The Skeptics Guide #1112 - Oct 31 2026

Interview with Andrea Jones Rooy on the Election; News Items: Red Flags for Bad Journals, Comets and the Origin of Life, Schooling and Dementia, Trapping Antimatter; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: CT Haunting; Science or Fiction

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 29th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:19Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  And Jay Novella. Hey, guys. So, Bob, what are we, two days away from your favorite day of the year? How are you doing?

• 0:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy, yes, two days till Halloween, and it's weird how it's bittersweet because, you know, it's not about, it's not about the day, really, the 31st. It's about the season. It's about October and now really September and October. So it's like, as it gets closer, it's like, oh, man, it's almost like I don't want it to arrive because November 1st is like the worst day of the year.

• 0:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it because of all the cleanup? Why is November 1st the worst?

• 0:50Bob Novella?

  No, it's just like a mini, I mean, it's just, it's just an attitude. It's, I'm just so bummed. It's like, it's all, you know, it all peaked and it's like, ah, it's over, like, oh, crap. But of course, and then, of course, I found a strategy around that. I've been having the Halloween costume party, like, the Saturday after Halloween for years, and that is funny. It's kind of like a psychological salve, because it's just like, oh, and I got the party to look forward to, and I have to still, you know, decorate even more for the party.

• 1:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and I know that you love decorating and you love kind of celebrating the holidays visually, like, pretty much a lot of holidays, but of course, nothing holds a candle to Halloween. So do you get, like, viscerally upset when you see Christmas decorations on November 1st?

• 1:34Bob Novella?

  November 1st, I get viscerally, not enraged. I'm just like, I'm quite pissed.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Flames, flames.

• 1:42Bob Novella?

  Flames, side of my face. When I see Halloween, when I see Christmas decorations in October, that's annoying as hell, really annoying. It's like, you know, it's like, I'm shopping for Halloween and I'm seeing Christmas stuff. It's like, what? I mean, can't you wait till at least two months before the holiday before you start decorating, before they start displaying it? But it's money, it all comes down to the money. They're tweaking it so that they're maximizing their income. I can't really disagree with that. And they are putting out Halloween stuff even earlier. Now, I'm seeing some Halloween stuff, you know, very early August even, or potentially even late July. There's also the summer ween whole, you know, summer ween idea as well. But, uh, but yes, I am pissed. I am pissed, yes. Summer ween's a thing.

• 2:25Bob Novella?

  But I am not happy when I see Christmas stuff in the aisles that should have Halloween stuff.

• 2:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I was wondering if that's also contributing to your depression, you know, the day after Halloween.

• 2:34Bob Novella?

  I get into, I eventually will get into Christmas. I like decorating. I decorate the crap out of my house for Christmas as well and put a lot of time and effort. I'm not actually constructing animations for Christmas, but I am, you know, I've got a big collection of Halloween, of Christmas stuff that I put out, and like, how do I arrange it this year? What could I do different this year?

• 2:54Cara Santa Maria?

  You are my equal and opposite, my friend. I am like, I have no decorations in my house. I have no, I don't, I don't ever buy any of that stuff. I don't ever, like, yeah.

• 3:06Bob Novella?

  I can make your house look so good.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  Bob, and he'd love to spend your money, Cara. Cara, do kids come to your place for Halloween?

• 3:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my gosh, every year, this is the crazy thing. I live in a small lot development, right? There's like 45 units. I live in one of those kind of skinny, tall houses that has a roof deck on the top and no yard. Like, my square footage is higher than the amount of land I own because of that.

• 3:32Bob Novella?

  Oh, my goodness, that's awesome.

• 3:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, it's super weird, yeah. It's very, I guess, urban way to live. And so, and there are tons of people in my development, which is kind of set back from the street, it's very safe, with kids. And every year, I have candy and I have the lights on. One year, I even put a bowl on the front porch next to, like, a pumpkin or something to really say, hey, guys, I'm participating. Nobody came.

• 3:55Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 3:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. We have no trick or treaters anymore. It's so sad.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely been a cultural shift. A lot of parents do, like, the trunk or treat.

• 4:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like a more controlled environment, yeah.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Rather than going around, walking around.

• 4:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 4:11Bob Novella?

  I mean, they, they have their place and the communities are different, but the, just the idea that that could replace the trick or treating house to house, to me, is just like, ugh, so.

• 4:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Good, Bob has. It has in a lot of places, yeah.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  Our neighborhood basically aged out. You know, when our kids were young, there were a ton of kids, and we had a lot of people coming to the house. And now, like, just everyone grew up and there's no kids in the neighborhood anymore.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, I get like 16, 16 people. It's like, it's, you know, it's minimal.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Cara, did you know that Bob, we used to build a, you know, like, a series of three different rooms in Bob's basement as a mini, you know, haunted house, right?

• 4:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I love that.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  And we would change the theme every year, so it was a complete redo every year.

• 4:59Bob Novella?

  Zombie, clowns, vampires.

• 5:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And who would come to that? Like, neighborhood kids or like, just you guys?

• 5:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it was a lot of kids. It's just like, when his neighborhood was younger.

• 5:07Bob Novella?

  We got over 100 kids one year.

• 5:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  One of my favorite things that we did, we went out in the woods behind Bob's house and we cut down a bunch of, of small trees, you know, medium-sized trees, and we brought them into the basement and made a forest in his basement.

• 5:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's so fun.

• 5:22Bob Novella?

  So I remember, I took a picture of it, and somebody, some friend saw the picture and said, oh, Bob's decorating outside this year? I'm like, no, this is inside my basement. It looked great.

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, we don't really have a place to do that anymore. My basement is the SGU Studios.

• 5:38Bob Novella?

  True.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  So that's not working.

• 5:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. I don't have basements, because I live in LA.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Cara Santa Maria?

  We don't have basements.

• 5:44Speaker 01

  Oof. Why not, though? What's the point about LA that, no basements?

• 5:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It must be the ground, the, you know, in Texas, we didn't have basements either because everything's on, like, bedrock.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know, in Florida, they don't have basements because it's all water. If you dig down, the water table's so high, you can't, basically can't have a basement.

• 6:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, I have, I have friends, I'll put it that way, I have friends who live up in Oregon, and looking at some of the differences between their houses and my house, they have this, like, weird thing, many of them called a perimeter foundation, and there's crawl spaces under their houses because it's wet there all the time, and you need to have, like, dry areas under your home so that, like, your house doesn't rot sitting on the ground. And it's such a, like, bizarre concept to me because I live in a very, very dry area where that's just not a consideration.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  So Andrea will be joining us for a quick interview later on in the show. She came on to talk about some issues surrounding the election, because the election's coming up, just a few more days, the midterm elections in the US.

• 6:46Cara Santa Maria?

  May terms, go out and vote, do it.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Have you voted yet, Cara?

• 6:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I, um, yes, I have voted, and I voted by mail, because that's what, like, all of us do here in California.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I voted in person already.

• 6:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, me too.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Steve, contrary to your bad, uh, experience voting, you know, I went down, I decided to, uh, to vote early because my wife is leaving for a business trip, so I'm like, let's just go to town hall and do it. You know, it was basically very, um, well thought out, and I was in the building probably for about 15 minutes, and it was largely because I was taking my sweet-ass time making sure I filled everything out. Yeah. And I, and I understood everything, because, you know, you can easily get confused and not know what you're doing. Uh, you know, a couple of things. One, there was one thing, like, a local thing for my town, where it just said, you know, do you, do you vote yes or no for, you know, this updated proposal situation or whatever? I had no idea what it was, so there, there was a guy there who was supposed to answer all the questions.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  I go over, I ask the guy, what is this? You know, what are we actually voting on here? And essentially, there was one key thing that was being changed in the town, and it was whether or not people could go to a town hall meeting and hear, be able to interview, like, the contractor and what the budget would be for, like, a new big project, right? So I said, okay, so what is the update? He said, if you, if you select yes, you're, you're saying that you want the townspeople to be able to go up and talk to the contractors during, you know, a meeting, right? I'm like, oh, okay, so I vote yes. Go home, my wife looks it up, the guy gave me the exact wrong information.

• 8:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  It was, you vote no, if you, right? I couldn't believe it. I'm like, that, you have, you have one job, dude. You have one job, sitting there to answer questions about, about, you know, filling in your votes.

• 8:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you know, to be fair, like, and this is a, a local thing, but I don't think it's local to LA, I think it's all of California. We vote by proposition and ballot initiative, and one thing that's like a well-known problem in California is the language used in these propositions is intentionally opaque. And so very often, and that's why I like voting by mail, you have to really do your research on these, because it might sound like you're voting yes for something when you're actually voting it down, or you might think you're voting for one thing, but there's some sort of, like, loophole in it that is, you know, that's like pork tied to it. Yeah, that you're like, ooh, I don't want that at all. So you have to do a lot of research in California to vote your conscience and to vote your

• 9:18Cara Santa Maria?

  values, because sometimes the way things are worded does not give you the information you need. It's frustrating.

• 9:26Speaker 01

  That's terrible.

• 9:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  So what Jay was alluding to with my experience, I, you know, locally, I vote in person, and it's always a five-minute in and out affair, very well-run, but this year, it took an hour for me to vote.

• 9:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Were you, like, on the first day or something?

• 9:42Speaker 01

  It was the first day, that might have been the issue. So, but what happened was they got a new machine to scan the ballots when you're done with the whole process, and that was the backup. That, that was a choke point for the whole process, because in early voting, the entire town, including all nine voting districts, vote in the same location, right, the library. So you have to tell it what district you're voting in.

• 10:08Jay Novella?

  And that was a multi-step process. It was a ridiculous process to do that. You had to get this, you had to say, enter the number of your district, which was on the little ticket they give you when you're walking through the process, and then hit search. It then pulls up four more options, one of which is your district. I don't know what the other three are. You have to find that, and it's in a table that clearly has code in it, not like, not public-facing information. And then, you know, so it makes it just maximally cognitively demanding to like, look at that information and find the information you need. Then you hit your district again, and then hit next, and then finish.

• 10:52Jay Novella?

  Five presses to enter in one number.

• 10:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That feels like a literacy test.

• 10:56Jay Novella?

  So.

• 10:57Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean? That feels unconstitutional to me.

• 10:59Jay Novella?

  Well, what I found was that that interface was probably not meant for the voter. It was meant for the poll workers. They were supposed to pre-program it so that it would take, you know, because it's.

• 11:09Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 11:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the machine is supposed to be adaptable to any, you know, voting situation. So like, they would have to tell it how many districts there are and whatever. And they screwed up. So it was like a terrible interface. It was slowing everybody down. There needed to be a poll worker there to help everybody through the completely counterintuitive process of entering a one freaking number. And since you already have a ballot that's specific to your district, that information could have been on the ballot, you know?

• 11:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 11:37Jay Novella?

  So it was an unnecessary step that was unnecessarily complicated. But this is part of my ongoing series of things that annoy Steve that are related to the fact that when you have any kind of public-facing system or any kind of system is going to be used by people who are not the software engineers, right?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:56Jay Novella?

  That you need to make the system work for the end user. Don't make the end user work for the system. Don't solve your problem by having the end user enter in information or whatever, do manual steps that should be all done automatically by the system itself. But it's amazing how frequently I encounter that, and it's infuriating every single time.

• 12:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, what year is it? You know what I mean? It's like, Apple is not a standalone thing anymore. Everybody looked at Apple and learned, and that's how a lot of people program now. They make things that are intuitive for the end user. Why are we so behind? Anytime something has, something is like municipal.

• 12:36Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, it's probably budget. It probably comes down to like, people that don't know how to hire the right people, right? Because they work for the local town or whatever. There's not like a lot of understanding of those types of things.

• 12:48Cara Santa Maria?

  But this is a public good. This should honestly be like, I don't know. I feel like this should be corporate philanthropy at this point, you know? Like, like, give back.

• 12:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the company that sold the machine to the town should have had people to help them get it to the state it needed to be in for the voter. That was, so I put this back on the company. You don't just send off a voting machine, say, good luck, here you go. Here's a manual that you probably can't read. Or you should have people to make sure that it's installed properly and it's functioning properly. And they clearly didn't do that.

• 13:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And real tech support if something goes wrong. Yeah.

• 13:26Jay Novella?

  Absolutely. This, I also think, Kara, as you say, what year is this? This is why old people get curmudgeonly, right? Because, yeah, in the, I went through this in the 90s. You know what I mean? And all of these problems were solved in the 90s. And it's so frustrating 30 years later to keep encountering the same bullshit problems that we solved 30 freaking years ago.

• 13:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Jay Novella?

  It's no excuse. There's no excuse in this day and age for that kind of user interface. Absolutely none. Especially for a mission-critical thing like voting.

• 14:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:03Jay Novella?

  You know, people were bailing on the line because it was too long.

• 14:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's terrible because like, we know from kind of a psychological science, like behavior perspective, when they're there, they're much more likely to just do it.

• 14:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Cara Santa Maria?

  They may never come back at that point.

• 14:22Jay Novella?

  Right, they may have disenfranchised voters. Absolutely. All right, Jay, get us started on the news items with, there's an article about red flags for bad science journals. So when you hear that a study was published in a scientific journal, how much confidence does that give you? Right?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  By itself, none.

• 14:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, on its own, nothing. Yeah, definitely depends on the journal.

• 14:45Jay Novella?

  So what does, what does the peer review actually guarantee, if anything?

• 14:50Speaker 01

  There are no guarantees. It's not, that's not the word I would use.

• 14:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I guess a different question is, what do we hope is happening? Or what do we think is generally happening?

• 14:58Speaker 01

  What's supposed to happen? So, yeah, when it functions properly, it is a quality control. It should be functioning as a pretty good quality control.

• 15:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely, that there are individuals with a certain level of expertise who are making judgments about the submitted papers to ensure that they are sufficiently valid, reliable, that the statistics were run appropriately, and that the conclusions in the paper are appropriate conclusions based on the analysis that was run.

• 15:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and so the peer review process happens before the study or whatever it is is accepted or published. There are experts that are turned to, that are supposed to go through it and do some quality control and then give feedback to the journal. And the journal then decides whether or not they're going to publish it.

• 15:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, or they say to the author, hey, you need to make these changes and bring it back to us. Yeah.

• 15:53Jay Novella?

  So the reviewers, though, you know, they can't necessarily verify every single element, every measurement or whatever that happens that they, that were recorded during whatever the study is. Like, it's not going to that level. And that's a known thing. You know, it's a known limitation because of time constraints and money and everything. So we have a new study that examines, you know, potentially problematic journals in Scopus, right? Steve, I'm sure you and Kara know what Scopus is. This is a major research database that scientists use to find studies. It's a way to find studies very quickly. It rationalizes all of them, so they can be searched on and found. It screens the journals that it includes,

• 16:35Jay Novella?

  but that doesn't mean every study those journals publish is reliable. So there is a lot of journals that end up, you know, getting, getting things submitted to, that are included in Scopus but aren't necessarily respectable. And the researchers looked at journal publication records going back to 2015. So they're going from 2015 all the way up to August 31st of this year, simply because that was the information that was available to them since they started. The study is a pre-print, meaning it was shared publicly before completing a formal peer review, and that doesn't mean it's wrong, but its findings are just preliminary.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So this article on peer review has not been peer reviewed?

• 17:16Jay Novella?

  It has not.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 17:18Jay Novella?

  And it goes all the way down. You know what I mean? Infinitely. So the first, the first warning sign that they, that they said is a journal publishes more than twice as many papers as it did the year before. That sends up a red flag. As an example, if they published 100 papers and then it went to 250 papers in one year, you know, can its review process keep up? Number one. And they only counted jumps where the earlier year had at least 10 papers. So going from two to five isn't really that big of a deal. It's when, you know, it's when you have, when you're a sizable number, like 100, and you double or more than double it, then they consider that something to look into. Second, the journal's papers become heavily concentrated in one country, right?

• 18:03Jay Novella?

  This is a, this is, you know, you could think with artificial intelligence doing, you know, a lot of, a lot of, creating a lot of content here, and there's certain countries that are submitting a lot of studies, quote-unquote, "studies." This could be a really big problem, and it is a pattern that they're finding, that there are certain countries where, you know, studies are coming out of that are being submitted, and it's kind of like a, coming from a paper mill, you know? In one year, the country contributing the most papers accounts for 25%. In another year, one country accounts for 75%. That's a, that's a 50 percentage point difference year over year, and that would send up a red flag. And to qualify, you know, more than 70% of the papers

• 18:47Jay Novella?

  had to come from one country in a year. And the leading country's share had to differ by more than 40 percentage points between the journal's most and least geographically diverse years. So I know it sounds, it's a little complicated, but basically, they have a way of analyzing it where they think it's appropriate to have a red flag go off when certain criteria are met, depending on how many papers are being submitted and by what countries and what percentage from what countries and all that. And it is complicated, but it's necessary.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  It's so important. I mean, it's getting so out of control these days. We need, we need this to at least be tracked and make people aware, you know, of what's happening and, you know, with these journals. And, oh my God, it's scary.

• 19:30Jay Novella?

  Particularly, you know, AI allows people to submit even more papers than, or, you know, paper, the number of papers being submitted has skyrocketed. The third red flag that they said they have to keep an eye on is that more than 15% of a journal's papers were flagged by the problematic paper screener. That's a piece of software. It's not a person. So this software automatically looks for certain warning signs, including strange wording, possible computer-generated nonsense, right? That's a big one. And references to retracted papers. This means that papers that were formally withdrawn from the scientific record, but they are still being used to reinforce research that's being done in a subsequent paper.

• 20:13Jay Novella?

  All of these things seem very obvious, but, you know, they, these things get committed all the time, and they have to, they have to screen for all of this. The software also looks for technical phrases that have been scrambled somehow. So here's an example. Let's say the word, the term artificial neural network, right? That's a, that's a standard term. It means specific things and it's talking specifically about a certain type of AI system. But the screener's research gives an example where that becomes fake neural organization. Well, what the hell is that? Those words, you know, they sound kind of similar and they might be pointing to the same thing, but they don't mean the same thing. They really don't. They might sound like they are, but they don't mean the same thing, or they're not supposed to mean the same thing.

• 20:58Speaker 01

  Is that a flag for AI-generated content?

• 21:01Jay Novella?

  Um, yeah. You know.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Or is that a bad translation?

• 21:04Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was a translation problem or artificial intelligence doesn't get the term right and it comes up with its own term.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:12Jay Novella?

  So there's different ways of this happening.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  It's literally translating the words, but it's not using the technical term properly.

• 21:17Jay Novella?

  Yeah, for whatever language. Right. Exactly. And guess what? People need to investigate all the flags. Let's say the software, the problematic paper screener does a study and says there's 100 things in here that need to be looked at. Somebody has to look at those 100 things. So it does become onerous. It's important to note here, the software doesn't establish fraud. It just puts up red flags that have to be gone through by people.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe it's important to note at this point too, Jay, that the, the process, there is an editor in this process, right? When you submit to a journal, it goes to an editorial staff. They then decide if it's even worth sending to peer reviewers. They choose the peer reviewers, right? They communicate with the peer reviewers. The peer reviewers respond to the editor. Usually it's either reject, accept with changes or accept. It's almost always accept with changes the first time. It's almost never do you get through on the first pass without changes.

• 22:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but sometimes people are just straight up rejected.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, or they straight up rejected. Yeah, but sometimes, but I mean, the one that's very unlikely on the first pass is the accept as it.

• 22:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So the editor is critically important, like, because they're the ones who, to choose the reviewers and also they can choose to listen or not listen to them. It's just recommendations to the editor. So if you're trying to run a paper mill, like if you're, if you're running a predatory journal or a pay to play journal and you're just trying to crank as many papers through it as process, the editors could be doing basically nothing. You know what I mean? They could not be doing their job. And which is, which of course we know from, from like Sokal and other instances where, where people were able to get deliberately terrible papers passed a lot of these journal editors, because they're just not doing their job. It's a, it's a, almost like a fake process they set up just to crank as many papers through as possible.

• 23:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, or even if peer review is happening, as you said, they can choose to reject that. So even if these papers are going through, you know, relatively rigorous peer review, if the editor in chief of the journal wants to, they can sort of circumvent that.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's just recommendations to the editor.

• 23:26Jay Novella?

  So one more thing out of the study here, the researchers identified 3,753 journals with at least one warning sign. And of those, the vast majority, 3,557, these were still indexed in Scopus. So that means that Scopus was still covering those journals and adding records of their papers to its searchable database, which again, there's a problem because of the volume here and the lack of experts and the lack of resources. You know, we don't have, we don't have a way to do it all perfectly. It can't happen that way. And I hate to say this, you know, because it's, a lot of people don't like artificial intelligence or whatever.

• 24:07Jay Novella?

  I'm just saying though, you know, as a matter of, you know, this is a matter of fact, at some point, artificial intelligence would probably be able to chew through this and get, and get very, very accurate results.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  I agree. This is actually a perfect task for AI, because there's a lot of detailed tedious work under the auspices of an editor, right? But the editor could be using AI tools to help screen papers and find a lot of the errors or statistical mistakes or misreporting or signs of fraud or whatever, that they should be doing by hand now. And of course, the best journals, we hope are doing all, all this, but it could become an incredible tool for editors to increase the quality and filter out the crap, which we absolutely need to do, because the literature is itself a living, breathing thing.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  And if it's flooded with crap, that even if all the, the good research is getting done, it's getting buried by a mountain of noise.

• 25:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we also have to, to kind of remember that if the research itself is getting flooded with crap, that is probably going back into the training data for the AI itself.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So now it's using crap to find crap and it's, you know, you're going to get garbage in, garbage out.

• 25:26Jay Novella?

  Well, that, that's up to the people who are in charge of the, of training.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:31Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. But I, I can almost guarantee you that like Anthropic, for example, is not going through and choosing which studies they're training their AI on. They're saying, go read the literature.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, but keep in mind, Kara, there's two stages to training in AI. There's the pre-training, which is like just on the internet or whatever, right? But then there's a specific curated training. And so hopefully if you're doing that to create a tool that you're specifically going to use to judge peer-reviewed research, that's being trained on just good quality curated studies, hopefully.

• 26:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Hopefully, but like by what standard are they actually dividing that out? Because we're talking about developing a standard here. So the question is, what standard are they using?

• 26:14Jay Novella?

  You know, and it's scary, you know, this whole thing has been bothering me. You know, Steve, you and Kara have talked about this quite a bit, about how, you know, there's more and more and more junk that is entering into the, the body of knowledge, which it blows my mind. You know, we, we've spent so many years, you know, building up this, let's just say medicine, you know, is, is the subject we're talking about.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:39Jay Novella?

  You're building up this body of knowledge about human biology and all of the things that go into it. And then at some point, it just is, is getting, just like the internet, it gets

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Inshitified.

• 26:50Jay Novella?

  Filled to the brim with garbage.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  So, but I think part of, to put this in perspective, I think part of the problem is that the, the, the literature was kind of designed to be systematic, comprehensive and thorough, right? Because the idea is if you are trying to answer a question by looking at all the data that exists in the world, you want the literature to capture all of that, right? And so I think that sort of biases the system towards being very inclusive, but that has been exploited by bad actors who are using it with these business models that are based on being predatory or just being low quality paper mills. And so now that's flooding low quality data. And so the, the dilemma is, well, you know, we want high quality data, but we also don't

• 27:36Speaker 01

  want cherry picked data, right? We want to look at all the data that exists. So how do you balance those two things? And that's what they're wrestling with. You know what I mean? I still, I, I do think we need like a layer that is like, this is a high quality, high bar of peer reviewed, only the best studies are in this data set. Then there could be another data set that like, this is everything that had ever existed. You know what I mean? Like this is, there is, the bar is set very low. But the question is, how would people interact with those, with those things? Because we know what happens. There's this sort of subculture of pseudoscientists and charlatans and cranks and ideologues that just live on the low quality data.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  And they exploit the low quality data to make a case for whatever it is they want to believe. And they call it science or evidence-based, but it's bullshit because they're just cherry picking the crappy data. So we certainly don't want to make it easier for them to do that or give them the imprimatur of being legitimate. But that's what's happening now, basically. All right, let's go on. So have you guys heard about this? A, a new study looks at the plausibility that comets delivered the prebiotic molecules to the early Earth. Have you guys ever heard that?

• 28:53Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, that idea's been floating around for about 100 years. And there's a new study, I won't tell you the results yet, I'll leave that to the end, that, that impacts whether or not that was likely to be true. But let's back up a little bit, because the, the story's always interesting, right? The scientific question itself. So we're talking about, there's, you know, the scientific discipline looking at life origins, right? Life origin research. This is not what happened to life after it arose. You know, this is how did life go from non-life to life? How do we end up with prebiotic chemistry to living organisms? And that's a really tough question. I think that's one of the toughest questions in science, in all of science, that we are facing today.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  Partly because this happened once, four billion years ago, right? It's, we have, we don't have multiple examples of this. It takes a really long time. You need a planet, planetary sized lab for millions or, or hundreds of millions of years. It's not the kind of thing you could replicate. You know what I mean? So we're now trying to infer as best as we can, this complicated process that happened once on Earth for three and a half to four billion years ago, right? It's tricky, but they, but the scientists have made a lot of progress. So the, the area where I think the evidence is the strongest is that pretty much for

• 30:21Speaker 01

  every prebiotic compound, there, there had, you know, scientists have demonstrated an abiotic way to synthesize it, meaning amino acids, nucleobases, nucleotide precursors, lipids, sugars, peptides, right? All the building blocks of life can all be created abiotically, meaning without life. So through just normal chemical processes, these things will spontaneously emerge if you have the right raw materials, right? That's pretty solid. You know, either these things have actually been done or there's highly plausible pathways that they could be done. And so there's that, not, not a problem there. So what's the problem then?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  If all of the precursors of life, all the building blocks of life can be made spontaneously from just prebiotic chemicals, why even think that they needed to be delivered to the Earth on comets?

• 31:19Bob Novella?

  Because of just pure concentration, I would think.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so concentration, that's good. Concentration is one. So the thing, if a comet is delivering- During a package of these, you know, these building blocks, then they're all in the same place at the same time. Whereas if they're just being made in the world's oceans, they could be very diluted. So that's one sort of issue, even though you can make them. Another issue is that the environments that allow some of the, of the building blocks to be made may not be the same as the environments needed for other building blocks. So again, you might have them being made in different locations, but they all need to be in the same place at the same time in order for them to sort of work together to eventually develop into a living system, right?

• 32:04Bob Novella?

  Now, Steve, this ties into something I read about years ago that I always found fascinating. Soon, soon after the moon was created, it was, it was basically so much closer to the earth, like 15 times larger in the, in the sky. And the tides, of course, were mountains. They're mountainous sized tides. And they, and these tides would, would rip across the land, you know, like 100 miles, right?

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Scouring it for minerals and stuff.

• 32:30Bob Novella?

  Yes. Scouring it and bringing that back into, into the oceans and helping create this soup of, of materials. Could that, does that factor into this at all? Or is it just not the right time?

• 32:42Speaker 01

  It's, it's an element of, so the thing is, what you're getting at is that the terrestrial origin of the building blocks is, is still, I would say, the dominant hypothesis. And there are, there are terrestrial solutions to all of these problems. That's one. Another one is that, well, maybe it happened by hydrothermal vents or lightning striking ponds or lakes so that therefore they're all concentrated in a smallish body of water.

• 33:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Or in these clay shallow pools where the clay is acting as a template, as a catalyst for the creation of these building blocks, again, in sort of a limited volume. So it doesn't dilute out. So there are, there are many plausible solutions to these issues. But one of the plausible solutions was, well, maybe they just were being delivered by comets. You know, that there was a continuous rain of these building blocks onto the earth. They could have collected in certain locations and, and places. And then that could be one potential solution. Added to that is we've found these building blocks on comets. So we know that they're there. And so it, that again, makes it very plausible. All right.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So this is where the new study enters, right? So now we're up to the new bit. They said, okay, so these building blocks exist on comets. If comets were raining down in the early earth, which they were, this could have been an important mechanism for the accumulation of these building blocks in order to allow life to develop. But they, they asked the question, but how, but would they survive? Would these building blocks survive comets impacting the earth? So they did a computer simulation using updated knowledge about the likely atmospheric condition of the early earth and, you know, also just a better understanding of the likely speed and angle of incidence of the comets when they enter

• 34:42Speaker 01

  the earth's atmosphere. And what they found was the vast majority of comets striking the earth during this sort of bombardment phase would have been too violent for the prebiotic molecules to survive.

• 34:57Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:58Speaker 01

  That some of them, like one in a million, maybe would have gotten through and would have actually delivered some prebiotic feedstock. Again, they actually used that word, remember from last week, the feedstock word, but not enough to be significant. They said they can't rule out that there was any contribution, but it probably wasn't the main contribution. Now, they used a specific molecule for their modeling because they said, first of all, this is an important molecule. And if also the survivability of this molecule is a good predictor, it's a good marker of the survivability of feedstock in general. Do you guys have a guess what this molecule is? I'd be surprised if you guessed it, but just to throw it out there.

• 35:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Then no.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  It's hydrogen cyanide, which is a high energy molecule. So it has a single bond between the hydrogen and the carbon, and then a triple bond between the carbon and the nitrogen. And that triple bond is very high energy. What that means is that it could be used to drive other chemical reactions. So keep in mind for prebiotic chemical chemistry, you don't have photosynthesis, right? So life can, can perpetuate because we are constantly absorbing energy from the sun and getting that energy into living chemistry, biochemistry through photosynthesis, right? We're generating, life creates high energy molecules from energy

• 36:22Speaker 01

  from the sun. So how did that happen, you know, pre-life? You would still have needed biochemistry just without life. And so there had to be high energy molecules that could be the, sort of the energy carrier that could drive these reactions. And those molecules would need to get, to regenerate their energy, right? So how is that happening? So that's why they say, well, maybe it's by a hydrothermal vent, right? And the hydrothermal vent is producing these high energy chemicals through, through, through chemical gradients and through heat, you know, or maybe it was like in the lightning strikes in, in bodies of water

• 37:03Speaker 01

  or whatever. Something was happening where the ambient environmental energy is getting into the chemistry and driving these biochemical reactions. So anyway, so the, the hydrogen cyanide would not have survived most comet impacts. So that's simply not the root for most of the building blocks. So we're back to all of the terrestrial explanations, the hydrothermal vents, the lightning, the, the clay pools. Incidentally, they said, they ran the same simulations for Mars, and they said that far more of them would likely have survived an early Mars impact. So again, that doesn't show that it was a mechanism,

• 37:44Speaker 01

  but it's more plausible as a mechanism for the delivery of building blocks of life to Mars, if not, if it wasn't significant for the earth.

• 37:53Bob Novella?

  Is this, Steve, would you consider this like a significant conclusion?

• 37:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think it doesn't change things in that the terrestrial origin was already dominant, but it does sort of narrow the list of possibilities of what could be going on. And it does help science say, all right, we're going to focus our efforts on the terrestrial origin hypotheses and not worry about the comet origin because it looks like that is not a plausible pathway. So it just kind of narrows the scope for scientists to focus their research. Now, of course, this is one study. I don't know that this is the final word. Always have to caveat that. It seems pretty compelling and it's a pretty significant piece of information in terms of cometary versus terrestrial origin for life's building blocks. So it probably will have an impact on the field, but it's

• 38:39Speaker 01

  not a game changer because I think a lot of researchers were already there, right? They already were favoring the terrestrial origin.

• 38:46Bob Novella?

  All right, Bob, tell us about trapping antimatter. So guys, check this one out. Researchers have trapped and manipulated a positron for a month. Now, this, this combination of long-term trapping, which has happened in the past, but also combining that with extraordinary quantum control and detection, that's really the, the unprecedented part of this. And, uh, but it boils down to like, what mystery are they, are they working on? Why are they doing this? How did they do this? And what cool future technology might this actually help with? This is from physicist from Northwestern University in the US, published in Physical Review Letters. So this boils down to antimatter.

• 39:29Bob Novella?

  We've mentioned this a bunch of times on the show. Almost every particle has an antimatter counterpart, right? With the same mass and spin, but the opposite electric charge essentially. If there's no charge, then other things will have, will be different, like other quantum numbers will be different. But there's always that, there's, there's that difference. Unless, unless the particle is its own antiparticle, like photons, but that's unrelated to this. So we're talking about electrons and positrons in, in this specific situation. But there's also the whole, scientists have made whole antimatter atoms, you know, it's just a fascinating topic. But where do you guys, where do you guys think? Where do we, where do, where does antimatter come from? How do we even know about antimatter outside of theory? How, where have we encountered antimatter in the universe, do you think?

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Is it, or any made when cosmic rays smack into our atmosphere?

• 40:17Bob Novella?

  Yes, there's, yes. Those, those interactions, when they happen, which happens all the time are, are very common, but essentially they come from cosmic explosions, these intense particle interactions and radioactive decay, which we can, of course, have been studying on, on the earth here for, for many, many, many decades. So yeah, so they come from these various places and they're, one of the famous attributes of, of antimatter is what? What, what do you guys know of? Like, why is it so famous? Like, what, what is the thing that everyone will almost always invariably say about antimatter?

• 40:49Jay Novella?

  Well, one thing, it would explode if it touches matter.

• 40:52Bob Novella?

  Right. Exactly. It's like it converts 100% of its energy of, you know, of its matter into, into energy whenever it touches normal matter. That's like its most famous attribute. Realistically though, only a portion of that energy is, is really usable, but it is still, you know, and it has amazing energy density. So, but the mystery they're looking at here is fundamentally an asymmetry. Our theories do not say why we have matter and not antimatter in our universe, right? And it's, it's not like antimatter wasn't created. It actually was. There was a lot of matter and antimatter at the beginning of the universe and they, they duked it out and basically annihilated each other. But there was a little bit extra

• 41:33Bob Novella?

  matter left over. So all the matter in our universe is essentially is, is coming from this leftover bit. You know, they, they like to say that the ratio was a billion and one Matter and matter particles compared to just a billion antimatter particles. So at the end of the day, that little bit of residue was just left over. We don't know why. We don't know why that's the case. Now, we have theories of why matter won, but we don't know which explanation, if any of them are right. So this is what, this is kind of the nuts that these researchers are trying to crack. But these are, these particles are hard to study, right? Oftentimes, especially in this situation for their research, these particles are moving at relativistic speeds.

• 42:17Bob Novella?

  You know, like 88% of the speed of light. That's tough to deal with, right? And also is that pesky little fact that whenever these positrons, you know, these, these positive electrons, when they hit electrons, they annihilate. So they're moving fast and they, they hit other, anything they hit, any other matter that they hit, they're just going to annihilate with. So they're very, very hard to study. So I got a quote here from Northwestern's physicist Gerald Gabrielse, the paper's senior author. The biggest challenge is to persuade a positron that is ejected from a nucleus in a radioactive decay with a very high energy to slow down enough that we can capture it into our particle trap. So that's one of the biggest problems. You've got to slow this thing down first. So the type of, of positron that they wanted to use in terms of like how it was produced,

• 43:02Bob Novella?

  was the easiest one to do on the earth is radioactive decay. We can, we can study that all the time. It's relatively easy to study this radioactive decay. So what, what happens during radioactive, radioactive decay, guys? Imagine you've got the nucleus of an atom. It's unstable. Say there's too much positive charge. So in this, in this specific scenario, the excess proton converts into a neutron through the weak force and emits a positron and a neutrino. So that's how, so they've got this radioactive material. It's a, it's a radioactive isotop of sodium and it's like a positron gun. It's just spitting out these, these positrons, moving at like something like 88% the speed of light. So, so those positrons are then, and then hit a tungsten crystal.

• 43:46Bob Novella?

  So this is their attempt to slow this thing down. Cause, cause when these positrons are interacting with this, with this crystal, it's transferring some of its kinetic energy to the crystal. And of course, not all of the positrons make it out. A lot of them just go right in. They hit other electrons, they annihilate and, and they're, they're done, they're dead. But, but some of these positrons make it out. They have their, they have their kinetic energy taken away to a, to a large extent. But they come out, they don't come out unchanged. These positrons come out as a new form called positronium. And that's because they're bound in a weird excited state to an electron. So you've got the, you've got an electron and a positron paired together.

• 44:29Bob Novella?

  And they're, they're both excited, which makes them separated. So it's essentially a way to delay their annihilation. So they exist as positronium very briefly, but they only need positronium to exist for a brief period of time because it's going into the trap. It's a trap. So this is called a penning trap. So these penning traps has a very tiny opening, just like something like 625 micrometers. Super, super tiny. And basically the, the positron is cloaked because it's paired with the electron. They think it's just a neutral atom and it gets right, it gets right in there. But then they've got electric fields that strip away the electron. And you've got the, the positron trapped inside of this, this, this, this penning trap.

• 45:13Bob Novella?

  And they confine it using electric and magnetic fields. And it's confined to a large extent. It's not touching the walls. So this is an amazing vacuum trap. It's, it's super cold. It's like 300 milli kelvins. I mean, this is, this is on the cusp of, of absolute zero, so close. And so the positron is in there. It's cozy and it's safe and it's isolated. That's the key thing. You wanted, you want it isolated. So it's not interacting with anything. It's not annihilating itself and it can be studied. So this gets to the point now where they can then manipulate this positron. They've got it stored. It's, they've kept it in there for as long as a month. And now they're, they're trying to manipulate it.

• 45:54Bob Novella?

  So what they do is they use microwaves to bump up the, the energy levels of this positron, right? One quantum level at a time. And as they, as they do that, they can see the, they can, they could detect the transitions between the, the energy levels. So they have amazing control of this positron and, and trying to learn its secrets. And they're so, they're studying its behavior in this way. And what they specifically, what they need to look at is the subtlest magnetic properties of this positron, the magnetic moments, right? So we, we know so much about the magnetic moments of electrons, but we don't know a lot about the positrons because they're so, they're so hard to, to trap and study. And this is, and this is what they've been able to do here.

• 46:38Bob Novella?

  If you want a little extra detail, what they're trying to do is a very super sensitive test of CPT symmetry, charge parity in time. Look it up. It's a whole thing. It's fascinating. So with this new study, they could, they could potentially tease out this asymmetry between matter and antimatter and find out, you know, why the universe took the path it did? Why, why there was extra matter created and, and solve this mystery, mystery, hopefully leading to, to brand new, to brand new physics. There's other angles here that the first thing I thought of course was using antimatter as energy, right? Steve, of course my mind went there. Now, in, I'll just cover that really briefly. This is antimatter as energy storage.

• 47:22Bob Novella?

  This is not a source of energy, right? Antimatter is not a source of energy. It takes a ridiculous amount of money to create it. But in terms of energy density, it doesn't get any better than that. It's got, it's got 10 billion times more, more energy is released than chemical combustion. It's really, it's really the king of energy, energy density here. But there's a lot of problems with it. And, and one of the problems is creating the antimatter. The cost is unbelievable. CERN did an estimate that it would cost a quadrillion dollars to create a gram of antimatter. It's just, just stupidly expensive. As I said, it's, it's, it's not a source of energy. It's great as stored energy. And this storage component, it seems like we're getting much, much better with storage,

• 48:06Bob Novella?

  with storing this, these, this antimatter, which is something that we would need to do in, in the future if we were ever going to use it as, as energy storage. But this is something that might take centuries to solve because just creating the antimatter is so problematic, creating it in bulk. It's so, it's so expensive. We never, we never may be, we never might be able to get past that problem. But it's still something that's fun to consider that we may be able to do. And this type of research kind of takes us a little bit closer to, to being able to do that. So, so check it out online if you're interested, guys. Fascinating stuff.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. The, the matter antimatter annihilation thing as a, like a rocket fuel or as an energy source is so alluring, but it is completely science fiction at this point.

• 48:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it is. Yeah.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just made such a tiny amount of, as you say, it's a huge energy sink. It would only be like a really good way to store energy. But we've only manufactured what a few nanograms in, in ever like on the earth. And it would take a few grams to get to Mars, for example.

• 49:08Bob Novella?

  Right. And who's got the time and the quadrillions of dollars you would need to do that?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Kara, does education protect against dementia?

• 49:18Cara Santa Maria?

  The short answer is yes, it does. The long answer is, uh, do we know that that is causal?

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Or that that is correlative?

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And there is now another tick mark in the category. Actually, the researchers argue the first ever tick mark in the category that says this is likely, at least in part, a causal protective effect. And so the statistics here are complicated, but we're going to get into it. So this is really interesting. There's a study that was recently published in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, you know, in economic sciences called "Education reduces dementia incidence and mitigates genetic risk." So that's a pretty bold claim there.

• 50:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And the question here is how would one possibly know, considering that you cannot take the same person and both give them more education and give them less education and then compare their tendency to develop dementia over time? You can look at populations, but it's very, very hard to tease out all of the different confounding factors when we do observational research, right? But the researchers decided in this case to use a very particular type of design called a regression discontinuity design. And in a second, I'm going to describe what that is. But first I want to talk about the population that they were looking at.

• 50:55Cara Santa Maria?

  So specifically the outcome variable here was whether or not somebody developed.

• 51:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. So, meaning at the time of recording, did this person have features that were consistent with Alzheimer's or other dementias that are similar to Alzheimer's? So, these are people who are still alive, for whom there was no autopsy performed, and who, you know, based on diagnostic criteria, would qualify for what they're calling an ADRD, Alzheimer's disease and related dementia. And this was a study that was done in the UK, and they were able to utilize a very particular

• 51:41Cara Santa Maria?

  thing that happened in the early 1970s to be able to have two very distinct groups. One group who had more education and one group who had less education, but all other things were equal. So, we're not talking about people who had the opportunity to go to college or university versus those who didn't. We're talking about one extra year of schooling. And Jay, how do you think, or what do you think happened in 1972 that would allow these researchers to say, this group over here had one extra year, this group over there had one fewer year, and nothing else was different between them?

• 52:20Speaker 01

  They had ADHD or not, or mental health issues?

• 52:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No. Here's the thing, because that would have been a huge-

• 52:25Speaker 01

  A huge difference, yeah.

• 52:26Cara Santa Maria?

  A huge difference between the groups, right? So, we can't just look at kids who like dropped out of school a year sooner, because there could be a reason they dropped out of school, and that reason could have a larger impact on their tendency to develop Alzheimer's-related dementias later.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  And so, something external had to be imposed upon the population.

• 52:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, and what that was, was a law that changed that made it illegal to drop out of school before the age of 16, when previously, the cutoff was 15.

• 52:53Bob Novella?

  Oh, that's easy.

• 52:55Cara Santa Maria?

  So, before 1972, the age at which you legally had to go to school was up until 15, and then you could drop out. And after 1972, that age changed. It was called the Raising of the School Leaving Age Order, 1972, and it affected students across the United Kingdom. And so, that allowed for one of the really important components of a regression discontinuity design. So, I'm not going to get deep into the math here, but a regression discontinuity design is a quasi-experimental method that helps to estimate causality when you can't really do a randomized control trial.

• 53:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And the way that it works is they can look at immediately after or immediately before some specific threshold. And the kind of assumptions here are that there is no manipulation, so the population couldn't sort themselves in or out of the groups. And in this case, they absolutely couldn't, because there was a very, very specific cutoff. It was students born after September 1st, 1957, or students born before September 1st, 1957. You can't change that.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:13Cara Santa Maria?

  That is just what it is. Also, there's an assumption that in the absence of the treatment, the relationship between the variables would be smooth and continuous through the cutoff point. So, that cutoff point being one more year or one less year, if you didn't have that, there would be no difference between the two, because there's enough variability within the population. And then, the last thing is that that cutoff point has to be strictly enforced, and it has to be independent of any other co-founders. So, in this case, it's a pretty clean opportunity to use a regression discontinuity design.

• 54:52Cara Santa Maria?

  And when you use the type of statistical analysis required in a regression discontinuity design, you can make causal inferences, different than when you just look at observational data and you can't really determine, you know, are smokers more likely to drink more coffee, or is the coffee making it so that they smoke more, you know, whatever? The chicken and the egg problem, that's so common amongst correlational studies. In this case, you can make some causal inferences. So, what do you think happened when they compared the students who had to stay in school to the age of 15 to the students who had to stay in school till the age of 16, many,

• 55:35Cara Santa Maria?

  many years later, when these individuals were 65 years old?

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Well, I mean-

• 55:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you think that the students with more education had a lower incidence of Alzheimer's and related dementias? Do you think that it was the same, or do you think that they had a higher incidence, for some reason?

• 55:53Bob Novella?

  I assume lower.

• 55:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, and they did. They had lower.

• 55:56Bob Novella?

  Wow, one extra year, just one year.

• 55:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's not even like, yeah, it's just one year, and like, sometimes with these continuity designs, the cutoff is so low that we are talking about one extra year of education, but we're not talking about one extra year of life. And we have to remember that, because of course, that would be a major confound. If we were looking at a group that was 66 versus a group that was 65, we could say, well, all of this variance is explained by the fact that the incidence goes up with age. And of course, one extra year means an extra year of a chance of getting dementia. So, when you're looking at a cutoff like you do in this kind of treatment, you can literally look at a week after and a week before, and you can say, okay, a week of

• 56:41Cara Santa Maria?

  time is not enough to change the incidence rate of Alzheimer's-related dementia, but it is enough to say, this week after versus this week before group had a wildly different experience in that they were required to stay in school longer. So, you know, even given all of the variability, the researchers feel pretty confident that there is some amount of variance here in the incidence rate of Alzheimer's and related dementias that is, that is explained by the manipulation of whether they had an extra year of school. That said, things get complicated statistically when we look at the actual numbers. Here's a big problem with their results.

• 57:24Cara Santa Maria?

  When they looked at the overall group of people that they were engaging in this analysis on, the incidence rate of Alzheimer's at this relatively young age was less than 1%, just under 1%. When they looked at the protective effect of that extra year of education, it was 0.88%.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, that's huge.

• 57:48Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a, that's a huge difference against a background level of only 1%. And so, they're like, we do not think that this could be the only explanation for all of this variance. They also say, we cannot confidently make a distinction about the magnitude of the protective effect. We don't think it's 0.88% protective here. We don't think that the magnitude is something we can say, but we do think we can say that the direction is appropriate. We can say that causally more education reduces the risk of developing Alzheimer's and related dementias later in life. How much? Our research is not going to answer that question.

• 58:31Speaker 01

  Carrie, you know what would go a long way to sort this out? Just do a 10-year follow-up, man. So, the one possibility-

• 58:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they need to look at them when they're older and when the incidence rate gets a lot higher.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  It's at a kind of a young age to be assessing for Alzheimer's.

• 58:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and they said that too, and they were like, listen, there may be different mechanisms between early, we know there are different mechanisms between early onset and late onset Alzheimer's, and that may not be as sensitive to education effects, for example.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  But not only that, so when I, when I was reading this, like, the first thing I thought of is that, because this is a known phenomenon within dementia research, that higher baseline functioning delays the diagnosis. It doesn't-

• 59:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But right there-

• 59:15Speaker 01

  It delays the diagnosis, not, it doesn't necessarily delay the disease, but if you're starting from a higher point of functionality, you basically don't present yourself to medical care, right? If everyone's presenting at the same point of severity, but you're starting out higher, it takes longer to get to that point.

• 59:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They, they make that point in their limitation section, and they, they kind of go even farther to say, there, there could be a SES effect here too.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's another, that's another factor.

• 59:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not just higher baseline education. It's also all the things that come along with higher baseline education. You may be more likely to, to compensate, to mask, to do all these things.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  For longer.

• 59:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, you may be more likely-

• 59:57Speaker 01

  But that effect should, should go away over time. That's why I'm saying, if you follow them up till the end of their life, probably that effect will go away, the delayed diagnosis effect.

• 1:00:06Cara Santa Maria?

  They also, they also argue that there's like another side to that, which is that sometimes when you're a higher SES or you have more education, you may be more likely to seek treatment.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, there is kind of like, but, but how much does that balance out? We don't know. We just, we just really don't know. Following up 10 years later and looking at the difference between this cohort and that cohort, and seeing if that magnitude changes, would be really telling. My guess, though, is that the directionality won't change, because we have other research that does show a large correlative effect. And what these researchers are saying is not, we're predicting how much it reduces the risk. They're saying, we're, we're showing that there is a reason to think that it's causal, not just correlative. We know the direction of the change.

• 1:00:51Bob Novella?

  What about, this is, maybe you hinted at this in Confounding Factors, but what about just learning later in life, after, you know, after school? And, and, you know, and how active you are cognitively? Did they try to deal with that as well?

• 1:01:07Cara Santa Maria?

  No, because I think the assumption is that, of course, that may have an impact. But what variable are they looking at? How much formal education you got? Now, I think somebody could argue that if you get more formal education when you're young, you're more likely to keep learning later in life. But that's just something that would magnify the effect. It would still be tied to that early educational cutoff.

• 1:01:30Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:01:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And so that's the variable they wanted to understand. How complex that variable shows itself, I think, would be a question for, for later research. Or can you make up for the effect of limited early education by choosing to do later?

• 1:01:42Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  Interesting question. So Bob, there is separate research which pretty clearly establishes the benefit of continuing education late in life.

• 1:01:51Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  And reducing your risk of, again, being diagnosed with dementia, whatever that means.

• 1:01:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think the big question here that a lot of people grapple with is the nature/nurture question.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Cara Santa Maria?

  How much of this is genetically pre-coded? And, you know, how much of it is going to happen because of biological processes anyway? And how much is there a mitigating or protective effect based on behavioral choices that we make throughout the lifespan? And they did specifically, in their study, look at individuals who, you know, tested positive for a predictive factor for Alzheimer's, which we've talked about before on the show. It's the APOE4 variant. And so, you know, we know that people who have two copies of APOE4, for example, have a tenfold higher risk of, of developing this.

• 1:02:44Cara Santa Maria?

  This is a single nucleotide polymorphism. And they actually did tease that out. But now we're talking about percentages of percentages of people in the study. And they found that there was a protective effect there as well. So even in those who we might argue have a stronger nature effect, the nurture still did seem to have an outcome.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the environmental factors do mitigate the genetic predisposition. But there's also a subgroup, there's a group of people who have familial Alzheimer's. And for those people, if you have the gene, that's just genetic disease. If you have the gene, you get the disease. But for most people, it's just a predisposition. And those are, those are typically modifiable by environmental effects. It is the, sort of, the interaction.

• 1:03:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's very similar to cancer in that way. Yeah, it's, it helps to answer that question because I think an important question in public health is, what can we do that's preventative? How, what's the ROI on that? How is it going to affect, you know, the population as a whole? And what these researchers are saying is that, hey, listen, it does look like it is, there's some amount of causality here. And so, yes, it behooves us as a society to make sure that educational opportunities are available to everyone to mitigate this risk.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Invest more in education and really encourage lifelong learning. Absolutely. But the, the remaining question that I have, though, which doesn't really affect that first question, like, should we promote education? Absolutely, it's still protective. Is, to what degree is the mechanism direct versus indirect? Right, so the indirect thing would, is like socioeconomic status and that. But could there potentially be a direct mechanism? Meaning stimulating the brain to learn more has some biological protective effect on the brain through either stimulating stem cells or whatever, something.

• 1:04:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  Keeping the brain more active.

• 1:04:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And during sensitive periods, too, of development, you know? If you are academically oriented when you are young and you are exposed to that type of learning, is your brain going to be able to better, you know?

• 1:04:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, whether.

• 1:04:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Reject or whether, yeah, the physiologic changes there. Probably.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  I certainly hope that's true.

• 1:05:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  Sure, you do, Steve. Yeah, someone who is massively overeducated. I absolutely wish that that is true.

• 1:05:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and regardless mechanistically, there is, we know there's something going on. It's not just a mind over matter thing.

• 1:05:14Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:05:14Cara Santa Maria?

  There is a biological process at play, but what is that? We still don't know.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Cara. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time?

• 1:05:23Jay Novella?

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

• 1:05:42Jay Novella?

  Many people guessed Tasmanian devil.

• 1:05:45Bob Novella?

  That, that is the raccoon that I caught in a trap recently. It was, it was a benign trap. He was, he was a very comfortable and happy, until I tried to let him out. And then he made sounds like that and I, I noped out and walked away.

• 1:05:59Speaker 01

  Because of the clue you gave last week, saying that I would be particularly interested in this, I'm going to guess that it's a bird or birds. And that, because you said it was surprising, it's probably cute birds that you wouldn't expect to be making noises like this.

• 1:06:13Jay Novella?

  Okay, well, I have a guess from a listener named Aaron Kinney. And Aaron said, pretty sure it's spary foam being used, commercial grade or just a can of great stuff, unsure. So this is like the, the sprayable, expanding foam that I'm sure, if you own a house, you probably used it somewhere.

• 1:06:32Bob Novella?

  Or if you're active in Halloween, that is an awesome tool for, for Halloween crafts.

• 1:06:37Jay Novella?

  It is. And when it comes out, it makes like this ripping kind of sound, you know?

• 1:06:41Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:06:42Jay Novella?

  Or if you've ever dispensed whipped cream from a can, it has a similar crackly kind of noise. That is not correct, but I thought that was a really interesting guess. Another listener named Dave Weldon said, howdy, Jay. I'm one of your longtime patron minions. My guess is that this is a mongoose going at it with a cobra.

• 1:07:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'd buy that, too.

• 1:07:03Jay Novella?

  So this is not correct, but there's an element in there that you, you got the understanding of the more general idea. Another listener named John B. Sandlin wrote in and said, just for fun, I'm guessing that this is a very agitated squirrel. Isn't that funny, Bob? That you said that? That's not a bad guess. It's not a bad guess. I have a, a close, a close winner. I'm going to give this the win because this one was hard. Because it does, it could be lots of different things. And I, I think this person got most of the way there. This is from a listener named Katie Anne Mattson. And Katie Anne said, hi, Jay, very long time listener and love the work you guys do. I think this week's noisy is a couple of curlew birds. Curlew birds.

• 1:07:48Jay Novella?

  And if you look these up, if you look up a curlew bird, it has a feature that looks very similar to the actual birds that are making this noise. So these are birds, Steve, you are correct. And they are indeed fighting.

• 1:08:02Bob Novella?

  Are they cute?

• 1:08:03Jay Novella?

  They're, yeah, they're cute. They are cute. You want to guess?

• 1:08:06Bob Novella?

  They look like I'm looking at the curlew. It kind of looks like a kiwi.

• 1:08:10Jay Novella?

  It does look like a kiwi because these are kiwis fighting.

• 1:08:12Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:08:13Jay Novella?

  Kiwis fighting, these are the birds that, from everything that I've seen about them in person, video, whatever, like, fighting kiwis does not exist in my mind. I didn't think that they fought. Well, guess what? I was wrong and here's a little bit again.

• 1:08:36Jay Novella?

  Come on, kiwis? What are they fighting over? Like, what's the problem?

• 1:08:40Bob Novella?

  Fighting over a female kiwi?

• 1:08:42Jay Novella?

  Maybe. Could be like a snuggle hole they want to, they don't want to share. I don't know. But they fight. And there was a video, I wouldn't have believed it if someone sent me the audio, but I saw a video and the kiwis were really pissed and they were fighting. It was like piss and vinegar fight, like the knock down fight. You know what I mean? Anyway, that was very cool. I enjoyed all of that. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. And this noisy was sent in by a listener named Casey McBride. All of the different sounds in this audio are of the same process.

• 1:09:35Jay Novella?

  If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. I've said that, that phrase, what, Steve, a thousand times, maybe?

• 1:09:46Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 1:09:47Jay Novella?

  I still get emails. I had somebody email me at [email protected], asking me where to send an audio file.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  You've found it. It's right here.

• 1:10:02Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like, what's happening here? Did I miss a conversation? I don't know. But yeah, then there's a conversation happening on Reddit where people are asking. Yeah, it's [email protected]. That's anything that you want to send, who's that noisy related, go through that email, please. And if you send it to me directly like that, you can attach files. And that's why I do it that way.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Jay. A quick email, this one comes from Jeff from California, who writes, "Right in your backyard in the Hartford Current, very disappointing. The whole thing is presented as completely normal." And then he links to an article, the title of which is Paranormal Activity Found at Abandoned Connecticut Hospital, Investigators Say. Spirits have had a lot to say. Did you guys have a chance to look at this article?

• 1:10:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  So this is, why is this in the Hartford Current? Because it's Halloween. Every October, every October.

• 1:10:56Jay Novella?

  They can't help themselves.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  They can't help themselves. The local news does a fluff story on something haunting or whatever. Sometimes they contact us to be the token skepticism. They, but not always. This one didn't even bother with the token skepticism, right? So this was basically an advertisement for Connecticut Spirit Investigators, who's just a local, there's a ton of these in New England. Yeah, it's a local ghost hunting group. And it's the same bullshit that we've heard a thousand times. You know, it's footsteps and shadows and, you know, and voices and whatever. Do they have any evidence? Of course not. If they had anything compelling, we would, it would be all over the place, right? We would see it. Every time you ask, "What's your best evidence?", it's always absolute crap, right?

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  So this is just all more of the same, a lot of stories, but nothing concrete to back it up. So, but yeah, this is, this is the typical October fluff piece. We, we have been involved with many, many of these over the years. All right, guys, so we have a great interview with Andrea Jones-Roy. So let's go to that interview now.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  We are joined now by Andrea Jones-Roy. Andrea, welcome back to the SGU.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Hi, thank you. It's great to be here.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  So we thought we'd have you on briefly because the, this is the last episode that comes out before the midterm elections in the US.

• 1:12:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  And you and I have been talking a lot about this because we are also on another podcast together, The Political Reality Podcast.

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  Yes, indeed.

• 1:12:37Jay Novella?

  Wait, wait, you guys are podcasting behind my back?

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  We're actually podcasting in front of your face sometimes, Jay.

• 1:12:44Jay Novella?

  No, I'm there. I know.

• 1:12:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:46Jay Novella?

  Could I ask you guys a question?

• 1:12:48Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:12:48Jay Novella?

  You know, you're, there's so much information out there about the election, about polling, about, you know, the number of people that have already voted and everything seems to be like aggressive, like people are out there voting and there's all this information. And I'm just curious, you know, why is it that we can't, you know, be confident about what the polling is showing? If it's consistently showing the same thing with all of these polls that are happening from all of these different organizations, they all seem to track. What is it intrinsically about polling that just can't let us, you know, accept it?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Well, Jay, if you listened to our episode, season two, episode 10 of Political Reality, can polls be trusted?

• 1:13:29Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  We chat about that for a full hour.

• 1:13:31Speaker 05

  Yes, indeed.

• 1:13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, but go ahead, Andrea, give us a quickie.

• 1:13:36Speaker 05

  Well, I was also going to say, Jay, you may have even been in the room when we spoke about it. So I'm really glad that it resonated with you at that time.

• 1:13:43Jay Novella?

  I'm trying to, I'm giving you guys a softball over here and you're like busting my balls.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  Step it up, Jay.

• 1:13:49Jay Novella?

  Let me ask you another question. In the 1930s political environment in Germany.

• 1:13:54Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:13:54Jay Novella?

  Should I continue?

• 1:13:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, about those polls, actually, now that you mention it. So Jay, the short answer to a very complicated question is, is basically two things. One, polls have been generally doing better, quote unquote, because better can mean a lot of different things. But they generally have been doing better than the, let's say, mainstream narrative would have us believe. And, and a lot of that is to do with the fact that humans are very bad at understanding probabilities. And even more than that, the news and various, you know, online social media soundbites are even worse at talking about the fact that, say, even a race that's predicted to go one way, you know, 60, 40,

• 1:14:39Speaker 05

  it's quickly talked about as a lock, as though that's 100.

• 1:14:42Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 1:14:42Speaker 05

  Right. And so, so part of it is the way that we've interpreted the polls. But another piece of it is, is there are some things going on under the hood with polling that, that American polling outfits have been working on for the last 10 years. And it will be very interesting. There's many things that'll be interesting about the upcoming election. But one of the many things is how well the polls are doing. So some of the things we talk about in this episode are that whenever Trump is on the ballot, it does seem to be the case that pollsters have underestimated how well Republicans will perform. And so that's part of why I think a lot of people in the United States think, oh, polls are always wrong. They're not off by a ton. It might be a couple of percentage points in terms of the margin of error, 2016 being a little bit noisier than that.

• 1:15:25Speaker 05

  But the other piece of this is that we are not underestimating the performance of Republicans when Trump is not on the ballot. So polls have been quite accurate in 2018 and in 2022. So they've been consistently very good on the midterms. One of the questions that we all have going into the election on Tuesday is, is this another case of a midterm election and the polls being pretty reliable, like they have been for the last two midterm elections? Or has Trump managed to kind of jam himself on the ballot in many ways? Because he is being outspoken in a lot of campaigns. He is making a lot of speeches and kind of injecting himself into the discourse. And we're also all wondering if, even if he weren't doing those things,

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  if pollsters since 2016, because they tend to overestimate the, the strength of Democrats, is that, whether they have corrected for that? So we just don't really know. And, and it's kind of a moving target at all times. But we will know a ton more, even this time next week.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's why we're going to be, so yeah, part of the reason why I wanted to have you on too, is to promote the fact that so next Tuesday, this is, you know, two days after the show comes out, or three days, we're, we're going to be doing a, the first Political Reality livestream. This will be Tuesday from 12 noon to 2 PM Eastern Time. And then the following, that's Election Day. And the following day, Wednesday, you're going to join us for our typical Wednesday SGU livestream, which starts at 12 PM Eastern Time, so that we could do the post-election analysis. And we could talk all about how well the polls did or did not do.

• 1:16:58Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  One thing we talked about that, what I found very interesting is that polls are not forecasts. And I think people look at them that way.

• 1:17:07Jay Novella?

  Well, what are they then?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Because as is often said, it's a snapshot. It's just a, it's a way of collecting data. And you really only know, this is how people are answering this poll right now. And there's a lot of moving parts in terms of like, is it a representative sample? And is there a shyness effect? And are there any systematic biases in the data? And you have to wait it to make sure that it's representative, et cetera. But forecasts, I think what people want the polls to be, that's like, well, what's the probability of a certain outcome? There are forecasts, I think Nate Silver is probably the most well-known one these days, who use the polls and other data to then forecast a probability.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  So if he says, oh, like the Democrats, which he has said recently, the Democrats are 75% likely to take the House and the Senate. That still means there's a 1 in 4 chance they won't. So if they don't, does that mean he was wrong? No, he said there's a 25% chance that this could happen. It's just probability. Forecasting is probability. Polls are a snapshot and they're very problematic, but they are information. They're not perfect information. They don't tell you what is going to happen, but they're information that are used to make forecasts. The forecasts are probabilistic, and that's why we never really know what happens until the election actually happens.

• 1:18:28Speaker 05

  That's right. And I think that's such an important distinction, Steve, because it is the case. And especially when we think about things like the polls were way off. They were all wrong, you know, in 2016. And it's like, well, we're conflating two things. One is the probability of a particular candidate winning that, yes, these pollsters or these aggregators or these news outlets decide to, you know, pull out of the polls, but they also, as you said, like with Nate Silver, add in other things like fundamentals and other assumptions and things, incumbencies, how the economy is doing, presidential approval, all that other kind of stuff. But the actual predicted, you know, margins are still quite narrow. And so even right now, if you dig around, say, on Nate Silver's forecasts and his aggregators

• 1:19:09Speaker 05

  and all of these other things, but you can also, Real Clear Politics and a couple of other outlets are also good. You can see that even though he says things like, you know, it's something like a 90% that Democrats take the House at this moment, but the actual predicted balance is something like almost 50/50, right? And so it's really two totally different numbers that we're trying to make polls do both. And they're really two totally different things.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people do conflate like there's a high percentage chance of something happening with it will happen.

• 1:19:43Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:19:44Speaker 01

  I always like to give my medical analogies when we're doing the Political Reality Podcast because it's such a statistical game, you know, which I would teach, for example, students and residents all the time. It's like, yeah, this is the 95% answer and this other possibility is the 5% answer. But that means one time in 20, it's going to be the 5% answer. And for us, that's every week. That's one patient or whatever, how many patients we see per week. You have to think of it that way. This is a once a week thing that will happen, that 5% or the 1% will happen once a month or whatever. The 0.1% will happen once a year, but it will happen. You always have to be.

• 1:20:22Speaker 05

  And it's not never.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  It's not never. Yeah, even 1% is not never. It still will happen sometimes. The question is, in retrospect, did what you say had a 90% chance come true nine times out of 10? That's, so you could only really know in retrospect if your prognostication was accurate.

• 1:20:39Speaker 05

  Right. And unlike, I think, medical patients or medical professions where presumably you have many, many, many patients to compare this against, we have so few elections and they are all, we would consider, you know, totally, not even just an independent draw, but they are all so different that if we are even trying to learn, okay, why was it that the polls were overestimating the probability of a Democratic success in 2016? Let's correct for it, but also the electorate has changed and all kinds of other assumptions.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  Kind of a one-off, right? I mean, you'd never have the same exact election twice.

• 1:21:11Speaker 05

  Exactly. I think in general, my rule of thumb on this is I take seriously aggregators of polls. So not forecasts, but just like, sort of, if we take all the polls that are out there, it's just a ton of data. We know that it can be noisy. We can dig into the weeds on what each pollster is doing in terms of weighting. And we can sort of think holistically about what it's showing. And keep in mind that there's also, you know, say, three-point margin of error, which is huge for a lot of these elections that are quite close in the United States. But then the forecast is, those can be evaluated, I think, in a way that forecasts are tricky because unless you're coming out with a 100, 0, you really can't ever say. I mean, I went back the other day and I looked at what the forecasts actually were for Trump and Clinton in 2016. Do you remember this, Steve?

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  Did we talk about this?

• 1:21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, was it, yeah, yeah. And wasn't it like Nate Silver, who gave Trump a 30% chance of winning?

• 1:22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  Which kind of.

• 1:22:03Speaker 05

  And no one believed him.

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, which kind of pole vaulted him to fame a little bit because he would say, hey, I still think Hillary Clinton's going to win, but he has a real chance of winning. Don't, we cannot rule this out with the data that we have.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  He, yes.

• 1:22:15Speaker 01

  So he seemed to be prescient, you know, when Trump won.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. He, and this was on the heels of him basically perfectly calling the previous two Obama elections. But somehow, even then, even, I was paying attention to him. I was not working for him yet at the time, so I wasn't, you know, insider information or anything like that. But I was clicking on his forecasts and his models and his articles constantly in 2016. And literally the Sunday before the election, he went on, I think it was ABC News, and it's a whole printed article and transcript, and there's also a video of him saying, look, 30% chance of winning is not nothing. A couple of states in the Midwest could go the other way and he's in the White House. And I remember just not registering. And that's part of where the probability piece, I mean, I even went back and looked at what he was saying.

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  And not that he's this sage that knows everything, but he is the person I, if I'm going to pay attention, I'm going to pay attention to him. When in 2024, his final run of his model basically had it worked out to a coin flip. Like he ran something like 80,000 simulations of the election based on all the polls and all of the other assumptions that we've been talking about. And I think Kamala Harris won somewhere between 50 and 51% of the time. And so it was basically even.

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  And I still managed to be shocked when Trump won in 2024.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  But it was a coin flip.

• 1:23:28Jay Novella?

  Guys, another, another big thing that people are talking about and obsessing about is whether or not this, this election is going to be contested or, you know, what is the post-election landscape going to be? And I'm curious to know what you guys think we can expect.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  I mean, I think, you know, Trump and his Department of Justice and his people are sort of showing their hand, right? I mean, they are already laying the groundwork for challenging the election. And this is consistent with his previous behavior. Previous behavior, by the way, is always a really good predictor of future behavior.

• 1:24:05Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:24:05Speaker 01

  Right? We said that on the show for voters, right? The best prediction of whether you're going to vote is if you have voted in a previous election. So we know that Trump is going to contest it, but he's playing, he's showing us how. He's challenging the Senate race in Alaska. He's challenging the, you know, threatening the election officials in California. And, and so I would be shocked if he doesn't do, if he doesn't follow up with all those. He's going to claim there was a huge illegal alien vote, that there was a huge fraudulent vote, that it was rigged and that really the Republicans should have done great.

• 1:24:39Jay Novella?

  But like in the past, I mean, I'd imagine, you know, the, the election and the voting and everything is going to be just as secure as the last two or three elections, which means the signal to noise ratio here is almost zero. So then we're just going to get into another situation where there's all, a lot of hand waving, but there's nothing that could pass through the courts.

• 1:25:01Speaker 05

  Well, and I think, but that, that can still cause a lot of chaos, I think, is one of my big concerns. I mean, I, I agree with Steve that Trump and his team have been very, very transparent, frankly, since 2015, when he said, or 2016 at least, when he said, if I lose, it will have been, it will have been fraudulent. He's been threatening to make a fuss about this since the beginning of his, his time in politics. But I'm also worried about some of the things on the day, like voter intimidation or confusion about, you know, purging people from the voting rolls. This is very anecdotal, but I know of some people whose family in Texas found out that they've been voting for, you know, three decades in Texas and they found out that they were removed

• 1:25:44Speaker 05

  because they didn't turn in some piece of mail that, that was circulated for the first time ever. Like, I think there is going to be a fair amount of funny business. So ironically, if there is anything that approximates fraud, I would say it would be perpetuated by the, the current administration, is my guess. I have no real basis other than, as Steve said, what, what they're threatening to do. But I think, Jay, to your point, I mean, we're still hearing about 2020, even though so many years have passed and Trump ended up winning the race to come back to the White House. And so unfortunately, I think a best case scenario is we get through the election. There's a general kind of procedure and people are sworn in in January. But I think for years, we may hear him, you know, saber rattling about things going on.

• 1:26:29Speaker 05

  I think that's probably the best case for us.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  But you don't think it'll amount to much?

• 1:26:34Speaker 05

  I'm, I'm more pessimistic. I've been doing an informal poll of any other political scientist, and we've done some of this, Steve, on the show, and then any other event that I've been a part of in the run-up to the election. Like how, I've asked, you know, where do you think this election will land on a scale of business as usual to civil war? And most people I have asked are basically in the middle in the sense that there will be a lot of claims of fraud. It will be very chaotic, but that ultimately it will proceed as a democratic election and our country will continue to be a democracy. I, one of my favorite responses was on a, an interview I did with Lindsay Cormack, who we've had on the show in season one. And she said, well, I don't think there's going to be a civil war because I think Americans are too lazy for a civil war. And I was like, okay, I'm fine with that.

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  I agree with that, actually. I think, I think only business as usual, partly because if the Republicans lose big time, it's because Trump is very, very unpopular.

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  That very unpopularity will mean that his whining about voter fraud will fall flat, right? He won't have the political juice to do, to really do anything about it. He'll do a lot, he'll make a lot of noise and I think people will largely ignore him, is what I predict. Of course, the core faithful, it'll just add it to their litany of, of propaganda that they have. I've been, interestingly, engaged in a lot of discussion over this issue of, you know, how secure are American elections and, you know, vote by, you know, by mail, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, it's always, interesting things always come out of it. And one thing that I, that I learned is like, oh, I see. They're focusing on hazard, we're focusing on risk, right?

• 1:28:15Speaker 01

  So in other words, hazard is the potential that something could happen. Risk is evidence that it actually is happening.

• 1:28:21Speaker 05

  Yes, yes.

• 1:28:21Speaker 01

  And so they all say, oh, look, these homeless people are stealing ballots and, you know, mistakes are being made and we can't know for sure that whatever. And we're saying, yeah, but it's not actually happening. The amount of voter fraud that is happening is orders of magnitude less than would be necessary to sway even an individual election. And it would have to be coordinated. What we're seeing is random.

• 1:28:45Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:28:46Speaker 01

  Background noise at an extremely low level. These are extremely secure elections, but they're like, but they point to the potential for fraud. It's like, okay. But then when you flip it and you say, okay, but those measures you're suggesting will cause voter suppression, then they say, prove there's actual voter suppression.

• 1:29:05Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Not the potential for voter suppression. It's like, oh, so you completely flipped the criteria when it's going the other way.

• 1:29:13Speaker 05

  Right. I'm trying to think of a medical analogy for this where it's like.

• 1:29:17Speaker 01

  That's my job.

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, step aside, Steve, I'm taking over now. Where it's something like, I'm going to freak out as though I think I might have cancer. But then if you say, okay, I'm going to treat the cancer, you're like, I don't know, you need to prove, it fell apart. You know what I mean, though?

• 1:29:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hear what you're saying, yeah.

• 1:29:36Speaker 05

  Because I think there is something there where it's like, I think we do this in everyday life. It's sort of like my mother is always worrying that if she hasn't heard from us, that one of us died in a ditch. And it's like, okay, you're behaving that way because of this thing you imagined up. But if we actually were like, I don't know, I feel like what they're doing is something that we do every day without realizing.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  I think it's motivated reasoning, right? That's the bottom line, is that there's different types of reasoning you can engage in, hazard based versus risk based, and you could flip the strategy to create whatever result you want. And again, I think both sides do this because the, like, the Democrats could apply different criteria to voter suppression as they do to voter fraud, and then the Republicans are the mirror image of that. And I think we just have to sort of logically apply the same criteria to all the questions, right? Because sometimes the Democrats have warned about voter suppression when in fact it hasn't materialized. Then they just have to acknowledge, like, okay, we were worried about this, and maybe that's why the other side was doing this. But when we look at the numbers, we can't see evidence that it's actually happening. You have to kind of admit that, you know?

• 1:30:39Speaker 01

  Not that there isn't legitimate voter suppression, but I'm just saying that for specific instances, you have to follow the same criteria, which I think means there's got to be a plausible mechanism and actual evidence that the phenomenon is happening in some sense of how big the phenomenon is, right?

• 1:30:55Speaker 05

  I mean, you raise an interesting point, Steve, because if you look at the data on, it kind of gets back to like, how would you measure voter suppression or disenfranchisement, right? Because if you look at the data on who's more likely to vote, so you're more likely to vote if you have a college education, if you're married, if you're older, white people are more likely to vote than non-white people in the United States, and women are more likely to vote than men. And so you could start to tell whatever kind of, it would be not scientifically valid, but whatever causal story you want in that. But you could presumably start to imagine, well, why is it the case that, say, people from more marginalized communities or lower income communities are voting less? And you could say, well, it's because they don't have time to get off of work and because

• 1:31:39Speaker 05

  there's like childcare issues and because voting is not a holiday in the United States and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you could argue that that's a kind of voter suppression. And so addressing voter suppression, like increasing, you know, early voting or mail-in voting and things like that would be something that, like, that's where I think the Democrats would say, I guess they're making something of a guess because we don't know for sure. But in general, the, you know, voter suppression, I think is, there's more voter suppression, evidence of voter suppression than there is of fraud. But it does depend on how you define suppression.

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  Of course, always. Yeah. One more thing before I let you go. So we're going to be talking again next Wednesday after the election and give our analysis and try to put things into some kind of context. But, but I always find, and this is not limited to politics, but like after an election, whatever happens, people use that to tell whatever narrative they already believe in.

• 1:32:34Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Because there's, you know, there's 100 factors, each of which moving the needle one direction or another direction. And you can't ever say at the end of the day, this was the one factor that caused this candidate to win or lose. It's the aggregate of all of the factors, but people will say, it was this, right? It was this vote or that factor or.

• 1:32:56Speaker 05

  Or my pet.

• 1:32:57Speaker 01

  Whatever.

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  Campaign strategy or candidate or whatever. Yes. Like, there's, there's very much a risk that, and not even a risk, I would say a guarantee, much more certain than any, any kind of political forecast, that whatever people think is, is the main problem in American politics on Monday before the election will somehow find a way to have that be the explanation for whatever happened on Tuesday, regardless of who wins. Like, that's going to somehow be the leading story.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:23Speaker 05

  In their minds, yes.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  So we have to try to keep that in mind and just avoid the temptation to do that. It's a lot of factors. But as I say, with a very highly contested election, or, you know, with a, we're a very close, polarized, you know, kind of electorate, if there's, if you win an election by one or two points, then anything that moved the needle by one percentage point was a factor in the election.

• 1:33:45Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  And so, in fact, to some extent, everybody's right in that whatever they're saying probably did move the needle, you know, and could have made the point, it's just not the only factor is the thing to keep in mind.

• 1:33:58Speaker 05

  Well, and I think there's even more, it's even, there's even more to it than that, which is that if you're looking at whatever race and you say, wow, the person I either hoped or thought would win, didn't win, and it does, it still doesn't mean that whatever they were doing didn't work. So for example, if Talarico doesn't win Texas, we don't necessarily conclude, well, Talarico should have done more of the one pet thing that I'm always talking about, then he would have won. What we don't know is the counterfactual and something like, he came closer to winning in a very deep red, traditionally red state, and that's a big deal, right? We say the same thing with, with Kamala Harris is that, you know, yes, she lost, but by, if you compare it to other incumbents running in democracies around the world, or if you compare her numbers to how Biden was doing before she joined the race, she did fantastic, right? Relative to how she could have done.

• 1:34:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. I agree. That's one thing that bothers me. Like, if you got 50.1%, what you did worked. And if you got 49.9%, what you did didn't work. It's like, yeah, but that, you can't define worked that way. Our elections, it's, it's an illusion created by the fact that our elections are winner take all, binary election. And it's the same thing like with football games. Like, if one team ekes out a victory, whatever, in overtime by one point, then everything they did worked and was right and it was good. And everything the other team did was, was a disaster and bad. But if it just one play had gone another way, the narrative would completely flip.

• 1:35:22Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, and I think, you know, I've been thinking about sports in the lead up to this election only in the sense that, you know, when we do like, there's, because I get a lot of questions, and we can talk about this in our various live streams as well. I've been getting a lot of questions about prediction markets and whether those are useful information when it comes to forecasting elections. And I kind of find myself thinking about like Vegas odds and sports betting as well, where, you know, if there's a prediction for the Super Bowl that like one team is going to win and there's a 70% chance that they're going to win, if there's an upset and the 30% team wins, people don't freak out and say, all sports predictions are wrong, right? We sort of hold. Yeah, yeah, we sort of hold political predictions out like with much more cynicism, I think, other than just like, yeah, the unlucky, the unlikely thing happened.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  I think people, people get that gambling is probability, but they don't, they don't apply the same logic to other things, though.

• 1:36:13Speaker 05

  Or that, you know, sports is, you know, most popular sports are a mix of skill and luck. And so there is going to be some luck. And I think we tend to underestimate the role of luck in a lot of these political campaigns, right? It could be that at the last second, a whole bunch of people saw some random post and were like, you know what, I am going to go vote or whatever, right? Like, there really are a lot of random events.

• 1:36:34Speaker 01

  We don't know how people are going to break at the last minute. There could be people who like are voicing their displeasure with the administration in a poll, but then they might revert to their tribe on election day. And you just never know how that's, how that's going to break. Well, as always, Andrea, I feel like we could talk about this stuff forever.

• 1:36:55Speaker 05

  I do feel that way, too.

• 1:36:56Speaker 01

  And we do. So if you are not already a listener, check us out at politicalrealitypodcast.com. We are actually getting close to wrapping up our second season. We had a full season in the spring. We're finishing up our second season this fall. Again, join us for the live stream Tuesday, 12 to 2 Eastern Time, Wednesday, 12 to whenever, also Eastern Time. We are going to be talking about the election and then wrapping up the results and doing all the same, similar kind of analysis. We'll be taking live questions, too, for the first time.

• 1:37:31Speaker 05

  Yes, we have, we have some emailed in questions that we'll, we'll answer, but yeah, please bring your, your live questions. We're also accepting predictions. We have a couple of reader or listener submitted predictions for what they think is going to happen. So tell us what you think's going to happen in the election. And by the way, if you're listening and you think, my gosh, I can't think about American politics for one second, will they ever talk about something else? Just this week, our episode features our conversation with Professor Alex Tan in New Zealand to talk about how New Zealand does politics and how it is low voltage, my favorite word of 2026.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have, we have an episode on Australian politics and an episode on New Zealand politics.

• 1:38:11Speaker 05

  We're slowly considering the possibility that there are other countries besides the United States.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  Now, Andrea, what'd you say to me? You said, vote early, vote often. Didn't you say that?

• 1:38:20Speaker 05

  That's what I said. And I said, I said, Jay, do it on, on Wednesday, okay?

• 1:38:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:38:25Speaker 05

  Early and often, all day Wednesday. That's what you want to do.

• 1:38:28Speaker 01

  All right, Andrea.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  You guys voted, right?

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  I voted already, yep, absolutely. Yeah, I voted today.

• 1:38:32Speaker 05

  All right, I'm going to go vote on Saturday, so.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Awesome.

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  Cool. Well, thanks, guys. See you next week.

• 1:38:37Speaker 01

  See you next week. Bye-bye.

• 1:38:38Speaker 05

  Bye.

• 1:38:51Speaker 01

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two are real and one is fake. And then I challenge my panelists to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week because it's Halloween. So I had to come up with a Halloween-ish theme. The theme is vampire animals. Okay.

• 1:39:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I like it.

• 1:39:10Jay Novella?

  That's cool.

• 1:39:10Speaker 01

  All right. Here we go. Item number one, the vampire squid, Vampiro toothus infernalis, draws blood from its prey using large suction cups on its tentacles, then drinks the blood through two long retractable feeding filaments. All right, number two, the East African vampire jumping spider, Ivarca calisavora, feeds on vertebrate blood by preferentially hunting female mosquitoes that have recently consumed a blood meal. And item number three, male vampire moths, Calyptra, are essentially salt vampires, piercing the skin of mammals to drink their blood,

• 1:39:52Speaker 01

  but retaining up to 95% of the salt while passing most of the blood's protein through their digestive system, undigested. Jay, go first.

• 1:40:01Jay Novella?

  Absolutely. Okay, so the first one, we have a vampire squid and it draws blood from its prey using large suction cups on its tentacles. And then what? The blood through two long retractable feeding filaments. So it sucks the blood with the tentacles and then it, and then it drinks the blood with these retractable feeding filaments that go into the suction cup, Steve?

• 1:40:29Speaker 01

  They go into the blood that it just drew out of the creature with the suction cups.

• 1:40:32Jay Novella?

  So the suction cup pulls the blood into a what?

• 1:40:35Speaker 01

  So it sucks the blood basically into the suction cup, then it feeds off the blood that it's collected in the suction cup.

• 1:40:41Jay Novella?

  But it's a suction cup. Does the suction cup move away from the host?

• 1:40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Jay Novella?

  Or it stays on? That, that completely doesn't make sense physics-wise to me. If you moved away, this is happening underwater, then the blood would just go.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  But you know, it's right there. It has, the filaments are there. It sort of sucks it up and then slips in the retractable feeding filaments and sucks up the blood.

• 1:41:00Jay Novella?

  Okay, let's move on to the next one.

• 1:41:03Jay Novella?

  The East African vampire jumping spider. What a title. This guy feeds on vertebrae blood by preferably, oh, by preferentially hunting female mosquitoes that have recently consumed a blood meal. Wow. So this jumping spider is going to jump up in the air and grab onto a recently fed female mosquito. That sounds tricky, too. That's weird, but okay. I mean, is, maybe there's a lot of them and it's not that hard. And it's not even using a web, right, Steve? Is it using webs or jumping?

• 1:41:38Speaker 01

  Does not use web, no.

• 1:41:40Jay Novella?

  So it's just jumping up into the.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  It has to find the ones that fed on blood and hunt those mosquitoes.

• 1:41:45Jay Novella?

  What does a mosquito do when it's fully fed? Where does it go? I don't know the answer to that. The last one, male vampire moths. These are essentially salt vampires. That's cool.

• 1:41:57Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:41:57Jay Novella?

  They pierce the skin of mammals to drink their blood, but retaining up to 95% of the salt while passing most of the blood's protein through their digestive system, undigested. So they poop undigested blood and suck the salt out. And these are moths that do this. So right out of the gate, a moth doing that? That's crazy. I don't, well, you know, we don't have that kind of moth where I live. All right, so it's between the squid with questionable physics on how it's actually getting the blood into its system. We have the jumping spider that has to be amazingly accurate at grabbing these recently fed female mosquitoes. And then we have, we have the moth that is pooping blood and, and eating the salt.

• 1:42:42Jay Novella?

  The salt, it wants only the salt. So it needs all that salt? That's my first thing. Why would it need all the salt? How can it live off of the salt? 95% of the salt, it keeps 95% of the salt while passing most of the blood, which, and then the blood has protein in it, which it's getting rid of. As weird as the, the jumping spider and, you know, the, the squid, I think the last one can't be true because what is it? It's, it's, this is its feeding? It's mostly eating salt? I don't believe it. That's the fiction.

• 1:43:10Speaker 01

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:43:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, I wish Bob was going first. So Jay, you think it's that the moth doesn't want salt? Or that, yeah, that the moth doesn't actually want salt, but there's another reason for it. I don't know. I don't, I don't see why in any animal that actually does drink or process a blood meal, I'm sure that they all have different reasons for getting the blood, whether it's a parasitic exchange sort of evolutionary thing, or there are proteins that they need from it. Or I don't know, salts, yeah, there's a lot of salts. I don't know. That one doesn't bother me as much. I think the thing that bothers me the most is the squid. Because I think, I mean, other than bats,

• 1:43:55Cara Santa Maria?

  obviously animals, blood is part of an animal's diet when they're eating an organism, like if they're a predatory animal, blood is part of the diet. But from what I understand, usually blood is like hard to digest and it's kind of harmful. And there are a lot of mechanisms in play for larger animals to actually reduce the toxicity of the blood. I don't know. Maybe I'm making this up, but I remember being on safari once and the, the guide telling us that like the lions, after they feed, they have to drink a ton of water because if they just sort of let the food sit, that the blood is, is very upsetting to their, to their digestive system.

• 1:44:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think of like bugs and bats as generally vampiric. And, and I don't, I don't think squid are vampiric. And I mean, yes, there is a squid called the, I don't think you made up that there's a squid called the vampire squid, but I don't know. Maybe it's a misnomer. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna say the vampire squid is a fiction. Your, your spidey senses that you had at the beginning, Jay, I, I absorbed them.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:44:59Jay Novella?

  Okay. And Bob?

• 1:45:00Bob Novella?

  All right, the jumping spider, I totally believe. I really love jumping spiders. I'm more familiar with the, the ones that we encountered in the United States. And they are, they have the best vision and they are, they are the smartest because they, they are hunters, you know? They, they have to find their prey and they, they can absolutely jump and catch flying insects, but also crawling insects and other, and other animals. So the fact that, the idea that this African version of the jumping spider, but a vampiric version, which is pretty awesome, can, can find and, and grab some mosquitoes with fresh blood, sounds more reasonable at least than the other ones. The, the third one here with the salt vampire, it sounds, I don't, yeah. I'm similar to Kara.

• 1:45:44Bob Novella?

  I don't have as much of a negative reaction to that as jaded. It sounds kind of, you know, not entirely unreasonable, at least not as unreasonable as this, this squid one that just, just rubs me the wrong way, this mechanically, it's how, how it works. And, and I think that kind of interesting animal, I would have come across that and, and remembered that more. So yeah, so this for, I'm not sure, but I'm just getting some bad vibes on this vampire squid. So I'll just have to say that's fiction.

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  You all agree on the second one, so we'll start there. The East African vampire jumping spider, Ivarca calisavora, feeds on vertebrate blood by preferentially hunting female mosquitoes that have recently consumed a blood meal. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science. Yeah, not, you know, you know, again, yeah, insects consuming blood, you know, a lot of that going around, not a big deal. But the question is, how do they preferentially hunt female mosquitoes who are full of blood? They just sucked out of an animal?

• 1:46:48Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, maybe the mosquitoes don't fly at that point. I don't know.

• 1:46:51Bob Novella?

  Well, what, what, with their vision, could they detect the, the heat of the blood? Bigger cache of, of heat in their abdomen than normally would be there?

• 1:46:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, that is, they can, they can detect the blood. Yeah, that's correct.

• 1:47:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  They use both vision and smell to identify.

• 1:47:06Bob Novella?

  Okay. Cool, man. Jumping spiders are awesome.

• 1:47:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, pretty cool. All right, let's go back to number one. The vampire squid, Vampiro toothus infernalis, basically means the vampire squid from hell. Draws blood from its prey using large suction cups on its tentacles, then drinks the blood through two long retractable feeding filaments. You guys all think there's something hinky about this, but Bob and Kara think this one is the fiction. This one is. The fiction.

• 1:47:36Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:47:37Bob Novella?

  The suction cups are problematic. Getting blood from the suction cups. I mean, I know they're, you know, they can change the, you know, your face.

• 1:47:46Speaker 01

  Suction cups.

• 1:47:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Does it even drink blood?

• 1:47:49Speaker 01

  No. So it's called the vampire squid, although it doesn't drink blood and it's not a squid. It is a cephalopod. It is that's related to squid and octopi, but it's neither a squid nor an octopus. It's a separate, it's, it's, and it's, in fact, it's the only genus in this group. Right?

• 1:48:11Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's the vampiro whatever group of cephalopods.

• 1:48:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Why is it called a vampire squid?

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  They're deep dwelling because they, because they look cool, man. They look like they're black and red and they, and their, their tentacles really have like a cape between them. Yeah, like webbing between them.

• 1:48:31Cara Santa Maria?

  They're cool.

• 1:48:31Speaker 01

  They don't even really have suction cups. And then they could also, like, they could flip it inside out so that they're inside this cape with the spikes all around them, you know, on the, that are on the inside. They're very, very cool looking, but they're, they're, they just feed off of the stuff drifting down into the deep ocean. They don't, right? They, they do have two long retractable feeding filaments, but they're eating just the snow, right? That the organic matter falling down into the deep.

• 1:48:58Cara Santa Maria?

  They're terrifying.

• 1:49:00Speaker 01

  But they look cool.

• 1:49:01Bob Novella?

  They're awesome, man.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Bob, you gotta make a vampire squid next year.

• 1:49:07Bob Novella?

  So.

• 1:49:08Speaker 01

  This means that the vamp, the male vampire moths, Calyptra, are essentially salt vampires, piecing the skin of mammals to drink their blood, but retaining up to 95% of the salt, while passing most of the blood's protein through their digestive system. Undigested is science. I was hoping to get especially Bob and Jay on the salt vampire thing.

• 1:49:25Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:49:25Speaker 01

  Making you think that I made that up based upon the, the famous Star Trek episode, The Man Trap, with, which featured a salt vampire. But no, this is, this is absolutely true. Now, Jay, you asked a couple of important questions here. What's it using the salt for? And what's it living off of? Now, the female vampire moths use their proboscis, right? Their nose to feed off of fruit, right? They just basically suck up the juices of fruit and that is their primary source of nutrition. And so do the male bats. So they still eat fruit. They're not living on the salt, but they eat blood. They drink blood and apparently just for the salt. So what do you think they're doing with all that salt?

• 1:50:08Speaker 01

  And how are they, why do they need the salt and the females don't need the salt?

• 1:50:13Jay Novella?

  I mean, yeah, what are they doing with all that salt? Like, so 90, 95% of what enters their, their body is, is, it's that salt that they're keeping.

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  They're drinking the blood for the salt, not the proteins. So when the females are getting ready to lay their eggs, the males pass the salt on to the females, which makes, which increases the number and survivability of the eggs. Right? So it's basically, it's storing up the salt for the female when they lay the eggs. And it's not the only insect to do that, but it, I think it is the only one that gets the salt from blood. Pretty cool.

• 1:50:55Bob Novella?

  Okay. Salt vampire.

• 1:50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, salt vampires.

• 1:50:59Bob Novella?

  When you saw that, you must have been like, oh, yeah, babe.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:04Speaker 01

  Well, I saw the description. They didn't use the term salt vampire. Like, hey, wait a minute. And I asked, is this a salt? Is it, is it fair to say that this therefore is a salt vampire? I was like, yeah, it absolutely is.

• 1:51:16Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:51:19Bob Novella?

  All right, guys. The quote is, "Science isn't about being right forever. It's about being less wrong than yesterday." Who said this? We don't know. It's just this common quotation that floats around the internet. But I really, I really like it. We've said, we've had, we've had similar sentiments expressed on this show many times. I like the way this one is, is phrased. I mean, people sometimes expect science to be right forever, right? I mean, big picture discoveries, all like biological evolution on Earth. Yes, that's forever. That is not going to change. But what's happening precisely behind the scenes is constantly being updated and refined. Science is not about truth with a capital T.

• 1:52:00Bob Novella?

  It's, it's about continuous refinement, being more and more less wrong, if you will. And I just, you know, wanted to talk about that a little bit. Steve, what could you add to that?

• 1:52:10Speaker 01

  When I look up like who said it, basically the answer is the internet said it.

• 1:52:13Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:52:15Speaker 01

  It's a modern internet adage.

• 1:52:17Bob Novella?

  There you go.

• 1:52:18Cara Santa Maria?

  All righty.

• 1:52:19Bob Novella?

  It's an MIA. It's an MIA.

• 1:52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, proud or pretty funny. Yeah, I like it. I like, there's a couple of things here. It is, science is about being less wrong, right? Just incrementally getting closer and closer and closer to the truth. But yeah, it's, you can't judge science by whether or not its conclusions at any given time are true forever. Because the thing was Dana O'Brien, who said, "If science knew everything, it would stop." Right? I mean, by definition, where our knowledge is changing. That's what the whole endeavor of science is about. And everything is up for revision if there's new data, new information, new concepts, new ways of looking at the world, maybe even if it just deepens our understanding of the world. Right?

• 1:53:04Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's a, you know, a reasonable nugget for science communication.

• 1:53:09Bob Novella?

  Thank you, MIA.

• 1:53:12Speaker 01

  All right. So, hey, guys, have a great Halloween.

• 1:53:15Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve. You too.

• 1:53:17Bob Novella?

  You too.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  And I hope all of your midterm dreams come true, whatever they may be.

• 1:53:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:23Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:53:34Speaker 01

  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 [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.