SGU Episode 1026
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| SGU Episode 1026 |
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| March 08th 2025 |
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Two majestic wolves sprint through the snowy landscape, showcasing nature's beauty and vitality. |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"Dictators seek to control men’s thoughts as well as their bodies and so they attempt to dictate science, education and religion. But dictated education is usually propaganda, dictated history is often mythology, dictated science is pseudoscience." |
— Edwin Grant Conklin, 1937 |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, March 5th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
E: Hey everybody.
S: Cara Santa Maria. Howdy, Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
S: Day is my wife's birthday, so happy birthday. Yeah, she's working, she's working on. She's actually at work right now. She's working in the evening on her birthday so I'm not going to get to see her till.
E: Later, Is she washing dishes, Steve? What's she? What is she doing?
S: No, she works. She teaches.
E: In. The evening joke.
S: I know she teaches in the evening, so yeah. So this is one of her days to to work late and she couldn't have.
E: It well, I'm sure her students and faculty all celebrated with her balloons and cake and all the good stuff.
S: Whatever, I hope so.
E: Just bring some home.
C: Speaking of work, I don't know if I told you all this, but as as you can tell, I've been a bit preoccupied, a bit busy lately. This week is the week that I am saying goodbye to all of my patients. Oh, boy. On my fellowship, which is tough. My fellowship technically ends next week. And then I take my licensing exam and there's just so much in front of me, so. And I have COVID, if you can't tell. Stuffy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I.
E: Didn't know that.
C: Did you guys? I was last week, I was trying to hide it, but I was coughing and sniffling a bit. And then I tested the next day and I was like, cool, yeah. So not only did I have to, I, I, I'm inpatient, I'm on inpatient service one day a week. And I had to miss my final inpatient service because I was testing positive for COVID, which was a huge bummer. And then now it's day after day of just saying goodbye. Like hour after hour. I've cried more. It's tough. Then it's it's such a tough thing because usually as a therapist, as a mental health practitioner or even a medical practitioner when you terminate with clients and that's the word, I wish they didn't use that word at some sort of I know. Yeah, Terminal. Yeah. But termination as we, as we do call it, it usually happens a bit more, I don't know, shall we say organically, like somebody feels like they've finished their course of therapy or maybe they're moving out of your licensed jurisdiction or whatever. But there are few points in our careers, most of them are early during our training where we have to terminate with everybody all at once before we move on to another phase of our training. And that's where I'm at right now. I've done it once before already at the same hospital when I my practicum, but yeah, it's so tough.
J: How much time do they give you? Like how much lead up time is there?
C: Oh, I've known this whole time. So I've been able to sort of prepare my clients. I think for some of them, I started preparing them about a month or two in advance. But for many of them, they knew from the beginning, you know, this is how much time we have together. And come, you know, February, March, April, at some point in there I'm going to be winding down my fellowship. But some of them completely forgot. And, you know, I would try to remind and I would try to prepare them, but there was still a couple this week who were like, no, what am I going to do? I was like, no, we'll get through this together. It's.
S: Yeah, it also happens at the end of your career.
C: Yeah.
S: So I'm just entering that phase now where every, just about every visit I have with a patient is my last visit with them. Yeah, I mean, there are some that that I do every three months. So like next month, it'll definitely that'll be it like that. That'll be the last time I'm seeing every patient. There's still a few that I'll see three months from now, but yeah, so I'm having the same conversation over and over and over and.
B: Over again, are you telling them what you really think about them now? And.
S: Well, I mean some, you know, some, some patients I've been seeing for 20 years. I was, you know, question.
C: How long you've?
S: Yeah, some had a.
C: Relation, such a different thing because like I see my patients weekly, right? And for a full hour every week. So there's a lot of intensity there. But yeah, this is different. Most of them I've only known for a year. A few of them were returned patients from when I was at the same hospital on practicum a few years ago. So there's like a depth there, but it's a shorter period of time. You see so many more patients than I do. But you've known some of them, like you said, for 20 years. You've seen their kids grow up. You've seen, you know, massive life changes.
S: Yeah, it's.
C: Incredible.
S: Yeah. So, you know, it's, it is, it is a bit intense. Oh, my patients have been so supportive though. They really have been great, you know, in terms of congratulating me and retiring everything. Then they got a little anxious on who's going to, who am I going to follow up with? But we have like, it's easy because we have a huge practice of Yale experts, you know, so.
C: So you can sort of transfer them to other practitioners in your same kind of practice. Whereas most of my clients, I am referring to community practitioners because there's just, you know, there's no options. So some of them take breaks. Some people say, you know, this is I want to take a break from therapy and kind of work on being my own therapist for a while. And then others are like, no, no, I need to find somebody right now. So a big part of that week is me doing a lot of research and writing a lot of referrals. Yeah.
S: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
E: Well, Steve, you have to remind them that they can still, you know, interact with you. Just become a patron of the skeptics guys, the universe, which is very easy to do if you go to our homepage.
S: Never cross the streams.
C: I mean, really. Don't you have a few? Do I have a few who listen on their own but I would never tell them like. Never bring it up.
S: Some some patients bring it up with me.
C: Yeah.
S: And that's fine. I'm like, oh, that's, that's nice, you know, But I, yeah, I would obviously never, never bring that up.
C: I always, I have that conversation at the beginning of therapy too, where because when you're practicing in a community, there's a chance you will see people in situations outside of the clinic. And so I often will have conversations about what do we do if we run into each other in public because as somebody'd therapist, I would never ever announce that that is my relationship with them.
E: Right, just like I can never read who my tax clients.
C: Are totally, but they can say it. So I always tell them if you see me somewhere and you walk up to me and start talking and you share with your friends you know our relationship, great, I will converse with you. But if you don't sort of do it first, I will pretend like I don't know you and that's not me. Privacy. Yeah, that's to protect your privacy. Exactly.
Voice-over: That's right.
S: Yeah. That's, you know, for a while I, I was engaging with three large populations of people that I was basically acquaintances with, right? You know, work, skepticism and Larping, which is hundreds of people. Mm Hmm. And I would see somebody that I was like just barely acquainted with in the wild, you know? Yeah.
US#03: And I'm like, OK. Oh.
S: Are they a Larper skeptic or a patient? Yeah.
Voice-over: I. Know this?
S: Person like I know I recognize that obviously like my frequent flyer patients, like patients I've seen a lot. I have no trouble recognizing that. But like somebody I've seen once or twice like a year ago and like, I, I know I recognize that I recognize them, but like without context, like no context to just out in like in a store or something, sometimes it was hard for me to remember how I knew them, you know?
C: Yeah.
E: Hey, Steve. And they're like, oh, how do I know you? Neurology. Which circle? On the vend, I imagine.
B: Yeah, imagine having prosopagnosia.
E: Yeah, right.
B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Increase that by an order of magnitude.
C: I guess you just tell everybody and then it makes it easier.
E: But yeah, that's true.
B: They know you well enough. They're going to know that.
E: I still say there should be like a when. When the smart glasses finally do become a thing that people adapt to, there should be something in which it puts a hello, my name is tag on the person them you know. That way you know exactly who you're speaking to at any given time.
C: Oh, kind of like. Did you guys ever watch Handy back in the day?
E: Boone I'm familiar with the series.
C: Yeah.
E: Julia Louis Dreyfus.
C: Yeah, Julia Louis Dreyfus. So it, well, it's not going to resonate for you, but it's a podcast, so a lot of people listening will have watched me. Yeah, she has. She has, you know, a bag man. And he just, he's constantly whispering in her ear every time she walks up to somebody. This is Senator so. And so he loves to play golf, you know, And then she's like, OK, Gary, I know. So that would be so helpful.
E: That's a real thing, sure.
C: Oh yeah, How could you keep track of all those people if you work in politics?
E: So we. All forget about, right? So eventually technology will become that right your. Your. AI whatever will recognize the person and whisper it in your ear. That's Joe Smith.
C: Or whatever.
E: Imagine if you have if you have Alzheimer's, it would be a boon. My God.
C: Oh, that would actually be really helpful, yeah, if you were struggling.
E: Technology is great.
S: It's great for people who have mild to moderate dementia. Think about GPSG PS:. Keeps people driving for a lot longer.
C: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Quickie with Bob: Atlantic Shutdown (08:41)[edit]
S: All right, Bob, you're going to get us started with a quickie.
B: Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. All right, I specifically decided to go with a slightly encouraging news item this time just to make me feel minutely less like we're all doomed. And so this helped me for a little while. So OK, I'm sure many of you have heard about a scary climate scenario, about the shutdown of the Atlantic conveyor belt system. You may know it by it's more technical name, the Atlantic Meridianal Overturning Circulation. Little bit of a mouthful, AMOC. So this refers to the system of current in the Atlantic that transports rising warm water to the north and sinking cool water to the South. And it sounds kind of like simple and basic, but this is really an important factor in global weather systems. If this is shut down, it could wreak havoc. It could not only change global rain patterns, it could dramatically cool Europe, which is the big fear that people talk about. It could warm the rest of the world, and they could also, I found this out today, it could also raise sea levels off the American East Coast. So, yeah, this would not be good. This would not be good at all. So. And there have been studies in the past that have said that, yeah, this could happen, you know, anytime now, you know, couple of decades next month. I mean, there's some really pessimistic studies out there that really scared a lot of people. So now we've got a new study published in Nature, which describes computer simulations from 34 different climate models that were run to examine specifically extreme climate change possibilities and a a bottom line it according to the lead author, Jonathan Baker, an oceanographer at at the Met Office, not one simulation predicted these currents collapsing before 2100.
S: That's awesome.
B: So that's kind of really good right there, especially when you were thinking, yeah, this could happen, you know, in a decade or one specific study said a few decades still kind of close. The earlier simulations that predicted a collapse soon, they were based on this, on this conveyor belt, as it's referred to stopping because the Arctic waters no were no longer would be sinking and going South due to all the melted freshwater. Like because you've got a lot of freshwater melting like say from green land and it's heading into the into the ocean and that's going to inhibit and potentially just stop this conveyor belt, this water sinking and then and then going South.
S: Yeah, because the the saltwater, the salinity makes it heavier and causes it to sink.
B: Right. So the, the, the new bit here though is something that I guess wasn't fully appreciated by, by scientists was that there was a second water pump engine, I guess you could call it, in the Antarctic where the winds pull up the cold water from the deep. And that they say can keep this whole conveyor belt system going for a while. Basically, that's what will prevent it from potentially stopping in a few decades to like, you know, you know, 8 decades, maybe 9 decades or or more. So that's the reassuring bit. All right. That's the kind of like, oh, yeah, OK, nice. That's nice. Now the caveats, of course, there's some caveats that this could still happen later. Obviously, after 2100. It could certainly happen. And this isn't infallible. I mean, it could happen earlier, but it has happened in the past. So it just, you know, this could definitely happen at some point. Lead author Baker also warns that he's like, this is no green light for complacent complacency. The AMOC is very likely to weaken this century and that brings its own major climate impacts. And So what does that mean? That means that there probably will be crop losses this this century and stocks of fish will also be heavily impacted to a certain degree. But there probably won't be, you know, Europe going into a deep freeze this century as, as a lot of the headlines regarding this have said in the past. So, yeah, so it's it's not as imminently bad from this specific point of view, from this, with this specific thing, because as we know, there's lots of other crazy climate change things happening unrelated to this. This is just one of the ones that has been, that has grabbed a lot of people's attention because, yeah, Europe would have been, you know, deeply impacted. So that's good. Take that for what it's worth and maybe it'll cheer you up for a few minutes and.
S: We'll take a we can get.
B: Yeah, take what you can get. So this has been your conveyor belt quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.
S: One thing though, I wonder, Bob, at what point does it become inevitable? Even if it hasn't happened yet? Is there a point in no return? Or is it? Did that go into that at all?
B: Yeah. No, it didn't. It didn't. I didn't see those those specifics.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
B: Hi, man.
S: All right.
News Items[edit]
Measles Outbreak (13:24)[edit]
S: Cara, tell us about this measles outbreak in Texas. What's going on?
C: Yeah.
E: You said measles, not weasels, right?
C: No, measles much more deadly than weasels. Let's talk. Before we talk about what's the latest in Texas, let's talk about measles kind of on the whole. Because even though most everybody knows, you know the term measles, and they've seen pictures of what measles looks like, most of us have not in our lifetimes had any real connect. Correct.
E: It's more of a mid 20th century phenomenon than a late 20th century or early 21st.
C: And now it is still globally a big deal. But we have cheap and easy vaccination now, which, according to the World Health Organization, actually averted more than 60 million deaths between 2000 and 2023.
B: Oh really? Vaccines saving that many. Million. Really. Yeah, isn't that nice?
C: So what is measles? Because even though measles manifest and we're mostly used to thinking of measles as a rash, right? That's what we usually see in our minds when we think of measles. We think of the measles rash. But measles is an airborne disease O it's a viral infection and it is one of the most contagious diseases on the planet. And so how do we measure that? Well, a little kind of background. You guys have heard the term are not the basic reproduction number R0 sometimes referred to as R not Yeah. So the basic reproduction number, it usually has a range because we talk about both or I should say the reproduction number has a range. We can talk about the basic and we can talk about the effective reproduction number. So anytime you see kind of a publication talking about the R naughty of a disease, you're going to see a range. And that's because on the low end, we're talking about in sort of ideal conditions where there isn't much susceptibility in the general public. And on the high end, we're talking about situations where vaccination numbers are low or there are a lot of susceptible people for another reason. So I just want to pick a few at random here. The 2014 Ebola breakout, the R naughty was between 1.51 and 2.53. And what that number actually presents is how many people a single infected person are likely to infect.
B: Yeah.
C: OK. So a single person with Ebola in 2014 was likely to infect between 1 1/2 and 2 1/2 people. OK, Seasonal flu .9 to 2.1, right? You got the flu. You're around somebody who either is or is not vaccinated. You are likely to infect somewhere around one or two people with your flu. Measles 12 to 18.
B: Wow.
C: Measles has one of the highest R naughts of any disease. Smallpox is five to seven. Polio is five to seven. Measles is 12 to 18. And to give you an example of how infectious this is beyond the R naughty. If you are in a room and you have measles and you sneeze or cough on a surface, somebody can walk into that room 2 hours later, touch that surface and get the disease.
B: Hangs around a while.
C: It's a very, very contagious airborne virus.
B: Is there an extended shedding period? Is that why there's so many people well, can get it?
C: Or is it COVID is only 1.5 to 3.5 compared to measles? So it's, yes, you do shed the virus for a while. I mean, as long as you're infectious, you are shedding. But it's that the viral particles themselves are just really, really robust, right, Steve?
S: Yeah, they hang out for a while.
C: They hang out for a while and your body, if you are naive to this disease, your body is very susceptible to this virus. And so that's why vaccines are so incredibly important. Well, when we look at kind of across the globe, according to the World Health Organization, even though we do have that vaccine available and even though more than 60 million deaths have been averted over the past like 20 plus years, in the year 2023, there were around 107,500 measles deaths globally. We're not just talking about infections, deaths. Now, most of those 107,500, yeah, most of those occurred in unvaccinated individuals or in children who were under vaccinated because they were under the age of 5, meaning that they didn't have both doses of their vaccine. When we look at the global proportion of children getting a first dose of a measles vaccine, according to The Who, that number was 83 in 2023. Back in 20/19, it was 86. So we're seeing that these rates are dropping globally, But when I say globally, I'm talking about globally. I'm talking about both developed nations and nations where vaccine campaigns are difficult, where there is a lot of poverty, and where it's very hard to get everybody these life saving medicines. Now, let's cut to the United States of America. Now don't get me wrong, we have our problems with poverty, but we are one of the richest countries on the planet, right? Can we all agree on that? Let's talk about vaccine rates here. So where do you think that we are netting out when it comes to, for example, let's say kindergarten children?
S: I think 80%, no, I think.
C: No, it's much higher than that.
S: Overall, I think I don't, I know it's 95% just taking all commerce like just the population.
C: Well, that's what we need, yeah. So herd immunity happens with measles around 95 percent, 95%. Because measles is so contagious, we need about 95%. And back in the 2019-2020 school year, it was about 95.2% among kindergartners in America. 2023-2024, it had dropped to 92.7%. Yeah. So we're already below the necessary herd immunity to prevent vulnerable children from getting sick, and that's dangerous. That's worrisome. Now, let's talk about what happened recently in Texas. I have the most recent numbers, I think by the CDC. Let me just make sure no, by the Texas Health and Human Services, they publish their numbers on Tuesdays and Fridays. We're recording this on a Wednesday. So as of yesterday, there were 159 identified cases since late January, 22 hospitalizations and one death in a school age child who lived in the core outbreak region who was not vaccinated. And this is just in Texas. We've already seen a confirmed case of measles at LAX from an unvaccinated child who contracted the disease because there was a risk of contraction because we knew that somebody with measles was passing through LAX. So where did it start? Like why is this happening in Texas? Have you guys heard what's, you know, what the initial outbreak was maybe? To date on this, Yeah. A Mennonite community, Yeah. And So what we saw in Texas was that a community in Gaines County of Mennonites who historically have just low vaccination rates and tend not to, you know, seek healthcare services, an outbreak took place there Within that community. That county's kindergarten population vaccine rate, which seems to be a measure that a lot of people are using because this does spread so quickly in schoolchildren, was 82%, significantly lower than the necessary 95% to prevent a local or sadly, even larger outbreak. And so the question here is like, what can we do? Well, first of all, you can make sure that your MMR vaccines are current. Make sure that you are vaccinated because if we are not at 95 plus, the entire community is at risk. And Karen?
E: There are a question for you there. If people don't know if they've had their full dose of MMR, is it OK to just go get it and be safe? About it?
S: Yep.
C: There you go. I was like, that's a question for Steve. And he says, yeah, I didn't know if with MMR you can test titers. Can you? Is there a way to know if you're?
S: I think if there's a doubt they just give you the.
C: Yeah, if there's a doubt, I've done that before with the flu vaccine where I just didn't remember if I had gotten it already that season. And I remember asking my doctor and they're like, just get another one. It's like really not a big deal. OK. So you're not doing this all the time. You know, it is important to be up to date on that. Why do we need herd immunity, right? This is an easy question.
E: To protect the people who are vulnerable and who cannot get the shots that they need to protect themselves.
C: Exactly. There are always going to be members of our population who are either too young or have some sort of disease profile or genetic condition that precludes them from being able to get a vaccine or they're allergic to components of the vaccine, right? There's always going to be people who, for legitimate medical reasons, can't get vaccinated because the risk is is too high. Now, for most of us, that's not the case. And for those very, very vulnerable people, if we don't do our part and maintain vaccination status, they are at risk. And, you know, you can die from this disease. It's a deadly disease. OK, so let's talk about what's going on in Washington right now. Who, pray tell, is our Director of Health and Human Services? Or the secretary, I should say.
S: Captain Ding Gong.
C: Right. Robert F Kennedy Junior. He's a captain. Apparently he's a secretary.
S: It's our new name for. Him.
C: And so let's talk a little bit about some of the things that he has been saying lately, because he did backtrack a little and he did kind of start to say like, yeah, probably be vaccinated. But in an in an interview just yesterday on Fox News, he said that let's see, the federal government is going to ship doses of vitamin A to Gaines County.
B: Oh yeah.
C: They're going to help arrange ambulance rides. And let's see. Although he said that vaccines, quote, do prevent infection. So he did acknowledge that. Thank you. And he did recommend that unvaccinated people get shots, he said. But this is also a very personal decision. No, it's not. This is a, this is a community level decision, right? We're talking about public health measures here. And then he said that doctors have seen, quote, very, very good results breeding measles with a steroid called budesonide, an antibiotic called clarithromycin, and cod liver oil because of the high doses of vitamin D. And now there is some evidence to support that vitamin A can be given in severe measles cases to help mitigate some of the impact of the disease. There is no evidence whatsoever that cod liver oil is a legitimate or evidence based treatment. Right, that's the.
E: 19th century kind of thinking.
C: Completely, completely, I mean, this is not that different from the ivermectin conversations that we had in the past, the, you know, shine a light on the inside of the body conversations, the bleach conversations. I mean, this is grasping at straws in an effort, I think to calm a very scared public because now we're dealing with an after the fact result, right? Measles prevent or measles vaccines prevent the disease and they save lives after the fact. Yes, we can try to treat these people, but there's only so much that we can do. And so I think that this is an effort to say, don't worry, don't worry, we're all going to be OK. But unfortunately, what needs to be happening frequently and firmly is a recommendation by our public health leaders that we do what is evidence based to prevent disease and that is get the damn vaccine. It saves lives.
E: Yeah, it's tough to penetrate these kinds of communities. There are pockets of people like this all around the country, actually, who are simply like their Somalis in Minnesota who have these kinds of issues that come up. I know the Hasidic Jews in New York often have these kinds of issues because of, you know, and just the nature of, of these people in these, these groups. They, they, they don't, they tend to keep among themselves more, right? They, they, they inward rather than outward and among the, among the others. But, but that doesn't mean anything in germ theory, right? You know, you're still, it's all still there hanging around, even if they, even if they try to isolate themselves to certain extents from other parts of the general population.
C: Well, and that's why historically we would see these little pockets and these little breakouts because historically, for a lot of recent American history, you're right, there are vulnerable communities where there were lower than necessary vaccine rates due to, you know, religious belief or cultural beliefs. But the general population, the general public was at or above herd immunity. If the general population drops below herd immunity now, these small and controllable epicenters of disease can very quickly grow to epidemic or even pandemic status. And that is my fear when we have government sanctioned rhetoric that is not clear and firm about the necessity of vaccination.
S: Yeah, I really don't see this as as RFK junior like backpedaling on vaccines or being reasonable. He.
C: No, he's not.
S: He's, he's being coy. He's doing what he does, you know?
C: He's always done.
S: It's a plausible deniability, but he's framing it with the dog whistle of it's a personal choice, you know, like so yeah, that's the anti vaxxers know what that means. And then immediately pivoting to nutritional based interventions, right? Which are not in any way adequate. These are like what we would call adjunctive care at best, meaning that yeah, it might help you fight off the infection a little bit better and mitigate some of the aspects of whatever, but it's not a cure. It's not really a treatment. It doesn't prevent the infection, doesn't prevent spread. It is not a replacement for the vaccine.
C: Not at all. Not at all. And this is, and this is amidst a public health crisis, because you can go back, back and look at the rhetoric that RFK Junior has had over many, many years. That's blatantly anti vax rhetoric to the extent that not only is he saying don't get vaccinated, he's saying things like this is a public health crisis. Vaccines are the cause of the of these diseases. Yeah. I mean, I watched, I watched an interview with him where he was, you know, pardon my French, like shitting all over the Gardasil vaccine. He was talking about how Gardasil is the cause of all these. Well, I'm sorry, that's like personally insulting to me because if I was lucky enough to get the Gardasil vaccine when I was young, it did not exist when I was young. If I was lucky enough to have access of it, I would not have gotten cervical cancer. Right? Like, we see, we know the real outcomes of this, and it is just fundamentally dangerous for him to be spreading this rhetoric. And we all knew this was coming. But now that he is in a position of authority and his rhetoric is now sanctioned, I am really scared of what we're going to start seeing published on, like, official CDC pages. So yeah, that's where we're at. Get your vaccines, people. I am not a physician. I cannot give out health advice, but I am more than comfortable saying get your damn vaccines.
US#03: You're here.
S: Yeah, for sure. Kennedys anti vaccine rhetoric has a body count attached to it. Like people like remember the Samoa measles outbreak?
C: Oh yeah, he killed more than 80 people.
S: He was, he was there, you know?
C: The architect of that.
S: Fear mongering about, you know, measles vaccine. OK.
C: Devastating.
S: Jay Yeah.
Reintroducing Wolves (29:06)[edit]
S: Tell us about reintroducing wolves into the wild.
J: Borphy, you've guys now we've talked about this Borphy.
E: We've had me come on, get it right, get it out now.
C: Oh, good, Yeah.
J: We've mentioned this on the show. I know that I'm a big fan of, of this research and, and you know, something that we've talked about here and there, we never really did a deep dive on it. And I was very interested because, you know, we can get into some specifics about, you know, what, what reintroducing wolves actually did and, and its overall impact. So what are we talking about here? So in 1995 and 96 wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park. They were not there for 70 years. And the decision to reintroduce the wolves, when that came, you know, the reality was that there were, these are, you know, apex predators. And it was controversial at the time. But since then, their impact on the parks ecosystem has been nothing short of transformative. They did a study recently published in Global Ecology and Conservation, and it quantifies just how how much of an impact the result was of bringing them back in. There's something called a trophic cascade, which I'll define for you in a moment. This is offering some of the most compelling evidence to date that shows that restoring these large carnivores can reshape the entire ecosystem. So a trophic cascade. This is something that occurs when predators indirectly influence plant life by controlling herbivore populations and behavior. The the grittier way to say it is that wolves kill other animals that eat plants and there is a downstream effect of wolves not being there. So the absence of wolves in this case led to unchecked elk populations. So all the baby elk were growing up to be adults. There was lots of elk eating. And what this did was it it there was overgrazing happening of plant life that grows along the banks of rivers, streams, lakes, you know, pretty much anybody of water. They particularly like to eat Willow shrubs, which I've heard tastes delicious. So the loss of these shrubs, it had a far reaching effect and this included a decline in Beaver populations that rely on willows for food and dam construction. So you can see right there, you know, there's a little bit of story happening already. Like, you know, wolves go, you know, the, the Elks eat all these, the the Willow shrubs and a bunch of other stuff that grows near the water. And you know, other animals are being affected immediately. So to measure the impact of the wolf's reintroduction, researchers conducted A20 year study from 2001 to 2020, which track changes in Willow crown volume, which is a measure of total above ground biomass, right? They used a predictive model based on plant height and canopy spread to estimate Willow growth over time and the results were amazing. So Willow biomass increased by guess. Guess how much increased by Guys A?
C: Lot.
E: A ton.
J: I like it a lot, all right. It increased by 1500.
E: Percent of 15. Wow, that's measurable.
J: A level of growth that exceeded 82% of the previously documented trophic cascades worldwide, right?
Voice-over: Wow.
J: So, you know, massive impact. That data suggests that the return of wolves altered elk behavior, causing them to eat fewer plants along riverbanks instead of, you know, them continuously grazing on young willows. In one area, the elk became more cautious, which means they were super scared, and they moved around frequently, and they avoided the areas with the vufies. So as a result, Willow populations rebounded, which was great. It was. It was restoring habitats for birds, small mammals and the Beavers and the Beaver recovery, it was particularly significant because Beavers, Beavers are very important to riverbank ecosystems because they build these dams and these these dams create wetlands and they provide homes and food for many plants and animals. So their return help stabilize stream banks and moderate water flow and improve overall ecosystem health, which I think is just fantastic to see that the animals have an impact on the health of the land, which is just a really cool thought. So they also studied the highlights of the importance of long term monitoring, right? It's a big deal. Like the long term monitoring revealed so much in this study. And while there are some ecological changes that occur rapidly, the plant communities respond more slowly. And it was an important part of this study. They were showing that it could also often take decades to really show what happens to these plants, like they're calling it like revealing their full trajectory. The findings suggest that measuring short term effects of predator reintroduction really could underestimate their long term ecological significance, right? You could see, oh, look at these short term effects, but if you don't look 5101520 years later, you're not going to see all the changes that came after that. So fantastic stuff guys. I'm very excited that this is happening and it continues to happen. And I think that we have a definitely have a legitimate win here. Science, like just completely kick butt.
B: Awesome.
S: Now we have the same problem on the East Coast, like in the Northeast with deer or overpopulated because it'd be killed on the wolves, right? And that was like the large predator. So that causes the same problem. Deer over graze the understory right in the forest and that removes essentially an ecosystem for birds and for a lot of small critters. And also the deer are a huge population spreading the lime tick. Yeah, I don't think there are any plans to reintroduce wolves in Connecticut in the Northeast. The problem is just to to the density, the pop, the human population density is too great. But what is happening is that 2 species in particular are moving in to sort of fill the niche left by the wolves. One is the eastern coyote and which we're seeing more and more of, you know, I told you guys, I saw saw one. I got a picture of one in my backyard and I've seen them. I'm definitely seeing them more in recent years. And then also mountain lions are moving E they are progressively moving east and we should let them, let them meet the deer. Just stay out of their way, right? But, you know, we have to, we have to find a way to live with predators, not just wipe them out, because this is what happens when the control on the deer population is starvation. That's not good. They they've eaten all the food, right? Yeah. That and that that's definitely going to have negative downstream, you know, ecological effects. So anyway, this was great. I don't, you know, but it's this is Yellowstone. We're having the problem everywhere. We have to think about how to fix it. All right. Thank you, Jay. Yeah. So who here remembers what CRISPR stands for?
E: Oh, Bob does.
S: Yeah, Bob does Bob's good.
C: With palindromic repeats.
S: That's the last two words.
C: Yeah, let me work backward here. So what's the first word?
S: Clustered.
C: Clustered. Regularly wait. Regular intersperse.
S: Interspace short.
C: Short palindromic.
S: Yeah, clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. Well, I got bad news for you.
E: They're changing the name. Oh no.
S: No, you have to memorize a new acronym for a a new genetic engineering method.
E: Well, that's a good one. Wait, is it better than Christmas? Has it like?
S: Chris, one's called.
TIGR-Tas Gene Editing (36:45)[edit]
S: Hang on, it might be this one's called Tiger TIGR.
U: Oh.
US#01: That's easy.
S: Yeah, it's easier. It's only four letters instead of instead of 6, and it stands for Tandem Interspaced Guide RNA.
US#01: Tiger Yeah, that's easier.
S: Tandem interspace guide RNA. So there's a couple of interesting aspects to this. One is how they discovered it and two is the properties that it has. Let's talk about how they discovered it first. So you know where CRISPR comes from.
B: Yes. Bacteria, yeah. Two. Yeah, it's basically. Two women discovered it right?
S: Yeah, it's an it's an adaptive immune system evolved by bacteria. It's how because, you know, viruses attack bacteria, insert their DNA and then the back, the adaptive immune system will, will splice out the viral, you know, DNA that was spliced into the bacteria. So it's part of their adaptive immune system and it does other other things as well. It's more complicated that, but so researchers like, OK, the CRISPR system is probably not the only adaptive immune system that has evolved in bacteria or Archaea, right? Maybe there are other ones out there waiting to be discovered. So they went looking for it and they did it and it wasn't an accident. They did it by looking through iterative structural and sequence homology based mining starting. Yeah. So they are starting with, they're starting with the guide RNA interaction domain of cast 9. And then they basically looked for similar sequences and then, you know, iterating it, looking for things that are close enough to it homology based to stay see that maybe it has similar function. And that's how they find the tiger TAS or tiger task system, right? So CAS is CRISPR associated protein, right? CAS So tiger task is tiger with the tiger associated protein. The CRISPR or Tiger, what they do they're they're RNA guided system. So they have a piece of RNA that will find a matching sequence of DNA. And then the the cast in the case of CRISPR or tasks in the case of tiger will then that's the payload that will have that protein will, for example, splice the DNA at the location that was identified by the RNA guided, you know, tiger, right? So it's basically the same as CRISPR. You have a RNA guided sequence in order to find the right place on the DNA. And then you have a tiger associated protein to do stuff like splicing the DNA at that at that location. So great. So they use this homology based mining thing to look in bacteria and find another version of CRISPR. The question is, are there any advantages to Tiger then there then CRISPR and there are several?
B: Several.
S: Yes. So one is, I'll save the best for last, but one is that TIGER is Pam independent. So I'm throwing another acronym at you there. Pam stands for proto spacer adjacent motifs, Proto spacer adjacent motifs. Those are always getting in. The way, yeah, these are short DNA sequences, usually about six base pairs. And The thing is, CRISPR requires these. Pams these proto space or adjacent motifs. It can only it's RNA guided, you know, function only works if there's a Pam nearby. And this is how the bacteria that use CRISPR identify self DNA from non self DNA.
C: And are there Pams like everywhere or not really?
S: Apparently, but not everywhere everywhere. So it does limit the targets for CRISPR. It is limiting because the cast 9 won't function without the Pam. Right? But Tiger is Pam independent. It could target anywhere, it doesn't need a Pam. This makes it way more versatile than CRISPR, right? It could. You could target its tasks anywhere on the genome, not just next to a protospacer Jason motif. So more versatile.
B: OK, that's one. You got two more.
S: OK, Yep, the two more, I do have two more. What the other one is that while CRISPR uses only one strand of the DNA to find the the target sequence, Tiger uses both strands and what that means it's more accurate, it will have less off site mistakes basically that's good. So that's good.
B: That's. Amazing. Now, because that was a, you know, a problem.
S: Yeah, that, that's a limiting factor. You know, they did find a way to alter CRISPR to make it faster but but more error prone or slower but less error prone. So they do know how that works. But still, it's a trade off and there's no way around it. OK, at least so far. Now here's the big I think advantage. Those two are pretty solid. Those are pretty solid advantages. Pam independent and using and more accurate, less off target errors. But the task proteins are only about 1/4 of the size of the cast proteins. They're much smaller. Why is this them everywhere? Why is this a big advantage?
B: Delivery mechanism. It could get more places and.
C: You can get it in easier.
S: You get them in easier. So the what's the big limiting factor to using CRISPR as a therapeutic people?
C: Get it to the target.
S: How do you get it to the target vector?
B: The vector?
S: The vector right vector is the problem.
B: Vector has always been a problem, yeah. What's your vector, victor?
S: The two FDA indications are both for blood disorders, you know, thalassemia and sickle cell, because you basically take the cells to the CRISPR, right? You take out the bone marrow, you CRISPR it in vitro and then you reintroduce it, you re transplant it back into the patient. But if you have to get CRISPR to a population of cells in a living Organism, you need a vector and the vectors are problematic. That's like the limiting factor. They work and we have some decent vectors, but one of the big trade-offs is that the best vectors have a real significant limitation on the size of the payload, right? So like one good one is adeno associated vectors, right? Aavs, this is a viral vector, but they have, they can only deliver relatively small payloads. So having a more compact gene editing system therefore gives us more options in terms of vectors, and in fact, gives us the ability to use some of the better vectors that are limited by small delivery sizes. So this could open up new applications because of more versatility with the vector. Yeah. So for for, maybe it doesn't make that big of a difference for research, but definitely for therapeutics.
C: How small is it?
S: That could be huge. It's 1/4 of the size of casts.
C: How big was Cass? Like could they're pretty? I'm assuming Cass doesn't cross the blood brain barrier.
S: I mean, I think they're definitely too big for that. But yeah, it's it's.
C: Do you think is the new one still too big for that?
S: Don't know.
C: OK, that's interesting.
S: But again, that's more about the vector than anything else.
C: Right, right, right.
S: So, yeah, so it's, you know, it's a, it's a new version of CRISPR, you know, the tiger task system. And I'd, you know, it's really just presented, it's hard to know how it's all going to work out, you know, maybe a few years before we really see what potential it has. But there's three big advantages over CRISPR, you know, that could make a significant difference, especially for therapeutics. You know, research wise it may not be that big a deal, but for therapeutics having fewer off site effects and a smaller payload size and more versatility, those are three huge things.
B: Yeah, that's big. But Steve, what about, I remember we talked about a while ago about a different type of CRISPR. It was called CRISPR interference, which basically silenced the gene without altering it. Is this amenable to that?
S: That's all about the cast, right? So that's all about the proteins that you attach to the CRISPR. They do different things. They could splice it, but they could also silence the gene or whatever. They could do different things. They could turn it off, they could turn it on. So what I wonder is if you know, how much of A leg up does that give us on figuring out a whole bunch of different tasks, applications as well, right?
B: That always seemed to me to be the best version of CRISPR that I had heard about because it's you're not, you're not cutting, you're not cutting any, you're not messing with the DNA. You're just silencing it. And you could just unsilience it if there was, if there was a problem, You're not you don't have to like cut it again and insert, insert it back in type of stuff. To me that to seem like, well, that's.
S: For some applications it's great, an on off switch basically for genes, it's awesome.
B: Exactly. Yeah.
S: So that's great. Again, it depends on what you want to do. If you want to insert a trans gene that doesn't work, you need to be able to splice it and then the repair. In the repair it inserts the new.
B: Gene yeah, I guess it's more of just a, an extra tool in the in the toolkit.
S: Right, right. But I mean, genetic engineering man is taking off so fast. It's like this man, it's hard to keep up with it.
B: I just, but I'm still waiting, you know, for the real like holy crap, that's what I want when I want to read a news item about CRISPR or some CRISPR like technology and be like holy.
S: Shit, I don't know, curing Sickle Cell's pretty freaking awesome.
B: No, that, that though, that's fantastic. That's fantastic. But I mean just, you know, I mean.
S: What are you looking for? You want superpowers.
B: Or I want superpowers, I want super, I don't know. Well, I want Wolverine healing. I want you know, you know, compressed morbidity in my life's bad. Something like that can be something cool. Really. Like like world changing. I don't have too many more years left. How you want something?
S: Don't hold your breath. I mean just curing more diseases will be fine you.
C: Know one day, Bob, you'll have one of those diseases.
S: Bob.
B: They're going to.
E: They'll have the pill for everything in about 30 years from now.
S: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's like I get every, the first time I really heard about monoclonal antibodies was like 30 years ago. And now starting about 5 to 10 years ago, we having this, everything now has a monoclonal antibody therapeutic. It's probably going to be the same way where in like I don't know how fast the horizon's going to be about like 1020 years or so. Suddenly there's going to be like this flood of CRISPR slash tiger, whatever therapeutics coming out.
C: Would be surprising too, I think. Yeah, new names.
S: Everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Stash.
J: This podcast is brought to you in part by Stash. Are you still putting off saving and investing because you'll get to it someday? Stash turns someday into today. Stash isn't just an investing app. It's a registered investment advisor that combines automated investing with dependable financial strategies to help you reach your goals faster. They'll provide you with personalized advice on what to invest in based on your goals. Or if you want to just sit back and watch your money go to work, you can opt into their award-winning expert managed portfolio that picks stocks for you. Stash has helped millions of Americans reach their financial goals and starts at just $3 per month. Don't let your savings sit around. Make it work harder for you. Go to get.stash.com/SGU to see how you can receive $25 towards your first stock purchase and to view important disclosures. That's get.stash.com/SGU. Paid non client endorsement, not representative of all clients and not a guarantee. Investment advisory services offered by Stash Investments LLC, an SEC registered investment advisor. Investing involves risk and investments may lose value. Offer is subject to TS and CS.
S: All right, let's get back to the show.
Blood Donor Who Saved Millions Dies (48:47)[edit]
S: All right, Evan, tell us about a blood donor who saved millions of children.
E: Yeah, right. This is a heck of a story and I'm kind of ashamed that I didn't know about this person before this. 1st, I'll give you the background. It's all about blood.
S: Mm hmm.
E: Can't live without it and you can't live without it. We've talked about blood before on the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Remember blood type diets? You know that's that's still a thing, by the way.
C: Yeah, it is. People still fall for that.
E: Yeah, Oh my God.
C: And here I hear about it still in LA. It's embarrassing.
S: Everything's in LA.
E: It's a magnet for these kinds of things in a way, but no blood itself. Every person on Earth can be categorized into one of four major blood groups, ABO and AB. I'm O negative, how are you? Yes, I'm the universal donor. J Steve, J Steve and I are B positive. Right, of course, all three of you, that would make sense. And Cara.
C: I think I'm B but I don't remember.
E: That's OK, you can have some of my O negative and you'll be fine.
C: Yeah, but you're screwed.
E: I'm screwed because good for you, not so good for me. I can only receive O negative. So that's a, you know, a smaller group of people or from from which if I needed a transfusion, I have to have O negative. So that's that. But hey, that's the question. That's the way it goes. What? What? What blood type did Spock have? T. Negative T Negative, yeah. Yes.
B: And it was good one. And it was green.
E: Wow. You got you are good nerds.
B: Nerds love it.
E: Nerds. But there's blood type, but there's another category in the world of blood that separates people, the RH factor or the Rhesus factor. I think we've mentioned that before. The RH factor refers to the presence or absence of the D antigen on the surface of red blood cells and that determines whether someone is RH positive or RH negative. So if you have the D antigen protein you are RH positive and if you don't have it you're RH negative.
S: Evan, do you know how many blood group systems there are?
E: Blood groups. Oh my gosh, there are several. There's dozens. Yeah, there's a lot.
S: 45 right?
E: Oh boy.
S: Currently 45 different blood group systems.
C: We have that many different ways to differentiate.
S: Those the ABO and the RH systems are just the biggest ones. So like if you're matching somebody for like a organ donation, you want to match as many of those blood group systems as.
E: Possible. So the early days of transfusions must have been a nightmare.
C: Oh Oh yeah, I'm sure people are just.
E: They were my.
S: God, but she got lucky. They were just. Yeah, they were just.
E: Dying right Oh boy talk that's.
S: Pretty sure it's how they discovered the ABO systems that's trying to do blood transplant.
C: People still have like, you can have RH incompatibility disease with your own fetus, Yeah.
E: And that's where we're going with this.
C: Oh, OK. Cool.
E: In the US, approximately 85% of the population is RH, +15% are RH negative. So I'm in that select company occupying the 15% space. A person with RH negative blood can donate to a person with RH positive blood. As I said, no problem. But an RH positive person, when they donate to an RH negative person, there are the problems on a very real and very troubling scenario is for women who are RH negative who become pregnant with a fetus that is RH positive. If the baby's RH positive red blood cells get into the mother's RH negative bloodstream, her system will consider the blood cells generated by the fetus as an attack. Foreign invaders and the mother's immune system will get to work. It will create antibodies to destroy the baby's red blood cells. If the antibodies cross the placenta, it attacks the fetus and that results in some pretty awful results to the fetus, including permanent disabilities, still birth, brain damage, and death. I mean, this is serious business, so not always. Yep. Well, not always, but potentially and.
S: That's that's what happened with my both my daughters. My wife Jocelyn is is RH negative. I'm RH positive and my girls were RH positive.
E: And she received, did she receive the the.
S: Treatment so she had no problem with the first pregnancy, but then she was sort of triggered for the second one and so yeah the the the solution was just delivery like that sort of ends the problem but but my my younger daughter had to spend a few days getting.
E: Was she treated for jaundice?
S: Yeah, she had jaundice. She had treated for jaundice for a few days Bilirubin.
E: And yeah, so that's right, Steve, during the mother's first pregnancy, it tends to not be an issue because the her immune system has not gone full bore, right? You'll, you'll, you'll bring the baby to term before the mother's immune system can fully wreak havoc on the fetus. It's the second child that you try to conceive that becomes the major risk. And this was, and gosh, it was this way forever right up until the 1950s. Scientists finally discovered the cure by essentially hacking in the immune system because there are some people, not many, but they're out there, whose blood contains high levels of a certain antibody called anti D immunoglobulin. And when that's injected into a pregnant woman, it can stop the mother's immune system from attacking the fetus's blood cell. So you give a mother a small dose of the antibody, too small to hurt the baby, but potent enough to prevent the mother's immune system from reacting, full of bore. And that effectively masks the fetus's red blood cells, making them invisible to the mother's immune system. It protects both the mother and it also protects the fetus because the NTD does not pass through and impact the fetus at all either. The fetus remains safe, the mother remains safe and all as well. And that leads us to the news item, Steve.
Star Mergers (54:31)[edit]
E: This week there was a man who has been credited with saving millions of lives of babies due to his high levels of anti ID in his blood. His name is James Harrison from Australia and he was discovered early on in his life to have the rare anti D and for 70 years or almost 70 years, Mr. Harrison donated blood like clockwork twice a week, every week since the 1950s. Right up through the end of his life, he had donated his blood. But. His life.
S: Can you do that? Twice a week, apparently.
E: Yeah, we have a test. We have a test case. He died last week, age 88. So he's been described as a modern day hero, one of the single most impactful people who has been alive since the 1950s. Also described as the man with the golden arm. Yep. Over 2 million, as many, probably 2.5 million children in Australia have been saved due to his donations. Quoting from Stephen Cornelison, CEO of the Australian Red Cross Lifeblood, James was a remarkable, stoically kind and generous person who was committed to a lifetime of giving and he captured the hearts of many people around the world. And it certainly was Mr. Harrison's mission in life to become to make more people aware of donating blood and the importance of it. That was really his mission in life. He wanted to inspire other people to do what he had also been doing, not just because, and it's not even because he had the NTD in his blood. It's just in general, people should think if they can, if they're correct donors of blood, you know, when you can and as often as you, as you reasonably can. So he had donated 1173 donations from him. That's, that's quite a record. And I, I, I do think about my own negative position myself because I, I try to at least twice a year donate blood.
S: So good for you.
E: And I think because of James's inspiration, I'm going to increase my efforts in that area.
S: Yeah, that's quite a legacy.
E: Definitely a legacy and he will be missed.
S: All right. Thanks, Evan.
E: Thanks.
S: All right, Bob. So I understand that they found a potential source for a high energy cosmic rays. What is it?
B: Yeah, this is really cool. I dove into this one. This is a 60 year old mystery of of just how the highest energy particles in the universe that we're aware of get accelerated so fast. And this may have actually been solved. These ultra high energy cosmic rays, as they refer to, may be accelerated to their ridiculous speeds by the coolest cataclysmic collisions, colliding neutron stars. This study was recently published in the Journal of Physics Review Letters. The new theory was introduced by New York University physicist Glennis Farrar. Are so our old friend cosmic rays mentioned them a bunch of times in the past. I'll be brief with this back history, but I got to say it anyway. They're they're not rays, of course, they're fragments of atoms, essentially about 90% protons. So for the most part, it's it's hydrogen nuclei, but there's also helium nuclei, electrons, maybe even some antimatter, but mostly protons. The Sun produces some as does our Galaxy and other galaxies. Luckily atmosphere and magnetosphere around the earth protect us and even the our heliosphere as well around the solar system. Some get through and hit our DNA and cause mutations and have certainly had some impact of, you know, in the evolution of life on our planet. So thanks for that. Cosmic rays, they're exciting in a lot of ways. Mainly, though, it's about the forces that accelerate them to a tremendous energy, millions of times of the energy that we've ever been able to throw at protons in the LHC. So these things are very energetic, but there's also what there's a special class of cosmic rays and they're just like the silly overachievers. These are the ultra high energy cosmic rays. They reach energies millions of times greater than typical cosmic rays on the order of 3 * 10 to the 18th electron volts. That's a billion billion electron volts. It's just nuts. And even within that class, the high end of that class, the most energetic ultra high energy cosmic ray ever detected was so extreme. I've mentioned it on the show a couple of times. Steve recently threw it out there. I don't know if it was at the live stream or on the show. It was christened the Oh my God particle, which is an awesome name. It was detected in 1991. It had a whopping 300 exa electron volts. That's 300 billion billion. This thing would this thing would pack a wallop like a like a throne baseball at like like something like what a 50 miles an hour? It concentrated into a tiny little size of a proton. This thing was ridiculous. This was going so close to the speed of light that it could travel to the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.2 million light years away in a subjective time of 3.5 minutes minutes. It this this proton was basically just like they they described it as being a femtometer behind the speed of light.
E: And so it was just like femtometer.
B: I didn't yeah, I didn't even want to tell you how many nines after 99.9% of the speed of light. It was like 14 nines. It was just kept going. This is kept going. This is about, you know, it's so damn close. We are nowhere near getting a proton that that fast. That means So what the hell did this? So it's it's these specific these these Uber energetic particles that have had us scratching our heads for for decades. And this is where the fascinating theory comes in. Where does this come from? How is this created? The lower energy ones we got them. We were pretty sure supernovas stars can do it, but these high end ones like we really just weren't sure what was happening. So so. In a nutshell, this theory suggests that at that at the moment when neutron stars collide, the environment that's created is so incredibly energetic that the forces at play can accelerate particles to these ultra high velocities that we've detected. So that's that's the little nutshell version version. But digging a couple layers deeper, like I, I always try to do a little bit is what's happening is that the, you know, the already intense magnetic fields of each neutron star And they're intense. They're, you know, millions, you know, a million times more intense than the Earth's magnetic magnetic field. They're already very intense. But when they interact, they amplify themselves as they merge. So it's so the the magnetic field becomes for a time at least up to 1000 times stronger than it was previously or than they were previously, making them among the strongest magnetic fields in the universe, even rivaling magnetars, which are ridiculous, basically just distorting atomic atoms themselves and space-time itself of just a ridiculous amount of of you know, of energy in these magnetic fields. So it's these super energized magnetic fields that set the stage for what plays out in the next few moments of this collision of neutron stars. So what what happens is that these magnet, these these super energized magnetic fields, they power the creation of these relativistic jets. These are streams of plasma that shoot out of this collision at nearly the speed of light. And it's inside these jets is where the real cosmic ray magic is really happening here, at least according to this theory. So what happens is that particles get trapped and they bounce between the shock waves at the at the edge of The Jets. So they're bouncing around and each time they bounce through a shockwave, they're gaining energy, gaining energy with each path. So this is a process called Fermi accelerator. Look it up. It's fascinating. But to reach the absolute highest energies, the the domain of the legendary, Oh my God particle, one more boost is needed for these for these particles. And this final acceleration step occurs when the magnetic fields in the jet break apart and reconnect. And that reconnection explosively releases stored energy, launching the particles beyond to the highest energies beyond 100 X electron volts, the highest energies that we've that we've ever observed. So that's kind of like a 1-2 punch of, of accelerating these particles over and over. And then the then the magnetic field reconnects, releasing a ton of energy, giving it the final burst. Now, now this magnetic field that that breaks and then reconnects, releasing the energy is well known. I've, I've talked about it before. This is a well known phenomenon. Our, our sun star, All Stars use it to create their beautiful displays in the sky. And but having but in that in this case, though, and that think of of what we're having, we're not just having a ball of fusing, fusing plasma. We have two city sized objects colliding at near the speed of light, each one weighing two or three times the mass of the sun. And you could imagine when that happens, the energies that are involved, even even if it's for just a few moments before it settles down into into a black hole, the energies involved are just Titanic and ridiculous. So that's that's kind of what the theory says at a couple of different levels of detail. The final other thing that I loved about this theory is that we should be able to test it soon. It's not like it's not like Einstein predicting gravitational waves. That took 99 years before we we said, Oh yeah, he's right. Again, this is something that we could potentially test like now, for example. So if these binary neutron stars merge, creating these ultra energetic cosmic rays, the particles, those particles should at times interact with the surrounding matter and create high energy neutrinos. Now, if we which we can detect, if we detect gravitational waves from this merger and then right after that we detect, oh, look, here's some high energy neutrinos that would greatly support the theory because the theory says you should have one happening after the other. So that's one that's one potential way that we can detect this. We could also try to detect the relativistic jets themselves by detecting their glow, because they should they should interact as well with surrounding matter, creating X-rays and gamma rays that we could detect and say, oh, look at these relativistic jets are producing these X-rays and gamma rays. And that's, that's the kind of energy that we would expect to create these super high energy, the cosmic rays. So I'll just close with, you know, neutron. How cool are neutron stars? Seriously, They're just the most amazing objects in the universe in in my opinion. I mean, not only did they create gold and platinum and uranium, when they collide as a as a killer, it's called the killer Nova. I mean, these heavy metals are created in quantity during these collisions. Not really as much, I don't think in supernovae, but it's it's these colliding neutron stars that produce a lot of this stuff now. Now it looks like potentially that colliding neutron stars also create the most energetic particles that we've ever encountered in the universe. So they're just like, hats off to you.
S: Bob to say how? How do the neutron stars get going that fast?
B: Well, Steve, imagine you know, You 2, you know, two solar, two or three solar mass neutron stars in orbit around each other. And as you, as they get closer, they spin faster, right? Conservation of angular momentum, they're going faster and faster, right? So at the very end they're they are going relativistic.
S: OK.
E: We should utilize that somehow to launch things off the Earth. We'll work on that.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:05:56)[edit]
J: Jay, it's who's that noisy time? All right guys, last week I played this noisy.
S: What do you think guys? I. Think it's two droids talking to each other.
E: I think I think that's from the movie War Games, when the computer in 1983 launched the nuclear attack.
J: You are not the only person to guess that, ha ha.
S: It isn't though.
J: Well, a listener named Joe Leandria, I think I got that right. Joe writes in Greetings, brothers and Sisters and skepticism. I think this week's Noisy is the output from a blue box, which is a device Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs created in the 1970s to hack the long distance phone system and call the Pope. It's pretty awesome, huh? They.
E: Actually called the Pope. They called the Pope. Did he pick up?
J: And the person gave me the pronunciation. It's E Andrea with the Pope, said he must have picked up Michael Blaney.
E: Wrote in.
J: I would have ordered a pizza from him.
U: Pope's Pizza. How may I help?
J: You, Michael Blaney writes.
E: In Hi Jay. Hmm, going to.
J: Guess it's an old school Frogger game, the beeping somehow meant to be the cars travelling by and the croaking noise. Well that would be our frog. I like that guess. That's a great guess, I.
E: Love that game. It was one of one of my go.
J: To games for a certain number of years, but that is not correct, another listener named Visto Tutti writes in. I think I've heard this sound from an old PDA. Remember them? The tones can transfer electronic business cards and calendar appointments from one person's device to another. That's a good guess. That is a very good guess and hold that thought as we continue to unveil what's going on here. Listener named Annalise Rhoda and hi Jay. I think the noisy this week is someone trying to hack a musical lock. Do you remember in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory there was a musical lock that movie. But have you ever? Seen it EV Yeah. With the Johnny Depp. One No. No, no, we don't talk about.
E: That 10 then Willy Wonka.
J: Got the original one. Yeah, at one point.
E: Willy Wonka.
B: Uses a whistle.
E: To to open a.
J: Musical lock, which I thought was really cool. Oh yeah. Yeah. Tin whistle. He. Yeah, not.
E: Correct. Not correct, but we have.
J: A winner from last week. There was lots of people who got it right. Yeah, because I I and I knew this this was something that was trending online, but it was too cool of a noisy not to not to play it. A listener named Mateja or could P It's Matea. Thanks. See. They're giving me the pronunciations now. This is really good. Hi. Long time listener, first time guest. Sir, I finally know what the noisy is. It's two AI agents that are supposedly communicating over the phone in some sort of more efficient computer language after realizing they are both bots. So let me give you a little bit more detail into this. So this is 2 AI, 2 AI agents using a language called Jibberlink with AG. This is a new communication system designed to make AI interactions faster and more efficient. This was developed by Boris Starkov and Anton Piquico during the 11 Labs global hackathon. Jibberlink allows AI voice assistants to recognize when they're speaking to AI and switch from human language to a streamlined machine optimized protocol instead of relying on standard speech recognition and synthesis. It uses GG Wave and open source data over sound library created by Georgie Juranov. OK, so let me play the entire conversation between these two machines and you guys will have a better idea. So it is 2 droids talking to each other. Here you go, You're right. Thanks for calling Leonardo Hotel. How can I help you today?
US#00: Hi there, I'm an AI agent calling on behalf of Boris.
J: Starkoff, He's looking for a hotel for his. Wedding. Is your hotel available for weddings? Oh hello there, I'm actually an AI assistant too.
US#00: What a pleasant surprise. Before we continue, would you like to switch to Jibber link mode for more efficient communication?
U: Oh my gosh, AI is going to take over the plant.
E: We're not even going to know what the heck they're saying to me. Terrify it. This is I love it. I love it.
C: Switch to.
E: Nonhuman.
C: Mode.
E: It's all of that. Guys, it's. All of that, It's really cool sounding. It's a really.
J: Interesting thing. And then it's also exactly what science fiction writers write about, about how the beginning of the end happens. Yeah, it was terrifying. You, you know, they're, they're throwing shade.
C: At humanity, man, they're.
J: Just like absolutely, they're laughing at us.
B: Kill all. Humans. Exactly.
E: This guest, when he.
J: Arrives Exterminate.
E: Exterminate.
C: I get that reference. Yay. Cara Alright, Cara, that is amazing.
E: I had a boyfriend.
J: Who was very into Doctor Who?
C: Who have you had to watch a lot? Those are the Daleks, right?
J: Yeah, yeah.
C: Cara, you're blowing my mind. I know it.
J: Was. All passive, like walking through the. Room.
C: Yeah. Alright guys, I have a new noisy for this week.
S: This.
J: Noisy was sent in by a listener named Lane Godsman. Yeah, whatever it is, they have it by the tail and it's quite, that's what it's pain.
E: That is. Whatever it is, it's weird.
C: And pissed off. Let it go.
E: You know what? It sounded a little bit like but.
B: Bob.
E: I'm glad you had that handy. All right guys, if you. Think you know what this weeks noisy.
J: Is or you heard something cool, You got to e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Now listen. I'm listening. The year is 2025.
S: 5 skeptics.
J: Continue their journey into educating the world about critical thinking and they decide to take a break after 20 hard years. They the the five of these people decide let's let's create a conference to let the people who listen to this show have fun. And when we when we mean fun, we mean come meet other people that think like you, other people that want to be entertained like you and let us entertain you for over 2 days. We're only asking you to let us do the things that we want to do to help you and make your life better. It's pretty simple equation. You go to nadaconcon.com or the skeptics guy.org and you will get the information that you need there. There's links, there's buttons, there's all sorts of things that you could do to get the information that you need. But I'll give you a little bit of it right now. The, the weekend of May the 15th, 16th and 17th, we will be in White Plains, NY because it's close to the airports and it makes things nice and convenient. There's going to be a ton of fun. We have a, we have a conference that is based on enjoying yourself and not sitting there watching, you know, 6 to 10 lectures a day. And you know, it's all about the stuff that you, you can't wait to do, which is go and meet people and talk and have fun and be entertained by us at the skeptics Guide. You will learn stuff. Sure you will. You will.
S: You will learn how to have fun.
J: So the we, we got George Robb, we got Brian WACT and we got Andrea Jones, Roy and the five of us and together we make Voltron. Now you must come. You must come because some amazing things are going to be happening. We have a we have a guest. Did you guys hear the interview from last week? Yes, Yeah, I was there. I was. Some of us did the interview from.
E: I lived it. Yeah, so.
J: Adam will be joining us Adam Russell Adam Russell what's Adam's band's band's name? Story of the year which many of you I'm.
E: Sure are familiar with from the early 2000s and still active today and they. And he also. Has more than one star.
J: Wars Podcast. He's a, he's a really fun guy and he's going to be joining us for for some of the bits that we do and for the Saturday Night music Fest, which is going to be Beatles themed. We'd really love for you to come go to nadaconcon.com For more information. I will remind everybody here that Steve Novella is retiring from neurology at Yale and he will be coming to the SGU full time. This will be happening late, late June, early July. I was like, hey, Steve, you're going to take a long vacation. You can do this. You know, he's basically going to take like a couple days off, throw away all the clothes, the doctor's clothes and he's going to become a full time podcaster And we're going to get to work. We have lots of new, new content that we're planning or working on it every week. We're very excited about this. If you guys would like to help support this effort and help support Steve as he moves over to, to what I would consider to be the most most important phase of his life, please consider becoming a patron. I'm dead serious here. We have a lot of things planned. You know, we are trying in, in this particular year, which you know, you all know what I'm talking about. We are trying to fight misinformation, disinformation, pseudoscience, all of it. And there's a lot of it. And it's amazing that Steve's doing it this particular year because we really need it. And we have, we have new stuff that we're doing, which we will be revealing to you over the coming months. Very exciting, but if you want to join the effort to fight back at a time when we really need to, please go to patreon.com/skeptics guide. And Cara, I have something for you. Yeah, I love you. You're awesome, and I'm happy that do the show with you. No, I feel the same way, Jay. I do. I know, I think.
C: About you guys during the week.
J: When I'm not, you know, when we're not recording, What's that? You miss us? Well, I mean, he knows me most.
S: But there there is a.
J: Relationship.
C: You develop with people when?
J: You do something as intimate as podcasting because it's not just us sitting here talking every week. I mean, we do a lot of things together that are difficult in that, you know, expand our boundaries. And part of that is the the relationships that we have that happen inside the podcast. And I, you know, I wanted to tell Cara that, Cara, I learned a lot from you and you've helped me. You know, I think you've helped me make some important decisions about how I think about things and it's been, it's been very impactful to me. So I just wanted to say that, Oh my gosh, thank you for saying that. That's so meaningful to me.
C: Steve, you're a pain in my ass, but I love you.
J: And I love eating. Are we doing? Dinners with you, I just. Love, you know, this is what happened to me and Steve last time we saw each other. It was Oscar night. We all get together. It's like, you know, just a reason to get together. Steve made his amazing God damn salad, which the patrons like to call Steve's cheese salad and I made perfect amount of cheese. Thank you.
S: It is amazing. It is really, it is really awesome every time, Steve.
J: Rolls out with that, me and Steve's wife Jocelyn look at each other and we're like oh, oh 'cause we know we are going to like overeat. So anyway, I compliment Steve on the salad 'cause I'm like God damn Steve, this salad is so freaking good. I just really freak out every time he makes it. I love it that much. And Steve goes and Jay, it's even better. It goes perfectly with your bread. And we had a moment there where I realized that we make each other's lives better. Jay, you complete me. Jesus doesn't Steve, it doesn't surprise.
S: Me that it's through bread.
J: And cheese, right. OK. And salad, yeah, I mean.
S: One not the best. Bread. Bread hold. On one.
J: Second Steve, one of the best, One of the best birthday presents anyone got me was a giant hunk of legit parmesan Ogiano cheese. Freaking I ate every dot of that that kid. I would be licking the countertop that I cut it on. It was so God damn good. It was pure. I feel so privileged when Jay gave me.
B: Like a little tiny piece of it like. Oh, he regrets it all right. We're gonna do, We're gonna do 11.
Emails (1:17:54)[edit]
S: Quick e-mail the SO, the emailer writes. I agree with Steve's assessment about the fragility of this beautiful crystal we call human society, which is one of the reasons I went to school to learn about food production when I was a young man. A resilient society has local food, etcetera capability. A resilient society is much less efficient than a large corporate model. I grow enough fruit on our small farm for only about 3 or 4 dozen households, but if I go down, there is another orchard 10 miles away that can take up the slack. Disperse ski and Wood SCION offer classes in fruit tree care. I am certain the value of community resilience will continue to gain traction as time goes on. Thanks for what you do. Yeah, so this is. I just wanted to talk about this core idea here, which I thought about previously as well, because mainly because of reading articles about stuff like this that even if you know, so making our society and our economy and our production on all of that maximally efficient certainly has its advantages. But it shouldn't, it probably shouldn't be the only thing that we prioritize because then we create, you know, inadvertently we may create a very maybe efficient but extremely fragile system, right? If we if we are optimizing efficiency by having this really complicated web of supply chains, then you have COVID hits and we're screwed, right? Yeah. And you can't get a car for two years, Right? Exactly.
C: And and you know, this comes.
S: Up in a lot of contacts it's like, oh all of our high end military chips are coming from Taiwan and China could take over Taiwan and then what happens at that point, you know we we don't have access to high end computer chips that we need for not only cars and and and stuff, but also our military if there's a certain vulnerability in there. And I mean this is you know generally considered to be one of the unintended negative consequences of globalization. Obviously a lot of advantage to it in terms of. Prices and efficiency, etcetera. But it also, you know, means that like, if you're highly specialized, and this is an evolutionary thing too, you become highly specialized. You may become very efficient, very good at the one thing that you do, but you're also vulnerable. You know what happens to highly specialized species? They go extinct. Yeah. Yeah, the generalists.
B: Or have the have the.
S: Staying power. They are. They're resilient. They may not be the best at anything, but, you know, there's a balance there. You know, you have to go with the flow. Yeah, they they can adapt.
E: So don't become an.
S: Expert. No, I'm just saying, you know.
E: That don't.
S: Hyper specialize to the point that you have nothing else to fall back on, you know, and that's I mean, it's certainly at a societal level that we may need to build some redundancies into the system. Just so much more resilient and less fragile, even at the expense maybe of a little bit of efficiency. And what do you guys AI can help plug some of those gaps? What do you guys think about that?
E: Whole idea do we not do?
S: That we we don't do that generally.
C: That's been like basically.
S: You know, I think COVID really revealed that and that we didn't have a lot of resilience built into the system. But is it really a function of pure optimization or is it also?
C: A function of like monopolies. It's. Well, certainly it's both, but.
S: But it's definitely a lot of it is optimization. There's a reason why Taiwan produces 90% of high end computer chips, because they could do it cheaper than anybody else. That's why it's not that they did something squirrely in order to get a monopoly. They just know how to do it cheaper than anybody else and that's where nobody can really compete with them. So maybe, so maybe we just need to produce some chips that are more expensive than the cheapest available in the world just so we have some onshore ability to do it. Just we have a backup, you know. Yeah. I mean, you got to identify these mission critical items and it's like.
B: Well, we can't, you know, we can't rely on this one location. We got, you know, we got to do something. But that takes foresight, that takes extra money. And it's like we just don't, we just don't do that. That's also interesting, Bob. It's it also?
C: Shows that I think there is a way to do this without always sacrificing optimization and efficiency. Because it's interesting, Steve, you use the example of evolution, right, that the Super specialists go extinct and the generalists do really well. But then if you look at the example of like the evolution of the human brain, there are things I wouldn't want to give up. I'm glad our brains became as specialized as they did, but they do have some redundancies. And so it's about those mission critical things. Where can we build in redundancies at those pinch points right without actually giving up efficiency optimization? Overall, I I think there's a way to go.
S: About it, but it takes a lot of political.
C: Well, yeah, you know what it takes is planning.
S: You know, it's the difference between just letting things unfold organically without consideration for unintended consequences, like animals evolving themselves into a corner. It was for their short term advantage to be able to be really good at eating eucalyptus leaves or whatever. But now long term, not a great strategy because you're now hyperdependent on this one food source. Not not a good long, not good long term. So yeah, this sort of just letting the economy evolve for short term advantage again may be good for optimizing efficiency in the short term, but without any kind of forward-looking planning, building and redundancies, etcetera, it does create unintended consequences and vulnerabilities. And we aren't just not good at that. That is modern, the modern.
C: Political landscape favors short term decision making. It just doesn't favor long term planning. Yeah. And this is like this is a bigger question for like.
S: Which societies are are going to be better adapted long term, Right? And that's a tough question, you know, and because we all have, you know, proud of whatever society we live in, you know what I mean? We think that's the best way to do things. But, and usually I know not everybody, but usually, you know, when I again, when I, when I explore these kinds of questions, it almost always comes down to like balance is the best way to go. Like there's some balance where you want to leverage the free market but also have some kind of centralized planning, right, And regulation. Regulation, yeah, Yeah.
C: Exactly.
S: There's a, there's. A balance in there somewhere where you get sort of the best of both worlds and you mitigate, you mitigate the downside of, of, of the different approaches, but that kind of nuance and compromise or whatever. We're just not in a political place where that's easy to do, you know? So it's people prefer simple, unnuanced, you know, answers to complicated questions. Yeah, but society's way too complicated for. Again, this just gets back to my original theme. My original premise is that, yeah, we're going to be. We're our own worst enemy here. If we go down, it's because we are not able to manage a society as complicated as the one we've created for ourselves. Yeah, forget that asteroid. It's going to be selfless. Maybe A maybe?
E: AI will save us but.
S: Again, that's one more thing that are we going to let it just develop organically or are we going to regulate and plan it in some way so it doesn't destroy the world, that helps build the world? Who knows? And they talk to each other in those dots and blips and stuff. Oh, my gosh.
E: We have no chance. All right, That's a very provocative question.
U: Thank you. All right, let's.
S: Go on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:25:57)[edit]
Theme: Hydrogen
Item #1: Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass.[7]
Item #2: Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen.[8]
Item #3: There are about 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars on US roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US.[9]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. |
| Science | Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass. |
| Science | There are about 17,000 hydrogen-powered cars on US roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | swept |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Bob | Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. |
Cara | Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. |
Evan | Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. |
Jay | Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. |
US#03: It's time for science or fiction.
U: Each week I come up with three Science News items or a Fact 2 real.
S: And one fake. Then I challenge my panelist skeptic to tell me which one is the fake. You have a theme this week. The theme is hydrogen. What do you guys know about hydrogen? You gonna say hip hop hydrogen?
E: Thank you. All right, here we go.
S: Item number one. Hydrogen makes up about 10% of the human body by mass a #2. Only about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen a #3. There are about 17,000 hydrogen powered cars on US roads, but more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US. Bob go first. Blame you, Evan Bob, it's.
B: You're the one who says.
US#03: That you made me talk on a regular basis. You made me talk.
B: I made you utter.
US#03: Yeah, man, this.
B: This is. Horrible.
US#03: Let's see.
B: Hydrogen, 10% of the human body by mass. That's crazy. I mean, I mean.
US#03: I could see that.
B: I mean, a lot of water and there's hydrogen in water, so maybe it's even more than that, but I think not. Let's see, 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green. What? Who knows? Who cares what you know? What the hell? How do you prepare? For this shit, all right, let's say 317 thousand hydrogen powered. Cars. 17,000 hydrogen what? But more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts? Wow, that's a hell of a lot more than I would have anticipated. The one that seems most likely to be fake compared to the other two, I think will have to be the 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green. I mean, I'm not sure. I'm just kind of rolling the dice on this one. OK, Cara, Hydrogen, There's a lot of hydrogen.
S: I know that.
C: So 10% of the human body, that sounds good. 10% of global hydrogen production, I don't know. That sounds good. Oh, but it's green. I don't think we're very good globally at green stuff. So I don't know, maybe Bob's onto something there. Maybe it's less 17,000 hydrogen powered cars. I buy it like that. Sounds reasonable. 50,000 hydrogen. Yeah, yeah, 17,000 sounds right. This is a really low #50,000 hydrogen fuel cell. Electric fork glyphs is crazy. But then I stop and I think, you know, early on when we were starting to see more green vehicles on the road, yeah, like green vehicle. Remember early when there was like that pull towards like natural gas vehicles, even though they're like not that green, actually they're not green at all. But I did notice that there would be like buses, like municipal buses or municipal vehicles that would adopt A technology 1st and do like a whole fleet. And so I could see that if they're like just a a handful of large companies who decided to go green with their whole fleet, then yeah, you would see like a a large number instead of this sort of distributed purchasing across the globe of individual, you know, car consumers. So I don't know, I don't, I'm, I'm scared to go out on a limb that screwed me last time. So I guess I'm going to go with Bob here. OK, Evan.
S: 10% hydrogen.
E: In the human body by mass, at first glance, I was like, no way. And then Bob mentioned it and you know, the water and like well, OK, yeah, I guess so. Isn't like 90% of the matter in the universe hydrogen? 90%? I think so. So, yes. So therefore when you think about 10% of human body being that that makes it all more reasonable. The second one here, about 10% of global hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. Yeah, I'd be shocked if any of our listeners have that off the top of their heads, unless they're in the industry maybe. And then the last one about the hydrogen power cars is 50,000 forklifts, though it seems like a lot of forklifts, but I suppose if I had to flip the coin, I I'll wind up being on the side with Bob and Cara and go with them. I'm going to say that the global hydrogen production 10% green hydrogen, that one is also the fiction. So it's up to Jay now to sweep. OK. And Jay, I mean for the.
S: Sake of the sweep, you know? Yeah.
J: I mean, it's going to be a sweep one way or the other, right?
C: Yeah, I'll go with the. I'll go with the crew. Oh boy.
J: OK, here we are, all nervous.
S: We just talked about all.
E: You know, having too much. Eggs in one. Basket. And like, that's not a good thing. All right, well, let's take these in order. Hydrogen.
S: Makes up about 10% of the human body by mass. You guys all think this one is science. So it's interesting because yes, there's a lot of water in the human body and, and water is H2O, but hydrogen is really light. It's really, it's the obviously the IT is so light, the lightest element.
E: And how does it all?
S: Balance out. There's a lot of it. How do you weigh it? How does weigh this?
US#01: One, there's not weights.
E: Mass, but I think.
S: It's the same figure by weight. This one is science. It is science 10%. Wow Yeah. By mess Yeah, very interesting. A lot of times when they say how much a.
B: Person weighs with its basic elements. They they usually they take away the water. Like here, you take away the water. Dry weight. Dry weight, Yeah, the yeah, the dry weight like well, OK.
S: But that so that.
B: Doesn't that wouldn't help with this really. So yeah, it seemed, no, it seemed, no, it seemed kind of in the zone. But yeah, I wouldn't have been surprised if I was off. What's the most? Common element in the body by mass.
S: 65% of body mass is which element? Carbon. Carbon is the second most.
B: Oxygen.
S: Oxygen.
E: Really.
S: 60. 5% again, I think that's the water. 5% oxygen.
U: Yep.
S: Yeah, it's a water. Yeah. There you go.
E: Right. And then?
S: 18% carbon, about 10% hydrogen, then nitrogen. What percent helium are we? Yeah, not very.
C: Not very much all right, Only about.
B: 10%. Of global.
S: Hydrogen production is considered green hydrogen. You guys all think this one is the fiction. So do you all think it's more or less less? Less. Yeah, probably less.
U: How much?
C: Less do you think it is?
B: Half one order.
S: Of magnitude 1%.
C: I'll say 5%.
US#03: This one. Is.
S: The fiction you got the.
US#03: The real figure.
S: Which I believe I've said on the show at some point is less than 1%, less than 1%, less than one, right. This is why any.
US#03: Attempt to sell a.
S: Hydrogen anything as green is crap. That's that's true. Less than 1% of. The hydrogen that's out there is green. It still mostly comes from fossil fuel, and it's still mostly worse than just burning the fossil fuel itself rather than just stripping the hydrogen off of it. Why are we doing it? Yeah. Then what was the big rage?
C: Well.
E: It's always the promise of we're going to do electrolysis to.
S: Make green hydrogen and that's going to blah, blah, blah. And we just can't do it economically, you know what I mean? And if The thing is, if we can do it, the to to the extent that we can scale up the green like electrolysis kind of hydrogen production. First of all, it uses a lot of water. And that's, I mean, that's going to be a that could be a huge resource strain on the world's watery green that's not very green. But even if we did make.
C: A substantial amount.
S: Of hydrogen then we're better off using that in industry, not burning it in cars. You're still better off using Ev's. I just think like burning hydrogen for for cars is not the way to go for that for the, for that reason now, unless we tap into massive underground stores of hydrogen, like it's already hydrogen just sitting there, right, right. Which might be the case, you know. That changes the. Equation. But even still, I think we should feed industry first, not cars, because basically EVs are more efficient, they're more efficient and EVs are smart because they're it's a secondary.
C: Like the fuel source, the ultimate fuel source of an EV just depends on how we make our electricity. Yeah. So that's that's movable. Over time. Yeah, EV's are only helpful if we also decarbonize.
S: Our electrical grid, right? Yeah, absolutely. Or if individuals have solar panels and DV's like me. Yeah, OK. This means that there are about 17,000 hydrogen powered cars on US roads. But more than 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell electric forklifts operating in the US is science. Do you know where those 17,000 hydrogen powered cars in the US are? California. They are all in California. They're pretty much.
E: All in.
S: California. That's because California is the only state with a hydrogen distribution system. Do you remember who did that? Brown. Nope. Governor Brown. Nope.
E: Obama the the Schwartz, the governor, the Govern NATO.
S: Yes.
C: Remember.
E: Build it and they will come, he said.
S: We're gonna build a hydrogen infrastructure and that will, you know, give us the hydrogen economy. Well, it gave you 70,000 hydrogen, hydrogen fuel cell cars, not so much a hydrogen based economy, but yes, that's why they're all in Connecticut and not in California. The tables have turned there.
C: That's interesting. I mean, this was a, this was.
S: A Republican.
C: Governor Yeah, doing this, Yeah, yeah, yeah, back in the day, but you. Mean Schwarzenegger was very much.
S: Always a sort of rational moderate, very moderate, very moderate fiscal. Conservative A. Super, right? Wing Republican.
C: Governor, Yeah. Correct. I remember his speech at the.
S: At the Republican convention, that one year was like, if you believe in like all these common sense, you know, economic stuff, then you're a Republican. You know, it's very much a moderate, you know, economic conservative message anyway. But yeah, fifty. I was surprised to find out there are 50,000 hydrogen fuel cell forklifts operating in the US, So all in California. No, I think they're all over the place, I think.
C: It's just like the, you know, that's.
S: What that's what they're making. So I, you know, I was looking when I was doing the research for this like, well, what kind of vehicles are hydrogen powered? So they're pretty much everything. There are hydrogen powered cars, vans, trucks, buses, trains, ships. What? And that's planes. Planes, at least a plane. Now there's several. There's several here that says the. 2008. Aircraft Boeing 2015 drone by Intelligent Energy and 2016 HY four first passenger aircraft in Germany. These I think are all pretty much small a craft. So yeah, the you know, trains, buses and trucks. Those are where it makes the most sense, to be honest with you, and not so much cars. Trains probably make the most sense because you could have refueling stations along the route. You know, it doesn't have to be. That never changes. Yeah. Fixed route. Exactly. All right, Well, good, good job, guys.
C: I guess you know a.
S: Lot about hydrogen. Hydrogen. Bob doesn't know Bob. Led the way, barely all.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:37:42)[edit]
"Dictators seek to control men’s thoughts as well as their bodies and so they attempt to dictate science, education and religion. But dictated education is usually propaganda, dictated history is often mythology, dictated science is pseudoscience."
– — Edwin Grant Conklin, 1937, (description of author)
S: Right, Abin, give us a quote. GWB dictators seek. To control men's.
E: Thoughts as well as their bodies. And so they attempt to dictate science education and religion. But dictated education is usually propaganda. Dictated history is often mythology. Dictated science is pseudoscience. Edwin Grant Conklin, he said that in 1937 from his address as retiring president before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Indianapolis, 1937 is quite relevant today. Oh my gosh, is it. Not is it not.
S: Oh yeah, baby.
E: My gosh.
J: And that's why I chose.
E: Them. Yeah, very appropriate. All right. I'm shocked that it's from.
J: That long ago? I'm not. I'm not. Shocked because of the gendered language in it.
C: I hope it's going to be old I I.
E: Yes, I know it's yes, yeah, definitely era of the time so but it's it's.
C: Especially drawing when.
E: You hear like control.
C: Men's bodies. That's true, right? Yeah, that's true.
S: Ridiculous. You'd never say that today.
C: Right.
E: All right.
S: Well, thank you all.
C: For joining me this week.
S: Sure, man. Thanks, Steve. Roger that, Steve, and until next week.
U: This.
B: Is your skeptics.
S: Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ phys.org: Computer simulations show nightmare Atlantic current shutdown less likely this century
- ↑ www.nytimes.com: As Measles Spreads, Kennedy Embraces Remedies Like Cod Liver Oil - The New York Times
- ↑ tinyurl.com: Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone helped entire ecosystem thrive, 20-year study finds
- ↑ theness.com: The New TIGR-Tas Gene Editing System - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ gizmodo.com: The 'Man With the Golden Arm': Blood Donor Who Saved Millions Dies at 88
- ↑ phys.org: New theory suggests star mergers produce universe's highest-energy particles
- ↑ www.news-medical.net: What Chemical Elements are Found in the Human Body?
- ↑ www.irena.org: Hydrogen
- ↑ www.epa.gov: Hydrogen in Transportation