SGU Episode 95

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SGU Episode 95
May 16th 2007
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 94                      SGU 96
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
R: Rebecca Watson
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
'Great intellects are skeptical.'
Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900, German Philosopher
Links
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Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction

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

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, May 16^th, 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: Hi, everyone.

S: Perry DeAngelis...

P: Hello, everyone.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Hi, everyone. How's everyone?

J: Very good. Quite well.

S: We have an interview coming up later this evening with Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. But first, we're going to do some news items.

News Items

Scientology vs the BBC (0:46)

• news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/panorama/default.stm

S: One interesting news item from this week, there's been a conflict between the Church of Scientology and the BBC. I know you guys have all read about this.

J: Been all over it.

S: Yeah, the BBC is airing a program, an investigative piece about Scientology, and it's rather unflattering. This is being done by John Sweeney. He is the BBC reporter. And the Scientologists are trying to get the program blocked on the basis that Sweeney is, what they claim, he is bigoted and biased, and that the BBC shouldn't be giving him a venue to air his bigotry. Which, of course, is what they always say whenever anyone tries to offer up any criticism of the Church. One other background for this, John Sweeney apparently, I guess as part of his investigation for this piece, was going through the Scientology Museum. And at one point, everything that was happening got to him so much that he kind of lost his cool. And he had a bit of an outburst. The Scientologists, who I guess were filming him the whole time, caught this on tape and immediately started a YouTube campaign to try to discredit Sweeney, to show that, see how emotional and biased and bigoted he is. Sweeney, in turn, wrote an article explaining what happened and responding to them. And this is all sort of surrounding the question of whether or not the BBC should air this piece. And the piece did air on May 14th. And if you missed it, you can watch it online. We'll have a link to the site that has that. Did any of you guys catch it?

J: No, not yet. I was going to do it today. I did watch some of the other stuff. I did watch him freaking out. It was embarrassing, but I know the back story. I understand what was going on. At that particular moment, they were making an accusation against his interview credibility. Basically, the accusation made was that he was going easy on someone who was talking out against Scientology. He had to view a bunch of people, I don't want to say torture, but I guess he was watching something about psychiatry. And they were showing kids needles in their eyes and all sorts of crazy stuff. The worst of the worst stuff that anyone could ever dig up about past psychiatry methods and everything that the church was pumping out as modern.

S: So basically, they're anti-psychiatry propaganda, and eventually it got under his skin. Yeah, he admitted it was unprofessional for him to lose it like that, but it's ridiculous that the Scientologists are trying to use that to discredit his journalism or the piece itself. I guess the bits that are most provocative in the piece concern his interviews with family members and parents who have basically been disconnected from their relatives who have gone into Scientology, which is one of the features that is common in destructive belief systems or destructive cults, where they do try to separate you entirely from everybody from your previous life, your life outside of the group. And Sweeney was documenting this about the Church of Scientology.

J: So, did you guys know that... I never heard of this before until I started doing research on this particular article and this event. L. Ron Hubbard, or as I like to call him, Drunk Hubbard, he came up with this idea, which he calls Fair Game.

B: I got it, Drunkard Hubbard.

J: Drunkard Hubbard. This Fair Game thing, which basically means that anyone that goes against the Church, opposes the Church in any way, is fair game, which means that they can legitimately be tricked, sued, or lied to and destroyed. And I quote, tricked, sued, or lied to and destroyed. He said that. And then Sandy Smith, who I believe is one of the producers of Sweeney's program, said that this is the most clear fair game smear tactic from the Scientologists. They have accused people of murder before, they have falsified allegations against people, and now they are doing it against us. And they are. They are going tooth and nail against the BBC. They accused the BBC of death threats. The BBC.

E: People with death threats.

B: So Hubbard started this maliciousness that's kind of endemic to the religion. I just kind of thought it was like an outgrowth, something that just kind of evolved in that direction. But I didn't know that he endorsed these malicious tactics.

S: And John Travolta is the celebrity, the Scientology celebrity, who is taking the forefront and criticizing the BBC and Sweeney. That's why the Scientologists woo and try to recruit these celebrities, like Tom Cruise, who we all know is Jay's favorite actor. And now it's John Travolta's turn to take the forefront in the PR campaign against the church's enemies.

J: I also read something else I thought was really interesting. The church goes after celebrities for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that they actuall recruit more celebrities with celebrities, because they have that star value. They have the personality. And it's really, to me, it's ridiculous. How obvious is this?

S: I don't know, Jay. I don't know what they're thinking about it. Maybe they think they're getting a little bit of the star treatment, but they don't have any appreciation for how bad it is for the rank and file down below.

J: So I think Nicole Kidman actually broke it off with Cruise because of this.

S: Did she make any definitive statement about that?

B: I just remember reading in an article recently that when she got to level three, whatever that entails, I guess when she finally heard about the whole Zinu baloney, when she heard that, she was like, that's it. I'm out of this.

J: Good for her, right?

B: So yeah, my respect went up for her when I read that.

P: Yeah, it took her all the way to level three to figure it out, though.

More Rosie and 9-11 (7:06)

• newsbusters.org/node/12748

S: The other news item involving a celebrity fronting or shilling for nonsense involves Rosie O'Donnell at it again. Now, we had spoken before about Rosie on The View talking about basically endorsing 9-11 conspiracy theories, although she said, I don't know who did it. But then she asked all the usual questions, like, but this is the first time that fire melted steel. And now, on a recent episode of The View, she added a couple of more nuggets to that. Again, she's just parroting loose change and other 9-11 conspiracy outlets. Nothing she's saying is new. She again made the claim that fire can't melt steel, because steel melts at 2,700 degrees. It's actually 2,750, but that's close enough. But then interestingly, in the next breath, she says, and there was molten steel in the floor of the towers after it collapsed. The people saw pools of molten steel. By the way, there was not molten steel at the base of the towers.

B: It was aluminum.

S: It was molten aluminum from the planes. The planes did the aluminum. The planes melted. And that's what people saw and confused for molten steel.

P: Steel, aluminum, what the hell's the difference?

S: She was confronted with the notion that—

P: It's all metal-ish.

E: She's no biology major.

S: Very low temperatures, like even just a few hundred degrees, like even just 400 degrees, would significantly weaken the steel enough that it couldn't support the weight of the building, and it would collapse. And she didn't really have an answer for that. Although later, she also repeated the canard about the towers falling faster than free fall, which is— First of all, it's wrong. If you watch the video, you could see objects falling and dust falling faster than the building. Again, what do the— Again, they're just anomaly hunting. These anomalies aren't even real, because the towers aren't falling faster than free fall. But clearly on the video— I remember I got into this email debate with one of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists, and we looked at the same video. I said, you could see the debris falling faster than the tower. And they just said, no, it isn't. The tower's falling faster. What can you say then? What can you say about that?

B: At that point, you just walk away.

S: It's just we're looking at the same thing, and we're seeing different things. But do they think that there were like rockets at the top of the towers accelerating them faster than free fall? What's the scenario that creates the towers falling faster than free fall? It doesn't make any sense.

E: A gravity pump that the government secretly made to help bring them down fast. Gravity pump.

J: You know, she said on that episode, the one I think where she originally opened her mouth, that she wants to get physics experts in from Yale and all that, and of course—

S: Or Harvard.

J: And Harvard, but it didn't happen, right?

S: No. The physics experts are already on record as saying how the towers collapsed.

B: But they did say during that segment that I saw that maybe they should get an expert on one side and a supposed expert on another side and have them talk about it. And then Rosie said, nobody wants to talk about it. Well, then why are you bringing it up? If nobody wants to talk about it, clearly people want to talk about it.

E: No expert wants to take the side that Rosie O'Donnell is taking.

P: I thought she was the expert.

B: Oh, she could find plenty of them.

Star Kids (10:32)

• www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/05/14/01564.html

S: The other interesting news item from the past week is an article. I think, Perry, you sent me this article, the title of which is Researcher, like how they use that. Researcher says, some children demonstrate unusual abilities after UFO and extraterrestrial encounters. So a while ago we talked about the indigo children. Now these are the star children.

E: Not to be confused with the Star Child Project, right?

S: Right. Star Child. So these are kids who had an encounter with aliens and now they have either ESP or some paranormal ability.

E: 12 feet.

S: This quote unquote researcher, Rodwell, said-

E: Her name was actually close to Roswell.

P: That's an interesting name.

S: My clients include both adults and children who exhibit transformative changes such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and healing as they become more spiritually aware and begin to operate on a multidimensional band of reality.

J: That is so freaking cool.

E: Wow, that's a lot of gobbledygook just written to one sentence.

B: What were these kids? One dimensional until this happened and now, bam, they're in three dimensions?

J: Hey, Bob, I'm telling you, when I get drunk, I can have all those powers too.

S: Now she doesn't have any evidence for this, of course.

J: No, Steve, she says, and I quote, Australia's Mary Rodwell says that there is now enough evidence to conclude that these quote unquote beings appear to come from other planets and other dimensions parallel to our own. Right there.

S: Now is this spectral evidence?

B: No, wait, I got a question. How does she know that these dimensions aren't perpendicular to our own? That's the question I have.

S: Yeah, why are they always parallel? You know what? They might even be askew.

E: Ooh, or tangential.

P: I mean, come on.

J: I know, right, Perry? It's like, will you please? Please?

P: She's a member of the Australian Close Encounter Resource Network, ACER, you know?

E: Founded in 1978, right after the movie Close Encounters came out.

J: This is her best proof. She says, these star children exhibit a maturity and wisdom beyond their years and often describe their connection to spirit and angelic realms. That is amazing proof.

E: Angelic realms, like nirvana.

B: No, Jay, she's got better evidence than that. Towards the end it said that though her evidence does not include an actual UFO, Rodwell says that she has evidence from a scientific, medical, psychological, and historical perspective to support her paradigm-shifting conclusion. Okay, again, they mention evidence all over the place. Show me the evidence.

S: Show me the evidence.

B: I mean, you just can't throw evidence around and not produce it. Just produce it, and that will end this.

S: Well, the reporter didn't actually decide that it was necessary to reference any actual evidence. Apparently they didn't ask such pointed questions.

P: Oh, come on.

S: Whenever anyone says that what they're doing is paradigm-shifting, you know they're full of it. My research is paradigm-shifting. You're a quack.

P: Your research is baloney.

S: There's almost a one-to-one correlation between self-proclaimed paradigm-shifting and quackery.

P: It says on their website the ACERN website, it says ACERN is a professional organization and as such has several professionals available as a resource, offering information, counseling, and therapy. They offer counseling and therapeutic support, telephone and Internet support, access to professionals, psychologists, GPs, as well as complementary practitioners.

S: Right.

P: This is a full-service organization.

E: I'm a complementary practitioner. Perry, you're looking very well today.

B: Perry, can you use a more mocking tone next time?

P: I can't.

S: Yeah, you're slipping, Perry.

P: I mean, this is a...

Multivitamins and Cancer (14:28)

• www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-05/jotn-mu051007.php

S: One last news item. There was a recent study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute that links heavy multivitamin use to advanced prostate cancer. This is... We reported on a previous meta-analysis from Scandinavia showing that a correlation between multivitamin use and death in that meta-analysis. This is a more specific study, but it is a correlation study. It does, again, raise the concern that we should not think of vitamins as having zero risk, anything that could do anything to the body. If it could help you, then it could hurt you.

J: Even water.

S: We need to have evidence-based guidelines for anything, even things that may seem benign like taking vitamins. Now, what the study showed is that those men who were taking just regular supplemental doses of multivitamins did not have a correlation. It was only in those who were taking vitamins more than once a day, so what would be considered high or heavy multivitamin use. So there's a little bit of a dose correlation there, which lends a little bit of credibility to it. Plus, a lot of multivitamins... People don't realize this, that there are some... Multivitamins contain the fat-soluble vitamins, like some of the B vitamins, that get stored in the fat in your body. The excess does not get simply excreted in urine. You actually hold on to it. It's actually not that difficult to get toxic levels of vitamins if you're getting certain vitamins from multiple sources. Some people might take a multivitamin plus a B complex, plus supplements that have vitamins in it, and they might be eating fortified cereal. Who knows? In certain cases, you've added it all together, and you're getting actual toxic doses. This wasn't looking at specific non-vitamin toxicity. It's just saying that men who were taking the higher doses had a higher correlation for prostate cancer. Now, this is not a randomized study, in that men were not assigned to take heavy multivitamins at random. The people were choosing themselves. And whenever a study is not randomized, so people are not sorted randomly into what they're taking, then that introduces the possibility for a host of confounding factors, including unknown variables that we can't anticipate. For example, like in the Scandinavia meta-analysis that I mentioned, it's quite possible that people who are sick take vitamins because they think it will help because they're sick. So then, of course, taking vitamins would correlate with being sick, right? Because it's the sickness that led to taking the vitamins, not the other way around. And you just can't control for those kinds of things unless you decide at random who takes the vitamins and who doesn't.

P: Steve, there's a phrase in this piece that is a quote from the authors, and it says, because multivitamin supplements consist of a combination of several vitamins, and men using high levels of multivitamins were also more likely to take a variety of individual supplements. We were unable to identify or quantify individual components responsible for the observations we observed.

S: Yeah, so they're saying two things, really, that there's lots of things in a multivitamin, so you don't know what it is in there. If it is a cause and effect, you don't know what is the cause. And also, because men who self-selected for taking heavy doses of multivitamins probably are also taking lots of other supplements, and it may be something else that they're taking that really was the culprit. So they were just pointing out some of these confounding factors that I'm talking about.

P: But if they couldn't separate the difference between the multivitamins and these other supplements, doesn't that really skew the study?

S: Well, what they're saying is this is a correlation study. What they're saying is that there was a correlation between prostate cancer and heavy multivitamin use, but that correlation may be because those who were taking the heavy multivitamin use may just be a marker for other behavior, because it may go along with other behavior like taking a lot of other supplements. Does that make sense? So sometimes when we see a correlation, the correlation is not due to a cause and effect. You're correlating with something which is just a marker for the real cause. It's something that itself correlates with the real cause. You may be one or two or multiple steps removed from what's really going on. That's basically what they're saying. So that's just a generic weakness to this kind of epidemiological data and why it's never definitive. You can really only definitively answer these questions by doing placebo-controlled randomized trials, where you basically control for all these other variables that we're talking about.

P: Yeah, I mean, if you set up a study to do it specifically, double-blind and everything, it would be hard to control.

S: Yeah, make two groups or make three groups. One group gets nothing, group two gets multivitamins, group three gets heavy multivitamins, and then you follow them for five years and see how many get prostate cancer. You could do that study.

J: Steve, on a side note, don't they computer simulate models like this? Are we at that point yet where we can simulate the physiology?

S: Not in any meaningful way. I mean, you can only do that really as sort of preclinical, preliminary data.

E: To see if something really terrible is going to occur?

S: Pharmaceutical companies certainly will do that. They'll try to predict as much as they can before they spend the millions and millions on human trials, what substances will do in people, for example. And, of course, you do animal research. As much as you can, first you have to do a certain amount of preclinical research before you ethically can expose humans to new substances. If you're researching vitamins or things that are already out there, it's a lot easier. You don't have to do that because these things are already available to people. The bottom line is there are no computer models of human physiology and biochemistry where we could, say, expose that to a novel chemical and predict how the body's going to deal with it, or all of the effects. There's just too many variables and too many unknowns. So human beings are variable. It wouldn't be a model. You'd have to model the full range of variation among people.

J: Right, exactly.

P: It's a big spectrum. I mean, human beings all the way to Rosie. It's hard to qualify everyone.

E: She's like the third one from the left on the evolution chart, right?

J: Oh, God.

S: Well, let's move on to your email and questions.

Questions and E-mails

Moon UFO (20:56)

I wanted to hear that you take on this video is:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc7mkHtuLOs

Since it's still fairlly a new video at youtube, I couldn't find any hard information on the video and it's credibility, and I didn't see any reason to give it any (credibility).

A few red flags poped-up, but I would like to hear what your opinions on it are before listing them (and I'm sure you will probably also see them and more). Russian rocket? CGI? Just a very strange rock? Real Aliens?

Congrats on a great show, keep up the great work.

Petrucio
Brazil

S: Well, I think we have time for just one email today because I want to leave plenty of time for our interview with Pamela and Fraser. This email comes from Patricio in Brazil, and he writes, I wanted to hear your take on this video. And he gives us a link. Since it's fairly a new video at YouTube, I couldn't find any hard information on the video and its credibility, and I didn't see any reason to give it any. A few red flags popped up, but I would like to hear what your opinions on it are before listing them, and I'm sure you will probably also see them and more. Russian rocket CGI. Just a very strange rock. Real aliens. Congrats on the great show. Keep up the great work. Thanks, Patricio. So this is a video that ostensibly is of a NASA recording of an Apollo lander skimming over the surface of the moon. Apparently it's of the far side of the moon.

B: I guess we don't know it's a lander, though, Steve. It's just a flyby.

S: A flyby.

B: I assume it's one of the orbiting...

S: Could be. Close, though, but you're right. It could be. So some lunar vehicle with somebody... But manned, not a robot, because there's somebody manning that camera.

P: Apollo 20, it says.

S: It says Apollo 20, which of course is your first clue because the Apollo missions only went up to 17. There was no Apollo 20. And it ostensibly shows a cigar-shaped object in the lunar soil. It looks big, although it's hard to get a reference, something for a reference of size. And then as the camera zooms in on it, it shows some unnaturally sharp right angles and regular features, and it's clearly not a natural object once the camera pans across it. It could certainly be a spaceship. It looks like the surface is encrusted with lunar soil and it's pitted, so you're also hearing, it's barely audible, the voice of the astronaut who's taking the film. And it's transcribed with a subtitle so you can see what he's saying. And he comments that it looks like it's billions of years old, for example. It's actually an interesting video, but it's, I also think, also quite clearly a fake. I don't think that this... It's not a real video. It's not a misidentified natural object. I don't think it's a rocket, like a Russian rocket, as Patricio hypothesized. I think the video is just plainly fake.

B: Well, a couple of red flags that I saw was, the first thing you see is that there's some numbers and lines superimposed over the image, like the camera was looking through a transparent piece of glass with some writing on it. So I don't know why they would actually film something so historic, even if it's just the moon, why would you film it through this obscuring haze of numbers and lines? And a couple of the other, the two biggest red flags, and they're kind of ridiculous, right before the ship shows up, there's a huge light flare.

E: Yeah, it's a cut.

B: The screen just goes all white, and then there's static, and then the ship shows up. And then the other thing that I noticed...

E: Oh, and the numbers are gone, Bob, at that point also.

B: Oh, yes, good catch.

E: Yeah, you no longer see the numbers at that point.

J: Yeah, but Bob, you hear that beep noise of the communicator turning on and off, so it has to be true.

B: Well, yeah, that was very realistic. The background beeps were very realistic. But the other one was that right after, right after this huge light flare and static, the terrain is markedly different than how it was before this happened. So, I mean, I don't think you need any bigger red flags than what we've just mentioned.

S: There's a rough cut there, yeah.

E: Definitely a rough cut. And as it zooms in, you get a pretty close shot that fills up about the whole frame with what appears to be the nose tip area of the ship. What it looks like to me is the end of a pen that somebody covered in dirt, basically and that the part where it looks like maybe the window of the cockpit is where the metal clip begins on the tip of a pen that you would have fastened to your shirt or something like that. That's what it looks like to me.

S: Now, you want my hypothesis?

J: Sure.

S: I think that this is actually not a hoax. I think it's a prank. And the reason why I say that is because the person who is putting these videos up on YouTube has their own YouTube space. His username is RetiredAFB. And he joined on April 1st, 2007. Coincidence?

P: Like I was saying, this is the first time I'm seeing this live here for the first time we're reporting a podcast. This is one of the stupidest videos I have ever seen. This is lame. Lame.

E: This was a question sent in by a listener.

S: This is no dumber than the 9-11 conspiracy.

P: I didn't say it was. Just wondering why we chose to talk about it.

S: It's also not impossible that we might uncover a buried monolith or some alien artifact.

B: Monolith.

J: Steve.

P: It blows.

J: Steve, I like Steve's hypothesis. I think it is a prank. I think that they were hoping to get somewhere with it. It's actually, if they did it as a prank, it was a good job.

S: Yeah.

P: What?

S: Production quality for what it is trying to look like is not bad, you know. Actually, there are a number of these videos on the internet now. They're like viral videos. And there was one about like, do you guys remember seeing the demon in the woods?

E: Oh yeah.

S: From a few months ago. Where it's somebody like as if they're just going on an investigation through the woods and they're walking with the camera. It's like three minutes of that nonsense. Then they come across like the glowing eyes in the, or there's like this, it takes you a moment to figure out that it's like a crouched, thin, dark human form. And then like the head turns to you and it has glowing eyes and you realize what it is. But there's also like the music chimes in right at that point for a little dramatic effect. So it's clearly produced. But a lot of these things are being done. I think we talked about this before. They're being done actually as a viral advertising campaign for some video game or movie or something that's coming out.

E: Drink alien Coke.

S: Right. So I don't know. I don't know if this is part of that or if this is like next year there's going to be some movie about discovering a spaceship on the moon or if this guy is just plainly an April Fool's prank and he's trying to see how much, how much leverage he gets before.

E: Does it look like the tip of a pen to anyone else? I'm just curious.

P: I'm speechless.

S: It's roughly cigar-shaped.

P: A pen, a penis. What difference does it make?

J: To you.

R: A lot, let me tell you.

P: Oh my God.

S: Good, Becca.

J: She whipped that out quick, guys.

E: Nice.

S: Well, that's all the time we have for emails this week. Let's go on to our interview.

Interview with Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay from Astronomy Cast (28:04)

• www.astronomycast.com/
  
  
  Fraser Cain
  In addition to co-hosting Astronomy Cast, Fraser Cain is the publisher of Universe Today, one of the most popular space and astronomy websites on the Internet. Fraser has been working in the software/Internet industry for the last 12 years, and was a partner in two software companies that are now traded publicly. He studied engineering at the University of British Columbia, and is currently completing his computer science degree. Fraser has written 3 books of his own and published a popular astronomy guide called What's Up 2006. He lives on Vancouver Island, off the West Coast of Canada.
  Dr. Pamela L. Gay
  A lifetime stargazer, Dr. Pamela L. Gay has followed her obsession to a profession. Today Pamela is a visiting assistant professor of Physics at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches introductory physics and astronomy courses. Teaching by day, she works on astronomy data by night, teaming up with amateur astronomers who are expert observers to study variable stars. In between, she finds time to mentor students working on observational astronomy projects through Swinburne Astronomy Online. Podcasting is a creative outlet that brings together her love of astronomy with her passion for teaching, making staying current in an ever-changing field a fun endeavor. Pamela also maintains a blog at starstryder.com.
  

S: Joining us now are the hosts of the popular podcast AstronomyCast, Fraser Cain and Pamela Gay. Fraser and Pamela, welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.

PG: Well, thanks for inviting us.

FC: Hi, skeptics.

R: I think this is the first time we've had dual guests on.

S: This is true.

R: This is very exciting. Bold new ground.

FC: Let's hope we can hold this together.

R: Yeah.

S: So just for a little background, Fraser is the publisher of Universe Today, and Pamela is a lifetime stargazer and an assistant professor of physics at Southern Illinois University, and together they do the AstronomyCast podcast, which is a very excellent science podcast. You can check it out on iTunes, and we'll have a link to it, of course, from our notes page on our website. So how did you guys decide to get into science podcasting?

FC: Well, I think that for me, I actually started up my Universe Today podcast about almost two years ago, and really I just got goaded into doing it by people on the forum. So they nagged me to do a podcast, so I ended up getting equipment and doing it, and ran that for about a year or so, and I had an idea for another podcast that was going to be much more specific, almost like an educational podcast that was going to cover the entire concept of astronomy from one aspect to another, sort of deal with one topic at a time, and not be newsy the way Universe Today was, so be something that maybe could stand forever as a resource. And when that idea was kind of bubbling around in my mind, Pamela had come up for air from her work on slacker astronomy, which you can go into at some point, and so I pitched the idea to her. She thought it was good, and we started doing episodes. I think that was back in September of 2006.

R: Pamela, what happened with slacker astronomy? Because that was really popular. I loved slacker astronomy.

PG: Well, there were a lot of life changes going on all at once. I got married and moved to the middle of the country, and Aaron entered graduate school, and we all wanted something slightly different, going in slightly different directions. And for me, putting out a weekly show, it's something that's fun, that I really enjoy. Slacker went to doing more like once a month. And also, putting on a professor hat, there's always this creeping suspicion that at some point, my students are going to go, yeah, not funny with the slacker astronomy stuff. So it's just a little bit safer doing astronomy cast with Fraser.

FC: It's also misnamed, I think, because you guys were putting in a ton of work.

PG: Oh, yeah. It was five hours to write an episode sometimes, and that's five hours to write a 12-minute bit. Travis was doing all of the editing. Sometimes we did truly insane things, like pretend we knew how to sing. And it was a wild ride, and it was a lot of fun, but it was time to try something new, try new directions. And so two new shows came out of what used to be just one.

R: That's great. Yeah, and I know a lot of people were really happy to hear you back up on the airwaves, so to speak.

S: Well, I think the format works very well because it's very conversational. The two of you basically engage in a conversation about the topics that you're talking about, and it makes it less dry and didactic, which even like for me, I love science. I can sit for hours in lectures, and I often have to. But even still, with as high a threshold as I have, it is sometimes very difficult to just maintain your attention when it's just a voice talking on a topic. A conversation just makes it so much more accessible and easy to pay attention and listen, so I think it works really, really well.

B: We've got a lot of good feedback about that, too. A lot of people say they really like the conversational tone between us and the give and take between all the various participants of our podcast.

FC: Yeah, well, I was going to say, I've been following your show for about six months or so, and it works out really well. I think some people were saying, you guys should structure it more like Skeptic's Guide, and that was how I first started listening to your show. So... I was like, they got mail, and they have great little contests, but I don't think we will.

S: Well, let's get to some astronomy. Bob, I know you had some questions for Pamela. Why don't you go ahead and get started?

B: One question I have is about the ultimate fate of the universe. I think there's a couple ideas that I think are pretty much thrown around that I think are... Most people think these are probably one of the ways it's going to happen. I mean, the Big Crunch is not... I mean, that was for years. I remember thinking, well, we're going to end in a Big Crunch, and of course, dark energy destroyed that idea. But now, is it correct that it's pretty much the two contenders are the heat death, where entropy reaches maximum and there's no temperature gradients or anything, or the other one that's kind of interesting, if pretty nasty, is the Big Rip, where the accelerating expansion caused by the dark energy just kind of rips everything apart into elementary particles and radiation. Are those the two big contenders for the ultimate fate of the universe, or is it some that I'm not aware of?

PG: You're right on target. That's exactly what we're seeing is the possible fates. One thing that's working somewhat in our favor is the amount of dark energy doesn't seem to be increasing in time, and so that hopefully is pointing toward a heat death for the end of the universe. But we're still learning. We've only known about dark energy since about 1998, so this is still a completely new field of thought. It's one of these things where I'm young enough that I still have all the color in my hair, but all my textbooks are already out of date.

S: I'm sure you saw the pictures of the dark matter ring around the galaxy cluster.

PG: Oh, I actually made that the backdrop on my computer, and I very rarely do that.

S: It's beautiful.

PG: The basic idea that everyone had always had was the dark matter halos around both individual galaxies and around clusters of galaxies were spheres, just big blobs of dark matter that acted as a scaffolding that held all of the luminous, all of the visible matter. Now, in this particular case, the dark matter actually forms basically a donut around the cluster of galaxies. We hadn't thought that these shapes could occur, and this is a great new idea, and it's actually one that makes perfect sense. If you collide two objects, the dynamics of the collision can drive anything that's affected by gravity, and dark matter's affected by gravity. It can drive it into a ring. We've seen this with individual galaxies before, where you take one galaxy and you throw a second galaxy through its center perpendicular to the plane of the disk, and you can end up with this really neat ring. Well, in this case, at some point in the past, a cluster threw itself at a different cluster, and the result of the merger of those two systems created this donut of dark matter.

FC: We're actually really fortunate because the way we're seeing it, we're really lucky because of the way the angle of the collision happened, so we're seeing that ring because it was like a head-on collision. And the second thing is also in the time, because when the two galaxy clusters collided, it's like the dark matter sloshed out into this big ring, and it expanded, expanded, and then it's sort of reaching the limits of the gravitational pull and is going to start coming back inside again and oscillate. And so you've got this really good timing, both in the way we see it as well as when it's happening, for us to be able to see this ring.

S: Right.

B: How big were these clusters?

PG: Oh, I don't know those exact numbers. I only hold so much in my head. But the European Space Agency, sorry, the European Southern Observatory folks have both really great diagrams of how this happened on their website as well as all the numbers, and there's a good link to this off of the Bad Astronomy website.

S: Yeah, yeah, Phil Plait on Bad Astronomy has the pictures up and talks about this as well. The cluster is a couple of million light years across. And just for a little bit of background for the listeners, dark matter is matter that we know is there because of its gravitational effects, although we can't see it because it's dark. It's no radiation, correct? And it also doesn't interact with matter in other ways. Really, the only interaction that we know about is gravity. Is that correct?

PG: Yeah, it doesn't generally interact via the electromagnetic forces at all, and in some cases only slightly via the weak force, such as neutrinos interact via the weak force.

S: I have another question. Now, with this latest bit of evidence where they map, we can't see the dark matter, but we can map out where it should be and the gravitational effects on the matter that we can see, and we get this nice pretty picture of a ring, which led to the prediction that these were two superclusters that collided. And if I read it correctly, these superclusters look like they did collide because there's two different sort of identifiable subsets of this now one supercluster. So how much of a proof is this for the existence of dark matter? Can we say at this point dark matter definitely exists and that evidence is pretty conclusive?

PG: Yes. This is actually slightly more subtle. We're able to see the dark matter because of the way it bends light from background objects. So when you look at...

B: Through gravitational lensing.

PG: Yes, through gravitational lensing. So when you look at a whole bunch of background galaxies, they're going to have a random distribution of shapes, and if you average their shapes together and nothing is affecting them, they should average out to little circles on the sky. But if instead you end up seeing a teardrop or something that's slightly splattered off to the right, you know that these distortions are being caused by some sort of a lens. In this case, it's a gravitational lens that's affecting the light between you and where it's being emitted. So we're using the ability of gravity to bend light to make a map of mass that we can't see in any other way except via its gravitational pull. It's really, really neat science. It's getting some truly phenomenal results on making these really detailed maps of completely invisible stuff. So it's just great science done with high-resolution imaging.

FC: And there was another result earlier this year that was kind of in a similar vein. One of the questions about dark matter is, what is it? And one of the main theories is this WIMPS theory, this weakly interacting massive particles. So they only interact through their gravity. And so one of the results that happened earlier this year that was announced was that, once again, you had two clusters coming together, and when the two clusters collided, their gas in between them has a cross-section. The gas molecules are essentially bumping into each other, and the gas molecules slow down and sort of form this gas cloud in between where the galaxies were coming together. The stars, planets, all that kind of stuff passed right by each other. And the part that's interesting is that the dark matter had no cross-section, so the dark matter also passed right by each other. And so you got this separation. It's almost like someone had separated out the gas, the stars, and the dark matter into three separate layers as these two clusters came together. And so, once again, there's more evidence that if it was something that just was gravity acting differently at large distances, you wouldn't necessarily see this. Or if it was some kind of cold gas that you wouldn't be able to see, then you would expect the dark matter to bump into other dark matter and slow down. But the dark matter just went right on past itself without interacting, which provides more evidence for this weakly interacting mass of particles.

S: So dark matter is definitely this thing. It is some kind of actual matter. And yet we still have no idea what it is. Is that correct?

PG: Yes. But it's one of those times, though, where we are slowly building a picture of the elephant with a dozen blind men each identifying a different part. We don't have the complete picture, but we're getting at all the pieces. And eventually we'll have the complete picture.

FC: And knocking off the things that it's not.

PG: Yes.

S: So what are some things that were contenders that we've shown that it's not at this point?

PG: Well, there's modified Newtonian dynamics, which isn't 100% dead, but it's now safe to say that dark matter does have a physical reality. We're not simply seeing a flaw in our understanding of gravity. For a while, there's this back-of-the-field twitch that, well, maybe there's this extra term in gravity that only really comes into play at extremely large distances. And there are some really good mathematical theories that are able to explain up to but not including the gravitational lensing. They were able to explain the rotation curves of galaxies. They were able to explain the Tully-Fisher relationship, which describes the rotation rate and luminosity relationship in spiral galaxies. It just made a lot of really good fits to observables. But it can't explain the gravitational lensing. So it has to be set aside as, well, you can't explain this, but weakly interacting massive particles can.

S: So the WIMPs are the leading contender at this point?

PG: Yes.

S: So what study would prove that? What's in the works to validate that hypothesis? Well, it's kind of hard to figure out how to interact with something that doesn't seem to want to interact via any identifiable reaction that we can do in a lab, that we can do in an accelerator. So there is a lot of really intelligent head-scratching going on.

FC: One direction that is being considered is you might not be able to detect it because it doesn't produce any electromagnetic radiation, but you might be able to detect it as it's annihilated. So there's a possibility that, for example, dark matter might be annihilating around the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way. Or there could be dark matter annihilations in other locations where it gets scrunched up with gravity. And that could let off particles and radiation that maybe could be detected.

PG: And there are some researchers that are actually looking at the gamma ray background, where if you look faint enough at the entire sky, there's background light in many different colors. It's not just a microwave background. There's an infrared background. And as you look at this, there's different spikes at different wavelengths, and there's people thinking that perhaps some of these spikes correspond to dark matter annihilation at large redshifts.

FC: I think dark matter is a great aspect of science, especially of cosmology, because they don't know what it is. And yet it does seem to be there, and it just has certain characteristics that you can't explain away. And I see a lot of people on forums who disagree with the concept of dark matter almost instinctively. Like, it's not there, I don't like it. And yet, almost like with quantum theory, it's one of those things that your intuition is worthless. All you can do is slowly move forward, listening to what the experiments tell you, the direction that the evidence builds up. And there's so many now, so much evidence that's mounting up, that you can't just say, I don't like it. And yet that seems to be a real knee-jerk reaction that a lot of people have. And I'm sure it's very similar in a lot of other fields with skepticism.

S: Yeah. But you have to say, if you don't like this theory or this hypothesis, come up with another one that fits the evidence that we have so far. You explain the existing evidence, you have to come up with some kind of alternate theory. Or you have to come up with some concrete reason why it can't be right. Just the fact that it doesn't feel right is not enough.

PG: So often it seems like people are recreating Galileo's little demons behind friction, where you say, no, there can't possibly be friction. And you attribute all of the characteristics of friction to little demons, and eventually you've defined your little demons in such a way that really it's friction. You just have a new name attached to it. Well, if it looks like an elephant, smells like an elephant, and roars like an elephant, you can call it a puppy. But it's still probably an elephant.

B: I think I'll ascribe to Douglas Adams' idea. His idea, dark matter, actually turned out to be all the packing material in all the boxes of the astronomers' equipment to study dark matter. So that gets my vote.

S: Now, Fraser, you brought up dealing with skeptical issues. And so far on AstronomyCast, I've listened to a lot of the episodes, and I was just looking back over your archives. It looks like you guys have been sticking with pretty straightforward astronomy. Do you plan on tackling pseudoscientific topics within astronomy?

FC: Well, we do. We keep bumping them down. But I've got one I'm planning called Astrology is Worthless. But, no, I think that that's a situation where I think there are a lot of people, especially listening to our show, who might even be sitting on the fence about astrology. So I'd like to let them know where we stand and then let the chips fall where they may. The other one is I was going to do a show on rational explanations for UFOs. So Phil goes into this quite a bit, Phil Plait, where he talks about, here's a UFO sighting and here's the rational reason, or here's a rational reason for a UFO, or some weird thing in the sky. Do you think that looks like a UFO? But after that, there aren't a lot of pseudoscience. I mean, there's some like this Planet X colliding with the Earth. But some of it for us is just so fringe that I don't know if it's even worth our time to debunk.

PG: The type of places where you're also going to see it cropping up with us is there are still people who think that using redshift, using the rate at which objects appear to be moving away from the Earth to demonstrate, or from the entire galaxy for that matter, to demonstrate that the universe is expanding is ridiculous. And they claim that quasars, extremely bright galaxies with actively feeding supermassive black holes in their center, aren't really what I just described them as. They're just really bright things that are flung out of normal galaxies at extremely high velocities. These people are still out there and at some point we'll confront them. There are people out there who think the Big Bang is ridiculous and we need to consider study state models. So there's all these different things just within astronomy alone that we can attack and we can use as a teaching tool to explain, well, no, really, here's why we understand that quasars are at extremely large distances. Here is why we know the Big Bang is true and study state doesn't quite work. So there's lots of room within just astronomy to stick with the hard science and without the people realizing it, debunk their myths.

FC: We did do one show, about four or five episodes, and we actually mashed a whole bunch of topics into one show. Went through string theory, white holes, time travel, warp drives.

B: Yeah, that's a good one.

FC: Yeah, and we got a lot of flack for that one actually.

S: Flack from who?

FC: Oh, yeah. Yeah, we actually did.

B: I enjoyed it.

FC: Well, I think that people, because the concepts are so wonderful, moving faster than the speed of light, moving back in time, portals into other universes, changing dimensions, that people really, really want them to be true and will hold on to any piece of evidence that they can get their hands on. And the problem is then these concepts get an unreasonable amount of coverage in the media, and especially in science fiction shows and stuff like that. So warp drives or time travel fundamentally break the laws of physics. String theory is one of these examples that the job of string theory is to fundamentally bring together all of the laws of the universe, to provide one formula that tells you that you look at it one way and you've got gravity, and you look at it a different way and you've got rocks, and you look at it a different way and you've got the strong nuclear force. And wouldn't that be great? And so people really hold on to string theory, and yet the reality is that the evidence right now doesn't exist. So it's just math. And we wanted to put that in context for people and say, here's where it all stands. Sorry.

B: Even Brian Greene, I went to a talk that he did, and even he said that it really shouldn't be called a theory. It's really a hypothesis.

S: Or a model. I think a model is probably better. Because a model is what it is, a mathematical model. So it hasn't graduated to a scientific theory. Would you agree that that's pretty much where it is right now?

PG: Oh yeah, totally.

S: I agree. I think dealing with science fiction is interesting, because it basically gives you an opportunity to conduct a thought experiment about what may or may not be possible. And you have to marshal a lot of knowledge of physics and cosmology and astronomy in order to think about these questions. So I don't know, I think it can provide a really interesting way of learning how to apply knowledge about astronomy, don't you think?

FC: We actually got a lot of heat as well for the two episodes we did on the Drake Equation and the Fermi's Paradox. But we saw it as a teaching tool, right? We said, let's go through each piece of the formula, and what does it mean? What do we know about the possibility of the number of stars in the universe? And as you get near the end, it all just falls apart. It's just fine. No one's saying it's going to actually predict anything.

PG: One of the weirdnesses that I've never been able to understandis there are people out there who take their there are not UFOs visiting the planet Earth to the extreme of saying you can't possibly think there's an alien anywhere in the entire universe. Well, the universe is a big place, and I think that it's completely rational to discuss the possibility of life on other worlds. There's a lot of other planets out there. Well, at the same time, just sort of going, oh dear, no, Roswell, it really wasn't little green men. It's okay. Move on. They're not the same discussion. It's really two completely different fields of science and non-science.

S: Absolutely. I mean, there is, in fact, no reason to think that the Earth is unique or privileged, that life can or did only occur here.

PG: Yeah.

FC: And I think one of the great things about science right now and the missions that are going up is we actually are within, I think, striking distance to start answering that question, both with the SETI project, which is listening for signals from other worlds, but there's some new missions on the books. There's the terrestrial planet finder, which is on hiatus, but there's ESA's Darwin project, which is a telescope capable of seeing, measuring the atmosphere on Earth-like, Earth-sized planets going around other stars. So remember there was this recent discovery of Gliese 581c, which was this Earth-sized world in the habitable zone of a nearby star. Something like the terrestrial planet finder or Darwin could look at it, see oxygen in the atmosphere of the planet, and that would essentially be a slam dunk for life.

S: Mm-hmm. Right. Or methane or something that's unstable unless it's being generated in an ongoing process, presumably life.

FC: And then we're also finding we've got the rovers going, the new class of missions going to Mars. There's going to be the Phoenix lander, which is headed out in August, which is going to land on Mars up in its northern pole, dig into the dirt, and search for evidence of... I think it's going to be searching for current evidence of water ice near the surface. Oh, I don't think it's equipped to look for life this time around, but then there's a science laboratory which is going to be coming out, I think, in another 3 or 4 years, which actually will have the ability to look for life. So on all these different fronts, we're so close to actually looking for life and not looking for UFOs.

PG: And NASA's in the process of a really neat test right now where they've built an underwater explorer that is a test critter, a test submarine critter. I'm referring to a robot here as life, which is stupid, but it's cute. And they're figuring out how to explore the liquid, hopefully, water...

B: Europa.

PG: Yeah, on Europa, and to test out their technology, they're exploring... They say it's called a bottomless cenote. I'm not sure if that's the correct pronunciation. A big hole in the ground in Mexico that no one has ever managed to get to the bottom of. And they're getting live feeds of what is it underwater in this part of our own planet we've never explored. And if this works, then at least we have a starting point on how do we explore Europa when we get there in the future.

B: Yeah, the next difficult thing would be how do you bore through miles of ice just to get to the liquid center?

S: That would be cool. I hope we do that sooner than later because I think that finding life in our own solar system, especially if it had evidence that it arose independently of life on Earth, that they were not mutually seeded or something, would be incredibly cool and certainly would increase the probability of finding life elsewhere.

B: I think Europa is the best candidate in our solar system. All the ingredients seem to be there. You've got the heat created by the tidal forces of Jupiter. You've got minerals. You've got a liquid environment. There's not much more you need.

PG: No.

FC: And I think as Stephen said, the big question is, is it all connected? Because there is a lot of evidence that microbes can survive in space in vacuum. They found microbes on spacecraft on the moon. So there are asteroids that strike various planets in the solar system and can move from planet to planet. We had the Mars meteorite. There are meteorites from Venus and the moon on Earth. And scientists think that microbes could survive the trip through reentry. So there's a real possibility that there could be, for millions of years, asteroids smashing into planets, kicking up meteorites, meteorites landing on different planets, life's on board, lands in water, starts a new colony in the new location. So I think either way, if we find nothing, that's very interesting. Kind of sad, but interesting. If we find life that has a common ancestor, that's very interesting because it means that life has been shuffling around for millions of years already. And if they find something that's completely different, that's also really interesting. And I've even seen theories that the solar system leaves a wake of particles in its trail as it goes around the galaxy and could be littering stars behind us with microbe-laden meteorites as well. That's where a lot of this is going to get very interesting.

S: Yeah, it's basically the panspermia model that life basically gets seeded throughout the whole galaxy and could be related distantly to life even in another solar system because of that.

B: Gliese 581, it's been in the news, the star on the planet, Gliese C. Just one thing that occurred to me was that since Gliese C was about 13.3 times closer to its sun, even though the sun was about, I think, a third the size of our sun, a third the mass, it just occurred to me that the tidal forces would be gargantuan, and I tried to do a calculation and I came up with like 240 times the tidal forces that we experience from the sun-moon system. And I would think that would almost preclude life on the planet. I mean, how big would the tides be on a planet with tides 240 times bigger than we experience?

PG: Well, you're definitely looking at a system where it very rapidly became tidally locked to the star. So just as we see the same side of the moon all the time, within a very short period of time, and I haven't actually done that calculation yet, Gliese, if it hasn't already, it will be locked to its sun. This will help. Without the rotation, the planet can stay contorted in a systematic way. But there's the other issue of it can actually raise tides within the star at a certain level. This is a small planet, so it's not going to be doing anything too terrible. But when you get the extremely large, hot Jupiters very close to their central stars, the stars and the planets are going around at different rates, and you can end up raising tides in the stars that affect how the stars' convection layers work and other sorts of neat things.

B: Wow.

S: Wow, that's neat.

B: I didn't think of that.

S: It seems that so far we're still mainly finding relatively large planets, so this is the smallest one so far, but they're all pretty close to their stars. And that's an artifact of the techniques that we're using, correct?

PG: It's 100% an artifact. We don't yet have the technology to find the smaller planets at Earth-like distances away from sun-like stars. Darwin will get there.

S: And when's that going up?

PG: I believe 2012, 2013 was when it was slated for. It's not in the too distant future.

S: Okay.

PG: It's a partnership. Corot is already up and has already found its first transiting planet.

S: So five or six years from now, we could start finding a lot of truly Earth-like planets.

PG: It's a goal.

FC: There's going to be a handful, yeah, of missions coming out between now and then as well. There's the SIM planet quest. Oh, I don't have all of them in my head. But there's probably about three or four missions between now and then, as well as the James Webb telescope, which we'll be able to participate in that.

B: Now, these are all satellites, right?

PG: The one exception is now that we know that little tiny stars, the red dwarfs, have planets going around them, the HARPS, extremely high-resolution spectroscope down in La Salle, Chile, it's on a one-point-something meter telescope run by the European Southern Observatories. It's capable of finding these Earth-sized planets around small stars. This is the neat exception is, if you make the star small enough, you can start seeing small planets at reasonable distances.

S: Well, Fraser and Pamela, it was wonderful having you on The Skeptic's Guide. It's really interesting talking to you about all these topics.

B: Thank you.

FC: Our pleasure. Any time.

S: Yeah, I mean, astronomy is a great topic. It's definitely, like, one of my favorite sciences outside of my own specialty. There's just so much astronomy news going on. There's so much discovery going on with really pretty pictures. So it's fun. It's always fun.

FC: That's the advantage. That's what makes it so easy. Yeah, it's great.

S: So there's definitely a niche for podcasts like yours, like Astronomy Cast, and I think it's you doing a great job of making science accessible, fun, and cool and bringing it to the masses, and that's what we're all about, right?

FC: Thank you very much.

PG: Oh, thank you.

S: And we'd love to have you guys back on in the future.

PG: Oh, of course.

FC: Yeah, well, maybe you can give me a hand with the astrology and UFO shows.

S: Absolutely. All right, guys, take care.

PG: It's our pleasure.

Science or Fiction (1:02:14)

Question #1: A new home buyer discovered the house's former owner mummified on the couch. Question #2: Molecular biologists have created a method for converting protein sequences into original musical compositions. Question #3: Neuroscientists have successfully induced artificial memories in a mammalian brain.

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

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts. Two are genuine and one is fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics and you at home to tell me which one is the fake. Is everyone ready?

E: Two. Oh, yes.

P: Yes.

S: All right. Number one, a new home buyer discovered the house's former owner mummified on the couch when they first went into their new home. Number two, molecular biologists have created a method for converting protein sequences into original musical compositions. And item number three, neuroscientists have successfully induced artificial memories in a mammalian brain. Jay, why don't you go first?

J: Okay, so we got the first one you mentioned was that a house was bought and there was a corpse in the house.

S: Not just a corpse, a mummy.

J: There was a mummy. What country was this in?

S: I didn't say.

J: Can you tell me?

S: Why?

E: Egypt.

J: I'll tell you why, because I know probably in countries like the United States and Canada and parts of Europe, the home inspections are required. And if it happened, say, in Africa, where I don't think...

S: Okay, fair enough, fair enough. This one happened in, oh, let's say, Spain.

J: It sucks. All right, moving on to the second one, the protein sequence into music, sure, some bozo would do that, of course, and it's probably pretty cool and I'm surprised that I don't remember reading anything about that.

S: Oh, you're getting surprised now when you don't recognize these. Okay, a little cocky there, Jay. How did that one get by me?

J: I don't think we could do that yet. That seems too... I don't like that one. I don't like the first one and the last one. The artificial memories, I don't think they could do it.

S: So the artificial memories is fake. Okay, Evan?

E: I'm going to agree with Jay that neuroscientists have successfully induced artificial memories in a mammalian brain and that is fiction.

S: All righty. Bob?

B: Let's see. A molecular biologist converted protein sequences into original music compositions. That sounds doable. Let's see. Inducing artificial memories. I'm going to kind of go with that one. So one, I'm going to go with the one that is false. As cool as it might seem, finding the owner of your house mummified, the previous owner mummified, I just can't see how that would slip by everybody. That seems least likely.

S: Okay.

B: So I'm going to go with that.

S: Okay, Rebecca?

R: I disagree. Couch mummies exist. I'm sure of it. Because of all those people they find like in their homes with big stacks of newspaper and the cats nibbling away at their bodies. So a couch mummy is totally within the realm of possibility. Protein music, that just sounds awesome. So I'm going to say that that is a fact. Neuroscientists inducing artificial memories. I did see that before, but I'm pretty sure that that was an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie. So I'm going to say that that's fiction.

J: Yeah. That's sci-fi.

S: Okay. Perry?

P: The first one about the mummified thing doesn't sound right. You need like a pack of Egyptians or something to do that. You can't just... If you just croak on the couch, you don't become a mummy.

J: Evan, I just realized I don't have an accent or a funny voice for an Egyptian.

P: You got to do that. The second one sounds fine.

B: That's a good point, Perry.

P: The second one is about protein sequences in music. That sounds fine. And the third one, neuroscience as a facility to induce memories. That one's pretty tough, but memories are in there. You can get at them. You could change them. You bang your head. I think that one's okay. I'm going to go with number one. The mummies.

S: Couch mummy.

R: Couch mummy.

S: Okay. So you all agree that molecular biologists have created a method for converting protein sequences into original musical compositions. I'll agree that that is science. And that is science.

E: Yay, science.

J: Yay.

P: That's so nerdy.

S: Yeah, it's so nerdy. What they basically did was create a scheme for translating the 20 amino acids that make up a protein into each amino acid has a note. So that means every protein would be a 20-note score, essentially. This was done at UCLA, the UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. They say every protein will have its unique auditory signature because every protein has a unique sequence. You can hear the sequence of the protein. And they actually did this for more than just whimsical or musical reasons. They think that it may help them identify patterns in the protein sequences because you might be able to hear the patterns. Your brain might be able to recognize and decipher those temporal patterns from hearing the notes. And it might be easier to recognize than, say, visually representing the amino acids.

B: Plus, you can always say my proteins sound better than your proteins.

S: This research was done by Rai Takahashi. He says, we assigned a chord to each amino acid.We want to see if we can hear patterns within the music as opposed to looking at the letters of the amino acids or protein sequence. So, very interesting.

R: And then they went to bars and asked beautiful women if they could make music together.

S: Right, right.

P: Let me take a look at your protein, baby.

E: Those UCLA students. They're a wacky bunch.

J: Hey, Perry, you see the protein on that brush?

S: Now, Bob and Perry, you both think that the couch mummy is fiction.

P: I believe, unfortunately, yes.

R: Couch mummy lives.

S: And this one is science.

R: Couch mummy lives.

S: There's a couch mummy. Homebuyer finds modern mummy on couch. Now, Perry, ordinarily, you'd be correct. But there are some differences in the conditions. So, basically, what happened is this poor old woman stopped sending in her rent checks or her, not rent checks, her mortgage payments.

J: So, they killed her.

S: So, eventually, she she forfeited her mortgage and the bank sold it off. It's like now several years later.

R: Oh, that's sad.

S: The woman was reported missing. Apparently, no one looked in her home.

E: Or they did and they said, oh, my God, there's a mummy in there. We can't go in there.

J: Steve, what about the smell?

R: Yeah, really.

S: This was explained away as, so, Rosa's mayor, Carl Paramo, told the newspaper El Mundo that it was normal that no one missed the woman because in housing developments like this one, people are not minding other people's business.

B: Or their stages, apparently.

S: When the new owner walked into the home, he found her mummified sitting on the couch. Now, the speculation is because this development is quite near the ocean, that the heavy salt air contributed to this mummification, this natural mummification process.

E: So, she wasn't wrapped in something? Her skin became, like, a texture to it?

R: No, her brains weren't pulled through her nose.

S: She got so, I guess, infused with the salt from the ocean air that her flesh didn't decay.

J: Was she smiling?

R: What?

P: She pulled a Jerry Falwell. She just dropped dead in the middle of her situation.

B: I think there's a rumor that her TV was set to the same channel that the video was.

S: The coroner's estimating that her remains were there since 2001.

E: Wow.

J: Oh, my God.

E: Maybe that's why nobody smoked.

S: That's pretty cool, huh?

J: That's terrible.

E: Then maybe it prevented it from giving off its horrible odors that it otherwise would have.

S: Right, it would not have decayed as much. It would not have stank.

J: Rebecca, let's take a death pact with each other right now.

R: No, Jay, I'm not going to marry you if we're not both dead by 40.

J: Even in that moment of death, it's a death proposal.

R: Oh, then yes, I will kill you if you're not dead by 40.

J: Thank you. No, you know what I'm talking about.

P: You have to get your head frozen, Rebecca.

S: Jay's going to get his head frozen, then we can mummify the rest of his body.So when they reanimate you, Jay, you'll have your mummified body there.

J: Oh, my God.

R: That would be creepy.

E: I remember touching that.

S: All right, which means that neuroscientists have successfully induced artificial memories in a mammalian brain is fiction.

E: That's right. There is no such thing as a mammalian brain.

B: I read about that. You must have tweaked it.

S: Yes, I did tweak it. So what really happened was neuroscientists have successfully imaged the anatomical changes that occur with memory formation. So yeah, that's it. So you knew it sounded familiar. So this is UC Irvine researchers reveal first images of brain changes associated with memory. So they actually show changes in the size and shape of the synapses, the connections between neurons that are involved with forming what's called long-term potentiation. So that's a long-term or permanent changes in the connection between neurons or brain cells that is the substrate of memory. And they think that this basic science information, of course, doesn't have any immediate applications, but this new understanding may lead to a better understanding of memory disorders like Alzheimer's disease, for example.

E: What's that now?

S: Or Huntington's disease is another one that was specifically mentioned. And maybe even disorders like ADHD. So anyway, the bottom line is the more we learn about exactly how the brain functions, the more we'll be able to think about and approach treating brain diseases. So pretty cool. The pictures are very cool.

P: Not nearly as cool as the mummified woman on the couch.

S: The couch mummy's cool, too.

P: That's much cooler.

S: By the way, guys, I was going to use another item for my science or fiction, but then one of our very helpful listeners emailed this piece to everybody. So I knew you all saw it. I was going to use the Fruit Flies Have Free Will.

E: Oh, yeah, that was cool.

S: Of course you're taking an email to everybody. So I couldn't use it.

B: No, I read it. I read it.

S: It was also kind of all over the place, so it wasn't a very stealthy item. But this is a cool one to talk about very quickly. This is researchers looking at fruit fly behavior and trying to model their behavior. Like if they're flying against a window, what does their flying pattern look like? And they basically determined that it's not repetitive. It's not random. There seems to be some purpose to it that is not random. And what they basically figured out is that somewhere in the fly's mini brain, there's a method for generating new behavior, like saying, here's a new flight pattern. Let's give this a try. So as a way of basically generating new behavior when they run into a roadblock so that they have a chance of, I guess, working their way out of it. And this is now where it gets to a little bit of speculation, but they're thinking that whatever this mechanism is for generating new internal behavior or thoughts may be how brains actually produce non-deterministic activity, basically free will. And we've talked about free will on the show with several people before. I know with Susan Blackmore, for example. And there are many of those who think that because of our brains are physical, matter, deterministic, that that precludes the notion of free will. So this is an interesting concept of would this ability to generate these novel thoughts or behavior that we could then run with, if you will, could that rescue the notion of biological free will? I don't know. I have to think about it some more. It's interesting.

R: Probably not. OK, next.

S: So anyway, congratulations to Jay, Evan, and Rebecca. Good work.

E: Thanks, Doc.

R: Thank you.

Skeptical Puzzle (1:15:02)

This Week's Puzzle

Remember me for memory is our finest art.
In Einstein's steady thoughts I shared his greatest mistake in my simple way.
I was worlds apart from those who took me.
Removed from water, through flame I was transfigured to stone.
Leaving the aborning odour of SETI

Submitted by Angus Dorby

Last Week's Puzzle
In a skeptical context, if I've been cut up and cured, what has happened to me?


Answer: Acupunctured
Winner: no one

S: Evan, can you please tell us last week's puzzle?

E: OK. In a skeptical context, if I've been cut up and cured, what has happened to me?

S: And the answer is?

E: The answer is that I have been, and this is a real word, I looked it up, acupunctured.

S: Acupunctured.

E: How do you know?

P: I thought it was bleeding.

E: No. No, it's not. And the main clue here, obviously, it's an anagram. Cut up and cured is an anagram for acupunctured.

S: For acupuncture.

R: Oh, you sneaky little bastard.

E: Yes. I know it was kind of short and quick, but it was just too cool when I discovered that cut up and cured was an anagram.

S: An anagram for acupuncture.

E: That was so cool.

S: Did anybody win?

E: No. Nobody won. I won, so put me.

S: Congratulations.

E: Thank you. Thank you.

S: That was quite a puzzler. So what is the puzzle for this week?

E: The puzzle for this week is the following. This week's puzzle comes from a listener. Angus Dorby submitted this puzzle for our pleasure, so I hope you all enjoy this. Remember me, for memory is our finest art. In Einstein's steady thoughts, I shared his greatest mistake in my simple way. I was worlds apart from those who took me. Removed from water, through flame, I was transfigured to metal, leaving the aborning odor of seti.

S: And seti is S-E-T-I.

E: Correct. Search for extraterrestrial intelligence.

S: Okay. Very interesting.

E: Go ahead and twist your brains around that one and send in your answers. Good luck, everyone.

S: Thank you, Evan.

E: Now, here's an update for everyone. Part of the reason, also, last week's puzzle was a little bit on the short side. I should be prepared to present next week's puzzle in rap.

R: Oh, my.

S: Next week.

E: Next week will be the big week. I predict that next week's episode will be our most listened-to episode to date for that very reason. So we'll see if my prediction comes true.

Quote of the Week (1:17:23)

'Great intellects are skeptical.'- Friedrich Nietzsche 1844-1900, German Philosopher

S: Well, Perry, last week you volunteered to take over the skeptical quote of the week.

P: Yes, actually, I fired Bob, so...

S: Yeah, so how's that going?

P: I really had no choice.

S: Here's your debut. What do you got for us?

P: Yes, I have a quote. It is as follows. "Great intellects are skeptical." Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844 to 1900, a German philosopher of some note.

E: Nietzsche.

E: Yeah, I think I heard of him.

R: Very complete of you, Perry. Thank you.

P: Great intellects are skeptical. It practically goes without saying.

Vote for Rebecca (1:17:57)

Vote for Rebeccahttp://www.publicradioquest.com/audio/user/2760

R: You know, before we sign off, I'd just like to plug a little thing I'm doing called the Public Radio Talent Quest. And it's basically American Idol, but for public radio to find a new host. So I'm hoping to win and to get a skeptical show on public radio.

S: That would be awesome.

R: And no, I will not quit the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

S: That would be terrible.

R: That would be terrible.

E: Steve, careful. Your range of emotion there is overwhelming.

R: Everyone can see how terrible it is by listening to the earlier part of this podcast when I was having technical difficulties and was sadly mute.

S: Yeah, you were just quiet.

R: Thank you. In order to get into the second round, I need people to listen to my two-minute introduction and give me a good rating. So we'll include the link on the notes page. Please click it and register. And it's very easy. And just give me five stars if you like it. And you can hopefully one day hear a good...

P: If you don't like it, you can go to hell.

R: Hopefully one day hear a good skeptical/sciency show on the radio.

E: I can't wait.

S: Good luck, Rebecca.

R: Thank you.

S: Well, thanks everyone again for joining me. Always a pleasure.

R: Thank you, Steve.

J: Thank you, Steve.

R: Good times.

P: It's th least you could do Steve.

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