The Skeptics Guide #1052 - Sep 6 2025

Quickie with Bob: Real Interstellar Technosignatures; News Items: Sexless Seeds, Spouses Share Psychiatric Disorders, CRISPR Improvement, Robotic Bee, Tin Man Syndrome Retraction, Super Wood; Who's That Noisy; Taxing Deductions; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. Evan Bernstein. Hello, everyone. And George Robb.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  See you in September.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  It's September already.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  Hi, everybody.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Always great to have you on the show.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Oh, nice to be here, even though I'm here and you're there. But still, the idea of us being here together is what it's, what it's all about.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  We're all virtually here, basically.

• 1:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm really way over here.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 1:11Speaker 05

  I can see you from here. I can see your house from here.

• 1:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that a Sarah Palin reference?

• 1:16Speaker 05

  It's a very old joke.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  So, George, we wanted to have you join us, just partly because we love having you on the show. You're going to join us for the whole show. But two and a half weeks from now, two weeks from when the show comes out, we are going to be together in Lawrence, Kansas.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  Kansas, can you believe it?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  We haven't had a live show in a while. It's going to be a lot of fun.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Okay, who amongst us has been to Kansas before? Because I have not.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  I don't think I have. I don't quite remember, though.

• 1:41Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  And you were there. And you were there.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Seriously, right? How many Wizard of Oz references can we throw into this trip? I'm excited. I'm excited. I think it's going to be really cool because it's like the kind of place you go where I think the people that are going to be at these shows are going to be really into it and appreciative of this, of this kind of science island arriving, perhaps, much like the wizard in the balloon stopping by for a few minutes to be like, you're, it's okay, we're all on the same team. Yay.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're doing a extravaganza.

• 2:15Jay Novella?

  That's the nighttime show.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  That's the nighttime show. We change that every time we do it. We change at least one little thing about it. We keep iterating it and it keeps getting better. People ask us, like, what is this show? What do you guys do?

• 2:27Jay Novella?

  Basically, it is an improv show where George has all these different things that he throws at us that we know the game, but we don't know the specifics of what it is. So for example, would be we do a thing called Freeze Frame, which George and the audience secretly pick out a movie. And then, all of us but one know we're going to be told what the movie is and they have to freeze their bodies in a position. So the person that doesn't know what the movie is, let's say it's Bob, he's backstage. He comes out and he sees all of us standing in this weird position. He has to figure out what the movie is. And so it's like, we don't know what the movie is going to be and we don't know what any of it's going to be. And it's crazy and it's awesome and it's fun for us and it's fun for the audience because, you know, we're doing some, you know, some crazy stuff.

• 3:11Jay Novella?

  Steve, remember when your pants fell down that year?

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I do remember that, yeah.

• 3:15Jay Novella?

  And then also, we are teaching the audience about how they cannot trust their own senses. And we fool the audience in so many different ways.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  There's a lot of audience participation.

• 3:25Jay Novella?

  There is.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're going to have you doing all kinds of interesting stuff. To me, the whole show is about showing you how your brain is really good at some things and your brain is really bad at some other things and doing it in the most fun and interactive way we possibly can. Audiences love it. I mean, we get a really good response when we do it. We're always excited when we do it and people seem to really dig it. And like Steve said, it's different every time. It's different every time, even the same games that we do, because the games are set up to be different. Even if you've seen the show before, it's a very different experience every single time.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  And then we're going to do a private show, but it's really more than a private show. We call it the Private Show Plus. It's at least three hours, but it'll be more than that. And in the middle, we record a live recording of the SGU, but around that, we do just a whole bunch of interactive stuff with the audience. And that changes every time, too. We just sort of decide. What are we gonna do this time, you know? But it's always fun, sort of interactive games. And George, you're gonna give us a little bit of a demonstration of one of the games that we play during this episode.

• 4:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, later on in this episode, we're gonna play a little bit, just to give you sort of a hint of what's gonna be happening. It's like, like you said, there's this chunk of it that is just a regular podcast. Not that there's anything regular about this podcast.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  It's a little off the rails, yeah.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  It's a, it's a sort of off the rails recording of the show, which is really fun to see, because out of the two-plus hours, let's say, that is recorded, it usually ends up being an hour and a half show-wise. So there's all this extra little sort of behind-the-scenes stuff. And then we have on top of that, some games that we play. Stuff that also involves the audience in a cool way. It involves the rogues in a cool way. And it's, it's a lot of fun. And we're gonna have a little sneak preview today in this, in this episode.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, those shows are a lot of fun.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  So, so get your tickets while you can, because there's still, how much space is left? They're going quick.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Jay, how do people get tickets?

• 5:10Jay Novella?

  Well, there's, there's one particular way, George, that people get tickets here.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 5:14Jay Novella?

  It's a little complicated to see if you can follow along.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Alright, alright, slowly.

• 5:18Jay Novella?

  You gotta go.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  So you go, or I go? Or just one goes?

• 5:21Jay Novella?

  They, it's always they.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  They, okay, they go.

• 5:24Jay Novella?

  They have to go to the skepticsguy.org, the website.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Okay, and then?

• 5:29Jay Novella?

  Not the physical store, the website.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, not the store.

• 5:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, no, they go there. There is a link there for both of these shows. The, um, the Private Show Plus is gonna happen, I think our start time's at noon. And that'll run from noon to three-ish. And then, the nighttime show starts at 8:00 PM. I think, um, VIP starts at 6:00. But all this will be clarified in emails that I'll be sending out to everyone soon. Tickets are absolutely available. We would love to have you out there. You know, the Private Show Plus situation, though, George?

• 5:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:59Jay Novella?

  That one, you know, this is the thing I tell people, but they don't really know it until they've come, and then they go, "Oh yeah, now I get it." The thing is, we do a show, sure. We do a live recording of the SDU. But everything is off the rails from the get-go. You know, because we're in the space with people, and it's a more intimate situation. Like, we're joking around more, we're saying things that we don't say while we do, while we record at home individually over here. Like, it's just, you know, when we're in a room together, there's a lot more chemistry happening, and it's a ton of fun. Plus, you're, you know, you're there, which is gonna make it even more entertaining.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Well, that's very sweet of you to say. It's a behind the veil kind of look at the process of the whole thing. Plus, I mean, look, just one segment that we're doing, you've all been to Q and As before. You know, you have the podcast Q and As, you have the celebrity Q and As. We have a Q and A that is going to be the most original, different, fantastic Q and A you've ever been involved in. We are guaranteeing this is going to be the most interesting Q and A. We came up with this the other day. It was, it was like a bolt of lightning hit all of us. We went, oh, my gosh, this is the way we're going to do it. So if, if for nothing else, come to that Q and A. That's going to be really, really special and different. We're excited for that.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on with the show. We've got a lot of great content for you coming up. Bob, you're going to start us off with real interstellar techno-signatures.

• 7:14Bob Novella?

  Yes, thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Guys, you know, you know, there's so much nonsense out there lately, but interstellar comets and asteroids being alien technology. And I'm just getting increasingly frustrated with people like Avi Loeb and now also apparently, apparently Michio Kaku, who's also now chiming in with similar nonsense. It's like so ridiculous.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  Didn't he learn anything from us when he was on our show many years ago?

• 7:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God, no, it was, it was therefore, therefore very refreshing just recently to see a paper out there spelling out the actual red flags that would make me and real scientists sit up and take notice. Like, whoa, what's going on over here? So this is a new paper was recently published in the archive server called techno-signature searches of interstellar objects. Very straightforward. So this was led by James Davenport from the Dirac Institute at the University of Washington. So ultimately, this is a search for techno-signatures, right? Direct evidence of technology being used by some extraterrestrial

• 8:20Bob Novella?

  life, some alien life out there. Now, this paper specifically addresses four techno-signatures for ISOs, I S O S. That stands for interstellar objects. Okay, so that's the context. So this is a quickie. So let's just cut to the chase and I'll stop rambling here. The first category here is described as acceleration anomalies.

• 8:40Bob Novella?

  This is, I think, is one of the most important ones. So this is primarily deviations from an expected orbital path, right? Unexplainable by known natural processes like outgassing, radiation pressure, and there's lots of other subtle ways that objects in space can move non-gravitationally that don't imply an engine pushing something. It's just like slightly weird trajectories, but they are easily explainable and they are real. So one famous example for this is One Eye, O Muamua. This had a weird, seemed to have a weird trajectory, and we really just didn't get enough observing time to pin down exactly what was happening.

• 9:21Bob Novella?

  Of course, Avi Loeb was chiming in saying that this was a major example, a major red flag for this to be an alien ship, which is ridiculous. Nobody, no one reasonable in my mind thinks that O Muamua was not natural. This was just something we caught at the tail end of its orbit that we could easily observe, and we just didn't have enough time. We don't know exactly what was going on, but we have a decent idea. Okay, now the hallmark of this option, this category, these acceleration anomalies, isn't subtle in my mind, right? Any subtle motions that we can't immediately explain are probably going to be natural, right? There's something that, oh, we'll figure it out, it's just very subtle. I mean, what was that probe that we sent out?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was thinking about that.

• 10:03Bob Novella?

  Pioneer?

• 10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, one of our own probes had anomalous acceleration we couldn't figure out for years, yeah. Just slight subtle accelerations like a Muamua had, which was probably just outgassing and we just didn't know where it was coming from.

• 10:16Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  You don't need to hypothesize alien nuclear engines to explain that. But if it's doing major course corrections in a way that is beyond, what even beyond the possibility of a natural explanation, then that is convincing.

• 10:34Bob Novella?

  Right, so to me, that would be the hallmark of this first category, this acceleration anomalies, sudden, non-gravitational acceleration that's clearly unnatural, perhaps caused by some advanced thruster, who knows? Seeing this and... I mean, if it like changes its orbit or speeds up or even slows down dramatically, I think that would be enough to say, whoa, this could seriously be something artificial because this was dramatically beyond anything we would expect naturally. So that's category one. Number two was strange colors or spectra. So here we're looking for non-natural colors

• 11:14Bob Novella?

  or reflectance. Okay, this could indicate some weird coatings or paints or even glass. Another option in this category would be something like if we see an extra infrared glow, this could be suspicious waste heat, you know, for example. To detect this kind of stuff, spectroscopy could help, help us with this category, potentially to find unknown chemicals or even alien laser emissions potentially would be in this category. That was two. Number three was odd shapes in space. This one was an interesting category. So if something that we detect is incredibly thin, like a solar sail, say, or even something that was shaped like a cylinder, then this would be a huge clue. Unfortunately, though, I don't think at these distances that we're talking about, we might not, even if it was

• 11:59Bob Novella?

  a solar sail or a cylinder, we might not get close enough to have that one image that clearly shows that. But there are other clues or hints that we could get. If we saw something like unusual brightness changes or unusual rotation patterns or even light curves, weird light curves, any of those could indicate that we may have an object out there that has an artificial shape that is causing those anomalies. So that's number three. Number four, this final one is transmissions or emissions. So this would probably be one of the easiest techno-signatures to detect from an ISO in our solar system. I mean, we're talking about detecting potentially just EM radiation. Like, for example, the classic

• 12:43Bob Novella?

  one is the narrowband radio transmissions that SETI often is looking for. Now, this would be trivial for us. We've been doing this for many, many decades. So these signals, these narrowband radio transmissions are prioritized because these would be ideal communication frequencies. For long distance with minimal interference from the interstellar medium. It just sails right through with very little interference. And we've looked for those frequencies because it's ideal. If you're, you know, a technology that uses electromagnetism to communicate and study the universe, that's probably what you would use. But of course, if this is an alien spacecraft and it is communicating in something like sub neutrino axion fields oscillating at Planck scale harmonics, then we would never

• 13:27Bob Novella?

  detect it and we would never, we would never know. So I'll end with that. This has been your non-avi lobe quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Bob, what about a warp signature?

• 13:35Bob Novella?

  Oh my God.

• 13:39Bob Novella?

  Maybe we'll add, maybe we'll add a category five or maybe would that fit under? Yeah, that would probably fit under acceleration anomalies.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Or they're hailing us. I guess that's transmissions.

• 13:47Bob Novella?

  That's category four. Yeah, transmissions or emissions. So yeah, so this is the stuff we should be talking about. None of this nonsense, oh my God, look, it's going by Jupiter and Saturn. That's gotta be intentional. That's, that is clear signs of an intelligence. Give me a break.

• 14:01Speaker 05

  Gotta sell books, Bob. It's about selling those books.

• 14:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's what it seems like to me. It's just so frustrating. Dude, come on, please do some, listen to our podcast. How about that? Listen to that. Get some critical thinking skills under your belt.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, Jay, tell us about sexless seeds.

• 14:15Jay Novella?

  Well, Steve, I have a question for you.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:17Jay Novella?

  Do you know how the Cavendish banana crop is grown?

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do.

• 14:21Jay Novella?

  Well, go ahead.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  So because each, each, each banana plant is a clone, right? So you have to take actually a clipping from the form, you know, of one banana plant and plant that and that becomes another banana plant.

• 14:33Jay Novella?

  Those are the offshoots and they're called suckers.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:36Jay Novella?

  And I didn't make that up. Yeah, so that's essentially similar to what I'm about to talk to you about. There is a, there's a nice and obvious benefit to doing this. One, because you know, you can pretty much predict what the flavor is going to taste like, its consistency, how long will it take to, you know, how long will it last during shipping? You know, they know all these numbers now because they're dealing with the same exact fruit every time. But, and I know you know this, Steve, there's a dark side, right?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  There's downside too, yeah.

• 15:03Jay Novella?

  The downside is really bad and it's not as bad, it's not quite as bad as Steve's cats peeing in his banana. ...of plants in the STU studio. No. That, and that, that almost destroyed George's, uh, livestream show that we were doing that night, but I won't digress. I don't need to go there, because George knows what the hell I'm talking about. I do. It was bad. I do. So in the mid 1900s, there was a fungus called Panama disease, and it nearly took out all the Gros Michel bananas, which were the bananas that people were eating before they decided to switch over to the Cavendish. And now, there's a new strain of the same fungus. It's called Tropical Race 4, and it's spreading around the globe, because every Cavendish is genetically identical.

• 15:47Jay Novella?

  So, once the fungus strikes, you know, once the fungus figured out what, what version of itself was gonna work, it's starting to tear through plantations like wildfire around the world, and there's no diversity to slow it down. That's bad. Right now, scientists are trying to create that same kind of situation on purpose, but with more guardrails up. So, the idea is, and this starts in eastern Australia, there's a crop of, of sorghum, which it will soon sprout, it's under a mesh tent, and it looks pretty ordinary, but these plants are nothing but groundbreaking, and there's a massive modification to them, because they will reproduce without sex. Now, this is plant sex. I'm sure you can find that, like other kinds of sex, on the internet, if you're interested to see about it.

• 16:32Jay Novella?

  The process is called, catch me, am I right here, Apomixis, Steve? Apomixis. Apomixis, okay. So, their seeds grow without fertilization, they produce perfect genetic clones of the parent plant, and it's pretty much the same outcome as the bananas, right? But the seeds form rather than, like, these offshoot cuttings, and that, that's the way that they would reproduce those plants. A scientist called Anna Colletunau, uh, she's at the University of Queensland, and she's been working towards this for three decades. She began studying wild plants, like dandelions, that naturally reproduce this way, which I didn't know, I think that's pretty cool. So, her team has actually engineered the process into a major food crop.

• 17:14Jay Novella?

  Their experimental strain is called High-Gain Sorghum, and if it works, every flower head could produce- produce thousands of cloned seeds. And there are major players involved in this. They're circling, right? You have a company called Corteva Agroscience. This is one of the world's biggest seed companies. And they happen to be a partner in the project. And also, the Gates Foundation is backing similar efforts because there's a huge potential here to help, you know, small, small scale farmers, you know, in the Sub-Saharan Africa region where access to reliable seeds could mean the difference between feeding people and survival in a famine, which happens over and over again. Most commercial seeds today are actually hybrids. Uh, I have to stop myself.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  That happens all the time. That was Jay pinching himself, basically, to not say it.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  As I like to point out, before the first GMOs came on the market, like 98% of seeds planted in the US were hybrids.

• 18:14Jay Novella?

  It's a hybrid.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:16Jay Novella?

  So farmers, Steve, come on, get serious. Farmers buy them, they buy them because they deliver high yields, which is exactly what farmers want. Those benefits, though, disappear in the next generation due to genetic reshuffling, right? So you can't, it's not like gonna last forever. It happens during that, that one season of planting. And then it, you know, they start to lose the traits that you want. This forces farmers to buy new seeds every year, which, you know, isn't really a bad thing, if you think about it. Um, there's a big, you know, business around seeds and companies are involved. And there's genetic, um, patents and all this stuff. It's a whole other story that we could go into at some point. But, you know, it does require farmers to buy seeds every year.

• 19:00Jay Novella?

  APO mixes, like I said, changes the rules. Farmers could save seeds and they can replant them without losing the performance, which is the desired traits that they want from the plant. And this would break them free of an expensive seed buying cycle. So for companies like Corteva, it's a chance to, uh, to rapidly fix these desirable traits into new varieties, which would speed up development, it'll cut costs. It all seems really, really nice. And, you know, so again, this isn't just science. There's a lot of economics mixed in with this. And I dare say that there's always economics mixed in with big science. So the banana story, getting back to that, it is like a dark cloud that hangs over all of this.

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  So when every plant is genetically identical, a single pest or disease can devastate those plants. It could be in an entire region, or it could be globally. So this uniformity can bring stability on one hand, which a lot of things that we want, again, like I said, the size of the fruit, and the taste, and the shipping, and all that stuff. But it also creates a new vulnerability that we have to calculate into this equation.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  But Jay, it's not a new vulnerability. It already exists. We already have monocropping. We're already planting uniform hybrid seeds. They're just difficult to make, and they only last that first generation. The hybrid traits don't breed true, because now you get a random assortment of, you know what I mean, of matchup of genes. This is really just going to leave us in the same place, just a lot cheaper to propagate these hybrid plants. You don't have to hybridize them each generation. Once you make them, they just clone themselves indefinitely. The hope is, so the way I see it, there's two real benefits here. As you said, for farmers who don't have the money to buy seeds every year,

• 20:47Speaker 02

  they could potentially save and replant their own seeds. But also, the hope is...

• 20:54Jay Novella?

  That they just get a new genetic strain every season, right?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. It makes it so much cheaper that we could have a lot of different hybrids, so that we're not all planting the same one, right? So if you lower the cost of generating new seeds, that increases the genetic diversity of the plants that we plant, of the crops that we plant. If it's really expensive that a few companies dominate, and they have their signature seeds, they don't have as much biodiversity. I think the same is true of GMOs. Most of the cost is in the regulation. And by having the regulation so intense, it really makes it only profitable for a few mega corporations.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  The small startups have a hard time. So making the development and marketing process as cheap as possible actually opens it up to a lot of smaller companies and increases the variety of seeds that are out there.

• 21:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and hopefully, as they develop this technology, they will do a thing. Maybe it's on a cycle. Maybe every three or four years, they sell them a different strain. What would you call that?

• 22:02Speaker 02

  Cultivar.

• 22:03Jay Novella?

  A different cultivar, which essentially is different genetics, that would be variable enough that maybe wouldn't be susceptible to the same thing that the previous one did. And if they can make that happen, this could put farming in the hands of more people, it could lower the prices, it could streamline a lot of things. And again, another big fear that I have after learning about all this, is that these big corporations don't want that, because they want to make the money, and they want to make a lot of money. It's not like, "Let's do what's best for the people in the world." It's what the companies are going to do, what's in their best interest.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but companies, they don't own the plants and the cultivars and the seeds that are already out there. But if they make a new hybrid, which is hard to do that, then they have a patent on that for a while. But again, if you lower the threshold so that, say, a university, or a government, or an organization can make a hybrid with a stable trait, that then, to make more of them, all you've got to do is plant them and collect the seeds, right? Because the hybrid traits are stable, because you're just cloning it. Again, that's the point. Now, you can just, seeds reproduce themselves, right? You can just mass produce them with the stable hybrid traits, and it won't be, it will actually

• 23:20Speaker 02

  break the monopoly of the big corporations. Which is a good thing, in that, again, it gives us greater diversity, more competition, more startups, more other opportunities to do this. So anytime you lower that cost and that threshold for getting something to market, getting it in the field, that seems to me that that's a good thing.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  Jay, there was one word you mispronounced.

• 23:45Jay Novella?

  What's that?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  It's sorghum. Yeah. You have to say it that way.

• 23:51Jay Novella?

  Sorghum.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  No, in Pennsylvania here, there's fields and fields of stuff. It's corn, there's like, sunflower. But whenever I drive by a field, and I see it, I point at the field, and I go, "Oh, sorghum."

• 24:06Jay Novella?

  Why?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  I don't know why. It just makes me very happy.

• 24:10Jay Novella?

  You ask why, and that makes me think, "Do you even know, George?"

• 24:15Jay Novella?

  This is a guy that has infected me over and over and over again.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Well, this is a new infection, and I hope that whenever you see a field of anything, you'll go, oh, sorghum.

• 24:24Jay Novella?

  I don't say the number seven anymore. I say savin.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 24:28Jay Novella?

  I can't, I can't say it any other way.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  It's been Georgified.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  It's been Georgified. So, folks out there, please pronounce it sorghum.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  Do you know what it's used for? Sorghum? Sorghum.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  For, for, uh, gingham?

• 24:43Speaker 03

  No, I don't know. Yeah, for, for filler, right?

• 24:44Speaker 02

  Is it feed? Yeah, it's, well, it's animal feed, ethanol production, biofuel, but also just, it's a gluten-free grain, which could be used in any way that grains are used, you know, flour for flatbreads or whatever.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's got a lot of uses. It's actually a really important, uh, crop. You know, even though you don't, like, you never order sorghum at the restaurant. You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's not like...

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Never order what?

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Sorghum. Sorghum. Sorghum.

• 25:07Speaker 03

  Okay, thank you.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  You know, like, I've never gone to the store and purchased a bag of sorghum.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:12Speaker 02

  At the store, but it's in a lot of the stuff that we eat, right?

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  All right.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 25:19Speaker 02

  Thanks, Jay.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Kara?

• 25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah?

• 25:23Speaker 02

  Uh, you ever had that, um, friends, like a couple, a married couple?

• 25:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  And, you know, they have the same personality type?

• 25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  And maybe sometimes even more than that, you know? Tell, is that a thing? Tell us about that.

• 25:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That's definitely a thing. Um, we're gonna talk about a very specific study, but to broaden out, I guess, we could point to some really interesting research that as a psychologist, I had to study quite a lot of, like, why people are attracted to each other. And it does seem to be the case that while the number one predictor of attraction is, can anybody tell me, the very first number one?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Face. Face. Smell? Physical attractiveness?

• 26:04Speaker 03

  Age?

• 26:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Proximity.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Pro- oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's kind of.

• 26:08Speaker 05

  Well, yeah.

• 26:10Cara Santa Maria?

  If you're around somebody a lot, you are more likely to be attracted to them.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  Also, just be friends with them, too.

• 26:15Speaker 05

  Imagine there are evolutionary pressures involved in that.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  The one you're with, right?

• 26:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And there are others, though, right? There are, people are attracted to people who are like them, right? People tend to be attracted to people who look like them, who sound like them. There's even, unfortunately, a sibling. Do you guys remember? Oh, God, I'm getting into the weeds here, but there's a documentary about this very unethical physician who donated his own sperm to a lot of women in his community. And like, there are rules about how much sperm you can donate.

• 26:50Speaker 02

  Eight thousand babies or something.

• 26:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, for, for that reason, there are all these children in the community, many of whom are related without knowing it. And many of whom found themselves dating and then had to obviously take these DNA tests and learn about this. But there is some good research that shows that people who are genetically related are, do tend to be more attracted to one another, very likely for the same reason, right?

• 27:14Speaker 02

  But then isn't there also like the exotic factor where you could also be attracted to somebody who's very different from you?

• 27:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, sure. I mean, every, anybody can be attracted to anybody, but what we're talking about is not so much, let me figure out the variants for you personally, but let me look at like global trends, right? And so when I look across the board, people who are near each other tend to get together. People who have things in common tend to get together. Opposites actually don't tend to attract as often. But that's only a part of what we're talking about today because a new study that was published in Nature Human Behavior looked at almost 15 million people. They looked at the records of many, many people in Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden because they wanted to ask a simple question.

• 28:02Cara Santa Maria?

  When somebody is diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, are they more or less likely to be partnered with somebody who also has a psychiatric disorder? And they found that across the board, whether we're talking about different age cohorts, whether we're talking about Asian versus Scandi communities, that people are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with the same or another psychiatric condition of their spouse.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So.

• 28:38Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 28:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. So when one partner is diagnosed with, so they looked at nine different conditions. They looked at schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, and substance use disorders, and also anorexia nervosa. And they found that spouses are more likely to have the same condition as they're significant other than to have different ones, but people are more likely to also have another psychiatric condition than not when comparing all of these different couples. Now, this was a trend that was noticed in the literature, or noticed by some researchers in Nordic countries, but nobody had looked at it globally. And so researchers from across those countries and here in the US, namely

• 29:21Cara Santa Maria?

  in Tulsa, in San Diego, and in Los Angeles, looked at these large databases from Taiwan, where else did I mention? Sweden, and from Denmark. And they compared those databases to each other. And they found that not only does the pattern hold across countries, across cultures, it also holds across generations. So they looked at Taiwan specifically because they had access to richer data there. And they divided it into like 10-year cohorts. So like the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, all the way up to the 1990s. And they found that the chances of partners sharing a diagnosis actually increased a little bit with each

• 30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  decade, especially around substance use disorders, but that the pattern really did tend to hold. The only place where they found some differences in Taiwan, married couples were more likely to share an OCD diagnosis than in Nordic countries, for example. But for the most part, they found that this held. And so. You know, they didn't answer the question, why? But they speculated, as many researchers do, where they dig deep into an important question and they do a complex statistical analysis and they say, we can see this pattern, but now we've got to explain this pattern. This is what we think and maybe we should do more research to figure that out.

• 30:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So I would ask the panel, the rogues, why do you think that people with a psychiatric diagnosis are more likely to be partnered with somebody with a psychiatric diagnosis?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Well, my question is, does it develop over time? Like, the longer you are with someone, is your environment similar so that those kinds of behavioral things can emerge? Or is it because if you have some condition within you, you inherently find another person equally attractive? Or like you were brought up in a similar way? Like, the whole nature, nurture?

• 31:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, and you're touching on two of the reasons that the researchers did speculate. One of them, they said, is that, here's a psychiatric geneticist named Jan Fullerton at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. She said that, you know, social environmental stressors can contribute to a new diagnosis in a partner who was unaffected before, especially if they had mild or undiagnosed symptoms. So let's say they had a tendency towards, and then being around their partner who maybe was either untreated or was manifesting certain symptoms that may kind of have pushed them into a diagnostic category. Another thing mentioned by the researchers is that, obviously, we're just attracted to people who are like us.

• 32:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, you know, I tend, I struggle with depression. I tend to do well with people who understand that about me. Maybe they understand that about me because they've dealt with it as well.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  Kara, what about just the propinquity thing again? Like, literally meeting in the waiting room, you know, seeing your therapist? You know, my personal experience, like, when I know couples who both have psychiatric diagnoses, that's almost always how they met.

• 32:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep, and that's, they mentioned that as well, shared environment. Is a way to meet people, but also, once you are in a shared environment, people tend to converge. They just become more like each other the longer they're around each other. And then finally, what about social stigma, right? I mean, it's one thing when we're talking about depression, anxiety, you know, but if we're talking about more what we might call severe mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar one disorder, it can be difficult to date. Just telling people that you're dealing with those conditions may make them, you know, concerned, or there may be so much stigma that they don't want to engage. But when you know other people, again, who are dealing with the same thing, who might take the same medications as you, who understand what it's like to live with

• 33:13Cara Santa Maria?

  these mental health conditions, you may be more likely to be interested in sharing that time and space with somebody. So, and this just reminds me of like, just a very basic thing that almost every student of psychology is exposed to, and, and I think physicians as well, Steve, which are these different models of thinking. The first one, which it's almost like, I never think to use the word anymore because it's so ingrained in me, but this idea of a bio psychosocial model of wellness or of health, right? That we are all made up of our biology, our psychology, and our social experiences. And it's very hard to tease those things apart because they all influence each other. And then finally, in psychology, we often talk about there being something called a diathesis stress

• 33:57Cara Santa Maria?

  model, which means that yes, it is likely that we have predispositions, whether they be genetics, differences in our brain chemistry, personality types, early childhood experiences. And then there is the stress portion. So you've got a diathesis already, and then you experience some form of stress, whether that's trauma, or a chronic stress like poverty, or, you know, discrimination, or maybe drug use, or some other form of stress. And those things combined often lead to the onset of a mental health disorder. And so you can see how having both the diathesis portion and the stress portion of that.

• 34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Could also come into play when two people are spending a lot of time together. But so it's really interesting. I think the thing that surprised me the most, I don't think it actually surprised me that this was the outcome of this study. I think the thing that surprised me the most is that it didn't, it hasn't seemed to change over time, even with massive advan- I mean, they looked, the first cohort was 1930 to 1940. We didn't have antipsychotic drugs then. Like massive advances in mental health treatment, and yet these trends tend to hold. So that's pretty interesting.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  So the Madonna song, "I'm Crazy for You," is more clinically accurate than we previously presumed?

• 35:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It could be.

• 35:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Not that it's pejorative, sorry. And this also, I mean, like, because now you have, the whole idea of dating and finding, finding mates is very different now than it was in the 30s and 40s and even the 60s and 70s in terms of online dating and like, and it still doesn't, it still doesn't matter. You still find people that-

• 35:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, if anything, I would think it would get even more.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Even more, yeah.

• 35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so. Because with online dating, and this is something I have quite a bit of experience with lately, you can, you know, you do sometimes open up about certain things early on, and especially the older that you get, the more you're like, I don't want to deal with somebody who's not like aligned with me politically, ideologically, who doesn't understand like these, you know, things about my life. And so people do, they kind of share those things early. Like, there are checkboxes on dating profiles for things like neurodivergence, you know? People just, they, they wear those labels, sometimes very proudly, and they want to meet other people who get it. And so I think that that probably does have a lot to do with this.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  And if you go to like a big college or university, which most people who go to university do by definition, there's tons of these sub-communities, right? You will find your group of people who, you know, are really in your very narrow, narrow sub-niche, you know?

• 36:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  And that, you know, could also align with psychiatric disorders.

• 36:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. I think it's, what's surprising to me is not that this is the case now. It's surprising to me that this was the case in like the 30s and the 40s.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  Right.

• 36:52Cara Santa Maria?

  When people were mostly marrying somebody who lived down the street, you know, or who they met at work.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Cara. Guys, I have more CRISPR news for you.

• 37:04Bob Novella?

  Oh, what you got?

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And it's good news.

• 37:08Bob Novella?

  Thanks for saving it, not saving it for science or fiction.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I almost did, but no. All right. So you know what the big limiting factor is on CRISPR? Okay, for those who need reminding.

• 37:19Speaker 05

  Remembering what the acronym means.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yes. What is the acronym? Evan, should you bring it up?

• 37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no. Cluster repeating.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Clustered regularly.

• 37:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, regularly.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Inter spaced. Regularly, that's the one.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Short palindromic repeats. Right.

• 37:32Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 37:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:33Bob Novella?

  You are right, Steve. You are right.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 37:36Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Good job, Steve.

• 37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I always say.

• 37:40Speaker 02

  And that was from memory. I don't have that in front of me. So CRISPR, if you do reminding, is now it's like 10 years old or something?

• 37:47Cara Santa Maria?

  That's nuts. Don't say that.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  I know, right?

• 37:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't like that.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  To more efficiently and cheaply edit genes, right? You can silence a gene, you can make a snip, you can insert a gene, you could do all kinds of things. And it's really made it easier to do a lot more genetic research and there's the potential for genetic treatments. There's already two FDA-approved CRISPR treatments, both for bloodborne diseases like sickle cell and thalassemia, both of which have something in common, which I've mentioned before. You can take the cells out of the body, right, the bone marrow, do the CRISPR and then put them back. Why is that the case? Why are the first two therapies targeting cells that you can remove from the body?

• 38:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Because then you can just inject it.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, it makes it easy to target those cells.

• 38:40Cara Santa Maria?

  You don't have to worry about a vector and something.

• 38:42Bob Novella?

  You know where they are, you know where they go, bam.

• 38:44Speaker 02

  Right. If you're trying to do CRISPR on tissue inside a living organism and you can't remove that tissue and put it back, you have to get the CRISPR to those cells.

• 38:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so you have to use a vector, but it needs to be specific to the tissue.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  This is the big limiting factor. So we have this great tool, but we can't get it to the cells we want to get it to. It's got to get to the right organ. It's got to get to the right tissue within that organ. It's got to get to the right cells within that tissue. It's got to get into the cell. It's got to get into the nucleus. And it's got to make the genetic change.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And not just that. You don't want it to go to the cells.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And you don't want off-target. You don't want off-target changes. And each step of the way, you lose a big chunk, right? So you end up with sometimes less than 1% of the cells that you're targeting actually get the genetic change you're looking for. Something very tiny. Therefore, that could limit the effect, the effectiveness of therapeutics. And it also means that there are some things you just can't target. So it narrows the scope and it really limits the effectiveness of CRISPR. The CRISPR itself is an amazing tool, but we can't get it to the cells we need to get it to. But now... They solved it. They totally solved that problem. They didn't. I mean, it's never a total solution, but there's been a significant... 90%, 80%. Give me a high number.

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Significant advance. There's been a significant advance. So you remember, I've spoken before about LNP's. What does that stand for?

• 40:16Bob Novella?

  Large Magellanic People.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Lipid Nanoparticles. Remember lipid nanoparticles? Oh, NP. I thought you said NP. No, LNP. LNP, lipid nanoparticle. So this is a technology for delivering stuff to tissue in the body, right? And you can use this to deliver drugs to cancer cells. You can use it to deliver CRISPR to the cells you want to get it to. Yeah, they're little fat bubbles that can be designed to go to where you want them to go to. They have the proteins on them that will bind to the receptors or whatever. LNP, huge technology. There's another technology that's similar that is not been approved for any specific use yet,

• 41:02Speaker 02

  but is in stage, phase 2 clinical trials. And that is SNAs. What does that stand for? There are a lot of acronyms. Small. That stands for spherical.

• 41:15Bob Novella?

  Narwhal.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Spherical nucleic acids.

• 41:18Bob Novella?

  Damn.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  So this study involves LNP hyphen SNAs. And what they did was they

• 41:26Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  take the CRISPR, they put it inside an LNP, a lipid nanoparticle, and then they wrap the LNP in a spherical nucleic acid.

• 41:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, I thought it'd be the other way around, but okay.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  No.

• 41:37Bob Novella?

  That way it sounds better.

• 41:38Speaker 02

  So you have, you have basically all the tools you need, right? The caspine enzymes, the guide RNA, DNA repair template, whatever you need to deliver to the cell in order to do the genetic change that you're interested in, wrapped in an LNP, right? So that's the sort of capsule that delivers it all. But then you coat that in the SNA, a spherical nucleic acid. And know what that does? Is that targets the cell that you're interested in and also helps it get into the cell. Because the spherical nucleic acid, right? It's nucleic acid, it's DNA.

• 42:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's code, yeah.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  It's programmable. You can, you could make it into whatever you want. So that means, once you have this technology, you can program that DNA theoretically to target any cell population that you want.

• 42:30Bob Novella?

  But how does it get there? But I mean, how does it move? What's the motility? How does that work?

• 42:35Speaker 02

  You, well, that's different ways. You can just inject it into the blood. If that's the way to, if that's work, so you can inject it into the organ or into spinal fluid or whatever. You inject it into whatever the cavity is that you want it to get to.

• 42:47Bob Novella?

  But then you get it nearby and it goes the final yard?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:50Bob Novella?

  Goes the final mile? All right.

• 42:51Speaker 02

  All right. So in this, in this proof of concept study, they found that the LNP SNAs entered cells three times more effectively than LNP's alone.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  And they they increased the success rate of the CRISPR more than 60% compared to current models.

• 43:14Bob Novella?

  There's your number, Bob.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's three times the the ability to target the cells, three times the ability to get in, and a 60% improvement in the final, making the final edits that you're interested in.

• 43:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but 60% better than 1%? I mean, wait, is that what we're talking about here?

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, yeah, I know, so it's, it's, but that's

• 43:33Bob Novella?

  It's still low.

• 43:34Speaker 02

  That is still, that's clinically significant, I mean.

• 43:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, when you take a pill, what percent of the active ingredient is actually binding to where you need it to be?

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it gets distributed throughout the whole body, and only a small portion of it is actually binding to receptors.

• 43:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's probably a teeny tiny bit of it, yeah, that you actually need.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  It needs to be tested in specific, like, specific formulations need to be tested in specific diseases.

• 43:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was wondering, did you, did you mention that? What disease were they? Are they just looking at the mechanism?

• 44:02Speaker 02

  They were just looking at the mechanism. This is just, again, proof of concept. So now they need to go to animal studies to, to, you know, disease models, right? They need to do the actual.

• 44:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  And then, once the animals, disease model studies are done, then they will be ready to do human trials. So, we're still years away from this being in the clinic, but this is an important technological advancement. And it's, again, it's not one thing, it's not like this is only going to be useful for one disease. We're talking about a technology that could be used for, yeah, like CRISPR, CRISPR-LNP-SNA.

• 44:35Bob Novella?

  We're not targeting what we want to do.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  This is just a general platform, yeah, that could theoretically target any cells in the body and make any genetic change that we want. So, this will massively increase the scope of targets for CRISPR, and also the success rate of making the genetic changes.

• 44:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And we'll only know it as CRISPR, the same way we only know Cas9 or Cas10 as CRISPR.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  There's all different components of it.

• 45:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Similarly, right?

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's CRISPR. But, actually, you know, this LNP-SNA technology is as important as the CRISPR. And again, it's used for other things, not just delivering CRISPR. It could be used to deliver drugs to cancer cells.

• 45:15Bob Novella?

  Drugs, yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  For example, getting those

• 45:17Bob Novella?

  Chemo, chemo directly to cells.

• 45:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, great.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a really important technology.

• 45:23Bob Novella?

  So when is this gonna roll out, Steve?

• 45:25Speaker 02

  Well, again, it's, this is just again-

• 45:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Five to 10 years.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Proof of concept study. Yeah, remember all those steps I talked about? It improved performance every step of the way. Every step in that chain was better with the SMPs.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  Who developed it, Steve?

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so-

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Which, is it-

• 45:43Speaker 02

  So this was developed by a team of researchers.

• 45:47Speaker 03

  But like, American or European?

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is, Merkin's lab is at Northwestern. Merkin is the main doctor working on it, and it's at Northwestern. That's where most of the work is being done.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  So they'll lose their funding soon, which is good.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, right, right. Yeah, I mean, this is exactly the kind of research that needs-

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, there is a company called Flashpoint Therapeutics, which is commercializing the technology, so that's good, too. That, sometimes you get that startups will spin off out of a university. They get a patent, they spin off a startup, and they commercialize it, and there you go. So that seems to be what's happening, which is good. You know, again, you don't want it to be dependent on government funding.

• 46:24Bob Novella?

  Some universities are optimized for spin-off technology like that, which I love. Like, "Yeah, man, turn it into tech that I can get to. Come on."

• 46:31Speaker 02

  So, this is great. I've been paying attention to this technology. This is a massive improvement. This, this is the kind of thing, like, 10 years from now, we'll be looking back and thinking, "Wow, this was a, this was a huge milestone." You know, like, all the things that'll be, uh, it'll just be in the background, you know, of so many new therapeutics, I suspect. Yeah.

• 46:52Bob Novella?

  Steve, I mean, I remember, oh, God, it's been a few years now or more, where we're talking about other advances, other types of CRISPR. And one was that, instead of actually, you know, snipping, you know, the, you know, the genome, it actually would turn it on and off.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, that's still in play.

• 47:08Bob Novella?

  That's still in play?

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 47:09Bob Novella?

  I mean, that's still okay?

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:10Bob Novella?

  That sounds pretty awesome.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  You could turn genes off and turn them back on again.

• 47:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, CRISPR is like a big tent now.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Oh, totally.

• 47:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I just don't come across it much anymore.

• 47:21Cara Santa Maria?

  It's because it's all just included, like, they just call it. But, but everything, even Cas9 and Cas10, like I mentioned, those are different techniques. But we just kind of assume that that's all CRISPR.

• 47:30Bob Novella?

  There's other Cas's, too.

• 47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  All right, George.

• 47:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  Tell us about this robotic bee.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 47:40Speaker 03

  So I have a question for all of you. If you were to design a robotic bee, or what they call a micro aerial vehicle, an M A V, what do you think would be the most difficult thing to overcome?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably power source. Flight, too, I guess. No, control. No, we can make things that fly. I think making things that fly is not that big a deal. It's all about the power source. Yeah, something really tiny would be power. I would suspect powering. I mean, yeah.

• 48:05Cara Santa Maria?

  I would think that if it's so small, solar could help. I think it would just be that, like, dying? I don't know, like, getting damaged? Like, it's expensive, and you have to make a bunch of them.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Well, you're sort of, yeah, you're sort of, you're all in the ballpark. I mean, it all feeds off of each other. But the biggest challenge, it's not the maneuverability, it's not the size. They can get these things very tiny. They can make them maneuver, they can fly. The problem is flight time, which in essence is energy.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  It's energy, right.

• 48:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. Building something into the system that allows it to fly for more than 10 seconds. So like, in 2021, MIT Robotics, they developed this little guy. It was less than a, less than a gram. That's what's considered an M A V.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  Any kind of flying thing that's less than a gram, which is super tiny. But they developed one, and this, because they were working on it, this had, in essence, eight wings and four little, like, bodies on this thing. And it was very maneuverable, but it could only fly for about 10 seconds. Because it would basically get up, and the more, the simpler the flight, the longer it would last. The more complex the flight, the less long it would last, but on average, about 10 seconds. Well, they've gone back to the drawing board and basically redesigned this little M A V to be much more reminiscent of nature in terms of one body, like a bee's body, and two wings.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  And what they did is by using this and then combining with some other little, little modifications, they're now capable of having this thing fly for 17 minutes.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  So it's a hundred ti- over a hundred times more efficient. You can do a lot within that time, right? Which you can do a lot within that time. So from the, the precy, they had this, of the study, they said most sub-gram M A Vs. So yeah, so that's considered a thing less than a gram. Are limited to hovering for less than 10 seconds or following simple trajectories at slow speeds. Here, we developed a 750 milligram flapping wing M A V. That demonstrated substantially improved lifespan, speed, accuracy and agility with, with transmission and hinge designs. That reduced off-axis torsional stress and deformation. The robot achieved a 1,000 second hovering flight, two orders of magnitude longer than existing sub-gram M A Vs, which is really cool.

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Now what's neat about these little guys is not only could they give bees a break and if you know, there's sort of the bee population. It's in, it's, it's, it's in danger, then it's not in danger, then it's in danger, then it's not in danger. What these little flying M A Vs could act as pollinators, but they could act as pollinators in environments that bees don't really work well. So you could have vertical farms with fluorescent lighting, let's say. Now bees don't like vertical farms, bees don't, and they especially don't like vertical, uh, fluorescent lighting. But these can, these little guys can, can do the gig. They can also be in like harmful environments, like in space.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Or in areas that let's say were contaminated with radiation or poisons or who knows what to kind of help reestablish and fix crops or fix whatever kind of thing you might need fixing. So it's not, it's not to replace bees, but to sort of be an, an extra artificial pollinator. While they were developing this little bee, this little guy, they also worked on a grasshopper-like little robot. Which I thought was really cool. This is smaller than a human thumb. And it can hop 20 centimeters at about 30 centimeters a second. It jumps into the air. And it can land and be effective on all kinds of surfaces from grass all the way up to ice.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  And it can even land on a, like a tiny leaf and stuff. The grasshopper, which they're calling the grasshopper, they can also hover like a drone. Using 60% less energy than flying robots that are similar to it.

• 52:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Speaker 03

  So the robots the size of a bee and a grasshopper scientists believe can also be helpful in rescue missions during earthquakes or inside pipelines where large counterparts cannot get into or reach. So it's like, much like the CRISPR news. It's good news on the front. You know, like with the, there was always the problem with jetpacks, right? What's the ma- the major problem with jetpacks?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Flight time.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Is fuel.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  In turn.

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Flight time.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Well, it looks like they're getting way, way closer to having significant increases in flight time for these little tiny M A Vs. That, again, picture a gram and all the tech that's in this little tiny, less than a gram device, flying around, doing complex flying. For, uh, right now, we're at 17 minutes and it should increase. It's pretty cool.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  Love it, man.

• 52:43Bob Novella?

  I wonder if you could get a thousand of those buggers, could they lift me up?

• 52:47Speaker 03

  Ah, buggers.

• 52:48Bob Novella?

  For a few minutes.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably they could.

• 52:50Jay Novella?

  Legit, like, is this an experiment or like, what would they use these for, I wonder?

• 52:54Bob Novella?

  Well, besides pollinating plants, like George said, I mean, what else could, yeah, what else could they do? You know, they could assess, you know, nooks and crannies in disaster sites and report back, "Hey, I found some people down here, come over here."

• 53:05Speaker 03

  You could sense, you could, you know, get them to be sensitive to any kind of, so like, they could, they could search for oxygen, let's say, in some kind of a pipe or search for CO2, which means that survivors are breathing off CO2. So they send in these little bees or these little grasshoppers. You could build large farming facilities that wouldn't need to rely on natural pollinators. So you could have, you know, like, like when you have those, sort of the, uh, idealized city buildings that have the large towers of fruits and vegetables and flowers kind of growing. These guys would, would be great in those environments, especially with fake light. Cause bees don't like the fake light, apparently. So, yeah, so that's kind of a thing.

• 53:43Bob Novella?

  Steve, I wonder if you could GMO some plants that are so weird and foreign that regular biological bees just don't want to pollinate it or can't pollinate it, then you just throw these mechanical buggers in and have them do it because the normal bees are just too, too afraid of the GMO plants that don't make any, any sense to the real bees.

• 54:03Jay Novella?

  Why would you want to do that?

• 54:04Speaker 03

  Well, let's say you have some kind of like space crops that have to be resistant to who knows what, radiation or... You know, maybe you have to develop a, we can't use bees. We'd have to either genetically modify bees to be able to do this kind of stuff, or just use these little guys.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, you're saying that the inadvertently can't be pollinated by regular bees. That wasn't done on purpose.

• 54:24Bob Novella?

  Right, well, yeah, I mean, it's a cool plant, but like, hey, bees don't like this. We gotta pollinate this, these weird GMO plants some different way, and like, let's use the, let's use the robot bees.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  All right, thank you, George. Okay, Evan, tell us about Tin Man Syndrome. What is that?

• 54:38Speaker 05

  I will, yeah. File this news item under, how the hell did we miss this one 10 years ago? This is actually a current news item, but as always, there's background, so I have to go back 10 years to fill you in here. It's March 31, 2015. The website is called radiopedia.org, which is described as a well-known and widely-used radiology reference site. And they published a case titled ectopia cordis interna, or Tin Man Syndrome. And this is where a patient's heart was depicted as being located entirely in the abdominal cavity beneath the diaphragm. It was written by, or a case contributed by, I should read it directly from the site, Matt Skalasky.

• 55:22Speaker 05

  And the systems involved the chest, the gastrointestinal, gastrointestinal and cardiac. I guess those are the areas of concern. Here's the story. A patient went to a radiologist as part of a pre-employment screening, apparently because the patient had a long history of gastroesophageal reflux. The case starts with an X-ray picture of the man's chest with this descriptor. "Frontal and lateral chest radiographs demonstrating absent cardiomeastinal shadow. No aortic outline is evident, bilateral ectopic inferior pulmonary veins." Basically, it's a chest X-ray. Now, the next image is that of an MRI of the patient's torso, and that descriptor reads,

• 56:04Speaker 05

  "Selected coronal images show the intra-abdominal heart closely related to the stomach, distal transverse colon, and pancreas."

• 56:14Speaker 05

  This vascular congestion is a common feature. And then there's one more image, a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci titled Organ Networks of the Thoro-

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Thoracoabdominal, Thoracoabdominal.

• 56:28Speaker 05

  Thoracoabdominal, thank you Steve, the Thoracoabdominal cavity, drawn in 1502. And they just, they say, "There remains academic debate as to whether this was based off of a corpse with ectopia cordis interna, or whether the heart's location was a deliberate distortion of reality by the artist." Here's the case discussion. So Tin Man Syndrome, "It's a rare variant of ectopia cordis in which the heart is located completely within the abdominal cavity. It's almost always an asymptomatic condition found incidentally on imaging, or less often detected by physicians when attempting to ausculate." I mean, I guess, what's that, stethoscope?

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Ausculate, or in Vulcans, apparently.

• 57:09Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, yeah. When they, when they're attempting to hear what's going on in the chest, or the abdominal palpitation, or abdominal palpitation. And they talk a little bit about the history, they talk about the Leo da Vinci drawing there. Now, they also say, "The first ever description of the condition in the medical literature was a controversial monograph submitted to the Royal Society in 1874 by Dr. Noher Lubdub, entitled, 'An Unusual Case of Ectopia Cardia in a Haryana Boy.'" I guess that's a location.

• 57:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, his last name was Lubdub?

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Did you say?

• 57:44Speaker 05

  I'm getting there, I'm getting there.

• 57:46Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a massive red flag.

• 57:47Speaker 05

  Noher Lubdub.

• 57:48Speaker 02

  Noher Lubdub? I mean, what the fuck is going on?

• 57:51Speaker 05

  I'm reading to you. This is, this is verbatim from the, from the, from the article. And the monograph was later retracted when accusations were made that the images accompanying the text had been doctored. It was not until 1908 that Dr. Lubdub's work was vindicated, when the existence of the condition was confirmed during the early years of chest radiography. Unfortunately, Dr. Lubdub had fallen into deep depression following his expulsion from the Royal Society, only occasionally seen wandering the streets of Shandar, mumbling, "And yet it beats." His death was unrecorded.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. Loved up. Loved up. Okay. I left out a couple of key things here. The title of the, I doctored the title of this paper, which actually reads, "April Fools 2015, Actopia Cordis and Ternio Tin Man Syndrome." And the first paragraph of which says, "This case is fictitious and the described condition is not a real diagnosis. The images in this case have been digitally altered." It gained attention back in 2015. Apparently, some medical professionals initially mistook it as real pathology. They began citing or sharing it as authentic. And I guess they say that's perhaps understandable because Radiopedia's trustworthiness has a reputation. But this was clearly, and there were so many indications, like Dr. Lovedub, Kara.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  No hear Lovedub?

• 59:12Speaker 05

  No hear Lovedub.

• 59:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But to be fair, don't publish an April Fools journal article.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  They have a, they have a.

• 59:20Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, what are you doing?

• 59:21Speaker 05

  Yeah. No, I get it. They have a history. It's kind of their, you know, their thing. I agree, Kara.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Not with the internet. You can't do it anymore. Social media has ruined it. You can't do that anymore.

• 59:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, not just that. AI has ruined it. Like, we, it's not always people who are scrubbing the internet for this stuff. It's bots.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  Among their other April Fools prints, because it's an annual thing, apparently they do, Von Schlap syndrome, obviously Tin Man syndrome, cactus disease, something called apple eye. I mean, I haven't read into all of it.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Apple eye?

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Apple eye is one of them. We'll talk about that one, maybe.

• 59:58Cara Santa Maria?

  This reminds me, did you guys ever, do you remember when Stephen Colbert used to do The Daily Show? And he had a character named, it was called, it was a segment called Cheating Death with Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, DFA.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 1:00:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And he was like, and he was like with Prescott Pharmaceutical. Yeah. And he would always have like a weird side effects of all of the drugs that he was pushing.

• 1:00:18Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 1:00:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, like, I don't know.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  Hilarious.

• 1:00:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Wandering fungus and.

• 1:00:23Speaker 05

  All right. So that's your background. But how does it relate to the contemporary news on Skeptic's Guide to the Universe? Because over at Retraction Watch, Kara, we love Retraction Watch.

• 1:00:32Cara Santa Maria?

  We do.

• 1:00:33Speaker 05

  They have a report from about two weeks ago, and also another one that came out the other day. But here's the one from two weeks ago that reads, "Tin Man Syndrome Case Plagiarized From Hoax, Sleuths Say."

• 1:00:44Speaker 05

  And they describe, "A group of researchers say they encountered Tin Man syndrome in real life in a 22-year-old patient they claimed that had no significant medical history." The researchers, based in Iraq, published their rare case report in the journal Medicine. This was in July of 2025. The journal Medicine. Steve, that, that sounds, that's a legit journal. Yes, no, are you familiar with it at all? Medicine? No. Medicine. I've never heard of it. Well, I looked it up. The journal Medicine is published by Lipton, Williams & Wilkins, a reputable, peer-reviewed medical journal. However, it is a mega-journal with a broad scope and a lower impact factor compared to highly selective top-tier journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.

• 1:01:28Speaker 05

  Its reputation is valid, but its status has changed over time. So, take that, you know, for what it's worth. Here's the title of the paper that was published there. "Asymptomatic Young Male With Ectopia Cordis Interna: A Rare Case Report." I'll read you a couple of highlights. Their rationale: "Ectopia cordis interna is a rare congenital condition that occurs when the heart is found within the abdominal cavity." Patient concerns: "A 22-year-old Iraqi male with a chest infection presented to the clinic with a chest infection during which the anomaly was incidentally discovered." Just like the original paper. Diagnosis: "Although there are no clear symptoms, the anomaly can lead to potential risks during any abdominal procedures, interventions. The patient got a chest x-ray for his infection, which revealed the anomaly."

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  Outcomes and lessons: "The case highlights the importance of early detection of this condition through imaging modalities and the need for focused research into its long-term implications and management strategies." So, a sleuth came across the paper, I'm reading, going back to Retraction Watch here. "A sleuth came across the paper and after running the images through Google Lens," that's a tool I've never used before, but apparently, what, you take, you take a photograph of something and then you ask Google to find the original source and it will do it? That it linked them back to the April Fool's publication in Radiopedia, way back when. "The sleuth as a physician was asked to remain anonymous. They sent Retraction Watch the tip out of concern that the misrepresentation could mislead healthcare providers, potentially leading to incorrect surgical planning or treatments for patients with similar conditions."

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  Retraction Watch went over to David Sanders, who is an expert, image expert and biologist at Purdue University. He said the images indubitably originate from the same source. He says it's very obvious they overlap in the images otherwise, the overlap in the images otherwise is so extensive as to be impossible to represent different patients. So they absolutely pulled it directly from the original source material. He also pointed out that the first reference in the paper with the off, which the authors used to define the condition is actually a paper about ectopia cordis, not ectopia cordis interna. And ectopia cordis is the, a rare condition where the heart grows outside of the body.

• 1:03:42Jay Novella?

  Oh, bad.

• 1:03:43Speaker 05

  That's a real thing. That's awful. So the author, Retraction Watch also reached out to Skolasky, who was the original author of the satirical paper. And he said, "I'm not sure how this made it through peer review or why anywhere in the right mind would think to publish it." The authors maintain, the authors of this paper maintain the validity of their case. The lead author is Ashraf Basalia, and he's a researcher at Had Rama Hospital in Yemen. And he called the similarities to the Radiopedia case entirely coincidental. The case report is one of six that Basalia had recently published in the journal Medicine.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  So that was back on August 15th of this year. One week later, August 22, the journal Medicine says that they're retracting it. None of the, yeah. So here's what they said. The art, this is their response. "The article, asymptomatic young male with ectopia cordis interna, a rare case report, which appears in volume 104, issue 30 of Medicine, is being retracted. After publication, a concerned reader contacted the editorial office alleging that the images in the case appeared to be direct reproductions from a satirical online publication."

• 1:04:57Jay Novella?

  Which they are.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

  Yep. "The authors were asked to provide supporting documents for their case in response, including the original radiographic images, and they were unable to provide the necessary documentation, which cast doubt on the credibility of the presented case." So the journal Medicine went back and they also looked at the five previous submissions by Basalia. And his group and they retracted them all. Something tells me that these doctors publishing careers have maybe come to an ignominious conclusion.

• 1:05:24Speaker 03

  Do you think they were publishing just to be, just to say they were published or like, would there be some other?

• 1:05:29Speaker 05

  Here's the reason, that's a good question because retraction watch actually reached out to the doctor. To say, hey, we need your, you know, opinion on this and he said, he did reply in email. He said, I admit that ectopia cordis is not a real case based on our investigation and it was faked. That's his own words, but it was faked to destroy the author's reputation. That's what he said. Said, uh, the doctor said the paper was a trap, and this is a quote, a trap made by someone who wants to destroy my career intentionally.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  That's bullshit.

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. And that person in question, who the doctor says is not a medical professional, provided the researchers with, quote, all the case details and documentations regarding the ectopia cordis intern.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

  And they didn't do their work. They were fooled. The fact that they were fooled. Again, I think he's just making shit up to cover his ass.

• 1:06:17Speaker 05

  He's just.

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  Is the easiest explanation, but even, even the story he's telling doesn't let him off the hook. He basically means he didn't do due diligence. He didn't do, you know, what academically is like the minimum necessary. So by coincidence, I wrote about predatory journals in, on science-based medicine today and it dovetails nicely with this news item. You know, there was a study looking at using AI to basically screen for predatory journals. And, um, so right now there's 15, over 1,500 open access journals. And 13, AI flagged about 1,300 of them as being probably predatory. And then human evaluators went through them and said over a thousand of them were, were truly predatory.

• 1:07:02Speaker 02

  So there were 250 or so or 300 false positives by the AI. So it's possible, you know, they wanted to, because the thing is, they're just, human evaluators are overwhelmed by the sheer number of these fake journals. And when they, and when one does get outed as being predatory, meaning they don't have legitimate peer review, they don't have legitimate editorial policy, they're just taking money from researchers to get published. And once, you know, if they get outed, they just, you know, make a new website with a slightly different name, right? The, the, the barrier to entry is so low that you can just keep making more and more and more fake journals and start collecting money. And, you know, the, the researchers specifically said that a lot of, you know, countries that

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  don't have a well-established infrastructure of science and academia are what they're, who they're targeting. And so a lot of, you know, papers coming from places like Iraq, you know, do end up in these lower-tier or sometimes outright predatory journals, and they're crap. And they're doing it just to get recognition, you know, and just to get, buff their CV and get promoted and whatever, and try to establish themselves.

• 1:08:11Speaker 05

  Get publishing credits, whatever.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's a huge problem. It's just gumming up the whole system with terrible papers. And we really need to do, we really need to get a handle on it, you know, in, in multiple ways, like this, this can't go the way we're doing.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  So at the very least, stop with the April Fool's crap.

• 1:08:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, again, like, we just have...

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  Well, I guess, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  At the very least.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, like, yeah, we just, we don't want to live in that world anymore, basically. Um, all right.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  I still want to look into Apple Eye, though. That's interesting.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about super wood, jokes aside.

• 1:08:42Bob Novella?

  Super wood in the news. I'm not talking about an improved version of Tadalafil, but regular tree wood that's been chemically and mechanically treated to be far stronger and tougher than any other type of wood before. Researchers claim it's even stronger than steel and could be used as a structural load-bearing material similar to steel or concrete. This was licensed for a startup called Invent Wood, which plans to start a commercial run of this wood this year, this year, actually, they said this summer, uh, but the summer's almost over, so maybe they're running a little late. Okay, you might not know this about me, but I love wood. I've actually been working, working with a lot of... A large, old, heavy planks of wood because we're building our pirate ship for this year's haunt, so I'm just like, you know, wood is just wood. I just love it. It's just, especially

• 1:09:24Bob Novella?

  really old wood, it's got so much character. Alright, steel and concrete are great, but the beauty of wood is just so far superior in so many ways, but it's not strong enough to replace those other materials for many of the, you know, the many of the areas that we use them for. And attempts have been made in the past to make wood stronger. They would treat, they would pretreat the wood with chemicals and then they would squeeze it to make it denser. And that helped a little bit, but it actually, it wasn't enough because the wood would often expand and weaken, so it really wasn't ideal. This new technique is very similar, but it adds a novel removal process first. So it's removing components before it does the squeezing. So wood contains three components. There's, you know, there's

• 1:10:04Bob Novella?

  cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin. And they basically bathe it in chemicals to reduce the hemicellulose and the lignin. So it's really just mainly just the cellulose is left. So this raw wood is treated to remove these, the lignin and hemicellulose, and that allows this next step to reach levels that it's never reached before. So they mechanically treat the wood to be, to be hot, they use a, they call it a hot press. And they, I think it's at about like 100 degrees Celsius, so it's really hot, they're squeezing the crap out of it. And what that does is that completely collapses the cell walls in a process called, surprisingly, densification. Actually, I don't mind that word.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  Are these, are these like boards, Bob, or is this like chopped up, like fibrous?

• 1:10:47Bob Novella?

  It's, they don't, they don't go into detail in the paper on what they, they just said, they describe it as just raw, raw wood.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  But Bob, they say it's specifically not chopped up wood bound by?

• 1:10:59Bob Novella?

  No, it's not, it's not like the, that crappy, that OBS wood, where, yeah, it's not little chips that are, that are put together. So I know it's definitely not that, but I, but I'm not sure how, how it looks, you know, during, in the middle of this process. So, alright, so it's, it's densified, it's densification. So what's happening is that these strong cellulose nano fibers are all like pressed really close together, closer, closer than ever, than ever before. And it's, this reduces the wood's thickness by, what percent do you think it's, it's reduced? Too late, you guys took too much time. 80%. Oh, whoa. 80%. So, and it increases its density threefold.

• 1:11:41Bob Novella?

  So, as you might imagine, at this point, this super wood has some amazing mechanical properties. So, but before we discuss that, we probably need to discuss strength and toughness. What, we've mentioned it only a couple of times on the show before, because this involves strength and toughness and things. So, what does that actually mean? Strength is the ability to withstand forces without permanently deforming or fracturing. Toughness is the ability to absorb energy and deform before breaking. Okay, so for me, an iconic strength, an object that's pure strength with very little toughness is glass, right? It resists force fine, but it just shatters easily. It's not going to bend, it's not going to deform, it's just going to shatter. The other end of the scale here is toughness.

• 1:12:24Bob Novella?

  If you have that without strength, it's like, I tried to think of this one. I think Plato is a great example of toughness without strength. It absorbs energy quite well, right? But it really, it does not resist forces before permanently deforming, which is the hallmark of strength. So, now, remember though, as part of this, though, there's this classic trade-off between strength and toughness. Most of the, most of the time, if you increase one, you're going to diminish the other. And there's really no way to get around that if it doesn't want to get around that. So, if you make something stronger, it's going to, it's going to become more brittle and less tough. And conversely, the opposite is also true. So, a particular type of strength needs to be mentioned here. I'm doing this for Steve, because he specifically mentioned this, and he's right.

• 1:13:07Bob Novella?

  It's often the most important strength rate or type of rating for how strong something is, and that's called specific strength. This compares strength to density. You could think of this as, and I'm sure you've heard of this, the strength to weight ratio. That's essentially specific strength. So, how was this super wood? How strong was this? So, they threw a, there were a lot of numbers in the paper. First off, remember that trade-off I mentioned between strength and toughness? Well, that didn't even apply here. They said in the paper, "Interestingly, the large increase in tensile strength of the densified wood is not accompanied by a decrease in toughness."

• 1:13:43Bob Novella?

  So looking at the strength of the super wood, it had a high, it had a record high, Steve, a record high tensile strength, 587 megapascals. That's 11 and a half times higher than that of just untreated natural wood. Uh, the toughness didn't go down. The toughness was actually 8.3 times higher than that of, of natural wood. So stronger and tougher, which is, which is pretty epic. But what about the specific strength? Cause actually that could often make or break, um, a new, a new material. The paper, yeah, right. The regarding, regarding the specific strength, the paper said, "The intrinsically lightweight of cellulose also results in a specific strength of the densified wood, 451 megapascals per cubic centimeter per gram."

• 1:14:26Bob Novella?

  That's, that's higher than lightweight titanium alloy. So the specific strength is very, very high here. It, it, it's really good. So this is not a deal killer for the, for this at all. Um, they say in the paper also that our, our processed wood has a specific strength higher than the most structural metals and alloys, making it a low cost, high performance, lightweight alternative. And that's kind of the crux here is like, sure, this is very strong, but can we really use this as a structural metal, uh, that will be as, as a structural component that will be as strong as some metals and alloys that, that we use? And it seems like it can, you know, the, you know, the, the, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting, right? Let's just see what it really can do. Let's have some, some engineers look at this and see,

• 1:15:09Bob Novella?

  and do their own tests and see if it really can, can be structural and, and load bearing. That would be, that would be great. Spokesperson from Invent Wood recently said, and remember this isn't from the paper. This is basically marketing. But they said, "Super wood is specifically engineered to be up to 50% stronger than steel in certain applications with a strength to weight ratio up to 10 times greater." So clearly some strong ass wood we got here. So what are the, what are the benefits? Here's one that I hadn't considered, just the purely environmental. The densest and hardest woods are found where? What do you think they're, they're found? Tropical, uh, yeah. Very, you're very good. Yeah. Tropical, like teak and mahogany. We've all heard of those. Those are some of the, the most beautiful and dense and, and hardest woods out there. Um,

• 1:15:53Bob Novella?

  If super wood is actually a viable alternative, then environmental costs could disappear with teak and mahogany, like over harvesting is a problem, and also trading biodiversity for monocultures, right, could all be minimized. So that would be wonderful. So we wouldn't be depleting teak and mahogany and potentially, you know, over harvesting and all that other stuff. The other side of this coin, though, is that the concrete and steel we use in so many buildings in our infrastructure, you know, we love our big, beautiful concrete and steel, right?

• 1:16:23Speaker 05

  Big carbon footprint.

• 1:16:24Bob Novella?

  Yep. Making steel and cement, which is the critical component of concrete. I looked this up. That causes 10% of our world's total greenhouse gas emissions. Is that in the ballpark, Steve?

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Bob Novella?

  Was my source right? 10%? If, you know, it may be a big if at this point, but if renewable super wood can replace some of that for some of the things that steel and cement do and concrete do, that could make, even if it goes down a few percent, that would be just, you know, yippee for us, you know, good job for us if we can make that happen. We don't know. So basically, I'm waiting for this to be released commercially and have real people using this and reporting on it. They said it was going to be released commercially this summer, and I tried searching for some of the latest news about this, and I haven't been able to find anything that's less than a couple of months old. So I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe they were delayed. Maybe it's just going to be released this year. Who

• 1:17:21Bob Novella?

  knows what happened? But this one, I definitely wanted to follow this one. This is pretty cool. Super wood, people?

• 1:17:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, we've talked about this kind of thing before. We also talked about the idea of like building large buildings out of wood rather than steel because it becomes a carbon sink, right? Not a carbon source.

• 1:17:38Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  And especially, yeah, if the wood is preserved and is high quality, it could last 100 years, you know, it could be locking up that carbon for a long, long time. So, yeah, that could be, you know, one more way to try to turn this huge ship around.

• 1:17:55Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:17:59Bob Novella?

  All right, guys. Last week I played This Noisy.

• 1:18:10Jay Novella?

  Alright, what is this? Easy, it's baby Godzilla.

• 1:18:16Jay Novella?

  So I stuck with a theme here on the ones that I chose. So I'll just go down this real quick. So a listener named Bradford West wrote in, said, "Chao Jay, man, do I love dogs. Some of them, though, are complete drama queens about getting their nails clipped." So yes, you correctly identified this noise as coming from a dog, but I wanted more, a little bit more information. And I've clipped my dog's nails, and he didn't make that noise, but maybe some do. So let's see what the next person says. So Robin10Kate said, "Hi Jay, long time listener. Rare, who's that noisy guesser? I think this sound like, this sounds like a dog, specifically a Pomeranian, about to get vaccinated." I don't think it's a Pomeranian.

• 1:18:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's a French Bulldog.

• 1:18:57Jay Novella?

  And then Robin did tell me how to pronounce her name, which is, it's not Robin10Kate, it's Robin10kata. So even when people tell me how to do it, I still screw it up. Ryan SkiBa wrote in and said, "I hope George is not on the next episode of the show."

• 1:19:12Speaker 03

  He's a smart man.

• 1:19:13Jay Novella?

  What the hell? How did he know?

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  That's weird, yeah.

• 1:19:16Jay Novella?

  So he said-

• 1:19:21Jay Novella?

  Crap. He said, "Is it a screaming French Bulldog?" Now, my son and I love listening to freaky French Bulldogs make all the weird noises that they do. And there is a massive array of crazy sounds that French Bulldogs make. So I highly recommend, if you have any free time, go check that out, it's really crazy. Uh, Bob Coburn wrote in, said, "This week's noise, he sounds like Little Fred, a TikTok dog, who is a tiny little guy who loses his shit anytime a package is delivered. His life goal is to destroy any such package, he's my hero. I looked up Little Fred, and indeed, he loves to rip up packages. This is not the same dog." Steve has a dog like, or had a dog like-

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, my dog, it's a puppy, that was his favorite thing to do, was to rip up my freaking packages.

• 1:20:06Speaker 05

  With your camera equipment in it, all kinds of things.

• 1:20:08Jay Novella?

  So I have a winner. This is the person who guessed correctly. This is Jim Borzillin. Nope, Borzillery. Borzillery. Yes, sorry Jim. He said, "Hi Jay, long time, first time Patreon subscriber, etc." "Sounds to me like a beagle that was super happy to be reunited with an old acquaintance." Now that is technically correct. You corrected, you selected the correct dog, and I do believe the correct circumstance. But there is a little bit more information that we need, and someone did send that in as well. So I would consider this person a winner as well. This is Ben Z. Muller, and Ben said, "Just started listening to Skeptic's Guide podcast, and I love it so far. Thanks for all the hard work. You guys are awesome."

• 1:20:52Jay Novella?

  "A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a dog named Geraldine who made noises like a tie fighter." "I'm 99% sure this is it. So listen again. This dog indeed sounds exactly like a tie fighter."

• 1:21:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:18Jay Novella?

  So, yeah, we're talking about Star Wars, Kara. Star Wars. Stop it. So, I can't play it for you because you have to see it as well. So look up Geraldine Star Wars, and you'll see a video where they take the noise that this dog makes, and then they add a little sound effects to it and show it over the Star Wars movie, and it's remarkable.

• 1:21:43Speaker 03

  This is why we have the internet.

• 1:21:44Jay Novella?

  Yes, exactly. Thank you, George.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  This is why we have the internet. Fantastic.

• 1:21:48Jay Novella?

  So, good job, everybody. I have a new noisy for you this week. This is sent in by a listener named Rob Schukrun. He did give me the pronunciation, and trust me, I would not have gotten it correct.

• 1:22:21Jay Novella?

  Okay, so I played enough. Everybody knows how to play this game. You know what to do. Email me at [email protected] if you think you know what it is. And if you heard something cool this week, please take a moment, record it, do what you gotta do, and send it over to me. So if you want to become a patron of The Skeptic's Guide, you can support the work that we do. Go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. You can join our mailing list. Go to the skepticsguide.org, and we send out an email every week. We'll tell you everything that we did the previous week and some other fun stuff. You can give our show a rating. We're going to Kansas, two shows on September 20th. Go to the Skeptic's Guide homepage, like we discussed, if you want to get information or buy those tickets. And that's it, Steve. That's all I got for you.

• 1:23:03Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Jay. George, it's time. You're gonna do a bit that we do in some of our live recordings.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes. All right.

• 1:23:14Speaker 02

  Tell us about it.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  All right. So I'm going, this is called taxing deductions. Taxing, a little game, we call it taxing deductions. I'm gonna present a statement, and this is a statement that is historically true. This isn't like a fictional thing, or this is a thing that has occurred, but it's very vague. And you five have to figure out what in the heck I'm talking about. I can basically say yes or no, as you sort of query me as to what it is, and you have to deduce what I'm referencing, what I'm talking about, and why the statement that I have made is the way it is. Does that make sense to everybody? It does. All right, kids. This is a tough one, but I think you can do it. Here we go.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  Why did one of the world's most famous sculptures cause a bridge to be three times longer than it needed to be? Now, if you happen to just know this answer, you have to recuse yourself, because the fun is not in the destination, the fun is in the guessing. So, again, I will say it again. Why did one of the world's most famous sculptures cause a bridge to be three times longer than it needed to be?

• 1:24:20Jay Novella?

  My initial guess is it might be the Washington Monument.

• 1:24:23Speaker 02

  That's not a sculpture, though, the Washington Monument.

• 1:24:25Jay Novella?

  What is it, then? Are they carving stone?

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  An obelisk.

• 1:24:28Speaker 03

  Well, it's not the Washington Monument, so I will...

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  Is it the Statue of Liberty?

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  It is the Statue of Liberty.

• 1:24:33Jay Novella?

  The bridge.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  In order to get the bridge, to get the statue to where it is, they had to, to put a bridge in a certain location that was longer than the, than the most efficient location?

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  No, not as, not as relates to the, not, yeah.

• 1:24:49Jay Novella?

  So you want us to guess the bridge?

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Well, you have to guess the bridge and, and the reason why.

• 1:24:53Speaker 05

  Did it have to do with the transportation from France, like the boat that carried the pieces?

• 1:24:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe it was so heavy that they couldn't make it that short? They had to like, okay.

• 1:25:01Speaker 03

  So yeah, so you're, you're already presuming something in terms of the relationship of the statue to the issue. So, yeah.

• 1:25:09Cara Santa Maria?

  For the traffic to get to her?

• 1:25:11Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:25:12Speaker 05

  The traffic to get away from it.

• 1:25:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Can we ask you questions?

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Was this bridge in the US or in, in France?

• 1:25:18Speaker 03

  It is in the US. Yes. Which is not a yes or no question, but I'll save some time.

• 1:25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Was this bridge in New York?

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:25:26Jay Novella?

  Is it the Varenzano Bridge?

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  No, it is not the Varenzano Bridge.

• 1:25:31Speaker 05

  Does the bridge still exist today?

• 1:25:33Speaker 03

  Sort of.

• 1:25:35Jay Novella?

  What kind of answer is that?

• 1:25:37Speaker 03

  Sort of.

• 1:25:38Jay Novella?

  Okay. So the sort of bridge somewhere in the New York City area.

• 1:25:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit of a gray, but yes, it, it, it sort of still exists.

• 1:25:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it, is it a, is it a car bridge?

• 1:25:51Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, it's a car bridge.

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  Is it also a train bridge?

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  I don't know. There's no trains. I don't believe there's a train.

• 1:25:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Does it have something to do with the trucks that had to bring pieces over?

• 1:26:02Speaker 03

  Nope.

• 1:26:02Jay Novella?

  Does that, does the height of the bridge factor in?

• 1:26:05Speaker 03

  The height does not factor in. No.

• 1:26:07Jay Novella?

  Okay. But so there's a bridge related to the Empire State Building in Subway.

• 1:26:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Statue of Liberty.

• 1:26:13Jay Novella?

  I'm just checking to see if George is paying attention. All right. So this, so the Statue of Liberty was not brought in. It wasn't built. They brought it in in pieces. So I don't think it.

• 1:26:23Speaker 03

  That, that's true. Does that have anything to do with this?

• 1:26:25Jay Novella?

  Probably not.

• 1:26:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably not.

• 1:26:27Jay Novella?

  Okay. So we, we talked about traffic for people to see the statue. That wasn't a factor. We talked about height.

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  Does it have to do with ships getting to Ellis Island?

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:26:39Jay Novella?

  So, but how could a bridge three times longer than it needed to be, which means that the bridge would, would start and stop way inland?

• 1:26:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Or it bends.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Not necessarily, not necessarily.

• 1:26:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, or it like, it, it has a hump in it?

• 1:26:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, not, not. I think there is a little bit of a hump.

• 1:26:55Speaker 05

  Circuitous route.

• 1:26:57Speaker 03

  It is, it is a bit of a meandering bridge.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  They had to change the location of the bridge?

• 1:27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, the location is important here. Yes. It's the location of the bridge.

• 1:27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Was the statue in the way?

• 1:27:11Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:27:11Jay Novella?

  Is it the Brooklyn Bridge?

• 1:27:13Speaker 03

  It is not the Brooklyn Bridge.

• 1:27:14Jay Novella?

  Damn you.

• 1:27:15Speaker 03

  So, think about, okay, think about New York City bridges, or New York bridges, I should say, that are sort of still there, but not really, but they are.

• 1:27:24Speaker 05

  Oh, not that Tappan Zee Bridge, the old Tappan Zee? Which is now the Mario Cuomo Memorial Bridge?

• 1:27:31Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:31Speaker 05

  Which got rebuilt about 10 years ago.

• 1:27:33Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's longer than it needed to be?

• 1:27:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:27:38Jay Novella?

  But it's still there. They just redid the bridge.

• 1:27:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it longer now than it needed to be?

• 1:27:42Speaker 03

  It's still longer than it needs to be, yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 05

  It ran kind of, runs parallel to where the old bridge was.

• 1:27:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that bridge takes two curves on the water.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like if you're unaware, the Tappan Zee Bridge was built in 1955, and then in 2017, they basically knocked it down and built a new one, just a couple hundred yards off from where the other one was.

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Which crosses the Hudson River.

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  And it's now the Mario Cuomo, but still, everybody calls it the Tappan Zee, so.

• 1:28:08Jay Novella?

  All right, so, but this is related to the Statue of Liberty?

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  It's related to the Statue of, yeah, why is it where it is?

• 1:28:14Speaker 05

  Because you can see it from there.

• 1:28:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:28:16Jay Novella?

  No, you can see New York City a little bit from that bridge.

• 1:28:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can't, I don't believe you can see the Statue of Liberty from there, but you can see New York City, yeah, it's quite, speaking of Kansas and Oz, it looks like, it looks like Oz from out there, it's kind of interesting.

• 1:28:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's pretty cool.

• 1:28:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:32Speaker 05

  Is it a union thing, like, hey, we gotta build this bridge three times longer, three times the cost?

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  That is the closest, the closest so far. It's not, it's not because, but that, yeah, now you're thinking the right way.

• 1:28:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so the unions or the people involved are gonna benefit?

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  I want to say not unions, but that's, that's the direction we want to start thinking.

• 1:28:56Cara Santa Maria?

  So the people involved in building this bridge were gonna benefit from it being longer?

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:29:00Speaker 02

  And what does that have to do with the Statue of Liberty?

• 1:29:02Speaker 05

  Oh, did it, did it?

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:29:04Speaker 05

  Was it a, was there some kind of budget that they had to use up and they had to sink it into something?

• 1:29:08Speaker 03

  No, that's a good guess, but no. So, so also think about, if you're familiar with the Hudson, there are portions of the Hudson that are very wide and there are portions of the Hudson that are not so wide.

• 1:29:18Speaker 02

  Oh, my God, you're right. I mean, it's not the widest part, but it's one of, it is kinda wide.

• 1:29:24Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, they built it at the wide part.

• 1:29:26Speaker 03

  Why did they build it at the wide? Why did they build it there?

• 1:29:29Speaker 02

  That's what I said originally, George, that they built it at the wider part than what they had to because of the Statue of Liberty.

• 1:29:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but why?

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  But there's a specific reason I didn't.

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a specific reason, yeah. Built it at the wider part?

• 1:29:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, to benefit them somehow. That there's some financial incentive?

• 1:29:45Speaker 05

  They put it next to the rich people?

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:29:48Speaker 05

  They were closer to the bridge?

• 1:29:50Speaker 03

  No. So again, this is 1955. So the statue's there. The statue's established. It's, it's done. If we think that the...

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Is it, has it to do with New Jersey, New York?

• 1:29:58Speaker 03

  Sort of, sort of, yes.

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  Wiring the land on the other side?

• 1:30:03Speaker 03

  Not so much, yeah.

• 1:30:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Did they want it in a specific neighborhood?

• 1:30:07Speaker 03

  No. I mean, it ended up being, you know, this place because it, this fit what they needed it to be.

• 1:30:14Speaker 05

  So they could charge a bigger toll?

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  They...

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  No, but Evan...

• 1:30:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, so it needed to be long enough?

• 1:30:22Speaker 03

  Okay, so I'll tell you this. So...

• 1:30:24Speaker 05

  Too close to George Washington Bridge, otherwise?

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  The, the Tappan Zee Bridge is three miles long because at the place it crosses over, it's three miles wide. If you go about a half mile south, it could have been a mile wide.

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Speaker 03

  Why didn't they build it a half mile south? So the Statue of Liberty is, is a...

• 1:30:44Speaker 05

  Marker, for sure.

• 1:30:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, a landmark.

• 1:30:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. It doesn't relate directly to the Statue of Liberty, but the Statue of Liberty influenced where the thing was built. Because, because of an organization.

• 1:30:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Like airplanes?

• 1:30:59Speaker 03

  No, no, but...

• 1:31:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Boats, boating?

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  Does it have to do with the ferry?

• 1:31:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it the dock workers?

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  All those, all those, all those.

• 1:31:07Speaker 05

  The state.

• 1:31:07Speaker 03

  What controls all those?

• 1:31:09Cara Santa Maria?

  The Transportation Administration.

• 1:31:11Speaker 03

  Yes, okay, okay.

• 1:31:13Cara Santa Maria?

  So they needed you to be like, turn left at the statue.

• 1:31:18Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:31:19Speaker 03

  All right. There's two organizations. There's the, there's the Port Authority. Okay.

• 1:31:26Jay Novella?

  Oh, I know, George. They had like a, um, oh, God, I went to the Statue of Liberty and they told me about like how the, the size of the island changed and there was like different organizations that were, that were like vying over who owned what property and all that. Is that it?

• 1:31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, if it was at that point, one organization could take care of it, but if it was somewhere else, it was another one's purview.

• 1:31:46Jay Novella?

  That's it, Kara. That was it. That they...

• 1:31:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like you're, you're pretty much there. So, so there is the Port Authority and the Port Authority controls the bridges, the tunnels, the ins and outs of New York. They control a span that is 25 miles with the Statue of Liberty in the center.

• 1:32:09Speaker 05

  Oh, that becomes the center of the...

• 1:32:11Speaker 03

  That becomes the center and everything that radiates out from that 25 miles is the Port Authority. When New York State was building the Tappan Zee Bridge, they didn't want the tolls to go to the Port Authority. They wanted it to go to the newly formed New York State Thruway Authority.

• 1:32:26Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:32:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So it had to be outside of the 25 miles.

• 1:32:28Speaker 03

  So it had to be outside the 25 miles and exactly about a half mile outside the 25 miles is one of the widest portions of the Hudson. And it was, and it was worth it because the economics of it was, even though it cost whatever, five times more than it would have, even though it was three times longer, it was worth it because now every penny of the tolls that go for the Tappan Zee Bridge and the new Mario Cuomo go to the New York State Thruway as opposed to the Port Authority.

• 1:32:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And those tolls just go up, up, up, but the cost of the materials was the same.

• 1:32:57Speaker 05

  So what New York City did is they moved the statue a mile north.

• 1:33:02Speaker 03

  That's right, yeah. Gave her like a, like playing guitar, like a mile long guitar.

• 1:33:05Jay Novella?

  They made the Statue of Liberty Island a lot bigger than it originally was. And if I remember correctly, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey water, not New York water.

• 1:33:14Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah, officially it's in New Jersey.

• 1:33:16Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:33:18Jay Novella?

  All right, so we got it. Thanks, George.

• 1:33:19Speaker 03

  It's a tough one. You got it. It's a tough one. But yeah, you did well. You did well. Well, that's the kind of brain, brain melting fun that we have, we're gonna have in Kansas.

• 1:33:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I want everybody tonight to go on their phones and play a game of Semantle and tell me if you had the same feeling.

• 1:33:32Speaker 05

  S Y or S E?

• 1:33:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And then report back. Semantle, like semantics, but Semantle.

• 1:33:37Jay Novella?

  All right, that was fun, George, but now we're gonna go on to an even funner game. Science or fiction?

• 1:33:47Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items for facts, two real, one fictitious. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the faker Rooney. We have a theme this week. Bridges. This theme is in honor of Kara, and the theme is marine mammals.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  So I will do very poorly on that. Okay, is everyone ready? Yes. Here we go. Item number one: Large whales build up earwax in layers, forming rings which can be used to estimate their age. Item number two: The blue whale has the largest brain in absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived. And item number three: Otters have pouches near their forearms which they use to store rocks to use as tools, sometimes keeping a favorite tool for years.

• 1:34:49Speaker 03

  Those are good.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  There they are. George, you know the rule, right? Whoever talks first goes first. Whoever talks first goes first. Okay. So George gets to go first, sort of, for...

• 1:34:59Speaker 03

  Uh, okay, yeah, these are actually really fun, so, so, um...

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  As advertised.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got two whales and an otter. Now, otters are just the coolest. I'm just, have you seen otters like holding hands?

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  Oh, they're adorable.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  And floating? It's just the coolest thing, so, okay, I'm gonna say that otters have the pouches they can hold stuff is totally true. I'm gonna say the blue whale having the largest brain is totally true because when I was a kid, I used to go to the Museum of Natural History in New York and they have that gigantic floating blue whale, which is the one thing from my childhood. It's the one thing from my childhood which is as big as I remember it.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  Ha ha.

• 1:35:36Speaker 03

  Like, I went back there when I was in my 30s, it's like, oh my god, this is amazing. So I'm gonna say that the earwax having rings that you can sort of guess the age is the fiction.

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:35:47Speaker 03

  Number one, yeah.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  All right, so, what do we got here? We got large whales that build up their earwax in layers, forming rings which can be used to estimate their age. You said that was a fiction, George?

• 1:35:57Speaker 03

  I did, yes.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  Apparently you don't have an earwax problem, because I can, I can see that...

• 1:36:01Speaker 03

  Oh dude, like, if, if, if there's ever a urine and earwax shortage, I am set.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  Okay, all right, I mean, this one is weird as it sounds, I mean, it doesn't seem like completely crazy.

• 1:36:13Jay Novella?

  You know, like in there, maybe their ear canals are so big too, that like, there could be many years that go by. All right, that one's on the back burner as a maybe. The, uh, the second item, the blue whale has the largest brain. Brains. On absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived. You know, I don't know. Any animal that ever lived, I mean, there's been lots of animals. I know it's currently, isn't it the biggest animal? Or, yeah, it's, yeah, yes, I think, but I am correct. But ever lived? I don't know. So that's a question mark there. Otters have pouches near their forearms, which they use to store rocks or use as tools and sometimes hide shanks in them. Okay. I mean, that sounds weird too, but like, not crazy.

• 1:36:55Jay Novella?

  That one's fricking weird though. Pouches in their forearms. You know, Robocop stored a gun in his leg and I thought that was always cool.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  Not nearly as cute though.

• 1:37:03Jay Novella?

  I don't know. I, god damn it. All right. So the, it's the largest brain one is getting me because of, of any animal that ever lived. Like what about, you know, they're, they're massive, but I don't know. Any animal that ever lived, how big did? All right. I don't know. You see, I'm thinking here, Steve. I don't know. The pouches in the forearms is wicked, crazy, weird too. And they keep tools? That's pretty, uh, sentient there. Ah. Number two is definitely the fiction, Steve, because it doesn't have the largest brain. It might be a dinosaur or something.

• 1:37:33Bob Novella?

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:37:34Speaker 05

  Earwax and layers, rings used to estimate age? That's trees. That's not whales. It's not earwax. What? No way. That can't be right. And the blue whale? What? The whales are the largest things that have ever lived, not specifically the blue whale. I think the sperm whale is larger than the blue whale, but still, in absolutely, absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived. And then the otters. I have to go with George. It can't be. It can't be rings of earwax. No.

• 1:38:02Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. I'm gonna go with my gut and just screw up as usual. So, uh, the ear, the earwax thing, yeah, weird. Weird as hell, but not like beyond the pale. Uh, the blue whale is absolutely the largest creature that has ever lived on the earth ever. So the fact, no, it's a blue whale. And the fact that it has, the claim here is that it's, has the largest brain of anything that's ever lived in absolute size. That makes perfect sense, but maybe that's what Steve wants me to think.

• 1:38:31Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, there you go, Bob.

• 1:38:33Bob Novella?

  So, but I'm just gonna- I'm just gonna go with the one that just gave me a reaction. And this was, it was the pouches. I have seen otters messing with rocks. And the rocks are a decent size. They're not tiny pebbles. They are rocks. And to think of a rock that size in a pouch on the forearm is kind of ridiculous. It's not a little rock. It would be a big, weird thing that just doesn't, is too big to make sense. So I'll just, I'm gonna say that the otter is fiction.

• 1:39:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, and Kara? So I am pretty confident that otters have pouches near their forearms. Forearms? Yeah, you mean, like, by forearms, you mean not their back legs, right? Right, they're, not their back arms, yeah. Yeah, cuz I'm pretty confident they're sort of in their pity pits, like, near their pity pits. And they do put rocks in them. And they like, and they love their little rocks. And they hang on to them for a really long time. I like my little rocks.

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  I guess it's like a pet rock.

• 1:39:31Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm less confident about the other two. The earwax in layers at first blush sounds ridiculous, but I don't know. I could see that happening, right? If you're, if you're that long-lived and you're not, how are you gonna clean out your own earwax if you're a whale? I don't know. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah. Maybe that's a business we should start.

• 1:39:51Speaker 05

  How does that relate to a, to a, to a year on a calendar?

• 1:39:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but it, it doesn't have to be, like, one to one. It just, you, you, you take enough cores out of whales' ears, then you, and you compare them to other aging, yeah.

• 1:40:04Speaker 05

  It does say estimate.

• 1:40:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and then, um, I agree with Bob. The blue whale, because I, I think I got slammed for this once on the show. It's like, clearly, there's a dinosaur this big. It's like, no, the blue whale is the biggest thing that has ever lived on the planet.

• 1:40:18Speaker 05

  I like that voice, Kara.

• 1:40:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Extant or extinct. But that doesn't mean it has the largest brain. And as we know. True. Chihuahuas have, like, a ridiculous brain-to-body ratio.

• 1:40:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like a

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  No, but he's talking

• 1:40:29Speaker 05

  Or insects.

• 1:40:31Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true. That's true. Okay, he's talking

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  And chihuahuas don't swim that great, so.

• 1:40:34Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't.

• 1:40:35Speaker 05

  But they do have pouches.

• 1:40:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So their brains are small, but they're really big for little dogs. You know what I mean? And so maybe there is another huge whale. I don't think it would be a dinosaur. I would think it would be something similar. Like another species of huge whale that has like a ridiculously big. Either the earwax is totally made up or there's a different whale. And I just don't think you'd make that up of a pulled cloth. So I'm going to say the whale ones, or sorry, that the, um, they're all about whales.

• 1:41:03Speaker 05

  I should have bothered that too.

• 1:41:05Cara Santa Maria?

  The blue whale brain is the fiction.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  All right. So we got two for the earwax, two for the blue whale and one for the otter. So I guess we'll start with the otter since that has the least amount of people for that one. Otters have pouches near their forearms, which they use to store rocks and to use as tools, sometimes keeping a favorite tool for years. Bob, you think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks that otters have pouches. And this one is science. This is science. You gotta watch the video. I have a link to it in the notes.

• 1:41:39Speaker 03

  Adorable science.

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  Adorable as hell.

• 1:41:41Speaker 03

  Adorable science is the best kind of science.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, they give, they show us like the keeper, whatever, working with this otter and he hands him some food. They put food in there to eat later. Then he has this fairly big rock and it just sort of squirrels it away in its little axilla pouch, you know, near its forearm.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  It's amazing.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  So good.

• 1:42:01Speaker 02

  It is amazing. You knew that, George?

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  I did. I did. Yeah. I just, it's like, otters are, I could watch videos of otters just floating on their backs, holding hands for days.

• 1:42:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Smothering up with their babies.

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:17Speaker 05

  Wait, wait, wait. Are we saying there was selective pressure for an otter to have a pouch in its forearm? Or is this just some kind of random thing?

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Must have been.

• 1:42:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, probably used it.

• 1:42:24Speaker 02

  Probably both. It had something that it could use.

• 1:42:27Speaker 03

  They open shellfish. They open shellfish. They crack, they crack the little shells on their, they float on their backs. They grab the rock. They crack the shell.

• 1:42:34Speaker 05

  I've seen them.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  So they find a nice rock. It's a good heft and the right shape. This is a keeper.

• 1:42:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And then they made more babies that live longer and then

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 1:42:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Ended up in their

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  They really are epically cute. I mean, the fact that they eat while floating on their back is genius.

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  It's like a vacation animal. It's just, it's on permanent vacation.

• 1:42:55Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:42:57Jay Novella?

  Oh, Steve, I just watched a video. Oh, my God.

• 1:43:03Jay Novella?

  Like, it's nothing. He's like, wow, there it is. Yeah.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:43:08Jay Novella?

  Imagine like one of them just whips out like a birthday cake from those pockets. Something else comes out.

• 1:43:13Speaker 03

  Swiss Army knife.

• 1:43:16Speaker 02

  So the other two are interesting, right? So the thing is, you know, ears are kind of self-cleaning. Like, you don't have to clean out your ears. The wax comes out by itself.

• 1:43:25Jay Novella?

  For most people.

• 1:43:27Speaker 02

  And blue whales are the largest animals to have ever lived. But that doesn't mean that their brain is the largest, so either way. Even if whales do have wax, tree ring dating, I mean, it's kind of weird.

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  Let's go, let's do number two.

• 1:43:43Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  Jay and Kara, you think this one is the fiction, correct?

• 1:43:49Jay Novella?

  Have a good day, Kara. We lost.

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  The blue whale has the largest brain in absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived. Jay and Kara, I think this one is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is the fiction. Oh.

• 1:44:11Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God, it feels so ghost.

• 1:44:13Speaker 02

  If the blue whale's the largest animal, why doesn't it have the largest brain?

• 1:44:17Jay Novella?

  Maybe it doesn't need it. There is no, it's not always a correlation of brains. Is it another, is it a current living animal or an ancient animal?

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  It's got to be like a. Jay, dinosaurs had tiny walnut brains.

• 1:44:28Jay Novella?

  It's another, it's another whale.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  It's got to be another whale. Which whale?

• 1:44:32Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  Sperm whale.

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  It is the sperm whale. The sperm whale is smaller than the blue whale, but why would the sperm whale have a bigger brain than the blue whale? Because it needs to be smart.

• 1:44:43Jay Novella?

  Is it more social? Because it dives deeper and it needs more brain to manage all that air management?

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  It needs, it needs more brain power to manage its lifestyle, but it has nothing to do with diving per se. Some more social?

• 1:44:55Speaker 03

  Hunting?

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Hunting, that's right. Blue whales are baleen whales. They filter feed. They float around, sucking in their food. Sperm whales have echolocation and hunt. And they have, they're way more social and cooperative and that requires more brain power.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:45:16Speaker 02

  Sperm whales have brains that are about 20 pounds. Uh, blue whales, 15, 16 pounds. So it's not insignificant. It's a huge difference.

• 1:45:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That feels very small, though, still.

• 1:45:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:27Speaker 02

  Well, the human brain is what, 3 pounds? So it's

• 1:45:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but

• 1:45:31Speaker 02

  A lot bigger than a human brain.

• 1:45:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Fi- but are, are those whales only five times bigger than humans?

• 1:45:35Speaker 02

  Well, there, there, so the thing is, you know, if you, if you map out brain size to body size, it's not linear.

• 1:45:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:42Speaker 02

  As you get bigger, you don't need to, the brain doesn't grow as fast as the body does. So it actually makes sense for that curve. You know what I mean? Um, with the sperm whales being a little bit above the curve and because they had their hunters and the blue whales being more typical on the curve. All right. That means that large whales built up earwax in layers, forming rings, which can be used to estimate their age is science. This is cool. Now, what happens is, it's actually an adaptation. The earwax builds up until it completely occludes the ear canal and you get a wax plug. And then that plug just grows bigger and bigger and bigger linearly as they age. Right?

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  So when you have a wax earplug from a, from a whale, you cut it sort of lengthwise. And you can see the light and dark rings. Dark rings for when they're migrating. Light rings for when they're feeding, because there's more lipids in the wax. So it's lighter in color.

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Think of a size Q-tip, you need to do that. I mean, my god.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  Now, you might think that that impedes their hearing, but it actually improves their hearing. Do you know why? Interesting.

• 1:46:55Bob Novella?

  Just conduction through the wax.

• 1:46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the wax has the same conductive properties as water. And so underwater, underwater, it actually aids in the sound waves communicating through to the inner ear. Um, yeah, cool. So, and Kara's right, it's some way, it's the, the ratio of rings to years is not always one to one. It depends on their habits. Some whales have a seasonal migration and it's pretty much one year, one ring is one year, but not all whales. It depends on their, their migration patterns and feeding patterns, et cetera. Uh, but yeah, they have freaking rings. You could estimate their age from their

• 1:47:36Bob Novella?

  Earrings.

• 1:47:36Speaker 02

  These ear, these earwax plugs, these giant

• 1:47:40Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  little plugs that they, they recover from, from whales. Yeah, cool.

• 1:47:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Steve, you said the wax conducts sound as like it's better because it's, it's like water. But wait, without the plug, it would be filled with water anyway. So wouldn't it be the same?

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  They said it'd be better than if it were filled with air. I guess there could still be a pocket of air in there.

• 1:47:59Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  And yeah, that's what they said. But the thing is, it's not a detriment, right? Because it's water conduction to water conduction to the eardrum, basically.

• 1:48:09Speaker 03

  Does the wax have like ambergris properties to it, you think? I wonder if it's like, has some kind of, you know, smell.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't think so. I think it only has, it only has scientific interest, you know? Otherwise I don't see why.

• 1:48:23Speaker 03

  No, I just mean literally like, is it like, is there some?

• 1:48:27Speaker 02

  Some use for it. Did whalers back in the day.

• 1:48:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:30Speaker 02

  Oh, we got the end of plug. Yeah, whatever.

• 1:48:32Speaker 03

  Time to smoke, well, as we've got the plug. Four more candles for the Light her up.

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  You don't know ambergris.

• 1:48:40Bob Novella?

  Ambergris is like whale puke, right?

• 1:48:41Speaker 03

  It's puke. Yeah, basically.

• 1:48:43Bob Novella?

  Perfume, it smells so good.

• 1:48:44Speaker 03

  Right. So I wonder like if there's something inherent about.

• 1:48:47Speaker 02

  Smells good. I think it's because of its physical properties. It helps it stick and stay on you longer. Oh, it has it.

• 1:48:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? No, I thought it was like musk, like a really intense musky smell. And I thought it was pronounced ambergris.

• 1:49:01Speaker 03

  Amber gris.

• 1:49:02Speaker 05

  Amber gris, no way.

• 1:49:03Speaker 03

  Amber gris, amber gris.

• 1:49:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Amber gris?

• 1:49:06Speaker 02

  So amber gris is used in perfume because it functions as a powerful fixative.

• 1:49:10Speaker 05

  See that Kara?

• 1:49:11Speaker 02

  Making sense to last longer on the skin. And it imparts, okay, and it imparts a unique, complex, musky, sweet, and marine aroma. So it's both.

• 1:49:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It's a marine fecal aroma that sweetens with age.

• 1:49:23Speaker 05

  What people figured this out. That's remarkable. Just random selection of doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

• 1:49:30Bob Novella?

  When you're slaughtering, when you're slaughtering big, beautiful whales for your job.

• 1:49:34Speaker 05

  Oh, I know. The whale economy was huge.

• 1:49:35Bob Novella?

  You smell some crazy shit from it, so.

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  I suppose so, but of all the things.

• 1:49:39Cara Santa Maria?

  But really, you guys always heard it as amber gris?

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. I've always heard amber gris because it's from the French. It means gray amber. Amber gris.

• 1:49:50Speaker 03

  Well, there's the.

• 1:49:50Speaker 05

  One of us is right and you're wrong.

• 1:49:52Speaker 03

  There's the patina. There's the patina, which is, I think, maybe that's called amber, amber gris.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  The internet says amber gris.

• 1:49:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, which internet?

• 1:50:00Speaker 02

  I'm just saying the first link that comes up.

• 1:50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  It's a medical journal.

• 1:50:04Speaker 05

  You have to go to the French one, guglè.

• 1:50:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Guglè.

• 1:50:09Bob Novella?

  Kara, I just listened to a pronunciation online and the guy was saying amber gris.

• 1:50:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, that's crazy.

• 1:50:15Bob Novella?

  But just, just one guy, who knows? I don't think I ever heard anyone actually say the word. I've just read it over and over and just pronounced it phonetically. Just very simple amber gris.

• 1:50:28Speaker 05

  It doesn't come up in conversation often, I'll grant you that.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

  Just say it already and listen to this guy go on and on about how to pronounce.

• 1:50:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:50:36Speaker 02

  No, even the French, even the pompous French guy says amber gris.

• 1:50:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. All right. There you go.

• 1:50:42Speaker 05

  Now, now.

• 1:50:45Jay Novella?

  You always make things so complicated, Kara.

• 1:50:48Speaker 05

  Let's not be redundant here.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  That is an example of what's called hyperforeignization. Where you overapply a rule that you learn about a foreign language. It's like, I, which, and I learned the concept of hyperforeignization because of the coup de grace. It's like, no, it's coup de grace. Coup de grace. Coup de grace is blow of fat. Coup, like, like Mardi Gras. Coup de grace is the blow of grace.

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  Cachet.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  People just think you always don't pronounce the S at the end of French words, but it's not true.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51:20Jay Novella?

  So Steve, how awesome are me and Kara then?

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you guys won.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  Oh, come on, really?

• 1:51:23Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 1:51:26Speaker 05

  We're having such a pleasant conversation.

• 1:51:28Speaker 03

  Ausome, ausome.

• 1:51:30Speaker 02

  Had to bring competition into it, Jay. Listen, everybody won because everyone had fun and you learned something interesting.

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  All right, Evan.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  Can I take that doll?

• 1:51:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:51:42Speaker 01

  Can I take that doll?

• 1:51:44Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 1:51:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Correct pronunciation.

• 1:51:47Speaker 05

  You would pronounce it ambergris.

• 1:51:49Speaker 02

  You're right. Ambergris.

• 1:51:50Speaker 05

  Ambergris.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  Ambergris. All right. Kiss my ambergris. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:51:59Speaker 05

  Tonight's quote is a cautionary quote. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  I like that.

• 1:52:06Speaker 05

  Now that was, I've heard this before. I had no idea from where.

• 1:52:10Speaker 02

  I say it all the time, or some version of it.

• 1:52:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:52:12Speaker 02

  Torture the data, yeah, if you torture the data until it confesses is another version of it that I.

• 1:52:17Speaker 05

  I like that one. Ronald Harry Coase, C.O.A.S.E., British economist and author. Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and Sciences in 1991. So he is a Nobel Prize winner.

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:52:32Speaker 05

  In economics. And yeah, so there it is. That's where it came. And yes, so definitely a cautionary quote, I believe.

• 1:52:40Speaker 02

  I mean, it says it all. You know, it's really perfect for the right circumstance. It's kind of about pee hacking when you think about it.

• 1:52:47Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why you got to pre-register your studies.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:52:50Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:52:51Speaker 03

  It's like that episode in Next Generation when Data was, you know, taken hostage and he got, so he was pushed so hard that he was gonna, he was ready to kill the guy. He was ready to kill the guy.

• 1:53:00Speaker 02

  It was exactly like that.

• 1:53:01Speaker 03

  Something happened in transport. So yeah, don't, don't push the data.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  George.

• 1:53:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I was wondering.

• 1:53:09Speaker 02

  So we've had two Star Trek and one Star Wars reference this episode, just keeping track.

• 1:53:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Too much.

• 1:53:14Speaker 02

  George, thank you so much for joining us, brother.

• 1:53:17Speaker 03

  I am so, I'm gonna be making the sound that that dog made when we, when I see you guys at the airport. I'm so excited. I'm just gonna be.

• 1:53:23Speaker 02

  Oh wow. We will see you in just about, just a little over two weeks.

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  Looking forward to it. Looking forward to visiting Kansas for the first time.

• 1:53:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, my goodness.

• 1:53:33Speaker 02

  It'll be a ton of fun. All right, guys. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man. You got it, brother.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

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

• 1:53:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:54:24Speaker 08

  Breathe in and reset with Lincoln Rejuvenate, an available multisensory feature in the 2027 Lincoln Navigator SUV. Experience the luxurious massage, visuals, and scents to help you relax in the driver's seat. It's your time for a reset. Visit lincoln.com to learn more. Lincoln Rejuvenate does not operate unless the vehicle is in park. When the vehicle is off, or if any doors open, do not use the feature in a closed garage or in other enclosed areas. See owner's manual for important operating instructions. Lincoln and Navigator are trademarks of Ford or its affiliates. All rights reserved.