SGU Episode 1009

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SGU Episode 1009
November 09th 2024
"Northern hemisphere of the ice-covered moon, revealing its unique surface features."
SGU 1008                      SGU 1010
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
“When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the time and the place the tide will turn.”
–Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), American abolitionist and author
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, November 6th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me, the speaker, Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Kara, Santa Maria.

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone.

S: Let's. See what's going on in the world today.

E: I think it's a waxy. Crescent. Moon out. It's warm thing. It's very warm.

S: It's unseasonally warm out there.

E: In Connecticut has been just beyond. 77. 20° above normal temperature.

S: Yeah, and Trump won the election. Yeah.

E: Yeah, I forgot about that. Halloween happened.

S: I didn't forget about that. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, Thanksgiving coming up. Yeah, yeah, something's happened. So yeah.

E: It was like a random assortment of miscellaneous. Stuff.

S: So listen, you know, obviously we're recording this the day after the election. Trump, you know, we just found out, you know, whatever half a day ago that Trump won. We're still processing it. This is a sort of a big thing to wrap your head around. We're not happy. We're not going to pretend we're happy. There's a great deal to be concerned about. He thinks global warming is a hoax. He wants to rollback anything, you know, that we're doing about it. He's going to probably put an anti vaxxer in charge of our healthcare. I mean, there's a lot to be concerned about, but we're not going to talk about the politics. This obviously a lot of scientific and skeptical considerations that we'll be exploring this episode and in the future, but we're going to move on. So a lot of actually happened. It's been 2 weeks since we've recorded a show and we went to SICON last weekend. That was a lot of fun.

E: That was great. Yeah, we had a nice time.

S: Skeptical events are always, always recharging for me. Like getting together. We got to see some of our old friends. I gave a talk on controversies within the skeptical things that skeptics disagree with each other about, because I think we should focus on that more at these conferences. We should be working out with each other, you know, in a positive, constructive way, the things that we disagree about. Because while you still learn some stuff, it gets kind of boring talking about the stuff we all agree on over and over again. You know what I mean?

C: And then there's this like big elephant in the room.

S: Right, right. And everyone like don't talk about the thing we can't talk about now. That's like I just talked about it.

E: No, gosh, that's what you that's when you should talk about.

B: Exactly, That was an amazing talk, the best one I've ever heard, Steve, that you've done. Standing ovation. Well, certainly accolades and tears afterwards by people. It was amazing to just experience.

S: Well, if people were clearly hungry to address that issue, you know, yes. Oh yeah, avoiding it is not the way to do it. Part of the talk was on the biological sex controversy. If you want to read about it, actually blogged about it on Neurologica because there was a bit of disagreement, which again, I think is healthy and good. But you can read about that there. We'll probably be putting out a video at some point. SICON will be putting out the just recordings of the talks at some point. So I do think we, you know, need to explore these issues. And I think, you know, we can if, if hey, if there's a, if there's a group of people who should be able to disagree politely and constructively and focus on logic and evidence, it's us, right? I mean, we can't do it. Who how can we expect anybody to do it? We have to practice what we preach, you know what I'm saying?

E: I agree, Holy.

J: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, I kind of lie. It's hard. You know, it's hard. We've been doing this a long time. We've been trying to teach people critical thinking and and sometimes the world doesn't bend the way that you'd like it to and it's quite actually all.

E: Used and it's good to remind ourselves of a lot of these things as well.

S: Yeah, that was one of the themes as well. It was an exercise in humility. It's like, look, we disagree pretty much along political lines. As much as we'd like to pretend we are trans partisan or whatever, we're not. You know, we are just as susceptible to ideological bias as anybody else. We just have to be more aware of it and confront it, you know what I mean? That's the whole metacognition angle. Not ignore it or pretend like the other side is the only side that's ideologically biased and your side isn't, you know, but motivated reasoning is so powerful. I think that's one of the hardest things even for seasoned, knowledgeable skeptics to deal with. Because we're good at it. We're good at motivated reasoning, ironically, because people who are able to argue in a sophisticated way and put forth a nuanced argument and have a lot of knowledge at their fingertips are actually better at at at motivated reasoning. And they're more confident in it as well.

B: Yeah.

S: So that's, yes, we have to be very aware. That's like our big heel in the movement. We have to be very aware of it. Yeah. So that was fun.

C: I think also kind of understanding, oftentimes we talk about causation and the directionality of causation. It's such an important part of science literacy, and I think we have to remember it when it comes to our own moral standings and our own decision making around things like policy. Because very often we may think that something is a decision or an ideology that we came to via evidence when actually we came to it because, well, I agree with them about this. Why wouldn't I agree with them about that? You know, is my position based on my investigation or am I open to somebody telling me what my position should be because we're on the same team?

S: That was one of the controversies I I've referred to. Is the idea the question of can all, even ethical and moral questions be resolved with science, or does it require philosophy and morality and ethics, you know, separate from science? I tend to align myself with the philosophers in the movement on this issue. I've engaged with that discussion. And I think the philosophers absolutely crush it, you know, when they come up against the other people, Like, we don't need to do philosophy. Philosophy is irrelevant to science. Like, no, you're doing it whether you know it or not. You are doing it. You're just doing it wrong. And then you guys went home and I went to Dubai. That was first time in an Arabic country. It was very, you know, it was a good experience. So Dubai is a very interesting city. It's very wealthy, it's an international city. There was English everywhere. The only one touristy thing I did was like entirely in English. And but there's this layer of Arabic Muslim culture there as well. So it's it's kind of like you're in an alternate universe in a sci-fi movie, you know what I mean, where everything's the same but different.

B: Yeah.

S: So I gave a gave What turned it turned out to be a nine hour seminar on scientific skepticism. It's not a lot of time. It went by super fast.

C: Really.

S: I had the perfect audience because they were very smart, very engaged. They knew why they were there and they wanted something out of the conference. But this was all new to them.

C: Oh yeah, that's exciting.

S: Yeah. So they asked tons of questions, like every question was anticipating a future slides like that's a good question, we're going to get to that or let's talk about that or that you know, and you realize when you're doing. I didn't. I realized when I was writing it, but especially when I'm giving it what a massive body of knowledge we have amassed under the umbrella of scientific skepticism. There is so much to talk about. 9 hours was nothing. It was scratching the surface.

B: I can't talk 9 hours about anything. Even if it was counting numbers I couldn't do it.

S: Well, Bob, I wasn't giving a nine hour lecture. You have to engage. It was asking questions. They were asking me questions. We were doing demonstrations. I did all the psychological stuff that we do. You know what I mean? It was it was dynamic.

E: The. Socratic. Method.

S: It wasn't me blabbering for 9 hours.

C: Assuming you had breaks too. And there were breaks in there.

S: Yeah, there's 3/3 hour sessions with a break in the middle of each session. So I, I did what I usually do at these longer, longer classes that I give. I gave a quiz that I've come up with, which is, which is quiz focusing on scientific literacy, critical thinking skills, media savvy, and just like belief in the paranormal kind of stuff. 30 questions. They were able to like do the questions on their phones. And then I was able to like get, you know, did it all in Google Form. So you got like a chart, pie chart of all the answers.

B: Yeah.

S: So then we went over them at the end of the seminar and it was a lot of fun. But what was really interesting is that they basically were average. They they did their result, their results were aligned with a lot of published surveys about these questions. Like one of the questions was, did humans and non avian dinosaurs live at the same time? 60% of them got that question wrong.

Voice-over: What?

S: Oh yeah, we're all science nerds, right? So like to be to us, these questions are blazingly obvious, but to even well educated, these are all like CEOs very power, you know, very high end, high achieving business people, but they're not science nerds. So very few of them where there's a couple engineers thrown in there, but. And you've just realized how, you know how compartmentalized knowledge can be, you know?

US#07: Yeah.

S: Part of the whole theme of the talk was to be humbling. You know, it's like, yeah, even you, you know, the whole idea, like even though you might be very successful in one area, you don't know everything. No one's an expert in everything. And that was part of the demonstration, you know, of that, of that.

B: What's the name of your talk?

S: Still have a brain. You still have a human brain. What's that, Bob? What?

B: Was the name of the talk. You don't know squat.

S: No, that was just, well, the whole theme of the conference was futurism actually. So it was like science, critical thinking in the future, something is what I called it. But I did a little futurism at the end as well, like from our book.

B: Oh damn, yeah.

S: Yeah, it was good. It was very good.

B: Oh, so it wasn't specifically a skeptical. Conference.

S: No, it wasn't it, it was really, and it's month long. It was a month long conference where people were coming and going, you know, and it was just a series of lectures and, and seminars and classes on a bunch of topics. The guy who is the Dean of the Dubai Future Foundation, Muhammad Kassam, he's a big, you know, fan of the show. He's been listening to us for years. He's the one who, wow, who invited me there. And he like wants to inject skepticism into, you know, the United Arab Emirates and the whole region, you know, not just the UAE, not just Dubai, but like the whole like into the whole culture. He, you know, it, we may all get invited there in the future. Like this is he made it sound like this is the beginning of our relationship. You know what I mean? This is a sort of a building.

E: I love it. Nice, nice.

S: That's why it's great to like because we've obviously been operating within our own culture for 30 years. It's nice to go somewhere else that where like, there is, there isn't, you know, an organized skeptical movement. Like it's just a virgin territory. It's like, Oh my God.

E: I could be packed in 20 minutes, it's just saying.

S: 15 hour flight just warning you but.

E: Bobby, you have to talk for 9 hours about something.

S: But the food, the food was incredible. I'm a fan of Middle Eastern food. Not as if that's a monolithic thing. It's a thing. It's like I had Iraqi food. Never had Iraqi food before. It was Middle Eastern food. Same spice palate, same kind of vibe, but it was different. It was everything was was just cool. Nothing I've ever had before. It's awesome. It was incredible. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. Yeah. I hope. I expect we will be. We'll be going there sometime in the future.

B: Just please, not October. No promises.

S: But yeah, and it, and it was, it was really interesting how similar it was. Like I had conversations with people who were, you know, like from the UAE, but I talked to somebody who was heavily involved in the power industry. You know, I could have been talking to somebody here. It was really no different. They had all the same issues, all the same information, you know, as far as that was concerned, pretty much the same attitudes. I was kind of surprised, but it's interesting how similar things were. But I think that's because it's an international city and also they are looking to, I think they're looking to like elevate the UAE as a modern technological sort of state and Dubai as a as an international modern city. So they're very interested in in that sort of thing. Hey, George is here. George, how you doing, man? George.

US#12: Hi everybody. What's going on? What's going on? Do you are you as excited as I am for December to like get here? Can we get the holidays happening? Can we get the vibe of the holidays please happening?

S: I think we need to celebrate Pearl Harbor Day with a special event or two.

US#12: Perfect. So we've got this monster day, December 7th in Washington DC of all places. Are you ready for it? I hope. You're ready for it. I hope we're ready.

J: Steve and I are working on supplementing the SGU swag stuff. So if you're going to be there in the, the best and pretty much only time that you're going to get good SGU swag is if you come to a live event because we bring all the premium stuff. George, the question is, are you excited?

US#12: We rarely do a big AA double show in one day like this, and what's so great about doing both a private show earlier in the day and then doing the extravaganza at night is we get so wonked out, giddy, funny, silly, almost like like skeptic skeptic drunk by.

US#07: The end of it.

US#12: It's a long day and those are the best shows. So if you're going to go to 1 show this year, go to the extravaganza, go to the private show that's happening on the 7th because it's going to be this marathon day. It is such a blast and what's super cool is this is one of our very special holiday themed extravaganza shows. We've only done this one other time, I think was in Arizona.

US#03: Right, I think yes.

US#12: Yes, during that Arizona show we had the famous Yukon Cornelius incident. Do you remember that of? Course I do.

US#03: Oh my God, one of.

US#12: The biggest laughs of all time. Ask us about that sometimes. If you see us, ask us. We'll tell you in DC about the Yukon Cornelius incident that happened in Arizona. It's fantastic. We'll try to recreate that on some level, but it's.

J: Also important to say guys, that the private show is a private show plus, which means there's an extra hour of content. Basically we do audience interaction. It's different every time.

US#12: Yeah, we, we've done a we did a scavenger hunt once. We did a bunch of trivia things once. We did like some song stuff once. Every time it's different. Every time it's special. So even if you've done this before, come to it again because it's guaranteed to be different. Same thing with the extravaganzas. Every extravaganza, the framework is the same, but there's so much improv and incidental stuff that happens. Every show is different. We literally had people going to two shows in a row. We did this back couple months ago and they they fully enjoyed both shows.

J: I love doing, I love doing those shows because we've had weekends where we've done like 6 shows and three days. Like we've had some pretty serious tours that we've been on, but I really like it when the all of us have to like really work together to make it all happen. And it's such a feel good when we, when we do the shows and we finish them, it's like, Oh my God, guys, it was so awesome, right?

US#12: And then we get to see, we get to see everybody. You know, for the most of our lives, we're sitting here talking to microphones in our basements. So it's kind of nice to see people's faces and hear everybody laugh and interact and enjoy themselves. There's a lot of audience participation that happens at the extravaganza as well as the private show. So come on out. It's talk about a great gift for someone who likes the show. I mean, could you think of a better?

S: President George, everyone should know that you are one funny bastard. It's.

US#12: True, I I I just had my license renewed. So funny bastard licensed. That's my funny bastard license. Renewed, freshened. I got the new the new test taken for that. So yeah, all good. No, we're excited. I'm excited. I hope you guys are as excited as I am, because that means that you'll be equally as excited. And then the equations, all even and good.

J: Go to theskepticsguide.org and Ian has put these special buttons on there that you can click. And if you're interested in either show, you just click the button that you like. And also don't forget, I do think there's some VIP tickets left for the extravaganza. And also, let's not while we have George on, let's let's plug one more thing because it's actually a huge deal.

S: Not a con.

J: Yes, we have not a con coming up. This is yes, the weekend of May 15th. It's going to be in White Plains. New work. And let me tell you, we had a goddamn awesome time. It was epic. It. Really was the best conference I've ever been to and it was the best conference I was involved with. And real quick, I must have said this story, but I'll just say it really quick. There was this one guy that came up to us and said, you know, I came here, I didn't have any friends, I didn't know anyone. I was almost not going to come. And I said, what the hell, I got to force myself to do it. And we have a, an event wide puzzle that you have to live through the entire event to be able to figure out the entirety of this puzzle. And he like picks up the puzzle sheet and he said, the next thing you know, I'm sitting down with like 6 people I don't know. And we're hanging out like we're friends. And that was it. He was bingo, bingo. Yeah. He he was hooked in and the.

US#12: Magic of Nauticon.

J: But isn't that what we saw, guys? I mean, you know, we, we've known for a very long time that we've curated an amazing group of, of listeners and patrons. But this group of people, man, I got to tell you, like, I feel like I have a lot of friendships with, with the people that come and there's a lot of love and a lot of affection and a lot of awesome stuff. So if you're interested to come have a great time, you know, this conference is about socializing. If you're interested, you can go to nadaconcon.com. Remember George, that Ian made this weird URL con con con?

US#12: Con or you?

S: Go to our homepage and just click on the button.

J: Yeah, there's not a con button there.

US#12: Not a con 2 Skeptical.

J: And George, what's happening at Nauticon this year? My God, what's happening at Special I?

US#12: Can't even keep track of it. We have so many fantastic ideas that happening. We got this kind of Beatles theme that's going through. We might have like a special super game show, another game show, more audience participation. We're going to have SG University where you get to learn stuff in 15 minute chunks from all these experts on stage. It's just overwhelmingly cool. But the most important thing is like you just said, Jay, you get to hang. We, we, if we've, we've built it in so that there is this time to just meet and greet and hang and talk about stuff and have that very wonderful beer that that Westchester's famous for. It's just, it's just the best. It's the best time.

S: Well. George, thank you for popping in.

US#12: Thanks. I'll pop in anytime. I'm going to go pop out now and we'll see you on the other side, friend. Alrighty, bye guys.

S: While we were at Sidecon, we actually did a number of interviews. We have a really great interview coming up later in this episode with Brian Cox. Oh yeah, the Brian Cox, Brian Cox and Brian Wecht, who is our friend and, you know, collaborator on Nauticon and other things, who's also the Brian to be the Brian to also be a physicist and a ninja and an actual ninja. Don't even ask, because we can, yeah. He he was there for the interview. He said it and made it extra special. He was this special sauce, so that'll be later in the show. But now we're going to go on with our new items.

Quickie with Bob: Scientists identify chemical properties of superheavy elements moscovium and nihonium (18:51)

• Scientists identify chemical properties of superheavy elements moscovium and nihonium 

S: Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

B: Sure. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. So international team of scientists have actually determined the chemical properties of some super heavy elements, Muscovium element 115 and nihonium element 113. So this makes muscovium the heaviest element ever chemically studied. And you might be thinking how the hell do they test an element chemically if that element lasts for milliseconds before decaying? Very good question. So that's what I'm going to describe. The lab setup was very slick. Essentially they create super heavy particles and using gas chromatography, they quickly kind of shuttle those elements through various detectors that are lined with quartz and gold. Now if the element say muscovium, if it binds with the quartz or the gold that is detected and recorded, as well as how long it binds with that, with the gold of the quartz and where and where that super heavy element ends up. So that binding information is invaluable data as to how these elements behave chemically. Now they found generally the results said that both super heavy elements, muscovium and nahonium, they had weak interactions with quartz and this actually lines up with their predictions. So here's where it gets really interesting. I wasn't aware of this. They predicted that relativistic effects would make super heavy elements less reactive than similar elements on the periodic table with fewer protons, say like lead. For various reasons, they think lead and muscovium should behave similarly and how it binds with quartz and gold for example, and it didn't. The muscovium did not react, did not bind as well, and that was predicted. So it's believed that relativistic effects come to play with super heavy elements because they have more proton. All right, So imagine that you've got a super heavy element with 115 protons. There's so many protons in the nucleus. Now that increases the electromagnetic forces that are available that are in play in the nucleus, and that alters the electron, the electrons in the atom. Now, classically, if you look at this classically, you could say that the electrons get closer to the protons because of the electromagnetic force is stronger and that makes them move at speeds closer to the speed of light. And doing that you're gaining mass. Now you can look at it quantum mechanically. You can look at it as the electron cloud around the atom becoming distorted because of the stronger electromagnetic forces because of the protons, right? You're with me. So either way you look at it, whether you look at it classically or quantum mechanically, the Super heavy elements should change how they interact with other elements chemically. And that's exactly what they showed with this experiment. This with these relativistic effects come into play with with these super heavy elements causing them to behave differently chemically. That's exactly what this what they showed. So sure, this doesn't mean that we're going to add muscovium or nahonium to the iPhone 20, but understanding the chemical properties of super heavy elements could lead to breakthroughs in material science and other fields. Who knows what kind of interesting breakthroughs could happen with a deeper understanding of relativistic effects influencing super heavy elements. So this has been your relativistic super heavy quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

S: Thank you, Bob.

News Item #1 - BioGenome Project (22:08)

• https://www.science.org/content/article/once-thought-fantasy-effort-sequence-dna-millions-species-gains-momentum 

S: Jake, give us the 1st news item you're going to tell us about the Bio Genome Project. What is that?

J: All right, this is awesome guys. The Earth Bio Genome Project, it's also called EBP. This is a really amazing effort. They started it in 2017 and their goal is to sequence the genomes of all 1.67 million named eukaryotic species. There's 8.7 known species, but they're just talking about the ones that are currently named. This encompasses ready plants, animals, fungi and other microbes. So the eukaryotic organisms include. Let me give you the bigger list. There's the animals, plants, fungi and protists, encompassing all multicellular life and some unicellular species.

S: So basically, Jay, that's everything but bacteria and Archaea Exactly that's is there anything else like it's like algae single cell it.

C: Depends on the type of algae. Blue-green. Blue-green algae is not.

S: So there's some of each, OK.

J: Well, guys, they they specifically are distinguishing eukaryotes from simpler, you know the non nucleated prokaryotic organisms like bacteria. So I think I think we define that pretty good. So the project scale, literally it, it it's so massive, bigger than earlier efforts that have come before it, like the human genome project. And you know, that was a cool thing that they did that project. It focused on mapping a single species genome to the human species, right. The Earth Bio Genome Project's ultimate goal is to revolutionize this understanding that of all all the Earth's biodiversity, which will improve conservation strategies, It'll Dr. advancement in agriculture and human health. So there's three phases. It's structured. The first phase is in 2026, they want to sequence 10,000 species. This should be covering one representative per eukaryotic family. Then phase 22030 is the is the end date. They want to expand that to 150,000 genomes, which includes one for each genus. And then by phase three, which is 2032, they want to complete the genomes for all 1.67 million named species. It's huge, absolutely, but they have a plan. So let's go into that. They don't have an idea or a concept. They actually have a plan so far, the EBP, right? Remember I told you that's what they call it. They've sequenced 3000 genomes from 1060 families. And this covers a lot of work, but that's far from its phase one target. And the initial cost estimates for phase one were over 600 million, but they were able to reduce that to 265,000,000 because why guys?

E: AI.

J: That's a great idea, but that wasn't it because of rapid advancements in sequencing technology. And again, keep in mind, like sequencing technology is constantly being improved on as the years go by. It's been in a constant state of flux, which is awesome because look at that price difference, 600 million to 265 S By comparison, the human genome projects, first draft of their genome project cost over $100 million. But again, keep in mind the Human Genome project work on one. Species The EBP is. Going to work on 1.6 somewhat more, you know, 1.6 million, that's so much more it's ridiculous. So despite the investments, the Ebps progress needs to happen faster than it currently is, and they're trying to figure out how they're going to do it. So what they want to do is they want the weekly genome production to scale from 20 to 721 by phase two, and they've scoped it out that that will meet their deadlines. So unlike its predecessors, EBP is a decentralized global project. This is great It involves affiliates from 28 countries. Two major hubs are BGI in China and the Welcome Sanger Institute in the UK. So the project needs regions that have massive biodiversity to get funds to keep the project moving forward. So the problem is, is that a lot of these places that have a huge biodiversity, they just don't have enough money to make it all happen. Some regions have funding, they have these funding issues, but the people behind the EBP came up with a solution to help them out. And this is a great idea. They developed a portable sequencing lab they call G boxes and I could not find anything on why they call it G boxes. So these labs, you know, they can be deployed wherever they need to. Each unit costs approximately 5.5 million to install and operate over a three-year period. And they can sequence between 1003 thousand genomes annually. And they can just pump these, you know, these G boxes out where they need to go. And they're relatively, you know, inexpensive all things considered. So the funding has been ongoing and it's been a huge challenge for them. You know, right now, guys, as everybody knows, there's geopolitical tensions and they get in the way. And it really matters when countries don't agree and don't have good relations with each other. You know, science basically suffers a lot, and particularly between the US and China. And you'd think, you know, why can't they just talk and fix it, but they can't because we can't even agree. And you know, each country can't even agree on what's going on. Even partial success here would still be awesome. You know, if they don't actually get all the way and and they're actually describing it as transformative, you know, a high quality reference genomes could do lots of things. It could accelerate conservation efforts for endangered. Species. It could identify genes critical for crop resistance, as an example, or can improve our understanding of ecosystem dynamics. There's a lot, a lot to this. It's not just getting the information, but there are applications there that they know of. So as it stands, EBP right now, it's the most ambitious genome initiative in history. And if it's fully successful, it'll mark a new era in science, which is offering insights into intricate tapestry of life on Earth. You know, great. It sounds great. But really, they're saying we're going to basically have a backup of the genome of all these named species. And it will be the foundation for lots of future solutions and global challenges that are coming up, right? Because if we want to save species, we can understand, you know, what their needs are better. And if we lose the species, we might someday be able to bring it back, which would be great. So even in the project's early stages, the project does demonstrate. I would consider it to be extra ordinary potential and, and a hugely collaborative workspace for, for science on a planetary scale. You know, that's the exact environment that science I think is best when there's tons of people involved globally and it and it's something that's happening all over.

S: Yeah. I mean, the cool thing is like, essentially this will give us a map of all living things, like at the at the genetic level. And we've got to start, we can start asking really interesting questions evolutionarily and otherwise, you know, it's just a massive data set. And imagine that we stick AI after it to try to find patterns and stuff. Yeah, in, in that vast data.

J: Absolutely. I mean, you would think this would be something that would have hopefully already been done, but it's still incredibly laborious. It's very hard with today's technology. But you know, this type of science actually drives innovation as well. So it's really good when, for example, I just read a cool statistic that like NASA, you know, in 2022, NASA brought 10s of billions of dollars of industry by its inventions and everything that that all the science that they're doing, like it's really valuable downstream when, you know, they hit literally hand over the technology that they're creating to companies in the United States. So bottom line is I, you know, I'm 100% behind this project.

News Item #2 - Ancient Solar Magnetic Field (29:25)

• https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024AV001396 

J: I think it's wonderful. It's the exact type of science that needs to be funded globally. And I can't wait to hear that you know that bell ring when they finish.

S: Let me ask you one more question, yo. Does the sun have a magnetic field?

J: It's gotta. Of course it does.

S: Yeah, it does. How strong is it?

J: It's Steve. It's, it's it's wicked strong, Yeah. Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's 18/23 in dungeons and. Drags. Yeah, it's it's the strongest force I would imagine in in the Galaxy, no.

S: It.

B: Extends past Pluto.

S: I mean, it's big. It's big. It's actually it's very variable. So the earths magnetic field at basically the earths surface is.

E: One Gauss.

S: It's .6 Gauss. Oh yeah.

E: Not even.

S: One OK the Suns mag. The average magnetic field of the sun at its surface is 1 gauss, so just slightly stronger average strength around 1 gauss, but it's highly variable with sunspots being the strongest. That's why the thing that's what sunspots are. You can get. The sunspots can reach magnetic field strengths of 2000 to 3000 gauss.

B: That's attractive.

S: That's huge, right?

B: Yeah. Yeah, Yeah. You got very powerful magnetic effects like reconnection happening that can. Unleash. Very powerful.

S: Now it's very, it's a very big magnetic field. It's bigger than Earth's magnetic field, but it still decreases with distance. So at the Earth, how strong do you think the Sun's magnetic field is at the Earth's distance?

E: Probably pretty weak, because it's pretty weak.

S: It's 50 micro gauss, yeah.

E: Oh wow, Five one 500,000.

S: It's a yeah, micro is a millionth, so 50 millionths of a gauss, 50 million or 5 micro Tesla. So I guess the Tesla is 10 Gauss.

E: Well, that's barely detectable. Yep.

S: What about a Pluto?

E: It has to be.

S: Nano Gauss.

E: Really.

S: Yeah, .2 Nano Tesla. Got it, Tesla. Yeah, I got nano, right?

E: Yeah.

S: Or So what would that be? Or two nano gauss still right? Yeah. Awesome.

E: What? What does that even do at?

B: That it's negligible, right? That's basically negligible. I don't even know if we can measure basically anything calculating it. But it it still keeps out the the interstellar medium, the to some extent, yeah, yeah, it defines the boundary.

S: Until you get to the here solar system, yeah.

B: And Helio shock and all the Heliosheath and all that other stuff.

S: Now the question is, has this always been the case or has the in the past, especially the distant past, especially the very early solar system, was the make the sun's magnetic field stronger?

B: I'd say much stronger aren't there? Don't some young stars have are very kind of chaotic like are they? Were they like Wolf? Rayford stars.

S: Yeah. How could we answer that question, do you think?

E: Well, we what time machine?

B: You know, Time Machine.

E: Would yeah, that'll do. It's at the amount.

B: Look at other stars.

E: The amount of elements. Look at other stars and in the current star versus the what we estimate was in the early. Stars.

S: Or we could measure it.

E: Huh.

S: From other stars. No, because through.

E: Telescopes looking.

S: How do we know what the Earth's magnetic field was in the past? Oh, you look at like fossilized.

E: Rocks.

S: Yeah.

E: Oh yeah, right. Or the water. Sample no water.

S: You're looking for rocks that have elements that will align themselves to a magnetic field and you basically you D align them and however much energy you have to put in to D align them is how much energy was put in to align them. Basically, I think this is how it works. So then we could say that, well, that's how strong the magnetic field was when this thing crystallized, right when this formed. So how could we get rocks from 4 billion years ago? Oh, asteroids, Asteroids, Exactly. Meteors, Asteroids and meteors. So for meteors that hit the Earth, basically those are going to tell us about the magnetic field of the inner solar system, because most of the meteors that are going to land on the Earth probably formed in the inner solar system. And we have done that. But if we could get an asteroid from the outer solar system, then we could get a measure of the magnetic field, you know, when that asteroid formed? Probably 4 billion years ago, whatever, 4.6 billion years ago in the outer solar system. So this is what was just done. Do you guys remember Ryugu the.

E: Japanese Oh it yes, it went and landed on an asteroid and took a sample.

S: So, so the asteroid was Ryugu, right? We talked about this, I think when when they recovered it and they got the the grains from right. Just like we talked about Bennu was the NASA project. This was the Japanese 1. So they had the recently a team analyzed particles from Ryugu for signs of an ancient magnetic field in the outer solar system. And they what they found was nothing, right? So they didn't, they found no evidence of a magnetic field. But what they said, what this means is given the techniques that they used, they can only say that there's an upper limit to how strong the magnetic field could have been. And that's 15 micro Tesla. So there if there was a magnetic field in the outer, so past Jupiter, when we when I say outer souls, I'm talking about past Jupiter. If there was a magnetic field beyond Jupiter, it would have been at, you know, basically where that asteroid formed. It would have been less than 15 micro Tesla, which is not negligible. It's small, but it's not negligible. It's not in the nano Tesla range and what I what do I mean by not negligible? Something very specific here because one of the questions was what was the impact of the sun's magnetic field in the formation of planets and other objects circling the sun. They analyzed other data. Then the researchers concluded that there may have been a other data basically indicated that there was a 5 micro Tesla magnetic field in the outer solar system, which fits with the IT had to be less than 15 micro Tesla. So this is not completely confirmed. They are hoping to get the same analysis from the material brought back by asteroid Bennu and to see if they can confirm that. But the data that we have so far is kind of lining up to there was probably a weak magnetic field but not insignificant magnetic field in the outer solar system. So what what effect does the magnetic field have on the formation of the solar system? You know when the solar system condenses out of a cloud of gas, like it becomes basically a spinning disk, the sun forms it in the middle and you have a cloud of ionized gas, like a disk of ionized gas surrounding the sun. It's ionized, so it responds to a magnetic field. The thinking is that in the inner solar system, that magnetic field, the sun's magnetic field would have caused clumping to occur, which probably formed into the inner rocky planets. And so the question was, could the same process have been happening for the outer planets and even other stuff out there and this. So this is sort of moving in that direction saying, yeah, it could have, you know, there if there was this five microtesla or whatever field out there, it was probably 50 to 200 microtesla in the inner solar system. If it was like 5 or whatever microtesla in the outer solar system that could have contributed to the formation of the gas giants and and basically everything condensed into like asteroids and comets and stuff past Jupiter. So that's why they're so interested in this question, you know, because this effects their models of early planetary formation right in the early solar system. Yeah. So the next step I think is going to be doing the same analysis of particles from Bennu to see if that also lines up with the maybe they can get a more precise number or confirm it that there is what there was like A5 micro Tesla magnetic field in the outer solar system at that time. So that's pretty cool.

B: Nice.

News Item #3 - MAHA (37:34)

• https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/04/us/politics/trump-rfk-health-fluoride-vaccines-aca.html 

S: All right, Kara, we're going to, I go in a bit of a different direction here. Tell us about the possibility of RFK being in charge of our health.

B: Oh, geez.

S: RFK Junior, I should say.

C: RFK Junior, who Trump has publicly verbalized, he plans to put into a quote position of power. Actually, I guess the real quote was to go wild on health. I think that's actually what he said. And possibly, quote, declare war on the FDA. He's a proponent of this sort of newly dubbed health freedom movement, or what some are calling Maha, make America healthy Again. When he suspended his campaign for the presidency in August of this year and backed Donald Trump, he promised to make him to give him a big position. He hasn't verbalized or he hasn't specified what that position might be heading up health policy. You know, some have speculated positions with the FDA or the CDC, although those require approval like congressional approval, whereas let's see the secretary of Health and Human Services or possibly a czar role, I think would be possibly easier to put him into.

S: Yeah, it wouldn't require approval.

C: Yeah, you could. Just appoint him.

S: You're the health czar and that's it.

C: You're the czar, and now you do this, which is.

S: Like his personal advisor. In a way, right? And the president.

C: And so a lot of people that are writing about this are showing a tweet. I mean, there's so much data to mine here. There's so much evidence of what will happen, that this is not crystal balling. This is just saying, well, this is what the dude said he was going to do. But here is a tweet from RFK junior, Robert F Kennedy Junior, who quickly like, I guess for those of you who don't know who he is, he is he is an environmental lawyer and actually has a very long track record of sort of working to protect vulnerable people against environmental disaster. But also he's a hardcore anti vaccine activist. And I love that. According to his Wikipedia page, he's an environmental lawyer, American politician, anti vaccine activist and conspiracy theorist just right there in the first line. So he founded the Children's Health Defense which is an anti vaccine. Group, they're one of the biggest peddlers of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Obviously, he tried, he attempted to run for president and he is a Kennedy. So he's the son of Robert F Kennedy and he's the nephew of JFK and Ted Kennedy. Back to the tweet here. So this was October 25th, 2024. So only about a week ago, two weeks ago. FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptide stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by pharma. At last. At last, we'll.

S: Be able to use sunshine without the FDA. 'S. Interference.

C: If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. One, preserve your records and two, pack your bags. Oh boy, oh boy. OK, so.

S: David Gorsky describes this as an extinction level event for science based federal health policy.

C: Yeah, that's in the headline of a very long piece that he wrote about how dangerous this would be, and he, of course, wrote it the day before the election. So let's kind of talk for a second about some of the things that RFK Junior wants to see changed. A lot of people are focusing on fluoride. I think we'll come back to fluoride because, Steve, you wrote a piece about fluoride. Yeah.

S: Because of this, yeah.

C: Because of this exactly. But there are other things that have been highlighted across the board that are problematic. Obviously, he is one of the biggest anti vaccine voices out there. The New York Times did a post where they sort of dug deep into whether or like can he actually affect real change here? Like could Trump ban vaccines, for example? And what the New York Times, what this article at least is saying is that, you know, the short answer is no, because public health in the US is mostly controlled by the states, not the federal government. And then where there is federal kind of over site, that's with the FDA, they license the vaccines. And the president can't just remove a product that's lawful and licensed from the market, at least not without like, trying to do so through legal maneuvering. But the president could put pressure on the FDA. The president could make sure that the judges that are appointed limit the power of federal agencies. We also know that he before he left office last time where he changed the classification of a lot of federal aid.

S: Yeah, I forgot the name of the order, but yeah.

C: Yeah, federal employees so that they could be let go and their jobs were not protected. And so he passed this before he left office. Last time, like Week 1, Biden reversed that. But it's very likely that he's just going to dive right back in once he takes office. So yes, there could be a lot of change here. One person is quoted in this article saying there's a lot of mischief that can be done, but a flat out ban? No.

S: But they could, you know, pull funding if anybody doesn't follow their dictates. That's how the federal.

C: Government. Works a lot.

S: The state controls it, but the federal government could just pull funding.

C: Yes, exactly. Affordable Care Act, you know, recently, and I think that this was in a, in a final bid to get elected, Trump kind of pulled back a little bit on his rhetoric around the Affordable Care Act and said that he like never mentioned ending the program. He never would have thought about such a thing. But there's a lot of, like, he's on tape, you know, saying that he did want to appeal Obamacare or the ACA. As we know, that actually requires an act of Congress. But he could use executive power to undercut the law or to restrict access to the law. And this article really details a lot of the ways that he would be able to do that. So like, for example, in January of 2021, Biden issued an executive order that strengthened Medicaid and the ACA. And Trump could just undo that as soon as he's in office. And then if Congress were to repeal the act, what would come next? Well, going back to what you said, Jay, well, there's concepts of a plan. Yeah. No idea. They got no. Idea. They got nothing.

S: There is nothing. There's only so many levers you could pull there, you know, That's there's no magic here, you know?

C: And so then we're going to backtrack a little bit to fluoride, but I did want to point out a friend of the show, Dr. Andrea Love, she has a blog called Immunologic and she wrote a piece back in September about the Congressional American Health and Nutrition Roundtable. The headline of her article is the Congressional American Health and Nutrition Roundtable was an egregious display of anti science disinformation. So basically what happened is that on Monday, September 23rd, but GOP Senator for Wisconsin, Ron Johnson hosted a public taxpayer dollar funded event where he put together what he claimed to be a panel of quote, experts who will provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing and healthcare industries which impact the current state of National Health. End Quote. But what really he put together was a panel including, I'm going to list some names, Robert F Kennedy Junior, Jordan Peterson, Michaela Fuller, Casey and Callie Means, Vani Hari, Max Lugovir, Courtney Swan, Marty Macary, Alex Clark, Jason Karp, Brigham Bueller, and even more scrolling. Scrolling Jillian Michaels, Chris Palmer and Grace Price. None of whom have any expertise relevant to what this panel is supposed to cover.

B: They're all a bunch of quacks and. All that's. Food.

C: Base. Yeah, all of whom are notorious anti science quacks. Yeah, You know, they all pedal misinformation. And not only do they peddle misinformation, the vast majority of them benefit financially from misinformation. Many of these individuals have make their money having outlets, whether it's books or blog posts or podcasts or whatever, that are directly funded by supplement industries. So what they did during this panel is they demonized Big Pharma, they demonized Big Food, but then they talked a big game about, quote, big Wellness and big organic food without calling them that, right? And this is the sort of playbook that we've seen over and over and over. Why would you trust the, the kind of mainstream individuals who have, you know, the FDA and the CDC have their boots on their necks when instead you can trust the Wellness industry because they have the real answers. And the reason that they're able to tell you what's real is that the FDA isn't, you know, tying their hands behind their back. And this is really the basis for the Make America Healthy Again movement. Deregulation. It's just about going in and deregulating, deregulating, deregulating. The funny thing is when we we are already quite deregulated when it comes to alternative medicine, But when we start to deregulate legitimate medicine, that's when the pseudoscience is no longer compartmentalized. It now bleeds its way into the legitimate medicine game. Yeah. And Big Pharma, the very quote industry, and I'm saying that in, in, you know, air quotes, big pharma, the industry that they are so angry with is going to start peddling pseudoscience.

S: Totally. They're happy to be deregulated. It's like, oh, we could sell crap we don't have to research and charge up the wazoo for it. Sure, we're all in. This is not an anti big pharma bill. It's a pro quackery, pro snake oil, you know, movement. That's what it is.

C: Yep, Deregulation will hurt so many people. People will die. They are, I think it's they are dying and they will continue to die. And very often the people that will die are women and children, individuals of color, LGBTQIA individuals, people who are vulnerable.

S: Yeah, and low socioeconomic status. Yep, absolutely.

C: And so now I guess we should talk a little bit about fluoride. I don't want it to take up the whole thing because we have covered it in the past, but basically RFK Junior is touting lines from Doctor Strangelove like, and I think, you know, it's the argument is that fluoride. I've got to find his quote because I got it.

S: Right here.

C: You got it right here. Oh, here I have it too. He described fluoride as an industrial waste. Industrial waste is so deseciated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease. And then in an interview just this past Sunday, Trump said that the idea of doing away with fluoridation, quote, sounds OK to me. And so, Steve, you did a really great job of going through each of the things in that list and debunking. You know, we know that although some fluoride is produced through industrial processes, it is not industrial waste.

S: And it doesn't matter. It's like one of those, it's a chemophobia thing, because at the end of the day it completely dissociates into fluoride ions. That's it. It's a fluoride ion. It's an element, it doesn't matter. It's like saying this hydrogen Adam came from poison, who cares? It's now a proton, you know what I mean? It doesn't matter where you sourced it from. It's that's just fear mongering. Chemophobia, that's what.

C: That, of course, but that's, that's totally from the playbook, right? That's from all of the rhetoric, arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders and thyroid disease. You do a great job of going through and saying, OK, this was this one study or this was when, you know, the levels that were looked at were, you know, X number of times greater than any acceptable level by the FDA. And time and time again, what we have seen it's.

S: The EPA actually, but.

C: Oh, thank you. Yeah.

S: Because the fluoride is naturally occurring in water and, and the US has locations with high levels of fluoride. The EPA sets limits. If it gets higher than that, we actually reduce the level of fluoride. We only add it up to a very tiny amount that's well below anything that causes any issues.

E: Doses.

C: And by the way, again, this is a decision that's made at the local level. There are states in this country that don't, or I guess I should say cities within states in the country that don't fluoridate the water. 72.3% of the US population has access to fluoridated water according to the CDC. And the CDC calls fluoridation one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century. Because fluoridated water helps with oral health, it reduced cavities and tooth decay by 60% in the Grand Rapids experiment in 1945, where the first efforts to fluoridate water began. It was such a resounding win that other jurisdictions decided to do this because the evidence was overwhelming.

S: Yeah, and it saves money. And then they say, well, we get with fluoridated toothpaste, you don't really need it these days. But when they take it away, tooth decay goes up, right? So clearly we do. Right.

C: Because of course, when we democratize something like fluoride in the drinking water, everybody has access to it as opposed to requiring it to be viewed. I mean, I hate to say this because it shouldn't be a luxury item. It should be a necessity item. But for some people, it is a luxury item. And for some people, they just don't have access to the oral hygiene that they need. Maybe they're using fluoridated toothpaste, but they're not brushing their teeth multiple times a day. Maybe they don't have an opportunity to go to the dentist and use the fluoride that they give to children at the dentist.

S: Well, this is what we're headed for.

C: It's really, really scary. And that's just one of, you know, the ACA, fluoridated water and vaccines that's just scratching the surface. There is so much pseudoscience that RFK has peddled. And when you, again, look at the things that were covered by the panel, that's sort of like a good early taste of what we could be up against, all of the Wellness Wellness industry bullshit that they were peddling. It really, really scares me just so much pseudoscience and just outright lies. Yeah.

S: All right. Thanks, Kara. All right, Bob, I understand the moon.

News Item #4 - Miranda May Have Life (53:21)

• "Miranda" moon of Uranus likely has an ocean and possibly life - Earth.com 

S: Miranda has water and maybe something else.

B: Perhaps we may tentatively, perhaps, maybe have yet another icy moon in our solar system with a subsurface ocean. And we know what that means, right? First, my first thought is like, oh, maybe there's chemosynthetic life in there, but that's definitely jumping the gun. The moon, though, doesn't orbit Jupiter or Saturn, but the far more distant and less well branded planet Uranus. How could such an interesting oceanic possibility be teased out of such a distant small object? The study published in the Planetary Science Journal, led by Tom Nordheim, planetary scientist at the JOB Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. So this starts with Uranus, the second farthest planet, at 19 AUS, at 93,000,000 miles, the distance Earth to the sun Jupiter's only 5 AUS, so this is like a lot farther away. This is the planet that rotates on its side. You know that that one giving it crazy seasons, like at the polls, it's 42 years of sunlight and then 42 years of darkness. Wow. Yeah, that's nasty. The star of the study, so to speak, is Uranus's innermost moon. Miranda, The moon is tiny. It's got a surface area of of Texas. Texas is big, but it's small for for a moon with a diameter of only 470 kilometers, it's one of the smallest observed objects in hydrostatic equilibrium in our solar system. If if it's in hydrostatic equilibrium, that means that it is it is round because of gravity.

E: Like the moons of Mars are not round.

B: Right, right. Depending, of course, what it's made of. But you know, they're rocky moons. So how do we go about determining that there might be water under the ice on a moon that's 2.7 billion kilometers away?

E: Call the water company.

B: Yes. Another option would be to, well, in this case, it's it's ironically about what's on the surface of the moon. And we first got a look at Miranda from the pictures Voyager took way back in 86.

US#00: Wow.

B: It looks like a patchwork of different moons that got stitched together. It's really kind of bizarre. There's like these these grooves or canyons that are 12 times deeper than the Grand Canyon. And there's these huge cliffs and there's these weird trapezoidal shapes, geological shapes called Caroni. They think it just be it might be dense, you know, metallic or rocky material from previous collisions with meteors. Clearly, Miranda has a strange and complicated geological past. So to reconstruct that past, the researchers combined the old with the new. They use the old Voyager pictures and because that's really the best image images that we have of Miranda, even though it's, you know, some 86. I mean, Voyager got pretty damn close and we incorporated those old pictures into modern modeling techniques. Nordheim described it as squeezing the last bit of science we can from Voyager 2's images. So how does the surface of Miranda shed light on its interior? They say in their paper. In this paper we will attempt to constrain Miranda's interior structure from interpretation and modeling of surface stress patterns. So the researchers claim that by determining what caused these those weird deformed surface geological shapes and structures, they they will be able to winnow the possibilities of what the interior of Miranda is like based so based primarily on the surface. Another model showed that OR concluded that 100 to 500 million years ago Miranda could have had a sub ocean, a subsurface ocean more than 100 kilometers deep. So now how do you actually create an ocean on a small moon so far from the sun? The most likely culprit, they think, are orbital residences with nearby moons. These are really fascinating. Residences like this are like pushing a kid on a swing. You know, you're the kids swinging and you push at the right at a time and the kid goes farther and farther and farther. Orbital residences are like that. The tidal forces between the moons of of Uranus can be amplified by these residences to the point where the moons actually experience a change in their orbits. And that's why Miranda's orbits are inclined a bit, they think. But it's not only the the orbit that changes because of these residences. You can, it can change the axis of rotation itself and the tilt of its axis. So it, so it just wreaks havoc with these moons, these resonances when they line up, you know, when they're, when they're properly set up. So this can also obviously wreak havoc on the moon's surface. And they calculated that all of this resonance movement and stuff actually compressed one side of the moon and stretch the other side. And that's probably one of the main reasons why we're seeing such a weird, a weird surface going on there. Now all of this also creates friction and heat in the interior interior and that's what they think could have created the ocean there. So it basically kind of almost boils down to tidal forces. Again, that which is what we see in that's the in the moons of Jupiter as well. We've got moons that some of the most volcanically active moons around Jupiter are because of the tidal forces are just constantly needing and compressing the interior. So kind it's kind of related to what we're seeing here, although these these residences are a little bit different. So how can that ocean still exist though, after 1/2 a billion years? Because this happened, you know, 100 going into a half a billion years ago. How why is this this ocean still there? So they say that that one reason is that this tidal heating could persist, persist because of this eccentric orbit that that the moon is now in. Now, they're not saying that the the ocean is still, you know, 100 kilometers deep. They say it's probably smaller, but it's it's probably still there. And the other bit of evidence for that is that if it were frozen solid, if the moon had no subsurface ocean, they say that there there would have been evidence of that on the surface. And they do not see that evidence. So, so that's basically the gist of their argument. In the future, they may be able to more definitively demonstrate that Uranus still has a subsurface ocean. That would be very cool. I mean, I don't think, I mean, it's just so far away. I mean, imagine three times farther away than Jupiter. I mean, I don't think we're going to be getting there anytime in our lifetimes at all. But but maybe someday we will, we will be able to say that this is 1 surface ocean that not only exists and like I said at the beginning, perhaps if there's a subsurface ocean, there could potentially, potentially be some sort of of life, some, you know, single celled organisms, some microorganisms that are, that are based on the chemo, you know, chemo, synthetic rather than photosynthetic. And that will be of course, mind boggling. But actually, I hope, I'm hoping that we'll find that nearby with Saturn and Jupiter, not have to go all the way to Uranus. But right. So much closer, yeah.

S: One more thing to keep an eye on. Yeah, but I'm not going to. To be a probe there anytime soon.

B: No, which is the the process they went to, to to model this and come to that conclusion, which was different and fascinating to me.

E: Yep, no probing of Uranus. Got it.

News Item #5 - Club 27 Myth (1:00:14)

• The Myth that Musicians Die at 27 Shows How Superstitions Are Made 

S: All right, Evan, what's the Club 27 myth?

E: Have you? Heard of this before.

S: No.

E: No, yeah, I think you, I think maybe you have, but you don't know it as the Club 27 myth or or what they call the 27 Club. That's for short, but this is a cultural phenomenon referring to a group of famous musicians initially and then artists and some other actors who got folded into this group, who have all died at the age of 27.

C: Oh, OK. Yeah, yeah, the Kurt Cobain.

E: Right, right, right. But. But Kara didn't start there. It's not a modern phenomenon.

C: Oh, right, Janis Joplin too.

E: Yeah, this dates back to actually the first one was 1969. That was when I was born. And Rolling Stones Co founder Brian Jones, he dies at age 27. He drowned. It was tragic and the rock world was stunned by that loss. But then in 1970, Kara Janis Joplin, also at age 27, died. And Jimi Hendrix, age 27, dies in 1970. So all right. Yeah. Brian Jones, 69. Now Janis and Jimmy are gone. In 1970 all age 27, and then one year later, 1971, Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors.

B: He was 27.

E: Dies at age 27 in the holy. What is going on with our music stars dying at age 27? Is it some kind of curse? But regardless, forever there it was cemented in our culture. If you were a fan of any kind of music growing up in the 70s, even the early 80s, my guess is you have some kind of memory of discussions about the 27 Club phenomenon. And then what started happening is people started taking a peek back in time before the club was realized. And you'll find out that legendary bluesmen Robert Johnson, he was aged 27 when he died. So that. Yeah, yeah, that big name to the club going forward, like you said, Kara, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana in the 1990s, Amy Winehouse, also aged 27 in 2011, she passed away. And so you wind up casting sort of this larger net because you wind, because what people will do is they'll start throwing actors and artists and other media people effectively into this more and you get more relevant data points. So what do, what do our brains do? Well, we like to soak up these types of celebrity related cultural phenomenon and accept them sort of as, I don't know, like a quasi fact or fact ish sort of thing that exists. And maybe you think, wow, what are those odds? All these amazing musicians and artists and celebrities dying at age 27. What are those chances? Are we really capable of knowing and understanding what those actual chances are with the statistical significance? Probably not, but this has been studied before. I went back to an article for over at Vox from 2015 and there was research done that year by a professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney. Her name was Diana Theodora Kenny and the most common age of deaf musicians was not 27 in her study. Do you want to guess what the age was most common death for these artists?

B: 60.

C: 869.

E: Bob's a little closer 60. 756. 56 was the age.

C: Because musicians live hard.

E: 11,000 / 11,000 musicians were in in that study and she studied people who died between 1950 and 2010. Only 1.3% of of those musicians died at age 27. Two point 3% were the most at age 56. So yeah. And, and if she graphed it on a on a chart, it makes a very nice, you know, bell curve statistically speaking. But regardless of that and other studies, this continues to be a subject of revisiting and more studies, but in different ways. And this is where we ran into the news item this week. It's being covered by a lot of places, but Scientific American, and her name is Rachel Newer NUWER. She wrote an article about this titled The Myth That Musicians Diet 27 Shows how superstitions are Made. Yeah, and she's referring to a new study that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS titled titled All Right, Bear With Me Here, Path Dependence, Stigmergy and Mimetic Reification of the Formation of the 27 Club Myth with authors Zachary Donovan and Patrick Kaminsky. What they were trying to do here is basically get into how a legend or a myth that emerged out of random but strange series of events went on to have a real world impact by shaping the legacies of other famous people who subsequently died at age 27. In effect, they're saying, yeah, it's a myth, but there is maybe something going on here that is of some significance. And what they did is they looked, they used Wikipedia and they looked at various languages, obviously throughout the world. And they used an analysis of people who were born after 1900 and who died before 2015. And they came up with over 344,000 Wikipedia pages, but then they used page visits as their proxy for fame, right? So this is based on that. So they put that model together. And do you know what happened when they looked at it? And as far as looking at all the artists who died at age 27, was it a, was it a significantly different number? Was there, was it the same? What do you guys think?

C: I don't know.

E: It was the same.

C: It was the same. Yeah. We didn't know.

E: It was the same. That did not change, but here's what they did find, they said, among those in the 90th percentile of fame, and higher for those that did die at age 27, they experienced an extra boost of popularity in the form of more page visits to their Wikipedia page that could not be accounted for by other factors. They say the effect was particularly pronounced for the most famous of the famous or individual individuals who roughly achieved the 99th percentile of fame. And that bump, they say, indicates that people who die at age 27 are considerably more likely to be more famous than, comparatively, those who even die at just age 26 or 28.

S: So that's confirmation bias.

E: I suppose so. That's what that is.

S: Yeah, 100%, yeah. You have, like, people underestimate how many potential musicians there are, right? Especially if you include celebrities. It's thousands and thousands. You could come up with the same kind of number of people who die at any age and there's a bell curve, you know, that has nothing to do with the age 27. That's just a, you know, people notice a pattern and then they include the data in subsequent formulations. You know, I mean that they, they carry that quirky observation forward. And then especially then you, then you engage in confirmation bias. You're looking for data to, to fit the pattern and without looking at all the data, it's just classic, you know, This is why even if like we see this same phenomenon happen, even like in the clinic where you by coincidence see a couple of patients with some kind of a correlation. And so maybe there's something here. So you you look to see if there's other cases, and you find them, and you include the original observations in the data, and you have a case series that makes it seem like something's happening. It's all just random quirkiness that has nothing to do with anything. You need an independent, thorough evaluation with new data to see if this holds up. And of course it doesn't. It's just random nonsense.

J: Correct.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:08:09)

J: Jay, who's that noisy time? All right guys, going back at least 2 episodes, here's the noisy that I played. You guys have any guesses?

E: Yeah, it's Donald Duck maneuvering inside of a tank.

J: That's pretty good. OK, I got so many good, good guesses, meaning ones that I thought that, you know, just were worthy of of, of that sound. The first one was from Joe van Denden, and he says, is that the Walker bringing the spacecraft carrier, the Europa Clipper, back out of the launchpad? Very cool guess. I mean, yeah, I could see that. I hear what you're saying there. And I think that's a great guess. You're not correct. And I would like to actually hear that sound if you ever can get it. Another listener named Matthew Morrison said, hi, Jay. My daughter Neve. And I think it is a ship moving through the water where there is a layer of ice on top that is breaking as the ship moves through it. Another fantastic guess because there are water like sounds going on in that clip. So you know, I think that was pretty cool. Guess you are incorrect and tell me no big deal. Everybody tries. It's great to try. Sometimes we actually win, right. So keep trying. Next one is Matt. So skins and he said, Jay, great to meet you at Sycon. Before I give you my guess, I want to tell you about my grandmother's brownie recipe and how it led to me led me to know this noisy. And then he's course he's kidding because I asked people, you know, please don't write me these big stories. Cut to the chase. And then he said water powered organ or a bird. Now, whenever anybody says or a bird, I just ignore that because of course, you know, I shouldn't even be taking guesses from people with more than one guess. But I, it was a joke. I get it. Water powered organ. It is not a water powered organ. But again, there is, you know, there is a water kind of noise in there. And I can see where he's coming from. Next one is from Ben Simon. He said this week's noisy puts in mind movie scenes of nervous naval officers quietly glancing at each other during a tense submarine dive. So I'm going to say this is recording of a record-breaking deep dive by a research submersible. Another awesome guess. It's not correct, but damn that's an awesome guess. But there was no winner this week and that's perfectly OK. Like I said, you know we try, sometimes we fail. What do you want to say? Try or do not? There is no fail, right?

S: Do or do not. There is no try.

J: Right, that's it. Well, that's not does not apply to who's that noisy. So I want to thank everybody for being honest because since nobody won, that means I'm 100% sure that everybody that listens to this show that sent in a guest respected my request to not write in if you knew the answer because I knew a lot of people knew the answer out there. So you know what, props to you guys more, more reason to go to Nauticon because we have high quality people that listen to this show. So guys, what is that sound? I was really excited to hear it after I knew what it was. And then I listened to it and it ended up being as cool as I hoped it should be. OK. This is the sound of molten metals swirling in the Earth's core as its magnetic field flips.

US#00: Can't record that the tape recorder would melt.

J: Yeah, that's what I thought. No, but that guys, that is the internal swirling sound of the Earth's core and it made me think of something really interesting and and luckily it's not the case. Imagine if we constantly we heard that noise, but that noise is, you know, think about how loud that noise must be. It just can't penetrate all the rock and regolith and everything. But I just thought that was a wicked cool noise. Let's listen to it again. It's.

E: Loud. I still hear Donald Duck in there A.

J: Little There's a boat Creek noise in there, so I get all those guesses.

B: Jay, you mentioned as the magnetic field flips. Wait, what does that mean?

J: I guess they were recording it in in anticipation of the flip. I don't think it has anything to do with the flip, but that's why they were recording. And before I move on to to the new noisy for this week, I have a response to something that we talked about. You know, Cara was mentioning that that we see back in episode 1007, we heard the voice of both Helen Keller and her interpreter. Kara commented on how strange it it is to hear the accent that was used by the interpreter whenever recordings from that time period are played because nobody speaks that way anymore. And then Kara speculated that that's probably just how people spoke back then, but it sounds effective. So a couple of people wrote in about this, this particular emails from someone named Steven Hopkins. And he says it's it absolutely was affected as it was manufactured. It was a manufactured accent which did not evolve organically. It's called Mid-Atlantic accent or the transatlantic accent. And there was a basically it was a put on accent by Northeastern American upper class in the early 20th century. And it was adopted by many broadcasters and actors of that time period because it made them sound cultured and because they felt it helped their voice come through more clearly. OK, so the voice is BS, right? It it, it was.

S: Well, we've. Spoken about this we.

J: Absolutely.

S: Have the mid, the Mid-Atlantic accent. What's yeah. What's interesting about it is that it's not a regional accent. Like it doesn't exist anywhere. It is a a learned accent. It's taught like in finishing school or whatever. And it is essentially like an Eastern American accent with some British affectations and, you know, and mixed in, like British sounds mixed in And so, and it is supposed to be a very like you enunciate things very clearly and, you know.

C: But it's also got this, like, high and mighty sound to it, yeah.

S: Right, exactly. But The thing is, so and and so that person might not have been speaking that way because she was being recorded. She might have been speaking that way because she was educated at one of the schools who taught her to speak that way. And maybe she did lay it on a little bit thick because she was being recorded. We don't know. Because everyone has their own individual manifestation of like what their Mid-Atlantic accent is. But that doesn't mean there isn't also temporal accents. Because if you watch documentaries of like, I've watched a lot of World War 2 new documentaries and you watch people in the 40s being interviewed on film and they're not actors and they're not, you know, they're not upper class affectations. They speak in an accent that doesn't exist today. You know, it's like the That's right. Yeah. That's not that exactly. It's like that's kind.

J: Of a stage accent, but roaring along.

S: But that's when you hear like what real people sound like at the time because they're not actors, they're just people in the war or whatever. So there is absolutely temporal accents as well. But I do agree that that persons accent was probably a learned transplant agreement. I really don't like it.

J: It sounds so put on you know that sounds. Like snobby. Yeah, yeah, absolutely just right it. Was snobby. It was literally snappy. I mean that was. Kind of Roger that.

S: And it just sort of faded away after World War 2.

J: All right, so good job everyone that sent in all those great guesses. I have a new noisy for you this week. Check this out. There you go.

E: That's a ready whip. Whip cream being dispensed.

J: Yeah. We know that like it's like 11:00 at night and you get it in the refrigerator that. Yeah, yeah. That's straight into the mouth. Yeah, that is like, that's a rite of goddamn passage in the United States.

E: We should all take one tonight.

J: So, OK guys, if you know this week's noisy or if you heard something really cool, e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org.

Interview with Brian Cox (1:16:21)

https://briancoxlive.co.uk/

S: All right, so let's go on with that interview with Brian Cox and special guest Brian Wecht. And for those premium Patron members, you get to listen to the full, uncut version of that interview that'll be up this weekend. Well, joining us now is Brian Cox. Brian, welcome to the sky, to the universe.

US#06: Pleasure, pleasure to be here.

S: You are one of the people that we've been hoping to get interview with for a very long time. You are obviously one of the superstar science communicators in the world. We really appreciate what you do. So we were talking about making the transition from being basically an academic, a scientist, to being a science communicator. How has that worked out for you? How do you feel about that?

US#06: Well, I mean, the first thing to say, it was an accident, so I didn't really plan it. In fact, in my early career as a PhD student and then postdoc, what all I tried to do was get research fellowships so no one would bother me and then just do research. And I didn't even want to teach, right. I just wanted to avoid everything about apart from doing particle physics. And then we, we, I got involved in one of the sort of funding crises that happen every now and again in all, sort of all countries I think in, in the UK. So I began to get involved in arguing for more funding for research and that brought me into contact, I suppose, with the media and the, and the press. And so it was an accident really. And then, and then the, the BBC in the UK interviewed me a few times. And then sort of why don't you make a little documentary on the radio about particle physics? And then why don't you make a little TV show, a little low budget thing about particle physics. And, and so it, it happened by accident. And now I mean, I, I, I love teach. So now I choose to teach at the University of Manchester. I Teach First years quantum mechanics and relativity actually. And I, and I obviously, as, as you've said, I get involved in making television programmes and so on. So it was, it was something that I came to later in my career, but I very strongly believe that it's an important part of an academic career if you choose to do it. And in fact I was at the University of Manchester last week. We had a bigger sort of worldwide universities conference there. And I spoke at that and said that I think it's extremely important that if academics want to engage in whatever capacity, it doesn't have to be making television programmes. But just in speaking about climate science, as we spoke about today, for example, then that should be seen as not only positive, but it should be part of an academic career if the academic chooses. So promotion case and so on. And so I, I've come to believe that it's extremely important of course, now to, to engage and we can talk about why the, all the reasons why I think that's the case.

S: Yeah, obviously I completely agree with you. Also, being an academic myself, I, I'm always curious, asking my fellow sort of academic science communicators, how's that going for you? And how specifically how does the, the university, do they agree with you that this should be part of an academic career and that you get credit for it for promotion? And I know there's a little bit of a divide. I think it's worse in the US and in, in the UK. So what is? What's your experience?

US#06: Been yeah, the University of Manchester actually we have a, a so we have the promotion, the they call it the legs of the promotion case and and they are research, teaching, administration and we call it social responsibility. We so, so we have the, so it's a quarter basically of the case. It can be, which is public engagement, as we might call it so, but I think it depends very strongly on your vice Chancellor, the head of the president of the university. But also, and I spoke about this about this conference last week, it can often be that I do find that the people right at the top are very. They, they understand, as I think we all understand, that it's vitally important to communicate science, of course, in a, in a democracy, as Carl Sagan said, the idea that you have a if you have a population that has no contact with the way that we acquire reliable knowledge about the world, then the decisions that democracy makes will be flawed, right. So, yeah, yeah. And I think people at the top know that you can have problems in universities with the kind of middle management, the heads of department level because, you know, because of the funding streams and so on. So I think that's where the in, in the UK, if there's going to be a problem, it will be with your kind of line manager. It won't be with the the people at the top who understand the wider picture.

B: Right. I talk a lot about particle physics on the show and I want to get your sense of how you feel about your confidence in the future. You know, you've got the LHC who's they've scaled up now to what, 14 Tera electron volts and the Higgs boson is still like the biggest thing that they've done. They've they've made a lot of discoveries. But how is your optimism in the future for being able to reveal some new physics beyond the standard model? What do you think we'll ever in, in a reasonable amount of time get to a regime and where we can discover new physics? Or is it probably forever beyond technology that we could build and finance to discover? Is it just too far beyond us for a long time now?

US#06: It's a very good question, and the answer is, for the first time in the history of particle physics, we don't know.

B: And it's a little. Scary, right?

US#06: It's a little scary, I mean. So the LHC, I should say it was. Why was it built at that energy? It was built at that energy because we knew that the Standard model without a light Higgs broke down. Mathematically speaking, get those energies. So what that means in reality is you either discover a Higgs boson of some kind or some other mechanism. In fact, I worked on physics without a light Higgs at the LHC before we turned the LHC on. So signatures the model breaks down, one of the places it breaks down most obviously is in the scattering of West bosons, for example. So you can bang W bosons together. WW scattering is cold. And if you, if you calculate that process without a Higgs boson in the theory, then it, it, it gives you nonsense basically energies of actually 1.4 TV, right? So, so, so well within the scope of the LNC. So that's why you could, you could with absolute confidence build that machine because you knew you were going to discover something. It's also true to say, many of my colleagues who've been in past couple of weeks longer than I have would say, but it's also true that most of the machines that we built discovered things they weren't built to discover, right? So, so this sure, you know so, but but at least you knew there was an energy threshold which was within the scope of that machine that you'd see something, right?

B: And justify that billions of dollars spent, yeah.

US#06: Now you're absolutely right. Now that, that at the moment with LHC, we're in a, it's, it's exciting in that we're in a precision physics regime. So we're still looking for obviously new particles, but most people I, I think would have put money on super, super.

US#05: That was my field when. It was a string theory.

US#06: It comes out of string theory. It's it it it there. I'm sure that that nature is super symmetric at some. It seems it seems very plausible, right? And also plausible that the LHC might have seen.

B: Sure so. Nothing from the LHC, but nothing. Nothing.

US#06: So you're right that what do you do? I mean, it's true that particle physics goes in phases where you then go into a precision measurement phase like the the accelerator before it lap in the same tunnel. You know, we we were making high precision measurements on the West and Z bosons and that that get was necessary information. So you, you kind of go to a Higgs factory type model, for example, if there's nothing else, you start making high precision measurements on the Higgs, which is what we're doing with the LHC at the moment with the upgrades while still looking for new signatures. So, so we know that there's it's not complete, right? We know.

US#05: That the standard model but.

US#06: We don't know where the energy scale is, Yeah.

US#05: Right.

US#06: So we don't know how big to make the next one. Is that basically the answer? Yeah, in other words.

US#05: But it's not just big, it's the type.

US#06: So you could do a Muon Collider or something like that too.

US#05: If you're going to do a baryonic Collider, then that looks probably you'd have to just scale it up, but you can do lots of other. Stuff.

US#06: Yeah, so the, but then again, again, having said all that, I'm a strong supporter of the, the, the, the big machine, whatever, whatever it's currently called that CERN want to build the Super LHC, which is 100 kilometre tonne like.

B: Amazing.

US#06: Because, because what you do find is that, and we, I saw it first hand with LHC, is that there aren't many people who know how to build accelerators on that scale. And they're really difficult. And you can forget, you can lose the expertise and it's hard. And actually a lot of the people who worked on the IHC were towards the end of their careers, they're highly experienced people. And so I think there's a very strong argument that it's not a lot of money. Actually, when you look at these are decadal projects, we're talking about the machine for 20304050 years in the future. And so the, the level of, you know, a a billion dollars a year or something in total, which CERN is it? It looks expensive CERN, but, but actually it's budget is less than my university, the University of Manchester. So it's, it's, it's, it's yearly budget out of which it builds the machines is of a medium sized university. It's it's a lower budget than at Harvard and Princeton and those universities, right. So, so I think at that level, the the idea that the world has this capability to build these machines and builds one of them and it takes decades to build them and then you operate it and do good physics with it for 50 years is, is compelling to me. And and and you know, I'd put money on there being interesting stuff. It's not you, it's getting theoretical physicians. It's it you get into problem if you don't it's getting.

US#05: Narrower and narrower, Narrower as.

US#06: Well, yeah, right. So, so, but but having said all that, as I said earlier, it is the case that we we couldn't guarantee it knowing what we know at the moment.

US#05: It does seem like, I mean supersymmetry, the constraints are getting tighter and tighter for that, right? So who knows what's going to happen with that. But then you have something which is possibly related, although a priori, not necessarily dark matter where, right? That seems like a much more plausible discovery to me at some point in the nearer future.

B: Sure. And the standard model doesn't say anything about that. So we need to go beyond, we need to go beyond the standard model. That's right.

US#05: And is that supersymmetry or something else?

B: I saw this.

US#06: Very, there's a very cool some work that I heard of the other day where from string theory. So maybe you know where you're looking at the parameter space of string theory and looking at this, you know, landscape possibilities. And then saying I, I think it's true to say that if you go, if you take the cosmological constant, which is what is it 10 to the -122 in plank units, ridiculously tiny number, and you use that as the parameter that you don't know, You don't know why that's the case, but you've used that. I think there's some theories now that are suggesting that you could link that to dark matter in the sense that you get it. It can be sort of slight largest extra dimensions about the Micron scale that are implied by that low value of the cosmological constant, which and then the gravitons, the the tower of excited states of gravitons seem to have the right properties to be dark matter. So it.

US#05: Was it was Oh, the client states from that.

US#06: Or yeah, I heard it's actually it's on a Yeah, Bafa is a.

US#05: Collaborator of mine.

US#06: Right.

US#05: So it's it's, it's his. So I don't, I don't know this. Yeah. So swampland is kind of the, the, there's a, so I thought about this, so I might be getting this wrong, but there's a question of is everything that's possible out there described by some theoretical model or not? So is it how complete or you know, is your theoretical framework? And he coined this term swampland to, you know, to ask what can we actually, you know, what's allowed in terms of the parameter space versus the actual theory?

US#06: Yeah, So it was it, it was I, I think there's a review paper. I haven't read it yet. I was only made aware of it the other week. So I, I might on the plane back tonight. But it looks really fascinating. So it's just an example of where this theoretical progress, that and string theory is a good example because I get asked a lot, you know, that people tend to think, oh, it kind of went away, it kind of failed, but it's not.

C: It's a tremendous.

US#06: Amount of progress, yeah, with holography as well, which is coming in there in a DSCFT. And it linked to the work, the tiny bit of research that I do into black holes and then then it, it, it does seem that we're on the verge of AI think a really exciting transformation.

US#05: The way I have always explained it to people is I think the original, so when string theory was first, you know, kind of out there in the, in the mid 80s, some very optimistic people said, you know, we're going to be, we're going to have the, you know, electron mass from, from first principles in 10 years, which was just completely not true. Because what they wanted. Is write down the theory, we get to A4 dimensional universe with the standard model and that's it. That's not true. That didn't happen. I think it's never going to happen. But what string theory does provide is this tremendous toolbox that you can use to understand hard problems like with holography. And people are using this all the time to study amazing things that we didn't have access to before from from a variety of standpoints.

S: Is it a shut up and calculate kind of moment where it's like it works? Don't worry about what it how it relates to reality.

US#05: I think there, I, I think that's a valid philosophy. I, you know, what can we calculate with this that we couldn't calculate for? It's also valid to ask, and what does this mean for the real world? Can you use these techniques to actually calculate anything useful? That is an open question right now. There are some people who are just really digging deep and trying to get the standard model out of string theory. Even just getting the standard model with the right particles and masses actions, that's very, very hard to do.

J: Guys, if we had. If we could just magically have these answers appear in front of us, right? What's the practicality behind it? Is the goal here to just understand how the world works, or are there actual applications that people like me could relate to?

B: Look what flowed from quantum mechanics. I mean, I'm just talking to you whole industry.

US#06: I'm not talking to. You, I want to talk to you. So one of the fascinating areas which I've been involved in a little bit, so I work with, I have a, a Co supervisor, PhD student at Manchester who happens to be funded by the way, by an information technology company, but is working on black holes, quantum information. There's a direct link between the at least the techniques that have been developed to try to understand things like the black hole information paradox and the techniques you use to build error correction codes, quantum computers, you know, to try to protect the memory from errors and so on. So if you'd have said, and I say this to funding agencies when I speak to them, if I'd have said to you fund research into collapsed stars because that will help you build quantum computers and understand them, then they would have just laughed at you, right? Of course. But it turns out that the skill sets at least are the same. And it, it could, I mean, basically, you know, it's not only that it, it is that this field of emergent space-time, which is very popular at the moment. And where where essentially what you have the simple way to say is you have space-time emerging from a quantum theory, from quantum entanglement of some objects, which are probably the scale that from the Beckenstein entropy, right? The, the, the stale, the, the tile, the event horizon to work out the entropy of a black hole. It's probably, we probably know the distance scales. Actually it's probably string. It's a string scale. But so, so the, the idea that space-time is emerging from entanglement, that that's becoming an experimental science now. I, I find it interesting. I find it fun. The the, the use probably the best use from a physicist perspective of quantum computers like the Google quantum computer and Microsoft is not actually is a quantum computer, but has a load of qubits because they're really good arrays of qubits. That's not why they put spent billions of dollars building the things. But if you're a physicist, you go, this is brilliant. I've got a lot of qubits and there was a paper recently where there's this film. I know you saw it. There's a the IT it. So it's in a particular configuration of the qubits, a particular entanglement structure of the network, you, you get something that you could interpret as a filament of space emerging. It's it's, it's a sometimes described as A1 dimensional wormhole, right, Right. So, but that's a remarkable paper. It's not, it's a, it's a published paper. You can look at it. There's some controversy about that's the right interpretation of it. But I It's fascinating that quantum gravity is becoming an experimental science. Potentially we seem to be on the verge of that for.

US#05: Years now too. The, I mean, another question that you know, a lot of people say, oh, it's nonsense, extra dimensions, right? There's AI don't know if they're still doing it. But for a while there was a group, the Addleberger group in Seattle, which was. So the idea is that if you have access to extra dimensions at very small scales, you'll see deviations from the inverse square law of gravity, right? Because the gravitational flux can spread into the extra dimensions. So what they were doing is they were moving things, you know, together in very tiny distance scales and checking for deviations from 1 / r ^2. There's one extra dimension and it's 1 / r ^3, etcetera, etcetera. Oh my God, These are. If they had, you would know about it, right? Yeah. I. Would have talked about it. This is a.

US#06: Question this paper from that that I heard of that I said I haven't read in detail yet, so I'll read it tonight. But it does suggest that the the the maybe a largish dimension at the Micron scale which so it'd be interesting to see what the experimental because they can.

US#05: Put downs on it. It's like the number and size of the extra. Dimension.

B: Does that relate to the as an explanation for the weakness of gravity compared to the other fundamental forces? Is that like kind of leaking into these other potential dimensions? Is that where you were going with that?

US#06: No, not quite. I mean, it's not totally unrelated, but it wouldn't be the same thing historically. That was a thought, wasn't it?

B: Yeah.

US#06: Yeah. So I'm not sure you've know more than me in modern string theory. Whether? That's guys why?

J: Why do physics change when you go smaller, but they don't change when you go bigger?

US#05: Why do you?

J: Know I mean like, you know, because we know that when you go when you get into a certain. We got the you're talking. About quantum regime regime, right?

S: Right, that you're asking why isn't there a new regime of the?

J: Like if you if you just opened up, you made the scale tremendous would concepts of physics. Change.

S: Well, don't some people think that's exactly what happens and that's why that dark matter is actually gravity behaving differently the Super. OK, so we have theories about, about, about. That that's theoretically possible, I think that's a minority.

US#09: View. It's a minority, yeah.

S: You you think dark matter is the answer to the observations or?

US#06: Even, well, I don't, no, I mean we've operated under the assumption. The thing is that the assumption that it's a weakly interacting particle of some description that fits quite a lot of things, including in particular the cosmic microwave background. It's, it's an important component of the way that the sound waves move through the plasma in the early universe before 380,000 years after The Big Bang. And the, the, so we have very good data there. And, and essentially what you're seeing, if you look at those pictures of the CMB, you're seeing sound waves going through the plasma and, and the, the, the presence of some kind of weakly interacting particle in there. The, the not electromagnetic, the interacting is, is, is a component of those fits that fit very well. And that fits also gravity rotation curves and other things as well. So, so it, it's, it's a good model, but it's not to say it's right because, you know, we, we don't have to.

C: Discover what it is.

US#06: But it does fit multiple different independent phenomena. We see not only the gravitational phenomena, but also the CMB, and it tends to be the case. You said when you modify general relativity, for example, it tends to be the case. You can modify it and fit something, but you mess up a lot of other things. It's quite difficult, isn't it?

US#05: Near impossible. That's right. And I think if you polled most working physicists now, they would, you know, for a while there was this wimp versus macho.

US#06: Yeah, Dark matter, I think it seems fairly consistent than most people would say wimps at. This point but.

US#05: Yeah, you could find some. People. Who want to? Yeah, well, I mean, until we know, we know, right? Still right. Anything.

US#06: Is possible, but I find it this idea clearly dark energy is even more perplexing to say the least.

US#05: Right. Certainly.

US#06: This idea that the, I find it fascinating that there may be a link between that and of course, inflation, which looks similar and this the, the, the fact that our universe is not, is on the edge of stability because which we know from measurements of the Higgs mass and the top quarter mass and so on. So I think there's quite a few of my colleagues you speak to think that maybe these things are related in some way. I mean, inflation looks, it's a very much the different energy scale. But then you've got the inflation, you've got the Higgs, which is not contributing to anything. It seems this, this scalar field that doesn't blow the universe apart. And then you've got dark energy that it's a fascinating. Yeah, yeah. So I that's the cussing edge at the moment. I think it's one of the most interesting fields in theoretical physics, trying to understand if those things are the same. Maybe they're not all different.

S: Does it feel to you that we're still missing something absolutely fundamental about the universe that you know is is making it impossible for us to really understand?

US#06: What's going on? I mean the the example maybe you could talk as well is is holography. I think, you know, a DSCFT, which is an example of a holographic theory that I think is is really radical. It's this idea that we can, we can find dual descriptions of reality, you know. So we that toolbox surely is going to be.

US#05: Yeah, the the rough idea is that a, you can use A10 dimensional string theory to describe essentially A4 dimensional field theory. And we're in the regime where one problem gets hard, the other gets easy. So you can do kind of geometrical calculations in the gravity regime to give you field theory data in the particle thing. And in very special super symmetric cases, there's an exact dictionary between the mass of this baryon is the dimension of this operator. And you can get these really non trivial matchings, you know, these crazy, like irrational numbers that, you know, pop up very nicely in both. And it's, it's a wild thing. It's people. There's no proof of it per SE, but there's so much data to indicate that it's it's correct that I think it has to be true. Now, does that help us describe our universe? Is another another question entirely.

J: One last question guys, who gets it? Will AI help this field in any way?

US#06: It's a really it's a question that gets asked a lot, isn't it the the and it does you know, in in data analysis, then you'd have to say yes, right, large data sets and so on. Whether or not creating new physical asking ChatGPT to build a quantum theory of gravity, that's a different thing. I don't know what the answer is to. That.

US#05: Have you tried plugging that in to see? What it says you can try, it won't do it. Big thing. So I left physics about 10 years ago and one of the big things that I see different that my colleagues are doing is a lot of them are doing machine applying machine learning to. Complicated systems to see what they can do. So it's not, it's not AI and. It's not going to solve the problem, it's going to accelerate the research. That's right. It's kind of like what I would say a good analogy is what AI did with protein fold.

S: Yeah, right.

US#05: OK. So it could speed things up a lot.

S: Speed thing helps that way. So probably tell us about your current project. The horizons show that you're.

US#06: Doing yeah, I, I've been doing these, she said, show my, my friend Robin Ince, comedian that I worked with on, on the BBC said, you know, it's, you should call it a lecture. And then he says, not at those ticket prices, though. You can't call it a lecture. So it is true that, so I, I ended up developing this, this live show, which is big LED screens basically. And then all many of the concepts we've just discussed actually, but so it has become a, a show and we, it was built for arenas in the UK. So we've done 1415 thousand people in the OTA arena and Wembley and things like that stadium cosmology, right? And, and so I've enjoyed doing it a lot. We've we've done it over 400,000 people have seen the show across the world in.

S: The last that does make me feel good about humanity, that we can get that many people to to sit for a science show.

US#06: Some people listening to you describe the Penrose diagram is kind of strange. So just to finish it off, because we came to the US actually very early on in the development of it and we just have to COVID and we did some small places and I just wanted to finish it off. So we're bringing it back in at the end of April, start of May to a few cities, LA, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and to, to just, and it's just me really saying I want to say goodbye to this, this this particular show. And I'd like to do it here because we, we get started here in a sense a long time ago and it's changed a lot.

S: Where can people find dates and get tickets?

US#06: There's there's a website calledbriancoxlive.co.uk its.co.uk because I think brian.coxlive.com I don't know, probably we couldn't get it. So it doesn't matter. Does it say it's Brian coxlive.co.uk and the tickets are there? And then, you know, we might try and extend it a bit and come to, you know, I, I've never done a show in Vegas, for example. So I think we could just ask David Copperfield to move out for a night. Or something.

S: And put it in there. But yeah, so. Well, Brian, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for sitting down with us. Thank you.

US#09: Fantastic. Thank you. Thanks all. Right.

Science or Fiction (1:42:32)

Theme: None Item #1: New research finds that higher penetration of weather dependent renewable energy sources (wind and solar) on the grid does not increase vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. Item #2: A recent study finds that coyotes are thriving in North America, and in fact direct hunting by humans results in larger populations. Item #3: A population based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #3
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #2

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

US#06: 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, and I challenge my panel of skeptics. Tell me which one is the fake because panel is the plural of skeptics or the collective. All right, you guys ready three regular news items. Here we go. Item number one. New research finds that higher penetration of weather dependent renewable energy sources, wind and solar on the grid does not increase vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. Item #2A recent study finds that coyotes are thriving in North America and in fact, direct hunting by humans results in larger populations and item number. 3A population based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. Bob, go first.

B: OK, so wind and solar do not increase the vulnerability of blackouts. Yeah, that kind of makes sense. I'm going to. I'm think I'm just going to buy that, although I haven't read anything specific about that. Coyotes are thriving in North America and direct hunting by humans results in larger populations. I don't know about that last bit. Let's let's see. I did not even absorb this third one at all. Population based cohort study of preterm inference finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. So basically being preterm has no bad side effects.

S: Lasting into adulthood.

B: All right, tell me everything that you can say about these three for the first person going.

S: They're all pretty self-explanatory.

B: All right, I'm. Going to say the wolves.

S: The Coyotes you.

B: Mean fiction. Wolves. Coyote. Wait, you said coyotes? It's coyotes. Wolves.

S: OK, I say.

B: That's fiction.

S: All right, Jay, because I feel like it.

J: This first one about the higher penetration of weather dependent renewable energy sources, it doesn't increase the vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't think it would increase vulnerability. I think it, but these are, you know, these are things that definitely need electricity and have a lot of wiring and everything. Yeah. So this is a really interesting thing here, Steve, because you're saying increase, they do not increase vulnerability to blackouts.

S: So there aren't more blackouts.

J: Because of them.

S: Right. And when they and when blackouts do occur, they're less severe.

J: Yeah, All right. I think that's science that that just makes sense. It took me a while to parse through it because at first for some for some reason I thought you meant during like a EMP or some some you know solar flare or something but that was just mistaken. OK so that one to me 100% science. The second one of recent study finds out that coyotes are thriving in North America and in fact direct hunting by humans results in larger populations. So why would direct hunting by humans result in larger populations? Maybe because they they're killing off the weak ones. And you know, is that that possibly be it? That one's a maybe. That doesn't seem to track with me. The third one, a population based cohort study of preterm infants, finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. Preterm infants. OK, so does it matter? We're like how early they are.

S: Yeah, there's a cut off.

J: OK.

S: So preterm to qualify as preterm.

J: Can you tell me what the cutoff is?

S: So if you're born before 37 weeks, you are considered preterm.

J: OK. So yeah, that's early.

S: I wish I knew that. That'll change your answer. Nah, just saying it all.

J: Right, so let's think about this. So when if a baby comes out early, I would imagine that there's reasons why that happens, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with the baby. So then it comes down to, and you know, I mean, guys, what I'm about to say that I am not an expert, right? I'm thinking off the cuff here. The baby's kind of nutrition changes. I don't think nutrition is a maximum, a maximal problem here. I mean, there might be other things that the baby would be getting from the mother that could affect its development. And you know, babies can't breathe until they hit a certain age range. So the baby would that that could be a factor. It's this is a messy one. I think that today, with proper care, babies are OK if they're born in Steve's preterm time frame. But this whole thing about like, you know, hunting the coyotes, I just, something rubs me the wrong way. That one's the fiction.

E: OK, Evan. Well, all right, the grid and not increasing vulnerability to blackouts. I believe that. But this part about reducing their severity when they occur, I'm having a hard time understanding why that's the case. Why would it reduce the severity of the blackout? I'm going to be interested to hear that one. If that one turns out to be science, I have a feeling it's kind of fiction. Y coyotes, I have no idea. Thriving in North America. I don't know. And in fact, direct hunting by humans result in a larger populations. Why would that be? Because they cluster more. And then is that how that will work? Would work because it creates pockets? I don't know. I don't know about that one either. And the last one, no boy preterm infants, no significant economic, that one's like the one I know the least about. I I, they're all fiction. Thank you. OK. And Cara says.

S: Darn it, automatic failure, but OK.

E: No, that's not an automatic failure. That's an automatic win.

C: The forfeit.

E: I'm going to use my get out of jail free card on this episode. Don't we all get one for the year? No, no. All right, how about the preterm infants 1? I can't put my finger on it, but I think there's something, there's maybe an educational effect that lasts into adulthood that they've found. So I'll say that one's a fiction.

S: OK, Kara.

C: I think coyotes is science. They are thriving. They are everywhere, at least in Lai. Think that there are many examples of what's called conservation hunting where culls are done intentionally to maintain or even grow populations. I think it's about distribution more than anything because animals are not, you know, spread out evenly. I think that the weather dependent, so like wind and solar energy being in higher numbers, I don't think it would increase vulnerability to blackouts. I know that the problem was with the severity, reducing the severity when they occur, but maybe they're just faster to get online, you know, or maybe they're cheaper and easier to fix, like, who knows. So yeah, the one that's really, really bothering me is this idea because you said a study of preterm infants. So just because 37 weeks is the cutoff doesn't mean that we're not also talking about babies that are born at 2526 weeks. Babies that are born early do not have fully developed organs. They're sick, they need surgery, they undergo a lot of treatments. There is no way that that doesn't affect them economically well into adulthood. This one just seems impossible to be science, so I have to say that that's fiction.

S: All right, so you all agree with the first one, so we'll start there. New research finds that higher penetration of weather dependent renewable energy sources, wind and solar on the grid does not increase vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science.

C: That's great now.

S: This was part of the reason for this study was I don't know if you guys remember the whole Texas blackout thing where they were blaming the renewable, you know, resources on the grid when it was in fact, it was in fact the the coal-fired plants or gas plants that were going down. So what they found was that, yeah, that the renewable, having renewables, weather dependent renewables on the grid does not make it more vulnerable even to weather based events, right? So even if there's a storm or whatever, it doesn't make it more likely for these sources of energy to go down than traditional sources. And when a blackout does occur, the amount of people who lose power is less because this is a more distributed power source and they they do come back more quickly. So, yeah, this is it actually blends resiliency, if anything, to the grid. Yeah, it's great. I guess we'll just keep going in order. A recent study finds that coyotes are thriving in North America. And in fact, a direct hunting by humans results in large populations. Bob and Jay, you think this one is the fiction evident? Kerry, you think this one is science? And I guess the question comes down to how could directly hunting coyotes increase their population? This wasn't a call to increase their population. This is like when you try to reduce the population by hunting them and then.

C: Backfired.

S: And backfired. Yeah. So this is science. This is science.

C: Yes.

S: This one is science because yeah, this is all true. What happened, What they think is happening is that even in locations where they have very liberal coyote hunting laws, meaning like it's open season, like there's no restricted season, there's no limit on how many you can kill. And then with those populations actually over time increase. And the the reason why they think this is happening is that they're the hunters are disproportionately killing older coyotes. And then the younger coyotes have more resources and they have more pups. And so they're just breeding more. And so essentially their conclusion was, is that hunting is not an effective population control mechanism for coyotes. They just bounce right back in even bigger numbers.

C: So we're disproportionately hunting older coyotes because slower and easier.

S: I guess they're easier to kill. Yeah, it must be must be the case. Whoops. This study also did a lot of other things. So coyotes also do not suffer when their when their region overlaps with wolves, except for certain. That's very that's regionally dependent, but in many locations basically depends on food supply. They they do fine even when they're competing with wolves, but they don't do fine if they're competing with bears.

C: Yeah. It's because coyotes and bears I think they both hunt but they also scavenge.

S: Yeah. So that's that's a good point. So there's actually a mixed effect when when coyotes overlap with other other predators, there's a decrease in prey availability. But the especially the larger predators tend to leave behind carcasses that the coyotes can then scavenge.

C: Yeah.

S: So they actually increase their flute supplies sometimes. So depending on a lot of variables, sometimes it actually increases the coyote population because now they have more scavenging yeah available.

C: And bears and coyotes also scavenge their garbage. Bump garbage dump scavenger. Yeah, so they they come into urban areas and take food.

S: Yeah, but coyotes are a meso predator. Have you heard that term? They're in the middle. They're not small. They're not large. They're meso. And they're they're just thriving. They're just adapting really well to human civilization. Doing just fine, all right, all right. That means that a population based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. Is the fiction because they found significant economic and developmental effects and educational effects. So they have lower rates of enrolling in a university, graduating from a university with a degree. They have lower income per year, 70% lower. So, yeah, there are lasting effects. It's hard to tease out exactly what that might be. Is this due to just they're not as healthy or maybe the neurological development is delayed? And the, the reason why this is an important research question is because clearly they are starting at at a loss. You know, farther back they have, they have to make up ground. The the question is, do they eventually catch up or do they do their deficits persist? So this was, they were looking at 18 to 28 year olds. They say they had followed them for, you know, a long time, like two couple decades. So this is a long, long follow up.

B: How long? How did you define preterm? How? How? Many 37 before. 37 or less.

S: Or less. So some of them were a lot were a lot less, yeah.

B: 3730.

S: Seven, Yeah.

B: And that what's what's typical 40 what I was. So I mean, I was four weeks, I was a whole month premature.

S: Yeah, but it obviously it gets worse the more premature you are. So they looked at, you know, like 34 to 36 weeks, 32 to 333028 to 2124 to 27 and the effects got worse, you know, the the more preterm you were. Yeah. So it wasn't much for like just 36, you know that.

C: So 40 is the average, but a full term baby is 37 or 37 plus up to 42?

S: Yeah. So, but you know, the, but it is still true that with modern medical management they do fine, but they, you know, they, they are starting, you know, at, at a deficit and they don't quite make that up, at least not in the in their 20s.

B: That sounds preterm. Sounds like a way too broad of a term, at least for this specific science fiction.

S: But it was true no matter how you slice it.

B: I was biased because I'm preterm and I'm awesome. No.

S: But think of how much more awesome you would be.

E: Oh my gosh.

C: So me.

E: Right, fighting for resources.

S: You don't want to think about all that stuff. You were a twin. Twins also are at a deficit because your your twin was using up some nutritional resources and.

E: So you over you overcame multiple options.

S: And our mother smoked when she was pregnant with all of us. Damn. And that takes a hit as well. And we were exposed when we were kids. We had it.

E: Really takes a hit. So we did. She drank too. Yeah, she.

S: Wasn't. A drinker. My parents weren't drinkers. They were not drinkers, but they, yeah, they, they both smoked. Terrible, but all that meth.

C: Hated it.

S: Hated. It the worst thing about my childhood was having to deal with that.

B: Yeah, the worst.

S: Yeah, that was like this one annoying, constant presence in my childhood. Otherwise, we had. I think our childhood was great.

B: Oh, barely was a blip on my.

S: Wrap. I hated it. Totally hated it.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:57:09)

“When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the time and the place the tide will turn.”  – –Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896), American abolitionist and author, (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

E: When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer. Never give up then, for that is just the time and the place that the tide will turn. Very comforting words from Harriet Beecher Stowe, American abolitionist and author from the 19th century, and so key and critical to helping end slavery in America. Can't be understated. How important. She overstated. How important.

S: She was Political change is a never ending marathon.

E: Right. So keep this in mind folks, especially these days.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

S: Well, thank you all for joining me this week. You're welcome, Steve.

E: Thanks. Steve.

S: Thanks, Steve, and until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.