The Skeptics Guide #1034 - May 3 2025

Interview with Melanie Trecek-King; News Items: Internet Fakes and Violence, Lab Grown Teeth, RFK On Autism, AI Designed Instruments; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Big Bang Miracle; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, April 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:53Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:55Speaker 05

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:57Jay Novella?

  Hey, Steve, you know that May, particularly May 4th, is Star Wars Day, right?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, may the fourth be with you.

• 1:04Jay Novella?

  There's a few things happening all at once. So this, this show comes out on May 3rd, which is one day before Star Wars Day. It also is our 20-year anniversary.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15Jay Novella?

  And

• 1:16Speaker 05

  Holy crap.

• 1:17Jay Novella?

  The Volanot Airbike looks like the speeder from Return of the Frickin' Jedi. It's real. It's real.

• 1:24Speaker 05

  Oh, my God. Way to lump all those into one phrase.

• 1:28Cara Santa Maria?

  So this is like a, it's like a hovercraft moped?

• 1:32Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  No, it's not, it's not really a moped. I mean, it's a hoverbike.

• 1:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a bike, though.

• 1:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38Speaker 02

  It looks like it's a speeder. It does look like a speeder.

• 1:41Speaker 05

  It looks like the speeder from episode six, The Return of the Jedi.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Which was an excellent marketing decision on their part.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  No doubt, because they, they did this in the, in the forest, among the trees and things. How could you not think of that when you're watching this video?

• 1:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I do kind of feel like I've been on one of those hoverbikes this whole week that I've been in Vietnam, because we have been riding around on a scooter in the most insane scooter traffic you can imagine.

• 2:08Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 2:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It would be nice to be able to go over the head of the scooter in front of us periodically, I think. Although what I don't like about these hovercraft is that they're basically like leaf blow, like vertical leaf blowers?

• 2:20Jay Novella?

  Well, so what? That's how they go around.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this is Volanot. They did, they came out with their promotional video. It, it looks damn impressive, but yes, you could see the, the blast of air below the bike as it's going over the ground. Uh, would not be pleasant, I imagine, like in an urban, uh, or residential environment.

• 2:38Jay Novella?

  We haven't developed anti-gravity yet. Could you give this company a break? This thing is freaking awesome.

• 2:43Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but here's the thing, like, how feasible is this technology really? If you have to blast everything directly underneath it? If the whole point is that you not, you want to be able to go over top of things?

• 2:53Speaker 05

  But what other technology exists that mitigates that?

• 2:57Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no, but that's not the right question. Do we need this?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  It, uh, it looks to me, honestly, I don't think this is for commuting to work. This is a recreational vehicle.

• 3:08Cara Santa Maria?

  So long as it remains like an ATV kind of off-roady. Like here, go, go on dirt paths and have fun. But this doesn't seem like it's going to be great for the environment and it definitely is not going to be good for any commuters underneath it.

• 3:21Speaker 05

  Well, it's electric. It's not like it's pouring, it's not gas or petroleum based.

• 3:25Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but it's blasting all the foliage it's going over.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Well, the, the most of the video I'm looking at, it's, it's in like the desert. It's like over sand.

• 3:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 3:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But you see the video where there's a little bit of like tree something and there's just like, like leaf bits flying everywhere.

• 3:40Speaker 05

  Yes, as if you took a leaf blower to it.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Here, there, there, um, he's going over like gravelly terrain and from one camera angle, you see rocks flying all over.

• 3:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Just like shipped windshields left and right.

• 3:56Jay Novella?

  I, I think you guys are missing the, the whole point of this thing.

• 3:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I am missing the point, Jay. This is why, uh, it's so fun to have us as a group.

• 4:05Jay Novella?

  200 kilometers an hour, 124 miles an hour, this thing can go.

• 4:08Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh. You better hold on.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  What range?

• 4:12Jay Novella?

  Um, I'm looking for it. I'm not seeing it. Um, it's seven times lighter. It's seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle.

• 4:18Speaker 05

  How could it hold the fuel, Bob? It wouldn't, I don't know that it could get itself, propel itself if it had to hold the weight of that fuel.

• 4:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it has to be lighter than a typical motorcycle or it wouldn't get off the ground.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  I bet you it's like five, 10 minutes.

• 4:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, 20 minutes, maybe something like that.

• 4:32Speaker 02

  But we'll see.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  But again, this is, this is version, you know, 1.0, you know? And like all these other vehicles that are coming down this path, they, they, they intend to, you know, be able to increase their range.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  No time soon is this going to be used for actually, you know, traveling from point A to

• 4:49Cara Santa Maria?

  If at all.

• 4:51Speaker 02

  If this is, yeah, I said, if at all. This is a recreational vehicle. The only other, just sort of brainstorm, the only other application I could imagine for it would be military. You know, if you need to-

• 5:01Speaker 05

  Yes, search and rescue. Search and rescue. Search and rescue, definitely.

• 5:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Great for that. Or needing to traverse, you know, something that's not traversable. Like, you're on some sort of vehicle and then you need to fly over something so that you can continue whatever you're doing.

• 5:18Jay Novella?

  It says it's jet propulsion, so it might not be electric.

• 5:21Speaker 05

  Ooh, really? Jet propulsion?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  What does that mean, though?

• 5:25Jay Novella?

  Well, you know, we don't know. There's just not enough information.

• 5:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, does that mean jet fuel, or does that just mean-

• 5:30Speaker 05

  It says seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, thanks to advanced use of carbon fiber materials, 3D printing, and minimalistic approach. That, that-

• 5:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So not because of-

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Sounds electric to me.

• 5:41Jay Novella?

  So more importantly, will they sell a kit to make it look like the speeder from Return of the Jedi?

• 5:47Speaker 05

  That'll be the first kit that comes out, yes.

• 5:51Jay Novella?

  Because that-

• 5:52Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh.

• 5:53Jay Novella?

  That is something that I want. There's not many things out there that I want at this point in my life.

• 5:58Speaker 02

  It looks super fun, gotta say that.

• 5:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:00Jay Novella?

  I'd rent one. I would definitely rent that and check it out.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  There might be places like where you go and you pay 20 bucks to get a five minute ride.

• 6:08Speaker 05

  You go to Las Vegas, right? They have a spot out in the desert. A bunch of people jump on these things for whatever, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, and you take it up for 10.

• 6:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't they already have like a water version of this, though, that's been around for ages that like nobody uses and is not for sale?

• 6:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah. I wonder how high it can go, too. I would imagine that-

• 6:27Speaker 05

  Make a water hose.

• 6:28Cara Santa Maria?

  As the resident wet blanket of the group, um-

• 6:32Speaker 05

  No, it's okay. We need you to keep us, keep us honest and prevent us from buying-

• 6:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Keep you grounded.

• 6:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  I agree. This is- This is a product looking for a function, right? They're like, not filling any need. It's just, we can do it. It's cool.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a solution to a problem we don't have. Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 05

  But look at the video.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  As I said.

• 6:54Speaker 05

  I mean, that is an impressive.

• 6:55Speaker 02

  And you know, I gotta say. Maybe some niche things like search and rescue or storming a castle.

• 7:01Jay Novella?

  It's about freaking time, too. I mean, come on.

• 7:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Jay Novella?

  We've been watching all of these products come and go and they're like, this is gonna do this and that and everything. This thing looks like it's ready to go.

• 7:10Cara Santa Maria?

  We'll see.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Looks like it's working.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  I wonder if you could fit a ballistic parachute in it?

• 7:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I will say, one thing that's so strange to me being here. So I'm in Vietnam right now. I'm in a really remote kind of area outside of Lang Kho, which is somewhat near, about an hour from Da Nang. I know that's terrible pronunciation, but I don't speak Vietnamese, which is near Hoi An and Hoi. Jay, when you first introduced this, you said three things, right? You talked about our anniversary. You talked about this hover bike and then you mentioned the date. So, and Steve, when you introduced the show at April 30th, it was like really jarring for me because again, I am in the future, which really weirds me out for some reason.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  You're on May 1st.

• 7:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, it's May 1st where I am. And I realized when I was coordinating getting home, that I arrive home before I leave.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 8:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so weird.

• 8:05Bob Novella?

  Friggin' cool.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  That's a great quirk.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  But you're just getting back time that you lost.

• 8:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm just getting back time that, yeah, because I got here two days after I left. That's true. But yeah, Jay, I definitely had one of those like, what time is it in the North Pole moments?

• 8:18Jay Novella?

  Oh my God. I still think about that from time to time.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  All right, well, let's, we have a good interview coming up later in the show, but let's get started with our news items. Carrie, you're gonna start us off with internet fakes and their effects on public violence.

• 8:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so this is a really interesting article that I stumbled across. It was recently published in Information, Communication and Society. It's, that's an open access journal, or maybe it's not, but the, at least the article itself is. Open Access, published by a group out of Notre Dame and a couple of other kind of allied universities called Visual Narratives and Political Instability, a case study of visual media prior to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. So these researchers who wrote about it in the conversation, one of them is a professor of engineering at Notre Dame and the other is

• 9:18Cara Santa Maria?

  a professor of peace studies and global politics. They were interested in kind of investigating a new way to maybe not predict, but to understand violence and mass conflict by looking at propaganda online. And apparently, using AI, which many researchers have been using because it allows you to comb through just like mass quantities of of big data. Oftentimes, when we use AI, we're relying only on written text because it's much easier for these models to be able to comb

• 10:01Cara Santa Maria?

  through all this written text and categorize it or understand it. But as we know, when things go viral, what's usually going viral?

• 10:10Speaker 05

  Videos of cats?

• 10:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Videos of cats, that's one of them. Yeah, but like visual imagery, right? We're usually seeing like memes with photographs or drawings. And there might be some text included, but there's not even always text necessary to convey a pretty complex kind of political message. And so what they're interested in understanding is how memes or how these different online propaganda approaches promote, this is how they list it, promote beliefs and goals, gain support, dehumanize opponents, justify violence, and create doubt or dismiss inconvenient facts. And so, again, because these these different technologies are more and more

• 10:57Cara Santa Maria?

  sophisticated, like these deep fakes are getting better and better. AI is still pretty good at understanding this image is manipulated versus this image is genuine, but what it struggles with is understanding context. So an example that they use is, you know, they already know how to program to track posts online that say something like, quote, and this is the example they use, Ukrainians are Nazis. But what's harder is to find images of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia on them. Does that make sense? Like, it's just tougher for them to be able to comb through that. So combined with AI, they used basically a team of computer scientists and social scientists,

• 11:42Cara Santa Maria?

  and they looked at a massive, massive kind of trove of data. So what they did for this, it's sort of like a proof of concept study, it's a case study, is they looked at accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers. Have you guys heard that term mill blogger before?

• 12:00Speaker 05

  No. Yes, I have.

• 12:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like a, like a...

• 12:02Speaker 05

  We mentioned it when, back in 21... Like a blogging sweatshop kind of thing?

• 12:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, basically, mm-hmm, like a propaganda sort of machine. So these mill bloggers, they specifically focused on Telegram, which is a messaging app. Well, it's much more than that. They combed through the accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers. So they came out with about 6 million posts, including about 3 million images. And then they analyzed them in a detailed way by categorizing them, timestamping them, and then using a suite of AI tools that could detect image manipulation. So they were able to know if the image was changed. And then they also used actual people, physical people, to try and understand the

• 12:48Cara Santa Maria?

  context, and they put that information together. They use a couple of examples in the conversation write-up. Like, for example, there's an anti-Putin journalist, actually an ex-Russian soldier named Arkady Babchenko, and they show, so, so apparently Ukrainian security services...

• 13:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Faked his death to expose an assassination plot against him. And so because his death was faked and that was discovered. This there's a meme of him wearing like a T shirt that says gamers don't die, they respawn. Right. And the idea here is to kind of like A be be quote unquote funny. Be so division and kind of increase that that distrust that was already starting to form. And they show other examples as well, doctored images of political officials from Ukraine, spending time in in kind of more like submissive positions with Western leaders. And also we mentioned kind of the notsification, which is very kind of low hanging fruit, classic online meme. And and here's the big takeaway.

• 13:55Cara Santa Maria?

  So they found, this is really, really interesting, that leading up to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. I think in the two weeks, yeah, only two weeks leading up to it. There was a 9,000% increase in the number of posts that were just produced by these, you know, nearly 1,000 Russian mill bloggers and a 5,000% increase in manipulated images from these Russian mill bloggers. They could only figure that out, yeah, by actually screening to see what was manipulated.

• 14:28Speaker 05

  They would do things like take footage of prior incidents that didn't even have anything to do with that conflict and re-tag them and basically call it current. That was a very popular method that they would employ quite a bit.

• 14:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And we see that now, we see that, you know, in our kind of American political discourse right now. All the time. Yeah, you'll see like some sort of march or some sort of rally. And it turns out that wasn't even in the same country or it was from three years previous for a different reason. So basically what they were trying to proof of concept in this in this study was how can we analyze this visual content? How can we understand it contextually? Because that's the really kind of sophisticated portion that they show in this study. AI just simply can't do yet. It can't look at an image and understand the underlying propaganda message.

• 15:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And understand how it might sow division, how it might dehumanize, how it might increase distrust. But what they also showed, which is really interesting, and they they did not. It's not that they didn't explain why it's at the point of the study was not to try and understand why. But that this massive spike two weeks prior to the invasion was meaningful. I mean, it was like deeply statistically significant. And so, you know, as the title implies, memes and conflict study shows surge of imagery and and fakes can precede international and political violence. You know, whether it's a chicken and egg situation, whether these mill bloggers knew knew what was coming.

• 16:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And they were trying to increase, I guess, in some ways intentionally increase support from the citizenship. Or whether there was a lockstep kind of unrest that was occurring amongst the people that helped, I guess. I codify, maybe that's not quite the right word, but justify the military action. You know, we don't, we don't know the cause and effect here. But what we do know is that prior to a breaking point, in this situation at least. Where violence erupted in a meaningful way. There was a lot of online chatter and a lot of sowing of distrust and a lot of just.

• 16:44Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, negative memes that were being flown all around the Internet. And so this may be a way, as the authors argue, to predict conflict, to predict unrest. And to understand better where those thresholds and those breaking points are in in a real world way. Like, like a measurable kind of geopolitical conflict way. We may be able to take that temperature online, just in terms of the quantity of this type of chatter. Um, it's it's disheartening, it's scary, it's but it's also fascinating. And I think could be incredibly useful for promoting peace.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  It reminds me a little bit of that show Person of Interest, which features.

• 17:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I never saw it.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  An AI just surveying the Internet and seeing patterns. The kind of contrived bit was that for reasons of confidentiality, whatever, you know, you can't, you know, violate people's privacy. So it was skirting the laws on privacy by not telling the police, oh, this person is going to murder that person. So you better do something about it. They it would just spit out a social security number and say, this is a person of interest.

• 17:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I see.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  And then the police had to figure out who was going to kill who and why and when, you know, and then and then keep it from happening. But it was just the basic idea of you have it artificial intelligence, you know, monitoring all internet traffic and picking up on these patterns and predicting what's going to happen, which I think is highly plausible.

• 18:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it's I it's already it's already.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  It's already happening.

• 18:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, yeah, these researchers could do it with probably minimal clearance. So you can imagine that these NSA programs, I mean, we've we've been talking about this for decades. These NSA programs that are collecting large data from citizens and, you know, they would claim, oh, we only look at the metadata. And whether that's true or not, uh.

• 18:38Speaker 02

  It's bullshit. I mean, Amazon, what do I want to buy? I mean, how does it know that?

• 18:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, exactly. And that and there's also a big difference.

• 18:45Speaker 05

  That's what my relatives are shopping for and it hits me with it. How does it know I'm even related to these people? Of course, they look.

• 18:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But I do, we have to be careful because what we're conflating here is like a is like a national security military spying on your own citizens, big brother thing versus a monetary.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  But they have the data.

• 19:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Capitalist, of course. It exists. And we have probably, in the terms and conditions, given them permission to do this already.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Oh, no doubt.

• 19:09Jay Novella?

  They hear everything they say.

• 19:11Speaker 05

  Including this?

• 19:13Jay Novella?

  I mean, you know, it's no mystery. Like, our phones are constantly monitoring what we say. I mean.

• 19:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, when you say what we say, you mean in multiple ways. You don't mean physically our voices. You mean all the things we're saying with our internet activity, right?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  Well, I think he meant with you meant.

• 19:27Jay Novella?

  No, I meant that our phones are here, you know, we have, we have Alexa devices and Google, Google devices in our phones. Their phones are, you know, know where we are at all times, you know.

• 19:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So through all these different, yeah. And you're right, they do physically listen to our voices, too, through things like Alexa and Siri. We do have a microphone there. Yeah, whether it's listening in the background, I think you're right, we've yet to fully.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's listening in the background enough that it gets activated when you say, like, okay, Google, it gets activated.

• 19:55Cara Santa Maria?

  True, true, true, true.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  That what's probably the most disturbing thing is how comfortable we're getting. With all of this.

• 20:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's, that's part of why I have a level, and this feels a little weird. Talking about this in a hotel room in Vietnam, prior to hopefully gaining reentry to my country, where I am a natural born citizen in, in only a few days, but having been in China and Hong Kong. Because one of the reasons that I feel a little bit of just discomfort when I travel to China is the normalcy of, and maybe it's just because it's much more out in front. Like the same kind of stuff is happening in the background in a lot of Western countries.

• 20:39Cara Santa Maria?

  But the normalcy and the comfort level of like, large monitoring and of having all of your banking transactions on the same app across the whole country in a closed way. And being behind this great firewall and having facial recognition. Yeah, to get into your apartment building and swiping the same card for all of the transit. And that's not to say that it's not like that in the US. Maybe we just have more of a sheen of privacy and more of a, whereas there's just sort of an openness to that quote, big brother vibe, but I definitely, when I'm in China, I do feel a little like I'm in a Black Mirror episode. And that's, that's an uncomfortable feeling for me.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Very bad way.

• 21:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but again, I don't know how much of that is, is a real difference or just a feeling difference between all these nations at this point.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  Isn't that the point? How can you know?

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  I think it's a real difference. It's both.

• 21:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's both. You're right. There, there is a demonstrably, you know, measurable difference. But I do think that we sometimes assume that while we have a lot of freedoms, which are, you know, question, we can question whether or not they're dwindling, but that we have a lot of freedoms in, in like the United States, for example, and other Western nations.

• 21:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Comparatively, exactly. I think we often conflate freedom with lack of oversight. And that's just not, I don't think we can do that anymore.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Two quick things. One is just to make a point when I just said, okay, Google, a minute ago, my phone popped up with the assistant and it just.

• 22:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, how did you undo that after?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  And then. And then the microphone pops up, listening to what I'm saying. And the other thing is, since you mentioned Black Mirror, the new season is out and it's awesome.

• 22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I need to watch when I get home.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  So good.

• 22:23Bob Novella?

  So good, man. I'm still working my way through.

• 22:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess I could watch here on a VPN.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  First episode is brutal, but it's brutal in that Black Mirror, like just a very realistic, like uncomfortably realistic way. Anyway.

• 22:39Bob Novella?

  Totally believable.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. The fact that it was believable is what made it so brutal.

• 22:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the, yeah, that's, that's so many of those episodes. It's like, oh,

• 22:48Cara Santa Maria?

  we are right on the precipice of this. Or I'm, I can feel it because like five out of the 10 aspects of this episode have already happened.

• 22:57Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God. I mean, like, we're literally saying, guys, that our reality here in the United States is kind of similar to Black Mirror now.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a quasi-documentary.

• 23:07Jay Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It's terrifying. I'm reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler right now. Aren't you guys proud of me? I'm reading sci-fi?

• 23:16Speaker 02

  Proud of you.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 23:17Bob Novella?

  Liz, you gotta talk to Liz about that character.

• 23:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and part of the reason that this, this book is like such a bestseller, impression. I mean, granted, she wrote about it in the 90s. It's not like it's, you know, hundreds of years old, but she, it takes place today. That's what's the weird thing is you're reading these journal entries like labeled 2025, 2026, and you're like, oh, this might be where we're going. But.

• 23:39Bob Novella?

  Isn't there someone who specifically says, make America great again?

• 23:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I haven't gotten to that part yet, but yeah, I think so. It may not be in the Sower, but there's, um, yeah, because it's a, it's a, what's a duology? That's not a thing. It's a two-part book series.

• 23:55Cara Santa Maria?

  But, but part of the reason that I think these kinds of books are so jarring and things like Black Mirror are so hard is that Octavia Butler didn't sit down and come up with something fantastic. She was like, mm, you know, a few left turns and this is where we could be.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 05

  We're always on a.

• 24:12Jay Novella?

  And we took those left-hand turns.

• 24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  We did.

• 24:15Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I, I think even she would have been shocked at where we're at right now.

• 24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, she probably didn't expect it to happen so soon.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Let's move on. Jay, tell us about lab-grown teeth.

• 24:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, thanks, Jay.

• 24:26Speaker 05

  Oh, cool.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we'll.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Do they get up and walk around?

• 24:30Jay Novella?

  We'll click over to something a little bit more positive.

• 24:32Speaker 05

  Click over.

• 24:33Jay Novella?

  So, guys, what was your worst dental experience?

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I don't know. I haven't really had any. They're all about the same. I haven't had any.

• 24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm a great dentist.

• 24:42Speaker 05

  And it was not fun.

• 24:44Jay Novella?

  I had a root canal. Yeah, some teeth cleaning is gonna be brutal.

• 24:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't root canals, from what I understand, and I've never had a root canal, but my dentist, I almost had to have one. My dentist told me they feel the same as when you have to get a deep, like cavity drilled out. The only difference is your pocketbook, like they cost three times as much.

• 25:03Jay Novella?

  I had, I had one and it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated. You know, I'd say it was worse than, than a typical cleaning.

• 25:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, than a cleaning, but not than a filling, right? Like if you have to get the shots and get the drilling and get like a partial or a crown or something.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  You know what I don't like about dentistry in general? I don't like being prone for long periods of time like that. And I have gone through things like, I remember when I had my braces and I had to have all those impressions done and things like that. It's felt like hours that I had to remain in that chair and my head tilted a certain way and don't move and do this. And, oh, I hate that constraint.

• 25:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it the body being, for me, it's the gag, it's like the holding your mouth open and trying not to like choke on your own spit.

• 25:48Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I hate that.

• 25:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's the breathing through your nose and trying not to gag the whole time. That's what bothers me.

• 25:54Jay Novella?

  Well, there are a lot of people, guys, you know, the, the world is filled with people that are having dental nightmares. You gotta take care of your teeth and you gotta do it every freaking day. It's a, it is a lot of work and it's a commitment. I'm trying to train my kids right now to like really want to do it.

• 26:09Bob Novella?

  Ah, they don't have to. They got these tooth replacement things coming up, man.

• 26:14Jay Novella?

  But, but the point, the point is though, there are, you know, we're lucky that we haven't had really bad dental surgery and stuff. There's a lot of things that people have to go through in order to have some semblance of teeth in their mouth.

• 26:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, my mom has implants and things like that. It's funny, she's in her mid 70s and she like refuses, she does not want dentures, right? So she's, uh, every time she has a tooth problem, she has to go through the implant thing. You guys know about these where you get like the post and you've got the bone graft and it's gotta heal? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:43Jay Novella?

  So the point is that these researchers that I'm about to talk to you about, the vision that they have is one day you'd go to the dentist and you know, they're not going to be giving you fillings or giving you these hardcore implants and stuff like that. That they're going to do something where your body regrows a legitimate biological tooth that occupies that space and it is a tooth. That's it. It's a new tooth. So their long-term goal is that you know, the researchers at King's College London, they recently developed a new type of hydrogel that is a key factor in supporting the growth of teeth from stem cells in the lab.

• 27:22Jay Novella?

  And the study that they published, it was published in ACS macro letters and it marks, I would consider this to be a significant step towards biological tooth replacement using their regenerative tissue engineering. So this is significant. Again, you know, we're not talking about you're going to go out and get this next year at the dentist. Like this is a step, but this was a big one. This was a really important step that they made. Today, tooth loss is treated with, you know, the interventions like fillings and crowns and implants. You know, they work, right? You know, some of us have, you know, I definitely had to get a root canal as well, you know, and I've been hyper taking care of my teeth my whole life. It just, you know, it can happen to anybody.

• 28:07Jay Novella?

  But these treatments, of course, you know, they work, but they have limitations. You know, fillings, they weaken over time and you could need to get them replaced. It's not uncommon for people to get their fillings replaced. You know, implants that people get, they can fail. And that is actually more common than I think most people who don't get implants don't realize that they do and can fail. And none of them really are restoring the structure or the real function of real teeth. Right? You know, you get a root canal and now you have a numb spot in your mouth, right? Like you have, you know, those teeth are no longer registering the information that all the other teeth in your mouth give you, right? Your teeth actually give you quite a bit of information about temperature and, you know, chewing sensation and everything.

• 28:50Jay Novella?

  The study's co-author, Dr. Zhu Chenzhang, said fillings and implants are stop-gap measures, but they don't regenerate, they don't grow, and they don't integrate like natural tissue. And in nature, tooth development, it begins in the embryo through a complex exchange of chemical signals between two types of stem cells. Steve, you've probably heard of these. You have the epithel and the menzochemal.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Muzenkemal.

• 29:17Jay Novella?

  Muzenkemal, yeah, it's a tough word, huh? So these are two different types of stem cells that are set into motion in an embryo, and that eventually turn into teeth. And there's a very specific environment that teeth need to grow in. There's actually quite a complex thing going on for teeth to do what they do. So these cells that I mentioned, these two different types of cells, they self-organize into a tooth bud, and they progress through these developmental stages, right? It starts with a bud, then there's a cap, and then eventually, you know, the bell will grow, and then they're forming the layers and structure of a complete tooth. And it absolutely doesn't just happen.

• 29:59Jay Novella?

  It needs a specific environment, and it has to be coaxed by the body in order for it to work. So the researchers had to replicate this process in the lab, and it requires more than just putting the right cells together. It requires the right environment, and they came up with something that mimics the body's extracellular matrix, which supports the cell viability and enables this slow coordinated signaling necessary for the tissue growth to take place. And that's where this hydrogel stuff comes into play. The researchers at King's College London, they created this special gel-like material that's made from gelatin that acts as a support structure for growing teeth in the lab. So they used a chemical technique called click chemistry to connect parts of the gel

• 30:44Jay Novella?

  in a precise way using two ingredients, tetrazine and norberine. Have you guys heard of those two chemicals?

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:52Jay Novella?

  Right, okay, so there's these two chemicals, ingredients that they're using to make this happen. So by changing how much gelatin they used and adjusting the balance of the tetrazine and the norbamine, they were able to control how stiff or soft the gel was and how much it could swell and how quickly it released the signals to the cells inside, right? You get a picture here, so it's like a lattice that they have control over where they can regulate its stiffness and, you know, how well the, how firm it is, how much support it's giving. And this was like a thing where they were like just trying to get it through this particular keyhole, so it works perfectly with how these, how these two stem cells

• 31:37Jay Novella?

  need to grow in order to successfully produce a tooth. Now, the physical traits turned out to be critical here, right? Softer gels gave the dental stem cells room to talk to each other and arrange themselves into early tooth-like structures, which are called tooth organoids. I've never heard of that before. Tooth organoids.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  Well, you've heard of organoids because you've talked about it on the show.

• 31:58Jay Novella?

  Of course, I've heard of organoids, but tooth organoids. It's like, you know, it's like a doll that I would play with or a kid's, a boy's toy from the 90s, you know what I mean?

• 32:08Speaker 05

  Heard of cavity creeps.

• 32:09Jay Novella?

  Remember the Micronauts? You guys remember those?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 32:12Jay Novella?

  Tooth organoids. I don't remember that. So gels that were too stiff made it harder for the cells to...

• 32:17Speaker 05

  That's okay, Karen.

• 32:18Jay Novella?

  All right, so they tested all different types of gels and different, and changing the stiffness of these gels. And what they found was if the gel was too stiff, it made it harder for the cells to develop properly. So the best results came from a gel that was made with 8% gelatin and a 0.5 to 1 ratio of the tetrazine and the norbamine.

• 32:42Jay Novella?

  Within eight days, this setup that they came up with consistently produced organized cell structures that showed the early building blocks of real teeth. And that is it, right there. And that is, that is the incredible feat that they did. You know, it's easy for me to talk about this, and you know, basically talking here for a couple of minutes, about something that was an incredible amount of time and energy and research that it took to get to the point where they realized the environment that needed to be there and how to simulate that environment. The researchers confirmed that the tooth organoid formation was happening using a couple of techniques, histological staining and fluorocyan imaging, right? These are just ways for them to be able to kind of see what's going on inside of the, of the gel.

• 33:26Jay Novella?

  Only the softer hydrogel group produced organized structures that had both of the two types of stem cells needed, and they also were able to detect that they were interacting properly. And this indicated that the scaffolding that they created successfully replicated the signaling environment of natural tooth formation, because stem cells need to communicate with the environment that they're in, and other stem cells, in order to do the things that they do, to build basically any part of our biology. So when you think about it, to grow a tooth, there's a little microcosm universe that has to exist there in order for everything to be just right, in order for the cells to function the proper way to do what we want them to do.

• 34:09Jay Novella?

  So this was a very difficult thing that they pulled off. Now, the hydrogels that had higher stiffness produced either poorly organized tissue, or they failed to generate the tooth organoids at all, right? They couldn't, it just didn't work. So the conclusion here is that the physical characteristics of the hydrogel scaffolding that they, they were able to figure out, it directly impacted the developmental outcomes. And therefore, and the good news is, now that they can go on to the next step, with moving on to the next phase here, which is actually going to be to fully grow the tooth. So, the, the team said that they haven't implanted any lab-grown teeth until a living subject yet, but their work demonstrates, they basically created a bioengineered tooth.

• 34:52Jay Novella?

  At least in the early stages, it's possible. And this was the hard part. This was the part I think that if this didn't work, nothing was gonna work. And they were able to actually make it happen, which is fantastic. So the next round of research will focus on developing methods to transplant these organoids into the jaw and guide their full full maturation into a functional tooth. So, I don't know, man, it doesn't sound like it's that that far away. You know, hopefully, once they do this, the body will take over and actually finish the job. According to the authors of the study, though, they said this approach could definitely someday offer a biological alternative to regular dental procedures. You go into the dentist, they probably would have to take samples of your biology to

• 35:37Jay Novella?

  to, you know, grow the culture, say, like, you know, to get that beginning thing happening. And then they, it's like, it's like a little implant that they put in there that you probably can't even feel because it's tiny.

• 35:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but in your jaw.

• 35:47Jay Novella?

  And they pop it in there. Yeah, hell yeah, Bob. They pop it in there and like, you know what? They take out, they take out the root canal, they pop this in there. And, you know, I don't know how long it would take, but you, for your body to grow a tooth. But imagine a tooth just comes up and out of your gum and you've got a new tooth.

• 36:04Bob Novella?

  That, yeah, but Jay, it may be functional. But my question is, is it aesthetic? Is it just like some freaky snaggletooth that works? But you don't want to smile because it's like, what's happening in there?

• 36:17Jay Novella?

  The real question, Bob, is can you grow vampire teeth?

• 36:20Bob Novella?

  Or shark teeth.

• 36:21Jay Novella?

  Yes, or shark teeth. Imagine they just keep folding out like shark teeth? That would be freaking awesome. All right, but all kidding aside. I know I'm being enthusiastic about this, but I happen to be like, I'm a big toothbrusher and teeth. You know, I take care of my teeth. I take care of my teeth. You know what I mean? I really do. I, you know, there's nothing better than having a clean mouth and dental. You know, having your dentistry, your, your, your mouth be healthy is very important. Lots of things can go wrong in your health if you don't have healthy teeth. And, you know, it's, it's been documented, you know, they're saying that heart disease could be affected by the health of your, your teeth and the cleanliness and, you know. You get cavities and you have like, you know, that going on in your mouth. Not only does it give you bad breath, but it is a health risk.

• 37:07Jay Novella?

  So I just think this is awesome. I really hope that, you know, my kids at least

• 37:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, man.

• 37:11Jay Novella?

  get to experience this if they ever have any major problems, which everyone will. You know, most people have some type of thing go wrong. You know, you can't really get through, unless you're like a complete, completely religiously, like going in there and flossing and taking care of your teeth.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 37:26Jay Novella?

  From childhood.

• 37:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But even then, yeah, even then it doesn't always matter because a lot of this stuff is genetic.

• 37:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 37:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Jay Novella?

  I had a-

• 37:34Speaker 02

  What bacteria you happen to have living in your mouth?

• 37:36Jay Novella?

  I asked my-

• 37:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 37:37Jay Novella?

  The last time I got a tooth cleaning, well, I've talked to the hygienist on and off, like just out of curiosity, my whole life, usually make friends with them as they're in there. You know how they make small talk?

• 37:48Speaker 05

  They're in there.

• 37:49Jay Novella?

  But I talk, you know, I like to talk to them because they see-

• 37:52Speaker 05

  They're all up and in there.

• 37:53Jay Novella?

  And I had a hygienist tell me, I said, Carl, what was the worst, what was the worst thing you ever saw? You know, and she, first thing she did, she went, "Oh."

• 38:05Speaker 05

  That react.

• 38:06Jay Novella?

  She goes to- The person had, had not taken care of their teeth at all and all of the tartar and the buildup, which could be as hard as your teeth, you know, like it's unbelievable, like that stuff that grows on your teeth.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  Calculus.

• 38:20Jay Novella?

  Right? She said that when she tried to do the initial cleaning for the person, that the back, like the inside of their teeth, like the backside of their teeth, there were no bumps or ridges from their teeth. It was all smooth from the buildup of that material. Yeah. And-

• 38:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So gross.

• 38:37Jay Novella?

  When they cleaned it out and it took, it was an incredible amount of work and there was lots of bleeding and terrible stuff going on. The person touched their tongue to the back of their teeth and commented, "Oh my God, I feel bumps in my mouth." Right?

• 38:51Speaker 05

  As opposed to this kind of wad of crud that was otherwise occupying that space.

• 38:57Jay Novella?

  You can't feel the difference between one tooth and the next. It's this one slick little situation going on there. And I guarantee you that's not even close to the worst stuff that's going on, but I mean, that you gotta take care of your teeth, folks. I mean, they will take care of you. You know, you don't want to like have chewing problem. Can you imagine like every time you chew, you it's painful? That's that's a nightmare.

• 39:19Bob Novella?

  I want a new damn biome. I want a biome that is benign and doesn't create goddamn tartar and calculus on my teeth. That's what I want.

• 39:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I want a biome that makes them like, I don't know, calcified better. Like, I want, I want a biome that's Yeah, that's not just benign. That's like beneficial.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you imagine if you replace all the the oral flora, first we get rid of anything that that secretes acid, anything that will eat away your enamel, anything that will give you bad breath, anything that will cause a buildup of the tartar and replace them with ones that will actually protect your mouth, take care of it, make it smell nice and repair your enamel.

• 39:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Would be amazing.

• 39:56Speaker 05

  If I made a product like that, I would call it tartar sauce.

• 40:00Jay Novella?

  Guys, keep in mind, you could you taking care of your teeth goes an incredibly long way. Get get a cleaning a couple of times a year. You know, go to the dentist, listen to what they have to say. They you know, they don't just tell you. They are telling you about your oral health, not just like, how's your tooth doing? You know what I mean? It's like they're checking your gums or for cancer. You know, this is an important thing to do.

• 40:23Bob Novella?

  And Jay, my hygienist told me that you could be perfect, brush floss every day, and you still need to go get a cleaning because it only helps slow it down. The calculus will still build up no matter how good you are. So you gotta still go in no matter how good, like twice at least.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  I went last month. My hygienist said my gums look great.

• 40:45Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good.

• 40:46Speaker 05

  Thank you, because I pay attention.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  So guys, have any of you heard what RFK Junior had to say about autism in the last couple of weeks?

• 40:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but all over that team.

• 40:57Bob Novella?

  Something new and stupid or old and stupid? What what now?

• 41:00Speaker 02

  Well, he said it was old, but he did say it recently. It's bad. It's really bad. So it's vintage RFK Junior, right? He, as I like to say, I didn't make up this term, so I forget who said it first. He uses scientific data as a drunk uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination. Right. Yeah, he does. He makes a lawyer's case for whatever his narrative is, because that's what he is. He's not a scientist. He's a conspiracy theorist. He's a lawyer. And that's what he's doing. So, he said, this is how he characterized autism. He's like, you have a normal child who regresses into autism when they're two years old.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  And these are kids who will never pay taxes, never, they'll never hold a job, they'll never play baseball, they'll never write a poem. Never write poetry. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.

• 41:53Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 41:53Speaker 02

  And then he goes on to say, so I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don't understand, and it must be triggered or caused by environment, by environmental or risk factors. Oh, boy. He further said that, he's gonna figure out what the, what the cause of autism is by September. So, don't worry about it. He's gonna have it all sorted out within.

• 42:16Speaker 02

  Oh, good. Why is he waiting? Gonna. Finally. Surpass fifty years of research in five months.

• 42:22Cara Santa Maria?

  God, there's so much, Steve. There's so much.

• 42:24Speaker 02

  I know.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  It's a tsunami of misinformation.

• 42:27Speaker 02

  This hurts.

• 42:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 42:29Speaker 02

  So, let's break, let's break this down a little bit. So, first of all, he, he's talking about autism, and he's describing the absolutely most extreme end of the spectrum, right? Because autism is a spectrum. It's the autism spectrum disorder. Which is interesting, the fact that they, I understand why they include such a broad spectrum under one diagnostic name, because there is a neurological similarity going on. There's a phenomenon, logically speaking, they are, there is some commonality there. But, it does create a lot of confusion, right?

• 43:09Speaker 02

  If you're, at one end of the spectrum, you have people who are above average in intelligence, completely functional, very successful in life, doing all the things he says that people with autism will never do. But they are just neurodivergent, right? They're not neurotypical.

• 43:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but let's be fair, Steve. Those people usually are not diagnosed with autism.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  No, no, they, but increasingly, they are, Kara. That's part of the point here.

• 43:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but, but, but what I'm saying is that part of the diagnostic criteria is that you require support. So if you don't require any support, you can't qualify for a diagnosis.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  I didn't say these people don't require any support. You can have all of those things that I said, but still have different sets of strengths and weaknesses. You still may have difficulty with social engagement, have difficulty with maintaining your cognitive attention, etc.

• 44:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I just wanted to clarify because it kind of sounded like you're saying they're high functioning across everything.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  No, they're not. Otherwise, they wouldn't have a diagnosis.

• 44:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Otherwise, they don't have autism spectrum disorder.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  As I say, they're neurodivergent. That's what it meant by that. And that neurodivergence can include lots of things that are just, they have different challenges than people who are neurotypical.

• 44:20Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's the pop psychology concern that I have lately, is that so many people are self-diagnosing ASD because they're neurodivergent, when really they have ADHD or some other form of neurodivergence. And they're like, oh, but I'm on the spectrum. And it's confusing.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  You shouldn't self-diagnose, and we don't count that.

• 44:40Cara Santa Maria?

  You should not, yeah.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  But the point being is that you can get diagnosed with autism beyond the spectrum and be extremely high functioning, even though you do need some, you might need accommodations for the challenges that you have. And then there's the entire spectrum down to people who are non-verbal, right? So he, but he's, so he's talking about that end of the spectrum. We struggle with language here, which I'm going to get into in a minute, because, again, because we're trying to capture this broad spectrum under one label, there's no way to make everybody happy all at once. And when you say, well, this person has severe autism, or a level three autism, or a profound autism, the people at the neurodivergent end of the

• 45:26Speaker 02

  spectrum that I described, like, well, that implies that it's a bad thing, or that, you know, even just using the term severe, they take exception to it. Pathologizes it. We're just, and so it makes it challenging to even discuss it.

• 45:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  But, and there's legitimate points on, you know, all sides here. There's no perfect answer. Because there are just different trade offs.

• 45:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I see a lot of parallels with deafness.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. The deaf community says, you know, this is, we are, this is part of us. We are deaf. This is our identity. We have a deaf culture. We, we don't need to be fixed. We don't need to be cured. We, we are what we are. And it's the same thing. The neurodivergent community, they support each other with that kind of approach. It was like, yeah, we're not diseased, you know?

• 46:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  We are just different and

• 46:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yet there still is a requirement of support, even in the deaf community, right? Like if you are deaf, you need closed captioning in, in certain situations. You need types of support.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Some of them will say, Kara, that the only reason they need quote unquote, "support" is because civilization was built by neurotypicals for neurotypicals. And they're, they're neurodivergent, trying to survive in a neurotypical world that's not adapted to them.

• 46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. Yeah. And that's in some ways how you can define support.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  There's some legitimacy to that as well.

• 46:49Bob Novella?

  Right handed, left handed.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Right. It's like, it's like considering left handed as a disorder because the world is made by right handed people.

• 46:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But which is why the, the levels are, at least in the DSM, defined as level one requiring support, level two requiring substantial support, and level three requiring very substantial support.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  That's how it had, the language has evolved. The level of support you need, not the level of disease or disability

• 47:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  or severity or whatever. It's just, there's high, high support and higher support or low support, whatever. So in any case, RFK Jr. is living in 2005, right? He's living in the, a world before we even had this conversation. And he, he is looking at autism through the lens of the anti-vaccine movement, 100%.

• 47:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's a great way. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Everything he just said is from, is the, is the, you know, again, we dealt with this in 2005 in, from the anti-vaccine movement. He is still locked into that narrative. That, that his narrative is, you have normal children, right? Typical children, healthy children, who then regress into autism and it destroys their lives. It destroys their families. And this is something that is the environment that we are doing to them. That's literally what he said during that talk. That's his narrative.

• 48:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And his narrative, let's be honest, is propagandizing something in a really major way. He's describing level three autism in the same breath that he's talking about all these new cases and some sort of epidemic. But all these new cases are not level three

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. So that's one

• 48:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's infuriating.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's one of the problems with what he's saying. He's saying that there's like autism diagnoses are quote unquote surging. Epidemic, wrong term, it implies, you know, that's epidemic is a term you use if you're trying to imply that there's an environmental cause.

• 48:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And an infectious disease.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, contagious in some way. But even if you're saying, yeah, there's an increase in the autism diagnoses, that's a fact, nobody denies that. But what the evidence shows is a few things. One is that it's mostly, could mostly be explained by diagnostic substitution, increased surveillance, and the increased availability of support of services. And every way you look at the question, that's sort of the answer that we get. And the best studies are ones that take a look at different cohorts and apply the exact same diagnostic criteria. And they find that when you do that, right, you look at people from 20 years ago versus today, and you apply the exact same diagnostic criteria, the rate is the same, right? It's the, it's flat. The difference is not in a real increase. It's an

• 49:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That's a huge point.

• 49:38Speaker 02

  It's a shift in diagnostic patterns in several ways. But the evidence also shows that the increase in the number of diagnoses is way skewed towards the level one end of the spectrum, right? The

• 49:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the people that weren't caught before.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:57Cara Santa Maria?

  The people that we didn't, that we just go like, oh, yeah, that person That's where you would expect them to doesn't make eye contact. Yeah, exactly. And we just didn't diagnose them.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  They would have had no diagnosis, or they would have had some other diagnosis.

• 50:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like, I just interviewed a wonderful woman on my podcast recently who specializes in neuroimaging. And she talked all about like, the female autism spectrum kind of pattern, and how it's just been missed historically.

• 50:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 50:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, everything, it was all about boys, boys, boys, boys, bores. So we just didn't recognize it in young girls who were more trained in sort of

• 50:33Speaker 02

  It manifests differently.

• 50:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, totally.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  We don't diagnose as many heart attacks in women because the criteria are all male centric. It's all an artifact.

• 50:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And so the fact that we're getting better at this is a good thing. It's a good thing that we're diagnosing it more.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  No, there's Oh, that's the point. There was an increase at the level three end of the spectrum. The profound is what some people call profound autism end of the spectrum. But it's much, much, much, much less. And again, that's explained by diagnostic substitution. These people were diagnosed 30, 40, 50 years ago. They were just diagnosed with something else.

• 51:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, like with schizophrenia or catatonia?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Schizophrenia or just mental retardation, you know, just something less specific, just not autism. So, but he conflates it all. He says, there's a surge at the mild end of the spectrum and therefore there must be a cause at the severe end of the spectrum. But he completely gets it wrong because again, he's not a scientist. He's not a critical thinker. He's a conspiracy theorist and he's a crank and he completely gets it wrong. But again, he is starting with this 30 year old narrative that is from the, right out of the anti-vaccine movement. So what about the regressed into autism thing? So first of all, he's getting that wrong on multiple layers as well. First of all, most people with autism do not regress.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  It's like 20% or so, 30%. And what that doesn't mean, when we say regress, that's just any loss of milestones or any loss of function. It doesn't mean that they were, that they were typical or normal to start, right? He's misinterpreting regression as going from not having autism to having autism.

• 52:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, but not just like the autism manifesting in a worse way.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  It's like you have autism and then you, you have more difficulty with language. You have autism, you have more difficulty with socialization as you get older. You know, that's a complicated phenomenon, you know, it has to do with, you know, things can get more challenging as you get older, but there may be also something in a subset of people in terms of what's going on. But in any case, they're not going from not having autism to having autism. But he's misinterpreting it that way deliberately. Because again, this is all about blaming vaccines. Let's not forget that, right? But we know from data that if you, if you look back at evidence that we have, or if you follow cohorts, you know, longitudinally, that you can see clinically the signs of

• 52:59Speaker 02

  autism as early as six months. So not two, not two years old. And you can see it in, if you look at the brain and if you look at biomarkers, you could see it. Guess how early you could see it?

• 53:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, like?

• 53:14Speaker 02

  In utero? In utero, in the womb. I was right. In the fetal stage. So it's, and also there's pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it is a complicated, multi-gene genetic disorder. It is dominantly genetic. There's like a hundred and fifty, two hundred genes that have been implicated. And here's the thing, a lot of those genes, they're, they're not bad alleles or bad genes. They're not like, oh, if you have this, it's the only thing it does is increase your risk of autism. A lot of them have, are beneficial, you know, in, in, in other ways, right? That's, that's kind of how evolution works, right? People who get sickle cell anemia, that gene persists because it also protects you from malaria.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  It's the same kind of thing where genes that might make you more intelligent or whatever in some, high functioning in some ways make it more likely for you to develop neurodivergent traits as well. It's complicated, it's super complicated. But- So it's not going away? It's not going away. It's mostly genetic, right? So we know it's really, it's not increasing. It's not, you know, happening to children who are not, who do not have autism in age two. They're not regressing from non-autistic to autistic. So he basically gets every aspect of this story wrong. He basically pissed off everybody with autism. And everybody, you know, who had, you know, connected to the neurodivergent community. And now he's selling this complete snake oil thing of he's going to find the cause

• 54:43Speaker 02

  of autism by September. Again, everyone, and he hired, of course, he hired an anti-vaccine fake Dr. Charlatan, you know, Geier to do the study. It, this is, it's, everyone knows what the outcome of this fake study is going to do.

• 54:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, he's starting with the conclusion.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  He's starting with the conclusion. Absolutely, that's what he does. That is what he does. There is a wrinkle to this, though, while everyone's getting pissed off at RFK. I read an interesting opinion piece out there in the New York Times by a mother of a child with profound autism. It was like, sometimes she feels like that end of the spectrum gets lost in the discussion, right? And the lost in the neurodivergent approach. Which includes things like, we don't need a cure, we just need accommodation. And she's like, my child, yes, he needs accommodation, but he's, again, nonverbal, not independent for anything. And it's like, you know, this is not just neurodivergence. You know, my child is impaired.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  And absolutely, this is something that I would want to prevent or treat if we had a treatment for it. So let's not, you know, lose sight of that. And I do think, like, what's the solution here? I don't know, because again, it's different trade-offs. I think, I do think we need to make it more clear, though, that autism is such a broad spectrum. And we might need to have, you know, more distinct subset names that we use.

• 56:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And we used to, but we got away from that.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  I know, we went in the wrong direction.

• 56:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we used to say Asperger's. What were they?

• 56:16Speaker 02

  Like Asperger's, yeah.

• 56:18Cara Santa Maria?

  We would say Asperger's for...

• 56:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:19Cara Santa Maria?

  No, for individuals who were verbal. I mean, that was the general distinction.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  Basically.

• 56:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Now it's level one autism. Whereas like, you know, if somebody is level three, for example, they would probably have all these specifications on their diagnosis. They would have, perhaps, with accompanying intellectual impairment, with accompanying language impairment, with catatonia, maybe. Or with, you know, so there are all these specifiers, but that nuance, that minutia gets lost, you're right.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  But the label, I go into this in some detail on Neurologica, but just very, very quickly. How we make diagnoses depends on what you're using those diagnoses for. Because there's different ways you could make diagnoses, then again, they're not ones right and the other ones wrong, and they're just different trade-offs. I feel like we've moved in the direction of a diagnostic scheme that was designed by researchers and not necessarily clinicians. And certainly not people who are dealing with the public or regulations. And so... You know what I mean? It's like, we're, let's, they're emphasizing what is helpful for research, not necessarily what's helpful in terms of dealing with this as a society. And so we end up-

• 57:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that, yeah.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Right? So we end up with a, with a diagnostic scheme that's confusing in every context except for research, where it's emphasizing a phenomenological-

• 57:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that the DSM is trying to please both.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  DSM is trying-

• 57:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think the DSM is trying to please both.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  It is, it is, but I, I remember very distinctly the director of the NIMH complaining that the DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of, you know, of psychiatric diagnoses, that it was specifically blaming it for problems with research because it was not, it was not optimized for research sufficiently.

• 58:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the thing, some, it has to be both, because what we know about what to do clinically comes from the research-

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And what we do research-wise comes from clinical feedback. And it's like, they have to talk to each other.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  But, yes, but you can't optimize it for both.

• 58:18Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I know, and that's the hard thing. Yeah, something's gotta give. And we've moved away, I mean, this is really in the weeds, but like, really quickly, we've moved away from more cata-, DSM was historically very categorical.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:28Cara Santa Maria?

  If you have these things, you have this. If you have the, and now we've moved into more dimensional, which is more clinical. I mean, it's like, it is a move in the right direction, but it's, it maybe hasn't gone far enough.

• 58:38Speaker 02

  So, yeah, so it's tricky, it's tricky. But there's one thing we can say for sure, and that RFK has no idea what he's talking about, but he's worse than ignorant.

• 58:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Speaker 02

  Full of a misinformation and a, a completely biased narrative that is all about being anti-vaccine, essentially. He is a dangerous, dangerous quack, that guy, really.

• 59:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. All right, Bob, tell us how AI is gonna help transform astronomy.

• 59:10Bob Novella?

  Sure, man. I really dig this one. Alright, guys, what if researchers handed off the redesign of the most sensitive instrument we've ever created to an AI? That's exactly what researchers have done for gravitational wave detectors, and these new designs seem better than any we have come up with. The next gravitational wave detectors we build might not just represent the next generation, but a leap to the one after that. And imagine if after the baby boomer generation, we went directly to millennials. This would absolutely not be like that. The paper is published in Physical Review X, "Digital Discovery of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors." It's a good read, most of it, of course, there's jargon everywhere,

• 59:52Bob Novella?

  but some parts of it are eminently understandable, at least by me. So gravitational wave detectors, we've gone over them many times, so let's do a brief overview. They detect those mind-bogglingly faint ripples in spacetime caused by accelerating masses. Our current detectors like LIGO can now detect the ripples caused by neutron stars or some black holes that are orbiting each other ever closer, right? Until they collide. We can detect them, we have. To do this, they use laser beams at right angles, L shape, right? L shape, they say, to act as interferometers. Now gravitational waves change the length of one of the beams, changing the interference pattern between the two beams that we can detect and then interpret and figure out what exactly caused them.

• 1:00:35Bob Novella?

  Now, these machines are fiendishly complex, but so sensitive, they can detect changes less than the width of a frickin proton. Less than the width of a proton. Incredible. We have plans for future gravitational wave detectors, but they use tried and true design principles for the most part, even the ones that are space-based. The lead researcher here is Dr. Mario Kren, who helms the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. For this research, he and his team joined forces with LIGO researchers, which of course makes sense, because that's their babies. So together, they made Urania. Hmm, or is it Urania? U-R-A-N-I-A.

• 1:01:19Bob Novella?

  is pretty slick. It's not an LLM, not a large language model, or it's not even a neural net. It's based on machine learning methods, and that means that it's a subset of AI that uses algorithms and statistical methods which learn from data to make decisions. All right, that's just a basic overview of what that is. Now, your Ania doesn't look at gravitational wave detectors and try to improve it. This is key. It starts with a performance goal, and then it works backward to discover the optical designs that can reach that goal. That's that's critical here. So it's it's like an evolutionary algorithm. There's a lot of similarities with similarities between that and evolutionary algorithms that are based on physics

• 1:02:01Bob Novella?

  that incrementally builds better and better gravitational wave detectors based on the performance feedback with like every generation that's created. So what did Urania, Urania discover? What do you think, guys? Tell me what you think would be the first thing researchers would love for Urania to discover? The first thing. I would want to see, and what they saw was the gravitational wave detectors that we already have, like basically, hey, here's LIGO. That that was very, very important because because if it creates, if it designs LIGO from scratch, that means that that you're doing something right, because you know LIGO works. We use it every day.

• 1:02:42Bob Novella?

  And if it if it says, hey, this will work, then you know that you're probably it's going to increase your confidence level that that you were on the right track with with Urania. Okay, so that's that's exactly what they what they got. They got designs that they know they've already created, and they know it works.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's like any model. The first thing you want to do is show that it predicts what you already know.

• 1:03:04Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:03:05Speaker 05

  That's fair.

• 1:03:05Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  But that's that's not enough. That's not enough. That just means that at least there's nothing broken about it.

• 1:03:10Bob Novella?

  Right. So yeah, so it gives you so this gives the fact that they that it it predicted or created designs that you know already work gives you confidence that other designs that it might come up with are probably probably have a greater chance of actually being actually decent. And Urania did absolutely do that. And but it but it made designs. A cool thing here is that it created these designs that nobody thought of, and nobody probably would have thought Of maybe ever or for a very long time. And I'll describe some of the, some of the designs that they came up with. It had designs that were very, that had very non-intuitive light paths.

• 1:03:52Bob Novella?

  So they weren't the typical L-shaped, right angle laser paths. They were like weirdly intricate nested paths that, that don't use any type of normal beam splitter logic, right? Some designs had optical components that were arranged in such a way that no designer would ever put them together that way. It just didn't make any sense. So the optimization logic for some of the designs were totally opaque to the researchers. They're like, why this optimization design doesn't make, doesn't seem to make any sense? Why would this optimize this, this detector? They, they didn't know. So, but the next step, the next critical step here was testing the designs. And they, of course, they have a way of testing them without spending millions of dollars by building them and testing them that way, right?

• 1:04:37Bob Novella?

  Who, you don't want to do that. That's ridiculous. They, they would have built 50 of these. So to do that, to test these designs that Urania came up with, they use the tools and the simulations that they use, that they already use for LIGO upgrades. And they use these tools to test other observatories like Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein Telescope, which is a next generation interferometric gravitational wave detector. To use those tools that we know that they work extremely well. And they know that these tools can say, this design will most likely work. And you could make, you can spend, you know, it's worth risking millions of dollars because it's, the tests have been so successful. So these are the kind of tests that they brought to bear on these new designs.

• 1:05:20Bob Novella?

  These weird, intricate, bizarre, unintuitive, non-intuitive designs that Urania came up with. That's what the tools that they used. The result of this was designs that were shown to be using these tools that were not only better than, than current instruments, but better than anything that we have on the drawing board. By like a, like a two generations beyond anything that they were even thinking of. So one of the designs that Urania made extended the sensitivity band deeper into the, into the sub 10 hertz. range so that that sub 10 hertz range would be critical for observing heavier black hole mergers

• 1:05:56Bob Novella?

  earlier in their co-orbiting in spiral and that's one of the the problems with um with current gravitational wave detectors is is the mass range of of black holes that you can detect so this would help with that but one of the most intriguing findings had really novel topologies you know design detector designs that look like they could expand our current observable volume in space up to 50 times our current detectors because right now these detectors can can find you know amazingly faint gravitational waves from uh from certain sized black holes but you can't keep going you can't just detect them any at any you know distance in space because eventually it's going to be so attenuated we can't even detect it these designs or some of these designs seem to be able to um potentially

• 1:06:42Bob Novella?

  increase our observable volume in space up to 50 times which is amazing 50 times that's that's incredible okay so so how was how exciting is this this is it's I think it's pretty amazing this this reminds me specifically of Ted Chang's short story got it got to talk about my buddy Ted Chang here uh one of my favorite authors he he created a super short short story called the evolution of human science and the parallels here are really interesting so in his story uh human science discoveries stop and it has stopped because there is these these benign meta humans that have been born you know genetically engineered um and all these meta humans make all the new discoveries and they make all the inventions

• 1:07:23Bob Novella?

  because they're just so ridiculously smart um but they're also incomprehensible to us so in order for for for neurotypical humans if you will to learn any new scientific principles what they have to do is they have to employ what's called herman hermeneutics which Kara had mentioned I think a couple of years ago awesome word so they employ hermeneutics and that means that they try to interpret and understand the science and technology of the meta humans who are so smart that we can't understand what they create or publish so we so we have to try to infer sign new scientific principles by the objects that they create and what little document There is that that's comprehensible. So that's so that's the story. And it seems like that's kind of like

• 1:08:07Bob Novella?

  an era of this era of scientific discovery that we're that we're creating here with AI. We're kind of going down that road to a certain extent. And let me just say here a quote by by Kren, who seems to agree with me. He said, "We are in an era where machines can discover new superhuman solutions in science, and the task of humans is to understand what the machine has done. This will certainly become a very prominent part of the future of science." So very interesting point of view there that I obviously agree with. So so humans, let me just try to describe this in another way. Humans have relatively easy access to a portion of the design space for gravitational wave detectors, right? We've created them, theorized them, we use them. So we kind of have this ability to access

• 1:08:52Bob Novella?

  a portion of this design space. However, we don't know how big that is, but we obviously can have some insight into a part of it. But we're also in a bit of a straitjacket of old assumptions and design traditions, right? And even the limitations of the human brain is also kind of a straitjacket for solving some of these issues. So these AI tools don't have these limitations. It just optimizes based on physics and performance goals. That's what it does. So how much more of that total possible design space will they see? I want to see that. I want to see how far they can go in creating these designs that we will, you know, may have never even dreamt up in a million years. So the researchers took, the next step was that the researchers took the top 50 designs

• 1:09:36Bob Novella?

  and put them in a catalog called the Detector Zoo. Now, this is this is public. Other researchers, other scientific institutions can look at these designs, study them, and learn from them, and maybe even refine them, and hopefully eventually even construct some of them. So I'm gonna, I'll end my talk here with a ChatGPT quote on this topic, which I which I liked. This, so my ChatGPT said to me, he's like, "It's like we taught AI the language of mirrors and lasers, and it spoke back to us in a dialect we barely understand." Which was, I thought, was a pretty good quote. When it said that to me, I said, "Where did you get that quote? Give me the reference to that quote." And it's like, and my ChatGPT said, "I thought it out myself." This is from me.

• 1:10:20Bob Novella?

  Probably telling me the truth. I'm not, you can't be 100% sure, but

• 1:10:25Speaker 05

  Thought Mark Twain said that.

• 1:10:26Bob Novella?

  There you go. No, it was Abraham Lincoln. So, yeah, this is really fascinating. We're starting to see this, Steve, you'll agree. We're starting to see this in other, in other fields where the, the assistance that we are getting from AI is quite dramatic in scientific discovery. And I think we're just barely scratching the surface here. And this, this, to me, this, this, um, urania was one of the, one of the better examples that I've, that I've come across. And it's also being applied to particle physics and, and quantum physics as well. So I am really excited over the next 10 or 20 years to see, you know, what these, what these machine learning tools, these, uh, these AI tools can come up with and design, and, uh, design and think about, you know, in a way that we, you know, may never be able to do.

• 1:11:12Bob Novella?

  We may struggle, and I, I assume in the future, we're going to be struggling even harder as these designs become even more complex and obtuse to our way of thinking. It's going to be fascinating to, to have these advances that we may never even be able to figure out. We know that they work, but like those characters in, uh, in Ted Chiang's novel, we, we know that they work amazingly well. We just can't understand at all what's, what's going on inside.

• 1:11:37Speaker 02

  Bob, can we use this method to design a better hover bike?

• 1:11:44Bob Novella?

  Um, I would think absolutely. You just, just give it a lot of data on hover bike, data and, uh, and studies and everything. And I think it probably could come up with a one that we never would have thought of.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. It's who's that noisy time?

• 1:11:58Jay Novella?

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

• 1:12:21Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  Dr. Zayas would, uh, ape make a human doll that talked?

• 1:12:27Jay Novella?

  Listener named Benjamin Davu said, "Hey, guys, Ben here, the Frenchie from Japan. I think I got this one. This is a bamboo leaf held between two thumbs and the user blows on it to make it vibrate. Also seems like a pinched rubber balloon, but I really think it's the leaf." This one, and a ton of people guessed that this was a blade of grass in a similar situation. This is not correct, but there is a definite similarity between that noise and, you know, basically creating like a reed instrument with some type of plant or grass or whatever. Another listener named Braden Ellis said, "I think this week's sound is a baby goat having its teeth brushed."

• 1:13:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Jay Novella?

  That sounds like a video that I missed, but sure, yeah, I could see that. Ben Borger wrote in and said, "Hello, everyone. This week's noisy is a rubber chicken. The change in pitch is controlled by how hard you squeeze the rubber chicken." I've had so many people email in the rubber chicken answer. I think this might be the first time I mention it. I'm not sure, but it does kind of sound like a rubber chicken a little bit, and I think it was a good guess.

• 1:13:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think it sounds like a rubber chicken. To me, whatever it is, I do not want it to be behind me on the airplane.

• 1:13:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, of course not, of course not.

• 1:13:34Cara Santa Maria?

  It would be a nightmare flight.

• 1:13:35Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy. Alexis Collins wrote in and said, "To Jay, we like to listen to your podcast with our dad in Kill Dare, Ireland. We think this week's noisy is a rollout party blower that has a small hole in it at the end. You know those little party things you blow and the thing rolls out and goes bleh?"

• 1:13:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:52Jay Novella?

  It's not that, but there's a little bit of that in there. I can hear that. Another listener wrote in named Steven. Steven said, "Jay, it's a cat pretending to be a baby. My cat is always pretending to be a baby very..." So, I want to hear that. So, if your cat pretends to be a baby and makes baby noises, email me at [email protected]. Listener named Omar Moynunen, Omar, you've got to tell me how to pronounce your last name. He says, "Hey, Jay, this noisy sounds just like my two-year-old when you give him a mic and a speaker. He puts his mouth directly on the mic and makes these sounds." So, that guess is actually not that far from what's going on here. Just keep that in mind. And then, you know, the closest one that we got was a listener named Michael Sosito.

• 1:14:36Jay Novella?

  Michael said, "Hey, Jay, it sounds like a small mammal. I'm going to say a porcupine getting its belly tickled." Okay, so what this actually is, is this is a baby otter playing with its hand and its mouth.

• 1:14:50Jay Novella?

  It's a little baby otter who's using his hand to kinda go like that in his mouth. Listen again and you'll hear it.

• 1:15:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Jay, I caught a little bit of the la la la la.

• 1:15:14Jay Novella?

  Of course you did.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  I think that's otterly ridiculous.

• 1:15:17Jay Novella?

  Yes, it is.

• 1:15:19Bob Novella?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:21Speaker 05

  Steve did the heavy lifting.

• 1:15:22Jay Novella?

  Baby otter.

• 1:15:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I love how you're like, "Thanks, man."

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  I got you covered, Evan.

• 1:15:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Solid.

• 1:15:28Speaker 05

  You're a good man, Steve.

• 1:15:31Jay Novella?

  But I would rather have a baby otter than one of those, uh, what is it, a French Bulldog? You know, the ones that talk a lot?

• 1:15:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, they do sound like that.

• 1:15:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:15:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:40Jay Novella?

  All sorts of crazy stuff, those dogs. There's one of them I like in particular. This woman like carries him around in a baby carriage and he goes blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like literally sounds like a guy with no teeth saying blah, blah, blah. Incredible.

• 1:15:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I know that lady on the end and she's always like, "You're embarrassing me. Stop."

• 1:15:55Jay Novella?

  Oh, that's, um, yeah, my, my, my son and I listen to him all the time. He's the one that did that song.

• 1:16:04Jay Novella?

  Right? If you know it, you know it.

• 1:16:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, that one in the car.

• 1:16:09Jay Novella?

  That dog is awesome, but never would I own one of those dogs. Just never, because they're, they are so vocal and bad. You know, they're just, they sound like they're angry and upset all the time. All right, I have a new noisy for you guys. Uh, this noisy was sent in by a listener named Kenny Haberman. It's a little long, but you gotta hear the whole thing.

• 1:16:56Jay Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:16:56Speaker 05

  That's the hoverbike.

• 1:16:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I love those types of sounds. They are so freaking, I don't know, they're just very powerful. Anyway, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email us at theskepticsguy.org. Did I say that correctly? Email us at [email protected]. Now, you might wonder, Jay, how did you screw that up after doing Who's That Noisy for so long? I am so busy that I can't see straight, getting ready for the conference. I've got so many details that I've got to handle. But the thing that you need to hear from me right now is that it's still not too late to go. You could hear this within a few days of when the show comes out, and easily buy some tickets, and show up in White Plains and have the time of your life.

• 1:17:43Jay Novella?

  We are really excited. I mean, we're going through all the details. You know, we have nine people involved as directors for this conference. And, you know, we're just constantly upping the ante on all the bits that we're doing, and refining everything, and it's really, really coming out awesome. I'm so psyched, guys, I can't wait. We're gonna have such a good time. So if you're interested, just go to notaconcon.com, or you can go to theskepticsguy.org, and there'll be a button on there on the homepage for you to get more information. But tickets are available. We'd love to have you. A couple more quick things. You could join our mailing list. You can go to theskepticsguy.org, and we have a way for you to join our mailing list on there.

• 1:18:24Jay Novella?

  We send out a mailer every week that goes over everything that the SGU has done the previous week. You could also become a patron to help show your support, especially during these times when skepticism and critical thinking need to be out there. You know, we are expanding the amount of things that we're doing. We have new shows that we're working on. I told you guys this. They're gonna be happening over the next few months. We're very excited, but your support would help a lot. So go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. Steve, what else we got? We have the Kansas show.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  Kansas.

• 1:18:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we will be in Kansas. We'll be not too far from Kansas City in a town called Lawrence. And we will be doing a private show and we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza of special significance. That means the entire cast of the SGU, Cara, Evan, Bob, Steve, me, George, Rob. And if you look quick, you might catch a glimpse of Ian doing some fancy stuff behind the mixing board. Everybody loves Ian. Every single one of us thinks Ian is awesome and he hates when I say this, but that's the truth.

• 1:19:32Bob Novella?

  He's listening right now.

• 1:19:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why we love him.

• 1:19:34Jay Novella?

  And if you know, you know, but Ian might have another watermelon incident. You don't want to not be there because if another cool thing like that happens again, you want to be on home plate to see it happen for yourself. Anyway, those dates, the weekend of September 19th, I believe both of our shows are happening on the Saturday of that weekend. Please consider coming. It's going to be a great time and who knows when we'll be out to Kansas again. This might be, it might be a very long time. So please try to join us if you're local. There you go.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay. One really quick email. This one comes from Jim from Michigan and Jim writes, "Thanks for the informative and entertaining show. I had a friend recently questioned me about miracles. I told him that I had not seen any evidence of a miracle. He then asked me if I believed the Big Bang Theory, not the show. I told him that I did and that it was, in my opinion, the most likely explanation for the beginning of our universe. He then stated that the cosmic inflation aspect violated our physics laws because it expanded faster than the speed of light. He stated that this would qualify as a miracle. I did not have a reply other than to thank him for giving me something to think about. I am curious what your thoughts are regarding this. Keep up the good work." So what do you guys think?

• 1:20:45Bob Novella?

  That does not break, that does not break any laws of physics because it's, because space can expand faster than light. You just can't move within that space faster than light.

• 1:20:53Speaker 02

  Exactly. So the premise is wrong. It's a, it's a, it's a faulty premise.

• 1:20:57Bob Novella?

  Next letter.

• 1:21:01Speaker 02

  But there's also a logical fallacy in there. What is that? The good bet whenever someone's claiming a miracle is what is the logical fallacy?

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  God of the gaps.

• 1:21:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the fact that we don't understand it, the fact that we don't understand something doesn't doesn't mean that you have to then.

• 1:21:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Therefore, God.

• 1:21:17Bob Novella?

  Therefore, God. God of the gaps.

• 1:21:19Speaker 02

  So yeah, it's an argument from ignorance, the specific version of that being what we call a God of the gaps argument, you know, we insert God or a miracle into something that we don't currently understand, could also frame it as confusing currently unexplained with unexplainable. Like, there's no possible way to explain it, therefore, it's magic. But yeah, so the premise is wrong, but even if it were correct, even if we didn't currently understand it, that just means that we don't have a complete set of laws of physics for the universe, which we don't, right? Our laws are at present incomplete, and things like the Big Bang are where those laws break down, right? We don't have a quantum gravity law in physics, for example. We do not yet have a theory of everything.

• 1:22:04Speaker 02

  So it's also like saying, well, black holes couldn't exist, therefore, there are miracles. It's like, no, that's pointing in the direction of we need more complete physics in order to describe what happens in weird situations like black holes and the Big Bang. But in this case, he's not even up to bat, because as Bob said, the universe can expand faster than the speed of light, that's not the same thing as traveling faster than the speed of light within the universe. So he got he got his premise wrong, too. Double failure. Okay, guys, let's go on with our interview.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Joining us now is Melanie Tresick-King. Melanie, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

• 1:22:51Speaker 07

  Oh, thank you for having me. I'm so happy to be here.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  Melanie, you're an associate professor of biology at Massachusetts Oat Community College, and you are also an activist skeptic running the multiple things, Thinking is Power. I think is that, would you say that's your main outlet?

• 1:23:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  So tell us how you got started in all this and then why did you decide to incorporate this whole skeptical thing into your academic career?

• 1:23:13Speaker 07

  My background is ecology and I'm from the Midwest. And when my husband got a job across the country, I'm from Iowa. We moved across the country to Massachusetts. I started teaching at a community college, and I love teaching at a community college. But I was finding myself teaching the science courses for people who don't want to be scientists when they grow up and love those courses. But I finally realized with as much as I love biology, that was probably not the best use of their time. And so I thought if I had a single semester to teach the average person what they need to know about science, what would that look like? And I'm a bit ashamed to say that I actually didn't know about the skeptic movement during that time. And so I-

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  How long ago are we talking about?

• 1:23:58Speaker 07

  Oh, this was five years ago, maybe six.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:24:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, not very long. When I finally, when I found the skeptic movement, I found so many resources that I didn't know were there. And I was incorporating basic concepts anyway, but this gave me so much more to include in class. And so, yeah, then I started communicating that online on Thinking is Power, thinking maybe people who weren't my students would be interested. And yeah, that's where I am.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  Just took off from there. Do you have a, like a specialty within the whole scientific skeptical thing that you focus on? Or are you trying to really hit like any issue? Like I see a lot of your videos range from alternative medicine to, you know, to more biological topics, to climate change. And are you trying to cover it all or do you have a specialty?

• 1:24:46Speaker 07

  I mean, so I think broadly speaking, my specialty would just be misinformation.

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 1:24:50Speaker 07

  But I joke that my science communication is for the normals. I mean, that's who my students are. They're just people who are mildly curious, don't have lots of time to spend looking into these things and are open to things. And so there's a lot of them out there. And so what I try and do is just take a lot of the different concepts that other people specialize in and then distill them to where maybe somebody who doesn't have a lot of time and interest can learn something about.

• 1:25:21Speaker 02

  So, starting off, say, you know, five, six years ago, basically as just a scientist, you know, a biologist, and then trying to get into the whole skeptical thing, how do you feel your science background prepared you for all of the content that is necessary to understand in order to fight misinformation in pseudoscience? Did you feel like, oh, you're basically were starting from scratch? Or did you feel well-prepared for that transition?

• 1:25:48Speaker 07

  Uh, that's a really good question. I feel like, so the class that I designed ended up being, it's for non-majors.

• 1:25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 07

  But what I realized in the process was that I didn't know a lot. Like, there was a lot about pseudoscience and science denial and conspiratorial thinking that I didn't know about, and actually even basic philosophy of science. And so, learning those things, I think, made me a better science educator. But then, I actually think that we need to do a better job, I'd be curious your thoughts on this too, but we need to teach more science majors these things. I mean, we see way too many, you know, medical professionals and falling for, for example, anti-vaccine, or even thinking homeopathy works, or, and so, I think we could do a better job teaching our future scientists.

• 1:26:39Speaker 07

  Me personally, I feel like my science background prepared me for a little niche within science, but not necessarily to help understand the misinformation in this.

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, my experience as well, the, you know, all the critical thinking. Media savvy, science versus pseudoscience, logical fallacies, all of that stuff. I was not taught that in school, you know, as part of my, my education, either undergraduate or medical school or whatever, at any, any time during that, that extensive education, right? That was all just completely separate from formal education. That information's out there and I think you had a lot of, a lot easier time in 2020 than we had in 1990 or 1995. Internet. Yeah, there's a, the amount of resources that are out there now are massive. But you're right, it's very hit or miss.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  What I find like with my own residents, fellow students or whatever, is that they could be all over the map. Some of them, I think it's just all like what mentors you happen to come across, you know, in your, in your training. Some of them are, are very well equipped, you know, to deal with misinformation and pseudoscience. Others have absolutely no idea. Not only straight, not only pseudoscience, but even pathological science within mainstream science, which, you know, these are two sides of the same coin. Right? So it's, you're right, there's no systematic way of teaching it, which we absolutely need.

• 1:28:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, I actually, I did have something that you did not have for sure, which is your book. Honestly, your book was so helpful in my process. Yeah. So thank you.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, well, that's, that was why we wrote it. We basically. Yeah. Put all this in one space. Yeah. I mean, there were, and we had, you know, predecessors too. We obviously read the demon haunted world, um, why people leave weird, weird things. You know, there was, there were, you know, books along the way. And so this, I think there's, it's, you know, we like talking with, with younger skeptical activists because it does provide a lot of continuity, you know, like generational continuity. We've got to keep this movement going, right? You know, we're not going to be here forever. And so, um, even though it's a lot of it is, you know, feels like reinventing the wheel, it's, but it is, it's important, I think, for each generation to have new voices. Yes, we're going, we're debunking the same shit. We've been doing it for 200 years. I mean, it's amazing, you know, when we, sometimes I do a deep dive on a topic, like I remember I was do it, looking at.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  Magnet, you know, devices like fraudulent, you know, snake oil magnet devices. And I found a reference to a book that was written in eighteen fifty, systematically debunking snake oil magnetic healing devices. All the same shit we're dealing with today. It's like, wow, they, they did this two hundred years ago. And it was amazing. It's like, it's all just, so it's, we're just passing it forward. You know what I mean? And we are building, I think, a knowledge base. I do think we are more knowledgeable how to do this than previous generations. Oh, of course. Yeah, we're standing on their shoulders.

• 1:29:43Speaker 07

  I, I think one of the things the skeptic music movement really taught me was that, so as a science educator, I, nearly every science course, especially for the introductory stuff, starts with, um, chapter one, the scientific method. For those of you who can't hear me, I'm now air quoting, scientific method, right? Here are the, the steps that you do to do a science and then it gets done. And then like, here's everything that we know. And it's presented like a collection of facts that are tried and true and never going to change. And this is what we know for certain. And, um, but the skeptic movement really taught me was, why do we need the scientific method?

• 1:30:23Speaker 07

  Right? We need it because we are irrational and biased and flawed and emotional and unreliable narrators of our own experience. Like, why isn't I tried it and felt better sufficient evidence? Or why isn't I saw it? So I know it's real. And so, um, you know, I, I designed the course and I, it kind of scared me at first because I, I now spend probably the first, I want to say like third of the semester um, on what I call critical thinking, but it's basically epistemology, metacognition, um, uh, the limits of perception and memory, cognitive biases. But all of that then gets to a place where when I introduce science, students know why we need science.

• 1:31:09Speaker 07

  And so in other classes, when I start, you know, day one, here's a scientific method. I think I'm missing some really important stuff here because how are students to know why this information is more reliable than anything else? And so, um, so that was an important lesson. And the other thing was just the basic idea of including misinformation. A lot of science classes don't include them. So how are students to know the difference between reliable and unreliable information? If you don't bring that into the classroom and help them grapple with it? Help them understand the differences.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And but I still think there's a bit of a stigma within academia about, you know, touching upon fringe topics or talking about pseudoscience or bringing, as you say, you got to bring it into the classroom. They just feel uncomfortable with it, you know? I still get that a lot. Or at best, it's like, well, I'm glad you're doing it. You know, do you get that a lot? Do you get the, well, good thing you're, I don't have to worry about it now because you're taking care of it, you know? Because I just, which is unfortunate. It's like, no, we shouldn't be embracing this with both hands. This is the most important thing that we need to do is to teach people how to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real. That is what science is all about. So why do you not want to do that?

• 1:32:24Speaker 07

  When I start the semester, day one, the I start by fooling students. I do the Randy, James Randy made it famous, but it came from Bertram for the fake personality or astrology reading.

• 1:32:39Speaker 05

  Astrology?

• 1:32:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:32:41Speaker 05

  Classic.

• 1:32:41Speaker 07

  I, yeah, it's great. They fall for it, hook, line and sinker. Right? And it turns out I'm a decent liar, but it's for a good cause, right? So I tell students like giant, you know, backstory. I have a friend who's a great astrologer and I'm not going to tell you she is, but you know, and I get some basic information from them. I, you know, make them think I'm really deep diving into their personality. The next class, I give them their readings. How accurate is she? And I've been doing this for a long time and about 4.3 to 4.5 out of 5, which is about what four are found. So now get with somebody around you and talk about reading and why do you think it's reliable? Why do you think she was able to know this? And sometimes it takes them like 10 minutes before they realize they all got the same reading because they're cherry picking. Like this worked for me and this, there's denying that.

• 1:33:26Speaker 07

  It's a game though. It's a joke. Like it's, it's a low stakes environment where I'm able to, okay, yes, I lied to you. Am I sorry? You know, like, not really. Will I do it again? I might, you know, right? So I want you to be skeptical. I don't want you to just trust what I'm saying. But the real lesson is, I could tell you, I could fool you. And you'd be like, oh, sure. I'm writing a book on misinformation right now. And every time I talk to somebody about misinformation, they're like, oh, that's fascinating. Oh, can you believe what people fall for? Oh, my God, people are so stupid. And it's like, how long until I get to the misinformation that they believe? Right, because we all have something. So with the students, it's like, if I told you I could fool you, you wouldn't believe me. So I fool you to prove to you I can fool you.

• 1:34:11Speaker 07

  Now, if you don't want to be fooled, have the humility to recognize that. And now we need to practice our skepticism. And here's how we do that.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that is a tried and true method within skeptical seminars, lectures. I do it all the time. What I find a little challenging, you have to really up your game. So, yeah, I love talking to naive audiences, meaning they're not steeped in skepticism because everything works on them, because they haven't seen any of it before. But then, when you're talking to like people who are in the skeptical movement or who like, you're telling them ahead of time, I'm giving you a lecture on how you could be fooled. And so then their their guard is way up or they, you know, it's all, it becomes a lot harder to get away with that. But you still can do it. You just got to know which ones will sell, even to a prepared audience.

• 1:35:01Speaker 07

  And I, so if you find something that works on more skeptical audiences, you simply must share. Because you're right, the ones in the skeptic movement, they know these tricks. You have to find one. And even if you find one where they know you're fooling them, they just maybe not are able to figure out how that even works.

• 1:35:20Speaker 02

  But yeah, like, you're not going to get them on the astrology one, on the fore effect, like, they don't even bother. Or even like, there's a, you have to go one level deeper. It's like, for example, you know, the, you know, the gorilla video, right? The invisible gorilla. Well, there's a, there's a follow up to that where it's meant for people who know the invisible gorilla video, where they throw another deception in there, another inattentional blindness that. So people think they know it, but they really don't. So that's the kind of thing that you have to do. You could find that on the website. We're giving it away now to anyone listening to this episode.

• 1:35:53Speaker 05

  Spoiler alert.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  But that's the kind of thing you gotta do. You gotta figure out, all right, you gotta get more obscure, or you gotta do it in a way they don't realize you're doing it, or you gotta do, you gotta divert their attention to things they think they know while you're doing something else. It becomes, yeah, it's a little tricky. And you're not gonna get them on everything either. So, you know, you just gotta accept that and just say, this is a demonstration. I know you guys are skeptical. You've heard all these before, but for what it's worth, right? And you gotta pick the ones, too. The last thing I'll say is you gotta pick the ones that work even when you know what's happening. For example, like anchoring is a great one. You know about anchoring? Like you show people a picture of a house, and you tell, you know, half the people without the other half knowing, does this house cost

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  more or less, cost, you know, more than a million dollars? You ask the other people, does this cost more or less than $200,000? And then you ask them to guess the actual price. And of course, they're gonna anchor to whatever you told them. And so even if they kinda know about anchoring and they know about the demonstration, it'll still influence them. It's kinda hard for it not to. So you still get a good effect out of it. Or there's all the priming stuff, like you can't not, you can't make yourself immune to that, you know, even when you know what's happening. You know, it's like, have you ever seen a really good mentalist like Banachek?

• 1:37:09Speaker 07

  I was gonna bring up mentalism, because you know they're fooling you.

• 1:37:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:37:13Speaker 07

  You just don't know how.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  You're right, exactly. If they're really good, they have to be good, though. Like the one, the bad ones, not so much, but the good ones, like Banachek, doesn't matter. You could know, you know, even even have an idea of the kinds of things they could be doing. It doesn't matter. They still, they're just, they're good enough to fool you. There's just too many ways to do it.

• 1:37:34Jay Novella?

  So Melanie, you mentioned your book. So you're currently writing this book, or is it, is it coming out soon? What's your, what's the status on that?

• 1:37:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's coming out next fall. So I'm I'm in the midst of writing.

• 1:37:47Jay Novella?

  And how's it going?

• 1:37:48Speaker 07

  Ah, goodness. I have newfound respect for people who've written books. Uh, this is an emotional roller coaster. I'm having a great time doing it. On other days, they may tell you something else. But, uh, the book is a field guide to misinformation. And it's basically about understanding the different forms that misinformation takes. And not just, so, um, there's a lot of great, uh, organizations that focus on specific kinds of misinformation. Um, and they do great work, but I feel like a lot of what's missing there is why we fall for misinformation. And so, um, it's also understanding ourselves and our own vulnerabilities to different kinds of misinformation. So, um, the, the threading the needle of, um, why might I be vulnerable to this?

• 1:38:33Speaker 07

  And how to understand how this particular kind of misinformation works.

• 1:38:37Jay Novella?

  Out of curiosity, are you discussing politics at all?

• 1:38:40Speaker 07

  Oh, that's actually a really good question. I try, I use what I call a trading wheels approach. Which is, I purposefully weighed people into the shallow end. I'm giving lots of metaphors here and I don't mean to. Um, I teach people how to think and how misinformation works using examples that aren't emotionally or identity triggering. So that they learn the skills and then hopefully graduate to something else. That's why I start with like the astrology reading and then, then I go into like witchcraft and psychics. And I work my way to like evolution denial or climate change denial or vaccines, but I don't start there. So with a book, I'm trying really hard to spend, um, most of my time on examples

• 1:39:25Speaker 07

  that would not trigger the vast majority of people. I'm also very aware that we're in a time where the concept of misinformation itself has become political and, um, is the subject of

• 1:39:40Speaker 07

  A lot of conspiracies, skepticism, in that the people who most need to read a book like this, I don't want to turn them off right away.

• 1:39:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you have to thread that needle. We all have to do it from time to time. I mean, it's, it's, for us, it's been very much like we don't discuss politics on the SDU.

• 1:39:59Speaker 02

  Well, to clarify, we are nonpartisan. A lot of the topics that we deal with, like, we've talked about gun violence, for example, you know, and gun safety laws. That's massively political, but we say, we try to talk about the science and to try to stay as nonpartisan and politically neutral as possible, which is impossible, but you know, whatever, we do the best we can. So at least let's talk about the science. Then there are topics where, you could tell me what you think about this, it's just unavoidable, it's so unavoidable that even within the skeptical community, everyone has taken political corners, which is incredible, like the whole trans issue. Everyone has taken to their political corner on that issue. And we're not supposed to do that. Like, we're the one movement who's

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  not supposed to do that, and yet, here we are.

• 1:40:46Speaker 07

  Something like, climate change comes to mind, too. Climate change, like, the one predictor, the, the, the single most predictive factor, whether somebody accepts or denies climate change is political affiliation.

• 1:40:56Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  And as soon as issues become attached to our identity, they're very hard to dislodge, and especially if they become a tribal issue. And we, obviously, we need to be able to address those issues. But something else with addressing those issues is that, like, somebody who denies climate change, or denies evolution, or going in with the facts on those issues, or going in with the science, is not going to convince somebody, because that's not how they got there.

• 1:41:25Speaker 02

  It's not a knowledge deficit problem.

• 1:41:26Speaker 07

  Right. And so, helping them understand their own thinking, why they might, why they may have gotten there without following the science, it certainly feels like we did, right? None of us think, oh, I'm denying science, or I'm falling for pseudoscience. Yeah, so it's a dicey issue. I joke that with my class, it's way easier. My students are captive. For a semester, they want a grade, and so they have to stick with me for four months, as I walk them through, and then finally get them to the deep end, and we can take off the training wheels. Online and in real world, it's much harder than that. And it requires somebody to...

• 1:42:05Speaker 07

  They could deep dive into their own thinking and really be willing to be skeptical, not of what they've heard, but of their own thinking processes.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  And so what, and you have your, you're mainly on YouTube, you're putting out your series of videos. I mean, you probably, you have to do all the social media these days. You can't just do one.

• 1:42:26Speaker 07

  As far as social media channels, my biggest platform is Facebook. I try on Instagram. I don't understand Instagram. I am on TikTok and I'm trying on YouTube.

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  Stick with it.

• 1:42:39Speaker 02

  It is funny how they all have their, their own sort of personality and they, they skew to different demographics and they're different little subcultures. They all have their own little online subculture. Again, we try to do everything, but like currently we're doing a lot of TikTok. It's very frustrating because the, the culture on TikTok is so anti-intellectual. It's overwhelming. It's really overwhelming.

• 1:43:03Speaker 07

  I've watched your videos on TikTok, if that makes you feel better.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  Thank you. No, I mean, we're there. Obviously we think we're getting something done, but man, it's, it's rough some weeks. Facebook is great. It's just old. I mean, it's just for old people, which is fine, you know, but you, you can't just, you know, you can't just do Facebook because you're going to be missing a whole generation. Like the, once, once their parents got on Facebook, the kids all got off Facebook, basically.

• 1:43:27Speaker 07

  Well, there are at least a lot of people on Facebook.

• 1:43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. So we do everything as well, but you just got to figure out whatever works for you. It's all an experiment. There's no formula.

• 1:43:37Speaker 07

  And I have heard, for what it's worth, that the largest podcasting platform is actually YouTube.

• 1:43:43Speaker 02

  So Melanie, tell us where is the best place that our listeners can find you?

• 1:43:47Speaker 07

  So my major platform is Facebook. I'm also on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. All of those are at Thinking Powers and I have a website, thinkingispower.com.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Great. So if they go to Thinking is Power, they'll get to everything.

• 1:44:00Speaker 07

  Yes, everything.

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  Awesome. Okay. Well, Melanie, thank you so much for joining us today.

• 1:44:06Speaker 07

  Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 1:44:08Speaker 05

  Thank you, Melanie.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I have three news items, but they all happen to be in the same theme. These all have to do with metallurgy. All right, here we go. Item number one, researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. Item number two, scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes that

• 1:45:06Speaker 02

  is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. And item number three, researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. Kara, go first.

• 1:45:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So in Max Planck, or at Max Planck, they devised a single-step method for extracting, you said that was nickel? Can you hear me?

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  Nickel.

• 1:45:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, cool. For extracting nickel from ore, it reduces the total carbon footprint by 84%, energy usage by 18%. The total carbon footprint of the extraction process, I'm assuming, is what you mean? Okay. UT scientists developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal, oh my god, I don't know, nanopore membranes. So that would be like trace amounts of rare earth metals, three times faster than existing methods, half the energy. Okay, so we've got 84% carbon reduction, 18% energy reduction, then we've got three times faster, half the energy, and then at Penn State...

• 1:46:14Cara Santa Maria?

  We've got lithium extraction, minutes rather than hours, no toxic chemicals, much less energy. So that one's vaguer. That one doesn't have any specific numbers. I don't know. Which of these things is harder to do? To extract nickel from ore, to separate rare earth metals, or to extract lithium? And which one do we need the most? I mean, we need the rare earth metals. So I think people are probably working on that faster. I'm going to say that that one is the science. It might be the fiction, because who freaking knows? But I'm gonna say that one's the science, because that's probably what there's more effort in right now, and more money being put towards is the rare earth metals. So

• 1:46:56Cara Santa Maria?

  then that leaves nickel and lithium. I think we need lithium even more. I don't know if we need as much nickel. We probably do. But I'll call the nickel one the fiction. I don't know. It's a total shot in the dark.

• 1:47:11Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:47:12Speaker 05

  It would be easier if I knew what the multi-step method for extracting nickel was. So I could make some kind of good comparison here to these 84, to the carbon footprint, 84% reduction and the energy usage of 18% savings. The second one, the industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions. Nanopore. Nanopore membranes? I don't know that. Three times faster than existing methods, half as much energy. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Metallurgy, really, Steve? Can we have a different topic?

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  They're all news items, you know, from this week. This all happened to be around.

• 1:47:55Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, that's right. These were all over TikTok.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  Metallurgy and also involving things that we really need.

• 1:48:01Speaker 05

  And the last one here about the new tech, new technique for extracting lithium. All right. Whenever I see something like new technique for something, that leans me towards the science section, because, yeah, you could have the technique down, doesn't mean you're going to necessarily have the immediate results. It's more like a proof of concept kind of things. And I think those things turn out to be more science, rather than fiction. So therefore, huh, tell you what, Kara?

• 1:48:31Speaker 05

  I'm going to join you. I'm going to say nickel, extracting nickel is the fiction, and I don't know why.

• 1:48:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Same, same.

• 1:48:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:48:42Jay Novella?

  I think it's the, uh, the, the last one here. Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium, uh, that could, they could do it in minutes rather than hours.

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  Oh, that's right. The researchers were from, uh, some other university, right?

• 1:48:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I think that one is the fake.

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  Which one?

• 1:48:59Jay Novella?

  Penn State. Penn State one.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. And Bob?

• 1:49:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about any of these technologies to have any big red flags. The only, the main thing that stuck out to me is, uh, the lithium one, the, the third one. And, and my attitude is it's probably too good to be true. Or, you know, cause it'd be great for, for batteries. So I'll say that one's fiction. I'll join with Jay.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  So you all agree on the second one?

• 1:49:25Speaker 05

  You have a chance to sweep us right now, Steve.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  We'll start, we'll start there. We'll see. Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes. That is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. You guys all think this one is science and this one is the fiction.

• 1:49:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:49:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Good job.

• 1:49:53Bob Novella?

  Just like that, people.

• 1:49:55Speaker 02

  Just like that.

• 1:49:56Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  Um, but this is based on a real news item. That does have to do with rare earth metals and nanopore membranes, but it's not an industrial process. This is just a laboratory proof of concept. So there's no data on how much faster, how much energy, nothing, because they just, they didn't do it and on any scale. It was just like the basic science of trying to figure out how to make pores that will be selective in terms of which kinds of ions can pass through. So it's a good start. You know, it might be the kind of thing where down the five, 10 years from now, you might have something. Um, it was able to, to have greater affinity for, again, for rare earths versus potassium, magnesium, like calcium, those kinds of irons.

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  But also it was able to, to have differential, uh, preference for the lighter rare earths versus the middle rare earths, not the middle earths and the heavy, the heavy rare earths. So yeah, it does, it has potential, has potential, but this is, this is still a ways off. So, you know, the, the, the big problem with the rare earths, they're, they're critical for tons of, of modern technology, electronics, for batteries, for lots of things, but they're very difficult to purify from ore, and they're also very difficult to reclaim from recycled electronics. They require a lot of toxic chemicals, they're very bad for the environment,

• 1:51:19Speaker 02

  and they're, they're slow, right? So, in fact, it's the, the refining of the rare earths is really more the limiting factor in terms of supply than mining the ore, right? We actually have rare earths in the US, not as much as in other parts of the world like China.

• 1:51:37Speaker 05

  It's a minor point.

• 1:51:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but we just have no capacity to refine it. You know, that China has most of the world's ability to refine rare earths. So, being able to come up with a, a process that's more environmentally friendly, and that is, you know, more, of course, efficient, would be fantastic. But there's a lot of work to do before we get there. All right, let's go back to number one, research at the Max

• 1:52:03Bob Novella?

  That's all right. China will steal it and then make it, and make it work.

• 1:52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll make it work. Research at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and use, and energy usage by 18% is science. This is a pretty significant advance, and this is

• 1:52:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 02

  you know, well, on its way to, to application. So, this process has a number of advantages. If, for one thing, it can use lower-quality ores. Like, right now, we have to use sort of the, the high-quality nickel ores, because the lower-quality ones are way more complicated to extract the nickel. There's more complex, more complex chemical compounds, you know, with nickel in them. And so, it takes multiple steps using a lot of carbon and a lot of energy. In fact, if we make batteries, you know, batteries and EVs have a lot of nickel in them. You know, arguably, we're not actually reducing the carbon by much. We're just shifting

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  it to the battery production, right? Because we're just shifting it to mainly the nickel production. It's still a net advantage, right? There's still a net gain. But a huge part of the carbon footprint of EVs is processing the nickel that's going in the batteries, you know? So they came up with a process that if you use green hydrogen, that's a huge F, right? If you use green hydrogen, use hydrogen plasma instead of carbon. So what uses zero carbon. So the only carbon release would be in the production of the hydrogen itself. But if you use green hydrogen, then there actually the process itself, this one step process, which uses a lot less energy and is a lot faster, which is also very important,

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  releases no carbon. But if they include the mining and the shipping and all the other stuff and all that, that's still there's still a carbon footprint. But all the carbon from the actual processing of the nickel itself and extracting it from the ore would be gone. Of course, if we're using gray hydrogen, it's not as much of an advantage. Still an advantage, still better, but just not as much.

• 1:54:13Bob Novella?

  Is that like the difference between Gray Hulk and Red Hulk?

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  Remember, gray hydrogen is like you make it from you're stripping the hydrogen off of hydrocarbons.

• 1:54:22Bob Novella?

  Ah, yes.

• 1:54:23Speaker 02

  Versus electrolyzing water, versus pulling it out of the ground. There's like all different kinds of hydrogen depending on.

• 1:54:28Bob Novella?

  Can we institute, can we institute a laugh track for the jokes that I make that fail horribly?

• 1:54:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:35Bob Novella?

  Just checking.

• 1:54:36Speaker 05

  Come on. We've been, we've been playing without a safety net for 20 years now. We're about to start now.

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  So, demand for nickel is probably going to double by 2040, which is not that far off.

• 1:54:50Speaker 05

  Oof.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  Double.

• 1:54:52Speaker 05

  That double your nickel is a dime. See, Bob? No laugh track.

• 1:54:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it sucks, doesn't it?

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  This means that.

• 1:54:57Bob Novella?

  I tell you, I'm getting depressed. No, no, we're saying, we're saying nickel so many times. I keep thinking of Joe Nickel every time you say it.

• 1:55:04Speaker 02

  Oh. All right. This means that research that Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods is science. And this is also potentially huge, because

• 1:55:21Bob Novella?

  Awesome.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right now, the way they purify lithium is a couple of methods. They both suck. Um, so one is you can, well, they're, they're both energy intensive. So if you can purify it from, from lithium rich, uh, like brine, but that requires evaporating it, which means pouring a ton of energy into heating it up for hours in order to evaporate it off. And then you, you get left with sort of the lithium cake and then you have to purify the lithium further from there. The other thing you could do is if you, if you get like the lithium ore, is you have to bake it at high temperature with sulfuric acid, like you're baking it in sulfuric acid and then you leach it with water. It's a multiple step process. Then you have to add a, a basic chemical, uh, what is that sodium hydroxide? And then to,

• 1:56:06Speaker 02

  to neutralize it. And then you have to heat it again. And, but yeah, it's a multi-step process, uses a lot of energy. They figured out a way, they, and what they did was they, first they modeled it and then they tested it, is they found that if you combine it first with sodium hydroxide, then you can go from that compound with a single step at a low temperature to a purified lithium without having to go through an acidic phase and then neutralizing the acid and all that. So it's, the, the whole process is, is an order of magnitude faster, does not use any toxic chemicals, uses a lot less energy. So

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  this is obviously critical. The, uh, demand for lithium is going to increase even more than demand Oh, yes. for nickel.

• 1:56:54Bob Novella?

  But we keep finding more and more of it.

• 1:56:56Speaker 02

  Again, the limiting factor is the processing of the lithium. It's not necessarily like the, the, the source

• 1:57:02Bob Novella?

  Deposits.

• 1:57:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's not the lithium deposits. It's getting, it's get, turning it into battery grade lithium, you know, it's gotta be. Relatively pure. We have millions of metric tons of lithium deposits in the US. We just cannot process it fast enough to meet our needs. So we get 97% of our lithium comes from Chile and Argentina, even though we have lots of lithium in the US. So yeah, we need to develop these, uh, these techniques, you know, and get them at an industrial scale so that we can be more independent, but also just increase the world's supply, you know,

• 1:57:38Speaker 05

  It helps everything, right?

• 1:57:39Speaker 02

  Helps everybody, yeah. We need to multiple times the amount of lithium. We need twice as much nickel. Uh, we need way, we have multiple times the rare earths. We're having the same problem with copper. We don't have enough copper right now. If you calculate like how much copper we need to get to our climate goals by 2050, we don't have enough. We have like a third of the copper that we need. So we would have to like triple the world's production of copper, which again, the limiting factor is not the mining of copper. It's more the refining of it.

• 1:58:12Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:58:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and so we need to do, we need to do it faster and we need to be energy and carbon efficient, right? If we, if we spend a lot of our carbon budget making this transition, we could actually make things worse in the short term, you know? It still might be worth it in the long term, you know, for electrifying these various industries, these various sectors, but, um, if certainly if we could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the transition itself, that would be a huge help. So these, all these news items are good news. They're all moving in the right direction and, and hopefully they will pan out, you know, really well. So good news, everyone.

• 1:58:55Speaker 05

  Great. It's actually quite a positive.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:59Speaker 05

  Positive science fiction.

• 1:59:01Speaker 02

  I did sweep you. Okay. Evan, give the quote.

• 1:59:04Speaker 05

  "It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error and ignorance." Written by my favorite emperor and should be yours, Marcus Aurelius.

• 1:59:19Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:59:19Speaker 05

  Of his, the sixth book of Meditations.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  He was a real skeptical philosopher.

• 1:59:24Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:59:25Speaker 02

  2,000 years ago. It's amazing.

• 1:59:27Speaker 05

  Yes. Yep. And was in, and a leader, you know, a real leader of government. So.

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  I think he's from the future.

• 1:59:37Speaker 05

  Is that right? Because we have a chance then.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  Let's hope the future comes quickly.

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  Not to diminish the intellect of the ancients. He was, he was just a very, very, um, you know, he was a philosopher and, as you say, and a leader and, uh, very accomplished.

• 1:59:56Speaker 05

  Very.

• 1:59:56Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 2:00:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:00:00Bob Novella?

  Finally.

• 2:00:01Jay Novella?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 2:00:02Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:00:47Speaker 02

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is.

• 2:00:52Bob Novella?

  What is it detecting? Fresh produce, fresh meat. Okay. What happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 2:01:01Bob Novella?

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices when your fresh detector is going off. Head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.