SGU Episode 1053
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| SGU Episode 1053 |
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| September 13th 2025 |
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"Exploring the intricate details of microstructures through advanced imaging techniques." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"The word is mightier than the sword." |
Ahiqar, the Assyrian Sage, from the folklore titled The Story of Ahiqar, (earliest written version in the 5th century BCE) |
| 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 Guy to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 10th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy Jane Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
S: So did you guys hear the announcement today from NASA about a possible bio signatures on Mars?
B: Yeah, I did. And I'm cautiously whatever. Yeah.
E: Well, I think it builds more evidence in the correct direction, saying that there was once life on Mars.
S: Yes, it's a candidate, you know what I mean? It's not confirmation. So they found basically they found speckles, you know, like these are visible, like naked eye visible with the camera from Perseverance, You know, they found rocks that have deposits which on Earth can be created with microbes.
B: Yeah. So, yeah, there's two minerals that they found, one's associated with decaying organic matter and the other one is created by microbes on Earth. But of course, these minerals can be generated abiotically. So don't get really excited at all really about this, but you would need high temperatures and acidic conditions to create these on Earth. So the most important but here is that there is no evidence currently for any high temperatures or acidic conditions in this area. So what, what, what they've basically done is that they've reduced the non biological origin probability a little bit, but you it's you can't rule it out yet. More studying to be done. And it's, I think chances are it's a biotic and you know, it was created, you know, either at low temperature, you know, low temperature, which we're not sure how that would, if, how possible that is in that area, but it's probably the, you know.
S: But here's probably the the bigger point, Bob, is we can't really know for sure unless we get them in an Earth lab. Yeah, we got to retrieve, got to retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth before we could resolve that question.
E: Had they cut funding in order for that program to retrieve the vials?
J: No.
E: That was Jay. Jay, did you? Did you? Talk about that on a prior news item.
J: Oh yeah, That was like scrapped. And then there was like talk about trying a different way to do it and.
S: So. So NASA's Mars Sample return mission has faced significant funding cuts and potential cancellation.
E: Oh my. Gosh.
B: Cancellation.
S: Cancellation. Yeah.
B: Did you hear the the NASA administrator, Sean Duffy give a little shout out to Trump to try to, you know, you know, save, you know, to help NASA here? He said this finding by Perseverance launched under President Trump in his first term is the closest we've ever come to blah, blah, blah. It's like he just threw that out there, Like, wait, OK, I.
E: Understand what is it going to do unless we get the samples back?
B: Yeah. Well, I mean, at this point, I think any extra funding from the government would be would have them, would make them overjoyed at NASA. Absolutely. And save, you know, saving any jobs. I think a little like, you know, Schindler, like I could have saved, you know, 10 more jobs if I just got some more, a little bit more money out of Trump, you know, that kind of.
S: Or the legislative branch could do their job, you know.
E: Right. Inappropriate.
B: Well, that's what are you talking about, really.
S: But they did appropriate the money, they should just assert their right to to the purse strings which is in the Constitution, rather than just laying down and letting Constitutions executive branch steal their path.
B: Much meaning anymore.
E: Well, back to the point of the significance of this particular news is that it says here NASA's science mission chief Nikki Fox said it. And this is a quote. It's the closest we've actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars. Now I understand we're inching that direction, but for her to say that seems pretty significant.
B: It's news, it's certainly news, but I'm just not getting my hopes up. Of course, burn too many times it's you know, if there's an if there's an abiotic pathway, that's probably going to be it, you know, at.
S: Least so far every time that turned out to be the case.
B: Right. Get just get back to me when you got something that's three incremental steps and not just one.
S: But I mean, the bottom line is we got to get that those rocks back from Mars.
E: And perhaps today's announcement is a, in a political sense, a way of reestablishing the political will to get the funds to get this.
S: Back that could be it could be a strategic announcement, like we really do have to get these samples back to Earth. But most importantly, I just want you to be happy, you know?
E: Bob's happy.
S: Evan, tell us about Earth's new quasi moon.
E: Yes, I will do that. May I start by giving a hat tip to Bob for allowing me to borrow the title of his reoccurring segment on the SGU?
B: Yeah, man, I'm, I, I was, I meant to read, actually read this and I just got too hip deep into my stuff. So like, please. I'm curious to see what this is all about.
E: Well, Bob, I know you can't see it right now, but I am raising my hat. Off my head in your. Direction.
Quickie with Evan: Earth Quasi-moon (04:50)
E: This is your quickie with Evan and I'm going to let you know about Earth's newest moonish thing that has been added to Earth's slate of naturally occurring companions, Earth. OK, so to review, Earth has one official permanent solid natural satellite object, all those words, that is what? The moon. Moon, the moon, the moon and and then we have these mini moons. You know what these are? I think we've talked about these.
S: That's no moon.
B: Yeah, I think we briefly mentioned them. Yep. They're like temporary, temporary moons in a sense, right? They're just kind of. Oh yeah, we're kind of sharing an orbit for a little while and then they move off, right. That's my.
E: Small asteroids temporary captured by Earth's gravity entering the orbit, and it could be just for a couple hours and some last several months, but eventually the sun's pole reclaims it.
B: Mine, mine, mine.
E: Yeah, exactly like the Ring of Power getting cast back into the fires. Around the Doom. Almost like that. As a side note, I looked. There's this thing called Kordolowski clouds. KORDYLEWSKI Clouds Clouds Stable clouds of dust located at the L4 and L5 LaGrange points.
B: OK, yeah, that's a good place to hang out.
E: Yeah, and they call them ghost moons. Ed Warren would be so proud of that.
B: Oh God.
E: But they're just.
B: They're just clouds. They're not, like, real.
E: They won't form, they will never form, they will never congeal together to form, but they but they are clouds that orbit so.
C: That's ghostly.
E: They they call them ghost moons, yes. Back to mini moons though for a second and I'm going to get to the quasi moon. Earth doesn't. No fixed number of mini moons average of 6.5 of these six or seven orbiting Earth at any given time. Now here's the question. Have we talked specifically on the SGU about quasi moons? I don't remember. We did.
S: Yeah, we could. Yeah. We last time they discovered a new one of these temporary satellites, we talked about it.
E: And that's what we've got again, Quasi, a brand new, well, a announced, newly recently confirmed and newly announced a quasi moon 2025 PN 7 is its designation. This is courtesy of Earths guide.org, by the way, Meet Earth's new quasi moon detected on August 29, 2025 by the PAN by the Pan Stars Observatory. Yeah, on Haliakala, Hawaii. I hope I repeat Haliakala, Haliakala they looked at some data on this thing. They had it back in as far as 2014 from what I could find and that they've added it all up and they've observed it recently but 2025 PM 7 it has been Co orbital with Earth for 60 years now. What what I know, I know it's been hanging around for a long time, but only, but only now is essentially effectively official and it's expected to remain for another 60 years before it will transition back to its original horseshoe orbit. And I don't know that we've talked about horseshoe orbits, but that is a Co orbital motion in which a smaller body moves in a path that appears horseshoe shaped relative to a larger body. And they described like 2 planets are a planet and an asteroid sharing an orbit around a star. The smaller bodies orbit oscillates, but it's overall path when viewed from the reference frame that rotates with the primary body, it forms a horseshoe. So that's why it's called the horseshoe orbit. But for a while, this thing is the Earth has it for now, and it will have continue to have it for about 60 more years.
B: Two quick questions, Yeah. How big and how far away?
E: Yes, those are my next 219 meters in diameter. Far away, closest 2.8 million miles, farthest 37.2 miles. So it's out there. I mean, what? That's like a third of the way to the sun practically if 3237 point 2 million.
B: Yeah, right.
E: So 2.8 million miles, it will not. Yeah. So it's nothing that's going to come that close to Earth. So our regular telescopes can't see it. You have to detect it using using some very special equipment. So I was.
B: Wondering if it was worth even. Imagine if we can just grab it.
E: I know, wouldn't that be? I know that would be cool. But we have Yeah. But at least, you know, it's, we do have it in a sense for a little while. Sixty more years in that far far out orbit, but there were seven known current, there were seven known quasi satellites of Earth known before this. And now PN7 makes #8 so a heartfelt ahoy. To Ahoy Ahoy PN7.
B: Welcome to the crew, man.
E: Welcome and we're sorry we have ignored your presence these past 60 years. It was not nothing personal. This has been your quickie with Evan. I now send it back to Bob, who will send it back to Steve.
B: Back to you, Steve.
S: Thank. You, Bob and Evan.
E: Yeah, welcome.
S: Jay But I know people are developing these tiny robots, but, but how can we get them to to move where we want them to go?
J: All right, well, I mean, this is this isn't like a Oh my God, I can't believe it research, but it is like incremental and very important piece of research for the idea that we would like to control very, very small machines to do a lot of different things.
News Items
Guiding Tiny Robots (09:39)
J: I mean, just just alone, you know, with the ability to help people, you know, like an example of it would be that it could deliver medication to a very targeted area in your body, you know, instead of taking a pill that, you know, essentially gives your entire body the medication, right?
B: Yeah.
J: It could be like a targeted delivery that can go exactly where a tumor is, for example, or something like.
B: That it's not a tumor.
J: So these, these tiny robots, like historically they, they pretty much they have to be dumb, right? They don't, they don't have the, the space because they're microscopic. You know, they don't have the space for like a, a processor or a camera on board sensors and that type of stuff like that. Those components right now, like they're, they just can't be shrunk down that small. So that means that these, you know, microbots, they can only respond to, you know, like environmental cues. If you want to make them do something useful, like you want them to deliver drugs, like I said, or clean a contaminated water supply, you're going to need to control them from the outside. And you'd like to control them real time to figure out, you know, a way to make them navigate, to get to where they're going, where they need to go without them themselves having to do real processing. That's, that's it at its core. So researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, they came up with a a different idea about this. So in a new study, William Reinhart and Mark Miskin, they describe a method they're calling artifact official space times, which sounds pretty interesting. And I'll tell you why they picked the word space-time. So what happens is they let their microbots follow a complex path without any central controller or onboard intelligence, like a like a real processor onboard these tiny microscopic robots. The trick is that they're actually changing their environment in just the right way, so they will automatically go to where they want them to go. And I'll explain how it works. So the micro bots are made out of silicon and they're powered by these tiny, tiny, tiny photovoltaic panels. And those photovoltaic panels act like motors, but only under specific conditions. So when light hits one of those panels, it produces an Electro kinetic reaction which actually pushes the robot forward. So each robot has two of these. So think of them as like a really small tank, right with two trick with two treads, one on the left and one on the right. If both of the motors get the same amount of light, the robot will move in a straight line. But if one side is brighter than the other, the motor on the left, say, which is getting more light will move faster and it'll make it, it'll make the robot turn. And I know that sounds simple, but it was a very difficult thing for them to achieve. And what they had to come up with is, you know, they, what they do is they project patterns of light onto the bottom of the Petri dish using a digital projector. And from above, you know, it looks like a map, say, with light and dark regions, in that the light and dark regions are very specific. Because as the little robots move through this, they can make them go to any point that they want to just by changing the light and dark areas of the projection, like I said, because they're reacting to the light that they're seeing, so the robots can't. See. The map, they're not aware of the map in any way. All they're doing is reacting to their environment, which happens to be an environment that has that has light as a cue, right? The light actually is making the whole thing happen. So the bright regions pulls them forward, the darker ones slowed them down and this allows them to change direction. I watched the video of it and it works remarkably well. I know that they're incredibly small, but they look like they're moving pretty fast. It's it's a pretty interesting thing and it does kind of look like a flat tank. It's really cool. The researchers were saying like you could think of it like the grooves on a record, like the robots are the needle and they're blindly tracing the path that are etched into the landscape in a sense, right? Because that's what the light and dark regions are actually doing. So what makes this study different from the past ones is essentially the math behind it. So Reinhardt and Miskin noticed that the motion of the robots follows the same rules of light moving through curved, A curved region of space. How about that? So the, the Starlight, for example, that is bending, that goes too close to a black hole. And what they did was that they're, they made a connection between, they're robots in a light and dark space and essentially the way that relatively relativity works. So the this connection that they made means that they can borrow mathematical tools from general relativity and optics to describe or design their light fields. And it tracks. It works.
S: Interesting.
J: So they're using equations now that that the big man came up with, you know what I mean, that you don't have to guess, they don't have to do a lot of testing. They can just calculate exactly how a given pattern will guide the robot. And it could be a very complicated environment like mazes, branching channels, whatever it is, and they can come up with it, the light pattern as a mathematical equation, they make it and it works and they and they're doing it. So in one experiment, they designed a light field. It caused the robots to patrol a circular path, like security guards walking around, right? And another example, they built the maze and they projected a pattern that let multiple robots find their way to a specific area that they chose without ever touching any of the walls of the dish. And the, the, I think the most impressive 1 was when they created a, a sorting field, a single static light pattern that made different robot, different robots exit a junction through different paths purely based on where they started. So it's complicated and it's working. And the important thing here is that they didn't have to make any real time adjustments, meaning, you know, let's say they're looking at the activity of the robots. The robots are just doing what they're what they're going to do by the, the, the way that they're designed. Meaning they have the photovoltaic sensors that produce the charge. And it really comes down to the design of the light in dark areas. They don't have to tell, Hey, robot #25 seven, do turn a little bit to your left. There is none of that real time communication necessary. The robots will go to where the light directs them to go. So once the projector turns on, that pattern stays fixed and the robots don't need any individual instructions or monitoring. It's really cool. It makes it inherently scalable. And you could release thousands of micro bots and they'll all follow the same rules all at once. So you're now they're, you know, you're controlling thousands of or even more of these tiny robots instead of only being able to communicate to a handful of them. And they can't even be as small as they are if they're being communicated to. I feel obligated to tell you this is just a lab setup. The robots aren't, you know, they're operating in a shallow Petri dish, Petri dish with liquid, you know, that of a certain height under carefully, you know, manipulated lighting in real world applications. There'd be a lot of noise in the system. The right there be random disturbances. There'd be imperfect, you know, manufacturing, you know, the projected light field today, like you can't work deep inside of a human body or in a murky river, right? So there's restrictions, of course. But again, this is just the beginning and it's a really cool thing that they came up with going past the idea that it's a leap, you know, this is a conceptual leak that they came up with. What would the real world applications be for things like this? Like why? Why are they even doing it? The scalability aspect here is really important because the current systems that exist can only control a few of these microbots at a time because each one of them needs constant tracking and external commands like constant. This method uses a single static light field and it can, it can handle swarms of these things. So it's no problem that it just makes it super easy that way. It's the simplicity brings down the cost dramatically. So the robots are cheap to make. They're simple. They don't need onboard computers, They don't need onboard power sources. It's just all there is no intelligence. It's all by the design of the light field. I don't think we should just struggle off a lot of these interesting little things that happen like this because it took thousands and thousands of these to make an iPhone, right? It had to start somewhere a long time ago with people coming up with taking small steps in, in an unknown direction that later got picked up by other engineers and, you know, using research that was done 50 years ago to help them figure out how to do something today. So I, I think this one seems pretty obvious that there's a cool benefit to it with other, you know, other labs taking this in other directions as well. I just think overall, like this type of research is the exact type of things that need to be done. And This is why we shouldn't cut science funding because we want people to, you know, to do wacky stuff like this. Because again, it's all part of the aggregate knowledge base that other, you know, other researchers and scientists and, and people in the lab can use to make even bigger and more, more cool things. Eventually, you know, maybe they will be able to to, you know, put these things in somebody's body and it goes right to where they wanted to, to do something very specific.
S: Yeah. I mean this, you know, kind of technology is one of those. I think for now, it's like a sleeper technology they're doing, they're working out the basics, doesn't really have a lot of applications. But if we get to this threshold, you know, in terms of like the level of control and the level of functionality, there could be some amazing applications of it medically, you know?
J: Yeah, it's, it's important.
S: We just don't know at this point.
J: I think it's really important for for people to understand the idea that nothing, no new technology today is just invented out of whole cloth and they have a finished exquisite technology like it is dependent on just millions of hours of human research that came before it. Just to find out, you know, to, to, you know, figure out small things, you know, make you know all these little things. OK, look what we know how this functions now we know what the the chemical reaction does over here. You know, not one of them by itself really means that much. But it's the aggregate knowledge base that allows more complicated things to develop later on. So we need researchers doing stuff like this.
C: Hey, Jay.
J: Yeah.
C: Did you see the most recent Last Week tonight? Because that it was like the thesis statement of John Oliver's main piece.
J: No, tell me what he said.
C: I mean, it was basically just that we can talk about single studies all we want, and we can sort of poke fun at studies that ostensibly look like they're not doing something important for humanity. But ultimately, all of the great discoveries we have are made-up of thousands of human hours and hundreds of published studies, and it all has to work together.
S: And it's often researchers pursuing some quirky interests or curiosity with no idea of what it was going to lead to.
J: Definitely. I mean, looking at it like a web, right? Like you can have all of these different epicenters on that web that are discreet pieces of research and stuff, but eventually they do start to connect and people will start to go, oh, we could take from here, take from here, take from here. And exactly what you said his show was about. Like absolutely, yes. It costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time, but that's where science gets all it's cool stuff from, right? So we have to, we have to be OK with that. And that's, I think the sad part here is that the government is just stripping all of this research, anything like this. It's just so much of it now is being destroyed. And we're not funny.
S: We're destroying our scientific research infrastructure. It's terrible.
J: It sucks, but anyway, this is cool. Don't get depressed, be happy. This is cool. Little robots. Now we'll drive around on a light beam, Steve.
S: Thank you, Jay. So you guys remember back in April when RFK Junior, sorry to bring you bring it down with.
Tylenol and Autism (21:40)
S: Our. But he predicted that, and this is in quotes. By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and we'll be able to eliminate those exposures.
E: Let me check the calendar. It's September.
S: It's September, and he hasn't been able to surpass decades of research in five months. Shockingly, of course, you know, we all suspected that he's making statements like that because he already thinks he knows what quote, UN quote those exposures are, right?
B: Yeah.
S: You can't like start from scratch and complete any kind of reasonable scientific study in five months. Like, we're not going to unravel whatever aspects of autism are remain to be unknown in those five months. He was just setting up this idea that he's going to be blaming vaccines for autism. So here we are. It's September, and there's a report from the Wall Street Journal and some other outlets that an upcoming HHS report, you know, by RFK, is going to tout a link between Tylenol, acetaminophen or paracetamol in in Europe and autism risk, you know, exposure to Tylenol in pregnancy and, you know, mothers and the risk of their child having autism.
C: Isn't that debunked already?
S: It's already debunked, which isn't the great. It's great to leak of that. That's what the announcements going to be, gives us, you know, science communicators the opportunity to pre debunk it before it even comes out. And maybe they won't bring the paper out, who knows. But let's just review the evidence really quickly just so you have the information in case family members like, oh, I heard there's a link, blah, blah, blah. But let me back up a little bit because I always like to draw generic critical thinking, scientific literacy lessons from these individual stories. It's important to recognize that whenever you look for correlations, you'll find them pretty much, you know, to me, there's going to be correlations pretty much everywhere. It's like if you're looking for patterns, you will find them. And oftentimes when people are looking like they're doing observational research, meaning they're not doing a controlled study where they're randomizing subjects and either giving them a placebo versus a treatment. They're just looking at the world and saying, oh, if you look at this cohort of people, what happened to them? Like, what did they do and what happened? They're just observing what's happening out in the world. There's lots of confounding factors, obviously, because you're not controlling for everything. There's lots of variables. And if you just, you know, slice and dice the data in a few different ways, chances are pretty good you're going to find some correlations. And that's often how preliminary studies are done. You may look for 20 correlations or you may look for 100 correlations. And this is not really to confirm any kind of cause and effect relationship. You're literally, you might just, you're just on a fishing expedition. You're just saying, hey, is there any signal out there? And then that is meant really only to create a hypothesis that there may be a correlation there. Then you have to confirm it with a fresh set of data where you're looking just at that, right? Also, these kind of studies tend to have a massive false positive. That's just by their design. Again, this is like screening tests are meant to have false positives. That's how they are designed statistically, etcetera. Because you're screening, right, you want to capture everything and then you follow up with a more careful or detailed or precise analysis to see if what you're finding is real. Does that make sense? So what that means from a practical point of view is that there's, there's always going to be these preliminary evidence for all kinds of correlations, of course, a right. And not only that, it, it goes both ways. If you just look at, oh, let's look at some exposure to some food, If anything gets worse, it's a risk. If anything gets better, it's a cure. You know what I mean? It's like anything can happen and it becomes either oh, this will prevent this disease or this will cause that disease. It's meaningless. It's noise in the background that's meant for researchers to say, OK, let me pick up the ball and see if this is real, right To really confirm or deny this hypothesis.
C: That's the important point there too, is like you have to actually be doing hypothesis testing, yes. You can't just go let's look at big data and see what trends in a certain direction because everything's correlated with everything. Yeah, that's the.
S: Data, yeah, right. You're just you're going to find things you got to. That's not a confirmation. You have to then later confirm it, OK. Although there are analysis you could do to see how strong that correlation is and how and if it's applying a particular or favoring a particular causal relationship. There's there's a lot, always a lot of details in there. Yeah. All right. But if you're if you're RFK junior, right, or you're a Wellness warrior or I'm now, I guess a Maha loser or whatever, right. You're somebody who's who's career is based upon this kind of thing, eat this super food to be healthy or avoid this cancer risk or whatever, then all of these preliminary correlations are gold, right? I mean, you could dumpster dive through all of these preliminary, mostly incorrect correlations to weave whatever tail will sell your supplement or make people afraid or whatever it is that you're trying to do, right? Build your guru career, you know, as a Wellness idiot, right? This is the world in which RK Junior lives. He clearly has demonstrated he has no idea how to properly interpret the scientific literature and he just cherry picks these scary preliminary data to tell whatever story he wants to tell. And of course, sometimes he will cherry pick studies that were done by pseudoscientists that there are there are terrible studies just to make whatever point he wants to make like that vaccines 'cause everything, for example. OK. So yes, there is. Having said all that, there is preliminary data where if you just look at the raw data, there is this tiny effect. Really, there's this tiny correlation between mothers using Tylenol and pregnancy and increased association with either autism or ADHD or other neurodevelopmental disorders, right? However, so that's almost certainly what RFK junior is going to be touting if he, if he does go through with this report or what others have stated that there's this correlation. But The thing is we've already done the follow up research in this case, right? If we hadn't, I would be saying we have to wait, we have to do the follow up studies. We don't really know. This is preliminary, but now I get to say we've done the follow up studies, right? So in 2024, which is fairly recent, there was a pretty high quality review. They looked at a national, the Swedish national database and this review included data on 185,000 children. So it's pretty statistically robust. Again, this is an observational correlational study, not a cause and effect study. So they did find, yes, there's this very small increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders with Tylenol use in pregnancy. But there are two reasons to think that this is not a real cause and effect. One is there was no dose response curve, right? So if a drug is causing a benefit or a substance is causing a risk or harm, you would expect that more of it would cause more of a harm, right? We call that a dose response relationship or a dose response curve. And so it's good to include that analysis of what they did with they said, OK, if we go, if we compare the lowest 25th percentile of exposure to acetaminophen and then the middle medium, you know, 25 to 75th and then the highest 75th greater than 75th percentile, is there an increase? And there wasn't, it was a flat line. There was it was random, there was no dose response curve. So that really argues pretty strongly against there being any kind of causal effect here. But even more definitive than that, the authors did what's called a sibling control analysis. And this is a way to control for confounding factors, right? Remember, with the observational data, the biggest weakness is that there are confounding factors, meaning there are factors you are not controlling for and you are not randomizing. And that could be seen in the data for, you know, and like, the simplest way to think about this is if A correlates with B, you can't assume if it's an observational study that A causes B, It's possible that B causes A, it's possible that C causes A&B, right? So it's possible that pregnant women who are more likely to take Tylenol have something else going on that could also make them more likely to have a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder. So one way to control for this is to do a sibling control analysis. With that, what you do there is you use the subjects sibling as a control and so you have like 1 sibling with the the exposure of interest and one sibling without the exposure of interest, right? So you could say during my my mother's pregnancy with me, she took Tylenol. But with my mother's pregnancy with Jay, she did not take Tylenol, right? So you've kind of isolated the Tylenol exposure from all of the familial and genetic and some of the environmental factors.
E: There's enough of those kinds of case of candidates to make a study.
S: Absolutely. And so they did that kind of sibling control analysis and the correlation completely goes away. There is no correlation once you control for that basic familial confounding factors, right? And that's for any of the three any, any neurodevelopment, either autism, ADHD or other, you know, neurodevelopmental disorders. So that's pretty definitive. That means that the there is no real correlation between Tylenol use and autism or other disorders and the author's conclude that prior studies showing a possible link may have been attributable to familial confounding right to these confounding factors. So this is pretty robust evidence. It's a large study, it's well done. And again those two things lack of a dose response curve the effect goes away when you control for confounding factors that's always the death. Now, in an observational study, like when you control for confounding factors, the effect goes away. And it wasn't real to begin with, right? It was, it was due to the confounding factors that you're now controlling for. So, but this is like 3 layers too deep for somebody like RFK, right? Who doesn't care about this. He's just saying, oh, look, there's a possible link that's enough to scaremonger about it. Look, I kept my promise. I found the the exposure that's causing our autism epidemic or whatever. He'll do a victory lap is what I predict. So we'll see what it what actually happens. But it's good that the data is already there that science communicators are already getting out there saying Nope, there's no evidence for this. The evidence does not support a link. The other issue here is that Tylenol is really the only Safeway to treat fever in pregnancy. Scaring women against using that could have harm. It's not just like, oh, who cares, You know? So generally speaking, we tell pregnant women not to take any medications they don't absolutely have to take. That's sort of standard procedure. But if you're having a lot of pain, that's not benign, that is a potential risk for a pregnant woman. And if you may not be getting enough nutrition or whatever, there's all kinds of things that you may be spending too much time in bed or whatever you may, you know, there's that's a risk factor. Also, fever, you know, can be a risk factor. So telling women don't treat your fever or pain during pregnancy is not a benign thing to do.
C: No, it also just perpetuates, I think these, I don't want to even say decades, centuries long biases in healthcare against treating women's pain, just being like, just deal with it, you know? And even if, let's say a woman who is pregnant is having a severe pain that is not linked to anything dangerous, right? Even if she doesn't have a fever or it's not indicative of some sort of harm, it will cause bad psychological outcomes she will like. It will contribute probably to depression during the pregnancy. It will contribute to negative emotions about her pregnancy if she feels unwell and she doesn't have options in front of her. It's like it it I don't. It just feels like another one of these ways to like, blame mothers like we used to do in the 50s. Totally.
S: This is that people have brought that up as well. This is just an an extension of the idea that mothers are to blame for their child. 'S conditions. Even when it's we know from mountains of evidence that autism, for example, is dominantly genetic. That doesn't mean to say there are no environmental factors that might affect that, but it's dominantly genetic. It's not dominantly environmental, which RFK seems to believe, again, against all evidence. And also keep in mind like Tylenol is our first line treatment for migraines. We're not just talking about, oh, I have AI stubbed my toe or something. And, you know, a migraine during pregnancy could mean significant disability, nausea and vomiting, things that are again, not benign for the pregnancy or the mother themselves. And so everything is a risk versus benefit, right? Everything in medicine is risk versus benefit. So it's not as simple as saying, well, just to avoid all risk, you know, at all costs, like a life is not that easy. You avoid one risk, you incur another. If I if you're by avoiding that risk, you're also avoiding the potential benefit. And so you have to make a more rational sort of decision about where is the optimal balance, you know, of risk versus benefit in any for each individual patient, each individual situation. This kind of fear mongering based upon misreading of the evidence is harmful. It is literally harmful.
C: And I don't even I mean, like, I feel like it's even charitable to call it misreading of the evidence. Yeah, I think it's it's confirmation bias in a group of people who fundamentally are pushing an agenda that's anti medicine completely. Yeah, it's it's basically this weird sort of paleo viewpoint that somehow more medicine is worse. And if you can live a quote clean. Lifestyle. Yeah, it's the clean living bullshit. Avoid any pharmaceuticals and avoid any sort of intervention that it's going to be healthier for you. I mean, it's the same. It's the anti vax, it's all of it and it's just so dangerous.
S: Absolutely. All right.
Music Choices as we Age (37:27)
S: Well, Cara, yeah. You're going to talk next about the music choices we make as we age.
C: Yeah, I'd love to take a mini poll just of the of the rogues today. How many of you OK first and foremost, do you tend to listen to more music from when you were younger or more music from the past? Younger.
J: Younger, yeah.
E: I'm influenced by my daughter in this regard, so I don't know how typical I am, but one of the things Rachel I do, we go to concerts together, so a lot of my music is more contemporary. You're listening to what she. Sort of by exactly right, and I do like keeping up with what she is listening. I agree that's. What? It's our way of bond.
S: The second category of music I listen to is music my daughters listen to. Yeah, 100%.
C: And would you say that that makes up like half of your listening? Yeah, most of your. Listening.
S: Yeah, probably half and half my youth. Their youth very little like current you know music that is not I'm not being exposed to to somebody and.
E: I'm definitely a blend. I'm a 5050 blend.
C: Okay, And then for, let's say for like Jay and Bob, do you use any sort of service like Spotify or something like that that recommends music to you?
J: I I don't let anybody recommend music to me so.
C: You you only listen to what you want to listen to.
E: That's right.
J: Yeah, I mean, you know, I will hear stuff that my kids like. And, you know, there's a few, few recent artists that I, I definitely like and I'll, I'll every once in a while I'll hear some of their new stuff. But I mean, in my mind, you know, I just can't find anything that's better than the stuff from the late 60s, seventies, 80s and 90s. Like I, I, you know, I just, I don't know, is it my age? I don't know, Cara.
C: And so I'm going to talk about a study that is not going to tell us the why. It's going to tell us more the what. And it's going to tell us something that we already knew. But this is the first time apparently, that we have like scientific evidence to back up the claim that as we get older, we focus on fewer and fewer favorite songs and our musical taste narrows. But what I love is that the authors, instead of talking about our musical tastes narrowing, they use, I don't want to call them euphemisms, but I guess their their language bias is probably because they're older as well towards our musical taste becomes more refined as we. And so here's what they did. It's actually a really interesting approach. So it's three. Yeah, more seasoned.
J: And I want to hear what your answer is too, Cara.
C: Oh, I'm 100% the same. Like I listen to stuff I listen to in high school all the time, all the time and and some kind of vintage stuff from before that. I do listen to some current modern music, but by and large I would say that. So I work at A at a gymnastics gym and I'm definitely the oldest person. Well, I think I'm technically the second oldest person there. And often times when they're playing music, I'm I'm like, I've never heard this before. I have no idea who this is. They'll mention the name of the artist and I'm like, yeah, and, and I'm by the way, 41 years old like I am. I'm not old. I'm not young, but so these universities, this international study, what they decided to do is try to understand people's music habits a little bit more, especially focusing on like different artists and different genres that individuals listen to. And the way they did it is by looking at big data from a service called Last FM. This is a music service where you can sort of feed in your listening habits, like from a place like Spotify and build out a profile so that you can get more sort of more of an analysis of your own musical habits and and tastes. And when people make profiles on Last FM, they put in their age. Now, we don't have a lot of data on how these algorithms work over long periods of time because they haven't been around for that long. So this is one of the earliest studies that was able to look at 15 years of data, and they looked at over 40,000 users. So we're talking like almost 550 million plays, and they looked at over a million different songs across those 15 years. So they wanted to see how people's music listening habits changed over time. And they were especially curious because this was actually published as an extended abstract in a proceeding, like a conference proceeding at UMAP, which is user modeling, adaptation and personalization. So these are, you know, scientists who are interested in how these different services feed you what you want to hear. Like, how do these algorithms work in such a way that the end user is enjoying their experience? And basically they found that programs like Spotify or companies like Spotify, they're not targeting older people in a different way than they target younger people. But older people's habits are different than younger, younger people's habits. Younger people are really interested in new music. They're really interested in novelty. They're interested in trying on different hats, different personalities, different genres. They want to hear stuff they haven't heard before. Older people, by and large, not everybody, but by and large they tend to. And this is their quote, which I think is lovely. middle-aged listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar, while older listeners want more tailored recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences. So what they found is that older people's music habits, by and large, focus on songs from their youth. That people do go back and listen to songs from when they were younger and as they put it, musical taste becomes more quote unique the older the listener is. So like they claim that teenagers will often find a lot of common favorite songs with other people their age, even if they're sort of in different cliques or, you know, go to different schools. Whereas as you get older, your musical tastes may become more specific and it may be harder for you to meet other people your age who are into the same kind of music you are. You know, like I have an ex-boyfriend who just listened to like death metal all day every day. I mean he would hate that. That's how I'm classifying his musical taste because in his view, it was incredibly varied, right? But it was all just hard. He listened to a ton of hardcore music. And, you know, he was in his mid 40s. I don't think he had a lot of friends who were listening to music that was as intense as the music that he listened to. He had a handful of them, but for the most part, people were like, bro, I can't get into this. It's like loud. Can you turn it down? And I see that across the board. You know, I've got a lot of friends who still listen to punk rock. They love their punk rock. And for my friends who aren't into punk rock, they just don't like it. And so it's hard to find commonality and to talk about music with your friends and to go do musical things with your friends, unless you maybe went to school with them or you already bonded over those musical similarities. But definitely kind of making new friends as an adult, you do learn that you might have a ton of stuff in common and then you're kind of surprised by how different their musical taste is than yours. I've I've found that that's happened a lot.
E: Cara I just reconnected with someone I hadn't spoke to since 1991. I mean, this year, and this was during this is my last year of college, this person was into a heavy metal, I mean, real heavy stuff. I asked him kind of what he's listening to now. He's like, oh, Billy Joel, you know, just like what? No way. It took me for it. Threw me for a loop. I had no idea.
S: So.
C: That's interesting.
S: I wonder how much of it is just a changing music itself versus our changing life situation. Like when we were younger, we were in school and we had lots of exposure to people who were like, playing new albums and when you would get to hear them. And you know what I mean? Like, there seemed like there was a set of new stuff coming out that you got exposed to and you could sort of choose what you liked. And now I wouldn't know where to go. Like, there's just so much out there, and the stuff you hear on the radio is largely crap, you know?
C: Well, but that's also an older person perspective. You have to remember that too because like if we take any cross section of time, the older set is going to say that that that newfangled music is crap.
S: But it's not just that because when I had when my daughters were at that stage, when they were still living at home, they were in high school or whatever, and they were sampling a lot of different groups. First of all, they were into a lot of older groups. They were listening to foreigner and you know, like stuff from our generation. Then they were listening to new groups that I otherwise were heard about. So I was able to select the ones that I liked. And then I got into, you know, Muse and Arctic Monkeys and stuff like that that I otherwise never would have gotten into.
C: Which is now old again.
S: I know it's not old, so there's got to be good bands out there that I would get into now if I had the ability to get exposed to them. But I just don't think it's the pop stuff that you're hearing. It's more like the next layer stuff. That's maybe.
E: Not alternative, it's.
S: Alternative stuff.
C: Well, but even if we're talking about one genre like alternative, which is a has a million sub genres within it, I think probably what not just what these researchers are kind of getting at, but also what individuals working behind the scenes at companies like Spotify and Pandora hopefully are focusing on is the idea that people get dialed in to their tastes and they like the nostalgia of their youth. But there is always new music that has some sort of connective tissue, some sort of flavor, some sort of vibe. And it is hard to pick out what those variables are, right? Is it a tempo? Is it like a beat? Is it, you know, the the timbre of somebody's voice? Is it sort of the sounds of the guitars? But they're.
S: Why isn't Spotify doing that? Why aren't?
C: They.
S: Are yeah, they actually I should like.
C: They are and and so you, there are settings within all of these different apps where you can have a mix and then you can put it on like a smart mix or whatever they call it where it will recommend things to you. But what these individuals, they're saying is that they're doing that to an 18 year old and to a 65 year old the same way. And what they probably should be doing is narrowing that algorithm for the older individuals so that there's not as broad a mix being kind of thrown at them because they're less likely to go, oh, I like this. And they're more likely to just downvote everything that doesn't sound just like what they liked before. They're just not intentionally searching for new music. And so it's not to say that older people wouldn't engage with newer music, but that newer music probably needs to be more narrowly focused on their established tastes as opposed to having, I guess, a really eclectic, let's throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks approach, right, Which works with younger people.
S: What do you think, Jay?
J: I mean, you know, if it weren't for Rick Biedo, I would be agreeing with Cara. I mean, it seems like every generation kind of has this experience. The bottom line is I think that there's very, very real world reasons why music, the quality of music in general is not as good as it used to be. And and this comes from deep analysis of the complexity of the popular music today. So I think it's kind of both. I think that because of companies like Spotify and Pandora and that whole streaming model, it's D nutted bands from being able to make money and it's changed the industry so much that, you know, there isn't the same quality of bands out there. You know, the vetting process is not the same. There used to be there used to be promoters and people that, you know, their job was to find new talent. And there was a, there was a, you know, Cream rising to the top effect here that.
C: Yeah. I disagree. I I I think now we have a cream rising to the top effect. It doesn't rise as high to the top, but wasn't.
S: Also buried in more stuff that was just so.
C: Much out there, but that's the thing to us it's buried, but not to people. You know, a 1718 year old right now who is on Tick Talk, knows who the hot people are, who is like using SoundCloud, who is looking at these different outlets and they're finding people who have a completely democratized approach to music. There aren't the barriers to entry that they used to have. And yes, there's so much more music out there and it's harder for us like old people to figure out how to dig. We're just.
S: Not plugged in.
C: We're just not plugged in. But The thing is, I, I would argue, Jay, that actually removing all of those barriers to entry, yes, it might make it harder for you or for me to find that incredible music. You know, pop's going to always be pop. There's always going to be the stuff where we're like, I don't get this, I don't get this Top 40, Like, why is this so popular? But when you can, when anybody can self produce an album and publish it, the quality of music is going to go up. It just is because there are going to be people who didn't have access before that now have access. I think it's.
J: Largely the pop music that that that Rick Piedo is talking about. And sure, I mean, there could be millions of diamonds in the rough throughout all these streaming services that I I just don't have a pathway to get to.
C: Yeah. And that's, I think that's really what this is about is how can these music services improve that pathway for older adults who just don't want to dedicate that much time or energy? But I think we all have to be careful not to fall victim to. I mean, I guess this could be a name that logical fallacy where we tend to compare the best of our tastes to the worst of other people's tastes.
S: No, that's not fair.
C: Because I hear, I hear it a lot, especially with the like older people argument that like, in my day, music was amazing because The Beatles, yeah, The Beatles were great. But now what is this crap? And it's like, well, but you're picking like a Top 40.
S: I agree with you. I just want people to tell me who are the great bands of today so I could listen.
J: To yeah, why would it be so hard for them to, for people like us to even find out about them? If they're that freaking good, you'd figure we'd know about them, I thought.
S: We're going to get emails with people telling us, giving us their recommendation and do it. I want to hear them. I seriously, I would love to be plugged in to ways of finding great new music.
C: This is how you do it right?
S: I love this stuff from the from the old days but I'm getting bored with it.
C: Yeah, and here's the thing. Here's the big difference, right? Teenagers have more time than we do. Yeah, they put their time and effort into this. Young people go to festivals. I just don't go to festivals.
S: No, I know. Like when I was young I would listen to the radio when I was in the car. Now I listen to the news.
C: Exactly. And like when I want to see a band, which is rare anymore, and that's not because I don't love music, but I need to. I need to have my earplugs and I need to have a seat. Like I don't want to. Be standing all night. But when I want to see a band, I'm going to go see a band I love. And I want to, you know, and I actually am annoyed if a band that I love just put out an album and I haven't really had a chance to get into it. And that's all they play at the show. Like I want to hear the stuff that I love. Whereas when I was young I would go to huge musical festival, like music festivals that had like 1520 bands playing and I might go, oh, I've never heard this before. This is pretty good.
S: Yeah.
C: I don't do, I don't seek that. I don't seek novelty out the way I used to. Yeah. And so we've got to remember too. It's it's a lot of it. This is user error.
S: Yeah, I, I totally agree with that, Yeah.
C: Yeah.
E: Yeah, now 41 is kind of old.
C: Wait it listen to. They can't.
E: Sing like Sinatra. It's crap. Get off my lawn. And we didn't even talk about AI creating.
S: Music, well, that the AI slop is going to be. We're going to get buried in that for sure.
E: Yeah, Oh my gosh, there's going to be millions of. Songs.
C: Does anybody even come? Do people like AI slop? Nobody actually likes AI slop, right?
S: No, but it's out there.
C: I know it's out there and it's burying everything, but are people actually choosing to listen to it or is it like that U2 album that was on the I Might?
S: Listen to it and not know they're listening to.
C: Yeah, yeah. That's.
E: Or it may be the favorite music.
S: About and The thing is, it's going to get just good enough that it's like mediocre. But it already is in. The range of the shit that's already out there, you know what I mean?
C: It's going to definitely come across songs before where I'm like, I don't think these are this is a real band.
S: It's going to explode the low end of the music distribution, make it even harder to find the good stuff. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.
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S: All right, guys, let's get back to the show.
Mind Reading Wearable (56:19)
S: All right, Bob, tell us about Mind reading wearables. I'll premise this by saying the article you sent me I did not like.
B: Yeah, actually there was there's not a lot about this out there, so I'll take some of this with a with a grain of salt. Some of the texts seem interesting, but let's just jump in and we can we can discuss it. Alter ego is a startup spin off from MIT was recently in the news again, describing A wearable device that people that allows people to silently communicate back and forth with either an AI or a computer or other people just by thinking the words they claim. They claim their primary focus is to help people with speech disorders, but it also has a plethora of other potentially interesting uses as well. The MIT website describes the device like this. Alter Ego is a non invasive wearable peripheral neural interface that allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence assistance services and other people without any voice. So yeah, so this started as a project at the MIT Media Lab in 2018 and it was spun off officially I guess, this year as a for profit company called Alter Ego. Arnav Kapoor is an MRT graduate, Harvard Medical School researcher, and of course CEO of Alter Ego. So he said this, he describes his technology at a Ted talk back in 2019. So what, 6 years ago? He said, imagine talking to yourself without vocalizing, without moving your mouth, without moving your jaw, but simply by articulating those words internally, thereby very subtly engaging your internal speech system, such as your tongue in the back of your palate. When that happens, the brain sends extremely weak signals to these internal speech systems. Kapoor then describes next that they had developed a sensor that they that they developed for your face and neck that could pick up those subtle signals, allowing an AI to turn these patterns into the words that they represented that you were consciously sub vocalizing. The AI then silently answers your query with whatever you know, whatever it may be by using bone conduction that to the inner ear that you can then hear seemingly normally, but without apparently drowning out apparently without drowning out whatever else that you may be hearing at the time, right. So you could it's not going to disrupt what you may be hearing necessarily. So, so that's how alter ego works in a in a nutshell. That process kind of makes sense how how this works. One question I had I had here, you may have as well. Why does this inner speech even send these faint muscle signals in the 1st place that they don't even move the muscles, but these signals are being sent when you're just thinking about about words specifically thinking about why?
S: That's the motor planning area, Bob.
B: Yeah. Well, yeah, there was a lot of technical reasons why that's the case. One, one way to describe it that made that made some sense and see if you agree with this, Steve. One answer is that it it's ultimately faster and cheaper for the brain to allow some of the signal leakage to the speech muscles, then then it would be to perfectly isolate those muscles from inner speech. So we're just like, Oh yeah, some of the signal gets out. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't really, it doesn't move any muscles really. But it's just like, it's easier to do to do that than to really isolate, you know, the muscle.
S: I would go further than that because go further. You know, I wrote recently on Neurological blog about our study where they're charting the brain process. This isn't a mouse brain, but they basically like totally mapped out everything that's happening in a mouse brain when the mouse is doing certain tasks, right, some specific decision making tasks. And what they found was is that the sensory and motor areas were far more involved in that process of thinking and decision making than was previously suspected. So we actually think with our motor cortex, if that makes sense. To some extent it's involved. That's why we're so embodied. You know, and it's absolutely, these circuits are all related. So it makes perfect sense. Like if you're thinking about yourself hitting a tennis ball, the muscle, the motor part of your brain that is involved with that task is lighting up even if you're not moving, right, Right. So it's it's actually a nice feature that that we can exploit to do this sort of thing, right?
B: Exactly. And that's exactly what we're doing. And Steve, it also reminds me of, I remember studies that I read many years ago. Hopefully it's probably still correct that when you're dreaming and doing things in your dream and moving, that they could detect those same, those, those same patterns in in your brain that are, that are being activated because you're, because you're, you know, you are moving in the dream. So your your brain kind of thinks you are. Right.
S: And when you're thinking of a picture, you're the same part of your brain lights up as when you're looking at the picture. It's the same thing, right? So it works with perception as well.
E: Neat.
B: So Kapoor says at this point in his Ted Talk, he was, he was very clear that he said just to be very clear, the device does not record or read your thoughts. The control resides with the user. And so, yeah, he's specifically, he said that he seemed, it seemed like he was making a very important point. And of course it is. You don't want to have, you don't want to think about some device actually reading your thoughts and, and you having no control because that's because that's obviously quite scary. And that's not the case with this specific tech. And this idea, though, ties ties into the big distinction between this specific technology and most brain interface technologies that we've discussed in the past. Directly recording brain activity. You need something that's somewhat evasive. Either it's going to be a full on implant in like under your skull, in your brain somewhere, maybe even on the the surface of your brain, but in your beyond your skull. But also it could be all the way down to something like electrodes that are attached to your bare scalp, right. So it's is that right? Is that accurate enough, Steve? That's kind of like the range of invasiveness that you'd be dealing with with the.
S: There are scalp conventionals, there are stent electrodes in your in the the vessels in your brain. Then there's like brain surface electrodes and that deep brain electrodes.
B: So those are obviously quite problematic. You know, they're they're they're effective for that type of technology, but they're it's invasive. It's invasive and they, they, they really need to nail down how to make it less invasive and more, more permanent, because even even connections in the brain eventually is eventually will drift and be, you know, and need to be addressed. So alter ego is less, less invasive than in two ways. It slips on easily and it gives users more control, control over what is shared. It's only things that you are specifically and, you know, volitionally saying or, or thinking with your mind. So, so it's less invasive in those ways. And this, this technology, it's not. I guess it's not a surprise. It fits very well with what Kapoor has his earlier beliefs about the relationship of humanity and with technology. He's long advocated for technologies and AI to be developed that integrate and extends human capabilities, but to augment us instead of diminishing us, as he says, or replacing us. And I'm sure many people would agree with that these days with what's going on with AI, especially with with artwork and things like that. So just Kapoor describes alter ego as giving you the experience of a conversational AI that lives inside your head that you could talk to like you're talking to yourself internally. It's like basically your your alter ego, if you will. This your other mind in a sense, is the the entirety of the Internet could eventually be accessible as as a way of talking to yourself so that he he finds that very interesting. So what are some of the potential uses for this technology technology? So I kind of categorize this into into several, several buckets here. So one category of use cases, if you will, would be for disabilities. So people that have trouble communicating due to due to conditions like ALS or stroke, cancer, laryngectomy or or dysphonia, which I think is that what RFK Junior has?
S: He has dysphonia.
B: Yeah, exactly what I said. So so that's that's like the they said this was their primary focus is to help people with these disabilities. And I mean people that can't really talk or communicate like that, they can use a computer in some ways and and and craft sentences, but it takes it takes a while to do that. This is something that could help them communicate so much more simply and easily and quickly. So I think it could be an incredible boon for a lot of these these these sufferers. But another use case category here is for when obviously when silence is important. So when, for example, when talking to somebody in a medical setting could increase infection risk, right? Because sometimes you just don't want droplets being shared, you know, being launched into the air. So the, the, the less you talk, the, the, the, the, the lower the infection risk. So that, so this could be used for that specific example. But also there's broadcast sets, there's courtrooms, libraries, covert research, where silence is important, that this technology could be very helpful. Another, another category is if hearing is obscured for whatever reason. So Fire Rescue teams are trying to coordinate information amongst other rescue team members and their sirens and other noises on site. You could communicate this way without worrying about people not hearing you. But also construction sites, concerts, factories, motorcyclists, all these are all scenarios where hearing could be greatly impaired. And this type of communication could be great, great for you, you know, greatly helpful. Now a lot of this technology, I was surprised that a lot of this technology seems to have already been fairly well developed, at least according to the demos that I saw for at least like for five or six years, they had the basics of what I've been discussing. It's it seemed, it seemed to me. So some of the limitations that they that they experience I think would be something like speaker training. There's probably a deal, a great deal of speaker training that's probably going to be required if you had this technology right now. Also, I think that remember when I said that this, this device will read those signals and, and map using an AI to map those signals to words? Well, I, I found out that they had a 92% accuracy rate, but that was only with a very constrained vocabularies. So that so and so these weren't really real world world testing with people that that you have normal vocabularies. So, so 92% you got to take that with a, you know, with a that's not, I mean, yeah, so that's so maybe this is one of the areas where they've improved in the past five or six years. And, and there's also reliability issues that are that are, that are very likely like if like what if you're walking and sweating and what if you're, you're, you're walking fast and that the motion of your body, you know, interferes with this device. It's it's and this isn't a subtle device. This is hanging over your ear, down the side of your your face, cross your at the top of your neck and then up under your lips. I mean, this is not a subtle thing that you're wearing. It's not very covert at all. If you wear this, it's like those Google glasses with the, with the, with the beeping light, the bleep, you know, the, the flashing light on it. I'm just curious what improvements have been made in the past half decade on this. And I think we're going to find out pretty soon. Kapoor will discuss alter egos technology live this September 17th at Axios AI Summit in Washington, DC. So next week, I might be able to have a quick little update on this technology and where, where it is now as opposed as opposed to a lot of the information which is kind of at a date probably by this point right now. But it seems interesting and it's got some possibilities for some niche scenarios that could help a lot of people. But Steve, so what's your take? What's your take on this and what I said?
S: My take is that it looks dorky, the guys swirling. In the device.
B: Yeah, yeah. It's not subtle, It's not. That may be at all.
S: Yeah, I mean, sure, it's it's not implausible that if you're like sub vocalizing basically and it's picking up on your muscle contractions and interpreting that with 90 or something percent accuracy, that's not implausible. But the question is, how transparent are they being about how big the whole thing is and like what is connecting to and what its real functionality is? I'm just trying to find like really solid technical details and there's just not.
B: A lot, not a lot of that out there. Hopefully next week we'll have some more information. So I'll definitely chime in next week as to what what was released, you know since then.
S: I don't like them calling it telepathy.
B: Though that's just no, no, it's, I think that's all like other, you know, I didn't see MIT called referring to it as telepathy at all. I mean, I have seen like near telepathic, you know, in, in some places. So, yeah, they, they, they, they're not saying that this, this is telepathy. And it's not, of course you know that that websites are going to grab onto that idea and, and couch it in those terms.
J: I worry about this technology because it sounds like it could really mess people up.
S: Why?
J: Because you know, if you're, if you're like have a direct connection in your brain just by thinking to access the Internet and all that stuff, like, come on.
S: Yeah, you're just talking about the application of being plugged in. Yeah, plugged in with a deeper level. Have it interact overtly with the world.
B: Yeah, right. It's definitely a deeper connection than we can experience now. Hands free, voice free. It's, you know, it's, it's and it kind of is. Imagine, imagine you think a question and then you hear an answer with no, you know, external keyboards or voice interactions. That's got to be a weird feeling.
J: But I think we need to, we got to like stop moving in the direction of being insular and actually like, you know, have communities and kids got to go out and ride their bikes, you know?
B: How the hell did we survive those days? I don't know.
Decreasing Science Scores (1:10:11)
S: Evan, tell us about these decreasing science scores.
E: Yeah, sorry. I wish I had better news here. Latest results from the Nation, from the Nation's report card, officially known as the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP. We have some, we have some problems here about science education in America. OK. So this assessment, they assessed 23,000 eighth grade students at 600 different schools that participated in this science test, which covered physical science, life science, as well as Earth and space sciences. And this test was taken in 2024, but the assessment is now been analyzed and they've released the results. 2024 eighth grade science scores dropped by 4 points, and that erases all of the gains that had been made since 2009 when they started to perform this particular assessment. So we can't go back more than 15 years on this particular one. And we also need to point out that this is the first time they've resumed it since the pandemic. So for, for for what that's worth, on the test, the scores ranged from zero to 300. And a four point drop on a scale like that, you know, it doesn't sound huge. But in the world of educational assessments, they say that's considered a serious decline. Only 31% of 8th graders scored at at or above the proficient level. And that means roughly 2/3 of middle schoolers do not have a solid grasp of science concept that they are expected to know by the end of middle school. More than 1/3 of the students scored below the basic level, indicating they don't fully understand fundamental concepts. For example, plants need sunlight to grow, a concept like that. This particular assessment parallels a trend in math and reading scores for 4th and 8th graders, which was done by another assessment that was released in earlier this year in January which showed similar declines. They also did an analysis or as part of the assessment. Students enjoyment and interest in science. In 2019, 52% of 8th graders said they enjoyed science activities. 2020 442% a 10% decline. Interest in learning science fell from those years, 47% down to 39 percent 8% drop. Fewer students are believing that doing well in science actually matters in the real world, either for their future careers or understanding how the world actually works around them. And you can, you know, there there's, there's reasons they, they believe are, are attributable to this. You know, they call them the equity gaps. Who's being left behind? Unfortunately, girls scores dropped by 5 points. Boys scores dropped by three. So we have another gender gap here in science that is on the widening path again, and that reverses years of of having made progress in that particular area. Asian American students were the only group to improve, gaining 2 points. Caucasian students averaged 161, just above the basic threshold. Hispanic students averaged 137 on the scores, American Indian and Native Alaskan Alaska Native students 132 and Black students 130, all considered below basic level.
C: Cool.
E: Yeah, a little bit of, you know, if you, if you pick through it a little bit, you do find maybe a sliver or a, you know, a what is called silver lining. The science test scores, they don't contain state level data that would paint a better picture, say, of how California is faring compared to the rest of the country. There's something called the California Science Test CAST cast, and that test that is done annually has increased a point, actually went up one point. So maybe we need to, you know, turn to states like California to see kind of what they're doing to help reverse this, this overall trend nationwide.
J: Yeah. I mean, that's that, sure, but who's gonna actually do that? I mean, yeah, we're so polarized. You know the government isn't going to do anything that California's doing.
E: Yeah. That, that, that's a fairpoint, Jay. We're kind of in a climate right now in which that's less likely to happen, maybe then more likely.
S: But Evan, I wonder how much of this is still just all the pandemic effect it.
E: Could be.
S: Experts it's a really a trend I think it's a none of them it's not a good time pandemic yeah to yeah to identify a long term trend right, right. We're in the midst of this, yeah, this short term effect.
E: Yeah, and I'm even even sure how, how long 15 years is. I mean that's it's, you know, it's a decent amount of years, but I don't know if that's really, if that's really long enough even. I mean, we, we have to, they're going to run this test again, apparently in 2028 and we'll get results in 2029 and figure out, you know, and let's see how, how another post pandemic set of tests come out. So let's remain a little optimistic there. You know, that this is limited, but we do, we do have to be aware of it. We need to make sure the teachers get the resources and support and training that they need to do the, the, the real hard job that they have and, you know, and, and spread out and we got it. We got to do better and making sure that all students have have as much access to science learning as as possible and not make it, you know, just spotty, you know, for some students rather rather than others. And I don't know anything we can do to help reignite students curiosity, you know, and make it applicable to real world, which is which is exactly what it is. We have to get them to get into that mindset as well.
J: Yeah, I know it's easy, easily said, but.
E: I know we have to be aware of it though. We have to be aware.
C: And we have to want it. Yes, we have to like parents have to want this. They have to vote for people who are promoting this.
E: Correct.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:16:17)
J: All right, Jay is who's that noisy time? All right. Guys, last week I played this noisy. All right. You guys recognize this?
E: Yes, that's from the band Tangerine Dream from the 1970s. Speaking of old music, thank you. Next one.
J: OK, well I'm going to start here with Visto Tutti because he is my standard bearer, Visto says. This sounds like the sounds one hears when under a steel bridge as vehicles pass over above the bridge in quotes. Sings as it resonates with the load of traffic. I really really like this guess and I've heard that sound that he's talking about. I get it and it definitely has a very similar vibe to it, but that is not correct. Michael Saucedo said Hey Jay, sounds like audio from an external camera on the ISS during a spacewalk or external repair. That one too is a cool guess. That is not it. I have not heard that sound. I'd like to hear that if I can find it. And, you know, again, of course, that sound has to be like vibrating through solid matter because it's not going to go from an external source outside to anywhere because there's no atmosphere. But yeah, I could, I could see that it would we'd have a similar sound because it would have to go through metal, of course. Right. Michael Blaney wrote in. He said, hi, Jay. Really getting the Star Trek the Original series vibes here. Some glowing orbs making a weird sound. Kirk is keeping an eye out for danger, not really paying attention, while Spock is raising an eyebrow, scanning away and saying fascinating. That's funny because I see what you're saying with this guess, he says. As to what made the noise. I'm going to guess that some underwater steel pipes being struck by a hammer. These are all good guesses, however none of them are correct. But a listener named Paul Levine wrote in and said, Hi Jay, this sounds like it could be an excerpt from I Am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lussier. So do you guys know what this is? Have you heard this?
S: No, no, no, I don't.
J: Recommend. Let me let me play this for you. Let me play the original for you real quick. So this is the original recording.
Voice-over: I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.
J: OK, so he talks for I think a couple of minutes. Then what they do is they so they record that. Then as an example, they upload it to YouTube and then they download the audio and they repeat. So let me go a few generations forward.
Voice-over: Articulated by speech.
J: Right, you hear the difference? I.
Voice-over: Regard.
J: This activity, now I'll go forward a few more generations. You still hear words. Now let me jump ahead like dozens of iterations. So there is a, there's a, this is not lossless, right? This is there, there is a definite audio quality loss and there is anomalies that are happening that have an effect on the audio that comes out after the compression process. Does that make sense to you guys? So there's a degradation and it's just a cool experiment. I don't know how many times they did it. I think overall it, it, I don't know what point it actually makes it. I do think it's interesting in its own right, though. And I and I do find the sound very like I, I picked one where you can just barely maybe make out some words. Because if, if people could make out the words, then they would be able to figure it out by looking it up. But anyway, you know, this was a hard one. I didn't get a lot of guesses and I I only got one person. I guessed it correctly. It's if you know it, you know it. That's the thing. So now you guys know it. And you, you could not be fooled by this. I have a new noisy Steve. I don't know why I said your name right there, but this was sent in by a listener named Otta, who is from Seattle. What a coincidence. We were just talking about Seattle. I'm going to help you guys on this. It is not someone using an electric razor while riding in a helicopter. So that's not the guest. So don't send that in. I think this one's cool and I, I'm really looking forward to telling you what is actually going on here. So if you're interested in submitting a guess or you heard something cool this week, e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve. The show comes out on Saturday. The date on Saturday is going to be the 13th, so people who are hearing this, like on the 13th or the 14th or the 15th, even the 16th, you could still buy tickets to our shows. I've been deliberately booking venues that have large audience sizes just so I don't have to turn anybody away because I really hate to do that. So we have seats available. The private Show, the VIP and the Extravaganza are all going to be in the same theater. And this is about the the Kansas shows that we're doing on the 20th of this month. So if you're interested in attending any of those shows or if you heard the show last week where George was giving details about what we'll be doing, it's going to be a ton of fun. There's a lot, a lot of good entertainment here. You can go to theskepticsguide.org to buy tickets for those things.
S: All right. Thank you, Jay.
Emails (1:22:08)
S: It's going to do a couple of emails. First one comes from Wichita, KS speaking to Kansas.
E: Oh, hello.
S: Have you or can you cover Gold nanowire gel electrolyte batteries pros and cons? Thank you for your very informative and entertaining show, Curtis. All right, thank you, Curtis. Have you guys heard of this gold Nanowire gel batteries?
E: Nope. Nope.
S: Well they are great. They are extremely durable. So that it has a gold nanowire core with a manganese dioxide shell and then coding kind of fixes it stabilizes it. So it it prevents the like the cracking and the disintegration that is a problem. And then the entire assemblies and in case in flexible plexiglass like gel and that is the electrolyte, right. So advantages extremely durability, huge lifespan, 200,000 cycles without any significant degradation, right? High performance, high, high specific density of of, you know, energy density. So they're great except for the fact that you are never ever going to see them in any device.
E: Well. Right. I mean.
S: Yeah, so this information is off from 2016, It's been 9 years. So I looked for updates since this was reported in 2016 and there are no updates. Basically, if there is anything happening in some lab somewhere I have, I was not able to find information about it. The problem is that they like did the proof of concept. Yep, this all works, it's great. It's completely economically not viable.
E: Right.
S: Number one reason.
E: Con that falls into the.
S: Con yeah, that's it's just not going to happen. Number one reason. What do you think?
J: They can't get their resources.
S: Gold, gold nanowire, Whenever you see like how much gold, gold or platinum or whatever, like if that's their key, it's like not going to happen. We're not going to be mass producing gold nanowire batteries.
J: So you hate gold, Steve, That's what you're saying?
S: I'm just saying when a precious metal is involved, that dramatically decreases the probability it's going to be economically viable #2 it's really hard to manufacture. This may be the bigger reason. It's just very hard to manufacture. So making a cost effective mass production process is not in the works, right? So no time soon are we going to see this technology. And I suspect they either have to reformulate it so that it it's not made out of gold and it's easier to manufacture, or it's going to have to wait 10 or 20 years. And who knows it'll if it'll even be cutting edge by then. Maybe some of the insights they got from this battery can be applied to other batteries, but it's just.
E: A step. Towards whatever. It's just.
S: It's stuck. It's stuck because it's of those two big problems that are that are insoluble. So it's a great proof of concept. Not practical, unfortunately, because it would be great. All right, question #2 I don't have the person's name in here. This is about our Otter discussion from last week. I get the appeal. I personally like river otters more than sea otters, but otters are monsters. And then he links to an article by Vox Otters, the violent necrophiliac serial killers killing fur monsters of the sea.
B: Wow.
S: We've spoken about this before as well. Yeah, otters. So listen, here's the thing. We tend to anthropomorphize. Anthropomorphize animals and we tend to think of of this cute furry animal that holds hands and float on it's back and you know, put stuff in his little pouches. They are adorable. They're absolutely adorable. But they are wild animals. We can't, these are not domesticated animals, they're wild animals. They are in the weasel family and they are, their behaviors are typical of wild animals, but even at the extreme end of the bell curve, you know what I mean? So they're one of the species that their, their typical mating behavior is violent, right? The, the males push the females heads underwater, they bite them, they cause injury, they kill them. Sometimes they're, they're, you know, that's where the necrophilia comes in. They won't necessarily stop their rate, their mating behavior if they kill the female in the middle of the process. So yeah, they, they're wild, vicious animals, right? Just like you would expect a giant weasel to be so and it's and every site you read about it says like, listen, I get it. They're cute, they're adorable. If you encounter them in the wild, keep your distance. They are wild animals. Do not be put off by the fact that they're cute and fuzzy and. Adorable.
J: So Steve. So they do store Shanks in those little floors.
S: They might, they might.
E: Yeah. Of course they do.
J: Steve, we got some emails from people saying that they don't have favorite tools.
S: But there's a video they said that the one said that they don't store rocks but I saw the saw them putting a rock in its pouch.
C: Oh yeah, they definitely store rocks.
J: I don't think it's because it's their favorite, they just happen to be using it I think at that.
C: No, I think that a lot of them do use the same tool over and over. I think that's pretty well established.
J: I'm just telling you, the emails we got, I don't want, you know.
S: I sourced it pretty well.
C: I agree with the person who wrote in. I also prefer river otters. They are definitely always my favorite to watch when I go to a zoo because they're just really active and really fun.
J: Yeah, they they do seem like they have even like a little sense of humor there. You know what?
C: I mean, they're so playful, like they play with toys.
J: But it's it's a perfect example, though, Steve, right. Like it looks cute. It's doing cute things. I mean, it'll take a chunk out of you like you got you got to stay away. It's a wild animal. Like don't. Don't put honey on your kids faces to get a picture.
E: You know clearly.
Science or Fiction (1:27:59)
Theme: Gravitational Waves
Item #1: Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science, in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks.[7]
Item #2: A recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking’s theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease, and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas.[8]
Item #3: The “smallest” gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars.[9]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science, in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks. |
| Science | A recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking’s theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease, and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. |
| Science | The “smallest” gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Jay | The “smallest” gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. |
Cara | The “smallest” gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. |
Evan | Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science, in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks. |
Bob | Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science, in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks. |
S: All right, guys, it's time for science or fiction.
E: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 genuine and 1 fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. There is a theme this week. Do you guys know what happened 10 years ago?
J: Yes.
S: What a lot of things, but anything science technology related having to do with astronomy and the way of the detecting stuff in the universe.
B: Was that the Einstein multi? Messenger astronomy.
S: No gravitational, gravitational way, Yeah. So that was LIGO coming online.
B: 10 years already.
S: Yeah, it's been 10 years.
B: 10. Years LIGO. That was awesome, man. That was a big big. So a new category of of astronomic astrophysics, like a new course.
S: So the theme is gravitational waves. OK, yes, here we go, item number one. Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty. Second, only two atomic clocks I #2A recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. And I #3. The smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. Let's see Bob, you are not going first. So Jay, go first.
J: Oh, Christ, I literally just said to myself, well, at least I'll hear what Bob says. All right, You want to play it this way? So the first one here, Steve, gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instrument in science in terms of relative uncertainty. Second, only two atomic clocks. I like what I'm hearing here. This is a hard question to answer because, you know, if you're not in the field and you're not intimate with these instruments, you know, you have to been very lucky to read about this at some point. But I, I do find this one to seem very sciency. I think it's true. The second one, a recent detection of LIGO of colliding black holes, confirmed Stephen Hawking's theorem. At the surface area of the event horizon of a black holes, they cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas.
S: I'll give you a little bit more info since this is a very wordy 1. So what Stephen Hawking said was that the area of and some other guy too with the area. The area of a black hole's event horizon is proportional to entropy, and because entropy can never decrease in any closed system, this area also cannot ever decrease. And so when 2 black holes collide, if thermodynamics applies right, so not only can the surface area can't decrease, it has to increase by at least a little bit, and a recent collision detection confirmed.
J: That, I mean, how could I? You know, that sounds great, right? I mean, it this, it's so complicated and it's so specific, I couldn't possibly, you know, give a good answer here. I'm just going by what my gut is saying. And I, I, I mean, I just feel like that made sense with what you just said. What, what else could I possibly do? So the third one, the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. You know, Steve, this one sounds like BS to me. There's something about this I don't like. I don't know, EV. You feeling that I don't like it? That one's a fiction.
S: OK, Cara.
C: So you went with the smallest is 2 neutron stars as the fiction?
J: Yeah, I don't like it.
C: All right. I'll go with Jay. I have no idea.
E: Oh, please, let me be right. OK, Evan. I'll I go next. Yeah.
C: Oh. God, Evan. Nice, nice.
E: I hope everyone stayed around for the pay off on that. OK, I'll I'll, I guess I'll try to nail these in order a little bit. Second most precise measuring instrument in science. So what they Steve was LIGO? Was LIGO the 1st or there were gravitational wave detectors before that?
S: No, that was the first, and there's now two other ones.
E: So in 10 years we have the second most precise measuring instrument in science in a 10 year window. That seems quick. I don't know, right? I mean, how did that happen? But I look, I, I have no idea about any of these. The second one about colliding black holes, confirming Stephen Hawking's theorem. Sure. I mean, I'm glad you gave a little extra descriptor there, Steve. It helped me definitely understand it a little better. And I don't see why that I'm trying to find something in there to see why that would be wrong. The last one, Jay and Cara, about the smallest. Why is smallest in quotes here? Well.
S: Because you know what does small mean? You know what I mean? This is the This would be the least amount of disturbance in the gravitational space-time continuum, whatever that that is getting picked up by Lego.
E: Not, not even Luke, could detect that disturbance in the. That's right. All right, well, I don't, so I'll go with my gut. I I don't think in 10 years they made the second most precise measuring instrument in all of science. That seems like that would be incredible, but I don't know. I'll take the odds and say that ones fiction.
S: Okay. And Bob?
B: All right, start with two here. So LIGO detected 2 colliding black holes and confirmed Stephen Hawkings theorem that okay, so the surface area of two colliding black holes, the event horizon cannot decrease greater than the sums. That's true. That is correct. I don't know, however, if they've confirmed this based on LIGO. That's that's what I'm not sure of if they actually confirmed it, but it is true. The theory is that it's the, you know, it's going to be greater, not not less, not not it's not going to be, it's not going to decrease. So, so I don't know about that one. The smallest gravitational type of event, two merging neutron stars, that's correct. That's the smallest. So it's, so it's like 2, it goes like 2 neutron stars and a neutron star in a black hole and then two black holes. So yeah, that the smallest is 2 neutron stars. Damn you, Bob. Combinations on a slot. Pretty damn confident on that one. I mean, I mean, I like that. But could you be wrong, Bob? On that one, probably not shit, unless, unless he pulls his typical Steve baloney and comes up with some weird, weird, crappy thing that I I hadn't. I would be, but I would be shocked. I would be shocked. There's nothing, no, there's nothing smaller that it can detect. I mean, what's smaller? What's 2 colliding? What you tell me what else makes.
E: Gravitational waves.
B: Well, anything. Move your hand up and down. You're making gravitational.
J: Waves it's.
B: All right, so then let's go to let's go to one now, the most precise measuring instrument. So you're saying the second LIGO is second that technology? Yeah, the second most precise. See that one I'm pretty skeptical of. I mean, LIGO can they that is so precise it can detect. Imagine this something on the order of 5 or 10 thousandth the diameter of a proton. It's yeah, it can detect that that that type of movement because that's what's over across over what, 4 kilometer arms of the LIGO. I mean, it's ridiculous. And even even a even an atomic clock I think isn't quite. But it depends how you define, you know, most precise how you did. How do you define that? I mean a second over billions of years. It's pretty damn precise.
S: So I'll tell you since you're asking, yeah, it's, it's change in X / X, right? That's it. It's just how much of A change can it detect versus the size of the thing that it's detecting? So that's how you compare time and distance. Otherwise there's you have to make it dimensionless, right? Otherwise there's no way to compare those two things. So if you're just saying this relative uncertainty, you know, regardless of units, which one is more precise.
B: Yeah, I'm going to say I'm not certain on this one. I'm going to say that that this one is is the fiction and because the other ones are probably probably correct with the with the OK, the caveat.
C: #2 So what's the split?
S: OK, you're even split between 1:00 and 3:00, so you all agree on the second one, so we'll start there. A recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms that Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. You all think this one is science. I guess the question here is, was it recently confirmed?
B: That's it. That's the question. Yeah.
S: Was it, was it just neither confirmed nor disconfirmed or was it disconfirmed? Right. So which of those 3 possibilities and this one hopefully is?
E: Maybe not like.
S: Science. This is like I wouldn't.
B: Think no further.
S: Atlas that did it. Not like I wouldn't do that to you, obviously, but yeah, so it was.
B: Nice.
S: Yeah, 22 merging black holes. They were able to, you know, estimate the surface area of the event horizons. And it's like, Yep, it confirms what Hawking's predicted.
B: So from the gravitational waves, they confirmed the area of the Wow pretty.
S: Cool. Now this only includes classic relativistic understanding of black holes. It does not the idea that the event horizon can never decrease. It can because of quantum radiation, because of Hawking radiation Exactly. So if you include that it it can. But the idea that other than that other than Hawking radiation.
B: Yeah, but that's not really happening.
S: It is, but it's interesting that black holes are thermodynamic objects that that are obey the laws of thermodynamics in terms of entropy and energy and everything. Yeah, it's massive. Very interesting. All right, let's go back to number one. I guess gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty. Second, only two atomic clocks. Bob and Evan, you both think this is fiction, but for opposite reasons. Bob, you think it's the most sensitive. And Evan, you think that even second is too much because it's only been had this technology for 10 years. Well, this one is. The fiction?
B: Yeah, baby.
C: Oh man, Jay, we were on a good St.
S: You were, but why?
B: Is that so happy I took you guys down, Bob?
E: 'S right?
S: Bob is right, it is the most the most precise by several orders of magnitude. Atomic clocks are. The second are #2 and it's interesting because I was thinking about that. What's more precise atomic clocks are getting pretty damn precise.
B: They. Are they've thought that and they've been jumping up in the past 10 years, they've been like, oh, now 10 times more.
S: Exactly. That's why it was like. Until you look at this specifically, I wouldn't. I don't know that I would be able to have guessed the answer to this question.
B: Steve, do you remember?
S: Make that comparison except when you're made formulating a science or fiction right.
B: Right, right. Do you remember we did a news item about atomic clocks where if one atomic clock is higher on the wall than the other one, then there are times drift because they're because they're in the gravity that's precise.
S: But it's like 10 to the 18th versus 10 to the 21 in terms of the relative uncertainty. So it's 3. The orders of. Magnitude, all right for life.
B: That makes sense. I mean, yeah, Ligos, Ligos Kingman. That's ridiculous. The a fraction of the width of a proton. It could discourage like nuts.
S: Now there are some some calculation physics via calculations, like we could make statements about the size of particles, but that's not the same thing as relative uncertainty, right? So it didn't really apply. All right. That means that the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars is science. And those are Bob's correct. Those are the three types of events. Neutron star with neutron star with neutron star with black hole, black hole with black hole. That's it. Those are the three types of.
B: Events. See, if you guys paid more attention to me, you wouldn't have gotten that wrong.
S: Now, but Bob, The thing is, the thing that might have thrown you on that was what if we just discovered a gravitational wave from the merger of a neutron star and a white dwarf or a black hole in a white dwarf, then right for. Example.
B: Yeah, that's right. But that I would consider that incredibly unlikely based on what I know. About yeah, I agree. I agree.
S: But that's the other thing is like so definitely 2 neutron stars colliding.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:41:10)
"The word is mightier than the sword."
– Ahiqar, the Assyrian Sage, from the folklore titled The Story of Ahiqar, (earliest written version in the 5th century BCE), (description of author)
S: Is this quote UN quote smallest gravitational event that gravitational wave detectors have detected? Definitely. But I don't know if that means that's the theoretical limit, but it probably is.
B: No, I would. I would think that it would require a change to the technology like like to detect to detect massive black hole collisions. You need to tweak the tech to do that. As it is now, it's not going to do it.
S: But they are getting way more precise and they're in that they are decrease mainly because they're decreasing the background noise. So this is the reason why this is the first time we've confirmed.
B: OK.
S: Though you know Hawking.
B: Interesting.
S: Because the previous ones we didn't. There was too much background noise to say this with any certainty. But now it's the signal is just way cleaner and that allowed for this calculation and and the confirmation of of Hawking's theorem.
B: Yeah, yeah, probably the processing of the signal is just so much better with so much better. Maybe even AI, Maybe even AI being used as well. All right, This was this Jay. This was my what you would call it. How did you discuss? Slumdog.
E: Millionaire Slumdog? Yeah. Slumdog Millionaire.
S: All right. Well, good job, Bob and Evan. Oh.
E: Thanks.
S: Evan, give us give us a quote.
J: I'm. Offended by you not telling me and Cara do.
S: You feel bad about yourself. Did I?
J: I don't like that. Did I hurt you? Why are you singling us out?
B: No, Evan, give us a quote. Pay attention to.
E: Wait, we have heard the expression the pen is mightier than the sword.
S: The penis mighty the.
E: Penis mighty and joked about many times, many times. Well, you know, you go to, you go to make that your quote for the week and then you go to look up exactly where it came from and guess where you go down the rabbit. Hole. The rabbit hole. Where did this come from? Oh, it was actually, yes, it was made popular in 1872, but it was also written in 1700. It was also written in, you know, 1690. It was. And it goes all the way back, the way, way, way back to the earliest iteration of this. The word is mightier than the sword by a Haikar, the Assyrian sage from the folklore titled The Story of a Haikar. Earliest written version of this appeared in Egypt in the 5th century BCE, and the folklore is said to be even hundreds of years older than that. And that is the earliest written substantiation for this, for this particular phrase. I like that they say the word is mightier than the sword that, you know, as compared to the pen is mightier because the word is, is not. It can be also the written word, the spoken word language itself, using our words, using, using our brains, using our ideas, as opposed to, you know, resorting to, you know, some of the well, shall we say, weaker parts of the human character.
C: Yeah, but the pen is a tool like a sword.
E: The pen is. The pen is.
C: The pen didn't exist. Back when this was when right there were no pens were there.
S: No.
C: That's why. That's why they didn't call it that to begin with.
E: They were just.
S: The clay tablet doesn't might.
C: Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue.
S: The chisel is mightier than this one.
E: It would have been good in a Mel Brooks movie, yeah, to make, to have fun with that. But the word is mightier than the sword.
S: Nice. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure.
E: Thanks, Steve. You're welcome, brother.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ earthsky.org: Meet Earth’s newest quasi-moon, recently discovered 2025 PN7
- ↑ www.science.org: https://www.science.org/content/article/microscopic-robots-navigate-artificial-spacetimes
- ↑ sciencebasedmedicine.org: Tylenol and Autism
- ↑ phys.org: The older we get, the fewer favorite songs we have, study shows
- ↑ www.techtimes.com: Alterego Introduces World's First 'Near-Telepathic' Wearable
- ↑ edsource.org: Enjoyment of science plummeted along with scores on 8th grade national test
- ↑ No reference given
- ↑ journals.aps.org: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/kw5g-d732
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: List of gravitational wave observations - Wikipedia