SGU Episode 725

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SGU Episode 725
June 1st 2019
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SGU 724                      SGU 726
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 Tuesday, May 28^th, 2019, 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: Cara, you're just touring the world and doing all kinds of stuff. But you have time for the SGU this week, which we love.

C: I'm so excited. Yeah. So we're recording a different night than usual because you guys were all so nice to kind of be flexible with my banana schedule. And actually, I did work this morning. I was in like a little sound studio in Hollywood shooting some stuff for Brain Games. And I was able to meet a friend for lunch, so I had to drive all the way across town. And I'm sitting in traffic because I live in LA and I'm driving across town and I'm blasting the music so loud. And I'm just really into it. You know when you're really into it and you're singing at the top of your lungs and you've got like dance moves and like nothing can distract you from how just zoned out you are listening to your music. So I'm going hard. I'm sure I look ridiculous, but I'm not thinking about that at that point. And I'm sitting at a red light and I look over and this guy is trying to get my attention. And I was like, oh, God, how long has he seen this? And then I noticed he's holding up his phone and I'm like, oh, God, was he recording me? And I started to get creeped out. But then he starts pointing to his phone, like just sticulating a lot and pointing to his phone. And so I turned down my music and I rolled down my windows and I waved at him. I'm like, hi. And he's like, I know you. I'm listening to you right now. And he's holding up his phone and I can see that he's listening to an episode of SGU.

J: Oh my God, that is awesome.

C: And I was like, I'm so sorry I didn't notice you. I was really into my song. Nice to meet you. It was hilarious. Like, wow, that's so weird. It just happened like in my neighborhood, too.

J: And that was it. Then he drove away.

C: Yeah, we both drove away.

J: Oh, that is really cool.

C: Yeah. So hi, I didn't get your name, but it was nice to meet you. Maybe you can write us an email. Tell us who you are.

S: That is kind of a weird thing. Imagine being the person you're listening to a podcast. Then you see one of the people next to you in traffic. That would be weird.

C: I guess, too, he must have recognized my car first, I would think, because my car has a talk and my license plate says talk nerdy. Yeah. And it's like I talk about my electric car all the time on the show because I can't imagine that he would have recognized me. I was like going hard with the dancing and the singing. I'm just unsure.

J: I would love to hear his side of the story. Like so I'm driving to work and I'm pissed, but I'm listening to the SGU and then I see Cara.

C: You know, not sure if she can see me because she's really into it.

E: She's gyrating.

S: I thought she was having a seizure.

E: So I was getting ready to dial 9-1-1 when suddenly.

S: How often do you guys get recognized in the wild, as I like to say?

J: I got recognized in the supermarket. Yeah. It's weird.

B: It's rare. It's rare.

E: I got recognized on an airplane coming back from the solar eclipse in 2017. I got noticed.

C: It happens to me sometimes because I do TV work.

S: Yeah, you do more TV work. So sometimes people recognize me.

E: Visual exposure, yeah.

C: And I may have told you guys about this before, but one time I was hiking with my boyfriend's parents were in town and we were hiking in Griffith Park and some girls stopped to ask for directions to something. And I started to give them directions. And then they're like, are you Cara Santa Maria? And I was like, yeah. And they're like, I recognize you by your voice. But they didn't know what I look like. Isn't that so weird?

B: I got that. But I got a little twist to that one. I was at a haunted convention and I asked a question during a little seminar and somebody came over to me. He's like, you went to SGU? And I was like, yeah. But what was even the most hilarious thing, though, was that he thought I was Jay.

J: I love that.

C: It's so weird that people can't tell you guys apart. You sound so different.

J: Yeah, well, now that you know us so well, Cara, you hear all the inflections and everything.

S: I get what I get a lot of at work is, are you the Dr. Novella from the podcast? I'm like, did you think there was another Dr. Novella? I guess there probably is somewhere.

C: But do you ever have, are they patients or is it other like health care providers?

S: Everything, everything. Most recently, it was an ICU nurse.

C: OK, I feel like it would be weird if one of my one of my clients recognized me.

S: Yeah, I just say thank you. They say I listen to the podcast. Oh, thank you. That's very nice. And then try to move the conversation.

J: But that's so funny.

B: You're going to die.

J: You're in like the most formal setting that you exist in. Like they can't get any of the funny you or anything, right? You just have to go, yes, yes, thank you. Now let's get to your chart. OK you're not doing good. You know, it's like, oh, my God, you're not doing good.

C: You're not doing good, Jesus Jay.

S: Well, it's very common for patients to look up their doctors on the Internet.

C: Well, I heard. Yeah, I found that out recently. I was one of the other like one of the what do you call them? Child care counselors at the group home where I work texted me. It was like the girls found your Instagram, by the way. And I was like, oh, no, I didn't even think about what to do. I mean, luckily, my Instagram is all just like nerdy science stuff and pictures of my dog. And I show them pictures of my dog already. But they were like, are you famous? And I was like, no, I'm not famous.

S: If you have to ask the answers now. You have to be cool with anything my patients could find online. That's just the reality of being a professional. But also, I think it maybe it filters people out a little bit. And I'm kind of OK with that. You know, if someone's not going to see me because of articles I've written for science based medicine that's probably not a horrible.

C: Then you might not be the doctor they want.

S: Yeah, exactly.

What's the Word? (5:53)

• Word_Topic_Concept

S: All right, Cara.

C: Yes.

S: You haven't done a what's the word in a while?

C: I haven't. And a word came to mind as I was speaking with a friend because it is a very common word that I think a lot of people have come across. But like he had said, I never thought to look up what it meant. And I don't think I ever actually knew. So the word is carapace. Have you guys heard this word before?

B: Sure.

J: Of course.

E: Oh, carapace.

B: Good word.

C: It's a great word. Also, it has my name in it.

E: It's your middle name, too, Cara Pace. Santa Maria.

C: Pace is my middle name.

E: It is now.

C: It's not Louise anymore?

E: Oh, wow. Learned something new.

C: You guys didn't know it was Louise?

S: I thought it was Santa.

C: No, my last name is Santa Maria.

J: Cara, I know everything about you because you gave me all your travel information.

C: Oh, yeah. No, that's always the joke, you guys, is that my name is very Italian. When you just say my first and last name, Cara Santa Maria, right? It means dear mother of God. But then it becomes very Southern when it's my first and middle name. Cara Louise, get down here.

B: You're ambidextrous.

C: Yeah, look at that. OK, so a carapace. This is the kind of covering the shell, the shield, whatever you want to call it, that's bony or sometimes made of chitin that covers usually the dorsal or the back part of an animal. Oftentimes it's like an arachnid or a crustacean. But I think more commonly, the way that I usually use the word is is referring to a turtle shell. Yeah, that's a carapace is a turtle. This is like a fancy way to say turtle shell. Like, look at that turtle's carapace. And then you can sound super smart when you see a turtle in the wild. Do you guys know what the belly portion is? The under-

B: Yes! Give me a second. Brain is searching. Brain is searching. Last week I heard this. What is that? I looked it up.

E: It's the undercarriage. It's the oil pan.

C: Come on, Bob.

S: It's the belly bone.

B: Filastrum.

C: You're so close. It's the plastron.

B: Yes. All right. I was close. I feel good.

C: Yeah. The plastron. Interesting, right? I hadn't heard of that either. I just found it when I was reading about the carapace. I tried to look up the etymology and it's a bit like nobody knows. We know that the word carapace is French. We know that it came from Spanish and Portuguese, Carapacho or Carapaza. But we don't know where it came from before that. Some people might think some people think it might have been Latin. Some people think it might have been Greek, that the root words actually are the same words for like a cape. In Latin, it's the same root as cape. But in Greek, it's the same root as beetle. And so nobody really knows where it came from.

S: Because both could work.

C: Yeah, both could totally work. So this is that kind of like backward etymology. Figure it out of outishness. Trying to make up a word as I go. But we do know that more recently it was borrowed from the French, which was borrowed from the Portuguese. And there's even a Catalan Carapaza. So they all sound kind of similar. Carapace, Carapace, Carapaza. Yep. Carapace.

S: I think it's it has to be the dorsal section, though, in order. It's not usually. I think it always is, right?

C: Yeah, it has to be. It has to be the dorsal section.

S: Which is the back, basically.

C: Which is the back. But I do think that in some, I don't want to say always because I fear that there's a handful of animals where it goes all the way around and it's one piece.

S: Well, it could be. But I think it has to at least cover the back.

C: It has to cover the back. Yes. And if it's segmented, it has to be the back piece. But I think sometimes there are animals where it goes, it goes all the way around.

S: And it's also the headpiece, too. So if you're like a crustacean or insect, it's not your thorax. It's the headpiece. It's the exoskeleton on the back of the head, basically.

C: Well, it's usually below the head. Like if I guess it depends on the on the organism. But like if you look at a picture of a lobster's carapace, it's down over its shoulders.

S: Yeah. Yeah. OK, but it's that it's the one in the front. It's not their tail.

C: Yes. Yes. Good. Good point. Yeah, it's more it's more thoracic than abdominal. It's like up high across their shoulders.

S: But I'm like a kind of spider. It is their head.

C: And on a crab, it's just the whole body. And a turtle.

S: Well, turtles and the interesting in turtles, it's their ribs. Their rib cage is the carapace.

C: Isn't it funny? The shell-

B: I love that. Evolution is awesome.

C: It's really cool. Carapace is a really interesting anatomical feature. When you actually look at if you've ever had the opportunity to look at a turtle skeleton, they're really fascinating.

S: Yeah. Yeah. Turtles are amazing.

B: So Spider-Man in Endgame that little techno backpacky thing with the leg?

J: Yeah. Yeah. Of course.

C: I do not. You will have to tell me.

J: It basically looks like somebody put a giant crab on his back with the claws coming around, wrapping around his body so he could use them.

C: But it's a part of him. It's not something he wears?

J: Yeah, he wears it. Yeah, it's part of his suit.

C: I mean, you might be able to call it a carapace, but I think it has to be a part of you to really be a true carapace. It's like a carapace piece. It's a carapace.

S: All right. We got some cool news items for you this week.

News Items

Hyperloop Update (10:57)

• Hyperloop Hype 

S: We're going to start with Jay. You're going to give us an update on the Hyperloop.

J: OK, so in case you didn't know, because maybe everyone listening doesn't know what a Hyperloop is, it could be something that Bob, you know, something with physics that Bob's into.

C: I do think it involves physics.

J: It does. But it's not like this is something that you could actually see with your eyes. It isn't like an invisible force or a black hole situation. So I want you to think of it as a giant hamster tube that like something a car size or bigger could fit in. And they suck the air out of it or not all of it, but they suck a lot of the air out of the tube. And what this does, it allows whatever vehicle is traveling through the tube to have a lot less wind resistance. And that's pretty much it. There's lots of ways it could manifest itself or ways that it could be designed. That you're just sending passengers in a vehicle that's traveling through a tube that is mostly void of air.

C: Is it like the tubes at the old bank?

J: Yes, exactly. So if you ever were in like a Costco or one of those places, you could see that they used to pass money through one of those vacuum tubes. That essentially is it. The tube is getting sucked along because there's negative air pressure on the other side. I think in this instance, though, it's not really sucking the vehicle through. There just is a lower air pressure in the tube and the vehicle gets propelled by what? It could be magnets or whatever.

S: Something else.

J: That's right. And it could travel really fast because there just isn't wind getting in the way. And I'd have to say right now, on the surface, before digging into the details, a hyperloop could seem like a really cool idea. It could allow passengers to move really fast. I would think that at its upper limit, the speed could be pretty extreme. I'll be talking about what the speeds are now. But they could be eventually very fast. But is it really a good thing? Is it worth spending the money to fully deploy the infrastructure to build hyperloops when you compare it to what we have today and what is it actually promising to do today? Or even like what could it do in 10 years? And the question is, I'll tell you right now, I have a very large skeptical flag up in the air about hyperloops, even though I think they're cool and I'd love to see the technology developed if it pans out. It would be a lot of fun. And of course, I would like to travel faster. But the details, man, so let's get into the details. So as an example, driving your typical car, I know Bob knows this, most of the fuel you use is spent on what?

E: Acceleration.

C: Drag.

B: Dealing with drag and friction.

C: Yeah.

J: Yep. Dealing mostly with drag. So I have some cool statistics here for you. It's actually called wake drag, by the way. It's not that the air is passing over the car, because we have cars that are very aerodynamic today. When the air gets caught up and makes like little- Vortices or eddies or whatever, that's called wake drag. And that's really where you're losing it, because at different speeds, the car will do different types of things with the air.

B: Eddies. The space-time continuum.

J: And the faster you go, the less efficient most vehicles or all vehicles become. So I'll give you a quick chart. At 60 miles per hour, your car is 3% less efficient than 55 miles per hour. At 65, it goes down to minus 8%. At 70, it goes down to minus 17. At 75, it goes down to minus 23. At 80, it goes down to minus 28. So as you go faster, your vehicle becomes less fuel efficient. So there actually is a good reason to drive 55. How about that? A hyperloop wouldn't really deal with this diminishing return thing that I just told you about. And it also wouldn't have to deal with a few other things. Heavy traffic issues, pedestrians, or bad weather are great examples of lots of nasty things that we have to deal with with roads, especially if a tornado comes and rips your neighborhood apart. You don't have to deal with that. So new technology like this, of course, it comes with a lot of questions and concerns. And one of the biggest ones is, where should the tubes exist, right? So they're going to build it. Let's say they decide they're going to build a hypertube. So what do you do? Do you build it above ground, or do you build it below ground? This is a huge question right out of the gate, because the cost differential between those two scenarios is dramatic. So above ground, it would be less expensive than digging tunnels. But then you have to think about things like real estate. Okay, where is it going to go? This is a massive expense. Let's say you wanted a hyperloop in New York City. How could you possibly build one of these in a city like New York City? On what property? Would you put it just around the exterior? And even still, where would it go specifically? Would it be up in the air? That could be dangerous. That could have an impact in ways that we haven't thought of. And let's say that you didn't have to worry about it. Let's say you were using it like a subway, where it was going outside of a city. Well, you'd have to worry about the existing roadways and wildlife, as an example. Because you can't just, again, you can't just build structures without having an impact on the environment. It would also need to be maintained and protected from the elements, which adds some costs. And another concern, which is pretty scary, is terrorism, right? Now imagine people are traveling at 500 miles an hour in a hyperloop, and all of a sudden somebody blows up a part of it, and all that air rushes in. Now you're going 500 miles an hour, and suddenly the air pressure comes back. You're not in good shape.

B: Basically, you hit a wall.

J: Now you focus on the underground hyperloop. So what do you got to do? Well, okay, so building tunnels would solve a lot of the above ground issues, of course. They wouldn't take up the same amount of real estate. They could easily go under cities. They could easily get around obstacles like rivers and big roads and highways. The problem is once you start adding up the cost of digging tunnels, man, this could make the price skyrocket like nobody's business, and it might quickly outstrip the benefit that you're getting. Because digging holes is not cheap. You need special machinery, and this machinery, if you've ever seen them dig a legit hole underground with those round machines that turn around, they have to precisely get two different ones from two different directions to match up and all. This is big business, massively expensive type of work. So either way, building a hyperloop means that an incredible amount of red tape has to be dealt with. There's going to be issues revolving around land usage and right of way and environmental impact, et cetera, et cetera, right? So we have two major developers today. We have Elon Musk's Boring Company, and I mean boring as in boring a hole. That's the name of the company, and Virgin Hyperloop One. There are some big differences between the technology that they're working on. So Virgin system actually has a promising test track built in the Nevada desert right now. You can see videos of this online if you go take a look. They've done some recent tests, and they have actually achieved speeds of up to 240 miles per hour inside of their hypertest loop, which is pretty cool.

S: But I do want to point out, Jay, that was with – in that system, it's like a subway car going down. There was no people inside. So no one has actually rode that test track yet.

J: Yeah. Now, of course, the car – yeah, the car would have to be airtight, right? Of course, and that's whatever technology that they're going to have to develop to do that. They only reached 240 miles per hour because they were saying, look, it was just the shortness of the track. They've only got a quarter mile track. So they have to spin the thing up and then have it hit this max speed and quickly spin it down because the track is ending. Now this really was ridiculous. I watched a video and they're showing some engineers who were working on the project and they're like, we could get this system going as soon as 2023. No, you can't. I'm 100% sure that no one is going to be riding in a hyperloop by 2023, not in three and a half years. There's way too much stuff that hasn't been achieved yet and red tape that hasn't been gotten through yet. That's way too quick. Ten years sounds a lot more reasonable to me. If there was a huge amount of money and political will behind it, maybe shorter than that. But nobody's going to be riding in them that soon. But it's pretty cool to take a look at. So I recommend looking at that video. Now Elon Musk and his company, their technology was originally conceptualized to basically be like a road vehicle that goes on a sled, right? So it drives up on, let's just say it's this big metal sled and they're using magnets to levitate it and propel it, kind of like the maglev train, similar type of idea there. This was a pretty cool idea and everyone that seemed very excited about it, but they scrapped it. Because you know what? It didn't work. It didn't work well. They tried to use it. I saw a video of it. They got the sled up to 50 miles per hour and it was a very bumpy, scary looking ride. So the boring company ended up paving over the magnetic track and they just had a car drive on a tunnel, a paved tunnel that was dug in the ground. You know what? I wasn't impressed. The tunnel was tight. The car gets in there and somebody's steering this in the tunnel. I mean, you can't let people do that. If you get into a car accident inside this little tunnel, the clear out procedure must be ridiculous.

C: Well, why would you even need to? It's only going one direction, one way. Why wouldn't it just be on a regular track then?

J: I know Cara. I didn't understand.

C: Why would you have to drive it?

J: Yeah. I know.

C: It's weird.

J: I'm agreeing with you. In the video, if you realize the person's driving the car in the tunnels, it all of a sudden gets a little weird. It's just an underground roadway. Now, Steve, I got to ask you a question. In that solution, did you read anything that said that they were still lowering the air pressure to make it work better?

S: Yeah. I think that's still the idea. So you have decreased wind resistance and you have a dedicated road, but you're otherwise just driving on a paved road in a tunnel.

J: Is it me though? That sounds ridiculous because it's one thing to use their vehicles, like to use the company or whatever political entity is going to be in charge of it. But they're going to maintain the air pressure. You can't just let some person put their vehicle in there. How do you know it's going to be – I know that they're not going to just let a regular car go in. But even if it is a car that was rated to be adequate for air pressure situations, which none exist today as far as I know, how do you know it's working? It's dangerous.

C: It's not just that. That's ridiculous because there's no scale. You're building a multimillion, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars project for a car? No. It needs to be to move thousands of people.

J: Yeah, I agree.

C: Otherwise, what's the point? And when it comes down to it, there is a problem that people are trying to solve over here on the West Coast, which is how do we get from LA to San Francisco fast, really fast? We don't have an option for that.

S: That's definitely one – a hyperloop between San Francisco and LA is definitely on the short list. But Jay, let's – here's the question, right? What is the niche for a hyperloop? What is the travel problem it's going to augment or solve?

J: Well, OK. I mean I think I can answer that. This really – it can't compete with airlines because right now, the airlines have an immense infrastructure. One airplane can fly to another airport very easily. The way that they organize flights and all that stuff, you can't – it can't compete. It's too fast. It's too ingrained in society and it's already there. The hyperloop would need this massive billion-dollar infrastructure to start bopping around and for long hauls, it just doesn't seem to work. Now I agree. Like this LA to San Francisco thing, that could do it. It could be a really good choice if they could get the technology squared. It seems to be the right distance. It seems like if they let the vehicles be big enough to fit 20 people in a car or 100 people in a car. When I say car, I mean whatever vehicle they end up putting in there, whatever cool like monorail type job they got going on. That would be cool.

C: But they also have to solve the problem of the grapevine like we – there's too many mountains in the way. This has been a big problem from the beginning like it's not an easy straight shot to go from LA to San Francisco.

J: Well, it seems like they got to cut through the ground. I mean I don't know how hard it is to cut through that particular ground.

C: Yeah. I know that lots of papers have been written about this specific problem, the grapevine problem.

S: They built the tunnel. They should be able to build a tube.

J: Yeah. But the problem is though, Steve –

E: It's a far distance.

C: It's far.

S: The speed here –

E: It's not that far.

J: If you want this thing to ever get up to like airline speeds, 500 miles an hour and up, you can't – it can't take turns. It's not going to be – they've got to worry about that big time. And real quick, I don't want to lose this thought. Another thing that Elon Musk did was he wrote a white paper back in 2013 about the Hyperloop technology, the concept behind it and everything and he made it open source to the public, which was great because I don't want to fanboy hard on Elon Musk. I don't know him personally, right? I don't know the guy. I just like the way he's rolling right now. I like the impact that he's having on society. To me, it's positive. I know there's a lot of people out there that don't like him. But I mean you can't take away from the cool things that he's helped develop. He really does want competition. He wants other companies to put the money into all of these new technologies that are happening including the Hyperloop. That's why he gave away a lot of free information with his white paper. So I give him some props for that. So both of these companies seem to be in the lead with Hyperloop technology. But they're not there yet and let's face it. Let's say the technology did exist. The question again is – let's put it right down on the line here. Is it going to be worth the expense to implement it and would we gain anything? Would there be an actual net gain? I'll give you this one answer that I didn't read anywhere. I came up with this but I think it's important. I'd say that in the long term, it might end up being better if we can develop the technology because you could power the Hyperloop with renewable energy and you can't do that with – you can't power airplanes with electricity yet. That might be something – there might be something to it because jets contribute enormously to global pollution. I know the jet infrastructure is already in place and airports are everywhere. You can't reroute a Hyperloop. You can't throw airplanes at a problem when it comes – the Hyperloop is a very rigid thing. But I still think having something that could be powered by renewable energy might be the way we move people in the future. Maybe we move away from air travel and move more into Hyperloops. I don't know.

S: Let me tell you my guess and this is very hard to predict future technology. If I had to guess, I would say we're never going to see a Hyperloop in the foreseeable future. Not in the US. There may be – like I know Dubai is investing in it and maybe – who knows? Maybe something like that. Somebody wants to throw a ton of money at it just for the novelty of it.

B: Sure. Why would we do that? We don't even have bullet trains.

S: Yeah, that's my point. So first of all, it's never – in my opinion, it's never going to replace air travel. Air travel is – you just need two airports. You know what I mean? You don't need any infrastructure in between them and I don't think we're going to get the Hyperloop up to the speed of current jets and if we did, by the time we did that, we're going to have supersonic passenger jets. I think the probability of having that is a lot greater for much less infrastructure cost. I just don't see this ever competing with air travel. So really the only possibility is that it's going to compete with train travel on the medium distance. Like again, the LA to San Francisco, New York to DC, that kind of thing, like the Eastern Corridor. And there, I think the reason we're never going to see it in one word is maglev. Why would we do this when we don't even have a maglev? Right now, the fastest maglev in service can travel at 267 miles per hour and there are maglevs on test tracks that have gotten up to 374 miles per hour. So with just maglev technology, again, it's using magnets to levitate the train, you can – we're approaching 400 miles per hour and yes, that needs infrastructure. It needs a track which is still a lot easier than a tube in terms of infrastructure. So if we – why would we go all the way to a Hyperloop when we don't even have a maglev? The current maglevs are faster than the current Hyperloops. I think then they're plenty fast for these medium city distances. They require – it's a proven technology with less infrastructure and I think there are logistical and legal reasons why it's difficult to lay down that infrastructure in the US and the same reasons that we don't have a maglev in the US, we're not going to have a Hyperloop in the US. For countries where you can have maglevs, they do. I don't think the speed advantage of the Hyperloop is going to be enough anytime soon to justify the increased infrastructure cost, right? Why would you build a 500-mile-an-hour Hyperloop when you could build a 400-mile-an-hour maglev much cheaper? The cost benefit is not there. So for those reasons, I just don't see where it's going to fit in and why would we ever go there until you can get to the point where it would make economic sense to build this massive infrastructure. I don't see it happening. But it's just one of those things. It's a sexy technology that when you think about it in the real world, they just don't see a place for it.

B: Yeah. It sounds so cool. But then you think, imagine building an underground tube from New York to DC. What a job. That's like geoengineering almost. That's insane to think about, such a long tube under the ground.

E: Remember the big dig in Boston?

B: Oh my god.

E: That took 10 years, 20-something billion dollars to accomplish. That was just getting a tunnel built in Boston.

S: Once you have it, though, it would be a great piece of infrastructure.

B: Oh my god, right? It would be epic.

Smart Clothing ()28:51

• Fresh Developments In Fabric Tech Could Finally Push The Arrival Of 'Truly Wearable' Smart Garments 

S: All right, Bob, here's another technology that I'm dubious about, but I think there's some potential. It's like there's potential here, but who knows what's going to actually happen. Smart clothing. Tell us about that.

B: Yeah, this wearable technology. It's been in the news lately, more than it has in the past for sure. Two companies, I found two separate news items that are claiming serious inroads in the creation of clothing with integrated electronics that is also still washable and stretchable and comfortable and not clunky and annoying. That's their goal anyway. Are these real advances finally, or is it more sci-fi fluff? I'm really hoping that this could be finally the start of something like this where there's this comfortable clothing with embedded electronics. To me, it's like a lesser version of jet packs and flying cars, right? We've thought about it since we were kids, and we're surprised it's not here already, but we're totally skeptical when anybody says that they've had a breakthrough. It's like, really? Whatever. Talk to me when people are wearing this stuff because you see it a lot, and it's like we can't even get a serious shirt with heating elements that you could wash. How simple can that be? Why doesn't everybody own a shirt that you just put a little battery to it, and bam, you can go out in 10-degree weather, and you don't even need a coat. Don't even have that yet.

S: That reminds me. Really quickly, that reminds me of a Jetsons cartoon episode where he's testing this super armor clothing thing, and then it gets destroyed in the washing machine.

B: Yeah. That was great. Well, that said, though, I think we may potentially be entering a time here when all the elements needed to create this real smart clothing might be finally coming together. Hard to be really confident, but I mean, look at Gartner Forecast. They recently said that shipments of wearable devices, just generic wearable devices this year will reach 225 million. That's up almost 26% from 2018. That's a huge, huge leap. They also looked at specifically smart clothing itself, and they're predicting an increase from 4.1 million shipments in 2017 to 19.9, just under 20 million shipments by 2022. So they're seeing some good, good things coming with wearables generally, but also smart clothing specifically. So let's look at the first. The first company is called Peretta. It's a UK startup called Peretta. They claim to have developed a technology that can embed electronic systems, or they'll say conductive patterns, right onto the textile. It's integrated at the fiber level, so the fabric doesn't lose any of its desirable properties, how breathable it is, and how it moves, and how it stretches. You don't lose any of that because it's actually part of the fibers. They claim that this could be done at any point in the creation, really. You could do it on – you could integrate this stuff onto a finished garment or at the level of like when it's like on these huge rolls that all the patterns are cut from at a mass scale. So at one end of the spectrum, you could have an Etsy shop, a private little Etsy shop that buys these garments and then somehow is doing this themselves of integrating the electronics, or it could be just a mass market and reach many millions of people. That's part of the appeal. They say they could do this on knitted textiles, woven, nonwoven, natural, synthetic. So it seems like you could put it on most any type of textile that's out there. I found this quote from the Peretta news release. Wearable technology is on the cusp of a major transformation. Wearable products are evolving from rigid devices such as smartwatches and wristbands towards genuinely wearable smart garments based on electronic textiles or e-textiles. So you may be hearing more about e-textiles from Peretta in the future. The other company was DuPont. They have a DuPont Advanced Materials that has been working with – on these things and with some other companies. The product line I think they refer to is called DuPont in Texar. So their idea is they have these unique stretchable inks and films. So that's kind of what they've been focusing on, these special inks and films that could be added to the textiles to again create a comfortable, durable, and washable smart clothing. I think they're saying that this thing can survive 100 wash cycles, which is pretty good. I don't know what the average number of wash cycles a typical piece of clothing goes to. I would think it would be more than 100. But that's pretty damn good I think if you have electronics embedded and you could wash it 100 times. So they have things like flexible sensors that can be used for things like biomedical applications. They even have printed flexible batteries and photovoltaics. So pretty slick. One thing that they developed piqued my interest back to the clothes that actually heat up that you could just wear outside instead of having a bulky jacket. They call it In-Texar Heat. And let's see. So I'm pulling some of this from their website. It consists of a thin layer of carbon resistors interconnected by an underlying layer of silver electrodes printed on a stretchable thermoplastic polyurethane laminate. So then they say that when powered, I'm not sure what that means. Would you just have like a 9-volt battery that you would plug this into? What kind of would it be photovoltaics? I'm not sure how it would be powered. But they said that when powered, it would create a comfortable warmth that doesn't rely on cables, thick wires, or big batteries and can stand up to very cold environments. So that's cool. That's something I've wanted for literally decades. Where is this stuff? I know they have it out there, but you don't see it very often. I don't see it very often. And it is, it does have bulky cables and batteries and things. It's not very comfortable. It doesn't seem to me. So DuPont said recently about this, In-Texar materials also can enable biometric monitoring in smart clothing. Pulse rate, respiratory rate, muscle activity, and form awareness are all measurable using sensors and conductive pathways built from In-Texar. So yeah, so they've really been focusing on this specifically. They've been developing a lot of this technology with a wearable market specifically in mind. So now some of the analysts are saying that this can work if you consider that the new generation, like I said, the new generation of flexible sensors and batteries have been made with wearables in mind. However, they say that there's still some big challenges ahead in terms of how you're going to put it all together and interconnect everything. Apparently, that's still a bit of a problem, at least to some of these analysts' point of view. I think we'll eventually crack this nut, probably in dramatic ways eventually. And these latest advancements that I'm reading about, it could be the beginning of some sort of mass adoption of these smart textiles. But as usual, in terms of how they're going to be used, what's going to be popular with people, you really can't predict that. You can't know that really until you're in the mix and you see people really experience it and see what kind of applications they're willing to shell out some good money for. But within like 10 to 20 years, I think for sure we're going to see some very interesting applications of this.

S: The tech may be ready in that time, but I'm still not hearing a killer app though.

B: Yeah.

S: It'll make you warm. All right. That's fine. Okay, great. If you're in a really cold environment, you basically want a heating blanket for a shirt. Okay. Other than that, why would I, why would I care? Why would I want electronics in my clothing?

B: Well, they've got things for like, for infants. I mean, if I had an infant and they've got some of these textiles even now that can, that can monitor things like heart respiration and heart rate in your baby, that would be very very-

S: Really got to be safe then, you know?

E: Put that stuff in his mouth.

J: If it's being powered by a nine volt, what's it going to do to a baby?

B: I didn't see too much on exactly how these would be powered. I was just riffing on the nine volt thing. I'm sure they probably wouldn't even use a specific nine volt battery, but I mean, some of them were talking about integrating photovoltaics, so I don't know how the, how the power sources would work on this. I mean, sure. Then some of them would be mechanical, just from, just from like a still suit from dune where your actual movement can help power it. I'm sure they go in that direction too, but it's a matter of how when is this going to happen? Still, it's kind of hard to say how and how popular it's going to be, but eventually I think there'll be some specific niches that people will love, but like I said, who's to say what that, what that would be.

J: What did you guys think though, too? Like I get the idea they want to integrate it with clothes that would need to be washed, but you know, for the, especially for the thing that heats you up, it could be like a parka or something that you really don't need to wash that often.

S: An outer clothing that you wouldn't be washing on a regular basis. Not your underwear.

E: It's getting awfully warm in here.

C: Although it might be more effective as underwear.

E: But that has limitations.

S: Yeah. All right. Thanks, Bob.

Misreporting Medical News (37:53)

• Misreporting the science of lab-made organs is unethical, even dangerous 

S: All right, Evan. This is an interesting piece in the Conversation about the dangers of misreporting medical science news. That's a topic we cover a lot.

E: We do cover it a lot. And good thing other people are covering it as well. Did you hear about 3D printed human organs in the news recently? Well, you misheard.

J: Not recently.

E: Well, let's just put it this way. A lot of that reporting has been incorrect.

S: I'm shocked. Shocked.

E: We're not at all shocked at that. Need a new heart? First step, turn on your 3D printer. No. Not exactly. Cato O'Connell. He's from Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia. He's a researcher in 3D bioprinting, and he has a background in physics and nanoscience. He works with surgeons, engineers, and biologists to develop ways to print 3D tissues using living cells. And we've talked about that before on the show. But his particular article here is talking about the misreporting of science, and we've talked about this. It's unethical a lot of the times, and it can be potentially dangerous. And he writes about it in relationship to his particular field of expertise. Because he got bombarded last week on his social media pages with headlines such as the first 3D printed heart using a patient's own cells, and they showed a video, a real nicely put together video of a healthy looking heart apparently materializing inside a vat of pinkish liquid. And he actually went and looked at how much exposure this particular piece got, and he said that he counted it to 3.8 million followers on Twitter, and it was viewed over 3 million times off the Facebook page. So it's tons of exposure, but it is terribly inaccurate. Now in the original scientific paper, he said, you got it, it's what we talk about again, we go back to the original scientific paper. And he said if you go back to the paper, you realize that what actually happened was this. Israeli scientists described how they built upon their own work earlier regarding bio-inks, which are printable materials and cells to create 3D structures in the laboratory. And their main focus was to print a square patch of heart cells, not to actually 3D print a heart, a working organ. You're actually just making a structure, and then the scientists are using the bio-ink to create these little patches for blood vessels using this ink. So the team printed the cells into a thumbnail sized heart shape, so a little tiny thing, right? Now the text of the original paper clearly stated that the printed heart shape structure was not a real heart, but that got by so many people out there, and before you knew it, 6 million or more people think that an actual heart was printed. He says this is not uncommon, unfortunately. He gave examples, such as a couple years ago, Wake Forest University, they had to issue a clarification notice following a report that one of their scientists had printed a human kidney live on stage. What that scientist had actually done was printed a model of a human kidney on stage. It wasn't the actual human kidney. And then also another one, a 14-year-old boy had become the first human patient to be implanted with a 3D printed nose. No, it wasn't a 3D printed nose. They used the 3D printing to create the shape of the nose, just like a model of the nose, as a template to help the surgeon do the work that they had to do. So he said this is a real big problem, and it's the responsibility of scientists such as himself, also of course for journalists and anyone else, passing on what's ultimately medical information to the consumer, they have to be much more responsible when it comes to these kinds of reports, especially when it has to do with cutting-edge technology. People have a very high level of enthusiasm when it comes to new breakthrough technology, and there's a big excitement about it. There's this rush to say, oh my gosh, this is the latest, greatest thing, and how can I – and he winds up getting phone calls from people at the hospital where he works and other places saying, where can I get in on this latest research I heard about? And he has to unfortunately kind of bring them down from those high expectations, say, by the way, these are only models, they're at experimental stage, no human trials, there's nothing like that. So he's constantly finding himself correcting people on this particular aspect of science reporting.

S: Yeah, I have to believe those journalists know exactly what they're doing. You know what I mean? They just don't care. If you make that level of mistake, it's not like the journalists who reported or showed an image of like a complete heart appearing in a vat that they had to create somehow because it's not real, right? It's not like they didn't know that was total BS.

E: He also speaks in his paper about the pressure there is on these journalists and other people to promote, to do a sales pitch effectively, and in some cases, the actual creators or developers of these technologies sometimes get caught up in the hype as well. It's because they're trying to bring up not obviously the awareness, but it comes down to money. They want more money for research so they can continue to do the work that they need to do. And some sensationalism has to creep almost naturally, in a sense, into these particular pieces of reporting. Otherwise, they don't feel that they're not going to get the attention that it would otherwise receive. So it's kind of a catch-22 in that respect.

J: Well, yeah, it's effective, right? I mean, we're all loving to see that latest and greatest awesome achievement, but it's massively deceptive, obviously. You can't pretend that you printed a human heart. I agree with Steve. I don't think anyone was confused about what they were doing there.

C: Well, I feel like a lot of times what ends up happening is that the article itself will break down all of these issues, but the headline and maybe the lead will open, will have like an open-ended, like, did they blah, blah, blah, or they'll use vague language in order, or sometimes, yeah, the headline will just be straight up not true. And if you actually take the time to read the article, a fair amount of times the science writer actually did a like halfway decent job parsing everything, but the way to get you in was disingenuous. And unfortunately, most science writers don't write their own headlines.

S: Yeah, there's many points of failure.

C: There's a lot. Exactly. There's a lot of points of failure from our view, maybe success from the view of somebody who's getting a lot of clicks, and that's the other real difficult thing. It's the way that we monetize these things.

S: Yeah, but I think the point here, it's all despicable, but the point here is when it's dealing with medical issues, there's this other ethical layer where patients are actually reading this, and this is affecting their interaction with the healthcare system. This is like doctors now have to spend their time, and I know because I do this all the time, having to correct misinformation that patients gleaned from popular reporting.

C: But isn't that also a problem even with like really well-vetted medical information?

S: Yeah, it's bad enough.

C: Isn't WebMD just as difficult for you as a doctor?

S: It's not just as difficult. It's bad enough when the reporting is good and just dealing with the layer of misinterpretation of hopeful, often just people are just looking for some hope, and they read something that's maybe a little hyped, or they interpret it in a way that's, oh, wait, can I get stem cells to treat my whatever? It's like, not this decade. You know?

E: Talked about it last week, stem cells.

S: Yeah, I know. I got to be the buzzkill. But it's worse when it's like actively deceptive.

C: Of course, yeah.

S: It's a lot worse, you know?

C: But that's also-

S: So you can't compare the two.

C: I mean, that's an ethical problem across the board. That's unethical in the medical field. That's unethical in journalism too.

S: Yeah, absolutely. All right.

Murray Gell-Mann Dies (46:13)

• Murray Gell-Mann, father of quarks, dies 

S: Very quickly, I have some sad news, but in all honesty, it's not that sad in that you guys know Murray Gell-Mann.

B: Quarks, baby.

S: Yeah. He passed away this week, but he was 89 years old.

C: It's a life well lived.

S: He had a life well lived. He lived to a ripe old age. He died at home. It's not sad in that no one's immortal, but it is a passing of a great scientist, a great man. By all accounts, he was a great guy, not just a great scientist. So as Bob blurted out there, Murray Gell-Mann is a physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1969, and he won it for... Here, I'll read the Nobel announcement. He won it for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and to their interactions. So Gell-Mann was he was instrumental in assembling the standard model of particle physics, and he was apparently the guy who came up with this notion of quarks. I think it was independently thought of by somebody else around the same time, but he had the idea that, hey, we could maybe explain all of these crazy particles that people are discovering if they were made in turn by a deeper level of fundamental particles. Bob, you know where he got the name quarks?

B: [inaudible]

S: Yeah. From a poem. So he called them quarks. He also came up with the name gluons.

B: The force carriers.

S: Yeah, the force carriers.

B: They're fascinating just themselves. They're absolutely fascinating.

S: They're the particles that mediate the strong nuclear force, which of course holds the quarks together. Then a lot of people credit him with just giving the whole naming convention of quarks, top, down, charm, all that strange...

B: Yeah, strange, charm.

S: Yeah, that sort of, he set the stage for that whole naming convention.

B: Very whimsical.

E: I'm glad he used easy to understand terminology, or names at least. He didn't come up with crazy stuff that nobody will ever remember.

S: By all accounts, just a brilliant physicist. This was able to, again, generate these hypotheses about, hey, how could we explain this really interesting phenomenon of particle physics? It just stood the test of time, right? That's why we're talking about him. So we'd like to mark the passing of great scientists, and Gell-Mann definitely deserves it. Again, one of those people that should be a household name. I think he's on the level of an Einstein in terms of his contribution to physics. I mean, we can obviously debate that, but he's pretty much up there. If you came up with the whole idea of quarks and had a huge role to play in the standard model of particle physics, that's Einstein-level contribution.

B: That's huge. That's huge. It's like top five type of dude.

S: Yeah. All right.

Happiness (49:14)

• [url_from_show_notes _article_title_] 

S: Cara, you're going to finish off the news section with an interesting question about what makes us happy.

C: Yeah. Or I guess why happiness, yeah, kind of how do we come to those things? There's a couple of interesting articles that some of you may have come across in the news recently. The first one, I'm just going to do quick and dirty because there is no source paper for it, or at least not yet. There is a behavioral scientist named Paul Dolan. This was covered in The Guardian, but I think it got picked up in other places, talking about sort of that historically studies were done where spouses, men and women, were asked about their level of happiness. We've seen publications that married people are happier, right? We've all seen these publications. It turns out that a lot of the research that was done historically asking married people how happy they were was done with their spouse in the room, which is a little bit confounding.

B: Fail.

C: Yeah. So apparently when you take the spouse out of the room, the answers change a bit. And what we find is that women tend to be happier when they're not married. Not so the case for men. Sorry. And also women tend to be happier without children. So comparing all the different groups of like married versus unmarried, with children, without children, that women without children and without a spouse tend to be the happiest of the groups.

E: A bit subjective, though.

C: Of course it's subjective. That's the whole point.

S: You got the happy-o-meter.

E: The happy-o-meter. That's that latest, greatest technology. I've heard so much about it. Where can I buy five of them?

C: But remember, this is based on self-report data from the actual people. It's not based on some sort of rating by a psychologist.

E: I understand that. But one person's happiness may not be another person's happiness.

C: Which is why you ask thousands and thousands of people and look for trends in the data. So interesting. Of course, he was citing new research, but he didn't really talk about it. I can't find the source article. So we'll hold on to that one until we can see more hard data on it, but definitely jumped out on the page to me. I wanted to link it, though, to another article that I came across, which was recently published, talking about whether or not an association existed between mortality and life purpose. So this looked at a really big cohort study of nearly 7,000 adults that are all over the age of 50, a big U.S. health and retirement study. And they were able to pull a bunch of stuff out of this longitudinal study. And when they started to pull some of the information out of it, because it's the kind of study where there's a massive database with just like tons of questions that were asked. So researchers can write dissertations for decades based on this study. They thought, OK, we want to know whether or not living for something, feeling like you have a real purpose, actually helps one live longer. And so they looked at the data. They realized that historically, some of the ways that they measured life purpose weren't very good, like single question responses, or there was once a tool that was used that wasn't actually well validated. So after a certain point, the health and retirement study, I think like in the 90s, started asking or maybe the early 2000s, yes, in 2006, they started asking from a different questionnaire called the Riff and Keyes Scale of Psychological Wellbeing, which was really well validated. And so they used the data from anybody who was in this study after 2006, after they, got rid of all the study participants that didn't meet criteria. They ended up with this massive N of, like I said, nearly 7,000 people. And they went through and they started to compare all-time mortality. So just like how soon after doing this, after participation, did they die? And also, or sorry, that's all-cause mortality, and also individual illnesses. And they compared those things to people's ratings on this scale, basically, that showed whether or not they felt that their life had a sense of purpose. And they found that for all-cause mortality, there was a high correlation, a significant association between life purpose and mortality, obviously in the negative direction. So people who tended to rate their lives as having more purpose tended to live longer. And they also were able to find that within people who died of heart, circulatory and blood conditions, also digestive tract conditions. And I think there was another one, but they did not find a trend for cancer. So there seemed to be no effect on life purpose and cancer, but really interesting study. The discussion's fascinating, too, to read about because, of course, in the discussion section of almost every study, you have to kind of speculate a little bit. You're like, this is the data. This is what we found. This is what we're actually studying. But why? Right? Like, we don't know. We didn't test why. But based on other literature reviews and meta-analyses and things like that, maybe it has to do with inflammatory factors. Maybe it has to do with things like cytokines, cortisol. There are so many things that they didn't actually test for that could be intermediate, kind of mediating or moderating variables, but they don't know. And so that really does-

S: Maybe they just take better care of themselves.

C: Could be that, right? That people who feel like they're living for something, and they mentioned that, of course, are going to be more conscientious about their health and well-being anyway. Maybe they go to the doctor more often and they eat better and they are probably more risk-averse because they're like, I got to stay alive to get my life's work finished or this project to the next level.

S: And Cara, my understanding is that there's a pretty consistent signal in the research literature that having a sense of purpose makes you happier.

C: Yeah. So they found-

S: That correlates really well.

C: Absolutely. They found previous studies that showed that. And there were even previous studies that did show some correlation between life purpose and mortality, but there weren't any that were super robust and there weren't any that they felt used a really good validated measure. So they decided to do this and this kind of reinforced what the literature was already sort of pointing to, which is that, yeah, having something to live for is incredibly beneficial for mental health and it actually is correlated with living longer.

S: Yeah. I think that makes sense.

C: Pretty cool. It makes perfect sense.

S: Getting back to the women are happier if they're a single thing.

C: Yes.

S: But I think I wonder how much of that is generational because I could totally see if you – in the older generation where women do a lot of the domestic work and don't really have a fulfilling life. They're not out there with – well, I don't want to say that they paint with that brush, but they are constrained by societal expectations and – you know what I mean? I just think that –

C: Sure. Did the cult of domesticity make women miserable? Yes. I think that's absolutely true.

S: So maybe that's what we're seeing. It's not just that – and I wonder if it's true like in a more modern context of a woman, a married woman because I think they – now, why would it be different than men now?

C: Well, because I think there's a couple things to unpack there and one is that even though it's not as overt as it used to be, I do think that the cult of domesticity stuff exists for sure. We still live in a culture that's patriarchal. We still live in a culture where women are expected to get married by a certain age, otherwise they're old maids, where women are expected to have children by a certain age, otherwise they – what was their purpose in life if not motherhood? Like there's still a lot of societal pressure from both parents and grandparents but also just from society as a whole. There's still gender norms and relationships that are heavily based on men making the money and women keeping the home, although oftentimes women then on top of that still make money. So it's like two breadwinners, yet the women are still supposed to do the laundry and take care of the children and do the cooking and blah, blah. I'm not saying that's always the case but I still think it's pretty normative. They mentioned in this short write-up, he says that like men benefit from marriage because they, quote, calm down. You take fewer risks. You earn more money at work and you live a little longer. But she on the other hand has to put up with that. She actually dies sooner than if she was never married. So like that's the thing we always see, right? Like when a married woman dies, her husband's like done, like really quickly after. But when a married man dies, a woman usually stays alive a little longer. But apparently if she had never been married, she has an even longer lifespan. So it's interesting. I think that this really comes down to happiness though. It comes down to, as Evan said perfectly, it's subjective. So if you're the kind of person who seeks that kind of partnership and who feels like your life is not going to be complete without children and then you get all of those things that you're working for, you're probably going to be happier. But I think if you're the kind of person who's maybe doing it because of the societal pressures or you think it's what you want because it's the path that's always been laid out for you or you think it's what you want because you're getting pressure by your partner or whatever the case may be, which I think through all of human history was to a large extent the case, it's really hard to decouple those things. Like a woman's right to choose and a woman's right to do all these things, it may be protected, but that doesn't mean that it's not heavily still influenced societally. So it's very hard to know what is it that I want or what is it that I think I want based on how I was raised or based on all the experiences that I've had. You can't really decouple them.

S: It is a good sort of overall measure, like the happiness. It's vague in a way, but it is a good marker for, I think, a lot of sub-issues like equality, you know?

C: Absolutely. And freedom of choice.

S: So I hope it is changing. I hope.

C: I think so.

Who's That Noisy? (59:41)

Answer to previous Noisy:

_brief_description_of_answer_ _perhaps_with_a_link_

S: All right, Jay.

J: What?

S: You know what time it is.

J: Time to dance?

S: Time for who's that noisy?

J: All right. Last week, I played this noisy. [plays Noisy] What is that?

S: That's a weird one.

E: Yeah. Oh, yeah.

C: It's very quiet and very clicky, creaky. That's doing something.

J: So Steve Wynick writes in and says, hello, the noisy this week was the last sound heard by the Opportunity Rover as it died alone on an empty planet.

C: I'm so depressed right now.

J: I know, right? Talk about a midlife crisis. Yeah. That is wrong, but that is a in a single sentence, like my heart sank a little bit. That was written well, my friend. But it was not curiosity. David Ernest Garcia wrote in, hi, Jay, I could be totally off, but the noisy almost sounds like a bamboo forest. Cheers.

C: It does sound like that?

J: Yeah. Does it? Steve and Cara, Bob, Evan, you think that sounds like a bamboo forest?

C: A little bit. The creaking and something every so often snapping.

B: I like that guess.

S: I would guess so.

J: Maybe it's slightly reminiscent in my memory of corn growing, that popping of corn growing maybe a little. I don't know.

C: Corn pops when it grows? Or are you thinking of it in the microwave?

J: No, like a cornfield. A cornfield, like when they can grow pretty, pretty fast.

B: You can hear it.

C: Weird.

J: And you can hear it. If there's enough, you can hear like like just the cracks and stuff of the plants growing.

'E: So someone from the city hearing that for the first time must be a little- Like, what is going on?

C: I'm like, you mean in your microwave?

J: You're talking popcorn, aren't you? All right. So Anders Winstrand is the winner this week. And Anders said, how are you doing, Jay? This week's noisy is what we in Sweden call a tjader or tjader, pronounced like shatter with a drawn out A. So it's shatter with a drawn out J. So it's tjader, tjader, okay.

C: It's either tjader or tjader.

J: Tjader, yeah. Okay.

B: Or tjader is rude.

C: You think he means drawn out?

J: Or William Shatner. Or in English, a capiocalli or capiocalli. And he says, I'm sure you can pronounce that correctly. Ha ha. The noisy is the male of one of these huge birds in full lek, which is mating mode, around this time of year when they are known to be very aggressive and often attacking people who get too close. Keep up the good work and listen to it again. [plays Noisy] I heard that and I'm like, wow, this could be so many different weird things. You know, it has like a cup sound to it almost. Like it's the throat echoing, but it didn't sound like an animal to me, which I just said, I said, this is it, man. So let me give you a little more information. And this is the info that Jerry Keller sent in when he originally sent me the noisy. He said the Western capiocalli, God, I hate pronouncing words. Also known as the wood grouse, heather cock, or just a capiocalli, it's the largest member of the grouse family. The largest known specimen recorded in captivity had weighed 7.2 kilograms or 16 pounds. The species shows extreme sexual dimorphism. With the male twice the size of the female found across Eurasia, this ground-living forest bird is renowned for its mating display.

C: I think it's just pronounced capiocalli.

J: Capiocalli. Capiocalli. Yep, you're right. I don't know. I could be wrong.

C: Yeah, I think it's just capiocalli.

B: Yeah, you're right. I don't know.

J: But think about how weird reality is. In some crazy mind, this means, hey, would you like to get it on?

C: Of course. Turning me on, you have no idea.

J: That's like, you are so sexy.

New Noisy (1:03:50)

J: Okay, so I have a new noisy. The noisy for this week was sent in by a listener named Brendan Flynn. Thank you, Brendan. And check out this noisy.

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

short_text_from_transcript

That's a new noisy for those who just joined us. And that only works with a live broadcast, I think, when you say things like that. So anyway, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you want to send me in that cool noise, just like the one you just heard, you can email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org.

Announcements (1:04:38)

J: Steve, I would like to ask our listeners to please consider leaving us a comment or some type of feedback on iTunes or whatever podcast aggregator you are using. We haven't asked that in quite a while. And it actually is a good thing to do to help other people find the show.

S: Yeah, it absolutely helps promote the show.

'C: Just don't write in to tell Jay that it's actually pronounced Cap-per-kay-lee. I looked it up.

J: That's right. That's right, Cap-per-kay-lee.

C: That's right, Cap-per-kay-lee.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:05:09)

Email #1: Bandwidth or throughput

S: Bob, who was it that said the best way to be correct is to be technically correct?

B: Yeah. Yeah, I think that's just a meme that's out that's out there. I love it.

S: That's technically correct, which is the best way to be correct. All right. We're going to do a question, an email that is in that vein. This one comes from Ken Wallace. And Ken writes, this one has been bugging me since Phil Plait said it. I am an engineer who designs GPS receivers and a big fan. I have to take issue with the statement that some people mistakenly use the term bandwidth instead of throughput. Engineers reserve the term throughput for software and processors. In the case of a communication channel, throughput is akin to the data rate. As the data rate increases, the bandwidth required to transmit that data increases. And then he re-references Shannon Theorem. Bandwidth is a limited resource, the coin of the realm. Over the air, it is allocated by the FCC. In a cable or fiber, the medium itself has bandwidth limits. When higher data rates are desired, the question is always where are you going to get the bandwidth? And is why engineers are focused on bandwidth and not data rates? The FCC has allocated 5G servers more bandwidth than 4G, so higher data rates are possible. Okay. So what's he talking about? So we mentioned this on the show, I think, last week about –

C: Yeah. I asked you guys what throughput means.

S: Yeah. And there's also – we mentioned about bandwidth is often people use bandwidth interchangeable with like how quickly the data is being transferred. And we had been corrected previously by Phil Plait on the show about it, which is why he brings up Phil Plait. Okay. I looked it up just to try to square all this away. And it's one of those things that's complicated, but I'm going to try to give you my understanding. Actually, Ken is correct. The guy knows what he's talking about, but I'm just going to broaden that a little bit. So there's three terms that we want to define, right? It's bandwidth, throughput, and data rate. The thing is bandwidth technically is the amount of frequencies that are available, right? It is the width of the band, right? It is the bandwidth, the number of frequencies. But he's correct that the maximum data rate or throughput is a function of the bandwidth. But it's not the current or the actual throughput. So bandwidth is the breadth of frequencies that you have available to you and that determines the maximal rate at which you can push data through the pipe. So the bandwidth is how big the pipe is, right? Does that make sense? The throughput is the amount of data actually going through the pipe at any moment.

C: So that's how much water is in the pipe.

S: Yeah. And the data rate and throughput are very similar. Data rate is like the megabytes per second, like how many megabits per second are going through. So throughput depends not just on the bandwidth though. It also depends upon the signal to noise ratio. So he referred to Shannon, which was one of the founders of information theory. But it's actually the Nyquist equation. Nyquist refers to the relationship between bandwidth and the maximum data rate. There's also the Shannon-Hartley equation, which takes into consideration the signal to noise ratio. Because the maximum amount of energy of data that you could push through the pipe depends on the bandwidth and the signal to noise ratio. The Nyquist equation assumes zero noise. So that's like an idealized situation, which doesn't exist in the real world. So that's interesting though, because then data companies could tell you about their bandwidth that they're offering you, but that's an idealized situation that you will never experience. You will never get that. Like they'll say, yeah, we have a bandwidth that allows for 100 megabits per second, but you're only going to see 60 megabits per second because there's actually noise in the system. So it's actually an idealized, noiseless system.

C: So is that 60 megabits your throughput?

S: That's your data rate. And then the throughput is the actual amount of data that's going through. But again, throughput and data rate, you don't have to really – that's a subtle difference. You don't really have to worry about that too much. But it's like the data rate is kind of the maximum. So bandwidth is the maximum, the data in an idealized situation. Data rate is your actual maximum data rate, and throughput is the actual amount of data that's going through. Does that make sense?

E: All right.

C: Yeah. Those two things sound the same to me.

S: They're very similar.

C: I'm going to pretend they're the same.

S: Yeah, yeah. Don't worry about it. I've read many articles on it. They said these are confusing. There are subtle distinctions. Even people in the industry get it technically incorrect. But that's the things that you want to know about. So if you want to use bandwidth as shorthand for like how much data can we put through the system, it's actually not a bad analogy. Data rate is technically more correct because it takes into consideration the bandwidth plus the signal-to-noise ratio. And there are other things too, like the quality of the receiver. The better the receiver, the more it's going to be able to accept your data. So that will limit it as well. So there's real-world context that will affect the actual throughput, the actual amount of data that's going through. And then also—

C: Well, and isn't your throughput also dependent on other people in the system? Or is that just your bandwidth? That's everybody's bandwidth.

S: You are correct. There might be 10 people using that pipe. And so their data rate is going to be different because they're sharing the bandwidth, exactly. So that's why like you have an office and you're like, oh, we have this great, all this massive bandwidth, one gigabits per second. But yeah, you have 100 people sharing it. And so their data rate is going to be very, very limited. So 5G—so I asked specifically, all right, but what's the relationship between the frequency, like 5G versus 4G, 5G is a higher frequency, does that give you more data rate? And the answer is no, but the amount of data that you can—that the signal is carrying does not depend upon the frequency of the signal. But the higher the frequency, the greater the bandwidth the signal can occupy. And so you have to go to higher frequencies in order to utilize greater bandwidth and therefore a higher data rate with any one signal. Does that make sense? So the 5G is allocated more bandwidth, but it could also utilize more bandwidth because it's a higher frequency. So that's—there's an indirect relationship between frequency and how much data you can put through. It's not—but all other things being equal, the frequency in and of itself doesn't change the data rate. Does that make sense?

C: Sort of, yes.

J: It does. I mean, I get it. I'm just not sure why in the—why would more data be able to go over a higher bandwidth? I mean a higher frequency, sorry.

S: Because—only because a higher frequency allows you to use more bandwidth. And the bandwidth is the ultimate limiting factor on how much data you can—data you could push through.

C: So like when people say, I just don't have the bandwidth for this right now. Like that's a good analogy.

S: It's a reasonable metaphor. It's more than a metaphor. But yeah, it's a reasonable metaphor. Absolutely.

C: Oh, sorry. I wasn't technically correct when I said analogy.

S: Right.

E: I still won't get cancer by using 5G.

S: You still won't get cancer.

C: Yeah, yeah. That's all still true.

S: All right. Are we squared away on that? Good. Let's go on to a name that logical fallacy.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:12:40)

• _Fallacy_Topic_Event_

S: This one comes from Justin from Fort Erie, Ontario, eh? And Justin writes, I run a YouTube channel in which I respond to mostly young earth creationism. Your show and websites are often a great resource for me and I appreciate all the hard work you guys put in. I am just wondering if this logical fallacy has a name or if it is encapsulated within another fallacy. I've had several people message me asking questions like, if abiogenesis is so easy that it could happen naturally, why haven't we been able to replicate it with modern science yet? Is this just an extension of the argument from ignorance and that we humans are currently ignorant of the specifics of how something works, therefore it can't possibly happen naturally, have happened naturally? Or is there a more specific fallacy that I am unaware of? Thanks for everything you do. So what do you guys think about that argument that if abiogenesis can happen in nature, this can happen just through natural forces, why haven't we been able to do it ourselves with modern science?

E: Well, geez, nuclear fusion happens in the sun naturally. We have a pretty hard time getting it to work here on the planet.

B: And protons decay. We've got to wait quintillions of millennia. I mean-

C: Yes, there's some sort of logical fallacy that says human beings are all powerful.

S: Yeah, so what would you call that? What would you call that, Cara? It's not technically a logical fallacy, what you said, but it's a-

C: The human arrogance fallacy? No, I don't know. I have to look up my cheat sheet.

S: I would say when you're introducing something like that, it's an unstated major premise, right? In other words, you're assuming something and taking it as a premise without explicitly stating this is my premise. And if that unstated major premise turns out to be an unwarranted assumption or just flat out wrong, then your argument is doomed to failure, even if the logic itself is okay. So with this person, when someone makes an argument, they're basically the unstated major premise in my opinion is that if something can happen in nature, then it should be easy or at least achievable to do it with technology, with modern science. And as Evan, you brought up a great example. Well, yeah, there's all kinds of things that happen. Like nuclear fusion happens in the sun, but it's really, really technically difficult to do it. Of course, I would say if there's a logical fallacy in there, it's the false analogy because they're trying to – in the case of Evan's example, you're making an analogy between the conditions that exist within the core of the sun and conditions that we can reproduce on earth, right? In the case of the young earth creationist argument, the false analogy is the timeframe that scientists have to work with and the timeframe that evolution or natural forces had to work with. It may have taken millions of years for abiogenesis to occur on earth. And you're saying, why can't we reproduce this earth-sized experiment over millions of years in a laboratory? Well, that's why because this is something that – the time and scope and the resources that were available for this to happen. There is no analogy to a laboratory and the fact that we have modern technology doesn't solve those problems. It's like it doesn't solve the tremendous heat and pressure you need to make fusion happen.

C: And the Miller-Urey experiment was good. Like it was a solid experiment, right?

S: Yeah. It got part of the way. It didn't obviously answer a lot of questions, but it just showed the feasibility of one piece of the process that –

C: And like a pretty freaking important piece of the process.

S: Yeah. Absolutely.

C: You know, like amino acids.

S: Amino acids.

C: Like if we could get there.

S: Yeah. I mean there's still major pieces to the puzzle that that experiment didn't solve and we don't want to oversell it. Absolutely. But yes.

C: But it's almost – he's almost speaking as if it never happened. You know what I mean? Like why can't we do this in the lab? It's like, well, we've already done part of it in the lab.

S: Well, that's just denialism. That is the setting the goalpost out of reach of whatever we've currently done. It doesn't matter. Anything we currently know or any current experiments are never enough because we just set that – so that's like a move – you could say this is a moving goalpost fallacy as well. Just set that bar out of reach in that, oh, you haven't made life in the lab yet? It's all bullshit then. Well, why? Why is that your criterion making – you're reproducing in the lab? It's not a reasonable criterion because the conditions that – in which it happened in nature are vastly different than anything we have the capability of reproducing in the lab. At best, we can reproduce tiny slices of it like with the Miller-Urey experiments or like with evolution. Yes, we've observed tiny slices of evolution in the lab. You haven't observed the kind of evolution that takes millions of years because it takes millions of years. So it's just not a reasonable –

B: And we don't need to observe that to know it.

S: Yeah, exactly. So it's partly denialism. It's partly moving the goalpost. It's partly false analogy. It's partly the unstated major premise. It's kind of all working together in that.

C: And similar to denialism, like looking at this one resource for logical fallacies, informal, again, logical fallacies, they name one called personal incredulity, like he's incredulous. Just because he doesn't understand it means it's probably not true, which I think is a very common informal logical fallacy. I can't wrap my head around that.

S: I can't imagine that happening.

C: Exactly.

S: That's not a limitation on nature. And let's get real. Whenever somebody makes that kind of argument, it's almost always motivated reasoning, right? They're just backfilling an argument for something they already want to believe in. That didn't lead them to the conclusion in the first place. They don't say, I don't believe in evolution because I can't imagine it. They have some other reason for doubting evolution, and they're using the lack of the ability to imagine it as just motivated justification for it. Because it's an argument. They're reaching for the available arguments to support their position, not really using logic to arrive at a conclusion. Okay. All right, guys. Well, let's move on to science or fiction.

[top]                        

Science or Fiction (1:19:12)

Item #1: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #2: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #3: _item_text_from_show_notes_ Item #4: _item_text_from_show_notes_

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. You guys ready for this week?

J: Absolutely, Steve.

S: All right.

C: Yep.

E: Yeah, sure.

S: All right, here we go. Item number one, a new study found that only 54% of teenage girls given a prescription in the ER for a sexually transmitted disease filled the prescription. Item number two, scientists have found a method for increasing the maximum speed by which catalysts can increase chemical reactions by 10,000 times. And item number three, a new study finds that applications of commonly used herbicides increase the mutation rate in weeds, making the emergence of resistance more likely. All right, Cara, go first.

Cara's Response

C: New study found only 54% of teenage girls given a prescription in the ER for an STD filled the prescription. It bums me out, but I would think it's probably true. This was a U.S. study?

S: Mm-hmm.

C: Yeah, because in the U.S., right, they're not going to have health insurance, or they might be on their parents' health insurance, and they might be afraid to use it. They might not have enough money to cover the prescription. I think that if in the ER they actually physically gave them the pills, they'd be more likely to take it. But if they had to then go to a pharmacy to fill it, I could definitely see a lot of girls being afraid to do that. Scientists have found a method for increasing the maximum speed by which catalysts can increase chemical reactions by 10,000 times. To be clear, the speed has been increased by 10,000 times, not the catalysts are increasing the chemical reactions 10,000 times.

S: So I don't know what the difference is between those two things is. So in other words, the amount by which a catalyst can speed up a chemical reaction has a limit, right? And what the scientists figured out is a way of increasing that limit by 10,000 times.

C: Okay. I don't know enough about chemistry to know. It just seems like a very big leap. Let me jump to the last one. A new study finds that applications of commonly used herbicides increase the mutation rate in weeds, making the emergence of resistance more likely. Commonly used herbicides. Commonly used herbicides. Well, we already know that Roundup does that, glyphosate. I don't know if it increases the mutation rate, but I do know that it increases the emergence of resistance. I don't know if it's a mutagen itself, but the evolution happens faster because the other things are just dead so they can't reproduce. So this one's a little tricky. You're asking if they're, you're saying they're mutagens. New study finds that applications of commonly used herbicides increase the mutation rate. They're actual mutagens. I think it's between two and three, 10,000 times seems high. It seems like maybe a thousand times faster. So I'm going to say that one's the fiction, although that's probably, you're probably, that's a gotcha one and that's probably a science, but I'm going to go with the catalyst being the fiction.

S: Okay. Jay.

Jay's Response

J: All right. So the one, this first one here about the teenage girls given a prescription, they're saying that 54% of them who were given a prescription in the ER about an STD did not fill the prescription. No, it says that they, 54% did fill the prescription.

C: Yeah. Only 54% filled.

J: Which is you know, 50, it's almost 50-50 there. But when I think it through, I'm like, all right, you're in the ER. They tell you, hey, you got an STD and here's a prescription. You know, hopefully like I don't know the difference between them saying it'll get rid of it or this will help I don't think they're going to give you a prescription in the ER for something that needs therapeutic medication, like herpes you don't get rid of. They just give you something to get rid of the symptoms. But I don't know. Either way, like you just think that most of the people would be like, yeah, I better do something about that. You know, and did they go to the ER for that? That's the question. Was it a secondary thing that they found or did they go into the ER specifically for the STD? Because if they did, you'd think that they would even be doubly likely to get the prescription. So that one just says, I don't know about that. I don't know if I agree with the 54%. You'd think it'd be a lot higher. The one about the chemicals, I have no problem thinking that they found a way to increase a chemical reaction by 10,000 times. I mean, it might seem, that might seem like a lot, but it might, in the real world, it might not translate into it being that much faster. I'm guessing. Again I agree with Cara.

C: Well, it translates to it being 10,000 times faster.

J: Yeah. But it might be the difference between a fraction of a second and a second and you wouldn't really even be able to notice it. You know what I mean? It could be such a short amount of time that you wouldn't really, really notice it. But either way, even still, even if I'm wrong about that, I don't think that I'm finding something like this is that kooky. I think it just that the big number might be because of very short timespans. And then the last one here, a new study finds that applications of commonly used herbicides increased mutation rates. You know, and I could see that one being true too because herbicides are going to be attacking certain things and other weeds could have mutated to not be as affected and their survival rate is just enough where they survive and pass on. So I mean, I could feel, I could argue for that one as well. So I think-

C: It can't all be true.

J: I know. I think the first one about the ER, 54% of teenage girls, that one's a fake.

S: Okay, Bob.

Bob's Response

B: Yeah. That just sounds so sad that that could even be a possibility. If that's true, that would be terrible. 54. Half. Flip a coin. Flip a coin. I won't fill my prescription. Huh?

J: Judge unemotionally.

B: Yeah. I mean, I'm just surprised that you could oh, I have an STD. Oh, here's some medicine to help me with it. Ah, screw it. It's like, wow. Why would anybody do that? That's just like...

J: I know.

B: All right. So-

C: I explained why, but okay.

B: I remember hearing you talk about it and I was thinking, I should heed Cara's advice.

C: You're thinking, I should listen to these words.

B: Yes. But... Yes. I did. I did. And I will definitely... It will help sway me a little bit. The herbicide one. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I don't know if it's a mutagen or not, but the fact that some will survive and then have far fewer competition, less competition, that's, I mean, sure that could increase the mutated, mutated weeds out there. I can see that. Yeah. The second one, 10,000 times increase of the catalyst. I specifically was thinking in biology. I guess it doesn't need to be within biology. But I would think that 10,000 is just so huge. I mean, wouldn't that just increase the amount of heat that's generated by an unacceptable amount? Well, I don't know. I never really took chemistry though. I took astronomy instead in high school. So what do I know? But I'd say that one's fake anyway.

S: And Evan.

Evan's Response

E: 54% of teenage girls. That seems like a low, low number, right? That's what's shocking here. But that doesn't mean it's not true. The other one, the 10,000 times of the maximum speed. Wow. Catalysts and chemical reactions. We're not talking about a specific catalyst and a specific chemical reaction.

S: No, it's like any, almost, you know.

E: Right, right. That's, oof, that leans, that one leans towards fiction if you ask me. What about this herbicide one? Increasing the mutation rate? How long have we had? Commonly used herbicides. Okay. We've had these things for a long time. Wouldn't they have realized that the mutation rate was changing a long time ago if that were the case though? That's the problem with this one. 30, 40 years. I don't know. The roundup's been around a real long time among others. Wouldn't they have been able to measure that a while ago? Maybe they can only recently pinpoint it. Geez, I don't know. Okay, fine. Ah, nobody chose the weed one, right? So I'm going to choose the weed one. I'm going with weeds. Fiction.

C: Steve will not be swept.

E: Exactly.

S: Okay, Evan. You're parting from your fellow rogues and going striping out on your own.

E: I am.

C: He's going rogue.

E: Dangerous country I'm venturing into.

S: So I guess since you guys are evenly – you picked all three, so there's no reason not to just take these in order.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: So we'll start with number one, a new study found that only 54% of teenage girls given a prescription in the ER for a sexually transmitted disease filled the prescription. Jay, you think this one is the fiction and this one is science.

J: Damn.

S: This is surprising.

B: That's so sad.

C: It doesn't surprise me.

S: So these are girls that were diagnosed with pelvic inflammatory disease or tested positive for chlamydia. Now if you've ever worked in an emergency room, you'll know what PID is because it's a very common ER admission and this is one of the things where you diagnose when they walk into the emergency room because they have the PID shuffle.

C: Oh, poor girl.

S: No, because they're in pain. They can't even walk normally. You could see by the way they're walking, like, yep, she has PID. So imagine you're having – you're in pain. You are symptomatic. That's what brought them into the emergency room and either you have it clinically or you test positive for chlamydia. You're given an antibiotic. So this is not herpes because these were antimicrobials, right? And almost half don't take it. So that is very disappointing.

C: Well, don't fill it.

S: They don't fill it. They don't fill it.

C: Not that they don't take it.

S: That's the thing. Some may fill it and not take it. I just – it's hard to imagine that they're doing that. So this is a retrospective cohort study. They looked at two different emergency departments in a large urban tertiary care children's hospital, enrolled adolescents between age 13 and 19 and yeah, 54 percent filled the prescription. So they said they need to do a follow-up study where they look – they try to identify the barriers to filling the prescription. So this study did not look at that. So your speculation is reasonable, Cara, but we don't know and we definitely need to figure this out. Is it money?

C: I hope that they look at money and stigma.

S: Is it stigma? Yeah, whatever. But who – they're suffering through this rather than treating it. And of course, because it's a sexually transmitted disease, going untreated is just going to perpetuate it.

C: Of course. But they might be more scared of their parents than they are aware of how necessary treatment is.

E: Wait. Aren't their parents bringing them to the ER?

C: Probably not.

S: No. Not necessarily.

E: Wow.

C: Yeah, probably not. Or if they are, they're lying about what is wrong and the parents are asked to leave the room when they're giving the results.

S: Well, we always do that, by the way. If a child, a teenager comes into the emergency room or whatever, at some point we're going to say – we're going to ask the parents to leave the room. And if it's a minor, they don't have to.

C: No. But it's the only way you're going to get a true answer out of it.

S: Yeah. But we kind of like give the parents a look. It's like we need to have a talk.

E: It's best if you're not here.

S: Yeah. It's like – and most parents get it. Some parents are – they're very, very protective. But however, the exception is if you suspect child abuse, then you can have the parents physically removed at that point. The gloves come off because then you're 100 percent – your responsibility is for the child. You do whatever it takes.

C: Yeah. And you're a mandated reporter. You legally have to report it.

S: Yes. You have to report it. You have to.

J: If they take their latex gloves off, isn't that like a microbial issue then?

S: All right. So we have to solve this problem though because that's really bad.

C: We need to be giving these kids the drugs instead of having them fill it on their own.

S: I agree.

C: Give them a bottle of pills to walk away from the hospital.

S: It would be cost-effective. That's the thing. It would be cost-effective to do that, to give them free antibiotics.

C: Yep.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: OK. Item number two. Scientists have found a method for increasing the maximum speed by which catalysts can increase chemical reactions by 10,000 times. Bob and Cara, you think this one is the gotcha – no, you think this one is the fiction.

C: I think this one's fiction. But I also think it's the gotcha.

S: Evan and Jay, you think this one is science. And this on is...

B: Say it.

S: Science.

B: God damn it.

S: It is science.

C: That means Evan won.

S: Yes. Good job, Evan.

E: I almost went with that one as the fiction.

S: Yeah. So this was the gotcha. I actually forgot to include an important little detail that would have made it even more interesting is that this limit has been in place since 1960. So this is like 50 years in the making here, more, almost 60 years. So here's the original limit or the current limit, I should say, is what's something called the Sabatier principle. And what this is, if you think about it this way, so a catalyst is something that increases the speed of a chemical reaction. Obviously, they're extremely useful in industry because of whatever you're producing, any chemical that you're producing, mass producing for the market or any drug that you're making or anything like that, you want the reaction to be quick. And sometimes the catalysts are necessary to take reactions from being glacially slow to occurring on human lifespan in a human timeframe or occurring in a manufacturing friendly timeframe. So they're like basically the reactions don't happen at any kind of significant rate without the catalyst. But there's a limit and the limit, the Sabatier principle is this idea of a Goldilocks zone, of a sweet spot, where if the catalyst and the reactant bind too loosely, then the catalyst doesn't work. And if it binds it too strongly, then it won't let go at the end of the reaction. So it's got to bind it just enough to make the reaction happen, but still release it and reset for the next reaction, right? So at that sweet spot, that's the limit. That's basically the maximum speed with which that catalyst will increase that chemical reaction at the Sabatier limit. And for the last 60 years, that's been the fastest that catalysts work, any catalyst for any reaction, right? So what they did was they essentially applied a wave of energy to the catalyst itself, which could be just like a piece of metal, right? Metals are often good catalysts. And if they dialed the frequency to the resonance frequency of the reaction, it dramatically increases the reaction rate up to 10,000 times. So that is...

C: Put a peak on the peak. I love it.

S: Yeah, exactly. It's like a peak in the peak. And so this could be huge. Imagine if... And Jay, you're right that for some reactions, it may not make a difference, but for others, I mean, imagine if the process by which we're making useful industrial chemicals or pharmaceuticals or whatever could proceed thousands of times faster, and especially if that's the rate limiting step in the manufacturing of whatever. So this is still like the technology of technology. This is not an application. This is just a new way of making stuff. So we'll see what happens when this starts to get implemented in industrial chemical processes. But this is one of those things that could be as widespread in its application as like the assembly line. You know what I mean? It's a basic industrial technology that we're talking about here. And again, it's one of those things that people don't think of that much who are not experts like thinking of catalysts and chemical reactions. But actually, chemical reactions are what our modern world is built on. You know what I mean? So if you really think about it, just about everything that we do is a chemical reaction.

C: It's also what your body is built on. It's an enzymatic reaction.

S: And I don't know if this would apply to enzymes, to biocatalysts.

C: Yeah. I think there's probably a bio limit because of like ATP and stuff.

S: They talk mainly about metal catalysts here. But you will see this could be a really – this could have wide ranging implications.

B: Is anyone speculating? Somebody must be speculating about what this could mean. Nobody?

C: Oh, sure.

S: They're talking about like ethanol plants for example. It could dramatically reduce the cost of producing pretty much any chemical. So we'll see. We just have to see how this gets implemented. But hitting upon that idea, oh, we'll just use some kind of resonant frequency to increase that optimal point of making the enzyme do what – not the enzyme, the catalyst do what it does. It's brilliant. And it worked out beyond their wildest dreams. 10,000 times. Amazing.

Steve Explains Item #3

C: So Steve, you got to tell me.

S: Yeah.

C: Is the operative phrase in the last one, increase the mutation rate?

S: Yes.

C: That it's not actually a mutagen. I knew it. I knew it. So the evolution is still happening. It's just not a mutation.

S: Yes. Exactly. So number three, a new study finds that –

C: You heard me even say it.

S: I know. Believe me. Increase the mutation rate in weeds making the emergence of resistance more likely is the fiction because the study showed the exact opposite. They were looking to see that. Now, it is definitely true that when you apply an herbicide to a field of plants, the weeds that are naturally resistant are the ones that will survive and then they will predominate. So yes, that's just evolution. But the question the researchers had was does the application of the herbicide itself cause new mutations to arise? Is the resistance the product of a new mutation or is the resistance something that was always there in the wild type to begin with? So they were studying amaranthus which is a very common weed that plagues crops and they produced 70 million seeds from a single plant. I guess this plant produces a lot of seeds. They said one good plant could produce 100,000 seeds. So they took one plant. They did a few generations. They got up to 70 million seeds. I think just probably two generations would do that. 100,000 seeds from 100 whatever how many plants. And then they planted it. They applied the herbicide. They found the ones that were resistant and they were able to track back the genetic features that created their resistance to the wild type. In other words, it was not a new mutation. It was something that existed already in the plants.

C: I feel like I should have known that. I did know that.

S: In fact, they didn't find any new mutations causing resistance in their test plot.

C: That's good news.

S: Yeah, it's good news. It's good news. This is like 70 million seeds. They basically said that the mutation rate was a lot lower than they thought it was. And the reason why they thought that it might cause this is because plants under any stress will increase their mutation rate. Just ultraviolet radiation will do it. You stress out the plants and it tends to increase their mutation rate. But apparently not commonly used herbicides. At least not the ones they looked at in this study. That is a little reassuring. It doesn't need to really change the basic fact that you're going to still generate herbicide resistance by overusing it and you still need to use them with integrated pest management and use them intelligently just like antibiotics. You can't just use them willy nilly. Right, Bob? I know that drives you nuts. You have to use them intelligently. Absolutely. It just doesn't change that. But it is reassuring at least on this one layer that at least it's not generating spontaneous mutations causing the resistance. The resistance is there in the wild type to begin with. Yeah, I thought that would get a lot of people. You were close, Cara.

C: Going first is the worst.

S: I know. You went last last time. Last time you went, you were last. So your turn to go first. I try to balance it out.

C: Fair. Whatever.

S: Evan, I was sweating you, man. Oh, man, I'm going to get a sweep unless Evan strikes out on his own. Good job.

E: It was a total guess.

C: Smart play. It's a strategic move there, Evan.

E: I didn't go with anything other than a guess.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:58)

What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?  – Craig Mazin _alternate_display_text_for_name_ (_birth_year_-_death_year_), (description of author)

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

E: All right. This quote was furnished courtesy of listener Stephen Hopkinson. Thank you, Stephen. And it comes from, it's the opening monologue from the HBO miniseries, Chernobyl. I don't know-

C: Ooh, I've been watching that.

E: Oh, I have not. I can't wait to see it.

B: I've heard about it.

S: I watched the first episode. It's very good.

C: Yeah, I've watched all, but the final episode is next week. So I'm all caught up. It's super good. You guys should watch it.

S: Yeah, we're watching it. It's really good.

E: Don't tell us how it ends.

S: I mean you know the story. It's challenging to tell a story that you already know. But of course, there's the story behind the story. Seeing it happen, like, holy shit, what are they doing?

C: I know.

S: It is amazing. Because we know the end. We know, like, seeing them rationalizing. It's not so bad. Like, yes, dude, it is bad. But, yeah, it's definitely worth it.

E: Worst in history bad.

C: Yeah. It's also really, like, well acted, beautifully shot. It's well done.

S: I have just this one scene. Just one scene I'm going to spoil for you. Just one more scene. All right. Very quick. Is that, that stands out. Is that, like, the main guy who's in denial about the severity of the leak, is, like, in the process of telling his supervisors that nothing is happening when he just vomits all over the table because he has massive radiation sickness. It tells you, like, it's fine.

E: Nothing to see here.

C: No spoilers. But that denial continues throughout the series.

S: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We know that. Right? We know that. But it's amazing. There's so many things. He picks up this graphite. What's this? That guy's dead. You're dead.

C: He's dead.

B: You're dead. You're dead.

J: Shut up.

C: I don't think I knew the story, but I don't think I knew the intensity of the, like, the severity. I mean, I knew how severe it was, obviously, but, like, seeing it there, number to number, like, as it progresses through the series, they talk a lot about the science, and they do a pretty good job with the science, and it's, I mean, it's really well done.

B: Oh, that's good.

S: It's amazing. Again, just one other thing that struck me was when one of the guys is reporting that the measured radiation levels were whatever. He gives a number.

C: 3,000, whatever.

S: But he says, but that's the highest that the counters go. That's the highest of that. But the guy completely ignores the second part. He says, oh, 3,000. That's not too bad. It's like, yeah, but I just said that was the highest that the meter goes.

C: Yeah. We need to get a more sensitive meter.

E: You can't measure it.

B: What are the chances that it peaks right at the device you're using?

C: It's beyond incompetence. That's why the series is so good, because as you follow it, you see that it's propaganda. The whole series is about propaganda and the confluence of like the worst accident sort of potentially in human history combined with a government that's so cloaked and refuses to admit. So only when there's radiation showing up in Switzerland. Only when there's radiation showing up in Sweden.

E: They can no longer contain it.

C: But even still, they're going to hide it up to the point just what other people know. That's amazing to watch.

S: That's the thing. It's like it's not incompetence.

C: No.

S: It was the culture. It was the culture of –

C: It's the KGB.

S: Nothing is wrong. We have to pretend that everything's fine. Even in the middle of the worst nuclear accident in history, we have to like – Everything is fine.

C: They didn't even – What's it called? Not quarantine. Force the people out.

S: They didn't even evacuate.

C: Evacuate. Yes. They didn't even evacuate for like days because they didn't admit to themselves that they needed to.

S: Yeah.

E: That's why the opening monologue –

S: And Evan, give us – The quote is perfect with that in the background.

C: Sorry, Evan.

E: See, I'm trying this new thing where I sometimes talk about the source even before the quote and then things like this happen. But it's good. It's good. It's a change of pace. Opening monologue goes like this. "What is the cost of lies? It's not that we'll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then? What else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories?"

S: That is a fantastic quote. So applicable to –

C: So relevant.

S: To the current time.

E: Oh my gosh. Apply that one to so many things.

C: But I think we all know what we're applying that one to right now.

E: Timeless.

C: Yes.

E: It's a timeless quote.

C: There you go.

S: It's timeless and timely.

C: And yet especially timely.

E: Very good. Very good. Written originally by Craig Mazin. M-A-Z-I-N.

S: Very nice. All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Thank you.

S: And thank you guys for joining me this week.

B: Sure thing.

J: Yes, Steve.

C: Thanks Steve.

E: Thank you, Dr.

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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