SGU Episode 726
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| SGU Episode 726 |
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| June 8th 2019 |
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| S: Steven Novella
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Introduction[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, June 5th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening, folks.
S: So have you guys heard about this the Starlink fiasco?
E: Starling?
B: Yes.
J: Oh, yeah. Elon Musk was sending up all these global satellites that are gonna give people cell service anywhere on the planet.
S: But they're really bright. The satellites are bright.
E: Too bright.
S: Yeah, so imagine 12,000 satellites in the sky that are as bright as bright stars, that's like four times as many naked eye visible stars, right?
C: That's not okay.
B: Well, why are they so much more bright than other conventional satellites?
E: That's a good question.
S: Because LED lights. I don't know.
E: Don't they have a dimmer switch on those they could turn [inaudible].
J: Reflective surface Bob. It could be you the orbit that they're in is catching more sun or I don't know.
E: They couldn't spray-paint these things black before they went up?
S: It's actually a lot worse than I was, I'd be reading a lot about it because if you're taking any kind of timed exposure, there are satellites streaking through your field all the time. And that ruins the image. So astronomers are quote-unquote panicking according to the hyped reports, but yeah I wonder what's gonna happen with that.
J: Well, I mean I would look at it like it's one of the things that happens that makes international rules come into existence, right? I'm sure they have some type of thing there, but maybe it wasn't as detailed as it needs to be. They have to really quantify the hell out of that, right? Like it has to be this many lumens worth of light reflection and blah blah blah. And what could we do about it? We're not good at deorbiting things.
S: Well, they haven't launched all of them yet. They just launched some of them into the sky.
B: Well, you said 12,000.
S: That's that would be the full employment.
C: How many did thy launch.
B: That would take decades. 12,000?
J: No, no.
S: They're launching hundreds at once, Bob.
J: They're small Bob.
B: Are they nanosats?
J: No, no, I think if I remember correctly they're the size of a big grapefruit I thought. Let me look it up, hold on.
C: I went camping this weekend in a place called Trona pinnacles, which is like three hours from LA and it's like a certified dark sky area. A and I slept outside on a cot under the stars, it's really dark. It's really beautiful. Milky Way, all that stuff. I saw probably five satellites and maybe like ten shooting stars while I was down there out there. I don't think I saw any of these. Could what I've seen these?
S: Imagine 12,000. So some astronomers saying it'll look like the whole sky is crawling.
C: Yeah, but I mean you said that they already sent some up, but I didn't see them. I mean, I saw some satellites, but they were doing like the standard, what are they called? Flares? They were just regular satellites because they were pretty faint. I mean you could see them because of the movement and then every so often they would flare. But I don't think I saw any of these.
E: Hey Bob. Help me on the math here. So if I look up at the sky, what what percentage of the entire sky of the plant visible from the planet Earth am I looking at? 2%? Something like that?
B: Maybe you could say you could see... depending on where you're located maybe 30 to 40 percent of them. It's still a lot. That's just a guess. But the thing is if you're sending up 12 ultimately 12,000 satellites that are gonna be that bright, there was no like hey, wait, let's think about this.
S: Nope. They din't consult scientists or astronomers.
B: That is pathetic. That's pathetic.
C: Like don't we see the, doesn't the ISS fly around the world 15 times a day?
S: Yeah, you can see it.
E: Yeah, I have an app that tracks it.
C: Yeah, and so like how far from that orbit are these sets? Did they fly around more times than that a day?
S: These are 373 miles.
B: That close?
E: That's close, that's not 25,000.
B: That's not geosynchronous, that's for sure.
S: So right now, for comparison, right now there's about 400 satellites in that orbit. So 400 it's gonna become 12,000. Which is about four times the number of visible stars in the sky.
B: Yeah, well, it's good that they're raising a ruckus now because now they could make changes because it's gonna be quite a while before they launch them all up. They raise enough ruckus they could change something about the satellites to prevent if possible. That's almost on completely untenable. Like no, you can't do that.
S: I applaud the goal of providing Internet to the world, doing this that's interesting. There was no thought of what it would do to viewing the sky.
C: Or to just like space junk.
E: And I've heard of private companies sending advertising up into space, building billboards essentially large enough that you could see them with the naked eye from the planet. And I've heard that for decades now. I always saw that was just the worst of the worst ideas. Get one up there, you're gonna have a hundred billboards floating around eventually. Who the hell wants to see that in space?
J: They'd better never do that. That's ridiculous.
S: Yeah, or imagine like advertising on the moon.
E: Oh, no.
C: My god, so depressing you guys. It's like the most most dystopian thing we ever talked about.
E: Moon brought to you by the coca-cola company.
J: I agree Cara, that is really, that's anti-
S: That's Fallout, the dystopian Fallout or that would happen in Futurama.
E: Ah, sure.
B: God, yeah.
E: They were talking about it being miles high by miles wide these billboards. They'd unfold in once they're in orbit.
B: I'm talking about the moon.
C: The moon is not that small.
E: The moon? You'd have to have something pretty big.
C: You would but like you could see it easily, you could see it with binoculars, you could see it with the telescope. You could see it with the naked eye, especially if it's like a logo, like a giant logo on the moon.
B: Right, right.
E: I remember science fiction story. They use the moon as a projection screen and they were able to project things onto the moon.
C: Yeah, like with lasers. You could do that from Earth.
E: You'd did a lot of lasers to do.
C: Yeah, but you could do it.
E: You could make out with your eye.
B: The atmosphere would attenuate the beams tremendously, but but yeah, we do do it. That's how we know how far away the moon is to millimeter accuracy or so.
C: Like ping it.
J: Yeah, I couldn't find the size but the weight is 500 pounds or 227 kilograms. I don't know. I don't know how big they are.
C: Wait, wait per or is that the whole payload of like a hundred of them?
J: Per, each one [inaudible].
C: [inaudible] is big. That's not small.
J: Yeah, 500 pounds could be the size of what like a garbage can?
C: It's definitely not the size of a grapefruit.
J: Yeah, I probably am not correct with that size. I don't know. I thought I saw a picture of them once that they made them look like that. Bottom line is though, I mean it's the right like Steve said 12,000. I want to know at any given time how many can I see at once fully deployed.
C: It sounds they never thought that far ahead.
B: Hundreds.
C: There's gonna be stars we cannot see because these are so bright. That sucks.
B: Oh for sure.
C: It's gonna completely change the night sky.
B: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Completely changes. Screw that shit.
'E: So what's more important, seeing the night sky or giving the world internet capability?
B: It's a false dichotomy.
C: There are other ways to give the world the intrnet.
B: The more I think about it we are not gonna see ads on the moon that's utterly riddiculous. I'm not talking about aesthetics or or anything like that. Just the pure technically pulling that off. You're not gonna do it from from the earth-
E: No, you wouldn't do it from the earth, you'd have orbiting the moon doing it.
B: Orbiting the moon and it would have to be so amazingly powerful. Why would they invest like a billion dollars just to get a stupid ad on the moon?
E: It wouldn't just be a ad Bob. It would be a series of ads by multi-billion dollar corporations. You don't think Apple and Facebook couldn't do it.
C: And you realize that our entire economy is built on advertising, right? Like everything-
B: Of course, I do.
C: -all of Facebook. That's like all like is selling private information to advertisers so they can mark it to you.
B: Yeah, but I don't think I don't think they're gonna want to invest what I will back of the napkin calculation tens of billions of dollars.
C: No, maybe not now. And yeah, it's ludicrous, but I would not put it past like to be like, oh just for an advertisement. Everything is about advertising. Like they have massive budgets for that.
S: I'm gonna Bob and tell you about a science fiction movie story that I read once. Okay a long time ago where aliens visited us and cool. They offered us their advanced technology healing technology, etc., in exchange for renting, like in perpetuity Jupiter.
E: No problem, hey.
S: Yeah, and so we did. We sure we'll take your healing tech.
B: What's the rental agreement?
S: And so what they wanted to do with Jupiter was put an advertiser on it. Just put a giant billboard in the atmosphere of Jupiter that could be seen. It was a funny story.
C: But yeah, cuz these people because these aliens are like interstellar travelers and stuff.
S: Yeah, yeah.
C: Just like a billboard? That's funny.
S: It was a billboard.
C: And we're all like stuck on earth like we don't understand your technology. Help us not die.
S: We were the backwoods rubes.
C: Totally.
E: I'll buy that for a dollar.
J: Steve, just entered a concept into my mind that's horrifying to me. Corporate aliens.
E: Oh, someone's got a sponsor them Jay.
B: Look at Vogans, man.
S: Vogans, yeah. I know. It's funny. Like our conception of aliens is always so sanitized. Like it's monoculture and they're so serious, they have one unified purpose as a race.
C: Yeah. And it's either all good or all bad.
S: Yeah, but think about it all the interesting quirky culturally insane stuff, that an alien race would do.
B: Look at Discovery. They had the extremist Vulcans. I thought that was really cool.
S: Yeah, like we can't you really understand what their motivation is because you have to understand a lot about their culture to realize. Like if there was the equivalent of a corporation that had very narrow interests. Because we don't have a hard time imagining humans in the future like with Avatar. So there there was a corporation from earth exploiting the locals. We don't have a hard time imagining that, but we rarely think about it the other way. Anyway, we have a good show coming up.
Forgotten Superheroes of Science (11:12)[edit]
- _Person_People_Group_
S: We're gonna start with Bob Forgotten Superheroes of Science. You haven't done one of these in a while.
B: Yes for this week's Forgotten Superheroes of Science I'm talking about Anne Innis Dagg born in 1933. Canadian zoologist biologist feminist and author known as the Jane Goodall of giraffes. As sometimes happens, maybe not often enough as a child Anne Dagg's career in science was essentially hard-coded into her little brain when she fell in love with giraffes at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago. Just such a wonderful experience to imagine a little kid seeing something at a museum and then basically her life, her career is set in motion at that day. It's just a fun concept that I think all parents should strive for with their little kids. So she looked for a book, she loved giraffes so much that she looked for a book on what were now her favorite animals. And of course the internet wasn't around but she couldn't find it. Even in that thing that they called libraries back in the day. No books, so she said to herself or she actually said so I thought well, I'll learn about giraffes and then I'll write one and that's exactly what she did. Dagg graduated with a degree in biology from the University of Toronto in 1955. Soon afterwards she talked a farmer in South Africa to let her do research on his land. And for over a year she documented giraffe behavior. Including things seen for the first time how drafts were fought using their very long and very strong necks. She documented male giraffe homosexual behavior and many many other things. In a recent documentary film The Woman Who Loves Giraffes Dagg said no one had ever really studied an African animal in the wild or pretty well any animal in the wild. So I was breaking ground without realizing it. This is true. She was the first Western researcher to study animals in the wild in Africa in 1956. This was well before Jane Goodall study of chimpanzees and Diane Fossey's work with gorillas. So perhaps then it would be more correct to say that Jane Goodall was the Anne Dagg of chimpanzees. So after that she returned to Canada and published 20 research papers, but unfortunately and not surprisingly she ran to her fair share and then some of discrimination because she was a woman. We've mentioned this all the time on these segments. It's really disheartening. She was refused tenure and jobs as many women scientists were at that time. It's just so horrible to think that science that wasn't done because of discrimination like that. And this discrimination of course continues to this day in many ways and on so many levels. But still she had an amazing career and she did write that book and that book was the book on giraffes. Anybody after her, anybody who was studying giraffes had to read her book because that that was the book to read so of course that would be the go-to book. So remember Anne Dagg, mention her to your friends perhaps when discussing service Camelopardalis, Fission fusion societies or the constellation crux. Look them up people.
E: Oh boy.
S: The constellation crux?
B: Yes. That's a constellation called crux that these, if I'm pronouncing this right the Toswana people when they look at that constellation they see two giraffes.
C: Oh, cool.
S: Interesting.
E: I like that.
S: There is for pretty much any of the charismatic megafauna, I imagine there's like one researcher who wrote the Bible on that animal, right?
B: Sure.
S: There is Anne Dagg of probably pretty much anything out there. Oor there needs to be anyway because every animal probably has just as complex behavior and lifecycle and information about them that you're only gonna learn if you spend years in the wild observing them.
J: Yeah, of course.
S: And a lot of the in decision bucks, a lot of them like Diane Fossey, Anne Dagg, Jane Goodall were women. I wonder if that that activity just being in the field observing is disproportionately women. In the 19th century observing nature was one of the few scientific activities that women were quote-unquote allowed to do.
C: Yeah, and a lot of early entomologist I mean, I don't think they unfortunately got the title but like in Victorian era like a lot of women kept insects. It was like a very womanly task would be to like catch insects and and then watch their life cycles and draw them and write things down.
S: Yeah, exactly.
C: But of course-
S: That was okay.
C: -nobody called them naturalists or scientists, unfortunately.
News Items[edit]
WHO and TCM (15:41)[edit]
S: Okay. I'm gonna start off the news items. This one is unfortunately is not a good news item. It's a bad news item.
E: Bad news everyone.
S: It's about the World Health Organization. It's an organization I have a love-hate relationship with. They do a lot of wonderful things. They were founded in 1948 by the UN and their manifesto is their constitution I agree with pretty much across the board. I particularly want to point out where they say the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health is one of the fundamental rights of every human being without distinction of race, religion, political belief, economic or social condition. They also state that evidence-based medicine is vital for health and medical progress. So I think that their latest publication of the International Diagnostic Codes, the ICD codes, now we're up to ICD 11, which is an international standardization of diagnoses, pretty much what it says. Which is used in the US for billing and referrals and for epidemiology, for tracking morbidity and mortality. It's the standardization of the diagnoses. So in the latest one, they have a whole chapter on...
B: No, don't say it.
S: Traditional Chinese Medicine diagnoses.
B: Oh my god, what the hell?
J: When I read this like a little piece of me just died.
S: Yeah. It's terrible.
C: Is the reason that they include this because they want physicians to be able to recognize if patients come to them and describe symptoms that already have names in their culture?
S: Well, that is part of the justification for it. They always gonna justify things like this by saying we just want to keep track of what's actually happening out there in the world and people are using this and so we need to keep track of it.
C: But don't you think that at least that portion is valid, like that the new-
S: No, I really don't.
C: Really? The DSM 5 has a section on like cultural competency and diagnostics with like mental illness, psychological disorders. They call them very different things in different cultures. And then they try to cross tabulate and say like this is maybe this like similar to schizophrenia in our culture.
S: But that's not what it is. That's not what this. This isn't saying, this is how this, so we understand this to this disease to be X in the West or in developed nations and in this culture, they understand that same entity in this way. This is what they're gonna call it.
C: That's not this is.
S: That's not what this is at all.
C: That sucks.
S: What this is is codifying essentially completely fake diagnoses within the pre-scientific superstitious philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine that has no relationship to scientific diagnoses and no relationship to reality to be honest with you. They're based on diagnostic techniques that are not real and diagnostic entities that are not real. And they say again, one of the justifications that they give for it is that this will help epidemiologically to track morbidity in countries that use traditional Chinese medicine. But again, that's we we all know that's not really what it's about. This is about legitimizing traditional Chinese medicine as part of China's effort to export their culture in a very deliberate campaign to do so.
E: It makes sense because they could compartmentalize this entirely away from the rest of legitimate science and still say we're studying this as cultural phenomenon however, they want to classify it. They don't have to lump it in with legitimate science.
S: Oh, I know but also the chapter is optional and it's in addition to. You can't use it instead of, you have to use it in addition to a real diagnosis which you may think that's a good thing but what that means is it doesn't serve any of the purposes they state that they say, it gives a lie to every justification that they're giving for it because if you still have to use a real diagnosis even in countries that use TCM, then what's the point of the fake diagnoses? What it does it's basically this is the best marketing-
B: It's pandering.
S: Yeah. It's the best marketing that TCM has ever had essentially.
C: But what do you think is the real honest rationale? You really think it's marketing?
S: Oh, absolutely. And make no mistake, the head of the of the WHO for the previous 10 years, like up to 2017 was Chinese and believed in TCM. And so I don't think that's a coincidence. And of course the acupuncturist are all crowing about this, right? This is the legitimacy that they've been seeking. But of course, look what what diagnoses do you think they're going to be including? So actually David Gorski's written about this. I've written about this now for Science-Based Medicine in Dave's article. He reports on this one. This is SG 26. Bladder meridian pattern.
C: What?
S: A pattern characterized by clashing headache and sensation that the eyes are being torn out. The nape of the neck is tight, there is pain in the spine, the waist arches backwards, the thigh cannot flex, the back of the knee has lumps and there is a sensation that the calf is being split apart. Symptoms and signs also include excess lacrimation, nasal congestion, pain in the head, neck, back, waist, sacrum back of the knee, calf and foot and impaired use of the little toe.
B: Lacrimation, is that tears?
S: Lactrimation is tears. But don't forget the the impaired use the little toe. That's important because of your little toe it's critical. And all of those symptoms can be explained as a bladder meridian dysfunction now by the World Health Organizations ICD-9 codes.
E: Great.
B: Meridian, but they actually are buying into a meridian.
S: Oh, totally.
C: Of course, this is TCM.
B: I mean, they explicitly will say this is a meridian based issue? What the hell?
S: Totally. So here is now acupuncture today describing the diagnoses that are going to be used in the ICD 11. So they give an example, so like for example, you might say the TCM, Traditional Chinese Medicine, TCM pulse is string-like so that's based on the pulse diagnosis basically lists they feel the pulse for minutes and characterize its nuance details of the pulse right? So they have the pulse is string-like and the tongue. That's another TCM diagnostic modality, they just look at the tongue and make all kinds of diagnoses based upon what it looks like. The tongue is dusky with a thin white coat. Now they say if my patient is seeking an acupuncture treatment in my notes I will write down a TCM diagnosis that I may select based on channel pattern identification syndrome differentiation. Migraine due to obstruction of lesser yang meridian. If my patient is seeking an herbal treatment in my notes I write down a TCM diagnosis that I may select based on a visceral pattern identification syndrome differentiation migraine due to ascendant hyperactivity of liver yang. That's what's in the now the World Health Organization ICD 9. Based upon pulse diagnoses, which is fake. Tongue diagnoses, which is fake and meridians yin and yang. It's a complete pseudoscience.
B: You do realize that this is one of the signs of the apocalypse?
S: Yeah, so the thing is that there's absolutely no way that you can codify the ascendant hyperactivity of the liver yang without endorsing the underlying pseudoscience.
C: Of course.
E: Right.
S: It's just no way you could separate those.
B: Which would then impact the rest of the damn book.
S: Well again, it's in its own chapter and it's a separate diagnosis.
E: It should be in it's own book.
B: It's like they pulled it from another universe. I mean eventually it's gonna have to infiltrate the other aspects of that code right? I mean, how could it exist unto itself?
S: No, I know, I agree. So and in China a government newspaper called this a major step toward TCM's internationalization. So again, that's what they see, they're not being coy about that at all.
B: Talk to me about the outcries and not just you and Dave.
S: No, there's an outcry. There is an outcry. So there was a recent editorial in Nature. So that's a big science journal and it wasn't in one of the subsidiaries. It was just in Nature. And they were appropriately critical of the WHO for doing this. However, I do have to quibble with some of the things that they said. Because I don't expect I mean it would be nice. I would like for scientists who are not steeped in scientific skepticism to understand this at a deep level. But they rarely do. So here's a here's one paragraph that I thought was equivocating accommodationism, but you listen to it. They write, traditional medicine should certainly not be dismissed. Sometimes it is all that's available in many parts of the world. Some life-saving therapies have come from natural products and there are doubtless more to be found. Famously the gold-standard malaria drug Artemisinin was discovered in China, isolated from sweet wormwood. An herb used in TCM. It is also important to distinguish practices that do no harm from those that might not work but are relatively benign and those that might work but have not been tested rigorous.
E: Wishy-washy nonsense.
S: It's worse than wishy-washy. So first of all, it's buying into the framing of alternative medicine that oh natural remedies are alternative and they lead to real treatment. So it's so there's got to be something in here that's good. So first of all, we talked about the Artemisinin discovery. First of all, it was not used for malaria in traditional Chinese medicine. It exists in a part of the country that doesn't even have malaria and the fact that we purify drugs from plants. Okay, that's nothing new. Many of our drugs are purified from plants. It doesn't in any way justify the herbal use of those plants, which are usually disconnected from their actual pharmacology. Or nor does it justify a system that is not based on on science or evidence.
C: No, I mean and this is what, like isn't this what ethnobotany is all about. Somebody goes out they go to these regions where people have traditional techniques and then they actually look at them in the lab. And if they realize that something works, then it becomes medicine.
S: They identify it. They purify it. They quantify it.
C: And it's not traditional medicine anymore.
S: That's right. Exactly.
C: It's medicine.
S: Yeah, there's pharmacognosy, which is a whole practice of scouring traditions and plants and said are looking for the raw material for developing to pharmaceuticals. Absolutely. That's always the foot in the door, the tip of the iceberg for alternative medicine. The herbal treatments. Because herbs are drugs. They can't actually have an effect. Most of them are crap, but some of them can have an actual effect.
B: Right, even a blind basketball player can sink it once in a while.
S: Yeah, but like it doesn't say anything about acupuncture or other ones that are based on magic. Just because some herb turned out to have a useful pharmacological component to it that doesn't mean that magic works or should be given any relevance.
C: That's why I do think that at least the comment that they made about the difference between things that just haven't been sufficiently tested and the things that have been tested and debunked. I do think is an important comment that not a lot of people think about. A lot of people think anything that's traditional or anything that's quote-unquote natural. We just haven't really done the science on it yet. And it's like no most of that stuff. We've done a lot of very good science.
S: We actually no that they don't work.
C: Yeah, exactly.
S: But I do think that they were kowtowing a little bit by saying that because that does play into that narrative, this all works just hasn't been tested rigorously yet. No, it actually doesn't work. And the other thing is we don't need to test everything rigorously, right? Some things we know don't work because they don't make any sense.
E: Implausible.
S: I wrote in Science-Based Medicine. I could say that eating spiders will cure your migraines. I don't need to test that hypothesis to dismiss it because I just made it up as based on nothing. And there's no plausibility.
B: And that's a difference between evidence-based and science-based.
S: Yes, exactly. So we can use prior plausibility to make statements and decide what's worth testing rigorously. And also the characterization of any pseudo-scientific treatment as quote-unquote benign is false. None of its benign, the unstated major premise there is that something which does not have direct harm is benign and that is not the only type of harm that comes from pseudoscience.
B: Opportunity cost.
S: There's opportunity cause, there's delayed treatment, delayed effective treatment. There is spreading conspiracy theories about science and medical institutions. There is spreading belief systems, which are pseudoscientific. Now people are talking about yin and yang. That's not benign. Believing in pseudoscience is not benign. So that's where the editors in nature failed in my opinion. They bought into the alternative medicine propaganda hook line and sinker in that paragraph, which is unfortunate. But the rest of it was good. The rest of the talk about the fact that traditional Chinese medicine is responsible for a lot of species being endangered and even going extinct. We talked about the pangolin. But also the Rhino, lots of other ones. The donkey. I mean if they've exhausted a lot of these species in Asia and now they've moved on to Africa and they're starting to create a massive market for the trade in these African animals. And as the middle class of China grows the demand for these traditional Chinese medicine snake oils is growing and that's gonna wipe out a lot of species.
E: When billion people start demanding something you bet it's gonna have an impact.
S: Absolutely, so that's not benign either, folks. Even though it's not causing human harm it's pseudoscience causing species to go extinct because of demand for rhino horn or pangolin scales or whatever, bear bile.
E: Shark fins.
S: Yeah, tiger bones.
C: Ass hide glue.
S: Ass hide gule, yeah, absolutely. So this is a fail. This is a fail on the part of the World Health Organization. They deserve to be ridiculed for it and criticized sharply. I'm glad at least to see that editorial in Nature. I hope there's enough of a backlash that they reconsider because the alternative medicine proponents are going to use this to push their ball forward, right? This is just the first step, but we have to push it back because this is bad. This is the infiltration of quackery into scientific medicine and it's gonna have a massive negative effect. It is having a massive negative effect. Okay, let's move on to some completely different topic.
Solar Cell Defect Mystery Solved (30:56)[edit]
S: Jay, you're gonna tell us about maybe a solar panel discovery.
J: This is a cool thing here. There's 40 years of researchers around the world. They've been trying to solve this inherent problem with the silicon substrate that makes up most solar panels and the research team at the University of Manchester is saying that they solved this flaw. So this flaw existed and I didn't know about it, but they solved it the day I found out about it.
S: Well, to be clear. They've solved the mystery of what's causing it. They haven't fixed-
J: They haven't fixed yet. It hasn't been engineered yet. Yeah. So the real question here is what does this mean to solar panels moving forward overall efficiency, right? Let's talk about it. So today the bulk of solar panels that are out there reach about a 20% efficiency and this means that 80% of the light that hits a solar panel is not absorbed. It just it doesn't ever get turned into electricity. So in order to collect as an example 200 watts of electrical power a thousand watts of potential sunlight has to hit the solar panels, right? Does that make sense? So over the past several decades 270 research papers have been focused on this. It is a known material defect in silicon that limits and also degrades the solar cell efficiency. Now the issue is that after a solar panel has been functioning it drops from the 20%, which is as good as they get. The 20% efficiency and it drops to an 18% efficiency. And they didn't understand what was going on and nobody could find out what the cause was. 270 papers later and nobody had any idea what why this was happening and it was happening predictably and easy to measure. They can easily see, yep, we look we're losing 2% efficiency now after the solar panel has been running for a little while. So this is called light induced degradation. A 2% drop might not seem like a lot but if you add up all the solar panels out there and all the lost power it actually turns out to be an incredible amount of lost energy. So this problem has completely stumped everyone who's looked at it for a very long time. Some of the best researchers in the field were looking at it for 40 years and they couldn't figure it out. The international team at the University of Manchester though, they have finally found the defect. So the team was led by a professor professor Matthew Hassel and the paper was published in the Journal of Applied Physics. So the team observed that a defect exists or there is something in physics that's happening here that is causing this this 2% loss. So they found that the bulk of silicon solar cells change when they're exposed to sunlight. And they observed something that they're calling a trap that limits the flow of electrons. Which which blocks them or slows down the the flow of electrons. That's essentially what they're gauging the efficiency of the solar panels. How many electrons are they pulling off of this thing per a certain amount of time? This is the loss of solar cell efficiency. So the researchers are saying that it's just a matter of engineering now to fix the problem that's what Steve was saying before. It seems like they minimize the oh, it's just a matter of engineering that was a very sounding easily to be solved situation. I really have no idea, couldn't find anything on it because I don't think anyone's even looked into the engineering fix yet.
S: Yeah, who knows that's just making that up.
J: Yeah, right?
S: How hard it's gonna be to fix this problem.
J: And the more efficient a solar panel is directly translates into the fact that there it has fewer of these electron traps. So from what I read here, it seems like if you have a 15% efficiency it's because of these traps that are in there that are more present in a panel that's 15% efficient versus a 20% efficient. More efficient cells also means that it'll have a larger charge carrier lifetime which simply means how much electricity can the material produce until it doesn't work anymore? And I think that they were saying that once they figure this out that they would be able to increase the the lifespan of solar cells as well. And I also saw something that said that they can reset the solar cells by treating them in darkness in a heat chamber and I've never read that before but that's interesting because imagine instead of throwing away or trying to recycle solar cells after they've lived throughout their lifespan, they bring them back to a factory, they heat treat them and then redeploy them. That would be fantastic. Steve you had a very awesome blog not that long ago that really covered three new areas of solar cell technology and this is not a part of that. We're talking about the 95% that are already out there. These solar cells that are made out of a base of silicon are the vast vast majority of the ones that are out there right now and this augmentation would only affect that one of the three that you blogged about.
S: Yeah, I did write about this recently. So just just to give you some background. Most of the commercial solar cells right now are based on silicon. The efficiency range for the ones on the market are 17 to 20 percent, which is really good actually. When we first started doing this show we were talking about like the 12 to 15 percent range, they were they were much lower at that time. So there's been this steady progress. But there are prototypes in the lab that get up to 26 percent, right? So we could already get silicon based solar cells at 26 percent efficiency. Just not commercialized. They haven't been scaled up so we could mass-produce them. There's apparently a theoretical limit for silicon of 29% that's called the shockley quiescer quiescer limit q u e i s s e r. In order to get past that limit, that 29% then we have to do some kind of quantum dots or whatever. Then there's got to be, it doesn't mean that that's the absolute limit totally just that's the limit for using silicon using existing technology, but we might be able to get around that with quantum nanotechnology, right Bob? So that's that's pretty good. Even 29% would be incredible. But there's another, there's an up-and-coming type of solar panel called perovskite. You guys heard of this?
B: Yeah.
E: Yes.
S: Yeah, so it's a different material and perovskites are the efficiency of the perovskite solar panels is increasing very rapidly and the theoretical limit for perovskite is around 31%. A little bit better than the silicon. However, the perovskite panels have a major drawback and that is that they're not stable. They tend to break down in sunlight. That's a bad thing. So that's a that's a major problem that needs to be fixed with the perovskites and it's one of those things where if they do then the probably that will revolutionize the solar panel industry. If they don't we'll never see them. But there's also another kind of solar panel. Organic solar panels. The current organic solar panels are at about an 11% efficiency, so that's a lot less but organic solar panels are a lot cheaper, they're thin and they're flexible. And they're easy to mass-produce and to install. So even though they have half the efficiency they may have a quarter the price and there you could put them in more places and they're easier to install etc. So it could be, depends on your application, like how much density of production that you need. But organic solar cells may be the way to go. However, there's a major problem with the organic cells and because they are also not stable. The surface tends to react with oxygen in the air and moisture and breaks down and so the efficiency slowly decreases over time. You can cover it with a sealant, but then that reduces the efficiency even more and the increased thickness reduces the flexibility and can make it more rigid. I was writing about this because there is a recent discovery where they found a new method of making the organic solar cells more stable chemically without, they treat them with butyric acid methyl ester and that tends to stabilize the surface so it doesn't react with oxygen without changing its thickness or its flexibility. So we'll see if that pans out but that you know, again, we talked about these solar will take news items occasionally, but there's actually they're happening all the time and as we discussed recently on the show, this is what ultimately is responsible for the slow steady increase in the efficiency and reduction in the cost of solar panels on the market. So we don't know which one of these like in 10 years are we going to be using high-tech silicon solar panels, perovskite solar panels, or we're just gonna be plastering organic solar panels everywhere. Who knows. I don't think we know the answer to that question yet. But any of them can work out. But even just the the state-of-the-art now like a good solid silicon panel with 20% efficiency is great. And if we can keep it from losing that 2% degradation even better. As Jay said doesn't sound like that much but it actually is. All right, let's move on.
Mutation Affects HIV and Flu Risk (40:47)[edit]
S: Cara.
C: Yep.
S: This is an interesting item. I also wrote about this but this is you're gonna talk about one a different aspect than the one I focused on. A mutation that causes HIV protection but has a downside to it.
C: Yeah, and I did read your write-up as well and I also got into a couple conversations on Twitter which were kind of interesting about this. But for those of you, does everybody remember the first CRISPR babies from last year? Oh boy. So this is a follow-up from that story and if you remember I tried to look up how to pronounce his name, of course, I don't speak Mandarin so my pronunciation is not going to be great, but I think it's pronounced He Jiankui and actually did this like rogue CRISPR work and the idea was that there was a woman who wanted to undergo IVF. Wanted to use the father's sperm. The father was HIV positive. So the idea here was well there seems to be a deletion or a mutation of the Delta 30 called Delta 32 and Steve you actually got a little bit deeper into it. This was the the CC are five gene, which is a receptor, sorry. The CC chemokine receptor type 5 gene and the idea was well if we use a mutated version of that then perhaps these babies will actually be resistant to HIV because in the general population it appears to be the case that when individuals have this mutation, this naturally occurring mutation, they're immune to HIV. Okay, so kind of makes sense on the surface, everybody following so far. Okay. So the issue is this guy goes rogue. He does this CRISPR gene editing without any sort of approval or oversight or anything like that. And then he comes out and does this big press release that says by the way, I created these two babies using CRISPR. So there's a new paper that was just published in Nature where these researchers were like, you know what? I'd love to see what happens when their home homozygous for this allele so they've got these two mutations, they've got this mutation on both copies of the gene and it's this Delta 32 allele, the exact same one that the researcher tried to mutate using CRISPR. Or tried to actually knock out. From what I've read a little bit deeper he was just trying to knock that gene out altogether, but we'll get there. And so these researchers were like we're gonna look at a ton of people and we're gonna see and like a ton of genetic information and we're gonna decide whether or not there any outstanding effects from this change other than resistance to HIV. So they looked at four hundred nine thousand six hundred ninety three British people or people of British ancestry and they looked across the board and they saw that across a bunch of different calculations that they did people with this mutation or people who are homozygous for it so they had it on both versions of their gene had a 21% increase in all-cause mortality rate. So Steve maybe you can give us just because I didn't dive too deep into this but it just means 21% of them died sooner than like quote-unquote normal, right?
S: Yeah. What is the risk of dying over a period of time and it was 21% higher if you had the double dose of that mutation.
C: Then if you didn't.
S: Yeah, then if you didn't.
C: Yeah, so it wasn't so much about these different things could cause a bubble, it's just like across the board all-cause mortality.
S: Yeah. But if you read deeply into it, it was a lot of it was from the flu.
C: Yeah, and that makes a lot of sense and we'll double back to that. They also found that, like they did some population genetics work, too. There's something called the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. A lot of you might remember back to your Bio 101 class when you learned about Hardy-Weinberg. So they were looking that they kind of did some population calculations to show like yeah people with these alterations to their gene also have decreased fitness overall. Okay, so like evolutionarily this isn't good. The interesting thing though, is that I didn't realize this but I shared an article from Cosmos which is an Australian magazine and it links to the journal article in Nature where the title of the journal article which makes perfect sense is CCR 5 Delta 32, so we're just talking about that this allele, is deleterious in the homozygous state in humans. So basically when we look at a big chunk of people if they have this it not good, seems to be 21% increase in all-cause mortality. This guy tried to edit this gene, put it in these babies. A lot of people are misreporting this in a really crappy way where they're like, by the way these kids are probably gonna be sick. Like no, we don't know that. There's so many factors at play. 21% increase doesn't mean these kids are gonna be sick. It does appear that it has an immune, and that's what you wrote about more Steve, so maybe you can pick that up in a minute that it affects obviously an immune response, that's why people don't get HIV when they tend to have it. But it does seem to be the case that people get sick from other things more often and oftentimes those other things are viral infections like the flu.
E: Which are common.
C: Yeah, which are much more common than HIV. Just in the sense that they're easier to catch I should say and they're harder to prevent against. You can prevent against HIV with certain types of preventive measures where we're a little bit more knowledgeable about how to prevent against HIV. So but one of the interesting things that came to pass when I tweeted this article is that, and I think all mentioned by name. There's a really great science communicator named Adam Rutherford. Do you guys know who he is? He's from the UK. I've had him on my podcast a couple of times. He's a quite successful writer, science communicator. He's a geneticist, actually. He has his PhD in genetics. He contributes to the Guardian. He used to be an editor at nature.
S: I've read his stuff.
C: Yeah, so he's written a lot of good books. Well humanimal I think is his most recent book. Great guy. So I tweet this thing and he replies to me. So interesting. And I feel like I should have known this and I think you did know this Steve because of the way you wrote your article, but we nobody in all the articles I read dive too deep into it. So I tweeted the HIV protective gene mutation targeted in the Christopher baby scandal could potentially prove fatal study finds. And then he said except that neither of the babies have the Delta 32 deletion, which is just another level of awfulness of this story. They were implanted after He demonstrated that they didn't have the new allele, but he did it anyway. And I was like wait what that was the whole point? Everything I'm reading says they have the Delta 32 mutation. Where'd you read that the gene was unaltered? And he said, he showed it in the original presentation in Hong Kong. He was trying to introduce d32, but neither embryo carried it. Instead they had a different edited deletion alleles unknown to science or nature. None of this is verified as all we know is what He presented.
E: So what are we talking about?
'S: He introduced a different mutation on the same protein.
C: On the same protein and none of us know what it is. We don't know what it does. So basically he says, I'm trying to knock this out. He doesn't knock it out. He ends up mutating it in some different way. So these researchers like well look when people are homozygous for this one specific mutation this other bad stuff potentially happens. But A, not only do these babies not necessary not have the mutation that these researchers are writing about even though what they're writing is really important to know. They also probably don't have or because they don't have that mutation, they're probably not even HIV resistant.
S: So we don't know.
C: We have no idea. We don't know what the mutation is that they have. And so that's kind of what he wrote in the final summation. Yes, it would have been unconscionable if he had succeeded in altering CCR 5 with the well-studied d32 deletion but after pre implantation screening he identified that the edits were not the same as d32 and he went ahead anyway. And I think that's the really interesting and important, a really interesting and important aspect of this story, is that like not only did he do something in a rogue way without the scientific community or any international standards at play. This was a massive ethical violation and we've talked about this a lot on the show. He also didn't even do the thing he set out to do but was like, let's see what happens anyway.
S: Yeah, so he introduced a novel mutation. We have no idea what the effects are.
C: And one thing that we didn't mention, I mean you had mentioned in your article and everybody else did or most people did too, but I didn't mention yet in the summary is that he did this on the germline not the somatic line. So these things are going to be passed on if these children live to adulthood, if they decide to procreate, their children will also have this edit to their genome.
S: Yes. He has potentially introduced this mutation into the human gene pool.
C: Yeah, and I mean the thing is I don't think that we should completely let this conversation get out of hand and become like this big big bogeyman that says like oh my gosh now that this one thing has gotten into the gene pool, which it hasn't yet, but if it does all of humanity is doomed to blow up, but at the same time, I mean, this is the whole conversation around unintended consequences. We don't know what this thing does yet and instead of testing it in mice or instead of going by the protocol and figuring it out the way that we have since like the dawn of modern science and medicine. He was like nah, I'm just gonna do it my way.
S: Yeah, you just level jumped. He bypassed all the regulatory protocols and the scientific protocols and was a cowboy and it really seems like he was just seeking fame.
C: Oh, for sure and I mean, I don't want to I don't want to be ageist or anything about it but I mean this guy's like 35 years old. Nobody really knew who he was before this happened. Now he's internationally famous even though nobody's really heard of him in a while. And yeah, it seems like he was doing this for some sort of personal gain expertise. I don't know, maybe deep down he thought he was doing the right thing for this family?
S: But all the villains think they're doing the right thing. Listen, this guy is-
E: Especially dr. Octopus.
S: Yeah, he is a mad scientist, right? If you define what a mad scientist is this guy fits the bill. He really had no right to be doing this. He did it on his own because he thought he was doing something good but really there was definitely some seeking of notoriety in there and it's a shame. Not to say as you say Cara, you're correct, we shouldn't catastrophize this. And it doesn't necessarily mean that we should never make germline changes to the genome. Just that we have to do a freaking carefully so that we know what we're doing.
C: Yeah, or that we shouldn't use CRISPR in human trial, like of course, like we're not saying we shouldn't do any of this. We've just got to do it the right way and make sure that like the scientific community, the ethics committees are like in agreement about it.
S: Yeah. Personally I think we should genetically engineer the heck out of humanity. I have no qualms about that at all. There's a ton of genetic diseases that we can do away with. The thing is there we've already identified lots of alleles, right? Lots of variants that are just better than other variants. If you have this version of the gene you don't get cholesterol buildup in your arteries. Lucky you. Well, why can't we give everybody that good gene? If we could do it safely effectively and predictably, know the results, the potential to improve health is pretty tremendous and we shouldn't shy away from that.
C: Especially for genetic disease for which we don't really have any legitimate treatment. Let's say somebody has Huntington's disease. That's a horrible and it's a dominant thing, if we could wipe out Huntington's disease, that would be huge and we very potentially could but as you wrote in your article, there is a better standard of treatment to prevent transmission of HIV.
S: Yeah, he didn't he didn't even pick the right target. If he had picked an incurable genetic disease, that would be one thing.
C: If he would cure Huntington's disease people would have been like, oh, I'm pissed but like let's see how this pans out. But yeah, you're right, he picked something where people are like, why would you do that? You could just use the treatments that are available.
S: And to be clear, always trying to anticipate emails, you can't eradicate a genetic disease because there's a spontaneous mutation rate. So even if we got rid of every person with Huntington's disease on the planet they'd be back in a generation because there's a spontaneous mutation rate. It's going to develop spontaneously at a certain rate.
C: Yeah, but it wouldn't be at the rate that it is right now.
S: But you minimize it. Well, it depends. Some diseases you pretty much are at the homeostasis level, right? You have the spontaneous mutation rate like for example, if there are genetic diseases where if you have that disease, you're not having kids, you're not living long enough to have kids.
C: Well, and that's why Huntington's is such a weird example because it's dominant, so you only have to have one copy of it to get Huntington's and it doesn't show up until you're older than breeding age, which is tough.
S: Huntington's is actually more weird than that because it's a trinucleotide repeat, so it's not just a mutated gene. The mutation is this repetition of three nucleotides and that the number of repetitions determines the severity and how early it presents and it undergoes what we call amplification meaning that the number of repeats tends to increase in each generation. So you have the first person who may die with it and never even realize they had it, then their children get it at 70 and their children get it at 50 and then their children get it at 30 and then it dies out because they just get it too young. But even then there's the proband, there's the sort of the first person with the mutation spontaneously than all of their descendants. But it doesn't just last for a while because it does tend to present late for a while until it amplifies to the point where the disease is so bad you're getting it even at a young age.
C: But multiple generations can be sickened by it.
S: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But you're right, there are some diseases where it's just it's like it's a dominant disease, it doesn't present to your older and yeah, it could exist in high numbers in the population. And then there are recessive genes, like we all have multiple recessive genes for horrible diseases. The reason why you can't eradicate recessive diseases is because, well at least not clinically because the people who show it clinically is just the tip of the iceberg. This is the third time I think in this episode we're gonna refer to the tip.
C: Because it's only 25% of the offspring that would get potentially.
S: If both parents have it.
C: If both parents are heterozygous.
S: But most of the time only one parent has it, they passes it down to as you know, 50 of their children, but they're just carriers. So most people are carriers passing it on to other carriers and only when both parents have it and come together do you get the disease.
C: And even then it's a low chance that you'll get the disease.
S: Yeah, so it's just a very small percentage of all the mutations out there. So there's no way around the fact that there's always going to be a large amount of just background mutations in the human population but still when when there are clusters of disease in families and in lines, whatever, in certain populations and in certain nationalities. And we could certainly fix that.
C: Yeah.
J: Steve, can they just copy the genetics of somebody else and swap out like the damaged genetics and there wouldn't be a like a reason to think anything weird is going on?
C: What do you mean?
S: You mean like with CRISPR? Yeah, I mean that would be what you would do.
C: You would just rewrite it.
S: Yeah, you wouldn't change it to something novel, you change it to something known. The healthy version of that protein. Like if you take somebody with sickle cell disease and you give them normal hemoglobin that doesn't sickle and that's a cure. So imagine you could cure sickle cell anemia. Only genetic manipulation is going to really do that.
C: But also remember that one of those random things is that if you're a carrier for sickle cell you might have a malaria resistance and so it might be like yeah, we should wipe out all of sickle cell.
S: Yeah, we should but we should also cure malaria.
C: Exactly, because let's say we wipe out all of sickle cell without thinking about that we might get like a huge spike in malaria cases.
S: Unless you're not living in Africa, then you probably don't need the sickle cell trait.
C: Sure.
S: In an endemic area.
C: But that's where it came from which is why I know much higher in african americans.
S: Yeah.
C: Yeah.
Military Lasers (57:50)[edit]
S: All right, bob. You're gonna tell us about lasers.
C: Lasers?
E: Lasers, they're good for projecting advertising on the moon Bob.
B: So yeah, so the united states navy announced recently the ship which will be the first to have the powerful helios anti-missile laser weapon. So here's yet another development that has my inner 15 year old jumping up and down looking for somebody to high five. This will be an actual vessel with a potent laser that can knock shit out of the sky. It's really impressive. Helios for the for you laser impaired stands for high energy laser and integrated optical dazzler with surveillance system. It's Lockheed Martin's baby, the initial design is going to be 60 kilowatt laser and it's designed to grow into 150 kilowatts.
E: Oh, it's gonna grow.
B: The navy's plan is to fully integrate it into the combat system as well as a power system, so this is not going to be just like bolted on. This thing is going to be fully integrated, kind of like Star Trek's the m5 computer that was integrated-
E: Oh, yes.
B: -the enterprise and started killing all the other, but I digress. Ronald Boxall, the navy's director of surface warfare, he said we are making the decision to put the laser on our destroyers. It's going to start with prebble in 2021 ship and when we do that, that will now be her close-in weapon and we now continue to upgrade. So yeah, this is really a development I've been waiting for quite a while. So the system that they have in place now is a phalanx. It's a gatling gun and that's meant for their in close, like holy crap this thing is getting close, let's take this out. So like I said initially it's going to be 60 kilowatts, and it'll be it'll be used for jamming or confusing or dazzling enemy surveillance sensors and it could also be used to counter small boats and unmanned aerial vehicles. So it's not going to be an immediate full replacement for this close-in phalanx that they have. But this is a test bed that's going to be improved. So for comparison a 10 kilowatt laser can destroy drones. No problem. 30 kilowatts is enough to disable a truck. So this initial one will be 60 kilowatts. Then they say that this will can be upgraded in place up to 150 kilowatts. And so that's a much more powerful. Didn't get a real time frame for that but I think within a half decade that shouldn't be a problem. Eventually though, the plan is something like a thousand kilowatts also known as one megawatt. A million watts. Brian Clark, retired submarine officer and analyst with the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, he said there's a viable path right now with the DOD's laser tech maturation program to get a one megawatt laser that can fit on a ship. So once you get past 500 kilowatts, you start getting a laser that can take down incoming cruise missiles, even supersonic ones. So that's one of the- that's kind of like the end game for this type of thing.
S: Do you think we could ever get up to 1.21 gigawatts?
B: It depends. Are you talking about pulse laser or continuous laser? Pulse laser we've already blown past that. Continuous laser? I don't think the optics can handle it. We would need something far different. I actually read a treatment on what would happen to a laser that's a gigawatt, a continuous laser and it would basically fry the optics, I mean it wouldn't even get past the optics before it just obliterated itself. But maybe they could have a series of, like five like 500 megawatt or 100 megawatt lasers that each shoot a beam, that combined the beam, but I digress again. So why is the navy doing this? So I'm sure they have their fair share of inner 15 year olds. But developing lasers like that's good for other really good tactical reasons, which I wasn't aware of. So anti-ship missiles are becoming increasingly fast and sophisticated, right? I mean they're talking about a supersonic, hypersonic, ultrasonic. They're getting really intimidating at this point beyond what they've been and there's no reason to think that in the future. They're not going to be really really nasty. So historically the plan to deal with with like say anti-ship missiles is to fire two ship missiles against an attacking missile. So you fire the two missiles, take a quick look, if they didn't work fire one or two more, right? But future attacks are going to be different. When they start thinking of some of these future altercations, with battleships and destroyers, they think that it's going to be more of saturation attacks. So what's going to happen is the enemy is just going to keep shooting more and more missiles. And their goal is to shoot more than you have to shoot back. And then once you've saturated your missiles for those close attacks, you're pretty much a sitting duck in many ways. But the real downside to that is not only could you lose your ship. But that would be insanely expensive. If they if they make you constantly shoot all of your missiles. I mean you're talking millions of dollars for some of these missiles and you if you're just shooting them off willy-nilly trying to save the ship, eventually, it's going to be just way too expensive. So as you can see a laser system could be invaluable in that scenario, right? I mean you're not going to run out of photons. But of course you can run out of ship's power. So you would need enough power to back up that laser so that you can constantly be using it in that role. So then the goal then would be to make the saturation attacks too expensive and untenable for the attacker. So that's kind of the goal. So you don't want to make it too expensive for the ship being attacked with the people that are considering doing it to you, until of course they have their own lasers and then well, we'll see what happens when when that happens. So yeah, it's going to be a couple years and they're going to put the test bed on the prebos destroyer and I'm sure they're going to do tons of tests and see how it goes. I think they'll probably quickly escalate up to, or grow it into 150 kilowatt laser and then hopefully, I mean, I saw some predictions 2030 they could have megawatt or even earlier. I've heard some estimates even earlier for these megawatt class lasers. But I guess integrating it into the ships is going to be quite difficult. But we're on the way. I mean, they will happen. Eventually, all of these ships will have 500 kilowatt at least or maybe megawatt lasers that can handle a lot of the close-in work. But of course, the missiles aren't going to be going away. They're still too effective and they'll be working in tandem for a while and they may never actually go away. But it's good to know that you have a powerful laser that could handle these saturation attacks, if need be. So cool stuff. Cool technology anyway.
S: Are the military applications for these like 500 kilowatt megawatt lasers the only ones being developed or what would be a non-military application for them?
B: Non-military is nanosats that are accelerated to near relativistic speeds. Maybe not relativistic but maybe 10 percent the speed of light, five percent the speed of light that can go conceivably to the Alpha Centauri, within 20 years. So that's fascinating non-military application for these lasers, continuous lasers that can do that. So that's one.
S: All right, cool.
B: Hey, real quick. I just popped on the australian skeptics website and I saw a headline Britt Hermes successful in defamation lawsuit. That's great.
C: Yeah, she messaged me today.
B: Congratulations Britt.
C: I'm so happy for her.
E: Fantastic.
B: My text must have got lost in the mail. But yeah, awesome.
S: No, yeah, she emailed, the science-based medicine crowd got the email.
C: Yeah, it's a big deal.
S: Yeah, but she was trying to keep it under wraps for a while, but then what got announced so now I think we could officially say it, so she won a defamation. So she's the former naturopath. She's being sued by a naturopath for defamation. Just as a bullying tactic to silence a critic and she eventually, won that lawsuit, which is great.
C: And it was kind of in some ways a lot deeper than that. Like this woman apparently bought up multiple urls that were different permutations of Britt's name and then was having them forwarded to like the naturopathic society's website.
S: Yeah.
C: Like it was a lot of really horrible kind of not just defamation lawsuit but like weird bullying and like it was terrible. I'm so glad that she came out on top of that.
J: It's more prevalent than people know. I mean you can easily hurt someone by using a search engine. Just a search engine, because google tracks your searches. You could spam a search, you can do search on a term about someone so many times, using software of course, that it gets into the google search engine. Meaning that other people will see it pop up if they type your name in they could see a derogatory statement about you pop up or a derogatory question. It's really interesting. It's happened to people we know and it's it's serious and it could ruin your life. Somebody typing things into a search engine. Just that.
Announcements (1:07:23)[edit]
S: All right well Jay, it's who's that noisy time.
J: Steve, before I do who's that noisy, you know NECSS is right around the corner and we have what I would consider to be one of our best lineups that we've had I love the workshops. I'm doing a workshop this year with Brian Wecht. I'm actually doing two with Brian and Steve you're joining us on one of these. We're going to be talking about listing off the top animated films or we might even go outside of just films. The best animation that we think has had an impact on culture and society. And also interestingly, we're going to discuss how the movies and books have shaped people's perception of critical thinking and skepticism and scientists. Like you have a weird scientist in a movie. Why are scientists hokey in movies? So we're going to dive into that, it's going to be a cool workshop. And Steve you're doing a workshop on-
S: George and I are doing a workshop on stump the skeptic where people can just give us any claim or experience or something and challenge us to offer a skeptical explanation for it. And it's just a way of modeling what the process would be like, how would you go about evaluating something? Well, I read this in the news, should I believe it or not. Or my friend says that they were abducted by aliens or whatever. And then we'll just go through like how do we skeptically evaluate that claim.
J: We're going to have Carl Zimmer. We're going to have Mary Roach.
C: Yeah.
J: Paul Offett. Heather is going to be there. Heather Berlin. David Gorski is going to be there. George Hrab is going to be there. The SGU is going to be there. We're doing the skeptical extravaganza this year. If you haven't seen it, we will be doing it again at NECSS. Now the skeptical extravaganza is a science and skepticism comedy skit show. And you know what? People love it. I'm just going to say it like it is. We go nuts. We do everything we can to make you laugh with all these different games that we play. And the audience gets involved in some of the things that we do and it's a ton of fun and I think it's George at his best because he has to be funny and witty but he also has to be running the show, which I love. I love George at the helm. So it's a great show. We really hope that you can make it this year. Go to necss.org. And if you do come this year Steve has promised to dance with all SGU listeners.
S: I haven't but yeah. You could say that if you want to.
J: And the other thing I wanted to mention was you can become an SGU patron and support the work that we do. There is a lot of things that we're involved with. It's not just the SGU. It's not just NECSS. It's not just the all the other conferences that we attend, but we have a lot of things that we do to support the skeptical community and we want you to support us so we can keep doing the work that we do.
C: Yeah, I'm really glad that we started using Patreon. It's been really helpful for me with my podcast Talk Nerdy. It's been huge with the SGU. It's such a cool community because people can log in and they can talk on the discord server, they get access to add free shows and to all sorts of awesome member content, but I think even beyond all the perks and stuff, I like patreon because it's such a cool platform for content creators. If you're not on it yet, just a quick and simple, this is how it works. You sign up and you pick how much money you want to spend to support all the artists that you care about in a month. And you divvy it up based on who you want to send it to. So like different podcasters, different youtubers, like whatever you have, poets, comic book artists, like there's all sorts of cool stuff on there. And then you have a cap so Patreon won't let you overspend. You decide what you want to spend your money on and then they cap you off based on what you tell them. So you're never going to end up being like oops I dropped x dollars when I only had half of that to spend. It's really cool. It like keeps you honest with yourself and I think it's sort of the future. It really is going to be how we support and promote content in the future.
J: If you're interested, you can go to theskepticsguide.org and check out our membership awards. Rewards? Awards Cara? What do you call them?
C: Rewards I think.
J: Yeah, there were rewards. It's rewarding. It's rewarding, right?
C: Yeah, I think we're rewarding the membership. We're not giving like awards.
J: Trophies. Yeah. And you could also go to Talk Nerdy patriot. What is it? Patreon.com/TalkNerdy?
C: Yeah, it's like all the same for all of them. And the cool thing too about Patreon is that it'll recommend other users. Like other content providers. So if you're like, oh, I love SGU and I listen to Talk Nerdy, you'll start to see other podcasts and other like youtubers and stuff like that that are in line because other people are supporting multiple people, so there's an algorithm to tell you who else they support. And so you actually discover really cool stuff on Patreon, too.
Who's That Noisy? (1:12:15)[edit]
J: Okay. Now I want you to prepare yourselves because it's a little mind-blowing this week, okay? Last week I played this noisy. [plays Nisy] And it goes on. What do you think? I mean it there's it certainly has a familiar sound to it, correct?
B: Yeah.
E: Yeah, the thing you find in the mad science experiment.
J: That's what Jim Kelly thought. Jim Kelly wrote in and said, howdy, I think it's either a tesla coil or a power station thingy. And, yeah, I agree with that. It isn't, it certainly does sound like that though. And Jason S wrote in said long-time listener and double sponsor, a member at patreon, I think he means double sponsor meaning he might still be on the classic or the legacy membership and on patreon. I will email you Jason. We'll talk. I'll help you clear that up. He said I may be wrong. It happens a lot, but this week's noisy sounds a lot like the staple of movie villains laboratories at Jacob's Ladder. Yeah, I mean pretty much, same thing, not the same thing as a tesla coil, but same kind of noise, that electrical noise snapping in the air. That's not correct. But it certainly does sound like that. And then Steve Fleming wrote in and said hi Jay, from the land down under looking forward to seeing you guys and the rest of the team when you visit Melbourne, Australia in December for the conferences. We're going to New Zealand and Australia for the conferences coming up this November-December. He said he already has tickets. Cool. So the noisy sounds like a high voltage microwave oven transformer. It isn't. It isn't. Because this has nothing to do with electricity.
B: Wow.
J: I know. Listen to that. I'll play it after I tell you what it is. What is this? What is this? This came from a video, it was recorded inside a beach 99 airplane. So now that I've told you that it is something to do with an airplane. What is it? Let me play it for you again and you guess. [plays Noisy] It's in an airplane. Prop plane.
B: Bugs hitting hitting the propeller.
J: No, but it does have something to do with the propeller. Listen to this. Never heard about this. So the sound you hear is the propellers having their rpms slightly out of sync and slowly being matched by hand. Many multi-engine aircraft, this is what Brendan Flynn wrote in he said many multi-engine aircraft have a system you can turn on to automatically match the speeds and even positions of the blades. It's called a synchronizer or a synchro phaser. However this one was disabled at the time. Not having your props synced is considered bad form and incredibly annoying to anyone else in the airplane with you. So I guess if the rpms of the propellers are not spinning exactly at the same speed you get that dissonant noise. And I'll play it really quick one more time just so you now fully know what it is. [plays Noisy]
B: Wow.
J: Imagine being in an airplane for hours hearing that crazy noise.
E: I wouldn't like that at all
J: But man, when I heard that I was like, this is so cool just by itself. It's a cool [inaudible].
B: Noone get it.
J: I like it when people win. It's fun, but it certainly sounds like electricity. I just find that amazing. And this amazing theme I have with who's that noisy that man, bacon sounds like rain, sounds like propellers needing to be synced sounds like a tesla. It's weird. It's just funny how many things sound like other things.
E: Yeah.
C: Bacon sounds like rain.
J: Yeah, it does. I saw a Ted Talk on it. If I tell you it's rain, you believe it. If I tell you it's bacon frying you believe it.
C: That's amazing.
J: It's true.
New Noisy (1:16:13)[edit]
J: Okay, so we have a new noisy sent in by a listener named Cal Landon and this one, I'm telling you, I love this. I love this. This is very cool. There's no clue for this one. I'm just going to play it. There you have it. It's a noise.
E: Well, it is that.
J: I've played it for you. And it was sent in by a listener named Cal Landon and there's no clues. And I need you to tell me what it is. And you know what? I want you to get it right this week. Anyway, listen, email me directly. I'm the only one that gets these emails. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. If you heard anything cool this week, which a lot of you did. And also you can email me your guesses. And one person, last week when I said hey guys, and you could just write me to say how you doing. One person wrote in. One person. And they said how you doing Jay? And I wrote back I said, you know what, you're the first person that sent this, so you're going to get something special. So I sent them a picture of me and Bob on a roller coaster like ride making crazy faces. And Bob knows the picture, right Bob?
B: Yeah, of course.
J: It's probably one of the best pictures of me and Bob of all time. And I just thought hey, thanks for being cool and here's a picture for you, and the guy liked it. It was very funny. So thank you Steve and thank you Jesus.
S: All right. Thanks Jay.
[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]
Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:17:38)[edit]
Question_Email_Correction #1: _brief_description_ ()[edit]
S: All right. We're gonna do just one quick email. This comes from Blake Hutchings from the UK and Blake writes. Love the show, I'm a longtime listener that has been listening from the very beginning. I think he means from the beginning of the show and at the beginning of when we were publishing it. Something caught my attention in your recent episode number 724 while talking about life on other planets Jay said that Mars was our closest neighbor. Steve made a correction by stating that Venus is in fact closer but the fascinting truth is that neither is correct. In fact, the closest planet to earth for 46 percent of the time is Mercury. Venus is closest 31 percent of the time and Mars 13 percent of the time. This is counterintuitive, but true. My source for this claim is another podcast that I listen to regularly the BBC's More or Less podcast, which is a great show all about fact-checking statistics. And then he gives a link. I thought you might find this to be an interesting topic to talk about on the show. So Blake is correct in his statistics, but wrong I think in his overall statement. I wrote him back to say it's actually it is interesting. This is one of those things like in the editing when this came up I'm like, all right, well what we said was technically true. We didn't really give a complete answer. So I always debate with myself. Should I break in and say the caveat or just let it slide and see if we get any emails. And this time I let it slide and we got an email, but it's an interesting discussion. So the problem is that the term closest is ambiguous. And I thought of at least four ways you could interpret it. If you just ask the question what planet is closest to the earth or what's the closest planet to the earth? You could interpret the way Blake did which is which planet is closer to the Earth for the majority of the time. And it actually makes sense that it's Mercury because if you think about it, obviously at any given point in time planets are different distances depending on where they are in their orbit. When Venus or Mars or Mercury's on the opposite side of the sun from the earth. They're a lot farther away than when they're on the same side. And so since mercury is the closest planet to the sun, it varies the least. When mars and venus are on the other side of the sun, they're farther away from the earth than mercury. So that's why the mercury could be closer to the earth for the plurality of the time, 46% of the time. But that's only one way to interpret closest. Another way is to say which planet is closest right now or at any given point in time. We were not referring to that. But there's two other ways that actually in which venus is closer. One is which planet gets closer to the earth than any other planet, right? And that's venus. The close approach between venus and earth is closer than any other planet to earth. And in fact, it's closer than any other two planets. Even closer than mercury and venus ever get to each other.
B: To me that's the most important one.
S: And that's what I was talking about, I know actually venus is the closest planet, it's the one that comes closest to earth. But you could also talk about the average distance and venus has the shortest average distance from earth of any planet also. So venus wins in those two ways. But mercury does win in kind of a weird way in my opinion, just the percentage of time that it's closer. And then venus mercury and mars are the closest planet at any at different points in time. Jupiter is too far away to ever be the closest planet to earth. So even when earth and jupiter are at their closest. It's still farther away than all the other inner inner planets, because jupiter is just so much farther out than any of the mars or inward. But thanks for for provoking that discussion.
E: It's important to define these things a little more tightly I suppose.
S: Yeah, exactly. I mean I get the lesson here is, this is fun but the lesson is-
B: Ambiguity invites pedantry.
S: That's true. And Blake definitely gets the pedantic email of the week no question, but it's that science requires precise definitions of terms. And often we need what we call an operational definition meaning that if you go through this process you get a specific answer. Or it has to be like by definition, this is the definition of this means this specific thing. All right guys, let's move on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:22:21)[edit]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | |
| Science |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items, two real and one fake and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. For science or fiction this week. We have a special guest Gary Loveland. Gary, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.
GL: Thank you. Glad to be here.
J: So Gary what happened? Let's tell everyone how you found your your way onto this show. I'll set the stage. So I'm looking at the SGU subreddit. It's just /SGU. I try to keep up with everything that's going on there and people were talking about our patrons that come on that we allow to come on and be guest rogues with us and do a whole show. They're having an interesting conversation and it's really cool for me to read stuff like that because it just gives me insight into what people think. But there was a conversation and they were like, yeah, you know those guys those people like are paying to get on and what do you think about that? And what do you think about the quality of that they've been doing. Now personally, I think everyone's done a great job. We loved it. We've always had a really good time when we have guests on the show. But then Gary, so he's on reddit and he said something along the lines of, how does a poor guy like me get on the SGU? And I had a moment where I'm like, I totally related I'm like shit. I feel bad. So I wrote him back on the subreddit.
S: I don't feel bad.
J: And I said, I don't remember exactly what I said. Something like hey, I'm offering to get you on the show for science or fiction. You want to do it, email me at this email address and he emailed me. So what was it like from your side of the fence?
GL: Just shocking. I wasn't expecting that at all. I'm just skulking around reddit making random comments and then all of a sudden I just said oh when they're gonna have on a I think I said like [inaudible] when you responded to me, I was shocked.
C: Yeah, Jay, do you skulk around reddit too? Like are you usually commenting and stuff on our subreddit?
J: I'll comment when I need to. People are having conversations and stuff and I answer. If people ask questions or if something comes up that I can help. Every once in a while something will come up and I'm like, how can I not respond? Like I have the answer like that type of thing. But I read I read everything. I'm a huge reddit fan. I love reddit. Like I am addicted. Yeah, I have like 50 subreddits I'm into and it's really-
C: Seriously? I had no idea. I hate to say I'm not a big fan of reddit, but it's not because I'm not a big fan of reddit. I just think there's a lot of great stuff on reddit, but the worst of the worst is also on reddit.
J: Oh that's not true, 4chan has the worst of the worst.
C: Well, yeah, fo course 4chan has worst of the worst.
J: But I gotta be honest with you-
C: But you're not hanging out on 4chan, are you?
J: No, not at all.
E: Not anymore.
J: No, but the point the point is like subreddits are communities and communities are different in the real world and they're different on reddit. I love most of the subreddits I'm on, I love them.
J: Yeah, the ones you're on, I'm just saying there's some pretty horrible stuff on reddit.
J: There is but it's a viable, amazing platform. It's powerful and it's real time and it's great. I mean God I'm on the Star Trek one. I'm on Star Wars one. I'm on the science fiction one. I'm on the sci-fi one I mean I'm on all of my hobbies.
C: It's like my fifth circle of hell right there.
B: Do they have a fifth circle of hell one Jay?
J: I'm sure they do.
E: It's called 5chan.
J: Gary you on reddit a lot? Do you see some of the crazier stuff on there?
GL: Yeah, I'm on there quite a bit. My daughter actually turned me on to it. I remember which was the first one went on but she's like you would fit right in and yeah, I did.
C: That's awesome. Oh, that's so cool.
E: She pre-screened it for you. Nice.
S: Yeah, I mean it's the whole thing is funny because as the show has evolved over the last 14 years now, we always wanted to be a an outlet for skeptics, right? Not just us but of course 14 years ago the community was smaller and to us that meant people that we knew who were skeptical activists who were now, people that the community has grown, they're like the recognizable people. But now there's hundreds of thousands of other people who obviously can't have a hundred thousand listeners come on the show. So the Patreon idea was one way to just occasionally have on another voice, just a listener of the show get a different perspective. I think it's worked out really really well. We wouldn't continue to do it if it wasn't working out well, and all the people who have been on so far I thought have done a great job. And the feedback has been you know, pretty much universally positive. So Gary tell us a little bit about yourself though. So what do you do? What's your job?
GL: Let's see. I live in Las Vegas. I work in a warehouse at one of the hotels on the strip. I'm 51 years old and have three daughter. Next week will be my 27th anniversary.
J: Cool.
S: How long have you been listening to the SGU?
GL: I was trying to remember today how long it's been. It's been years.
S: You're still listening, huh?
GL: Well, it's the first podcast I download every week.
S: Oh, that's awesome. I often wonder like on average how long does somebody stick with the show. Because it wouldn't bother me if people would listen for two or three years and then say okay, I pretty much learned the whole skeptical thing and then move on. That's fine. But you know, I mean obviously I'm thrilled if people can stick with us for years and years. That's great.
J: Well, Steve. We also, we're a community all by ourselves at this point.
S: That's what we're trying to be, anyway.
J: Yeah. Gary, it's funny, I had no idea how old you were and still didn't right up until you said you're 51. And for some reason like when I'm on reddit, I just assume everybody's 12 years old.
G:' My daughter's like no, they're all old guys like you.
J: Starting to think, I really do think now that like there's like a heavy block of 50 and 60 year old people on there.
E: Wow.
S: All right. Let's do this.
J: All right, here we go.
S: We have a theme this week. The theme is glaciers.
C: What? No.
S: Seems pretty random. What do you guys know about glaciers?
C: I'm pretty sure they're made of ice.
S: Cara, no spoilers, come on. All right. Here we go. Just three little interesting things about glaciers. Here we go, item number one. During the most recent glacial period glaciers covered 64 percent of the land on earth. Item number two, deep glacier ice turns blue as it ages. And item number three, glaciers contain about 75 percent of the fresh water on earth. Gary, you're our guest. So you get the honor of going first.
C: The honor.
S: The honor. The privilege.
GL: [inaudible] go last and just go with Evan.
E: Yeah, now you're talking.
S: If you're psychic you can go with Evan, yeah.
Gary's Response
GL: Okay, the first one about this, during the last glacial period the ice or the glaciers covered 64 percent of the earth. I believe that one is science. Second one, science. The last one, 75 percent of the fresh water and I'll say that one's the fiction.
S: Okay, Jay?
Jay's Response
J: All right. So the first one here about 64 of the land on earth. So this is when the most recent glacial period was covering 64 percent of the land. I'm not sure I'm believing this one just because I have a recollection of like seeing a picture of at some point. I don't know if it was the most recent glacial period though. And I'm not even sure how many there have been. I'm sure there's been a lot. So I'll come back to that one. I just want to go through these other ones quick. So the second one here about the the ice turning blue. I think that is science. I have seen tons of blue glacier ice in my viewing. Especially when I'm on reddit. And this last one about glaciers containing 75 percent of the fresh water. I also believe that one is factual. And it's interesting to think that what that number would be, during a glacial period that number might go up to 95 percent or even more. Imagine that. I think the one here about the last glacial period was covering 64 percent is the fiction because I think it was much less than that.
S: Okay, Evan.
Evan's Response
E: Am I allowed to get a clarification on the most recent glacial period Steve?
S: Depends on what it is.
E: Well, uh my understanding it was 20-25 000 years ago. Am I off the base there?
S: Yeah, I don't see any reason to tell you that. Doesn't really affect anything.
E: Okay, 64 of the land. So my understanding is the if I'm right the last glacial progress which started to retreat 25 000 years ago did push land down as far as I think places like Texas. They stretched down there pretty far. So if you think of all of Canada in gulf, you think of all of just about all the United States, and it was happening if it happened basically to that latitude all around the planet that would be about 64. That would be about two-thirds of the land. So I think that one's right. Deep glacier ice turning blue as it ages. Why? It's not like the water is blue. So it forms minerals or something is in there turning it blue or some other color, it may not be blue. It could be green. Could be something else. I don't know about this one. The 75 of fresh water on earth. Yeah, that's a you know, I don't know, there's... The glaciers are big. I mean these are miles high, well a mile high I think in certain places. That's a pretty good volume of water. Could it be 75%? I think it could be. I'll say it's the blue one. I'll say glacier ice turning blue as it ages is fiction.
S: Okay, Cara, they're all split up so far.
Cara's Response
C: Jeez. Okay, so Jay thinks that it's not 64 percent. Evan thinks it doesn't turn blue and Gary thinks it's not 75 of the fresh water.
S: Correct.
C: Okay. All right, so I'll go in order. 64% of the land on earth. So just the land though the continents. But still like the land's pretty spread out, there's a lot of land in Africa. A lot.
S: Oh, you're obsessed with Africa these days.
S: I know. And south america, there's a lot of land. So I feel like even if those two things weren't covered that wouldn't be 64%. I feel like that's half the land. I could be wrong. Maybe the north pole with like Russia, all of Europe, all of Asia. I feel like that's half though. But also this was so long ago that well, it wasn't that long ago. The continents kind of look the same, right? I don't know. That seems like I feel like I've seen drawings of like ice ages and stuff. And they weren't covered in ice. There was more ice but I feel like the globe wasn't covered in ice. So that's why I'm kind of leaning towards Jay on this. But let me see if there's other ones. I think, I know that there's blue glacier ice. I've seen it and I think you see it when outside ice calves off and sometimes you see it deep in cores, which would mean it's older, right? So maybe that one's science, I don't know. The freshwater one is throwing me because I'm like aren't glaciers over salt water? But then I'm like, there's not that much fresh water on earth, right? If you really think about it salt water is the oceans. So fresh water is underground. And then it's just like in lakes and rivers and stuff. And if you added all those up, it's not that much. So maybe 75 of the fresh water being caught up in glaciers is actually not as much as it sounds. Because it's not that much water in general. So, I don't know. I feel like Jay made the most compelling case I'm gonna GWJ on this.
S: Okay, Bob.
Bob's Response
B: It's amazing how in the course of 10 minutes. Yeah, all over the place. At first they all seem great, all good, now they all seem bad. So, all right, well, let's see. 64 percent land on earth, the most recent glacier period. I'm not sure.
J: Bob, hurry up.
B: That seems fine to me, but I could be off. But I'm gonna go with it anyway, the third one, 75 percent of the fresh water. Wait, doesn't Lake Superior and the great lakes have the vast majority of fresh water? That's gonna kill me. But the one that's really getting to me is this deep glacier eyes turning blue as it ages. I think you may be trying to trick us here. Sure, everyone's seen that that blue color coming off of some glaciers. But I don't think that's a factor of the aging of the ice. Isn't it the depth of the ice? The more ice, the light goes through, the more the the other colors are scattered out and you see the blue just like why the sky is blue. I think it's a factor. Deals with the depth of the ice and not the age of the ice. I can't imagine maybe the compression of the ice at the bottom it does something, but it's got to be all about the light and what's filtered out and how much ice it's going through. So that one's kind of trumping the other concerns I have. So I'll say the blue ice is fiction.
S: Okay. We have a good spread. So let's start with the number three.
Steve Explains Item #3[edit]
S: Glaciers contain about 75 percent of the fresh water on earth.
B: Oh my god.
S: Gary, you think this one is the fiction and this one is-
B: Did he sweep us?
S: -science.
B: Oh, really?
J: Oh, wow.
S: Yes. Sorry, Gary.
B: What about the great lake Steve?
S: Yeah, but Bob, you know how much water there is like for example in the glaciers in Antarctica? That's three miles deep of ice. It's a lot. There's a lot of glacier ice.
B: Yeah, the one great cover the planet with water. I mean it's like-
C: No.
S: No.
C: If it was really thin I guess anything could do that if it was thinning.
B: True. But I think the depth, I just remember there's an impressive amount of fresh water in the great lakes, amazing amount. But I didn't pick it. So I feel good about it.
J: The reason why this is true is like you got to think of this as a accumulation of snowfall. It falls, it stays there and then when more falls on top it compresses it down and pushes it and pushes it and it becomes solid bricks of ice.
C: That's why it's fresh water. I'm such an idiot. I'm like, oh, it's all salt water.
S: No glaciers are all fresh water because salt water doesn't freeze, right?
C: Yeah. Well, I thought-
E: Well at a much-
S: At much lower temperature. Glaciers are basically just fresh water. All right. Well, let's move on to one number two.
Steve Explains Item #2[edit]
J: Oh boy.
B: Really?
S: Deep glacier ice turns blue as it ages. Bob, you think this one is a fiction and Evan you think this one's a fiction? So this is interesting Bob you came up with a very interesting interpretation that yeah, may look blue but that's just a function of the amount of ice, not the age of the ice. But this one is science. Sorry guys. It is completely a function of the age of the ice. What do you think is happening-
B: [inaudible- action? What's going on?
S: Yeah, what's going on? It's happening to ice as to glacial ice as it ages I gave you a little bit a hint by saying it's deep. It's compacting
J: It's like just like I said before like what happens is as it gets, you know as the molecules are lining up and they're basically pushing in the most uniform way that they can, right Steve?
S: No.
J: They're getting as solid as they can.
S: Close, but it's not the crystalline structure of the ice that's changing. It's squeezing out the air bubbles in between the ice. And those air bubbles get squeezed out progressively over time and the denser the ice becomes the more it absorbs red and therefore it reflects blue and looks blue.
C: Cool.
J: Which means it is blue.
S: Yeah.
C: Yeah, which means it is blue. But right because don't you always see blue like deep underneath stuff?
S: Yeah. It's not an artifact of the amount of the whatever the transmission of the light. It is blue.
C: It's because it's old.
S: Physically, because it just I guess the structure of ice that's compacted without any air bubbles in it, it absorbs red light. That's it. That's a little interesting fact. Okay.
Steve Explains Item #1[edit]
S: All that means that during the most recent glacial period glaciers covered 64% of the land on earth is the fiction because the real figure is half that. Only 32%. About a third. So I think Cara your sort of estimate of what did the earth look like and the land was the closest but it was actually only a third. Now the different glacial periods, the glaciers got different distances south. Some went a little bit farther south than the others. So some may have been a little bit more than that, but I don't think any of them, in the current ice age I don't think any of them got to 64%. Of course at some point if you go back billions of years there was snowball earth, the whole earth was a glacier. So just a clarification on terminology because you guys were kind of all over the place on this. We are actually in an ice age right now. And ice age is a period where there are glacial periods. So during an ice age there are glacial and interglacial periods. So right now we're in an interglacial period in an ice age. Does that make sense?
C: So we're in between glacial periods.
E: It's gonna come it's gonna come crush us again
S: Yeah, so the last glacial period ended Evan 15 000 years ago.
E: 15? Okay.
S: It's when it ended. Yeah, remember the younger dry that stuff after the ice age when the ice melted, and then it wiped out all the megafauna in north america, but it could have been a meteor impact, but they're not sure. But anyway, that was like 12 000 years ago when the megafauna died off, right? Yeah, so that was the that was at the end of the most recent glacial period. Not ice age, but glacial period was still in the ice age. And there have been, what would my reference sa,y seven glacial advances and retreats in the current ice age over the last 650 000 years.
E: So another one will happen, likely to happen.
J: Yeah, this is another one of those items or topics, where having a six-year-old child helps.
S: Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of right because I mean it's one of those things like people think they know about glaciers, but do you really know about them? I mean, do you know about them in detail. And this of course is even really superficial. This is not obviously like somebody who's an expert on glaciers has tremendously deeper knowledge about it. So Gary you survived, you survived your first science.
E: Yeah, Gary.
GL: Yeah, I was hoping to retire with a win but.
S: Most people don't win their first time out, especially going first. It is especially challenging.
J: Most people and George Hrab don't win, right?
E: Poor George.
C: Has George never won.
S: No, he won twice I think.
J: Oonce or twice. Yeah.
C: Okay.
E: In the 14 years we've been interacting.
J: Well Gary, thank you. I just want to thank you. It was cool meeting you in the online way. We'll probably never meet in person unless you go to a conference.
GL: I want to very badly, next time-
J: I'd love to make it to SCICon 2020 if that's possible, that'd be cool.
C: And they might come to LA sometime soon-ish. So if we work that out, we're pretty close. I was just in Vegas like a week or two ago.
S: Yeah, SCICon is in is in Las Vegas and we're sort of building up a list of requests to go to LA and so eventually it'll reach critical mass and we'll have to go. But for this year our dance card is kind of booked because we're going to Australia/New Zealand. So that's kind of sucking up all of our travel time. In addition to our usual stuff of NECSS and DragonCon. So yeah, so we'll be making it out there this year, but next year is very likely actually.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:42:42)[edit]
(quoted text)
– _alternate_display_text_for_name_ (_birth_year_-_death_year_), (description of author)
S: All right before we end this segment, Evan you're going to give us a quote.
E: "First you make people believe they have a problem and then you sell them the solution. That's how advertising works. Every snake oil salesman knows that." That was written by Oliver Marcus Malloy, who is a writer. You guys ever heard this name before? He has a best-selling trilogy Bad Choices Make Good Stories. Downloaded over a hundred thousand times on various online platforms.
S: And that's absolutely true. We say that all the time, that basically you create a fake problem and you sell the solution to that problem. That is the snake oil industry right there in a nutshell. Gary, thanks for joining us for science or fiction.
GL: Thanks for having me, been awesome.
J: You got it, man.
S: Thanks everyone for joining me this week.
B: Sure, man.
E: Thanks Steve.
C: Thanks Steve.
J: Whatever Steve.
Signoff[edit]
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.
- ↑ Science Based Bedicine: WHO Promotes Unscientific TCM
- ↑ Phys.org: Solar cell defect mystery solved after decades of global effort
- ↑ Cosmos Magazine: HIV-protective mutation may boost influenza risk
- ↑ Defense News: When it comes to missile-killing lasers, the US Navy is ready to burn its ships
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]
- ↑ [url_from_SoF_show_notes _publication_: _article_title_]