SGU Episode 575
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| SGU Episode 575 |
|---|
| July 16th 2016 |
 |
| (brief caption for the episode icon) |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Guest |
D: David Banachuk |
| Quote of the Week |
It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth; on the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous--> |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| Forum Discussion |
Introduction[edit]
You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, July 13th, 2016, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...
B: Hey, everybody!
S: Cara Santa Maria...
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella...
J: Hey guys.
S: ...and Evan Bernstein.
E: Evening, folks.
S: And we have a special guest rogue this week, David Bednatchuk. David, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.
DB: G'day.
E: Where are you from, Dave?
DB: From Australia. Well, I'm Polish-Australian, I guess, just to explain my strange accent, yeah. And yeah, I met you guys when you deigned to come to Australia for the second time at the skeptic conference, so that was great.
E: It was a great time.
J: So that was in 2014. You know what else we did in 2014, guys? We went to WETA Workshop. We met David and Leonard that work there, and we got a behind-the-scenes tour, and for no damn good reason, I just want to thank the people at WETA for taking us on the most spectacular geek experience of my entire life. Thank you, WETA, and everything about you. I love you.
C: WETA, why didn't you bring me? Why didn't you know that I was going to join The Skeptic's Guide?
S: Next time. Next time, Cara.
C: Guys, guess where I went? Yesterday? No, two days ago, on a really fun tour.
B: Australia?
C: The Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
B: Oh, my God.
C: Yeah, it was really, really fun. My friend Holly is an optics engineer there, and so she took a small group of our friends on a tour, and we got to go to the Mars yard, and we got to go to mission control, and it was really cool.
S: It sounds awesome.
B: Wow, that sounds fantastic.
J: I have to do that. So mission control, this is-
C: This is the mission control at JPL. So anytime you've ever seen on NASA TV a JPL mission that is going into orbit or entering the atmosphere, if you watched the Curiosity landing and you saw everybody celebrating in mission control, that's where we were.
E: Cool.
J: Because I think we have a listener that works there named Ben Honey. Did you meet him?
C: Maybe. I did not meet Ben Honey, but there were a few guys in mission control when we looked, and they were monitoring Juno, and they were monitoring Voyager. It was very cool.
S: David, tell me a little bit about your involvement with the Skeptical Movement.
Interview with David Banachuk(2:26)[edit]
DB: I think I can actually pinpoint my start in skepticism. At university, on the library shelf, the library magazine shelf, had this Skeptical Enquirer copy there, and I'd never seen this, and I picked it up, and the one thing I remember from it is this cartoon with a chiropractor standing in front of a flip board or something, and it had buttocks and an elbow, and it's pointing ass and elbow to the wrong part of the anatomy, and he's lecturing from it, and he says a chiropractor, and I said, are you allowed to say that? What is this? Gradually from that, I started subscribing to Skeptical Enquirer, and on and on down the rabbit hole.
S: Let me ask you another question, David. Have you ever encountered a poisonous snake in Australia?
DB: Yes, it was at a children's party, and all the kids were running around, and suddenly they congregate in one spot in the front yard, and they were like, kids, what are you looking at? Oh, there's a snake, and it was one of these brown snakes that'll kill you if it bites you. So this is one of the very few times that I'd come across a snake. We don't trip over them on the footpath or anything like that, but we called the snake man, and we were expecting some sort of professional sort of rugged up in hazmat gear or something, and this guy in shorts and flip-flops arrives, and by then the snake had escaped into some bushes or rocks or something, and he just dives into the bush in his flip-flops, and he starts pulling these rocks apart. It seemed very casual, but yeah, you can just sort of look in the phone book, and then the snake man comes.
J: And he's like, yeah, I put mustard on them, I eat them, they don't bother me nothing. He shows up.
C: Well, just to be really pedantic for a second, maybe you could put mustard on them and eat them because they're not actually poisonous, they're venomous.
S: They're venomous.
J: Don't even get with the words, okay?
C: I had to.
S: I asked you that, David, because by coincidence this past weekend, I had my first encounter with a venomous snake in Connecticut. We only have two venomous snakes in Connecticut, the copperhead and the timber rattlesnake. So I was clearing out an area between my yard and the woods. My house is surrounded on two sides by woods, and I was there with my younger daughter. We were clearing out an area that we want to build a garden in, and then I see this very large snake, like a three-foot snake, and I'm about two feet from it. I'm like, I have no problem with snakes. I love snakes. I think they're beautiful. It was a very, very pretty snake. I'm like, oh, that's a very pretty snake. I wonder what kind of snake it is. I've never seen that before, so I'm trying to run it through my very limited data set of snakes. I'm like, oh, it's not a garter snake. It's not a rat snake. It's not a milk snake. I get a close look at it, and I'm like, God, that head is suspiciously copper colored. I took a picture of it with my phone and positively identified it. It's absolutely 100% a copperhead, which is actually a very rare snake. It's a rare thing to encounter.
J: Yeah, but what happened is you texted it to all of us, right, Steve?
S: Yeah, yeah.
J: So then I forwarded it to a friend of mine who used to run the Connecticut Snake Legion or whatever. The guy's a snake expert friend of mine. So he's like, oh, my God, that's a beautiful picture. I write it back, and I go, yeah, Steve just took this in his yard, and he wrote back, oh, my God, tell Steve, don't go near. He's like, if it bites you, your hand will get necrotic, and it can't kill you, but it can kill your dog. He just spills all of this Danger Will Robertson crap out. So then I call Steve. I'm like, Steve, get the hell out of there. Steve's like, I know what the hell it is. I'm showing you an awesome picture I took of the thing. So anyway, but the bottom line is, Steve, you have to get that snake removed from your yard.
S: Yeah, I know.
C: Do you have a source of water? Because it's an aquatic snake, right?
S: No, it's not. It's a woodland snake. It does like to be near wetland, but it's not technically a water snake. It likes underbrush. And then in retrospect, looking at that part of my yard, it's like a perfect snake habitat. It's perfect. So number one is I have to really finish cleaning it out, so it's not. But here's the other thing. In our neighborhood in the last few years, especially this year, we have-
B: Three kids have died?
S: No. There is an absolute population boom of all rodent species. So we have tons of chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, and mice just running rampant around.
J: Why?
S: I don't know. Our dog used to do some population control in our yard, but he's just too old and arthritic now. He's not doing his job. So I actually wouldn't mind having a snake in the yard.
E: So adopt a snake?
S: I wouldn't mind it. But not that one.
C: You want a different snake.
S: Yeah. A rat snake would be perfect.
C: Go get yourself a rat snake.
S: But the other problem is we feed the birds and we inadvertently feed all the rodents too.
J: That's why you have an explosion of little guys that run around grabbing seeds because you're feeding-
S: I know. What am I to do? Not to have a bird feeder? But it's not just my yard. It's the whole neighborhood. Like my wife and I go on a walk. I literally counted 11 rabbits just walking around the block. They're adorable, of course. But the thing is, we also, there were reports of hunting bands of coyotes. So the coyote population is also exploding in Connecticut and they're attracted to this small game. So that's why I told my wife, we've got to do some population control here. I don't know what to do. But I mean, either we need to get a new dog or get an outside cat. We have indoor cats because we don't want them eating all the birds.
J: Steve, stop feeding the birds.
C: But then he can't bird watch.
S: Yeah, you've got to feed the birds.
J: Watch TV or something. I mean, come on.
E: We need to be more like Australia where species never take over the environment like this.
S: I wouldn't mind leaving it for a couple of months just to eat some chipmunks and then
J: Yeah, kill your dog though, Steve. Don't do it. You know, the people that will come take it, they're not going to kill it. They'll move it or they'll put it in to a sanctuary or something like it's the best thing to do, man.
S: I also found for 20 bucks, you can get a snake trap and that is humane and then you could release it somewhere in the woods. So I may do that as well.
J: Have David give you the name of the snake guy.
S: The snake guy with the flip-flops?
DB: The guy with the flip-flops, he's a pro.
B: You need to buy a hunter-killer robot snake. Oh, they don't make those yet.
E: You can dream, Bob. You can dream.
What's the Word (9:19)[edit]
- Apoptosis
S: All right, Cara, What's the Word this week?
C: Ooh! The word this week, I think, is a really good one. It's a word that I used very often in my research. And it's a word that was sent in by Horhay in San Diego, who just recently came across it.
S: So, Cara, before you tell us the word, you're somebody who says off-ten (often).
C: Oh yeah?
E: Oh no! You're gonna call her out for that?
S: I've never noticed
C: What's wrong with off-ten?
S: Nothing, it's just wrong. It's actually not wrong.
(Evan laughs)
C: Wait
S: It is a
C: You say off-in?
S: Off-in, yeah.
C: It's off-ten. (Laughs)
S: It's both, both are acceptable.
C: Wait, anything you guys don't say forward, do you?
B: Yeah
S: Forward? Yeah.
B: Forward
E: Forward – foe-ward
C: Foe-ward, I know east-coasters, and they all say foe-ward.
J: Yeah, yeah.
E: Drop that R ...
C: Yeah
J: Well, we also say but-in instead of butt-in (button).
C: Butt-in, yeah. And I say butt-in, and I say skeleton.
J: Skeletin
C: But that's 'cause I was a singer. I have a weird mix, because I was both a Texan and a singer, and so I really enunciate everything.
J: David, wait, David, say the word button.
DB: But-ton
J: All right, he used the T.
C: Yeah
J: Say the word off-in.
DB: Off-in
J: Yeah, all right.
DB: Wait, wait! I'll say it properly. Ofin
(Cara laughs)
J: Okay, so
C: I
J: Cara, I
C: say off-tin
J: you're out-voted. You can't say it that way any more.
C: Nope, gonna say if forever. Also, this next word
E: Yeah! Cara! Rage against the system!
C: Interestingly, as per most of the words that I choose for What's the Word, there is some
B: Multiple pronunciations.
C: debate around how to pronounce this word.
E: Naw!
J: Go ahead.
C: How do you pronounce it, Steve?
S: Apoptosis
B: Yeah
C: You say ay-pop-tosis.
S: Yes
B: Absolutely
C: I say ay-pop-tosis! Steve and I agree on something! We say apoptosis! Most people say aa-pop-tosis.
S: No, it's ay-pop-tosis.
C: Trust me, I think it's “ay” also, but I looked it up, and almost every pronunciation online is aa-pop-tosis.
J: Ay!
B: What the hell?
C: It hurt my brain when I realized that. That said, I'm not changing the way I say it. Also, there's a
S: Me neither
C: whole other pronunciation that we will get to in a minute. Okay, so I'm gonna keep saying ay-pop-tosis, cause that's how I say it. Apoptosis is also known as programmed cell death. It's a normal, and healthy genetically determined process where damaged or excessive cells, or unwanted cells by the body are systematically kind of killed off, specifically, what happens, is the DNA in the nucleus of the cell actually fragments in response to a specific trigger. And either that's usually a chemical stimulus, or it's when a suppressing stimulus is removed, or damaged.
So, when apoptosis doesn't work correctly, it can actually lead to tumor growth, and therefore cancer. We often talk about apoptosis in direct opposition to necrosis, which is unprogrammed cell death. So, necrosis is cell death that happens because of disease, or because of damage. Apoptosis is cell death that happens on purpose, the body programs the cells to die in order to maintain certain types of processes moving smoothly.
The first authors to use the term, and actually developed the term, were Kurr, Wielie, and Curie, in their 1972 British Journal of Cancer publication. Apoptosis: A Basic Biological Phenomenon With Wide-Ranging Implications in Tissue Kinetics. And they described it as a hitherto little recognized mechanism of controlled cell deletion, which appears to play a complementary, but opposite role to mitosis in the regulation of animal cell populations.
But here's something really interesting: They described the actual pronunciation in their paper, because they coined the term, and none of us are pronouncing it right. Are you guys ready?
S: Yeah
E: Yep!
C:
”We are most grateful to professor James Cormack of the Department of Greek University of Aberdeen for suggesting this term. The word apoptosis is used in Greek to describe the dropping off or falling off of petals from flowers, or leaves from trees. To show this derivation clearly, we propose that the stress should be on the pnultimate syllable
So far, so good.
The second half of the word being pronounced like tosis, with the P silent, which comes from the same root 'to fall,' and is already used to describe drooping of the upper eyelid.”
So actually,
E: Ay-po-tosis?
C: Aa-po-tosis, not
S: Ay-po-tosis
C: Aa-po-tosis, yep! And apparently, there are some pedantic professors out there who really push this. I've seen so many online forums about it. But most people still pronounce is aa-pop-tosis and / or ay-pop-tosis. So, I guess, pick you poison.
S: Yeah, I mean, definitely, P-T-O-S-I-S is tosis.
C: Yeah!
S: No question about that.
C: That's funny.
S: That's tosis. That's like, droopy eyelids, right? If you have one – if your eyelid's droopy, that's ptosis.
C: Yeah, so ay-po-tosis is the P-O-E kind of thinking of it that way, is technically the pronunciation
S: Yeah
C: that was intended by the authors. But we have all seen what happens with the JIF / GIF debates,
S: Yeah
C: so, sometimes that not necessarily pan out.
(Evan chuckles)
S: Yeah, I've always one hundred percent of the time heard ay-pop-tosis,
C: Me too!
S: but that could also be regional. It's also institution and regional dependent. So that's just what I've been exposed to in the northeast.
E: Yeah, more off-ten than not.
C: Guys, I'm always interested in this. You should Tweet and let us know how you've pronounced the word in your intro bio, or your cell bio classes.
S: And as you said, apoptosis is critical to developing, and to maintaining subpopulations. But also, it's been identified as the cause of some diseases, inappropriately triggering apoptosis can be a cause of certain degenerative diseases.
C: Yeah, we'd all have cancer,
E: Cancer
C: we'd all be riddled with cancer if we didn't have it,
E: More so.
C: apoptosis. Yeah.
S: And also, just developmentally, like, the reason why your fingers separate. You know, initially, there's webbing between the fingers, then there's programmed cell death to separate them.
J: Are you telling me that if that didn't happen, I could swim like Aqua Man?
S: Yes, that's what I'm saying. That's the take-home, Jay, yeah.
J: Apoptosis can go screw itself, man!
C: (Laughs) Yeah!
News Items[edit]
Solar Panel Impact(15:24)[edit]
S: All right, Jay, tell us about the environmental impact of ground-based solar panels.
J: I swear, I remember thinking about this when I first saw one of those giant solar arrays, like, “Guys, it's producing a lot of shade! Doesn't that have some type of impact?” Solar panels are cool! That's the title I gave this news item. And Cara, you will find out soon why I say that.
As the world moves away from what? Fossil fuels, and all that crap that we're putting into the atmosphere, and we head towards renewable energy. And no one is more excited than me. I love seeing countries like Germany completely kick ass with their renewable energy.
We have scientists that are now looking at the impact of things like wind mills and solar panels on the environment, right? So you build a huge wind mill farm, and people were saying at one point, “It's killing birds,” or “It's making vibrations or noise,” this, that and the other thing. And it turns out those are safe, and they're highly effective.
And solar panels, well you put them down, they're covering a lot of ground, and it makes shade, and there's a lot of impact on ecosystems. But it's pretty cool, because this is actually very good news. In a recent study, environmental scientists at Lancaster University, and the Center for Ecology and Hydrology (Bob, that means it's about water), spent a year (Jay and Cara chuckle) spent a year monitoring a solar park near Swindon that's in Southwest England.
The solar parks in studies were found to have an impact on the local climate because solar panels create shade, and they also absorb and convert solar energy; and they found that there was a five degree Centigrade cooling effect under the study panels during the summer months.
So of course, the results were, on a spectrum depending on the time of year, time of day, and all that stuff. But I guess during the hottest months, they can really say there was a five degree Centigrade cooling effect.
These temperature changes definitely have an impact on the biological processes, like how fast or slow plants grow, or what plants were growing, and the scientists, they want to figure out not only the impact of the solar parks, but how to use the information, how to optimize all the future projects that are coming, right? Researchers know that the world is about to build millions, or spend billions or tens of billions of dollars building solar parks, and we need to know what impact are they gonna have on all different kinds of environments.
The researchers published a paper called, “Solar Park Microclimate and Vegetation Management Effects on Grass and Carbon Cycling.” Now I wrote them and said, “Could you please shorten that title?” And they wrote back and said, “Go screw yourself.” But I still think my title is, “Solar Panels are Cool,” is better than ...
(Cara laughs)
J: The results were published in the journal, Environmental Research Letters. So one other cool thing to think about here: Studies like this are gonna not only give us and land owners, farmers, and people managing solar parks, people that are growing crops; it's gonna give us information to learn things about, for example, “Would the presence of solar panels allow us to grow crops that can't thrive, say, in full sunlight in a specific region?” Which they say, “Yes, they would. The shade that they provide would allow different types of crops to be grown in areas that they can't be grown in today.”
And also, solar panels can actually collect water in arid areas. So they could use them to collect water, and then use them to water crops! So they're actually collecting sunlight and water, which makes them wonderful.
S: You mean, like, dew? The precipitation?
J: Yeah! Yeah! So I put it to you, Bob, and David, and Evan ...
E: What?
J: How cool are solar panels?
S: Five degrees, cool?
J: Come on!
(Cara laughs)
DB: I can see why they did this study in England, because they need all the sunlight they can get at.
E: That's for sure.
DB: Anything that blocks that out, they really notice it. 'Cause they only get one month of it a year.
S: We could power the whole world with a patch of solar panels in the middle of Australia.
J: Maybe.
E: Why don't we do that!
B: Yeah, right!
J: Maybe.
C: We have a really big patch out here in the Mohave. I drove by them on the way to camping. They're beautiful!
J: But I think it's better, instead of doing that, Steve, 'cause you gotta think about distribution and all that, like, electricity is not easy to transport over long distances.
S: Yeah
J: We need solar panels everywhere! They gotta be everywhere! We have to have a total distributed network.
B: We need them in space!
E: That's right, we need ...
B: In space!
E: a Dyson sphere of solar ...
J: But Bob, how are you gonna beam the energy down?
B: Microwaves!
S: But not on roads.
J: No.
E: No, no. No. (Cara laughs) Interesting idea, but not gonna happen.
C: I think they're trying it again, by the way.
S: Oh, sure, they're goin' ahead.
(Cara chuckles)
E: Yeah.
Ancient Supernovae(20:17)[edit]
(Two supernovae had several effects on the Earth millions of years ago)
S: Well, speaking of sunlight, Bob, tell us the effect of ancient supernova on Earth's biology.
B: So yeah, this is pretty interesting. Recent computer models suggest that effects from radiation from two relatively nearby supernovas millions of years ago were more substantial than previously thought and could have long-term consequences for the climate. We all know what supernovas are, how powerful they are, and potentially very scary. But generally, when you think about it, you feel pretty safe since pretty much everyone we see, or exactly everyone we see, are many thousands or millions of light years away. So you feel pretty safe. To be truly screwed by a supernova, you'd have to be about 25 or 26 light years away, any closer than that, and we're really in trouble. But we're starting to get hints that we could be very lightly screwed by supernovas that are much farther away, on the order of hundreds of light years away, and still can have a very interesting and dramatic effect. So this particular story started in April of 2016, earlier this year. Researchers published very good, solid, ironclad evidence that two supernovas exploded relatively close to Earth millions of years ago. One was about 2.5 million years ago. The other was about 7.5 million years ago. Weirdly, they were both nine solar masses and approximately 300 light years away. Kind of odd that they were exactly the same size and distance. And this was cool as well. They came to this conclusion from deposits of iron-60. Iron-60 is a radioactive form of iron. Did you know that there was such a thing as radioactive iron?
J: No, I didn't.
B: I had not heard about that. I can't imagine if Iron Man's suit was made of that. But I digress. Iron-60 deposits are important because they are seen as compelling evidence for nearby supernova explosions. Because of those two studies, Brian Thomas from Washburn University in Kansas and colleagues from the U.S. and Europe decided they wanted to model the effects on Earth's climate and biota of such supernovas just to see what would really happen. Let's really take a deep dive on what would happen because of a supernova that close. And their findings surprised them. One of the researchers said, I was surprised to see as much effect as there was. I was expecting there to be very little effect at all. The supernovas were pretty far away, more than 300 light years. That's not really close. So what are they talking about? Why were they surprised? Well, if you were there during that time, during one of these supernovas, you would have noticed it visibly. At night, there would be like a bluish light in the sky. And that lasted for several weeks. If you were diurnal, you may have even had your sleep patterns disrupted because of that light. It was so bright.
J: Diurnal?
B: Yeah. Active during the day, sleep during the night.
J: Oh, okay. Yeah, got it. All right.
DB: As opposed to crepuscular.
C: Which was the word of the day just a few weeks ago, right?
J: Very cool.
E: Yeah.
B: So the most surprising effect seen in their model, though, was not the visible light, but the invisible radiation. So the radiation in this context means increased cosmic rays from the supernovas. And cosmic rays, we've mentioned them many times. You may remember they're energetic charged particles coming from space basically. The researchers found an order of magnitude increase in cosmic rays in their models. And when these cosmic rays interact with the atmosphere, they create these secondary particles. Most importantly, muons, which I'm now pronouncing correctly, you might notice.
C: Yeah.
B: So muons are essentially fat electrons. Or is that not PC? Is it maybe corpulent electrons?
E: Rubenesque.
B: They are negatively charged. They have a mass 207 times greater than an electron. Pretty beefy. So look at a square meter of floor or ground right now. In one minute, 10,000 muons go through that space. So a good chunk of muons are going through there. And really you don't need to worry about them. They generally just go through you and everything, even rock. But considering there's so many of them, the very little amount of damage that they do does accumulate a little bit. Now imagine 10 times as many cosmic rays hitting our atmosphere. And they would then in turn create 20 times the amount of secondary muons. So that's about 200,000 muons per minute going through each square meter instead of 10,000. So you've got a big jump in muon production very close to the ground. And so basically that many muons essentially tripled the radiation dose each terrestrial and many aquatic animals received because of these supernovas. Tripled the radiation dose. Now imagine that happening for 1,000 years. And that's what they think happened. It's pretty much like a CT scan for everything, everything alive every year. But that's – it's just one CT scan a year. That's not devastating. But it could have meant that cancer rates increased worldwide as well as mutation rates, which means what? If you increase mutation rates, then you have…
S: Cancer.
E: Cancer.
S: Evolution.
J: Cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers, right Bob?
B: Yeah, right.
E: And cancer.
B: So yeah, cancer, which I already mentioned. But yes, it basically speeds up evolution. So who knows what impact it had on evolution by accelerating it a little bit. So there you go. There's the animal, the effects on the animals on the earth. But that wasn't the only impact at all. So remember those muons. They and the cosmic rays that spawned them were in great abundance at that time, like I said, especially in the lower atmosphere. What's the lower atmosphere called?
S: Troposphere.
B: Yes, the troposphere. So those particles mess not only with biology but the atmosphere itself as well. I mean we're talking about ionized particles. They rip apart molecules. They tear electrons away from atoms. Basically, it's ionizing the lower atmosphere and it's ionizing the atmosphere to a level eight times greater than it is today. And it did that for a thousand years. So you've got a troposphere that is much more ionized than usual for an extended period of time. So what does that mean? Well, it's hard to say.
E: Cell phones won't work?
B: But there were some interesting possibilities that are being discussed because it may be a coincidence but there was a lot of climate change going on at this time. Africa was getting drier and drier, totally drying out. The savannas were replacing forests. And also at this time, glaciation periods started happening. This is like the birth of glaciation essentially happening repeatedly and repeatedly over and over like we see for many, many thousands and thousands of years today. Pretty interesting. They still have lots more studying to do to really see if there's a connection to climate change. But it seems it's pretty clear though that even supernovas though that are hundreds of light years away, there's nothing obviously to take lightly even in terms of just pure radiation damage. So interesting stuff. So I'm curious to see how this pans out as more research is done.
DB: How does it make you feel guys when you learn about these worldwide massive events happening in Earth's history? Then you sort of think of this blip on the history of the Earth that is human civilization. If anything like that were to happen right now, would we be wiped out with any one of these things that we are increasingly counting across the Earth's history?
B: Yeah, some of it is intimidating but it's important to know that a lot of the things we talk about, these catastrophic things that are happening on the Earth, like even this one, they generally take – they act slowly. They take a long time and you probably wouldn't even notice it if it was happening. But of course there are those few things that are absolutely catastrophic and quick like an asteroid impact, which is actually one of the things we could actually do something about but we're not really taking it as seriously as we can. But other things like if there were a supernova 10 light years away or a gamma ray burst that was really close, that is nothing you could do. Absolutely nothing you could do, not with modern technology for sure. So you just got to look at the odds and the odds are so remote that I just don't even think about it.
J: Well, you're right. First of all, that's an amazingly scary thing and I think as we learn more and more about the universe, we realize just how insanely deadly it is and it could be instantaneous. That freaks me out. Elon Musk wants humanity to be multi-planetary and I would love it if we had people out of our solar system as well. It's time to really think about this stuff because not only do we have the understanding but we can actually see the possibility of doing it in another 50 to 100 years.
C: I don't know about leaving the solar system.
B: Yeah, it's a little more dramatic.
J: No, Cara, it's fine because if they put virtual reality headsets on them, they're going to be fine, trust me. And we have those.
S: What if they get motion sick from them?
C: I know.
E: That's what drama means for.
J: We'll selectively breed humans to not be sick like that.
S: VR compatible humans.
J: You won't make the cut.
E: There you go.
B: If you get motion sick, you shouldn't even be an astronaut. Stay home.
DB: Hey, aren't they all on scopolamine or something up there? You guys talked about this. You guys had a segment on all the drugs that astronauts –
B: Who remembers?
J: I like how he said we, right? We talked – I mean you guys talked about this. You're all there with us every week.
C: And remember things way better than we do.
Kubrick Moon Landing Hoax (30:07)[edit]
S: Have you guys, you guys have heard about the Moon-landing hoax conspiracy ...
B: God ...
S: nonsense, right?
B: Ridiculous!
C: Of course!
S: We've talked about it many times ...
B: The lamest grand conspiracy out there I think.
S: Yeah ...
E: But it just won't go away, will it?
S: One of them. Have you heard about the connection with Stanley Kubrick?
B: Oh yeah.
J: Of course! Yeah!
E: Oh, yes!
B: I read your blog!
J: What is it? Say it real quick so I can know, Steve.
S: Yeah, so, just because big stories tend to attach themselves to famous people, right? So there's a conspiracy theory going around there that Stanley Kubrick (the film director who I am a particular fan of), was the director who created the fake Moon landing video. So of course, right? If you're gonna fake a Moon landing, you're gonna get a famous director ...
E: 2001
S: whose absence would be completely noticed by the entire industry, (Cara laughs) and you couldn't just get rid of afterwards, you know? As opposed to using some unknown director who you could then off ...
E: (Chuckling) Bump off in the back!
S: Bump off, yeah, once everything is done. Or just pay him enough to shut him up, or whatever. So this takes a silly conspiracy theory and adds an even sillier angle to it that just makes it even more ridiculous. I'm talking about it because Kubrick's daughter, Vivian Kubrick, lashed out at the Moon hoaxers recently. I guess she gets harassed a lot by them.
So she wrote an open letter to Moon hoax conspiracy theorists. Let me quote you from that. She says, “My father's artistic works are his unimpeachable offence.” Essentially, she's arguing that his life work is that of a man who was very much against a totalitarian government hiding secrets from their populus. He would never have cooperated in this sort of cover up.
She goes on, “Finally, my love for my father notwithstanding, I actually knew him. I lived and worked with him. So forgive my harshness when I state categorically: The so-called 'truth' these malicious cranks persist in forwarding, that my father conspired with the US government to fake the Moon landings, is manifestly a grotesque lie.”
I find that interesting. So she obviously, she knew her father, she worked with her father. She knows he didn't do this, right? From personal knowledge. He didn't disappear for months conspiring with NASA to fake the Moon landing. Interestingly, when I wrote about this, somebody noted in the comments that Vivian Kubrick was a Scientologist, and she's a bit of a crank herself.
B: Oof.
E: She's got some interesting notions ...
S: Right, right. Okay, I get that. That's irrelevant to the point though. I'm not citing her as any kind of authority on anything. Her personal knowledge her own father, all other things notwithstanding. But in any case, you guys also remember the Newton shooting, right? And there was a conspiracy ...
E: Of course.
S: that it was a false flag operation, that no kids were actually killed; and we have a personal connection to that. Evan, you and I and Jay, I think, to a lesser extent; we know of a family; the mother was there while the shooter was in the school. They had several kids in the school ...
E: Two kids.
S: Yeah, I think three total. One was there at the time, and two were not in the school at the time.
E: Right. Yeah.
S: And the husband was a first responder!
E: Yes, he was.
S: And saw the bodies. And this is somebody that we've known personally for years!
J: Since high school ...
S: They're not crisis actors, right? We know these people!
J: Absolutely!
E: I was just with the family again two weeks ago.
S: Yeah.
J: But also, Steve, it's not just we know those people. We know a lot of people in the community. I mean, I was living in the town when it happened. I was living in Newton, Connecticut when it happened.
S: And Sandy Hook, in Sandy Hook, not just Newton. Yeah. There's definitely a problem with the way these kind of grand conspiracy theorists think. They have a thought disorder. They have a difficult relationship with reality. They're trapped in a number of mental pitfalls. One is the JAQing off, where they're “Just asking questions?”
E: Excuse me? Oh.
(Cara laughs)
S: You heard that term?
J: That's not okay now?
B: I love it!
C: (Laughs) Is there another word for that?
S: J-A-Q-i-n-g? No, I think it's perfect. (Rogues laugh) So we're just asking questions! You know, I'm curious? Why are there no stars in the background of the pictures? 'Cause you don't know anything about photography. That's why.
E: Or don't know how to look up the answer.
S: How come before the Apollo missions, the scientists involved were hunting for Moon rocks in Antarctica? 'Cause they wanted to know what Moon rocks are made of? I mean, they just cast sinister cast on these innocent either coincidences, or things that are not immediately explained, because as if you would know every tiny little detail of how a complex organization operates, or how a complex event unfolded, you know? Like the police caught some guy walking in the woods outside the school at Sandy Hook. What was he doing there? Who the hell knows!
The fact that there's some guy wandering around in the woods is not in and of itself unusual or curious. It's the kind of thing that you would expect to happen when you canvas an area and look for anything unusual going on. You're gonna find unusual things going on.
But the confidence that they have that this is all evidence of a conspiracy is really interesting. And I do think that it does take on another layer when you are personally involved, when you have personal knowledge that they're wrong. You know absolutely that they're wrong, but you can see how... they really are very much like children looking at the world.
They are kind of mystified by reality, if you know what I mean. And they say they “investigate” things, they don't really do any investigation. They don't talk to the people involved. They're not doing any journalism. They're never doing any kind of investigation that would actually uncover the truth.
Like the people who believe in the Sandy Hook conspiracy, they didn't talk to any of the people in the town, or the family, 'cause if they had, if they had done actual investigation, it would become immediately apparent that this was a real event that actually happened ...
E: They hunt for ...
S: touched the lives of many, many people, in a web that you cannot unmesh from reality.
E: They hunt for clues that support their ...
S: Yeah
E: their position that they're ... the results they're looking to get.
B: Not just clues, anomalies.
S: Yeah, they're anomaly-hunting on the internet. Yeah. I love the Mitchin web video, where they have the people in the back room planning the Moon hoax, and it turns out, they say, “Well, we have to build a huge rocket, because otherwise people won't believe we got to the Moon! (Bob laughs) We need to show them a huge rocket.” So if we still have all the cost of building a rocket capable of going to the Moon, what money are we saving?
It's like, “Well, we won't have to cater it.” (Rogues laugh) “Actually, it will cost us more to cater the film crew, than just to feed three astronauts for a couple weeks.” So that actually will cost them more ...
B: Right.
S: But, yeah. It's perfect satire which shows you, when you think about it, how ridiculous the whole thing is. Or, the best one is, if they faked it in order to have one over on the Soviets, why didn't the Soviets just expose it? Or, if the Soviets were in on it, why didn't they fake them going to the Moon too?
J: Yeah.
S: Or, whatever! It doesn't hold together. It doesn't make any sense.
B: Oh, it's ridiculous. And Steve, I just thought of another reason why the selection of Kubrick as a director is ridiculous. Not only is this guy would be missed, world famous, and you would probably get a low level director that you could conveniently kill if you have to.
S: Yeah.
B: But another good reason is, who cares about the director? Think about what you're doing! What's so important? The plot flow? The casting? The motivating? The actors?
J: No, Bob ...
B: Wait! Let me finish this thought! You don't need a good director, you need just a merely competent director! What you need is a cinematographer, a special effects guy, a set designer, and science consultants. Those are the important people you need ...
S: Yeah
B: not a director!
J: That's not true Bob.
B: What!?
J: The director made it really happen. The idea is that some one like Kubrick would be the only person that would even know how to pull in the talent to pull it off and everything, because he was at the top of his game, and was more connected than anybody in his hayday.
B: So you're saying they used him more for connections than his directing skill?
J: No! I'm not saying that at all!
C: No, it's just the director often would actually hire the DP, they would hire the A-Cam, they would hire all of those people, because it was their vision. So they had to use a cinematographer that could pull off their vision ...
S: And they were involved in the special effects. They were involved with the cinematography.
J: Yeah
C: Yeah
S: So there is a point there. I think Jay's closer to true than what you're saying, Bob, but your point is well taken that still, you don't need somebody like Kubrick, who is an artistic film director, for a piece like faking the video. You really just need the technical people.
B: Yes.
S: The only thing you could really say is that you needed Kubrick for some kind of technical skill, but even then you could just get the people who worked with Kubrick, you know?
B: I know!
S: You wouldn't need Kubrick himself.
Neurasthenia ()[edit]
(Fake disease: Allergic to all unnatural and modern things)
S: Evan, what in God's name is neurasthenia?
E: That's a great question.
S: It's a great word. Actually, I've heard of it before. It's one of my favorite fake diseases. But tell us.
E: OK. I was going to ask you if we've spoken about this on the show before, but apparently we haven't. Anyways, the topic came up because there was an investigative article that ran in The Guardian recently. And the title is called Allergic to Life, the Arizona residents sensitive to the whole world, which is actually a topic we've touched upon before on the SGU. We've discussed the claims of health detriments due to exposure to Wi-Fi radiation, cell phone radiation, those sorts of things. But this reporter from The Guardian, and her name is Kathleen Hale, she went to visit this place called Snowflake, Arizona, which is a town or more of a settlement. About 20 people have migrated to the spot in the Arizona desert to escape what the residents perceive to be are the harmful effects of, well, not only things like Wi-Fi radiation, but all sorts of factory processed chemicals, detergents, fragrances, plastics, fabrics, you name it. And they claim that they are highly allergic or have bad reactions to this stuff. So modern society essentially makes them sick. And in the article, they actually bring up the term neurasthenia, which I had never really heard before. Well, it's a term which originates back to the year 1829. It was thought by doctors then that there was some sort of physical problem within a person's nervous system. But the term was then borrowed by the neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869. And Beard used the term neurasthenia to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, palpitations, high blood pressure, depressed mood, and these sorts of things. And he postulated that neurasthenia was a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves. And Beard attributed this to modern civilization. And it became, well, a relatively popular diagnosis in the late 1800s and early 1900s in the United States. And they expanded it into including symptoms like weakness, dizziness, fainting, and other similar sorts of traits. Beard actually advocated electrotherapy as a treatment for it. And then he did these experimental treatments as well. And that position was held at that point to be kind of controversial. In fact, one review posited that Beard's knowledge of the scientific method was highly in question. And he said, don't believe their claims. They are unwarranted. But in any case, it's for the most part been abandoned as a medical diagnosis. It's no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. I'm sure there's an abbreviation for that. But according to WebMD, the term is actually still used in places like the United Kingdom and China. Yeah, these people have gone to this place in Arizona to escape it all. And when I say escape it all, it is everything. They cannot use soaps. They cannot use anything and everything essentially that society has. Heck, they can't even have like insulation and wallpaper and paint in their house. In fact, one of the houses that was visited by the reporter, she described it as wallpapered in heavy-duty Reynolds wrap. So they actually put tinfoil up because metal is okay.
C: Oh no, because that doesn't look crazy at all.
E: These people claim to be sensitive to grains, GMO foods, preservatives, artificial flavorings, artificial colorings. In fact, they don't even have blankets for their beds because they release gases over time. I guess the decomposition of the fibers and stuff. They're very, very sensitive to that. I'm actually surprised she's that close to any sort of electronic devices. In fact, when the reporter and the photographer who went there, because they immersed themselves in this town for a couple days. It's actually a pretty interesting way of doing investigative reporting. One night they decided to charge a camera battery while everyone was asleep. The two ladies with which these reporters were staying found out about it like the next day. And they claim that the charging of that camera battery actually did damage to them. And they were pretty upset about it. So that's the kind of level of sensitivity that these folks are claiming. My heart kind of goes out to these people in a certain way. And in another way, when you do have reports like this, you kind of wonder how many people are there at home now reading about this kind of stuff and sort of doing their own self-diagnosis. Saying, oh, wow, I have all these things too. And yeah, these chemicals. I have bad reactions to this and I don't know how to cure myself. Well, maybe I should try doing something like this. In that sense, I fear that it sends out the wrong signals to certain people that they might actually go and try to isolate themselves to this extent.
S: Well, it may be all in their head or it may be that they have some undiagnosed illness and they have been captured by this alluring diagnosis. So what's interesting is that if you look at the history of medicine, there has always been a neurasthenia in some form or another, right? So after neurasthenia fell out of favor, these patients would have been diagnosed with syphilis. And after diagnosing everything unknown as syphilis fell out of favor, we had chronic Lyme disease and multiple chemical sensitivity. And now whatever, just electromagnetic sensitivity and just allergic to everything. So essentially you have patients who have chronic, usually vague symptoms. I'm a little – I can't think straight. I'm fatigued. I have aches and pains. But they may have some specific symptoms because most people are not perfectly healthy. We all have our aches and pains. So there's a little bit of hypervigilance where you are very vigilant about the slightest symptom, sometimes what we call the symptoms of life, right? I mean who is perfectly symptom-free at any moment in their life?
E: Right.
S: And also if you then focus on things, like try to imagine the top of your head itching, it will freaking itch. Just there's an intention component to this. And of course it's often very comorbid with anxiety and depression and they become self-reinforcing. So they're depressed because they have symptoms, which then makes the symptoms worse, which makes the depression worse, right? So they're self-reinforcing, which may also be comorbid with poor sleep. It's very, very, very common.
E: Poor nutrition too. They start eliminating all this stuff from their diet and they become emaciated.
S: Or sedentary lifestyle because they're too painful to exercise. So the thing kind of takes on a life of its own. Sometimes I think that patients get into this because of lifestyle factors, some because of anxiety and depression, some because they have a real undiagnosed illness. But the problem is that the existence of these fake diagnoses, it's like flypaper, you know what I mean? It sort of attracts and traps people and then they can't functionally address what's really going on. And there are things to do. Even if we can't make a nice little label diagnosis for what they have, a nice, clean, neat little label, still we could say what they don't have and we can address their lifestyle factors, we can address their symptoms, we can improve their quality of life. There's a lot of functional things you could do, but they get distracted from the practical things pursuing the fake diagnosis. This is an extreme example of that where they move to out of the way town where they're isolated from the world. But then the treatment becomes a disorder unto itself, you know what I mean? The diagnosis and the treatment for the fake diagnosis itself is then a medical disorder. And that's a problem. And unfortunately, it's promoted by a lot of quacks who don't have the nuanced understanding of the complex interplay between symptoms and illness and psychology and lifestyle. And they just want to give patients what they think they want, which is a nice, clean label that encapsulates all of their symptoms. And that is just often not in existence.
E: These people feel let down by the medical professional industry, in a sense, because they can't figure out what's going on with them. So they turn to these alternative health practices. In fact, they said that there is a physician apparently in town or nearby who practices integrative health treatments and they're very, very happy for that. In fact, one resident of the town claims to have some sort of device that can detect environmental illnesses in people, a gadget, a black box that they wave around and they say, yeah, okay, yeah, it's definitely you're sick because of the environment. And then you go to address them that perhaps there's a psychological component to all this, and then they want nothing to do with even knowing about that. They're absolutely convinced it has nothing, nothing to do with that, and they are 100% convinced it has to do with these things that you find in modern society.
S: Right, but that's been reinforced again by the quacks. They're absolutely vulnerable. I consider them to be a vulnerable population to quackery. In many cases, they may have actually been failed by mainstream medicine, not because they weren't diagnosed with something they don't have, but I've experienced personally a lot of patients similar to this who no one's just had the 15-minute conversation with them that they need to have to get them focused in a more constructive direction. It's just like, well, if the workup's negative, we don't know what you have, and they don't explain why that's okay and why they don't need to continue to be on this treadmill of what we call the million-dollar workup where they're just constantly searching for a diagnosis because if you allow them to keep searching, they'll find it. They'll find a diagnosis, and chances are it'll be fake. But that's a skill set unto itself, talking to people in such a way that you can make them feel comfortable with the fact that they don't have some horrible disease, that what they have is just a combination of a lot of things and that we can address them all individually. It's difficult. It's difficult.
Tiny-armed dinosaur(52:07)[edit]
S: Cara, I understand that T. rex is not the only dinosaur with tiny little arms.
C: It's not. There's a new dinosaur, guys, and it was just described today. So there's a new article published just today in PLOS One, the Public Library of Science, and it was by Macavicky et al, and the title of the article is An Unusual New Theropod with a Didactyl Manus from the Upper Cretaceous of Patagonia, Argentina.
S: I love jargon.
C: Didactyl.
S: I do. It's like poetry to me.
C: So, yeah, so this is an unusual theropod, which is a meat-eating dinosaur, mostly meat-eating dinosaur, with these little hands that have two fingers, and they're really, really tiny, and it was discovered in 2007. That's how long it took for them to publish this. When they were on a dig in Patagonia's, I am so going to butcher this, Huincul Formation? Huincul. H-U-I-N-C-U-L. Huincul. Huincul Formation. Anyway, a big boneyard that's approximately 94 million years old. So they're on this dig, and as Brian Swietek, who is both a good friend of mine but also a preeminent paleontology writer, wrote for Smithsonian, what always seems to happen is like, what is it called, Murphy's Law, where the biggest discovery is made the last day you're supposed to be out in the field. So these researchers were out. Researchers from the Field Museum are out in this formation looking around, and on the very last day, Akiko Shinya, who is the Field Museum's chief fossil preparator, spotted this fossil, and as they started to uncover it, they realized that it's a pretty special fossil. They ultimately named it Gualicho, after Gualichu, who is a spirit associated with a certain people of Patagonia. It's like a nefarious spirit who spreads bad luck, and the researchers, of course, experienced a whole lot of bad luck when they were in the field, like often happens when you're out in really intense situations. And so it was ultimately named Gualicho Shinya. So the first part is for Gualicho, the spirit of the region, and Shinya, of course, for Akiko Shinya, the preparator who discovered it. So that must be also really cool for her. And it seems to be an example of convergent evolution. So we talk a lot about evolution on the show. The difference between divergent evolution is where there is an evolutionary pinpoint in the cladogram. So there's a point during the evolutionary track where something splits off and follows two divergent tracks, and they happen to have similar traits, but ultimately become very different in other ways. Convergent evolution is when there are two traits or multiple traits that actually evolved independently of one another. So a good example that we often use are bird wings and bat wings, right? They have, in many ways, similar traits, but they didn't come from a similar ancestor whatsoever. They both evolved things to keep these organisms aloft. And in this case, it does look like these teeny tiny arms are examples of convergent evolution because Gualicho Shinya is actually a type of Allosaurus. And if we think of Allosaurus, we don't think of these tiny arms. We typically think of T-Rex, like you said, Steve, or we think of Carnotaurus, two really good examples of a genus that are associated with these wimpy little arms. But Allosaurus, we don't think of like that. And specifically, Gualicho Shinya looks to be the most closely related at this point to Deltadromeus agilis, which is actually a theropod that was discovered in Africa. It's also interesting because a lot of the reporting on this story goes deep into why these organisms might have had the tiny teeny little arms. And we talked about this recently on the show. Nobody really knows for sure, of course, but there do seem to be a lot of really interesting sort of hypotheses about that. Reduced function in those limbs. Obviously, a lot of people say it's most certainly due to reduced function in the limbs, but why would there be reduced function in the limbs? Some people say it's for balance. Some people say it's for these carnivores needing room for such incredibly large heads and needing the real estate kind of given to these intense neck muscles that if there were arms in the way that they wouldn't be as ferocious a predator, as effective a predator. But there are a lot of different reasons that they could have lost their ability to use those teeny tiny arms. And this is just another organism that allows individuals, I think, to start learning about why that would be because now we have one more data point.
S: Yeah. I like how they describe it as a shift to head-only prey acquisition and dispatch.
C: Yeah, that's like really good jargon. I love that.
S: Yeah, I love that. I think all of those things that you talked about, they're not mutually exclusive.
C: Exactly.
S: There's more room for the head, more room for neck muscles. They're out of the way. They're not needed. So it's all good.
C: And yeah, now we have a third in this kind of class of wimpy-armed dinosaurs that we can study to understand that further.
Quickie with Bob: New Dwarf Planet(57:44)[edit]
S: Bob, we haven't done a Quickie in a long time.
B: That's right! Too long!
S: Speaking of tiny things ...
(Rogues chuckle quietly)
B: Good one, Steve.
(Cara laughs)
S: Well, actually, I'm referring to the news item.
B: Oh okay. All right.
S: But that's interesting you interpreted it that way.
(Bob and Cara laugh)
B: Come on, that's exactly what you wanted me to think. (Suddenly very happy) Thank you Steve! This is your Quickie With Bob. So, using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Moana Kaea in Hawaii, researchers have found a new dwarf planet beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt. It's called, “2015 RR245” (nice name), and has joined the ranks of Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, as well as Ceres as a bona fide dwarf planets. So here's some stats: It's twice as far from the Sun as Neptune ...
E: Whoa!
B: when it's at its most distant point in its journey.
E: That's out there.
B: It's, yeah, far away. It's one of the largest known orbits of a dwarf planet, circling the Sun once every seven hundred years.
C: Wow.
B: And it hasn't been totally confirmed yet, but they think its diameter is about seven hundred kilometers. It's the smallest dwarf, if that holds out. But it's still a dwarf planet because it meets the criteria, which are: It's in an orbit around the Sun (duh); it has sufficient mass to overcome the rigit body forces so that it's spherical; it hasn't cleared out the neighborhood around its orbit like regular, real planets; and it isn't a satellite. So it is a dwarf planet.
There has been no name decided yet, and it will an upgrade in the name. It may take a few years as they pin down its true orbit. But I would like to recommend, “Dwarfie McDwarf Planet.”
(Rogues laugh)
B: This has been your – yes – this has been your Quickie With Bob. I hope it was good for you too.
C: Hey, Bob, I have a question.
B: Yeah?
C: How do they know it's not a satellite if they haven't fully mapped out its orbit? How do they know it's not actually orbiting something else?
B: Well, if it was orbiting something else, you would think that would have been detected as well.
C: You would think.
B: It would probably be bigger as well, which would make it even more obvious, unless it was much dimmer. But I don't know how much of its orbit it has mapped out. But I think they're fairly confident that it's not a satellite. But even if it is a satellite, then it's in orbit maybe around a real planet or another dwarf planet. So that would be cool too!
C: So then it might be a Moon, right? Then it ...
B: Yeah
C: would be considered a Moon.
E: Right.
C: Cool.
S: So, as Bob said, there are five confirmed dwarf planets. From closest to the Sun to farthest, it's Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Eris. But there are six already, six possible other trans-Neptunian objects: Orchis, 2002-MS4, Salatia, Quayore, 2007-OR10, and Sedna. So there's potentially, there's definitely five, potentially another six more, and this would be a seventh one. So that's potentially ...
E: Ooh! Seven dwarves!
(Cara laughs)
S: Potentially twelve dwarf planets if all of the seven possible ones are confirmed, as there's gotta be a ton more. I think we're just scratching the surface.
B: Oh my god!
E: They think there are hundreds, potentially.
B: Many, many, potentially.
E: Potentially hundreds.
S: Yeah, cool! Very cool.
E: They just gotta find them.
B: Gotta catch'em all!
C: Oh no!
Who's That Noisy (1:01:06)[edit]
- Answer to last week: Carbon fiber bicycle wheels
S: Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.
J: All right. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] All right. What do you say?
C: Steve said there was obviously a Doppler effect there. You could hear it. Something coming close and then going past.
J: This is one of our listeners testing out his new carbon fiber bicycle racing wheels. And the interesting thing about these carbon fiber wheels, you could look them up. There's a lot of videos of them on there, is that he said that they're often acoustically tuned. So I guess the wheels make the same sound because I guess it would be annoying if they didn't have the same pitch as they go. But they make that kind of wobbly, almost like a spaceship kind of noise as the bike rides by. And the Doppler effect made it sound really interesting. But yeah, that's cool, right? So it's just carbon fiber tires just interfacing with the pavement and making a tone.
C: That is cool.
J: But this week, a listener named Nicholas Alden sent in a... I'm going to actually say that this now has booted my previous favorite noisy of the year. This is my favorite noisy of the year. What the hell is this? And Bob, my God, Bob, this one is for you, my brother.
B: Okay.
J: [plays Noisy]
B: I know what that is.
C: That's horrifying.
J: Don't say it. Do not say it.
B: No, I'm going to say it. Courtney, when she first saw you naked.
J: So Nicholas, oh my God, thank you for that. That is so awesome. I'm so excited to tell everybody next week what the hell that is. And I'll tell you right now, it's not just a cool noisy and it's scary. And I'm sorry if anybody got really disturbed by that. But it was freaking awesome. But when I tell you what it is, you're going to even think it's 10 times more awesome. That's how cool this noisy is.
S: You might be overhyping a little bit, Jay.
J: I don't think so.
S: We'll see.
J: I don't think so. You can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org with your new awesome noisies and your guesses and take any guess guys. Just throw your guesses at me. Don't think, oh, I have to kind of know. No, I don't care if you think it's your dog or whatever. Just send me a guess.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay.
Science or Fiction (1:03:45)[edit]
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two real and one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. No theme this week. Just three regular news items. I think you will find that they are very interesting. Here we go. Item number one. Scientists create a plastic polymer barrier that is one million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Item number two. A biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they would have had to be very rigid with a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. And item number three. A new study suggests that a preference for a consonant versus dissonant music is learned rather than innate.
J: Wow. That's cool.
S: David, as our guest, you go first.
DB: All right. The polymer one doesn't seem implausible. I really didn't like the sauropod neck one. They're saying, I mean, sauropods, they're like brontosauruses.
S: That's right.
DB: I know. Walking around with this stiff neck sticking out there, I don't see how that's compatible with life. So I don't like that one. And I don't like the music one either because my impression was that a preference for consonant music exists in all cultures, which would work against the cultural hypothesis. But I least, sorry, I most dislike the sauropod one, so I'm saying stiff-necked sauropods is fake.
S: Okay, Bob.
B: Let's see. I'll start with three. Preference for consonant versus dissonant music. Yeah, it just seems obvious that dissonant music was kind of like hardwired. And where would they even find cultures that haven't even been exposed to lots of modern music? They're pretty isolated. That doesn't sound right, obviously. It just seems like such a grating thing that like nails on a chalkboard. Let's see. Let's go to number two, the biodynamic study sauropod. In order to be stable. So what? It would flop around unless it was very rigid? I guess that's kind of what they're saying. I mean this would make sense if a sauropod had a very wide field of peripheral vision. Off the top of my head, I'm trying to think of how the eyes are separated on a sauropod. I don't know how wide. I mean if it was wide enough, I mean if you had like 200 degree peripheral vision, then you would be okay. You wouldn't necessarily have to be pointed at something to see it with, predator eyes. So I could kind of see how that would work. Let's go to one, the plastic polymer. A million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Well, graphene does a lot of shit, but this doesn't sound like something that graphene would be good at necessarily. I don't know. That one's probably wrong more than the others even. I'm going to say that's fiction.
S: Okay, Jay.
J: All right. So I'll take them in order. So I don't know, Bob. The plastic polymer with the monolayer of graphene. I mean just don't know how the plastic and the graphene are going to interact with each other to create a better barrier, you know? A million times less permeable though. That's amazing. That's a lot. So I don't know. I think there's something about that one I think is science because they're experimenting with these chemicals and getting properties out of them. They're constantly tweaking for little properties that are beneficial. So I'm going to say that one's science. The second one here about the sauropod, it just this one seems fake, like as if Steve made it up, like, oh, yeah, they're next or they had this. I don't know, Steve, you bastard. I feel bad for them if they did. Talk about a crappy life. They have these amazingly long necks and they can't even really do anything with them. That sucks. How do they drink water, for crying out loud? Five degrees and maybe up and down was fine, but left and right was bad. I don't know. I can see you throwing them off balance though. But this damn one with the music is the one that I just want to be wrong. I do believe that what David said holds some merit here, that we globally seem to have a preference for some type of consonant music. My gut is telling me to say this one is the fake. I'm going to follow my gut and say that this one about the consonant versus dissonant music is the fiction.
S: An even spread. Three out of three. All right, Cara?
C: Plastic polymer barrier a million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Well, graphene is obviously magic, so this one is obviously science. Biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they'd have to be very rigid. I would agree with that. With a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. That's weird. And not only is that weird because it would not accommodate them eating or sleeping or doing any of the things that modern organisms that we sometimes equate that to like giraffes can do. If you've ever seen a giraffe sleep, they rest their head on their butt. It's really cute. They make little giraffe pretzels. But also sauropods themselves were really differently shaped. You know, Brachiosaur had like a really tall neck that went straight up and then you have Apatosaurus or Camarasaurus that were like longer. So to me, I don't know. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. The last one, a preference for consonant and dissonant music is learned rather than innate. This one also triggers some alarm bells, but honestly, I think it could be true. It's a bummer because I think we want to think that all people like hearing music in the key of C, but that's because we are all people and we grew up in the West. But the truth is, if you really start to think about non-Western music, there are a lot of weird dissonant chords that we often hear. I mean, think about a Gregorian chant, for example. That absolutely doesn't sound like traditional consonant major key stuff. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the fiction is the sauropod, the sauropod one.
S: And Evan?
E: The reason I think the sauropod one is going to turn out to be the fiction is that if it had this rigid neck with the five degree range motion, I mean, doesn't it need to kind of look for predators and stuff? I don't know what kind of other dinosaurs hunted these things, but how could it survive for probably as long as it did if it didn't have the ability to kind of sense, determine its environment around it? It would seem like a big, big negative as far as trying to keep that species alive. So I'll say that's the fiction.
S: OK, so Cara, David and Evan, you think that the sauropod one is the fiction? Bob, you think the graphene one is the fiction. And Jay, you think the music one is the fiction. So I guess we'll take this in order. Number one, scientists create a plastic polymer barrier that is one million times less permeable to water by adding a monolayer of graphene. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. And this one is science.
B: What? You totally screwed me.
S: How did I screw you?
B: You screwed me because.
E: Because you read it and you read it wrong?
B: No, because that was so close to another item that I just assume you morphed the other item into that one.
S: There's a title of the actual published item. Million fold decrease in polymer moisture permeability by a graphene monolayer.
B: See? See?
DB: These titles are so misleading.
S: So this is potentially an important advance because, as the authors say, you may think that plastics are very impermeable to water, but over time they are not. And if you need to wrap, say, sensitive electronics like organic LEDs and you need to be able to store them for months or even years without any water getting in, plastics just don't cut it. So what they did is they used chemical vapor deposition to incorporate a single layer, a monolayer of graphene into the polymer. And then in testing, this polymer with the graphene was a million times less permeable to water. It can go a lot longer without essentially any significant water getting through. Very cool.
B: Let me tell you my story now that I read. This is really cool, actually. They created a new source of renewable energy. That unto itself is awesome. Using a three-atom-thick barrier with salt water on one side and fresh water on the other. And the salt water goes through the barrier, through these special pores, and it creates a current. It actually creates a current. So you put these things like on an estuary or something where like a river or a stream empties into the ocean and you can create energy. They're talking about a cubic meter, a square meter of material that's covered with 30% pores could produce like a megawatt of energy. It said it could light 50,000 light bulbs. So first off, that's just cool, very, very interesting. Hey, it's a new renewable source of energy. That's fantastic. And it just sounded so damn close to what this was. Like, oh, he just totally morphed this one.
S: Yeah, I saw that news item too. Definitely very cool using the osmotic gradient as basically a way of driving a current and generating electricity. Very cool. All right. Well, let's go on to number two. A biodynamic study of sauropod necks shows that in order to be stable, they would have had to be very rigid with a range of motion no more than five degrees in any direction. Cara, Evan, and David, you think this one is the fiction.
B: I'm saying it's fiction too.
S: And this one is the fiction.
B: Oh, bastard.
S: But this is based on a real study. Scientists are definitely interested in how sauropods were able to maintain their extremely long necks.
B: Well, how did giraffes do it?
S: Now, Evan, you asked how do sauropod dinosaurs fend off predators. But actually their main deterrent to predators is their size. It's definitely believed that they just grew big, really, really big as a deterrent to predators.
C: Except when they were babies.
S: Yeah, but then the babies just hide in the herd, right? That's their main defense. And interestingly, they know that they have a certain design to their vertebra, the bones in their neck. Now, most vertebrates just have sort of flat vertebra with discs in between. But sauropods have a ball and socket joint for the neck. The study was looking at whether or not the ball and socket joint was more stable with the ball facing away from the body versus toward the body. Now, in sauropods, the ball in the ball and socket joint always faces away from the body. And what they found was that that's because if it's facing towards the body, while it may be overall as strong, it's much more susceptible to dislocation. So the neck vertebra were less likely to dislocate in the configuration that sauropods have with the ball facing outward.
C: It sounds kind of crazy to me. Are there any other organisms we know of that have ball and socket joints in their necks?
S: Oh, I don't know. I didn't have time to look into that. I mean, the giraffe might. That's an interesting one. We'll have to see if we have time to check that out. All right. Well, let's move on to number three. A new study suggests that a preference for consonant versus dissonant music is learned rather than innate. Jay, you thought this one was the fiction, but, of course, this one is also science. And, yeah, this one is really interesting. So, Bob, you wondered, well, who would they get to test this hypothesis? Well, there is a very isolated Amazonian tribe. They said that they are days away from any civilization, and many of them had little to no contact with Western culture. This study was led by Josh McDermott at MIT and Ricardo Gadoy, a professor at Brandeis University, and it was published in Nature, the July 13th issue. They studied the Tsimane people, T-S-I-M-A-N-E. Again, a very isolated Amazonian tribe.
B: Yeah. Yeah, I know. I read it. It makes this even more annoying. Continue.
S: And they found that when they played consonant versus dissonant music to them, that they actually had no statistical preference for consonant chords. They liked them equally. So that's an exception to the notion that all cultures like consonant music. I don't think this one study is, of course, the end of this discussion or this debate. This is just one line of evidence. It's possible that this tribe, they're outliers. There is something innate about the preference for consonant music, but maybe that could be overcome in certain cultures, or it could be that it's just purely cultural. By reading that I've done, it makes it sound like this is somewhat of a debate. I don't know where the balance of the opinion is, but this is just one piece of information. Again, you have to be cautious against treating these individual studies as if this is the final word on what sounds like a much more complicated question.
C: Yeah, and there are instruments in other cultures that we don't even have that make sounds that we don't even hear. You know what I mean? I think the reason it feels so primal is because music touches something so primal. For us to have been exposed to music from such a young age, and honestly, most music is the same. It's so structured. It's so built on the same kind of platform that these tiny variations can cause such a big difference in how they resonate with us. I mean, I think it would make sense that it would feel so primal. Holy crap. By the way, I just found out that giraffe cervical vertebrae, specifically just the neck vertebrae, not the thoracic ones, have ball and socket joints.
S: Oh, cool. Cool, cool. So hey, another example of convergent evolution. Different evolutionary lines finding the same solution to a similar problem. How do you maintain stability in a long neck? That vertebral joint evolves into a ball and socket joint. So obviously it must be easy or at least very plausible for that to evolve. And so we're going to see it crop up in multiple times. It's like a bat wing and a bird wing. Very cool. All right. Well, let's move on.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:18:45)[edit]
S: Evan, give us the quote of the week.
E: "It is not the antiquity of a tale that is an evidence of its truth. On the contrary, it is a symptom of its being fabulous." Well said. Basically tearing down the argument from antiquity. And I'm loving it. Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason. He wrote that many, many years ago.
S: The Age of Reason.
E: The Age of Reason.
S: Are we still in the Age of Reason, do you think?
E: I don't know. We're holding on to threads of it maybe.
DB: I call it a post-reason age.
C: Post-reason.
E: It's kind of this hybrid in which there are pockets of reason intermixed among the fabulous, as Thomas Paine would have said.
C: The bimodal age.
E: Just a little bit about Thomas Paine. He was an English and American political activist. Born in 1737. Died 1809. The Age of Reason follows in the tradition of 18th century British deism and challenges institutionalized religion and the legitimacy of the Bible. Pretty controversial for his time, certainly. Definitely not. But he wanted to put it out there sort of in a layman's terms. Made it very accessible to the masses as was his way of communicating with people with the other pamphlets and things that he wrote. It was definitely within his idiom. And he's forever recognized for it.
S: So, David, thank you so much for joining us. It was a lot of fun having you on the show.
DB: Oh, the pleasure was all mine. Thank you so much for having me, guys.
B: Thanks, David.
E: Well done, Dave.
S: A lot of people have asked us if we're going to be at Dragon Con. The SGU will be at Dragon Con. We will all be there. We'll be doing a show like we always do when we're at Dragon Con on Saturday night. We'll be doing a private show. We'll try to get on as many panels, et cetera, as they want us to be on while we're there. We'll be hanging out. So if you haven't been to Dragon Con before, it's a ton of fun. It's in Atlanta, Georgia. First weekend in September. So, yeah, check it out. We'll be there. So thank you all for joining me this week.
B: Sure.
C: Thanks, Steve.
E: Thanks Doctor.
Signoff[edit]
S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.
S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.
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