The Skeptics Guide #1060 - Nov 1 2025

News Items: Therapeutic Nanoparticles, What Killed Napoleon's Forces, Making Better Photosynthesis, Second Generation Black Holes, More on 3I-Atlas; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Human Instinct; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:46Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Jay Novella?

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Hello. So, Bob, tomorrow's Halloween. You all ready? You set? You cramming or you?

• 1:00Cara Santa Maria?

  What is that? Oh, it's a screen.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  That's Bob's wife. She's under the table.

• 1:04Speaker 06

  I usually ask if Halloween's ready for Bob.

• 1:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm in decent shape for Halloween and the party, which is the next day. Not too bad shape for that either. Of course, no matter how ready you are, I will still work to the last minute trying to tweak, tweak, tweak, the final tweakings of various things. But I'm very happy with my output this year.

• 1:25Speaker 06

  Bob, you to Halloween is what Stanley Kubrick was to movie making.

• 1:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Aww.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Cooper.

• 1:29Cara Santa Maria?

  That's huge.

• 1:30Jay Novella?

  It's not him too.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  It's Kubrick, not Kubrick. It's not like Q from Star Trek. All right.

• 1:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's Emu, not Emu. And we all say, we all say, it's Emu.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I'm probably gonna say that wrong later. Uri Geller, not Yuri Geller.

• 1:43Jay Novella?

  If you understand what the person is saying, you gotta be cool, you know?

• 1:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, we got an email from somebody in Australia this week who was like really mad that we all say solder instead of solder, I guess.

• 1:54Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:56Bob Novella?

  Wow, I wouldn't, oh my god.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  There's actually three L's in solder.

• 1:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, but I, I looked into the etymology and it comes from the French, but then it was changed. So it's like, the original, it doesn't even have an L in it. But this happens a lot in American English because it's so informed.

• 2:11Jay Novella?

  That's what I'm saying, why don't we say conniget?

• 2:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they do say like, why don't, why don't you say fillet or herb? And it's like, cause it comes from the French. And we pronounce it like the French, because American English is a mix.

• 2:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah. You know what's funny though? You could see your own language evolving over time, like, herbs with an H to me sounded so utterly ridiculous. And I've been kinda like training myself to realize it's probably the better way to pronounce it. You know what I mean?

• 2:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't like it. I don't think so. I think it's airb, airb.

• 2:40Jay Novella?

  Airb, you don't like it.

• 2:42Speaker 06

  But then there's the name Herbert, which adds a layer of confusion to the whole thing. Because you do pronounce the H in that sense, herb for short.

• 2:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, what about, um, Houston and Houston? That one always gets people. In Texas, it's Sam Houston, right?

• 2:56Speaker 06

  But in New York City, it's Houston Street.

• 2:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Jay Novella?

  What about honor? You don't pronounce the H in honor.

• 3:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Honor.

• 3:02Speaker 06

  Honor.

• 3:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, Brits don't say ballet, they say ballet, but then they say fillet.

• 3:08Speaker 06

  Filet, fillet.

• 3:09Jay Novella?

  It's all chaos.

• 3:09Bob Novella?

  Language is why.

• 3:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It is.

• 3:11Jay Novella?

  Bob, where do you stand on the Halloween should be the last Saturday in October rather than October 31st?

• 3:19Speaker 06

  Oh, good question.

• 3:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, it should always be a weekend?

• 3:22Jay Novella?

  So it would always be on a Saturday?

• 3:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Cause it's a party day.

• 3:25Bob Novella?

  I get it. I, I say, I'm a traditionalist, I say stick with the 31st, because it doesn't matter. Because wherever Halloween is, if it's Wednesday, I'm not working, I'm not going to a job. And so it doesn't matter to me.

• 3:39Jay Novella?

  That's a Bob centric thing, right? Like, what about all the kids whose Halloween could be significantly truncated if it's on a school night?

• 3:46Bob Novella?

  Well, don't get me started, because the, the, the tradition that we need to worry about is this stupid trunk or treat, where there, where a lot of families, a lot of families are doing trunk or treat. And then instead of trick or treating, which to me is scandalous and should be illegal.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  I did see a whole bunch of cars the other day in a park, not doing that.

• 4:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But you have to remember, there are parts of this country where people... Don't want you coming to their homes. It's not safe to go into neighborhoods. Uh, people, all the lights are off. Trunk or treat does allow kids to like trick or treat safely.

• 4:20Bob Novella?

  If that's the only option, that's fine, but I don't think that's as common as you.

• 4:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I do. I literally, I'm in the middle of LA in a very, very family friendly neighborhood in a development of houses where half of the people here have kids. And on Halloween, nobody has their lights on. And it's so sad.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  That is scandalous.

• 4:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I turned on my light. I had the whole thing. I had all the candy. I got like, you know, king size candy bars from Costco ready. Not a single person came to my door. It was depressing.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  It's, I know, it's terrible. I think partly this is a COVID holdover because the whole trunk or treat thing started in COVID.

• 4:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we did it when we were kids.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  This is ratcheting down our actual physical interaction with other people. I mean, Halloween night.

• 4:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it increases it. I actually think that kids who trunk or treat are more likely to get more FaceTime with people.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  I don't know. The thing about taking your kids around the neighborhood is you get to, you know, it's an event every year where you meet every neighbor in their house. They meet your kids. You know what I mean?

• 5:18Cara Santa Maria?

  That died like 30 years ago.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 5:21Cara Santa Maria?

  It really did.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  No, when my kids were young, we did that. And now like again, last year, zero people came to our home.

• 5:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. We'll say 20 years ago because your kids are getting, when they were young. Yeah. It's like, oh, time. I know. I trick or treated when I was young too, but I also stayed out with my friends until the streetlights went out. My parents had no idea where I was. We don't live in that era anymore. We live in an era where kids can't walk home from school without being released by an adult. Like, it's just a different time.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  Is that a good or bad thing?

• 5:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's bad.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's bad.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  It's the helicopter parenting, which is a holdover.

• 5:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's not even their fault. It's like school policy now. It's, you know what it is? It's CYA.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:59Cara Santa Maria?

  It's all CYA now.

• 6:00Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Liability and, right, accountability.

• 6:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 6:04Bob Novella?

  But kids who are, kids who are relevant for Halloween almost.

• 6:09Bob Novella?

  Adults in the United States have taken over Halloween. The kids are just like this, "Oh yeah, that's kinda cool too." So let's focus on what's really important. The parents, they're the ones that are spending the money on decorations, costumes, candy. They're making it the second most popular holiday in terms of like money that people spend. And Halloween's the best, because you throw a Halloween party, you invite people that you care about. You're talking Thanksgiving or Christmas, you gotta go to family shit and nobody, you know, a lot of people don't want to do that because family is full of drama and craziness. So that's one of the things that makes Halloween special is that, just from the party angle, but the idea of adults taking it over, it's just like, it's a done deal and the kids are just ancillary, like, "Yeah, get some candy."

• 6:53Bob Novella?

  Which is interesting, and I like talking to other people from other countries who love Halloween, but they're like, "Damn, man, you know, we're just not embracing our country yet." But it's kind of like a slow, kind of like a slow migration that is happening for a lot of countries. It's just interesting to see this particular American, United States export, an export that I agree with, you know, going out there and finding kindred souls all over the place. So people just love the macabre aspect of Halloween and want to embrace it.

• 7:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, don't you love how Bob, see, this is why I love doing throw downs with Bob. You asked him if he thinks it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month, and he said no, and then made a compelling argument for why it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month.

• 7:39Bob Novella?

  Can I push back on that? I don't think so. Another reason not to change, it's really not really about one day. It's the fall season, it's all of October, all the things that embrace Halloween. It's not just that one night.

• 7:54Cara Santa Maria?

  The problem, though, is when it's on a Thursday or a Friday, because you do all the parties the weekend before, and by the time Halloween comes, it feels over a little bit, and then it feels weird to have parties on November 1st, or November 2nd.

• 8:08Bob Novella?

  It feels only a little bit weird, it's still fine, I think it's still totally fine. First off, you can get amazing deals on, because it's after Halloween, you can get the cheapest costumes, pumpkins, all sorts of great stuff. Also, if you're like me, and a few people that I know, where it's actually a little bit, it's a bummer when Halloween's over and that buildup is done, it's kind of not, I don't get depressed about it, but it's like, "November 1st sucks, it's the worst day of the year." But for years now, I've been throwing the party after. The first Saturday after Halloween and it's great because it extends the season for me a little bit. Um, as well, but it's also means that no one's going to a Halloween party after Halloween. So you get a bigger party because everyone. Bails on parties when I tried to throw them in October because.

• 8:50Bob Novella?

  You know, they, because they're going to so many parties. There's so much competition for really. Essentially only two weekends is the big competition and then that's it. So it's, so there's so many good reasons to, to do it right after Halloween. I mean. Maybe next year Saturday is Halloween, I think, right? That would be a good, a good day.

• 9:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it moving forward or backward?

• 9:10Bob Novella?

  For, so yeah, it'll go.

• 9:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:12Bob Novella?

  Unless it's leap year. I don't know.

• 9:13Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no, it'll be Saturday.

• 9:15Bob Novella?

  So yeah, Saturday, Halloween, man, that's big.

• 9:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I love having an October 19th birthday for that reason. Every year from the time I was a kid. My birthday parties were epic. Epic. Because like you said, it's a friend holiday.

• 9:29Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 9:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not a family holiday.

• 9:32Bob Novella?

  Not necessarily a family holiday.

• 9:33Speaker 06

  But if you move, if you move Halloween off of October 31st, aren't you decoupling it from All Saints Day and doesn't that? Kind of defeat half the purpose?

• 9:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Do we really care?

• 9:42Bob Novella?

  Oh God, not at this point. Not in 2025.

• 9:45Speaker 06

  But those are the origins, right?

• 9:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but nobody, nobody thinks about that.

• 9:49Speaker 06

  Except me, okay.

• 9:52Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I mean, there were, maybe there are people.

• 9:54Cara Santa Maria?

  How many people who celebrate Easter and are like hiding eggs and stuff are thinking about?

• 9:58Speaker 06

  Dress up for All Saints Day next time.

• 10:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but like, you know, it's, how many people who are celebrating Easter are thinking about like fertility? They're not. They're thinking about Jesus or they're just like candy.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  Easter is one of those holidays. It does fall differently each year.

• 10:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I know, but I'm saying like it's. Coupled to a fertility, like a pagan fertility festival.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  And it's coupled to the solstice, I thought.

• 10:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And fertility festivals. That's why we have like bunnies and eggs. Yeah, that's what most of our holidays are. They're like amalgamations of multiple like cultures.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, I, I, I get it. I get it. But there's a reason why Easter drifts and All Saints Day does not.

• 10:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Easter's calculated and it was very important historically to get that calculation correct. Otherwise. You're going to hell.

• 10:39Speaker 06

  Well, I suppose it was a way of people tracking exactly where the heck they were in any given year.

• 10:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 06

  All right, let's move on to our news items. Wait, why?

• 10:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Can't we just spend three hours talking about that?

• 10:51Speaker 02

  Jay, you're going to start us off by talking about therapeutic nanoparticles.

• 10:55Jay Novella?

  Alzheimer's disease has been blamed on what, Steve? The sticky clumps of amyloid beta protein that builds up between the brain cells, right?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  I mean, it's complicated. Alzheimer's is a complicated disease that has lots of pieces, lots of things are happening at the same time. And the complexity is, we don't know what is driving the disease and what's an effect of the disease. And there may be multiple different things driving it in different people, right? There also could be feedback loops where like A causes B, which reinforces A, which causes C. You know what I mean?

• 11:31Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 11:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But those are markers, right? Those are good markers of the disease.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  But the thing is, it's not all pure markers. Like amyloid beta is the big thing, right? Is amyloid beta just, because that's a waste product that builds up in the brain cells? And it definitely causes problems. But is that what's driving the disease? And the only way we're going to ultimately really know is if we fix that problem, does it fix the disease? Which is why there was so much excitement about the recent treatments that are amyloid based that did have some clinical improvement, not dramatic. So which means it's probably not the whole story.

• 12:11Cara Santa Maria?

  What did they do? Did they slow the progression?

• 12:13Speaker 02

  They did slow the progression. Yeah, they didn't stop or reverse it, but they did slow the progression.

• 12:18Jay Novella?

  Well, I thought that this study was pretty cool. I mean, again, it's still in mice, but there was a team co-led by the Institute of Bioengineering at Catalunya and West China Hospital, Sichuan University. They were in collaboration with partners in the UK and they published a study that suggests the real problem may be broken cleanup system, not just excess waste, right? So right now, like Steve said, the amyloid beta is building up. It's a protein that builds up in the brain. And this is one of the things that they find that people that suffer from this disease, you know, they can see that buildup. And in the past, of course, you know, like there really isn't that much we can do about it. Although we do think that it is, you know, one of the very important markers.

• 13:04Jay Novella?

  The human brain, our brains rely on the blood-brain barrier. Brains. We can call it BBB if you want. Easy, Bob. Its main job is to control what can pass from the blood into the brain. And it also is there to help remove waste from the brain, right? So it does a couple of critical things. One critical protein that's called LRP1. It almost says the word LARP, which I thought was funny. That works like a conveyor belt system that brings the amyloid beta out of the brain and into the bloodstream. And, and actually, when we see that happen, we can tell, we can detect it in the blood. So, so with Alzheimer's, that system fails.

• 13:47Jay Novella?

  LRP1 levels fall, its function weakens, and the brain's waste begins to pile up. And that pile up can actually, you know, stop your brain from functioning well. It could even be doing damage to your brain. Those leftover proteins and protein fragments clump into these plaques that disrupt and damage the nearby neurons. So instead of trying to invent new drugs, though, this team decided to try something different. They, they wanted to try something that isn't based on chemicals. It's based on more like the plumbing of the brain. I thought that was a really cool way to put it. They looked for a way to fix the brain's natural waste removal system. They built these tiny hollow particles, and these, you could visualize them as microscopic bubbles.

• 14:30Jay Novella?

  And they call them polymersomes. And these bubbles were coated with a molecule called Angiopep2, which can attach to the LRP1 and the protein that normally carries waste like amyloid beta out of the brain. So each bubble has just enough of this Angiopep2 to get the LRP1 working again, but not so much that it would overload or damage it. And that was a big issue, you know, and a very hard thing for them to do. They had to find the right balance and how to tight, how tightly the particles stick to the LRP1. And they ended up finding the right balance there. And again, like that little detail was difficult and it just shows you how cool science is and how they can actually change

• 15:14Jay Novella?

  the properties of things like molecules, which I find, you know, just incredible. So in the Alzheimer's model mice, a single injection of these optimized polymersomes reduced the amyloid beta in the brain by about 45% within a few hours. Now Steve, that sentence, that idea that I just said to me is, that sounds amazing.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't get excited. It's a good proof of concept, right?

• 15:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but this is in mice, I get it.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  That's what these mouse models are for. But I mean, you know how good mouse models are at predicting Alzheimer's treatments?

• 15:50Jay Novella?

  Not much.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Basically almost zero, right? I mean, they're, they're like famously terrible at predicting the outcome of clinical trials in humans because it's not the same disease. It is a model. It is a model to test very specific mechanisms. It really, it isn't the disease. It's not the same disease as it is in humans. And so you just cannot extrapolate at all clinically from mice to humans. What you can do is ask very specific mechanistic questions. Will this increase the clearance of amyloid beta from neurons? And in these mice, it does. Will that have a clinical benefit in humans? We'll know in 10 to 20 years.

• 16:33Jay Novella?

  Sure. But the point, the point is though, and again, this is just science doing its thing. This is another test that they found, another, you know, they created something that has an effect and they might be able to someday have a version of this that works in humans.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. And as is often the case with these kinds of news items, like don't get so focused on the Alzheimer's bit, in my opinion. What's really cool about this is they are engineering these polymersomes and that they can fine tune to have very specific effects. It's the therapeutic model that I find more interesting, not this very specific application, which may or may not pan out.

• 17:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I was just, I was just saying what you just said, but not as cool. That's what I meant. Like the idea that they can modify. These molecules and have them have varying properties. And they're like, we gotta change this property. Like, that to me is such a fantastic thing that they're able to do today. So, anyway, the point is that when they applied this, they were able to detect in the blood that there was an increase of amyloid beta, which shows that the brain was actually moving it outside the brain barrier and dumping it into the blood, which means it's waste product. And it was, so they were able to 100% verify that that process was happening.

• 17:53Jay Novella?

  It showed that the peptide was being, you know, essentially flushed out. And that's exactly what we want to have happen. Microscopy confirmed that the nanoparticles restored normal placement of the LRP on blood vessel cells and shifted the blood-brain barrier internal machinery back towards healthy function. Then they were testing the mice's behavior, and the mice treated with the new therapy performed almost as well as healthy animals in memory and navigation tasks. The improvements also lasted up to six months. So, there were some very interesting outcomes here from this study that they did. And, you know, they are also, they made sure that the researchers obviously know what Steve knows, that, you know, there are cool things about this, and there's some early, early things that are happening

• 18:38Jay Novella?

  that might pan out to humans one day, but it's too early. And you'll see some headlines actually say, you know, like, you know, Alzheimer's completely eradicated in mice, you know, that type of thing. That's not, that's not what's going on here. But, the nice thing about what they're doing, again, is this isn't giving somebody medication and trying to figure out medications that can sneak through the blood-brain barrier and, again, becoming dependent on chemicals. Like, they're changing the function of the plumbing in your brain, which I find to be a much-

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Well, they're optimizing it, right? They're restoring it, is really what they're arguing. And just as for further background, which I think impacts on this study, there's a huge correlation between vascular health and Alzheimer's. And, you know what the number one risk factor for Alzheimer's is?

• 19:27Jay Novella?

  What?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  What do you think? Age? Well, yeah. Age is like the universal risk factor. Yeah, let me just say, other than age.

• 19:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, other than age. Like cardiovascular problems?

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, specifically high blood pressure. And what does high blood pressure do? It damages these small blood vessels. The very, the very same small blood vessels that this study is saying are necessary in order to clear the amyloid. And so, that's, yeah, so, which again may be a coincidence, but I think it probably all has something to do with itself. Like you get, you know, you get the buildup, which damages the vasculature, which worsens the buildup, and this is kind of reversing that by introducing this sort of optimized, you know, polyrosome that's in that sweet spot, right? Where it's binding just strong enough to get it, but not so strong that it gets backed up. And so it facilitates the clearing of the amyloid, which restores the, the blood brain barrier and the vascular health so that it could, it could clear it even more.

• 20:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's so interesting because I feel like it's, it's always more complicated than that first idea, right? Like, oh, we see this stuff. Something about Alzheimer's must be causing us to make more of this stuff. Or maybe we'd always make this stuff. And something about Alzheimer's causes us to not be able to clean it out.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Or both.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Or both.

• 20:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there's tau. Don't even get me started on tau. Totally different waste product, which again, there's probably different subtypes in different people. Then there's different genetic subtypes. It's very complicated.

• 20:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And what you're, you're talking about is, is what commonly known as the plaques is what we've been talking about and you're talking about tangles.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  Well, the plaques form from these waste products.

• 21:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Right? So you, so there's, you have, you have like amyloid, for example, then you have amyloid plaques. These are two different things. And then you also have other pathological features that form, like the tangles. Then you have, then you have inflammatory activity, which how much of that is driving it? How much of that is reactive or secondary?

• 21:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Even if it is secondary, does it exacerbate and worsen it? Is there any room for clinical improvement by treating the specific components of the inflammatory reaction? These are all open questions.

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's not going to be one answer.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  There's not going to be one answer.

• 21:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, that's the thing. It's too complicated, a disease for there to be one simple treatment.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it may get to the point where we need to, I mean, unless we find this missing key that we've been missing all this time and it's like, oh, if we change this one thing, the whole cascade doesn't happen. I doubt it's going to happen at this point. I can't rule it out, though. But more likely, we're going to have a suite of treatments that, like with cancer, you have to do 10 things.

• 21:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Like cancer, I was going to say that, yeah. And the way to, the way to get rid of cancer is to prevent it from ever happening. That's, that's hopefully what we could do with Alzheimer's, right? If we could get to a point where we prevent it, then we don't have to treat 1 million components of it.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Well, that's the promise of the treatments that prevent, like the buildup of amyloid. It's like, oh, if we can get to people 20 years before they would become symptomatic, maybe they'll never become symptomatic. But how do we identify people that early? Well, it's, it's easy if they have a genetic form, where we could say, you're going to get it because your parents had it or whatever. It's harder if it's not genetic and, and we have to figure out some way to accurately screen people and in a way that actually predicts who should get treated early on and who should not.

• 22:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Or if the treatments become cheap and they're not very invasive, we just do it to everybody like we do with vaccines.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  But that we're not there.

• 22:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Right? The treatments are, are, have high risks, they're expensive and they have high bad side effects. So, yeah, that's the thing. You can't just give it, can't put it in the water, as we like to say, even though, putting aside whether that's practical or not, just, meaning we can't just give it to everybody because you end up causing way more harm than good. We're definitely, yeah, we're not at the vaccine point where we could just give everybody an Alzheimer's vaccine. You know, that would be great if we do get to that point, but we're not there.

• 23:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Jay. Kara, what killed off Napoleon's forces?

• 23:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so this is a really interesting study that I came across, and I have to admit, I'm not a war buff, and I definitely haven't done deep dives onto, or into, the 1812. I even had to look up, what, what was this called? Because it has like five different names. The French Invasion of Russia, the Russian Campaign, the Second Polish War, and in Russia, they actually call it the Patriotic War of 1812. Anybody here have any sort of like personal interest?

• 23:51Speaker 02

  In that particular war?

• 23:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like have you been reading books about it?

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Not a lot, but.

• 23:56Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, it's like that. How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

• 24:00Speaker 02

  I've read about the Roman Empire, just not so much Napoleon.

• 24:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Not so much Napoleon. So I had to read up a little bit on the background. So I want to talk about the background first so that then I can talk about this study that sort of challenges some of the previously held ideas. So, long story short, and like very short, Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812 with over half a million soldiers.

• 24:23Speaker 06

  Big mistake.

• 24:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like a lot. Yeah, we know. Russia is not, it's never a good idea to invade Russia with a ground war. And so then there was this big battle on September 7th that was super, super bloody and Napoleon and his troops actually were able to invade and occupy Moscow. So they thought they were doing pretty well. The problem is when they got to Moscow, it was like empty and had been burned. So, under the orders of the governor there and military officials, Russian military officials, they burned the city and left. So Napoleon gets there and he's like, we got here. Look, we're going to take over. But there was nobody there to take over.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  He was king of the ashes.

• 25:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And then after that, he kind of like squatted for a while to, you know, try to supply up and figure out a new way to leave. The problem is he probably waited too long. He was also looking for a peace offer that never came. So on October 19th, actually my birthday, they started to retreat. They already had lost quite a few soldiers, you know, during battle. Then as they started to retreat, you know, all the terrible things happened, right? There were some ongoing attacks, so they did lose more soldiers to battle, but really they were devastated by, what do you think, weather and disease? Right?

• 25:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, Russian winter.

• 25:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And so there was, this is, goes down in like military history books as one of the most devastating military campaigns in history. There are estimates that he lost over 90% Napoleon of his army.

• 25:58Cara Santa Maria?

  So over 500,000 soldiers and horses died. And a lot of people think that typhus was the cause of the vast majority of disease. And there have even been some early studies where DNA was taken from fallen soldiers, you know, in their graves and but but older like PCR techniques were used to amplify some of these DNA, these broken DNA fragments. And and and it was kind of estimated that typhus was the cause. So typhus is also known as rickettsia, I can never say this, rickettsia. I always want to say rickettsia, but it's not.

• 26:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Rickettsia prowazekii. And that's a parasitic aerobic bacilliiform bacteria. And it's, you know, the main agent of epidemic typhus. And then they also, there were some ideas that there was another pathogen called Bartonella quintana, which is spread by body lice. So, OK, let's cut to this new study, which was just published this month, where the authors say, not so fast. We used more modern techniques to look at the remains of a very, very small sample of this much larger group of soldiers who died.

• 27:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So these soldiers died in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December of 1812, and were buried there. So they were able to collect samples from 13 teeth of these different soldiers. And they looked at, it kind of made up about 20 million different DNA reads. And then they used some pretty complicated, I could get into it if you like, but some pretty complicated new approaches that are kind of being called ADNA. Have you guys heard ADNA? I had to Google it and then I was like, oh, that's so obvious. Ancient DNA.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  Oh, okay.

• 28:06Cara Santa Maria?

  There's like a whole field now called ADNA. So there's like all these really state of the art methodologies that go far beyond PCR. It's not just about amplification. Now it's about using much more sophisticated techniques.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  How do they define ancient? Is there a number?

• 28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  There is actually. I looked it up. Obviously, we know there's an upper boundary for sufficient DNA for sequencing, which is between half a million and one and a half million. But there have, the oldest DNA that's ever been sequenced was from mammoth molars that are about a million years old.

• 28:40Speaker 06

  Really?

• 28:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And we've recovered genetic material from sediments that was two million years old, but they couldn't sequence it. But it looks like most of it, we're talking thousands of years.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 28:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, a few studies have succeeded. Only a few studies have succeeded in amplifying DNA from remains older than several hundred thousand. Most of it was, is within like the tens of thousands. So researchers in this study are using, and there's a name for this field too, which I hadn't heard before either, metagenomics.

• 29:12Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 29:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Metagenomics, which is the study of genetic material from entire communities of organisms. So that's where they will often look at like environmental samples collectively so that they can try and understand something. So these are metagenomics researchers that I guess are borrowing from those techniques and they apply them to these 13 different teeth. And obviously this is 200 year old DNA. What they did after this really sophisticated kind of extracting and analysis, what they realized is they couldn't find any typhoid at all. They couldn't, they actually couldn't find either a Rickettsia or the Bartonella quintana.

• 29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And actually it would be like R. proezeki. Usually you would say the species name.

• 30:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Or B. Quintana. But they did find a couple interesting things. They found Salmonella enterica. And specifically, a specific type of Salmonella enterica that causes something called parathyroid fever. So it's similar to typhoid. They're both types of enteric fever. And so comparing that to the the records of the time, like what was actually written about how these soldiers were acting and what their symptoms were, it would make sense then that it could have been parathyroid when maybe they didn't know about it, or they they just kind of misdiagnosed it as typhoid. So they found not only parathyroid caused by this Salmonella enterica strain,

• 30:48Cara Santa Maria?

  but they also found a bacterium in the DNA called Borrelia recurrentis or recurrentis. So this is another body lice transmitted bacterium. And it causes something called Laos-born relapsing fever. It's not necessarily deadly, but combined with the parathyroid and the exhaustion and the starvation and the, you know, hypothermia that a lot of the soldiers were experiencing, it could have exacerbated or caused their death in addition. So these two main diseases, these researchers found, you know, they they say in their discussion,

• 31:33Cara Santa Maria?

  you know, we only looked at 13 teeth. So it could be that there actually was some typhoid and that there actually was some B. Quintana too. But we didn't see any of it. And so, you know, maybe we just didn't sample the right people. Or maybe what we thought caused the the majority of this death was not actually the the pathogen that caused it. And maybe it was more likely this parathyroid problem along with this body lice disease called relapsing fever, which is super, super rare now. I mean, both of these diseases are rare in developed countries.

• 32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  You do see a Laos-born relapsing fever in some regions of Africa where it's still endemic. Parathyroid, I actually don't know how common parathyroid is because there's no, there's no vaccine for it. The typhoid vaccine can help a little bit. But there is no vaccine for parathyroid. Oh, here we go. Six million people a year are affected, most common in parts of Asia, very rare in the developed world, can cause 30,000 deaths a year. It's very similar to typhoid. So we're talking fever, headache, abdominal pain, malaise, wasting, like muscle wasting, nonproductive cough, slowed heart rate, and

• 32:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess spots. You get rosy spots. Not everybody does, but some people do. And abdominal pain with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, all that good stuff.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  But Carrie, do you think, is it fair to say, because you know, a lot of ancient armies, they die of like disease and exhaustion and malnutrition and climate, whatever. I know Alexandria, Alexander the Great's army, like half of them or more died from dysentery or other illnesses. So we're, and I know the same is true of Napoleon's army, especially during this retreat from Moscow. But do you think, is it fair to say that they died of diarrhea, whether it was typhus or another disease that could also cause diarrhea?

• 33:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, probably. Basically, they originally thought that, you know, dying of whatever this disease is, they actually, in the documented symptomatology, they do say fever, diarrhea, and jaundice. Those were the three things that were like heavily documented. So I think it is safe to say, but historically, we thought it was typhus and what's called trench fever, which is that B. Quintana. And now the researchers are saying, actually, it may have been parathyphus, Lausborn relapsing fever, not typhus, and trench fever. Fun times.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Trench fever is one of those wonderfully archaic sounding diseases. Right.

• 34:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  It's old timey. Like trench fever and consumption.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  Trench and foot.

• 34:19Speaker 02

  The drop season.

• 34:20Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, which is why I couldn't come up with it, because when you actually look at modern write-ups of Bartonella Quintana, CDC, or NIH, or WHO, write-ups of it, they don't call it trench fever anymore. So you have to specifically Google trench fever to learn about the fact that that's what caused it.

• 34:40Speaker 02

  Shell shock.

• 34:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. There's so many of those things. Trench foot.

• 34:44Speaker 06

  Trench foot, yep.

• 34:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Well, we're too, that was still pretty big.

• 34:48Speaker 06

  What was it? Do they still call it foot and mouth disease?

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Hoof and mouth disease.

• 34:52Speaker 06

  Hoof and mouth disease?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes, that is correct.

• 34:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But trench foot specifically is.

• 34:59Speaker 02

  That's just from having your feet wet for weeks.

• 35:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Wet, yeah, it's, we now call it immersion foot syndrome. Cold and wet for a long period of time and it can cause, you know, all sorts of horrible things. And eventually you can lose your feet.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, terrible.

• 35:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  All right, thanks Kara.

• 35:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Not how Napoleon's army died.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  All right, guys, I'm going to talk to you about photosynthesis. You guys know what photosynthesis is, right?

• 35:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 35:25Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell me what it is. What's the core of photosynthesis?

• 35:31Speaker 06

  By the core, by core, you mean like?

• 35:32Speaker 02

  What happens?

• 35:33Speaker 06

  You mean plants or, and plants absorb the energy from the sun and turn and do and have a chemical process by which it derives its energy and.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's that chemical process?

• 35:43Speaker 06

  The carbon dioxide.

• 35:44Cara Santa Maria?

  They're fixing carbon.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, the key piece is the taking of carbon from carbon dioxide in the air to build the sugars, right? That is the food, the carbohydrates.

• 35:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And then they also respire.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  They respire oxygen, yeah.

• 35:59Cara Santa Maria?

  They still respire, they respire and they photosynthesize.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Now, does anybody know what the key enzyme is that fixes carbon from the atmosphere?

• 36:08Bob Novella?

  Is it enzyme 4716?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  No.

• 36:12Bob Novella?

  Are you sure?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  It is rubisco.

• 36:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, rubisco.

• 36:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Ribulose 15 by phosphate, carb oxalase oxygenase, obviously.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  Right, we'll call it rubisco.

• 36:23Speaker 06

  What?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  Now, obviously.

• 36:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't worry, I looked that up. I did not know that.

• 36:29Bob Novella?

  Sounds like a hot sauce.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  It's impressive.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  This process of photosynthesis using rubisco as the main enzyme driving it is the key to all life on Earth, right? I mean, most of the energy that is consumed by life is produced in this process. And, you know, we, most of our food we grow is dependent on this process. What's interesting is that in plants, the rubisco-based photosynthesis is really inefficient. It's massively inefficient.

• 37:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it never needed to be, right? There's just plants everywhere.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Need is an interesting concept evolutionarily.

• 37:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, there was no, and there was no environmental pressure for it to become more efficient.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  So I don't think that's accurate. I think it's easy, it's better to say that plants found a very inefficient solution.

• 37:23Speaker 02

  To the

• 37:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Rubisco inefficiency problem. Their solution was just to mass produce rubisco.

• 37:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 37:33Cara Santa Maria?

  What about the idea of like, it's much harder to go back than to just continue forward, right?

• 37:38Speaker 02

  There's the evolutionary constraints, you know, that may, why didn't we hit upon other solutions? Yeah, like, once plants hit upon that solution, it's like, we're gonna, that's basically

• 37:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, we're good.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Brute force our way to, to making more food from sunlight by just making tons of rubisco. It was just an easy

• 37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe it's cheap and easy for a plant to make a lot of rubisco.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  And by some estimates, like, you know, that's half of the protein in a photosynthesizing part of a plant could be rubisco, you know? And

• 38:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, yeah, well, but then again, that is, it's like, main driving.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so

• 38:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, activity.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for plants, it was fine. Yeah, just make a ton of this stuff. We can do it. It's, it is an easy, evolutionarily easy solution, just make more. But the problem is, when now we are trying to feed the, you know, eight billion plus people by growing crops as efficiently as possible, that just brute force your way through it and make a ton of rubisco is, is, becomes the limiting factor in the efficiency of our, of agriculture, right?

• 38:41Speaker 06

  Right, like silicon to, to, to computer chips, right?

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so, like, specifically, the, the very high need of nitrogen fertilizer comes from the fact that you need nitrogen to make rubisco, right? So, that, a lot of that fertilizer

• 38:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  And a lot of water. So, water use and fertilizer use in crops, you know, a lot of that is due to this very brute force solution that plants evolved, you know, in order to maximize their photosynthesis. Now, there's a couple of other living organisms that also photosynthesize that are not plants that hit upon

• 39:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Blueberry algae?

• 39:20Speaker 02

  A different solution.

• 39:22Bob Novella?

  Sorry.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  What were you talking about? Rubisco?

• 39:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Blue green algae.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  Yes, algae, absolutely, algae and some bacteria. And they came up with a different solutions rather than just like producing tons of rubisco. Do you know what solution they came upon?

• 39:39Bob Novella?

  A different enzyme?

• 39:40Speaker 02

  No, not a bad thought. What's called CO2 concentrating mechanisms or CCM. So they evolved to get as much CO2 next to the rubisco as possible. So that the enzyme becomes more efficient. Rather than having 10 times as much, you make it 10 times as efficient. Just to throw a number out there, right?

• 40:04Bob Novella?

  Just by having CO2 closer?

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's probably why.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  It's a reaction, right? So you need to have lots of interaction between rubisco and CO2 by having lots of rubisco. Or you could maximize that interaction by concentrating the CO2 over a little bit of rubisco. Does that make sense?

• 40:23Bob Novella?

  That, yeah, that sounds like a relatively easy fix evolutionarily. Why didn't more?

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Well, whatever.

• 40:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's not a good thing necessarily. Think about the fact that our oceans are acidifying and we're seeing these massive algal blooms everywhere that kill everything else off.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  Well.

• 40:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It's probably because they're able to use that carbon so much more efficiently than like the other organisms.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Right, but I mean, it wasn't a problem in nature. We're making it a problem.

• 40:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but it's a problem now.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Because we are, because yes, because we are, part of the reason for that is we have to give so much nitrogen to our agricultural plants to make them grow optimally. And if some of that fertilizer gets washed into the ocean, now you have these very efficient organisms with all this nitrogen and they just go crazy, right?

• 41:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, tons of that, not just some, tons of that is getting washed into the ocean.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a lot. All right, so. But what if, what if we could get that CO2 concentrating mechanism, that CCM, as they call it, into our crops? That's, this has been the goal for decades of researchers. They were looking for, how can we do this? Now, one of these specific mechanisms is what's called a rubisco-containing compartment. You put the rubisco in a box, and you get CO2 in that box, and that's how you increase its concentration of CO2. That make sense? It's very, it's, you know, conceptually very simple. Just put it in a box with a bunch of CO2, and the reactions happen in the box, and you're good.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  That's how the algae solve the problem, rather than just making a bunch of rubisco. All right, so researchers have made a proof of concept, right? By creating their own box for rubisco, and showing that it can actually work. It can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. Now, but what do you think they make the box out of? Polymerosomes? Very close. Ha! The same kind of idea, right? Basically liposomes. Just, you know, this is that technology that we're talking about, right? Where you just encapsulate things into... Fat? Yeah, these sort of, these bubbles.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  All right, so they made one, so, but you have to get rubisco inside these cages, right? So, they, what they figured out is that you have to make the cage around the, right, the rubisco. You can't get it in there after the fact. Why? Why can't you shove the rubisco in there after you make the cage? Whatever. They couldn't, they, this has been the trick, right? Making this happen. Yeah. You know, at, at a nano level. So, they, they are, they were working with the rubisco-containing compartments from cyanobacteria, specifically called carboxy-somes. So, we had the polymer-somes from J. Now, we have the carboxy-somes from photosynthesis. And they were able to tag it...

• 43:24Speaker 02

  With this 14 amino acids so that that would load the rubisco inside of it. Right. So basically something that would latch on to the rubisco and then build the cage around the rubisco. Does that make sense? Hmm. So they had to build it at the right time, you know, as the plant develops so that it's the cages are forming when the rubisco is being made. Timing is critical. Yeah. Yeah. Cause they didn't do that, then the, then the, it didn't assemble properly and didn't work. This is all the technology, right? You gotta get stuff to work. There's always these little, these little. How many trials and errors? Yeah, it's a lot of trials, a lot of little things you gotta go through. Holy moly. All right. So, but eventually, eventually they were able to make the carboxysumes,

• 44:05Speaker 02

  package up the rubisco and they, they worked, you know, they, they, you know, but they, they haven't, you know, completely developed the technology yet, right? This is, this is just a proof of concept. Yeah, how efficient. And there are additional components that they're gonna need to get in there in order for this to fully work. Right. And then of course, we need to get them into crops so that our wheat and corn and rice are using this method. And this isn't the only research being done into, you know, again, this carbon concentrating methods. This is the whole approach. But the good news is, you could look at, I always look at it in terms of good news. Good news is, there's a lot of headroom on efficiency. Yeah, right.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Photosynthesis in our crops because by chance, plants evolve this inefficient method, which means all we gotta do is figure out a way to get this either algae or cyanobacteria method into crops. And again, this is a significant progress in doing that. And then if we do that, what that means is not only will our produce be way higher yield, but they will use significantly less water and nitrogen fertilizer. So this could be an absolute game changer for agriculture. That's ridiculous. Yes. It'd be an absolutely game changer. So it's why it's worth, you know, doing, developing this technology and investing a lot in, in this kind of research and also multiple different ways. Like we can not

• 45:34Speaker 02

  put all our eggs in one basket. Like we could try to, you know, address this issue with multiple different approaches.

• 45:40Bob Novella?

  How beneficial would this be?

• 45:42Speaker 02

  Massive.

• 45:43Bob Novella?

  During, during the, especially though, especially during like the zombie apocalypse, all the canned food's gone. You gotta actually grow your own food. Oh, look, I've got this new plant 2.0 that's much more efficient. That's gonna be a lot easier to.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  It could be a second green revolution, right?

• 45:59Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. If it works as we hope, I can't see how it wouldn't be.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Well, the potential is there, right? That's the bottom line is the potential is there. They're making progress on the technology. Conceptually, I think we have our heads wrapped around this. We've just got to keep track of it and see how it goes. And obviously, there's a lot of GMO research that's going on to do the same thing, you know, to get.

• 46:19Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Some kind of, of carbon concentrating technology going. There's also different types of rubisco that are more efficient and, and some plants have them and some don't. So getting the C4 versus C3 into all the plants can also give a boost of 10, 20% to productivity, which is huge, you know? Yeah, but the potential here is just massive. All right. Bob, tell us about second generation black holes.

• 46:45Bob Novella?

  All right. So my title for this is, well, kind of is black hole zombies in the news. They're dead stars and they ravenously eat their own. Now, at least that's what a recent paper is saying, but not in those words, of course, not even close that they even use those words, but a more conventional opener for this new site. It might go like this. Gravitational wave astronomers report two unusual black hole mergers that are the best evidence yet for second generation black holes. A paper was recently published on this in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Okay, so these collisions were revealed by not just LIGO, but we're talking LIGO, Virgo and CAGRA collaboration. These respectively,

• 47:25Bob Novella?

  those are the gravitational wave observatories for the United States, Italy and Japan. And three together, they make quite a team up. So they, we know this, right? They measure subatomic scale distortions in spacetime caused by distant cataclysmic events like colliding black holes or neutron stars. It's a new, it was a new era in astronomy, multi-messenger astronomy, where you can look at the radiation from objects in space, but you could also look at what it does to the fabric of spacetime itself. Okay, so last year, they came across two unusual but similar black hole collisions within a month, within a month of each other, although one was 700 billion light years distant and the other was over 2 billion light years distant.

• 48:09Bob Novella?

  Imagine they're traveling through space all that time and they, they hit our observatories within one month. LSC spokesman Stephen Fairhurst described it as "among the most novel events among the several hundred that the LIGO Virgo CAGRA network has observed." So why, why was this special? So both of these collisions were interesting in that, now imagine you've got four black holes, two in their binary, so they got two binaries. For, for each of these binaries, one of the pair was extra massive, right? It was more, like more than twice as massive as, as its partner that it, that it's orbiting around. So for example, one was 17 solar masses and its partner was seven, and the other binary

• 48:53Bob Novella?

  pair had a 16 solar mass primary and an eight solar mass secondary black hole. So they were much, they were unbalanced in terms of, of their mass. But these larger black holes also had very unusual spins. One was among the fastest spinners ever, ever seen. I was trying to figure out, okay, this, this star is spinning really fast, almost the fastest ever detected. So how do you put that into context? And it's really hard because there's, there's no solid surface here, it's the, it's dimensionless, so it's hard to... To actually describe it, but so the best I can come up with was a fair way to think about it is that the spacetime at the black hole's horizon, like 83 kilometers wide, was frame

• 49:35Bob Novella?

  dragging around and around about 400 times per second. It's literally pulling space with it, and it sounds pretty disorienting and potentially spaghettifying as well. So the other, the other larger black hole was bizarre as well in that its spin wasn't necessarily as, as fast, but it was the, the spin was in the opposite direction of its orbit. So that, that's a retrograde, retrograde spin that has literally never been seen with this level of clarity and confidence before. They think they've seen them before, but it was very fuzzy and hard to make out. This one was like basically crystal clear, as far as I could tell. Retrograde, retrograde spin on a black hole. So what does this all, what

• 50:19Bob Novella?

  does this all mean? So what? Seeing that, seeing binary black holes where one member has twice the mass, and in addition, this atypical rotation implies what? It implies a violent history for that black hole. Something happened in its past that was pretty, pretty nasty. So the simplest explanation is that those larger black holes, they weren't just simple remnants, you know, they, they didn't form from just one dead star and have been hanging out ever since. They likely formed from previous collisions and the resulting larger mass and the weird spins that they saw initially were, were basically, you could look at it as like scars from those previous, those previous mergers that had happened in

• 51:01Bob Novella?

  its past. So it, these, so when, when these black holes smashed together in the past, it, it left these fingerprints on it. When they merged with other black holes in the future, they, they showed that these scars from having already, you know, already merging previously. So they liken these now to what, what they're calling second generation black holes, which experience what they refer to as Hierarchical mergers. Black holes that merge over and over suggests that they formed in these dense environments like star clusters where this can happen. So it's not like a typical, when you think of a black hole, you know, an ordinary stellar mass black hole, you know, a very large star goes through its life cycle and it explodes

• 51:44Bob Novella?

  into supernova and it becomes a classic black hole. They kind of like stay there and encounters with other black holes are very, very rare, rare because you're kind of like in your solar system and there's not, the nearest star or black hole could be many, many light years away. But these look like they, they formed in dense environments, so dense that the, the closest black holes in other stars were close enough where they could, over the, over the years, of course, many millions of years, they could merge together over and over and over. So this helps us elucidate this, this, this life cycle, or you know, this life cycle of some black holes and what, you know, you know, what their journey through, through their existence is like compared to, say, other black holes.

• 52:26Bob Novella?

  So for me though, the real takeaway and potential of these, of these observatories, it was expressed by Gianluca Gemmi, he's the spokesperson of the Virgo collaboration. He said, "These detections highlight the extraordinary capabilities of our global gravitational wave observatories." And he couldn't be more right with that. I'm constantly amazed at what these, with what these gravitational wave observatories can do. No instrument, no instrument ever created by humanity can detect changes in distance better and smaller than, than a proton like LIGO and its siblings do, basically on a, on a daily basis. It's amazing how exquisitely sensitive they are. They help us interpret these distant laboratories in space that could never exist on Earth

• 53:11Bob Novella?

  with, with the tremendous energies that they unleash. We would never be able to, I mean, we could model it on supercomputers, probably, but actually observing real reality and as a, as a laboratory, these are colliding black holes. We're only ever going to just observe these in distant space. This allows us, these, these devices, these, this technology allows us to stress test general relativity in ways that we'll never That we'd never be able to do otherwise. And the fact that LIGO and Virgo and Cogruck and their future descendants continue to be refined and become even more sensitive than ever means that they will be even more sensitive

• 53:51Bob Novella?

  to any new physics that may go beyond Einstein's general relativity or our standard model of physics. So the more sensitive they become, the better they will be to sense new physics when it finally, you know, finally, if ever emerges out of there. Brand new branches of physics like that is a holy grail, obviously, and would certainly win future Nobel prizes and offer insights into deeper layers of our universe, if any of that interests you, of course. That's all I got, Steve.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  All right. Interesting. Thanks, Bob. All right, Evan. Avi Loeb is at it again. What's going on now?

• 54:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 54:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, there's news this week because, well, October 29th was just yesterday, and Comet 3I Atlas made its closest approach to our sun. So that has to do with Avi Loeb in the news. I'll get to him in a moment. The anticipation for this day was built up for several months, actually, as scientists and the public have anxiously, maybe not anxiously, but they've been waiting to see if this stranger from outside our solar system is going to swing around the sun as, well, standard models would predict, or is this something other than a comet that has the capability of altering its own trajectory in some way, which would be a very strong indicator that it's not a comet at all, but rather something out of a science fiction novel.

• 55:13Speaker 06

  Hmm, I wonder what the results are. We're going to find out. But Comet 3I Atlas, yes, first of all, a little history, was discovered on July 1st, 2025, and since then astronomers have been doing everything they can to learn as much about it. Because unlike other comets, 3I Atlas doesn't orbit our sun. It's an interstellar comet, one of only three that we've ever seen, hence the designation 3I, three interstellar. It is thought to be at least 7 billion years old, which is almost twice as old as Earth, and apparently the oldest comet that's been observed. So that alone makes the study of this comet a rare chance to try and learn something about ancient objects hurtling

• 55:56Speaker 06

  around from outside of our solar system. But it also unfortunately opens an opportunity for fringe scientists, crank pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists to have a field day playing with this chunk of debris from a distant part of our universe. Yeah, so here's something unusual. To our understanding, let's go crazy with our imaginations, they say. It doesn't work that way, folks. We've mentioned 3I Atlas on the show many times over the last few months since that July discovery, and not the least of reasons why is because of that astronomer from Harvard University, Dr. Avi Loeb. He's made quite a name for himself occupying that fringe science, or fringe scientist category, in

• 56:38Speaker 06

  my opinion. He made international headlines back in 2018 for arguing that the interstellar object Oumuamua might have been a light sail sent by an ancient civilization. And more recently, he led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to recover debris from IM1. That was that 2014 meteor that he also suggested could be of interstellar origin and possibly artificial. Both cases drew wide attention, but none of Loeb's extraordinary interpretations have stood up to any peer-reviewed scrutiny. But 3I Atlas, Loeb's theory is that, well, yet again, here's another candidate for extraterrestrial technology. It is cleverly disguised,

• 57:22Speaker 06

  maybe, maybe as a comet, yet revealing, because the comet does not behave like other comets, that scientists have been able to study, the ones that originate and continue to move in orbit in our own solar system. He describes these anomalies as such, these are jets of material that apparently pointing toward the sun rather than away from it, an almost complete lack of a visible tail, and an emission of nickel without any sign of iron, where you would normally have the two of those coming out in a predictable ratio. So this is an, that's considered an extremely unusual mix.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  It's almost as if we've never seen an interstellar comet before.

• 58:02Speaker 06

  Well, that's the point, right? Is, that's what this all boils down to.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  It's only the third one, people. Yeah. No, it's the first interstellar comet, it's the third interstellar object.

• 58:11Speaker 06

  Third interstellar object.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  So it's the first time we're seeing something like this, and he's saying, but there's unusual stuff we've never seen before, therefore, we need to seriously consider aliens? Therefore, aliens. Yeah.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Uh, I went to EarthSky, EarthSky's a good website. Uh, they, they've done good work on, um, tracking 3I Atlas, um, and its movements and the plausibility at all of what Avi Loeb has to say about this. And there's really nothing here that requires any alien engineering degree whatsoever. It's moving on a hyperbolic trajectory, it's gonna sling it back out of the solar system after it passes near the sun, as the models describe. Um, and this is observations from multiple observatories, this isn't just one source looking at this, the, the Panstars 2 telescope has been tracking it, NASA's NeoWise mission is tracking this as well, among, among others.

• 59:04Speaker 06

  And it really has all the hallmarks of a typical, it's volatile, but it's a typical interstellar comet that they say, it's losing water and gas as it warms, and it's, it has a faint coma, you know, it's not, they say it's just not dramatically seen as some of the other comets that we've been, you know, have observed in the past. Uh, jets pointing towards the sun that can be explained away by, as an optical geometry effect, because of our viewing angle and solar illumination, so there are, there are answers to all of the questions, all of the anomalies that are being, that are being posed here. Again, none of it you have to go to alien engineering for. Yeah, so what happened? Yeah, it reached the sun, uh, just yesterday, and again, the latest observations, it's,

• 59:47Speaker 06

  it's on its way back out of the solar system now, but it has not made any dramatic turns, it has not done anything out of, out of the usual, it is not displaying any kind of behavior that would say, hey, we need to really scrutinize this and take a second look at it, and maybe Avi Loeb or someone else is on to something. None of that is occurring. This is acting as a comet should act. Oh, did you know, I hadn't heard this one before I researched it for this news item, there's speculation that the object's reversed engineered trajectory points towards the same direction as the wow signal that was detected back in 1977?

• 1:00:23Bob Novella?

  No way, man.

• 1:00:26Speaker 06

  I mean, that's, you know.

• 1:00:27Bob Novella?

  How accurate could that be?

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  A point for creativity, but, you know, I mean, trying to stir up old controversies and old, you know, old conspiracy theories is, uh, is rather interesting. I thought that they were able to ma- bring back the wow signal and fold it into this, right? Into this event as well.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  He's spiraling down the crank drain, this guy. So now he's saying that NASA's withholding photographic evidence that could prove that he's correct. Yeah, just, just for him to, anything for him to be correct, right? So. Anything. This is the pattern he's falling into, and it's actually way made wor- worse than, way worse than we've already documented. So for example, he says, oh, it doesn't have a coma, a comet should have a coma. And then there was a paper that showed that it does have a coma, and they said, the paper's wrong, because, because it, why? Because it shows, then he, then he had to admit that it, that it did have a coma. He said, well, maybe it has a coma because the interstellar craft picked up dust from its interstellar travel.

• 1:01:24Bob Novella?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:01:24Speaker 02

  Therefore, it, so he just keeps, you know, just changing what he's claiming, you know, just getting more and more silly. Then he said, oh, it's, you know, it's glowing with its own light, you know, which is not true. Yeah, the anti-tail, the tail pointing forward, is likely because the stuff that's coming, you know, what happens is the, the, the comet gets heated up by the sun, that's what creates the coma, and then the solar wind creates the tail, right? So it blows the stuff away. But if the particles are very heavy, they won't quickly get pushed away by the solar wind. They will, it will just keep going and radiating out from the comet, and the brightest point on the comet is the one that's facing the sun, right?

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  So you're gonna have ejected material going towards the sun, and if it's heavy particles, it won't get pushed into a ki- a typical cometary tail, hence you're left with an anti-tail. Does that make sense? And this, and we've seen this before, and then you would expect, well, over time, it still will get pushed into a regular tail, it'll just take longer, because the- Particles are heavier and that's what's happening. That's what we're seeing as time goes on. But he, you know, the thing is, again, I don't have a problem with saying, oh, could this observation be consistent with an alien craft, whatever.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  But this is just not the kind of thing that should be shopped to the public at this stage. Because this is

• 1:02:55Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Completely consistent with just a regular comet or, you know, an interstellar comet with some unusual features that we'd never seen before.

• 1:03:03Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:03:04Speaker 02

  Because it's interstellar. That's it. It's, you know, the probability of this turning into something fantastical like an alien spacecraft is negligible, but maybe it's not technically zero, but it's pretty damn low. And it's certainly Occam's razor dictates that, you know, we have to rule out, you know, non-alien, you know, interpretations first, just regular old astronomical object stuff first. And he's just making a career, going on Joe Rogan now, talking about how NASA's hiding data. I mean, this is, he's becoming just a straight up crank now.

• 1:03:39Cara Santa Maria?

  People aren't just picking this up. He's got a publicist. You know he is.

• 1:03:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah. He has, he has sullied these interstellar close calls for, for years, for years, whenever, and, and we're, we're going to get to the point where we could literally, you know, potentially detect two, three of these every year. And, and now for years, everyone's going to be talking about, what, is this also an alien craft? I also expect him at this point to say, these, those aliens are so smart that they made this one look just like an icy ball of rock and not, you know, not what it really is. That's how good they are. Like, really? I expect to hear that from him anytime now, how good the aliens are at disguising what it really is.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Real shame. It detracts, it detracts from the wonder of the science of all of this. That's what really should be on Showcase here, is how amazing.

• 1:04:26Speaker 06

  These things are and the fact that we are able to learn these new things about them. That's, that's the real excitement here as far as I'm concerned. How American is this whole thing, right? It's just like, here's a chance of real interesting science. No, it's aliens.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  I don't think that's uniquely American.

• 1:04:44Speaker 06

  As far as NASA not releasing the photo, not all of their devices spit out photos as fast as others and, you know, I think it was the, what, the high-rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? That takes time to, to get those images to, to come out of that particular one and that's the one he was referring to. So he, he doesn't bring that into his discussion at all when he's talking about it, you know, that this is, this is, this is, this particular instrument does take a long time to render these pictures. No, no, no. Instead, it's NASA's hiding stuff. So, yeah, that, that's what throws him into the crank category when he starts doing stuff like that.

• 1:05:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, the guy is probably drunk on money and the, you know, the fame that he's getting for it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 06

  Yep. Books he's selling.

• 1:05:30Jay Novella?

  It's a good lesson here, you know, like you can watch it in real time. Just watch him slide down the crazy hole, you know, just because he's getting other things that are apparently more important than real science.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Well, even if you put the motivations aside, I do think there's a feedback loop of why aren't I being taken seriously for my crank ideas than to people are just closed-minded to their hiding data, to they're wrong, to there's a conspiracy and it's all, you know what I mean? You just keep, that's, I think, the feedback loop that he is going down right now. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:06:05Jay Novella?

  Yes, it is. All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:06:17Jay Novella?

  That's pretty weird. What do you think?

• 1:06:18Speaker 06

  Did anyone suggest it was a Morse code signal of some kind?

• 1:06:22Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:06:22Speaker 06

  No, okay.

• 1:06:23Jay Novella?

  You did, though.

• 1:06:24Speaker 06

  Maybe.

• 1:06:24Jay Novella?

  Are you gonna stick with that?

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  Possible, that's what they were going for. I just don't know what, what made the noise, though.

• 1:06:29Jay Novella?

  All right, well, we got, I got a lot of guesses, some fun ones. There was a lot of people sending in a lot of jokey stuff. Thank you for the laughs, but I, you know, obviously I can't really. I can't go, I can't go all in on that. Uh, but this one, this one made me laugh. This guy is named Kevin Walsh and he says, hi Jay, I think you're at the point where if it sounds like a bird, it's probably not, but if it's a bird, it doesn't sound like one. Ha ha ha. That being said, this doesn't sound like a bird, so I'm gonna guess it's a woodpecker. I'm like, okay. Nice. It is not a woodpecker. And Steve, have you ever heard a woodpecker make any kind of sound like that? No, they're usually way more rhythmic. Yeah.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  And they laugh a lot, touring to the cartoons.

• 1:07:09Jay Novella?

  Absolutely. That's only the piliated woodpecker.

• 1:07:14Jay Novella?

  I have another listener named Gary Blanford. Gary said, uh, "To me, it sounded like a lead worker flattening or shaping the lead sheet prior to welding or other processes. Keep up the great work." That's an interesting guess. I, I haven't worked with lead. I've only worked with iron. So I don't, I don't hear, I don't hear that, but that was interesting. I actually wanna, wanna know what that sounds like now. Another listener named Nicole H. said, "Hi, this is my first time writing. I was bummed a few weeks ago because I recognized the rollercoaster noise, but I didn't send an email. This is a lesson to everyone out there. Take the chance, send the email. Sometimes you're gonna be right." She continues, "This week's noise sounds like liquid-filled bottles rolling downstairs." Interesting.

• 1:07:57Jay Novella?

  I've heard this noise. Uh, this is not correct, but thank you for the guess. Scott Wesley writes in, "Sounds too simple and I think you've done it before, but it sounds like one of those playground pipes where you can tap with your hands or slip on flat shoes to make these sort of noises. It sounds very clean though, either, either well-practiced or I'm wrong." So Scott, did you mean, did I, have I played the playground pipe noise before, or I wasn't crystal clear on what you said, um, or what you meant by that. But the bottom line is, I'm almost sure I have never played this noisy before. I mean, it is a hard thing 'cause the noises go back into when Evan used to do it as well. So I don't have perfect clarity. I have okay clarity on that, particularly things that are like over five years ago.

• 1:08:42Jay Novella?

  Anyway, you are incorrect and that's all fine. It's okay to be wrong. As Steve says, he's wrong all the time, right? No, he never says that.

• 1:08:51Jay Novella?

  Hi. Anyway, um, so nobody won. And I, you know, it always completely baffles my mind when people don't guess that it's a bird when it's a bird. And this is a bird. Steve, you want me to play it again and you want to try to guess? Sure. Alright, here we go.

• 1:09:15Jay Novella?

  What do you think? I have no idea. Bird heart. It's an emu.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  Emu.

• 1:09:18Jay Novella?

  What's it doing? You're right. I actually wrote down how to pronounce it. It's an emu. I told you later in the show I was gonna mispronounce it. Did you hear me say that? Alright, so it's an emu. Emu. Emu. And these are large, flightless birds. They live in, they're native to Australia. They are the second largest bird in the world after the ostrich. Um, the adults can grow to about six and a half feet tall and weigh around a hundred to a hundred and thirty pounds. And of course, they have long necks. That's how they get up that high. Strong legs, brownish feathers that look shaggy because each feather has a double shaft. Very cool bird. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and here it is. I'll say it now. You gotta put it in before, Steve. Ready?

• 1:09:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so this noisy this week, guys, this one has very high pitched, uh, somewhat annoying tingling sounds. Um, so if you want, turn your volume down a little bit just to make sure you don't, uh, don't hurt yourself.

• 1:10:26Jay Novella?

  The people in the background have nothing to do with this, just so you know. Alright, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at W T N. Finish it, Steve. At thescutthesky.org. There you go. Alright, Steve, there's stuff. Yeah. There is stuff. Okay, so first off, we have, um, tickets for sale. We have a bunch of shows planned. We're calling this the E R E, the Exclusive Rogue Encounter. What is it, you might ask? Um, this is the result of people emailing us like for a very long time, asking us They want something, they like the VIP things that we do, but they want something more intense, you know, like an intense VIP thing. So we thought we'd turn this kind of like into,

• 1:11:11Jay Novella?

  you know, a Disney World attraction where you will encounter us like we are dinosaurs. Uh, no, that's not what it is. This is gonna be, this is gonna be exclusive, meaning the numbers are gonna be very low, and it's gonna be more intimate. We are going to have, uh, you know, it's gonna be like you and a handful of other people hanging out with the SGU. Yeah, like we're not performing, we're engaging. We're talking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

• 1:11:38Speaker 06

  Private time with the SGU.

• 1:11:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, it's gonna be a lot of fun. We, we don't know exactly what we're gonna do, because we'll, you know, we'll think about it. We could do anything. It could be anything from listening to music, to, you know, to playing games, to slapping George around, just whatever, you know, whatever we decide. But it'll be fun, and this'll happen on Friday night. I'm not gonna say anything else about that, because the, the tickets are not up yet, or they might be by the time this episode comes up, if not-

• 1:12:04Speaker 06

  That's how exclusive this is.

• 1:12:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they'll be next week. Bottom line is, watch out for that on the home, on the SGU homepage. Then, you know, that'll be January 9th, and on January 10th, we have two shows. We have the SGU Private Show, and we have the SGU Extravaganza with George Robb. All those tickets are available on the SGU.org site. And then, we fast forward now to Saturday, May 16th. Uh, that's in Madison, Wisconsin, at the Atwood Music Hall. Um, it'll be the same exact arrangement I just said. Friday night, exclusive Rogue Encounter. The Saturday, which is actually the 16th, will have both the SGU Private Show and the Skeptical Extravaganza Stage Show. And just to let you know, we're gonna be doing a show in New Haven at some point. That's New Haven, Connecticut. Uh, those, those dates will be coming out soon.

• 1:12:50Jay Novella?

  It'll be sometime in the, uh, probably early spring. And also, guys, if you wanna support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com/skepticsguy.

• 1:12:59Speaker 06

  Thank you, Jay.

• 1:13:00Speaker 02

  All right, we got a quick email. This one comes from Norbert, who asks, "Here is my paraphrase of what a psychologist said on a radio program many years ago. Humans have reflexes, drives, and urges, but humans do not have or act on instinct."

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  At the time, I simply accepted the comment as accurate, but what are your thoughts? I thought that this might make an interesting segment for the show. All right, well, thank you, Norbert. I think it is an interesting question. Carol, what do you think about that? Do humans have instinct?

• 1:13:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, I have to look at specifically how they worded this.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  Your immediate reaction is it depends on the details, which I agree.

• 1:13:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Reflexes, drives, and urges, but they do not have instinct. Well, how is a reflex not an instinct? Like, this is all just operational definitions.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Exactly. But I read them like, this is, but depends on your definition. This is a semantic argument.

• 1:13:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we do have reflexes and drives and urges. And I don't think there's a difference between an instinct and an urge or a drive. I think what they're asking is, do we have things that are innate versus environmentally influenced? And we do.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  Totally. We totally have innate thoughts, feelings, behaviors.

• 1:14:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and like suckling, exactly, yeah, coughing, like, yeah, all of those things. So we have these basic kind of neurological ones.

• 1:14:17Speaker 02

  But I think even more complicated, like, I think the parenting instinct is absolutely real.

• 1:14:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there are definitely instincts. I mean, and people have them when they have pets even, I think. Whenever there's something in your charge that you're caring for. There are certain, you know, neurotransmitters, there are certain brain states that you experience. But then again, there's always an exception to the rule. Because there are some people who have weaker versions of that. There are people with psychopathy who might struggle with, you know, empathy. And probably those things aren't triggered.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now, I think where people might make a distinction is that, because all of these things, reflexes, drives, urges, instinct, whatever you want to call it, the more neurologically sophisticated a species is, the more higher level cognitive processes will be affecting these behaviors and feelings, et cetera, right? So just because, like, as human beings, we can think about stuff and alter our behavior accordingly, doesn't mean we don't have the instincts. Right, doesn't mean the instincts aren't there.

• 1:15:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I think there's also a big difference between what we're talking about, like quote neurological. What I would actually not use the word instinct, I would use the word reflex or drive or urge. And what we often think of as instincts are, can be learned, but they're still instincts. Because we have heuristics and we have biases. And so even though there's a lot of environmental influence, there is still the quick reaction. You know, the thinking fast and slow. And when we have the quick reaction, whether it is socially influenced or whether it is biologically influenced. There it's the immediate reaction versus the higher level, I need to sit and think about this.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And so some people might call that an instinct. It depends on how you define it.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  Right. But I think by any reasonable definition, we have instincts in that, you know, the, the core part of the definition is it's, there are some things that are, are innate that affect our thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Absolutely.

• 1:16:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and pulling away your hand from a hot fire. You can call it a reflex, sure, but we also have the cognitive ability to override that and force our hand there, even if it burns. So it's like even a reflex is more complicated than that. So I think the word instinct is just a loaded word and they're using it. Whatever your professor was or the, um, the psychologist on the radio program was. My hope is that they contextualized it more than that. They didn't just say that sentence and then like go dead silent.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  Right, you can't leave it there.

• 1:16:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I, reflexes have a very specific definition in neurology, so I would reserve them for that. Those are, those are usually things that are happening at a peripheral level, you know, or if they are in.

• 1:17:09Cara Santa Maria?

  So like hitting the knee with the hammer.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Or if they are in the brain, they're on a subconscious level. It's like a circuit. It is literally a circuit that does not involve any higher level thought. And may in fact be completely independent of it. Like you can't even impact it with your higher level thought.

• 1:17:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so like instinct, for example, as opposed to reflex would be like maybe pulling, pulling your hand away. Or it's like, there's all the obviously famous little Albert experiments, which were flawed, but whatever. And most psychologists generally agree that there are two main fears that infants have.

• 1:17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Loud noises and heights.

• 1:17:44Speaker 02

  Falling, yeah.

• 1:17:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like falling and loud noises, that those are just things that quote unquote innately.

• 1:17:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're instinctive fears.

• 1:17:51Cara Santa Maria?

  They're instinctive, yeah. But then they can learn all sorts of other ones and they feel instinctive. It feels instinctive to recoil to a snake, but that is learned.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  That's totally learned, fully learned?

• 1:18:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. There's all sorts of cool experiments where they put babies with snakes and the babies are just like grabbing at them and like totally not

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:18:08Cara Santa Maria?

  concerned at all.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:18:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, we're gonna do a name that logical fallacy as well. This one comes from TikTok, so this is also from TikTok, but this was someone who, Kara, I believe is a Mormon, who, who, according to their, their faith, there were horses, modern horses in the Americas prior to contact with the Europeans, right? But of course, scientists, you know, historians say that there is no modern horses in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans.

• 1:18:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, only, only like extinct horses?

• 1:18:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:18:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:43Speaker 02

  And those extinct horses probably all migrated over from Europe. The horses evolved in Europe and Asia and then there were waves of immigration from over the Bering Strait when that was passable, et cetera. And then modern horses evolved in Europe and Asia and were brought to the Americas by Europeans, basically.

• 1:19:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But according to the Mormons, Native Americans are a quote, lost tribe of Israel.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  I know, right, this is all part of whatever they're saying.

• 1:19:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, which we don't have to get into for this piece. But this guy is saying that that argument, that there were no modern horses in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans is a logical fallacy. It is the argument from ignorance. And, and then he backs it up by saying, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So he's trying to use skeptical logic, you know, the kind of arguments that we make. Yeah. In order to say, we don't know that there weren't, you know, modern horses in the Americas prior to Europe. You're just basing it on this conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

• 1:19:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's just another semantic argument. We can't prove that there were no horses, but we can say reasonably that there's no evidence that there were horses, so it's likely there weren't. I don't understand why, yeah.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:20:02Cara Santa Maria?

  We say the same thing all the time. We operate as if there were no horses because there's no evidence to think there were.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Exactly. You weren't here for the interview with a philosopher a couple of weeks ago, where he made a very good point, which I think we need to constantly reinforce, which we have, but he put a good term on it. "Science operates by the inference to the best explanation."

• 1:20:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:20:22Speaker 02

  And that's it. It's all inference to the best explanation based upon the totality of evidence and not proof, right? It's not math. It's not proof. And so, in the context of science, we can say, if you look at all the evidence, right? There's evidence that horses evolved in Europe and Asia, right? They did not evolve in the Americas. There's no evidence for horses in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans. And we know that Europeans brought their horses over here. And so, the simplest, so you have Occam's razor kicking in, the simplest explanation, the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions, as we like to say more accurately.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  And the best inference to, you know, to the most likely conclusion is Europeans brought modern horses to the Americas. They were not here before. Him trying to call that a logical fallacy means it's the fallacy fallacy, right? He does not understand how these fallacies work. I also often point out that saying "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" is technically wrong. It is evidence of absence. It's just not proof of absence.

• 1:21:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a form of evidence of absence, for sure.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  It's a form of evidence, though. And how good is the evidence? Well, it depends on how much you've looked and how effective, whatever your survey technique is.

• 1:21:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, what percentage of the population can we sample?

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, would we have expected to find horses, evidence of horses, pre-Europeans if they were here? Like, would we have expected to find typhus in the remains of Napoleon's soldiers? It doesn't prove they didn't have typhus, but we didn't find what we expect to find if they did. And that is absolutely evidence of absence.

• 1:22:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It is evidence of absence. Yeah, it's just not proof. I use the same argument when people ask me why I call myself an atheist and not agnostic. And I always tell people, I think that the term "agnostic" is a global label. We are all agnostic. We are either theistically agnostic, or we are atheistically agnostic. Meaning, nobody has full proof. All we can do is operate as if there is no God, or as if there is a God, or multiple gods. I operate as if there is no God, meaning I am an atheistic agnostic. Some people operate as theistic agnostic. So I drop the agnostic label because it's redundant. But I feel like it's the same thing.

• 1:22:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, there's evidence of absence all around me, which is why I choose to subscribe to that view. But I cannot prove that there is no God.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  The inference to the best explanation is, we don't need to hypothesize God, or gods, or supernatural things to explain the world that we see. And it's not a very useful hypothesis, anyway.

• 1:23:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:23:15Bob Novella?

  What makes it extra frustrating is the fact that a lot of people will say that they absolutely do have evidence, which of course is no evidence at all.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're wrong.

• 1:23:23Bob Novella?

  So frustrating.

• 1:23:24Speaker 02

  I always say both, I'm an atheist and an agnostic. I have just a slightly different formulation. I agree with what you said, but I think this is a communication thing. Because agnosticism professes the inability to know, which you are saying. So you are agnostic.

• 1:23:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so I am professing. And you're right, some people don't profess it, but my argument is, I don't care if you profess it.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Atheist.

• 1:23:43Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  And I got into this argument with people before, too. There's a strong atheism and weak atheism, right? And strong atheism is, you know, I know there is no God. Whereas weak atheism is, I don't believe in God.

• 1:23:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's my argument.

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we are weak atheists and agnostics, which is the only scientific stance, in my opinion.

• 1:24:03Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, and etymologically speaking, I'm sorry, but atheism is a lack of theism.

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  Yes, right.

• 1:24:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That's all that is. It's not, it's not an assurance that theism is wrong. It's not anti-theism, it's atheism.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Okay, but we like to be philosophically accurate.

• 1:24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:24:20Speaker 02

  In how we describe our beliefs. All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake. There's a sort of theme here. And the theme is "good news, everyone", which I've used many times before. These are all news items. They're all current news items, but they all tend to also be good news. All right. Here we go. Item number one. Engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. All right, number two. A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  And now, number three. Researchers demonstrate a liposomal delivery system that can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers. Jay, go first.

• 1:25:39Jay Novella?

  All right, so first one. Engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. What does "gallium-doped" mean?

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  So dope.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  It just means that you've included. You know, just, yeah. It's just, it's an engineering term. It just means you've added it to the, yeah, the gallium atoms have been added to the germanium.

• 1:26:06Jay Novella?

  So, Steve, instead of superconduction happening at a much lower temperature, it's happening at the liquid nitrogen level. That's essentially what you're saying here, right? For that, for that, um...

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  You're framing it interestingly. We already have superconducting material that's at this temperature range. But it's like, it's ceramics.

• 1:26:23Jay Novella?

  All right, so this is a different...

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  This is the first time where it's using like metals we're already using in electronics, getting up into that range.

• 1:26:29Jay Novella?

  And that's a big deal. I can clearly see that. Okay. I mean, you know, that's, uh, it would be fantastic. I can't think of anything off the top that would go against this being a possibility. Yeah, so I'll just say that's a maybe. Uh, number two. A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. Less than 1% of the energy of current methods. And that, if true, would be a massive...

• 1:26:58Jay Novella?

  Massive gain and help in so many freaking ways, not using all that energy and all the heat that's produced. When you say deep learning, are you including L L Ms?

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Whatever uses, you know, the deep neural net learning methodology.

• 1:27:12Jay Novella?

  Okay, I mean, I'm pretty sure that they do.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure that includes L L Ms.

• 1:27:15Jay Novella?

  I mean, that's massive. Sub 1% of current energy use. I can't imagine how that could have, how they could have figured that out. That the framework allows them to use a hundredth of the energy. I don't know. Okay, that's a big what if. No, I don't think so. That's, that's, that one is on my top list now. Third one here, researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with a thousand times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers. Well, the good news is it's either like this awesome cancer thing or the 1%, less than 1% energy usage, which either one of those being true would be fantastic.

• 1:28:00Jay Novella?

  You know, for some reason, I think the cancer thing is true and the energy one is false. Number two, Steve, the deep learning using less than 1% of the energy usage of current methods is, is a fiction for me.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm kind of leaning that way, too. I don't really understand the first one, the gallium-doped germanium. So we've got these materials that are already used in electronics and they've created this form that's now superconducting at ambient, oh, we, dang it. I feel like we get this all the time. Superconduction at ambient temperatures and we haven't been able to crack it in the temperature range if it, of liquid nitrogen. Okay, it's still pretty cold. So that's considered ambient temperature?

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Ambient pressure.

• 1:28:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, sorry, ambient pressure, but still really cold. Okay, yeah, that one actually seems like it could be true.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  Because, you know, some superconducting materials are like millions of atmospheres, like, oh, that's nice, good, happy for you, but, yeah.

• 1:28:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Because I feel like I've seen like the, yeah, maybe it was ceramics like you guys mentioned, but the displays of like the thing like floating, but it had to be super, super cold. Deep learning models, yeah, less than 1% of the energy of current message. What I don't like about this news item is it doesn't say something like, "A new framework for deep learning models has been shown to train faster," or like, "Has been modeled to train faster." It just says it does train faster and it uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods. So that makes it sound like it's not theoretical, or it wasn't a proof of concept, they actually did it. And so that's like, wow, that's a big deal. I think the liposomal delivery system being used to safely deliver anti-cancer drugs is, I think that's already science.

• 1:29:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So the big question here is, it was previously an unusable drug, and it had 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, but now it can be used safely. That would be the new bit, because I think we already have liposomal delivery systems for anti-cancer drugs. So that's why that one seems like it's closer to reality, so I'm going to say the deep learning model is also the fiction. That's what you said, right, Jay?

• 1:30:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm with you. That is correct.

• 1:30:07Bob Novella?

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  I can't really add much more to that than what Jay and Cara have already said, and led me to the same conclusion. I don't know how you get to less than 1% of the energy of current methods and achieve equal or better results, that's like, you know, win and winning, winner, winner, beyond that, win-win. So I think that's the least plausible of the three. I'll just say that that's the fiction, that's all I've got.

• 1:30:34Bob Novella?

  Okay, and Bob? All right, well, I mean, this superconducting advance seems interesting. As you said, Steve, yes, for many years, we have had, we've matched this with ceramic-based materials, and it's been great, but one of the classic problems was, well, how do you, you know, how do you turn ceramic into like, you know, wire, you know, superconducting wire, something like that? So perhaps this was mainly beneficial because since it's metallic-based, it would be better to use at the liquid nitrogen temperatures and ambient pressures? I don't know how much of a big plus this one is, considering that we can already, we could already do it with ceramics. But yeah, there certainly can be some huge advantages, potentially, that I'm just not...

• 1:31:19Bob Novella?

  Really can bring to mind here. Let's see, the less than 1% of the energy. Isn't that what, do you remember early in this administration? Trump was talking about spending like what some crazy money, a billion dollars for for these, you know, super, you know, these computer centers to, you know, for AI. And then was it, was it China that just came out with, with the similar AIs that or LLMs that were just like, use much less energy? I'm forgetting the details. I try to, I try to forget that period of my life, but um, I don't, so it reminds me of that.

• 1:31:59Bob Novella?

  So in that sense, it seems very similar to what we've already knew or seen that China could do or admitted to being able to do many, you know, many months ago. I don't know. It's just too foggy to really remember those details. So let's look at the third one here. Yeah, this liposomal delivery system, that sounds great. I want that to be true so mu- so much. But yeah, I'm gonna just have to go with the crew here. Less than 1% still. That's so dramatic. I hope it's true, but it just seems less likely than the other one. So fiction.

• 1:32:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's, let's start with number three. Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable can- to cancer drug with 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug resistant cancers. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is very cool science. So yeah, the question is like, was the thousand, like it could easily have been 100, even 10 times the toxic, you know what I mean? So, and as we've discussed before, and I know Kara is very well aware of, you know, chemotherapy is very toxic. It is poison. And there's a therapeutic window. The therapeutic

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  window is it has, you know, clinically significant anti-cancer effects with tolerable side effects, right? The benefits are more than the side effects.

• 1:33:28Cara Santa Maria?

  But like, and so toxic that, for example, in chemo centers, there's a dedicated bathroom.

• 1:33:35Cara Santa Maria?

  The workers and the guests do not use the same bathroom as chemo patients. And chemo nurses, the infusion nurses, have to get their blood tested regularly. It's that toxic.

• 1:33:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wipes out your immune system.

• 1:33:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  No, absolutely.

• 1:33:48Cara Santa Maria?

  The nurses working around chemo have to make sure they are not getting, yeah, that they're healthy to be able to use it and that they're not getting any chemo exposure.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  How does the contamination happen?

• 1:33:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, some of it's so toxic, like, I think it's, um, what's it called, red, oof, not red devil, um, but there's this one, like, for triple negative breast cancer, uh, uh, treatment that's so toxic that, like, if you spill a vial of it, it, like, burns a hole in the linoleum. Like, it's, it's pretty intense stuff.

• 1:34:15Speaker 02

  Alien blood, what the hell?

• 1:34:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:34:17Speaker 02

  Right. So, there are lots of drugs which kill cancer cells quite nicely, but there isn't a therapeutic window because at the, at the, they're so toxic that there's no safe dose for people, basically. So, like, injecting bleach for COVID? Yeah, something like that.

• 1:34:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  So, but, but as Carol said, this, the idea of, well, we're gonna take liposomes, this is the third some, you know, news item now that we're talking about this week, uh, we take these little packages, and if we can deliver, deliver them selectively to cancer cells, that then might open up a therapeutic window. It might increase the amount of toxicity to the cancer while decreasing the amount of toxicity to non-cancer cells. So, this is just doing that really well, basically. They developed this, you know, liposome that can target cancer cells specifically, like, certain genetic changes that make cancer cells cancer cells, and they make it so that they can't repair their own, it causes DNA damage that can't be repaired. So, eventually, those cells die.

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  Because it is so super selective in its delivery, uh, it was encapsulated what's called a pedulated liposome. The, it says in vivo efficacy, this is all animal studies, but in vivo efficacy was evaluated in three allograft models of cancer, melanoma, breast cancer, lung, and a xenograft model of uterine sarcoma. So, basically, they're trying to give mice human cancers, right? Uh, and they were highly effective, even in the very drug-resistant cases, and in some, in some of the mice, like, eliminating the tumors completely.

• 1:35:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, I want, I want to be a mouse. Cancer, Alzheimer's, what else? They, they got it going.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  So this is, this could, this approach could open up a whole new list of possible anti-cancer drugs that previously were just too toxic to use. And now we can use them and they're more effective even against previously drug, you know, drug resistant tumors.

• 1:36:18Bob Novella?

  How were the side effects, though?

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  Uh, well.

• 1:36:21Bob Novella?

  A little harsher than, than conventional?

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  No, no, that's the thing.

• 1:36:25Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it would be, it would be less.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  The idea is to make it even less.

• 1:36:27Bob Novella?

  Well, not necessarily.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it would be because it's, it's, it's more targeted.

• 1:36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, the targeting is, again, this is a mouse, so it's hard to say like what, what it would be like in people, but the idea is to get it at the same or less than, than conventional chemotherapy, um, hopefully much less.

• 1:36:43Bob Novella?

  If it's more targeted, then what, couldn't you just use this for all chemo drugs, then?

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:47Bob Novella?

  It's more targeted.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  That's where, that's where we're headed. That's where we're headed. Absolutely.

• 1:36:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And the idea, there is a, a correlation. I wouldn't say they're the same thing, but there's a massive correlation between toxicity and side effects.

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Like side effects are a function.

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  They're the effect, right? The side effects are the effect. It's just, you, you, you want to use drugs that were, cancer drugs are more susceptible than non-cancer drugs, for whatever reason.

• 1:37:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why, that's why diseases like triple negative breast cancer, you have to hit people with just like this horrible toxic drug because it doesn't have any genetic markers. It doesn't have any hormone markers.

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  Target therapies, yeah.

• 1:37:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, triple negative. That's what that means. There's no markers in it.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  All right, let's go back to number two. A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. You guys all think this one is the fiction and this one is?

• 1:37:36Bob Novella?

  I smell a sweep.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Science. This is science.

• 1:37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's a sweep.

• 1:37:41Bob Novella?

  Oh, man.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  This is awesome.

• 1:37:42Bob Novella?

  You got the sweep, Steve.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Now, how do you think they did it?

• 1:37:45Bob Novella?

  Who cares? You got the sweep.

• 1:37:49Speaker 02

  So this is the title, this is the title of the paper. Topographical sparse mapping, a neuro-inspired sparse training framework for deep learning models. So, they model it after the brain. And specifically, so you know in these neural nets, this is now the, this is my oversimplified understanding based upon the articles that I'm reading, right? So I know the experts will be cringing at like how inaccurate it is, but this is the basic concept that they're discussing in this paper. That neural nets, the nodes all connect to nodes at the next level, right? Like every node connects to every node, from one level to the next.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  But in the sparse mapping, you only, a node only connects to the nearby nodes at the deeper level. And they're-

• 1:38:43Bob Novella?

  And that's it? That's the breakthrough?

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  That's, that's a big piece of it. And so, there's far fewer fine tuning that you have to do in the training. You don't have to use, you don't have to, they say, they call the old models over parameterization, right?

• 1:39:00Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  And, and by getting rid of that, you know, basically you're getting rid of a lot of the, you know, parameterization that you have to, the tweaking that gets done to these connections, so that it's, uses less than 1% of them, right? And you still achieve the same results. And in fact, you get there faster.

• 1:39:21Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:39:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, because of course the training is faster because you're not having to make as many computational changes each step of the way, right? So essentially, you're using a sparse connectivity patterns rather than an unnecessarily overly robust connectivity patterns. The other thing that they do, also inspired by brain function, is pruning.

• 1:39:43Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:39:43Speaker 02

  The connections that don't get used get pruned.

• 1:39:46Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, what a great idea.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, again-

• 1:39:48Bob Novella?

  Good enough for evolution.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  It's trying to just use only the connections that are absolutely necessary for the functionality, rather than just having this default, everything connects to everything. Right, because that's the oversimplified way to say it. And the results were impressive. They, again, the training work went a lot faster, used less than 1% of the energy, which is, you know, huge in terms of, obviously, one of the big issues with AI is the massive energy footprint that they have. But also, the reason, that's the reason why it costs tens of millions of dollars to train AI models because of all the energy usage. So this could also make it a lot cheaper, you know, to train these models as well. So yeah, that's pretty cool. I hope this all pans out. Yeah.

• 1:40:34Speaker 02

  All right. And that means that engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. Is the fiction because they did make, you know, gallium-doped germanium that is superconducting, but only at 3.5 K, 3.5 Kelvin. Whereas liquid nitrogen starts at 77 Kelvin.

• 1:41:00Bob Novella?

  Right. So it's, so it's super expensive if you want to get it that.

• 1:41:03Speaker 02

  Well, you just can't use it. Yeah. It's just not, it's not usable.

• 1:41:06Bob Novella?

  Liquid nitrogen is much cheaper.

• 1:41:08Speaker 02

  It's funny because I was reading first the press release and then the, the study itself. And in the press release, they don't mention, I'm like, the whole time, like, at what temperature, at what temperature, at what temperature? They didn't mention it till the very end.

• 1:41:20Bob Novella?

  Oh, that's bullshit.

• 1:41:21Speaker 02

  I know. Like, come on. That's, that's your first paragraph.

• 1:41:24Speaker 06

  It's like a cliffhanger.

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:25Bob Novella?

  God.

• 1:41:26Speaker 06

  It's how they keep you reading to the end, actually.

• 1:41:28Speaker 02

  So, I mean, obviously, like, like a lot of superconducting research, like the very high ambient, very high pressure superconductors, or, or whatever, the idea is that this is sort of a new way of achieving superconductivity. And then hopefully we'll be able to keep going with this research and get to the point where it is at liquid nitrogen temperature, which is still super cold, but because you can cool it with liquid nitrogen, it becomes, which is actually relatively cheap, it becomes functionally very, you know, useful.

• 1:42:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I read once that's as cheap as milk. That was, you know.

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  So it's night and day, right? Like when the first superconductors that hit the public awareness in the 80s, the breakthrough was getting those ceramic superconductors up to liquid nitrogen temperature.

• 1:42:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  That was the big breakthrough. Not room temperature. We're not there yet.

• 1:42:20Bob Novella?

  Not at ambient pressures, anyway.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now, if we could make germanium is similar to silicon. Germanium and silicon are kind of the workhorses of electronics, right? And computing. So it is a big deal that we can get to superconducting in germanium at all. That's great. Now, we just have to figure out how to get it at much higher temperatures. And it does essentially work in the same way ultimately as other superconductors, Bob, which you know is what?

• 1:42:52Bob Novella?

  Well, Cooper pairs is one low-level way.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Yes, that's it. It's the Cooper pairs.

• 1:42:56Bob Novella?

  That they talk about, yeah.

• 1:42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, the doping of the gallium allows them to get two electrons to form together to form a Cooper pair, and then they're superconducting.

• 1:43:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it's so more complicated than just that.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:43:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  But that's the simplistic level description. So it seems to be work. Eventually, you get to that same endpoint of Cooper pairs. Interesting, but not useful at present, just maybe might lead to something in the future. But the other two are massive, and those are very, very good news indeed.

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  I had a Cooper pairs once. He gave me both barrels.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  Did he? I don't get it. I don't either. Oh, a Cooper, Cooper in like a barrel.

• 1:43:33Speaker 06

  Cooper made barrels, yes.

• 1:43:34Speaker 02

  That was pretty weak, Evan. Pretty weak. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:43:38Speaker 06

  Wouldn't describe it as weak. Some might say clever. "All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested, and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness, but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again." Ernst Meyer.

• 1:44:14Speaker 02

  Yep, correct, although said in an age before science denial was a thing.

• 1:44:20Speaker 06

  True.

• 1:44:21Speaker 02

  So he's missing a lot of nuance that was not necessary back in the day.

• 1:44:26Speaker 06

  The good old days.

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah.

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  That's a good point.

• 1:44:31Speaker 02

  But now we would say, but I'm not saying that we can't act upon science that we have now. You know what I mean?

• 1:44:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:44:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, he died in 2005, right, right before we started this podcast, basically.

• 1:44:43Speaker 06

  We could have had him, I know, clarify that for us, but he was gone.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  Shame. And you could mention he was an evolutionary biologist.

• 1:44:51Speaker 06

  You could say that.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  Was his claim to fame.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 1:44:57Speaker 06

  Thanks.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  And thank you all for joining me this week. You got it, brother. Thanks, Steve. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

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