SGU Episode 93

This episode needs: proofreading, time stamps, formatting, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing!

How to Contribute

SGU Episode 93
May 3rd 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 92                      SGU 94
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Science . . . looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.
Carl Sagan
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, May 3^rd, 2007, and this is your host, Steven Novella, President of the New England Skeptical Society. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Rebecca Watson...

R: Hello all.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Wishing all of our listeners a happy National Day of Prayer here in the United States at least.

S: Evan-

J: Evan, that's it man, you're cut off.

E: The National Day of Prayer.

R: Hey, it's the National Day of Atheists Giving Blood, not the National Day of Prayer.

J: This is the National Day of Never Wanting to Hear Another Holiday Announced Ever Again.

S: Perry is off this evening so we'll have to muddle through without him.

E: I don't write them, I just report them. Go ahead.

J: I know, I know.

S: We do have a couple news items tonight. We also have a special guest. We have Bug Girl on later in the show to talk about the whole bee colony collapse. But first, a few news items.

News Items

Philly Shuts Down Psychics (1:10)

• www.philly.com/philly/wires/ap/features/20070427_ap_philadelphiashutsdownpsychics.html
  
  www.philly.com/inquirer/home_top_stories/20070427_Who_knew__Law_shuts_city_psychics.html
  

S: The city of Philadelphia has cracked down on psychics. Now apparently, this was not any new legislative initiative. What happened was that the police department in Philadelphia, someone noticed that there has been on the books in the state of Pennsylvania for 30 years a law which makes it illegal to practice fortune telling for gain or profit.

J: Wow.

S: It's a third degree misdemeanor. The police department brought it to the attention of the deputy commissioner of the city department of licenses and inspections. So they said, huh, we better crack down on this then. So they decided to shut down. They're not making arrests or making any fines. They're just shutting down astrologers and psychics and tarot card readers in the city of Philadelphia.

B: How awesome is that?

J: Isn't it amazing when every once in a while something like this happens and my first reaction is, it's impossible. You just don't expect rational thinking to enter like that. Like, hello, I'm here. I'm rational thinking and everything is going to work out.

E: 30 years.

S: It's kind of quirky though. I mean, the law was on the books 30 years ago. It's not like it was passed today or recently.

B: Right.

S: They just decided that this is a law. It's their job to enforce the law, so they better enforce it. They have no reason not to do it. None of the news reports about this actually found out why this initiative was suddenly taken.

R: Yeah, it does all seem pretty mysterious still.

S: Yeah.

R: I imagine there was some high ranking skeptic who found this out and decided to take a chance and it caught on.

S: Right. That's what I mean. That's what I wanted to know.

E: Well, more importantly, why didn't these fortune tellers see it coming?

J: One of them, right?

E: Not one.

R: Low hanging fruit.

S: That is the joke that everyone says whenever something like this happens to psychics. Well, they didn't see that coming. If you read all the news articles about it.

B: Yeah, but it's true.

S: It is true.

B: It's obvious and it's funny and silly, but it's also damn true.

J: The Akashic Library, somebody left a file drawer open. Some rain got in there.

S: There's a couple of quotes from some of the local fortune tellers who did not like it. So one psychic complained, they're discriminating against gypsies, although he was born and raised in Philadelphia. So the guy who said that was not a gypsy himself. He also noted that critics considered that Jesus was a psychic and a fortune teller and they crucified him. So they're comparing themselves to Jesus.

R: So they should count themselves lucky.

S: Right.

R: They're only getting put out of business.

S: But my favorite quote is, look what they want to do with the fortune tellers. The man said, we might be coming to the end of the world.

B: Oh my God. A little hyperbole maybe?

S: A little hyperbole.

E: The end of the world.

R: I don't know. Let's give the fortune tellers their chance then. I say we set up a licensing bureau and allow them to prove that they can do what they advertise they can do. And then they can go ahead and peddle their services.

J: That's a great idea, Rebecca.

S: It's a terrible idea. I'll tell you why. It looks good on paper and it may work for a little bit of time. The problem is that the psychics will be endlessly paying attention to whatever this bureau is. They will be trying to get on people that they know appointed to it. And over time, it will turn into a rubber stamp licensure for psychics and will give them a false sense of legitimacy.

R: Steve, why are you such a pessimist?

J: It's a stupid idea, Rebecca. I can't believe you suggested that.

S: Because that's what always happens.

R: What do you mean that's what always happens.

S: That's happened to every pseudoscience that's ever licensed in the United States.

B: That's why the JREF should administer it.

R: Yeah. You get a scientific organization to be at the head of it, not a political one.

J: Let's just take our win and walk, okay?

S: But it would have to be bulletproof because the thing is the people who are going to care about these laws over the long term, day in, day out, week in, week out, are the psychics. And eventually they'll pervert it as just a means of giving themselves a false sense of legitimacy. And then it also will become a mechanism for them to squash their competition. So all we'll be doing is protecting –

R: Not if none of them can actually get a license because none of them will actually be able to prove that they could do it.

S: It would take endless vigilance on the part of the skeptics to keep every law in every state –

J: I just think – look, it doesn't get much better than what's happening right now. You're closed. You can't do that anymore. That's it.

S: But these laws actually were not uncommon 20, 30 years ago. I mean New York City had a bunco department. Their job was to crack down on fortune tellers because – on the assumption that they're all frauds. And now it's just the – there's been a sea change where it's –

B: The good old days.

S: Yeah, the good old days.

E: I wonder when the lawsuits are going to start. They're going to challenge this in court I would imagine.

B: What's going to happen? I mean what's going to be like in six months? I mean it can't – something is going to happen.

R: Well, you know it's going to require eternal vigilance.

E: Look, all it's going to take is one judge who believes in this stuff to make a ruling that's going to overturn it all.

S: Well, if the law is on the books, a judge might not be able to overturn it. It may require the legislature, the state legislature to actually get rid of the law.

J: Nothing better than having upper government making decisions on whether or not psychics should be allowed to charge for their services. Like there's nothing better that they could be doing with their time.

S: Right, right. The other problem is that the psychic crowd – basically they need proponents of woo-woo. They know how to work both sides of the political aisle. Unfortunately, science and skepticism doesn't have a political party in this country.

J: Not yet of course, yeah.

S: We'll have to form a third political party.

J: Steve, if we finally do create our own party and you're the forerunner, we'll call it the smarty party.

S: Smarty party?

R: Smarty party. That's guaranteed to win. I can't see how that plan could possibly go wrong.

B: Better than bright.

S: Yeah, I was going to say, the better the idea is, the bright. That'll work out really well.

Fire Melts Steel (7:10)

• www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/30/2048/43439
  

S: The next news item that caught my eye this week was a major fire that occurred on the roadway from the Bay Bridge onto Interstates 580 and 980. This is in the East Bay's MacArthur Maze. And what happened was a gasoline tanker exploded. The fire and the heat from the burning tanker melted the steel on the underbelly of the highway overpass, causing it to collapse.

R: How can that be true when I saw a movie online that said that fire can't bend or melt steel?

S: Right. The story doesn't really have any significance in and of itself, but it's sort of caught the attention of the blog community because it seems to directly contradict one of the core claims of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists that fire can't, quote-unquote, melt steel. And they said, it's never melted steel before.

B: Shouldn't it have been fire weakens steel?

R: Well, yeah, and that's the argument we've been making over and over and over again. And it's the one that they keep ignoring. So it's nice to have this story come up. I mean, it's a terrible thing to have happened, but it's at least nice to have something that's all over the news. It's unavoidable that fire has caused this collapse.

S: Right. I mean, there was a good blog satire about how this fire, the bridge fire, was all a big conspiracy and basically making fun of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists. It's pretty funny. We'll have the link to that.

J: So did the fire actually melt the steel this time?

S: Well, it weakened it. They said that it began to melt and bend in the intense heat, and that caused it to collapse, which is basically what we're saying about the Twin Towers is that the fire softened the metal, the steel, and caused them to buckle and give way. Well, actually, when I was reading this article, one other thing occurred to me, a point that I don't know if anyone's ever made. If it were impossible for even the intense fire of a jet-fueled fire from the jets crashing into those buildings, if that couldn't weaken the steel enough to make them collapse, why did the engineers who designed the towers in the first place include the foam insulation around the steel beams? If steel beams are so resistant to fire and heat, why would they bother to spend millions of dollars insulating them?

R: Part of the conspiracy.

S: They anticipated that in the 70s, apparently.

R: Yes.

S: When they built these things.

R: Deep roots, deep roots.

S: The foam didn't work because the impact of the jet shook them off the beams.

E: That's right.

R: They were meant to withstand heat, but not impact, not an explosion. I've never heard that argument made, and I wonder what the conspiracy theorists would say. Why was it there in the first place if what you're saying is impossible?

J: So you're saying that Bush Hitler wasn't behind this?

E: Yeah, Bush started the Reichstag fire.

Woman Hanged as Vampire (10:04)

• www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8ORA3MO0&show_article=1
  

S: Another quick news item. This one is more just one of those morbid curiosity things. A woman was hanged for being a vampire.

E: In what year?

S: In 2007. This, of course, took place in Georgetown, Guyana, and a crowd of Guyanese villagers lynched an elderly woman because they believed her of being an evil spirit who drinks the blood of human babies.

J: Just babies.

S: Apparently.

E: Human babies.

S: There is a local sort of vampire legend in this area. This is in Africa. And so this is consistent with the local legend. The police are still investigating the incident. We don't really have many more details. But occasionally these things crop up where either someone is killed for being a witch or being, in this case, a vampire or for being possessed or as part of an exorcism. And it still is incredible that there are places in the world where this kind of superstition still reigns.

J: There's people that live out there that have to watch out to not come off like a vampire or else they'll kill you.

B: Well, it says here that the woman raised suspicions with unusual behavior. I'd love to know what that unusual behavior was.

R: Well a lot of times, especially when it's women that are being hanged and murdered for things like this, it's simply a fact of a woman being too intelligent or too mouthy.

J: Yeah, you're right.

S: Rebecca, you'd be dead in five months.

R: I would be dead.

J: I mean, we want to kill you here. Forget it.

S: In fact, if you read the histories of the European witch hunts, which lasted a hundred years and millions of people were killed, in fact, most of the victims were women. And a lot of them were just the old woman in the village whose husband died or maybe was never married. They were easy to pick on. Or as you said, if you were sort of a mouthy, outspoken woman, then you were targeted. So there definitely is a lot of misogyny in these kind of witch hunts.

J: You know, Steve, they actually think in that mythology that the creature that's the vampire, I guess it's pronounced the old Higue, H-I-G-U-E, they say that that creature takes the shape of an old woman.

S: Right.

J: So it's like the old switcheroo too. They didn't kill an old woman. They killed a creature pretending to be an old woman.

S: They don't take the form of a young man. They always take the form of an old woman. It's like the old sea hag. That sort of icon of the old hag exists in a lot of different cultures.

B: Unfortunately, she doesn't revert back to her natural shape once she's dead. So you can't really prove it.

R: It really demonstrates the problem with allowing a superstition like that to become so ingrained in a culture and to allow people, adults, to continue to believe in something so absurd. If you look at it from their standpoint where they live in a world where such a thing as a Higue really exists, then it makes perfect sense to find this woman and kill her before she enters your home through a keyhole. It really stresses the importance. When people say to you, well, what's the harm of a superstition? That's the harm.

B: That's the far end of the spectrum right there, and people are capable of it.

J: And it's happening today. And it also proves no matter where you are in the world that it sucks to be old and ugly.

R: Yes.

S: It's an extreme example, but it's good to remember what the worst case scenario with superstitious beliefs can be. Let's move on to your emails.

Questions and E-mails

Drake Equation (13:46)

Message: How do you make a dog go 'Meow'?

Get a frozen dog from Alcor and run it through a bandsaw - mmmmeeeoooooowwwww. (Sorry Rebecca)

I really enjoy your podcasts - it's so refreshing to hear American accents that are not preaching but lampooning the fundamentalist right-wing BS that we hear so much of in Australia. Keep up the good work.

I do, however, want to take you to task over a some pseudoscience that you used in Ep 92 - The Drake Equation. I think this piece of nonsense has been masquerading as science for way too long. Sure, it looks like science - a whole string of variables with superscripts and subscripts thrown together with an equals-sign, but science it ain't. While last week's news might help to provide a better estimate for one of the terms in the equation, it still leaves way too many variables (eg 'life', 'intelligent life', 'intellegent life that wants to communicate') that are based purely on guesses, feelings and intuitions, and not on a shred of science. (One such variable would be too many.) I know you didn't make any claims as to the rigor of the equation, but at best it is science fiction. And SGU is better than that.

May the force be with you,

James
Melbourne, Australia

Drake Equation:
www.activemind.com/Mysterious/Topics/SETI/drake_equation.html

S: The first email comes from James who writes, I really enjoy your podcast. It's so refreshing to hear American accents that are not preaching but lampooning the fundamentalist right-wing BS that we hear so much of in Australia. Keep up the good work.

B: We don't have accents.

S: Of course not.

B: Go ahead.

S: I do, however, want to take you to task over some pseudoscience that you used in episode 92, the Drake equation. I think this piece of nonsense has been masquerading as science for way too long. Sure, it looks like science, a whole string of variables with superscripts and subscripts thrown together with an equal sign, but science it ain't. While last week's news might help to provide a better estimate for one of the terms of the equation, it still leaves way too many variables. For example, life, intelligent life, intelligent life that wants to communicate that are based purely on guesses, feelings, and intuitions and not a shred of science. One such variable would be too many. I know you didn't make any claims as to the rigor of the equation, but at best it is science fiction, and SGU is better than that. May the force be with you.

E: Okay, so he's invoking the force?

S: From Melbourne, Australia.

E: Thank you, James.

S: So we did talk about the Drake equation, and for listeners who may not know what it is, the Drake equation was first developed by Frank Drake in 1961, and basically it's actually a thought experiment. I don't think it's fair to say that it's a pseudoscience. I mean, it would be, I guess, bad science or pseudoscientific to present it as if we know what the numbers are when we don't, but I don't think anyone really does that. It really is just a thought experiment. It's like, how many radio-transmitting intelligent civilizations are there likely to be out there? You can also use the estimate to say, on average, how far away would the closest such civilization be to Earth? And this was just a way of sort of doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation to say when we point our radio telescopes at the sky, are we going to be flooded with messages, or are we going to be looking for a needle in a haystack? And yes, every single variable is an estimate.

J: Yeah, and I think what James was saying is that, over time, people talk about it, and people were taking it as legitimate science, when, if you go in and read the equation, you'll see, every time they bring up a factor in it, they say, current estimates are between X and Y. You know what I mean? It's a huge guesstimate. It's one huge guesstimate.

S: I don't know. I think it's a bit of a strawman. I don't know of anybody who's misrepresenting the Drake equation. Right? I mean, who is out there saying that we can— I mean, what serious scientist is out there doing that?

B: Right, and I think, Steve, I think you characterized it as a thought experiment. I think that's an excellent way to characterize it. I remember listening to Carl Sagan during his Cosmos show in the— what was that, the late 70s or early 80s?

S: Yeah, early 80s.

B: I remember my first introduction to the Drake equation, and he discussed it. And I remember him saying it's kind of implicit in the equation that this is a complete unknown. There's so much variation in what the potential answers could be. And I remember him saying that, on one hand, it could be we could be alone in the universe if the equations kind of go this way, or there could be our galaxy could be teeming with life if these variables were such and such. So it's kind of inherent in the equation. And you're right. I don't know anybody that really presents it as science.

S: Some of the numbers are not difficult to estimate. Like, we know how many stars there are in the galaxy, and we know pretty much to an order of magnitude, how many galaxies there are in the known universe. So we could start with that. And then beyond that, though, it's pretty much there's a series of estimations. And the error bars, of course, grow exponentially with each one. So the error bars at the end of the equation are enormous. But the point was, the equation itself is legitimate in that if you actually knew what all the numbers were, you could actually calculate the number of civilizations. So it's not pseudoscientific in terms of that. It actually does what it proposes to do. And it's really a way of saying, if we fudge with the variables this way, how does that affect the final result? And again, I think, again, that was really just proposed as a thought experiment. And so I think it's just a non sequitur to say that it's pseudoscience. But thanks for your email anyway, James. It was a good opportunity to talk about the Drake equation because I think it is kind of fun.

EM Sensitivity (18:16)

Dear Skeptics,

We have a question about 'EM sensitivity': a supposed condition where electromagnetic radiation causes a wide range of medical symptoms. We are inclined to believe that it's completely psychosomatic, but were wondering if Steve or anyone on the panel has more concrete knowledge about the condition. A couple of relevant links:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=450995&in_page_id=1879

From the article:

'Last time someone came to visit,' she warns, 'I started feeling awfully nauseous. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone!'

She pauses, looking genuinely horrified. Apparently, this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes - 'No wonder I felt so sick.'

Everything about this story sets off skeptic alarms, including the article's photo. For one thing, a mesh net like this wouldn't be of any use against microwave radiation, for one. I have heard from other sources, though, that EM sensitivity is a real and testable condition.

Thoughts? We are avid listeners of your show. Thanks for everything!

Tim and Liza Gerla (soft G, like Girl)
Raleigh, NC, USA

S: The next email comes from Tim and Liza Gerla from Raleigh, North Carolina. And they write, we have a question about EM sensitivity. That's electromagnetic sensitivity. A supposed condition where electromagnetic radiation causes a wide range of medical symptoms. We are inclined to believe that it's completely psychosomatic, but we're wondering if Steve or anyone on the panel has more concrete knowledge about the condition. Then they give some links, which I'll of course include in the notes page. From the article that they link to, last time someone came to visit, she warns, I started feeling awfully nauseous. It's actually should be nauseated. And this is about a woman who claims to have a very severe manifestation of EM hypersensitivity. It turned out he had a picture phone with him and had left it switched on. A picture phone. She pauses looking genuinely horrified. Apparently this type of mobile automatically sends signals to a local base station every nine minutes. No wonder I felt so sick. Everything about this story set off skeptic alarms, including the articles of photo. For one thing, a mesh net like this wouldn't be of any use against microwave radiation. So the pictures you're referring to is of a woman wearing a metal mesh net over her head. It kind of looks like a beekeeper sort of helmet. I have heard that from other sources, though, that EM sensitivity is a real and testable condition. Thoughts? We are avid listeners of your show. Thanks for everything. Well, thank you, Tim and Liza. I actually just, before the show, which I often will do, I did a literature search on several permutations of electromagnetic sensitivity, EM sensitivity, et cetera, and I could not find any peer-reviewed published scientific papers on this condition. I did a Google search on it and only came up with sites either promoting belief in it or selling devices to protect you from it or basically promoting the diagnosis. I couldn't really find anything that I would consider to be credible scientifically about this condition. My take on it is, first of all, it is not an established medical condition. There is no known pathophysiology and there isn't any syndrome where we could say, yes, here's the syndrome. It has these epidemiological features. It definitely occurs and it's a real entity that exists. It's at best a controversial disorder. I categorize this as a pseudo disorder because I personally am not convinced that it is real. It's not totally implausible, but it's pretty implausible that just electromagnetic fields would cause this variety of medical ailments. Another reason for my skepticism is that a lot of the symptoms are what we call the symptoms of life. It's kind of that there are symptoms that anyone can have.

J: My lower back hurts. I have a headache. I don't sleep well.

S: Yeah, I got fatigue, poor appetite, low energy. It's also those symptoms which do tend to be highly psychosomatic, meaning that they can be produced by psychological stress. When you see that constellation of symptoms sort of in a vague syndrome with some kind of questionable disorder attached to it, without a lot of plausibility pathophysiologically, I think that you're dealing with this kind of syndrome. These things have always existed in medicine. There have always been these fake disorders with this same list of symptoms on it that never had any clear pathophysiology, and they just sort of change over time. A hundred years ago, there was a disorder known as neurasthenia, which just means funky neurological symptoms. It doesn't really mean anything specific.

R: Funky, that's an actual term, right?

S: That's the colloquialization of neurasthenia. Then after that, everyone who had this list of symptoms had syphilis. That was like the fake diagnosis of the day. Syphilis was replaced by Lyme disease. Lyme disease is a slightly different kind. Lyme disease is real, but there are a lot of people who have vague symptoms. By that, I mean symptoms that could be a symptom of any of hundreds of different maladies, and also could be symptoms in people who are healthy, who don't have any specific disease going on. They don't point to any specific pathophysiological process. They're just sort of the vague symptoms that anybody can have.

J: With this particular thing, it's pretty easy to test for it, I would say, because if she claims to be that sensitive... I think, Rebecca, you said this, or Bob, I don't remember.

B: I did.

J: Saying that you could just do the... What's that girl's name?

B: Rosa. It's the therapeutic touch test that she did. Emily Rosa?

J: Yeah. Yeah, just do that test on them.

S: Yeah, a double-blind test would certainly solve the issue. And the fact that no such double-blind test is in the published literature, I think, is very telling. But just to complete what I was saying about Lyme disease, that's one of those diseases that's real, but that sometimes people who have symptoms that are not specific, like they may have fatigue or memory problems or sleep problems, think that they have Lyme disease despite the fact that all of the laboratory evidence is negative. Then it becomes controversial. Or chronic fatigue syndrome, for example. It really exists. There are people who have chronic viral infections who have chronic fatigue syndrome. But probably the vast minority of people who think they have that diagnosis actually have that diagnosis because fatigue could be a symptom of 100 other things. It could be sleep deprivation. Oftentimes it's nonspecific symptoms that are being caused by a disorder that people don't want to have. They don't want the diagnosis to be you have a primary depression or anxiety disorder. So they say, I want to have something physical, basically.

J: They want something easy to fix.

S: Well, part of it is that they want something that's outside of themselves, that's attacking them, that can be cured. If only this toxin were removed or this infection or this radiation or this candida or whatever, there's a long list of things, then I will be healthy. But to say, no, this is an intrinsic problem to your biochemistry or whatever, or the diagnosis is you're 50. And this is what it feels like to be 50 and not really having taken very good care of yourself. People don't like that diagnosis. So there's always these either overdiagnosed or pseudodiagnoses that are there to fill that gap. And they've always been around in one form or another. So I think that ultimately EM sensitivity fits into that category. But if hard scientific evidence comes to light, I'll be happy to modify my opinion.

E: There's a doctor who says there is no doubt that electrical sensitivity is a real phenomenon because she has seen too many people affected by it to think otherwise. So she's basing it on her own personal observations as opposed to research and tests.

S: That's a huge red flag in medicine because I've seen it. I've seen this work. I've seen this happen. They're just saying it's anecdotal, which we know is completely unreliable. So anecdotal evidence, high implausibility, vague syndrome, not real, in my opinion.

More on Hitler (25:50)

First E-mail:

Hey guys, gal and Perry! I just wanted to follow up on the (ridiculous) argument by 9/11 conspiracy theorists that Hitler burned the Reichstag, so Bush might as well have hijacked the planes.

First off, the Reichstag burned in the night, when nobody was in it. Also, as you can read for example in Sebastian Haffner's account of his youth in Germany up to 1933, the general populace was very aware of what had really happened with the Reichstag; or at least, they knew it wasn't the poor sod the Nazis said who did it. It's just that a mixture of fear and carelessness (and of course people who approved of Hitler's course) was stronger than any anger the people might have felt at some building burning down. Hitler not only burned the thing, but it was also he who instilled the symbolism into it. That was even a matter of some jokes, according to Haffner, of how Hitler didn't respect the Republic at all, but then gets all puffed up when the Reichstag burns.

So this analogy doesn't hold up, no matter where you're coming from. It's simply STUPID.

Patrick Pricken
Essen, Germany


Second E-mail:

I've listened to most all your pod casts since August 2006. I think Rebecca rocks & is funny as hell. I'm not a conspiracy theorists & don't believe that 9-11 was necessarily an intentional security breach. You recently addressed a listener's email on your pod cast who felt you were not doing a very good job de-bunking the 9-11 conspiracy theory. He likened Bush to Hitler & you all just went off on a patting yourself on the back tangent, basically calling him an idiot & discounting anything he had to say because he used the name Hitler.

I think you all missed the point. American's have been lied to by this administration on several major, life/death issues. Please don't take my word for it. ask George Tennant - he's all over NPR saying it himself. The history of America is littered with accounts of citizens being used without their knowledge. Everything from agent orange to intentionally using African Americans to aid in medical research without their consent.

Maybe you should take the chips off your shoulders (especially Perry - he never has his own thoughts anyway, he just gives a hearty OF COURSE! when someone voices an idea). You're all sounding very Republican.

I liked your podcast because it seemed very Snops.com meets Science Friday. I don't listen to hear you talk about how intellectually superior you are. more debunking & less preening please.

Sincerely,

A Dissatisfied Listener
Valentina DaCosta
Clinton, CT

S: The next email comes from Patrick Pricken in Essen, Germany. Hey guys, Gal and Perry. I just wanted to follow up on the ridiculous argument by 9-11 conspiracy theorists that Hitler burned the Reichstag so Bush might as well have hijacked the planes. So Bush might as well have hijacked the planes. First off, the Reichstag burned in the night when nobody was in it. Also, as you can read, for example, in Sebastian Hafner's account of his youth in Germany up to 1933, the general populace was very aware of what had really happened with the Reichstag, or at least they knew it wasn't the poor sod the Nazis said who did it. It's just that a mixture of fear and carelessness, and of course people who approved of Hitler's course, was stronger than any anger that people might have felt at some building burning down. Hitler not only burned the thing, but it was also he who instilled the symbolism into it. That was even a matter of some jokes, according to Hafner, of how Hitler didn't respect the Republic at all, but then gets all puffed up when the Reichstag burns. So this analogy doesn't hold up, no matter where you're coming from. It's simply stupid. Also, thank you, Patrick, for that email. So that's a very good point, and I thought of that as well, that this is referring to an email we discussed last week where somebody was saying that, well, false flag operations exist. Hitler burned the Reichstag in order to justify his policies, and so therefore it's plausible that Bush pulled off 9-11 as a pretense for invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The main point that we made was that the two things are really not analogous because burning a building in the middle of the night is not hard to pull off, but 9-11 would have taken an absolute master, complicated plan. And he brings up yet another point, was that as simple as the Reichstag burning was, everybody knew about it. It wasn't like they kept that a secret. So, I mean, how are you going to keep 9-11 a secret when, in fact, the example he gave wasn't kept a secret? So it's another significant disanalogy.

R: You might as well blame Bush's dog for 9-11 based on the fact that Mrs. O'Leary's cowl started the Chicago fire.

E: That's right. Exactly, right. I mean, how can you point to history and events in history to say, because this happened then, then Bush must have done then someone did this now. And there's a false analogy there.

S: Yeah. Now I wanted to, we had a second email on this topic and I wanted to read that one too. This one's from the other point of view. This one comes from Valentina D'Acosta from Clinton, Connecticut, who also signs your email as a dissatisfied listener. And she writes, I've listened to most all your podcasts since August 2006. I think Rebecca rocks and is funny as hell. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and don't believe that 9-11 was necessarily an intentional security breach. You recently addressed a listener's email on your podcast who felt you were not doing a very good job debunking the 9-11 conspiracy theory. He likened Bush to Hitler and you all just went off on a patting yourself on the back tangent, basically calling him an idiot and discounting anything he had to say because he used the name Hitler. I think you all missed the point. Americans have been lied to by this administration on several major life-death issues. Please don't take my word for it. Ask George Tenet. He's all over NPR saying it himself. The history of America is littered with accounts of citizens being used without their knowledge, everything from Agent Orange to intentionally using African Americans to aid in medical research without their consent. Maybe you should take the chips off your shoulders, especially Perry. You're all sounding very Republican. I liked your podcast because it seemed very Snopes.com meets Science Friday. I don't listen to hear you talk about how intellectually superior you are. More debunking and less preening, please.

E: Where to start?

S: I'm not sure the characterizations are quite fair. I don't think we used the term idiot, nor were we really... I'm not sure how you get that we were patting ourselves on the back. But again, the point that we were making is that the analogy that the emailer was making was not apt, that there was some significant logical fallacies in there. And also, I think that Valentina is making the same mistake, is committing the logical fallacy. It's also a bit of a strawman that America has lied, George Bush has lied, therefore it's plausible that they're lying about 9-11 or that they are lying about 9-11. And first of all, that is a strawman because we never took as our premise that governments don't lie or that the American administrations never lie or even that Bush administration never distorted the truth or lied or whatever. Whenever you're talking about the current administration, everything you say is always controversial. But the fact is, we never took as our premise the fact that they didn't lie or don't lie. So that's a strawman. We acknowledge that governments lie. Governments are political entities. They're in the business of distorting the truth for their political ends. The intelligence agencies are in the business of deception and lying. That's what they do. We acknowledge that. The point was that saying that because the government has lied in the past, they are therefore lying now is a logical fallacy. And that is a logical fallacy that last week's emailer was making. We're also not saying that a priori, governments can't lie. We're not saying that either. What we're saying is, simply, that 9-11 was too complex, too huge a conspiracy for the Bush administration to pull off. Period.

J: You mean to successfully cover up.

S: For anyone. First of all, I don't think they could have pulled it off. And even if they pulled it off, there's no way they could have kept the wraps on it. You know, in this country. There's no way they could have kept that from the New York Times and the entire press.

J: At one point, Steve, you made the point...

S: All the liberals and everyone, all of Bush's enemies on the other side of the aisle. There's just so many people who would have been highly motivated to prove that there was something fishy, something sinister going on on the part of the Bush administration. And no one has been able to come up with anything solid. Of course, we've also, in detail, debunked the specific material claims. Like we talked again earlier tonight about the melting steel. All of the specific physical claims made by the conspiracy theorists have been thoroughly debunked. The science is bad. It's just not there. And the logic is flawed. That's our point. So, frankly, I don't think that Valentina is making a valid criticism here.

E: I mean, if you read the exchange again, if you go back, and Steve, it's on your blog, and the entire initial exchange you had with, whose name was Mato, or Mato from Switzerland, is there, and you can clearly see... I mean, what Valentina says in her email is that she feels that we were not doing a very good job of debunking the 9-11. That's what Mato was getting at. But I don't even see that in Mato's emails. I mean, he was talking about the Bush-Hitler... Prescott Bush and Hitler. He was talking also about stolen elections, skull and bones. He was throwing so many things out there. It just really was all over the place.

S: And to clarify, I mean, if Valentina's point is that we didn't spend enough time debunking the claims of 9-11, that wasn't the purpose of that exchange. Actually, that email was read as name that logical fallacy. That was the segment of the show we were doing, name that logical fallacy, and we talked about the logical fallacies in Mato's email.

J: Plus, we've covered the 9-11 thing. Ad nauseum.

E: Well, I guess the point is, if she's really been listening since August 2006, I really don't see how she or anybody can get the perception that we favor some sort of political agenda over another. I mean, sure, we do talk about politics when it intersects with science and logic and reason.

S: Certainly, everyone on the podcast has political views, like everybody else.

E: Of course.

S: There's a pretty broad range of political views on this podcast, without getting into specifics. You could probably figure that out, though. But our show is apolitical. We do not talk about purely political things, only as it intersects with science, as Evan says. But also, was Valentina saying in that comment that we're sounding Republican that to say that George Bush did not pull off 9-11 is somehow being a Bush-apologist or being a Republican-apologist? Is that the point of that? I just think that's a complete non sequitur. I don't understand why you would even bring up that point.

J: For the record, I'll say I am no fan of Bush. At all.

R: I'm a dirty hippie commie.

J: Yeah, but who is-

S: Rebecca's pretty much on record as being a hippie.

R: I giggle every time we get any email that says we're all a bunch of Republicans or something, because I could not be further from Republican if I tried.

Genetic Drug Followup (34:48)

Hi guys,

Great show as always. I had a couple of comments:

First, Dr. Novella mentioned that PNAS is a prestigious journal, and the papers are presumably peer-reviewed. Interestingly, this is not always the case. Members of the National Academy can actually publish papers there without peer review, and a substantial fraction of papers there are published through this mechanism. The bacterial flagellum paper was not one of those, but this is an important thing for skeptics to know about PNAS as a journal. IIRC, a lot of the HIV denialist stuff was published there (because of people like Peter Duesberg and Kary Mullis), and there will definitely be more bad science published there in the future. However, the papers are marked as 'Communicated by<member's name>' at the top, so they can be spotted.

Second, a couple of comments about the drug to enhance stop codon read-through. I don't have any specific knowledge of that drug or its biochemical mechanism, but I do have some general knowledge of the read-through phenomenon. You guys weren't entirely clear on why the drug would work better for some diseases than others, and I thought I'd try to clarify that. First, this drug would definitely not be safe at high doses because it would interfere with the functioning of normal stop codons. Even at low doses, you would expect a certain percentage of normal proteins to have abnormal C-terminal tails on them because of read-through, and there's no way the drug could be
tailored to tell the difference between a stop codon that's 'supposed' to be there and one that isn't. So there will be side effects, and they will limit how big of a dose you can give. Knowing that, there is no way this drug could restore a gene containing a nonsense mutation to anything but a small percentage of full functional status.

So if you are homozygous for a hemoglobin gene containing stop codons (I'm not sure if any of the thalassemias fall into that category, but just for sake of argument pretend one of them does), I don't think this is going to work very well, since you need a LOT of hemoglobin gene expression. However, if you have a homozygous nonsense mutation
in a gene for an enzyme, as in the case of inborn errors of metabolism, you might only need the gene to be 2% active to be fully asymptomatic, so in that case the drug might work very well. It's also possible that this drug will work better with some stop codons
than others (there are three: UAA, UAG, UGA), so that might be a factor as well. One last thing is that this drug will most likely work best on recessive mutations (two good copies = healthy, one good copy = healthy carrier, zero good copies = sick). If the nonsense mutation is either dominant negative (two good copies = healthy, one
good copy = sick because truncated protein inhibits the normal protein) or haploinsufficient (two good copies = healthy, one good copy = sick because it isn't quantitatively enough), I wouldn't expect this to work well in that case either.

I will post that explanation on the message board when my account is activated.

Anyway, I love the show--keep up the good work!

Luke Sjulson

Some references:
www.fsp-info.de/neufsp/PTC124_background.pdf
www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7140/edsumm/e070503-07.html
jcp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/47/4/430

S: One more email before we go on to our interview. This one comes from Luke Julson, and he writes, Hi guys, great show as always. I had a couple of comments. First, Dr. Novella mentioned that PNAS is a prestigious journal and the papers are presumably peer-reviewed. Interestingly, this is not always the case. Members of the National Academy can actually publish papers there without peer review, and a substantial fraction of papers there are published through this mechanism. He's referring to the piece last week where he discussed the bacterial flagellum paper. He says the bacterial flagellum paper was not one of those, but this is an important thing for skeptics to know about the PNAS journal. Second, a couple of comments about the drug to enhance stop codon read-through. I don't have any specific knowledge of that drug or its biochemical mechanism, but I do have some general knowledge of the read-through phenomenon. Now he's referring to a news item that we discussed last week about a new drug that treats genetic diseases where the disease is caused by a mutation that stops the manufacture of the protein. And this drug allows the ribosome, the little protein factory, to read through these false stop instructions and to complete the protein. He goes on, you guys weren't entirely clear on why the drug would work better for some diseases than others, and I thought I'd like to clarify that. First, this drug would definitely not be safe at high doses because it would interfere with the functioning of normal stop codons. I will comment on that myself in a moment. Even at low doses, you would expect a certain percentage of normal proteins to have abnormal C-terminal tails on them because of read-through. And there's no way the drug could be tailored to tell the difference between a stop codon that's supposed to be there and one that isn't. So there will be side effects and they will limit how big a dose you can get. Knowing that, there is no way this drug could restore a gene containing a nonsense mutation to anything but a small percentage of full functional status. So if you are homozygous for a hemoglobin gene containing stop codons, I don't think this is going to work very well since you need a lot of hemoglobin gene expression. However, if you have a homozygous nonsense mutation in a gene for an enzyme, that means both of the copies of that gene are the same. As in the case of inborn errors of metabolism, you might only need to get to be 2% active to be fully asymptomatic. So in that case, the drug might work very well. It's also possible that this drug will work better with some stop codons and not others. So that might be a factor as well. One last thing is that this drug will most likely work best on recessive mutations. So that's one where you need to have both, you need to have both of the two copies of the gene need to be the disease gene. If the nonsense mutation is either dominant, negative, or haploinsufficient, I wouldn't expect this to work well in that case either. So let me explain that a little bit. So what he's saying is, and these are some good points, that if you have a genetic disease where you're not making an enzyme because both of your copies for the gene that make that enzyme have the same mutation, then it's possible that allowing the genes to make a little bit of the enzyme or a little bit of the protein may be enough to reverse the symptoms of the disease. But let's say you have a situation where you need a lot of the protein in order to function. Then in that situation, making a little bit of it won't significantly affect the disease. It's also, in some cases, the abnormal protein itself has some negative effects. It may inhibit the activity of the healthy protein or may have some toxic effects. So this may not significantly decrease the amount of truncated or abnormal protein and therefore it may not help those diseases as much either. The new story was pretty new when we talked about it last week. And now in the past week, I've had some time to look into this a little bit further. In fact, the published data, and I have links to all of this, shows that this drug increases the amount of read-through. That means where the protein is being made and it's reading through this mutated abnormal stop instruction. So read-through is a good thing. It means it's reading through the abnormal stop instructions. That this drug increases that rate 12-fold. So that it increases the production of full-length proteins by 12-fold, which is very significant. So it's not just a little bit. It's not the 2% that Luke said. Also, the evidence we have so far, they specifically looked to see if there was any increase in reading through the normal stop messages, the normal stop codons. And they found no increase. So basically no proteins with extra tails at the end indicating that there was read-through. Because I guess read-through happens at a normal rate in just normal healthy individuals. And they said there was no increase in that. What I could not find, and what I do not know the answer myself, is why there is that difference. Why specifically, just getting very reductionist, why exactly does this drug have such an effect on the abnormal stop codons and such a minimal effect on the normal stop codons. So that's an interesting question. I think that maybe we don't know the answer, and that's why I couldn't find it. So if any of the listeners know the answer to that question, please email me with it. And I'll keep my eye on this. Because this is a very interesting drug, a very interesting approach. So as this scientific knowledge develops, it's something that we'll probably return to in the future.

E: Yeah, Jay, you want to add anything to that?

J: I missed that middle part. Could you repeat that?

Interview with Bug Girl (40:34)

• Skepchick 'Buggirl' joins us to discuss the bee population decline.
  
  Bug_girl has a PhD in Entomology and works at a Midwestern University
  membracid.wordpress.com/
  
  www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8OSE3VO2&show_article=1
  
  
  E-mail in response to my question regarding the bee situation:
  
  CCD is real - it is a mysterious loss of bees - not normal winter loss, for which we are searching for a plausable explanation. We do not have the 'smoking gun' yet. I just wrote this on our UD losses to a reporter in MD and this might help give an explanation
  
  We do not have 'the smoking gun' to say what exactly CCD is - the pathogen loads are very heavy in colonies showing the Collapse (that is bees have several pathogens not just single ones for example) but are they cause or effect? (something else weakening the bees and then pathogens finishing them off). We still do not know. In the past we thought such mysterious losses were nutritional but loss patterns were much more limited than this current winter.
  
  I have been surveying Delmarva beekeepers now for several years. In 2001 spring they had heavy losses and again in 2004 and now in 2007 have about 25% loss rate (heavier than normal and than it should be).
  
  I was the apiculture professor at U MD for 11 years and have been the same at UD for the past 25 years. This year I had much heavier losses than ever before - I had 12 healthy colonies that I harvested honey from in August, I monitored for mites in August (levels were below threshold (my research has focused on determining mite level thresholds the past few seasons) and yet I had only 1 colony survive this spring. The losses were NOT typical of winter losses but were what we describe as CCD - no dead bees (they were gone!) yet there was honey and stored pollen (their winter feed). I have had winter seasons where I might have lost 25% of the University (MD or UD) colonies I care for but never this heavy a loss in the past and

S: We are now joined by the infamous Bug Girl. Bug, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

BG: Hello.

S: Thanks for joining us. So you are one of Rebecca's skepchicks, and you go by the pseudonym of Bug Girl because you are an entomologist. You have a PhD in entomology.

BG: Yes, I do.

S: At an undisclosed Midwestern university. And you do the Bug Girl blog, and you also contribute to the Skepchick blog. And Rebecca asked you to come on our show tonight to clear up all of the misinformation and tell us what the real information is about this mysterious loss of bees that's been going on.

BG: It is very disturbing, and it's actually the sort of thing that is almost as interesting for the social buzz around it than what's actually going on scientifically.

R: One of the reasons why we really wanted you to come on here is because not only do you have that expertise in bugology, but you are such a great skeptic, and I'm guessing you keep your eye on all of the cool bug myths that are floating around the country. It seems like this has been a huge one. I've been taken in. I was pretty sure that the cell phone thing was a good theory, but I take it that that's not a good theory.

BG: No, and the sad story about it is it's actually been really bad for the poor guy who did the study's career. It started with the Independent, did a story. They found a copy of a paper that he had done as a preliminary study. This is a student in Germany, a German university graduate student, and ran with it basically. You can find a lot of papers here and there talking about magnetic field influences on bees and other sorts of things because they have a very complex navigational system. They took all of that out of context and fed into it sort of public fears about electromagnetic fields and the environment is changing and our world is scary and just came up with this real fear-mongering piece. The poor guy was royally flamed by entomologists.

S: Now, just for some background, tell us what the facts are surrounding the decrease in the bee population.

BG: Well, even that is kind of mixed. It really depends on where you are. There are losses in bee colonies. n some cases, it can be up to 80% of colonies are dying. Basically, you have a hive, it's going great. You come back the next week, all of the bees are gone. You're left with some baby bees, the larva and eggs, and honey is still there. All the bees are gone. All the adults disappear. It was called vanishing bee disorder initially, but vanishing is not a science. It is collapsing, so they changed it.

S: So it's colony collapse disorder, CCD.

BG: Yes.

S: When I was reading the article about that, I saw CCD. And being the geek that I am, I said, charge coupled device, what does that have to do with bee populations?

B: Taking pictures of them.

BG: But the rapidity of it is what makes it so unusual. It's not at all unusual for a beehive, which is a very complex social almost organism. You can get up to 60,000 bees in a single hive. And to have it suddenly in the space of a week or less, they're gone, is something that you kind of notice. And to have that happen on a large scale, where you have half of the hive suddenly disappear, that's pretty alarming. At this point, it's been reported pretty much across the United States. There's a few states, but it hasn't been reported. But some of that is simply that there isn't an official monitoring system, which is part of the problem. There are reports in Europe from most of the major EU countries. There are some reports now in England that that's not confirmed. There's also unconfirmed reports of Brazil as well.

S: Now, what's the probability? I know there's no definitive answers yet, but what's the thinking? Is the probability that this is just a fluctuation, or is there some new effect going on that's significantly decreasing overall populations?

BG: Well, nobody knows. And that's why it's this sort of blank slate that people can throw theories at and use to support whatever pretty much their favorite conspiracy theory of the day. One of the things I talked about on Skepchick was some of the wackier ideas. I mean, obviously, bee rapture is one that I actually kind of like that one.

R: That's a great idea.

BG: And actually, there is a very long history of bees being used as symbols in the Bible, certainly very important to the Mormons. Yeah, I think bee rapture, definitely not under major investigation. There's sunspots, was a good one. The military is producing these mysterious waves that are altering our minds, and that's driving away the bees.

E: Not again.

B: Maybe we just think they're gone. They're really there, but our minds have been altered.

S: Invisibility cloaked bees, that's a good hypothesis.

R: Quantum theory, probably.

E: When we say the bees are disappearing, we have no trace of their bodies? Or are we finding the dead bees?

B: There's got to be thousands of corpses somewhere. Where are they?

BG: Well, part of it is that in general, when little insects die, they get hauled off pretty quickly and disassembled by something else. Birds, less so, more ants than anything else. But basically, once they go off, bees can range for miles away from their hives.

E: Wouldn't that mean ant populations would be thriving with all the new source of nutrients and all the dead bees? Perhaps there's a correlation there.

BG: My sense is ant populations are always thriving, speaking as a homeowner. I think it's more that it's not something that they don't pile up anywhere obvious. They're so scattered. Plus, they're really small. They can be blown quite a ways. Think of them as a little tiny piece of dandelion fluff. I mean, they're a little heavier, but still, if they're up in the air high enough, they'll continue to blow for quite a way, even if they stop flying.

B: Didn't somebody run some tests where they irradiated some hives and they repopulated it with bees and they had a control, and the irradiated hive, the bees thrived more in that hive than the other one, which would kind of lead you to think that maybe it is some kind of virus or bacteria that is causing this.

BG: The key suspects right now are some sort of a fungal pathogen or a bacterial pathogen. The poor bees have just had a really tough time in the last 20 years.

B: This has happened multiple times in the past. There's been these scenarios where there's been big die-offs.

BG: Yes, similar die-offs, but nothing that's abrupt and nothing that's serious. The loss in terms of the numbers of bees is much more than before. It's also not seasonal. Typically, bees have a very distinct rhythm to their life. There's no seasonal pattern that's really normal. A lot of bees don't make it through the winter. There's no flowers to forage on, and so it's not at all uncommon in the spring to have hives just not make it. But to have something that doesn't seem to be attached to seasons, doesn't seem to be attached to food. Early on, they were looking at if you artificially supplement the bees' food, does that make a difference? It doesn't appear to make a difference. It's basically they just don't know. They have so many possible candidates that at this point they can't say for sure, which honestly is a good thing because we don't want a scientist to just yeah, here's what it is. And one of the things I think will give us answers, there's a CCD Colony Collapse Disorder Working Group that's been formed, and you can actually visit their website, and they have very specific plans for this is who's going to investigate what component, because the thing that's made this sort of mysterious is there isn't a system for gathering information. A lot of it is anecdotal, and I think all skeptics know how reliable anecdotal data can be. And so they're basically putting together a system to try and figure out, okay, what's really going on here, and to investigate it in a very careful, scientific way. So they've managed to eliminate some things, but they haven't managed to confirm specifically what the cause is.

S: And there's a lot of speculation about toxins that humans are introducing into this ecosystem. Has that been eliminated, or is that still a viable candidate?

BG: Depends on which toxin.

S: Pesticides or things like that?

BG: Yeah, pesticides definitely are still a possibility. If you look at the way that we measure the toxicity of a pesticide, there's something called an LD50, which is the lethal dose that will kill half of them. The sublethal effects. So one suspect is imidacloprid, I think is the name of it, that appears to affect bee navigation. The idea is it's not something that normally would kill a bee, but it may confuse them and keep them from finding their way back home. They're very good at navigation. If you could take their beehive and move it just 10 feet to the right, that'll freak them out, and it'll take them a very long time to find it again, if they find it at all.

S: They're very precise, but then easily confused.

BG: Yeah, well, it is a little brain.

R: But on that topic, let's say it is the pesticides that's interfering. Would organic foods be a step toward eliminating that problem?

BG: Well, I suppose, but then you get into all the larger issues of how can we sustain the production that we have right now without the pesticides that we use.

B: But also, it doesn't explain why all of a sudden all over the world this is happening. We've been using pesticides for decades. Why now?

BG: The one that is suspect is a relatively new pesticide. They call them neonicotinoids. I haven't done jargon for a while. And all of you smokers out there, just so you know, one of the first pesticides was and still is nicotine. And there's a variety of pesticides that are basically variations on nicotine. And this is one of them. That's one suspect. The other big thing that's getting a lot of discussion is GM crops, genetically modified organisms. It just doesn't really fit. It's a very big deal in Europe. I've got to say the Europeans are a little more paranoid about GM than I am myself. There's very few genetically modified crops being grown in Europe, and yet Europe is also experiencing the same colony collapse problems that we are. Not to as much of an extent, but still, it's still happening there.

E: What about the southern hemisphere, South America, and so forth?

BG: Brazil is the only potential report right now, and that's not 100% confirmed. If it was the genetically modified crops, we're up to almost 40% of the, if you look at just corn, almost 40% of it now has some, a little bit of some transgenic piece of it. The thing that they've put in the corn, for the most part, is not something that is toxic to honeybees either. So it's a possibility, but it's so remote. The other thing is that corn is wind pollinated, and so bees are not a major part of the corn life cycle at all. They will occasionally go and investigate, but they're really just not a major corn pollinator.

S: Do we have a sense yet of what the implication of this is going to be on crop pollination?

BG: The first implication is going to be that prices will go up, because already honey producers and pollinators have had to raise the prices. And a lot of people don't realize that if you pass a truck in the middle of the night, that's got big tarps over it and a lot of little white boxes inside, and it's oddly buzzing, that's bees.

E: Or a nuclear weapon.

BG: True. Well, that's glowing green, though. So bees are constantly in motion. If you're growing, let's say I'm growing pumpkins, I'll pay a fee to have a beekeeper bring his hive into my fields and put them out there so I'll get good pollination. And that fee has already doubled in just the last ten years, and I would not be at all surprised, given the bee shortage, if it doubles again. And that money has got to come out of the farmer's pocket, who's going to then pass it on to us. What that means in terms of long-term shortages, at this point it's too early to say. But obviously losing, I should say that the honeybees are actually an introduced species, they're not a native insect to the United States.

E: Really?

BG: Yeah, they were brought here in the 1600s, in, I guess, the specifically 400th anniversary of, what was it, Roanoke?

E: Jamestown.

BG: Jamestown, thank you.

R: Yeah.

BG: It's a very important food source early on, and a lot of our plants as well are also introduced species. So it's kind of an artificial system, and right now the estimate is that about a third of our food supply is pollinated by honeybees. So not native bees or other pollinating insects, but the honeybees themselves. And losing that, there probably is some slack that could be picked up by the honeybees, the native bees, but for the most part they've been completely displaced by the introduced species. And many of them are nearing extinction and are quite threatened. So there certainly would be, even if the honey, let's say, worst case scenario, this is totally doom and gloom and not reasonable, all the honeybees really do get ratcheted and disappear. There would be a period of time where the native pollinators would have to pick up, and I think, yeah, we could see some serious food shortages. The other thing that people don't realize is that a lot of the things that bees pollinate, the commercial beekeepers pollinate, is food for animals. So clover, alfalfa, which means that beef prices are going to go up. And beef prices are already up because ethanol is the big fad right now, which is driving corn prices up. It just means I'm not going to eat steak for yet another year.

B: Do you think that we should all stock up on honey and maybe make a killing on eBay in about a year or two?

BG: Well, you can always buy it from Australia because they seem to be just fine.

R: Well, it sounds like the moneymaker is to actually invest in the bees so you can take them from farm to farm, right?

BG: Right now, yeah, if you've got a beehive. The singing bees are actually pretty difficult. I mean, they're fairly time-consuming. They're really interesting and they're really fascinating, but you can't just sort of get a hive and throw it in the backyard, throw bees in, and go. They take a fair amount of care. It's a fairly significant investment of time if you're going to do it.

R: Okay, never mind then.

S: Yeah, time, effort, forget it.

BG: I think living in the city, there may also be some issues with your neighbors. I don't know.

R: Maybe, yeah. Or the cats. The cats might not like it very much.

BG: The cats probably will be neutral, yeah. Unless the cats are nectar-producing, the bees aren't going to be interested.

R: You know, I'll have to look into that. I'm not sure.

BG: It's not nectar that she produces.

S: Now, Bug Girl, we actually have an audio recorded question from one of our loyal listeners, and she has a very important bug question to ask you. Evan, can you play that clip for us?

E: Sure, I will go ahead and play that now.

Hi, Bug Lady. Can ladybugs be boys?

Can ladybugs be boys was the question. And that comes from Rachel in Cheshire. Hi, Rachel. Can ladybugs be boys?

BG: Absolutely, yeah. It's really hard to tell, though, because of that hard shell. But there are boys.

R: Is there like a little test you can do to figure out if they're boys or girls?

BG: It doesn't really sound like it's appropriate for Rachel's age group for me to tell you more about that.

E: It doesn't have to do with counting the spots on the back or the colors?

BG: No, the spots on the back are pretty random. There's actually most insect genitalia is internal until it's needed. And then there's a change in blood pressure and it pops out.

B: Kind of like Jay's.

E: Jay's a ladybug?

S: So you have to dissect them or something in order to sex them?

BG: You have to dissect them, there's actually something called a phalloblaster.

R: Wow.

B: I like it.

R: I thought you would. Is that through a specialty catalog?

BG: I could probably hook you up with one.

R: Okay, we'll talk later.

B: Of course it's a millimeter in size.

BG: Yeah, it uses pressure to evert the organ of interest.

S: That sounds interesting.

BG: And the honey bee mating system and actually several other insects have some really alarming sexual habits.

S: What's the weirdest one?

BG: I think it's a tie.

B: The mantis?

BG: Bed bugs. Bed bugs are messed up. They have what's called traumatic insemination.

B: Yeah, they stab them and insert the sperm.

BG: Yeah, pretty much anywhere they grab you, they just poke it in and squirt the sperm in or migrate off to find the eggs.

B: I read that on Needlerama.com.

BG: It is.

R: It's violent.

BG: They also have the part about how males will grab other males and inseminate them as well and replace their sperm.

E: I read that on Grossorama.com.

B: They replace it?

R: That's kind of cool.

B: Wow, what an interesting...

R: Well, okay, so what are bed bugs tied with on the kinky sex scale of insects?

BG: Insects that have post-copulatory mating plugs, which is sort of like the ultimate chastity belt. The way to make sure that a female does not mate after you've done your thing is to basically have your penis break off and stay there as a plug.

R: I don't know. Who gets the worst part of that deal? The male or the female?

B: The guy.

S: The male dies after that?

BG: Yeah, the male dies.

R: Well, wouldn't you?

E: Would you want to live after that is the question.

BG: I don't know. It's not really clear whether they die in shame or of ecstasy or just sort of blood loss, but they die. There's a variety of different mechanisms, but a lot of times there's also some where the male will do that and there's also little things called spermatophores, there's like big globs of protein. Who knew? That stick there and serve as a little snack for the female to increase her egg production.

R: Oh, a little snack. That's disgusting, actually. Who would have thought that a question from a six-year-old could lead to that discussion?

BG: Well, it is me.

R: That's true. That's why we love you.

S: Rachel's three years old, right?

E: She's turning four in a few weeks.

R: Oh, okay. Sorry.

BG: But, yes, there are boy and lady bugs.

R: Thank you for that, Bug Girl.

S: Well, Bug Girl, thanks for being on the Skeptic's Guide. We enjoyed talking with you. Thanks for straightening out the whole bee situation.

R: You are lovely and very smart, which we always appreciate. It's always a nice change of pace here on the Skeptic's Guide.

S: I hope we can call on you whenever we have any future insect crises.

BG: No problem. I'm happy to do the ask an entomologist thing anytime.

S: Excellent.

R: Bye, Bug Girl.

E: Thank you.

S: Take care.

BG: Okay. Bye.

Science or Fiction (1:01:32)

Question #1: Anniversary syndrome, the tendency for people to die on the anniversary of a traumatic event, is a well-documented phenomenon. Question #2: The scientific approach used by the Franklin Commission to evaluate the claims of Franz Anton Mesmer was the first time such techniques were used to evaluate a medical therapy. Question #3: Loss of gender recognition is a frequent early manifestation of Alzheimer's type dementia.

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics and you all at home to tell me which one is the fake. There is a theme this week.

E: I love themes.

S: The theme is things I learned while at the American Academy of Neurology meeting.

R: Oh, no.

E: This is my field of expertise.

J: We're going to do this. We're going to do so bad.

R: Unless it's things you learned over dinner the other night with me, I'm not going to do well at this.

E: One of the presenters wears a wig and someone else dressed up as a leprechaun in a play or something.

S: So I was just at the annual American Academy of Neurology meeting. Actually, I just got home a couple of hours before we started recording this podcast.

E: Boy, are your arms tired.

S: Actually, I took the train. As I did last year, I noted some items of interest and turned them into my science or fiction for this week. So everyone ready? Item number one. Anniversary syndrome, the tendency for people to die on the anniversary of a traumatic event, is a well-documented phenomenon. Item number two. The scientific approach used by the Franklin Commission to evaluate the claims of Franz Anton Mesmer was the first time such techniques were used to evaluate a medical therapy. So that was the first scientific evaluation of a medical therapy. Item number three. Loss of gender recognition is a frequent early manifestation of Alzheimer's-type dementia. Jay, go first.

J: All right. Of course I haven't read about any of these.

S: Of course not.

E: You didn't attend the National Academy of Neurological Situations.

J: Okay, we're going to take this a little we'll take it at Bob speed. I'll talk this one out. I would agree. I would say that one's not fake because, sure, you're stressed out, and you could die from stress. Okay, that one makes sense. Then you said something about Mesmer, validating him with science. And then this loss of gender recognition, it could be a precursor to determining Alzheimer's.

S: One of the mental malfunctions that people with Alzheimer's disease have early on is that they lose the, they start confusing men and women together.

J: Okay, I thought you meant something else, and now I've clarified it. I'll go with that one as the fake.

S: Evan, go next.

E: Very good one, Steve, I must admit. The first one is striking. I'm sorry, the anniversary syndrome one is striking me as just not right. There's something not quite right there. The Franklin Commission and Anton Mesmer, I think that one's correct because Franklin and Mesmer are linked in history in other ways. So I'm tending to believe that that's correct.

S: All right, just to clarify for our listeners, that Benjamin Franklin investigated Mesmer is established. I mean, that's not in question, right? Everyone knows that. The new bit here is that that was the first time, basically, science was used to see if a treatment works. That's the new bit.

E: Something's telling me that's the curveball.

J: Yeah, now I'm starting to second-guess myself.

E: I'll say that the Franklin-Mesmer one is fiction. That was probably not the first time in recorded history that that had happened.

S: Okay, Rebecca?

R: Yeah, I tend to agree.

J: Shit.

R: Well, I wasn't at first, but that sounds, I mean, that's how you determine whether or not treatments work. You do it by science, and maybe if it were more specific, it'd be easier to tell, but I'm going to go with that. Also, I had no idea it was called the Franklin Commission. Never heard that part. So anyway, I'm going to go with that.

S: All right, Bob?

B: Loss of gender recognition. Sounds reasonable. I'm not going to go with that one. The Mesmer therapy sounds – that doesn't sound too – I'm leaning towards that one, but one is kind of grabbing me because one really – the one where you – people dying on the anniversary of a traumatic event kind of reminds me of the idea of people waiting for their birthday or waiting for an event, and they die after the event. Somehow their life is prolonged until they reach a milestone that they've been waiting for. It seems tied to that. It seems related to that. So dying on the anniversary, I would tend to say no. So I'm going to go with that one as being the fiction.

S: Okay, so you're saying the anniversary syndrome is fake.

J: That's what he said.

B: Right.

S: Evan and Rebecca say the Franklin Commission is fake, and Jay says that the Alzheimer's disease one is fake.

J: Yep.

S: Do I have that correct?

J: I totally screwed this one up.

E: You start with number three, Steve.

S: Let's take them in order. Let's go number one. Anniversary syndrome, the tendency for people to die on the anniversary of a traumatic event, is a well-documented phenomenon, and that is science.

R: I feel like we've talked about that before.

J: I remember that from somewhere.

S: It crops up. I actually had a very interesting lecture about cardiac stress and basically neurological stress on the heart, and this was one of the lines of evidence, that being forced to sort of relive the trauma of an event because you're reminded of it by the anniversary is enough to put that added stress on the heart that can lead to a heart attack.

E: That's incredible.

S: That one is science. The scientific approach used by the Franklin Commission to evaluate the claims of Franz Anton Mesmer was the first time such techniques were used to evaluate a medical therapy, and that one is also science. That one's true.

R: Where did you get that?

S: One of the topics of the conference was neurology throughout history, sort of a historical section, and there was a couple of abstracts actually about Mesmer and about that commission, and that was one saying that it was the first historically documented case where what Franklin did, which was different, now Mesmer, who basically came up with animal magnetism where he basically hypnotized people and convinced them that whatever their ailments were went away, and there were a lot of people who had psychosomatic ailments, and it was really effective at treating the psychosomatic ailments, but most of the attempts at debunking Mesmer focused on the theoretical basis of animal magnetism, that it didn't exist and it was theoretically flawed, and Franklin did a test, just forget about the theoretical basis of it. Let's just test it to see if it works, and that's the first documented case of that being done to see if a medical intervention actually worked or not.

R: I'm really skeptical of that because I just don't see what the proof of that could be.

S: Well, you're right in that saying that something is the first is always contingent upon whether or not you find something else earlier. So somebody may find some earlier documented case of some kind of scientific test of the efficacy of a medical treatment, but this was reported and the researchers found that this was the first documented case.

R: The other thing is that the test that they were doing, I could be wrong here, I'll have to check on this, but the test they were doing wasn't to determine whether or not the treatment was effective. It was to determine whether or not Mesmer had discovered that special fluid that he thought caused animal magnetism.

S: Here's the quote from the abstract. The Franklin Commission ignored Mesmer's poorly formulated theory and focused on observable immediate effects of animal magnetism on subject behavior rather than any possible beneficial longer term effect on disease outcome. So they were looking at was there any observable immediate effect of the Mesmer's therapy on animal magnetism rather than focusing on the theoretical basis of his treatment.

J: Steve, as far as the science or fiction rankings go, this counts, even if it's contested, tonight counts.

S: It stands because it's things I learned at the end and I in fact learned that. Whether or not it gets falsified by later data is irrelevant.

R: So you could have learned utter crap.

E: You're saying if next week we learn that that in fact was wrong, we don't get credit?

S: No, of course not. Science is always contingent upon further evidence.

J: Yeah, so as of right now, today, that's the latest and greatest.

S: Yes, as of that publication.

E: In your limited world, Steve, but perhaps the rest of the known world.

S: Hey, guys, guys, find an earlier example of documented in history.

E: You got it. Listeners, find an earlier example and help Rebecca and I out. Thank you.

S: Number three, loss of gender recognition is a frequent early manifestation of Alzheimer's type dementia. That one is fiction. So congratulations, Jay.

J: Thank you.

S: In fact, an abstract discussing the signs and symptoms of Alzheimer's type dementia showed that gender recognition survives long into the disease. That even severely affected Alzheimer's patients were still able to tell the genders apart. So that one is clearly fiction. So that was challenging. We would do for a challenging one.

R: I'm still skeptical.

S: It was challenging.

E: Rebecca, you don't go down easy, do you?

R: You know, that's too easy.

S: Because there's no way you guys could have read this beforehand.

J: We had to deduce.

S: Right, right, which is nice.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:11:38)

This Week's Puzzle

This is a guest puzzle this week from Chris Lamb of the UK:

Centuries ago,
A labored magician's trick,
I'm king I had to know,
And sent my wise men quick,
Her hair was not concealed,
They believed but never thought,
And later was revealed,
This fraud was at my fort.



Last Week's Puzzle

It offers plenty of traction, yet barely moves at all
It offers a rosy view, yet may damage your sight
It offers a contrast in style, but don't let your head swell
You'll find your pockets may empty, in more ways than one

What is it?

Answer: Inversion Therapy
Winner: Dorbie and Ian

S: Well, Evan, can you please read last week's puzzle?

E: Yes, here it is. It offers plenty of traction, yet barely moves at all. It offers a rosy view, yet may damage your sight. It offers a contrast in style, but don't let your head swell. You'll find your pockets may empty in more ways than one.

S: And the answer is...

E: And the answer is... Well, okay. The answer I was looking for is inversion therapy, which, in fact, Dorby from the message boards guessed correctly. But I do want to also credit Ian, who early on in the thread made a guess that gravity boots was the answer to the puzzle. And you do need the gravity boots in order to achieve the inversion therapy.

S: It's basically hanging upside down.

E: Right, right, exactly. So we'll split the winners or have dual winners this week in Ian and Dorby. Dorby got the clue I put in there about rosy view in that she picked up that I was poking fun at Rosie O'Donnell, who uses inversion therapy to treat her depression. And that was basically the angle and the crux of the puzzle for last week. So congratulations to both Ian and Dorby for figuring it out collectively.

S: Strong work. And this week's puzzle, I understand, was submitted by one of our listeners.

E: Yeah. Chris Lam, all the way from Newcastle in the United Kingdom, is giving us this week's puzzle.

S: Well, he didn't actually come to visit us. He sent it to us over email.

E: No? Oh.

R: No, he brought it to our door.

S: He didn't actually come all the way.

E: He wrote it down and folded it into a paper airplane and sent it across the pond. Okay, so here we go. Centuries ago, a labored magician's trick. I'm king, I had to know, and sent my wise men quick. Her hair was not concealed, they believed but never thought. And later was revealed, this fraud was at my fort.

S: Interesting.

E: So ponder that one and see if we can come up with the answer.

J: Did the person tell you the answer, Evan?

E: Oh, yeah. Yeah, they told me the answer. I thought about it for a while. I was not able to guess it in the time that I allowed myself to guess it.

J: I think it's cool that you read a listener's puzzle. That's cool.

E: It's a good puzzle.

S: Any listeners out there, if you have really good puzzles, and they don't have to be in the same style, I think I'd like to actually mix in some more logical puzzles, send them in because if they're really good, we'll use them, absolutely.

E: What are you saying, Steve?

S: I'm just trying to help you out here, Evan.

E: Are you saying I don't provide enough logic puzzles?

J: Evan, no, we love your puzzles, but damn it, you've got to put more time in because we want the rap, baby.

S: It's still always a rap, too. We're not off that hook.

E:' No, no, no, no, no. There's development on that front. I won't give out any surprises, but it is most definitely in the works, and it's coming sooner than later.

S: Excellent.

R: We're all very excited.

E: None more excited than me.

Quote of the Week (1:14:58)

'Science looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.' Carl Sagan

S: Bob, give us a quote to close out the show.

B: Here's a quote from Carl Sagan I recently discovered. He said, "Science looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success."

S: Absolutely. A wise man, that Carl.

E: I could just read anything and everything he's ever written.

J: And pretty much have, right?

E: Well, not quite there yet.

S: Well, thanks, everyone, for joining me again.

J: Thank you, Steve.

R: Thanks, Steve.

E: Thank you, Doctor.

B: Yeah.

S: Always a pleasure.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by the New England Skeptical Society in association with the James Randi Educational Foundation. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at www.theskepticsguide.org. Please send us your questions, suggestions, and other feedback; you can use the "Contact Us" page on our website, or you can send us an email to info@theskepticsguide.org'. 'Theorem' is produced by Kineto and is used with permission.

References