The Skeptics Guide #1046 - Jul 26 2025

What's the Word: Fossil Words; News Items: New Supermaterial, Avi Loeb and the Alien Hypothesis, Belly Fat Jab, Hormone Therapy, Death by Haunted Doll; Who's That Noisy; 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, July 23rd, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Howdy.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  Hey, guys.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Was it Buenos Aires? Is that what you say?

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Buenos Aires.

• 0:58Speaker 03

  Buenos Aires. Pardon me.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I just got back from a week in Sicily.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Ah, Sicily.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  It was a beautiful, beautiful country, very.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Beautiful.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Beautiful. Yeah, it's really, it's really different. So, you know, the, it's, it's deserty scrubland, but not that dry. It's got, there's lots of trees and olive trees and, and stuff. But, you know, it's not like forest. It's, it looks more like Arizona than like Connecticut. In fact, there are prickly pears, cactus, all over the place, even though it's not native. It was introduced in like the 1500s, but it's been such a part of Sicilian landscape for so long. It's like part of their culture now.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  Yep, it's stuck around.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, very lovely. And the, the cultural history is amazing because, you know, obviously there were, the Greeks were there, then the Romans were there, then there were a lot of, a lot of Arab occupation there, and they eventually unified with Italy. So they're, you know, obviously part of Italy now. But they have all these different cultural elements, you know, still present. And, you know, we went to, I think the most amazing thing I saw when I was there was the Valley of the Temples. It's a, and it's also called the Hill of the Temples. It's like a hill in a valley. So sometimes it's.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Valle de Temple?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  So yeah, the Temple of Hercules is the best preserved Greek ruin in the world, like Greek temple. It's, it's not intact, but it's pretty complete, you know? All the columns are there. And there's a bunch of other ones that are in various stages of ruin, but it was cool. Very, very cool.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Were you able to visit all the major cities, you know, towns?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  A lot of them.

• 2:44Speaker 03

  Palermo, Messina, Catania.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went to Catania, I went to Palermo.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  Syracuse?

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Castel Amaro, I did not go to Syracuse.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, we had, you know, what was it like? We had a full week, you know, so.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  Steve, did you see anything that might indicate it was a ruin from World War II or anything related to the war?

• 3:04Speaker 02

  So I, not directly, and I asked about that on a couple, you know, pretty much every tour that I took. So apparently all of the damage done in World War II was repaired.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  So most of the times, yeah, that's like, Catania was bombed, you know, pretty significantly during World War II. And they pointed out this, this area here was, you know, pretty demolished, but it was completely repaired, you know?

• 3:30Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  And then there were some places where, like in Catania, it's interesting because, you know, it's right in the shadow of Mount Etna, which is still an active volcano. And at some point in the last hundred years or so, a lava flow extended the area of the land, basically extended the shoreline, so that all of the, like, the castles and defenses were now no longer on the ocean. They were on the Mediterranean, they were inland.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  I see.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  And so they were not strategically important because they were like no longer able to defend a port. And so they were not bombed during World War II because of that. It's interesting. The whole place is, I mean, it's obviously a volcanic island. Like, Catania is all lava. Everything's made out of blocks of lava, all of the. The squares had lava.

• 4:22Jay Novella?

  I wonder if that's a good building material.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  It is. It's a very strong, very good building material. Although they had an earthquake in 1690 something, I think. And it was devastating. It was like it flattened the entire city. And they, our tour guide said they basically, there's the before time and the after time, right? Like the city was completely rebuilt after the earthquake. But you know what, what structures withstood the earthquake the best?

• 4:53Speaker 03

  Hmm. What would have withstood the earthquake the best?

• 4:56Speaker 02

  The Roman foundations.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  Oh, but they're concrete, huh?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  They weathered it very well, to the point that they actually built buildings on top of the, the Roman foundations because they were so strong.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had the good stuff.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, that concrete just was, yeah, we've, we've talked about this before on the show. You know, how it even got stronger over time. So they, they stood when almost every other building fell.

• 5:21Jay Novella?

  Now, more importantly, Steve, you mentioned that they have very dense meatballs there.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  They do. Their meatballs are very meaty. The meat, the meat to breadcrumb ratio was different than what we're used to. It was more meat, less filler.

• 5:34Speaker 03

  How did you find that?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  They were great. They were different, a little different. You know, they weren't as, I don't know, fluffy as what we were used to. But they were, they were fantastic. The food was good. The only thing is it's very heavy seafood and I'm not into seafood. So that, you know, pretty much anywhere we went, like half to most of the menu was seafood.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the big, and the big cities or towns are on the coast. So you would expect that, sure.

• 5:59Jay Novella?

  Joss must have loved it though, Steve.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  She did. She had like every night, she had some different kind of seafood.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  Steve, uh, was, uh, it only Sicily? That was your, the entirety of your trip?

• 6:08Speaker 02

  We went to, we started in Malta because my wife had a conference there. So that was just a weekend, like a Thursday to Sunday, and then, then a full week in Sicily. And that was like, that was not enough, really. We were, you know, we drove all around the island.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  Look how tiny Malta is on the map. Oh my gosh.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's a good.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  It's a speck.

• 6:29Jay Novella?

  What are you doing, man? You're looking bigger.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is a small island. It's a couple of islands, but yeah.

• 6:36Jay Novella?

  So you fly there, Steve, or take a boat?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  We took a ferry from Sic- we flew into Sicily, took a ferry from Sicily to Malta and back. That was like an hour, an hour and a half. I say ferry, it's like a ship, you know, it's like a smallish cruise liner, you know, but it was.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Is it like the one we took when we visited the Great Barrier Reef?

• 6:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  A ship like that? Larger?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Much bigger.

• 6:58Speaker 03

  I see.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Much, much bigger, yeah.

• 6:59Jay Novella?

  Oh god, the water there looks amazing.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So, the Blue Lagoon was filmed there. It was beautiful, yeah.

• 7:07Jay Novella?

  Wow, wow, wow. Well, I gotta put that on my list. It looks fantastic.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, yeah, it was, it's very, very beautiful. Obviously, a lot of movies are filmed there because it looks so old, you know, and the first, in the first season of Game of Thrones, for example, the city of Medina in Malta was King's Landing. So of course, that's part of every tour now, like, this is where

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, here it is.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Ned Stark was killed, you know.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh. They're doing what Lord of the Rings did to New Zealand.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Game of Thrones did to Malta. Very cool. And it was just the two of you. How nice.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It was.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  When was the last, when was the last time, and who? It was just the two of you, right?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  When was the last time the two of you just took a vacation like this somewhere?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Couple of years. We went to Bermuda a couple of years ago.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Okay, but that's just Bermuda.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  This was, this was like, yeah, this was the first really extended vacation, just the two of us. Because, you know, we have kids, so we've, and

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Exactly, yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  You want to take your kids, you want to give them the experience. But yeah, this is like a second honeymoon kind of trip.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Damn kids. Meddling kids, Bob, meddling kids.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And of course, the whole time we're there, it's like, oh, we gotta bring the kids back and show them all this cool stuff, you know.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  I wish the kids were here.

• 8:25Bob Novella?

  You did not.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Didn't say we wish they were there. We said we ought to bring them back. Make a separate trip.

• 8:31Bob Novella?

  No, you're not going back. We're going to Japan.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  So these are not mutually exclusive.

• 8:37Bob Novella?

  Well, we gotta get to Japan before it goes crazy over there.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  All right. Well, we got a great show for you this evening. We're gonna start Kara with what's the word?

• 8:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Hey, that's me. This week, I thought I'd do something differently. Mostly, I was inspired by listener Ryan Taylor, who wrote to us and said, much earlier this year, I thought this would be a topic of interest. You've had conversations in the past about the history of specific phrases, like blood is thicker than water. You remember we went down that rabbit hole. And of course, I do what's the word. This is in a similar vein. So he introduced the concept of fossil words. Have you guys heard of these before? I guess I hadn't heard that label, but I've thought about the concept.

• 9:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't.

• 9:17Bob Novella?

  They're very old.

• 9:17Cara Santa Maria?

  So fossil words are, as he put it, and this is like pretty standard definition, words that have mostly disappeared from the English language, but remain, quote, fossilized in several phrases. Like, we might talk about short shrift, but how often are you talking about shrift in another context?

• 9:34Speaker 03

  You get the short shrift, right?

• 9:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Bob Novella?

  I love those, yeah.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Skullduggery.

• 9:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, and so.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  One fell swoop.

• 9:39Cara Santa Maria?

  One fell swoop. That's a great example. And there are a ton of them, like, without further ado, or run amok. I rarely amok without running. How about you guys? Yeah, I just don't amok often.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Well, there's a muck time.

• 9:51Bob Novella?

  I walk amuck sometimes.

• 9:53Cara Santa Maria?

  There are so many like this. Like, oh, I love this one. This one was fun as I was digging deep. Just desserts. It is D E S E R T S, spelled like deserts, but pronounced desserts like a deserter, because it's the state of deserving something.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  Oh, deserve?

• 10:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  I thought maybe desertion.

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  No, so if you get your just desserts, you are getting something that you deserve. You're not getting like dessert, like chocolate cake. Um, but I

• 10:23Speaker 03

  And that phrase is an, is kind of a negative, is kind of a negative term. Like, somebody gets their just deserves.

• 10:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, something that they deserve.

• 10:29Speaker 03

  You got what you were asking for.

• 10:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Got what you had coming, yeah.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  You're asking to be hurt.

• 10:32Bob Novella?

  Here, here's one, kith and kin. You don't hear kith.

• 10:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. I never hear kith and kin, though. Is that a common one?

• 10:37Bob Novella?

  Uh, well, you don't watch, um, A Christmas Vacation, maybe. Um, but, um, I watch that every year with Liz. But yeah, kith and kin.

• 10:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I love, um, the whole shebang. When's the last time anybody used shebang? It's like, uh...

• 10:52Jay Novella?

  I say that every once in a while.

• 10:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, every...

• 10:54Jay Novella?

  Well, there has to be something, you know, big, right? You know, it's gotta, it's gotta fit it.

• 10:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and apparently, uh, programmers have taken it over and they use it in their, um, in their languages as well.

• 11:04Jay Novella?

  If I remember correctly, Kara, Perry used to say that. He'd be like, "The whole shebang!" Like, you know, he'd say it like that. Remember that, guys?

• 11:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I feel like I see so many of these, and Steve, you may too, because I know Steve and I share our love for the New York Times crossword. Like, eke out is always on the crossword. But when, when is the last time you said eke, otherwise?

• 11:25Bob Novella?

  Well, in terms of fear, it's a word for, that denotes fear.

• 11:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's spelled differently. Eke.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Spelled differently, yeah.

• 11:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. Eke is eke out.

• 11:34Bob Novella?

  Oh, it's, oh, you're talking Eke.

• 11:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yep.

• 11:36Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 11:36Cara Santa Maria?

  It's spelled differently. Yeah, you eke something out.

• 11:38Jay Novella?

  What does eke mean?

• 11:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Eke. Well, let's look it up. I mean, that's the thing.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  Like, when you eke out a wind, like, just get fired.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Barely makes sense.

• 11:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I thought you meant, what's the etymology of it? I was gonna say, I couldn't get into the etymology of all of these things, um, but there are a fair amount. Uh, like, beyond the pale is a perfect example. According to Merriam-Webster, it's not the word that we're used to using, like, pale, like, lacking in color. It was derived from a Latin word, pallas, which means stake. So, beyond the pale was beyond the stakes or the fences that made up the boundaries. So, it was outside of a boundary. That's where we got beyond the pale.

• 12:18Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 12:19Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not, it's a totally different word, pale. And then here's another one.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Makes sense, though.

• 12:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Kidnap. So, nap, apparently, was a slang word for nab. So, if you nab something...

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Kidnap.

• 12:31Cara Santa Maria?

  They altered it. Like in the 17th century and said nap instead. And the only way it's really stuck around is kidnapping. We don't use the word napping of anything else. It's different from the word nap to sleep. Totally different usage, totally different word, just spelled the same. And there's a few others like that slipshod, abated with bated breath. You only ever do any, yeah, you only ever bait your breath, huh? You don't really bait anything else. It comes from the same root as abate. We use abate all the time.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Oh, sure, abatement.

• 13:04Cara Santa Maria?

  We never use the word bait or baited.

• 13:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just fascinating. And there are.

• 13:10Bob Novella?

  Here's one, in the, in the offing.

• 13:12Cara Santa Maria?

  In the offing.

• 13:13Bob Novella?

  Offing.

• 13:14Cara Santa Maria?

  What's that?

• 13:14Bob Novella?

  That's just an expression that means like it's within possibility, you know, your, your race is with, you know, is in the offing if you perform well.

• 13:21Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so interesting. I've, I've, as I'm reading these lists, I'm only regurgitating the ones that feel salient to me. But there are so many that I'm like, I've never heard that in my, or, or maybe I've heard it and I've read it, but I've never said it. Like, do you ever say wend your way? Like wend one's way?

• 13:39Bob Novella?

  No, definitely not.

• 13:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Me neither, but I see it all over all of these lists. Oh, here's another one. This one is, I think, relevant for a lot of skeptics. Sleight, as in sleight of hand. It's the only time we use that word.

• 13:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 13:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Isn't that weird?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  But you can slight someone at the same time.

• 13:56Bob Novella?

  It's funny because I, I have noticed these fossils from time to time, but I never really realized how many there are.

• 14:02Cara Santa Maria?

  There are a lot.

• 14:03Bob Novella?

  So many. Now, when you think about it, when you dive down this rabbit hole.

• 14:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you stick something in one's craw?

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Stuck in your craw.

• 14:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Stuck in your craw. When else are you talking about craws?

• 14:13Bob Novella?

  Crawfish.

• 14:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Or battening down the hatches?

• 14:16Bob Novella?

  That's legit, though. There are hatches that need battening.

• 14:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Down or up?

• 14:21Speaker 02

  That's the only thing you batten, right?

• 14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It's really the only thing you batten, yeah.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  Do you batten up the hatches?

• 14:25Cara Santa Maria?

  You might say boarding batten when you're talking about a sail, but yeah, otherwise, those are, that's it. You only batten a hatch.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Anchors away.

• 14:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Fascinating. Anyway, so thank you, um, once again to Ryan. That was really interesting to dive into. And now everybody will notice them, you know, when they are running amok, not walking amok.

• 14:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wreaking havoc. Haven't havoced without wreak in a while. Haven't wreaked without havoc either.

• 14:55Jay Novella?

  Hmm, yeah, wreak havoc. Wreak destruction, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  I wanna, I wanna pay attention to come up with some more.

• 15:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, we'll try to inject as many as we can going forward.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Well, what you do is you find out what the pieces of it mean, and then you use that out of context.

• 15:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Appropriately, but out of the idiot.

• 15:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you use it in context, but out of the, yeah, out of the fossilized phrase.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  There is a, there is a word I looked up specifically for my news item, so a little foreshadow in there, which is a rarely used word, and when you hear it, you'll probably know it.

• 15:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, here's one that I think we could all probably use, like ulterior. Yes, it is still kind of in common parlance, but you only ever hear it when you're talking about ulterior motives. So maybe we can all use it to describe other intentionally kind of hidden things. Ulterior, I don't know.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  ulterior.

• 15:51Cara Santa Maria?

  We're just gonna come up with a bunch of synonyms for motive.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Well, because our brains are so trained to hear motive after ulterior. Now you have to decouple it from that, it's not natural.

• 16:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Fascinating.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Cara. Jay, tell us about this new super material.

• 16:09Jay Novella?

  Well, slow down there.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Is it kryptonite?

• 16:12Jay Novella?

  It's cool, it's cool, but there's a lot to talk about. Well, first of all, you know, we have to talk about plastic in general real quick to kind of set the stage here. So, as you guys know, right, plastic is unbelievably useful. It's used in all applications at this point. I mean, where, you know, where isn't it used? We just can't live in the modern world without using it. It's cheap to produce, it's chemically stable, you know, it's useful in pretty much every industry, but the problem with plastic is what? That it doesn't biodegrade, or it does incredibly slowly. It's, it pollutes the environment. Um, you know, it's, like I was saying, it's, this is not biodegradable stuff. It just, it just stays there and unleashes chemicals into whatever, you know, whatever

• 16:57Jay Novella?

  surrounding area that, that it's in. You know, major concern here, the amount of plastic in the world is this, this freaking It blows my mind. It's larger than the volume of Mount Everest. The, uh, the, the used plastic in the world would, would bury Manhattan under one and a half kilometers of plastic, which if you think about the, the sheer volume that we have in our environment, it's, it's unreal. You know, we have research now that shows that it harms our ecosystems. It's entered the food chain. The recycling rates are just abysmal. They are so low, it's pathetic. And, you know, current global efforts are simply nowhere. They're just, there's, there's nothing going on here that's going to regain the ground that plastic is

• 17:40Jay Novella?

  taking from us every year. So, of course, lots of companies and, and research labs, you know, there's a huge effort to replace plastic with a material that has, you know, most of, if not all, the benefits of current plastic, but none of the negatives. And it's been impossible to do so far. So, for example, like past attempts that have been made, you know, they, they could come up with a material that would work, but it's way too expensive to make. It's not strong enough. It requires really complicated chemical processing, which, you know, the chemicals are expensive. Some of them could be very dangerous. However, there is, you know, of course, I'm going to pivot this to some research that's, that's happened that has shown, uh, you know, something promising that I think is worth talking about.

• 18:25Jay Novella?

  So Rice University and the University of Houston, they, they might, hopefully, they might have developed something that could one day help us move away from the plastics that we use today. So their research was recently published in Cell Reports Physical Science. This is a journal. And they outlined the process for creating a very strong biodegradable material from bacterial cellulose. This is unlike most plastic substitutes. This one, you know, actually performs better than many of the metals and, and glasses that are being used in manufacturing, both in strength and thermal performance. Now, Steve, I know there's different kinds of strength. I think in general, for the applications that they could make with this, it would be,

• 19:06Jay Novella?

  you know, stronger than the plastics that we're currently using. So they have some key innovations here. Cellulose is already the most abundant natural polymer on earth. It's everywhere. It's, you know, it doesn't cost anything to get your hands on it. It's what gives plants their rigidity, right? So when you have a, you know, plant stalk that's standing up, you know, out of the ground, it's using cellulose to, you know, have that form, to hold it in that form. But there's a bacteria now that, the name is so ridiculous, I don't even know if I should try to say it. I'll try it. Ready? Kara, just be patient with me here.

• 19:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  It ends with an I, I'll bet.

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  It's Comagatibacter xylanus.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Oh, I was wrong.

• 19:47Jay Novella?

  Comagatibacter xylanus.

• 19:49Cara Santa Maria?

  That's probably kinda right.

• 19:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, close, right?

• 19:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Sounds good.

• 19:53Jay Novella?

  In order to produce this, they spin cellulose into ultra-thin nano-fibers. And these are long chains of glucose that form dense, entangled mats. And that's basically how plants make it, right? It grows that way. And it's not uniform, there's no rhyme or reason to how, you know, these strands like connect to each other. It's all chaotic. You know, you could just think of them as randomly aligned, right? All these different strands that are going in all different directions. Now, they're strong, but they're not remarkable in any way. So the Rice-Houston team changed that by introducing this interesting mechanical constraint. What they did was, they grew the bacterial cellulose on a rotating gel

• 20:34Jay Novella?

  in a bioreactor, right? So just think of it as like a flat plane that's spinning around inside of a bioreactor, and that's, and that's the environment that they grew the cellulose in. And this rotation forced the bacteria to lay down cellulose nano-fibers in the direction that they wanted them to, for it to grow in. And this formed ordered sheets rather than chaotic tangles. So that, that shape and that way that they connect with each other is uniform, and it fixes lots of problems. So the result is a highly aligned cellulose film that has a tensile strength up to 436 megapascals. So that doesn't mean

• 21:11Jay Novella?

  Anything unless, you know, let me give you a comparison for most of us who don't really know what that means. 436 megapascals in comparison, so a common plastics like PET plastics, we use those in water bottles, food containers, synthetic fabrics, right? They have a tensile strength of 50 to 100 MPA or megapascals. So aluminum tops out like at 400 and even some types of glass fall short of where the engineered cellulose could get to from a, from a strength perspective, which is really cool because of course we want it to be strong. And as an added bonus, Steve, because you're purchasing today. No, but as the team said, as a, as a bonus, right?

• 21:52Jay Novella?

  You know, they didn't even know this was going to happen, but they found that if they essentially doped the films that the cellulose is, is being grown on or laid down onto. If they, if they, these films have boron nitride nanosheets, right? That are there during the biosynthesis. Now these, you know, these are atom thin structures and they're known for, they're known for high thermal conductivity and strength and they bond to the cellulose and they make a matrix. And what this does is it's like a film with a tensile strength now up to 553 megapascals, which is even stronger, right?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Pascal.

• 22:30Jay Novella?

  Pascal, yes, exactly. Isn't there a guy named Pascal?

• 22:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Was.

• 22:36Jay Novella?

  I will never say that incorrectly again. So this now is more than five times stronger than the PET plastics like water bottles and food containers. It's three times better at dissipating heat compared to the untreated cellulose. And all this is happening without needing high temperatures or chemical solvents or any expensive post-processing. The bacteria essentially build the material in one step. Now, of course, this sounds so good, right? You know, there, there are some takeaways that we're going to get to. But, you know, before I go there, there, this would have potentially broad applications. You know, you could use this material in thermal management for electronics, which, you know, if you think about how much, how much thermal management is happening in all these heat-producing electronics

• 23:21Jay Novella?

  that we all have, I mean, each one of us probably owns, you know, two, three, four, five devices alone in the house. That turns into a lot of need for thermal management. They could use it for packaging films, biodegradable textiles, flexible sensors. It happens to be optically transparent. It's foldable. Like I said, it's strong. And it's more thermally efficient than conventional plastic. So it contains no toxic byproducts. There's one called bispheronol A, BPA, right? BPA? Yeah. That's not present in this. And unlike petroleum-based polymers, it will naturally degrade. That's important. And doesn't introduce anything funky into the environment.

• 24:06Jay Novella?

  So, you know, this isn't just lab tinkering. Like, they're not just like, hey, lab-scale tinkering where they make a tiny little bit of this stuff, but it would cost an incredible amount to mass-produce it. The process can be scaled up using the rotating gel platforms in standard bioreactors. It makes it far more viable than most of the other green materials that other companies have come up with. Most of them, if not all of them, couldn't get out of the small-scale production, and they're not seeing a problem here with that. So this is the first time that bacterial cellulose outperformed plastics and metals across multiple categories, again, without requiring exotic methods or expensive inputs. So I did try to specifically find out, like, what this is on track for. So, you know, they have to do all the things that need to be done

• 24:51Jay Novella?

  in order to get past the initial gates, right? They have to prove that it can be scaled up to a, you know, very, very large amount, right? It's not just, you know, hey, we want to make enough, you know, we want to make a pound of this stuff a day. They probably, you know, are looking way past that, like, for mass production. They need to find out, you know, how cost-effective it'll eventually be. I read that there are steps along the way where it could be like, you know, there are some early uses of it could come out as soon as, like, two to three years. But for it to go into like full production and really be replacing a lot of the products that we use, it's probably, and I hate to say it.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Five to 10 years away?

• 25:30Jay Novella?

  Five to 10 years. You know, that's the, you know, we've said this before, but the five to 10 year thing means they don't know how long it's gonna take.

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:40Jay Novella?

  It could be less than that, depending on how well the research goes and everything. Now, this isn't like testing, you know, medical procedures or medical interventions on people where there's, you know, an incredible amount of testing that has to be done. They could get to the finish line in a few years if things go really well with, you know, how well the testing goes and, you know, as they scale it up, it's, there's nothing holding it back. I'm being hopeful because I want to think that my kids have the chance of living in a future that isn't completely choked out by the plastics that we're making. You know, I think about this all the time, like on a personal level, like I have, I don't buy plastics if it's possible. You know, if I'm in the supermarket, if I can find ketchup in a glass container, I'm gonna do that.

• 26:22Jay Novella?

  It's not easy and most of the time, you know, I can't do it, but you can, you can find some products that are in glass containers, you know, switch brands if you have to, whatever. We all need to stop.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Or aluminum, it's fine.

• 26:33Jay Novella?

  Exactly. I love, I love it when a water bottle, like you wanna buy water and it comes in a big aluminum can. I love that.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  But my big question, Jay, is how much will it cost? Is it cost effective?

• 26:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's, that's, I think, the, the big one.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:50Jay Novella?

  If the price-

• 26:51Speaker 02

  It could be a deal killer.

• 26:52Jay Novella?

  Of course it could, you know, but if the price is a little bit more expensive, you know, I think it would be fine. I mean, if it's like 10 times the price, you know, we don't know anything yet, but I'm gonna keep an eye on it, you know, this is on my list of things I'm looking at. I really do hope that this works. I mean, imagine that, we just dump all this stuff in a landfill when we're done with it and it just biodegrades and goes away and it's totally fine.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Jay, you should look for catsup, I think that comes in a glass jar.

• 27:16Jay Novella?

  I will do that immediately.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  Instead of the ketchup.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. You guys remember who Avi Loeb is, right?

• 27:24Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Avi Loeb.

• 27:27Bob Novella?

  How's he been? What's he chasing now?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  He is the Harvard astrophysicist who, uh, whose claim to fame came when he, he speculated that the first interstellar object, uh, that was detected, Amu Amuwa, might be actually an alien probe.

• 27:48Bob Novella?

  Yeah, a spaceship, if you will.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Right. So remember a couple of weeks ago, we talked about the third interstellar object, the Three Eye Atlas?

• 27:57Bob Novella?

  Yes, I did. It was a wonderful news segment.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  It was very well delivered.

• 28:04Bob Novella?

  Thoroughly researched.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Thoroughly researched. You know, Avi Loeb published a paper and then wrote, you know, an opinion piece saying that we need to investigate whether this is an alien artifact.

• 28:15Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  And, you know, he has a, uh, the Galileo Project, which is dedicated to looking for techno-signatures, you know, of alien technological civilizations.

• 28:29Bob Novella?

  And that's a, that's a worthwhile endeavor.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I have, and he-

• 28:33Bob Novella?

  I think that's how we're gonna find him.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  I thought that may be the most likely way that we're going to detect the existence of alien civilizations as to their techno-signatures. I agree. My, my problem with him is not that he's doing that, it's that he's doing it wrong. He's just not doing a good job. I mean, he's, he is, in my opinion, falling into this pattern that we have encountered many times of a scientist who is not familiar with pseudoscience, who then falls into all of the pseudoscientific pitfalls and traps.

• 29:09Bob Novella?

  Traps.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Right? We've talked about this occasionally over the years on his show. Like, remember there was that neurologist who fell for facilitated communication? Same kind of thing. It's like, you don't, knowing science, even being a, you know, world-class scientist at an institution like Harvard, is not protection from falling for pseudoscience if you are not familiar with all the critical thinking stuff that goes into understanding pseudoscience. Remember Mack, who also was at Harvard?

• 29:37Bob Novella?

  John Mack.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, John Mack, the psychiatrist who thought his patients were actually abducted by aliens? I mean, you know, come on. Uh, anyway.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  So here are some of his arguments. They're so bad. They are so, they're like embarrassingly bad.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  They are.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  But he outlines his arguments. One is that, well, 3I Atlas, you know, again, it's an interstellar comet. It's zipping through our solar system. It's going too fast to be bound by the gravitational pull of the sun. So it's, you know, on a hyperbolic pathway. So we know from its, from its path that it came from out of the solar system and will leave our solar system. So, and it's the third interstellar object that, like that, that we have detected. So he has done what we call anomaly hunting, right? Oh, let's just look for features and then invent some reason why this might be an indication that it's an alien artifact.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, especially if you have a preconceived notion about things and try to retrofit it.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, like he's, he's starting with the, like, let's look for things that might indicate that it's alien, right? So, one thing he says is, the orbital plane of the comet of 3I Atlas is about five degrees off the ecliptic, which is, you know, pretty close to the ecliptic. And he says there's a 0.2% chance that that would be the case. That the, it would be five degrees and it would be in retrograde compared to the planets, the direction that the planets are going. So, but, okay, so what? You know, why would the, you know, the plane of the comet be in, in, in any way predictive that this is, this might be alien?

• 31:26Bob Novella?

  Right. Would we even notice any that we're not in the plane?

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Well, so he is assuming that the two, the 0.2% comes from, you know, any possible random arrange, you know,

• 31:39Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  orbital plane. So I looked into that because I know what you're saying about it. What if we're looking for them more in the plane? But Atlas is a whole-sky survey.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  So I'm assuming this is the whole Sky survey, that it does have an equal chance of noticing things in any plane, so that's fine. My real problem with, I mean, first of all, if it's, if you're just going by the five degrees, it's actually 2.7%, right? 10 degrees, 5 degrees on either side of the ecliptic out of 360. But he includes the fact that it's retrograde. But again, he's, then he retrofits. It's like this sharpshooter fallacy. You know, he's drawing the bullseye around the hole. So why, so he says because it would make it harder for Earth, for observers from Earth to detect it.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  And therefore to intercept it with chemical rockets.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 32:36Bob Novella?

  Oh my god, like they know we have chemical rockets.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  They know that we are here, yeah, they know all about us.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  That's, that's one problem with that. The other, I mean, it's also, it's, that's all, that's a secondary problem.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  That's why I'm laughing.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  The primary problem is like, so what? You know, you could have found, invented some reason why an alien might desire any possible feature, you know, parameter of this comet. This is not something that you could predict ahead of time. Again, you're just completely retrofitting. But yeah, there is this, this deeper problem of, and he is, connects to another point that he makes, you know, this is like, I think, his worst point. He says, you know, so the, at the speed it's going, it would have entered our solar system 8,000 years ago. And he says-

• 33:24Bob Novella?

  Wait, wait, do we have, do we know enough of its orbit?

• 33:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, is it, no, it's orbit.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  That's what he says. Said, this was roughly when human-made technologies became advanced enough to start documenting history on Earth.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Oh, here we go.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Again, so the frick what? So, well, I mean, he's saying that the aliens knew that we were interesting at that point, right? So then they sent the probe to take a look at us. But it makes no sense at all when you think about it. So first of all, why are you starting your count at the beginning of our solar system? Where did the probe come from?

• 33:57Speaker 03

  Right. Outside the solar system.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we don't know where. Yeah, right. You know, that's completely arbitrary to say that that that's when it was the aliens decided to send a probe our way. And also, because that's when we started to document our history, so what? That's not when civilization became apparent or crossed them threshold. Again, talk about searching for any justification, right? There's nothing special about 8,000 years ago, but That's such motivated reasoning. But Bob, didn't you relate that to the, well, they sent, so he makes another point, that it will get it to its close approach to the sun when it's on the opposite side of the sun from the earth, right?

• 34:44Speaker 02

  So it's perihelion will be hidden from Right. That because that would be the best time for it to fire its rockets to change its orbit, to stay in the solar system, and people and observers from earth wouldn't be able to see it doing that. We can't see it. No evidence. It's, well, again, it's astrology level retrofitting. It's like, so it's making so many assumptions about the motivations of the aliens, these alleged aliens who are sending in their probes. First of all, think about this. So if he's arguing 8,000 years ago, the aliens decided, we want to take a look at that planet.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  And then they orchestrated this orbit so that, you know, 8,000 years ago, so that it will be in the plane of the ecliptic so we could, it could like send probes or take a look at multiple planets, you know, on its way in, but be hard to detect for an astronomer on earth and also make maneuvers on the opposite side of the sun hidden from earth. So that assumes that we're at a particular place in technology, 8,000 years in the future. Yep. And not only that, but that particular Impossible to predict. It's impossible to predict, but it's essentially where we are right now, which is chemical rockets, which is probably just the tiniest little blip on our technological

• 36:12Speaker 02

  times, right?

• 36:15Speaker 02

  First of all, we could, we could have fission rockets right now.

• 36:19Bob Novella?

  We had them in the sixties. We were testing them. I mean,

• 36:21Speaker 02

  I know, it's like technological.

• 36:22Bob Novella?

  It's just a quirk of, of history, why we don't.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  It's a quirk of history. It's not a foregone conclusion that there's going to be any prolonged period where we only have chemical rockets.

• 36:31Bob Novella?

  Also, Steve, if that thing's trying to, trying to hide its trajectory change on the far side of the sun, we could still detect something happened. Like, wait a second. That trajectory makes, that new trajectory makes no sense.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Well, I know. We would immediately know something happened. And he said, cause that way it could come and then visit the earth. It's like, then why hide itself from us if it's, if it's gonna come visit the earth anyway.

• 36:57Bob Novella?

  Steve, you're not a Harvardist. Just face it, okay? You don't understand.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  It's almost childish. I'm like, come on, that's your reasoning? It is such anomaly hunting and special pleading, and it's just bad. So again, I, it's the, almost the worst aspect of it is that it gives a bad name to academic disciplines searching for techno-signatures. Because I think that's a legitimate endeavor. But when you have like the face of that be somebody who's doing it so poorly and making arguments that are so transparently nonsensical. It actually is accomplishing, I think, the thing that he's most afraid of, right? So if you read his article, he's very defensive about sort of the academic and scholarly legitimacy of what he's doing.

• 37:47Bob Novella?

  Oh, he must, yeah, he's gotten lots of pushback.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, for a good reason, but he's missing the point.

• 37:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 37:51Speaker 02

  He's, he's saying, we need to keep an open mind and it would, you know, like,

• 37:56Bob Novella?

  That's not an open mind.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has nothing to do with the things he's talking about. It has nothing to do with this isn't a legitimate academic concern or having an open mind. It has to do with, your arguments are crap, dude. That's what it has to do with, only that. Your, your logic is crap. And I think a lot, you know, so he needs some 101 in critical thinking in pseudoscience. So that he does not fall into these blatant pitfalls.

• 38:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Read our book.

• 38:22Bob Novella?

  Read our book.

• 38:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, start there. You could start there, absolutely.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  And then become a listener.

• 38:27Speaker 02

  So frustrating. And then, you know, he tried, then he finishes off by jacking off, right? Just asking questions, kind of approach. He's like, he says-

• 38:37Bob Novella?

  That is a hilarious expression. J-A-Q-ing off. I love it.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  This is how he finishes, this is towards the end. "Our paper is largely a pedagogical exercise with interesting realizations worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3i Atlas is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and we await the astronomical data to support this likely origin. Nevertheless, when viewed from an open-minded and unprejudiced perspective, our paper includes many compelling insights that could be applied to tens of interstellar objects that are expected to be detected over the next decade by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory." No, it doesn't. It doesn't include compelling insights. It concludes horrible logic and

• 39:22Speaker 02

  terrible arguments. And that's the problem. But you could see how defensive he's being, trying to justify what he's doing.

• 39:29Bob Novella?

  That actually would have been cool if he came up with a list, you know, if he said, "Now, Atlas, okay, Atlas, I'm sure it's a comet, but here's things that we could look for in the future that could be interesting and informative and somewhat anomalous and really come up with real things to look for."

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Actual anomalies and something that might have some predictive value. Now, the problem with the predictive value thing is that we don't have any-

• 39:53Bob Novella?

  You have to wait millennia.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  We don't have any gold standard, right? We don't know how to judge how predictive any feature is because we have nothing to compare it to. We don't, we can't say, "We've seen this before and these are features that we can statistically correlate with interstellar objects being an alien artifact, being a natural phenomenon." We're just speculating. Again, he's just speculating very, very poorly. I think that he almost admits by saying that it's overwhelmingly likely to be a natural object. He's admitting that all of his things together have almost no predictive value. I think, though, he thinks it has a small predictive value, whereas I think it has zero predictive value.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  It has zero predictive value because the methods he's using are so bad, because he's anomaly hunting and retrofitting and special pleading. The fact that he also, you know, now runs an organization that gets donations to do this, you know, you could make of that what you will.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  At least he's consistent.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  That's not, it's not a good thing, though, when you're consistently bad. That's, that's not a good thing. He clearly has learned nothing over the last seven years after his Muamua experience.

• 41:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, reminds me of Ralph Cramden. Ralph Cramden, you know, screws up.

• 41:07Speaker 03

  In a way, yeah.

• 41:08Bob Novella?

  Remember the honeymooners? He screws up again and his, and he says to his wife, Alice, no one's 100%. You know, no one's 100%. And his wife's like, you are, you get it wrong every time.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  No learning curve that I can detect. All right, anyway, Bob, tell us about this belly fat jab.

• 41:26Bob Novella?

  All right, fat in the news, fat in the news. Taiwan's Callaway Pharmaceuticals announced a first-in-class injectable drug that safely, appears to safely remove fat cells near the injection site, not just shrinks them, they're gone. So this, their study is based on the fate, their phase two results, which were recently published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal. The paper's name is "Efficacy and Safety of CBL 514 Injection in Reducing Abdominal Subcutaneous Fat," blah, blah, blah. I don't know about you guys, but Kara and I are very excited about this.

• 42:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we've been talking offline about this.

• 42:05Bob Novella?

  Right, this is like, I, I send every week, I send, here's my, here's my news item, some physics or astronomy thing, no, no word for a decade from Kara. I do this, and she's like, Bob, oh my God, let's get on this study.

• 42:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, it's like Kybella, but way better, I'm so excited.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you guys don't.

• 42:22Bob Novella?

  All right, so why are we excited? Do I even need to answer that? I mean, we're human, first of all, right? Most humans are obsessed with this. The global weight loss industry is projected in 2034 to be about a third of a trillion dollars, more than a third, 360 billion dollars by USD. So why is this big? I don't know. I have some notes here that I think I'm just gonna, I don't want to go on a rant, but losing weight or fat is specifically, is a pain in the ass, right? It's hard. People are obsessed with it because it's hard. And of course, you've got to factor in the media, right? Always throwing in our faces, you know, you gotta be skinny and muscular. That's all that matters.

• 43:07Bob Novella?

  So it has made people into these like, machines looking for ways to lose fat, to lose weight, right? Temporary diets are horrible, right? Because they're statistically almost certain to fail in the long run, right? Restricting calories is really hard and trust me, when you get a little older, it's like ridiculously hard. My body's like, no, you're gonna eat right now. You're not gonna get hungry. I don't want you to get hungry. It's like, I can't, I can't allow myself to get hungrier than usual. It's just a weird thing. I don't know if you guys are experiencing that too.

• 43:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also, I feel like as I get older, my calorie deficits have to be more extreme because my metabolism is not what it was when I was young. Like, when I was young, I could get away with eating a lot of calories and I was more active, but it feels like even now, when I'm pretty active, my just basal metabolic rate is so much lower than it was before. It's just hard to get rid of it. And I like that you were saying fat and not weight because it's not really about losing weight, right? It's about losing, especially belly fat.

• 44:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, the dangerous stuff.

• 44:15Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, and this is why Ozempic is so popular now. It's as popular as... I was trying to think of an analogy as coke in the seventies, right? It's just a weekly, it's a weekly injection and you almost certainly are going to lose weight. But even with Ozempic and similar GLP-1 drugs, they're problematic. And we talked about it on the show a bit. They cause both fat and muscle loss and muscle is notoriously difficult to build and it's among our most precious tissues and losing that is actually, it's horrible because you lose, you lose fat and muscle, then you gain fat back. So you're actually worse off. It'd be better if you didn't lose any weight at all because you, you end up with even less muscle.

• 45:00Bob Novella?

  So Ozempic also is good in a lot of ways, but also bad because you're losing some muscle as well. So this new drug also has this, the added benefit of not only, of not only killing fat cells, which is, which is a lot better than just shrinking them because when a fat cell goes away, it's gone. You're not going to be building new fat cells, especially after adolescence. It really doesn't happen. So this drug, you lose the, the fat cells die only, only near where it's injected. So let's talk about the drug more specifically. It's called CBL514. It's a small molecule drug and it triggers something called adipocyte apoptosis, fat cell death. This is programmed cell death that uses chemical triggers to do that. It's a natural process.

• 45:45Bob Novella?

  Any debris, any dead cells are cleaned up by our immune systems and metabolized into energy or harmless waste product. So this is a natural thing that's, that's not dramatic, that doesn't impact other critical systems of your body at all. And there's, there's three possible uses for this drug. There's the non-surgical fat reduction, which I've been mainly focusing on, but also cellulite. And this would help with that. And there's also a disease called Durcom's disease. Hadn't heard about that one. That's apparently a condition that causes painful fatty tumors to build up around the body. This sounds like this would be perfect for that, just killing those fat cells that are causing the pain. This sounds like a great application for that.

• 46:27Bob Novella?

  So, okay, this new study is specifically about how this drug did. And it's phase two trials. We've mentioned phases like this probably scores of times on the show. Phase one is essentially a small group of people, 20 to 100. It's first time and it's essentially for evaluation of safety and dosage range and if there's any, you know, obvious side effects. That's a phase one. Phase two, as we're seeing here, expands this study to a large group, 10, 100 people to 300 people, and then to see how effective it is and to further evaluate its safety. Phase three then, which could come after this, could involve hundreds to thousands of participants.

• 47:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Sign me up.

• 47:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So, so there is actually, I did find one drug that is similar to this. It was an injectable drug that could get rid of fat in very small areas where it's injected. It's called ATX 101. It stands for deoxycholic acid injection.

• 47:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that, that's Kybella, right? Yeah, that's what I was mentioning before. Kybella seems to be the only thing on the market, but it's like an acid that injects and kills the fat cells with acid. It doesn't actually induce apoptosis.

• 47:42Bob Novella?

  Wow, yeah, that sounds nasty. Currently, though, that is the only FDA approved minimally invasive injectable treatment for fat reduction. And it has been effective for small areas, but the side effects are scary. We're talking about skin necrosis, hello, dead skin, ulceration, nerve injury, and infection. So, no, no, thank you. I won't be going anywhere, going anywhere near that. That sounds pretty nasty.

• 48:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's mostly not, it's not used for belly fat. It's mostly used for double chin.

• 48:11Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 48:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Bob Novella?

  Okay. So now, CBL 514 has no side effects like that, that have been detected. What they did see was the following. So they had a phase two A study. So this is a kind of like a preliminary phase two. It was mostly proof of concept at this point. The paper says that the drug had a favorable and acceptable safety profile as well as efficacy in reducing subcutaneous abdominal fat at multiple dose levels. So they, they show that this, this thing works and there's no, there was no obvious. Side effects. So now, the meat of the paper, though, goes into, um, goes into the Phase IIb trials, and there was two of those. So there's two papers, one for each of the Phase IIb trials, which, which looked more, again, at efficacy and safety information. Now, the

• 48:57Bob Novella?

  first Phase IIb trial was, it was randomized, single-blind, and placebo-controlled. It had 76 participants, and 80% showed a greater than or equal to one-grade AFRS improvement. Um, AFRS stands for Abdominal Fat Rating Scale, which is, didn't know that thing existed. They, um, one article described it as, as five categories of abdominal fat rating. So they improved, uh, one of those. And I'll give a little more detail a little later. The second Phase IIb study was double-masked placebo-controlled, and it was multi-center, US and Canada, and that had 173 participants. So for both of these, the researchers found

• 49:40Bob Novella?

  that the safety profile was very favorable. It was, it was consistently acceptable across both trials, no serious systemic side effects. Uh, the worst that was a local injection swelling and pain. Almost everyone, I think 99%, did note that there was some swelling and pain. Some people had a little bit more pain than others, but that was really the only thing that, that I came across in the two, in the two papers. Um, in the paper's conclusion, they said, "Our results indicate that targeted injection consistently and significantly reduces subcutaneous abdominal fat, comparable to that achieved by liposuction, and shows a favorable safety profile. Over 75% of the CBL514-treated participants who achieved

• 50:25Bob Novella?

  the target fat volume loss greater than or equal to 150 mL required just one or two treatments." So, um, it worked for the vast majority of the people, 75 to 80%. I, I believe there was some loss for, it seems, I think, for everyone, but, uh, 75 to 80% reached the target, which was 150 mL. So they're, they're also, the other number that they throw around is like, like 20, the second- Test here, the second study looked, used MRIs specifically to really take a close look at the fat. And yeah, there was like 20 to 25% of the, of the fat layer was gone, something like that. So pretty dramatic, pretty solid. So it's also, I think it's important to emphasize that this isn't just for aesthetics.

• 51:08Bob Novella?

  There are, you know, there are reasons to do this that are more than just, you know, how you look and how you feel about yourself. You know, like I said, that there's also, this works for cellulite and Durkum's disease, but the focus is on this non-surgical fat, fat reduction. So it's, so it's more than aesthetic. The benefits are much broader. Abdominal fat, especially as we age, is related to serious conditions, including this chronic pain, this stroke, cardiovascular disease. Even though the drug targets just the subcutaneous fat, just under the skin, it does not specifically target the deeper visceral fat, which is, which is critical as well, because it's that fat that's, that's kind of, you know, enmeshed around your internal organs.

• 51:50Bob Novella?

  It's that, it's that fat that is why men have much more heart disease than women, because we have, we have much more visceral fat.

• 51:58Jay Novella?

  How quickly does it work? Like, does it kill the fat cells, like, within minutes? Or what is it?

• 52:02Bob Novella?

  No, I think, well, they were, I think, within a week or two. It's, it's on a scale of weeks where, when it's, you know, they were going back and testing them to make sure to see how much they had lost. So yeah, it's fairly quick, you know, a week or so.

• 52:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And you were saying it doesn't touch visceral fat?

• 52:17Bob Novella?

  No, it doesn't, but, but that said, that said, they said that it seems like it could have a positive impact on the hard to treat visceral fat, but they need more research on that. So there may be a little bit of a benefit, benefit to the visceral fat. But, you know, the effect doesn't go too much farther from the injection site. So if you're just injecting it, you know, into your, into your belly, you know, the visceral fat's farther away, so it's going to be, you know, it's not necessarily going to have a direct impact. So it seems to be maybe a little bit of an impact, but, but I think that they need more research for that.

• 52:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But if you're already reducing your total fat store load?

• 52:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Then the work that you're doing may have a greater benefit on visceral fat.

• 53:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Like if you are doing calorie deficit, or you are increasing your.

• 53:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 53:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Your energy.

• 53:08Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. And even just reducing the subcutaneous fat can, it can still reduce chronic disease risk at least. So there definitely could be some very good benefits to, to, uh, to getting rid of this fat. Um, all right. So the next step here is phase three, which has already started. Um, there's, they're planning on over 300 participants across 30 clinical sites in US and Canada. If Canada even still wants to work with us at this point. Uh, we shall see what, what happens. So, so based on the clear results, um, of phase, these phase two studies, um, and the extensive preliminary work that, that they've already done with the FDA for phase three, there is hope that this drug could be commercially available sooner than what maybe would maybe typical.

• 53:51Bob Novella?

  Uh, one of the articles I read, uh, by Bronwyn Thompson at newatlas.com, claimed that this drug could potentially be commercially available in 12 months. That seems overly optimistic. And Steve, I know you agree with that. That's probably overly optimistic, but it, it could be, it could potentially be much sooner. This is, I don't think this is going to be a five-year, 10-year thing at all. It could be, you know, maybe a couple of years, or maybe even, even sooner. I don't know. But they, um, they're definitely, uh, into phase three at this point. And if, if this gets cleared and everything looks good after phase three, then there's nothing really that's going to stop this. And I think if this goes well, if this goes very well, this is good, just going to explode. I don't know what the cost would be.

• 54:33Bob Novella?

  But then I think this could be Ozempic level, like, you know, frenzy of people trying to get their hands on. Spot reduction of fat with, with just some swelling and pain in the injection site. To me, that's just like, people are going to be clamoring for this.

• 54:46Jay Novella?

  Bob, do you think that, um, this is going to cost a ton of money or what?

• 54:49Bob Novella?

  I don't know. Hard to say.

• 54:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so. It's only, it's single, it's, it's, it's, uh, effective after a single or two injections.

• 54:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, one or two injections.

• 54:57Cara Santa Maria?

  So even if they are really expensive, it's not going to be. Like Ozempic, you have to keep taking.

• 55:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, for the weekly, that's weekly for a bunch of weeks.

• 55:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of like forever. I think that the people who go off of it gain the weight back.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're gonna, they're gonna bounce back.

• 55:12Jay Novella?

  Well, the devil's in the details, right? So like if they, if they give you a single injection and, you know, it has a certain amount of biomass it's gonna get rid of, right?

• 55:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, those cells, those cells are gone. So even if you lose weight, if you, if you gain weight back, you're, you're gaining the weight with fewer fat cells. So it's just not gonna be the same, you know, it's not gonna be the same.

• 55:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you'd have to make whole new fat cells. You'd have to replace them.

• 55:36Bob Novella?

  Right, and that, but that doesn't happen. After, there's like three times in your life where you actually create fat cells. Um, the, you know, the last main, the last time that happens, you know, like when you're born is one, and also adolescence is another one. So when you're an adult, you're pretty much done making, making fat cells, you know, from, from scratch.

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Really?

• 55:55Bob Novella?

  So if you get rid of fat cells.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  I like that.

• 55:57Bob Novella?

  That, then they, they are gone. Your body's really not gonna create any new ones. And the reason why you, you have areas of your body, uh, like compare your stomach to your bicep. You're, the, the amount of fat cells in your, per unit area of your bicep under your skin is far, far, there's far fewer fat cells there than in your stomach. You know, there's this, under your, you know, under your, your, in your abdomen. There's lots of fat cells there. That's why it, it might, it gets bigger quicker, um, than any other, than any other place in your body, because there's more fat cells there. If you remove those fat cells, that's just, you know, it's not gonna be a problem area, uh, nearly as much as it used to be with so many, with so many fat cells. It's just, they're not there.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but to be clear, though, you still will gain weight.

• 56:38Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Store fat. You, you'll, but the distribution of that fat storage will be altered by the fact that you have artificially eliminated fat cells from one part of your body.

• 56:49Bob Novella?

  So problem areas will be less problematic is another, is another way to put it.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you might, you might develop new problem areas, though, that are even worse than the one that you just got rid of.

• 57:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, this is, I can see this being purely, well, you said there, there were some kind of like diseases that this could tackle, but for the most part, this is. Is going to be a cosmetic development. Absolutely, yeah. That is targeted towards individuals who are a relatively healthy weight or have mild, like, or who are somewhat overweight. Yeah, not morbidly obese. Yeah, and who are just struggling with, like, basically with confidence about their bodies. Right.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Thanks, Bob. Kara, tell us the latest news about hormone therapy.

• 57:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, not just hormone therapy. There's actually two things I wanted to cover today that are sort of, I guess, process stories. There are two FDA panels that convened recently. Both of them were, I'm not sure if they were led by, but both of them, yeah, I think they were, because they were introduced at least by Dr. Marty McCary, who is the new FDA commissioner under the current administration. And I'm feeling a certain kind of way, like, I'm being pulled in two different directions. So I'm going to be really curious about the insights of the team here. So the first one, actually, I'm going to go away from hormones and come back to them in a minute,

• 58:17Cara Santa Maria?

  has to do with antidepressants during pregnancy. So for a very long time, a lot of research has gone into determining the safety and efficacy of basic antidepressants, like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The article in the New York Times that covered this panel focuses on Prozac. Prozac kind of came on the scene about four decades ago. That's fluoxetine. That happens to be the antidepressant that I take. And a lot of research has gone into determining its safety and its efficacy during pregnant. And although there are some potential side effects, and there are some risks,

• 59:01Cara Santa Maria?

  low-level risks, a slight rise in the odds of birth defects, time and time again, it does appear to be the case that the risk of a mother having untreated depression during her pregnancy outweighs the minor risk of an increased odds in birth defects.

• 59:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yet, as we know, the Department of Health and Human Services is led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the Food and Drug Administration, specifically the FDA, as I mentioned before. The Commissioner is Dr. Marty Makary. I've read up on Marty Makary. Interesting guy, seems to have a lot of legitimacy to his training, to his active work as a pancreatic surgeon, specifically doing surgical oncology. He trained at Johns Hopkins. He was involved, I think, with Atul Gawande in the surgical checklist that was

• 1:00:03Cara Santa Maria?

  developed there at Johns Hopkins. And he was an advocate of universal masking during COVID. But he has opposed broad vaccine mandates. And he has had some kind of concerning views about vaccines. At the same time, like, it's hard to pin down whether his decision-making has been political. He donated to Obama's presidential campaign, but he's also been an advisor to a conservative healthcare think tank. So I think that, I'm hoping at least, that he is a person, until we're proven otherwise, that is making decisions, or at least, personal decisions and policy decisions, where there is no, I guess, pressure put

• 1:00:48Cara Santa Maria?

  on him, based on the evidence and based on his clinical thoughts and feelings. That said, we don't know. We don't know. He is starting to see, it's starting to seem like there's a shift in his conversations about things like food dyes and things like that. But let's take a step back and let's talk about these two panels that he ran. The first one is about the use of antidepressants during pregnancy, and whether or not the FDA should actually add, add a black box label, which has never been there before. Many individuals who watched the panel and reported on the panel have stated that they felt that the

• 1:01:27Cara Santa Maria?

  panel was very biased and very anti-psychiatry. That many of the experts on the panel have backgrounds and agendas that seem to be anti-psychiatry.

• 1:01:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So we had, for example, somebody named Dr. Yosef Wit Doring, who is the founder of a tapering clinic that works to help patients quit antipsychiat- or quit psychiatric medications. He claimed that many women will come to him on antidepressants, and he tries to help them get off because of the risks to a fetus. We also have two British psychiatrists on the panel that were invited by the FDA, who have long records of criticizing the use of psychotropic medication, Dr. Joanna Moncrief and Dr. David Healy, who have written books about psychiatric medication

• 1:02:24Cara Santa Maria?

  and who have also served as expert witnesses on trials involving psychotropic drugs. But there was one panelist named Kay Russos Ross, who is an expert in postpartum health at the University of Florida, who actually made a case that, you know, antidepressants are really important in treating pregnant women, especially those who may use substances or forgo prenatal care if they're not taking their antidepressants. And so there is some concern that this panel was convening as a politically motivated panel that is, I guess we could say, biased against psychiatric medications, and that the decision-making of the panel may not be evidence-based.

• 1:03:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, if we switch gears to another panel, and this is interesting and confusing to me, and I'm, again, curious about your, Steve, your take, but also the rest of the rogues. Another panel that recently convened is calling for the removal of black box warnings on certain hormone replacement therapies. Specifically, one of the things that they really focused on in this panel was the black box warning on topical estrogens.

• 1:03:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, the panelists stated that many of the black box warnings that come with menopausal hormone replacement treatments are based on findings of studies that were performed when HRT dosages were significantly higher than they are today. They were also based on studies that were performed where the average age was significantly older than the average age of those receiving HRT currently, because many people are starting hormone therapies while they're still in perimenopause, not when they're officially in menopause.

• 1:04:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, there's kind of a double argument that was put forward in this panel. The first one was all of the risks, and we're talking about potential, you know, blood clots, cardiac risks and stroke, that kind of led to the original black box warning label that was put on these hormonal menopause products, these HRTs, was again, based on a higher dosage than women take right now. The other one is that it was all based on oral hormone, so systemic hormone, and not

• 1:05:02Cara Santa Maria?

  topical treatments like vaginal, like creams or ointments, that are often used to counteract some of the symptoms of menopause, like vaginal dryness and painful sex. So, it's an interesting argument that sort of gets to the heart, I think, of one of the important conversations that has to be had when it comes to biomedical science, which is that there's the research side of things, and then there's the regulatory side of things. And the hope is that those two things play nice, and that they're in lockstep. But the reality is that very often, there is either a delay, or there's kind of a slowness

• 1:05:46Cara Santa Maria?

  to titrate, for lack of a better word, the way that we

• 1:05:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Regulate these things. At the same time, there are some individuals, and I think Dr. Jen Gunter is cited in this article, and she's, you know, a very prominent skeptic in the OBGYN space, saying, "I am still really concerned about a lot of the side effects. We don't have enough evidence to show that they're not harmful." That said, she specifically kind of mentioned that the topical argument is one that she agrees with. It's just, it's disconcerting when we see experts across the field or across, and we talk about this all the time in our discussions of biomedical science here as skeptics, right? One of the things that we often talk about is consensus, right?

• 1:06:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That there are certain things that are sort of without a shadow of a doubt, the vast majority of experts have consensus on, and that's how science works, right? We look at the consensus of subject matter experts. Then there are other places where there may be finer points that are still up for debate, and those are really interesting edges that are important to dive into and to talk about and to try to promote and fund more thorough and creative efforts to do science in those areas. And then there are those places where it's sort of the sharpshooter fallacy, right? Where a decision has already been made due to a bias or an agenda that's being forwarded,

• 1:07:21Cara Santa Maria?

  and then the evidence is cherry picked. And right now, we're living in an era where there is so much evidence. There's just a lot of science, a lot of good science, but a whole lot of junk science, and it's very easy to cherry pick and make what sounds like an intelligent argument for almost anything. And so it's worrisome that we're living in an era where science is deeply, deeply politicized.

• 1:07:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Curious, Steve, in your reading, especially of somebody like Dr. Marty McCary, and in your reading of like these two very different panels that were convened and run by similar people about both adding a black box warning label to something that in my view probably doesn't need it, and removing a black box warning label to something that I don't know if I have enough background to know if it should be removed or just altered yet.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  There are certain trends that I have noticed right over the last 30 years with these kinds of expert panels and the FDA recommendations, et cetera, et cetera, to keep in mind. So one trend is that there's a tendency to be risk averse, to be more worried about causing harm than missing out on a benefit. And sometimes the numbers don't favor that approach.

• 1:08:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially if the harm is not death, like if the harm is not death or dismemberment.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Whatever, even if it is, it's a numbers game, right?

• 1:08:57Cara Santa Maria?

  True.

• 1:08:57Speaker 02

  At the end of the day. So, and so like even within my own specialty, I've seen drugs get a black box warning for a theoretical risk that wasn't even shown to be actually the case. And then 20 years later, people are still avoiding that use of a medication, even though like now we know there's no risk, like the risk is negligible.

• 1:09:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's what they talk about a lot in these write-ups, is the idea that this does change prescribing and it changes consumer uptake of these drugs. Like, and here's, here's an example that I'll give you just to interject and then, and then please continue. I take a drug for a disorder called idiopathic hypersomnia that is massively black box, like it's got a black box warning and it's really regulated.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And it has a lot of really dangerous side effects and worrisome side effects. That said, it is the only drug on the market that's FDA approved for my diagnosis. Everything else that's given is off-label, and there's even a drug that's somewhat off-label that's It's now has orphan status for my diagnosis because my diagnosis is very rare and it's debilitating. And the risk benefit analysis is such that because I can tolerate this drug, my neurologist and I agree. It's very much an important drug for me to take. On the flip side of that, if you guys remember on the show, I talked at length, I was very open about having gone through hysterectomy. After my hysterectomy, I couldn't take birth control anymore because I I used vaginal birth control.

• 1:10:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And I had a lot of side effects from going off birth control that I didn't like. I had an explosion in acne. I didn't feel well. My hormones, like my my moods were all over the place. And so as soon as I could, I got back on it. Then I had a blood clot and now nobody will write me a prescription for the birth control. Even though we know that my blood clot was caused by, like it was caused by an iron infusion. And but but nobody will come near it. Back in the day, when I tried to get on it, they were like, oh, you have migraine with aura? We're not going to prescribe it. And and I remember really struggling with that. I remember my gynecologist saying, you can't take birth control because you have aura. And then my neurologist saying, that's outdated.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  That's outdated, yeah.

• 1:11:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Nobody takes birth control at the level they used to take and now it's not a risk anymore. And so you see that different specialties are arguing. And then as the patient, you're stuck in the middle going, how do I get the help I need?

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  There is a specialty bias and that's such familiarity with the literature. Because you know why? Because neurologists read the neurological literature and internists read the internist literature. And they not, they don't necessarily read each other's literature to the same degree. And that matters. Because, yes, like I, there's a lot of drugs where neurologists have come to a comfort level with it. Where like cardiologists are afraid to use it. And that you hit upon one was the hormone therapy in migraine with aura. I reviewed that literature because I have to make those recommendations to my patients. And it's like, it's not really a risk. It was always a minor theoretical, eh, maybe sort of might be a risk.

• 1:12:12Speaker 02

  But then you can give the progester- the progesterone only. And really, it's only a risk if you also smoke. If you don't smoke, don't worry about it, basically.

• 1:12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And there are such low dose estrogen drugs now.

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  That's true. And also you fail to consider the risk of not treating. Because

• 1:12:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  that has a risk as well. So that's the risk aversion thing. I think there's a bias in there that you have to think about. And you may want to consult with multiple specialists on big decisions for that reason, get different perspectives. But the other thing is that even when you have well meaning, evidence based practitioners, there's not always an objective answer because it is risk versus benefit. And the question is, what is more meaningful to you? A this risk or that risk, this benefit or that benefit? And there's no right or wrong answer. And people come to different conclusions about it. I can remember the same, we had the same debate about how old should we start recommending

• 1:13:12Speaker 02

  routine mammograms? And two different panels came up with two different age cutoffs. And it was based upon how much of a risk do you think is the anxiety caused by a false positive?

• 1:13:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, a big part of this is a conversation about psychological health, which I don't think historically was considered as much. And the truth of the matter is, a black box warning carries weight psychologically. And it's very, because all drugs have a package insert, right? All drugs are legally required to list the risks and the side effects. At what point does it cross a threshold to require a black box warning? And how much of that is up for debate? I don't know. I mean, I think that is an important categorical question.

• 1:14:07Speaker 02

  There's also a medical legal issue here. It's like, there's a, one question is, what do you think is probably the best medical decision? But there's also the question of, what is the decision you're confident you could defend in a court of law?

• 1:14:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, those aren't always the same thing.

• 1:14:24Speaker 02

  And black box, black box warnings are like a, a don't go there kind of thing. It's like that's people, doctors worry about that.

• 1:14:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like do it at your own risk. But I remember, I remember asking my, uh, my neurologist, I was like, listen, is there long-term data about this drug that I take who's, that's only been on the market for a few years, uh, taking it nightly. Um, and he was like, not really, like we don't, so far it seems like people are okay, but we don't have longitudinal long-term data. And I was like, should I be scared of that? And he was like, well, you know what we do have is longitudinal, long-term data of what happens when you sleep 12 to 14 hours a day. And it's not good.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like, at a certain point, that sort of risk versus benefit, you're right. We bias towards risk aversion without remembering that the do nothing approach comes with its own risks.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  Doing nothing is a risk. Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:15:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. But the social media TikTok universe is all about risk. No nuance, there's no risk versus benefit. This is the RFK approach. It's all about, he's texting a lawyer. What risk can I, you know, can I scare people about approach to healthcare? It's destructive. It's actively harmful. It's not really logic and evidence-based. Uh, and so, yeah.

• 1:15:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why I'm so, so curious and confused about these specific panels, because one is about adding a black box label to something that does seem to have a political agenda behind it. But another was about removing a black box label to something that I guess historically RFK and McCary have been proponents of hormone therapy. And so it's interesting, like, what is the motivation there? I don't know. More to dig into for sure.

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Right, right. All right, thanks. Evan, this is a, this is a funny story that we have a personal connection to.

• 1:16:17Speaker 03

  We do.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Give us an update. Tell us about the haunted doll.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  Annabelle, the cursed doll, back in the news. We covered one five years ago, five years. That was the last time we spoke about Annabelle. Remember, that's when COVID was raging. That's how long ago that was. I have dubbed Annabelle the second most well-recognized doll in the world.

• 1:16:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Behind Chucky?

• 1:16:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:16:44Bob Novella?

  Third.

• 1:16:44Speaker 03

  Barbie was number one, Chucky was number three, and Ken was number 14.

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  What about Kermit the Frog?

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Didn't make the list.

• 1:16:55Speaker 02

  Well, come on.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, puppet doll.

• 1:16:59Bob Novella?

  It's a Muppet, man.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit different. Well, in any case. And as Steve mentioned, we have seen, at least the guys have, sorry, Carrie, you weren't with us at the time, but we saw Annabelle up and close. In fact, one of us, Bob might have touched her.

• 1:17:16Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:17:17Speaker 03

  Or in the case, I mean, in the case it was.

• 1:17:19Bob Novella?

  It was in the case. I couldn't get to Annabelle unfortunately, but I'll never forget, um, what's his name? Demonologist dude, uh...

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Ed Warren?

• 1:17:28Bob Novella?

  Ed. Oh, my God. It's like, don't touch anything because people have died who have touched because everything was so cursed. So I'm walking behind him and literally touching everything within reach.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  In his...

• 1:17:40Bob Novella?

  Everything. 20 years ago, whatever it was, still alive. It's like, so ridiculous. Come on, don't touch anything.

• 1:17:46Jay Novella?

  But Bob, that might be why you can't lose the last five pounds.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  It could be. That's the curse of Annabelle working.

• 1:17:51Bob Novella?

  There you go. There you go. Worth it. Totally worth it.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  Annabelle is the name of a Raggedy Ann doll, which came into the possession of Ed and Lorraine Warren. The original Ghost Hunters, I don't know, did they start the genre? Can they be credited?

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  They gave it a boost. I don't know if they were the first first.

• 1:18:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Bob Novella?

  And they go back a ways, though, and it might have been...

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  1952 is when they started with their shtick. Boy, I tell you what. Well, in any case, Annabelle Raggedy Ann doll, according to the Warrens, back in 1970, there was a student nurse named Donna, no last name, and Donna was given the doll. Donna lived with her roommate, Angie, also no last name, and both soon noticed strange occurrences. The doll seemed to change positions on its own and move from one room to another room when no one was looking. Hmm. And then things escalated from there. They allegedly found mysterious notes written on parchment paper with, which they didn't own. It wasn't their paper. And it would have notes that would read things like, "Help us."

• 1:18:50Speaker 03

  The doll reportedly even appeared to have blood-like red liquid on its hands and chest. So they decided to seek some answers. Donna and Angie consulted a psychic medium who told them the spirit of a young girl named Annabelle Higgins had attached itself to the doll. The spirit said she felt safe with the women and asked permission to stay. So out of sympathy, the girl said yes. But they were all of them deceived. Because according to Ed Warren, when they investigated the case, the Warrens concluded that the entity was not a child's spirit, but a malevolent demonic force that used the Annabelle persona as a ruse to gain trust and ultimately possess a human being.

• 1:19:34Speaker 03

  So what did the Warrens do? They took the doll from Donna for safekeeping and for spiritual containment. They performed a blessing and placed the doll in a locked glass case in the Recult Museum in Monroe, Connecticut, not far from where we are right now. And thus, the legend of Annabelle, the haunted doll, was born, stolen by and brought to you by the imaginations of Ed and Lorraine Warren. And of course, the legend of Annabelle grew with every retelling by the Warrens and their acolytes, and eventually, hey, the public at large. Annabelle became the showcase of the Warrens' collection of supposedly haunted artifacts, right, Bob? All the things that you touched in their, in their, in their collection. And there it was, a locked glass box.

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  Annabelle lived where it could no longer conduct its evil doings, and a sign on it that says, "Do not touch." We see the real power is for those who touch the doll. If they touch that doll, they become the victim of Annabelle's evil curse, which brings misfortune, misery, injury, and possibly death to anyone unfortunate enough to touch. Now, as I mentioned, we actually got to see Annabelle among the other hoarder clutter that was in that basement. There's no other way really to describe it. All those magical cursed artifacts that they curated as part of their museum of haunted objects, so much so that the Warrens boldly proclaimed their basement, because of that collection, was the most haunted place on the planet.

• 1:20:58Bob Novella?

  I'm looking at a picture. Looking at a picture right now, and I see, I see Annabelle, but I also see two skulls that I actually own, identical versions of those skulls, which makes me very happy.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  And you too can buy them at Amazon, I'm certain.

• 1:21:16Jay Novella?

  So guys, can I ask a question?

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:21:18Jay Novella?

  At this stage in your description, right? For anyone that might not know more details about Ed and Lorraine Warren, the primary question I think that people should be asking themselves is, how did they not get, if those items were truly possessed, right? Why would they feel so secure to bring all of that into their house? Like literally below them?

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a good question, Jay. And that is because Ed and Lorraine train, uh, claim to have specific powers of their own and training on how to handle such things.

• 1:21:54Jay Novella?

  Either that or they were full of shit. One of those two.

• 1:21:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was one of the, it was one of the two. Steve, he was a demonologist. All right? Do you have a degree in demonology? I don't.

• 1:22:05Jay Novella?

  You have a degree in baloney.

• 1:22:06Speaker 03

  Exactly. And Lorraine was a clairvoyant or an aura specialist. She sees auras. Everybody illuminates some sort of.

• 1:22:16Jay Novella?

  My god, Nora.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  And for us, it was, uh, you know, our auras apparently weren't good because she felt that somehow science interfered with anything good going on about our auras. If I recall.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  All right, well, Annabelle.

• 1:22:30Bob Novella?

  How did she phrase it, guys?

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  Was it the science thing?

• 1:22:34Bob Novella?

  Was it the science that did it to you or something?

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, she did. She did. She was, she was, she wanted to know how we fell from, from holy grace, you know? Very religious people, clearly. Well, okay, Annabelle. I think most people know Annabelle from the Conjuring movie series. That extremely lucrative franchise up to date, I checked it, $2.3 billion. This is the highest grossing horror franchise in history. $2.3 billion of gross receipts at the gate, Bob. That's crazy.

• 1:23:06Bob Novella?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:23:08Speaker 03

  So that's it. Annabelle's cemented into popular and horror culture. No way around it. Well, fast forward, okay, many years. Ed dies 2006, supposedly not related to Annabelle or any other curse. Lorraine dies in 2019, also not Annabelle related. What became of Annabelle at that point? After Lorraine's death, the occult museum and the organization they founded, NESP, R, which stands for the New England Society for Psychic Research, became maintained, uh, still in Connecticut by their daughter Judy and, uh, her husband, Tony Spera, who we've mentioned on the show before. So they ran the museum. Now, the museum was ultimately, uh, later that year shut down

• 1:23:49Speaker 03

  because apparently they've been, were in, in various, had various zoning violations for many years, having this, uh, attraction in their basement. Oops. So like any good huckster, what you, what do you do? You take your show on the road. Annabelle and many of the Warrens collections of oddities have turned into a traveling carnival show. Uh, COVID slowed it down a little bit, but in recent years it went back on the road and it is still drawing pretty decent crowds. Here is the news item for this week related to this. His name was Dan Rivera, 54-year-old paranormal investigator and lead researcher for NESP. He died on July 13th, 2025 in his hotel room in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  during the Devils on the Run Tour featuring Annabelle the Doll. Uh, as part of the tour, Rivera was traveling around the U.S. with other members of NESP to show off Annabelle, uh, among some of the other things that the Warrens used to keep in their museum. His death came after he finished a three-day sold-out stop in Gettysburg and, uh, the show was hosted by something called Ghostly Images of Gettysburg Tours at the Soldiers National Orphanage. So for what you want, you know, these places, they do host paranormal and ghost-related themed events, unfortunately.

• 1:25:06Jay Novella?

  Evan, so, so, uh, we got the, you know, got this collection of like, like incredibly dangerous stuff and now it was given to the daughter and the son-in-law. Now they have the skills that Ed and Lorraine had, the magic skills?

• 1:25:20Speaker 03

  That's a good question, Jay. Good follow-up on that. No, but I've seen pictures of each of them handling Annabelle wearing black gloves.

• 1:25:28Jay Novella?

  Oh, the gloves.

• 1:25:29Speaker 03

  So apparently these are, uh, plus-one magic items of some kind.

• 1:25:33Jay Novella?

  The gloves, they do nothing.

• 1:25:35Speaker 03

  That allow protection against such against such things. They have not released the cause of death for Dan Rivera yet. They said it'll be eight to 10 weeks before there is an official release or the investigation or whatever is concluded into his death. The no foul play is suspected. It's some kind of health related reason, but they'll they'll tell us in a couple of weeks. What was what the cause actually was. I predict it had something to do with a ham sandwich. You never know. You never know. That's how Mama Cass went and Rivera was a was featured as a paranormal investigator on the Travel Channel's Most Haunted Places and served as producer for a number of other shows, including Netflix's 28 Days Haunted.

• 1:26:18Speaker 03

  Anyone in the net in the world of Netflix, listen to our show, you think? I mean, would you know, because we're available. As I guess is what I'm saying to either come on an existing show, make a show. We would love to offer some some rare insights and other things about our history, our investigations, a lot of the things we've come across in our, you know, now 30 plus years of having done all a lot of this stuff. And I think that would make for an interesting, at least part of a documentary, if not a documentary unto itself. But so I'm just saying Netflix were available. Give us a call. Again, no foul play expected was suspected. But again, the history of such of Annabelle is that they attribute,

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  and all these attributions are from Ed and Lorraine from their stories. So it's all ghost storytelling. That's all this is. Someone died in a motorcycle crash after they mocked the doll after visiting the Warrens in their museum. A priest had a fatal car accident when the priest said something negative, apparently in the presence of Annabelle. People have been assaulted or had marks on their bodies unexplained after having visited and perhaps somehow insulted Annabelle. I like this one. Even Ed Warren once had a problem. He said, he said, "On one occasion, his vehicle's brakes and power steering failed in the car." So he had

• 1:27:45Speaker 03

  To like, you know, swerved or somehow get, you know, get the car to stop. So Annabelle was the cause of that. Apparently he was transporting Annabelle from wherever to wherever. And the way he, he, he got the car to stop. And then what he did is he sprinkled holy water on Annabelle in order to get the immediate effects or whatever curses she was putting on Ed at the time to go away. There is some speculation that Ed mictrated on Annabelle. But again, that's just a rumor.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Pissed on her.

• 1:28:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, piss on her.

• 1:28:14Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I didn't want to have any of that.

• 1:28:16Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but there's a, there's a whole angle.

• 1:28:18Speaker 03

  There's the secret word, mictrate.

• 1:28:19Jay Novella?

  Evan, there is a whole angle here that I'm surprised Ed didn't think of. He should have talked to Annabelle and said, let's open a car dealership together. You, you damage the cars as they drive by. I'll do the repair work. We'll split the profits.

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I mean, that's, uh, that's as good as anything else that's ever, any idea that I think has ever come out from the, from the Warrens and their, and their infamous history, as it were.

• 1:28:46Jay Novella?

  It's so convenient that they could just, you know, assign, you know, blame or, or, you know, that the doll did this, the doll did that when, you know, some guy died in a motorcycle crash. You know, it's like, I think it's disgusting that they're, they're making claims like that. Oh, this guy talked bad about this doll I have in my basement. And that's why, you know, this, this motorist died, you know, it's like, who the hell do you think you are? Commandeering this person's story to further your bullshit.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  It got a lot of press this week because of this death. And all the new, you know, and you're reading these news stories about it. And they are, they're telling those stories again, Jay, about, you know, the Warrens claim that this happened and this happened. It's like, yeah, they gave us the same stuff. Zero evidence of any of it, obviously, was our conclusion after they showed us their best evidence and told us things and, you know, but it was all just garbage. Hundred percent ghost stories. They're the greatest ghost storytellers perhaps in history, but they have nothing else. That is the Warrens.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:29:47Jay Novella?

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

• 1:30:12Jay Novella?

  Okay. Guys, any clue what this is?

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  Well, there's multiple sounds there. Something sounded like a truck, right? Like an 18-wheeler, either pulling up or driving away. That was kind of the background. But there was also this squeaking, kind of struggling to open the pickle jar kind of noise.

• 1:30:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I heard that too, yeah. This one is very interesting. So I would have been able to identify this sound. And that's only because I was exposed to it. And it is something that, once you hear, you kind of, you know, you can recognize it. But I couldn't imagine someone straight up guessing and getting it right. So let me, let's get through these. Listener named Joshua White wrote in, said, "Hi, this sounds like an old push mower, the kind without a motor, and you have to push it for the blades to turn," right? So he's talking about a manual push mower, which we actually had when we were kids. It was our grandfather's push mower. And he's right. If you didn't, you know, you have to push it for the blades to go. And it was hard as hell to use. You guys remember that?

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have one though.

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  It's a brilliant, brilliant invention. Yeah, no power needed, totally, totally green.

• 1:31:21Jay Novella?

  You have a mechanical only push mower, Steve?

• 1:31:24Speaker 02

  I got it for just like small area spot work. It works really well.

• 1:31:29Jay Novella?

  They, well, you gotta keep the blade sharp.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  You gotta keep it free of rust and keep everything sharp.

• 1:31:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Jay, I used to have one when I lived in Danbury, and I used it mainly for the workout. Because it was a whole of a workout.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  It's a good workout, upper body.

• 1:31:43Jay Novella?

  I remember like as a kid pushing it, and like I could only get it to cut like about six inches of grass by the time it stopped. Because you gotta like, you push it really hard, and I wasn't big enough to keep it going. But anyway, they're hard. Anyway, that is not correct, but thanks for the memory. A listener named Dan Oberst, or he, oh, he gave me the pronunciation. It's Oberstie. And now that I see it, I think I was wrong all these years. Like, yes, it is Oberstie. Sorry about that, Dan, because I recognize your name, and I think I've read it before. So, anyway. Dan said this week's "Who's that noisy is the sound from inside the equipment penthouse over an elevator shaft?" Now, I think this is a good guess, for sure. You know, I've heard the noises that elevators make throughout the years of my life.

• 1:32:26Jay Novella?

  I did get trapped in an elevator once, but I didn't hear any of these noises then. And it was completely my fault.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  It was 100% your fault. I was with you.

• 1:32:34Bob Novella?

  In Italy?

• 1:32:35Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the, you know, we were doing something in there. I remember exactly what we were doing, by the way, that stopped the elevator.

• 1:32:42Speaker 03

  Oh?

• 1:32:43Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:32:43Speaker 03

  So, it was a, it was an attempt to get the elevator to stop.

• 1:32:47Jay Novella?

  No, we were trying to rub our feet on the carpet in the elevator to produce static electricity.

• 1:32:53Speaker 03

  Well, that seems harmless.

• 1:32:54Jay Novella?

  We did it, and for some reason, the elevator stopped, and then some dude had to hand crank it to get it down. And I just remember, like, somebody yelling to that guy in Italian.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  We were in there for a good, like, hour and a half.

• 1:33:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:08Speaker 03

  Oh, that's scary.

• 1:33:09Bob Novella?

  90 minutes, really?

• 1:33:10Jay Novella?

  It was a sweatbox, man.

• 1:33:11Speaker 03

  Oh, that's awful.

• 1:33:12Jay Novella?

  Yes, but this noisy is not anything to do with elevator shaft, but I do hear some similarities in sounds that I've heard. Another listener named Chris Ford wrote in. He said, "Hey, Jay, is that an engine dyno? Sounds like an electric ducted fan spinning up, something being tested for near-future commercial aviation applications, perhaps." Chris, you are not correct, but you are on to something. We will continue. Another listener named Jeremy Samuel wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, this is the first time I've ever felt like I might have a clue what the noise is. I think it's a jet fighter engine spinning up. Sounds like a single engine, so I'm going to say an F-16 going from stationary to moving along the runway." You know, and Jeremy, you're also in the right neighborhood, kind of.

• 1:33:56Jay Novella?

  But, so, let's do the reveal here. I have several winners, but the first one was Ryan Handel. And Ryan said, "The sound from this week's," he said, "The sound from this week sounds like a vertical wind tunnel getting up to speed before the flyer gets in." It sounds like, and I get this part, it sounds like an iFly Gen 9 tunnel, so Colorado's tunnel, Detroit's tunnel, or one of Texas's tunnels. You guys understand what's happening here?

• 1:34:24Speaker 03

  The iFly is the indoor, what?

• 1:34:27Jay Novella?

  Indoor skydiving.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  Indoor skydiving, yeah.

• 1:34:29Jay Novella?

  And he said, "Sounds like a Gen 9 tunnel," so, and then he's naming the cities and where the recording happened, because he knows what-

• 1:34:37Speaker 03

  Well, they know where the Gen, he knows where the Gen 9s are, as opposed to the Gen 8s or the Gen 7s.

• 1:34:42Jay Novella?

  Which, I think is freaking amazing, that there are people, you know, like, people that have these experiences, or it could be their job, or, you know, whatever it is, like, can get that specific. I love when "Who's That Noisy?" produces, like, someone that is like, "I know what it is, and I'm gonna tell you even more," you know, it's just really cool. Alright, so guys, I've gone indoor skydiving many times. Um, the first time I did it was actually when we were in New Zealand for the last, uh, the tour that we went on.

• 1:35:09Speaker 03

  Bob did outdoor skydiving, at least once.

• 1:35:10Jay Novella?

  Bob did real skydiving.

• 1:35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Jay Novella?

  So, there is, without a doubt, a huge fan, uh, it's an electric fan, and, you know, they actually have to, um, adjust the speed of the fan depending on your body weight, particularly for heavier people, you know, you can hear them turning up the knob on the fan to, to increase the airspeed. And it sounds exactly like this, so let me play it again, and just imagine, you know, this is the operator, increasing the speed of the fan.

• 1:35:56Jay Novella?

  Pretty amazing.

• 1:36:00Jay Novella?

  Pretty amazing machine, that actually can simulate skydiving, you know, because the air's moving fast enough to essentially lift you up, and, you know, I saw, one of the times that I did it, you know, I saw someone who really knew what they were doing, and could do some unbelievable maneuvers inside those chambers. It's incredible, it really is, and it's a lot of fun, it's a really cool thing to do. Um, it's not so stupid expensive that you can't go give it a shot. Um, I think it's a great experience, so if you're interested, you should go check it out. Uh, anyway, so, uh, good job, Ryan, very cool. I'm curious, uh, you didn't say in the email, but maybe you can email me and tell me why you know that information so well. Maybe you, what do you do, installs?

• 1:36:43Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, I got a new noisy for you this week. This is sent in by a listener named Robert Gennardi, and here it is.

• 1:37:20Jay Novella?

  Very cool. All right, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Steve, September 20th, 2025, this year. Yeah. Uh, we will be in Kansas. We're doing two shows on the same day. On September 20th, we'll be doing a live SGU recording, and then we'll be doing an extravaganza that night. This includes all five of us and George Robb. And if you want to catch a glimpse of Ian, you look to the side of the stage and you might see his red hair over there. Uh, do not look him directly in the eye. Trust me, just don't do it.

• 1:38:00Jay Novella?

  Go to theskepticsguy.org to buy tickets, to check it out, whatever you want to do. There's information there, but, uh, we'd really love it if you could join us. There's still tickets left for both of the shows, so please check it out. All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction?

• 1:38:18Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:38:28Jay Novella?

  Each week, I come up with three science news items, or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week. What do you think it is? Uh, I think it's crazy politicians. Italy. Close. Or Sicily, Sicily. It's close, it's Malta. Malta.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  I think most people know next to nothing about Malta, right? It's just-

• 1:38:58Speaker 03

  Because there is nothing next to Malta.

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  No, there's stuff there.

• 1:39:02Speaker 03

  The ocean.

• 1:39:02Speaker 02

  All right, these are three facts I encountered while visiting Malta. All right, here we go. Item number one, despite being a small island nation notoriously cramped for space, Malta has one of the highest cars per capita in the world and the highest in the EU. Item number two, Malta contains among the oldest freestanding structures in the world, megalithic temples older than the pyramids at Giza and Stonehenge. And item number three, the national bird of Malta is the peregrine falcon with a large breeding population on the main island. Evan, go first.

• 1:39:41Speaker 03

  Highest cars per capita in the world, okay. Wish I knew what the population of Malta is, I don't know. But it's small. Boy, I mean, that, yeah. Well, you could walk the entire main island, I think, in a day, right? Or, I mean, it's really not that big. So if you had, I don't know, if you had 100,000 people on that island, maybe? That would, could do it? That could do it. I have a feeling that one is science. I also have a feeling the second one is science. Some of the oldest freestanding structures in the world, and I guess I'll use what little

• 1:40:22Speaker 03

  I can retain from the movie Patton, in which, a scene in which General Patton and his entourage visit Malta, and he's giving a tour to some people of the press and others, and he's explaining certain things and how it is like, one of the, it's history of warfare and stuff. So, yeah, that could have some of the oldest freestanding structures in the world, definitely. This last one about the peregrine falcon. So, what's it eating? You know, right? I, if I knew more about falcons, maybe I'd have better- Idea of in case this one is science, but I have a feeling it's fiction. Cause I just don't know that there would be enough to um.

• 1:41:06Speaker 03

  It either the national bird, hold on with a large breeding population on the main. Yeah, no, I'll say it's something else. It's not the peregrine falcon. I'll say that's fiction.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:41:17Cara Santa Maria?

  So oldest freestanding structures, most cars per capita, large breeding population of peregrines. Peregrine seems realistic. Oldest freestanding structures. I feel like, how do you define that? Can it be ruins?

• 1:41:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah. Yeah. Cars, though. I guess the Italians do love their cars, but I don't know. I feel like that it would have to have like one of the highest GDPs also for that to be the case. And I don't think I know of Malta as being one of the richest countries in the world. So maybe I'll say that one's the fiction because I don't think it's one of the richest. So I don't think it would have the most cars per capita.

• 1:42:03Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:42:04Bob Novella?

  Um, you did say that traffic was crazy, so that kind of makes me think that most the highest cars per capita is possible. And freestanding structures, um, I know there's lots of temples there, so maybe that's going to be related to that. So I'll say that one's probably science as well. Yeah, the peregrine falcon one just seems like it doesn't fit. Um, I but I don't know, but I'm just going to say it anyway. Falcon fiction.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  Okay, and Che.

• 1:42:31Jay Novella?

  Steve, you did say to me and Bob that driving there was crazy and you couldn't figure out which way to go. Like, like, like he was being driven by someone and he couldn't rationalize which way the car was gonna go. Right? So that's crazy, crazy. But that doesn't mean that there's a lot of cars there, but but you were thinking about cars. The one about the, um, let me see here, um, oldest freestanding structures in the world. Um, I believe that one is science because there, you know, there's some pretty cool stuff there. There is a temple to Hercules there.

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  Hercules.

• 1:43:08Jay Novella?

  Hercules.

• 1:43:08Speaker 02

  That was Sicily, Jay.

• 1:43:10Jay Novella?

  Oh, whatever.

• 1:43:11Speaker 03

  Aw, you gave him... You gave him a little help.

• 1:43:14Jay Novella?

  I felt so smart, Steve. I felt so smart.

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  He remembered it. He just misremembered.

• 1:43:20Jay Novella?

  But I know there's cool stuff there, because Steve and I talked extensively about this, so I'm gonna stick with that. Okay. So we're left with the Boyd's and the Cars. Um, which one? Steve is a birder. And he likes bird details. Kara, I'm trying so hard to logic something into this. I have no clue.

• 1:43:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. This is a dart and a dartboard.

• 1:43:42Jay Novella?

  And Malta. I mean, what... The only thing I have to say is I would think it would be some type of sea bird of that, you know, because it's like an island, it's small, it's gotta be an animal that deals with the ocean in one way or the other.

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  Uh... Hi? Jay, I have with me my science or fiction coin. Do you want me to use it?

• 1:44:02Jay Novella?

  Alright, Bob. It's gonna be between the Cars and the Bird. So let's say, let's do this. Because you picked the Bird, you flip it for the Bird, and if it comes up Fiction, I'll go with you.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  You said flip the Bird.

• 1:44:15Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah. You flipped a coin about the Bird. Alright, that's great. Go ahead, Bob.

• 1:44:19Speaker 02

  Do it now.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  Fiction.

• 1:44:23Jay Novella?

  Alright, I'm with Bob. Steve, the Bird, it is not that bird, it is another bird, it's a sea bird. Thank you.

• 1:44:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Damn!

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  Gosh, you're leaving Kara all out on her own there.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:44:33Speaker 02

  But you got her.

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  All the great... On the middle one, so we'll start there. Malta contains among the oldest pre-existing structures in the world, megalithic temples older than the pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge. You all think that one is science, and that one is... Science! That is science. Malta is freaking old. It was...

• 1:44:56Speaker 03

  Old.

• 1:44:57Speaker 02

  You know, conquered by so many different forces over the years. Phoenicians...

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. Look where it is on the map.

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  And understand why it's like, hello?

• 1:45:08Speaker 02

  And then... Um, you know, and then the Greeks and then

• 1:45:13Speaker 03

  Carthaginians.

• 1:45:14Speaker 02

  There were the, uh, the hospitalers were in charge for a while. Then they had to bribe Spain not to conquer them at one point. Um, and then it was a, it was a, uh, uh, English colony for a hundred and 50 years.

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Finally gained its independence and became an independent nation in 1975. Uh, so it has a long history of multiple wave after wave after wave of, of colonization and conquering and everything. And it's a mix of different cultures for that reason.

• 1:45:47Speaker 03

  And of course there, yeah, whoever conquers first is going to put all their structures up.

• 1:45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, but there was, yeah. So going back, there are these megalithic temples there. Older than the pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge, you know, going back three, 4,000 years B.C. Uh, among the oldest in the world, not the oldest, but it also, we had this conversation too. It depends on what you count as a freestanding structure, but these are on the, on the shortlist. Okay. Let's go to number two, the national, I mean, I'm sorry, let's go to number three. The national bird of Malta is the peregrine falcon with a large breeding population on the main island. I'm really surprised.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  Maltese falcon.

• 1:46:23Speaker 02

  That none of you mentioned the Maltese falcon.

• 1:46:25Speaker 03

  Well, I, you might, because I did, well, I thought of it, but didn't want, I strategically didn't mention it.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  Okay. Because falconry is in fact very popular on Malta.

• 1:46:38Speaker 03

  However.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  And it has been for, it has been for a long time, but this is the fiction. It's a fiction for a couple of reasons, a couple of reasons. First of all, the national bird of Malta is the blue rock thrush.

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  Was that like the first thing you looked up when you were researching Malta?

• 1:46:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course it is.

• 1:46:56Speaker 02

  Blue rock thrush. And, uh, because the falcon was actually endangered on Malta and they had to reintroduce it. And it's just starting to make a comeback. So there isn't a large breeding population on the main island.

• 1:47:11Jay Novella?

  Isn't it a sea bird, Steve?

• 1:47:12Speaker 02

  Time. No, it's a thrush.

• 1:47:14Jay Novella?

  Come on.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  All right. I'm happy. I'm happy anyway. But there is a connection with falconry and Malta. But the Maltese falcon, you know what the connection of that is to, to Malta?

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:47:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:47:27Speaker 03

  There is none?

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  Nothing. It was a novel that was made into a movie. It has no basis in reality. It's pure fiction.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, probably Humphrey Bogart's second most famous film.

• 1:47:39Speaker 02

  Right. But yeah, Falcons live on the island and they hunt stuff, Evan, you know? There's lots of... It's not that far from Sicily. And by the way, Cara, it's not Italian. Malta has nothing to do with Italy.

• 1:47:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's near it.

• 1:47:54Speaker 02

  It's just, the thing is, it's close to it, but culturally, it is completely different. So...

• 1:48:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I'm just saying like in terms of like importing. It's right there.

• 1:48:06Speaker 02

  There are two languages. There are two official languages of Malta. Maltese and English.

• 1:48:12Speaker 03

  Oh, English?

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  Maltese is a Semitic language. It's not Italian. It's a Semitic language because of their Arabic influence.

• 1:48:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  And English, because it was an English colony for 150 years, right?

• 1:48:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:28Speaker 02

  In fact, so like one of our tour guides was saying that like 20, 30 years ago, you know, children were learned Maltese as their primary language and English is their secondary language. And today, it's really the other way around. They really learn English as their primary language and Maltese as their secondary language. Just because it's such a much more of an international language and of course Malta is becoming more and more of a popular destination for tourists. But having said that, Cara, it is a popular destination for Italian tourists because it is so close. And so there is a huge Italian influence there now. But historically, culturally, it's not Italian. It has nothing to do with it. It's in the EU and it's...

• 1:49:12Speaker 02

  Where they, and they drive on the left there because it was a British colony, whereas they drive on the right in Italy, including Sicily. Anyway, interesting. And I heard the language and it's yeah, it's it's it's unique, but you could tell that it's a Semitic language. But it has a lot, there's a lot of introduced foreign words into their language. Right? Anything modern, basically, they use the English word. Anything food related, they basically use the Italian word. That was introduced just from, again, the introduction of that. But there's a lot of, a lot of Arabic words as well. Interesting, very interesting culture. Okay. That means that despite being a small island nation notoriously cramped for space, Malta

• 1:49:56Speaker 02

  has one of the highest cars per capita in the world and the highest in the EU is science. And it is crazy. Now, the, the reason why, guys, what I was telling you is that the streets were not really made for cars. Right? And that the streets are- They're very narrow. Yeah, they're very narrow. It's like, it was, like, you're on the edge of your seat the whole time. You're driving in the car, going from, from point A to point B, like, you don't know what's gonna happen next. If you're not, obviously, you know, a native, it was, it was quite an experience. And we, we were not, we chose not to drive ourselves on the island. So we were only, like, we Ubered it when we had to. Yeah. We would walk.

• 1:50:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you know why I think I got that wrong?

• 1:50:37Speaker 02

  Why is that?

• 1:50:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Other than just not knowing.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  You misunderstood the-

• 1:50:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I read it as the most cars per capita. Not one of the most.

• 1:50:45Speaker 02

  One of the most in the world, but the most in the EU.

• 1:50:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. I don't know why I read it as the most in the world.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  But it's pretty high. It's pretty high on the list, just not number one. You guys want-

• 1:50:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I just looked it up. It's below the US.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  It's just below the US.

• 1:51:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  It's, um-

• 1:51:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, most of the countries above it are like tiny countries.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  They're tiny countries, yeah.

• 1:51:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Gibraltar and Liechtenstein and San Marino.

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

  Uh, so it's number 11 on the list, although Taiwan is out of sequence on the list. I don't know why that is. Uh, but anyway, so, Evan, the population, 532,000.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  On that small, whoa, that's a lot of people.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  With 438,000 cars. There's 438,000 cars on that little tiny island. And I totally believe that, having been there. It was, you know, there were a lot of people driving around.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Is it all petrol, or did you have any electric vehicles?

• 1:51:33Speaker 02

  It was both. We definitely, there was some electric vehicles.

• 1:51:35Speaker 03

  All right, at least there's some, okay.

• 1:51:37Speaker 02

  But it was mostly, yeah, mostly ICE engines. They, and just like no public transportation. You know, there's just no infrastructure for that.

• 1:51:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is weird.

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  What's the Maltese word for Uber?

• 1:51:48Speaker 02

  It's Uber. They borrow English words for most, you know, modern technologies.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  Hence my funny comment.

• 1:51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:59Speaker 02

  Even like comb, the word for comb in Maltese is comb.

• 1:52:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's okay.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:52:08Speaker 02

  Very cool place. It is fun to visit a place I know almost nothing about, you know? I just didn't really know much about it until we went there. Very cool.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  I'm glad you were adventurous that way.

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So we went there specifically because my wife had a conference there, but they do conferences in interesting places like this and it's, we almost went to Malaysia a few years ago for this conference, but it was canceled because of COVID. Which was a shame because one of her coworkers is from Malaysia and they were gonna host us and show us around. We were really looking forward to it. All got canceled due to COVID. It was a shame.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  That would have been perfect.

• 1:52:51Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:52:52Speaker 03

  Damn shame.

• 1:52:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, now that she's a tenured professor, she may be going to these conferences every year. We'll see what interesting places they take us to. Anyways, so good job, guys.

• 1:53:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  Thank you. Good job, guys.

• 1:53:07Speaker 03

  It was a coin, it was, it was, it was a coin flip. I mean, really.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  This week's quote was suggested by listener Steve from Saskatchewan. Thank you for so much. "Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy." Giadorno Bruno, Italian philosopher, in the late 1500s, I think.

• 1:53:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  Born February 15, 1548. Italian philosopher, poet, alchemist, alchemist, astrologer,

• 1:53:44Speaker 03

  among other things. He's known for his cosmological theories which conceptually extended to include the then novel Copernican model. Whoa, so a little ahead of his time, huh?

• 1:53:56Speaker 02

  Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:53:58Speaker 03

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:53:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, Steve.

• 1:53:59Speaker 03

  Welcome back.

• 1:54:00Speaker 02

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

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:54:44Speaker 00

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