The Skeptics Guide #1082 - Apr 4 2026

Quickie with Bob: Transporting Antimatter; News Items: Artemis II Launches, Can AI Predict Science Replication, Smart Drugs, Nuclear Electric Propulsion, Underwater Fairy Circles; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 2nd, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  April Fool's. Oh, that was yesterday.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're off by a day.

• 0:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, sorry about that.

• 0:55Cara Santa Maria?

  We thought we were gonna boycott this year and every year, that this is our reality, no?

• 1:01Speaker 02

  What's our reality?

• 1:02Cara Santa Maria?

  The world that we live in, where it's impossible to tell what is a prank and what is real.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09Speaker 04

  Gets harder with AI, that's for certain.

• 1:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you guys do? I mean, do you do April Fools?

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Not for a long time. Steve actually burned us out on April Fools. I did. I did one epic April Fool's, and that was it. It was.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Really?

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Really pissed Perry off. Oh, Perry. Oh, for years, he burned.

• 1:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, wait.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Burned on this one.

• 1:31Cara Santa Maria?

  You're leaving us all hanging. What happened?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Well, I convinced everybody that I was taking a job out of state. And I built it up for like six months. And then on April 1st, I got my letter to see if I was accepted for the job. And I sent the letter to everybody. And Perry replied to me angry. And I'm like, did you open the letter? Did you open and read the freaking letter? Because when you open and read the letter, it says April Fools.

• 1:56Jay Novella?

  Oh, he was so freaking mad.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  Less than pleased.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  Perry was the, he did not like to be tricked, right? Even if it was something harmless like this, right? It's just totally fun and just among friends. It's not like it was a viral thing or anything, right? Or public. Oh, but he sees. Or cruel. He said, Steve, I'm gonna get you back. I'm gonna get you. I'm gonna, and for years, he kind of plotted and tried to think of something as good, if not better. But I don't think he ever succeeded. Not that I'm aware. Oh, boy. Classic.

• 2:30Jay Novella?

  So we've been talking here behind the scenes about favorite colors. And the strangest thing about the discussion about favorite colors is that Kara refuses to accept the idea that people legitimately have favorite colors. So Kara, why don't you start us off with explaining what the hell's going on here?

• 2:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm not questioning your reality. I'm not saying you don't have a favorite color or you don't believe that you have a favorite color. I'm just saying this all stems from like a private show that we did where, where an audience member asked us what our favorite color was and color words, colors were. And I said that I reject the premise because I get why little kids have a favorite color because they feel social pressure to pick one. And parents want to know what color to make their birthday party and what color to ice their cake. But I think as adults, it just, it doesn't make sense. It's so arbitrary. It's categorical too. I need context. When you say, what's your favorite color? What do you mean? Like, what color do I want to wear? What color do I want to paint my house?

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  What color? I don't know. I think that different colors are favorite for different reasons.

• 3:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I get that. I mean, that's very practical. It makes sense, but. In my, my experience, however I got there, Kara, right? I, I grew up in the seventies, you know, my favorite color is orange. I grew up in the seventies, orange was a dramatically prominent color. I've also been obsessed with oranges my whole life. Like, I really enjoy, you know, the flavor of a good orange.

• 4:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Would you say it's your favorite fruit and your favorite color?

• 4:06Jay Novella?

  I mean, it is in my top two fruit, I would say, yes.

• 4:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, alright.

• 4:10Jay Novella?

  It's hard because, you know, my taste changed, changes depending on my mood.

• 4:15Jay Novella?

  But the color, my favorite color doesn't change depending on my mood. That's an interesting observation. Yeah, so I like orange and it, it makes me feel good. I literally get a sensation when I'm looking at the right shade of orange, I can, it makes me feel warm.

• 4:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, but don't you have kind of some touches of synesthesia?

• 4:33Jay Novella?

  I don't know. I, I mean, I've never experienced it anywhere near what the, the true definition of it is. I mean, I'm not, but I mean, I, I would think, if anything, Kara, I think it's just conditioning over time.

• 4:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Agree. I think that a lot of people felt a pressure when they were young to just pick one. And then they never thought about it again. I don't think there's been any critical thought about the favorite color. So now it's just this knee jerk thing. What's your favorite color? Blue, I love blue.

• 5:01Jay Novella?

  Let me ask everyone a question. I'll go down the line. So Steve, is there a color that you find more pleasing? Meaning that when you see it, it does make you feel something that the other colors don't?

• 5:11Speaker 02

  Uh, it does depend on, on context. So for, for clothing, I like blue, like a good medium blue. But I like the green of nature and I like being in, you know, green spaces.

• 5:25Jay Novella?

  So you don't have a favorite color?

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Those are, those are my favorite colors, but, but for other things, I like orange.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, like your oranges.

• 5:37Speaker 02

  Like, I wouldn't want necessarily a green car, but I, I would rather have an orange car. But I wouldn't want to be in an orange forest.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, that's, that's obvious though. I mean, alright, so, alright, so I'm classifying you with Kara as not, not a single favorite color. And you, you are not declaring that it, it gives you a feeling. Evan, do you have a favorite color and why?

• 6:00Speaker 04

  I have two favorite colors. It's a tie.

• 6:03Jay Novella?

  Go ahead.

• 6:03Speaker 04

  And, uh, hunter green, specifically hunter green and navy blue.

• 6:08Jay Novella?

  And do you feel anything with these colors?

• 6:11Speaker 04

  Oh, sure. Yeah, they're they're like jewel tones. So I find those very, I don't want to bring this in, crystallism or crystal therapy or anything. They've always been just very appealing, pleasing colors for me. If I'm at a game board, for example, a board game, and someone asks me what color I want to be, those will be the choices. I'll reach for green or for blue, whichever one's available. It's just how it's always been.

• 6:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay. And Bob, what do you got?

• 6:41Bob Novella?

  Echo and puce are kind of nice.

• 6:44Speaker 04

  We're talking the visible spectrum as well, too, Bob. Remember that.

• 6:48Bob Novella?

  Growing up, it was red. Now it's black. And yeah, of course, I agree. It's contextual. You know, you know, in terms of things like cars and clothes and lots of different like electronics and robots, black is my favorite. So what else can I say?

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Sense, though, isn't black the absence of color?

• 7:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, we could get technical, but I mean, black, I think it's perfectly okay to have black and white be considered just colors and not pigments in this regard, because you could

• 7:23Bob Novella?

  Even light, you know, light.

• 7:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's more of a light thing than a pigment thing, I would think, because, right, because black light basically means nothing's being reflected. And for pigments, you can just mush a whole bunch of colors together and you'll get black. Yeah, I mean, and you've asked, Jay, how does it make you feel? I don't know. That's ineffable for me. I can't explain what it makes me feel. It just, I love the way it looks.

• 7:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Could you be convinced to have a different favorite color? Are you like precious about it? Or you're like,

• 7:53Bob Novella?

  Probably not.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  There are 10 million bucks. I'll say whatever color you want.

• 7:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, to me, picking a favorite color is like picking a favorite number.

• 8:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:02Bob Novella?

  I got those too, man.

• 8:04Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 8:04Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so bizarre to me.

• 8:05Bob Novella?

  Thirteen and 666.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yes, thirteen's one of mine.

• 8:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But they're just number. They're just, it's arbitrary.

• 8:12Bob Novella?

  It's not, though, because you think about it. Think thirteen. People are like, some people are freaked out about thirteen. There's even a phobia about it. So to me, it's kind of like a skeptical science thing. Like, really? You have a problem with thirteen? Well, hey, it's my favorite number. What do you think of that? That's kind of like layered in there, I think.

• 8:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure.

• 8:29Bob Novella?

  And 666, too. You know, I love all things macabre. So that, so, so, yeah, other things are playing into it. Graham's number, you know, that's my geeky side. A number so big, you couldn't write it down and you would fill the observable universe with zeros. I mean, yeah, that, that's the kind of, that's where I'm leaning in terms of favorite numbers.

• 8:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 8:47Bob Novella?

  Which is not entirely unpredictable for me.

• 8:50Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, I'm, I'm very surprised to be saying what I'm about to say, but I am in the minority here because everyone else didn't. Other than Evan, who had a little bit of, of a feeling, Steve and Bob, you guys like, pretty much straight up, don't have a, a feeling or a sensation at all when you, you are talking about your favorite colors. I have a distinct favorite color and I feel something when I see it.

• 9:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, to me, it's just not the same as having a favorite flavor, for example. Which I know it's hard, that's even, that, even that's contextual, but like, I'm pretty sure most people, if you sat them down and they were offered eight different flavors of ice cream, they would probably pick one of them pretty consistently.

• 9:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they like that flavor more than others. It tastes better to them. But like, colors don't taste to me. Like, I don't care.

• 9:42Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Jay Novella?

  I mean, too, you know, Kara, we, you know, orange, out of all the colors, orange is tied to its flavor, you know?

• 9:49Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 9:51Jay Novella?

  It is. And, you know, I used to eat the orange Starburst, was my favorite. And I was eating them when I was watching Star Wars. I mean, I got, you know, I got history with orange.

• 10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But it, isn't the pink Starburst objectively the best one?

• 10:06Bob Novella?

  It is.

• 10:07Jay Novella?

  I personally, I personally like the two citrus ones. I like the lemon and the orange.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Lemons are.

• 10:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I just realized something.

• 10:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Bob Novella?

  There are colors that I, I have some feeling about.

• 10:17Jay Novella?

  You don't like them.

• 10:19Bob Novella?

  No, no, I absolutely love them together. And it's a fusion of your favorite and my favorite. Black, black and orange is Halloween.

• 10:27Speaker 04

  Well, it's gotta be a Halloween.

• 10:30Bob Novella?

  I am hardwired for that color combination. Because when I see it, I go, I focus right in on it. And it does give me a feeling, a good, a really good feeling. Like, I don't know, the fall, something about, you know, the whole, all the activities in the fall. I mean, it's just those two colors together, man. That's just like hardwired for those two numbers.

• 10:50Jay Novella?

  Blue and orange are the colors of science fiction. They are, and everyone laughs at me when I say that. But if you pay attention to the colors that are used in, in a lot of science fiction movies, blue and orange actually are used quite a bit. And then they work really good with each other when it comes to dramatic lighting for science fiction.

• 11:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and even like colors, like, like the colors on like, like advanced technology. Um, yeah, the blue is absolutely like a blue, like a blue, purple are really, to me, the best colors for that application.

• 11:24Jay Novella?

  All right, Bob, you have a quickie.

• 11:26Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Anti-protons have been made portable for the first time. Have you guys seen this news item? Researchers at the Beryon Anti-Beryon Symmetry Experiment Base recently announced that they've successfully transported 92 anti-protons across CERN's main facility, their site. Now, CERN, we've heard of CERN, we all know CERN. Among its many other accomplishments, apparently it's one of the only, or maybe even the only, factory of sorts for anti-protons. They, they can make, they make them and they can store them. Uh, now, we've talked about antimatter plenty of times, right? Anti-protons specifically, they're identical to regular protons, except they have what? An opposite charge and parity.

• 12:11Bob Novella?

  Antimatter like this is famous, really, for one interesting, fascinating attribute. And that is that it blows up. Whenever it touches regular matter, it blows up. Instantly converts into various types of nasty energies when it comes in contact with ordinary matter. So many people know about that. Seems to me anyway. So now CERN can make them and store them, but studying them is hard to do onsite for various reasons. So shipping antimatter, antiprotons specifically to distant labs would be very helpful scientifically, right? In terms of ultra-precise antimatter measurements, which we really can't do onsite in CERN because it is the various magnetic fields that are all over the place where they're being created. So you can't measure them with

• 12:56Bob Novella?

  extreme precision. And with those measurements, you might ask, what are we, so what? What are we going to do if we have ultra-precise measurements? Well, we could potentially finally solve the great mystery of why there's so much matter compared to antimatter in the universe. The standard model of particle physics and even general relativity have no answers for why there is that imbalance. And so it's considered one of the big mysteries of physics. Now, this new breakthrough involved putting 92 of these antiparticles in a truck and driving it around a bit. Now, of course, it was a bit more complicated than that. They stored the antiparticles in a special cryogenic container called, you may have heard of this, a penning trap. Now, for a penning trap, as you might imagine, isolating the antiprotons is key because you don't want

• 13:41Bob Novella?

  it to interact with anything. So to do that, they've got superconducting magnets, they've got liquid helium-based cooling, they've got, and of course, the ever-important vacuum chamber to really isolate the crap out of it. So I know what you're thinking. I know what most, everyone's thinking right now. Okay, 92 antiprotons. What if it blew up? What if they interacted with matter? What if the penning trap failed? What would happen if you had 92 antiprotons? Well, not a hell of a lot. You're talking about the release of 10 to the minus 8 joules, which is about 28 nanojoules. That's equivalent to about the energy of a single mosquito in flight. And it's also equivalent to, Steve, you're gonna like this, the energy required to fire roughly 30 neurons.

• 14:24Bob Novella?

  So yeah, you would probably not even notice it if they all failed. So I'm sure after they transported them, they make sure, they made sure that they were still intact. So that's what's going on. So perhaps this day will be remembered in the somewhat distant future when antimatter annihilation rockets are first launched and made possible due to similar penning traps, tested in 2026, and now described by me in episode 1082. Right, Steve? This one's gonna be 1082, I think? All right. This has been your baryonic asymmetry quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Jay, do you know what I'm looking at right now?

• 15:01Jay Novella?

  You're looking at the, uh, the current information about Artemis 2.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  The live feed from the Orion capsule. Because in literally-

• 15:09Jay Novella?

  What are they doing?

• 15:10Speaker 02

  In five minutes, they're gonna do their, uh, their burn to-

• 15:15Jay Novella?

  Flip and burn, flip and burn?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  They don't have to flip, they're just gonna do the burn that will, that will put them on the, uh, course to the moon.

• 15:22Jay Novella?

  What's their favorite color?

• 15:23Speaker 02

  NASA's Artemis 2 live views from Orion.

• 15:26Jay Novella?

  All right, well, this is, you know, thank you for, for starting this off, Steve, because I gotta say, um, I watched the launch. I was, I was a 10-year-old. I was so excited. I was nervous, I was worried, you know, I was like, cause you know, after, after with the space shuttle incident, I, watching launches are a little scary for me as well, because they are that dangerous, you know, like horrible things can happen very easily. But you know, once it gets up to a certain altitude, you know, once the boosters are, are ejected and definitely when they, when the capsule moves away from the, uh, the rocket itself, that they're in really good shape when that happens.

• 16:06Jay Novella?

  Bottom line though, it was so exciting, oh my God, I was so excited. So I was up, standing next to the TV for like the 10 minutes before the launch, and I was, you know, telling my kids everything, like this is what this is, this is what these are, we have to watch this, you know, explaining the countdown clock, explaining Capcom, you know, down to like, you know, the beep noise, you know, those, the noises that they use when they begin and end transmission. To me, it was glorious, and it was one of my top, on the shortest list of things about humanity that I love. Space travel and space exploration are, are in the top, top, top, you know, I don't know, top two or three.

• 16:45Jay Novella?

  Um, I think it's incredible expression of humanity to, to build things like this, to, you know, to endeavor to go to places we haven't been before, to expand our, our horizons and understanding of the, the reality that we live in. And space exploration, as Captain Kirk said, it's the final frontier, it is. And it's, it's remarkable to me that we could do it. We have three, you know, we have three Americans and one Canadian right now that are moving at what, four or five times the speed of sound or way faster than, I don't even know what their top speed is, Steve, what is it?

• 17:16Speaker 02

  25,000 miles per hour right now, or 40,000 kilometers per hour.

• 17:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so that is, that is like what, 30 times the speed of sound?

• 17:24Speaker 02

  Mach 32.

• 17:25Jay Novella?

  Okay, so incredibly fast.

• 17:28Jay Novella?

  And they're not pointing their ship and flying in a direction that is going towards the moon. They're flying in a direction towards where the moon is going to be.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 17:39Jay Novella?

  Right? That's, and this is something I told my kids, you know, I'm like, we don't fly in straight lines in outer space. Like, we have to fly to rendezvous, to meet up with whatever, you know, whatever celestial body or anything that's out there. You know, it's not like it's there and I just go there. It's not like a boat on water. It is very much the calculations that need to be made. And, you know, I told them, like, you know, back in the day, like, there were people that did this. Like, you know, now we, we use computers to help tremendously. But still.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  We used human computers back in the day.

• 18:13Jay Novella?

  How did they do it? You know, how did they, how did they do that? You know, I was trying to answer their questions, but they were, they were shotgunning me with questions faster than I could get to, and I didn't know all the answers, which is part of the fun, because, you know, then I'll look it up and I'll, I'll find out. I just want to tell you, like, the quick stats. There's four people, four crew, Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. They launched on April 1st of this year. They were at Launch Complex 39B, Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mission duration, now, this is a fun one, 10 days about. Why do they say about or approximately 10 days?

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Like, they give themselves some wiggle room.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, in case they have to make an adjustment along the way.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  But I think the big thing is, what's the weather when they're going to re-enter?

• 18:56Jay Novella?

  That's a big one. You know, again, like, if their burn needs to go, like, three more seconds, for whatever reason, that could affect how long it takes them to get back. You know, when you add up those miles and those little micro-adjustments that can build, you know, can add up to maybe, you know, hours or, you know, I don't know how long of a delay it could be from, like, exactly 10 days. You know, if you were to say, okay, it's going to be 10 days from, you know, as the clock counts.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  As the world turns.

• 19:25Jay Novella?

  And it does.

• 19:26Cara Santa Maria?

  10 days of our lives.

• 19:27Jay Novella?

  But they deliberately make the flight profile flexible because of these different factors. Like, you know, they might have to go around the earth a couple more times if the weather's really bad or pick a, you know, go to a different entry point. Jay, what's their time zone? They are, you know, that's, no, but it's a cool question.

• 19:42Bob Novella?

  UTC, probably.

• 19:43Jay Novella?

  Because their time zone is probably whatever, whatever Florida is, right? Like, that's, that's the time zone that they've been living on.

• 19:51Bob Novella?

  Houston, yeah, got Mission Control is, to put it the way the time is there.

• 19:54Jay Novella?

  Gotcha.

• 19:55Bob Novella?

  I got a question.

• 19:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:56Bob Novella?

  10 days, 10 days approximately. What are they doing? Are they sitting for 10 days? Do they actually, is there enough room to get up and walk a little bit?

• 20:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I think they have a toilet.

• 20:06Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 20:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Bob Novella?

  They've got, but how much room are we talking about? I just have no idea how much room they have.

• 20:11Jay Novella?

  Jay, do you have the stats on that? All right, well, Bob, let me start with, what are they doing? Because I really wanted to know, and I did quite a bit of reading on this. You know, this is the first time that the astronauts are going to be flying, not only, you know, for the Artemis mission, but this is the first time that they're going to be using the Orion capsule. So they need to test the capsule and everything that the capsule can do. They have to test, thoroughly test the life support systems, and the people need to be on board to test them. And it's, you know, it's one of the central mission purposes, you know? If, if the, if the life support systems are flawless and they're super reliable, you know, that's a very different position than, you know, if they come back and they say,

• 20:52Jay Novella?

  you know, we had issues, we had legit issues that we had to constantly tweak and, and, you know, make work for this trip. You know, other things that they're doing are verifying Orion's systems that, you know, are they working as designed? Is there anything different about how they function in deep space versus the simulated environments on earth? You know, it, does the crew aboard the ship change the predicted function of these different systems? We're talking about crew procedures, mission operations, performance away, like I said, from low earth orbit. They have to demonstrate a broad range of capabilities that are needed for future deep space missions, including Artemis missions, right? You know, they're, they're always paying it forward. So NASA describes.

• 21:34Jay Novella?

  Artemis two as a building, building from what Artemis one achieved, proving capabilities needed for later missions and early Mars preparation. So they are legitimately laying the groundwork for every single future mission that that comes after. And not just the lunar missions, but you know, anywhere they would use, you know, if they, you know, if they have the life support systems and they're really good and everything is functioning optimally, they very well could be used or a, a, the beginnings of the engineering of what they would use for a Mars mission, right? The cool thing and the, the, the giant thing that is blowing my mind is the changes that they made. You know, when you, when you really look into the, the updates that they made and, and getting into the details, it suddenly becomes exciting

• 22:19Jay Novella?

  as if I'm looking at the color orange, Kara. Yeah. So Artemis one was uncrewed and it was testing the SLS, right? Which is the rocket. It, it's, it was testing the Orion capsule, of course, nowhere near to the level of testing it when it's crewed, but they, you know, they tested it to see if it just would do basis, basic functioning, basic mission profile. Um, you know, does the hardware basically work in space? When they got that confirmation, then Artemis two became available to them, meaning that they could, you know, send people on it. So now Artemis two, we have four astronauts are flying around the moon. They're coming back. It's all about, you know, testing the, the crude systems, validation of the mission, life support, crew operations, navigations, communications, you know, all of these things

• 23:04Jay Novella?

  in there that the crew is, is being a huge part of. Now Artemis three unfortunately was downgraded. It's not going to be the first lunar landing anymore. So under NASA's 2026 update, which we, we did talk a little bit about, Artemis three is now a low earth orbit test mission to validate systems and operations, which include rendezvous and docking work with commercial lunar landing elements. And this, all of these things need to be tested before they're going to let them go to the moon and actually do it. Now I, I couldn't find an explanation on why that there wasn't a, a test already for this stuff. So I'm assuming that hardware is changing.

• 23:45Jay Novella?

  And order of events are changing, but I'm waiting for the information to become available. Now Artemis IV, this is the mission that is identified as the first crude lunar landing in the updated plan. It's targeted for early 2028. And after that NASA is very strongly framing Artemis as a program of repeated lunar missions. Right? This is infrastructure, delivery, expansion toward continuous human presence, a larger moon base concept than the original one that they had. And NASA's March 2026 policy that we are discussing right now, the it materially and explicitly discusses recurring landings, heavier infrastructure, and a path towards legitimate continuous presence.

• 24:29Jay Novella?

  And one thing they said that I I'm surprised is that they would only be doing one launch a year. You know, that's, that's pretty serious. You know, like I was thinking more like one every three or four months.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  So they're, they're planning on at least one a year with a goal of one every six months. And that's crude missions. That's in addition to 30 robotic missions just to land material on the moon.

• 24:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So they definitely need to bring an incredible amount of stuff up there.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jay Novella?

  So, look, it's all looking good to me from a fan perspective and from a science communicator perspective. Like, you know, NASA has retooled their entire plan. It seems to make more sense. I'm thrilled that they're going to put the time and energy into the moon. It just, to me, it was such a no duh thing for the last 50 years, you know, like, you know, we need a base on the moon and we need to, we need to work on our, our space capabilities there. It finally seems like it's going to happen.

• 25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I share something, Jay, that I was, I was looking up while you were talking because I

• 25:27Jay Novella?

  Your favorite color?

• 25:28Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 25:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I do, my favorite thing about, about this Artemis mission.

• 25:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I do remember reading that they have a toilet and this is like the first time, right? That they have a space toilet. Yes, but the toilet broke. And this is my favorite part. Okay. So within hours of launching, the fan in the toilet wasn't working. And that was necessary for peeing in the toilet. You could still poo because they had a different waste collection system for that. But peeing in the toilet would have been impossible. And so a mission specialist, and it's pronounced Cook, Christina Cook. She noted the issue. She reached out and I'm going to, if you don't mind, I'm going to perform the two sides of this conversation.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 26:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Very short conversation.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 26:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And the cool thing about-

• 26:12Speaker 02

  With the beeps in between.

• 26:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I get to perform them because it's between Christina Cook, who is mission specialist, and Amy Dill, who is mission controls Capcom. Two women. I love this. Okay.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  Are you sure you don't want me to be one of these people?

• 26:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Nope, nope. It's gonna be me. Okay. So she reaches out and says, right, that the toilet's not working. What do we do? And they give her instructions for how to like, fix the jam in the toilet fan. And then she comes back, Christina Cook comes back and says, Houston, integrity, good checkout. Happy to report that the toilet is go for use. We do recommend letting the system get to operating speed before donating fluid and then letting it run a little bit after donation. We are cheers all around and we will do that. That was a real conversation.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  I love that. Love it. Cheers. You bet your ass they were cheering all around. And by the way, integrity is the name that the astronauts gave to their Orion capsule.

• 27:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice. So Houston, integrity, good checkout.

• 27:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Love it.

• 27:14Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 27:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's go for use. Let it run before donating fluid.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Donating fluid. So Bob, you asked about the Orion capsule. It's 60% larger than the Apollo command module. 330 cubic feet of habitable volume, 690 total cubic- Pressurized volume.

• 27:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Habitable.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  It has, oh, they're burning right now. I'm just listening to it. They're burning for the moon right now as we're recording this.

• 27:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Me.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's, they have a toilet, they have exercise equipment, they have sleeping areas. So it's, you know, they describe it as like two minivans worth of interior volume. Two minivans. Okay, I can relate to that. That's not bad. That's not bad. Two, what, six-person minivans?

• 27:58Cara Santa Maria?

  I've been in minivans with you guys.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  With the gear in the back, Bob.

• 28:02Cara Santa Maria?

  We've been in minivans together many a time. Would we want to be in a minivan together for 10 days in space?

• 28:08Speaker 02

  God, not. Well, it's two minivans.

• 28:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Two minivans.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:13Jay Novella?

  Kara, you know, I love seeing so many women at Capcom. Yeah, it's so cool.

• 28:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this is so cool. You know, I was busy yesterday. I couldn't see the launch. It was kind of a bummer. Um, could, I could not get away, but um, and this is great, but for me though, the, the launch where they're gonna actually land and walk, that's the one where I'm gonna be losing it, I think.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  That's gonna be an order of magnitude more exciting.

• 28:37Bob Novella?

  It really is. And we gotta do something special, guys. What they're planning, when is they, the tentative plan for?

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Twenty twenty eight.

• 28:43Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  That's not fun.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  But uh, so uh, yeah.

• 28:46Jay Novella?

  You know, the thing is, Bob, like we got, I gotta just set expectations now. Yeah, it would be awesome if we went and saw the launch and did something or whatever, but it's so unpredictable whether the launch is actually gonna happen on the dates that they give.

• 29:00Bob Novella?

  Mm hmm. Oh, yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  If you're dedicated to see that launch, you gotta be flexible.

• 29:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 04

  Or retired.

• 29:07Jay Novella?

  So my kids asked me two, two smart questions. They first asked, you know, they were like, why did they launch on April Fools? This was my son. Why did they launch on April Fools Day? Like, don't you think that that's just playing right into the hands of the idiots?

• 29:19Bob Novella?

  Oh my God. And we saw TikTok videos where they actually mentioned it. So yes, but hey, that's the window, man. You got a window, we gotta respect it.

• 29:27Jay Novella?

  And then they asked like, you know, how do we know when? You know, how did, like, what, what? How do they pick when it goes? Like, why didn't, why couldn't they just do it the next day? You know, and I had to explain launch window to them. And it wasn't that hard, you know, I was, and the other cool thing was um, explaining to them, like when the rocket like goes on its side and is going more sideways than it is up, right? And so it very quickly, you know, there was a video of a jet flying overhead. And the pilot goes, look at the right side window. And they got to see the launch and you could see it arcing almost immediately.

• 30:01Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes. I saw that video. That was, can you imagine seeing that from a plane?

• 30:05Jay Novella?

  So it was a cool thing to explain to my kids, you know, it's got, it's gotta go sideways a lot more than it's gotta go up.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  Did you tell them launch windows can be a pain?

• 30:14Jay Novella?

  I, well, yeah, I told them like, you know, they went over Jay's head. I get it.

• 30:18Speaker 04

  No, I didn't. No, no. I'll tell the kid, have the kids tell you.

• 30:22Jay Novella?

  Window pain, Jay, come on. Different kind of pain.

• 30:24Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 30:26Jay Novella?

  We were just saying today, or yesterday, Ev, that you are the king of dad jokes. I appreciate that. That's high praise.

• 30:34Cara Santa Maria?

  You could hear him say, pronounce it differently, spell it differently with his voice, couldn't you?

• 30:39Jay Novella?

  You could. Oh, interesting. All right, so, so good luck to the astronauts. Good luck to Capcom and everything over at NASA that are driving this effort. And, you know, they're on their way, guys. They're leaving Earth orbit and they're going to the moon.

• 30:54Speaker 02

  Yep. You go watch the live feed where you could see the curved surface of the Earth, almost as if it's a globe.

• 31:03Jay Novella?

  Or a disk.

• 31:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but Steve, I guess you didn't notice, Steve, I see the curved, the curved shape of the so-called Earth, but I also see a black on the right and I don't see stars. So that, obviously, this is a fake.

• 31:16Jay Novella?

  What?

• 31:18Bob Novella?

  Can't see, I don't see any stars. It's just black. They forgot to add the stars.

• 31:21Jay Novella?

  Bob, a quick side note, when you're going down that path. So, you know, Olivia got home from school yesterday and today, and today in particular was the day I'm like, so, did your science teacher, like, say anything about the launch to the moon? Like, no, I know what the answer was gonna be. It's a definitive no, because he would, you know, he's not gonna, he's not gonna make that mistake twice. But he didn't say anything, and I'm just turning it over in my head. You have a science teacher, you have 10, you have 10-year-old kids. You could teach them this stuff in such a way where they would be raptured.

• 31:54Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 31:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:55Jay Novella?

  You could, you could make them be so excited about this.

• 31:58Bob Novella?

  I would have just...

• 31:59Jay Novella?

  And he said, "Nothing. Nothing." It's a pudge. It's a putz. Yeah, it's a putz. Unreal.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, is artificial intelligence gonna help us sort out this science replication issue?

• 32:13Cara Santa Maria?

  That was the hope. And I think, I don't think we can say, "No, it's not." I think we can only say, "Not probably." Well, definitely not right now and possibly not anytime soon. So, there is a write-up in The New York Times by a friend of the show, Carl Zimmer.

• 32:33Cara Santa Maria?

  He's been writing about replication in science, apparently since 2011. Wow. And there's a big story this week because just yesterday, articles were dropped in Nature by the group behind SCORE, which stands for Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence. And so I want to hit some of the highlights about SCORE that Carl hits in the article. And then maybe we can talk a little bit about the sort of cache, the trove of publications that came out in Nature.

• 33:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Some of them were preprints, but I think the three main, no, the preprints also, they all dropped yesterday on April Fools. Why? See, they didn't have a launch window. They could have pushed that back by a day, but I guess they chose not to. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about SCORE. This is a really interesting, massive, very massive undertaking. Okay, so SCORE was funded by DARPA, which is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. And it involved, it was a collaborative effort involving 865 researchers.

• 33:56Cara Santa Maria?

  They ultimately published three papers, three main papers in Nature, along with six additional preprints. But there are like dozens of other papers that sort of collectively tell these stories. And what they did, this team of 865 researchers, is they sampled the claims that were made from nearly 4,000 papers. They were all published between 2009 and 2018. And so that is one of the sort of discussion points, is that there may actually be improvements in outcomes even since this large-scale study, because they cut off their collection of

• 34:41Cara Santa Maria?

  published papers in 2018. Right? So that's like, can you guys believe it? That's eight years ago now. That's almost 10 years. What? You were in your 30s, Kara. I know, right? What is happening? Covid. Okay. And so these articles, they were published across 62 different journals and they specifically focused on social sciences. So, but they looked at a lot of different social sciences. Criminology, economics, education, finance, health management, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, poli sci, public administration and sociology. And before you ask, why were they only looking at replication in the social sciences?

• 35:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Wouldn't it be more meaningful or, or wouldn't we have different results if we looked at the quote unquote, hard sciences? I'm, I'm just going to tell you, the answer is no. And I think Carl did a really great job in the comments of his, of his article in the New York Times, answering that very question. So real quick, I'm just going to read you. A commenter said, "Why would you choose social sciences for this study? Perhaps working with scientific disciplines that do not revolve around human behaviors might have been a better starting place." And Carl said to the, the asker, "The DARPA funders, part of the Defense Department, were especially interested in social science to apply findings to soldiers. Also, the social scientists had been working on these issues far more than researchers

• 36:06Cara Santa Maria?

  in other branches of science. So they already had the tools to use in such a big project." And then when people said, "No, but it should really be stressed that this is only looking at the social sciences. I expect that natural science studies would have much higher replicability." Carl answered that and said, "In the article, I linked to one study on cancer research that found about the same rate of success and replication. There are other studies I didn't have room for in other branches of biology and have spoken to people in physics and AI, et cetera, who have similar concerns. Social scientists are unusual in that they're tackling the problem more aggressively than researchers in other fields. Replication is a problem across scientific disciplines."

• 36:50Cara Santa Maria?

  In some fields, the replication crisis is pretty similar in terms of the numbers. So I think this assumption that just because it's a psychology study, that it by definition is not replicable, or it's less replicable or reproducible, I think is actually not a very good assumption. And the literature is not, the literature is showing us that we have this problem across fields that you would think would be sort of resistant to these types of problems. So to answer your question, Steve, one of the components of this huge endeavor did specifically look at how well can we predict sort of these

• 37:32Cara Santa Maria?

  different aspects of replication? How well can we predict if a research study is going to like stand up, hold up to the test of time? And I'm being very careful with my wording here because another big component of this study is what is the difference between reproducibility and replicability and robustness? Those are three words that sound like we could use them interchangeably, but we actually can't. We study all of those things differently. And studies might be more reproducible but less robust, or more replicable but less reproducible. So we've got to be kind of careful with our language there. But you asked

• 38:16Cara Santa Maria?

  about AI. So apparently, people, especially experts within their fields, are like kind of good at determining whether or not a study is going to, predicting whether or not a study is going to be repeatable over time.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's not surprising, Kara. That's all the stuff we talk about.

• 38:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Right? About how to interpret a study and how to know if it's, if it's a good study or a robust study or not.

• 38:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And people who do this for a living. They prioritize that and they have the skills to do it. So in the top line, they basically say that humans can forecast replication success with reasonable accuracy, but machines, and specifically, they did look at synthetic markets, macro score, and A plus? Well, these are methods that were used by Rajdmahar, maybe? That's how you pronounce the name, and 39 co-authors who wrote one of the pre-prints. And they found that none of the three methods that they used were consistently effective at predicting which claims would replicate successfully or not.

• 39:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Whereas Modi and co-authors, 33 co-authors on the Modi paper, used two distinct methods of looking at predictions from people about the replicability of findings, of replication markets, and something called replicats, which I love. And they found that people pretty accurately predicted replication outcomes, like 76% and 78% success rates. But that these, basically these AI, these machine learning approaches could not point to a study and say, this study will be able to be replicated versus that one, at least not with any sort of consistency. So are you guys interested in the difference between the three things?

• 40:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Replicability, reproducibility?

• 40:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And robustness? Okay. We'll do a quick.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  I know what the difference is.

• 40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you do. Okay, so reproducibility. What do you think that means, Bob? Quiz time.

• 40:28Bob Novella?

  Other researchers, you having the same setup will have the same results.

• 40:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so conducting the same analysis on the same data, will you get the same finding as they originally reported?

• 40:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So this is actually just analyzing. And they found that part of the reason that reproducibility is really, really hard is because in some fields, and psychology is a culprit here. A lot of researchers don't publish their data.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:58Cara Santa Maria?

  So if you don't have the original data, and also not just the original data, but the code that was used to analyze it, when you go to analyze it later, you're going to have to basically make up a new way to do it, or you're going to have to pull data from databases or from other sources. And that's why they find that in situations where they don't have that original data and code, these were reproducible at like 11 to 38%. They were really low. But when the original paper had both the original data and the code, we're looking at like 77 to 91% reproducibility. So that's important to remember. And this

• 41:40Cara Santa Maria?

  is across all the social science papers that they looked at. Robustness. Okay, robustness. Evan, what do you think robustness is? Think about the same kind of parallel structure. So I'm going to read you their definition of reproducibility, the one Bob was just talking about. Reproducibility refers to conducting the same analysis on the same data and assessing whether the finding is the same as reported in the original paper. Robustness is conducting.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  How well it stands up to the rigors of testing, maybe?

• 42:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It's about using different analyses that, you know, because in science, there's not just one way to analyze data. You can ask the same research question and come to a different answer because you did a different analysis.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 42:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Even though both of those analyses are valid for that research. So that's what they were looking at here. They were like, what if we use alternate but reasonable analyses on the same data? And they found that there was a lot of uncertainty and that these numbers were not always great. Let's see, 34% of independent re-analyses revealed the same result as the original finding. 57 revealed the same result with a tolerance range four times the size. And then when, when it comes to how they drew conclusions about this study, you know, like the big picture takeaway, 74% of analyses arrived at the same conclusion as in the original investigation. 24% came to no conclusion.

• 43:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Conclusive result and 2% came to the opposite conclusion.

• 43:15Speaker 02

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 43:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. And then the final one is replicability. That is when you're testing the same question in new data and assessing whether the findings are similar to what was reported. And that's what I think many of us think we're talking about when we talk about reproducibility. It's can a new group come along and ask a similar question or the same question to that study and collect all new data, all new subjects? Do we have the same findings?

• 43:43Speaker 02

  And we also talk about exact replications, which means you did the exact same protocol. You didn't change anything about the methods.

• 43:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, which is impossible to do when the methods aren't very clear.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And so that that also becomes a problem. But here we found that in this study of 164 papers that they looked at for these kinds of replication attempts, 49% were replicated successfully. And that does seem to be, you know, plus or minus, like there are error bars there, kind of what we've seen in previous studies. When we've seen these, you know, these big articles coming out 10 and 15 years ago, maybe more like 10 years ago, about the replication crisis or the reproducibility crisis, especially in psychology and in social sciences, around that 50% number is what we do tend to see. But what the authors of, or I guess all the participants of SCORE want to underscore,

• 44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  didn't mean to say it that way.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Of course you did.

• 44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that research, okay, this is a good quote from the actual press release from these folks. "Research is hard, and in some ways, the hard work begins after making a discovery. A tremendous amount of effort is needed to verify and have enough confidence in new discoveries to build foundations for further discovery. There is no single indicator of the repeatability of evidence or research credibility more generally. There is substantial opportunity here for innovation and development of indicators to assess credibility, to diversify our understanding of how trustworthy findings are established." I think we have to be careful not to use a single indicator and say, oh, that lab couldn't reproduce their findings, therefore their findings are null and void.

• 45:32Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not always the case. But as we increase sort of journal standards, right? We want preregistration to avoid P-hacking. We want the full raw data to be published in appendix. We want all of the coding that was used to be published and a really kind of clear method section with not just the methods for how the data were collected, but also the methods with how they were analyzed. If all of that is included, I actually think that this crisis is going to be less of a crisis. And it sounds like the, um, that's one of the big takeaways from SCORE as well.

• 46:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And they have other recommendations for how we can improve our ability to do science. And again, going back to the thing I said at the beginning, they were looking at research from 2009 to 2018. We're already seeing changes, especially in these social science journals where the kind of level of scrutiny is more robust in, in these large journals. But also don't think this is a social science problem only. This is a science problem. And, you know, in some ways you could argue that it's an overblown problem. In other ways, you could argue that it's underblown because it all depends on how you're defining whether or not something is reproducible.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  But if we want to conclude confidently that something is true, we'd like it to reproduce, replicate and be robust. I mean, you want all of those things to be true at the same time.

• 47:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And it does seem to be the case that the only way you're ever going to get to that place is to be as transparent as possible about how you did your research. That's the first part because then we'll know with confidence if it reproduced, if it replicated and if it was robust. But if we're filling in gaps, we're never going to be able to be that confident in answering that question.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  And Karen, I was reading that, that study too. The thing I thought was like, well, why aren't experts even better at predicting which studies are, you know, robust and replicable, et cetera? And I think it's large, not entirely, but largely because they don't have all the information. They're getting a scrubbed version of. What happened, you know, like here's a narrative, here's the data I want to show you. Here are the methods I want to tell you, unless of course, the study was pre-registered.

• 47:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, then they can compare it.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Such a huge factor because then we know that they're following the methods that they outlined before they started looking at data and they didn't do any hinky, peehacking kind of stuff.

• 48:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  But if you don't know, you don't know what you don't know.

• 48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  You don't know what you don't know. So unless there's a glaring problem in how they did their methodology that a sophisticated reviewer can notice in their, in their method section, or unless it's somebody who has just a wealth of knowledge about the state of that literature.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And this finding feels like it flies in the face of that.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 48:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's no good reason for it, you know, it's going to be hard to catch those kinds of things.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Totally. Yeah, you're right. There's two levels of expertise. There's topic expertise because you know a lot about that narrow topic. And the other one is what I would call science-based medicine expertise where you know how to evaluate studies and the literature. Like I've been doing this long enough where I'm like, this paper just smells like pee hacking. Like there's, there's stuff going on here that doesn't really make a lot of sense unless there was some pee hacking going on. So I, I get very concerned about stuff like that. Okay. Thanks, Cara.

• 49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Bob, if I said the words smart drugs to you, what would that mean to you? What's a smart drug?

• 49:16Bob Novella?

  One possibility is a drug that will augment intelligence. That's one interpretation.

• 49:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Like a drug that makes you smart?

• 49:24Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Okay. That's not what I'm talking about.

• 49:26Bob Novella?

  I know. I think, but that's, that's what the first thing that comes to my, my head. But of course you're probably thinking of a drug that is actually like is adaptable in some way, depending on what environment it finds itself in. It's, it could not make decisions, but be adaptable, I guess is the best word for it.

• 49:43Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, what about you? What's the first thing you think of when I say, what's a smart drug versus a dumb drug?

• 49:48Jay Novella?

  You know, I saw, you know, it's funny, Steve, I saw an email alert that you posted about it and I was planning on reading that. I would think, I would think a smart drug.

• 49:57Bob Novella?

  Bet you're blunt reading that.

• 49:58Jay Novella?

  This is tough. I was hoping that it meant that the drugs were more tailored to the particular person.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  That could be an effect, but that's not what is narrowly meant by a smart drug.

• 50:10Jay Novella?

  Does it change its behavior depending on the environment?

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 50:15Jay Novella?

  Okay. I don't know.

• 50:15Bob Novella?

  I was wrong too.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  What about you, Cara?

• 50:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, yeah, I would think targeted treatment.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  So targeted, but what targeted in what way?

• 50:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, like, I think about kind of improvements that I've seen in the cancer treatments that my patients get, where more and more often they're able to identify gene variants or specific receptors on cancer cells and develop drugs chemically, like, like using computational chemistry, and develop these drugs that that isolate and go just to the source and not anywhere else.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're getting close to the answer. Yeah, and it's not not surprising because these apply mostly to cancer drugs, even though they-

• 50:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because you want you want the cancer cells to die, but the rest of your body-

• 50:57Speaker 02

  Keep the good material alive. Keep the good stuff alive. So we'll get back to that, but let me back up a little bit and tell you, explain to you why traditional drugs are dumb. So if you ingest a drug, let's say you just take a pill, where does the drug go in your body? Bloodstream.

• 51:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, everywhere it can, depending on the size and the solubility of the drug.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  The short answer is everywhere.

• 51:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Everywhere. Although we do, we do talk about compartments. There are compartments in the body where the drug will distribute more or less, depending on whether the drug is more fat soluble or more water soluble, or whether it can penetrate certain privileged compartments like the central nervous system. Right, so if you want to get one level, so the short answer is pretty much everywhere. The one level deeper answer is that may be distributed more in some compartments than in others, or be excluded from some compartments in the body. But basically, they just diffuse throughout the body wherever it can go chemically.

• 52:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, wherever it fits, basically.

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, which has a lot to do with just whether it's water or fat soluble, whether it's protein bound, things like that.

• 52:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And also just how how big the molecules themselves are. That's that's a big one with the blood brain barrier.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, yeah. But but that's it. It just diffuses based upon basic chemistry. It doesn't know where it's going. So even if there's one cell population in the body that you're targeting, you're bathing every cell in the body with that drug, or maybe most- Of the cells. That's why they're dumb. But what if we could send a drug to just the cells that are the target of the drug? That would be a smart drug. That's, that's great.

• 52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And we do have that.

• 52:42Speaker 02

  We do.

• 52:42Cara Santa Maria?

  In a smart dumb way.

• 52:43Speaker 02

  We do. But this, now I'm going to be talking about a news item. I'll tell you how we have smart drugs and how they're, they're maybe about to get smarter. In fact, they may become programmable drugs. And that sounds, that sounds even more provocative. All right. So one of the, the, the current method that is being used, especially with chemotherapy, right? Are, is called antibody drug conjugates or ADCs. Now these use monoclonal antibodies. You remember what those are? Monoclonal antibodies are essentially a technique for making a whole bunch of antibodies that are identical to each other, hence monoclonal, they're one clone.

• 53:27Speaker 02

  And they therefore are have affinity towards one target, one antigen, right? So you could essentially conjugate a drug with an antibody that, that attaches to a biomarker on a target cell. Makes sense? Especially if that target cell is say, a cancer cell. You have a biomarker on a cancer cell. You conjugate it with a chemotherapeutic agent that goes just to those cancer cells and not to healthy cells. So it delivers, delivers the drugs to the cancer cells.

• 53:59Cara Santa Maria?

  This is why if you've ever known somebody who had HER2 positive or estrogen receptor positive or progesterone, progesterone receptor positive breast cancer, they can get more targeted treatments that often have fewer side effects than somebody who has triple negative breast cancer.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  Right, triple negative is the worst.

• 54:16Cara Santa Maria?

  They get brutalized by their chemo. And they actually often will call that first line treatment, the red devil.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  And why chemotherapy is often a target for this? Because this is the context in which we push toxicity of drugs to their limit, right? Because the stakes are so high. If you have a terminal cancer, that's, you know, you're going to have a horrible death. Due to that disability, pain, drugs, and then that probable death because of that cancer, you would tolerate a lot of toxicity from drugs that could treat that cancer, right? And just sort of the risk versus benefit ratio is just different calculation. And chemotherapy is basically designed to be more toxic to cancer cells than to healthy cells, enough more toxic that you can get to a lethal dose with less of an effect on

• 55:06Speaker 02

  healthy cells, but still you're going to suffer some cells, like your hair follicles, are going to suffer more, so you're going to lose your hair.

• 55:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, your fingernails.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you might lose some of the mucosa. Yeah, so.

• 55:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's for the dumb chemo.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  That's for the dumb chemo.

• 55:20Cara Santa Maria?

  That's for the chemo that just target like mitosis.

• 55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's going everywhere, but it's more deadly to cells that are replicating quickly, and so cancer cells are more susceptible to it than healthy cells. But if we could get a chemotherapeutic drug to just attach to cancer cells.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  Oh, yes, please.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  I mean, that is the holy grail, right, of chemotherapy.

• 55:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's hard, because cancer cells are smart and they look like regular body cells.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard. You got to find something targetable on those cancer cells. And again, some cancers are more targetable than others, depending on the subtype and everything.

• 55:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like even if you have an estrogen receptor positive cancer, like in some ways you're lucky because you get to take chemo that's targeted to the estrogen receptor, but in other ways, you have to go through early menopause if you haven't yet. You have to take Lupron and other drugs that just completely knock out all your estrogen, and you never get to take estrogen again, because otherwise it'll feed your cancer.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right.

• 56:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's still, it's still pretty gnarly, even though it's targeted. So it would be great if they could target not just the estrogen receptor, but only the estrogen receptor on cancer cells.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Only the cancer cells, right?

• 56:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that would be huge.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  Can they do that?

• 56:28Speaker 02

  So that's what the ADCs are about, but they have some limitations. One limitation is that because they're big, they can only penetrate so deeply into solid tumors, right? So they can't get to all the way into the tumor. They also can only carry so much drug with them. They have some limitation on the amount of drug, and they're also not isolated. As we would like, so there is some off target drug delivery. So now we have a new study looking at another technique. Instead of ADCs, these are DDCs, these are DNA drug conjugates. Now, how this work, how this works, they have DNA strands and the strands themselves are used to, are used to target desired, desired biomarkers on the cells that we want to get the drug to,

• 57:13Speaker 02

  and then deliver their payload to those desired cells, like cancer cells. And the DDCs have an advantage over using antibodies to target cells. The, the DNA strands do because this is what they, they developed. You can target multiple biomarkers. So you take a DNA initiator strand, which is what will initiate the, the endocytosis of the drug capsule into the cell, right? So now this is what will trigger the release of the drug in the cell. That's the DNA initiator strand. You split that up between different biomarkers. And now only cells that have both biomarkers will get both halves of the DNA initiator strand,

• 57:56Speaker 02

  which will then click together, turn on and cause the drug, the drug to be delivered to the cell. That is genius. So now you have a system that works like programmable operations. Theoretically, you can combine different DNA strands with a either, or, and, or you're not, or whatever, like only if this, then, you know, like, well, there's a bunch of if then statements, like a computer program. So you could say, well, if you have either of these two, but not that third one, or you have only if you have these two, or whatever, if you have this one, plus any one of these other three ones, theoretically, there's no real limit to how many parameters we could put, put into it, then hence the programmable aspect of that.

• 58:39Speaker 02

  But even just in its simple form, if you have both biomarkers, you get both pieces of the puzzle, they click together, and then only those cells get the drug. So what is the advantage there? So one, of course, that it's much more specific because you need two simultaneous targets, right? It's a, they, they liken it to two factor authentication, right? It's going to be. It's going to eliminate a lot of false positives, which will limit toxicity, which is kind of the whole goal of this, right? Is to limit off-target effects of the drugs. These are also smaller, so they could penetrate deeper into solid tumors, and they can carry a larger amount of drug. So it's just a, it's a superior technology.

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Now, I need to say at this point that this is in the proof of concept stage. They did this study. The problem here is that the DNA is unmodified, and it's not as stable as they would like it to be. So they still have some work to do to adjust these DNA strands to make it more, to make it more stable, so it would actually work, you know, as a treatment. And of course, you know, the more we study different targets, you know, then the, the, the longer the list of, of potential things that we could target here.

• 59:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that seems to be one of the main problems that I see over and over is that, number one, there are no universal cancer biomarkers.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:00:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like, you have to go with what we know about your specific cancer. And then, not all of your tumor cells have the same biomarkers, homogenous, I guess, as, as we would hope or we would think they are. And then this is the worst part. You develop resistance.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could.

• 1:00:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Cancer is very smart.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  It continues to evolve.

• 1:00:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so when people are like, oh, they, they, they can no longer, they're no longer responding to that chemo, so they have to start a, you know, a second-line treatment. What's actually happening there is the same thing, well, I guess we could use an analogy, to what happens in antibiotic-resistant infections. The cancer is literally evolving to no longer die in the presence of that chemo.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  Right. That's why you gotta knock it out right away. Can't partially treat it.

• 1:00:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why earlier is always better. Removal is always better. And that's why most people who have stage-four metastatic disease, if it's stable, it's whack-a-mole for the rest of their lives. That is how they are treating their cancer.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  All right, now, the researchers also tested mechanisms to amplify the drug delivery, use the same DNA strands to do that, and they found that they could increase the concentrations of the desired drug at the desired cells by a hundredfold using the, you know, the mechanisms that I described.

• 1:01:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That's good.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, so imagine a hundred times the dose at the target cell versus off-target cells, that's, that's huge.

• 1:01:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Huge, yeah.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  Yes, you basically have a negligible, you know, dose that doesn't have any effects, and then you have a, you know, a significantly high dose. And now, this, of course, is not limited to treating cancer. You could also deliver immune therapies, you could also deliver pretty much any drug. So, most drug side effects are because of their off-target effects, right? Some are that it just goes hand in hand with the effect you're going for, but oftentimes, it's like, yes, it also binds to the same receptor on this other cell population, which causes this other effect which you don't want, and that makes it a side effect. Or, it makes it toxic to your liver, or your kidney, or your heart, or whatever. And if we could essentially massively reduce the dose while still delivering an effective

• 1:02:16Speaker 02

  dose to only the target cells by a hundredfold, then, you know, but that could virtually eliminate side effects from drugs.

• 1:02:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, imagine an opiate medication that knocks out pain but doesn't get you high.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Or doesn't suppress your breathing, that would be nice.

• 1:02:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Doesn't suppress your breathing and doesn't make you constipated.

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Right. That'd be awesome.

• 1:02:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, imagine the quality of life.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Those are all off-target effects, absolutely.

• 1:02:41Cara Santa Maria?

  None of those things are things that we want from opiates, but they're things that ruin people's lives when they have to take opiates.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  And, there's a lot of drugs that are great, they're very effective, but they'll, they're not approved, and you'll never see them because they have this one side effect that kills them. And so, right, or it's one toxicity, oh, the liver, too much liver effect, or too much kidney toxicity, this drug is cancelled. Those drugs, we could go through all these drugs, and say, hey, what about at one hundredth the dose? This opens up new therapeutic windows for drugs that otherwise would not have any therapeutic windows.

• 1:03:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  And that could tremendously expand. And the number of potential drugs that we have at our disposal. So it's still in the experimental phase. Again, this was a proof of concept study and I always think, how long is it going to be between this is transforming medicine? Right before we see this in the clinic? It's hard to say, but a good rule of thumb is, yeah, 20 to 30 years is a good rule of thumb. That doesn't mean we're not going to have anything before then. Yeah, can't AI.

• 1:03:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't you think like, see, we always joke like five to 10 years whenever something's like in like, I don't know, like starting to ramp up to to human studies. But I see, I have patients who by the time they have failed out of their different lines of treatment, there's already a new treatment.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but those are treatments that that were in the experimental stage 30 years ago, Cara.

• 1:04:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  That's my point. Where is this?

• 1:04:04Cara Santa Maria?

  But even with like CRISPR and with these like fast track ways.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  CRISPR was the fastest. CRISPR was basically 10 years instead of 20 to 30 years.

• 1:04:13Cara Santa Maria?

  But then you add to it, the computational chemistry piece with AI.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So you're right. I mean, it's hard to say. I hope it's going to be faster. I'm giving you basically the historical answer, you know? Like monoclonal antibodies. Again, I heard about them in the 90s and they're really transforming medicine now. But the first treatment was maybe 15 years ago. So it's just that it builds up over time by the, there's the first use versus it's like this is now mainstream medicine. It's everywhere kind of thing. That's where you get to the 20 to 30 years. But we'll see maybe again, things can be absolutely could be moving faster than they have historically. But it's better if you anticipate that and it's faster than you're excited than the, but thinking this is right around the corner.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Then you're disappointed. You think they lied to me, you know, that whole, the premature hype then leads to perpetual disappointment. So just don't.

• 1:05:08Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Don't fall for that.

• 1:05:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Clinical trials are still slow. They just are.

• 1:05:12Speaker 02

  It just is.

• 1:05:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Clinical trials are slow.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, no matter how you slice it, it takes time to do clinical trials and to follow outcomes.

• 1:05:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But for the people who are desperate, they sometimes have access to treatments that other people don't have access to.

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  Compassionate access to experimental treatment. Absolutely.

• 1:05:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, tell us about nuclear electric propulsion.

• 1:05:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy. This was fun. NASA recently released a new and interesting vision for the moon and beyond, right? We've talked about this on the show. No more Gateway Station, and now more of a moon-based focus. But also, what really caught my attention was this talk about a nuclear electric propulsion rocket. Using a small fission reactor, they would at some point activate it in space, send it to Mars on a one-year journey, drop off these Mars helicopters to scout landing sites and look for underground ice. So you'll be hearing all about this kind of stuff on future shows since there's so much moon news going on right now and all the changes. So yeah, you're going to be hearing about this, I'm sure.

• 1:06:15Bob Novella?

  But my focus today, and probably more in the future, is predictably on the plans for this new nuclear rocket, which is supposed to head to Mars during the December 2028 window. And if you know anything about launch windows, as we've mentioned earlier in the show, you know they don't slide. That window comes and goes, and there's no delaying it. So regarding that specific deadline, Steve Sinicor, Fission Surface Power Program Executive at NASA, said, "The scope must bend around this deadline. This will be the first mission in a sustained cadence. Not a one-off. It's a Pathfinder, not a blueprint."

• 1:06:55Bob Novella?

  NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, he described SR1 freedom as 70% solution to prove that it works. Okay, so this is a demo, right, guys? This first one that we're going to see is a demo rocket that's using specifically already existing technology. That's how they have a prayer of getting this out in 2028. So it's existing technology. It's a demo. So they're going to start small and simple, which is fine. You know, they want to have, when they're done with this piece, a flight, you know, flight proven hardware. They want to have a launch precedent. They want to have a workforce. They want to have an industrial base. They want to have all of this stuff ready to go.

• 1:07:35Bob Novella?

  So that when they scale it up and do more launches and do more with it, that all these other, these foundational components will already be there. So you might be asking if you're, if you're familiar with nuclear rockets, all, you know, what's a nuclear electronic propulsion? Um, and what's, what about nuclear thermal? Because I used to talk about the nuclear thermal rockets that they were working on with the Draco program. Uh, what, you know, what's going on with all that stuff? So why did they pick nuclear electric? So nuclear electric uses a reactor. It's a nuclear reactor, whether it's fission or fusion, and that generates heat. That heat is converted to electricity and then that electricity powers electric thrusters, right? That, and those thrusters can accelerate a propellant like Xenon. So you, you may be familiar with ion thrusters.

• 1:08:21Bob Novella?

  That would fit this bill, but there's also hall effect thrusters. There's magnetoplasma dynamic thrusters. All there's all sorts of, of types of these electric thrusters that would use nuclear, that could benefit from nuclear electric propulsion. Now, if you're, if you've heard about ion thrusters, you might remember what they were saying when they were really in the news. They have very, very low thrust. Take a piece of eight and a half by 11 paper, put it on your hand. That, that, that force, that pressure you feel, that's, that's the thrust you would get from a common ion thruster. Especially one that's based on solar, like solar panels, you know, it doesn't have a nuclear reactor powering it.

• 1:09:00Bob Novella?

  So extremely low thrust, but it's additive. So over many days or weeks, it builds and builds and builds. And long after a chemical fuel would, would be depleted, this thing is keep building and you can get, and you can get velocities far exceeding what we can. Uh, over using chemical rockets and you could also, with very little mass, you could also change trajectories. You can go to multiple planets. You could do things that chemical, chemical rockets just aren't really able to do. So nuclear electric propulsion is Super efficient. It's super efficient mass transport in deep space. And it also works where solar power becomes weak. Because you get out to Jupiter, the strength of the sun's rays at Jupiter is like 4% what we feel here.

• 1:09:42Bob Novella?

  So solar panels are not going to be helping much. So for deep space, nuclear electric propulsion would be fantastic. Conversely, nuclear thermal propulsion, that's where the reactor directly heats the propellant. Okay, say like hydrogen. And then that you heat the hydrogen, that hot gas expands and it's expelled out of the nozzles. You know, similar to a conventional chemical rocket, but better in many ways. You could think of a nuclear thermal rocket as more of like a true nuclear rocket in a sense. Whereas nuclear electronic propulsion is more like a nuclear power plant that's driving these electric thrusters. So that's one way you can look at it.

• 1:10:23Bob Novella?

  So a little bit more detail about these NEP, nuclear electronic propulsion design they're going with. It's going to be 20 kilowatts, which is, you know, it's pretty good. But for a demo, it's fine for a demo. You know, we would want a lot more eventually. It's using low enriched uranium dioxide, uranium and uranium dioxide. So one interesting aspect of this plan is that the reactor is going to be mounted away from the spacecraft on a boom. Why do you think they're doing that? Why would they put the reactor away?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  Radiation? Interference, some kind of interference.

• 1:11:00Bob Novella?

  Well, the radiation is going to fry electronics. So you want to separate the reactor from any of the electronics. And that would also apply for if people were on this, which they're not going to be on this. But yeah, you want to keep people away from that radiation as well, too.

• 1:11:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But is that far enough away?

• 1:11:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the boom that they're planning for this would be safe and would be safe for the electronics. That's not too hard to figure out. But for people, yeah, you'd have to really take it seriously for people are going to be near this. But yeah, this is definitely not going to have anything to do with people at this demo stage anyway. But then also this, the reactor is going to have a power conversion system, right? To convert the reactor heat into electricity. That's a critical component. The other critical component that you might not realize is radiators. They're going to have lightweight composite and titanium radiators. So these are, these are space radiators there. The thermal management on these type of craft are critical, right? Because you think, oh, um, you know, you're in space. It's really, really cold.

• 1:12:00Bob Novella?

  But I mean, you've got a lot of excess heat caused, caused by the electronics and the propulsion system. And you, you would think that, oh, the heat's not that, not a big deal. Cause you're in this cold, you're in, you're in a vacuum and it's really cold. So you could just easily just dump the heat into the minus, what is it? 200 degrees, whatever in, in space. But heat transfer is a problem in space. It's a huge problem. There's no atmosphere out there. And if there's no atmosphere out there, what does that mean? What are you missing? There's no heat conduction. There's no heat convection. So the only thing you have available is, is, um, releasing the thermal energy that's building up and going to destroy your craft. You release it as infrared radiation. So these, so these radiators are critically important.

• 1:12:45Bob Novella?

  And they're especially important on a, on a nuclear electric propulsion system. So these radiators are going to be big and it's, it's, it's so big that they may even be a down, a downside. But those are critical components. And if you see any mockups for this, this ship, you're going to, you'll see those. So that's what they were, that's what the plan is. They're going to launch this thing in 2028 if it's ready. Send it to the Mars, dump off some, some, some technology to get some information with using those, those cool new helicopters that they have on Mars. But so what's going to happen in the future? So we got 20 kilowatts now. That's the SR1, that's the demo, that's the proof of concept. In the 2030s, we, they're talking about anyway, seeing things, seeing a ship

• 1:13:28Bob Novella?

  that's more on the range of a hun- hundreds of kilowatts to, to even megawatt scale nuclear electric reactors. That is big, that is, that is epic. And we've never, you know, we've never seen anything like that on, on a spacecraft before. So these, what are these going to do? These reactors are going to also probably power the lunar and Mars infrastructure. But that's not the, that's out of scope for my talk. I'm going to talk about the rockets. So for the rockets, what you're going to see is if we had, if this works well and we have reactors that are at the level of hundreds of kilowatts or even megawatts, what you're going to see is essentially deep space freight trains. You could have rockets that can carry 100 tons of cargo

• 1:14:10Bob Novella?

  to the moon, for example, a lot of cargo, more than that even. They'll be super efficient. In terms of propulsion, it'll be the most efficient thing in space, but not super fast. That's, you know, nuclear electric is not super fast. That's just one, that's just one of the trade offs. If you compare it to other nuclear technology like nuclear thermal, it's just not going to be as fast. What about getting people on this super reactors that have up to megawatts of power available? So what are we, what are we going to see? Is that even possible? Like I said, they're going to be super efficient, but they're going to be also relatively low thrust. So there is talk though, Steve, you mentioned this as well, when we were talking about this.

• 1:14:53Bob Novella?

  They're talking about a hybrid architecture using chemical, hybrid, it's a hybrid, chemical and nuclear electric. So combine, you know, basically combining the benefits of both of those. So if you need some quick thrust or quick, you know, quick, strong thrust or maneuvering, you could use your chemical rockets, but then for the sustained push over the, over the weeks and months, it's going to take you to get to Mars or wherever, then you could use the, you know, the high efficiency nuclear electric stuff. So that's, that's kind of what they're thinking. But as of right now, we're not sure, you know, if that's, that's really viable for having, having, you know, a rocket with crew, with people on it. You're also going to see on this, as I mentioned, extra large heat radiators.

• 1:15:36Bob Novella?

  There, the research shows that you're going to need for something like this, you're going to need one to 10 megawatts for a human crew. So 100 kilowatts, 500 kilowatts, not going to do it. You have to get in the megawatt range in order for that to be powerful enough. The bottom line is that a lot of research is needed before we can figure out whether we can use nuclear electric propulsion to get people to Mars because we need to get them. Mars very, very fast. You know, there's a lot of radiation out there. You're also in microgravity, which is also debilitating the longer you're out there. So we need to do a lot of research before we can find out, you know, does this, does this whole scaled up, super powerful system, does it all work together? You know, in a system, is it a whole system that's practical? We don't know.

• 1:16:20Bob Novella?

  And it probably could be a while before we figure that out. Generally speaking, if you read a lot about this, you'll find a lot of people saying that nuclear thermal is often considered better for having a crew onboard. It's not as efficient as a nuclear electric, but the thrust is just more powerful. And it also has double the chemical rocket efficiency, even if it's not efficient as nuclear electric. The trip time will be, will be the shortest, even if Steve, even if you give them a chemical nuclear electric hybrid system, nuclear thermal will be faster. It depends on how much faster, but it will, it'll be, it'll definitely be faster if you really optimize it for that.

• 1:17:03Bob Novella?

  So that's going to shorten exposure time to radiation and minimize microgravity. So they may decide that, you know, we really need to go with nuclear thermal for people because it's just like, we got to get them out of space as fast as possible because we don't, we can't, we can't really shield people effectively from radiation. And microgravity just messes you up when you, when you're out there for so long, especially when you got to land on Mars and then you got to go on the surface and start doing some work. So that's it. That's all the information I have. So that's, so that's where we are. That's where we're going.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Bob, you don't think much of these engines, huh?

• 1:17:36Bob Novella?

  I hate them. No, they're fascinating. Both of them, both of the, you know, this, the nuclear electric propulsion systems will change space exploration for humanity, even if we don't get crews on there because we could use it to, for, you know, to send probes and scientific missions to the outskirts of the, of the solar system. We can send, we can send all sorts of material to, you know, to Mars and the moon with it. So it would be incredibly help, incredibly helpful. And we may even get it to work with, with, with people, sending people to Mars. But I suspect that we may need to go with the nuclear thermal for that, but we shall see. But people are talking about nuclear rockets again, and that makes me very happy.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is, this is definitely overdue. We could have had these 30 years ago.

• 1:18:20Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, don't get me started, Steve.

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  You just didn't push the research. This is all

• 1:18:24Bob Novella?

  I mean Steve I was saying was talking about it in the 70s, right? This is, yeah, this is all, this is all fission. We had working rockets doing ground testing in the, in what, the late 60s? And then of course, the, the new, you know, the nuclear treaty, what was it? The space ban treaty? Yes. Happened. And then even Draco, Draco was a, was a, was a heavy research, really good research for a nuclear thermal rocket that I talked about on, on the show before. And it got, it got very, they were starting, the engineering was mostly done and they were getting started on doing the hardware. And then last year, they, they killed it. They just killed it last year for lots of different reasons, um, which was very frustrating. One reason was that launch costs have, have, have dropped so low

• 1:19:09Bob Novella?

  that when they looked at the equation, you know, they, they looked at the huge investment they would have had to make and then the gains they would have made. It's like, ah, they, The balance sheet didn't work, right? They killed it. And, uh, and, and other silly reasons. Sure. It's technically extremely difficult.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  I mean, short term, I see it. You know, we need chemical rockets to get off the earth. By the time you get into low, by the time you get into low earth orbit, you have expended 90% of the energy you need to go anywhere in the solar system, basically.

• 1:19:35Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  But it's all about how fast you want to get there. And if you want to send people into deep space, you need to get there fast and that requires nuclear rockets, period. So it depends on your goal. Yeah. If you're just sending robots around, you don't need it. But if you want people on Mars, you need nuclear rockets.

• 1:19:53Bob Novella?

  And also Steve, don't forget, if you want to get, if you want to get a scientific package to a deep space, you know, Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto, and you don't want to dilly-dally going around the earth, around the sun, here and there, you know, use a really powerful nuclear engine and you can get there a lot faster than just, than trying to make it like, we got to maximize cargo and we got to, you know, and, and who cares what it does to the mission time? No, I care what it does to the mission time. I'm getting old. I need to, I need to sit to get to where they need to get.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Come on, science, catch up with Bob's age.

• 1:20:26Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell us about underwater fairy circles. That sounds nice.

• 1:20:33Speaker 04

  Doesn't it though? First, I want to let you know how I found this article in this news.

• 1:20:38Speaker 02

  You're a scuba diver?

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  Not exactly. I'm going to start with something that may sound not at all related to it, but we'll get there. Okay, bear with me. Hey, Bob.

• 1:20:49Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Fill in this blank, okay? A blank of crows.

• 1:20:55Bob Novella?

  A murder of crows. Oh, my God, I love it.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  Ding ding ding.

• 1:20:58Bob Novella?

  I love, one of my favorite memes. It shows two, two crows on a bench. It says, attempted murder.

• 1:21:06Bob Novella?

  I love that so much.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  There's another one, crows drinking, drinking drinks all lined up, and they call it the crow bar.

• 1:21:16Speaker 04

  Jay. Yeah. Fill in the blank. A blank of lions.

• 1:21:21Speaker 02

  Isn't it a pride?

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  It is a pride of lions. Very good, very good. Hey, Kara.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  Fill in the blank, okay? A blank of fish.

• 1:21:31Cara Santa Maria?

  School.

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  A school of fish. Very good.

• 1:21:34Bob Novella?

  These are easy.

• 1:21:35Speaker 04

  Steve, you get the hard one. Okay. But it's, but it's with birds, so maybe not.

• 1:21:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, I bet he knows it.

• 1:21:41Speaker 04

  A blank of owls.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  Parliament.

• 1:21:43Bob Novella?

  Yes. That, oh, yeah, man, we've, we had our, we went through our phase many decades ago of like memorizing all of these awesome animal grouping names, or they're so creative.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  Bob, don't harsh my mellow. Don't take away my.

• 1:21:58Bob Novella?

  Okay, whatever. But Parliament of Owls is one of my, one of my favorites.

• 1:22:02Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a really good one.

• 1:22:04Bob Novella?

  So perfectly appropriate for owls.

• 1:22:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I think my favorite is a dazzle of zebras.

• 1:22:09Speaker 04

  Yes, a dazzle of zebras. That's a good one, too. And there are so many good ones. You can look them up. Now, fill in the blank if you dare. A blank of scientists. A panel? That's one of them. Oh, that's a good one. There are several. There are actually nothing. There's nothing official, nothing codified, nothing universally accepted. How about a study? I think that's one of them as well. I like that. I would like to offer a baffle of science.

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Scientists are baffled. Exactly, Bob. Thank you. That's where I was getting. Just Google or search scientist baffle, you will come up with news every day about how baffled scientists are to the left, to the right, above and below.

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  And that is how I found this article about the fairy rings underwater. And I've talked about fairy rings before in other contexts, back in 2012, you may remember. You know, that was the year the Mayan calendar told us the world was ending. Yes. We're all supposed to be destroyed. So that didn't pan out exactly. But it was July of 2012 and we were at the amazing meeting in Las Vegas. And I brought up a news item about fairy circles in the country of Namibia. You've been there, Kara? I have. Have you ever heard about the fairy circles of Namibia? I have not. Ooh, fairy circles of Namibia are mysterious reddish hue circular shaped patches dotted

• 1:23:37Speaker 04

  along a 1,200 mile stretch of desert grassland throughout the country. The circles vary in size, but they can be as large as several feet in diameter. And there are hundreds of thousands of them that plaster the landscape. You can look at the pictures online. They're fascinating. Now, tribe folk in Namibia for centuries attributed them to what else? Supernatural causes, right? You know, gods made them, or even folklore. Dragons were dwelling under the ground whose poisonous breath would cause those patches. And at the time, there was an update suggesting that the mystery might have been solved. There was suggestion that there were termites that were perhaps causing this.

• 1:24:19Speaker 04

  And further research says, no, possibly, probably not. It probably has more to do with soil and ratios of nutrients and some other, you know, factors like that that are involved. Weather-related processes, among some other things. So, I couldn't help, at the time, recall that, not only in places like Africa, but in America and in Europe, we have things known as fairy rings as well. They're called fairy circles in Africa, but we have fairy rings. And those are mushrooms, right? Growth of mushrooms, which appear to grow in a deliberately designed ring-shaped pattern. I don't know if you guys have seen them. I had them in, when I lived in Cheshire, Connecticut. They, I had one in my backyard.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, rings of mushrooms? See them all the time.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Very common. Very, very common. But, you know, and they obviously have a lot of history, folklore, and mythology surrounding them. Supposedly they're portals to gateways, to the realms of magic creatures, like elves and fairies and pixies and, and these, and these kinds of things. You know, the Cottingley fairies, you know, that story? I don't know if you've ever talked really about it on the show. So this all relates to things that we've been talking about for many, many, many decades in the skeptical circles. But, once again, here we go. We've come around full circle. And this time, this time underwater, though. So here's the headline I found from the website Ecoticious, just

• 1:25:46Speaker 04

  from the other day. Fairy circles of seagrass forming underwater, and scientists are baffled. Here we go. Because no one knows what mechanism draws these giant rings on the seabed off the coast of Scotland. So-

• 1:25:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that true?

• 1:25:59Speaker 04

  Is it true that the scientists are baffled, or that-

• 1:26:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, is it true that no one knows what's causing them?

• 1:26:05Speaker 04

  They don't know why this, apparently, and I did read several sources, they've not been able to determine why they form the circular patterns that they do.

• 1:26:14Cara Santa Maria?

  But do they have some good ideas?

• 1:26:16Speaker 04

  Yes. Yes, they actually do.

• 1:26:20Speaker 04

  But for the first time-

• 1:26:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Big difference between not knowing anything and having some ideas, but not, you know, being able to confirm them yet.

• 1:26:26Speaker 04

  And apparently, for the first time, just this year, earlier this year, they have video evidence. They flew drones over these areas in these water, in these water regions off the coasts of Scotland and captured them in video. First time. I don't know why they weren't able to do it, because I guess they spontaneously, or for whatever reason, take on this form, and then another times they don't. So they're hard to, you can't pinpoint it. You kind of just have to catch it as, as you can. So there are hundreds, though, of these giant ring shapes that have appeared on the seafloor off the coast of Scotland. And the formations resemble pale turquoise halos sent against, set against darker water.

• 1:27:09Speaker 04

  And each one, well, they describe it as a near-perfect circle. I wouldn't say they're near-perfect circles, you know. They're circular. There are very few rare, very rare perfect circles. You can't really even say perfect circle, but that's another thing. But they're living seagrass meadows, and scientists are going to be taking a closer look at the footage and try to better understand why exactly these rings form. They were filmed in the Sound of Barra, that's B-A-R-R-A, which is a shallow channel on the outer, oh boy, Hebrides? Am I pronouncing that correct?

• 1:27:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Hebrides.

• 1:27:42Speaker 04

  Hebrides, thank you. Cara, I refer to you for all things Scottish, because I think you've been there more than-

• 1:27:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I've been there a lot, but don't ask me to pronounce anything that's written in Scottish, like in Gaelic, or is it, I always mix up-

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  Gaelic Gaelic, yeah.

• 1:27:55Cara Santa Maria?

  One of them is Gaelic and one of them is Gaelic, and they're spelled the same, but one's in Ireland and one's in Scotland.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, I've been interchanging those two.

• 1:28:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, no, they're two different things.

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  Oh, no. Well, bad on me, then. Oh, potato, patata. Exactly. First time such seagrass circles have ever been recorded. They also refer to them jokingly as seagrass donuts. But but locals and others call them fairy circles in the of the water. The rings are made of common eelgrass, didn't even know there was something called eelgrass, Zoster marina, which forms dense meadows in shallow sheltered bays. And in the sound of Barrow, those meadows carry intricate circular patterns that echo similar formations seen in the Mediterranean off of Denmark and near the Isles of Sicily in England.

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  So researchers have linked similar rings to a mix of factors that include changes in sediment, toxic hydrogen sulfide building up in older plants, and the way seagrass spreads outward from a central patch while older shoots in the middle slowly die back. So those are some of the things that they are looking at as to why and how these organized patterns occur. Plants do tend to help each other at close range and then compete for space and nutrients across larger distances, which can naturally create rings, stripes, or leopard-like spots in vegetation. And in practical terms, though, the seagrass meadow, they work quietly in the background

• 1:29:28Speaker 04

  of everyday life, and they are very important to nature and preserving the ecosystem, certainly with other fish and animals, birds. They help protect low-lying coasts, and they help prevent erosion and and other storm damage-related events that that occur. Their leaves slow the water, allowing particles to settle, which can improve water clarity and even reduce contamination in seafood. So seagrass is a part of our blue carbon system, and it does need to be studied more closely. It needs to be preserved because there was a time back in the 1930s in which the seagrass, which was abundant for many reasons, you know, human activity mostly, became so damaged

• 1:30:10Speaker 04

  that it that, you know, they they weren't sure if it would really ever come back. And it is coming back, but it is a slow process. It's not fully restored to the levels we were seeing practically 100 years ago. So a good opportunity for scientists to take a closer look at this for the benefit of ecology and the environment, learn more about them, and bring more awareness to people about them. There you have it.

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:30:38Jay Novella?

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

• 1:31:02Jay Novella?

  All right, what is that, guys? I really, I want to hear something from all of you.

• 1:31:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It sounds like a baby, like, harp seal to me.

• 1:31:10Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 1:31:11Speaker 04

  Jay, I predict that that is you, a week ago, practicing your excitement voice for the launch of Artemis.

• 1:31:22Speaker 04

  That's what I was gonna say, man.

• 1:31:24Jay Novella?

  Steve, any guess?

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Well, I guessed last week it's the alien from Lost in Space.

• 1:31:29Speaker 04

  Oh, that's right, yeah.

• 1:31:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it the alien?

• 1:31:33Jay Novella?

  The first guess was sent in by a listener who identified himself as atheist. Says, "Hey, guys, love the show. I'm just a carbon-based life form that originated from Brooklyn, New York, that now resides in the primordial ooze of Port St. Lucie, Florida. My guess is that, in observance of Passover, the noise is the blowing of a shofar, or ram's horn."

• 1:31:57Cara Santa Maria?

  It quite sounds like that, doesn't it?

• 1:31:59Speaker 04

  No, it doesn't, but that's still a nice guess. I like it.

• 1:32:03Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a sad shofar.

• 1:32:04Jay Novella?

  Evan, you've heard of a shofar, right?

• 1:32:06Speaker 04

  Yes, I have.

• 1:32:07Jay Novella?

  Do they sound like that?

• 1:32:08Speaker 04

  Not, not that I've heard, no. And I have heard them blown, because I've been to temple and shul many times.

• 1:32:14Jay Novella?

  All right, well, that is incorrect, but thank you for the guess. A listener named Sharon Tender wrote in, "Hi, Jay, I'm going to guess a bird. No, it's an animal that breathes oxygen, since I heard the breath intake. Jeez, I listened at least 10 times. Okay, my guess is a giraffe, only because I have no idea what they sound like." All right, it's not a giraffe. And I will, I will take a note here that you said that you, you think it breathes oxygen because you heard it take air in, okay? Just make a note of that. Stevie Wyatt wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, my guess for this week's noisy is a trumpet player performing a tune through just the mouthpiece and not the whole instrument." And I've heard people do that, but that is not what you're hearing here. That's incorrect, but thank you.

• 1:32:57Jay Novella?

  A listener named Martin Turley wrote in, "This week's noisy reminds me of an elk or some other species of deer." He said, "Thank you for the show, guys. It makes my world a little brighter." All right, so his guess is it's some type of elk or deer. If you heard that in the woods, like if you're out camping with friends and then like 2:00 AM you hear this. (whistling) Like you are not okay. You're not okay.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Get it.

• 1:33:24Jay Novella?

  You would be like, it's like Blair Witch times 10, you know? A listener named Marcel wrote in and said, "I think I know the answer to who's that noisy this week. It's a humpback whale on a speakerphone." I thought picking a whale as the animal was pretty interesting. Whales make a lot of noises. When he said that guess, it made me think like, what would a whale sound like outside of the water? Would it sound weird like that? I don't know. I thought that was a fun guess. Okay, we have a winner, guys. The winner's name is Ludlow, and this is actually something called a daxophone.

• 1:33:59Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:34:00Jay Novella?

  You guys know what that is?

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  No. What did you call it? A daxophone?

• 1:34:04Jay Novella?

  Daxophone.

• 1:34:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a typo when you hit the S, the D key instead of the S key. The two are next to each other.

• 1:34:10Jay Novella?

  Daxophone. This is an experimental wooden friction idiophone invented by Hans Rachel in the 1980s. It uses a thin wooden tongue that is bowed, plucked, or struck in its shape, and its shape and playing technique can produce those eerie, voice-like, almost animal or human sounds. So this one is really cool, and I do recommend you look it up and watch someone use it. It's weird-looking and a little hard to identify, but it's definitely being stroked by a bow, a bow-type of thing. It has a strange, human-like quality to the noises that it can make, and there's a wide variety of noises that it can make.

• 1:34:53Jay Novella?

  I had to pick, out of all the different sounds, I picked this one because I thought it was the most unique. Let me play it again. (whistling)

• 1:35:11Jay Novella?

  Very cool. Very cool instrument. I'm surprised it's not used in horror movies more. Maybe it is and I didn't realize it. Anyway, very cool. You know, thank you, Ram, for sending that in. I just never heard, I quite, never heard quite anything like that before. So I appreciate that a lot. I have a new noisy. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Tomas Madszewski. I can't just, I'll never not be there. Okay, here is the new noisy for this week.

• 1:35:52Jay Novella?

  Oh my God.

• 1:35:53Speaker 04

  Oh my, I don't know what it is, but I want one.

• 1:35:54Jay Novella?

  I know.

• 1:35:56Cara Santa Maria?

  That one's less, less freaky, probably because it's a baby. That's my guess.

• 1:36:01Jay Novella?

  All right. So if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you gotta email me, guys, if you hear something cool, because it really helps this, the who's that noisy segment flourish. Email me at [email protected]. And just as a reminder, the name of the segment is who's that noisy. It's not what's that sound? Or what the heck is it?

• 1:36:24Speaker 04

  Who said that?

• 1:36:25Jay Novella?

  What the heck is it? People, people write in the funniest names for this segment.

• 1:36:31Speaker 04

  I have a guess for WTF.

• 1:36:36Jay Novella?

  So Dr. Carl, right? This is a

• 1:36:38Speaker 04

  Yes, Australia.

• 1:36:39Jay Novella?

  A very accomplished science communicator from Australia who we've met many times. We've shot videos with him.

• 1:36:46Speaker 04

  Oh, he's fun.

• 1:36:47Jay Novella?

  He is, he is very funny. Very smart guy, by the way. Steve will be playing a promo that he made for us for this week's show, that will talk about the Australia Nauticon Conference that's happening in July. If you're interested in learning more, or you'd like to buy tickets, you can go to theskepticsguide.org. And we have an events button on the homepage that will take you to all the tickets that we have available right now.

• 1:37:11Speaker 07

  G'day, Dr Carl here, letting you know that I will be appearing at Not a Con 2026, from July 23rd to the 25th, at the Sydney Masonic Centre. What is a Not a Con? Well, it's not a convention, but it sort of is sort of-ish kinda. It's an interactive festival of ideas and games and audience participation by the Australian skeptics and the whole crew from The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, which is the number one skeptical podcast from the USA. The tickets are selling fast, with some types having already sold out. So, jump onto notaconcon.com or skeptics.com.au to find out more and book your place while you still can.

• 1:37:55Speaker 07

  Bring your brain, bring your mates, and I'll see you there. Peace, love, and green beans. Bye's.

• 1:38:00Speaker 02

  Going to do a quick named logical fallacy. This question comes from Theo, and he writes, "An addicted listener since 2006, whoa, and Patreon supporter for many years, your recent discussion about Lyme disease reminded me that I've often thought that I don't know a handy term to cover common cases that seem to have a lot in common with what informal logic is called undistributed middle term, namely the conclusion that shared properties argue for a strong link, even a shared identity. When there is sequence, we have post hoc, some cases are pareidolia, some cases of Texas sharpshooter fallacies seem close. Is there a more general informal term, though, one that would help explain, for example, a lot of conspiracy theories?

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  For example, the elders of Zion hold secret meetings, these powerful figures are holding secret meetings, therefore..." Dot, dot, dot. Theo. Alright, you guys understand the question. What is the informal logical fallacy when you use some, let's say, superficial or limited similarity between two people or groups or things to argue for a deeper connection?

• 1:39:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it like, is there something like an illusory, illusory connection or something like that?

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  I think it's simpler than that, to be honest.

• 1:39:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, really?

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  I mean, you can always slice and dice, you know, these informal logical fallacies, you know, this lumper splitter kind of thing, but I just think this is all a false analogy.

• 1:39:29Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  Right, that's what we mean by a false analogy. That's what you were getting at. That's what you mean by a false analogy. And either that, it just means that you're using an analogy problematically. Basically, you're saying, like, the example that he gave. Oh, these two things have this similarity. Therefore, that means they're similar in these other ways.

• 1:39:48Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  And also, there is the flip side to that where there's, I think, the denial of analogies that people... So, for example, I might say, you know, that A is analogous to B in this one respect. And then somebody says, "Yeah, but they're not analogous in this other way. Therefore, your analogy is false." It's like, "No, but I'm not saying that they're analogous in that other way. I'm saying that they're analogous in this one way." Like, all right, I'll give you an example. So, I've often said, like, there are similarities between organic biological evolution and technological evolution, right? They're similarly constrained, for example, and they have to follow through similar functional phases.

• 1:40:30Speaker 02

  So, like, someone saying that, like, what did our ancestors, you know, thousands of years ago have half an eye hanging out of their head? That wasn't functional. It's like, that's like saying people in the Middle Ages were dragging around half of a deer tractor. That's not how it works. That's not how evolution works, whether it's technological evolution or biological evolution. But then they'll say, "Yeah, but that's like, technology is intelligently designed." It's like, "Yeah, but you're missing the point. That's not the analogy that I'm making." You know what I mean? So, you could abuse analogies both ways. When you make an analogy, you're saying it's analogous in this way. It doesn't mean that it's analogous in any other way, or that it's not analogous in any other way.

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  It depends on the specific example that you're using.

• 1:41:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so I often will say, if I'm giving an analogy, I'll say, "It's not a perfect analogy." Because I use that premise because people will do that often.

• 1:41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, not saying this is a perfect analogy in every way, just in this one limited way. There's a similarity that is instructive, or that highlights something. But, yeah, the false analogy of, I mean, this happens all the time. Like, this just happened in the comments to my blog. It's like a cesspool of logical fallacies, if you're interested. By the way, I'll tell you the example and I'll tell you something else from my comments that's amazing. But, but one person was saying, "Oh, you know, you pick and choose which studies you believe to." So that's the same as, you know, this anti-vaxxer picking and choosing studies that he has to listen to. It's like, no, he's cherry picking studies. I'm analyzing studies for their quality and robustness and replicability. Ooh, here we go.

• 1:42:09Speaker 02

  You know, that's two completely different things, even though you superficially say, "Yes, you only believe some studies and not others." Right? Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right, but this is, that this, there is an anti-vaxxer I'm arguing with online, and he's dropped an argument that is astounding, because he's making a lot of assertions with no links to any studies to back up his completely false assertions. And then I counter them with a link to actual studies and systematic reviews and whatever. And as he said, like, what you never link to studies which support what you're misinformation. I wonder why that is. Guess what his reason was for not linking to the studies? I have no idea. Yeah, you could never guess this in a million years.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Because... He says, "Because there are none." Because, that's, that's the actual answer. But his answer was... But he'd never say it. Because if I did, then you and your cohort would scrub those studies from the internet to hide the truth. Whoa. Wow, you can do that, Steve? Yeah, right? You didn't know that? You're powerful. You have that pow- you have that superpower? I can... Oh, my gosh. You know, me and all other doctors in the world, we have a, you know, we get together online. Yeah, cabal. Oh, I read in the comments of my blog, a link to this study showing that vaccines are not safe. We all now have to scrub it from the internet. Okay. What the hell? That's a different level of... Yeah, that's a different level. Yeah. Right.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  All right. That's infuriating. Wow. Let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:43:56Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I have a theme this week. The theme is corals. Corals are fascinating. Corals. Corals. Coral. Coral. What TV show is that from?

• 1:44:17Speaker 04

  That's The Walking Dead. Walking Dead.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  Walking Dead. Coral. All right, what show is coral used as like cool? SpongeBob. SpongeBob, very good.

• 1:44:28Speaker 04

  Oh, very good.

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  That's so coral. All right. Here we go.

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  Let's bring that back.

• 1:44:34Speaker 02

  Item number one, corals are actually colonies of tiny animals known as polyps, each of which is similar to and closely related to jellies. Item number two, some living corals today grow on reef structures that have persisted for over 400,000 years. And item number three, corals get their nutrients from a combination of symbiotic algae, autotrophic, and feeding, heterotrophic, with different species varying from 100% autotrophic to 100% heterotrophic and everything in between. All right, Kara, go first.

• 1:45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so first and foremost, corals are colonies of tiny animals and the animals themselves are called polyps and they're related to jellies. So it's like a, this one has multiple parts. So I don't think you would write it so like that one part is science, but one little detail is fiction. So I'm sort of leaning towards this one being science, although I don't know how well corals are related to jellies. Some living corals today grow on reef structures that have persisted for over 400,000 years?

• 1:45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That seems bananas, but I don't know. I feel like all the damage that's happened to corals has happened in the last like 20 years, and maybe they've just been like thriving for a really long time. But of course, you're not saying that the living corals today are that old. You're just saying that the reef structures are that old. So basically, the calcium carbonate, like the dead part, is persistent and the new corals are populating it all the time. Oh, maybe. And then corals get their nutrients from a combination of symbiotic algae. Okay, so the definition of symbiotic algae would be that they're autotrophic. And then feeding would be that they're heterotrophic.

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so just to clarify, because this is kind of a lot of stuff. The algae make energy from sunlight, right? They photosynthesize and provide those nutrients to corals. But corals also eat, right? And that's heterotrophic. So they use some combination of the two, but different species are kind of all over the place in terms of the percentage of how much is from eating and how much is from the algae.

• 1:47:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I say they're all science?

• 1:47:01Speaker 02

  You can't if you want to automatically lose.

• 1:47:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh dang it, okay. I feel like this is all, could all be true.

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, right? I'm feeling the same way.

• 1:47:12Cara Santa Maria?

  This is really hard, so what am I missing here? Maybe they're not closely related to jellies. Like, maybe that is the thing that I didn't see? Are there any other details I could be missing? And when you say the reef structures have persisted, you mean kind of they've generally persisted? You're not saying they are exactly the same now as they were 400,000 years ago?

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  Well, they're growing things. They're always changing.

• 1:47:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  But, yeah, they're basically in the same place on the same reef for 400,000 years.

• 1:47:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:47:42Cara Santa Maria?

  In the same place on the same reef. And they get their nude and they're autotrophic and they're heterotrophic. But different species vary from 100% to 100% and everything in between. I guess that one has the most room to be wrong. So maybe there aren't any that are 100% autotrophic and 100% heterotrophic, but they're more mixed. I have no idea, but I'm just going to put my, not even a whole nickel. Maybe I'll put a penny down on that one.

• 1:48:11Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:48:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, pretty much agree with you on a lot of what you said here, Kara. Yeah, polyps and all that, that jives with my vague memory of exactly what's going on there. But the fact that they're closely related to jellies? I have no idea. Seems like they could be, but that could be way wrong. And the 400,000 year reef structure, that could absolutely be the fiction, because it's just like something that is not even close to anything I've ever heard about. But, I mean, I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if you said, yeah, they really only last for a few centuries type of thing. It wouldn't surprise me depending on climate and so many different things. Could, yeah, wait a second. I mean, I would think climate would have some big changes, but 400,000 years isn't

• 1:48:57Bob Novella?

  that, that long. Ah, I'm going to go with Kara, because this, the 100% autotrophic and 100% heterotrophic, I think, could easily be a place where it just never gets to those extremes. It's always a mix of sorts. So yeah, I guess I'll go with that. I'll put a penny and a half on that.

• 1:49:14Jay Novella?

  Okay, Jay. Yeah, I'm following the party line here. I mean, yeah, corals are, they're made up of, you know, the, the polyps. I don't clearly remember the name, but given that that's the name, yeah, that's, that's science to me without a doubt. You know, the jellyfish and sea enemies with, with the phylum? I, I call them sea enemies, Kara.

• 1:49:37Jay Novella?

  First off, didn't they change the word jellyfish to jellies?

• 1:49:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why I wrote jellies.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  Yes, jellies.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but people still use jellyfish all the time. I mean, I think-

• 1:49:46Speaker 04

  But they're wrong.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  I don't know. I think it's still, it's like a common name. Jellyfish is still a common name.

• 1:49:51Speaker 04

  Same with starfish.

• 1:49:52Jay Novella?

  All right. I think that one is science. Uh, the second one here about, uh, living corals and they persisted for over 400,000 years. I see no reason to think that they wouldn't, you know, and humans have done the most damage to, to them. So, you know, it could even be more than that, you know? Um, I say that one is science. You know, the third one is very out of my ken. I don't really have anything to apply it to, you know? I would think there would be quite a bit of variability, but since the other two seem so sciency to me, I'm just gonna go with these guys and say it's the fiction.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:50:26Speaker 04

  Good word, Jay. Ken, good word. I'm so glad I'm going last. I know so little about corals.

• 1:50:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Now you know even less.

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  Not coral, Evan. Not coral. Not coral.

• 1:50:43Speaker 04

  Related to jellies, huh? That's neat. I mean, yes, I knew about the colonies of tiny animals known as polyps. I also recall that. But like everyone else, the jellies comparison? Okay. And then the 400,000 years of structures? Sure. Don't they make artificial structures as well for coral to grow on? Is that a, is that an effort to restore coral? They put things in the ocean specifically that it can grow upon. So yeah, I think that one's right. And that by elimination leaves the number three, which is where everyone else went. I don't have any reason to, I have no information to go against that. So it's, we're all sinking or swimming once again.

• 1:51:26Speaker 02

  All right. So let's take these in order since you all agree. Uh, item number one, corals are actually colonies of tiny animals known as polyps, each of which is similar to and closely related to jellies or jellyfish, if you prefer. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science.

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's, it's, it's, you know, Jay, you're correct. The sea anemone is the other closely related type of animal. They're all nodarians, the same phylum, right? So corals are very closely related, you know, to, to, to jellies. In fact, if you, you know, the, the coral is just a colony of these little polyps, right? But each polyp kinda looks like a little jellyfish, right? If you look closely at it. Yeah. And in fact, obviously, jellies did not evolve from modern corals, but they share a common ancestor. And that common ancestor was probably something that was attached to

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  the ground that had polyps, right? And one of them, the polyp detached and remained free swimming. And that's a jellyfish, right? That's it. Oh. And in fact, they might, they're one of the earliest and might be the earliest mobile animal, the first animal to not be attached to the ocean floor. Neat. May have been. What a day that was, man. May have been jellyfish, yeah. So are we descendants of jellies? No, they're in a completely different column than we are. All right. But that's pretty cool. Very. Uh, all right. You guys have heard the joke with Franz, like this, who needs anemone? Oh, God.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  I haven't heard that in a long time. That's really bad.

• 1:53:10Speaker 02

  I love that so much. That's a good one, though. Isn't that, isn't that genre? That's a good one. All right. Let's go on to number two. Some living corals today grow on reef structures that have persisted for over 400,000 years. Coral! You all think this one is science, and this one is also science. So you got it.

• 1:53:30Jay Novella?

  Yay!

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  Back your way into it. You saved us, Kara. So yeah, so, um, yeah, so, you know, reefs are basically, as Kara said, that's what's left behind by corals, right? So you think of corals on the surface. As they grow, they leave behind these structures, these calcium carbonate structures, that's the reef. And some of these have persisted for very long periods of time. There are some Individual corals, like the corals themselves, may be thousands of years old. Like the living coral is continuously been growing for eight to 10,000 years. But the reef structures themselves go back 400 or more, maybe even 500,000 years old.

• 1:54:15Speaker 02

  Although that doesn't mean that the corals on top of them have been continuously growing for that whole time. There may have been some times when they were dying back, for example, depending on changes in climate, etc. But the structure itself remained intact and corals have been growing in that place on that basic structure for 400,000 years. All right. Which means that corals get their nutrients from a combination of symbiotic algae, autotrophic, and feeding, heterotrophic, with different species varying from 100% autotrophic to 100% heterotrophic and everything in between is the fiction. And I, damn it, I knew you were gonna say this was the fiction for the very reason that

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  you did, that it was the most complicated of the three. Because... You gummed your guts, Steve.

• 1:55:03Cara Santa Maria?

  What is the thing? What is the...

• 1:55:05Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 1:55:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I think, well, I said I think it's because maybe they're never 100%.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  100% what? All right, so...

• 1:55:14Cara Santa Maria?

  One of the two, I guess, not both.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  How much, so, corals are considered obligate mixotrophs, right? So, mixotrophs are partly autotrophic, partly heterotrophic. So, it's kind of, they're symbiotic plants and animals, right? It's a plant and an animal living together, a plant and algae, a photosynthetic algae. And the algae provides the energy, right? The sugars. But corals need other nutrients and that they have to get by eating. They can't get them from the algae. But if you are a coral in the deep sea... Too deep for photosynthesis, then you are 100% heterotrophic.

• 1:55:59Speaker 02

  So there are corals that are 100% heterotrophic, but there are no corals that are 100% autotrophic. Because even if you live in a shallow part of the ocean and you might be 95% autotrophic, you still need these other nutrients from feeding. So you still need to feed. Yeah, so I searched far and wide and specifically as there's no 100% autotrophic corals. They're all mixotrophs, except for the deep sea ones, which are 100% heterotrophs. Because there's no sunlight down there to have the photosynthesis. But that's cool that they get their, they're both plants and animals, basically. They get their food from both photosynthesis and eating.

• 1:56:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That's very cool.

• 1:56:40Speaker 02

  How many other things do that?

• 1:56:42Bob Novella?

  Isn't Rocky, doesn't Rocky kind of do that?

• 1:56:45Speaker 02

  Carnivorous plants do that, I guess. Do Venus flytraps do that?

• 1:56:50Bob Novella?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 1:56:51Speaker 04

  Do they eat flies for, it's nutrient? That's a nutrient source for them.

• 1:56:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they don't do it for shits and giggles.

• 1:56:58Cara Santa Maria?

  For our amusement. And there's other ones. There's like pitcher plants. There's a lot of plants that are carnivorous.

• 1:57:03Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Some of them are beautiful. What about Rocky from Hail Mary, Steve?

• 1:57:10Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't think he's photosynthetic, is he?

• 1:57:13Bob Novella?

  Well, it can't be because it's not sunlight. But he's got a mix of creatures inside of him that, something about that.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not sure what the relevance is for corals, but sure. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:57:27Speaker 04

  We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon.

• 1:57:31Speaker 02

  You're not going to do the accent?

• 1:57:33Speaker 04

  Oh, you want me to?

• 1:57:34Speaker 02

  I'm just asking. I mean, just, I was a little disappointed.

• 1:57:37Speaker 04

  Okay, well, I wasn't going to, you know.

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  You don't have to.

• 1:57:43Speaker 04

  I could do it. All right, let me try with the accent.

• 1:57:47Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:57:48Speaker 04

  "We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too."

• 1:58:14Speaker 02

  Very good.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy, thank you, thank you. I hope I did not insult.

• 1:58:19Bob Novella?

  No, you did a good job, although I did hear a little bit of Littlefinger from Game of Thrones in there, but that was good.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  Oh, thank you. But, no, I have never seen Game of Thrones, so I was not drawing from any inspiration there.

• 1:58:33Speaker 02

  Did you just say you never saw Game of Thrones?

• 1:58:36Speaker 04

  And that'll be it for this week. Tune in next week on The Skeptic's Guide to the-

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  We have to have a conversation, Evan.

• 1:58:42Speaker 04

  Oh, no.

• 1:58:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I never saw Game of Thrones.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  Thank you, Karen, you saved me.

• 1:58:46Speaker 02

  What are you waiting for? Oh, my God.

• 1:58:48Speaker 04

  I heard something about a Starbucks coffee cup.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  It's a last season to be redone, I think.

• 1:58:53Speaker 04

  Is that a spoiler alert?

• 1:58:54Speaker 02

  It's a great show. It is a great show.

• 1:58:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:59:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:59:01Bob Novella?

  Thanks, Steve. Sure, man.

• 1:59:06Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:52Speaker 08

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