The Skeptics Guide #1101 - Aug 15 2026

News Items: Trump Order on Vaccines, Spying with WiFi, Diminishing Vegetables, Two Origins of Life, More Pentagon UFOs; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Thousand Year Old Remedy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, August 13th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara San Maria.

• 0:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:22Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Guys, this is the first show that we are recording in the studio for several weeks, and this is going to be the first non-live episode we're going to air in a month, in four weeks. The last four episodes were all live shows.

• 0:34Cara Santa Maria?

  We made it.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  I know. It was an amazing trip. So we're all back, obviously, from our trip from LA, Sydney, Christchurch. It was basically for like Bob, Jay, and I was three weeks, essentially.

• 0:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right. Yeah, because you guys came out earlier. I got to be at home at the beginning.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  That's a long trip, man. It was a lot of fun, but exhausting.

• 0:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was a tight schedule. I mean, we were, you know, when we were in New Zealand, we were going day to day, new hotel, new hotel, new hotel. That was pretty rough.

• 1:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay, I remember like as we were approaching, I can't remember if we were at the bottom of the North Island about to go to Christchurch, which was not our last stop, but our last show, or if it was when we were already in Christchurch. At one point, you said to me, you know, it feels kind of like we just got here, but also we've been here for a fucking year. I'm ready to sleep in my bed.

• 1:26Jay Novella?

  Totally. And when we did our last show, I remember like I just felt, I felt like a ton of bricks lift off of me because, you know, it's a heavy lift. Everything that we've had to do to get to where we got to, it just felt like, you know, okay, we did it. We landed every single thing that we tried to do, and it felt great. I was so excited that everybody, all the people that came enjoyed it, and that all of us enjoyed it.

• 1:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's phenomenal.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, as you say at the beginning, like, there's 10 ticketed events that we have scheduled in the next basically two weeks. And that's a ton of, four SGU shows that we had to produce live while we're traveling.

• 2:06Bob Novella?

  Seven flights.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  Plus seven flights, plus two conferences. Hello, that's, when I say 10 ticketed events, that's in addition to two conferences, you know?

• 2:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And conferences, like, I don't think people real, well, I'm sure people who go to conferences realize, but whether you're performing, whether you are coordinating and producing, or whether you're just attending a conference, it's exhausting. It's just exhausting to be present all day. It's exhausting to be on, to be surrounded by people when you're used to being alone a lot. It takes a lot out of you, but it's also really invigorating. It was so fun. We have the best fans.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  These live events are always invigorating in that you get to speak to a ton of people who listen to the show, and they all tell us like what effect it had on their lives. And never get tired of hearing that, of course, you know, because this is such a big part of our life, and we dump a ton of time and resources and energy into it. So it's always good to hear that people appreciate what we're doing, you know?

• 3:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And Nauticon, I especially love because there's so much interaction with the audience, and we feature the audience so often, that we actually get to learn about them, you know? Like, I feel like we get to be kind of invested in some of these folks that either it's their first time seeing us, or they're sort of like regular people that we see at every show. I always feel like I get to learn more about them as opposed to it just being, you know, that kind of one-way conversation that we often have as podcasters.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Right. So what's our next big trip, guys? And nobody wants to think about it.

• 3:36Jay Novella?

  You know, we all would love to go to Japan. I just don't see it happening because I don't think anyone, I don't know if there's enough English speakers there.

• 3:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm voting, I mean, we'll probably end up going to the UK next, just because that's like our next biggest market, or maybe Canada, but I still have this like dream to do South Africa, because that's probably like our, what would you say, like our fifth biggest market? Because it is an English-speaking market, and I know that we do periodically get emails from fans there, but I'm not sure, you know, how big a show could be.

• 4:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So people keep, do ask us, hey, when are you coming to wherever? You know, recently, we've had a lot of requests to come up to Canada. And my answer is always like, you know, just you got to make it happen. We obviously, we love doing these trips. There are a ton of work. We only have so much room in the schedule to do these big trips, especially international ones. And it costs a ton of money to get us anywhere, right?

• 4:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's expensive just from a logistical perspective.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, logistically, because it's all of our equipment, it's, you know, it's our support staff, it's every, it's a ton of people that we got to bring out. And it takes a lot of prep, you know, before doing that. It's a lot of person hours. And so...

• 4:49Bob Novella?

  Especially the M&M and the Reese's Peanut Butter Staff. Those people are critical.

• 4:54Jay Novella?

  Don't forget about the Tim Tams, Bob.

• 4:56Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, just, all that means is that we got to make sure that enough people show up to our events to make it logistically feasible. So if you want us to come someplace, just help make that happen, or help us assess how plausible it is. We definitely have like on our short list, no hard plans. We are talking with people in the UK about doing another UK or Europe-based event. I definitely want to do a Canada-based event. We were in Vancouver. This is like 10-plus years ago, but we haven't really been back to Canada since then. I'd love to do South Africa. We're probably going to go to Japan either whether just for vacation or not. So if there are enough people, English-speaking skeptics

• 5:40Speaker 01

  there who would want to organize an event, maybe we can have that happen. And then...

• 5:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe Hawaii and Japan, if we were going to do something like that. I wonder if we could get a big enough group in Hawaii and do that on the way.

• 5:52Bob Novella?

  What about Hong Kong?

• 5:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or Hong Kong, or tie it in. I've done Hong Kong skeptics and the Chinese skeptics before. I think Southern China might be too small, and also logistically a nightmare to get those visas. But for Hong Kong, yeah, it may be a big enough group. So we could definitely look into that as well.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  But to clarify, like, if you want us to come especially far to your end of the world, get organized on your end.

• 6:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and if you already have a skeptic community, you guys already have meetings, you already know that there are, like, let's capitalize on that. Tell us how many people usually show up. Tell us how we can, yeah, get them all together.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  But the next event that is happening, might as well talk about that now. We will be at Dragon Con this year. We haven't been in a few years. We have a busy schedule. It's going to be me, Bob, and Jay.

• 6:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm not able to make it.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not able to make it. But we're going to be basically doing the whole, the whole weekend with Christian Hubicki.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, great.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  We're on a bunch of panels with him, mostly robot-themed, because he's a roboticist, but on all different tracks. We're doing, obviously, a live show. We're doing an SGU private show, which you can purchase tickets for. That's on the website. That'll be on Saturday night, 8 to 10 p.m. And a special person's going to be making their debut as a guest rogue on the SGU during the private show at Dragon Con. Do you guys know who that is?

• 7:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't.

• 7:17Bob Novella?

  Shouldn't we know?

• 7:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Are we allowed to know right now, or do you have to put it in the chat?

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Yes, you are.

• 7:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  It is. My daughter Julia is going to join us.

• 7:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's awesome. That's so cool.

• 7:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Hoping to cultivate her into sort of the next generation. We'll see how that goes. She's like, I don't know what I'll talk about. I was thinking of talking about this. And she like gives me a half-hour lecture on this topic. I'm like, yeah, just say that, Julia. That'll be fine. That'll be fine.

• 7:44Bob Novella?

  Just bone up on that.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  No, she, again, I raised her as a proper nerd. She and her friends give PowerPoint presentations to each other for fun.

• 7:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I love that. Oh, there's like, yeah, there's a whole thing on like YouTube and Instagram and TikTok of people doing like PowerPoints about like, you know, somebody's dating life or somebody, you know, how things are going at work, or whatever. It's so good.

• 8:06Bob Novella?

  I want to see some of those, some of those PowerPoints, man. I want to see like what's generally considered to be like their, their most well-received PowerPoints that they created.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Well, she told me about one where she did a PowerPoint to her friends on which supernatural creatures are the most sexist.

• 8:22Bob Novella?

  Oh, geez.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  Like vampires, werewolves, zombies, or whatever. And it's amazing, the argumentation, the details she went into of that topic.

• 8:32Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 8:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Hopefully with citations.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  All right. Well, let's get into some news items. We're going to start with one that's a little political. By the way, as an aside... This is a, get this ongoing discussion about how political the SGU is. And our editorial policy has not changed on this. So our editorial policy hasn't changed. We still talk about topics that if they have a scientific, critical thinking, skeptical, et cetera, angle to them, but there has been a lot more intrusion of politics into science. So that's why we are talking about those topics. And this one that I'm going to talk to you about right now is a great example of that.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  So Trump recently announced a, an executive order called the gold standard childhood vaccine recommendations, which is none of those things, right?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  It's a perfect example of a completely inappropriate intrusion of politics into science and all the things that we've been complaining about, you know, with this Trump 2.0 administration, where agencies that should be independent in order to allow, you know, science, evidence and expertise to really be guiding policy. And they, they should be insulated from excessive political intrusion, right? That's sort of the idea. You want scientists to be making scientific recommendations for the government, not politicians, cherry picking only the science that they want. So in this case, this is about the, the CDC's recommended vaccine schedule. That means the list of routine childhood vaccinations.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  There is a committee as part of the CDC, whose job it is to be up to date and review all the evidence and make recommendations about which, which vaccines should children be getting routinely. These are just recommendations, right? Now, in the US, states pretty much control these things in terms of healthcare. So how this gets applied is states decide which vaccines children require in order to attend public school. Also what exemptions are allowed for that. And then, you know, there are other agencies, like there is the American Pediatric Association who makes their own recommendations, right? As a professional organization, as they should. So what role does the executive branch have in this? Nothing, right?

• 10:54Speaker 01

  This is completely outside of their purview. This is completely unprecedented. They're not supposed to be, have anything like, the president making an executive order about the vaccine schedule is ridiculous. It makes absolutely no sense. The details of it are also, are also what we, what you would expect with Trump and RFK Jr. standing right behind him, right? And to, you know, to me, for those of us at science-based medicine, this is just an obvious, you know, additional step in, you know, RFK Jr., you know, with Trump, their campaign to systematically undermine vaccines in America. No question that's what's going on. If you have any doubts about that, go to the science-based medicine, you know, David

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Gorsky has been doing most of this, writing, I think this is 11 blog posts in a series called, "They're Definitely Coming for Your Vaccines." And where he, he details everything that, that RFK Jr. has done over the last, you know, year and a half or so, to completely undermine vaccine infrastructure in this country. So in isolation, this one executive order is not that big a deal because it doesn't, it's just a recommendation. It doesn't have any teeth to it. But you could see how it's laying the groundwork to further undermine vaccines. I also think it's probably has a lot to do with the midterms, like just throwing the base some red meat. But let's get into some of the details, right? So Trump said during this announcement, there's a direct quote from him, "Decades ago, children

• 12:22Speaker 01

  received only a small fraction of the vaccines required today. In those times, people were much healthier and of course, the high rates of autism now observed did not exist."

• 12:33Bob Novella?

  Where do you start? Oh my God.

• 12:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 12:35Speaker 01

  If you, you could look at the history of the vaccine schedule, you know, the recommended number of vaccines, of course they've grown over time because we've developed new vaccines. And as new vaccines become available, you know, the experts decide if they, you know, what role they, they should have. Should they be given routinely? Should they be given only to a targeted population? When should they be given? These are all public health decisions that are completely evidence-driven and they are, it's just a math game, right? It's like, how, how do we make sure we minimize, you know, disease and morbidity and mortality?

• 13:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And they are doing that.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  They are doing that.

• 13:10Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the thing. If you tie it to the actual infant mortality, based on these communicable diseases, it goes down when we vaccinate them.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  So the, you know, the, so the number of vaccines given has increased as new vaccines have become available, but it's not that dramatic and it's completely appropriate. And it's pretty much in line with other similar countries around the world. Now, his claim that people were healthier in the past is just, that's a myth that is demonstrably wrong. Obviously, you know, that's a vague statement, healthier, but if you look at the big things, like let's look at, oh, life expectancy. It's steadily climbed in the US over the last 50, 60 years. There was a drop during COVID, right? But that's an artifact, that's due to COVID. But it's, it's recovered since then. And in 2024, life expectancy in the US was higher than it was in any previous year ever, right?

• 14:03Speaker 01

  So we have, we have higher life expectancy than we've ever had, now that we've recovered from the COVID blip, right?

• 14:09Bob Novella?

  So we were healthier back then, but didn't live as long. I guess that's what happened, that's what's happening.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  What, you know, again, what do you mean by healthier? Infant mortality rates are down. That's obviously very relevant to like childhood vaccinations, et cetera. Cancer survival is up. Infectious diseases are down. But of course, if you could choose to look at certain things, like obesity is up. Okay, yeah, that has nothing to do with vaccines, you know? That has nothing to do with anything relevant to this question. That's, this is a lifestyle thing, you know? People debate about why we are having an obesity epidemic. Is it the food industry? Is it just lifestyle? Are we going to be more sedentary? Whatever. And of course, any, any disease for which obesity is a risk factor, like diabetes, is also tracking that, is also increasing. Was he talking about the obesity epidemic? I doubt it.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't think he was talking about anything specific, but it's not even relevant to vaccines. So anyway, the idea that we were healthier, again, the, the very deliberate implication being that we were healthier because we had fewer vaccines is nonsense. It's factually incorrect and vaccines have demonstrably made us healthier, have reduced infectious diseases, have reduced, you know, childhood mortality and morbidity, has increased our life expectancy. It is, you know, vaccines are the single most safe and effective and cost-effective public health intervention that humanity has ever devised by like orders of magnitude. It's not even close. That, that whole aspect of it was of course utter nonsense. And then, of course, he brings up autism.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Now, the, the anti-vaccine movement just cannot let go of their autism claims. They just cannot let it go. And RFK Jr. is right there as well. Now, we've reviewed this evidence many, many times on science-based medicine. I reviewed it very quickly when I wrote about this, this whole thing recently there. Again, for example, the World Health Organization in a recent analysis said that the, an expert committee on vaccine safety has found that based on available evidence, no causal link exists between vaccines and autism spectrum disorder. The conclusion reaffirms WHO's position that childhood vaccines do not cause autism. And that is the same conclusion that pretty much any professional organization comes to.

• 16:22Speaker 01

  You look at all the evidence over the whole world, country to country, whatever, there is simply no signal there. Now, a lot of that research is focused on two things, the MMR vaccine and thimerosal, which is a preservative. There's also been a substantial amount of research looking at aluminum. But in addition, there has been research looking for just any correlation between the number of vaccines that people get, how compliant they are with the vaccine schedule, et cetera, and any neurological consequence, including autism. And again, there's no correlation there. There's no signal there whatsoever. But RFK Jr., who is just a consummate propagandist, in a recent interview says, "They haven't

• 17:06Speaker 01

  shown that vaccines don't cause autism. They've only studied one vaccine and one ingredient." Now, if you track the anti-vaccine movement like I do, you immediately recognize that phrase, "One vaccine, one ingredient." That is an anti-vaccine propaganda. It's also, as I said, it's not true because they've also studied aluminum, but they've also just studied vaccines in general. Now, we haven't done the one study that, whenever you point out that, well, you haven't done a vaccinated versus unvaccinated study. It's like, they're right. We haven't and we never will because it's unethical. It's completely unethical and so it's never going to happen. It can't happen. So that's just a denialist strategy to, to ask for the evidence that cannot exist or doesn't exist for whatever reason.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  But we have a mountain of evidence showing that there is no link between vaccines and autism.

• 17:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be clear, when you say we can't do that study, you mean we can't do a randomized controlled trial?

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Randomized controlled, we have observational data. You can look at observational data, which is what we do have, lots of observational studies, but you can't select people to not get vaccines.

• 18:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, right. Because that's the standard of care.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, you were getting, you can't randomize people to not get standard of care. That is unethical.

• 18:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Because they, oh, let's see if, how you do, how your cancer does with no treatment and we can compare that to the treatment. No, you can't do that because you can't withhold treatment from people as part of the study.

• 18:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. When we know that the treatment helps.

• 18:26Bob Novella?

  How about a long time ago, before it became the standard of care? Did they do it then?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Well, no, because whatever you have, the vaccine is proven safe and effective. It's by definition, part of the standard of care at that point.

• 18:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm talking about before that.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  Well, there were no vaccine.

• 18:39Bob Novella?

  Well, when they first developed them, did they, did they, did they do it?

• 18:42Speaker 01

  They were, well, they looked at the vaccines as they were being developed. I'm still not sure exactly what it is you think, you're thinking about.

• 18:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Are you, are you saying that like, okay, let's say the MMR vaccine, when it was brand new, did they do randomized controlled trials to determine its effectiveness?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Right, yes.

• 18:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And were they able to look at autism outcomes then? Or did they just not think to test that?

• 19:04Speaker 01

  So they did, it wasn't specifically tested because there was no one saying that MMR was associated with autism. We also didn't look at MMR specifically for a thousand other diseases because why would we? You just look at all outcomes, right? You just look at the group that get, that got the, gets the new vaccine, the group that does it, and you just say, is there any difference in any disease? So that kind of data we have.

• 19:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, basically you're looking for measles, mumps and rubella. Let's, what's the difference in the measles, mumps and rubella rate?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but also negative side effects. Any negative, any negative outcome, any negative outcome, whatever that is.

• 19:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why we have all of this rich data and research on any drug that says, these are the risks, these are some of the things that can happen.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, the risk of

• 19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  There are always risks. They're just very low with vaccines.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  It's risk versus benefit. Risks of vaccines are very, very low. Anything serious is literally like a million to one. And the benefits are obviously huge. Now, the other thing that's that's so intellectually dishonest about this is just saying, well, it's only one vaccine and one ingredient. It's like, yeah, it's the one vaccine and the one ingredient that you guys were complaining about. Right. So they said MMR vaccines associated with autism. So it was studied and shown not to be associated with autism. They said, well, hey, well, it's not MMR. It's thimerosal. That's the cause of autism. So that was studied to death, and there's no correlation there either. Now they're saying, well, you've only studied one drug and one ingredient. Yeah, the two that you said were the cause of autism and are wrong. It's completely disingenuous to say that. Total moving gold post.

• 20:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It is. And to be clear, the only reason, like when people go, yeah, but why those? Like, where's the data? Why is this the reason, you know, the thing people are obsessing about? Because Wakefield made it up. I mean, I think that's the other thing that we have to remember. It was literally a dart at a dartboard. He made that up because he wanted to target or to produce and make money off of his own vaccine that didn't have that.

• 20:55Bob Novella?

  Let me interject. Let me interject there because I recently heard something that I hadn't heard before. A different angle to what you just said, Kara. The angle was that he had lawyers who were who were who were financing what he was doing. So that because the lawyers were ready to sue vaccine manufacturers. So are they? Are they both true? Was one true? What's the status on that?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so you RFK Junior also, you know, makes money off of, you know, suing manufacturers. So there's there's a vested interest in sort of trumping up the risks of vaccines.

• 21:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, you can't use that word.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  I know.

• 21:30Cara Santa Maria?

  In that context, it was fine. Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  So seriously, so for the for the for the anti vaccine movement, the reason to point at vaccines into to tie with autism was like over the 90s and aughts, there was an increase in the incidence of autism diagnoses. And so they're like, oh, let's latch on to that. The vaccine schedule is increasing, thimerosal cumulative dose is increasing, and autism is increasing. Therefore, it's causing autism. But here's the thing, that's not true. The autism, the true autism rates are actually not increasing. The diagnoses are increasing because we've broadened the definition, because we are surveilling it way, way more. And because there's been diagnostic substitution.

• 22:17Speaker 01

  These people existed 30 years ago. They just either got no diagnosis or they got a different diagnosis.

• 22:23Bob Novella?

  The net has smaller holes.

• 22:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like the joke is like your grandpa who spent his whole day in the basement playing with his trains wasn't just different.

• 22:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? He was probably autistic. And when you really think about all of the different diagnostic criteria, there are probably a lot of older adults in your life who who would qualify for the diagnosis, but it just wasn't culturally normative at the time.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Cohort studies where they said, all right, let's look, let's apply the same surveillance technique and diagnostic technique to like medical records over different populations. And guess what? They find the same rate of autism over in the 90s and the aughts or whatever. It's not increasing if you apply the same methods to making the diagnosis. So there is no autism epidemic. It's not like this. We have that. We have to explain some massive increase. It that you can, I can't rule out a tiny increase that's really in there for demographic reasons or whatever. But the bottom line is it's mainly a diagnostic artifact. Now, if you look at the CDC website, which is this is a complete travesty. This is malfeasance. It used to say there's no link between vaccines and autism.

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Now it says that this is not true and that we have not ruled out a link between vaccines and autism. The CDC website says that now.

• 23:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, that's the problem with politicizing science. We're seeing this across the board, across all of our federal, you know, science institutions. They've either overtly gone anti-science because of pressure or they've removed specific things that our or our, I don't want to say our, the administration thinks are controversial. So they're just kind of mealy mouthed now.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Like they don't have a strong stance.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  So here and here's the thing, and this is why RFK Junior is a despicable human being, in my opinion, that technically speaking, you could say, well, we haven't quote unquote ruled it out. If you define that as demonstrating that the risk is literally 0.000, right? Because that doesn't exist in medical science. There's, we have not ruled out anything. All the only thing you could ever say is that whatever risk is there is smaller than the the size of the risk that the existing data has the potential to detect. Right? Which is a wonky way of of saying there's no correlation there. There's no known risk or no established risk.

• 24:49Speaker 01

  But the thing is, you could never say it's zero. It's statistically never zero. Nothing. No risk is ever zero, right? It's only as small, it could only be smaller than our ability to detect it with the given data that we have. And that's where we are with autism and vaccines. It's smaller than the hundreds of studies that we've done. You know, the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of of individual people in all the studies that we've looked at around the world, which means it's in, it's not zero, but it's in the background noise. It's effectively zero.

• 25:21Bob Novella?

  It could be, it could happen once every quintillion shots. But we're just not, you know, we will never get that, we'll never get to that decimal point.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  So it's completely disingenuous without explanation to just say it has not been ruled out. That's just bullshit. That is misleading. That is deliberately misleading.

• 25:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And that's what RFK does. Essentially has been ruled out though, right? For all intents and purposes.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  It has effectively been ruled out, meaning what we mean by that is it's it's so small, it's in the background noise. It's not even worth worrying about.

• 25:52Jay Novella?

  So you don't like any of this? That's what you're saying?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  It's part of a consistent anti vaccine campaign that has been, you know, now being carried out in by RFK Junior under Trump in the last year and a half. It's going to continue. It's clear what his goal is to to completely minimize vaccines. And he was actually worse than we predicted. You know what I mean? Like we, but these are all the things that he could do. He's done all of them and more.

• 26:20Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Cassidy.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally. Absolutely. The one guy could, you know, Senator Cassidy could have stopped at least RFK's appointment. And he knew better because he's a physician, 100% knew better. And that was a complete moral failure on his part, in my opinion. Anyway, we'll have to keep a close eye on this because it's happening. It's going, it's going to continue to happen. Jay, tell us how we could spy using wifi.

• 26:46Jay Novella?

  Have you guys heard about this before?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we've talked about things like this.

• 26:50Bob Novella?

  What kind of spying, Jay?

• 26:51Jay Novella?

  Well, this is, this is really, this is both really cool. Like this is common, right? It's cool and it's scary of what the potential is here. And it seems, you know, wifi just seems like

• 27:01Bob Novella?

  That's kind of scary.

• 27:02Jay Novella?

  It's just wifi, right? It is. And it's everywhere. And if you think about it, like most of us have wifi in our homes. And if you go to a workplace, there's wifi, of course, at work. There's wifi in practically every store you go into, airports, airplanes, supermarkets, any public space, right? Any, any place where you're going out in the public, there's parks that have, you know, outdoor wifi, you know, it's

• 27:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:26Jay Novella?

  It's pervasive. So we're, we're jumping from one wifi bubble to the next. And I don't have a problem with that because, you know, that type of connectivity, you know, we need it, you know, like, or do we really? But that's another discussion. But the bottom line is it's everywhere and we all use it. A few years ago, it was discovered that wifi signals can be used to detect people. And I did read about that. I remember. I think it was three, maybe even four years ago. But there's a new one that a lab discovered that can recognize specific people. So we have researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, and they developed a system called BFID. BF stands for what, Bob?

• 28:12Jay Novella?

  No, they said that they can identify people by analyzing how their bodies affect wifi signals. And in their experiments, they're, they were able to detect particular people with an accuracy of what?

• 28:25Bob Novella?

  85%.

• 28:26Jay Novella?

  Kara?

• 28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  95%.

• 28:28Jay Novella?

  Steve?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  95.1%.

• 28:31Jay Novella?

  99.5%.

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  He gets the car.

• 28:35Jay Novella?

  It's essentially 100%.

• 28:36Bob Novella?

  Damn.

• 28:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It knows us better than we know ourselves, at least by our shopping behaviors.

• 28:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but Jay, have they ruled out that they actually can? Oh, never mind.

• 28:47Jay Novella?

  So let me try to explain how this works. I've dumbed this down a little bit just to make it so we can get through it. Wi-Fi uses radio waves and those waves, they travel through the room, they can travel through walls, they interact with everything, every shape, every texture everywhere in the room. They bounce off the walls and furnitures, they get absorbed, they get scattered, and of course, they interact with anything, including, you know, people and pets or whatever, like anything that's in the room, including us. Now, researchers had been experimenting, you know, using this phenomenon, they call it Wi-Fi sensing, this has been going on for years. There's a previous system that they used Wi-Fi to detect whether someone was in the room, they can track their movement,

• 29:31Jay Novella?

  they can recognize like activities that they're doing. It wasn't very reliable at identifying, like it could identify that it was a person in the room, but not the specific person, right? Now, those systems relied on something called channel state information. And let's just say it's called CSI, right? This was the part of the Wi-Fi signal that they were using to make these readings on the room and the movement in the room. Now, getting CSI generally requires specific hardware, you have to have modified firmware, and it does put very legitimate practical limits on who can use it, right? It's not just happening

• 30:14Jay Novella?

  in anybody's home. You had to modify the equipment that you were using to be able to do this. The new research, this takes advantage of something that's much easier to obtain. This is called beam forming feedback information, and I'll call that BFI, right? So CSI is the first version of it that they found that they could use, more complicated, harder to get to. BFI is quite easy to get to, right? I think, you know, basically it doesn't take much to get there. So beam forming, this was introduced with Wi-Fi 5, which, you know, pretty much, you know, most people are using Wi-Fi 5 technology at this point. They put it in to improve the wireless performance, of course, there's constant upgrades to these

• 30:57Jay Novella?

  technologies. And essentially, instead of like just blindly broadcasting a signal in every direction, the access point, say your modem, can use information about the radio environment to improve how it sends signals to connected devices, meaning that it's going to send information to those devices and it will know where the devices are and it could kind of concentrate where it's sending the Wi-Fi signal, right? Not totally focus it on there, but it just makes it a better connection to, say, your cellphone or your laptop computer because it knows where it is and it can enhance the signal that's going in that direction. So these Wi-Fi devices will send information about the wireless

• 31:37Jay Novella?

  channel back to the access point. That information is BFI. And here's the problem, BFI is transmitted unencrypted. No one thought to encrypt it, because why? Someone within radio range could potentially collect that BFI signal. They could read it, meaning they could use an instrument to read it and get the information that it's sending, right? They don't need to know your Wi-Fi password to access that information, they don't need to get on your network, and the person that is being observed, of course, doesn't need to be carrying a phone or other Wi-Fi device because it's more about the beam interacting with the

• 32:17Jay Novella?

  environment, not a device. So let me just paint the picture. You have your Wi-Fi mesh system in your house or whatever, you could be having it built all into a modem that you have or whatever, but you have a device or several devices in your house that are sending out Wi-Fi signal. And just think of it as waves of water or sound waves that are going out, just to visually see it, right? So they're going out and radiating away from that device and they're hitting everything and they're bouncing off other surfaces and hitting everything from both directions and all that. They can even go through walls and go through floors and everything. It does lose some signal, of course, when it does that. But there is also information coming back to the transmitting device that

• 33:01Jay Novella?

  can tell now what's in the room. It's actually able to collect like a, you know, like a night vision type of idea of what's in the room with some modified software, not a big deal.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  So it basically tells if there are people in the room, like how many people are in the room, which rooms they're in?

• 33:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so they tested different ways of walking, you know, people walking with different gates, walking normally, carrying a backpack, carrying a crate faster, you know, passing through a turnstile, you know, like all these different human activities. Then they trained a straightforward machine learning system that would recognize individuals from these Wi-Fi measurements. So it's just a bunch of data, Cara, that they're giving to a very vanilla machine learning system that could sift through the data, figure out what it is that it's seeing, right? Like, you know, I guess they give it the starting information, so it has a starting point, but, you know, it learns to identify a backpack, it learns

• 34:04Jay Novella?

  to identify a human from a cat, and it learns the shape of people's faces. Again, that's the fidelity that's going back to the signals that are going back and forth to this equipment. It's there.

• 34:18Cara Santa Maria?

  So how can this be like used nefariously?

• 34:20Jay Novella?

  I'm gonna tell you.

• 34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah.

• 34:22Jay Novella?

  So knowing now that everybody's Wi-Fi signal that's using Wi-Fi 5 is sending this type of, this type of BFI, you know, unencrypted BFI transmissions, right? And knowing that I just told you that there's enough information in that data getting back to the Wi-Fi machine that it could actually feed that data to a machine learning system that could identify people with almost up to 100% accuracy, an individual person, right? Now, of course, you would have to tell it who that person is. It can't look at you and know who you are, right? Yet. Yet. Meaning like, you know, if there's a picture of Cara on the internet, it might, someday in the future, it might be able to figure things out that way, but

• 35:06Jay Novella?

  right now, you'd have to say, this is Steve's, you know, imprint, this is what his face looks like, and, you know, this is him, and anytime you see that face, that's Steve forever, right?

• 35:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, kind of like in your phone, when you, like your photos, you have to like first label people and then it can track them.

• 35:23Jay Novella?

  And it knows. So it's way more capable than the original version, the CSI version that they came up with. Why is this a problem? First off, the information, like I said, could be grabbed by anybody, if you have a listening device. And what if that person already knows what you look like? And what if it could upload your information to their machine learning system to say, you know, this pattern is Cara, this pattern is Bob? What if you were able to do that on a massive scale? Right? I mean, this is just the beginning, like they just discovered this, like no real energy has been put in to like make this super easy and make it so, you know, you can identify millions of people. Like, you know, this was a limited study, but again, it worked so unbelievably well. Now, there's

• 36:08Jay Novella?

  limitations, right? The study conducted, you know, these tests under controlled conditions, they had restrictions to the kind of clothing, right? There are things that people could do to dramatically obscure their gait if they wanted to. You know, there is reflective type of clothing that people could wear to confound the readings.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  Would wearing a tin hat help?

• 36:30Jay Novella?

  I think the tinfoil thing is gonna come in here, Steve, it's coming into play. The system, they don't know if the system could do it if it was reading tens of thousands of people at a time or thousands of people. You know, how stable are the signatures? You know, these are all questions, of course, the scientists are like, let's try to answer every question, you know, and all that. This could be a problem. Now, the simple question I asked was, well, can't they just make it so it is encoded? So, you know, it isn't like open to the public that you have to, you know, end-to-end security, like, you know, we constantly are talking about like, you know, having things be secure on both ends, you know, it has to be transmitted where there's a key involved or whatever, some type of security measure in there. How hard would it be to implement that on all the routers that are out there, right? It's basically a software update or a firmware

• 37:15Jay Novella?

  update to do something like that, I would think. You know, I'm not an expert in this, but, you know, it's not that big of a stretch to think that they could add software to make it so these types of signals have to be encoded, but could the encoding be, you know, broken into? Who knows? I find this really fascinating because it's a technology that is, it's just everywhere and everybody knows about it and it's been benign all the way up, you know, as soon as people realize that you weren't going to get cancer from your Wi-Fi, you know, the Wi-Fi signals in your house, we don't think about it. And it is very, you know, very easily can be taken over to do, to have massive security breaches, which I think could be troublesome. I don't know. What do you guys think about this?

• 37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it's like one of those things where I feel like I'm so saturated with privacy concerns that unfortunately, my psychological defense is to just sort of

• 38:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 38:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Not even, you know, I, it's like we're past a threshold at this point. I'm like, everything's going to get me. So therefore I'm probably not doing anything that I need to be doing to ensure my safety.

• 38:17Jay Novella?

  Exactly. We live in a tsunami of technology.

• 38:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:20Jay Novella?

  That again, it's like the waves keep going over and over our heads and like, which wave are you going to pick to fight against? And how, you know, what are your chances of actually having it succeed? Like, you know?

• 38:29Speaker 01

  But I don't think we should give up because I do think

• 38:31Cara Santa Maria?

  No, we shouldn't. Yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  That we just need to raise the political salience of cybersecurity and cyber privacy. They need to be issues and voters need to, to continue to make them issues, right? It's easy enough to, to demand that the government doesn't violate our privacy. There's already an infrastructure for that, a legal infrastructure. Like they need to get a warrant or whatever. But we, but it's more difficult to make sure that the, that technologies are regulated so that private actors can't violate our privacy.

• 38:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Cause to me that's, I mean, I, I get why government violation of privacy is incredibly pernicious, right? Like there's a long, rich history of civil rights literature around this, but I think we sometimes are a little too, I don't know, like Pollyanna about the possibility of abusing power within private corporate, like private corporations, non-governmental entities are often the very people that the government ends up contracting with later anyway.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 39:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:31Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not just, oh, they're trying to make a little bit of money. It's so much more pernicious than that. And I think we often don't, don't really think about like, what's the old saying? Like if there is no product, you are the product.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:43Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 39:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Like we are the product.

• 39:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And try turning your wifi off in your house and see how happy that makes you.

• 39:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Exactly.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  Well, that's the thing. If it gets tied to an essential technology.

• 39:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's the whole terms and conditions may apply. It's like, we don't read the terms and conditions because we still have to use our email.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Or we can't do our jobs.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  Or drive your car now, right? I talked about that not too long ago on the show. Like just in your car is like the location where you're probably most surveilled, you know?

• 40:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  All right, Kara, tell us about diminishing vegetables throughout the world.

• 40:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. This is something that I feel like, once I say it out loud, it's going to be a, of course, kind of thing. But I don't know how often we're all thinking about this problem that was recently, I'd say summarized in an article in Penis, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. It's a perspective article under agricultural sciences. So really it's more of a, I would say like a lit review of, of some of the issues that are facing us that was written by some very knowledgeable people in this field. I say that because I'm trying to remember, but I think some of the affiliations are, yeah, like the World Vegetable Center. I think if you work at the World Vegetable

• 40:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Center, you know a lot about vegetables, or the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The article is called reversing vegetable biodiversity loss to diversify diets. And they make some, some claims in here that I think are important. Basically the, the, the main claim is that we are facing a global decline in vegetable biodiversity and we need to make active efforts to reverse that decline in order to address another global problem, which is widespread malnutrition due to underconsumption of diverse vegetables. So some of the big kind of problems

• 41:39Cara Santa Maria?

  that we're facing. Number one, global vegetable intake is about 40% below what's recommended for optimized nutrition. And that drives a lot of problems. It drives first, problems with children, right? We see failure to thrive. We see that kind of hidden type of hunger. Like we, we've talked about this before on the show where an individual is both struggling with obesity and also nutritional deficits because they're eating calorie dense foods that are actually really lacking in the basic like vitamins, minerals and, and nutrients that are necessary to thrive. And what ends up happening throughout the lifespan when

• 42:23Cara Santa Maria?

  we don't eat enough vegetables? What do you guys think?

• 42:26Speaker 01

  It's not good.

• 42:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not good, right? Like, and, and the world, the World Health Organization says that it's probably one of the top five dietary risk factors driving the global burden of disease. So when we think about the big, the big killers, cardiovascular disease, you know, heart disease, type two diabetes, GI cancers, these big killers are often directly, like we have very good evidence to directly link those to, to diet and especially to poor diet and, and nutritionally devoid diets. But also there are other problems when we don't have enough vegetables accessible to individuals, especially when the reason we

• 43:11Cara Santa Maria?

  don't have enough vegetables accessible to individuals, which we know is a multifactorial problem, right? We know there's a, there's an economic problem. We know that there are land use problems. But when we're specifically focusing on biodiversity loss, why do you think, or how do you think, maybe both? How and why is vegetable biodiversity so low?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  I think it's primarily due to the market forces in the agricultural industry, right? So they're going to favor vegetables that are profitable, that are shippable, that are, you know, highly productive. And if that's your primary outcome is like, how much money can I make on a plot of land growing vegetables? This, but you're going to choose the vegetables. Everyone's going to want to grow the most profitable vegetables, right? And

• 43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Therefore that reduces the biodiversity.

• 44:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. So not only does the industry itself not favor vegetables like human food, because it, it has the lower, the lowest sort of ROI, but you're a hundred percent right that these sort of high commercial value crops are taking up space in the market. And what ends up being neglected, at least according to the authors, are what they call nutrient dense regional opportunity crops. And we'll, we'll talk about what some of those are. Some of them I had never even heard of, which is kind of the point here, right? And so what happens then when we have an industrial agricultural focus on high commercial value crops? Well, I mean, we, we've talked about some of these big issues

• 44:40Cara Santa Maria?

  like habitat loss and environmental degradation that can happen when we are, A, growing, like monocropping specific vegetables and actually not allowing some vegetables that may have historically grown, whether they're like wild varietals, which we know that some wild varietals are not very edible, but there still are quite a few opportunity crops where wild varietals would be edible and they would sort of naturally grow in certain regions. But we've kind of clear cut those regions in order to grow commercially viable crops. Also, so, so a lot of these decision-making have, has driven extinction. About a quarter

• 45:24Cara Santa Maria?

  of wild vegetable relatives right now are facing just full extinction. So, so good food crops that we could be having, that we're choosing not to grow agriculturally and put, put sort of effort into growing, a quarter of those are like at threat of going extinct and some already have. And so what then ends up happening? Well, we have biodiversity loss, like I mentioned at the beginning, right? We've got an intake that's 40% below recommended dietary levels. We've got nutritional deficiencies that are stunting growth in children and also leading to chronic disease in, in adults. We've got biodiversity loss.

• 46:08Cara Santa Maria?

  The, the authors of the article cite that 80% of genetic erosion studies report significant loss. So like when they look across all of the literature, they're seeing just a massive trend of it's only going down. It's not staying even and it's not going up. And then what ends up happening when you have, let's say these, you know, handful, and we're talking dozens, really, like in the dozens of varietals that are being grown across the globe because they sell well. And, you know, it's becoming more and more homogenized. What happens when a blight develops?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Wipes out everything.

• 46:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's just uniformly affects the food supply. And so there we lose crop, which means losing money, but it also means massive shortages. That means that poorer individuals have less access to food because it's always going to burden the most vulnerable among us first. And so, you know, the researchers say, what can we do about this? They're probably their biggest approach is to start to increase heterogeneity of the global market. So they're saying like, we need to move away from this westernized, standardized push towards eating just the same crops over and over and over, like these

• 47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  three tomatoes and those two onions. And, and we need to start looking again at what some of the more regional, or maybe even culinarily, like traditional and varietal crops are, and see if we can sort of make change by introducing them into more recipes, by valuing them more within, within these communities, and especially focusing on nutrient dense regional crops. And so what are some examples of those? Have you guys heard of a spider plant?

• 48:03Jay Novella?

  Ooh. That sounds familiar.

• 48:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So this is a dark leafy green that grows in parts of Africa. That's very, very rich in micronutrients. And it's also been identified across the board as a priority crop for climate adaptation. So it seems to be very hardy and it seems to be very resilient to, to the warming planet.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  But Kara, it's all supposed to be very bitter. And I wonder if that's also a reason which we haven't mentioned is that people are growing and selling the tasty vegetables and maybe some of the more highly nutritious, resilient, local varieties are just bitter.

• 48:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I think part of the issue there, it, it's a cultural issue, right? Because given the option between eating a Twinkie and eating cabbage, you know, most children are going to choose the Twinkie. And families often, given the option between even a sweet, bright, but nutritionally less dense vegetable, you may choose the one that feels more palatable. But if you're in a situation where you grow up eating these bitter vegetables, they're part of the local cuisine, and they are the option that's in front of you, you develop a taste for them.

• 49:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and that's the thing, we are developing a world where we are moving more and more away from health as a priority and more into kind of that quick, you know, that quick hit. And it's, it's, it's happened across the, across the world. And so spider plants are one example, bitter gourds, also bitter is in the name. And these are, these are common in Asia and in the Caribbean. Also slippery cabbage, which I had never heard of. This is a, a pretty popular in the Pacific. And it's very good at diversifying diets. It's a dark leafy green as well. And then pumpkin. We, you know, we have pumpkins, obviously all over. They're, they're native to the Americas. They're globally recognized. But

• 49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  one of the things that we don't think about with pumpkin is they're very drought and heat tolerant. And they're rich in beta carotene. Like a lot of times carrots are the place that we, you know, that's like really the only orange crop we're often eating. But pumpkin can offer a lot of variety there to get more color on your plate.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  What I do in the fall, when we go to the farmers markets for stuff, is I get some small sugar pumpkins. And then you, you, you hollow them out of the seeds and stuff, and you just like make a stew in the pumpkin. And then you eat the pumpkin along with whatever it is you cooked inside.

• 50:25Jay Novella?

  What pumpkin is this? Is this a sugar pumpkin?

• 50:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, the sugar pumpkin.

• 50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Sugar pumpkin. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of pumpkins too, that I have started eating more and more of because of the influence they have in the Asian cuisine and where I'll go to eat. So one of my favorite styles of food is hot pot. And there are different kinds of hot pot. I tend to like more like Sichuan varieties of hot pot. So it's basically like a really rich broth with a lot of peppers. So you've got like this rich broth with like slick oil of like pepper on top. But you can also do it as a non spicy version. Sometimes they have divided pots and it literally sits on a burner the whole time you're eating it and is boiling. And you drop meat, vegetables, noodles, whatever in, they cook really rapidly. You fish them back out and it's a very kind of social way of eating as well. Pumpkin is phenomenal in hot pot.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And so that's a, yeah, that's a major thing. I eat a lot of tofu and a lot of pumpkin in hot pot form.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  But Kara, here's a question. So, because, you know, when we do travel and either for the show or just with my family or whatever, a lot of places have a local farmer's market. And those local farmer's markets often have a lot of local, like heirloom varieties of vegetables.

• 51:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Which is great. I mean, that's what I think the local farms are for, right? Is to maintain regionally specific and also heirloom varieties of vegetables, which are not necessarily shippable around the world. So why isn't that doing it though? Right? Why isn't that preserving these local varieties as much as they need to? Or is it, it's just not enough?

• 51:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's because the market's not big enough. So one of the things that we have to do as consumers is choose to go to those markets instead of going down to the local big box grocery store for our produce when we can. And I know that it's hard because it's often more expensive, but actually in some situations, it's cheaper to go to the farmer's market or to do like a CSA box. That's one of the cheapest ways to do it. I don't know if your local community has CSA options, but very often if you search for local CSA boxes, what you're doing is you're signing up to be part of a co-op of a farm.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:26Cara Santa Maria?

  You're saying, I agree to buy a box of vegetables every month at this set price, and I'm going to buy whatever is fresh and in season. You're going to choose what it is. You're going to put it in the box, and I'm going to come pick it up once a month at this very set price. And that's going to sort of help the economic burden of the farm continuing to work.

• 52:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's going to ensure that I have access to, to this produce. But what ends up happening?

• 52:49Speaker 01

  They can ship it around. I mean, they could drive it around. It's like the milkman, right? You have the vegetable man who comes by with a box of vegetables.

• 52:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And often they, they do that. And so a lot of people just don't know that they have access to these. Most communities do have access to these if you're in a, you know, reasonably population dense area.

• 53:06Speaker 01

  What's it called again?

• 53:07Cara Santa Maria?

  CSA, which stands for, I should know that off the top of my head, but I'm going to look it up.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Community Supported Agriculture.

• 53:13Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. Community Supported Agriculture. So it's like, yeah, being a part of your, your agricultural co-op, your local CSA box, as opposed to going to, you know, I'm not going to name names, but a local big box grocery store and buying whatever is, you know, just on the shelf. Because then you're literally going, okay, I have one type of carrot. That's all that they sell. I have either a red, a white, or a yellow onion. And whatever they have there is the one I'm going to buy. Or I have a, you know, Hass avocado. Like, you don't end up getting the options available to you. But part of it is a personal choice, right? We talk about convenience and in that very last news item, Jay. Part of the reason that we eat the way that we eat is because we don't know how

• 53:56Cara Santa Maria?

  to eat otherwise. We've been taught to eat this way. And so it is about sort of prioritizing choosing diverse vegetables and knowing that it has really positive downstream effects, not just for our health and our family's health, but actually for the global agricultural market. It will change the way that farmers choose what to farm because the consumer is driving what's on the shelves. You know, it's, it goes back and forth. And we talk about this a lot. When you have limited choices, you're going to make whatever choices you can within those limited choices. But when you can find a way to be empowered to make

• 54:37Cara Santa Maria?

  more diverse choices, it changes the market pressures. And so that's sort of what they recommend in this summary article is, you know, promoting vegetable diversity, as they say, to diversify diets, particularly among vulnerable groups and children, by including these nutrient dense, climate resilient vegetables into home meals, into school meals, but also integrating it into policy frameworks for long-term impact. Prioritizing this at an individual level, but also a community level and, and a global level. A, simply for the fear of the risk of these things going extinct, but also because we know it

• 55:19Cara Santa Maria?

  will increase nutrition density, which is, has a buffering effect against chronic disease.

• 55:25Jay Novella?

  Wow.

• 55:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Something we don't often think about, right? We're like, oh, I eat carrots. That's good for me. And it is. It's very good for you. But there's a lot of cool vegetables out there.

• 55:35Speaker 01

  There are CSAs all over Connecticut.

• 55:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. CSAs are everywhere. They're very cool. Also, oh, they do recommend, if you are somebody who likes to farm yourself, like you have a small garden in your backyard or even like a countertop farm, save your seeds.

• 55:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 55:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Save your seeds because that actually promotes diversity, because you'll end up with a lot of like cross breeding and just interesting stuff when you plant your own seeds from your own produce. It's, it's much better than just buying seeds every time where they're pretty homogenized.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks Kara.

• 56:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 56:05Speaker 01

  All right, Bob. How many times has life arisen on earth?

• 56:07Bob Novella?

  Aha. That's more complicated question than you might imagine. I came across this, this news item on the Science Alert site, and the title was Radical Studies Suggest Life on Earth Erose Twice. And yeah, sure, that got my, my attention, but it's such a clickbaity title. It was so, it's so annoying. But the paper it's based on is fascinating as hell. It really grabbed me the past couple of days here. And that's because it addresses one of the major problems of A, biogenesis, how life arose from non-life. Let's get into some of the details here. This was, this study was published in Science Advances.

• 56:46Bob Novella?

  The title is a lot better than what the Science Alert site news item has. The title is Intermediate Stages in the Origin of Metabolism in Phosphorilating Hydrothermal Vent. This ultimately deals with a mystery. They're dealing with a mystery here. And I'll ask you guys, what, what is one of the central mysteries of the origin of life that you think these scientists are trying to address here? How would you characterize it?

• 57:10Jay Novella?

  That's a tough question. I mean.

• 57:12Bob Novella?

  It is tough, right? Because there's a lot of ways to approach that, that question. This is a, it's a classic origin of life, chicken and egg problem here that, that they're dealing with. Specifically, it's about our metabolism in a lot of ways. So our metabolism requires enzymes to speed up reactions, right? But metabolisms create enzymes. So how did the first metabolism, how could it possibly have worked? Right? So that's kind of what their angle, that's how they're, they're approaching this. And if you're not too familiar with enzymes, they essentially speed up chemical reactions. So they're apt, they're so ridiculously critical to life. They could, they could perform, they could cause a reaction to happen in your body that takes milliseconds. But I did, I recently read some research today

• 57:55Bob Novella?

  that showed that without, without these enzymes, some of these critical chemical reactions that we, that life depends on would take, how long do you think?

• 58:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, longer than your life?

• 58:06Bob Novella?

  Longer, yes. Longer than your life. Yes. And one guy estimate, one scientist estimated it at billions of years.

• 58:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 58:15Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 58:16Jay Novella?

  What is that?

• 58:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Right. Essentially, yes. So long that I guess from, from his point of view and a lot of scientists' point of view, life really would not be happening with enzymes. So they are so critically important. Okay.

• 58:30Bob Novella?

  So let's look at their research. Their research involved essentially reconstructing a network of about 420 fundamental metabolic reactions. These are chemical reactions supporting in metabolism that are absolutely required. Without that, we are done. So they're talking about these chemical reactions that synthesize critical things like amino acids, parts of the DNA, and all from very simple components, CO2, H2, ammonia. So this is what they were doing. And then they then worked backward, comparing bacteria and archaea, right, to the top domains of life, comparing bacteria and archaea to determine which enzymes their common ancestor had and which evolved later, right?

• 59:15Bob Novella?

  So what were those first enzymes that would have existed, or probably existed, on the last universal common ancestor of bacteria and archaea? That's LUCA, last universal common ancestor. So LUCA is all over this paper. So they're trying to find out, get some insight into, flesh out, so to speak, what LUCA was like in terms of the enzymes it would absolutely need. So what would ordinarily be the result? Guys, we're comparing bacteria and archaea, and they're examining the most fundamental enzymes that probably existed at the beginning of life. So what do you think the result would be when you compare the enzymes of the earliest

• 1:00:00Bob Novella?

  bacteria with the enzymes from archaea? What do you think would be expected from that comparison?

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  Well, it depends. If they have a recent last universal common ancestor, they should be pretty similar. If they don't, they could be pretty distinct.

• 1:00:19Bob Novella?

  Right. I mean, but we're talking about these essential metabolic reactions. So generally speaking, you'd expect that bacteria and archaea would use homologous enzymes, right, inherited from their common ancestor.

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  If they're essential, yeah.

• 1:00:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah, by definition. So that's what you would expect. So part of what they found is actually what was expected. The ancient chemical reactions themselves were essentially universally conserved, right? So these chemical reactions were fundamental, super important to life. So these were conserved, the chemical reactions themselves. But what surprised the researchers was that many of the enzymes catalyzing those same reactions are not conserved between bacteria and archaea. And that was a big shock, because you would think most, if not all of them, and according to their reconstruction, there was a boatload, like half of them, that enzymes were just not there for LUCA, the last universal common ancestor.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  So they're using the same essential chemical reactions, but they have different enzymes for those reactions?

• 1:01:25Bob Novella?

  For the bulk, for approximately half of that.

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Half of them have different enzymes. And these are not related enzymes, they're completely different enzymes.

• 1:01:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely different. They're not just like, you know, differently evolved ones. So this then gets to the crux of their main contention here. They proposed that the other half of the critical chemical reactions were being catalyzed by environmental metals. So it was outside of the metabolism of these earliest cells. So that means that geochemistry could have been working in concert with biochemistry at the very beginning of life. And that's the crux of one of their main contentions here. But more specifically, it means that the environmental metals surrounding, that LUCA was within, and meshed within, were potentially acting as catalysts, as enzymes, speeding

• 1:02:16Bob Novella?

  up half of these metabolic chemical reactions needed for the protocell to survive and reproduce. So let's get to, all right, where do you guys think that this environment was? What were one of these environments that would make sense?

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Near thermal vents.

• 1:02:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's always good to suggest weird things happening around hydrothermal vents. So yeah, so they looked at specific types of hydrothermal vents, and this created an environment that just fits neatly into what they're saying here. So what they're saying is that it could have been like a primitive, imagine a primitive cellular system that's plugged into Earth's kind of like geochemical reactor, right? I'm trying to think of analogies, how to describe this. Another way to look at it is that part of LUCA's metabolism was the planet itself, essentially, right with the geochemistry. Joseph Moran from the University of Ottawa, Canada, said, "The closer we look, the more clearly we can see that early biochemical evolution was a hybrid of enzymatic and

• 1:03:14Bob Novella?

  metal catalysts." I just did not, I've not heard that before. This was just so fascinating.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  That means to me that that could have bootstrapped life, basically, like this whole chicken and egg dilemma, is that these primitive cells were relying heavily on chemical reactions happening outside of themselves, right? The primordial soup, you know, they're just sort of swimming in a lot of the stuff that they need for life. And then slowly, over time, they evolved the ability to make them inside of their cells. But they weren't dependent on making them internally, because there was a huge external source.

• 1:03:52Bob Novella?

  Right. So that's essentially correct, Steve. So one conclusion that you can arrive to from that is that LUCA then was not, you know, an autonomous biochemical factory, if you will, right? It wasn't automa, oh boy.

• 1:04:08Speaker 01

  Autonomous.

• 1:04:10Bob Novella?

  Autonomous. So this would mean then that LUCA was not, in fact, an autonomous biochemical factory, if you will. So then my question to you guys is this: was this protocell alive? Imagine you're a cell, you've got enzymes, you've got half a metabolism that you could do internally, but half of your metabolism needs geochemical reactions to feed into that will then accelerate the chemical reactions that you need. Was such a cell alive?

• 1:04:43Speaker 01

  Yes. I would say yes unequivocally.

• 1:04:45Bob Novella?

  I would agree with that as well. But lead author Martin, though, his take on this is that if it couldn't live independently of its geochemical environment, then it doesn't, he anyway, doesn't regard it as fully living.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  None of us live independent of our environment.

• 1:05:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, right, I mean, that's, I guess you could, you know, that's how he interprets it. I mean, that's how you interpret it.

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  Keep in mind, scientists usually go out of their way to interpret the context of their research to maximize its impact and significance, right?

• 1:05:18Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  So you always have to take that with a grain of salt.

• 1:05:20Bob Novella?

  Yeah, true. All right, so then what happened next? And Steve, you alluded to what happens next here. And the authors contend that slowly over time, LUCA branched off into distinct bacteria and archaea, as each of these lineages internalized these environmental reactions. You got that? So you, right, they evolved enzymes to replace what the environment was previously doing for them. But they evolved the enzymes differently to perform the same essential chemical reactions.

• 1:05:51Speaker 01

  Right, so LUCA was a hybrid, basically.

• 1:05:53Bob Novella?

  So, right. So you get that? So when bacteria and archaea branched off, they created their own enzymes to do those critical chemical reactions that the geochemistry was performing for probably eons. So, okay, so then this then means that the full suite, this full suite of autonomous metabolic machinery evolved after their evolutionary split from each other. And that's one of their key takeaways. So in other words, bacteria and archaea each independently evolved into fully free-living cellular life, which is probably how Martin would characterize this. And that's where those clickbait headlines arise, you know, the ones that say "life arose twice." This is what they mean.

• 1:06:38Bob Novella?

  The authors are not saying that a-biogenesis happened twice independently, which is the conclusion that anyone could naturally reach by reading, I reached, that's what I thought when I read the headline, that they're talking about independent a-biogenesis, because that would truly be an amazing discovery. That's not really what happened, it's not what they're saying. "Bacteria and archaea still evolved from a common ancestral system, and they share the same basic genetic code." William Martin, as I've been referring to before, this senior author of the study, said, "We are looking at one origin of the genetic code, but two origins of life." And again, it's how he's defining life here, being, you know, free-living, autonomous. That's his definition.

• 1:07:23Bob Novella?

  But it is one origin of the genetic code, which, you know, two, which these titles are going against, right? The titles that say "life arose twice" kind of goes against that. So that's why they're so frustrating. All right, so before I go, guys, I want to quickly go into, the researchers also tackled the energy problem, which is another huge one. And that, of course, I'm referring to ATP, adenosine triphosphate. That's the primary energy-carrying molecule found in the cells of all living things. Without ATP, you do not move, you do not metabolize, you do not live. So this is critical. The thing is, though, ATP itself requires enzymes. So what's the energy source for these early metabolisms, if enzymes didn't even exist

• 1:08:08Bob Novella?

  yet? And they again showed a similar scenario. They showed in this specific case that phosphate found in these hydrothermal environments can drive reactions without ATP or enzymes. So yet, once again, we have geology doing a job for countless eons that later biology internalized. So this is what they contend, this is what they believe. It makes sense, and it's just a fascinating idea. So I'll end with this: "The tree of life may have not had biological roots, but more of a fusion of geochemistry and biochemical roots." So curious to see, you know, what other scientists are saying about this, and how robust their research is. But Steve, what do you think? Doesn't this make a lot of sense?

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  It does, it makes a lot of sense, especially.

• 1:08:53Bob Novella?

  I love it.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, evolution has to bootstrap itself in this sort of way, right?

• 1:08:58Bob Novella?

  Right, you don't have to make a super-complex metabolism right out of the gate. You could just slowly get there as the cell takes on more and more of these chemical reactions and creates its own enzymes and doesn't need geochemistry. So we're transitioning from geochemistry to biochemistry in a slow, methodical way. Perfect sense. It's like going from a light spot to a complex eye with a lens, you know, it's just a slow progression of utility.

• 1:09:29Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Bob. So guys, have any of you seen the latest release of UFO, so-called UAP videos from the Pentagon?

• 1:09:37Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:09:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, God, there's a new, a new release? What the hell's, all right, what do we got?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  There's gonna be more still. They still have a bunch of stuff they haven't released. They're just sort of going through them and releasing them in batches. So it's, it's just as unimpressive as all the other ones. I mean, the one that is, there's always like one or two that filter up to the top that the media is paying attention to. And this one, it's basically a dot. That's it.

• 1:10:02Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 1:10:03Speaker 01

  It's, it's a dot on an infrared monitor. And in fact, we're not seeing the data from the monitor. I guess somebody took a video with their cellphone of the monitor and that's what is, was released. But I always love the disconnect between what, how people are describing what we're seeing and what we're actually seeing. You know what I mean? So in this video, this, this is the cold orb video, right? So you might hear that term. This is the cold orbs. And the, the release said, the file says, "In an accompanying incident report, the blips are described as multiple unidentified aerial phenomena observed maneuvering erratically and in formation. The report states that the objects

• 1:10:47Speaker 01

  appear to be flying at low altitudes and to vary in speed between 250 and 1,300 miles per hour with no detected means of propulsion."

• 1:10:56Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  So I've looked at it. I've done a careful analysis of the video and I've come to the conclusion that it is overwhelmingly likely to be, what do you think?

• 1:11:08Jay Novella?

  A grain of seed.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  It's a bug. It's a bug. It's an insect.

• 1:11:11Cara Santa Maria?

  A bug.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  There's almost no doubt. I mean, so first of all, it's not multiple,

• 1:11:15Bob Novella?

  How to focus, bug. Classic.

• 1:11:16Speaker 01

  It's not multiple objects flying in formation. I think what they're described, there's one clear dot. There's a couple of other sort of fleeting dots, but the only thing they could be referring to by the inform, in formation bit is that what you're seeing is, is a, an image trail. You know what I mean? Like, when you have, you can even make your mouse do this on your computer screen, but like, well, you know, when you see like, something moving across a video where it's leaving a, a ghost trail behind it, right?

• 1:11:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Where progressively fading, it's exactly following the movement of the, of the, the leading dot. It's clearly, that's what that is, just an, just an artificial image trail. And it's moving in, Kara, what we would call a stochastic fashion, right? Was one of your words. Basically, it's doing that random bipping about that is typical of, of a bug. And not sure why any intelligently, you know, piloted craft would move in such a way. Now, of course, their estimate of speed is based entirely on their estimate of size, which, you know, they, the person viewing that estimated it was four feet in diameter. So of course, if you think it's four feet in diameter, then you must think

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  it's far away and moving very, very fast. But of course, if it's a bug, then it's not, it's very close and moving, in moving bug speed, right? So this is just a fly. That's all it is. And that's, this is it. This is all that they got, guys. This is these like, pretty easily debunked artifacts. Did we talk about Disclosure Day, the movie Disclosure Day on the show yet? Cause we-

• 1:12:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so. I've never seen it.

• 1:12:57Bob Novella?

  Don't remember if we did on this show.

• 1:12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, very quickly, this is Spielberg's recent movie about, about this, about the government, you know, like I said, basically reporters getting a hold of documents, documenting the government's 60 years of hiding their interactions with aliens and alien spacecraft, et cetera. And at the end of the movie, like, we see the disclosure, right? They should, they, you know, upload all of the files to the media. And it's, you know, I thought I was completely unimpressed with the movie. I mean, Spielberg is always a good storyteller, so there's always gonna be moments that are interesting. But the, the, you know, mild spoiler alert here, the basic plot was, you know, basically every UFO believer's wet

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  dream of what Disclosure Day would be, right? It's like all of that stuff, like act, dramatic, clear alien spacecraft, you know, clear alien interactions, all that kind of stuff, like undeniable alien phenomena.

• 1:13:56Jay Novella?

  God, this, I mean, this is like a friggin' child's dream, you know what I mean?

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Jay Novella?

  Like, what the hell?

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  But the thing is, I, I'm thinking, if we were talking afterwards, like, wouldn't it have been fun if at the end of that dramatic movie, the disclosure was exactly what the Pentagon actually disclosed, meaning dots and blurbs and shadows and stuff, and that was it?

• 1:14:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:16Speaker 01

  Imagine how fabulously anticlimactic that would have been. But the thing is, that's what they, that's what disclosure has actually been. It's all crap. It's all just completely unimpressive crap. If I were still a UFO believer, I would be so fantastically disappointed at the poor quality of the stuff that we're getting as this like, big time government disclosure. It's nothing. It's a big nothing burger.

• 1:14:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Anyway, it just shows you they got nothing. Of course, they'll say they're hiding the real stuff, right?

• 1:14:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, yeah, it's so hard on the show. Like, it's funny, it's, I often don't pitch stories like that, you know, I always like, tell Steve in advance, like, hey, I've got these like, five or six choices. You choose the ones that seem to fit into the, the vibe of the show. I often don't pitch stories like this because in my mind, it's really hard to just talk about something that isn't anything.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:09Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean? Like, it's so hard to, I guess it's not really proving a negative, but-

• 1:15:14Bob Novella?

  Well, it's all about- It continues to not be there.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  It's about the psychology, it's about the culture, the mythology, the conspiracy thinking, the logical thought. It's all about that stuff, right?

• 1:15:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  And interestingly, we've talked about this at times too. This is, yeah, this is like Bigfoot skepticism, where we're basically applying critical thinking and scientific methodology to-

• 1:15:33Bob Novella?

  Microcosm.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  To, to, to questions that are pretty childish, often are very simple, like, no, there isn't a Bigfoot roaming around the country. No, you know, the government's not hiding aliens. There's nothing magical going on in the Bermuda Triangle, whatever, all these things. But the thing is, like, we cut our teeth on a lot of those issues and you could learn all the lessons of critical thinking and skepticism with these that you then apply to more nuanced and more complicated, or theoretically-

• 1:15:59Bob Novella?

  More emotional, people that are more emotionally invested, right?

• 1:16:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  So it's, it's good. And I often liken it to, like, if we see a patient who has an extreme end-stage disease, we call in all the medical students to see it, right? Cause like, you're, even though they may never see a patient with that again, it helps them detect and understand the more subtle present, you know, versions of that disease. So we often will focus on these extreme pseudosciences, cause it helps you understand, wrap your head around how pseudosciences work, so that you can detect them in their more subtle manifestations. And things like vaccine denial, global warming denial, things like that. All right, let's move on. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time?

• 1:16:43Jay Novella?

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

• 1:17:03Jay Novella?

  Okay. You guys think you know what it is?

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  I mean, it sounds like you're tapping something crystalline, whether it's metallic or mineral or whatever.

• 1:17:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like hitting a pipe or something.

• 1:17:13Jay Novella?

  Okay, so a listener named Chris wrote in and said, "This week's noisy is someone hammering in a grounding rod," right? Essentially like a, a metal, a metal rod. Not a bad guess at all, because there is that, that, you know, metal on metal kind of sound and the hammering, of course. But you're not correct. Another listener named Seth Beach wrote in and said, "This week I believe that is a nail gun." I've heard and used nail guns. I don't, I don't hear, I don't hear that.

• 1:17:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:43Jay Novella?

  But thank you for guessing. Evil Eye wrote in and said, "It sounds like someone having fun using a hammer to play or knock off icicles from their roof, almost playing the alphabet song," which I had several people say that they hear the alphabet song in that. I did not hear that, and you are not correct, but I do understand, you know, the icicle thing, cause they do make kind of those higher pitched sounds. I had like, you know, about six or seven people guessed correctly, but the two people who, like, wrote in first, we have Thomas Martin and then we have Sarah Kalwar, Kalwaroski, Kalwaroski. They both guessed correctly, but I'm gonna tell you what this is. Okay, so we have a, somebody's hammering something, right?

• 1:18:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:29Jay Novella?

  And then, what do you hear? Do you hear anything happening during that, during the noisy?

• 1:18:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, steam or like, something moving through a pipe or-

• 1:18:38Jay Novella?

  You hear like, a tonal change, right?

• 1:18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Jay Novella?

  There's like, a, there is a change in the way it sounds at a certain point. And then, at the very end, you hear, which I think is the second most important sound that you hear in the whole thing. Let me play it for you again. I'll, I'll fast forward just to give you the three different stages here.

• 1:18:58Jay Novella?

  That's the first one.

• 1:19:02Jay Novella?

  Then it gets to this.

• 1:19:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:09Jay Novella?

  At the end, you hear that psh, right?

• 1:19:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:12Jay Novella?

  Okay. All right, so what this is, is this is someone who is splitting a stone.

• 1:19:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:19:19Jay Novella?

  And they're using a hammer and plug and feather wedges. Okay, so the hammer's the hammer. Uh, the plug is the metal thing that you're hammering down into the stone, right? They typically like will drill or chisel a hole in the stone to get it started. And they, they, they have like a, like a stainless steel, like big nail type of thing that they're hitting in there. But there's these thing called feather wedges, which go on opposite sides of the nail. And they're, what they do is as the nail goes down, it pushes these wedges and it helps push the rock apart in certain directions, right? So you have like, wherever you want the crack to form, these wedges will help that crack form on that line, right? You have to really see a video of this, but it's really cool.

• 1:20:01Jay Novella?

  So it's kind of interesting to see like, you know, I saw a video of a woman who weighed, I mean, what? Like a hundred pounds, just smashing the hell out of a, a rock. And, you know, hitting each nail along the way. So if you have like a rock that's say is five feet across, there'd be like a, there'd be like every foot, there'd be one of these drilled holes with, with the nail in it and with those two feather wedges alongside each nail. And you hit them and you keep hitting them. And at some point, when the tone changes, that's when it's really starting to open up and, and because you're not hearing that high pitched metal noise, you're hearing more of a duller metal noise. And then the stone splits and it's usually like a very clean split. You know, wildly used in the history of, um, using stone for buildings and everything like, you know,

• 1:20:46Jay Novella?

  quarries and all that stuff. Like this is like, this been, been done for a very, very, very long time. I thought that was cool. So anyway, um, I have a new noisy. Steve, if you guess what the new noisy is, I'll give you a million dollars.

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:01Jay Novella?

  Go ahead. You have to guess it before I play it.

• 1:21:04Speaker 01

  Oh, if I guess what you're gonna play before, if I don't get to listen to it first.

• 1:21:07Jay Novella?

  That's right. It's a million bucks, Steve. I mean, what do you want me to do? Hand it out?

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  I think you're gonna play the sound of a lightsaber.

• 1:21:14Jay Novella?

  You are incorrect.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:21:18Jay Novella?

  Kara? I knew you would like that. This list, uh, this noisy was sent in by a listener named Evan Humphrey, and here it is.

• 1:21:52Jay Novella?

  Now, I could have played this noisy without the people talking.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:21:56Jay Novella?

  But I, I left it in there specifically because I think, um, it could help. Cause I do think that this one is difficult, but there, I think there's good, good chunks of information in there that you can pull from. Anyway, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, we've done everything.

• 1:22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. Did all the things.

• 1:22:18Jay Novella?

  It's, I'm, I'm literally, as I'm going through, I'm deleting all the links to everything that I've been telling everyone for all these years now. But Steve, we do have a Dragon Con live SGU performance. Um, this will be at the American Hotel and you can go to the skepticsguy.org for all the details on when and the address and all that stuff. Just go to our website. Um, Kara will not be joining us. It'll be me, Bob, Steve, Christian Hubicki, who is, we've had on the show, he's a roboticist, and Steve's daughter, Julia, who is going to, um, entertain us with something very interesting that she prepared. And on top of that, Steve, we have all of the things that we're doing at Dragon Con. This is what happened. We get on a call with me, Bob, it was me, Bob, Steve and Christian.

• 1:23:03Jay Novella?

  And we was like, let's come up with a bunch of panel ideas. And we came up with a bunch of panel ideas. And we passed, you know, we emailed them to all the varying tracks and we got every single one of them accepted.

• 1:23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Jay Novella?

  So now we're doing a ton of talks, a lot, quite a bit. And Kara's like, suckers, I am not doing that crap. My wife and I are also talking about a potential costume idea. I'm not gonna say what it is, but I might be in costume for part of that event.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Jay.

• 1:23:32Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Uh, one quick email, this one comes from William from Seattle, who writes, is this real? And then he links to a TikTok video. So right out of the gate, I would say chances are pretty low, but anyway.

• 1:23:43Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  Please explain if it is, love you guys, been listening for years and saw you in Seattle the last time you were here. All right, so have you guys had a chance to look at this video? It's about a thousand year old remedy.

• 1:23:55Jay Novella?

  Hmm.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Now, well, I know, if you're first, you're like, hmm. Now, the, the remedy itself is real. This is, it's perfectly fine. The first half of the video is fine, if a little sensational. Uh, it's the second half that I have a problem with. But so, but the, the video is talking about something called Bald's eye salve. And this is, comes from a 10th century Anglo Saxon medical text written in Old English. Uh, the name of the text is Bald's leech book. It actually has leech in the name. And, uh, so that's not, not just a myth, they actually did use leeches. Uh, but anyway, it's, it's for a topical, uh, salve that, that was said was for a WBN,

• 1:24:41Speaker 01

  which is like a lump in the eye, basically like a sty or an infection in the, in the eyelid. And it's made from garlic, uh, then some other allium species. They don't know exactly how to translate it, but it could be either leek or onion, but onion seems to work better. So it's probably onion, so garlic, onion, wine and ox gall, which is basically bovine bile. You mix those things together, you put it in a bronze container for nine days and you got your salve, right? So there was a, there was a recent, uh, study where they reproduced this. And then they tested it in vitro to see if it had any antibacterial properties, and it does.

• 1:25:23Speaker 01

  Then they tested it on mouse wounds, uh, and it, it works quite nicely. So the combination has two properties that, that are very complimentary. One is that it breaks apart biofilms of bacteria. You know how bacteria, if you get enough of them in one place, they can form this film, which makes it hard for antibiotics to penetrate. Uh, but it also has bacteriocidal activity. So it actually breaks up the film and kills the bacteria. So it works nicely as a topical antibiotic salve. Great. So it's interesting, you know, that they came up with this thousand years ago, but you know, they had, remember, you have to keep in mind, people back then were just as smart as we are today. They didn't know as much, but they were people, right?

• 1:26:06Speaker 01

  And when you have hundreds or even thousands of years to work stuff out like this, yeah, people came, a lot of societies came up with a lot of natural treatments for stuff based upon things that were in their environment. And through trial and error, they, they discovered lots of interesting things. So, but then the second half of the video gets into, of course, you're never gonna see a pharmaceutical company develop this because it can't be patented and they don't make money on it. And they're, you know, maybe you'll see it eventually in an LLM, you know, for a, a health, uh, product or something. All of that and everything says in the second half of our video about that is nonsense. Um, so actually it is being developed by pharmaceutical companies. So she's just actually directly wrong about that, even if it can't be patented, but maybe it could be.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  So here's, what do you think is the main reason why you can't just take this formula, right? And then market it? What would be the main prop limitation there?

• 1:27:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Making sure the ingredients are clean and tested.

• 1:27:04Jay Novella?

  You'd have to do work.

• 1:27:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. You'd have to research.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  No, so you're gonna market a salve made of onion, garlic, wine and ox bile.

• 1:27:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wouldn't be very shelf stable?

• 1:27:15Speaker 01

  Not shelf stable, of course, not shelf stable at all. It lasts for just a short period of time, probably like a few days. Uh, and then it itself, it, it's, it itself will become infected with mold and bacteria and other things, right? So it's not shelf, it's shelf stable. This is the kind of thing where you make it and then you use it, right? Um, so what the pharmaceutical companies are doing is they're trying to identify the actual active ingredients, the active parts of these, uh, of this, this recipe. And then develop a shelf stable version of it, right? That wanna be an actual cream or ointment that you could put in a bottle or a tube and it will be shelf stable. So that's what they're doing, that's what they're developing.

• 1:28:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they could probably put it in an inert, uh, solution so that it's less likely to be, you know, have an allergen or have a side effect or, you know, whatever.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, if you wanna make this stuff yourself, go right ahead.

• 1:28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  You can actually order bovine salts, bile salts online. It's not that, not as hard to come by as you might think. Um, but yeah, as a commercial product, it has, this is what pharmaceutical companies mostly do, by the way, right? Is they identify active ingredients from research or whatever. And a lot of times they are deriving it from, from natural remedies, uh, or from plants or whatever. But you have to come up with a shelf stable version of it that actually, if it's taken internally, it's gotta be bioavailable. This is external, so you don't have to absorb it or anything. And this also doesn't have to be internally safe. Uh, but it needs to be able to survive long-term in a product, you know? And that takes a lot of R and D and they can make their money off of that.

• 1:28:59Speaker 01

  Also, by the way, pharmaceutical companies can make money off of products that can't be patented. Uh, they make maybe about 10% of the profit that they would make on a, on a drug that they have a patent for. But that still could be a lot of money. I mean, the Tylenol is still a, a huge cash cow for the company that makes it, for example. It's been off patent for years. But the question is, that here's the problem is coming, is spending the hundreds of millions of dollars to get FDA approval for a product you don't have a patent on. That's where the problem is. But that's why there are like orphan drug laws that will, you know, help pay for that. And, uh, for something like this, I don't even know that they would need to do that kind of research, right? Cause it's not taken internally.

• 1:29:44Speaker 01

  The individual components themselves are mostly grass, right? They're, you know, you don't have to do research on an onion or garlic, right? These are, the ingredients themselves are all available. So I don't know, it depends, I guess, on how they, what their ultimate formulation is. Totally sounds like something that's completely marketable if they can develop a shelf stable product. But again, they go right for the conspiracy theory, right? Cause that, that I guess sells TikTok videos.

• 1:30:11Speaker 01

  All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction?

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  It's time for science or fiction?

• 1:30:26Speaker 01

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious, that I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have three regular news items this week. First time in a while, since all the live shows, we have to do more evergreen type of science or fictions. Yeah. Just three news items. You guys ready? Yep. Here we go. Item number one, a recent study finds that increased screen time in childhood is associated with improved cognitive processing in adolescence. Item number two, astronomers have discovered a new type of stellar object, a black hole star, which is a bright red object as large as our solar system and with a million solar masses.

• 1:31:10Speaker 01

  And item number three, a new study finds that adding iron to certain ocean ecosystems could increase phytoplankton and permanently sequester as much as 10% of the world's annual CO2 emissions. All right, Kara, go first.

• 1:31:23Cara Santa Maria?

  This first one about cognitive processing bothers me a lot. I feel like you could make an argument for it, and it's so hard because it's one study. Like, I could see that in a study, increased screen time in childhood could be associated with improved cognitive processing. I mean, how are they defining cognitive processing? It probably also depends on like what they're looking at, and, you know, I don't think increased screen time watching, I don't know, horror movies, but maybe watching like educational videos could definitely be improved with cognitive processing. And also, increased to what point? You know, two hours more than one hour, or like nine hours?

• 1:32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That probably is not. So I could see there being enough nuance that that would be science, which would leave me with the two that I know less about. Okay, so, a new type of stellar object, a black hole star. What? A bright red object as large as our solar system? And with a million solar masses? That doesn't... Okay, so it says dense as a million suns, or it says massive as a million suns, but it's as large as our entire solar system? What? I don't like this one at all. But then again, I don't know enough about... Like, every time we do a big cosmology one, I'm like, everything sounds insane to me.

• 1:32:52Cara Santa Maria?

  So, you know, like, at what point are the limits there? Oh, that's bananas. Okay, and then the last one is adding iron to a certain... Okay, again, single study. Iron to a certain ocean ecosystem... Oh, to certain ocean ecosystems, plural, could increase phytoplankton and permanently sequester 10% of CO2 emissions? How would iron work to do that? I mean, it would make like a CO2 sink? Yeah, I mean, that's what you're saying, right? Hmm, which one bothers me the most? I think maybe this one bothers me the most. Oh, gosh. Phytoplankton.

• 1:33:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe the issue here is that, ugh, is that a good thing? Yeah, I guess it is a good thing, right? Because phytoplankton are photosynthetic. So you drop iron into the water, the phytoplankton bloom, and then they photosynthesize more. They're all science. I don't know, Steve. You've got me with this one. This one's harder than usual for me. I'm gonna say the black hole star is the fiction, that maybe there is a black hole star, but it's not nearly as massive as they're saying it is.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  Okay, Bob?

• 1:34:11Bob Novella?

  I can make sense of the increased screen time one. Sure, yeah, maybe it improves cognitive processing in adolescence, but maybe there's downsides, or what kind of screen time are you talking about? So many unanswered questions there in my mind. Let's see, the black hole star, man, what the hell? I obviously did not see this news item. I want that to be true, though, so badly. It's big as a solar... Yeah, I mean, it's the event horizon, could it be that big? With a million solar masses? I mean, our Sagittarius A star at the center of the Milky Way has got more than that. I think it's like, what, 5 million solar masses? Which, you know, is a lot, but also not a lot.

• 1:34:54Bob Novella?

  And the ecosystem one there, yeah, it looks all good to me, but who knows? Maybe it's too good. More phytoplankton and less CO2. I mean, yeah, so maybe I'll just go with that. That's maybe too good to be true in some ways. So I'll say that the phytoplankton is fiction.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Okay, and Jay?

• 1:35:16Jay Novella?

  Okay, the first one, at first blush, I'm like, no way.

• 1:35:20Speaker 01

  No way.

• 1:35:22Jay Novella?

  A study finds that increased screen time in childhood is associated with improved cognitive processing in adolescence. You said it's associated with it, and of course, you know, how are they studying this? Like, you know, it has to be where people are just telling the researchers what their screen time use is, which could be wildly inaccurate. All right, whatever. I mean, that one, I don't know. You know, the screen time use could be associated with a lot of stuff. But I have children, you understand? And I see this happening in my house, and I just don't think it's an overall net positive thing. But the first one's vague enough where it could be true.

• 1:36:04Jay Novella?

  Second one about the black hole, Kara didn't like it and Bob liked it. I just never question if like, anything weird that could potentially exist probably like does when it comes to like stars and black holes and things like that. Like, this is just a variation. It's pretty cool. I wonder if anyone ever made like an illustration of it to see what it looks like. I don't see any real reason to doubt that. That's the one I'll just say is my definite. So it's between one and three. The last one, a new study finds that adding iron to certain ocean ecosystems could increase phytoplankton and permanently sequester as much as 10% of the world's annual CO2 emissions. So how is that happening? So it makes...

• 1:36:48Jay Novella?

  Increasing the number of phytoplankton, and then what? When they get eaten or die, where does that carbon go? Maybe their bodies go to the bottom of the ocean, and then they... The thing I don't like about it is the word permanently.

• 1:37:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, damn, I didn't see that.

• 1:37:06Bob Novella?

  I hate when I put so important word.

• 1:37:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:10Jay Novella?

  It also could be that it's 10%. That could be wildly off. Steve likes to mess with those numbers, too. I don't like... Kara, I don't like any of these.

• 1:37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I like them all.

• 1:37:21Jay Novella?

  All right, so Bob said two was science, and you said it's fiction, and Bob thinks that three is fiction. No one picked the first one. I don't know, I'm leaning more, just because the astronomy thing, I'm not gonna doubt that there's some black hole out there with a bright red, that it's bright red, you know? Like, who am I to deny that? I'm gonna say the third one, Steve, about the phytoplankton and the iron, I think that one is fiction.

• 1:37:45Speaker 01

  All right, you all agree with the first one, so we'll start there. A recent study finds that increased screen time in childhood is associated with improved cognitive processing in adolescence. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. So yes, it's an association because it's an observational study. Obviously, it's how would you do a controlled study? You know, you have to enforce, randomize kids to how much screen time they have and enforce it somehow. What the study found was, they were looking at, this is from the PANIC study, P-A-N-I-C, they were looking at both physical activity, sedentary time, nutritional factors, and also screen time. They found, and to their surprise, they found that increased screen time throughout childhood

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  actually was associated with improved measures of cognitive processing in adolescence. That physical activity also associated with improved cognition, and sedentary time had a negative effect, so those things were more expected. The reason why this, you know, could be the case, so first of all, one of the things they conclude was, we can't assume that all screen time is bad. A lot, obviously, would depend on what kind, as one of you said, what kind of screen time are we talking about? Yeah. And certainly, like, video games famously are actually very stimulatory to cognitive function, for example. Now, we're watching educational programs, or things that have, you know, that have

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

  any kind of cognitive stimulating factor.

• 1:39:19Speaker 01

  And in addition, you know, other possibilities could be, could include releasing neurotrophic factors, altering brain structure, affecting sleep, stress and anxiety. So there's multiple ways in which screen time may have this beneficial effect on brain development and be manifesting in teenage years. And this also reinforces something I think we've mentioned before, that when we're talking about interventions to make kids have, you know, better, be more healthy and including more, better, better brain health, that it may not be effective to focus on reducing screen time and instead focus on increasing physical activity to make sure that they're getting a variety of different types of activity and that they're

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  getting enough physical activity, but don't necessarily restrict screen time because that in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing, right? Does that make sense?

• 1:40:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And use the screens, damn it. Dance, Dance Revolution. I think that there are ways to integrate that for sure.

• 1:40:16Speaker 01

  Absolutely. All right, let's go on with number two. Astronomers have discovered a new type of stellar object, a black hole star, which is bright red object as large as our solar system with a million solar masses. Kara, you think this one is the fiction? Bob and Jay think this one is science. And this one is science. This is science. Bob, I'm kind of surprised. I thought there's a coin flip that you would have seen this. This has been all over the news for the past-

• 1:40:41Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Yeah. Because I found my, my news item today from a link I had put down, you know, recently. So I, I didn't really take a deep dive in the news and I would have seen that and devoured it. In fact, I'm kind of pissed because I want to cover that. And I gotta wait for, to get the okay to cover that because now it's, it's part of science fiction.

• 1:41:00Speaker 01

  Well, let's, let's cover it right now. It's very interesting. So first of all, we're talking about an object in the very young universe, right? So these are things that are very far away, therefore very far back in time. We're talking about hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang. I think this one's within the first 700 million years. Astronomers have seen, you know, previously, these really bright point objects, right? They're red. They're extremely bright. And they're point objects. So they're not like galaxies. Now, normally, when something is very red, what is the cause of that? What is, what causes the light to be so red shifted?

• 1:41:38Bob Novella?

  Like dust.

• 1:41:39Speaker 01

  Dust. Right. Yeah. Dust absorbs the blue light. And so it passes through the red light. But that causes a certain spectral pattern that they were not seeing here. What they were seeing was something called a Balmer break. Have you ever heard that term before?

• 1:41:54Bob Novella?

  I, I have. I've heard of that.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it essentially means that the light is not being absorbed by dust. It's being absorbed by hydrogen, right? And so you get a, you know, a break in the spectrum at, at a specific location, which indicates that hydrogen is what's absorbing that light and causing it to be red. And so they, so now, but that, we only see those in stars, right? So now, we're, we're looking, okay, so there's this really, really bright object surrounded by a lot of hydrogen. And it's a lot of clean hydrogen, meaning it's not a lot of dust in with that hydrogen. So what would do that? So what they found is that

• 1:42:35Speaker 01

  they, they, they used simulations to, to test these hypotheses, is that, okay, what if there is a black hole at the center of this object that we're seeing, and it's surrounded by a massive envelope of pure hydrogen and helium, basically at the, you know, the hydrogen helium percentage of the universe, right? And that fit what they were observing. It fit the, the Balmer break in the, in the spectrum that they were seeing. And it exactly explains what was being observed. They estimate the size of it and the, and the, the mass of it. And then that's where they came up with those numbers. This also solves a, potentially

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  solves a mystery. And that is, how did the super, the primordial supermassive black holes, right? The, the supermassive black holes at the early, early universe?

• 1:43:28Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  How did they grow so big, so fast? And, but, and so this suggests, well, maybe that's because they developed out of these objects, these black hole stars. Because imagine a dense, dense, dense envelope, the size of our solar system of hydrogen and helium, and the black hole at the center is actively feeding on it. So Kara, how do you think they figured out that this could not be just a giant star?

• 1:43:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Something else around it?

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  No, there was some feature of it that you cannot explain with nuclear fusion.

• 1:44:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I have no idea.

• 1:44:02Speaker 01

  It was way too bright. It's producing about a billion times as much, or more than that. It's like billions of time, tens of billions of times as much energy as you could produce through fusion of hydrogen. So this isn't just a star. It's not glowing bright, bright red because it's a star. The only thing that creates that energy is a black hole. So they knew that the energy source was a black hole.

• 1:44:27Bob Novella?

  The energy would be coming from an accretion disk?

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:44:30Bob Novella?

  Then why wouldn't that accretion disk overshadow the, the, the entire, you know, all the hydrogen?

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  It's getting filtered through a solar system size dense envelope of hydrogen.

• 1:44:40Bob Novella?

  It must be, it must be very dense.

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  It's very dense.

• 1:44:43Bob Novella?

  How did that black hole get there? I mean, what was the evolutionary history of that whole, that whole thing? It's a black hole. So it, it, it was a star. It was a, it was a heavy, you know, a heavy, like eight, at least eight solar mass star.

• 1:44:56Speaker 01

  Or maybe not. But maybe it formed some other way in the, in the-

• 1:44:59Bob Novella?

  Well, that's just it. That's just it. I mean, you know, I love to see the speculation on, on, on how this got to be what we're seeing.

• 1:45:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And if there's one, there have to be more, right?

• 1:45:08Speaker 01

  There are. There are. This has been like, they've been seeing these bright red dots and they don't know what they are. And this is one that they were able to, you know, have enough data to, and this is all coming from-

• 1:45:17Bob Novella?

  Well, they're obviously BRDs, Steve. I mean, what's the problem?

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. These are, the, the observational data is coming from, what do you think?

• 1:45:24Bob Novella?

  Oh, JWST.

• 1:45:25Speaker 01

  Yep, the Webb. James Webb Telescope. Yep, absolutely. So we, we will be seeing more of these.

• 1:45:32Bob Novella?

  So friggin' cool, man.

• 1:45:33Speaker 01

  No, I, I was curious-

• 1:45:34Bob Novella?

  Oh, look, here's a new stellar object.

• 1:45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a new, a new stellar object. You'll see them every day. That, of course, caught my eye. A black hole star. Now, I was wondering, it's like, so if this is a super dense envelope of hydrogen, could there be fusion happening in that envelope of hydrogen? And the answer is no. Because as dense as it is, it's still orders of magnitude less dense than the core of a star where you, you know, you need that gravitational confinement, you know, again, way, way more than you can get in this kind of envelope to create a significant amount of hydrogen fusion. So no significant fusion. It's all coming from the accretion disk of a black hole at the center, causing this hydrogen gas to glow and, but create that sort of spectral pattern of just hydrogen that you

• 1:46:19Speaker 01

  would, that we usually see from a star. All right. That means that a new study finds that adding iron to certain ocean ecosystems could increase phytoplankton and permanently sequester as much as 10% of the world's annual CO2 emissions is fiction. And Jay, you hit upon both reasons why it's fiction.

• 1:46:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:46:37Bob Novella?

  Way to go, Jay.

• 1:46:38Speaker 01

  Because it's not permanent. More than half of that CO2 is eventually re-released into the atmosphere. And it's more like 1%. It's not 10%.

• 1:46:46Bob Novella?

  Ah, oh, my God.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  So-

• 1:46:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Very cool.

• 1:46:49Bob Novella?

  See, I know all about phytoplankton, Steve.

• 1:46:51Speaker 01

  Well, so the, the idea, though, is an interesting one. So in, in some places around the, the globe, the production of phytoplankton is limited by nutrients and specifically iron. So the thinking is, well, if we just feed it the rate limiting nutrient, iron, that would cause a phytoplankton bloom, right? As Akara said, that would, the photosynthesis would, would fix a lot of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Then they fall down to the bottom of the ocean and we, we have an easy way of sequestering, of sequestering CO2. Several problems emerged from this. It did work in some places better than other. The southern ocean is probably the best place, like around the Antarctica. But several

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  problems. One is it's a pretty tiny amount of CO2. You know, it's 1% about of the, what we release every year. So this is not a replacement for, for reducing emissions of CO2, right? Second, it has a lot of knock on effects in the ecosystem because that phytoplankton bloom uses up a lot of other nutrients that are now not available for the rest of the ecosystem. So, right? So it causes basically nutrient poor water in the ocean. So that's bad. And then three, it doesn't seem to be permanent, that it gets, most of it gets re-released anyway. So, you know, could this play some role at some point in helping us

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  balance the CO2 in the atmosphere? Maybe. But this is a, this is, if anything, ever going to be a minor player. Not, not any kind of significant solution. All right. So good job, JM, Bob.

• 1:48:26Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 1:48:27Speaker 01

  Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:48:29Bob Novella?

  All right. Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet and they have to touch it to be sure. George Carlin.

• 1:48:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so good.

• 1:48:43Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:48:44Speaker 01

  That whole, that whole bit is hilarious.

• 1:48:46Bob Novella?

  I've missed George. And this quote is, of course, about standards of evidence, right? Carlin's pointing out, obviously, here that people frustratingly often accept an enormous claim that's unfalsifiable without demanding any, any direct evidence at all. But for, so, but for mundane claims, they often require immediate, you know, empirical confirmation. It's totally ass backwards, back asswards. It's just totally like, no, you gotta, you gotta reverse that there, people. But, uh, so, so my takeaway is just listen to some more George Carlin.

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was very, very, very funny, very, very brilliant comedian. And also, I think this has a lot to do with culture, right? It's that we believe things that are part of our cultural tribe that are embedded in society and our people that we live with, whereas something that has no emotional investment, you know, you will exhibit a robust and often appropriate amount of skepticism. But we just don't when it's a tribal in, uh, supporting beliefs. All right. Well, thank you, guys, for joining me today. Welcome back from down under. We're back to our usual schedule.

• 1:49:52Bob Novella?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:49:54Jay Novella?

  I'm not jet lagged at all. I'm, you know, I'm fine.

• 1:49:57Speaker 01

  It took me a week, about a week to get over the jet lag. The jet lag wasn't the big problem. As you could probably hear, I'm sick. A lot of us got viruses while we were away. Mine sort of kicked in later and I think I got, I might've gotten a super infection, so I'm still getting over it. But I was, the last week, we didn't do, we used one of our shows that we had recorded live last week, thank goodness. I basically spent a week as a zombie. I was completely jet lagged and sleep deprived. I couldn't make up for my sleep deficit because I couldn't sleep because I had a cold and I was coughing all the time. It was just, I was, I accomplished absolutely nothing for an entire week.

• 1:50:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yikes. I had about a day. It's, it's interesting. Like usually my jet lag isn't so bad because of the meds that I take. And in Australia, I had no jet lag. But when I got home, I had about a day where I slept for like the whole day. Did you guys do that too?

• 1:50:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:50:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I just could not stay awake. I just kept falling back asleep.

• 1:50:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the next day I had three hours from like, basically, I took a quick four hour nap when I got home at 9:00 AM. But then from like 2 to 5, I was just like, eh, eh.

• 1:51:01Speaker 01

  And that, that travel day, Kara, for us, that travel day was like a 40 hour day because-

• 1:51:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you guys got stuck and super delayed. Oh, god, so much drama.

• 1:51:11Bob Novella?

  Forty-one hours for me and Jay, no, yeah, me basically, but you were a little bit even longer because you had to wait.

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  Forty-two, forty-three, door to door. It was like 42 hours of travel. But also it was a, it was a super Monday because it was at 13 hours or 14 hours, whatever, to the day itself.

• 1:51:27Jay Novella?

  Super evil Monday, yeah. It sucked. We got stuck in LAX. They canceled our flight home, right? So Sydney to LAX.

• 1:51:35Bob Novella?

  A 10 or 11 hour delay.

• 1:51:37Jay Novella?

  LAX canceled our flight to JFK. And we sat there from 6:00 AM to 9:00 PM.

• 1:51:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, god. I felt so bad. My partner and I, you know, we went straight home. I had to work. We're back at the house. He's napping. I'm seeing like all the texts coming through. And I was like, oh, no, I can't help you. I wish I could help.

• 1:51:57Speaker 01

  But of all the flights, of all the flights, I'm glad it was the last leg because-

• 1:52:02Bob Novella?

  You're right.

• 1:52:02Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:52:03Speaker 01

  We didn't miss any connecting flights. We didn't miss any events or anything. That was a, one of the, any other flight, it could have been a much bigger problem.

• 1:52:09Bob Novella?

  Basically, any other one, yeah.

• 1:52:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the problem is LAX is literally the worst airport. I mean, most American airports are pretty terrible.

• 1:52:17Jay Novella?

  But it does particularly suck. Because I walked that airport. I know LAX like really well now.

• 1:52:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope you at least spent time in the International Terminal because that's where the good food and stuff is.

• 1:52:29Jay Novella?

  Well, we ended up getting into the-

• 1:52:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, a lounge, yeah.

• 1:52:33Jay Novella?

  The Delta Sky Lounge because Steve has American Express card and we finagled our way in there.

• 1:52:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, yeah, that's the way to do it because then you can just sleep.

• 1:52:41Bob Novella?

  Good food, relax. You could even take a shower, which was pretty slick.

• 1:52:44Jay Novella?

  Which don't make it sound like it wasn't hard, Bob, because it sucked.

• 1:52:46Speaker 01

  It sucked a little bit less because of that.

• 1:52:49Bob Novella?

  Right. Suck less. Takeaways.

• 1:52:51Speaker 01

  All right, well, we're all home safe now. And again, thank you guys for joining me this week. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:53:03Speaker 01

  Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected]. And if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.