SGU Episode 1012
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| SGU Episode 1012 |
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| November 30th 2024 |
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"Diagram of ocean currents in the North Atlantic, highlighting key flow patterns." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality." |
Paul Kurtz |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Saturday, October 26th, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, 5 Days.
B: Five days until Halloween. Hello.
S: Harris, Santa Maria.
C: Howdy.
S: Jane Novella. Hey, guys. Evan Bernstein. It's up, Psychon. And we have a special guest today, Brian Wecht. Brian, welcome.
US#06: Guys, just call me Dave.
S: So we are at Sycon in Las Vegas. Thanks, everyone, for inviting us here. All right, let's get it.
News Item #1 - Near Earth Microquasars (00:54)
- https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Near_Earth_Microquasar_found_to_emit_powerful_gamma_radiation_999.html [1]
S: Let's go on with some Science News. Bob, you're gonna start us off with some some more black hole news. Sort of, kind of.
B: Sort of. All right, this one was pretty interesting as I think some of my topics are so astronomers, well, it's not interesting. I'm not going to do it in my mind anyway. You might disagree. All right, observations made by astronomers on using Hawk high altitude water Chirankov gamma Ray Observatory may actually rewrite some what we know about the birth places of the most energetic particles ever created in the universe. So what do you guys think are the most energetic?
S: Cosmic rays.
B: Well, yeah, that's right. But some people might say the LHC, right? The LHC, the Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons to into collisions of 14 trillion electron terraelectron volts, trillion electron volts pretty powerful, but cosmic rays are the are the champ by far that we're talking energies of 100 trillion electron volts to 1000 trillion electron volts, which is head of volts scale the most. And actually it goes even higher than that. The most energetic proton they've ever discovered in these cosmic rays had the kinetic energy of a 57 mile per hour baseball in a proton. That's how close to the the speed of light this thing was accelerated to. So what can accelerate protons to that level? What can impart that much energy to a proton? And the consensus, we're not sure what's creating these super ultra high energy cosmic rays, but the consensus is typically that these are very distant, extremely as you might imagine, energetic processes like pulsars, supernova remnants, and specifically for this news item, quasars. The quasars, we talked about them on the show a bunch of times. These are super massive black holes at the cores of galaxies that that emit gamma rays and, and cosmic rays. But most importantly, these are distant. These are 500 million light years away up to 13 billion light years away.
S: What's the closest one really 500?
B: Million light years.
S: That's the closest one, yes. Is that because their origin is so far in the past?
B: I would think because you to create supermassive black holes that size it takes some time, but that's.
S: I'm not sure I was like OK.
B: But that's I googled it yesterday. That's the closest one. OK, 500 million. But these are far, far away. What if I said that, that we may have found an energetic process right in our backyard that could potentially create these in our in the Milky Way, say only 20,000 light years away. They have found these micro quasars that are emitting surprisingly powerful gamma rays and it's right in our backyard 20,000 light years away. That's nothing compared to billions super super close now micro quasar. I wasn't even sure what that was until last week. Micro quasar is a black hole, but it's not a super massive black hole. It's a stellar mass black hole, 3456 solar masses and it's in orbit or Co orbiting or you know, it's feeding off of a regular star and siphoning that matter into its system and and dealing with it in ways that I'll get into detail. So the the gamma rays that they detected at these micro quasars were 200 trillion electrons.
S: Gamma or cosmic? What did I say? You said gamma, OK.
B: No, no, the gamma rays, the gamma rays, the gamma rays, the gamma radiation coming from this micro quasar is 200 trillion electron volts. So I'll make that connection to cosmic rays. So the micro quasars in that they've detected in the past were were nowhere near that. So this was a surprise. How could how could this micro quasar be creating gamma rays that powerful? So what's happening is that black holes can be the best accelerators in the world. They can accelerate particles far more than anything that we, I think we've ever detected. So what's happening is that you've got a twisted magnetic field that's taking the particles that are getting sucked into the black hole and, and, and then channeling them into jets. So now the gamma rays are produced by these jets by interacting with, by the protons in The Jets, interacting with the, the interstellar medium right around The Jets. And that is that's creating the gamma rays that we're that we're detecting here. But the key here is that you've got, because if we see gamma rays, that means that there's also probably cosmic rays coming from these. And it's really interesting processes that are happening here creating these accelerating protons to, to like a baseball being hurled at 57 mph. There's things like shock acceleration. Imagine a proton in this jet. And what happens is that the protons go across the shockwave of this turbulent jet back and forth across the shockwave, getting faster and faster every time it goes back and forth. There's also magnetic reconnection, which is is extremely powerful. If you got these super powerful magnetic fields and they're being reconfigured and that reconfiguration releases tremendous amounts of energy. Our sun does this with its magnetic field, but a black hole, as you can imagine, would be much, much more powerful. So every time the the particles go near this, the magnetic reconnection happens. It imparts energy to the protons and electrons. They go faster and faster and faster, closer and closer to the speed of light. There's also things like Fermi acceleration, which is, which is really fascinating. Particles scatter off of moving field lines, magnetic field lines, and it does it over and over and it makes it faster and faster. So this is how a black hole, even a small black hole can impart tremendous acceleration to protons, accelerating even to the level of these ultra high energy cosmic rays. Now that what are the benefits? The benefits of this is that if you're studying how these particles are created and you're looking at quasars a billion light years away, it's hard. It's far away, it's very old and it's things happen over millions of years. And so you're not going to see a lot of change. And it's also not very clear because over millions of years, you know, the radiation is being scattered. So when you're looking at micro quasars though, 20,000 light years away, it's very clear. We can study the processes that impart these accelerations much more easily, much more easily because it's right in our backyard and we can, you could see changes in real time happening. You can see jets changing over days when it's in our backyard, but when it's a billion light years away, it's going to you're not going to see much change at all. So we can learn more about how these amazing particles are created do.
US#06: You understand the so the interesting thing here was that so they they've been able to detect these things for a while here. They were able to pinpoint where they were coming from. So was there some technological advance that let them pinpoint this or have they just not in that experiment? OK, because the tech doesn't seem that new.
B: Thing is, gamma rays fly out basically straight. If you see a gamma ray, you're basically seeing you could easily determine where it came from. The problem with cosmic ray with cosmic rays is that they're charged particles. They're quite circuitous as they travel through. So when you see one come this way, it could have been born way over there. So that's why you kind of have to infer at this point that to get this gamma radiation that we're see high, high energy gamma rays are also probably producing cosmic rays. And, and it's probably also being created at the same place because it's, it's a, you know, this, the black holes are creating, you know, they're marshaling amazing energies creating gamma rays. And, and the gamma rays and the cosmic rays are protons and electrons accelerated to really high energies. Now it depends who you talk to.
S: So gamma, but you said gamma rays were protons that were super accelerated. Now gamma ray is electromagnetic radiation. Yeah, it's just, it's just the EM radiation, right?
B: Protons are. That's like cosmic. Gamma radiation is light and.
S: There's the protons and electrons that they only become cosmic rays when they get to a certain speed or they're always considered cosmic rays.
B: They yeah, if they if they were accelerated to high energies and they impact the Earth and we detect them somehow by their daughter particles that shower down, we would say, yeah, these are these are cosmic rays. But I'm talking specifically about these ultra high energy cosmic rays, which are, which are rare, but it's so immensely powerful that we're like, how are these things? It's mysterious how they're how they're being created. But one clarification I could make could make is that cosmic cosmic rays are often they're an astronomer will always say, Oh yeah, it's electrons and protons primarily. Some will say that it's also gamma rays, but other scientists will say won't necessarily include gamma rays into the cosmic ray definition. So but but they're created by similar processes, so there you go. It ain't over all.
S: Right. Thanks, Bob.
B: Oh, I'm done.
S: All right, Kara.
C: Oh, I'm next.
S: Yes, you are next. You like surprising that? Was how we could fix science.
C: No, that's a terrible intro for me. I will turn the question around on you.
News Item #2 - How To Watch Researcher Misconduct (09:25)
C: So there's an article that I came across an editorial really in Retraction Watch. If you don't read Retraction Watch, you should. And the editorials by Derek or Darrell Shubin. And he is a long retired independent consultant, but previously worked at the federal level. There's so many like things here. He's the founding director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity, senior vice president the National Action Council for Minorities and Engineering, senior policy officer for the National Science Board. And he worked at the federal level for for many, many years. And he writes this editorial kind of looking back on the 80s when he first started his career, before we even had an Office of Research Integrity. And he reflected on concepts like scientific misconduct and how the scientific community handled those concepts so many years ago, right, 40 years ago, and what they're doing, what we, I guess, as a collective are doing now. And I think when we talk very often at conferences like this, but in conversations in the halls and conversations on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, we often talk about distrust and mistrust in institutions, in science, and what sort of we can do as science communicators, what individual citizens can do. But one of the conversations that we don't often have specifically is how scientists and specifically the publishing process within science has some amount of responsibility and what we can do to improve. And so in this editorial, he sort of reflects back on the idea of misconduct and research, which was his research topic way back when and how. Here's a wonderful quote. Today. It's a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for profit, politicized international interests.
S: Cara by misconduct, do they mean deliberate fraud? Or could that also just mean mistakes and bad techniques?
C: I mean, I think these are all variations on a theme, right? So it, it's a spectrum, Steve. Yes, I think there is, there's obviously, obviously there is fraud that is often committed, there's. Not just fraud that we're talking. About yeah, but we're not just talking about fraud, we're also talking about interests that put undue pressure on individuals. And. But yes, he does use language like deceit and suspicion. And so he poses quite a few questions about how we might as a community, and not just the scientists who are actively doing research and publishing, but the the editors who are involved, the journals themselves, how we might grapple with this really important question. He he often calls that the watcher community throughout his throughout his writing. I'm going to kind of pose some of those questions to you. And the big one sort of at the end is he says, can the watcher community, which should include you and me, do more than better report the perversions of scientific publication? Indeed, how can when we meet the moment and increase the promotion of better practices? So that's sort of the top the overarching question. But let's get into some of the individuals research. He he claims research should not be a policed activity. And oh, by the way, when he when he enters into these, he basically says Ioffer the watcher community some prescriptions and a few questions without solutions or answers. So many of these are quite rhetorical, but he he claims research should not be a policed activity, a policy that permits practice, can regulate or undermine it. Is the trust based publication honor system perhaps always a fiction now eclipsed by extrinsic interests or actually subverted by profit motives. And so I'm curious what what you all think about that given the nature of how we publish and maybe we should, we could probably talk a little bit about that.
S: Yeah, but so he, he's saying that publishing is still on the honor system and that maybe we that we, we can't do that anymore because.
C: Where he's saying, should we be able to?
S: There's too many vested interests to really have an honor system for research integrity in publishing.
C: And I think that's the open question, right? Are are we still on an honor system like we were 40 years ago? We do have regulatory agencies that do exist now that didn't exist 40 years ago. But that said, we also have for profit journals. We have predatory journals that didn't really exist back then.
S: You know, from my understanding, the answer is sort of because I mean, it's journal by journal, right? As you say, we have predatory pay, pay to play journals is are they providing any kind of quality control And not no, in in some cases the answers of straight up no. We also have ideological journals, right? Journals that have a certain perspective, you know, and like if you're the Journal of Acupuncture, I don't expect you're going to do a lot of good quality control on acupuncture research. But if you're The Lancet or if you're the New England Journal of Medicine or Cell or like Nature, these big journals, they have a robust editorial process. But even there, there's room for, there are things that they're not doing that they could be doing. Like one thing that one specific point that comes up is should we force, should we force researchers to provide their raw data to the journal so that the entity, you know, the number crunching could be independently verified. And I've spoken to researchers, but I'm not a researcher, you know, of that kind. So I don't, you know, but I've spoken to researchers and they've and the, the responses are mixed. But, you know, one point that many of them raised is, you know, I generate terabytes of data in my research and you're really going to force me to keep all of that data and provide it in some format, you know, upload it? No, I mean, so it's, it's like it's, it could be laborious and I'm not realistic expensive and expensive is a bad thing when you're talking about research and would really bog down the process. So there's a, there's a return on investment question with all of this, right?
C: And and what about the question of pre registering experimentation right? Like I'm. 100% in favor of that. Yeah, like I have an interesting scientific question I want to ask. This is how I want to approach it. I'm going to document that in writing and then I'm going to go do it, which prevents this phenomenon of P hacking where I just keep collecting data until I get to the point I want to be at you. You set the parameters in advance and then you it. It doesn't force, but it helps to shape. Yeah.
S: It does help to tell you in one way that's very specific. As I saw not too long ago, and I can't remember, we mentioned this on the show, but a systematic review of medical studies on some question. I forget that doesn't matter what the topic was, but they did an analysis of like if we looked at like we did, there are 30 studies looking at this question. If you look at all of the studies, this is what this is the result that you get. There's a little bit of a positive effect, but if you only look at studies that were pre registered and didn't violate their PRE registration, meaning they didn't change their methods between registration and publication, there's no effect. Yeah, So the effect goes away when you basically control for P hacking, which to me means there's no effect there. And the that was only possible with pre registration because I'm a big fan of PRE.
US#06: Registration. Does the honor system here mean anything that's not possibly catchable by peer review? Everything I like, the raw data, the analysis, maybe some specific analysis, that's what we're talking about.
C: I think they're, Yeah. I think they're saying honor system is, is also peer review. You know, that this is, is these are volunteer reviewers that are subject matter experts. And he poses that question at. Well, it's it's a very burdensome process and individuals don't get paid for it. Yeah. And very often what ends up happening is that people who step into those roles may not have specialized knowledge. And he's pretty firm in his language here. He he literally says some of the best analysis is done in this behind the scenes role, yet it remains largely unrewarded. Without this specialized knowledge, reviewers lacking subject expertise are perpetrating fraud. Like he, he straight up claims that if you do not have the expertise to review this paper and you are reviewing it and kind of let it slide, 'cause you don't get it that that's fraudulent there's.
US#06: Not to say people who have the expertise but just aren't taking it that seriously. Right, Right.
C: Yeah, Yeah, It's another question. And I think here's an interesting 1. So this is more of a statement than a question. Grapple with it as you may, the frequency of scandals of fabrication and misappropriation should be statistically insignificant. But the magnitude of these relatively few misdeeds can have profound real world consequences for careers, funding, perceptions and confidence in scientific progress. And this is, I think, an important phenomenon to grapple with. Even in the instances where there is outright fraud or in the instances where terrible mistakes are made, you know, maybe unknowingly, the consequences can be really dire. And as we often talk about, it's very hard to put a genie back in a bottle, right? Or unring a bell. I mean, obviously, like Wakefield comes to mind. And So what can we be doing within the community to either prevent or mitigate those kinds of issues, because they're really important issues.
S: I mean of the fraud of committing fraud, like deliberate fraud. Yeah, it's, it's hard.
C: It's hard. It's not fraudulent even if it's a mistake, but like large mistakes that get a lot of play that are really hard to then retract. So that's the point of retraction watch, right?
S: I do think that journals have more of a responsibility to to do the kind of analysis that would have a reasonable chance of detecting bad mistakes or outright fraud. Sometimes fraud goes undetected for years because nobody did a basic analysis that would have revealed it. And when it is ultimately revealed, it's like really obvious. And it has even worse effects than you than you were saying, Karen. All those things were true. But also, like, there have been cases. There was a recent case of a researcher who for years was publishing fraudulent Alzheimer research and distorted the entire field for a decade. You know, one, one person. And because if you're going to commit fraud, you're probably going to do it to discover something new and interesting and which people are going to get interested in and.
C: That's going to lay the ground.
S: Going to lay the groundwork and then it gets cited and then it gets retracted and but it continues to get cited to get these zombie citations right so the so there's it creates ripples throughout the literature that are just devastating but I I and I do think that we're not doing nearly as much as we should to minimize. That because such, you know, a few instances that instances because they have such a bad ripple effect. I do wonder though, how valuable AI will be in sort of automatically looking for the signatures of fraud.
US#06: You know, because it's a point. It's just a volume yeah album, right? There's so much research and it's not slowing down they.
C: Have so many, we're only getting more. Much time.
S: 10s of 10s of thousands of papers a year and it's crazy.
C: Yeah, and I guess. One other big question that I want to pose before, before we move on is, is this question about the culture of science, that the modern culture of academic science and how much does the publisher parish culture, the lab culture, the aspirations of individual researchers? How much would a culture shift there then have a trickle down effect on the publication industry? And, and just as a quick kind of continuation of that, he asks, you know, can watchers, of course, the U's and the Me's and the and the reviewers and everybody serve as honest brokers, or must they inevitably become partisan by virtue of investing in the publication industry? Is the very act of engaging in this way changing our ability to remain unbiased?
S: Yeah, I know. That's a hard question. Yeah.
C: And I don't know how often we're really sitting and exploring. We're just churning the machine very often.
S: I what I find is that even researchers, even people who absolutely need to know this and there's a lot of research out there to show this, don't necessarily know how to not commit fraud or meaning they don't do it deliberately. They do what they're doing like they pee hack. 30% of researchers when asked do you do ABC or D, all of which amount to P hacking said yes, I do that occasionally and I think mostly one percent, 30% about there about 1/3 mostly because they don't know it's P hack right? And they don't even know what hacking is.
E: So they should have some sort of what course or something they should be taught.
C: We are. We are. They are. Part of the issue is they're. Ignoring. It or, or maybe it is important in certain types of science to have also a subject matter statistical expert as a co-author like and you do see that that is a a tactic that some people take, but we are all supposed to already be able to do that. A lot of the.
S: Teaching Training. A lot of the training is is mentorship, which means it's hit or miss and I think it needs to be way more systematic.
C: And I'm also biased as a as a social science researcher. Like in psychology, we get a lot of statistical training. And when I was trained as a biologist, it was night and day. I didn't get nearly as much of that kind of training.
E: I got none. Sorry. For context, I'm a physicist. I got none of this.
C: At all that's frightening.
S: Medicine, it's all mentorship. Hit or miss?
E: Yeah. Context. I'm a tax preparer by day. I, I have to do certificate, certain certifications every year, year after year after year, I have to take even it's the, even if it's the same class. And in fact, sometimes it is the same test that I have to take and pass every year. And I get the repetitive nature of it, but it does definitely help keep tax preparers like myself, you know, honest, up to date on the late on the latest issues. And, you know, we always have to keep certain things in mind. It's part of our culture now. And it weeds out, it really weeds out that bottom 10% that tend to kind of, you know, pollute the rest.
C: Of the industry, we see it too. Steve's a neurologist. He has to maintain a license. He has to do continuing education. I'm a psychologist. I'm going to do the same thing. But researchers is true. Maybe there should be a continuing education requirement?
S: There, it's the good news there and I think we talked about this maybe six months ago or so. There is now a, a certification in research methodology like how not to P hack. It's not required.
C: It's not. Required. Yeah, Not.
S: Required yet, but it exists.
C: Perhaps some journals will start to require it.
S: We just need to take that next step. And I think, and this is a process, I think they're going to do it for a while, see how it works, whatever and then require.
C: It like if I do human subjects research I in order to get IRB approval at my university I have to be NIH trained in the ethical way to work with human subjects. Like, why can't we have that as a federal?
S: I would not be surprised if before too long the NIH will require certification in how not to do research fraud.
J: I mean, is this something you can learn by watching a video? Like does it have to be taught by a person? Or can it just be like here, let's watch this and you'll understand, you can watch.
E: Courses. I do that all the time.
S: Yeah, most of the way there. But yeah, you do. It is. It does help to also have somebody that you can talk to about it to make sure that you're absorbing the lessons, you know? But yeah, All right, let's move on. All right, so we fix science. All right.
E: All good. You're welcome. Black holes? Check. Science. Check.
S: Right.
News Item #3 - Genetically Modifying Brains (24:37)
S: I'm going to talk about genetically modifying the brain. This is cool. This is very cool. So we taught, you know, we're big fans of CRISPR, you know, the ability to you to precisely manipulate genes, swap in segments, turn genes off, turn them back on again, etcetera. And it's amazing. It's amazing what we can do now the in terms of clinical applications, right, curing disease with CRISPR or some other genetic method. The big limitation guys, is what we've talked about this. What's the big limitation?
C: Well, the thing it in. Getting it in the vector the vector.
S: Vector, yeah, it's getting the CRISPR to the cells. So there's a couple of ways around this. One is you could take the tissue out of the body and then do it in the Petri dish, right? So if you're taking bone marrow out of the out of a patient, you then CRISPR their bone marrow and you put it back into them, right? So you can target the cells because you have them in a jar, in a Petri dish, whatever.
J: You can't take somebody's brain out.
S: No, you can't do that.
J: And it's hard to get to the brain not.
E: Ethically, at least.
S: It's hard to get to the brain. You can also do the CRISPR and at the egg stage right as part of IVF. So let's say you, although this is still ethically grey zone, remember we talked about, you know, the Chinese researcher he who who did this without approval and it was a mess. But that's another way you get, you have, again, you have IVF, you have the cell in a Petri dish, you do the CRISPR and then you correct the genetic mistake and then you implant it. But what if you have an adult or just a, you know, even a growing baby? It's hard to get the CRISPR to the cells in, in an Organism that you want to get them to. So for years we used viral vectors and viral vectors work, but they have this nasty tendency to cause infections and that has slowed. Like in the 90s, there was like this one study where they were using a viral vector to try to treat, you know, a genetic lung disease. And the, you know, this the first subject died of encephalitis. And that literally set the whole field back a a decade at least, you know, because we had to go back to the drawing boards and well, we can't do that again, you know, so that's a viruses are they're an option, but they're a problem. Another option is what we call lipid nanoparticles. Lipid nanoparticles, And I think we've mentioned them on the show before, but they're basically just like this. And they're little, you know, lipid, you know, little spheres of fat and they're, you know, nano engineered And they're, these are little packages, they're little delivery mechanisms. So you could put the CRISPR in the the lipid nanoparticle and then inject that into the target tissue, right?
J: Or you could cook with it and you eat it, yes, right. It's oil, right? So you can fry up some meatballs, the oil.
S: You could try that. OK, yeah, I don't think that would work, but.
J: You have meatball on your bingo card. Check it.
C: So the idea is that the the lipid can like pass the cell membrane to get to where it.
S: Needs to go, but there's a couple problems with that. So one limitation is it's a lot of fluid, right? And you're sort of injecting that fluid into an organ. And that's a problem because just because it's physically.
C: And also how is it targeted?
S: Well, it's not really targeted, it's just diffusing into the cells that you want to get it to. There's another problem and that is that the these lipid nanoparticles are very immunogenic, meaning the immune system doesn't like them, right? They trigger the an immune reaction because they are literally foreign particles, right? I mean, they are what the immune system is supposed to fight off.
US#04: Just fat. Just fat.
S: Well, but they're engineered or whatever there. There's not just fat.
US#04: And it's not they're fat.
S: It's but it's also that. There's other things there, but OK, as you can see in the little graphic. So, so this, this new study now addresses a lot of these issues. And specifically we're, we're targeting the brain with the, with the current research that we're looking at. And the idea is that we want to get these, these lipid nanoparticles with genetically modifying material in, you know, as a delivery, you know, as the package into brain tissue. Again, it's hard to inject into brain tissue without damaging it, so the solution there is to inject into the ventricles. You know what the ventricles are? Yeah, they're the fluid filled spaces inside the brain. So that's, so the brain has its own essentially sort of delivery receptacle. Like it's just unload here. You know, you inject it into the ventricles. It the the spinal fluid has access to a lot of the brain tissue and it's a fluid filled space. So you're not injecting directly into brain tissue. So that's one thing that they did, which we're going to inject into ventricles.
C: Into the ventricle itself, not into the column.
S: No into the brain like the lateral.
C: Ventricle needle through their skull.
S: Yes. Cool, we do this all the time.
C: Yeah, yeah.
S: Yeah, we do. In humans, what we do is we want to inject something into the ventricle. We go through the right frontal lobe because that's you do, that's the most redundant tissue in the brain.
C: You have to drill like, do you have to do a craniotomy? Like, yeah, you drill a little hole first.
S: Yeah.
J: Steve, just to clarify, would you only do this to affect the brain or you would do this to affect the other organs?
S: Of the brain. This is all about targeting the brain, OK? So here they're, they're trying to treat a developmental neurological disorder. In this particular study, it's Angel man's syndrome. But there's many, many different disorders that affect the development of the brain, right? And they're all horrible, right? So, but if you're trying to affect brain development, you got to get to it while it's developing, right? You got to get to it in the womb. So here they're trying to, this is a mouse study. But what they did was they injected these lipid nanoparticles full of a CAS nine that the CAS 9 is the snippers, right? This is the part of the CRISPR system that makes the cut at Target, you know, that will make the cut where you want it to. But actually it wasn't, it didn't have CAS 9 in it. It had CAS 9 mRNA in it, right? So now you're injecting the mRNA that codes for CAS 9 in with the lipid nanoparticles. Then that gets to the brain cells. They make the CAS 9 themselves and then that makes the genetic, makes the genetic alteration, it snips the gene that we want to get rid of. Now this process has been done before and the the with a success rate of about 1%, meaning that when you do this, 1% of the brain cells get the genetic change that you're looking for, which is therapeutically insignificant, right? So that's no therapeutic effect. So they wanted to, you know, they were looking for ways to increase this. So they end up the limiting factor is the amount of these lipid nanoparticles that you can inject, because if you inject too much, you get an immune reaction and the inflammation destroys the brain. So but they figured out a way to dramatically increase the amount that they can inject by, you know, essentially having the lipid nanoparticles degrade as soon as they deliver their package I'm.
C: Smart.
S: Yeah. So the and their results were they were able to get the make the genetic change in 30% of the brain cells up from 1%, which is therapeutically significant. So it basically went from not significant to significant. So now this is an extremely good proof of concept, but it's actually better than it sounds be cut for a couple of reasons. Because they were injecting at a stage in brain development where there were still a lot of neural stem cells. And so those and progenitor cells. And so those neural stem cells become a lot more cells, right? So they're trying to make the change early enough in the development of the brain that a lot of the brain cells and and then they like a month after birth, they sacrifice the animal and they look at the brain and see how many of the cells have the genetic change. 60% of the hippocampus cells had the change and 30% of the neurons had the change. So that's significant.
C: Why? So? Why do this in the fetus and not the embryo when there are fewer cells?
S: To be a brain, there needs to be a brain to target right? So they need to have the ventricles to inject it into.
C: They can't just do it in like the neural I.
S: Guess it would be too. It would be too primitive, you know. But there are some diseases though where they suspect that the success would be even greater. Can you think of a reason why that might be? Remember this is a genetic disorder that kills brain cells if you think about it that way, because the cells that are not treated die and the cells that are treated live and disproportionately represent the the eventual to brain right.
B: There's a lot of pruning that happens anyway, right?
S: Yeah, but this is not for development. Yeah, there, there there is. There's even in development, there's a lot of pruning, but that's not the, the key is that the, if in a destructive disease, they, they, they think they can get up to 90% of the cells because, you know, because the only the cells that get the genetic change are going to survive or they're going to differentially survive. So they should really predominate in the ultimate brain that they're born with. So this is really encouraging. You know, 'cause again, the vector is the problem with genetic, using genetic manipulation to treat disease in, you know, it basically when you, once you get to the fetal stage and beyond, right? You know, 'cause you can't, it's in a living Organism, you can't have it in a Petri dish, right? So, so this is great.
US#06: How? Early can they detect these things?
S: So they're genetic disorders, so they could detect them as soon as they know that someones pregnant, they could do a, you know, karyotyping and do a genetic analysis. And it's but the also if you know, the parents like are at risk, they could screen for it, etcetera. They say, oh Yep, you have it, we're going to have to do the treatment, you know. So yeah, it's potentially, you know, extremely, extremely useful.
J: That's the. Threshold for them to do this on humans.
S: Well, yeah, I mean, they first they're going to do they need more animal research because, you know, you're injecting genetic modification into the brain. This is this is serious.
C: I don't is any of this ethically approved? I mean, do we do any CRISPR in? Yeah.
S: No, this is not approved for humans.
C: I don't just mean this, I mean anything that uses CRISPR in utero, we don't do.
S: In utero. Not that I'm aware.
C: I don't. Think no.
S: Not yet. We're Yeah. The only ones that were approved were like the blood ones, the ones that take it out of the body and put it back in. So yeah, this is, this is great. So we obviously take, this takes years, this kind of research. So this guy could imagine there's going to be a few more years of animal research. Then we're going to get the first human trials are going to be just like safety trials, just to make sure that, you know, it doesn't cause brain inflammation, things like that. And then maybe 10-15 years before we see like therapeutic trials and, but this is, this is definitely something that's happening and this is extremely encouraging. This is a massive step forward. They really they solved a couple of really big problems here.
B: Steve, this is 1 application of this technique. What about using it for anywhere else in the in the human body?
S: Yeah, so the the the ventricle thing only works for the brain, but just the fact that they can get a larger volume of these particles into tissue without causing the inflammation is a great advance. Yeah, absolutely. And again, using the mRNA to make the CAS 9 is brilliant.
B: Yeah, that's cool to send the instructions where you want.
S: The the, the raw materials already there. You know, the, the, the mechanisms already there. Just yeah, just use it.
News Item #4 - Largest Prime Number (36:05)
S: All right, let's go on, Ryan.
US#06: Yes.
S: A lot of numbers on the screen. Tell us about those numbers.
US#06: Lots of numbers. So for let me give you a little context about who I am because you know these guys, but you probably don't know me as well. I'm trained as a theoretical physicist, so my interests are string theory, quantum field theory, and math, although I left that job a while ago and now I dress up like a ninja and play piano.
B: Cool.
US#06: Ninja talk about some math stuff, yeah.
B: I still have hope Brian will be a physicist again one day.
US#06: And no one makes me feel worse about my career decisions than YouTube.
B: Yeah, somebody's got it, but I'm. Some physicist always an awesome. Decision.
US#06: That's true, yeah. I still, I I was saying this to Leonard the other day. I'm still a physicist. I'm just not a professional physicist.
B: Yeah.
US#06: So.
B: True.
C: Professional ninja.
US#06: That's right, I'm even a fake one of those actually, but. Professional fake ninja. That is actually true, right? So I'm going to talk about prime numbers because I'll just cut to the to the chase and then I'll give them context. Recently, just in the last week or so, the new largest prime number that we know of was announced as a, as, as a discovery. That's the headline. But let me back up a little bit. What's a prime number? So I think most people here probably know a prime number is a number that is divisible only by itself and one right? That's the definition of a prime number. Lowest prime number is 2. All other prime numbers are odd, right? Because any even numbers divisible by two. And then you have a bunch of other prime numbers that come up pretty fast, 357, not 9, etcetera, etcetera. That's a prime number. The question is how do you check? So if you're writing down the list of prime numbers, how do you check if any given integer in front of you and it sure is basically a whole number is prime. So the naive thing to do is you just start dividing it by a bunch of prime numbers and see if if every if something goes in or not. You actually only need to do this. The most naive thing you can do is check all the primes up to the square root of that number, right? Because you can't have all the factors be bigger than the square root of the number, right? Then that would be too big. So the problem is when you start generating very, very large primes, that gets computationally extremely onerous and expensive, right? So if you're looking for really large prime numbers, which we currently are, that just divided by every prime, you know, starts to break down pretty fast. It's still theoretically possible. It would just take forever. So the question is, are there prime numbers we can generate or possible prime numbers that maybe we can check a little bit faster? So there's a class of prime numbers called Mersenne primes, which are of the form 2 to the P, where P is the a prime number -1 so for example, the lowest prime number is 2 to the. Let's take the lowest prime 2 to the two 4 -, 1 gives you three. That is a prime number. Turns out if you do this with a bunch of low prime numbers, you get other prime numbers. 2 to the three is 8 -, 1 is 7 that is prime. So you can start checking this. And it turns out that this is not a sufficient condition for to use the math word primality, because if you check 2 to the 11 -, 1, that is a composite number. That's 2047, which is 23 * 89. All right, that is a composite number. Composite means not prime. Not prime. Yeah, composited means not prime. So Mersenne primes are just primes of this form. But you still have to check that they're possibly prime. And it turns out that you there's an algorithm called the Lucas Lerner algorithm that for this, this specific type of prime number is a much faster way to check for primality. So you can do it and it's computationally not too bad. OK, so right now you might if you, if you start checking for Mercen primes, you get a bunch of them pretty early on. But to give you what I think is a pretty remarkable piece of data, I should say, by the way, we also know they're infinitely member, infinitely many prime numbers, right? We don't know if they're infinitely many Mercen prime numbers. It does a class of prime number, but they might stop at some point. That would be weird. No one thinks that's the case, but theoretically it's true and.
S: Can I ask you the other question, Brian? So if when we're looking for prime numbers, we're looking for the biggest prime number we can find, but we're not necessarily finding them sequentially. Oh no, there may be smaller prime numbers we have in fact.
US#06: They're almost certainly, I mean they're it would be shocking if there weren't. What we're looking for right now are numbers that are big and that we can check in a computationally non expensive way that are prime right. But there are, well, I mean, certainly I, I think it would be a truly shocking result. If you look at the list of the largest primes and there was just a gap, a vacuum of primes in the middle of them because there's a lot. These numbers, as you'll see in the second, are pretty, pretty large. Yeah, right now we know of only 52 numbers that are Mersenne primes, which is an amazingly, amazingly low, low number because they're very sparsely distributed.
S: In total, including all the low ones.
US#06: Yes, including all the low ones. They're only 52. And the headline here is that the 52nd one that we know of, which is not necessarily the 52nd Mersenne prime because it's possible some, some are hiding in there, was found as though this was announced by the great Internet Mersenne Prime search. And the person who actually found this, his name is Luke Durant, found that the following number is prime. I have to read this off because I I didn't memorize it.
B: This could take a while.
US#06: It's. So the number itself, the full number has over 41 million digits, which I'll start reading right now. Yeah. Do it.
B: Settle in, folks.
US#06: Yeah, the number is 2 to the 136,000,270 nine 841 -, 1. So that number has been conclusively shown to be prime by.
B: Yes, and that number in a text file was 46 megabytes and Tolstoy's War and Peace was like 3 Meg, 3.4 Meg so.
US#06: It's, yeah, it's, it's, it's a big, big number. Matt Parker, if you guys know him, really wonderful math video. Guy has a video where he displays, I think it's, it's a large number of these digits, 1 frame at a time. And it still takes 6 minutes to to get through and he's doing like 24 frames per second or something like that. It's, it's pretty awesome. So what, what, what's interesting about this? A couple, couple interesting things. So this great Internet Merced prime search was they were using this Lucas Lerner algorithm to check for primality up until about 6 years ago when they found a faster way, which is probabilistic. So they can do a quick check and it's not 100% guarantee that if it meets that criterion that it's prime, but the probability that it is prime, that it isn't prime is very, very low. OK, so they, they discovered that this was faster. And the thing I read, which I thought was really interesting is that the probability that it isn't prime if it passes this check passes this check is lower than the probability of a hardware error checking it with the Lucas Lerner algorithm. That's, that's how successful this is. So what they do is they use this probabilistic check and there's some modifications to it that have been refined over the last few years even. And then they go through another check and make sure that, you know, you can actually run the Lucas learner thing and check to see if the number is actually prime. And this number is now 100% guaranteed to be a prime number.
J: Right. Is this like just a an exercise to find these numbers or is there a practical use for prime numbers?
US#06: There's a cash reward for some of them. Really. Enough offered by me? No, I mean, there's no practical use for it specifically. It's just like, hey, let's find a big number. Did that Mike just go off the reel? One thing that was interesting about this recent discovery is that it was I think the first to use GPU's because the guy that discovered is a former NVIDIA person who wanted to show people that GPU's graphics processing unit, graphics processing units, which are used a lot in AI, are good for more than just AI stuff, right? So this was kind of a a proof of concept for him to show that you can use this computing power to do something else. There is, I would be shocked if there was any actual utility to the discovery itself. Although like many things, maybe the process of trying to find ways to do it can have offshoots that are potentially potentially interesting.
B: And that's not to say that primes aren't useful for lots of things, but these are so big.
US#06: That's right, It's like they're too big to use like in security or encrypt. Yeah, yeah, as we know. Yeah, that's right. So primes are extremely useful things in a variety of contexts, but not ones this big, not this big. So if the other cool thing about the great Internet Merced Prime search is that it's the kind that anybody can be a part of. So you can just go to this website, download the software and start using your computer to check large numbers for being prime.
S: And this number was found just using desktop computers like, not a supercomputer somewhere or?
US#06: It was a bunch of yeah, GPU's kind of spread out all over, all over the world.
S: OK, so it was. Crowdsourced. Kind of.
US#06: Yeah, that's right, I've heard. Could a quantum computer find the next one? Well, if such a thing existed, that would definitely cut down the computational. Time the real.
S: The question is yeah, Is there a quantum computer algorithm rhythm that would not run on a conventional computer that would find primes?
US#06: Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I imagine the. Answer. Yeah, yeah. It's it's almost.
S: So Brian, if everyone in this room, we connected our computers and we find a prime number, we can.
US#06: I'm not connecting my computer to anything that you've touched. Very sorry. I've seen your Internet history.
J: Make 1,000,000 bucks together, yeah. Well, this, this guy spent this guy a million.
US#06: The the number I read there's a Washington Post article about this is so the guy spent $2,000,000 right? Did you see that of his own money, which seemed I'm so large that I don't know if I quite believe it. And the cash reward I think was $3000. Forget it. So I don't know if it's exactly.
B: But that's a deductible expense, so. Never mind.
E: Which will carry forward into future years. That's right.
B: I have a two you're welcome dollar tax write off that's. Awesome Steve, I see some non primes in your image down there, but that's all right.
E: Bob.
B: Seven more magic amulet news.
News Item #5 - Magic Amulets (46:11)
E: Yeah, yeah. Let's get to some hard science here. Yeah. So this one comes from Canada in the world of sports. So we're familiar with the Toronto Maple. Leafs. Sure. Anyone. Yeah. Hockey national. Thank you. Yeah. Love hockey. That sports team has been around since 1917, so that's 100 and seven years of proud hockey tradition in Canada now. But the team just recently, like last week, made news outside of the hockey rink when their team assistant captain, his name is John Tavares, was seen last week wearing what can only be described as a amulet with magical powers draped around his neck while he was playing. Yep. And upon noticing this, surprisingly in a way, the Internet started jumping on him and calling him out for promoting pseudoscience and nonsense. So yay, good for, good for them.
S: Ohh Internet.
E: They actually got this one. Right, but we don't know if it works or not. Well, yeah, what is this magic?
S: You've proven it doesn't. Work, Evan.
E: Uh huh. Yeah, Yes, I have actually. OK, why? Why is he wearing this this thing? All right, It's called the Aries Tech or Aries Tech. That's AIRESTECH. That is the company that makes it. And the product is called Life Tune 1. I went to their website to find out what exactly it is they claim this does. Here. Here are their words, not mine. The only proven solution for neutralizing electromagnetic field pollution? Create yeah, creating safer environments without disrupting your daily technology use. It is patented, clinically proven nanotechnology Bob Whoa to neutralize harmful radiation from your everyday devices such as your cell phone and your Wi-Fi, keeping you and your family and your pets safe.
S: So. So what exactly is patented?
E: Yes, right. So what it is? Part of it is that the. Name here's the part that's patented it's A and we've talked about this before it's a sticker a sticker that they've put onto a charm or you know some kind of wearable or you they also have products in which these stickers exist on little placards and plates that you put around your house so it's the actual sticker that that got patented it more from them our silicon resonator chip negates EMF radiation present in your surroundings without damaging your tech so you can also put this actually on your cell phone on your laptop computer and on appliances apparently can I just.
C: Well, how do you patent to sticker? Isn't that already patented?
E: But it's.
C: Technology.
S: This is a nanotechnology sticker.
E: Yeah, it's, it's if you look very close. Very small. It has these swirls almost like a fingerprint, you know, design on it. It's sort of this Mandelbrot to.
C: Work right? They just have to be an idea. Exactly.
E: Right, if you pay the fee and you get like the peanut butter and Jelly sandwich is a patent as well. They say their claims are backed by the 22 global patents, 25 clinical trials and nine peer reviewed studies. Yeah, yeah. So.
C: So remember that my topic like just only two.
S: When companies say that, so there's a couple of possibilities here. 1 is they're just straight up lying, right? That's a possibility. But there are also a lot of companies that do research for hire. Basically they'll do clinical trials or whatever and get whatever results you pay them to get.
J: Like there's a box on the website that says what result do you want us to find?
S: Yeah. So that that's or the other thing is they're citing research that has absolutely nothing to do with their product.
C: And interpreting it.
S: Yeah, they're just, yeah, they're telling you whenever you go to these companies and like pull, if they have, they cite their, the research that they're quoting here. They're the research is always completely irrelevant to the product and the claims that they're making. They're just, they're, they're just hoping that no one's going to check, right. They're just, there may be some superficial like it's a study on EM radiation and that's like that's it, that's it. That's, that's the connection. And they say this study supports our technology because it's about EM radiation and our technology is about EM radiation. That's literally what they do. So that's just, it's just marketing BS basically.
E: There are a list of other athletes also who are have promoted this product in the past. Why are why are why is a hockey player OK concerned with EMF radiation while he's skating around on the hockey or they have his cell phone in his uniform or something Example, carrying a laptop. No, no, no, you see, the magical amulet here is all and this is from them. This is also designed to stimulate healthy biological function, empowering athletes to optimize performance and recovery by enhancing the body's natural electromagnetic fields. Promoting optimal function and the lucky charm will also increase resilience and adaptability to environmental stressors.
S: Who is cheating?
E: Or gobbledygook, right? Basically, right. Yeah.
S: Right. Yeah, if it actually did work, you'd probably have to ban it. So how does it block electromagnetic radiation and your phone still functions?
C: Well, it's it's sticker technology, Steve. It's complicated.
S: You know, sticker. Absorbs the harmful stuff.
C: Wiggle.
S: How's the good stuff to get through? There's harmful EM radiation and good REAM radiation.
C: Yeah, and it optimizes your biologicals.
S: Yeah.
J: I thought the same thing. Like if you put it, if you put it on on your router, you know your Wi-Fi and it's supposed to block the radiation. I mean, basically Wi-Fi is a form of radiation.
S: Or is it? Cleaning the electromatic. Cleansing the EMF.
J: They know. Do they care?
E: They're selling these things for up to $430 per.
S: Sticker that probably cost the buck? Yeah. To make not even. Not even.
E: Yeah, well. The charm cost something and I'm sure the little necklace that it comes with. That's such a specific number two 430.
S: That's marketing too though. You don't sell things for round. Number right, I know. Then it seems arbitrary.
E: And can EMF hurt us?
S: Non ionizing.
E: Right from our phone, from our laptop.
S: No, no.
E: It cannot. Nope, that's been proven right. Wasn't you did a write up on this the recent WHO study?
S: Yeah, I think it was last week's episode. It was about the The Who review of 25 years of research on does EMF from cell phones cause brain cancer? And the answer was a pretty resounding no. So, yeah, the the the from first principles, you know, scientists think that that non ionizing radiation, so too weak to break chemical bonds, doesn't have any biological risk. You know, So the only sort of maybe like again, if we talk about hazard versus risks, like is that you have to ask, is there anything happening? The only thing that happens maybe is a little bit of tissue warming. I'm talking about like a degree, you know, like not anything that you would think would be biologically significant. That's it. That's really it. And the rest is just the precautionary principle, like, well, how much evidence do we need to prove that it's not doing anything? It's like, well, there's really no reason to think that it is. And we have lots of evidence now to show that it isn't. So that's, you know, as I'd like to say there's a lot more things that are a lot bigger problem to worry about. This is way below the threshold of of worry.
C: And, and I mean, isn't it true? Ionizing radiation needs to be shielded, and when you shield it, it no longer radiates. So it's like your microwave, right? Works on the inside, but it doesn't work on shielded Outside.
S: Shielded, yeah.
C: So if this actually was shielding.
S: It wouldn't work. The device wouldn't.
C: Work block. Yeah, like what?
S: Yeah, but yeah. But it's not it's, there's no internally consistent coherent claim being made here. It is literally just magic.
C: It's a sticker.
S: It's a magic sticker, yeah.
E: Latest, greatest Someone else to come up with another one in a few months, I'm sure.
S: Right. And we were talking, Evan, about this, like, what is the responsibility of a sports celebrity in promoting pseudoscience? I mean, they're not, they're not scientists, but they are celebrities.
E: Influent their influencers in their own.
S: Influencers and you know, they may if they're true believers, then it's sad, but if it's, you know, if they didn't do their due diligence, I think that's grossly responsible. And again, good for the Internet, you know, for Doctor Pig piling on him for doing this. I think really that's shame is really the only recourse we have in a case. There's nothing.
C: Is in this case, I mean if they actively cause harm though, if they promote a pseudoscience that leads to somebody being like. That's there's liability. Yeah, there is liability. I think there should.
J: Be well, you know, the Kinesio tape thing was another one.
S: Yeah, it's still around.
J: But the the we have to educate ourselves and educate our kids and not expect famous people to freaking tell us what reality is right?
S: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep. Jay, tell us how the world is going to end.
News Item #6 - Atlantic Current Climate Tipping Point (55:10)
- Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, 'impacting the entire world for centuries to come,' leading climate scientists warn [6]
J: Yeah, I mean, I read a ton of space related news and a ton of global warming related news, just the topics I I tend to like to cover. So the interesting thing about what I'm about to talk to you about is that I got to talk to Michael Mann today about this particular topic. Now let me give you a little background. So what, what ended up happening is, you know, I'm picking the topic that I want to talk about. I find stumble on an article. I look up the same topic on, you know, given by the other outlets reading, reading through, reading through, trying to figure out what's going on. And it's pretty grim, you know, and I'm like, well, I, I just, I should talk to people about this because it's one of those like moments for global warming. So here's one of the titles. Scientists warn of imminent collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents.
S: Sounds bad.
J: It sounds bad and and potentially, you know, it could be an amazingly bad thing, right? So I've noticed in one of the articles that they mentioned that Michael Mann was one of the people that like kind of signed his name on it saying, yeah, like this is a good thing for people to know about, right? So we talked about it and it turns out that the articles the the news outlets they tended to, particularly with global warming stuff, over exaggerate how dangerous these things are imminent, how quickly they're going to happen. Right. It it was a really awesome moment for all of us talking to Michael Mann because it was a damn like even these trusted news outlets that you know that they're pretty hard hitting Science News outlets are are amping up the drama for. Click Baiting us Click. Baiting us so I wanted you guys to know that just you know, as a as a consumer of science information, I'm sure you guys are reading it as well. Just, you know, take a step back and realize that even the most trusted ones out there can be amping it up a little bit to click bait you and you know, who knows to what degree so.
US#06: Do you mean in the article itself or just the?
J: Headline in the article itself, like as I go through what I'm about to say, I'm going to, I'm going to have to pull it back a little bit. There is a, an observable effect happening here that I think people should know about. So there was an article published on October 31st or 21st, sorry. And we had 44 of the world's leading climate scientists, including Michael Mann, say, Yep, this is something that people should know about. So there is a ocean current, the Atlantic meridonal. Please don't correct me on that. Overturning meridonal meridonal. Thank. You meridonal is better. Yes, I like it. Like Meridian, all the ways that people say it, I enjoy. So let's call it a mock. Am OC OK. And they're saying it's deteriorating, right? This ocean currents. If you look at the graphic, you could see that, you know, the ocean currents move water significantly all over the world and they're happening continuously. What they have noticed though, is that because of global warming, right? What is global warming doing? There's a few things that global warming is doing to the Earth right now. So it's melting polar ice and it is increasing rainfall and increasing rainfall in places where rainfall is not commonly found, right. Massive amounts of of fresh water is entering the ocean and that has an impact on these ocean currents because there's a system that happens when these ocean currents function. What they do is, for example, the a Mach current takes warm water from like say the Gulf of Mexico, and it moves that surface warm water up to the north. And then that the heat dissipates out of that surface water. And then that that water then at a lower temperature then drops and it creates a shift in, in the water, which creates motion, which creates the keeps the current going. Sorry about keeps that current moving, right? But when you when you enter a lot of non salinated water into the mix, it changes the way that the water behaves because fresh water is less dense than salt water and it makes it harder for for cold water to sink, which disrupts this cycle and it's continuously happening. This disruption is continuous, continuously happening, which is not good. And another factor here is that because global temperatures are going up in general, the ocean water is heating on its own as well, just from just from, you know, the air temperature being warmer all around the world. So why does it matter, right? So you got to look at Amok, like it's a massive conveyor belt moving water around and it transports the warm surface water, like I said, all around. And that that distributed heat does a lot of things to the areas around it. Like, for example, it warms up North America, it warms up areas in Europe, especially, you know, areas like Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden. They, they don't people, they're probably don't know this, but they're depending on that heat being transferred from the equator come up to them. So they don't have things like the cold BLOB, which you might have heard about, right, guys? Right now there's, there's something called a cold BLOB that is happening in a very specific areas. And it's basically the weather patterns are changing and there's certain areas where it's getting really, really cold because of the changes that are happening here. And the cold BLOB is getting bigger, which is not good. It's like, you know, this is one of those signs of well in the future, you know, global warming has had these crazy effects on the, on the our environment because weather is changing globally. So the bottom line here is that this effect is happening, but the article said this is imminent and it's going to happen within a few decades. And after talking to Michael Mann today, you know, he's like, look, this is all they're observing things. They have data, but it's not going to happen and they don't know what's going to happen and.
S: They said there's a range. It could be 20 years, it could be 80 years.
J: You.
S: Don't know.
J: So, you know, I, I think after talking to him, you know, I was like, maybe I won't even cover it. And then I realized, no, this is a good lesson for all of us because again, this is legitimate. They they are observing this, they're making, they're taking readings, they're seeing the temperature changes.
S: They just hyped, they hyped the they hype the imminence of it and also when the when it does shut down, if it does shut down, right and, and whenever that happens, what are the bad consequences? Obviously will disrupt climate, you know, Europe become colder, Europe's agriculture.
J: Is going to.
S: Could be shift aggregate.
J: Typhoons are going to shift southward and and this is what's bad, right? So, you know, as like we're we're used to in, in North America here, like, yeah, we know we got hurricanes like they develop in the Gulf of Mexico and in that region they come through. But what's happening is there the intensity is dramatically increasing. That's just where where I happen to live. But this is happening all over the world. Well, you'll have tropical monsoons that are going to places that they never have gone to before because weather patterns are changing and insects and animals and the environment is not adjusted to that because it just hasn't happened there before. Like as an example, it takes a long time for water to to be absorbed by certain types of soils. You know, if it's, if it has more clay, the water doesn't percolate as quickly and go down into the soil, which is really bad because that causes massive flooding. And as we all know, after watching these two hurricanes barrel through Florida, lots of people die when that happens because the water can't be absorbed because basically Florida Kevin Fulton, I talked to Kevin extensively about what happened with him and his farm that all that happened so quickly. The water can't be absorbed by the ground because the water table is basically the ground.
S: Right in Florida. In Florida have basements there and also won't the ocean like raised by a foot?
J: Yeah, Michael, Michael Mann said that like in the West Coast, it could go up by a foot, which is is a massive, that's, you know, that's, that's city changing. Yeah, you know, water levels. Where would that extra water come from? It's it. It'll cut.
S: Glacier melt, right?
J: It'll come from glacier melt. It'll come from.
B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
S: But also water is different volume based on its temperature, right? So it's not just amount of water, it's also the temperature of the water.
B: But didn't Michael also say that even if this does collapse, it wouldn't be as apocalyptic as as a lot of people think?
J: It potentially the point is we don't know and the article says we do right. The article puts it into into a place where you're like, oh, OK, this is going to happen in the next 20 years. I have young kids, the world's to be done when they're there, you know, and like it's, it's a sad thing to think about. Yes, it's all of these things are happening, but but we are getting we're getting fooled by by science, news media. We can't trust everything that we read.
S: Well, I first heard about the Amox cycle and the potential for it to shut down like 30 years ago. Yeah, this is this is not a new idea. This is just a new, I think estimate of like when it's going to happen and what the effects would be. It's not updated. It's not updated information models. I'm sure.
E: Was there? Wasn't there a Star Trek episode called Time? Anything. No. No, no connection. OK, no connection. No idea.
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US#11: All right, guys, let's get back to the show.
Interview with Andrea Love (1:05:05)
US#11: We're going to pause our live recording at Cycon to go to an excerpt from an interview that we also recorded at Cycon with Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who is an avid science communicator. As is often the case, the full uncut version of this interview is available to our premium members. You can find that content on our Patreon website.
J: Andrea, thank you for joining us for this interview. We're here at Scicon and I would like to talk to you first about give us a little idea about your talk that you did and you know why they invited you.
US#00: Yeah. So thanks for having me. Big fan. I'm going to be talking about the selective rejection of science based on ideological beliefs. So talking about a lot of the themes that we've already heard about that people who can be scientifically minded or at least believe that they're scientifically minded are still susceptible to misinformation. So utilizing some of the case studies that I've kind of written about recently with regard to endorsing anti science rhetoric in the context of things like food ingredients and food additives and genetic technologies and cancer treatments and, and using those to kind of under score that people can be very staunchly pro science. You know, those who have their lawn signs that say they believe in science. But then, you know, we see states like California who pass legislation where they're banning food additives, that it's entirely based on false premise and misinformation and often influenced by their constituents or anti science activists.
J: Is there anything going on today that you think is like one of the worst offenders of this?
US#00: So I would say that a lot of these NGO's that claim to be, you know, pro health or advocates for health or the environment, Consumer Reports, the Environmental working Group, they've been long term propagators of this and they make a lot of money and they have ties with media outlets and politicians and they're very well funded. And so they kind of get their hooks in and they create this ecosystem of misinformation. And many people actually don't realize that those organizations are the originators of these things that they come to believe. For example, The Dirty Dozen list. Everybody knows of The Dirty Dozen list, but a lot of people don't know that it's coming from the EWG and what the EWG has actually done to erode signs in public health over the last several decades. And so I think, you know, they're obviously a major player. I think a lot of the media outlets, you know, and particularly kind of the LAX oversight with what's getting published, this kind of fixation on clickbait and mischaracterized data. But it also is coming from, you know, poor quality science, right? We have people that are publishing studies in fields that they don't have expertise in the lead and tampons, you know, headlines I wrote an article about and the lead author, she's a postdoc. Her background is in public health, and she's writing about biomedical science and toxicology and biochemistry. And public health scientists don't have biomedical training. And so, you know, she doesn't even have the expertise to even study this phenomenon. But if you look, she has a long personal history and like, feminist activism. And she received a grant from an organization geared towards, you know, Women's Health. And so you kind of see how people, even in the sciences, are influenced by their personal beliefs to pigeonhole themselves into creating bad signs, which is then taken out of context by press release, media outlets, social media influencers, and then it goes viral.
C: But to be clear, somebody in that position could also be doing good science. So I think it's important maybe just to take a second to talk about why that particular scenario was bad science. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean those. Things didn't because she was those things. That's not why it was bad science. Science, the science was bad and she may have been motivated because of those things.
US#00: Is what you're saying yes, yes and no I mean, I think if if your doctoral work and kind of your scientific training throughout your career has been in a non biomedical science field, it'd be really hard for you to craft a study that's going to appropriately assess a biomedical phenomenon, right and she.
C: Was a sole author.
US#00: No, she was the primary author. So the the senior author on the study is a geochemist, so she knows how to do analytical chemistry assessment, which is essentially what the study did. But they were making claims about health where none of those authors actually had expertise in any sort of biomedical science. So, you know, they're they're trying to find a problem where there isn't. And essentially they were finding these trace levels of, you know, elemental metals that exist in the environment and they exist in all plants. And they were then saying, oh, we found it in digested tampon fibers. Therefore your tampons are leaching toxic metals into your body. And it's like, first of all, those levels were far below the regulatory thresholds for any of those things. And I think people forget that cotton is a plant and it grows in the soil and so it picks up these substances. And so they kind of undermine and they, they said even that this was the first study to assess that. And they clearly don't understand how regulatory oversight occurs because tampons are Class 2 medical devices. And even if they're not publicly publishing these data, I guarantee that all of these ISO standards for raw materials for tampon manufacturers, like they know what impurities are in those fibers. And so by saying that in their study, they're undermining all of these things that go into regulatory oversight and further eroding confidence that people have in our federal safety agencies and science as a whole.
S: I think you just described like my whole problem with the environmental working. Group right? I'm so glad to hear that because I've had a problem with them for years and I'm glad it's not just me, no.
US#00: Because they seem.
S: So ideological and I find often because I write, you know, for science based medicine, like I cover a lot of the stuff that they write about and it always feels to me like it's a bunch of a chemist who have no idea about public health who are looking at hazard. It's like, oh, there's stuff here. They have no idea how to put it into context of risk and they have an agenda. Like they want everything to be scary.
US#00: Yes, they they get money. The scarier they make these claims sound and they're getting money for their organization, but also for the companies that donate to them, which are the safer alternatives that they're frequently recommending to people, whether it's food, whether it's consumer products, whether it's sunscreens. And they sell their EWG verified label on top of that. And it's interesting because I met a new, a relatively new hire to the EWG. I was speaking at a cosmetic chemist conference about the overarching harms of chemistry, cosmetic chemistry and misinformation. And I called out the EWG. I didn't know that he was in the audience because I'm not a cosmetic chemist and I don't know the sphere, but one of the other panelists was like, oh, that guy. He's like, and he came from industry and he connected with me on LinkedIn. And so now I can see like his content and, and I don't know if you know, there's financial incentive, but like his content has so dramatically shifted and he essentially insinuates that hazard assessment is the more appropriate way, whereas, you know, any other toxicologist or safety chemist would would say the opposite.
S: And yeah, so and what I have found, it's not unique to me, but I think that the pattern that we see a lot, this could be really subtle. You tell me if you agree with this, that like, industry doesn't necessarily have to tell you these are the opinions we want you to have. They just need to find somebody who already has those opinions and fund them. So that person thinks I'm just getting funding to talk about the stuff that I'm already talking about, Not realize that, yeah, you were selected by industry because you are fitting into a narrative they're trying to promote. And then of course, once that relationship happens, I do think they kind of get steered even more in that direction.
US#00: I, I agree. And, and it's interesting because you know, when, when I'm often debunking claims because I'm always trying to, you know, alleviate that risk perception gap, right? Because I think people are paralyzed with health anxiety about things that don't pose tangible risks to their health, right? Food ingredients, vaccine adverse events, vaccine ingredients, organic produce versus conventional produce, trace levels of pesticide residues. And you know, FYI, organic farming uses a ton of pesticides. They just omit all of those and they're not looking at like social determinants of HealthEquity to healthcare equity and access to affordable foods. And those are the things that actually impact health. And what ends up happening is that when you debunk them, then you get accused of being bought and paid for and they're like, well, this industry is buying you off. And it's like these other people that you're promoting are industries, right? Big organic farming is a multi billion dollar industry. And it's so interesting to me that there's this, you know, dissonance in terms of like, well, if you know, we know it's because they have this parasocial relationship and this, you know, confirmation bias. But you know, if you're ever saying something, even if you have 30 years of data supported by 20 plus global regulatory agencies, you know, you're the one that's being paid to say that versus the person that's cherry picking a study that was, you know, bombarding mice with 10,000 full doses of anything.
S: Right. And that's, but that's the narrative, You know, if you like look at videos on TikTok, which which we do, that's the narrative that people say. And it's really hard to push back against that because, as you say, immediately you're the shill. Yeah. And it's like, yo, that's just big pharma looking for money. It's like, yeah. But you realize that people you're quoting like that guru is making millions of dollars selling snake oil. I'm just telling you that he's wrong. I'm not making any anything out of it, but they so just really hypocritical the way they yeah.
J: Selectively decide it's thrown around too. The whole shill thing is thrown around so, so freely at this point. And it's it's such, it's so pathetic. Because we're science communicators. Yeah. Like we're not getting paid off by anybody. I know, you know, we're, we're barely, you know, like we're, we're a small business here, you know what I mean? Like we like making money has been not a priority of ours.
S: It's the black box conspiracy.
J: Yeah, right.
S: It's just like anything I disagree with. They are doing it, yes. There's no detail, there's no specificity, just they they are engaged in this broader conspiracy and that's it. That's the boogeyman are.
J: They are they getting into prestigious journals or who? Who's publishing?
US#00: That no, not usually they're usually pay to play or low quality or journals that routinely have, you know, peer reviewers that don't have relevant expertise like they're having like a physiologist review toxicology related studies. And you know, again, I think that's a bigger challenge of the whole academic research model. That's a bigger conversation because, you know, I think it's very wasteful that people are kind of doing frivolous research in order to get published. They can get their next grant. And when they publish something that all of these people that are scraping the Internet for buzzwords like certain heavy metal words or the words of pesticides or things like that, then then that gets kind of selected cherry picks. And otherwise it probably wouldn't have even, you know, gotten any attention. And it's very frustrating for me because, you know, I actually have a full time job in bio in in biotech, and I do all of this in my free time. And, you know, I left academia for a lot of different reasons, but one of them was the frustration with kind of the model of how research is able to be conducted. And it's not to say that biotech is is perfect or anything, but the goals are very different because there's always some tangible endpoint as opposed to, you know, simply trying to academic researchers are just trying to sell their ideas to get more grant funding. And so it's always interesting too, when I see like, people with academic appointments kind of be automatically trusted more than someone who's a scientist in an industry role because you have that kind of ivory tower. Perception.
C: Yeah, it I think about sort of when I was working on my dissertation, I was digging deep into like Heideggerian phenomenology. Stay with me for a second. One of the things that Heidegger did, which was different from previous views of phenomenology is he was like, biases exist. And my, I'm saying, let's own them and make them explicit because if we do that, then everybody is operating from a standard playing field. Whereas historically they were like, let's be unbiased. And that's bullshit. I'm sorry. That just does not exist. And so I guess that leads to an important question, which is what are the solutions to these issues? Because it's very easy, you know, like we were talking about the tampon thing. It's very easy to be like, we'll look at their bias. But at the same time, I understand why there's activist science going on because the historical bias was very anti. And so we want to counter that bias. And so like, is it about making more room for more biases and hoping they come out in the wash? Is it about people pretending they're unbiased? Like what is?
J: The care there's a whole ecosystem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I'm I'm learning is there is an entire ecosystem now that is a sham. It's like you have the the people who are are doing research that are qualified to do it. You have bullshit journals. You have people reviewing, you know, the papers that get put in these journals that don't have the credentials to do it. And it seems to me it's all propped up just so they can get grant money. That whole thing has to be toppled over and the only way to do it is to expose it.
C: Yeah, but they're it's like it's all variations on a theme, right? Like this is the most egregious version, but we could come down to the middle and be like, it's still kind of happening even in people who are above board. So that's that's. Yeah, no, absolutely.
US#00: And, and, and that's, you know, often why when we talk about the body of evidence on a topic, right? And, and how you can't take a singular study at value, you, you have to look at it in the context of all of the information on that topic. And, and I actually talked about the kind of the reason that this tampon study got so much attention with, oh, I can't remember what magazine is like a career magazine talking about like Women's Health in the workplace and all that. But. But, you know, it's one of those things where they're exploiting the fact that there is systemic misogyny and sexism in research, in medicine, in science, and using that to foment fear and anger and panic and. All of the Wellness influencers that I saw sharing the study were like, see, no one cares about your health as a woman. They don't care that your tampons are poisoning you, this, that and the other. When in reality, the story should be, listen, we've been doing research on menstrual products and mental health. We have a lot more we need to do to better characterize and better study this. But this is not saying that your menstrual product is unsafe, right? And what you ended up seeing was these Wellness influencers, while they're vilifying tampons, they're selling menstrual cups, they're selling menstrual, they're selling menstrual underwear, of course.
J: Infowars sells vitamins, but it does have something that they sell.
C: But it doesn't undo the fact that the body of evidence, which we're always talking about how science is self correcting and there's this body of evidence and we want to look at meta analysis that there are biases even in those that historically, especially when it comes to Women's Health, there is a misogynistic bias in the science itself. And so it becomes a difficult. Yeah, you know, it's it's the whole thing when we're battling pseudoscience and much pseudoscience has like a kernel of truth in it, right. And so it's like, how then do you approach that? Yeah. And and and really have, I think a a Gray area conversation with a public that doesn't want to be.
S: In Gray and just to to genericize it a little bit because I was going to ask also if you have any tips or tricks about this one is similarly the narrative of, you know, you don't have to worry about that it's actually safe. Certainly makes us sound like, you know, we're the deniers. And totally the. Person who is saying you need to be worried, they are trying to poison you or whatever, They don't care about your health. They're the maverick truth tellers who are out there trying to save you. And we're like nothing to see here. Don't worry about it. This isn't a risk. It's hard. I mean the movie. In the movie, we're always the villains.
C: Right, of course. Because that's what the bad guy says, yeah. Exactly.
S: That narrative is so out there.
J: How do we? Combat, that says face it guys, is fun as sciences to people, especially to people like us, like science and critical thinking and all that. It's not sexy. It's not sexy. It's just not like, you know, it's.
S: Tedious, but that's the way, by definition.
J: I mean just pick like.
US#00: I want to make it sexy, right? I also.
S: Want to do to confront that villain?
US#00: It's. Really hard. So like when we're talking about the tampon study, for example, it's we need more Women's Health research. But this isn't the way to do it, right? This isn't we We shouldn't be wasting research dollars on these studies that are trying to find a problem that doesn't exist. We should be conducting quality studies funded for people that have expertise in these fields and have have legitimate reasons to assess these sorts of things. And that's really hard because grant applications are very disparate across different fields and different funding agencies. And so, you know, there isn't going to be a singular solution, but it becomes so challenging to even have those nuanced conversations about, hey, like this was wildly mischaracterizing things. And, and often what I do is I try to, you know, I like to leave with data, but people don't like data. They like emotion. They don't want to connect with who's delivering the message. So it's all right. I know you read the study. This is what the data actually say. This is how little lead you're actually finding in these tampons. And this is the environment they extracted it in, which is not the environment of your vagina because your vagina is not 350°. And you know, aph of one, it's not going to happen, right? But then it's, and I still use tampons and I still feel totally comfortable, you know, using them. And you also, if they're your preferred product, like. And so, you know, I feel like we have to convey some of that emotional attachment while we're also trying to assess things. And so often, you know, I get a lot of heat when I talk about, you know, the marketing ploys of organic agriculture and how it's not even just that it's not more nutritious and not pesticide free, it's actually more ecologically damaging and, and all that. And so, you know, people are like, well, are you saying that you buy conventional produce? And I'm like, yeah. And honestly, like, I wish that we could get to a point where we had more modern agriculture tools so we could impart more nutrition and reduce further reduce use of pesticides because that's, that's what they all claim they want, right? They don't want to use pesticides, but they, they refuse to acknowledge that the organic products that they've so emotionally invested their, their identity in use pesticides, many, many at much higher quantities and many that are more ecologically damaging. And so, you know, it's got to be a way to like frame things that hit or resonate with their motivation. And so if their motivation is, well, they don't want pesticides, Well, you know, can we continue to repeat and reiterate, well, G crops can actually allow you to reduce pesticides and increase yield and improve food stability. And you know, we've, we have 30 years of data that say it's not harming the environment, even if the EWG and Vani Hari have told you that it does.
S: Right. Where can people find you on social media?
US#00: Yeah. So my name is Andrea Love. I have a PhD in microbiology and immunology. I work in life sciences biotech, primarily developing therapeutics and interventions for cell and gene therapy, cancer, infectious diseases, and I founded Immunologic to provide science communication and help demystify a lot of these science and health topics. So you can find me at immunologic.org or on the social channels at Doctor dot Andrea Love.
S: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us. This has been fantastic.
US#00: Yeah, thank you for having me.
Science or Fiction (1:25:56)
Theme: 19th Century Pseudoscience
Item #1: Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline.[7]
Item #2: Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases, and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water.[8]
Item #3: A popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form, and was a significant early influence of Picasso.[9]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #3 |
| Science | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #2 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
US#00: It's time for science or fiction.
J: All right, guys.
S: What is? What time is it? It is. Science or fiction time.
J: I tell a joke, Steve or no? No, just that. I've been coming up with jokes about everything that's going on at this conference and Steve's like, you're not telling any jokes.
S: All right, each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and one fake. And then I challenge, I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. And the audience gets to play along, too. All right, here they are. There's a theme this week.
C: Vegas.
S: No.
E: Nevada.
S: You were hoping it was going to be Vegas or Nevada. Neither. The theme. Halloween is not Halloween. Nope.
B: Come on Bob, peanut butter zombies.
S: The theme is 19th century pseudoscience.
B: Oh, cool. OK. Cool. Halloween would have been better. Well, maybe no, it's OK.
S: No, all right, here we go. They're a little complicated, but bear with me. Item number one, Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Item number two, Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths and drinking vast amounts of water. And item number 3A popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form and was a significant early influence of Picasso. All right, so we're we're going to do something very simple. Was going to pull my panel and then we'll pull the audience. See what you guys say. Let's just start from the left and go down to the right. So, Brian, you get to go first.
C: Get to.
S: Get to go always a. Privilege.
US#06: Privilege.
S: In the Vanguard position, Brian, you got to go first.
US#06: All right, I think it's pretty clear that I don't have anything intelligent to say about any of these. The. Merely united did they? Yeah, mesmerism surviving seems plausible to me, although giving rise to psychology and act out and discipline. I guess I don't know the the one that's kind of since the one that's kind of tweaking me here is number 2, Hydropathy, the belief that water could cure most, most diseases, most diseases. That's I've never even heard of that. At least I've heard of mesmerism. And three, sure, I guess the influence on Picasso is weirdly specific, but let's say that's right. So I'm going to say #2.
B: Is the hydropathy 1 you think is the fix OK Bob? I'm having trouble with one in. Three, but I said 2 Bob, maybe you didn't hear me.
US#06: I did. I did. You said. You said 2 is fiction.
B: I'm thinking one or three is fiction. Yeah.
US#06: But my point is, I said something different. I'm just, I just feel like maybe you didn't hear me or something.
B: He's a not non professional physicist. Right, David, it's my turn now. Yeah. You can call me Dave. Phrenology, that's brain bumps, right? Yes. Now I know that that that science actually, it's baloney, of course, but I've read in the past that phrenology actually helped with the study of of the mind and psychology because they were focusing on the brain so much that it actually helped transition to real science. So I've heard of that. So that's why I've never heard of phrenology dealing with anything like this painting and sculpture. But then number one, you're saying specifically that measure mesmerism survived and actually helped give rise to hypnosis and psychology, which I thought phrenology did. So I don't know which one to pick. Probably 2.
C: Can I ask a clarifying question while we're still early on? So the way that it's written, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology. Do you mean contributing to the rise?
S: Yeah, contributing to the riser, yeah, but pretty directly. I'm not saying like we wouldn't have Psychology Today if it weren't for mesmerism, but like there are connections lead through leading through from mesmerism directly to academic. Psychology.
B: Yeah, like it feels like an episode of Connections. So I'll say for knowledge Jay #3 is the fiction, because I think I've never heard of any of that ever happening, so I'll have to go with that one.
J: OK, Jay. You know, bloodletting led to modern medicine, right? So I, I kind of, but still there's a pathway, you know, so I could see with number one, with mesmerism. Like sure, you know, you know, people were trying different things, You know, some of them probably believed that, some of them knew it was BS, but we're taking advantage of it. But then, you know, it seems like the progression that you set up there with number one seems reasonable. I don't know for sure, but I'm going to say that one is science. And then I'll go to #3 next. So the, the applied phrenology and then the fact that there's lots of painting and sculpture. I mean, I, I have seen tons and tons of pictures of paintings and sculptures of phrenology. I'm sure everybody here has, right? You know, you just something I've stumbled across. I've seen, you know, phrenology skulls in museums. You know what I mean?
US#06: It's the white skull with the black stuff from.
J: Yeah, so that kind of seems legit. I mean the Picasso 1 is. Sure.
US#06: I like where you're going with this check.
J: Yeah. I don't. So I'll take #1 as a fiction. Kidding. I'm getting a move with Brian. I'm going to go with Brian because Brian is smart and I love him and I don't want him to cry after the show, so I'll go with #2.
B: But.
J: Looks on here, Jay. I'm going to cry no matter what.
B: Hey, what was Brians first words for science and fiction? I don't know. Basically saying he doesn't know anything about this.
US#06: Well, it sounds like you listened to something I said, Bob all.
E: Right.
B: We shall see. All right, Evan.
E: Yeah, mesmerism there. So there have been other examples of pseudosciences that have helped sort of give rise to real science. You know, astrology probably is the prime example of that. So I think there's a parallel here. And my recollection, didn't Ben Franklin contribute to the debunking of mesmerism, if my memory serves, yeah. So I think I think that one is science. I also think that number 3 is science for many of the reasons Jay mentioned it. It was very artistically expressed in a lot in in several different ways. You know, the the intricate drawings, definitely the sculptures, no doubt about it. I had no idea about the Picasso aspect of it, so I'm not sure if that would be enough to turn that one into the fiction. But the hydropathy one that I have not really heard much of it all about, that's the most foreign of the three to me. So that's why I'll say that's the. Fiction.
B: That's what Steve wants. And. Cara.
C: So just just to be clear, Bob thinks that phrenology is the.
B: Phrenology. Everyone else.
C: Is with hydropathy, am I mixing it that up with animal magnetism? OK yeah, same thing. Yeah. So this idea that there's this life force and then when something's dead, you can like reanimate or you can re force. And then this idea of hypnotism did sort of come from that early psychology experimentation is really about sensory understanding of the of the world. Like a lot of it is what's the just noticeable difference between this and that. Yeah, the academic psychology as an academic discipline is very different than like clinical psychology. I do think that like physiopsychology that I could see there being a link there, although I don't know that's a tough one because like how at what percentage did it give rise going down to phrenology, which is not bumps on the brain, it's bumps on the head, on the skull.
Voice-over: Yeah, yeah, made by the brain.
C: So yeah, I could see phrenology, that there being an art movement, but as a method of understanding and representing the human form is interesting to me because phrenology, like iridology and like all of those representational pseudosciences, they say something about something else. But phrenology is talking about personality traits. It really didn't talk much about your foot does this or your arm does this and this sounds like he's talking about more of an iridology like chi map. So I'm not that one's kind of sticking out to me. But then also with hydropathy. Hydropathy, I know that there have been like water bath therapies for a really long time, like, oh, you're, you know, you've got the, I don't know, the fevers and let's put you in a nice bath and all of that. I don't know if it was called hydropathy. It might have just been hydrotherapy. I don't think you would make it something the fiction because you changed the name like that. I don't think anybody believe that water could cure most diseases. I think the idea there was that temperature changes are important. So I think the one that's sticking out to me is the is the phrenology one that that that jump from the brain to whatever that's that's not actually phrenology. That's not what that is so.
S: So there's good 2 for Phrenology is the fiction, 3 for Hydropathy is the fiction. Everyone agrees with Mesper. Now we're going to pull the audience, we're going to do the George Hob One clap method, right? I'm going to hold my hand up here, and when I come down to here, you're going to clap for the one you think is the fiction.
C: We practice. We're going.
S: To practice. So just clap when I get my hand come drops perfect. All right, So if you think that the mesmerism mesmerism 1 is the fiction clap. If you think that the Hydropathy 1 is the fiction clap and if you think the Phrenology 1 is the fiction clap pretty even attributed to you guys were.
C: I heard more for phrenology.
S: You think so?
E: TuneIn next week when we reveal the answer.
S: Want to do a tiebreaker? All right, Hydropathy, phrenology. All right, Phrenology definitely is in the lead. OK. Democrats.
C: Not put your faith in maybe he's.
S: Close. But there's only like 3 people in this room. I think the measurement 1 is the fiction slit. We'll start there. Kara, I know what you're feeling right now.
C: No, you do not.
E: They'll be superstars if they go.
S: Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Most of the people in the room think this one is science. Good smile on his face. Is science all right? Me, Bob, You're lucky.
B: I was going to. Read me.
S: I know he's unreadable. All right, that is very interesting science. So he's not here, but yeah, mesmerism started by Anton Mesmer, right, The idea of animal magnetism, you know, kind of playing off to this recent discovery, you know, increasing knowledge about electricity and magnetism. He said, well, that's an invisible force that you can manipulate. There's an invisible force in living things, we'll call it animal magnetism, and you can manipulate that in order to cure diseases and whatever in ailments. Most of his clients were women and you know, there was very exploitative.
C: Surprising.
S: Yeah. And they, you know, he, they would, he would cure whatever their ailments were, you know, with his manipulating the animal magnetism. He was and he trained a lot of people. There were, you know, people who were supposed to be sensitives, you know, who were able to manipulate it. It was like a thriving industry. And then the, the, you know, the royal Commission was set up to investigate him in, in France. And Ben Franklin was part of that. And they investigated him and said, he's completely full of it, right? This is, he can't do anything. It's not all nonsense. And that pretty much killed, you know, mesmerism in that form, right? But it did survive and later in that in the 19th century, because you know, the the quacks are not going to stop, stop doing it just because it's not true, right? So, but, but instead of like saying that we're moving this fluid around this magnetic fluid to cure disease, mesmerism became really a form of stage hypnosis. What we today would recognize as stage hypnosis, putting people into a trance where they don't remember what happens during the trance, but you can get them to do things. And not only that, but the idea was when they were in the trance, that was, you know, induced with when they were mesmerized, right? They had access to, you know, a deeper intelligence. They, they had insight into themselves and into other people, especially their illnesses and their ailments. So it's like essentially, take somebody, mesmerize them, put them into a trance, and then while that person is in the trance, they're like a guru who could now make profound statements about like other people's problems and diseases. There's an interesting feminist angle to this, in that women started using this in order to gain a voice that they would not otherwise have right. Because when they're mesmerized and in this trance state, what they say is supposed to be magically profound. They're now an Oracle. And so that was advantage of it. I took advantage of it. Yeah. Now the the same sort of now the hypnosis movement that came out of the mesmerism movement was very interested in this, all the psychological aspects of this and the mind and what, how does the mind work and how does all this hypnosis work? And that the same people and the same sort of discipline did feed into the development of the of academic psychology in the early 20th century. So there is. A a direct through line there. Again, I'm not saying we wouldn't have Psychology Today without mesmerism, just like we would have chemistry without alchemy, we would have astronomy without astrology. But the same people, the same traditions that kind of evolved from 1 into the other. So I thought that was all pretty cool.
US#06: I just want to put a plug in here for the 1986 Mets theme song Get Mesmerized.
S: Mesmerized.
US#06: Isn't absolutely worth here. Thank you. One person knows what I'm talking about.
S: Go on to #2 Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water. Evan, Jay and Brian, you think this one is the fiction? About a third, maybe 40% of the audience think this one is the fiction and this one is science.
B: Good job, Bob. This is absolutely.
S: This is a very popular movement of the 19th century. It was hydropathy, also called the water cure, later adopted by naturopaths, not surprisingly still around for that reason. And yeah, they just thought that pure water could cure just about anything. And if you drink it, you bathe in it, you'd wrap yourself in it, whatever. That would work. Pure it was it treated. It had to be pure water.
US#06: But wasn't the water not that great?
S: No. Yeah.
C: But that that kind of worked, yeah, just clean water is pretty good for you.
S: But remember, this is probably dovetails with the SPA movement, which was based off of like mineral springs like this pure because again, because everything was so foul. Kellogg. Actually did have a pure water source that probably would be seen as very, you know, curative and been healthy, healthful, etcetera because everything else was sewage, right? Yeah. So that one is absolutely science, which means that a popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form and was significant or was a significant early influence of Picasso is the fiction. But what aspect of that is the fiction?
E: Picasso.
S: The Picasso aspect, as I said, 100% fiction. Yeah, the rest of it is real. So there was this artistic movement in the 19th century. Phrenology was really popular in the 19th century. And again, phrenology is the idea that different parts of the brain do different things. And just like a muscle, if you exercise one part of your brain, it's going to get bigger. And they couldn't measure the brain directly, but you could measure the skull over the part of the brain. So they thought the brain would sort of bulge out in one location because of your personality, and that would influence the overlying skull. And therefore there would be a bump that you could measure with. They had precise phrenological measuring devices. Interestingly, the phrenologists were mainly opposed by neuroscientists who thought that the brain was not compartmentalized right. And the phrenologists were correct. They were on the correct side of that debate. And as it, you know, as we learned more about that, the for now, that's this is partly why phrenology became so popular and then was thought of as legitimate, because they were actually on the correct side of pretty much the first big debate within the neuroscience community. But on the most fundamental question, is the brain homogeneous, or are two different parts of the brain do different things?
C: Problem is, all the things that they said that it did were just wrong.
S: We're all wrong. Their map of the brain was complete nonsense, utter fiction. And it is wrong that the the brain does not hypertrophy, right? The internal structure changes. You can see the connections and the networks and everything. And we could now measure them. Like if you play the violin, the representation for your left hand in your in the motor cortex gets bigger.
B: Homunculus.
S: But you can't see that on the surface of the brain. And then they're.
C: Definitely don't have a skull bone.
S: Certainly not in the skull, the overlying that that part of the brain. So that part was utter nonsense, but it enjoyed a lot of of academic legitimacy and popularity into the 20th century. Yeah, you know, very, very late.
B: Steve, Steve, can you confirm my memory of the idea that different ology impacted psychology and and studying study?
S: You were wrong. It was neurology that you were thinking of. I knew you were psychology.
B: Some some ology.
S: Yeah, it was. It was what I just said about neurology. That's what you're thinking of.
B: Yeah, it was. Kind of, right?
S: Yeah, yeah, kind of kind of right, IE wrong so, but then and so. I still want.
B: I still.
S: Want popularity, that's true part of the popularity led to this idea that well, because artists at the same time we're trying to not just like copy human figures or whatever, but like really understand the human form mechanistically, right? And that helped them like they wanted to know the muscular structure and how things worked and that would help them reproduce as they represent the human form. So of course you have to know about phrenology because that's part of the human form. It's like if you're going to paint a picture of an angry person, you got to give them bumps in the right place to try to represent their essence, right?
E: They are.
S: That was a real tradition. Not bad, but that I think it pretty much faded out by the time Picasso was around. Picasso's early influences were were African art. So a lot of the what you think of is like like a Picasso kind of form, especially early on was that he actually appropriated a lot of it from African art. And now we looking back on it, a lot of artists are critical of that because he did appropriate it and he also presented it with the the tropes of the time about savagery and primitivism and everything. So he was a product of his time like everybody didn't. So yes, he did suffer all of that sort of bigotry of his time, but that that was his early influence. Nothing to do with phrenology. I just made that up because it's Picasso, you know, It's kind of weird and I thought it would people would buy it.
C: And they did.
B: I mean.
S: Karen, I didn't.
B: All right. But you still got a bunch of stuff wrong, Bob. Bob was wrong and he won. I was right and I lost. People will remember that, Karen. I won. That's the important thing.
S: Let it be known, Bob and Karen and most of the audience. So congratulations audience did a good job. Smart crowd.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:46:39)
"Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality."
– Paul Kurtz, (description of author)
S: Evan, give us a quote.
E: Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct yet have no factual basis in reality. The late, great Paul. Kurtz.
S: Yeah, he was. He was quite the guy I remember. Here's my anecdote about Paul Kurtz, My very first skeptical meeting, right? So this is, it was the four of us, right? We come to Buffalo for a meeting of, of CYCOP at the time. And we were nobody, nobody knew who we were. We were just getting started. This is like 1995 or whatever. And I met Paul Kurtz and he like pulled me aside and talked to me for like 1520 minutes about the skeptical movement and the humanist movement and you know, his philosophy. They like really just had this nurturing instinct wanted to, you know, just saw me as just some new person just entering the movement. And he really, really, really wanted, you know, to to express to me like what the whole movement was about and bring me in. And that made that had a huge influence on me. You know, I was like, yeah, this is this is a cool movement. These are cool people. They're educators, mentors. Like this is mentoring instinct was there and it was great. I'll never forget that, which is a good, good thing to remember. Like those little things, people never forget it. You, you go that little extra step to just give somebody some time. I always try to remember this. Like, we're at these events, we're all busy, we're overwhelmed, we're prepping, we're doing this. I do try to stay humble. We all try to remember that just giving people that little extra time could have the same kind of influence that like he had on me, you know, just try to keep that in mind. All right, All right. So thank you all for joining us at this episode. Thank you to CSI for inviting. It's always a great time. Thank you guys for joining me this week. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ www.spacedaily.com: https://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Near_Earth_Microquasar_found_to_emit_powerful_gamma_radiation_999.html
- ↑ retractionwatch.com: Reflecting on research misconduct: What’s next for the watcher community? – Retraction Watch
- ↑ health.ucdavis.edu: Could a new medical approach fix faulty genes before birth?
- ↑ www.mersenne.org: Mersenne Prime Discovery - 2^136279841-1 is Prime!
- ↑ www.thestar.com: Why is John Tavares backing a ‘magical amulet’?
- ↑ www.livescience.com: Key Atlantic current could collapse soon, 'impacting the entire world for centuries to come,' leading climate scientists warn
- ↑ No reference given
- ↑ muse.jhu.edu: Project MUSE - Hydropathy at Home: The Water Cure and Domestic Healing in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain
- ↑ www.nationalgalleries.org: https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/features/phrenology-19th-century