SGU Episode 674

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SGU Episode 674
June 9th 2018
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SGU 673                      SGU 675
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
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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 Wednesday, June 6^th, 2018, 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.

S: How is everyone doing this evening?

C: Doing well.

B: Pretty good.

C: Thanks for asking.

S: Hey, did you guys see that orange lobster that they discovered?

J: No.

B: What?

C: I did not.

E: Orange lobster.

B: Orange?

J: Yeah, it's cool.

C: Googling.

E: Not just orange, like neon orange. I mean, this thing is orange.

C: I've seen blue lobsters before. Aren't they pretty rare?

S: Yes.

B: Oh, they're awesome.

S: There are rare blue lobsters, but the orange lobster is even more rare. One in 30 million, they estimate.

J: Steve, aren't they all orange?

C: I know. When I just Googled orange lobster and they all look orange to me.

S: No, first of all, they're like brownish black. They get red when you cook them, but when they're alive, they're not red. They're camouflage. You know, that's the color of the bottom of the ocean.

C: That makes sense.

B: Oh, yeah.

S: The orange one would be picked out by predators in two seconds, which is why they're rare.

E: Which we got it.

J: So they know more kung fu, right? It's actually called claw fu, by the way, Evan.

S: Claw fu, yeah.

C: I've seen one that, when you Google it, there's one that's half orange and half dark.

J: Yeah, I see that one too, Cara. I'm looking at that right now.

C: Ooh, that must be also rare. But what's this one about? What happened?

S: It's just a mutation. Yeah, it's just a genetic mutation.

J: I would not want to eat the blue one. That one, I would just think it's poisonous.

C: Oh, I love it. I wouldn't want to eat it either, but I might want to mount it because I'm a weirdo.

E: Listen to this from the article from where we found this. This appeared in CBS Local out of Boston. According to the New England Aquarium, the one and two-thirds pound orange lobster is considerably more rare than the blue lobster. The Lobster Institute at the University of Maine said the likelihood of the lobster being orange is one in 30 million. There's a lobster institute.

C: Of course, in Maine.

S: At the University of Maine. Of course.

E: Headed by Dr. Zoidberg, maybe?

S: Oh, my old scuttling grounds.

E: You could have an ink pouch inserted, you know? Get away from your enemies.

S: This reminds me of a couple of months ago, it was actually in February. The Yellow Cardinal. Did you guys see that?

J: No.

C: No.

S: It was seen in Alabama. I actually tweeted about it.

B: How did I miss that?

J: Come on.

C: You're so mean.

S: A Yellow Cardinal.

J: So what's with him, Steve? Is it male or female?

C: He's so pretty.

S: It's a male. It's gorgeous. Look up Yellow Cardinal. It's gorgeous. First of all, this is not an issue of camouflage because red cardinals are pretty red.

E: Oh, they stand out.

S: They're not camouflaged to begin with, and there are yellow birds, so it's not like it's a problem. It's just it's a rare mutation.

C: It's rare, but it looks like there's enough of them that they've been photographed several times.

S: Yeah. Because, yeah, because when they crop up, people... This is one in a million, which I think is probably a rounded off number, but it's also rare.

C: And also, like a cardinal, right, one in a million, which is... It's rare, but they're flying about and people will see them. With the lobster, it was like one in thirty a million. They also had to catch the damn thing.

S: Yeah, that's right.

C: And pull it up in a net.

E: And that lobster, it didn't even occur to the fishermen or whomever was handling the lobster that they had something special there. It wound up in the tank for sale at the local store somewhere. I mean, it got to that point. Well, you got to think about how they used the other lobsters. Anybody could have taken it.

J: They're capturing them in bulk and what's the lobster fisherman going to do? Like, hey, I'm going to sell this. You know what I mean?

C: Yeah?

E: Well, if you know your trade, maybe.

C: Isn't that what he does for a living, is catch them and then sell them?

J: Yeah, but special sale, like who's he going to find to sell it to for like $1,000 or something?

S: Well, it's going to an aquarium now.

C: Oh, cool.

E: That's good.

S: Yes, the yellow cardinal is very rare, but weird birds are not that rare, actually. Jay got his son a, well, I got him for him, actually, a bird feeder. And they're starting to look at birds now and get used to what they're seeing come to the feeder. So, Jay, not on a semi-regular basis, you will see weirdos. You will see birds that are like 1% or 2% variations or that are just like albinos or partial albinos or partial leucism, leucistic birds, Cara.

C: What is that? I got to add it.

S: Yeah. L-E-U-C-I-S-T-I-C.

C: Okay.

S: So, for a couple of years, we had a cardinal in our, coming to our feeder that was a female cardinal with partial leucism, meaning that it wasn't a full albino, but it had-

J: Does that mean she'll have sex with any other bird?

S: No.

C: I've seen these on pigeons before.

S: Yeah. They're like-

C: Leucism, yeah.

S: Patches of reduced color, you know.

C: Yeah. And it almost looks like a brindle, like a white brindle pigeon or something.

S: Yeah.

C: Because it's like patchy.

S: Also, I once took a photograph of a rare black-capped, yellow-bellied sapsucker, which is about 1%.

S: That totally sounds like you made it up, doesn't it?

C: I know. Black-capped, yellow-bellied sapsucker. What do you say?

S: Yellow-bellied sapsucker. That's a type of woodpecker.

C: It's a type of sapsucker.

J: It's also an insult in certain areas of the country.

S: You yellow-bellied sapsucker.

C: Oh my gosh. I just looked up the peacock, a peacock with partial leucism. It's like the most stunning thing I've ever seen.

J: Yeah. That is like right out of like a Michael Whelan painting, you know.

C: It's gorgeous.

J: Speaking of birds, we have early bird pricing for NECSS.

C: Oh my gosh.

B: Hey. Nice segue.

C: So good.

J: Tis ends this coming Friday, June 15th. So you could save one third of the cost on a three-day ticket, which I recommend that you do because we have wonderful lectures on Sunday as well, including a lecture I will be giving. So don't miss that. Early bird also applies to student tickets, which are already over half off. So if you're a student, you have no excuse. You really should come to NECSS.

S: I'll be talking about, during the Science-Based Medicine Day, I'm going to give my talk on muddy thinking about clean eating.

B: Oh. I see what you did there.

C: That's so important.

B: Nice.

S: My wife came up with that title. But it was good.

B: Yes, she did. She comes in handy. She definitely comes in handy.

J: That'll be on the Friday at NECSS. And Science-Based Medicine includes Steve Novella, Harriet Hall, David Gorski, and a special guest, Michael Marshall of the Good Thinking Society.

S: All the way from the UK.

C: Oh, Marshall's going to be there. That's great.

B: Wasn't he on Land of the Lost?

J: No.

S: With Holly?

J: Steve, you're doing a panel on medical marijuana?

S: Yes, that's correct.

C: Oh, cool.

J: Do you have to get high before the panel just so you know what you're talking about?

B: I can help you with that.

S: That is incorrect.

E: Wow.

J: We have other panels throughout the weekend. We have one, CSICom Meets Me Too. That's with Cara Santa Maria. Who the hell is she?

C: I know her.

J: Olivia Kosky and Virginia Hughes.

C: Yay. So excited. So many cool individual talks, too. Isn't Katie Mack coming?

E: Oh, yes.

C: Yeah.

B: I can't wait to hear her talk.

C: I love her.

S: James Randi's going to be hanging with us, too.

J: It's our special guest.

E: I know. Yes.

J: If you want to meet Randi, you want to talk to him, you want him to sign something, you have a question you've always wanted to ask him, you got to come to NECSS. We also, and don't forget, our keynote speaker this year is Jennifer Ouellette.

B: Awesome.

C: Yay.

B: She's awesome.

J: We just interviewed her two episodes ago, if you're interested.

E: But it's that early bird special, June 15th. You've got to get in before then.

C: There's no reason not to.

J: Evan, you promised anyone that buys the early bird tickets you were going to make them dinner or something, right?

E: I did. I made an offer through my Facebook and I'll make the offer here as well. First time attendees to NECSS. It's our 10th anniversary. So if you haven't been, now's the perfect time to go. First time attendees, come and find me. I have something special for you. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but come see me because I have something for you.

C: That's so sweet.

E: But you got to show up. You got to be there to get it.

J: You should go to NECSS.org for all the details.

What's the Word? (8:37)

• Hermeneutical

S: So Cara, what am I going to ask you?

C: What's the word?

S: What's the word?

C: Okay. So this word, it gets deep, y'all.

S: This is one of those words that if you want to sound smarter than you are, you throw this word out there.

C: Completely. And I still to this day don't fully understand it, which is why I thought it would be important to do this as a what's the word. So you guys know I'm back in school. I've been gone for 10 years, started a new PhD in clinical psychology, and I've been reading an awful lot. And psychology is interesting because it kind of rests on a foundation of neuroscience and biology, but also philosophy and sociology. They all kind of blend together. And one of the words I kept hearing over and over was hermeneutic or hermeneutical. Yes, hermeneutical.

E: Hermeneutical.

C: Do you guys remember, isn't that the name of like a prosthetic for when your dog gets neutered? Can't you get neuticles?

E: Is any of those fake testicles?

J: What?

C: Yeah, it's a real thing.

J: Oh my God. No, they do have fake testicles. I know they do.

C: Yeah. No, but I'm telling you also-

E: And the purpose is?

J: So you look normal.

C: The brand name is actually neuticles. That's why every time I hear the word, it makes me laugh. Yeah, neuticles. Hermeneutical, not neuticles. Very different. So hermeneutical, it's a word that you often hear in philosophy, but you also hear it in like religious scholarship. You hear it in pedagogy and you hear it in psychology and related fields too. But it's straightforward definition that you read in the dictionary, I think doesn't really capture it. Like the Merriam-Webster definition, for example, says the study of methodological principles of interpretation, parenthesis, as of the Bible, close parenthesis. And the second definition-

S: It doesn't do it justice.

C: Right? It doesn't. And the second definition is a method or principle of interpretation. But it's so much deeper than that. So I've been looking around the web to just try and find deeper and better explanations. The Wikipedia article on it, I have to say, is actually kind of complicated and it might leave you with more questions than answers. But I found a good blog. It's the Oxford University Press's blog. And there's a post by Jens Zimmerman, and it was only posted last year. So it's quite modern. And it's nine facts about hermeneutics, and I think it's really helpful. So the first fact that Jens listed was hermeneutics is all about interpretation in fields of study. So we did mention that. When we interpret actions of our friends or try to figure out what a job termination, for example, means in the context of our life story. So right there, I think that's an important point, that context part of it. That's really central to hermeneutics. It's the art of understanding and of making oneself understood. It goes beyond mere logical analysis and general interpretive principles, even though most dictionary definitions do say it's just an interpretation or the study of interpretation. The word hermeneutics comes from the ancient Greek language. Hermeneunen, I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, means to utter, to explain, to translate. It was first used by thinkers who discussed how divine messages or mental ideas were expressed in human language. So we'll take a break from this write-up and we'll look a little bit at the etymology of hermeneutics. It was first introduced in 360 BCE. This is an old word. This might be one of the oldest words we've talked about on the SGU. And there's some folk etymology that suggests that it actually comes from Hermes. Actually, the core of the word in translation does mean interpreting or translating or interpreter. But again, it goes beyond just interpreting because it really has to do with interpreting texts, or allegories, or stories in the context of the time that they were written and in the context kind of in situ of what was going on then and who the person who was telling these things mean.

B: Yeah, it's critical.

C: Yeah, it's like what do the allegories, what do the metaphors that are told really mean and why did they use allegory or metaphor in this place instead of speaking in plain language? All of those things kind of come together when we talk about hermeneutics. What do you think, Steve? Does that kind of cover it or am I missing something really glaring?

S: I think it covers it, but there's different ways to parse it. I think one thing that helps me understand it is to think of it as like a paradigm of interpretation. It's not the interpretation itself. It's like meta-interpretation.

C: Yeah, it's like how you would go about it, even more than that.

S: What's the underlying theory that you're using as a method of interpretation? For example, interpreting a story as an allegory is a hermeneutic, right, as opposed to even a film. Let's say if you're reading a film, are you looking at the superficial story or are you looking at the subtext? If you're looking at the subtext, well then what's the relationship between the story and the underlying meaning that the director is trying to convey? That's a hermeneutic. It's the theory of how to go about interpreting whatever it is you're interpreting, a text or a speech or a film or whatever.

C: It's a theory. It's a methodology, and even if you get super deep into philosophy, it's an entire school of thought.

S: Yes, it's like a school of thought.

C: It can become a focus.

S: Or like Freud's theory of how to interpret dreams, that's a hermeneutic.

C: That's definitely hermeneutic. And then we often—

B: Waste of time hermeneutics.

E: But it's a hermeneutic nonetheless.

C: Well, and I might argue, even though this is totally meta, that as much as it's a complete waste of time to try and find actual symbolism in dreams that links up to some sort of guidebook, then we're really talking about astrology. Having conversations that are quite personal about themes that you've experienced in your dreams can open, and I think that's what most psychologists do use it for. It's more of a Rorschach to get people talking about stuff.

B: Okay. Yeah.

C: And then you can tap into things that matter to them and help them sort of breach that heavy division of their defenses that a lot of people have. But anyway, even beyond that, I love, Steve, that you mentioned hermeneutics as a way—let's say if you're looking at a film hermeneutically, because I think that we've talked a lot about Star Wars on the show, and as much as Star Wars is a really fun franchise, and I really do enjoy it for its entertainment value, the biggest problem that I have with Star Wars is this hermeneutic good versus evil, dark versus light, religious allegory.

S: Although it really is an epic quest. I mean, so you could look at it under the hermeneutic of the epic quest, right?

C: You can do that too, yeah. And again, it's like these different interpretations. It's the methodology of how you do it. So it's a really—it's one of those great philosophy terms that you're so right, you throw it around to sound smart, and after about 20 times of me reading it or hearing it from professors, when context clues were really failing me, I finally was like, I need to start reading about this deeper. And it's still—it takes effort every day for me to fully wrap my head around a word. You know, sometimes a word stands in that has such complex meaning and that's got so many things attached to it that it really does require expanded conversations around it, even when you write the term.

S: Yeah, I mean, it's not a word that you could really, like, understand a superficial definition of it out of context of how it's used technically within some discipline, right? You have to be talking about philosophy or about biblical interpretation or film interpretation or whatever in order to really understand why the word exists. Why do we need that word? What are we referring to with it? All right. That's—I like—the words I like the best are the ones that actually expand your understanding, not just like, oh, here's an interesting word, but there's a concept.

C: Yeah, like here's a label.

S: Here's a concept that this word attaches to, and that—it's the concept that's important.

C: And there are a lot of theorists that would say that almost all words do that, but it's true. You can kind of draw a dividing line between words that we think of as simple functional labels for things that we all understand maybe intuitively, or even if it's not intuitive, just things that we've learned throughout life. And then there are words that without having the word, our understanding of the concept itself is impoverished because the word allows us to think more deeply about it. Thank you.

B: What sucks, what annoys me is that you learn this wonderful word, hermeneutics, and then you're afraid to say it because people will look at you like, really? You're going to throw that word out there? Really?

C: Oh, my gosh.

B: Right? So it's just frustrating when you have a word that's just so out there and that's so obscure, right? I mean, how often do you hear hermeneutics, for Christ's sake?

C: Bob, I have to tell you, I love that you said that because last week we did the word eruptive, remember? And so then I'm writing a paper about Yalom's take on existential fear of death and how you can approach the dying population of patients with existential psychotherapy, and I use the word eruptive because I'm talking about boundary experiences, experiences in people's lives where they have like a brush with death or a brush with something really intense that takes them into what Heidegger called like an ontological mode, a mode where you're like really aware of your being, and it's really stressful. Like most people live in this more vapid world where we just deal with frivolous things. So I'm talking about this boundary experience, and I talked about it being eruptive. And my TA who was grading it was like, did you mean eruptive? Like the E word? And then I wrote back and I go, no, I actually was really focusing on this word and blah, blah, blah. And we've been talking about it a lot in my show. And he was like, thank you so much for introducing me to a new word that I didn't know. That said, for ease of reading, it's probably best to focus on using words that most people already know.

B: Oh, God. Damn.

E: Yeah. Wouldn't that be better? There you go.

B: Perfect example. And I can see that. You know, part of me understands that, but part of me is also like throw in a word. You know, don't look up a word to say, oh, I want to sound smart. Just throw a word that you might just know that might be a little bit obscure. Throw it in there. And once in a while, you can't do it too much because then it's just like overwhelming. But throw it in there.

C: But it was the only word in the whole piece like that.

B: And make them look it up.

C: Exactly.

B: Make them look the damn word up. People should be looking up words.

S: So my rule of thumb, my rule of thumb is, yeah, I wouldn't use a word that's more complex than you need just to sound smart because then you're not going to sound smart. You're going to sound fully yourself and you're just going to obscure what you're trying to convey.

B: But what if it's a beautiful word that you just want to share?

S: Well, if you're doing poetry, that's different than the word you choose, whatever freaking word you want. But if it's just prose.

C: If it's academic writing, yeah.

S: You're trying to optimize understanding. Don't use a word that's more complicated than it has to be or more obscure than it has to be. But I do like words that accomplish certain things, that they may be more precise or specific than more general words. They may be more efficient, like one word that captures something that would otherwise take a whole sentence to say, or that expand our conceptual space, right? So hermeneutics, I think, is one of those words that expands our conceptual space. Whereas eruptive, I think, is just an efficient word.

C: It's efficient. And I was specifically talking about a sense of being and a sense of emotion rushing in in numbers that you never before have experienced so it actually was more descriptive than erupt, like a volcano erupting, because then it just means your emotions are out there, like messy. But it was much more focused use. But at the same time, I totally – I struggle with that sometimes too.

S: But I wouldn't dumb it down. I find myself just naturally using words that are useful, that are genuinely useful, you know? And if I feel like – if it just comes to mind because it says exactly what I want to say, I use it, you know?

C: Do you have words though that you use all the time and you feel like you overuse them and you wish there were more adjectives for them?

S: We use ubiquitous a lot.

C: Ubiquitous. I use the word fundamental all the time. And I wish there were better words for fundamental.

E: Interesting.

J: On this show, interesting is the most interesting.

S: Basically.

B: I love the words cool and awesome. And sometimes I just feel like very – I'm just so lazy that I'm not using more variants of those two common words.

E: And there's the word like.

C: That's true because those have a lot of adjectives.

J: A lot of people complain about the overuse of the word awesome.

C: Yeah. Because it means inspiring, like overcoming you with awe. But we're like, oh my gosh, this water bottle is totally awesome.

J: We need a new word for awesome.

S: The three of us and almost – I mean we're children of the 70s when awesome was a word, you know? When everything was awesome.

E: Oh, yeah. In the 80s too.

S: In the 80s, into the 80s. So that's just part of our generation.

C: But isn't groovy also part of your generation?

S: No.

B: No.

E: A little before my time.

S: That's a decade earlier.

C: Dang it.

S: I know. It's funny. I always challenge my daughters to like name the decade that things come from. Like to us, it's so obvious like the 70s and the 80s and the 90s totally have their own different vibe. But to them, it's all ancient history.

E: Yeah. If it's before 1990.

S: All right. Let's move on finally to some news items.

News Items

The Sterile Neutrino (22:03)

• Reports of sterile neutrino's resurrection may be greatly exaggerated 

S: Bob, this is I think the news of the week.

C: So passive-aggressive.

S: You have the news item of the week, the sterile neutrino. What the hell is that?

B: Yeah. This one was fun to research. So an experiment called Miniboon claims evidence for a new type of neutrino called a sterile neutrino. Previous experiments both support and refute this particle's existence. So the question is, do we have a long-awaited new physics, new particle, or is this just another physics dead end? So yeah. So neutrinos, little neutral ones. This is the second most ubiquitous particle in the universe after photons. Millions are going through your fingertip every second. Like right now, one Mississippi, now another million. So you get the idea. They're just flying through everything. So these particles only interact using the feeble, weak nuclear force and gravity. So these forces are just so antisocial in the context of this particle that a single neutrino, it's often said, can go through light years of lead before interacting with a single atom.

J: Oh my God.

B: Yeah. It's amazing. So because they are so ghostly, they are the first particles to escape supernovas, which is an interesting little factoid, making neutrinos their herald, kind of like Silver Surfer, and is for Galactus. I'll tell you later, Cara.

C: Yeah. I'm like, what?

B: So there are three verified types or flavors of neutrinos, electron neutrinos, tau, and muon neutrinos. So then in the 90s, you have the liquid scintillator neutrino detector. I love that name.

C: Scintillator.

B: Yeah, scintillator. That's at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. So they discovered a new neutrino, which they call the sterile neutrino or inert neutrino, because it only interacts through gravity. It doesn't interact through the weak nuclear force. So there's essentially no way to directly detect this thing. You're just not going to directly do that at all. So this was kind of put to the side, though, this whole idea, though, because other experiments really couldn't find them. But now most recently in the news, we have this mini boon neutrino detector in Fermilab, and this has reignited the hunt for this sterile neutrino. So the detector produces protons that hit a source that creates these neutrino, which blast into this 800-ton sphere of a special kind of oil. Now the neutrino on the impact, they're very rare. There's a lot of neutrinos, so it takes a lot of them and a lot of liquid to have a single interaction, which creates these flashes of light that are read by the tubes, which translate the light into computer-readable signals so they could figure out what kind of particles are creating it. So this latest evidence is now published in the famous archive, Physics Preprint Server, which we've mentioned many, many times. So what their experiments are showing that is they have 460.5, approximately, more electron neutrinos than theory predicts. So they got 460.5 more. Not sure where they're coming from. So this is more, even when you consider the other flavors of neutrinos oscillating and becoming electron neutrinos, they already take that into account. The crux of the theory, then and now, is that the system behaves as if a sterile neutrino appears and then oscillates into one of those extra electron neutrinos that are detected. So you get that? So you have all these neutrinos impacting the oil, and occasionally you have the sterile neutrino that's created and then oscillates into an electron neutrino, and then that's what they're detecting as extra, as part of the 460.5 extra. So remember, sterile means it's undetectable, so we can only kind of infer its existence. That's the crux of the entire thing. So why is this so exciting, or potentially? Because this could be the first new particle since the Higgs boson in 2012, and it's already half a decade away. And even more importantly, this could be the first hint of new physics beyond the standard particle, a new particle that the standard model does not predict. So that's huge, because as we all know, we're just not seeing any of the new physics that we expected to see at the energies that we're able to harness at the LHC. So what's going on? So this is extra exciting. So now you have Kate Schulberg, who's a particle physicist at Duke University. She said, if the mini-boon's new result holds up, that would be huge. That's beyond the standard model, that would require new particles and an all-new analytical framework. So yes, very exciting. So this is obviously strong new evidence for sterile neutrinos. In fact, this is an interesting angle. If we only had this new experimental result, and the one from the 90s, it would pretty much be a no-brainer that this would be, they would just kind of tack this on to the standard model already, because it would be so compelling. I think if you combine those two experiments, it's like sigma 6.1, which is huge. So however, and you knew a however was coming, as new evidence is produced, other evidence has weakened. There was one detection event that was based on missing antineutrinos around nuclear reactors, and they said that this is because of sterile neutrinos. That now is considered to be a mistake due to bad calculations. Yes, bad calculations do happen. So now that is not evidence for sterile neutrinos. Other big neutrino experiments, one of them called the Underground Oscillation Project with Emulsion Tracking Apparatus experiment in Switzerland, has failed to produce any hint of sterile neutrinos. Another potential problem is this, and this one sounds pretty significant to me. The background noise created by the experiments themselves are very similar to the signal that's being detected. So if it's kind of hard to separate background noise from the signal that you're looking for, that's kind of a red flag that you go, okay, you got to be extra sure about this one. Some are saying that this detection could be all about systematics. That means that the neutrinos are interacting with the particular experimental setup in a way that scientists just don't understand yet. So there's something going on about these particular two types of experimental setups, the one in the 90s and the one now with the mini-boon, that's causing an interaction that they're not quite sure what that's all about. So basically, cross your fingers, but don't break out the bubbly just yet unless you just feel like getting drunk. Sure, go right ahead if that's what you want to do. But in the future, we've got some next-gen experiments that are in the pipeline. One is called Isodar in Japan, another one is called K-Pipe, and even new micro-boon experiments are being designed to specifically deal with this problem. So hopefully, who knows, in a few years or more or less, they will be able to run these experiments and say, yeah, we fixed this. We know why it seems like these inner sterile photons are being created and they really exist or they might say, sorry, another dead end. So it'll be nice either way to have a definitive answer, but you know which way I'm leaning.

E: Can we call this the devil particle?

B: And there could be other types of – we've got three different types of active neutrinos, the electron tau and muon. There could be multiple different flavors of sterile neutrinos, which would be pretty cool. And the other thing that really got my attention is that even though you can't directly detect these sterile neutrinos, they could somehow play a part in unexplained phenomena in physical cosmology like dark matter, baryogenesis, dark radiation. So they could have some role in these other fascinating things that are still incredibly mysterious. So that would be awesome as well.

S: All right.

Tardigrade Lifespan (30:11)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: Jay, answer me a question. How long do tardigrades live?

J: All right. So let's talk about tardigrades. We've talked about them many times. But this is –

C: We love tardigrades.

B: We love them.

J: This will be the definitive discussion. OK? And again – All right. Yeah. Now, these buggers are very interesting. There's that word again. And they are also adorable and there are some details about them that I think I'm going to tell you that you've never heard. I think the last time we talked about them, we were saying –

B: Curiosity peaked.

J: They are also called water bears and moss piglets. Moss piglets.

B: I forgot about that awesome one. Oh my god.

E: So cute. I want to hug one.

J: Moss piglet is – it just needs its own cartoon. Like right there, it's called moss piglet. Creative people, run with that. These guys hold an honorary position as the smallest and cutest animals out there. But hiding on the inside, there's these superman-like qualities that they have. They're seemingly indestructible. And we've seen them survive trips into outer space and complete desiccation only to come back to be more powerful than ever. They come back and they're like – they get some water and they're good. They come back fully as if nothing ever happened.

B: Hydrate me, baby.

J: So seriously, what do these little guys do? You see pictures of them. They've got eight hands, eight limbs with hands on them. Eight hands.

E: A little like claws.

J: Yeah. Well, OK. Claws, hands. I mean they've got hands.

S: Do they have jazz hands?

J: They capture–

C: They kind of do.

J: -times four, Steve. So the term tardigrade is a phylum, which is a high-level category, taxonomy of the animals. Then there's over a thousand known species within tardigrade. Dang.

B: Really? A thousand?

C: It's a phylum? It's not a genus?

J: It's a phylum.

C: What? So how many different genuses, geni, genuses?

J: There's many smart genus.

S: Genera.

C: Genera. Damn it. How many genera?

J: Look it up. Google. Not a dictionary. So these guys are up to one millimeter long and this is another fun point that I found out that they're so light that their weight is basically meaningless.

S: It's insignificant?

J: It's insignificant. It's just they're light. They're so light that it just doesn't matter. We don't even need to talk about that.

C: And aren't they kind of full of water like any other pond scum?

J: Yeah. Oh yeah.

C: They're mostly just phospholipid bilayer.

J: Right. Yeah. They're just a droplet of water with a little bit of membrane. So scientists want to know how long they can live and what is their optimal habitat. So it turns out they love to just live about anywhere on the planet. But their habitat of choice is a riverbed on a nice piece of moss tucked away inside of there. That's pretty much it. They just like a nice wet spot with a little bit of greenery growing and they're good to go. So under optimal conditions, their natural lifespan is no longer than what? Now I don't know if any of you guys looked this up. Don't say it if you didn't.

S: Two and a half years.

J: There you go. Two and a half years. But did you guys know that if a tardigrade somehow enters an environment that is hostile, like an arid desert or even outer space, they will go into a state called cryptobiosis. And this means that they shut down their metabolism and that they can reduce their need for oxygen, food, and water down to zero. They can remove almost all the water from their body and this enables them to survive temperatures as low as 328 degrees Fahrenheit or as high as 304 degrees. That's minus 200 Celsius and 151 degrees Celsius.

C: So that's what you mean when you say they're desiccated.

J: When they enter cryptobiosis, their body does all of these different things automatically. So just like one of those men that you got when you were a little kid, you put that little figure into a bottle of water and it sucks up all the water and gets big again. Remember those things?

C: Yeah. They were made of sponge.

J: And they would fall apart really easily when they got to full size. Tardigrades will do this once they get water in their system again. They'll reanimate and they could do this in hours. It doesn't take very long for them to go from completely desiccated to completely operable again.

C: Hey, Jay.

J: Yeah.

C: I found an amazing website.

J: What is it called? Tardigrade.com?

C: Tardigrada or Grada, I don't know how you pronounce it, Tardigrada.net/register/taxonomy. And it's an updated list that was based on a publication from 2009 from Degma, Guidetti, and Bertolani. And it's updated several times a year by Peter Degma. Thank you, Peter. And it has the full taxonomy of every discovered tardigrade down to the genus level. So not only are there like, I mean, we could sit here and count all these genera, but it is like in the probably hundreds. It tells you apparently there are two classes, three, three classes of tardigrades. Eutardigrada, Heterotardigrada, and Echinuscoidea. And then it shows you all the families and subfamilies and then the genera underneath that. Because of course, it goes kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.

J: So researchers have said, and I love this, this idea right here, that as long as a tardigrade can enter cryptobiosis, they can deal with almost anything. That's profound. You know, they are that resilient. So back in 2000...

S: All right, Jay, but I have one question. They say they could survive up to negative...

J: 328 Fahrenheit, 200 Celsius.

E: 200 Celsius.

S: What's the exact number of Celsius, 200?

J: Yeah. So that space gets to down to what? In the low three...

S: Two or three degrees Kelvin, right?

B: Two or three Kelvin.

E: Approaches zero Kelvin.

S: So how could they survive if that's colder than what they say that they could survive?

C: Probably because they're within the warmth of the sun.

S: Is it only when they're in the upper atmosphere and they still have a little bit of heat going on there?

J: I'm not sure. I mean if you... That's a cool question, Steve.

C: It's a cold question.

J: I'm not sure. I'm not sure what happens. And like if they went into deep space, could they travel to another planet or would that be too cold?

S: That's my question.

J: That's cromulent. Let's let someone on this research team answer us.

C: But they could definitely travel on a spacecraft.

J: Sure.

C: They just might not be able to travel on a comet, for example.

J: So back in 2016, a paper published in the journal Cryobiology showed how a bunch of tardigrades that were frozen in 1983, these guys survived and were reanimated in 2014. So that's 30 years that they survived. And researchers found that their ability to preserve themselves is mostly due to a unique set of proteins. And these proteins, I love this, they can protect the fragile cell components into a fixed position. So the membranes and other proteins in the DNA are protected from being shattered or ripped or torn apart as the cells become desiccated or frozen. And this is a big problem with cryonics, is the idea that the water that's in the human cell, when that water is frozen, it turns into crystals and those crystals form sharp edges and their size increases. And that rips apart cells. And that's why when they're doing this process, when they're trying to cryopreserve something that they want to desiccate it as much as possible or replace the water with an antifreeze. These guys use proteins to fix everything in place and then they can desiccate themselves almost completely. So they're doing it all on their own, like natural cryopreservation.

C: Yeah, that's amazing. Back when I was working on my master's, there was a girl in our lab whose whole job was to try to figure out how to cryopreserve the nerve cell networks that we grew. And she never solved it while I was there because the crystals always destroyed the cells, at least some amount of the cells.

J: So this is part of the reason why we're researching them. We want to know about their biologies and researchers still don't know all the details about how these guys pull off their survival mechanisms. Like the biochemistry that goes on in their little bodies is amazing and mysterious to us to this day. Now think about the biology that can survive immense heat, like being boiled or frozen or completely dry. Or Bob, here's another fact that's going to blow your mind, up to 80,000 pounds per square inch. That's the answer to the question, how much pressure can they withstand?

B: What?

J: Yes, that's six times the pressure of the deepest part of the ocean. They can also take direct solar radiation and gamma rays. Now follow me here.

B: Gamma? Wait, you said gamma?

J: Yes. My theory is that all of these little guys are actually the Hulk.

B: Little Hulk.

J: Yes. They can repair their... But these guys can repair their own DNA.

E: Hulkagrids.

J: Which means they can shake off the effects of radiation.

S: You still haven't answered my question. What's the upper limit on how long they can survive in their preserved state?

J: We have...

S: 30 years is what we have.

J: We have 30 years. They don't think...

S: But could they survive a million years?

J: No. No. The researchers said they can't do that.

S: Why?

J: They'll still suffer the effects. They're not in complete stasis, but they could probably, definitely more than 30 years, but it might be the upper limit could be probably... From my reading, I was getting the sense that they were thinking that the upper limit is not too far away from 30.

S: But even if it's 100 or 200, it's still nothing. It's not interstellar years. You'll see why I'm obsessing about this when I get to my item.

J: Well, one more thing, Steve. All the tardigrades don't survive this process. It's a good point to make. It's not like 100% survival. It's just the ones with more fortitude can survive.

S: They are cool little buggers, no doubt.

Loius Viton Rainmaker (39:45)

• Louis Vuitton hired a shaman to stop the rain for fashion show 

S:' All right, Evan, we're going to take a little detour through pseudoscience, as you often want to do in the middle of our news items. Tell us, is this has to do with, of all people, Louis Vuitton? Why are we talking about Louis Vuitton on the show?

E: Louis Vuitton. Yes. Well, in order to do this news item, Steve, I'm over here at the fashion desk of the SGU newsroom, which is to say I'm wearing a t-shirt and shorts in my office.

J: Evan, do you have textiles draped over the desk?

E: Like you wouldn't believe, Jay.

C: Evan, are you wearing socks and sandals?

E: I'm wearing Bombas socks and an unnamed brand of sandals right now. Yes, absolutely.

C: You are so fashionable.

E: And I'm here at the fashion desk because I caught this news off of PageSix.com. Yep, there is such a thing. In case you don't know, whenever you hear the phrase PageSix, it means celebrity gossip tabloid useless crap news. OK, so it's a phrase. Recently, the company hired a shaman to prevent rain at one of their outdoor shows in France. And it does not appear to be the first time that the mega corporation has paid for magic and spells. Unidentified sources are saying that the guru, this is the shaman, had also been hired to control the weather at previous shows around the world. However, some executives at the parent company LVMH decided to stop using the shaman for unstated reasons. But one can only hope that they saw it was a colossal waste of money. However, their minds were changed recently.

S: By scientific evidence and careful observation?

E: Of course.

S: Controlling all variables?

E: No doubt about it.

S: Eliminating bias and random occurrences?

E: Without question, Steve. And let me...

S: Rigorous statistical analysis?

E: Peer review?

S: Peer review.

E: Of course. So here's what they did, Steve, to your question. There was a downpour that washed out a outdoor Dior that's in Christian Dior. Once again, I impress myself. The Christian Dior show was washed out. You know, fashion, what the heck? We never talk about this stuff. So come on. That I even know these names is remarkable.

S: Don't you have a little post-traumatic stress disorder about clothes and fashion and shopping?

C: Oh yeah! Oh yeah!

E: Yeah, but we're not going to get into that now. That's for another time, but thank you.

C: I'm really proud of you, Evan.

E: Thanks. Yes, I'm approaching my phobia head on.

C: This kind of stuff is just like coursing through my veins. So it's really funny to hear you struggling through the pronunciation of different fashion designers.

E: You know, it's hard to go wrong with Louis Vuitton or Vuitton and Christian Dior.

C: Yeah, you know the designer, I want to test you on one, the designer whose initials are YSL?

E: Oh, Yves Saint Laurent.

C: Oh, look at you! You can put the French accent and everything. I'm very proud.

E: See?

C: I'm very, very proud.

E: Wow, thanks, Cara. I feel like ending the news item on a high note right here without even finishing the story.

B: Good idea.

E: However, I shall slog ahead. Now, Bob, it's not sterile neutrinos. I get that that lesser news of the week is overshadowed by the likes of Louis Vuitton, so you're going to have to just understand your place here. All right. But back to Steve's question, how did they come to the conclusion that they needed the shaman back? Well, it was thanks to Christian Dior, because they had an outdoor show a week prior to the Louis Vuitton show that also took place in France. Both shows were in France, and that show experienced massive downpours. They were washed out. Absolutely. It was a catastrophe. And so the folks at Louis Vuitton did not want to take any chances whatsoever. They brought the shaman back after letting him go. They brought him back. They begged him to come back, and he did. And he did his voodoo that he does so well. And sure enough, at the Louis Vuitton show, during the actual show itself, there was no rain. Wow.

S: What are the odds?

E: Isn't that amazing? Tell me, how else could that have happened if they didn't bring a shaman in?

C: Yeah. I see no other possible explanation.

J: And you know why, Evan, you know why they didn't verbally berate him?

E: Tell me.

J: Because you don't squeeze the shaman.

B: Oh.

C: Wait, what is that from?

E: 1970s toilet paper commercial.

S: Please don't squeeze the shaman.

J: Come on.

E: You see, before a bear started squeezing the toilet paper, there was this old man in a supermarket. Mr. Whipple, right?

C: What?

S: It got a little creepy, so they had to replace him.

E: This is to stop people from squeezing the toilet paper.

C: Now I'm going to spend all night looking these videos up on YouTube.

E: You'll find it quickly.

S: So this is, yeah, the rainmaker fallacy.vAnd this is very, very common in pseudoscience where there are essentially random events and then you claim to do your voodoo or whatever it is that you do. And either the random event you're waiting for eventually happens or it's one of the things where it happens sometimes and not others. And you can interpret it with a little bit of confirmation bias. You could believe in whatever you want to. And that could be predicting the sex of children or the weather or whatever. Anything like that. Where there's a limited set of possibilities and it's like obviously – I'm joking, but it's seriously, what are the odds it would rain and then not rain? I mean it's pretty darn good. And of course if it doesn't match up, well, that's just the exception that proves the rule, right? So you can't lose.

E: That's right. However, this shaman to the executives over at Louis Vuitton, he has an impressive record. He was used at a show in Rio and also in Kyoto. So he's been going all over the world for them. Although at some point, some executives said, this is dumb and let's get rid of this. But hell, they brought him back and now it worked. And now you'll never convince anyone on that executive board to think otherwise. That's it. They are in like Flynn when it comes to this nonsense. Now, before I go, a little bit about the Brazilian-based shaman. His name is Orazio or that's his stage name, whatever it is. And yes, he has done – he has worked for other organizations, companies and whatnot including the Rio Olympics 2016 and of course he was engaged by the queen. Yes, he worked his magic at Meghan and Harry's Windsor Castle wedding last month. He commands a six-figure fee for ensuring that the weather remains precipitation-free and he flies around the world in a private jet. So hey, there's money to be made in this whole shaman business.

C: Wait, wait, wait. He doesn't just get a six-figure income. He charges six figures for a single event?

E: It's a six-figure fee.

C: What?

E: I couldn't find an exact number.

B: Don't you charge that much?

E: That's what – for doing a rain dance, I would.

S: The world is fundamentally unjust.

J: Right, Cara?

E: I mean and forget it.

C: Think about like how much a physician who delivers your child makes compared to that or somebody who holds your hand while you're dying or a psychologist who helps you through a divorce. People who do real things that matter make way less money than that. They make fewer dollars.

E: Yeah, but when you have a company like Louis Vuitton with their name and prestige, a company valued at $28.4 billion as of 2013, when they kind of put their marker behind these sorts of ideas, it unfortunately has a – tends to have an impact on how people think about these things. Fortunately, we have a remedy for that. It's our book.

S: We should send a free copy to Louis Vuitton.

E: Oh my gosh.

C: No, seriously.

E: They have their entire executive board of directors there definitely.

S: Oh boy.

Panspermia Follow up (48:01)

• Panspermia Pseudoscience  

S: So guys, I love it when this happens. Remember how we talked about panspermia a few weeks ago? I wrote about it in my blog, Neurologica.

E: I remember you got some feedback or pushback, shall I say, about that.

S: Yeah. Well, that's what I'm talking about. So we were talking about a paper that was published where they said that they were trying to support the notion of panspermia, which is the notion that life originated in another solar system and then spread throughout the galaxy including to Earth, right? They had several lines of evidence which I deconstructed. One was that octopi are alien, which is silly.

C: Octopuses.

E: They look funny.

S: Octopuses. It's all fine, Cara. And then – It is. It is. There are many different ways you can pluralize octopus and it's all reasonable.

C: Okay. I think most octopus researchers will disagree with you.

S: They were also saying that the Cambrian explosion, unexplainable. So you need to have alien genes to explain the Cambrian explosion.

B: Clearly.

C: Clearly, yeah.

S: One of the authors of that study emailed me.

B: Whoa.

C: No.

S: Yeah, Ted Steele. Now it's not as special as it sounds because apparently he's been emailing everyone who's been criticizing his article.

C: Still, that's really cool.

S: Yeah. It's still fun. And here's the thing. The guy's a douchebag.

B: Oh, okay.

E: Can you phrase that a different way?

S: To put it bluntly. So I had to deconstruct his email on my blog. The thing is we criticized the paper for being a little pseudoscientific and then he writes me an email trying to defend himself, but behaving like such a crank that he accomplished the exact opposite of what I suspect he was trying to accomplish. The reason why I said he was a douche was because he cc'd my chairman and a random assortment of my colleagues at Yale.

E: Whoa. Douchebag. He tried to embarrass you.

S: That is a classic douchebag thing to do.

C: I'm sure this doesn't happen often, but it's probably happened when you were sued.

S: Yes.

C: And now it's happening. What does your chairman do when something like that happens?

S: Well, it's funny because I just met with him yesterday and he brought this up. But he said, yeah, I get emails from the people that you write about and he very appropriately says he just ignores it because I have the academic freedom to say whatever the hell I want to say. So he ignores it. He knows what I do and when people write to him complaining about me, it's always cranks trying to do what this guy was trying to do. He just ignores it. It's funny because the fact that Ted Steele thinks, what does he think he's going to accomplish by doing that? He was trying to embarrass me and he was trying to intimidate me by that, which is a completely – it's what we call a dick move. But it had zero effect because everyone already knows that I do this and all he's doing is shouting, I'm a crank. That's all he's doing.

E: Crank alert.

B: I love when they shout.

C: It makes it so much easier to find them.

E: They're cute when they're upset.

S: All right. But let's get to the meat of his email. He says, four extraordinary set of biological facts are speaking for themselves. I mean there's just so many features of pseudoscience in this one email. That's why I want to talk about it because this is like part of our science versus pseudoscience thing that we do on the show. So in addition to trying to embarrass me, he also then – he says that clearly you were emotional. Let me quote him exactly. I can see you have got quite emotional and I am sure you are, therefore, not thinking straight.

J: Are you kidding me?

S: That's his opener. That's his opener.

B: Does he know how Vulcan you are? What the hell?

S: I know. I actually wrote on my blog that he's embarrassing himself because he has absolutely no idea like who I am and what my reputation is. But it's just also you can read the original email. There's nothing emotional in it at all. It was a perfectly calm deconstruction of his nonsense.

E: Well, you said he was replying to a lot of people. He just took a template and just stuck a new name at the top for each one and sent everybody the same thing.

J: A lot of times people like mirror what they're doing. Maybe he was emotional.

E: Projecting.

J: Yeah, that's called blog spermia, Bob.

S: Then he goes on this long tear bragging about his own credentials, huge red flag. Like I'm not impressed and I don't care what your credentials are. That's like some kind of –

B: They're irrelevant.

S: They're irrelevant. That's an argument from authority. He attempts to reverse the burden of proof, right, which is a classic pseudoscientific tactic. Trying to basically say that I have to prove that he's wrong.

E: Wrong. Burden of proof is on the claimant.

B: You have heard about science, right?

S: Yeah. But he accomplishes this by using yet another pseudoscientific tactic, and that is prematurely declaring victory from very weak evidence.

C: Well, he already did that in the article, right?

S: Right. So he doubles down on that strategy. That's basically what he's doing. He's saying this evidence is such a home run that now you have the burden of explaining why I'm not correct. But each of his lines of evidence are crap and they're easily deconstructed. But if the tone in his email and in the original paper, the tone is triumphant, right? That is another red flag in and of itself of pseudoscience. Rather, real scientists when writing should be and usually are appropriately humble and skeptical of themselves, and they speak and write and act as if they have the burden of proof, right? So they go to suggest this, it may mean this, but here's the weaknesses in the data.

E: No absolutes.

S: This is the follow-up research we have to do.

C: The discussion section would say something to the effect of, although this is highly improbable, we are asserting a possible alternative explanation, blah, blah, blah. It would be so hedged.

S: And if they overstate the implications of their data, they get slammed for it. And often in the peer review process, the peer reviewers have said, dude, you better dial that back a notch because that's – you're overstating it, right? So there's a – getting through – that's why their paper couldn't get published in an actual prestigious peer review journal. So they had to publish it in the Journal of Cosmology, which is a rag, right? We've talked about that before. They publish all kinds of speculative nonsense. They have a very low bar. That's why it's published in that journal because no peer reviewer would let them get away with their triumphant tone. We've proven all that kind of crap.

C: Can you imagine a scientist just saying that like they did? I've proven that blah, blah, blah. That's like science 101.

E: Eureka.

S: This is what he writes. We now have a set of extraordinary facts to explain. The usual skeptical response in these situations is extraordinary explanations require extraordinary evidence. The situation now is the reverse. Extraordinary and multifactorial evidence exists now on earth and its immediate environs. So now we must provide an extraordinary explanation that fits all these facts and makes sense of them. This has been the aim of science since time immemorial. Thanks for explaining science to me. So here are the four extraordinary sets of biological facts that speak for themselves. Evidence never speaks for itself. It is always in the context of hermeneutics. Right, Cara?

C: Yeah.

S: So number one, eukaryotic fossils in meteorites greater than 4.5 billion years old, e.g. Murchison. Murchison is the name of a meteorite, not of a scientist or author. So now if that were true, then he would be correct, in that that would be extraordinary. If there were fossils, clear fossils of living things older than the earth, you better believe that would require an explanation.

C: Also, we'd all be aware of that.

S: Panspermia would absolutely be a viable hypothesis if that were true. The problem is this is crap.

C: It's a crank, yeah. It's a crank interpretation of markings.

S: So there are these little bubbles and things and fibers and whatnot in meteorites like Murchison, but it's meteorological, right? It's geological. Yeah, it's mineralogical, mineralogical, geological. It's not biological. There's no reason to suspect that it's biological. There's lots of problems with the biological interpretation. The consensus of scientific opinion is that it's not biological. These are not fossils. This is just mineralogical formations. And this also goes back to Steele is referring to a paper by Richard Hoover and also a paper that was rejected by legitimate peer-reviewed journals and also published in the Journal of Cosmology. So you see there's a circle jerk going on here where the panspermia guys all refer to each other and their own crappy published research in crappy journals. It's a completely separate ecosystem of bad pseudoscience. They're not convincing the greater scientific community because their arguments are terrible, their evidence is terrible, and they're prematurely, victoriously, triumphantly declaring victory over nonsense. That does not prove their point. Okay, so the claims of microfossils and meteorites is unproven, speculative, and cannot be used to say that I demand that I have to explain it and that we have to resort to extraordinary things like panspermia. Okay, number two, he writes, Interstellar dust infrared extinction spectrum equals infrared extinction spectrum of freeze-dried E. coli. This is the most incredible scientific result I have ever seen, he adds for emphasis.

C: Wait, what is he talking about?

S: Yes, let me explain this to you. So again, this is referring back to a paper by Hoyle and Wick Ramasinghe who were the early proponents of panspermia. And it's the circle jerk, again, referring to other panspermia guys. So the infrared spectrum of interstellar dust, right? So if you look at that curve of infrared energy, the spectrum of light going through interstellar dust and try to explain what's causing this spectrum, it could be caused by particles that are about the same size as freeze-dried bacteria.

C: Or anything else.

S: Or anything else that size, right? So that's the problem. So I wrote in my blog, however I invite Steele to peruse the spurious correlations website to see why such correlations do not prove causation and are not necessarily impressive.

C: I hope they've added an interstellar dust like dropdown on that website.

S: And of course, in parallel to this, real scientists have been pursuing other explanations for the infrared spectrum of interstellar dust and have plenty of very un-extraordinary candidates like other molecules. Large carbon molecules, for example. All this really means is that the building blocks of life are out there. And we know that. And that's not controversial. The idea that there are amino acids and carbon molecules and other stuff that could be the building blocks of life in the interstellar medium is not controversial. And it also does not amount to panspermia.

C: And that's why we're spending billions of dollars to look for it. We've been trying to figure this out.

S: Right, which is why abiogenesis may be common because the raw material is everywhere. This could just be a superficial similarity due to particle size. There's nothing in there that's the fingerprint of actual bacteria. But the panspermia people go, aha, there are bacteria in interstellar dust. No, there isn't. OK, number three. He writes, bacteria in cosmic dust on the external surface of the International Space Station. OK, it's sort of true. Russian scientists have found bacteria on the outside of the International Space Station. And the consensus of scientific opinion is that this is contamination from Earth. Yes, remember-

B: Where was it made?

S: The ISS is in low Earth orbit. It's still in the atmosphere. So all it would really take is for bacteria to be kicked up a little bit. We know that bacteria are floating around in the atmosphere.

B: Yeah, yeah.

S: Sure. We're not exactly sure how the bacteria would get kicked that far up. But there are hypotheses. One is that actually that cosmic rays could actually kick bacteria out into low Earth orbit. But whatever. Maybe it's something else we haven't thought of.

C: But can't the bacteria, like, withstand the launch? Oh, I guess you're saying it's the ISS.

S: So the sterilization techniques used when we send up stuff into space does not completely 100% eliminate bacteria. It just gets to, like, the less than 0.1 or whatever percent.

C: And that's when there are no mistakes made. And when did the ISS go up? And what sterilization techniques do they use for Soyuz? Like, we don't know these things.

E: How many missions did it take to complete the ISS? I mean, dozens.

C: We didn't have the same clean room technology back then.

S: Exactly, exactly. We're just reintroducing Earth bacteria. That's what's happening. There is no evidence of alien bacteria. No one has found alien bacteria on the ISS. So, again, he's declaring victory from something that has a very mundane explanation that has not been ruled out. How often have you seen that?

C: This one kills me the most. This one's, like, the most painful because he's basically, like, this thing that's basically on Earth. It's, like, only this far away from Earth. It's so much more likely that alien bacteria is all over it. It's, like, right there. Like, you can see it when you look at night.

S: We found bacteria just outside this massive cloud of bacteria. Where did it come from? It must have come from somewhere else.

E: The depths of the universe.

B: If he's so confident, just do it. He could solve the problem so quickly. Just do a genetic analysis of the bacteria.

J: Exactly.

S: Don't get complicated, Bob. All right. Point number four. You ready for point number four?

E: I am ready.

J: Yes.

C: Oh no.

S: Here it goes. Point number four is tardigrades.

B: I see what you did there.

S: A single word. He's not even making an argument or a claim. It's just tardigrades. That's it.

C: It just says tardigrades?

J: What?

S: That's it. That's his point.

C: This isn't his email to you, right?

S: I'm reading his email word for word. Tardigrades. Point number four.

C: Then he just dropped his microphone.

E: Steve, it's tardigrades.

J: He dropped the mic with a tardigrade and walked out.

E: It speaks for itself.

B: That's why you were asking about the tardigrades in space and how long they could last and how cold it is and all that.

C: Steve, this is the greatest email ever written. Tardigrades. Boom.

J: Right, Cara?

C: Boom.

J: That's going to be my talk at NECSS. I'm going to walk out, tardigrades, and just kick the mic over.

E: Any questions? I thought not.

S: Just a crank being a crank, unfortunately. It is funny. The more pseudoscientists protest that they want to be taken seriously, the more they actually prove our case, typically. This is a classic example of that.

E: Oh, boy. Clearly, he knows nothing about you.

C: Yeah, right? He did not do his homework.

E: If he did an hour of homework, he might have been like, maybe I should pass on this one.

S: The comments to my deconstruction of his email has 243 comments.

J: Wow.

E: People going to town on him.

S: There are some fanboys in there taking his side.

B: Oh, god.

E: Really? They're trolling you?

B: All right.

S: Again, they're just proving our point. Just proving our point. As you read what they have to say, it's just they're just acting like pseudoscientists.

E: Wow.

S: Saying, I'm not a creationist. If you're not a creationist, stop acting like one.

E: I'll give you something to be a creationist about. I like how we were impressed in the beginning. Oh, the author of the article wrote you, Steve.

S: Yeah, I said don't be that impressed.

Who's That Noisy? (1:05:16)

S: All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

J: Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy]

E: Whatever it is, it can't get the engine started.

J: I got a lot of different guesses here. A lot of interesting ones. Someone said it's the inside of a running dishwasher.

C: Oh, yeah, because I've never heard what that would sound like.

J: Yeah. Sam McCloud said it sound like a horse with a bad case of asthma laughing. A lot of people said that it's a lathe or a lawn sprinkler or a key cutting. Now, I really do think this sounds like key cutting. However, it is not key cutting.

C: It does sound a bit like key cutting. But key cutting is almost a little more obnoxious than that.

S: It is.

C: Yeah, it's got like a high-pitched kind of like a horrible metal on metal sound.

J: Sadly, there was no winner because this was an incredibly hard noisy. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Tess Reynolds. I'm going to read Tess' email to give you some background and then you can hear what it is. She says, hey Jay, I'm currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the ACRF Image X Institute at Sydney medical school and then I'm not working on developing patient connected imaging protocols for high-precision radiotherapy and the interventional cardiac suit I am on the hunt for cool noises. How cool is she for being on the hunt of cool noises? Although I get to play with state-of-the-art robotic cone beam CTs, which make amazing noises. I found this particular noise interesting. So check it out. I have also attached a photo. But what is making the sound is a simple 2D motion phantom that we use to replicate the chest motion of a patient breathing during the course of a CT or cone beam CT.

C: The chest motions?

J: Yeah. So this machine spoofs a CT scan to simulate certain breathing patterns. Does that make sense?

C: I think so.

J: So it's not supposed to sound like breathing. I think the CT scan scans this thing and it simulates the breathing of a human breathing. So she says here, in most conventional CT and cone beam CT scans, respiratory motion is not accounted for, resulting in blurred and streaked images. So our group, they focus on being able to track the motion and adjust the image to essentially make it more sharp. And they use the machine to do that.

New Noisy (1:07:56)

J: I like this one. It's probably one of my favorites for the year so far because of all the different cool things that you're going to hear here. But this noisy was sent in by Kirk Mona. Kirk has sent in noisies before that got through my incredible hoop that you have to jump through. I'm very particular about these noisies because they have to hit on a lot of different levels in order for me to play them on the show. So Kirk, I think, kind of gets it. But please, I'm not trying to discourage you from sending me in noisies because I still get a lot of fun out of them and I save all of them. So just so you know. So this week's noisy. [plays Noisy]

B: You're right, Jay.

J: I love that noisy. I love that. I left the person's, oh, in there deliberately. I usually don't – I try to get out all the human reactions to the noisies that you hear. But I left it in. This one is – I don't think you could guess it if you didn't see a video of what's happening. But it's really fun. It's a really cool thing that's happening here. And I left that guy exclaiming at the end as a guess, I mean as a clue for you. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, it's got to be cool. Email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:09:23)

E-Mail #1: Balance of nature

S: All right. We have one email this week. Cara, I know you love this email. This comes from Zach from Texas. And Zach writes, hi, everyone. Long time, first time. I love listening to your show but I have one respectful nitpick. On your last episode, Cara mentioned the balance of nature. This is a very old idea that is pre-Darwinian. Nature is not so clean cut and the relationships among organisms can be quite messy. I do realize that complex relationships can and do co-evolve but they aren't balanced. Keep up the great work. I love the show. It's my favorite podcast. Best regards. Well, thanks for writing, Zach. I do have to take exception to your summary there though because, again, we don't mind nitpicking, being pedantic. Right, Jay? But every now and then, I do think that people get inappropriately pedantic. And my operational definition of that is sometimes we will summarize things in a way that's true as far as it goes. And yes, of course, there's always deeper and deeper layers of complexity. But that doesn't really make the superficial layer that we're discussing at the moment really wrong. It's just incomplete. But we know it's incomplete. It's a drive-by. We make an off-the-cuff comment like the balance of nature saying that it's more complicated. Of course, it's more complicated than that. That comment wasn't meant to be a detailed description of the complex web of relationships among different organisms and natural ecosystems.

C: But also the entire conversation we had was about that. So it's like taking three words out of context can be sometimes a bit – it's as if we're like, well, the sky is blue, right? And it's like, well, if we're going to really talk about the color of the sky. At a certain point, you have to be able to communicate.

S: Yeah. But here's the thing. I actually think that saying that there's balance in nature is perfectly fine. I think that Zach may be overreacting to the fact that the concept of balance is abused quite a bit. So this is interesting. I think this is the same thing that we talked about last week with Elon Musk. Musk said, oh, anything with nanotechnology in the title is bullshit. Well, yes, there's a lot of abuse of the term nanotechnology for marketing and for promotion and hype. But that doesn't mean that everything nanotech is bullshit.

C: No, especially not nanotech.

S: Yeah.

C: Like the actual field of nanoscience.

S: Right. So I've written for many years about the abuse of the concept of balance in pseudoscience, most often in alternative medicine, right? The idea that –

C: Like your body's off balance?

S: Yeah. It's a very old concept. I mean probably one of the oldest concepts of health had to do with balance, the balance of the four humors, right?

E: The humors, right.

S: And being ill, being sick was because your humors were out of balance and that's why you –

E: Drain blood.

S: That's trying to reduce the blood humor so that it balances with the other humors or you need a purgative to get rid of your excess bile or whatever, right? Because the four humors were phlegm, black bile, green bile, and blood and you were always trying to balance them. And then all of Eastern medicine, acupuncture, all of that is based on the balance of yin and yang and they also have their elements that have to be in balance. And so it's a very ancient concept and it does carry forward a lot, I think, in pseudoscience or alternative medicine. That doesn't mean, however, that balance doesn't exist in biology. It exists to a great degree. There are lots of systems in the body that exist in homeostasis, right? Where there's some kind of literal balance between two or more things and, yeah, that relationship may be regulated in a complex way. But I think it's perfectly accurate to say that there is a balance. There is a balance of electrolytes. There's a balance of different neurotransmitters. There is a balance –

C: Your blood pH has to be balanced and if it's not, you die.

S: Yeah. I mean the concept is legitimate but it can be oversimplified or abused. And if you think about ecosystems, they're absolutely – it's accurate to say that there's a balance between, say, predator and prey. How else would you describe that relationship? Again, there's a lot of complexity there. Of course, we're not saying that there isn't but –

C: But also the word balance, I think, implies complexity. It implies that there's a lot of back and forth and that it iterates and that it titrates until it gets to a place where things are somewhat homeostatic. And what we were talking about was maybe not apex predators. I'm trying to remember the exact context but top predators. And when a top predator is removed from an ecosystem, it wreaks havoc.

S: Yeah. Whatever they were preying upon, their numbers increased because they're no longer being kept in check until they push up against the limit of their food source, in which case they might crash in population. And that happened in areas where humans were expanding. So like in North America, we hunted lions and wolves pretty much to extinction or nearly so. We removed a lot of the predators from the environment and therefore, the herbivores like deer would be out of control. And then they could have massive die-offs because they exceed the carrying capacity of their food sources and they overpopulate. Then they have a bad winter and then there's massive starvation. So, there's a balance between predator and prey and species and food sources and environments and the niches and the space that they have and all sorts of resources that exist in a homeostatic complex relationship. And I think balance is a perfectly reasonable way to just vaguely, colloquially refer to that when it's good enough for the purposes of the conversation, right? Saying, oh yeah, but it's more complicated doesn't mean it's wrong at that level.

C: Yeah. And also, I just – just as a general note, we definitely appreciate – we love email from the listeners. We get a lot of it. And so, I'm going to just apologize straight out if you don't get a response. We tend to respond when we can but we also are inundated with emails. But we're so glad that they come. But a piece of constructive kind of feedback that I would give is that if you're going to write an email and say you're wrong to say X, it's sometimes helpful if you offer alternatives. It's sometimes helpful. Like it should be, I think, a constructive critique, not a critique for the sake of critique. Also, tonally, I just recommend in general that when men reach out to women, they think about how easy it can be to sound like they are mansplaining. Zach, I don't know if that's what you're trying to do and I don't want to blame you for that. But it's a very difficult issue that many women have to deal with. And I think maybe we can use this as sort of a learning experience to know maybe just to empathize a little bit of what the experience can be when individuals work incredibly hard to prepare a lot of content that's well-researched and that's well-spoken. And that when we speak off the cuff and we aren't even making mistakes, we're just saying things that are maybe slightly less descriptive than your ears would prefer them to be. That you maybe just kind of think about what it sounds like if and when you want to chime in those two cents.

S: But there are some concepts here that I think are important in terms of what is – in terms of science communication, right?

C: But that's also the way you're interpreting it because I don't think any of them are overtly pointed to in the email.

S: Yeah, no, I agree. So here's an example. I think these are often best explained by examples. If we're talking about the difference between how flat earthers understand the earth and how scientists understand it and we're saying clearly here's five lines of evidence that show that the earth is a sphere. And somebody wrote – well, actually it's an oblate spheroid. That's clearly missing the point and that's clearly a level of detail that is not necessary for the discussion of flat earth versus spherical earth, right? And so that's completely unnecessary beside the point pedantry that misses the actual point of the discussion. OK. Let's move on to science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:18:32)

Item #1: Item #2: Item #3:

Answer	Item
Fiction
Science

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

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 then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I've got three regular news items, no theme.

C: OK.

S: See if I manage to find one – find ones that you guys haven't seen. Are you ready?

J: Yeah.

S: All right. Item number one, a new study finds that people have inattentional smell blindness. They may not notice a new odor if distracted and then become habituated to the odor without ever noticing it. Item number two, a Pew survey finds for the first time that the percentage of Americans who feel it is essential that the US remain a world leader in space exploration has dropped below 50%. Item number three, scientists report the results of a study that show that parents restricting their children's use of electronic devices in order to make time for schoolwork actually correlates with worse academic performance later in college.

J: Oh my god. What the hell is that about?

S: All right, Jay. Well, you're so interested. Why don't you go first?

Jay's Response

J: Right. So OK. So this inattentional smell blindness. OK. If somebody is distracted and there's an odor in the room, they might not notice it and then they become habituated to it. OK. That's interesting. I'm not sure I agree with that but then this is kind of like the – what do you call that thing? The toupee thing, Steve? Like how would you know?

S: The toupee fallacy.

J: Yes.

S: Yeah, like I always notice the smell. You don't notice it when you don't notice it.

J: No, you don't. A Pew survey finds – oh, wait a second. This Pew survey should be about the first one.

S: Yeah.

J: You see what I did there, Cara? Now that's humor.

S: All Pew surveys are about blasters, Jay. Pew, pew.

J: All right. The Pew Pew survey finds for the first time that the percentage of Americans who feel it's essential that the US remains a world leader in space exploration has dropped below 50%. See, I would think that this would be the exact opposite, that it would be a lot more than what it was. I'd like to think that. Oh, boy. That's disturbing. I mean if people are thinking that, the only thing that would make me not feel bad about it would be that if they wanted to move to the private sector. Then this last one about the – this is the one that I'm – you always think this is the one that Steve is trying to slip in there. Restricting children's use of electronic devices correlates with worse academic performance later in college. What the hell? All of those automatic emails I get from baby center and I do restrict my kids' screen use a lot, a lot. It's a constant daily battle because you just want them to do something that you think is healthier, like read or brush their teeth, stuff like that.

C: Just all day, every day, brushing teeth.

J: Exactly. My kids are obsessed with brushing their teeth, by the way.

C: Of course they are. So are you.

J: I mean three is the obvious one. I can't see how allowing kids to use electronic devices over their schoolwork is going to make them perform worse later in college. No. Nope. That's a fiction.

S: OK, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: No, that was Jay. It wasn't Bob. OK. I see. I'm second.

E: I see what you did there.

S: Comma. There's a comma in there.

B: Yeah. The one that stuck out to me was the inattentional smell blindness. To me, that's just like the other two just – I can kind of make sense of the other two. This one really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. Our senses are basically designed to say something's new. Something's changed. That's why after you put on a shirt, you don't feel the shirt anymore. Otherwise, you'd just be feeling it all day and you'd go crazy. So with smell, the thing that's getting me about your statement here is where you say they may not notice a new odor if distracted. Well, distracted by what? I think that's kind of critical because if you're distracted by lots of other odors, then I think you would have an apples-to-apples comparison with the inattentional blindness with using sight.

S: No, it's not by odors. It's by a task. Distracted by a task, not by other odors. It's not being masked by other odors.

B: Exactly. Exactly. If you said other odors, then I would tend to agree more with this. But because you didn't – because it's not other odors and it's another task, I think no matter what you're doing, I think a smell would definitely grab your attention. To me, that just seems kind of like, yeah, that's what would happen. I could be wrong on that. But to me, it's just like, no, you would smell something even if you were focused on something else. The other ones I can kind of see, world leader in space exploration, yeah, I could see that dropping below 50%. People are stupid out there. They don't know how awesome space exploration is. So I could see that going below 50%. All right. Maybe not stupid. They don't have the obsessions that I have, but they're wrong. And then for three, yeah, restricting children's use of electronic devices. Yeah, this stuff, nothing would surprise me. There's so much counterintuitive stuff out there. It's like you can make a good argument either way. So it's like I don't know what to pick for that one. So the only one that really had a reaction out of me was the first one. So I will go with the inattentional smell blindness is fiction.

S: OK. Cara?

Cara's Response

C: I feel completely differently than both of you. I just feel like the most obvious answer is the Pew survey answer.

J: Pew, pew.

C: Pew, pew. OK. So let me go through them really quickly. People may have inattentional smell blindness. They may not notice a new odor if distracted and then become habituated to the odor without ever noticing it. We know that attention is very selective. We know that it's very – we're very bad at multitasking, and that could be multisensory tasking also. If you're driving a car and you're focused on your conversation, there are things you will not physically see with your eyes in front of you because you're listening so intently to the person sitting next to you. I don't see why it would be weird at all.

B: But if Jay farted, I will smell that no matter what I'm doing.

C: I don't know. If you're doing a complex task.

B: You haven't smelled his farts.

C: But also who knows if these are things as severe or as noxious. These could be pleasant smells that were in the study. It just has a new odor. So you might not notice the odor of perfume in a room if you are actively doing a math problem. I just don't – it's like there's actually a study that shows that – and my friend did this in one of his YouTube videos. If you're walking side by side with somebody and then you ask them to do a complex math problem, almost always they stop walking because they physically can't do the two things at once.

B: That's awesome.

C: I know. It's amazing.

B: I love that.

C: To me it's super obvious. And then the last one is super obvious too. Scientists report the results of a study that showed that parents restricting their children's use of electronic devices in order to make time for schoolwork actually correlates with worse academic performance later in college. Because we're not talking about young kids. We're not talking about plopping down kids in front of the TV. That's not what this is – sounds like it studies. It studies that if you don't let kids use technology to do schoolwork, they're not going to be successful in the future in an academic setting where technology is prioritized. Of course if you take away the iPad and then you make them write a paper without the use of all the tools that they have in front of them, they're not going to do well in a school where they need all those tools. It's just we don't write on typewriters anymore. You have to have internet literacy to be successful. So to me that one's really obvious too. It's the Pew survey that seems like – I think in an era of like more intense nationalism and patriotism and tribalism than we've ever had before. I mean I don't want to say ever before but like we're definitely in a tribalistic time right now. I think that, yeah, being like America, number one, we're the best. We don't apologize. That would never drop below 50%, even something scientific. Because space exploration as we know is one of those scientific avenues that has always had a high correlation with both political parties. So to me, this is just the most obvious fiction. So I'm going to go with that.

Evan's Response

S: Well, Evan, they're all spread out. You have no help. Bob chose one. Cara chose two. Jay chose three.

E: No help.

C: So which of us was the most convincing?

E: Well, I'd say that the one who already kind of said a lot of things I was going to say was Cara. Especially pertaining to the Pew survey and that the U.S. remained a world leader in space exploration, dropped below 50%. I don't think it's even anywhere near 50%. Like Cara said, nowadays I think it's rekindled in a sense and gone higher in recent years. That one stood out to me as well. So I have to say that's the fiction.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Okay. So we can take these in order since you guys are all spread out. We'll start with number one. A new study finds that people may have inattentional smell blindness. They may not notice a new odor if distracted and then become inhibituated to the odor without ever noticing it. Bob, you think this one is the fiction because of the Jay's farts argument. Everyone else thinks this one is science.

E: It's a solid argument.

S: And this one is actually a gaseous argument.

E: Thank you. There you go.

S: And this one is science.

B: I knew it. Wait. No, I didn't. Crap.

S: So yeah. So Cara's right. They had people distracted by a task. And one of the odors that they introduced was coffee, which is a strong odor that people can certainly detect but not a caustic or toxic odor, right? Certainly not something like putrid flesh or whatever. Not something that would make you gag but a strong odor that people should be able to detect. And the people who were engaged in demanding tasks were 42.5% less likely to notice the smell. And 65% of them never detected the coffee because they became habituated while they were doing the task. So this is inattentional smell blindness. They did this study specifically to extend the findings of like the invisible gorilla, right? To see does the visual and auditory blindness has already been established in literature. Does that extend to smells? And their study showed that it does. And, yes, this is the phenomenon, the more general phenomenon of interference, as psychologists call it, which is whenever you're engaged in any one activity, it reduces your performance in any other activity. We are using up limited resources. It is the walking and doing math problems demonstration. I think that's perfectly correct.

C: Chromulant.

S: Yeah. It's perfectly chromulant.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: OK. Let's move on to number two. A Pew Pew survey finds for the first time that the percentage of Americans who feel it is essential that the U.S. remain a world leader in space exploration has dropped below 50%. Cara and Evan think this one is the fiction. Jay and Bob think this one is science. And this one is the fiction. It is the fiction.

E: America.

S: It is the fiction.

C: America.

E: USA. USA.

S: Here are the numbers. The Pew survey found that 72% of Americans think it is essential the U.S. continue to be a world leader in space exploration.

B: That's encouraging.

S: 80% think that the space station has been a good investment for the country.

E: Good.

S: And 65% think that it is essential that NASA continue to be involved in space exploration. So that gets to your question of privatization, Jay. So it's less than the other numbers but still it's pretty close. 65% versus 72% think that NASA should be involved. They also then broke it down by, well, what should be the priority for NASA? What should NASA's priorities be? What do you think was the number one? We'll say number one and number two. So there's three categories, top priority, important, but lower priority, not important, should not be done. So if you consider just what's the top priority versus top priority plus important, you get different rankings. You understand what I'm saying? But these two are close even though they were sort of swap places depending on how you look at it.

J: Putting people or a base on the moon, clearing up the debris field around the earth.

S: So, Jay, just give me your top. What would you say is the number one top priority? Would you say it's going to the moon?

J: This is what people said or who is saying this is the top priority?

S: This is people surveyed, Americans surveyed, U.S. adults, percentage of U.S. adults.

J: OK. Then I will say putting people on the moon because I don't think that the average person out there is really thinking that much about the debris field or asteroids.

S: OK. Evan?

E: Yeah, moon.

S: Cara?

C: Boldly going where we've never gone before.

E: Oh, I like it.

J: More Star Trek episodes. Yes, Cara.

S: Bob?

B: Yes.

S: Bob?

B: I'll be a little bit idealistic. It should be finding NEOs, near earth objects.

S: OK.

B: Demolish us.

S: Bob is correct. The rest of you are completely wrong.

C: That's a good one, Bob. Good job.

S: Send astronauts to the moon, Jay and Evan, was the last one with only 13% of people saying it should be a top priority.

E: Well, 87% of people have no clue.

S: Although 42% said it should be some priority. Cara? Going where we've never gone before. Send astronauts to Mars was second from the bottom at 18%.

C: Wow, we suck. But I suck less than you guys.

B: A little bit less.

S: Bob, yours was in the top two. So monitoring asteroids, near earth objects, 62% top priority, 29% priority. Only 9% said it should not be a priority. So that was the least, the smallest amount of people saying it should not be a priority. And then number one in terms of top priority at 63% was monitor key parts of Earth's climate system. How awesome is that? So the top two were very pragmatic. Monitor the climate and monitor near earth asteroids. They weren't the pie in the sky where no man has gone before things. And then conduct basic scientific research was next. Develop technologies that could be adapted for other uses. Conduct research on how space travel affects human health. Search for raw materials. Search for life and planets that could support life. And then at the bottom, send astronauts to Mars. And then at the very bottom, send astronauts to the moon. Very interesting. Very pragmatic. Almost completely in order of pragmatism. Very interesting.

J: Oh, well.

E: Oh, where was the search for life?

B: Happily surprised.

S: Yeah, the search for life was kind of in the middle. It was, well, it was third from the bottom. But 31% said a top priority and 73% said it should be some priority total. 73% said top or some priority.

E: That is interesting.

S: Yeah.

E: You ask that 40 years ago, I think you'd have had very different answers.

S: I think so. But, I mean, we have to admit, guys, right? That overall, except for Bob, we underestimated the intelligence of the average American. I think people are paying attention more than we think. They're saying that monitoring for near-Earth asteroids that could potentially threaten the Earth should be a top priority.

B: My God, yeah.

S: That's really encouraging. That's two-thirds of Americans listed that as their top priority. You know?

C: Yeah.

S: That's very interesting. As a top priority. And then the climate system, I was really surprised about that. You know, monitoring the climate, 63%.

B: Yeah, that actually even occurred to me. And I said, nah, that's not going to be a priority.

S: And 89% – sorry, 88% said it should be a top or an important priority. That means that's both parties, right? That you can't get to 88% with just Democrats. So that means the majority of Republicans also think that this is a priority for NASA.

E: Encouraging.

S: Even while the current administration is sort of reducing this as a priority for NASA.

C: But maybe that's why, you know?

S: Maybe people are reacting to that.

C: It's because they feel the political pushback.

B: Yeah, probably.

E: Possibly, possibly.

B: I mean that's like even – isn't examining the Earth and studying the Earth like part of NASA's charter, right?

C: Yeah, probably.

B: It's like officially in – this is one of the things we need to do. And there's been a push of late to actually remove that. Like basically turn all satellites outward and don't look inwards. Like really? At least in terms of just studying and learning about climate change. So I was very happy that people realized that that's a priority and they can't lose that focus.

S: There's more to this survey. We'll link to it. But here's a good one. This is the robots versus astronauts debate. So how many people think it's important, it's essential that we send human astronauts into space and not just robots?

E: 10%.

C: 40%.

B: Yeah, I'd say like 60%.

J: I'll go higher than that. I'll go 80%.

S: Once again, Bob, it was the winner, 58%.

E: Oh.

B: Killing it.

J: You bastards.

E: Yeah. How did you do in science or fiction, Bob?

Steve Explains Item #3

S: All right. Let's go on to number three, scientists report the results of a study –

B: What have you won lately?

S: Restricting their children's use of electronic devices in order to make time for schoolwork actually correlates with worse academic performance later in college. That, of course, is science. I was very careful to word this just as a correlation. It's hard to interpret the causation. But the people who did the study did look at the baseline academic performance. They wanted to make sure this wasn't just parents of children who aren't doing well saying, hey, you better cut back on the electronic devices. So, of course, they don't do well later. But at any level of baseline performance, there was an effect. The students did better if they were not restricted from using electronic devices. But the other thing is that this correlation was only if parents restricted their children's use of electronic devices in order to make time for schoolwork. If, as Jay said he does, if they restrict electronic devices so that they will engage in other healthy activity, that actually correlated with better performance later in college.

J: That's what I said.

S: That's what I said you said. That if you're saying get out there and play, not do your homework, then that correlated with better. Now, I don't know what to make of all of this because it looked like they were looking for a lot of different comparisons and they found correlations all over the place. So, I would take all of this with a huge grain of salt. But this is what they found. And this is certainly counterintuitive. And that's why this is the leader, right? Even though there's a lot of these little findings in this study, the notion that this paradoxical effect like telling people, kids, get off that computer and do your homework had a negative effect. And this study was not capable of telling us why that correlation exists. Although, again, they did rule out baseline performance as a correlating factor. But it could be, as Cara said, what the authors speculate is that in today's world, being computer literate is important and there is some benefit. Even if they're just playing video games, you could be learning computer skills, problem-solving skills. You know, there is –

J: Bow hunting skills.

S: Yeah, nunchuck skills. I mean there's lots of stuff that you could be getting. So –

C: I get that reference.

S: Yeah. Good. Thank you. Strategic thinking, analytical skills. I mean there is evidence that engaging in video games does have some intellectual benefits to it. Obviously, everything within limits with the right balance, right, Cara?

C: Yes, it's true.

S: So anyway, it's complicated to interpret these kind of factors. And this is something that I've thought about a lot. I think any parent today thinks about this a lot. I have two kids. They use computers and screens a lot. And I do tell them, gee it's a beautiful day out there. Just like our mother told us, right, guys? Although, we lived outside. I mean –

B: Oh, my god. Leave in the morning. See you tonight.

E: That was a Saturday.

J: There was no internet. We weren't playing a lot of computer games.

S: I know.

E: Although when Atari came out, it started to change things.

S: That's true.

E: It started to change.

S: But still – And I don't just like kick my daughters out of the house. I say, hey, guys, let's go outside and do X, right? I mean that's – Let's work on the garden or let's do something specific outside activity. And they will go on their own initiative and ride a bike or do things outside. But they definitely do have a lot of screen time as well. And I think very carefully about what should I do about that. Should I just let them do what they're going to do and make sure – As long as they get their homework done and they're getting good grades and just not worry about it, which is basically what we do. Or just try to make sure that other types of activities are available to them and maybe do things with them that do get them outside but not try to restrict their use of electronic devices. It's tough. This, I think, study shows us how difficult it is to really know the full implications of all those decisions.

J: I think it's very complicated and hard on a day-to-day with my kids. It's hard to judge what's – You get these ideas into your head of what is in their best interest. You kind of relate to those decisions that you made. As a skeptic, I'm constantly trying to update my info. But my gut is always telling me too much screen time is bad, too much – I want my kids to be doing things that's going to have development.

S: Yeah, and make no mistake. There is evidence too. There's published evidence that too much screen time is bad. The other thing is I can't remember – I remember reading this study and talking about it. I don't remember if we talked about it on the show. But recent research indicates that you're better off not restricting children's screen time but maximizing their non-screen time. Does that make sense? So, in other words – And this – Like the Academy of Pediatrics has changed their recommendations not to limit kids' screen time to this much but make sure that kids get a minimum of physical activity and non-electronic device activity. So, in other words, it's flipping the emphasis and that kind of goes along with this study as well. Don't tell them not to use a computer or not to use an electronic device. Just tell them to do something that is physical or that will involve them being outside or getting activity. And as long as they're doing enough other stuff, let them do what they'll do in their downtime in their playtime. That seems to be where the consensus is heading. But this is, I think, still a moving target.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:42:02)

Piltdown Man sets a good example of the need for us to take a step back and look at the evidence for what it is and not for whether it conforms to our preconceived ideas.  – Isabelle De Groote, paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University

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

E: Here we go. "Piltdown Manson is a good example of the need for us to take a step back and look at the evidence for what it is and not for whether it conforms to our preconceived ideas." And that was expressed by Isabelle de Groot who is a paleoanthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University.

S: Yeah. Actually, that's a translation. What she actually said was, I am Groot.

E: Oh, why didn't I see that coming?

J: I heard that too, Steve. I just couldn't think of a joke.

B: Neither could Steve.

C: Oh, damn.

B: I liked it. It was good. It was funny.

S: That's rich coming from you, Bob. Yeah, so we've talked about this before on the show, the fact that Piltdown Man was crafted to fit the prejudices of the time, the idea that we would find pre-humans, fossils of creatures halfway between humans and our ape relatives, who had a human-like brain and an ape-like body, and that's what Piltdown Man was. When in fact, in reality, our ancestors had a human-like body and an ape-like brain. They were bipedal, upright, but still had like a brain halfway between that of a chimp and a human. So it was the exact opposite sort of pathway to get to modern humans. Long after that became obvious in the fossil record, people were still clinging to Piltdown Man because it did confirm their previous preconceived notions.

C: Also, didn't nobody have access to the bones?

S: Yeah, that was part of it too.

E: For a good long time. It's still one of the best examples of scientific hoaxes out there. I love pointing to it. I can't get enough of it.

S: It's iconic.

E: It is.

S: And a good historical mystery too. Whodunit.

E: That's right.

B: That's right. That was never [inaudible].

E: That has never been settled.

S: Hey guys, don't forget that our book is coming out October 2nd. You can pre-order that now if you go to skepticsguidebook.com. You'll find all the places that you can pre-order it. It's coming out in different countries. So far, it's China, Russia, Germany, Korea, UK, Australia, New Zealand.

C: America.

S: And of course, North America. And as new international publishers come online, we'll let you know. When you can pre-order it in other countries, we'll let you know. As we get closer to the release date, we'll be talking about any book signing events or whatever that we'll be doing. And we'll be sure to remind you about it. But pre-orders will help promote the book. So we appreciate it if you pre-order it now rather than waiting until after the book comes out. And you can get it both e-book and hard copy. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe book. A must-own, I understand. All right. Thank you all for joining me this week.

B: Sure man.

J: You got it Steve.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thanks, Steve.

Signoff

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

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

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