SGU Episode 996

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SGU Episode 996
August 10th 2024
"Exploring the vibrant underwater world, where jellyfish gracefully glide above the ocean floor."
SGU 995                      SGU 997
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
"We must remember psychics and mediums have been plying their trade since the beginning of time, so if anything were to change, it may take generations of rational and critical work to settle the dark waters that are continually being swirled and muddied."
Mark Edward
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Download Podcast
Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

Voiceover:You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S:Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, August 7th, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria, Howdy, Jay Novella, Hey guys, and Evan Bernstein.

E:Good evening, everyone.

S:So, Bob, you know what week it is?

E:It's not called week. Perseids. Oh, yes.

C:Oh, my God. It's August.

S:No wonder we're not going to see them. Bob, since we broke the curse, maybe we'll see it this year. Yeah. We're going to have a friggin' hurricane this year.

E:Yeah.

S:Hitting right at the peak of the Perseids. So we got that going.

C:Didn't Bob tell you he sold his soul to the devil? You guys are never seeing anything celestial again.

B:That was the tradeoff. Remember that morning you woke up and there was a little pinprick on your finger? Yeah, it was a mosquito or a spider. Yeah, that's what we wanted you to think. What? So Steve, Hurricane, wait, we're supposed to go to, whatchamacallit on Sunday? Where you going? Whatchamacallit? Good Italian food. I mean, amazing Italian food. If that gets ruined, I will cry. And legit though, Steve, we said this before on the show, like Bob and I try to see them every year around my birthday and every single year it's been hazy. Literally like 15 years.

C:That's too bad. They are really, really spectacular.

B:Oh yeah, man. They could be a few a minute or more.

S:But you got a day on either side where you could still see decent. It's not a one-day event.

C:But that's also three days of staying up pretty late.

S:It's better if you stay up late, like stay up after midnight, look to the north.

C:Yeah, go out in the middle of the night. That's when it's amazing.

S:So I just had a fun event yesterday. I was invited to be the keynote speaker for Project Fibonacci, which is basically a STEM promotion conference for high school students. And so they asked me to speak in this year's theme was AI, so artificial intelligence. They asked me to speak about critical thinking and also artificial intelligence.

B:Cool. How'd it go?

S:It was great. Yeah, it was good.

B:What did you talk about?

S:I talked about critical thinking. I always iterate my talks, like I never give the exact same talk twice, which is crazy, I just make more work for myself, but I'm always talking to a slightly different audience, you know what I mean? And plus, things change all the time. So I framed this one as how to know what's really real, get that phrase, in the age of misinformation, right? So it was all about how to control your access to information and Don't let other people decide what information you see. We talk about all the ways in which information is curated, whether using algorithms or AI or whatever, and then of course all the critical thinking and media savvy and scientific literacy tools that you need to use in order to be able to evaluate sources of information and the quality of information, etc. A lot of skepticism 101, but just sort of packaged around that theme.

Voiceover:Nice.

S:What was your AI angle? Just talking about how AI influences the whole thing, right? That you could generate massive amounts of fake information, deepfakes. The internet is increasingly bots talking to other bots, that whole thing. I showed them a few photos and had them guess if they were real or fake. They basically got them all wrong because I chose them specifically to be a little bit deceptive.

C:Like you chose real looking fake pictures and fake looking real pictures.

S:Yes, exactly. Love it. Yeah, they fell for it. All right, so we do have to start with a little bit of sad news.

Special Segment (03:59)

Mark Edward None

S:Evan, you told us about this. You heard first our friend Mark Edward passed away last week.

E:Yeah, we were really sorry to hear about this. It was this past Sunday. I read about it in Facebook posts. They were pouring in from skeptics all around the world, and I reached out to Susan Gierbeck. She's well known for her work in spearheading the gorilla skeptics, and they do a really good job of keeping Wikipedia entries tidy. For the well-known people in the skeptic community, she was Mark's life partner, and she shared her thoughts on a Facebook post this past Monday. It's a long post, but I'll just read a couple things from it. She says, in my mind, when I thought I would have to make this post, I thought I would start by saying it's with a heavy heart to tell you that Mark Edward had died. But now I've been through this process the last few years and weeks, I can't say that. It was an amazing death and an amazing life we had together. Mark has had stage 4 prostate cancer for years and science has given him the most amazing quality of life. He never thought he would make it to age 73. He was shocked he would make it to 70 or even 65, and every birthday he was shocked. We knew the end would probably be 2024. We had talked about it and we were prepared. I thought it would be later in the year, but life's not always what we prepare for. His last few months have been incredible. He's been performing, teaching magic, making art, listening to music, spending time with his chosen family, our cats, and he got to see the sunflowers he planted grow taller than his house. Yeah, it's a long post. You can read it in its entirety over at Susan's Facebook page. It's a lovely tribute. Susan's a very lovely person. When she and I were exchanging messages on Facebook the other day, she reminded me that the day he died, it was August 4th, was International Psychic Day. One of many strange coincidences that happens throughout a person's life and even in their death as well. But why is that relevant? Well, if you knew Mark Edward, you would know about his career as a professional psychic, his undercover work that he did in the 1990s when he was manning A phone at a popular psychic telephone network. Boy, that was before the internet, wasn't it? Just before the internet was really becoming a thing. Okay, so he was a professional mentalist. He specialized in what he called magic of the mind. Spent over 35 years in world-class venues from high-end nightclubs and theaters to hundreds of private parties and corporate events. Traveled the world as a skeptical activist and used those skills, including his skills as a mentalist, to teach and promote critical thinking. A couple of little facts about Mark. In case you didn't know, he's only one of five specially chosen and trained psychic mediums in the history of Hollywood's famed Magic Castle. Cara, I know you're familiar with that. He performed 15 years of seance performances. Over there, I helped him perfect the role of spirit medium and psychic entertainer. He's written books on the subjects, obviously given lectures on how magic works, mentalism, and what psychic fraud is really all about. And of course, he's well sourced in so many different News items, news articles, networks have referred to him in all of his work, and just really a lifelong pursuit of this. We had the pleasure of sitting down with Mark way back, TAM7. And an interview, Episode 219, if you care to go back and listen. I did listen to it today. Steve, you were involved with a project directly with him as well.

S:Yeah, the pilot. He was on the pilot with me for The Skeptologists, but unfortunately never got picked up, never aired. But yeah, that's when I first met him. Yeah, it was during that pilot.

E:Yep. Yep. During that time. And of course, we had seen him at many Skeptic conferences after that, became very friendly with him, you know, obviously had him on the show, but you know, also got to know him a little bit better. I thought a couple of takeaways from our interview we did with him, a few things. When he was working at the phone bank, basically pretending to be a psychic, it was like a Lady Cleo kind of thing, even though it wasn't her network specifically. But this was in the 90s when this was a big thing, telephone psychics. It was a big moneymaker. So he was in there, but he kind of was an infiltrator in a way. He got in there, and he would try to help people out as much as possible. He observed it as poor man's therapy. And what he meant by that is that these were people who were so either desperate, looking for answers, or really couldn't afford in some ways to get the professional help that they otherwise needed. That people will turn to these kinds of psychics to help them make life decisions, make health decisions, make financial decisions. Wait, don't psychics cost more than therapists? At a fraction of a price, apparently.

C:Really? I thought psychics were pretty expensive.

S:Well, if they're deliberately trying to rip you off, they are.

E:Yeah, initially though, Cara, what happens is, like many things, they'll draw you in at a cheap rate, like an addict, right? They'll give away free drugs or whatever, and then eventually they'll turn it up. If they find out that you've got money, they'll start charging more for these things.

C:Right, which is not what therapists do. No, of course not.

E:Of course not. His book is called Psychic Blues. That's his book about his time in that industry. He did a seance with us when we interviewed him. I remember this. He had us all. We all put our hands on the table, turned the lights out, and he asked some silly questions, and did the old table thumping with his knee or his foot or something. And then when it was over, God, I laughed at my own stupid comment. He said, all right, did you feel anything? And I said, yeah, I felt other people's hands on the table. I don't know why. That just struck me as funny. We had a good laugh over that one. Yeah, Mark, very well known amongst among skeptics and will certainly be missed.

S:Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thank you, Evan. Let's move on with some news items.

News Item #1 - Moon As Deep Storage (10:22)

• Scientists devised an unexpected use for the moon. It's a vault. 

S:Let's move on with some news items. Jay, you're going to tell us about deep storage on the moon.

J:Yeah, this is like, you know, it's going to be expensive, but it seems like a no brainer, you know, after all these years of being a fan of everything that goes on in outer space. So scientists and researchers are now proposing that the moon's extremely cold. And, you know, it's in lots of places. It's permanently shadowed. This is a good fit to cryopreserve animal cells. And I suspect it would be the begin if we successfully, you know, create a facility to contain this, then it would be probably other things, too, like a seed bank and all that. This would be the ultimate version, like I said, of a seed vault or a seed bank. And this would safeguard Earth's biodiversity against all this stuff. Right. You know, the loose term is terrestrial threats. You know, we're talking horrible weather, natural, you know, natural disasters, climate change, wars, socioeconomic disruptions. You know, another nice catch all phrase there. But, you know, things are things are kind of scary around the globe right now. You know, things could get nice in 20 years and get scary again. And we just don't know what the future is. So it is a good idea. You know, God for freaking bid, we need it. But it's great that we would have this. So this idea is led by Mary Hadjdorn from the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute. They published their findings in the journal Bioscience. So let's get to some details here. So the Moon South Pole is of course their chosen location. This is because the temperatures are consistently at or below minus 196 degrees Celsius. That's minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, absolute zero is minus 273 degrees Celsius or minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit. But the moon's coldest temperature would serve very well as a natural cryogenic environment. It doesn't need to be absolute zero. It's definitely cold enough to have an incredibly long preservation effect at that temperature. It wouldn't require power. These are two huge things. The Moon would provide significantly more security and longevity than Earth's bio-repositories, and for obvious reasons like I said before. The Earth-bound ones need intensive management, constant electrical power, continuous supply of liquid nitrogen, You know, there's all these things together making them vulnerable to something as common as a significant bad weather event. You know, they're going to pick places, of course, where there aren't earthquakes, but earthquakes can literally happen anywhere. As a quick example, climate change, you know, tornadoes are becoming more common in freaking Connecticut in the United States for, you know, for a minor, you know, change in Earth's temperature. And like all of a sudden, the weather's going crazy. What's it going to be like in 30 years? You know, who knows? So this project aims to initially target the most at-risk species, but of course their ultimate hope here is to cryopreserve most animal species on Earth. They've done some sample testing and they've done these in space-like conditions on Earth to test out the concept to ensure viability before being stored on the Moon. This involves challenges like developing robust packaging to protect samples from space's extreme conditions, high levels of radiation, They want to make sure that they maintain the cryogenic temperatures during transport, which is a big deal. You know, I guess that they would bring them down to temperature on Earth, get them stable, you know, make sure everything is the way that they want, and then they would move them. There's also the idea that a lot of different countries are going to want the really high profile places on the moon, like all the really good places on the moon. Like this you know because I you know even though this would be a great place to store biology for a long term it's also a good place for people to live because of how stable it is and the temperatures is very very consistent. Additionally the impact of microgravity which Bob likes to talk a lot about that could be a problem right you don't want anything to like hit the facility so we'd have to have it underground you know probably in a lava tube or something like that. So the Lunar Biorepository, this would operate as a co-op with different nations. It would involve public and private funded scientific partners, you know, similar to the seed vault that's found in Norway. The ultimate goal here is to create this secure and sustainable solution that will preserve the Earth's biodiversity. And, you know, again, I think it's a great idea. It's going to be difficult. It's going to, you know, all all in. Think about what we'd have to do and all of the samples that would have to be taken from all of these different animals. I mean, think about the variety that we have. And, you know, things are going to get more extreme as weather changes. We're going to be losing a lot of a lot of creatures that live on the Earth. And we'd want to get there, get their samples and stored on Earth, probably before we would ship them up to the moon eventually. And it is a pipe dream right now because think about what I'm saying here. I'm talking about like, you know, a facility that's specifically for this. In some underground layer, deep enough underground to protect from radiation and all that stuff. So it's probably going to happen, but it's probably going to take a long time. But this is what scientists do. They plan way in advance because that's what you have to do, because everything has to be ready when you need it to be ready. They're focusing on preserving skin cells. That's because they can be easily cryopreserved and then they can later be transformed into stem cells, which could recreate the species. You know, there's other things that they could do, like they could preserve sperm and embryos, but that's way more complicated and just a much harder thing to pull off. So I guess the stem cell route is the one that they think is the most viable.

S:But that's not as complete, though, as doing if you had a fertilized egg. Yeah, or just even germline cells at all. Right, it's much better because, you know, a fertilized egg has the mitochondria, it has the cell structures in it. If you just have, like, a skin cell that you can turn into a stem cell, it's not quite as good, but at least you get the DNA.

J:Well, I don't agree with you at all, Steve, just because I'm a jerk. No, you're right, Steve. I did read a little bit about this, and what you said tracks what I read, but I guess the sperm and embryo thing is super hard to preserve for a long time.

C:Well, what are people using in frozen zoos on Earth?

J:I would imagine they're using sperm and embryos, but they can replenish, you know?

C:Yeah, that's true. I've only ever done a deep dive into frozen zoos for plants, which I think are much easier to cryopreserve.

S:Well, aren't we just – isn't that seeds?

C:No, not always.

S:Okay. So now we have the frozen seed bank up in – Yeah, we have the seed bank in Svalbard, yeah, yeah, in Norway.

C:But no, not always. And I think that, yeah, frozen zoos, they do exist on Earth, right? But I don't think we have every single species already catalogued and documented – or every known species, I should say.

J:No, I mean, that's a herculean effort. They're going to be testing more of this on Earth, and then they're going to bring some of the tests up to the space station just to see what happens. They're being very thorough about it, which is really smart, because one thing that they didn't think of could spoil it all, so they want to really cover all their bases here.

S:Did they talk at all, Jay, about would that be better than just putting it in orbit?

J:They did not mention that at all, Steve.

B:I did mention radiation problems, so I think it's the radiation problems in space where they had just another layer of expense and complication.

J:It is a more complete solution, Steve, because You know, I think anybody that that is thinking of low Earth or some type of orbit around the Earth, the problem is, is that experts are starting to get very concerned about what's going to happen to all the space junk and how it could, you know, it could cascade into a really big problem. So I would imagine that they'd want that solved before anyone would feel comfortable putting up a permanent thing in orbit that's just going to be there as a seed bank. I don't know, I'm guessing at that, but I wouldn't feel comfortable putting anything in low Earth orbit right now.

C:Yeah, I mean, is the assumption that anything in low Earth orbit is technically permanent?

S:Well, it'd have to be high enough that there's no drag from the atmosphere.

C:Right.

J:Yeah.

C:But then at that point, yeah, like just collisions are probably pretty... Yeah.

J:I mean, we have to be on the other side of this junk problem that we have in orbit around the Earth. And that's, that apparently is a long way off. All right. Thanks, Jay. Yep. Cara, tell us about the science of happiness.

News Item #2 - Pursuit of Happiness (19:20)

• Overthinking Happiness Can Lower Life Satisfaction - Neuroscience News 

J:Cara, tell us about the science of happiness.

C:There have been a lot of different studies that show different outcomes when we ask pretty basic questions about, should we be aiming for, you know, the pursuit of happiness? Should we be focusing on positive thinking? This is an area, a research area that's really fascinating to me, mostly because of my work in psycho-oncology. I hear a lot and probably Steve, I'm sure you run across this a lot in clinic as well. A lot of sort of, whether it's magical thinking, or whether it's actually thinking that probably lines up with some evidence that exists out there. There, there's a lot of power or strength put into the idea of thinking positively and that being linked to health outcomes, right? I mean, yeah, yeah. And so sometimes it's tough to talk to patients about this issue in an informed way, because the research evidence is kind of all over the place. There is some pretty strong evidence that shows that pessimists actually do sometimes have better health outcomes because they're more likely to like, go to the doctor. So what's going on? I need to go check this out. But a lot of the studies, and this is the first thing that's pointed out in this new study, tend to focus on the fact that when people value happiness, like the more that they value happiness, the less happy they are. And that seems like a weird paradox, right? And so it's like, why would that be the case? So a group of researchers published a new study in the journal Emotion called Unpacking the Pursuit of Happiness. I don't want to read the second half, it spoils the whole study. No, I'm going to. Being concerned about happiness, but not aspiring to happiness is linked with negative meta emotions and worse well being. So sort of what they contend is that a lot of the studies, a lot of the research in this area conflate different constructs. They don't drill down deep enough into what's actually being studied. And so they wanted to make a pretty firm distinction between those two constructs that are listed in the title, being concerned about happiness, or aspiring to happiness. Those are two very different things, even though they sound like they would overlap or like they would be the same thing. They recruited over 1800 participants, they divided it into three separate studies, and they asked individuals to judge their own happiness. And they did find that individuals who judge their own happiness reported across the board, like lower well being, increased negativity and more disappointment and positive events. And it's like, why would that happen? Well, it's not necessarily saying to yourself, I want to pursue happiness. Happiness is a goal of mine. I want to put it in the center of my life. I want to prioritize it. That actually is not in and of itself harmful. It's weirdly also not necessarily linked to positive outcomes. It seems to just be kind of neutral. The difference here is the self-reflection It's the measurement, it's the introspection that comes with having an expectation and that expectation not really always aligning with reality. So what the researchers basically found is that people who are constantly self-evaluating their happiness and going like, am I happy enough in this moment? Is this giving me the joy that I was hoping that I was expecting? They tend to experience lower life satisfaction They tend to experience, they rate higher on measures of depressive symptoms. They also found that people who focused on judging their happiness, right, or constantly evaluating it, felt more negative generally about positive events. So you take two groups of people, you show them a positive event, those who are kind of critically evaluating whether or not they're happy, they tend to say that that positive thing was less positive than individuals who aren't undergoing that sort of meta process. They also found that in general, and this is sort of the big takeaway from the study, it's the advice that the researchers sort of give, it's also the advice that I often give in psychotherapy, accepting your authentic emotions as they come, not judging them and saying, wait, this isn't how it should be, I need to change so that I can be more like what I should be, but saying, no, this is how I am. This is how I'm I think where things start to go awry is when we set ourselves up to a standard. And let's be honest, an impossible standard, that I'm going to be happy and joyful all the time, that I'm always going to be positive about every experience that I have. And it's very difficult to fulfill that standard. And it seems to be the case that when we're constantly reflecting and asking ourselves if we do, We notice that we're falling short of an unrealistic expectation. And when we fall short of an unrealistic expectation, our evaluation of that experience actually results in a negative kind of schema. So it's interesting in trying to be happy, we're often setting ourselves up for less happiness.

E:Is it like people are looking for the perfect happiness and because they can't achieve it, therefore… I think that's part of it.

C:I think that's part of it, yeah. I mean, it's a little hard to define, right, what is the perfect happiness. I think it's an expectation of consistency in mood, which is not appropriate, and affect, which is not appropriate. I think it's an expectation that somehow we have enough… that it's a failure of will if we have negative emotions. And that's not the case. It's a normal human experience to have negative emotions. And most of the emotions that we have are quite adaptive, anger, fear, frustration. Oftentimes, these signal to us things that are really necessary for our evolutionary survival. Of course, now we live in a world where we don't always have to require those things and we ruminate on them and we have a lot of negative kind of coping strategies that result in things like anxiety and depression backfiring and being chronic or being kind of misplaced. But the truth of the matter is, yeah, there is this sort of social pressure, this toxic positivity, this power of positive thinking, it very much links back, would you agree, Steve, to like the secret

S:Yeah, it's also like blaming people for things not going well or for not being happy. It's neurotic. It's a lot of neuroticism. It's like being anxious about being anxious. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. I also find that it's tricky because, as you say, you want to take positive steps in your life.

Voiceover:Yeah, and you want to maintain hope.

S:Yeah, absolutely. But the thing is, like, oftentimes, ironically, for events that should be super happy, people are upset and sad because it's like they set an impossible standard. It's like the bridezilla thing. It's like the wedding. The wedding is supposed to be the happiest day in your life. But if it doesn't go perfectly, Then it's a disaster and you're all ins and tears, right? Or you're on vacation and you want it to be the absolute best, and so you get really neurotic and anxious about having it be the perfect event rather than just going with the flow to some extent. And there's a happy medium in there. You don't want to be too passive. You want to plan to get the most out of things, but be okay with whatever happens, you know?

C:It's, you know, a strategy that I often use in therapy with patients that I work with with cancer is when they're dealing with things like scansiety, which is a very common experience, right? You're going to go in for an MRI, or you're going to go in for a blood test, and it's going to tell you where your tumor markers are. Have they shrunk? Have they grown? Have they stayed the same? It's Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Their day in and out, hoping for a positive outcome is a good thing. But constantly self reflecting and asking yourself, am I happy enough? Am I happy enough? Am I happy enough? That's not a good thing. And it seems to be that this drills down a little bit deeper into the actual processes that underlie where things fall apart. It's not as easy as saying positive thinking is bad or positive thinking is good. It's what are we doing along the way? And what components of it are beneficial? What components of it can be detrimental? It's interesting.

S:All right. Thank you, Cara.

News Item #3 - Measuring Blood Pressure (29:06)

• Resonance sonomanometry for noninvasive, continuous monitoring of blood pressure 

S:Thank you, Cara. Guys, what do you know about measuring blood pressure? This is not something that I don't think we've ever talked about on the show before.

E:I don't think we've talked about it.

B:No.

E:You take one of those things, you wrap it around your arm, you squeeze the air thing.

B:It's called a sphygmomanometer. I know that there's invasive and non-invasive, which I learned today.

S:Well, when was the first time somebody measured blood pressure? The day I was born, no? No, no, I'm talking about historically. You mean in history?

C:Well, they had to know what it was in order to measure it, right? Or did they not?

S:They had to have some concept that there was pressure inside the arteries. In the vessels. And that it was important.

E:Oh, then it was probably like 18.

U:1733.

C:Wow, that's interesting. And was it just based on listening?

S:Nope. No, it was actual, it was an estimation of blood pressure. What they did, this is Sir Stephen Hales. He introduced a brass pipe into a horse's leg artery, connected to a glass column, and measured how high the blood rose. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, It took about a hundred years though before the next advance. In 1828, that was the first time a mercury manometer was used to actually produce a quantifiable measurement of blood pressure. So that was actually the invasive measurement of blood pressure preceded the non-invasive measurement of blood pressure. And then you could actually also connect that to what was called a kymograph in order to produce a tracing of blood pressure so you could follow it over time. And then in 1855 was the first time somebody was able to estimate blood pressure non-invasively by compressing the artery, using how much pressure did it take to compress the artery, basically, to stop the blood from flowing. And this is what led to the sigmoidometer. And by 1901, Dr. Von Recklenhausen added the broad inflatable arm cuff. So you basically had modern blood pressure measurement in the early 1900s. 1901, you had the sigmoid, and then a few years later, they figured out how to measure the diastolic pressure, the lower number, right? So it wasn't just We have the higher number when the artery was totally obliterated. You can listen to the blood vessel, to the sounds of blood flowing, and also detect the lower number, the diastolic blood pressure. By 1905, you basically had modern, both invasive and non-invasive blood pressure monitoring, and little has changed in the last 120 years.

C:By 1905, then, did we also have a good understanding that blood pressure was a good indicator of heart health?

S:Yes. OK. Yeah, and it became pretty standard. And also, low blood pressure is an indication of severe trauma or blood loss or whatever, or heart failure. So yeah, obviously, there's a lot to learn at that point in time. But yes, the basic concept of this is important for measuring cardiac function was there. So it's interesting that, you know, 120 years, not much really has changed in terms of measuring blood pressure. We're still using cuffs and tubes, putting it into the artery, right? Well, this leads me to the news item that I'm going to talk about today, a new method for the non-invasive measurement of blood pressure. And what do you think they use? What is the basic technology, if you had to guess, if you didn't read the article?

C:Your iPhone.

S:No.

E:Phrenology. No, it's not phrenology. Tricorder.

S:They use a noose. All right, so no serious, no serious guesses. They use ultrasound, right? So it's based on sound waves. Don't they use ultrasound also to image vessels when they're having a hard time getting a... So what they're doing is using, first of all, they use what they call acoustic stimulation sound waves, right, paired with ultrasound imaging. So they're essentially looking at the resonance properties of the artery. And then they had to figure out the physics of everything. I'm not going to get into these weeds, but they figured out the physics of You know, how does the artery respond to the acoustic stimulation as measured by the ultrasound imaging? And then you can calculate from that a real-time blood pressure inside that artery. And they say that it creates an artery agnostic, which means it can work on any artery, and demographic agnostic, which means it can work on anybody. Calibration-free, it does not have to be constantly recalibrated like some methods, non-invasive way of continuous blood pressure monitoring. So it's not just a one-time blood pressure, it's a continuous trace of blood pressure, which is very useful. That's like if you're in the intensive care unit, or even just like in a step-down unit, not on a regular floor, what we call a floor bed in the hospital, because we don't have anything to monitor it.

J:Steve, how long does it usually take to get a blood pressure reading from someone?

S:Well, if you're just doing a non-invasive blood pressure cuff reading, you can get it in a minute, right? Yeah, but you have to just do it over and over and over. But that's a one-time blood pressure.

B:And it hurts sometimes.

S:Yeah, so on the floor, we would have the automatic cuff now, and every minute or two minutes, it'll do another pressure, and if you need it that frequently.

C:But in the ICU, you can be on continuous monitoring.

S:On the ICU, you can have an arterial line, right? That's right, yeah. What we call an A-line, arterial line, and then you hook that up to a monitor, and you can have a continuous blood pressure monitoring that way.

C:It's more accurate, right?

S:It's more accurate, it's more continuous, but it does have to be calibrated, and it is only in arteries that you could stick a catheter into.

C:Yeah, it's invasive.

S:It's invasive, and it's not artery-agnostic, as they say. So this, they say, with this method is non-invasive and it's better and it could be any artery.

C:Yeah, that's really cool.

S:Which is sometimes very important because sometimes you don't just need to know the systemic blood pressure, like what the overall blood pressure is. You might want to know what the blood pressure is of a specific artery. Yeah, you might want to know how's their blood pressure in their foot. Thanks for joining us today. Seems really great.

C:I think that would be awesome because then you might even be able to see it on the regular floor. I mean, if it got cheap enough for continuous monitoring. I'll tell you one of my favorite things to do in the ICU that I can't do when I'm rounding in or when I'm seeing patients on the main floor is when we do like really intense relaxation techniques like deep belly breathing or Thank you so much for joining us. Because like for the most part, right, and I like and there's some things I like about if something's not broken, why would you fix it? Exactly. A lot of technology is solving problems that don't exist, which is kind of annoying. But this is cool because there is a real use for it.

S:Yeah, but this is something that was needed a non-invasive way to continuously measure blood pressure. It's not like we didn't know that we had this need. It was just no one's been able to fill it before. All right, Bob, tell us about the first complex life to evolve on Earth.

News Item #4 - First complex Life on Earth (37:26)

• Complex life on Earth began around 1.5 billion years earlier than thought, study claims 

S:All right, Bob, tell us about the first complex life to evolve on Earth.

B:2.1 billion years ago. And so what leads these researchers to believe that? What could make them believe that? And what happened to these proposed first Earth animals? The paper was published in the journal Precambrian Research. Sounds like a cool journal I'd like to check out. Its lead author is Dr. Ernest Chu-Fru at Cardiff University School of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The study's name So what a fascinating possibility this paper presents. But we need to start at the beginning, as usual. So when did life and complex life begin on Earth according to the scientific consensus? Fossil evidence put the earliest bacteria-like life around three and a half to potentially over 4.1 billion years ago. And that's just the first potential evidence that we found. I mean, clearly it started and didn't fossilize in any way.

C:That's pretty fast.

B:It's like after Earth. Yeah, we're basically learning as soon as Earth cooled enough, life just kind of like leaped into existence. But the next stage took a little longer. The first evidence of complex multicellular life appears to have begun 635 million years ago. That's pretty much the consensus. So that was a hell of a long time between the two, right? So single-celled life took 2.8 to 3.7 billion years for these cells to hook up for the most consequential orgy the Earth has ever seen. So why did it take so long? And there's lots of reasons for that. One reason it took so long is that the proper nutrients just were not available. Thank you for joining us today. Phosphorus is absolutely critical to life on Earth. Phosphorus is a key ingredient in DNA and RNA. It was also probably critical to the prebiotic chemistry that eventually led to life on Earth. Phosphorus is also the P in ATP, adenosine triphosphate. That's the energy currency for all Earth life. If you want to move, you're going to need some ATP. Bottom line, full stop right there. So yeah, phosphorus is pretty important stuff. So if you track the rise of bioavailable oxygen and phosphorus in Earth's history, you find a huge increase 635 million years ago. And that coincides, obviously, with the first solid evidence of multicellular life on Earth. So it's very easy to make that connection like, oh, look, bioavailable oxygen and phosphorus, So why would anyone think that complex life began earlier than that? And I'll cut to the chase, because these researchers claim that there was an earlier localized spike of available oxygen and phosphorus. But that's getting ahead of myself a little bit. This all starts here in the Franceville Basin on the Atlantic coast of Central Africa, a continent that Cara loves, which contains unusual sedimentary rock. In this rock, they found these weird structures. They discovered this many years ago. I could not find the year these rocks were discovered, but the sense I get was 20, 30 years ago. The individual constructs within this rock were semi-spherical with thinner outer membranous edges. They're small, about seven centimeters in size. So it's actually hard to figure out what were these things. Was it alive? Was it never alive? What was it? And scientists go back and forth on what they think it was. So we don't know for sure precisely what these things were, but if you want to imagine them, You know what they totally remind me of. And Cara, I'm sure you remember the original series Star Trek episode, Operation Annihilate. Operation Annihilate. Now remember that one. Those weird kind of pancake shaped creatures that fly and they attack you and they attach to your back. And they drive and you kind of go like literally crazy when they're attached to you. And one lands on Spock. Remember those? Remember I created one? I created one. Yes, she remembers that. I created one for my Jim Kirk costume. I created one at a latex. It was really cool.

C:So when these rocks were discovered, researchers were like, I don't know if this is a fossil or not, but I know that whatever this is, there's something interesting in here that we need to investigate further.

B:Absolutely. One way or the other. And of course, one possibility is incredibly amazing if it really was some sort of life that existed that far in the past. But I mean, you'll understand a little bit better after this next little section here. So I'm going to go into detail. So there was a central body that was surrounded by radial structures. And other structures are described by scientists as convoluted tubes with a string of pearl shapes that ended in some flower-like shape. So some scientists even describe them as being reminiscent of slime mold and amoeba organisms. So something that these are true fossils created by single-celled or even multicellular creatures Some 2.1 billion years ago. And of course, that would be extraordinary. If that were true, oh my God, that would be Nobel Prizes and scientific craziness if it was that, if they found complex life that far away. But, you know, we really don't know. Others say that they're not fossils at all. They're pseudo fossils, they say, of inorganic pyrites. Some describe them as just these simple concretions, essentially hard masses created by precipitating minerals. Okay. And that's where this has stood for a number of years now. Some think that this could be some form of early life. Many think that this is not enough evidence, and it's probably something that's not organic. So without further evidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that these are more likely to be just complex geological structures formed in rock, and that's it. I mean, you can't really just say, oh, it was alive, without any more evidence. But this latest evidence, though, may force a bit of a rethink on this. Now, these researchers did a geochemical analysis of this sedimentary rock in that basin in Africa, and their inclusions are fascinating and pretty intense. They say that what happened in that area over two billion years ago, two continents collided, and the subsequent underwater volcanic activity was so unusual that it created this unique nutrient-rich laboratory That let evolution essentially experiment with biological life like it never has before. So that's kind of an overview of what their conclusion is. Geo-microbiologist Dr. Chi Fru said, we think that the underwater volcanoes which followed the collision further restricted and even cut off this section of water from the global ocean to create a nutrient-rich shallow marine inland sea. He continues, So they're proposing that this continental collision and volcanic activity over 2 billion years ago It formed a stable inland sea, which was nutrient enriched with phosphorus. The sea was like an oasis for photosynthetic bacteria. They just kind of hung out, sunbathing with their margaritas. Over time, this resulted in two critical things that complex life needed, oxygenated water and an abundance of phosphorus from the volcanism and tectonic activity. Those are the two exact things that I said earlier were critical to complex organisms, multicellular life. Exactly the two components, you know, that we think were critical for complex life 635 million years ago. And these researchers believe it happened first, potentially, in this localized area 2.1 billion years ago, appropriately enough in Africa, or what eventually became Africa. Frue then says, this would have provided sufficient energy to promote increase in body size and greater complex behavior observed in primitive simple animal-like life forms, such as those found in the fossils from this period. So, this wasn't just an oasis for bacteria, it was a nutrient-rich laboratory for genetic tinkering, potentially creating the first animal life on the Earth. Now, how fantastic would that be? I really hope that they get even more evidence for this because this would really be an amazing discovery. So, the next thing you might be wondering though is, well, why did this biological renaissance fail Assuming it even existed, of course. Now, there's no solid evidence for why, but perhaps, I think, and some people were saying that that oasis created by plate tectonics and volcanism was too isolated. It really was not pleasant on Earth, in most of the Earth all over, not for complex life anyway. It was the only place on Earth like it, probably. There was no new influx The Earth as a whole was still inimical to multicellular life, and that prevented this amazing evolutionary experiment from taking a foothold globally. That's what I think. In this study, they don't really talk about that extensively at all, but that seems pretty likely to me if this happened, that it's just something that potentially happened and then just couldn't spread elsewhere because it was just too isolated and the Earth was not a nice place for animals. So what probably happened was that they eventually ran out of resources and died out. How sad is that? To think about that, if that's what happened, how sad. You know, it's also not sad, because then we wouldn't exist if they took over back then. But then it's kind of sad again, because imagine... Imagine what that life could have been like here on Earth now with literally 3 billion more years of evolution under our belts. I mean, what a thought, what life, the diversity of life and what kind of life that may have evolved with With billions of more years of evolutionary tinkering, incredible to conceive. So really interesting. How fascinating to think that over two billion years ago, the Earth might have had its first real try at complex life, multicellular life, and it worked for millennia, potentially. And then eventually, like, ah, sorry, can't finish this. And it just kind of like, they all died out.

S:The false start.

B:False start, and finally, the environment around most of the Earth, or much of the Earth, the nutrients were all there that were needed, and all the other factors. Everything was right now for the second try at complex life, and it worked, which is pretty awesome. But I hope this is true. It might not be. There's a lot of interesting speculation here, but there's no home run, like, oh boy, they really did it. The evidence is interesting and compelling, but it's not ironclad and a done deal at all. But I hope they investigate this even further, because that would be pretty amazing.

S:All right. Thanks, Bob. Evan, give us an update on life on Venus.

News Item #5 - Life on Venus (49:34)

• Life on Venus? New Discovery Deepens Controversy Over Possible Signs of Life in Planet’s Atmosphere - The Debrief 

S:Evan, give us an update on life on Venus.

E:Back in September of 2020, I reported on a news item concerning the planet Venus and how there could be signatures of life. Back in June of 2017, using the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii along with the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile, Dr. Jane Greaves and her team at Cardiff University were studying the atmosphere of Venus and they discovered something amazing. As we know, we've talked about this many times on the show, specific molecules will absorb light coming through the clouds of an atmosphere of a planet at different characteristic wavelengths. Through this process, Dr. Greaves and her team detected phosphine, which was a very unexpected result. Why unexpected? Because the scientific understanding of phosphine here on Earth is that it's made only one of two ways. Number one, artificially by human technology. Number two, naturally by anaerobic bacteria, generally in things like rotting corpses, fecal matter, and worms. Yuck. Phosphine is comprised of one atom of phosphorus, topping a base of three hydrogen atoms. The chemical formula is pH 3. Phosphine gas is described by one scientist as, quote, not very pleasant. Pure phosphine is odorless, but technical grade samples smell like rotting fish, is toxic, and is spontaneously flammable. The team's announcement received considerable media attention at the time and led to a controversy that accumulated in rebukes From some in the scientific community. Arguably the sharpest criticism was leveled by the organizing committee of the International Astronomical Union, the IAU, their commission on astrobiology. They questioned the ethics of Greaves and her team over the manner in which the discovery was revealed. Part of their argument was that the data that they obtained was very noisy and there were these various algorithms that they used to reduce the data. So there's some question as to the reliability of that data that was ultimately pulled out of the signals. But the other thing they did is they came out and said, quote, it's an ethical duty for any scientist to communicate with the media and the public with great scientific rigor and to be careful not to overstate any interpretation which will be They want to remind everyone that the relevant researchers need to understand how the press and the media behave before communicating with them. So they kind of, you know, give them the ruler on the back of the hand, you know, wrap the knuckles in a way saying, you know, you didn't handle this right and you got to be careful about, you know, how the press and the media and everything is going to take this. And so then there was backlash to that. Right where the IAU came under scrutiny for saying that you guys went too far kind of with your criticism in this regard. So it kind of all became kind of a messy thing and kind of in its own way. So what happened is they retracted their statement, the IAU, and they kind of replaced it with this. They said that the observed PH3 feature through the telescope data can be fully explained employing plausible mesospheric sulfur dioxide abundances, and the identification of PH3 with the other telescope that they used, the one out of Chile, should be considered invalid due to severe baseline calibration issues. Okay, so they pulled back their criticism about the media, and they replaced it with something that was more technical, basically saying that, here are the reasons why you shouldn't have brought it out in this way, or said, hey, there's a life signature, a possible life signature, even though they did. They said in their paper, when this first came out, they said, even if confirmed, we emphasize that the detection of PH3 is not robust evidence for life, only for anomalous and unexplained chemistry. So they feel that they hedged it enough, you know, Dr. Greaves and her team. So that was the controversy at the time, but there's an update now. Four years later, Venus and the data are getting another look, both in observation of prior records and a collection of new and improved data. Greaves and her colleagues presented fresh evidence for an upcoming scientific paper at this year's Royal Astronomical Society meeting in England. New observations potentially strengthen the past findings, hinting at the presence of biosignatures that, if confirmed, could mean life forms are able to thrive in the planet's harsh environment. Greaves and her team succeeded in detecting phosphine again in deeper portions of the planet's atmosphere during observations once again made with the James Clerk Maxwell telescope, which had a new receiver installed in these past years on the telescope. And now they have collected as much as 140 times more data than previous observation yielded. And they include the additional detections of what phosphine. Not only that, there's new evidence showing the presence of ammonia, which is another gas that, say, is the result of, well, on Earth at least, its biological activity. One scientist said that the presence of ammonia on Venus, if it can be confirmed, is more significant even than the discovery of the phosphine. Greaves in an interview with CNN said, Also, there are many significant unknowns about the Venusian surface and atmosphere. Even a gold standard discovery of two bio-associated molecules is not evidence that life is extant. It's saying it's phosphine. It's saying it's ammonia. We need more data, and there will be attempts, and there will be opportunities for more data. They say there are some limitations with these Earth ground-based observations, but in the future, we're going to have stuff that is not ground-based. NASA's deep atmosphere Venus investigation of noble gases, chemistry, and imaging. Which is D-A-V-I-N-C-I, the DAVINCI mission. It will dispatch a probe into Venus's harsh environment and measure its atmosphere. This happens in 2029. It's on schedule for that. Also, the European Space Agency's Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is going to pass close to Venus next year. It's equipped with instruments that could potentially obtain useful data that may complement the finding by Dr. Greaves and her colleagues. So, Venus He's back in the news again, and it's a continuing story, an evolving story. It's by no means dead.

S:I do like how it showcases the scientific process here, and how scientists at least try to be very circumspect and very humble in their presentation of their data. And even when they color just a little bit out of the lines, as you said, they get wrapped on the knuckles. Even if it was a little heavy-handed, it's still like, you know, we have to be very careful how we communicate to the public. You can't throw out the word Thanks for watching! But at the same time, this is genuinely exciting, although we don't know what it means, and it may mean nothing, or it may just be, oh yeah, there's some interesting chemistry happening on Venus, but there's nothing to do with life.

E:Right.

S:So we have to just, yeah, just wait for more evidence.

E:Well, no, in another four or five years, we'll probably have another update on this one.

S:Yep, yep, yep, yep. All right, thanks, Evan.

E:Thanks.

S:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (57:56)

S:All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

S:All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

J:Now, if you remember, I told you that the the rhythm of the noise is meaningless.

Voiceover:Mm hmm.

J:I got a ton of guesses on this one. This week, I'm mostly pick people like in the order that they come in just to be fair, like if someone answers before somebody else, I give them a little higher priority. But I do sometimes pick out, you know, ones that came in days later if they're really interesting. So this person, Hunter Richards, wrote in and said, I'm not a gun person by any stretch, but this sounds like an airsoft rifle being fired. He says he can hear birds in the background. So he thinks that it's basically at target range. So I did not hear birds in the background. And if they are there, that's just this is just another example of me losing my hearing because I did not hear anything in the background there. Not a correct answer, but I think I've heard airsoft rifles being fired and there is a similarity there, so it was a good guess. Another listener named Candice Denison wrote in and Candice said longtime listener, first time guesser, totally sounds like the recoil of water weapons. You know, that squeaky sound it makes after shooting and it's sucking in more water. I have extensively used water weapons, and yeah, they make different kinds of noises. I could see one making a similar noise to that. Not correct, but not a horrible guess. Keely Hill writes in, hi, Jay. My guess this week's noisy is someone shooting a five gallon metal jar with a paintball gun. Now, I've done very similar things to that, and I've heard similar sounds to that. And again, another good guess, but not correct. Alan Champion writes in, is that a pogo stick? And there's a big spring in a pogo stick so they could make a weird noise like that. Not correct. I have two people I'd like to mention as the winner for this week. The first person that wrote in, Cameron Cherry, said, Why oh why did I wait so long to listen to today's episode when it's one of the two times I've been certain of exactly who that noise is? I don't know why this person is complaining because this is me because they were the first one to answer. But oh well, I'm sure many people will get this one, but it's the sound you hear when you clap your hands in front of the famous Chichen Itza temple in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. So what the local tour guides do is they'll tell you a story that it was Specifically engineered to make that sound. It's like the sound of a local bird call and all that. I don't know how verified that is or not, but that is the sound. If you clap your hands, the sound is reflected off of the stepped pyramid temple that they have there. And it makes this sound. And I was there, actually. And I heard that sound in person, by the way. And it is real. Here it is. So that's the guy clapping and that's the second sound. The sharper sound is the echo. Very cool. Another person that wrote in named Dorothy Bullard said she's a long time listener. This week's noisy sounds like the clap echo effect of the Chichen Itza pyramid. Yeah, so she was correct as well. Had two correct guesses this week. So thank you guys for that. That was a lot of fun. That's a really cool place to visit. And if you ever are in that location, I swam in an underground, what would you call this? It was like a giant cavern that had incredible spring water in it that you could you could pay to go swim in. And I just I remember doing that and thinking it was amazing. So just a very cool part of the country to visit. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Jonathan Sadler. Take a listen. If you guys think you know what this week's Noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN at the Skeptic's Guide dot org. So this is your last chance this week as you hear this, if you're listening to it, you know, as of like, this will come out what on a 10th, Steve?

S:This episode we're recording right now?

J:Yeah.

S:Yeah, 10th. 10th, yes.

J:So, if you're listening to this on the 10th and before the 17th and 18th of August, you could still buy a ticket, well actually just the 17th, because the 18th is sold out. The 17th, we still have tickets available for the Extravaganza. That's the 2.30pm show on Saturday the 17th. If you want information on that, you can go to theskeptic'sguide.org. We're packing up. We're super excited, guys. We're on our way. Steve and I did our preliminary talk about swag today. Ian and I did all of our pre-tech packing and checklist and just going through everything, getting into extreme details now. Super excited. The SGU's 1000th episode. If you're a patron of the SGU, if you're a paying patron of the SGU, At the $5 level or higher, you will get a free live stream of the 1000th show as it happens, as it happens in real time. That's called a live stream, Cara. Have you ever heard of those?

C:Yeah, they're live, and they are streams that happen live, yes.

J:So two quick things, guys. We are coming up on our 1000th show. If you feel that the work that we do here at the SGU and the 20 year legacy that we have behind us, if you feel like that's valuable and you'd like to help us continue doing the work that we do, please consider becoming a patron. You can go to patreon.com forward slash Skeptic's Guide. I would like to thank everyone who's been listening to us even for a short amount of time. We really do appreciate everyone that puts the time in to listen to the show, and we really do hope that we're having an effect on some of your lives to help you think more clearly and get the resources you need to find out what the truth actually is, because the truth is out there, you just have to know how to look for it. Most importantly, we want people to lead loving and fulfilling lives. It's funny, this scientific pursuit of critical thinking has had a dramatic effect on my life. It's helped me become a happier person in my life. In so many ways, it's hard to describe. It's just an exercise in thinking that actually, in my experience, has helped me just become a much better version of who I am. And I really appreciate the fact that we've been doing this together, guys. And I really do look forward to the fact that we could have another 10 or 20 years ahead of us doing this. That'd be awesome.

S:I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

J:We're going to stop until we drop, right, Steve?

S:Don't stop until we drop. All right, thank you, Jay. Just one quick feedback before we go on to our interview. We do have a great interview with Forrest Valkai coming up. But first, during my news item last week, I was talking briefly about the differences between alternating current and direct current. Do you guys remember that? I do. The primary advantage of AC over DC is that you can step it up to high voltage and it has a much less loss when transmitted over long distances. But a lot of what we do with electricity, including solar panels and electric car batteries, is DC. And there have been some at least thinking about, I don't know if they're full proposals, but exploring the notion of what would happen if we had a DC infrastructure? We just went all DC. Would that integrate better with a world where we have most homes generating power with solar panels and driving EV cars? And I pointed out that the ability to transmit electricity long distances using DC has actually improved with modern technology, so that advantage of AC is not as stark as it used to be. I just threw that out there as sort of a thought experiment. Several electrical engineers emailed us to point out that there's another advantage of AC over DC, which may not be mitigated by recent advances in DC technology, or at least not sufficiently.

Emails (1:06:10)

S:Several electrical engineers emailed us to point out that there's another advantage of AC over DC, which may not be mitigated by recent advances in DC technology, or at least not sufficiently. And that is that it's easier to convert the voltage in AC. And that not only is when you're transmitting it to a residential home or whatever, but also to individual appliances. You can adjust the voltage to what the appliance needs much more easily. Then with DC current, so one engineer even speculated that even if we were starting from scratch today, we still might decide to go with an AC system for that reason. But yes, you can convert the voltage in DC, just that the equipment to do so is much bigger, and I guess more expensive. But I wonder how long that will be the case. If we've made so much advances in that, that's an assessment of the technology as it is today. I wonder if there were a concerted effort to design and build and advance a DC infrastructure, if that advantage of AC could also be overcome, or at least mitigated to the point that the advantages would be better. I don't know. It's interesting to think about. It was mainly just a way of talking about the differences between the two and the fact that the infrastructure that we're moving towards is we have an AC backbone, but we have DC power being generated by solar panels and DC power being stored in our EVs. And anyway, we'll be interested to see where it all goes. All right, well, let's go on with our interview. We are joined now by Forrest Valkai.

Interview with Forrest Valkai (1:08:11)

https://www.valkailabs.com/ S:We are joined now by Forrest Valkai. Forrest, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

US#00:Thank you so much for having me.

S:So you are a fellow science communicator and very active on social media. Tell us a little bit about what you do.

US#00:Yes, so I'm a biologist by training, got a handful of degrees in biology. I really love it because it's like the pinnacle of all science in my opinion. You know, they say like everything relates back to chemistry, but you have to have all of the sciences together in order to make biology happen, you know, and it just it gets me so geeked up and excited and I just want to share that with the world. I want to Thank you for joining us today. I've been doing it on the internet for four years. I was an informal science educator for about 10 years. Schools and summer camps and colleges and libraries and universities and whatever would hire me to come out and do classes, workshops, assemblies, whatever the case may be. I worked for a bunch of education companies doing that for a while.

B:Cool.

US#00:And then I kind of got to a point where I realized that I could make something better than what the companies were asking me to produce. And so, I started doing it on my own and I went back to school and actually earned my way into doing this on my own terms and in my own way. That's where the handle Renegade Science Teacher came from, which is something that I still use on TikTok is because I live in Oklahoma and I would get all sorts of heat For teaching things like evolution and the age of the Earth and climate change and other science things that people had questions about. And so I wanted to do it my way and I wanted to teach in a way that I knew would actually really make a serious impact for people and change their lives.

S:You're like the Jack Bauer of science communication.

US#00:Sure. Thanks for watching! Thanks for watching!

C:It has a voice, that's for sure. Oh, yeah. 2001 to 2010. Oh, absolutely. Oh, and then something else in 2014. Yeah.

S:Not that long ago.

C:Steve, 2001 is 23 years ago. Not that long ago.

E:Not 2014, it's only 10 years ago.

C:A decade.

E:This millennium, Napster was still a thing in 2001.

C:Have you guys seen those t-shirts that say, like, be patient with me? I'm from the 1900s. Yeah.

US#00:You want to listen to some turn of the century music, like Green Day?

E:I was just at the Green Day show two nights ago. How do you mention that?

US#00:They're still touring?

S:So Forrest, tell us a little bit about your science communication style. What is your philosophy of communicating?

US#00:So when we're talking about pedagogy, I really stick to, and I'm going to grossly oversimplify these, kind of like a positivism, progressivism, and critical approaches. So positivism being just generally The idea that there are facts to be known. There is an objective universe out there and like there's like some really, really, really cool stuff that you can go grab that isn't really so much open to interpretation. We can talk about what you do with the facts, but we can't talk about, you know, whether or not you agree with certain facts. Progressivism being more like question-based learning, audience-focused learning, like helping people to be brought into the conversation rather than talking at them. And then that leads to critical theory, which is generally just the idea that a person's social life, economic life, political life, gendered life, religious life, whatever, all different parts of a person Thank you for joining us. And how it has unique applications for you and your life right now, actually, today. It's not just something you read in a book. And also, with those approaches combined, the main thing that I'm trying to do is show people that science isn't some secret tome of knowledge on a high shelf that's only accessible to old white dudes with big white beards and long white coats, and that they have to earn their right to be able to access this. Science is all around you, all the time, right in front of you. And it's always going to be there. It always has been there. And all you have to do is learn how to read the writing on the world that you live in. And so trying to make it personal and make it real and make it accessible and make it fun is really my main goal. And I do that by being a generally weird person and just geeking out about things that get me out of bed in the morning.

B:You've been asked that question before, haven't you?

US#00:What is my teaching style all about? Well, my first degree was in education, so I got a little bit prepared for it, but not that much.

S:Good answer. Yeah, I hear a little bit of education speak in there in your answer. I do notice on your description of your approach is that you include skepticism in your science literacy. Tell us about that a little bit. Why do you think that's important?

US#00:It's important because it's quite important and the main reason is because it takes two seconds to get onto TikTok and look up body hacks or tell secrets that they don't want you to know and see some person talking about how when you eat Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for joining us today. How to critically think about things that are above your pay grade. And so you see this a lot. I remember one time, I think it was last year, there was this dude on TikTok who was claiming to be a health expert, who was talking about how no one should take antibiotics because antibiotics kill all cells in your body. And when you take antibiotics, you're more sick afterwards than when you started taking them. And his proof was that that's where fevers and stuff come from and like those all these symptoms of illness. And also viruses are just your own cells that are being purged from your body. And that's why we have flu season because all humans are naturally evolutionarily synced up to purge our cells at a certain time of month. There is no viruses, it's just your own cells. But just All this insane stuff. And when you look through his comment sections, it's all these people who are like, I have a chronic illness, and I'm not getting the answers I want from my doctor. And you're the first person who's telling me these things that sounds so revolutionary. Please help me. How do I treat my cancer? How do I treat my fibromyalgia? How do I treat my atherosclerosis? How do I teach whatever Thank you so much for joining us today. If I can ramble a little bit further, it's what you see with COVID misinformation, vaccine misinformation, mask misinformation, people talking about masks, building up CO2, and vaccines have mRNA and you can't, you don't want mRNA in your body, you know, and it's like, dude, If you don't have to know the science, if you knew how to ask good questions, you would be able to tear this stuff apart. And so, yeah, skepticism is really important to me because it's a lot easier to teach somebody to just ask somebody how they know what they know than it is to teach them about what an endoplasmic reticulum does.

S:You know, all of science, right?

US#00:Exactly, yeah.

S:Yeah, I think we learned that lesson the hard way over the last 30, 40 years, that the knowledge deficit approach of just giving people information doesn't work for most things, or for some things, but it doesn't work for most things. And you have to, it has to be in the context of critical thinking. Otherwise, you know, as you say, And what's interesting is that if people increase their science knowledge, it doesn't decrease their belief in nonsense or pseudoscience until you get— Yeah, it's more confident. Yeah, it just makes them more confident in their wrong beliefs until they get to like a graduate level. Like, unless you have a PhD in science, it doesn't help you not believe in nonsense, which is really interesting.

US#00:Me sitting over here without a PhD, nobody look at me.

B:Evaluating evidence, that's a critical piece right there.

US#00:Yeah.

E:And where do you learn that? Right. And how many students are being taught that in their undergraduate classes?

US#00:Hardly any. Absolutely. It was a big thing for me. And I remember that at the end of my undergraduate career, I took this class in community and invasion ecology. I went in there expecting to do the And I was just taken aback. What are you talking about? Are they right? Well, it was published in Nature. Of course it was right. And it's like, yeah, but like, look at the figure on like page three. They measure species in like decimals. How do you have like 0.7 of a species? And I'm like, Thank you so much for joining us today. And not knowing how to really ask questions and think in a broader sense, and especially in biology, that's the name of the game. Chemistry and physics, you guys are lucky because you put the numbers in the formula and it does the thing and you know what it is. Biology, if you think you've got life figured out, you look under the next rock, you'll be proven wrong. It's so important. In my field especially, to be able to really think in a big picture way and critically analyze what you think you know, and to be willing to kind of tear apart any paradigm you have, because I promise you nature has weirder things in mind than you do.

S:So what are some of the favorite topics that you've covered?

US#00:Honestly, I love evolution. I specialized in evolutionary biology and organismic biology when I was in my undergrad. Since then, I went on to get to focus in grad school on bioanthropology and biomedical science. Learning about evolution and how humans play into this whole weird mess that we find ourselves in, those are some of my favorite things now to teach as well because I feel like they're things Thank you for joining us today. I also find that a lot of the times I've been turning science education into advocacy for marginalized groups or for just social progress in general. The beginning of my content creation career was talking about race. It was in 2020 right in the middle of the Black Lives Matter protests and my very first video was talking about Where human skin coloration comes from in an evolutionary sense, how humans evolved, where we got different racial characteristics, and how if you know a racist person today, they're upset about the effects of 100,000 year old sunlight and they need to get over it because it's just weird. And how like as the point of the message was that like as a biologist, when I say that we are all a family, I really mean that. That's not just a platitude. I mean that you are seriously related to everybody around you. And that message really resonated with a lot of people.

J:I'm afraid you're asking for too much. Because it is remarkable when you think about that, like from a scientific perspective, we are so unbelievably alike.

US#00:Yeah.

J:But, you know, we're also seem to be hardwired to find the differences with each other.

US#00:Oh, yeah. No, we're absurdly tribalistic creatures. There was this really cool thing. I think it was Ty Fell back in the 1970s. He was a social psychologist and he did those group – what do you call it? The experiments about intergroup discrimination where he would separate people by totally arbitrary means into different groups. Like one of the biggest – I think the most famous one was like he would show a bunch of dots on the screen and he'd ask him how many dots are there and it's like a split second decision. And then he'd say, OK, well, you overestimated the dots and you underestimated the dots. And so you go this way and you go that way. And in actuality, it was completely random. There was really genuinely no criteria. He was lying about whatever he's putting them up on. And then they would play games. And people from group A would go out of their way to screw over people from group B within minutes. And when you ask them why, they just say, well, they're going to do it to me, you know, if I don't do it to them first. And Ty Fell himself, he wrote in these papers, he's like, Discriminatory hateful prejudice behaviors were like frighteningly easy to trigger in these people who knew that the separation was completely arbitrary and meant nothing and they just had this insane tribalism about them. But the cool thing is, further context, there was another really cool study I remember where they took people from Australia and people from China and they put them in an MRI machine and they poked them in the face and then they showed them videos of other people being poked in the face and they're measuring not the somatosensory cortex, I think it was the anterior cingulate gyrus if I remember right, it was some part of the brain that isn't actually doing the feeling but is processing the emotion of feeling pain. We've if only we had somebody here who studied neuro. And I remember they like across racial lines, they had this difference where like somebody of their own race, they had a more emotional reaction to seeing somebody else being hurt as if it was them being hurt. But then they did it with exchange students and they had these Chinese people living in Australia and Australian people living in China. And all of a sudden that difference wasn't there anymore. And it just showed like the more that they spent time around each other, the more that they were around other people of other races, cultures, backgrounds, religions, whatever, the more they started to see those people as people and identify them as a family. And so, yeah, we are absurdly tribalistic creatures. And it's very, very easy for us to draw these lines and say, no, no, no, no, this is us and this is them. But it's also really easy to change those lines. And the more you surround yourself with diversity of people and opinions and races and colors and classes and creeds and all sorts of things, Thanks for watching! Yeah, that's right.

S:I agree. That we draw lines is a human trait that we inherit, but how we draw the lines is totally learned. And you can absolutely, just by exposure, essentially make all of humanity is my family, basically, rather than drawing progressively narrow and smaller groups and othering everybody outside of our small That research is like decades old now, showing that over and over again. It's very, very consistent. But also, when people are afraid and when they feel under stress, that tribalistic instinct is on steroids. It gets ramped up.

US#00:That's why fascism works so well. If you can say those people are the problem, then people will believe you, especially the more scared they are. It works the same in every country. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, Bob Novella, Cara Santa Maria, Thank you for joining us today. Thank you for joining us today.

S:But it's not a panacea, you know, and we've just today on TikTok, you know, had an interaction with our, you know, our audience where individuals were like, well, if they have an XY chromosome, they're a man. That's it. That's the ending of the discussion. Like, what is easy as that? What about this XY person who has a vagina? And they just they just say, I disagree with you. What are you talking about? I'm just giving you a fact and they just, it didn't penetrate.

US#00:Yeah, no, I've had that discussion where someone says, you know, it's only, you know, XY equals man all the time. And it's like, okay, here's a case study on a woman with Sawyer syndrome. So she has XY allosomes and has given birth to children. So either you need to agree with me that not all XY people are men or even male. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for watching. Because we just have learned new stuff about this science in the past few decades. And I've had people challenge me on that and say, yeah, but when those are the new textbooks, you need to look at the old textbooks because they were the right one. And it's like, when would you ever do that at any other time? If you take science seriously, give me one other time when you're like, no, no, no, no, no. We were right before we knew more things. Back when we were ignorant, that's when we had it right.

E:Back when alchemy was a thing. Let's go back there.

S:Yes, it's the old science. Go back to the old science.

E:Yes, I like the old science.

S:Yeah, but again, this is where the critical thinking comes in, because you tell them that while the new books are infected with woke ideology.

J:I love this one. Well, all doctors don't agree on that. Well, yeah, you can always find somebody who doesn't agree. I mean, you know, and the concept of, you know, there's a consensus. To them, the word consensus is hostile.

US#00:Thanks for watching! Thank you for joining us today. People saw science at work. People saw us arguing and debating, and things changed, and we learned new stuff, and we changed the guidelines. It was a very scary situation. People were looking for guidance, and they got it. Then, as we learned new stuff, we came out and said, hey, actually, this is now better guidance. I think the majority ... That's not fair to say. I think a huge amount of Americans We're really taken aback because they thought that science was just the book that we went and checked it. Oh, it says in here that if you get COVID, you do this. And then they had to see us learning about something and trying to help people at the same time. And they don't think that it's possible to walk and chew gum. And it's just I think that really is disillusioned a lot of people to what science is capable of, because they don't understand that it is a messy and long and difficult and Thank you for joining us today.

S:Well, thank you so much for joining us. It's been really fun.

US#00:I really appreciate you having me.

S:Thanks, Forrest.

US#00:See you in October. Bye.

Voiceover:It's time for science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:31:57)

Theme: The Future Item #1: A new study finds that if the world’s highways were covered with roofs of solar panels they could generate more than 60% of the world’s electricity and reduce traffic deaths by 10.8%. Item #2: Engineers have developed a method for heating the plasma inside a tokamak fusion reactor for about one tenth the energy of current methods. Item #3: Scientists outline a new method for warming the surface of Mars that is 5,000 times more efficient than existing proposals.

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

Host	Result
Steve

Rogue	Guess

Voiceover:It's time for science or fiction.

S:Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We kind of have a loose theme this week. The theme is the future. Three news items, what they have to do with future technology.

E:Okay.

S:All right?

E:Cara, was that two or three groans? Yeah.

S:Okay, you always groan, but then you do fine, so just chill. Here we go. Item number one, a new study finds that if the world's highways were covered with roofs of solar panels, they could generate more than 60% of the world's electricity and reduce traffic deaths by 10.8%. Item number two, engineers have developed a method for heating the plasma inside a Tokamak fusion reactor for about one-tenth of the energy of current methods. And item number three, scientists outlined a new method for warming the surface of Mars that is 5,000 times more efficient than existing proposals. Jay, go first.

J:If the world's highways were covered with roofs of solar panels, they could generate more than 60% of the world's electricity. And then the other point was that it would reduce traffic deaths by 10.8%. Well, first of all, how the hell would they be able to get that specific with the reduction in traffic deaths? That's one thing that makes me think this one's fake. You know, the thing is, the amount of money it would cost to put solar panels above existing highways and then it would be a problem if they wanted to widen the highway and everything, the whole premise seems to be broken to me.

B:I mean, we debunked the crap out of that a decade ago, but that's irrelevant compared to what's stated there, right? It's all irrelevant.

J:I know, I mean, just think the practicality isn't there, but okay, so someone did a test. Yeah, what's the surface area, blah, blah, blah, that maybe they're not caring about any of the legitimate logistics and costs and all that.

S:Now, to clarify, because I'm not sure you guys are getting this, this is not covering the roads with solar panels. This is building a roof over the road. Yeah.

J:Yeah, I think that's... Oh, I thought that was a typo. Oh. I read it that way, Steven.

S:I think it's still... Yeah, Bob's probably made me think he didn't get it, so I might as well just clarify that front.

J:I mean, you know, all this is telling us is the surface area that they would have available to them and some guesstimate on how that would somehow lower traffic incidents and lower traffic deaths because maybe of sun glare and stuff like that. Okay, yeah, that could be science. Second one is the engineers have developed a method for heating the plasma inside a Tokamak fusion reactor for about one-tenth the energy. Wow, that is awesome. God, I hope that's true. That's, you know, this is one of those incremental steps that we've been waiting for that just keeps making, you know, the viability of this project, you know, more legit. I don't have any reason to think that that one is off. The last one here, scientists outline a new method for warming the surface of Mars that is 5,000 times more efficient than existing. Wow. You know, that one seems legit, too. Like, you know, yeah, there could be some novel way that they came up with to to do that. So, you know, the first one is just sucks in any way I interpret it. I don't like anything that they're saying in the first one. It just seems like a useless study. You know, the other two, like, are saying something very significant. But, you know, I don't know. I'm just going to take the first one as the fiction because I just don't like it.

S:Okay, Evan.

E:The study finds that you cover the highways with roofs and solar panels and reduce traffic deaths. It's more like a thought experiment rather than I think a practical suggestion of any kind of thing. Thank you for watching. The second one is about heating the plasma inside a tokamak fusion reactor. One tenth the energy of current methods. Well, the only thing that strikes me a little weird about this one is the one tenth of the current energy method. That's quite a The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by Steven Novella, On Mars in order to get it warm, but what would the new method be? Did we talk about artificially crashing bodies into Mars, like pulling asteroids in using a tractor beam or something?

B:But that was more to bring water to the planet than heat it up, I would think.

E:So warming the surface of Mars 5,000, what would you be doing? You drilling down to the core and releasing energy from the core or something? So it's between two and three for me. I'll say the tokamak one. I'll say that one's the fiction because one tenth of the energy I think is just a bit too grandiose.

S:OK, Cara.

C:I'm going to go with Evan because I don't know what a tokamak is.

S:That's basically the type of fusion reactor that's like a donut shape and you have plasma in it confined by magnetic fields. You've got to heat up the planet to the temperature of the core of the sun.

E:The plasma's like the jelly.

C:Yeah, I mean, these all sound not reasonable. Yeah, I don't know. I'm gonna go with Evan because it's the last thing I hear.

E:Thanks, Cara. When we're wrong together, it somehow makes it less painful.

C:It's easier, right?

E:It is.

C:Yeah.

B:Okay, Bob. Yeah, the roofs of solar panels are so damn goofy. But I mean, It seems reasonable within an order of magnitude that those numbers would be correct. Too bad you'd also have to light the interior of those damn structures as well because the highway lights will be too high. You'll be in shadow at night when the lights are on.

C:Yeah, but LEDs take no energy.

B:Yeah. Thanks for watching. Actually are out there for warming the surface of Mars. How much of a thing is that? How many detailed studies have been done? Not many at all that I'm aware of. So the fact that somebody can come up with a new way that's much more efficient doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Because this doesn't seem like a huge topic that people have analyzed to death and like, look at this new efficiency we discovered. Big deal. The most benign, the most commonplace thing here is number two with the Tokamak. I don't know. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is hosted by

S:All right, so you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Scientists outline a new method for warming the surface of Mars that is 5,000 times more efficient than existing proposals. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. This is science.

B:Yeah, it's the technique.

S:So the existing proposals mainly involve in putting basically the greenhouse gas effect, right? Basically finding some way to release enough gases and CO2, whatever, to increase the greenhouse gas effect and warm the surface of Mars that way. So this does something else. Other than that, what do you think it is?

B:I mean, solar arrays in orbit that redirect the sunlight to the surface? No.

S:Not bad guess, but no.

B:Crashing those moons into the surface.

S:No. It's no moon. It basically involves releasing glitter into the atmosphere.

C:What?

S:Let's not do this. A planet of glitter?

Voiceover:What could go wrong?

S:Basically, they're nanoparticles that they say have to be shaped just the right way. They say they would be about the size and shape of glitter, but the purpose is to scatter the light so that you get more of the sunlight affecting the surface and to block the release of heat from the surface. Essentially, it would duplicate the greenhouse gas effect. It would scatter light and trap heat, and they said it could work very quickly. Within years, it would already start to warm up the surface. It could warm the surface of Mars by as much as 50 degrees Fahrenheit, which would be hot enough for ice to melt in certain regions. I don't think the poles, but maybe you get some ice melting around the equator of Mars. So, the downside of this, and it is 5,000 times as efficient in terms of how much stuff you have to release into the atmosphere in order to get the same effect, and they said that they could maintain this based upon their models by releasing 30 liters per second Continuously, basically. A sustained release of 30 liters per second globally of Mars glitter, and that would work. But as soon as you stop doing that, within a few years the effect would start to slowly go away. So you'd have to basically continuously do it in order to maintain the warming that you get out of it.

B:So how would you get that much glitter?

S:Yeah, that would be the problem, right? Not that this would be an easy engineering feat, but it's still 5,000 times easier than bringing gas to Mars. They also said that you could make it out of the local Mars regolith, right? So you wouldn't have to bring material to Mars, you could make it out of Mars. So I guess you have like machines on the surface of Mars processing the Martian dirt into these nanoparticles and then spewing them up into the atmosphere.

E:Does anyone here hate glitter as much as I do?

S:Yeah, it gets everywhere.

B:I was doing some early Halloween shopping and every now and then I'll grab something that looks interesting. And then, but sometimes there's stupid glitter on some of these products. And as soon as I see the glitter, I put the product down, I wipe my hands off. I'm like, I'm not buying that piece of crap because I don't buy anything with glitter on it.

C:That's good. It's also an environmental disaster that has literally no necessary use.

E:Seriously. It's all negative, no positive. As far as I'm concerned. What about with strippers?

S:Glitter or no glitter strippers?

C:Don't need glitter. No. Don't need it.

S:I'm not looking at the glitter.

C:Don't need it.

S:All right, let's go back to number one. A new study finds that if the world's highways were covered with roofs of solar panels, they could generate more than 60% of the world's electricity and reduce traffic deaths by 10.8%. Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. This is science. Sorry, Jay. Damn.

C:Oh, wow.

S:What a stupid... Thanks, Evan.

E:Oh, sure. Well, yeah.

S:They basically just did the calculation, like what it would take to basically cover all of the world's highways with solar panels. Guess how many solar panels it would take? Well, how big?

E:Yeah, right, like a standard average size.

S:Standard solar panels.

E:Oh, gosh.

S:A centillion of them.

E:It would be a few billion, probably.

S:Yeah, $51 billion. So that's a lot. It obviously costs a lot of money. There are significant engineering obstacles to this. But this is never going to happen. No, it's an exercise. But it would generate a lot of electricity.

E:They said that it would provide a net return of about $14 trillion over the 25-year lifetime of the panels, if they did that. Is that net?

C:Here's a question, and they probably didn't look at this, but if you were to compare all of these newly built road roofs and the surface area that they offered to just the roofs on dwellings that already exist on the planet.

S:Yes, I do know that if you put solar panels on every residential home in the United States, that would produce about 30% of our electricity.

C:Yeah, so now you add to it every single build, every single commercial? Yeah. The Skeptic's Guide

S:Well, part of the idea is that the panels would block weather from hitting the road. So that's where you get the 10% reduction in traffic does is that, you know, the rain and snow and sleet, whatever is not part of that. Yeah, it's protecting the road from the weather. So that's one advantage. They also said that, you know, the highways are already basically connected into a network That follows population and whatnot. So it's like a pre-existing network that would be amenable to a network of energy production. So that's what kind of spawned the idea. But yeah, I think it's cost prohibitive. It's not the low hanging fruit in terms of building solar panels.

E:Right. Plus the implementation of that, that would be like a roll out over a hundred years probably to get to that point.

S:It's all how much money you want to spend, right?

E:Well, yeah, I mean, but, you know, you still need labor to do it. You still need labor to do it all. What are you going to do, get ten million people to do this?

S:Yeah, they are building some test stretches, you know, to see how it works. Oh, my God. So, it may work in a very limited rollout in very specific areas.

E:Yeah, and there's some places that just don't get that much sun.

S:But, yeah, I mean, put it on, like, there's also highways going through the desert, you know.

E:Well, absolutely, right, yes.

S:So I guess it may be one of those things that like certainly the world's highways are not going to be covered with solar panels, but there may be some limited rollout. And who knows, once you do it, you may notice, they may notice that there's some advantages to it or that you could be leveraged in some way. It's hard to predict. I don't think it's going to work out, but If they do some test stretches, it may provide surprising benefits, who knows. It's a lot better than solar freaking highways though, I'll tell you that.

B:Yeah, got to admit that.

S:All of this means that engineers have developed a method for heating the plasma inside a Tokamak fusion reactor for about one-tenth the energy of current methods is the fiction because, yeah, that's too much of an advantage.

B:I'm sad and happy.

S:But this is based upon a news item that is interesting, Bob. It is still an interesting proposal that might improve the Tokamak technology. What they're working on is figuring out how to heat up the plasma using only microwaves and not using the copper coils that they have in the middle of the tokamak, right? So basically the tokamak works like a toaster oven, right? You have copper coils in the middle that heat up and heat up the plasma, and you also have microwaves that can heat it up from the outside. The problem with the coils is that they take up a lot of space, and so it makes the whole tokamak design a lot bigger. So if you can eliminate it and you can get enough heating from just the microwaves, then you could shrink the size of the tokamak significantly, making everything easier and everything cheaper, which of course is one of the goals, you know, in terms of developing tokamaks. The study was looking at how do they do that? What is the frequency and the angle? What are all the little details that would optimize the transfer of energy from the microwaves to the plasma, and how hot could they make the plasma? Could they make it hot enough that they could eliminate these coils in the center of the tokamak? That was the study. But yeah, you're still transferring energy into heat, right? You're not going to get a 10-time increase in efficiency would be amazing, you know, a little unrealistic. All right, well, good job, guys. Evan, give us a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:49:51)

"We must remember psychics and mediums have been plying their trade since the beginning of time, so if anything were to change, it may take generations of rational and critical work to settle the dark waters that are continually being swirled and muddied."  – Mark Edward, (description of author)

S:Evan, give us a quote.

E:We must remember psychics and mediums have been plying their trades since the beginning of time, so if anything were to change, it may take generations of rational and critical work to settle the dark waters that are continually being swirled and muddied.

S:All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. Until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info at theskepticsguide.org. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

U:you