The Skeptics Guide #1102 - Aug 22 2026

News Items: Drone Delivery System, Human Taxonomy, Peptide Wellness Fad, NASA Radiation Vest; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Model Railroaders, Leechbook, Genetic Diversity; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, August 20th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:18Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:22Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:22Bob Novella?

  How's everyone doing?

• 0:24Jay Novella?

  Pretty good.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  What's happening in the world?

• 0:26Jay Novella?

  You know, Steve, I like things that happen in outer space.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:29Jay Novella?

  Just like the next guy over here. They were able to see that moon crater made by the SpaceX rocket. So, did you guys, first off, did you see the picture?

• 0:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It made a crater. Wow. I mean, I guess we should expect that, right? Everything makes a crater?

• 0:42Jay Novella?

  Yeah, no, without a doubt. I mean, it's not really that great to look at. There's a couple of features of it that are interesting. Like, one, you can see, like, the debris lines coming off of the crater.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:52Jay Novella?

  Which, you know, is not that common. The crater is 60 feet across. It's 18 meters across.

• 0:58Cara Santa Maria?

  That's pretty big.

• 0:59Jay Novella?

  They said it was about 10 feet or 3 meters deep. And, um, you know, NASA-

• 1:03Cara Santa Maria?

  That's really big. 10 feet deep?

• 1:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And then how big was the rocket itself? Not that big?

• 1:08Jay Novella?

  Not, we're not even close.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  It was just the upper stage, right? It was the upper stage of a Falcon 9.

• 1:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so the orbiter caught that, got pictures of it. And if you look at the before and after, you know, it's no questioning that it's a fresh crater and wasn't there before.

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, those debris lines are insane. Like, the little, like, psh.

• 1:27Jay Novella?

  The thing about this crater that's different from other craters is we know what created it.

• 1:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:33Jay Novella?

  Um, and I think that knowing that and knowing, like, the mass of the thing that hit it is helpful, information-wise, to understand other craters.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. I mean, as kind of depressing, I don't know if that's quite the right word, but like, as much of a bummer as it is that this happened, it must be a boon for planetary scientists who study craters.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Because now they have, like, before and after. That's amazing.

• 2:00Jay Novella?

  This could be a sign of things to come because of the amount of space debris that there is. As, you know, as uncommon as you might think, something from low Earth orbit would make its way to the moon and hit the moon. It's not, it's not something that is so uncommon that, you know, we could expect it to hap-, you know, these things could happen again.

• 2:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:19Jay Novella?

  And it's not good if you think about us having people living on the moon.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Well, keep in mind, Jay.

• 2:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  This particular rocket launched a pair of moonlanders to the moon. So, this was on a trajectory to the moon. It's not like this was an upper stage of a rocket that was going into low Earth orbit.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I was wondering. So, so this rocket was on its way to the moon and it basically, part of it crash-landed into the moon?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Well, it's like, this was the upper stage of a rocket that was on a lunar trajectory in order to insert these two landers to the moon, these two private landers. So, it was basically already headed, you know what I mean? In order to launch something to the moon, you have to be going to the moon.

• 2:56Cara Santa Maria?

  So, what happened to the landers?

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Uh, that's a good question.

• 2:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, was it ju-, like, why did only, why did some of it crash into the moon?

• 3:03Speaker 01

  No, no, I mean, the landers did what they did.

• 3:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, they did. Okay, they did, okay.

• 3:07Speaker 01

  This was just the leftover debris that was sort of already heading to the moon.

• 3:11Jay Novella?

  But that is, you know, that is the problem, though, right? Because there's going to be a lot of traffic to and from the moon. And it's not unlikely that there'll be other circumstances like this, where, like, something was heading to the moon and then it ended up pushing, you know, payload away from itself. But then we have to figure out ways to ensure that we're not going to have these, you know, unexpected crashes into the moon.

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. Okay, this upper stage of the Falcon 9, because it was going, what, 5,400 miles per hour, and there's, you know, like, no atmosphere, basically, the metal just vaporized. I mean, I know it's not crazy, but it's crazy.

• 3:50Jay Novella?

  It is crazy. Like, you'd think, you know, the impact alone, right? So, the thing hits the surface of the moon and the regolith, when it hit the regolith, it was going so fast that there are no significant pieces of metal left over.

• 4:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they said there are probably some fragments and little pieces of debris that are embedded in the crater floor, but like, most of the upper stage, the metal literally vaporized. It's aluminum and steel. It just turned into gas.

• 4:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah, think of that kinetic energy, man. That's a lot of kinetic energy.

• 4:20Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. Wow.

• 4:22Jay Novella?

  I mean, I turn a lot of things into gas, too, Cara, but very different circumstance.

• 4:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Very different process altogether, yes. I mean, yeah, we'll learn a lot from this. And it was never intentional, right? The idea was that these things would land and that this would fly off into space? Or was the idea that this was going to crash-land? It was part of the calculus?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  They initially thought it would end up in, like, high Earth orbit.

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  But interactions with the Earth and the moon's gravity, they said there was also an unexpected solar activity altered its path to put it on an intersection course with the moon.

• 4:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:57Jay Novella?

  They didn't say with confidence it's going to do this, right? Like, we need that assurance. You know, we have to deal with extraordinary precision now because, again, we have tons of debris in Earth orbit. Um, that already makes it difficult for spacecraft to get in and out, which it's only going to get worse. Uh, you know, we talked about this on the show with things that are planned. And then, you know, like, again, there's going to be settlements on the moon. You know, we're not going to, the US isn't going to be the only country.

• 5:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. And even before there are people, because I do think that's pretty far off, we're going to have infrastructure.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's no atmosphere, there's no atmosphere to protect.

• 5:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Debris doesn't burn up, and the atmosphere just hits the ground with full force.

• 5:39Bob Novella?

  There's kind of an atmosphere, but it's so minimal, yeah. Essentially, ignore it. Uh, lava tubes, baby. Put the people in the lava tubes.

• 5:48Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. I, this is kind of interesting, though. So, the lithium and sodium gas and all of that dust that got kicked up is analyzable by these different telescopes and orbiters. So, all of these people are now getting some really interesting understanding of moon composition under the surface because that crash kicked it all up and were able to capture the specter of some of that stuff. So, that's really cool.

• 6:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, a fresh crater that deep, that's rare as hell. I mean, I don't think they, they never dug that deep when they were, when they had boots on the ground. So, that's kind of a unique opportunity.

• 6:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. It's like, ugh, I kind of hate that, like, good will come out of this, but not really. I mean, it is, it is really interesting. But it also, this is how we learn and how we get better, right? This is how we iterate, is by making mistakes. And luckily, this mistake didn't harm anybody.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Well, the other issue is for rockets that are launching stuff to the moon, they don't really have enough fuel left over to do anything else, right? It's not like, if you get into low Earth orbit, you can have an extra fuel to de-orbit, you know, or whatever you need to do. You know, our rockets are just bitterly getting stuff to the moon. So, if, that's it, they just say, yeah, just be in high Earth orbit. It'll be in some kind of, you know, a big orbit when it's done. There's not, it would take a lot of fuel to bring that back down to the Earth and de-orbit it.

• 7:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  All right, let's move on. Jay, tell us about this new drone delivery system.

• 7:15Jay Novella?

  So, as of this month, August 2026, there's eight companies that are certified by the FAA as part of 135 drone air carriers in the United States. And these, these companies are Wing, UPS, Flight Forward, Amazon Prime Air, ZipLine, Cauzy Aviation, Drone Up, Drone Express, and the most recent one is the DoorDash Air. But the real players and the real race for the consumer delivery is between Wing, Amazon, and ZipLine.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  What's funny, when you sent me the items, it said ZipLine Drone Delivery. And I didn't know that that was the brand name. How are ziplines involved in the drone delivery? Didn't make any sense to me.

• 7:57Jay Novella?

  Well, it's because when the thing delivers it, Steve, you have to have a zipline from your garage to the end of your driveway, and you have to catch it. It's, I made that up. Anyway.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are no ziplines involved.

• 8:08Jay Novella?

  There isn't. But it does use some type of metal lowering line.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:13Jay Novella?

  Um, and that's where they got zipline from.

• 8:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, right. It's not going to, like, land and take back off. It's just going to drop the thing.

• 8:19Jay Novella?

  Well, ZipLine, actually, what it does is you have, like, a more substantial drone that's up in the air, and it lowers down like a little guy.

• 8:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, oh, like the, like, like the rover did. What did they call that? The space, not a parachute. Oh, there was a name for it.

• 8:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that was awesome.

• 8:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 8:38Jay Novella?

  That idea was fantastic.

• 8:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Very cool.

• 8:40Jay Novella?

  So, they lower it down, and then it'll drop its cargo off, you know, like, an inch above the ground.

• 8:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:46Jay Novella?

  But that is like-

• 8:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so it's like, more gentle than your typical delivery person.

• 8:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I think the thing here is, like, I don't know if this is the main reason why this company developed this, but they don't want their drones to get too close to the ground. Because people, you know what I mean?

• 9:02Speaker 01

  That always seemed to be the most vulnerable point of the whole idea, is that these drones are vulnerable to vandals, you know?

• 9:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Yeah, people, you know, if they can get a big one down, it's got a lot of expensive equipment on it. Which, you know, I think the vast majority of people have no interest in. Uh, but, you know, if it was, I'm making this up, but if 5% of them get damaged or stolen or whatever, that's not insignificant. Wing is owned by Alphabet, which is a Google company. They probably have the strongest path here to mass-market residential delivery at this point. They've already completed more than, take a guess, how many, how many, um, deliveries have they completed?

• 9:43Speaker 01

  20 million.

• 9:45Jay Novella?

  Okay, Kara.

• 9:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, a thousand.

• 9:49Jay Novella?

  Bob.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Graham's number.

• 9:50Jay Novella?

  That's not even funny. It's one million.

• 9:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  I know Steve was like 20 and it makes it sound like a little bit, but one million is

• 9:59Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 9:59Jay Novella?

  That's a lot of completed deliveries. And they operate from, it says from more than 50 US locations, which is a lot, right? So you know, you could roughly say one in every state. I don't know exactly where these locations are, but the idea here would be that there would have to be drone locations scattered everywhere, just like Amazon's processing buildings. But its biggest advantage is not the drone itself, but it's Walmart, right? Cause Wing and Walmart plan to expand drone delivery to more than 270 Walmart locations next year, 2027. This could potentially reach about 40 million Americans. And instead of building, you know, an entirely new distribution network, Wing is saying

• 10:43Jay Novella?

  that they can use existing stores already stocked with products that are located close to customers. And that of course makes a ton of sense, right? Because if they can put their drone delivery system on the roof of these buildings, you know, they, all they have to do is come up with a way to get the product up into the drone section and they're good to go. So then there's Amazon. Primair developed more slowly than expected and that Amazon originally hoped, but the company, you know, now they're pushing it really hard. Like they're putting a lot of time and energy into getting this to a finish line. Amazon said that it plans to expand their drone delivery to nearly 500 US cities by the end of 2026, right? We're not far off from that. It's a, what is this? MK30 drone?

• 11:28Jay Novella?

  That's their drone. It can carry packages weighing about five pounds. And the FAA filings are showing that Amazon's planning for as many as a thousand flights per day from some of their delivery centers. So, you know, not, not a massive start, but it's going to start somewhere. It looks like Amazon's going to win the geographic availability race because they already have all of these distribution centers everywhere. They have a massive infrastructure. And that gives them this incredible leg up on the other, the other companies that are trying to get there. But you know, the, the company that has the most interesting technology and the one that I think will have the most successful technology, I'd have to pick ZipLine after reading in about these, about the leaders here.

• 12:13Jay Novella?

  ZipLine, um, they've completed about 2.5 million commercial deliveries worldwide. They have a new platform two system where it can carry up to eight pounds. It has about a 10 mile service radius, which is actually pretty good. And you know, the, like I said before, like it handles the final delivery better than any of the other drones, which is that lowering of the product and it only drops an inch to the ground. That, that's all good. You know, like this, you know, if it's delivering food, right? How, how far off the ground would you want a ham sandwich to, to fall? Like one inch is fine. Two feet questionable, five feet, forget it.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  Are there pickles on the ham sandwich?

• 12:50Jay Novella?

  There'd have to be.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  What kind of bread are we talking about?

• 12:53Jay Novella?

  Well, if it were, if it was up to me, Steve, it would be some type of Artesian sourdough.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  No, no, it's gotta be rye. You kidding me? What are you crazy?

• 13:01Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys remember all of those competitions we had in like elementary school where you would try and build a balsa wood scaffold to drop an egg and it not break? This is really coming in handy now, huh? We need to go back to that elementary technology.

• 13:16Jay Novella?

  So ZipLine's, um, the main drone stays about, you know, it could be hundreds of feet up in the air, which is, gives plenty of distance to make it safe.

• 13:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's actually good to hear because I, I don't know why I have this like dystopian fear of there just being like bzz above our heads everywhere.

• 13:33Jay Novella?

  And they also developed a much more quiet noise, right? The propeller noise is much, much more quiet, which is, it's all physics, right? And it's not impossible. And then that smaller autonomous like delivery vehicle thing that descends down on a tether, it can maneuver itself too. And they're saying that it can maneuver to a very precise location. And I don't know if like everybody gets to pick what that location would be. Like I would be perfectly happy if it dropped it off somewhere towards the end of my driveway. I don't want it.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Well, you have to have like a little drone delivery pad with like a, a mark on it to say drop the packages here.

• 14:13Jay Novella?

  I would say no, but I mean, it'd be interesting if they do let you pick the, the drop off location, but, but then you can't have the final say because some people might pick really strange locations.

• 14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm thinking about like, you know, where I live, where the kind of urban density is really, really high, it would need to be precise because the difference between my door and my two next door neighbor's doors is just a few feet. You know, so, oh yeah, like it's, uh, you know, I live in these like tall skinny houses that are all right next to each other. And so it, depending on the market, the needs are, are going to be very, very different. So that's good that it's autonomous because then it can sort of fly maybe into a porch area or something.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Or drop it off on your deck.

• 14:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 14:57Jay Novella?

  I think it's really cool that they, you know, they took into account like, hey, we need to land this thing in a, in a certain space. Obviously that comes into play and it was smart that they, they designed the whole thing around that premise. The question is, why aren't millions of drones already doing it? Like what's, what's the holdup? And there's, there are some legitimate obstacles I wasn't aware of.

• 15:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, my, you know, my, one of my best friends in the whole world, her partner has a startup company, a startup drone delivery company. And so I see firsthand the difficulty. Like it is, it sounds technologically easy, but it is not.

• 15:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they're saying like regulations are a big problem here because there are existing regulations and they were created before the idea of drones.

• 15:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh. And also probably we need new regulations for drones.

• 15:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they will. It's all coming. You know how, it's all like that first paving, you know, like this is the first time all of these bridges are going to be crossed. So there's something called beyond visual line of sight, BVLOS. They always have to do that. And what that means is companies can receive an FAA exemption and waivers, but the United States, you know, hasn't finalized their national regulatory framework for things that you are going to deliver, like the beyond visual line of sight idea here is that the drone is dropping something off and it, it could be a very complicated mix of events. It's not super obvious how things are going to play out, right? Because there could be a fence and they have to take into account all of these little

• 16:33Jay Novella?

  snags and, and edge cases that could make this complicated. But that, you know, they're working on it. The FAA is definitely engaged here. They're proposing some new rules, which will all be worked out. You know how this works. It could take years, but there's all these, all these considerations that have to have answers. Then they have air traffic is a problem, you know? So let's say a few hundred drones are flying over a city. That's not a big deal, but if you have tens of thousands that are being operated by Amazon, Wing, ZipLine, DoorDash, they need an automated traffic management system. This can't be like people sitting in towers, looking at drones because it's, it absolutely won't work that way. It has to be managed by software.

• 17:14Jay Novella?

  And the FAA is developing something called unmanned aircraft system traffic management, UTM. And it would allow the drone operators that, to have like coordinated routes and avoid conflicts with other air traffic and each other, because it could become a mess. And that's, that right there, that visual for me, Kara, like that's where I'm like, imagine you're in, you're in a city, you know, I, we live near New York City, so I'll pick New York City as my sample. You're in New York City and you look up and there's just hundreds of drones in your, in your view at any given moment.

• 17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. It's like such a, it's, you know, I think we just, we get used, things become normalized. And so we're used to looking up and seeing power lines everywhere. We're used to looking, in LA, we look, there are always helicopters in the sky and they're loud and they're ugly and they're a bummer and they make it hard to sleep at night. And I think, you know, I, I do think we will just adjust to this, which is so sad because I want to have a pretty sky when I look up.

• 18:14Jay Novella?

  Of course.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  What's interesting, we get like the introduction of a technology like this that is going to have a massive impact, a new culture evolves around it, right? Like when cell phones became a thing, you, you, no one can predict all of the impacts it's going to have on personal interactions and the way we live our lives. And there's knock on effects that are hard to anticipate. I think this will be the same. You know, like there are, they just have to, to some extent, they just have to do it and see what happens. It's like to see like how much of a, of a distraction is it going to be? How much of a menace? How much vandalism is there going to be? Or is somebody going to figure out some other thing to do? Like the, the development of porch pirates developing out of the massive home delivery

• 19:00Speaker 01

  system that we have now, right?

• 19:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like some sort of technology, like a police scanner, but that tracks like drone delivery. So the second it gets dropped off, they just snatch it up.

• 19:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I could definitely see that.

• 19:11Jay Novella?

  I can also see people building like a, a place on the roof that they can gain access, like, you know? Like right now, it's really a pain, a big pain in the butt for me to get into my attic. Like it sucks, but you know, maybe there, in the future you'll be like, look, I have to have a receptacle on my roof, which means you gotta.

• 19:28Cara Santa Maria?

  That would be easy for me. Yeah. Cause I have a, I have a functional roof. It's part of the build, you know? So I could just go up there and nobody could access it. But you know, I, I would hope that, just like we have laws around construction noise, I would hope that we would have laws around the pollution, quote unquote, visual.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  It's all zoning.

• 19:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Auditory. Yeah, but like around drone delivery, like you know, what would be lovely is if drones could only deliver packages in the early hours of the evening, when the sun was set. So it wasn't blocking our view of the sky yet, but it wasn't so late that the noise is a nuisance. Like I would love there to be a window. And that's the cool thing I think about this stuff being autonomous and not relying on individual labor, the way that deliveries are now, is right now you look and there's Amazon trucks everywhere, right? There's Amazon people walking around every block of my city at any given time. You see Amazon, Amazon delivery people.

• 20:28Cara Santa Maria?

  You could probably coordinate an effort where deliveries were in a smaller window if it was all calculated, right?

• 20:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, personal preferences is, to me is interesting because it's, are they going to allow you to say like, hey, from two to three in the afternoon or whatever, like, you know, you know, you're going to be home. A lot of people are at work. Could you opt to have it dropped off at work instead of at your home?

• 20:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And could there be restrictions so that whole neighborhoods are drone free during certain hours? I would love that.

• 20:59Jay Novella?

  Unfortunately, like by the time all the regulations are passed and all of that has been put into play. I think people are not going to really, we're going to be kind of left out of the equation, you know, then we'll complain if there's a, if there's a reason to complain and you know, it'll probably go that route.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  But on the flip side, you could also imagine, you know, a not too distant future where you order something and you literally have it an hour later because a drone just took it directly to your house and dropped it off. And you're like, yeah, this kind of sucks, but I got what I needed in an hour.

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I'll tell you that, that is the internal struggle I have every day. And I know that there will probably be like Reddit threads about this and I'm going to get hate emails about this, but like my own morals and political ideologies are at a real kind of conflict with the convenience.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Convenience.

• 21:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the convenience of my life. I live in Los Angeles. I can get anything delivered within an hour. Like I have Amazon delivery that can happen within one or two hours, which is.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Already?

• 22:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. But I can also Instacart anything, Grubhub anything. Like it's all expanded now. Any store, anything that somebody could pick it up and drive it to my house within an hour, that's done. And now you're right, we could get it from a warehouse that's a little bit farther away.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:21Bob Novella?

  Guys, I've got, I've got, I've got an Amazon warehouse that's being finished right now, just miles away. I mean, I mean, it's going to be, you know, eventually ridiculous for me.

• 22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but think about, like, you probably don't want that giant warehouse there, but also look at the positive side.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  But you want the convenience.

• 22:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 22:41Bob Novella?

  It's, I mean, I don't mind it. It's out of the way. I never would drive near it.

• 22:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but see, that's the thing. It's out of the way for you. But there will always be that sort of NIMBY attitude that we have to be careful about, which is like, I want all the things that come from it, but put it in somebody else's backyard.

• 22:57Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, it's, it's on, it's near the top of a hill.

• 23:00Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 23:01Bob Novella?

  It's got a low profile, but you can see it on Route 8. But I don't think it's really in anybody's backyard necessarily, you know, to that, to an extent where it's an eyesore. I'm not, but I'm not certain. I haven't gotten close to it yet.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, but that's why they're talking about putting data centers in space, you know? I mean, not the only reason, but it's for that reason. Yeah.

• 23:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah. One more thing. There's lots of things I could have talked about here. There's more limitations and considerations, but there's one thing I, I thought was interesting. So do, do drone deliveries actually save any money anywhere? And, you know, the industry has researched this and they've estimated that costs could eventually fall towards $2 per delivery. That's a projection, but that's, you know, it's probably within the range of where it would go to. You know, a lot of the companies that are doing this haven't demonstrated any kind of, you know, what the economics would be at a massive scale. You know, but what would you be willing to pay? Is it worth $2? Sure. That's, that's not that big of a deal. But would you pay 10 bucks? Particularly if you bought something

• 24:03Jay Novella?

  that was worth 20 bucks? You know what I mean? I don't think I would do that. One cool thing they're saying is that, you know, pharmacies could send medications immediately, eventually, like when, when these services are, like a company could purchase like a, have a contract with a, with a drone company, like a hardware store, you know, they're not going to have their own drone system, but they could, they could use a, you know, third party company to do it. I'm, I have a mixed feeling about this. I think it's going to be one of those things where we won't know what it looks like and feels like until it happens. And then a lot of people won't like it and some people won't care. Yeah, I think it is kind of inevitable. The best that we can hope for is that the companies do their best to

• 24:46Jay Novella?

  make it, you know, as least an eyesore and a, you know, sound, you know, a sound problem as possible.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Guys, this is a very interesting topic. Human taxonomy. How do we classify all of the, the, let's say, the recent human ancestors, the last four to five million years? We have Australopithecines, Paranthropus, Homo. We have a lot of different Homo species now. And the, the evolutionary picture for humans, human relatives, human ancestors over the last few million years has become really complicated. But we also are still missing a lot of pieces to the puzzle. You know, so I saw this article by a paleontologist, Ian Towell. The name of the paper is "Clades, Grades, and the Genus

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Problem: A Case for Revising Hominin Taxonomy."

• 25:41Bob Novella?

  No.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  He basically, his proposal, I'll tell you what his proposal is first, and then we'll go, I'll go back and discuss what problems he's trying to fix, which is what the fascinating part, is to make all of that one genus, just to say it's all Homo, right? So there'd be no more Australopithecus, there'd be no more Paranthropus, it would just be Homo Apharensis instead of Australopithecus Apharensis. What's your immediate reaction to that?

• 26:13Bob Novella?

  My, my gut reaction is that sounds reasonable.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  Sounds reasonable.

• 26:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  What about you guys?

• 26:20Cara Santa Maria?

  One more time, rephrase the.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  There are three genera of recent hominins, right? There's Australopithecines, which are sort of the, the first to emerge. And then out of Australopithecines, probably, evolved the Homo genus, right? Which eventually contains us, Homo sapiens. And also Paranthropus, which is like a very robust form of Australopithecus with like really big jaws and big teeth.

• 26:50Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  Not different enough that they said, all right, this is a different species. This is a different genus. And he's saying, eh, let's just make it all Homo. And, yeah, so the question is, so yeah, why is he proposing this? Why does he think that there's a problem with the current, the current system, you know, taxonomical system that we're using? So this is the, this is the deeper question. The deeper question is, well, what is the system? How do we break up all of the human ancestors into different taxonomic groups?

• 27:20Bob Novella?

  Is it all just all morphology? Cause there's no genetic information, really.

• 27:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's the interesting thing too. Like it's a bigger question of how do we do any taxonomy? Because my guess is that extant species, we, we just have such a wealth of information about them. We could keep splitting until the cows come home. Whereas extinct species, if we wanted to err on the side of caution, we would be more lumpers because we're just looking at shapes.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you're, you're, you're dancing around the issues here. You're, you're, you're correct to an extent, but it's a little more complicated than that.

• 27:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it tap or jazz?

• 27:57Speaker 01

  So first of all, there's no objective answer to this, right? I mean, with any categorization, categorization system, you can choose what criteria you want to use in order to break up your categories. And you could choose how much lumping and splitting that you do, right? There's no like, oh, this is the one true scientific way to do it. And no, it's like, we just make choices. The other thing is that it's, it's always going to be a schematic, right? It's always going to be an oversimplification of reality, which is going to be infinitely complicated. But we just have to draw lines somewhere. So there's, there's, there's a two basic ways in which scientists now are devising, and this is also a false dichotomy,

• 28:39Speaker 01

  but basically there's the cladistic system. Have you guys heard of that cladistics?

• 28:44Jay Novella?

  No, of course. Hello.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  So what, what is it?

• 28:47Cara Santa Maria?

  There's like the little like upside down Vs where it like this gets split into this and there's different clades that you follow throughout.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the key is that cladistics uses one criterion for taxonomic groups, one and only one. And that is evolutionary branching points. That's it.

• 29:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  So that means that a clade by definition is a common ancestor and every one of its descendants, a hundred percent of the descendants, right? That's one clade.

• 29:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Does it have to be defined to use cladistics? Or are there sort of gray common ancestors where we know there would have been one, even though we've never seen it?

• 29:26Speaker 01

  Well, there are limitations to our knowledge.

• 29:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, exactly. There are a lot of holes.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  The limitation of cladistics is we don't always know what the evolutionary branching points are. But the system is an attempt to align taxonomy 100% with evolutionary branching points. And it's not just a limitation of our knowledge. That's one point. Sometimes we don't know what the branching points are. The other one is the branching points aren't clean, right? Humans and chimps, you know, got together for millions of years after the, after we split. And that could have spun things off that were not, like, there's no clean evolutionary branching point in that case.

• 30:04Bob Novella?

  That's a huge problem with cladistics.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:07Bob Novella?

  That's right. That's really big.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  But we have, and Bob, you were not correct when you said we don't have genetic information. We do, because we can now get, we can do DNA analysis of fossils, like most famously Neanderthals, but even going back older than that. So we are now, we are, we have more and more genetic information to try to inform.

• 30:28Bob Novella?

  How far can we really go back?

• 30:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Hundreds of thousands of years, right?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  The oldest fossil out of which we've gotten DNA is 1.2 million year old mammoth fossil.

• 30:37Bob Novella?

  The vast majority of these fossils are just too old to get any genetic information.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  You're correct. You are correct. And that is a limitation. The other issue with any system is that there is no objective cutoff for like what's a species versus a genus, versus a family, versus an order, right? Like that, that, there's a lot of wiggle room there as well. And in the cladistic systems, every branching point isn't named, right? It isn't a taxon, because there's too many of them. So they have to arbitrarily decide which branching points are big enough to deserve a taxonomical group name.

• 31:16Bob Novella?

  What a mess.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  It's a mess. Now, what's the other system? The other system is the Linnaean system, right? And the Linnaean system uses whatever it wants to use to make its, its taxonomical designations. It does use and it can use evolutionary branching points, and it tries to have what we call monophyletic groups. Monophyletic means an ancestor and all of its descendants, right? That's one, it's a clade. But, but the Linnaean system uses non, non-monophyletic groups, polyphyletic or paraphyletic. So paraphyletic means that it's an ancestor and some of its descendants, but not all of its descendants. So you may

• 31:59Speaker 01

  have descendants in different groups, but not all the intermediaries. And polyphyletic means that it includes people from, includes species from different groups, right? Without everything in between. So they're kind of similar, but they're, they're sort of technically slightly different. Whereas monophyletic ancestor in every single descendant. All right. So. But the Linnaean system, which is what we have been using for human taxonomy, is the big advantage is that it's based upon what you can see, right?

• 32:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  So you could define a group by a morphological feature, or multiple morphological features. If you have these three things, you belong to this group. And therefore, you get a new fossil, does it have these three things? You're a member of that group, you know? And so it's very easy. You don't need genetics. You don't need to know the evolutionary branching point. And so it's very pragmatic from that perspective. But some scientists, some paleontologists say, yeah, but you end up with these paraphyletic groups that aren't real evolutionary groups. And it doesn't reflect our evolving understanding of the evolutionary relationships and eh, you know? So that's where we are with humans, with human evolution. So like, for example, the Australopithecine group is a paraphyletic group.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  It is not a monophyletic group. It is not a clade. And Tao makes this point as well, that those anatomical features that we are using to divine, to find the Homo genus and the Australopithecus genus and the Paranthropus genus are breaking down as we find more fossils that have a mixture of features that we previously thought were unique to one of these paraphyletic groups. Does that make sense?

• 33:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  So like, for example, a large brain was one of the features of the Homo genus. But then we found Homo naleti, which has a really small brain, more like in the Australopithecine range, or somewhere in between. And so it's like, okay, so is that still a feature of Homo now? So it's kind of, those criteria that we developed are breaking down. So that's kind of the problem he's trying to solve here.

• 34:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it also, oftentimes, part of our definitions of speciation, whether they're explicit or implicit, has to do with a lack of ability to interbreed. And what we often don't consider with some of these hominid species is how much after the fact-

• 34:30Speaker 01

  They're all hooking up, I'm sure.

• 34:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And so now, all of a sudden, well, is this something where it had to do with, you know, kind of divergent evolution? Or is it something where then later, these two groups rejoined and shuffled their genes around? That's why I think that-

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's gene flow.

• 34:47Cara Santa Maria?

  -genetics for migration is also really complicated for that reason.

• 34:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there probably was a lot of gene flow among these groups, absolutely. And that complicates it as well. So that's what we currently have, and that's the problem he's trying to fix. It's a mess. We have a non-cladistic system with paraphyletic groups. We're basing our designations on features that are becoming, every time we discover a new species, it complicates our system. And it changes the way we're ranking these, you know, we're nesting these individual species into genus groups. There's another problem which is interesting-

• 35:20Bob Novella?

  It's not like, here's a new puzzle piece. It's like, oh, wait, here's another piece. Now the puzzle just got bigger and more complicated.

• 35:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's getting more complicated with each new piece, not more clarified.

• 35:29Cara Santa Maria?

  That's rough.

• 35:31Jay Novella?

  But Steve, shouldn't we just be ignoring, like, these biological edge cases and just basically say it's a dualistic system?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  These are edge cases, these are actual species. But I hear what you're saying.

• 35:44Jay Novella?

  You know what I was saying, right?

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. Right. So how do we, so his proposed fix is, say, listen, we should stop pretending that we know how these things shake out at the genus level. There's no way to make it work cladistically. One reason why it can't work cladistically is because you can't have one genus nested within another genus, if they're both clades, right? It has to be a sub-clade, which means it has to be a sub-genus. So then we'd be breaking this all up into, there's families, then below family, there's tribe, then below tribe, there's genus, then species. But we need super tribes and sub-tribes and super genus.

• 36:29Speaker 01

  Like, we would need to be, you know, breaking it up significantly in order to be able to have all of these things be monophyletic clades. Right now, we know they're not. Like, there's no way, there's no way really to rectify the way we currently have Australopithecines, Homo and Paranthropus into cladistic groups. So he's saying, just forget the whole thing, just make it all one genus. That kind of fits better anyway, because the human genera are very narrow temporally, meaning that they're very shallow in terms of time compared to other animal groups. And so this is actually, you know what I mean? Because we're kind of breaking it up really fine.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  But in reality, this is probably all just one genus, and we're just looking at now just subgroups within a genus. So everything would just become Homo afarensis, Homo africanus, Homo naleti, right? Homo neanderthalensis, everything would just be Homo.

• 37:25Bob Novella?

  Steve, what would be the distinguishing characteristic that would mean you could not be in the new Homo group?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  So he's basically saying, everything in the last four to five million years. So there are still going to be, there still will be Australopithecines, but that are older than that. Or there would be other genera that are even older than Australopithecines. He's not touching those. He's just saying, everything in the last four to five million years. And he, so the advantage is that it would make it easier to name and to classify new species, because it's not new hominin species, because it's not going to be breaking our system every time we find something new. Right? So he says, "It addresses the problem of non-monophily. It avoids conceptual difficulties associated with genera with shallow time depths, and it facilitates a more coherent evolutionary comparisons with more stable taxonomy."

• 38:15Speaker 01

  That's the other thing, it creates stability. If your taxonomy changes every time you find a new species, then that creates instability, and also is a problem for the literature. This way, it would be, it won't be, it won't change, because everything is the same genus, so it would create stability. But there's limitations. One limitation is the loss of taxonomic information, right? So now, with only one group, we're not going to, we're losing the information we had by breaking them up into multiple groups. So he's like, yeah, but he's saying, all right, but this would be greater consistency, greater transparency, and he said this would work. Now, this is just his proposal. We have no idea if the community is going to pick up on this. But at the very least, he's identified a very interesting problem.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  He, you know, I think explains it very well, and shows what the trade-offs are, right? Categorization's all about trade-offs. And we'll see, maybe people will propose other things. Like, for example, we could make a tribe above all of those genera, like, which we could call Australopithecine, right? Which is the suffix you use for a tribe level. And that contains all current Australopithecus, Homo and Paranthropus species. Still gives you the problem-

• 39:31Bob Novella?

  What's this tribe shit?

• 39:32Speaker 01

  What's that?

• 39:33Bob Novella?

  What's this tribe crap, man? I never heard of tribe in this classification scheme.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Tribe's a new thing. Tribe is below family, above genus.

• 39:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Do we apply it to other organisms or only hominids?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's across the board, taxonomically.

• 39:42Bob Novella?

  Never heard of that one.

• 39:44Speaker 01

  Stuff's changing, Bob. I know. Like, every time, like, if I haven't delved into this for a couple of years, like, there's new shit going on. You know? So, but that still doesn't solve a lot of the problem. You still have to, the thing is, we still have to figure out, then, within that, like, what do we do with the genera Australopithecus, Homo or Paranthropus? And we don't know precisely what their relationships are. So it doesn't really solve the problem, it just sort of creates-

• 40:07Bob Novella?

  Is it kicking the can up the tree? I mean-

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, kind of, it's kicking the can up the tree. But yeah, I think it's a mixed metaphor, but sure. So the, there is, the point is, there is no solution until we really flesh out all of these relationships, until we know what the evolutionary branching points are. So I think, whatever system we currently use, Tao doesn't specifically say this, but I think, anything we currently use is a placeholder. This is just like, all right. And I think, keeping the placeholder where it is, is also fine, because it's, again, we're not pretending to be cladistic, because we don't have enough information to be cladistic. We're just saying, we're going to just lump them based upon the features we can see, right? The morphological features we could see. We'll do the best we can to put them into an evolutionary tree.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  But until we know where the branching points are, we can't really resolve all these issues. So we do have to just say, this is what we'll do for now, and then, maybe in 50 or 100 years, when we have a lot more information, we'll rework everything again into a more of a consistent system. But that is a trade-off too, because that causes problems for the literature. You know, we're calling a species one thing, and then we're going to rename it to something else. It's going to make reading the literature before that point difficult, right?

• 41:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  So it's a dilemma. There's no solution. It's just that we have to just sort of pick our poison. But I like it as such, it's complicated, but it's such a great example of all of the trade-offs that we confront when we try to impose any classification system on something as complicated as nature. There are no answers, there are just trade-offs, you know? All right. Kara, tell us about, this is something I've had my eye on for a while. I think we've covered it a little bit on science-based medicine. But tell us about this peptide wellness fad.

• 41:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. The reason that this is in the news now is because there was a recent FDA advisory panel vote. So there was an FDA advisory committee that got together to talk about specific peptides that have historically been on a list, basically, called the category two of the bulk substances, nominated under sections 503A or 503B of the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act. So these bulk drug substances on the category two list have historically, basically been

• 42:38Cara Santa Maria?

  in, you know, defined as things that compounding pharmacies cannot put into their drugs, because they are unsafe to do so. And a lot of peptides are on that list. Well, what are peptides?

• 42:53Speaker 01

  They are-

• 42:54Cara Santa Maria?

  They're like, smaller than proteins.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Well, they're, a peptide specifically refers to a chain of amino acids that has not folded into a specific protein. Protein requires three-dimensional folding and structure.

• 43:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:09Bob Novella?

  It's like a proto-protein, proto-protein.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but sometimes they never become proteins, you know what I mean? They're just the, they're bigger than individual amino acids, they're smaller and less complex than most proteins. And so they're chains of amino acids, basically, but then they don't have, like, the coils and the sheets and all of those kinds of things.

• 43:29Bob Novella?

  Why haven't they folded, though?

• 43:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They didn't need to, I guess.

• 43:34Speaker 01

  Because, I mean, or they're too small.

• 43:36Bob Novella?

  The amino acids link together and then it folds naturally in a super complex way. That's almost impossible to predict.

• 43:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and I think part of it may be because of the lengths.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Part of it, I think it's because they're small, but also Bob, that folding does not necessarily happen spontaneously. There are mechanisms in the cell to fold proteins. And so if you're making it in a lab and it's just in a dish, it may not fold spontaneously.

• 43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we have peptides all throughout our body, too. So what I'm seeing, I do think that's an interesting question, Bob. What I'm seeing, just as a short swift answer, is that because peptides are usually 20 to 30 units only of amino acids, they're just not stable enough. They're too short to make those bonds that are needed to make them lock into the fixed structure. So they would just like be changing shape all the time.

• 44:21Bob Novella?

  God, that makes, that makes sense.

• 44:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So, so usually proteins are 50 plus amino acids and usually peptides are 30 or fewer. But I'm sure there's like, just like you were just talking about, Steve, I'm sure there's a ton of exceptions to that rule. But so peptides are, you know, naturally occurring in our bodies all the time. Peptides can also be made in a lab, as you mentioned. And I think probably part of the peptide quote craze that's happening right now, part of it is probably due to GLP-1s. Like if, if we're going to be honest, GLP-1s, which are glucagon-like peptides, are recently, well, I mean, they were actually FDA approved quite some time ago for type 2 diabetes, but as we know, recently have broader appeal

• 45:04Cara Santa Maria?

  because they've been FDA approved across several different manufacturers for weight reduction. And, you know, researchers showing a lot of really positive benefits from, from these specific peptides called GLP-1s. Yet RFK Jr., he's often touting the kind of quote efficacy, I don't even know what he's touting, the, the wellness panacea nature of peptides to cure all that ails you, right? And so there are all of these, like if you do a deep dive into all of the peptides that are on the market, I mean, and it's really

• 45:43Cara Santa Maria?

  questionable if they're legally on the market, definitely they're not FDA approved. Okay, there are about 100 therapeutic peptides, oh, that are authorized or, or approved. So like GLP-1s, yeah, fully vetted through the FDA approval process is probably like around 100. But there are a ton of unapproved or compounded peptides. And that's where things get really interesting, right?

• 46:13Speaker 01

  But, okay, yeah, the compounded peptides, I guess, is the, the

• 46:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the new item here.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  That's because generally they should be illegal. Like that's an unapproved new drug.

• 46:22Cara Santa Maria?

  If they're being sold as drugs. The problem is, you can always just call it a supplement.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, even as a supplement, you can't just call it a supplement. Remember, you have to, if you, as soon as you attach a disease to it, it's a drug. So you have, you have to say, this will enhance your whatever, your, your well-being. You could say that.

• 46:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yeah. This is a, how do they say it on like a lot of these different kind of gas station supplements? Like this will increase your libido, or this will make you stronger.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Wait, what will increase libido?

• 46:54Cara Santa Maria?

  None of it, Jay. None of it. It doesn't work. Come on. And so, so the problem is that we've got people like RFK Jr. And other like wellness influencers, I'm going to call him a wellness influencer. That's

• 47:07Speaker 01

  No, he's technically, what we call a jackass.

• 47:09Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. Yeah. I could use his official title, Health and Human Services Secretary, but instead I'm going to call him Wellness Influencer Jackass, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's often touting that peptides, you know, are the, the solution to all of your problems. And so, you know, under his influence, an advisory panel got together to look at a bunch of different peptides that are thought to be, I'm doing air quotes here, or that are already kind of marketed, you know, illegally or not, but definitely not as drugs, for quote, sleep issues, wound healing, cognitive disorders and more. And they're, basically

• 47:48Cara Santa Maria?

  what they were coming together to vote on is a very sneaky way to get these peptides available to the public and kind of circumvent a lot of regulation that exists right now. So as I mentioned before, there is this list, the bulk substances list, and under 503A and 503B of the Federal Food Drug and Cosmetic Act. So category two includes substances that by definition, according to FDA, you know, research and policy and vote are, present

• 48:27Cara Santa Maria?

  quote, significant safety risks. And because of that, they are disallowed from being used by compounding pharmacists in their compounds. So they can't add these things to a pre-existing drug. They can't compound with these things and say, here's a new compound that, you know, has, has this effect. And when you look through the list, I mean, it's for good reason. Like this is associated with cancer of the breast in women who are exposed while pregnant. Or this other thing was known to cause adverse effects, including death in the pediatric population. This thing is really hard to dose correctly. And, you know, evidence

• 49:08Cara Santa Maria?

  shows that it can lead to cases where children and adults have died when they were mistakenly given this. So there are a lot of reasons that each of these compounds was added to the list. You can go to the list, you can read when it was added to the category, which category it was added to, and, and exactly why, like the evidence base for that. And so this group got together to look at a handful of them and to vote as to whether or not they think they should be taken off of the list. And they voted, yes, take them off the list. We don't want them on the list. We want to be able to sell them. Why?

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Interestingly, all the people with ties to the peptide industry are the ones that voted for it.

• 49:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like who are these people? What is their vested interest? What do they stand to gain from this? Now, it's actually a little more complicated than even, even some of the articles that are writing about this vote say, because basically they sort of stop there. The panel voted to increase consumers' access to these peptides. And because of that, even though they're not FDA approved, they, they voted to increase access by taking them off that list. And because of that, you know, everything's going to go to shit. But ultimately, we still don't know what's going to happen after that vote. That vote in and of itself does not legalize them, and it also doesn't take them off the list. Congress still has to make decisions about that. These are just committee recommendations.

• 50:35Cara Santa Maria?

  The problem is, the other people in the FDA voted they need to stay on the list. The other people in the FDA looked at all of the available evidence and said, no, no, no, there's not enough scientific evidence here to say that we should take these off the list. But the quote advisory panel that was put together by RFK Jr. said otherwise.

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Which explicitly included people from the industry.

• 50:58Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent. And so it's like, now what is going to happen? Well, I think we can all kind of guess. So here's a quote that I think is important. I was looking up some position statements from organizations that are evidence-based. So here's the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, who said, "We are concerned that the April 2026 change in the safety classification of wellness peptides was not accompanied by or the result of new scientific evidence. Public communications regarding these peptides must clearly articulate that the new classification was triggered by a policy change and is not a safety endorsement validated by clinical evidence." So basically, these 12 peptides that were removed from

• 51:38Cara Santa Maria?

  category two have not undergone adequate clinical evaluation for the indications for which they're marketed. All of the commercial use that is happening right now is based on preclinical data. It's based on conference abstracts. It's based on rationales that are not linked to any peer-reviewed evidence. And without that evidence, there is just no way to know. How safe these things are. And that's the fear is that now a bunch of people are going to be guinea pigs. I mean, we know that there's already a black market and even they're calling it here a gray market, where people are going to find stuff, even if it is illegal and they're going to

• 52:20Cara Santa Maria?

  push past the regulations and they're, and they're going to choose to be human guinea pigs. The fear here is that this legitimizes it. So people who don't know they are engaging in beta testing a drug that hasn't, you know, not been shown to be effective or safe is going to think that it is effective or safe because a government panel said so. And that's really scary and really, really dangerous. And it's just yet another example of ideology and political influence. And of course, as you mentioned, Steve, which really this is what's guiding all of this, commercial interests is influencing policy decisions that downstream could have massive negative implications for health and human safety.

• 53:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And again, what is wellness influencer, RFK Junior's actual title? He is the Secretary of Health and Human Services. And he is making explicitly unhealthy decisions for human beings.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's terrible. And yeah, we also, we do have a history to go by here. Like if you look at just the past hundred years or 50 years of any kind of treatment that, that came onto the market or people were using prior to adequate scientific research, how did that all work out in the end? Almost every time it turns out to be, it was unsafe or ineffective. It's not, try to think of an example of something where, you know, people were recommending its use before adequately researching it. And it turns out, oh, this works great, you know, no.

• 53:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Even with adequate resource or, or the bare minimum adequate research, we have to continue to do studies because there have been examples where we vetted a drug minimally, but by a minimal standard, and then later found out that we needed more evidence and we had to pull it off the market.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 54:08Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, having not even any minimum standard has never worked out in our favor.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:14Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, it's, it's so incredibly dangerous to just assume that because people on the internet are injecting themselves with peptides and then saying, I feel really good now.

• 54:26Speaker 01

  Which means nothing.

• 54:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my gosh. Like there is a reason that there is a very strict vetting process for FDA approval. And let's be clear again, these aren't just random peptides. These are peptides that were already on a list that had legitimate evidence supporting their non-use.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:47Cara Santa Maria?

  These were on a list of dangerous peptides that they have then removed from that list because of, you know, industry ties, ideological reasons, XYZ. Oh, so scary. I am so concerned, especially with the rise of all of these consumer like drug companies that are really skirting a lot of these regulations. You know, when GLP-1s first came out, look at all of the kind of secondary market companies who said, oh, you can't afford it from the actual drug company who did all the studies on that compound. We'll just make our own version and you can buy it from us.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, I mean, that right there is really dangerous and scary and it's sort of in that gray market area. This feels like we're taking things that are black market and just fully putting them on the market. So dangerous.

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also another loophole you didn't talk about is that sometimes these get sold for research use only.

• 55:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Oh yeah, that's a big way people are buying them.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  It's just a loophole to get them out there, but really people are doing it for personal use, not for research.

• 55:49Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent. And I think you see this with a lot of like illegal use of things like anabolic steroids and other peptides. Yeah, it's like, look at the label and it says like, not for human consumption.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But then there's of course some, you know, literal cookbook online of exactly what your dosage should be based on these like biohackers. And it's so dangerous because these are not, A, these are not pharmacologists who are, who are touting this or promoting this, this kind of regimen. And yeah, I, I love this quote at the very end from a scientist in one of the articles I read, allowed to be compounded does not mean FDA approved. For most wellness peptides, the, the human evidence is thin, the right dose is unknown, and you can't be sure what's in the vial. I myself personally would not be injecting myself with any experimental molecules. Yeah, don't inject yourself with experimental molecules, people.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Kara. All right, Bob, tell me about NASA's radiation vest. I guess it's the anti-radiation vest.

• 56:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I would hope so.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  No, it releases radiation into the astronauts.

• 56:56Bob Novella?

  All right, guys, did you hear that NASA has tested a new solar space radiation vest for astronauts? And it has also shown promising capabilities. How cool is that? This is what astronauts need. All right, so let's see what it can do and what it cannot do. This is from the journal Science Advances. The name of the, of the study is weirdly jargon-free. It's, the name of it is first evaluation of wearable radiation protection for human deep space exploration as flown on Artemis One. Pretty much says it all there very easily. So all right, so we've mentioned many times, over and over on the show, how problematic space radiation is for people outside of our magnetosphere.

• 57:40Bob Novella?

  It's one of the primary concerns for astronauts. So let's get to the vest. The vest's name is Astro RAD, which is a pretty, pretty good name, pretty solid name, I think. RAD in this case is an acronym that stands for radiation absorbed dose. It weighs, what do you think this thing weighs?

• 58:02Speaker 01

  57 pounds.

• 58:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, screw you. No, it's 20, it's 26 kilograms, which is about 57 pounds. This was developed by Israeli startup Stemrad and US aerospace company Lockheed Martin. The key thing here with this vest is that it's hydrogen rich. It uses a hydrogen-rich polymer to protect, to protect against proton radiation, solar proton radiation. This is essentially polyethylene. Plastic water bottles are made out of it, plastic bags, milk jugs, squeeze bottles. These are made of polyethylene, so this is a primary ingredient in this vest. And it's, it's, it's used because it's so good at efficiently slowing down protons.

• 58:46Bob Novella?

  And it also, very importantly, creates much less secondary radiation, which could be really bad. You know, secondary radiation is not your friend in this context. The vest is also not a whole body vest. It's mainly torso area. It focuses on areas that they consider to be especially sensitive to radiation. It's also not intended for daily use. It's designed for times in the ship when, when there's elevated solar radiation and you need additional protection, then the ship can offer, or additional protection that even the shelter on the ship can offer.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Now, Bob, I, when I was looking at the vest, I was very interested in what parts of the body they considered to be radiation sensitive. So I looked into it a little bit because specifically it does not cover the thyroid, which is very radiation sensitive. And what I found was this isn't designed to protect against future damage from radiation, but immediate acute radiation damage. So they want their astronauts to be able to function immediately after getting exposed to radiation. That there, this is not designed to prevent cancer 30 years down the road, which is interesting.

• 59:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, see, I'll get, I'll get into a little bit more detail about that. So the experiments themselves were, were basically groundbreaking. The study's lead author, Stemrad researcher Jordan Hori, said, the largest, this is the largest experiment ever conducted to determine astronaut radiation exposure beyond low Earth orbit. Now, the vest flew around the moon in 2022 on the uncrewed Artemis One mission and they used mannequins, they put the vests on mannequins and, but they didn't call them mannequins. They had a far, far superior term. They called them phantoms, which is just like, okay, call them phantoms. That's such a fun word to use in this context. The, the vests were strapped on these phantoms in, in a seat in the Orion capsule.

• 1:00:44Bob Novella?

  And the, the mannequins themselves are not your, you know, your. Department store mannequins, obviously, a lead author, again, Jordan Hori said that these are made out of tissue equivalent resin. The material that they're made of interacts with radiation in the same way that human tissue does. They had several different densities of this resin, representing, for example, lung, bone, soft tissue, etc. Now, they named, they named the, the phantoms Zohar and Helga. Zohar, the Zohar phantom wore a vest, the Helga phantom did not. And of course, there's also many, many radiation sensors interspersed, you know, all over the mannequin. Now, the researchers described the phantoms as female. Helga is clearly female.

• 1:01:29Bob Novella?

  Zohar, I did some research on the name Zohar. It's some, a lot of people describe it as unisex. A lot of other websites describe it as, as, as, as female. But either way, they, they are describing the phantoms as female. Why do you think that they're doing that? And Steve, this is a little bit related to what you were saying. They did that because they, they specifically focused on female anatomy, because women statistically face a higher risk of radiation induced cancer. So that's, that's what their focus was. And, uh, you know, the men would also be protected as well. But it, it just tickled me a little bit because it's just, it's one of these rare cases where

• 1:02:10Bob Novella?

  women were actually prioritized in research over, over men, uh, which, which doesn't happen as often as you, as you think it, it does. And historically, the record has been, has been actually very horrible. But so that was, that was interesting. So the biggest problem with this research was that there was no major solar storm. It just, you know, that's all, you can't predict those things over, especially over, over the short, the short term, you know? And they just didn't encounter a big solar storm. So they needed to do that, right? So, uh, they used the data collected as Orion passed through the, the inner Van Allen radiation belts around the earth as an analog for, for the intense solar radiation.

• 1:02:51Bob Novella?

  And what they did then was that they, the data was scaled to predict how the vest would have performed, um, probably during, uh, intense historical solar storms, one in 1972 and in 1989. So they, they took the data and kind of statistically massaged it so that it was, so that it was like the vests had gone through, um, really intense solar storms that we've experienced in the, in the past. The one from 1972 was actually, um, was after the Apollo 16 moon landing and before the Apollo 17 moon landing. Luckily, because if, if the astronauts were en route to the moon or on the moon in 1972 during that storm, they could have, they could have had a lethal exposure.

• 1:03:35Bob Novella?

  That's how, that's how bad that, that storm was. So they actually got very lucky there. So the results, the results of the, of these experiments were that there was a 60% lower effective dose for the 1972 solar storm, and there was a 40% lower effective dose for the 1989 storm. And, uh, the researchers tried to give, give a more intuitive, I guess you would describe it, a more intuitive way to describe these results. And they described it as avoiding the radiation would be roughly similar to avoiding 193 days of normal deep space radiation exposure for 72 scenario and 131 days for the 1989 event. Um, now remember, this is, this is kind of important.

• 1:04:18Bob Novella?

  These vests have, had not been exposed to severe solar storms like this. These results are really like an extrapolation. It's, you know, it's reasonable, but they were not exposed to these storms. So they don't know precisely how they, how they would have reacted. So why do you guys think there's a difference? Why did the vest offer less protection from the 89 solar storm than the 72 storm?

• 1:04:39Speaker 01

  Uh, it was more intense. So they only blocked a certain amount, like is it upper limit to what it blocks?

• 1:04:45Bob Novella?

  It's, no, there's no upper limit, but it was mainly just intensity. The, uh, 1972 was less energetic than 89. And if it's more energetic, then the, the vest is just less of a shield.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:57Bob Novella?

  You know, and this leads directly to the radiation elephant in this room. And I hope this occurred, this thought occurred to some people. What about galactic cosmic rays? I mean, this vest is optimized and made for solar, solar radiation from the sun. Uh, and it was not made, and it actually is not effective hardly at all for galactic cosmic rays. And that's because galactic cosmic rays are, are much higher energy protons, um, than, than solar radiation protons. And also galactic cosmic rays also have extremely energetic, heavy nuclei like, like carbon. And it's really dramatic. Solar protons are, have energies, uh, from tens to hundreds of mega electron volts.

• 1:05:42Bob Novella?

  Galactic cosmic ray particles are hundreds of mega electron volts to giga electron, uh, giga electron volt levels, uh, per nucleon. So it's much more, much more energetic, hundreds of times. I mean, these galactic cosmic rays would fly right through that vest and, and laugh at it. It would really, it's really no, no help at all. And you can't just say, well, let's just make thicker vests because with the, the more shielding you have for galactic cosmic rays, the, the greater the potential for, uh, this deadly, uh, secondary radiation. Uh, so it's, it's, it's not an easy problem to solve at all.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  But it just does nothing for the galactic radiation.

• 1:06:19Bob Novella?

  Right. They're just too powerful. They're just, they're just too powerful. So then my question to you guys now is this then, so if this does not help at all for, you know, for galactic cosmic rays, what help is this vest? You know, if, if it's only helping with solar radiation? What do you, what do you think? Why even, why even care?

• 1:06:35Jay Novella?

  Isn't that still amazingly helpful?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  Cause a solar storm could be deadly.

• 1:06:40Bob Novella?

  Right. Right. That's, that's the key. A solar, a solar storm can quickly throw a huge amount of relatively lower energy protons at astronauts over hours or even days. So this is perfect for the vest, uh, to potentially make a major difference. Just put on this vest, um, for however long you need, hours or days, and you, and you, you know, you could make a huge difference here. Galactic cosmic rays, uh, on the other hand, are more like a persistent drizzle of the, of these ridiculously energetic atomic cannonballs, essentially, right? So this, the persistent drizzle though builds up over time.

• 1:07:20Bob Novella?

  So it, it could dramatically or even catastrophically raise your odds of cancer, cardiovascular damage, even, uh, neurological effects over time. If you want to protect against galactic cosmic rays, you would require, uh, tremendously more expensive masks. You need a lot more masks, which of course costs a lot of money to get, to get on your vessel and in, in space. You'd need a lot more masks to protect you. Similar, you know, if, if you wanted to do anything similar to, uh, what Astro Rad does for solar protons, yeah, you would need a tremendous amount of mass around you. So much mass that you would even guard against the, uh, secondary radiation. But that's, it's just, it's just way too cost prohibitive and we're not going to see anything like that for the foreseeable future.

• 1:08:02Bob Novella?

  But for relatively brief missions to the moon though, this vest could offer substantial emergency safety benefits without the need for expensive and heavy shielding around the Orion capsule. I mean, I, I would imagine, you know, you would have a sheltered area on your ship that it offers decent protection. Um, and if you needed extra protection, you put the vest on. And, uh, they're even talking about constructing some of the materials in the ship that hold cargo and have, and having those materials be, have extra, you know, hydrogen rich materials inside them as, as even more protection. So, so this is great, this is great news for Artemis and, and any moon missions in the, in the future. You know, traveling, traveling to the moon, working on the surface of the moon.

• 1:08:43Bob Novella?

  If there's, if there's a, a nasty solar storm headed your way, uh, this could, this could, you know, potentially save lives for sure. Uh, so yeah, this is an interesting advance. The galactic cosmic rays though, that's going to be a stubborn problem for a very, very long time. And, uh, and I'm not sure exactly how that problem's going to be solved. Maybe they might, you know, it's, it's a matter of just getting the masks up there, like water would be, would be good, but you know, how, how heavy water is or some, some, or some very, uh, some new technology using, um, you know, magnetic and electric shielding, which could help a little bit, but not fully. I don't know. That's a huge, huge problem, but.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  So Bob, one thing I was interested in is that they said, this is not meant for daily use, but just like during a solar storm.

• 1:09:25Bob Novella?

  Yes, right.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  But if you're in zero gravity, who cares how much the vest weighs, right? I mean, I wonder how restrictive it is just physically, not the weight itself.

• 1:09:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they, they, well, they wanted, they, they didn't go full body because they also didn't want to have the, you know, the cumbersome, you know, they didn't want to make it cumbersome for, for moving. Although, yeah, true. If you're in, if you're in microgravity or zero G, then, uh, it wouldn't be that, that cumbersome.

• 1:09:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, sleep in the thing, you know?

• 1:09:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah. If, if need be, they, they could definitely do it. That, that's true. But also if you're working with equipment, um, it could, you don't want it to get in the way. And, and don't forget Steve, every ounce, every ounce matters, you know?

• 1:10:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I know. It's more of the weight that's on the capsule. It's not the weight on the person, right?

• 1:10:10Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  That it's heavy to wear. It's heavy to, to put on a capsule and to launch into Earth orbit.

• 1:10:15Bob Novella?

  Right. That, yeah, that, that's a factor as well. And yeah, maybe, maybe that they're, they're not factoring in as much as you might assume they would about future, you know, future risk and how it might impact you in the future. Um, like, like that angle you mentioned, I hadn't come across. Uh, it's more, more of a short term, make them, yeah, make them live. Yeah. And that's the case. If it's, the radiation is that bad, um, it, it could very well be, well, we're going to save your life. This storm is so bad. Like if it's like at the 1989 level, they might very well say, this vest is going to save your life, but man, you, you're going to have a 30% increase in your, your chance of these nasty, uh, effects from the radiation because of it. But, uh, that'd be worth it. I mean, still, you know, still kind of worth it.

• 1:11:00Speaker 01

  Still better than nothing. All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:11:03Bob Novella?

  Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:11:05Jay Novella?

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

• 1:11:33Jay Novella?

  So many people guessed some type of dentistry.

• 1:11:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. It has a drill-like sound or an animal-like sound.

• 1:11:41Bob Novella?

  Sounded like a whale.

• 1:11:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It's either a harmed animal or a drill.

• 1:11:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so I, uh, so, you know, if you guessed that, it's actually not a horrible guess. The only thing that, to me, would have told you it wasn't were the, it was like an outside kind of ambience and then there were multiple male voices talking, which to me is kind of like, not, not hap- you know, dentistry doesn't happen in that environment. So, Visto Tuti, the guy that was not well enough to come to the conference, but is well now, he's okay now.

• 1:12:16Cara Santa Maria?

  He's not real. He doesn't exist.

• 1:12:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:18Jay Novella?

  I know. We don't, you know, there is no, there is no real way of knowing Kara. Like, I thought that, you know, we were gonna be able to suss him out at the conference, but he's still a mysterious man. He wrote in and said that, he goes, "This is a hard one. I'll need to break it down, reason through." So he says, "In the noisy, I can sense Kara disapproving amount of freaking sea mammals vibe, but listening again, the longer tones sound electronic. The guys talking speak English and seem to be searching for something in water." Then he says, "I'm guessing that these guys are doing some electrofishing, trying to stun a certain species of sea creatures for study or for lunch."

• 1:12:57Jay Novella?

  That was, that was a rational pathway assessment, but you are incorrect, sir. Let's continue. Sean Bob Kelly wrote in and said, "I'm from Alaska and I think it's a whistle pig or also known as a marmot in the rocks. So excited. I think I actually got it this time." I did, I did look up this animal. There is a whiskey named whistle pig, so it makes it a little bit more difficult to search on that term, but you will find the animal. It's not it, and it does make a cool sound, but it is definitely not a whistle pig, but thanks for guessing. Michael Blaney wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay. It was great meeting you all in Sydney. Glad to be home or missing the travel?" Glad to be home.

• 1:13:39Jay Novella?

  You know, two weeks is a long time. The time change is difficult, but we had a wonderful time and we're already talking about our next couple of events, so we definitely didn't lose any steam in that direction, but I'm being in my own bed. You know what I'm talking about? You can't, can't beat that. He says he's guessing it's a frog. It's making some weird and wacky noises. Not a bad guess, because there are frogs that make these peep noises that are kinda like this noise, not 100%, but that was a, not an awful guess. Evil Eye wrote in, I got a lot of my regulars here. Evil Eye says, "I'm just gonna guess zebra. I know they don't sound like horses or donkeys." It is not a zebra, but it's, again, not a bad guess, because some animals like that

• 1:14:22Jay Novella?

  make weird, high-pitched noises. Do you guys wanna guess before I tell you what it is?

• 1:14:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it an animal?

• 1:14:27Jay Novella?

  It's not an animal.

• 1:14:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, is it something that drills?

• 1:14:31Jay Novella?

  It is not something that drills.

• 1:14:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, then I have no idea.

• 1:14:34Jay Novella?

  All right, so I got two correct guesses that I want to, these are the first two people to tell me. So the first person said, "A detector that is metal." He means a metal detector, right? And the next guess, that was from, sorry, the first guess was from George Burwood, and the next guess is from George in Oregon, and George's guess was a metal detector. Said probably a handheld one used to localize the fine after the main detector got hit. Okay, so these guys were close, close enough for me to give them the win, because it was very particular what this item is.

• 1:15:09Jay Novella?

  This item is called a mine hound, and it's an advanced handheld dual sensor detector used by military and humanitarian teams to find landmines, unexploded ordinance, and hidden improvised explosive devices, IEDs. You know what IEDs are?

• 1:15:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Jay Novella?

  So the person who sent this to me, his name is Evan H., and he said that he used to use it. He used one of these devices in southern Afghanistan, 2011, 2012, in the US Army. The enemy in that area would routinely plant improvised explosive devices. These are the IEDs. They had pressure plate triggers. Someone would just simply step on the plate, activating it, and bad things would happen. And, let me see here. He says, "Due to the risk of these IEDs, we were obviously deeply interested in avoiding them. The best tool we had was the mine hound." So it is a ground penetrating radar. Very cool. I'll play it very briefly again, just so you can hear.

• 1:16:11Jay Novella?

  Okay, there you go.

• 1:16:12Speaker 01

  Jay, do you know what you call somebody who uses a metal detector?

• 1:16:16Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  They're, they call themselves detectorists.

• 1:16:19Jay Novella?

  Detectorists?

• 1:16:20Bob Novella?

  Oh my god.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they get very-

• 1:16:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I thought there was gonna be like a punchline.

• 1:16:23Jay Novella?

  I thought that was a dad joke, yeah.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  No, it's because, there was a show called The Detectorists, and it was, it was a really funny show, how they recommend it, actually.

• 1:16:30Bob Novella?

  They could've done better than that.

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, they get very, they get very uptight if you call them a metal detector. Like, no, this is a metal detector. I'm a detectorist.

• 1:16:40Jay Novella?

  Got it. Don't wanna step on those toes. My god.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  Oh my god. Hobbyists?

• 1:16:45Jay Novella?

  Forget about it. All right, guys, I got a new noisy for you this week. This one was sent in by a listener named Stephen Gluff, and here it is. Oh, this one, I gotta give you the annoying sound warning. It's a little high-pitched and it isn't a fantastic recording, but it's interesting. Take a listen.

• 1:17:35Jay Novella?

  This one is kinda strange, but very cool. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something interesting that you think I should play on the show, email me at [email protected]. Steve, we're gonna be at Dragon Con.

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  We are.

• 1:17:49Jay Novella?

  And we have a private show that we're doing at Dragon Con, at the American Hotel, which is not too far off the beaten path. That event will be on Saturday, September 5th, at 8:00 PM, but if you want all the detailed information, you can go to theskepticsguy.org and look under our events page. And while you're there, you'll also see that we're giving a whole bunch of talks, and we're doing most of them, or we're doing panels, and we're doing most of them with Mr. Hubicki. This is Christian Hubicki, who is our roboticist friend. We're gonna have a lot of fun. These are gonna be great panels, so we hope that if you're there, you can at least catch one or two.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  It's funny, we always refer to him as our roboticist friend, but most people probably know him from Survivor.

• 1:18:29Bob Novella?

  Survivor friend, too.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Which is completely incidental to our relationship with him.

• 1:18:33Jay Novella?

  Christian is so much more than Survivor.

• 1:18:35Speaker 01

  I know. I know.

• 1:18:37Jay Novella?

  A couple of other things, Steve. Don't forget that we have the Political Reality Podcast that is dropping, shows weekly. This is a political or politics-based show. It's not about pointing fingers and bashing people. It's about truly understanding the topics that are coming up, to give everyone a well-needed education on civics and understanding government in a way that, in a skeptically-aligned way. So give it a try if you haven't checked it out yet. Another thing is, if you'd like to support the SGU and the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. Any support that you give would be greatly appreciated.

• 1:19:18Jay Novella?

  We are going into a very, very difficult year here in the US, with all the political insanity going on, and we are here to help push back on the irrational thinking and misinformation that is happening, and it's happening bigly.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  Bigly. All right. Thank you, Jay. A few questions. First one comes from Graham, who writes, "I was disappointed to Kara's offhand comment that made out that model railroaders are all autistic. It was shocking of her to disparage a fabulous hobby. I get the point that she was trying to make, but I found it insulting at the least. I have been in the hobby for over 60 years, and playing with trains in the basement is not a sign of mental issues. I am not saying there are not some strange people in the hobby, but by and large, we are as sane, if not more so, than average. Having a hobby, any hobby, is a great stress reliever. It could be said that anyone who has as their hobby to constantly chase down pseudosciences might be a little bit strange, too. Model

• 1:20:21Speaker 01

  railroading has always had a poor outlook by people as boys playing with their toys, whereas no one seems to think someone who plays with little squares of paper, fell at a lee, is strange. Obviously Kara has never been around a true model railroad, as compared to toy trains, as there is a huge difference. Maybe in the future, think about comments like this before uttering them."

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:20:44Cara Santa Maria?

  That's paladely.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  That's like stamp collecting.

• 1:20:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, well, that I would have made the same comment about stamp collecting.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it could have absolutely applied to that. So I wrote back to Graham. I mean, clearly, we touched a nerve here, you know, but Kara said nothing of the things that he's accusing her of saying, right, Kara? First of all, you didn't, this is just a point of logic, and this comes up quite a bit, saying that even if you said all autistic people like to play with model trains, that's not the same thing as saying all people who are model railroaders are autistic, right? Those just logically doesn't follow. But of course, you didn't even say that.

• 1:21:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I didn't say either of those things.

• 1:21:24Speaker 01

  You just said that as an example, if you had a relative who spends all day in the basement, you know, playing with his model trains, you know, a generation ago,

• 1:21:35Cara Santa Maria?

  They would not have had the diagnosis.

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  Would not have come down with a diagnosis, whereas today, it's very likely that they may be diagnosed as being autistic.

• 1:21:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And I also did say, what's the joke? I did say that at the beginning, right? I said, what's the joke? Like, grandpa who spent all day in the basement with his model train, no, that wasn't autism. That was, you know, grandpa was just unique or whatever.

• 1:21:56Speaker 01

  That was just grandpa.

• 1:21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that was just grandpa, because 50 years ago, yeah, he wouldn't have had a diagnosis. Now, of course, not everybody who spends all day in the basement playing with their trains is autistic. But I think the larger point here, which is even more important, is I hear you, Graham, that you feel insulted by my words, and I obviously did not want to insult you. But I think it's also important to think about the words that you used, and how insulting they may be towards people with autism. Autism is not a mental deficiency, or what was the phrasing he used?

• 1:22:28Speaker 01

  Well, a mental disorder, or he likened it to not being sane.

• 1:22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, exactly. Like, no, this is neurodivergence.

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a different way of, you know, processing. It's largely, it's a different brain. And because of those differences in the brain, it has lots of downstream effects. And also, there's not one way to be autistic.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. So part of the problem is that the term autistic is, I think, too broad a diagnosis now.

• 1:22:58Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  There is some pushback against, like, oh, we just, is the spectrum so broad that the term itself now is confusing? But clearly, you were talking about what previously would have been called Asperger's, or is now called Level One Autism, somebody who's highly functioning, who's just neurodivergent. And one of the things that people with this type of neurodivergence have is, they like to spend lots of time alone, engaged in detailed hobbies. That's

• 1:23:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, it's part of the diagnostic criteria.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  It absolutely can be part of it.

• 1:23:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's called fixed interests.

• 1:23:29Speaker 01

  Totally. And it could be, and choose any of 100 hobbies. And also saying, like, you know, somebody like this, who's like on the autistic spectrum, is more likely to end up as an engineer. Doesn't mean that all engineers are autistic. But anyway, it's not disparaging. That's the thing. It's not disparaging at all. It's not a mental problem. It is not, you know, it doesn't say anything negative about your quote unquote sanity. It's just neurodivergent. So that's the big thing I really wanted to emphasize here, is that it wasn't disparaging. Even the limited point you were making, which is not the bigger point he accused you of making, itself is, either way, it's not disparaging. In fact, Graham was being disparaging by conflating autism with a mental disorder.

• 1:24:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, with an insult or something. I mean, and we shouldn't even have to say this, but like, obviously, I'm a psychologist. I work with individuals on the autism spectrum all the time. We have people, we have autistic people in our friend circles, in our family.

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  Hey, I'm probably a little bit on the spectrum myself. I mean, not diagnosable, but I'm like

• 1:24:34Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go. Like, we celebrate this as just a different way of existing in the world.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And even the word different, it's like, it's a spectrum. We know that, too.

• 1:24:44Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:24:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think neurodivergence is a good term. That kind of covers it. Okay. This one's fascinating. The next one comes from Christopher. This was in the Patreon comments for this episode. He writes, regarding Steve's off the cuff comment about Bald's leech book and leeches, here's a good, what's the word for you? The word leech in leech book has nothing to do with the animal. It is a modernized form of the Old English leech bok, L-A-E-C-E dash B-O-C, in which leech means physician or healer. To quote Edema Line, I guess an etymology page, the word is probably from Old Danish leek from Proto-Germanic.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  And one who speaks magic words, like, the original origin, enchanter, one who speaks magic words, or healer or physician. We still have this word in modern Scandinavian languages, including my native Swedish. In the English speaking word, calling a doctor a leech comes from this sense. However, it has become confused with the animal leech. Again, quoting Edema Online, the form merged with leech in Middle English, apparently by folk etymology. Doctors in old times, now this is him speaking, doctors in old times did use leeches, though. This is not in dispute. All right. So I want to make a tweak to what he's saying. I was fascinated by that, that leech actually referred to doctor, not leeches. And it's not because leeches were discussed in the book. It's because it's a doctor's book of

• 1:26:11Speaker 01

  treatments. But the word leech comes from the word for doctor, because

• 1:26:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they both do. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:19Speaker 01

  Doctor, because doctors used leeches, they started calling leeches the word for doctor, leech. And then we stopped using the word leech to mean doctor, but it kept referring to the leech animal, which is interesting.

• 1:26:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Sucking blood. Yeah. And that's why then we say, you know, that that person is leeching off of whatever.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Or just we call the animal a leech, right? That, that

• 1:26:41Cara Santa Maria?

  True.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it was a secondary sort of use of the word, but that stuck with it while the original use became archaic and is no longer used.

• 1:26:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It sort of reminds me of how the word cardinal, the bird, a cardinal, and the color, is named for the robe. Like, a cardinal's robe was that color, and then the word was used to describe that color, and then the bird. And it's backward from what you're like, how could that be possible?

• 1:27:06Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:27:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That's, it's really interesting.

• 1:27:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So guys, I wouldn't say it has nothing to do with the animal. The animal is named after the doctor word leech. Okay, one more. And this is just a word on genetic diversity. So I had a bit of a back and forth with an emailer, who at the end said, ah, just forget everything I said. But, which is interesting. But I still think it raises a very interesting concept. So Kara, last week, you were talking about the decrease in genetic diversity among crops.

• 1:27:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  And this gets, this is another version of the categorization question, right? What do we mean by genetic diversity? And how do you measure it? And whether or not genetic diversity is increasing or decreasing, kind of depends on how you measure it.

• 1:27:53Cara Santa Maria?

  As in, like, the, like, what, how many variants exist that are distinct versus how much diversity is within that one organism?

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  Exactly. So I think, I mean, there's lots of differences technically, but that's the one I wanted to focus on, is that over, and this is why I asked the question, but aren't there like, a lot of more new varieties? And so if you're talking about genetic diversity, is how many varieties of stuff are out there? That's actually increasing over time. But if you're talking about how much diversity is there within a variety, a cultivar, the paper that you were discussing was showing that it's been decreasing over time. Although he says even that you can argue with, depending on how you measure the genetic diversity. But that's a technical thing. He eventually said, I just forget about it. I'm just giving you my own personal bias, not what's in the literature. See, this is, this is his area

• 1:28:44Speaker 01

  of research. So, but anyway, but I think that that distinction, I think, clarifies for me what the problem I was having with that, which is, yes, there are, we are making more hybrids, we are making more varieties, we are making more kinds of plants. But within each variety, there could, because we are selecting for just the optimal plants, right? We're only using the ones that are the most economically advantageous, that actually represents a decrease in genetic diversity within that cultivar. But also, the other question I had was, are even though there are more varieties, if you ask the question, well, how much of our crops are represented by how many plants? That also is, that genetic

• 1:29:27Speaker 01

  diversity is also decreasing over time, right? I think 20 plants are responsible for like 95% of the crops that we grow. Even though there are thousands of plants, most of the plants we're planting are these 20 commercially most advantageous ones.

• 1:29:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And that was the lens through which I think the, the article was written, is that if we're actually just looking at like biomass on the planet, or really, the article was about what we're eating.

• 1:29:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:54Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, and the nutritional kind of effects. But also, they did mention ability to withstand climate change, or drought, or other things. And when, when, like, 80% of the crops that we're eating are just like these, this handful of variants, one bad yield can affect the global economy.

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's about fragility versus resilience, right? So in order to have a more resilient agricultural system, we may not do what is economically optimal. We may have to spread out our risk a little bit by keeping, you know, planting plants that are maybe not the most profitable, but they increase our genetic diversity. So we're not, we don't have such a fragile system.

• 1:30:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:30:40Speaker 01

  All right. Let's move on to science or fiction.

• 1:30:56Speaker 01

  Each week I come up with three science news items for our facts, two real, one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You have three interesting news items this week. These are all good news, kind of technological advances, kind of things.

• 1:31:13Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:13Speaker 01

  That's the sort of loose theme here, but they're all news items. You ready?

• 1:31:17Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:31:18Speaker 01

  All right. Item number one, researchers have tested an intracardiac pacemaker powered by a triboelectric nanogenerator, a fully self-powered pacemaker that can potentially last the lifetime of a patient. Item number two, engineers have developed a 3D-printed electronic skin that has 10 times the resolution of pressure and temperature sensing, a customizable, form-fitting shape with lower manufacturing costs. And item number three, scientists have developed a coconut oil-derived biofuel blend jet fuel with equal performance to pure kerosene jet fuel, but only half the CO2 emissions. Bob, go first.

• 1:31:58Bob Novella?

  Did you just wing that decision?

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  No, I do. It's a rotation, Bob. I'm doing a strict rotation this year.

• 1:32:04Bob Novella?

  Okay, didn't sound like it, so I'm happy.

• 1:32:05Cara Santa Maria?

  I went first last week.

• 1:32:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, so suck it.

• 1:32:07Bob Novella?

  All right, so this intracardiac pacemaker, triboelectric nanogenerator, is that some, that's like a static electricity thing? Triboelectric, can you give us the definition of that?

• 1:32:20Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so funny, Bob, because the first thing I thought was, this has turbo and cabulator vibes all over.

• 1:32:26Speaker 01

  Right. The energy derives from bringing oppositely charged plates close together and pulling them apart.

• 1:32:35Bob Novella?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, you could take advantage of movement of the heart itself. I mean, that does sound reasonable. Triboelectric nanogenerator, fully self-powered pacemaker, lifetime of the patient. Yeah, I mean, I could find some semblance of a reason why that could potentially work. So let's try, look at the number two. 3D-printed electronic skin, 10x, 450 shave, lower manufacturing costs. I mean, that sounds reasonable. I mean, I wonder what the material is, but I mean, these days, they can, they can 3D-print using so many different materials, not just those plastic wires. So, all right, I mean, nothing's jumping out at me here why that's unreasonable.

• 1:33:17Bob Novella?

  And the third one here, a coconut oil-derived biofuel blend, equal performance to pure kerosene jet fuel with only half the CO2. I mean, I can't think of a reason why that wouldn't work, but that just sounds a little bit too, too good, or it just, it's rubbing me a little bit more the wrong way than the other two. Yeah, so I'll just have to say the coconut is fiction. Not, not sure though, these are good.

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  All right, Jay?

• 1:33:40Jay Novella?

  I agree with Kara, like the triboelectric nanogenerator, like, just sounds completely made up to me. Did you, Steve, did you say what that is, by the way?

• 1:33:49Speaker 01

  I did.

• 1:33:50Jay Novella?

  Well, hook a brother up.

• 1:33:53Speaker 01

  So the, the energy comes from having these tiny plates, oppositely charged plates that move closer together and get pulled apart.

• 1:34:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and it power a pacemaker. I wonder how much power a pacemaker needs. I would imagine it's not a lot. Okay, that seems cromulent. Second one, engineers have developed a 3D-printed electronic skin. That's cool, right? So it can, it's going to be, it's going to be more like real skin, that you can have sensation through it, it's customizable. 3D-printed is the part of this that I don't like. Something that good could be 3D-printed. That's my big red flag. And Bob, you picked this third one here, about the coconut oil-derived biofuel. I don't have a problem with that one. I don't think that's a, that's a, you know, the fact that they're using coconut oil as a source doesn't really bother me.

• 1:34:43Jay Novella?

  You know, half the CO2 emissions, you know, that, of course, that, that's questionable, but that one isn't really bothering me as much as the other two. All right, this is how I'm going to do it, Steve. The first one, I'm going to make the assumption that pacemakers don't require a lot of energy. I'm pretty sure that they don't, and that this is at least possible. Man, this 3D-printed electronic skin, I just don't know. I don't know about that one. It's bothering me a lot more than the coconut oil. So I'm going to say that the 3D-printed electronic skin is the fiction.

• 1:35:11Speaker 01

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:35:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree with the guys on the triboelectric nanogenerator, although yes, it sounds like gobbledygook, once you explained what it is, potentially lasting the lifetime. I mean, that's, obviously, this has been a goal. We don't want to have to go back in and surgically change batteries. So, yeah, this would just reduce a lot of risks. And it just says they've tested one. So, sure, it may not be fully available yet, but I could see this being an advance. So it's really between the two that the guys don't agree on. So, the coconut oil biofuel blended with a jet fuel. Okay. Would it smell weird when you burnt it?

• 1:35:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Equal performance to pure kerosene, but half the CO2 emissions. I mean, wouldn't we all have heard about this? Hmm. Why would it not have carbon emissions at the same level as like regular jet fuel? I don't know, I don't know. And then, the 3D-printed electronic skin, you wrote here, I don't know if I can ask this because I'm going last, but 10x the resolution of pressure and temperature sensing, then what?

• 1:36:28Speaker 01

  Then existing, then the, then existing.

• 1:36:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, okay. Not like than our.

• 1:36:31Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:36:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Pressure and temperature, okay.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Then, then whatever the next current best one is that's existed so far.

• 1:36:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's, so it's like a huge leap, basically, and it's 3D-printed, which means it would be cheaper and more customizable. Well, I want that one to be science, so I'm going to go with, I guess, Bob, and say that the biofuel one is the fiction.

• 1:36:51Speaker 01

  All right, you all agree on the turbo and cabulator one, so we'll start there. Researchers have tested an intracardiac pacemaker powered by a triboelectric nanogenerator, a fully self-powered pacemaker that can potentially last the lifetime of a patient. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. This one's cool.

• 1:37:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:11Speaker 01

  This is maybe cooler than you think, but it can only cramp so much into one, you know, one sentence. Yeah, so it is a triboelectric nanogenerator, and it works, as I said, you have the two oppositely charged plates, and just when the heart beats, right, they move closer and farther away from each other, and that creates a small electrical charge, which then can power the pacemaker itself. So it is the beating of the heart that powers the pacemaker. Now, why haven't we done this already? The reason is that these nanogenerators don't produce a lot of electricity, and as little juice as the, as the pacemaker needs, they were off by about an order of magnitude.

• 1:37:46Jay Novella?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

  This device creates 10x as much energy than previous nanogenerators.

• 1:37:53Bob Novella?

  There you go, order of magnitude.

• 1:37:54Speaker 01

  So it got up to, it got up to the, the level that you need to self-power a pacemaker. How did they do that? How did they get to an order of magnitude more energy generation? Because they tweaked the hell out of it. They researched it so that, you know, just, just engineering-wise, mechanically, that the movement of the plates was optimized. They optimized every single aspect of the engineering of this. They had to make it small enough to fit into the battery compartment of existing pacemakers, right? This is, so this is, it could just be plugged into, you know, the intracardiac pacemakers are ready. And this does solve a huge problem, because Kara is right.

• 1:38:35Speaker 01

  So, you know, there's, for, intracardiac pacemakers are basically ones where they, they go inside, you know, the vein, and then they put it inside the ventricle of the heart, right? And the batteries that run those things last eight to 10 years.

• 1:38:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, man.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  So, at that point, what do you do? For the, for these small intracardiac pacemakers, they don't even bother taking the old ones out, they just put a new one in.

• 1:38:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so they don't do a battery swap, they just put a whole new unit on top of it?

• 1:39:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, but, but if you're, if you're a young patient, and you might need multiple of these, that then becomes a problem. Otherwise, for other models, they have to do another surgery to remove the old one and replace it with a new one, a new pacemaker with a fresh battery in it. So, it's a huge problem, right? And this would solve that. Now, I say obviously potentially last a lifetime, because it hasn't been tested over time yet. They're just, they, they said it's self-powered indefinitely, right? But they have to, they had to engineer the hell out of it so that the precision of the movement wouldn't change over even decades, right? Like, 40 years from now, the thing is still working as precisely as it did the day it was implanted.

• 1:39:44Speaker 01

  So that's their goal, they think that they did that, but then until it's tested over years, you can't really know. It was tested in a pig, it has not, right? It was not tested in humans yet. Of course, you have to do animal testing for this kind of thing before you could get approval to actually implant these in people. But that's the next step now, is human trials. So it's still going to be years, you know, before this gets approved. But the fact that we now have these nanogenerators is, you know, has, that could generate this much electricity is huge, right? This could obviously be applied to way more things than just pacemakers. Pacemakers are always like the low-hanging fruit, that's the first thing you're going

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  to try it out on, but this could open up a world of implantable, self-powered electronic devices for medical applications. So that's, that is amazing. All right, let's go on to number two. Engineers have developed a 3D-printed electric, electronic skin that has 10x the resolution of pressure and temperature sensing, a customizable, form-fitting shape with lower manufacturing costs. Jay, you think this one is too good to be true. Bob and Kara, you think this one is science, and this one is science. Sorry, Jay.

• 1:41:00Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, the fact that it's like better in all three of these features at the same time, that's the thing that I think is really amazing here.

• 1:41:07Bob Novella?

  So, yeah.

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  So it has 10x the resolution, right? So just better at sensing pressure and temperature. It combines both of those sensory modalities into one. It's, because it's 3D-printed, so they basically would scan the prosthesis and then print it to form-fit the prosthetic, rather than just having strips that you're just attaching to the prosthetic, right? So it fits a lot better. They also snap together, they said like Lego kind of thing, so they're easy to customize and, and put together that way. And because it's 3D-printed, the overall manufacturing costs should be much less. So, yeah, this is a really great advance for, for prosthetics with some kind of brain machine interface.

• 1:41:49Speaker 01

  Getting that feedback is hugely important to the, the ability to control a robotic prosthetic, right? Without the sensory feedback, you basically have to look at it, like, you have to look at your arm, your robotic arm, for example, to see what it's doing in order to be able to control it well. But if you can feel it, it improves the overall control, and it removes the ability to have to always be looking at it in order to, to have that good control. All right. All this means that scientists have developed a coconut oil derived biofuel blend jet fuel with equal performance to pure kerosene jet fuel with only half the CO2 emissions is the fiction. And Kara, you hit upon what makes it the fiction. It's that

• 1:42:32Speaker 01

  the CO2 emissions are not half. Why would they be? You're burning it with, you know, the CO2 emissions are the same. They were just happy that they were the same, right? That the CO2 emissions didn't increase, which would have meant a loss of efficiency. So for this blend, and they tested the blend everywhere from zero to 100, right? They were just, they just blanketed to see what, what's the optimal ratio. And also, there are basically two derived biofuels from the coconut oil, one with methanol, one with ethanol. So they were looking at different blends of those two versions with the kerosene jet fuel. And they found an optimal ratio where like the, the nitrous oxide and the

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  CO2 emissions were not significantly changed, which is good. Again, there's no real expectation that they would decrease. You just want them to not increase. They said the thermal efficiency was the same, which is great, but the specific fuel consumption was increased. So it would burn more fuel, basically to get the same effect, but the, the thermal efficiency and the emissions were the same. So, you know, this, the idea here obviously is to make a biofuel jet fuel. You know, jet engines are going to be one of those things that are going to be really, really hard to electrify, right? We're going to be burning jet fuel for a long time. So the, the really, the only pathway to limiting the net CO2 emissions

• 1:43:58Speaker 01

  is going to be using bio, biofuel jet fuel. Cause at least then it's circular, right? You're taking the CO2 out of the atmosphere to make the biofuel and then you're returning it to the atmosphere, but you're not releasing previously sequestered carbon, right? That's the idea of biofuels. So yeah, coming up with a really good biofuel blend for jet fuel would be awesome. Even if it's like 30%, which I think was the, the optimal one. If you're cutting your jet fuel use by a third, that's something. That's, that's pretty significant. This is also part of the impetus for this is not just CO2 reduction, but also, uh, you know, jet fuel is expensive. And when, when there are disruptions to the pipeline,

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  you know, like the Strait of Hormuz, like what's happening now, really, we were worried about this for our trip, right? Like suddenly air, air travel prices spiked because the cost of jet fuel spiked. And so anything that could reduce dependency on this, this pipeline of jet oil and its byproducts, you know, it's, it's, it's refined products also could have a huge economic benefit as well. So there's a lot of incentive to develop biofuel jet fuels, both economically and environmentally. Uh, so this, this may end up having some utility as far as that's concerned, but again, the doesn't, it has the same amount of CO2 emissions. It's just that whatever those emissions are that come

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  from biofuel were not sequestered CO2. They were CO2 that was, that was tied up in the growing of the, whatever you're using as your, your feedstock for the biofuel to begin with. They also mentioned in the, in the article about this, that a third of coconuts that are grown for the coconut market never make it to the store because they're just not good.

• 1:45:49Bob Novella?

  Third.

• 1:45:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow. Yeah. So there's a, there's not good.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. They, they don't meet, they're just not good. They're not good enough to sell, right? Um, and for whatever reason. So this could basically be a stream for those third of the coconuts that don't make it to the supermarket, basically. Um, you could use it for biofuel. It's like, what do you do with all the ugly vegetables, right? Cause you can't really sell them, uh, in a grocery store, but gotta find some use for them. So you're not just throwing away the ugly fruit and ugly vegetables, right? Cause that's what they do, basically. All right. It's a good job, Bob and Kara.

• 1:46:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Bob.

• 1:46:25Bob Novella?

  Take it.

• 1:46:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That was all you.

• 1:46:27Speaker 01

  All right, Bob.

• 1:46:29Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  Give us a quote this week, but first you have to address an issue with your quote from last week.

• 1:46:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Apparently, uh, apparently this was, the quote was a mishmash of, of, of Carlin and other people. And he didn't really say that full quote. Uh, it looked legit. I did some testing and, and people, other websites were claiming that it was, that it was good. So this happens from time to time. Uh, so that kind of sucked. But, uh, so, but what I, in order to compensate poor George, I am going to, uh, quote him again. Uh, this, this quote has been, has been vetted much more thoroughly. And I specifically went to georgecarlin.net, which has, uh, uh, much higher confidence in, uh, in his quotes

• 1:47:15Bob Novella?

  taken directly from the sources. And this quote is, "By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth." George Carlin, Napalm, I mean, it's Napalm in Silly Putty 2001. So yeah, I mean, it's important to remember this, obviously, you know, as, as scientists and as science communicators, we often think of scientific language ever more precisely describing reality. But of course, language also has tremendous power to obscure reality. And, and George Carlin loved exposing that aspect of language.

• 1:47:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. I always said, that's one of my sort of red flags. Like when I'm reading, whether it's a paper or an article or listening to somebody talk is are they using language to make things more clear or less clear, right? And oftentimes the snake oil salesmen, the con artists are using overly complicated language to make things less clear, to actually muddy the waters, to confuse people. They're using words that are unnecessarily complicated.

• 1:48:16Bob Novella?

  Metaphors, euphemisms. Yep.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. So as opposed to scientists who are using things to be more precise and more clear, uh, even though, you know, you do have to learn the jargon sometimes to understand what they're saying. But yeah. And of course Carlin was famously a cynic. So that we're getting at the cynical view, but it's good to recognize that language can be used for many purposes, sometimes to obfuscate the truth.

• 1:48:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And I'll throw out another quote that I'm seeing here on his georgecarlin.net site. This one, uh, made me giggle a bit. Uh, he said, "I never worry that all hell will break loose. My concern is that only part of hell will break loose and be much harder to detect." Yeah. Right. That's page 189 of his Napalm and Silly Putty. So.

• 1:49:03Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:49:04Bob Novella?

  All righty.

• 1:49:05Speaker 01

  All right, guys. Thank you for joining me this week.

• 1:49:08Bob Novella?

  Of course.

• 1:49:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:49:09Speaker 01

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

• 1:49:16Speaker 01

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