SGU Episode 1062
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| SGU Episode 1062 |
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| November 15th 2025 |
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"Intricate beauty: A close-up of two fascinating winged insects." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"I may have discovered a planet, but the real achievement is the inspiration it provides to future generations. " |
- Clyde Tombaugh |
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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 Saturday, September 20th, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody, Evan Bernstein. Hello, Kansas. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Cara Santa Maria and George Trump. Yeah, George. We are live from Lawrence, KS. This is my first time in Kansas. How about you guys?
US#05: Yeah, first time.
S: Yep.
E: Third time. Third time, yes.
S: How?
E: Do you? Yeah.
S: You drove through it.
E: Twice I've drove, I've driven through it twice, once north-south and once east West and that was it. We may stop for lunch or something while we were moving around the country, but that's it. Never had a whole day in Kansas.
S: When we were driving from the airport, George said. You know, if we, if we didn't know we were in Kansas, could you tell from just looking around? And other than being flatter than we're used to, not really. Yeah. It's. Pretty.
C: It looks a lot like Texas. Yeah, honestly. Yeah, but not part of the Hill Country, but like North Texas.
US#05: Parts look like Jersey or like Pennsylvania too. Like, I mean, that's the problem with, you know, Raymour and Flanigan being everywhere. That's the thing.
C: That's how it. Works America.
US#05: America, Yeah.
S: Yeah, it's Chili's. And basically it's all the same thing.
US#05: Yeah.
Special Segment (01:39)
Nightmares None
S: We're going to start with off with a little bit of a discussion about nightmares. This, you know, Evan suggested this is a possible news item. The item itself is pretty simple. It's like how you can control your nightmares and it makes you healthier. It's like, OK, well, not so much, but there is this issue of, and Bob and I, you know, talked about this for a while about like lucid dreaming or trying to develop the ability to control, like to be aware that you're dreaming and to control your dream, which is a really difficult and a very unstable state. You tend to either dream, you wake up or you, which means you're back into the dream or you actually wake up. It's very hard to maintain that knife's edge of being dreaming, but know that you're dreaming. But we thought we would use this as a jumping off part point to talk about our common recurring nightmares. And interestingly, I had my recurring nightmare last night.
E: Oh. Do tell.
S: Because so this, I think this happens more often to me when I'm sleep deprived and just, you know, because of travel and everything and being in a hotel room, I usually don't sleep as well. So I woke up at like 4:00 in the morning and then, you know, went back to sleep and it was hard to get back to sleep. And then I slept for four more hours. And that's, that was the period that was, that was very that was my sleep deprived sleep that I have. So I had a little bit of sleep paralysis, which happens sometimes. I did that thing where I dreamt that I woke up, but I was still dreaming and like I'm, I'm getting out of bed and going to the bathroom. I knew I was had to meet these guys. And I'm like, am I awake? Yeah, I'm awake. I'm awake. I could. I'm walking around and looking at things and everything. You like your dreaming self can't tell that you're not really awake. Then I go. Then I walk back to the bed and I see myself sleeping in the bed. Like, shit, I'm still sleeping. Wow. But the nightmare, the recurring nightmare had some point in there, Jay. You were in it and you were there and you were.
US#05: There, put him up, put him up. That was awesome.
S: Jay was there, and there was some other. Person it might. Have been Ian but I'm not really sure so we were being chased and that's my recurring nightmare and being chased by some malevolent force. So this time it was the authorities like the whatever that means and you know how you just know things in dreams. They were chasing us because they thought that we were criminals but it was a misunderstanding. But still we like felt like we had to run away from them and Jay had a portal gun from the portal game. You guys know that.
B: Wow.
S: So we're we're using the portal gun to like escape into the Rocky Mountains or something. And but they still managed to track US down. And then the guy had me at gunpoint. I had to wrestle the gun from him and I shot him in the ass. Still didn't, which was surprising because the guns are almost never work in my dreams, right? Like you can't pull the trigger or something or swords are wobbly. You know they have a phasers. Phasers never shooting, never work.
J: Why is that that? Well, Freud, that's something to say to dream there.
C: There's no answer to that question.
J: The thing that bothers me is like dreams are just happening, you know, and, and when a part of your brain is making it up and another part of your brain is experiencing it and why is it universal like big FU? Why couldn't it be ultra successful and ultra fun like?
C: I don't think it's universe.
E: Sometimes that can happen.
C: So, so what's interesting to me, and I don't know if there's like gender differences with this, but I, I've dated, I had a, an ex who is male who had night terrors and almost always he'd be like, no, get away. And I'll be like, what were you dreaming? And it was, he was always being chased or people were breaking it. That literally never happened to me. I've never had those kinds of like I'm being hunted dreams, but I had a recurring dream when I was little and it's like fucked up. You guys. Like honestly, I think This is why my parents put me in therapy like really early on. I don't dream anymore that I know of because I'm on like sleep medication that keep me in delta and I don't I just don't think I dream or I don't remember.
B: You have to be experiencing R.E.M. At some point.
C: I don't, I don't get, I don't get much R.E.M. At all but you.
B: Don't you just don't? Remember that you don't. Remember.
C: Yeah, but I also the drugs I take prevent me from getting a lot of R.E.M.
B: But you've got to get somewhere. You'd be like, go slowly crazy. You'd go slowly. Crazy without room you do have to have. Room you have.
C: To even if you're in Delta all night, yeah.
B: You wouldn't. You would not last long.
C: I don't think that's true. I think you can't not have delta. I think you can. I think you can avoid paradox my.
S: Understanding is is that you really need a good sleep architecture. You need to go through all the the stages of sleep. You know, with a certain pattern, there could be variation. Yeah, I've been bored, but if.
US#05: Cara, you're actually dreaming right now. Wake up, wake up. This is your nightmare anyway.
C: As an aside, anybody out there who has narcolepsy or or narcolepsy type sleep disorder? I have IH which is similar to narcolepsy. There's a medication we take which is like GHB it's xywave and it just forces you into delta all night and you're like awake during the day. And without that I am sleepy girl my whole life and sleepy. Anyway, when I was young I had this recurring dream and I'm talking like kindergarten, first, second grade where I would go to sleep and I would wake up just like you did. And I would be like, oh, it's time for school. And I'd go to my parents room to wake them up for school and they were dead in their beds. And I was like holy shit. So I went to find my sister and she was dead in her bed. And so I left the house and went around the neighborhood knocking on doors, some of them were open, went in, everybody was dead, all the animals were dead. And I was the only living soul and it was terrifying. This is a good TV.
J: Show, watch and it.
C: Was like everything was dead but me and I spent the whole nightmare trying to search for something that was a lie. You ever find it in the? And I never could. No. I would just be searching. Searching. And then and then I'd wake up. And I had that a lot. And I haven't since I was a child. As an adult, the only things I have are like stress dreams about going to file for my graduation. And I still owe, like a whole credit. Yeah. What? When do I still?
S: Have the I have to take a final, yeah.
C: When do those end?
S: Yeah, never.
J: Apparently no stressors do it. My so my kid nightmare was anybody when I was a kid, my dad used to let all of us watch all the science fiction movies and everything. So there's one thing where that some dude reanimates an arm, you know from the hell. Remember that? I remember 1 scene like it grabs the guy scared the shit out of me. So my semi reoccurring dream was that there was a gauntlet, you know like a armored hand crawling after me and then I stopped having it when I finally picked it up and I scooped out the mustard that it was that filled it and that how that broke the chain because mustard wasn't scary to me but my real. Wow, the arm was full of mustard. It was a gauntlet. It was like a it was like armor, you know what I mean? OK. And that was that was how my brain transferred it from like a human hand to like a more terrifying gauntlet hand drunk crawling after more terrifying.
C: That it was full of mustard like, well, yeah, cuz it was like gauntlet. Yeah, it wasn't a real arm. Arm the other.
J: Arm had ketchup.
C: Gauntlets are always special. I.
J: Was in my parents closet and they had a deep closet when we were kids. Yeah, my dad had his safe right there. Remember I was sitting next to it. OK, And the thing came in. Where's the?
US#05: Mustard come in. I don't understand. I have no.
J: Idea. I don't know, like mustard? Yeah.
S: Was it brown or yellow? It was a good yellow mustard. Yeah, George. Do you like yellow mustard?
J: I.
US#05: Hate I hate mustard, but I mean.
S: If the mustard is scaring me, that would make it scary. Gauntlet of mustard. Oh, my God. Yeah, it was.
J: Yeah. I mean, now that I'm thinking about it, it's pretty messed up. So anyway, my adult dream. So really quick, I got to give you a little background. I have been looking my entire life to have a proper love relationship. And I, and I mean, like many people, just failure after failure after failure. And I got into my 30s, got into my 40s and I'm like, you know, nothing was working. And I finally was at the point where I'm like, it's not going to happen, you know, because it's statistically it, it was getting less and less likely. I meet my wife, who's my best friend and is the the freaking sunshine of everything that's good in my life. She's she's unbelievable. And I've never been loved like this. I've never felt loved like this before. You know, I can go on. This is my.
US#05: Nightmare, by the way.
J: So my. With. You my nightmare is that I don't know. I know that the idea of her, like I found someone, she's my wife, but I don't know who she is. I don't know her name, I don't know what she looks like and I don't know where she is. So it's like that whole veil thing, like something's. Wrong. Why am I with? This weird person there's this I'm not supposed to be here. This is not what's supposed to be Twilight Zone kind of dream Yeah, and it. And it totally upends me. Like I wake up freaking out when I because I because you really feel it. And that's.
C: Like a real neurological disorder, like when people, the Invasion of the Body Snatchers thing where they don't wreck it. Like there's people that they know but they don't recognize. Yeah. That's scariest shit. Like if I ever had.
J: There is a Yeah, that. Imagine having that. Like in the dream, everything's normal except I know that I'm supposed to be with somebody else and I have no other idea of who that person is.
S: Yeah, that's kind of like a dream about having cat grass. Like this is not my wife.
J: Yeah.
S: That's interesting. Yep. George, about you I had.
US#05: One very influential dream when I was a kid, it wasn't recurring, but I was probably 4-4 or five, and I was in bed. And to me, it wasn't a dream. I was awake. I mean, in my mind, I was awake in my bed. And subsequently, most of my dreams do take place like in my bedroom. Like literally, I'll be in bed. I'm aware that I'm in bed and something is happening in the room. But I was a very, very young youngster. And it was morning and I looked up and at the foot of my bed was a closet that had the door open. And at the top of the closet was sort of like a shelf at the top. And it was a dark sort of shelf. And there were two hands sort of these wispy, not quite bone, not quite smoke hands just sort of doing this waving motion, just independent. There was no body, there was no whatever. And I remember just sort of looking at it and like being scared, but sort of but not really doing anything about it and just being terrified. I, I told my mom the next day that this had happened and she was like, that was probably a dream. And for probably 10 to 15 years after that, I couldn't have a door open. Like if I was in a, in a bedroom somewhere, like my dorm, the closet couldn't be open. It had to be shut. And it never happened again. It was just that one time. Do you?
C: Remember, like you said, you didn't do anything about it. Could you move? You might have been having a hypnopom pickle. Yeah, it might have been. Yeah. I don't think that was a dream. I think that was a hypnopompic. It felt.
US#05: So unbelievable, like I knew what dreams.
C: Were I knew what dreams were at that. Point.
US#05: But it was just, and it was just leaning. Towards.
C: You said it was morning, you were in bed, you didn't do anything. Yeah.
US#05: So that, and to this day I can sort of still picture it. I'm sure I've modified it in my head over time and now it's Technicolor or whatever, But. And it wasn't, you know, there was no blood. There was no, it was just. That's creepy. That ain't right. That ain't right. Yeah. When I.
E: Was a kid also, my dreams have changed. I think a lot of people have had that experience as well. You don't dream about the things you used to when you dream about new things. But when I was a kid, the reoccurring dream I would have that would frighten me is that I could not control myself from falling. It's the falling dream, right? We've, I think we've all experienced that, that sort of you're, you're dropping you, it's death is coming. You have that sinking sensation in your body. But I would have the dream where I would try to remain on the ground, yet something was nefarious or otherwise was pulling me up into the sky and would drop me. I would constantly get dropped as a kid. Now as an adult though, I would. I don't really have nightmares per SE, but my reoccurrence is that it's this level of frustration that I can't seem to get something done. I need to be over there now. I know I need to be over there now. Why aren't I over there now? I'm trying to walk. I'm not walking. Why? So I get very frustrated. Yeah, it's called.
C: A stress stream? Yeah. Oh. Totally.
E: And, and it's true of all sorts of scenarios, like I know I have to write this thing, why aren't I writing it? Why what is going on? I have to write this, why aren't I writing? So I can't make sense of it and I wind up getting really angry with myself in those dreams. And that takes on many forms and many Mary various kinds of scenarios.
B: Yeah, I've had plenty of nightmares. I can't really remember any that are like, really like, oh, listen to this one. I've had the stress, the stress. Dreams are common, everyone. But there's one nightmare that I remember that was really fascinating, and it was a nightmare of a movie nightmare. Werewolf, American Werewolf in London. There's a dream sequence where he's a where David Naughton's attacked by these weird creatures with weird faces. So in my dream, I'm in my kitchen and and where we grew up, and they come in the house with machine guns and start killing everybody. So yeah, pretty bad, right? But I was also experimenting with lucid dreams at that time, and I said, this is not real. These aren't real bullets. This is all bullshit. So I walked right up to them like, you're not even real. And they start shooting me. I'm like, see, nothing, guys. So then I'm like, all right, I'm done with you. I walked out of the house and I and I tried to fly, which is what I would do whenever I had a lucid dream. I'd try to fly and I would almost invariably fail because it's so hard. You know, you try to leap in the air like Superman, it just just fall flat. It doesn't work. It's so frustrating. But the few times it actually worked, it was magical. It was just like, holy crap, you feel like Superman. If you ever tried to lose a dream, try to fly because it's like amazing Bob.
C: When you when you fly in your dream. So when I fly in my dreams, it's I'm like doing the breaststroke and. Yeah. Is that how? Everybody or do you like times?
J: I have both but that's.
C: The only way I've ever been it's which?
S: Is silly, requires a lot of mental effort, and it's hard to sustain. Interesting in my dreams, but you can I.
C: Can do it in my dreams that. But like, it's this is how you get up a level and you're aloft and I'm always the only one and everybody's going whoa, that's so badass. Yeah, it would.
US#05: Be Is there any evolutionary advantage to not just dreaming, but nightmares in particular? Is there some kind of can we think of any of any we?
C: Still don't even understand 100% like what dreams are right, why we dream. So I think it's hard to make that leap. I mean.
S: You know that dreams, the REM sleep is important for consolidation of memory for right? Your brain is sort of recalibrating like the desktop. Clearance the dream.
J: Actually have to happen or is your maybe you need to be conscious enough for your brain to do the work that needs to happen during Well, you're not maybe it's a byproduct I.
B: Thought it's like your brain is just firing in a much more random sequence than norm and your mind is trying to make sense of all of that static and that's kind of how I see but dream imagery when.
S: You're dreaming. The part of your brain that does reality testing is not functioning, which is why, which is why I think makes sense to you in dreams that don't make sense to you when you wake up because you're a different person when you're dreaming, you're not your decipher, you're not your waking self and the.
B: Key with lucid dreaming, I think is that you there's a critical threshold of activation in that that lobe of your brain where you can do reality testing like, whoa, this isn't real. This must be a dream. So that's that's the idea, I think so, Bob.
S: You mentioned that you in that dream, you were in our childhood home. What's interesting is that when I remember my dreams, it's either in a place that's not real. If it isn't a place that I'm familiar with, it's almost always in our childhood home. I don't think I've ever had a dream where it's in my current home that I'm living in that I remember that same for you guys as well. You, but that's.
J: That's true. Yeah, my dreams.
C: Are usually pretty typical, like yeah did.
J: You guys ever Bob and Steve growing up when mom and dad put the extension like put the the party room in, did you ever dream that you were being pulled in there? Did you ever dream that Bob? Because that I don't know why, like I don't being dragged pulled into wires. They're having a shared part of the house.
S: Explain.
J: What this is my. Dream was was it mustard? What's going on? Well. It was always like the lights were always off, right? So when we all went up to bed, yeah, it was like that room and then the the new room that they were putting on off of it, it was pitch black. And I always be being creeped, outgoing, quick. I got to go quick. The light, there's a kitchen there and I got to run and turn the corner, get up the stairs before that room gets the light switch doesn't work. So I had a dream that I got pulled into that darkness and it's I still get a little creeped out when I think about it. You know what?
US#05: I love when when, when pets dream.
J: Oh, yeah.
US#05: Like when you're when you're a puppy and they're chasing bunnies. We used to call it ice chasing bunnies. That's just the coolest thing 'cause it's just like, oh, they're dreaming too. So they're, you know, there is some evolutionary purpose for it to reprogram whatever. But do. Yeah. But like, do dogs have nightmares too? Like, is there a sure. Wow, like some mailman, it's got a machine gun or like, what's the that? Could be anything.
B: Here's one. More, I think we had nightmare cross fertilization when we were growing up because I remember my sister telling us that she her nightmare I think infected some of our nightmares. She had a dream where she called this monster. The beep beep eye. The beep beep. Oh.
J: My God.
U: So.
J: It's where that came.
B: From in her mind, in her dream, the beep beep by was an eye, right? But it would draw eyes all over you, right? That's my memory. In my version of it, it was a robot because beep beep to me is a robot. So it was a robot that would draw eyes on you. And that's where my memory ends. What's your memory giant?
S: Floating eye. Yeah, All right. But that was chasing you. That was, again, the just a chase stream.
B: That's kind of creepy.
J: In my dream, I ate the eyes and they were meatballs.
S: Yeah, that's so that tracks.
News Items
The NeuroWorm (18:55)
S: All right. Have you guys heard of the brain worm? Not the brain worm, of course we have.
U: Yeah, you.
S: Guys know where that quote comes from, by the way? In the eyes, not the ball worm, Yeah. Anybody know any?
J: Yeah.
B: Wait.
S: Anyone know where it comes from? It.
B: Sounds like Lord Farquhat. Flash board. Flash Board. Nice flash job. Nice. Such right?
S: 22 SGU Geek Product points OK wow the.
B: 1980. Version.
S: So we have spoken. About brain machine interface before and do you guys remember what the biggest technological limitation of the brain machine interface is yes fidelity the electrodes staying the electrodes it's the electrode but that's that's what I mean it's part of it but it's really the so with the software we kicking butt right we can make sense they.
US#05: Move they they don't stay in place they what they so. Yeah.
S: So the the problem with the, so we have multiple choices with electrodes, you can put them on the scalp surface, which is not invasive, but there there's a lot of attenuation with the skull, right. So you lose a lot of information. You could put brain surface electrodes and they're much higher fidelity, but they fibros over, they form scar tissue and you know, inflammation and whatever. So it's not good. Deep brain electrodes, same thing. They eventually will scar over. And then there's the stent roads which you put inside veins, which are still experimental, but those are those will have a lot of promise. But So what we're missing, like the next step, would be to make flexible electrodes. That flex with the brain so it doesn't cause the scar tissue. So that, so that is, you know, there are a lot of groups working on that. So now there's a study not only doing that, but taking it even a step further. And this is this is the the brain worm. So what they've done is they've designed a series of electrodes, right, to look like an earthworm. So if you imagine an earthworm and the bands are each electrodes, right? Yep. And they the in the head of the worm is a magnet. So they can actually have the worm sort of crawl through your brain by moving the magnet, by moving from external magnets. So they could reposition it as desired. And because it's flexible and movable, they tested it in, well, they tested it in because it also could be used for muscle, like you could use this to monitor muscle activity or brain activity. They tested it in the muscles of rats and they went a year with minimal scar tissue, which is that's the key right there.
J: So you move it to minimize the scar tissue.
S: Well, but yeah, the fact that it moves, it's not rigid and not fixed in place, then that's where the scar tissue forms. How is it not?
US#05: Destroying tissue as it moves though, like.
S: Why would it?
C: Must be weak on the surface surrounding. Like it's. Going it's going to take the path of least resistance or and the.
S: Muscles, It's going through the fascia. The fascia is the connective tissue. It's not boring through muscle cells. So it's like moving through the the planes between muscles in the brain. You know, it would be going through your folds, the gyre and the valleys.
J: I don't know what that is, the sulking you're talking about the surface of your. Yeah, it'd be outside.
C: Oh, so these are super fit? They're contours. They would.
S: Be on the surface. This would be brain surface. Select and.
C: Also, just to clarify, they're modeling it after an earthworm, but they're not the size of an earthworm. No, they're actually.
S: They're smaller and they're flatter.
J: Flat worms so.
S: Would you feel that? Could you? Your brain does not feel anything.
J: But I know, but it's not your brain. It's on the surface of the bottom of your skull. Has any sensation?
S: Well, so it would be the dura, right? It would be the lining around your brain. Is it?
C: Underneath the dura.
S: Yeah, the whole point would be to put it on the surface of the brain, right? So we could crawl along the surface of the brain. So the advantage here is 1. So the primary thing is if they could get these electrodes to last for years, that would be amazing, right? That would that makes it much more viable as a technique.
J: So it's not like a a prong that's stuck into your brain. It's just touching the surface. It's just skimming on the surface. All right, That's what's.
C: What diseases are that? Because I don't know. I think about like DBS that that's by definition deep brain. So how helpful it is what, what kinds of things can this help with? So.
S: First of all, just for studying the brain, right? So if you have somebody has epilepsy, let's say, So what you know, we could do EEG's, you know, electroencephalograms from the brain. Sometimes we do, you know, from the skull surface. But then for if we're planning on cutting out a chunk of your brain to stop your seizures, we need to know exactly where the seizures coming from, which means we need to capture it right as it starts.
C: But you still aren't going to know depth. You're only going to know well.
S: Yeah. But The thing is, if you could, once you put the electrodes in place, then that's it, you're getting one spot. Yeah, this would say, let's, let's see what's happening over there, let's move it. How long can you bring? I mean, in real time they're just moving it with magnets.
J: Yeah, but I mean, like, could you move it from here to here in like 3 seconds or you has to?
S: I don't know exactly how long it takes, but it's not a limiting factor. It doesn't take long to move.
US#05: It could this theoretically could this be non invasive like like the bug and wrath it's?
S: Minimally invasive. They don't call it, put it in the ear.
US#05: Or put up your nose or something and it like finds its way. That's a.
S: Good point. It's minimal. It's considered minimally invasive because like with the if you're laying electrodes along this the brain surface, you got to open up the brain to do that. But here you could literally bore a hole bore, right?
US#05: Put the worm.
S: In there and then get it to the place where.
US#05: It's got to go so.
S: It's less invasive for that reason. You only have to bore a small little hole. And then for brain machine interface the the thing, because it's dynamic and flexible at the same time, you could calibrate it, get it to the right part of the brain to have the functionality that you want, right? So there's more flexibility there. Rather than putting it someplace hoping it's the right place and seeing how well it works. Like if this isn't working, outlet's move it a millimeter to the left and see if that works better. Whatever. It'd be just more of a dynamic relationship.
J: So I know it's super small. Yeah. But like, let's say here's the head, like my thumb is the head. It's long.
S: I mean, it should, you should think it's not short. It's it's the hope. You want it to be long so it could go because the whole, the whole thing is electrodes, like 60 electrodes. And so you want them spaced out, you know, for a reasonable disk.
J: How do they control where the tail is?
S: So I just think because of the way it moves, you know, but there is only a magnet on one side on the on the head. Yeah, that's correct.
J: OK. Is this built?
US#05: Or this is this is theoretically here is it?
S: They published a paper where they did it. They showed that it works in the muscles of rats. In the muscles.
US#05: Yeah.
Ant Gives Birth to Different Species (25:18)
S: Wow, Tara, tell us about these ants. Yeah.
C: This is a really interesting story. It was actually published earlier this month in Nature. It was a big deal. So these ants. This is a picture of Queens of a Mediterranean harvester Ant. The species here is called Messer ibericus. They're in Spain. So we're going to have to hold two different species in our heads in in explaining this story because it's a little bit complicated. So there's M ibericus, Messer ibericus, and then there's M structor or Messer structor. So two different species, same genus, right, M ibericus, M structor. So researchers were observing these M ibericus colonies and they realized that there were some M structure drones hanging out within the M ibericus colony. They also realized that there were some hybrids of these ants within the within the colony. It's a hybrid.
S: It's.
C: I'm going to say that word so many times. Be cute for a minute. And, and so the researchers were like, OK, it's not that uncommon to see hybrid species within some kind of colonies or structural organizations of animals, right? We've seen hybrids of different like dog species or different marine animals animals.
S: Are always getting busy, yeah.
C: And if they're close enough, like if they're the same genus and the species is close enough, they can often make offspring, but the offspring might be sterile. So in an Ant colony, it doesn't really matter if the drones are sterile because as a general rule, the drones aren't there to mate. They're there to do jobs. But what the researchers noticed was that there were drones that were from a different species within the colony. But the species in question, M Structor, sometimes was like hundreds of miles away geographically. And they're like, how did these ants come across these other ants? Also bear in mind that these ants diverged about as long ago in evolutionary history as we did from chimpanzees. This will be important for the analogy that the researchers make later. So they're trying to figure out where did they come across these, how did they make these hybrids? And at the beginning, they were all joking, like, what if they were giving birth to a different species? That's ridiculous. And then the more they dug in, they were like, shit, I think that's what happened. So they start observing these these queen ants and they're noticing that they're laying eggs and they're, they have offspring that are a different species. And so they look at the offspring and they're like, how did they get there? Maybe they came across some drones somewhere. What's going on? They looked at both the M structor and the MI baricus ants and they found that they all had MI baricus. Was it MI baricus or M structor? So now I'm confusing myself. Doesn't matter. They all have the same mitochondrial DNA. And they were like, well, that's weird. What is going on here? As they dug a little bit deeper and they were able to actually watch these Queens lay and then look at the genetics of of the eggs that they laid, they realized that without any exposure to the other species, these queen mothers were laying a different species of Ant, which is the first time that's ever been observed in any animal anywhere on the planet. They're calling it xenoparity, foreign birth. So.
J: It's just a coincidence, no?
S: No.
C: So it seems to be an evolutionary quirk. That's helpful because if you can increase the diversity of your colony, because what often happens is that a queen will mate with a fertile drone to produce offspring, but they're all genetically the same, which is bad. Queens also tend to have something they call selfish genes. So sometimes when a queen mates, she just makes more Queens over and over and over. And you need to have a balance of different roles in the colony. So one way to prevent that is to mate with a different species and then the queen is less likely to make more Queens. So what ends up happening, and this is the analogy that they use because one of the journalists on this was like, wait, so is this like if a human woman mated with a chimpanzee and then produced a hybrid offspring? It's a hybrid that that was sterile and couldn't produce more. And they were like, no, it's even weirder than that. It's if a if it's if a woman, a human woman mated with a chimpanzee in an effort to produce hybrid offspring so that they could have workers continuing to make the colony run. I am.
J: I'm so afraid that someone's going to try to do this this.
C: Is amazing. Well, The thing is we had we didn't even think this was possible. And so it's funny, I was telling Bob about it earlier and he was like, but how does it work? And I was like, I don't know. They didn't tell us that I think they're still trying to figure that out. They they they figured out that it does work. They were able to observe the outcome to clarify.
S: Though they're giving birth not to just hybrids, but to the other they're giving birth.
C: To the full other species, so then they can mate with the full other. Species. And produce hybrids, so.
S: But they must have the genes then for that other species.
C: They all have it in their mitochondria.
S: But that's. Is that enough though? I.
C: Guess we'll figure out how that mitochondrial DNA is making its way into the gametes. I don't know. Or maybe there's some other They still don't understand how it works. Yeah, I.
S: Think I'm missing something? Well.
C: I think they are too like they were like this isn't possible, but then they observed it and they were like this is the only explanation. Is it?
S: Possible they made it in the past like they're saving the sperm from the other species for late for later.
C: Hundreds of miles away and they're ants. So it doesn't. I don't think it is possible.
S: Yeah, Yeah.
C: But maybe. Maybe.
S: But once you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, exactly because.
C: The because the truth of the matter is this seems impossible, right? So it could be, could be, but but either way, they are giving birth to a different species, whether they're holding onto that sperm and they call it sometimes like sperm paratism, paratism or something like that, parasitism or whether they have the genetic code somewhere in them and they're able to kind of like drum it up. That's what's happening. It's the first time it's ever been observed. So this.
US#05: Kills like every creationist argument about not having another species come from, you know that transition?
C: Add it. To the list. Yeah, they.
J: Don't care, it's right there.
US#05: That's that's astonishing. The.
J: Phenomenal, right?
C: But.
J: It also isn't. It's not like a deliberate choice. It's all happening like automatically like.
C: Yeah. I mean, we never know. Like what is deliberate mean? Are they, are they, you know, having philosophical topical debates about it? No. But are there certain environmental pressures? That's what.
US#05: Must have what must have failed previously to lead to this being successful and then be reproducible well.
C: It doesn't always mean that something has to fail. Sometimes it's just that something is more successful. Right, Right. So yeah, I mean, there either way, there are environmental pressures that are allowing for this to happen.
S: That's freaking cool evolution.
C: Very cool.
Primordial Black Holes (32:11)
S: Bob, you're going to tell us even more about black holes.
B: This one's cool. I love this news item so much. The new research seems to suggest that there could be a 90% chance that in the next 10 years we could see an exploding black hole there.
S: Could be a 90% chance, yes. What's the percentage chance that there is a 90% chance?
C: Sex Panther. 80% of the time. You can't.
B: It's unknowable at this current time. If this is true, this would be the biggest. Gift. To astrophysics physicists in our lifetimes, the upside is so good that it's, it's fun talking about, even though it might be unlikely, but it's fascinating. And I and I learned a bunch of things that are that are actually 100, you know, probably 100% true. All right, So, all right, so do appreciate this. We got to, we got to just talk a little bit about just black holes and Hawking radiation black holes. We all we, we have all heard of black holes, right? You've got a couple of varieties. We've got super massive black holes, millions to billions of solar masses right there, amazing other fantastic objects. There's stellar mass black holes, a lot smaller, maybe 3, three solar masses to perhaps 150 solar masses. OK, but there's also a hypothetical black hole called primordial black holes. Now these, if they exist, they, they would have formed in the first second after the after The Big Bang. After The Big Bang, there was so many density fluctuations happening that they think that these black holes could have formed not by an imploding star, but by just these these density fluctuations that enough mass was in one space, enough mass energy was in one space. That black hole forms. These black holes, when they're talked about today, they typically say, yeah, they probably have the mass of maybe Earth mass or down to an asteroid or even, you know, much even smaller than that. So if if you had a, if you were a super primordial black hole with a mass of say an asteroid, you would your event horizon would be about as big as a, as a dime, very tiny. These are obviously very, very small black holes. So the next critical component here is Hawking radiation. Now we've talked about Hawking radiation. Stephen Hawking, of course, came up with the idea Hawking radiation that let me just set the table for this a little bit. Hawking radiation is a result of black holes losing their immort immortality and becoming just, you know, objects that won't live forever. When when Stephen Hawking looked at black holes through a quantum lens, he realized that they have a temperature, they actually have a temperature and because of quantum effects, then if they have a temperature, then they they're emitting thermal radiation. And if they're emitting thermal radiation, that means that they're going to be losing mass, which means they have a finite lifetime. So that's what that's what his conclusion was. So what happened was the idea is that the black holes would emit radiation and shrink and get hotter and then emit more radiation and then shrink and get hotter and that cycle would continue. So Hawking radiation, though, is probably not being emitted from the big boys, the supermassive black holes and and the solar mass black holes, because they're they're colder than the universe is. So they're not really going to be emitting. There's no net loss of mass from these big guys, but the primordial black holes, if they're still around and they're they're small enough, they're going to be small enough and hot enough to be emitting something that we could potentially detect. The problem is nobody thinks they've been emitting radiation or gamma rays these years because we would have seen that glow in the universe. We would have seen this gamma radiation glow. So here's the new bit. Now, the new bit is that they're trying to incorporate some new theories and models of dark matter into these primordial black holes. So the end result would be that these primordial black holes perhaps have a charge like a static, a static charge, very, very small charge. But if it has that charge and some models seem compelling, if these whole black holes have the charge then and they would basically have been in kind of like a slow motion stasis for the past, you know, billions of years. They would not have been emitting anything. They would not have been shrinking, but not. But according to this theory, they could be doing that now. They could be releasing this in this, this they could be exploding in the near future. So that's where the 90% comes from. If their model is correct, then there is there's a 90% chance in the next 10 years we could see an exploding black hole. Bob. Can I ask you a question?
J: So which black holes could potentially explode? the Super small ones? Yeah, only the.
B: Small ones cause the bigger ones are are too big. They're not going to be releasing any, any real radiation for, oh, about 10 to the 67 years, right?
J: So what is it a big deal if it explodes like what happens so?
B: It's going to be so awesome. And that's what I'm getting into right now. Wait, wait. Wait, what?
J: OK, nevermind. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, we want.
S: You're going to cover it.
J: You're going to cover it.
S: I mean, it's a good thing.
B: And tell us why. All right. So say we see the explosion, What what does that mean on its face? It's, it's fantastic because it proves so many things. It's ridiculous. It proves that hockey radiation is real. If we see, if we see a gamma radiation burst that disappears very quickly with no, you know, with no delayed afterglow that gets smaller and smaller and other things. If we see that and we've got detectors that can detect that, then we know that hockey radiation exists. Huge coup right just there. We would also prove that primordial black holes exist. Another huge coup right there. We would also have evidence for this dark electromagnetism that's related to dark matter. That would also maybe even be the biggest discovery right there having finding some link to dark matter in this. But the other thing, and the thing that really caught my attention and blew my mind is that the particle explosion, when this tiny black hole exploded, it would emit essentially an inventory of all possible particles that could exist. Think about that. It would emit everything that that that we have been looking for, that we have theorized about, that we've already found everything that that black hole could create could be emitted and we could detect it about. That you're not talking about blew me. Away you're not.
J: Talking about elements, right?
S: You're not talking about particles, different kind of particles.
B: Electrons, protons, quarks, axions, neutrinos isn't.
C: I mean, all of those things are out there, Higgs.
S: Well, no. But see there are very high, high energy particles that we've never detected and we can't create even in a large hydrogen Collider. So this would basically be like a super, super, super, super Collider with energies orders of magnitude beyond what we could ever create. I hear spitting out part high energy particles that would otherwise we would never say well.
C: But that's the question, right? So are you saying that we would need some sort of detector near this? No.
S: No, we on earth, yeah, but.
C: Then aren't all of those particles, they've been created at some point in the universe? So they are out there, we're just not able to detect but.
S: It's just an event we.
J: Have to capture. We have to capture the event, right? So when a black hole sucks something in, right, Yeah, like, you know, this is black.
C: Holes don't suck.
J: Pull.
C: They they pull, it's just gravity pull.
J: Whatever. Yeah, When? A thing goes into a black hole. Yeah. And it's made out of matter. Yeah, it it automatically strips that down and turns all of that matter which we're talking about, you know, elements of singularity. Well, wait, no, it doesn't turn them into these particles or the well.
C: They're already made of those particles. I know, I know.
J: It takes them all apart and makes them.
C: Spaghettifies it, yeah.
B: When something enters the event horizon or a black hole, we don't know what happens. Our physics breaks down with singularity is just a placeholder for we don't know what the hell is going on. So you, you can't speculate. Where do we come up with quantum gravity? Then we might have a better idea, but it's, we don't know what's going on. But The thing is, it's not, it's not like the particles are in there waiting to leap out. What's happening is that this black hole that that's exploding is, is releasing. When it gets hot enough, it releases one particle, say a photon. When it gets a little bit hotter, right? It shrinks and it gets hotter then it then it releases electrons. Then it gets smaller and hotter, then it, then it releases protons and then it goes through the inventory of all the possible, the possible particles that are related to the temperature of the black hole at that time and it goes through all of them. And so we're getting what we can detect from this is gamma radiation. So we're looking at this gamma radiation and when a new particle is emitted, it changes, it changes the slope, it changes the energy spectrum. And we can see that little step. And then, oh, here's another step, here's another step, here's another particle. And when we look at it, we could say, here's the standard model of physics. I see the electron, I see the, I see the protons, I see quarks, I see all of these things that we know that we've already discovered. But then you keep looking at this gamma ray signal and you're like, what the hell is that? What the hell is that? We don't know what that stuff is. It could be, it could give us a road map to all these particles that we probably never would have found maybe in 1000 years of technological advancement. It could give us just a road map for all these particles beyond standard physics, which we've been waiting for for so long. And it would be just an amazing occurrence that I hope, I really hope this is true. Because if it's if it's not true, then we would have to wait. And I calculated how long we would have to wait for a small black hole, like a stellar mass black hole, say the smallest black hole is about probably 3 solar masses. The small stellar mass 3 mass. We would have to wait. I calculated 10 billion octo decillion years in order for that thing to evaporate. And I don't think we're going to be around in, but in our billion because the universe is so. Old.
J: Isn't there things that are kind of positioned to do that, right? No, it's only 13 billion.
S: He's talking about Octo Gazillion or I don't even know what you meant. I'm.
B: Talking about the I'm talking about the evaporation of a black hole that's more massive than the sun, not the primordial little blood that.
S: Would take so long that so long, yeah, but the but the primordial ones could happen or happening now apparently. And if we keep looking for them, maybe we'll see one. And here's the catalog of every possible particle that exists in the universe, even the ones you haven't discovered yet. And that will give us like the road map to this, complete the standard model. That's cool.
C: Two quick questions. The first one is. How do we detect that? I was going to say. How visible? What? What instruments?
S: Gamma ray detectors?
B: We have them. How do we?
C: Detect the event. I mean, how do we detect all of those? Really just the. Energy of the particles.
B: It's we would detect. The easiest way to detect this is through gamma radiation, because there's going to be a lot of gamma radiation, gamma radiation coming out of this thing. Even particles that come out, we would never detect them because they decay too quickly, I'm saying, but they decay into gamma radiation. So that would be part of the gamma ray signal. And we that, that we could interpret. We could.
C: Interpret that to know the high energy particles. Yeah, because that's the part that I was confused about. I know we can do this in a Collider, but that's a closed system. When all this stuff is just flying through space. How do we even know? And it's decaying so quickly. Yeah, it would.
B: All it would. By looking at the gamma radiation we did, we can detect what's going on the signature. Inside because it's all. The fingerprints of all these articles are embedded within the gamma radiation. That's changing the the energy signature, the spectrum, the energy spectrum, all that stuff is being affected by the new art, the new particle that has just been created and released.
C: And so the other question is, if it's such a high energy explosion, right, would it also cause a ripple in space-time? Like would we be able to detect it with gravitational wave detectors? LIGO?
S: Not necessarily. Necessarily. Gravitational event, yeah.
B: LIGO and gravitational waves are all about mass. Accelerating mass like 2 neutron stars. Remember it?
S: Has the mass of an asteroid and it's way too small. Yeah.
C: But what about the explosion itself, even?
B: But even explosions I don't think is optimized for for a gravitational wave detection would.
US#05: It be at all visible or that we're just talking purely like you can see in.
B: Gam, if you could see gamma radiation, you will be. It'll be visible to you. Yeah, hard tell us. We wouldn't see anything. It would be a gamma radiation telescope purely.
US#05: A radiation kind of thing. It wouldn't be like that cool dot that all of all of a sudden appeared kind of thing, right? It's not big enough. A couple.
B: Of caveats, this was a simple test model that they created. It was a proof of concept to to show that their idea could work. And also we don't know how many of these black holes formed. We don't know how much hidden charge they may have had. And so those questions are open and the the answers to those questions can make this be a not even a not even issue a non issue that might not even happen. But if it did, if it did happen, what I love about this is that it would be, it would be like a genie came to an astrophysicist and said, what do you want? I'm like, give me a road map and every particle that's possible in the universe and you could get it from this type of explosion that may happen 90% chance if this is true in within 10 years. So there's a.
S: 20% chance the.
US#05: Genie's like, really we'll be doing. That follow up 10 years from now, that's. Absolutely.
S: But at least it's, it's falsifiable, right? I mean, in that we, if this is true, we should see this happen.
B: So basically like three people are excited about this. I hope, I hope, maybe, maybe we're up to with this audience, maybe four or five of us, I think.
E: It sounds cool to me. We're excited.
B: Thank. You thank you tell.
J: Them, Bob.
B: I love this news item, Bob.
J: You really? I I learned a couple of things about black holes that I didn't quite wrap wrap my head around in what you just said, so I thank you for that.
B: Yeah, because I've heard about hockey radiation for decades and I never really thought, well, what the hell is Hawking radiation? I thought it was just maybe some particles, some type of radiation. I didn't know that it was potentially everything. It's just. All the particles, all of all energy dependent.
S: Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week. Quints it's.
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S: Guys, let's get back to the show.
Cultish (46:52)
S: All right, George, you've been reading this book, Book Cult, as you were talking about it. Tell, tell us what's going.
US#05: On yeah, I love I love when you read a book or you see a show or you get some piece of information that sort of re challenges sort of beliefs that you may have or makes you kind of re examine what you may think or how you've acted in the past. The whole sort of skeptical experience of, you know, the hardest thing to be skeptical about is stuff that you believe in, you know, things that confirm what you believe and you have to kind of take a second sometimes to stop. And this was a nice sort of journey in reading this book. It's called Cultish. It's by Amanda Montel. And in essence, Miss Montel writes about this idea that the language of cults is very specific. What people that sort of control other people do it in multiple ways. And one of the ways they do it is by modulating and and using language in a particular way, which isn't surprising. We sort of all know that you kind of get that, that, you know, the Tom Cruise mile stare kind of like thing. But what was interesting is that her approach to this book, she talked about how it's not just Scientology or the Jim Jones cult that things like CrossFit and soul cycle, you know, Etsy workers and stuff that are people that do a lot of beauty products, you know, like makeup and Amway and things like that use very, very similar language. It's, it's sort of it's, it's an idea of expressing an intense ideology, creating a community and then controlling that community. And So what you do is you essentially create this language that is exclusive, you know, so in Scientology there's these great, you know, someone is suppressive, right? There's a suppressive person that's like the worst kind of person you can be in turbulate. That's a great Scientology word, you know, decludge. The other one is yet you decludge something basically like declutter, sort of figure out, you know, unravel, but you decludge it. And so non Scientologists don't decludge. Scientologists decludge. It's a great word occlude and you start having similar words like that, that. And this is the part that I sort of realized my own experience years ago. A couple years ago I did, I did CrossFit for a while. And CrossFit in an odd way is almost proud of itself being a cult. You know, they sort of embrace this idea that yeah, we're we're a good kind of cult because we make you healthy and strong and all that kind of stuff. And I started realizing they had all these keyword keywords and phrases and stuff, you know, things like WOD, the workout of the day, or AMRAP. I mean, what an AMRAP is as many rounds as possible, right? So you do this thing where you try to, you know, you have 30 seconds and you have to lift the kettlebell until it smashes your face and do it as many times as you can in a minute or whatever it is, many runs as possible. You don't go to the, you know, it's not a gym that you go to. It's an affiliate. You know, it's a or, or, or box. You go, yeah, I'll see you at the box. You know, the other interesting thing was that just struck me was they have workouts that are named after women. They call them the girls. And there's the there's the Annie, there's the Grace, there's the Chelsea. And there's certain kinds of exercises that you have sort of put together. So like Amy I know is 1, which is like you do 5 pull ups, 10 push ups and 15 squats. That's an Amy do that five times. And I thought like, oh, you name it, like a female to of course you can do that because it's named after a girl. You know, this idea of like this kind of cult programming of like, yeah, strong male pseudo, you know, strong guy, jump into this thing and do it. And then I started thinking about my musical experiences and how jazz has this sort of particular language that's associated with it. That hasn't changed since the 40s. You know a gig, right? You have to go to a gig that's. A Gaz thing That's I. Mean that's like music, music and sort of you go to, yeah, I got a gig. That's where that's from. Clams. You know what's a clam? Money.
B: You know what a clam is?
US#05: No, a clam is a mistake. So like if you're playing, if you're playing and you make a mistake, it's like, oh man, the clams tonight. Oh, it was a seafood buffet tonight. Oh my God, the clams a head like is the top of the song, you know, or or rushing, dragging all that, all these like little expressions. And it just made me start to think about like, have I been adding to this kind of cultish language? But.
C: Isn't the difference then that if if an in Group evolves organically and so there's in Group status and it's a way for everybody to feel like a familiarity versus an out group or when there's a intentionality and a leadership that says think this way, talk this way. That's the difference. That's what she.
US#05: Addresses. She talks about Soul Cycle and Soul cycle, for those of you that aren't aware, it's sort of a Peloton cycling thing. You sign up and you do these classes online and again, they're very specific. They have very specific language. You pick your instructor. The instructors have sort of things about them that certain people like to do. And what, what the author of the book talks about, she says the difference between Soul Cycle and Scientology is when the Soul Cycle class is over, no one is saying you can't leave the class. And no one is insisting that you use those Soul Cycle terms in the rest of your life. And that if you don't use those Soul Cycle terms, you're being suppressive or you're being whatever. And that there is a, an agreement, a tacit agreement that like we're coming here to this Soul Cycle class or maybe this makeup tutorial or whatever it may be. And we understand that we're kind of kind of winking. We're doing cult like cult, cult ish cult light, maybe even. But we understand we can leave at any time. And that's that's sort of yeah, that that that main difference. Whereas if you're at the Jim Jones compound or you're in Scientology, they're going to do everything they possibly can to make you not leave. They want to maintain you Amway. They don't want you to stop, you know, selling their garbage to your friends. A bunch of other sort of multi level marketing thing that used it. The one, the one example from that that it made me think that CrossFit started to crossover into this kind of dangerous cult was there's a, there's a, a thing called Uncle Rhabdo, which the more I thought about this, the more this disturbed me. So rhabdomyol, rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdomyolysis is where if you work a muscle too much, if you exercise a muscle too much, it it releases portions of itself into your bloodstream it like.
C: Breaks down it basically. Breaks down.
US#05: Yeah, it releases much.
S: It's any exercise done that it does. OK, if you. Actually, you're doing it now. It's just a it's a it's just a matter of degree, OK, if you work, if you have a good workout and then I tested your blood, you would look like you have a mild abdominal, OK, right, right, right. And in fact, we often have to, I've had to ask patients, have you done any exercise in the last few days? Because that I have to just how do I interpret the number based upon that but.
US#05: It kind of stinks. Get to that. Point of like where you actually have liver damage, yeah.
C: When you have Coca-Cola colored ear kidney. Damage.
S: OK, Kidney damage.
US#05: Yeah. So to take this Rhabdomyolysis and they created this character called Uncle Rabdo, the idea of like, it's actually kind of a badge of honor. To get that. Awful. Yeah, it's. Awful. It's awful. And so you did die. From that I had. I had read an article about you know what, you know, someone had referenced Uncle Rapdo and I just didn't get a chance to ask what it was. I looked it up and I'm like, wait a minute, that's terrible. So I went to this sort of main training guy and I said, what's the deal like with this Uncle Rabdo and and, and Rabdomyolysis? And he was like, well, yeah, you know, I mean, it's and like, because like people have gotten really ill and and, you know, they aren't aware of how hard they're working. And, and he's like, well, yeah, I mean, you could cross the street and get hit by a bus.
S: Yeah, that's a great answer.
US#05: I'm done. Thank you much. Bye. You know, like, and that was the justification like, yeah, no, you're not working hard enough until you're literally like you're you're destroying cold, colder, you know, And so I thought, OK, that's that's where it's crossed over. So it just, it just made me think about what else in my life that maybe has is.
S: On that borderline, it's important to recognize and we, we've we've spoken about this before we we got, we were really involved in anti cult activity early on. Yeah, pre pre SGU and we were doing with just the New England Skeptical Society because there's a lot of that based in Connecticut around us. But anyway, so the, you know, a cult is first of all, the belief system is irrelevant, right? It's just the behaviour and the behaviour is a continuum. It's it's not a black or white and there's a what we call a demarcation problem. There's no sharp line that divides something that isn't a cult from something that is a cult. It's a it's just a continuum. And so yeah, a lot of things have we have a jargon and we have a community and we have commonality or whatever. But the the more of these features of cult like activity that you build up at some point you do crossover this fuzzy boundary where they all right now this is really operating like a full blown cult. Yeah. And of course, there's a lot of things that are just are blatant cults, like they're doing it, they're doing it all and it's top down, it's deliberate. It's not organic or cultural. It's not a jargon for rug for pragmatic reasons. It's just it's meant to separate you from other people, to get you inside the community, to make you dependent on the.
C: Community, that's the main thing. Like as a psychologist, when I see people who are who are trying to like heal from having been in a cult, it's no different than a woman who was in a coercive relationship. So it's whether it's one person or whether it's 50 people, the what what I think of as definitional is that it's a high control environment that takes like your volition away from you. And so sometimes.
S: They deliberately try to break down your resistance, yeah.
C: And they'll still.
S: Sleep deprive you, they will. Yeah, they will starve you and.
C: The ones that are the best at it are the ones that make you think it was your choice all along. Like that's when it starts with the language which.
US#05: Starts with this, which what she writes about, it starts with these, you know, these subtle memes they put into your brain, these little like portions.
C: Of it, you know, it's funny, as you mentioned Amanda Montel and I was like, that name sounds familiar. And I just looked she was on my podcast. There you go. Last year, she had another.
US#05: Book called Yeah the.
C: Age. It's called the age of magical overthinking. OK, notes on modern irrationality. And we did like a live recording for the Toronto Public Library. Cool. And like, yeah. So I was like, I know her. Cool, we didn't. Talk about cultish we should have.
US#05: Think of last year thing just came out so highly recommended. It's nice. It's very conversational too. So just yeah, sticks with you.
Common Pseudosciences (57:11)
- "It's Junk Science" — People Are Sharing The Things That Are Actually Pseudoscience That Most People Just Take As Fact - Yahoo News UK [5]
US#05: Thanks.
S: George, what's All right, So we're gonna talk about Miss common myths, common misconceptions that are being spread around social media. There's just an article that went through like 15 of them. We can't go through all of them, you know, very deep. We don't have to. Most of these we've talked about before, and some are very quick hits. Evan, you sent this to me. What? Just what was the first thing on the list? I'm going to pull it up.
E: And again, the the question that triggered all this is they someone wrote about this who says it came across the post on the popular ask Reddit page from user whoever who said what are some things that are actually pseudoscience that people don't realize? And the list was extensive. A alpha based dog training. I don't know that we've actually covered that well on the show. The.
S: Idea that there is an alpha male in a dog pack is that's been pretty debunked, right? So anything derived from that is also. Well, yeah.
C: And the idea that your dog thinks that you're his alpha is ridiculous. Yeah, can.
U: We.
US#05: Have that like in Sky writing across every other podcast, like every comedian's podcast. Can we just make it like there's no such thing as the alpha? Please stop talking about it. What?
J: About like wolves don't have kind of like a de facto leader.
S: No, I mean, there are more or less dominant dogs in the pack, but there's no berries to that's the alpha and everyone else is a beta that doesn't exist. It's not that simple. It was.
US#05: A flawed study that a guy did like whatever that was 100 plus years ago.
C: And while there are some animals where there are, yeah, like leaders within the group, that doesn't translate to, like, domestication of dogs to us. Even if there were an alpha in the pack, they wouldn't go like, human alpha. Now follow you. Like that doesn't make any sense.
E: Astrology was on the list. We've covered that quite extensively. Here's one. They call it Barnes and Noble Science. So these are books published by people who can't get peer reviewed papers published.
U: Yeah.
E: And that's a pretty wide category of things we've.
S: Talked about that a lot too. Like basically if you're bypassing peer review and going right to the public with your wacky idea, you're a crank, right? That's what again, that's one of the things that cranks do. But now of course, you don't have to publish a book. You can just make a website or you can make a YouTube. Now get a.
US#05: TikTok TV like TikTok PDF on Amazon.
B: Or worse than that, you have a, you have a like a fake journal of the bullshit journal and submit to that. Like see unpublished peer reviews. Like, Oh my God, that's it's a journal of.
E: Bullshit research. Biorhythms, mood rings. Oh my God.
B: Remembering other things. Biorhythms.
E: Mood rings. Got it. How old were we, 24? Yeah, I totally.
J: Believe that when we were younger, you did.
E: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was one thing. You know, like most of these. And when you're kids, they impress you, but they also impress adults sometimes. Blood type astrology. Oh.
S: That's yeah.
E: We've talked about that blood type diets that's such.
S: Common in Japan, right? Yeah, very.
E: Common in Japan, the.
US#05: Blood type diet thing, there's nothing to that, correct? 00, Absolutely. Because I started debating someone about this and like they were so vehement and I was just, I was trying to be nice. I was trying to just and I was like, OK, maybe I totally missed something, but there's nothing.
S: Good to question yourself if you're not 100% sure. I mean, yeah, do I really am? I sure because it sounds like bullshit, but maybe there's something to it. But in this case, there's zero to it. There's absolutely. I mean, this is just the the immune proteins on your blood cells. It says nothing about any other aspect of your Physiology, your biochemistry. It is complete nonsense. So you could be confident, OK about that.
J: So basically there's a bunch of people out there who believe in this who are basically not eating certain foods because it's not their blood. Yeah, right.
S: They're eating their, they're eating to their blood type. That's like eating to your astrological. It's like eating.
C: To your eye color yeah blue eye people really shouldn't be eating too much meat that's.
S: A good way to put it, How about?
E: How about this one? This is one I've heard of in the past, but never thought of it. Your brain develop is is continually developing until you're on an average of age 25. Yeah, I've. Heard that over and over. I've. Heard that a lot.
S: It's zero to that. So really, yeah, there's there's nothing to that. Another one.
US#05: And so you have to think about it for a while the.
S: The study that kind of kicked that off, they only looked at people up to 25 seriously. I said, look, the brain is developing until you're 25. Oh.
US#05: That's so funny, but.
S: Then they but they didn't look at people after 25. And here's the other thing there. What's the difference between developing, maturing and learning?
C: And and rapid pruning.
U: Right.
S: So there's one of those is about growth, like your kid in your brain doesn't get any bigger. Well, it's not just about size, it's also not to you, but to a lot of like the strength.
C: Of connections.
S: It's it's, but it's myelination, it's connections for the states. Wait, let me just say justification.
J: Let me ask you from a person who doesn't know as well as you, at what point on average does a, a child into adult till their their brain stops growing bigger?
S: That just depends on when they stop growing bigger.
J: OK, so it's rando, but what is it?
S: What's the age range, you know, upper teenagers, typical something like that. But but just the great the brain getting bigger doesn't mean that it's necessarily developing more. So I think again this is the definitional thing also.
C: The brain to body ratio is different. It's it's not linear, like little kids can't put their arms over their heads because their heads are so big, but they're. Adorable. Yeah, the. The ratio is different, Yeah, the. Ratio is off, yeah.
S: So like, if you're like, we know, we've raised we've raised kids at some point, like you could see different circuits kicking in place in your brain, like they couldn't put words together. Now they can whatever. And and also just even with coordination and we used to joke about their cerebellum is not fully myelinated yet, right? That's development.
J: Actually sons video game circuit turned on two years ago and it's powerful. My God.
S: So there's that kind of just you actually getting the the basic nuts and bolts of how the brain functions in place. You, you have that by the time you're through puberty, right? But then teenagers don't have the mental discipline that adults have. But what is that? Is that just maturity? Is it because the brain hasn't fully developed yet? Does it ever really stop? Is it just And if you look at people who are 5060, their brains function differently than people who are 2030.
C: 2 They're conflating, I think, the nature nurture of executive function with brain with overall brain development, which we should really only be talking about frontal like prefrontal cortex anyway. Yeah.
S: But even if you're just talking about that, it's so.
C: It's still. Yeah, it's a.
S: Continuum and you know it. There's different ideas mixed in here, like development bleeds into maturing the bleeds into just learning stuff and getting better at moderating your emotions or whatever. I.
C: Think The thing is the courts want to be able to say there's a one to one ratio right they want to be able to say you know the difference between right and wrong you are an adult and you should not be responsible it's.
S: Actually being used in sentencing and in policy, it's like, oh, we can't. Like, you know, you can't drink until your brain's fully formed or whatever, and it's just pseudoscience. It's this black and white again. Like there's no demarcation the.
C: Demarcation is because it's very easy to say A5 year old may not understand with a gun the outcome of their actions. It's much harder to say that about a 14. Speaking of. Drinking.
E: How's this one breast milk pump and dump after alcohol. So these are these are mothers who are breastfeeding. They'll have a drink, but then they'll go ahead and pump out the breast milk that they've got because that was contaminated with the alcohol that they just drank. That way they're not giving alcohol to their children. Hadn't heard of that one before. Of course you.
U: Had.
E: Heard about it? Yeah, but.
C: I don't like the way they're debunking it either they're saying they're being very all or nothing about it. You should pump and dump if you drink way too much or you shouldn't so.
S: Some drugs pass through breast milk and some don't. Yeah. And we have to know that. Like if I'm prescribing to a breastfeeding mother, I got no. Is this something that gets passed through the breast milk or not? I actually don't know off the top my head about alcohol. Alcohol.
C: Does but in small quad but.
S: So in small, quad small, if you're like really, that's what.
C: I'm saying I don't like that they're saying if you're breastfeeding drunk.
E: In a site that they source that debunked. It said no, it has to. It would have to be a lot of alcohol, but for some.
C: People, they are drinking a lot of alcohol. So I again, I wouldn't say that that's 100%.
S: Yeah, it's more a matter of degree. It's a.
C: Matter of degree, I'll go.
E: Quickly through some of these other ones a lot of them we touched chiropractic conversion therapy detox the general detox feed a cold starve a fever at old wives tales. No, no good fingerprints, a unique fingerprints that it's it's undetermined. They don't have good science on this as to determine whether a person's fingerprints are unique or not. And.
S: Also the whole fingerprint analysis is way more art than science. Like the like on television shows and movies that pretend like, oh, like, you got a partial here I met the computers flash through the images and you make a match, right? That's not what's happening. That's not reality. It is more of this. Oh, yeah. I could kind of see, you know, it's really, it's very subjective. It's not a but there. Is a database.
C: There is. There's a code, but yeah. And then.
S: Maybe you can be. That's the other thing is, and there's a couple of things coming up on this list that are like this. It's not as black and white as TV pretends. It's way more subjective, but that does not equal useless. It doesn't mean you can't maybe rule some people out because of fingerprints. Same thing with we can jump to the lie detector. The lie detectors are not detecting lies like we talked about this. They're stressed and stressed and people get stressed for different reasons and people have different ability to hide their stress. And So what you're detecting.
E: Just taking a test could be stressful.
S: But that doesn't mean they're worthless. True, they, they may not be like you can't say, well, he failed the lie detector, therefore he well, was lying 1:00 to 1:00. It could be that well, or he passed a lie detector, therefore he wasn't lying. You can't say that it's it's just possible that he was really good at hiding a stress or he was stressed out over being interrogated by an authority figure. You, you psychologists.
C: Use these tests all the time inside, they just don't call them lie detectors where.
S: They're useful is basically just intimidating the person into telling the truth because they think you can tell them.
J: Oh, that's awesome.
S: That's how they're really used I.
C: I also think with the fingerprint thing, what it what the list is saying is that you know, whether or not no other person on the planet has the same fingerprint pattern. We we can't know that because nobody's it's almost. Unknowable. Yeah, right. But for the most part, fingerprints are relatively unique, the same way that zebra stripes are relative they.
B: Find your fingerprint at emergency and you got some splaining to do that. Yeah, well, that's right. That's you can't just say, oh, it's it's not unique. So I'm I'm free.
US#05: Koalas have very human like fingerprints apparently. It's it's, it's thwarted some some police investigations, apparently.
U: Being.
E: Being a police, yeah. Being a police, yeah.
US#05: Right. Yeah, the koala, Yeah, had some kind of being.
E: A police investigation for certain forensics, bite analysis, Ballistics analysis, and blood splatter analysis.
S: What, Dexter.
E: Dexter's not true. They're all subjective. That's all raw.
S: Not that they're not. It's not. It's not all or not.
E: Not they're not. A slam dunk they're not.
S: The slam dunk that the That's the bottom line.
E: Well.
US#05: You're you're interpreting data. As soon as you interpret data, it's like, yeah, the biting.
S: Analysis, I think is the worst of the really I. Think by Yeah, that's.
C: The one where I think. It's a lot more completely.
S: What are they testing for? Like they look yeah, the shape they're looking at. Does the bite mark match your? Like if you do a test bite mark, does it match and?
C: Very often people have been let go when they realized, oh, that was made by a tool like that wasn't even a bite. Like they'll assume it's a bite based on the shape. And very often when you see a criminal proceeding, the prosecution and the defense are going to bring in their own spatter analysts and they're going to say opposite, you'll find. You just dueling.
J: You think though that a bite would be kind of consistent because your teeth typically stay in the same well, what conditions were you doing the bite under?
S: You know, there's so many other variables in there also. How you think?
C: Is your bite and. Also, is it a bite? What we're talking about is actually when there's an analysis of a bite on skin. Yeah. Like, is it even a bite or was that from an animal or was it, you know? Yeah, like if you.
J: Bite into like a mold thing. It's going to be your teeth. If you bite into the surface of an orange, it doesn't, right And.
C: If you bite somebody's leg, it might just look like the bruise.
US#05: If you have Charlie from the Chocolate Factory teeth then it's very.
B: You guys have? Seen.
C: Does anybody, does anybody know what I'm talking? Yeah, there's like memes. The kid who played Charlie in Willy Wonka like his teeth first.
B: Movie. The first movie, yeah.
C: The original and not just jacked like like I think there's some sort of physiologic problem like you. Were explaining molars. Yeah, right.
S: Let's come on. Yeah.
E: Continuing Sigmund Freud Apparently everything Sigmund Freud did was.
S: Preliminary and early on in a very new and difficult yeah, there's a big.
C: Different I mean, I'll soapbox this for a second. I am not a psychodynamic psychologist. I'm an existential psychologist, but I have, you know, colleagues who are psychodynamic. Generally speaking, we all learn about Freud and I think what they're saying in this listicle is that a lot of people just stop there and they go, OK, that's just how things are. But the reason we learn about it is from historical perspective to know where the field was early on. There is a field now called psychodynamic psychotherapy, which is based on actually like object relations. Like it's, it's very, very different. But there are some things that Freud talked about that now have evolved into understandings that we it's kind of like.
S: Saying Darwin was wrong about a lot of things. Of course he was. He was whipping up a whole new scientific discipline. He's amazing how much he got right. But we've pretty much everything you said, we've evolved into different versions of what what he said. But.
C: We have actually had to just be like, let's ignore that thing. Yeah, there's something. Yeah. There's like, I mean, he was like giving his patients coke and like, you know, all the women were his standard, so.
S: Psychiatry is way more wishy washy wobbly wobbly than yeah I.
B: Mean you I don't my take is that he's not very relevant today. He's not true, right? It's not, but every.
C: Psychology student learns about him and that is a problem with how we teach psychology because if you get a 101 course, you get a bunch of history, but you don't get a lot of like modern lens. And so a lot of people think that that's how we're all got you now.
E: Yeah, handwriting analysis, graphology, we've talked about that. Immune system boosting. No, no, we've talked about that. You don't.
C: Want to boost your immune system? Right, exactly. It's. Bad. Terrible. Unless you're immune, you know so.
S: Either with the immune boosting thing. What I find is either the snake oil supplements, whatever that claim that they boost the immune system do nothing, or they're bad for you because they they actually, you know, can cause autoimmune disease. Yeah. Yeah. Like your immune system needs to be tightly regulated. Just make suppressing it or boosting it or increasing it is not necessarily an inherently good or bad thing. Oh.
C: You should only do that under the like with with medication with a physician because you have a diagnosis that requires.
S: It, yeah, but aren't generically just boosting your immune system aren't.
B: Vaccines and immune boosting technology.
S: They're a way of targeting your immune system against a very specific right. So if you can, I think the word boosting is very vague. So if that's what you consider boosting, sure. But that's not what people are talking about. But.
J: That's not the same as. Taking. Vitamins are on the list be.
S: More robust and just a vague I mean, if anything, sleep will do that.
J: Sleep will. Sleep will keep you.
S: You know anything that keeps you healthy makes your immune system function better. Just like your muscles won't function better and your brain functions better. But you don't want well nourished. And well rested and hydrated all your systems operate but.
C: There is A and this is not a demarcation problem. There is a point where your immune system is over functioning and that is bad because it starts attacking your own body. Yeah. Correct.
E: We all know about that. Natural and organic. We've talked about that ad nauseam, the Myers Briggs personality test. Yeah, we.
C: Don't use that at all in psychology. It's like a wind.
E: Up toy that just won't stop and. I mean, that's culty. Oh. Yeah, like George totally called quantum anything non physics. Yes, Oh my God, poor quantum. Stay in your lane. Quantum rain based illnesses like catching a cold from being out in the rain. That's been disproven so.
S: You we can go beyond that even there's there's an open question about whether being cold can make you sick. Like being you know what it well, it's not really. I mean, it's been pretty much been debunked. I don't know that the the final nails in the coffin on that one because you get the question is do are some viruses, do they spread more easily in the cold weather or things like that? But certainly you can't catch a cold by being out in the wet rain. Yeah, because you need a virus. You need Yeah. And.
C: That's like in it's people always conflate like epidemiological data with individual data, right? Yeah, it's like it. And mostly.
S: It's mostly that's when the kids are at school. That's mostly what the winter viruses.
US#05: Yeah.
B: Plus, yeah, when it's cold out, you're you're amongst people in, in, in a building inside and that's and it's spreading that way. What about? The what about the bones?
US#05: Bones like feel like you can tell the storms coming because your hip hurts. Oh.
S: Yeah, pressure, that's.
B: Humidity. That's.
S: That's that's real. There's barometric pressure for migraines. There's humidity for arthritis. So some people, like, they know when the storms coming because they get a migraine. Yeah, that's what I thought.
US#05: That's real. Yeah. That's really cool.
E: Three more O2, more taste map of the tongue. Oh yeah.
S: I mean, who?
E: Wait, heard about a song?
J: Raise your hand if you believed it. I was hot.
E: OK, everybody believed that. I'm very shocked.
J: To see like when I was a kid that would, that was the thing and like, and I did it, I tested it and it, and I tricked myself into thinking that, that, well, the, once you put something in your mouth, your saliva dissolves it and it goes all over your tongue, right.
S: So you can't, it's really hard. And we do, this is part of a neurological exam. And if someone has Bell's palsy, I want to know if where the lesion is. And there's one specific place where you also pick off taste to half of your tongue. So if, if they have, that's where it is, then it's in the facial canal. If they, if they have retained taste, then something else could be on. It could be a stroke, it could be something else. So that's a very important thing to do. I had to learn the technique to do that. You have to like really make sure that they're not, they can't close their mouth, they can't swish it around. You got to just touch it with a, you know, what do you do with lemon juice or something? No sugar, sugar, water, and you go to the very side of the tongue without letting them swish it around at all. Can you taste that? What does that taste like? They should immediately be able to know that it's sweet. If they don't, if they go there, I can't tell. Then they close their mouth, they go, oh, it's sweets again. That's 'cause you just now you got it washed over the other side of the tongue. So that's probably what was going on.
E: And the last one's the what they call the troubled teen industry, like wilderness survival, you know, throwing these kids who are having problems not. Just pseudoscience extreme. Scenario harmful.
C: Yeah, there's a great book by Maya Salivitz about that. She, yeah, kind of blew the doors off of that.
U: All right.
S: Evan, you're also going to tell us about this one. What is this? Looks like a nightmare. This is the BP by Jeez. You've.
E: Heard the expression. The truth shall set you free. Right. We're familiar with that.
Tooth Eye (1:16:11)
E: Well, this one is the tooth. Shall let you see. That's a tooth. No, sorry. The little little extreme graphic here. Yeah. So tooth in eye surgery. Also known by its medical name, osteoodonto Keratoprosthesis. Yes. Prosthesis. O OK. P for very short. OK, Yeah. So this is a legitimate procedure. In fact, I shared it with Steve. I said, Steve, what? You know, this looks like a one we should talk about. He's like, Are you sure about this? And we we had to. Look it up. We had to look it up and a multi source.
S: It's real specialized.
E: Surgical technique used when the cornea is so badly damaged by either scarring, chemical burns or autoimmune disease, which we just talked about that regular transplants won't work. So this is this is where they go next. You a patient will, they'll extract a tooth, usually a canine tooth from from the patient itself. They'll include small amounts of bone to serve as a structural support for a tiny lens. OK, so then they drill a hole right through it. They implant the tooth lens piece under the patient's cheek somewhere. So they take this, they put it into their cheek somewhere where it allows blood, tissue, blood and tissue growth to, to, to secure, I guess, you know, keep it, keep it all in place. The body also builds up support and integration for it. Then what they'll do is they'll prepare the eye, they'll remove the scar tissue graft, mucosal lining from the inner cheek over the corneal surface. And then after the toothpiece has matured while it's in your cheek, they'll take it, remove it and implant it into the eye, replacing the damaged cornea, allowing light through the optical lens. That is the procedure. And yeah, it's legit. You don't get 2020 vision though out of it, but in in about 1/4 of the cases they get you get 20302040. The majority of cases, about 60% of patients are somewhere between 2040 and and 2100. Much better than, you know, blind blind. Do you have to brush that tooth?
S: I think that's why they put the membrane over and everything. Yeah. So The thing is the corneas are really hard structure to to mimic, right? It's got to be rigid, hard and transparent. So this is the one, this is from the 60s, right? This is like been around for a long time. I'd never heard of it. This is, it's only, they've been a few 100 cases like since the 60s where they've actually done it. So it's pretty rare procedure. This guy, the patient that they were talking about had like 5 or 6 cornea transplants and they just only lasted for a few months and then they would degrade. So this wasn't working. That's why he was one of the cases where like, well, we could try this really rare thing. I'm sure the surgeons haven't done many of them because there's only so many that have ever been done. We.
C: Don't have something that's like not, you know, like plastic because.
S: I guess because the body rejects it. You just want that's why they own bone is because people.
C: Can wear contacts so you would think that you have.
S: To change them every day and clean them and everything. Yeah, OK.
C: Some.
S: Can go a couple of days, you can change.
C: Your cornea and that.
E: Is kind of the key. These are your own body parts anyway, So the rejection, your body won't reject this. You know, it's not like you grow it somewhere else and try to bring it in. Yeah.
S: Just a weird but true kind of thing. Tooth eye.
Snake Oil (1:19:33)
S: All right, Jay, tell us about the history of snake oil.
J: Yeah, so this this one caught my tooth eye because. Because. I, you know, I knew what the, what snake oil means to us as critical thinkers, but I didn't know the history of it. You know, I was just curious to know more details about it. And I really found a cool story here. So where did it come from? Where did the phrase come from and why did you know? And why do people today use it to say that things are BS, you know, that it's a scam or whatever? So originally what happened was there were Chinese railroad workers that came over to work in the United States. They this was like, you know, early to mid 1800s and they brought this snake oil remedy with them. But it was real. It was actually real. Like they had, well, real in quotes.
S: I mean, The thing is. It's not like it's a pharmaceutical. Like it was really effective. It was one of their, you know, herbal type of remedies that yeah, it probably had some.
J: It did have some effects, some effects. They tested it, but it was.
C: Real in the sense that it was Oil of snake doesn't.
S: Mean that they all the things they used it for it was effective.
J: Well basically this is what I read that they only used it for inflammation and let me get into the details here. So first of all, they only took oil from a water snake. And the way that they would extract the oil from the snake is first that they would, they would boil like snake fat, of course, and that's where the oil is coming from. Then they'd skim off the oil that rises to the top when they boil it, and they would just simply bottle it. And then when they needed it. Now, the history says that, you know, these people were working incredibly long hours. It was a really, really hard life to be a railroad worker like that. And that the, they'd rub it on the exterior of their body and that there would be, you know, help joint muscle pains, inflammation, things like that. So that oil from that snake is rich in omega-3 fatty acids and it's also rich in EPA, which is another type of fatty acid. And it, it has been proven to have anti-inflammatory effects and Scientific American actually verified that it works. It actually has a, it, it does do something of the like Steve Wright.
S: It's not like, Oh my God, it's like, but it's like a liniment.
J: But but it did something and it was real in in that effect. So specifically we say, why did it work? Well, EPA, the you know, that type of amino acid, it reduces inflammation muscle like modern pain relief creams or whatever, but not as not as strong or whatever. And again, they just rubbed it on themselves and you know, it was widely used in that community. So then of course, what happened is people found out that they were using this and some guy in particular named Clark Stanley, he called himself the Rattlesnake King, and he became the most famous snake oil salesman. So this was in the late 1800s. OK, so it says 1893. He was at the Chicago World's Fair and he completely won over a very large crowd of people. He would pull out a live rattlesnake. You know, he would extract the the, the fatty tissue from it. This is all on stage. He'd boil it right there. He'd bottle it right there. And he would be selling it. And he, of course, this was the type of person that would say this can cure any anything. You know, we know the whole that story. Your very common idea is that it's a panacea. You know, what do you got? It'll cure that. Did he?
US#05: Call it snake oil, apparently.
J: He did OK and his product became a national sensation. He became very famous. The the problem is that American rattlesnakes they have almost no Omega threes and none of the other fatty acid that actually was the active ingredient, which of course doesn't matter because he was making money. So in 1916 the the government actually did something which doesn't happen anymore. So they had the Pure Food and Drug Act. This is in 1906. And this gave the government authority to regulate these false medications that were beginning of the FDA. Yeah, it was so bringing.
US#05: Back snake oil because I think it's going to be a good thing. I don't think I.
J: Haven't been biting my tongue this entire podcast with that brain worm shit. I was about to explode anyway.
S: Not the brain worm.
J: So they take his stuff, they test it. the US Bureau of Chemistry, which Steve said the precursor to the FDA, they got lab results and they revealed that snake oil had the following, had baby oil, which is mineral oil. It had less than 1% of beef fat. It had red pepper, turpentine and trace amounts of camphor. So this guy, Stanley, he pleaded guilty, plead no contest, and he was fined anyway. Just guess, how much was he fined?
E: $10.
J: 20 bucks there you go.
C: What year was it though 19?
J: 16 It was early 1900s so.
C: What was that worth now about?
J: Like 600 bucks, nothing this less than a slap on a wrist that he probably made, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars selling this crap. But what did happen was there was a you know, the newspapers reported it and he you know, it cemented the snake oil is BS name and that's where it came from. So this goes back, you know, 100 / 100 years ago. And of course, you know, again, like the last thing to say is, you know, now snake oil means everything. Anything that particularly a skeptics think is BS, you know, but most people use snake oil if they want to talk like, oh, it's fake, it's snake oil. And that's where it comes from. I like this. Now, as a critical thinker, I didn't know any of that. I've been using snake oil the whole time. You know, we've been doing the podcast probably, you know, many, many years, even before that. It was just, you know, a phrase that that was put into my head and there's a legitimate story. And the fact that it started off as something that actually worked, not great, but worked, blows my mind. But.
C: Doesn't that always have pseudosciences? There's like that little kernel of truth, and then they just expand it and expand it and expand it until it no longer even exists. Yeah.
S: But they're also very common at the time and still today was taking something that was used by some either foreign culture, exotic culture or indigenous culture, right? There's a huge industry of remedies that were taken from American Indians. And again, it was not the American Indians who were promoting it. It was some snake oil salesman, some, you know, some con artist who hit upon it. It's like, oh, you know, the echinacea falls into this like, oh, they use they use echinacea. It's like, OK, this is a, and even if they didn't, they just said they did anyway. But some the echinacea was actually used by some, you know, America. Right.
US#05: Also, quinine was a bark.
S: Yeah, so right. Well, yeah, but quinine actually can does stuff right.
US#05: But but wasn't it used or was that or was that coincidental that it's I thought it was used by South South American.
S: Yeah, yeah. But they didn't know what it was doing. Oh, OK.
US#05: Yeah.
S: I mean, I think that, you know, some cultures did hit upon certain things that were obvious, of course.
C: I mean, there are there are like things that will.
S: Make you fall asleep, there are.
C: Indigenous practices that come from things that we ultimately made into pharmaceuticals. There are animals in the wild that use certain remedies. Yeah, that's true.
S: But here's the thing they were using in Asia for a whole bunch of different stuff, but not flu, not the thing that it was currently being marketed for. They would use it for snake bites and leg injuries, whatever. There's like random stuff and it was not based on anything but the idea what this is an ancient remedy used by this natural people was the marketing thing. And I'm sure the snake oil thing was the same where it's like, Oh yeah, there's from ancient Chinese remedy, right? I don't know if that all comes from there too, but that's the same kind of thing. Usually when there's something specific like snake oil means generically A fraudulent treatment, it there's a specific source to it was we we often will use things that have a specific reference and then we generalize to mean that type of thing. But that's.
C: Also fun because then you can be that asshole who watches movies and somebody says the word snake oil but it's anachronistic because it was too early. It wasn't.
S: They didn't use that.
C: They didn't have.
J: Snake oil in 1874 the proper. Way, the proper way to to evoke that is actually actually actually all right.
Flowing Water on Asteroid (1:28:01)
- Scientists find evidence of flowing water on Ryugu’s ancient parent asteroid. 'It was a genuine surprise!' [8]
S: One more news item. One more news item.
B: One more. Yeah. All right, then we're.
S: Going to do science of fiction sounds.
B: Like a plan, all right.
S: All right, so this, I don't know if this is high. I think this is high Abusa. Remember that high Abusa, this is the asteroid that or no, like the high Abusa was the satellite, right? And yeah, this is the Ryubi or something asteroid. And they collect, they've managed to rendezvous with an asteroid, collect samples, do some science right there. And they brought samples back to Earth. So this is a news item based upon a recent analysis of some of the samples from this asteroid, and they found something very interesting. I'm going to save the conclusion till the end. So they were looking at what?
J: Isn't that what the end is, though?
S: Well, you know, you could, you could sometimes lead with the answer and say this is how they found, but then you don't have a conclusion. Anyway. They were looking at, yeah, this is something very, very technical and wonky, but it's very interesting. They were looking at the ratio of letrium and hafnium. These are two elements. The thing is lutetium was decays into hafnium and so they could they we know how old the asteroids is, right. So they said, well, this the ratio of hafnium to lutetium in the sample should be this much right? That's physics doesn't change, right. The half lives are one of the, you know, you could hang your hat on that, that it doesn't change throughout the history of the universe. So unless you're a creationist, then they say, oh, it changes by whatever amount it has to have changed in order for the Earth to be as old as I want it to be. But real scientists say they can, you can use it as a as a constant, right? So the problem is the there was far less hafnium in the sample than there should have been.
J: So when there's less hafnium, is it quarterm?
U: Yeah.
J: You know I'm trying I I wake up with the intent to entertain the people that spend money to come see us. Stevens all like science and shit over here like I just want you guys to have fun. All right, go back so that.
C: That means it's younger.
S: So you would think that it means it's, but it can't because it it's an asteroid. We know when it formed. We know where it formed in the soul is an out, you know what I mean? So we know those things could.
B: That hit a younger asteroid well.
S: You're close to the answer.
E: So with contamination, it's not.
S: Contamination. It's not contamination if that's your thought so, but it's good. This is the what the conversation I would have. What could have happened? Why is there less hafnium than there should be? It's not because it's younger, because we know it isn't. It's not contamination from another box. Could I have a guess?
J: Could it have been like evaporated off by as going too close to a sun or something?
S: You're getting close, getting closer to the answer. There's not a.
J: 3rd element that has affected the other previous one it's.
S: Not a chemical or or, you know, it's not, it's not, it's not it something washed away some of the hafnium.
C: So it did undergo the change and then it somehow went away, right.
S: OK. And. This is so again, they don't know that this is what happened, but this is what they're left with. Again, they've eliminated every other possibility they could think of, and this is what they're left with Solar.
US#05: Wind.
S: No, it would have had to have been something liquid. So therefore there was flowing water inside this asteroid. Why wouldn't it freeze? Well, it did freeze. It refroze, but the so they're saying, but it would have had to have been much later than they thought it should have been because, you know, we solar system formed out of a cloud of gas and dust. Everything is hot and then it cools down. And you know, we know where asteroids form based upon its constituents because there are different constituents at different places, distances from the sun. And you can tell how this formed in the outer solar system then came inside or whatever. They can tell these kind of things. And a lot of a lot of it is by the volatiles, right? Things that would evaporate if it gets too close to the sun or if it goes too hot. So this, you know, we, we know there's ice in, in the asteroid and we know where it's from, but at some point that ice must have melted, washed away the hafnium and then refroze or, or evaporated.
B: So, but if it washed away the stuff, some of it, where did it actually go though?
S: Well, then it washed it away, away from the asteroid. So we evaporated out into space. How?
B: Much gravity is required to wash something away on the surface. Are we talking about this happening on the surface? Deep within the But if the water evaporates, it doesn't take the hafnium with it. It did, though.
S: I mean, no, that's why it had to be liquid water that literally physically washed it away. Like so they're saying. So the only answer they're left with is this the conclusion. This is the conclusion. OK, here we go. This is why I wanted you. I wanted you to tell me what you thought first. I agree. But what could have done it? So they said the only thing that's left on our list of possibilities is that there was liquid water percolating through this asteroid much later than it should have been.
U: Why?
B: Water well.
S: Liquid. So yes, liquid. Liquid, probably liquid like other liquid stuff too.
J: Different.
S: Probably mostly liquid solvent.
C: Yeah, some some liquid solvent so.
J: What if it was? What if the regolith had frozen water and then it got near a sun and then it liquified?
S: But but we kind of know about where it was in the solar system based upon what it's made of and it's consistent.
C: Does it does it just not have enough of its own gravity for the water to like stay on it? Like how does the water just this?
S: Is inside, yeah, but then.
C: You said it had to wash away so.
S: What do they think happened so. Percolated through it. Washed away from whatever they wherever they got the sample doesn't necessarily mean it washed away from the asteroid, but it could have if it got to. If it percolated to the surface, it would have gone away. Gotcha.
C: Gotcha, gotcha. They're.
S: Sampling deep in the asteroid and there should be hafnium there, and there's a lot less of it than there should be something, so maybe.
C: They'll see like a band if they actually did a core or something.
S: The samples we have we. Don't have the whole.
C: Asteroid.
S: So this is what they're thinking. At some point after a lot of the happening him already was created through radioactive decay, another asteroid impacted. It melted the ice washed away the hafnium and then it refroze the liquid that had the hafnium in it just whisked off into space or or again just away from the sample that just to.
C: A different part of the asteroid.
S: So that's their that's their current hypothesis. Something hit this thing melted the ice from the heat of the impact, and then it eventually refroze. But some of the hafnium went away. Is that it? But water should have been percolating through that sample way later than the history, the life history of that asteroid should have made it possible. Is that cool? But the chain of logic is, is interesting how they can infer they have these little pieces of the asteroid and they're this they're figuring all this stuff out. And that that radioactive decay thing is always such a an important piece of information because again, it is something that we could say this is physics. This is what had.
US#05: To have happened where did they get the pieces this is.
S: For them, this was recovered from the the high abuse of OK.
US#05: Yeah.
S: The centre probe and they brought it back in.
B: The future, they get another sample and there's too much happening. I'm like, this is where it went. It went over here, I mean.
S: Maybe.
U: Yeah.
S: All right. Cool.
Science or Fiction (1:35:21)
Theme: None
Item #1: There is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year.[9]
Item #2: Wind account for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the US.[10]
Item #3: The incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world.[11]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | There is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. |
| Science | Wind account for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the US. |
| Science | The incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | clever |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
George | The incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world. |
Cara | There is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. |
Jay | Wind account for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the US. |
Evan | There is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. |
Bob | The incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, Kansas, from which it spread to the rest of the world. |
S: Well, everyone, it's time for science or fiction.
U: It's.
Voice-over: Time for science or fiction?
J: What we should make an Stu Snake oil?
E: Yeah, like I could be careful.
J: No. No, no, wait, let me just This is like your Homeopops idea for cooking.
E: That was actually Evan's idea. Homeopops.
J: You came up with evaporative therapy? Evan came up with Homeopops.
E: No, I just.
J: It'd be a cool decorative bottle.
E: It looks like an old snake oil bottle.
J: But then we have like, an Stu logo or maybe you're the Barker or something. It'd be. Yeah. There's an idea in a bookshelf as swag, you mean. Yeah. Bookshelf item. Fake.
S: Fake snake oil Doc.
J: Novella's old timey remedy. Evan. Evan, you see me? I appreciate that. Thank you. I. Got you Jay, but we'd have to you.
B: Know you have to write on it like a 100% bullshit. Yeah, well. Yeah, it's got fused.
J: Well, Jay, But Jay, what would it cure?
US#05: What would that, what would the SGU cure be?
J: Yeah. What would it?
US#05: What would it be? Everything. What would it be or what?
J: Ills you like like. Politics. Let me see. It's some kind.
US#05: Of yeah, like a a remote control on we. We're so. Silly like this cures. Like it'll.
J: Keep you from giving, getting this with the scabies, the scabies, what's like a what's like a kid heebie jeebies, heebies, something like that cures all scabies. Is a real thing. Oh, scabies are real, yeah. Yeah, OK. Sorry, I don't know.
S: I love the old timey diagnosis too. It treats consumption, Yeah.
C: Drops.
S: Nervous condition. Dropsy. Yeah, nervous, Nervous. Nervous penile dropsy.
U: Nervous.
J: Penile dropsy. Oh my God. Can we call it a liniment?
C: What they used to there was a liniment. Liniment.
S: Yeah, liniment. Yeah, Or my favorite one as a neurologist, of course, is neurasthenia. Neurasthenia.
C: Oh it. Can calm the nerves if I made the.
J: Snake oil. Who would like who would like it? Just have to see. I forget it. I'm not doing it. No, no, no. Percussive.
US#05: Melancholy cures percussive melancholy.
S: Percussive melancholy.
J: Nice, nice.
US#05: Guaranteed 100% George. You have percussion guaranteed.
S: OK, each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and 1 fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics. Tell me which one is the fake. We have a live audience, which means you all get to play along. We're going to do this very specifically. We're going to ask the panel to give me their answers 1st. Then we'll ask you to weigh in. And you have to be sure not to give away the answer before they vote, right?
J: You don't want them to say, hey, I know the answer.
S: I don't want them to indicate in any way what they think the answer is. How many people here, by the way, you can do the one clap thing or whatever. How many people here are from Kansas?
U: A lot.
S: That's good, right? The theme of the science or fiction this week is Kansas. I didn't.
B: Do the research, Evan.
S: Asked me yesterday, is the theme going to be Kansas? Like shut up, I.
E: Said you should. Have thrown us a curveball. Say it's Oklahoma.
S: I sometimes I don't always do the place we're in, but we've never been here. It's sometimes I do the place that we're in. But cures quizzical Bernstein that they can't know for sure. What's that?
US#05: Cures Quizzical Bernstein.
S: Yeah. All right, so keep it cool. Yeah. Poker face about in the audience out there. You won't necessarily know the answer, but I don't know sometimes I think yeah, I have to think to myself like what a local know this app.
J: How much do you really know about Connecticut? That's the question that's part of what I ask myself.
S: So I'm not going to do the state bird, you know I mean, you guys should know it's state bird is the Meadowlark. Thank you guys are all going to know that right.
US#05: Meadowlark would.
C: You know that about your state.
US#05: I think it's these these construction crane is mine.
S: Come on, you know, you know what Pennsylvania is, No. No the. Bird, You don't know what it is, Larry.
C: California Larry Bird.
US#05: The Bethlehem bird is the swift. I know that the swift is.
C: California The Condor.
S: Yeah, OK. Connecticut is Robin the American Robin. Thank you, Robin. This has been your birding moment with Steve. It's not going to add about birds. I almost said Kansas birds. It was going to be my theme, and I found a couple of good ones, like just describing birds. Did you know there's a bird in Kansas called the Dick Sickle? That one is fiction, all right.
C: The bird is the quail. I would not. Have the quail.
J: Some some person who found the birds like. Dick. Sickle.
C: Like they had to know exactly.
J: What they were. Is there a reason? Is there an operational reason? Yeah, yeah.
S: I don't know what it is for that one, but there, there, there is. And some of them have really funny names. But if you break it, if you deconstruct it, it means.
US#05: Oh yeah. Jay, it cures Dick sickle, Yeah.
S: Right, right.
US#05: That. Down I. Like it? I wish.
J: More than three people raised their hands. I I really like it.
S: Like, there's the tip mouse, but we know that we have tip mice in Connecticut. Yeah. All right, here we go. Item number one, there is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, they are there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. Item number two, wind accounts for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the US. And item number 3, the incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, KS, from which it spread to the rest of the world. OK, Should I start with Bob or should I start with George? All right, George, go first. It's their fault. George. Thank you.
US#05: Large population of bison. I like that. I like that that's I like that being true. Winding, winding wind accounting for 52% seems awfully high. Seems awfully high, which makes it feel like that's probably true because it's like it's being deceptive. So I bet that's true. And the Spanish food did not start in Spain. I know it did start here some somewhere in I guess in the United States. But would they would OK, Would Steve know that the audience knows this? What is the What does Steve think the audience is going to know you can't play?
C: These head games, man, No, I know it always gets us. I know to.
S: Clarify, George. Just I tried to find ones. I thought they wouldn't, that they wouldn't, but I'm not good at doing that.
US#05: Oh. OK, so I want. Them to not chime in so. I think. I think, OK, I'm going to say the bison is is the fiction, the bison's fiction.
S: OK, Cara.
C: Yeah. So we know Spanish flu started in the US We also know Spanish flu was spread around the world by soldiers. And so if it originated at Fort Riley, I don't know. I don't know, like the main place where they were getting it, but maybe that was a port or something where a lot of training was happening for for the war. I agree with with George that 52% feels high because I think about wind, where are we doing a lot of wind, like offshore? Maybe not, I don't know. Is it windy here? Was it windy? Do you guys remember? Was it windy today? They're not supposed to say anything, I know. But it is like it's flat here. So planes, I don't know, maybe. And then yeah, bison, Bison. I mean, they used to be everywhere. I think about them in like Montana, but I do think about them in like American grasslands, Prairie. Good. I'm gonna go with George on this. I'm not sure. Maybe it's.
US#05: Buffalo. Maybe he's being sneaky and it's actually Buffalo and not. I don't. Think he would do that?
C: I think that's too similar. Yeah, I don't think he would do that. Steve, I'm gonna. Go with George on that, OK?
J: OK, Jay. Yeah, I did. I, I know that the Spanish flu did not start in Spain. It started here. I don't know. I don't think of my years of having Steve do science or fiction. I don't think that he would assign it to, you know, a local heat, you know, like a place in Kansas. So I think that one is science. I'm going to pop over to now the, the, what do we got the, the murder bison. I mean, look, you know, there, there's a lot of people who are growing bison for for the meat, you know, then I would think, OK, it's perfectly fine if they grow them here. It's ton of flat land. Seems like a really good state to grow bison and and do all that. And they're dangerous. Of course they are. They're wild animals. I, you know, I don't know if they're like particularly feisty bison, but I think if you, if people like are, you know.
US#05: Band name Feisty Bison.
J: If they go on to other people's property, you know, teenagers and stuff, people can get injured, sure. You don't want to be around giant animals like that. So I think that's science. I, I, you know, I don't think, I think what George says was the 52% seem too high. And I think that's where Steve, Steve likes to be tricky in those areas. I'm going to say that one's a fiction, right? OK, Evan.
E: The Bison of Kansas. I just don't know about these reported attacks and injuries per year. I mean, you know, anytime you get people and animals together, there are going to be some injuries. Scores of reported attacks and injuries per year. Yeah, that would be the reason why I would go with that one as fiction. Now, the wind, 152% and the third highest state in the US. So the other two would what be coastal. And you know, hey, when I landed yesterday off the plane in here in Kansas City and we went to pick up our rental car and noticed signs by the bathrooms, tornado shelter. And I started seeing tornado shelter, tornado shelter, tornado. So, you know, yeah, there's a lot of wind in Kansas, actually, so feels.
C: Work in tornadoes.
E: Well, sure. It just, you know, we're from Connecticut, we don't have those things. So we come to a state where we're not familiar with and just odd to see tornado shelter signs on a regular basis in a lot of places not in.
C: Texas so.
E: I'm leaning towards that one being science. The last one about Fort Riley, KS. No I don't, I don't know that for certain. So I guess I'm going to have to go with George and Cara and say it's the bison one all.
S: Right. And Bob, I was so.
B: Happy when I saw the Spanish fluke. I'm like, yes, I know it's not from Spain. I some from some other country. And then everybody seemed to say, oh, we all know it's from the United States and like it is. I didn't I didn't know that I told it. So thanks for the info and thanks and thanks to you guys for picking George first. So that's good. So the other thing, I'm kind of really bummed now that I wasn't looking out that plane window because I think Jay was glued to the window and he saw that there was a lot, he saw bison. So he's like, all right, that's science. And I think I think he didn't see a lot of windmills. So that's why he that's why he picked the the windmill. So I'm going to go with that. How could I not go with that? So that's fiction. Oh boy.
S: They're wind turbines turbines.
B: Windmills, turbines, Let's.
US#05: Start with the third one well.
S: 1st we have to pull the audience. Yes, all right. So I'm going to do the George thing, but you're going to go, you're going to follow me. Look at my eyes only. All right, If you think that the bison is the fiction clap, If you think that the wind is the fiction clap. And if you think that the Spanish flu is the fiction clap. OK, So the audience thinks the like the the wind turbines the audience.
US#05: Is going J&B boy? Yeah.
S: So let's take these in reverse the order since nobody went for the third one on the panel. Very minority of the audience. The incorrectly named Spanish Flu of 1918 started in Fort Riley, KS, from which it spread to the rest of the world.
B: Would you be pissed if you were in Spain and they named this deadly? Oh yeah. Now. Scourge after the country you lived in. It is.
S: True that it did not come from Spain. Do you know why they was called the Spanish Flu? Nobody.
B: Else is reporting right because. There's World War One. I'm. Not going to fess up, no.
S: Country wanted to report their their mortality numbers because that would make them look weak and Spain didn't care. So they accurately they were the only ones to accurately report their numbers. So it looked like there was a lot of cases in Spain and not so much everywhere else. But it was a total lie. So it got called the Spanish flu for that reason. It did originate in the United States, but where in the United could could have come from anywhere in the United States right. That's the question.
J: That's what I point.
S: Very easy just to say, OK, I'll make it Kansas, right? This one is. Science.
J: Did come from Kansas. Did you guys did everybody here know? No.
U: Yeah.
S: The my understanding is that Fort Riley is a town, right? It's not. It probably was a Fort at some point. But so they came from camp something. I actually forgot them camp something in Fort Riley. And yes, it was primarily spread through soldiers because it was World War One. That's what made it so bad. So that one is true. Let's go back to #2 wind accounts for 52% of electricity production in Kansas, the third highest state in the US Bob and Jay and the majority, the vast majority of the audience who are from Kansas, apparently think this one is the fiction and this one is science.
US#02: Oh Dang, no, I thought. We had it, man.
S: 52.
US#02: Percent.
S: What are the two states that are higher? Iowa, North Dakota, Those are the 2 that are higher. But yeah, Iowa's number one. Yeah, there's a lot of a lot of wind in Kansas. Well, to answer Everett's question, you know you can't use wind turbines during a tornado, I didn't think.
C: So.
S: Nor in just If the wind gets too brisk, you have to shut them down. You can. Use them once you've. Got to shut those things down if the wind gets too hurricane, any kind of like really stormy kind of weather. No, they got to.
C: All those Kansas hurricanes. Yeah, I.
E: Wasn't implying that you'd, you know, Yeah, a lot of electricity. Let's get more tornadoes going. I was just saying that you don't realize how, you know the conditions of the place you're going. You also.
C: Realize tornadoes aren't just a function of like lots of wind, right? It doesn't just get so windy it becomes a tornado. I get that doesn't doesn't work, but yeah.
S: There are a lot of flat states in the Midwest that have a lot of wind turbines. You know, Oklahoma, that's, and I was in Oklahoma. I was in Oklahoma, I was in Oklahoma and giving a lecture and there's wind turbines everywhere. Now, of course, Oklahoma's a very RedState. So the not in the cities. When you're in a city, it's like any other city anywhere else, right? But it's the rural areas that are very regional in terms of their beliefs and culture and politics and stuff. The population in Oklahoma believes that their dramatic increase in earthquake frequency is due to the wind turbines. Sure, not due to the fracking, which is actually what's causing it, because that's what they were told. And then it's those damn wind turbines. All right? You should.
E: Go attack them that.
S: Means that there is a large population of bison in Kansas, and while they may appear docile, there are score of reported attacks and injuries per year. Is the fiction now? What about it is fiction? Are there a lot of bison in Kansas? Yes, there are, but a lot. What's a lot is for the population is 5000 to 6000. A lot. That's a sizable herd. Some a lot of them are in private herds, but some of them are not. But then they are not docile. They are dangerous wild animals. Anybody here play the game Medieval dynasty? Yeah. So there are medieval bison, not bison there. I could what they call them. There are similar creatures in there. They will run at you and kill you. They are really dangerous in the game. And that's very accurate in.
C: Oregon Trail. They help you cross the trail.
S: Almost forgot. About that game. Defining.
E: My childhood. So are these just like protected somehow or are there?
C: Yeah, there probably just isn't that much human conflict with.
US#05: Them so the there had there's zero.
C: Injuries per year I think, I guess.
S: Because people who are around them know not to get near them. The last reported injury was from 2022, so 3 years ago. So not score per year. Yeah. But again, like that kind of number, like you could sound reasonable and particularly if they're on private farms and all that, like the people who work there know what they know what they're doing. Yeah, yeah.
J: Are there any bison in the audience? Is there? Do we have anybody here see a bison in Kansas? Do bison moo. Maybe bison?
C: Move some noise, bison moo.
S: No, somebody mooed in.
C: The honor, I'm just saying they.
E: Must have some.
S: Kind of. They make noise, some kind of noise, yeah. But it's not.
C: It's not. I wouldn't call it a moo.
US#05: Not mowing, no, they licked. Your salt off your car get too close.
S: All right, so good job to the non novellas up here and like 3 people in the audience.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:52:15)
"I may have discovered a planet, but the real achievement is the inspiration it provides to future generations. "
– - Clyde Tombaugh, (description of author)
S: Yay, Evan, give us a quote.
E: I may have discovered a planet.
S: But the real achievement is the inspiration it provides to future.
E: Generations Clyde Tombaugh, who is the discoverer of the planet Pluto, the dwarf planet Pluto the dwarf. Got to put that in brackets.
S: Now in the quote the.
E: Planet.
S: Scare quotes.
C: Who? Who?
S: Studied. Here at the University of Kansas. University of Kansas alumnus.
E: So that is why we chose the quote to honour him. Thank you, Evan. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Yeah, you guys see you.
S: Thank you all for coming.
US#05: And thanks to all the.
S: Kansans.
U: Is that how is the Kansans? Is that?
S: Correct. Good. We're kineticutions. I love that. Yeah. Thanks to all the Kansans for your wonderful hospitality since we've been here. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Thanks, guys. Nice.
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- ↑ www.sixthtone.com: China’s NeuroWorm Inches Its Way Toward Brain Disorder Breakthroughs
- ↑ www.nature.com: One mother for two species via obligate cross-species cloning in ants
- ↑ phys.org: An exploding black hole could reveal the foundations of the universe
- ↑ en.wikipedia.org: Cultish - Wikipedia
- ↑ uk.news.yahoo.com: "It's Junk Science" — People Are Sharing The Things That Are Actually Pseudoscience That Most People Just Take As Fact - Yahoo News UK
- ↑ www.nbcboston.com: Man, 34, has tooth implanted in eye to restore his vision – NBC Boston
- ↑ pharmaceutical-journal.com: The history of snake oil - The Pharmaceutical Journal
- ↑ www.space.com: Scientists find evidence of flowing water on Ryugu’s ancient parent asteroid. 'It was a genuine surprise!'
- ↑ No reference given
- ↑ No reference given
- ↑ No reference given