The Skeptics Guide #1012 - Nov 30 2024

Interview with Andrea Love; News Items: Near Earth Microquasars, How to Watch Research Misconduct, Genetically Modifying Brains, Largest Prime Number, Magic Amulets, Atlantic Current Climate Tipping Point; 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.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Today is Saturday, October 26, 2024, and this is your host, Steven Novella.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:56Bob Novella?

  Five days. Five days until Halloween. Hello.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Haris Santa Maria.

• 1:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 1:04Speaker 05

  Hey, guys.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Evan Bernstein.

• 1:08Speaker 05

  What's up, PsychCon?

• 1:10Speaker 02

  And we have a special guest today, Brian Wecht. Brian, welcome. Hi, guys. Just call me Dave.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  So we are at PsychCon in Las Vegas. Thanks, everyone, for inviting us here. All right, let's go on with some science news. Bob, you're going to start us off with some more black hole news, sort of, kind of.

• 1:32Bob Novella?

  Sort of. All right, this one was pretty interesting, as I think some of my topics are. So astronomers, well, if it's not interesting, I'm not going to do it, in my mind, anyway. You might disagree. All right, observations made by astronomers on using HAWK, High Altitude Water, Cherenkov Gamma Ray Observatory, may actually rewrite what we know about the birthplaces of the most energetic particles ever created in the universe. So what do you guys think are the most energetic?

• 2:01Speaker 02

  Cosmic rays.

• 2:02Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah, that's right. But some people might say the LHC, right? The LHC, the Large Hadron Collider accelerates protons into collisions of 14 trillion electron, ter electron volts, trillion electron volts. Pretty powerful, but cosmic rays are the champ by far. We're talking energies of 100 trillion electron volts to 1,000 trillion electron volts, which is petavolt scale. The most, and actually it goes even higher than that, the most energetic proton they've ever discovered in these cosmic rays had the kinetic energy of a 57 mile per hour baseball. In a proton, that's how close to the speed of light this thing was accelerated to. So what can accelerate protons to that level?

• 2:45Bob Novella?

  What can impart that much energy to a proton? And the consensus, we're not sure what's creating these super ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, but the consensus is typically that these are very distant, extremely, as you might imagine, energetic processes like pulsars, supernova remnants, and specifically for this news item, quasars. And quasars, we've talked about them on the show a bunch of times. These are supermassive black holes at the cores of galaxies that emit gamma rays and cosmic rays. But most importantly, these are distant, these are 500 million light years away, up to 13 billion light years away.

• 3:23Speaker 02

  What's the closest one, really, 500?

• 3:25Bob Novella?

  500 million light years.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  That's the closest one?

• 3:27Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Is that because their origin is so far in the past?

• 3:31Bob Novella?

  I would think, because to create supermassive black holes that size, it takes some time.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  Takes time. Is that right, Brian?

• 3:38Bob Novella?

  But that's... I'm not sure, honestly. But I Googled it yesterday, that's the closest one.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 3:43Bob Novella?

  500 million. But these are far, far away. What if I said that we may have found an energetic process right in our backyard that could potentially create these, in the Milky Way, say, only 20,000 light years away? They have found these micro-quasars that are emitting surprisingly powerful gamma rays, and it's right in our backyard, 20,000 light years away. That's nothing compared to billions, super, super close. Now, micro-quasars... I wasn't even sure what that was until last week. A micro quasar is a black hole, but it's not a supermassive black hole. It's a stellar mass black hole, three, four, five, six solar masses. And it's in orbit or co-orbiting or, you know, it's feeding off of a regular star and siphoning

• 4:27Bob Novella?

  that matter into its system and dealing with it in ways that I'll get into detail. So the gamma rays that they detected at these micro quasars was 200 trillion electron

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, gamma or cosmic?

• 4:38Bob Novella?

  What did I say?

• 4:38Speaker 02

  You said gamma.

• 4:39Bob Novella?

  Okay. No, no, the gamma rays, the gamma rays. The gamma rays, the gamma radiation coming from this micro quasar is 200 trillion electron volts. So I'll make that connection to cosmic rays. So the micro quasars that they've detected in the past were nowhere near that. So this was a surprise. How could this micro quasar be creating gamma rays that powerful? So what's happening is that black holes can be the best accelerators in the world. They can accelerate particles far more than anything that I think we've ever detected. So what's happening is that you've got a twisted magnetic field that's taking the particles that are getting sucked into the black hole and then channeling them into jets. So now the gamma rays are produced by these jets by interacting, by the protons in the

• 5:22Bob Novella?

  jets interacting with the interstellar medium right around the jets. And that's creating the gamma rays that we're detecting here. But the key here is that you've got, because we see gamma rays, that means that there's also probably cosmic rays coming from these. And it's really interesting processes that are happening here, creating these accelerating protons to like a baseball being hurled at 57 miles per hour. There's things like shock acceleration. Imagine a proton in this jet. And what happens is that the protons go across the shock wave of this turbulent jet, back and forth across the shock wave, getting faster and faster every time it goes back and forth. There's also magnetic reconnection, which is extremely powerful. If you've got these super powerful magnetic fields and they're being reconfigured and

• 6:07Bob Novella?

  that reconfiguration releases tremendous amounts of energy. Our sun does this with its magnetic field, but a black hole, as you can imagine, would be much, much more powerful. So every time the particles go near this, the magnetic reconnection. It imparts energy to the protons and electrons. They go faster and faster and faster, closer and closer to the speed of light. There's also things like Fermi acceleration, which is really fascinating. Particles scatter off of moving field lines, magnetic field lines, and it does it over and over, and it makes it faster and faster. So this is how a black hole, even a small black hole, can impart tremendous acceleration to protons, accelerating even to the level of these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays. Now, what are the benefits?

• 6:50Bob Novella?

  The benefits of this is that if you're studying how these particles are created and you're looking at quasars a billion light-years away, it's hard. It's far away, it's very old, and things happen over millions of years, and so you're not going to see a lot of change. And it's also not very clear, because over millions of years, the radiation is being scattered. So when you're looking at microquasars, though, 20,000 light-years away, it's very clear. We can study the processes that impart these accelerations much more easily, because it's right in our backyard. And you could see changes in real-time happening. You could see jets changing over days when it's in our backyard, but when it's a billion light-years away, you're not going to see much change at all. So we can learn more about how these amazing particles are created.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Do you understand, so the interesting thing here was that, so they've been able to detect these things for a while. Here, they were able to pinpoint where they were coming from. So was there some technological advance that let them pinpoint this, or had they just not done that experiment?

• 7:50Bob Novella?

  No.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Because the tech doesn't seem that new.

• 7:52Bob Novella?

  The thing is, gamma rays fly out basically straight. If you see a gamma ray, you're basically seeing, you could easily determine where it came from. The problem with cosmic rays is that they're charged particles. They're quite circuitous as they travel through, so when you see one come this way, it could have been born way over there. So that's why you kind of have to infer at this point that to get this gamma radiation that we see, high-energy gamma rays, are also probably producing cosmic rays, and it's probably also being created at the same place, because the black holes are creating, they're marshaling amazing energies, creating gamma rays and the gamma rays. Cosmic rays are protons and electrons accelerated to really high energies. Now, it depends who you talk to.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So you said gamma rays were protons that were super accelerated?

• 8:39Speaker 05

  No, gamma ray is electromagnetic radiation.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just EM radiation.

• 8:43Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  The protons are, that's the cosmic rays.

• 8:45Bob Novella?

  Gamma radiation is light and then...

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Does the protons and electrons, do they only become cosmic rays when they get to a certain speed, or they're always considered cosmic rays?

• 8:52Bob Novella?

  They, um, yeah, if they, if they were accelerated to some high enough energies and they impact the earth and we detect them somehow by their daughter particles that shower down, um, we would say, yeah, these are, these are cosmic rays. But I'm talking specifically about these ultra-high-energy cosmic rays, which are, which are rare, but so immensely powerful that we're like, how are these things, it's mysterious how they're, how they're being created. But one clarification I could make, could make is that cosmic, uh, cosmic rays are often, they're, an astronomer will always say, oh yeah, it's electrons and protons primarily. Some will say that it's also gamma rays, but other scientists will say, won't necessarily include gamma rays into the cosmic ray definition.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 9:32Bob Novella?

  But, but they're created by similar processes, so, there you go.

• 9:37Speaker 05

  It ain't over.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Bob.

• 9:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, I'm done.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  All right, Kara.

• 9:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I'm next.

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yes, you are next.

• 9:44Bob Novella?

  He likes surprising people.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  Tell us how we could fix science.

• 9:47Cara Santa Maria?

  No, that's a terrible intro for me.

• 9:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I will turn the question around on you. Um, so there's an article that I came across, uh, an editorial, really, in Retraction Watch. If you don't read Retraction Watch, you should. And the editorial is by Derek Sch, or Daryl Schubin, and he is a, a long-retired independent consultant, but previously worked at the federal level. Uh, there's so many, like, things here. He's the founding director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Center for Advancing Science and Engineering Capacity, Senior Vice President of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, Senior Policy Officer for the National Science Board. And he worked at the federal level for, for many, many

• 10:33Cara Santa Maria?

  years. And he writes this editorial, kind of looking back on the eighties when he first started his career, before we even had an Office of Research Integrity. And he reflected on... Concepts like scientific misconduct and how the scientific community handled those concepts so many years ago, right, 40 years ago, and what they're doing, what we, I guess, as a collective are doing now. And I think when we talk very often at conferences like this, but in conversations in the halls and conversations on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, we often talk about distrust and mistrust in institutions, in science,

• 11:15Cara Santa Maria?

  and what sort of we can do as science communicators, what individual citizens can do. But one of the conversations that we don't often have specifically is how scientists, and specifically the publishing process within science, has some amount of responsibility and what we can do to improve. And so in this editorial, he sort of reflects back on the idea of misconduct in research, which was his research topic way back when, and how, here's a wonderful quote, "Today, it's a quaint reminder of how much science has been captured by for-profit politicized international interests."

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Kara, by misconduct, do they mean deliberate fraud? Or could that also just mean mistakes and bad techniques?

• 11:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, I think these are all variations on a theme, right? So it's a spectrum, Steve. Yes, I think there is, there's obvious, okay. Obviously, there is fraud that is often committed.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  There's not just fraud that we're talking about.

• 12:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we're not just talking about fraud. We're also talking about interests that put undue pressure on individuals. And, but yes, he does use language like deceit and suspicion. And so he poses quite a few questions about how we might, as a community, and not just the scientists who are actively doing research and publishing, but the editors who are involved, the journals themselves, how we might grapple with this really important question. He often calls that the watcher community throughout his, throughout his writing. I'm going to kind of pose some of those questions to you. And the big one, sort of at the end, is he says, can the watcher community, which should include you and me, do more than better report the perverse?

• 12:57Cara Santa Maria?

  ...of scientific publication. Indeed, how can we meet the moment and increase the promotion of better practices? So that's sort of the top, the overarching question, but let's get into some of the individuals. Research, he, he claims, "Research should not be a policed activity." And, oh, by the way, when he, when he enters into these, he basically says, "I offer the watcher community some prescriptions and a few questions without solutions or answers." So many of these are quite rhetorical. But he, he claims, "Research should not be a policed activity. A policy that permits practice can regulate or undermine it. Is the trust-based publication honor system, perhaps always a fiction, now eclipsed by extrinsic interests or actually subverted by profit motives?" And so I'm curious what, what you all think about that, given the nature of how we publish, and maybe we should,

• 13:42Cara Santa Maria?

  we could probably talk a little bit about that.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but so he, he's saying that publishing is still on the honor system and that maybe we, that we can't do that anymore because

• 13:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Or he's saying, "Should we be able to?"

• 13:53Speaker 02

  There's too many vested interests to really have an honor system for research integrity in publishing.

• 13:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that's the open question, right?

• 14:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Are, are we still on an honor system like we were 40 years ago?

• 14:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:06Cara Santa Maria?

  We do have regulatory agencies that do exist now that didn't exist 40 years ago. But that said, we also have for-profit journals, we have predatory journals that didn't really exist back then.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, from my understanding, the answer is sort of, because, I mean, it's journal by journal, right? As you say, we have predatory pay, pay-to-play journals. Is, are they providing any kind of quality control? Not no. In, in some cases, the answer is of straight up no. We also have ideological journals, right? Journals that have a certain perspective, you know? And like, if you're the Journal of Acupuncture, I don't expect you're going to do a lot of good quality control on acupuncture research. But if you're the Lancet, or if you're the New England Journal of Medicine, or Cell, or like Nature, these big journals, they have a robust editorial process. But even there, there's room for,

• 15:01Speaker 02

  there are things that they're not doing that they could be doing. Like, one thing that, one specific point that comes up is, should we For me, for me force researchers to provide their raw data.

• 15:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  To the journal so that the, you know, the number crunching could be independently verified. And I've spoken to researchers about, I'm not a researcher, you know, of that kind. So I don't, you know, but I've spoken to researchers and they, and the responses are mixed. But the one point that many of them raised is, you know, I generate terabytes of data in my research and you're really going to force me to keep all of that data and provide it in some format, you know, upload it? No. I mean, so it's, it's like, it's, it could be laborious and I'm not realistic, expensive, and expensive is a bad thing when you're talking about research and would really bog down the process.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So there's a, there's a return on investment question with all of this, right?

• 15:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And what about the question of pre-registering experimentation, right?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  I'm a hundred percent in favor of that.

• 16:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like I have an interesting scientific question I want to ask. This is how I want to approach it. I am going to document that in writing and then I'm going to go do it, which prevents this phenomenon of P-hacking where I just keep collecting data until I get to the point I want to be at. You, you set the parameters in advance and then you, it, it, it doesn't force, but it helps to shape, yeah.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  It does help, I'll tell you, in one way, that's very specific, as I saw not too long ago, and I can't remember if we mentioned this on the show, but a systematic review of, you know, medical studies on some question, I forget what, it doesn't matter what the topic was, but they did an analysis of like, if we looked at, like, we did, there were 30 studies looking at this question. If you look at all of the studies, this is what, this is the result that you get. There's a little bit of a positive effect. But if you only look at studies that were pre-registered and didn't violate their pre-registration, meaning they didn't change their methods between registration and publication, there's no effect.

• 17:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  So the effect goes away when you basically control for P-hacking, which to me means there's no effect there. And the, that was only possible with pre-registration. I'm a big fan of peer review.

• 17:18Speaker 05

  Does the honor system here mean anything that's not possibly catchable by peer review? Everything like the raw data, the maybe some specific analysis? That's what we're talking about?

• 17:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I think they're, yeah, I think they're saying honor system is is also peer review.

• 17:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 17:33Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, that this is is these are volunteer reviewers that are subject matter experts. And he poses that question as well. It's a very burdensome process and individuals don't get paid for it. Yeah. And very often what ends up happening is that people who step into those roles may not have specialized knowledge. And he's pretty firm in his language here. He literally says, "Some of the best analysis is done in this behind the scenes role, yet it remains largely unrewarded. Without this specialized knowledge, reviewers lacking subject expertise are perpetrating fraud." Like, he straight up claims that if you do not have the expertise to review this paper and you are reviewing it and kind of let it slide because you don't get it, that that's fraudulent.

• 18:10Speaker 05

  Not to say people who have the expertise but just aren't taking it that seriously.

• 18:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Yeah. Yeah, it's another question. And I think here's an interesting one. So this is more of a statement than a question. Grapple with it as you may. "The frequency of scandals of fabrication and misappropriation should be statistically insignificant, but the magnitude of these relatively few misdeeds can have profound real-world consequences for careers, funding, perceptions, and confidence in scientific progress." And this is, I think, an important phenomenon to grapple with, even in the instances where there is outright fraud or in the instances where terrible mistakes are made, you know, maybe unknowingly. The consequences can be really dire. And as we often talk about, it's very hard to put a genie back in a bottle, right?

• 18:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Or unring a bell. I mean, obviously, like Wakefield comes to mind. And so what can we be doing within the community to either prevent or mitigate those kinds of issues? Because they're really important issues.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I mean, of the fraud, of committing fraud, like deliberate fraud.

• 19:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:15Speaker 02

  That's hard.

• 19:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Even if it's not fraudulent, even if it's a mistake, but like

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:19Cara Santa Maria?

  large mistakes that get a lot of play that are really hard to then retract.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  So

• 19:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the point of Retraction Watch, right?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  I, I do think that journals have more responsibility to, to do the kind of analysis that would have a reasonable chance of detecting bad mistakes or outright fraud. Sometimes fraud goes undetected for years because nobody did a basic analysis that would have revealed it. And when it is ultimately revealed, it's like really obvious. And it has even worse effects than you, than you were saying, Cara. And all those things are true, but also like there have been cases, there was a recent case of a researcher who for years was publishing fraudulent Alzheimer research and distorted the entire field for a decade. You know, one, one person.

• 20:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Um, and because if you're going to commit fraud, you're probably going to do it to discover something new and interesting and which people are going to get interested in.

• 20:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's going to lay the groundwork.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  It's going to lay the groundwork and then it gets cited and then it gets retracted. And, but it continues to get cited, get these zombie citations, right? So the, so it creates ripples throughout the literature that are just devastating. But, um, I, I, and I do think that we're not doing nearly as much as we should to minimize that because such, you know, a few instances, instances can have such a bad ripple effect. I do wonder though, how valuable AI will be in sort of automatically

• 20:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  looking for the signatures of fraud, you know?

• 20:48Speaker 05

  Because at some point, it's just a volume

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  problem, right?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  It's a volume problem.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  There's so much research and it's not slowing down.

• 20:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 20:53Speaker 05

  You only have so many

• 20:54Cara Santa Maria?

  We're only getting more.

• 20:54Speaker 05

  so much time.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  Tens of, tens of thousands of papers a year. That's crazy. Yeah.

• 20:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And I guess one other big question that I want to pose before, before we move on is, is this question about the culture of science, the, the modern culture of academic science and how much does the publisher perish culture, the lab culture, the aspirations of individual researchers? How much would a culture shift there then have a trickle down effect on the publication industry and, and just as A quick kind of continuation of that. He asks, you know, can watchers, of course, the yous and the me's and the reviewers and everybody, serve as honest brokers? Or must they inevitably become partisan by virtue of investing in the publication industry? Is the very act of engaging in this way changing our ability to remain unbiased?

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, that's a hard question. Yeah.

• 21:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And I don't know how often we're really sitting and exploring. We're just churning the machine very often.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  I, what I find is that even researchers, even people who absolutely need to know this, and there's a lot of research out there to show this, don't necessarily know how to not commit fraud, or meaning they don't do it deliberately, they do it because they don't know what they're doing. Like, they P-hack. Thirty percent of researchers, when asked, "Do you do A, B, C, or D?", all of which amount to P-hacking, said, "Yes, I do that occasionally." And I think mostly-

• 22:14Bob Novella?

  Forty-one percent?

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Thirty percent, about a third. Mostly because they don't know it's P-hacking.

• 22:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  And they don't even know what P-hacking is.

• 22:21Speaker 06

  So they should have some sort of, what, course or something? They should be taught?

• 22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  We are. We are.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  They are taught.

• 22:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Part of the issue is maybe-

• 22:30Speaker 06

  They're ignoring it.

• 22:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Or maybe it is important in certain types of science to have also a subject matter statistical expert as a co-author. Like, and you do see that. That is a tactic that some people take. But we are all supposed to already be able to do that.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  A lot of the teaching-

• 22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It's part of our training.

• 22:45Speaker 02

  A lot of the training is mentorship, which means it's hit or miss.

• 22:48Speaker 06

  That's right.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  And I think it needs to be way more systematic.

• 22:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'm also biased as a, as a social science researcher. Like, in psychology, we get a lot of statistical training. And when I was trained as a biologist, it was night and day. I didn't get nearly as much of that kind of training.

• 23:01Speaker 06

  I got none of, sorry, for context, I'm a physicist. I got none of this training at all.

• 23:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, well, that's frightening, yeah.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Medicine, it's all mentorship, hit or miss. Yeah.

• 23:09Speaker 06

  For context, I'm a tax preparer by day. I, I have to do certific, certain certifications every year, year after year after year. I have to take, even it's, even if it's the same class, and in fact, sometimes it is, the same test that I have to take and pass every year. And I get the repetitive nature of it, but it does definitely help keep tax preparers like myself, you know, honest, up to date on the late, on the latest issues. And, you know, we always have to keep certain things in mind. It's part of our culture now, and it weeds out, it really weeds out that bottom 10% that tend to kind of, you know, pollute the rest of the industry.

• 23:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And we see it too. Steve's a neurologist. He has to maintain a license. He has to do continuing education. I'm a psychologist. I'm going to do the same thing. But researchers, it's true, maybe there should be a continuing education requirement.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  There, it's the good news there, and I think we talked about this maybe six months ago or so, there is now a certification in research methodology, like how not to be hacked. It's not required yet.

• 24:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not required, yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Not required yet, but it exists.

• 24:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Perhaps some journals will start to require it.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  We just need to take that next step. And I think, and this is a process. I think they're going to do it for a while, see how it works, whatever, and then require it.

• 24:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like if I do human subjects research, I, in order to get IRB approval at my university, I have to be NIH trained in the ethical way to work with human subjects. Like, why can't we have that as a federal?

• 24:34Speaker 02

  I would not be surprised if before too long, the NIH will require certification in how not to do research fraud.

• 24:41Speaker 05

  I mean, is this something you can learn by watching a video? Like, does it have to be taught by a person? Or can it just be like, here, let's watch this and you'll understand?

• 24:48Speaker 06

  You can watch courses. I do that all the time.

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, most of the way there. But yeah, you do, it is, it does help to also have somebody that you can talk to about it, to make sure that you're absorbing the lessons, you know. But yeah. All right, let's move on. All right, so we fix science, all right?

• 25:01Cara Santa Maria?

  All good. You're welcome.

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Black holes, check. Science, check.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  All right. I'm going to talk about genetically modifying the brain. This is cool. This is very cool. So we talk, you know, we're big fans of CRISPR, you know, the ability to you to precisely manipulate genes, swap in segments, turn genes off, turn them back on again, et cetera. And it's amazing, it's amazing what we can do now. The, in terms of clinical applications, right? Curing disease with CRISPR or some other genetic method. The big limitation, guys, is what? We've talked about this. What's the big limitation?

• 25:42Bob Novella?

  Getting it in? Getting it in. The vector. The vector.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Vector, yeah. It's getting the CRISPR to the cells. So there's a couple of ways around this. One is you could take the tissue out of the body and then do it in the petri dish, right? So if you're taking bone marrow out of the, out of a patient, you then CRISPR their bone marrow and you put it back into them, right? So you can target the cells because you have them in a jar, in a petri dish, whatever. You can't take somebody's brain out. No, you can't do that.

• 26:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's hard to get to the brain.

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Not ethically, at least.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  It's hard to get to the brain.

• 26:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  You can also do the CRISPR in, at the egg stage, right? As part of IVF. So let's say, although this is still ethically gray zone. Remember, we talked about, you know, the Chinese researcher, he who, who did this without approval and it was a mess. But that's another way. You get, you have, again, you have IVF, you have the cell in a petri dish, you do the CRISPR and then you correct the genetic mistake and then you implant it. But what if you have an adult? Or just a, you know, even a growing baby? It's hard to get the CRISPR to the cells in, in an organism that you want to get them to. So for years, we used viral vectors and viral vectors work,

• 26:56Speaker 02

  but they have this nasty tendency to cause infections. And that has slowed, like in the 90s, there was like this one study where they were using a viral vector to try to treat, you know, a genetic lung disease. And, you know, the first subject died of encephalitis and that literally set the whole field back a decade at least. You know, because we had to go back to the drawing boards and, well, we can't do that again, you know? So that's, viruses are, they're an option, but they're a problem. Another option is what we call lipid nanoparticles. Lipid nanoparticles. And I think we've mentioned them on the show before, but they're basically, just like this, and they're little, you know, lipid, you know, little spheres of fat. And they're, you know, nano engineered.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  And they're, these are little packages, they're little delivery mechanisms. So you could put the CRISPR in the lipid nanoparticle and then inject that into the target tissue, right? Or you could cook with it. With it and you eat it. Yes. Right, it's oil, right, so you can fry up some meatballs. Mm hmm. The oil. You could try that. Okay. Yeah, I don't think that would work. You have meatball on your bingo card, check it.

• 28:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So the idea is that the lipid can like pass to the cell membranes and get to where it needs to go?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, but there's a couple of problems with that. So one limitation is it's a lot of fluid, right? And you're sort of injecting that fluid into an organ. And that's a problem because it's physically.

• 28:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, how is it targeted?

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's not really targeted, it's just diffusing into the cells that you want to get it to. There's another problem, and that is that the these lipid nanoparticles are very immunogenic, meaning the immune system doesn't like them, right? They trigger the an immune reaction because they are literally foreign particles, right? I mean, they are what the immune system is supposed to fight off.

• 28:44Bob Novella?

  Just fat, just fat.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Well, but they're engineered or whatever. There, there's not just fat.

• 28:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not their fat?

• 28:52Speaker 02

  It's but it's also that there's other things there, but. Okay. As you could see in the little graphic. So, so this new study now addresses a lot of these issues. And specifically, we're targeting the brain with the with the current research that we're looking at. And the idea is that we want to get these these lipid nanoparticles with genetically modifying material in, you know, as a delivery, you know, as the package into brain tissue. Again, it's hard to inject into brain tissue without damaging it. So the solution there is to inject into the ventricles. You know what the ventricles are? Yeah. They're the fluid-filled spaces inside the brain. So that's.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  So the brain has its own essentially sort of delivery receptacle, like it's just unload here. You know, you inject it into the ventricles. The spinal fluid has access to a lot of the brain tissue, and it's a fluid-filled space, so you're not injecting directly into brain tissue. So that's one thing that they did. We're going to inject into ventricles.

• 29:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Into the ventricle itself, not into the column?

• 29:55Speaker 02

  No, into the brain, like the lateral ventricle.

• 29:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Stuck a needle through their skull.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  We do this all the time.

• 30:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we do. In humans, what we do is we want to inject something into the ventricle. We go through the right frontal lobe.

• 30:08Cara Santa Maria?

  You do.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Because that's the most redundant tissue in the brain.

• 30:11Cara Santa Maria?

  You have to drill, like, do you have to do a craniotomy? Yeah, you drill a little hole first.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. But Steve, just to clarify, would you only? Do this to affect the brain or you would do this to affect other organs? No, the brain. This is all about targeting the brain. Okay, so here they're trying to treat a developmental neurological disorder. In this particular study, it's Angelman's Syndrome, but there's many, many different disorders that affect the development of the brain. And they're all horrible, right? So, but if you're trying to affect brain development, you gotta get to it while it's developing, right? You gotta get to it in the womb. So here, they're trying to, this is a mouse study, but what they did was they injected these lipid nanoparticles full of a Cas9, that Cas9 is the snippers, right? This is the part of the CRISPR system that makes the cut.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  At target, you know, that will make the cut where you want it to. But actually, it wasn't, it didn't have Cas9 in it. It had Cas9 mRNA in it, right? So now, you're injecting the mRNA that codes for Cas9 with lipid nanoparticles. Then that gets to the brain cells. They make the Cas9 themselves. And then that makes the genetic, it makes the genetic alteration. It snips the gene that we want to get rid of. Now, this process has been done before. And the, with a success rate of about 1%, meaning that when you do this, 1% of the brain cells get the genetic change that you're looking for, which is therapeutically insignificant, right? So that's no therapeutic effect.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  So, they wanted to, you know, they were looking for ways to increase this. So they, and the limiting factor is the amount of these lipid nanoparticles that you can inject. Because if you inject too much, you get an immune reaction and the inflammation destroys the brain. So, but they figured out a way to dramatically increase the amount that they can inject by, you know, essentially having the lipid nanoparticles degrade as soon as they deliver their package.

• 32:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, smart.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, the, and their results were, they were able to get the, make the genetic change in 30% of the brain cells, up from 1%. Which is therapeutically significant. So it basically went from not significant to significant. So now this is an extremely good proof of concept, but it's actually better than it sounds. Because for a couple of reasons, because they were injecting at a stage in brain development where there were still a lot of neural stem cells. And so those and progenitor cells, and so those neural stem cells become a lot more cells, right? So they're trying to make the change early enough in the development of the brain

• 32:59Speaker 02

  that a lot of the brain cells and and then they like a month after birth, they sacrifice the animal and they look at the brain and see how many of the cells have the genetic change. Sixty percent of the hippocampus cells had the change and thirty percent of the neurons had the change. So that's significant.

• 33:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Why? So why do this in the fetus and not the embryo? When there are fewer cells to begin with.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  There needs to be a brain to target, right? So you need to have the ventricles to inject it into.

• 33:25Cara Santa Maria?

  They can't just do it in like the neural.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  I guess it would be too it would be too primitive, you know. But there are some diseases, though, where they suspect that the success would be even greater. Can you think of a reason why that might be? Remember, this is a genetic disorder that kills brain cells, if you think about it that way. Because the cells that are not treated die. And the cells that are treated live disproportionately represent the eventual to brain, right?

• 33:57Bob Novella?

  There's a lot of pruning that happens anyway, right?

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, but this is now for development. Yeah, there is even in development, there's a lot of pruning, but that's not the the key is that the if in a destructive disease, they they they think they can get up to ninety percent of the cells because, you know, because the only the cells that get the genetic change are going to survive or they're going to differentially survive. So they should really predominate in the ultimate brain that they're born with. So, this is really encouraging, you know, because again, the vector is the problem with genetic, using genetic manipulation to treat disease in, you know, it basically, when you, once you get to the fetal stage and beyond, right, because you can't, it's in a living organism, you can't have it in a petri dish, right, so, um, so this is great.

• 34:44Bob Novella?

  How early can they detect these things?

• 34:46Speaker 02

  So, they're genetic disorders, so they could detect them as soon as they know that someone's pregnant, they could do a, you know, a karyotyping and do genetic analysis, and it's, but they, also if you know the parents like are at risk, they could screen for it, etc., they say, oh, yep, you have it, we're gonna have to do the treatment, you know, so, yeah, it's potentially, you know, extremely, extremely useful.

• 35:06Speaker 05

  What's the threshold for them to do this on humans?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, they, they, first they're gonna do, they need more animal research, because, you know, you're injecting genetic modification into the brain, this is, this is serious.

• 35:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't, is any of this ethically approved, I mean, do we do any CRISPR in, yeah?

• 35:24Speaker 02

  No, this is not approved for, for humans.

• 35:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But I don't just mean this, I mean, anything that uses CRISPR in utero, we don't do.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  In utero, not that I'm aware of.

• 35:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't think so, not yet.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Um, we're, yeah, the only ones that were approved were like the blood ones, the ones that we could take it out of the body and put it back in, so, yeah, this is, this is great. So, we obviously, this takes years, this kind of research, so this guy, I imagine there's gonna be a few more years of animal research, then we're gonna get, the first human trials are gonna be just like, safety trials, just to make sure that, you know, it doesn't cause brain inflammation, things like that, and then maybe 10, 15 years before we see like therapeutic trials, and, but this is, this is definitely something that's happening, and this is extremely encouraging, and this is a massive step forward, they really, they've solved a couple of really big problems here.

• 36:07Bob Novella?

  Steve, this is one application of this technique, what about using it for anywhere else in the, in the human body?

• 36:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, the, the ventricle thing only works for the brain, but just the fact that they can get a larger volume of these particles into tissue without causing the inflammation is a great advance, yeah, absolutely, and again, using the mRNA to make the Cas9 is brilliant.

• 36:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's cool, like to send the instructions where you want it and have it.

• 36:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, right, the mech, the raw material's already there, you know, the, the mechanism's already there, just, yeah, just use it. All right, let's go on, Brian.

• 36:38Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Lot of numbers on the screen, tell us about those numbers.

• 36:41Speaker 05

  Lots of numbers, so let me give you a little context about who I am, because you know these guys, but you probably don't know me as well. I'm trained as a theoretical physicist, so my interests are string theory, quantum field theory, and math, although I left that job a while ago, and now I dress up like a ninja and play piano.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  We'll talk about some math stuff, yep.

• 37:01Bob Novella?

  I still have hope Brian will be a physicist again one day.

• 37:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, no one makes me feel worse about my career decisions than you do, Bob.

• 37:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, somebody's got to.

• 37:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Once a physicist, always a physicist.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  That's true, yeah, I still, I was saying this to Leonard the other day, I'm still a physicist, I'm just not a professional physicist.

• 37:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Bob Novella?

  True.

• 37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Professional ninja.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  That's right. I'm even a fake one of those, actually, but anyway.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  Professional fake ninja.

• 37:26Speaker 05

  That is actually true.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  That's accurate.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  Right. So, I'm gonna talk about prime numbers, because, I'll just cut to the chase, and then I'll give them context. Recently, just in the last week or so, the new largest prime number that we know of was announced as a discovery. That's the headline, but let me back up a little bit. What's a prime number? So, I think most people here probably know, a prime number is a number that is divisible only by itself and 1, right? That's the definition of a prime number. Lowest prime number is 2. All other prime numbers are odd, right? Because any even number is divisible by 2. And then you have a bunch of other prime numbers that come up pretty fast, 3, 5, 7, not 9, etc., etc. That's a prime number. The question is, how do you check?

• 38:13Speaker 05

  So, if you're writing down a list of prime numbers, how do you check if any given integer in front of you, and integer is basically a whole number, is prime? So, the naive thing to do is you just start dividing it by a bunch of prime numbers and see if something goes in or not.

• 38:29Speaker 05

  You actually only need to do this, the most naive thing you can do is check all the primes up to the square root of that number, right? Because you can't have all the factors be bigger than the square root of the number, right? Then that would be too big. So, um, the problem is, when you start generating very, very large primes, that gets computationally extremely onerous and expensive, right? So if you're looking for really large prime numbers, which we currently are, that just divided by every prime you know starts to break down pretty fast. It's still theoretically possible, it would just take forever. So the question is, are there prime numbers we can generate, or possible prime numbers, that maybe we can check a little bit faster? So there's a class of, uh, prime numbers called Merced primes, which are of the form

• 39:12Speaker 05

  2 to the p, where p is the, uh, a prime number, minus 1. So for example, the lowest prime number is 2 to the, let's take the lowest prime, 2 to the 2 for minus 1, gives you 3. That is a prime number. Turns out if you do this with a bunch of low-prime numbers, you get other prime numbers. 2 to the 3 is 8, minus 1 is 7. That is prime. So you can start checking this, and it turns out that this is not a sufficient condition for, to use the math word, primality. Because if you check 2 to the 11 minus 1, that is a composite number. That's 2047, which is 23 times 89, alright? That is a composite number.

• 39:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Composite means not prime?

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Not prime, yeah. Composite means not prime. So, Merced primes are just primes of this form, but you still have to check that they're possibly prime. And it turns out that you, there's an algorithm called the Lucas-Lerner algorithm, that for this speci- this specific type of prime number, is a much faster way to check for primality. So you can do it, and it's computationally not too bad. Okay. So, um, right now, you might, if you, if you start checking for Merced primes, you get a bunch of them pretty early on, but to give you, uh, what I think is a pretty remarkable piece of data, I should say, by the way, we also know there are infinitely member, infinitely many prime numbers, right? We don't know if there are infinitely many Merced prime numbers. It, as a class-

• 40:38Speaker 05

  ...a prime number, but they might stop at some point. That would be weird. No one thinks that's the case, but theoretically it's true.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  And can I ask you another question, Brian? So if, when we're looking for prime numbers, we're looking for the biggest prime number we can find, but we're not necessarily finding them sequentially.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  There may be smaller prime numbers we haven't found.

• 40:56Speaker 05

  They're almost certainly, I mean, they're, it would be shocking if there weren't. What we're looking for right now are numbers that are big and that we can check in a computationally non-expensive way that are prime, right? But there are, I mean, certainly, I think it would be a truly shocking result if you look at the list of the largest primes and there was just a gap, a vacuum of primes in the middle of them. Because there's a lot, these numbers, as you'll see in a second, are pretty, pretty large.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  Right now, we know of only 52 numbers that are Merced primes, which is an amazingly, amazingly low, low number, because they're very sparsely distributed.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Total, including all the low ones?

• 41:32Speaker 05

  Yes, including all the low ones. There are only 52. And the headline here is that the 52nd one that we know of, which is not necessarily the 52nd Merced prime, because it's possible some, some are hiding in there, was found, although this was announced by the great internet Merced prime search, and the person who actually found this, his name is Luke Durant, found that the following number is prime. I have to read this off, because I didn't memorize it.

• 42:00Bob Novella?

  This could take a while.

• 42:01Speaker 05

  It's, so the number itself, the full number, has over 41 million digits.

• 42:06Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 42:06Speaker 05

  Which I'll start reading right now.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Settle in, folks.

• 42:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. The number is 2 to the 136,279,841 minus 1.

• 42:21Speaker 05

  So that number has been conclusively shown to be prime by, yes.

• 42:26Bob Novella?

  And that number in a text file was 46 megabytes, and Tolstoy's War and Peace was like 3 meg, 3.4 meg, so it's a big.

• 42:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's a big, big number. Matt Parker, if you guys know him, really wonderful math, uh, video guy, has a video where he displays, I think it's a large number of these digits, one frame at a time, and it still takes 6 minutes to, to get through, and he's doing like 24 frames per second or something like that. It's, it's pretty awesome. So what's interesting about this, a couple of interesting things. So this great internet Mersenne prime search was, they were using this Lucas learner algorithm to check for primality up until about six years ago, when they found a faster way, which is probabilistic. So they can do a quick check and it's not 100% guaranteed that if it meets that criterion,

• 43:17Speaker 05

  that it's prime, but the probability that it is prime, that it isn't prime is very, very low. Okay? So they discovered that this was faster and the thing I read, which I thought was really interesting, is that the probability that it isn't prime, if it passes this check, passes this check, is lower than the probability of a hardware error checking it with the Lucas learner algorithm. That's, that's how successful this is. So what they do is they use this probabilistic check and there's some modifications to it that have been refined over the last few years even. And then they go through another check and make sure that, you know, you can actually run the Lucas learner thing and check to see if the number is actually prime. And this number is now 100% guaranteed to be a prime number.

• 43:58Bob Novella?

  All right, is this like just a, an exercise to find these numbers or is there a practical use for prime numbers?

• 44:05Speaker 05

  There's a cash reward for some of them.

• 44:07Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 44:08Speaker 05

  Not offered by me. No, I mean, there's no practical use for it specifically. It's just like, hey, let's find a cool big number. Although, did that mic just go off there? One thing that was interesting about this recent discovery is that it was, I think, the first to use GPUs, because the guy that discovered it is a former Nvidia person who wanted to show people that GPUs graphics processing units, which are used a lot in AI, are good for more than just AI stuff, right? So this was kind of a proof of concept for him to show that you can use this computing power to do something else. There is, I would be shocked if there was any actual utility to the discovery itself,

• 44:51Speaker 05

  although like many things, maybe the process of trying to find ways to do it can have offshoots that are potentially, potentially interesting.

• 44:58Bob Novella?

  And that's not to say that primes aren't useful for lots of things, but these are so big.

• 45:02Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 45:03Bob Novella?

  It's like, they're too big to use like in security.

• 45:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, as we don't, yeah, that's right. So primes are extremely useful things in a variety of contexts, but not ones this big.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Not this big.

• 45:10Speaker 05

  So if, the other cool thing about the great internet percent prime search is that it's the kind of thing that anybody can be a part of. So you can just go to this website, download the software and start using your computer to check large numbers for being prime.

• 45:22Speaker 02

  And this number was found just using desktop computers, like not a supercomputer somewhere?

• 45:27Speaker 05

  It was a bunch of, yeah, GPUs kind of spread out all over, all over the world.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  Okay, so it was crowdsourced, kind of?

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's right. I forget.

• 45:35Speaker 06

  Could a quantum computer find the next one?

• 45:38Speaker 05

  Well, i- if such a thing existed, that would definitely cut down the computational time.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  The real, yeah, the question is, yeah, is there a quantum computer algorithm that would not run on a conventional computer that would find primes?

• 45:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I imagine the answer.

• 45:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 05

  It's, it's almost.

• 45:53Speaker 06

  So Brian, if everyone in this room, we connected our computers and we find a prime number, we can.

• 45:58Speaker 05

  I'm not connecting my computer to anything that you've touched, Jay. I'm very sorry. I've seen your internet history.

• 46:04Speaker 06

  We could make a million bucks together.

• 46:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, well.

• 46:06Bob Novella?

  This, this guy spent a million.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  The, the number I read, there's a Washington Post article about this, it says the guy spent $2 million, right? Did you see that, of his own money? Which seems so large that I don't know if I quite believe it. And the cash reward, I think, was $3,000.

• 46:20Bob Novella?

  Forget it.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  So, I don't know if it's exactly.

• 46:22Speaker 06

  But that's a deductible expense, so.

• 46:24Bob Novella?

  Never mind.

• 46:24Speaker 06

  Which will carry forward into future years.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 46:27Speaker 06

  I have a $2 million tax write-off. That's awesome.

• 46:30Bob Novella?

  Steve, I see some non-primes in your image down there, but that's all right.

• 46:36Speaker 05

  Bob.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Evan, more magic amulet news.

• 46:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, let's get to some hard science here.

• 46:46Speaker 06

  Uh, yeah, so this one comes from Canada, the world of sports. Are we familiar with the Toronto Maple Leafs?

• 46:52Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 46:52Speaker 06

  Anyone? Yeah, hockey, national, thank you, yeah. Love hockey. That sports team has been around since 1917. So that's 107 years of proud hockey tradition in Canada. Now, but the team just recently, like last week, made news outside of the hockey rink when their team assistant captain, his name is John Taveras, was seen last week wearing what. can only be described as a amulet with magical powers draped around his neck while he was playing. Yep. And upon noticing this, surprisingly, in a way, the internet started jumping on him and calling him out for promoting pseudoscience and nonsense. So yay, good for, good for them.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Oh, internet.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  They actually got this one right.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we don't know if it works or not.

• 47:39Speaker 06

  Well, yeah, what is this magic?

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Have you proven it doesn't work ever?

• 47:44Speaker 06

  Uh huh. Yes, I have, actually. Okay, why, why is he wearing this, this thing? All right, it's called the Airestech or Airestech. That's A-I-R-E-S-T-E-H. That is the company that makes it and the product is called Lifetune One. I went to their website to find out what exactly it is they claim this does. Here, here are their words, not mine. "The only proven solution for neutralizing electromagnetic field pollution." Create, yeah, "Creating safer environments without disrupting your daily technology use." "It is patented, clinically proven nanotechnology, Bob."

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  "To neutralize harmful radiation from your everyday devices such as your cellphone and your wifi, keeping you and your family and your pets safe."

• 48:31Speaker 02

  So, so what exactly is patented?

• 48:35Speaker 06

  Uh, yes, right. So what it is, it's-

• 48:38Speaker 02

  What part of it is that, the name?

• 48:40Speaker 06

  Here's the part that's patented. It's a, and we've talked about this before, it's a sticker. A sticker that they've put onto a charm or, you know, some kind of wearable. Or you, they also have products in which these stickers exist on little placards and plates that you put around your house. So it's the actual sticker that, that got patented. More from them. "Our silicon resonator chip negates EMF radiation present in your surroundings without damaging your tech." So you can also put this actually on your cellphone, on your laptop computer, and on appliances, apparently, as well.

• 49:15Cara Santa Maria?

  How do you patent a sticker? Isn't that already patented?

• 49:18Speaker 06

  But it's

• 49:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Sticker technology.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  This is a nanotechnology sticker.

• 49:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, if you look very closely.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  It's very small.

• 49:24Speaker 06

  It has these swirls, almost like a fingerprint, you know, design on it. It's sort of the

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 49:30Speaker 06

  Almost this Mandelbrot.

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't have to work, right? They just have to be an idea, something new.

• 49:35Speaker 06

  Exactly. If you pay the fee and you get like the peanut butter and jelly sandwich is a patent as well. They say their claims are backed by the 22 global patents, 25 clinical trials, and nine peer reviewed studies.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  So.

• 49:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So remember that, um, my topic, like just only two?

• 49:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. When companies say that, so there's a couple of possibilities here. One is they're just straight up lying, right? That's a possibility. But there are also a lot of companies that do research for hire, basically. They'll do clinical trials or whatever and get whatever results you pay them to get.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, like there's a box on the website that says, what result do you want us to find?

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's, or the other thing is they're citing research that has absolutely nothing to do with their product.

• 50:23Cara Santa Maria?

  And interpreting it.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're just, yeah, so you, whenever you go to these companies and like pull, if they have, they cite their, the research that they're quoting here. Their, the research is always completely irrelevant to the product and the claims that they're making. They're just, they're, they're just hoping that no one's gonna check, right? They're just, there may be some superficial, like it's a study on EM radiation and that's like, that's it, that's it. That's, that's the connection. And they say, this study supports our technology because it's about EM radiation. Our technology is about EM radiation. That's literally what they do. So that's just, it's just marketing BS, basically.

• 51:00Speaker 06

  There are a list of other athletes also who are, have promoted this product in the past. Why are, why are athletes, why is a hockey player, okay, concerned with EMF radiation while he's skating around on the hockey? Or is he have a cellphone in his uniform or something? Does he have, carrying a laptop? No, no, no. You see, the magical amulet here is all, and this is from them. This is also designed to stimulate healthy biological function, empowering athletes to optimize performance and recovery by enhancing the body's natural electromagnetic fields, promoting optimal function. And the lucky charm will also increase resilience and adaptability to environmental stressors.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  He's cheating.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  Or gobbledygook, right? Basically, right? Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, if it actually did work, you probably have to ban it.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  So how does it block electromagnetic radiation and your phone still functions?

• 51:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's sticker technology, Steve. Complicated.

• 51:57Speaker 06

  The sticker absorbs the harmful stuff, allows the good stuff to get through.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  There's harmful EM radiation and good EM radiation.

• 52:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And it optimizes your biologicals.

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:06Jay Novella?

  I thought the same thing. Like if you put it on your router, you know, your wifi and it's supposed to block the radiation. I mean, basically wifi is a form of radiation.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Or is it cleaning the electromagnetic, cleansing the EMF?

• 52:20Speaker 06

  Do they know? Do they care? They're selling these things for up to $430 per device.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  A sticker that probably costs a buck, yeah, to make.

• 52:28Speaker 06

  Not even.

• 52:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Not even.

• 52:29Speaker 06

  Well, the charm costs something and I'm sure the little necklace that it comes with.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  That's such a specific number, too. $430.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  That's marketing, too, though. You don't sell things for round numbers.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Oh, right. I know.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Then it seems arbitrary, right?

• 52:43Speaker 06

  Can EMF hurt us?

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Um, non-ionizing?

• 52:46Speaker 06

  Right? From our phone, from our laptop?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 52:48Speaker 06

  No. It cannot. Nope. That's been proven. Right? Wasn't, you did a write-up on this, the recent WHO study?

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it was last week's episode. It was about the WHO review of 25 years of research on, does EMF from cellphones cause brain cancer? And the answer was a pretty resounding no. So, yeah, from first principles, you know, scientists think that non-ionizing radiation, so too weak to break chemical bonds, doesn't have any biological risk, you know? So the only sort of maybe, like, again, if we talk about hazard versus risks, like, you have to ask, is there anything happening? The only thing that happens maybe is a little bit of tissue warming. I'm talking about like a degree, you know, like not anything that you would think would be biologically significant.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  That's it. That's really it. And the rest is just the precautionary principle. Like, well, how much evidence do we need to prove that it's not doing anything? It's like, well, there's really no reason to think that it is, and we have lots of evidence now to show that it isn't. So that's, you know, as I like to say. Say, there's a lot more things that are a lot bigger problem to worry about. This is way below the threshold of worry.

• 54:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and, I mean, isn't it true? Ionizing radiation needs to be shielded. And when you shield it, it no longer radiates.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's like your microwave, right? Works on the inside, but it doesn't work on the outside.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Shielded.

• 54:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it's shielded.

• 54:18Speaker 02

  Shielded, yeah.

• 54:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So if this actually was shielding.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  It wouldn't work. The device wouldn't work.

• 54:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It would block, yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, what?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, yeah, but it's not, again, it's, there's no internally consistent coherent claim being made here. It is literally just magic.

• 54:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a sticker.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  It's a magic sticker.

• 54:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 54:34Speaker 06

  Latest, greatest. Someone else will come up with another one in a few months, I'm sure.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Right. And we were talking, Evan, about this, like, what is the responsibility of a sports celebrity in promoting pseudoscience? I mean, they're not, they're not scientists, but they are celebrities.

• 54:50Speaker 06

  Influenced, they're influencers in their own right.

• 54:52Speaker 02

  Influencers. And, you know, they, if they're true believers, then it's sad. But if it's, you know, if they didn't do their due diligence, I think that's grossly irresponsible. And again, good for the internet, you know, for, for pickpiling on him for doing this. I think, really, that's, shame is really the only recourse we have in the case.

• 55:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's nothing you can do.

• 55:13Cara Santa Maria?

  It is in this case. I mean, if they actively cause harm, though, if they promote a pseudoscience that leads to somebody being like...

• 55:19Speaker 02

  That's, there's liability there.

• 55:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there is liability. I think there should be.

• 55:22Jay Novella?

  Well, you know, the Kinesio tape thing was another one.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's still around.

• 55:25Jay Novella?

  But the, we have to educate ourselves and educate our kids and not expect famous people to frickin' tell us what reality is, right?

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 55:37Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  Jay, tell us how the world is going to end.

• 55:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I read a ton of space-related news and a ton of global warming-related news. Just the topics I, I tend to like to cover. So, the interesting thing about what I'm about to talk to you about is that I got to talk to Michael Mann today about this particular topic. Now, let me give you a little background. So what, what ended up happening is, you know, I'm picking the topic that I want to talk about. I find, I stumble on... An article, I look up the same topic on, you know, given by other outlets, reading, reading through, reading through, trying to figure out what's going on. And it's pretty grim. You know, and I'm like, well, I should talk to people about this because it's one of those like, oh, moments for global warming. So here's one of the titles, scientists warn

• 56:23Jay Novella?

  of imminent collapse of key Atlantic Ocean currents.

• 56:27Speaker 02

  Sounds bad.

• 56:28Jay Novella?

  It sounds bad. And potentially, you know, it could be amazingly bad thing, right? So I've noticed in one of the articles that they mentioned that Michael Mann was one of the people that like, kind of signed his name on it, saying, yeah, like, this is a good thing for people to know about, right? So we talked about it. And it turns out that the articles, the news outlets, they tended to, particularly with global warming stuff, overexaggerate how dangerous these things are.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Or imminent.

• 56:56Jay Novella?

  How quickly they're gonna happen, right? It was a really awesome moment for all of us talking to Michael Mann, because it was like, damn, like, even these trusted news outlets that, you know, that are pretty hard hitting science news outlets are amping up the drama.

• 57:10Speaker 02

  The clickbaiting us, yeah.

• 57:11Jay Novella?

  Clickbaiting us. So I wanted you guys to know that, just, you know, as a consumer of science information, I'm sure you guys are reading it as well. Just, you know, take a step back and realize that even the most trusted ones out there can be amping it up a little bit to clickbait you. And, you know, who knows to what degree? So.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  Do you mean in the article itself, or just the headline?

• 57:30Jay Novella?

  In the article itself.

• 57:31Speaker 05

  The article itself.

• 57:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Like, as I go through what I'm about to say, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have to pull it back a little bit. There is an observable effect happening here that I think people should know about. So there was an article published on October 31st, or 21st, sorry. And we had 44 of the world's leading climate scientists, including Michael Mann, say, yep, this is something that people should know about. So there is a ocean current, the Atlantic meridional, please don't correct me on that, overturning meridional, meridional? Thank you.

• 58:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Meridional.

• 58:01Speaker 05

  That's better.

• 58:02Jay Novella?

  Yes, I like it. All the ways that people say it, I enjoy. So. Let's call it AMOC, A-M-O-C, okay? And they're saying it's deteriorating, right? This ocean currents. If you look at the graphic, you could see that, you know, the ocean currents move water significantly all over the world, and they're happening continuously. What they have noticed, though, is that because of global warming, right? What is global warming doing? There's a few things that global warming is doing to the Earth right now. So it's melting polar ice, and it is increasing rainfall, and increasing rainfall in places where rainfall is not commonly found, right? Massive amounts of fresh water is entering the ocean. And that has an impact on these ocean currents.

• 58:45Jay Novella?

  Because there's a system that happens when these ocean currents function. What they do is, for example, the AMOC current takes warm water from like, say, the Gulf of Mexico, and it moves that surface warm water up to the north, and then that, the heat dissipates out of that surface water, and then that, that water then, at a lower temperature, then drops, and it creates a shift in, in the water, which creates motion, which creates the, keeps the current going, sorry Bob, keeps that current moving, right? But when you, when you enter a lot of non-salinated water into the mix, it changes the way that the water behaves, because fresh water is less dense than salt water, and it makes it harder for, for cold water to sink, which disrupts this cycle.

• 59:30Jay Novella?

  And it's continuously happening, this disruption is continuously, continuously happening, which is not good. And another factor here is that because global temperatures are going up, in general, the ocean water is heating on its own as well, just from, just from, you know, the air temperature being warmer all around the world. So why does it matter, right? So you gotta look at AMOC like it's a massive conveyor belt moving water around, and it transports the warm surface water, like I said, all around, and that, that distributed heat does a lot of things to the areas around it. Like, for example, it warms up North America, it warms up areas in Europe, especially, you know, areas like Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Finland, and Sweden, they, they don't, people

• 1:00:12Jay Novella?

  there probably don't know this, but they're depending on that heat being transferred from the equator.

• 1:00:16Jay Novella?

  ...to come up to them so they don't have things like the cold blob which you might have heard about, right? Guys, right now, there's something called a cold blob that is happening in very specific areas. And it's basically the weather patterns are changing and there's certain areas where it's getting really, really cold because of the changes that are happening here. And the cold blob is getting bigger, which is not good. It's like, you know, this is one of those signs of, well, in the future, you know, global warming has had these crazy effects on the, on our environment because weather is changing globally. So, the bottom line here is that this effect is happening, but the article said, this is imminent, and it's going to happen within a few decades. And after talking to Michael Mann today, you know, he's like, look, this is all, they're observing things, they have

• 1:01:01Jay Novella?

  data, but it's not going to happen, and they don't know it's going to happen in

• 1:01:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, they said there's a range. It could be 20 years, it could be 80 years.

• 1:01:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  You don't know.

• 1:01:10Jay Novella?

  So, you know, I, I think after talking to him, you know, I was like, maybe I won't even cover it. And then I realized, no, this is a good lesson for all of us because, again, this is legitimate. They, they are observing this, they're making, they're taking readings, they're seeing the temperature changes.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  They just hyped it. They hyped the

• 1:01:24Jay Novella?

  They hyped the

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  Imminence of it. And also, when the, when it does shut down, if it does shut down, right? And whenever that happens, what are the bad consequences? Obviously, it'll disrupt climate, you know, Europe will become colder.

• 1:01:37Jay Novella?

  Europe's agriculture is gonna

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Could be shift agriculture.

• 1:01:40Jay Novella?

  Typhoons are gonna shift southward. And this is what's bad, right? So, you know, as, like, we're, we're used to in, in North America here, like, yeah, we know, we got hurricanes, like, they develop in the Gulf of Mexico, and in that region, they come through. But what's happening is, there, the intensity is dramatically increasing. That's just where, where I happen to live. But this is happening all over the world. Well, you'll have tropical monsoons that are going to places that they never have gone to before because weather patterns are changing. And insects and animals and the environment is not adjusted to that, because it just hasn't happened there before. Like, as an example, it takes a long time for water to, to be absorbed by certain types of soils. You know, if it's, if it has more clay, the water doesn't percolate as quickly and go down into the

• 1:02:23Jay Novella?

  soil, which is really bad, because that causes massive flooding. And as we all know, after watching these two hurricanes barrel through Florida, lots of people die when that happens because the water can't be absorbed, because basically, Florida Kevin Folt, I talked to Kevin extensively about what happened with him and his farm. That all that happened so quickly, the water can't be absorbed by the ground because the water cable is basically the ground in Florida.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  In Florida, yeah, they can't even have basements there. And also, won't the ocean like raise by a foot?

• 1:02:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Michael, Michael Mann said that like in the West Coast, it could go up by a foot, which is, is a massive, that's, you know, that's, that's city changing.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:04Jay Novella?

  You know, water levels.

• 1:03:05Bob Novella?

  Where would that extra water come from?

• 1:03:06Jay Novella?

  It's, it'll

• 1:03:07Speaker 06

  Glacier melt, right?

• 1:03:08Jay Novella?

  It'll come from glacier melt, it'll come from, uh,

• 1:03:11Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. But also water is different volume based on its temperature, right? So it's not just amount of water, it's also the temperature of the water.

• 1:03:18Bob Novella?

  But didn't Michael also say that even if this does collapse, it wouldn't be as apocalyptic as, as a lot of people think?

• 1:03:26Jay Novella?

  It potentially, the point is, we don't know. And the article says we do, right? The article puts it into, into a place where you're like, oh, okay, this is going to happen in the next 20 years. I have young kids, the world's going to be done when they're there, you know? And like, it's, it's a sad thing to think about. Yes, it's all of these things are happening, but, but we are getting, we're getting fooled by, by science news media. We can't trust everything that we read.

• 1:03:48Speaker 02

  Well, I first heard about the AMOC cycle and the potential for it to shut down like 30 years ago. Yeah, this is, this is not a new idea. This is just a new, I think, estimate of like, when it's going to happen and what the effects would be.

• 1:04:01Speaker 06

  It's unupdated.

• 1:04:02Speaker 02

  It's unupdated information.

• 1:04:03Bob Novella?

  Better models, I'm sure.

• 1:04:05Speaker 06

  Was there, wasn't there an Star Trek episode called AMOC Time?

• 1:04:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:04:10Speaker 06

  Anything? No?

• 1:04:10Speaker 02

  No, no connection.

• 1:04:11Speaker 06

  Okay, no connection, fine.

• 1:04:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No idea.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Aura Frames.

• 1:04:18Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like most of us, you know, our parents and grandparents, you know, they're not, they're not so tech savvy, right? But Aura's digital frame is actually the perfect tech gift to get them because it's super easy to use, the image quality is fantastic, setup is a breeze, and you could basically put all of the digital pictures that you have, make them accessible to the frame, and they just scroll through the pictures and everybody in my family absolutely loves it.

• 1:04:43Bob Novella?

  This was so easy to The setup, it was ridiculous. You only really just need your phone to upload as many pictures as you want. You could add people to the account and have them add it. The best thing really, though, is this. It is the perfect gift. I literally cannot remember one gift I gave my mom for Mother's Day or Christmas for the past 10 years, except one gift. It's the Aura Frames. I see it every day. We commented on it every day. I call her over, "Ma, look at this picture." It happens all the time. It's the best gift.

• 1:05:11Speaker 06

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• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. We're going to pause our live recording at SciCon to go to an excerpt from an interview that we also recorded at SciCon with Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist who is an avid science communicator. As is often the case, the full uncut version of this interview is available to our premium members. You can find that content on our Patreon website.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Andrea, thank you for joining us for this interview. We're here at SciCon, and I'd like to talk to you first about, give us a little idea about your talk that you did and, you know, why they invited you.

• 1:06:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so thanks for having me. I'm a big fan. I'm going to be talking about the selective rejection of science based on ideological beliefs. So talking about a lot of the themes that we've already heard about, that people who can be scientifically minded, or at least believe that they're scientifically minded, are still susceptible to misinformation. So utilizing some of the case studies that I've kind of written about recently with regard to endorsing anti-science rhetoric in the context of things like food ingredients and food additives and genetic technologies and cancer treatments, and using those to kind of underscore that people can be very staunchly pro-science, you know, those who have their

• 1:07:02Cara Santa Maria?

  lawn signs that say they believe in science. But then, you know, we see states like California who pass legislation where they're banning food additives that it's entirely based on false premise and misinformation and often influenced by their constituents or anti-science activists.

• 1:07:22Jay Novella?

  Is there anything going on today that you think is like one of the worst offenders of this?

• 1:07:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So I would say that a lot of these NGOs that claim to be, you know, pro-health or advocates for health or the environment, Consumer Reports, the Environmental Working Group, they've been long-term propagators of this and they make a lot of money and they have ties with media outlets and politicians and they're very well-funded. And so they kind of get their hooks in and they create this ecosystem of misinformation. And many people actually don't realize that those organizations are the originators of these things that they come to believe. For example, the Dirty Dozen List. Everybody knows of the Dirty Dozen List, but a lot of people

• 1:08:12Cara Santa Maria?

  don't know that it's coming from the EWG and what the EWG has actually done to erode science and public health over the last several decades. And so I think, you know, they're obviously a major player. I think a lot of the media outlets, you know, and particularly kind of the lax oversight with what's getting published, this kind of fixation on clickbait and mischaracterized data. But it also is coming from, you know, poor quality science, right? We have people that are publishing studies in fields that they don't have expertise in. The lead in tampons, you know, headlines, I wrote an article about. And the lead author, she's a postdoc, her background is in public health and she's writing about biomedical

• 1:08:56Cara Santa Maria?

  science and toxicology and biochemistry. And public health scientists don't have biomedical training. And so, you know, she doesn't even have the expertise to even study this phenomenon. But if you look, she has a long personal history in like feminist activism and she received a grant from an organization geared towards, you know, women's health. And so you kind of see how people, even in the sciences, are influenced by their personal beliefs to pigeonhole themselves into creating bad science, which is then Taken out of context by press release, media outlets, social media influencers, and then it goes viral. But to be clear, somebody in that position could also be doing good science.

• 1:09:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So I think it's important, maybe, just to take a second to talk about why that particular scenario was bad science. Yeah, oh, absolutely, yeah. Those things didn't... Because she was those things, that's not why it was bad science. The science was bad, and she may have been motivated because of those things. Yeah, yes and no. I mean, I think if your doctoral work and kind of your scientific training throughout your career has been in a non-biomedical science field, it would be really hard for you to craft a study that's going to appropriately assess a biomedical phenomenon, right? And she was a sole author? No, she was the primary author. So the senior author on the study is a geochemist. So she knows how to do analytical chemistry assessment, which is essentially what the study did.

• 1:10:22Cara Santa Maria?

  But they were making claims about health where none of those authors actually had expertise in any sort of biomedical science. So, you know, they're trying to find a problem where there isn't. And essentially, they were finding these trace levels of, you know, elemental metals that exist in the environment, and they exist in all plants. And they were then saying, oh, well, we found it in digested tampon fibers, therefore your tampons are leaching toxic metals into your body. And it's like, first of all, those levels were far below the regulatory thresholds for any of those things. And I think people forget that cotton is a plant, and it grows in the soil, and so it picks up these substances. And so they kind of undermined, and they said even that this was the first study to assess that.

• 1:11:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And they clearly don't understand how regulatory oversight occurs because tampons are Class II medical devices. And even if they're not publicly publishing these data, I guarantee that all of these ISO standards for raw materials for tampon manufacturers, like, they know what imper are in those fibers. And so by saying that in their study, they're undermining all of these things that go into regulatory oversight and further eroding confidence that people have in our federal safety agencies and science as a whole.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  I think you just described like my whole problem with the environmental working group. I'm so glad to hear that because I've had a problem with them for years and I'm glad it's not just me.

• 1:11:50Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  Because they seem so ideological and I find often because I write for Science Based Medicine, like I cover a lot of the stuff that they write about. And it always feels to me like it's a bunch of chemists who have no idea about public health, who are looking at hazard. It's like, oh, they're stuck here. They have no idea how to put it into context of risk. And they have an agenda. Like, they want everything to be scary.

• 1:12:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. They get money the scarier they make these claims sound. And they're getting money for their organization, but also for the companies that donate to them, which are the safer alternatives that they're frequently recommending to people, whether it's food, whether it's consumer products, whether it's sunscreens, and they sell their EWG verified label on top of that. And it's interesting because I met a new, a relatively new hire to the EWG. I was speaking at a cosmetic chemist conference about the overarching harms of chemistry, cosmetic chemistry, misinformation. And I called out the EWG. And I didn't know that he was in the audience because I'm not a cosmetic

• 1:12:58Cara Santa Maria?

  chemist and I don't know the sphere. But one of the other panelists was like, oh, that guy, he's like, and he came from industry. And he connected with me on LinkedIn. And so now I can see like his content. And, and I don't know if, you know, there's financial incentive, but like, his content has so dramatically shifted. And he essentially insinuates that hazard assessment is the more appropriate way. Whereas, you know, any other toxicologist or safety chemist would, would say the opposite.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  And yeah, so and what I have found, it's not unique to me, but I think that the pattern that we see a lot, this can be really subtle. You tell me if you agree with this, that like industry doesn't necessarily have to tell you, these are the opinions we want you to have. They just need to find somebody who already has those opinions and fund them.

• 1:13:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Speaker 02

  So that person thinks, I'm just getting funding to talk about the stuff that I'm already talking about, not realize that, yeah, you were selected by industry because you are fitting into a narrative they're trying to promote. And then of course, once that relationship happens, I do think they kind of get steered even more in that direction.

• 1:14:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I agree. And, and it's interesting because, you know, when, when I'm often debunking claims, because I'm always trying to, you know, alleviate that risk perception gap, right? Because I think people are paralyzed with health anxiety about things that don't pose tangible risks to their health, right? Food ingredients, vaccine adverse events, vaccine ingredients, organic produce versus conventional produce, trace levels of pesticide residues, and you know, FYI, organic farming uses a ton of pesticides. They just omit all of those. And they're not looking at like social determinants of health, equity to healthcare, equity and access to affordable foods. And those are the things that actually

• 1:14:50Cara Santa Maria?

  impact health. And what ends up happening is that when you debunk them, then you get accused of being bought and paid for.

• 1:14:57Speaker 02

  Your shell.

• 1:14:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're like, well, this industry is buying you off. And it's like, these other people that you're promoting are industries, right? Big organic farming is a multi-billion dollar industry.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 1:15:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's so interesting to me that there's this, you know, dissonance in terms of like, well, if, you know, and we know it's because they have this parasocial relationship and this, you know, confirmation bias. But, you know, if you're ever saying something, even if you have 30 years of data supported by 20 plus global regulatory agencies, you know, you're the one that's being paid to say that versus the person that's cherry picking a stuff.

• 1:15:37Bob Novella?

  That was, you know, bombarding mice with 10,000 full doses of anything.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  Right. And that's but that's the narrative. You know, if you like, look at videos on TikTok, which which we do, that's the narrative that people say, and it's really hard to push back against that because, as you say, immediately, you're the shill.

• 1:15:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  It's like, yo, that's just Big Pharma looking for money. It's like, yeah, but you realize the people you're quoting, like, that guru is making millions of dollars selling snake oil.

• 1:16:05Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:16:05Speaker 02

  I'm just telling you that he's wrong. I'm not making anything out of it, but they so just really hypocritical, the way they selectively decide.

• 1:16:13Jay Novella?

  It's thrown around, too. The whole shill thing is thrown around so so freely at this point. And it's it's such it's so pathetic, because we're science communicators.

• 1:16:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:21Jay Novella?

  Like, we're not getting paid off by anybody.

• 1:16:23Bob Novella?

  I know.

• 1:16:23Jay Novella?

  You know, we're barely, you know, like, we're a small business here. You know what I mean? Like, we like, making money has been not a priority of ours.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  It's the black box conspiracy.

• 1:16:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Right? It's just like anything I disagree with, they are doing it. It's like, there's no detail, there's no specificity, just they are engaged in this broader conspiracy. And that's it. That's just the boogeyman.

• 1:16:42Jay Novella?

  Are they are they getting into prestigious journals? Or who's publishing them?

• 1:16:45Bob Novella?

  No, not usually. They're usually pay to play or low quality or journals that routinely have, you know, peer reviewers that don't have relevant expertise, like they're having, like, a physiologist review toxicology related studies. And, you know, again, I think that's a bigger challenge of the whole academic research model. That's a bigger conversation because, you know, I think it's very wasteful that people are kind of doing frivolous research in order to get published, they can get their next next grant. And when they publish something that all of these people that are scraping the Internet for buzzwords, like certain heavy metal words, or the words of pesticides, or things like that, then then that gets

• 1:17:27Bob Novella?

  kind of selected cherry picked. And otherwise, it probably wouldn't have even, you know, gotten any attention. And it's very frustrating for me because, you know, I actually have a full time job in bio in biotech, and I do all of this in my free time. And, you know, I left academia for a lot of different reasons. But one of them was the frustration with kind of the model of how research is able to be conducted. And it's not to say that biotech is is perfect or anything, but the goals are very different, because there's always some tangible endpoint as opposed to, you know, simply.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Trying to academic researchers are just trying to sell their ideas to get more grant funding. And so it's always interesting too, when I see like people with academic appointments kind of be automatically trusted more than someone who's a scientist in an industry role. Because you have that kind of ivory tower perception.

• 1:18:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it I think about sort of when I was working on my dissertation, I was digging deep into like Heideggerian phenomenology. Stay with me for a second. One of the things that Heidegger did, which was different from previous views of phenomenology is he was like biases exist. And my I'm saying, let's own them and make them explicit. Because if we do that, then everybody is operating from a standard playing field. Whereas historically, they were like, let's be unbiased. And that's bullshit. I'm sorry, that just does not exist. And so I guess that leads to an important question, which is, what are the solutions to these issues? Because it's very easy. You know, like we were talking about the tampon thing. It's very easy to be like, well, look at their bias. But at the same time, I understand

• 1:19:05Cara Santa Maria?

  why there's activist science going on, because the historical bias was very anti woman.

• 1:19:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And so we want to counter that bias.

• 1:19:12Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:19:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And so like, is it about making more room for more biases and hoping they come out in the wash? Is it about people pretending they're unbiased? Like, what is the solution?

• 1:19:20Jay Novella?

  Kara, there's a whole ecosystem. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I'm learning. Is there is an entire ecosystem now that is a sham. It's like you have the the people who are doing research that aren't qualified to do it. You have bullshit journals. You have people reviewing, you know, the papers that get put in these journals that don't have the credentials to do it. And it seems to me, it's all propped up just so they can get grant money. That whole thing has to be toppled over. And the only way to do it is to expose it.

• 1:19:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but there it's like, it's all variations on a theme, right? Like, this is the most egregious version, but we could come down to the middle and be like, it's still kind of happening, even in people who are above board. So that's, that's

• 1:19:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, absolutely. And and and that's, you know, often why we'll we talk about the body of evidence on a topic, right? And and how you can't take a singular study at face value, you you have to look at it in the context of all of the information on that topic. And and I actually talked about the kind of the reason that this tampon study got so much attention with, oh, I can't remember what magazine is like a career magazine talking about like women's health in the workplace and all that. But but, you know, it's one of those things where there Exploiting the fact that there is systemic misogyny and sexism in research, in medicine, in science, and using that to foment fear and anger and panic.

• 1:20:39Speaker 06

  And all of the wellness influencers that I saw sharing this study were like, see, no one cares about your health as a woman. They don't care that your tampons are poisoning you, this, that, and the other. When in reality, the story should be, listen, we've been doing research on menstrual products and menstrual health. We have a lot more we need to do to better characterize and better study this. But this is not saying that your menstrual product is unsafe.

• 1:21:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:21:11Speaker 06

  And what you ended up seeing was these wellness influencers, while they're vilifying tampons, they're selling menstrual cups. They're selling menstrual discs. They're selling menstrual underwear.

• 1:21:21Jay Novella?

  Infowars sells vitamins. They always have something that they sell.

• 1:21:24Cara Santa Maria?

  But it doesn't undo the fact that the body of evidence, which we're always talking about how science is self-correcting, and there's this body of evidence, and we want to look at meta-analyses, that there are biases even in those.

• 1:21:35Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:21:35Cara Santa Maria?

  That historically, especially when it comes to women's health, there is a misogynistic bias in the science itself. And so it becomes a difficult...

• 1:21:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:21:44Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, it's the whole thing when we're battling pseudoscience, and much pseudoscience has like a kernel of truth in it.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:21:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And so it's like, how then do you approach that?

• 1:21:52Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:21:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And really have, I think, a gray area conversation with a public that doesn't want to be in the gray.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  And just to genericize it a little bit, because I was going to ask also, if you have any tips or tricks about this one, is similarly, the narrative of, you know, you don't have to worry about that, it's actually safe, certainly makes us sound like, you know, we're the deniers.

• 1:22:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally.

• 1:22:16Speaker 02

  And the person who is saying, you need to be worried, they are trying to poison you or whatever, they don't care about your health, they're the maverick truth-tellers who are out there trying to save you. We're like, nothing to see here, don't worry about it, this isn't a risk. It's hard. I mean, the movie, in the movie, we're always the villains.

• 1:22:31Speaker 06

  Yes, of course. Because that's what the bad guy says.

• 1:22:33Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly. That narrative is so out there. So how do we combat that?

• 1:22:36Jay Novella?

  Let's just face it, guys. As fun as science is to people, especially to people like us, like, science and critical thinking and all that, it's not sexy.

• 1:22:44Speaker 06

  It's not sexy.

• 1:22:45Jay Novella?

  It's just not. Like, you know...

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  It's tedious, but that's the way, by definition.

• 1:22:48Jay Novella?

  And we just picked, like...

• 1:22:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Want to make it sexy, right? Yeah.

• 1:22:52Speaker 02

  What do you do to confront that villain narrative?

• 1:22:54Cara Santa Maria?

  It's really hard. So like when we're talking about the tampon study, for example, it's, we need more women's health research, but this isn't the way to do it, right? This isn't, we, we shouldn't be wasting research dollars on these studies that are trying to find a problem that doesn't exist. We should be conducting quality studies funded for people that have expertise in these fields and have, have legitimate reasons to assess these sorts of things. And that's really hard because grant applications are very disparate across different fields and different funding agencies. And so, you know, there isn't going to be a singular solution, but it becomes so challenging to even have those nuanced conversations about,

• 1:23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  hey, like this was wildly mischaracterizing things. And, and often what I do is I try to, you know, I like to lead with data, but people don't like data. They like emotion. They don't want to connect with who's delivering the message. So it's, all right, I know you read the study. This is what the data actually say. This is how little lead you're actually finding in these tampons. And this is the environment they extracted it in, which is not the environment of your vagina, because your vagina is not 350 degrees and you know, a pH of one. It's not going to happen, right? But then it's, and I still use tampons and I still feel totally comfortable, you know, using them and you also, if they're your preferred product, like, and so, you know, I feel like we have to

• 1:24:24Cara Santa Maria?

  convey some of that emotional attachment while we're also trying to assess things. And so often, you know, I get a lot of heat when I talk about, you know, the marketing ploys of organic agriculture and how it's not even just that it's not more nutritious and not pesticide free. It's actually more ecologically damaging and, and all that. And so, you know, people are like, well, are you saying that you buy conventional produce? And I'm like, yeah. And honestly, like I wish that we could get to a point where we had more modern agriculture tools. So we could impart more nutrition and reduce, further reduce use of pesticides.

• 1:24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's, that's what they all claim they want, right? They don't want to use pesticides, but they refuse to acknowledge that the organic products that they've so emotionally invested their, their identity in use pesticides many, many at much higher quantities and many that are more ecologically damaging. And so, you know, it's got to be a way to like frame things that hit or resonate with their motivation. And so if their motivation is, well, they don't want pesticides. Well, you know, can we continue to repeat and reiterate? Well, gee, crops can actually allow you to reduce pesticides and increase yield and improve food stability. And, you know, we've, we have 30 years of data that say it's not harming the environment,

• 1:25:41Cara Santa Maria?

  even if the EWG and Vani Hari have told you that it does.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Right. Where can people find you on social media?

• 1:25:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so my name is Andrea Love. I have a PhD in microbiology and immunology. I work in life sciences biotech, primarily developing therapeutics and interventions for cell and gene therapy, cancer, infectious diseases. And I founded Immunologic to provide science communication and help demystify a lot of these science and health topics. So you can find me at immunologic.org or on the social channels at doctor dot Andrea Love.

• 1:26:19Speaker 02

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sitting with us. This has been fantastic.

• 1:26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, thank you for having me.

• 1:26:27Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:26:36Jay Novella?

  All right, guys.

• 1:26:38Jay Novella?

  What is, what time is it? It is science or fiction time. I tell a joke, Steve, or no? No. Just it? I've been coming up with jokes about everything that's going on at this conference. And Steve's like, you're not telling any jokes.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  All right. Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge, I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake, and the audience gets to play along too. All right, here they are. There's a theme this week.

• 1:27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Vegas?

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:27:10Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Nevada? You were hoping it was gonna be Vegas or Nevada? Neither. The theme is not- Halloween.

• 1:27:16Bob Novella?

  Halloween.

• 1:27:17Speaker 02

  Nope. Come on, Bob. Jammy's.

• 1:27:19Bob Novella?

  Peanut butter. Zombies.

• 1:27:20Speaker 02

  The theme is 19th century pseudoscience.

• 1:27:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, cool. Okay.

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:27:27Bob Novella?

  Halloween would have been better.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  Well, maybe, no.

• 1:27:31Bob Novella?

  It's okay.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  No. All right, here we go. It's a little complicated, but bear with me. Item number one, although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Item number two, hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water. And item number three, a popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form, and was a significant early influence of Picasso.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  All right, so we're just gonna do something very simple. We're just going to poll my panel, and then we'll poll the audience, see what you guys say. Let's just start from the left and go down to the right. So Brian, you get to go first.

• 1:28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Get to.

• 1:28:27Speaker 02

  Get to go first.

• 1:28:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Always a privilege.

• 1:28:29Speaker 02

  Privilege.

• 1:28:29Bob Novella?

  What a joy.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  Privilege. In the vanguard position, Brian, you get to go first.

• 1:28:34Speaker 05

  All right. I think it's pretty clear that I don't have anything intelligent to say about any of these.

• 1:28:39Speaker 02

  Clearly neither did they.

• 1:28:41Speaker 05

  Yeah. Mesmerism surviving seems plausible to me, although giving rise to psychology as an academic discipline. I guess, I don't know. The, the one that's kind of, since, uh, the one that's kind of tweaking me here is number two, hydropathy, the belief that water could cure most, most diseases? Most diseases? That's, I've never even heard of that. At least I've heard of mesmerism. And three, sure, I guess. The influence on Picasso is weirdly specific, but let's say that's right. So I'm going to say number two is the fiction.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Hydropathy, one you think is the fiction. Okay, Bob.

• 1:29:15Bob Novella?

  I'm having trouble with one and three.

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  But I said two, Bob.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  Maybe you didn't hear me.

• 1:29:25Bob Novella?

  I did, I did. You said, you said two is fiction. I'm thinking one or three is fiction.

• 1:29:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, but my point is I said something different.

• 1:29:34Bob Novella?

  I'm just disagreeing.

• 1:29:34Speaker 05

  I just feel like maybe you didn't hear me or something.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  He's a not, non-professional physicist.

• 1:29:42Bob Novella?

  All right, David, it's my turn now.

• 1:29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can call me Dave.

• 1:29:47Bob Novella?

  Phrenology, that's brain bumps, right?

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:29:51Bob Novella?

  Now, I know that, that, that science actually, it's baloney, of course, but I've read in the past that phrenology actually helped with the study of, of the mind and, and psychology because they were focusing on the brain so much that it actually helped transition to real science. Um, so I've heard of that. So that's why I've never heard of phrenology dealing with anything like this, painting and sculpture. Um, but then number one, you, you're saying specifically that mesmerism survived and actually helped give rise to hypnosis in psychology, which I thought phrenology did. So I don't know which one to pick.

• 1:30:28Speaker 05

  Probably two.

• 1:30:32Speaker 05

  Can I ask a clarifying question while we're still early on?

• 1:30:34Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  So the way that it's written, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving

• 1:30:40Speaker 02

  Rise to hypnosis and even psychology. Do you mean contributing to the rise? Yeah, contributing to the rise, yeah. All right. But pretty directly. I'm not saying like we wouldn't have psychology today if it weren't for mesmerism. Right. But like there are connections lead through, leading through from mesmerism directly to academic psychology.

• 1:30:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, like it feels like an episode of connections. So I'll say phrenology, number three is the fiction because I'm, I think, I've never heard of any of that ever happening, so I'll have to go with that one.

• 1:31:09Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:31:10Jay Novella?

  You know, bloodletting led to modern medicine, right? Um, so I, I, I kinda, but it's still, no, there's a pathway, you know? Um, so I could see with number one with mesmerism, like sure, you know, you know, people were trying different things, you know? Some of them probably believed it, some of them knew it was BS, but were taking advantage of it. But then, you know, it seems like the progression that you set up there with number one seems reasonable. I don't know for sure, but I'm going to say that one is science. And then I'll go to number three next, so the, the, uh, applied phrenology, um, and then the fact that there's lots of painting and sculpture. I mean, I, I have seen tons and tons of pictures of paintings and sculptures of phrenology. Um, I'm sure everybody here has, right? You know, you just, something I've stumbled across, I've seen, um, you know,

• 1:31:54Jay Novella?

  phrenology skulls in museums, you know what I mean?

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  There's a white skull with the black stuff on it.

• 1:31:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Um, so that kinda seems legit. I mean, the Picasso one, eh, sure.

• 1:32:04Speaker 05

  I like where you're going with this, Jay.

• 1:32:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Bob Novella?

  I don't.

• 1:32:08Jay Novella?

  So I'll take number one as the fiction.

• 1:32:10Bob Novella?

  Whoa.

• 1:32:11Jay Novella?

  I'm kidding, I'm kidding, I'm gonna go with Brian.

• 1:32:13Bob Novella?

  The hydropath.

• 1:32:14Jay Novella?

  I'm gonna go with Brian because Brian is smart and I love him and I don't want him to cry after the show, so I'll go with number two.

• 1:32:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, but remember. It's on you, Jay, I'm gonna cry no matter what.

• 1:32:23Bob Novella?

  Okay, what was Brian's first words at, for science fiction? I don't know, basically saying he doesn't know anything about this?

• 1:32:31Speaker 05

  It sounded like you listened to something I said, Bob.

• 1:32:33Bob Novella?

  All right, we shall see. All right, Evan.

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, mesmerism. There have been other examples of pseudosciences that have helped sort of give rise to real science. You know, astrology probably is the prime example of that. So I think there's a parallel here. And my recollection, didn't Ben Franklin contribute to the debunking of mesmerism, if my memory serves?

• 1:32:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Speaker 06

  So I think that one is science. I also think that number three is science for many of the reasons Jay mentioned. It was very artistically expressed in several different ways. You know, the intricate drawings, definitely the sculptures, no doubt about it. I had no idea about the Picasso aspect of it. So I'm not sure if that would be enough to turn that one into the fiction. But the hydropathy one, that I have not really heard much of at all about. That's the most foreign of the three to me. So that's why I'll say that's the fiction.

• 1:33:38Bob Novella?

  That's what Steve wants. Good job.

• 1:33:39Speaker 02

  All right, and Kara?

• 1:33:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So just to be clear, Bob thinks that

• 1:33:44Bob Novella?

  Three.

• 1:33:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Phrenology is

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  I was phrenology, everyone else is hydropathy.

• 1:33:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Is with hydropathy.

• 1:33:51Bob Novella?

  G W B.

• 1:33:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Am I mixing that up with animal magnetism?

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 1:33:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah, same thing. Yeah, so this idea that there's this life force and then when something's dead, you can like reanimate or you can re-force. And then this idea of hypnotism did sort of come from that. Early psychology experimentation is really about sensory understanding of the world, like a lot of it is, what's the just noticeable difference between this and that?

• 1:34:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the academic, psychology as an academic discipline is very different than like clinical psychology. I do think that like physiopsychology that I could see There being a link there, although, I don't know, that's a tough one because like how, what percentage did it give rise? Going down to phrenology, which is not bumps on the brain, it's bumps on the head, on the skull.

• 1:34:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it's made by the brain.

• 1:34:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah, I could see phrenology, that there being an art movement, but as a method of understanding and representing the human form is interesting to me because phrenology, like iridology and like all of those representational pseudosciences, they say something about something else, but phrenology is talking about personality traits. It really didn't talk much about your foot does this, or your arm does this. And this sounds like he's talking about more of an iridology like chi map. So I'm, that one's kind of sticking out to me. But then also with hydropathy, hydropathy, I know that there have been like water bath therapies for a really long time, like, oh, you're, you know, you've got the, I don't know, the fevers and let's put you in a nice bath and all of that.

• 1:35:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know if it was called hydropathy, it might have just been hydrotherapy. I don't think you would make something the fiction because you changed the name like that. I don't think anybody believed that water could cure most diseases. I think the idea there was that temperature changes were important. So I think the one that's sticking out to me is the, is the phrenology one, that, that, that jump from the brain to whatever, that's, that's not actually phrenology, that's not what that is, so.

• 1:35:52Speaker 02

  So, there was two for phrenology is the fiction, three for hydropathy is the fiction, everyone agrees with mesmerism. Now we're going to poll the audience. We're going to do the George Robb one clap method, right? I'm going to hold my hand up here and when I come down to here, you're going to clap for the one you think is the fiction.

• 1:36:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Should we practice?

• 1:36:11Speaker 02

  When I practice, so just clap when I get my hand come drops? Perfect. All right. So if you think that the mesmerism, mesmerism one is the fiction, clap.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  If you think that the hydropanathy one is the fiction, clap. Yep. And if you think the phrenology one is the fiction, clap.

• 1:36:33Speaker 06

  Ooh.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  It's pretty evenly distributed, so you guys were... I heard more for phrenology. You think so?

• 1:36:39Speaker 06

  Tune in next week when we reveal the answer.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Want to do a tiebreaker? Alright, hydropanathy?

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Phrenology? Alright, phrenology definitely is in the lead, okay. Mark craft. Not put your faith in me, people. It was close. But there's only like, three people in this room, and I think the mesmerism one is the fiction. Shit. We'll start there.

• 1:37:01Speaker 02

  Kara, I know what you're feeling right now. No you do not.

• 1:37:03Speaker 06

  They'll be superstars if they go.

• 1:37:04Speaker 02

  Although discredited in the late 18th century, mesmerism survived throughout the 19th century, giving rise to hypnosis and even psychology as an academic discipline. Most of the people in the room think this one is science.

• 1:37:18Bob Novella?

  Good smile on his face.

• 1:37:19Speaker 02

  This one is...

• 1:37:20Bob Novella?

  Look at him.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Science. You can't read me, Bob.

• 1:37:24Bob Novella?

  You're lucky.

• 1:37:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I was going to be ashamed.

• 1:37:25Bob Novella?

  I know, he's unreadable.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  Alright, that is very interesting science, so...

• 1:37:30Bob Novella?

  He's not...

• 1:37:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, mesmerism started by Anton Mesmer, right? The idea of animal magnetism, you know, kind of playing off the just recent discovery, you know, and increasing knowledge about electricity and magnetism. He said, "Well, that's an invisible force that you can manipulate. There's an invisible force in living things, we'll call it animal magnetism, and you can manipulate that in order to cure diseases and whatever, and ailments." Most of his clients were women, and, you know, it was very exploitative. How surprising. Yeah, and they, you know, he, they would, he would cure whatever their ailments were, you know, with his manipulating the animal magnetism. He was, and he trained a lot of people, there were, you know, people who were supposed

• 1:38:14Speaker 02

  to be sensitives, you know, who were able to manipulate it. It was like a thriving industry. And then, the, you know, the Royal Commission was set up to investigate him in, in France, and Ben Franklin was part of that, and they investigated him and said, "He's completely full of it," right? He can't do anything, it's all nonsense. And that pretty much killed mesmerism in that form, right? But it did survive. And later in the 19th century, because the quacks are not going to stop doing it just because it's not true, right? So, but instead of saying that we're moving this fluid around, this magnetic fluid to

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  cure disease, mesmerism became really a form of stage hypnosis, what we today would recognize as stage hypnosis. Putting people into a trance where they don't remember what happens during the trance, but you can get them to do things. And not only that, but the idea was when they were in the trance that was induced with mesmer, when they were mesmerized, right? They had access to a deeper intelligence. They had insight into themselves and into other people, especially their illnesses and their ailments. So it's like, essentially, we take somebody, mesmerize them, put them into a trance, and

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  then while that person's in the trance, they're like a guru who could now make profound statements about other people's problems and diseases. There's an interesting feminist angle to this, in that women started using this in order to gain a voice that they would not otherwise have, right? Because when they're mesmerized and in this trance state, what they say is supposed to be magically profound, they're now an oracle. And so that was- They took advantage of it. They took advantage of it, yeah. Now, the same, sort of now the hypnosis movement that came out of the mesmerism movement was very interested in this, all of the psychological aspects of this, and the mind, and how does

• 1:40:26Speaker 02

  the mind work, and how does all this hypnosis work? And that, the same people and the same sort of discipline did feed into the development of academic psychology in the early 20th century. So there is a direct through line there. Again, I'm not saying we wouldn't have psychology today without mesmerism, just like we would have chemistry without alchemy, we would have astronomy without astrology, but the same people, the same traditions that kind of evolved from one into the other. So I thought that was all pretty cool.

• 1:40:55Speaker 05

  I just want to put a plug in here for the 1986 Mets theme song, Get Metsmoredized.

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  Get Metsmoredized?

• 1:41:02Speaker 05

  Is absolutely worth hearing. Thank you. One person knows I'm talking about.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:41:06Speaker 05

  Look at us.

• 1:41:07Speaker 02

  Go on to number two. Hydropathy was the belief that water could cure most diseases and involved wrapping patients in wet cloth, cold or hot baths, and drinking vast amounts of water. Evan, Jay, and Brian, you think this one is the fiction? About a third, maybe 40% of the audience think this one is the fiction, and this one is science.

• 1:41:28Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Good job, Bob. Yeah, Bob.

• 1:41:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, high five.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  This is absolutely, this was a very popular movement of the 19th century. It was hydropathy, also called the water cure, later adopted by naturopaths, not surprisingly, still around for that reason. And yeah, they just thought that pure water could cure just about anything. And if you drink it, you bathe in it, you wrap yourself in it, whatever, that would work.

• 1:41:55Bob Novella?

  Pure? Was it treated?

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  It had to be pure water.

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  But wasn't the water not that great?

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  No, yeah.

• 1:42:02Cara Santa Maria?

  That kind of worked. Just clean water is pretty good for you.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  But remember, this is probably dovetails with the spa movement, which was based originally off of like mineral springs, like this pure, because again, because everything was so foul.

• 1:42:16Speaker 05

  Kellogg.

• 1:42:16Speaker 02

  Actually did have a pure water source that probably would be seen as very, you know, curative and been healthy, healthful, et cetera, because everything else was sewage, right?

• 1:42:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that one is absolutely science, which means that a popular movement applied phrenology to the arts of painting and sculpture as a method of understanding and representing the human form and was significant, was a significant early influence of Picasso is the fiction. But what aspect of that is the fiction? Picasso. The Picasso aspect. As I said. Hundred percent fiction, yeah. The rest of it is real. So there was this artistic movement in the 19th century. Phrenology was really popular in the 19th century. And again, phrenology is the idea that different parts of the brain do different things. And just like a muscle, if you exercise one part of your brain, it's going to get bigger.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  And they couldn't measure the brain directly, but you could measure the skull over the part of the brain. So they thought the brain would sort of bulge out in one location because of your personality, and that would influence the overlying skull, and therefore there would be a bump that you could measure with, they had precise phrenological measuring devices. Interestingly, the phrenologists were mainly opposed by neuroscientists who thought that the brain was not compartmentalized, right? And the phrenologists were correct. They were on the correct side of that debate. And as, you know, as we learned more about that, the phrenology, this is partly why

• 1:43:51Speaker 02

  phrenology became so popular and was thought of as legitimate, because they were actually on the correct side of pretty much the first big debate within the neuroscience community on the most fundamental question, is the brain homogeneous, or do different parts of the brain do different things?

• 1:44:09Speaker 05

  Problem is, all the things that they said that it did were just wrong.

• 1:44:11Speaker 02

  Were all wrong. Their map of the brain was complete nonsense, utter fiction, and it is wrong that the brain does not hypertrophy, right? The internal structure changes. You can see the connections and the networks and everything, and we could now measure them. Like, if you play the violin, the representation for your left hand in your, in the motor cortex gets bigger. Homunculus. But you can't see that on the surface of the brain. And then there-

• 1:44:38Speaker 05

  You definitely don't have a skull bone.

• 1:44:39Speaker 02

  Certainly not in the skull, the overlying that part of the brain. So that part was utter nonsense. But it enjoyed a lot of academic legitimacy and popularity into the 20th century. You know, very, very late.

• 1:44:52Bob Novella?

  Steve, can you confirm my memory of the idea that phrenology impacted psychology and studying-

• 1:44:59Speaker 02

  No, you were wrong. It was neurology that you were thinking of. I knew you were wrong.

• 1:45:03Bob Novella?

  Psychology. Someology.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was what I just said about neurology. That's what you were thinking of.

• 1:45:08Bob Novella?

  That was kind of right.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Kind of right, i.e. wrong.

• 1:45:14Speaker 06

  So, but, and so, I still won, I still won.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Part of that popularity, that's true. Part of the popularity led to this idea that, well, because artists at the same time were trying to not just like copy human figures or whatever, but like really understand the human form mechanistically, right? And that helped them, like they wanted to know the muscular structure and how things worked, and that would help them reproduce, as they represent the human form. So of course, you have to know about phrenology, because that's part of the human form. It's like if you're gonna paint a picture of an angry person, you gotta give them bumps in the right place to try to represent their essence, right? That, who, what they are.

• 1:45:55Speaker 06

  Oh my god.

• 1:45:55Speaker 02

  That was a real tradition. No, but that, I think it pretty much faded out by the time Picasso was around. Picasso's early influences were, were African art, where, so a lot of the, what you think of as like, like a typical Picasso kind of form, especially early on, was that he actually appropriated a lot of it from African art. And now, we, looking back on it, a lot of artists are critical of that, because he did appropriate it, and he also presented it with the, the tropes of the time about savagery and primitivism and everything. So, he was a product of his time, like everybody, and so yes, he did suffer all of that sort of bigotry of his time. But that, that was his early influence.

• 1:46:39Speaker 02

  Nothing to do with phrenology, I just made that up, because it's Picasso, you know, it's kinda weird, and I thought it would, people would buy it.

• 1:46:45Bob Novella?

  And they did.

• 1:46:47Speaker 06

  I mean.

• 1:46:48Bob Novella?

  Kara and I didn't.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 1:46:50Speaker 06

  But you still got a bunch of stuff wrong, Bob. Yeah. Bob was wrong and he won, I was right and I lost.

• 1:46:56Bob Novella?

  People will remember that Kara and I won. That's the important thing.

• 1:46:59Speaker 02

  Let it be known, Bob and Kara, and most of the audience, so congratulations, audience, you did a good job.

• 1:47:04Speaker 06

  Hey!

• 1:47:08Speaker 06

  Smart crowd.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:47:10Speaker 06

  Skepticism is essential to the quest for knowledge, for it is in the seedbed of puzzlement that genuine inquiry takes root. Without skepticism, we may remain mired in unexamined belief systems that are accepted as sacrosanct, yet have no factual basis in reality. The late, great Paul Kurtz.

• 1:47:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was quite the guy. I remember, here's my anecdote about Paul Kurtz. My very first skeptical meeting, right? So this is, it was the four of us, right? We come to Buffalo for a meeting of PSYcop at the time, and we were nobody, nobody knew who, where we were. We were just getting started, this is like 1995 or whatever. And I met Paul Kurtz, and he like pulled me aside and talked to me for like 15, 20 minutes about the skeptical movement and the humanist movement, and you know, his philosophy, they like really just had this nurturing instinct, wanted to, you know, just saw me as just some new person just entering the movement, and he really, really, really wanted, you know, to express to me like what the whole movement was about and bring me in.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  And that made, I had a huge influence on me, you know? It was like, yeah, this is a cool movement, these are cool people, they're educators, mentors, like just his mentoring instinct was there, and it was great. I'll never forget that, which is a good thing to remember. Like those little things, people never forget it. You go that little extra step to just give somebody some time. I always try to remember this, because like we're at these events, we're all busy, we're overwhelmed, we're prepping, we're doing this. I do try to stay humble, we all try to remember that just giving people that little extra time could have the same kind of influence that like he had on me, you know?

• 1:48:48Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:48:49Speaker 02

  Try to keep that in mind. All right, all right, so thank you all for joining us at this episode.

• 1:49:00Speaker 02

  Thank you to CSI for inviting us, always a great time. Thank you guys for joining me this week. Thank you. And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:49:14Jay Novella?

  Skeptics 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.

• 1:49:51Speaker 00

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