SGU Episode 1023

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SGU Episode 1023
February 15th 2025
"Streaks of light capture the beauty of the night sky's cosmic dance."
SGU 1022                      SGU 1024
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
“One of the problems with anecdotes is that they tend to be provided by the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones.”
― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

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, February 12th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

E: Hey everybody.

S: Cara, Santa Maria.

Voice-over: Howdy, Jay.

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

E: Good evening everyone.

S: How's everyone doing getting ready for your fake holiday coming up in a couple days? Did anybody do anything like my wife I deliberately don't do anything for.

C: Yeah, everything just inflated and expensive.

E: I know the Hallmark holidays, as I call them, are just, you know, consumer excuses for people to spend money on things they frankly, let's face it, don't need. And, and, and, and your love and appreciation for a person. I mean, you know, that should be celebrated every day, not on anyone it.

C: Should be, but the unfortunate thing is it's not often.

S: Listen, it's a good reminder to like take some time out for your significant other, but you can do it in a non commercial way. And if you feel like they like getting flowers every now and then, this is the worst time. Get them flowers to do it at some other time of the year. Just make a point, a note of it, even if it's just a few weeks from now. Anytime other than Valentine's Day, when supplies are limited and prices are ridiculous.

E: Yeah, or do something a little different, like you have you and your partner give to a charity, right? Make a make a, make a Valentine's Day charitable donation, something like that that you can celebrate together. That'd be nice. Or.

C: Cook together instead of going out to dinner.

E: Yes, agreed. Absolutely play play board game. Do you know, just hang out and enjoy each other's company?

J: And do it every week, you know. That too.

E: Yeah, but the Hallmark holidays, I don't know, have always kind of stuck in my craw a bit. I've never quite understood them. And even though other members of my family, I don't know, they, they sort of live and die by the calendar on these things, you know? And they go, they go with the pageantry, they dress up, they do the whole thing. It just never appealed to me, just didn't.

C: You're so right about like Mother's Day and Father's Day and like, are there siblings Day?

E: I'm sure there are, you know.

C: But can we still do like our birthdays? You OK with that?

E: OK, yeah, I'm not. I'm not, as, you know, militant. I'm not as put off by birthdays and those kinds of celebrations.

C: I feel like celebrate any day you want to celebrate. There's enough garbage in the world right now that if you can find a reason to celebrate, do it.

E: Here, here. Oh, and happy birthday, Charles Darwin. Oh, born on this day, February 12th. Now, Darwin Day, that's a real holiday. Now that's it's a holiday where it's celebrating. I'm gonna buy you all. I'm gonna I'm gonna buy you all a Finch card.

S: Or a fossil. I'd rather have a fossil rather than a card, yeah.

E: But those are expensive.

S: I'd rather have a $400.00 thing instead of a $2.00 thing. Sure. No, you know, come on, There are fossils that are literally one or two dollars. There's like a low quality trial, like there's like literally millions and millions of those. You could get them anywhere.

E: But then it wouldn't be much of A gift then would.

S: It it's just, it's the idea. It's the, it's the, you know, it's the the thought, you know. Here's a little fossil to celebrate Darwin Day.

E: Well. And, and, and someday, you know, you would think that, you know, give someone a penny on a day and, you know, big deal. No, no big deal. But there is going to come a day soon maybe in which you get a penny. It's like, oh wow, I remember these because these don't exist anymore.

S: I've been hearing that my whole life, that they're getting rid of the penny.

E: Well, you know, it was made news last week that I guess the president is going to say no more penny production, no.

C: But I read that the Mint stopped making pennies like 3 years ago. Oh.

S: No. We wouldn't know.

C: I think they.

S: Did to detect it for like 20 years that that's how many freaking pennies there are.

C: I know, but let me.

S: About 3.2 billion pennies were manufactured in the 2024 fiscal year.

C: There.

E: You go, right?

C: JK then.

E: And that's down from 5.3 billion from just a few years ago. So they're.

S: Down they're.

C: Facing them out. Gotcha.

E: I was speaking with someone and we were talking about he was concerned about the inflationary effect of the removal of the penny from the system, which is not something I'd really thought about before. Do.

C: People even use cash, not to mention that. Right.

E: Yes, they do care. They do. They do use cash. I still see people, you know, mostly, let's say I'm older types of people that reach into their wallet and pull out the greenbacks and Jingle in their pocket for that change.

B: Yeah, if my, if our mom's got some cash in her wallet, she just automatically pulls it out. I'm like, ma, save that. You can use your credit card, save them cash for tips. You know, that's, it's, it's so weird because I used to, I remember I used to have a nice little skull bank in my room. I would come home every day and fill that up with. Some. With some coins. A skull bank?

J: Did you just say a skull? Bank.

B: A skull bank? You got a problem with that, do you? Have a.

J: Piggy Bank, literally like a Piggy Bank skull, or you just call it like when you save money, you call it the skull bank.

B: Oh, no, it's a, it's a, it's a plastic hollow receptacle resembling a skull that is meant for money. After a, after a year or two, I'd have like, you know, 150 bucks of, of change and a lot of bones. But for the for the past ten years or or more, it's like I've, I've got no change in my pocket. At the end of the day, it's like none, it's, it's so rare.

C: Yeah, I never have change. I hate it when I get to a meter and it doesn't have like any way to pay except with change. I'm like, I guess I'm not parking here.

E: Yeah, right. Well, Carrie, you remember payphones, right? Well, you were still alive on. Payphones.

C: I took a picture of 1 the other day.

E: Oh cool.

C: Yeah, there was one like when I was on a walk and I was like, oh, Relic, I don't think the phone. I think somebody had cut the cord to the phone.

E: You know, some people's parents wouldn't let the kids go out unless they had pocket change so they could make that emergency phone call from the pay phone if they had to.

C: And I came from the era, you know, I was born in 1983. So when I was a teenager or even a preteen out on my own, I had a pager. I felt right in that demographic. So before cell phones, we had pagers and our parents could page us and tell us to call home.

E: That's high tech for, you know, way, way more. Yeah. You know what the pager was when we were growing up? It's our mother at the door yelling our name into the into the air, saying get home for dinner. Oh, boy. But Speaking of Steve's retirement? But. That was smooth, huh?

S: That's coming up.

E: Yes.

S: What do you think about when when you think about retirement, Steve? Like how does it turn over in your head? So it's 95% very positive. I am, I definitely want, I'm looking forward to working full time for the SGU. I'm looking forward to being on my own schedule. You know what I mean? Like the biggest thing is like if I could sleep just as long as I want to in the morning that is, that would be wonderful. But at the same time, you know, I've been spending the last 30 years keeping all these plates spinning, you know, basically maintaining, you know, all my clinical skills and knowledge and board certifications and licensure and everything that's that's, you know, be nice to not have to worry about all that. But I have all these pretty highly developed skills that I will no longer be using. And yeah, so it's a little sad, you know, it had to happen sometime. Obviously do.

C: You think you'll consult or anything?

S: No, because either you maintain everything or you don't. You know what I mean?

E: You have to shut. You really shut it, Shut it down, basically.

S: I mean, I'll probably, I, I will get license for another year just because I've already met all my requirements for doing that. But in a year I won't have met my requirements for to continue my license. So I'm not going to get 30 CME credits over the next year if I'm not, you know, working at Yale and doing what I'm doing. So that's part of the benefit is not having to maintain everything.

E: You're going to lose access to all your all the publications and things, Yeah.

US#01: Yeah, maybe you're not with the institution anymore.

S: Yeah, well, I mean, I'm retiring from you. I literally have to turn in my ID. I'll lose access to everything.

E: The key to the washroom, too.

S: But I'm looking forward to the transition. It's like, it's not like is like, you know, like every patient's now asking me about it, but I tell I'm not really retiring. I'm just retiring from patient care. I'll still be doing.

E: I'm not really retiring, I'm just retiring from you.

S: From you, like the all of my, I'm still going to be teaching, right? I'm just going to be teaching in a different venue and all of my medical and clinical knowledge will still be put to use writing and, and and promoting science based medicine and all that, just not in direct patient care. So you know, it's it's better than just retiring entirely.

E: Sure, and having absolutely nothing to do at that point, that would be awful. You think I can't imagine.

S: Well, I've had a lot of people talk to me about their retirement and it's, it's, you know, about 5050. Some people like, it's wonderful, you're going to love it. People like I am bored out of my skull.

E: Oh my God, you will not be bored. That's. Like a prison of their own making.

S: That absolutely, absolutely. I will not be bored. I'm not where I think I will be in the this is wonderful category because I'm still going to be working exactly as much as I want to. You know what I mean? I have plenty plenty to do.

E: I think before, I think before long, Steve, you'll be crafting your own and sword.

S: Maybe.

E: You're gonna become a swordsmith.

S: Maybe we'll open up. I have room for one more hobby I can add. We'll see.

C: How much room you have for hobbies?

S: You have any ideas? About that, no, I don't know. I'll think about it. Jay and I took a blade smithing class that was fun.

E: But you see.

S: I'm ready to do that again. I loved it.

E: And a pesto making class right?

S: I took a pesto making class.

E: And glassblowing. Oh yeah, you're, you're good. You know you'll find plenty of things to do and learn.

S: Well, let's get on with the show.

News Items

Demographics of Misinformation (10:01)

• Who Believes Misinformation - NeuroLogica Blog 

S: We're going to go right into some news items and actually I'm starting off, there was a new meta analysis for, you know, looking at the demographics of who is most susceptible to misinformation. And they were specifically looking at A1 particular research paradigm, which is the the news headline paradigm where you show somebody a news headline, it's either real or fake. And they have, it's a forced choice. They have to say if they think it's real or they think it's fake.

C: How good would we be at that game?

S: We would be very good based upon the the the results of this, but we'll just say that but but let's go over. There's some interesting details here worth digging into. First of all, this is a this is a meta analysis. They looked at 256,337 unique choices made by over 11,000 participants across 31 experiments. So that's a pretty sizable meta analysis. So first of all, just looking across all of that, people did better than chance. So that was good for the 50 that's.

US#01: Promising.

S: They were correct. They correctly identified true headlines 68.51% of the time. OK, false headlines 67.24% of the time. So about 2/3 of the time, more or less, they were able to correctly guess whether a headline was true or false. That's, you know, that's pretty bad actually, if you think about it. You know, if a third of the time you really don't, you, you falsely believe that something is true or you think it's false. So better than chance, but you know, not that great.

E: Not great.

S: And so then then of course, the more interesting thing is they doubling down into what factors predicted it. So let me go over a few of them. So one factor they looked at was education level. How do you think that predicted whether people were able to identify true or false headlines?

E: I think more. Education after it is of course it. Had a positive impact probably.

B: Really wouldn't kick in though until higher, really higher education education.

S: So across these studies, it had 0 impact.

B: Well, that's that's.

S: Not good. Educational level alone conveyed essentially no benefit.

B: What about PhD level?

S: So what you're thinking of Bob, is belief in pseudoscience, which is a separate. It's not this paradigm. I, that was my, I remember that as well. I actually wrote about that, that the education level doesn't protect against believing in pseudoscience until you get to the PhD level. That's why science education.

B: Yeah.

S: Yeah. But this at least in this paradigm, in these studies, I don't know how how the range of education level was, but the education level had no measurable process. So what does that mean it to me?

B: Gotta. Be you got to listen to this show and be a skeptic.

S: Yeah, to me, that's a failure of the educational. System.

C: That's what I was going to say. What does that say about our education system?

S: It means we're not teaching the skills necessary to tell fake from true headlines. So there were some strong predictors, though one of the biggest was having an analytical thinking style, which is why I think we would do well because that's what we do, right? We do analysis. So analytical thinking means that you go through and you look at the evidence, the logic is source of the information like you do an analysis as opposed to the intuitive thinking style which is like this feels fake.

US#12: My gut is telling me the. Gut. Yeah.

S: And again, not to criticize that, that's a, that's not a bad thing to listen to, but it should just be a starting point, not a conclusion, right? It kind of gives you a, a head start on your analysis, but but or tells you maybe how much of an analysis you have to do. But you shouldn't just rely on your gut, because that's just heuristical thinking, you know, then that's.

C: Easy. Some people's heuristics are more reflective of reality. Yeah, exactly.

S: Yeah, or they're just not perfect. They're never perfect. They're just.

C: Never perfect, but some but heuristics build on previous analysis, since if you're never analyzing then that's not very good.

S: And that comes up a lot, the analytical versus intuitive thinking style. Analytical thinking style also correlates with lower belief in conspiracy theories, lower belief in pseudoscience, so figure lower belief in paranormal stuff. So, yeah, so it does correlate with a lot of those things. And it is something that can't be taught. It is a skill. Whereas people, some people are just naturally more analytical versus intuitive or vice versa. But it is absolutely a skill that can be taught. So that's the thing. I think that's not being taught in public schools that we absolutely should be. Yeah, older age. What do you think?

C: Well, what do you mean by older age? What's the cut off?

S: I don't, you know, they, I don't know how how they broke it down, but just.

C: My guess is that it's bimodal. I could be wrong, but that the very young and the very old are struggling more. But it could be that older is actually better for using analytic styles. Older. You get the better you are at it.

S: Pretty much throughout the the age groups that they looked at, older was better. They also looked at not just how accurate they were, but if there was a true headline bias or a false headline bias. And the older age was associated with higher overall discrimination, but also with a false headline bias, so they tended to think that headlines were false.

B: Good. That's a good knee jerk, right?

S: Yeah, there's actually not so and one of the point I'm kind of jumping to one of the limitations of this study, which is interesting. I thought about it and then it was it was listed in the by the authors as a limitation is in these studies in this paradigm, there's generally 5050 true and false headlines, but that's not necessarily reality, right? What if reality maybe maybe have a different mix and therefore a a false or true bias may be helpful or or harmful depending on how well it matches reality. Here they just did 5050, which is artificial. But anyway, So yeah, old, the older we got, the more the more cynical I guess we get because we get tend to have a net a false headline bias, but overall more accurate, higher discrimination. They also looked at self identified political party, self identified Democrat and self identified Republican. To what effect do you think that had? Well, I mean, we know what, you know, one party leads more towards, you know, a reality bias than the other, right?

E: Depends on the subject, but.

S: So I'll just say what you're all thinking. Self identified Democrats had a greater accuracy and self identified Republicans was associated with a lower accuracy overall. But also the Democrats had a greater false bias and Republicans had a greater truth bias.

C: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

S: Yeah. So Democrats again tended to be more cynical about the headlines, more negative, whereas Republicans tended to be more trusting about the headlines, more likely to believe they were true. They also were more accurate on the on deciding what was true than on what was on, on determining what was false. But it goes along with the truth bias, right? You're going to pick up more of the true ones if that's where you say, if you said 100% were true, you would have 100% truth accuracy and 0% false accuracy, right? But so, yeah, truth bias goes along with a higher truth accuracy. So this is a complicated question. We're not saying, and this study is not saying and these this research not saying that Democrats are smarter than Republicans, where Republicans are gullible or anything like that. It did you know, exploring why exactly this is, is, is very complicated. There is a couple of theories out there, you know, 1 is that Republicans may already be self selecting for some cognitive features like intuitive thinking style. So.

C: So being Republican may mean that you, like, by definition, are more intuitive as a thinker.

S: There's also different relationships with authority, which may be playing playing a role. And what about?

C: Exposure to news as it is.

S: Then the other one is the information ecosystems that they're living in, right is is the at least in this country are Democratic leaning, liberal leaning news outlets. Do they have a different style or strategy than Republican or conservative leaning news outlets? Certainly feels that way. But then exploring exactly why that is. It was was not part of these studies, but that's interesting to think about. But when I when I blogged about this, like the a lot of people reacting when you're just saying Republicans are stupid. It's like that's not first of all, I'm not saying anything. I'm reporting on there with this systematic review found looking at 31 different studies. This is the data, but the Nope. But no one is saying that. Like if you read these studies, nobody is saying that. It's, it has to do with just like the information ecosystems and maybe cognitive style things like that. You also have to look at other demographics like is there an age difference or income, whatever. It's all kinds of other demographic differences that could be playing a role here. But I still haven't mentioned the single biggest predictor.

C: So what's not? Oh, is it SES?

S: So the and this one correlated with mainly with accepting false headlines is true. So this is the predictor of a lower accuracy, but specifically accepting false headlines and you voted for Nope.

US#04: What? What haven't we touched on?

C: We touched on age, we've touched on nothing, we've touched on race or gender.

S: Neither of those. It was familiarity. If people had heard it before, that was by far the strongest predictor. Yeah. So familiarity bias. So, yeah, I've heard that. Therefore it must be true. Like, think about that. We all do that, right? So what does that? That's actually pretty scary because that means if you lie repeatedly, people will believe it.

C: Right. That's really.

US#01: That's true. We see.

S: That out I know that's this is this is the echo chamber effect too. So if you're, if you have a, if you have a news echo chamber, like you're only consuming a few sources of ideologically aligned news, the familiarity bias is going to be massive. And I think that's when things get elevated from propaganda to gaslighting, right to you're living in a different reality. And, and this is what we're experiencing, let's face it, like there are people who are living in different realities because of partly it's not just that being exposed to, to false news or misinformation, it's also which news they're being exposed to. You could have a propaganda outlet with a massive influence on your audience without ever lying or saying anything that's not true. If you just, there's so many events and facts and things out there, all you have to do is just have a massive filter. Just really select only the news that reinforces certain narratives. They're all true. It's all real news. It's just a very biased selection of the news and that, but you know, familiarity bias kicks in and that creates your view of reality and that literature has is pretty well established as well.

US#03: It's very comfortable for a lot of people.

S: Yeah. And it's very comfortable. Yeah, to reinforce what you already believe and what you want to believe. We know that as well. That's separately research that shows that. So what does all this mean? You know, I think individually is the easy thing to say, you know, consume various outlets of news. Don't rely on anything narrow. Specifically. Look for sources that are neutral or even may go against your preconceived notions. You know to challenge yourself and it doesn't mean you have to consume propaganda, but you know you should try to consume a range of reasonable sources of information. Don't stick yourself into an echo chamber. Learn analytical thinking right, which means listen to the skeptics of the universe. Now, seriously, you have to learn skeptical, critical thinking, media savvy and scientific literacy. Those skills are critical, you know, in the world today on the societal level. This is where it gets tricky, right? We've had this conversation before because nothing seems to work or be feasible. You know, it's like we live now in the Wild West of misinformation and I don't know what's going to change it. You know, we sort of that's, that's just a new reality.

US#01: Improved education.

S: I mean that that's dealing with the misinformation, but I just mean there's no guardrails anymore. There's no editorial policy, there's no Fairness Doctrine. Those things are gone. I don't see that they're going to come back anytime soon.

B: Yeah, I have a different interpretation as to what this means and what's going to happen and it's boil. I can boil it down to 2 words.

S: Yeah, I know. We're aft.

B: No, that's a good, that's a good one. My 2 words are more more luck and Eloy.

S: The more luck and the Eloy, yeah, that's where we're headed. Is that The Time Machine? Yeah, Time Machine.

B: Yeah, human society evolves into two classes of people, the underground, more luck and the the naive angelic kind of Eloy on the on the surface. And what the more luck? Eat them. Just eat. Yeah, yeah.

S: So interesting. You know, the research is, I think, very informative in terms of, you know, the phenomenon. What we do about it is more complicated. All right, Jay, you're going to talk about something a little bit similar, fake research and what kind of toll that's having on real research.

The Toll of Fake Research (23:37)

• Fake studies are slowing lifesaving medical research — all while fraudsters are getting rich, investigation reveals 

J: I didn't really realize to, to what depth all of this is and how serious it is. And you know, the basic concept here is that researchers rely on the entire, the integrity of existing public studies the and they'll reference them to create new studies, right? So they'll take the existing knowledge, they'll make sure they're fully aware of it, and then they'll study something else that's based off of those earlier studies. You know, when a scientific field advances, you know, new technologies, you know, new treatments and everything. This is always born on research that was using previous research as a building block or a stepping stone. This works for the majority of sciences that are legitimate, right? You know, you know, scientists are are constantly referring to to pre-existing literature. But today, you know, I'm going to make you guys aware that there is, there has been this growing issue in the scientific community that's threatening the basic core of especially medical research. You know, over the past decade, a shadow industry has emerged. Right now, it sounds creepy, but that's a good way to put it. And this freaking industry is churning out fake academic papers and peer reviewed studies. These are called paper mills. They profit in many different ways when they do this. But they, you know, they, they profit by flooding journals with fraudulent studies, undermining legitimate discoveries. They stall the progress in critical fields like Cancer Research and medicine. So what's the scope of the problem? So there are estimates out there that suggest that fake studies number in the hundreds of thousands. There are retractions of these fake studies, but this is a slow and inconsistent and pretty rare occurrence. There's been over 55,000 papers withdrawn and at the experts suspect that the there's a much, much larger number that goes undetected in some fields, particularly oncology and genetics. These fraudulent studies have become a very serious major roadblock to new scientific discoveries. My God, that is so depressing. So how do they get published? Academic publishing operates on the peer review system. So what does that mean? That means that somebody will publish a study into a journal, right? The journal is, is 99% is is based on the the field of science that they're working in. And then there are experts who have value evaluate the submitted papers before they're accepted. And this process, at its best, it should filter out unreliable research. But that's not how it actually happens. Reviewers, the vast majority of them, are volunteers, right? So they have limited time, and they frequently have to assume that the submitted research was meant to be legitimate, right? It might not be.

US#01: It's done in good faith.

J: It's done in good faith. Exactly. So they don't have the time or the bandwidth to vet these papers with fraud on their minds, right? They have to do it this particular way because it would become massively time consuming, which does that. Those man hours don't exist. So also some publishers who want to make money above all else choose reviewers that are more likely to approve submissions. Accepted studies get, you know, get charged, right? So if they accept the study to the paper, they're going to make a lot of money off of the person submitting it because they have to pay publication fees, which can be very pricey. It's all part of the cost of, of doing research. So at its worst, some paper mills create fake peer reviews, which that is insidious right there. These are entirely fabricated experts who approve these fraudulent studies, right? So it's not real people who are not. And these fake people are approving fake studies. And then others infiltrate editorial boards or bribe journal staff. You know, the result is a steady influx of fake research, and it's making its way into all of these different scientific databases, which what, what does that do? It completely waters down the quality of the information that's in there. And that's the least of the problem because it has disinformation in it, right miss or disinformation depending on your perspective, But that that wrong information will make future researchers do studies that are based off of the wrong information. The consequences of this fraudulent research is absolutely extensive and it goes beyond the particular study themselves. So the the false data, like I said, it can mislead scientists. It can influence new clinical trials that would never have been take, never have taken place. It can delay the development of life saving treatments. I mean, this list just goes on about what these fake studies can do.

S: I can't remember if we spoke about this, but the one great example of how fake studies can distort research was Alzheimer's disease. Did we talk about this real, real, huge controversy over this? No, Go ahead, Steve. Fraud in Alzheimer's Research. So basically, there was this one researcher who was literally faking these blots, right? Faking data in order to to get good results, you know, on their study and they were, they were allegedly supporting the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease. You know, whether or not these amyloid plaques are driving the disease and Alzheimer's, and therefore we should treat them as a way of addressing, you know, slowing down or stopping Alzheimer's. So for 15 years, for a significant amount of time, this person was cranking out fake research and really distorting the research in the direction of the amyloid hypothesis and distorting the field of Alzheimer's Research for over a decade. It was massively massive negative effect on the research. Really real scandal. And because of.

C: The end all just for their career.

J: Yeah.

C: Basically this one researcher's career. As if that's more important than. You know. Hundreds of thousands.

J: Because of these circumstances, lots of scientists, you know, have abandoned their fields. For example, Jennifer Byrne, who's an Australian researcher. She specializes in cancer genetics. She discovered that the the genes that she had been studying for decades were being misrepresented in fraudulent papers going back to 2017. So she closed her lab and she was unable to justify continuing her research because of all of that polluted misinformation. You know that that that's happening more and more frequently. It's happening right now. There are people who are doing research based off of false information. They don't even know it.

S: So I do have to. Let me just say one thing though. This is all true, but one thing that researchers do often is before you set up a whole lab to study something and do a grant and everything, you replicate the findings that you are basing your research on. That's one of the main reasons that replication gets done. People are doing it before they then build on it in their own research. That's what you should be doing because that's one, one way to minimize the negative impact of fraudulent research. If you can't replicate it, then don't build from there. But there's only so much that you can do that, right? I mean, it's, it's to some extent you're, you are relying on good faith, you know, publication of research.

J: So there's been pushback though, which is good, like so because of how serious this is, researchers and publishers have developed some new tools, right? You'd think that they'd be using AI and I'm sure if they're not right now, they will be. But they're using new tools to to detect the fraudulent work. They have automated screening systems. One of them is called problematic paper Screener and it analyzes huge databases to flag whatever. You know, there's a lot of like keywords that they have and they, and, and concepts and things like that, which are considered to be suspicious studies. And some journals started collaborating to share the, the fraud that they've detected and fraud techniques that they've detected. And then, you know, there's, there's independent watchdogs like retraction watch, you know, they track and expose retracted studies. But the problem is the field is growing very fast. And you know, it's always harder to keep up with the fraudsters in every field or whatever, wherever you look at them, they're harder to keep up with. And then we can, and I'm really hoping that AI can.

S: Just gonna say that, you know, a So this is a perfect job for AI.

J: Yeah.

S: And because they could do just that, they could look for patterns that would predict fraudulent research. At least then that the papers can be flagged and then screened by a person you know. I mean there's no reason why we shouldn't be like using that and really developing good fraud detecting AI tools. Think about this way. You could make you could write a whole fake paper with AI Yeah, to submit it, submit it to some pay to play throw away rag journal to to beef up your you know, your credentials.

E: Oh sure, I mean, Gee whiz, we've seen, we've seen non AI generated, you know, written papers that have made it past the that have gotten past the gatekeepers.

S: Well, yeah, that's been studied, right? Yeah. We was like famous study where they submitted to hundreds of these, you know, online pay to play journals and like half of them published blatantly fraudulent paper, right, But half didn't half screened it out. They said no, this, this doesn't, this doesn't work. So there was good quality journals out there and the higher quality journals didn't publish it. I mean, to some extent you could have predicted like some of the ones that would not have fallen for it, but there's just so many now because it, you know, part of it, it's like, again, this is the digital revolution. This is like social media that the bar has been lowered, the bar for entry. You can set up a virtual publication business all online, all digital and without much investment, like you don't need a brick and mortar infrastructure. So that opens the floodgates to to, you know, fly by night fraudulent to operations. It it makes it it opens the floodgates to legitimate publication too. But you know, this is the price you pay for the for lowering that, you know, bar to entry is that let's everything good, bad, fraudulent, all the crap that lets it all in. And the literature is an entity, right? That that's the thing you have to realize. It's just like you talk about the media or whatever, but the literature, like the scientific literature, you know, in each field is like a living Organism. You know what I mean? It is a dynamic thing unto.

C: It's a dynamic thing that is produced by people.

S: Yeah, it's produced by people and but it has patterns within it. It tells a story and, you know, we base our scientific understanding on the story that the literature is telling us. And it's it's easy to distort that either by just bad practice, by naivete in it, by unintended consequences, just some systemic problems in the publication process or biases in the publication process or deliberate fraud, right? And you have to get better at minimizing all of those things. It's so it's starting to get to like really concerning levels, you know?

C: It is, yeah.

B: All right, things are at concerning levels.

C: Yes, they are. Yeah.

S: One of them I was.

C: Waiting for.

S: That is dangerous. St.

Dangerous Street Drugs (34:49)

• There's Never Been a More Dangerous Time to Use Street Drugs. Here's Why. : ScienceAlert 

S: Drugs. This is this is the PSA. Be a part of our show.

C: Oh yes, welcome to the The more you know. So have have any of you heard of nitazines? Yeah, have you heard that term nitazine and. Nitazines. There you go. Also known as benzemidazole opioids. These are synthetic opioids that have a specific structure, a benzemidazole structure. Sometimes they're called opioid new psychoactive substances, opioid NPS. They've got a couple other group names depending on, you know, who you ask, the organization that's looking into them, the country where they're being used. But these drugs have been around since like the 50s. They were first synthesized actually by pharmaceutical company in I think it was Switzerland. But they were deemed to not be usable because they are incredibly potent and there's, you know, just a strong risk of respiratory depression and because of that, death. So this is a group of synthetic opioids that are not legally used as medicine pretty much anywhere in the world, but are making its way into the street drug culture. They bind the MU opioid receptor. And there's still some argumentation about their potency. I've read, like, different claims from different sources of literature, and that's because I think the jury's still out on this. But they can be up to several 100 times more potent then morphine. Some people claim that they are stronger than fentanyl. Other places say that their potency might be around the same as fentanyl. And to be clear, fentanyl is also a synthetic opioid. Most synthetic opioids can be kind of put into two different classes, like the fentanyl type opioids and then the nitazine classes. And I'm talking about the nitazines, not the fentanyls. Both are synthetic opioids. Does that make sense? So there is a really interesting article online. It was written by Philip Berry, who's a research fellow, King's College London, and he is somebody who has researched sort of the UK drug trade for many, many years, really the international narcotics industry. But he's looked at UK specifically working for the UK Home Office as a consultant and he also specializes in the Afghan drug trade. The reason that that becomes part of this conversation is that only very recently there have been some changes to the Afghanistan culture, if you guys remember, and there have been some real crackdowns on opium poppy growth and distribution out of Afghanistan. And when the opium market changes in a country that was sourcing much of the heroin around the world, people find drugs elsewhere. So heroin produced from opium poppies is apparently a pretty intensive process. I mean, this doesn't surprise me. It's a very, very old process. I didn't realize as I was digging into this that in some cases it's like 17 plus steps to go from the actual plant to the produced heroin. Whereas when making synthetic opioids, these can be synthesized in a lab with as few as four steps, significantly less labor intensive, in many cases, significantly cheaper and easier to produce, and also significantly stronger. Not only are they stronger, there's another reason that they may be preferred in the global drug trade. And what do you think that might be? We're trying to make money off a product here.

S: Yeah, more profitable.

C: More profitable, yes. It also means smaller bulk so we can move more product.

S: Yeah, right.

C: More easily. Less is more when moving drug products, you can hide them more easily and then you can later cut them into like a lower quality heroin or a lower quality drug. And that is what we're starting to see based on some toxicology reports coming out of multiple countries. This article skews very UK, but we've seen this. We've seen this in the US and we've seen this in a lot of other European countries as well, that during fatal drug overdoses, during investigation of those deaths, nitazines were found in the toxicology reports. But very often, it wasn't just nitazines, it was nitazines mixed with other medications. And Steve, I know that you've probably seen this when you've been doing acute care in clinic. I've definitely seen this when I'm in the hospital, that when somebody comes in with a really complicated tox screen, I think that there's an assumption that like, whoa, that person's doing a lot of drugs. But very often that person might have only taken 1 substance and that substance happened to have a lot of things in it that they didn't know about. And that is the real risk when we're talking about synthesized St. drugs in illicit laboratories. Because whether they're being sold as brand name drugs that were then released back to the street, counterfeit drugs, or they're being pill pressed as a new formulation, we don't know what's in them. And when you don't know what's in the drug, you don't know. What kind of a tolerance you have. You don't know what your what a lethal dose looks like. You don't know what an effective dose looks like and a lethal dose and you don't you don't know where those curves cross, which is really important to know when it comes to drug toxicology. So there have been, I'm seeing a statistic here that more than 400 deaths plus more non fatal overdoses were linked to nitizines in the UK between 2023 and June 2023 and January 2025. But the author says this is slightly likely an underestimate just because these drugs are so new, we may not even be looking at for them and we may not be reporting on them. And what we have seen across the board, and I don't want to get sort of too in the weeds about the UK drug trade versus the US drug trade, but there are specific sources, Afghanistan and being 1, Turkish drug trade being another that historically bring heroin into the UK. We often in the US get our drugs from China or from Mexican cartels or from Mexican cartels via China. A lot of these drugs are being synthesized in China. And although there have been some crackdowns, there haven't been really many, if any at all in Mexico.

S: So you're saying we need more crack?

C: No, I'm not saying that we can talk about solutions. So this problem in a minute crack is not one of them.

S: Or crackdowns I guess.

C: Yes, crackdowns, crackdowns that that is what I said. These synthetic opioids can be made relatively easily using precursor chemicals that are generally speaking uncontrolled and actually not illegal. So there are places in the world where you can buy all of the ingredients that you need to make these synthetic opioids and you can make them relatively cheaply and easily, which is which is dangerous. Also, just a cursory look at like the Wikipedia article for the list of benzamidazole opioids, the nitazines is I can't even count how many are on this list. There are so many variations. So when legislation, when drug laws try to catch up with these and say, OK, we got to ban this or we're going to make this schedule one, or, you know, this is no longer going to be legal. Manufacturers just change one component of the drug and now it no longer fits into that classification and they can sell it legally until regulators catch up with them again. So it's it's a pretty dangerous game that we're seeing across many, many countries where the illicit drug trade favors opiates and especially favors opiates that are strong, that are cheap and that don't take up very much space. So I mentioned one of the reasons was because of some of the crackdown or not the crackdowns, but the basically the changes to the legislation and just to the general culture in Afghanistan around around opium poppy farming. But we've also seen some changes in the culture in China, which has sort of throttled a little bit of the production there. So now we're seeing more coming up through Mexico. So even though nitizines have been slower to catch on here in the United States than they have in parts of Europe, there is a chance that we're going to be seeing a big wave coming through the United States soon, especially given the US history with opiate misuse. We know that the reason that we had the opiate crisis to begin with is because of a market that was flooded with legally prescribed opiate medication. And then when people could no longer get the drugs, they would turn to other forms of opiates on the street, like fentanyl. We also know that there's been a demographic change in opiate users, so it's not really chic to use IV drugs now. People still do it. But we do see that those people are tending to get older and that younger generations want oral drugs. They don't want to inject opiates. These very, very, very potent drugs can be taken orally. So the root of administration is easier and it sadly is a little bit more welcome by a younger group of user, which can be very dangerous. But one of the things that I'm really curious about is what we do about this. How do we approach this? What are some of the ways, especially here in the US where we know that we've already had a synthetic drug crisis using the opioid fentanyl, Gosh, 75,000 deaths in 2023 alone. And did you know this primary cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 49?

Voice-over: Yeah, my.

C: Gosh, primary cause of death. So we already know that there's a susceptibility here to this as a as a as a crisis. And when these new kind of knitizines come in or continue to come in, because they already are here, it's only a matter of time before they're here in larger numbers. We see something that's kind of scary that happens. So let's say somebody was taking a prescribed opiate that's a very specific potency. They develop a tolerance for it and they need more to feel the same pain relief or the same euphoria that they had before or just to stave off withdrawal symptoms at this point. So they take something that is either a larger quantity of the same drug or it's a stronger drug in a lower quantity and they continue to take that. Steve, I've, I'm sure you've seen this, I've seen this many times. There are patients who because of their opioid use, I see it in cancer a lot because they have to take large quantities of opiates. They're walking and talking and seem clear headed on a dose that would knock most people out.

S: Yeah, they get tolerant. Too.

C: People can build up a tolerance, right? Well, what happens when you build up a tolerance to a certain type of opiate and then you turn around and take a whole new opiate that you think is the same, but it's chemically different? You're going to take it in a dosage that may be really dangerous for you. You're probably not going to start slow. And that's where we see a lot of these deaths. We see them in people who think that they can handle the dosage that they're about to take, but their body is naive to it.

S: Or they're just getting a much higher dose than they think they are.

C: Yeah, or you're right. Or it's significantly stronger than what they think they're taking. They think that they're taking oxy, but they're really taking fentanyl or they're really taking these nitizines and that's really, really dangerous. So it's a huge issue. And I guess, you know, as we know, the drug war as we have waged it over the past, what would you say now 50 years has not really been working. There are some lessons that can be learned, but anybody have any kind of ideas? I have a few I.

B: Mean education is.

C: Education is important, right? I don't think most people have even heard of knitizines. I think more and more the education that what you think you are taking might not be what you're taking because there are in in this article specifically. But I've seen it cited in a couple of reports by the CDC and a couple like a larger report by the OAS, the OASCICAD, the Inter American Drug Abuse Control Commission from the Organization of American States. They put out an informational bulletin last year on the emergence of netizens in the Americas. And what I'm seeing is that people think they're taking like a benzodiazepine, like they think that they're taking Xanax that they bought on the street, but it's cut with nitazines. And so they don't even know they're taking the drug that they're. Yeah, it's really scary, right? It's really scary. So drug testing, having access to be able to legally test the drugs that somebody is about to imbibe into their body to get a report that says this is the drug that you actually think you're taking, or this drug is this percent this, this percent that.

E: So you buy a kit to test your drug.

C: Yeah. And we also see these sort of kits becoming more and more available. Well, we see them in safe use spaces of course, but we also see them becoming available as community pop ups in regions where a lot of St. drug use is common, like at, you know, dance parties, things like that, or in tent cities around around different large populations. And so making these things more available and understanding the harm reduction approach I think is a really, really important one and just, yeah, becoming a way. But it's always hard to outrun the drug manufacturers because they do seem to be one step ahead of the of the legislation and the the law enforcement.

S: Part of the problem is that we're no longer cooperating with China and Drug Enforcement.

C: Nope. Yeah, it's a big part of the problem because there was, there was, it was sort of a free for all. So most of these nitizine problems started in 2019. It's funny, they were first developed in like the 1950s, but they we really didn't start seeing them flood the market until 2019. And at that time there were some really good negotiations with China about reducing or increasing, I guess some of the crackdowns there on the precursors. But since then, you know, obviously because of the geopolitics right now, those relationships are pretty fraught and it's becoming more and more difficult. So we may, we may not even see a lot of imports from China directly due to tariffs on other products that are mostly going to be used to smuggle these drugs in. But those tariffs don't exist between China and Mexico. And so this researcher who has an expert in the international drug trade was basically saying we're just going to be continuing to get these drugs through through Mexican cartels who are probably getting them from China anyway.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

C: Yep.

S: Well everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Stash.

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S: All right, let's get back to the show.

Nearby Habitable Exoplanet (51:10)

• Researchers confirm an exoplanet potentially capable of sustaining life 

S: Bob, tell us about this nearby potentially habitable, habitable exoplanet. Habitable.

B: Surely, surely this is a recent paper that has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet only 20 light years away. This is a super Earth, but it's even more special. It's within the stars habitable zone and it's brawny as hell, weighing in at a whopping almost to six Earth masses. That is beefy. This was published in the journal Astronomy and astrophysics. Now how cool is that? You know, but but it gets better. This gets even better. But then towards the end it gets a little worse. So let's go, let's go over that. Let's go over now what we know about this this solar system. This is the star is HD 20794. Never even heard of this 20 light years away. I'd never heard of it. I've looked at the nearby stars before and I don't know the name, maybe because the the name is just so damn lame. That's, that's probably it. But this star now we know now presides over a multi planet super Earth system. Bravo and bravo to all the people, all the scientists and technicians and everybody who spent years, literally a few years doing data analysis to tease out this data. Because it was, it was at the edge of detectability. And they they worked on it and worked out and they found something very, very cool. Very did they?

US#03: Say which method they used to detect the exoplanet.

B: Yeah, this was a radial radial velocity, but it was right at right at the edge of detectability. So this star, let's start with the star. This is a GHV *. Our sun is AG2V. And I was like, you know, I kind of know what those mean, but I, I dove in a little bit. The G is essentially a yellow star around 5700 Kelvin. That's essentially what that means. the V, I didn't know. This means that it's on the main sequence, which which means a few things. It means it's fusing hydrogen in its core, which is nice. And that means that it's going to be stable for a really long time. So that's really good. That's where you want to, that's where you want to evolve on the.

US#13: Many billion year life.

B: Oh, yes, right, yes.

US#13: Orange is probably optimal, but yeah, yellow is. Acceptable.

B: Yeah, yellow's good. I'm happy with yellow. So this star, it's just the star is very similar to the Sun, except it's AG 8 and the Sun is AG2. The lower the number, the hotter the stars. So this star is slightly cooler, dimmer and smaller than our sun. So so now that I've given you a little bit more information, let's sum up now. Not only have they found a super Earth in its habitable zone and only 20 light years away, but the star itself is also very, very sun like Steve J Evan, what kind of D&D role is that? Is that an 18? That's an that's an amazing find to find it, to find it that close. And, and I mean, there could be liquid water on this all over this planet. It's it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. I was pretty excited by this. So a couple more comparisons though, with the star, the metallicity of the star is low. That's not great for some reasons. That means that it has fewer heavy elements than the sun, which is a bummer. If you're evolving on a planet, you want a lot of heavy metals having low metallicity of the star. I assume that that's going to translate to the planet itself that that's not great. If you develop complex life, you're not going to have good resources. Even your belt is out in some, in some your, your, you know, your asteroid belt might not even be able to find too much stuff. But it's the other thing is that this, this star is 6 to 10 billion years old. So this, this is an old boy. This is our sun is what, four and a half, 4.6 billion years. So if there's a life on this that it could have developed, I could have a billion years or more evolution than than any life on the Earth. So who knows what's possible there. You know, that's a lot of assumptions right there, but it's nice. It's it's cool to think that billion, you know, a few billion years more of evolution could potentially do.

E: Bob, does the H tie into that number, that G8 number versus the G2 number? In other words, because it's older and it's causing fewer, you know, less, less metallic.

S: The lighter math stars have a longer lifespan.

B: Yes, they do, yeah, because the the giants burn through it like like like there's no tomorrow, right. So then you've got really, really much lower mass stars like brown dwarfs and stuff that and that lasts like ridiculous amounts of time. All right, so let's look at the planets. There's three planets. They think there's at least three. They're pretty confident about 3. There could be a few more for sure. So these are these are named BC and D, right, Because they just give the sun, you know, the Sun's always designation, right? So, so, so B&C are they're, they're beefy too. They're 2.1 and, and three Earth masses, but they are too close to the star. So it's pretty hot. It's going to be probably pretty hot there. Oh, and you know, unless of course, they're tidally locked, then it might, there could be potentially a ring of, you know, temperate climate around it, Who knows? But we basically know very little about those guys. Let's see. And we don't know a lot about the other one either. The DD is the one that that we're talking about here. This is 5.82 Earth masses. It's got a 647 day orbit. Earth is a D. And it's in, right? And it's in the habitable zone mostly, which is really, really cool. So like I said, the planet has about 6 Earth masses at about 1.8 Earth diameters. So this seems to be pretty dense, right? That's, you know, you're shoving 6 Earth masses and it's, it's not even, it's not even probably twice, you know, the diameter of the Earth. Can we assume higher gravity based on that? Oh.

S: Yeah, surface gravity would be about twice that of Earth.

B: Twice. About two, yeah. I did some calculations on it. It'd be about two, so yeah.

S: Which means you would never, never get off the surface of that world with chemical rockets.

B: Well. I did, I did some research on that specifically, as you might imagine, and as far as I can tell, it's would it's at the edge of possibility. It's, it's maybe potentially possible because it's right at the edge. It's it's only you would only need to go only a little bit faster than the, the the fastest theoretical speed a chemical rocket could attain to, to to achieve escape velocity. So it's right at the edge, right at the edge. So, yeah, either way, even if they can get off with a chemical rocket, this would take technology that we don't even that we couldn't, we couldn't muster today ourselves. So yeah, they're, they're gonna have a very, very hard time getting off of that planet, if at all. Assuming of course, is complex life.

S: But also meaning if we ever wanted to land on that planet, we wouldn't be able to get back off again.

B: Right. Yeah, we'd send it. Yeah, we'd just be all probes. And yeah, we'd have to do some virtual virtual telepresence if we want to pretend like we're on it. So there's not a lot of other findings about this planet that they can really talk about now. It's, you know, there's still, there's still need to do some more investigations and, and things. But, but it's the implications that I find so fascinating. So what do you think? What are some of the major implications of this finding that we could do? What sticks out in your head?

S: We have to look at the atmosphere.

B: Yeah, it's, and it's all about the bio signatures. I think we're, yes, we're on the cusp of being able to do more than ever with, with remote biosignature detection. If you want to look at another planet and see any biosignatures, this guy is almost the, the, the perfect trifecta, right? It's, it's, it's really close because the closer you are, the much, much easier it's going to be to detect any biosignatures. We found some promising exoplanets and they're like, you know, 100 light years away or 1000 light years away. Good luck. I mean, you know, maybe we could do something, but it's so much easier to to, you know, to observe the obviously when it's so much closer. So that's great. It's also, it seems to be a rocky super Earth. So it's much better, much higher chances, I think of finding life or any biosignatures than if it were a Jupiter like planet, right, A giant gas giant. And of course, of course it's in the habitable zone of the star, at least for a good chunk of its elliptical orbit. It's in the habitable zone and that could be potentially problematic. I'll touch upon that towards the end. All right, now detecting these signatures, these biosignatures will likely involve waiting for it to pass in front of the star. I think we've mentioned this a few times on the show. The different gases in the atmosphere will absorb different wavelengths of light coming through from the star, right? And then these absences, these, these lines of these wavelengths that are absorbed by the gas would be like fingerprints in the stars, in the stars spectrum. So then you could see, oh, it's got it, you know, it's got these gases. And the gases that we would love to see would be anything like oxygen, ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, all of which are obviously specifically associated with life on Earth. If we found those. Oh my, my God, this would be crazy. It would be amazing discovery of the millennia. If some alien is looking at our atmosphere, the wavelengths that those gases absorb that I mentioned would be subtracted from the sun's light. What do you think can detect these gases? What's out there right now that could that should start looking very soon for some of these fingerprints. James Webb, James Webb. Yep, James Webb can find some of them. And there's also a bunch of future telescopes that that are on the horizon, like the ELT Extremely Large Telescope. They're going to be able to. To detect a lot of those as well. And there's more so wow, the next the next 10 years is going to be fascinating. I hope they really zoom in on this planet. Let's see. And there's also don't forget there's also the idea that this planet would be fantastic for direct imaging. I mean actually looking at the planet and imaging it and not inferring it from from some from transiting or or radial velocity or anything like that. In that scenario, they use something like a coronagraph or star shade to block out all that intense glare from the star so they they can directly observe an image of the planet and they could also analyze the reflected light for bio signatures as well. So that's another potential option we may see in the future. All right so here's a cool question. What are some of the ramifications of life on such a massive Earth like planet? Like what would what would some of the things that would really stand out for life living there evolving there and one of course, is that the stronger gravity. The gravity is like twice Earth's right so that means that the the atmosphere could potentially be extra stable lasting for billions of years, right because we we've lost the lightest gases on Earth just like drift off into space. Because it's the gravity's not strong enough to hold on to them. But the problem then though, becomes if the gravity is too strong, it could leave to it could lead to something like a super thick atmosphere. And then you could have a potentially runaway greenhouse effect. This big planet could have a lot more internal heat than the Earth. And we know that, you know, plate tectonics and things like that, you know, subduction zones and all that can and volcanoes can help stabilize the the climate as well. Volcanoes could even potentially replenish an atmosphere if it's lost. But then again, if there's too much volcanic activity like that would not be good either. So it's kind of a balance. Let's see. One of the one other thing I found is that the oceans on such a planet could be many times deeper than our oceans. In fact, if the surface is unhabitable, you could potentially have, you know, the oceans. The, you know, imagine A50 mile deep ocean swarming with swarming with life. Wow, that were.

E: Two gravity, 2 times gravity pressure. Ohh my gosh.

B: Yeah, Well, yeah. I mean, you go 10, Can you imagine going under 50 miles of water? What that what that pressure would be like? Damn all right, so obviously I'm not trying to get too excited here, but it's so much fun to speculate, isn't it? I got to reinforce. We don't know a lot about this planet, especially regarding its atmosphere. We does it have an atmosphere? We don't know if it has a thick atmosphere. It could be more like Venus, hot, uninhabitable, nasty as hell. It could potentially have a ridiculously large atmosphere, and in that case it could resemble even Neptune more than earth. So it might not even be, you know, really like a rocky planet that you would recognize. It could be very Neptune like. That would be kind of kind of annoying.

S: Yeah, because super earths basically blend into sub Neptunes.

B: Yeah, exactly. Let's see. It could have no atmosphere and it could be barren like Mars, you know, very, very little or no or no atmosphere. That could be a bummer. We could find that out. It's like, Oh well. And then of course it could have a moderate atmosphere. It could be Earth, Earth like. It could be an ocean world. That, of course, is what we're what we're all hoping for. And even if it had the perfect atmosphere, it could be doomed. Why? Because there's no magnetosphere. There you go. Right, the churning.

E: With all kinds of stuff and you're dead.

B: Yeah, the the. You know, the churning of the iron in the Earth's core creates a a, you know, a Geo Dynamo protecting our planet. Mars doesn't have a robust magnetosphere and so the solar wind just eroded the it's atmosphere over millions of years at no atmosphere just because you don't have a magnetosaur that would stink. That's so that's a possibility as well. The only other thing I'll, I'll end with this is the the only other thing that is potentially a deal killer here is that it's a, it's orbit has been shown to be within the, the habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone. But it looks like it's not in it for the entirety of its orbit because its orbit is elliptical. You know, it seems much more elliptical than the Earth. Elliptical is bad for a, a planet with life. The Earth has an elliptical planet, but it's only slightly barely elliptical. It's it's, it's, it's nearly circular. Yeah. And that's great for a stable, for stable climate. That's wonderful. You start getting, you know, you know, an elliptical orbit, then you're, you're really hot at one year, the other, the other, the other side of the year, your, your everything's freezing. So it's just like crap, you know what, it's going to be pretty tough for something to evolve there unless of course, it's all, you know, oceanic and it could potentially get away from it. But who? So if that's if that orbit is too elliptical, it's like, damn, there's going to be probably very little hope for any, you know, any liquid water on its surface for any great period of time. So all right, so I'm, I'm done here. This is just like so much interesting speculation, but it's just speculation. We got to wait for the real scientists to do their work and hopefully we can take a take a real good assessment of its atmosphere, maybe even directly imaging and try to answer some of these questions.

S: All right. Thanks, Bob. All right, man. All right, Evan, I understand.

Reverse Engineering Alien Technology (1:05:05)

• Tuttle Capital files for ‘alien tech’ ETF 

S: We're reverse reverse engineering alien technology. How's that going?

E: Oh my gosh, Steve, we are so close to having this figured out that you can invest, you can actually make an investment based on that premise. Can you believe it?

S: What?

E: Well, yeah. Now let me tell you about it. It's called an ETF. You know what an ETF is an exchange traded fund. We probably, many of us have them in our retirement accounts or our stock portfolios or what have you. But that's a type of fund that's traded on stock exchanges, but they hold a diversified portfolio of assets. So you trade the fund instead of a single stock, for example. And there's lots of advantages to doing this type of trading. And among those is that, you know, you can have ETFs for different asset classes, including equities, bonds, commodities like gold or oil, or even niche sectors such as technology and healthcare. I'm not sure it can get more niche than this because there's been a new filing with the United States SEC, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission by a group of investors called Tuttle Capital. Their new ETF that they are looking to enact that they applied for it is called the UFO Disclosure AI Powered ETF with a focus on reverse engineered alien technology. The idea behind this group of stocks that would be in this fund is that in the near future, the United States government and perhaps other governments around the world will soon be disclosing all they know about captured or recovered alien technology. And the tech companies in this fund represent the leaders in those fields that will successfully figure out the secrets on how extraterrestrial vehicles, you know, zip around the solar system, the Galaxy, wherever they come from, and also how they seem to defy the laws of physics when they are captured in dribs and drabs on video while buzzing around Earth's atmosphere. And that is what I call niche. It will invest at least 80% of their net assets in a basket of companies that Total Capital and I quote, believe have potential exposure to advanced or reversed engineered alien technology spurred by disclosures about UFOs and alleged advanced technologies. That's direct from their registration statement. Companies in here will include, you know, aerospace groups and defense contractors and other companies that are this is them rumored to work with classified technology, potentially leading to groundbreaking advancements. The chief executive officer of a company, his name is Matthew Tuttle Total Capital and he said that he's been interested in UFOs for a long time. He said I'm a trader, but I look at UFOs and I say that they're using a power source that is light years beyond anything we have. If our government has this technology and its release, that will be a game changer. The ETF is going to short other companies that are threatened or could be made obsolete because any alien level technology that's discovered right is going to blow away whatever mundane Earth based technology that we have. Now they do warn as these are speculative things, you know, and I'll get to that in just a second. On the level of speculation here in that, you know, the risks go along with these kinds of investments. You know, for example, you know, the government's may choose to not reveal all the secrets about the alien technology that they've either captured or recovered or what have you. They say the government confirmation or denial of advanced alien tech is uncertain and rumoured breakthroughs may never materialize. This entire theme is highly speculative and subject to rumor cycles. OK, so I have a couple thoughts on this. Just a couple.

S: My big question is, I'm sure this is where you're going, is, is this fraud?

E: Right, yes, that was definitely one of my one of my big questions the is this on the edge of being fraudulent And you know, because I don't know the chances of this playing out the way that they are describing. I think approach is implausible to say that UF OS and UA PS disclosures by governments will amount to anything more than simply the declassification of classified information, right. And just telling you what they know and what they have and saying that you're going to discern. You're going to be able to discern technological information as a result, that that is reckless at best. At best, what this data is going to include blueprints of alien ships or the specs of a propulsion system that you know has been conceived by otherworldly beings, or what medical, medical devices that the aliens supposedly use on the people that they've abducted over the years. This is science fiction and it is fantasy.

C: Does it matter if they believe it for fraud?

E: Yeah.

C: Like it has to be intentional, right? Hard to prove.

E: Hard to prove it would be, but I don't know that you couldn't make a case for it.

C: That any reasonable person would know that, yeah.

E: What you're doing is you're, you're, you're drawing in potential investors here who are, who do not have a certain level of either sophistication or experience in these kinds of investments. It's one thing if you're, if, if you know about the, if you know how to invest and you decide to, you want to take a chance or a risk on this based on the fundamentals of the companies that are involved in the ETF, that's one thing. However, you're going to have a whole groups of people who are going to just see USUFO and reverse alien engineered tech and that's going to be it for them. That will be the entire basis on which they're going to want to throw their money in there. And I think you are miss to a certain degree misleading people with the with these promises that frankly have so little chance of ever material of materializing based on what they're telling you.

S: It's complicated though, because the companies sound legit.

E: They are right.

S: It's just like aerospace companies or technology companies and they may do fine. You know, I mean the investment may not necessarily be a money loser, but the hook is these are the companies that are going to benefit from reverse engineering alien technology and we're going to short companies whose products are going to be rendered obsolete by reverse engineering alien technology. And the whole concept is I think it goes beyond speculative. As you're saying, there's and I there's speculation and then there's science fiction, right? There's more fantasy. This is just really made-up nonsense. This is the kind of thing I could see a judge going either way on it if it came before them. But the other question I, and this is something I just don't know, like if you fully disclose, it's like, Hey, if you want to invest in reverse engineering alien technology, these would be the companies you would invest in. We could make that happen for you if you want, if that's something you want to do. You know what I mean? Not making any specific claims, just saying this is what it is. That might not be fraudulent, maybe scummy. You know, it may not be a good investing idea, but it may not be fraud. I don't know. It's complicated.

E: It's in a way it's also a slap to these companies that that will be ultimately invested in. You know, you're kind of you're kind of slapping this UFO label on them that that they don't deserve, they didn't ask for. They're not they're not individually promoting their companies as having anything to do with with these things. It's sort of a stain upon them if you ask me. And I don't, I don't even know if these companies really how they how they would feel about it. I suppose bottom line is bottom line and dollars are dollars. So that ultimately rules the day. But I don't know, would you? I don't want, I wouldn't want the taint of this kind of stuff on my company.

C: Does an individual company have any legal recourse for what funds they're included in?

S: I mean, if they're traded on the on the stock market, anybody could put together any collection, you know, of openly traded stocks they want call it whatever and there you go, you know?

C: But if you were trading, let's say, health care stocks, and then you made claims about the companies that were fraudulent, claims about the companies without their knowledge.

S: That's yeah, if you're making fraudulent claims, then that's fraud, right? But you can do this without making claims. Just saying this is sort of the theme of these stocks. And yeah, invest at your own risk. We're not making any claims. We're just making it available for anybody who wants it. You know, that's the kind of coy way of doing it.

E: It is very coy. It's very it's very slick and a number of assumptions here they're they're making in their in these kinds of statements, you know, when they talk. That's that's really astounding. You know, UFOs are real intelligent beings have brought their technology to Earth. You know, government has captured and retrieved distinctively otherworldly technology. That's a lot to to have to choke down and, and you know, swallow without, you know, well. It's all logs. Sick by it, Yeah, Yeah. Yeah.

S: But I've seen, you know, decisions where judges basically determine that some entity, some purse or whatever is a quote UN quote menace to the investing public. You know, they may decide that that's what this represents, even if it's not outright fraud. I don't know.

E: The SE and and before we close, the SEC has granted permission and, and approved applications of funds that do have similar sorts of names to them. In other words, there's one called UFO Procure Space ETF that's been approved. However, they're not making claims that about the alien technology and, and government disclosures and that things are being repressed. It's simply a basket, a basket of companies in this particular. And they just, you know, they're aerospace and other things. They just happen to call it, you know, UFO. Something like that is much, much easier to to accept than than what this other ETF is trying to do.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:15:02)

J: Jay, it's who's that noisy time? All right guys, last week I played this noisy.

Science Quiz (1:15:18)

None

E: That is 2 goo geese arguing back and forth, one saying yes I am the other saying no I'm not, yes I am no I'm not, yes I am, no I'm not.

J: So listener named Johann Lund said, hello, Jay, it sounds like someone is trying to turn off a big old rusty tap. Thank you and the rest of of the SGU rogues for everything that you do. So you know, I, I when I read this, guess I'm like what? I don't see it. And then as I leave you listen to it. I totally hear it. So I get I get why you picked that. It's not correct, but that was a fun guess. Anthony Kelly wrote in Hey there. Hey there. I think it's ice or dry ice falling down some kind of pipe or shaft. I've heard ice do that. I haven't heard it make that kind of noise. I've heard it make like a like it has like a very aluminum type of sound. I can't think of it a better way to describe it at my home when like the ice falls down and you know, in the what do you call it, the downspouts. They it doesn't, it doesn't have like a high pitched thing. It's like a rattly kind of noise. But thank you for the guests, another listener named Adam Price said. My 6 year old son Sam says robot monkeys at the zoo. That is probably one of the best guesses we've had all year. Now that Sam says that, I want to see these monkeys right now, another listener named Darren Hawley wrote in. I'm pretty sure that's a sandhill crane probably recorded at a zoo based on the resonant sound. That is not correct, but you are moving in the right direction. I have a close guest here Michael Blaney wrote in Hi Jay. It almost sounds like two birds having a rap battle. Definitely seems like people in the background. So I'm, I'm guessing just two birds answering each other at some kind of bird park. That's a very good close guess. Not correct, but very good. The winner for this week is Bob Whiteman and Bob wrote this week's noisy is a couple of flamingos talking with each other. My daughter Eleanor, 11, and Madeline, 9, recognize this immediately from our many visits to the San Francisco.

US#04: There you go, See I said the sign. Basically the same thing, two birds having it out.

J: So these basically these are actually 2 flamingos at the Key West Butterfly Sanctuary. They're called Rhett and Scarlett, right? Guess where that's from? And apparently they were talking about something that we can't comprehend. What about?

C: They both made the same. We both said it.

J: OK, you'll hear it. You heard it again. Yeah, that's an argument, I guess. All right, guys, I have a new noisy for you this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Aaron.

US#00: Johnson, the Afghani OCC, bought around the Hampton the rugged launcher of the People 35 launcher to Bolton.

Voice-over: Whoa, the hell, man.

J: Something's not quite right there. If you guys think you know what this weeks noisy is or you heard something cool, you got to e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, we've had several people become patrons in the last few weeks with our request for people to please seriously consider becoming a patron now, because Steve is coming to the SGU full time and we really could use your support to help make this a smooth transition and to get us into creating the new content that we've been working on. I'm hoping like within a month we're going to be able to tell you guys what we have planned. I'm very excited about it. I mean, it's going to be a very different phase for the SGU when Steve does this because we're going to really, we're going to create a lot more content. So if you want to support us, please consider it because we really could use the support at this time. If you also would like to know everything that the SGU does, you can join our mailing list. I just go to theskepticsguide.org. You can sign up there. We give you an e-mail about everything that we've done the previous week. You could also give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. We have not a con 2025. We have tickets to purchase to come to this conference, Spent a lot of time with some great people. There's lots of socializing. We have a lot of things to entertain everyone. And we're, of course, we're in the wonderful city of White Plains, NY, not far from New York City, pretty far from Boston. So you won't be going there, but we had a wonderful time last time. I'm really hoping that you guys consider coming. It's going to be a great show. You can go to nadaconcon.com For more information.

S: Thank you, Jay.

J: Evan, you have a science quiz for us this week.

E: I do have a science quiz for you. I had actually prepared this a little while ago, you know, closer to the beginning of the year, but we're only getting around to it now. So there's a particular theme to this quiz and it has to do with, well, years. Years is the main theme that runs through this SO.

B: Years or years?

E: YEARS. Years. So first of all, I'd like to wish you all a happy New Year. Oh wait, that's an old note. When is it too late to wish someone a happy new? Year, I'd say.

S: Like mid, mid mid January, January, yeah.

E: Even even if your first interaction with that person isn't until, say, the first week of February. Yeah.

S: February's definitely past the due date on that. Yeah, all.

E: Right. Yeah.

B: But yeah, then that's when you say something like, so how's your new year going?

S: Yes.

E: I see February.

S: It's like how, how late in the day can you say to somebody have a good day or have a nice day?

C: Yeah. When does it switch to good evening? Yeah.

S: Yeah, right. But yeah, when you have to switch at some point to a good evening is obvious. Or you know, but like, if it's two in the afternoon, good.

US#03: Afternoon.

S: But you're saying like but not as a greeting as like, more like when you're leaving like have a nice. Day like, have a good rest of your day. Have a good rest of the day. At some point you switch over to have a good rest of the day. When does that happen?

E: There's no official time. It's whatever you feel like, I suppose. Yeah, no, no rhyme or reason. Go, go with your gut. So good morning everyone. And here's OK, I've got 5 questions for you. They are science questions. And again, the theme is years. Let's dig right into it. Question number one, in what year did the first direct observation of gravitational waves take place? And it's multiple choice. So I'm going to give you the choices. Was it a 2015, B 2017, or C 2019? We drew random lots backstage, which we actually didn't do. I did it myself and I came up with J. You'll give us your answer first. 15. OK, Cara.

C: Yeah, I feel like I've lost a lot of time because of COVID, but I do think it was probably a decade ago now, so I'm going to say 15.

S: Steve yeah, I was thinking 15 as well.

E: And Bob?

B: That's so funny. You guys think it's 2015. It is.

E: Which is why Bob went last on this category, because you are all correct 2015.

B: Pissed you all got it right.

E: The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made in September 2015, when a signal generated by the merger of two black holes was received by the LIGO Gravitational Wave Detectors in Livingston, LA, and in Hanford, Washington.

B: What a day that. Was Bob.

E: I know it was a big deal for you.

B: Big. That was big. It was big for all all of astronomy and astrophysics is immense. New a new brand new window went to space like damn multi message astronomy. Hello.

E: I am so happy you're all off to a great start. Let's move on to the second question. Who is credited with having discovered the nucleus of an atom? Well, is it? And it's a multiple choice, ABCA 1897 by JJ Thompson, B 1911 by Ernest Rutherford, or C 1932 by Werner Heisenberg. And we will start with Cara.

C: I think I remember Rutherford. The date I don't remember at all, so I'm going to just go with my gut and say it was Rutherford.

E: Rutherford, 1911, says Cara, Steve. Ernest. Ernest Rutherford, you sound pretty confident there. That's good, Bob. How about you?

B: I believe he liked calling himself Ernie a lot of.

E: People to his friends, Jay, how about you? Yeah, I'm going to go with Steve.

C: Going with Tara the.

B: Phone. Yeah. I'm going to go with Cara, of course. The Rutherford atom.

E: So, Jay, you're changing your answer to go with Cara instead of Steve, is that correct? Yes, please, everybody is correct. 1911 Ernest Rutherford. Yep. I'll give you a little background on the others through JJ Thompson, 1897 Through his experiments with cathode ray tubes in 1897, JJ Thompson's finding proved that atoms are not indivisible and contain even smaller particles like electrons. So Nope, not the not discovering the nucleus. Heisenberg 1932 developed a model for a nucleus composed of protons and neutrons. But no, in 1911 it was Rutherford, and his experiment involved firing alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil, observing that most particles passed through but a small number were deflected at large angles, leading him to conclude that the positive charge of an atom is concentrated in a tiny, dense center called the nucleus.

B: Yeah, some previous, some other theories. What was it the the nuclear pudding? Model. Yeah, the pudding.

E: Oh interesting, I hadn't heard that in more. Time, yeah.

S: Yeah, the electrons were embedded in a more of a diffuse positive pudding, but yeah, he proved it was all at the middle, all at the center.

B: Big, that was big, man. I was like, whoa, very cool. That's a new layer of the onion.

E: 3rd question for you. Great job so far guys #3 Which one of these journal articles do not belong to Albert Einstein? Is it a 19 O2 on X-rays? Was it B19O5 on a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light? Or is it C 1915, the field equations of gravitation? And Steve, we'll begin with you.

B: X-rays.

E: Moving on to Bob.

B: Yeah, X-rays just leap out. I believe it was Renkin who discovered them.

E: J.

B: God damn, I don't know.

E: X-ray is 19. O2, Transformation of light Nineteen O 5 revealed equations of gravitation, 1915.

J: 1915.

E: OK. And Cara.

C: And go with the guys and say X-rays.

E: If anyone said B19O5 transformation of light you'd be incorrect. It is in fact the X-rays 119 O2 on X-rays that did. That journal article did not belong to Albert Einstein. The other two were his. But for a bonus point, who did in 19 O 2 write the journal article on X-rays?

S: Is it Rankin?

E: Nope. Nope.

S: No. Huh. Let's see who else might have done. It wasn't like Marie Curie.

E: Yes, Marie Curie.

S: Yeah, OK. Really nice. She was awesome, thank God.

E: All right, moving on the 4th question. Ivan Pavlov's dog Experiment is a classic study in psychology that demonstrated the concept of classical conditioning, which posits that behaviors can be learned through the association of different stimuli. Pavlov's Dog Experiment was published in what year was it? A 1897, B 1910, or C 1922? And Bob, you'll start.

B: Let's go in 1910.

S: I don't.

E: Know J.

S: Yeah, 1910.

E: Cara.

C: 1897.

E: And Steve?

S: It's going to say 1922, but Cara's guest bothers me.

E: See what? See what you do to us every week. Welcome to our YEAH.

S: I'll stick with my original gun to say 1922.

E: All right, 1922. The year, in fact, was 1897.

B: Cara. Studying for her licensing. I know it gave me pause.

E: I don't know why it's just. A long time ago.

B: What did we learn? Yes.

C: Good job.

E: Carrie, you've gotten everyone correct.

B: OK.

E: So there's no pressure on you to get this last one correct #5 the last one. Louis Pasteur published his Germ Theory in 1861. What was considered the main prevailing theory of disease at the time that germ theory of disease was published? Was it a spontaneous generation theory? Was it B miasma theory? Or was it C the humors theory? And we will start with Ji think it was the humors. OK, Cara, I tried. To answer it in my head before. You gave the options and in my head I said.

C: Miasma. So I'm just going to stick with that. But like my time, it's an uncomfortable feeling. Steve, what do you think?

E: Yeah, I also thought miasma before the choices came. I mean, all of those things were in play.

S: In the 1800s, but I think specifically for infections, it was miasma and Bob, yeah, absolutely miasma.

E: The correct answer is.

B: Miasma theory.

E: Well done, Kerry. You swept the entire game. What do I win? Perfect. Well, I mean the. Accolades and the. Prestige, and I'll take it, the admiration of your fellow rogues and so much.

B: Like, like she didn't have it before. All right, so. Miasma theory. This theory prevalent before.

E: The germ theory believe diseases spread through bad air or noxious vapors from decaying matter, leading to practices like poor sanitation being linked to disease but not understanding the actual microbial cause. The other two there was spontaneous generation theory, which I really wasn't all that familiar with. This theory now discredited life. You know it. Yeah. I propose that living organisms could arise from non living matter, like maggots appearing on decaying meat. No, you wouldn't remember that Bob. And of course the humorous theory, Jay, which I would have, which I think I would have also guessed if this was positive to me. So I would be with you there, Jay. Humorous theory that passed out of favor actually in the 1600s, but it was based on the belief that the human body was composed of four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. So there you have it, a science quiz. The theme is years, and I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you, Evan You're welcome.

Emails (1:30:40)

E: Quick e-mail this e-mail.

S: Comes from Big Wohler, who says he's from Menlo Park, CA SETI Institute, NASA Ames Research Center. Anyone can claim that, and Bill writes, among other things.

E: One of the items in last.

S: Week's of science or fiction was a space junk. Just before I heard that, I read that four to five star link satellites deorbit every day. That's nuts. I hope they are deorbited purposefully. And he gave us a link. So I checked it out and it seems that that claim is correct. That seems to be the case 4 to 5D orbits heard at least recently that hasn't been at that level for too long, but that's the plan, right? But going forward that probably yeah, that. So this is this.

E: Is the older.

S: Satellites are now D orbiting and being replaced by newer ones. There have been 500D orbits so far of Starling satellites. Of course there are thousands in orbit, so I think the goal is to what? To get up to 20,000? How big are they? 5050 thousand by 20,000? By 20-30 more.

B: Additional.

E: 50,000 Are they the size of a bus?

S: Or a little.

B: Smaller they.

E: Are well, they know how much they weigh, 30.

S: Kilograms each Charlie's Hadley produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide when they when they deorbit so they must weigh more than that although yeah it's combining with oxygen so that might be adding weight to it but. And they're burning up on the way. They're burning up. Yeah, they burn up entirely in the atmosphere.

U: So the.

C: Concern is.

S: That as each one enters the atmosphere, it's the the products producing these waste products like aluminum oxide, which could eat away at the ozone layer. So there was a recent study which found that there isn't, there was has been an eightfold increase in these compounds between 2016 and 2022. And this is going to increase significantly, you know, as more and more of these satellites deorbit. So this is a, this is a new paradigm, right? This is not just, you know, sending up satellites, this is sending up 10s of thousands of satellites on a on a rotational basis, right? That that with that are going to have to be replaced on a regular interval. Five of these are deorbiting every day. So that is going to be putting a a large amount of aluminum oxide and other substances into the atmosphere. This has been characterized by one NOAA scientist as a as an experiment in atmospheric chemistry. So does that mean we have to launch things into the atmosphere to compensate?

US#01: Or is.

E: That not going to work well. I think we have to think about what these satellites are made.

S: Of and you know what the full life cycle of them is? You know what happens at the end of their life cycle? Yeah. The key is we we need to study this to see you know what, you know what?

B: It could be doing to the chemistry of the upper atmosphere and what a huge increase in the next 5 years could, could potentially mean, right? That's yeah, that's seems like common sense, but you know, common sense is in short supply these days. So it it it erodes ozone, it can.

E: Either wait, the ozone. Yeah, well, that's the concern.

S: That maybe does other stuff too. I mean, again, it needs to be cloud formations could be impacted potentially at the and things of.

B: Course that we have no idea what, you know, what could happen unless we take a deeper look. Yeah, yeah, it's worth, definitely worth more, more.

S: Investigating, but it's not but.

E: Nothing is pausing while it's being investigated. It's just right I.

S: Know it's full steam ahead. Yeah. All right.

Science or Fiction (1:34:21)

Theme: None Item #1: Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity. Item #2: In a recent study adults were able to learn absolute pitch after 8 weeks of training to a >90% accuracy. Item #3: Astronomers announce the detection of a super high energy “cosmogenic” neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PeV.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Astronomers announce the detection of a super high energy “cosmogenic” neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PeV.
Science	Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity.
Science	In a recent study adults were able to learn absolute pitch after 8 weeks of training to a >90% accuracy.

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Astronomers announce the detection of a super high energy “cosmogenic” neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PeV.
Jay	Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity.
Cara	In a recent study adults were able to learn absolute pitch after 8 weeks of training to a >90% accuracy.
Evan	Astronomers announce the detection of a super high energy “cosmogenic” neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PeV.

E: Guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

S: It's time. For science or.

US#01: Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three Science News items, 1 facts, 2 real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys just regular news items this week? You guys ready? Yeah, ready. All right, here we go. Item number one, biologists.

E: Have engineered a.

S: Bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and to demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity. Item number two, in a recent study, adults were able to learn absolute pitch after eight weeks of training to a greater than 90% accuracy. And our #3 astronomers announced the detection of a super high energy cosmogenic neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PETA electron volts. Oh baby, that's a lot of volts. Bob, was I hearing you volunteer to go first?

B: Fuck.

S: As I said it, I was like, no.

B: Pull the words back. All right, continuous delivery of drugs. In the to the in. Testament continuous. How do we interpret that? Does that mean that it's creating the drug itself and that it will continue to deliver that drug as long as it's alive? Yeah, basically, that's poof. That's pretty. Intense, but then and. Then when you listed the other two, they seemed even less likely. Let's see, absolute pitch. My understanding is that absolute pitch was something that it's kind of kind of innate and not necessarily trainable, especially by such a high percentage. But who knows. The one that's getting me though, is this super high energy, cosmogenic to hell, cosmogenic neutrino, super high energy 'cause I mean, they found a new neutrino. Is it or was it just a regular neutrino that was much higher energy? I mean, these guys, these neutrinos don't pack much of A Wob. I mean, they don't interact hardly at all with anything. They're they can go through light year, literally light years of lead before interacting with anything. Yeah. So I'll say neutrinos fiction. OK, Jay. OK. The first one by biologist that.

J: Engineered the bacteria. To continuously deliver drugs, I think that one is science. I don't think that they worked out all the kinks yet, but I mean, bacteria are amazing factories that can make lots of different chemicals. So I don't think there's any problem with that. All right, this one about the perfect pitch, I am highly suspect of that. And I think the reason is is because adults, you lose your ability to have perfect pitch pitch as you get older. So I'm not too sure about that one. And this last one here, astronomers announced the detection of super high energy cosmogenic neutrino that is the most energy. Yeah. I mean, the the second one here definitely is the one I know the most about. And I seriously don't think that even with eight weeks of training that you can get that high of an accuracy. No way. OK, Cara. I don't like any of them, Bob. Like I'm. Struggling the way that you were.

C: The one about the neutrinos, I have no idea, but I was like, sure, sure. And then Bob was like, no, that's impossible. And that makes me uncomfortable. The perfect pitch, I'm assuming absolute pitch is the same as perfect pitch. Yeah, this one really rubs me the wrong way. But that's why I think it might be science because it's like, oh, we all thought and look, we turned it on its ear. So I'm going to say that that one is science. But then the engineered bacteria that can just keep delivering drugs, what does that mean? It continuously delivers. It can. Yeah, it can, you know, deliver a steady dose.

S: Of right, there we go. OK, that's the important thing. Yeah, the steady dose. That bothers me a lot.

C: I could see them dumping a bunch of drug, but they would have to be metabolizing the drug somehow in order for it to then be released at a steady dose, which I don't get. And bacteria are always multiplying. They have really short lives. So I don't know that one really bothers me. Like I've seen bacterial infusions to treat like C diff and obesity. I don't know. I'm going to say that that one's the fiction. The the drug 10 all spread out promise. Yeah, up to you, Evan. Well, let.

E: Me break this time. Help care you made excellent. I I I was saying, oh, that the bacteria 1 sounds yeah, that's good science. It's cool. And but then you said things you said and I'm like, oh, crumbs now I don't know, but you know, just that they engineered the bacteria to deliver the drug. I mean, what we're talking about, it doesn't matter if it's in a mouse versus a person, you know, I mean, at what? At what stage is this the fact that you engineer this bacteria that can do it? I don't know if it necessarily means that there's a straight line to, you know, using this for people. It could, I don't know, more of like a proof of concept kind of thing. I don't know. The one about pitch is the one I probably know the least about or have read the least about. I didn't know about this 90% threshold with pitch. So that's, yeah, just kind of new to me, but the Neutrino 1. I learned everything I needed to know about neutrinos from that documentary called 2012. Remember that movie in which, you know, they discovered that neutrinos were actually interacting with the core of the earth and destabilizing everything and Oh my God, you know, it's like over the top insanity. So that was the one that I had initially pegged as the fiction. I didn't know that there was a range of different types of these neutrinos and stuff. So I think I'm going to go with Bob. I'll say the neutrino is the fiction. But you know, I will not at all be surprised if Cara winds up being correct. Or Jay. Well, yeah. Or Jay. Yeah, for that, Matt. Right. Because I know the.

C: Least I've heard the least about.

E: That one. So yeah, it's interesting you guys all went with the field that you know the.

S: The most about, well, you know, at least some familiarity here. All right, Well, I guess.

E: We should take them in order since they're you guys are all spread out.

S: Biologists have engineered bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity. Cara, you think this one is a fiction? The boys think this one is science and this one is science. Sorry, Cara. So. Yeah. So they used, used a bacteria phage to do the genetic engineering of, of different kinds of gut bacteria that already live in the gut and they engineered them to produce protein based drugs. So they're producing the drug. They're not just releasing it. They're, they're because it's protein based, right? And this was a study in mice was not in humans and and they showed clinical improvement in both chronic inflammation and obesity. So that this definitely has potential just engineer your gut bacteria to produce your protein based drugs. Problem with protein based drugs is that it's hard to get them past the stomach, you know, because the stomach has enzymes and you know, they duod them the upper part of the of the gut that's meant to digest proteins so they get digested. But if you have the lower part of the gut that you're already past that point. And so it could not enough of the of the protein can get absorbed. So it's just another delivery system for protein based drugs rather than having to get an injection or an infusion. And this also, yeah, just get your 1, you know, one dose of bacteria and it will last for a while, right? They'll just continuously release the drug that you need. So this could develop into another drug delivery system. Very cool. Let's go to #2 In a recent study, adults were able.

US#08: To learn.

S: Absolute pitch after eight weeks of training to a greater than 90% accuracy. Jay, you think this one is a fiction? Everyone else thinks this one is science. Perhaps the keyword here is adults. Is that the keyword? I don't know, Jay. Was that what that what you were keyed it on? Yeah.

J: So.

S: Young people have a much higher higher.

J: Ability and chance to learn to learn this skill. But as your hearing degrades as you get older, I also think that your brain changes to the point where you can't sense perfect pitch anymore. That's what they used to think until this study. This. One is science. This was surprising.

S: So they were testing that assumption that you lose the ability, that it's basically mostly genetic and and innate, and that you especially lose it as older as you get older. So they specifically tested this in adults and this was just an online training exercise over, you know, the eight week period, but it was fairly intense. It was 24 hours of training on average. And this the adult subjects were able to learn how to identify the absolute pitch greater than 90% accuracy, which kind of turns the prior beliefs on its head, as Cara was saying, Pretty cool. It's good to know with enough training, but this kind of fits generally with cognitive research that with enough training most people could learn anything. It's only a matter of how much training, not if you could learn it. You know what I mean? Anything learnable, you could do it if you if you put enough hours into it. Which means astronomers announced the detection of a super high energy cosmogenic neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 PETA electron volts is the fiction. But there's only one little part of this. That's the fiction. What do you think that little part is? It's the it's the energy. It's not a neutrino. What do you mean the the the number?

B: The one.

E: 20 Yeah, because I think I.

S: Think the highest cosmic Gray energy.

B: Was is higher than 120? Yeah, so the 120 is correct. So the.

S: The only thing that's fiction is it's not the most energetic elementary particle ever detected. So they did detect the highest energy neutrino. They think it may be a cosmogenic. They're not sure. They need more research to know if it's cosmogenic. Basically, it's generated by cosmic rays.

B: By interactions.

S: With cosmic rays. So the question is, that makes sense. Is it high? Is it produced as a super high energy?

B: Neutrino because it's.

S: Coming from like a supermassive black hole or is it given that high energy because it's interacting with the cosmic ray? So they don't know because they only have one, only detected 1. So we need to detect more of these so we could start to get some statistics on it, etcetera. And then they could figure out if it's if it fits with the cosmogenic model or not. But but it's not even close to being the most energetic particle ever detected, which was a cosmic ray. Yeah, that's like that little cosmic ray, which is like, I think a proton.

B: Right. Essentially a proton, yeah, it hit you with the force of a of a fastball. So so. This. Neutrino was 120 PETA.

S: Electron volts, which is 20 times more energetic than the previously most energetic neutrino. But the most energetic particle cosmic ray was 323,000 PETA electron volts. So basically more than 1000 times as as as energetic. And that particle, Bob, you know, it was dubbed, it was dubbed the Oh my God particle. The Oh my God particle.

B: Yeah, this is the Oh my God particle.

S: But yeah, that that. Thing is, like Duck.

B: Particle.

S: That thing was intense.

B: But Steve, I'm looking at an article here.

E: Reads an article that says.

B: The neutrino was 220 PET electron volts. It makes sense. I think it, it might be created by interaction with the cosmic Gray because I mean, we've detected neutrinos from supernova and they're they're not anywhere near that. And since so Bob so energetic, I think the the the discrepancy.

S: So the 120 PET electron volts was the energy of the Muon that they actually detected, but they infer from that the energy of the neutrino that created the Muon. That was probably the 220. Yeah, right. So they didn't even directly interact with the with the neutrino, It was the.

B: Muon, The Muon that was produced by the neutrino interacting with the massive underground salt.

S: Water thing, that they cool, man.

B: Yeah.

S: Wow, I didn't think neutrinos can get that interjected.

B: You got all you got all that, Cara. Sure. Trust does Cara, it's cool. All right.

S: And you're being bombarded by a bunch of these things. It's really.

E: Not that powerful though, but yes, no, not that.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:27)

“One of the problems with anecdotes is that they tend to be provided by the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones.”  – ― Robert Carroll, Unnatural Acts: Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed!, (description of author)

E: Evan, give us a quote.

S: One of the problems with.

E: Anecdotes.

S: Is that they tend to be provided.

E: By the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones. Written by Robert Carroll from the book Unnatural Acts, Critical thinking, skepticism and science exposed the survivor bias. Yep, right. Yeah, dead.

S: Men tell no tales. True as it ever was. Yeah. Very important, that's.

E: One of the many. Reasons that anecdotal evidence.

S: Is completely unreliable. I like what? So one of our other skeptical colleagues, Barry Bierstein, who unfortunately is no longer with us, summed it up really nicely. He said anecdotes tell you what you want to be true, not what actually is true. That's true that the anecdotes are just full of confirmation bias, that they are confirmation bias machines. That was one of my very first lessons of skepticism back in the 90s. I'm.

E: Like boy I never thought of that before. It was like eye opening. It's okay to use them to generate hypothesis, but.

S: Not to test hypothesis, right? You can make an observation and go, hmm, I wonder what caused that? But you can't use just the fact that you happen to observe something or hear about something or whatever as evidence that something is true or not true. That's confirmation bias. All right, thank you, Evan, Thank you and thank you all for joining me this week. Thanks, Steve. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.