SGU Episode 1001
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| SGU Episode 1001 |
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| September 14th 2024 |
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"Stunning microscopy reveals the vibrant complexity of cellular structures in vivid colors." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong." |
Alessandro Volta, - 1745 –1827, the inventor of the electric battery - |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
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, September 11th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Jay Novella, and Evan Bernstein.
E:Good evening, everyone.
S:So guys, we're recording on September 11th. This is the 23rd anniversary of the attack on September 11th.
C:That makes me feel very old.
E:Yeah, it did happen a long time ago. Generation-defining moment, certainly. I mean, it's one of those markers in history where it was pre-9-11 and post-9-11.
C:And there are full adults today who were not born when this happened, for whom this is just a history book thing.
J:Yeah, my kids are nine. I have to say nine now. My daughter just turned nine. My kids are nine and eleven. I was telling them about it on the way to school today and then when they got home you know they talked about it in school and they started asking like pretty serious questions you know they wanted to know were there people on the airplane that crashed into the building what happened to the people all that stuff it was hard to talk about it because you know as a parent you're always guessing like what should I say how much detail should I give and then they they asked they were like why would anybody do this and that's a hard question to answer there's a lot of context there Yeah, it's a it's a hard thing. I just said, you know, lots of people don't like the United States. And, you know, they were making a statement, a political statement that my son was like, and they they killed themselves. And I'm like, yeah, you know, what are you going to say?
E:Well, the hijackers did. You know, yeah, the hijacker, the victim certainly did not.
J:The people who were making the political statement killed themselves.
C:Do you guys remember, were you West Wing watchers? Do you remember that incredible episode that they put out? Oh my gosh.
US#03:Which one? Can you be more specific? The 9-11 episode.
C:I don't quite remember the context, but for whatever reason they needed to put an episode out. And they knew that they couldn't do like a full show and they knew that it wouldn't be the right tone if they just, you know, kind of move forward like nothing would happen. Yeah. So they made an episode really, really fast. And it's just in a closed room with a bunch of students kind of talking about all that context that you just mentioned, Steve. It's really powerful. It might be worth rewatching.
S:Yeah, I remember they were talking about the fact that terrorism like this doesn't really work. It doesn't accomplish a political end. It usually just galvanizes whatever your opposition is.
C:And I think it also did grapple with the very real and very difficult reality of empathy when it comes to violence like this, that these things don't happen in a vacuum, and that as horrible and crazy and just horrific, whatever the most extreme words you can use to describe it, the people who were involved They felt justified. They had their reasons. That doesn't mean they were right. But to ignore that that part of the equation exists and to not explore it, I think is pretty, I don't know, naive.
S:They were the heroes of their own narrative.
C:Exactly. And so trying to understand that perspective is the only way To be able to, you know, make policy and make decisions that are effective and useful. But if it's just purely like it's just evil, only evil, evil is the reason people are evil, it doesn't really tell you the story.
S:Yeah, and unfortunately, you know, even today, 23 years later, there are still 9-11 truthers out there. RFK Jr. recently said, like, he's not going to take sides on like what happened on 9-11.
C:What does that even mean?
S:Vivek Ramaswamy said last year we still don't know what actually happened on 9-11. So still sort of pretending that the official's narrative is not true or not accurate. And I'm still seeing videos and they tend to crop up around this time of year. Looking at the collapse of the towers and making stupid statements about physics, like, why is this happening? It's like, because you're an idiot. That's why that's happening, because the basic science that you're deliberately not understanding, like, oh, things like pressure, you know, it's like, yes, when the towers collapse, the air pressure inside the building gets, blows out the sides. Are you surprised by that? Does that really think you need to manufacture some conspiracy theories to explain something so simple? It's ridiculous. It really is childish in a lot of ways, but that's the way conspiracy theories work, right?
E:And unfortunately, once they get going, you can never put out that those myths, they take on a life of their own and they grow.
C:Yeah. And you know, in the immediate aftermath, when there was so much chaos and confusion and horror and tragedy, people look for answers, right? People are desperate. It's hard for them to accept that horrific tragedy just happens. And so very often they try to come up with alternate explanations. And I'd be super curious. I know that like 9-11 happened before you guys started the podcast, but only within a few years. So this was an important topic on the show. You know, just recently we had my friend, our friend Eli Bosnick on the show, and he shared that like he was a 9-11 truther before he started listening to SGU. And like that really opened his eyes and kind of brought him into skepticism. And I'd be so curious. To see how many of our own listeners kind of change that view and evolve that view just based on, maybe not just, but based on this show along with other sources of information.
S:Yeah, because it's easy to get overwhelmed with noise, right? It's one of those things, like, I remember even when we were really young, even like pre-skeptical, you know, age, you know, reading a book about all the coincidences between the assassination of Lincoln and Kennedy. And if you pile them all up without context, it certainly seems like there's got to be something going on. But it is just a bunch of coincidences. And it's the same thing with the 9-11, like if you watch Loose Change, which I did and it was painful, but it's like a whole bunch of, what's going on here? What are those guys doing? This doesn't make it. It's all mystery mongering, you know? But all together, you could see somebody be like, yeah, there's something weird going on. If you're not already preloaded with a lot of critical thinking skills and specific knowledge about conspiracy thinking and subjective validation and confirmation bias and all that sort of stuff.
C:Right, because you could do that with literally anything in life.
S:Any complex historical event is going to have so many details that if you want to make some coincidence-like narrative or mystery-mongering or cynical narrative out of it, you can. People are actually quite good at that. So guys, I wanted to talk about the fact that this past weekend, I know three of you were there, so you know about it, my older daughter got married.
J:Yes.
S:So yeah, it was a very nice ceremony.
J:It was beautiful.
S:I don't know how you guys felt, but it was a little non-traditional in that they didn't do a lot of the typical stuff that You know, at least in the Northeast, what is considered a typical wedding ceremony happens, which I thought was super cool that they didn't, because it's all the crap that is terrible and that I hate about weddings. And they just, and this is all, they decided this all on their own. Yeah, like we're not going to do the whole toss the bouquet, toss the garter thing. We're not going to do all this stupid, creepy stuff. You know, she didn't make her bridesmaids buy bridesmaids outfits. It was just like, here's the color theme, just stay within this sort of range of colors.
US#03:Yeah, that was a great idea.
C:I think that's pretty typical now. I mean, I shouldn't say it's non-traditional in the grand scheme of things, but I think it's becoming more and more typical.
S:I agree. I think it's more generational, which I think is great, just rebelling against all the really dumb At the ceremony, Jay actually officiated. He did a fantastic job, Jay.
B:Oh, Jay. Jay did an amazing job. Really good.
S:He's very personal, you know what I mean?
B:Orient and funny.
S:Yeah. So it was none of this generic love and marriage crap that, you know, once you've heard it twice, you just want to, you know, you want to gnaw your legs off.
E:But sit through that again.
S:Oh my god, we're doing like no generic readings, you know, it's just just none of that It was just all relevant to them to the you know, it was all very personal. It's great So I really happy with the way the whole thing came off
J:Well, it's funny when you experience a wedding like that and you're comparing it to every other wedding you've been to kind of unconsciously, you can't help it. And that's when it really hit me, Steve, like, wow, man, so many weddings are just completely phony.
S:You know, there's so many phony rituals.
J:Yeah.
S:As opposed to like a personal experience with just people who care about each other, getting together to celebrate those specific people, you know.
E:And now, yeah, also the wedding industry itself has built it. It's built on scamming people, frankly, out of a lot of money for a lot of things and nonsense that they don't need. Exactly.
S:It's like you feel a lot of pressure. You have to have these things at your wedding, but it's really just there just to generate revenue for the wedding industry. It does not add to the actual experience.
C:I love how much you guys sound like me right now. The four married guys on this show, I love that you're making a lot of points that I've long been very, very critical of wedding culture. But I really love that you're making a lot of the points that I've often made. Weddings are rough, but they don't have to be.
S:They don't have to be.
C:Yeah, and I have more recently been to friends' weddings that were so much more fun and relatable and deep and actually meaningful and beautiful and didn't feel like some big show, some big expensive production, yeah. Because to me it's a weird thing. It's a very personal thing getting married. And I find it strange that we put it on display the way that we do.
S:It's fine to announce to the community, like all the people that you care about, we are now going to dedicate ourselves to each other, and that's fine. But I think we all have been to enough weddings, and we all agree that the industry of ritual that has grown up around weddings, basically just there to make you spend a lot of money, But also, it puts so much pressure on the couple getting married and the people putting on the wedding. They think if every little detail is not perfect, then it's a disaster. Actually, I didn't have to do this because my daughter is chill and gets it already, but just to make sure that we were on the same page the morning of the wedding. So just so that you know, none of the details matter, right? There's really nothing that can go wrong today that will ruin the wedding. It's going to be awesome no matter what happens. Don't worry about it. And these details will not matter. You will not remember them 10 years from now, other than 20 years from now. The only thing that you're going to remember is the personal connection that happens during the wedding. That's it. No one's going to remember the bridesmaid's dresses or the frickin' cake or whatever. No one's going to remember any of those things.
US#03:Yeah, but I'm going to remember that ice cream though. I'm not going to think about it.
S:That was an ice cream bar. That was pretty cool.
E:That was nice. That was definitely nice.
S:And, you know, our friend George Robb was there. You guys don't know George. And he, of course, he's been to a thousand weddings because he's, you know, literally in advance. Yeah, literally because he's been in a band that plays a lot of weddings. And, you know, we've talked with him a lot about it as well. And he, you know, completely agrees. And he got out of it partly because he was fed up with the wedding industry. It's such a ripoff. But it's like, yeah, the only thing that matters is that the people who care about each other are together and they have a good time, you know what I mean? And that's it. And all the things that people obsess about, all these details, are meaningless. All they do is add stress and expense and nothing else.
C:Yeah, it's such a sad thing to think about how many people on this day that's supposed to just be like a relaxing and exciting celebration are eaten away with like guilt and shame and stress and negative emotions. Like how sad.
S:Yeah, so I'm happy to see that certainly my daughter and her people, but also I think the generation in general is getting away from that. Oh, yeah.
C:The most recent wedding that I went to was my dear high school friend who got married on the beach in Florida. And it was amazing. Like we were barefoot and her mom Got ordained in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. And so she dressed like a pirate, because that's what you're supposed to do. And there was a lot of noodly appendage references and it was like, it was just lovely and real. They built a massive megalodon jaw altar because they're both biologists. Yeah. And they put it on the beach and it's, I love seeing people do things their way.
E:Was it actually to scale to the human, right?
C:It was huge. It was bigger than scale. It's so cool when you get to experience something very personal to people that's very, that celebrates who they are.
S:I think the same thing is true of funerals, by the way.
C:Oh, yeah.
S:Again, the big industry has built up to pressure you into spending a lot of money on things that are pointless. Yep.
U:100%.
B:I'm telling people, if I don't get frozen, I want to be buried in a really cool, battered, beaten-down, toe-pincher, old-fashioned coffin.
S:Yes.
B:Spending five or ten grand on a coffin is ridiculous.
S:And then you get a hermetically sealed? Why?
C:And you're embalmed in there. Yeah, it makes no sense.
S:When you're vulnerable, that's the thing. You're vulnerable. Emotionally, you want to do what's right and you get this pressure to spend a lot of money on things that mean nothing.
E:It's like grief industry stuff. It drives me crazy.
C:And a lot of people are also scared, not to refer to my other podcast to talk nerdy, but I did interview years ago now. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us today. Completely legal to do that. It's still legal. It's still safe. You don't have to embalm a body. You don't have to do all those things that you mentioned that cost so much money. But most people don't know. They don't know their rights and they don't know what is safe and what's legal and what's healthy. And so out of fear, they're like, oh, take care of it and do it hermetically. And that's really sad because it separates you from the death in a lot of ways. And a lot of the mourning and processing actually doesn't happen when you're not close to the person.
News Item #1 - Embryo Models (15:36)[edit]
S:All right, let's move on with our news items. Cara, tell us how scientists are doing modeling embryos.
C:Yeah, so there's an article. It's actually really funny because I just pulled up the PDF of the article. I was looking at the web view in Nature. And when I opened the PDF, I was like, oh, there's an article published on the 12th of September. And I was like, that's tomorrow. So I guess the web article came out today and the print article is tomorrow. But in in nature, you know, the magazine, it's called The Science and Ethics of Human Embryo Models. And it's an article written by Smriti Mallapati. And it's a really interesting, short, sweet grappling with what is happening in the embryoid Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for joining us today. So whenever you see that word oid, actually, what does that suffix mean?
S:Humanoid is like.
C:Resembling or like. And yeah, it comes from the Greek meaning form. So like an embryonic form. Okay, so embryoids or embryoid bodies, these are aggregates of cells that are usually formed by pluripotent stem cells. And they can include embryonic stem cells and also induce pluripotent stem cells. There are actually different terms depending on what level of development. So developmental biology or embryology is pretty complex because at that stage of development, like the very earliest stages of development, everything changes like day to day. So it actually, the transmogrification, is that a good word? From one day to the next, we're talking about the difference between, let's say first, a blastoid. So that's like a blastocyst. It's a model blastocyst. That is something that develops by the end of one week of fertilization. And it's usually just kind of like a clump of cells that surround an empty cavity. And then at about that weak point, it does start to implant, and then it undergoes a programmatic change. So it goes from being a blastocyst to an embryo, or in the models, we have blastoid models, and then we have embryoid models. And those models tend to include tissues that are starting to form during that stage of development, like tissues that become the placenta. And then after that, the differentiation becomes more granular. And so the next step is what we usually call gastrulation. Here we're talking about researchers creating something called gastruloids, and these represent this stage where embryos really start to become much more organized. They have a body plan, and this happens at about embryonic day 20. And then there are later stages that are even more differentiated. And part of the reason that embryoids are so necessary is because in a lot of different places, it's actually I have a quote, no, it's not a quote. Well, I'll read it as a quote. I have a quote here from the author saying that In the lab, or in the womb, these embryos are too small to be observed using ultrasound. And in the lab, there are technical, ethical, and often legal limits to studying real embryos outside the body beyond 14 days after conception. So many countries and many jurisdictions have laws preventing researchers from studying embryos, actual embryos that were formed in utero, If they are older than 14 days post fertilization. So researchers have really been competing, you could say, to come up with the best embryos. The article says that there are kind of as many models as there are labs making them. And each lab is focusing on some different aspect, and they may put more effort or energy into making that aspect of the embryoid as authentic, you could say, as possible. But none of them are perfect. And I think that is an important point to make. Very often when we talk about science, I think we're sort of lucky in that we live in an era where things just seem to work magically. And we're so used to seeing just really, really sophisticated advanced science and assuming that it's flawless. It's not. There's a lovely quote here that says, if embryo models were houses, then behind the facade, they would have uneven floors, distorting mirrors and ghosts in their closets. Nevertheless, dozens of labs are competing to grow the best likeness of a human embryo. But the question becomes, let's say we're talking about a blastoid or just a whole embryo body or a more differentiated embryo, one called a gastruloid. At what point do the same ethics that apply to, let's say in vivo research or in vitro research with an embryo that was Originally in utero, at what point does that same ethical regulatory guideline apply? And the truth is, it's wildly different depending on where you are. And there's some really lovely stories in this article about those ethical dilemmas that researchers are often So there is an international body. It's called the International Society for Stem Cell Research, the ISSCR, and they put out guidelines in 2021. You know, they obviously don't have jurisdiction over every country. These are just guidelines. Many countries have their own guidelines, their own legislation. This article talks about some rules in Australia and what happened when one researcher named Jose Polo bumped up against those rules in 2020. So he He leads a team and he told Australia's regulatory body, hey, we've developed these pretty interesting blastoids and we want to do some cool stuff with them. And they were like, wait, wait, wait, you need to hold so that we can figure out if your blastoids meet the criteria that we have on the books to be considered an embryo. And so in Australia, they define embryos as biological entities with the potential to develop to a stage. We'll be right back. So the same limits applied to him with his embryo that their lab worked so hard to develop as if they had taken a human embryo and tried to do the same types of experiments on it. They were unable to do that. And so they had to get this special license and there were certain things that they couldn't do, like they couldn't grow them to study later stages of development. And the team was upset, right? They're like, we think that You're making a mistake and you're actually getting in the way of important legitimate research. That's an extreme example, but there have been examples all over the world of either guardrails being put up or Thank you for joining us today. At what point is this thing, I don't know, alive? At what point do we need to really be putting the same types of ethical constraints on an embryo as we would put on an embryo? And maybe let's look at the ethical constraints that we have on the embryos themselves and know if those are still So one researcher, Hyun, he said, it's a pretty exquisite balancing act. You want to skate as close to the edge as possible without falling over. So basically, researchers now are having to figure out how do we make our embryo models as close to the real thing as possible without being so close that we're no longer legally allowed to do research on them. And what does that mean? Where is that dividing line? And so I don't know, I'm curious from you all, like from an ethical perspective, from, you know, everything from using our critical thinking here in the moment to that initial reaction that some of us have that is probably actually kind of guiding, sadly, some of the legislation out there. What do you guys think about this? Where do you sit on it? Or is it something you've ever even thought about before?
S:Well, yeah, we've talked about this before in the context of like, how many cells can you get to before you go from being a clump of cells to being a person?
C:And like, is that even? You know, like all of these litmus tests are these sort of thresholds. What is the appropriate? Is it really about cell count? Is it about differentiation? Is it about tissue layers?
S:It's a continuum and there's no, there isn't any objective place to draw a line. So you typically in those situations, we draw a line that's clearly before whatever the concerning point is, knowing that it's arbitrary, and we're just giving a little bit of a buffer. But there's there's no absolute demarcation there.
C:Right. And or you leave something out of the model like they do talk about that this Man named Nicholas Rivron, who is credited largely with being sort of the first lab that developed a blastoid, he said in the article, like, these are not complete models. And they go on to talk about how, you know, one group's blastoid model doesn't have trophoblasts, so there's no nutrition available to them. And, you know, one of them does have like a small trophoblast-like layer, but it's not really organized the way that the real blastoid would be organized. So when you have these changes, whether they're by design or simply because the science isn't there yet, are those types of things enough to say, well, but it's not like a real embryo because it can't do X or it can't do Y? Where it doesn't have this one foundational thing. But at what point is the gestalt enough? And I think that's an interesting question, but it's also open to maybe, how do I even say this, a slippery slope fallacy that may not actually be a fallacy. That sort of line in the sand and where is it and what does it actually mean? I don't know, it's interesting.
S:Personally, I don't think that it's a problem until you get a nervous system. If you have a nervous system where you can kind of experience your own existence, then we have to start treating it as an entity.
C:What about like early on when the neural tube is first forming?
S:Well, again, it's a continuum without any sharp demarcation line. We just have to decide clearly here there is a nervous system. Clearly here there isn't a nervous system.
C:So you get a neural tube really early.
S:Yeah, I know that.
C:And they're saying primitive streak, right, which becomes that. And so that's really early. That's like a couple of weeks. Yeah, it's like the precursor of the precursor of the precursor. Like which one is the thing?
S:There's no right or wrong answer here.
C:Yeah, it's tough.
E:Only in the context of researchers running afoul of laws. And that that's really what we're trying to prevent here is from people.
C:Well, it's both sides, right?
E:People being held, you know, prosecuted for
S:Well, there's that, but there's also what should the law be, right? We're also asking that question.
E:And there should be panels of experts that inform governments on how to build laws around these things.
C:And there are, you know, there are like the organization that I mentioned, but a lot more than just You know, these kinds of ethical questions are not just based in science, right? They're also based in moral values. They're based in cultural values. And it's quite complicated to make those kinds of decisions. But it's, it's like you said, Evan, not only is it about these researchers not running afoul of the law, but it's about researchers work not being squashed. Not Being Held Back It's, you know what it is, it's the outcome of those stem cell discussions. This happened because of stem cell research. This uses stem cells. And so this is the, those next steps that those stem cell discussions were worried about.
E:And I think the scientists, correct me if I'm wrong in my memory on this, were going to the countries to where the laws were allowing them to do the most research.
C:Well, yeah, that's always going to happen too, right? People are always going to figure out how to use the, how to navigate the system.
S:All right, thanks, Cara. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, NordVPN.
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S:All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Guys, do you remember, we've talked about this before, but do you remember what a structural battery is?
News Item #2 - Carbon Fiber Battery (31:20)[edit]
B:It's a battery that also provides structural support for whatever, it's a car or a building.
E:Oh, like a building can be a battery?
S:It could be, it could bear mechanical loads.
B:Ooh, wow. A new advance for this idea? Talk about it.
S:Speak to me. A new study made a significant advance in a carbon fiber structural battery. This is a significant advance. It's sort of getting in the zone of usability. So essentially, as Bob said, structural batteries have the advantage that they're strong enough that they can be used as part of a structure. They could be used for a building, or for the frame of a car, or of a plane, or of your phone. It could be like the case of your phone is the battery.
B:So it's double duty. Which is huge for cars and phones.
S:From one perspective, if it's strong enough, the weight of the battery is functionally zero. Because you don't have an extra battery, it's just the weight that you already have to have there for the structure itself. So, with powerful enough structural batteries, we could have super thin cell phones, or very light electric vehicles, or way more important, very light electric planes.
US#03:Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. Yeah, so let's talk about— That might be the best application. Yeah, absolutely.
S:Let's talk about where we are. So there are two basic features. Obviously, it has to have all the good features of a battery, right? But the two features that we're interested in, in terms of how good a structural battery is, is the energy density, the watt hours per kilogram, and the elastic modulus, which is the strength. So this carbon fiber battery, they've had these before, but this is like a better version of it. They were able to make it have a higher energy density and higher strength, higher elastic modulus. So here's where they are now. It has an energy density of 30 watt-hours per kilogram. Now to put that into perspective, the best lithium-ion batteries that we're using right now have an energy density of 200 to 300 watt-hours per kilogram. So at the high end, it's about 10 times the energy density. The amperous batteries, remember we talked about those, those are the silicone anode lithium-ion batteries, get up to about 400 to 500 watt-hours per kilogram. But lithium batteries are very heavy. And electric vehicles, for that reason, are heavier than their internal combustion engine counterparts, which does affect how much energy is necessary to propel them and also affects the lifespan of the tires and also the wear on the roads. So it's not a small thing that electric vehicles are extremely heavy. So now the strength, the strength is 76 gigapascals. Now to put that into... English. Well, to put that into context, the elastic modulus of aluminum, which you can make a car frame out of, right, or an airplane frame, is 70 gigapascals.
B:And what was this one? 76.
S:It's stronger than aluminum. It could be used to build a plane out of it. You could build a car out of it. It's the highest reported in the literature for a structural battery, but it's only one-tenth the energy density. So what does that mean?
B:It doesn't matter because you could then have a smaller lithium-ion battery than you would ever need.
S:So I tried to find out, like, all right, what would a car's body made out of carbon fiber weigh? How much would it weigh? And it would weigh about 100 kilograms, 90 to 100 kilograms. Let's say rounded up to 100 kilograms. But that's like for a sports car because that's what most of the cars that have carbon fiber bodies are, right? Let's say you have a bigger car, and also remember we're not trying to necessarily use carbon fiber to make the car as light as possible. It's okay if it's heavier because we're saving all the battery weight. So you could easily make it twice as thick, which actually is a good thing because now it's twice as strong, and it will last longer. So let's say you build a car frame that's 200 kilograms for a sedan or an SUV, which is heavier than a sports car made out of carbon fiber. So that would be 30 times 200, 6,000, which would save you, if you divide that by 300, would save you 20 kilograms worth of lithium-ion battery in the car. Which is, you know, it's not a huge amount, but it's something. Lithium-ion battery in a Tesla 3 weighs about a thousand pounds. But let's say you build an airplane out of it, and that airplane weighs a thousand pounds, or two thousand pounds. Now you're talking 10 times as much battery. And so the range would be better because it would take less energy to propel a lighter vehicle, especially with a plane, less energy to lift off a lighter plane. So there's definitely a role for it, but clearly we're not there yet, because the energy density isn't quite there yet. The previous version was 24 white hours per kilogram, this is 31 hours per kilogram. So we're getting there. We would probably have to increase it by a factor of four or five, I would think. Before it's going to be really useful. But the other thing is, you say we're building the body of a car out of carbon fiber. What if you build the frame itself, the chassis? I don't know if that's plausible. What if the whole car was built out of it?
B:I was thinking the chassis. That's interesting. You're talking frame. The panels.
S:Yeah, like the panels and stuff. So that's like the 100 kilograms. If you had 1,000 kilograms of this stuff, and that's how much the car weighed, it still only would have a 30-mile range instead of a 300-mile range. Maybe it would be more because it's lighter. It would have a 40 or 50-mile range. So again, at the current energy density, it's not quite there. But the fact that it's structurally very strong, it exceeds aluminum in terms of its elastic modulus, means that it's basically free battery capacity, in terms of weight. And there may be applications where it can be much bigger, like you could think of if you're using it to build a wind turbine, where the wind turbine basically is the battery. And that could weigh, you know, thousands and thousands of kilograms.
US#03:Well, your house.
S:Yeah.
US#03:Or you want to build a house with that damn stuff.
S:Yeah. Yeah. Parts of your house, like the support beams or something. I think we're at the point where we may be able to find uses for it that are helpful, but we're not at the point where it's going to replace lithium-ion batteries, right? Its energy density is still too low. It has cycle stability up to a thousand cycles. Which is good, what they say, with 100% coulombic efficiency. I think it just means it doesn't lose its capacity. And it's solid state, so it has less of a risk of catching fire than the liquid lithium ion batteries. So it's stable, it has a lot of cycles. So it does have the other features of batteries that are helpful.
J:Well, I mean, how many cycles did you say?
S:So they've tested it to a thousand cycles.
J:What would be like the lifelong cycles, like if you bought it and used it for a number of years?
S:If you recharged it every day, you'd go for two and a half or three years without any loss of capacity.
C:What's a normal lithium ion?
S:I was just looking up the amperage batteries. They are rated at 1200, so just a little bit more. It's in the range of what we're using, 1200 cycles. While I was researching this, I did update on the Amprius batteries. These are the silicone anode ones. They're expanding their product lines using the technology, but they're still saying that they're not planning on making them for electric vehicles for cars until 2027. They're still mainly making them for airplanes because they have that higher energy density, the 400 to 500 watt-hours per kilogram.
B:I think that's a potential downside, though. If you say you build the frame of your car or even some of the major components of your house out of that, and then after five, six, eight years, oh, they're no good. That would really blow because replacing a battery is one thing, but replacing structural elements is a whole other beast.
C:Yeah, getting a whole new frame to your car.
B:Well, it would have to functionally last the lifetime of the car.
C:And the thing is, right now, EV batteries are about 1500 to 2000 charge cycles, the lithium ions that you have in there. So they would have to at least get it to that point.
S:Yeah, it's not quite ready for prime time yet. But also keep in mind, what do you consider how many cycles? That's with how much of a drop. It's not like they're at zero at that point. I think they count 80% or 90% or something.
C:That's true. That's before it starts to decrease.
S:Yes, but it's still perfect. It's so functional. It doesn't have quite the capacity. It's not bricked. Yeah, it's not bricked. It doesn't have the range it did before. Unless it is a brick.
C:And that's, by the way, that translates to about 500,000 miles. What cars last 500,000 miles?
S:Yeah, that's a lifetime of a car. Most of them don't. Yeah, I know Tesla was boasting that they had million mile batteries now, but it's whatever. It's always partly marketing. But then we're getting up there. I mean, I've never had a car for 500,000 miles.
C:I mean, Oh, like some people I've seen have, I mean, People who drive these like classic cars up to like 200 maybe?
S:Yeah, 200 is the most I've gone to.
C:Yeah.
S:That's usually at the point at which the car is like ready to go. So yeah, I mean, I think we're getting closer. We're already at the point where they're lasting a lifetime of the car. That's not a problem. For your home, it would need to be more. But the other thing is like, it depends on how frequently you're charging it and discharging it, right? It's not necessarily every day.
C:And also what is the structural modular component? Like, I know that this is not a good comparison, but under my sink, so I have a thing in my sink that has, it's an instant hot. Do you guys, have we talked about this before? And so I've got an instant hot tap and I've got a filtered tap and they're like the two small taps that are to the side of my regular sink. And instead of having one of those multi-stage filters where you're constantly having to replace the filters themselves, I have this all in one unit. It lasts five years, and then you get rid of it and you put a whole new one in. And I like it because I'm not a plumber. You know what I mean? And it's just easy to just replace the whole unit that way. It's actually very good for peace of mind. It makes life easier. So if these batteries were modular units that were replaceable, where they had, you know, a purpose, a structural purpose, but they weren't the whole damn thing, that might actually be more useful. Like your phone case.
S:Yeah.
C:Yeah, it probably outlasts your phone. Oh, sure.
E:Phones, jeez. They barely last two or three years.
S:Now, of course, this is all laboratory, right? This is not being manufactured. So we can't even talk about cost. Because regardless of how much energy it stores, it basically eliminates the weight of the frame of the car. If you have an electric vehicle, Because you still need the same amount of range capacity, but you're just basically using the frame and the body and everything as a battery, so that counts towards your range rather than counting zero towards your range. So whatever range you get out of that is basically free in terms of the weight. But the question is, how much does it add to the cost of the car? If it may not be cost effective,
C:Well, and what about the externalized cost, too? Because every component now is not just pure metal or pure carbon fiber or whatever, are these things recyclable? Are they going to be way worse for the environment?
S:Yeah, you'd have to do a life cycle environmental analysis. But yeah, if you're making stuff out of carbon, it's binding up carbon. But I don't know what the carbon footprint of carbon composite is from making that. Yeah, so we're not at the point yet where we're doing like industrial life cycle analysis of carbon efficiency and cost effectiveness and that sort of stuff. This is more of a proof of concept. They got it to the point where it's strong enough. They're increasing the energy density. And now, you know, so it actually is usable in some context at this point in time. Theoretically, if we can get that energy density up, the more useful it will be. Again, this is like one of those things where it's a great proof of concept. I don't know if this is going to be something that we're actually going to be using at some point in the future. It's kind of like not too long ago, I think we talked about the cement batteries, where it's kind of the same thing as another type of structural battery. Yeah. And again, it's like, I don't really know that this is going to be a thing. Just because again, the energy density was way too low. But you would think, oh, what if you make the foundation of your home out of this? And then that's your battery for your home. It's like, OK, I guess.
C:And then you have to replace the whole foundation of your home.
S:Yeah. Well, you obviously wouldn't replace it. You would just say, once it stops being useful, you just need to get a battery.
C:Right, right. And that's I think that's the thing about a lot of these material science things is when they're still in development, and we're all excited about all of the potentials. What we what's important is that there are very often narrow uses that could be really helpful. Like, if it's the right size, the right shape, and the right, you know, context, it could be cost effective, but it may not apply to everything.
S:Right. Maybe this would be really great for NASA probes, deep space probes, where every ounce counts. It doesn't matter how much it costs, or if you have NASA producing it, because it's going to be a one-off that NASA is going to make. And if you're saving 20 kilograms for your battery, that's huge in terms of the fuel savings and everything.
B:I mean, would you just charge it in deep space? How? Too far from the sun. It might be hard to beat nuclear batteries.
S:Yeah, that's true. But there are probes that have batteries for certain purposes, whether it's charging up from solar panels or whatever. Yeah, it depends on the use, depends on the mission.
C:Well, and even if it was literally like, I know it's the example you used at the beginning, it's your phone case. Yeah. Like, or it's your phone itself is a battery. That right there is a multi-billion dollar industry. And having phones that didn't die, computers and phones that don't die, that you don't have to charge, are you kidding me?
S:Yeah, like a laptop might be a good use, because if the whole laptop, because a lot of them aren't built out of aluminum or magnesium or whatever, like they build them out of those kind of metals, they don't have to be super structural, just enough to hold the laptop together. If that was a battery, it could make the whole thing lighter. And you don't necessarily need a huge battery, you know, for a laptop.
C:And people don't, laptops aren't, they don't have components like PC, well even like Apple PCs don't. But people don't go into their laptops. They use them until they die.
S:Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
News Item #3 - Zeta Class Supercomputer (48:11)[edit]
S:All right, Bob, tell us about this new Zeta class supercomputer.
B:Zeta? If you insist. It doesn't exist. Just leave it with that. It doesn't exist yet. Japan recently announced it will start building the world's fastest supercomputer next year, and it may be ready by 2030. But this could be, they say, the first zeta-scale supercomputer. What does that mean? And what has grown to be the biggest challenge to creating such a computer that could make it impractical for many years beyond 2030? Okay, so the plans for the supercomputer Beast was released recently by Japan's Ministry of Magical Technology. Whoops, wrong ministry. It was Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology.
C:That's a cool ministry.
B:It is. I didn't know about these, but yeah, there's 11 ministries of Japan that make up the executive branch of the government of Japan. None of them are as cool sounding, I think, as this one, but there's the Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but this is Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Now, outlined in the plan released by this ministry is the successor to Japan's fastest computer that it ever made, Fujiku, which held the world title briefly as the world's fastest supercomputer until it was dethroned in 2022. The new machine is currently being referred to as So, yes, the original was called FUJAKU, and its successor will apparently be called FUJAKU Next. And as you might predict, I'm not a fan of this naming convention at all. You know, perhaps Steve, since he was born a year after me, maybe he should have been called Bob Next. And Jay could have been then Bob Next Next. I think they could have come up with a name a lot better than that, but yes I am name obsessed. Anywho, so what are the press release takeaways? The device will likely cost more than three quarters of a billion USD. Yeah, expensive. And I thought the iPhone 16 was going to be expensive. That's a lot. The supercomputer is expected to be fully online by 2030, as I said. It will be built by Japanese companies, RIKEN and Fujitsu, both of whom helped construct the original Fujiku supercomputer. And of course, the real big takeaway is that their belief that this could be the very first ZetaFLOP supercomputer So yeah, I throw flops around all the time, I guess. How fast is that? So to see how fast it is, let's look at the current champ. What is the fastest supercomputer on the planet? And that's the United States Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. Talked about that in an episode back in 2022. It can do 1.1 exaflops on the LINPACK benchmarks and look it up. Now, 1.1 exaflops, that's essentially one quintillion calculations per second, one followed by 18 zeros. That's what exaflop is. This exaflop that I say is essentially a calculation. You can look at it that way. It's a little bit more complicated, but that's essentially close enough. This was the first exascale supercomputer, the first publicized at least, because China apparently had one, but they weren't publicizing or saying anything about it. So all right, you don't get to brag about it if you're not going to tell anyone about it. Okay, so a Zeta Class supercomputer, by comparison, is a thousand times faster than that, and Zeta Class happens to be one of the coolest names, I think, for a class of supercomputer. You know, there's, you know, Terra Class, Peta Class, Or FLOP, you can kind of throw those, interchange those. Zeta Class, to me, sounds, is one of the cooler versions. So instead of a quintillion calculations per second, 10 to the 18, it would be a Zeta Class supercomputer would be one of my favorite numbers, one sextillion calculations per second, which has 21 zeros after it. That's a billion trillion, a Thank you for joining us today. The person power of the entire Earth working for 4000 years on nothing but computation. OK, let's do it. So that level of calculation speed would really allow us to address global scale challenges like never before. One example I came across is that modeling global weather accurately for up to two weeks. What does accurately mean in that context? I'm not sure, but it would be the most accurate model of global, the global weather, not just like over Connecticut, but the world's weather, current weather. Imagine predicting that up to two weeks with unprecedented resolution never seen before. But don't forget, a computer like this would greatly improve modeling across the board since you name anything that's very important, What about like those experiments where people like model reality?
C:Oh, I mean, talking about where they but they can only do like one, I don't know, millimeter. Because we just don't have the processing power right now.
B:This would this would do 1000 millimeters. How's that? That's awesome, Bob. So, so even some think That is, a Zeta class supercomputer might be able to accurately model the whole human brain. At least that's what physics and math professor Kay Kirkpatrick thinks. She's talked and written about that. And of course, the key word there is accurately. What does that mean? But it would be able to potentially model it accurately better than, more accurately than anything, but probably a thousand times better than anything. So how's that? But if they could pull this off, it would be an extraordinary achievement. This would be one of the most important computers on the planet. It would do things that no other computer could do. And then, of course, after many, many years, when it becomes common and you may have an iPhone that is ZetaFLOP comparable, That could take quite a while. But hey, the computer in your pocket right now was the world's fastest supercomputer at some point, you know, a few decades ago. So yeah, there's that. So yeah, there's no denying that this would transform many industries, many scientists, and discoveries. No question about it. A thousand times better than anything we have right now? Come on. It'd be incredible. Predictably though, there's a huge thing coming. There's this huge thing called a butt coming. And this time, this but, one T, has to do with efficiency. Efficiency is the big but here. Now, we could not build a zeta-scale supercomputer today just by scaling up the technology of Frontier, which is the exascale supercomputer, the fastest one right now. We can't just scale that up and do it. It would never work. The Frontier, think about it, the Frontier supercomputer draws 21 megawatts of power. Now if you just do a simplistic extrapolation of that to a supercomputer that's a thousand times as powerful, 21 megawatts times a thousand, that's 21 gigawatts of power that that would be drawing. 21 gigawatts!
Voiceover:It can't be done!
B:That's roughly equivalent to 21 nuclear power plants. That's just like, no, that's not even really conceivable. It's a joke. But that's not a really fair comparison, because these technologies are obviously not static. When they built the frontier, when they finished it two or three years ago, the technology has moved on significantly even from then. So you're not doing a real Good extrapolation there. They keep getting faster, they keep getting smaller, better and better all the time. For example, the CPU and GPU, the graphical processing unit, the performance of these have been doubling every 1.2 years, and that goes back as far as 1995. It's kind of fairly consistent. Every 1.2 years, performance is doubling for the CPU and the GPUs. Like a Moore's law? Which is, yes, which is kind of, you know, which is, you know, and these are critical components, as you might imagine, of supercomputers. But the energy efficiency, though, has not been increasing like that. So for energy efficiency of a supercomputer, they would use gigaflops per watt, right? That's, that's a way that they think about energy efficiency. And that's been doubling not every 1.2 years, but as much as every two and a half years. Right? So you've got the CPU and GPU doubling in performance every 1.2 years, but the energy efficiency is only once every, you know, two to two and a half years. So the gap is widening. Yes, it's widening and widening. Energy efficiency then over the years has been lagging behind these other improvements. And now we're at the point now where it can no longer, this energy inefficiency can no longer be ignored. It's in the rearview mirror. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein. So if you consider now then an excess scale supercomputer built by 2030, and if you realistically consider the technological advancements that have been happening and will happening, assuming it continues at 1.2, Right? And 2.5. We may be able to create an exascale supercomputer that draws 500 megawatts of power, a half a gigabyte. And that's a lot better than 21 gigawatts. This is just 500 megawatts, half a gigawatt. But still, 500 megawatts, that's still a deal breaker. That's too much, too much, too much. You'd have to get that down to about 100 megawatts. And that's what some experts think that if you're going to create an exascale supercomputer, and Japan does this by 2030, they're going to have to get this power draw down to around 100 megawatts. 500 megawatts is going to be too much, and they're going to have to get it down. Can they do that by 2030? I don't know, maybe, maybe not. It's hard to say. The CEO of the semiconductor company AMD, Lisa Su, thinks that AI driven algorithms and design could potentially reach 100 megawatts. But we'll have to wait and see how realistic that is. And it just seems like an interesting idea that yeah, I mean, using AI's to create algorithms and design the supercomputer could be the critical extra thing that we need to kind of tame this energy and efficiency that is plaguing supercomputers and it's really plaguing The super cutting edge ones now that we want to create, it's just like, we've got to deal with it. And then maybe incorporating AI will help in this regard. But like many things, we'll have to just wait and see. And fingers will be crossed that I will be discussing an existing exascale supercomputer, hopefully, you know, maybe five years, half a decade, if we're still doing this crap.
E:How will this impact Steve's gaming experience?
B:Oh, boy. Can you imagine this computer running a VR? Oh, my God.
E:It could run the holodeck on the enterprise.
B:It'd be better than the damn reality.
S:All right, thanks, Bob. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Surfshark.
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S:All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Evan, is belief in UFOs benign or is there a potential downside?
News Item #4 - UFOs A Societal Problem (1:02:00)[edit]
E:Mm-hmm, yeah, well, I don't know, we've been kind of only talking about this, what, forever?
C:Well, and wait, didn't you just talk about this last week, which was actually several weeks ago?
E:I did, yes, but since, but afterwards, after we recorded that, and I know it just came out this past week, A research fellow, his name is Tony Milligan. He's with the Philosophy of Ethics in King's College, London. He wrote an article that was published by the Conversation website. The title of his paper is, Belief in Alien Visits to Earth is Spiraling Out of Control. Here's Why It's So Dangerous. Just interesting to see this happen to pop up in the media this week. Here's what he writes, first couple paragraphs. The idea that aliens may have visited the Earth is becoming increasingly popular. Around a fifth of United Kingdom citizens believe Earth has been visited by extraterrestrials, and an estimated 7% believe that they have seen UFOs. The figures are even higher in the US and rising. The number of people who believe UFO sightings offer likely proof of alien life increased from 20% in 1996 to 34% in 2022, and some 24% of Americans say they've seen a UFO. Yeah, unfortunately, not at all surprising. I did recently talk about this trend of UFO belief and how it's been rising in the recent years. Certainly, largely attributable to our news media. That's where I place a good chunk of the blame. But these numbers are on par with what I recently talked about. He said that in a paper accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, I argue that the belief in alien visitors is no longer a quirk, but a widespread societal problem. Indeed it is. And this is what I think we've been trying to get across to people for a long time now, that things like belief in extraterrestrials and even things Bigfoot and ghosts, sort of this Basic topics of skepticism that we've touched upon for so long, they do have sort of a long-term corrosive effect on how people think about all sorts of things, things that really do matter in life, a person's health, their safety, their finances. And it also impacts their civil discourse and ultimately the body politic. And this is what he really gets into. He writes that the belief is now rising to the extent that politicians, at least in the United States, feel that they have to respond. The disclosure of information about claimed unidentified anomalous phenomena, UAPs, from the Pentagon has gotten a lot of bipartisan attention in the country. Much of it plays upon familiar anti-elite tropes that both parties have been ready to use, such as the idea that the military and a secretive cabal of private commercial interests are keeping the deep truth about alien visitation hidden. That truth is believed to involve sightings, abductions, and reverse-engineered alien technology.
B:We can't handle the truth.
E:Yeah, right? No kidding. Two things here. It would be nice to not have to use our public resources, such as our governments, towards pursuing what are effectively unicorns. I call it chasing unicorns. But that's where the public's collective consciousness pushes these politicians and some of these governing bodies who have to answer to the masses. So our bureaucrats and our institutions, flawed as they are, frankly they have better things to do. And the attention and resources that they have to devote to dealing with UFOs, UAPs, and the like, I think would be much better spent in almost, I don't know, any way imaginable instead of chasing this stuff. It's not like these political institutions or politicians are going to ultimately release a report saying, oh, we've come to the conclusion there are no extraterrestrial UAPs. Is that going to help? It's going to probably stoke the fires hotter. And how many minds really are they going to change ultimately by this? Certainly not enough to penetrate this sort of cultural saturation of UFO and UAP belief that I believe we exist within. And hey, is this going to also dissuade the media to stop doing what they've been doing for so long? You know, sort of poking the bear and stoking the fires? Uh-uh, I don't think so. And a second point, which he brings up, very important, the anti-elite tropes. Yep, and I think this is the meat and potatoes of the article. These patterns of thought further people's distrust in the institutions. And while there are definitely legitimate grievances that you can have against governments and governing bodies, it's the ones that are baseless, evidence-less, unscientific, downright fabrications. Those are the ones that are corrosive. It's ill-placed blame. Government becomes sort of the scapegoat, even when they are trying to lend resources to achieve more clarity on what are otherwise fantastical claims. He talks about cover-ups, right? He says belief in a cover-up is even higher than belief in alien visitation. 2019, a Gallup poll found that a staggering 68% of Americans believe that the US government knows more about UFOs than it's telling. He also goes into the article about how this is not necessarily a one-party issue. He goes through a little bit of the history back with Jimmy Carter, which we've talked about before, but also Things that Hillary Clinton has spoken about, Barack Obama has spoken about, Donald Trump has mentioned. Everybody has talked about this, so it seems to go beyond any political party affiliation. He writes that too much background noise about UFOs and UAPs can also get in the way of legitimate science communication. About the possibility of finding microbial extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology, the science of dealing with these matters, has a far less effective publicity machine than ufology. And he goes into some statistics which support that. I mean, none of this, as I'm reading all of this, none of this is surprising to us. Certainly this is right, I think, on par with the things that we have been talking about. For 20 years on the podcast and even in the 10 years prior up to that, so long as we've been a skeptical organization. I think the more we have people such as Tony Milligan writing more about this aspect of the dangers, which may not seem like dangers on the surface, but they are actually and can be dangerous long term, is important. It's important to drive that point home.
S:Yeah, I agree. And it's even, I think the one layer here that you didn't bring up, which is important, is that in our social media-driven world now, that any conspiracy belief is a gateway, right? It's a gateway to a dark underbelly of all conspiracies and, you know, the deepest, darkest parts of the social media that truck in all kinds of conspiracies and anti-establishment, anti-expert, you know, Thank you for joining us today. But on the flip side, it's also a really good teaching opportunity. And I think that's where skeptics come in, right? So we see it, we can't just complain about it. We have to see it as an educational opportunity, a teaching moment. Where we could teach people critical thinking skills and you know because if you could recognize why belief that the government is hiding space aliens you know is probably not true you learn a lot of critical thinking skills you know along the way.
E:Yeah, absolutely. No doubt about it. We need more of this. This aspect of the conversation needs to come to the forefront more. And really, certainly in the context of the times we're living in, middle of the 2020s here, in which misinformation is staggering to the degree that it is. Certainly the internet, TikTok, everything else is all feeding into that. So we need more of this, much more of it. Thank you for joining us today.
C:And I think that's really what contributes to the confusion that people have between, for example, believing that advanced sophisticated aliens have visited us here on earth versus the belief or the statistical assumption that there is life in the universe. A lot of people don't know the difference between those two things, and it's because of that, I think, that breakdown in the critical thinking.
S:All right, thanks, Evan.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:11:42)[edit]
S:Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time. All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.
E:Any guesses, guys? Yeah, that was chirping crickets, and something was howling over those chirping crickets. Yeah, of course. So that's the noise.
C:Monkey bird.
J:It was definitely the monkey bird.
E:Oh, that's an old debate.
J:A listener named Erin O'Coscary said, hi, Jay, keep up all the fun sounds. I heard that scream in episode 999 and thought of banshees here in Ireland. That's not what it is, because banshees are mythical, and I heard I heard only one, but I did think of them when in Melbourne years back and I heard a bushstone curlew scream. It's a bird, by the way. And then she says a word like slankt. So you're not correct, but that was a lot of fun. Sulaughton. Yay, I think I actually know this one. This sounds like an eastern screech owl. We have them in our yard sometimes. The sound is super weird. And Sue's from Milwaukee. you know I've heard screech owls a little bit there yeah I mean I could see a little similarity but that's not correct Anthony Murphy said hi is this a female red fox in Ireland it is probably the source of the legend of the Banshee right we're going back to the other person there It's not that, and the guy says hello to my wife, Rosalene.
S:So the fox, when they're mating call or whatever to each other, that is a screechy sound, but it has a different intonation to it.
J:For sure.
S:It goes up and then down, you know.
J:Can you give us an example of a sound like that?
S:I was hoping. It sounds like somebody's screaming in the background.
E:It does. It sounds like a person.
J:Kevin Walsh wrote in, he said, Hi Jay, this sounds like a lone fisher cat. I once had a nest of them near my yard and it sounds like people getting murdered every night.
S:No. Fisher cats sound almost exactly like the foxes. And in fact, you could find videos online of like trying to disambiguate like fox or fisher cat. You know, that's, they're very similar.
C:Wait, what's a fish or cat?
S:It's a mammal. Is it a cat? No. It's like a weasel. I think it's in the weasel family.
J:But Cara, you never look them in the eye.
C:Okay, all right, thanks for the info.
J:Sam Serene.
B:Yeah, they killed Liz's cat once, and that was a tough cat to kill. Oh no!
C:Is that why they're called fish or cats? Because they fish for cats?
J:I told you, don't look those bastards in the eye. Sam Serene wrote, and greetings Jay, I think this week's noisy is the were-mouse or wolf-mouse. Wolfy. Thank you all for what you do and congratulations on 1000. Unfortunately, there was no winner. Because this one is not easy. All right, guys, I'm going to tell you what this is. This was first sent in by a listener named Candice Dennison, and she said, hi again from good old Mormonville, a.k.a. Utah.
Voiceover:Utah.
J:Today, I was learning about language amongst animals, and I came across the amazing call of the Hyrax. H-Y-R-A-X. The hyrax can make a variety of different sounds that differ based on location, like accents, but what's even more fascinating about the hyrax is that it has figured out syntax, similar to birdsongs. So this is a mammal. This is also called the rock rabbit or dassie. It's a small furry mammal. It looks like a robust, oversized guinea pig or rabbit.
S:A furry, fluffy guinea pig.
J:They have stumpy toes and hoof-like nails. So here it is again. Okay. You don't want that in your backyard.
C:No, but they're so cool. You guys, I have a hyrax skull.
J:Whoa. It's a hyrax.
C:Yeah, a friend brought it. It's a hyrax. It's a hyrax. A friend brought it back from Africa. And the coolest thing about the hyrax is that its closest relatives are elephants and manatees.
J:What the hell?
C:Those three organisms are closely related to each other and no other organisms. Isn't that weird? I guess the other, Manatee has a cousin, right? What's it called? Like a Dongguan or something?
B:Yeah, Dongguan.
C:Yeah, those are the ones. Those are related.
J:All right, Cara, just for you, I have a new Noisy this week.
C:Thanks.
J:Samed in by a listener named Colby Santana, and here it is.
U:Thank you for watching!
J:Creepy, huh?
B:What the hell, man? I love it.
J:Good luck on that one, guys. If you heard, if you think, wait, first off, if you know what the noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN at the Skeptic's Guide dot org. Steve.
S:Jay.
J:Some updates for you. I have made contact with about 10 hotels in the DC area. I actually have two right now. That I'm negotiating with and I have decided that if these negotiations don't work out that these statistically the chances of us going back to White Plains has gone up significantly.
Voiceover:Okay.
J:It turns out that D.C. is very expensive. Like buy a house expensive for how much money. And I am not exaggerating. Wow, so anyway I hope that one of these plays out and I can talk them down enough to make it happen because you know DC is fun and we thought it'd be a cool place to go but we will have the conference either way and it'll happen sometime in April or May so I'll keep you updated I am I am pushing very hard to get some answers soon and And the thing is, I was waiting to book the SGU private show in D.C. on December 6th when I booked the big hotel, because I'm going to say, hey, by the way, I'd like a very small room, you know, so I'm kind of like trying to do use that in my negotiation. So I don't have that landed yet. The private show in D.C. on December 6th. It's going to happen. If you want to go, you're going to be able to go. It's going to be Friday night, December 6th. Probably around 7 p.m., somewhere in the D.C. area. So just, you know, don't forget about us because I will hopefully within, you know, next week I'm hoping I'll have the ability for you guys to buy tickets. So that's that, guys. Other than that, let me give you a quick rundown of what the SGU has going on. We will be at Psychon, Evan. We're going.
E:We will be there in October.
J:The SGU will do a live show. All of us will be there. And then Steve will be giving a talk. But we hope to see you there. We hope to also reconnect with a bunch of people that we haven't seen in a long time because we haven't been really going to conferences recently. So I'm really looking forward to doing it. Psychon is a wonderful conference. This one is in Las Vegas. You can go to psychonconference.org, that's C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C-E dot org. And if you guys appreciate our 1000 shows, 1000 shows! my grand it is a grand it's a grand of shows if you appreciate the kilo of shows the key of sgu a key a key a pure uncut sgu if you wow that was awesome if you guys appreciate the work that we do please consider becoming a patron We would really appreciate your support. You can go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide. You can also join our mailing list. You can go to our home page and you can click the link there. You'll see a link to join this mailing list every week. Ian and I send out an email that tells you everything that the SGU has done the previous week. Lots of stuff happening.
C:Steve, I'm going to issue a real-time correction on myself. Dongguan is a city in China that I have been to. Dugongs are the animals that are related to manatees, but that's not the correction. The correction is that aardvarks, which I didn't know I learned something new. So it's not only elephants, hyraxes, manatees, it's also aardvarks. Those four animals, which all feel very random, are evolutionarily the closest related to each other. Very strange.
E:I also made an observation just now. A thousand shows? And we mentioned the term kilo. So a kilo in weight is 2.2 pounds. So for a thousand shows, if you were to convert that into weight, we'd have 2,200 pounds of show, and therefore that's a ton of shows we've done.
C:That's amazing. We've done a ton of shows.
E:We have.
C:Do you have a metric ton?
S:QED. Now is that T-O-N or T-O-N-N-E?
E:That's T-O-N, right? T-O-N.
Emails (1:21:06)[edit]
S:All right, guys, we're going to do one quick email. This comes from Calvin, who writes, I was a little disappointed with discussion regarding net metering on this week's show. I feel you were unfair in your portrayal of those evil power companies and their poor net metering policies. Full disclosure, I am director for a rural electric power cooperative, and I'm also an electrical engineer. The part you left out of the net metering discussion is the customer is asking the power company to act as their battery. When they have excess power, they charge the battery by pushing the power to the grid. When they need power, they discharge the battery by pulling it from the grid. And if the battery is exhausted, then they purchase power from the battery. Acting as a battery costs the power company money. So now the electric rates of your neighbors must go up to cover this cost. And he goes on to discuss that. So first, Calvin, and I wrote back to him to express this. First of all, I explicitly said that we use the grid as a battery. I used those very words, in fact. So I did not leave that out of the discussion. But what we're talking about is this notion that if you have residential solar, There's a claim that some utility companies make that that increase their costs and that increase the costs, the infrastructure costs, borne by their non-solar power using neighbors. That's why it's not necessarily fair to pay, quote unquote, pay residential solar users 100% of the cost of the electricity they send to the grid. That's the claim by the companies. It's wrong. And I discussed this previously. I've written about this previously. I know we don't always have the opportunity to give the full backstory when we make comments like this. But here is what I had previously researched and I just updated my searches to make sure this is still the most accurate information. So, first of all, what the evidence shows is that residential solar actually saves the utility company money and actually bears extra costs for their neighbors. And it does that primarily by reducing the need for extra capacity, for extra fuel to burn on those peaker plants that you use to make more energy during high demand. And less need to increase grid capacity and other things. So it actually reduces the cost, the systemic costs, and it saves the power company money and potentially could save their neighbors' money. Especially since one thing that causes peak energy use is using electricity for air conditioning, and that happens when the sun is shining, right? So it does tend to offset those air conditioning peak demands. I'll link to this in the note. There are reviews, there are studies which show that this is the case. Now, some people complain that the utility companies pass higher costs on to their non-solar using neighbors. And the thing is, when they do that, that's not because their costs are increased, it's because their revenue is decreased, because they're not making money from their former and now solar using customers. So they're just making more money off of the non-resident, the non-solar users to make up for the lost revenue, not because their costs are higher. Does that make sense? They're just choosing to do that. You know, oh, our revenue's down, let's increase the cost on the people who have to buy electricity from us, right?
C:But is what the listener said true in and of itself, that it does cost more money to be the battery, but that money, because money is fungible, the net cost is actually a gain?
S:Yes and no. So yes, here's the one sort of kernel of truth in all of this. Most of the charges for infrastructure costs are designed as a percentage of your bill. It's like a surcharge. You buy $100 worth of electricity, you pay a $5 surcharge to pay for infrastructure. So if you're not buying any electricity though, You end up not paying the surcharge even though you're still using the infrastructure. Right.
C:Why not just add that back?
S:Well, yeah. What some utility companies are doing are having fixed costs. They're saying everybody pays a certain amount regardless of how much electricity you use. Basically, you're charging the solar customers for using the grid as a battery. Thank you for joining us today. Does that make sense? So that's fine. It's your pay-to-play.
C:If you want to be on the grid, you have to pay to be on the grid.
S:Yeah, that's fine. But the thing is, yes, but if you are somebody that invests money in solar panels, you're investing your own money to make an infrastructure upgrade that saves the utility company money. So, if anything, we're subsidizing the electricity companies to some extent. They should be paying us.
C:You're subsidizing them as their industry dies, as more and more people get solar. And that's the thing that they see, right?
S:Well, that's their problem.
C:The fact, you know, that's... But it's that very subsidy you're giving them that is linked to losing a customer.
S:Right. But again, that's just because they're not competing with a better option doesn't mean they get to gouge people, you know what I mean? Or claim, make claims that are false. It's not costing them money. It's not costing them money. It is not costing our neighbors money. It is. Right. And again, it's totally fine to like, whatever, if I have to pay $10 a month to use the grid, that's fine. I don't care. But the thing is, if you don't do net metering, some people are saying that not only should we do net metering, we should be paying solar residential users for the benefit of the energy, the stability that they're contributing to the grid, and the reduced need to buy whatever more infrastructure costs for the grid. But that's a pipe dream. I'm not even worried about that. As long as the residential solar units get 100% of the cost of the electricity they're sending to the grid, it's fine. Otherwise, you're getting ripped off, because the solar company is paying you less for electricity than you're paying them. You're both energy producers. They're giving you electricity at some point, and you're giving them electricity at some point. It should be an even swap. I mean, why do they get to charge you retail and pay you wholesale?
C:Given that there is a some sort of surcharge or something to be... But even without that, because again, we're saving the money.
S:So their whole premise is wrong. It's factually wrong.
C:Money is fungible. And the fact that they're losing money over here, they're going to come up with a way.
S:They're not losing money. They're just not making money. They're losing revenue.
C:Yeah, exactly. It's different. It's different. The opportunity cost. It's different to us, but it's not different from a corporate perspective. Right. The stockholder. Their revenue is going down. And money is fungible. They're going to figure out a way to spin it.
S:Well, then do something else. Make electricity greener, cheaper, make a better product.
C:Right. And this is a monopoly. It's not like we have a choice, you know? Like we have to use what a company is doing.
S:Oh, I'm sorry you don't have an absolute monopoly anymore. Right, exactly. Smallest violin. All right. Let's move on to science or fiction. Probably get more emails from that.
Science or Fiction (1:29:25)[edit]
Theme: Extinction
Item #1: A recent genetic analysis concludes that the Rapanui population was not in decline prior to contact with Europeans in 1722.[5]
Item #2: New evidence pegs the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor in humans to just 20,000 years ago.[6]
Item #3: A new DNA analysis of a 45,000 year old Neanderthal specimen finds that they were genetically isolated from other Neanderthal groups for about 60,000 years, a fact that may have contributed to their extinction.[7]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voiceover:It's time for science or fiction.
S:Each week, I come up with three fake news items, both facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics on which one is the fake. You have a theme this week. These are all news items, but there is a theme. The theme is extinction. Something to do with extinction. Okay. Are you guys ready?
J:Let's do it. Here we go.
S:Yeah. I like your attitude, Jay. Item number one, a recent genetic analysis concludes that the Rapa Nui population was not in decline prior to contact with Europeans in 1722. Remember, that's Easter Island. Item number two, new evidence pegs the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor in humans to just 20,000 years ago. And item number three, a new DNA analysis of a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen finds that they were genetically isolated from other Neanderthal groups for about 60,000 years, a fact that may have contributed to their extinction. Evan, go first.
E:Okay, recent genetic analysis concludes that the Rapa Nui population was not in decline prior to contact with Europeans in 1722. Yes, so this is something I had heard about. I kind of believe that because the nice thing about genetic analysis technology is it gets better with time and with new techniques and things. So when they went back and they did this more recent analysis, yeah, they could have made this discovery. I think this one's very plausible. The second one about—
B:Well, I thought you'd throw us a tidbit, which you often want to do for the first person, but not second or third.
S:But that's not one. That's something you have to, that's a plausibility thing. I will help explain to you to understand what the thing is, but that's a analysis you need to make.
B:Yeah, I was trolling.
S:So, you know, the Y chromosome is passed exclusively down the male line, just as the mitochondria are passed down the female line. So there's like a mitochondrial E, which is the mitochondrial most recent common ancestor, like the individual female, who is the mitochondrial common ancestor of all currently living people. Same thing, at some point in the past there was a male whose Y chromosome is a common ancestor Y chromosome to all extant people. However, it's a statistical determination. It's not like there was literally one person who was this person. And it can change over time as we discover new branches or genetic variations or whatever. But it just means all the Y chromosomes lead back to one Y chromosome 20,000 years ago. It doesn't necessarily mean there was only one person at that time, one male. It just means that the other Y chromosomes didn't make it through.
E:I wish I could remember right now how long ago Mitochondrial Eve event took place. Something tells me it's much farther back than 20,000 years ago. Wasn't it more like The Skeptic I wish I could remember right now because that would really help me with that one. And then the last one, the analysis of 45,000 year old Neanderthal specimen finds that they were genetically isolated from other of their group for about 60,000 years and that might have contributed to their extinction. I don't see a problem with this.
US#05:And by there, I mean Neanderthals.
E:Yes, other Neanderthal groups.
US#05:All Neanderthals, like the extinction of Neanderthals, not just this one group, just to be clear.
E:Yeah, because if you're going to isolate a whole segment of genetic material like that that can't be passed around again among the larger group, you'll have a deficiency, you'll have a situation that can arise in which it possibly could Thanks for watching! Steve, you did raise your voice. So based on that, I'll go with my gut and I'll say the Rapa Nui population when I'll say that one's the fiction.
B:Okay, Bob.
E:Bob, you better back me up on this.
B:The Neanderthal one is interesting. Two distinct populations of Neanderthals. If that's true, that's great. That's good. That's very interesting. I don't think we've ever thought of that before, or at least never had evidence before. So I kind of hope that's true. The one that's getting me, though, is the why chromosomal most recent common ancestor, 20,000 years, does not seem like enough. So I'll say that's fiction.
E:No, Bob, you totally misled me.
B:I hate you. No, I did.
E:Yes, you did. You busted in on my guess, and I would have gone with that had you not said what you said, and I changed my answer based on that.
S:All right, Cara, you go.
C:OK, should I spread it out? No. OK, so we've got Rapa Nui and we've got Neanderthal. I'm going to know. And then we've got Y chromosome. I'm going to take this backwards. Forty five thousand year old Neanderthal. was genetically isolated from Hominids, that you have these sort of like subpopulations. The Y chromosome, I'm struggling on this one. Same with Bob. I thought that this was hundreds of thousands of years ago, not just tens of thousands of years ago. I mean, it is the most recent common ancestor, but that would be a big ass bottleneck if we got down to like one. Thank you for joining us today. Europeans came in and gave them all smallpox and then they all died. Sure, that seems reasonable. Yeah, so I think I'm going to go with Bob on this one. G-W-B. G-W-B.
J:Okay, and Jay. You know, I've thought heavily about all three of these, Steve, and I'm going to go with Bob slash Cara because they are correct. Yeah, I think that you dropped one or more zeros there.
S:Okay, let's go to number three then, since you all agree on that one. A new DNA analysis of a 45,000-year-old Neanderthal specimen finds that they were genetically isolated from other Neanderthal groups for about 60,000 years, a fact that may have contributed to their extinction. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Thanks for watching! Lived in the Rhone Valley in France, and comparing them to known Neanderthal genomes, whatever population he was a part of was probably isolated from the main population of Neanderthals for at least 60,000 years. Now, what they say the implication of this might be is that Neanderthals in general lived in isolated groups that did not have a lot of interaction or interbreeding with each other, and that this would have made them more vulnerable to extinction, that fact. And so that may be a contributing factor as opposed to modern humans at the time who were very outbred. They were exchanging genes all over the place.
C:I love them that Neanderthals are all keeping to themselves, but when a human comes by, they're like, yeah, I'll try that. I'm down.
S:At least a little bit, right?
C:Yeah, at least one point something percent.
S:Two percent or something. I guess we'll go backwards. New evidence pegs the Y-chromosomal most recent common ancestor in humans to just 20,000 years ago. Bob, Jay, and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Evan, you think this one is science. So the thing here is that it's new evidence, right? I mean, maybe you're correct about what was the current belief, but new evidence changes it because this one is the fiction. Yeah, I just, ah, I lopped a zero off it. There's 200,000. Two to 300,000. The, the mitochondrial Eve is more like 900,000. Evan, you were close on that.
E:Of course I was close. I was right on the whole damn thing. And all I did was change my answer from the right one to the wrong one. Signing off. Good night.
S:That's what you get for trying to game the system rather than just answering the question.
E:This is a conspiracy between you and me.
S:A recent genetic analysis concludes that the Rapa Nui population was not in decline prior to contact with the Europeans in 1722 is science. So there was this theory that the Rapa Nui population was in decline because they were not managing their ecology well. They were using all the The palm trees on the island and they basically were deforesting the island and it was unsustainable the way they were managing things. And that they were in significant decline and contact with Europeans was the coup de grace, right? That was sort of the final blow, but they were already on the way out. There's a sort of related genetic question here. And that is, when did the Rapa Nui mix their genes with South American populations? Because we know that's the case, right? There's some South American genes in Rapa Nui individuals. And was that something that happened before or after contact with Europeans? Which of course means, if it was before, they were able to travel from Rapa Nui to South America, or vice versa, right? Because it's pretty far. Rapa Nui is pretty isolated in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 3,700 kilometers west of South America, 1,900 kilometers east of the closest inhabited island. Pretty isolated.
E:Wow. My gosh. Have to row that and paddle that entire thing.
S:Oh my gosh. So there were 15 specimens that they had. They did a thorough full genomic analysis, and they found that The genetic diversity in the population was not decreasing over time. So that indicates that the population was not decreasing, right? And then the second thing they found was that the genes from South American populations predates contact with Europeans by a couple of hundred years. So that means they made that trip, right? As we said, there was some Trans-Pacific hanky-panky going on.
C:Well, it wasn't just that trip, right? Yeah, they had to get there in the first place. But wasn't there also some other like, like Filipino or I'm trying to think I thought maybe, yeah, I thought that Rapa Nui had like, really interesting genetic mixes. So it's seafaring people.
S:Yeah, there were seafaring people clearly. Yeah.
B:So they're getting in their boats, and they're, they're huffing it for Thanks for watching and see you next time.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:15)[edit]
"You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong."
– Alessandro Volta, - 1745 –1827, the inventor of the electric battery -, (description of author)
S:Evan, you did lose by trying to second-guess me, but you do get to give us a quote.
E:I appreciate that. You're welcome, everyone. You must be ready to give up even the most attractive ideas when experiment shows them to be wrong. Alessandro Volta, the inventor of the electric battery. Cool little fact, Volta proved that electricity could be generated chemically and debunked the prevalent theory, this I did not know, that electricity was generated solely by living beings? Really? That was the theory?
S:Because that's where it was first discovered, the galvanic response, right? You would shock a frog's leg and it twitches. Also, remember, same thing with magnetism. That's where the term animal magnetism originally came from. There was this magnetic force that was exclusive to living things. They had no clue how things worked back then, so they were just throwing crap against the wall. At the time, that was not an unreasonable hypothesis. Living things are clearly energetic. They generate energy. And do you think that inert rocks can generate electricity? I mean, again, if you don't know chemistry and physics and everything, if you go back to that time, what was known?
B:They should have known.
S:But it was reasonable to say, well, maybe it's something that is unique to living things. You know, they had to they had to figure it out. It's like, no, you know, inanimate chemicals, you know, rocks can generate electricity. Yeah, that was cool. Very, very important discovery. All right, well, that's it. We're done.
Voiceover:Yay.
S:You're done with me, Steve? We're done for this episode 1001. This is the first episode of our second 1,000 episodes.
E:Totally binary.
S:A new millennium of SGU. 20 more years, guys. Oh, god.
C:Is this going to crash some sort of naming system? It already did. It already did?
E:Oh, it did? We had our Y2K moment? Yeah. Why 1K? Why 1K?
S:Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
E:You're welcome, Steve. Thanks, Steve.
S:And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. The 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 Skeptic's Guide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ www.nature.com: Human embryo models are getting more realistic — raising ethical questions
- ↑ onlinelibrary.wiley.com: None
- ↑ www.livescience.com: None
- ↑ theconversation.com: Belief in alien visits to Earth is spiralling out of control – here’s why that’s so dangerous
- ↑ www.nature.com: Ancient Rapanui genomes reveal resilience and pre-European contact with the Americas
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: Y-chromosomal Adam - Wikipedia
- ↑ www.popsci.com: Neanderthals' social isolation may have sped up their extinction