SGU Episode 729
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| SGU Episode 729 |
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| June 29th 2019 |
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"Detailed view of a medical scan, highlighting a significant measurement of 27.8 mm." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
“Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking.” |
Robert T. Bakker |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
C:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, June 25th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, folks. Cara is shooting today, filming something.
US#01:So guys, I have some exciting news, however. The paperback version of our book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, is coming out in both the US and the UK.
S:Both publishers are coming out with a paperback version. They'll be out this fall. Nice. I think the UK in October, the US. What's it gonna cost, love? Yeah, the payback's usually cheaper. US in probably November.
B:Also at the same time, the Chinese version of our book is coming out.
S:The hardcover. In Mandarin, yeah, in a hardcover. Yep. Oh, can't wait to see that. Yeah, I don't speak Mandarin, but it'll be kind of fun to see it in a different language. So yeah, so we're in discussion with both publishers actually about whether or not we want to include some new material in the paperback. So I'm probably going to crank out an extra chapter to put in the book. And we might also add some references, like some extra reading material. But this is preliminary.
E:I'll let you know what we're able to produce for the paperback version.
S:We've got to do it quickly, though. But listen, if you want to help, anybody who has found anything in the book that was wrong, typos or anything that you think that you would like to bring to our attention, please do it. And I know a lot of you have already done this, and we've tried to keep a catalog because, you know, books get updated. But this is an opportunity to update the manuscript. So you could email us at info at theskepticsguide.org with the subject line paperback SGU book. Yeah, so what we want you to send us – and we can't do rewrites, right?
J:If you want us to get into a long discussion about something, it's not happening. But any word choice errors or typos or whatever, anything that you think could be quickly fixed, we need a page number and then what the correction is, and then also you need to tell us if you're going off of the American or the UK version of the book. Mm-hmm. Yeah, this way we can get as many corrections into the paperback version as we can in addition to the extra material.
S:So we're trying to crowdsource it. Also, there's a very short window for this. I haven't decided what the extra chapter is going to be, and so if you have any recommendations, feel free to send those as long as well. If you've read the book and you're like, oh, I wish they had a chapter on X, well, now there might be. So send me those suggestions and I'll pick the best one, but you got to do that soon. Yeah, now I've recommended to Steve that this new chapter be about me. Just all Jay? Yeah, just about me. My whole skeptical life. That's what we would name the chapter, by the way. Jay's Skeptical Life. And I think it's a great idea. I mean, if enough people email this in, Steve might go for it. Yeah, that's not happening. Be a very short chapter, right, Steve? We need an update on the star child, Steve. It's been many years since we've talked about that.
J:Now there's one more book-related thing I want to talk about. Yeah? What's that? You guys might remember before the book came out, we announced that there was one special book that had a very special handmade signature page, right, where we all did something special.
E:Oh yeah, did that find surface? No, it didn't, and I want to remind all of our readers out there
S:Please check your book. Check the front pages of your book. Make sure that you don't have it, because if you do have it, you need to contact us.
J:And all you need to do is take a picture of that page and email to us. And you're going to win something big. It's going to be big. So do this. Trust me. Check it. Email us with the picture. And, you know, it's possible it's still in a bookstore. It's possible. I guess so. Is this the equivalent of the Willy Wonka golden ticket? Yeah, it's a legit golden ticket. It's big. Steve will sing songs for you if you get it. No, it's better than that, Evan. What's better than that? Do you have any Gobstoppers left? So whatever happened to the girl in that movie where she turned into a blueberry? They had to juice her. They went and squished her. Yeah. They popped her like a zit. Oh, God. You ruined it.
E:Yeah, they basically make it so that you never see those kids again.
J:But the implication is they they're fine. You know, they they sort it all out through Willy Wonka magic.
E:Whose was the most horrifying? Was it the kid that got stuck in the chocolate tube?
J:Yeah, just got stuck on the tube. The kid got shrunk and they had to bring him to the taffy stretching room. I mean, that's, you know, that doesn't sound good.
S:Yeah, or the kid who got broken up into a billion atoms.
J:That's what I'm talking about. Well, he died. What happened to that kid is he broke continuity. He died. He broke continuity, yeah. And they made a miniature new version of him.
S:That kid is dead. And the thing is, the kid's dead. He wouldn't even be self-aware anymore because his brain is so tiny that he could never be, you know, human equivalent with a tiny, tiny brain.
J:I think that's where we need to go with this.
S:We need to scientifically deconstruct what We'll be right back. But the blueberry girl has massive stretch marks.
E:Yeah, not only that, but she's got PTSD big time. Yeah. But I hear that she eventually hooked up with some of those oompa-loompas. Oh, my God.
J:She did, yes, because she looked like that colloidal silver guy.
E:Yes. You're right.
J:All that silver.
S:This papa smurf, papa smurf.
J:Yeah, exactly. So she's the... Violet. Smurfette. Violet, you're turning violet, Violet. Thank you for joining us today.
E:Is that supposed to have some kind of deeper meaning? I'm not kidding.
S:I think that he was into voodoo. That's where he got his magic from.
J:Oh, and is that where the Oompa Loompas came from? Is that Canon, Jay? No, but as an adult, not when I was a little kid, but when I had seen that movie for the first time where I was old enough to interpret things that I'm watching, I remember saying, maybe he's into
E:You know, that's your hypothesis, that Willy Wonka is voodoo.
J:The Everlasting Gobstopper is a voodoo magic. Steve, voodoo goes all the way down. Yeah.
E:I don't know. He does have magic.
J:I mean, there is magic in that place. It's not just strength. Yes. It's a combination of tech and magic. It's a techno-mage. It's voodoo. I'm telling you, man. Maybe it's Oompa Loompa voodoo. They have their own kind of voodoo. Well, that's what I was thinking, you know, shrunken head, shrunken body kind of thing. Well, I don't know that we're going to solve this tonight.
S:This is not, I did not anticipate this is where the conversation was going. And it's not over. I'm sorry.
J:It was me. I'm Mr. Non-sequitur.
S:I can't help it. All right. All right. Let's get a hunt to some news items.
News Item #1 - Deep Space Atomic Clock (08:18)[edit]
S:Let's get a hunt to some news items.
J:Yes. And Bob, you're going to start us off with a deep space atomic clock.
E:Why would we blast a good atomic clock out into space?
S:Because it looks like the Borg Cube, and how cool would it be that we sent the Borg Cube out into space?
E:Yeah, that would be awesome. So yeah, more atomic clock news this week.
S:Yesterday, June 24th, Jay, I'm sure you're aware, the SpaceX launched NASA's test system, among other things, called the Deep Space Atomic Clock. This will test the use of a specialized atomic clock for onboard navigation, and the claims are that it could revolutionize space travel. So let's see. How would it do that, Bob? Yeah, let's see if that's a little bit of hyperbole.
B:So SpaceX Falcon Heavy successfully delivered to orbit yesterday a lot of things, a solar sail, ashes of 152 people, hello, and an atomic clock. Clocks are, of course, are endlessly fascinating in so many different ways. You've got that quartz watch on your wrist, and it basically works by a quartz crystal vibrating in a very predictable, regular way with electrical current. Those vibrations are a little tick-tock of the timekeeping piece, but the problem is it loses a millisecond every six weeks. Which isn't a lot for just like for making your doctor's appointments, you know, that's not a problem. But if you're dealing with long distances, especially distances that spacecraft will travel in space, then after six weeks, you could have it, you could introduce an error of 300 kilometers. So clearly quartz crystals are not a good option for space-based or for very, very, very precise calculations. Then you've got satellites and you've got timekeeping and satellites. The atomic clocks there generally use cesium or rubidium atoms, and they're much more accurate than quartz clocks, but there's still some drift. They're still not nearly as bad as a millisecond in six weeks, but they're not as good as the best atomic clocks. So they drift a little bit, and they still need twice daily updates from the huge, super accurate atomic clocks that are on Earth. And so then you have the deep space atomic clock. So this uses charged mercury atoms, and they keep them in a very special electromagnetic trap. And when they're excited, these ions oscillate, creating a kind of tick-tock, tick-tick or whatever. But these are 50 times more accurate than current satellites that are using cesium and rubidium oscillators. So they're much, much better and they're light enough to go into a satellite. Current spacecraft navigation is kind of like GPS because what you're doing essentially is tracking the time it takes light to travel between two points and you're very, very accurately determining how much time that that takes. That's part of what GPS does. So currently, for spacecraft navigation, I wasn't really sure exactly how this worked, but you'd need, it's multiple steps, right? So you got a spacecraft, say you got a spacecraft halfway to Mars and you wanted to adjust the navigation or make little tweaks, so you have to find out exactly where it is, right? So the Earth would then have to basically ping the spacecraft, send a signal to the spacecraft. Then the spacecraft would have to send the signal back to Earth. And then at that point, you'd have our super accurate, very heavy atomic clocks on Earth determine the exact trajectory. And then another signal would go back to the craft telling it, all right, this is what you got to do. So it's a multi-step process. But with this new deep space atomic clock, things are a little bit different. So that's kind of like, imagine if you had a GPS navigation on your phone and you're trying to get to Washington, D.C. and it's like, oh, by the way, right turn 20 miles ago. I mean, you know, it doesn't work if things take way too long to accomplish. And also, of course, as your spacecraft gets farther and farther away from you, or is it further? No, it's farther. As it gets farther and farther away from you, it takes more and more time, even to the speed of light, to do the round trip. With the Deep Space Atomic Clock, what this allows is one-way tracking. That means that the spacecraft receives the signal from Earth and then the clock can perform its own tracking calculations right on board. So you don't have to send the signal back to Earth and then Earth sending its instructions back to the ship. So what you end up with is quicker, more responsive navigation. There's much, much less input from the Earth. Earth does not have to coddle you and do all this communication back and forth to do all sorts of things, not only determining your trajectory and things, but also communications and stuff like that. So therefore, you could have unexpected events that can be dealt with much more quickly this way. You can make quicker course corrections and lots of things. And also, this would go a long way towards lightening the load on NASA's Deep Space Network. This network consists of a lot of radio telescopes, and it allows you to manage many space-faring vessels that are flitting around. And if they can kind of do a lot of their own work, then it would be a much lighter load on the Deep Space Network. So that's pretty much it. That's what's in space right now. That's what's being tested. NASA has been working on this for two decades, a long time they've been working on this, and they anticipate some sort of revolution in space travel. And yeah, this will help. It's not as sexy as a nuclear thermal rocket engine. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Thanks for watching! So hopefully this test bed will work out great and then in the future, say when we go to Mars, we'll be much more adept, responsive, and able to do a lot of the calculations on board instead of having to communicate with Earth. Cool, so where exactly is the satellite going to be? It's in orbit right now. It's in orbit right now. Where's the orbit at? It's at twice, I believe it's at twice low Earth orbit. I think it's like 400 miles up, something like that. No danger of colliding with other things, I hope. Oh yeah, they always take that into account. All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, this is one of those articles you sent me where I read the headline and my initial reaction is, nah, I don't think that's going to happen. So are we going to be printing vaccines at home in the future?
S:Maybe.
News Item #2 - Printing Vaccines (15:16)[edit]
S:Maybe.
S:Maybe, yeah.
B:I mean, this is just an extrapolation on where technology has been heading and lots of different, you know, how concentric circles of technology can start to crisscross and new things will arise. Well, if they're concentric, they're not really going to crisscross, are they?
S:Never mind. You know what I mean? You know the Olympic rings, Bob? You know, circles? I see. Gotcha. Right. Overlapping. How would you say that? Overlapping circles? Yeah, like Venn diagram. That's what I would say. So concentric is the wrong word, and I'm sorry.
U:Correct.
J:That's OK. Now about these vaccines. Yeah, so anyway, so the vaccines. So one idea is that we need the ability to detect pathogens similar to the way that our bodies can, right? So our bodies are incredibly fast at detecting foreign bodies and in most cases our bodies can find a way to get rid of whatever the pathogen is. Now imagine if everybody's home and all public buildings had pathogen detectors. Well, it turns out that this is not that far out. I mean, we have biological detectors today. There's a lot of companies that are working on this type of technology. And think about the use of that. That would be so profoundly useful to be able to detect, hey, you know what? There's a flu strain going around in the school. And the staff would be able to act accordingly and maybe save a lot of people from getting sick. And that would drive health care costs way down. Another idea here is we also need to be much more agile in the way that we create vaccines and general medication. So one concept that really is intriguing is some kind of bioprinter that can create chemicals. Now this is what Steve was saying at the start here is that this could be kind of like a print-on-demand situation. As futuristic as this might sound, the very beginnings of this are already out there. A team of scientists unveiled a digital to biological converter back in 2017. And it's capable of printing DNA and manufacturing proteins, vaccines, and viruses. What? I can't believe I missed this, but I'm sure it's not working at an incredibly useful level, but it's the beginnings of a reactor that can make these types of molecules. That's fantastic. The machine is roughly the size of a large refrigerator, and it's expected that future technology will continue to miniaturize the processes that happen, and this could be the size of a toaster someday. That would be an absolute game changer. Now, the goal would be to have technology like this where we would have a bioprinter in every pharmacy, in every doctor's office, in every hospital, and they could be programmed with FDA-approved medicines or whatever it is that you need it to pump out. As long as it's approved, everybody would be able to have the raw materials to build these molecules to make these medicines. Creating a new medicine or cure could be as simple as downloading You know, whatever you would call it, the new blueprints, you know, and that wouldn't take long. You know, with the internet as fast as it is today, it wouldn't take long at all just to download whatever piece of software that you need to update a machine that can do something like this. Now, the cool thing about this to me is that it would be on demand, right? So you would be printing molecules on demand. And this would allow a lot of cool things to happen that we can't do today. We could be able to implement more precise fine tuning of something. So let's say, as an example again, I'll take the flu because everyone gets the flu and understands what it is. So let's say that a strain of flu surprises the people that choose what vaccines that they're going to build a vaccination for that year, right? It's December and people have been getting vaccinated since late September, early October, and that vaccine isn't working so well. So they decide, you know what, we know what the flu that's hitting is, let's change it and give everyone an updated vaccine, or at least everyone from that day forward would be able to get the latest vaccine and not have to go through all the rigmarole that these companies have to go through in order to produce Thank you so much for joining us today. Yeah, I think the harder part is going to be the regulation, not the technology. So we already have the digital to biological converter, right? So if you have the sequence of DNA, it's basically all the equipment necessary to crank out that DNA, which could then make the proteins that you want for whatever, like the vaccine. That can work, assuming it gets smaller, faster, cheaper over time, even with incremental advances.
S:And eventually, sure, your average pharmacy might be able to afford one of these machines, for example, and then maybe a doctor's office. But I think the potential for abuse is massive. I'm very concerned about that. I agree. I mean, maybe it would have to be more on lockdown where it isn't in a pharmacy, which is pretty common in supermarkets today, if you think about it. Maybe there needs to be distribution centers or something where it is much more on lockdown. Maybe we would have to update the way we handle doling out medication. But the idea here and what the article was really pushing was this idea that we would have this agile way of producing medications and vaccines
J:That not only could be altered depending on the person or the situation, but also to fight back what seemed like is the inevitable time when we're going to have biological warfare happening on more of a massive scale. Yeah, I mean, I still think there are some quality control issues like, you know, this process is prone to introducing mutations, for example. So I would see this for the foreseeable future being more of just a new manufacturing method. You know what I mean? Just shortening the time from like identifying the strain of virus we need to make a vaccine for and getting that vaccine out. That would be fine, Steve. You know, I'm thinking it really is the idea of being agile and being able to mass produce.
S:So you wouldn't want like two places in one country to be doing it. You'd want like a thousand places that could manufacture this that are safe. Regulated, FDA approved, you know, all of that I totally agree with. But it's like, you know, having all your eggs in one basket. You don't want like so amazingly few companies making vaccines. You know, it would be very easy to have a massive vaccine shortage if a company goes out of business or whatever.
J:Like you don't want things like that going on. Or you have a pandemic and you need like everyone in the country to have this medicine, you know, within a month type of thing where you get mass, you know, mass produce. Or faster, you know, like it could be something that much faster. Like look at Ebola. I mean, that that goes quick, man. It's super catchy. I mean, I was reading articles about Ebola and how... Well, it's not airborne. But I know it isn't, but it's super catchy. I mean, it's scary how catchy it is. I mean, these people walked through a town. They walked through a town. They snuck around the guards.
B:They, you know, they were suspected of possibly being infected and they got out of the confinement zone and they walked through a town and basically killed the town.
J:What? Really? Yeah. Yes. They infected the whole town. Somebody got infected. They touched something and somebody got it. And, you know, a town died.
B:You guys have played that game, Plague, Inc. Yes, it's awesome.
J:Yeah. But you're the plague. You're the plague. But it'd be a lot harder to win that game if they had this technology. That's right. That could be one of the things that happens is scientists develop print-on-demand vaccines. Oh, damn. Damn. How are we going to beat that? That's why in that game, the funny thing is you want to stave off detection as long as possible. You know, you want it to be like just like a common cold that mutates into the zombie virus very quickly.
S:That's what you got to do. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that, Jay.
J:All right.
S:So I came across an interesting news item today about carbon capture.
News Item #3 - Carbon Capture (23:23)[edit]
S:So I came across an interesting news item today about carbon capture.
S:This is not a way to capture carbon. It's more of what you do with it after you catch it right after you capture it.
J:As we've been discussing on the show quite a lot recently about global warming, that we need to marshal our technological innovation to try to reverse the trend. We're still putting out more CO2 every year. So one of the ways to do that, obviously, is to produce less CO2.
S:Thank you for joining us. But one approach is to make that more feasible, is to make something valuable with the carbon when you take it out of the atmosphere, so then you get a financial incentive to do so. You're not just burying it, right? So there's actually a number of possible technologies for that, and a recent BBC article was reviewing some interesting ones I wanted to just talk about briefly. So carbon dioxide is actually a very useful molecule. It's actually a highly valuable molecule in industry. It could be used to create fuels, polymers, fertilizers, proteins. And also building materials. Carbon. Carbon. Yeah, carbon dioxide. Did you guys know this? I think we might have mentioned this on the show. How much of the world's CO2 production is caused by making concrete?
U:20%.
S:Wow. It's big. It's big. Thank you for joining us. Yeah, so concrete is cement plus aggregate, right? So you add sand, gravel, cement, and water together, and then that hardens into concrete.
J:Yeah.
S:Yeah. So there's a company in the UK, Carbonate Aggregates, and what they do is they can make what they call aggregates, basically like calcium carbonate stone, by absorbing CO2 into what they say is a wide range of thermal wastes. The one example they give is fly ash from coal burning. So you could take all that fly ash, and then it'll absorb CO2 like a sponge, and they have a process by which they could turn that into these aggregates, right, which could then be used to make concrete. That's like a double whammy. Yeah, and there's an American company called Solara that could use CO2 to make cement to replace, they said all you need is, you need CO2 and then a source of alkalinity and a source of calcium, which can both be sourced from just normal industrial waste streams. Wow. And then they have a process, they don't go into the details, you know, but they have a process by which, yeah, that they could make cement. So, you put these two things together, you have one company that can make cement out of CO2, the other one that can make aggregate, and you could make concrete. Now, imagine if we replaced all of the concrete that we're making in the world with concrete that's made from a large amount of CO2 taken from the atmosphere. And we're not putting CO2 in the air from making concrete from limestone. No brainer. That could be very useful in turning this CO2 ship around. Of course, there's always two big questions, right? We talk about all these processes, these technological proofs of concept. You guys say that one is, is it scalable, and what's the cost? Those are the two things. Often the deal killer, it's like, oh yeah, this works, but it's just way, way, way too expensive, or you will never be able to scale it beyond the lab. Those are often deal killers. But this process is already being done. It's scalable by these two processes that I'm talking about. Cost is the one thing I'm not sure about. And they say that they're competitive, but they have to be really competitive. But here's the thing. If we actually were not subsidizing the release of CO2 through fossil fuel subsidies, and instead we said that if you release CO2 into the atmosphere, that has a cost associated with it, and you have to cover the cost that you are imposing on society of releasing that CO2. But also removing CO2 from the atmosphere has a value to it. And so if we value removing or sequestering CO2 and price releasing CO2, these technologies become much more cost effective, right? That makes sense. And it's not like we're imposing something beyond the actual externalized costs, right? All we're saying is we're not going to subsidize you, right? We're not going to pay you to release CO2 into the atmosphere. And you're not going to be able to dump your waste into the environment for free, right? We don't let companies just dump toxic waste in rivers or wherever. Not anymore. And force that cost onto the public to do the cleanup while they reap all the profits. Did you know that it's already been – the case has already gone to the Supreme Court where they decided that the EPA can categorize CO2 as – Pollutant? Yeah, as pollution. Really? Yeah, because they fought that. They said CO2 is natural. We need it to live. It makes plants grow and it's not a pollutant. But yeah, from a legal point of view anyway, which makes sense, it's considered a pollutant. The dose makes the pollution? Yeah, yeah, exactly. What is a pollutant? It's something unwanted that you're releasing into the environment. Well, okay, it qualifies. So, interesting. There are other things companies are working on other processes as well. Again, so creating fuels and fertilizers is very, very helpful. You can make like really super high quality fertilizer. But the problem with those approaches is that the CO2 eventually gets released back into the atmosphere. So what you're really doing is making sort of carbon neutral fuel and carbon neutral fertilizer. But that's still very valuable. Right now a lot of our fertilizer comes from fossil fuel. And that's another way in which CO2 is being released into the atmosphere through fossil fuel. And of course, we burn fossil fuels, and that also releases previously sequestered CO2. So if we instead have a closed loop and we're just making fertilizer and fuels out of carbon that we've captured from the atmosphere, then the whole process is carbon neutral, especially if we're driving the whole thing with clean energy, right? If we're burning coal to do this, then obviously that doesn't work. The other thing you could do is while we're phasing out fossil fuels, you can pair carbon capture with industrial or energy-producing processes that produce CO2, capture it right at the source, and then funnel it into one of these processes that make something valuable out of it that then makes the whole process more cost-effective. Again, what this all says to me is, and I read a lot about this on a weekly basis, there are factories out there that are capturing carbon from the atmosphere. It's happening at large industrial scales. These companies are already making the products that they're talking about. This is already happening. So we actually have the technology at this point in time. Thank you for joining us. They absolutely can be cost effective, and we don't have to so-called pick winners and losers either. There are so many companies working on this. You can let the free market sort it out. All we really have to do is jigger the free market forces so that they properly value things. Right now, the system is not properly valued. It's distorted. We're actually distorting the market to favor the release of CO2, which is insanity. Think about that. We have things arranged so that it's economically advantageous to dump CO2 into the atmosphere that was previously sequestered. We need to completely flip that around and just make it so that the economic advantages go towards not releasing CO2 or even taking it out of the atmosphere. And we have the technology. And then let the free market sort out what the best methods are and how to close these loops. It's frustrating that it's not happening just because… Is there enough of a profit motive there for the free market to take it and run? I mean, anything that will net profit, there will be a free market for us to do that, right? What's it worth to us to take CO2 out of the air? And it's not like we can't put a number on that. There's two ways to answer that question, right? There's a hard economic value, and then there's a quality of life value. The thing is, even if you just look at the hard economic end of the equation and say, if we're being completely selfish and cynical and don't give a crap about quality of life or fairness or whatever, and we're just making a hard economic decision, And these numbers have been run. Economists are saying, yeah, it's cost effective to mitigate climate change. Climate change is going to F our economy. It's going to cost a lot of money. In fact, there was a recent study which found that global warming itself is going to increase our energy demands because we are going to have to run more air conditioning. Think about that feedback loop. The hotter it gets, the more energy we need to cool ourselves down, which will produce more CO2, which will make it even hotter. That's a vicious cycle. That's a vicious cycle, exactly. So that's happening. The estimates range from like 12 to 30 percent increased energy demand by 2050 because of global warming. So you factor that in. We've mentioned on the show before that the healthcare costs of pollution themselves are hundreds of billions of dollars. Even if you don't believe in global warming, just the extra healthcare cost. I think that's an underestimate. There's studies coming out more and more showing the negative health effects.
E:That's like just counting the obvious ones like asthma.
S:But as we learn more about the negative effects of pollution, that figure is only going to rise. So we could save hundreds of billions of dollars in healthcare costs, we can save money in not having these increased energy demands, and then there's all of the climate change affects itself on the economy, as well as mitigating the effects on people's lives of climate change. It's going to be an economic disaster, and anything that we do now to prevent it is an investment that is completely cost-effective, like by a large margin. That's really how you have to look at it. It is a long-term investment for the survivability of the very lifestyle and economy that we've enjoyed for so long. The problem is I can only think of a couple of countries that are actually not completely short-term thinking, thinking the next one, two, or maybe even three quarters, but that's it. That's the problem. That's too long-term. It's like, nope, I've got to fix my bottom line this year or next quarter. They don't care to look that far enough ahead.
E:Yeah, there has to be a high enough participation rate to make it tilt. It's going to be our demise. Here's a nice headline in a Washington Post article which I'm sure is entirely accurate.
B:Horns are growing on young people's skulls.
News Item #4 - Horny Kids (36:31)[edit]
B:Horns are growing on young people's skulls.
E:Phone use is to blame, research suggests.
S:Now, you read that headline, and you might think, oh my goodness, kids talking on their cell phones all the time, and now they're growing a pair of horns from just above their ears, very, very much like Satan, and all is lost, right? Must be Satan at work. Then you read the first line of the actual
E:Researchers at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia are suggesting that young people are developing horn-like spikes at the back of their skulls, bone spurs caused by the forward tilt of the head, which shifts weight from the spine to the muscles at the back of the head, causing bone growth in the connecting tendons and ligaments. The weight transfer that causes the buildup can be compared to the way the skin thickens into a callus as a response to pressure or abrasion, and the result is a hook or horn-like feature shutting out from the skull just above the neck. Okay, so maybe it's not satanic, but what do I have to do now? Start blaming Google and Facebook and MySpace and Napster on this horn problem that people are developing, especially in kids. Hmm, I don't know. David Shahar, he's a chiropractor who recently completed a PhD in biomechanics at Sunshine Coast. And his supervisor, Mark Sayers, an associate professor of biomechanics at Sunshine Coast, who has a whole bunch of peer-reviewed publications and academic journals. They are the ones who have put forth a bunch of papers They say that their discovery marks the first documentation of a physiological or skeletal adaptation to the penetration of advanced technology into everyday life. Here's a quote, Enlarged external occipital protuberance may be linked to sustained abreient postures associated with the emergence and extensive use of handheld contemporary technologies such as smartphones and tablets. Okay, so that's an interesting hypothesis. But is that the science? Or is that just an observation by a chiropractor and his supervisor? These papers received widespread attention because they were published in some peer-reviewed journals. Among them, one in particular, Scientific Reports. It got subjected to some pretty significant criticism, I would say. Problems in the source and size of the sample and the ability to draw conclusions about the use of smartphones from x-ray evidence. Some of which was drawn from patients experiencing mild neck problems. So what you do, I guess, is you take a bunch of patients, you look at their x-rays, you see what is going on at the backs of their skulls. You line that up with the ages of the people. I think they were ranging in ages from 18 to 86. And they found that the size of the bone growth they're talking about was present in 33% of the population. That actually decreased with age. So the older the person was, the less likely it was that they had this protrusion. And they looked at 1200 x-rays. So what's wrong here, Steve? We got a couple things wrong here, I would say. Too many horny kids. Mm-hmm. Well, there's that. Can the new sort of posture that people are adapting because of the technology that they're using be the cause of something like this? Well, first of all, these aren't horns. These are calcifications, right? It's not a bony growth. It's not like an extension of the skull. This is just calcifications forming in the ligaments that are attaching to the skull.
US#03:Why are they forming?
E:This forms just as, you know, why do people get carpal tunnel? This is just the aging of the body and this is just what happens. And I think one of the big criticisms here is that this study is purely observational.
S:It is in no way, they didn't even look at phone use, right? So the idea that this is somehow attached to phone use, this is a great example of science reporting, reporting the speculation at the end of the study rather than the data that the study actually shows. The study has nothing to do with cell phone use. That was just pure speculation that the researchers threw in at the end. But of course, that becomes the lead. Right, because that's the most sensational part of all things. Yeah. Also, you know, there were differences with age. There are tons of differences with age. Again, concluding that the age difference has to do with behavioral differences from young people and older people. It's massive speculation. There are so many confounding factors. You absolutely cannot conclude that from the study. And then there's also problems just with the data itself. It's a sloppy study. It never should have gotten through peer review. And when you see a sloppy report of a study, meaning that the way the data itself is being reported, Like, for example, data in the tables doesn't match the data in the graphs of those tables. You know what I mean? There's internal contradictions. You have to wonder if the whole methodology was sloppy. You know what I mean? It does not instill confidence in the study itself. And of course, this is one study, it would need to be replicated. But that's why we want to replicate studies, because you never know, looking at an individual study, if it was this just completely sloppy methodology, or is there actually a real effect here. So I wouldn't even confidently conclude that this is a real effect. But let's say it is, we can't say anything about the cause from this data, right? We didn't look at possible causes. So, it's a big nothing burger, in my opinion. And it's not horns, that also is a misnomer. It's just calcifications in the ligament, yeah. But of course, calcifications on an X-ray, you know, the bones are made of calcium. If you see calcifications, it looks like bone on an X-ray. That doesn't mean it's actual bone, you know what I mean? And the journal that published the main study says that they are taking these criticisms into consideration and they're investigating the concerns. I wonder if this means that they've begun some sort of I wouldn't say retraction process, but…
E:When I wrote about this, I quoted the Washington Post headline. Washington Post, think what you want, but it's not a rag. You know what I mean? It's not like a tabloid. But their headline was, Horns are growing on young people's skulls.
S:Phone used to blame is to blame, research suggests. Every piece of that is wrong. It's so sensational, it's crazy. That's clickbait. It's just clickbait. The technology's from the devil. Exactly. That's the image you conjure in your mind. It is one of these devil horns growing on the heads of these children because of phone use. Research suggests, and like you said, Steve, the research did not suggest that phone use is to blame. The researchers are suggesting that phone use could be to blame.
E:Yeah, like people didn't have a cause to like put their head down before having cell phones, like work at desks and read books. Typewriters, you know, 100 years of typewriter. Use tools, yeah. All sorts of stuff, right? Tool use, yeah. Tool use, exactly. It goes back a little ways. Yeah. And on the end, and as a quick tangent to that, there's something that came out today. I don't even want to tell you the source because it is a rag, but this is where it's leading to. Today, is this what people will look like in 2100?
S:How tech could change the human body? Thick skulls, claw hands, a second set of eyelids have all been proposed by scientists as possible future adaptations. Simply because of the technology that we're all working with today.
E:So they show this caricature of a hunched over person with this hunchback, obviously disfigured. This awful claw-like hand with the thumb exaggerated as if they were doing nothing but texting in their life. Just crazy. And swiping left and right. So it feeds into this kind of stuff as well, no doubt about it. All right, definitely bad science reporting of the week. A lot of people sent us that email. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (45:23)[edit]
E:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time. Last week, I played this noisy. What is that? Ah, well, it has a... Sounds like something mechanical. A wheel is turning. Yes.
S:Spokes, maybe?
US#04:Something is possibly... I think that's what your brain sounds like, Jay, when you're thinking really hard. I got a lot of different, interesting guesses. I had a listener write in. Chris Henry said, Jay, this is my first time guessing. Been listening for the last six years. Love the show. Keep up the good work. Really like the new segment five to ten years. I got a bunch of people telling me in Who's That Noisy emails how much they like the segment. Good. Good. We'll be talking about it more in the future. That makes me believe that people still think that you are doing Who's That Noisy? Just so people understand, this is Jay, and I do the Who's That Noisy segment now. Jay, that's okay. I get emails about, hey, Jay, here's a quote for you. That's so funny. You know, but it's funny because they just get ingrained, you know, like it's like the first thing that hits their head and it sticks. He said, I think the noisy for the June 22nd show sounds like a Keurig coffee maker. My God, Chris Henry. First of all, you should know by now from listening to the show that not only do I do Who's That Noisy, but that I hate Keurig, everything to do with the Keurig and that it produces what I call swill.
U:It's not actually coffee. It is a definition called swill. It's coffee that has been abused so badly and the beans themselves originally were probably so bad that it's useless.
S:It's not even drinkable at that point.
E:This is what Bob lives on. Bob lives on this beverage from this machine. Anyway, no, it's not a Keurig. And I love it. Yeah. I drink only pour overs.
B:Thank you. And I will move on. I drink Sanka.
J:Oh, God, Sanka is bad. So a listener named Abhijit Chandra wrote in and said, Hey, Jay, I think the noisy is a foot powered sewing machine. How cool is that? He said my mother had one that she had to turn by hand when I was a kid and this sound has gotten ingrained in my brain. It's just that this one sounds a lot faster. So I'm guessing it's a foot powered one. And then he goes on to say that it's ingenious engineering and that many tailors still use this contraption in India in their shops. Cool. And you know what?
E:He has given me the pronunciation of his first name and it is actually Abjeet.
J:I think I said that correctly that second time. Perhaps. Jim Kelly wrote in and said, I think this week's noisy is an automated weaving machine. These are all fun guesses, guys. Scott Peterson wrote in and said, hello there. It kind of sounds like an old school projector reel being being rewound. And I agree with that, too. So the correct answer, guys, this was sent in by a listener named Sebastian and Sebastian said, I'm a software developer from Saarbrücken, which is in Germany. I've been listening for more than five to 10 years, for more than five to 10 years. That's funny. So I guess nobody knows how long it actually was. The Noisy sounds like a small-scale Stirling engine, one that could fit on the table. Now, this was a fantastic guess. He's not 100% correct, but he's more correct than he knows. So, Paul Rimmer, who sent in the original noisy, let me read to you what he said. He goes, I recorded a noisy for you at work this week. I'm an electronics engineer and I work for a well-known luxury automotive OEM in the UK. He said his roles is the development of hardware in the loop simulation test benches, which in a nutshell Our simulator is used to test the electronic controls used in cars in a lab environment. It's basically a matrix-type scenario for electronics, whereby we provide all of the stimulus to the hardware such that it responds as if it's a real car. How cool is that? So he used a closed loop, real-time models to simulate the electrical inputs that it expects, and we read the outputs, which are then fed back into the mode, hence closed loop. This allows us to prove out the control algorithms and production software in a very controlled manner without ever going near the road. Anyway, the noisy is the sound of one of those simulators, specifically an engine control module simulator. The sound you hear are the real electrical components, actuators mainly, that live in the modern engine, but without any of the surrounding moving mechanical components. This is how your car engine would sound without any of the noisy noises from the moving parts or combustion. It's a and he said the sound is mostly coming from the injectors. It was a very descriptive, noisy thank you. And Sebastian guessed that it said, you know, it was a motor that was close enough. I didn't think anyone was going to get this. So here it is again. I love it. Homegrown noisy by a guy that works on engines. Thanks, Paul. And congratulations, Sebastian. And I have a new noisy this week, and I think you will be pleased. That was a noisy sent in by a listener named Joe Vanden Eden. Alright, thanks Jay. Welcome. We're going to do a quick email and a quick correction this week.
Emails (51:14)[edit]
J:We're going to do a quick email and a quick correction this week. Last week, as an aside, I mentioned we talked about the radiation cards, and I mentioned that people speak Malay in Thailand. Turns out most people speak Thai in Thailand. Who would have known? Thanks for watching.
U:I think I thought that because I know somebody who speaks Malay who's from Thailand.
: Interview with Evan Saitta (51:49)[edit]
https://elifesciences.org/articles/46205
U:I think I thought that because I know somebody who speaks Malay who's from Thailand.
J:But in preparation for this, I just asked Google the basic question, what languages are spoken in Thailand, thinking I can give a quick overview of it, and oh my God, is it complicated. I read through some articles like twice, and I still really can't give you a decent summary.
U:So let me give you some pieces of information. The thing is that different articles sort of break it down in different ways. It's very, very complicated.
J:So about 30% of Thailand's population speak Thai as a native language, although it's the official language of the country and so a lot of people speak it even if it's not their native language. Mm-hmm. But there are also Thai languages.
S:There's like dialects considered part of the Thai language group, including Phu Thai, Shan, Song, Isan, Southern Thai, and a bunch of other ones. What about Mai Thai? And Mai Thai, yeah. There's also a lot of minority languages spoken, many of course borrowed from surrounding countries. So Malaysia is to the south of Thailand. They do speak Malay as the primary language in Malaysia. And in southern Thailand, Malay is the dominant language. Steve, what do you call someone that speaks Malay that is just lying around a lot? How would you describe them? A lazy? Lazy Malay? Yeah, Malay-zy. But this is just scratching the surface of all of the language complexity in this country. I mean, there are like villages who like speak their own dialect, you know? Of course. Yeah, I'm not pretending I knew any of this. I do find it, you know, it's really cool to hear about it. But yeah, I mean, is any one country just speak one language? I mean, I would I would think the answer to that would be no. Well, I mean, like, you know, we're used to thinking like, well, in France, they speak French, right? Even though I'm sure there are some subtle, you know, accents, right? Like in Spain, they speak Spanish, but we know there's like different ways to pronounce the words in different parts of Spain. I know that. Italy. Italy's got it. Well, Italy actually has a lot. The thing is, Italy was for a long time city-states, and each city-state did develop its own dialect. Some of them are mutually unintelligible. Yeah, mutually unintelligible dialects until it became a nation of Italy, and then they had to make art like, this is the dialect, that's the official language that everyone has to speak. But still, obviously, if you're a local living in a rural village somewhere, you probably speak your local traditional dialect. But still, I think as Westerners, we're kind of used to thinking, well, they speak French and France and German and Germany, you know what I mean? But in this part of the world, I'm not sure historically exactly why that is. It would be a very interesting question. It's like, my God, it's just a confluence of so many different languages.
J:They must have just been so much more isolated for longer. Yeah, the language is split off, but also mixed. It's just a much more complicated linguistic history than what we're used to. Okay, another quick email. This one comes from Les Rankins from Australia. Hey Les, we're going to be down in Melbourne in November, December.
S:Come see us. They write, I'm watching a show on Netflix and someone says something that I can't understand. I back it up and play it again and still can't understand what they are saying. Back it up again and raise the volume. Nope, still no good. So I back it up and switch on captions, so this time I will at least know what is being said. This time I read the caption, but I also hear them say the words. It's freaky. I back it up and switch off the captions, and now I hear the words as plain as day. It's not that I know what they are saying, I hear what they are saying. Yes, this is a well-known phenomenon. Powerful. It's very powerful. Sometimes we refer to this as audio pareidolia, right? So there's a funny bit that Richard Wiseman does in his skeptical talks that he gives, where he plays a song. I think it's in German, but he shows words underneath on the slide as the song is playing. And you hear the words you're reading, even though you're They're basically using words in English that sort of sound like the words that are being sung in German. Does that make sense? You guys know this. Yeah, this is like, some men like cheese, right? You know that song? Yeah. And you hear the words in English that are being written underneath the German words, which obviously as English are unintelligible. So this relates to the fact that the construction of your sense of hearing is a constructive process, right? It is an active, constructive process. You're not just passively Today, we're going It's how your brain is interpreting those sounds. And so knowing what is being said, it doesn't just make you able to interpret what you hear, you actually experience hearing those actual words. There's a similar phenomenon called the McGurk effect, which I know we've talked about on the show before. What you see also affects what you hear. That's how, like, if people who have marginal hearing can lip read, and they could, if they're reading your lips, it helps them hear what you're saying. It helps their brain interpret the words that you're saying. They actually hear them, and that's because we normally do that. Your brain will interpret sounds based upon how someone's moving their mouth, and the same exact noise can be heard in different ways if it's paired with different videos of different mouth movements. If you look up the McGurk effect on YouTube, you'll see a video of that. And the odd thing here, though, is that your perception, your self-awareness is engaged. You know, this is something that's supposed to be happening behind the scenes, but you could be aware of it, and then it produces this illusion effect, which is amazing. Right, the classic tie-in, the classic tie-in I think is for EVP, electronic voice phenomena, where people will go with tape recorders and they'll record innocuous white noise, background noise in haunted houses, and then when you play it back, they scour these audio tapes and they hear stuff. Yeah, well, that's the thing. So the classic mistake they make is like, listen, they say you hear somebody say, get out of the house. And then when you listen to it, then this then this effect comes into play and you hear what what you're expecting to hear. So the key of a professional, though, would be he'd be like, listen to this noise. Tell me what you hear. They can't if they said that if they put that expectation in your mind, all bets are off. Right. It's also like backward masking, like listening to music backward. And yes, because I live with Satan, whatever. All right. We actually have an interesting interview coming up with a scientist who's going to tell us about their research, exploring this question of whether or not the fossils of dinosaur bones actually contain preserved dinosaur proteins. This has been a raging controversy in the scientific community, but maybe the controversy has been answered. Let's see.
J:Joining us now is Evan Syeda. Evan, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide. Hello, thank you for having me.
B:And Evan, you are a paleontologist, a PhD, and you are currently a postdoc at the Field Museum in Chicago, correct? Yes. And we're talking to you tonight because of a paper that you recently published. You're the first author on this paper. The actual titles always sound very technical, but the bottom line is you're taking a look at whether or not the claims of proteins being found in dinosaur fossils are likely to actually be dinosaur proteins or contaminants, right? This has been kind of a controversy for the last few years. Yes, I would say that's kind of the main motivating factor for the paper.
S:There has been quite a lot of debate about this for a good number of years now. The short story is that we did not find Convincing evidence for dinosaur proteins in these bones, but that it wasn't all negative results, so to say. There was quite an interesting twist in that we seem to have found a very unusual and unique microbial community living specifically within the bones even while they're buried. So a bit of a downer and a cool surprise all in one. Yeah, so when did this claim first emerge that fossils, you know, 65 plus million year old fossils, could actually contain proteins? Because that kind of goes against the conventional wisdom at the time, right, that this claim was first made. There have been quite a few claims, probably the oldest ones are very old, maybe like 1950s or 60s or so, but the sort of modern incarnation of dinosaur proteins, I guess you could say, started in the 90s with using what's called antibody staining on things like fossil feathers. And then not that many years later, I believe it was somewhere around like 2005, A combination of antibody approaches and mass spectrometry on things like T-Rex bones, and that really started to kick things into gear.
US#02:A lot of people got very excited, a lot of people were skeptical, and the debate has gone on since. So this technique is essentially making antibodies that bind to proteins and then seeing if they bind to the fossils, therefore the proteins are there? Yeah, so the antibodies are immune system proteins that will ideally recognize a specific region of a target protein of interest. And so what you hope to do is to expose not just the bone itself, but very often you'll demineralize the bone, exposing the organic constituents within it.
S:And then you hope to see if you get localized binding. That's been, I would say, a driving method backing up the claims of dinosaur proteins.
US#02:Although myself and others have some skepticism as to whether these are true positive results or whether they are instead false positives where they're adhering to something else within these samples. Yeah, so the claims were, if I understand correctly, the claims were that the antibodies were binding to collagen, which is kind of a basic structural protein. Is that correct? That's, I believe, there's been reports of other proteins, but the main one of focus is collagen because it's the dominant protein in bone, in life, and it's also... It's like most of the proteins in your body are collagen, isn't that correct? I believe so.
S:Definitely if you're just talking about the bone, which is the fossil that we have, our bones typically. And collagen is also relatively robust compared to other proteins.
US#02:Another topic of interest is keratin protein. And so, yes, most of the claims have been, and with regard to the paper that we just investigating collagen in fossil bones. Yeah, because the consensus, if I understand it, is that a fossilized bone, all of the organic material has been replaced with minerals. That's kind of the process of fossilization. So is that generally true or is there anything that's not controversial, organic, that survives in fossils? Yes, there are plenty of ancient biomolecules or fossil biomolecules. It used to be the sort of old school view of fossilization where the fossils might as well have just been molds and then casts of the original tissue, such as a bone, and that they're completely replaced by mineral.
S:We now know that that's not the case, so organisms will biomineralize their tissues.
US#02:One of the most common examples being bone, right? So we do have calcium phosphate in our bones in life, and we know that those calcium phosphates can survive in fossils. Very often they become slightly altered, so you can get like, instead of hydroxyapatite, it's fluorapatite in the fossils. And so the tissues that are bio-mineralized in life very often preserve in fossils. So bones and teeth and shells. But we do know that there are actually molecules that can survive. There are reports that are backed up both with an understanding of the underlying chemistry as well as studies of fossils chemically and experimental work in the manner of oil and gas scientists.
S:Things like ancient melanin pigment. So we have melanin pigments that is We're tens of millions of years old very often and there's ancient steroids like the fossil versions of cholesterols that date back to hundreds of millions of years.
US#02:And so the question is which biomolecules can survive and for how long? And the big obstacle being what's called diagenesis. So those are the processes that happen. When the fossil is buried deep underground and experiencing high heat and pressure, so it's the geothermal heat and the pressure from the overlying sediments. And so the thermal stability of a biomolecule is a good indication of whether you might expect to find it in the fossil record. And the problem with proteins is that they are probably the second least stable category of at least biomacromolecules. So the only thing less stable than proteins are nucleic acids, and that would include DNA. So some biomolecules can survive, like melanin, as you said, and certainly the biominerals. But proteins hasn't been clearly established at any point, only the controversial evidence that it hasn't really reached consensus yet. Is that fair? A better way to say it is that the oldest non-controversial or uncontested, I guess you could call them protein sequences or peptide sequences, are from just under 4 million years old. We have some 3.4 million year old collagen. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for joining us today. So this brings us to your research. So there were some scientists who claimed to have found collagen from T. rex or other dinosaurs based upon these antibody binding techniques.
S:And some other evidence, but yes. That was interesting, but not settled, right? That was still controversial. So let me just ask you, do you buy that? How skeptical are you of your research aside?
US#02:Did you think that the evidence put forward for T-Rex collagen was compelling? I would say I was skeptical. A large part of it The Skepticism arose though once I started studying protein degradation and fossilization. I got into the collagen and bone aspect of this based on my work on soft tissues such as feathers and how they preserve. So I have various studies of fossil feathers. As well as some experimental work where we use high heat and high pressure to simulate fossilization. And the model we were coming up with for You know the fossilization of these sorts of soft tissues is that you have unstable components such as proteins like the keratin protein of feathers that break down during fossilization and then those breakdown components are lost out into the sediment. Whereas the more stable, thermally stable components such as the melanin pigment or any calcifying salts in feathers can survive the high heat pressure.
S:And they are left behind and so I don't know if some of your listeners might be familiar with some of these like feathered dinosaurs from China. You have these skeletons preserved and then around the skeletons you have essentially these carbon films preserving the feathers and those carbonaceous stains, those black stains are largely melanin pigment preservation. In fact you can even I reconstruct the color of some of these dinosaurs, reconstruct the melanin-based colors.
US#02:You can see striping and spots. I've done a little bit of that work. That work is largely the byproduct of my old PhD advisor's research. I've sort of touched upon that briefly though. Yeah, we've spoken to a paleontologist who focuses on that, I believe it's at Yale. Is that who you're talking about? Well, he is now at the University of Bristol. Okay. A lecture, which is where I, he was my advisor. So I studied under him at the University of Bristol and he was a graduate student at Yale when he made the discovery. So yeah, you spoke with Diaka Vinther, my old advisor. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Very, that's very cool research as well as basically you could tell what the, at least the color pattern and somewhat about the color of these proto birds based upon these trace, trace fossil evidence. Okay, so the plausibility of T-Rex collagen is pretty low just from the survivability of proteins under those conditions for that long. It would be a record-shattering discovery if it were really, really confirmed. And then now enter your latest study, which as I understand it essentially says there's a lot of bacterial or whatever, there's contaminants thriving in these fossils and that could account for the evidence that was previously put forward as evidence of dinosaur collagen. Yes, so, you know, it's a pretty complex paper. We use quite an arsenal of techniques. I believe the total author count is like 19 different people from various different labs.
S:And so what we try to do is we, rather than going in sort of guns-a-blazing, attempting to sequence dinosaur collagen or use these antibody techniques, which
US#02:Sort of assume a high level of sequence preservation. So for example, the antibodies need a three-dimensional structure to recognize, which would imply very long sequences of amino acids forming these ancient peptides.
S:So just to be clear, are you saying that the polypeptide needs to be folded into a protein structure, or it could just be the sequence of peptides? Well, as far as I know, most antibodies recognize the tertiary and quaternary structure of the protein. So those are the higher order levels of protein folding for those who remember their high school biology and chemistry classes. It implies a very high level A very high quality of preservation and so rather than going in guns-a-blazing that way we kind of started from the ground up looking at the structure of these so-called soft tissues within the mineral component of the bone, their elemental composition and then very basic aspects of their chemistry and working our way up to
US#02:Probably the more useful analysis in terms of the question of collagen, which is these sorts of amino acid analyses. So we study the profile of which amino acids are found in the bones. And we also examine what's called the racemization. The vast majority of life uses amino acids that are in what's called the left-handed configuration. Amino acids are the building blocks of these proteins, and they can come in either left or right-handed forms.
S:Because of their structure, they have the ability to be in one of two mirror image states. And to keep everything in order, life
US#02:The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Incorporating new amino acids or creating new amino acids, the amino acids that remain can eventually equilibrate into a 50-50 mixture of left and right-handed molecules. And so you have this sort of measure of relative age. It's not an absolute dating method, but you can get a relative age. And you can see whether you have an input of recent proteinaceous material. And so when we look at these bones, not only do they not match the profile you would expect from collagen, they are also very dominated by left-handed or recent amino acids, which is not a good sign if you're claiming that there's very ancient proteins in there. Another example is that the organic carbon in the bone was not radiocarbon dead. It should certainly be radiocarbon dead if the majority of the organic carbon from the bone is dinosaur carbon. And so that was another worrying sign and the fact that I believe we have about 50, I'd have to check the exact number, but I believe it's about 50 times the amount of DNA in the bone compared to the surrounding rock matrix and surrounding sediment. And all of these things were suggestive along with other lines of evidence that not only do we fail to detect really clear evidence or really any evidence at all of ancient proteins, dinosaur proteins, but also that we have a lot of recent organic influx into the bone, a lot of recent contamination. And these are bones that I collected using aseptic techniques straight from the ground. So we not only have the bone for comparison, but also the surrounding sediment. And so even while these bones are buried, they are far from sterile time capsules. They are very much what we would call an open system. And that is very worrying, right? Because you can have the breakdown of the original components of the dinosaur that then are lost Thank you for joining us today. And I suspect that various dinosaur soft tissue claims might be better explained with a microbial origin. And that's not to say that there can't be anything ancient in the bones, but it is an issue if they are magnets for subsurface microbes. Yeah, so there's bacteria all over the place. Just to clarify one thing, so there's signatures of recent biology, not ancient biology, so that seems pretty clear. But in terms of the handedness of the amino acids, so life has all left-handed, but over time, there aren't living processes recycling the amino acids. They tend to become an even mix of left and right. Remind me how that happens. Do left-handed amino acids flip to right over time? How do you get to the 50-50 mix from all left-handed? They flip over time. They have an intermediary structure that they can conform into. They can either flip back to the left or flip to the right. The right-handed ones will flip back to the left, but There is actually an equilibrium that is reached for most amino acids at 50-50, and so eventually over time it reaches what's called a racemic mixture, which is this 50-50 left and right-handed mixture. Right, and that's what you would expect to see if these proteins were 65 plus million years old. Yeah, so there is sort of a workaround in that sense, though. So most of these amino acids, there's a few exceptions, but most of them They are only capable of flipping to the right hand version if they are at the terminal ends of the protein sequence or if they're free amino acids.
S:So it's actually correlated with a protein breakdown. And so you're kind of in a catch-22. If you want to claim that, oh, you know, we're getting a super recent signature for these amino acids because the collagen is just so exceptionally well preserved, Well then, there better be a whole bunch of other lines of evidence. For example, the amino acid profile better be similar to collagen, and it is very much not. And so, the sum total of all the evidence is more consistent with non-collagen proteins that are recent.
US#02:So, do you think this is the final nail in the coffin of the T-Rex collagen claims, or have you heard from the other side? What's the response? Well, the only things I hear from the other side are what's published in the literature and expect the debate to go on. As for me, I mean, I'm pretty convinced. I think that the oldest protein sequence is 3.8 million from these fossil eggshells.
S:I think that it could be extended a bit farther back beyond that.
U:All right, well, very interesting.
US#02:Yeah, this is something I've been following since it was first published because the whole idea of like T-Rex proteins, I mean, the media loves it, and the headlines always reported that without a hint of skepticism. But I was like, I don't know if I buy that. It's interesting. It'd be cool. But it definitely was pushing the limits of what had already been established. So I'm not surprised that it looks like it's more likely to have been basically modern contamination. And it sounds like your study supports that conclusion pretty solidly. I would say yes, there appears to be a significant microbial community living even within berry bone when it's unexposed. All right, well Evan, thank you so much for sharing your research with us. No problem, always happy to talk about science. It's time for science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:20:45)[edit]
Theme: None
Item #1: A new study finds that elite athletes have a performance-enhancing bacteria in their guts that sedentary people lack.[5]
Item #2: Astronomers have identified long carbon nanofilaments in the interstellar medium.[6]
Item #3: A recent Harris poll finds that 45% of Americans have doubts about the safety of vaccines.[7]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
US#02:It's time for science or fiction.
S:Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake.
US#02:One is fake news, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is fake. Are you guys ready for this week's news items? We are ready. All set. You are ready? All right, here we go. Item number one, a new study finds that elite athletes have a performance-enhancing bacteria in their guts that sedentary people lack.
S:Item number two, astronomers have identified long carbon nanofilaments in the interstellar medium. And item number three, a recent Harris Poll finds that 45% of Americans have doubts about the safety of vaccines. Jay, go first. This first one here about the study that finds elite athletes have a performance-enhancing bacteria in their guts that sedentary people lack. You know what I hate, Steve? I read a lot of science news and this one is tickling something. But of course, I don't know enough to remember any details other than, yeah, like, OK, it's exactly what you want me to be doing right now.
US#02:I don't know. Your gut, apparently, according to news that I've been reading for the last year, has everything to do with everything in your body, including your performance. All right. So is it possible?
US#04:Sure. Sure. Because the bacteria can can release chemicals that your body would interact with. Does it make sense? Yeah, I guess so. I'm going to move on to the second one. Astronomers have identified long carbon nanofilaments in the interstellar medium. How would astronomers have identified long carbon nanofilaments? How would they see that? How would they know that that stuff is there unless it was dense somehow and they could see light bouncing off of it? I'm not sure about that one. And the final one, a recent Harris Poll finds 45% of Americans have doubts about the safety of vaccines. 45%. Okay, I would say that one is science, because even though people have doubts, I know people that have doubts but still get vaccinated, so I think that one is science. I'm going to say that I think that the second one about astronomers is also true, and the first one is fiction of some kind. I think you're changing the news item somehow about the gut bacteria. Okay, Bob. Yeah, I'm going to take it from the bottom, 45% of Americans Yeah, doubting vaccines that many of Americans?
U:Yeah.
US#01:Unfortunately, that's disgustingly believable. The second one, the nanofilaments?
U:Yeah, I felt similar to Jay. I mean, how are they detecting nanofilaments?
S:But I mean, that could probably, you know, be many ways they could do that. That doesn't surprise me. What surprised me a little bit was the first one, the elite athletes, and the performance enhancing bacteria in their guts. Jay said, does it make sense? And he kind of said that it kind of does, but I don't think it makes sense. I would think, I mean, bacteria in your gut, I mean, when it's time for the performance, I'm not sure how bacteria in your gut is going to really help you. If they were like in your muscle cells or lungs, perhaps, but in your gut, I mean, you know, if you need to digest something quickly, then sure, they could enhance your fast eating performance or digestion performance, but actual athletic performance, the location of them in the gut, to me, is a red flag.
J:I'll say that's fiction. And Evan. Forty-five percent of Americans have doubts about the safety of vaccines. That's probably science because having doubts could be kind of a range unto itself. You know, serious doubts, mild doubts, so you lump it all together and you get 45%. That's probably how we arrive at that number because it's a spectrum unto itself. So I think that one's right. Now these nanofilaments in the interstellar medium, oy, you know, the name alone suggests that they're really, really We'll see you next time. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. It would be their diet, because these elite athletes have been athletes mainly from the time that they were growing up.
B:Have their bodies adapted to something that has created a new gut bacteria for them specifically? I always thought it was heredity that determined your gut bacteria. If that is the case, then that one would be the fiction. Oh, so difficult. Well, I'll go out on the limb. I'll say it's the... Join us. Nah. I've decided not to go out on the limb. I'm crawling back. To the safety of Bob and Jay. Steve, you might sweep us here. I'll say it's the gut bacteria, but...'cause I'm too afraid. I'm a coward. OK. All righty. So you all agree with that number one it's a fiction, so we'll take these in reverse order, which most of you guys did. A recent Harris Poll finds that 45% of Americans have doubts about the safety of vaccines. You guys all think this one is depressing science because you're jaded skeptics and cynics. And this one is science. But it's not as bad as it at first seems. Again, that's the lead, that's the headline, 45% of Americans doubt the safety of vaccines. But you've got to look a little bit deeper into the poll.
E:And it doesn't mean that 45% of Americans are anti-vaxxers or are generally negative about vaccines, just that they have some kind of doubt about this. How about the safety of vaccines? What's the source of that doubt? About 16 percent said that the source was online articles. Another 16 percent of that 45 percent said that it was because the pharmaceutical industry is squirrelly. And 12 percent said information from medical experts. So that was the breakdown there. So again, these are like just people who have, yeah, they heard things about vaccines. They're not really sure about it. They have some reason to doubt the safety. However, when asked whether or not they generally support vaccines, 82% said that they did, and only 8% were generally negative about it. So, the specific question, I think vaccines are unsafe and ineffective, that was 2%. I think the risks of vaccine side effects outweigh the potential benefits of vaccination, that's 6%. So it's a solid 8% of anti-vaxxers, right? So I would consider those 8% anti-vaxxers. And then the middle one is I am unsure of whether vaccines are safe and effective. That's the vaccine hesitant. That was another 9%. We've got 8% anti-vaxxers, 9% vaccine hesitant. I think the benefits of vaccination outweigh the potential risks of vaccine side effects. That's 31%, and I think vaccines are safe and effective.
U:That's 51%.
E:So that's 82% who are basically fine with vaccines. So that's actually not bad. But of course, the 45% is the number they go with in the headline. We still need to do better. That 17% of anti-vaccine and vaccine-hesitant is more than enough to reduce herd immunity for many diseases.
S:So that is enough. It's critical. And also keep in mind that anti-vaxxers tend to cluster. So even if the total percentage is low, you get outbreaks in cities and schools and locations where they're clustering. So that's a huge problem as well. Okay, let's go back to number two. Astronomers have identified long carbon nanofilaments in the interstellar medium. You guys all think this one is science. So how do you think they're finding these? You guys seem to express some things about how they might be identifying them. Well, I was saying, I figure spectro— Bob, I get stuck on that. Spectroscopy. Spectroscopy. Spectroscopy. Yeah, it's got to be, right? It's got to be spectroscopy. I mean, how else are you going to identify specific molecules? Some, you know, an alien blog, maybe? Unless they're dense. Spectroscopy is my guess. They have to be dense, though. You can't just have one element floating around. Well, I mean, enough that they'll affect the spectrum of light that's shining through them, but that doesn't have to be that dense. It's amazing what we can tell about what's going on out there. It is. It truly is. It really is. Light is fascinating. However, this one – you ready? – is the fiction. Damn! I should have thought. Because what they found – they didn't find nanofilaments. But they did, however – this is just as maybe equally interesting – they found buckyballs. These are C60, carbon-60. This is basically a soccer ball-shaped sphere made of 60 carbon atoms. But, no carbon nanofilaments. So, I think it's a truncated icosahedron. Okay. Icosahedron. That's what they're calling it. Buckminster fullerenes or buckyballs. Cool. All right. All that means that a new study finds that elite athletes have a performance-enhancing bacteria in their guts that sedentary people lack is science. This is cool. You guys hit upon a lot of the issues here. So, you think, okay, how can something in the gut I'm waiting for this answer. That's the genus, the species is V. atypica. What this bacterium does is it eats lactic acid.
J:That gets produced in the muscles during exercise. Sure. That's the soreness. That's what makes you really stop, basically, ultimately.
S:But the bacteria are in the stomach and the lactic acid's in the muscles, so how does that work?
J:A long straw. Yeah, back to my question. How does that work?
S:The lactic acid goes in the blood and then gets filtered out by the liver, and doesn't really ever go through the gut. However... Maybe it does. In the gut. However, still, so the scientists, this is good science, right?
US#07:So the scientists are like, well, how is this happening?
S:It's like, okay, there's lactic acid is getting into the gut and this bacteria is eating it. Okay, does this affect the steady state of lactic acid in the person? And the answer is no. It doesn't actually eat enough of the lactic acid that it affects the amount of lactic acid in the blood or in the muscles. So that's not Now we're back to square one. Yeah.
B:Then the next question is, well, what's, when it's eating the, the, what else does it do? What does it release?
S:What does it release? What is it making? And it turns out it's fermenting the lactate into a short-chain fatty acid, propionate. That is getting into the circulation. And that short-chain fatty acid, it turns out, can have some beneficial effects. It could be a source of energy. Oh my god, wow. That is amazing. That when you're pushing your body to its limits, converting some of your lactic acid into another energy source might give you a little boost to your performance. And what they found was that if they ejected the short-chain fatty acid into the stomachs of mice that they were exercising, their performance increased. So that could be the effect.
B:It could be just the metabolic byproduct of the bacteria, not the fact that it's eating the lactic acid.
S:Even as sexy as that sounds, to think that that's why it's happening. But again, the fact that it makes sense is not enough. You have to check and see if it's actually true or not. And you have to give credit to these researchers. They just kept asking questions and checking their hypotheses to the next hypothesis that derived from what they found so far. And again, it took them into surprising directions, a lot of twists and turns that they wouldn't have anticipated up front. Imagine they take that bacterium and they genetically modify it to soup it up, like give it nitrous oxide, and then do an even bigger, more dramatic performance enhancement. Crazy cardio. Yeah. Or, yes, so you could genetically modify it to do what it's doing even more efficiently. But let's say it's been optimized already. Let's say evolution has tweaked it, and it's pretty much doing what it does as good as it's going to do it. The question is, can you give this as a probiotic to people who are not elite athletes, and will that affect them physiologically in any way? Will it help them maintain their weight or give them more energy or whatever? Who knows? It would have to be a probiotic. This is where a lot of this research gets, and I follow the gut bacteria research somewhat closely. I'm not enough to really, really be an expert, but enough that I could be familiar with what the researchers are doing. And it seems like quite often researchers get to this point, right, where they identify bacteria that correlate with either diseases or with healthy states. And then they're trying to say, oh, if we could get rid of that bacteria or add this bacteria, whatever.
J:But this actually goes a little bit farther.
S:This is beyond correlation. They actually have shown an actual mechanism of cause and effect here. But the problem then comes down to how do we actually change people's gut bacteria. And probiotics just doesn't work. The technology just doesn't work. Fecal transplant. Yeah, you have to go to fecal transplant, but that technology is still in its infancy and there's been some recent problems with it, you know, causing side effects. And so we need to, we haven't figured out yet the technology of altering people's gut microbiota. You have a stable ecosystem of about a hundred different species of bacteria, and you can't alter that stable ecosystem by just throwing one or two species at it. You have to somehow coax it over to another stability, and we don't know how to do that yet. So that's where we are. So even when we have something like this, like, hey, this could actually improve athletic performance, we don't really know how to reliably get it to people.
B:And it's unclear, so maybe you're probably going to see marathon runners taking probiotics with this bacterium in it prior to a marathon, but that may have no effect, we don't know, because it's not, again, in a stable ecosystem in their microbiota.
S:So, we haven't really closed this loop yet. We haven't really taken it all the way. But it is very, you know, we're at that stage where it's really interesting and there's lots of speculation and the potential seems huge, but we haven't matured this technology yet where we have proven treatments, proven therapies or interventions based upon this basic science knowledge that we're accumulating.
E:Interesting.
S:All right, well, Cara dodged another bullet. I always seem to sweep you guys. Oh, gosh. I'll go with my gut next time. Yeah, totally. I know, Evan, that was painful to listen to you just step up to the right answer and then, oh, he crawls away, admittedly, from fear. It was fear. Damn it. And I've observed before, Evan, that when you bravely strike out on your own, you have a good track record. I should. I should have more confidence in that. No, Evan, what's wrong, man? Fear is the mind killer. It's tough. In some ways, I find it easier to go first. I don't have that fear. I start listening to the other people and I get my reservations. Feel free to go first every time. Thanks for watching! Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read. You can't stop them from reading and thinking. Robert T. Bakker helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were endothermic. He was mentioned in Jurassic Park. I totally agree with that quote, by the way.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:56)[edit]
“Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking.”
– Robert T. Bakker, (description of author)
S:I totally agree with that quote, by the way. I'm sure, like many, many kids when I was younger, and to this day, I find dinosaurs fascinating. And I love how they transport me to an alien world. You know what I mean? Like, you imagine what the Earth was like when dinosaurs were stomping around. It's completely alien. To me, that's endlessly fascinating. Oh, and we went to the museum in Britain. Oh my gosh. Oh yeah, that's the museum. It does. It transports you to a different world. Most certainly does. Yeah, exactly. There were some things in that museum that were like, whoa, you know, there's a game I play every once in a while called Ark, and it's weird, but bottom line is like there's really large dinosaurs as you're running around. The really big ones, like when they walk, there's it's a thunderous sound and the ground shakes. And it made me realize, like, yeah, you know, like when you're when something is that much tonnage is stomping around near you, you're going to feel the earth vibrate and you're going to hear it. Never really think of it viscerally like that.
E:I wonder if there's any really good virtual reality dinosaur apps out there, like we get to walk around with, like to experience it in VR. Yeah, just to see how big they are. Yeah. Yeah. I've done one under the, in the ocean, you go underwater and you swim with whales among other things. And it's, I don't know, you have to kind of close your eyes at a certain point and be like, okay, this is just the simulation. This is not real. Don't freak out here. There are some dinosaur VR apps.
B:I haven't experienced any. Maybe I'll take a look and report back to you. There's Back to Dinosaur Island.
E:Hey, guys. Logical LA is back. It's coming this July 21st, and it's at a new location, the Sycamore Center in Lakewood. So come join me. I'll be speaking on a panel. I'll be hanging out Saturday night and Sunday I'll be there. I've got speakers like Gemma Lornat and Hector Garcia, Brooke Weitzman, and Thomas Westbrook. Check out the website, logicalla.com, and hope to see you there. I'm looking forward to it. And today, don't forget, it's only two weeks until Nexus in New York City. Yes, she is going to be there. Now, if you can't physically get yourself to New York to go to Nexus, I feel sorry for you.
S:But as a consolation, you can actually sign up to watch the whole thing live streamed.
E:Go to NECSS.org slash live.
S:Enter in the amount you'd like to contribute. There's a minimum contribution of $15 for the whole conference. And then just click give me access to the live stream. Then follow the prompts and instructions and you're all set to go. You'll be able to watch a live stream of all the panels and talks from Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.
E:And there'll probably be some extra behind the scenes interviews with a number of the speakers. So, really a good way to experience Nexus if you can't get to there physically, and also help support the whole conference.
J:So check it out, anycss.org slash live. All right, well thank you guys for joining me this week. We love you, Steve. Thanks, Steve. 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.
S: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.
E:Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ www.nbcnews.com: NASA to launch deep-space atomic clock that could transform space exploration
- ↑ arstechnica.com: Printing vaccines at the pharmacy or at home will be the way of the future
- ↑ theness.com: More Ways to Capture Carbon - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ theness.com: People Growing Horns? – More Bad Science Reporting - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ news.harvard.edu: Performance-enhancing bacteria found in the human microbiome — Harvard Gazette
- ↑ www.nasa.gov: Hubble Finds Tiny “Electric Soccer Balls” in Space, Helps Solve Interstellar Mystery - NASA
- ↑ www.prnewswire.com: 45% of American Adults Doubt Vaccine Safety, According to Survey