SGU Episode 740

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SGU Episode 740
September 14th 2019
Nature's fury unleashed: a stunning display of lightning against a dramatic sky.
SGU 739                      SGU 741
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation."
Mary Wollstonecraft Sheeley, A Vindication of the Rights of Women
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality. Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, September 10th, 2019, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein. Hi everyone. So Cara, welcome back from Africa. How was it?

U:It was amazing. It was awesome.

US#01:I went to three countries, so I had been to Namibia previously. Did you go to Namibia? I hear it's really Namibia.

S:I'm such an idiot, too, because somebody posted, I was so tired, and somebody posted on my Instagram underneath a picture I posted. It was like, hashtag Namibia. And they were like, don't you mean Namibia? And I was like, no, I mean, Namibia. Like, I didn't even realize that that was like a Trump reference until later when I thought about it. Yeah, I love Namibia.

C:I've determined that, like, this just reinforced my love for Namibia. I think it's my country. We went to Botswana, too. Botswana did not speak to me quite the same way, but I still really enjoyed it. And also a bit of time in South Africa. And guess what I saw? A lion? A lion. I did see lions, but guess what else I saw? A fossil. A zebra? I did see lots of zebras. I did see fossils, but guess what else I saw? You saw a penguin. I saw a pangolin. A pangolin. A pangolin, cool. Yeah. They're very, like, they're very, very shy. It's very rare to see one in the wild. I actually went out with a guy who's doing pangolin conservation research and we tracked one, but we didn't actually end up seeing her. But I had the opportunity to go to like a rehab facility vet clinic where they had just recently received a pangolin that had been poached. And so it was really sad, like its claws were all broken and like half ripped out because it was trying to claw its way out of a container. Yeah, it was really sad.

J:So they were doing treatment on its claws.

C:They would kind of give him a light anesthetic and clean its claws and then tube feed it. So I was able to sit there while they were doing it and like touched its scales and really like saw a pangolin up close. It was like amazing. I got a bit misty. Wow. Did you see no Cappy? I did not. They're apparently even harder to see in the wild. Yeah, I didn't see any Okapi. I saw a lot of hoofstock, zebras, giraffes. I ate giraffe. What? Oh, brave. I didn't love it, but I didn't hate it. It was a bit gamey, but it was like minced giraffe, so they prepared it really well. My favorite is oryx and kuru. Springbok's really good too.

S:Do they just eat a lot of bushmeat in Africa or is that always like just a an exotic dish even there?

C:No, so game is really common because I also think that wild game is like some of it is just you know hunted but also at least for some of the antelope species and stuff they also farm them because it's kind of like if us eating venison. Yeah, you know what I mean? Like there's so many so much hoof stock there. So yeah, a lot of times if you're at a restaurant that's like a fast food restaurant or something, it'll just be like beef and pork and chicken because farming is massive.

S:But in nicer restaurants, and also at lodges and things like that, it's not uncommon to be served game.

C:I really like it too. It's so good. And also biltong is very common, which is kind of like, kind of like what we would call beef jerky, except there, a lot of it is made out of game. So you can taste a lot of different meats, and they're dried. So they last for a lot longer. But it is hard when we I went on a road trip, which was really fun. So I rented like a kitted out four by four. So there's a rooftop tent. That folds over and you just sleep in the tent on the roof. And yeah, it was really great. The truck has everything you need, like cooking supplies, sleeping bags, camp chairs and everything. So you've got like your own portable living arrangements, which is really, really helpful. But the problem is when you cross from country to country, you know, they have to watch out for what's it called? Foot and mouth disease and lots of different cloven footed diseases. And so you can't bring, you have to like eat all the meat. You have in your fridge before you cross country boundaries, which, you know, feel kind of arbitrary if you're on a road trip, but obviously there are boundaries for a reason, like there are governments that have different laws. So when we're driving from the Limpopo region of South Africa up through Botswana and then into Namibia and across the Caprivi, each time we stopped, we're like, Do we have meat in the car? Crap, please don't take it. You know, so there's that. You have to think about those things. But it was amazing. It was beautiful. Just so much wildlife, obviously elephants and rhinoceros and lions, saw cheetah. I didn't see a leopard this time, but I saw a leopard last time. And then this time I did see a buffalo, a Cape buffalo. So I've seen the big five now, which was pretty cool. What was your, what was your number one experience? Strangely, because Botswana was not my, like it's not my favorite country, especially compared to Namibia. I really love Namibia. But while I was in Botswana, it just happened to be where I was and when I was there. The Botswanan sunsets I think were really incredible. Like at one point in the Okavango Delta, I went on a boat ride in part of the delta that was in Moremi National Reserve. And so saw this sunset over the water in the middle of the Okavango Delta and just the sun is so big there. It's so big and it's so red and when it sets it's just it's like all the photos you've seen of African sunsets they're just stunning. And so that was really, really fun. Yeah, I've literally only been home for like a day and a half. I'm so tired. I spent 35 hours in transit, but not that much, not all that time in the air. So basically, because The road trip went from Joburg, which is like the easiest place to fly to. That's where I picked up the 4x4 and then dropped it off in Windhoek, which is the capital city in Namibia, and then took like a small plane from Windhoek back to Joburg. So it started with the Windhoek flight, which is two hours, then I had eight hours down in the Joburg airport. And then I think I could be wrong, but I think it's like 12 hours to Heathrow, had a few hours down in London, and then another 12 hours back to LA. Yeah, it's brutal. Getting to Southern Africa from Los Angeles is hard. When you live on the East Coast, it's a little easier because there are direct flights from New York to Joburg, and they're, I think, 18 hours. So it's like one of the longest flights you can take, but at least it's just one flight you get it over with. For you guys going to Southern Africa is almost the same for me going to Australia. I can fly direct, but it's like the longest flight you can take. And we're all going to experience that together soon. New Zealand and Australia, here we come. Coming from LA too, so that'll be really exciting to welcome you guys to my city and to do some gigs out here. I think it'll be super fun. Yeah, so when we're in LA, while we're in LA, this is on November 23rd, that's Saturday, we have booked a location for an extravaganza. George is going to join us. We're going to do an extravaganza while we're out there. And then in the morning, we're still working out the location details, but we're going to also do a private recording of our show. So if you're in LA on November 23rd, on that Saturday, we're going to have those two events, a private recording and an extravaganza.

S:Because we'll be flying in Friday night, and then we're flying out Saturday night. We have all day Saturday, and we'll hang with local skeptics while we're there. Also, that'll be my mom's 71st birthday. Very cool. Maybe she could come into town. Yeah, it'll be fun. Awesome. All right, well, let's dig into some news items.

News Item #1 - Super Lightening (08:01)

• The Daily Galaxy - Great Discoveries Channel - Great Discoveries Channel 

S:All right, well, let's dig into some news items. Bob, you're going to start off by telling us about super lightning. Yeah, the results of a recently published study of lightning reveals some really new and interesting details about what's called, not super lightning, but super bolts. This is from University of Washington study.

C:The lead writer is atmospheric and space physicist Robert Holsworth from the College of Washington. Now, Holsworth knows his lightning. He's been studying it for over 20 years.

S:He also manages what's called the Worldwide Lightning Location Network. I was not aware of this.

B:This is 100 lightning detection stations all around the world, six continents, including Antarctica, all over the place. So when lightning is detected by three or more of these stations, then they could really get a bead on it. And what they do is they compare the readings to determine the lightning both size and location. It's kind of like, remember when you were a kid? Remember when you'd compare the time difference between the arrival of lightning and then its thunder? It's kind of like that, but actually it's not like that at all, in fact. So actually what they detect are the radio waves produced by the lightning, and these are from 3 to 30 kilohertz. So the study ran from 2010 to 2018, so they got a good eight years. They actually determined the location and timing of, guess how many lightning strokes did they detect? 4,927. Oh wait, there's one every second. Billions. Well, not billions. Two billion. Two billion. Well, not billions. Two billion. They got two billion. Yeah, billions is correct. But with only 100 stations around the world, two billion still sounds like a huge number. So what did they find? They found that of the two billion strokes that they detected, Four millionths of a percent, or one in 250,000 strokes, were confirmed superbolts. Now a superbolt in this context is defined as releasing the electrical energy of more than one million joules.

US#03:So of course I've got to put that into perspective.

B:That's about a thousand times the energy of an average bolt of lightning. Okay, that's one. And one way to think of this is the kinetic energy of two metric ton vehicle traveling at 32 meters per second. So this is it's a hell of a wallop. And yes, I know a lot of you are thinking about it. This is the kind of bolt that Thor hit hella with in Ragnarok. Thanks, Bob. But that's for the typical energy levels. We were not expecting this dramatic difference. So they knew about these super bolts before. The fact that they existed were not new, but the fact that they could be so dramatically strong was kind of a surprise for them. They also found that these superbolts are most common in the Mediterranean Sea, Northeast Atlantic, and over the Andes, and they have lesser hotspots east of Japan, in the tropical oceans, and off the tip of South Africa. Did you see any, Cara? Probably not. Superbolts. I didn't see any lightning at all. Okay. Makes sense. Yeah, like it did not rain. It's interesting because these bolts do not encroach on the land. If you look at the pattern of strikes for these Superbolts, they actually will outline the coastline of various countries because they're pretty much a water phenomenon. And the other thing, the other big thing that they determined was that we get most of our lightning here, the summer storms, right? We get the, we get our weather in the summer in the Northern Hemisphere, and we get a lot of it, you know, a lot of our biggest lightning will happen then. For these superbolts, the big the big time of the year is November to February. That's when that's when a lot of them are will happen over over bodies of water. Now, as opposed to the causes, why does this happen? Why is there this pattern? Why are they so much stronger? And why do they happen over water? What actually is happening here? They're not really sure. They think it might be related, or Holsworth thinks that it might be related to sunspots or cosmic rays. And he says that, but we're leaving that as stimulation for future research. So hopefully in the future, we'll find out why these superbolts are What they are. And so interesting. I saw this all over the news. Like, I got to get I got to do a deep dive on this and see what's going on with these superbolts. So there you go. I guess they were news clashes. Bob, do they know why they only occur over water in that land? No, for all the other research I did, I couldn't find any hint of why, why it was just they just happened. So I didn't see much like weather per se in southern Africa. But guess what I did see a lot of? I'm Bob Novella.

C:Jay, speaking of electricity, tell us about the latest on lithium-ion batteries.

News Item #2 - 20-Year Batteries (13:32)

• In lab secrets, Tesla is talking about 20-year lithium ion batteries – pv magazine USA 

C:Jay, speaking of electricity, tell us about the latest on lithium-ion batteries.

C:So what I decided to do was take a little peek into the SGU archive and see about some of the discussions that we were having about batteries. And what I found was episode 213, where we discussed battery technology. This was a recording that we did ten years and one month ago.

S:So what's even more interesting here is that we actually say on the show in 2009 that there's all of these promises of new battery technology, but none of them are ever seen to be able to get out of the laboratory and scale up to the consumer market.

J:So we were talking about all this battery hubbub. Even 10, 11 years ago, we were getting the beginnings of becoming very jaded about the whole thing. And we were even saying 10 years ago that we were acknowledging that we just have to appreciate these small yearly incremental improvements that we're seeing. This was 10 years ago we were talking about this. Well, Cara, freshly back from Africa, I'm happy to tell you in particular, my friend and co-host, we finally do have some legitimate, real, cool, good battery technology news. Are you ready? I know you're all sitting down. Tesla has conducted a three-year test, or they did three years of testing, on their current lithium-ion battery technology in order to provide a baseline of what batteries can do today so we can more accurately gauge how much battery technology improves over the coming years. Right? Pretty cool. So the tests that they were running over the past three years include long-term charge-discharge cycling at 20, 40, and 55 degrees Celsius, long-term storage at 20, 40, and 55 degrees Celsius, high precision calometry at 40 degrees Celsius, and several different electrolytes are considered in this unbelievably chemically oriented graphite chemistry, including those that can promote fast charging, right? Now the reason for the cell performance, degradation, and impedance growth, these are examined using several methods and they've concluded that the battery type that Tesla has been working on should be able to power an electric vehicle, get ready, for 1.6 million kilometers or 1 million miles and last 20 years. Ooh. Of course, now that means you still need to recharge it, right? Yeah, that's not a single car. Yeah, you have to recharge it. That's not the range, that's the life expectancy. Throwing that out there. Thank you. What is the standard, like what's the lifespan of the battery in my car? It's probably not at this level, but it's probably pretty good. Okay, I'm looking it up. Yeah, look it up, but I would bet you that it's not, like, unbelievably less than this. I saw something in the news. Using the superchargers, I think, degrades it much faster.

B:But I think they tested that after 10 years. Is it 10 years you would lose, like, 9 to 10 percent? Yeah, this looks like some sort of test. This one says that it lost 8% at 70,000 miles.

C:That doesn't sound too bad.

J:That's okay, but compared to this battery, it's not anywhere near this battery.

C:But let me make sure, I have to clarify a couple of things.

B:Now, they were talking about it lasting 20 years in a grid energy storage environment, not in a car. Right? Because I think the movement of the battery actually does some internal damage and could crack some of the textures that are inside that actually store the energy.

C:But 1 million miles, guys, 1 million miles, 1.6 million kilometers of driving.

J:That's 20 years. I don't know how many years the battery would last in a car, but that is a long time. It's longer than the car, so that's all you need as far as cars are concerned. You could junk your car and keep the battery for your next car. And what does this battery cost? I didn't get into any of that. I mean, this is a battery that they have. Six quintillion dollars. No, this battery exists. It is our baseline battery. It's the Tesla baseline battery. It's not like, you know, if you get a Tesla, you're going to get this battery.

B:The researchers have found that over three years of testing the lithium-ion NMC532 graphite battery cells have the potential to stay structurally sound long enough for cars to reach greater than one million miles.

E:When they say All of those news items that were frustrating you 10 years ago because they made these bold promises that you think were never realized.

J:A lot of those, and we've talked about this, a lot of those quote-unquote breakthroughs They've contributed to the incremental advances we've been seeing every year over the last 10 years. And here we are, it's 10 years later, and lithium-ion batteries are a lot better than they were 10 years ago.

E:They have a larger range, they're more stable, they have a greater life expectancy.

S:That tech, the incremental improvements in that tech have added up quite a bit over the last decade. Just like with solar panels, the incremental improvements have added up every year. So I think we had to shift our expectations. We shouldn't be waiting for a breakthrough, even though that would be more exciting. It's more that we just have to be content with the incremental advances every year, and they add up more quickly than you think. They're cumulative. And so here we are. I think we're basically here. I remember getting really interested in electric cars 20 years ago, and the tech just wasn't ready for prime time at that point. The ranges were really low. Obviously, you want them to be even better still, and they will. They'll be better next year. They'll be a little bit better the year after that. In another 10 years, it'll be awesome compared to where we are today. What's up, Bob? What's going on? Thank you for joining us.

B:In the energy density that we could have in these batteries, that would be amazing. That would really start bringing a lot more people in. 20 years is great, but I would take 10 years with a much greater range. But it's a balance. You know, it all comes down to a balance, and a great longevity is fine, but I'm just waiting for that, you know, some really solid... Now you're never going to be happy, Bob. Bob, what do you think is, what's the average age of a car on the road today? In the U.S.? I bet you it's... Really? Seven years. Four years. Oh, average. Five years? The average, average, average age of a car on the road in the U.S. Four is a good number. Four years, I think. Five years. The average age of a car, seven years. Eleven years. Wow. Geez, wow. Eleven years old. Right? That's the average. Yeah, but you could also think that there's probably a lot of new cars and then there's a handful of crazy vintage cars.

S:And that would drag the average down.

B:I don't know.

C:I mean, sure, that's partly yes, but there's still got to be a ton of 15, 16, 17 year old cars out there.

B:I guess.

S:For that average to be 11 years. So 20 years is about right. If you want that battery to last as long as a car, You need 20-year batteries about what you need. And also think about this, Bob.

C:Electric cars, man, they don't have moving parts in the engine itself. They are lower maintenance, though they have a lot more longevity. And so owning an electric car for 20 years, that may become the norm.

S:That'd be quite a change. Yeah, because I think most people do what I do, which is just lease. Because the technology changes so fast. That's true, because we're still on the steep part of the curve. Yeah. Yeah. But, Bob, you're never going to be happy. The thing is, like, 10 years ago... Oh, I give you a list of things that would make me ecstatically happy, dude. But my point is, it's like when we get, right now, it's like 10 years ago, we're like, oh, if we could just get that range over 300, 350 miles, man, then that would be good. And here we are, like, oh, man, I want that range to be 800, 900,000 miles.

C:And if we were there, it'd be like, oh, imagine if we had a 20,000 mile range car. It's like if you do surveys, everybody thinks they would be happy if they were making 20% more money than they are right now.

S:Whatever they're making, as long as they're on a party. Right. It doesn't matter.

B:It's irrelevant. Your salaries are irrelevant, and you think you'll be happier with a little bit more. It's all relevant.

S:It's all relevant wherever you are right now. But I won't be happy until we're near the limit of physics in terms of energy density. Like, yep, OK. Even Q couldn't help us with this one. You are choosing to be unhappy then, Bob. Now, I mean, there's a lot of technology that makes you very happy, but it's just like batteries. Name one. Name one. What makes it extra frustrating is that there is a lot of money going into battery research, and it's such a tough nut to crack.

B:It's still these little incremental changes, and we've come a long way, but I mean, you know, we're not there yet. Like that battery, that wall, that, what's it called? The power wall. Powerwall. I mean, that's great, but it's not quite there.

S:But I love the idea of having a huge battery in the house.

B:That's great. I mean, I'd rather have a fusion reactor buried under the ground that could power my house for half a century, but you know, we'll get there. Yeah, you want to win the lottery instead of just investing in a conservative, safe investment that makes you a predictable percentage every year. Well, I want to be alive with one cool, amazing breakthrough, like the fusion reactor. That would be amazing. Just give me one cool one. Right. Hey, I'll answer you, Jay. Cellphones. Smartphones are amazing tech. I am never without my phone. I love it. I'm addicted to it.

S:Maybe even a little obsessed. But that's an awesome bit of technology, Jay. What you have at your fingertips is incredible. So I'm very happy.

J:And we instantly took it for granted. Yep. Right. Right. There's another one that Cara's going to be talking about in a few minutes, and that's CRISPR.

News Item #3 - NDE Study (24:40)

• Neurochemical models of near-death experiences: A large-scale study based on the semantic similarity of written reports - PubMed 

B:How about that? Oh, yes. We'll get to that in a moment. But before we talk about that, before we talk about CRISPR, we're going to talk about near-death experiences. And DEs. Yes, there's been sort of a breakthrough in NDE research, not really, kind of just told us what we already know, but in a more rigorous way.

S:So, some researchers did an interesting study looking at what they call neurochemical models of near-death experiences. So they made a comparison between anecdotal accounts of people experiencing psychoactive drugs and anecdotal accounts of people experiencing near-death experience. And they wanted to see, first of all, how similar were they, and second of all, which drug was the most similar. So they looked at 15,000 reports Keneman. … of people using 165 different psychoactive substances and compared them to 625 NDE, near-death experience, narratives. They did basically a linguistic analysis, like which reports used the most similar words describing their experience. Any of you, Cara, maybe you have a guess as to which drug? Ketamine. It was ketamine, that's right. Did you read the article or just do that? No, I've heard that. I've read that for many years. I think the first time I heard about it was in reading about Vietnam, they were using it for for injuries. And, and they were inducing out of body experiences, and they had to stop using it because people were like getting freaked out, but not. Yeah, so I've done ketamine before. What does it feel like? Yeah, it's classified, I think, as a dissociative anesthetic. Yeah, that's exactly right.

B:Yeah, so when you take ketamine and you take it in a large enough quantity, which I did, which I probably shouldn't have done, but I took it with people who had probably had more experience with the drug. So I wanted to try it a little bit, and they were like, that won't do anything. You should take this much. This is a good dose. And it was obviously too big of a dose.

C:So I went into what a lot of people will colloquially call a K-hole. And that actually is, I think, that sort of near-death experience thing that we're talking about. So my experience was that I was completely paralyzed. And I remember feeling a little bit like, I can't tell if I can't move or if I feel so intensely that if I do move, I'll puke everywhere. So I need to sit really, really still because it feels like if I move, something bad will happen. But probably I couldn't move. And I had an experience, I was with a friend of mine, we were lying on a bed in a party. And we felt like we compared notes after, like we had been lying still, but floating around the house listening to people's conversations. Wow. So we had that dissociative experience of leaving our body and like floating around the house. And I think probably because I was an atheist and because I knew I had taken the drug, I wasn't afraid I was dying. But that probably is what people talk about when they talk about leaving their body. Yeah, that's correct. So that tracks with the research. And so ketamine is a NMDA receptor antagonist. That's how it works. It is probably just an endogenous anesthetic, and it is classified as a dissociative anesthetic. It's safe in that it doesn't make you stop breathing like opiates do, so it's a lot better than opiates. So it's also a really good wartime anesthetic as well, because you could just give it to people and not worry about the dose or not worry about them stopping breathing.

S:And if they freak out, that's like they have a lot worse things to worry about in the middle of war than a little out-of-body experience. So it's still popular for military use. It's also, more recently, it was discovered, and I think the Yale researchers happen to be involved in this research, it was discovered that it's a very effective antidepressant. Wow, wow, why? Especially for people who are treatment resistant, right? Yeah. Do they know why, Steve? Like, what's it doing? Well, we're not really sure because its main activity is the NMDA receptor antagonist, but it probably has other activities as well, and we're still trying to sort out what those are. So it's a very interesting drug. So the fact is, obviously, for interpreting the implications of the NDE experience, that's redundant. The NDE

C:Thank you for joining us.

S:Yes, that's entirely in the mind. Then it certainly implies that this is a brain experience and not some kind of spiritual experience. And that's a good rule of thumb. Again, this gets back to understanding that the brain constructs your experience of reality, of yourself, your connection to your body, your separation from the universe. These are all things that circuits in your brain are doing. And if you disrupt those circuits, that alters the way your brain constructs your experience of reality in ways you would not be aware of unless you read neuroscience, right? There's nothing in your life experience that would give you any intuition about how your brain constructs reality for you and how it would break down if we start turning off the appropriate circuits. So therefore, if you experience something that's outside of the range of your normal everyday experiences, like things feel different to you, it's probably because there's something changing the way your brain is functioning. Although we intuitively interpret that as a supernatural experience. So it's something external instead of internal. Yeah, exactly. This experience is hyper-real or hyper-emotional or whatever. It's something really spectacular about this experience. Therefore, reality must be different while I'm experiencing it. But that's the conclusion that everybody has, just intuitively. Rather than saying, my brain must be constructing reality differently for me right now, but that is clearly the better interpretation. It's just not the one that we intuitively come to. Probably because, you know, what I suspect is that the brain evolved, mammalian brains evolved to create the illusion of reality, right? So almost by definition it has to construct reality so that we experience it seamlessly. And therefore, that seamlessness about how we perceive reality in ourselves, etc., means that we, by definition, cannot detect the process itself. And it makes it really hard for us to believe. Yeah, we can't even think about it. That's the other thing to realize. You can't even think about things that you don't have the neurological capacity to think about. And I've probably mentioned on the show, for example, like if somebody has, there's a phenomenon, a neurological phenomenon called anosechnosia, which is the inability to detect that you have a deficit because the part of your brain that you would need to sense the deficit is the part that's not working. Oh, interesting. So is Kopgras Syndrome a version of that? That's the one where people like... The Impostor Syndrome. Yeah, where they think somebody's like replaced somebody else and they just can't believe that it's not real. Yes. So, yeah, that's it. I'm not sure if that's an example of anosognosia, to be honest with you, but it might be. So that is a deficit of the emotional connection between our visual system and the limbic system, right?

C:So, when we identify an object visually, the visual cortex makes a match, and if it's something that has agency, then we connect it to our emotional center to see what we think about it, what we feel about it, and connect it to other memories about it.

S:And if that connection is broken, you would see somebody you recognize, but not feel anything about them. And people interpret that lack of feeling as, well, that can't be that person. Like if I see my wife, and it does not provoke all of the normal feelings that has. Well, it scares the shit out of them. It does, but people assume that the world is broken, not that their brain is broken. That like it's an invasion of the body snatcher situation. Because I guess even if you explain it to them, they're like, I get it cognitively, but I can't get past how it feels. Exactly. So other examples would be if you have certain kinds of aphasia, which is a problem with language, and you may not know that you have a problem with language. And so patients think that the world is broken, right? So like I had a patient tell me that the phone doesn't work when the phone was fine, they just couldn't operate it. Or they think everyone is speaking a foreign language.

C:Not that they have a problem with language, but that now they're suddenly surrounded by people speaking this unknown foreign language.

S:The most dramatic example is if they have left-sided weakness, for example, because of a cortical lesion on the right side. They can't sense that they have an inability to move, and so they can't even think about that side of their body. They think they're fine. They think they're fine. But how can you help people to show them that something's amiss? Well, you can't sometimes, sometimes you can, but sometimes you just have to adapt, like with hemispheric neglect, sometimes you just have to like turn their dinner plate so that they'll eat on the other side of it. Wow. And then they'll only eat on part of the other side of it. You essentially have to wait for the brain to rewire itself. In the acute to subacute phase of the lesion, there's nothing you can do. They literally lack the neurological capacity to think about with a part of the world that contains their deficit.

C:Well, and do you remember that Oliver Sacks like one of his books he wrote about like a super rare experience where there's somebody I think that he was in like he was institutionalized and every night he would land on the ground out of his bed and every night the nurses would have to put him back in bed and they realized that the reason he kept falling out of bed is he would wake up and he thought that the leg and there was a corpse leg in the bed, but it was actually his own leg.

S:Yeah. And so he'd throw it out of the bed every single night and like refuse to understand that that's his own leg because it like didn't feel like it was a part of his body.

C:Yeah, that's another part of it, too. Can you help people that have that, Steve? Yeah. In fact, there's a classic test to see if they have a cortical stroke. You hold up their arm in front of them and say, whose arm is this? And they will invariably say that's your arm. Wow. Oh, gosh. And you call that helping them? No, that's how you first diagnose them. It's a diagnostic test. Yeah, and after weeks of rehab, you know, and the brain plasticity kicking in, you can get them to understand intellectually that it's their own arm. And therapy. I mean, therapy helps too.

S:Yeah, it's rehab. Yeah, because there's an ownership module in your brain. There's a circuit in your brain that tells you that part belongs to you. And if that's broken, then you think it doesn't belong to you.

J:But again, the interesting thing is that you think the world is broken, not that your brain is broken.

S:And that applies to near-death experiences. What people are experiencing are not an otherworldly supernatural experience. They're experiencing their brain not working, whether it's due to medication or due to the hypoxia associated with the near-death experience. Which is, again, the other thing is that why this fits is that ketamine may have neuroprotective effects, meaning that when the brain is dying, releasing similar endogenous chemicals may be neuroprotective, but also happen to have these out-of-body type effects, which then people interpret spiritually. So it's a safety trigger for the brain, basically? Yeah, a desperate attempt to minimize damage to brain cells during some kind of catastrophic event. I love conversations like this because it makes me think, you know, what modules don't humans have that would allow us to conceive and imagine things in the universe that will be forever lost to us until we could augment ourselves, you know what I mean? Like teaching a dog algebra type of thing. The smartest dog ever will never understand algebra.

E:But what is it? What modules of circuitry in our brain do we not?

S:Imagine the fourth dimension. Yeah. What's the right angles to reality?

B:You could only imagine. Yeah, I used to do science journalism for the Huffington Post. I did a lot of videos and I interviewed a lot of physicists. And it was when I really first started trying to cover scientific areas that I had zero background or expertise in. And so every time I interviewed a physicist, I would always ask them if they can see or like understand the world in multiple dimensions, like if they have some sort of skill that I just don't possess.

S:And, you know, obviously everybody said no, except for Neil deGrasse Tyson.

News Item #4 - CRISPR Trials (38:36)

• Four U.S. CRISPR Trials Editing Human DNA to Research New Treatments 

S:Alright Cara, tell us about those CRISPR studies that we're doing.

C:Yeah, so CRISPR, we all remember, we talked about this recently, like the trials, I shouldn't even call them trials, the rogue experiment, basically, that was done in China on the twin girls that was supposed to prevent them from getting HIV passed down, which of course, we know that there were better treatments, so there's a lot of ethical concerns about that. CRISPR is one of these really interesting technologies where we're not going to do a deep dive into CRISPR because we've done that like 1000 times on the show at this point. But it's one of these really interesting technologies where like, it's the bleeding edge of amazing things that could happen, but there's also so many ethical concerns around it. So what I wanted to do is on the back of a cool article that I read in Smithsonian, talk about some of the human trials, the first ever human trials that are slated to happen within the United States utilizing CRISPR technology. So there's kind of different buckets. We could we could slice and dice this a few different ways. That was kind of a CRISPR joke, but not really. So one of them is a really interesting trial utilizing CRISPR to try and treat a certain type of inherited blindness. It's called Lieber. I don't know if it's Lieber or Leber. Lieber is optic atrophy. OK, Lieber congenital amaurosis. So probably the same dude. And this is a type of inherited blindness that happens in childhood. And patients are often very, very young when they're first diagnosed with this. So in this trial, they want to include patients that are as young as three. This one is in a special camp into itself because it's actually the only CRISPR trial sort of on the horizon that plans to do in vivo CRISPR changes. So, this is going to be an injection, an infection, you could even say, of an adenovirus into the back of the retina to actually effect a change within the photoreceptor genome in these very specific locations. The idea is that it would go in using Cas9 to fix this. The treatment's called Edit101, but to fix this portion The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe Some of these faulty photoreceptor and when I say photoreceptor, of course, I'm talking about rods and cones within the retina. So hopefully regrow some of the cells so that a certain percentage of them become normal enough to cause or lead to an increase in visual acuity in these individuals. They've done previous studies in primates and also in donated human retina, and they did see some interesting changes with very few off-target changes. So now they're moving into, I think it's a phase one trial. They didn't specify in this article which ones were phase one and which ones were phase two, but they do say that all of these are phase one and two trials. So Steve, maybe you can just, before I dive into the other ones, a quick refresher on what happens in a stage one and a stage two clinical trial. Because we're talking like, does it work and does it hurt you, right? Yeah, so they're phase one and phase two. Oh, you're right. Sorry, I keep saying stage. Phase one, phase one. So phase one includes mainly safety, you just want to make sure people aren't going to drop dead, and pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, like they give people different doses, see how they metabolize it, see what their blood levels are, see what the half-life is, just basic nuts and bolts, bioavailability, just of the pharmacology itself.

S:And then they'll start to do some basic, like make sure the kidneys don't fail, there's no, the liver enzymes aren't bumping up, you know, just a whole battery of safety testing, EKG, just look at all the organ systems, make sure there's no organ toxicity with the medication. That's phase one. If it's safe in humans, go to phase two, where you might do more safety testing, and you might start to incorporate some preliminary, like, open-label efficacy. Like, say, you know, is there anything, is this having any effect that we're looking for? And then phase three is when you do a multi-center, placebo-controlled, double-blind clinical trials looking to establish efficacy. Yeah, so and there you're basically, like in phase two, you're saying like, does it work? And in phase three, you're saying like, does it work better than what already exists? Well, no, phase two is still safety, is mainly still safety. Oh, really? And just preliminary doesn't work. Preliminary doesn't work. Yeah, but the definitive efficacy is phase three. And then phase four is post market, right? That's when you're saying, all right, now how does it work out there in the real world? Which is kind of Well, I guess it's scary, but it's also part of the process.

C:How well is she going to do it? Exactly. You can only have so many patients involved in a study. Eventually, it's got to be opened up.

S:So these are all phase one and phase two trials. So basically, we're just, or scientists are just trying to understand, is this harmful? You know, they've often already done this in, you know, some level of animals, or like donated tissue, and now they want to see like, is it harmful? Or is it safe for these individuals to do that?

C:And then they'll move on. And we're talking timelines of like, you know, some of these trials, just the phase one or phase two trials are set to go on until like 2030 something. Like some of these are really long trials, so keep that in mind. Also keep in mind that the one I just told you about, visual impairment, that is the only CRISPR trial on the books right now in humans in America that is set to utilize an in vivo, so like within the patient's own cells inside their body. Thank you for joining us. So there's a couple different cancer ones, and I'll get to those last, but the next one that I wanted to just do a quick and dirty on was for sickle cell disease, which is super interesting. We've heard of sickle cell. We know that it causes anemia, but also a lot more than anemia like pain. And that's because of the shape of the red blood cells that are caused by these hemoglobin clumps. These red blood cells that are supposed to be smooth and round actually become sickle-shaped. They are sickle cells, and they cause all these blockages in the blood vessels. Thank you for joining us today. Yeah, and it causes all sorts of horrible things, right? Your blood is supposed to flow, and in sickle cell, it doesn't flow well. So you get, it's really painful. Yeah. And so it's a really interesting thing, right? Because it has to do with hemoglobin, right? The actual genetic change affects the hemoglobin protein. Yeah, it's the hemoglobin gene.

S:And so we've got two different, apparently, or maybe more than two, but we've also got a gene for fetal hemoglobin.

C:So what we're talking about with sickle cell is usually beta globin, but fetal hemoglobin actually doesn't have any effect on sickling. And so the idea here is to actually boost the production of fetal hemoglobin in these individuals. It alters it so that the fetal hemoglobin actually takes up more of the sites on the hemoglobin's molecule, and then it can lower the likelihood of the actual cell that contains that hemoglobin to change shape, which is really interesting. So the idea here is that they're going to do chemo on their bone marrow cells and then inject these edited stem cells into the patient through an infusion. And then there's like a cutoff, like they want to generate 20% or more of the fetal hemoglobin in an effort to sort of like bump out enough of the beta to Thank you for watching. And then the other ones, in this article, they talk about them as two different trials, probably because they're being led by two different people, but I'm going to lump them together just to make things easier. So there are also trials in place for cancer purposes, which we knew I think early on this was going to be a big part of the CRISPR sort of revolution. So there is a T cell trial that's going on in an effort to like extract T cells. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by That would actually cause these modified cells to target cells with a certain marker. And in making that target, it's going to help sort of like be more specific in the cancer targeting. And so this one is for people with multiple myeloma. Actually, I think this is like multiple cancers. Yeah, because there's a multiple myeloma, there's the sarcoma. So this is just very specific to the patient's own cancer because it's utilizing patient's own T cells. And then the other cancer trial that is also underway, and these are all in recruitment phases right now, or stages. Ha, mixed up phase and stage again. It's utilizing donor cells, so it's not using the patient's own T cells, but it's utilizing donor cells to then inject them into the patients to help with relapsed or non-responsive non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. And so the difference here is that the cells are coming from somebody else and then they're being edited and then they're going in. And so it also has a two tiered approach. One is to target these cancers like by editing these T cells, but the other one, of course, is to prevent the patients from rejecting the donated T cells. So there's some really interesting stuff underway. And I think that this is only the beginning. Like I think we're going to see, of course, specific genetic diseases being targeted in these kinds of trials. And definitely, I think we're going to see cancer research being really, really ramped up. In like a major way. And there's hope on the horizon, but also I think you always have to temper that with like, these ethics committees are very, very important. And we have to make sure that this isn't too much too soon because I think everybody gets very, very excited about the possibility and the potential for good reason. But also we need to remember that this is a very powerful tool and that we don't know what's going to happen. We think we know, but we need to make sure that we're doing everything by the book and keeping up with every step of the game so that we can make sure that if some sort of like, you know, a fact that we didn't know about starts to proceed that we... Like superpowers. Well, you know what, it's interesting, I mean it's not interesting you say superpower, sorry Jay, but it's interesting this idea, in this article they actually talk about clinical trial, a clinical trial in 1999, so this is way before CRISPR, but it's gene editing. So, you know, we've had the potential to do gene therapy and gene, not gene therapy, but gene editing for quite some time. Now it's just kind of cheaper and more targeted with CRISPR, right, and a little bit easier. But they did a gene therapy phase one trial and a famous patient named Jesse Gelsinger died at 18. This was a big thing. Stop the research dead in the tracks for a while. Stop the research dead in the tracks. They uncovered all sorts of ethical concerns about like, Thanks for joining us today. And that's the thing that I think I don't think anybody here is trying to be nefarious.

B:It's just we want to see people get well.

C:And so, yeah, I'm very excited about this. I think a lot of people are very excited about this. But also, I think we have to make sure that we're doing it the right way. And it seems like hopefully, the individuals who are involved in these really groundbreaking trials are doing that. They're following the ethical guidelines of any other drug development. It's just this one happens to be really cool in editing the genes of these people. Yep. And just like all other technology, it's still going to ultimately be incremental. It's going to take a longer time than it seems up front. Like these clinical trials just take years. That's just the way it is. And some of them like decades. Yeah. But this is like moving faster than most new technologies. CRISPR is amazing. Fun, isn't it, Steve? It is. I hope that we're going to start to see major genetic diseases or diseases that have a major genetic component start getting knocked off one by one as we can crisper our way out of it.

S:The potential is amazing, right? It is. It's one of the most transformative technologies to come about in decades.

C:And in our lifetime, Bob.

S:It's true. It's absolutely true. It's almost as transformative as that new research Evan into holy water, right?

News Item #5 - Holy Water Trial (53:10)

• Doctors to test grandad's claim holy water at Lourdes cured his terminal cancer 

S:This is going to transform medicine. 1858. All right, yes, we're going back.

B:The Village of Lord. And it's not Lords, I figured out today. It's Lord. I've been pronouncing it Lords all my life.

S:Everyone says Lords. Well, everyone in America. Good point, Cara.

E:So the village of Lourdes rose to prominence both in France and around the world due to the claim that a local peasant girl named Bernadette Subirao had seen an apparent apparition of the Virgin Mary. Not just once. Apparition. Apparition. I said apparition. I'm sorry, it's pronounced apparitions.

S:I'll try that again.

E:Local peasant girl Bernadette Subirao saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary. How's that? But she didn't see it just once, she saw it 18 times over a span of several weeks, February and March of that year. Now particular to today's news item, on February 25th, 1858, young Bernadette explained that the vision had told her to drink the water of the spring, to wash in it, and to eat the herb that grew there. Apparently this was supposed to be an act of penance. Not eating herbs may have had something to do with the visions, but that's more of a side note. The point is, not long thereafter, the city with the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes, and that's what the apparition is named, it had become one of the world's most important sites of pilgrimage and religious tourism. Few quick facts, Lourdes hosts six million visitors every year. It has only second to Paris as far as the biggest center of tourism in France, and is the third most important site in all of Catholicism besides Rome and the Holy Land. Lord is third on that list. Kind of sad. Yeah, in a way it is sad. But the news in any case is this. Here's one headline I read today. Man from Britain who believes Lord Holy Water cured his cancer is going to have his claims tested by a board of doctors. Wow. His name is Kazik Stepan back in 1965. He thought his life was over when he was diagnosed with an inoperable tumor on his spinal cord, and he was just 18 years old at the time. But with determination, And some considerable skepticism from his doctors that Casa could even endure a trip from Britain to France. He managed to make the trip and he partook in the bathing. And it took place on September 8, 1965. And supposedly that's a very important date because Catholics celebrate it as the birthday of the Virgin Mary. Happy birthday. Kazakh claims to have experienced a miracle after he bathed in the water, and it enabled him to walk for the first time in months because of its reporting healing properties. He's still alive. He's still, well, alive. He's 71 years old now, and he's returning to Lord to see if his miracle is going to be verified by, get this, the International Medical Committee of Lord, which is comprised of 30 doctors. Holy crap, and pun intended there, they have a medical committee to determine if a person experienced a healing miracle of some kind. That is something. Alright, here's the criteria by which these doctors... Wait, and this is today? Oh, yes, that's right. Okay. This is not in the 1800s. No, no, no. This is today's headline. I know. It's happening right now as we speak, basically. So these doctors, all right, for a cure to be recognized as, well, they call it medically inexplicable. These doctors are technically not allowed to determine if something's a miracle. That is for the Catholic Church. To decide through their own rules and regulations.

C:What they do is they recognize conditions as medically inexplicable.

E:And in order to have it recognized as such, you have to establish these facts. Here's their little checklist. The original diagnosis must be verified and confirmed beyond doubt. The diagnosis must be regarded as incurable with current means. The cure must happen in association with a visit to Lord, typically while in Lord or in the vicinity of the shrine itself, although you don't have to drink the water and you don't have to bathe in the water, those are not required. The cure must be immediate, the cure must be complete, and the cure must be permanent, no recurrence. No backsies. No backsies. So it's had a lot of time, and they vote. It becomes a vote, and if two-thirds of the doctors say it's inexplicable, then it's inexplicable. Then it's handed off to the church and they decide if it's going to be a miracle or not. So since then, about 7,000 people have claimed to have been healed in some way by their visit to Lourdes. Only 70 have been deemed both medically inexplicable and a miracle by the church. Right, so on the one hand we have to question the legitimacy of the process, and does it hold up to independent verification? It sounds like the answer is mostly no. But the other thing is, after how many people have visited LORDE? Millions? million six million a year it's up to six million a year you have 70 cases so what's the probability out of the millions and millions of cases that there's going to be some you know residue of unusual inexplicable cases it's like you know the really good ufo sightings

S:Yeah, you've got millions of crappy ones, and there's going to be this little residue of ones that just happen to be really unusual, just by statistics alone.

E:If you were somebody who thought that they were real, that still is horrible odds.

S:It's still a million to one, or something thereabouts, that you're going to be healed. So again, it's basically consistent with there not being any magic, right? That's exactly what you would expect if visiting Lord did nothing. All right. Thanks, Evan. Yep.

Segment 2. Quickie (1:00:10)

DNA analysis of Loch Ness https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/dna-analysis-of-loch-ness/

S:So I just want to do a quick, a quickie follow up, because we talked about this previously, that the idea of doing a DNA analysis of an environment in order to tell all the things that live there. Remember this? We talked about doing this in the Loch Ness. Take the water, and you can just basically see what DNA is in the water. Recently, a study was completed doing a DNA analysis of Loch Ness. And keep in mind, this was actually a serious ecological investigation. They were really asking what lives in the loch. And the whole idea of looking for the Loch Ness Monster was just sort of a gimmick, you know? But they really just wanted to see, ecologically speaking, what's living there. They didn't find anything that was mysterious, right? So there was no unknown large reptiles or anything that could actually be a Loch Ness Monster. Not that we have any... No plesiosaurus material. No plesiosaurus or anything like that. What they did find was a lot of eels, and so this of course leads to the headlines that the Loch Ness Monster may be a giant eel, say scientists. That's not really what they're saying. There is no Loch Ness Monster. They're just saying there are eels in the Loch, and that's something that the locals could tell you without the DNA analysis, right? They know that there are eels in there. I'm sure they've been fishing eel out of there for many, many, many, many years. But there's just a, there's maybe more than they were realized, you know, so the DNA shows how ubiquitous they are in the lock, because they were in every location that they looked at. There was a lot of yield DNA. So that's it. I mean, it's interesting that, you know, we now have the technology to do such a thorough survey of a body of water, see what's living in there just by, you know, amplifying the DNA. It's a really powerful tool.

E:They also found human DNA in the, in the lock.

S:So I wonder to what degree. Yeah, I doubt that there's anybody living in the lock, but it just shows you that Aquaman. Swimmers, bathers, or whatever, you know, people have gotten their DNA into the Loch and there it is, you know. No big feet, though. No Loch Ness Monster. None of the stuff we really want. Nothing cryptozoological. Do you remember when we were in Scotland and our amazing tour bus driver was like, do you guys want to go to Loch Ness? And we all started laughing. And she was like, what? And we're like, let us tell you a little bit about what we do. Thanks for watching!

C:And Loch Ness was also kind of off of our route for the day. We would have had to detour and miss some other things. And it's full of tourists. Yeah, right, tourist trap. We probably wouldn't have gotten to Glencoe. Tourist and eel DNA.

S:But since they have like a love-hate relationship with the Loch Ness legend, because it's like what every tourist thinks of. The Highlands were beautiful and the lochs are beautiful.

E:But it does drive tourism, so it's kind of like the movie Braveheart. They have a love-hate relationship with that movie. It drives a lot of interest in Scottish history and a lot of tourism, but they hate the fact that it was so historically inaccurate. What are you gonna do?

B:It's interesting, though, like the way they reacted to it.

S:It was just funny, which is like, oh, thank God I don't have to go to the lot. Gosh, that was such a great trip. What a great day that was. It was. Yep. If you have an opportunity to visit the Highlands, it's definitely a place to visit. All right, Jay, who's that noisy time?

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:04:01)

S:All right, Jay, who's that noisy time? Last week I played this noisy. Okay, so apparently a lot of people guessed amazingly correctly about this one. This might be the most responded noisy I've ever done, and the most correctly guessed noisy I've ever done.

U:So, real quick, I'll go through a couple of the wrong guesses. Jim Kelly wrote in, I think this week's noisy is the sound of the fans in a wind tunnel starting up.

J:I totally can understand, Jim, why you think that is what the sound is.

U:It's a very good guess.

J:It's not correct, but I can totally hear that wind fan noise going on. Another listener named Joss Elias said, hey, my first guest in. I've been listening for a few years and I've only ever heard a couple I had a real guess at. I think this is possibly Formula E cars leaving the pit lane or a slow speed corner somewhere on the track. And he wants me to say hello to Cara. And he's an amateur freshwater fish breeder in Southern California. This was a good guess. And I'll tell you why. When I read the winner, you'll understand why that that was a not so far off the mark guess. So the winner from last week. Now, I'm going to say this. That this thing, this noisy occurs in many cities around the world. I have to say this, because the person who guessed didn't guess the correct city, they did guess correctly, however, right? So, you know, I don't want to like tie this to the city because of how many places this is happening around the world. So Will Samuel said, hi team. The noise this week sounds a good deal like the London Underground. I think it's a train accelerating as recorded from the platform. I've also heard a similar sound on Overground electric trains and in the Singapore Metro. I suppose the electric motor must be connected to a gearbox with many gears in it or something. So yes, you did win Samuel, even though you got the city and the country wrong. It is an electric train. So let me get back to Thayer Murphy, who wrote in. He said, so I love the show. I've been listening for a few years and finally got something less boring to send. And he says, so it is a metro train, but not just any electric train. I live in Sydney, Australia, and although we have a larger size train network with about 175 stations, the normal trains with normal human train drivers, this is operated by the state government. But in late May of this year, a new line of driverless metro trains was opened to the public. So the sound of one of these trains taking off for an underground station, the new train line is only 13 stations currently in the northwest of Sydney. He keeps going on, but the sound he recorded, he was at work and he's currently working for the said train company, and he said that the trains are fully automated, with no driver's regards on the train, and when the train stops, the platform has a set time to stay there. And then the train takes off. It's an electric train, and this is what electric trains sound like. This is what the electric motors on trains sound like. I had people guess Washington DC. I had people guess tons of people from London. The London Underground. London Underground I heard so many times. But I heard all over the world these electric trains exist. This one happens to be in Australia. But indeed, the winner was Will. Good guess, Will. Will guessed, now Steve, check this out. He sent me the email at 11.57 a.m. on September 7th. What time did you publish that show? I think at 11 a.m.? Yeah, so one of the quickest guesses of all time for who's that noisy. So very good. I thought that was a lot of fun because he If he did listen as soon as it dropped, he got right to that point, which makes sense because I usually do Who's That Noisy about 20 minutes before the show ends. Unless we do emails. So anyway, great guests by everyone. Thanks for writing in. I got a lot of fun conversation out of quite a few people that were telling me interesting tidbits about where they're from and why they know the noise. I have a new Noisy this week, and this week's Noisy was sent in by a listener named Carl Milner. Tell me what you think of this one. I'm going to give you a little information here. I would imagine that that noise goes on for quite a while, doing what it's doing, whatever is happening and being done to whatever is being done to whoever or whomever or whatever or however.

U:Must be that new lithium-ion battery that lasts 20 years. Yeah, I imagine that they last a long time, a million miles, but they sound terrible. But they make that noise. They scream when they scream.

J:So, if you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool this week, you can email me at WTN at The Skeptic's Guide dot org. Steve! We will be in Australia and New Zealand doing lots of different stuff, going to two different conferences, hopefully meeting hundreds of people that we haven't met before and seeing a bunch of people that we have met before. At these conferences, there will be multiple events we will be doing. At both conferences, we will absolutely be doing a private SGU show. Dates and locations are finally being finalized, some of which were happening during the recording of this show while I was sneaking an email off here and there to talk to my friends that live oh so far away from the United States, and they're getting up for work, so this is a good time to be chit-chatting with them. So I really do fully intend on having the final information settled very soon for those private shows, but please go to our website, Check out our events and under the SGU events you can see a listing of the conferences and the websites for those conferences and all the details that they are continuing to add to those websites about other speakers. So please consider going. At the very least go check out those websites. If you're local and if you're not local and you want to go on an awesome trip, go! Get on an airplane for crying out loud, get out of that dungeon, stop hanging around your parents basement playing video games and go to a skeptical conference and meet your wife or husband or boyfriend or whoever. And as Steve said we are going to be in Los Angeles doing the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe and George Robb. We combine our laser beams and become the skeptical extravaganza of special significance. It's a one to two hour Live, comedy-infused, science and skepticism-infused stage performance where we have a ton of fun. Lots of people have seen us do the show. The good news is, if you've seen it, the show is never the same show twice because we rewrite everything. The content is always different. The content is different. The bits could be the same, meaning we could run the same improv bit, but the content that drives the bit is completely different. We are doing a major rewrite of the show this month so that any future extravaganzas will be significantly different than the previous ones. Yeah, we've learned a lot from you for five years. There'll be some old bits that we can't re-forward, but there's going to be a lot of new stuff. We have one in particular that Steve and I are very excited about. It has to do with a wheel. That's all I'm going to say. So please come check us out. That Eventbrite will be up soon as well.

S:Everyone's got to give me some time because Dragon Con was all consuming. Oh, and by the way, Dragon Con went awesome for all hands on deck. It was great. We all had a great time. Yeah, it was great.

J:All right. Thank you, Jay.

S:So guys, let's move on to science or fiction.

J:It's time for Science or Fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:12:13)

Theme: Electric Eel Item #1: Electric eels are not true eels, but knifefish, a group closely related to catfish, that contains 220 species that all have electricity producing organs. Item #2: Electric eels are obligate air-breathers, coming to the surface for air, and can drown if they get stuck underwater. Item #3: The electric organ of an electric eel is entirely located under its chin, which it places on animals it wishes to deliver a maximal shock.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Item #3
Science	Item #1
Science	Item #2

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

J:It's time for Science or Fiction.

J: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. We have a theme this week. I feel like I may have used this theme before, but it doesn't matter.

S:I'm sure you have. The theme is the electric eel.

U:Electric eel. Yep, I knew it.

US#04:Yeah. How did I know, Cara?

U:All right, here are three items about the electric eel.

S:I'm going first. Item number one, electric eels are not true eels, but knifefish, a group closely related to catfish that contains 220 species that all have electricity-producing organs. Item number two, electric eels are obligate air breathers coming to the surface for air and can drown if they get stuck underwater. And our number three, the electric organ of an electric eel is entirely located under its chin, which it places on animals it wishes to deliver a maximum shock. Jay, why don't you go first? All right, this first one right out of the gate. The electric eels are not true eels, but they're knife fish. Wrong. I don't believe this. That's ridiculous. A knife fish is a knife fish, which is not related to or has anything to do with an electric eel. They probably don't even like each other. So I am going to say that that one is absolutely false. I don't even have to go to the other ones. That one is the fiction. But I will say electric eels are obligate air breathers. That I didn't know. And I know nothing of whether that's true or not.

J:And the last one, the Electric Eel's organ, is entirely located under its chin. That makes perfect sense to me, because if you watch Star Wars, the Return of the Jedi, when the Emperor is shooting lightning. From his fingertips, you could see him smile, invoking his chin electric organ action. That's where the electricity was coming from. Thank you very much for science. I will move completely back to the first one and say that that's bullshit. Knife fish are knife fish. Thank you. All right, Bob. Let's see, the obligate air breathers make sense. I don't have no reason to think that that's wrong. So I'll just go with that one. The electric organ, it just sounds weird to have it under its chin, but I really just can't, you know, how could I dispute Jay's Star Wars explanation? So he really can really convince me on that. I mean, the only thing left to go with is a night fish is fiction. I mean, what else? I have no choice. OK, Evan. Wow, Jay convinced me.

B:Jay, that was the most convincing science or fiction ever. Wow, I killed it. Thank you. Bravo. I'm so, I'm so with you. I'm going with Jay. Okay, and lemming number four, Cara. Wait, so you guys all think it's the knifefish one? Apparently. Jay is positive. But have you ever seen a knifefish? That's not a knifefish. I can't say that I have or haven't because that would give you an unfair advantage in this

E:There's a beautiful fish called a black ghost knife. So I'm assuming that's a knifefish and they're eel-like. They're long and they ripple when they swim and they don't have fins.

S:Or if they do, you can't see them. So why could an electric eel not be a knifefish?

C:That one was like the first one that I was like, yeah, I buy it. The obligate air breather thing freaks me out because I had no idea that fish could do that.

J:But I think like the one that freaks me out the most is the one about like some sort of weird organ because I feel like you're not supposed to get near an electric eel at all because like they'll shock you from anywhere.

C:That's what I always thought. Like that they can shock you from, it's like their skin or something. So I don't know. I don't know how they work at all, but I thought like you could get zapped from their head, from their tail, from anywhere. So I'm going to say that the organ one is the fiction. That's a shocking answer, Cara. Is it? Yes. Oh, shit. It's going to be... You better not be right, goddammit, because all you did was gallivant for the last month while I studied science. I feel like I did study wildlife. I didn't study electric bills. That's not science. My biggest concern is that Steve just swept us. Me too, that bastard. And the air breather thing, because the air breather thing really does bug me too. I don't like the air breather. What do you mean they're obligate air breathers? I don't even know what the hell that means. It's a fish.

J:It's not a mammal. They must breathe air to survive. I don't like it.

C:I think he made up that word too. But they all have to breathe air.

J:They breathe dissolved oxygen through their gills. They're fish. From their head right down to their eels.

C:Ugh, but I'm gonna go with my shock organ on this and say that it's not the chin thing, because that's weird. Okay, so you guys all agree that electric eels are obligate air breathers coming to the surface for air, and can drown if they get stuck underwater.

J:I do not, but okay.

C:Ready? All they have to do is lift their chin out of the water. He's so excited right now. No, I'm not.

E:I'm actually scared.

C:You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. Thank you. Oh, good. So no sweep.

S:Alright, so Steve, let me ask you a question.

C:Yes.

S:Do they actually have to stick their mouth out of the water and breathe air? Yes. Yes, they do. That sucks when you're a fishy type of eel. Now, let's... Let me give you a little bit of background on electric eels.

J:They live largely in South America.

US#03:They eat electricity.

J:In the Amazon. They eat chocolates. There's a wet season and a dry season. During the wet season, there's water all over the place.

S:Thanks for joining us today. And they're also smaller. So the eels can wind up in a lake that they can't get out of until the wet season comes back. And this lake could be smaller, and they could be susceptible to predators. But most important for this item is that those lakes could be very oxygen-poor. So now they're stuck in this low-oxygen water. Predators everywhere. Their adaptation with predators everywhere. They evolved the ability to breathe. They have this extensive vasculature in their mouth, and so they basically exchange air in their mouth. Why in the Matrix did the artificial intelligences decide to use humans for batteries instead of electric eels? That's a really good question. I would have used electric eels. Me too, maybe in the fourth movie they'll address that. I would use the fusion that they use to run everything else. I think the AIs did it just to screw with the humans. I agree. I do too. That's the only thing that makes sense. It is. The battery thing is a pretense.

J:They were obsessed with their makers and they couldn't let it go, clearly. What's going on right now? What's happening? Cara, they're making a new Matrix movie.

S:Keanu Reeves, The Matrix.

B:If you don't know about this, I clearly need to come hang out with you in Los Angeles and watch movies with you soon. And definitely not talk about it at almost 11 p.m. What's funny, my daughters, when they watched The Matrix, they loved it.

S:They loved The Matrix, but they didn't get how revolutionary the movie was because all of the stuff that was cool about it has been duplicated so many times.

J:And I had to explain to them, that was the first movie where that bullet time thing happened. It's a cliche now, but this is what established it. But anyway. Jurassic Park has the same thing. Should I go to number one or number three next?

S:The electric organ of an electric eel is entirely located under its chin, which it places on animals it wishes to deliver a maximal shock. Steve, I get it. It's a mouth organ that they have under their chin. That's how they play the damn thing. Cara, you think this one is the fiction, the boys think this one is science, and this one is... Say it.

E:...the fiction.

S:Oh, yes. Oh, you suck, Cara.

E:You suck.

B:It may not be for the reason you think, though.

S:Oh, it's probably not. It never is. It never is. This is the fiction because the electric eel has three electric organs and comprising 80% of its body.

J:Okay, so it's most of it. It's mostly electric producing organ.

S:So that's all they do. So kind of like, don't touch one. Steve, if an electric eel has a heart attack, can it electrically shock its heart back into pumpkin? Yeah, imagine that. But they could do it to each other, maybe. But, there's a kernel of truth in here because the under the chin is where it delivers its maximal shock. It can shock animals through the water, right?

US#03:It doesn't have to touch them at all.

S:What they do is they use their electrical production for communication, for navigating, and for hunting.

J:And it'll deliver this double little shock.

S:If it thinks that there may be prey nearby, it will give it a double quick shock. And you know what that's for? It causes the fish to twitch. It actually contracts its muscles with an external electrical shock, and then it could detect the twitching in the water, and then it eats it. Isn't that cool? Then it gives it a maximal, it gives it a big shock, you know, to stun it, and then it eats it. So it does like the too-quick shock, that's just to see if there's anything there by causing the prey fish to twitch, and then it will give a stunning shock. But it also uses the shock to scare away predators, Which are often animals that are trying to hunt it in the shallow pools that it might be stuck in. Like an alligator, for example. So what it does to those types of animals, it actually jumps out of the water and attaches its chin to it, underneath its head, its chin. And the farther it gets out of the water, the greater the voltage difference. And the more of a shock that it delivers. Oh, geez. Yeah, so it could deliver a pretty mad, 860 volt shock. Oh, I didn't realize they were that dangerous. Only about one amp, though, so not a lot of amps, but a big shock. So that could, you know, definitely eff up even a big animal like a alligator. To a human, human deaths from electric eels are rare. The shock is not enough to like directly kill a person unless you got like a pacemaker or a weak heart or something. It could hurt though, right? It would absolutely hurt like hell. However, it can, it has stunned people enough that they drown. That's what happens. It's like, what just happened to me? Yeah, like you can't move your legs suddenly and they drown in shallow water. Yeah. All right. This means that electric eels are not true eels, but knifefish, a group closely related to catfish that contains 220 species that all have electricity-producing organs, is science. It's not a true eel. The entire group of night fish can have these electricity-producing organs. They use it primarily for communication and maybe navigation, but it's primarily for communication, not as hunting, though. Which makes sense, and this is very common. We see this evolutionarily. You see a creature that has some amazing ability, and you think, well, how did that evolve out of nothing? But they're usually related to animals that have an incipient version of that thing, right? So, in this case, they're related to a whole group of animals that all have electricity-producing organs. These electrocytes, right, the electrocytes produce the electric, the static electric charge that the organs could then store and then release suddenly. But, so it's just a specialized version of this organ. It's like if you only imagine if hummingbirds were the only birds that survived. How the hell did this animal evolve? The ability to fly that way, but if you didn't know that they were related to hundreds of species of birds that flew in a less extremely adapted fashion. Or I just think of like those beetles that shoot stuff at you. Yeah, there's other beetles that shoot stuff in less extreme ways, you know, for other reasons. There's always some derivative, you know, transitional feature. So it's the same for this. And so it's debatable whether or not knifefish are in the same group as catfish or just related groups. In other words, the exact ordering evolutionarily of the groups is a little bit in debate, but they're definitely closely related. And while I was doing research for this piece, I discovered there are electric catfish. Wow. Yeah, there are catfish that are basically like electric eels. Now what prompted this theme this week was a news item which I actually didn't ultimately use. So we used to think there was one species of electric eel, and recently we discovered that this one species is actually three species. And that was due to a combination of genetic analysis but also morphological analysis. They all look the same, you can't tell them really from just looking at them. But they do have different ranges of their power, and part of this was based on the fact that they discovered the most powerful population of electric eels. This is the ones that could release, they measured their electric shock at 860 volts, which is now the most powerful electric animal on the planet, is that one species of electric eel. Definitely cool. I mean, a really incredible adaptation. Yay! Sniffed it up. I said with immense confidence that the knife fish was not them because I thought I was correct. I'll never trust your confidence again. Well, Jay, I do have to say, which is something that's always funny for me listening to the show live and editing the show, is that there does appear to be an inverse relationship between your confidence and your correctness. I'm going to have to remember that. It's funny that you're often—remember, somebody actually did a mashup of this of Jay saying, I'm absolutely sure that this is the answer when he's completely wrong.

J:And you find this humorous, I take it. I do. It's very humorous.

S:You know, I learned from science or fiction that just a lot of information slips into our minds. Yeah. You don't remember where it came from, you feel like you know something or you get a tickle, or you're like, oh, sometimes you feel like very strongly about it. But I got to be honest with you, though, there is a difference. Like, for example, if we were to, I don't know, be talking about, say, Thanksgiving.

J:I know that when we were talking about that science or fiction where I was confidently winning the Thanksgiving science or fiction, there's a different feeling in my head versus like me tonight. I thought that I knew what a knifefish was because I've read about knifefish before. Have you seen a ghost, like I think it's called a black ghost knifefish? But there's 220 species, Cara, and some of them look like catfish, you know, they don't look like this. Oh, yeah. But like that helped me. Like you guys Google it.

US#09:They're gorgeous.

J:And the only reason I know this is because I saw it once in a pet store and fell in love with it. And it's always stuck in my head. Well, there it is. That's like your slumdog millionaires, like, you know, that's where you had that piece of information from. Yeah. And even the black ghost night fish, its face actually looks a little catfishy, now that I'm looking up close.

C:But it's wiggly.

S:Even eel faces look a little catfishy. Yeah.

C:Weird. So these are different than the eels that are in Loch Ness. Yes. Those are real. Those are true eels. Those are real eels. Yeah. OK. Absolutely, yeah, they have nothing to do with each other, except they both appeared in this episode of the SGA.

J:And they're both called eels for some reason. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:29:24)

"When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation."  – Mary Wollstonecraft Sheeley, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, (description of author)

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

C:When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation. And that was written by a woman named Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

S:From her book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, this is actually the mother of Mary Shelley of Frankenstein fame.

E:Her mother, who wrote this, and who wrote the book, The Treatise, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, is considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. And basically, it argues that women should have an education commensurate with their position in society, and that it's essential for the nation, in the nation's best interest, frankly, for women to be educated appropriately. I mean, 1792. Wow. Out of her time. Well, boy, I tell you.

S:Well, she was vindicated.

E:Absolutely. It took a couple hundred years. Yeah, right? A couple century and a half later, but it finally caught up. But she was one of the first ones. And without her, we wouldn't have Frankenstein. That is exactly right. That's true, yeah. It's pronounced Fronkenstein. Fronkenstein. Well, that's Igor then, isn't it? Interesting. Sure. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Thank you. You got it, man.

S:And welcome back, Cara. Thank you.

E:We missed you. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking.

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