SGU Episode 576

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SGU Episode 576
July 23rd 2016
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 575                      SGU 577
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Guest
M: Maria Cork
Quote of the Week
Denialists maintain their stance - be it in regard to HIV and AIDS, the holocaust, or 9/11 - in the face of exhaustive and irrefutable evidence. It is not melodramatic to say that vocalization of these particular falsehoods have been responsible for many deaths -->
Ben Vincent
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, July 21^st, 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: Good evening, folks.

J: Hi.

Pokémon Go ()

(The rogues talk about playing Pokémon Go. Bob is excited about the augmented reality)

S: All right, fests up. How much of you guys have been playing Pokemon Go this past week?

B: Me.

E: Thank goodness I have not.

C: Bob plays.

J: I tried it.

B: I do it for the fitness and social aspects. That's it.

E: Yes, right. Of course. Yeah.

C: I interviewed Bob on my personal podcast on Talk Nerdy last week, which was so much fun.

B: It was.

C: Yeah. He, unprompted, started talking about Pokemon Go.

J: Oh, Bob, don't pretend it's not.

B: I told you to edit that out, Cara.

J: I mean, to give it my real review, first off, I didn't even get to level five, so I didn't fight or anything. But I walked around with Steve, and it kind of sucked. I'm like, all right, well, where's this... You see some rustling in the bushes in the app. You see these leaves go up, and you walk over, and you throw a stupid ball at the thing, and it captures it. I guess I'm missing all the fun, right? There's a fun part of this game, Bob?

S: It's a little bit more fun than you're giving it credit for. So I play with my daughters. It also is, you have to walk around to play. I guess you could drive around, but-

B: No, it really won't work.

S: Yeah. To get to places, it sort of forces you to walk around. Plus, you get eggs, and if you have to hatch... In order to hatch the egg, you have to walk, and driving doesn't count. It's like you have to walk five kilometers, then your egg hatches. So it is designed to get you off your ass, get you moving around, get you to-

J: That's great.

S: -points of interest. You have to go to points of interest in order to get more Pokeballs and stuff. So that aspect of it is great.

B: It's critical, I think, because I literally would not be interested, nor would I play for longer than a few days if it weren't for that. If you could just sit on your couch and have them come to you, I would lose interest so fast. So that's what I think is so key about it. Even the social aspect, which is, I think, secondary. I've got a couple friends at work who are like, hey, we just saw a PokeStop that somebody dropped a lure on. Let's run out. So we just left our job and spent 20 minutes walking across the street to do this stupid thing. I'm telling you, I'm cranking up the steps every day.

E: Exercise goes up. Productivity goes down.

B: It's-

C: I'd be interested to see how big the user base is of people who really weren't that exposed to Pokemon. Because okay, I'm 32, I'll be 33 in a couple of months, and I'm just too old for Pokemon. It was a phenomenon that happened just like maybe a few grades below me. My little sisters were into it, but I was just too old. So obviously, Bob, you weren't playing with Pokemon when you were young.

E: Not that he admits to.

B: Not in the slightest. Like I said, my attraction is what it is to this specific game. And I had no real interest in Pokemon at all before this.

J: They're saying 9.5 million daily users are active.

C: Holy crap.

B: It's gargantuan. It's the biggest app in, I think, United States history. The biggest app.

S: Oh, yeah.

B: Bigger than Tinder.

E: Wow.

B: It is a cultural phenomenon. And I think a lot of part, a big part of it that we haven't mentioned, I think, is the augmented reality, virtual reality aspect to it. Because you are walking around a very simplified map of your town, of wherever you are. But then when you actually see a Pokemon, then actually your camera comes into play. And it's like overlaid on top of whatever. I had a Weedle or whatever overlaid on a jar of peanut butter on my desk. It was just a funny thing. So that's another component that I think is important. And I think it also shows you that this is the beginning. This is just the biggest beginning of augmented reality games that I think are just going to sweep the nation, sweep many nations.

S: Yeah. I think that's the real news. The real news story here is how popular the first augmented reality game is. And this is the chumpiest, most basic version of augmented reality you can imagine.

B: This is Atari. This is Atari.

S: This is Space Invaders.

B: It's a tabletop tennis.

C: But the smart thing is that it is a social game as opposed to, like, I have a couple of really cool augmented reality toys that, they're kind of museum-friendly toys. I have this deck of cards that's a deck of dinosaur cards. And when you put your camera over it, the dinosaurs come to life. They're really cool. And also, like, farm animals, they're for kids, but they're really exciting and cool. And they're fun, but you can only really play with them for so long, and you can only play with it alone.

S: Yeah.

C: But this becomes this augmented plus going outside of your house, plus having this whole social aspect. It just kind of fits in on the zeitgeist right now. It just makes sense for everybody.

S: Think about the potential. Imagine wearing-

B: Oh my god, I have.

S: Imagine wearing your phone. Imagine wearing, like, augmented reality pretty much wraparound goggles, and playing games like Call of Duty in your neighborhood. Just imagine-

C: That's awesome.

S: Right?

J: Yeah. So augmented reality, meaning that there is a graphical overlay on top of the real world. It's not-

S: Yeah, but you're out and about in the real world. There's something compelling about that.

E: Ignore the traffic.

C: Imagine if you have, like I've seen this before with kind of half VR augmented reality where you have sensors, right? You have a sensor on your outfit, you have a sensor on your toy gun or whatever. So you can basically be playing laser tag, like fake laser tag out in public, but you're augmenting it to be like Call of Duty.

S: Yeah.

C: Like, how cool would that be that you actually have the interactive component where it's not just pushing a button on your phone, but you're playing with, like, little toy guns?

J: I think that's awesome.

E: Walking Dead scenario, that'd be cool.

B: Just make sure they don't look realistic, too realistic in real life.

C: That's the cool thing. They look neon yellow in your hand until you put on the goggles.

B: Yeah.

C: Then they look badass. Yeah.

J: Yeah. If we could start getting some haptic feedback like when you can actually feel things.

B: Sure. Good word, Jay.

J: You know, like they have gloves now that give a little bit of sensory feedback from a game, but it'll get better as the tech companies have to start spending a ton of money and then when they sell billions of them, the cost will come way down. Guys, a quick update. Another number I read here that said there are 21 million daily active users on the Pokemon game.

C: Oh my gosh.

J: Yep. It's unbelievably huge now.

C: By the way, an article breaking news right now, an article I just saw on CNN Politics. State Department spokesman calls out reporter for playing Pokemon Go in briefing.

E: That's it. That's it. It's infiltrated the highest levels.

B: But did you guys, did you guys see this? Some guy on TV doing the weather, some woman walks in front of him playing Pokemon Go on camera live. It's hilarious. That's the best example yet that I've read.

E: That weatherman totally got in the way.

B: Fantastic.

Forgotten Superheroes of Science (7:12)

• Carlos Juan Finlay

S: All right, Bob, tell us about this week's Forgotten Superhero of Science.

B: Yes, for this week's Forgotten Superheroes of Science, Carlos Juan Finlay (1833 to 1915), was a Spanish-Cuban epidemiologist who first recognized that Yellow Fever was transmitted through mosquitoes. Huge, huge, huge finding! Yellow Fever, you don't hear much about it, really. We know what it is; we've heard of it. But it was a horror in Finlay's time, and it still is to this day in some countries. It ravaged and haunted the tropics back then.

Often you would get better after you contracted it after a few days, but then sometimes it came back with a vengeance, and with a fifty percent mortality rate. People were dying, a lot of people were dying. In Cuba, Finlay noticed a pattern of Yellow Fever outbreaks during mosquito season, and that was the key breakthrough. His theory, that mosquitoes were the disease vector, wasn't widely believed for twenty years until famous war surgeon Walter Reid and colleagues were sent to Cuba to research the disease that caused so many deaths during the Spanish-American war.

Now, Finlay convinced Reid, and together they identified the specific mosquito species, and had incontrovertible proof; and this was the first time ever that mosquitoes were shown to actually be vectors; and this ultimately led to the eradication of Yellow Fever from Cuba and Panama, saving hundreds and thousands of lives, and also allowed for the completion of Panama Canal, which was taking a huge toll.

And then of course, then vaccines were developed, and it's much better than it used to be. There are still many parts of Africa that are isolated, they're still getting hit with it. There's also many reasons that Yellow Fever is actually increasing a little bit here and there.

So, another interesting aside: History books will often say that Reid made the discovery. But contrary to many similar historical examples, Reid always gave Finlay full credit for being the first to find a link between mosquitoes and disease. So, remember Carlos Juan Finlay; mention him to your friends, perhaps when discussing arboviruses or aides-egypti mosquitoes!

E: Ooh! Or Zika.

S: So, some historians insisted on giving full credit to the white guy, even when he was insisting that, “No, it really was ...”

B: Yes

S: “you know, the Spanish-Cuban who did it.”

B: Absolutely, yep. He was great about it, even in personal correspondences, he gave him full credit.

News Items

Funding Replications (9:42)

• http://www.nature.com/news/dutch-agency-launches-first-grants-programme-dedicated-to-replication-1.20287

(Some funding has been given by The Netherlands to replicate major studies, in order to make sure they're really true)

S: All right, Cara, I understand the Dutch are trying to do something about the problem of replications in science.

C: Yes, a pilot program funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research or NWO, which is a funny acronym, not the New World Order, was just launched with a specific goal to encourage researchers to replicate studies in the social and medical sciences. Three million euros was put into the national fund for use over the next three years, making it the first ever effort like across the world for replication funded by national organization. Their main focus is so-called cornerstone research. So that specifically refers to studies that are like heavily cited, that have been used to shape public policy, that are represented in textbooks and other curriculum, or that have had a pretty large media footprint.

S: We call those seminal studies.

C: Seminal studies.

S: Yeah.

C: There you go. So that cornerstone has less a wee-wee reference in it. So I kind of like that. So according to the NWO, here's a quote, the NWO, sorry, here's a quote, the pilot program replication studies focuses on two types of research, reproduction, which is replication with existing data, the data sets from the original study are reanalyzed, and replication with new data. A data collection is put together, which is subjected to the same research protocol as in the original study. By encouraging the realization of replication research, NWO intends to make a contribution to increasing the transparency of research and the quality and completeness of the reporting of results. The pilot is not aimed at tracing falsified research results and data sets, or other forms of reprehensible research practices and misconduct. The NWO hopes to fund eight to 10 studies a year over the course of the program. Remember, that's three years. And although 3 million euros out of an overall annual budget of 700 million euros doesn't sound like much, it does represent a change in the way that scientists and the public are thinking about replication. So if you guys remember, we have talked about this issue previously on SGU. A few months ago, we discussed a meta-analysis showing that over half of psychology studies failed reproducibility attempts. That was part of the reproducibility project that was led by Brian Nosek, the executive director of the Center for Open Science in Virginia. He's voiced his support for the Dutch initiative, but his own findings have actually gotten a lot of pushback from psychologists, claiming that their methodology might have been flawed and that there were other issues with the reproducibility project. Probably the most vocal opponent of both Nosek's research, but also this new Dutch initiative, is Daniel Gilbert. He's a Harvard psychologist. Here's a quote from him in an article that was published in Nature yesterday by Manya Baker. Quote, If the Dutch government wants to spend its money on research whose sole qualification is its unoriginality, then that's their prerogative. Will we learn something valuable from such research? Probably. Will it be more valuable than what we would have learned if the same amount of money had been spent exploring important new ideas? That's a difficult question to answer, but it is the critical question and it's the question no one asks.

S: That's not that difficult a question to answer.

E: I don't think so.

C: I know. It's a very cynical outlook, especially, I mean, the fact that he chose the word unoriginality I think has bite to it. Other researchers do argue, though, that reproducibility should just be built into the publication process and it should be required before peer review can commence. But I'm definitely interested in what you guys think. I mean, I personally think that this initiative is a great step forward, and I'm not sure I fully understand why there's pushback. And I also think that, yes, reproducibility needs to be built into the publication process, but there's only so much you can do in a single lab.

E: You want another lab to actually do those studies. Someone else. You want someone else to do it.

S: We've talked about this in bits and pieces over the years on the SGU. There are lots of potential problems with the way science is conducted. There's researcher bias. There's publication bias. There's perverse incentives. There's incentives to publish new and exciting and contradictory results. And replications are thought of as boring and unoriginal and doesn't do anything for your impact factor, and so they get undervalued. Nobody wants to give them space in their pages. If you back up and think about the bigger question, which is, as a civilization, if we want to get the most bang for our science research buck, right, we have a certain finite amount of resources, time not just money, but time and people and the things that you need to do scientific studies. We have finite resources. We want to make scientific progress as efficiently as possible with those resources. There's a certain sweet spot of balance between new exploratory research, exploring new ideas, but confirming ideas, and replicating studies to make sure that the data is reliable. And I don't think that right now we're in the sweet spot. I think that there's been a ton of evidence, a ton of evidence in the last 20 years indicating that the process has shifted far too far to the new original exciting research end of the spectrum and too little neglecting the boring replication end of the spectrum. And we have to pull it back to, I think, the sweet spot of a more appropriate balance between those two types of research. So that's why I think—

B: How do we do that?

S: Well, I think this is one way.

C: With incentives. That's the problem. There's no incentive. Yeah, like the culture of science and science publication is such that there's really no incentive to replicate or reproduce studies. It's not sexy. It doesn't get you a lot of cachet within the scientific community if you're not—even look at the way he said it. It was like unoriginal research or whatever.

S: Yeah, it's bullshit.

C: It just makes you, oh, oh, this guy just redoes other people's studies. He's so unoriginal. So having some sort of incentive, like a monetary incentive, is a really good one.

S: But the thing is there's something to be said for being a real expert technician at carrying out scientific studies. Somebody should be able to build a career out of just being an experimentalist. Your job is to—

B: Wow, what a cool idea.

S: -analyze research that other people do, search it for flaws and weaknesses, fix it, do it better, replicate it correctly. And I have heard researchers—this is like personal communication to me—like when someone brings up, hasn't this study been done before? And the answer is, yeah, but we're going to do it right. And that's the correct response. Who cares if someone's done it before? I'm going to do it right. And that's what everyone's attitude should be. Also, the concept here is that the threshold for when scientific evidence is compelling to the point where we could say, okay, this is probably true. Now we could take this as a given and move forward is a lot higher than I think most people think it is. That threshold is higher if you really look at the evidence, if you look at reversals and things that turn—when you do take a close look at it, it turns out they're not true, etc., etc. So the way to achieve that higher threshold is more replication, basically. That's the primary way.

C: Because those replication studies that you're talking about that actually do get published are so rarely pure replication studies. They're usually, like you said, original research where part of the methods was that they replicated previous research in order to show that the protocol works. And so even then, it gets buried, it gets lost because that's not the pure point of the publication. But I think this is a step in the right direction. I think it's cool that the Netherlands are doing that. I also think it's really cool that this agency has 700 million euros to just give to scientists within—to Dutch scientists for their research. It's so cool. But I do like that they said, you know what, we're taking money out of the main pot and we're specifically earmarking it for this because it's gotten to the point where we have to do it. We just have to.

Data Storage Breakthrough (18:09)

• http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/a21877/data-storage-breakthrough-chlorine-atoms/

(Atomic hard drive with a density 500,000 times better than what we have today)

S: Anyway, Jay, you're going to tell us about an exciting new breakthrough.

J: There was a study published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. So on 7-19-2016, Dutch scientists at Deft University claimed to have created an atomic hard drive. Awesome. Very, very cool. Before you start getting ready to throw away your existing drive, Evan, this drive exists only in the lab. It's not ready for prime time, meaning there's one. They're using very expensive equipment and people like us won't probably ever get this drive. But there's some cool things about this and then we'll talk about what this news item really means. Today's best day to storage is good. It's a lot better. We have SSDs coming out. But most people are still using spinning drives. You have the big metal drives that have the disks in them that are spinning around. Or you get an expensive solid state drive which has no moving parts. It's like a really big thumb drive and they're very fast, a lot faster than a spinning drive. Everybody is crying about data storage problems on their phone or whatever. We just don't have enough data storage. Now their drive, these scientists that had this breakthrough happen, their drive actually moves around single atoms, which, wow. The technical info behind this drive is that it can store a single kilobyte of data, 8,000 bits in a space under 100 nanometers across, perfectly meaningless to people like us except Bob. But to give you a real – Bob goes, wow, like right on cue. To give you a real world understanding, this technology can store every book that ever existed on the size of a drive no bigger or thicker than a postage stamp. Check that out, right? I mean, come on. Now, wherever you're sitting right now, you should have leaned back and said, wow, that's amazing.

B: Get the happy chills.

J: In case you don't know what a stamp is, a stamp is about the size of a one by one centimeter piece of paper. The other half of our audience sat back and went, wow.

B: If you don't know what paper is, why are you listening to a podcast?

J: Now the drive that the scientists are using, when they call it a drive, it's a stationary thing, which I'm about to describe to you. It's microscopic. It's not as big as a postage stamp. You can't even see it with your eye. That's how small their drive is. Their storage density is about 500 times better than what we have today. Researchers were placing chlorine atoms on top of a copper surface and they made a grid with the chlorine atoms. So if they were to add or remove an atom from the grid, it represents a digital one or a digital zero in really, really simple terms. That's how they did it. That's how they simulate an actual drive.B: Oh, that's it?

J: Yeah. It's not that big of a deal. The big deal, Bob, it's not this big, oh my God, they came up with this unbelievable thing. It's how do they do it? What do they do?

S: It's not the concept it's the technology to manipulate single atoms at that level.

B: Well, you would need, typically, you would need a proximal probe, like an STM, a scanning tunneling microscope, but that's a big honking device.

J: I know. I know. Let's talk about it now, though. But that's what they're using. And of course, we're not going to have tiny versions of that on our desks in our lifetimes. That's not going to happen. What I do think, though, is this is important and the reason why we talk about technology like this is this lab with these scientists might not be iterating their thing down to something that's scalable and doesn't need to be in a clean room and doesn't need to be at liquid nitrogen temperature, which their drive does on all the things I said. But it's the very beginning of just proof of concept. We actually do have a drive that we moved atoms around. We stored, this is the other cool part, is they took Richard Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom lecture where he discusses how there's tons of potential technology to be developed on the atomic scale.

B: That was the beginning of the first real serious proposal that I'm aware of about nanotechnology right there.

J: Yeah, I think you're right, Bob.

B: I know I'm right.

J: And they also stored Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species. Wow. Anyway, they also stored Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species and they proved that they could write the data down, that they could store it, that it'll stay there if they leave it alone for a little while, and that they could read the data. Now that, in and of itself, on the atomic scale, that is a feat.

S: Yeah, it's a proof of concept type of news item. It's just the interesting bit about it is how much data could you store once you have the ability to store it at the atomic level where an atom is a bit? What does that kind of information density look at? Five hundred terabytes per square inch is what it looks like.

E: Nice.

S: That's amazing. That's nice.

E: That fits easily in your pocket.

B: That's half a petabyte.

S: Of course, in a few years, we'll be like, 500 terabytes? That's nothing.

E: Nothing. Bob, we're heading for the yattabyte.

J: Yeah, we are. But questioning, again, like how much data storage do humans actually need? Like, we're going to start doing-

E: Pokemon Go?

C: A lot.

J: But think about it.

C: My laptop is always full. I have to delete files every time I sit down to record SGU.

E: Oh my gosh.

C: Yeah.

E: It's a little extreme.

S: You need a new hard drive.

C: I need a new hard drive. It's only 250 gigs, but it's like 250 gigs is constantly full. And I'm offloading to my terabyte hard drive constantly. That's almost full.

J: We're going to get to the point soon where we're going to be recording our lives, our entire life.

B: Absolutely.

E: More so.

B: And 4K, at least. I mean, our storage, maybe even 10K, our storage requirements are just going to shoot up as high as they are now. They're just going to get much, much bigger.

S: The bottom line is that whatever storage we have, our applications and use expand to fill it.

J: Yeah.

S: And that there's no end in sight for that. Because as you say, yeah, we're just scratching the surface in terms of video and super high density imaging and et cetera. So I think we'll take it. Dramatically increase the amount of hard drive space we have and we'll fill it.

The Connectome (24:08)

• http://www.nature.com/news/human-brain-mapped-in-unprecedented-detail-1.20285

(A map of the connections of the human brain)

S: All right, guys. Well, you guys have heard about the Connectome project, right?

B: Yes.

E: Yes.

S: Well, we have some of the first like really updated data from it recently published is a map of the human brain, the connections of the human brain published, I think just today as we record this or yesterday, actually yesterday in Nature. So what they found was that they were able to identify this is reviewing MRI scans and fMRI scans of the human brain, trying to identify discrete regions in the brain. What makes a brain region discrete? Well, it's the same kind of cells making the same kinds of connections to other parts of the brain, right? So if you have a clump of cells that are all sort of organized the same way, the same type of neurons and they're all making the same connections to other parts of the brain, then we consider that a discrete region. Guess how many different discrete regions they found in the brain.

J: 10 million.

E: Four.

C: A little high. A little low. A little low.

S: 180. 180.

J: Is that a lot?

C: It's a lot more than we thought, more than we had before.

S: So the previous estimate was 95 and this is so not quite twice as many. This is 180.

E: Almost twice as many.

C: Almost twice as many. Yeah.

S: Almost twice as many.

B: Well, Steve, did they identify any new cell types? Because I've been reading a little bit about it in terms of optogenetics and I mean, there's lots and lots of different types of cells and subtypes of cells. It's not just neurons. I mean, there's lots of variety there.

S: Well, I don't think they've identified any new kinds of neurons because that's the kind of classical just dissecting the brain and looking at the neurons under microscopes and staining them to see their shape and their connections, et cetera. So there are many different types of neurons that make different types of connections in the brain. And then the other main type of cell is the astrocytes, which are the support cells, but as we've learned in the last decade or so, they actually participate in modulating neuronal function. And so they're involved with storing information as well.

B: Aren't they glial cells?

S: Yeah. Astrocytes are a type of glial cell. Yeah.

B: Okay. All right.

S: This is similar. We talked about like this being the connectome project being similar to the genome project. What's interesting is that what occurred to me is that when you're mapping the genome, it's digital, right? I mean, there's an A, T, G, or C in each position. And once you've mapped it, you've mapped it. You know what I mean? There's no issue with resolution, either you have the information or you don't. But with the connectome, even though we've mapped the entire brain, we're just getting started because it's all about resolution. This is just increasing the resolution with which we've mapped the connections to the brain. But there's definitely a lot greater resolution that we can get to. We may not identify significantly more discrete regions, but we will learn more and more about the connections that those regions make and the functionality, how they functionally wire together and work together. And this is this may help us. I mean, the goal of all of this is to help us understand how the brain works, right? How does it encode information? How does it modulate function? We see different parts of the brain lighting up when people do different tasks, but it's hard to interpret that because you really need to think about networks and like the same discrete region or module in the brain might have different functions when it participates in different networks, you know? So it's really complicated. But having a map will definitely help us in that retry to understand what those connections are and what they do. So that's cool. Very cool research.

E: Good stuff.

S: So yeah, yeah. This is just, I think, the beginning of a lot more to come with the connectome, understanding the human brain.

HAARP (28:13)

• http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/us-developed-weapon-system-may-cause-global-warming-govt-116071800897_1.html

S: All right, Evan.

E: Yep.

S: You sent me this interesting article about HAARP ...

E: HAARP!

S: in the Business Standard – I had to see if that was a legitimate news outlet or not. It's funny, but ...

(Rogues laugh)

S: Business Standard abbreviates their name as B.S. (Rogues laugh) Wasn't filling me with confidence. But tell me about it.

E: All right, well they picked it up courtesy of The Press Trust of India, or PTI, which is a legitimate – for as much as it can be – a news outlet. So that's where they pulled this from. And here's how the headline reads, okay? “US Developed Weapon System May Cause Global Warming, The Government of India Warns.”

Okay, so HAARP, right? When I say HAARP, I'm referring to the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program; H-A-A-R-P.

B: Didn't they close that down?

E: Yeah, well, Bob, maybe you've heard of it in one of two ways, okay? Here's way number one you might have heard of it: HAARP was a US military-funded project. It was unclassified, non-clandestine; and it was an ionospheric research program whose purpose was to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. And I say “was” because as you alluded to, Bob, the HAARP program officially ended in 2014.

Now here's another way you may have heard of it: HAARP is a secret weapon of the government which has the capability of any of the following evil superpowers: It can cause earthquakes, can control the weather, can boil the atmosphere away, can disable satellites, can destroy aircraft including TWA flight 800 and the space shuttle Columbia. It can control the minds of people and orangutans, or is responsible for global warming.

S: Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait: “People and orangutans?”

E: I threw the orangutans thing in there.

(Rogues laugh)

B: Orangutans (Steven and Evan had been saying orangutangs)

C: Thank you Bob!

E: Yes! (Applauds) Ten points for Bob for picking up the ...

S: I say it that way just to have Bob correct me every time.

(Rogues laugh)

E: And they also think HAARP is not shut down; it's actually still being wielded to this day for evil purposes. So, which way do you think they're going with this particular story?

C: (Sarcastic) Hmm...

E: So here's how the article reads: “'A US-developed weapons system that strikes the atmosphere with a focused electromagnetic beam may cause global warming,' says the government of India.” And when I say “the government of India,” we are talking about the environment minister Aniel Manhavedave. And he put this down in writing the US has developed a type of weapon called, “High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program. It strikes the upper atmosphere with focused and steerable electromatic beams. It's an advanced model of a superpowerful ionospheric heater, which may cause the globe to warm and have a global warming effect.

Well, apparently he's not aware that it's no longer in service, but again, there are some people that think that actually it is, and shutting it down is just part of the great cover up in one of the many conspiracy theories surrounding HAARP. That's what you have here.

(Rogues laugh)

S: (British accent) There you are then!

E: (British accent) And there you are! (/British) HAARP is responsible for global warming.

S: It's interesting how something innocent like that just takes on a life of its own.

B: Yeah

S: To get in their head that there's something sinister about it, and that's it! There's something sinister about it. And now, nothing that you could say, or that will ever happen will dissuade them from that, because it all becomes part of the conspiracy.

E: Right

C: It's also interesting because we know what's responsible for global warming. It's not like that's a big, open-ended question ...

E: Right

C: and we needed to find some kind of scapegoat. We know what causes global warming. We don't know everything, but we know a lot of the picture by now.

S: If you believe that sort of thing, Cara.

(Evan laughs)

C: (Sarcastic) Oh, yeah. If you believe those climatologists.

E: But, look, so I think the takeaway from this article, perhaps, is that people in high positions, in government levels and so forth, can easily get swept up in the hysteria of conspiracy theories just as easily as any other human being on the planet.

S: I think some people are more easy than others, but yeah, I get your point.

Bio Bot (32:47)

• http://www.theskepticsguide.org/sgu-science-pic-of-the-week-bio-bot-stingray

(Commercial at 40:07)

S: All right, Bob, tell us about this artificial biobot, stingray, cyborg, whatever thing.

E: Cool.

B: Do you guys remember the classic Star Trek episode-

S: Yes.

B: -Operation Annihilate, called Operation Annihilate, where those weird, flying, fleshy, disc-shaped creatures infected Spock and killed his first brother?

E: Oh, yes. Yes.

C: I missed that one. Damn.

B: Scientists actually created one of those. It doesn't fly. Wait, it doesn't fly.

E: Oh, wow.

B: And it can't infect anyone, but it can swim, and that's about all it does. But it's still... It kind of looks like it, but it is still... It's pretty sweet. It's an incredible construct called a biohybrid machine, or biobot made to look and move like a stingray, and it consists of three things, silicone gel, some gold, and genetically engineered rat cells. That's it. And it's engineered to move towards light and undulate just like a real stingray. It's a really beautiful movement.

E: Neat.

B: So this is the latest example of nature-inspired robotics. It's created by a team of researchers headed by Sung Jin Park and Kevin Kit Parker at Harvard University's Department of Bioengineering and Applied Sciences. It's tiny. It's only a half inch long, and it weighs just 10 grams. So it may not be impressive in size, but it can move realistically towards light and even be steered by changing the properties of the light hitting it. So how do you even go about making something like this? It's really four layers. This thing consists of four layers. First, you have a silicone gel that's created in a mold, so it's got this stingray shape. And this is the silicone that's just like the outer layers of breast implants. Then you put a gold skeleton inside.

J: That sounds really cool.

B: I would love a gold skeleton. Now the reason for this is that silicone is kind of floppy, but with the skeleton in it, it bends back into its original shape because it kind of has a shape memory. And it might sound kind of weird and expensive to have a skeleton that's made of gold. But remember, this is tiny. It's a half an inch. And it just so happens that gold just so happens to have the ideal combination of stiffness and bendiness for this specific application.

J: Well worth the expensive.

B: The next part is an interstitial layer of silicone that's super thin. Now this is here for two reasons. It prevents the fourth and final layer from touching the gold, but more importantly, it has these micro patterns in it that are basically from the mold that the silicone was in. And that helps the final layer grow in the precise arrangement required. And then the layer four, the final layer, this is on the underside of the robot stingray. And this is that mouse heart cells. Now these are aligned in a back and forth pattern from the middle kind of going outwards. So when muscle flexing starts, they move the silicone pectoral fins in an efficient stingray like manner. Now these just aren't some any old mouse cells that they throw onto the biobot. These are special genetically engineered cells that are tweaked so they respond to very specific frequencies of light. And this was accomplished, of course, through the new and incredibly promising field of optogenetics. We've mentioned this a bit on the show. I think it's well worth mentioning again and going into a little bit more detail. So optogenetics uses a viral vector to incorporate a gene into nerve cells. And that gene encodes for a very special light sensitive algae proteins called channel rhodopsins and rhodopsins. And this protein is expressed in the cell membrane, which activates the cell when it's exposed to light. So you put light of a certain frequency on the cell, these channels open, it lets the ions flow in or flow out, whatever you want. And it does what the cell is designed to do. So what makes this so fascinating is that – and so efficient is that you're able to activate neurons far more quickly than any drugs can activate them and with far more accuracy and specificity than electrical stimulation. So it's just so much better than any other way. And so with this new powerful tool, it's already essentially being taken for granted that this is going to cause a revolution in neuroscience. It really is a huge, huge field. I think a few years ago, it was recognized as one of the top new science fields of the decade. I mean it's really – it's big now and it's just going to get bigger in my opinion. But it just doesn't work on neurons. It's great for muscle cells as well. So once the cells are in place, all the researchers needed to do was flash two sources of light, one going to each fin and this made the biobot make this undulating pattern heading towards whatever the light source is. And then if you wanted to give it a turn left or right, then all you had to do was make one of those lights on one of the fins brighter or to flash more often and there you go. You're steering a biobot Stingray. So it's pretty slick.

J: Now Bob, they send this thing out to kill people? Like what do they do with that?

B: Jay, it's a hunter-

E: Just to enslave them.

B: It's a hunter-killer biobot Stingray. Unfortunately, Jay –

J: Wait. This could go get Steve's snake.

B: It could. If the snake was in water, possibly.

E: Or his new outdoor cat.

S: You're getting ahead of us.

B: Jay, you're not going to be able to buy this for Dylan for the pool or the tub, unfortunately. The robot needs special nutrients in the fluid because these are living tissue, living cells after all and equally important, these are – so these are just heart cells. There are no immune cells. If you put them in your tub with Dylan, bacteria and fungi would attack them so they would ot last long in the wild. But the potential benefits for something like this I think are pretty cool besides general robotics advances. It can be used to learn more about heart cells. In fact, one of the researcher's goals, his overall goal in this entire project was to create artificial hearts for kids who need them. So very laudable goal.

E: Yeah, definitely.

B: But there's just so many applications. Adam Feinberg is a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon. He said by using living cells, they were able to build this robot in a way that just couldn't replicate with any other material. You couldn't replicate this movement with onboard electronics and actuators while keeping it lightweight and maneuverable and it really is remote controlled like a TV set. So you really couldn't do this using any other technology that we have right now. It would just be way too heavy. In my mind, the real question is, what is this thing? Is this biobot alive? What the hell do you even call it besides a biobot?

C: It's a cyborg. It's a cyborg.

B: Yeah, in many senses it is. But one quote I got from Kit Parker, who's a bioengineer at Harvard. He led the team. He said, I think we've got a biological life form here, a machine, but a biological life form.

J: A learning computer.

B: I wouldn't call it an organism because it can't be produced, but it certainly is alive. And yeah, part of it consists of living cells. So in some sense, it is alive.

Who's That Noisy (41:49)

Answer to last week: Aztec Scream Whistle

S: All right, Jay, get us up to date on who's that noisy.

J: All right, last week I played you my favorite noisy of the year. This is what you listen to. [plays Noisy] Now, I bet that you guys know that I got a lot of weird email about that.

B: Yeah.

C: Jay, what does it say about you that this is your favorite noisy of the year?

B: Well, it's mine as well. It's mine as well. Especially once you learn what the hell it is.

J: Yeah, so I have to admit, I spilled my guts to Bob. It was too cool. I had to talk to him about it. Very, very cool noisy. So I'll tell you a couple of guesses I got. One of them was Ani Koski said, to who's that noisy, this is a hot water kettle approaching boiling temperature. And I ask you, Ani or Oni, who the hell would want their hot water kettle to scream at them like that?

B: I would. I would.

E: A person who's hard of hearing, maybe.

J: Maybe just over Halloween. I don't know. But that was funny. I got a lot of the screaming goat. I got one that was joking around about that's the noise the mob makes of them killing people, I guess. A lot of death references like that. But unfortunately, all those are incorrect. This is the correct answer. The correct answer is that is called the Aztec death whistle. And they have a few ideas of what they did with these. One of them is that they use them to pray to the wind god, one of their gods. But the one that most people believe in, the one that is, I guess, what most people are saying is the correct answer is that-

E: They want to be correct.

J: Yeah. This is the one I want to be correct. the Aztec warriors would blow these as they ran into battle. So you would have hundreds of warriors blowing-

B: Hundreds. Hundreds.

J: -death screaming whistles to intimidate and to shake up the army that they're running and fighting against. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think somebody stumbled on how to make a shape that makes this noise when you blow through it. Because it's like a skull that you just hold in your hand, you blow like a whistle. And the idea is that the Aztec warriors would be wearing these as they run in and at the appropriate time, they all kind of look at each other and go, blow, and they just freak the crap out of the army. Keeping in mind that you and I and everyone here only heard one and it was scary, imagine hundreds of them. So-

B: Oh my god.

J: So again, thanks Nicholas for sending that in. Love it. Love it. Love it. I think it's very cool and there's a little historical component to it.

B: Jay, I looked these up. I'm going to buy one. I found-

E: Just one?

B: I'm going to buy hundreds. I found a bunch that you could buy, Jay, and some of them look really, really cool. The only downside right now is that none of the ones that were for sale actually said, this is how it sounds. Because I could just see you buy one like, oh, this sounds like a wimp. But once I find one that will actually wisely say, this is how it sounds, by the way, I'm going to buy it. It was like 50 or 60 bucks.

J: Maybe the guy who won Who's That Noisy this week, John in Denver, can help you out. Because John wrote, that's an Aztec death whistle. The Aztec armies would sound hundreds of them to frighten their opponents. I have one myself. So, John-

C: Oh, no way.

J: Email Bob at INFO@theskepticsguide.org. It said, John, I have one. Tell us where you got it and help Bob out. He needs one of these.

B: Excellent. I want it for Halloween. I'm going to walk around in October and just blow that damn whistle. Imagine, Jay, imagine if I did that in the haunted corn maze when I was doing the corn maze. It would have been freaking-

J: I know. Bob, I actually thought about that. How cool that would be. That could be our lunch break sound or snack break sound. So this week's noisy, I'm doing something that I don't believe Evan ever did and I know I've never done it. I am crowdsourcing an answer to a noisy that somebody sent in and they don't know what it is. And I thought this would be fun. And I think if I get more people sending them in, I'll do this more often because I think it's a really cool idea to see our audience respond. So Lara Chavon sent in a noisy. She said, this noise was recorded by my father just before sunrise. He says he could not see the birds that are doing this noise, but it's so beautiful that I had to share it and maybe someone will know. And this was-

B: Steve will know.

J: Yeah. Well, I'd love that too. That would be really cool to test Steve out. And she's in Brazil. So check this noisy out. And if you think you know what it is or if you're 100% certain, email me and let me know. Let me know if you're guessing or if you're 100% certain so I could try to get to the real answer here. So here are the mystery birds. [plays Noisy] What do you think, guys? They're so cute.

B: I have no effing idea.

E: Let's see. Brazil. Toucan. No.

J: Steve, any guesses?

E: That's the first one off the list.

S: I'm not familiar with birds of Brazil.

E: What?

J: Well, you should be. How about the boys from Brazil? All right. So to all of you people out there that want to help, if you have an idea what they are or you know for certain, email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org and please keep sending me in your awesome nosies.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

What's the Word (47:28)

• Estivation

S: All right, Cara, What's the Word?

C: Ooh! The word this week is estivation. Anybody have any inside knowledge? Anybody have any guesses as to what estivation refers to?

S: I know what it is.

B: That's sleeping, yeah, sleeping during the day, isn't it?

S: No, no, during the summer.

C: Ahhh!

B: During the summer!

(Cross talk inaudible)

J: When you go digging with Emilio Estivez.

(Cara laughs)

S: During a hot or dry period,

B: I see

S: but usually the summer, yep.

C: Yes, yes, yes. So, in zoology, specifically, to estivate is to be in a dormant or inactive state, generally in a hot, dry environment. We see it in reptiles, insects, snails, even some mammals. But it is not to be confused with hibernation. That actually occurs during the winter months, and it generally lasts longer. Estivation, of course, occurs during the summer months.

In botany, it also has a definition. It's the arrangement of petals and sepals in the bud of a flower before it opens. And that's as opposed to vernation, which is the arrangement of young leaves in a leaf bud, before it opens.

And also, because of its usage, you can kind of use estivation in a literary sense. You'll sometimes hear people refer to estivating. Like, I have friends from Texas who like to estivate in the Pacific northwest, in order to beat the heat. So that really just means summering over someplace. It's very hoity-toity.

E: Huh! I see.

C: (British accent) Yes, I see. (/accent) So, the etymology of this word is interesting. It was first described in the early to mid 1600's in the scientific sense. And it comes from the Latin estis, which is actually the way it's typically spelled, the A-E-S-T, although the American spelling is just E-S-T. And the Latin estis literally translates to the hot season, or summer. Later, it became estivare, which means to spend the summer. So it's like a direct translation there, from the Latin. And that's what animals do.

Estivators, as I said before, are typically snails, earthworms, bees, salamanders, toads, frogs, lizards, crocodiles, some snakes, mud turtles, desert tortoises, and the mammal that I spoke of is the adorable, little hedgehog. Hibernators, we all know, are some small birds, and mammals, pocket mouses – pocket mice – kangaroo mice, bats, insects, and animals of that nature.

B: And bears!

C: And bears!

E: Oh my!

C: Sweet, little bears. Yes!

B: It's an amazing process, what their body's actually going through during the hibernation is amazing!

C: Yeah, hibernation is a much more intense metabolic process than estivation, although it is what we think of as that kind of induced, long term, minimal sort of metabolic processes.

S: Yeah, they also, they had to develop the metabolic pathways to live off their body fat. We can't live off our body fat, 'cause we need glucose, you know.

E: Damn shame, too.

S: But they can, essentially, make glucose out of fat, so they can just live off their body fat.

E: Wow.

C: And we also don't have enough of that kind of fat. Like, they have a really high proportion of brown fat, and we don't.

Your Questions and E-mails

Question #1: Snake Follow Up (50:31)

Love the show and I’m a long time listener. Occasionally you guys mention things that I’m pretty passionate about and this time it was snakes. As an avid reptile keeper, this hit close to home for me. I agree that keeping potentially harmful wildlife from your yard is important and I would strongly encourage you to use the methods that are least harmful to the local reptile population. Please don’t get a cat and let it outdoors. Since Dr Novella lives next to a natural area, an outdoor cat will patrol far from the yard and kill whatever it can. Keeping a pet cat as an outdoor pet no longer is seen as a socially responsible way to keep cats. Cats are indiscriminate killers of pretty much anything they can take down and don’t distinguish between native wildlife and introduced pests such as rats and mice. The feral cat problems in Hawaii and Australia are prime examples of the extreme side of the problem. If I could suggest other solutions, put a fish pond below your bird feeder, get a Jack Russel Terrier, hang a tray below your bird feeder to catch spillage, convert your bird feeder to a hummingbird feeder, place lots of rodent traps (live or lethal). I’m sure there are other things I haven’t thought of. Keep up the good fight Rogues! Doug Taylor Mill Creek WA

S: All right, couple quick emails. First a follow-up. You guys, Evan, you mentioned the snake. I got a couple of emails about this. This one comes from Doug Taylor from Mill Creek, Washington. He writes, love the show and I'm a long-time listener. Occasionally you guys mention things that I'm pretty passionate about and this time it was snakes. As an avid reptile keeper, this hit close to home for me. I agree that keeping potentially harmful wildlife from your yard is important and I would strongly encourage you to use the methods that are at least harmful to the local reptile population. Please don't get a cat and let it outdoors. Since Dr. Novella lives next to a natural area, an outdoor cat will patrol far from the yard and kill whatever it can. Keeping a pet cat as an outdoor pet no longer is seen as a socially responsible way to keep cats. They are indiscriminate killers of pretty much anything they can take down and don't distinguish between native wildlife and introduced pests. The feral cat problems in Hawaii and Australia are prime examples of the extreme side of the problem. If I could suggest other solutions, put a fish pond below your bird feeder, get a Jack Russell terrier, hang a tray below your bird feeder to catch spillage, convert your bird feeder to a hummingbird feeder, I already have a hummingbird feeder, place lots of rodent traps, live or lethal. I'm sure there are other things I haven't thought of. Keep up the good fight.

C: But don't use rodenticide.

S: So, apparently Doug doesn't want me to kill a lethal snake but wants me to slaughter rodents indiscriminately.

C: Don't use rodenticide in your yard.

S: No, no, no.

E: And get a Jack Russell terrier.

J: We thought of killing the snake. We were kidding about that.

S: We never said we were going to kill the snake. I did joke about getting an outdoor cat. I have two cats. They're indoor cats. I'm never going to have an outdoor cat. I agree. They are slaughterers. You know, they just kill. I can't have an outdoor cat and a ton of bird feeders and bird houses. Those things are almost incompatible.

E: It's a recipe for a lot of violence.

S: But interestingly, so I did clean up the snake condominium I had going there in my backyard. So, I cleared out all the sticks and the rocks and the underbrush and everything from the borderland between my lawn and the woods.

E: You're like St. Patrick.

S: I did not, no further sightings of the copperhead. It might have just been passing through or maybe it's living somewhere else. I don't know. I haven't seen it again.

E: Maybe a raptor picked it up, flew away.

S: It's possible. We have hawks that also perch on the edge of our woods. It's a very good place to find game. What's interesting is that I noticed in the last week or so, many fewer rodents in my yard.

J: No dead bodies out in the backyard?

S: No, no dead bodies. Just, you know.

E: Well, fewer rodents.

S: Well, a couple of weeks ago, I walked out onto my deck and at least a dozen chipmunks went scurrying, you know. And now, I barely see them. So I don't know what that means. It could mean-

J: They're probably scared.

C: It could mean that that snake was hungry.

S: It could mean that that snake's just been dining on that chipmunk. The chipmunks are probably the perfect size for it, like little perfectly sized snacks.

C: Then it probably means that snake has friends because snakes don't dine that often.

S: Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what it means. Just casual, not counting or anything. It's just casual observation. But it was dramatic. I mean, because they were literally all over the place. They have a trail through our backyard. You can actually see the trail, the chipmunks. They've matted down the grass in the pathway that they take.

J: That's a lot of chipmunk movement.

E: That's a lot of traffic, yeah.

C: Are they eating your vegetables? Why don't you like the chipmunks there?

'S: They do eat my vegetables.

C: They do? Okay.

S: They eat the bird feed that falls down.

C: Yeah. Because they're so cute.

S: They're cute. They're adorable. I don't mind them. Just don't eat my stuff, man.

C: Yeah.

E: Don't eat my stash.

S: Yeah. Just don't eat my veggies. And you could tell. I was like, all right. So I had a zucchini that was half-eaten, and you could see the little tiny little bite marks all up and down.

C: Oh.

Question #2: Archaic Terms (54:23)

Guys, It occurred to me that many of your younger listeners may have misunderstood Evan's quote of the week from Thomas Paine. The word 'fabulous' is used by most young people as a rough synonym of excellent. Of course, in Paine's time, the primary meanings (perhaps the only ones) derived from the root 'fable.' In the context of Evan's quote, I believe Paine had in mind the meaning given as definition 5.a. In the OED, viz. Resembling a fable, absurd, ridiculous; or perhaps 3.a., i.e, Of a narrative: Of the nature of a fable or myth, full of fables, U historical, legendary. I've run into this kind of misunderstanding by law students when I teach as a guest lecturer. In reading old court opinions or treatises. They often misconstrue the use of the words fabulous and fantastic as indicative of the author's approval, when, of course, nothing could be further from the intent. Similarly, they sometimes understand the word artificial to have a negative connotation, when in fact in such old texts it is likely to mean something akin to artistic. There was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a strong preference for the new factory-made products generated after the dawn of the industrial revolution, over the homespun and natural. There was a strong prejudice against the latter, which were thought to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Thus, there was a widely held belief that man-made things are ipso facto superior to natural things. Equally fallacious with, and the polar opposite, of the naturalistic fallacy we wrestle with today. It might be useful, when using quotes from earlier eras, to explain the meanings of such words in their time, when their meanings have changed so significantly. Regards, Steve

S: All right. One more quick email. This one's really cool. This comes from Steve Harris, who actually frequently sends me news items. But he writes an email. It says, it occurred to me that many of your younger listeners may have misunderstood Evan's quote of the week from Thomas Paine. The word fabulous is used by most young people as a rough synonym of excellent. Of course, in Paine's time, the primary meaning, perhaps the only ones, derived from the root fable. In the context of Evan's quote, I believe Paine had in mind the meaning given as definition 5A in the OED, resembling a fable, absurd, ridiculous, or perhaps of a narrative of the nature of a fable or myth full of fables.

E: Yes.

S: Legendary.

E: Yes.

S: Which is definitely true. I've run into this kind of misunderstanding by law students when I teach as a guest lecturer. In reading old court opinions or treatises, they often misconstrue the use of the words fabulous and fantastic as indicative of the author's approval, when of course nothing could be further from the intent. Similarly, they sometimes understand the word artificial to have a negative connotation, when in fact, in such old text, it is likely to mean something akin to artistic. There was, in the 18th and 19th centuries, a strong preference for the new factory-made products generated after the dawn of the Industrial Revolution over the homespun and natural. There was a strong prejudice against the latter, which were thought to be old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Thus, there was a widely held belief that man-made things are ipso facto superior to natural things, equally fallacious with and the polar opposite of the naturalistic fallacy we wrestle with today.

C: Interesting.

S: It might be useful when using quotes from earlier eras to explain the meaning of such words in their time, when their meanings have changed so significantly. Yeah, I thought that was very interesting. And that's true. I did look it up as well. Yeah, absolutely. Like fantastic means fantastical, not true, you know? And fabulous meant like a fable, not wonderful.

C: Yeah, not like, look at those shoes.

E: Abfab, baby.

S: But it's funny how many of these words just come to mean awesome, excellent fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I noted that too. Like that was simply an archaic use of the word fabulous in Paine's quote.

C: But the other one you mentioned, the one that he said his law students will sometimes screw up, it was the opposite. What was it again? It was fascinating to me.

S: Artificial.

C: Artificial. Yeah.

E: Of artifice.

B: More like artsy.

C: Yeah. Yeah, meaning artistic. That's so weird.

S: It's all our bias and our narrative, you know? It's marketing. A lot of it is actually marketing.

C: Yeah.

E: Oh, gosh.

S: The appeal to nature or the appeal to technology or the appeal to science or whatever. It just creates an emotional kind of feel, a halo around some concept that it takes on a certain connotation. But that changes over time. But we're so stuck in our own time we just don't realize sometimes how much things change. We have a very cool interview coming up. So let's go to that interview now.

Interview With Maria Cork (57:30)

S: Well, joining us now is Maria Cork. Maria, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide!

M: (British accent throughout) Thank you so much for having me.

S: I know Jay in particular has been really looking forward to this interview. We've been setting this up for a couple of months. But, Maria, you have a bit of an unusual job. Why don't you tell us about it?

M: I do. My day job is that I work in the creature effects industry over in the U.K., and for the last couple of years I've been working on Episode VII of Star Wars, and I supervise the hair department within creature effects.

S: Creature effects? So you make costumes.

M: Yep. The practical ones, nothing to do with digital, it's all the practical costumes with animatronic heads and prosthetics and that kind of side of things.

S: Do you do any full animatronics? Or there's always a person involved?

MC: It varies. A lot of the characters – I mean, if we're looking at that specific film, The Force Awakens – there was some characters that were people with animatronic heads, some of them were complete puppets that were puppeteered from outside. Some of them were just hand puppets. There was a complete mix of different things.

S: And what did you primarily work on?

MC: As you can probably guess from the sort of job that I do, the hair work, most of the build involved working on Chewbacca.

J: (Wookie scream) Oh my god! First, I want to ... Steve, you know, you didn't even properly welcome her. I was totally expecting Steve to do this. (Strained) Oh! Oh god Steve! My light saber is outta juice!

(Multiple people groan)

J: Oh my god! Let me recharge ... oh my god! That hasn't happened to me before!

S: Okay, you ready?

(Light saber sound effect)

(Maria laughs)

S: Jay has saber envy now.

J: Oh my god! My battery lasted for like, six months.

C: Oh yeah! That's yours Steve!

S: Jay, it happens to every guy. You can't get it on.

(Rogues laugh)

J: I really need to go see a Jedi doctor.

C: Mine's actually right behind you Maria, hanging on the wall.

MC: Ah, have I got time to grab it?

C: Yeah!

(Another light saber turns on)

MC: Are we gonna have a virtual saber fight now?

S: Absolutely! I've already started.

C: ... Just stick it back in.

(Maria laughs)

C: There we go.

J: So, can you tell us how did you start with that career? How do you become a hair specialist? Where did it begin?

MC: When I was a teenager, I was one of the people who was completely obsessed with horror films, and anything along that genre. So I used to watch one of those and go, “I really wanted to do effects!” And I love all the magic as well. It kind of went hand in hand. And I started doing silly make up, slit wrists on friends at school when I was about fourteen, fifteen, and annoying the teachers.

And then I got my first work experience at a small model making company near my house, and then started working at Skepton's Studios one day that I had off while I was doing college. And as soon as I finished to eighteen, I started as a runner in a special effects workshop, and worked my way up, and spent a lot of time in Jim Henson's creature shop, which was my first kind of big break in the industry, as the runner. I worked my way up through that company.

S: So, did you learn your skills mainly as an apprentice? Or do you get a degree in making Wookies?

(Laughter)

MC: That came much later! But early on, I didn't go to university. I just kind of knew what I wanted to do, and started literally as the person who would run out and buy all of the goods for the special effects companies, and go to havadasherie shops and sculpting supplies, and then started to get the work doing a bit of seaming of the skins, and painting, and helping out and doing whatever I could; and then eventually specialized in hair – I think it was when we did Animal Farm at Jim Henson's creature shop, for an HBO TV series.

And we had lots of animatronic pigs to make. And I was doing a lot of the hair work on that. After six months of that, kind of went, “Yeah, I think I know how to do this! I think I can do more of this.”

J: But it's quite an honor to be the person on the planet that got to put the hair on the Chewbacca costume. I find that to be pretty profound. Like, you have to be amazingly good at this.

MC: I've been doing it for a while now. When I got that phone call, 'cause the guy who's my boss, Neil Scandlen, who's heading up the creatures department, I've worked with a lot in the past. We did Sweeny Tart, and we did Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, and lots of other jobs together. But when he called me for that one, and it was always from the outset, he said, “We have to make Chewbacca,” - it's terrifying! It's daunting! It's a legacy character that everyone loves, and you don't want to be the one that doesn't do the right job of it. There's a big weight on my shoulders as soon as I took the job.

J: I bet. But seeing your work on the screen though, being a part of that film and everything, that's history.

MC: Yeah, I mean, it's something that I'd never experienced in my job before. We make things all the time, and some one will go, “Oh yeah! I saw that seven-head you did in this TV show.” And then it all moves on. But this is something really different. I mean, I was just saying to Cara before you guys came online, we did the Star Wars celebration this Saturday, which was at the Excel Center. It's like a kind of ComicCon, but specifically for Star Wars. And the creature department heads all did a panel talk for four thousand people. That's not something you normally do in my industry.

J: Oh god! First off, how was the conference? Was it incredible?

MC: It was amazing! I'm so happy. Borick Davis headed up our panel, so he was sort of looking after it, and introducing us all. And it was more of a conversation. So that was great, because he's brilliant at that kind of thing. And he put us all at ease, and plus we all know him because we put him in costumes quite a lot. So that was good.

But it was just an experience I've never had anything like, walking out into a room full of four thousand people who love the work you've done. Well, you hope so any way.

C: And what were you saying to me before we started recording? No where else in world will you see, like, a man in a Princess Leia bikini?

MC: Yep!

(Rogues laugh)

MC: I think there were two costumes that I loved that I saw on Saturday. There was a beautiful Asian lady with full beauty make up on in an Obi Wan Kenobi outfit with a stuck on beard, which was just fantastic! And then there was a guy who had done his own Chewbacca outfit, and it was just a cardboard tube and a cardboard, like a poncho that he has put over his head; and he just painted Chewie on it, and it was just brilliant! I love it.

(Cara laughs)

S: Cara, I betcha that's not literally true.

C: Literally? Oh ...

S: There are plenty of places where you will see guys in Princess Leia outfits.

C: Yeah, I bet you there's a whole dark corner of the internet just ...

J: You can pay for that, but ... let's not go there.

MC: I think there's probably about five hundred of them down in San Diego at the moment, isn't there Jay? Just getting ready for the weekend.

C: Yeah, already in line.

J: So, to do the work that you do, so they gave you the body suit with no hair on it. You just got handed this ... what material was the suit made out of?

MC: So, the body suit itself was a liker suit. The original one they used in A New Hope was knitted, but we decided to go with likert just for longevity, 'cause we knew how much we were gonna have to film on this film. So it was a liker suit that came to us, and we would pattern out where the blends are, so the color changes from ginger into the grey mix. And we would just knot the hairs in one or two at a time using a tiny little crochet hook, double-knotted in the same way that they make high-end wakes.

C: Oh my god! How long does that take?

MC: Well, we made five and a half suits in total, 'cause there were three different people playing Chewbacca in the film. We had Peter Mayhew obviously. We did one and a half suits for him. So we did the half one for when he sat in the Falcon, just because it's easier to dress him, and for his own comfort. And then we had a photo double, who was a guy called Jonas Suitarmu. And we also had Ian White, who was a stunt double. And each of those guys had two suits each because for every day that we filmed on a suit, it had to go back to the work shop, and two people had to spend a day getting the knots out and restyling it, every day. So ...

S: Oh wow.

MC: I'm trying to think how long that took in total. The peak of the build, we had thirteen people in their department, and they were generally just knotting the suits, and that was for about six months.

C: Oh my gosh!

MC: But then we had about a year's development before that, or six months' development before that just to get to the point where we knew what we were doing and could get on with it.

C: Wow!

J: So, there was a moment where you finished the first suit, (I'm just assuming that this happened) and did you guys have this moment where you finished the first one and you just stood back and went, “Oh my god! It's gorgeous!”

MC: (Laughs) I think we carried on developing the whole time, even when we were done, because the suits – one thing – that their head is whole 'nother ball game because the head consists of the skull. So the first thing we did was try and get the head and the face right. So Luke Fisher in the sculpting and concept department spent quite a bit of time sculpting a head, and then I'd get it and put some hair on it. Then we'd look at it; figure what wasn't right; go back; he'd change the sculpt head; then I'd put hair on it again. So that was our first thing, trying to make that right.

And even once you've got the completed head done, just the styling on it changes, 'cause Chewbacca moves his head (I think I said this on the panel on Saturday) he has a tendency to tuck his chin down and move his head left and right. And as he does, the hair on his chin kind of puffs out, and he stops looking like Chewbacca.

So then we started sewing bits of the hair down to the cowl with invisible thread and things just to try and keep it all in shape, but it was a real monster task. We got as much reference as we could from the original film, and stills, and video footage and things; and just worked with picked out photos we liked that captured the essence of Chewie; and tried to just kind of make that. It was always our brief to try to make it look and feel like Episode IV Chewbacca.

J: Yeah, and you guys didn't, or the people who made the actual head didn't add anything to it, right? Didn't you say, when you and I talked a couple of months ago, they wanted it to be identical to movies four, five, and six, right?

MC: Yeah, I mean, we could have tried to add, I think there was talk at the start of maybe adding eyebrow movements and other things, but because it's such a legacy character, and because it's Chewie, and all he had was its real eyes, and he opens his mouth and then has two paddles in the top lip that cause his lips to go up into a snarl. But that automatically happens as he opens his mouth. That's all we did. We didn't add any more.

You can kind of just lose the character. And things that come up on the internet quite a bit is people going, “Why didn't you age him?” And that was always the brief, again, it came from J. J. It was kind of, we just need to make him look like Episode IV. Plus, the folklore of Wookies is they live to about four hundred years old, and he was what, two hundred in Episode IV?

S: Yeah

MC: So he's only going to be two hundred and thirty in Episode VII, so specifically trying to age him, I think, might have looked like we were trying too hard, I think.

J: Were you personally on set, like, every day? What was the job like?

MC: Once we had finished the build, and we started shooting, I was looking after Chewbacca every day that we shot. We did about forty or fifty shoot days on that film. There were days when we would have two Chewbaccas up, so Peter Mayhew would be doing something, and then we would also have Yonna standing by, or we'd have Ian White standing by for a stunt.

So then we had another team from the hair department; and I'd always be on set, somebody from fabrications, so they would help dress. So there were two of us. But I'd go and do the make up in the morning, black his eyes out, and then we'd both dress him in a tent on set, and I'd look after him on the actual shoot.

J: So you like standing behind the camera, and every time the actor does something that screws the suit up, you like, “Oh! Don't do that!” (Maria laughs) “What are you doing?”

MC: Yeah, yeah. I think I was the bane of the eighties life, because I was always the last person out when they were gonna start rolling, because he would, he'd shake his head, and you were trying to keep some semblance of continuity throughout, and it's hair, it does move around, that was fine; but we had to try and keep it. And sometimes this one bit would just fall across his face every time, and there'd be like, “Yeah, go on. We know you're gonna go in. Go on damn it!”

(Cara laughs)

J: So when you watched the final movie now, do you see anything like, “Oh! We should have brushed the hair to the left! Oh! ...” like, you know, that type of stuff goin' on too?

MC: I think the first time I watched the film, which was at the pre-screening, which was the first time we got to see it, just before it was released, I think it was about five hours before it was released. They had hired a cinema just for the crew throughout the day to go and see it. I was just – you do, you focus on the things that you did, but then the second time I watched it, I kind of relaxed from it. And I realized, you have to.

B: Yeah

MC: You've done what you can do. And it's a seven foot-six wig, and there's only so far you can go with it. You try your hardest.

S: Was that all human hair? Did you say that?

MC: It's not human hair, it's yak-belly hair, which is what they use a lot to make theatrical beards from it. It's a little bit coarser, and yeah, as it says, it's from the belly of a yak. But it's quite commonly available for theatrical things.

C: Oh, really?

MC: And it's what the original suit was made of as well. So, again, we just didn't want to change anything around.

C: I have a sweater that's wool and yak, and it's really warm.

MC: Yak's quite coarse, I mean, maybe that's the top part of the hair. If you look at a yak, it's got this strip of really long hair under its belly, and then its tail hair's even coarser and longer, so again, they use that for beard hair ...

C: Yeah

MC: in theaters quite a lot.

C: I definitely know when I wear that sweater, I feel hot.

MC: (Chuckles) They do live in Tibet in the pole, so ...

C: Yeah

MC: that makes sense.

C: Is the full costume very, very warm?

MC: Compared to some of the other costumes that people are in in that film, which made of foams, and they're really big and hefty, at least with this one we put air conditioning on him or we put a fan on him. It goes through the hair, through the light suit, and he can feel it. Some of the guys who were in the much bigger fabricated suits don't feel any benefit of any air, so they're just stuck in there. The guys in fabrication put fans in there to get air flow going, just to keep them cool.

C: Ugh! Those suits must smell so bad.

MC: We use a, our secret weapon is far gone vogcurantri oil at the end of every day. Things that you can't put through the wash, we spritz them with vogcurantritri. So all the time, production, like, “You can't get alcohol on the production budget.” We're like, “Honestly, we're not drinking it, I promise!”

(Cara laughs, Jay chuckles)

J: You're like, “Just pour vodka all in the suit, and everything's great.”

MC: Yeah! It's good! It's an antibacterial, and the teetri smells good, and it's also an antibacterial; it works really well.

J: No, we forgot to mention that your close friends with Richard Wiseman, and he set this interview up for us. He made the connection. He actually turned to me during a live recording and said, “I've got a dead dog in my garden.” No, after he said that,

(Laughter)

MC: I've seen where the dead dog is. I have seen that. I've been to his house. I know all about the dead dog, trust me!

J: After he said that, he was like, “Oh my god! Jay, I have someone you have to talk to.” And he told me what the deal was, and I lost my mind. I'm like, “Are you kidding? Yes, make that happen!” So I want to thank Richard for making the connection, and I want to thank you for taking the time to come and talk to us. And I'm sure that you made about, at least a solid fifty percent of our audience super-psyched to hear all this awesome info about the movie.

MC: Aw, thank you so much. No, it's been an absolute pleasure to come on here, and yeah, I'll do anything for Richard. He's a sweetheart.

J: So, you know, if by any chance you happen to work on a Star Wars movie again, nobody knows, could you please come back and chat with us again? Maybe next year, or whenever?

MC: If I ever get the chance to work on another Star Wars film, I shall put it in the diary.

J: Excellent!

S: Excellent! All right, thank you so much Maria.

J: Thank you Maria.

MC: You're so welcome!

Science or Fiction (1:12:32)

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 fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. You guys ready for this week?

J: Yes.

C: Yes.

S: All right. Three regular news items this week. Item number one. A new study finds that heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second extends the shelf life from three weeks to 10 weeks. Item number two. A new analysis concludes that the moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed, as recently as 10 million years ago. And item number three, researchers have demonstrated that humans can detect a single photon of light. Bob, go first.

B: Heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second. So basically-

S: I would say, let me say, this is in addition to pasteurization because with pasteurization you get to three weeks. Just to make that clear.

B: Heating it by 10 degrees. So does that mean that you're rapidly increasing the temperature within one second? Or just you get it up 10 degrees hotter for one second? That's probably what it means. It seems like an obvious overdramatic result for just such a simple thing. So oh well. I can't think of a reason. Yeah. All right. Let's go to the second one. The moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed. Ten million. I'm not familiar. So what, can you tell me? I guess you won't give me too much more detail about that basin.

S: That's the right eye of the man on the moon.

B: Ten million years ago. So they used to think that those basins, so the seas, right? The maria, the seas, that they were caused by impacts that kind of fractured the crust and then this lava kind of seeped out and spread over. But now I think the conventional wisdom is that these were just eruptions, basalt eruptions, which are impressive eruptions. They have happened on the earth. They are wow. Okay. I'm not buying that one. I'm not buying that one. Let's see. Let's look at the third one. A single photon of light. Damn. You know, I've heard both. For years I've heard both. That we can detect a single photon and then other people are saying, no, it's granular as one single photon. But now they're saying we can. All right. I'm going to go with the moon. Moon fiction.

S: Okay. Jay?

J: The one about the heating the milk, I think this one makes a lot of sense. They're not saying you heat it and you leave it at that temperature. You're heating it up really quick, killing off whatever is in there, bacteria, whatnot. And then it'll just increase the shelf life. So it's as part of the pasteurization process, which I just thought when they pasteurize something that they're kind of doing that. But this is like a specific temperature and everything. I mean, sure. So, okay. I really don't have any reason to not believe that one. You know, the one about the Imbrium Basin, it is interesting because to think that's the... What would you call that, Steve?

E: Feature.

S: Feature.

J: Thank you. Perfect word, Evan.

S: But it's a Mario.

J: That feature could only have originated less than 10 million years ago. That's not a lot of time when you think about just how much time the moon has existed. Interesting. And I'd like to know why they think that. If there's a study here, I'd like to read that. This last one about the humans being able to see one photon of light, I completely believe that. I think that that's an absolute given. So it's between the milk and the moon's Imbrium Basin. And I drink milk, so therefore I'm an expert on it. And since I have not been to or eaten the cheese from the moon, I'm going to say that that one is the fiction.

S: Okay. Cara?

C: Okay. Heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second. I still don't know how you accomplish that. Like physically, how do you accomplish? Because it's either, like Bob said, heating it up 10 degrees within a second or within less than a second's time, or heating it up to 10 degrees and letting it sit there for less than a second, but then like it would stay that warm for longer than a second. I don't know.

B: You have to chill it.

C: I'm confused by this one. Yeah. Then you have to super chill it like less than a second later. Yeah. I don't know. I always thought the shelf life was already long, so that doesn't seem too unreasonable. The Imbrium Basin on the moon, well, the moon is, gosh, I hope I'm not wrong here. The moon's like almost the same age or around the same age as the earth. And that's four and a half billion years old. So 10 million is really recent. And I would think that a feature that's that pronounced that you can see with your naked eye is huge. So if something like that happened only 10 million years ago, I would think that there would be other outcomes of that in the solar system of an impact that big, like it would actually change its trajectory or something. I don't know. That seems too soon to me. And then humans can detect a single photon of light. I buy it. Can't we see like a candle at a distance of a mile or five miles or 10, I don't remember, on a clear night? We have really good vision, better than any of our other senses. So I'm going to say that, yeah, I'm going to GWBJ, and I'm going to say that the Imbrium Basin is the fiction.

S: And Evan.

E: The reason I think the milk one is science is that, yes, they did figure this one out. The reason it's not being implemented is because of like anything else, cost analysis. It probably costs too much to go through whatever sudden heating process and then cooling process would be involved. Not worth it. They couldn't. They'd have to sell milk for 20 bucks a gallon or something. So but as a proof concept, yes, this that does work. The one about humans detecting a single photon of light, they didn't say every human, but some humans and people who have very, very perhaps clear, as clear or as pure a vision as you can possibly have. They can probably see the photon of light that leaves the moon, the moon's left. So that's fiction. I'm going with the team.

S: All right. Well, let's take these in order. A new study finds that heating milk by 10 degrees Celsius for less than one second extends the shelf life from three weeks to 10 weeks. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is a science.

C: Yes.

S: So the shelf life of milk just with ordinary pasteurization is two to three weeks, which is fine. We go through a gallon of milk in four or five days.

C: You have a family. A single person has a harder time with that.

S: By a quart then.

C: I do.

E: Big milk is taking advantage of this.

C: I know.

S: But there are people who live in remote areas where the milk has to go farther, and by the time the milk gets there, it has a very short shelf life left. But in any case, extending the shelf life of milk would be nice. So what the researchers did was they used a low temperature short time or LTST method. This is a Purdue study. First, they inoculated the milk with lactobacillus and pseudomonas. They heated it in a pressurized chamber, rapidly raising and then lowering the temperature by about 10 degrees Celsius. But this was still, it was low temperature, still below the 70 degrees Celsius threshold needed for pasteurization. So they didn't raise the temperature beyond what's already done in pasteurization. This extended the shelf life to 63 days. It decreased the number of bacteria. That's basically how it works. Decreased the number of bacteria to below detectable levels. The fewer bacteria, the longer it takes those bacteria to reach the numbers necessary to alter the milk, to spoil the milk. They tested the resulting milk with panelists who detected no differences in color, aroma, taste, or aftertaste. So it seems to not affect the quality of the milk, but just extends the shelf life. So yeah, I don't know.

B: It's a shock. It's like the rapid rise and drop that shocks the shit out of them.

S: I guess so. I guess so.

E: More testing needed, I think.

S: You could also just irradiate the milk and kill all the bacteria, then you could store it on your cupboard shelf, you don't need to put it in the refrigerator.

C: Well, they do. There are milks that you can buy that are shelf stable.

S: Yeah. It's irradiated. It doesn't make it radioactive.

B: It's not ionizing radiation that's coming out.

S: All right, here we go. Number two, a new analysis concludes that the moon's imbrium basin was formed much more recently than previously assumed, as recently as 10 million years ago. All of the rogues quite confidently feel that this one is the fiction, and this one is the fiction.

B: Yeah, baby.

J: Sweet.

E: Moon.

S: Good job, everyone.

C: Yay.

S: And you guys hit upon the reasons why this is fiction. The main basins on the moon, the mare, the black areas, were formed during the area of heavy bombardment billions of years ago, about 4 billion years ago, including the imbrium basin. And for this one, for the imbrium one, there's a clear evidence of a massive crater, of a massive impact. Not just a crater, but I mean, they have the markings left on the surface of the moon by the debris from whatever impacted it.

B: The ejecta. The ejecta?

S: Yeah, exactly. So what their analysis did show was that the asteroid that formed the imbrium basin was about 10 times as massive as we previously thought. It was protoplanet-sized. It was big enough that it was actually a protoplanet, not just an asteroid. So it was about twice as big and about 10 times as massive as previous estimates. That was the actual news item. Cracked open the crest of the moon, caused the basaltic eruption and formed that sea. Okay, let's go on to item number three. Researchers have demonstrated that humans can detect a single photon of light, which is of course science. This was a controversy for a while, Bob. There were people that didn't know what the lower limit of human light detection was.

B: That's why I heard both, I guess.

S: Yeah. It actually was known that a retinal neuron could respond to a single photon. But what was not known was whether or not that would be perceived by the brain. Would that signal make its way to the brain because the brain may filter out background noise and that a single photon would just be eliminated with the noise. You know what I mean?

B: Yeah.

S: So what they did is they put subjects into a very dark room for like 40 minutes, let them completely dark adapt. And then they would look into a device that would either emit a photon or not emit a photon. And they had to say whether or not they saw the photon. They had to do it this way because 90% of the photons would not make it through to the retina, right? They would get scattered by the lens, the cornea, the vitreum the fluid in there. So they had to do a statistical analysis to see if they detected the photon more often than you would predict by chance. And they did, significantly so. So they were able to detect a single photon. They describe it as like you don't, you almost don't really see it. You just have this vague sensation that something happened. You know what I mean? It doesn't, it doesn't like create an image. They said it was a very bizarre experience. Like they were just like barely on the edge, obviously, of detection. But it's almost like just you have this sense that something happened, you know?

C: Oh, and I misspoke when I said mile, it was 30 miles. A human can see a candle flame 30 miles away on a clear night.

S: Yeah.

J: That is far.

E: Wow.

C: If you were like up high, obviously, because you would lose the horizon if you were like at sea level.

S: Yeah. The horizon's 15 miles away. So yeah, you wouldn't. So good job, everyone.

J: Thank you.

C: Yay!

S: Yeah, the 10 million years. That was, that was very, very implausible.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:25:07)

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

E: All right, here we go. "Denialists maintain their stance, be it in regards to HIV and AIDS, the Holocaust, or in the face of exhaustive and irrefutable evidence. It is not melodramatic to say that vocalization of these particular falsehoods have been responsible for many deaths." Too true. Too true. Science writer Ben Vincent wrote those words as part of an article back in 2009 titled When Pseudoscience Kills, Trust Denialism and Peter Duisburg.

S: Yeah.

E: Very good article and a very good reminder that there are very serious consequences when people give in to the ways of pseudoscience.

S: Yeah, Duisburg is a scientist who is an HIV denialist. He's like basically the head of the HIV denial. He's the only-

E: Right, the poster child.

S: Yeah, he gives it whatever respectability it has or at least plausibility. But-

J: I wonder how you get on in your life to denying HIV. Like I can understand to a certain degree being a global warming denier, but like why would you deny HIV?

C: Yeah, because there's good rhetoric around that. There's like enough people kind of on your team. But yeah, how big is the HIV denial movement and how gross is it? You know what I mean?

E: Oh, it's-

S: Honestly, a lot of them are dead.

C: Oh, interesting.

S: And I mean that seriously. A lot of the people who had HIV and were HIV deniers didn't take the medication and now they're dead.

C: Ah, yeah.

S: That actually took a huge toll on the HIV denial movement. A lot of the big people who are like, I'm living with HIV and I don't have AIDS and blah, blah, blah. Now they're dead.

C: Oh, and that would make sense as a motivation for it because you don't want to admit to yourself that you're so sick.

J: Yeah, there you go. Thanks.

E: Sure.

B: Death by denial.

C: Yeah.

E: Yep. The words hoist and petard come to mind in that context.

C: Well, that was a bummer ending.

E: Well, no.

C: Thanks, Evan.

E: Need to bring everyone down on that one. It's just a friendly public service reminder that pseudoscience kills. Be well, everyone.

S: That's a running theme on our show. Pseudoscience kills. That's okay. But okay, we'll end on a positive note.

E: Let's.

Star Trek Replica Set (1:27:25)

S: Bob, tell everybody what the SGU is doing on July 31st.

B: We are going on a tour of the original full sets used for the classic Star Trek show that were recreated, lovingly recreated to millimeter-scale perfection in Ticonderoga, New York, and they're used on the Star Trek Continues web series that continues the original voyage of the Star Trek Enterprise with Kirk, Spock, McCoy, all those guys. So yeah, we're just so excited. I've seen the shows. The show is really cool. The sets are exquisite. These are... I've seen a walkthrough of the entire set. You walk through, everything is there. You can just walk from the bridge to the turbo shaft to the sick bay to the transfer. Everything is there. Just all connected. It's wonderful. So we're all excited. We're going to go on the tour July 31st at 10 a.m. in Ticonderoga, and many of us will be in costume, and we're all so excited.

S: Just like we did when we saw the Star Wars opening, we're going to auction off two of the tickets that we have to lucky SGU listeners who want to join us for a day of Star Trek geeking out and tour an incredible... That's another word, actually, whose meaning has probably changed, but an incredible, fantastic, fabulous recreation of the Star Trek Enterprise, the Starship Enterprise. So yeah, so join us. It's going to be a lot of fun. If you want to go, then email your bid to INFO@theskepticsguide.org. Put Star Trek auction in the subject and just give us your number. So we're going to auction off the two tickets individually, so we'll just take the two highest bids. If you want to bid for both tickets, go right ahead. If you are going to win one, if you have the same bid for both, you'll win both. So just tell us if you're bidding for one ticket or for both. Again, we'll just take the two highest bids, and then we'll let you know. You're responsible for your own transportation, of course. We'll just meet you there, and you've got to do this right away because it's next weekend. So send in those bids if you want to join us for a day at the Starship Enterprise. All right, guys, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

J: Thank you, Steve.

C: Thanks, Steve.

B: Anytime, Steve.

E: Doctor.

Signoff

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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