SGU Episode 1011
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| SGU Episode 1011 |
|---|
| November 23rd 2024 |
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A cosmic silhouette presents the mysteries of the universe and celestial wonders. |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all." |
Chien-Shiung Wu (Experimental Physicist) - Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research" |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, November 19th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
S: How's everyone doing? We're recording a little bit early because we're getting ready for the Thanksgiving break. I'll be going away this weekend.
J: Yeah, I'm going to see my family in Denver.
S: Yeah, this is the holiday where the novella guys are all splitting up. I'll go into our in-laws.
E: Don't worry I'll hold down the state for you. I'll be remaining in Connecticut.
S: Thank you.
E: I'll take care of things. Just leave the keys.
B: [inaudible] she's all set.
C: I'm going to Oregon.
S: Proud of you.
E: I always mispronounce or Oregon.
S: It's Oregon, right? They don't want to say Oregon.
C: No, it's Oregon.
J: Org, Oregon.
E: And that's the people of the state who get to decide that, right?
S: I guess so.
E: I suppose that's fair.
S: So I know you guys have heard about the fact that The Onion has acquired InfoWars.
B: Yeah.
J: Oh, yeah.
C: It's amazing.
J: How wonderful is that?
S: Well, there's a wrinkle. Did you guys hear the wrinkle?
J: No. What happened?
E: No.
S: It's being contested.
C: Of course it is.
E: Okay.
S: Just as a quick review, InfoWars is the media outlet of Alex Jones who got sued for lots of money and has to award like $1.5 billion to the families of the Sandy Hook massacre because of his hateful conspiracy theories, right? One little bit of justice in the world. And to pay off the money he owes, they're selling off his assets, including InfoWars. And so that just was up for auction, and it was purchased by The Onion, or the parent company of The Onion, or the parent company of the Onion, Global Tetrahedron is the name of the parent company. And they plan on launching it as a basically satire of itself.
C: That's amazing.
E: Okay.
S: Sometime next year. It would be amazing. Totally amazing. But a company affiliated with Alex Jones is claiming that the bidding was not fair, that they did not have a fair opportunity to make a counter bid, so now it has to go before the judge. And hopefully this is just all a waste of time and it'll still happen.
E: A stall tactic, it sounds like.
C: Yeah, but the judge is not going to allow a company affiliated with Alex Jones to buy the company.
S: Well, their argument is that the goal of the bid is to get as much money for the families as possible. And so if they have a higher bid, the judge should honor that.
'C: But then are they just going to turn around and give it back to Alex Jones?
S: Well, they could. I don't know. Hopefully this won't sink the deal, because it would be awesome if The Onion gets InfoWars. Also, the people who sued Alex Jones, who are getting some of the money, essentially gave The Onion some of their money to get the bid up enough to win.
C: Oh, interesting.
E: So they're investors in a sense.
S: I guess so, yeah, because they wanted this to happen, and they wanted to keep it away from a company affiliated with Alex Jones.
E: Sure. Okay. All right. Well, yeah, it sounds like a delay tactic more than anything to me.
J: I mean, I don't know. I think they legitimately want, he wants to get it if he's got the money. I don't know how much they paid for it. But I mean, it's look, people just don't, people will throw lawsuits out there like crazy today. You know?
E: Right.
J: It's all BS. Like, he didn't do it. He lost it. He wasn't on his game. Whatever the problem was, the time came and the time went. It's all forecasted. It's not like they secretly put it out. It was in the public eye. That's it.
S: Yeah. Well, we'll update you on if there's any, I think it's going to be, go before the judge next week.
J: Yeah. Well, we'll see.
E: Okay. Quick resolution. Let's go.
S: Yeah. Hopefully there'll be a good quick resolution. All right. Well, let's get into our news items, because we have a great interview coming up later in the show with Kevin Folta, if you want to leave time for that.
News Item #1 - Sense of Self (04:00)[edit]
S: I'm going to start us off by talking about giving robots a sense of self.
E: Oh, don't do that.
B: Just throw that brain circuit in there. That'll be good.
E: I've seen too many movies where that didn't work out as intended.
C: But don't they need that for like, I don't know, that embodied kind of-
S: Yeah, that's the question, Cara. That's a good thing, right? So there was a recent paper published by three experts. One is a robotic, a cognitive roboticist, right? So they deal with AI that controls robots. Another one is a cognitive psychologist who specializes in human-robot interactions. And the third was a psychiatrist. So they wrote a paper talking about the fact that we should be studying the elements of a human sense of self, the components that make that up in robots. And then we could then do research on those elements in the robotic model. To break this down, what's interesting about this, what I found interesting about this, obviously I'm a neuroscientist. I love the cognitive neurosciences and I also love robots and AI. So it all comes together. What I've been saying for years is that AI is going to be a fantastic way to study neuroscience, right? Because it essentially gives us an actual model that we could mess with. What happens when we take this component down? Or what happens when we dial this all the way up? Or whatever. And we could see how the pieces interact with each other. But first we have to know what all the pieces are, right? So this is, they were talking about what are the pieces of a sense of self? Do you guys have, I mean I've spoken about this before, but do you guys have any guesses? Like what do you think would be something very specific, like some circuit in the brain that not doesn't create necessarily by itself a sense of self, but that would contribute to our sense of self?
C: Well, I think there's the obvious things like our proprioception, like our understanding of our own body map and where we are in space. I don't know. I did a whole podcast with this really interesting cognitive, I think he was a cognitive neuroscientist. Ooh, he might have been a psychologist, about how the concept of self only develops in relation to other. And so you can't really have a sense of self if you're in a vacuum.
S: Right. So that's correct. And the different components, one that you're getting to we would call is embodiment, right? So there's a sense that you are in your body, right? There's also a sense that you are separate from the rest of the universe, right? At some point you end and the rest of the universe begins. What's interesting is that infants don't have that. That develops after birth, like over time. Then that module clicks in and then they can see like this is my hand and everything beyond that is not me.
B: Imagine that day like, oh shit, I'm not a god. What the hell?
C: Well, you can like see it when they recognize their own parts and stuff. And they start to see themselves in the mirror and all those good things.
B: They pass the mirror test.
S: So then another component is the sense that you own your body parts.
E: Oh yeah.
S: And then-
E: Agency, right?
B: Well, sometimes I rent out parts.
S: Agency is a separate thing, Evan. Then there's the sense that you control your body parts. That's agency. And then there's the sense that you can have an influence. You can do stuff that influences the rest of the world, right? You could do something that would affect something else. And there's also the sense that other people have the same kind of sense of self that you have.
C: Yeah, that comes much later.
S: That comes later, yeah.
B: What does that have to do with your own sense of self?
S: Because you have to have a theory of mind, right? And the theory of mind is that you have to know what an agent is in order to feel like you're an agent. And if you are an agent, that has to mean that other people are also their own agents. And they're not you. They are separate from you. The thing is, and I think a lot of people get tripped up who haven't – who are not neuroscientists or who haven't thought about this, is that these things seem so fundamental, you might wonder, do we really need a circuit in the brain to make us feel that way? These things are true. But that's naive. That's not how our consciousness works. We don't feel that way simply because it's true. We have to – it's a constructed subjective experience that the brain has to actively make.
C: And it can be knocked out.
S: And it can get knocked out. Mostly we know about these things when they get knocked out.
E: Brain injuries.
S: Injuries and drugs are the two big ones, right? And now we could do it with like transcranial magnetic stimulation. We could turn off this circuit or turn off that circuit. And so there are drugs, for example, that will make you have an out-of-body experience. What's an out-of-body experience? You lose your sense that you are in your body.
B: Ketamine.
C: Yeah, ketamine does that.
S: Or you feel like – I remember when we interviewed a neuroscientist who did LSD. She said that when she took it, her body expanded to the size of the universe. So what's that?
E: Oh, Jennifer Ouellette.
C: Yeah, she and Sean did LSD for one of her books.
S: Although I don't think that's who that quote is from. It's from Susan Blackmore.
E: Oh, OK.
S: But in any case, so what is that other than you not feeling you are separate from the universe? You feel one with the universe, right? It feels like a spiritual experience, but it's just a breakdown of your sense that you are not one with the universe, right? Which, again, is an actively constructed sense that you have. Because how can you have a sense of self unless you're distinguished from not-self, right? So you're in your body, self versus not-self. And then we talk about alien hand syndrome. What's alien hand syndrome? The circuit that makes you feel as if you control your body is not working at some point. How does that circuit work? Well, first you decide you want to make a move. You make a move, and then you feel and see the move. And if it matches, your brain says you control your hand. If it doesn't match or that circuit is broken, you don't feel as if you are controlling your hand. You feel like it's acting on its own agency, not your agency. Even though subconsciously it may be your agency, you don't feel that it is. So people with alien hand syndrome will be walking down the street and then their hand empties their pockets onto the sidewalk.
C: There's the famous example in Oliver Sacks book where a patient kept waking up on the floor. And they discovered that he thought that there was a cadaver leg in his bed. And he would throw it out of the bed out of fear. And then he would go with it because it was his own leg.
S: That's a different phenomenon.
C: Oh, really?
S: That's neglect. Yeah. So that's the sense that a part of your body doesn't belong to you because it's not part of – because if you have a stroke in your right hemisphere, you won't know that the left side of your body belongs to you.
C: So you're talking about the difference between it feeling like it's possessed by somebody else or feeling like it's not possessed at all?
S: Well, so this is the difference between feeling like you own it versus feeling like you control it.
C: Right, right.
S: Alien hand syndrome is the lack of feeling that you control it.
C: And neglect, it's a lack of ownership.
S: Neglect can result in a lack of sense that you own it. So, yeah, and what patients will say, there's another patient in the bed with me because that's not my leg. It must be another patient's leg. And the quickie bedside test we do is we take their paralyzed hand, the one that they're neglecting. We hold it in front of their face and we say, whose hand is this? And they invariably say, that's your hand even though you're showing them their own hand.
E: Wow.
S: Because they don't feel like it's part of them and therefore it isn't, right?
C: What about example of both versions or of like the two – how those things are actually separate?
S: They are. They are distinct phenomena, although obviously these are all related. But they are – these are the components that are distinct.
B: Steve, if you put on an alien costume, would that enhance your alien hand syndrome?
S: No, it wouldn't. It's not necessary.
B: Not even one chuckle from anybody.
S: No.
E: It would look cool.
S: I was laughing on the inside.
E: You do that a lot to me too.
S: A couple of other interesting wrinkles here. You can have a sense of ownership over a part of the body you don't – that doesn't exist, right? So you can have what's called a supernumerary phantom limb. So this happens – these are now like you have a stroke. The ownership module gets disconnected from the paralyzed limb, but it's still working. It's just not getting any feedback from your arm. So it makes up an arm. You have a phantom limb, and it's separate from your real physical limb. And you feel like you own it. It's part of you. You control it. You just can't obviously manipulate external reality with it because it exists only as a figment in your mind.
B: What about your homunculus in that scenario, Steve?
S: Yeah, I mean the homunculus is somewhat plastic, right? It can adapt.
C: Yeah, you can rearrange it.
B: So it would have – by definition, would that have adapted to that phantom supernumerary limb?
S: They tend to go away over time. So they tend not to persist indefinitely. The most extreme case was somebody who had four phantom limbs, four supernumerary phantom limbs. So he was literally Doc Oc because he had eight limbs, but four of them weren't real. And there's also phantom limb when you like have a paralyzed arm or you have like an amputated arm rather, and you still feel like it's there because the arm is physically gone, but your ownership module still owns the limb. That circuit is still there even though there's no physical arm in place. And Cara, have you ever heard of this? I forget what the technical name of it is. But there's a very rare syndrome where people feel like they don't own parts of their actual body. And they often present to doctors saying, I want you to amputate this thing attached to me.
E: Oh.
C: Interesting.
S: Because it's not me. And it makes them feel very uncomfortable. And there's a huge ethical discussion going on as to what is the appropriate thing to do about that.
B: Wait. Like their liver?
S: No. It's usually a limb.
E: Their arm.
S: It's usually a limb.
C: Like let's say they don't want their – yeah, their pinky.
S: But imagine feeling like your left arm is not you. It's attached to you.
C: And there's something neurological going on, but they're probably often misdiagnosed as having some form of psychosis.
E: Can't medicines help with that?
C: That's not what's wrong. He's saying there's a circuit in their brain that's faulty.
S: Right. And it's so rare. We don't really have like a lot of research into it. So I don't know that we have it all fleshed out. And certainly not a lot of treatment trials or anything.
B: So to speak.
S: So all of these components can be disconnected from each other is the cool part. So now getting back to the robot thing with the paper. What they want to do is say, yeah, let's – now that we kind of know all of these components, mainly from people with strokes or people on drugs or whatever, where these circuits go off for one reason or another or anoxia or whatever. This is, again, part of – often part of a near-death experience, for example, the out-of-body experience. Let's see if we can replicate these components in a robot, make a robot feel as if it's inside its robot body. And so they could replicate the circuits. For example, for the agency module, you could say like the robot knows what it wants to do, meaning that at least there's the circuit that says you're going to raise your right arm. So that information is in the AI controlling the robot. It then will raise the arm. And then you have sensors that feed back to say how is the limb moving and does it match what you intended to do. And if it does match, you have to give some kind of positive feedback to the algorithm. And so that would essentially mimic that loop that exists in a human brain that makes you feel as if you own your body part, right?
B: Aren't they kind of doing that now though?
S: To some extent, but they want to explicitly try to replicate these components of a sense of self that humans have in a robot and then see how that influences the robot's behavior. Maybe it will improve the robot's ability to control its movements, for example. Maybe it will have some consequences. Probably we evolved these things for a reason.
B: Maybe give it a psychosis, some robotic psychosis.
S: Yeah. Now, the question is this. Now, if we want to keep going forward with this, if you add all these things together, what does that add up to, right? Does it add up to an actual sense of self that the robot has? Now, I don't think that if we had all these circuits disconnected from each other and not connected to anything, that was also trying to replicate consciousness.
C: Consciousness, yeah.
S: And what is consciousness? Again, we could try to replicate that in an AI/robot. Essentially, if I had to strip it down, what we know now is wakeful consciousness. If we're talking clinically now, what is wakeful consciousness? It is a constant communication that the brain is having with itself, right? There's just this constant loop of neurological activity, and it's being activated by the brainstem. The brainstem is constantly giving your cortex a kick in the ass. And then every time something happens, it leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else. And if that just keeps happening, that chain of neurological events is your stream of consciousness, right? And it's taking in sensory information. It's taking in information from your own body. It's taking in information from other parts of your brain that are communicating with each other, and it produces the stream of consciousness, right? That sort of self-propelling.
C: And it's not just excitatory. It's like there's a lot of inhibitory action going on.
S: Well, yeah. At the high levels, when there's a lot of stuff happening, you have to sort of inhibit the stuff to control your behavior. So it's not just chaos.
C: Or a message of seizure.
S: Well, those seizures are inhibited at a really basic level. Like every time one neural circuit, a bunch of clump of neurons sends a signal to another clump of neurons, they inhibit all of the adjacent neurons. So that's to keep it from spreading outside of the circuit. Yeah, to prevent seizures and prevent what we call ephaptic transmission. Ever hear that term, Cara?
C: Ephaptic?
S: Ephaptic. E-P-H-A-P-T-I-C. Yeah, basically meaning not through a circuit, but just spreading it to adjacent neurons.
C: Just the spread.
S: Seizures are when a bunch of cells or neurons are firing, not along pathways, but just because they're all next to each other and they're just all firing.
C: Yep. It's bad. And not good for the brain for that to happen.
S: And here's the final question I want to leave you guys with. Is there a difference between a general sentient AI that exists only virtually and one that's in a robot? And what would an AI that exists only virtually be like? Now, the gray zone in between these two states is what I call the Max Headroom thing, which is that you could have a virtual body. An AI that's not in a robot, that's just on a computer, could have a virtual body and could have all of these sense of self modules running with the virtual body. But what if you didn't do that? What if you had none of these sense of self circuits running? You just had the AI. What would it experience? And would that be sustainable? Would that be functional? Do we really need to embody it in order for it to be a functioning, self-aware AI?
C: Well, and I guess to make it even more complicated, if we're talking now about software, not hardware, software can control external hardware. So even if it's not a robot body, if that AI has access to the grid or it has access to a server, could it then embody other machinery?
S: Maybe your house is its body or a spaceship is its body.
E: That's Futurama right there. Spaceship is the machine.
S: But it's embodied in something. Yeah, it's embodied in something.
C: It's embodied in something, but in a much more, I think, useful way. Like that to me, you could do a lot more with that than like a robot in a humanoid body.
E: Well, was HAL 9000 that?
S: I think so, because it had total control over the ship.
E: It was indistinguishable. It seemed to be indistinguishable.
S: Anyway, it's fascinating. The thing that's interesting is that we will be able to investigate all of these questions once we do it, right? We could speculate now, but once we do it, we'll get a much better sense of how the sense of self and embodiment affects artificial intelligence, whether it's virtual or just in the void or if it's embodied in a robot. We will see. Cool.
News Item #2 - America Needs a New Space Station (21:13)[edit]
S: All right, Cara, tell us about the new energy secretary, or at least the proposed new energy secretary.
C: You sound so happy when you say that. I feel like this is going to be a new series, because as I was prepping this, I found out that Dr. Oz has been selected for Medicare and Medicaid.
B: Oh, man.
E: What?
C: But I did not do a deep dive for that one. So I'll just set that on the shelf.
E: What board of trustees dealt with that?
C: I guess there's somebody at the helm.
S: There's always somebody at the top. There's always somebody appointed who's in charge.
C: So instead, we're not going to talk about Dr. Oz, at least not this week. We will be talking about Chris Wright. His full name is Christopher Allen Wright. He's the CEO of Liberty Energy. It's the second largest fracking company in the U.S., and he is the presumptive nominee for United States Secretary of Energy under this next Trump presidency. He's obviously got a lot of experience in the energy sector. He is a board member of a nuclear energy company, also a board member of a royalty payment company for mineral rights and mining rights. But there's a little bit of a wrinkle in that he does not believe in climate change.
S: Didn't he also work for a solar company too, I heard?
C: Yeah, he's been on boards and worked for, like, companies across the board. And that's what Trump really pushed when he did his post on, I think, Truth Social, where he said, I'm thrilled to announce that Chris Wright will be joining my administration as both United States Secretary of Energy and member of the newly formed Council of National Energy. He's been a leading technologist and entrepreneur in energy. He's worked in nuclear, solar, geothermal, and oil and gas. He is an oil and gas executive. He is a firm believer. Well, I actually—it's hard to know what somebody actually believes in their mind, but he's a firm—
S: Proponent?
C: Proponent. Not proponent. That's not the right word either. He claims that there are no negative impacts from fossil fuel energy on the climate.
B: Wow.
E: Wow. That's a remarkable statement, Bob. Thank you.
S: Despite all the scientific evidence.
C: He claims in a video that he posted on his LinkedIn, and this is what he labeled the video, five commonly used words around energy and climate that are both deceptive and destructive. Climate crisis, energy transition, carbon pollution, clean energy, and dirty energy. Hashtag energy sobriety. So he claims that quote, we have see no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts or floods. Despite endless fear mongering, he says that there is no climate crisis. And he goes on in this 12-and-a-half-minute video that he posted to his LinkedIn about a year ago to basically argue that carbon dioxide cannot be a pollutant and carbon dioxide cannot have all of these downstream negative consequences because it's natural, because it's a natural phenomenon that occurs via photosynthesis.
S: Right, which is a nonsensical argument.
C: Yeah, and respiration. So it's pretty scary. He says that there is no climate crisis and the negative impacts from climate change, because, of course, he can't fully argue that climate change doesn't exist. Like, there are very few people who do that now. Instead, they've sort of moved the goalposts. And he says that the negative impacts from climate change are less than the benefits of using fossil fuels. So he is a firm believer that we need to continue to drill. We need to continue to burn. That these approaches to energy are going to allow us energy independence. And according to Donald Trump's Truth Social post, U.S. ENERGY DOMINANCE, he put it in all caps.
E: Well, that's dominant.
C: Yeah, which is a large goal of the administration. You know, to be fair, Chris Wright has worked in alternative energy. He works in energy, which means he's worked in renewables and non-renewables. It does appear, I cannot speak for him, but it does appear that the motivation here is money. It's not clean energy. It's just energy, right? And however it's going to be the most lucrative and the easiest to produce that energy is going to be the path. And that's what's so scary, because we know the cost now of natural gas. We know the cost of crude oil. We know the cost of fracking. And these just aren't arguments that he's making. And he's going to have inordinate power, if he's confirmed by the Senate, to lead the Department of Energy.
S: He will 100% be confirmed. There's no way that they're not going to confirm him.
C: Oh, God, don't say that.
S: But let me tell you this, Cara. I'm going to make an argument for why this is not as bad as it seems.
C: I know where you're going with this.
B: Good luck.
S: And I'm not just comparing him to the other secretary or whatever.
C: No, I know where you're going with this. It's an argument.
S: It's an argument. Here's my argument.
C: It's still bad.
S: But let me put it out. Obviously, it's bad to have somebody in that position who just straight up denies the science, right? That's not a good thing. And this will absolutely be a setback. And it would be worse, obviously, than if we had somebody who was fully on board with transitioning away from fossil fuels, which he isn't. But at this point in time, essentially, we have two strategies for transitioning to renewable energy, green energy, low carbon energy, and away from fossil fuels. And these are not mutually exclusive, but there's some combination of reducing supply and reducing demand for fossil fuels, right? So far, we are not taking the reduce the supply approach. Under the Biden administration, the United States is producing more fossil fuels than any other country at any time ever in human history, including during Trump's administration.
B: So we're right on plan then.
C: Is that a function of just there being more people and more need?
S: It's a function of – you know what it is? It's a function of Russia invading Ukraine. We jacked up our oil and gas production to essentially displace Russia's sales to Europe. So we're trying to replace Russia's sales to Europe of natural gas and oil. And that put us over the top to more production than we've ever done before. So the idea that – it's always been silly for Trump to say, we're going to bring oil back and we're going to be dominant. We're already there, dude. We're already – we're producing more oil than we ever have before or anyone has ever had.
C: But Biden didn't do that willy-nilly.
S: No, he did it deliberately.
C: Deliberate with a lot of calculation.
S: But the point is we're already there. We're already producing all this oil. And we're doing that to keep prices down. Now, keeping prices down is actually a good thing because it lowers the value of pulling that oil out of the ground. It's also good because it takes money away from authoritarians who are basically funded by the sale of fossil fuels. So ideally, we will reduce demand first. How do we reduce demand first? Because then that, again, reduces the cost. It reduces the value of fossil fuel and the incentive to go after it. You do that by transitioning to green energy, right?
C: Fewer cars that run on gas.
S: Fewer cars that run on gas and fewer coal and gas-powered energy production. So for right now, it's more important that we build non-fossil fuel resources than that we restrict fossil fuel. Eventually, we have to dial down the fossil fuel. But for now, if we're just investing in expanding our non-fossil fuel infrastructure, that's fine. And so my hope is, again, this is just a hope. But there has been a lot of good news recently on the nuclear power front, which I just summarized in my blog post. The Biden administration and also a consortium of countries around the world have pledged to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050.
J: Good.
B: Wow.
S: Triple. That's huge. That is huge.
E: It's a big piece of the puzzle.
S: Now, if by 2050, we have a 50% increase in our energy demand, that means doubling the nuclear percentage of production. So right now, we're about 19%, 20%. So we're talking about going to about 40% nuclear worldwide and in the US. And that's probably where we should be. So I don't know of any reason why this guy or why the Trump administration is going to undo nuclear.
C: No. Yeah, he's pro-nuclear.
S: They're pro-nuclear.
C: This has broad bipartisan support.
S: So, yeah, this has broad bipartisan support. So as long as this keeps happening, that could keep us on pace to where we need to get by 2050, right? It may not be good for the solar or the wind industry. I get that. That's where I'm more concerned. But here's the thing. Some people have argued that because wind and solar are currently the cheapest form of new energy to add to the grid, that it doesn't need a lot of subsidies at this point in time. Companies are doing it because it's the cheapest. And so, hopefully, that will have inertia unless they actively try to inhibit it, which they may, which Trump may just decide to mess with the wind industry just to do it because he doesn't like wind.
B: Kills birds and stuff.
S: I don't think this guy would do that because, as you say, he's kind of neutral.
C: Yeah, I think he's neutral about the source like from a moralistic perspective. But that's actually a bad thing.
S: Yeah, I agree. But for now, doing the all of the above so that at least the renewables and the nuclear and the geothermal and the hydroelectric can still grow and expand, it may not be that much of a disaster is what I'm saying. It may not be bad.
C: I don't know. I think that he wants to fully deregulate oil and gas.
S: Well, they're going to deregulate. They're going to deregulate. But they're also probably going to deregulate nuclear and deregulate solar and wind, too.
C: Yeah, but that's not going to. So all of those things, yes, are going to make for more competition for alternative sources in the marketplace. But what they don't do is they do not mitigate the pollution.
S: Of course. Absolutely.
C: That is what is actually causing the climate crisis.
S: I agree. But I think, though, my point is it's really complicated to try to figure out over the next four years what the net effect of this is going to be. And if they continue to expand the non-fossil fuel infrastructure, it may not be that dramatic a difference. And if we are in a much better place in terms of more nuclear, more wind, more solar in four years, that might be a better time to start really thinking of ways to dial back fossil fuels. It wasn't going to happen in the short term anyway. It wasn't happening under Biden. It's definitely not going to happen under Trump.
C: Well, how quickly does – I mean, don't these nuclear plants take quite a while to get online?
S: But part of what Biden is already doing, he also put together – I mean, there's so many things going on. So he announced $900 million to support startup Gen 3 nuclear reactors. He was part of 25 signatories pledging tripling nuclear capacity by 2050. And also there's the Advance Act, which was just passed with bipartisan support, which streamlines regulations and also provides sweeping support for the nuclear industry. So they're trying to figure out ways – there's a commission. It's like figure out ways to make us be able to build nuclear reactors cheaper and faster and to streamline all the regulations. That's already happening. Again, I don't see that being undone under this guy or Trump.
C: And this is my spidey senses picking up. But while I agree that the regulatory burden is high right now – and we've talked about this on the show before – and there does need to be some streamlining, I think that it is still very important.
S: Absolutely.
C: That this be done safely.
S: Absolutely.
C: And I'm very worried that too much streamlining could lead to disaster.
S: And we should be worried about that.
C: Because then that will set us back like the last disaster set us back.
S: Right. So the devil is always going to be in the details. There is like a nuclear industry too. They don't necessarily want to build unsafe reactors. It's hard to really calculate the net effect of all of this. So yes, they probably – because Trump deregulates with a machete, not with a scalpel. We've seen that before. That's clearly what they're going to do now. And so yes, that is a legitimate concern. But the investors and the industry probably will welcome the deregulation. But hopefully there's already international standards in place for the nuclear industry. And hopefully they won't be eroded too much.
C: You know, it's like that is really where it bumps up. And that's the part where I don't have the same kind of hope that you have. I wish I did.
S: I'm trying to be positive over here, Cara. But the other thing is in four years, they could all snap back. You know what I mean? Or at least some of them. Or if they went too far, we have time to claw that back. It's not like whatever happens now is forever. It's really just – we're losing four years.
C: Whatever happens now with regards to regulation is forever if a plant is built under those regulations.
S: Yeah, probably not in four years. That's a little fast.
C: Yeah, and that's the hope, right? Because ultimately, while I agree with you that people who work in this sector do not want unsafe plants, there are many people who care more about profits than they do about safety.
S: Absolutely. So this is a complicated issue. This is one that I am definitely going to be keeping my eye on. I think it's not all doom and gloom. This guy because of the nuclear thing and because that's all gaining momentum, I'm hoping that over the next four years, that's where they'll focus their efforts.
C: I hope so too. I mean I do – I agree with you that it's not all doom and gloom. But I do think that the goalposts have been moved so far at this point that the reason it's not all doom and gloom is because exactly like you're saying, maybe we'll have nuclear. But like the deregulation of fossil fuels is scaring the living shit out of me right now. I got to be honest.
S: Yeah, I agree. I agree. I'm just not sure how much more damage they can do. We're already producing more than we've ever produced. You know what I mean? Like only so much they can produce.
C: We're already producing more than we've ever produced with strong regulations in place. So imagine when the lid comes off.
S: Yeah. So we'll see. We'll keep everyone updated. We'll see where it is in the spectrum of worst case versus best case scenario. I mean of all of Trump's appointments, this is not the one that keeps me up at night. Yes, this is not ideal. This is basically what you would – this is exactly what I would have expected. I guess it could have been worse.
C: I didn't expect somebody who fully denies climate change.
S: Oh, yeah. I did. Oh, 100 percent because Trump does.
C: I just thought we were past this at this point.
S: No, because Trump denies it. He's 100 percent denying climate change. He's still saying it's a hoax. Clearly there's two people that keep me up at night in terms of the appointments right now. One is Tulsi Gabbard because she's – you don't need to get into that. As head of intelligence, that's like actually dangerous for the country. And the other one is RFK Jr. because he could destroy the federal healthcare.
C: Well, now I'm going to add Dr. Oz to that.
S: Dr. Oz is not nearly as bad as RFK Jr.
E: At least he's a doctor.
S: I am not a fan of Dr. Oz. I don't know how much of mischief he can make at Medicare and Medicaid.
C: I don't know what he can actually do. Exactly.
S: Whereas RFK is like actively wants to cause mischief, wants to oppose vaccines. He is the wrecking ball. And Gabbard just doesn't know reality from fantasy and that's dangerous. As the head of intelligence, that's very, very dangerous.
C: But I guess my thing is you can say don't get vaccinated all you want. I don't know if he can actually block a vaccine from being available to the public. But you can say don't get vaccinated all you want. But if you defund or deeply change the structure of Medicaid and Medicare, people will die. Lots and lots of people will die.
S: Well, there's lots of ways that RFK Jr. can undermine our vaccine infrastructure in this country. This is a separate talk. Maybe we'll give this – probably what we should do is bring David Gorsky on because he's been really writing a lot about RFK Jr.
C: I just did like a little primer last or two weeks ago.
S: We'll do a good deep dive on like what could he actually do because that is a very interesting question. But that's I think the most – those two are the most scary appointees so far.
B: The big question, will he have a larger U.S. body count than he had during COVID? That's the big question.
S: Possibly. It is possible.
E: The next pandemic scares me.
News Item #4 - Finding Planet Nine (38:07)[edit]
S: All right, Bob. Tell us about finding Planet 9.
B: My turn, is it? Okay. Planet X or is it Planet 9 was in the news recently. Scientists have published a proposal to use an array of 200 small telescopes that they say can prove if a massive planet indeed exists in the farthest reaches of our solar system in the region where the so-called trans-Neptunian objects dwell. Daniel Gomez and Gary Bernstein from the Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania wrote on the online archive their paper. It is named An Automated Occultation Network for Gravitational Mapping of the Trans-Neptunian Solar System. Okay. So to better appreciate this, let's explore the few bits of terminology typically found in these discussions. First off, is it Planet X or is it Planet 9? Planet X is more general. That's a general term that's been used for many, many years, many decades.
E: Oh, gosh. A hundred years.
B: Right. Used for the potential planet beyond Neptune. That's Planet X. Planet 9, on the other hand, is often used interchangeably with Planet X, of course. But it seems Planet 9 is used most often when referring to the idea that the ninth planet of our solar system could potentially be found by observing its impact on the orbits of trans-Neptunian objects. So that's where you're going to mostly find the term Planet 9 and that makes sense and that's fine. All right. So this brings us to trans-Neptunian objects. And it's not hard to predict what that term refers to. It refers to objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. But those objects have two primary categories. The most distant trans-Neptunian objects exist in a region that I wasn't aware of called the scattered disk.
E: Whoa.
B: Now these are really, really far away, up to 100 AUs, astronomical units. Each AU is the distance from the Earth to the sun, 93 million miles. Sorry, I don't have the kilometers memorized. The scattered disk contains small icy bodies and they're in very eccentric orbits, really high off of the plane. The other major area where trans-Neptunian objects exist is – this is the place you really want to be. If you ever hang out beyond Neptune, it's going to be the Kuiper Belt. That's where you got to go.
E: Oh, yeah, sure.
B: Right? Sure, sure. Evan, you know. The Kuiper Belt starts at Neptune's orbit, right beyond its orbit at 30 AUs and stretches out to 50 AUs or 55 AUs I've heard as well. So it's huge. It's about 20 times as wide as the asteroid belt that we know between Mars – we know very well between Mars and Jupiter. 20 times as wide and potentially 200 times as massive. So the Kuiper Belt is gargantuan. Kuiper Belt objects though, they're not technically asteroids. I wasn't quite aware of this. As far as I can tell, it's because the word asteroid is mainly reserved for a location, not really what you're made of but really where you exist. So the large rocky objects between or near the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, those are asteroids. So if you're there, if you come from there, you're an asteroid. But Kuiper Belt objects are not referred to as asteroids. They're just basically Kuiper Belt objects. And they're actually – they're different also as well. They're made up of frozen volatiles, various ices composed of methane or ammonia and water too as well. Trans-Neptunian objects are anything beyond Neptune. And within that area, there's a huge Kuiper Belt area and there's also the more distant scattered disk object area. So now these objects are thought to be remnants from the solar system's formation. So they are ancient. And since they're so far away, they're basically unchanged. So they would be amazing repositories of information of the early solar system because they have not been melted. They have not been changed really in any way out there. Now, there are distant orbits though. This was interesting. They're in such distant orbits beyond Neptune. We think because Jupiter and Saturn got – basically they got together and they imposed their gravitational will on these remnants. And they forced them from out from in the inner solar system closer maybe to Jupiter-Saturn area perhaps. But they basically forced them out into the orbits that they are in now beyond Neptune. The question then becomes, can there be a true planet-sized object out there, a planet nine or even multiple such objects hiding in the Kuiper Belt? Many people think so. Now, the evidence most often cited for this, it's subtle. It's nothing really that's overt. But it is there and a lot of people are looking into it very closely. It's the subtle clustering of orbits of some of these Kuiper Belt objects. To the scientists, to the astronomers, the orbits just don't seem to be as randomly distributed as you would expect them to be. And one explanation they contend could be a very distant, unseen planet. Some say it could have as much as – as many as five earth masses, a super earth out there waiting to be found. That's five – I mean that would be – I mean I don't believe that. But I think there could be something out there and I hope there is. That would be amazing. Now, of course, they have searched and searched for planet nine. Nothing has been found. And this is where the paper comes in, this latest paper. So the authors contend that using 200 small telescopes, like something like 20, 30 centimeters, I mean pretty small, separated by five kilometers and lined up in an array that stretches end-to-end 1,000 kilometers wide. That such an array of 200 telescopes could tell us these critical details about planet nine if it even exists. So the key technique that they describe in detail in their paper is called occultation. Occultation appears more capable and fascinating than I would have thought. So here's how this works. So imagine you're observing an asteroid or a trans-Neptunian object. So you're observing it and you precisely time to the nanosecond or so when it blocks a distant star, right? It's moving in its orbit and it moves in front of a distant star that's in our galaxy somewhere, say, whatever, 10, 20, 30, 40 light-years away, whatever it is. So you time to the nanosecond when it's blocked and then also to the nanosecond that when the star reappears. And we could do that very, very precisely. Now, if you do that, not only with one telescope, but 200 of these telescopes, each one having their own slightly different angle, right? Each one has its own specific angle onto that occultation event. And so they'll have their own view, their own timings. So if you take all these 200 timings and put them together, you combine all that data. What you get is you get an extremely precise understanding of the asteroid's orbit, where it is and when, very, very precisely. It gets even better than that. The more of these occultations that you observe, the more accurate your timings and your positional data become, more so than any other method that's used alone. So then ultimately then the idea here is that once you have these hyper-accurate orbits mapped out, we can then detect very subtle gravitational anomalies, right? If we know down to the third, fourth, fifth, sixth decimal point when this star should be blocked by an asteroid or trans-Neptunian object. If we know where that – and it doesn't happen, then there's some – you have an anomaly. You have a gravitational orbital anomaly, and that's something that can be investigated. So we may discover, for example, through these anomalies that various asteroids are moving or trans-Neptunian objects are moving in a way that points to an unknown large gravitational source in a very specific orbital location. In other words, planet nine. So that's the hope, that this hyper-accurate information can actually say there's got to be something over here. Multiple asteroids, multiple trans-Neptunian objects are telling us that there's some mass in this specific area. It seems like it's got, say, two earth masses, and it's in this orbit, this distance from the sun. It could potentially be that specific. So all we would then have to do is just zoom in on that specific area, and we'd have a relatively very small parcel of space to investigate, and we could potentially find it. Best case scenario.
S: That's how Obi-Wan Kenobi discovered Carina.
B: Exactly.
E: Oh, that's right, because something was missing.
S: Yeah, there was a gravitational source that was missing.
E: But there was no – right. But there was no body assigned to it. It was a dead spot in space, but there had to have been something there.
S: Yeah.
B: All right. So even if –
E: Bob, we're talking science here.
B: Yes.
C: Science.
S: So even if planet nine, though, is a bust, a server like this could be incredibly informative about our outer solar system, right? There's still so much to learn even without planet nine. They believe – the researchers believe that a 10-year survey could find 1,800 new trans-Neptunian objects and reveal details about their properties, their orbital dynamics, their surfaces, so many different things. It could refine also our understanding of the boundary of our solar system and how it evolved.
S: And, Bob, a lot of the objects that it discovers could be dwarf planets even if they're not full planets.
B: Oh, yeah. Well, I didn't say. But, yeah, if it's not clear, dwarf planets basically are all in the Kuiper Belt. But the one exception I think is Ceres in the main asteroid belt. Yeah, in the asteroid belt. But pretty much all the other ones are – so, yeah, that's where we find dwarf planets. Favorite long shot though is the outside chance that it could reveal information about primordial black holes, black holes that existed from the early, early small ones that existed early in the universe soon after the Big Bang. So if a primordial black hole was to pass in front of a star, we could detect that by the microlensing event that would happen to the star's light, right? It would just bend the light and we could say, oh, crap. There's a super dense mass right there. It could be a primordial black hole. Long shot, I know, but that would be cool. But it would be truly amazing finding a true planet in the Kuiper Belt. How epic would that be? That would be astronomical discovery of the millennia really. I mean another planet potentially, multiple earth masses. The number would go back from eight back up to nine. I think it would make Pluto feel a lot better since one of its Kuiper Belt buddies was recognized as a true planet even if Pluto could never reattain that. And this project is estimated to cost only 15 million USD. That really – that's smaller than I would have anticipated. That really is – I mean sure.
E: That's a rounding error for some agencies.
S: Oh, yeah, it is.
B: Yeah, it really is. It's so tiny. It sounds like an amazing deal. It seems like a no-brainer deal to me. Of course once this is truly vetted by other scientists and astronomers and make sure their numbers look good. I mean this sounds like a great idea. I hope they do it.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
B: Sure.
News Item #5 - Stress and Paranormal Belief (49:26)[edit]
- Study Finds People with Traditional Paranormal Beliefs Feel More Stressed Than Those with New Age Varieties - The Debrief [4]
S: Evan, tell us about stress and paranormal belief.
E: It stresses me out. Does it though? Well, it depends. Did you know there's something called the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, the RPBS? This is a tool I had not heard of before. I have no – and shame on me. I probably should have read about this before at some point. It is a 26-item survey that measures a person's belief in paranormal phenomena. It's a widely used tool in parapsychological research and was developed by Jerome Tabasic and published in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies in 2004. So this has been around a while and I believe there are even references to this prior to that. So yeah, for many decades, this tool has been there. Basically, you have the participants respond on a Likert scale. One, strongly disagree, to seven, strongly agree. And they ask you questions about, well, how do you feel about witchcraft? How do you feel about superstition or spiritualism or extraordinary life forms? And down the list it goes. So much prior research has relied on this – using this tool. And the results have suggested that paranormal belief in general is not linked to poorer psychological well-being. However, certain facets of paranormal belief, such as superstition, could be linked with stress vulnerability.
C: You're saying that's a claim of these authors?
E: Well, no. This is – again, this is the prior research. I haven't even gotten to the current study yet. I'm just –
S: That's what I've read as well. It's like superstition is the one that gets triggered by feeling lack of control, feeling under stress, et cetera, depression.
E: Until along came a revised version of this tool called the Rash Purified Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, RPPBS for short. Yes, another tool to measure people's beliefs in paranormal phenomena. But it's considered a better statistical method that they use with improved validity and reliability compared to the original one. Enhanced ability to compare results across different populations and a more robust measurement of paranormal belief as a unidimensional construct. I also wanted to look up – because I'm unfamiliar with these tools, I did a little more research into it to figure out, like, is this legitimate? Is this considered scientific or is this kind of just something that experimental researchers are kind of throwing together on their own? But no, they say it is. They say this is legitimate.
S: It's part of psychological research. It could also be used for parapsychological bogus research, but it is part of just psychological research.
E: It's considered widely accepted as a reliable tool.
S: Yeah, like psychologists studying conspiracy theories. It doesn't mean that they believe in the conspiracy theories. They're studying them. It's the same thing. They're studying paranormal belief.
E: And that means – yeah, so that gets us now to the news item this week, which we can now better understand. There was a new study that was published in PLOS One titled Re-evaluation of the Relationship Between Paranormal Belief and Perceived Stress Using Statistical Modeling. The authors are Kenneth Drinkwater, Andrew Dinovian, and Neil Dagnall. Drinkwater and his colleagues had 3,084 people complete the RASH model survey, which is the more refined survey, alongside a questionnaire evaluating different facets of perceived stress called the Perceived Stress Scale, of course, to help deepen their understanding of potential links between paranormal belief and stress. Here are some quotes of what the researchers found. Finding support that the notion that traditional paranormal belief is associated with external control, specifically the notion that unknown supernatural forces and powers influence existence. Feelings of distress and reduced ability to cope with stress were associated with these traditional paranormal beliefs. So superstition is one of those considered traditional paranormal beliefs, right? Sort of belief in witchcraft, ghosts, these sorts of things. External forces that you don't have control over. And on the other side of this coin are the New Age philosophy sort of paranormal beliefs dealing with psi, spiritualism, precognition. They could not find it to be statistically linked to any tendencies regarding distress or coping for these New Age philosophy. And this is what was expected in their findings in line with the idea that traditional paranormal belief reflects anxiety. And again, it's about that lack of control over those external forces. They do admit the study was exploratory and does not support any cause effect relationship. Why is it important? So why did the authors why are they bothering with this? And I thought they summed it up nicely in the abstract of the paper, which I will read to you now, this part of it. Research into paranormal belief is important because supernatural credence persists within contemporary society and potentially influences everyday attitudes and behavior. For instance, investigators report that paranormal belief is associated with lower levels of trust in science and higher anti-science attitudes. These are notions not based upon reasoned or reliable evidence which conflict with prevailing conceptions of the world. Specific examples allied to belief in the paranormal are endorsement of alternative medicine, anti-vaccination, and conspiracies. Evidence suggests that paranormal belief is a form of non-clinical delusion arising from an over-reliance on emotional content and the failure to rigorously evaluate the validity of information. And what is it we talk about on this show for the past 20 years and the 10 years prior to that that we've been a skeptical organization and all the shoulders of the giants that we've stood upon that came even before that? It all boils down to this.
S: Yeah.
E: Right.
S: But I do think there's multiple moving parts here, having followed this literature somewhat over the years as a skeptic. There's also other studies which show that there's a correlation with intuitive thinking style versus an analytical thinking style, which makes perfect sense. And there's also this question of, which I don't see as much in the literature, the fantasy-prone personality type, which I think is just an extreme version of this tendency to believe in the paranormal or maybe intuitive thinking. But also this is very context-dependent. You know what I mean? It's like what culture did you grow up in and what is – how culturally acceptable are the beliefs that you're talking about? And that may be where the real divide here is between traditional paranormal beliefs and new-age paranormal beliefs in that the new-age one seems to be more of a – like you get into that subculture and that worldview. And I think it tends to attract people who have, again, this sort of fantasy-prone or intuitive thinking style, whereas like the more traditional ones may come about because of stress or whatever. It makes sense that they would not be – it's not all one phenomenon. It's not monolithic. I think there's – And I just – I also think that conspiracy beliefs are its own phenomenon, like the tendency to believe in conspiracies while there's a ton of overlap that is an entity unto itself.
E: Yeah. It's interesting. I would imagine there would be – and of course more research is needed – correlations of stress and conspiracy theory – conspiracy thinking.
S: Yeah. Maybe. But again, the conspiracy thinking comes in two flavors, opportunistic conspiracy thinking and dedicated conspiracy thinking. People who are conspiracy theorists, they believe in all conspiracies, and people who only believe in ones that support their worldview. Opportunistically.
E: So those comforting ones won't cause the stress.
S: Right. Probably.
E: Would not – probably not cause stress for them.
S: It's an interesting area. Again, I tend to follow this because it's pretty much in our sweet spot of what we do, and it's fascinating to look at this as a psychological research project.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (59:04)[edit]
S: All right, Jay. It's who's that noisy time.
J: All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] In its entirety. So, guys, have any guesses?
E: I have a guess. That was Jay's first attempt at playing the didgeridoo.
S: It sounds like a super old recording.
J: That's a nice guess. Anybody else?
C: It just sounded like an insect to me.
J: It has an insect-like quality. Absolutely.
E: I thought I heard help me in there.
J: There was a listener, many that wrote in, one of them named Benjamin Davout. Ben here, the Frenchie from Japan. I think this is a drone. Quadcopter equipped with ultra-low noise propellers, probably the asymmetrical type with a counterweight on the side opposed to the blade. Oh, and he says, my name is pronounced Davout. So, Benjamin Davout. So, that's an interesting and very specific guess. And quadcopters do make that kind of, what would you call it, a buzzing sound? Almost like a droning sound.
E: A droning noise.
J: Yeah. That is not correct, though, and we will continue on. So, a listener named Shane Hillier wrote in and said, it's a murder hornet. So, yeah, Cara, somebody else agreed with you about the insect-like noise.
E: Oh, gosh, murder hornets.
J: A listener named Stephen Walker wrote in. He said, hi, our guess is a bee, a honeybee, doing its waggle dance to tell its buddies which direction to find the good stuff. So, yeah, there was a murder hornet and a bee. So, definitely people are hearing that kind of sound, and I always find it fascinating that bees they talk with pheromones, which is basically smells. It's pretty freaking cool that they can communicate with that. So, now I'm going to click right over to the winner. We had multiple winners, but I'll play, I'll read one of them here. So, Frederick Niant was the first person to guess right, and he guessed this as the first known recording of a human voice.
S: Oh, wow.
J: I think at some point I've played this previously. I had a different recording, and now this is like an update because something pretty remarkable happened where they were able to-
B: Remarkable.
J: So, let me give you another listener's answer. This is Joshua Banta's answer. Very, very nice description here. He said it's an actual recording from 1860 of Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville singing a Clair de Lune. This is a something, it's played on something called a phonautogram. But let me give you some more specifics here. So, James, he said James Buchanan was the U.S. president at the time, pre-Civil War, pre-Abraham Lincoln. And he said de Martinville invented a device called the phonautograph that collects sound by using a horn connected to a diaphragm, which caused a rigid bristle to vibrate and inscribe a visual representation on a hand-cranked cylinder. But this was never intended for playback, by the way. It only produced visual images to show you what sound looked like. It's just squiggles on paper. But there was absolutely no capacity for there to be any playback. Now, we click forward to 2008, and the recording was transformed into a playable digital audio file by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California. And it worked really well. So it was inferred to be played back at a 10-second speed, which caused the voice to sound like a woman or even a child. But later, the scientists realized that this was the wrong speed. And when they played it back at slower speeds, they found the one that they thought sounded the most correct. And it is of a man. And they think it is Martinville himself singing Clair de Lune. So I'll play it again. Now, keep in mind this is the lowest fidelity recording you'll probably ever hear. [plays Noisy] So that's pretty cool, guys.
C: Weird.
J: Voices from the past.
E: Unexpected.
B: Yeah.
J: So thank you for sending that in. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. And this was sent in by a listener named John Karabaik. Thank you for sending in the phonetic pronunciation of your name. And I'm going to play the sound now. [plays Noisy] If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, email us at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, it's not too late. It's actually, it can be too late, but it isn't now. You're hearing this and it's and it's basically like what, the 20th or the 21st or soon thereafter in November. You could buy tickets to we have two shows going on in Washington, D.C. We have a private show that is a live recording of the SGU, limited audience size. And we record the show. And then for an hour, all of us, including George Hrab, will do something fun and unique that has never been done before in a live audience. So if you want to have some fun, you can join us at our private show. Or you can also go to the extravaganza. This is the skeptical extravaganza stage show that we have. It's going to be in D.C. as well. And it's going to be that night. The private show will be starting at eleven thirty a.m. and the extravaganza starts at eight p.m. Please get there around seven. You can go to theskepticsguide.org. We have buttons on there that link to tickets, which means you can buy them and you can come see us and we'd love to have you.
S: And Jay, we should tell people all of the social media stuff that we are on as well. So first of all, we do a live stream most Wednesdays starting at one p.m. And most Fridays starting at five p.m. Eastern. We have a Facebook page. Two blogs are affiliated with us, Neurologica and Science-Based Medicine. And we are still on X, but we are also now on Blue Sky. And we are on Instagram and we post TikTok videos, two or three TikTok videos every week. My my most popular TikTok videos. What do you guys think? What's it up to?
E: Four point five million.
S: Five point seven million.
E: Oh, no.
B: Five point seven?
E: Climbing.
B: Damn, man. How is it really slowing down?
J: No, it's still ticking along.
S: It's still going on.
E: Still tickety tockety.
J: The interesting thing is, like, there is just no rhyme or reason. It just went viral. So, sure, we could have slipped into TikTok algorithm or whatever. But like we make a ton of these videos and it's all all revolving around the same theme. Steve watches something on TikTok and then he'll explain why that person is wrong or whatever. Like we just kind of go into some of the more wilder things that people are talking about and and bend the skeptical eye at it. But this one me, Steve and Ian were like, what happened?
S: Wish we knew the formula. It just happened.
J: We're happy about it. But it is what it is. Oh, and Steve, I can't forget. Hold on.
S: Yeah.
J: These events in D.C. are fantastic and I do hope that you can make it. But my God, you got to go to NOTACON. This is our socializing conference. This is the conference where people make connections with each other. Tons of socializing. We have a ton of entertainment that we do. George Hrab, Brian Wecht and Andrea Jones-Roy will join all of us here at the SGU. It's 2.2 days of a lot of fun. And we really hope that you can join us. You can go to notaconcon.com. That's notaconcon.com. C-O-N-C-O-N dot C-O-M. Com. Bob, are you understanding what I'm saying?
B: Pretty simple.
J: It's notaconcon.com. Ian, I swear to God. All right. So anyway, guys.
C: Did you say 2.2 days?
J: Yes. Roughly, yeah, because it's like –
C: Spigoture.
J: You don't need to explain that, Jay.
J: Anyway. You'll see because you'll be there. So anyway, please try to join us for that. It's going to be a wonderful thing. We need some happiness in the world, and their happiness will be there. So please join us.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay.
Emails (1:07:20)[edit]
S: We're going to do one quick email. This comes from Mike Hampton who writes, On Friday's live stream, you began talking about phrases like way anchor and such. It reminded me of a phrase that I think wins the award for the dumbest phrase. That is, you've got your work cut out for you. I lived most of my life thinking this phrase meant you have an easy road ahead, which is what it should mean. Any project you do that involves cutting, whether that be carpentry, paper crafts, sewing, et cetera, at least a quarter to a third of the project is cutting the material to the sizes and patterns you need. So if someone has prepared the material by cutting it out for you, the project is suddenly that much easier and going to take less time. I was shocked to learn, shocked, shocked, that it actually means the opposite, which shot that phrase to the dumbest phrase in the English language as far as I'm concerned. So I looked into it because I love the etymology, especially of these kind of phrases. What's your guess? Where does that phrase come from? What's the origin? You've got your work cut out for you.
E: Oh, gosh. I'd only be guessing.
C: I mean, yeah. Who knows?
B: Farming? Something with farming?
S: Nope. Tailoring. It comes from tailoring, which is on his list. Sewing. And usually the way like a professional tailor would work is they would have an assistant. The assistant would cut out all the patterns and they would, for a dress or whatever, anything that they were going to make. And they would do all of that ahead of time. And the primary reason for that was to make sure that they had everything. Right? So you cut out all of the pieces. You make sure that every piece is there. And then the tailor would sew them all together into the final piece, the final dress or whatever. Now the sewing was the, that's where all most of the skill.
E: The artistry.
S: The artistry. And that was a lot very exacting and complicated work. Whereas the cutting was you're cutting that of a pattern. Not that that wasn't a lot of work, but that wasn't the tailor's work. So as a tailor, if you have your work cut out for you, that means you have a lot of work ahead of you, all that intricate sewing ahead of you.
E: I see.
S: Somebody else-
C: But I get what the dude is saying, because if you don't have your work cut out for you, there's even more work to do.
S: I hear what he's saying, but because there was built into the origin of this phrase, this division of labor, not for the tailor, you have nothing to do because your assistant hasn't cut out the patterns.
C: Right. So you get to rest right now. But once your work is cut out for you.
S: Then your work begins. So basically this is when your work begins, when the work is cut, quote unquote, cut out for you.
C: But that's not really how we use the phrase.
E: No, we've, we've twisted it a bit. You have a long road ahead of you.
C: Yeah. It's going to get rough now from here on out.
S: But basically it means you have a lot of work or difficult work or like, yeah, like you have a job to do. Like this is your job and you got to do it. Yeah. The uses evolve over time, but it does make sense in the context of its origin.
B: It does.
S: But yeah, some phrases do end up meaning the opposite of what they originally meant. Like for example, blood is thicker than water. We've talked about this on the show before. It means the opposite.
C: Doesn't it lob off the last part of the phrase?
S: Yeah. It's the blood of the, I forget now, it was like the blood of the Christ is thicker than the water of the womb or something. And it means the opposite of what people use it to mean now. It means that your dedication to your religion is stronger than your familial ties, where people now use it to mean that your familial ties are the strongest. The blood is thicker than water. It was flipped in its meaning. Always fascinating.
C: We do that a lot where we shorten the phrase and the phrase, I've seen a few other examples of this where there's a long phrase with a moral at the end, but when we shorten it, we only focus on the first sentence, which is actually the opposite of the point.
S: Like the proof is in the pudding.
E: The proof is in the pudding.
S: The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Or this is my, one of my big peeves and people say, I could care less.
E: Yes.
B: Oh my God. You can? So you care more.
S: I couldn't care less. I care so little. I couldn't possibly care even less. But people, they shorten it because we tend to shorten things, but that it flips the meaning when you shorten it.
B: That's annoying. That's annoying. Everyone out there. Just stop that one.
S: Say, I couldn't add the int and I couldn't care less, please. Okay. Guys, we have a great interview coming up with Kevin Folta. So let's go on with that interview now.
Interview with Kevin Folta (1:12:27)[edit]
S: Well, we are joined now by Kevin Folta. Kevin, welcome back to the SGU.
KF: Yeah, thank you. It's really nice to be here again.
S: Yeah, it's been a while and it's always good to interview people in person, so we could look face to face and have a discussion rather than over the interwebbies. So I've been dying to talk to you about a topic, a new technique that we can talk about just very, very briefly about that plant biologists are using to make new cultivars. You know what I'm talking about?
KF: Well, yeah, this was the work that was done. We've mentioned this briefly with Judd Ward and the folks. I can't remember the name of the company now, but the newest, it's a new technique that is involving doubling the genetic material inside of a cell. So basically creating a, not just the old polyploids, but actually creating a hybrids from hybrids. So allowing complete genetic sets being to pass down. So you're not getting genetic mixing in each generation.
S: So, yeah. So if you make a hybrid, then you can have those hybrid traits breed through to subsequent generations.
KF: That's right. You have a breed true going forward.
S: Because right now you can't do that with a hybrid.
KF: That's right.
S: This is something that we, that I know we bring up when we're talking about GMOs and we should probably remind our audience, you are a plant biologist and tell us, tell us-
KF: I'm a molecular biologist by training. I ended up working in plants and we do a lot of work in genomics, mostly around flavors and aromas, but other major plant traits that are involved in, traits that are important for farmers.
S: You're still a strawberry guy though.
KF: Not so much. I'm out of strawberries now.
C: Really?
S: No, because I wanted to get my new strawberries from you.
C: I tried those strawberries like on camera once with you.
S: They were amazing.
KF: Yeah, that's right. We did. And all those strawberries went in the autoclave, unfortunately. We created a fungus resistant strawberry and we, but the industry wouldn't use it. So it's gone.
J: Wait, so Kevin, you selectively bred these strawberries, right? Just correct me when I'm wrong.
KF: Well, you're wrong.
J: That's why I asked you.
KF: These were a variety that already existed that we added a gene that would prime its immune system. So even before a pathogen came along, it was ready to confront the pathogen. So, and it was awesome because they didn't get as sick. You could, they would recover from disease. It was great. And as we know, fungicide or strawberries are fungicide dependent crops. And so it allowed us to potentially make something that would help the industry farm with fewer fungicides, which is great for the environment, great for farmers. But there was a lukewarm feeling in the industry about it.
C: Because it was GM?
KF: Because it was genetically modified.
E: Oh my gosh. Really?
C: Where the gene, was it a synthetic insertion? Was it something from another organism?
KF: It was a plant gene in a plant. So it was a plant, it was from Arabidopsis.
C: Cotton? No, that's not cotton.
KF: No, Arabidopsis is the little white lab mouse.
C: Yes. The lab mouse of plants.
KF: Of plants, right. And so we put that in and it seemed to prime, it did great. The strawberry did wonderfully, but it did have a yield hit. So in other words, you were resistant to disease, but you had a slight dip in yield. And between that and the genetic engineering trait, they weren't so excited.
C: That's so interesting because a slight dip in yield, yes, I could see on paper that would be frightening to a farmer, but when all of your crop gets taken by fungus, that's a big dip in yield. So I guess they're willing to roll the dice.
S: Yeah, long term it might be positive.
C: Yeah.
J: But wait, way more importantly, they were delicious. And people need to, people I think would be very responsive to it if they knew how good they were.
KF: Yeah, but the base, that comes from the base hybrid. The basic strawberry was so good that, you add one more gene, you couldn't taste it. It just purely was in the management. Which is really expensive to apply.
J: So why, you might not know this answer, but why would we still get these supermarket strawberries that don't have a lot of flavor? Like, why aren't they just starting to grow these even without the gene editing?
KF: But that's changing. And it's because over the last decade, my lab spent a lot of time identifying the genes that control the traits that consumers really like. So we identified, we interviewed consumers, having them taste strawberries, and they tasted hundreds of different kinds of strawberries. And then we went through and did principal component analysis. So we took a strawberry, exploded it into its chemistry, and then said, which ones always line up with consumer liking? And there was always a list of 12 that consumers really liked. You know, when the consumers liked it, one of those 12 or multiples of those 12 was available. So then we found the genes that underlie those 12 volatile aroma traits. And then once we had those genes nailed down, identified markers associated with them, so DNA signatures, that would then, as they were inherited, would allow us to get all of them in one place. So that work is still ongoing by the strawberry breeding program.
C: And that's conventional breeding at that point.
KF: It's conventional breeding.
C: You're not actually turning those genes on. You're just finding cultivars that already have them and breeding them together.
KF: That's right. And the cool part is, is this is all done in a seedling. In the old days, we used to have to put out 10 acres of strawberries and taste them and run them through gas chromatography to find the ones that had it. Now you take 384 seedlings in a Petri dish, basically, do the assay, and then throw away the ones that don't have the markers. So this work is still ongoing at the University of Florida.
S: That's awesome.
KF: And I'm a little bit separate from it these days.
C: Can I ask a quick question? Like with this example, now that we have that kind of in our minds of how that works, could you just like CRISPR those things on?
KF: Now that's more possible, yes.
C: And would that then be considered, obviously, it is genetic engineering, but would it be considered genetically modified organism?
KF: That would be only if we left around the hardware that did the edit. So if you had Cas9, if you had the enzyme, that does the little scissors trick. If that enzyme was engineered in to do the work, then it would be one thing. But there's a lot of plants where you can engineer a single cell with CRISPR and do it in a single cell with the protein itself rather than have to install the gene. So in other words, you just put in the hardware rather than have the cell make the hardware.
C: Oh, my gosh. This is so annoying that you have to worry about this.
KF: Oh, yeah. Totally. But then you have that one cell, and sometimes you can get that in the two cells, five cells, 10 cells, whatever, and then eventually have a whole plant in that one cell. That one's foreign DNA free, yet it contains the edit you're looking for. That one is not a regulated article by the USDA.
S: So it's genetically engineered, but not genetically modified in the US. Is that correct?
KF: Well, as the USDA says, it's not a regulated article.
S: That's the bottom line.
C: I mean, it just goes to show that, yeah, the fundamental choices that are made in legislation around this are so divorced from the science.
J: I mean, people have this perception that if they eat a genetically modified organism, that's going to do something to them.
S: To their DNA.
J: To their DNA and everything. And again, it's misinformation. It's disinformation. It's big industry. There's motivations behind all this stuff.
S: I want to get back to the hybrids, right? So just as we were saying, that when you hybrid two plants together, the daughter plants have a certain mix of genes that, whatever, is a good crop. But if you take those seeds and breed them together, you end up with a mix of genes that might not be what you want. So I know before GMOs came out, like 95%, 98% of crop seeds were hybrids.
KF: Oh, still are. Still are.
S: Yeah, still are. It's like they can't be – you can't save your seeds and replant them, which is like an annoying thing about the whole anti-GMO thing. You can't save seeds. You never could. You could never do that with the hybrids. So now what you're saying is you can make a cultivar where the hybrid traits do go through to subsequent generations because – so is that like in the seeds now or is that you still have to do it every generation?
KF: It is a – once you have the first plant, there's a process that you basically break meiosis, right? So the segregation of alleles during – or of genetic complements during segregation of gametes. I know I got to straighten that out.
C: He's talking about sex, y'all.
KF: Basically, when you're making the pollen and the egg cells, you make sure that that doesn't reduce its gametes. It doesn't go down with half the genetic complement.
C: Oh, interesting.
KF: It passes the whole thing in one of the two.
C: So you're turning meiosis into mitosis.
KF: You're basically turning meiosis into mitosis.
C: Interesting.
KF: And that's passing down its genetic material.
'C: So instead of reduction division, you're just dividing the cells.
KF: And one of them gets the entire complement of the hybrid. The other one gets nothing.
C: And so quick question just to interject. When a hybrid – in the before times, like you were talking about, which is still the now times, when a hybrid would breed with a hybrid, you might – it's like Punnett squares, right? Then you might get traits that were undesirable. But are they always even viable? Because I'm thinking about animal biology, which is where I come from, and sometimes hybrids can't breed.
KF: That's true.
C: Does that happen in plants as well?
KF: There are examples where plants produce infertile offspring.
C: Interesting.
KF: But that's usually a function of polyploidy. So like a seedless watermelon is a combination of one that has four times the genetic material bred against one that has the normal complement, and it comes out with 3X. And so that's where you get seedlessness.
S: That's deliberate to make it seedless.
'KF: That's deliberate, yes. You have to have the right female flowers in the field and the right male flowers. Yeah, cool stuff.
J: So Kevin, there's a question that I've been wanting to ask you for a long time. I've been saying on the show a lot, like everything we eat, all the food, all the meats, all this stuff, it's all been selectively bred, right? And some of it has been genetically engineered. So we have this limited spectrum of different types of fruits and vegetables and meats and everything. But I'm curious to know, like, how broad could this flavor profile be? Like, could there be a million more brand-new fruits that don't taste like anything we've ever tasted before that just haven't been created yet?
KF: Absolutely. Yeah, there's so much volatile diversity out there. And what you're looking at is a combination of two different things. There's the volatiles that are out there, which are the major things that shape flavor, along with acids and sugars and other aspects, where the tongue and the olfactory system collide in the brain, right, with all the different things it's sensing. But there's so many unusual volatiles that are out there, and we find things all the time. But also things that disrupt your ability to perceive them. So things like miracle fruit. You can eat a miracle fruit and then not be able to, and then when you taste acid, it tastes sweet. So it's a weird sensory combination that's very interesting.
J: So to visualize it, this might be a hard thing to answer, but we have these little, along the horizon, we have pineapple and watermelon, blah, blah, blah. But literally, there could be millions of fruit flavors that we've never tasted before.
KF: Well, maybe you've tasted them, but you don't know you did. Because what's happening in a strawberry, there are very small hints of the major flavor of peach and the major flavor of grape. And you have to think of it like an orchestra. All these things contribute just a tiny little bit that's barely perceptible, unless you really know what you're looking for. But we can use gas chromatography and other analytical methods, analytical chemistry methods, to be able to detect them. And consumers notice when they're not there, even if they don't know why.
S: So maybe we can think about this in two ways. One is, if you have all the fruity flavors that we could taste, then a fruit is some combination of those flavors, some subset, and some are more powerful than others. So yes, strawberry has peach in it, but a peach has a lot of peach in it.
KF: That's right.
S: But there are also potentially, like, you talk about the chemical space. Is there a space of flavors that nature hasn't necessarily fully explored all of those flavors, and maybe there is more room for even new flavors that we've never tasted before? That we even know about.
KF: That's interesting. I think there probably are. I think if you start going into especially floral aromas, where you're attracting pollinators and unusual pollinators, where you attract the enemies of herbivores, so you have plants that are being fed upon, and then the plant will exude volatiles to attract the predator of the thing that's feeding on it. It kind of calls in the troops. But all these things may have some sort of flavor response in us, but we just haven't integrated them into fruits and vegetables. You know, the volatile ohm is extensive.
S: Yeah, right, exactly. There may be flavors in plants that are delicious, but the plants are poisonous to humans.
KF: Could be.
S: So we could make a non-poisonous version of them or get their genes into stuff we can eat.
KF: Absolutely, and all kinds of other interesting stuff, not just flavors and aromas. Look at like Sichuan peppercorns that have that numbing effect. There's so many interesting sensory aspects of plant biology, and I wish I still played in that field. We really kind of moved out of it a bunch just because now it's in the hands of the breeders. Now they've got to put it all together.
B: It reminds me, I was reading an article about medieval food and what it tasted like, and the flavor profiles that they enjoyed. If modern people had that, they would be like, what did I just eat? That was horrible. But it's making me think in the future that people of our future, our descendants, might feel bad for us because they're like, can you imagine they had so few things to eat, so few fruits, and they're enjoying, they have this cornucopia of tastes and flavors and volatiles that we just can't even imagine right now, and they would think of us as these poor people that had horrible food.
E: Tainted. People can be tainted by these artificial flavors that are out there. They think they know what a strawberry tastes like because they taste enough artificial strawberry. They don't really know what a strawberry really is supposed to taste like.
C: But isn't so much of food science understanding the basic interests of the consumer? And consumers like fat. They like sugar. They like things that historically, evolutionarily, were rare. And if we can make healthy food taste that way, then we can have the best of both worlds, and I'm down for that.
KF: Yeah, well, that was one of the big issues, was could you find volatiles that replaced sweetness? And you can. That's been some work by Linda Bartyshuk in our institution, a guy named Thomas Calhoun. They were looking at the flavor volatiles that made people sense sweetness in the absence of sugar. And so you would take two glasses of water, put in a tablespoon of sugar, and mix it. In one of them, you would add some of these fruity volatiles, and people would say the one with the volatiles was sweeter.
C: Smart.
KF: Even if they couldn't perceive the volatiles.
J: But it's incredible when you think of, like, someone who enjoys cooking a lot of Italian food, right? You know, onions and garlic, these are like the bases of so many different things in that. And then you can go to India now, and the bases of their flavors, there's a lot of curries, which are constructed flavors anyway, right? The complexity is so broad. Could you imagine if there was another 50 culture versions of food that we just have no idea what it tastes like, but it's partly because we don't have the vegetables and the beginnings to start those completely different types of foods that could be out there, you know? I just love that because I just think, like Bob said, in the future, people might have access to this stuff. They might be able to, like, genetically engineer something, like just by talking to an AI and then grow it and be like, oh, my God, I made a new freaking fruit. No one's ever tasted this before.
E: That's a good point.
C: That's cool, yeah.
E: Are they using AI in this development?
KF: Yeah, they are using this. And mostly that's happening with the breeders now. That's not anything. My lab is working on the opposite of AI. We decided when everyone's going AI, we're just going to go to kind of ignorant randomness. And so what we decided to do, this is the coolest new science, we were taking – we always wanted to take an organism and just put random DNA in it and see what comes from it.
S: And what do you mean by random DNA?
KF: Random DNA.
S: You mean random genes or, like, literally random sequence?
KF: A random sequence.
S: So it's not even a gene.
KF: It's not even a gene. It never – it encodes a protein product, a peptide, that has never existed in the universe before.
C: So instead of sort of having a hypothesis and going top down theoretically, you're just, like, going bottom up and going, what happens if we just mix this stuff up?
S: You're just throwing a whole bunch of shit against the wall and see what sticks.
C: Yeah, see what sticks.
KF: I always liken it to throwing monkey wrenches into the machine, that you're standing next to this elaborate machine throwing monkey wrenches in. Most of the time they don't do anything. But once in a while, one sticks in the gears. And so this is the coolest thing that we've been doing because we've been showing in bacteria as well as plants that we can identify new vulnerabilities for lethality by using random peptides. And the random peptides stick in either in different places or the random RNAs suppress RNA that's required for certain developmental transitions. And so why this is so cool is because we're not going to create a new herbicide or a new antibiotic by creating a peptide or a mimic of that peptide. But what we will expose is a new vulnerability we didn't know about before and then have smart people who design molecules make something that fits that vulnerability.
S: Is this like a new kind of mutation farming where, again, you're just trying to make random shit happen to see if anything good comes of it? Is it similar?
KF: I think it's even weirder.
S: Even weirder?
KF: Yeah, this is pure. And you have to have huge populations to be able to do this. But still with large populations, we find that lethality in about 5%, which is pretty amazing. It's much higher than we would have predicted.
J: What plants are you doing this in?
KF: We're doing this in Arabidopsis, which is the laboratory plant. But it also works in bacteria that we can disrupt very well characterized bacterial processes with randomness.
S: How do you feel the GMO attitudes are out there in the country? Have we made any progress? Are things getting better? Do we just stop talking about it? What's going on?
KF: We have absolutely made progress. And I teach a class on critical thinking in agriculture and medicine. They designed this course, and it is so much fun. And we talk about all the different ways in which we are deceived, deceive ourselves, cognitive bias, statistical deception, all the things like that that you guys talk about every week. It's fantastic. We talk about alternative medicine. Then we talk about genetic engineering. And now when I talk about GMOs, everybody kind of glazes over it. Nobody cares. None of the students are thinking it's a threat or a problem. There's no problem to solve in that room. But then it turns into how do we solve the problem that's still out there in the public? And how do I deputize this room of 30 students to engage their skeptical friends? And how do I get them to engage online? We're in social media where this stuff runs rampant. And how do we do it effectively? And so that's where I've really just taken such a turn away from biology science into much more sociology and psychology and understand how we can be better persuaders. And I think that's been just the magic in the last 10 years.
S: Absolutely. Obviously, this is what we do. We're thinking very carefully about how do we persuade people individually, the general population, people who matter in terms of regulators and whatnot. And it's just tricky. And each topic is different. But I think, yeah, the GMOs might – I also think that we've been moving the needle on that. I do think because this topic is amenable to information. And there was just – we are just combating misinformation and it's very correctable. I also think, and this is just now just my gut feeling, is that a lot of the pushback against the GMOs, the anti-GMO attitude, was just an unfamiliarity with the technology and just a disgust kind of reaction to it. I think – this is my hope, my thought and my hope, that much like IVF, in vitro fertilization, remember the test tube babies and all the protests and everything? And now nobody cares, right? I'm just hoping that the same thing is going to happen. Everything is genetically engineered. Who cares, right? Do you think that we're heading in that direction?
KF: I agree 100 percent. I also think there's a lot of disaster fatigue that we've been told, well, you're going to get lumpy and things are going to fall off and all the problems that we're going to have never materialize.
S: Never happen, yeah.
KF: And I think that has a big role in that too. And so now when we can remind people of what they said, of what the opponents said, and then we can show the progress of where it's going and we can show all the beautiful things that we could be doing, that people do change their minds and you can kind of persuade. There still is a rather vigorous anti-GMO movement out there that, if you look for it, you can find it.
S: Oh, yeah. No question.
KF: But it's all – it is changing. The big problem is that so many of the really good innovations that we have still haven't hit the road and that rubber hasn't hit the road. And so we don't have golden rice yet. We don't have the bananas, the soybeans, all the other stuff that could solve vitamin A deficiency.
S: They're so close.
C: But also it's like when the solutions feel like they're happening in the background to solve ever-increasing problems, like, oh, here's a solution to solve a blight that you never would have even known was there because we got out in front of it before it devastated the crop. People don't recognize all of the progress. They only recognize the progress when there's like a fundamental or radical change. And so I think that's always a problem is that in science, so much of what we have to do is to try to prevent devastation and then people don't recognize that we prevented the devastation.
S: If we stopped COVID from happening, nobody would know about it.
C: Exactly.
J: Cara, that's my job as a producer.
C: Right.
J: If you do your job well, nobody knows that you did it or that it was hard. So I think that's crazy. And I agree with you. And I think we were in a situation where we fight hard, many fronts. And GMOs are like – I think it's ironic when there was – what was it, Steve? Was it papaya or was it...
S: Papaya in Hawaii.
J: When Hawaii had a papaya blight, they just were like, we're going to plant the GMOs and we're just not going to talk about it.
S: Finally ignore the papaya industry because otherwise the papaya industry goes – I like that example. I also use the cheese example. It's like there would be no cheese industry without GMO rennet. Forget about it.
J: But you know what I think though? I think the big one is going to be chocolate because there is a cow blight. You know this?
S: If GMOs save chocolate, then we've won.
J: No, but that's not what I said. No, I know. It's funny. It's funny. But I really do think – like imagine if chocolate went away for a little while. They'll go, we can bring it back. We have GMO. We'll bring it back. You'll have it in six months. People will be like, do it.
S: Well, that's like the American chestnut tree. But I agree. I do think like the anti-GMO crowd – like panicking a little bit about golden rice and some of these applications because I think they know that like if we solve vitamin A deficiency or make a huge improvement with a GMO food that breaks all of their propaganda, it's not patented. It's not controlled by Monsanto or some big corporation. It's free to farmers. They can plant their own seeds, whatever. None of your boogeyman is true and it's going to – we're saving blankets. It's like a perfect PR superstorm pro-GMO and against the whole anti-GMO narrative.
J: I never thought of it that way, Steve. You're right.
S: They're panicking about it. That's why they're so desperate for it not to come to market.
C: It would also help I think a lot of the people who are on the fence or who are confused understand the difference between genetically modified organisms and corporate practices because very often they conflate the two.
S: A hundred percent. Almost always when I'm talking to a skeptic who's anti-GMO, that's the reason.
C: It's corporate stuff that they're upset about.
S: It's like it's really – I don't think corporations should have that much power. Well, they already do. This is not changing anything.
C: And also like that's not what we're talking about.
S: Yeah. That's not what we're talking about.
E: Is the anti-GMO lobby waning?
KF: Yeah, I think so especially because gene editing has been so democratizing. So going back to this CRISPR-Cas9, the ability to change a letter or two, that's been – that technology has been very – in the hands of universities and small companies and it just is a different feel. Small governments can do it. Everybody can do it. And with that kind of ability, it really changes the dynamic of who can bring a product to market. The traditional transgenic approach, what we usually think about is genetically modified. The fact that it was so regulated and that people pushed for more regulation meant that only a couple of companies had the ability to navigate that.
S: It was like three or four companies, right, that were putting out all the GMOs.
KF: And those three or four companies said, you know what? Make the process harder. Make it harder. Because if you make that process harder, it gives us exclusivity in that space. So the anti-GMO folks who are out there who said we hate these companies were doing nothing more than empowering the companies that hate it.
C: That's hilarious. So the companies were like, yeah, keep it up, guys. We love your protest.
E: They were actually really doing the devil's work.
C: Wow.
S: Yeah, regulate the hell out of it, right? Because then nobody can compete with us, right? Yeah. Anything else you want us to talk about that we didn't get to?
KF: No. I think that's pretty much it. The one thing that it may be to mention is that people do need to be participating in these conversations still and that it's not a dead issue.
S: We can't get complacent. Because it will come right back.
KF: It has the possibility to come back. And now they're fighting things like appeal, coating that you put on fruit to make it laugh longer saying that it's Bill Gates poison, you know? And never give away billions of dollars, but all of these things are still being discussed. But the bottom line is, is they limit how technology can reach the poorest people on the planet. The affluent are not missing meals. And so being active in this and remembering who we're really trying to help here and making food last longer, make it taste better, all that stuff. That's what we have to be doing. We've got to keep on it.
S: Well, thank you for your service. We appreciate it, Kevin.
E: Kevin, doing the good work.
Science or Fiction (1:37:35)[edit]
Theme: US Trivia
Item #1: Kansas is not only the flattest state in the US, it is literally flatter than a pancake, with a flatness score of 0.9997.[5]
Item #2: The coastline of Alaska is longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined.[6]
Item #3: The first telephone directory in the world was published in New Haven, CT in 1878. The names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included.[7]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Item #1 |
| Science | Item #2 |
| Science | Item #3 |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voice-over: 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. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is U.S. trivia, just randomoid facts about the U.S.
E: Random.
S: All right. Here we go. Kansas is not only the flattest state in the U.S., it is literally flatter than a pancake with a flatness score of 0.9997. Item number two, the coastline of Alaska is longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. And item number three, the first telephone directory in the world was published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878. The names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. Evan, go first.
E: Well, Kansas. Yes. That's the name of a star. According to a movie I once watched, Wizard of Oz, anyone? No. Literally flatter than a pancake. Wow, that's flat. That's pretty flat. Although, well, I didn't even know there was this thing called a flatness score, frankly. Even in these flat, flat states you are going to have some elevation differences, right? So saying it's flatter than a pancake, I have no – really can't say. The coastline of Alaska, number two, longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. Okay. So the thing you got to remember about Alaska, Alaska is big. It is the largest state for area. And also Alaska has got all these little islands among so many other things. And that coastline is a kind of a jagged maze. So could it be longer than the rest of all the coastlines? I think it could be. I have a feeling that one is going to wind up being science. And the last one about the first telephone directory in New Haven, Connecticut, not far from here, 1878. Names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. I have a feeling that one is also science. Therefore, I'm dubious about the whole pancake flatness Kansas thing. That one I think is fiction.
S: OK, Bob.
B: All right. Kansas is not the flattest state. Oh, it is. It is the flattest. Yeah. I could see it being flatter than a pancake. I mean, pancakes generally are a little domed because just the nature of how you just spread it. You just glop it on and then it spreads, right? It's got a viscosity. It spreads. And the middle is never going to spread quite as much as the outer edges. It just seems to me that that's not that big of a deal. The Alaska one, that's tough. I assume that when comparing the coastline of Alaska and the rest of the United States, that they use the same fractal dimension for all of those measurements. I'll make that assumption. I'll make that assumption.
S: We will make that assumption.
B: You have to. Because then you could say Florida has more coastline than every other country on the planet if you mess around with your fractal dimensions. Thinking about it, it seems like it will be close, but I think there's kind of like lots of little ins and outs of Alaska. So it might sneak by and actually be a little bit long. I don't think it's by a dramatic amount. So that would mean this last—I don't know what to make of this stupid—so it's a phone directory, not in alphabetical order, and oh yeah, it doesn't have phone numbers. What the hell? Why? Then it's not a telephone directory. I don't know what you would call it, but not a telephone directory. So I don't know what the hell is going on with that. I'm just going to say Alaska fiction.
S: Okay. Jay?
J: Yeah. So going backwards, I mean, you live close to New Haven. We both do. I never heard of this, but this is one of those news items where I'm like, I don't see any reason why the first telephone directory wasn't published in New Haven. Okay. I mean, there's nothing really there that's making me go, hey, you know. Now let's keep in mind about item number two here that Alaska is freaking huge, and most of the times that you see a picture of it, it isn't relative size. It's not the actual size compared to the other things on the map.
B: That's true. The Mercator projection will expand.
J: And then it's got tons and tons of jigs and jags and islands and blah, blah, blah. You know, it just like adds up. You know, I think that's probably true. I mean, I can't imagine, I can't imagine easily that it has more coastline just because of all the shapes you look down California relatively straight. Look down the East Coast, relatively straight Alaska's just got so much busy going on. So that leaves me to the first one here. I wonder if they took into account the curvature of the earth when they said how flat Kansas is. But it could be in like a basin, I guess. And I have no reason to not believe that it's wicked flat. I don't know about the number that Steve said, but I do not think that Kansas is the flattest state. I just don't think it is. I have reasons to believe this. And I will say that this one is a fiction.
S: And Cara.
C: Yeah, I got to go with, is that just Jay or is that Jay and Evan? I got to go with Jay and Evan on this because I seem to remember living in Florida and Florida being really damn flat, like really flat. And I don't know, maybe Kansas is flatter, but I bet you Florida gives it a run for its money. I buy the Alaska one. I think we have to remember that also a lot of the U.S. is actually landlocked. So like we're not just coastline all the way around. I'm with Bob on the whole like, why is it called a telephone directory? But my assumption is 1878. Did they not have phone numbers? Was it like telegrams or something? What was before phones? Telegraphs?
B: Smokesignals.
C: Yeah, it was a smoke signal directory. So maybe it's something like that. And they just, I don't know. But I think I'm going to go with Evan and Jay and say that Kansas is not the flattest state in the U.S. I have no idea if it's flatter than a pancake, though.
S: All right. So you all agree on the third one. So we'll start there. The first telephone directory in the world was published in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878. The names were not alphabetized and there were no phone numbers included. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science. And yes, the telephone directory was a telephone directory, not some other kind of directory that they just called a telephone directory. Do you know why there were no phone numbers listed?
C: Oh, because operators.
E: There were only like eight names or something.
J: Yeah, you would just call the operator. There were no phone numbers.
S: Phone numbers did not exist. Yeah, you would call up. You would just pick up a handle and talk to the connector. Yeah, give me Joe Bag of Donuts and then the operator would know who he was and would literally just connect you to the person.
C: So weird.
B: That's right.
S: Guess how many names were included?
E: I think it was like eight or nine.
C: 150.
S: 50. 50.
E: 50?
S: Five zero. So there were businesses and people who had phones in the New Haven area. And you'd call the switchboards. They'd connect me to this person. And then a few years later when they had more people, they said we should probably put these names in alphabetical order and why don't we just assign numbers to them in case we have somebody, like there's an operator who's covering who doesn't know everyone's name. You know, like that was the next step. And then that's when phone numbers were invented. But yeah, first one in New Haven, Connecticut.
B: Cool.
S: I guess we'll go backwards. The coastline of Alaska is longer than the coastlines of all the other 49 states combined. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. This is science. Sorry, Bob.
B: So what about Mercator distortion? Right? Because if you look at a flat map, Alaska's not that big.
C: It's still pretty damn big.
S: It's not as big as it looks on the Mercator projection, but it's still big. But it is really because of what some of you said. It's got so many jigs and jags and islands that it just, and there's like that one huge, panhandle-like thing at the, like the whisker thing at the bottom of Alaska. It's just, if you look at it, it's a lot of coastline. The rest of the U.S. has a lot of coastline too, but it doesn't get up to quite as much as Alaska.
B: What's the ratio?
D: Well, Alaska has 34,000 miles of coastline officially. The next, what's the next most coastline?
B: Hawaii?
S: Which state?
C: Oh, Hawaii, maybe California?
S: Florida.
C: Oh, Florida.
S: It's Florida, which has like 8,000. It's not even close.
C: Oh, wow.
B: What's the total though of the states?
S: Less than 34,000. I don't know.
B: Oh, wow. Less, huh?
S: Yeah. It's less than that. Yeah. I think it's by a lot. Like it's not even close. So yeah, because it's because of how crazy the Alaska coastline is. As Jay said, like the West Coast is pretty straight. The East Coast is mostly straight, then you get Florida and then it's straight again. Okay. Let's go back to number one, Kansas is not only the flattest state in the U.S., it is literally flatter than a pancake with a flatness score of 0.9997. That of course is the fiction. The flattest state, Cara, is Florida.
C: No way.
S: Now, the other way to designate flattest, you could do a calculation of the difference between the highest point and the lowest point compared to its area, right? I mean, Evan, you have to imagine a pancake the size of a state. It would have a massive mountain in the middle. You know what I mean? Like it would be a massive difference between the height. But anyway, what do you think is the second flattest state after Florida?
B: Who cares?
C: I'm assuming not Kansas.
E: The second flattest state.
S: Kentucky.
C: Really? Doesn't Kentucky have mountains?
S: Kentucky, Rhode Island, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, Minnesota, New Jersey, Connecticut, Alabama, Arkansas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, and then Kansas. It's like right in the middle of the pack.
C: Oh, wow.
S: Close to the flattest state.
E: Like it's the middle of the country, middle of the...
S: All it needs is one hill, and that screws you over. So the other way to designate it is just the difference between the high point and the low point, right? So for Florida, it's 345 feet. That's it.
E: Right. I knew that. Yeah, I used that.
S: That's the difference between the highest point and the lowest point in Florida. Kentucky's close. 388. Delaware's 450.Delaware's pretty flat as well.
E: I knew that fact about Florida. I would not have guessed Kentucky as number two.
S: Kansas is 3,363.
E: Oh, gosh.
S: It's not anywhere near as flat as Florida, but it just has that reputation of being just like a big cornfield. It's just a flat state, but it's flat on a pancake. That part is true. All right. Well, good job, guys.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:48:02)[edit]
"There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that is not going to the lab at all."
– Chien-Shiung Wu (Experimental Physicist) - Her nicknames include the "First Lady of Physics", the "Chinese Madame Curie" and the "Queen of Nuclear Research", (description of author)
S: Evan, give us a quote.
E: "There is only one thing worse than coming home from the lab to a sink full of dirty dishes, and that's not going to the lab at all." That's a wonderful quote by Shane Shwing Wu, experimental physicist. She was considered the first lady of physics, the Chinese Madame Curie, and the queen of nuclear research.
S: Awesome.
E: A very impressive resume she has. She should have won a Nobel Prize in physics. She was part of a team that did win the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics with two other Chinese researchers, but the men got the credit and she did not. So again, another injustice that should not have gone down that way, should not have happened that way.
S: All right. Well, thank you, Evan.
E: Yep.
S: And thank you all for joining me this week.
C: Thanks, Steve.
J: You got it, bro.
B: Sure, man.
E: Thank you, Steve.
S: And happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
E: Happy Thanksgiving. Be safe out there, please.
S: Next episode will come out after Thanksgiving, and that'll be the episode we recorded while we were at SCICON.
E: Right.
S: Yep. And then we'll be back with a new episode in two weeks.
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
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- ↑ theness.com: Robots and a Sense of Self - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ finance.yahoo.com: Why America Needs a New Space Station: Russia's Module Is Leaking
- ↑ phys.org: The best way to find planet nine might be hundreds of tiny telescopes
- ↑ thedebrief.org: Study Finds People with Traditional Paranormal Beliefs Feel More Stressed Than Those with New Age Varieties - The Debrief
- ↑ worldpopulationreview.com: Flattest States 2024
- ↑ www.graylinealaska.com: 49 Fun Facts About Alaska - Gray Line Alaska
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: Telephone directory - Wikipedia