The Skeptics Guide #1024 - Feb 22 2025

News Items: Bird Brains, Indoor Air Quality, Abortions and Infant Mortality, Black Holes Without Singularities, Banning Chemtrails; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Asteroid Hitting the Moon; Swindler's List: Tax Scams; 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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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, February 19th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Jay Novella?

  Howdy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:53Bob Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 05

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Happy Pluto Day.

• 0:58Speaker 05

  Yes, well, happy day after Pluto Day, but, you know, hey, you know, we can still celebrate today.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. It's Pluto Week, actually.

• 1:05Jay Novella?

  Really?

• 1:05Speaker 05

  I agree. It deserves an entire week. I mean, what the heck? We stripped it of its full planet status. We might as well give it a full week.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  But it is the first and the largest dwarf planet.

• 1:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. The king of the dwarf planets.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  They tried to make everybody feel better, saying, "We'll call them Plutoids," which nobody does.

• 1:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right. I see that once in a while, but yeah, it's not very common.

• 1:29Speaker 05

  I mean, you know, I read this yesterday, but it's, oh, it's Pluto Day. And I was thinking, like, does that mean on Earth or on Pluto? Because we're not going to celebrate that thing for, what, another 300 years before it comes around? But it is Earth-based, yes, the celebration.

• 1:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it still hasn't done a complete orbit since it was discovered.

• 1:49Speaker 05

  Really? I mean, that's, it's, it's an amazing thought. That's how far out that dwarf planet is.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  What are we celebrating, though? The fact that we're failing the Earth miserably?

• 1:58Jay Novella?

  Oh, Jay, coming in hot.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Yes, and not only that, not only that, but Pluto Day is celebrated on February 18th to commemorate the discovery of Pluto, which was made in 1930.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go.

• 2:09Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 2:09Speaker 05

  By astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  You know what I'm surprised about?

• 2:16Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  What about having to do with the dwarf planets? I'm surprised that there are still only five. I thought we were going to be adding dwarf planets on the regular, like because there's so many objects in the Kuiper Belt. And why are only five? We haven't been able to confirm a single one?

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that is kind of weird.

• 2:36Speaker 05

  We found thousands of exoplanets already in recent years. What? You're right. Why aren't we finding these items?

• 2:42Bob Novella?

  They're probably harder to find.

• 2:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it that they're not confirmed? Or they just haven't gone through the motions yet?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  There's a lot of candidates out there. I don't know what's taken them so long. There's just the same five. So who could name them? Pluto, Eris, Haumea, Maki Maki.

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Maki Maki, I know that one.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  And Ceres, that's in the order of size. Ceres is the smallest one. It's in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

• 3:06Speaker 05

  So close.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  So Ceres is intrigued because it was a planet. Then it was an asteroid. And now it's a dwarf planet. I think it might be the only object in the solar system that at one time or another was designated as all three of those things.

• 3:18Bob Novella?

  When was it designated a planet?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Initially, when it was first discovered, they're like, it's a planet. But then they said, nah, we'll just. Then it was like, all right, it's actually in the asteroid belt. So we'll just say it's an asteroid. And then when they made the category of dwarf planets, they got upgraded from an asteroid to a dwarf planet.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  I have a question about dwarf planets. It has to do with their moons. Now Pluto has five moons. Charon, Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Carberus.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Cerberus.

• 3:46Speaker 05

  Cerberus.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  It's a three-headed dog.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  With a K, but yes, Cerberus. Are these dwarf moons around a dwarf planet? Or do we still call them moons around a dwarf planet?

• 3:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Are any of their moons bigger than their planets?

• 3:59Speaker 02

  That's no moon. No, but Charon is an interesting one. Charon is big enough that you could, you could argue that it's a double planetary system or a double dwarf planet. Charon could be, we could decide, hey, this is actually another dwarf planet. And Pluto Charon is a double dwarf planet system. I believe that the center of gravity between Pluto and Charon is outside the surface of Pluto, which is something that you could use as a criterion for determining.

• 4:28Bob Novella?

  That's not a bad.

• 4:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Are there binary planets? Like, is that what we would call it? Or is it not quite like a binary star system?

• 4:35Bob Novella?

  Binary dwarf, binary dwarf system.

• 4:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Binary dwarf planet system?

• 4:39Bob Novella?

  I mean, you could, you could make an argument that Earth moon system is some, some sort of binaries, you know, binary. I mean, the, the, the moon is huge compared, you know,

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Relative to its planet, correct? Yeah, yeah.

• 4:52Bob Novella?

  But it's still tiny. I mean, it's, is it bigger than Mercury? Wait.

• 4:58Speaker 02

  Pluto?

• 4:59Cara Santa Maria?

  No, our moon.

• 5:00Bob Novella?

  No.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Um, there are moons bigger than Mercury.

• 5:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, there's some really big moons like around Jupiter, right? And Saturn.

• 5:08Bob Novella?

  Titan.

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Titan. Titan would be largest, yes.

• 5:12Bob Novella?

  Mercury is slightly larger than the moon, not much.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, and Earth moon. Earth moon, this is the reference I'm reading, are all larger than Mercury.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  In that order.

• 5:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, but Bob just read that it's not bigger.

• 5:24Speaker 02

  Our moon's just gotta be close.

• 5:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this is, this one site is saying that Mercury is slightly larger than the moon.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  How do you feel about causing a scientific controversy right on our show right now?

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Well, for

• 5:36Speaker 05

  The SGU is officially designating Charon as a dwarf planet. Change my mind, or change our, change our minds.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll, we'll write a letter to the International Astronomical Union to inform them of this change.

• 5:48Speaker 05

  To inform them, yes, right, right. Not inquire, not request.

• 5:53Speaker 02

  To inform them.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  We will slap him in the face with the fact.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Hey, if Trump could rename the Gulf of America,

• 6:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my god, don't, don't use that name, Steve.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  It says so right on my map here, Gulf of America.

• 6:07Cara Santa Maria?

  It says so in some of the maps.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  There's no international rules anymore. We just could name stuff, right?

• 6:12Speaker 05

  That's right. Exactly. So let's go, Charon.

• 6:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Every time you say Charon.

• 6:16Speaker 05

  We've just discovered the, uh, the sixth dwarf planet. Thank you.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  Carrie, you don't seem on board with this.

• 6:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  The controversy is not, you know,

• 6:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Stop normalizing it.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Oh, so we have to follow the rules? Is that what you're saying?

• 6:32Speaker 05

  I'm gonna make Charon great again.

• 6:34Cara Santa Maria?

  When they go low, we go high.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  You know what that means? That tells me it's time to go on with our news items.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  We're gonna start by talking about bird brains.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh.

• 6:48Speaker 05

  Who?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  I'm talking about bird brains.

• 6:51Speaker 05

  No, I mean, which person are we talking?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. So, the question...

• 6:58Speaker 02

  We all know that humans have the biggest and best brains, right?

• 7:01Speaker 05

  Well...

• 7:04Speaker 02

  But, it's interesting to think about the fact, though. This is one of those evolutionary misconceptions that I had when I was younger that had to be beaten out of me by, you know, reading good science communicators about evolution. Like, we tend to think conceptually of, yeah, well, humans have the biggest brains, and chimpanzees are close, but they're not as big as ours. They don't have, you know, as much sophisticated language, etc., abstraction, as humans do. And then apes generally have bigger brains, more encephalized, if you want to call it that, encephalization quotient, than other primates, primates than other mammals, mammals than other vertebrates, right? But we tend to think of the current extant animals as if they are frozen in evolutionary time.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Right? Meaning that, as you look back evolutionarily at our ancestors, that's not the same thing as looking across modern extant species.

• 7:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Tell that to 23andMe.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  So, our... Our common ancestor with all primates is not modern primate, is not a modern primate, right?

• 8:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  So, what that means in terms of the evolution of brains is that, for example, when we divided from our last common ancestor with birds, birds have spent just as much time evolving as we have.

• 8:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Right? Their brains are just as evolved beyond that point as our brains are. That doesn't mean that they've developed as much neuronal density or sophistication or whatever, or same specific abilities that we have. But we shouldn't think about... You know, we shouldn't think of them as if they have the brains that their ancestors had millions of years ago.

• 8:49Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I can imagine their flight mechanics and all sorts of cool things have evolved a lot more.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course.

• 8:53Speaker 05

  Well, sure, and the environmental factors alone have... Had an impact, I'm certain.

• 8:58Cara Santa Maria?

  That is what evolution is.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. Like even bacteria are just as evolved in terms of the, they have spent just as much time as evolving as we have.

• 9:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what about sharks?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Same, same thing. When we think of like, that's a living fossil, like that's, that group has been around for a long time. When we say that, like, we say like sharks have been around for a long time, but it's not the same sharks, right? It doesn't mean that they haven't evolved.

• 9:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And if we don't see a lot of-

• 9:24Bob Novella?

  No, but they say, they, they always say with that sentence, with, you know, with minimal changes, very little change.

• 9:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's because they're talking about their morphology. They're saying, if you look at them, they look the same.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Gross fossilizable morphology.

• 9:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  That doesn't mean they have the same immune systems that they had 100 million years ago, or whatever, the same physiology.

• 9:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And even if they haven't changed that much, they have been evolving, they just might have not had as much environmental pressure.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:50Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, like the oceans might not have changed as much.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  That's the other, the other bias, is that we tend to think of evolution as progressive.

• 9:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  When it is not inherently progressive. This was the fight that Stephen Jay Gould had, you know, he's like, evolution, there's no inherent tendency in evolution for increased complexity, or increased sophistication, or, you know, whatever, being more advanced, or less primitive, or however you want to conceive of it. It's just adaptation to the local environment.

• 10:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep, that's all it is.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  And that could, that could be a totally horizontal thing, a lateral move, you know, or it could even be, in some cases, like with parasites, a simplification. You may get more simple. Just depends on whatever the, the local adaptation, the local environment requires.

• 10:34Bob Novella?

  But couldn't you quantify the amount of change of evolution based on the amount of pressure, the selective pressure that, that has been, that existed through much-

• 10:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that is definitely a thing, but if you, you could also look at the amount of change as the number of mutations.

• 10:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  And that's pretty-

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 10:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's probably more accurate.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we can't look back, we don't know how the environment changed. We have to make all sorts of inferences on that.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  It could just mean, but they're basically using the same strategy that they were using 100 million years ago. So they've sort of made the same anatomical compromises, but that doesn't mean they haven't been adapting the whole time.

• 11:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Right. Anyway, so when we think about like bird brains, bird brains have evolved over the last 100 million years, just like mammal brains have. You know, they just have, they've just evolved differently. So when we compare brains across like mammals, birds and reptiles, for example. And there's a study, a recent study that did this, which is why I'm talking about it. We could say, well, what things do they have in common and what things do they have that are different? And this is another evolutionary question that comes up all the time. For functions that look similar, are they analogous or homologous, right? Is this convergent evolution or do they share, did their common ancestor have that feature?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  That was basically the question that they were asking. And this is just as a way of helping us understand the evolution of brains and vertebrates and also just, you know, how the human brain works. So what they found, the name of the paper kind of gives it away. Evolutionary convergence of sensory circuits in the pallium of amniotes. I love genuine technical jargon like that.

• 12:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Where it tells you exactly what you need to know.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Yes. And you would just say, oh, okay, what does convergence mean? What does pallium mean? What are amniotes? So amniotes are a subset of vertebrates that include reptiles, birds and mammals. The pallium is the gray and white matter that sits on top of the more, you know, primitive brain, deep brain structures. So it's basically the cortex, right? The cerebral cortex, which sits on top of the cerebrum. So this is the thing that greatly expanded in mammals and then massively expanded, like the neocortex specifically in apes and then humans. Right? That's the pallium. And they're saying, all right, now is the pallium of reptiles, birds and mammals organized in the same way?

• 13:05Speaker 02

  And for those circuits, right, those specifically looking at, I guess, sensory circuits here, that look the same, are they convergent, or are they derived from a common ancestor? So, how can we get at that question? It's always fascinating, too, like, well, how do, how do we know? How would we? Mm-hmm. Right? Because by definition, they look the same, right? So that, that doesn't tell you if they- Genetic markers? So, one is, yeah, genetic markers, but specifically, um, we can look at which genes are building those circuits, right? So if they're all derived from the same set of genes, then we could say, well, they

• 13:48Speaker 02

  probably then have a common evolutionary history. They started out the same, they just evolved in different directions. But if they are using different genes, then they probably evolved completely independently, right? Yeah, sure. The other way to look at it is more of an inferential method, but you could say, you could look at developmental biology. So there's the genetic method, just saying, well, which genes are active here? Is it the same genes or different genes? You could also say developmentally, are these structures coming into existence in the same time and location developmentally? Right? Because, again, developmental biology, to some extent, is a historical record of evolutionary history.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  It isn't exactly, of course, but, for example, this is always like one of my favorite examples, and I think it's very telling, the middle ear bones develop from the jawbone. That's because they evolved from the jawbones, right? That's why they develop from the jawbones. So, it's the same thing, you could say, are the neurons that are making these circuits in the pallium, the same neurons, developing at the same location and time across these different groups? And they found that they're not, they're different. Okay. So they're using different genes, producing different neurons at different times in developmental phase, but making the same kinds of circuits that are doing the same kinds of things.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  So what they conclude from that is that birds independently evolved- Yeah. -a lot of these, yeah, convergently evolved a lot of the same sort of neurological function that mammals did, mammals, including humans, right?

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Part of the reason why they're focusing on birds in the studies because some birds are very intelligent, you know. Oh, man, crows? But of course, intelligence. Ravens? Yeah, the corvids, they have very, very, you know, good problem solving abilities. But, but, and we've talked about this also, just if you look at like bird neurological ability, their cognitive abilities, it's different than mammals, right? It's just, it's still advanced, but they, their brains evolved to solve different problems in a different way.

• 16:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like bird song is something we will, we would never be able to master.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  The way, yeah, right.

• 16:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the way that they can mimic and, and react to different bird song and recognize these like mild differences. That's just, we didn't evolve in it with that need.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Same thing with cetaceans, like dolphins. They have really big brains, but they're very different than ours. They have way more white matter compared to gray matter than we have because those white matter tracts are processing all of that sonar.

• 16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they can sleep with one hemisphere at a time. That's cool.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 16:36Cara Santa Maria?

  We can't do that.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  Really? Yeah.

• 16:38Jay Novella?

  Steve, can we, can we have any real understanding about what their consciousness, what their conscious minds might be like?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Not really, not really. We can't know what it's like to be a dolphin. No dolphin whispers. We can infer it maybe from understanding their neurological function, but what do you think is the most advanced and different central nervous system from humans on the planet? Octopus. Octopus.

• 17:02Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's a great guess.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  The octopus has a donut shaped brain that wraps around its esophagus. But here's the, here's the coolest thing. They have about as many neurons as dogs do, but a lot of their neurons are in their tentacles.

• 17:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  So to some extent. Brains in their arms. Their tentacles have the capacity for independent thought.

• 17:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Think about that, having, so that's like a variable you would not have even thought of. This is like science fiction. It's like you're in, your, your brain is more distributed than our brain's a central nervous system. It is central. In one place, your brain, they have a distributed central nervous system in their tentacles. Their tentacles are kind of thinking independently.

• 17:47Jay Novella?

  Steve, an octopus could give itself a reach around and it really will feel like somebody else.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  There you go. That's the, that's the bottom line.

• 17:54Bob Novella?

  That's the most important takeaway.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  Good night, everyone.

• 17:58Bob Novella?

  Related to what Jay just said, I just saw an awesome meme today showing an octopus. It said, "If a female octopus is hungry and doesn't want to mate, but the male tries to, she'll let him insert his mating arm and begin the process before inching closer to him. Then she'll strangle him, kill him, and feast on his corpse in her den for a few days." Hell, yeah. Get it, girl.

• 18:21Speaker 05

  That'll learn you.

• 18:22Bob Novella?

  No, I sent that to Liz as soon as I saw that.

• 18:24Speaker 05

  How's that, how's that tentacle brain working out for you now? Men think with their testicles. Is that the same thing? No.

• 18:30Jay Novella?

  Steve, do you, do you think that they have the neurons there because, you know, they need to have like a quicker response to their tentacles to do, right? I don't know. What would be the benefit of that?

• 18:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Do they need more functionality? They need quicker reflexes? Absolutely.

• 18:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and there's eight of them.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 18:45Cara Santa Maria?

  So just the sheer number of them doing all different tasks.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another thing. They could do things. They could, that's right. They could function independently. There isn't one brain controlling eight tentacles.

• 18:54Cara Santa Maria?

  We know what happens.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  Eight tentacles controlling themselves.

• 18:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like if you do that fun thing where you kind of turn your right foot over and over in a clockwise fashion and then you try to like draw the number six with like your left arm and, or even with your right arm, actually. It's really, really hard to do.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  That's because of synkinesis. So our brains have trouble coordinating two limbs, right?

• 19:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Because we tend to, we, we trick it out by syncing them together and, you know, they're wired together in the brain so that we can coordinate them. But it's hard. It's challenging neural. Imagine doing eight. So that's, that makes sense. That's probably the primary reason why they're distributed in their tentacles. But it also makes me think of if we do, if and when we do encounter alien intelligences, we have absolutely no reason to think that they would be even recognizable to us.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 19:47Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, yeah.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  Little gray men, please.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  This is, this is the biggest contrivance, I think, in science fiction, which we kind of know and look past.

• 19:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  It's like, not only are aliens humanoid, they have 100% human brains.

• 20:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 20:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And, but the chances are overwhelming, even with a little bit of convergence, or even if we're selecting them for technological species, that they would be so neurologically distinct from humanity that it would be challenging to even interface with them. I think like the movie Arrival is one of the best.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  For like showing.

• 20:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's a good. My favorite sci-fi movie.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, a genuinely alien alien, including a neurologically alien alien that.

• 20:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And what's funny is it's a bit octopoid, if we're gonna be honest.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:33Bob Novella?

  Well, there you go. Ted Chang, the author, one of my favorite authors of all time.

• 20:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:38Bob Novella?

  I just wish he was more damn prolific.

• 20:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, what the hell?

• 20:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Was it called The Story of Your Life and others?

• 20:43Bob Novella?

  Stories of Your Life, yeah, and also Exhalations, his other anthology, high, super highly recommended, but I need more, man. I mean, he's got little things here and there, little short stories, a couple of them, but it's like, dude, I want to just like, never mind.

• 20:58Jay Novella?

  You know, a good way to think about how different aliens would be is the fact of what we were just talking about, how brains evolved on Earth at the same time, and there's huge variability in the way that their consciousnesses function, right? So, you know, an alien on another planet in a completely different, you know, series of evolutionary steps, it would be nothing like humans, it wouldn't think like humans, and like the movie Arrival, like, it could take an incredibly long time just to find some common elements that we understand as mutual, you know what I mean?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  Right, we might have an easier time communicating with an octopus.

• 21:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  And they could talk to the aliens for us.

• 21:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Or mating with an octopus.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Right. Of course, the other icon of science fiction that got this exactly right was Star Trek with the Horta. Yeah.

• 21:48Bob Novella?

  Silicon based, yeah.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  All right, Jay.

• 21:51Bob Novella?

  See that often enough.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Tell us about air pollution inside our homes.

• 21:55Jay Novella?

  So a lot of people by default, and I'm one of them, think that, you know, if the outdoor air is clean, then the indoor air must be clean as well, right? Because you just think, okay, that air, there's an air exchange and, you know, you know, like when the, um, the can, the forest fires were happening and the air quality outside was really bad. The air quality, I, you know, I knew at the time was bad inside the house, but was it equally as bad? Or could it even be worse under certain circumstances? And the answer is yes to everything, right? It could be anywhere and we don't know. Most people have no idea what the air quality in their house is. But we have new research that came out from the University of Birmingham. This was published in Scientific Reports, and they found that indoor air pollution can be significantly higher and more unpredictable

• 22:40Jay Novella?

  than outdoor air, even when the outdoor air is, is actually high quality. What they do is they, they use low-cost sensors, and it's a pretty simple solution. Instead of, you know, sensors are typically very expensive and they, they might even do way more than you need them to do, but there are low-cost sensors out there. And the researchers use these low-cost sensors to monitor particulate matter, it's also called PM, but I'll, I'll continue to call it particulate matter, in three homes over a two-week period. And surprisingly, all three homes had higher and more variable particulate matter levels than the outdoor environment. One home exceeded the WHO's 24-hour PM 2.5, right? So basically,

• 23:22Jay Novella?

  you know, particulate matter 2.5 is basically telling you the size of the particulate matter. 2.5 is small, very small. And the WHO says over a 24-hour period, your particulate matter at the 2.5 size safety limit has to be a particular level, or else it's, it could be damaging, right? So one of the houses of the three that they were testing, you know, exceeded the safety limit. Nine of the 14 days, one of the houses exceeded the safety limit, and that's really concerning. So this shows that outdoor air quality, it's not a reliable indicator of what people actually breathe inside their homes. Indoor air pollution is actually influenced by a lot of factors, including household activities,

• 24:05Jay Novella?

  the home ventilation system, and the external pollution sources around their home. So the study identified five key contributors, right? Two related to the indoor activities, like cooking on a gas stove, and actually indoor movement, meaning people move around in the house, and that has a negative effect on the air quality. And simply what it does is it stirs up settled particulate matter, which our houses are covered in, right? I mean, that, the stuff is everywhere. You ever have sunbeams come into your living space? And you could see the air, you could see what's in the air, and you're like, damn.

• 24:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, as a kid, you know, it was like, ooh, dust in the air, you know.

• 24:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but that's, you know, we're constantly shedding skin cells, and we're constantly adding pollutants to, most of us are, to the air in our homes. So the other three I was talking about, these are linked to the external sources, and these would include emissions from, say, a nearby restaurant, right? That's not uncommon for a lot of people. So this variation definitely underscores the need for household-specific air quality monitoring. So why do particulate matter levels differ between homes? What's the reason why these three homes, we only studied three homes, and there was a big difference in them? Why is that the case? So the three homes in the study were located in the same neighborhood. It was Selly Oak, Birmingham, and they had similar structural features.

• 25:23Jay Novella?

  This included gas and central heating, you know, gas stoves, yet their particulate matter levels varied significantly. And it demonstrated how personal habits and ventilation and external pollutants impact the air quality. So these variations are affected by the frequency of cooking, you know, and it's all cooking, but if you use a gas stove, it's a lot worse. And, you know, what cleaning products are used. So outdoor pollution can get into the house right through your door, right through your windows, you know. You have, you ever feel a draft coming from a door in your house? That's because, you know, the seal isn't 100%. That will definitely let outside air in. Your ventilation system will let outside air in. If you have a home, you know, like a freestanding home, it is supposed to breathe. It is supposed to have an air exchange.

• 26:09Jay Novella?

  You don't want it to be on 100% lockdown because the air, you know, that keeps the, uh, the moisture levels at a, you know, in a place where you don't get mold and all that stuff. So larger particles, we'll call them particulate matter 10, right? They settle quickly because they're heavier, but the smaller particles, you know, the 2.5 and, and the one tend to linger and then this increases your inhalation exposure. Many people assume the indoors are safe, but they might actually be exposed to, you know, worse pollution in their house. So what can we do about it? One of the study's key contributions was actually demonstrating how these low-cost sensors can, absolutely, they can track indoor air pollution. They can give you really good information.

• 26:52Jay Novella?

  Researchers use something called non-negative matrix factorization. Say that, Bob. Non-matrix factorization. Fail. Anyway.

• 27:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Non-negative matrix factorization.

• 27:03Jay Novella?

  Good job, Karen. This is a sophisticated data analysis technique that pinpoints pollution sources and, and the patterns of the pollution, right? And these sensors provide a very cost-effective way for homeowners and policymakers to monitor the air quality in real time. And you do want real-time monitoring, you know, you don't want it to have to, you don't want it to have to do a lot of processing. You don't want to have to actually like send the data away, you know, and have like the results sent to you. You want to know what's, what's going on day by day, if you, if you, if you care to be that fastidious. Professor Francis Pope, who's a co-author of the study, said, "Our method is easily scalable due to its low cost and would allow air quality management in homes across Britain and beyond." He actually said that.

• 27:46Jay Novella?

  So how can you improve indoor air quality? Like I said, first, you know, you could buy some of these low-cost monitoring systems. Uh, there is no single solution. There's lots of steps that can help reduce exposure. You need to improve the ventilation, right? Open the windows if you can, you know, when outdoor air is clean and you could easily find that out on the web. You could use exhaust fans while cooking, right? You definitely want to have something sucking the air above your stove out and pushing it outside. Use air purifiers. I have one here in my office. Uh, you know, you want something that has HEPA filters. Uh, they can, you could get filters that can remove these 2.5 and the size 10 particles, obviously, because they're bigger, but you can get the HEPA filter that removes the small and more

• 28:28Jay Novella?

  dangerous particles. You could reduce the indoor pollutants, right? Don't smoke inside. How about just don't smoke? Limit candles and incense, you know, that they put a lot of stuff in the air. Use a low VOC cleaning products, right? These are the harsh chemicals that we use. You know, what happens when you use a cleaning product is like bleach or whatever, like any sprays and stuff. They, the, whatever is in there evaporates, goes right into your air. And again, monitor the air quality, get the low cost sensors. You get the real time data, which will, which will allow you to monitor what's going on and make adjustments when you see something going on. Like if you're cooking and you see the air quality go, go down, that might tell you, hey, get a vent or open the windows when the weather provides.

• 29:13Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, Jay, I had a, an air quality expert on Talk Nerdy like years ago. And I remember talking to her about, you know, the different contributors. She talked a lot about gas stoves and things like that. But she mentioned something that I don't know why it surprised me. I guess because I never really thought about it. She said, one of the single worst things to have in your house without proper ventilation.

• 29:32Jay Novella?

  A pet?

• 29:33Cara Santa Maria?

  No, a 3D printer.

• 29:35Jay Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 29:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. She said they put off so much toxic garbage that like, you should really put your 3D printer like in a vent hood if you can.

• 29:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Because you know, like the, the plastics that they use, like they have to get hot enough to become malleable and they're, they're off gassing. So yeah, I could see that. Yeah. And there's places like, you know, there are, there are companies that have like a hundred 3D printers cranking out stuff, you know, all day, all night.

• 29:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope they have massive vent hoods.

• 30:01Jay Novella?

  And you know, and still, you know, like I gotta, I want to make a side comment because you brought it up, Karen. My mother-in-law bought my son a, you know, like one of those 3D pens, you know, you can like make objects. Oh my God. Super fun, guys. Like a lot of fun. And you could really get creative. You could, you know, there's a learning curve, definitely. Like I got better after I did it like four or five times. But you know what? I'm sitting there and I've got all this plastic, like leftover junk residue, you know, mistakes, all that stuff. And I'm like, oh man, like the, you know, like. There's a lot of plastic waste going on with this toy.

• 30:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's too bad you can't melt it down and reuse it.

• 30:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know. Maybe there is a waste recycling type of job. But now I'm scared because if you heat it up, it's putting crap in the air.

• 30:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you might want to wear a mask while you're playing with it.

• 30:48Jay Novella?

  So my final thoughts here, guys, go on Amazon, search the web, try to find some low-cost sensors that can give you some real data on what's going on in your home. And then respond to what they tell you. If you have bad air quality, do something about it. Get some air filters and open the windows. Make sure you have ventilation. Be careful about what products you're using. There's lots of things you could do that could make a significant improvement in your home.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Jay.

• 31:14Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Kara, this is a difficult topic. What is the effect of the recent abortion bans in the US on infant mortality rate?

• 31:23Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you guys think?

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It's bad.

• 31:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not going to be good, is it? Yeah, so researchers recently published a paper in JAMA called "US Abortion Bans and Infant Mortality." It was just published online on the 13th of February. So this was looking at the rate of death among children under the age of one before and after the abortion bans took effect. They looked across all 50 states, but they specifically compared states that had either implemented a total abortion ban or a six-week restricted abortion ban, which for all intents and purposes is like a total abortion ban because very often people don't know that they're pregnant until that point. So they looked at Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi,

• 32:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Wisconsin, and compared the befores and the afters. All of those bans or near-total bans were passed between September 2021 and August 2022 after the Dobbs decision. And they found that, once the bans kicked in, 5.6% more infants died than would have if the bans were not imposed.

• 32:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Across their analysis, that was an extra 478 deaths. And let's like dig into that a little bit more. Black babies were disproportionately affected. 11% increase in estimated child deaths compared with other racial and ethnic groups. Also, an 11% increase among children with congenital anomalies. So, children with birth defects. You know, the researchers posit that this is likely because they may, that many women were, you know, forced to carry fetuses to term that were never going to survive anyway. And so, we saw a higher death rate among, you know, babies born with birth defects.

• 33:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Digging even a little bit deeper, you know, there are some questions here about whether this trend will continue or whether it will plateau at a certain point. There was an interesting comparison as well when we look at different states. So, for example, southern states had higher infant mortality rates than northern states with the bans. And the researchers argue that it's probably simply a function of geography. Like, if you live in Alabama and you have an abortion ban, you're less likely to travel across state lines because it might require more money.

• 34:04Cara Santa Maria?

  You might have to fly or you have to put gas in your car multiple times. Whereas if you're in a northern state where there was a ban, you might be able to go just across the border. And so, they think that that actually affected the abortion number, which then affected the infant mortality rate. So, researchers still don't know if this trend is going to hold. They also, this is only infant mortality. We're only talking about between the time the babies are born and at one year old. What we're not looking at at all with this data are women dying in childbirth, right? So, we're not looking at the mortality of the mothers at all. We're only looking at, or even women dying during pregnancy or childbirth. So, there is some research that does suggest that maternal death rates are also on the

• 34:49Cara Santa Maria?

  rise in places where there's restricted access to abortion care, which has face validity. But we do need more, more evidence to support that. You know, kind of bad news across the board and the news gets even... Badder when we look at another article, which was originally published in an outlet called KFF Health News, but was republished by Undark, looking at the statewide publication of abortion statistics. And there's something kind of fishy going on here. So in Arkansas, in 2023, where there are one and a half million women living,

• 35:33Cara Santa Maria?

  the published abortion statistic for the state was zero. In South Dakota, the published abortion statistic for the state was zero. And in Idaho, the published statistic was just five. When they looked at kind of the same states that I mentioned earlier in the list for this other study, they found that many government officials across states with total or near total abortion bans started claiming zero or a very, very low number of abortions, starting in 2023, which was, of course, the first full year after Dobbs. And there are some, you know, quotes. I think this is an important one that sort of summarizes the argument here.

• 36:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Amy Kelly in OBGYN in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, said, "To say there are no abortions going on in South Dakota is ludicrous." She mentioned that many people have come to her hospital after taking abortion pills or to have medical procedures to help prevent death or end nonviable pregnancies. And she was like, "I can think of five off the top of my head that I dealt with personally, and I have 15 partners just in this hospital." So there's a concern here. What is wrong when government official statistics are not in keeping with reality? Why is that a problem?

• 36:54Speaker 02

  Because policy is based on those.

• 36:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, right? That sets the standard for decision making for years and even decades beyond. So, you know.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  What we're seeing is policy is dictating facts. Facts are not dictating policy.

• 37:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course. And that's, that's really the.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  That's authoritarian. It's 1984. That's what you do. It's double plus good, right?

• 37:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And that is the claim here that is really, really disconcerting, is that we are not only seeing that. Like you said, the policy is dictating the facts, not the other way around. But we're seeing a deep politicization of numbers, of pure evidence. These are not subjective statistics. These are objective statistics. And when they've become so politicized that, number one, individuals who are performing abortions are too afraid to document that for fear of retribution and very often prison time. And number two, people don't know what the guidance is because there's pressure, you know,

• 38:01Cara Santa Maria?

  coming from different directions to say zero, even if it wasn't zero. What you end up with is this kind of culture of people going along with that claim. And then what happens later when we say, oh, in a state with no abortions, these were the statistics, these were the numbers, look at the maternal health, look at the, you know, infant health, well, that doesn't really tell us anything if there were actually 500 abortions that took place. It's, it's very, very unlikely that across these states, there were no abortions. We do know that some of these statistics are not based on pharmaceutical abortion, because those happened across state lines, blah, blah, blah. But even with medical abortions, it's just highly unlikely. Abortions still happen even in these states when the mother's going to die, when, when

• 38:46Cara Santa Maria?

  specifically, it has to happen to save the mother's life. And yet, still, these states are claiming that that happens zero times. And it's just really not feasible. So, yeah, this is, I could probably find 50 more articles about some of the negative ramifications that happened after Dobbs. But these are pretty objective outcomes that are really disconcerting and really aren't political or shouldn't be politicized. They're nonpartisan outcomes.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  And whatever your partisan view is, you have to acknowledge the reality.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  If this is the trade off that you advocate, then advocate it. Don't pretend it's not a trade off.

• 39:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. And that's what's happening now, is that, oh, well, let's, let's cook the books, you know, so to speak. And that's a really dangerous thing to do when we're talking about public health. Yeah. And usually, the CDC does collect statistics. Not every state contributes, but the CDC does collect statistics on this. Who knows if that's even going to continue?

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Kara, don't worry. RFK Jr. is going to sort it all out.

• 39:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Now we have totally fact-based American public health policy.

• 39:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure. Just get some ivermectin, we'll all be fine.

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's all good. Just get that, you know, once you remove fluoride from the water, it's all will go away.

• 40:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, then we'll be good.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, Bob, tell us how to make a black hole without a singularity.

• 40:07Bob Novella?

  What?

• 40:07Speaker 02

  In ten easy steps.

• 40:10Bob Novella?

  Just go in there, kick out the singularity, you're good. Yeah, this was so much fun. A fascinating paper published recently has, for the first time, modeled a black hole without the need of a pesky singularity inside, and also without the need of some weird exotic matter to make that singularity disappear. These scientists are from the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona, and this was published in Physics Letters B. The title of the paper is Regular Black Holes From Pure Gravity. Pure gravity. All right, put on your seatbelts a little bit, guys. Let me just set the table quick, though, for this paper. And this should be nothing new for many of our listeners. Einstein's general relativity paints a picture of gravity

• 40:54Bob Novella?

  as what? Spacetime curving in response to mass and energy, right? Collapsing matter has nothing to stop it at the center of a black hole, it just like keeps collapsing. The result is what Einstein's field equations describe as a point of infinite density and curvature that we call a gravitational singularity. If true, this wouldn't be just some abstract concept of infinity. It would be a part of the physical universe. And, yeah, that's, scientists are like, I don't think so. They've always, they've had a problem with this since the get-go. The main problem is that this is essentially a black box in these black holes. Our best theories that handle these extremes like quantum mechanics and general relativity can't make predictions about what's in that box by themselves.

• 41:39Bob Novella?

  We need to combine them into one of the holy grails of physics, quantum gravity. We have some partial models of quantum gravity. I'm sure you've heard of some of these. String theory, duh, loop quantum gravity, the holographic principle, and there's other ones that are more obscure, but none of them are really ready for primetime, obviously, or you would have been hearing me crow about that on this show over and over. In the meantime, to remove these singularities, scientists have often resorted to models that invoke what's called exotic matter. I hadn't followed this too closely. I wasn't aware of how this worked, but what they usually, what they would typically do is they would take this exotic matter, usually takes a form of matter that has weird characteristics, like negative energy, and they could have, you know, potentially weird counterintuitive

• 42:24Bob Novella?

  effects on gravity. And the hopes is that exotic matter could alter the collapse of the matter, forming the singularity, alter that collapse, somehow preventing the formation of a singularity, maybe replacing it with some new quantum structure with finite density and curvature and no more infinities. You know, that's, that was the hope. Unfortunately, this exotic matter has never been observed in nature and it's purely theoretical. So they're just kind of like, well, let's see what happens if we do this. Even as a theoretical construct, it's hard to use and work with exotic matter, but can you guess why it's hard? It's because we would need quantum gravity to understand exotic matter and what its possibilities

• 43:09Bob Novella?

  are better. So it's just like, oh, here we're back to this quantum gravity again. We don't have it. We need it. Okay. So then, creating a model that does away with the need for a singularity without invoking exotic matter, that's pretty slick, right? So how do they do it? So I just, I grabbed like the bottom line quote from the paper, the most, in my mind, the most important quote from the paper, and it was, "We show via an explicit construction how an infinite tower of higher curvature corrections generically leads to a resolution of the Schwarzschild singularity." Okay? An infinite tower of higher curvature corrections. Jay, repeat that to me. Gotcha punk. Infinite power, higher corrections. Yeah, yeah, no. Forgot the curve part.

• 43:53Bob Novella?

  That's the meat of this whole paper. Infinite tower of higher curvature corrections. When I read that, I'm like, what does that mean? Where are they going with that? How am I going to describe this? Another way to express that, so that it's marginally easier to understand, is it's just an infinite series of curvature corrections. Alright, that's better. I know the word curvature in this context, right? That makes sense. But what is being corrected? And why do we need an infinite number of them? So what was going on there? So what they're doing is they're refining general relativity. Because general relativity is real good in low-energy regimes. If you want to deal with orbiting planets and bending starlight, then general relativity is fantastic.

• 44:36Bob Novella?

  But when energies go really high, as they are in a collapsing star, then general relativity needs to take that into account. Those high energies need to be taken into account. So that's why these quantum corrections need to be added to Einstein's equations. So it's a lot like Newtonian mechanics. Newtonian mechanics predictions at low energies and velocities are wonderful. If you want to put an orbiter, a probe into orbit around Pluto, then Newtonian mechanics can absolutely do that. No problem. Perfectly fine. No worries. But if you need to deal with anything that's near the speed of light, then Newtonian mechanics fails. It's not going to do what needs to be done. And this is one of the places where special relativity was able to step in and show it

• 45:21Bob Novella?

  how it's done. So now, to summarize that quickly, this paper supports the idea that general relativity is really, the general relativity that we know they contend, is really a low-energy approximation. Higher energies need to be accounted for with these curvature corrections. So that's why these curvature corrections are needed to be added, to take into account these higher energies involved. Alright, so why do we need an infinite number of these corrections? And I found a good analogy for this. And the analogy is a stairway. Now imagine the shape of a stairway. The shape of each step, you can think of as an abrupt jump in. The curvature like a singularity, right? Do you follow that bit right there?

• 46:02Bob Novella?

  You know, if you're following the pathway up and you got the step, that peak, that that shape is kind of like a jump in curvature. Now, you could smooth out those, you could smooth that out by adding curvature corrections. Now, in this, in this analogy, you could replace each step, each one, but replace them with a smaller step. And then you do it again, replace all the steps with smaller and ever smaller steps. So now, if you want a perfectly smooth ramp, you would need an infinite amount of smaller and smaller steps.

• 46:32Cara Santa Maria?

  That makes sense.

• 46:32Bob Novella?

  Now, I know that's not a perfect analogy, but I hope it kind of gives you the idea of what was going on here and why they, why they need an infinite number of these in order to make these corrections. So this is how you can get rid of a black hole singularity in this paper. This is kind of how they describe what's happening. Now, you make these quantum corrections to Einstein's equations to account for the high energies involved. Now, a finite, a finite number of corrections will help. It will lessen the infinite curvature of the singularity, but it will not, it will only lessen it a certain amount. You need an infinite number of these corrections. And when you do that, then the singularity will disappear. So, and so this is why that quote from the, the paper that, that was referring to the infinite tower of higher curvature corrections.

• 47:16Bob Novella?

  That's why that quote was so, so important. It really encapsulates the whole thing. What this theory is doing essentially is describing a deeper, more generalized version of general relativity. That's, that's, that's an interesting point, a very important point to get, get across there. So, so why is this compelling? One of the thoughts I had was, why is this compelling to scientists? And why, you know, couldn't this just be some ad hoc lucky fix, you know, with, with no likely relation to reality? And that was, um, you know, so I had to do some digging to find out, why is this compelling to these scientists? Why could this potentially be an important, a really important paper? First of all, the techniques that they use, that use these infinite series to refine low energy approximations, that is common.

• 48:01Bob Novella?

  Q E D, quantum electrodynamics, did it for Maxwell's revolutionary equations on electromagnetism. This is something that has been done in physics. In science, over and over, this is not just something that, hey, let's throw an infinite series of corrections in here. No, this is something that's been done before. Also, they looked at other quantum gravity models, like string theory and loop quantum gravity, and those models already predict that general relativity needs an infinite series of corrections at high energies. They already said this. So when you have multiple independent quantum gravity frameworks agreeing on the same type of corrections, that at the very least should be very encouraging to your theory, I would think. And then another

• 48:44Bob Novella?

  reason that this is compelling is that they found that these quantum corrected black holes, this idea, this whole theory complies with the first law of thermodynamics. So that's always a sweet consistency check. If you're breaking the first law of thermodynamics, eh, maybe you shouldn't publish that paper until you figured out what was going on. So in conclusion, I was thinking, so what would be a good follow-up at this point? And I was thinking, well, what's there? If there's no black hole singularities, if they are just an artifact of a low-energy approximation of general relativity, then what's there? What are we going to find there if we can find out what's in there theoretically or

• 49:22Bob Novella?

  even experimentally? One idea is that inside a black hole could be a theoretical Planck star, which I hadn't heard too much about. Planck star, it's an uber-dense quantum object, right? That makes a lot of sense. Extremely dense, but not infinitely dense, which is, of course, what we're actually going after. So a very, very dense quantum object, and it might have bizarre properties, like it could exist at a superposition of multiple distinct states. Who knows what that thing could be like if it even exists? They talk about quantum effects that could cause a slow time-dilated rebound. Some people say that there could be bizarre quantum effects inside these black holes that actually allow

• 50:06Bob Novella?

  for a rebound, but this rebound is slowed down because of the intense time dilation. And they say it could potentially become a white hole in many billions and billions of years. That was pretty fascinating. On the other hand, some people say that the interior of these of these quantum corrected black holes have been described as potentially fuzzy, fluctuating quantum spacetime with a weird, complex quantum structure. Who knows what the hell's in there? This is what some quantum gravity models point to these potentialities. But, and I'll end with the coolest part of all, is we may be able to actually find out about this experimentally, observationally. When these black holes merge, you know how we've detected gravitational waves and fluctuations

• 50:50Bob Novella?

  of spacetime, traveling at the speed of light away from these massive events like merging black holes? Those waves may have some nuanced differences to what general relativity in its low-energy approximation predicts. We might be able to detect the gravitational waves from colliding quantum-corrected black holes that point to the fact that, yes, these black holes do not have a singularity. They have some sort of, something else that's not infinite density and, you know, infinite curvature. So, there you go.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Bob, can you state a concise takeaway from this?

• 51:26Bob Novella?

  Yes. The very annoying gravitational singularities in black holes might not exist because they might just be an artifact, an artifact that doesn't exist in reality because general relativity, as it's laid out now, is just a low-energy approximation.

• 51:42Speaker 02

  All right. That helps. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 51:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Here at the SGU, we love Quince because you can find high-quality items at not-high-quality prices, like 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters for only $50. There are, like, washable silk tops and dresses, and even 14-karat gold jewelry. And the way that they do this, the way that they keep those prices down, we're talking 50% to 80% less than similar brands, is by partnering with top factories. They cut out the middleman and they pass the savings straight on to us. And I love this. They only work with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices.

• 52:23Jay Novella?

  I just bought my wife one of the coats on the Quince website. Bottom line is, everything that I've purchased from them for me and my wife is awesome. High quality. I really do think their stuff will last a really long time. I love it.

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• 52:57Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Evan, finally, finally, we're gonna ban something that doesn't exist.

• 53:06Speaker 05

  Leprechauns, unicorns?

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Chemtrails. What's going on?

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Chemtrails theory, oh my gosh. That is a fantastical suggestion that governments or other secret powerful organizations are deliberately releasing chemicals into the atmosphere through airplane contrails. And they're doing so for sinister purposes like weather control, population control, and mind control. It's all about control with them. Chemtrails theory, in every respect, is actually a conspiracy theory. Yep. All right, I mentioned contrails. Contrails, that's short for condensation trails. Those are those white streaks we all see behind the airplanes. They form when hot exhaust gases from jet engines mix with cold air at those high altitudes,

• 53:53Speaker 05

  and it causes water vapor to condense and form ice crystals. Simple enough. But there seems to be a prevailing understanding that contrails will dissipate in a relatively, what, short amount of time, you know, 30 seconds, maybe a minute, two minutes at most, and, you know, they're gone. However, if a contrail seems to hang around for, oh, five minutes, 10 minutes, sometimes 60 minutes, after that plane formed the vapor trail, well, something must be amiss, right? I mean, contrails hanging in our sky for an hour, that shouldn't happen. Because we all know how long water vapor and ice crystals should last at varying altitudes and temperatures and air pressures. We're all meteorologists here. No, no. There's something else mixed in with the water vapor and the ice crystals, right? Something deliberately added by people, because what better way to get insidious

• 54:38Speaker 05

  and harmful chemicals to fall from the sky and ultimately wind up becoming part of the air we breathe and in our homes, Jay?

• 54:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Because why?

• 54:48Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 54:48Cara Santa Maria?

  His mind control?

• 54:49Speaker 05

  But, ah, yes, it's all about the mind control. Mind control, population control, weather control. It's all control. Yep. Oh, these are clever minds at work, you know, and they're sinister minds. Super secret, top level government led population engineering attacking the air we breathe. What is this all about? The understanding about why not all contrails are the same come down to rather basic understandings about what? Temperature and humidity. So if the humidity is low and the temperature is not cold enough, and cold enough meaning 40 degrees Fahrenheit, I'm going to use the Fahrenheit scale for this, then contrails, yes, they will dissipate relatively quickly, a minute, two minutes at most. However, if the air is moist and the temperature is below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, well, that

• 55:34Speaker 05

  contrail will persist longer, much longer, in some cases, 60 minutes or more in several circumstances. So yeah, if the air is cold and humid enough, these tiny droplets freeze almost instantly into ice crystals, and there you go. You got your contrails. But the chemical, the chemtrail conspiracy theory, this dates back, oh gosh, many decades. There are, you know, there are some reports of this kind of shenanigans dating back almost 100 years. I mean, that's practically the history of air, of, of flight, of modern flight. But it's been investigated. It's been investigated by scientists, qualified investigators have taken a close look at the claims over all this time of that supposed evidence suggesting that chemtrails are real.

• 56:17Speaker 05

  And in every instance, it turned out to be what? Bad evidence. They either collected bad data or there was bad interpretation of the data, or there were misidentifications of things all over the place. And that's not even to mention the hoaxes, faked videos and pictures also presented as legitimate evidence. So as usual, there is zero scientific evidence to support their claims, and therefore chemtrails are nothing more than vapor trails and ice crystals caused by the exhaust of jets. They are contrails, nothing more. But here we are, 2025, the age of AI, advanced robotics and other scientific wonders that shape our modern society. And what are some of our state governments here in the United States doing with their valuable time and resources?

• 57:00Speaker 05

  They are working on legislation to ban chemtrails. Oh, gosh. But Evan, how can they ban something that doesn't exist? As Steve brought up. Well, that's a great question, Evan. They can do it because despite this amazing modern society built on scientific literacy, some people cannot overcome their, as I call it, reality-challenged existence. And those energies are used to lobby legislatures to also do stupid things. Remember, politics is downstream of culture. And in this example, culture are the airplanes and politics are the contrails. And in recent weeks, there have been multiple state governments, not just one, multiple state governments that have been working on legislation to curb or ban or investigate

• 57:44Speaker 05

  contrails in the belief that they are actually chemtrails. I'll give you a couple of examples. Iowa, local CBS affiliate in Des Moines, says, "23 House Republicans have signed on to an anti-chemtrails bill in Iowa despite not having any hard evidence that it's actually happening." The bill states it would ban the intentional emission of air contaminants into the atmosphere with the intent of changing the weather. And here's a quote from Representative, Representative, last name Grassley, sorry, I don't have their first name. Some would say, "Well, it just isn't happening." Others would say, "It is happening." I think it's something we need to have a discussion about as a legislature. So they're doing it in Iowa. What are they doing in Florida?

• 58:26Speaker 05

  According to the Palm Beach Post, "Florida politicians indulge conspiracy theorists with nonsense chemtrail bill." Conspiracy theorists who imagine that some vague amorphous operatives in the federal government are intentionally trying to poison the country by trailing clouds of toxic substances. And one of the leading voices of disinformation on chemtrails is, who's this? Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Do we know that? Oh, yeah, US Secretary of Health and Human Services, who claims, this was just last August, August the 24th, says, "We are going to stop these crimes." Chemtrails are apparently crimes, according to. Robert Kennedy, these things don't exist. So, and yeah, and more, and these kinds of things got stirred up even more in the

• 59:11Speaker 05

  recent events that took place in places like Florida with the hurricanes and North Carolina as well, in which people believe that this is actually happening. And some of this stuff was the result of chemtrails, chemicals being added into the atmosphere. California, Shasta County, concerns about chemtrails, drone surveillance and election fraud, among other things. But during a marathon nine-hour meeting that last week, Shasta County supervisors deliberated over who to appoint to the county commissioner boards, but an hour of that meeting was dedicated to the perceived dangers of chemtrails. They received a presentation on the alleged dangers of chemtrails from a local community member

• 59:54Speaker 05

  who had no scientific or official credentials. However, they run a website called Geoengineering, name is Dane Wigginson, I'm sorry, Geoengineering Watch is the name of his organization, and he produced a documentary. So therefore, he was called up to have his say. And he says, yeah, you know, obviously, this is happening and I have the evidence, but there are others who have looked at to his claims and said it is 100% fantasy. And finally, I'll bring up Arizona, Arizona this week. According to the Arizona Mirror, chemtrail believers are swaying GOP lawmakers to support geoengineering ban. House committee passes

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  a bill that would outlaw cloud seeding and climate intervention research after supporters cite debunked conspiracy theories about chemtrails. This bill will ban geoengineering, citing the long debunked chemtrail conspiracy theory as evidence that nefarious actors are already turning Arizona skies into a laboratory and treating its unsuspecting residents as guinea pigs. And that's just four examples. My understanding is that there are as many as 20 or more states who are

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  Either going to at some point this year or have already begun the discussions about chemtrails in their legislatures. This is an enormous waste of time and resources. It is absolutely pure fiction and pseudoscience and just one of the many things, once again, we are wasting valuable resources on.

• 1:01:27Jay Novella?

  It's so, it's so telling of where the state of the politicians and regular people out there, like the misinformation has seeped in very deep into a lot of people.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  Yep. Politics is downstream of culture. That's right.

• 1:01:39Jay Novella?

  And there's no way to really pull them out. Like I just, I'm sitting here thinking like, well, what could we do? You know, you could, we could communicate that it's false, but people, you know, like that's it. Anything that they hear to the contrary is the conspiracy at this point.

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And it's not like there hasn't been decades and decades of research into this, into this very thing. And once again, it's, it's, it's on a par with UFOs. It's kind of like that. What the federal efforts are to deal with UFOs and those things and whatever resources are being pumped into that, the same thing is happening now with chemtrails at the state level at least. And who knows, maybe someday at the federal level this will also happen. And who knows, you know, Robert F. Kennedy among, you know, among other peoples, you know, making these kinds of suggestions. Who knows what's gonna, how big and more, you know, prevalent this is going to become. And, uh, you know, just, just pseudoscience and absolute fantasy fiction.

• 1:02:34Jay Novella?

  But operationally, it's like, okay, yeah, let's ban chemtrails. Go for it. What do you do? I know. What does that even look like?

• 1:02:42Speaker 05

  You're right. It's like banning ghosts, right? But, you know, there's, it speaks to the culture. It speaks to kind of where we are in, in certain collective circles. And it's just, uh, not good. And this is just one more example of that.

• 1:02:57Jay Novella?

  All right. Thank you, Evan. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:03:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:18Jay Novella?

  What do you guys think?

• 1:03:19Cara Santa Maria?

  It sounds like fake English.

• 1:03:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like that song that George does at the extravaganza where someone just makes up a bunch of English sounding words, but they're not words.

• 1:03:30Bob Novella?

  Cute song.

• 1:03:31Jay Novella?

  All right, good. That's actually, you guys are in the right place. So a listener named Stephen Walker wrote in and said, "Hey, Jay, my guest for this week's noisy is a recording from a ghost box or spirit box. I had to look up what they were called, but I had a hazy recollection, probably from an earlier SGU episode that so-called ghost hunters would use these devices that hopped about different radio frequencies and recorded snippets of each to reveal secret messages." Yeah, so I think that's a good guess, because this is a very gibberish sounding thing that's happening. And if you were able to switch between radio stations very quickly, it would have a gibberish sound to it as well. But this is definitely not that. I have another listener, I have another listener named Michael Blaney who wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay.

• 1:04:13Jay Novella?

  Am I having a stroke or something? It sounded almost like English and I definitely caught a few words here and there." So I guess it's an AI-generated speech with a prompt, something along the lines of "give a newscast in a World War I-style report." Yeah, I've seen that. And that is actually a very good guess, because what else but AI would be able to produce something like that? If it was going to be, if it's not real. And a lot of people out there know what this is, because I got a ton of emails. Apparently, this dropped on the internet, I guess, a couple of weeks ago. The listener named Shane Hillier wrote in. He was the first person to guess. And he said, "It's an Afghani dude pretending to speak English." And that's exactly what it is. This comes from a video.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Oh, boy.

• 1:04:56Jay Novella?

  Basically, they're making fun of what English sounds like. Think I'll listen again and tell me what you think.

• 1:05:14Jay Novella?

  I think he does a great job.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  I think it sounds pretty good.

• 1:05:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Speaker 05

  It's fantastic. It's good.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  I wonder what, during the extravaganza, George has a bit where he also, he pretends to speak in other languages, like German, but it's fake German. But to us, it sounds like German. But I wonder what it would sound like to a German speaker, to a native German speaker.

• 1:05:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably just like that.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  Babbling.

• 1:05:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's the phenomes, or the phonemes.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  The phonemes.

• 1:05:40Jay Novella?

  The fairy bones. Anyway.

• 1:05:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Phenomenal phonemes.

• 1:05:43Jay Novella?

  I absolutely love this one. It tickles me to hear him do such a good job. And he's putting on like, you know, he's got like that deeper cadence thing going on too. And you pick up a couple of words in there, which is I'm sure totally accidental. I thought he said 35 at some point, but that's just audio pareidolia. I don't know. I would imagine just like with us pretending to speak other languages, that we do throw some legitimate words in there. Maybe, yeah. But who knows? Anyway, thank you so much for sending that in. That was great. I have a new noisy this week. This was sent in by a listener named Gertie. Gertie, you know who you are and thank you so much for this. It's a lot of fun. Let me play this for you guys.

• 1:06:49Jay Novella?

  Interesting. Guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have Noticon coming up. And we hit another milestone with Noticon because we have completely finished our programming and basically all the details for those shows. So we're in really good shape. We had a big meeting last night. Again, we have a lot of fun when we talk about this stuff. We had a big heated debate. I'll tell you what it was about at the conference, but we had a really big and funny heated debate last night. I was right, by the way. Yeah, Steve thinks he's right. Everybody else doesn't agree, but that's typical here at the SGU. I got multiple people to agree with me.

• 1:07:32Speaker 05

  There was a spectrum of feedback.

• 1:07:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there was. But that's what they're saying to your face. But anyway, a few reminders for those of you listening to the show. As you know, Steve is coming to the SGU to work full-time. If you guys want to help support that effort, I mean, the goal here is that we're going to, we're in process of creating four...

• 1:07:53Jay Novella?

  New, different shows, all of which are, you know, in the, in the hopes of pushing more good science content and skeptical content out there. They're very different programs and we're very excited about all of it. It's going to take a lot of time and money to pull it off and we could really use your support now more than ever. And let's face it, guys, I mean, you know, we all know, things are very, very much different in the world today than they were 20 years ago when we started this podcast. We need to push out these messages. It needs to get out there and that's why, you know, we're, we're doing it essentially. That's why we've made plans. Steve could have just retired and done the podcast, but you know, he tripled down and said, no, I, you know, if anything,

• 1:08:34Jay Novella?

  we've got to increase our output. So that's what the plan is. Please join us with that. If you become a patron, there is a lot of content on there that is not available anywhere else. We do, we do do special shows that are patron only, or patrons get early admission or whatever. There's lots of things that we try to do for the patrons. But the bottom line is, you know, we know that your support is being offered to help us do what we do and we want to do more of it. So please consider becoming a patron. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. We have a mailing list. You can go to our website to join that mailing list. It's going strong. Every week we drop an email that talks about everything that we did the previous week. Thank you, Steve.

• 1:09:12Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay. We're going to do one email. This email comes from Stefan Magnuson and he writes, "I was reading up on asteroid 2024 YR4 and I came across this on its Wikipedia page." And then in quotes, "Calculations using the observation arc of 55 days as of 18th February 2025 found that find that 2024 YR4 has a 1 in 32 or 3.1% chance of impacting Earth on 22 December 2032 around 1402 UT and a smaller possibility of impacting the moon about an hour later." I know you've talked about this asteroid before and potential consequences if it were to hit Earth, not great, not terrible.

• 1:09:55Speaker 02

  Given the timeframe, there would at least be some opportunity to evacuate affected areas. But what about the moon? Since the moon is much smaller, could a direct hit pose a greater risk of destabilizing Earth's tides, for example? Is this something to be concerned about? And what kind of consequences might we, might we expect if it actually happens? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this, and thanks for all the skeptical work you do.

• 1:10:19Bob Novella?

  Bottom line, not a concern.

• 1:10:21Speaker 02

  Not a concern, yeah, you're jumping ahead a little bit.

• 1:10:23Bob Novella?

  It could actually be, it could actually be quite wonderful in a, in a lot of ways.

• 1:10:27Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  We'd learn a lot.

• 1:10:29Bob Novella?

  So, based on some research I did about this, this could create a crater on the moon that's up to 1.2 miles wide, 2 kilometers. So, seems big, but that's really just a pothole compared to some of the big boy craters on the moon. There's one that's 1,500 miles wide, 2,400 kilometers in diameter. So, this would really be just a blip. In terms of the tides, the tides would have no impact.

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  Zero. There is no, there is no asteroid in our solar system big enough to affect the moon's orbit or to crack it open, right? Is the bottom line.

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, all that debris cleared out a long time ago.

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. In fact, if you collected all the asteroids in our solar system together, they would have less mass than the moon, less than the moon, every single.

• 1:11:17Bob Novella?

  Wow, that's, that's even less than I would have, I would have guessed, but that, that's interesting. The other, the other angle here is that, well, what if some of this debris from the moon hit the Earth? And that's possible. Chances are, though, that the, the small rocks would just burn up in the atmosphere. And we could potentially, if this happened, get a, get a, you know, a striking meteor shower, which could be a lot of fun.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, Bob, imagine if it smacks into the moon, we get a great show, and followed by the best asteroid shower, meteor shower you've ever seen.

• 1:11:46Speaker 05

  Sign me up.

• 1:11:47Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, watching that happen, that would be, that would make my astronomical day right there. Oh, well, it'd be more than a day, because it would take a while for that stuff.

• 1:11:54Speaker 02

  So, there is a bit of an update, though. So, the, he was giving the numbers for yesterday as we were recording the show.

• 1:11:59Bob Novella?

  3.2%, right?

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  3.1%, but NASA updated their numbers based upon overnight observations, because we're getting better observations now because the, the full moon's no longer in the way. Thank goodness.

• 1:12:12Bob Novella?

  Observing it. What's it up to now?

• 1:12:13Speaker 02

  It's actually went down.

• 1:12:14Bob Novella?

  Down?

• 1:12:15Speaker 02

  It's down to 1.5%.

• 1:12:16Bob Novella?

  Oh. Whoa!

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

  But still, it's over 1%, but they downgraded it from 3.1% to 1.5%. Still, at 3.1%, that was the highest probability.

• 1:12:29Bob Novella?

  Ever.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  Ever, of any asteroid this size hitting the Earth, this size or bigger. The probability of hitting the moon is 0.8%, so just below 1%. That's still relatively high as these sort of things go. But it's 0.8%, so we can hope for that, hope for a moon impact, that'll be cool. But it's not, not gonna affect its orbit, not gonna affect our tides, nothing.

• 1:12:53Bob Novella?

  I wouldn't mind a little bit of a scare, though, to just to get us, get us off our asses. I mean, I know we've been pretty good about tracking near-Earth asteroids, near-Earth objects, and that's great, but, you know, I think a little extra effort, I think, could be worth it. And to actually be prepared, to actually have some sort of rocket ready to go would be kinda nice. But I also read that if that, if it hit the moon and some of the, some of the rocks on the moon actually hit the Earth, that they were big enough not to burn up in the atmosphere, even they would be very small, and they would actually be probably, you'd probably see them on eBay. If somebody grabbed them, they would be so, so, you know, that would be very scientifically valuable, as, you know, as you could imagine.

• 1:13:38Bob Novella?

  So, so, yeah, don't worry about, about the moon or the tides. But hey, man, who knows, it still could hit. We will know probably much more, even more definitively in a month. I heard that in a month, the James Webb Space Telescope will be taking a look. And I don't know why it's taken a month to do it. I'm sure it's got a very busy, busy schedule. But that, that might, you know, that might be our last good look at that, that object until 2028.

• 1:14:05Speaker 02

  One other thing, if it hits the moon, that takes it out of contention for hitting the Earth ever, right? We don't have to worry about it coming back around whenever, and crossing the Earth's path.

• 1:14:15Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that'd be fine. One less object.

• 1:14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, one less object to worry about. Jay, you're gonna give us an entry of swindler's list?

• 1:14:23Jay Novella?

  I am. Well, it's tax season here again in the United States.

• 1:14:27Bob Novella?

  It is. Webbing season.

• 1:14:28Jay Novella?

  But this applies to basically any tax season anywhere around the world, because, you know, there are scams going on that impact people filing taxes and...

• 1:14:39Jay Novella?

  And so, anything that has to do with your personal information, this could apply. But in the United States, you know, we have taxes coming up and we have, I have a list here of six different things that you gotta keep your eye out for. So, there's something called IRS impersonation scams, right? We have scammers that pretend to be IRS officials, which is bad because there's a lot of people out there that really wouldn't be able to discern the difference between a person from the IRS calling you or not. Now, the fact is, they won't call you and they basically don't call you, they don't contact you that way.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  Correct. Not unless you are already engaged in a case with them.

• 1:15:12Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 1:15:13Speaker 05

  That would be the only exception to that rule.

• 1:15:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and that's fine because, you know, you already know people and you have names and all that stuff.

• 1:15:18Speaker 05

  And that would have happened in writing, probably through a series of documents among, you know, and not just one letter. So, yeah, you would have to be pretty involved at that point with that particular case for calls to happen.

• 1:15:30Jay Novella?

  So, what these scammers will do is they'll call up pretending to be from the IRS and they'll claim that you owe taxes and then they'll threaten arrest and deportation, whenever, anything that they can do to get you to pay immediately. And guess what? You're not paying the IRS, you're paying them. And they could ask for a ton of money and people that don't know the difference could end up losing all the money that they saved to pay their taxes. Very, very bad situation. There's also something called tax preparer fraud. In this scam, you have a fraudulent tax preparer, right? Someone that will help you prepare and file your taxes. And what they'll end up doing is that, you know, one of the things that they'll pull on you is they'll promise you very large refunds. "I have, you know, I know how to get the most refunds and all that stuff." And they, you know, it's common for them to falsify information on your returns.

• 1:16:15Jay Novella?

  This would end up leading the person who falls for this scam into having big penalties as the taxpayer. And of course, they can always steal your personal information and use it for identity theft, which is a whole other freaking mess that you don't want to get into. The phishing scams are the ones that I think most of us would interact with. Now, these are essentially fake emails, right? They'll send you email, you know, have fake websites on it that look exactly like official IRS websites and whatever, you know, the emails that the IRS sends out. All they gotta do is get their hands on one of them and essentially copy the format. And what they're trying to do here is get you to give them your personal information

• 1:16:56Jay Novella?

  or download malware, which would even be worse because, you know, then they can really get all your information. The IRS is not gonna, is never gonna initiate a contact via email. So just be careful. You know, you gotta know what channels the IRS would contact you through.

• 1:17:12Speaker 05

  Yep, or text. They will not text you either.

• 1:17:14Jay Novella?

  Then we have the social security number scam. Scammers might claim that your social security number is suspended or do, you know, due to tax reasons, right? And they're aiming to scare people into revealing their personal information. You know, pay money to reactivate whatever it is, you know, depending on who they get on the phone. They'll follow a script that they think would make the person most vulnerable. And watch out for that. Be careful. And there are also refund scams. Scammers can file fraudulent tax returns using your stolen personal information. And they're filing your tax return. And they're get, trying to get your refunds. And this happens, guys. This

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  That happened to me.

• 1:17:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  But the IRS caught it and now I got a PIN that I have to use to submit my taxes.

• 1:18:01Speaker 05

  Which is good. And I think that will be the way of the future. It's a, it's a way of doing like a two-step authentication and with the PIN.

• 1:18:09Jay Novella?

  Now victims, well, yeah, but you know, they're laying off a lot of people that work for the IRS. So that's probably pushed out. People who fall for this, they find out about it when they submit their tax return and it gets rejected because it's already been submitted. If this happens to you, contact the IRS immediately. You're gonna need them to help you fix this mess. And then finally, we have something called ghost tax preparers. And these are people who, you know, they'll prepare your, your taxes and then they'll refuse to sign the tax returns, which they have to do.

• 1:18:39Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:18:39Jay Novella?

  It's basically illegal for them not to do it.

• 1:18:41Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:18:41Jay Novella?

  And they'll also might promise large refunds and charge fees and on the refund amount. And they're often filing false returns. It's just a, it's just a big mess. To protect yourself, you should always verify any communication that's claiming to be from the IRS and use, you know, a reputable, reputable registered tax preparer. You gotta, you gotta find the legit people out there. There's a lot of them. You know, you can go on Google reviews. You can use a tax service like, you know, the, the several electronic ones that are out there where you just go through a series of questions on different, on a website that can help you walk, walk through it. If you really wanna work with a person though, just do your research. If anybody calls you about anything to do with your taxes, or you get any communication

• 1:19:25Jay Novella?

  about your taxes of any kind, be super suspicious. Don't click links, don't rush into anything. If the IRS really was reaching out to you, or if someone claims to be from the IRS and they do reach out to you, just say, "Okay, I'm gonna call back an official IRS number and go through that channel." Don't let them give you a phone number. You get your own phone number off the web. Make sure you have, you know, you're at, on the .gov site. Check the spelling of the website that you're at. Be careful out there, guys. Scams are going to explode right in front of our eyes now and forever, because AI is gonna enable people to have more density with their scams, and also, you know, do a better job, to be honest with you. So just keep your eyes open and be smart about what you do.

• 1:20:09Speaker 05

  And I would like to add one thing to that, please. Elderly people are more victimized by this than anyone else for a lot of reasons. So help out your family, your neighbors, if they need in these matters, because some people who are elderly don't always have somebody looking out for them, and they're left to their own devices to do it, and they're not sophisticated enough to understand these kinds of scams. So, talk to your parents, talk to your grandparents, make sure everything's okay with them when it comes to their tax returns as well.

• 1:20:40Jay Novella?

  All right. Thank you, Jay. Guys, it's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:20:48Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:20:57Jay Novella?

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is GMOs.

• 1:21:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Jay Novella?

  Some info on genetically modified organisms. You ready?

• 1:21:17Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:17Jay Novella?

  All right, here we go. According to the USDA, 55% of US cropland grows genetically modified crops, while worldwide, the figure is 13.4%.

• 1:21:30Speaker 02

  All right, number two, although frequently a target of anti-GMO efforts, there is currently no GMO wheat variety on the market. And number three, scientists have developed a scorpion cabbage that produces scorpion venom in its leaves, but this has yet to gain approval in any country. Evan, go first.

• 1:21:49Speaker 05

  Okay, number one, 55% of US cropland grows genetically modified crops. Worldwide, though, it's 13.4%. Okay, which means that, so the 55% for the US is cooked into that worldwide 13.4%, which basically if you took the US out of it, that figure would be much lower. We've talked about how I think these are illegal in some countries.

• 1:22:17Bob Novella?

  Well, define genetically modified crops, right? That's kind of important.

• 1:22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  You mean like the general definition?

• 1:22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, meaning it actually...

• 1:22:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Transgenic.

• 1:22:24Speaker 02

  It is a, it doesn't have to be transgenic, but it meets the definition, you know, the legal definition of a genetically modified organism that needs approval.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  Perhaps the only thing that could be fiction here is this is a USDA survey of information and, you know, how do they know really about what else is happening?

• 1:22:44Speaker 02

  Let me clarify, the first number comes from the USDA. The second number does not come from the USDA.

• 1:22:49Speaker 05

  Oh, okay, thank you.

• 1:22:51Speaker 02

  I'm inclined to think... I know, it's ambiguous, but I just got the figure from somewhere else. Yeah, don't hang your head on that because that second figure did not come from the USDA.

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  Though I'm alarmed because when you take the US percentage out of this, that 13.4 really drops and that's, you know, in a way a disconcerting number as it goes lower because for so many reasons we've talked about. I have a feeling, this one feels like it's science to me. The second one, no GMO wheat variety on the market. I don't know about that. That one's, you know, straightforward. There's not really much information there to glean. It either is or it isn't the case. So, you know, that one's almost a coin flip on itself. And then this last one, scorpion cabbage, never heard of it. Produces scorpion venom in its leaves. Why?

• 1:23:46Speaker 05

  To protect the plant? That way bugs and other mites and other things don't get in there? Has yet to get approval in any country. Okay, I believe that they've developed it. You know, and, and, and probably 12 other things that are, sound equally scary and crazy in a way. Uh, so I think the most likely one to be fiction will be the wheat one. I'll say that one's fiction.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:24:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It's funny because, okay, I, I agree with 55% of cropland, although that actually sounds low to me because so many of our staple crops are GM in this country, but 13.4% globally. Okay. Yeah, that also feels low, but it could be accurate. But then I was realizing maybe the reason it sounds low to me is because we don't have GM wheat.

• 1:24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I know that we have GM, you know, like the big staple crops, like soybeans and cotton and corn is a really, really big one. And we have some of those other crops like papaya, alfalfa, which is, you know, animal feed. But then I was like, oh, maybe we don't have GM wheat because the scorpion cabbage is bizarre. This feels like, you know, quote Frankenfood. It feels like a scare tactic that's often used like, oh, they're putting, you know, genes from a evil scary thing into this.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  Fish made of.

• 1:25:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, fish made of scorpion cabbage. So I don't know. That one feels like the fiction to me. So I'm gonna not go with Evan this time and say that's the fiction.

• 1:25:18Speaker 05

  That's okay.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  You're saying the scorpion cabbage.

• 1:25:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  Okay. We're still friends, right?

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Okay. Jay?

• 1:25:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, these are interesting. I mean, I'm going to jump right to, uh, the second one here. You're saying that, that although frequently a target of anti-GMO efforts, there is currently no GMO wheat variety on the market. So on, on what market, Steve?

• 1:25:38Speaker 02

  Anywhere.

• 1:25:39Jay Novella?

  Okay. The first one about the USDA, the USDA saying that 55% of US croplands grows some form of genetically modified crops. Yeah. I mean, I think that's science because there's some, there's some really heavy hitter crops that have, that have been genetically modified. And I think a lot of people don't, don't even know about it. But that one is definitely science. Uh, scorpion cabbage, I'm definitely with Evan. I, I don't, I don't know anything about this. It's producing scorpion venom in its leaves. Uh, and what the hell would They do with that. But, you know, I mean, it seems to me like that's doable because of our ability to genetically modify things. I mean, why couldn't they do it?

• 1:26:18Jay Novella?

  But again, I don't know much about it. But I mean, my gut is telling me that there are wheat GMO crops. So this is saying there aren't, and I think that there absolutely is. So I'm going to say that one is science fiction. That's the fiction.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  Science fiction?

• 1:26:35Bob Novella?

  Science fiction.

• 1:26:38Jay Novella?

  Science or fiction, Jay?

• 1:26:41Bob Novella?

  That was a good workaround, Jay. Clever.

• 1:26:44Jay Novella?

  All right, Bob.

• 1:26:45Bob Novella?

  Nice try, Jay. Damn, this one's rough. For some reason, I got stuck in my head that there is no GMO wheat. So I could be wrong. I could be wrong, but for some reason, that's shouting in my head. So based on that, then I go to the third one. Scorpion cabbage, that's a lure right there. That's just like, yeah, they're not going to buy that. So for that reason, I'm going to meta here, of course, I'm going to say that that one is science because it's just so godly stupid. That's bold. So that means that the first one, 55% US crop land grows genetically modified crops. That, I don't know.

• 1:27:29Bob Novella?

  These numbers, I think, have been tweaked up to a certain extent. I mean, 55%. So I was actually like, oh, if that's true, that's actually, it seems like a high number, especially when you add in the fact that about wheat not being GMO for some reason. So I'm just going to like, whatever. I'll say number one, the 55% crop land in the US is fiction.

• 1:27:51Jay Novella?

  All right. So we're all spread out. I always love that. So how should we go?

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. You didn't get swept, that's why.

• 1:27:59Bob Novella?

  Start with two. Get it over with. I want to rip the band.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  I'll take them in order. It's usually what I do if you're all spread out, not to bias in any one way. According to the USDA, 55% of US cropland grows genetically modified crops, while worldwide, the figure is 13.4%. Bob, you think that one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is science. Sorry, Bob. Yeah, so America is, you know, has the high croplands that are GMO. There are some smaller countries that don't have nearly the market we do that have a higher percentage, but are not, don't produce as much GMOs as we do. You know, so the US produces more GMO crops, I should say, than any other country. Right?

• 1:28:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Like in absolute quantity.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  In absolute quantity, yeah. But and for certain individual crops. So here's a breakdown of some of the crops. For sugar beets, 100%. That's it. 100%. No one's planting non-GMO sugar beets. Canola is recently also hit 100%.

• 1:29:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  If for corn, soybeans, and cotton combined, it's around 94%. Alfalfa has been coming up recently. That's up to 20%, but for all cropland, it's about 55%.

• 1:29:15Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Let's go right to the second one, because that kind of bears on the first one. Although frequently a target of anti-GMO efforts, efforts, there is currently no GMO wheat variety on the market. Evan and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Bob and Karen, I think this one is science. And this, and this one is the fiction. Good job, guys.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Because there is.

• 1:29:37Bob Novella?

  I can hear you saying, Steve.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:39Bob Novella?

  I can hear you saying that.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  I did say it recently.

• 1:29:42Bob Novella?

  This was all chaff. This was all chaff. So I wasn't wrong. All right.

• 1:29:46Speaker 02

  So Steve, you want to know why I know about this? Why?

• 1:29:48Bob Novella?

  Because you said it recently.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Because I bake bread and I do reading about wheat and I was curious about it. And I guess it's where they make it in where Africa or something? No, South America. South America. So it's HB4 wheat, triticum asstivum.

• 1:30:02Bob Novella?

  Quadratricale?

• 1:30:03Speaker 02

  So there's actually two. There's two types of genetically modified. Yeah, triticum. There's HB4 wheat and there's Roundup. Ready wheat. Um, the HB4 wheat is drought tolerant and that is being planted in some countries in South America who need the drought tolerance. But we don't really need it in the USA, so it hasn't really caught on. And I don't know why we're not using the Roundup Ready Wheat in the US. Uh, I don't know if that's a marketing thing or whatever, but the logistics behind that. But yeah, so in the US, there's no, there's no GMO wheat in the US, right? Which is what, what I meant. But yeah, that's not true in the world. So, um, Oh, that's tricky.

• 1:30:44Speaker 02

  There's GMO. That's why when Jay asked, what do you mean, which market? Like all of them, you know, that did. Ah, that was the right question, Jay. I did not clarify, therefore it's the world market. Uh, but anyway, yeah, a little tricky. Which means that scientists have developed a scorpion cabbage that produces scorpion venom in its leaves, but it has yet to gain approval in any country is science. The hell. So yeah, Evan, the, the scorpion venom is a anti pesticide, right? It's a pesticide, mainly targeting caterpillars, right? Cause they eat cabbage. But the venom itself was genetically modified to not affect human cells. There you go.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it kills insects, but not, doesn't, it has no negative effect on humans. So this, this exists, it just hasn't, it hasn't gained regulatory approval in any country yet. Uh, again, I don't know if it's being held up for political reasons, or if it just hasn't gone through all of the, the red tape yet. You know, it takes a long time to get approval. Uh, so it's, you know, it's just sort of stuck in limbo. But it's been, it may never come to market is the other thing, from what I've been reading.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Uh, for, for unclear reasons, but this, uh, that is an approach, you know, they're looking for, cause you know, we have like BT and the HT are like the two pesticide crops, right? So the, the BT produces a, produces a pesticide in the plant. So you don't have to spray it. And that, like, I think cotton, I think pretty much a hundred percent of cotton is now BT. BT cotton is just so much better as a commercial crop than non BT cotton. It's completely dominated the market. So which goes to show you that when farmers are left to their own devices, right?

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  Farmers have been now had 20 years, you know, 20, 30, almost 30 years to decide if they want to plant GMO plants or not. They're choosing the GMO varieties that are good for their business, right? Yeah. That have less, less loss to pests or, you know, have better yield or lower inputs or whatever it is. Those, those crops are thriving, except where they're banned, right? Except where regulation gets in the way because of unscientific reasons.

• 1:33:04Speaker 05

  Remember Sri Lanka?

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  Yes, that was the one that banned, um, artificial fertilizer. Is that what you're talking about?

• 1:33:10Speaker 05

  Oh, is it, was it fertilizer? I forgot. Yeah.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  I thought it was a crop, but.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  And then, and then they realized very quickly, which I 100% predicted that they're like, oh crap, we don't have enough crap. We don't have enough, um, you know, there's no, there isn't enough fertilizer, you know, manure.

• 1:33:26Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:33:27Speaker 02

  To go around, they had to like, and it would, their, their infrastructure, their agriculture was collapsing. They had to like emergently, you know, suspend the rules and, and allow for the use of artificial fertilizer.

• 1:33:40Speaker 05

  It was a catastrophe.

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  It was a catastrophe.

• 1:33:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  It was a total and it was 100% predictable. It was 100% predictable. You know, half of our food is fertilized by, by manure. The other half is artificial. Can't get rid of one or the other, right? You guys, we need both. We can't just cut our food supply in half. So you can't get rid of all of the, the animals that are producing the manure, right? Without shifting over time and replacing that as a source of fertilizer. And then you can't just ban half of the fertilizer, you know, that we're using to grow our crops either. And think that, well, we're going to just magically double our manure production. How's that going to work? You have to, you know. I was reading a good article today about economics, you know, because of the shenanigans

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  that are going on. And the main point was that you have to understand modern economics as a global ecosystem. That is the only way to understand it, right? All of the It's so intertwined. All of the old thinking, the Adam Smith kind of thinking about economics is obsolete now. You know, like, and they made the point to emphasize that. It's like, no single country on the planet can produce an iPhone. There isn't a single country that has all of the infrastructure necessary to produce an iPhone. Yep.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  It can only exist as an ecosystem of supply chains and various expertise and various manufacturing capabilities. Raw materials. Yeah, the whole thing that has to come together requires this intricate web, you know, and agriculture is the same way. It's exactly the same thing. It's a good way of looking at it. Yeah, it's an intricate ecosystem. You can't just start willy-nilly pulling pieces out, or banning things, or disrupting it and think like, it's not going to collapse, it's not going to cause a disaster. Because it is. We've talked about this too. This is like, my fear for, like, if civilization's going to collapse, how's it going to happen?

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  I think this is how it's going to happen. These intricate ecosystems are only going to get more complicated and interdependent and vulnerable to disruption. And a cascading disruption of this economic ecosystems can, you know, cause tremendous disaster. Not maybe the literal collapse of civilization, but I'm saying, that's kind of, you know, a significant disruption in services.

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, let's hope that.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:36:20Speaker 05

  Well, let's hope that when these things start to emanate and become reality, they course correct and say, okay, we got to stop this. We throw the brakes on, go back to, you know.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  And that will happen. That will happen, in my opinion. The only question is, how much damage gets done in the meantime? How much damage will there be before the course corrections are made? And like until that parachute is pulled or whatever? That's the question. That's the only question.

• 1:36:51Bob Novella?

  There'll be so much, so much finger pointing that by the time they realize it'd be too late.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. Maybe too dysfunctional to course correct in time.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  So, don't ban half of our supply chain for agricultural supply chain. It seems obvious in retrospect, you know? Actually, it was, it was obvious prospectively, as many people pointed out. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:37:18Speaker 05

  This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Duncan from New York, who wrote to us and the subject line in the email was Barry Unsworth quote. I had to look up who Barry Unsworth was. A fiction writer, an English fiction writer, award-winning writer. Never, never heard of him before, but in any case, he writes, "Hey Evan, I'm in the process of," he wrote releasing, I think he meant rereading. "I'm in the process of rereading Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth and stumbled upon this quote in the prologue." Here it is. "The kneading," K-N-E-A-D-I-N-G, by the way, "the kneading of memory makes

• 1:37:57Speaker 05

  the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeast-ing forever." And he writes a beautifully poetic way to phrase the rewriting nature of memory and recall. So, thank you, Duncan, for that suggestion. Yeah. And Jay?

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:15Speaker 05

  It's bread themed, you know?

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  I caught that. That's great.

• 1:38:18Speaker 05

  Bread analogy here. So I figured you would like that as well. And you'd rise to the occasion.

• 1:38:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 1:38:26Speaker 05

  Come on. You couldn't let, you couldn't expect me to walk away without saying something like that.

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Evan.

• 1:38:33Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:38:33Speaker 02

  And thank you all for joining me this evening.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  You're welcome.

• 1:38:36Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:38:36Speaker 05

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  Skeptics 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.

• 1:39:21Speaker 07

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