The Skeptics Guide #1077 - Feb 28 2026

Swindler's List: Tax Fraud; News Items: Universal Nasal Respiratory Vaccine, Origins of COVID, Reusing Spent Nuclear Fuel, Birding Brain Boost; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Starting A Skeptical Group; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, February 26, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:50Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 05

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  How are y'all doing?

• 0:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  All surviving.

• 0:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Y'all doing fine.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, all y'all, all y'all doing good.

• 1:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I love it.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Starting to warm up already.

• 1:03Cara Santa Maria?

  It was like 80 degrees outside.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, there. Not here.

• 1:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I know you guys have been buried under snow, haven't you?

• 1:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we had like an old school winter, winter we haven't had in a while. We definitely moved away from like the weather that was typical in the 70s and 80s. But this winter was like when I, when I was a kid. Cold, cold, tons of snow, lots of missed school days. My kids missed Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week.

• 1:30Speaker 02

  Now, Jay, when that happens now, do they try to do online teaching? Or it's just a snow day?

• 1:35Jay Novella?

  No, it's just a snow day. They, there is no indication of any kind of online anything going on.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  So they've really just abandoned that?

• 1:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was wondering if that would be a keeper after COVID.

• 1:45Jay Novella?

  Well, the problem is, parents then, it's complicated for parents because they can't help if they have to work or if they're working from home, you know? Luckily for me, though, I work from home, but I got more done in the last three days from not, you know, having to do my typical stuff. Like, you know, I would have gone to the studio twice. And Steve and I work at my mom's house on Mondays. So we could be over there, but also get work done. I, Steve, I can't tell you how much work I got done. It's amazing.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, and you don't have to drive anywhere. We got snowed out of the studio for two days.

• 2:17Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  Wow. I was blocked in my house. I couldn't get out of my driveway for three days.

• 2:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 2:22Speaker 02

  That's nuts. You know, there was the, our plow guys, it was so backed up. He ended up getting to our house at three in the morning.

• 2:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they're making money like crazy, though.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's probably their annual income, like over one month.

• 2:34Speaker 05

  The last 10 years, not so much.

• 2:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're going to Disney World in a couple of months after this winter.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Evan knows what it's like to have your annual work compressed to a short amount of time.

• 2:43Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, seasonal work is tough. You know, there's no joke about it. You're sleep deprived. You don't have time to have a regular meal, a sit down meal with anyone. Long, long days. Just it's crazy. It's crazy. It's not healthy, frankly. It's really not a healthy business.

• 3:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, especially when they put you on the rack, you know, in early April, they put you on the rack. Oh, boy.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  All the sitting, but it's all sitting in front of a computer constantly. I have to constantly get up every hour and walk around because if I don't, I will start to really get sore and that's no good because if you do, your muscles start to ache, then it slows down your work pace and then you're really screwed.

• 3:24Bob Novella?

  Have you tried, have you tried those sit-stand stations for?

• 3:27Speaker 05

  Yes, I do have one. Mm-hmm. And I do use it. Yes, I do use it occasionally. But, but walking, but walking is the thing. You have to get out and not be in front of a screen for some, for some time.

• 3:39Bob Novella?

  I've been walking every day for the past month. I love it. Love it.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  So healthy. Walk, walk, continue to walk.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had unhealthy work scheduled for like 10 years.

• 3:49Speaker 05

  When you had those months in which you were, what, was it attending or rounds or?

• 3:54Speaker 02

  From the moment I started rounding in the hospital, so third year of medical school through the end of my fellowship, you know, you're working 100 hour weeks, you know, basically. And this is before, now there's, there's all kinds of regulations that limit the amount of time you can work in a row and how much time you need to have off.

• 4:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And even with those regulations, it's still bad.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  It's still bad, but I was, I was pre-regulation. I had the 36 hour days sometimes and.

• 4:22Cara Santa Maria?

  How wonderful for patient care.

• 4:24Speaker 05

  Well, right, doesn't, doesn't everything decline as a result of that?

• 4:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, that's why they put in regulations.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Hence the regulations.

• 4:31Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  That was up. I could. There's no way I could do that kind of thing now.

• 4:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  It's one thing when you're in your twenties, you know?

• 4:37Speaker 05

  That's the point. Yep. Do. Right. 50s, 60s? Eh eh.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Forget about it. Forget about it. Forget about it.

• 4:43Speaker 05

  Forget about it. I'll be referencing Walking a little bit in my news item later. A little foreshadowing there.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  And we also foreshadowed one of Jay's items talking about taxes. Jay, you're going to start this off with a swindler's swindler's list about tax fraud.

• 4:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I did email Evan. I told him to back me up because Evan is swimming in this stuff, but I I try to do this every year because I just want to tell people like what the latest scams are that are being reported.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a healthy reminder. Very good.

• 5:11Jay Novella?

  And it's bad, you know?

• 5:13Speaker 05

  It is bad.

• 5:13Jay Novella?

  AI is helping a lot here. There's a refund text and email phishing scam going on. You get a text or an email. It's going to claim that your refund was approved, or it was processed, or it was delayed, or it needs some type of identity verification. And this link takes you to, of course, a fake IRS site or a state portal site. It'll, it'll ask for your social security number, your bank details, and you give them that, they got you. And it's going to happen quick. So you should never be giving that information out. I think just in general, don't give it out. If you're talking to your doctor that you know, and they ask for it, I, I push back and I go, do you really need it? Can you verify me another way? Like, I don't want to give my social out.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's no reason to give your social.

• 5:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you can almost always leave that line blank. And they're like, yeah, you don't have to put anything in there.

• 6:00Jay Novella?

  And your, your bank details, there's virtually no reason you ever, ever have to tell anybody your bank details. I mean, if they're going to do a bank transfer, that's one thing, but even still, that's, you have to give them, you know, your bank account number.

• 6:13Bob Novella?

  Your routing, yeah, your routing at least, right?

• 6:15Jay Novella?

  The routing number is generic for the bank. It's the bank account, you know, your ID with the bank. That's the number that I would not freely give out.

• 6:23Bob Novella?

  If you're going to transfer money like that, you could just use something like Zelle, right? Which will go from bank account to bank account. But you're not, and you're not giving out anything that's.

• 6:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Again, there's pluses and minuses to everything, Bob, because like Zelle, there's no insurance. There's no.

• 6:35Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 6:36Jay Novella?

  It's just a raw transaction.

• 6:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I learned that the hard way, but that's, but that's another future installment of Swindler's List. Shall we?

• 6:45Jay Novella?

  Oh yeah, Bob and I have a cool thing. Well, it's a sad story, but it's a good lesson. All right, so we got the W2 wage manipulation and fake return schemes. The, uh, this one is the current IRS warning is about scams that coach people to file false returns by inventing W2 wages or, you know, withholding amounts to trigger a bigger refund. And this can expose, uh, the filer to penalties and investigation.

• 7:15Jay Novella?

  Essentially, people are being told you could, you could falsify your return. Um, and they're doing it and you can get caught, you know, because there's, Evan, of course, could speak smarter at this than I am, but basically, you know, if you fall within normal parameters, and there are normal parameters for every income level.

• 7:34Jay Novella?

  Usually you're fine, you know, like, and you could look up what those normal parameters are, but if you step outside of them and you're, you're too many hits on the same return or whatever, like there's an algorithm that they'll, that, that, that you'll be beholden to.

• 7:50Jay Novella?

  Even though, you know, the IRS is pretty gutted. So I'm really not sure how well they're going to operate this year, but still like just be careful. Make sure you, you file as truthfully as you possibly can.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  I'll, I'll add to that. There are different levels of kinds of penalties. And, and the worst one is willful. Anytime you hear the word willful, that's a big part, that's a big problem because that usually means you're, you're in for jail time. If a court can find you guilty and, and put you away in jail for doing things like what Jay is saying. Claiming that you have refunds or, or W2s or other tax forms that you don't have, but that they say, oh yeah, you paid in this money. Now I want to get it back as a refund. That is willful and those carry the harshest penalties.

• 8:36Jay Novella?

  Uh, next one is the AI boosted phone scams, synthetic voices, tax resolution style imposters.

• 8:43Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 8:45Jay Novella?

  You get a phone call or it's a voicemail. It sounds completely polished. It sounds legitimate, realistic voices. It can even be voices that you know. They claim there's a problem with your tax return. They offer you, you can enroll in a program that can help you. The program doesn't exist. And of course, the ultimate goal here is identity theft. They're just trying to extract your information. Some of these scams, you know, they'll ask for your credit card information to make a payment and then they'll, they'll completely drain you. You know, it's just one of those things. Again, like you, you were at the point, I think I said this last year, you cannot trust the voices that you hear now. You know, if you get a phone call from your bank, call them back at the number that you know that they are, you know?

• 9:27Speaker 05

  Right. The IRS and the other state agencies, they will never call you. They will never send you a text and they will never send you an email asking for information. Those will never happen. Absolute red flags. Do not reply to them. Do not open any attachments.

• 9:43Jay Novella?

  You know, Stuff in the mail. It's happening like crazy. You know, like these scams are automated. So, you know,

• 9:51Speaker 05

  They're easy because they're easy.

• 9:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 9:53Speaker 05

  They're, they're extremely easy to launch. You send out millions of these things and you only need a couple hits to get some payback.

• 9:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And, and the thing is, you know, they, again, it's automated to the point where they don't really, they just have to set it up and, and tax season is stress season, not just for Evan, but for all of us filing our taxes. And, you know, there are people out there that get so freaked out, you know, that it could be so wound tight that they'll make quick decisions and not really think it through. That, that's why talk to your parents, talk to your grandparents, any people that you know, particularly elderly, because they, you know, people can get, they don't think as well. They're not as quick on their feet. They could be more worried about their money.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  Not as tech savvy.

• 10:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they're not tech savvy. You know, call them up and just tell them, look, call me if anything weird happens or anything that's asking for information, let you be the buffer for them.

• 10:44Speaker 05

  Agreed.

• 10:45Jay Novella?

  Another thing, this stimulus or tax credit bait via text and social media. So messages that you'll get will claim that you qualify for a stimulus payment, a special credit, you know, an urgent benefit update, you know, anything that they could do. To to capture you, right, to gather your intention. And then you're gonna, they're gonna try to get your personal data. It's always the personal data that they want. And the IRS specifically says, you gotta watch out for this and don't initiate contact in any way with any of anything like this. Have this, will they send you, will the IRS talk to you via snail mail?

• 11:22Speaker 05

  Uh, yes, in fact, that is the only

• 11:24Cara Santa Maria?

  The only way, right?

• 11:25Speaker 05

  Way. And even then, the criminals have found ways to make near perfect looking replicas of IRS letters and state and state letters in some cases.

• 11:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That's probably actually relatively easy to do.

• 11:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'm sure it is.

• 11:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  It is, but if you, if you know what to look for, there are inconsistencies within those letters that can be, that can be found, that do not either relate to your particular situation, or they have one piece of data that they reference that is, that is incorrect. So there are crumbs that can be found, but they're not easily detectable. So if you do get letters and you have any questions about it, and even if you don't have an accountant or a, or a, or a person to prepare your taxes, you can still call somebody, you can still call a professional before you reply to anything and ask them for their opinion. Yeah, they may charge you an hour fee or something like that, but at least they're not, you're not going to lose thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as a result.

• 12:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they also do this unclaimed refund thing. You know, these are all just ways to get at your information. But this, the unclaimed refund one is very, it tricks a lot of people because

• 12:34Speaker 05

  It's alluring.

• 12:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah, cuz you, oh, I didn't, I didn't get all my money from last year. What happened? And they give you some story and it sounds good, you know? And, and any of these can be connected to each other, right? So you could be, the unclaimed refund could be connected to the phone scam where, where they're using an AI voice. You know what I mean? So they're clever and they're getting a lot more clever. And I don't think that, you know, most of us are keeping up because, you know, AI is just making, it's throwing gasoline on their capabilities. So you could do some, some quick legitimacy checks to catch a scam. So first, if they're contacting you by text or email or social media or any kind of direct messages, treat this as high suspicious, like don't do anything.

• 13:20Jay Novella?

  Slow down, think about it, talk to people, check online. You know, the IRS says, don't initiate contact that way. That's not, that's not the way that they're going to contact you and you should not be contacting or responding to any of that. Any requests to pay by gift card, by crypto, you know, act now or get arrested.

• 13:40Bob Novella?

  Venmo.

• 13:40Jay Novella?

  Venmo, yeah, like they're just not going to talk to you that way. And the last one here is do not use the link in the message. Don't use their phone numbers, don't use their link, don't navigate to IRS.gov from their website or their text or anything, because, you know, they could spoof a phone number, they could spoof a, any kind of link, anything you could click on, whatever it looks like, they can, it'll be whatever they want it to look like. And to you, it looks totally legitimate.

• 14:07Bob Novella?

  Sometimes you can hover your pointer over the link and you could see that where it's going is not where they're claiming it's going. And they've probably got around that by now, but I'm sure it's still plenty of stuff out there where you could actually visibly see and confirm, yep, this is bullshit.

• 14:23Jay Novella?

  If you see a scam, you're connected to someone with a scam, whatever, like if you have any evidence, you can email the IRS, you can go to [email protected], send them what you have, screenshots, whatever, they'll appreciate it. You could forward texts. I think the number is 7726, which is spam, like letter spam on your phone. And your carrier can help block similar messages. You know, there are things that we could do to help other people. So that's it. So be careful, guys, you know, file, file early if you can, just to, you know, don't do it last minute and get desperate, you know, just put the time in. I, you know, I had a pattern for years where I'm like filing the day of, you know, I got time. And then next thing you know, it's like, oh, and what you know, it takes days and days and days to get documents.

• 15:08Jay Novella?

  You're going to have to call your bank, a former employer, all these things that we all have to do every year that completely suck. By the way, our system is so convoluted and utterly ridiculous, but I, you know, that's for Evan to talk to us about after taxes. Who I tell you. But the bottom line is don't do anything under pressure at all when it comes to your taxes.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a good, the under pressure thing is a good rule of thumb. There's never going to be so much urgency to paying your taxes that were correcting something or whatever. That you don't have time to investigate it, to take a deep breath, to ask advice about it. Like, don't do anything under pressure. There's no ever a legitimate reason for that. Take a couple of years if you want to investigate.

• 15:52Jay Novella?

  What I do.

• 15:54Cara Santa Maria?

  It is true that if you do get something from either the federal government with regards to your taxes or your state. With regard, because you know, I do individual and corporate taxes. And I've had times where like, you know, a return, whatever, something was mismatched. My accountant did something weird or I need, they needed something. They will send you multiple notices. Your first notice, you really don't have to do a whole lot. I mean, it is good to start researching, but like, trust me, you'll get more than one notice. It's not going to be like, oh, hey, you need to do this thing and we will never contact you again.

• 16:27Jay Novella?

  You know, if you file early, the good thing that happens is you're the first person to file for you because that happens. People will file for your taxes. They'll pretend to be you and file them. And if that happens, you're, you're not in good shape. Don't think it's because it was.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Well, that happened to me and it was no big deal because I just immediately notified the IRS and we sorted it out. And from that point forward, they send me a unique number that I use to file my taxes.

• 16:55Jay Novella?

  And then use people like Evan, because Evan knows what he's doing and he is a font of unbelievable information. I can't tell you how many times I've called Evan at the day of, Evan, I know you're doing the last thing. I'm screwed. And he's helped me like crazy because he knows what he's talking about.

• 17:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's true. I will say like, when you have an accountant, it can be really hard, right? It can be, it can be hard because you know that you're gonna pay extra money. But at the end of the day, generally speaking, either they are going to help you maximize your return legally, or they're gonna prevent you from getting yourself into trouble. So in the long run, you save money with an accountant.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Guys, have you heard about this new universal respiratory vaccine?

• 17:36Bob Novella?

  I did. I did hear about this. Is it legit, Steve, or what?

• 17:40Speaker 02

  It sounds too good to be true.

• 17:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Actually, universal.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  Don't get too excited.

• 17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, really?

• 17:43Speaker 02

  We just got excited.

• 17:44Bob Novella?

  Christ.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  It's, no, it's good. It's a good, solid advance. But of course, you have the headline saying universal respiratory vaccine doesn't put it into context.

• 17:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Into the mice?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Well, first of all, it's a mouse study, right? So that's the first thing to know. This is a study in mice. So that means there's years of human research between now and actually putting this up your nose, right? So this is not anytime soon. And most things don't make it through human research, right? Most things that look promising in animal, in mouse studies, don't make it through the human trials. But this is, I think, a solid technology that if this not specific thing, this approach has some merit. But in order to understand, and also, this is not a regular vaccine. That's the other thing. So saying it's a quote unquote, universal respiratory vaccine without qualifying why it's a universal

• 18:38Speaker 02

  vaccine, I think gives people a huge misunderstanding of what's going on. So you guys know how vaccines work, basically, right?

• 18:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Generally.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Bob, you want to give me a quick summary?

• 18:49Bob Novella?

  It's, it's just pure magic, man. There's no science behind that shit.

• 18:52Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:53Bob Novella?

  It supercharges your immune system to find what it needs to find and terminate it.

• 18:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It tells your body what the, the disease, the infectious agent is with, in, in a way that doesn't make you sick. So that later, if you approach it, you can fight it off.

• 19:08Bob Novella?

  Multiplies the antibodies.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all about the antibodies targeting specific antigens.

• 19:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Because usually you get sick the first time and then you develop the antigens.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  There's two parts to the immune system, broadly speaking, right? There's adaptive immunity and there's innate immunity. Traditional vaccines work by stimulating adaptive immunity, which, as the name implies, your immune system can adapt to and remember infections. So it identifies, it'll react with specific what are called antigens, receptors, proteins, whatever, on viruses, bacteria, fungi, pathogens, right? And then that creates a reaction, including the production of antibodies that target that, that get more and more fine tuned to that receptor, to that antigen. And then it creates memory cells.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  So the next time you get exposed, instead of it taking days to ramp up a response, it takes just hours to ramp up a response, right? So you get a much more quick and robust response because those memory T cells are already there, as if you've already been infected.

• 20:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's why all of us had to go through having chickenpox, but didn't ever get it again. Whereas kids today never had to go through that and they won't get it.

• 20:26Speaker 05

  Those kids today. I gotta get my second shingles shot soon.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  We've spoken about a universal flu vaccine for years, and it's been in development for years, but it's very tricky. Do you guys know why it's so hard to make a universal flu vaccine?

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Because it modifies every year.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  No. No? That's what I thought. But the whole thing, the whole point about a universal vaccine is that you don't have to track the strains every year.

• 20:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. So there must be something about flu that is hard to, about general flu that is hard to attack. Or that attacks your, something else that's important in your body.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  So you gotta keep in mind. That these bugs have been evolving for millions of years, right? Just as we, our immune systems have been evolving. And most pathogens are, you know, are evolutionarily mature. They've been around for a while, right? So like flu viruses. So one thing that they have evolved is that the highly conserved proteins, right?

• 21:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  Meaning the ones that are the same across all flu viruses are well-hidden. They're concealed in folds on so that

• 21:36Bob Novella?

  Oh, they can't be targeted easily.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Can't get access to them. And the stuff that's exposed to the outside world are highly variable.

• 21:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that why we can't even make a cold vaccine?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Because life would be so much better if we had a vaccine for the common cold.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a lot, a lot of viruses specifically, they hide their highly conserved antigens. So we just can't get access to them.

• 21:58Bob Novella?

  Rude.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  And the stuff that we can't target change strain to strain. And therefore, it's just been really freaking tricky to make a universal vaccine.

• 22:06Bob Novella?

  I thought there were lots of different types of cold viruses.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  There are.

• 22:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's different actual whole classes of

• 22:12Speaker 02

  But that's the point. Could you find something universal? The more universal it is, the more conserved it is across species, across varieties, across strains, whatever, the harder it is to get to. As a general rule of thumb, right? So that's why if it's really, really hard to make a universal vaccine and get some class of pathogens, like the flu vaccine, that's why.

• 22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's even harder against the cold because it's more than one class of pathogens.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Right. It's more than one species.

• 22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Coronaviruses and paraviruses, yeah, there's a lot of.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  So how did this vaccine get around that problem?

• 22:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it probably is not actually a vaccine.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yes, it's so it's not because it's not targeting the adaptive immune system. It's targeting the innate immune system.

• 22:58Bob Novella?

  Whoa.

• 22:59Speaker 02

  So it's a completely different approach, which is why I think it's like, you say, no, we didn't crack the universal vaccine problem. This is just a completely different approach.

• 23:07Bob Novella?

  It's a workaround.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Kind of. Yeah, it's kind of like a workaround, but. So what's the difference between the adaptive immune system and innate? Okay, so the adaptive immune system is slow, but specific, and it remembers. Oh.

• 23:21Speaker 05

  Oh, I like that.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  The innate immune system is fast. In general. It is nonspecific and it doesn't remember.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  So that's the shorthand. So the innate immune system is the first line of defense.

• 23:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's the thing that prevents us from all being sick all the time.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  All the time. It's really important. It includes things like your skin, right? It's part of the innate immune system, just a physical barrier.

• 23:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Mucus membranes.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  But it also includes actual immune cells, like in your mucosa, that attack based upon general patterns. So there's something called TOL-like receptors, T-O-L-L-like receptors, which you will never figure out what that stands for because there's no way to infer what it stands for. It's, and it doesn't mean anything. It's kind of like your science of fiction. It's, it is.

• 24:17Speaker 05

  Well, there's a reason why it's called that, though.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  There is. It's from the German word TOL. Do you know what that means?

• 24:25Speaker 05

  No, I'm not familiar with the German.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  It's like, it's like an expression like, oh, unbelievable, fantastic, amazing. It's so apparently the person who first discovered these receptors said that phrase in German. And so they ended up calling it the TOL receptor, but this is in a fruit fly.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  Like a eureka moment.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, like eureka. It's a good thing he didn't say, holy crap. Scheiße. And so, but that was discovered in the fruit fly. And then when they discovered them in mammals that were similar, they're TOL-like, so TOL-like receptors. Again, it doesn't mean anything inherently. It's such an interesting history to that name. Okay. So what do they target? They target PAMPs. Now, that is an acronym.

• 25:05Cara Santa Maria?

  PAMPs?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  P-A-M-P. What is that? P-A-M-P.

• 25:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, PAMPs.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Pathogen-associated molecular patterns.

• 25:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It definitely sounded like you said pants.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  PAMPs. Double P. Your brain made the closest natural thing. So what are PAMPs? So essentially, they are.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Patterns that evolutionarily the innate immune system has learned is indicative of certain kinds of pathogens. For example, a PAMP may be, oh, this snippet of RNA kinda looks like an RNA virus, you know? That's a PAMP. Or this receptor kinda looks like a bacterial receptor. It's that overall vague, nonspecific kind of pattern. This looks viral. This looks bacterial. And it attacks those things. What if it's wrong? Yeah, and sometimes it is. And that results in autoimmune diseases, right? So often, this is a part of the immune system that does that. Damn.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So it's very broad spectrum, very nonspecific, and it's very immediate but short term. And again, it doesn't learn, right? Because it's very nonspecific. So again, it's very complementary to the adaptive immune system. But also, these two immune systems work together because the innate immune system will then trigger adaptive immunity.

• 26:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  And then when the adaptive immune system gets activated, that increases the innate immune system. So they basically reinforce each other and stimulate each other to get both defenses up as much as possible during an induction, right?

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and it sounds like what you want is for your innate immune system, as you mentioned, to be swift and to have sort of a ceiling of its intensity. But once it becomes overactivated, or activated for too long, that can be dangerous for your body.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Well, it certainly wouldn't do it casually.

• 27:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  So it's either mistargeted, or too active, or persistent. So that's again, part of autoimmunity.

• 27:17Cara Santa Maria?

  So that kind of scares me about a universal vaccine that targets that part of your immune system.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  It's certainly something that was going to be a lot of safety data that is required. Maybe we could test it on RFK Jr.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  As you've guessed by now, this new vaccine activates the innate immune system, not the adaptive immune system. And what it does is essentially activate receptors that cause the innate immune system to become active instead of for a few days to remain active for a few months. That, okay. So it gives you basically three months of heightened respiratory protection. I like that. Because it's a nasal spray, right? So it's getting into your respiratory system.

• 28:08Cara Santa Maria?

  So unless you have an autoimmune disease that targets that, because like I have psoriasis, I would not want to put my psoriasis on auto drive for three months.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so people with autoimmune disease always should ask their doctor about any vaccines.

• 28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  Because they can sometimes trigger autoimmunity.

• 28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I definitely sometimes have like psoriasis outbreaks after vaccines, but what I wouldn't want is a three months' worth.

• 28:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Right?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:35Cara Santa Maria?

  But if it is localized to just things you can catch up your nose, that could be interesting.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  Well, it gets into your lungs, too. And so what happens is, what they found in the mice was that these immune cells formed in the lungs, right? So you have parts of the innate immune system become resident in the tissue, as they say. So they're there, ready to go, and their switches are turned on, right? And they just are persistently on high alert for several months. So Steve, you don't need, you don't need to instruct it on something specific to look for, though? No, no, it's just doing what it does, just all the time. Rather than flaring for a few days then going down, it just persists. Now, another thing to keep in mind is, when you feel like total crap when you have an

• 29:24Speaker 02

  infection, that's not because of the infection, it's because of your immune response to the infection. Right?

• 29:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So are you gonna be walking around with a fever all the time?

• 29:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's a good question, but immunity comes with a price. You have to think about it this way. How come we didn't evolve to just always have this on high alert?

• 29:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 29:42Speaker 02

  Right?

• 29:42Cara Santa Maria?

  We'd destroy our own bodies.

• 29:44Bob Novella?

  Take a toll on us.

• 29:45Speaker 02

  If that were an unalloyed good, we would, evolution would have favored it. But evolution has favored having it flare for a few days and then going quiet.

• 29:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it almost seems like a better approach is not to have it like go for three months, but like fast acting ultra immunity, like just for that flight. You know, like I want to do the nasal spray right before I get on that plane with all those people.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  That might be possible to just to trigger it for it, you know, without increasing the duration, but just trigger it before you get exposed.

• 30:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  If you're gonna be at a high exposure risk.

• 30:15Bob Novella?

  Or trigger it, but be able to turn it off.

• 30:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, untrigger it later.

• 30:19Bob Novella?

  How do you do that?

• 30:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. You have the antidote.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  That wasn't part of the study.

• 30:23Bob Novella?

  The antidote.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  So they also included something called ovalbimen, which comes from eggs. And this they learned by studying the BCG tuberculosis vaccine. So this is a vaccine that also stimulates the innate immunity, even though it is an adaptive immune system vaccine. And they, and the same researchers, researchers who figured out how that happens are doing this research. Like, oh.

• 30:49Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  This is how the BCG vaccine stimulates innate immunity. I wonder if we could just do that separately as a generic, nonspecific respiratory defense. And they found that it did. This is specifically what it happens for those who know what this means. Ovalbimen specific CD4 plus and positive and CD8 positive memory T cells that imprinted alveolar macrophages, enhancing antigen presentation and antiviral immunity. So basically what that means, this is something that the innate immune system does. There are macrophages which basically eat pathogens, right? They eat pathogens and then they present the antigens on their surface. And, and those antigens that are being presented on the surface of macrophages saying,

• 31:34Speaker 02

  hey, attack this thing right here that I'm presenting to you, activates the adaptive immunity, the memory T cells against those antigens. That makes sense? So this stimulated that.

• 31:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And you said it specifically in their lungs.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  In, yeah, in respiratory tissue, yeah. So they're, they're ready to go. So the idea here is that this would be used for outbreaks, epidemics, at the beginning of a pandemic.

• 32:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that would be nice.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Or maybe even for seasonal protection. So you could say, okay, in November, you get this vaccine and your, and your chance of getting the flu is dramatically reduced for three months to get you through peak flu season. You probably still need the adaptive immune flu vaccine.

• 32:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 02

  So this is again, complimentary to, not instead of a, a regular vaccine. But like when COVID hit, imagine when COVID hit, if we could give everybody this vaccine and basically buy us months of, you know, flatten the curve, obliterate the curve, give us the time it took to make a real vaccine that could then provide.

• 32:44Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, that would have saved millions of lives.

• 32:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's what all the.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Could have saved millions of lives, right?

• 32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's what all the charlatans and hucksters pretend they're pushing when they talk about boosting your immune system.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yes, right. All the crap that they were pushing, like ivermectin or whatever.

• 32:59Cara Santa Maria?

  This would actually do that.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  This could actually do that. But of course, that means we have to have billions of doses on hand, you know, ready to go. So anyway, so it's interesting. It would be an interesting additional tool to have in the toolbox and especially would be good for respiratory outbreaks and epidemics and, and maybe even pandemics early on to buy us time. It's another layer of defense. But for all the reasons that we stated, you know, basically the risk of triggering autoimmunity of one type or another or just having a lot of side effects as your immune system's ramped up for three months, there's going to be a lot of safety testing, right? This is going to be years of human trials, I think, before

• 33:43Speaker 02

  this makes it to market. But it's an interesting approach and the whole backstory of the different parts of the immune system, I think is good to go over. But if you just read the headlines, and especially if you know the history of our search for universal flu vaccines, you might have gotten. And the totally wrong idea about what this is.

• 33:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  You know, it's a completely different part of the immune system.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 34:03Speaker 02

  All right. Speaking of COVID, Kara.

• 34:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  This is a story that started in 2020 and has never fully been resolved. Where did COVID come from?

• 34:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's mostly resolved.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  What? Mostly?

• 34:19Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not fully resolved. Yep. Okay, so the WHO had an advisory group called the Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens. For some reason, the acronym for that is Sago. I guess they, Scientific Advisory Group Origins, they didn't want it to be Sagan, because I guess that doesn't roll off the tongue. So Sago.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Too much like Pamp's.

• 34:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah. They started.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Pamp's are cool.

• 34:53Cara Santa Maria?

  They started digging into the origins specifically of, you know, the novel coronavirus of COVID-19. Early on in the process, then they closed their assessments. They put out a publication previously, but there's, there was a new publication that came out just in the middle of last year. June 27, 2025, called Independent Assessment of the Origins of SARS-CoV-2. And this month, actually two days ago, in the journal Nature,

• 35:32Cara Santa Maria?

  the authors of that comprehensive investigation published an article called COVID's Origins: What We Do and Don't Know, where they summarize their big takeaways for a public audience. And so first and foremost, what's interesting is Sago is a group of 27 original members across multiple countries. But by the end, or at least by the publication of this, of this article in Nature, it was only 23 of those members. And they mentioned that one of them dropped out before the 2025 report. But the other three dissented from the decision to include the lab leak hypothesis at all.

• 36:18Cara Santa Maria?

  In their writing, because they said it just doesn't have any data to support it, and it's silly that we're even talking about it. So they, they, they went kind of to great lengths at the top of this article to say, listen, we're, we're only 23 of the 27. This is what we, uh, this is what the evidence show us. And this is, you know, these are our um, findings, uh, but we want to make it clear that some people dissented from this and didn't want to put their names on this. So that's pretty interesting. So basically, these, oh, and it's from 27 countries. So 27 experts from 27 countries. They looked at every reasonable possibility. They said it. They weren't trying to blame any one country. Of course, they just wanted to understand what happened so that we can be better prepared in the future. And

• 37:03Cara Santa Maria?

  they looked at all sorts of stuff. Case studies, um, animal reservoirs, hosts, insect vectors, environmental sources. They looked at evolutionary biology. They looked at all sorts of different kind of intelligence reports that they had access to, um, different discussions and obviously peer reviewed scientific studies that came out between 2020, 2021, all the way up until, uh, they wrote their report. And there was a big 2022 Lancet Commission. We probably talked about that on the show, right? I'm guessing we did because that was one of the other like big, um,

• 37:38Speaker 02

  And we've been writing about it for the whole time on Science Based Medicine.

• 37:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and so ultimately, they came up with four scientifically credible hypotheses that they then dug even deeper into and give their kind of determination of each of those four hypotheses. So do you guys know what those four hypotheses are? Like the sources? Like where did COVID-19 come from? Or SARS-CoV-2?

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Uh, CIA.

• 38:08Jay Novella?

  Wet market.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  The spillover event.

• 38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Spillover event. That's the important thing. So Bob, yes, you're, you're partly there with a, with the wet market.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Probably from the wet market, but spillover.

• 38:18Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, spillover. So a zoonotic infection, right?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Two would be lab leak.

• 38:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Lab leak, mm-hmm.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Three would be engineered.

• 38:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So that's like kind of lab leak intentional versus lab leak accidental.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Intentional, but actually engineered. And I don't know what the fourth one is.

• 38:32Jay Novella?

  You're missing, you're missing it, Steve. Fauci, Fauci got it from aliens.

• 38:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah. Credible hypothesis. No, the fourth one is a little, it's a little bit buried in the first one, I think, because like if you just say spillover, or actually, no, if you say spillover, that is its own thing. But if you just say market, as you said, Bob, that would include both. So the second hypothesis is that it was actually introduced into the animal markets from overseas through imported goods.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Got you. Yeah, right.

• 39:01Cara Santa Maria?

  The first is that there was a spillover.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  That's China's favorite theory.

• 39:04Cara Santa Maria?

  That's China's favorite theory. That's what they've been saying from the beginning.

• 39:06Bob Novella?

  Because it takes the blame away from being centered. Wasn't the engineered hypothesis debunked like very, very early in the pandemic? Where they looked at the genome and said, this has no hallmarks of engineering?

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So, so the, here they were asking, could this have been, you know, produced through reverse genetics, basically? Could people have gone into, you know, viruses, genes, or the regulatory, regulatory elements? And understood that kind of backward calculated these. People do this in labs all the time. They take viruses and then they, they kind of backward engineer them to make them like less pathogenic, right? So that we can study them easier and not risk getting infected. So the idea here is this, somebody, did somebody take a virus and make it more infectious? And they did look deep into this and they found that it, A, there's sort of no evidence to suggest it.

• 40:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And B, it would be really, really hard to do because the closest members of the class that includes SARS-CoV-2, so SARS-CoV-1 and other SARS-type coronaviruses that mainly hang out in bat reservoirs, they're mosaic in their genome. And so what ends up happening when they look at it is there are all these distinct evolutionary lineages, meaning that there were multiple recombination events over and over that led to these viruses, which makes it much less likely that they would have been engineered viruses, if that makes sense. And there's a lot of wonky science that they get. That's probably this.

• 40:47Cara Santa Maria?

  This section is actually interestingly, yeah, it's it's not this, but also it's the most complicated to explain why it's not this. And you're right, Bob, they kind of figured that out pretty early. But they did do some research to figure out how replicable the virus is. And their research kind of leads them to believe that even before this virus evolved to become SARS-CoV-2, or even before humans caught the infection, it probably could have already replicated in human cells, which is another kind of evolutionary piece of evidence, which shows that it probably wasn't deliberately manipulated. But let's go back to the other lab leak hypothesis, which is that it originated from an accidental

• 41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  lab related event. This is fascinating to me. And so I'm really curious. I mean, I know that we have debunked this over and over on the show. But one thing that I guess I didn't really realize until I read, you know, what I could of this report, is that they still can't say conclude, they can say it is very unlikely, because we actually think we know what did happen. And what did happen isn't a lab leak. But the reason that they can't conclusively say that it wasn't a lab leak is because they don't have access to a bunch of data.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the hardest part. Like, they've looked at published intelligence reports, they've looked at a bunch of different scientific reviews, and they all say, no, no, it's very likely zoonotic. As we mentioned, it's very likely a spillover. There's no evidence for a lab leak in any of this. But every time they asked for the actual information, like the raw data, it was redacted, they didn't receive what they asked for. And so they just have incomplete data coming.

• 42:34Speaker 05

  So they have to leave it. Technically open as a

• 42:37Cara Santa Maria?

  So what they ended

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Which is why the intelligence community concludes, hey, we can't prove it was a lab leak, but the Chinese are being squirrely for a reason. So we're worried that it was a lab leak.

• 42:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  Whereas the scientists are saying, no, this was zoonotic. There's no evidence.

• 42:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And that's why they're saying that this one tends to be more of a political argument versus a scientific argument. And that's not to say that there's not some, you know, concern there, of course, like, why are you being shady? But the science doesn't point in that direction. So they assign levels of confidence to these different hypotheses. And lab leak is almost always low confidence because of that.

• 43:13Speaker 05

  But not no confidence, zero.

• 43:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but they can't say it's no confidence because they haven't been able to look at all the information. And if you can't look at all the evidence, you can't make a final conclusion.

• 43:23Speaker 05

  And at this point, will we, will they ever have access to that necessary information in order to close this?

• 43:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I think something that's interesting is they did actually say in this report that they requested more information. And that information has started to become granted, but they don't have access to it yet. And so there will probably be more data to look at in the future, which is, I'm not sure if it's the reason why, but apparently they, the WHO has asked for a new Sago group to meet.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  Oh, okay.

• 43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So these 27 people won't be in that new Sago group. There, but they will assign new people to it. And, you know, their, their goal is to be as unbiased as possible, obviously, and to really focus on the science. So basically that leaves the two other questions. Was it introduced into China's animal markets from overseas, which is what China has endorsed? Or was there a spillover event that was likely near the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan? Or, you know, near it either in time or in location or both? And we've talked about this on the show. So obviously, the the evidence really does point to the fact that this was very likely a spillover event.

• 44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And what do you think is some of the kind of corroborating evidence that we have that would tell us this is a spillover event?

• 44:49Speaker 05

  They've tested animals from the market.

• 44:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so they've looked at different animals that were in the market. Yep, that's important.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  I think the big one is just epidemiologically, the pattern of the very first cases.

• 45:00Cara Santa Maria?

  More than 60% of the known cases in December 2019 were either people who worked at the market, people who made purchases at the market, people who lived near the market, or people who had some other link to the market.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  As far as I know, I don't think this has changed. They haven't found the smoking gun of the animal species that it came in, that it evolved in.

• 45:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No, they do know animals that can get COVID.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And they do know that early on, they were looking at like this metagenomic sequencing of different environmental samples. And so they indicated multiple wildlife species that were present. There were raccoon dogs, there were hory bamboo rats, and there were palm civets there. And they are all susceptible to those early evolutionary strains of SARS-CoV-2. But they could have been intermediate hosts. There's no way to know if they were the first spillover event, or if there was a spillover event that occurred earlier. So we really don't know. But what we do know is there are no verified cases of animal or human

• 46:10Cara Santa Maria?

  SARS-CoV-2 prior to December 2019. They said that there have been a couple retrospective reports of one or two cases in 2019, I'm sorry, in November 2019, in Italy and France. And then there was a wastewater sample in Brazil. But in all of those cases, they couldn't confirm those test results by other labs. So they're saying that's really low quality evidence. And where we have high quality evidence, every case we know about was in December 2019 and later. And so they don't know the actual source of the spillover event.

• 46:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But what they do know is that there are other strains that are similar to SARS-CoV-2, but they're too, too dissimilar to have been the direct progenitor. So they're probably like more ancestral strains and those have been found in horseshoebacks in Southeast Asia. So one type of virus shares 96% of its genetic code with SARS-CoV-2. Another one shares 96.8%, so sorry, 96.1, 96.8. So the one that shares 96.1 was found in China in 2013. The other one was found in Laos in 2020.

• 47:31Cara Santa Maria?

  So there were, it's very likely that similar strains have been circulating in Southeast Asia and that there may have been one or multiple spillover events and this is the one that stuck. You know, we may not be able to ever find that sort of patient zero or that, I don't even know what they call the animal.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  Right, yeah, animal zero.

• 47:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what they do say regarding China's kind of favorite hypothesis, saying, okay, well, maybe, you know, people got sick here, but probably the virus was actually in goods already and they came to our country and got people sick. The members of the committee say, you know, we're six years out and we just don't think that there's enough scientific evidence to support this, or really any. SARS-CoV-2 was detected, or COVID, do you say COVID or Cove? Was detected on frozen goods, but this was discovered months into the pandemic.

• 48:25Speaker 05

  So you have no rights.

• 48:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like people could have contaminated those frozen goods when they were testing them. And there's also no really good evidence to show that people caught SARS from frozen products at the seafood market or really anywhere else. So there's really no reason, and this is after a lot of investigation, there's really no reason to think that. It was introduced into China's animal market from overseas through imported goods. There's really no reason to to believe that it originated from deliberate manipulation

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:03Cara Santa Maria?

  of viruses in a lab. There's very good reason to think that this was a spillover event, right? A zoonotic infection. And there's no good reason and but sadly, not enough information to confidently say that it didn't leak out of a lab, but it's highly, highly unlikely. And that's just what we have to deal with sometimes in science.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Imperfect information. Right. Always. Almost always.

• 49:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  It's imperfect.

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And so they've kind of closed the book on this. I'm curious about the your guys' take on whether, you know, like I said, three people in the original group fully dissented and said, I'm not going to put my name on this because you're including those last hypotheses. What do you think about that? Do you think they should have been included? Do you think it's important to say, hey, this is what people think, and this is how we're going to debunk it, even though sometimes it leaves room for the conspiracy theorists to run wild?

• 50:00Speaker 02

  I think it leaves more room if you suppress it.

• 50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree.

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree with that, too.

• 50:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  That's already the narrative.

• 50:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  The narrative is the press and the and the government, whatever was suppressing the lab leak theory and, you know, which it's not, there's some truth to that, but it's not the conspiracy they're making it out to be.

• 50:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, definitely not with the scientists. And I think that's

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Definitely not with the scientists.

• 50:21Cara Santa Maria?

  It's all about framing, as you mentioned.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  I think what happened was it was the, once the engineered hypothesis was debunked, then the lab leak kind of got caught up in that net when scientists like this is this theory has been debunked. But it really wasn't until a year later that lab leak really started becoming proposed as a serious alternative to the engineered hypothesis. It's complicated.

• 50:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And and I think you're right. It's it. There's a there's an important kind of conversation about framing here because, like you said, if you suppress it, that makes the conspiracy theorists go wild. And, you know, my guess, I cannot speak for these three dissenters, but even one of them did publish. And she said at the top, I let it be known. I disagree with this decision and I want you guys to know. And I, I wonder if their take was, no, no, we're not trying to suppress anything. We don't think that it was even worth investigating because there was, it's not a hypothesis. Like you have to have some sort of observation to even develop a hypothesis. And so what they were saying is there was never anything pointing to this. So there's no reason to then go in and investigate it.

• 51:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And I could kind of see it both ways, but yeah, if, if this is going to be such an important narrative, again, you cannot, you cannot separate the science from the politics. You have to understand the science in the context of the political landscape. So why not investigate to debunk?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. What world are they living in?

• 51:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  You have to address these things head on.

• 51:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely. All right, Bob, this is interesting. So it's a, talk about another way potentially to reuse spent nuclear fuel.

• 51:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this was fascinating, Steve. The DOE is funding research that could make it practical, actually practical to cut the hazardous radioactive life of nuclear waste by 99.7%. Now that number gets thrown out around a lot on a lot of websites. They don't mean 99.7% in one day. This is not where that number came from. So they want to use a novel process to transmute this nasty, the nastiest nuclear waste into a form that remains super deadly, but only for a few hundred years instead of hundreds of thousands of years.

• 52:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That'd be huge.

• 52:36Bob Novella?

  Huge. Yes. That's where that number, number came from.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  You know what? You know what?

• 52:39Bob Novella?

  It's not huge.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Can I just say this upfront?

• 52:41Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  Here's just the whole.

• 52:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, it is.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Nuclear waste is so misunderstood. The stuff that lasts, so all right, very quickly, the, the more radioactive something is, the more intense the radioactive it is, activity is, the shorter the half life. And the longer the half life, the less the intensity. So the stuff that lasts for 23,000 years is barely above background radiation levels. By definition, it has to be, or otherwise it wouldn't last for thousands of years. Matter of volume. So in a few hundred years, the all the bad stuff's going away no matter what. And whatever's left over is is like background radiation level. It's not worth worrying about.

• 53:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Far enough above that it's still dangerous.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  It's not dangerous. It's just not dangerous. It's now it may be toxic, but you know, it does need to be stored safely. But the idea that it's going to be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years is straight up wrong. But anyway, this is still a very good thing for other reasons. Go ahead, Bob.

• 53:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And and don't forget, Steve, that engineering storage for millennia is a lot harder than engineering it for a few hundred years.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 53:52Bob Novella?

  That's also that's also a big bonus.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't think that's a it's an issue either. You know why? Because I bet you in a couple hundred years, we're going to have huge tech to deal with it that we don't have to worry about it. Right? We just have to store it for long enough for future technology to deal with it better.

• 54:06Bob Novella?

  And then if we have an apocalypse, we're gonna we're gonna irradiate.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  We'll have bigger problems.

• 54:10Bob Novella?

  The the poor schmucks that are trying to scrape out a living. So this is from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency dash energy. So this is ARPA-E. I didn't really know about that agency, ARPA-E. And they selected the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility to to do work on this project. And they got money, they had to grant money about over a little bit over eight million dollars USD. And this money specifically comes from the Department of Energy's Newton Program. And Newton is an awesome is an awesome acronym. It stands for Nuclear Energy Waste Transmutation Optimized Now. So I could just imagine the meeting they had and they came and they came up with that.

• 54:50Bob Novella?

  So the current problem is that spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors is it's there's a whole gamut of different types of isotopes and elements. And with varying half lives and everything, but it's it's highly radioactive. It's it's it's nasty stuff, especially, you know, if you if you took some fresh spent fuel. You and were directly exposed, you could literally be dead within days or even hours. I mean, this is this, you know, this raw stuff, untreated stuff, unshielded stuff is a super, super nasty. And I'm talking, you know, uranium, plutonium, plus. Minor actinides, as they're called, like neptunium, americium, and curium. For this new process, they're not using conventional nuclear reactors like, say, faster or even the more modern nuclear reactors.

• 55:33Bob Novella?

  They're relying on particle accelerators, and it's a really fascinating process. So what they want to do is they want to take particle accelerators, and in this research, be able to transition particle accelerator technology from more pure research into something that you could apply to something to a problem like this. So using the particle accelerators, they accelerate, as we know, what particle accelerators accelerate protons to, you know, basically relativistic speeds, and they aim it at heavy metal like mercury. So when you have something like high-energy protons hitting a heavy metal like mercury, what happens is that it spews out a lot of neutrons, and the word to describe that is called spallation.

• 56:17Bob Novella?

  I think that's how it's pronounced, spallation. So the neutrons then collide with the radioactive spent fuel. And when that happens, you get several different possibilities happen here. So you got, imagine you've got a neutron merging with a nucleus of a radioactive atom. So you could, if you just have the neutron, you know, merging with the nucleus of this atom, then you can, that's a different isotope, right? Because it's not a new proton, because extra protons is what makes a new element. New, extra neutrons gives you an isotope of that element, okay? And that could, and so that could happen immediately when a neutron is absorbed. You've got a different isotope. But also during spallation, you could have a different element created. And that can happen when, for example, the neutron merges,

• 57:00Bob Novella?

  but then it converts to a proton, like, say, during beta decay. The goal here, though, is to create fission. They want fission to happen. They want a neutron to join a nucleus and eventually leading to the fission event where the nucleus splits into one big nasty radioactive atom into, say, two smaller, kind of maybe mid-tier atoms that aren't as radioactive and something that will eventually be harmless much, much quicker than it otherwise would have been. So that's kind of the idea of what's happening here. So this is kind of like, it's kind of like a reactor, but it's, it's subcritical because a conventional nuclear reactor is critical and

• 57:41Bob Novella?

  you could have scary scenarios, as we know, where there's a runaway, runaway reactions that can do all sorts of nasty stuff. So that's critical, but this is, these are subcritical reactions that are being caused by the particle accelerators, much safer. And then the bonus here, of course, is that many of these reactions, I think the curium is specific to this, also generate a lot of waste heat and we can take advantage of that, right? So that you can, if you get heat, then you can have steam, then you can turn turbines and then you could generate electricity. So this could also not only take this radioactive spent fuel, but you could also, and make it less radioactive over time more quickly, but you could also

• 58:23Bob Novella?

  create carbon-free sources of electricity. So that's, that's a pretty solid win-win. RPE said that they, that this technique can be applied to the entirety of the US commercial used nuclear fuel stockpile within 30 years. So if this process was up and running within 30 years, they could basically convert all the, our entire nuclear stockpile at that time. Of course, we're creating a lot more all the time as well, but that's, that's pretty, that's pretty impressive. And then let's see here. So yeah, so I was going to talk here about the modern reactors can do this. Like you said, see, fast reactors, modern reactors can reuse some of the fuel, they can burn some of the fuel, but especially for the fast reactors, it's more, it's more complex and it's politically difficult. And

• 59:08Bob Novella?

  as I said, they rely on criticality, criticality which can cause runaway reactions. So these, using these particle accelerators is safer.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  So do all current nuclear fission reactors, right? That they all operate under criticality?

• 59:23Bob Novella?

  Right. But the point is that the, using particle accelerators, it's subcritical.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  I know, but you know, don't make it seem like a deal killer because that's what we're, that's what we've been doing for 60, 70 years.

• 59:32Bob Novella?

  It's not, it's not a deal killer at all, but it, this is, this is much safer than, than using fast reactors or modern reactors. And we are researching fast reactors, but there's, I don't think there's, I think China is a little farther along than we are.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  Russia's had one for decades. So yeah, so we

• 59:48Bob Novella?

  We had one and then we close it down.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  We are currently building a couple of salt cooled fast reactors. So the 2030s, we might see some coming online. Yeah, so it's not like we have a bunch of them up and running and everything.

• 1:00:03Bob Novella?

  They're not.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  They are proven technology.

• 1:00:06Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  But we just haven't done it at scale. But don't underplay how much that uses the spent nuclear fuel. Our current, you know, the traditional sort of legacy nuclear reactors only use 5% of the energy that uranium.

• 1:00:22Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Whereas the fast reactors use

• 1:00:25Bob Novella?

  How high do they get?

• 1:00:26Speaker 02

  90% like 90, over 90%. So right there, you could basically run our country for 30 years just on the current stockpile of nuclear, spent nuclear fuel. If you put them into, into, into fast reactors.

• 1:00:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, no, fast reactors are fantastic there, but they are, they're more, they're more complex and probably more politically difficult to sell.

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  They're more expensive and more complex. That is true.

• 1:00:51Bob Novella?

  Right. And the accelerators are, you know, they're, they're subcritical, so they're, they're, they're safer for sure. And, you know, you could just shut these down. You shut down the, the particle accelerator and that's it. I mean, the runner reactions essentially can't happen.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  But how close is this technology working?

• 1:01:06Bob Novella?

  They can make it work. They, my take is that

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Commercializable though?

• 1:01:10Bob Novella?

  No, they, they can make it work. The goal of this specific research is, is it, can they make it practical? Can they make it efficient enough to be practical? That's where this $8 million is, is trying to show. So, so we, we shall see. It's a really interesting, interesting technique that I wasn't aware that you can use particle accelerators in this way. So, um, so yeah, I would definitely be following this and thanks for that extra info, Steve. It's, I'm just so surprised of all the research I did today. I did some hours of research on this stuff.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  I've been writing about this for years.

• 1:01:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and that I trust, I absolutely, yeah, I've read about it too. You've done, clearly done more research on this specifically than I have. So I absolutely trust what you're saying. I'm just surprised that, that, that misinformation is so entrenched that it did not come up. I mean, I was looking at the, the laboratory right ...up on this and they had no hint of that at all. So that's disappointing, but it's a good point to make.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  There's an inverse relationship between the intensity of the radiation and the half-life. Just keep that in mind. You just don't mix those two things. You don't talk about the intense, intensely radioactive elements as if they have a half-life of thousands of years or hundreds of thousands of years. They don't. They have short half-lives. That's why they're intense. The other thing is, so there have been two ways to reduce spent nuclear fuel. One is the fast reactors, which is kind of an emerging technology.

• 1:02:33Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  But the old, traditional way that we can do it right now, France is doing it is just to reprocess the fuel, the spent nuclear fuel. You can reprocess it, re-enrich it, and then get more like 30 or 40% out of it instead of like just 5%. So we could be doing that right now. That's just a matter of expense, right? That's just money. It's more expensive. It's cheaper to mine and process fresh uranium than to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. But if people are so afraid of spent nuclear fuel, then just reprocess it and we could reduce it significantly. And then hopefully, the fast reactors will come online in the 2030s. That will reduce it further. And hopefully, they could get

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  this technology working and that will reduce it further.

• 1:03:21Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:03:21Speaker 02

  That's kind of my other point, is that there's so many things online that can significantly reduce spent nuclear fuel. And again, get it down to only that sort of short half-life stuff. So you don't have to even worry about it for thousands of years, only just a few hundred years. That's going to happen, one way or another. There may be some other way that comes out in 50 years from now, who knows? And that's my point. We can't assume static technology for hundreds or thousands of years. That makes no sense. All right, let's move on. Evan?

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:55Speaker 02

  So did you pick this news item just to please me?

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  Well, whenever bird watching comes into a news item, I mean, how can I not stop and take a second look at it? I have Steve a question for you.

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  In five parts.

• 1:04:13Speaker 05

  Number one, is bird watcher and birder the same? Can we, can we exchange those terms?

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, as far as I know.

• 1:04:21Speaker 05

  Fair, okay, all right. So that's, now, number two, you consider yourself a bird watcher. What are your bona fides for that? You know, how, what makes you a bird watcher?

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Anyone can be a bird watcher. If you look for, at birds, you are technically a bird watcher. It's a, it's a continuum. There's no bona fides, there's no threshold. If you put up a bird feeder and look at the birds who come to your bird feeder, you're a bird watcher. That's it.

• 1:04:45Speaker 05

  You have to keep the book, though, right?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  The entry, you don't have to do anything. The entry point is super low. It's just looking at birds. That's it. And, but there's an entire spectrum from having multiple feeders, like that, that are attracting different kinds of birds, getting binoculars, getting, you know, other, other, other kinds of viewing equipment, getting, you know, taking pictures of birds. Then you can go on birding trips, you know, go to like a location near where you live to, to look at water birds or different kinds of birds, whatever. There's a whole spectrum. Then you could join like the Audubon Society, you could do whatever, anywhere along that continuum, you're a birder.

• 1:05:23Speaker 05

  Part three, why do you like being a birder?

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  So I got into it originally as something to do father, daughter, with my daughter. And we both sort of fell in love with it. And, you know, first of all, it was amazing to me how little I knew about the birds around my house until I started looking. And it just becomes really fun to identify new species. They're, they're beautiful animals and you just learn so much. It's just a great experience. It's a lot of fun and it adds another layer to any trip that I take. I could look at the local birds and see new birds I haven't seen before.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  Do you ever talk or like tweet to the birds?

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  Number four, Steve, other than increasing your knowledge base and understanding of birds, do you feel that this hobby has helped you in other ways?

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Yes. It definitely increases your attention to detail. Because you have, you're sort of forced to notice things that before completely escaped your notice.

• 1:06:20Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:06:21Speaker 02

  And think, think of, it's a good way to think about categorization and, and variation within species and occasionally you're going to see rare mutants. And it's, so you learn about evolution, about biology, categorizations, a lot of stuff that you learn.

• 1:06:38Speaker 05

  And finally, the fifth part, thank you for your patience. Did you read the recent study from the Journal of Neuroscience that involved bird watchers?

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  After you sent it to me, but I didn't notice it before.

• 1:06:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Hey Evan, can I ask question number six?

• 1:06:51Speaker 05

  Oh, go for it, Kara.

• 1:06:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Only because this is like bothering me and I feel like if I don't say something, then I don't know. Did you guys both just say bona fides?

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  Bona feeds?

• 1:07:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that how you say? I have always said that word bona fides.

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  Bona fides? I think it's bona feeds. Well, I

• 1:07:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I just feel like we're gonna get emails and I was like, I can't be the only person.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  It could be, yeah.

• 1:07:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. Maybe, maybe they are both acceptable and it is

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  I think I've heard it both ways, actually.

• 1:07:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I've always said bona fides and I was like bona fides.

• 1:07:27Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know. Did I put that much emphasis on the DA?

• 1:07:30Cara Santa Maria?

  You 100% did. Enough so that

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Was I trying to be cheeky, maybe?

• 1:07:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Enough so that then Steve was like, my bona feeds.

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Well, actually, that's an Easter egg speaking of birds and we want the listeners to write in to tell us what you think of the word bona feeds or bona fides.

• 1:07:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Sorry.

• 1:07:49Speaker 05

  Steve, the name, the title of that Journal of Neuroscience study was called, "The Tuned Cortex: Convergent Expertise-Related Structural and Functional Remodeling Across the Adult Lifespan."

• 1:08:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that why you liked it, Evan? Because it was tuned and it was?

• 1:08:11Speaker 05

  Well, again, I only found it through the actual news article, which originated from NBC News. Cool. And here's, here's a pullout from the abstract. "Here we provide a multimodal view of cortical reorganization in a domain for which high level perception, attention, and memory are shaped through extensive practice, colon, bird identification expertise," also known as what? Bird watching, right?

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  By the way, I just, one of the references I found said bona fides.

• 1:08:45Speaker 05

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:08:46Cara Santa Maria?

  That's weird, too.

• 1:08:47Speaker 05

  A third way to say it. Oh, that's cool.

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  That's what I've heard before, bona fides.

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  Bona fides.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Cara Santa Maria?

  We are, we're all different.

• 1:08:59Speaker 05

  And Steve, you touched on a lot of the things that, you know, you're sharpening a lot of your skills in a lot of different ways, right? And you become in tune with those little subtle motions, right? Being able to distinguish trills from background noise, for example, or noticing, like you said, the very specific features of certain birds, noticing that pale eye ring that differentiates perhaps one, as they say, warbler, one warbler from another.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Or things you don't even think about, like the ratio of beak to body length.

• 1:09:37Speaker 05

  There you go, right? I mean, I would not have thought of that unless you just said it. The NBC News headline read, "Bird Brain Benefits: How Being an Expert Bird Watcher May Boost Cognition." And you might read that and think, oh, bird watching maybe boosts your intelligence? Well, spoiler alert, the answer to that is no, but apparently it could change brain structure and brain activity. You know, their actual structural modification that accompanies an expertise such as bird watching.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  I.e. learning.

• 1:10:08Speaker 05

  According to this study. I don't know what the prior, prior studies have said about this. This is just something that is current. So we're going to talk a little bit about. The study design. Researchers recruited 58 adults. That's a relatively small study, I would say, right? Twenty, half of which, 29 experienced bird watchers and 29 novices, little or no birding experience. So they were comparing expertise. Participants underwent MRI brain scans to look at structural differences, specifically gray matter density, and they also performed bird identification tasks while their brains were being monitored. So this allowed the researchers to look at things, well, structural differences, along

• 1:10:51Speaker 05

  with functional differences, you know, how active certain brain regions became during bird identification tasks. And here's what they found. The experienced birders showed denser gray matter in regions associated with visual processing, attention, working memory, and fine perceptual discrimination. Again, Steve, several of the things you touched on. And yeah, so these are the, exactly the cognitive systems you'd expect to be heavily engaged when distinguishing similar-looking species. And those same regions of the brain became more active when birders were asked to identify unfamiliar bird species.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  So the areas that were structurally different were also functionally engaged during expertise relevant tasks. And that alignment strengthens the interpretation that these brain differences are tied to birding skill and not just random variation, although there is some pushback on that a little bit. Maybe it's not all just the activity of birding. There are some other, what, confounding factors that could be involved here, right? Such as just generally being in nature. You have, in order to be bird watching, you're generally in nature. There's only so much you can do from your window. So you're out and about, right? You're walking around. In some cases, you're socializing. And these things are also tied to increased processing speeds. Um, let's see, who was it?

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Benjamin Katz, Associate Professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Science at Virginia Tech, said, "Birding isn't just a single thing. There are many different cognitive aspects. We don't know what the baseline differences are. You would need longitudinal data to make strong inferences about what birding itself is doing." Okay? So that's kind of like a caveat, right? That maybe, you know, it's not exclusively the fact that you're birding. Or as they say, you know, any sort of attention to detail, fine activity.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  They need to compare it to hiking. Why didn't they use hikers as the control group?

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, wouldn't that be, wouldn't that be a good comparison?

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  But the thing is, yes, from a scientific neurological perspective, that's correct. But from the perspective of, if I do birding, is that good for my perception and all that stuff? It is regardless of what the specific pathway, you know, regardless of what aspect of birding is making that happen, you'll still get those benefits.

• 1:13:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, um, they talk a lot about neuroplasticity, which is also something we've talked about. On the show, because they mentioned gray matter specifically. And, you know, maybe Steve, you can talk a little bit more about how the gray matter fits in here.

• 1:13:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they're just talking about learning.

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is a generic response to learning. Anytime you look at anybody who does a lot of something, like if you look at violin players, they have, you know, more gray matter in the part of the brain that controls the hand that's working the fret, you know, or whatever. That absolutely, that is just the physiological representation of learning. That's what that is.

• 1:13:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I would love to see a study that compared brains of people who were not at all interested, who were like, almost like, I would hate to birdwatch. That sounds like the worst thing I could ever do. And then they birdwatched for a while, and then they looked at their brains after. Because my question is, are people who tend to birdwatch just people who tend to have these types of attentional skills?

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  That's true. The arrow causation could be going the other way.

• 1:14:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But also, Evan, something to note, 58 participants in an fMRI study is actually kind of a lot.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  Oh, is it? Oh, okay. All right. It seemed like a small number. I mean, when we're usually talking about studies and numbers.

• 1:14:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I know. But that's a huge limitation of fMRI studies is you just can't scan a lot of people.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  But 50 is a good rule of thumb for you can do statistical analysis, right?

• 1:14:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. So long as you're kind of hitting that mark, you're in, you know, it's like, I guess you'll have some amount of power. But 58 is not a low number for an fMRI study by any stretch.

• 1:14:51Speaker 05

  Good to know. Good clarification. So perhaps that's why they did have just that many.

• 1:14:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  And that's what they were aiming for in order to get, you know, fair results, you know, something that they could really, really learn from here.

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:15:06Speaker 05

  Good stuff.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time? All right, guys. Last week, I played this noisy. And remember, this is a very annoying sound, so be ready or turn down your volume.

• 1:15:28Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that was annoying as hell. All right, well, guys, I'm sorry. This was a, it is an annoying sound to most people. But you know, this is science, so you have to be tolerant here. Hello?

• 1:15:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Jay Novella?

  Okay, you guys have any guesses? What is this thing? Someone's nightmare going to the dentist.

• 1:15:46Jay Novella?

  My God, Evan.

• 1:15:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I just had the second half of my root canal. Don't remind me.

• 1:15:49Jay Novella?

  Oh, no, sorry, sorry.

• 1:15:51Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's actually not that bad.

• 1:15:52Jay Novella?

  Evan, actually, you're mildly on to something. Oh, no. Yes. Okay, so Ben Brown wrote in. He said, hi, Jay, my daughter Claire, no relation to the Claire that submitted the noisy, asked me to send in her guests. She's, she is nine months old. This is nine months, guys, listening to the SGU. Wait, what? Really? She thinks the noisy sounds like a creepy swing set in an abandoned playground. Now, it might be nine years old. I don't know. I don't know, guys, but I just.

• 1:16:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably.

• 1:16:21Jay Novella?

  But when I saw nine months, I'm like, the kid's a genius. She's listening to the show. She knows what's going on.

• 1:16:27Cara Santa Maria?

  She knows what a swing set is.

• 1:16:31Jay Novella?

  So this is not correct, but I gotta tell you, anybody who sends in a guess that's nine months old can be on my show. Ben Simon sent in a message. He said, I have made this guess several times before, but don't read this unless I'm finally right. I think the noisy is of something being turned on a lathe. But this one doesn't sound like a typical wood or metal turning. Maybe this is the sound of, of working on a plastic piece. Not a lathe, but thank you for the guess. Sharon Roney, who is a huge supporter of the SGU and a friend of mine, she writes in and says, hi, Jay, it's been ages since I guessed, so I'll give it a try. This sounds like something being sharpened like a saw or maybe giving the Olympic theme a skate or sled blade.

• 1:17:13Jay Novella?

  Not a horrible guess at all, Sharon, but you are incorrect. Make us more cookies. Stephen Hunter wrote in, said, Jay, this noisy makes me think of a spinning lens atop a lighthouse. Except the mechanism is rusty and haunted. I think this is a perfectly crummy, I guess. Incorrect. But guys, there was no winner. This one was hard, and I admit it. But let me tell you what this thing is. This thing is called DentSply Sirona In-Lab MX X5. What's its half-life? It's a, yeah, let's talk about that for 45 minutes.

• 1:17:50Jay Novella?

  It's a high-end, five-axis dental milling machine.

• 1:17:54Speaker 05

  Oh, here we go, dental.

• 1:17:55Jay Novella?

  Yes, Evan, you always, somehow you figure these things out.

• 1:17:58Speaker 05

  Why, why is dentistry filled with horror noises?

• 1:18:01Jay Novella?

  Exactly, I know, man. There is a factory out there where they're just thinking up the next weird thing that we have to go through. So this is a machine that's used in professional dental labs to fabricate crowns, bridges, implants, surgical guides, you know, other restorations from digital designs. It says it can mill wide range, a wide range of materials, including zirconia, ceramics, resins, wax, some metals, and supports both wet and dry processing. It's a freaking miracle machine. And some dentists actually have this at their disposal, like they have enough business where they, they have it on-site and they manufacture these, these, you know, dental devices or whatever it is that people need. So it's pretty cool. It makes horrible sounds.

• 1:18:45Jay Novella?

  And I could see why, you know, they probably want it in a padded room or whatever, but it's, it's a very useful thing. It really is a miraculous machine with all the different things that it can do. The Densplay Sirona In-Lab MCX5. Alright, guys, I got a new, alright, guys, I got a new noisy for you this week. This was sent in by a listener named Matthias.

• 1:19:20Jay Novella?

  Guys, if you think you know what this noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected].

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Alright, one quick question. This comes from Matt from the UK. And he writes, "I've been a follower of your podcast since the very early days. I really admire what you do and how you increase scientific awareness. My views have always been scientific, but your show has really helped me stir me into a positive direction." And he goes on praising us a little bit more. And then he says, "I checked for local skeptical groups, but there isn't any near me and I'd have to travel some way, which isn't really convenient. A thought struck me that I could start my own group. Nothing big, just a place people can go to discuss things." How would I go about doing that? And I guess, more importantly, how much work is that? I can't imagine how much time and energy you all put into things you do,

• 1:20:08Speaker 02

  but I don't think I'd have time to do it as a full-time thing, Matt. So, that's a great question, Matt. There's a lot you can do, and you know, basically you could put as much or as little time into it as you want. It sounds like what you're talking about is that you want to form a meetup group, right? And the skeptical movement kind of split into those two types of organizations, right? Organizations that create content online, which is mainly what we do, and organizations that act as a local meetup group, which we also do, but we kind of do big events. But there are a lot of meetup groups, like Skeptics in the Pub. I don't know how active they still are, but these are still things that you can do.

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  But you could just, you know, that's just a matter of forming an email list saying, hey, once a month, we're going to get together at whatever this public place, or this library, or pub, or museum, or whatever, and talk about stuff, you know? It doesn't have to be a lot of work. But of course, you could make it as much work as you want, in terms of like how much prep you want to do, and do you want to get speakers in? And, you know, you could continue to scale that up and up and up. But, you know, I recommend don't overwhelm yourself initially. We've experienced, because we've been doing this for a long time, including local groups, meetup groups, et cetera, people who come in, they're very enthusiastic, they're full-court press, they want to change the world, and they burn themselves out in a year or two.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you don't want to do that. So pace yourself, be realistic. Sounds like you are coming into this very realistically, which is good. But yeah, I think the easiest entry point is to just form a local meetup group, you know, where you just get together once a month. And then if you want to add some bells and whistles to that from there, you can do that. All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction.

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction.

• 1:22:08Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics, tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is vaccines. Since I was talking about vaccines this week, I thought I would do that as a theme. All right, you guys ready? Yes.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:22:28Speaker 02

  Here we go. Three items about vaccines. Item number one, despite the claims of anti-vaxxers, no vaccines sold in the U.S. are made using human fetal cells. Item number two, the World Health Organization estimates that about 50% of vaccine doses are wasted each year due to spoilage. And item number three, the first known inoculation preceded the first vaccination by over 700 years. Evan, go first.

• 1:22:58Speaker 05

  All right. No vaccines sold in the U.S. are made using human fetal cells. The anti-vaxxers would have you believe otherwise. Well, this is something I think I've heard before, being bantered about by the anti-vaxxers. And I'm not aware of any human fetal cells used to make vaccinations. I mean, this one seems in line with what I understand, but there, you know, is there some, is there one vaccine that maybe uses some kind of human cells or something? I don't know. I think that one's going to be right.

• 1:23:38Speaker 05

  The second one about the WHO estimates that about 50% of vaccine doses are wasted each year due to spoilage. So that might be high, that 50% number. If this one's the fiction, it's going to revolve around this number. It's likely less. I hope it's less. We did hear a lot during COVID about spoilage of vaccines. I don't know if mRNA vaccines are more susceptible to spoilage as opposed to the traditional ones. And maybe that, when you bring that number in, it increases it. But I don't know about this one. I'm thinking this one's going to be the fiction.

• 1:24:22Speaker 05

  And the last one about the first known inoculation preceded the first vaccination by over 700 years. That does sound right to me. When was the first vaccination, though? Gee, you know, I thought this, maybe my timeline is off on this, but I'm not surprised that the inoculation preceded the first vaccination and by seven centuries, essentially. So I'll go with the WHO estimates one as being the fiction.

• 1:24:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:24:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know, 50% of vaccine doses wasted due to spoilage? So you're saying per year on average?

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Well, whatever, that per year is redundant. It's 50% of doses.

• 1:24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't like that. And so like thrown out, like fully wasted, not used.

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, not usable.

• 1:25:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  And spoilage.

• 1:25:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That seems really high. It seems like we have a very, very inefficient healthcare system across the world. If that's the case, and it also seems like that would be something that the WHO actually works on and wouldn't have that bad of a, of a waste number. I don't know that, if that one's true, it really, really bothers me. But maybe it's true. And then, uh, no vaccines are made using human fetal cells. Yeah, no, that seems true. Do you mean like never even researched? Or you mean actually in production?

• 1:25:41Speaker 02

  In production.

• 1:25:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I definitely, yeah, that one's straight up true. I think that's true. I think that, so the WHO one is bothering me, but the one that bothers me even more is the first known inoculation. The first, I think, completely agreed upon inoculation is, is variolation. It was smallpox and that was in like the 1700s. But maybe there were some examples of like, you know, people cutting open their skin and wiping disease into the wound earlier than that in like the Middle East or, uh, in Asia or something like that. But 700 years ago, I absolutely don't think so. I, I think that's the fiction.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob?

• 1:26:20Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's, I mean, I could potentially see an accidental inoculation 700 years ago.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  This is deliberate, as a strategy to.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  Protect against infection.

• 1:26:32Bob Novella?

  Oof.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  By definition, otherwise just infection.

• 1:26:35Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:26:36Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:26:36Bob Novella?

  All right, so the human fetal cells, no way. I mean, we would, we would know that. That'd be ridiculous and be shocked if that's, if that's the fiction. Yeah, so it's between those two. Fifty percent sounds like, sounds ridiculously high. You'd think they'd have that down by now. I mean, is the unit cost so low to them that they're okay with it? Or is there something we're missing in terms of preventing spoilage is a lot more difficult? But 700 years intentional? Oof. Yeah, this one's, I don't know which one to grab here. All right, I'm gonna, I'll go with the 700 years as fiction. That, that's just so long ago, man. This is so much earlier than 1700. So yeah, fiction, 700 years.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  Okay, and Jay?

• 1:27:21Jay Novella?

  I don't know why, but I, I thought that we did use, you know, human fetal cells for something to do with, with vaccines. I don't know if it was their development or testing. I, I don't know. I just, there's something there in my head. I thought, I thought I read something about that. I don't know if it's current or if this was in the past. Steve, you're, the way you worded it, no vaccines sold in the US are made using human fetal cells. Is that current or all time?

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  Current, we'll say current.

• 1:27:49Jay Novella?

  Okay, then I would definitely say that one is science because I would imagine we don't do that anymore. If we did it in the past, I would imagine we don't do it anymore. Okay, the second one here, 50% vaccines. So that's a lot. That's an awful lot. I'm shocked to hear that number. You know, I, I don't know if it would all be from spoilage though. I mean, couldn't there be? If it's 50%, you know, I would imagine there's lots of reasons why vaccines don't make it all the way to somebody's arm. But I don't know. I don't know, that's 50% spoil. I mean, if they, if it is typical that it's 50%, of course, they know it and they have to overproduce it just to make sure it's available for everyone.

• 1:28:30Jay Novella?

  In the last one about the inoculation 700 years ago, goddamn, it's a hard one. I mean, I'll go with Evan and I'll say, I don't think that half of vaccines are wasted due to spoilage.

• 1:28:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so you had even split between those two, but you all agree on the first one. So we'll start there. Despite the claims of anti-vaxxers, no vaccines sold in the US are used, are made using human fetal cells. You guys all think this one is science and this one is the fiction.

• 1:28:58Speaker 05

  No, the hell.

• 1:28:59Jay Novella?

  Steve, was I on the right track?

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, you were completely correct.

• 1:29:03Speaker 05

  Holy crap.

• 1:29:03Jay Novella?

  Steve.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  So you are missing, you are missing something there. This is, you know, I know.

• 1:29:10Jay Novella?

  Wait, I know what it is. I know what it is. They have, they're not harvesting cells anymore. They have a line that they keep alive, right?

• 1:29:17Speaker 02

  You're correct, but that's not why this is the fiction.

• 1:29:21Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:29:21Speaker 02

  So the difference, I think what anti-vaxxers say, they do say, they do sort of imply or say that they're like, um, but we're harvesting fetal cells to do that. But we, we do use fetal, fetal cell lines that were harvested in the 1960s. We're still using the same lines, right? To do that. But most vaccines sold in the US are not used, are not made using fetal cells, but some are. Varicella, rubella, hepatitis A, rabies, and the Johnson and Johnson COVID-19 vaccine.

• 1:29:56Speaker 05

  Holy moly.

• 1:29:57Speaker 02

  But this is what anti-vaxxers say. This, this is the bit that you're missing and how I got all of you. They say that vaccines contain human fetal cells. And what's true is none of them, none of the vaccines contain fetal cells, but the viruses are grown in human fetal cell lines. So they are made using human fetal cells. That's the difference.

• 1:30:25Speaker 05

  Huh huh, clever.

• 1:30:26Speaker 02

  So that's what you would think of. They do not contain fetal cells despite.

• 1:30:30Speaker 05

  But fetal cells are used.

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  But they are used in making.

• 1:30:33Speaker 05

  To make.

• 1:30:33Speaker 02

  Those vaccines that I mentioned.

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  Like a chamber of some kind or whatever.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  They culture them in those cells. That's it. Otherwise, we like culture them in chicken eggs or whatever, you know, something else.

• 1:30:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. So is the reason, then why aren't we just using chicken?

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  Just whatever.

• 1:30:49Speaker 05

  Obviously the human.

• 1:30:50Speaker 02

  These cells, because yeah, human viruses grow better in human cells. And if we can't get them to grow in non-human cells, then we have to use human cells. So these are the ones where we have to use human cells. But the vaccines do not contain fetal cells. I was dancing right on top of that.

• 1:31:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, you were. You were hovering over the target there, Jay.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:31:11Bob Novella?

  This means I got it too, Jay, because I said, unless we're missing something really important.

• 1:31:16Speaker 05

  You did qualify it, Bob.

• 1:31:18Speaker 02

  All right. The World Health Organization estimates that about 50% of vaccine doses are wasted each year due to spoilage is science. Why? Is it all spoilage, Steve?

• 1:31:28Speaker 05

  Refrigeration.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Yes, evidence is correct. It's refrigeration. So you guys, have you guys ever heard the term the cold chain? No.

• 1:31:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, I know what that is.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  Yes. Getting something from, yeah, entire.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it can never thaw until you use it. Exactly. So basically, all vaccines need to be refrigerated. They need to be kept between 2 and 8C from the moment they're created till they go in somebody's arm. And if there's any break in that cold chain, it spoils.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  Become ineffective.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  And it becomes, not only ineffective, can become toxic. You cannot use it. Bob, don't drink the vaccine.

• 1:32:05Speaker 05

  Do the vials have some sort of sensor on them, Steve, that measures if something spoiled?

• 1:32:10Speaker 02

  So that's a good question. How do they know if something, if the cold chain has been broken? I think there are ways to monitor that and to indicate if it's ever heated up or froze. That's the other thing. If it gets below zero, if it freezes, it's done. If it gets too hot, it's done. It's got, I said 2 to 10 or 0 to 10 or 2 to 8, somewhere in there. But, you know, it's got to remain at that sort of narrow temperature range. So estimates vary from about 25% to 50%, but the World Health Organization says 50%. That's their number. But, you know, definitely somewhere between 25 and 50%. It's hard to know exactly how much. The estimated cost is $35 billion a year. So depressing. $35 billion a year.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  It's just an infrastructure problem. It's an infrastructure problem. Why don't they take that $35 billion and spend it on more refrigeration? Well, because we're talking about countries with poor infrastructure. So there's a power outage? Anything that that power was cooling is gone. Whole shipments get wasted with, right? So if you, if you're, if you're trying to distribute vaccines in a country with intermittent electricity, this is where the problem is. This is obviously not evenly distributed. The US doesn't have this problem. When you're developed Western nations, they have some spoilage, but it's not 25 to 50%.

• 1:33:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, we should, we should help those countries.

• 1:33:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely, but this is, you know, infrastructure problems are hard to solve. You just can't throw money at it. You've got to develop infrastructure.

• 1:33:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you develop infrastructure by throwing money at it.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, well, yeah, I mean, it's not, it's not just a matter of money. It's that you has to be properly spent on the right things. And you have systemic problems, like societal problems that you have to fix. Governmental problems that you have to fix.

• 1:33:56Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

  It's not, it's, it's an intractable problem. But the, the World Health Organization is absolutely working on it.

• 1:34:03Jay Novella?

  Who?

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  The World Health, right. The World Health Organization.

• 1:34:07Jay Novella?

  I can't believe that.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  I've had to discipline myself not to say the who because they don't say that.

• 1:34:13Speaker 05

  Right, and I specifically don't say who.

• 1:34:16Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God, that made my night. I'm gonna fall asleep with a smile on my face.

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  So, they are, they are working on it. They have a working group working on it. And their hope is to get it down to 25% over the next 10 years and then down to 10% long term. But right now it's super high. And it's a problem because it does reduce the availability of vaccines to the poorest people in the world.

• 1:34:43Speaker 05

  It basically means we have to produce twice as many vaccines as is necessary.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Or we have to develop vaccines that have a longer period of time that they can sit at room temperature. Even if they have to be cold at the beginning of the chain.

• 1:34:55Speaker 05

  That sounds like an inherent problem with vaccines to begin with.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  That's part of the reason why we still use thimerosal, I mean, the world, not in the US. Which is a preservative. We put preservatives in vaccines for this reason.

• 1:35:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, preservatives in anything are so that we can get them to be extended shelf life. Yeah, it's a good thing.

• 1:35:15Speaker 05

  Folks.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  All right. This means that the first known inoculation preceded the first vaccination by over 700 years is also science. What?

• 1:35:25Speaker 05

  And it's not 700 years ago. It only predated 700 years, but the first inoculation must have been in like the 15th or 16th century or something.

• 1:35:32Speaker 02

  Well, when was it exactly?

• 1:35:34Speaker 05

  Uh, I don't know exactly.

• 1:35:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, so again, like variolation, like smallpox was in the 1700s and that's the first sort of generally accepted whatever.

• 1:35:43Speaker 05

  Is that considered inoculation?

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:45Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, that's the definition of inoculation. That's where we get the word. But so 1700, yeah, it's 2026 now. No, but God.

• 1:35:56Speaker 05

  Well, 700 years prior. So the year 1000 is was the first.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Exactly. The year 1000. That's exactly the correct date. Yep. In China, they took the scabs from smallpox, powdered it and blew it up people's noses. Oh, my God.

• 1:36:11Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing. Go them.

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:36:13Speaker 05

  Holy.

• 1:36:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And it worked, didn't it?

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  It worked.

• 1:36:15Jay Novella?

  I mean, so some like, some, somebody on drugs was like, yeah, crush it up and make them snort it, man.

• 1:36:22Speaker 02

  So the first vaccine officially is Edward Jenner, right? 1796, right?

• 1:36:27Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  This is more than 700 years before that.

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the, this kind of inoculation improves the survival from three in 10, if you get the natural infection, to one in 50 deaths, right? Three in 10 deaths.

• 1:36:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Down to 12. So you still have a one in 50 chance of dying if you get, you know, get inoculated with smallpox, but that's better than three in 10. So if you're in the middle of an epidemic, it definitely is advantageous to go that route. But yeah, things are always older than you think. You know, that's a good rule of thumb. Yeah. So this was tricky this week. I was, you know, it was the.

• 1:37:03Speaker 05

  Clever.

• 1:37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Those little distinctions made using and containing, right? That was the difference that made that one, the fiction.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:37:13Speaker 05

  Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  I love that quote.

• 1:37:19Speaker 05

  Roger Lewin, PhD, British anthropologist and science writer, who co-wrote three books with Richard Leakey.

• 1:37:25Speaker 02

  Yep, I know, I think I've read some of those books.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  Not what to think.

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why like when my kids were young, I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating. Like, if they would ask me a question, what color were dinosaurs? I wouldn't give them an answer. I would ask them a question, how could we know what color they were? Let's think about that, or whatever. I would always reflect it back as a question of how could we investigate that? How could we know? Give them a problem to solve. Absolutely.

• 1:37:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you sound like an annoying dad.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  They loved it. They, that, because then it's interactive and you're.

• 1:37:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:37:57Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah, they just don't want an answer and they loved discovering that I was wrong about something. They loved it. There you go.

• 1:38:05Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, we always go, why?

• 1:38:07Speaker 02

  Any adult was wrong about something, they, for some reason keyed in, keyed in on that specifically. I think it was an important lesson to learn, like, no argument from authority, all adults are not always correct. You can't listen to every adult. You have to think your way through it. They have to give a reason for it. You know, there's how we know things.

• 1:38:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's not even something that you have to foster and a child already has that. All we do is kill it.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just not killing.

• 1:38:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like little kids go.

• 1:38:32Bob Novella?

  Kids are, are natural born scientists, right?

• 1:38:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you go, because blah blah, and they go, but why? But why? But why?

• 1:38:38Bob Novella?

  Right?

• 1:38:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And most people just go, because I said so.

• 1:38:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, shut up.

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I said so, that's why. Shut up, kid, you're bothering me.

• 1:38:46Bob Novella?

  All right, before we go, I want to thank, I want to say, awesome job for Christian Ubiqui who survived the first.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  Hey, I haven't watched it yet.

• 1:38:55Bob Novella?

  Well, now you know, he survived the first episode and he kicked ass.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Spoilers.

• 1:39:00Bob Novella?

  Started a fire with, with eyeglasses.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Of what?

• 1:39:03Bob Novella?

  Good luck, Christian, for the rest of the season.

• 1:39:06Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:39:06Bob Novella?

  Survivor season 50.

• 1:39:07Speaker 02

  But no more spoilers, okay?

• 1:39:09Jay Novella?

  Before the end of this season, he'll have built some kind of robot.

• 1:39:13Speaker 02

  Out of coconuts and bamboo.

• 1:39:15Bob Novella?

  He has three robots on his shirt, which is awesome. I want to buy this shirt now.

• 1:39:20Speaker 02

  All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:39:23Speaker 05

  You're welcome.

• 1:39:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you.

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

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

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:40:08Speaker 07

  This is Colin Cowherd from the Colin Cowherd Podcast. Buy smart, drive for less, and trade for more. That's Toyota affordability. All starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or a half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's most capable and longest-lasting trucks. Built on a reputation for quality and reliability, Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. For a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. Shoptoyota.com. Toyota, let's go places.