The Skeptics Guide #1051 - Aug 30 2025

Why Didn't I Know This: First Portable Computer; News Items: Brightest Fast Radio Burst, Trash into Biochar, Declining Reading Rates, Most Americans Skeptical of Paranormal, Quantum Alternative to GPS; Who's That Noisy; From TikTok: Mammograms; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, August 27, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  How's everyone doing? Quite well, sir. Quite good. Good. So Uranus has a new moon. Oh, congratulations. How'd you say that? Way to go, Uranus. Uranus. It's new? Yeah, it's brand new. Well, newly discovered moon. I see. This is the first moon discovered around Uranus in 40 years. Oh, wow. Which brings the total count up to 29. 29. Does not have a name yet, just a designation. S/2025U1, you know, first Uranus. It's what, 6 miles wide? 6 miles, yep. Very dim, which is why it wasn't seen by previous probes and telescopes. They were looking for, I think, like for shepherd moons, because, you know, Uranus has rings, and the rings are tidy. They're not spreading out.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  So they said there must be some shepherd moons, gravitationally keeping them penned in. I see. So that's how they found this moon. But it's actually not a shepherd moon, though. It's not where it would need to be. It's a little bit too far out, but still, they were able to see it.

• 1:53Bob Novella?

  These ring particles will never deorbit and land on the planet?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I don't know. I was thinking that, too.

• 1:58Bob Novella?

  Is that the Roche limit?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if they're, if it's too close, they rein in. If they're too far out, they drift away, unless you have shepherd moons keeping them in place, I think is what happens. Interesting. It's next to, it's between the moons Ophelia and Bianca. You know where those names come from?

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Some reality TV show, right? It's all Shakespeare. Yeah. Puck is also around Uranus. Oh, interesting. Yeah, look at that, Juliet.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Portia?

• 2:27Jay Novella?

  So.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 2:28Jay Novella?

  Has anyone like just directly called out like the idea that Uranus has a different way of saying it? That means something and people laugh at it, but like why?

• 2:35Speaker 02

  Uranus?

• 2:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like my, the point here is, um, where'd the name come from and why, you know?

• 2:41Speaker 02

  It's a god?

• 2:42Jay Novella?

  But then at some point in the English language, people like came up with your anus and.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, what came first, your Uranus or anus?

• 2:49Jay Novella?

  Yes, exactly.

• 2:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but even if you look at how it's spelled, it's got the word anus in it.

• 2:54Jay Novella?

  It does.

• 2:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I think that was always gonna happen, even if it was always pronounced Uranus.

• 3:00Bob Novella?

  I don't think it was, was it? My memory is that it was Uranus and then eventually that that kind of transitioned to Uranus, which I'm totally fine with. That's fine, Uranus.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  Triggers the giggles.

• 3:09Cara Santa Maria?

  But I mean, it's a Greek god, so do we know how it was pronounced?

• 3:13Jay Novella?

  I think that, hey, maybe that'd be good. What's the word, Kara?

• 3:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like do we even know how ancient Greek?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  But you know.

• 3:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's ancient Greek.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, we need a Rosetta Stone now to figure this one out.

• 3:24Jay Novella?

  Well, that maybe is some people.

• 3:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:27Jay Novella?

  All right, well, it's a, it's a weird and funny coincidence that young people for, through the ages have been laughing at.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Oh, well, so apparently, apparently.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  The, the, I think more, the other spelling is O U R A N O S.

• 3:42Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Oranus.

• 3:44Jay Novella?

  Like, so you're basically saying, oh, Uranus.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Oranus.

• 3:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And when you go to like Merriam-Webster and you look at the pronunciation, they say both Uranus and Uranus.

• 3:53Jay Novella?

  Great.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  And, and of course, uh, the, the cartoon Futurama fixed it a thousand years in the future. They renamed it to your rectum.

• 4:04Bob Novella?

  Rectum damn near killed him.

• 4:08Jay Novella?

  So you guys, I gotta, it just reminded me, you know, like I've, I've told you guys before, I've been like in this on and on again, off again, like debate thing going on with this chiropractor that I, I used to be friends with.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:21Jay Novella?

  And again, I mean, I'm, I'm sure he, he's a nice guy, you know, like I knew him, he was a good guy. You know, I, I don't wanna cross those wires, right, but. I've been heavily debating him and calling him out in his profession, out in crystal clear terms and like just really saying like the hard stuff to say to someone who's, you know, career is dependent on something that, you know, I personally believe is complete and utter nonsense.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Jay, can you give us a little background, like is he a reform, I mean, you know, is he?

• 4:50Jay Novella?

  He's a straight chiropractor.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  He's a straight chiropractor?

• 4:52Jay Novella?

  Which means he believes in the magic.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Sublimation, yeah.

• 4:55Jay Novella?

  Yep, innate intelligence and life force and all that.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so he's deep in.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Blah, blah, blah.

• 5:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So I have to tell you, and I thought of Evan, of course, is that I actually sent him a post, a very heavy post, and I sent him the meme, "You have a degree in baloney." You know, the guy runs up, "I have a degree in chiropractic." And then the guy yells, "You have a degree in baloney," and I actually sent that. I couldn't help myself. It was like perfect for the situation.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  But in Futurama, he says, "I have a degree in homeopathy."

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  And he says, "You have a degree in baloney."

• 5:31Jay Novella?

  Oh, it wasn't chiropractic? I said it was homeopathy. I sent him that anyway, and he knew.

• 5:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, chiropractors learn homeopathy.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. Chiropractors are the most common prescribers of homeopathic remedies in the United States.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 5:44Jay Novella?

  And, you know, another few interesting details, because he was literally arguing that they can prescribe medicines and stuff, and they can perform surgery, and I was just like, this is all fantasy.

• 5:55Speaker 03

  Surgery?

• 5:56Jay Novella?

  They do, they can prescribe like a couple of things other than, you know, vitamins, and like you can't even call what they do surgery, you know what I mean? Like, there isn't, it isn't like...

• 6:06Speaker 03

  I've never heard of them doing surgery.

• 6:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But it can cause a lot of harm, as we often say. And you guys know what the most common fatal chiropractic injury is?

• 6:14Speaker 02

  Is it dissection?

• 6:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, dissection of the vertebral artery.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Vertebral dissection.

• 6:20Jay Novella?

  So basically, that means that they tear the, an artery in your neck.

• 6:23Cara Santa Maria?

  In your neck.

• 6:24Jay Novella?

  That means you bleed out like in a very short amount of time.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't mean you bleed out, it means you stroke out.

• 6:29Jay Novella?

  You stroke out.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And that actually happened to a friend of a friend who is in her twenties.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  No way. It's always so tragic, because it's mostly young, healthy people who just have like these worst possible strokes.

• 6:41Speaker 03

  And then they go ahead, the chiropractor will blame the incident that took place before, which brought them to the chiropractor, right ahead of time, and, you know, that, "Oh, it was your original injury, it wasn't me that did this."

• 6:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And so my friend has a rule now, whenever people in her life, or like people that she cares about, tell her... You know, oh, I'm gonna see the chiropractor for my back. I'm gonna, you know, she tries to tell them, don't do it. Like, don't go see the chiropractor. But she's like, you know what? Whatever you do, don't let them touch you above the neck.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 7:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, above the shoulders.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  No manipulation. That's what I tell my patients as well. It's like, I personally wouldn't let any, anyone touch my neck. You know, or manipulate, you know, the neck in any kind of violent way. Don't let a chiropractor do that. Lower back, it's like, eh, you know, as long as I'm not doing anything stupid, it could help your lower back pain. But it's not any better than just physical therapy or just doing anything, really. Yeah, it's not your brain stem.

• 7:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they might still hurt ya, but they probably won't kill ya.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:36Cara Santa Maria?

  At your own risk.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, you have an interesting entry, only the second entry into a possible new segment of the show. Why didn't I know this?

• 7:46Bob Novella?

  Oh, I have it listed as, how the hell did I not know that? What are you, how are you saying it?

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Why didn't I know this?

• 7:52Bob Novella?

  All right, okay, I'm gonna write that down. Gotcha. All right, okay. So, uh, yeah, this, this is fun. I recently experienced my own version of, why the [__] didn't, oh, I'm sorry, why didn't I know this? This has to do with what's considered to be the first laptop computer. Does anyone know its name? Is anyone even familiar with the first laptop computer? This is the Osborne One from the before times, way back in 1981.

• 8:21Speaker 02

  Eighty-one?

• 8:22Bob Novella?

  You know, Steve and I were using computers at that time, pet computers and stuff. I'm certain that we probably heard about this back in the day, or saw an ad. I'm almost certain we probably saw an ad.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  Bob, I saw this computer. I knew somebody who owned it.

• 8:36Bob Novella?

  No way, who?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  The father of my then-girlfriend owned this computer. He was very proud of it. The guy was, loved it. It was just, this was like the best thing that ever happened to him. He's still using it. And, yeah, I remember, so he showed it off to me, went through the whole thing.

• 8:52Bob Novella?

  That's so cool.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  The thing was a suitcase. It's, it was a, I remember, and I remember at the time, saying, this is not really a portable computer. It's certainly not a laptop computer. This is a luggable computer. That was the term.

• 9:06Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  You could lug it around. But the thing is, like, he could take it to the work site and then take it home, and it's the same computer. And he loved that. And looking at it now, it's like, oh, my God, you know?

• 9:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they they called it portable. My understanding is that they it was called portable back in the day. And they were laughing about that term nowadays. It kind of morphed into, you know, the term luggable. And that's so that's how we refer to these ridiculously heavy, you know, portable computers back in the day. The story starts essentially though in April of 81 at the West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco. Fair is spelled F A I R E, it seems.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Oh, boy, like like a rent fair.

• 9:46Bob Novella?

  Which seems appropriate. Right, exactly. First thing I thought of. The engineers and hobbyists that were there saw they saw it as something that was very silly. And ostensibly, they thought it was very unimpressive. So what they saw was something called a portable computer, but it tipped the scales at 24 and a half pounds. 24 and a half. It was very rugged, though. It's essentially a hard shell of ABS plastic around it. So it was it could definitely, you know, go the distance in terms of like lugging it around, which makes sense because that's what it was designed for. So imagine you've got this this thing in front of you. So the first thing you would do is you would lower the front panel. And so it would click down on a hinge and that would be the keyboard. So that that front panel that flips down would be the keyboard.

• 10:28Bob Novella?

  Okay, so above the keyboard and then facing you directly, right in the middle was this itty bitty five inch monochrome CRT. And my question here is, does that initialism CRT, does that require an explanation in 2025?

• 10:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Cathode ray tube.

• 10:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, has it slipped into obscurity like IRC and BBS probably had? I don't know, but cathode ray tube, right? So so this CRT was only a third of a standard terminal, showing only about 52 characters on each of the 24 available lines of text, right? But you can connect it, you could have connected it to a bigger display if you wanted. So that was wasn't that much of a of a problem. But still ridiculously tiny. So then on the left of this, left and right of these of that screen is the two five and a quarter inch, five and a quarter, right, the big ones, floppy drives. And floppies were really floppy. These but these were single sided, single density, right? So they were they stored about 100 100 kilobytes each.

• 11:28Bob Novella?

  So that's just like, my god, you know, of two or three modestly sized files or maybe a small program. So yeah, not much capacity, especially, you know, thinking about the terabyte thumb drives today. It's just so ridiculously tiny. But in its time, you could get stuff done. And remember, though, that you might say, oh, wow, two drives. Yeah, that was critical because the you would, there was no hard drive. Remember that. There's no, you know, no hard drive, no USB drive, no Wi-Fi, none of that stuff. So you would have your operating system on one floppy. So you would boot from that, say, floppy on the left. And then on the right, you can actually load files or copy files to the floppy on the right. So that's why there were two. Kind of, kind of critical. There

• 12:09Bob Novella?

  was no battery on this first laptop. Battery schmattery. It only worked by being plugged in. Got to be plugged in, or you're not doing anything. There were, however, games. They loaded text based games that were very popular back in the day. One of them was Hammurabi. And the other one was called Colossal Cave Adventure. Text based games. Wow. So, but none of this stuff that I've mentioned really got anyone's attention. It was more, more of a toy than a serious platform until several things were noticed. First off, it was the price. The Osborne one was seventeen hundred and ninety-five USD. That's about six thousand,

• 12:51Bob Novella?

  that's $6,000 in 2025. So six grand sounds like a lot, but that was a hell of a deal back then.

• 12:57Speaker 03

  Folks, also by comparison, there were cars, new cars that were selling probably in the range of about five or $6,000 back, back then as well. So you would have to, like, so this is the cost of like, one quarter of a car.

• 13:10Bob Novella?

  Right. So relatively speaking, that's a lot. But if you're a serious computer hobbyist or an engineer, or as we'll see, other professions, this was way worth it. And it gets even better when I discuss this second point here that was noticed. There was something brand new about, about this, this device, this computer. And it was a major, major part of its appeal. Preloaded commercially useful software, what we would say a killer software bundle today. That was something that, as far as I can tell, was not done. Anywhere before this, preloaded commercially useful software. And the thing is, though, so it had, let me just list some of the programs that it had. It had, out of the box, it had CPM, which is a 2.2, which is an operating system.

• 13:55Bob Novella?

  It had Word Store, WordStar, which is a very popular word processor of the day. There was SuperCalc, which was a spreadsheet. Then there was Mail Merge and both Microsoft Basic and C Basic programming languages. So this was all preloaded. The thing was, though, that this software was worth $1,500 USD. People were just astonished that that was included. To them, it was amazing. So that, yeah, so this computer was just about $1,800 and you were getting $1,500 worth of software. So it's like, yeah, the computer's only a small part of this deal. So it was an amazing deal when you factor in all that software that just came right with it. And the third revolutionary aspect of the Osborne 1 was, in fact, its portability and

• 14:40Bob Novella?

  communication. That was something that was really dramatic for various professions. So even Osborne himself agreed that the performance of the Osborne 1 was really just adequate, you know? But he would say that that wasn't the point. The point was that this device was actually a ready-to-use office in a box. He claimed that it was the only computer that could fit under an airline seat. And these were essentially marketing points, but they were very, very effective. This device, once people digested this and realized what they could do with it, it was like crack to many professions. Like journalists were among the first groups of the first profession that jumped on board. They were almost immediate. Many of them got rid of their typewriter and exchanged it for an Osborne 1.

• 15:25Bob Novella?

  For reporters, Osborne 1 was probably even more revolutionary. The newsroom became essentially wherever you were, wherever the reporter and their Osborne 1 was, that's basically your newsroom. You could be at a hotel room, you could be in an airport, you could be even on a battlefield. In 1982, reporter David Klein brought his Osborne 1 plus a heavy battery pack.

• 15:50Bob Novella?

  Into the mountains of Afghanistan, so we can cover the Soviet-Afghan conflict. You guys remember that? So, writing and transmitting dispatches from the field was just a, you can imagine, it was just a total game changer. So, I wanted to see, well, how did you actually transfer files, not at the battlefield, but say, like, if you were, you know, in a hotel. That was the classic maneuver. You know, you're a reporter, and you want to file your story. How do they do it? You know, there's no USB, there's no parallel ports, there's no wireless, anything. How would this work? So, one way to do it would be what's called Sneaker Net. I don't know if you guys have ever heard of Sneaker Net? Yeah. That's just a goofy way of saying you would walk the file to where you needed to be, and handing it over, like, you would just hand over your floppy disk. On a disk, yeah. Right.

• 16:35Bob Novella?

  So, that's one way. But the obvious, more popular option was to use Osborn One Serial Port that lets you connect to either other computers, or printers, or, most importantly, a modem. That was the key, right there. So, if you were in a hotel room, you'd connect your Serial Port from the Osborn One into your separate modem device. Now, these were typically fairly big, these modems, back in the day. These were acoustic coupler modems. And they were the ones that you literally just put your handset, the phone handset, right into it. You guys remember that scene in War Games? Yeah. That was a modem. That was an acoustic coupler modem. Then you'd run your terminal software that was already on your laptop, and then your

• 17:17Bob Novella?

  office would get your story, and somebody there, or the mainframe, would be able to take it. And then, you wouldn't need to dictate it, you wouldn't need to call anybody to dictate your story, right? That was a common way to do it. You wouldn't need to mail it, you wouldn't need to use a courier, or whatever other method. So much easier and more convenient. So, the sales for the Osborn computers, as you might imagine, this is the Osborn Computer Corporation, sales were through the roof. It was just amazing analysts. And for a time, it was good. Amazing, amazing, actually, until the Osborn effect.

• 17:51Bob Novella?

  You may have heard of the Osborne effect. Oh, boy. So this is, the story goes like this. So they've had a one or two years of amazing sales, making, you know, selling so many thousands and thousands of units, making millions of dollars. And Osborne himself mentioned that the successors to the Osborne one. And then there was two of them, a stronger, beefier one and a smaller, even more portable one. But he mentioned them. And the problem was, as the story goes, he mentioned it a little bit too early and it caused sales of Osborne one to dry up. Because people are like, why am I gonna buy? Right, why, I'm just gonna wait for the next one. So he kind of overproduced the Osborne one. They had a lot of those. And so sales dried up, income plummeted.

• 18:35Bob Novella?

  And since their margins, their margins were apparently way too thin. They were just razor thin margins and it led directly to bankruptcy. Just in 1983, just two years later, because of that, that snafu. So this scenario was called the Osborne effect. So, and announcing a new product too early has literally tanked companies before the Osborne one and afterwards. It's just this thing that happens that everyone's aware of, but it kind of has the name of the Osborne effect now. Now, the truth is obviously more complex than that. So still, the Osborne one was the first commercially successful product in this new category. It showed that there was tremendous demand for a computer that you could relatively

• 19:20Bob Novella?

  easily haul about. And there, you know, some people say that there were, you know, there were other attempts at portable computers, but this is really the first portable laptop-esque type computer that was commercially successful product and not just like maybe a one-off that barely, you know, did anything beyond that. It changed how computers were marketed, making them ready to work right out of the package. You know, software bundles were basically fairly ubiquitous, you know, soon after that across the computer industry. Tech companies worth their salt will always, will always carefully plan product announcements to avoid Osborning themselves, if you will. And the Osborne one, obviously

• 20:01Bob Novella?

  It foreshadowed the laptop as a juggernaut device for mobile computing decades before Wi-Fi and cloud computing, kind of like, you know, I see it as like, kind of like the Model T. It was a proof of concept for the masses that, yes, this is a viable product, people will shell out good money for this, it's got a niche, it's clearly got a place. I mean, I can't imagine, you know, if I'm go to a, to speak at a conference, all of us, you know, we're basically all bringing these laptops or, you know, or tablets, or even a phone, you know, it's even a phone, you could do so much. So it was really an amazing introduction, and I'm just surprised that I wasn't more familiar with it. Steve, you actually saw

• 20:43Bob Novella?

  one, you could, did you get a little demo, but you actually saw one, I've never actually seen one, but I'm sure I was familiar with it, but it just, you know, it's just not in my memory banks at this point. I would think it would be something that I would at least be much more familiar with, and hopefully, now, hopefully, there's a bunch of you out there like, oh, yeah, Osborne One, first, the first real commercially successful laptop that really showed what it could do. So, interesting story. Check it out if you want more details.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Can't call it a laptop, though, right?

• 21:11Speaker 02

  It's not really, yeah, it's not a laptop. Who again, it was portable computer.

• 21:15Bob Novella?

  Portable, I mean, exactly, I mean, but it's, yeah, it's not technically a laptop, but it's the portability, which is what makes a laptop a laptop, it's the portability.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Bob. Right. All right, so, we have the report of the brightest fast radio burst observed to date. Fast radio bursts are FRBs. We've been talking about them intermittently on the show. They're, you know, one of the current active astronomical mysteries. We don't really know what causes them, so it's a mystery that's unfolding in real time. What they are is what the name says, fast radio bursts. They're very brief, like one millisecond, a thousandth of a second, around there.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Burst of very high energy radio waves. So something very powerful clearly is causing them. Most of the ones that we observe are billions of light years away, which you know what that means? You know, how that, how you-

• 22:26Bob Novella?

  They occurred billions of years ago.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's really two things. One is if something is only happening very far away, that means it's only happening very far in the past. But it could also be that it's just rare and you need a large volume of universe to observe in order to statistically see them happen, right? And it seems like that's, it's really the second thing that's the case. It's just that they're, they're relatively rare and so we need to observe a large volume of space, which means on average, we're going to be seeing them very far away. But we-

• 23:01Bob Novella?

  Right, so it could happen very, it could happen very close, but it's very, very unlikely to happen.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  It's just, yeah, it's just unlikely. So the one that we're talking about now that was just observed was only 130 million light years away. I know that sounds really far, 130 million. But that's, makes it one of the closer FRB. So it's the brightest and it was fairly close. This is, and this is why we're talking about it, because those two things together, very bright, very close for an FRB, means we have really good observations of it. But there's-

• 23:38Bob Novella?

  Right, and Steve, if it's, you would think, if it's the same mechanism, which we assume it is because we're calling it a FRB, I would think this would be a lot brighter since it's so much closer than, you know, it's orders of magnitude's closer. So I would think it would be like ridiculously bright.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  But I think they're talking absolute brightness, not just relative brightness. Alright, so it's bright and close, that's great. We get, get better look at it than, than other things. But also, as we've discovered-

• 24:06Speaker 02

  FRBs, we've now started to, to develop the machinery specifically to look for them. So this one was seen by the CHIME, the astronomers love their, love their acronyms. The Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment. So this was originally developed to map the distribution of hydrogen in the universe. But it started picking up FRBs. And it's like, oh, cool. We're picking, you know, this is some, you know, we knew we've detected them in the past, but we've started to detect a lot of them with the CHIME. So it's between 2018 and today, it's detected about 4,000 FRBs.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  So several hundred per year. Now, the thing is because they're so-

• 24:55Speaker 03

  It's like one a day, man.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  They're, because they're so brief, they're very hard to localize precisely.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  And they don't repeat.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Well, most of them don't repeat.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Most don't repeat, yeah.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  There are a subset, a minority of FRBs that do repeat.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  There you go. Focus on those babies.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  And the repeaters can either be regular or irregular, meaning they could repeat, but at irregular intervals or unpredictable.

• 25:21Speaker 03

  That just adds to the mystery.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  But some of them repeat at regular intervals for a while, then stop, right? So, but most of them are one-offs. They don't repeat. Or maybe their repetition is so long, we, it's, if it's 50 years, we haven't been observing long enough. So maybe that will change. Maybe it's really just a long interval. But anyway, they said, all right, CHIME is detecting all these FRBs, but we can't really localize them. We could localize them to their galaxy. We could say it's coming from that galaxy, even if it's a billion light years away. But we can't say where in the galaxy it's coming from. We need a bigger, we're gonna need a bigger boat, right? We need a bigger telescope. And so what they built was what they call outriggers. Now, if you recall from radio astronomy-

• 26:06Speaker 02

  If you have two radio dishes 100 miles apart, it has not the sensitivity, but the resolution of one radio dish that's 100 miles in diameter. So that's why they built these outriggers, these smaller versions of chime, all across North America, which gives us a detection sensitivity as if we had a telescope as big as North America. So this allows for very precise localization of where the FRB is coming from. So now we have the perfect storm, right? We have these three elements together. We have chime with the outriggers. We have a bright FRB and a relatively close FRB.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  And what this enabled them to do was to see precisely where in the host galaxy it was originating from. And it seems to be coming from the outskirts of a star-forming region. So star-forming regions where you have a condensing, collapsing cloud of gas that's churning out stars. Yeah, it's nebula, but it's churning out stars, right? If you're in the middle of the star-forming region, you're probably a very young star, a newly minted star. The farther away from the middle you get, the older you are because you've drifted away, I guess, from the center of the star-forming region. So being at the edge means that it was a... You know, it could have been millions of years old, you know, kind of age.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Like it was an adolescent star, if you will. But also keep in mind that the bigger the star, the shorter its lifespan.

• 27:40Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  So this could have been...

• 27:42Bob Novella?

  Couple hundred million years, they really don't last long.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, so if you...

• 27:46Bob Novella?

  It's amazing, they have many times the amount of fuel that smaller stars have. But they go through it so fast.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Because they burn so hot.

• 27:53Bob Novella?

  Prophylactic, yeah.

• 27:54Speaker 02

  So it's possible that this FRB was coming from a blue giant or whatever, a very large star that in a... Only in a few million years, so it was still close to its star-forming nursery, turned into a neutron star. The big stars are also the ones that become neutron stars or black holes if they're really big. But this is not a black hole, right? So the thinking is, well, at the very least, they're hoping that by identifying where in the galaxy these FRBs are coming from, they'll be able to ask questions and test hypotheses about what phenomena might be causing these FRBs. Now, there is kind of a leading theory. Bob, I know you know. Any of you guys have a guess?

• 28:37Bob Novella?

  I like it.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Of what the leading theory is as to what's calling, at least the one-off FRBs, maybe if not the repeaters.

• 28:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, no idea. I really don't know.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  So it's something powerful.

• 28:48Jay Novella?

  Uh, black hole?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Supernova.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  It's...

• 28:50Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 28:50Speaker 02

  So, of course you...

• 28:51Speaker 03

  A collision of black... A collision of super black holes.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a really good guess. Bob guessed that, actually. That's a really good guess. It's something, if it's ever really powerful event, it's probably related to either black holes or neutron stars, right? Those are, those are likely candidates. Now, there's a specific kind of neutron star.

• 29:10Bob Novella?

  A flavor, if you will.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  A flavor that puts out a lot of energy. It's, it has a massive field and it's cranking... Nope, cranking out X-rays and gamma rays, and that is a magnetar.

• 29:24Bob Novella?

  Magnetar. Oh, magnetar. My favorite neutron star. They are amazing.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  The reason that...

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Don't get too close, Bob.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  The reason that that's a, that the, that magnetars have something to do with FRBs, at least some of them, is because in 2020, and I can't remember if we talked about this, I think we did.

• 29:41Bob Novella?

  Maybe.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  In 2020, we discovered the first FRB in our own galaxy, in our own galaxy, which is unprecedented before that.

• 29:50Bob Novella?

  That's nuts, man.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  And we were able to see that it was coming from a magnetar. So, it doesn't get better than that. So, many astronomers, like, until proven otherwise, magnetars aren't the source of FRBs, at least some of them, right? Again, maybe the one-offs, but not the repeaters or whatever, we don't know. But it's not all magnetars, but it's something that's happening to a magnetar that's producing these rare FRBs.

• 30:17Bob Novella?

  Right. It's something, it's some interaction, or could it be, Steve, could it be kind of like a starquake? A magnetar starquake?

• 30:26Bob Novella?

  Because a starquake is a, it's rare, but it happens in a neutron star where, where part of the crust shifts. And because that, the matter is so dense, even if it's like a millimeter shift of a, of a segment on the neutron star.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  It's a lot of energy.

• 30:43Bob Novella?

  It's so much energy is released that we could, we could actually feel it from thousands of light years away. We, and we actually experienced one of those, not, not too many years ago. Um, and it actually impacted our like ionosphere and stuff like that. So it could, maybe it's a, it's a magnetar starquake.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  It's basically just unknown. So we had the, we have a solid, solid piece of evidence that magnetars are the source of FRBs, but we don't know what's happening to make the, those magnetars produce the FRBs. Right now, we have only confirmed 40 magnetars. There's only 40 that we know of. So the, an FRB coming from a magnetar can't, is probably not a coincidence, right? They're so rare that it wouldn't be like, oh, it just happens to be in the neighborhood of a magnetar because they're all over the place. Nope, they're really rare. If it's in the neighborhood of a magnetar, that's probably the cause of what's, of the FRB itself.

• 31:37Bob Novella?

  And why are they rare?

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Because they only last for a short period of time. They radiate away so much energy that the, that the magnetic field, the super intense magnetic field fades away over time.

• 31:47Bob Novella?

  Right. And that calms down, which, which actually supports the story and the theory of why, you know, of, of them being rare because magnetars just don't last that long.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Now Kara, I know what you're thinking right now. What am I thinking? You're thinking, how powerful are magnetars magnetic? I was thinking that.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, can, can you express it in gauss?

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I can express it in earth magnetic fields. It's a trillion times as powerful as earth's magnetic field. It's so powerful, how powerful is it? That if you were a thousand kilometers away from a magnetar, you would instantly die because your molecules could not exist, right? It would disrupt the electron fields around your molecules. So your chemistry would be, couldn't function, right? Within a thousand kilometers.

• 32:36Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  That's how intense the magnetic field is. Trillion times as powerful as earth's magnetic field. Uh, but then they fade away over. 10,000 years, 100,000 years, you know, a million on the outside. So they don't last for very long, which means there's not many of them in the universe. So cool, you know, just a, again, nice, perfect storm. We got a nice little piece to the puzzle of what FRBs are. But this story is not over. We really still don't know what is causing these really brief, really powerful events. I'm sure we'll be talking about this more in the future. All right, Jay, we're gonna bring, bring us back to Earth now.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  Tell us about turning trash into biochar.

• 33:24Jay Novella?

  Have you guys heard of biochar?

• 33:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:27Jay Novella?

  Anybody else?

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Hmm, man.

• 33:29Jay Novella?

  Alright, it was new to me as well, so don't feel bad, because it's really, it isn't a common word that people come across. So let me just set the stage for you guys. Australia wastes about 31 million tons, which is about 34 million US tons of food every year. So imagine, if you will, it's enough to fill roughly 20,800 Olympic-sized swimming pools, or you could build a food scrap mountain that's taller than Sydney Tower if piled up. Massive, massive amounts of food waste. And it's not just a number, you know, it's more like a, you gotta think of it like a landscape of rotting biomaterial that is ultimately...

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Oh, Rob's haunt, gotcha.

• 34:14Jay Novella?

  It's not only a waste, but it's, it's, it's not good stuff for the environment. If you break it down, it's about 312 kilograms or 688 pounds per person every year. And that's four times the global average of 79 kilograms or about 174 pounds. It's just a staggering amount of what was described as largely like good food being dumped. So let me tell you what biochar is, I'll give you some details. It's basically a charcoal that's made by heating the organic material in a low-oxygen environment, which is very similar to wood charcoal.

• 34:52Jay Novella?

  This process is called pyrolysis, and it produces stable, carbon-rich material. It could be added to soil to improve the soil's structure, it holds nutrients, it could support microbial life. It's a really interesting material. So there was a recent review that suggests the idea to turn food waste into biochar. And this review examines whether this could realistically work at a scale for Australia, which would be a very, you know, very large. So they did find some legitimate potential here. So biochar can boost poor soils by improving their structure, their water retention. It can lock carbon in underground.

• 35:34Jay Novella?

  They described it as, you know, for decades or much, much longer. Australia's soils are, you know, they're considered to be low in fertility. So they're, you know, this would actually help the soil. When you heat, for example, 10 kilograms or say about 22 US pounds of dry food waste to around 300 degrees Celsius or about 572 degrees Fahrenheit. And if you do this for a short time, roughly 10 minutes, you can get back 7.6 kilograms or about 17 pounds of biochar. That's a yield of about 76%. And there, there, it's funny how these parameters, like, you know, if you put it in, into the

• 36:15Jay Novella?

  reactor for longer or at a hotter temperature, the yield drops, but it does create something else that could be useful as well. Like, so there are these variables that they could, they could use to make different properties emerge and things like that. On the energy side, the pyrolysis can be actually efficient. So, you know, they're saying in a fast system, like, you know, a system that is really hot in a short amount of time to treat the, the food waste. This usually makes less char at about 20%, but the energy to run them could be as little as 15% because they could reuse the gases that are emitted by the food waste as it's turning into biochar to fuel its own system, which, you know, again, that's, that's a really

• 37:00Jay Novella?

  nice way to be efficient. So how do you measure biochar beyond the yield and weight? There is a list here I can give you. I don't want to go into great detail here because there is so much that I could be saying here, so I'll just give you kind of the headers. You could measure it by its carbon content and stability. You know, how much carbon that's there that could be locked away. Surface area and how porous it is. This determines how well it will hold nutrients in water if it was buried in the ground. It's nutrient content, so does it have nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, trace minerals? And that all depends on what the food waste actually is. Like specifically, you know, if it's a protein-based food waste or if it's more plant-based, the parameters change.

• 37:42Jay Novella?

  They measure it by how much pH, what the pH is and the salts that are there. Of course, too much sodium or ammonium can harm soil, so of course, that would all have to be monitored and completely figured out. Its absorption capacity, which is very significant. How well will it soak up pollutants or metals? And its bulk density. This is weight per cubic meter. This is important for shipping costs and, you know, adding all of these things together with all of these different measures that I listed, they would be able to essentially figure out what the best-case scenario would be for each one of these parameters. Or maybe they're all mixed, right? These parameters could all be mixed together to develop different types of biochar that are specific for certain needs.

• 38:24Jay Novella?

  So, you know, it's cool that there's so much flexibility here with what they could actually produce from just food waste. So guys, so why do you think they want to, they're proposing that we bury biochar?

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Well, I think the big advantage, because I was looking into it as well, composting has a lot of the same advantages and it has better, it's beneficial for microorganisms which biochar does not have. But biochar has one huge advantage over composting, and that is long-term carbon sequestration.

• 38:54Jay Novella?

  Right. Yeah, that's a big one, especially today, of course, with global warming. Like, you know, we have to, we have to lean heavy into that. There's lots of little things here to, to think about. So first of all, it's porous, if they make it to be porous, which they can. Water and nutrients are retained for crops, which is weird if you think about it, but the biochar that's buried would kind of be like batteries that hold water and nutrients that will leach out into the ground. Another thing it does, it stabilizes the carbon, like Steve was saying, for decades or even up to centuries. It will also prevent methane emissions that routing food typically releases, right? So if you ever were near a dump, which I, I had the misfortune of being near a dump

• 39:39Jay Novella?

  for a very short amount of time, and man, that smell, that methane smell that is put off by that material is absolutely horrible. And, but you can think of though, of that methane is essentially energy. Beyond agriculture, the review mentions, like, these other uses for it that are more experimental, but they were saying that it could be, serve as pollutant filters or lightweight concrete. So is this a good idea? You know, turning food waste into bio, biochar is, you know, it's a strong concept on paper. It is far from a guaranteed solution. That doesn't mean anything really negative. It just means, you know, there's strong indications here that more research is, needs to be done.

• 40:21Jay Novella?

  You know, where the researchers say that it's very strong is waste diversion, right? So it would take millions of tons of food out of landfills and cutting all those methane emissions, soil improvement, the carbon storage, and the energy side benefits. Like I said, you know, the energy that would come out of the biochar as you're creating, it could be used to make more biochar. It's weak with food waste problems, like food waste is inconsistent. Like I said, it's wet, it's complicated processing that adds a ton of complexity to the whole thing. The infrastructure cost would be huge, you know what I mean? This is industrial scale systems that, you know, they don't really exist today in this form. You know, all the information is there in different ways, if you think about it, but

• 41:03Jay Novella?

  to really, you know, spike this thing out, it would have to be, so engineers would have to make a very finely tuned system that works specifically with all of these edge cases in order to pull it off. There are environmental risks. You know, some food waste biochars, you know, will have salts and ammonium in them that can harm the soil and organisms, so that's another layer of, of. Testing and you know, post-production testing that would have to happen, which drives up costs. We really believe that it could work, but a lot more money and energy needs to be put into this. And if they were ever to even, you know, build the first test facility, it would be a significant amount of money to build this out. That being said, you know, I don't want to be too optimistic here, but this is the exact

• 41:47Jay Novella?

  type of innovation that the world needs, in my opinion, because you know, food waste, even though it's happening the most in Australia, it's happening globally and it is another puzzle piece to lowering greenhouse gas emissions and being able to gain control over sequestering carbon, which we really need to do.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the, you know, we have to say that the ideal solution is to reduce food waste, but that's easier said than done. There's a reason why there is like 30% or 40% or whatever it is food waste in the system. It's because food rots and the system has losses all along the line from the farm to the table, right? You don't eat every scrap of food you bring into your house. You just can't, you know, just can't, no system could operate that efficiently. So we're always going to have food waste, even if we make huge efforts to decrease it. And I think the one thing we can say for sure is it shouldn't end up in the landfill, right? Like composting and biochar, I think are two good sort of end results for, for the food waste.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  Sometimes we feed it to animals too, like that's fine too. Animal feed is another reasonable way of recycling it back into the system. As long as it's not rotting in landfill and making methane gas, I think that's fine.

• 43:02Jay Novella?

  But Steve, there's a, there's a big question here that we didn't even address.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:07Jay Novella?

  What the hell are people in Australia doing with all this food? What are they doing?

• 43:12Speaker 02

  I don't know. I haven't read about that specifically. Why is their rate higher than the world average? Well, I'm sure the US isn't great either, but I'd be interested to see like, is there something systemic or is it environmental? Is it just their, you know, because they have to import a lot of food? I don't know.

• 43:26Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's, it, you know, that could be it, Steve. Maybe it is because they don't, you know, they don't have like a, you know, a lot of, a lot of land to grow food on, that they have to import it and that, that could be it. I kinda was joking around like to myself going like.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  It's probably some systemic issue. Yeah, not.

• 43:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like they're doing all these outdoor barbecues, you know, they're they're getting drunk and they're making too many hot dogs and, you know, I don't know.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  They don't they don't eat hot dogs, Shay. That's what I'm thinking.

• 43:53Jay Novella?

  You know what I'm getting? I know shrimp. I don't want to say shrimp on the barbecue.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  They don't eat shrimp either. They eat prawns and vegemite.

• 43:59Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  That's it. And that's it.

• 44:01Jay Novella?

  I don't want Iran to get pissed at me and be like, what the hell?

• 44:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I just don't want to read all the articles.

• 44:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about declining reading rates.

• 44:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you said that so joyfully.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  Does that mean people are reading more slowly these days?

• 44:19Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Unfortunately, it does not. Okay, so there was a study that was recently published in an open access journal called iScience. These are researchers from London and Florida who wanted to understand a little bit more about trends in the US specifically with regards to how people are reading for pleasure. And so they asked several questions. It's an interesting study because they were able to use, yes, self-report data, but self-report data, survey self-report data from a really large representative sample. So the the kind of larger database is called

• 45:03Cara Santa Maria?

  the American Time Use Survey. And basically, from 2003 until 2023, over 10,000 people every year provided nationally representative estimates for their average day across 20 years. So basically, they said, you know, this is what I did in this hour. This is what I did in this hour. This is what. And so what we're looking at, and I think this is important to understand because I didn't quite get this when I was reading some of the coverage of it, you're looking at a day, just like a blip, like in an average day, this is the percentage of people that read for pleasure. You're not looking at, these

• 45:44Cara Santa Maria?

  are the percentages of the people who read what they were, you know, when they read. Does that make sense? So we're looking at sort of a cross section of time, 10,000 people, representative sample, meaning it represents the US in terms of age and marital status and race and income level and education.

• 46:05Cara Santa Maria?

  10,000 people, hopefully representing, you know, the trends of the whole country. And they wanted to know a bunch of different things, you know? Are people reading on an average day? How much are they reading? You know? Where are they reading? Who are they reading with? And yeah, they collected all of that data. And then some interesting findings came out. So if I were to ask you on an average day in that survey in 2023, which is the most recent year that they have like whole data for, how many people? What percentage of the people in that survey read for pleasure on an average day?

• 46:46Speaker 03

  Wow. Gee, that's a, I don't know. 50%?

• 46:49Cara Santa Maria?

  50% read for pleasure? What do you, what do you, what do you think, Evan?

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Define pleasure?

• 46:55Cara Santa Maria?

  It, oh, I can define pleasure. They called that either, so they actually called it reading for personal interest. Either reading a book, magazine, newspaper, or listening to an audiobook, or reading on a Kindle or e-reader, or reading a library book.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh, I think it's higher than that. It's probably 67, 65%. I'd say 70%.

• 47:14Bob Novella?

  Does that include reading the news?

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Yes, newspaper.

• 47:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Book, magazine, newspaper, yeah.

• 47:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I think it'd be fairly high.

• 47:19Cara Santa Maria?

  16%.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  What? That, how, how are we so off on?

• 47:26Cara Santa Maria?

  16%.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Really? Wow, that's crazy.

• 47:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Read for pleasure.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Any of those things.

• 47:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. Any of those things. For pleasure, again, for pleasure.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  That's a shock to the system.

• 47:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  I read every day. I read every day. Yeah. There's not a, yeah.

• 47:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we are not the average American. And that's something that's really important to understand. So they found that over the course of this 20-year study, decrease in reading engagement declined 3% every year. Every year, 3% fewer, 3% fewer.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, and they have some theories as to why.

• 48:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. So they are, the researchers are very worried, I should say. They did say that the numbers are not kind of even across all demographic groups. Definitely people with higher education and women are more likely to read. White people are also more likely to read. But they are seeing shifts even among those. Now, here's something that's interesting. Of the people who read, the time spent reading has actually increased slightly. But most people don't read. And when you average out the, and this is what I'm still trying to understand. I gotta dig a little deeper into how things are worded in here. But the researchers are saying that in 2023,

• 48:45Cara Santa Maria?

  participants spent an average of 16 minutes reading for pleasure on a, on a day. But only 16% of participants read for pleasure. So I'm, I still can't figure out if that 16 minutes is averaging all the other people who had zero minutes. Does that make sense?

• 49:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I get it.

• 49:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it is because they said of the participants, the 16% of participants, the average person spent, spent an hour and 37 minutes reading. So basically the people who read are really reading. Like I read a book every night before I go to sleep. I also read news articles during the day. How do you guys generally engage with your reading?

• 49:23Jay Novella?

  I generally read throughout the day, mostly articles.

• 49:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  But I do some. Articles for me.

• 49:29Jay Novella?

  Some like just novel reading in bed at nighttime usually.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  I do research reading every day.

• 49:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Five to 15 minutes, but in like little pockets throughout the day? Yeah, okay.

• 49:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I listen to audiobooks whenever I'm driving, so. And then the reading though is I don't, I don't consider reading the news, pleasure reading in the last half year. It's, it's, it's a drudgery that I have to do that then I can't do anymore. And I, then I'll go to like reading about physics and astronomy and stuff like that.

• 49:59Speaker 03

  Happy stuff.

• 50:00Bob Novella?

  Cheer up and be in a happy place.

• 50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and truth be told, it's still probably would be considered reading for pleasure because nobody's making you read it. You're not doing it for work.

• 50:07Bob Novella?

  I know, but it's not pleasurable.

• 50:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I, I would say I probably read like a, a, a couple of articles a day. You know, depending on the day, depending on what piques my interest. And then at night, I probably average anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours, reading like in bed before I go to sleep, just depending on how early I go to bed.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  And do you use a Kindle?

• 50:30Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I, I, I use books.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, good old books.

• 50:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, with a, with a little nightlight thingy, a book lamp.

• 50:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I like, you know, I read a lot of stuff for work and news during the day. And then at night, it's all, it's all pleasure reading.

• 50:45Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, I mentioned that these declines at 3% each year over the course of the 20 year study, was not equivalent across demographic groups. Black Americans with the lowest education, the lowest income levels and living in outside of cities, so in non metropolitan areas, showed the steepest decline in reading. But even across that, we're seeing that, yeah, women and those with higher education showed the, were more likely to read and were more likely to read more. And so the question is, you know, what is causing this? And I've, I've been curious about this too, because I'm not sure if you guys remember kind of a bevy of stories popping up last year, beginning of this year, in a lot of

• 51:27Cara Santa Maria?

  long form magazines, like The Atlantic, Forbes wrote about it, kind of these op-eds from college professors being like, I don't know what to do, my students don't read. Like, I'm getting these crops of students out of high school who say that they've never read a whole book.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 51:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Have you guys read any of these articles?

• 51:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:46Cara Santa Maria?

  There's, there's one at Forbes called Kids Can't Read Books. There's one in The Atlantic called The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books. And so these are, you know, again, op-ed pieces that are, are written often by college professors or even some high school students saying, like, things feel different now. And I don't know if this is, you know, old man, you know, shaking fist at cloud, if every single generation says kids today, kids today, or if there's real data behind this, because there isn't a lot of good survey data about how often kids read. But we do see anecdotal evidence that, that shows, you know, college professors saying that students are coming up to them being like, I'm having a hard time keeping up with your assignments.

• 52:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And when they say, okay, well, how long did it take you to read a book in like your English class in high school? They'll be like, oh, we never read a whole book. We would just read like excerpts.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 52:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Or like, they would assign like a chapter.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Oh, God, you used to take classes where you read a book a week for the whole, for the whole semester.

• 52:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so in one of these articles, that is what they said, that they, you know, historically would assign, you know, I don't know, 14 books in a semester, and now it's down to like six or seven, because that's all the students can handle. So, so, but there are a lot of factors here. What does that mean? Like, what, like, because a lot of these professors and, and scholars who are writing about this are like, kids can still read, just don't. So like, what's going on here?

• 53:14Speaker 03

  As long as it's not in cursive, they can do it.

• 53:17Bob Novella?

  Attention span.

• 53:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so like, could we chalk it all up to attention span? Do you think that that has? Yeah, I think that's some of the variance for sure.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  There's a lot of diversions.

• 53:27Cara Santa Maria?

  We do have a lot of diversions, right? A lot of people blame social media.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Diversions.

• 53:31Bob Novella?

  Destruction.

• 53:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're like, how are you gonna read if you can just look at TikTok? And you can get some new kind of dopamine hit every two seconds. But also, like, there is a survey of seniors in 2023 that said that they spent, a self-report survey said they were spending just as much time on jobs and extracurriculars as they were on academics. Also, there's been a lot of grade inflation. For example, in a recent report, 79% of grades at Harvard were in the A range. Like, do you really think 79% of students at Harvard are making As? Probably not. It should be a normal distribution, right? So clearly, a lot of college students are, you know, getting by without doing all of their work.

• 54:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Some of these different experts are blaming things like Common Core. They're blaming shifts to global, or not global, but national academic standards that have moved away from the more sort of nuanced skills that are gained from reading a book in full and really engaging with the text, more towards standardized testing and, you know, hitting certain benchmarks. Okay, what was the, you know, main, the thesis statement? What were, you know, three points that you can make from this? Some of those things that you can do without having read the whole book. There's a Edweek Research Center survey that I came across

• 54:58Cara Santa Maria?

  of 303rd to 8th grade educators. Only 17% of them said that they primarily teach whole texts. About 49% said that they combine it with anthologies and excerpts. A lot of teachers are saying that they might, you know, assign a part of, let's say, Homer's Odyssey. They talk about this in the Atlantic article. They would assign a part of Homer's Odyssey and then they would supplement it with music and articles and TED Talks and, and different things that aren't just books. But it does seem to be the case that fewer students are reading books in school. And I don't know if that's what's translating then to fewer adults reading.

• 55:39Cara Santa Maria?

  One other part of this study that I didn't mention is that they did look at the, the percentage of individuals in the survey who read to children. Let's play Guess because this is rough. On average, the average across all participants in 2023, remember this is 10,000 representative sample, uh, how many minutes on average did participants spend reading with children every day?

• 56:07Jay Novella?

  Half an hour.

• 56:08Cara Santa Maria?

  30 minutes on average, these 10,000 participants?

• 56:10Jay Novella?

  That's my guess.

• 56:11Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you guys think?

• 56:12Jay Novella?

  That's probably something like that.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  29 minutes.

• 56:15Cara Santa Maria?

  One minute.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, 30.

• 56:17Cara Santa Maria?

  One.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  One?

• 56:18Cara Santa Maria?

  One minute.

• 56:19Speaker 03

  One?

• 56:20Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's probably again, because

• 56:21Speaker 03

  I didn't even read for one minute.

• 56:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Only 2%. Yeah, that's the average across all of the participants. So that's because only 2% of participants in the survey read with children.

• 56:31Jay Novella?

  Or the median, what's the median?

• 56:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, 200.

• 56:33Jay Novella?

  That's what I really want.

• 56:34Cara Santa Maria?

  So again, only 200, uh, only 2% of the 10,000 read with children. And so of those 200 participants, yeah. So if we just look at the 200 who did read with children, uh, they spent an average of 28 minutes, yeah, doing so. So that's pretty sad because even those who did read with their children were only reading half an hour a day with their children.

• 56:55Jay Novella?

  That's bad.

• 56:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's really bad. Yeah. And so they also looked at things like

• 56:58Jay Novella?

  That is really, that's negligence.

• 57:00Cara Santa Maria?

  They, they looked at things like, are people reading at home? Are they reading outside of the home, you know, blah, blah, blah. But I think those are some of the really, really big takeaways is that just people aren't reading anymore. And this is really disconcerting for, uh, you know, a lot of like educators and academic researchers, psychologists, sociologists across the board because we know that reading and especially reading for pleasure is associated with all sorts of really important skills. So not just direct gains like comprehension skills, vocabulary, logical reasoning, uh, you know, uh, recall, but also things like empathy.

• 57:42Cara Santa Maria?

  It's very hard to cultivate empathy if you can't read a story.

• 57:48Cara Santa Maria?

  And see the world through the lens of the characters in the story. And going from the beginning to the middle of the end is also really important. Things like, you know, emotional intelligence, I'm putting that in quotes, but however you want to define that. We're not just talking about academic achievement or like gainful employment or career growth, but also, you know, stress reduction, improved sleep, slowing cognitive decline as we get older, literally reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms. Like, there are so much literature to show that reading is highly correlated with so many important sort of cognitive, emotional, and just like functional skills.

• 58:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's low barrier to entry. It's inexpensive. And we should be increasing access, but not just access, because clearly this probably isn't just an access problem, but excitement and interest in reading as well. So, of course, the researchers of this study, they didn't research what's causing it, but they point to a lot of different things, right? Like, as we mentioned before, people are distracted. People are on their phones, but that can't be the whole answer. The way that we educate our children has changed over the last 20 years, and that might be affecting them. But also, why do we think that people in low-income neighborhoods are reading less?

• 59:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they probably, it's probably a luxury. They literally can't afford the time to read.

• 59:23Speaker 03

  They don't have books in the house.

• 59:24Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't have books in the house right there. They're probably not going to the library. And also, when you're working multiple jobs and you literally don't have free time just to make ends meet, you're not going to be reading with your children.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  Right, hard to foster that environment.

• 59:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So, these are systemic sociocultural issues as well that we have to address. Reading, in some respects, is sort of a luxury, or it has become a luxury, but it's so fundamental to, I think, a healthy, functioning society and just to humanity. And it's, yeah, I think when I came across this study and the write-ups of this study, it was very, very alarming for me.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a little bit alarming. I do think, because when you read, I know you can consume information in video and audio format, you know, reading isn't the only way to get information, but you definitely engage with the material differently.

• 1:00:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  When you read. I think, yeah, you get it much more of a deep, I think, understanding. You know, it definitely is more amenable to like doing a deep dive on a topic and really wrapping your head around it rather than just the, like, here's a quick narrative, go on to the next thing.

• 1:00:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And we know that to be true, because we have plenty of evidence that shows that people who read more have higher comprehension skills, right? People who read more can engage with the text in a deeper way. They can see metaphor in the text. They can then take whatever they learn from the text and apply it to other situations. And yes, as strange as it may seem, there is a lot of literature showing that reading is directly correlated with improved psychological well-being and increased empathy for others.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Wow, that's a good one.

• 1:01:09Cara Santa Maria?

  You've got to be able to read stories and think through the lens of the characters in the stories. Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:01:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Such a bummer.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  I agree. All right, thanks, Cara. Evan, is this good news? Are most Americans skeptical of the paranormal?

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Um, it sounds like it's good news, right?

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:30Speaker 03

  But maybe we need to define a few things here.

• 1:01:32Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:33Speaker 03

  In this particular poll, yes, I'm talking about a recently released Gallup poll titled, Paranormal phenomena met with skepticism in the United States. Two-thirds of Americans are skeptical of paranormal beliefs, and none of the eight concepts in this particular poll are believed by a majority of people. Okay. On the surface, that sounds very good, very positive, but we have to delve a little bit deeper into it, as always. Here's a little background. It was a nationwide poll conducted from May 1st to May 18th, 2025. Gallup surveyed

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  1,003 adults about eight paranormal phenomena, and I'm going to go over the eight with you. We have talked quite a bit over the years about polls. They are imperfect.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  And some are more imperfect than others and they are not to be mistaken as scientific evidence of anything. They're informative, okay, in a very general sense. You can measure the moods and sort of attitudes of certain groups of people at any given point in time, but maybe the best purpose they serve is to compare trends. In other words, how did people respond to the same poll back in 2001, you know, as compared to now in 2025? I think there's something there worth looking at, but it's not, it's not science. Okay. You always have to take polls with various grains of salt. But let me start with this. It's the 2025, this recent one, this recent poll. And I'm going to ask you, my fellow rogues,

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  to guess at some of the percentages here and let's see what you think. Four. Here is how the question was phrased. And these were people who were called by the pollsters. So the, these respondents were willing to answer their phone. You have to kind of keep that in mind for however that skews the, who these 1,003 people are. Kara, there's no way you would have picked up your phone for this. For each of the following items I'm going to read to you, please tell me whether it is something you believe in, something you're not sure about, or something you don't believe in. All right. I, here's what I'd like to do with you. I am going to tell you the eight paranormal subjects, and I'd like for you to throw out some guesses as to how many you think believe as a percentage

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  as a believe. Just give me the believe. Well, I'll deal with the don't believe, but for example, one of the categories is witches or witchcraft. What percentage do you think believe? This is US people. Forty. Forty.

• 1:04:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Thirty.

• 1:04:08Speaker 03

  Forty. Quarter. Steve's closest, 24%. 24%? Doesn't that seem high? One in four people believe in effing witches. Let's try reincarnation. The rebirth of a soul in a new body after death.

• 1:04:22Cara Santa Maria?

  So witches was 24, reincarnation is probably higher? Thirty?

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  Okay. Anyone else? Forty.

• 1:04:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Forty-two.

• 1:04:32Speaker 03

  It is also 24, same as witches.

• 1:04:36Speaker 03

  Let me jump to another one here for you. Psychic or spiritual healing or the power of the human mind to heal the body.

• 1:04:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that must be much higher.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  Twenty-four.

• 1:04:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Or the power of the human mind to heal. So many people.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would think that one's higher.

• 1:04:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'd be up in like.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Not that high, but it was the.

• 1:04:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, sorry.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Right, so it's gotta be.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Probably high forties.

• 1:04:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, high forties. This is the highest of them and it was forty-eight percent.

• 1:04:59Speaker 02

  Forty-eight.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Forty-eight percent.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  Forty-eight.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  I'll go down the rest for you. Ghosts, spirits of dead people that come back in certain places and situations, thirty-nine percent. So, yeah, thirty-nine percent.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  I'm surprised.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Telepathy or communication between minds without using the traditional five senses, twenty-nine percent. People can hear from or communicate mentally with someone who has died, twenty-seven percent. There's clairvoyance, the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future, twenty-six percent. And finally astrology, twenty-five percent.

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  That's still freaking high.

• 1:05:36Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very, very high. It's way too high, if you ask me.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Especially all between a quarter and a half, basically.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  For these various things, it's, yeah.

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  Now, Gallup, and so I'm gonna get to my point that I brought up in the beginning. Gallup used what they call a cluster analysis to group the same group of one thousand three participants by how broadly they believe in the paranormal. Here's what they did, and I have reservations about this, but this is what they did. They took the one thousand three respondents and they categorized them into two camps. Those who were open to belief and those who are skeptics. So where's the division? How do you divide them? If a respondent answered in the affirmative to three or more of those eight categories, they were in the open to belief group. If they answered in the affirmative in two or less, then they are in the skeptics group.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  That's how they, that's how they divided it up. Now, I know how I would have divided it up, you know? It would have been zero as skeptics and one or more in the open to belief group. But this is how Gallup did it. So, okay, so when you have those two camps, okay? The two or less or the three or more, two thirds wound up two or less. And the average was one. So 66% of these 1,003 people, they classify this way as skeptics. And one third of them were open to belief. And the average score there was five. They averaged believing in five of those things.

• 1:07:06Speaker 02

  But of course, to us, if you believe two of those things, you're not a freaking skeptic.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Correct. Right.

• 1:07:12Speaker 02

  They don't mean by what we mean by the relatively speaking, they were skeptic.

• 1:07:17Speaker 03

  And I mentioned comparing to prior. They said here, and I'll quote, "Interestingly, these results haven't shifted much compared to Gallup data from 2001, for example, so 24 years ago. Believed that most of these phenomena remain stable, but there are slight declines in belief in psychic healing and clairvoyance. Those had a six-point drop. And there was a seven-point decrease in telepathy. But all the other five categories remained about the same, within a point." So when you read a headline from a polling place, and I'm no, you know, Gallup does good polling on a lot, a lot of things, but you, the reminder here is take these polls with grains of salt, people, please.

• 1:08:02Speaker 03

  When you read the headline, paranormal phenomenon met with skepticism in the U.S. Yes, in a certain sense, but in, I think in reality, no. I don't think that there is much. I didn't get how many of these respondents said zero. I think it was 10%. No, 10% believe one. Of them, but they didn't give me a number for how many believed in zero. So it must have been less than 10%.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  That's crazy.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  And that's alarming to me. That's 90% or more believe in at least one of those things, which are obviously

• 1:08:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but, but I think that sometimes my, my gripe with Gallup is how they word questions. And I feel like including in that, the power of the mind to heal, you're going to get a bunch of people who aren't necessarily pseudoscientific. They're just more like,

• 1:08:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. They're going to read that.

• 1:09:01Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  It's not necessarily paranormal.

• 1:09:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Whereas ghost a hundred percent off.

• 1:09:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why I, I think those cutoffs are interesting. I mean, maybe, maybe their cutoff should have been one, not two. Sometimes when you do cluster analysis, you actually look at natural breaks in, in the data. And they may have seen that like, you know, people, people clustered around three plus and people clustered around two minus. And they were able to say, these look like two distinct groups.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  And witches could be Wiccans.

• 1:09:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, they could be people who identify who are like, I am a witch. This is my religion.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Or, or I, I don't know if, you know, Satan specifically wasn't brought up there, but I don't know if somebody would consider that part of witchery. Yeah. I don't know.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  But maybe.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  All right. So basically things haven't changed.

• 1:09:50Speaker 03

  So wait, but wait a minute. I thought we were making a difference, damn it.

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  Well, it would be worse if it weren't for us, Adam.

• 1:10:00Cara Santa Maria?

  You said there were fewer people who believed in clairvoyance. That's good.

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  There are, yes. Some of, a couple of these trends did go down by six to seven points. Three of them.

• 1:10:10Speaker 02

  All right, Bob.

• 1:10:11Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  You're going to tell us about a quantum alternative to GPS, but I thought that GPS was quantum.

• 1:10:18Bob Novella?

  Um, but not in the way that you think.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:10:21Bob Novella?

  Well, let's see. Let's see. See if you have any questions. So you guys remember X 37B? That's the uncrewed, that's the uncrewed US Space Force space plane.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, nobody's supposed to talk about it.

• 1:10:32Bob Novella?

  It's done many mysterious classified missions around the earth. And if previous trends continue, I suspect that the X-37B will be renamed something like Super Ultra Space Jet, much better than Elon's, believe me. So, but we shall see. We shall see what happens. Probably far worse than that. The space plane was recently launched and one mission it has that we know about is testing a new quantum inertial sensing system. This is an alternative to GPS and it's the first time such a system's been deployed in space. Now inertial navigation describes, it's essentially an internal system that can track your changing location without using external references such as GPS, right?

• 1:11:15Bob Novella?

  It's pretty much all inward looking and calculating and not outward. So GPS, GPS is great. I don't know what the hell we did before. I do know what we did before that and it was annoying and I never want to do it again. So I love GPS, but it doesn't work everywhere. Places that we'll never probably be, like deep space is one and underwater as well. But also there's certain environments that are described as GPS denied. But they include some obvious ones, underground tunnels, right? Dense forests and what was the other one? Urban canyons with tall buildings. So those can also be GPS denied. So, so not only does GPS not work everywhere, there's also ways to compromise it, to spoof it, to jam it, or just disable just conventional GPS signals.

• 1:12:00Bob Novella?

  So being able to navigate without relying on these external GPS navigation signals, it can be critical in various scenarios, as you might imagine, such as conflicts, battles. So, yeah, you could see how, yeah, we need to get away or we need a way to rely on something that just can't be messed with, that's better than GPS in various scenarios. So, now we do have conventional inertial navigation and I talked about one system that was pretty slick. That was many years ago. I couldn't find the episode. But, so this is conventional inertial navigation and it relies on things like gyroscopes and accelerometers to accurately track. On board, how fast you're going and in which direction, right?

• 1:12:40Bob Novella?

  So if you start in a known location and it's tracking you with the accelerometer and gyroscopes, where you're going and how fast, it could then just build up and calculate exactly where you are in relation to like a map that it has on board. But these suffer from things like airdrift, where you become increasingly farther away from where you think you are, right? So that just builds up over time. Now, this new quantum system offers orders of magnitude better accuracy and stability, thanks to atom interferometry. So this takes advantage of the wave nature of atoms. Look it up if you're not too familiar with it. It's fascinating. It's like the magic,

• 1:13:21Bob Novella?

  one of the magical things of the universe that is just so fascinating and counterintuitive and weird. So atoms are in this scenario, atoms are cooled down to millions of a degree above absolute zero, so that their wave properties can be manipulated with very high precision, okay? So a laser pulse then is able to put each atom into a superposition of two paths at the same time. There's many ways to, you could look at this or describe the scenario. Another way to describe this is to say that the laser splits the wave function of the atom, so one part goes down one path and the other part of the wave function goes down the other path. So that's another way. So it's pretty complicated. So as you might imagine, when these split paths recombine,

• 1:14:04Bob Novella?

  an interference pattern is created and that actually this interference pattern contains exquisitely detailed information about how they had moved. Any small acceleration or rotation taken by these atoms will shift the relative phase of these two matter waves. So this is the quantum equivalent of bulky physical accelerometers and gyroscopes that are used in conventional inertial navigation. Otherwise, it's very similar, tracking your movement and speed, direction, all that. So the results with quantum inertial sensing, though, have a threefold advantage to the non-quantum version. One is stability. Stability is much greater with the quantum system, because they don't have to, they don't

• 1:14:46Bob Novella?

  Have the material imperfections that are inherent with any mechanical, any bulk mechanical or optical gyroscope. They have these material imperfections that are going to impact the results one way or the other. So another advantage to the system is accuracy. It's much greater because any errors will grow much more slowly using this quantum system. So for example, the old, the old non-quantum inertial navigation or sensing system could wander off course by miles in a single day. These quantum versions, however, could potentially stay locked within a few meters for days or even weeks. So that's just tremendous. I mean,

• 1:15:26Bob Novella?

  comparing many miles in the course of a single day being off to a few meters in error that stays consistent for like days or even weeks. Incredible increase in accuracy. The final important advantage here is resilience, right? We kind of covered this. The resilience is much higher for this quantum inertial sensing because they can't be jammed, they can't be spoofed, or suffer from any type of signal loss that would plague, you know, that would plague systems that rely on GPS because this is all internal. So, okay, in a sense, this new system is kind of like LIGO for atoms, you could say. So instead of light waves interacting with each other, we have matter waves interfering, creating an amazingly sensitive motion detector. And I can't help but thinking,

• 1:16:10Bob Novella?

  you know, what other uses we might, we could make out of this type of technology. So stay tuned.

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  So this is not, you know, being deployed yet. This is still on the experimental stage.

• 1:16:19Bob Novella?

  This is tested, this is tested on the super ultra-space jet. It's being tested on that mission. And so, yeah, so probably won't, I don't know how much we're going to hear. We know about it now because it's not too classified.

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:33Bob Novella?

  But so maybe we'll hear some, if it was successful or not. So interesting stuff. I remember covering the inertial guidance system years ago, and it was fairly sensitive. But this just looks far, far superior.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

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

• 1:16:49Jay Novella?

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

• 1:16:59Jay Novella?

  Seemingly going on forever.

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Jay Novella?

  Guys have any?

• 1:17:03Speaker 03

  As long as Will Robinson's okay, I think we're in good shape here.

• 1:17:08Jay Novella?

  Well, okay, so let's get right into this. So, Michael Blaney wrote in, "Hi Jay, it's gotta be a bird of some kind." So, right out of the gate, I'll say, "Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of evidence there that it's a bird." He said, "I noticed Steve stayed quiet for it, so maybe, so I'm going to guess it's the showbill. They make some weird-ass noises, Michael." You know, my response to that is, "I would imagine that a lot of birds make the noise I just played, but I think this is a common sound that this bird makes, so you are not correct with the bird that I selected. But, you know, if you could play me an audio of that type of bird making that noise, I'll still give you one SDU point." A listener named Montgomery wrote in and said, "Hi Jay, this sounds like the Pengu from the popular kid show of the same name."

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  No way!

• 1:17:53Jay Novella?

  P-E-N-G-U.

• 1:17:54Speaker 03

  I remember that show.

• 1:17:55Jay Novella?

  "Absolutely love the work you all do and hope semi-retirement treats Steve well." Have any of you guys seen the Pengu show?

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:18:01Jay Novella?

  Does it make that noise?

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:18:07Jay Novella?

  A listener named Craig Messerman said, "Jay, this week's who's that noise? It sounds like the alarm on the self-driving floor cleaner at my local Winko when it runs over an old lady." Oh, my God, I didn't actually read that last part.

• 1:18:21Jay Novella?

  Lady says, "Not the last part."

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  A newly cleaned old lady, by the way.

• 1:18:25Jay Novella?

  The alarm that the self-driving floor cleaner makes at the local Winko. So, there is a robot at my local Stop & Shop.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've seen them as well.

• 1:18:35Jay Novella?

  And, you know, the thing, like, they put googly eyes on it as if that's enough. And I'm just like, "No, this thing should be making noises. It should be like an R2-D2 type of thing going on."

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  Whistling a tune or something, right?

• 1:18:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, anything. That'd be kinda fun. It's like whistles a little bit.

• 1:18:50Bob Novella?

  I could beat that. I've got, in my local Big Y, I bring Mom there quite often. They have a, kind of like a robotic floor cleaner. And as of last week, there's somebody clearly at this Big Y that is awesome because they put a skeleton riding it, and it was, I love it.

• 1:19:06Jay Novella?

  That is fantastic. That's the kind of creativity we need in this world.

• 1:19:10Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:19:11Jay Novella?

  Evil Eye wrote in again, and Evil Eye said, "I want to say a white-bell bird, but Steve will know that's wrong, but that's my guess." Apparently, Steve, they think, apparently, they think that you are a bird whisperer and you know it all. Apparently. Alright, so I was not sure that someone was gonna guess correctly, and nobody did guess correctly. That's two weeks in a row, which means I need to loosen the belt a little bit, and I will try to pick something a little bit more identifiable. So what this is, is, this is, uh, first off, this was sent in by a listener, an eight-year-old listener named Victoria. One of Victoria's parents sent it in, um, she recorded it herself,

• 1:19:52Jay Novella?

  and she made sure that, um, they remembered what it was exactly, including a photo. So, thank you very much. Wonderful Noisy, good job sending that in, Victoria, and if you hear any other cool stuff, uh, send that to me again, please. So, nobody won, cuz it's a little hard. So what is it, guys? You have any idea? Where's Victoria from? I will tell you, she's from Australia.

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Oh, Victoria.

• 1:20:15Jay Novella?

  Casawary. The person who sent it in said, "Good luck," saying my name, and their, the parents' name is Gabor Fagarashi. Oh, like Gabor? G-H-A-B-O-R. So, if I, if I was correct, or incorrect, email me and let me know. I have no shame at all in mispronouncing things, it's just a part of who I am. This is called a glossy black cockatoo. They are very cockatoo-ish, uh, but they're glossy and black, and that's why they named it that. Oh, they're beautiful.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Do many birds make that kind of repeating tone?

• 1:20:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that, that's the kind of noise that you would think, like, the animal kingdom would just kill whatever animal's doing it. You know what I mean?

• 1:20:53Speaker 03

  Right, smack it like an alarm clock, you know?

• 1:20:55Jay Novella?

  There's just nothing pleasant about that at all. There shouldn't be that much selective pressure. Look at those red tail feathers. Yeah, it's a cool bird. I have a new noisy, though. Uh, but before I play the new noisy, I'd like to play you something else. And this was sent in by a listener named Dustin Edwards. Wrote a song about it, like, to hit and go.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  Babble, babble, banana, babble, babble, babble. Banana, blah, blah, blah, ba- banana, me, banana, banana, me.

• 1:21:17Jay Novella?

  That's me. Steve said all those things.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Wow. Well, clearly.

• 1:21:23Jay Novella?

  I was talking about communicating with animals, right? I don't quite remember, but the thing is that this person mashed you up, Steve, and it's very funny. I love that type of thing.

• 1:21:31Speaker 02

  We need more mashes.

• 1:21:32Jay Novella?

  Remember, somebody was doing that for a little while. They were sending in mashups of us saying all sorts of different things. They were great, yeah. Yeah, they're always funny. It's really like a comedy-prone thing to do. I think it's very hard not to.

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  We should have a contest.

• 1:21:44Jay Novella?

  Alright, so this particular noisy I'm about to play you was sent in by Daniel Burliner. I believe that a lot of you will recognize something in this noisy, but I need you to give me the answer in a very specific way.

• 1:22:09Jay Novella?

  Okay. That is this week's noisy. Be specific. You can send me your answers to [email protected]. We are currently in full swing, producing our new political podcast called Political Reality. It is going really well. We had a, we did a test recording, and I'm bringing in all the assets now, like all the creative stuff that needs to be put in place in order to begin building it out. I have a very strong feeling that this is going to be a A lot of work. Well-loved podcast. I hope it is, of course. Yeah. But if you want to help the SGU do projects like this, and also other projects

• 1:22:52Jay Novella?

  that we have in the queue that will be coming at some point down the road, and if you support the work that we do, then please consider becoming a patron of ours. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. This is a good time to do it, because we have a lot of stuff queued up, and our bandwidth is partially dictated by the cash flow that we have. So please consider that. You can join our mailing list. I've told you guys many times what it is.

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  Join us.

• 1:23:19Jay Novella?

  If you're interested, go to theskepticsguide.org, and there's a link on there for you to sign up. We're going to Kansas, guys. September 20th, we'll be doing two different SGU shows. One of them will be a live podcast recording, and the other one will be our stage show with George Robb. That is called The Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance. It's a lot of fun. If you haven't seen us do it, I highly suggest you come out and check it out. We've been refining that show for a long time and we have a great time doing it and the audience always is enjoying it, so please join us on that.

• 1:23:51Speaker 02

  All right, thanks Jay. One really quick from TikTok. We talked about a lot of nonsense today on TikTok, but there was one we didn't get to. In this video, the woman is claiming that finally Switzerland bans mammograms, right? Because mammograms are horrible and they cause breast cancer. What? I was basically the essence of TikTok video. I have a mammogram tomorrow. Why didn't anyone tell me? So you should keep your appointment for your mammogram. Okay, alright. So, that's an urban legend. That's a myth that's been going around for years. Now, there was a committee who made recommendations to scale back the screening for mammograms.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  So this is not mammograms themselves, but should we routinely screen people with mammograms versus individual women needing to be referred by their physician to get a mammogram? And the committee recommended scaling back the automatic screening, but not because of the risks of mammograms, not because of what this person was saying, but because of, and we had this debate in the United States around the same time as well, because of the risk of false positives. Because if you get a false positive, it causes a lot of stress, it leads to further testing, it may need to lead to unnecessary procedures.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  And if you routinely screen a low-risk population, you get more false positives than true positives. And so it's all a risk versus benefit calculation. That's what was going on. But that got misconstrued by losers on the internet as they banned mammograms in Switzerland. Interestingly, they didn't even, the government didn't even accept the recommendation. They didn't make the changes they recommended. They kept them because there was an outrage by, you know, the experts who were like saying, this is not what's best for women. The risk versus benefit favors routine screening at a certain age or at a certain risk. And basically came to the same conclusion in most other countries as well, that yes, we have to consider the risks of false positives, but all things considered, once you get to a certain age,

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  the benefits of mammograms outweigh the risks. Mammograms are actually extremely safe. They may be uncomfortable, but they use very, very low amounts of radiation and they're very important for early detection of breast cancer. They have a massive positive benefit on the outcomes because of early detection. And the the benefits are definitely worth the tiny risk of the small amount of radiation you get. So this person was talking out their ass, basically. They had no idea what they were talking about. They were just, you know, relaying an urban legend and then thinking they're smarter than all the world's physicians. Just the this, there's this subculture on TikTok that just thinks all doctors are evil. It's childish. It's really childish. It's tinfoil

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  hat conspiracy level nonsense. And but they get a lot of, they get a lot of playtime, unfortunately, just really crazy.

• 1:26:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve, can I ask you a question about mammography that you may not know the answer to?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:26:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So are ultrasounds just as safe?

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  So they are, yeah, their ultrasounds are extremely safe. I don't know is, I don't think they're as sensitive. I don't think they're as good in terms of their ability to detect subtle early breast cancer.

• 1:27:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting, because ultrasounds are where they send you after they see something on mammogram.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Well, if if if they see a cyst, then they want to know, yeah, ultrasound gives them more information. So it's not really used for screening.

• 1:27:15Cara Santa Maria?

  For the baseline screening.

• 1:27:16Speaker 02

  So like she was saying, do that instead, or somebody in the comments was saying, that's like, that's not an instead thing. It doesn't have, serve the same purpose. That's how you explore a known lesion to see, yeah, is, you know, what's the, what is the composition of that? I had an ultrasound two, last week.

• 1:27:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I think that's why I was asking, because, you know, when, like, when I had my very first, the baseline mammogram, at least as was explained to me both by my physician and my, the mammographer, was they need to make sure that it's like the best imaging they have, because it's going to be what they compare everything to in the future. And so it's not uncommon to have to go back and get a second imaging done. In in my case, you know, I have dense breast tissue. So I had one little spot where if they like squeezed it just the right way, it would disappear. And so it, what it turns out to be is just dense tissue on top of dense tissue and that lit up on the mammogram. So they re-mammogram me, they figured that out. I got an ultrasound, they said, okay, it's not there. Good, you're good. But still in six months, let's do another mammogram just to make sure. And I was like,

• 1:28:16Cara Santa Maria?

  in my mind, of course, after all the smashing of the boobs, I was like, can't we just get an ultrasound? It's so much less painful.

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're just not, they're complementary. It doesn't replace it. That's for looking at that shadow, is that cystic or what is, again, what's the density of it versus looking at everything to see, is there any trouble?

• 1:28:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, whereas the mammogram gives you the whole breast from multiple angles and they can, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:28:43Speaker 03

  And how often is the recommended chest?

• 1:28:45Speaker 02

  Depends on your age.

• 1:28:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't know, but we start at 40.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  And family risk. Yeah, 40, 40. That's, that was the contrast, was it 40, is it 45, is it 50? You know, there's no right or wrong answer.

• 1:28:54Cara Santa Maria?

  No, there's not, but we know that I see, you know, I work in a cancer center. I see patients all the time who get breast cancer at 35, at 30, at 28. You know, it happens, so.

• 1:29:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. All right, guys, let's move on to science or fiction.

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Things in your life that you may not know some subtlety about in terms of how they work. All right, here we go. Item number one, microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. Item number two, rusting is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode. And item number three, the gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread prior to cooling are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. Evan, go first.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Ah, microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. Standing waves, hmm, geez, I probably should have concentrated more on that particular one.

• 1:30:29Speaker 02

  All right, so a standing wave is a wave that doesn't move, right? So have you ever taken a, like, have you ever a rope, two people are holding a rope, and you get it going, like vibrating at a certain frequency? You know, where the waves are just going up and down, but there's not waves propagating up and down along the string? That's a standing wave. That's a, so it's basically you have, yeah, just waves that are sort of fixed in position. They're not propagating.

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  Well, then this would make sense then if it, because you would have high, you would have spottiness to something like that. You would have, you would have a high energy spot versus a low energy spot. So I don't see a problem with that particular one. Uh, moving on to rusting. It is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron. Wow, really? Uh, including an anode and a cathode. Hmm. Hadn't heard about that before. What was rusting? Rusting is what? The oxidation and when it reacts with oxygen, but, and there's water, forms the rust. But is this actually, I don't know about this

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  one. This one's a little, uh, new to me, that description. I'll go to the third one about the gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread. Uh, oh, Jay's gonna have an advantage here. Uh, are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen. Hmm. Well, I'll, I guess I'll say the rusting one is the fiction. I never heard it described before as a little battery forming on the surface of iron. Is that right? Would that be right for water and oxidation? Hmm. Yeah. I'll, I have to guess at one of them. So I'll say the rusting one is fiction.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:32:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Microwaves heat unevenly. Yeah. I mean, the microwaves are bouncing around, interfering. I think that interference is what, what would be causing these standing waves. So yeah, that makes sense to me. Um, the third one also, these gases inside baking bread. I really wish Jay went before us. Um, but, um, it, but it kind of makes sense. I don't know how that, how that, how that works. It seems reasonable. I really can't comment on that too well. And then we've got the, um, yeah, the rusting. I think I'm gonna agree with Evan here. Um, it could, yeah, I don't know enough about the, the process to, to count, to discount this possibility that it's really, um, an electrochemical

• 1:32:59Bob Novella?

  process. I mean, be interesting, but I just can't, not sure. So I'll say that one's fiction. I mean, roll the dice here. Oh, wait, I've got my coin. I've got my coin.

• 1:33:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, flip that.

• 1:33:09Bob Novella?

  Yep. Number two, fiction.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  Perfect.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  All right, Kara.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  The coin, the coin never lies, by the way.

• 1:33:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like they're all science. Like these all feel like they would be science.

• 1:33:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's like little details in each of them that you could be getting us on. So you did say Yeah. partly because they produce standing waves. So I don't think you're getting us on the fact that it's like fully responsible. And I kind of agree with with Bob about the idea that like the waves are sort of like bouncing off of like all the shielding and stuff in the microwave. So yeah, we all know that microwaves have hotspots and stuff. Isn't that why they have like turntables in them? So that would make sense. I do think rust is electrochemical. Um, I think that's interesting to describe it as a battery, but that would make sense, right? With an anode and a cathode. And then I do think that the gases inside bread, like you mean like the little that make the little holes in bread. Yeah.

• 1:34:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Are about 80%. I mean, I do think they're mostly carbon dioxide, right? Because this is yeast. Uh, it's an anaerobic process that by yeast, yeast respire via fermentation, which is going to give off a lot of carbon dioxide. I think maybe that one is the only one with enough specific details that maybe it's not 80% carbon dioxide and 20% oxygen. Maybe it's like a different concentration. So I don't know. I'll say that the bread one is the fiction.

• 1:34:34Jay Novella?

  Okay. And Jay? This is um, my slumdog millionaire uh, version of uh, science fiction. Yeah.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:34:45Jay Novella?

  Microwave ovens, of course, heat food unevenly. Anybody that's used one uh, will know. Right? You guys know that, right?

• 1:34:54Speaker 02

  I do.

• 1:34:55Jay Novella?

  And I happen to know why. Because if I'm remembering correctly, it's not, I don't think it's the um, I don't think it's the shape of the inside of the microwave or anything. I think the actual waves affect each other and there's like high and low energy spots in a microwave. Oh, I know why I know this. Cause I, I watched a guy remove the uh, what do you call it? The, the thing in the microwave that makes the microwaves a diode? What is that thing called?

• 1:35:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:35:22Jay Novella?

  There's a, there's a component inside-

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, the thing that produces the microwaves.

• 1:35:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's what we call it, yeah.

• 1:35:26Speaker 03

  The microwave generator.

• 1:35:27Jay Novella?

  Yes, it had to be from TikTok or something.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  The Heisenberg compensator.

• 1:35:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so that's, that's pretty straightforward. Yeah, we know that there's cold, cold in hot spots and, and it's, there's some type of interference going on. This one about rusting, it's a, it's kinda, I don't know, it's kinda weird to say it's a battery, but I mean, there, there is a, it is an electrochemical reaction, that's what I know. So it fits the bill. But I mean, obviously, I know the answer to this last one here. How much detail do you want, Steve?

• 1:35:57Speaker 02

  Just give me, give me the bottom line.

• 1:35:58Jay Novella?

  Um, so, there, there's a, there's a few things that are happening here, but the vast majority of the gas is carbon dioxide, and that is, of course, essentially excreted by the yeast who are in hyper, hyper eating production, you know what I mean? Like when that, they get into the oven, the temperature change. You know, yeasts are like literally connected directly to temperature as far as their metabolism goes. So when the heat goes up, the yeast go berserk. And that's where you get oven rise from, like the, the oven spring where the, the dough goes from a, a small state to a larger state, because it's, all has to do with CO2 gas production. There's a, there's some nitrogen in the mix, it's inherent in there. It's just, there's this nitrogen in, in the stuff that dough is made out of.

• 1:36:43Jay Novella?

  Um, and the other, the other big player in there, you know, not, it depends on the type of bread, you know, hydration level of the bread is, is important here with this, but the water also instantly vaporizes. Pretty fast, right? And that water steams out of the bread, and actually, if you're using a Dutch oven, which is an enclosed space, it steams the outside of the bread, which has a chemical reaction on the outside of the bread, which is where you get a caramelized crust effect. But oxygen is like, I would say oxygen is so unbelievably insignificant that we shouldn't even be talking about it. It's not a player at all.

• 1:37:22Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:37:22Jay Novella?

  Doesn't come into play at all.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  Okay, so you guys are split between two and three, so we'll start with one microwave ovens heat food unevenly, partly because they produce standing waves with high and low energy spots. You all think this one is science. Now, clearly, microwaves heat food unevenly. We all know that, we've been using them our entire lives. That's not the part that's critical here. The question is- Is it partly because of the standing waves? There's lots of other reasons why microwaves heat food unevenly. They heat from the outside in, right, is one part. But also, you know how microwaves heat food, right?

• 1:38:01Jay Novella?

  They vibrate the water.

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  Right, they directly vibrate the water molecules. So, food has different concentrations of water in it. Even the same food will have different concentrations throughout. So, parts with a lot of water will heat up much more quickly than parts with less water.

• 1:38:18Jay Novella?

  Oh, god, like, I was heating up, I was heating up chicken pot pie. And every little piece of it, like, the crust versus the chicken versus the peas.

• 1:38:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:28Jay Novella?

  All different, yeah.

• 1:38:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And that happens with lasagna, too, where, like, the cheese is, like, super melty and then, like, the meat part's still cold.

• 1:38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm like, ugh.

• 1:38:36Speaker 03

  So, the standing waves have to do that.

• 1:38:38Jay Novella?

  Kara, I love you a little bit more because you just said that.

• 1:38:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's annoying, though, isn't it, Jay?

• 1:38:43Speaker 02

  But this one...

• 1:38:44Jay Novella?

  You gotta let it sit for about 10 minutes after you heat it up.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  That's why you're supposed to open and stir halfway and then put it back.

• 1:38:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Stir your lasagna, what are you talking about?

• 1:38:52Jay Novella?

  You just eat it till it melts your goddamn mouth, you know?

• 1:38:55Speaker 02

  This one is science.

• 1:38:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good.

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  Because it is also partly because of the standing waves.

• 1:39:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Speaker 02

  That's why, Kara, you're 100% correct, that's why it has the little spinny thing, as you said. It spins around, so it's moving through different parts of the, of those standing waves. Um, yeah, because there are hot and cold spots just in the microwaves themselves. Plus, there's the water factor, plus, there's the outside-in factor and blah, blah, blah, so...

• 1:39:18Jay Novella?

  How much could that possibly factor, the outside-in, like, where, are you talking about, like, the microwave itself?

• 1:39:24Speaker 02

  It only penetrates an inch and a half or two inches. So, anything bigger than that, it's only heating through convection.

• 1:39:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Or conduction. Um, so, you know what I'm saying? It's not penetrating, and that's why it's always better to cut things up, not have a big chunk of something in the microwave.

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  It does not penetrate that far.

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  Classic move.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:39:41Jay Novella?

  Well, you got, you want a microwave, ideally, that has a spinning plate inside to move through all those...

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  But the spinning is because of the standing waves.

• 1:39:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  Chopping it up is because it doesn't penetrate that far, and you have to stir it up in, you know, partway through. I usually will do it, like, twice when I'm heating something, just to, to help even out the distribution of heat.

• 1:40:01Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  Um, okay, let's go on to number two. Rusting is an electrochemical process with a little battery forming on the surface of iron, including an anode and a cathode. Bob and Evan, you think this one is fiction. Cara and Jay, you think this one is science. And this one is... Science. Yeah, Jay! Yep, this is cool. So, I know, yeah, of course, we know, basically know that rust is, iron is combining with oxygen. But is it just a chemical reaction? Is just the iron binding with the oxygen? Or is it, as you know, discussed here, an electrochemical process? And it turns out that it is. And it does, there is a little battery that forms, because you have, you know, an anode and a cathode with, you know, electrons traveling from one thing to the next.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  And that's ultimately leads to the iron binding with the oxygen and forming the rust. And that's corrosion, right? So corrosion is like an electrochemical process. And water makes it go faster. And salt water, the salt water acts as like a catalyst that makes it go really fast. That's why salt water really results in rust. All right, that means that the gases inside bubbles of freshly baked bread prior to cooling are about 80% CO2 and 20% oxygen is the fiction. And Jay knew all the details. So, it is...

• 1:41:18Jay Novella?

  I have more.

• 1:41:19Speaker 02

  Well, let me give you my quick summary. And if you want to add anything, you can add it, because you gave a pretty good description. So it's mostly CO2. And then the second biggest contributing factor is what?

• 1:41:29Jay Novella?

  Nitrogen.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  No, it's water vapor. Nitrogen.

• 1:41:32Jay Novella?

  No, but you can't say that, Steve.

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Yes, you can.

• 1:41:34Jay Novella?

  And I'll tell you why. Because water, the water vapor depends on, like, some doughs are super high hydration and some are very low hydration.

• 1:41:42Speaker 02

  But nitrogen is so small that it's always going to be less than the water vapor. It's CO2 first, water vapor second, and then a trace of nitrogen. The nitrogen's there because there are bubbles pre-existing in the dough that's just air. It's oxygen and nitrogen. There's no...

• 1:41:58Jay Novella?

  I don't think you're right. I don't think you're right.

• 1:41:59Speaker 02

  There's no oxygen because it gets used up, right? It gets metabolized. And so there's almost no oxygen there. Again, this is right when it's done baking, but prior to cooling. Once the bread cools, what's in those air bubbles? Uh...

• 1:42:18Jay Novella?

  I mean, I would have...

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  It's air. It just gets, eventually gets replaced with room air, because it's not airtight. You know, it's porous. The CO2...

• 1:42:27Bob Novella?

  I got it right. Because Steve said, "What's in the air bubbles?"

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  It's air, right.

• 1:42:31Jay Novella?

  So, an interesting thing here about that air is that the lack of oxygen in the baked bread...

• 1:42:40Jay Novella?

  Actually helps it last longer because you know without oxygen the microorganisms oxidation isn't happening. That's why it's good. You definitely want to cool your loaf and everything, but like, don't just leave it out. If you leave it out, it's going to obviously get stale. You could put it in a refrigerator or I freeze. I make two loaves. I never make one loaf anymore. It's always two or more.

• 1:43:03Speaker 02

  And then you freeze the one, yeah. Which is fine. As long as you freeze it airtight, otherwise it gets freezer burnt. I like that expression, "cool your loaf."

• 1:43:10Jay Novella?

  But you know, and you know, if you just, if you guys are, anybody listening to this are remotely curious. Yeast are unbelievable. These particular types of yeast that we use, they are unbelievable little machines. You know, they, they have different, they can metabolize an oxygen environment. They can metabolize in a, in a zero oxygen environment. They make, you know, they make CO2, they make ethanol. Like, these are magnificent little creatures that, that do so much. It's really cool. Like, you know, when I first started baking bread, it was just like, yeah, you put it in the oven and you pull it out. It tastes good. It's like, knowing the chemistry behind it has made me absolutely fascinated with what's going on. It's just a really cool chemical process that's happening.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  So, one thing I didn't know, Jay, until I was researching this piece, is that before you, that final bake, the CO2 is largely dissolved in the dough. Just like the water is, and when you heat it, the CO2 comes out of that, you know, dissolved form into the gaseous form.

• 1:44:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and also, like I said, don't forget that the yeast are

• 1:44:17Speaker 02

  The yeast are cranking out more at the end as well.

• 1:44:19Jay Novella?

  They're going berserk and they're producing a ton of CO2 and that's where the oven rise, you know, that's where they, they call it oven spring.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the part of the oven spring, look this up yourself, because this is what I was reading. Part of the oven spring, and that's the exact term they used, is CO2 already in the dough from the yeast metabolizing up to that point.

• 1:44:38Jay Novella?

  Just coming into a gas. It expands.

• 1:44:41Cara Santa Maria?

  There must be a certain point, though, right, where the yeast just die because it's too hot.

• 1:44:46Jay Novella?

  They do. They die. They die at about, I think it's 120 plus degrees.

• 1:44:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. And then they just, there's no more. All the CO2 that's there is there.

• 1:44:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but it should be enough. That's the idea. Well, keep this in mind. They're eating the dough.

• 1:44:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:45:00Jay Novella?

  They're eating the water and the flour and the sugars. So, you know, there's plenty of food for them to eat. So it's not that. It's not the lack of food anymore. It's a lack of, it's a lack of, they can't live in the temperature anymore. So they're, they're, they all die for a good damn cause.

• 1:45:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you, yeast.

• 1:45:17Jay Novella?

  Now, before we move on, Steve, Kara, you freaking amaze me. How she backs into the right answer every week.

• 1:45:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm always right for the wrong reason.

• 1:45:26Jay Novella?

  I'm always paying attention to you guys and what, where you go. It's really fascinating to me to like, just hear you guys, you know, figure it out, right? But Kara, like, your instincts are fantastic. Yeah, you have really good, that's true. You have very good instincts. But you're educated enough too, where you're making really good assumptions and things like that. Like, you had no business getting this one right.

• 1:45:48Cara Santa Maria?

  But sometimes, well, if I might, I, I, I did teach bio lab for many years and that's, and taught about respiration. But yeah, sometimes I think a little bit of knowledge really screws you in science or fiction.

• 1:46:02Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, it does. But you do so well. And we talk about you behind your back, particularly Bob and I, we're always like, how the hell, Kara's just got like this, you have like a confluence of knowledge bases that make you really good at science or fiction.

• 1:46:15Cara Santa Maria?

  You want to know what it is, Jay? I'm going to just throw back in.

• 1:46:18Jay Novella?

  Reading?

• 1:46:20Jay Novella?

  Of course, of course it is. And I, I want to say one other thing too. Today on the live stream, we were talking about like how people, most people don't have expertise in anything, right? Or you have it in one thing, but you don't have it in most things. Of course, yeah. The vast majority of knowledge out there, you don't know anything about. And I, I'm proud of myself for sticking with this hobby for as long as I have and, and really absolutely falling head over heels in love with, with bread and the bread making process and all that stuff. And I do feel like I'm entering a zone. Where I have a little bit of like, alright, I know what I'm talking about. You know what I mean? It feels good. It's empowering. I feel like I want to share my knowledge and teach people and, you know, tell people how cool it is and everything.

• 1:47:05Jay Novella?

  So I highly recommend, pick something in your life and get really good at it. Get really good, understand it upside down and backwards.

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I tend to look at knowledge as a pyramid. It doesn't have to be a single peaked pyramid. But like, get really, really good at one thing. But get somewhat good at a moderate amount of things. And baseline good at a lot of things. Cause there's a steep, everything has a steep learning curve at first. Just get over that initial steep learning curve and you like get 90% of the way there. You're not an expert or anything, but you know enough to know that all the things that most people think about that topic are wrong.

• 1:47:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Speaker 02

  You learn about all the myths and misconceptions and all the fact that TV completely misrepresents it. You get that in that first initial steep learning curve. So just be curious about as many things as you can.

• 1:47:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also the same with skills. Like you don't have to be amazing at something. You have to be good enough and you'll be able to do a lot in this world. Like, I think we've talked about this and I'm gonna say a word that's gonna make all of you say a word after, so I'm just gonna do it. So when I do my knitting.

• 1:48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Whenever I am knitting, all I know how to make is a scarf. I know conceptually how to increase and decrease stitches and how to cable knit and how to do all these cool things. I don't want to practice it enough to get good at it. But I'm good enough to just make a scarf and that pleases me. That's all I need to be able to make in this life.

• 1:48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm currently doing a deep dive on bamboo.

• 1:48:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Cause I have a stand of bamboo in my backyard. And I had to cut some of it down. I'm like, I'm gonna do something with this bamboo. So I just finished building a segment of fence out of it.

• 1:48:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:48:51Speaker 02

  And now, when my, when my current crop of bamboo has, um, has dried out enough, I'm gonna start heat treating it. That's the, I'm gonna level up to the heat treat skill. And just do cool stuff with it. Cause why not?

• 1:49:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Love that.

• 1:49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fun. Alright, embrace the analog world. We can't live our lives in the digital world. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:49:14Speaker 03

  I should've gone against the grain.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  Nice, nice.

• 1:49:20Speaker 03

  Thanks, Bob. See, get good at one thing. However profoundly we may penetrate the depths of space, there still remain innumerable systems, compared with which those which seem so mighty to us must dwindle into insignificance or even become invisible. And that was written by Mary Somerville. This quote was suggested by a listener named PK, who actually wrote us back in 2022 with this quote. And PK says, maybe you've covered Somerville before. She was a brilliant scientific mind for whom the term scientist was literally coined since "man of science" didn't include her.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  It was "man of scientist" before her. That is awesome.

• 1:50:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That's weird. Oh, fascinating.

• 1:50:08Speaker 03

  Isn't that?

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's awesome in a very disturbing way, you know, but...

• 1:50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:50:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Before her, it was only "men of science."

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  She lived, she was born in 1780, died in 1872, was a Scottish scientist, writer, and polymath. She studied mathematics and astronomy. And in 1835, she and Caroline Herschel were elected as the first female honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:50:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Very cool.

• 1:50:34Speaker 02

  A polymath, see? That's what we're talking about.

• 1:50:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we were, yeah.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  Be really good at one thing, but also be a polymath about a lot of things.

• 1:50:42Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Evan. And thank all of you for joining me this week. Thanks, Steve. Of course.

• 1:50:48Speaker 03

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:33Speaker 07

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