SGU Episode 992

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SGU Episode 992
July 13th 2024
A mesmerizing close-up of a marble, showcasing brilliant blue and white patterns.
SGU 991                      SGU 993
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
“Our illogical deference to Earth’s bounty has become so widespread that researchers had to give it a name: the “appeal to nature fallacy,” which occurs when we automatically assume something is better just because it’s natural, and likewise, worse if it’s not.”
― Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care
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Show Notes
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Intro

Voiceover: 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 Wednesday, July 10th, 2024. This is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

Voiceover:Howdy.

S:Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.

E: Happy Birthday, Nikolai Tesla. I didn't get you anything, so hope you don't hold that against me.

S:Did you get him a Tesla?

E:No, I didn't. I got him a cage, though.

S:Okay.

E:Thought he could use it. A coil.

S:So I had to go to court today. Always an interesting experience.

E:Wow.

S:What's going on? Nothing to do with me. I just had to appear as a material witness. Can't really go into the details.

E:Well, then it did have to do with you.

S: I had to appear as a materialist.

C:It had to do with a patient, probably. Yeah, probably. But we don't know. That's a good guess, though, right?

S:I find courtrooms fascinating. On one level, it's basically a logical sparring, right? So what's not to love about that? There's rules, it's all based upon logic and evidence, and the lawyers are playing their game, you know what I mean? But on the other hand, it is so incredibly tedious. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, See you next time.

C: Yeah, it's really not like it is on TV, is it? Oh my god, it's so 100% not like it is on TV. Like full of like gotcha, edge of your seat moments.

S:There's no gotchas. You know what I mean? By definition, because there's something called discovery. And then

E: Surprise witness number one!

S: Yeah, I guess it is like science because science is fascinating, but do you really want to stand in a lab all day and watch people run gels or whatever? I mean, there's tremendous tedium.

C:Oh, yeah. I remember back when I had a Wii, I bought this game in like the bargain bucket at a GameStop back in the day. And it was like a lab science game and I was playing it with my friends and then I just like got up and walked off and they were like, what? And I was like, this is so triggering. I just feel like I'm at work. Like, why would I play this game?

S:Only if you're earning credit or something.

C:It's not fun.

S:Yeah, I don't get sim games.

US#00:Yeah, not fun.

E:No?

S:Sim games? Like what? Like the Sims?

E:Yeah. Like civilization building games?

S: Yeah, I mean, I'm okay with games that are resource management if that's part of the game, but if that's the entire game is resource management, just like I have had these moments playing those sorts of games when I'm like managing or something or building something or whatever, and I'm thinking to myself, I could be doing this to my real house right now.

Voiceover:Right, exactly.

S: Why am I so, you know, fastidious about this virtual thing only I am ever going to see? But it's okay if it's like, you know, you kill stuff for a while, then it's like, oh, now I'm going to build my resources. You know, it kind of flows back and forth. Those games are good. I need some first-person action to break up the TV. Steven Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.

E: Yeah, that goes into your bill, right?

C:No, that's the thing. It must be so frustrating. That's what I was gonna say. When you're a material witness, it's completely different than being an expert witness. When you're an expert witness, like, you know, I've worked for forensic psychologists before who do this. They get paid to review records, to go up and give a professional opinion. They have these, like, large retainers. It's like it can be lucrative.

S:Oh, you get paid well. Yeah.

C:Yeah. As a material witness, you're not doing the exact same thing. But for some intents and purposes, you are doing something similar. But because you were called, you were subpoenaed, you don't get paid. You just get inconvenienced.

S:That's right. Pure inconvenience. And they never asked me the one question I most thought they were going to ask me.

C:No, that's fascinating. Did you work in the answer to another question?

S:Yeah, right. The thing is, when you're an expert witness, this is the big difference. You're an expert witness, you can say whatever you want, right? When they ask a question, you can say whatever you feel you need to say in order to give context to that question and educate the jury about that question. But when you're a material witness, you do have to just answer the question they ask you, right?

J:Oh, wow. That's a really—I've never heard that distinction before. Oh, yeah.

S:It's a big distinction. You are in charge when you're an expert witness, right? And the judge could—between the judge and the expert witness, the judge could say, you know, tell us more about this, or go on, keep talking, whatever. They'll just give you—they give you really wide free range, you know? The attorneys can object, but it's usually objecting to the other guy's question. They want to go in an area, but expert witnesses are given massive latitude. Material witnesses are like, if you get asked a yes or no question, your answer is yes or no, and that's it. You don't elaborate or whatever.

E: Yes, but... Ah, da-da-da-da.

S:Just to answer the question. But, you know, this was a little different, because even though I was a material witness, because this is a medical case and I'm a physician, they almost treated me like an expert witness in terms of giving me latitude, and they asked me a lot of questions that you would only ask of an expert witness. Like, what's your understanding of this scientific topic? You know what I mean?

E: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria,

S: It's interesting because as an expert witness, you could probably talk for almost as long as you want.

J:Pretty much.

S:I guess the judge would cut you off at some point, and you probably wouldn't get a lot of gigs if you went off on irrelevant tangents.

E:Who gets to decide who qualifies as an expert? The court does. Wow, so they could really make a bad choice and bring in someone who's not really an expert.

S:Both sides have to stipulate that they agree that that person's an expert, and the other attorney can always challenge you. That's the first thing that happens when you take the stand as an expert witness is they challenge your credentials, they challenge your objectivity, whatever they can to tear you down in front of the jury. And the attorney who hired you may object or try to defend you, but the bottom line is they're going to ask you, they're going to try to make it seem like you're not a reliable expert.

E:When did you stop beating your wife?

S:But the court and both attorneys have to stipulate that the court recognizes you as an expert in whatever field. And that's the other thing, it has to have a very narrow field in which you are an expert. Like, you are called for this question, right? So like, for example, I've been called as an expert neurologist who's commenting on causality. And that's the only thing I'm commenting on, meaning, did A cause B? I'm not commenting on, is what they did malpractice? The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. But within that, yeah, you could say whatever you feel you need to. So the lawyer who's asking you questions can't hem you in. You know what I mean? They can't play the game of that, yeah, did you stop beating your wife type of question, like asking a leading question. So you're supposed to still, if they ask you a question, like, are you familiar with this? You're supposed to just say yes, and then they'll ask you the follow-up question, tell me about this. So there is still sort of a protocol to how you answer questions, but if they stop there, you could say, but, and then just go off on whatever. They can't trap you by cleverly asking questions that hem in your answer.

C:But the lawyer on the other side can object.

S: Yeah, but they have to have a legitimate reason to object. They can't object. I object. The guy I hired isn't doing a good job.

C:No, I'm saying on the other side.

S:Yeah, yeah. Whoever's not asking the question.

C:Exactly. They can object and say, you know, whatever. I don't know.

E:And they get to cross question, you're right.

S:Then they cross, then they could redirect, you know, that goes back and forth a few times until everybody's happy.

C:Everybody's happy.

E:It's a question of the jury.

S: They do do that. That happened today. You can't have that conversation in front of the jury. So those conversations happen either before the jury gets there or at one point they did send the jury away so we could resolve a should the jury hear this type of question. That's the point. Yeah, it took a long time. It's an imperfect system, but it's a system that we have. But at least there are rules of evidence and rules of logic, and that's honestly what makes the system work. You can't just make any crack-ass argument that you want, unlike, say, every other sphere of life, pretty much. All right, let's go on.

Dumbest Thing of the Week: Robot Suicide [11:23]

• Civil servant robot 'commits suicide', deadly plunge under probe 

S:Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest thing of the week.

E: Yes, dumbest thing of the week, and here to sing the song is Cara Santa Maria. Take it away, Cara. Nope. Nope. Okay. That's a hard pass for Cara. Ouch. I don't want to take all the fun every time I do this. I'm going to offer it up to my wonderful co-hosts as I go through these, so I just want to give you guys the chance. Just sharing is caring, right? I know. I learned this from a radio show host back in the day who would present a news item this way. And what they would do, they read the article kind of in its entirety, in its context. And don't worry, this one's not really a long article. But as I go through this, I'm going to pause a couple of times along the way to make some points. And these points are sort of like the first things that popped into my head as I first read this article, OK? So here we go. The recent headline, and I saw this first at the website called Interesting Engineering. And this was about a week and a half ago, but since then, like in the last two or three days, it's really been on a lot of news sites elsewhere. But this is where I first read it. And the article's author, his name is Aman Tripathi. Okay. Here's the headline. Civil servant robot, quote, commits suicide, comma, deadly plunge under probe. Here's the sub-headline. Witnesses saw the robot erratically circling before its fall, sparking speculation about the cause. I'm going to pause here for a second and throw this in. Of the five of us, I think I consider myself, and again of the five of us, the Luddite of the group. I admit that freely. I know enough about technology. I'm able to use enough of it to still function in 2024, but I have no By no means the most technically savvy person, but if I saw a robot acting erratically, I mean, maybe the 7,000th reason I could think of as to why a machine is malfunctioning is that the machine was somehow programmed with the ability to end its function by seeking to actively fall off a surface, right? But again, that's just me, the Luddite. A first-of-its-kind incident has shocked the world after a civil servant robot at Gumi City Council in South Korea was found unresponsive after what appears to be a deliberate plunge down a two-meter staircase. Found unresponsive and deliberate plunge, that's called anthropomorphizing, I think. Maybe a new level of it as far as I'm concerned, but back to the article. Local media and social media users have called it the first robot suicide in the country. The robot, affectionately known as the robot supervisor, had been a model employee. Here's a quote. It was officially part of the city hall. It was one of us, an unnamed official said. They described it as a diligent worker. The officials stated that the robot worked diligently and handling daily document deliveries, city promotion, and information dissemination to local residents. Witnesses reported seeing the robot, quote, circling in one spot as if something was there, end quote, shortly before the incident, sparking speculation about the cause of the fall. Some experts have suggested that the robot may have experienced an emotional breakdown due to the stress of its work load, while others believe a technical malfunction could be to blame. Let's pause for that. Emotional stress? Emotions? Was this machine really programmed for emotions? Is that what we're being told?

J:Even if somebody said that they programmed something to have emotions, it doesn't actually have emotions.

E: Well, right, Jay. That's definitely a valid point. And Bob, your point as well, right?

B:Is that... Oh, is this an Onion article? I mean, it sounds... Is it an Onion article?

E:And Bob, absolutely. I had to stop. Thanks for watching. The exact circumstances leading to the robot's demise are under investigation. Pieces have been collected and will be analyzed by the company. Mysterious Circumstances The incident has sparked a wave of mourning and curiosity across the nation. Local media headlines questioned the apparent robot suicide, asking, why did the diligent civil officer do it? Was it working too hard for the robot? Social media has been abuzz with reactions ranging from poignant tributes to the fallen robot to serious discussions about the ethical implications of AI sentience and the potential for robot suffering. Talking about its equality, the robot was unique in its ability to call an elevator and move between floors autonomously. It reportedly worked from 9am to 6pm and even had its own civil service officer card.

US#00: Oh, cute.

E:Yeah, very cute, very cute. You see, but the point is that they're making here is that the robot uses the elevator move between its floors autonomously. Why would it even ever consider going anywhere near a staircase, you see, right? Other than did it have other intentions? And then finishing up, robotics and ethical concerns. Notably, South Korea is a global leader in robotics adoption, and it boasts the highest robot density in the world. With one industrial robot for every 10 employees, the nation has embraced automation in various sectors, from manufacturing to public service.

B:More than Japan?

E:Apparently so, as a representation of the population. So that's the article. There's a lot. to say about this as far as I'm concerned. And I know not everyone is gonna have my take on this particular one, and I do not mean offense to any person. But for once, I'm standing up for the Luddites everywhere when I proclaim that this is the dumbest thing of the week. Take it away, folks.

B:Dude, I really have to rethink now. My Roomba is usually pretty good at avoiding stairs, but every now and then, I find it had gone over the step. And now I'm thinking, maybe I'm just using it too much and putting too much stress on it and it's trying to kill itself. Like, wow.

S: Is this where we're really going?

B:Yes, it is.

J:I mean, people personify things, you know, like... Yes, they do. Dolls.

S:This is just deliberate, stupid sensationalism from news outlets. Nobody believes this.

C:Here's my weird take as a psychologist. It is important to think about these things because the way that we treat technology is in some ways a microcosm or a reflection on the way that we treat people, the way that we treat animals, the way that we treat property, and statues, and statues. Exactly. We can look at the psychology of our interactions with these machines and think about the way that we engage because what we, what I at least from a moralistic perspective, would not want to see is a world full of animate but non-sentient things that we treat in a really deeply inhuman way because that will can and may translate into treating People in outgroups that way translate into dehumanizing individuals because it's a reinforcement of certain types of behavior. I think that that is an important component of this. I think that the bullshit, ridiculous, dumbest thing of the week component of this is actually believing that the robot is like thinking and feeling and making these decisions.

E:Has emotions among others.

C:So like I do actually think that there's a lot of value in those kinds of conversations around robotics.

B: Yeah, and I think those kind of conversations are going to become more important as time advances, and we actually have, you know, bona fide levels of intelligence in these devices. Or even if they're not very intelligent. Not even necessarily self-awareness, sentient sapience or whatever, but some amount of intelligence where you could arguably make a point that it's sophisticated animal-level intelligence. All I know is that when I talk to chat GPT, I always say please.

E: That's because you're considerate at all times, Bob.

B:Yeah, I mean, that's our social training.

J:And I agree with what Cara said, though. I mean, I think it probably wouldn't be a good thing to I'm just thinking about my kids, you know, like I would tell them, yeah, I mean, to try to treat them poorly, you know, particularly if they're humanoid, you know, like it gets to a point, I think, where, you know, we we're going to need to teach people to treat them like they're people, even though they they're not.

S: Yeah, it's an interesting research question. I'm sure it will be researched at some point. And it seems reasonable that there'd be some connection. It certainly is a consideration. It won't necessarily translate is what I'm saying. Just like I'm thinking of playing violent video games doesn't appear to translate to exacting violence in the real world.

C:Yeah, but you're also not doing violent AR video games.

S: Well, that's another assumption. What if the violence is in virtual reality? If it's more real, does that matter? I don't know.

C:Or AR, not VR, but AR. Interposing on your reality. And it's not that the assumption is that this necessarily leads to that. It's the assumption that in the real world, the decisions that we make are often based on natural consequences. And when there are no natural consequences, Because we're treating an object a particular way, and that object doesn't talk back, it doesn't reflect, it doesn't say, that hurt my feelings, then does that then translate to a sort of, because we know it, we know it does in the genocidal playbook, right? Like when it comes to actual people, we know that this works. It's why genocidal leaders, you know, dehumanize certain groups of people and call them things like rats and call them animals and beasts and things, because it works.

S: So you're saying we should humanize the robots to make sure that we don't dehumanize people.

C:Exactly.

S:Based on how we treat the robots.

C:Exactly.

S:That certainly is a legitimate concern. I would be very interested in seeing what research actually says about it.

C:Yeah, I think right now it is a hypothesis, but I think it's a hypothesis that has like face validity. Yeah, exactly.

S:I agree.

J: All right, thanks Evan.

News Item #1 - Mars Simulation [22:41]

• NASA completes first mission simulating astronaut life on Mars 

J:Jay, tell us about this recent Mars simulation. So you guys should remember this. I talked about this Mars simulation mission that they started just over a year ago. So it was called the CHAPIA. It means NASA's Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. You know, not the sexiest name, but they're trying to like make the name mean something. So this this mission concluded on July 6, 2024. So to remind you guys, there were four volunteers living in a seventeen hundred square foot structure. It was three hundred and seventy eight days in total. And the the four people that were in the experiment were Kelly Haston, Ross Brockwell, Acna Celeru, and Nathan Jones.

C:What's that? Oh, sorry.

J:Paulie Shore.

E:I got that one wrong.

J: Ross, Ross Brockwell sounds like a fake 80s movie name.

E:Totally. Totally.

J:So they began the mission simulation on June 25th, 2023. Their habitat was 3D printed and it was designed to replicate as close as they can get to Martian conditions on Earth. Of course, the gravity was gravity or, you know, Earth 1G. This mission, again I said it's part of the CHAT-PAIA program. This is the first of three missions, and they created this mission to understand how humans would cope with the stresses of a Mars mission. It is a little more complicated than that, so let me get into some details here. So the habitat is currently located at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. It included things like bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms, areas for medical treatment and a recreation room, fitness and places to work. It also featured a sandbox that was filled with red sand for simulated, you know, Mars walks. And they had they had excursions that they had to go on. They had to get suited up for that. So during this simulation, they performed tasks that people at NASA thought would be likely things that people would end up having to do on Mars. This includes, you know, things like habitat maintenance, sample collection, robotic operations, and even crop growth. And actually, the crop growth is pretty interesting. Yeah, they had to grow several different things, but the whole point of this was they wanted to create intentional environmental stressors, you know, resource limitations, isolation, confinement, just to see how the crew would handle it and see if there was any obvious sticking points that they had to address. So the crew lived on shelf stable food. This included a variety of, you know, freeze dried items. They had thermostabilized meals, but they also had to grow a portion of their own food. So they grew vegetables and this was a legitimate and required part of their food source. They grew a bunch of different things. This includes peppers. They grew tomatoes and they had some leafy greens. And this part of the simulation included them managing the limited food systems in a Mars like environment. You know, this is critical and it was a very important part of them learning the sustainability lessons that they had to go through. And absolutely, like think about how important that will be when they're on Mars, right? Because some of their oxygen might even come from plant growth that they're going to have to take care of. But them being able to have some level of sustainability is going to be critical to what they're doing and further missions that they do, these simulated missions. There's two more coming. They're going to, I think, delve deeper into those things. So during the simulation, NASA closely was monitoring their health. Their performance, you know, they're gathering lots of data to support the crew during extended missions. You know, they were having fake mission control. They were identifying potential risks, particularly with the limited nutrition that they had. And now they're doing a two-week post-mission data collection and trying to figure out as much as they can over the data that they collected. Brockwell, who is the CHEPIA flight engineer, highlighted the mission sustainability lessons and he was emphasizing the importance of using resources sustainably and processing waste efficiently. These principles were going to be crucial for long-term survival and exploration on Mars. So you know I know that we're going to have to resupply people on Mars but we're going to try to make them as self-sufficient as possible and have them recycle as much as they can possibly recycle of course. So now NASA had collected this extensive data on the cognitive and physical performance of the crew and this is another huge part of this and this data is crucial for understanding how these extended space missions you know might impact human health and performance. You know, there are pretty extreme factors here. People are going to be very far away from the Earth. There is no like, hey, we're in trouble, come help us. There's going to be a supply chain that we set up. But when they land on that planet, you know, hopefully we'll have a lot of resources already there and even 3D built enclosures for them and everything. So, of course, these tests are absolutely required because they're figuring out tons of things that they just wouldn't think of on the draft board. Now they have to see people in the environment doing what they're doing and living through the stresses. So this mission provided these valuable insights into developing new technological solutions for future Mars missions and the data gathered will help them in designing better systems that will support life on the Red Planet. Now, I know that the gravity is an issue. It's not like a horrible situation. It's not like the moon where it's very difficult to get around. But it still is quite different. It could affect people's sleep. It could affect, you know, how much energy they expend because I remember we had this conversation, Bob. We were talking about moving around on the moon and how, you know, how it's very difficult to move on the moon, particularly if you're wearing a spacesuit. And it could even be more exhausting, exhausting to move in a lower G environment because you have to do weird things with your body to get to where you want to go. You know, walking is very efficient for us. But when you're in a lower Earth gravity, lower than Earth gravity, your whole movement patterns have to change. So I'll be really curious to see how they're going to simulate that and see if they can pull any useful data out of that to help the people that are going to eventually go. So this was the first of three missions, like I said, with the next two scheduled for 2025 and the following year, 26. These missions, of course, aim to further Welcome to the Depending on how far away the Earth is from Mars, the amount of hours it takes to communicate changes. They were using a 44-minute round trip in this experiment, but that time will change depending on the distance to the Earth, but it is significant. The crew had to learn to adapt to these communication limitations while they were trying to maintain their mental health and their team dynamics. Of course, these people were talking to their families while they were in this situation, They were having a hard time dealing with trying to find times that they can talk to their families because scheduling is a big problem. Of course, it's not just an open mic. They're not going to let them talk whenever they want to. It was regimented. They had to be very careful on how they did it. You can't have a conversation with someone if it takes 44 minutes for round-trip communication.

E:You have to artificially delay it.

J: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella,

E: I love the simulation. It wouldn't it wouldn't be realistic in this case.

J:So they did find a sticking point here with the communication gap, you know, that it was hard for them to deal with. You know, lots of interesting little nuggets of information that I think are very important. And it's way better for us to figure these things out now than 10 years from now. Right. We want to have this really, really thought out and understand all the different things that they're going to go through. You know, we were talking at one point, Steve, about how like one full-sized tree could produce enough oxygen to make certain... How many people was it? Do you remember, Steve? Was it one person or was it like 10 people?

S:No, I think it was just like one person.

J:It was one person per large-sized tree, right? So I wonder if they will be building any enclosures to have trees in them.

C:I would hope so. I think even just for your mental health.

J: Yeah, I mean, you don't need trees to get the oxygen, right?

S:Any plant growth. In fact, an actual Mars settlement, the problem would be making too much oxygen, because in order to grow enough plants to feed everybody, it would produce more oxygen than they would need. And you can't have the oxygen building up. So yeah, you have to actually either vent it or turn it into water or put it into tanks for fuel or whatever. You have to do something with it. But making enough oxygen is not going to be the problem. It's probably going to be what you do with the excess oxygen.

J:Well, that's good. I'd rather have that problem. The worst case scenario is you just vent it.

S:Yeah, but that assumes they're growing 100% of their calories from crops.

E: I don't think

J: Brain experiment, I try to put myself in a position like, first of all, you know, I'm not leaving the Earth for anything. But if I had to go to Mars, like I would be freaking out just about like my limited food selection for the rest of my life, you know, like for wherever, however many years you're supposed to go. You know, as I get older, I'm like more and more into food. I like to cook more. I'm like just way more into it. It would be an impossible thing. I couldn't get over it. I couldn't. Imagine like you're never going to have, you know, tomato sauce again.

E: Well, you could. I mean, you would have to, Jay, if you were thrust into a situation in which you had to adapt, you would adapt.

J:I mean, I'd do it, but I'd be miserable.

E:Yeah, maybe not for long, though. I think your brain would kind of— We're remarkably adaptive.

C:We are, but also I think some people would have more intense mental health reactions than others.

E:That's true.

C:And that's why, you know, I think we've talked about this before, but like what we used to consider the quote unquote right stuff That's a very different calculation now.

S:Yeah. When you're talking about an extended settlement of something as far away as Mars.

B:If I don't get enough meatballs and peanut butter, the other people's lives would be in danger.

S: Jay was to write a book called There Are No Meatballs on Mars. Is that a horror story, Steve? This is an exploration of what it would take to live on Mars. I know that book's already been written.

J:So Cara, like, tomorrow is my mom's birthday, right? So my mom, I was talking with Steve about this today on the livestream, the TikTok livestream. My mom wanted to go to Olive Garden and I'm just, I'm literally like, you're like, Olive Garden, I'd rather, I'd rather eat sawdust than go to Olive Garden.

C:Okay.

J:Because they don't cook food there. Yeah, it's a restaurant. They're heated up. They heat it up.

C:It's not, you know. It's a gene restaurant.

J: Terrible. So Bob goes, all right, well Jay, mom wants meatballs and homemade bread. You know, Bob like throws out like these two things that of course I love to make and I love to eat. But I had to explain to Bob, it's a day of cooking to do all that. You know what I mean? It's significant. It's not like I couldn't actually pull it off by myself because I have to work tomorrow. You know, like this is something I like would typically like do over a couple day period. But then my mother-in-law and my wife were like, we will cook her whatever she wants. So we're actually doing it now, Bob.

C: But okay, can I ask you a question?

J:Yeah.

C:Because I love you guys, and I don't want to ask you to be whatever. If mom wants Olive Garden, why don't you let mom have Olive Garden?

B:That was everyone's plan but Jay's. Jay was the only one.

C:Why is your distaste for Olive Garden?

B:We were going to do that. We were going to do that. I talked to Jay and he agreed. He's like, yeah, he'll do it. He was going to do it. He just made it clear to me in no uncertain terms that Olive Garden, he thinks Olive Garden is shite. So that's fine. But then I talked to Courtney today and she's like, well, let's ask mom. If she would be willing to come over and have spaghetti and meatballs at their house. And she said, yes, I was surprised, but that's fine. Cara, look. I told my mom, Mom, I will bring you to Olive Garden next week. Good. We bring her there all the time. She likes to go there because she likes to buy the take-home meals. Then she has food for the week.

C: And I think the thing about Olive Garden, as somebody who loves the Olive Garden- I know what to get Jay for his birthday now. The thing about it, you can talk about the fat content of the food, or you can talk about all these different things. You can talk about whatever happens in the kitchen, is that it is consistent.

E:And I think for people who like routine, who have cravings- Yeah, Pantera and Chipotle, all of them.

C:Did you say Pantera?

E: Is it Pantera?

C:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

E:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

C:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

E:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

J:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

S:Panera. Panera. Panera. Panera.

C: Of course you would go for her, of course.

J:But the thing I'm saying is, and I knew this instinctively, like, yeah, my mom would go to Olive Garden. She likes to go there. My mom loves coming over my house for home cooked meals because my wife and I, like, just, you know, we throw 100 percent of ourselves into it. We try to do, you know, we love it and it's meaningful to us and we cook really good food, right?

Voiceover:Yeah.

J:So I knew that she was going to be down for that. But, you know, I did have this visceral reaction thinking like Olive Garden. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella,

B: My biggest beef is that you go there and indulge a little bit, you're walking away with about 2,500 calories. I just had two days of food in one meal. If I'm going to eat like that, it's going to be my food.

J:It's not going to be their food. If I'm going to break my diet and actually eat for two and a half days in 10 minutes, it's going to be on my terms.

B: And I'll have breadsticks without Fredo sauce. You could eat like four of those before your meal arrives. Like, okay, my dinner's, the appetizer's not even here and I'm already 700 calories in. It's nuts.

E:And that's if you haven't had a drink. Some people have alcohol, Bob. Oh my god. Three, four hundred. You're right. A pop, man.

S: Anyway, go ahead, Steve. All right.

E:Hey, Steve, you wanted to move on or something?

S:Yes, you are.

News Item #2 - HIV Prevention [38:04]

• Science vs HIV 

S:Moving on, we're going to talk about HIV, which I think we've talked about in a while. Yeah.

B:They mostly come up occasionally.

S:What's there to talk about? Let's just start with the lead, all right? Just give me the bottom line here.

B:Now bury the lead.

S:A new study of a new preventive treatment. This is something that people who are not infected with HIV take The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. There are right now three, Truvada, Descovy, and Apritude are the three PrEP drugs that are on the market now.

E:I think I've seen commercials.

C:Truvada and Descovy are... Yeah, it's funny because they always just refer to it as PrEP.

S: The first two are pills, the Apertude is a monthly injection. They're about 99% effective, but they have specific populations that they target, like Truvada is for people who get it through either sex or drug injection, whereas Discovey is specifically for sexually active men or transgender women who have sex with men. So there's differences in whether you're getting it through drugs, through vaginal sex, through anal sex, through anal sex, if you're the giver or the receiver. All these things are different risk factors for contracting HIV. And you can't assume that a drug that's optimal for one is optimal for all of those, right? But in any case, those are the three existing treatments. But now, there was not a conclusion, but there was a preliminary result from a phase three clinical trial of a new drug. This is a twice a year injection every six months.

B: And... Wait a second. Twice a year every... Oh yeah, that checks out. Okay. Yeah.

S:Yeah.

B:Except leap years, Bob. You're off with it.

S:This is the Purpose-1 trial. The drug is Lenacapivir. And guess how effective it was in this clinical trial?

U:99.1%. 99.44%.

E:100%. So pure it floated.

U:102%. 100%.

E: Wow. Nothing's a hundred percent. I know, right?

S:Nothing's a hundred percent, but this was.

E:How many people did they study it on for?

S:No. So for the trial, it was a comparison between the linacapavir, the new twice a year injection, versus the two oral ones that I talked about, right? The Truvada and the Descovy. So there were 2,134 women in the new treatment arm, right, for at least 52 weeks. And there was zero cases, so zero out of 2,134 over a year.

B: How risky was their behavior?

S:This is in South Africa, and young women were specifically targeted because they are the highest risk group in that country. So it's a very high risk group. But here's the comparison. 1.5% of the women who took Truvada were infected over the study period, and 1.8% of the Discovey patients. So even compared against effective PrEP, this was more effective.

B:Nice.

S:And also you compare it to just background rates. They couldn't do a pure placebo arm because it's unethical.

E:And Steve, the animal trials before this obviously came up with the same results?

S:I don't know if it was 100% in the animal trials, but they had high hopes for it because it's It must have come close if not a hundred.

E:And when you see a result that yields a 100% rate, does that cause any questioning just because of the result?

B:Well, I mean a little bit. You have to look carefully just to make sure... But in this case... What's the prior plausibility? Is it a new technology? What do they attribute the success to?

S:It's just very effective.

C: Yeah, and remember that in this case, the other drugs are 99% effective, so it's not... Yeah, well, yeah, there was 98.5 and 98.2.

B:You see, that last little bit is really tough to get past.

S:I looked at the methods and everything. It all checks out. There's no big red flags. It seems like it was a legit trial. So I'm not seeing anything like, oh, we should question these results. Unless there was something not reflected in the write-up, you know? But there's two things to point out here. So one, it's a new mechanism of action, right? So the thinking might be that, well, maybe this is just a really effective mechanism of action. So the Truvada and Descovy, they both have Tenofovir in it, and that is... Oh, and Steve, I thought it was pronounced Discovy.

C:It could be Discovy. I feel like that's what they always say in the commercials. Oh yeah, it could be Discovy.

S:Yeah, I just, I've never heard it said that.

C:I know, these drug names are like...

S: So the two pills are replication inhibitors. They basically get incorporated into the HIV's DNA. Remember, HIV is a retrovirus. It has to insert its DNA into a host cell's DNA so that it gets replicated. The Tenofovir treatments, they incorporate themselves into the DNA and stop the replication. So they basically are replication inhibitors. The every month injection, which is cabotegravir, that binds to an enzyme called integrase, which is necessary for the DNA to integrate into the host DNA. So it's an integration inhibitor, an enzyme integrase inhibitor. So when these drugs

C: Okay. Oh, interesting.

S:That's what I'm saying.

E:Oh, compliance.

S:Especially for this population, because they were saying for young women in South Africa, having to take a pill every day can be a stigma, and they may not be able to do it. Of course.

C:I assumed that they were looking at effectiveness regardless of treatment adherence.

S: So there's a difference between efficacy and effectiveness. But in this trial, I don't know that they were necessarily tracking the compliance of the subjects. So there's something called an intention-to-treat model of a trial where it's like, I give the patient a prescription and then we see how they do, right, and it incorporates Well, you know, whether or not... Real world. Yeah, like real world, does the patient actually take it? As opposed to efficacy, which is if you take it exactly like you're supposed to, how well does it work? But a lot of trials can combine those because it's basically an efficacy trial, but there may be a greater dropout rate or there may be greater noncompliance or whatever. By the way, so the new drug, the Lenacapivir, the twice a year injection, is an HIV capsid drug, so it binds to the capsid around the HIV, right, the human immunodeficiency virus, and it blocks three different steps in HIV viral replication. So it's a new mechanism that may be more effective. But the big thing, the thing they're really touting is people just have to show up twice a year to get the injection and they're covered. There's no stigma, they don't have to take a pill every day or go every month for an injection. So the effectiveness is likely to be superior just for that reason.

C:Oh yeah, because from a public health perspective, you can offer that. Thank you for joining us today. Oh yeah, Gilead Pharmaceuticals been around a long time. It is unfortunate.

S:So they were happy with The Handmaid's Tale when that came out. Yeah, Gilead Pharmaceuticals. But they said that they were going to—Gilead Science is actually the name of the company. Gilead, huh? Yeah. But they said that they were going to make the drug available to generic producers. So they're not going to basically enforce their patent. You know, they're not going to keep it to themselves.

B:Oh, that's awesome.

S:Good for them.

B:Like that Scovelli guy. Oh my god. That guy. That guy.

US#00:Oh my god.

E:Forget it.

S:Screlly. Screlly.

US#00:Marvin or Marvin or something.

E:Scumbag.

US#00:Scumbag Screlly.

S: This could be potentially huge, right? If this drug is picked up by governments, purchase lots of it and make it freely available, which would be an incredibly cost effective public health intervention because paying for two doses of a drug a year is going to be way cheaper than treating that 1% or 2% or whatever. And it's not that low in some of these countries.

C: Yeah, right, this is like much higher than one or two percent. Oh yeah, you're right.

S:It could be, especially in this population, it could be very high.

C:When I was in Eswatini, which is the country with the highest HIV rate in the world, it's high. I think we're in the 30s.

S:Worldwide, there are 39 million cases with over 1 million new infections per year. Wow.

B:A million.

C:Yeah, okay. Eswatini, which is a small country in southern Africa, highest HIV prevalence in the world, 25.9% of its population.

S:Yeah, that's prevalence though, not incidence.

C:Yeah, that's prevalence. Yeah, I was talking incidence. The incidence rate is 0.62%, which is about 4,000 cases per year. Yeah, I said 1%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

S: So in any case, the World Health Organization had a goal of reducing new HIV infections to zero by 2030. They were really nowhere on track to achieving that goal. They didn't have the means to be able to do that. They're probably not going to achieve that goal, but they were really not on track. But this drug, if they really ramp up production and distribution of this drug, they could do it. Might change, you know, yeah, the calculus here. Thank you for watching. I have to say, when we do our 1000th episode, one of the topics that we're going to be covering is the history of topics that we've been dealing with for a long time. We'll talk about UFOs and what were they saying 30 years ago, what were skeptics saying 30 years ago, what's actually happened over the last 20, 30 years. And so this is, we're not going to be talking about this one, but I'm going to talk about it briefly now. 1980s basically is when HIV exploded. You know when the first case was, the first case of HIV in a human?

U:79?

C:Well, it was in blood.

S:Yeah, they identified it in retrospect in the 50s.

U:1959, 1959.

C:But that's when they discovered it.

S: That's what, that was the, there was blood from a patient in 1959 that when they looked I said, this guy had HIV.

C:Yeah, so it was probably even earlier than that.

S:It crossed over probably from the chimpanzees to humans sometimes in the 1930s.

C:Yeah, that's what, that's what I thought in the 30s.

S:Yeah.

C:And you think about it, that is a spillover event, but it's a very, very small spillover event. The truth of the matter is HIV could be eradicated.

E: Thank you for watching.

S: I agree, and this is the kind of thing they could do. But the point I was getting to is that we were hit with this new virus that completely transformed the infectious disease subspecialty, by the way. It had a massive effect on medicine in general. I was in med school in the 80s. It had this massive effect of HIV. Oh, absolutely. Here we are 30 years later. It's basically a manageable chronic illness, and now we have effective preventive treatment and 100% effective new treatment that we could potentially be rolling out based upon good old-fashioned reductionist science, understanding how that little bugger works, interfering with the basic science, understanding of how it replicates and how it operates in the body, et cetera, et cetera. And meanwhile, over this same period of time, going all the way back to the 80s, there were conspiracy theories about HIV, tremendous alternative medicine treatments, you know, either herbalism or homeopathy or whatever, denialism about whether or not it even exists, et cetera, all amounted to absolute nothing, a big steaming pile of crapola. All of the pseudoscience, conspiracy theories, alternative treatments have not saved a single person. They have arguably killed a lot of people by distracting them from good old-fashioned science, which is basically curing this disease and preventing it and could lead to its functional eradication. And we cannot lose that narrative. That narrative is so critical because we see it over and over again.

C:And this is a disease, I think, when we think about the scale of this disease, it sometimes gets lost because of how far we've come. This is, by many metrics, the third most devastating epidemic or pandemic

E: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Cara Santa Maria,

C: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. I don't think pandemic has to be fully worldwide though, does it? Let's see, technical definition.

S:I think there's a minimum amount of countries.

C:I'm sure it doesn't have to be in every single country, but it has to be probably in every country. It's just widespread over a whole country or the world.

S: But that's Oxford.

C:Spreads across countries or continents. Yeah, I think it's kind of a vague.

S:Yeah, continents is kind of always how I talk about it.

E:Play the board game Pandemic and see what happens.

C:I think it does have to cross international borders.

E:You'll learn real fast about those.

S:Anyway, yay science. Yeah, good stuff.

News Item #3 - COVID Protection Gene [53:54]

• Some people have never gotten COVID-19. An obscure gene may be why 

S:All right, Cara, tell us about this COVID protection gene. What is that?

C:OK, so there's a really interesting article that was published last month in Nature. Called Human SARS-CoV-2. Remember, that's the name of the virus. Yeah, Human SARS-CoV-2 challenge.

B:I thought that was going to be such a big name and everyone was going to use it. Nobody used it. It's only in the literature.

C:Yeah, we're all like COVID, had COVID, COVID pandemic, during COVID. It's like refers to so many. It's a time span now. It's the virus itself. It's the infection. But anyway, Human SARS-CoV-2 challenge uncovers local and systemic response dynamics. Okay, what does that mean? Well, there was an interesting study that was by British researchers who did what's called a challenge trial, which we don't often hear about because the ethics can sometimes be murky, but it's a situation in which people are intentionally infected. So this was at the height of the pandemic. It was in 2021. I think vaccines were available. I'd actually have to look at the exact date of when they started collecting data. I'm not sure if vaccines were available, but the individuals that they, that volunteered for this research were unvaccinated. They were young, they were otherwise healthy. And this was a study with 36 people, where they put a very small dose of the virus in their nose. And then the hope was that they could learn a lot about the way that the virus spread the early cellular responses, the immune response, you know, what is going on, they called it the dynamics of the early cellular responses. So they put the virus in everybody's nose, these 36 people's nose, and then they pick 16 of those people. So they look at a bunch of data across all 36 of those people for their study. It's really interesting. Oh my gosh, look at all this cool stuff that's happening. We've got this, you know, great information that we can now use to try and understand how this virus replicates in the body, how people get sick, what happens in their bodies. They take 16 of those people and they go, we're going to do like further analysis with them. We want to kind of dig even deeper. And this analysis takes a lot of time and money. And so we're going to like drill down with 16 of them. And they take these 16 people and they start to look and see what happens. And something kind of strange took place. And at first they were actually kind of mad because they were like, shoot, this like ruins our study. But only six of those 16 people actually got sick. Even though they put COVID in their nose. And they were like, huh, now we can't even figure out what's going on with their immune system because, you know, they're not getting sick. But then later they realized, wait, this is probably actually really helpful. It's probably really important that we understand why these people aren't getting sick and how these people aren't getting sick. And so they decided to dig a little bit deeper. And they realized that of those people who didn't get sick, that was 10 people, of those 10 people, they fell into two different categories. Seven of the 10 never tested positive for the virus at all. They just didn't They didn't feel sick, and they also never showed that they had the virus. Three of them didn't really feel sick, but they did show a transient infection. So, you know, and we've heard about this. If you remember all the stuff that we were trying to keep track of early in sort of the COVID timeline, and it was like, even if you test positive, you might be a carrier, or even if you don't feel sick, you might still test positive. So yeah, so three of them were like that. Seven of them never even got sick and never tested positive. And they did find that there were some subtle changes in some of the immune responses between those two groups. But what was really interesting is that there was a big similarity across all of the people in the non-sick group. They found that those individuals had a very particular Gene that was showing elevated activity. It was the HLA-DQA2 gene. And these are specialized immune cells that had actually been studied previously, but not much. They didn't really understand what the gene did. Some studies previously had hypothesized that it was linked to milder outcomes from viral infection, but they weren't really sure. They also found a couple other kind of interesting things that like, okay, there's this response, it's an immune reaction that is called an interferon response. And they found that in the people who were only transiently infected, the ones who, you know, caught the virus and like never really got sick, and the virus went away really fast. They had an interferon response that showed up in their nose. They were able to swab for it and see it. People, and it came like within a day, people who got sick, it took them five days for that response to show up in their nose. So something about that time gap Lead the researchers to believe that those who don't have this gene variant, their bodies give the virus time to spread and to divide. Whereas, to proliferate, whereas if there's really fast activity, local activity at the site of the infection, that could have prevented the transiently infected individuals from from ever getting sick in the first place. Weirdly, in the sick participants, they actually showed the interferon activity in blood samples before they ever saw it in their nose, which is super weird because they gave them the virus in their nose. So there was definitely a delayed immune response, which seems like it's pretty typical of the population with COVID. Whereas in these groups that either didn't get sick but tested positive, they had a really fast interferon reaction only in the nose. And for the individuals who never tested positive at all, Both of those groups had elevated activity of this specific gene HLA-DQA2. So, you know, the researchers are saying, of course, we've learned a lot since then, but having looked at all of this data and recognizing that this particular gene has probably an important function Thank you so much for joining us today. You know, we'll be genotyped and we'll see, am I more resistant to these types of infections? Do I have this type of immune capability that will allow me to kind of know that in advance versus those who don't have this variant and, you know, are much more likely to get infected? It is fascinating to think, and I'm sure that you all know somebody like this, too. Like, I've had COVID once that I know of. How about you all?

B: I had it one time. It took a few years for me to get it.

C:Yeah, it took a few years for me to. I only got it for the first time last year.

B:I didn't get it until 2023.

E:You got it from Florida, right? When you came back from Florida?

C:No, I got it on a... Oh, you got it on a flight back from Florida. Oh yeah, Bob, you were after me. You got it on a flight back from Disney World.

B: I think the day after we got home, so it might have been, you know, might have been at Disney World, might have been at Disney World, we were in crowds, we were in some big crowds. So yeah, could have been then.

C:And I got it on a flight home from Jordan just a few months before that.

J:And I got it on a flight home from Italy.

C: Nice.

J:And I don't know how I got it.

C:Jay, how many times that you know of have you had it?

J:I think I only had it once. It's possible I had it a second time, very late. I was testing, but I definitely had it once really bad.

C: Yeah, and Evan?

E:One time for me, one positive confirmed test for me.

C:Yeah, yeah. And we've all known people who have had it like five times, and we all know people, maybe at this point it's harder to know somebody, who either claim or who have, I think, a good story that they haven't had COVID. And it's really interesting to say, what is different about these individuals? This study inadvertently asked that question, And was able to partially answer that question. And part of the reason that this study was so incredibly valuable, because this happened in 2021, is that when they try to do challenge studies now, they have a hard time infecting people. So many people have immunity, which is probably why we've only had it the one time.

B: Can you induce it?

S:Yeah, plus all those vaccines. I mean, I think.

C:Well, that's what I'm saying. That's the immunity. So it's either exposure to wild type or it's vaccine immunity.

B:Or both.

C:But yeah, it's both.

B:And together, like people that have had both is the super immunity, right?

C:Totally.

B:For a while anyway.

C:And most of the globe has some amount of immunity against COVID at this point. So it's harder for them to do these kinds of trials. But back then, when our immune systems were naive, They were able to successfully infect these test participants. And they were really surprised when some people were like, just, yeah, I didn't get sick.

B:Can we induce that gene variant? Can we use CRISPR or something to give it to people so they're superhuman like us?

C:Like us? We probably don't have it, Bob.

B:I assume at least I have it.

C: By the time we both got infected, we were so vaccinated.

E:Bob already bought a cape.

B:That was the last of the extended family. But can we use CRISPR or that other new technique?

C:I mean, I think that's a pretty open question, right? What can CRISPR do? What can't CRISPR do?

S:It's easier to do it in embryos than adults. But the HLA typing is, for a long time, that's old news, right? It has a massive effect on risk factors that deal with the immune system, like your risk of getting autoimmune diseases, for example.

C:Oh, so they're typing for variants of the opposite.

S:Very strongly with certain HLA typing.

C:Oh, so they're typing for the opposite direction. They're looking for lowered expression.

S: But also, anything to do with immune function, there's an HLA association with it, basically. And so, yeah, this is just one more piece to that puzzle of identifying an HLA type. Yes, specific HLA gene. Yeah, that confers some good immunity. But I wonder if it also conveys a higher risk of certain autoimmune diseases, because You know, evolution is all about optimizing trade-offs.

C:We always talk about cancer versus aging.

S:Yeah. So I wonder if like fighting infection versus autoimmune diseases is another kind of trade-off. But sometimes evolution also hits upon just straight-up superior, superior genetics, superior proteins, whatever. So some people just do have better immune systems than others.

C:Yeah, and they still don't know why among the people Who had elevated HLA-DQA2, did some of them have a transient infection and some of them not get sick at all? When they had the exact same exposure. So clearly it's not the whole picture, but it's part of the picture.

News Item #4 - Nuclear Pasta [1:06:01]

• Researchers predict new phase in neutron stars that favors 'nuclear pasta' 

S: All right, Bob, I don't know what nuclear pasta is, but I want some.

B:Oh my God, this is pretty awesome.

E:You can get it at Olive Garden with nuclear breadsticks.

B:Scientists have filled in some of the fascinating details of the exotic types of matter in the crust of neutron stars. They have shown the likely existence of a phenomenon called proton drip that exists alongside neutron drip. And my favorite exotic matter in the universe, nuclear pasta. The researchers at the Department of Physics at TU Darmstadt and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, these findings are reported in the physical review letters. The study's title is neutron star matter as a dilute solution of protons in neutrons. So yes, I will now be talking about nuclear pasta. When I read those words, I immediately knew I will be talking about this on the show, and I just devoured it. So this is just ultimately at its most basic level. It's another amazing chapter about the most fascinating objects in the universe, neutron stars. When giant stars explode their outer layers and collapse their cores, if the core's mass is above what's called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkov limit, two to three solar masses, then nothing known can stop the collapse and we have a black hole. Now I say nothing known because there's some kind of fringe theories out there and some hope that there's a pit stop before black holes and some collapsing masses might create a quark star. So that's all I'll say on that. Look it up. Fascinating possibility. So, okay, if that final core mass is below the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit, Then we have a wonderful city-sized neutron star with a mass of about two suns squeezed inside. Now, to call this simply a ball of neutrons, it's not inaccurate, but it's like calling Jay's meatballs just spheres of mostly protein and lipids. This doesn't quite do it justice at all. So, yes, neutron stars are mostly neutrons, but we believe that there are layers of exotic degenerate matter in there that are different depending on how far below the crust they are, what forces are prominent, how much gravity, how much pressure, and lots of other factors as well. So, lots of different layers. Now the surface layer of a neutron star, maybe you didn't know this, is only a millimeter thick and it actually has regular atoms on it, like helium and iron. I've known that for a few years, I just didn't think there were really any normal elements in a neutron star, but there are on the surface. The gravity and pressure on the surface is nasty, of course, but it's not enough to overcome the structural integrity that atoms have that are there. So what do you think? What is it about the structural integrity of the atoms that prevents them from changing dramatically? It's one answer, and there's multiple. The one answer is the electrostatic repulsion, right, Coulomb repulsion?

C:I love that you knew we weren't actually going to answer that question.

B:That was a rhetorical question.

C:You didn't even give us a second to try.

B:I planned it. I planned on using it, and I got a couple more questions, but that was the easiest one, but I just didn't feel like waiting. So the electrostatic repulsion, that's like charges repelling each other, right? So positive protons, for example, they can't get too close together. They can't get too close to each other because of this electrostatic repulsion. They just don't want to get too close unless, of course, you apply enough force. So a little deeper into the crust, though, and the forces and the pressures have ramped up enough to create a phenomenon that they're very confident about called neutron drip. This they've known about for a while and they seem like, yeah, yeah, it exists. That was my take. So neutron drip, now it's not a type of old fashioned coffee. Although, if it were Jay, I'm sure Jay is thinking that if it really were coffee, it'd be better than current coffee. But no, neutron drip happens when neutrons experience two things at the same time, the intense gravity that's down there, plus the repulsion of the strong force. Thanks for joining us today. are surprisingly not known to be hanging out by themselves. If you see one, it's in a nucleus. It's kind of like quarks in that sense. And it's amazing because if you did take a neutron out from a normal nucleus of an atom, it would decay in about on average in 14 minutes. So the only thing keeping a neutron stable and lasting indefinitely, essentially, is because it's in a nucleus. Or, apparently, if you have it within the crust of a neutron star and the pressures are so intense that it can actually, the pressures and the other forces are so intense that the neutron star can leave the nucleus, the neutron drip as they call it, then it can be stable and it can be independent and it can last indefinitely. So that's kind of like the only way a neutron star can be independent is to be within these certain layers of neutron star crust. So now we've got the neutron drip area. If you go a little bit deeper in the crust, now that's where the magic happens. That's where we have nuclear pasta. And I'm just not joking about any of this. This is legit. And this has nothing to do with spaghettification near a black hole. Nothing to do with spaghettification. This is nuclear pasta.

S:That's another good book title. Nuclear pasta has nothing to do with spaghettification.

B: Yeah, love it. It's also a good band name. Like the neutron jet, it arises when there's a special balance of forces acting on the neutrons and the protons. There's this strong force trying to keep neutrons and protons close, right? That's one of the things that the strong force or the residual strong force, what it really is. That's what it does. If you get close enough, bam, you are locked in. Super strong force. But then there's also the electrostatic force, called the Coulomb force, which I just mentioned above. That's trying to keep the light charges apart. So this other competition that's happening creates distorted shapes within the neutrons and the protons. It distorts them into stable shapes For this nuclear matter, so it will hang out, it will last, and they are stable. So the first shapes that are created, as you're going down, you're going down into the crust, the first shapes created are semispherical collections of hundreds of neutrons and protons. What do you think they call that? You got, it's semispherical, not a meatball, you might think maybe a meatball, not a meatball. They call that gnocchi, kind of like an Italian dumpling, if you want to look at it. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's the spaghetti! It's spaghetti! Long rods of nuclear pasta. Of course you're going to call that spaghetti. That's the spaghetti phase of nuclear degenerate matter. Okay, you go deeper down and then the forces get even stronger and stronger and then these rods are fused together to form sheets. You've got sheets now. What phase is that? Oh, lasagna. Lasagna, lasagna. Yes, all right. The non-Italian lasagna. Thank you, Evan. So that's a lasagna phase, and it's so nice to see lasagna pasta represented here. It made me very happy. Usually they don't go with the lasagna connection. All right, a little deeper, a little deeper, and there's another phase of nuclear matter, and this looks like spaghetti, but it's not. There's a hole running down the center of it, and this is, I wasn't even really aware. Bucatini. Strong? What? Bucatini. Wow, Steve, nice. Where'd you pull that? I wasn't familiar with bucatini, but it looks like spaghetti, long and skinny, but there's a hole down the center, and it's also in the crust of of the universe. Steve, you're going to like this. Some researchers claim that the strongest known material in the universe is nuclear pasta. One way to measure a material's strength, and there's lots of different types of strength, is shear modulus. Right? That measures the resistance to deformation, specifically shear deformation. Okay? That's just one way to measure the toughness of a material. And it's an important one. Now, diamond probably has the highest shear modulus that we know of. It's 10 to the 12 ergs per cubic centimeter. An erg is just a unit of energy. Don't worry about that. It's got 10 to the 12. That's 10 times higher than most metals. It's the number. Diamond is tough stuff. It's only a billion, 10 to 12. It's just a billion. So a billion ergs per cubic centimeter. That's the toughest material that we really know. Nuclear pasta was calculated. Some awesome scientists decided, I'm going to test how theoretically tough Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for watching. Now we're not sure what's in the core. If you keep going down towards the core of the neutron star, yeah, we're not too sure. But it's got to be some crazy shit, right? It's guaranteed. Most theories, I think most people would say that the degenerate matter in the core of a neutron star has to be something beyond a neutron and proton nuclear pasta. It's probably quark gluon plasma. We've talked about that on the show. Fascinating stuff. Don't even get me started on it. But that's probably what's in the core. But we're not really I'm totally sure about that. Seems likely though. So you might now be wondering, so what the hell is the new research? Because this is all just background I'm giving you. I haven't even gotten to the meat of this.

E:Oh my gosh, right Cara?

B:But I know it's basically impossible to top nuclear pasta, but I will try my best. So these researchers essentially filled in the gap between the neutron drip phenomenon and the nuclear pasta. Okay, get your imaginations going again. Imagine we're going down through the crust. We're going past the surface, and the first thing we encounter in the crust is the neutron dripping, right? The neutron dripped. We talked about that. That's the first thing you see. That's where the nucleus is independent and kind of gets squeezed out of the nucleus of the atoms. And then after that, there's the nuclear pasta. But in between those two, in between the dripping neutrons and the nuclear pasta, the researchers wanted to see if they could find a proton drip phenomena, which is similar to neutron, but nobody really knew for sure. Some scientists were saying, yes, proton drips exist. Other scientists were saying, no, we couldn't find any evidence of the proton Thanks for watching! Neutrons can form their own exotic phase of matter in term of these neutron drips where they can glomerate together outside. They leave the nucleus and become their own phase of matter. And this is before it becomes the nuclear pasta. It's above. This is above depth-wise the nuclear pasta. So the lead researcher and theoretical physicist Achim Schwenk said, we were also able to show that this phase favors the phenomenon of nuclear pasta. So that was awesome because not only did they discover this proton drip, they discovered that it helps kind of shore up the whole idea of nuclear pasta. So that was just an awesome bonus right there. So proton drip not only improves our confidence and understanding of nuclear pasta, it helps us model the entire crust of neutron stars. You know, things like how electro-conductivity works inside there, how thermal transport works inside of neutron stars, and more. And all of that, once we have a good handle on that, and you know what's going on inside, then that will influence what we can observe, you know, how we interpret what we observe. So we can see, if we see some bizarre things happening or some mysterious thing happening with neutron stars, and there's plenty of them, we can then tie it back into what we know about the internal structure of the neutron star itself and make sense of what we're seeing. Schwenk says, the better we can describe neutron stars, the better we can compare with astrophysical observations. So yeah, this could in a sense revolutionize or really greatly help the study and understanding of what's going on in these amazing objects. So in conclusion, my only hope now is that whatever exotic degenerate fluid we ultimately find in the core, somebody will call it spaghetti sauce.

S:Spaghetti sauce.

B:And that's all I got.

S:All right. Thanks, Bob. Are you guys hungry?

E:Hell yeah. That was actually quite filling.

S: Bob, when you go to Rome, you're going to get Caccio e pepe and bucatini.

B:That's when you get the bucatini. Oh, is bucatini in there?

S:Yes.

B:Typically, yes. Oh, fantastic. That's how you know about bucatini because we never had that at home. That's for damn sure.

News Item #5 - Eyeball Planet [1:20:31]

• James Webb Space Telescope suggests this exoplanet is our 'best bet' at finding an alien ocean 

S:All right, Evan, tell us about the eyeball planet.

E:The eye of Sauron sees all. Well okay, it's an exoplanet, and its designation is LHS 1140 b, as in boy. And yeah, we've known about this for a while. Astronomers discovered it in 2017, and upon its discovery it was first believed to be most likely a gas giant, perhaps something, what, akin to the planet Neptune, maybe? However, a new observation with our favorite, the James Webb Space Telescope, it suggests that LHS 1140b may not be a gas giant, instead it could be an icy or watery world with a thick atmosphere. Oh, yep. It could be a world completely covered in ice, similar to Jupiter's moon Europa, or be an ice world with a liquid sub-stellar ocean and a cloudy atmosphere. Oh my gosh. This exoplanet, it's about 1.7 times the size of Earth, and right now, perhaps it's the most promising habitable zone exoplanet yet. Habitable. Habitable. That they've been able to identify. Thank you, James Webb Telescope. And yeah, so what, if there's really water there? I mean, is that not one of the, if not the best indicator for potential life, at least as we Terrans understand life?

B:Robots aside. Yep, that's an amazing solvent. It would be fantastic if they could prove it.

E: This and this ocean, Bob, may be a temperate water ocean as well. The lead author of the paper on this discovery, his name is Charles Cadieux. I'm sorry if I butchered that. He's a doctoral student at the University of Montreal. And here's what he said in his statement, of all currently known temperate exoplanets, LHS 1140 b, could well be our best one to date to indirectly confirm liquid water on the surface of an alien world beyond our solar system. It would be a major milestone in the search for potentially habitable exoplanets. Bob, you know what kind of planet, what kind of star this... And this planet lives in the star's habitable zone, the Goldilocks Zone, which we like to talk about. Now here's an interesting comment. Ryan McDonald, NASA Sagan fellow in the University of Michigan Department of Astronomy, I love that title, he aided in the analysis of LHS 1140 b's atmosphere. And here's what he said. This is the first time we've ever seen a hint of an atmosphere on a habitable zone, rocky or ice rich exoplanet. And he suggested that the team may have even found evidence of air on it. Oh my gosh.

B:Wow.

E:I don't know. That might seem a little premature, right?

B:So some gases then?

E:Right. Well, right. I guess if you're having air, what, that's a measurable atmosphere of some kind on the surface maybe? Yeah, no. So this exoplanet, again, was originally discovered in 2017, and it's been looked at by several telescopes, Spitzer Telescope, Hubble Space Telescope, the TESS, right? Yeah, yeah. But they said something was missing as far as their analysis goes, and that's when they turned James Webb loose on it. Without the web analysis, they couldn't really determine was this a mini-Neptune, this gas giant planet, or is it a super-Earth? And James Webb was able to give them some additional data to the point where they are saying now that this data has now strongly excluded the mini Neptune scenario and confirmed the world might have a nitrogen-laced atmosphere like Earth.

S:Wow.

E:They say it's a tentative result, tentative, it needs more study, but the presence of a nitrogen-rich atmosphere would suggest the planet has retained a substantial atmosphere, creating conditions that might support liquid water.

B: So I would have to assume that they discovered this through the transit method?

E:You know, the article did not speak to that because the original discovery was back in 2017. I would assume that's the case, Bob, but I can't say that for certain. Right, because the transit method, I think, is how the vast majority of these are found.

B:It seems likely, especially if you're determining what's in the atmosphere, you're going to capture the sunlight coming through, right, coming through the atmosphere, and then you see what that light is like, what was absorbed in the atmosphere as opposed to what's coming from the star that doesn't go through the atmosphere. And then you can kind of just figure out, oh, these elements are in

E: They compared this a little bit to the discoveries that we've made around the TRAPPIST system. They're taking a very close look at those planets in that particular system because it has some similarities to our own solar system here. However, they said that when you compare this particular planet and its system versus the planets of the TRAPPIST system. That LHS 1140b appears to be calmer and less active, making it significantly less challenging to disentangle LHS 1140b's atmosphere from stellar signals caused by star spots. They made a point of that because apparently, and this is the first I really read about this, is that the analysis with the TRAPPIST system, there could be some interference by these star spots by its host This is a red dwarf? Yes.

S: Yes, so forget about it.

E:Yeah.

B:Yeah.

S:But I mean, unfortunately, I mean, there's still, I guess, a little bit of a window. But in order to be close enough to a red dwarf to be in the habitable zone, you're going to probably be tidally locked.

E:You are tidally locked, Steven. Yes. And this is where we get to the eyeball part.

S:But you may be it may be resonant. I know there may be a resonant orbit where you like you The planet revolves three times for every two trips around the planet or whatever, and so it's not 100% locked, so that would be good. But the other thing is, yeah, the red dwarfs are very active when they're young and then they relatively calm down, but they're still way more active than a yellow star would be even when they're calm, quote-unquote calm, so it's a relative thing. And the thing is, if they had an atmosphere during the early phase of this star, the atmosphere would get stripped away.

E:What if it's a frozen planet?

S:Well, the atmosphere, why would it be frozen if it's in the habitable zone? That's the conundrum.

B: So, either... Well, it could be at the far edge, but because those stars are so small, you'd have to be very close to be in the habitable zone, so chances are it's going to be kind of nasty. And what they see as an atmosphere could potentially be like... Rock, just vaporized rock. Yeah, if it's too close.

S:But the sort of sliver of hope is that the planet reconstitutes in atmosphere after the red dwarf relatively calms down, or it was a planet that was farther away and then migrated in later in the age of the star. So yeah, there's some wiggle room there, but it's just not a great candidate for Earth-like or habitable planets. The sweet spot is probably orange stars in terms of their longevity and habitability.

E: I get that. I totally get that. But they still, you know, I guess what? An artist's rendition or I guess the computer models are suggesting that if, Steve, I get it, if this is a frozen world, basically, that is somehow close and hasn't been totally stripped away. Thank you for watching. This is part of the analysis. And the surface temperature of the ocean may very well even be a comfortable 20 degrees Celsius or 68 degrees Fahrenheit.

B:Mm-hmm. That's a weird spec... I mean, how do you speculate that? There's something we don't know here.

E:Yeah, again, and they admit more, more, more is needed. More time, I guess, more analysis with James Webb on this one. But it's fascinating, and it was certainly a stunning visual of the island.

B:Yeah, right.

E:And you may have heard me earlier, I used the term terran, right? The crust of Earth, right? So, but if there are people in the Trappist system, they would be called Trapeicists. Thank you.

S:Trapeicists.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements [1:31:02]

J:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time. All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy. Lots of stuff going on there. What do you think, guys?

E:Dot matrix printing.

J:It sounds like a printer. Definitely has a printer vibe to it, but not a regular printer. A listener named Alex Bonert wrote in and said his guess is that this sound you played is a seismograph recording an earth tremor. I think I've only seen a real seismograph once in my entire life in a museum. Every other time I've seen them, it was on some type of movie where something is exploding. Right. But yeah, apparently the arm moves really quick. Anyway, that is not correct, but that's an interesting guess. Another listener named Mitchell Altshuler wrote in and said, Hi, the noisy from the SGU podcast and uploaded on July 6, 2024 was the computer called Mother from the original Alien movie. That is not correct. And then I'm like, I haven't heard that in a long time. This is the Nostromo. So let me play you a little bit of that and you tell me what you think. Yeah, I recognize that sound. Definitely recognize it. Not a bad guess, but that is not the computer in the Stromo, but that movie from the movie Alien, freaking awesome movie. The other listener named Nadine Johnson said, after a couple of glasses of wine and beer, my husband and I are guessing electronic roulette wheel. And I don't think I've ever heard one of those, but this is not an electronic roulette wheel. It's something else. I got another guest here, a listener named Forat Janabi, and he said, Hey Jay, longtime listener, second time guesser. Actually, my 10-year-old son is the guesser. His guess is that it is a broken arcade machine. I am sure that there are some broken arcade machines that sound exactly like this noisy, but it's not correct. But I'm going to tell please tell your son, keep guessing, keep trying. Life is about making mistakes and learning from our mistakes. And I think this is awesome that he tried this. He's not correct, but I want him to guess as many times as he can next week and the following weeks, and he'll finally get it. All right. So, guys, what the hell is this? You guys were onto it. This is some type of printer. It's a 3D printer, a 3D printer. But there's something special about this 3D printer.

E:It prints other 3D printers.

J:It is the fastest 3D printer in the world.

E:Doesn't sound like it.

J:Thing is cranking like crazy. Listen to this thing again. You really have to see a video. But this is a podcast. But just listen to it. It is moving super fast. Later on, it goes... The thing is cranking like crazy. The person who developed it is apparently working on making them faster and faster and faster. 3D printers do not have to be slow. I think a big part of the problem is being able to move the substrate, whatever you're using. We use PLA plastic in most regular 3D printers and then they use a resin for resin printers. This was more of a PLA, you know, plastic printer. It is moving super fast. Very cool. It's the future and I'm really excited about that. So thank you all for guessing. And good job to the win, which came... Oh yeah, sorry. Did I say the winner? Okay, sorry. Oh, and I didn't mention, the winner is Christian Sigurdsson, and Christian guessed it the day before, because he's in a country that is so far ahead time-wise that he freaking guessed it on the 5th, not on the 6th. I'm like, damn, yeah.

C:What time is it in the North Pole?

J:Yes. I'm like, literally, like, I'm starting to do a search over here, and I realized, oh, she's just busting my stones. Okay, thank you. Thank you everyone for guessing. I have a new noisy for this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Paul Johnson, and here it is. Good luck on that one, guys.

E:Cricket sonar.

J:Guys, if you don't know the name of the game, it's Who's That Noisy? Sometimes people email me and they say I'm submitting something for What's That Noisy? But Steve's daughter actually said Who's That Noisy? That's the name of the game. My God, Steve. We've been doing the show for almost 20 years. We came up with Who's That Noisy in what, year two?

S: Now, it was later than that.

J:It was?

S:Yeah, like four or five, I think.

J:So how old was she, like six or seven?

S:Yeah, but we've been saying it for years, ever since she said it when she was two.

J:Oh, okay. That's right. I remember now. All right, I got a few announcements, guys. So, as you know, we're coming up on our 1000th episode. If you enjoy this show, if you think that the content that we make has any impact on you or the world, please do consider becoming a patron. You can go to our Patreon at www.patreon.com forward slash Skeptic's Guide. We'd really appreciate it. I think I mentioned last week As you can tell ads are down and patrons are really what's keeping us afloat. So we'd like to thank our current patrons and anyone who's considering to become a patron. We'd really appreciate it. You can join our mailing list. This is for free. We will send you an email every week about everything that we've accomplished the week before. All you got to do is go to our homepage and there's a button on there for that to join that. You can give our show a rating if you want that helps other people find us. We really appreciate you doing that. We have shows with tickets, Steve. Now, the extravaganza, Steve, August 17th, 2.30 is when the show starts. This is an afternoon show. We're going to be trying some new bits in that show, and it's going to be a lot of fun. There are tickets available if you're interested. Again, go to the SGU's homepage for more details on that. I have very, very, very few tickets left. I think about six tickets left for the 1000th live recording show. Right. This is on 18th. Yeah. At last I checked. I think there were six or seven tickets left. They're going to go quick. So if you're interested, get in there quick. You can go to the SkepticsGuide.org and there's a button on there for the thousandth show. Oh, and I almost forgot, Steve. Patreon recently updated the platform and we now can allow free memberships. So if you become a free SGU member, you'll get access to one of the channels on our Discord. We'll also give you portions of some of our premium content. So please think about joining us for free today, because what else in life is free, Steve? So Steve, that wraps it up. That's what's happening in SGU land. Back to you, brother.

S:All right. Thanks, Jay.

Emails [1:38:40]

S:One quick email. This comes from Bain in Newcastle, Australia.

US#04:Bain. Hello.

S:Bain. And he writes, good day, team. First, thank you for providing us all with this show. I stumbled across it a few months ago and have been an avid listener ever since. We do get emails from people who are stumbling upon our show recently, like, oh my God, there's almost a thousand episodes. What do I do? What do I do? But yeah, we have advice for you if you want to know how to consume our back catalog. Anyway, he goes on, my question relates to the latest fad of hydrogenated water. It seems that a couple of adults have turned a high school science experiment into a con. There's a lot of studies that hydrogen is good for the body, but hydrogenated water smells scammy. I agree, it smells super scammy, because it is. So this is just hydrogen gas dissolved in water, right? And the hydrogen is supposed to be good for you. This is a classic snake oil scam in that there's really no compelling evidence that this has any health benefits. But there's all that kind of wishy-washy evidence that's used for promotion, but doesn't really answer any questions. So first of all, what do you think is the main mechanistic claim made for hydrogen water? How does it allegedly help you? What do you guess?

B: I have no idea. Flushes toxins?

S:That's a good guess, and they probably say that somewhere in there, but the number one thing is it's an antioxidant.

B:Oh, God damn it.

S:Right? And as we know very well, there's no evidence that just routinely taking oral antioxidants has any health benefit. So right out of the gate, they're on shaky ground. A lot of the studies are marker studies, like they're looking at this marker or that marker. Those are virtually useless. You can't make health claims based upon them. That just adds information about what may or may not be happening, but it doesn't tell us that it works, that it's good for anything. And the clinical studies are all over the place, no consistent signal. As one researcher who reviewed the literature said, for every study you find that says it helps is another one that says it doesn't help, which is sort of the classic pattern that we see for something that does not work, right? There's no consistent signal there. There's no positive studies significantly in excess of negative studies. Thank you for joining us today. And I have patients who have specifically asked me about hydrogenated water. And I basically tell them, there's no evidence that it works. Just save your money. And this has been around for a while. This is not a very recent fad. We wrote about this on Science Based Medicine years ago. But you know, these things have second lives on TikTok and social media.

C:Have you seen the TikTok lady that's like really making the rounds? I mean, it's a little old now where she's like, as you know, water does not have hydrogen and it's not hydrogenating.

S: And you're like, what?

C:And so she's trying to sell hydrogen-rich water, but she makes these insane, like she doesn't know what water is.

E:Oh yeah.

C:And it's just so many people are like, say what? It's so scary.

E:Do not mix your hydrogenated water with hydrogenated oil. That is the rule.

S: Well, how about if you mix your hydrogenated water with oxygenated water, then what happens? Does it explode? Or do you just get more water?

E:It explodes into more water?

S:Yeah. All right, let's move on with science or fiction.

Science or Fiction [1:42:33]

Theme: Evolution Item #1: Evolutionary ideas go back to ancient Greek philosophy, going back to Anaximander who postulated survival of the fittest and that humans evolved from fish. Item #2: The North American pronghorn antelope is actually most closely related to African Giraffes. Item #3: Although not confirmed until recently, in retrospect the oldest pterodactyl specimen was discovered in Germany in the 14th century.

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

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

E:It's time for science or fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week, and the theme is evolution. You guys know a lot about evolution, don't you?

J:Well, sure. This is about it. Yeah?

S:All right. We'll see if you know this.

C:I don't know how much modern evolution research I know about.

S: Well, tell me what you know about these things. Ready? Number one, evolutionary ideas go back to ancient Greek philosophy, going back to Anaximander who postulated survival of the fittest and that humans evolved from fish. Eye number two, the North American pronghorn antelope is actually most closely related to African giraffes. And eye number three, although not confirmed until recently, in retrospect, the oldest pterodactyl specimen was discovered in Germany in the 14th century.

B:Bob, go first.

E:Hey, Bob.

B: Oof.

E:You always start with a, what is that called?

B:Ancient, um, aplosive? Um, I don't want to be, yeah. Thank you. Okay, so evolutionary ideas go back to ancient Greek philosophy? I've never heard of that going back that far. What year was Anaximander? 600 BC. Oof. Wow.

E: They know that because they found a coin with 600 BC marked on it.

B: Like, oh yeah, no brainer note for sure, but it's not really that crazy. And pterodactyl specimens discovered in Germany, but not recognized, but it was discovered in the 14th century. I just don't know where, how unreasonable it would be for pterodactyls to be discovered in Germany. If you know, have there been other pterodactyls discovered there? I think maybe not, but I don't know. And I don't know how crazy it would be that they were discovered. If they were discovered there, you know, if there was like never been a hint of any pterodactyls and then, Oh yeah, we found one in Germany centuries ago that I might want to say that that's fiction, but I just don't know. So the only one that's directly saying no way is Greek philosophy, survival of the fittest and that we evolved from. See life. I mean, come on. I would have heard of that. I got to do that card. I got to play that card. Something I would have I would have heard about and remembered. So I'll say that's fiction, but I'm probably wrong.

J: Okay, Jay. Although not confirmed until recently, in retrospect, the oldest pterodactyl specimen was discovered in Germany in the 14th century. Wow, so they're saying they found it in the 14th century. Wow. Well, I have never heard of that. That's interesting. I'm not sure about that. I don't know. Let me let that sit for a second. The second one, the North American pronghorn antelope is actually most closely related to African giraffes. The pronghorn is a beautiful antelope. Have you guys ever seen one?

E: No, I haven't.

J:You'll never forget it. When you see their their antlers, you'll never forget them. They're just really cool shaped. Yeah. I mean, you know, I can't I don't see why I even though giraffes have crazy long necks and everything like, you know, they could have evolved that relatively quickly. I think that that one's probably science. Then the first one, going back to ancient Greek philosophy with Anaximander, who said that survival of the fittest and that humans evolved from fish. Yeah, I see what Bob is saying, but there was a lot of philosophers talking at that time saying a lot of different stuff.

B:True.

J:You know, I don't know how if this is true, I don't know how deeply he went into any details. I bet you it was just kind of some if it happened, it was light speculation. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know if they found that that's pterodactyl specimen in the 14th century or something. Something about that one is telling me it's not true. So I'm going to say that's the fiction. Okay, Cara.

C:Okay, so I think that the North American pronghorn antelope being most closely related to the African giraffe is, I don't want to say likely, but could be science, mostly because there are a lot of animals like Like elephants, hyraxes, which are also known as rock dassies, and manatees are closely related. And it's like, what? And it doesn't seem likely that an antelope would be related to, or at least not more closely related to a giraffe than other antelopes. But most of the antelopes that I know about are African, obviously we do have antelopes in North America, but it's also not uncommon for animals to have weird names that aren't actually what they are. So because up until we could do genetic work, we were just going, oh, this hip kind of looks like that one's hip. They're probably related. So that one I think could be science because it could be like a case of mistaken identity. But the two that I'm grappling with right now are Anaximander. I think the thing that's bugging me about this one is survival of the fittest. And so I'm going to ask you a question that you probably can't tell me the answer to. But is that our modern understanding of survival of the fittest? Or is that his version of survival of the fittest?

S:It's survival of the fittest. People with who are stronger, faster, better, whatever, are more likely to survive and pass those traits on.

C: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Dinosaur and I'm going to be clear because a pterodactyl is not a dinosaur, it's a flying reptile. First dinosaur specimens were discovered in like the 17 or 1800s. So that would be a, that'd be hundreds of years before the first dinosaur. A pterodactyl specimen was discovered and knew that it was a pterodactyl specimen. I don't know. I don't think there's anything in the lore or the literature about these giant reptiles.

S:No, they didn't. That's the whole point.

C:They didn't know what it was. They didn't know what it was.

S:Not confirmed.

C:Yeah. Oh, I thought you were saying, although not confirmed until recently, that was the oldest specimen, as in the oldest.

S:In retrospect, looking back, oh, that was a frickin pterodactyl they discovered in the 14th century. But they didn't know until very recently that that's what it was.

C: So what, just so that you know, the way that this is written and the way that I'm interpreting it, although not confirmed until recently, in retrospect, the oldest pterodactyl specimen, not the first one discovered, the literal geologically oldest.

S:No, the first one discovered. Specimen, the oldest specimen, not the oldest species or whatever.

C: The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. And it is also kind of weird to think that we didn't even notice all this really old shit in the ground until like the 17 or 1800s. The Bible told us to not look, right? More plausible.

B:Yeah, it is.

C:And I'm still gonna say, yeah, the pterodactyl is the is the fiction.

B:Really? Okay.

C:I don't know, though. It's, I don't feel strongly about it.

B:God damn twinkos.

C:Okay, twinkos.

E:Pantera is a group and Panera is a restaurant.

C:Yeah, exactly.

E: Cracking me up.

B:And Tara's also a cool car.

E:Oh, really? I have to look that up. But we digest. Yeah, number one. All right, so Anaximander. Has nobody here heard of Anaximander? Because I learned about Anaximander a very long time ago.

B:Yeah, I heard of him.

E:Anaximander and Anaxagoras was another one. In fact, I had a Dungeons & Dragons The Skeptic's Guide to The DVD player and the Cosmos series. I believe on one of those episodes, Carl Sagan talks specifically about Anaximander. No way. I believe it was in the context of the first thoughts about these kinds of things, including evolution. I'm going to say that that one's science. What the hell? If my recollection is correct, it might not be correct. The second one about an antelope, right? Oh my gosh, how could a North American antelope here be closely related to an African giraffe? That's crazy. Now, I think we've talked about situations before where there is that sort of disconnect, like you said, the manatee, for example, Cara, in which you wouldn't think, or like, I don't know, don't we share a bunch of DNA with a sea anemone or a sponge or something, right? So there's all sorts of weird Play like that happening in the world between animals and things. So I'm not surprised by that one, even though I don't have any hard knowledge on it. And by the process of elimination, that means all I'm left with is the pterodactyl one, which I have no idea about. But because that's all I'm left with to choose from, I have to go with that as the fiction.

S: All right, so you're all in agreement on the antelope one, so we'll start there. The North American pronghorn antelope is actually most closely related to African giraffes. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Yeah, this is kind of an easy call. There's all kinds of screwed up taxonomy. You could just have a whole list of things that are misnamed, or you would be shocked to find what they're most closely related to, etc. Jay, you referred to the pronghorns antlers, but they don't have antlers. What do they have? What are those things on their heads?

C:Horns.

S: They're not really horns either.

E:Oh, okay.

C:They're not antlers, they're not horns, they are... It's hair.

E:Like rhinocest. It's like fingernail material, isn't it? Like dead cells, a bunch of dead cells. Is that what a horn is?

C:That's what a horn is. Yeah, it's not a horn.

S:It's not an antler. It's an outgrowth of bone.

C:Oh. Oh, it's actual bone.

S:Just like on giraffes. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe

C: No, it looks like a zebra giraffe.

B:Right. It does. It looks like a zebra giraffe. It's like a zebra deer kind of. Oh, and it's got those little little horny things on above its eyes. I guess that's the same. Those are those bony growths again. Cool. I could definitely see some giraffe in that bad boy for sure. For the Okapi anyway.

S:Oh, the Okapi, definitely.

B:Yeah.

C:Cute little ears.

S: Okay, let's go back to number one. Evolutionary ideas go back to ancient Greek philosophy, going back to Anaximander, who postulated survival of the fittest and that humans evolved from fish. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Bob.

B:Whatever. Wow, that's cool.

S:And it wasn't just him. There were lots of guys back then, several.

B:Did they say survival of the fittest?

S: I don't know if they use that specific term, but that's exactly what they were describing.

B:And it wasn't just like the strongest or whatever, it was the most fit.

S:But of course they didn't understand biology at the time. So, he thought there were these primal forces in the universe, and that these try different combinations, and then the ones that work better survive longer. But they did think that creatures evolve over time in this process. It's almost like mix-and-match organs and stuff, I guess is what they were thinking. And he did think, and there were others who also thought that humans evolved from other creatures, like fish.

C: It's it's amazing to think how long Judeo-Christian ideals, once they came on the scene, stymied this kind of thinking.

S:Right.

C:You know, even Darwin, like, it was he was like, he didn't publish for years because he was like, I wanted to get it just right.

B:Yeah. Wallace is on your heels, so I better publish quick.

S:And they had fossils back then, mainly of marine life.

B: Yeah, I'm sure.

S:And they had to come up with ideas about, well, where did these come from? What are these?

C:Was that where a lot of that mythology?

S:Sometimes mythology, but they also thought that it was a mineral. That this is, like, see, nature just creates these biological forms spontaneously.

B:Oh, spontaneous generation.

S: Thanks for joining us today. He actually, the idea of Lamarckian evolution existed before him. He didn't really champion it and he, by the end of his career, he had rejected it. He set out to see the idea that there's this inherent progress in evolution over time. He set out to show that that was the case. But he did good science. He made good observations and he actually proved the opposite and came around to it because that's what the evidence showed.

C:Sadly, that theory has his namesake.

B: A poor guy, man. I'd be so pissed at history. Like, screw you, history.

S:Oh, you got totally screwed. Totally screwed. He's like, damn, if you actually look at the fossils... He's a good scientist.

B:What the hell?

S:Everything's just adapting to its local environment. It's all horizontal. There's no progress inherent in the fossil record.

B:Beautiful.

S:Yeah. But total bad rap. Total bad rap. All of this means that, although not confirmed until recently, in retrospect, the oldest pterodactyl specimen was discovered in Germany in the 14th century is the fiction. I used that. It wasn't random. There were pterodactyls discovered in Germany. In fact, the most complete pterodactyl specimen was discovered in Germany not too long ago, a few years ago. And again, it's not unheard of that there were fossils discovered centuries ago. The first dinosaur fossil was named before we even knew that dinosaurs existed, or that the word dinosaur existed, and the species name still sticks. The Megalosaurus was the first dinosaur fossil. The species name still is Megalosaurus, even though we didn't know what it was at the time. But it had precedence, right? Because it was named. I like to take topics that you know well and find nuances and nooks and crannies that, you know, are not general knowledge.

B:Yeah, screw you.

C:So, when was this? I mean, what about this was true?

S:Nothing.

B:It was bunk.

S:I just was riffing off the fact that there was a recent really good pterodactyl specimen discovered in Germany.

Skeptical Quote of the Week [1:59:24]

“Our illogical deference to Earth’s bounty has become so widespread that researchers had to give it a name: the “appeal to nature fallacy,” which occurs when we automatically assume something is better just because it’s natural, and likewise, worse if it’s not.”  – ― Rina Raphael, The Gospel of Wellness: Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care, (description of author)

E: Our illogical deference to the Earth's bounty has become so widespread that researchers had to give it a name, the appeal to nature fallacy, which occurs when we automatically assume something is better just because it's natural and likewise worse if it's not. That was written by Rina Raphael. Her book, The Gospel of Wellness, Gyms, Gurus, Goop, and the False Promise of Self-Care. And Rina Raphael will be joining us at SciCon 2024 this coming October. And we look forward to seeing you there. Absolutely.

S:And she got it correct, the appeal to nature fallacy, not the naturalistic fallacy, which is something completely different.

E:There you go.

S:That's the well-ought confusion, the is-ought confusion. This exists in nature, therefore it's the way we should be. That's the naturalistic fallacy, as opposed to this is natural, therefore it's good and wholesome, and that's not natural, therefore it's bad and will kill you. That's the appeal to nature fallacy. And yes, I'm always enamored of any swipes against goop.

E:Absolutely. A good target.

S:A worthy target. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.