SGU Episode 1057
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| SGU Episode 1057 |
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| October 11th 2025 |
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"Exploring molecular structure: Copper ions and nitriles in dynamic cavities." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"Science is the greatest equalising force in the world. Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That's why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity". |
- Omar M. Yaghi |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 9th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.
B: Hey everybody.
S: Cara, Santa Maria.
C: Howdy.
S: And Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Evan is in phase two of tax hell. He has the late deadline in mid-october. So he's doing, Yeah.
C: So. Which like let's be honest, I think they just furloughed like half the IRS Staffs.
S: Right well yeah, no, it's true IRS is really going to look woefully under understaffed now it's correct. It's crazy. And so he's doing that. So you might notice we've started recording on Thursday instead of Wednesdays. That's I think the second week we're doing that. This is going to be our new normal and it's just a scheduling thing. Mainly because Cara is starting a new job and Yep, Thursday is going to be a lot easier for her than Wednesday.
C: Yeah, and I'm three hours behind you guys.
S: Yeah, so it's different. We're recording in the afternoon instead of the evening. So Jay's awake, right? Jay?
J: Yeah. I mean, we go till like 10:30 at night, a lot of times the Eastern Time, and I'm just, you know, a million times sharper at 1:00 in the afternoon.
C: I love to that you guys are like we're recording in the afternoon. I'm like it's 9:00 AM just.
S: Are you a morning person or an evening person, Cara?
C: I well, I used to be an evening person. I still am technically an evening person, but we've talked about this before because I have a sleep disorder that makes me a very sleepy girl. I take this really intense medication and now I just wake up in the morning. It's like the minute that the meds are done doing their thing, I'm just awake. So that's how they work. It's amazing, Yeah. So I wouldn't still call myself a morning person, but I'm much more of one than I ever was before.
S: I'm solidly a morning person.
C: You just like decline like.
S: This, I'm just very alert in the morning. I can you do a lot of work basically from like 6:00 AM to 2:00 in the afternoon is sort of my most productive hours. And then I can function in the evening, but I get progressively sleepy in the evening, Yeah.
C: Yeah, I'd say I have more physical energy in the morning. So that's when I love to go to the gym. That's when I love to like, Oh my God, run errands. And then I have.
B: Him in the morning.
C: Yeah. And then I have. Good. More mental energy at night. I love like staying up late to write or to read or to work on crafts.
B: Yeah, I can go to bed at 1:00 AM no problem. I don't do it as much as I used to, but midnight to me is just like 12:30. I'll be like, yeah, I'll go up. It's 12:30.
C: Yeah, I'm exactly the same way. I usually wake up between 8:00 and 9:00. I guess that's going to change when I start seeing patients again.
S: When I was working, I was I would wake up at 6 pretty much every morning or a little bit before. Now my retirement time, I wake up at 7:00. It's not much different, it's just I can linger in bed till about 7.
C: Is does your wife get up at the same time or do you always get up before her?
S: I always get up before her, even when she's working because she works in the evening. She teaches it and right, she has evening classes. She has just meetings and stuff during the day, but she's early. Is she pressured to get up early in the morning? So I generally wake up before she does.
C: What a life, I love it.
S: So you guys know what time of year it is again?
B: Yeah, it is. Halloween time. Wait, no Nobel?
S: Prize time.
C: Oh, that too, but.
S: Before we get to that, I have a quickie for you guys just because this is we can't pass this by.
Quickie with Steve: Liver Xenograft (03:19)
S: I would absolutely be reporting on this if it weren't Nobel Prize week. So we're just going to do a quick hit. Researchers have implanted the first pig to human liver xenotransplant. What? So we've been talking about this for a while, this whole idea of where do you source organ transplants from and what's the what's the wave of the future? And I do think this is the most promising way. So this is a pig was the donor and it was genetically modified. They, they made 10 gene edits. So xenoantigen knockouts, right? So taking out genes for antigens that would activate the human immune system and also human trans genes, putting in human genes for two basic reasons. One is immunity, right, immune compatibility, and the other one is unique to the liver. It is coagulation compatibility. So the liver, you may not realize this right there. What liver is the biochemical factory of the body. It detoxifies anything you eat, right? There's always a first pass through. The liver doesn't do everything, but that's, you know, anything it can detoxify gets done through the liver. The liver also does your glucose management, right, stores your glycogen and does that. And the liver also produces your coagulation factors. And so and that's a complicated, what we call coagulation cascade, right? So there's a complicated set of enzymes and proteins that are made in the liver that have to do with clotting your blood. So that has to be compatible to this is what makes liver Zeno liver transplants so challenging is because if you're not, it's not just the immune compatibility, you need the biochemical compatibility as well, right? The pig liver has to do all the things that a human liver would do in the way that a human liver does. And the big issue there is the coagulation compatibility. So having said all that, this was done in China. The recipient was a 71 year old man with hepatitis B related cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma, was not eligible for a resection or a liver transplant. So they did this xeno, it's called an auxiliary graft, which I mean, I think just means it was did not replace the liver. They just put it there in addition to the liver. And he survived for 171 days, which is wow, a long time, right? I mean, it's obviously not a cure, but that's for this technology. That's that's pretty good. And the big problem was not rejection, it was the coagulation. He eventually died of GI bleeds.
C: So do they. So this still isn't where it needs to be.
S: It's still not where it needs to be exactly. So I mean, 171 days is good, but that they have not dialed in all the changes they need to make yet in order to make this function. So I mean, obviously this, this is a patient who given his liver failure and his, you know, liver cancer, did, you know, had a very short life expectancy anyway. So that's why they're, you know, you're able to do this kind of experimental treatment and somebody like that. But this is a solid advance. This is a solid step forward. And we are seeing more of this these xeno transplant from genetically modified, mostly pigs at this point. Remember we talked about lung, They're, they're working on cardiac. Cardiac's probably the easiest because it's just a pump. You know, there are some challenges with the lung because it does have a lot of immune function as well. And it's challenging with the liver because of the biochemical compatibility. I think pancreas is probably on the short list. That could be like a, a cure for some types of diabetes and kidney, you know, kidney is a filter that should be pretty easy to make compatible, more so than the liver or the lungs, which I think are going to be the real challenging ones.
C: If you guys are interested in like reading about kind of what's on the horizon and like in a really fun way, I highly recommend Mary Roche's new book Irreplaceable You because she talks about this in depth in it. I had her on my podcast a couple of weeks ago and. Weeks so. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the book's fascinating. It like just came out.
S: Awesome.
News Items
Physiology or Medicine (07:46)
S: All right, now it's time to get to our Nobel Prizes. Cara, you're going to start us off with Physiology or medicine.
C: This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Mary E Brunco from the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, Fred Ramsdell from Sonoma Biotherapeutics in San Francisco, and Shimon Sakaguchi from Osaka University. They were awarded jointly the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine quote for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance. The the kind of long and short of it is they discovered how the immune system is kept in check by a whole second system that a lot of people believed either wasn't there or they just didn't really, they were really skeptical about how it might work. And so this is one of those stories of decades of research. And I love this kind of science because it's like, this is how we know what we know. But before I tell you more about their discoveries, I wanted to tell you like a kind of fun fact about how they were told that they received the Nobel Prize. So the Nobel Prize committee they put or nobelprize.org. They they do these great videos. I don't know if you guys have seen them on YouTube where they have an animation of the person who won. And then they have a phone call with somebody from nobelprize.org talking to them about like how they first found out. And usually it's, it's either a phone call or, you know, somehow it gets, I don't know if somebody finds out and tells them. But my favorite is that Fred Ramsdell, he was hiking with his wife up near Yellowstone and didn't have service for days after they were released. And so he only just found out about this like the whole world knew before him, which I thought was absolutely hilarious. And I don't know if you guys follow on Instagram, but one of my favorite accounts, Doctor Lucky Tram, he's a science communicator. He shared this like headline that says Nobel committee unable to reach prize winner who is quote, living his best life hiking off grid. So anyway, let's get into how they discovered this. OK, We know that there are T cells and B cells that help us when when we have a pathogen that enters our body and our immune system attacks those pathogens. What the researchers in this year's Physiology or Medicine Prize, what what they did is they they really identified, I don't like to say discovered because we kind of knew the cells were there, but they identified these specific types of cells called regulatory T cells, which are really important for peripheral immune tolerance. So let's kind of back up a little bit. I mentioned we have T cells and B cells. This year's prize really focuses on T cells. So that's what we're going to focus on. But B cells have somewhat similar functions. So there are T cells that are always patrolling the body and that sort of send downstream signals that say we need to attack when there's a pathogen that enters the body, a virus, you know, bacteria, anything like that. And then there's other types of keys, T cells, that actually bind to those cells and eradicate them. So they attack body cells that have been infected, and sometimes they also attack tumor cells, but sometimes they don't know to attack tumor cells. All T cells have T cell receptors, right? So there are these little things on the surface of the cells that understand or that recognize different pathogens. And for a long time, there was a sort of 1 gene to 1 pathogen hypothesis, and researchers quickly realized that there's just not enough actual DNA, There's not enough coding regions of the DNA to have all the genes we would need to map for all the different pathogens that we are exposed to. So really researchers a while back realize that a bunch of genes are randomly combined in different orders to come up with these special T cell receptors. And the I think the number now is that there's possibly like 10 to the 15 different types of T cell receptors. We're always able to recognize new pathogens.
S: It's basically everything.
C: Exactly like we can combine our gene, the genes can combine in such a way to produce new receptor receptors for anything that comes into the body. And obviously we don't recognize it at the beginning and then we mount a stronger response. We know that T cells are matured in the thymus, right, which is which is an endocrine organ in our body. And what sometimes happens is that AT cell that should be recognizing A pathogen actually attacks our own body cells. We know this happens because people have autoimmune disease. The thymus has this really cool system that helps it identify endogenous protein, so the body's own cells so that our T cells don't attack our own cells. Basically the thymus, there are cells in the thymus that have endogenous protein fragments that they attach to so that when the T cells are first matured, they sort of test them out and they say, do you bind to me? And if they bind to them, they go, Nope, you don't pass this test. We're going to destroy you. We're not going to release you into the body to go patrol viruses and protein, viruses and bacteria, because you're very likely going to attack body cells. And that's not no, no, no, we don't want that. Yeah.
S: So it's negative selection. We make antibiotics against everything and then select out the self.
C: Exactly. And so that is that central process that we talked about, right? That is, these are the patrollers that are doing central immune tolerance. After we discovered this, researchers said, OK, probably there are also some that sort of are patrolled after this thymus test. And a bunch of researchers started to do research in this field and they very quickly made a bunch of discoveries. But the problem was they made pretty big claims. And this happens. We see this a lot in the history of science where big claims are made or, you know, what we know is stated, but then, OK, but that means, you know, X means Y&Y doesn't pan out. And So what ended up happening with this field of peripheral immune tolerance is that it sort of died because so many people made such big, big claims that they couldn't replicate, that a bunch of researchers became really skeptical of the entire idea. So Shimon Sakaguchi, who at the time was in the Iichi Cancer Center Research Institute in Nagoya, he was like, no, no, no, I still think there's something going on here. And This is why he did this really interesting experiment where they've removed the thymus altogether from newborn mice. And they were like, OK, these mice are probably going to just make fewer T cells and their immune systems won't be good, right? So they'll just get infections and they'll die. But they found that if they've removed it like 3 days or later after the the mice were born, the opposite happened. Their immune systems went haywire. They were way too strong and they started attacking the mice's healthy cells. They got this range of autoimmune diseases and they often died from that. And so he was like, OK, this is interesting and it tells me that something is happening beyond this. So he devised these cool experiments where he took these mice where the thymus had been removed that had a an overactive immune system. And he injected mature T cells from a healthy donor, from a mouse that had a thymus intact. And he found that they were protected. So he was able to put mature T cells in after the fact and they were tested. So what what were these cells that he was putting in? He knew they were mature T cells, but nobody knew what types they were, so he was able to recognize that. And maybe this requires going back, but remember how I said that they're the patrolling T cells? Those have a protein called CD4. And killer T cells, the ones that actually do the attacking, they have a protein on them called CD 8. Well, he identified a protein called CD25 and he found that those patrolling T cells, they had both CD4 and CD25 on their surface. And he realized that if he added the CD 25 cells to the CD 4 cells that were already in existence in the Ultra kind of immune angry, you know, the hyperactive immune system cells, that's when they got healthy again. So there was something about these CD25 receptors that was preventing these mice from attacking their own tissues. And this was not only happening in the thymus, it was happening in somewhere in the periphery. And so he was able to identify this new class of T cells. They called them regulatory T cells. And then this research sort of continued. OK, so here's where this the story switches over to the other two researchers. So now cut to a little bit later. This was in the 90s that this research research was happening. So now we're going to cut to research that continued into the early 2000s, at the time Bronco and Ramsdell. Bronco just to as an aside, it's important to remember that she is, whoa, only the 13th woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or medicine, only the 66th woman overall to receive the Nobel Prize. So we're talking teeny tiny percentages there. So at the time Bronco and Ramsdell were working together. They were in a lab. They were at a biotech company called Celtec Cairo Science in Bothell, WA. They were really interested in the specific mutation called the Scurfy mutation. Scurfy, they were using a model Organism. It was a mouse that was developed actually out of the Manhattan Project research. So they were interested in how radiation sickness caused autoimmune problems. So some of these mice that had this genetic mutation were born with scaly and flaky skin, large spleens, large lymph glands. They lived for only a few weeks and they just were, were unhealthy and they were only male. So people realized, researchers realized this had to be an excellent chromosome. So only male mice got it because when female mice had the 2X chromosomes, one of them could be healthy. But men of course, or male mice of course only had 1X chromosome. And so if they carried the gene at all, they, they got really sick and they died. So they started to go like, OK, what's going on with these mice? Why are they so sick? And they realized that these T cells were were attacking the tissues of these mice. So Bronco and Ramsdale, this is where they enter because that was known. They were like, OK, what's going on with these scarfy mice? What is the mechanism underlying their disease? Like really. Like, we know it's something with the T cells, but we want to understand exactly where on the genome this mutation is occurring. And we've got to remember that this was before any of the modern technology that we have. So they had to do all of this kind of coding manually in order to understand where this gene was. They had to dig through like 170 million base pair nucleotides to figure this out. It was bananas. So they narrowed it down to about 500,000 nucleotides. They mapped that whole area of the X chromosome, and they ultimately narrowed it down to 20 different potential genes. And don't you love this? Like your keys are always in the last place you look. They looked through 20 genes and they found the mutation on the 20th world.
B: Oh my God. Classic.
C: Yeah, it's a lot of work.
B: Love to have heard them when they found it on the 20th.
C: Yeah, serious.
B: Few curse words.
C: Probably, yeah, more than a few. So they find this Scurfy mutation and they name it Fox P3 because it was similar to previously identified genes called forkhead box genes. So they called them Fox genes. So Fox P3 they found here's a kind of an interesting aside, but also very important for their for their prize. They realized that there was a human variant that was very similar to Scurfy in presentation, but they weren't sure if it was genetically similar. But once they did this research, they realized the human equivalent of Fox P3 was responsible for a rare genetic disease called IPEC syndrome, which is immune dysregulation, polyendocrinopathy, enteropathy, X linked syndrome. So this is an inherited immunodeficiency where again, only male individuals develop early onset autoimmune disease that's just really intense. It presents with diabetes, enteropathy, so attack on the GI tract and a lot of kind of gut issues, rashes like eczema and psoriasis and thyroid disease. And these children often die very, very young. So they were able to identify the actual gene responsible, which we now know with the tools that we have, we can start solving these these problems where there's a specific genetic mutation.
S: There is a clinical trial underway using CRISPR to treat iPads.
C: Amazing. Yeah, amazing. And so not only did they identify that, but they were able to basically look at the research that was previously done, you know, across the board, all the research that was done, but also the research that was done in Japan. And everybody now was able to say, I mean, it wasn't just Shimon Sakaguchi at this point, but because he had done all of the work leading up to it, he was able to take that discovery of the Fox P3 gene and say, wait, that is what is actually controlling the development of those regulatory T cells that I identified. So I was able to find their function through these really interesting experimental techniques. Now that I know where the gene is that controls it, we can, you know, do a lot of interesting things. We can knock it out. We can boost it. We can, you know, try and understand exactly what's happening. And so all of this research together tells the story of this secondary immune tolerance, peripheral immune tolerance. So not just this pathway that occurs within the thymus where the cells that are attacking healthy body tissue are sort of knocked out, but this whole secondary pathway where our body recognizes cells that attack healthy body tissue and potentially either gets rid of them or, you know, weakens them. Like there are so many different things we can do with autoimmune disease, right? So let's say, for example, that there's a disease where the body's own immune system is in hyperdrive, an autoimmune disease. Like, I have an autoimmune disease. I have psoriasis, that's my own body attacking my skin cells. And it causes these like, you know, scaly patches. And I have to take medicine for that in order to not have these patches on my elbows. Some people have it severely over their whole body. And there are a ton of autoimmune diseases. If we can dial down those regulatory T cells so that they're not attacking healthy disease or we can knock them out altogether, that would prevent autoimmune disease. On the flip side of that, cancer cells, tumors are especially good at recruiting. Oh no, they just recruit the the T cells themselves.
S: Yeah, the T regulatory cells, yeah, to suppress, to protect themselves from the immune.
C: Exactly. So they recruit the cells themselves and again, these T regulatory cells, this whole system are what was discovered or at least identified by the people who the three individuals who won the Nobel Prize. So tumor cells are really good. That's how they're able to cloak themselves within the body, right? They're able to say like we're just the body tissue don't attack us and then they grow and grow and grow. And so there's so much potential therapeutic benefit of continuing to develop drugs or treatments for these regulatory T cells to maybe be suppressed or turned off in the presence of tumors. And we actually do have some pilot studies on that where patients are getting interleukin 2. Interleukin 2 makes regulatory T cells thrive. So that's helping with the autoimmune disease and possibly even organ rejection after transplantation. But then as I mentioned, when it comes to the tumors, some researchers are like modifying the T cells, adding different antibodies on their surface so that they can be better recognized or they can send out these sort of T cells to transplanted liver or kidney to help take care of them. And of course, dialing it down instead of or, sorry, dialing it up instead of down in cancer, in tumor biology, it would be a whole other application and probably so many more that we haven't even thought about. So once again, congratulations to doctors Mary E Brukno from Seattle, OR who is in Seattle now, Fred Ramsdale in San Francisco and Shimon Sakaguchi in Osaka for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance.
S: It's another example also of how international like global collaboration is involved in modern scientific research. Like when if you read about any of these Nobel prizes but also just any story like this, it's always multiple labs in different countries contributing different components to how things you know unravel.
US#00: Yeah, which has.
B: Almost without, almost without fail. I mean, that's what I'm constantly reading multinational groups of, of, of researchers and labs and Oh my God, you're.
S: Doing research at this level, it's like almost unavoidable.
C: It's like you have to. And that not only has implications just for better science happening globally, but also it does have diplomatic implications. Like science diplomacy is so important because we see this all the time where countries that are having geopolitical conflicts still come together with their scientific collaborators. And yes.
S: The Trump administration just cancelled all NIH sub grants to international collaborators.
C: Yeah, because he it's like he wants us to be an island.
S: It's so short sighted.
C: When you're an island, everything gets weird, as we know from an evolutionary perspective, but also, yeah, from a collaborative perspective, like our science is going to wither. It's it's, it's not going to grow if we cut ourselves off from the rest of the world.
S: All right, Bob, you're, you're going to go on and tell us about the prize in physics.
Physics (26:53)
B: Yes, Sir, this year's Nobel Prize in Physics went to researchers who showed that that the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics that I love so much don't quit when things get big to hallmark quantum effects, tunnelling, and energy quantization show up even in macroscopic circuits that you can literally see. This year's prize went to John Clark, Michael Devore, and John Martinez for their foundational work in 1984 and 85. And that's right around the time, if you remember, right around the time that the mind flare was terrorizing those poor kids from Stranger Things. Right. Sorry, I've just, I've been binging that show. John Clark was professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley at the time. Now he's a professor emeritus at the university's Graduate School. Devore and Martinez are both professors of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. If you're rusty, I haven't talked about it in a little while. Quantum mechanics describes that the counter intuitive and famously weird behavior of microscopic objects like atoms and electrons. That weirdness of the of the quantum realm is not visible in the macroscopic world that we inhabit. Those effects are still there though, but they just kind of get averaged out by all the trillions of interactions that are happening in these these huge messy systems. Like even like relativistic effects, the time that your your your head feels compared to the time that your feet are experiencing are slightly different, but it's, it's so small, not even notice it. So what these guys did back in the 80s was to create electronic circuits made of superconducting loops where there's no resistance to flow. And within these circuits, they saw these two iconic quantum. The first was quantum tunneling. We talked about that a little bit before. This happens when a particle appears to move through a barrier, like an energy barrier, even when it doesn't have enough energy to do so. I came across theoretical physicist Steven Gervin's take on this. He, he likens this to uses an an an analogy comparing quantum tunnelling to a car in neutral. So imagine you're a neutral and you're approaching a hill. If you don't have enough energy, you're not going to make it over that hill. You just go up a bit, right? And then you just kind of slow down, stop and head back down. Imagine that this is the case, but you still make it to the other side using this process called. Quantum tunneling.
S: It's about the analogy is there's a tunnel going through the hill rather than having to go all the way over the top of it I guess.
B: Yeah, yeah, you could. Yeah, think of it that way. But it's just, yeah. It's, but it's a metaphor, right?
S: We're not saying that that's what's actually happening, but it's just.
B: Right, right. You could think of it. Yeah, think of it that way. If you're interested in that, please read, you know, go online, just milli billions of websites talking about it. Lots of ways to actually approach these topics. Now, this has been shown to exist in the micro world and it's actually so important that stars could not shine without engaging in quantum tunneling. And many of the technologies that we use today just wouldn't happen without this without this effect. So yeah, it's there and it's critically important to life as we know it. But quantum tunneling was never seen in the in the macro world in the way that Clark and Devore did in their experiment. Now, they did it specifically in this case by adding these, what they call Joseph's injunctions in their circuits. It's like an insulator that require tunneling to get past. So that that's, that's how they kind of, that's what they did to the circuit to spot this. The second quantum behaviour was mainly fleshed out by Martinez. This behaviour is referred to as a quantization of energy. It refers to the fact that subatomic particles can only gain or lose energy in fixed discrete amounts. Right. You guys, you guys have heard of that before. In our world, energy is generally comparable to say, a dial that can be turned by any amount, no matter how small it's continuous. The quantum realm, however, only deals in very specific energies, more akin to a channel selector than a than a continuous dial. So you can think of it that way. Now this was shown to happen in these large circuits by sending microwave photons into them and seeing how that energy was absorbed. Specifically, they looked, they were looking at the absorption spectrum, they saw that the energy was absorbed only at very specific frequencies, and these frequencies were specifically predicted by theory. But it also had the bonus of, of actually being solid proof that even these large scale circuits, we're experiencing this quantum energy quantization that we see in the quantum realm all that all the time, but not in the in, you know, the macro scale world that we live in day-to-day. All right, to sum up here, these are what these researchers proved is that quantum behaviors can happen in things that are large enough for us to see. It's not a phenomenon only for individual atoms or particles. In a real sense, these large circuits as a whole, we're behaving like atom sized objects. That means that the laws of quantum mechanics can also apply to macroscopic technologies. That that's the key right there. But also, these weren't just some cool but obscure experiments that happened decades ago. These, these discoveries that these gentlemen made, these, this was the foundation of a host of technologies that turn quantum physics essentially into engineering, right? Allowing the creation of devices that were practical and controllable. So this includes some things you might probably predict. This includes some modern quantum computer platforms that are out there today made by, I think it was like Google and IBM. But there's also quantum sensors and there's quantum amplifiers. And also there's, there's, I think even newer than those things, there's these super precise measuring technologies like superconducting gravimeters and the list goes on and on, all essentially flowing from, from the this foundational research from decades ago. So, so who knows? And also I love to extrapolate a bit into the future. So who knows what amazing technology in the future future can be traced back to this research from the time of the Mind Flayer in the 1980s. Nice. Yeah. That was so many, so many layers to this. But. Yeah, with quantum mechanics. Yeah, Oh my gosh, it's just it's, yeah, it's, it's nasty to cover because there's so many like, well, you can't say that because that's misleading. And though that that creates a, you know, a mental image that's.
S: Probably the minefield of of.
B: It is the minefield is a great way to describe.
Chemistry (33:01)
S: It all right, let's finish up with the Nobel prizing chemistry. This one goes to again 3 researchers, Susumu Kitigawa from Kyoto, Japan, Richard Robson from the University of Melbourne in Australia and Omar Yagi from the University of California at Berkeley in the USA. So again, an international researchers contributing to this story. And this has to do with something called metal organic frameworks, which we have definitely talked about on the show previously. But I'm going to go back to 1974 is where at least conceptually, this all begins. But I'm going to 1st, Bob, ask you a question. Do you remember back in high school when you and I believe it was Aaron, but you and somebody else got caught red handed by Mr. Kosh on playing catch with those molecule models in the chemistry class?
B: Absolutely right. And I haven't thought about that in probably 2 decades. So thank you for that.
S: I remember that that guy had radar. You did that absolute radar. Now I was an innocent bystander because I had nothing to do with this, but Bob was my ride home and so I had to stay behind and help you reorganize all the drawers of rubber stoppers before we could go home. Do you remember that?
B: I. Do I? The rubber stopper thing was even more deeply buried than the throwing around the the atoms and molecules. All right.
S: So I was reminded of that because this story begins with Robson, who in 1974 also was playing with these those model molecules. But that set him on a pathway not to reorganizing the rubber stopper drawers in the chemistry classroom, but the Nobel Prize.
US#05: If only we could have trembled that same Cap Steve.
S: So, yeah, so as a teacher back in the day, he would use, you know, but like the wooden ball and dowel kind of models that you build atoms out of. And he would have to have the woodshop drill the holes in the wooden balls and he had to tell them the specific angle at which to drill those holes, because that's the angle of the bonds that the that they, those atoms make accurate. Yeah. Because. And then he realized that once you do that, like once you put the bonds at the correct angles, the molecules sort of automatically build themselves in the correct way, right. The structure of the molecules sort of are automatic because they're, it's built into how many bonds like a carbon atom make and what angle are those bonds at, etcetera. So he's like, huh, that's interesting. I wonder if there's something there 10 years later, right. So this idea percolates with him for 10 years. Every year he's teaching his class like looking at these chemical models, like there's something here and what he thought I was, I wonder if we can take this up 1 hierarchical level, if the structure, right, the structure, 3 dimensional structure of these molecules derives from the types of bonds that these atoms make. I wonder if we could use bigger molecules to do the same thing, right? So essentially, if you have a molecule that also has specific binding sites, could you use it kind of like a tinker toy to build bigger structures out of? And so he combined copper ions also copper ions like to like to make four bonds, right? And he combined that with A4 armed molecule, organic molecule, you know, don't worry about what the long name is, right? So then you have also a very similar tetrahedral type of structure, right? For D&D players, it's like AD 4, right? So in the end, with four, the copper ions each able to make a bond, and he's like that this should behave kind of like a carbon atom, this giant molecule, right? So he tried to build these bigger structures out of it, and it basically worked the exact same way. He could build these larger structures out of these metal organic sort of compounds that he had made. And again, kind of like a chemistry tinkertory set. Interestingly, because these were so big, the structure contained these large cavities, if you could imagine that like these are these big molecules, you stick them together and it forms this bigger structure. But there's big voids, there's big empty areas in the structure just because of the gangly molecules that you're connecting together already. So then he further thought, huh, I wonder what we could do with this, right? So how, what kind of function would this serve? Again, initially he just wanted to see if he could do it, but he started to play around with different structures to see if he could get them to do different things. And he realized one thing is that gas could flow into and out of these voids, and you could also fill them with different kinds of ions, and maybe they could serve as sort of a catalyst to drive chemical reactions. And he started playing around, building different structures that would do different things. But there was a big problem with this technology, and that is these structures were fragile. They were not resilient. They would breakdown very quickly, and they could not resist high temperatures. And so they just weren't very practical or useful because of that. They just weren't stable enough. So now enter Kitigawa and Yagi. They were not working together. They were working completely independently, right? But they were sort of picking up from Robson's basic building blocks idea and experimenting with different ways of, again, not necessarily with any any outcome in mind. In fact, Kitigawa has a famous quote about the usefulness of useless, right. Things which seem to be useless can turn out to have incredibly useful applications. So you just never know. So just following your your interest and the the kind of just thinking outside the box and saying how this is interesting. I wonder if this would work, You know, and then worry about applications later yields incredibly useful things. The quick version is, is that Kitigawa and Yagi independently experimenting with this organic metal combination, these meta structures that you're making out using big molecules as building blocks were able to make much more versions of them and found out how to make them much more stable. And I think it was Yagi, in fact, that in one of his papers that coined the term. Metal organic framework for these kinds of structures. That's basically the story at the end of the day, these three people were critical for the development of this chemistry technology of developing these metal organic frameworks, making them more stable, but also making them more flexible. The reporting on this brings up the point that there were already other kinds of technologies like silicon dioxide and zeolites, right? That where you could have similar function. So there wasn't a lot of interest in these early on. It's like we can already do that with these other things. These are fragile, who cares, right? But the researchers kept pushing, and they found out that, well, first of all, we can make them stable, and secondly, we could make them do do something that the zeolites can't do. And that is that they're flexible. And what that means is they can change shape from when they're empty of stuff, whether it's a gas or other chemicals or whatever, to when they're full. And that just expands the number of potential applications that they could potentially be used for. So Fast forward to today, where are we? There are literally 10s of thousands of metal organic frameworks that have been created and they have a wide range of potential applications. We talked recently about harvesting water from the air in deserts. Those were metal organic frameworks. There's a lot of research looking at pulling carbon dioxide out of the air, right? Carbon capture. Those are metal organic frameworks. Oh, cool. There's a lot of metal organic frameworks that that are you are catalysts they make because you're bringing different molecules together. You could then catalyze reactions. You can make them happen more quickly. The thing about the metal organic frameworks and it's a framework, they're essentially programmable in a way like you can design the the structure so that the voids specific to whatever kind of molecules you want to fill them. And now with artificial intelligence, they can explore the potential design space of millions of metal organic frameworks and say, yeah, find one for me that does this. You know, so I think we're sort of poised for this technology to take off even more. One specific thing I thought of was can this be used as a hydrogen storage medium, right? Because we're desperately looking for something that would store hydrogen. And the short answer is it is being researched. It is being researched, but it's not very promising. And the reason for that is volumetrics is that while, well, it you can make metal organic frameworks that store hydrogen and they can be very mass efficient, have a low, you know, mass for the amount of hydrogen that you're storing. They don't compress the hydrogen very well. So they take up a lot of volume. So that may be useful in some contexts, like any static storage need, but wouldn't be good in a hydrogen fuel cell car. You need to keep the weight and the volume under control for your hydrogen storage. Doesn't mean that they won't eventually crack this problem, but that's where it is right now. There's some major challenges that's probably not going to be in an early and maybe even a never application for Mofs, but there's so many other ones. So this is just one of those. Again, those technologies that facilitate other technologies, it's also this is the technology that's often behind the news item, right? Like we were talking about the harvesting, you know, water from the air. The technology behind that is the metal organic frameworks. So keep your eye on this. This will keep popping up in a lot of the news items that we talked about.
B: Cool man, yeah.
S: All right, I think there's three awesome Nobel Prizes for this, for this year in the sciences.
C: And like is often the case with the Nobel, I guess, announcements, when you first read it, you're like, oh, yeah. And then you dig into it. You're like, whoa, this. Is. Such a big deal.
S: Yeah, absolutely. All right. We have one non Nobel news item.
Long COVID (44:21)
S: Jay, tell us about some recent discoveries with long COVID.
J: Yeah, so many people with long COVID report this brain fog thing. I mean, I think it's been in the news a lot. It's definitely a term that has gotten out there. A lot of people know about it, but, you know, is it legitimate? You know, what could potentially be causing it? So a research team in Japan asked those questions. You know, is there a measurable change in the brain chemistry that lines up with those that think they have these problems? So they did they, they looked into it and they used a brain scan that can see one kind of communication receptor on neurons, and it's called the AMPA receptor. Think of these receptors as tiny volume knobs that help neurons pass signals. So the team scan and 30 adults that claimed to have long COVID symptoms who had ongoing cognitive complaints. And what they did was they compared them with 80 healthy volunteers from a previous data set. So what they found on average was that people with long COVID showed a stronger AMPA signal across large parts of their brain. And in simple terms, more of those volume knobs were visible on neuron surfaces. They measured the test subjects brains with a PET scan and the tracer that they used, right? This is the thing that they typically will inject into somebody that will stick to the things that they're looking for and they're able to locate that them sticking onto that whatever it is they're looking for. So in this case, they want to find the receptors. So they, they used something called carbon 11K2 and this binds to the amp of receptors. And after the injection, the researchers were able to collect images during a 30 to 50 minute window. I guess that's how long it was able to be traced. And then they calculated a standard ratio that tells you how strong the tracer signal is in each brain region. And they they compared this against typical white matter as the reference. Prior work from the same group supports the idea that this signal mainly reflects receptors on neurons, not on support cells. And that matters because it ties the signal to synapses, where this is where of course neurons talk to each other. They also gave standard thinking tests to the people. And when they checked whether higher AMPA signal matched worst scores, 2 tests stood out. And Steve, I'd like to hear what you have to say about this. People with higher signal did worse on picture naming and on visual memory tasks that ask you to recall a figure, and those links showed up in the same brain areas that had the biggest group differences. That connects the scan results to the real world problems like finding the right word or remembering what you just saw.
S: This is, yeah, this is really interesting. The AMPA receptors are excitatory, but they're also excitotoxic. So what that means is that they increase the firing of neurons and they also cause some metabolic stress to those neurons, right? They actually could kill them if there's an if there's enough of that stress. So what what they think is happening is that it's just messing with the balance of signalling in these networks, right? Just throwing off the network by, you know, having an excess excitatory signalling, too much excitation and also too much stress on those neurons. And it can affect people's overall ability to maintain their focus and to think. What's interesting is that this is probably a global effect, right? This is not affecting one part of the brain. But when there are global effects on the brain, there are certain Canaries in the coal mine, if you will. There are certain symptoms that tend to be the first thing people notice and one of those is that just your ability to maintain concentration because that we take it for granted, but that's a very high energy functioning state of the brain. The ability to focus your attention, maintain your attention, you know, divert your attention, filter out things you don't want to pay attention to. We're all constantly doing that. And when that's even a little sluggish, you really notice it.
C: Yeah, and a lot of people kind of experience it as something called brain fog.
S: Yeah, brain fog. They.
C: Just can't think is so sorry if I missed this. Are these people producing too much glutamate?
J: They didn't mention that as far as what I read, this was a very, very long study.
C: Yeah. Just I'm wondering.
J: I don't think they know, just wasn't these receptors are more active.
C: I don't think they figured out why they're more. But amper receptors are glutamate receptors, right? So. So either they're making too much or too much is being left in the synapse, or there's something excitotoxic going on. Yeah, OK.
J: They also conducted blood tests and they found that there were two immune system signals. You know, it moved with the brain scan result. The blood tests don't prove cause and effect, though. It's a pattern that suggests the immune system and synapses might be LinkedIn these patients. An important question here is could this scan that they've created identify patients, right? They were able to identify 9 out of 10 people who don't have it. I know it seems backwards, but that's the way that their scan was working. And these are, you know, these are early numbers. It's a very small study and these tests aren't even ready for clinical use. They'd have to do much larger studies and really dig into that.
S: Yeah, but it's part of the process of going from a clinical diagnosis to a mechanistic diagnosis, right? Your, your diagnosis is I have brain fog, right? Like it's just a symptom. And maybe we could say you have brain fog and you don't have any abnormalities in your neurological exam that would explain it, right. So that's typically how we make a clinical diagnosis. You have some symptom and it then there's no obvious explanation that's. And so we're left with this syndrome anytime we can go from that and say this subset of those people have this physiological thing going on that not only helps us do more research, but design treatments for that subset of people, right? Because usually there's more than one thing going on when we have just a vague clinical diagnostic category, you know what I mean? Unless it's really, really specific which brain? Fog is not. It's very, very non specific.
J: Yeah. It's like feeling dizzy.
S: Yeah.
J: This study is a really good example of the scientific process and the difficulty with a lack of funding in science. So, for example, this is a good study, you know, they, they found something that is, is actionable. They need to look deeper in and they need to do more, more horizontal studies to add up the body of knowledge, right? It's, you know, it's, it's from a small data set. You know, it needs to be replicated by other labs. There's this is just the beginning of something that could take what Steve 1020 years to like really get into get to the point where you might even be able to treat it.
S: Yeah. I mean we like with every one of these Nobel Prizes, when you look back like when was the first kind of insight made about this, it's usually like a 30 year delay to now we're having researching actual applications. Yeah, that translating basic science to to applicable science is 20 to 30 years is typical.
J: But it's important, guys. It's very important. And we need to, the skeptic community, I think needs to, we need to know this and we need to, I don't know, what could I even say here?
S: It's good to be able to advocate for basic science research with good arguments because it's one of the first things to get attacked politically or when So it's easy to make fun of, for example, basic science research that has no obvious applications, like, we're wasting money on doing researching, like, like always, like the sex life of French frogs or whatever. But then when you trace. Yeah, but that research led to curing this disease, you know, 20 years later. The examples they choose are, you know, if you actually trace that research almost always lead to, like, really interesting discoveries and sometimes monumental applications. It's important to know that connection of why you cannot use that argument. Like, there's no obvious, immediate, direct application of this research, therefore it's useless. That's a dumb argument, and it's ahistorical. It's not true. So we have to just be patient and continue to sort basic science because we know that is the fuel that drives, you know, the engine of change or progress of our economy. You know what I mean? It's just it's so short sighted to to undermine the.
B: Totally. And this is a point that has been made for how many decades? This was obvious decades ago. But no, we still have to remind people over and. Over. Again, basic science is is critically important. Oh my God.
S: Well, I mean, one, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quints.
C: Fall is upon us and I can't even believe I'm saying this but even in LA this morning I took my dog out and it was chilly outside so I was excited to reach for my favorite hoodie. It's 100% Mongolian cashmere from quints. It was affordable. It's held up over a long time. They have so many pieces from bedding to cookware. I have an entire bed made of bamboo and it's so soft. It keeps me cool at night. I love it so much. And Jay, you've gotten what jewelry from Quince before?
J: Yeah, I told you, like my wife, we got her gold earrings and real quick, you know, she lost one of them contacted Quince and they they sent her a new pair. Like ridiculously. This company is like just their their customer support is freaking fantastic.
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S: All right, guys, let's get back to the show.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (54:24)
S: All right, Jay, you're going to, you're going to keep going with who's that noisy?
J: All right guys, last week I played this noisy. So you guys think that is well it's.
S: Definitely an animal, right?
J: Bob Cara.
S: Like a yeah, I would guess like a frog or something like that.
C: It's an animal or a toy.
J: Well, listener named Michael Blaney wrote in. He writes in quite a bit. He says, hi, Jay. I'm guessing it's a duck. That is all. Yeah, it does have a little duck kind of situation there. Another listener named Amanda Lee Ronan. Hi, Jay. I'm so excited to see you guys in Sydney next year. Yes, we are going to Sydney and I'm very excited. I'm pushing that ball forward every day. It's a lot of work and I cannot wait until we get to go. So she continues. I'm going to add my vote to what I'm sure must be an absolute legion of listeners all identifying this week's noisy as some deep sea divers sucking on a regulator connected to a tank with lots of nitrogen in it and then laughing at how silly they sound. Yeah. I mean, don't think you're crazy. That's not. That's not that bad of a guess if you think about it, because it has like, a, a human kind of laughing rhythm to it. And it definitely is a higher pitched thing. So I like that one Chelsea B wrote in. I think Chelsea B is going to start a rap group. You know, Chelsea B. Hey, Jay, It's Seaweed from Buffalo, NY. First time writing in to say this week's Noisy is another effing bird. I, I included that one because it's not just funny, but it, it's just emblematic of the whole thing, right? Because almost everything could be a bird. Like, like birds make every noise you can imagine. So it's always an OK guess to guess a bird. I like that she didn't even like pick a bird. She's like, it's just a bird. Gordie Swalm said, Hey, guys, this week's noisy sounds like an evil mechanical duck doing his evil laugh. Right? So there you have it that this is the guest that a ton of people wrote in. Thanks for thanks so much for doing what you do. And then guys, we actually have two winners this week. They both submitted within a minute of each other. So I definitely wanted to give them both a shout out. So the first one is Duncan Shaw. Duncan said pay J Duncan Shaw from South Africa. I've been listening since 2018. About my third time guessing the noise from this week's episode is a barking gecko and it was newly discovered. I heard it on Reddit. So I'm guessing one of many to get the correct answer this week. And then the next person is Rachel Griffin. She says hello. My guest for who's that noisy this week is the newly identified species of bark and gecko recently found in the Namib Desert. Is that Namib?
Voice-over: Namib. Namib like like Namibia.
J: Namibia. OK, so Namibia desert. Yeah, very cool. So yes, this is a newly identified species and.
S: I knew we were in the herpetology zone somewhere.
J: So listen again. The thing I find adorable I I did read this. I'm not 100% true that the information is correct but the person said this is basically the get go saying hey like get away from here I live here like stop bothering me.
S: Get away from me bothering.
J: You bother me. All right, guys, I got a new noise this week from a listener named von Contras.
S: Contreras. Contreras.
US#00: Oh, Contreras, It's Contreras. Oh, OK, Yeah.
J: All right, I, I, I have to say this. I almost didn't play it because this is really weird, but I love it and I think if you listen to it a couple of times you'll love it too. Check it out. And when you listen to it again, I notice that this sounds a lot like no, it sounds like the a song on Pink Floyd the Wall. I can't remember the song, but it definitely has that that progression going on there. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something really cool, you got to e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, yes, we have things happening.
S: We do.
J: We've made some excellent progress on the Political Reality Podcast.
S: We've filmed a bunch of Tik Toks.
J: We did and we basically have all of the elements now decided on and we're just waiting on one thing to to begin. And it's, it is nothing that is within our control, but it's all good because this is what it takes to to do what we're about to do. Very excited. It's all there and we will probably be launching this within a couple of weeks or or three weeks. I think we'll we'll need to get the first episode out. We are all going on an epic adventure and it this adventure will include we will all be going to LA and we will be doing a private show and we will be doing an extravaganza. And then we're going to fly to Sydney and we'll be doing an extravaganza and probably a private show and we're going to be doing a three day conference in Sydney. It's going to be not a con in Sydney. And we're working of course with the Australian Skeptics. We're super excited. This will be their 47th conference, but we are taking over the conference because it's going to be 100% content that we create and it's going to be awesome because we we've run this conference twice before. We know exactly what we're doing. It's going to be a ton of fun. We have some awesome people joining us like Doctor Carl. He will be there. I'm I'm going to be hopefully communicating with him soon to see how you know, how far in can I rope from Steve? I want him to. I want him to do.
S: Will you chuckle for us?
J: Yeah, I know. I just want him. I want him to do like everything basically. If you can get him to, to sit in with us for two days, that would be fantastic. Then guys, we are going to be going to New Zealand and we have, we are, I can say it now that we will be having a conference in New Zealand. I can't give you any details. It'll be the weekend after the conference in Sydney. This is all happening, by the way, the weekend of July 23rd of 2026. And then the following weekend will be the New Zealand conference. I'll be giving you guys more details as they come out. We're going to be selling tickets, hopefully. I mean, if I get my way, I'd like us to be selling tickets within a week or two. I think it's possible, but you know, I'm pushing very hard. It'll happen. And then, of course, all the details will have been completely finalized. Bottom line is we'd love to have you guys. This is a really, you know, really big deal because first of all, we're going to be, you know, going to two awesome countries that we love. We're going to get to perform to a lot of people in the US and over in New Zealand and Australia. We're hoping that we can bring Nauticon to Australia and and just absolutely blow them away. Steve, aren't you going to sing this time?
S: There's there's a small possibility that might happen, like .03%.
J: It's it's getting lower by the way. Camera might dropping dropping.
S: Fast.
J: Guys, if you appreciate the work that we do and you want to help us keep this going and it again, like help us increase our footprint, which is what we're doing right now, you can become a patron, you can go to patreon.com/skeptics Guide. Any contribution is absolutely welcome and we would really appreciate it.
S: Thank you, Jay. All right, we have a great interview coming up with Professor David Kyle Johnson.
Interview with David Kyle Johnson (1:02:00)
S: So let's go to that interview now. We are joined now by David Kyle Johnson. Kyle, welcome back to the SGU. Hey.
US#03: Thanks, Steve. It's great to be here.
S: And you are a professor of philosophy at King's College and you are on our Rolodex, as we say, you know, virtual one, I guess, as our, our philosopher that we can turn to when we need to talk to a philosopher. But you contacted us this time because we had a very quick, it wasn't really like a, a formal part of the show, but we, we, I think it was because of evidence.
E: It was the quote, right? It was the, the Joseph, you know.
S: Yeah, we had a brief conversation about inductive and deductive reason.
E: And I brought up Einstein, which was sort of a, I guess, an example of a scientist who maybe had some, you know, issues in the past with inductive.
S: Reasoning and of course this, the real story is way more complicated than our brief discussion. And since this is we're the SGU and this is logic, we're like, let's, let's, let's do it. Let's do a deep dive on deductive and inductive reasoning. So that's why you're here.
US#03: Awesome. I am very glad to do that. I've been thinking about it like all day prepping and I'm like trying to think about different ways like to approach it and explain it all so.
S: All right. So what's your, what's your elevator pitch kind of quickie version that you want people to walk away with? What? What's the difference between those types of reasoning?
US#03: OK, OK, so here's to the elevator pitch. Is is commonly thought that deductive and inductive reasoning are defined the following way. Deduction is reasoning that goes from the universal to the particular, and induction goes from the particular to the universal. That is incorrect. That is a misconception that is borrowed from Aristotle. That comes from Aristotle, and it's not even a complete accurate representation of what Aristotle thought. But the way that modern logicians understand deductive and inductive reasoning is deductive reasoning is reasoning that guarantees its conclusion, and inductive reasoning is reasoning that makes the conclusion probable. It raises the probability or makes it more likely that the conclusion is true, and that's how modern logicians understand those terms and all arguments fall under one of those two categories.
S: OK, I get that. So, but when you say that the general to the specific and specific to the general is not true, do you mean it's incomplete or it really is just absolutely wrong?
US#03: In as as an understanding of what deduction and induction is, even as Aristotle understood it, it is, it is inaccurate. It is also incomplete in that like, obviously there's more arguments than just those two kinds of arguments, but it is also the case that like as Aristotle understood and then as modern logicians understand it, that's not quite an accurate understanding of what deduction and induction is.
S: But would you agree because this is I got that. I get all that. I knew that, but I also thought that, well, the part of the reason why that that's the quickie summary is because if you do have like if you take as a premise a general rule, you can make an absolutely must be true conclusion about that using deduction. So that's where that relationship comes from, whereas induction you can't, it's more about generating A hypothesis. So you cannot make a this 100% has to be true. So there is still that relationship, right?
US#03: Yeah, kind of, except for when you said that inductions about generating A hypothesis, that is not necessarily the case either. Like it can. It can, but not necessarily, but not necessarily, right.
S: All right, so give us give us some more examples. Then let's just talk about deductive reasoning. So what would be some really good examples of deductive reasoning to help everybody understand what it is in its essence?
US#03: OK, so and this Aristotle kind of captures this when he says that he wants deductive reasoning to capture what he called syllogistic reasoning, which he defined as a discourse in which certain things being stated, something other than what is stated follows of necessity from them. So he has kind of that in in mind. He has that idea of an argument whose premises guarantee its conclusion.
S: So if the A equals B&B equals CA must equal C.
US#03: That's an example that's an example of one, right. So the problem is that whenever he like he says that's what deduction is. All of the examples he give are just categorical universal to particular arguments. They're all if all A's are B's and X is an A, so X is AB. Like, you know, all men are mortal. Socrates is a man, Socrates is immortal. Like those are the only kinds of, you know, examples he gives. But as what you're asking for, right, There's lots of other examples of arguments that that guarantee their conclusion. So classic example is modus ponens. If P then QP therefore right? And we can in our argument can follow that form without following the universal to particular, you know.
S: Gotcha.
US#03: Right, like so you know, if Biden won, then there'd be a male president. Biden did win, therefore there's a male president. Like that's modus ponens that those premises, if true, would guarantee that conclusion. So that's a deductive argument, right? Either A or B, not A, therefore B. That's felt a disjunctive syllogism, right? That is a deductive argument because if the premises were true, the conclusion would have to follow, right? There's also like axiomatic or definitional arguments like that, you know, like all bachelors are unmarried or whatever. That follows necessarily from the definition of bachelor. All mathematical arguments are deductive in this way, yeah.
S: I was going to say that it feels like math, like deduction is basically math.
US#03: Yes, very much so, right. And in fact, so this is one of like, so one of the kind of important things to realize about this and why I understand this distinction is important or whatever. Is it like understanding that that under that that understanding articulation of what deduction is is incorrect, that of the original understanding of universal particular is incorrect led to the modern understanding. And that modern understanding led to like sentential and propositional logic and that eventually led to predicate calculus. And it is upon that groundwork that like all modern computing is based on, right? So like you can't make logic gates with universal to particular logic, right? Like you, you've got to have propositional logic and predicate calculus and that kind of stuff or whatever. So it was like that development, that realization of updating or changing. How are you define it? Aristotle's old understanding of deduction to this new understanding, which led to the development of of the kind of formal logic is what makes like all of computing possible. So like it's really under, it's like it wasn't just a semantic, oh, we need to define it a different kind of way kind of issue. It was like really philosophically and, you know, scientifically important in that kind of way.
S: It allowed for the kind of logical thinking that is necessary when programming a computer. Exactly. So computers essentially follow deductive reasoning.
US#03: Yes.
S: That's a fair statement.
US#03: Yes.
S: OK. And then now let's take over to inductive logic. So give us some core examples of that.
US#03: OK, so inductive logic again, is any kind of argument which raises the probability of its conclusion, right? And so of course, Aristotle's example of going from a particular to a universal right would fit under that category, right? He would be like, I'm trying to forget, I forget what the exact names were, but like, you know, he had arguments like, I think I've got it here. Person A is experienced and wise, and person B is experienced and wise, and person C is experienced and wise. Therefore all experienced people are wise, right? Like that obviously follows that kind of classic articulation, right? But there are a lot more ways to raise the probability of conclusions without engaging in that kind of particular to universal logic, right? So analogies do this, right? Thing one has properties AB and C Thing 2 has properties A&B. So thing two probably has property C as well, right? That's not particular to Universal or anything like that, but clearly right if in the right conditions that kind of logic. It's a pattern. Yeah, it's a pattern, right? It's an analogy, right? You find similarities, you derive further similarities, right? Inference to the best explanation, where you consider multiple hypothesis, compare them according to criteria that determine what good explanation should do, and you pick the best one, right? You favor the best one that clearly does not always involve inference, you know, from particular to from particular to universals. And certainly it is the case that those kind of conclusions aren't guaranteed, but they certainly raise the probability of, of they raise the probability of the conclusion. In fact, something that I, I think most philosophers of science agree with this and something that I argue for in my book that I'm working on right now, which is called How, Why and When to Think scientifically, argues that all of science is inductive. No conclusion in science is ever 100% proven, 100% guaranteed scientific argument certainly can put the conclusions that they argue for beyond any possible reasonable doubts, right? Like you'd have to be crazy in numerous ways to reject them and you'd have to make ad hoc excuses and you know, yadda yadda yadda. But they'll never guarantee anything 100%, and so all scientific reasoning is inductive. In fact, in the book I agree with Ernest McMullen that all scientific reasoning is actually inference to the best explanation. You can do other kinds of reasoning in service to that, kind of like inference to the best explanation. You can even use deduction when doing that. And you can use different kinds of induction when doing an analogy and statistics. And you know, obviously a hypothetical inductive reasoning, right? Like, there's all different kinds of stuff that you can do, but it's all in service to trying to find the best explanation, which is an inductive form of reasoning.
E: And it sounds like that you can introduce new information when it's discovered into that and make a better conclusion as it as it reveals itself.
US#03: Yeah, right. So this is something that was what kind of was getting at your quote, Evan, where they were talking about like induction was guesswork, right. And then when you mentioned Einstein, Einstein was kind of talking about, well, how do we derive the theories upon which science is based, right. Is it this, you know, particular to universal kind of thing that we're doing or are we doing something else? And what makes it even more confusing is Einstein said it's not inductive, and he was. By inductive he meant the Aristotelian sense from, you know, general to, from, from specific to, to, to general, right, from specific to universal. He said it's deductive. But when he said deductive, he didn't mean it in the Aristotelian way or in the modern logical.
E: Way oh, so he conflated kind of two different things from maybe two different eras of understanding that's.
US#03: The dare he? Well, he that's what he says in his paper. In his paper, he defines what he means by deductive reasoning. And what he said is, is what I what I mean deduction. What I mean is making up hypotheses. We don't get it from looking at particulars or observations. We like literally create them through artwork. And then we deduce what would also be true if that hypothesis were true. So you make a predictive inference, right? And then you go off and test it to see if that you know if, if that prediction comes out to be true, right?
S: So he only wasn't using the jargon the way that philosophers use the jargon.
US#03: Correct, correct. And in fact, technically speaking, what he's talking about there, you hypothesize, you make a prediction, you see if the prediction pans out. That is actually inductive reasoning. Yeah, right. If you if, if P, like if my hypothesis is true, then I would expect this result. If H then RI do the experiment, I get R Therefore, the conclude the hypothesis is true. That's that's inductive reasoning. Or if it is deductive, it's invalid. That's another kind of issue here, but let me let me articulate that a little bit. So something that's really interesting about this distinction is that we can't, modern logicians recognize that we can't simply say that an argument's deductive if the premises guarantee the conclusion. Because if we say that, then there can't be invalid deductive arguments, right? If the, if the premises fail to, you know, guarantee the conclusion, well, then it's just automatically not deduction. But we recognize that there are invalid deductive arguments, right? Affirming the consequent, denying the antecedents are all examples of invalid deductive arguments. So what modern logicians usually do is say that, well, whether we counted as deductive or inductive depends on the intentions of the speaker. If they think their premises guarantee their conclusion, we consider it deductive. And then we bring the appropriate logical, you know, apparatus to bear to figure out whether it actually does guarantee the conclusion. And if they think it doesn't guarantee it, but it only provides support for it, well, then we treat it as inductive and bring a different, you know, logical apparatus to bear, right? So what's interesting is that in some circumstances, if P, then QQ, therefore P can be invalid deductive reasoning, right? If Biden is elected, yeah, Biden is elected, then we'll have a male president. We do have a male president. Therefore Biden was elected. Obviously that argument doesn't work. It's obviously deductive, but obviously it doesn't work. But Einstein's reasoning, if my hypothesis is true, I would expect this result. I did get this result. Therefore my hypothesis is true, follows the same logical form, but I wouldn't call that deductive and I certainly wouldn't say that it's like it's invalid or I would dismiss. I wouldn't dismiss it because it's technically invalid, right? He recognizes is all good scientists should that seeing that result in the experiment is not a guarantee that the hypothesis is true. But if the experiment's done correctly, there's pretty good evidence that the hypothesis is true, right? And the more you do that kind of reasoning, more experiments you kind of mount up or whatever, that's more and more reasoning that the hypothesis is true. None of it guarantees it, but it all, you know provides good support and that's all inductive.
E: It's all inductive science is. Inductive.
S: All right, I have a couple questions.
US#03: Sure, sure.
S: The first is It seems therefore that formal logical fallacies deal with deductive reasoning, and informal logical fallacies deal with inductive reasoning. Is that accurate?
US#03: The former I believe is accurate. All formal logical fallacies are going to be dealing with deductive arguments. Yes, they're they're going to be invalid because they don't guarantee their conclusion they're supposed to, and yada yada. Informal logical fallacies I don't think necessarily only deal with inductive arguments. Probably it would be safe to say that they usually do, but it would it be in like begging the question I would consider to be an informal logical fallacy assuming the truth of what you're trying to prove, and you could definitely do that. I see with a deductive. Argument.
S: OK, but the symmetry is that formal logical fallacies, if you are committing them, your conclusion must be false. Whereas with informal logical fallacies, if you're committing them, your conclusion does not have to be false. It could still be true, it's just not a good argument.
US#03: Yeah, not quite. So here's just a little distinction. I'll tell you're coming from. There's a little distinction here. If you commit a lot, if you commit a formal logical fallacy, what that means is that your premise, your premises, don't guarantee your conclusion. The conclusion might still be true, right? I could give you a bad argument for anything. I could give you an invalid argument for anything, even if it happens to be true, right? But it just means that the argument doesn't work to get you to that conclusion.
S: Right all right, so like an example I was thinking of is that well if you say if a = b and b = C, then a does not equal C, that has to be wrong. Right.
US#03: Yeah.
S: Cuz that's a formal logical fallacy. So. But you're saying you could construct a formal logical fallacy that doesn't guarantee your conclusion is wrong.
US#03: Yeah, right. So yeah, I could definitely do it where it doesn't guarantee your conclusion is wrong. So if I come up with an example off the top of my head, yeah, OK, here we go. If I am in Denver, then I am in Colorado. I am in Colorado, therefore I'm in Denver.
S: I see.
US#03: That argument is invalid.
S: But you might be in Denver.
US#03: But if I give it while I'm in Denver, the premise is true, the conclusion that you know, the premises are true and the conclusion is true. Even though the logic is not valid. Yeah. So I've given you an invalid logical argument, an argument that's that's deductive and it's invalid, but it happens at the premise. That helps, yeah. There you go.
S: But is it true that informal logical fallacies never prove that the conclusion is false?
US#03: Yeah, they know The informal logical fallacies will always. An argument that commits an informal logical fallacy will always fail to provide adequate support for the conclusion.
S: But doesn't mean the conclusion must be false.
US#03: Right doesn't mean the conclusion must be false, all right? It doesn't give you a bad argument for anything.
S: Yeah, got you. OK. That's good to know. All right. My next question is this can I took, you know, a course on Sherlock Holmes and logic and how that applied to actually medical diagnosis. It was a very good course and one of one of the things I remember from that was that the kind of logic that Sherlock Sherlock Holmes use in you know, the the literature is neither purely deductive or inductive and that it's this his own kind of Holmes in induction, a hybrid. So but it does sound like what he was doing was inference to the best explanation.
J: Yep, right.
S: So isn't that it? So that so maybe again that that my teacher was probably using an outdated version of what induction or deduction is it? Yeah, it is just inference to the best, the best, the most probable explanation.
US#03: Yes, So let me, let me let me talk about this. So this is great. I'm so glad you brought this up. So first of all, right, like, you know, I was wondering if the quote from Star Trek where Data is pretending to be Sherlock Holmes. And he he talks about like I, I did deduction from, you know, from the general to the specific or whatever. Like like that's the kind of like definition that floats around all the time, right? Yeah. And most people consider. Here they call what Holmes did deduction, but it's not. You're right, Steve. It's inference to the best explanation, which can involve both inductive and deductive. But at its core, it is inductive because the conclusions, the conclusion of his whole argument is never going to be guaranteed.
S: Right.
US#03: And one of I I teach a class on science, pseudoscience, and medical reasoning.
S: Yep.
US#03: And it is inspired by a paper that I wrote where I argue that what leads to medical one of the things that leads to medical misdiagnosis is doctors misunderstanding what the nature of scientific reasoning is and the nature of diagnostic reasoning is They usually classified as either system one or system 2 reasoning. And if instead they recognize that it was inference to the best explanation, that would provide them a better understanding of what it is. And then that would actually help them, not guarantee, but help them avoid diagnostics, you know, diagnostic. Yeah, right. Yeah, I agree.
S: And and the inference to the best explanation can use both System 1 and System 2 thinking. Yes 100% and and for the audience. System one I can't I always forget which is which. I think System 1 is in is an intuition.
US#03: Yeah. OK. So System 1 is basically like pattern recognition. Yeah, pattern recognition. And system 2 reasoning is more like what people classically call the scientific method, which is you form a hypothesis, you make the prediction you'd perform, you know, you do a task to see a prediction turned out to be right, and then you revise or reject based on the results, which that's often called the scientific method, right? I think that's better understood as the experimental method and the scientific method is inference of this explanation.
S: Right. And we call that in medicine, we call that System 2, analytical thinking.
US#03: Yeah.
S: And System 1 is the pattern recognition or intuitive meaning. It's like, I've seen this before. I recognize that, you know, I just have a gut feeling that this is what it is. But you have to back that up with analytical. Like I did a test and the test has this probability, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Then you do like real you're crunching the numbers.
US#03: Right. But even that is, it's inductive. Right. It's inductive, analytical, but it's all inference.
S: Yeah, it's all inference. You never know anything for sure in medicine.
US#03: Right. But if we understood, if doctors better understood like you do, that it's inference of the best explanation, yeah, I think diagnostic errors would be reduced. And right, One of the things that I love the Holmes connection is that my understanding is that Sherlock Holmes was based on a medical doctor, totally, that Arthur Conan Conan Doyle knew and he saw how he read, how he reasoned. So he modeled Holmes reasoning after this doctor. And then ultimately House MD's reasoning is based on Holmes because House is just a medical version of Sherlock Holmes 100. Percent. Comes full circle, right? I love that. I love it.
S: Yeah, and Watson, of course, is a doctor.
US#03: He's an actual, right?
S: Yeah, the character, right. OK. Any any nuance here that we haven't talked about yet?
US#03: So a couple of nuances here. 1 is the reason I think it's important to understand this. Like it's not just semantic to get the definition of induction and deduction right. Especially the point about like, we need to understand that science is inductive because one of the most common arguments of pseudoscientists, right, is that like they'll say like, well, you can't 100% prove my pseudoscience false, therefore it's true. Or they'll say, like, you can science 100% prove that global warming is really whatever, and then they'll use that as a reason to think that it's false. Now, obviously we all know that's an appeal to ignorance. Yeah, right. But what understanding the nature, the inductive nature of scientific reasoning allows us to do is really fully understand why that is a fallacy, Why appealing to ignorance is not not a good reason to dismiss science or accept pseudoscience. Because when they are, you know, refusing to accept something because it hasn't been 100% proven, they're asking science to do something that by definition, by its very nature, it cannot and does not do right. Right. Since it is inductive and doesn't prove anything 100%, when we're thinking about what we should accept based on scientific reasoning, we have to do what Carl Sagan said, right? And numerous others have said this, right? We have to proportion our belief to the evidence, not hold out for 100% certainty, right? And so this also, and what what this also lets us do, and it's related to pseudoscience is make us realize how widely applicable scientific reasoning is. If it is inference to the best explanation, then it's not just experiment. Experiment is extremely important in science, obviously, but it's not just, it's just not, it's not just scientific experiment. When you're doing inference to the best explanation, you compare hypotheses according to criteria that you know that that determine what good explanation should be. And some of those explanations are simplicity or simony, right? Scope or his explanatory power conservatism. Does it align with things that we already have good reason to believe? Right. And I can think scientifically and weigh those by weighing those criteria, even if I can't conduct an experiment. So, for example, if someone just tells me they saw a ghost in their room last night, I can't perform an experiment to like disprove or prove that hypothesis true, right? But I can consider other possible explanations, like it was a waking dream, their perception fooled them, or whatever, and realize, well, that's the much simpler, wider scoping conservative explanation.
E: The cost comes razor there.
US#03: That as the more likely explanation for what they saw. And I'm doing what I'm doing, so I'm thinking scientifically even though I can't perform an experiment. So once we realize that this is the nature of science and that science is inference of the best explanation, science becomes a lot more widely applicable because you don't have to run an experiment to think scientifically, right? And most people think that you have to do an experiment. You're not doing an experiment, you're not thinking scientifically. And you can definitely do that.
S: Kyle I also learned the term in medical school. Abduction. Is that used by philosophers?
US#03: Yes. So I'm so glad you asked Steve. I love this stuff. So, OK, so here's the deal with abduction. Abduction in its original form was. It's a term that was coined by CS Purse, and what he meant it to mean was hypothesis generation. So abduction is the process by which we come up with hypotheses to then compare and figure out which one is the best, right? Later, other people kind of adopt that term and use it as a shorthand for inference to the best explanation. So in one of my favorite textbooks, Ted Schicks How to Think About Weird Things, he uses the term that way. Abduction is just the same thing as inference to the best explanation. So by that understanding, abduction is a kind of.
S: Induction, yeah.
US#03: Right, but technically speaking, abduction in its original form is the production of hypotheses, which I disagree with Einstein. I love saying that like.
E: All wrong, that guy. Yeah, we tried. To get him on the show, but.
US#03: So I think that he is wrong that classical Aristotelian induction, not going from, you know, from specific, from particular to universal, can't generate hypotheses. I think sometimes that can. But I also think he's right that sometimes that's not necessary. You can just come up with them right, in a kind of artistic way. You get inspired or whatever, right? And you can come up with them. Of course, as you pointed out when you guys were talking about this before, you always just have you have to test them. It doesn't matter where they come from or how you generate them. You have to test them right to to get good to get good confirmation for it. But that's essentially what abduction is. It's originally the production of a hypothesis. It kind of kind of comes to be known as inference of the best explanation. I try to not to use it that way, but that's basically what it.
S: Is gotcha OK, all right?
US#03: So one more thing for you, Steve. You can cut this out if you want to, but I know you love Bayes theorem.
S: Yes, I do.
US#03: Right, so a really interesting philosophical problem is whether or not Bay should be classified as deductive or inductive.
E: I think about. Yeah, which, which, which vessel does it?
S: Pour I mean, my initial response was inductive just because it is a probabilistic statement. It's just like, how much does this data change the probability of the hypothesis being true? It all sounds inductive to me.
US#03: Exactly right. The only, the only. And that's, that's kind of what I think too. Yeah. The other side of the coin is it's all mathematical.
S: Yeah, that's true, right. If all you're saying is this is the probability, that could be a deduction.
US#03: Exactly right. If I say, well, if the probability of A is .5 and the probability is B of B is .5, then it follows necessarily that the probability of A&B being true together it was .25, right? Like that follows like right? That's mathematical, right? So it's. I don't know. I don't classify it's inductive, but it's kind.
E: Of can it be both at the same?
S: Yeah, I was gonna say, I think it's deduction in service to induction.
US#03: I like that. I like that.
S: All right, good.
US#03: Yeah. It's an interesting problem. I just, yeah, I don't know if anybody's spilled any ink on that with how it should be classified.
S: I get the feeling there's like 3 people in the world who care about that problem. Two of them are on this podcast right now.
E: Subduction is something totally different, right? We don't talk about that.
S: We'll talk about that on the Geologic podcast, right? Subduction. All right, Kyle, thank you so much for joining us and straining us all out on logic. Yeah, that was good.
US#03: Oh, thank you very much. It's always a pleasure anytime.
Science or Fiction (1:30:02)
Theme: None
Item #1: A recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world’s renewable energy assets.[6]
Item #2: New research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced stage cancer.[7]
Item #3: A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow, without supplemental oxygen, increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | A recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world’s renewable energy assets. |
| Science | New research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced stage cancer. |
| Science | A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow, without supplemental oxygen, increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | sweep |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Bob | A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow, without supplemental oxygen, increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold. |
Cara | New research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced stage cancer. |
Jay | A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow, without supplemental oxygen, increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold. |
Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts. 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panelists. Got this. Tell me which one is the fake? Three regular news items. Y'all ready? Yes, here we go. Item number one. A recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable energy assets. Our #2A new research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced stage cancer. And our number 3A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow without supplemental oxygen increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold. Pop go first.
B: Oil and gas companies hold 20% of the world's renewable energy assets. Let's see, I'm going to jump to three backpack that increases airflow, supplemental oxygen five times, fivefold that. That's a lot too. But what's getting me though, is quitting smoking. Improved survival, more than doubling survival time. That's just too huge to to ignore right there. I mean, if they can increase survival time by like 5 or 10%, that's dramatic. I mean, doubling survival time is just way. It's just an outlier. So I'm just going to have to say that that one's fiction.
S: OK, Cara.
C: That's the one that feels the most like science to me.
B: Oh. Your instincts mine suck.
C: Yeah, like you get a small cell well, and it just says a cancer diagnosis. It doesn't even necessarily mean small cell lung. Yeah, so it could be any cancer that if you continue to smoke after your cancer diagnosis, you're just going to massively shorten your your survival time there. So I I don't know, I think that that one is, is science, but it makes me wonder what the what? Yeah, more than doubling survival time, but like what's the baseline there? I guess it depends if we're talking about advanced stage different for different cancers. I don't understand how an avalanche backpack could increase your airflow without supplemental oxygen, unless it like, I don't know, it gives you like a tunnel to the outside world when you're buried somehow. I don't know, that sounds cool though. I don't really understand it. And then oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable assets. I don't think I believe that. I think that oil and gas companies have doubled down on oil and gas. I think we do see greenwashing and we see a lot of talk about them entering the renewable space. But I think that probably other companies that are like renewable only companies are, are dominating that space. So yeah, I think that one might be the fiction. I bet you it's they don't have 20. I don't think they have 1/5 of the holdings.
S: OK. And Jay?
J: Steve with the last one with the backpack, Yeah. So they said it's it's designed to increase airflow, Yes, but I'm not clear what that means. Like is it?
C: I don't think he's going to tell us that.
J: Like airflow to, I mean airflow to the person's mouth.
S: So there's nothing in their mouth, right? It's not like it's a tube in their mouth. There's no mask or anything and there's no supplemental oxygen. It's just increasing flow to like the area of their front of their head.
J: OK, so maybe maybe this is like the kind of backpack, it's like the instant release, like a like in a car, like the airbag, like it could create a breathable space around the person's face. OK, that's the only thing I can think of. And this technology exists, so I'm going to say that's science. Second one is the one about if you quit smoking after a cancer diagnosis, this leads to improve survival. I mean, I'd say that seems pretty obvious. Yeah, I think that one, that one is definitely science. I mean, quitting if you're not, if you're not going to die specifically from lung cancer, say, you know, then they're going to give you surgery or do something to help mitigate the cancer, then sure, quitting smoking is going to help you. So I think that one is science as well. So I'm agreeing with what Cara said. Like I don't think the oil and gas companies, I mean, 20% of the world's renewable energy assets is a lot. And if anybody would have the money to do it, it would be them. But again, for some reason, I just don't see these companies buying those assets because it's actually too smart of a thing to do because they could have just slowly become these new sources of energy, particularly in the US. Like we are like United States now is rejecting green energy. So what Cara said is very, very true. In my mind. I'm going to say that one's a fiction.
S: OK, so you all agree with the third one, so we'll start there. A study of a backpack designed to increase airflow without supplemental oxygen. Increased avalanche burial survival time by at least five fold. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. Oh, neat. Yeah. So this is like, can you wear a backpack? And then you just activate it, I guess, after you get buried in snow and it just takes advantage of the natural porosity of snow. So again, this is you. This is assuming somebody they're they're trying to simulate an avalanche condition, right? Where I guess where there's a lot of debris and stuff in that condition, it just circulates the air to the front of the person and they tested it. So they had people with the backpack that wasn't working compared to people with the backpack that was working. They measured their pulse ox, right? The either basically their oxygen and their blood and the, and the people could tap out whenever they wanted. So if they if their pulse ox hit 80 or lower or if the person tapped out, they ended it and the and the study was for 35 minutes basically they would auto end it at 35 minutes. Even though the backpack is designed to last for 90 minutes. In the treatment group, none of the subjects went below 80% or tapped out. So they basically all made it to the 35 minutes, which was the end of the of the study. And the people who did not have a functioning backpack lasted six to seven minutes. And they were pulled some because they their oxygen dropped below 80% and and some because they just couldn't take it anymore. They were they tapped out. So it might have been more than five times, right? But that's when the study ended, right? They didn't keep going. And this is so it's, you know, this is being presented as a potential way to increase survivability in, you know, in an avalanche situation, if you have 5 minutes to dig yourself out versus 35 minutes or whatever to dig yourself out or that increases the amount of time until you can be found and rescued. And so, and most people who die, they die of a 60, right? They just, the CO2 builds up in front of their face, they have their oxygen tension drops and they pass out and they die, right? They go with the cardiac arrest. That's the most likely reason to die in that kind of situation. So, yeah, it's a simply a simple idea. Let's just move the air around and just so that they have less CO2 building up in front of their face and more oxygen and see if that allows them to survive longer. And it does works. Works pretty well according to this one study anyway. All right, let's, we'll keep go backwards, I guess. New research finds that quitting smoking after a cancer diagnosis leads to improved survival, more than doubling survival time in patients with advanced stage cancer. Bob, you think this one is the fiction? Jay and Kerry, you think this one is science? So I guess the question here is the advanced stage cancer, is it possible that people are basically too far gone at that point to significantly increase their survival time through lifestyle measures like quitting smoking? Or is there still room to alter their survival time even if they're advanced? Or maybe it was beneficial, but only if you caught the cancer early enough. Or maybe it wasn't beneficial at all. What do you think, Bob? You're the one. You thought this one was fiction. What do you think?
B: I think, yeah, I think at late stage, the fact that it's late stage and that it was such a dramatic improvement just seems like a non start to me.
S: Yeah.
C: I also think that like if you're OK, so advanced stage, if you're talking stage 3 or 4, survival times are already depending on the cancer, but they can be already low. So when we're doubling on already low survival time, it may not be that big of a difference. We could be talking six months versus 12 months or three months versus 6 months.
S: I will. This one is science. This one is science. It was surprising that the effect was most pronounced in the late stage. The, you know, the advanced stage cancers. In this study, they looked at a bunch of different cancers. That's why I just said with a cancer diagnosis, they didn't want to look at anyone specific. They wanted to see just in general, how do people do What they found was in the in the late stage cancer, stage 3 or 4, those who kept smoking despite their diagnosis, 85% of them were alive after 210 days. In the group that quit, 85% were still alive after 540 days.
C: And this is all cancers combined.
S: Yes, this is all cancers, but this is the stage 3 and 4 cancers.
C: This doesn't surprise me because I mean, other than like radiation, like intense radiation, cigarettes are like one of the worst carcinogens, you know? About. Like by far, it's just like a if your body, if your cancer is already doing all the things cancer tries to do, spreading, recruiting blood vessel, doing all of that, and you just keep smoking on top of it, it's just going to do it faster, more intensely, more successful.
S: Yeah, So just didn't look at mechanism. This is just seeing how long do they survive. So that's one question. It's also maybe people who don't smoke, whether their chemo better, you know?
C: Oh, for sure, yeah. If you're smoking, you're also probably getting more like lung infections and.
S: Exactly the complications of all that is bad. And it also might be a marker for because again, this is not a controlled trial. They didn't say you smoke and you don't smoke. Yeah, they couldn't do that. So people who stopped smoking may take care of themselves in other ways better as well. So there's potential contracting factors, but from a practical point of view, and This is why this study was done, because about like what percentage of people do you think are smoking at the time of their diagnosis?
C: Well, I mean that it's. In the US, let's say US 75. Right now, no, no, no at the time of any cancer diagnosis.
J: Oh, any, any cancer, not just lung cancer.
C: 5 to 10%.
S: 25%, yeah.
J: That's it.
C: Oh, that's a lot.
S: 25%, so a little bit more than the than the background population, right, which makes sense because it's a risk factor for cancer and half of them about continue to smoke despite the despite the diagnosis.
C: Because they think what a lot of people think it's. Like, well, it's too late now. Yeah.
S: And in fact, unfortunately, some physicians might think that, too. Then I think, well, am I going to really focus my efforts on trying to get them to quit after they get the cancers like closing at the barn door after the horse is gone. But what? So they said, well, but should we should we be ignoring this as a lifestyle intervention as part of their overall cancer treatment? And this study supports the idea that now even, you know, even in late stage your it still will improve your quality of life and your survival time if you quit smoking as part of the overall cancer treatment. And I mean, this is not a significant. This is like almost a year of life. You know that's huge if you're.
C: That's better than some treatment. Yeah, it is. And so it would be really interesting to compare like this might be the single best thing you can do to increase survival.
B: Right to me, man, but.
C: Or it may be right there on par. So imagine it combined with like, you know, first or at this point you're probably on 2nd, 3rd, 4th line, so.
S: I should point out that there were previous studies which did not much of A benefit, but again, they were looking at specific cancers and like and focusing on earlier stages. And so this was a more comprehensive study looked at more different kinds of cancers and later stages. And that's again where the benefit was really the largest. So that's probably why it was missed in the earlier studies. But at the very least, this means don't neglect your smoking cessation intervention as part of cancer treatment because it there's a good reason to think that it may have a significant benefit. All right, all of this means that a recent analysis finds that oil and gas companies hold about 20% of the world's renewable energy assets is the fiction. So what's the percentage? Because you're right, they talk a big game lower.
C: They talk a big 70%. Yeah, I don't know, 5% something.
S: Like 1.42%, it's negligible. It's almost nothing.
C: Wow.
S: They've basically given up on this and they talk a big game, but they're not doing it. They're nothing significant. 1.42% of renewable energy projects worldwide.
J: OK, So what do you think that means?
S: They're just not, they're not investing in wind and solar, even though they're like, you know, we're going to invest this money into the new, a green energy economy, whatever. They're just not doing it.
C: They're investing in press.
B: How stupid and short sighted is that? What the hell?
C: I know they're going to. Yeah, well, because they're still making money on oil and gas.
S: So this included direct ownership also through subsidiaries or via acquisitions. This is counting everything, not just like under Exxon. This is like a subsidiary or an acquisition would still count. It's still only 1.42%.
C: Did they? What was I gonna say? Did they include natural gas as oil? And. Gas, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely not great, but they do that a lot too. They love talking about how that's clean energy.
S: Yeah, right. But that doesn't kind of renewable. Now, 20% of the companies they studied had some renewable energy assets, but the the total assets was only the 1.4%. It's only 20% doing anything. 80% don't have any renewable assets. Yeah, I I would suspect this would get worse in the current climate, you know, Yeah.
B: Oh yeah, the current climate? Absolutely. But jeez.
S: You know, the, the Biden era policies, you know, we passed 2 acts that make, you know, gave billions of dollars to develop. You know, renewable energy was supposed to really turn the ship around, but now Trump is clawing a lot of that money back. Yeah.
C: Yeah, it's terrible.
S: Well, good job, Jane. Cara, thank you.
J: Thank.
C: You. Yeah, Jay.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:45:03)
"Science is the greatest equalising force in the world. Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That's why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity".
– - Omar M. Yaghi, (description of author)
S: Jay, you're going to give us a quote this week.
J: I am Science is the great equalizing force in the world. Smart people, talented people, skilled people exist everywhere. That's why we really should focus on unleashing their potential through providing them with opportunity. You know who this is, Steve?
S: Yeah. Omar Yagi. That's the eleven, one of the chemistry Nobel laureates from this year. Yeah, that's a great quote. I agree with that. That's one of the things I like about science and academia is that nothing's perfect, but it is pretty much a meritocracy and it is sort of a great equalizer. Like everyone's on the same footing. It's just a matter of how good is your ideas, how good is your scholarship, How good is the work that you do? That's really the 90 percenter, you know what I mean? It is very powerful, you know, and something that we absolutely should be support, not only supporting, but making sure that everybody does have the opportunity, you know, to participate because anyone could be a great scientist, you know?
C: Yep.
S: Why limit our talent pool? All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
B: You got it, brother. Sure, man.
C: Thanks, Steve.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ www.journal-of-hepatology.eu: https://www.journal-of-hepatology.eu/article/S0168-8278(25)02497-3/fulltext
- ↑ www.nobelprize.org: Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 - NobelPrize.org
- ↑ www.nobelprize.org: Press release: Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 - NobelPrize.org
- ↑ www.nobelprize.org: Press release: Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 - NobelPrize.org
- ↑ academic.oup.com: https://academic.oup.com/braincomms/article/7/5/fcaf337/8258475
- ↑ www.nature.com: Oil and gas industry’s marginal share of global renewable energy
- ↑ jnccn.org: https://jnccn.org/view/journals/jnccn/23/10/article-e257059.xml
- ↑ jamanetwork.com: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2839664