SGU Episode 842

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SGU Episode 842
August 28th 2021
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 841                      SGU 843
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
ES: Eugenie Scott, American physical anthropologist
Quote of the Week
There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
Marshall McLuhan, Canadian philosopher
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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 Wednesday, August 25^th, 2021, 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: August 25. It's good to be alive.

S: Yeah.

E: I just made that up.

S: No. Really?

E: I never do that.

S: I didn't sound off the cuff at all. So I had the worst customer service experience of my life today. No hesitation.

J: What happened?

E: That says a lot, frankly.

S: This is a capstone to a four-month saga that's been going on. I had to have a couple of solar panels removed from my roof in order to fix my chimney, right?

E: Yes.

S: Now, even in the best case scenario, this is going to be a pain in the ass.

B: Agreed.

S: The solar company's got to come, take off the solar panels, then you got to coordinate that with the guys coming to fix the chimney. Then you call the solar guys to come back and put the panels back on. And even though they only had to remove a few panels, the whole system is off while they're doing this. Right? It's disconnected.

C: Oh, sure.

S: It's one continuous circuit. So the circuit's off. So my solar panels are bricks right at this moment. This was months ago. This was in May, in April. We've been trying to get the solar company to put the solar panels back for four months.

J: What?

E: Oh my gosh. You haven't been generating solar for four months?

S: No. Nope. No.

J: What do you mean? When you say trying, you're calling them and saying, hey, okay, you can put it back together now, right?

S: You know, you would think it would be that simple, but it's been such a cluster. So first you call and they say, okay, we're going to contact the guys who are going to do that and we'll get back to you. And it doesn't happen. And you call them again and they're going to get... So there's been multiple iterations of them just not getting back with us. So my wife sort of was doing that because she's home during the day. I'm at work. So it's easier for her to do that. But then at one point she's like, I give up. It's now in your court. You got to take care of it. So I'm like, all right. So clearly I have to escalate things. Like just calling somebody in customer service is not going to do it. So this is now my third attempt at escalating it as high as I could take it. The other thing that prompted it, so I noticed that they charged me like about what I would be paying for the electricity from the solar panels over the summer last month and this month. It's like, that's curious. They're charging me, they've charged me over $800 for electricity when my panels are generating zero electricity. So I wanted to sort that out and see if I can get them to reinstall my panels. So it turns out they started charging estimated electricity usage because they can't get information from my solar panels.

C: And instead of being like, why can't we get this information? They were like, meh, it's probably nothing.

S: I can give you an extremely accurate estimate. It's zero. The estimate is nothing. My panels are generating no electricity. Stop collecting money from me and I want the money back. Stop doing it and put my solar panels back on my roof. How about that? All right. So this is what made it the worst experience ever. So after all of this, I go through multiple people and I keep telling me, I said, yes, I want to speak to your supervisor. Whoever's above you is the person that I need to speak with. And I was on hold for three hours and 20 minutes.

C: What?

S: Three hours and 20 minutes.

B: Wow.

S: And I'm like, I'm not getting off this phone because they are not going to call me back.

E: Wait, they didn't hang up on you.

S: And then they hung up on me.

E: Oh, that's the worst. Oh, nothing infuriates me more.

S: Three hours and 20 minutes and then disconnect and nothing. And I couldn't call that person back because I was three-

C: Deep in the phone tree at that point.

E: Oh no.

S: I mean, the one mistake I made is I should have asked them, give me your number so I can call you back directly.

C: Because they do that for us, right? What's a callback number if we get disconnected? No, I want your callback number.

S: Oh, they have my number. They have my number. They have my email. They're supposed to text me. They're supposed to call me. Nothing. They are ghosting us. At some point-

B: That's horrible.

S: -my wife learned that, get this, they lost our solar panels. They lost them.

C: What?

J: How do you lose solar panels?

C: They're just pretending. They're just like tap dancing until they get you new ones or find them?

S: I don't know. I don't know.

J: How did you figure it out?

S: First of all, they are their solar panels, right? We don't own them. They own them. We just let them put them on our roof and we're not even leasing them. They just use our roof and we buy electricity from them. That's it. The only advantage we have is that we get it 20% cheaper than what United Illuminating would charge us. That's it.

B: Sounds like a good deal.

S: So they lost their own solar panels. So I'm like, I don't care. Just put new ones there. Who cares? It's fungible. Just put three solar panels up. I don't care who's... They're all your panels.

B: Maybe they don't make that brand anymore and they can't connect new ones to it.

S: I don't know.

E: There are supply issues with lots of materials. I imagine that's one of them.

C: Yeah. But it's like one of those things that it's such the American way, isn't it? Instead of being like, we're sorry, we have an issue here. Don't worry. We're going to get it fixed. It might take a while. In the meantime, we're not going to charge you and we really are sorry for the inconvenience. How can we make it up to you? It's like, hold please.

S: The person you get a hold of who's probably in India or something half the time, meaning that they're not... They're just a rented phone service.

C: Yeah, it's a call center.

S: The last guy I called to was like, this is my first day, sir. I don't know how to help you. I mean, seriously. He said this was his first day. I'm like, I want to speak to your supervisor. He's like, I don't know how to do that. This is my first day.

C: But see, even that's better. Even that, just admitting, I cannot help you.

J: So Steve, where did it end up though? Is that where you are now?

S: That was my day. It's done. I mean, I ran out of time. I'm doing the podcast. That's what happened. I ran out of time. And this is what always happens. Like I just keep-

B: Wow. Tell them that you're going to tell scores of thousands of people that's your shit.

S: Now we're escalating to reporting them to the state and to Better Business Bureau.

B: Oh, all right.

S: This is now beyond bad customer service to fraud level. This is now-

C: This is the point where you say the name of the company out loud on the podcast.

S: I will. I mean, dude, everyone, I've said it before. This is Vibrant Solar. They are famously horrible customer service, but they were just bought out by another company or they're working with another company or whatever. And so that's also part of like, well, we're in transition now, so we don't have your records. And so it's just even more of a cluster now. We'll see if the new company just, but just give me my freaking solar panels back and re-hook it up. Like the summer is going to waste.

C: You're right. Oh yeah. You're on the East Coast. It's going to be dark soon. It's going to be-

S: They don't produce much in the winter. They produce 90% of their electricity over the sunny months.

C: That sucks.

B: That's almost as bad as the time I gave my credit card for dinner and they came back and for all intents and purposes said, we lost your credit card. Can I have another?

C: What?

J: It was even worse than that.

B: It's basically what happened.

E: They dropped it in the soup.

B: Did we never tell this story on the show?

E: I don't know this story, Bob.

B: Out to dinner with Jay's family, me and Liz, out to dinner, really expensive, not very good food. It was Harry Potter themed, which was kind of nice. Courtney and I gave them our credit cards. They came back, didn't have mine. The register was 15 feet away, I think. Didn't have it. They lost it from the walk to the cash register and barely looked for it and then offered me nothing. They offered me, all they said was, what do you want us to do? Can we have another card? And that was it. That was it. Not like, no cost, zero customer service. Not like you would think they would say, I'm so sorry, I can't believe this happened. You have a free, your meal is free tonight. That's like the bare minimum, like the obvious thing to do. They didn't even do that.

E: It's like paying with cash and they dropped the cash somewhere on the way to the register and they came back to you and said, oh, we lost it anymore.

B: I even had to go up to them and say, well, we're leaving now. Here's my number in case you find my credit card. You want my number so you can call me? If you find it, no, I'm going to stop now.

C: This is where the power of social media comes in.

B: Yes, Courtney wrote a review that eviscerated them. It was wonderful, wonderful review and people, and she's got a lot of good, this review helped me upvote. So I was very happy.

C: And even beyond Yelp. I mean, I remember one time in Granted, I have to be honest, I love the Olive Garden and this just reinforced my deep, deep love because when you're here, you're family. One time I ordered Olive Garden back when they used to deliver and I was so excited for my dinner and everything showed up and what was missing from my order?

E: Breadsticks.

C: Breadsticks!

J: Unforgivable.

C: I know. I put on Twitter something like, because it probably wasn't even their fault. It might have been the delivery company, but it was like, my night is ruined. I'm so sad. It's the only thing I wanted in the world and there are no breadsticks. And they immediately responded, oh no, that would ruin our night too. There's a gift card for multiple meals on us. I mean, it was incredible. It was incredible.

B: Right. And that's how you react. That's how you react. Mistakes happen. I don't blame them for the mistakes, but it's how you react after the mistake. That's what shows your mettle. And that restaurant failed utterly. And Steve's solar company too.

S: We used to go with Perry, we frequently would go to Friday's. Because there's one like kind of between us, we would meet him there a lot at Friday's. So we kept track. We had three free meals at Friday's because of things that they screwed up, which is good. So that at least they do that. It's like, yep, we screwed up. Your meal is on us. That's the way to handle it. One time, Perry got a hamburger and you know the paper that's between the slabs of frozen hamburger?

J: Oh no.

C: Oh gross.

S: The paper was still on the hamburger. That's a free meal. Thank you very much.

B: Yeah.

S: Like there's just no question. It's something like that. That's the response. You comp the meal. That is the response.

B: And it's common sense. It seems like common sense to me. But when companies don't do that, it's like, all right, you failed. That's a fail.

C: My dad, by the way-

S: It's a customer service fail.

C: My dad used to do that to us at least once a month when we were kids. He would bake those Pillsbury cinnamon rolls. And the lid to the icing container would be stuck to the bottom of one of the cinnamon rolls.

B: I'd lick it.

C: And we'd always bite into it and be like, thanks, thanks. Almost burned my tooth.

E: Like the capsule at the top of the rocket.

C: Yes. Anyway. Memories.

J: All right. So I learned, don't go to Kava restaurant in Connecticut. Don't get solar panels from who, Steve?

S: Vivint Solar, but they're going-

E: They got acquired by Sunrun.

S: They got acquired, yeah, by Sunrun.

C: But do-

E: I just signed with Sunrun for-

C: Oh no.

B: You're screwed.

S: I hope- I hope they're better. But you know-

B: It can't be worse.

C: Do order soup salad and breadsticks any chance you can from the Olive Garden.

COVID-19 Update (11:38)

S: A very, very quick COVID update this week.

E: Oh boy.

S: The FDA approved the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.

B: Woohoo.

S: I hear that name pronounced so many different ways, BioNTech, but it's BioNTech, right? I mean-

E: Yeah, BioNTech.

C: BioNTech. Oh.

E: Because it's a capital N.

C: BioNTech. That was really wrong. And then I started saying BioNTech. Oh, it's Bio-

B: It'll never stick. It's the Pfizer vaccine. That's the name of it.

C: Yeah, but the problem is they've named it. Now that it's FDA approved, they can market it. And they've given it a name.

J: What is it called?

C: I can't even say it. Like Comemnity? Conemnity?

J: What?

C: How do you- Yeah, look it up, you guys.

B: Oh, something like community is something they're trying to make it-

J: Comernity.

C: Comernity. Comernity.

E: Oh, we should have called it Shotty McShotface.

C: Comernity.

S: Comernity.

E: Comernity.

J: That's the second-

E: Comorbidity.

J: -horrible branding I've heard this month.

E: Yeah, right? It's a step away from comorbidity.

S: I know, comorbidity.

B: That's like- Yeah, or co-murder. Like two people killing someone. Co-murderty.

C: Oh, it's bad. It's true. Oh, they're saying it's a mashup of COVID-19 immunity with mRNA in the middle. And it's meant- You're right, Jay, to evoke the word comunity. So maybe it's pronounced com-mur-nity.

E: Sorry. Too sloppy.

J: It just hurts when you look at it.

E: You should have run it by us.

B: That's a naming fail.

S: You're fired. You are fired. All right. But the good news is this probably will increase uptake of the vaccine because a lot of the vaccine hesitant people were like, well, it's experimental because it hasn't been approved. But now that it's approved, that takes away their last objection. So we'll see.

C: But also places can mandate it now.

B: That's the big- That's the big takeaway here. Not so much more people are going to get vaccinated. A little bit more. It's the mandates now that people will be able to- Companies, universities, they were just waiting for this to happen.

J: Where do you think we'll see the mandates?

C: Exactly where he just said. Hospitals, universities, government employees.

B: Government universities, yeah. And I want to see insurance companies to say, you're not going to get vaccinated? Okay, we're going to septuple your premiums.

C: Bob, I'm interested in your take on this. I saw an article the other day, and it was more of a philosophical kind of question than a practicality. But they were saying, if this became a practicality, what are the ethics of, let's say a hospital is inundated, and they only have so many beds, and they have to triage. And all of the individuals coming to the hospital are sick. Some of them are breakthrough cases. Some people never got vaccinated. Can you prioritize the people who did the prevention?

S: No.

C: Absolutely you can't. But it's a very interesting ethical question about prevention versus treatment after the fact. We don't have all the information, right? But what I'm seeing over and over is this very sad phenomenon where many nurses and frontline workers in the COVID wards are saying, I'm losing empathy. I'm getting really burnt out, and it's really hard for me to sit here. I feel for these people. They're dying in my care, and it's heartbreaking. But there's a part of me that just wants to shake them and be like, this didn't have to happen to you.

S: Yeah. I mean, I totally get that, but that's where the professionalism comes into play. You have to separate yourself from that. We do not blame patients for their illness. We don't like, oh, I'm not going to treat you for your lung cancer because you smoked, or you have a heart attack, but you're overweight.

B: Those aren't perfect analogies, of course, but I see what you're saying.

C: Exactly. And that's the point, right? It's not a perfect analogy.

S: We don't calculate in. The only time we do that is with limited resource, where we have no choice but to ration. For example, with organs, when you have one heart and six people who need it, you're going to give it to the person who takes the best care of themselves, for example.

C: And I guess that's the question. When you have five ventilators and seven people who need them, are you going to give it to the person who is doing everything they can to stay healthy? And that's frustrating.

B: Right. That's the real question, right? I mean, that's...

C: That is the question, right?

B: Isn't that the premise? Isn't that the premise of your question?

C: And, of course, again, this is more of a thought experiment.

E: Do we have ventilator shortages?

S: Yeah. We're not at that point, right?

C: But we could again.

S: If we did, you know... But there's so many other factors they take into place. It's more about who's the most likely to survive, not who deserves it more, you know?

E: But the unvaccinated has a higher chance of dying.

C: They do.

E: So does that make... Give them a certain priority because they are at greater risk? In other words, should you take... Should you triage them and take them first because of that?

C: Yeah. It's an interesting thing, right? You can look at it two ways. The way that we look at emergency medicine is, yeah, the sickest and most dire case we're going to take first and put more resources. But like he said, when it comes to organ transplantation...

S: Who's the most likely to benefit?

C: Who's the most likely to benefit from it. And the problem... And at a certain point, wartime triage becomes that, right? Wartime triage says that that person's beyond help. I need to move on to this other person because I'm not going to waste resources on a person who's dying anyway. That's a really sad scenario. And the scary thing is we are living in a scenario in which it's been that bad before and it could get that bad again. And people have to make those ethical calculations. I know, God, hopefully not. But that's the other thing. When we talk about case counts and we talk about trends, we talk about it homogeneously. Maybe we say here in America versus in these other parts of the world. But what we don't realize is that there are pockets in this country that are just like they were before.

S: And you bring up a good point though, Cara, about burnout, because that's real. Healthcare workers are human beings and being on the front lines can be very, very difficult. So you think about all the downstream effects of your decision not to get vaccinated. And one of them is becoming an increased burden on an already overburdened healthcare system, including the psychological burden on frontline workers whose burnout is exacerbated by the fact that you are refusing to get vaccinated. And that's partly why some people are ending up in the hospital and on ventilators and in their ICU. It's extremely frustrating. So it is such a selfish decision not to get vaccinated. But it's also, again, it's also a dumb decision because even if you're being selfish, it's orders of magnitude better for you to get vaccinated than not vaccinated.

C: You're right. It's such a selfish decision because you're putting so many people at risk. But the person you're putting the most at risk is yourself.

J: There's no humility. It's remarkable how they actually think that they're smarter than world-leading scientists, people that spent their entire lives studying this and working on it. They know better.

C: And the sad thing, Jay, is that in many of these cases, they've been duped into that. You know, it's like, you're right, many of these people think that they're smarter, but they've been convinced by greedy, manipulative, agenda-driven individuals who can talk the talk and walk the walk to think that they're smarter. Because if those people weren't putting out those videos, if the Mercolas of the world weren't spreading that misinformation, I don't think that we would have the same problem that we have right now. People wouldn't independently be coming to this conclusion.

S: Oh, I know. That's the thing. Like, I hear people, oh, like, they call other people sheeple. Like, this is the joke, right? Oh, you sheeple. Meanwhile, they're regurgitating some pre-digested talking point that was handed to them by some online charlatan. You didn't come to that decision. That's not an original thought on your part. That's something that somebody, some guy online said that you buy, and you're just repeating it thoughtlessly. It's sad from one level, but it's also very frustrating.

C: And ultimately, I want to see those propaganda spreaders held accountable.

S: Yeah, I agree. Totally agree. All right. Let's move on.

News Items

Ant Underground Cities (19:55)

• The science of ants' underground cities

S: Jay, you're going to start us off. This is a completely different thing. You're going to tell us about ant underground cities.

J: There has been progress made with ants, Steve. I thought you should know it. A team led by Jose Andrade, the George W. Hausner Professor of Civil and Mechanical Engineering and his team, they published a paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper covers the digging habits of ants and how ant behavior guides them to build amazing underground structures. So Jose Andrade set out to discover if ants actually know how to dig tunnels and structures underground, or are they just doing it blindly? And those two are very different, right? Because one would mean that the ants are very mindfully doing what they're doing versus just acting completely on instinct. And as much as you might think that the answer is obvious, scientists still have to test it. Even though, yeah, of course, they're not thinking on any high function. Of course not. But we still have to test it. We still have to figure out the parameters and figure out exactly what's going on if we want to learn more information about ant behavior. So since Andrade is an engineer, he needed the help of someone who specializes in insects. So he ended up finding Dr. Joe Parker, who is an entomologist at the California Institute of Technology, also known as Caltech. And Joe Parker researches ants. The researchers would give the ants cups of dirt and wait for them to start digging. So there was a lot going on in this part because they had to figure out how many ants do we put in the cup of dirt? How big should the cup of dirt be? But they did finally figure out a formula to get the ants to start digging. Then they x-rayed the cups as the ants made more and more progress. And this gave them the ability to track the ants progress in 3D as they proceeded to do their work. And they can see this in a simulation, right? So they would put all this data into a computer and then they could look at the simulation in real time to see exactly where the ants were digging their underground lair. Yeah, and then they could notice patterns and behavior, right? That's the whole point of this. So here's what they found out. First off, they found out that the ants were extraordinarily efficient in what they did. They dug straight tunnels and also used the inside edge of the cup as part of their tunnels. You know, once they discovered that there was an edge to the cup that was there where the ants were digging, they would actually use the cup to help them dig less because they didn't have to dig out as much. The ants' tunnels were also dug as steep as the dirt could support. Now, this is really cool. I didn't know about this. This is known as the angle of repose, right? So when digging in a granular material, the angle of repose is the steepest angle that can be dug without causing a tunnel collapse in that particular material. The ants were able to detect what the angle of repose was for the particular kind of dirt that they were digging, which is really cool. And this means that the ants were aware of the physics of their environment and they follow the rules of the physics to optimize their structures. So they were able to figure that out. It turns out that ants can detect force chains in the soil. In granular material, most of the material is not carrying an average amount of the weight of the dirt that's on top of it, right? This is because certain granules take on the bulk of the weight simply by the way they happen to be arranged. So some of the dirt is not carrying as much weight. Some of the other dirt in the ground is carrying a lot more weight because they're stacked on top of other pieces of dirt or the compression is different, right? So there's these things called force chains, which are basically where is the weight of the dirt going down into the dirt? And the force chains are the granules that form simply because some granules are randomly arranged in a better way to carry the weight, right? Does that make sense?

S: I like the analogy they made, which was to the game Jenga, which I'm sure you guys have played before. You're looking for the loose blocks to pull out, not the ones that are carrying, that are load-bearing.

C: Right, because then the whole tower will fall.

S: Exactly. So the ants are basically pulling on the grains and taking out the loose ones and leaving the ones that are bearing the weight.

J: Exactly. So as the ants dug, they slowly and subtly were changing the force chains in the soil. And also, they were trying to avoid the existing force chains. That's pretty damn cool. So they were able to, in some way, detect the force chains, right? Because on their level, when they're moving dirt around, they can feel it. They have a way to detect that. So while the ants build a tunnel, the force chains form arches around the outside of the tunnel, right? So check that out. They're digging out a tunnel, and now these new force changes appear, and they reinforce the outside of the tunnels that they build because they continuously form arches and arches and arches as they go. So remarkably, the force chains actually strengthen the walls of the tunnel. And also, the soil at the end of the tunnel becomes easier to dig because the tunnel's force chains relieve pressure on that soil. Whoa. That is really cool. So it means that the end of the tunnel where they're digging is actually the easiest part to dig because there's less force there than in the other parts of the tunnel. So did I mention that ant structures can last decades?

B: Whoa, really?

E: Yes. They won't stretch very long.

J: Yeah, 25 feet or 8.3 yards down into the ground. Decades.

S: They're huge.

J: They're giant. Ant colonies can be considered miniature cities. They have specialized chambers in there. They have nurseries. They have chambers for growing food.

E: Starbucks.

J: They have a couple of Starbucks. It depends on where they are. Sometimes it's Dunkin' Donuts. Sometimes it's Starbucks.

C: It's one right across the corner from the other one. It's crazy.

J: It was like, what are you doing? You dug a little hole for Starbucks. Now you're digging another hole for Starbucks. What the hell is going on? They even have chambers for waste. They have a real city going on down there. Some colonies have millions of individual ants living together. So let me get back to the main question now. Do ants know how to dig tunnels?

S: No.

J: And the answer ends up being no. So Joe Parker refers to the ants digging practices as a behavioral algorithm. Single ants don't operate like a colony of ants do. Why? They don't know yet. We don't know. When there is a colony, they behave almost like a single organism. This means that there is emergent behavior and the researchers don't clearly understand how the ants coordinate. There's lots of-

C: We see this in bees too, right?

J: Yes. Yeah.

C: They're just coordinated.

B: Oh, it's all throughout nature.

J: it could be pheromones. It could be noises. It could be through the Starbucks. We don't know. We just don't know. So what Andrade-

C: Caffeine mediated.

J: Yeah, totally. So what Andrade wants to do is emulate the ants' behavior in simulations using artificial intelligence, right? So collect as much data as they can on what the ants are doing and then run simulations and throw scenarios at it and see what the ants do and see if they can divine any information out of that. So by scaling this knowledge up to human-sized tunnels, though, which is actually one of the reasons why they did this study, this could one day help make human efforts more efficient at digging tunnels and possibly using robots to follow similar digging algorithms as ants.

C: It's funny because, Jay, when you were first talking about the ants doing all this really smart stuff so that they don't have the tunnel collapse on them, the first image I had was Shawshank Redemption. And I was like, I feel like you see these in prison movies all the time. People just dig tunnels and they get out. And I'm like, that probably doesn't happen. I mean, it has happened. But probably most of the time when people are attempting to just dig a tunnel to get out somewhere, it collapses on them.

J: I would think you're right. I mean, it's a scary thing to dig down into the earth. You know, as a human you're digging a hole and you don't know what the hell's going on down there. Your average person has no clue about what's actually happening and the way that the weight is being distributed.

C: Yeah. That's why you have civic engineers who have to, like, make calculations for that stuff.

J: But science being awesome, like some random scientist decides, hey who knows about digging? Ants dig. They dig incredible. Look at the look at these crazy, intricate structures that they have. They have to know something. They have to be doing something right. Let's look into it. And then you get this type of work happens where they they uncover some really interesting knowledge about ant behavior. And I just reading about this article, I learned about two concepts I never knew existed before. I mean, who the hell knew about force chains? I never even heard about that. But and I found out about it because of ants. Thank you, ants.

S: So bees and ants are both hymenoptera. Hymenoptera.

J: Why? What do they do?

S: They're in the same order. That's the order of insects. It's not surprising that they both have this emergent colony behavior. It's like no bee has the design of a nest a honeycomb in their head.

B: There's no foreman. There's no foreman saying, you do that. You go over there. There's no one in control.

S: There's a hierarchy, but there isn't somebody directing the bees to build the hive. They just are following a simple set of rules that when you add them all together, you get this emergent behavior.

B: Yeah, like birds flocking.

C: But to be fair, there is that cool stuff with bees where they'll like go look for more food and then they'll come back and do the wiggle dance and be like, that's where the food is. And like individual bees do that and that's really cool.

E: Do these ant cities have names like Atlanta or Constantinople?

J: Oh my God, Evan.

E: Canterbury.

J: But imagine, imagine like the, I was thinking about how interesting it would be. Like I think we've talked about this before. Like if you're on the scale of an ant a drop of water, the surface tension of water is visible in a way to you that it wouldn't be to a human. You could be inside of a drop of water. You could touch a grain of sand and the ant is able to touch it and know, hey, it's got force on it. Not, not the not Luke Skywalker force. It's got like, they can feel that, that force pushing down on the weight from the dirt above it or the sand above it and detect that. That's a really minuscule amount of force that they're detecting.

C: But also ants are very small.

J: Well, they have big hearts though.

Food Allergy Myths (30:24)

• What You Think of as 'Food Allergy' Might Be Something Else Instead. Here's Why

S: All right, Cara, what do you know about food allergies? Are they like real or bogus?

C: I came across an article on the Conversation. We've mentioned the Cconversation before.

B: Yeah. I love it.

C: You guys don't read it. I highly recommend it. Their little tagline is academic rigor, journalistic flair. So all the articles on the conversation, yeah, are written by people in these fields. But they're writing for kind of like public consumption. And so this is written by Marianne Cunningham, who works in human nutrition and dietetics at Glasgow Caledonian University. She's like, okay, let's talk a little bit about food allergies. Let's bust some myths here. And what she really linked to and cited quite a bit was the Association of UK Dietitians Food Fact Sheet about food allergies and food intolerance, because you know, there's a lot of misinformation flying around. The two big takeaways from this are that when we're talking about food allergies, we're usually talking about one of two very specific things. We're either talking about an immediate food allergy or a delayed food allergy. An immediate food allergy is a food allergy that is caused by immunoglobulin E, IgE. And this is like, this is EpiPen stuff, right? It's also itchy throat stuff. It can also be puking, pooping stuff. But what we're talking about is I eat something and my immune system is pissed at me for it because I am legit allergic to this food. And so it can be as mild as when I eat shellfish, I get a little itchy to when I so much as smell a peanut halfway across a room, there's a chance I could go into anaphylaxis. So I have to carry an EpiPen. These are IgE or immunoglobulin E mediated food allergies. And those are pretty immediate. There are also delayed food allergies. And these happen when your immune system is still involved, but it's a different reaction. And there are any number of immune reactions that can happen here. So it's less likely that you're going to have to go into anaphylaxis with these types of things. But we can talk about things like, they reference a lot atopic eczema is a good example of that. Atopic eczema is a type of eczema that really is like an immune allergic manifestation. And it can be triggered by all sorts of different things. One of those things can be foods. They distinguish food allergies from what they call quote food intolerances. And food intolerances are very different. Oh, I should say when we talk about food allergies, the most common food allergies that you'll see in kids are things like milk from cows, eggs from chickens, peanuts, tree nuts. Sometimes you'll see wheat allergies, soy allergies, shellfish allergies, sometimes sesame is an allergy. I actually have a friend who is deathly allergic to both peanuts and sesame. How sad. So every time he eats anywhere at a restaurant, he's like, what kind of oil did you cook this in? Like, can you imagine? Oh, it's terrible. And that's, I think, ultimately, one of the big takeaways. She busts a couple of myths about like just because I have symptoms after I eat a food, I must be allergic to it, which just simply isn't true. There are a lot of reasons that people can have reactions after they eat foods. Sometimes it is an allergy, but usually when we're talking about allergies, most people who have legit food allergies, they know it. Because they either have a violent reaction in the form of vomiting or diarrhea that happens every time they eat this food, or they begin to become quite itchy in their eyes, in their skin, in their throat, tongue swelling, difficulty breathing, or maybe even low blood pressure. And of course beyond that, death. Death can occur when you have a very severe allergic reaction to food triggers. But what is often termed, quote, food intolerance is a little bit more mushy. It's things like lactose intolerance. I'm not saying it's not true, it absolutely exists. The problem is, I think a lot of people exist on sort of a spectrum when it comes to these types of things. I don't know many people who can just drink milk like it's going out of style. Some can.

J: I don't have a problem with milk.

B: I've never grabbed a glass of milk and drank it in my life.

E: Ever? Ever?

B: White, the whole white milk, chocolate milk, yes.

E: Wait a minute, when you were a boy in the cartons at school?

B: And my grandma gave me a little packet of Nestle chocolate quick, and I made chocolate milk because I couldn't stand regular milk.

C: And so you didn't have, you had an intolerance in terms of, I don't like the way this tastes.

B: Oh my God, I think I drank warm milk when I was a little kid and never could abide it ever again.

J: I love milk.

C: But here's the thing, right? Some people can drink a glass of milk. Some people drink a glass of milk and they're like, uh-oh, going to be in the bathroom tonight. Other people, I think it's a matter of degree, right? I can drink milk, I don't enjoy it, because yeah, same thing, add some chocolate, sure. Or I can have a bowl of ice cream, but if I have four bowls of ice cream, I don't think I'm going to have a good night. And I think that there is there's a spectrum there.

B: I feel bad for you. I would have a bad night only in that I would be so mad at myself if I had four bowls.

C: For eating four bowls of ice cream?

B: Three bowls, not so much. Four, yes. That's pushing it.

C: There are other intolerances and sensitivities that you can see, like things like histamine, amines, vasoactive amines like histamines that you might find in things like red wine, in strong cheeses, in certain types of meat products, sometimes in tomatoes. There are salicylate sensitivities, so these are substances that are quite similar to aspirin chemically and they're found in certain plants, certain fruits, vegetables, nuts, and herbs. And then there are other sensitivities, caffeine. Some people have a sensitivity to caffeine or theobromide, bromine, sorry, which is found in chocolate. And we do find these sensitivities. We see that foods are labeled for this purpose, right? You'll look on the back of a package. This article was written from a British perspective, but here in the United States, we also have food labeling that'll say things like, warning, this was produced or packaged in a factory that also processes tree nuts, for example. Those are there to indicate if you have a severe allergy be careful because there may be something chemically within this food that's triggering, even if you didn't buy a box of peanuts. Even if this is a box of cereal that doesn't have peanuts as an ingredient, it was still produced right next to where peanuts were packaged. And if your allergy is severe enough, that could cause a triggered response in you. We also see crossover. I think we've talked a little bit before about how if you're allergic to shellfish, you might want to be careful if you're going to try insects for this first time. Like you do see some crossovers because of the ingredients or the chemical compounds that actually cause those triggers. One of the things that this dietician talks about in this sort of myth-busting explainer is that online allergy tests, by and large, are not evidence-based. So a lot of people think, oh, I've been eating kind of funny and I feel a little off and I must be allergic to some of the foods I'm eating and I need to figure out what that is. So I'm just going to go online. I'm going to buy one of these allergy tests, swab in my mouth, do something like that. Ultimately, the only evidence-based tests that are available are skin scratch tests, the ones that you get at your doctor. And really, they only tell you if you're going to have an immunoglobulin-mediated response. So basically, they're going to scratch a very small quantity of that onto your skin and see if your skin whelps up. And even that needs to be read by a professional. And so the kind of takeaway of this article, I think she dives into a couple of other things about eczema and warning labels and things like that. But the main takeaway here is that we can look at food systematically, we can look at it scientifically, and work with a trained professional to do things like elimination diets to determine if you do have a legitimate allergy to a food and whether that food either needs to be completely avoided or minimized in your diet. But very often, people self-diagnose. They have a reaction to a food or they have a reaction to something else, but it was within close proximity to eating the food. And so they think to themselves, it's because of that food, I know it is, I'm going to avoid that food. And then what ends up happening, especially when people really are dealing with gut problems, and they don't have, they're not getting the treatment that they need. And they're not really, unfortunately, in a position where they're able to medically manage some of these problems, is that and you see this quite a lot, it starts to drift into this sort of biopsychosocial territory, where yes, there's a biological component, but there's also such a strong psychological component. And we see, based on the evidence, based on the literature, that not just food allergy, but food aversion, dramatically affects quality of life. It affects your social life when you go out to eat, it affects your anxiety level prior to leaving home, it affects your ability to manage your anxiety when you're out, whether you're inside of the home or outside of the home, it affects how often you go to the bathroom and how that affects your quality of life. And it's really hard to tease out the psychological, the biological components, because they're in many ways, one in the same. And so I think what's so important here is that if you are concerned about food symptoms or food related concerns, it's important to see a doctor, it's important to go about this the right way, take an evidence based test, do a proper journaled elimination diet that's overseen by a medical professional, so you can determine if something is wrong, as opposed to self-diagnosing, as opposed to saying, it's probably that thing, I'm just going to avoid it. And now it's probably that thing, I'm just going to avoid it. And eventually, you've eliminated so many things that A, you might be getting nutritional deficits because of it, and you don't know what kind of supplementation you need. And B, your quality of life really does go down.

S: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know offhand, a lot of people who have complicated personal beliefs about their reaction to food that are not based on any actual evidence. But they come to believe it very fervently, and they don't like being questioned on it. And they make all the mistakes, they confuse an intolerance with an allergy, like everything's an allergy, or they identify the wrong component of the food that they're not tolerating. For example. I think the biggest slice of this now is all the people who think they have a gluten sensitivity that probably don't.

C: Yeah, that's a huge manifestation.

S: Also, there is good evidence that if people try to figure that out anecdotally, they end up over calling it massively, and they think that everything is associated with their symptoms. And just the final thing to be aware of is there are a lot of cranks out there who will give you fake allergy tests and don't fall for them. There's no magic test where you like people do like the applied kinesiology where you hold the item in your hand, and if it's weak, oh, then you have an allergy. That's total nonsense.

C: Total nonsense, or put this patch on your skin, or, yeah.

S: You need to see a real physician who could do a proper test.

C: And you're right. It's not just the diagnostic side that's become a big pseudoscientific cottage industry. It's also clearly the treatment side. I think this is the bulk of a lot of the pseudoscience that we see has to do with diet and people's fears and concerns and frustrations around diet and around the way that they feel throughout the day. Oh, it's because you're not getting enough of this supplement, or you're getting too much of that supplement, or you need to chelate this in your belly, or you need to... And so much of that is pseudoscience. So much of that is charlatans.

S: Virtually all of it.

C: Yeah. Virtually all of it. Exactly.

White Lady of Union Cemetery (42:28)

• The Warrens and the White Lady of Union Cemetery

S: So guys, I got an email recently from a listener, Tunke Durgen from Germany, who sent me a link to a video that was a blast from the past. So this is the video that Ed Warren took of the White Lady of Union Cemetery.

B: Oh, yeah.

E: Hey. My old stomping ground.

S: Oh, yeah. Which one of his collaborators digitized and uploaded to YouTube so you could watch it. And I took a look at it, watched the whole thing, and I wrote about it on my blog. The most interesting thing about it is the comments below the YouTube video, which are just...

B: Oh, gosh. You looked at those?

S: Well, you have to. It's like looking at a car crash.

E: Oh, they're so impressed.

S: Yeah. So the video... I mean, you have to watch the video. Obviously, we'll have a link to it, and I linked to it also from my blog. It's barely this white smudge. The thing that's interesting... We saw this video from the original VHS tape 20 years ago.

B: Quite a while ago.

E: Oh, it's 97.

C: Oh, really?

S: And my memory is that it was much better quality than what I'm seeing now on the YouTube video. So I don't know why that is. Is that just because the process was bad or the tape had aged? Is this a copy of a copy of a copy?

B: Your memory sucks.

S: Does my memory suck? Or maybe this is deliberate. I mean, who knows? But essentially, you could barely kind of make out this sort of white smudge walking among the gravestones in Union Cemetery. At the time, you remember what our impression was when we saw it on the original tape.

B: Is that the best you got?

S: Yeah. We asked Ed, show us your best evidence. Give it to us. What's your best piece of evidence that ghosts exist?

E: Blow us away.

S: This is what he showed us. We were so unimpressed. First of all, it's Blobsquatch, right? It's at that perfect distance where you could see that there's something there, but you can't make out what it is. If you were any closer, you could probably see that it's a person in a white sheet. If you were farther away, you wouldn't see anything. So it's like it's engineered. It's clearly, again, right at that perfect distance. And because even if you're trying to be charitable, it's hard to imagine how Ed would have acquired this tape. He filmed it himself, right? How is he filming it? He knew what that was.

B: Yeah.

S: Right?

E: Yeah. You're behind the camera.

S: In person, you know what's 20 feet away from you. In my opinion, it's just so obvious that this was faked. Again, if you want to be charitable, it's worthless. It's utterly worthless as evidence. But you guys remember that we asked Ed if we could take a look at the tape.

B: Yes. He said no.

S: And he refused. And we even said, listen, you can give us a copy. I understand if you don't want to surrender the original. I get that. Give us a copy. Nope. Wouldn't do it.

B: Wouldn't do it.

S: He did not want us to look at that tape closely, which again-

E: No, because if we tried to sync it, it would have caused him too much angst. Too much harm, he felt.

B: So he gave us another video.

S: Well, but there's only- No, he didn't. Somebody working with him did. But-

B: Oh, really?

S: There's only one reason why Ed would not want us to take a close look at that tape. And that's because he knew it was fake.

E: Right.

S: Right? If he thought it was genuine, because he- At this point, we were still like having a friendly investigation interview with him. And he wanted to show us that he had real evidence for the paranormal. And this was it. Right? He was like, hey, great. This is your best evidence. Let's take a close look at it. Nope. Wouldn't do it.

B: Yeah. It's adamant.

J: I'm surprised that he even let you guys get near them. You know what I mean?

S: He wanted us to validate him.

C: Yeah, because if you can get skeptics on your side-

B: Yeah.

E: Well, plus we were new, and perhaps impressionable. He didn't we didn't- It wasn't Joe Nickel coming to talk to him and investigate him. He knew who someone like Joe Nickel was but this was otherwise a new, upcoming, budding little group, local-

S: Yeah, we were local. We were two towns over.

E: Who could potentially be of a benefit to him and his enterprise, for lack of a better term.

S: But he had no idea what he was dealing with. But it also shows how clueless he was. You know, he was clueless. I mean, he didn't have the slightest clue of what scientific evidence really was, or even journalistic evidence. Forget about scientific evidence. It was all just glorified storytelling, his quote-unquote investigations. And then with a little bit of-

E: Couched in religious-

S: A little bit of showmanship thrown in. Yeah. A lot of religious overtones. And if he had to cut some corners here and there to make things impressive, that was okay too. We encountered many people who were former associates of Ed and Lorraine Warren, who broke away, and they all say they broke away because they caught Ed cheating. And that was basically what they all said. We could do this, and we're going to do it for real. Ed's fake. Basically.

E: Right. Yeah. They became disillusioned entirely.

C: But how funny that they're like, but yeah, I still believe this stuff is real. He's just a faker.

S: Yeah. Right.

E: Oh, yeah. No surprise there.

E: Steve, my takeaway from your piece was when you said that, like all paranormal things, it lives in ambiguity.

S: Yeah.

E: That is their stock in trade. It has to- It's not that they have to prove anything one way or be conclusive about anything. It's quite the opposite. You get people to have the doubt, and that's where you live entirely in the world of the paranormal, is in that doubt.

S: Yeah. The ambiguity is the phenomenon. That's right. And that's true of UFOs, of cryptids, of all of this. Absolutely. But again, read the comments, if you dare, on YouTube. Because you still-

B: What can you say about it?

S: Oh, you could clearly show the- Like you could clearly see, like first of all, you can't clearly see anything.

E: Oh my God.

S: You could see the shadows trying to drag them back down, and they-

B: Oh my God.

S: They have just the act of imaginations run wild, and they're just, they look at this and they see convincing evidence. It's amazing, the subjective validation, and the confirmation bias, and the motivated reasoning. It's all there. It's just really blatant. And again-

B: I won't be reading the comments.

S: It's such a crappy piece of evidence.

E: It's so bad.

B: I don't want to make my hope for humanity even lower.

S: Yeah.

B: Worse.

E: Well, it's the next generation.

S: I remember you said, all right, by the time we were investigating him, they had been doing this for, what, 30 years or something. I mean, they've been doing this for a long time. I'm like, all right, Ed, you've been researching this, you've been gathering evidence and doing investigations for 30 years. What has that produced? Show us your best evidence.

B: Yeah.

S: This was it.

B: But that alone, you think people would look at that way. This is your best? You're a certified demonologist and your wife is like a Claire Audient. I think it was. I mean, it's like, this is really the best? That's truly disappointing. And you would think some people alone would be like, that reason alone would be for what some people would need, to be disillusioned and walk away, but-

S: If you want to believe this is all you need, this little splotch-

B: Oh, absolutely. And it just goes to show, if you've got some showmanship, you've got some good stories and good narratives, you really don't need a blow away evidence. You just need the blob squash and that's all. That's all you need.

S: Yeah.

C: I wouldn't be surprised if that's their conventional wisdom when they talk to each other. Like those who are like, whether they're fully like, I'm a charlatan, or whether they're like, I've been doing it so long, I believe what I'm selling, I bet you that is their conventional wisdom. Like, guys, you don't have to do much. These people want something to hold onto. Just give them a little taste. Give them a taste. Give them a little something.

S: Ed famously said to us, you've got to talk to them like they're on a third grade level. Like, he had nothing but contempt for his audience.

B: Oh, he was. Absolutely. Absolutely.

E: Oh my gosh.

J: Unbelievable. I mean, imagine- And why the hell would he be saying that to you?

C: Right.

S: Because again, this is at a point where we were chummy, you know? We were getting along.

B: And we clearly graduated a third grade.

S: Yeah. And I mean, not to be mean, but Ed was not a shining intellect. This is coming from him. He was talking down to his audience, and this guy is, we would, using the local lingo, he's a jamoke, right? I mean, this guy is-

B: A jamoke.

S: He didn't have a clue.

C: I've literally never heard that word before.

S: He just didn't have a clue. You've never heard of that word, Cara?

C: A jamoke?

B: I hope it's still safe to say, Steve. God knows.

C: I'm from the South. I don't know, man. What is that? What's a jamoke?

B: Yeah. That's an old one, even for us.

S: A jamoke is somebody who is clueless, but doesn't realize it, and kind of a jerk, you know?

E: Dunning-Kruger to an extreme, in a way.

S: And an unsophisticated thug, right? Interesting to have that surface again. All right.

Feng-Shui in Australia (52:04)

• Feng Shui design trends attract Chinese investors in Australian real estate

S: Evan, tell us about feng shui in Australia.

E: Oh, boy. Feng shui in Australia. All right. I'm going to shout out to Richard Saunders. He's our very good friend, host of the Skeptic Zone podcast.

B: Richard.

J: Richard, my brother.

E: We love Richard. You know, we've probably known him 12 to 13 years now, at this point. He's from Australia, obviously, and listen to his podcast, if you don't, The Skeptic Zone. But in any case, over the years, he's taught us some Australian slang, some sayings. For example, good on ya. Right? He taught us that one. She'll be apples. Meaning, everything will be okay. Things will be okay. And of course, the one I think we like the most is, you've got a roo loose in the top paddock.

C: What's that?

E: Meaning that person's not quite all there.

C: Ah, like a screw loose.

E: Yes. I think we're going to add now a new... I want to add a new phrase to the Australian dictionary, because of this news item. The cheese flowing through this hut, mate. And why do I say that? Well, because of feng shui. Utilizing the ancient practice of feng shui could assist in attracting more investors to Australian properties, according to HSBC research. Now, HSBC stands for Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. I think a lot of people around the world are familiar with that institution. And they did. They ran a poll, not too long ago. 57% of all Australians believe feng shui could increase the value of their property. Yep. And among the other statistics from that poll, 82% of Australians prefer the look of a home that utilizes feng shui without even realizing it.

C: What? Wait. What?

E: Yep. That's what they said.

C: I want to dig into that one.

E: Well I mean, this is a private company kind of doing this. Not exactly a scientific...

C: Yeah. Like, how would they know?

E: Who knows what their metrics are? I did not even dig down to find out how the heck they came up with these numbers. However, they also said only 6% of Australians had a deep understanding of feng shui principles.

C: Holy crap. Six whole percent have a deep understanding of feng shui?

E: And which is...

C: Oh, but maybe 6%. You know, if you think about it, though, yeah, between Hong Kong and China, which is where you're going to see a lot of this. And by the way, it's pronounced super weird in Cantonese. I learned this when I visited Hong Kong. It doesn't sound anything like feng shui. I can't remember what it is, but it took me like a few times to learn it. That's like a very American way that we say the word. But it is so prevalent in Hong Kong that there are the skyscrapers, many of the skyscrapers on the skyline that you see look like there are holes cut in them. They're like donut-shaped.

E: That's right.

C: So that the dragon spirits can fly through.

E: Exactly.

B: Oh, of course.

E: To allow the bad energy to flow through. Retain only the good energy. Absolutely. Yeah. So this is the example of the city that is most prominently designed with feng shui. Yeah, it's totally feng shui.

C: Very much so.

E: How about this?

C: And there are experts that you can hire. Yeah, it's a whole thing.

E: Respondents to this poll also said that they feel the other top benefits of applying feng shui to a property means improved health. Forty-four percent of respondents believe that, that it has an improved health effect. So HSBC, they conducted this research in collaboration with a feng shui master, of course. And who had this to say, many people think feng shui is just a design tool to make your home look better, when in fact it's a powerful ancient practice that has the ability to improve not just the environment within the home, but also the health, wealth, and longevity of those living in it. Mm-hmm. That's pretty bold claims. All right. So what is feng shui really? Feng is wind, shui is water. That's the literal translation, if you want to call it that. But it is a traditional Chinese practice, which claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment. The feng shui practice expresses its architecture in terms of invisible forces, which we call, want to take a guess, guys?

S: Magic?

E: Magic.

C: Magic.

E: Qi. Or qi, qigong. They're invisible forces that are said to bind the universe, earth, and humanity together. So Obi-Wan and the Jedis apparently were big into feng shui. Feng shui is, I've seen it as old as 6,000 years old, some reports are. They say that's some of the earliest evidence of where buildings and burial grounds were laid out, basically to the alignment of the stars. So its initial practices combined elements of astronomy with some astrology and divination, but over time, other characteristics such as ancestor worship and numerology and elementalism worked their way into these practices. And of course, it also included the non-scientific explanation of qi, which is that magical, invisible, and otherwise undetectable alleged force that exists everywhere in the universe. So when you take all these features and you cook them inside a culture over the course of many millennia, you get this modern take on feng shui, which in the end amounts to it's a belief system. It combines various superstitions with many appeals to antiquity, and that is it. There is not a lot of science. There's no science backing any of this up. In fact, there's hardly any scientific research or adequately controlled tests that have been done with feng shui related to qi. I suppose for two reasons, nobody feels like it's worth the effort to try to disprove an invisible energy force like this. But even the purveyors, even the people who use it for marketing and for sales, don't feel the need to try to come up with their own institution of feng shui, for example, to put out their own sets of research. It just is. It's so saturated in that culture, they don't need those kinds of things to prop it up on. It just is. And apparently, it's having an influence not only in places like China, but obviously Australia. Geographically close to China, certainly a lot of Asia has adapted feng shui and taken it into their own cultures and appropriated it in their own ways. India, among other places, have a version of feng shui as well. So yeah, there's nothing to it. But it takes advantage of people is effectively what it does. You're taking advantage of the psychological disposition of people and you're using it. You're exploiting them for purposes to help you, well, in some cases, sell a house, but in some other cases, tell you what to do about your health and some other things that are frankly more important. So it's not benign in and of itself. It needs to be – people need to be more aware of it and really what it is. But it also needs a better explanation. There's just not enough people who really know what they're talking about in feng shui or what it's really expressing, what it's really telling them. And even the most cursory time spent looking into it, I think a lot of people would realize, no, I don't think so. There's nothing here. But 57% of Australians say it's going to help their property values. And that's how it translates in this article.

S: Yeah. I mean, to me, the whole thing is like it's just a waste that's superimposed on the either architectural or real estate industry in places where it's popular. It's like in addition to everything else, some charlatan is going to get $10,000 for nothing just to wave magic around.

E: And not just those industries, Steve. I looked up feng shui. They have beauty treatments which are based on feng shui. There are clothing lines based on feng shui.

S: Which makes no sense at all.

E: Really. But how is this, Steve? How to get pregnant using your own feng shui. That is a thing. Not only is that a thing, there's like a thousand YouTube videos about it. It's a bit disturbing.

S: All right. Let's move on.

Who's That Noisy? (1:00:06)

S: Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

J: All right, guys. Last week I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] I think last week, Cara, you said, didn't you say a pinball machine?

C: Yeah. It sounded a little pinball machine-y.

E: Because it has, there's a spring in there or something.

C: Yeah. It's like a spring and then something like dropping or like doink, doink, I don't know.

J: There's definitely a spring. Definitely. All right. Cody Combs wrote in. He said, hey, Jay, this will be my third time guessing. Hopefully I guessed it this time. This week the noisy sounds to me like the turning knob on a gumball or egg machine. So do you guys know what an egg machine is?

C: I think he's talking about-

E: It's the candy dispenser.

C: Yeah. Basically any dispenser where the things are inside of the plastic eggs.

J: Oh, God. Oh, that kind of plastic egg.

C: Like the little treat.

J: You put the money in, the coins, and you turn the knob.

E: Dead moth.

J: I got the gumball part of it.

C: Can you get a dead moth? That's so sad.

J: That's not correct, but I totally see why you guessed that. Visto Tutti. You may have heard of him before. Visto Tutti. So he wrote in and said, this noisy sounds like the spring-loaded arm being released of one of those launching machines for clay ducks.

E: Oh, yeah. Pull, and then you shoot the clay pigeon.

J: And if you've ever seen the way that you launch them, one of the ways you launch them is it's like a... But basically it's an arm that comes back around the side, and then it flings out this clay pigeon, which is basically a clay disc that is aerodynamic, so you could shoot it with a shotgun or whatever. So that is a good guess, because that thing has a spring, which we've already determined this thing has... This noisy has a spring, and it has like a metal sound to it as well. So not a bad guess at all, but not correct. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, hey, Jay, that sounds like something I used to do in school. He said, get a ruler, not too springy, extend about 20 centimeters over the side of your desk while holding the bit on the desk flat, then pull up on the end of the ruler that's sticking out and let it flick back, and it oscillates a bit on the edge of the desk. I've seen someone play Star Wars music by using a ruler in this way. And he's saying you could play around with the pitch by moving the ruler as it's vibrating back and forth. That's not it. It doesn't really sound like that, but I mean, I get why you say it, because there is a springy type of sound in there, but not that close. But we do have a winner this week. I don't think we've had one for two weeks. This is Marcel Janssens, and he says, hey, Jay, long time listener, show still as awesome as ever. If the noisy is what I think, it must have been sent in by a Dutch listener, and all Dutch listeners will immediately identify it. It is a, and this is what the word he put, it's a fietsstandaard, fietsstandaard.

E: What?

J: I don't know the American word for it, but he said bike rest. It's a kickstand.

C: It's a kickstand.

J: You know, when you push it back, that's where the spring now is releasing its energy as it pushes the arm back, and that's what you're hearing. So let me play that noise for you again. [plays Noisy] That second noise you hear is the kickstand going back into its closed position. So thank you, Dennis Kiefer, for sending that in. It was a very mundane, not unusual sound, but I thought I'd throw one of those at you guys because you never know what you're going to get on this show.

B: You never know.

New Noisy (1:03:40)

J: I have a new noisy, Bob. I'm going to dedicate this noisy to you for no reason. This noisy was sent in by Alex Tappan, and you must guess what this noisy is.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

There it is. Identify what is happening in this sound. You can email me for two different reasons, the two important reasons, or you could just email me to say hi or whatever. But you can email me if you have a guess for this week, or come on, noise is happening in front of you every day. Sometimes you're walking around and something cool happens. Give me that noise. Record it. Send me in the noise. You could also, if you stumble on something on the internet, you have no reason not to send it to me. So do it. Who's that noisy? WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

S: All right. Thanks, Jay.

Announcements (1:04:46)

J: Just as a quick reminder, last week we mentioned we decided that we will not be going to Dragon Con in Atlanta, which means that all of the shows that we had planned there are canceled. Unfortunately, the Delta variant is completely devastating the southern region of the United States, incredibly dangerous. So there was two shows that people signed up for that paid for the shows. They have both been refunded. You should have received your refunds for either of those two shows. One of them was the extravaganza. The other one was the private show. We're very sorry, guys. If you have any problems whatsoever with your refund, or if you just want to ask me a question about what happened, just email us at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. I'll be happy to take care of you. But I think everyone has received their money by now, and we will be back next year.

C: Jay.

J: Yes. Talk to me.

C: We are recording a virtual episode.

J: Yeah. So we are doing this. So Derek runs The Skeptic Track at Dragon Con, and we're going to record a show for him. If he can use it, we're going to do it anyway. We'll do it like it's like a live stream, full episode show

S: All right, guys. We have an interview coming up with Eugenie Scott, so let's go to that interview now.

Interview with Eugenie Scott (1:06:03)

• Neurologica: Evolution Denial Survey

S: Joining us now is Eugenie Scott. Eugenie, welcome back to The Skeptic's Guide.

ES: So great to be back with you all. Hello.

S: It's been a few years. I came across this study that was published just recently, and I noticed that you were listed as the second author on it. I wanted to talk about it, but I figured, hey, I'll just bring you on the show and we talk about it together. So the first author is John Miller, who is someone else that we've talked about on the show a few times, because we're kind of following the research that he's doing into civic scientific literacy over the last 15 years or so.

ES: More like the last 30 years.

S: Oh, yeah.

ES: He is a master of public understanding of science.

S: Absolutely.

ES: John's awesome.

S: Fifteen years is how long I've been following him, not how long he's been working. That's soon after starting the show is when I sort of became aware of the work that he was doing. And so, Eugenie, you were the director of the National Center for Science Education, which started out as an organization to promote evolution education. Then you expanded into climate change denial. And what have you been doing recently?

ES: I have been helping, of course, with Bay Area skeptics. And I will get in a quick little plug. We will be doing Skeptical this year. Hurrah, hurrah. It's October 24th and 25th, and it will be virtual, like everything else this year. And we will be, within a day or so, putting up our website, listing the speakers. So tune in. It'll be fun to see. I've been doing some skeptical stuff. I haven't been doing very much publishing. I've published a thing or two, and then, of course, this thing with John. 've become a beekeeper. I think that's what you're supposed to do when you retire.

S: Something like that, yeah.

ES: It's the gateway to chickens, I understand. Let me just say a quick word about John Miller, though, who I've known for probably 30 years. Miller, Scott, and Okamoto is the single article that is the most cited of probably all the rest of my articles put together. I mean, it just has a massive number of citations. It's quite impressive. That was a study that was published in 2006 based on John's data, international data. And when John had these data, which, as we will get into, it's cross-sectional data, but it starts in 1985 and ends in 2019, and it's just a lot of data there. He very kindly asked me to, again, consult with him on the interpretation and put it into the context and so forth, which I was happy to do because John is really great to work with. But, again, he gets the majority of credit for this article because he did the heavy lifting of the data collection and the data analysis. Glenn Branch and I, also from NCSE, are coming in at the end to kind of get credit for it, but John's awesome. He's really great.

S: And so, just the 64,000-foot view is that this is just looking at public acceptance of evolution. I know that can be highly variable depending on exactly how you ask the questions, frontwards or backwards. Yeah, since you've been asking the same question the same way over a long period of time, that we can do some longitudinal data. So, the big picture is that more people are accepting evolution in the last 10 years than in the previous 25 years. Acceptance or rejection of evolution was at its dead heat for 20 years, 25 years. And then, just in the last 10 years, they start to separate with. So, why do you think that's happening?

ES: You know, all of the research that I'm familiar with on this topic, and it basically boils down to two major classes of variables, education and religion. And the acceptance of evolution is highly influenced by how much education you have, and it's highly influenced by the degree of conservatism of your religious views. And one of the nice things about John's data is that he does have a measure. It's a composite measure, which he calls religious fundamentalism, which allows him to look at the role of this variable in both a bivariate as well as a multivariate fashion. Listeners do read the paper because there's just a ton of stuff in it that we probably won't have time to talk about this afternoon. But the more education you have, the more likely you are to accept evolution. This is particularly true in terms of the number of years of education. People with baccalaureate or graduate degrees have a much higher incidence of acceptance of evolution. But it's also true in terms of the kind of evolution you have. And one of the points that we make in this article, it's been a theme that John has been very interested in for many years, is the American higher education system is unique in a number of ways, particularly in that we have these general education requirements that everybody bitches and moans about, but you have to take a little social science, you have to take a little humanities, you have to take a little science, you have to take a little math, a little language, et cetera. This is not typical for developed countries. Most developed countries, you get to the college, university level, and you just leap right into your specialty. And the fact that we have a requirement in almost all higher education in the United States that you've got to take some science, and the one science that tends to be the most chosen, as it were, is biology. That means there's a really good chance you're going to get exposed to evolution at the college level. And the more science courses you have, we find in our data, but also in other data which is more fine-grained than ours, you find the more science classes you have, the more likely you are to accept evolution. So there's this really very nice, tidy education package. Similarly, actually the strongest predictor of rejection of evolution is religious conservatism. And John has a composite measure of fundamentalism which does show that the more conservative your religious views, the more likely you are to reject evolution. The more moderate your view is, the lower your score, as it were, in fundamentalism, the more likely you are to accept evolution. We look at the acceptance of evolution in 1988 and in 2019, because those two years we were measuring the same variables, so to speak. Looking at religious fundamentalism, yeah, the higher your score on that variable, the lower the acceptance of evolution. The lower your score, the less religiously fundamentalist you are, the higher your score. That makes sense. But what's kind of neat is to look at the difference between 1988 and 2019, because even those with the highest, in other words, the most religiously conservative, the highest fundamentalism scores, 8% in 1988, 32% in 2019.

B: Wow.

ES: I mean, that was just stunning when I saw that. And that gets us into a really interesting aspect of American culture over the last 10 or 20 years, especially the last 10 or 15 years, and that is that religious America has gradually become less fundamentalist. I think it's important to realize, I mean, this is a very, very big sociological issue, and I'm not an expert on it, but certainly the intersection of religious conservatives and political conservatives, which you can refer to as the religious right, is still structurally very strong. They have a lot of institutional support. They are a very strong influence in the Republican Party, for example, and in an awful lot of local governments as well. But in terms of numbers, the really strong fundamentalist churches are not growing. And in fact, the more mainstream Protestant denominations actually have been increasing over the last 10 years or so. So there's been an amelioration of the more conservative elements of American religion, Protestant Christianity. Simultaneously, more people graduating from college, there's been an increase in the amount of education people are getting. And those two things together, I think, would go a long way, I think, toward explaining the growth that we see in the acceptance of evolution, which is kind of cool.

S: Yeah, that was probably the single most surprising number for me, was that the highest scoring fundamentalists went from 8% to 32% accept evolution. And the numbers were a little bit higher in the next category as well, and also in the lowest category, up a little bit. But on average, it went from 46% to 54%. So not huge. I mean, that's the entire range of religious fundamentalism. But that was surprising. So why would the most fundamentalists go from essentially none of them accepting evolution to about a third accepting evolution over that time period? I'm not sure I would have predicted that. I don't know what's happening within the fundamentalist community to make that happen.

ES: That is not something most people would have predicted. We can only hypothesize at this point, because I have not seen data to test something like this. But one could hypothesize that there is a moderating influence in even conservative American religion. Part of this is age-related too, because you find younger people more likely to accept evolution, but younger people also tend to have more moderate religious views. So this could also be an influence there. And one of the problems that very conservative Christianity has had is keeping the younger people in the fold. How are you going to keep them down on the church after they've seen Paris? I mean, there are an awful lot of distractions for young people today in American popular culture, and it's a lot of fun. And you really can't shut up teenagers and college students in a box and expect them not to have any influence from outside culture. It's even the case that some of the social issues that have been very strongly influential in the religious conservative wing of American Protestant Christianity, they're even ameliorating a bit. Younger people are much more likely to accept gays and lesbians. There's still a very strong anti-abortion component. That seems to be a real litmus test for fundamentalist Christians. Evolution has never been quite as deeply rooted as a litmus test, shall we say, for fundamentalism. Our data suggests that it is weakening further.

S: The other thing that sort of stood out to me, which is something I did know previously probably from reading John Miller and other studies out there, is that increasing education doesn't help until you get to the college level. There really is no trend even between less than high school, high school, and associate degree. And then it jumps up a little bit for baccalaureate, and then it really jumps up for graduate. Which I think also holds for just scientific literacy in general. It doesn't really increase until you get to college level, even postgraduate level, really. So is that an indication that we're pretty much utterly failing science education at the high school level?

ES: No, I don't believe so. I think, first of all, American public school education is a very big battleship, and it steers slowly. I think everybody will recognize that. That said, there has been a movement within American education, science education, but all fields, toward establishing some kinds of standards. You could call them minimal standards, if you will. But there were advisory national science education standards in 1994. They were very influential in influencing the state science education standards. They weren't required, but there was a lot of buy-in from the states. And then more recently, in the, I think, 2013, 2014, the next generation science standards have also been influential. But the standards movement has really required the teaching of evolution at the mostly junior high and high school level. It's not really an elementary school topic. And this battleship is slow to steer, but textbooks do include evolution. State science exams, where they do have state science exams, that's not the case in every state, more often than not, do require some knowledge of evolution, which means teachers will be teaching it. Evolution really is back in the curriculum, much more than it was, say, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, et cetera. It takes a while for that to really trickle down and have an effect, because part of it is educating the next generation of science teachers, which, of course, is done at the university level. We just make a glancing reference in this article about what is actually a very substantial movement at the college level in biology education to really improve those elementary biology classes, the Biology 101 in college, and improve the instruction of biology to include more evolution, I might add. And that is going to have a very important effect upon the science teachers. Now, Glenn Branch and other colleagues at Penn State and NCSC published an article a year ago where they did surveys of high school teachers, and they found an appreciable increase in the amount of evolution being taught by high school teachers today compared to an earlier study using the same questions. I think it's very easy for us to be very disappointed about high school science education, but it is getting better, and evolution education is one of the examples of that. There's a turning away from memorization. There's an embracing of active learning education, things that you don't end up with as many facts to bubble into the standardized tests at the end. But if you end up with a better understanding of how science works, I'd take that as a win. And that's the kind of thing that you're finding middle school and high school teachers stressing these days.

S: Yeah, I mean, it's all good to hear, although I'll just say that I'm not convinced, and partly because I think it's more of a quality issue than an amount issue. So it's good that they're teaching more evolution, et cetera. I know that, ostensibly, they're teaching more process and less memorization. But having paid very close attention to two daughters going through public school system in actually a part of the country where the education system is actually above average, it's actually pretty good, the quality of the education of the science that they got exposed to at the high school level, I felt was abysmal. And yet, and at the college level, it was excellent. I mean, there's just a dramatic difference in the quality of the teaching in science between high school and college. And to me, this data sort of supports that, the idea that the more college courses you have in science, the more you accept evolution. But it's flatline through high school. In fact, the numbers go down a little bit from less in high school to high school in terms of acceptance of evolution. And I think generally speaking, and again, there's other data from my understanding to support this, that you really need, and this also has been my experience as a skeptic, you need to get to a fairly high level before your scientific knowledge really makes you a skeptic. You know what I mean? A moderate amount of scientific knowledge just doesn't quite do it, doesn't prepare you to deal with the misinformation and the logical fallacies and the subtle you have an organized system of science denial. A moderate level of science knowledge is not going to prepare you to deal with that. You really need to get to that college level before you're given the kind of understanding of how things are working and what the evidence actually is before you could I think handle it. At least to me, these numbers are consistent with that. Now, maybe it might take a generation to trickle down. You know, as you say, we have to train the teachers before they could be teaching, at a more of a sophisticated level to get the students up to a level. You know, maybe in 20 more years, we'll start to see those numbers move. But that was one thing that didn't surprise me about these numbers because it kind of fit.

ES: It is absolutely the case that more can be done for science education at the pre-college level. I'm not denying that at all. But things have gotten better. I guess I'm asking you to have faith.

B: Touche.

S: Well, I'll be hopeful. I'll put it that way. I mean, I think, yeah, this shows that the overall numbers are moving in a good direction. But again, they interact in such a complex way, like it's hard to know. And I'm not sure like how much cross-referencing statistically was done. Like for example I was wondering, is part of the effect we're seeing at college because fewer people who are fundamentalists go to college? Is that even true or is there any artifact in there? Is that because they're going to like life university or whatever? They're going to fundamentalist universities that weren't part of the survey? How much were you able to sort of dig down to any confounding factors like that?

ES: Granted, some religiously conservative people do end up at Bible colleges. And I don't imagine the amount of science education they get there, at least in evolution, is going to be worth a lot. But there are some very good religiously oriented universities. Brigham Young has a really great evolutionary biology group, all right? I mean, Baylor's got very sound geology and biology departments. Obviously, Notre Dame has has been fine for a long time. Brandeis, there's a lot of religiously oriented institutions that do quite well in science education.

S: All right. Well, it's, yeah, this has always been a tough nut to crack. But at least it is interesting that the numbers have moved in a good direction in the last decade and be very interesting to continue to follow this.

ES: Let's hope that 10 years from now, if you have me back on the show and I'm still alive 10 years from now, we won't see these numbers plummeting, we'll see these numbers going up further. So fingers crossed, call me in 10 years.

S: All right. Well, Geanie, thanks for joining us on such short notice. Really appreciate it.

ES: Well, it was a pleasure. It was great seeing you all. And keep up the good work, guys.

S: Thanks a lot.

B: Thank you.

S: Good luck with your conference.

Science or Fiction (1:26:21)

Answer	Item
Fiction	Visible laser beam
Science	Total artificial heart
Science	Allosaurus a scavenger

Host	Result
Steve	swept

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Visible laser beam
Jay	Visible laser beam
Cara	Visible laser beam
Evan	Visible laser beam

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Item #1: French scientists have developed a total artificial heart that changes its beating in response to changes in blood pressure and physical activity, with a study patient surviving more than two years with the device.
Item #2: A new analysis of the theropod dinosaur, Allosaurus, the largest meat-eater of its time, concludes that it was likely a scavenger.
Item #3: Physicists have developed a laser beam that is visible even in a vacuum and in the visible light spectrum.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake based on their clever deduction, or maybe they just happen to read it. We'll see.

E: Good luck.

S: Okay. Here we go. Item number one. French scientists have developed a total artificial heart that changes its beating in response to changes in blood pressure and physical activity with a study patient surviving more than two years with the device. Item number two. A new analysis of the theropod dinosaur Allosaurus, the largest meat eater of its time, concludes that it was likely a scavenger. And item number three. Physicists have developed a laser beam that is visible even in a vacuum and in the visible light spectrum. Bob, go first.

Bob’s Response

B: Okay. Total artificial heart. Well, it's about damn time. What was that dude's name from 30 years ago? I know this is tough technology, but I want to believe that better be science. Let's look at the next one. Analysis of theropod dinosaur Allosaurus, blah, blah, I don't care. Don't care about that one at all. Physicists have developed, the third one. Let's see. Physicists have developed a laser beam that's visible even in a vacuum and invisible. Throw in the visible light spectrum in there, huh? So let's see. A laser beam visible in a vacuum. Now remember, laser beams are visible because they're bouncing off something, particles in the medium that they're traveling through. So in a vacuum science fiction movies are generally completely wrong. You won't see the cool little laser beams. You won't even hear them, of course, either. But you got to see them because that's cool. So now they're saying they're visible in a vacuum and in visible light.

S: Yeah, so it's not like in x-rays or infrared or something. It's in the visible, at least at some point in the visible spectrum.

B: I'll say that that's fiction. Like the laser beams fiction.

S: Okay, Jay.

Jay’s Response

J: All right, so they're going on this artificial heart one. Yeah, so this is a big deal, right? So if this is true, like the changes in blood pressure and physical activity would make the heart change its behavior. That's pretty big, right? Because that's getting biofeedback so the heart can actually change what it's doing in response to what the body needs. Man, I hope that that's true because we really need something like this. Yeah, I mean, it is about time that somebody developed one of these. So I'm going to put that on as the maybe. This one about the theropod dinosaur, the Allosaurus. He was a meat eater and he was the largest and likely a scavenger. I would imagine a lot of... Now, why would a scavenger, if the largest dinosaur, if they're the largest, why would he need to be a scavenger? Why wouldn't he be a predator and a killer? The largest meat eater of its time. Well, he just happens to be the largest meat eater. But okay, lots of questions there. Last one, physicists have developed a laser beam that is visible even in a vacuum and in the visible light spectrum. This is great because this means that we could simulate blasters being fired, which I'm all for, which I think is very interesting. Now, how would that work? In order for it to be visible in the visible light spectrum, it would mean that the laser beam would have to be sending light particles outside of it, which means it's not a highly focused laser beam. What would be the purpose of that? I don't know. That one seems kind of sketchy to me. I agree with Bob. It's a fiction. There's something wrong with that.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara’s Response

C: I'm probably going to go with the guys. I think the Allosaurus one doesn't surprise me. I think T-Rex is a scavenger too. A meat eater. I mean, sorry, a predator also, but also a scavenger. Just they got to eat.

S: But to be clear, what this one means is that they were a scavenger and not a predator.

C: And not a... Yeah, I don't know.

S: Because, yeah, all predators will sometimes scavenger most. That's not what we're talking about. I'm saying...

C: But you're saying it's more like a vulture than another kind of raptor that, yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is a coin flip. I do remember that T-Rex is thought to have been both. I think we're never going to ultimately know beyond a shadow of a doubt. I think we're only going to be able to say, hey, there are bite marks on these bones or, hey, it's unlikely. But even then, were they post-mortem? Were they pre-mortem? Like, I don't know. But it wouldn't surprise me. The heart is incredible. Also not really surprised. Kind of bummed out. Well, it says surviving more than two years. I don't know what the upper limit is on that. My hope is that if this one is science, it's because this is only like a stopgap until somebody gets a transplant. Like, I don't think we're at a point yet where people are just going to be able to live with artificial hearts continuously. But I could be wrong. Because a two-year survival seems like it's sad. It's not enough to say, oh, here's a new heart. Let's do all this really invasive work. There's a point where it's like, is that worth it to the patient? But if this is a stopgap for a transplant, that could be massive. So I think I've got to go with the guys. I don't really know enough about this. Because I thought you could see lasers. But maybe there's something about it.

B: In a vacuum?

C: You can't see them in a vacuum. Yeah, exactly. Maybe you can't ever see them in a vacuum. Something about the vacuum just prevents you from it being visible light for some reason, because of the way that it scatters. Or I don't know. So yeah, I'm going to go with the guys just because they know things about lasers. And I do not.

S: And Evan.

Evan’s Response

E: It's hard to go. I'm glad Bob went first. It's hard to go against Bob. Frankly, when it comes to this, he probably knows more than maybe you always put together about this stuff. Although you got me on this scavenger one with the allosaurus. I thought you were saying that-

C: I know, when he clarified.

E: Both. But you're saying now it's scavenger instead of predator. The only reason that could be science is because allosaurus was basically what? Lazy and let the other dinosaurs do their work. And then it moved in and knocked everyone else out of the way and ate the prey? Is that how that works?And the heart. Very cool. It might be- Is it controlled with a computer chip? I'm wondering how much computer technology is involved in that heart. So I guess we're all going to go with the laser beam one.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Okay. So we'll take these in order. Number one is French scientists have developed a total artificial heart that changes its beating in response to changes in blood pressure and physical activity with a study patient surviving more than two years with the device. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science.

C: Oh, that's incredible.

S: Yeah. This is a French company making this heart. The news item was that the second implant was just done in the United States. First one was in July. Second one was this month. There have been some in France. However, there are 10 study patients that had the heart. And so one of the study patients has survived for at least two years. I think they hit the two-year mark in November of 2020. And I couldn't find any follow-up either way. So hopefully he's still going. They think that the heart should have at least a five-year lifespan there. And, Cara, you're absolutely correct. This is a bridge to heart transplant. This is not meant to be a permanent solution. But it certainly sounds like it's getting awfully close. Like if you're living for five years on an artificial heart, that's pretty good. How much better does it have to be? So the company is Carmat. C-A-R-M-A-T. So the power source is a small external battery pack. So yeah, it's not completely internalized, unfortunately. So that would be great.

B: That kind of stinks.

S: If it could harvest power from breathing or whatever. Like if it could somehow harvest enough power that it could recharge a battery and be entirely internal. But alas, that is not the case. It takes an external battery pack, which is still a huge limiting factor for these kind of artificial organs. This is the second fully artificial heart. Syncardia is the first one.

B: Syncardia. Nice.

S: But this one has the advantage of being responsive. You know, it actually has sensors to detect blood pressure, detect posture, physical activity, and can beat more or less as needed.

C: That's incredible. Because otherwise, you probably have to monitor your behavior so much. Just even keel all the time. Can't run upstairs. Can't stand up too fast. You can't.

S: Right. I mean, and you're right, Bob. When we were kids, we were first hearing about artificial hearts. And we all would have guessed 40 years in the future.

B: I would have bet the house.

S: But again, it's one of those nonlinear problems where it's really hard to. So one of the big challenges is it's hard to make a mechanical heart that's soft enough that it doesn't destroy the blood cells, right?

C: Right, yeah.

S: Even artificial valves have this problem. And left ventricular assist devices, they've all had to be redesigned and designed so that they're more gentle on the red blood cells. And that's been one of the main engineering hurdles as well. But also just you need a mechanical device that could pump 60 times a minute forever, right? I mean, it's just a huge engineering challenge.

B: It's amazing.

S: Because if it stops, you're dead, right? I mean, think about your car has to run continuously. And if you ever have a hiccup where your engine stops, you die. You know, that's.

C: And you can't just go in for an oil change. It doesn't work that way.

B: I wonder what his heart sounds like if you listen to it with a stethoscope.

S: Oh, I'm sure you can hear it. You can hear artificial valves and stuff. Let's go on.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Number two, a new analysis of the theropod dinosaur Allosaurus, the largest meat eater of its time, concludes that it was likely a scavenger. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science.

B: Yes.

S: This one is science.

C: I was so ready for you to say the fiction.

S: Oh, that would have been cool. Yeah. So this has been an open question for a long time because it's a theropod. It certainly looks like other theropod predators. But there are some details to Allosaurus' skeleton and particularly the skull that kind of give away that it's probably was primarily a scavenger. So one is that it has a very low degree of binocular vision. So we know from tons of living examples, like if you're a predator, chances are you have binocular vision, right? Because you have to hunt and to pounce. And so you can statistically correlate how well your binocular vision is with how much of your time you spend as a predator. And or just look at all the predators, look at their vision, all the non-predators, look at their vision. They're just different. And so Allosaurus falls into the non-predator end of the spectrum when it comes to its vision. And the other thing is that its skull is very weak. It's not robust like a predator is. It probably wasn't strong enough to subdue a prey, like completely different from T-Rex. So T-Rex was probably an opportunistic scavenger like most predators, but it was primarily a predator. It killed with its mouth, right? Allosaurus did not, probably did not do that. It just didn't have the bone structure that you would expect from a scavenger. I mean, from a predator.

B: Predator, yeah.

S: Yeah. Which is the thing that's surprising about it is that it was the apex. You know, it was the biggest meat eater out there. And yet it was still primarily scavenging. But again, keep in mind, at the same time, there were even bigger dinosaurs out there, just herbivores. So there was plenty of meat lying around to keep them fed.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. All this means that physicists have developed a laser beam that is visible even in a vacuum and in the visible light spectrum is the fiction.

B: You almost got me on that one, you bastard.

S: I was hoping to get somebody who read the headline. Here's the headline. Physicists make laser beams visible in vacuum. I saw that headline. I'm like, really?

B: Yeah. How did that happen?

S: How did they make that happen? And then when you read it, it's not that at all. I mean, it's just not the laser beam itself is not visible. They're shooting it against atoms and then using the atoms as detectors to know where the beam is. But the beam itself is not visible.

C: So visible is in quotes.

S: Yeah. It's like a real stretch. It's a real stretch. But it's detectable. It's not visible. I think detectable would have been a better word. They're using a system. And the reason why this is important is because they're using laser.

B: Lining them up.

S: They're using lasers to move around individual molecules. In order to produce quantum weirdness. And because the molecules need to be very precisely placed. And because laser beams are invisible in a vacuum, you're trying to aim a laser beam at a molecule and you can't see the beam. And so they said it's like trying to use a laser pointer to target a beam in a soccer stadium blindfolded. And that may even be undercalling it. So it takes days. It takes days to line, or weeks. They even say weeks to line up to line up all the lasers because it's like a lot of trial and error. So they came up with this system where you can have like a bunch of molecules. And because of the way the laser beam interacts with them, they can use that in order to detect within a few thousandths of a millimeter where the laser beam is pointing.

B: It's a cool idea.

S: And so that brought the aiming phase of this experiment down from weeks to a day. So if you do this kind of research, this is huge. But you can't like look at the beam and see it. So I just translated it.

B: You can't detect it.

S: Translated it into what the headline made it seem was the case. But yeah, this is like one of those. If you just read the headline, you could have been snickered.

C: Punks.

B: Nice try. Nice try.

S: It was a tough week. Again, the last couple of years has been really hard on science or fiction. That's why I'm doing a lot more of the themes. Because it's like all the news is COVID news. It's just like COVID, COVID, COVID.

C: I'm finding that when I pitch you stories. I'm like, oh, they're thin this week.

S: I know. I mean, literally like...

B: I haven't had much trouble.

S: If you go to the health news section of BBC News, which is one of my sources, they're featuring like seven stories all about COVID. Like that's it. That's all the health news there is. So like on science-based medicine, like half of my article is about COVID. Because that's the only news that's out there. It's like you have to really go searching for stuff. And so it's just... It was hard enough finding like three juicy science or fiction items. Now like when half of them are basically off the board. Unless I want to do a COVID-themed science or fiction, which I've done before. It makes it really challenging. This week was a particularly challenging week.

C: Because it's like everything's like gee whiz science. And nothing is like really a deep dive or a skeptical kind of demystification or whatever. So yeah, some weeks are harder than others.

S: It's a strangely hard sweet spot. But yeah, the good thing like with you, Cara, is that usually it enables me to balance the news items. Usually by the time you pitch, I know what everyone else is doing. So I can kind of...

C: Because I pitch the night before, before I go to bed. So you get it first thing in the morning.

S: I also like usually have a few options for myself. And again, I'll pick like what do we need this week? Do we need a pseudoscience? Do we need a hard science?

C: True. And sometimes that happens where you're like, I really like this one. I'm going to do this one. You can do that one. And I'm like, oh, cool. I love that. Or I already wrote about that this week. I'm like, oh, right on.

S: Yeah, there's only so many news items out there. All right.

C: For sure.

S: So good job, everyone. You swept me this week. It's been a while since you swept me.

B: You're welcome, guys.

E: Thank you, Bob.

C: Yeah, thanks, Bob.

E: More lasers.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:18)

There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
– Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), Canadian philosopher

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

E: This week's quote comes to us courtesy of our listener Adam from Ontario. That's in Canada. Thank you, Adam, for the suggestion. He said, hey, Evan, here's the quote. Here's the quote. "There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew." That was said by Marshall McLuhan. Henry Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian philosopher whose specialty was media theory. He's also known for the expression, the medium is the message, which I've certainly heard about before and discussed. And it's an interesting sort of philosophical take on media. But in any case, this particular quote, there are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew. I agree. We're active. We are not passive. We should not be passive, I think, is really the point here. We need to be aware. We need to be active. Everything we do has an impact. And we need to be more aware.

C: We all have responsibility.

B: What year did he say that? What year did he say that?

E: He died in 1980, so certainly before that.

B: I don't know. My point was that it's reminiscent of the controversy with these billionaires going into space and are they astronauts. Some people saying that, no, you're not really an astronaut if you're a passenger, only if you're really the crew. So that just reminded me. It just made me think of that. I was wondering if that guy said it recently, but he clearly didn't.

C: I guess not. It's funny, too, because the first thing I thought about for whatever reason when you said that quote was, do you remember early on in the pandemic, people would say, we're all in the same boat? And then it really became iterated to, we're all in the same storm, but that guy over there is in a yacht, and that guy is in a dinghy. I think we really need to keep that clear.

J: That's a funny way to put it.

C: Yeah, that's true.

J: It is true.

S: All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure man.

C: Thanks Steve.

J: You got it brother.

E: Thanks doctor.

Signoff

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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Today I Learned

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References

Vocabulary