SGU Episode 1051
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| SGU Episode 1051 |
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| August 30th 2025 |
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"Retro computing: The Osborne 1, an iconic portable computer from the 1980s." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"However profoundly we may penetrate the depths of space, there still remain innumerable systems, compared with which, those which seem so mighty to us must dwindle into insignificance, or even become invisible.." |
Mary Somerville |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, August 27th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
E: Hey everybody.
S: Cara Santa Maria.
E: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
S: How's everyone doing?
E: Quite well, Sir, quite. Good.
S: So Uranus has a new moon.
E: Oh, congratulations. How'd you say let it? Go Uranus.
S: Uranus.
C: It's new.
E: Yeah, it's. Brand new.
S: Well, newly discovered.
C: Moon I.
S: See, this is the first Moon discovered around Uranus in 40 years.
E: Oh wow.
S: Which brings the total count up to 29.
B: 29.
S: Does not have a name yet, just a designation. S/2O25U1 you know first.
B: It's what, 6 miles? Why?
S: 6 miles. Yeah, very dim, which is why it wasn't seen by previous probe telescopes. They were looking for, I think, like for shepherd moons, because, you know, Uranus has rings and the rings are tidy. They're not spreading out. So there must be some shepherd moons gravitationally keeping them penned in. So that's how they found this moon. But it's actually not a shepherd moon, though. It's not where it would need to be. It's a little bit too far out, but still they were able to see it.
B: These ring particles will never deorbit and land on the.
S: I don't know, I was thinking that too.
B: There was at the Roche limit.
S: Yeah, so if they're too close it, they rain in. If they're too far out, they drift away. Unless you have shepherd moons. Keeping them in place, I think is what happens. Staying it's next to, it's between the moons Ophelia and Bianca. You know where those names come from.
B: Some. Reality. Reality. Shakespeare.
E: It's all Shakespeare. Shakespeare.
S: Puck is also around Uranus.
E: Oh, interesting. Yeah, look at that Juliet Porsche. So definitely.
J: Has anyone like just directly called out like the idea that Uranus has a different way of saying it that means something and people laugh at it, but like what?
S: Uranus.
J: Yeah, like the point here is where'd the name come from and why you know?
E: It's a God.
J: But then at some point in the English language people like came up with your anus and then what?
E: Came first your Uranus or Anus.
J: Yes, exactly.
C: Well, but even if you look at how it's spelled, it's got the word anus in it.
B: It does.
C: Yeah, so I think that was always going to happen, even if it was always pronounced Uranus I. Don't think it was.
B: Uranus. My memory is that it was Uranus and then eventually that that kind of transitioned to Uranus, which which I'm totally fine with. That's fine. Uranus. Triggers the.
C: But I mean, it's a Greek God, so do we know how it was pronounced?
J: I think that, hey, maybe that'd be good. What's the word Cara?
C: Yeah, like, did we even know how ancient But you? Know. Yeah, but it's ancient Greek.
S: Yeah, gosh, we need.
E: A Rosetta Stone.
S: Sky and heavens, Well, that maybe some. Yeah, yeah.
J: All right, well, it's a It's a weird and funny coincidence that young people for through the ages have been laughing at.
S: Oh, well, so apparently, apparently yeah. The the I think more the other spelling is OURANOS.
E: Oh. Or anus like so you're basically saying, oh you're anus?
C: And when you go to like Merriam Webster and you look at the pronunciation, they say both Uranus and Uranus.
E: Great. And and of course the the cartoon Futurama fixed it 1000 years in the future. They renamed it to your rectum. Rectum damn near. Kill them.
J: So you guys, I got to, I just reminded me, you know, like I've told you guys before, I've been like in this on and on again, off again, like debate thing going on with this chiropractor that I, I used to be friends with. And again, I mean, I'm sure he, he's a nice guy, you know, like I knew him, he was a good guy. You know, I don't want to cross those wires, right? But I've been heavily debating him and calling him out in his profession out in crystal clear terms and like just really saying, like the hard stuff to say to someone who's, you know, career is dependent on something that, you know, I personally believe is complete and utter nonsense.
E: Jay can give us a little background, like, is he a reform? I mean, you know, is he?
J: He's a straight chiropractor, which means he believes in the magic.
E: Yeah. Yep.
J: Innate intelligence and life force.
E: And all that. OK, so he's deep.
J: Yeah, so I have to tell you, and I thought to Evan, of course, is that I actually sent him a post, a very heavy post, and I sent him the meme. You have a degree in baloney. You know the guy. The guy runs up, I have a degree in chiropractic. And then the guy yells, you have a degree in baloney. And I actually sent that. I couldn't help myself, it was like perfect for the situation.
S: But in Futurama, he says I have a degree in homeopathy, and he says you have a degree in baloney.
J: Wasn't chiropractic, I said there's. Homeopathy. I sent him that anyway and he knew.
C: Chiropractors learn homeopathy.
S: Chiropractors are the most common prescribers of homeopathic remedies in the United States.
J: Yeah, there you go. And you know, he other few interesting details because he he was literally arguing that they can prescribe medicines and stuff and they can perform surgery. And I was just like, this is all fantasy. They do they they can prescribe like a couple of things other than, you know, vitamins and like you can't even call what they do surgery. You know what I mean? Like there isn't, it isn't like.
E: I've never heard of them do.
C: It but it can cause a lot of harm as we often say, and you guys know what the most common fatal chiropractic injury is is.
S: It a dissection.
C: Yeah, a dissection of the vertebral artery. Vertebral dissection it means.
J: That they tear the an artery in your neck.
C: In your neck.
J: That means you bleed out like in a very short amount.
S: No, it doesn't mean you bleed out, means you stroke out.
J: You stroke out.
C: Yeah, and that actually happened to a friend of a friend who is in her 20s. Way.
S: It's always so tragic because it's mostly young, healthy people who just have like these worst possible strokes.
E: And then they go ahead, the chiropractor will blame the incident that took place before, which brought them to the chiropractor right ahead of time. And you know that, oh, it was your original injury. It wasn't me that did.
C: This And so my friend has a rule now whenever people in her life, life or like people that she cares about, tell her, you know, I'm gonna see the chiropractor for my back. I'm gonna, you know, she tries to tell them don't do it, like don't go see the chiropractor. But she's like, you know what? Whatever you do, don't let them touch you above the neck, right? Like above the shoulders. No manipulation.
S: That's what I tell my patients as well. It's like I personally wouldn't let anyone touch my neck, you know, just or manipulate, you know, the the neck in any kind of violent way. Don't let a chiropractor do that lower back. It's like, you know, it might as long as I'm not doing anything stupid. They could help you lower back pain, but it's not any better than just physical therapy or just doing anything really.
E: Yeah, it's not your brain stem.
C: Yeah, they might still hurt you, but they probably won't kill you. Yeah, at your own risk.
S: All right, Bob, you have an interesting entry.
Why Didn’t I Know This (07:09)
First Portable Computer https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/the-worlds-first-laptop-weighed-24-pounds-and-had-a-five-inch-screen-but-it-changed-computers-forever/
S: Only the second entry into a possible new segment of the show. Why didn't I know this?
B: Oh, I have it as listed as. How the hell did I not know that? How are you saying it?
S: Why didn't I this?
B: OK, me write that down. Gotcha. All right. OK, so yeah, this this is fun. I recently experienced my own version of why the didn't always. So why didn't I know this? This has to do with what's considered to be the first laptop computer. Does anyone know this name? Is anyone even familiar with the first laptop computer? This is the Osborne one from the Before Times way back in 198181. You know, Steve and I were using computers at that time, pet computers and stuff. I'm I'm certain that we probably heard about this back in the day or saw an ad. I'm almost certain we probably saw an ad, but it's still.
S: Surprising computer. I knew somebody who owned it.
B: No way. Who poor?
S: The father of my then girlfriend who owned this computer. He was very proud of Listener. The guy was would loved it or just this was like the best thing that happened to him.
E: He's still using it.
S: And yeah, I remember. So he he showed it off to me. He went through the whole thing.
E: That's so cool.
S: Thing was a suitcase. It's it was AI. And I remember at the time saying this is not really a portable computer. It's certainly not a laptop computer. This is a lugable computer. That was the term. You could lug it around. But The thing is like, he could take it to the work site and then take it home and it's the same computer. And he loved that and it Oh yeah. Now it's like, Oh my God, you know.
B: Yeah, they, they, they called it portable. My understanding is that they it was called portable back in the day and they were laughing about that term. Nowadays it kind of morphed into, you know, the term luggable. And that's, so that's how we refer to these ridiculously heavy, you know, portable computers back in the day. The story starts essentially, though, in April of 81 at at the West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco. Fair is spelled FAIRE, it seems.
S: Oh, boy.
B: Like it seems appropriate, right. Exactly. The first thing I thought of the engineers and hobbyists that were there. So they saw it as something that was very silly and ostensibly they thought it was very unimpressive. So what they saw was something called a portable computer, but it tipped the scales at 24 1/2 pounds, 24 1/2. It was very rugged, though. It's essentially a hard shell of ABS plastic around it. So it was, it could definitely, you know, go the distance in terms of like lugging it around, which makes sense because that's what it was designed for. So imagine you've got this this thing in front of you. So the first thing you would do is you would lower the front panel and it would it would click down on the hinge and that would be the keyboard. So that that front panel that flips down would be the the keyboard. OK, So above the keyboard and then facing you directly right in the middle, was this itty bitty, the five inch monochrome CRT? And my question here is, does that initialism CRT? Does that require an explanation in 2025 or has it? Cathode ray tube. Yeah. Has it slipped into obscurity like IRC and BBS probably had? I don't know. But cathode ray tube, right? So, so this, the CRT was only 1/3 of a standard terminal, showing only about 52 characters on each of the 24 available lines of text, right. But you, you can connect it, you could have connected it to a bigger display if you wanted. So that was wasn't that much of A of a problem, but still ridiculously tiny. So then on the left of this left and right of of these of that screen is the 2/5 and 1/4 inch five and a quarter right, the the big ones. Yeah, floppy drives and these.
E: Were these were really floppy?
B: These, but these were single sided single density, right? So they were they stored about a hundred 100 kilobytes each. So that's just like, my God, like, you know, a two or three modestly sized files or maybe a small program. So yeah, not much capacity, especially, you know, thinking about the TB thumb drives today that it's just so ridiculously tiny. But, and it's time you could get stuff done. And remember though, that you might say, oh wow, 2 drives. Yeah. That that was critical because the you would, there was no hard drive. Remember that there's no, you know, no hard drive, no USB drive, no Wi-Fi, none of that stuff. So you would have your operating system on one floppy. So you would boot from that, say this floppy on the left and then on the right you can actually load files or or copy files to the floppy on the right. So that's why there were two kind of kind of critical. There was no battery on this first laptop battery schmattery. It only worked by being plugged in, got to be plugged in or you're not doing anything. There were, however, games they loaded text based games that were very popular back in the day. One of them was Hammurabi and the other one that was called Colossal Cave Adventure. Text based games. Wow. So but none of this stuff that I've mentioned really got anyone's attention. It was more more of a toy than a serious platform until several things were noticed. First off, it was the price. The Osborne one was 17195 USD. That's about 6000. That's $6000 in in 2025 S 6 grand sounds like a lot, but that was a hell of a deal back then folks.
E: Also by comparison, there were cars, new cars that we're selling probably in the range of about 5 or $6000 back back then as as well. Oh, you'd have to like. So this is the cost of like 1/4 of a car.
B: Right. So relatively speaking, that's a lot. But if you're a serious computer hobbyist or an engineer, or as we'll see in other professions, this was way worth it. And it gets even better when I discussed the second point here that that was noticed, there was something brand new about about this this device, this computer, and it was a major, major part of its appeal preloaded commercially useful software, what we would say a killer software bundle today. That was something that as far as I can tell was not done anywhere before this preloaded commercially useful software. And The thing is though, so it had, let me just list some of the, the, the, the programs that it had. It had out-of-the-box, it had CPM, which is a 2.2, which is an operating system. It had Word store, Word Star, which is a very popular word processor of the day. There was Super Calc, which was a spreadsheet. Then there was Mail Merge and both Microsoft Basic and C Basic programming languages. So this is all pre loaded. The thing was though, that this software was worth $1500 USD. People were just astonished that that was included to them. It was amazing. So that, yeah, so this computer was just about $1800 and you were getting $1500 worth of software. So it's like, yeah, the the computers only this a small part of this deal. So it was an amazing deal when you factor in all that that software that just came right with it. And the third revolutionary aspect of the Osborne one was, in fact, it's portability and in communication that was those that was something that was really dramatic for for various professions. So even Osborne himself agreed that the performance of the Osborne 1 was really just adequate, you know, but he but he would say that that wasn't the point point. The point was that this device was actually a ready to use office in a box. He claimed that it was the only computer that could fit under an airline seat. And these were these were essentially marketing points, but they were very, very effective. This device once people digested this and realized what they could do with it, it was it was like crack to many professions like journalists were among the first groups of the the first profession that that jumped on board. They were almost immediate. Many of them got rid of their typewriter and and exchanged it for an Osborne one for reporters, Osborne one was probably even more revolutionary. The Newsroom became essentially wherever you wherever you were, wherever the reporter and their Osborne one was that that's basically your your newsroom. You could be at a hotel room, you could be in an airport. You could be even on a battlefield in 821982, reporter David Klein brought his Osborne 1 + a heavy battery pack into the mountains of Afghanistan so we can cover the Soviet Afghan conflict. You guys remember that? So writing and transmitting dispatches from the field was just a, you can imagine it was just a total game changer. So I wanted to see, well, how did you actually transfer files and not at the battlefield, but say like if you were, you know, in a hotel, that's, that was the classic maneuver. You know, you're, you're a reporter and you wanted to file your story. How do they do it? You know, there's no USB, there's no parallel ports, there's no wireless anything. How would this work? So one way to do it would be what's called sneaker net. I don't know if you guys ever heard of sneaker net that that's just that's just a goofy way of saying you would walk the file to where you needed to be and handing it over like you would just hand over your floppy disk, right? So that, that, that that's one way. But the, the obvious more popular option was to use Osborne one serial port that lets you connect to either other computers or other or printers or most importantly, a modem. That was the key right there. So if you were in a hotel room, you'd connect your serial port from the Osborne one into your separate modem device. Now, these, these were typically fairly big, these modems back in the day, these were acoustic acoustic coupler modems and they were the ones that you literally just put your handset, the phone handset right into it. You guys remember that scene in war games? That was, that was a modem. That was an acoustic acoustic coupler modem. Then you'd run your terminal software that was already on, on your laptop and, and then your office would get your story and somebody there or the mainframe would, would, would be able to take it and then you wouldn't need to dictate it. You wouldn't need to call anybody to dictate your story, right? That was a common way to do it. You wouldn't need to mail it. You would need to use a Courier or whatever other method. So much easier and more convenient. So the sales for the Osborne Computers, you might, as you might imagine, this is the Osborne Computer Corporation sales were through the roof. It was just amazing analysts and for a time it was good, amazing, amazing actually, until the Osborne effect. You may have heard of the Osborne effect. Oh boy. So this is the story goes like this. So they've had a one or two years of amazing sales making, you know, selling so many thousands and thousands of units, making millions of dollars. And Osborne himself mentioned that the successors to the Osborne one and then there was two of them, a stronger, beefier one and a smaller, even more portable. But he mentioned them. And the problem was he, as the story goes, he mentioned it a little bit too early and it caused sales of Osborne one to dry up because people are like, why am I going to buy, right? Why? I'm just going to wait for the next 1. So he kind of overproduce the Osborne 1 he had. They had a lot of those. And so sales dried up, income plummeted. And since their margins, their margins were apparently way, way too thin. They were just razor thin margins. And it LED directly to bankruptcy just in 19, 1883, just two years later. Because because of that, that's that's snafu. So this scenario is called the Osborne effect. So and announcing a new product too early has literally tanked companies before the Osborne one and afterwards. It's just this this thing that happens that everyone's aware of, but it kind of has the name of the Osborne effect now. Now the truth is obviously more complex than than that. So still, the, the, the Osborne one was the first commercially successful product in this new category. It showed that there was a tremendous demand for a computer you that you could relatively easily haul about. And there, you know, some people say that there were you know, there were other attempts at portable computers, but this is really the first portable laptop esque type computer that was commercially successful product and not just like maybe a one off that that barely, you know, did anything beyond that. It changed how computers were marketed, making them ready to work right out of the package. You know, software bundles were basically fairly ubiquitous. You know, soon after that across the the computer industry. Tech companies worth their salt will always will always carefully plan product announcements to avoid osborning themselves. If you and the Osborne one obviously to foreshadowed the laptop as as a juggernaut device for mobile computing decades before Wi-Fi and cloud computing kind of like that. You know, I see it as I kind of like like the Model T It was it was a proof of concept for the masses that yes, this is a viable product. People will, you know, will shell out good money for this. It's got a niche. It's clearly got a place. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, if I'm if I'm go to a peek at a conference, we all of us, I mean we're basically all bringing these these laptops or you know, or or tablets or or even a phone. You know, it's even a phone. You could do so much. So it's it was really an amazing introduction and I'm just surprised that I wasn't more familiar with it. Steve, you. You actually saw 1? You could did you get a little demo? But you actually saw saw one? I've never actually seen one, but I I'm sure I was familiar with it, but it just just, you know, it's just not in my memory banks at this point. I would think it would be something that I would at least be much more familiar with. And hopefully now I hopefully there's a bunch of you out there like, Oh yeah, Osborne one first, the first real commercially successful laptop that really showed what it could do. So interesting story. Check it out if you want more details.
E: You can't call it a laptop though, right?
S: It's not really. Yeah, it's not a laptop.
B: Yeah, but it's not old computer will be. Portable, I mean, exactly, I mean, but it's, yeah, it's not technically a laptop, but it's, it's the portability, which is, it's what makes a laptop a laptop. It's it's the portability.
News Items
Brightest Fast Radio Burst (20:56)
S: All right. Thanks Bob all.
B: Right.
S: All right, so we have the report of the brightest fast radio burst observed to date. Fast radio bursts are FRBS. We've been talking about them intermittently on the show. They're, you know, one of the current active astronomical mysteries. We don't really know what what causes them there. So it's it's a mystery that's unfolding in real time. What they are is what the name says fast radio burst. They're very brief, like 1 millisecond, a thousandth of a second around their burst of very high energy radio waves. So something very powerful clearly is causing them. Most of the ones that we observe are billions of light years away, which you know what that means? You know how that how?
E: You they occurred billions of years ago.
S: Yeah. So it's really two things. One is if something is only happening very far away, that means it's only happening very far in the past. But it could also be that it's just rare and you need a large volume of universe to observe in order to statistically see them happen, right? And it seems like that's, it's really the second thing that's the case. It's just that they're they're relatively rare. And so we need to observe a large volume of space, which means on average we're going to be seeing them very far away, but we might do it.
B: Could happen very, it could happen very close, but it's very, very unlikely.
S: It's just, yeah, it's just unlikely. So the one that we're talking about now that was just observed was only 130 million light years away. I know that sounds really far 130,000,000, but that's makes it one of the closer FRB. So it's the brightest and it was fairly close this and This is why we're talking about it, because those two things together, very bright, very close for an FRB means we have really good observations of it.
B: But there's, and Steve, if you would think if it's the same mechanism, which we assume it is because we're calling it FRB, I would think this would be a lot brighter since it's so much closer than, you know, it's orders of magnitudes closer. So I would think it would be like ridiculously.
S: Bright, but I think they're talking absolute brightness, not just relative brightness. All right, so it's bright and close. That's great. We get get better look at it than than other things. But also as we've discovered FRB's, we've now started to to develop the machinery specifically to look for them. So this one was seen by the CHIME. The astronomers love their love their acronyms, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. So this was originally developed to map the distribution of hydrogen in the universe. But it started picking up FRBS and it's like, oh cool, we're picking, you know, this is some, you know, we knew we've detected them in the past, but we've started to detect a lot of them with the CHIME. So it's between 2018 and today it's detected about 4000 FRB. So several 100 per year. Now The thing is, because they're so.
B: One a day, man.
S: They're because they're so brief, they're very hard to localize precisely.
B: And they don't repeat.
S: Well, most of them don't.
E: Most don't repeat.
S: Yeah, there are a subset, a minority of FRBS that do repeat.
E: There you go. Focus on those.
S: Babies and the repeaters can either be regular or irregular, meaning they could repeat but at irregular intervals that just.
E: Adds to the mystery.
S: But some of them repeat at regular intervals for a while, then stop, right? So, but most of them are one offs. They don't repeat. Or maybe their repetition is so long. We it's if it's 50 years, we haven't been observing long enough. So maybe that will change. Maybe it's really just a long interval. But anyway, they said, all right, Chime is detecting all these FRBS, but we can't really localize them. We could localize them to their Galaxy. We could say it's coming from that Galaxy, even if it's a billion light years away, but we can't say where in the Galaxy it's coming from. We need a bigger, we're going to need a bigger boat, right? We need a bigger telescope. And So what they built was what they call outriggers. Now, if you recall from radio astronomy, if you have two radio dishes 100 miles apart, it has not the sensitivity, but the resolution of one radio dish that's 100 miles in diameter. So that's why they built these outriggers, these smaller versions of CHIME all across North America, which gives us a detection sensitivity as if we had a telescope as big as North America. So this allows for very precise localization of where the FRB is coming from. So now we have the perfect storm, right? We have these three elements together. We have CHIME with the outriggers. We have a bright FRB and a relatively close FRB. And what this enabled them to do was to see precisely where in the host Galaxy it was originating from. And it seems to be coming from the outskirts of a star forming region. So a star forming region is where you have a condensing, collapsing cloud of gas that's churning out stars. Yeah, it's a nebula, but it's churning out stars, right? If you're in the middle of the star forming region, you're probably a very young star, a newly minted star. The farther away from the middle you get, the older you are because you've drifted away, I guess, from the, from the center of the star forming region region. So being at the edge means that it was a, you know, it could have been millions of years old, you know, kind of age like it was, it was an adolescent *, if you will. But also keep in mind that the bigger the star, the shorter its lifespan.
B: Sure. So this would have been a. Couple 100 million years, they really don't last. Long, Yeah, so. It's amazing. They have many times the amount of fuel that smaller stars are, but they go through it so fast.
S: As they burn so hot, so it's possible that this FRB was coming from a blue giant or whatever. A very large star that in a only in a few million years, so it was still close to its star forming nursery, turned into a neutron star. The big stars are also the ones that become neutron stars or black holes that they're really big. But this is not a black hole, right? So the thinking is, well, at the very least, they're hoping that by identifying where in the Galaxy these FRBS are coming from, they'll be able to ask questions and test hypothesis about what phenomena might be causing these FRBS. Now there is kind of a leading theory. Yeah, Bob, I know you know any of the guys.
US#03: I like it.
S: What the leading theory is as to what's calling at least the one off FRBS maybe, if not the repeaters.
C: Yeah, no idea.
S: I really don't know. So it's something powerful.
C: Black hole.
S: It's so.
C: Of.
E: Course a collision of black, a collision of super black holes.
S: Yeah, that's a really good guess. Bob guessed that. Actually. That's a really good guess. It's something, if it's a really powerful event, it's probably related to either black holes or neutron stars, right? Those are likely candidates. Now there's a specific kind of neutron star.
B: A flavor, if you will.
S: A flavor that puts out a lot of energy. It has a massive field and it's Nope cranking out X-rays and gamma rays and that is a magnetar.
B: Magnetar, my favorite neutron star. They are amazing.
S: The reason that get too close, the reason that that's a, that that magnetars have something to do with FRB's, at least some of them, is because in 2020, and I can't remember if we talked about this, I think we did. And maybe in 2020 we discovered the first FRB in our own Galaxy, in our own Galaxy, which is unprecedented, and we were able to see that it was coming from a magnetar. So it doesn't get better than that. So many astronomers like until proven otherwise, magnetars aren't the source of FRBS, at least some of them, right Again, and maybe the one offs but not that are repeaters or whatever. We don't know. But it's not all magnetars. But it's something that's happening to a magnetar that's producing these rare FRB.
B: It's something it's some interaction. Or could it be Steve, could it be kind of like a star quake, A magnetar star quake? Because because a star quake is, is a, it's rare, But what it happens in a, in a neutron star where, where part of the crust shifts. And because that the matter is so dense, even if it's like a millimeter shift of a, of a segment on, on the neutron search, it, it's so much energy is released that we could, we could actually feel it from thousands of light years away. We, and then we actually experienced one of those not, not too many years ago. And it actually impacted our like ionosphere and stuff like that. So it could maybe it's a it's a magnetar start.
S: It's basically just unknown. So we had to give a solid, solid piece of evidence that magnetars are the source of FRBS, but we don't know what's happening to make those magnetars produce the FRBS. Right now we have only confirmed 40 magnetars. There's only 40 that we know of, So the NFRB coming from a magnetar can't is probably not a coincidence, right? They're so rare that it wouldn't be like, oh, it just happens to be in the neighborhood of a magnetar because they're all over the place. Nope, they're really rare. If it's in the neighborhood of Magnetar, that's probably the cause of what's of the FRB.
B: Itself and why are they rare?
S: Because they only last for a short period of time, they radiate away so much energy that the that the magnetic field, the Super intense magnetic field, fades away over time.
B: Right. And that calms down which, which actually supports the story and the theory of why you know of, of of them being rare because magnetars just don't last that long now.
S: Cara, I know what you're thinking right now.
C: What am I thinking?
S: You're thinking how powerful are magnetars magnet.
C: I was thinking that.
E: Yeah, Can you express it in Gauss?
S: I can express it in Earth magnetic fields. It's a trillion times as powerful as Earth's magnetic field. It's so powerful. How powerful is it that if you were 1000 kilometers away from a magnetar, you would instantly die because your molecules could not exist, right? It would disrupt the electron fields around your molecules. So your chemistry would be couldn't function right within 1000 kilometers.
B: Oh yeah, that's how it tends.
S: The magnetic field is trillion times as powerful as Earth's magnetic field. But then they fade away over 10,000 years, 100,000 years, you know, a million on the outside. So they don't last for very long, which means there's not many of them in the universe. So cool. So, you know, just a again, nice perfect storm. We got a nice little piece to the puzzle of what FRBS are. And but this story is not over. We really still don't know what is causing these really brief, really powerful events. I'm sure we'll be talking about this more in the future.
Trash into Biochar (32:44)
S: All right, Jay, we're going to bring bring us back to Earth now. Tell us about turning trash into biochar.
J: Have you guys heard of biochar?
S: Oh, yeah.
J: Anybody else? All right, it was new to me as well. So don't feel bad because it's really, it isn't a common word that people come across. So let me just set the stage for you guys. Australia waste about 31 million tons, which is about 34 million US tons of food every year. So imagine if you will, it's enough to fill roughly 20,800 Olympic sized swimming pools. Or you could build A food scrap mountain that's taller than Sydney Tower if piled up massive, massive amounts of food waste. And it's not just a number, you know, it's more like a you got to think of like a landscape of, of rotting bio material that is ultimately.
E: Bob's Haunt got.
J: You it's not only a waste, but it's, it's, it's not good stuff for the environment. If you break it down, it's about 312 kilograms or £688 per person every year. And that's four times the global average of 79 kilograms or about 174 lbs. It's just a staggering amount of what was described as largely like good food being dumped. So let me tell you what biochar is. I'll give you some details. It's basically a charcoal that's made by heating the the organic material in a low oxygen environment, which is very similar to wood charcoal. This process is called pyrolysis and it it produces stable, carbon rich material. It could be added to soil to improve the soil structure. It holds nutrients, it could support microbial life. It's a really interesting material. So there was a recent review that suggests the idea to turn food waste into biochar. And this review examines whether this could realistic realistically work at a scale for Australia, which would be a very, you know, very large. So they did find some legitimate potential here. So biochar can boost poor soils by improving their structure, their water retention, it can lock carbon in underground. They described it as, you know, for decades or, or much, much longer. Australia's soils are, you know, they're considered to be low in fertility. So they're, you know, this would actually help the soil when you heat for example, 10 kilograms or say about 22 US pounds of dry food waste to around 300°C or about 572°F. And if you do this for a short time, roughly 10 minutes, you can get back 7.6 kilograms or about 17 lbs of biochar. That's a yield of about 76%. And they're, they're, it's funny how these parameters like, you know, if you put it in into the reactor for longer or at a hotter temperature, the yield drops. But it does create something else that could be useful as well, like so these variables that they could, they could use to make different properties emerge and things like that. On the energy side, the pyrolysis can be actually efficient. So, you know, they're saying in a fast system, like, you know, a system that is really hot in, in a short amount of time to treat the, the food waste. This usually makes less char at about 20%. But the energy to run them could be as little as 15% because they could reuse the gases that are emitted by the food waste as it's turning into biochar to fuel its own system, which, you know, again, that's, that's a really nice way to be efficient. So how do you measure biochar beyond the yield and weight? There is a list here I can give you. I don't want to go into great detail here because there is so much that I could be saying here. So I'll just give you kind of the headers. You could measure it by its carbon content and stability. You know, how much carbon that's there that that could be locked away surface area and how porous it is. This determines how well it will hold nutrients in water. If it was buried in the ground, it's nutrient content. So does it have Nitro, nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, trace minerals? And that all depends on what the food waste actually is. Like specifically, you know, if it's a protein based food waste or if it's more plant based, the parameters change. They measure it by how much pH, what the pH is and the salt, the salts that are there. Of course too much sodium or ammonium can harm soil. So of course that would all have to be monitored and completely figured out. It's absorption capacity, which is a very significant, how well will it soak up pollutants or metals? And it's bulk density, this is weight per cubic meter. This is important for shipping cost. And, you know, adding all these things together with all of these different measures that I listed, they would be able to, to essentially figure out what the best case scenario would be for each, each one of these parameters. Or maybe they're all mixed right there. These parameters could all be mixed together to, to develop different types of biochar that are specific for certain needs. So, you know, it's, it's a cool that there's so much flexibility here with what they could actually produce from just food waste. So guys, what? So why do you think they want to? They're proposing that we bury biochar.
S: Well, I think the big advantage because I was looking into it as well, composting has a lot of the same advantages and it has better. It's been a beneficial for microorganisms which biochar does not have. But biochar is 1 huge advantage over composting and that is long term carbon sequestration.
J: Right. Yeah, that's a big one, especially today, of course, with global warming, like, you know, we have to we have to lean heavy into that. There's lots of little things here to to think about. So first of all, it's porous. If they make it to be porous, which they can, water and nutrients are retained for crops, which is weird if you think about it. But these, the biochar that's buried would kind of be like batteries that hold water and nutrients that will leach out into the ground. Another thing it does, it stabilizes the carbon, like Steve was saying, for decades or even up to centuries. It will also prevent methane emissions that routing food typically releases, right. So if you ever were near a dump, which I, I had the misfortune of being near a dump for a very short amount of time. And man, that smell, that methane smell that is put off by that material is absolutely horrible. And but you can think of though of that methane is essentially energy beyond agriculture. The review mentions like these other uses for it that are more experimental, but they were saying that it could be serve as pollutant filters or lightweight concrete. So is this a good idea? You know, turning food waste into bio biochar is, you know, it's a strong concept on paper. It is far from a guaranteed solution. That doesn't mean anything really negative. It just means, you know, there's strong indications here that more research is needs to be done. You know, where the researchers say that it's very strong is waste diversion, right? So it would take millions, the tons of food out of landfills and cutting all those methane emissions, soil improvement, the carbon storage and the energy side benefits. Like I said, you know, the energy that would come out of the biochar as you're creating it could be used to make more biochar. It's weak with food waste problems like food waste is inconsistent. Like I said, it's wet, it's complicated processing that adds a ton of complexity to the whole thing. The infrastructure cost would be. Huge. You know what I mean? This is industrial scale systems that, you know, they don't really exist today in this form. You know, all the information is there in different ways if you think about it. But to really, you know, spike this thing out, it would have to be so engineers would have to make a very finely tuned system that works specifically with all of these edge cases in order to pull it off. There are environmental risks, you know, some food waste biochars, you know will have salts and, and ammonium in them that can harm the soil and Organism. So that's another layer of of testing and you know, post production testing that would have to happen, which drives up costs. We really believe that it could work, but a lot more money and energy needs to be put into this. And if they were ever to even, you know, build the the first Test facility, it would be a significant amount of money to build this out. That being said, you know, I don't want to be too optimistic here, but this is the exact type of innovation that the world needs in my opinion. Because, you know, food waste, even though it's happening the most in Australia, it's happening globally and it is another puzzle piece to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and being able to gain control over sequestering carbon, which we really need to do.
S: Yeah. I mean, I think the, you know, we have to say that the ideal solution is to reduce food waste, but that's easier said than done. There's a reason why there is like 30% or 40% or whatever it is food waste in the system. It's because food rots and the system has losses all along the line from the farm to the table, right? You don't need every scrap of food you bring into your house. You just can't, you know, just can't. There's no system could operate that efficiently. So we're always going to have food waste, even if we make huge efforts to decrease it. I think the one thing we could say for sure is it shouldn't end up in the landfill, right? Like composting and biochar, I think are too good sort of end results for for the food waste. Sometimes we feed it to animals to like that's fine to. Animal feed is another reasonable way of recycling it back into the system. As long as there's not rotting in landfill and making methane gas, I think that's fine.
J: But Steve, there's a there's a big question here that we didn't even address.
S: Yeah.
J: What the hell are people in Australia doing with all this put? What are they doing?
S: I don't know, I haven't read about that specifically. Why is their rate higher than the world average? Well, I'm sure the US isn't great either, but I'd be interested to see like, is there was something systemic or is it environmental? Is it just there, you know, because they have to import a lot of food? I don't know.
J: Yeah, it's it. Yeah, that could be it, Steven. Maybe it is because they don't, you know, they don't have like a, you know, a lot of a lot of land to grow food on that they have to import it and that that could be it. I kind of was joking around like to myself going like some.
S: Systemic issue, yeah, not.
J: Yeah, like they're doing all these outdoor barbecues. You know, they're, they're getting drunk and they're making too many hot dogs and you know, I don't know.
S: They don't. They don't eat hot dog, Shay. That's whatever.
J: You know what I'm getting. I know shrimp. I don't want to. Say shrimp.
S: They don't eat shrimp either. They prawns and dead. Your my yeah.
J: And I don't. I don't want. Root and. To get pissed at me and be like.
C: I just don't want to read all the.
S: Yeah.
Declining Reading Rates (43:41)
S: All right, Cara, tell us about declining reading rates.
C: You said that so joyfully does.
E: That mean people are reading more slowly these days.
C: No, unfortunately it does not. Okay, so there was a study that was recently published in an Open Access journal called iscience. These are researchers from London and Florida who wanted to understand a little bit more about trends in the US, specifically with regards to how people are reading for pleasure. And so they asked several questions. It's an interesting study because they were able to use, yes, self report data, but self report data survey self report data from a really large representative sample. So the the kind of larger database is called the American Time Use Survey. And basically from 2003 until 2023 / 10,000 people every year provided nationally representative estimates for their average day across 20 years. So basically they said, you know, this is what I did in this hour. This is what I did in this hour. This is, and So what we're looking at. And, and I think this is important to understand. I didn't quite get this when I was reading some of the coverage of it. You're looking at, at a day just like a, a blip, like in an average day. This is the percentage of people that read for pleasure. You're not looking at these are the percentages of the people who read what they were, you know, when they read. Does that make sense? So we're looking at sort of a cross section of time, 10,000 people, representative sample, meaning it represents the US in terms of age and marital status and race and income level and education. 10,000 people, hopefully representing, you know, the trends of the whole country and they wanted to know a bunch of different things, You know, are people reading on an average day? How much are they reading? You know, where are they reading? Who are they reading with? And yeah, they collected all of that data and then some interesting findings came out. So if I were to ask you on an average day in that survey in 2023, which is the most recent year that they have like whole data for how many people, what percentage of the people in that survey read for pleasure on an average day? Wow.
E: Gee, that's. I don't know. 50%.
C: 50% read for pleasure What do you? What do you? What do you think, Evan?
E: Define pleasure.
C: Oh, I can define pleasure. They called that either. So they actually called it reading for personal interest. Either reading a book, magazine, newspaper, or listening to an audio book, or reading on a Kindle or e-reader, or reading a library book.
E: Oh gosh, I think it's higher than that. It's probably 6765%.
B: I'd say 70%. Does that include reading the news?
E: Yes.
C: Newspaper, book magazine, newspaper. Yeah, yeah.
B: I think it'd be fairly high.
C: 60% what?
E: How? How are we so off on that?
C: 16%.
E: Really. Wow.
US#03: That's great.
C: Red for.
US#03: Pleasure, any of those things.
C: Uh huh. Any of those things for pleasure. Again, for pleasure.
E: That's a shock to the system.
C: Yep.
US#03: I read every of them.
E: I read every day. Yeah, there's.
C: Nothing because we are not the average American and that's something that's really important to understand. So they found that over the course of this 20 year study, decrease in reading engagement declined 3% every year, every year 3% fewer, 3%.
E: Fewer, and they have some theories as to why.
C: So they are, the researchers are very worried, I should say. They did say that the numbers are not kind of even across all demographic groups. Definitely people with higher education and women are more likely to read. White people are also more likely to read, but they are seeing shifts even among those. Now here's something that's interesting of the people who read, the time spent reading has actually increased slightly, but most people don't read. And when you average out the. And this is what I'm still trying to understand. I got to dig a little deeper into how things are worded in here, but the researchers are saying that in 2023, participants spent an average of 16 minutes reading for pleasure on a on a day, but only 16% of participants read for pleasure. So I'm I still can't figure out if that 16 minutes is averaging all the other people who had 0 minutes. Does that make sense?
J: Yeah, I got it.
C: I think it is because they said of the participants, the 16% of participants the average person sent spent an hour and 37 minutes reading. So basically the people who read are really reading. Like I read a book every night before I go to sleep. I also read news articles during the day. How do you guys generally engage with your reading?
S: I generally read throughout the day, mostly articles OK but I do some some like just novel reading in bed at night time usually.
E: I do.
C: So you would say probably like 5 to 15 minutes, but in like little pockets throughout the day. Yeah, OK.
B: Yeah, I listen to audio books whenever I'm driving, so and then the reading though is I don't, I don't consider reading the news pleasure reading in the last half year. It's it's, it's a drudgery that I have to do that, then I can't do anymore. And I then I'll go to like reading about physics and astronomy and stuff like that. Just cheer up and and be and.
C: And truth be told, it's still probably be considered reading for pleasure 'cause nobody's making you read it, you're not doing it for work.
B: I know, but it's not.
C: Pleasurable, yeah. So I, I would say I probably read like a, a couple articles a day, you know, depending on the day, depending on what piques my interest. And then at night, I probably average anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours reading like in bed before I go to sleep, just depending on how early I go to bed. And that's.
E: Do you use a Kindle?
C: No, I use books. Oh yeah. Paper books, Yeah, with a with a little night light thingy. A book lamp, Yeah, but.
J: You know, I read a lot of stuff for work and news during the day and then at night it's all, it's all pleasure reading.
C: You know, I mentioned that these declines at 3% each year over the course of the 20 year study was not equivalent across demographic groups. Black Americans with the lowest education, the lowest income levels and living in outside of cities, so in non metropolitan areas showed the steepest decline in reading. But even across that we're seeing that, yeah, women and those with higher education showed the were more likely to read and were more likely to read more. And so the question is, you know, what is causing this? And, and I've, I've been curious about this too, because I'm not sure if you guys remember kind of a bevy of stories popping up last year, beginning of this year in a lot of long form magazines like The Atlantic. Forbes wrote about it kind of these op eds from college professors being like, I don't know what to do. My students don't read. Like I'm getting these crops of students out of high school who say that they've never read a whole book. Oh my God, Have you guys read any of these articles? There's there's one of the Forbes called Kids Can't read books. There's one in the Atlantic called the Elite College Students who Can't Read Books. And so these are, you know, again, op-ed pieces that are written often by college professors or even some high school students saying like things feel different now. And I don't know if this is, you know, old man, you know, shaking fistic cloud, if every single generation says kids today, kids today or if there's real data behind this because there isn't a lot of good survey data about how often kids read. But we do see anecdotal evidence that that shows, you know, college professor saying that students are coming up to them being like, I'm having a hard time keeping up with your assignments. And when they say, OK, well, how long did it take you to read a book in like your English class in high school? They'll be like, oh, we never read a whole book. We would just read like excerpts.
E: Oh my gosh.
C: Yeah, or like they would assign like a chapter. Oh.
E: God, you used to take classes where you read a book a week for the whole for the whole semester.
C: Yeah. So in one of these articles, that is what they said that they, you know, historically would assign, you know, I don't know, 14 books in a semester. And now it's down to like 6 or 7 because that's all the students can handle. So, so, but there are a lot of factors here. What does that mean? Like what? Like because a lot of these professors and, and scholars were writing about this or like kids can still read, just don't. So what's going on here as.
B: Long as it's not in cursive, they. Can attention span?
C: Okay, so could we chalk it all up to attention span? Do you think that that has? Yeah, I think that's some of the variants for.
E: Sure, a lot of diversions.
C: We do have a lot of diversions, right? A lot of people blame social media diversions. Yeah. They're like, how are you going to read if you can just look at TikTok and you can get some new kind of dopamine hit every two seconds? But also, like there's a survey of seniors in 2023 that said that they spent a self report survey said they were spending just as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they were on academics. Also, there's been a lot of grade inflation. For example, in a recent report, 79% of grades at Harvard were in the age in the A range. Like do you really think 79% of students at Harvard are making A's? Probably not. It should be a normal distribution, right? So a lot. So clearly a lot of college students are, you know, getting by without doing all of their work. Some of these different experts are blaming things like Common Core, they're blaming shifts to global or not global, but national academic standards that have moved away from the more sort of nuanced skills that are gained from reading a book in full and really engaging with the text more towards standardized testing and, you know, hitting certain benchmarks. OK, what what was the, you know, main the thesis statement? What were, you know, three points that you can make from this? Some of those things that you can do without having read the whole book. There's a there's a Ed week Research Center survey that I came across of 303rd to 8th grade educators. Only 17% of them said that they primarily teach whole texts. About 49% said that they combine hold, they combine it with anthologies and excerpts. A lot of teachers are saying that they might, you know, assign a part of, let's say, Homer's Odyssey. They talk about this in the Atlantic article. They would assign a part of Homer's Odyssey, and then they would supplement it with music and articles and Ted talks and different things that aren't just books. But it does seem to be the case that fewer students are reading books in school. And I don't know if that's what's translating then to fewer adults reading. One other part of this study that I didn't mention is that they did look at the the percentage of individuals in the survey who read to children. Let's play guess because this is rough on average. The average across all participants in 2023. Remember this is 10,000 representative sample. How many minutes on average did participants spend reading with children every day?
S: Half an hour.
C: 30 minutes on average these 10,000 participants.
S: That's my guess.
C: What do you guys have?
S: That's probably something like.
E: That 29 minutes.
C: One minute.
E: Yeah, 30.
C: 111 minute one, but that's probably again because for one minute only 2%, yeah, that's the average across all of the participants. So that's because only 2% of participants in the survey read with children.
S: Or the median What's?
C: The median 200, so again only 200, only 2% of the 10,000 read with children. And so of those 200 participants, yeah. So if we just look at the 200 who did read with children, they spent an average of 28 minutes, yeah, doing so. So that's pretty sad because even those who did read with their children were only reading half an hour a day with their children.
J: That's bad.
C: That's really bad. Yeah. And so they also looked at things.
J: Like that's negligence.
C: They looked at things like, are people reading at home? Are they reading outside of the home, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I think those are some of the really, really big takeaways is that just people aren't reading anymore. And this is really disconcerting for, you know, a lot of, like, educators and academic researchers, psychologists, sociologists across the board, because we know that reading and especially reading for pleasure is associated with all sorts of really important skills. So not just direct gains like comprehension skills, vocabulary, logical reasoning, you know, recall, but also things like empathy. It's very hard to cultivate empathy if you can't read a story and see the world through the lens of the characters in the story. And going from the beginning to the middle of the end is also really important. Things like, you know, emotional intelligence, I'm putting that in quotes. But however you want to define that we're not just talking about academic achievement or like gainful employment or career growth, but also, you know, stress reduction, improved sleep, slowing cognitive decline as we get older, literally reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms. Like there are so much literature to show that reading is highly correlated with so many important sort of cognitive, emotional and just like functional skills and it's low barrier to entry. It's inexpensive and we should be increasing access, but not just access, because clearly this probably isn't just an access problem, but excitement and interest in reading as well. So of course, the researchers of this study, they didn't research what's causing it, but they point to a lot of different things, right? Like as we mentioned before, people are distracted, people are on their phones, but that can't be the whole answer. The way that we educate our children has changed over the last 20 years and that might be affecting them. But also, why do we think that people in low income neighborhoods are reading less? Because they probably, it's probably a luxury. They literally can't afford the time to read.
S: They don't have books in.
C: There, they don't have books in the house right there, they're probably not going to the library. And also, when you're working multiple jobs and you literally don't have free time just to make ends meet, you're not going to be reading with your children.
E: Right. Hard to foster.
C: That environment, so these are systemic socio cultural issues as well that we have to address. Reading in in some respects is sort of a luxury or it has become a luxury. But it's so fundamental to I think a healthy functioning society and and just to humanity. And it's, yeah, I think when I came across this, this study and the write ups of this study, it was very, very alarming for me.
S: Yeah, it is a little bit alarming, I do think because you, when you read, I know you can consume information and video and audio format, you know, it's reading isn't the only way to get information, but you definitely engage with the material differently. Absolutely. Read you guys. I think yeah, you get it much more of a deep. I think understanding, you know, it's definitely is more amenable to like doing a deep dive on a topic and really wrapping your head around it rather than just the like, here's the quick.
C: And we, we know that to be true because we, we, we have plenty of evidence that shows that people who read more have higher comprehension skills, right? People who read more can, can, can engage with the text in a deeper way. They can see metaphor in the text. They can, they can then take whatever they learn from the text and apply it to other situations. And yes, as as strange as it may seem, there is a lot of literature showing that reading is directly correlated with improved psychological well-being and increased empathy for others. Wow.
J: That's.
C: Got to be. You got to be able to read stories and think through the lens of the characters in the stories. Yeah, yeah. Such a bummer.
US#03: I agree.
C: Yeah. All right.
US#03: Thanks, Cara. Evan, is this good news?
Most Americans Skeptical of Paranormal (1:00:51)
US#03: Are most Americans skeptical of the paranormal?
E: It sounds like it's good news, right? But maybe we need to define a few things here. In this particular poll, yes, I'm talking about a recently released Gallup poll titled Paranormal Phenomena Met with Skepticism In the United States. 2/3 of Americans are skeptical of paranormal beliefs, and none of the 8 concepts in this particular poll are believed by a majority of people. OK, on the surface that sounds very good, very positive, but we have to delve a little bit deeper into it. As always, here's a little background. It was a nationwide poll conducted from May 1st to May 18th, 2025. Gallup surveyed 1003 adults about 8 paranormal phenomena. And I'm going to go over the eight with you. We have talked quite a bit over the years about polls. They are imperfect, and some are more imperfect than others. And they are not to be mistaken as scientific evidence of anything. They're informative. OK, in a very general sense, you can measure the moods and sort of attitudes of certain groups of people at any given point in time. But it may be the best purpose they serve is to compare trends. In other words, how did people respond to the same poll back in 2001, you know, as compared to now in 2025? I think there's something there worth looking at, but it's not it's not science, OK? You always have to take polls with various grains of salt. But let me start with this. It's the 2025, this recent one, this recent poll. And I'm going to ask you, my fellow rogues, to guess at some of the percentages here, and let's see what you think. Here is how the question was phrased. And these were people who were called by the pollsters. So these respondents were willing to answer their phone. You have to kind of keep that in mind for however that skews The Who these 1003 people are. Karen, there's no way you would have picked up your phone for this. For each of the following items I'm going to read to you, please tell me whether it is something you believe in, something you're not sure about, or something you don't believe in. All right, I am. Here's what I'd like to do with you. I am going to tell you the 8 paranormal subjects and I'd like for you to throw out some guesses as to how many you think believe as a percentage as a believe. Just give me the believe. We'll I'll deal with the don't believe. But for example, one of the categories is witches, witchcraft. What percentage do you think believe? This Is Us, people. 40, 4040.
B: Quarter.
E: Steve's closest 24 percent, 24%. Does that seem high?
B: One in four people believe in effing witches.
E: Let's try reincarnation, the rebirth of a soul in a new body after death.
C: So. Witches was 24, reincarnation is probably higher 30.
E: OK. Anyone else? 4042. It is also 24, same as witches. Let me jump to another one here for you. Psychic or spiritual healing, or the power of the human mind to heal?
C: Them. Oh, that must be much higher. 24 or the power of the human mind. You've got so many people that were sixty. Yeah.
J: I'd be up in like.
E: Not that. But you said it was. The penalty, right? So it's got. A yes, that's right. High 40s. Yeah, high 40s. This is the highest of them, and it was 48 percent, 4848 percent, 48. I'll go down the rest for you. Ghosts, spirits of dead people that come back in certain places and situations, 39%. So yeah 39% Surprise telepathy or communication between minds without using the traditional 5 senses 29%. People can hear from or communicate mentally with someone who has died 27%. There's clairvoyance, the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future, 26%. And finally, astrology 25%.
S: That's still freaking high.
E: Yes, it's. Very, very high. It's way too high if you ask me.
S: Especially all between 1/4 and 1/2. Basically for these various things, it's yeah.
E: Now, Gallup and, and so I'm going to get to the to my point that I brought up in the beginning, Gallup used what they call a cluster analysis to group the same group of 1003 participants by how broadly they believe in the paranormal. Here's what they did, and I have reservations about this, but this is what they did. They took the 1003 respondents and they categorized them into two camps, those who are open to belief and those who are skeptics. So where's the division? How do you divide them? If a respondent answer to in the affirmative to three or more of those 8 categories, they were in the open to belief group. If they answered in the affirmative in two or less than they are in the skeptics group, that's how they, that's how they divided it up. Now I know how I would have divided it up. You know, it would have been zero as skeptics and one or more in the open to belief group. But this is how Gallup did it. So OK, so when you have those two camps, OK, the two or less or the three or more, 2/3 wound up two or less. And if the average was 1, so 66% of these 1003 people, they classify this way as skeptics, and 1/3 of them were open to belief. And the average score there was 5. They averaged believing in five of those things.
S: But of course, to us, if you believe two of those things, you're not a freaking skeptic.
E: Correct, right?
S: They don't mean by what we mean by they're. Relatively speaking, they were.
E: And and I mentioned comparing to prior, they said here and I'll quote interestingly, these results haven't shifted much compared to Gallup data from 2001, for example. So 24 years ago believe that most of these phenomena remains stable, but there are slight declines in belief in psychic healing and and and clairvoyance. Those had a six point drop and there was a 7 point decrease in telepathy, but all the other five categories remained about the same within a point. So when you read a headline from a from a polling place, and I'm not, you know, Gallup does good polling on a lot of a lot of things, but you the reminder here is take these poles with grains of salt, people, please. When you read the headline, paranormal phenomenon met with skepticism in the US. Yes, in a certain sense, but in, in I think in reality, no, I, I don't think that there is much I didn't get how many of these respondents said zero. I think it was 10%. No, 10% believe one of them, but they didn't give me a number for how many believed in 0. So it must have been less than 10%. That's crazy and that's alarming to me. That's 90% or more believe in at least one of those things which are. Obviously, yeah.
C: But but I think that sometimes my my gripe with Gallup is how they word questions. And I feel like including in that the power of the mind to heal, you're going to get a bunch of people who aren't necessarily pseudo scientific. They're just more like, yeah, yeah, exactly. They're going to read that.
S: Sure, it's not necessarily paranormal.
C: Yeah.
E: Right, right.
C: For sure. And that's why I, I think those cut offs are interesting. I mean maybe, maybe their cut off should have been 1, not 2. Sometimes when you do cluster analysis, you actually look at natural breaks in in the data and they may have seen that like you know people, people clustered around 3 plus and people clustered around 2 minus and they were able to say these look like 2 distinct groups.
S: And witches could be Wickens.
C: Yeah, yeah, they could be people who identify who like I am a witch, this is my religion.
E: Or I, I don't know if, you know, Satan specifically wasn't brought up there, but I don't know if somebody would consider that witchery. Yeah, I don't know, but maybe.
S: All right, so basically things haven't changed you're.
E: Right. So wait, but wait a minute. I thought we were making a difference, damn it.
S: Well, it would be worse if it weren't for us. Haven't.
E: You said there.
C: Were fewer people who believe in clairvoyance? That's good, yeah.
E: There are, yes, some of the a couple of these trends did go down by six to seven points, three of them.
S: All right, Bob.
Quantum Alternative to GPS (1:09:41)
E: Yes, Sir.
S: You're going to tell us about a quantum alternative to GPS, but I thought that GPS was quantum.
B: But not in the way that you think. OK, well, let's see. Let's see if you have any questions. So you guys remember X37-B, That's the uncrewed. That's the uncrewed US Space Force space plane.
E: Yeah, nobody is supposed to talk about it.
B: It's done many mysterious classified missions around the Earth, and if previous trends continue, I suspect that the X37-B will be renamed something like Super Ultra Space Jet. Much better than Elons, believe me so. But we shall see. We shall see what happens. Probably far worse than that. The space plane was recently launched and 1 mission it has that we know about is testing a new quantum inertial sensing system. This is an alternative to GPS and it's the first time such a system has been deployed in space. Now inertial navigation describes it's essentially an internal system that can track your changing location without using external references such as GPS. Right? It's pretty much all inward looking and calculating and not outward. So GPS, GPS is great. I don't know what the hell we did before. I do know what we did before that and it was annoying and I never want to do it again. So I'd love GPS but it doesn't work everywhere. Places that will never probably be like deep space is 1 and underwater as well. But also there's certain environments that that are described as GPS denied, but they include some obvious ones. Underground tunnels, right? Dense forests and what was the other one? Urban canyons with tall buildings. So those can also be GPS denied. So. So not only does GPS network everywhere, there's also ways to compromise it, to spoof it, to jam it or just disable just conventional GPS signals. So being able to navigate without relying on these external GPS navigation signals, it can be critical in various scenarios, as you might imagine, such as conflicts, battles. So yeah, you could see how, yeah, we need to get away or we need a way to rely on something that just can't be messed with that's better than GPS in various scenarios. So now we do have conventional inertial navigation and I talked about 1 system that was pretty slick. That was many years ago. I couldn't find the episode. But so this is conventional inertial navigation and it relies on things like gyroscopes and accelerometers to accurately track on board how fast you're going and in which direction, right? So if you start in a known location and it's tracking you with the accelerometer and gyroscopes where you know where you're going and how fast it could then just build up and calculate exactly you know where, where you are in relation to like a, a map. That's that it has on board. But, but these, these suffer from things like air drift where you become increasingly farther away from where you think you are right. So that just builds up over time. Now this, this new quantum system offers orders of magnitude better accuracy and stability thanks to atom interferometry. So this takes advantage of the wave nature of atoms. Look it up if you're not too familiar with it. It's, it's fascinating. It's like the magic, one of the magical things of the universe that's just so fascinating and counterintuitive and weird. So atoms are, in this scenario, atoms are cooled down to millionths of a degree above absolute 0 so that their wave properties can be manipulated with with very high precision. OK, so my laser pulse then is able to put each atom into a superposition of two paths at the same time. And there's many ways to you can look at this or describe the scenario. Another way to describe this is to say that the laser splits the wave function of the atom. So one part goes down one path and the other part of the wave function goes down another, the other path. So that's another way. So, so it's pretty complicated. So as you might imagine, when these split paths recombine, an interference pattern is created and that actually this interference pattern contains exquisitely detailed information about how they had moved. Any small acceleration or rotation taken by these atoms will shift the relative phase of these two matter waves. So this is the this is the quantum equivalent of bulky physical accelerometers and gyroscopes that are used in conventional inertial navigation. Otherwise it's very similar. Tracking your, tracking your movement and speed direction, all that. So the results with quantum inertial sensing though have a three fold advantage to the non quantum version though one is stability. Stability is much greater with the quantum system because they don't have to. They don't have the material imperfections that are inherent with any, any mechanical, any bulk mechanical or optical gyroscope. They they have these material imperfections that that are going to impact the results one way or the other. So another advantage to the system is accuracy. It's much greater because any errors will grow much more slowly using this quantum system. So for example, the old, the old and non quantum inertial navigation or sensing system could wander off course by miles in a single day. These quantum versions, however, could potentially stay locked within a few meters for days or even weeks. So that's just tremendous. I mean, comparing a many miles in the course of a single day being off to a few meters in error, that stays consistent, you know, for like days or even weeks. Incredible increase in accuracy. The final important advantage here is resilience, right? We we kind of cover this. The resilience is much higher for this quantum inertial sensing because they can't be jammed, they can't be spoofed or shuffle, suffer from any type of signal loss that would plague, you know, that would plague systems that rely on GPS because this is all internal. So, OK, in a sense, this new system is kind of like LIGO for atoms, you could say. So instead of light waves interacting with each other, we have matter waves interfering, creating an amazingly sensitive motion detector. And I can't help by thinking, you know, what other uses we might we could make out of this type of technology. So stay tuned.
S: So this is not, you know, being deployed yet. This this is.
B: This is tested, this tested on the Super Super Ultra space jet. It's being tested in on that mission. And so, yeah, so probably won't. I don't know how much we're going to hear. We, we know about it now because though it's not too classified, but so maybe we'll hear some, some if it if it was successful or not. So interesting stuff. I remember covering the Inertial guide guidance system years ago and it was fairly sensitive, but this just looks far, far superior.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:16:17)
S: Jay, it, who's that noisy time?
J: All right guys, last week I played this noisy. Seemingly going on forever.
E: Yeah, as long. As well as long as Will Robinson's OK, I think in good shape here.
J: Well, OK, so let's get right into this. So Michael Blaney wrote in Hi, Jay. It's got to be a bird of some kind. So I'll right out of the gate, I'll say, yeah, I mean, there's there's a lot of evidence there that it's a bird, he said. I noticed Steve stayed quiet for it. So maybe. So I'm going to guess it's the show Bill. They make some weird ass noises. Michael. You know my response to that is I would imagine that a lot of birds make the noise I just played. But I think this is a common sound that this bird makes. So you are not correct with the bird that I selected. But you know, if you could play me an audio of that type of bird making that noise, I'll still give you 1 SDU point listener named Montgomery. You wrote in and said hi Jay. This sounds like the pengu from the popular kids show of the same name. No way PENGU. Absolutely love the work you all do and hope semi retirement treat Steve well. Have any of you guys seen the Peg goo show?
E: Yes.
J: Does it make that noise? A listener named Craig Messerman said. Jay this week's Who's that noise? He sounds like the alarm on the self driving floor cleaner at my local Winco when it runs over an old lady. Oh my God, I didn't actually read that.
E: What? He says.
J: Not the last part. OK, so the floor clean.
E: Exactly the.
J: Floor the the alarm that the four self driving floor cleaner makes at the local Winco. So there is a robot at my local stop and shop.
E: Yeah, I've seen them as well.
J: And you know the thing like they put googly as googly eyes on it as if that's enough. And I'm just like, no, this thing should be making noises. It should. It should be like an R2. D2 type whistling a tune.
E: Or something. Yeah.
J: Anything that'd be kind of fun. It's like whistles a little bit.
B: I could beat that. I've got in my local big Yi bring mom there quite often. They have a like a kind of like a robotic floor cleaner. And as of last week, there's somebody clearly at this Big Y that is awesome because they put a skeleton riding it and it was. I love it. That is fantastic.
J: That's the kind of creativity we need in this world.
B: Yes.
J: Evil, I wrote in again. And evil I said. I want to say a white bell bird, but Steve will know that's wrong. But that's my guess. Apparently, Steve, they think, apparently they think that you are a bird whisperer and you know it all.
C: Apparently.
J: All right. So I was not sure that someone was going to guess correctly and nobody did guess correctly. That's two weeks in a row, which means I need to loosen the belt a little bit and I will try to pick something a little bit more identifiable. So what this is, is this is First off, this was sent in by a listener, an 8 year old listener named Victoria. One of Victoria's parents sent it in. She recorded it herself and she made sure that they remembered what it was exactly, including a photo. So thank you very much. Wonderful, noisy. Good job sending that in Victoria. And if you hear any other cool stuff, send that to me again, please. So nobody won because it's a little hard. So what is it guys? You have any?
C: Victoria from.
J: I will tell you she's from Australia.
E: Oh, Vic.
C: Cassowary.
J: The person who sent it in said good luck saying my name and their the parents name is Gabor Fogorashi.
C: Probably Gabor.
J: GHABOR so if I if I was correct or incorrect e-mail me and let me know. I have no shame at all in mispronouncing things, it's just part of who I am. This is called a glossy black cockatoo. They are very cockatoo ish but they're glossy and black and that's why they named it that.
C: Oh, they're beautiful.
E: Yeah, many birds make that kind of repeating tone.
J: Yeah, that that's the kind of noise that you would think, like the animal Kingdom would just kill whatever animal's doing it. You know what I mean, right?
E: Smack it like an alarm clock.
J: You know, there's just nothing pleasant about that.
C: That much selective pressure. Look at those red tail feathers.
J: Yeah, it's a cool bird. I have a new noisy though. But before I play the new noisy, I'd like to play you something else. And this was sent then by a listener named Dustin Edwards.
E: We're talking about it like to heat. Babble, Babble, banana, Babble, Babble, Babble, banana, blah blah blah.
S: Banana me, banana, banana me. That's me.
J: Steve said. All those things.
E: Wow. Well, clearly.
S: I was talking about communicating with animals, right?
J: I don't quite remember, but The thing is that this person mashed you up, Steve, and it's very funny. I. Love that type.
E: We need more mashes.
J: Remember, somebody was doing that for a little while. They were sending in mashups of us saying all sorts of.
E: Different. Great.
J: Yeah, yeah, they're always funny. It's really like a a comedy prone thing to do. I think it's it's very hard.
E: Contest.
J: All right, so this particular noisy I'm about to play you was sent in by Daniel Burliner. I believe that a lot of you will recognize something in this noisy, but I need you to give me the answer in a very specific way. OK, that is this week's noisy. Be specific. You can send me your answers to WTN at theskepticsguide.org. We are currently in full swing producing our new political podcast called Political Reality. It is going really well. We had a, we did a test recording and I'm bringing in all the assets now, like all the all the creative stuff that needs to be put in place in order to, to begin building it out. I have, I have a very strong feeling that this is going to be a a lot of well loved podcast. I hope it is, of course, yeah. But if you want to to help the SDU do projects like this and also other projects that we we have in the queue that are that will be coming at some point down the road. And if you support the work that we do, then please consider becoming a patron of ours. You can go to patreon.com/skeptics guide. This is a good time to do it because we have a lot of stuff queued up and our bandwidth is partially dictated by the cash flow that we have. So please consider that you could join our mailing list. I've told you guys many times what it is. If you're interested, go to theskepticsguy.org and there's a link on there for you to sign up. We're going to Kansas, guys. September 20th. We'll be doing two different SGU shows. One of them will be a live podcast recording and the other one will be our stage show with George Hobb that is called the Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. It's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen us do it, I highly suggest you come out and check it out. We've been refining that show for a long time and we have a great time doing it and the audience always is enjoying it, so please join us on that.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay.
From TikTok: Question #1: Mammograms Not Banned in Switzerland (1:23:23)
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6boH6KC/
S: One really quick from TikTok. We talked about a lot of nonsense today on TikTok, but there was one we didn't get to. In this video, the woman is claiming that finally Switzerland bans mammograms, right? Because mammograms are horrible and they cause breast cancer. What I was basically the I have.
C: The mammogram tomorrow. Why didn't anyone tell?
S: Me so you should keep your. Appointment for your. So that's an urban legend. That's a myth that's been going around for years now. There was a committee who made recommendations to scale back the screening for mammogram. So this is not mammograms themselves. But should we routinely screen people with mammograms versus individual women, women needing to be referred by their physician to get a mammogram? And the committee recommended scaling back the automatic screening, but not because of the risks of mammogram, not because of what this person was saying, but because of. And we had this debate in the United States around the same time as well, because of the risk of false positives, because if you get a false positive, it causes a lot of stress. It may, it leads to further testing. It may need to lead to unnecessary procedures. And if you routinely screen a low risk population, you get more false positives than true positives. And so it's all a risk versus benefit calculation. That's what was going on. But that got misconstrued by losers on the Internet as they banned mammograms in Switzerland. Interestingly, they didn't even the government didn't even accept the recommendation. They didn't make the changes they recommended. They kept them because there was an outrage by, you know, the experts who were like saying this is not the what's best for women. The risk versus benefit favors routine screening at a certain age or at a certain risk. And basically came to the same conclusion in most other countries as well that, yes, we have to consider the risks of false positives. But all things considered, once you get to a certain age, the benefits of mammograms outweigh the risks. Mammograms are actually extremely safe. They may be uncomfortable, but they're they use very, very low amounts of radiation and they're very important for for early detection of breast cancer. They have a massive positive benefit on the outcomes because of early detection. And the the benefits are definitely worth the tiny risk of the small amount of radiation you get. So this person was talking out their ass. Basically, they had no idea what they were talking about. They were just, you know, relaying an urban legend and then thinking they're smarter than all the world's physicians. Just the this, there's this subculture on TikTok that just thinks all doctors are evil. It's childish. It's really childish. It's tinfoil hat conspiracy level nonsense. But they get a lot of, they get a lot of playtime, unfortunately, just really. Crazy.
C: Steve, can I ask you a question about mammography that you may not know the answer to?
S: Sure.
C: So are ultrasounds just as safe?
S: So they are, yeah, their ultrasounds are extremely safe. I don't know. I don't think they're as sensitive. I don't think they're as good in terms of their ability to detect subtle early breast cancer.
C: But oh interesting because ultrasounds are where they send you after they see something on mammogram.
S: Well, if they see a cyst, then they want to know. Yeah, ultrasound gives them more information and so it's not really used for.
C: Screening baseline so.
S: Like she was saying do that instead or somebody in the comments was saying that's like that's not an instead thing. It doesn't have serve the same purpose. That's how you explore.
C: Once you already have no.
S: Lesion to see yeah is you know, what's the, what is the composition of that?
B: I had an ultrasound, yeah.
C: To well, I think that's why I was asking because you know, when like when I had my very, the baseline mammogram, at least as was explained to me both by my physician and my, the mammographer, was that they need to make sure that it's like the best imagery they have because it's going to be what they compare everything to in the future. And so it's not uncommon to have to go back and get a second imaging done in, in my case, you know, I have dense breast tissue. So I had one little spot where if they like squeezed it just the right way, it would disappear. And so it what it turns out to be is just dense tissue on top of dense tissue. And that lit up on the mammogram. So they re mammogrammed me. They figured that out. I got an ultrasound. They said, OK, it's not there, good, you're good. But still in six months, let's do another mammogram just to make sure. And I was like, in my mind, of course, after all the smashing of the boobs, I was like, can't we just get an ultrasound? It's so much less painful.
S: Yeah, they're just not, they're complementary, right, Right. It doesn't replace it. That's for looking at that shadow. Is that cystic or what's what is again, what's the density of it versus looking at everything to see is there any trouble?
C: Yeah, whereas the mammogram gives you the whole breast from multiple angles and they can. Yeah, exactly. That makes.
E: Sense and how often is the recommended?
C: Yeah, I don't know, but we start it.
S: For and and family risk, yeah, 44 that's that was the Contras. Was it 40? Is it 45? Is it 50? You know there's no right?
C: No, there's not. But we, we know that I, I see, you know, I work in a Cancer Center. I see patients all the time who get breast cancer at 35, at 30, yeah, 28. You know, it happens. So absolutely.
S: All right, guys, let's move on to science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:28:40)
Theme: Everyday Chemistry
Item #1: Microwave ovens heat food unevenly partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots.[6]
Item #2: Rusting is an electrochemical process, with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode.[7]
Item #3: The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread (prior to cooling) are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread (prior to cooling) are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. |
| Science | Microwave ovens heat food unevenly partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. |
| Science | Rusting is an electrochemical process, with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Evan | The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread (prior to cooling) are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. |
Bob | Rusting is an electrochemical process, with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode. |
Cara | The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread (prior to cooling) are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. |
Jay | The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread (prior to cooling) are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. |
Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is Everyday Chemistry.
C: Okay.
S: Things in your life that you may not know some subtlety about in terms of how they work. All right, here we go. Item number one. Microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. All right #2 Rusting is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode And eye #3 The gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread prior to cooling are about 80% Co 2 and 20% oxygen. Evan, go first.
E: Microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. Standing waves? Hmm. Jeez, I probably should have concentrated more on.
S: That particular one, a standing wave is a wave that doesn't move, right. So have you ever taken a like if you have a rope, two people are holding a rope and you get it going like vibrating at a certain frequency, you know where the waves are just going up and down, but there's not waves propagating up and down along the string. That's a standing wave. That's so it's basically you have, yeah, just waves that are sort of fixed in position, they're not propagating.
E: Well, then this would make sense then if it because you would have high, you would have spottiness to something like that. You would have you would have a high energy spot versus a low energy spot. So I don't see a problem with that particular one. Moving on to rusting, it is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron. Wow, really including an anode and a cathode? Hadn't heard about that before. What was rusting? Rusting is what the oxidation and when it reacts with oxygen but and there's water forms the rust. But is this actually, I don't know about this one. This one's a little new to me, that description. I'll go to the third one about the gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread. OJ is going to have an advantage. Here are about 80% Co 2 and 20% oxygen. Well I'll I guess I'll say the rusting 1 is the fiction. I never heard it described before as a little battery forming on the surface of iron. Is that right? Would that be right for water and and oxidation? Yeah, I'll I have to guess at one of them. So I'll say the Rusting 1 is fiction. OK, Bob.
B: Yeah, microwaves heat unevenly. Yeah, I mean the microwaves are bouncing around, interfering. I think that interference is what what would be causing these standing waves. So yeah, that makes sense to me. The third one, also these gases inside baking bread. I really wish Jay went before us, but but it kind of makes sense. I don't know how that how that works. That seems reasonable. I really can't comment on that too well. And then we've got the yeah, the rusting. I think I'm going to agree with Evan here. It could. Yeah. I don't know enough about the, the, the process that to count, to discount this possibility that it's really an electrochemical process. I mean, interesting, but I just can't not sure. So I'll say that one's fiction. Maybe roll the dice here. Oh, wait, I've got my coin. I've got my coin.
E: Yeah, flip it.
B: Yep #2 fiction.
E: Perfect. All right, Karen. The coin. The coin never lies by the.
C: Way I feel like they're all science, like these all feel like they would be science and there's like little details in each of them that you could be getting us on. So you did say, yeah, partly because they produce standing waves. So I don't think you're getting us on the fact that it's like fully responsible. And I kind of agree with with Bob about the idea that like the waves are sort of like bouncing off of like all the shielding and stuff in the microwave. So yeah, we all, we all know that microwaves have hotspots and stuff. Isn't that why they have like turntables in them? So that would make sense. I do think rust is electrochemical. I think that's interesting to describe it as a battery, but that would make sense, right, With an anode and a cathode. And then I do think that the gas is inside bread like you mean like the little that make the little holes in bread are about 80 per. I mean, I do think they're mostly carbon dioxide, right? Because this is yeast, it's an anaerobic process that by yeast, yeast respire via fermentation, which is going to give off a lot of carbon dioxide. I think maybe that one is the only one with enough specific details that maybe it's not 80% carbon dioxide and 20% oxygen. Maybe it's like a different concentration. So I don't know. I'll say the the Bred 1 is the fiction.
S: OK. And Jay?
J: This is my Slumdog Millionaire version of science fiction.
S: Yeah, OK.
J: Microwave ovens, of course, heat food unevenly. Anybody that's used one will know, right? You guys know that, right? I do and I happen to know why because if I'm remembering correctly, it's not, I don't think it's the, I don't think it's the shape of the inside of the microwave or anything. I think the actual waves affect each other and there's like high and low energy spots in a microwave. Oh, I know why I know this because I, I watched the guy remove the, what do you call it? The, the thing in the microwave that makes the microwaves A diode. What is that thing called? There's a, There's a.
S: Component inside this is the microwaves.
J: Yeah, that's what we call it, yeah.
E: The microwave. Generator.
J: Yeah. So it had to be. From to high school or something? Yeah. So that's, that's pretty straightforward. Yeah. We know that there's cold, cold in hot spots and, and it's there's some type of interference going on. This one about rusting. It's a it's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of weird to say it's a battery, but I mean, there, there is, it is an electrochemical reaction. That's what I know. So it fits the bill, but I mean, obviously I know the answer to this last one here. And how much detail do you want, Steve? Just.
S: Give me. Give me the bottom line.
J: So there's a, there's a few things that are happening here, but the vast majority of the gas is carbon dioxide and that is of course essentially excreted by the yeast who are in hyper, hyper eating production. You know what I mean? Like when that they get into the oven, the temperature change, you know, yeasts are like literally connected directly to temperature as far as their metabolism goes. So when the heat goes up, the yeast go berserk. And that's where you get oven rise from like the, the oven spring where the, the dough goes from a, a small state to a larger state because it's all has to do with CO2 gas production. There's a, there's some nitrogen in the mix. It's inherent in there. It's just there's this nitrogen in, in the stuff that dough is made out of and the other, the other big player in there, you know, not it depends on the type of bread. You know, hydration level of the bread is, is important here with this, but the water also instantly vaporizes pretty fast, right? And that water steams out of the bread. And actually, if you're using a Dutch oven, which is an enclosed space, it steams the outside of the bread, which has a chemical reaction on the outside of the bread, which is where you get a caramelized crust effect. But oxygen is like, I would say oxygen is so unbelievably insignificant that we shouldn't even be talking about it. It's not a player at all. Doesn't come into play at all.
S: OK, so you guys are split between 2:00 and 3:00, so we'll start with one. Microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. You all think this one is science. Now, clearly microwaves heat food unevenly. We all know that. We've been using them our entire life. That's not the part that's critical here. The question is, is it partly because of the standing waves? There's lots of other reasons why microwaves heat food unevenly. The heat from the outside in right is one part. But also, you know how microwaves heat food, right?
J: They vibrate the water. Vibrate the water.
S: They directly vibrate the water molecules, so food has different concentrations of water in it. Even the same food will have different concentrations throughout, so parts with a lot of water will heat up much more quickly than parts with less water.
J: Oh God. Like I was heating up. I was heating up chicken pot pie and every little piece of it. Like the crust versus the chicken versus the peas. All different.
C: Yeah, all different, yeah. And that happens with lasagna too, where like the cheese is like super melty and then like the meat part's still cold.
E: Yeah. Like oh so the standing way, so.
J: Cara, I love you a little bit more because you just said that.
C: It's annoying though, isn't it, Jay?
J: But this one, you gotta let it sit for about 10 minutes after you.
E: You're supposed to open and stir halfway.
C: And stir your lasagna. What are you?
J: No, you can't. You just eat it till it melts your mouth. You.
S: Know this one is science because it is also partly because of the standing waves. Yeah, that's why Carrier 100% correct. That's why it has the little spinny. Thing I said. It spins around, so it's moving through different parts of the of those standing waves. Yeah, because there are hot and cold spots just in the microwaves themselves. Plus there's the water factor, plus there's the outside in factor and blah blah, blah.
J: So how much could that possibly factor the outside in? Like where? Are you talking about like it only the penetrates cut?
S: An inch and 1/2 or two inches. So anything bigger than that, it's only heating through convection, ever conduction. So you know what I'm saying? It's not penetrating. And that's why you, it's always better to cut things up, not have a big chunk of something in the microwave. Oh yeah, does not penetrate that far.
J: Classic. Move. Yeah, well, you got you want a microwave ideally that has a spinning plate inside to to move through all the.
S: But the spinning is because of the standing. Waves.
C: Chopping it up is.
S: Because it doesn't penetrate that far and you have to stir it up in your part way through. I usually will do it like twice when I'm heating something just to to help even out the distribution of heat.
J: Yeah, right.
S: OK, let's go on to #2 Rusting is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode. Bob and Evan, you think this one is fiction? Cara and Jay, you think this one is science and this one is science? Yeah, this is cool. So, yeah, I know. Yeah, of course we know, basically know that rust is iron is combining with oxygen. But is it just a chemical reaction? Is just the iron binding with the with the oxygen? Or is it, as you know, discussed here, an electrochemical process? And it turns out that it is and it does. There is a little battery that forms because you have a, you know, an anode and a cathode with. You know, electrons travelling from one thing to the next and that's ultimately leads to the iron binding with the oxygen and and forming the rust and that's corrosion, right? So corrosion is like an electrochemical process and water makes it go faster. And salt water, the salt water acts as like a catalyst that makes it go really fast. That's why salt water really results in rust. All right, that means that the gases inside bubbles are freshly baked bread prior to cooling are about 80% Co 2 and 20% oxygen is the fiction and Jay knew all the details. So it is I have more. Well, let me give you a quick summary and if you want to add anything, you can add it because you gave a pretty good description. So it's mostly CO2. And then the second biggest contributing factor is what nitrogen? No, it's water vapor.
J: Nitrogen, no, but you can't say that yes. I'll tell you why. Because water, the water vapor depends on like some. Some doughs are super high hydration and some are very low hydration.
S: But but nitrogen is so small that it's always going to be less than the water vapor. It's CO2 first, water vapor 2nd, and then a trace of nitrogen. The nitrogen's there because there are bubbles pre-existing in the dough. That's just air. It's oxygen and nitrogen.
J: There's no I don't think you're right. I. Don't think you're right.
S: Because there's no oxygen, because it gets used up, right, It gets metabolized, so there's almost no oxygen there. Again, this is right when it's done baking, but prior to cooling. Once the bread cools, what's in those air bubbles? I mean the air I would. It's air. It just gets eventually gets replaced with room air because it's, it's not airtight, you know, it's porous, the CO2.
B: Got it right because I because Steve said that. What's in the air bubbles? Got to be air right?
J: So an. Interesting thing here about that air is that the lack of oxygen in in the in the baked bread actually helps it last longer because the you, you know, without oxygen, the the microorganisms, oxidation isn't happening. That's why it's good. You definitely want to cool your loaf and everything, but like, don't just leave it out. If you leave it out it's going to obviously get stale. You could put it in a refrigerator or I freeze. I make 2 loaves. I never make one loaf anymore. It's always two or more and then I'll freeze them.
S: Which is fine, it's almost just you freeze it airtight otherwise it gets freezer burned. I'd like that expression. Cool your loaf.
J: But you know, and the, and you know, if you just, if you guys are anybody listening to this or remotely curious, yeast are unbelievable. These particular types of use that we we use, they are unbelievable little machines. You know, they, they have different, they can metabolize an oxygen environment. They can metabolize in a in a zero oxygen environment. They make, you know, they make CO2, they make ethanol. Like these are magnificent little creatures that that do so much. It's, it's really cool. Like, you know, I, when I first started baking bread, it was just like, yeah, you put it in the oven, you pull it out, it tastes good. It's like knowing the chemistry behind it has made me absolutely fascinated with what's going on. It's just a really cool chemical process that's happening.
S: So once I didn't know Jay, until I was researching this piece. Is that before you that final bake? The CO2 is largely dissolved in the dough just like the water is. And when you heat it, the CO2 comes out of that, you know, dissolved form into the gaseous form.
J: And also, like I said, don't forget that the yeast are are cranking out more at the end. They're going berserk and they're producing a ton of CO2. And that's where the oven rise. You know, that's where they, they call it oven spring. Yeah.
S: But the part of the oven spring, look this up yourself because this is what I was reading. Part of the oven spring, and that's the exact term they used. Is CO2 already in the dough from the yeast metabolizing up to that point just coming in, it expands. Coming into a gas. Yeah, it expands.
J: There.
C: Must be a certain point though, right? Where the yeast just die because it's too hot They. Do they die?
J: They die at about. I think it's 120 plus.
C: Degrees and then they just, there's no more all the CO2 that's there is there.
S: Yeah.
C: But it's.
S: Yeah, it should be enough that that's the idea.
J: Well, keep. This in mind, they're eating the dough, right? They're eating the water and the and the flour and the sugars. So, you know, there's plenty of food for them to eat. So it's not that it's not the lack of food anymore. It's a lack of, it's a lack of they can't live in the temperature anymore. So they're, they're all, they all die for a good damn.
C: Cause thank you yeast.
J: Now before we move on, yes Cara, you freaking amaze me.
S: How she backs into the right answer every.
C: Week right? Just so always right for the wrong reason.
J: Always paying attention to you guys and what where you go. It's really fascinating to me to like just hear you guys, you know, figure it out, right the carrot, like your instincts are fantastic.
S: You have really good, you have very good instincts.
J: But you're educated enough too where you're making really good assumptions and things like that, like you had no business getting this.
C: One right, but sometimes I really didn't well, if I might I, I, I did teach bio lab for many years and that's and and taught about respiration. But yeah, sometimes I think a little bit of knowledge really screws you in science. Or can.
J: Yeah, yeah, but you do so well, and we talk about you behind your back. You know, particularly Bob and I were always like, how the hell Cara's just got like this? You have like a a confluence of knowledge bases that make you really good at science.
C: You want to know what it is, Jay? I'm going to do a throwback reading. Yeah, of.
J: Course, of course it is. And I, I want to say one other thing too. Today on the live stream, we were talking about like how people, most people don't have expertise in anything, right?
S: Or you have it in one thing, but you don't have it in most things.
J: Of course, yeah, the vast majority of knowledge out there, you don't know anything about it. And I, I'm proud of myself for sticking with this hobby for as long as I have and, and really, absolutely falling head over heels in love with, with bread and the bread making process and all that stuff. And I do feel like I'm entering a zone where I have a little bit of like, all right, I know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean? It feels good. It's empowering. I feel like I want to share my knowledge and teach people and, you know, tell people how cool it is and everything. So I highly recommend, pick something in your life and get really good at it. Get really good, understand it upside down and back.
S: Yeah, I I tend to look at knowledge as a pyramid. Doesn't have to be a single peaked pyramid, but like get really really good at one thing, but get somewhat good at a moderate amount.
C: Of things.
S: And re end baseline good at a lot of things because there's a steep. Everything has a steep learning curve at first. Just get over that initial steep learning curve and you like get 90% of the way there. You're not an expert or anything, but you know enough to know that all the things that most people think about that topic are wrong. Yeah, you learn about all the myths and misconceptions and all the fact that TV completely misrepresents it. You get that in that first initial steep learning curve. So just be curious about as many things as you can.
C: It's also the same with skills like you don't have to be amazing it so you have to be good enough and you'll be able to do a lot in this world. Like I think we've talked about this and I'm going to say a word that's going to make all of you say a word after. So I'm just going to do it. So when I do my knitting, whenever I am knitting, I all I know how to make is a scarf. I know conceptually how to increase and decrease stitches and how to cable knit and how to do all these cool things. I don't want to practice it enough to get good at it, but I'm good enough to just make a scarf and that pleases me. That's all I need to be able to make in this life.
S: Yeah, I'm, I'm currently doing a deep dive on bamboo because I have a stand of bamboo in my backyard and I had to cut some of it down. I'm like, I'm going to do something with this bamboo. So I just finished building a segment of fence out of it.
C: Oh cool.
S: And now when my when my current crop of bamboo has has dried out enough, I'm going to start heat treating it. That's I'm going to level up to the heat treat skill and just do cool stuff with it because why not?
C: Love that.
S: Yeah, it's fun. All right. Embrace the analog world. We can't live our lives in the digital world.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:48:42)
"However profoundly we may penetrate the depths of space, there still remain innumerable systems, compared with which, those which seem so mighty to us must dwindle into insignificance, or even become invisible.."
– Mary Somerville, (description of author)
S: Evan, give us a quote.
E: I should have gone against the grain. Nice. Thanks, Bob. See. Get good at one thing. However profoundly we may penetrate the depths of space, there still remain innumerable systems compared with which those which seem so mighty to us must dwindle into insignificance or even become invisible. And that was written by Mary Somerville. This quote was suggested by a listener named PK who actually wrote us back in 2022 with this quote. And PK says maybe you've covered Somerville before. She was a brilliant scientific mind for whom the term scientist was literally coined since man of science didn't include.
S: Her there was man of scientist before her, that is. Awesome.
C: That's weird. Fascinating, isn't that?
S: Yeah, it's awesome in a very disturbing way, you know, But yeah, it.
C: Is for her it was only men of science.
E: She lived, but she was born in 1780, died 1872, was a Scottish scientist, writer and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and in 1835 she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
C: Nice. Very.
S: Cool. A polymath. See, that's what we're talking.
C: About Yeah, we were, yeah.
S: Be really good at one thing, but also be a polymath about a lot of things.
E: There you go.
S: All right. Thank you, Evan, and thank all of you for joining me this week.
C: Thanks, Steve, of course.
E: Steve. Here, man.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ theness.com: Brightest Fast Radio Burst Discovered - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ link.springer.com: Food waste to biochar; a potential sustainable solution for Australia: a comprehensive review
- ↑ cosmosmagazine.com: Reading for leisure rates decline in US
- ↑ news.gallup.com: Paranormal Phenomena Met With Skepticism in U.S.
- ↑ theconversation.com: Quantum alternative to GPS navigation will be tested on US military spaceplane
- ↑ www.comsol.com: Why Does a Microwave Heat Food Unevenly?
- ↑ hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Chemical/corrosion.html
- ↑ modernistcuisine.com: The Science Behind Each Stage of the Bread-Making Process - Modernist Cuisine