The Skeptics Guide #1061 - Nov 8 2025

Quickie with Bob: Nanotech Cancer Drug; News Items: NEO Robot, UN Climate Report, Human Toolmaking, Worst Panspermia Headline Ever, AI-Powered Wound Healer; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Horse Evolution, Stranded Taikonauts; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, November 6, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, folks.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  So Cara, guess what? I had my own cardiac calcium scan earlier this week.

• 0:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  A C C S.

• 1:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Can I ask how it went?

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, my score was zero.

• 1:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Zero? That's the only good score?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  That's the best score. I mean, one to 100 is very mild risk.

• 1:10Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's still a risk?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but zero is the best.

• 1:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm very happy about that. So I did a deep dive on it just to see, like, how good is this as a scan? And it's actually pretty, pretty good.

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, everything I've read says it's a, it should be standard practice, and it's pretty bananas that insurance companies are not paying for it for the most part.

• 1:31Speaker 04

  I don't know what it is. Can you explain what it entails?

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, and Cara, when do you think the calcium scan for cardiac risk factors was first introduced?

• 1:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably like way longer ago than we would think.

• 1:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, 1990.

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  35 years ago.

• 1:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:46Speaker 04

  Wow, before the internet.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what, medical researchers didn't just adopt it, they, even though it's, because even though it sounds good, they, they researched it in every way you could possibly imagine. So basically, Evan, this is a way of looking to see if there's calcium in the arteries in your heart, which calcium forms inside the plaques, and that is a better predictor of whether or not you're going to have a heart attack than stenosis, let's say, just the narrowing of the arteries. It's actually as good as your previous history, your previous cardiovascular history, which is always the best indicator. It's better than, but any other predictor, though.

• 2:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, and it's, it's And just to clarify, like, when you get an echocardiogram, for example,

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33Cara Santa Maria?

  it can tell you a lot, but it can't tell you if you're starting to get calcifications in those vessels.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And when you get a cholesterol test, that only tells you how much cholesterol is circulating in your blood.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It doesn't tell you how much is like stuck in your vessels. So all those things collectively, and your blood pressure collectively are indicators.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But from what I understand, yeah, this is the single best indicator other than I have had a cardiac event in the past.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Which is as good as, but the other thing is it's independent, right? It's not like, yes, if you have these other risk factors, you're more likely to have calcium and to have a heart attack. It's that it's independent of age, it's independent of whether or not you've had a previous event, it's independent of all your other risk factors. So that's important, too.

• 3:16Cara Santa Maria?

  The only time I read that it's kind of not independent of age, and tell me if you came across this same research, but there's an upper limit. Once you get to a certain age, it's very likely that you, that it's kind of a moot point because everybody has a risk score after a certain age. Like, they were saying that, like, I think above 80 or maybe 85, it was a pretty high age, nobody has a clean calcium because just by age, you start to have some calcification in your, in your vessels. And so they, they, at least the recommendations I read was to use other indicators.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Well, you always, you always put it in the context of other indicators and your cholesterol and your family history and all those other things.

• 3:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's the question, right? So for me, I had a cholesterol of 202, my total, and I have a family history of high cholesterol. And so the question was, do I need to take a statin? Because I'm sort of in the like borderline gray zone. But the fact that my calcium coronary test was zero, it's not, at least my doctor's like, no, we don't want to put you on a statin yet.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  That's exactly where I am. In fact, my cholesterol is also 202. I have the exact same number.

• 4:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, look at that.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  By coincidence, and we're cholesterol buddies, but it was the same thing. It's like, all right, we'll do the calcium scan. If it's zero, we will not start, we'll wait on the statins. If it's not, we'll, maybe we'll put you on statins.

• 4:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Are people who need calcium supplements at a higher risk therefore of heart attack?

• 4:39Cara Santa Maria?

  No, totally different.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Completely different.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Is because that's a deficiency that they're making up?

• 4:43Cara Santa Maria?

  No, this is calcifications in your vessel. It's not like

• 4:46Speaker 02

  It's a calcified plaque. That's what they're looking for.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  I see. Okay.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Plaque's formed on the inside of the vessels and then they calcify and then they rupture and form a thrombus which causes a heart attack. That's why they're, it's the mechanism. So it's so this is, this stems from our basic understanding of how heart attacks occur. They don't occur from, from the plaques blocking the artery. They occur from the plaques ulcerating, platelets forming a clot on that ulcerated plaque and that acutely blocking the artery. So it's just a different mechanism. So that, from that flows a lot of our current recommendations in terms of cardiac management, including anti-inflammatories, anti-platelet therapy, and calcium scans to predict risk.

• 5:33Speaker 04

  Steve, who should take, who should get this test?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Talk to your primary care doctor.

• 5:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And if your primary care doctor hasn't heard of it?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Well, I can't imagine at this point.

• 5:41Speaker 04

  A new primary care doctor?

• 5:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but a lot of them don't recommend it. They may have heard of it, but they may be like, oh, we don't do that. Because, because here's the problem. A lot of insurance companies don't cover it.

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, and it, and it's not often done in-house because it's a CT scan. But like, I live in the greater LA area, right? So I live in an expensive region and I still, my doctor knew of a place where she wrote me a referral where it cost me $100 out of pocket to do this test. So to me, it was worth it.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, for me, like nothing, because I'm basically in like the Yale HMO, you know?

• 6:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And so they, oh, they offered it?

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, they offered it to me.

• 6:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, see.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Part of my care.

• 6:18Cara Santa Maria?

  We didn't, we didn't. Maybe it's because I'm of my age, but it was definitely not considered an in-network option.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, but if you have any concerns or any risk factors, it's not a bad addition. You know, it's very reassuring when it's very low or zero. And if it's high, you know, that in and of itself could make it seem like you, you should be on anti-platelet therapy and statins, et cetera. So it could be a lifesaver, you know?

• 6:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, Steve, I think, I think the recommendation is talk to your primary care physician and, and try to get this test done because it really does give you a snapshot of, you know, if you have any blockages or something that is some, you know, something that needs to be dealt with, so.

• 6:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, not even blockages, Jay, like literally the very start of something. That's, that's what it can detect, which is so great.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, it detects the thing that's the mechanism of having a heart attack. You know, it's looking directly at your risk of a heart attack.

• 7:11Jay Novella?

  All right, let's go on with our show. Bob, start us off with a quickie.

• 7:17Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Researchers have taken an existing cancer drug and improved it so much, I was actually startled. This is researchers at Northwestern University, which is in the Northwest somewhere. They've taken- It's in Chicago. They've taken a common chemo cancer drug called 5-fluorouracil, 5FU, and transformed it. They've transformed it. Typically, this drug is far from ideal, sounds a little scary, but I mean, it is chemo, but I think it's a kind of like the, the scarier end of some chemo drugs, of the popular ones perhaps. It doesn't dissolve well, it doesn't get taken up efficiently by cancer cells, and it has bad side effects because healthy cells are impacted as well.

• 8:00Bob Novella?

  But still, apparently it's common, it's a common one, so I guess it still has some decent utility, right? So the researchers essentially rebuilt 5FU as, as a coated nanoparticle, and this is called a spherical nucleic acid, or SNA. And I predict you will be hearing that initialism a lot in the future, SNA. These, these are essentially strands of DNA or RNA pointing outwards, forming a sphere around a central core. You got that? So, so in this case, the core contains the chemo drug 5FU, but it can contain other things as well. So this radial orientation of the DNA or the RNA is critical because that's what changes the drug's behavior and makes it play nice with the cells in our body.

• 8:45Bob Novella?

  So in this form, the drug can now dissolve more easily and cancer cells can now absorb it like a sponge. So listen to these numbers. Animal tests showed leukemia cells took up the SNA drug about 12 and a half times more efficiently. The cancer cells were killed up to 20,000 times more effectively. Not sure how that was measured though, but 20,000 times seems pretty awesome. Disease progression slowed by a factor of 59. And the icing on the cake, the usual chemo side effects did not appear at effective doses. So it just sounds incredible. Steve, Karen, have you read anything about this? Is that because the effective doses were so much lower? Possibly. I didn't see specifically why the chemo was, the side effects were so much more, you know,

• 9:30Bob Novella?

  palatable.

• 9:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, I guess I'm not understanding. Is it that they're using less and it's more targeted? Like, what is this?

• 9:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's more targeted. What I read is more targeted. I think it's, I think it's both. They're using less because it's used, it's so much more efficient and targeted that, yeah, it makes sense that it's just because it's, the new effective dose is much lower than it used to be. That just makes perfect sense, although I didn't read that explicitly.

• 9:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's, that's great because as I'm reading a little more about 5FU, I'm seeing that it has for a long time been a first line treatment, but very often it's given with adjuvant treatments. It's like, not rarely, but it's not often given alone. It'll usually be combined with like cisplatin or something else to make it more effective. And so if they can not have to do that, that's also great.

• 10:16Bob Novella?

  Right. So now, so this technique being employed here has a bigger category. It's structural nanomedicine. And I think you'll probably be hearing a lot about that in the future as well. I hadn't really heard too much about it. But structural nanomedicine's approach is not to invent necessarily a completely new drug, but to take an existing drug and change its shape and packaging so the body handles it better and tumors are targeted with more precision. So that's, I mean, so that sounds like something that's definitely, I'd love to follow, structural nanomedicine because What a great idea. Here's drugs that we know they work, but for some, but for whatever reasons, they're not used as efficiently, nearly as efficiently as it could in the body. And this just makes, takes the drug and just makes your body just absorb it where you needed it

• 10:59Bob Novella?

  and absorb it super efficiently. So I'll definitely be following this. This has been your structural nanomedical quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 11:08Speaker 02

  Thanks, Bob. So Jay, tell us about this Neo robot I'm hearing so much about.

• 11:14Jay Novella?

  The Neo robot, Steve.

• 11:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 11:17Jay Novella?

  This robot will do everything for you.

• 11:21Bob Novella?

  Everything.

• 11:22Jay Novella?

  But there's a big but, Steve.

• 11:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:25Jay Novella?

  Because the robot, the robot, there's, there's like these details here.

• 11:29Bob Novella?

  The robot has a big but, why'd they do that?

• 11:31Jay Novella?

  Well, if it falls down, it doesn't make a noise. Let me get into the details because I think you're going to be as surprised as I am about what, what this thing is and what they are saying and everything. So first of all, it's a built by a company called One X Technology. They're based in Palo Alto and also in Norway. They are marketing a humanoid robot. They're saying, you know, it's a, in the near future household, which means very soon, like within the next year, and this thing will assist you in your home, not, it's not laboratory. This is in the home, right? So according to their website, and this is, you know, this is their marketing, they say, "Take on the boring and mundane tasks around the house so you can focus

• 12:12Jay Novella?

  on what matters to you." And here are their key claims that they're making about their robot. "Soft and safe design with tendon-driven actuators. It has a 3D lattice polymer shell, and it has pinch-proof joints, which are suitable for human environments." These are all legit. You know, the, the robot is indeed soft. It kind of looks like the whole thing is wearing a sweater. Aww. If you have animals, you know, think about how stinky that would get. I guess you'd have to wash it. I don't know.

• 12:40Bob Novella?

  It's washed.

• 12:40Jay Novella?

  They say the intelligence, it hoses down in the back. No, it hoses itself down in the backyard.

• 12:45Bob Novella?

  You have two of them, one hoses the other.

• 12:48Jay Novella?

  They're saying the robot can integrate visuals and the spatial orientation of your house has language capabilities, it can answer questions, it can remember context, and adapt to your home. So you know, this is a question mark for me on whether or not it can do all this. I don't see why it can't do this. Essentially, you know, it would be similar to what I would think of as a standard LLM that you're used to interacting with. Then they say the home service tasks, and from the press coverage, they're saying that it can fold laundry, organize shelves, it can answer the door, it can go and get objects

• 13:28Jay Novella?

  for you, and more to come. Now, that's where things get a little dicey, and we'll cover that in a second.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  That's where things get dicey? I think we're way too dicey already.

• 13:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. It can handle cutlery.

• 13:40Jay Novella?

  Well, everything I said up until that last bit, Steve, I mean, I feel like all that is completely doable. Sure, it has pinch-proof joints, no problem. You know, it's light, it's not gonna, you know, it's not gonna be like fall down and kill anybody. But when they get into what it can do physically, that's where we're gonna focus in on. But there's a couple of other things. One X says that Neo is built for home, so it's lighter weight, it's quiet operation, you know, makes the sound of like a, no louder than a refrigerator, and that they're gonna start deploying it in 2026. And the price and availability, they say you could order it, preorder it now, and it's around $20,000 or a monthly subscription, which I think is about $500. And you'll get it sometime in 2026. Okay, out of all this,

• 14:25Jay Novella?

  the claims that I have to zoom in on are of course like what it can actually accomplish. And this is the reason why I think most of us want a robot. Sure, some people might want one as a companion, some people might want to have just another presence in the house, whatever. The bottom line is, can it do stuff for me that I don't want to do? I don't want to wash dishes. I don't want to load and unload my dishwasher. I don't want to do laundry. I don't want to pick up after my kids. You know, all the stuff that parents are supposed to do, I don't want to do.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  You've had your fill, Jay.

• 14:59Bob Novella?

  I mean, just those few that you mentioned, you know, laundry, dishes, just those two things alone, I think would be like, yeah, here's my, take my money, please, take my money. That would be fantastic.

• 15:09Jay Novella?

  Of course. I mean, we've been talking about this for decades. You know, and Bob, Bob, Steve and I, and Evan, I mean, I know you feel the same way because we're all part of the same generation. We were, we were essentially sold this subliminally through science fiction.

• 15:23Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. For decades.

• 15:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it started off with cartoons when we were kids. The Jetsons had a full, fully functioning made it says. But the problem is, is that even though they have built this thing to be autonomous, you know, the people that have seen it in person and the, the reviews that have, have happened so far, you know, they're flat out saying like, this thing can't do complex, complex tasks. And, and here's the kicker. Now, Kara.

• 15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Jay Novella?

  Most of the time when I tell you, I hope you're sitting down before I say something, it's usually a joke. This one is not a joke. This is a, what the hell was this company thinking?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  I know you guys know, but Kara, what do you think the big gotcha is with all of this?

• 16:03Cara Santa Maria?

  With this robot?

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So it.

• 16:06Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, I don't know, a hundred thousand dollars?

• 16:08Speaker 02

  No, it's twenty thousand.

• 16:08Jay Novella?

  No, it's twenty grand.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  It's twenty thousand.

• 16:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you already said that.

• 16:10Speaker 02

  So it, it's a soft robot that could be in your home and can do all these tasks. But there's one thing in the fine print that changes the whole picture.

• 16:19Cara Santa Maria?

  You have to put it where it goes every time?

• 16:21Jay Novella?

  No, I'll give you a hint.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Worse than that, Jay.

• 16:22Jay Novella?

  I'll give you a hint. Alright, so Kara, they say it can do all these things. And here's the hint. It can do all these things, but it actually can't. But it actually can.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Under certain circumstances.

• 16:35Jay Novella?

  It actually can do it, Kara.

• 16:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Theoretically do that.

• 16:37Jay Novella?

  But there is something happening behind the scenes. When you clear away the, the smoke and mirrors.

• 16:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, there's a person operating it?

• 16:45Jay Novella?

  There is a person operating it.

• 16:46Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not a robot!

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 16:48Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  There's a tele operator.

• 16:50Jay Novella?

  How do they fit in there? And, and I said to these guys, I go, yeah, some guy that's high in California that's driving this frickin' robot around your house that is acting like a robot.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  Now, the joke is it's powered by AI and Indian.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  Oh no.

• 17:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's like the really bad thing.

• 17:08Bob Novella?

  Oh my god. But, but guys, but remember, it's not, it's not designed out of the gate that it needs a teleoperator all the time. It's designed to do stuff autonomously and the stuff that it can't do, it can get helped by a, by a, you know, a teleoperator.

• 17:21Speaker 04

  So it has a lifeline, basically.

• 17:23Jay Novella?

  It makes it unusable, though, guys, because it's not like there's always someone sitting there at the ready. Like, you kinda have to make an appointment.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  You do have to make an appointment.

• 17:32Jay Novella?

  You have to make an appointment to get your frickin', um, washing machine emptied. It's like, are you kidding me? You know, it doesn't really take that frickin' long. I'm not gonna like, get on that some app and wait on a waiting list just to watch this stupid robot do something I can do in three minutes.

• 17:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But, okay, but what if the lifestyle change was that you had a list of chores for the next day and you just queued them up the night before? And then as teleoperators became available, they did them in time, so that when you got home from work, they were all done?

• 18:02Jay Novella?

  Two, I have two responses to that, Kara.

• 18:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh.

• 18:05Jay Novella?

  And I'll, I'll start off by saying, you're, you're very smart, but we have to, we have to think about this. There is a person in your house at that point.

• 18:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the thing, right? So basically, they, they should be targeting this as remote domestic helpers.

• 18:22Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? This is a machine that'll, it, it prevents them from actually entering your house, but they do have access to, you know.

• 18:29Jay Novella?

  They could look at your credit cards.

• 18:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, they'll have access to everything.

• 18:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 18:33Jay Novella?

  There's a huge security issue here. Plus, that's, that's like the person who's supposed to be operating it. What if somebody hacks into it?

• 18:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 18:40Jay Novella?

  Because you can't tell me that the security's gonna be airtight on this thing in the home.

• 18:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And that, that's much less of a risk when you actually hire a housekeeper. I think, and also, there's an abuse potential here, right?

• 18:51Jay Novella?

  That's true. Oh, yeah.

• 18:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Because if you, if you hire a housekeeper, you know who they are, you can vet them. I've had a relationship with, you know.

• 18:57Jay Novella?

  Right. You probably get a different teleoperator every time. Kara, Kara, I have you covered, okay? Because I'm launching a new business. It's maids that are dressed up like robots, and they will cost you a lot less than getting the robot.

• 19:13Bob Novella?

  Way less. You gotta call it, Rosie?

• 19:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the thing, too, because then at least they're employed here in this country. You know that they're getting a fair wage. Like, that's the thing that really worries me.

• 19:23Jay Novella?

  So you want to invest in my company, right?

• 19:25Speaker 02

  You can purchase a lot of domestic help for $20,000.

• 19:28Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 19:29Speaker 02

  The $20,000 only gives you services for three years.

• 19:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 19:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, and then you have to start paying for the services.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. That is $500 a month or whatever it is, yeah.

• 19:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but for extra context, extra context here, the, uh, right now, when people that have used it now, um, they, they basically say it really needed help for most, anything it did. It really didn't do anything fully autonomously, like, like, you know, like emptying the dishwasher or anything like that. Um, it, it needed help. The CEO says-

• 19:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, great, so it's like having a man in your house. So wonderful.

• 20:02Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 20:03Cara Santa Maria?

  You wanna go do it?

• 20:03Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 20:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, let me help you the whole time.

• 20:06Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 20:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know how.

• 20:08Bob Novella?

  Exactly, but the CEO-

• 20:09Jay Novella?

  Wait, Bob, she's right. It'll yell from across the house, "Hey, do you know where the pasta is? Hey, do you know where the car keys are?"

• 20:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Do we use fabric softener? Where do we get that? Oh, I can't.

• 20:21Bob Novella?

  But also, guys, importantly, though, but wait, importantly, though, what the CEO says is this. The CEO says that this is how it is now, and the plan is, is to get this in houses because it's using deep reinforcement learning. So it's like hands-on training, trial and error. We become guinea pigs. So the more, right, the more that people use it, the better and better it's gonna get. So it will improve. And the CEO does say this, he says that the plan, the, the plan now is that next year, when this is offered to people, that it should be able to do most things autonomously, but the more complicated things will need a teleoperator. So that, so that's his plan. And if that, if that's what really comes to fruition in a year where it, where literally most of what it does is autonomous, that would, that would be great.

• 21:05Bob Novella?

  But that's, that's the question, that's the question.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  How much is the optimistic projections of a CEO of a tech company worth?

• 21:13Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 21:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, and also-

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Freaking nothing, in my opinion, nothing.

• 21:16Bob Novella?

  Exactly. That's the nothing.

• 21:18Cara Santa Maria?

  We talk all the time about bias when it comes to AI and when it comes to these like training algorithms. I say this only half in jest. The people who are going to adopt this technology early are like lonely tech bros who have a lot of money. And I don't want my domestic robot trained in one of his Silicon Valley apartments.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  But they will be.

• 21:38Jay Novella?

  I know Kara, you know, look, the training thing, it's not a bad idea. Like if we take out the fact that they're putting in like something that I wouldn't say half-baked. It's, you know, look, there is a lot of legitimate technology in this thing. It's not a joke.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  But it is half-baked as an actual home appliance and its utility.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  This is a $20,000 Roomba. I mean, come on.

• 22:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, when people were beta testing, they got to do it for free.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  That's the thing.

• 22:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I don't understand. They're making people pay to be their testers.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  If it still needs to be trained, call it a beta, give it, you know, give it, give it to people or give it to them at a really cheap price and let them do the beta training rather than selling it with this wink, wink, nod, nod, it's really a teleoperator and we're really doing it so we could train it because hopefully then it will get better.

• 22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Hopefully.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  The other thing, we, we, we'd actually talked about this on the live stream yesterday with Christian Hubecky, who's a robot, who's a roboticist. He's a robot. Wait, wait, Steve.

• 22:35Jay Novella?

  I knew it. I knew it.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Now I gotta, now I gotta kill all of you.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  He's a robot roboticist. Anyway, we're talking about the fact that, you know, within home is like the hardest place for a robot to function because it's a chaotic environment. It's very open-ended, et cetera. Especially if you have kids or pets. I mean, forget about it.

• 22:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Stairs. I have so many stairs.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Stairs. Yeah. So it's a very, very challenging environment and it's the, the probability of this being actually cost-effective and useful is almost negligible at this point in time. And you also have to consider the, the, um, the safety issue, like with driving cars, like 95% may be a technological tour de force, but it's pretty useless for the end user. If it's dropping your plates 5% of the time, or even 1% of the time, that's unacceptable. You need to get the error rate of these things down to a million to one, or something in that order of magnitude. And that, we're a long way away from that.

• 23:36Speaker 04

  Oh, that ain't happening anytime soon.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Other than that, it's great.

• 23:40Jay Novella?

  My, my, my primary question is, let's say that you could fast forward five years, and you take all the training data that they collect, and you put it into the current Neo system, right? This, this particular robot. How much better would it be able to perform? And I think the answer is, it probably would be able to perform a lot better.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  So, of course it's gonna get better.

• 24:05Jay Novella?

  There's a silver lining here, because, and I wanted, I wanted to talk about this very briefly. The idea is, like, companies are starting to, and I think, you know, this is the first real, real, real, like, robot in your home thing. Everything else has been, from what I can tell, and talking to Christian, and just being, you know, a fan of all this for my whole life, it's all a non-starter.

• 24:25Speaker 02

  A humanoid robot, or android.

• 24:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah, a humanoid robot, right. No Roomba, I'm talking about something walking around and doing stuff for you.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, my Roomba's great.

• 24:33Speaker 04

  Interacting with you.

• 24:34Jay Novella?

  This is like, the first one that a company is selling, like, you know, this is a milestone. And I think it's an important one, because money is being put into this, and companies are developing this technology. And it means that, just like autonomous cars, that even though the, the bell curve, you know, that it might be super steep to get up to the really high-end things that it'll be able to do, it's not unreasonable to say that within the near future, five to 10, that there could be a real robot in, in some people's houses that are getting some stuff done.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, but Jay, remember, the, the other question is, is an android robot the way to go? And why are we even focusing attention and development? Why does it have to look like a person? Because that's maybe not the best form for a domestic robot to be.

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And also, does it need to be such an intense multitasker? Or can we have small hubs of specialized robots around the house?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 25:30Cara Santa Maria?

  That to me makes way more sense.

• 25:31Speaker 02

  We talked about the robot arms that cook for you or whatever. You could have like the laundry arms or whatever. But there is some utility to an all-purpose robot. I could see that, just like-

• 25:42Bob Novella?

  Well, absolutely. Everything, a lot of tools we use are designed for a humanoid shape. Right, it's ergonomics, of course.

• 25:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so that's the utility of it being humanoid. But the utility of it being a single multitasker. There is, there is utility in that, yes, but there's also a massive downside, which is when something goes wrong, now you don't have any of your tasks completed.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  That's right. And I think we might be in the phase for the next decades, 50 years or whatever, where we should be focusing on whatever shape works best, doesn't have to be Android, and maybe more limited range of activity so that it gets good at some things rather than being crappy at everything.

• 26:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like what if there's a laundry bot that's dedicated to your laundry room? And it does multiple tasks within one room? It doesn't ever leave that room of your house?

• 26:31Speaker 02

  That's like building on the Roomba example. Like it does one thing, it does it well, it's not an all-purpose robot, it's not a humanoid robot.

• 26:39Cara Santa Maria?

  It doesn't have security breaches because it can't open doors.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  It doesn't need a teleoperator, yeah.

• 26:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Or even if it does need a teleoperator, it stays in that room.

• 26:48Bob Novella?

  I mean, what would this thing look like, though? I mean, would you have to change the layout of your entire laundry room? And that's, that's what I think is problematic. Like, all right, so we're gonna change the structure of your laundry room?

• 27:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Every time, we've had huge improvements in appliances that's happened, though. Like when the shape and size of washing machines and dryers, or, you know, go to a house in the UK and often they'll have a washing machine in the kitchen. Ours are in a dedicated space. Refrigerator sizes have changed.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  But Bob, what if...

• 27:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Ranges have changed.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  But what if it is your washing machine, right?

• 27:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 27:24Speaker 02

  You buy a new washing machine and it incorporates robotic arms that will load it, unload it, run it, fold the laundry when it's done, put it in the dryer.

• 27:32Bob Novella?

  I don't know when the last time you bought a laundry, you know, a washing machine. Man, they are ridiculously expensive and thinking about quintupling the price, I'd rather just do my own laundry. Man, that's a lot of money.

• 27:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I would too, but I think that there, you know, some people wouldn't.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  But some people wouldn't. And then the price will come down and then the idea of a laundry machine that does not have robotic arms would be crazy, you know?

• 27:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Look at every single appliance in your home. There's a version that costs a few hundred dollars and a version that costs tens of thousands of dollars.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is true.

• 28:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's a market for all of it.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  And there's everything in between. We just bought a dishwasher and the range was crazy. And every increment gives you some new functionality, like, oh, boy, that would be nice, you know? But you have to figure out where you land. And it's just, yeah, this would definitely be at the high end. But then the high ends come down over time. That's usually what happens when technology advances.

• 28:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And ultimately, that is the direction we're going. I know it sounds like a leap because we're talking about humanoid robots, but like, I just bought a new washer and dryer when I moved back into my house after I had tenants when I was in Florida for a year. And it has sensor features that are robot, I mean, they must be robotic, right? Or at least it's, the technology has massively improved.

• 28:46Bob Novella?

  You know, it's funny though, despite all of these problems, sure, this is problematic and it's probably not going to do nearly as well as the company hopes, right? It's all these problems we laid out. Still, still though, I get a little excited thinking about, holy crap, a company is going to be selling

• 29:05Speaker 02

  That's why they're doing it.

• 29:06Bob Novella?

  Robots for the home next year. And it's just like, oh, my God, we're there. We're at that point where this is happening. Hopefully, it won't be like Google Glass where just like, it fails so horribly that no one even thinks about it.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  But it might be. It might actually set the set the industry of domestic robots back by failing hard.

• 29:23Bob Novella?

  I know. So hopefully that won't, that won't happen. But just the idea is so like, wow, 2026, baby.

• 29:30Speaker 04

  This can't be the first company offering this, right?

• 29:32Bob Novella?

  This type of thing, yes. This is, yeah, for this.

• 29:34Speaker 04

  What, Japan doesn't have this? China doesn't have something like this happening?

• 29:38Bob Novella?

  As far as I know, this for this type of like universal, like type of robot that can do many different tasks in your, in your house of humanoid, you know, bipedal robot. I'm not aware of anything that, that is at this point where you could.

• 29:50Speaker 04

  I don't know. Other countries tend to be ahead of the curve.

• 29:53Bob Novella?

  I know, but even.

• 29:54Speaker 04

  States on these things.

• 29:54Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, let's be honest.

• 29:56Bob Novella?

  Christian Hubicki said that this is, this is, I'm pretty sure he said that this was a first of its, of its specific kind.

• 30:02Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a first of its kind if it actually does what they say it does. But to me, this is a gimmick. This is a way, because they know that they can get funding because it's sexy. But it's not reasonable and it doesn't make sense to jump 10 steps ahead like this.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  It's also part of the fake it till you make it culture. It's like, we're gonna create the image of a robot.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Kickstarter.

• 30:24Speaker 02

  But it's all teleoperated and then just to sell people on the idea and then eventually you will make the tech work. Trust me, bro, it'll work. We'll train it.

• 30:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And if they just said that outright, it would be fine.

• 30:34Speaker 04

  It's gotta be a self-driving car and someone and a desk driving.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  That's, that's what Christian said, Kara. It's like, if you had one wish, what would it be? He said transparency. Just tell us what it actually is.

• 30:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Cause some people would want that. Like we have robotic laparoscopic surgery where we know it's not a robot making the decisions. It's a, it's a surgeon operating it. We have things like that. There are plenty of people in this world who, who want like live-in or not live-in, but like domestic help, but they have like such crippling social anxiety or they really can't afford it.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  I think for like elderly, barely able to live on their own, that's gonna be an early adopter.

• 31:08Bob Novella?

  Oh my God. Imagine if our mom had something like.

• 31:11Speaker 04

  People with physical limitations.

• 31:12Bob Novella?

  Like this that worked.

• 31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And one more quick thing, at risk of sounding a little bit ageist over here, but like, we often will say this, right, that the population who things like this could help the most are, let's say, older individuals who are medically frail or who have, or folks with disabilities who need additional support in their home. But then there's, of course, the, we'll call it a stereotype because it doesn't always hold, but I'm only reminded of it because I rewatched an SNL, you know, those like

• 31:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:43Cara Santa Maria?

  fake commercials they do on SNL about Alexa when it like first came out where all of the actors were playing, you know, elderly and they were calling it like Audra, Amanda. And then they'd be like, what'd you say again?

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Techno incompetence of the older people.

• 31:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. Like, there's this sort of weird paradox here where the very people who might benefit the most from this, it's such a complex tool for them to have to learn how to use.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's the thing is to make it user friendly. And that's part of why like the Android form might be helpful. It's, you really can't, if it had powered by chatbots that are good enough and it can do certain things, you could interact with it as if it were a person.

• 32:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But we're so far from that. I had a hard time chatting with a chatbot at my bank the other day.

• 32:30Jay Novella?

  Kara, I have to close this off by directing this at you because you're younger and you'll see these wonderful things. When you finally do get a robot in your house, just tell him about me, okay?

• 32:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I will.

• 32:42Jay Novella?

  Or her, whatever it is, you know, I don't care.

• 32:45Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, yeah, your memory will live on in robot space.

• 32:49Jay Novella?

  I get to see you, you know, sitting there really old, you're knitting, you know. I'm knitting. I was on the podcast with the boys. You used to have podcasts. Tell it about us.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  All right. Kara, tell us about the new UN climate report.

• 33:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow. What a segue. Let's just bring it down. Bring it down. I'll keep it kind of short and sweet. I could get in the weeds here. But basically, there's a climate report that's put out every year by the UN Environment Program called the Emissions Gap Report. This year's Emissions Gap Report is depressingly called Emissions Gap Report 2025: Off-Target.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:34Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's fun.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  We've never been on target.

• 33:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That tells you what you need to know.

• 33:36Jay Novella?

  Stay on target.

• 33:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. We haven't been on target, but there are a few kind of hopeful and then I'll just take that hope right back away things that are kind of interesting here. So the big, I would say, the big takeaways of this 76-page report, first and foremost, is that under a third of the, they call them parties, so basically the countries or the nations, who were in the Paris Agreement, submitted new versions of what they call their NDCs, which stands for nationally determined contributions. So basically, that's the calculation

• 34:18Cara Santa Maria?

  or the record of how their country is actually performing based on their targets. And that's really what this report is, right? It's called the Emissions Gap Report. And what the Emissions Gap Report does is it compares the target, the sort of aspirational goal, to what the countries are actually doing. It's the disparity between their promise and what they're actually doing in order to reduce, you know, emissions and therefore limit the rise in climate change, in global temperature. Under a third of the nations

• 35:00Cara Santa Maria?

  who were involved in the Paris Agreement, so this is interesting because it's 10 years on, submitted new NDCs, nationally determined contributions. So we only really have the data for, you know, less than a third of the countries, anyway. Now, there is one cool thing. So last year, global temperatures, based on all of the algorithms, were predicted to reach 2.6 to 2.8 degrees of warming, and remember, that's a Celsius measurement. This year, it's down to 2.3 to 2.5. So that's, you know, that's a drop of 0.3 degrees in terms of the prediction. But there's a few problems with that.

• 35:43Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you think contributed to the drop?

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Covid.

• 35:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Anybody? Covid, maybe, but this is, I think this is only over the last year.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  Increased spiking prices of fossil fuels because of the Ukraine war.

• 35:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, that might have, and I don't even know if they even touch on that. But basically, what they say is the main driver of that change is just improvement in their methodological ability. So, yeah, like, they've, they've dialed in their algorithm better. And so the new method says, oh, it's a little bit less. So that is good, but it doesn't mean we've done anything to get there.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Well, right, yeah, it just means the measurement is tighter, but we're not, we haven't changed our behaviors enough.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Well, that's, there have been improvements in the projections of technological advances in green energy and how that will decrease our carbon footprint.

• 36:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's a big contributor.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  Isn't that tough to measure year by year, though? Doesn't it take five years, 10 years?

• 36:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, no, but that's the thing. Remember, what this report looks at is just the gap. So they look at the estimates versus the actual delivery on those estimates. So if a nation says, we plan to implement policy that increases the number of electric cars and, and, you know, increases the, the tax on greenhouse, and then we look at the last year and say, did they actually do that? And to what extent did they do it? So that's why they do it year after year. And then they take all that data and they update their projections based on that data. So, yes, Steve, you're right. They do, as part of the algorithm, they do look at cheaper technology and more ubiquitous adoption, and that is actually improving.

• 37:24Cara Santa Maria?

  When you look at all the graphs, they don't go up. Like, they go up, how do I put this? The trend is up, but the individual countries are curbing emissions. They really are. Like, we're, we're seeing change. But here's the kicker, and this is the big takeaway from this. Even though we've seen a 0.3 degree reduction between last year and this year, the United States alone?

• 37:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Is estimated to contribute a 0.1% increase because we have fully left the Paris Climate Accord. We have not avowed to do anything that we said we were going to do before. And we've taken basically an exact opposite stance with regards to how we're going to proceed. And that's detrimental. And so all of the reports are like, the US is undoing any progress that we've made based on new policies.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 38:19Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the real scary thing. So, you know, the executive summary basically says, and I'm just going to quote this directly. While holding global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100 remains possible. The size of the cuts at 55% off 29 emissions levels by 2035. And the time available to deliver them amid a challenging political climate. Means that a higher exceedance of this level will now happen. They're basically saying it's possible, but it's not happening. And we don't think it's going to happen because we're not doing it. And so then they talk at great length about what would happen if we did overshoot. But then we're able to dial it back. And that would mitigate a lot of risk. It wouldn't solve the problem. There would still be a lot of detriment.

• 39:04Cara Santa Maria?

  There would still be a lot of like life lost. There would still be a lot of probably drought and famine and extreme weather. And all of the things that happen when we have escalation of climate risks. But they are starting not to predict just because, you know, when we often talk about this, we couch it in terms of like, if we can keep to this, this is what will mitigate if we can keep to this. And now the language is changing to if when we pass it, we can fix it faster. If when we pass it, we can work to come back sooner. These are the things that will probably happen. So those are like the big takeaways. They're basically saying it's possible, but lack of ambition and action means exceedance of 1.5 is approaching.

• 39:47Cara Santa Maria?

  It's pretty much inevitable that we're going to have at least a temporary overshoot above 1.5.

• 39:54Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's still possible not to. It's very unlikely. And so now if we're going to be reasonable about this, we have to talk about what it looks like if we overshoot it. Also, they do not hold back in saying the new American stance and policy is detrimental. We have historically been one of the largest polluters per capita, right? We make a massive difference per human being living in the country because we have a relatively small population compared to the other large polluters. And our new sort of policy stance is undoing all the progress that collectively a lot of countries are making. And I think that,

• 40:39Cara Santa Maria?

  you know, they didn't want to hold back in in saying that. Maybe, maybe the hope here is that blame and shame is going to help. I worry that it won't with this administration, and it's just a function of waiting.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  I mean, Trump stood up in front of the UN and said climate change is a hoax.

• 40:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Don't do anything about climate change. There's no way that in this administration, anything good's going to happen.

• 41:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  He's clawing back money that was already approved for, you know, climate mitigation strategies.

• 41:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And, and we've already seen, I think it was the Secretary of State, I've got to find where this was written, already disavowed this report and said, like, we do not, you know, not we don't believe in it, but we don't promote it, or we don't, you know, I want to find that quote.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Whatever. BS, BS.

• 41:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Like, we don't think, I think, and their argument is always, we don't think the US should have undue burden. It's like they completely forgot about history. Nobody's asking the US to carry the sins of the rest of the world. They're asking them to clean up, they're asking us to clean up our own mess.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Exactly. Now, Cara, did you read Bill Gates infamous memo on climate change? Already infamous, huh?

• 41:47Cara Santa Maria?

  About it. And I'm really curious, like, where, I'm curious so many different people's stances, because on the one hand, it's like, I don't know, I kinda get what he's doing psychologically, but also, like, is that what he's doing? There's a meta level here. There's what he said, and then there's why he's saying it.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  I think if you look at his actual prescriptions about what we should do, they align pretty much 100% with what I've, and we've all been saying for the last five, 10 years. And what he's been saying.

• 42:19Speaker 04

  Diversify, nuclear.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  The framing is horrible. It is a horrible piece of science communication. He frames it like this, and I get, again, his ultimate conclusion is, "We should be spending our finite resources in a way that have the maximal impact on the quality of life for people, especially vulnerable people, people who are poor and starving, etc." It's hard to argue with that. But the way he gets there is so bad, I mean, so his, because he starts with this premise, which is, in my opinion, a blatant straw man. And other people have called him out of the straw. His premise is that climate activists often say

• 43:04Speaker 02

  that climate change is an existential threat that is gonna have mass, it's gonna decimate the human population in the next few decades. That's just not true. The scientists have never said that. The UN has never said that. We have never said that. That is not the center of that.

• 43:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But he's saying that some activists say it.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  I think even among activists, I think that's an extreme, fringe thing to say. Who is, I don't think I've ever read somebody argue the human population is gonna be decimated by climate change within a few decades? Who is saying that? I don't know. And it's certainly, that is not part of the conversation. It is an absolute straw man argument, even if there's like some fringe guy far on one end of the spectrum, who cares? That's not where the conversation is happening. And so if that's, if he's reacting to that, and he's saying, and the other thing is, he, throughout, he acts as if it is a zero-sum game in a way that it really isn't. Right, like we have these limited resources.

• 44:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And paying for climate change mitigation strategies, like somehow divorced from health and human safety is going to take away, but that's not true because he counters his own argument by saying reducing emissions will only serve to increase life years. So it's a strange thing, like if he had just said from the beginning, we need to change our messaging on this, we need to put people at the front and center, we can't talk about the globe as some arbitrary ineffable thing, we have to talk about how climate change is killing people. And I get that argument.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  But that's not really what he was saying, and this was, it was not about messaging, he was talking about strategy, he's talking about where we should put our funds. And he, the specific things that he called out are things that we have called out ourselves. It's like, I agree with that. Like, for example, he's like, one poor country decided to just ban artificial fertilizer, and then they ended up starving their people and having to buy it from other countries. Like, yeah. It's true. Yeah, he didn't mention it by name, but we've, yeah, I agree, that was a bad thing to do, that was short sighted. But he could have talked about it from a completely different framework that wasn't totally tone deaf about how the right was going to predictably respond to what he was

• 45:27Speaker 02

  saying, because they responded in the way that we would have 100% predicted, namely, like Trump tweets out, Bill Gates admits he was wrong about climate change and I was right all the time. And Gates lamely responds, that's a misreading of what I wrote, yeah. Yeah. It was totally predictable, that was totally predictable.

• 45:48Cara Santa Maria?

  But here's the thing, here's the thing, here's the thing, do you think that that was intentional?

• 45:52Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I think it was.

• 45:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you think that, because Gates is a smart man.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  5D chess thing?

• 45:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's better for Trump to be high and mighty and haughty and then still talk and still engage and still adopt certain policies and have that, you know, it's the South Park thing, right? Like, you are such a great president and no, you don't have a small penis, and then he's like, thanks, guy, and moving on. Like, if it's better to do that with a notori- authoritarian figure...

• 46:21Cara Santa Maria?

  than it is to have him be your adversary.

• 46:23Speaker 02

  I don't think he was talking to Trump. I think he was just like, this is, and he actually specifically said- He's talking to reasonable people. He was saying-

• 46:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I think he's talking to everybody and he's saying we all need to get on the same page.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  He's basically, he thinks that he has this massive insight into how we need to realign our priorities when it comes to climate change. And he said, 20 years ago, I said for my company, we have to realign our priorities to, for the internet, and I was right. And now I'm saying this about climate change, and I'm right this time, too. And it was a little-

• 46:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and he said the same thing about human health, right? And how they-

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Listen, I think a lot of what he's doing is great. And again, a lot of his prescriptions are like, we need to invest in green technology. We need to invest, you know, in policies that work. And he says, we, climate change is a problem. We need to address it. We need to, you know, continue policies and investments that will fix it. But he's just saying, don't do that instead of helping poor people, uh, come, you know, be resilient in the face of climate change. It's like, well, who's saying that? The thing is, the thing, and I think he's partly responding to the fact that the, the wealthy nations of the world are dialing back their support for aid, you know, to, to poorer

• 47:39Speaker 02

  parts of the world. It's like, yeah, the people who are doing that are the people who are not doing anything about climate change. So who, right? So who are you talking about? The people who are in fit, like, Trump is the guy who gutted USAID. And now your response to that is to say, we can't, it's because we're putting too much emphasis on climate change? Plus, he's way too much, he's way too much of a techno optimist. You're like, he's like, we're gonna have fusion power, like, we're near, near economic readiness for fusion power. Like, dude, we are nowhere- Did he say that? Yes. We are nowhere near rolling out fusion. Doesn't he listen to this show?

• 48:18Speaker 02

  But, he, like, when he says, we need solutions, we need to focus our research on getting the green premium down to zero. A hundred percent, I've been saying that for years. I a hundred percent agree with that.

• 48:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's his number one priority.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  You keep doing that, because that is fantastic. That, that will be the ultimate solution. But that's probably, but there's, the green premium is basically, if you have, you know, low carbon energy, or, or industry, or whatever, how much more it costs than high carbon alternatives. So if fossil fuels are way cheaper than non fossil fuel, like, you know, green technology, people aren't going to do, they're not going to pay for the expensive green technology over cheap fossil fuels. I get that. I hundred percent get that. But there's basically three ways to reduce the green premium. And he talked as if there was only one way, right? His way is, we have to technology our way out of this. We need to invest in technology

• 49:15Speaker 02

  that brings down the green premium. But there's a couple of other things you could do, too. One, although he mentions, like, we need to have policies that support green energy, but he doesn't, he doesn't, in no way talks about how policies like subsidizing fossil fuels, for example.

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, it's not even about having a, what do you call it, like, a fossil fuel premium, because we could do that, too.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Yes, right.

• 49:41Cara Santa Maria?

  We could have a fossil fuel premium that's arbitrary, but, but we do the opposite of that.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 49:46Cara Santa Maria?

  We subsidize it.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  The other, the other way to, to reduce the premium is to essentially tax carbon, which nobody wants to do.

• 49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Yeah, that's another.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  And that's really, don't let them externalize the cost of the carbon that they're emitting on health and the environment. And which, you know, some people consider that to be part of the subsidy. But whatever, however you frame it. So you could say, you could, yes, invest in technology that reduces the premium, also have policies which support, in which reduce the green premium, and also make sure that we're fairly pricing carbon. And that's another way to reduce the green premium.

• 50:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and take all that money from the fair pricing, the taxing, that feels like it's going to be pressure, because that's always the argument, right, is that the individual end user is going to feel that economic pressure, and put it into subsidies so that they can easily get the electric car, or so they can easily ride the bus.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Or for the poor people that you're so worried about. Yeah, exactly.

• 50:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Make it so that they don't carry the cost of this.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  So it did, at the end of the day, I mean, I like Bill Gates. I think he does a lot of great charity. I like the fact that he's investing billions and building like a salt nuclear power plant, you know, I agree with all that. But it did come off a little bit as a, of a kind of a tech bro kind of a perspective on all of this. It's like-

• 51:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But that is who he is, ultimately.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  I know. I mean, I guess he couldn't get away from that enough for this. And it's just, also, I felt it was just tone deaf. It's like, you're, as if like, you're not aware there are climate change deniers in the world and- You didn't make this bulletproof against them completely misinterpreting what you're saying.

• 51:17Cara Santa Maria?

  What do you think about this, Steve? What if, and I mean, I'm speculating here. So Bill Gates runs in very particular circles, right? He runs in these billionaire tech bro silicon valley circles. And we're seeing a very explicit movement with like the Elon Musks of the world. He's a very interesting character. Because he was an early innovator of climate change mitigation strategies that were very capitalistically oriented. But he's also increasingly becoming right wing. He's always been a bit right wing, but increasingly that sort of libertarian bank. What if that's his audience? The tech bros of the world who aren't climate deniers, but who are increasingly becoming more libertarian, more MAGA. And he wants to catch them.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  But if that were his audience, he failed because what they're taking from that is, oh, we were right all along. We don't have to do anything about climate change.

• 52:09Cara Santa Maria?

  What if what they're taking is we were right all along and here's more things we can do?

• 52:13Speaker 02

  But yeah, well, I hope I'd love to see that. That's not what I'm seeing.

• 52:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope that's the case too, because I do think, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I feel like he does get something that we aren't getting here, which is they're not even a part of the conversation if they feel insulted. But they become a part of the conversation if you

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he basically just insulted the left in order to do that.

• 52:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we know.

• 52:37Speaker 02

  With a straw man, with a straw man.

• 52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  He did insult the left, but we're all like, we still like him. That's the problem, right? He insulted the left, but we're like, Bill Gates, you know, really ultimately, he's saying all the same thing. He knows he's not gonna lose us.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  To arguments that something which at face value doesn't look good is really three dimensional chess. If we just give them like super credit. I'm usually not receptive to those kinds of arguments.

• 53:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I wouldn't be if we were talking about Trump's messaging, but I might be if we're talking about Bill Gates messaging. I really do. I really, yeah. I think he has a lot of advisors and he's a very smart man.

• 53:11Bob Novella?

  I wonder if he ran this by anyone and it's just, he needs to be more savvy with this kind of statement though, that he just didn't, didn't display the necessary level of savviness, if you, if you would. I mean, it's just, it's disappointing that, you know, maybe he should have run it through chat GPT. I don't know what he should have done, but.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  We should have run it by a skeptic is what he should have done.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Well, ideally.

• 53:31Bob Novella?

  Ideally, yeah.

• 53:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I think he is.

• 53:33Speaker 04

  That should always be the case, frankly.

• 53:35Cara Santa Maria?

  It should be, but again, I don't think we're his audience. I think he already has us. And I, my guess is that this is actually very savvy messaging for a particular audience that we have a hard time understanding.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  He's trying to reach out to make a broader tent out of it, is that the idea?

• 53:51Cara Santa Maria?

  That's my hope.

• 53:52Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, we can hope.

• 53:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the charitable way to look at this without just like.

• 53:55Speaker 04

  I agree, Karen.

• 53:56Bob Novella?

  I just, I keep thinking of the many people, countless people that now will think probably forever, yeah, Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and we were right. That's their takeaway forever.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  I'm already, I am already doing damage control on this and I think I'm going to be doing this for a long time. Let me just say that.

• 54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  But what's the difference between somebody saying Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and Bill Gates won't admit it, but he's wrong? What is the difference ultimately in their position? I don't think that makes any practical change.

• 54:23Bob Novella?

  That's a big difference right there.

• 54:25Speaker 04

  They want to take Gates down a peg because he's vaccinated, you know, because he's pro-vaccination, you know, that's another part of this.

• 54:30Cara Santa Maria?

  But what does that mean, take him down a peg? He's still affecting change with his billions of dollars.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  But if you get to write now an article like, like Trump did and like a lot of people on the right are doing, but just, you know, a lot of, now a lot of people on the right are, who, people who have, like, tried to come off as semi-reasonable, like, you see, people were overreacting about climate change, we don't have to focus our attention on it, you know, the, you know, conservative approach was correct all along, and.

• 54:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's also a massive draw, man, because he's not saying any of that.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  But the point is, he, he gave them a gift and, and the, you know, the majority of the people are not going to read this entire report and figure out that it's not what he was saying at all. You know, it's just, it, I think the net effect is going to be, people like us are going to have to do a lot of damage control. That's what I think the net effect is going to be. And it's already happening.

• 55:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know. I guess, yeah, but I want to see what the long term effect is. I think it's a ripple right now. And my guess is that he's going to actually have some connections and some conversations that he wasn't able to have prior to this, but we'll see.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. All right, guys, let me ask you a question. How long in the past do you think

• 55:45Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  human tool use goes? And I mean like hominid, human ancestor. How long have our, our clay been using tools?

• 55:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Are you asking for years or like who the species was?

• 56:01Speaker 02

  Well, if you want to, years ago, and if you want to name me the species, you get bonus points.

• 56:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it was.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Australopithecus, two million.

• 56:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think it was pre Homo sapiens, but I have no idea. I have no idea. Probably, yeah, 1.5 to 2 million years ago.

• 56:16Bob Novella?

  That seems like an overestimate. It's been hundreds of, many hundreds of thousands.

• 56:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we've been people for 250,000 years.

• 56:22Speaker 02

  All right, so the oldest known stone tools date back to 3.3 million years ago.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  Holy wow. Well, and.

• 56:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Price is right rules, you win, Evan.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  What was crawling around the earth 3.3 million years ago?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  So at that time, you know, there were, there were Australopithecines.

• 56:43Speaker 04

  Australopithecines.

• 56:44Speaker 02

  This is like at the end of the Australopithecines. These were from tools found at the Lamekwe III site in Kenya. However, the stone tools were found only intermittently.

• 56:56Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Meaning.

• 56:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Does that mean like it's an early evolution there?

• 57:00Speaker 02

  So in other words, they would, we would find them in one place and a, and a time for a number of years, then they would not, then we wouldn't see them anymore.

• 57:08Bob Novella?

  So are they, were they reinventing the wheel, so to speak?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the thinking was, the thinking was that the use was sporadic. And so definitely Australopithecines were the first tool users. And then Homo habilis and Homo rudolensis came into the picture around 2.8 to 2.75 million years ago.

• 57:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 57:27Speaker 02

  But among the Australopithecines, they've only found evidence of sporadic tool use.

• 57:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and when you say Australopithecines, it's a whole, it's a genus, right? There are a lot of different species.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  Yes, that's a genus, there's different species. But we don't often know, Kara. I'm saying that because we like, here are some stone tools. We don't know who was using them, but these are the creatures that were around at the time.

• 57:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So it could be that only one species was using them and other species weren't.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  It's also possible that only some populations were using them and then they would...

• 57:58Bob Novella?

  It died out.

• 57:59Speaker 02

  It died out.

• 57:59Bob Novella?

  Knowledge died out.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  And then it would have to get rediscovered by a later population. Oh, interesting.

• 58:06Bob Novella?

  So that was the thinking.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  That was what then the evidence for continuous, like a continuous culture of stone tool use, the evidence for that goes back to 2.4 to 2.2 million years ago. And that was, now we're getting close to the emergence of Homo erectus. So this is now like the tail end of Homo habilis, Homo rudolensis, and the beginning of Homo erectus is when we had clear evidence of a continuous culture of tool use. Anybody know what the name of that tool use culture is? Lithos something.

• 58:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Flint napping?

• 58:40Speaker 02

  No. Flint napping is a technique. It's the, that's the Olduan, Olduan, not Obi-Wan, but Olduan toolkit from Old Duvey Gorge, which is where they were.

• 58:50Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Of course, that I know. Yeah, Old Duvey Gorge. All right, so now here comes the news item, right? So paleontologists have now found evidence of continuous stone tool use going back 400,000 years, earlier than previously known, back to 2.75 million years ago, which is like the very beginning of Homo habilis.

• 59:13Cara Santa Maria?

  But still Australopithecus was...

• 59:15Speaker 02

  They were still around, but this was, this was the beginning of Homo habilis. And the evidence that they present shows continuous tool culture spanning a 300,000 year period. So that's a pretty, that's pretty good evidence for continuity, right?

• 59:31Bob Novella?

  Wow, man.

• 59:32Speaker 02

  Could it be that they stole?

• 59:33Bob Novella?

  A third of a million years, to hell.

• 59:35Jay Novella?

  So what kind of tools were they using?

• 59:37Speaker 02

  So they, this was...

• 59:38Bob Novella?

  Lightsabers.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they, they would find good rocks, right? So part of the culture was, there was some geological knowledge. They knew how to find and identify rocks that were good for flint napping, right? And then they would, they would have like a core and they would knock off flakes. The flakes themselves could be used as cutting edges.

• 1:00:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they were sharp as hell, man.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, but also they would, you could, sometimes you just had a core that was, like, you're just making, you're flaking tools off the core, but the core itself is not a tool. And then other times, like, if you're making something bigger, like an axe, you're flaking the edge, you know, to make a cutting edge there.

• 1:00:21Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  And then they would also sharpen it by, by refreshing, you know, flaking off new pieces to keep the edge sharp. Um, and yeah, it's, you know, even today, like, the paleontologists, like, if you're not careful, you'll cut your fingers on these stones, even today.

• 1:00:36Bob Novella?

  Wow, man.

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  They can be very, they can be very sharp. And this, so the other component, there's a couple of interesting components here. One is, tool making would definitely expand their dietary range. Cause now, they could hunt more, they could hunt bigger game, and they can get more meat off the bones and, you know, break the bones for bone marrow. And there's definitely also evidence of tool marks on bones. So we know when they were the ones who were working the bones. And so that enabled bigger brains, right? So there was this reinforcement between tools allowing for bigger brains, allowing for more tool use, you know? And that's when things really started to take off, you know, right?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  When, when this continuous tool culture and hunting, that's basically with Homo erectus. That's when things really started to take off. But probably beginning with, you know, the Homo habilis, Homo rudolphensis, leading to like Homo erectus and then, you know, the Neanderthal Homo sapiens, uh, clade.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Right, so paleontologists had this chicken and the egg question of, well, what came first? Did you need big, big brains to have continuous tool culture, or continuous tool culture to have big brains?

• 1:01:54Speaker 04

  Sounds like tools first.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  It sounds like tools first now, right? Because now we pushed it back to the, you know, 400,000 years earlier than we thought, like before the emergence of Homo erectus, which is really when, you know, the brain size really started to take off.

• 1:02:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, you needed some baseline brain development to even conceptualize doing this, right? Well, but that's the thing, like, what does big brain mean?

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Australopithecines had that, right?

• 1:02:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  Australopithecines, whose brains are not really much different than, say, chimpanzees, were able to make these tools.

• 1:02:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but are you implying that chimps could potentially do this?

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  Well, I said they were not that different, but they were bigger than chimps, but they really are not that different.

• 1:02:36Bob Novella?

  Different enough.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Different enough, clearly heading in that direction.

• 1:02:40Bob Novella?

  They crossed the Rubicon, between chimps and them, I think.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  And hominids, yeah.

• 1:02:44Bob Novella?

  There was some critical mass that made that conceivable.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  But it seems like, yeah, we crossed this threshold of tool use, which then allowed for much better nutrition. That and fire, by the way, also did.

• 1:02:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah, huge.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Cooking food, and then that really allowed brains to explode.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Not literally.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  The other interesting question here is, well, how do we know how far back tool use goes, right? And we're basically, our window into that question is rocks, because rocks can survive for millions of years. But how do we know they weren't using wooden tools? And of course, we don't, and we think they probably were using wooden tools, but the questions are relevant scientifically, unless you could think of a way to test it.

• 1:03:22Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Now, do you guys know?

• 1:03:24Bob Novella?

  Clearly, they must have. I mean, chimps now will use rudimentary, you know, wood-based tools, like branches. So I think it's pretty clear that they probably, almost certainly did, but unfortunately, it doesn't fossilize.

• 1:03:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, you don't get the evidence of it.

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, so evidence for wooden tools, like actual wood that was worked and used by by humans and human ancestors, goes back hundreds of thousands of years, several hundred thousand years. However, there's indirect evidence, and the indirect evidence comes from, they're looking at the wear patterns on stone tools.

• 1:03:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, was it attached to wood?

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, or was it working wood, right? Were they using this to work wood? And the other thing is wood residues on stone tools, right? So, and they have found wood residues on stone tools going back 1.5 million years.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Like found in the pores of the stones?

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, like there's like, oh, there's acacia wood on this stone, like microscopic, you know, residue. But by definition, if your indirect evidence depends on stone tools, it'll never go back further than stone tools. So we may never know for sure what, you know, wooden tools, perishable tools they were using prior to, you know, 3 million years ago, prior to use of stone tools.

• 1:04:44Speaker 04

  Too bad.

• 1:04:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, just unless somebody could figure out some way of getting indirect evidence, or if some wooden tool somehow got mineralized or something.

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, amber, you know, fell on a bunch of amber.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  So far, yeah, whatever, so far, we don't have any evidence of it. Interesting. I'm gonna throw in a quickie, guys, because there was another paleontological item, I just want to mention very, very quickly. Have you ever heard of Nanotyrannus?

• 1:05:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Nanotyrannosaurus? Yeah. Sounds like an oxymoron, but okay.

• 1:05:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, this has been a debate among paleontologists, whether these smaller specimens of what look like they're in the same clade as Tyrannosaurus Rex, were these young Tyrannosaurus, or these young T. rexes, or are these mature specimens of a different species of small tyrannosaur? This debate has been answered. We found a near-complete specimen of a clearly mature Nanotyrannus. It was definitely a separate species. Actually, we found-

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  There was, it was two specimens, a tyrannosaur, a tyrannosaur, a nano tyrannosaur and a triceratops who were in combat and killed each other, basically. Mutual demise.

• 1:05:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 1:05:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they actually did fight each other. So, interesting. The reason why it's so hard is because dinosaurs really change a lot as they age. Yeah. You know, their, their extra epidermal appendages can, can change shape and, you know, size and everything.

• 1:06:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they're so small, I mean, a lot of them are, are laid in eggs, so they're so small when they're, even, I mean, they're big eggs, but still.

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they start out small, they get really, really big, they can continue to grow throughout their life. We know really nothing about them except from the bones. So, figuring out male, female, adult, juvenile, are these the same species or different species, whatever, is really challenging. And we have to wait until we get really good specimens where we could say, oh yeah, based upon the growth rings and the bones and other features, we could say this is definitely mature. Like, that, that helps. There was also some other anatomical differences, like the cranial nerve paths through the skull, which were different enough, like, yeah, this can't be the same species, this has to be two different species. So, probably what this means is that, you know, again, T. rexes were at the very end

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  of the Cretaceous, so they were part of the end Cretaceous ecosystems, so we want to know as much as we can about them, like, what, what was the dinosaurs, what was happening with them when the asteroid hit? And it seems that the, the Tyrannosaurus clade was a much bigger and more diverse, you know, group than we previously thought. Which means that, because they're probably apex, all apex predators, that the ecosystems were probably fairly robust. You know, there's, there's an older theory that maybe dinosaurs were on the way out when the asteroid hit, but that is clearly not the case. All right, Evan.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:46Speaker 02

  You're gonna talk about pants murmia, but I love it when you said this to me, I agree. This is the worst headline ever.

• 1:07:55Speaker 04

  Isn't it ever? Isn't it though? Every once in a while, you come across a headline of a science news article that is so ridiculous. It makes you ask yourself, at least I ask this, does the editor really even care about this item? Or are they under orders to come up with something so click baity? That basically they cash in all their integrity chips out the window on this one. Sure. How's this for a headline, folks? Human DNA found in a two billion year old meteorite.

• 1:08:26Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  I mean.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Human DNA. Oh, now that is some tabloid level crap right there. That that's the kind of stuff that gets splashed on the front page of the National Enquirer. But no, this comes from an online magazine called Geek Spin, which I looked it up. It's a New York City based publisher that covers a range of topics for a geeky audience, including tech, lifestyle and pop culture news. Their content also includes entertainment and embrace a wide variety of geek subcultures, such as cosplaying, Android and Apple fans, Lego builders and science enthusiasts. All right, so they're not specifically science, but you know, at least they try to put on a patina that they do care about science, but not with a headline like this.

• 1:09:09Bob Novella?

  Um, yeah, I mean, based on your description, it sounded like something that I would might want to probably check out, but but not now.

• 1:09:16Speaker 04

  Not exactly, exactly. Human DNA detected in a two billion year old meteorite. New NASA data revives the theory that life on Earth came from space. So is NASA really saying that about human DNA in a two billion year old meteorite? No, not whatsoever. What the hell is this article talking about? Well, here's they're basically just rehashing some already reported news from months ago, frankly. Osiris Rex, that mission that brought back dust from asteroid Benyu and Japanese Hayabusa 2 did the same from the asteroid Ryugu.

• 1:09:55Speaker 04

  And Jay, I think you last talked about this, maybe a few months back. I recall you mentioning, having a news item about the retrieval of dust from space and rocks from space and things. So, I mean, this is an ongoing science news item that I've also touched upon over the years. It's unfolded. It's been unfolding for many years. When the researchers analyzed those samples that they got back, okay, they found carbon compounds, amino acids, and nucleobases, you know, chemical precursors of DNA and RNA, to be generous. But that's a long way. I mean, my gosh, that is such a leap from DNA itself and then human DNA. I mean, you're way out of your league there. No freaking

• 1:10:39Speaker 04

  way. How the heck did this even go wrong? One person I saw online commented, I don't know if it's a scientist or not, but they said, "This is the equivalent of saying, 'I found flour and sugar, therefore I discovered cake.'" Right? I mean, you have to jump so far, so far ahead. So here's how it works. You get this, you get a technical paper that uses phrases like, what, organic compounds or nucleobases? And then some wire service picks it up and summarizes it as, what, ingredients of life, maybe? And then the headline writer, yep, trying to grab attention, says, "Oh, life discovered." And finally, social media gets a hold of it and says, "Human DNA on a meteorite." So that's kind of for one possible

• 1:11:22Speaker 04

  evolution or of how these things become kind of runaway trains. Looked for NASA. NASA says, "No way. No biological molecules. There's no DNA. There's no RNA, no proteins." They absolutely, you know, said that clearly. There's not even room for interpretation there.

• 1:11:41Speaker 02

  What they find are amino acids.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:11:44Speaker 02

  And base pair, and bases, you know, from the, you know, adenine, guanine, the building blocks of DNA, the building blocks of proteins, but not proteins or DNA, as you say, and not life. And so tying this to panspermia is just not accurate. Panspermia says that life started elsewhere and was seeded onto the earth. Not the building blocks of life are are out there, which is a completely different claim. And is is not panspermia.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  And I and I went further to look for recent news articles about panspermia to see if perhaps they were really maybe alluding to to to something else here and maybe got their wires crossed or something. But no, there's really not a lot that's new about it. Other than what I did find out, though, is that panspermia is kind of now being subdivided into into different kinds of categories, which help define it a little bit better, such as molecular panspermia. It's also known as pseudospanspermia, which is the idea that the building blocks, right? Those amino acids you talked about, Steve, form of space.

• 1:12:48Speaker 02

  Otherwise known as not panspermia, in my opinion.

• 1:12:51Speaker 04

  Right, right. Oh, lithopanspermia is a term being, you know, used now. Microorganisms are spores that travel inside rocks between planets. And, you know, there's still very scant hard evidence that panspermia is really something that scientists are willing to to throw their hat on.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Also, Evan, we could make a distinction between stellar panspermia and interstellar panspermia. Like, it's it is perfectly plausible that critters from Mars got to Earth. Yeah, I'll buy that.

• 1:13:22Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  But not interstellar. That is a completely different picture, and it's the plausibility plummets to basically zero.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  Goes so down. Yep, yep, yep. Origin versus local emergence, absolutely such such a huge, huge component of that. So, yeah, worst headline of the year, I'm gonna say, and I'll probably be bringing this up at our end of the year review show.

• 1:13:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right. Make note.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  And basically, I read the article, like, there's nothing new here. This is exactly where we have been for years. You know, that there's components are out there, maybe we're still we're still thinking it's possible life may have come from within our own solar system, but but not interstellar. This is, yeah, just absolute unforced error of bad headline writing. Even the article itself wasn't that much better.

• 1:14:06Speaker 04

  No, there was no meat on that bone, frankly.

• 1:14:08Bob Novella?

  It's the super clickbaity rehash of the old news.

• 1:14:11Speaker 02

  Yep, exactly. Clickbaity rehash of old news. That's a perfect description. All right, Bob. Tell us about this AI-powered wound healer.

• 1:14:20Bob Novella?

  Yeah, sci-fi Band-Aids in the news? This one was fascinating as hell. Researchers have developed a smart bandage with AI in the loop to optimize to optimize wound healing. Results in pigs are quite promising, I think. This was developed by Professor Marco Rolandian colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So this was published in the journal Biomedical Innovations. So the title of their paper was "Towards Adaptive Bioelectronic Wound Therapy with Integrated Real-Time Diagnostics and Machine Learning-Driven Closed-Loop Control." So, all right, so what does that actually mean?

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  And can I say at this point, Bob, I am not impressed, but

• 1:14:58Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:14:58Speaker 02

  It seems like a really overly complicated way to do things that we already do. And the only justification I saw for this was, well, maybe in places that don't have access to real healthcare, this might be a substitute.

• 1:15:12Bob Novella?

  That's kind of what they stressed. So let's go through, let's go through what I have here. So the authors of this paper, this was funny, they estimate that humans have about 24 billion wounds a year. Okay, yeah.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  That's four, three each? Three each a year?

• 1:15:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, one to, they say one to three each. And that, of course, runs the gamut from scrapes, little minor scrapes, to surgeries, you know, so it's all over.

• 1:15:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't imagine only having three scrapes a year. I have more than that. I have three scrapes a month, easily.

• 1:15:43Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, the way I looked at it was like, how many times do you need a Band-Aid? Yeah, a few times a year is close, is close enough.

• 1:15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, I think I am not a careful person.

• 1:15:52Bob Novella?

  All right, so maybe, so maybe the number is closer to 30 billion. I don't know. So this device, when, when and if ever it's available, won't be designed for most of those wounds, obviously, right? They say in their paper, "While many wounds heal with basic at-home care, others require timely medical intervention to ensure proper healing. Delays in access to healthcare can lead to complications, including scarring, permanent tissue damage, infection, sepsis, and even death. A wound type and individual variability further complicate the selection of optimal treatments." So this is aimed at, clearly, this is aimed at chronic, high-risk, hard-to-monitor wounds, not paper cut. So that's, that's kind of the slice of wounds we're dealing with here.

• 1:16:31Speaker 02

  So Bob, I agree with that, but that contradicts a little bit what they're saying there, because they're saying like, Timely, what does that mean when they say timely? Because these interventions are for chronic wounds, right? And also, if you have a chronic wound, these are mostly in a medical setting, which, again, so what's the use case here? What exactly are they aiming this at?

• 1:16:54Bob Novella?

  Okay, well, and one thing I did was I looked at Waze and I looked for urgent care near me, and I found eight of them within five miles. So I think part of the things that they're saying is that many people just aren't that lucky, they just don't have the access that we have. You know, we're very lucky in that regard.

• 1:17:11Speaker 02

  But again, to be clear, this is not for urgent care. This is not for urgent wounds, acute wounds. This is for chronic wounds.

• 1:17:19Bob Novella?

  I thought of it as chronic wounds as definitely part of what it's for and not necessarily the whole tamale right there. So, yeah, I didn't think chronic was...

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  The interventions have only been shown to work on chronic wounds, though.

• 1:17:30Bob Novella?

  What do you mean? What interventions?

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  Like the electricity? That only works on chronic wounds.

• 1:17:33Bob Novella?

  It doesn't work on just general...

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  The evidence only exists for things like chronic pressure ulcers or chronic non-healing wounds.

• 1:17:43Bob Novella?

  Okay. They also say that even with standard care, it's often a one-size-fits-all approach that's only checked occasionally. So any important wound changes that might have happened in the interim could kind of get worse before anyone really realizes it if nobody's looking at it. And this reminded me of Jay's hand wound, where the material actually grew into your skin.

• 1:18:05Speaker 02

  No, my skin grew into the material.

• 1:18:08Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah, right, right. So, yeah, I never forget that image date. That was pretty nasty. All right, so this new device is called Aheal. How would you pronounce this? A-dash-heal? Aheal? Aheal? Aheal? It seems like a weird...

• 1:18:22Speaker 02

  Theheal.

• 1:18:23Bob Novella?

  Aheal? So the major components of this device is you've got a camera with ring LEDs for consistently being able to image the wound. You've got electrodes for electrically stimulating the wound site and reservoirs and actuators for storing and delivering liquid medications. So those are the major players. And plus, of course, the power source. And all of this adheres directly over the wound, kind of like... Some of those, you know, those diabetes, what they're like diabetes pumps for diabetics that you see, there's just like heavy duty, heavy duty, you know, adhesion onto the wind, onto the skin that doesn't really, you know, fall off easily like a regular Band-Aid. So how does it work altogether? So every, every two hours, images of the wound are taken and wirelessly transmitted

• 1:19:07Bob Novella?

  to an AI agent that they call ML physician software. So ML here clearly means machine learning and the machine learning angle was interesting and that manifests itself in two ways. They have a trained model to estimate which healing phase the wound is in, right? So it can distinguish visually the clotting phase, which is, which is the initial phase of the wound. The clotting phase, it can distinguish that from the inflammation phase, which, which is also distinct from the rebuilding tissue phase. And then towards the end, there's this remodeling phase that that happens. But the AI also uses deep reinforcement learning, which is trained, which is essentially a training through trial and error, right?

• 1:19:48Bob Novella?

  And I'm sure it wasn't training on real people, but through the literature or, or virtual training or whatever, it learns to recognize what treatment actions help most. You know, what kind of incremental intervention is warranted at this stage based on what it's seeing. So after the images are received, the AI assesses the wound and it builds an ideal healing timeline, which is essentially the fastest reasonable path from a fresh wound to a closed wound. And it tries to keep the wound on that path by giving it little, little nudges. And it can determine if the wound is, say, is it stuck in the inflammation stage? Or is it just generally lagging too far behind where it should be?

• 1:20:30Bob Novella?

  So then, once it makes that decision, the AI has essentially two knobs it can turn to nudge the wound along on its healing trajectory. It can use an electric field, which has been shown, from what I've researched, Steve, this electric field has been shown to accelerate healing by doing things like promoting cell migration and enhancing growth factors needed for tissue repair. You're saying that this is really only for chronic wounds and not?

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  Well, those are the mechanisms. Yes, yes, those are the mechanisms, primarily the promoting cell migration to the wound.

• 1:21:01Bob Novella?

  Right, but it hasn't been necessarily shown to work for for regular wounds.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything I've read is all in chronic wounds.

• 1:21:09Bob Novella?

  Okay, it can also, so the AI can also release into the wound a dose of drug. In this study, they used fluoxetine, which is anti-inflammatory and can help with wound closure. So that's what they use.

• 1:21:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Fluoxetine is Prozac.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  It's Prozac, yeah.

• 1:21:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think that's an anti-inflammatory.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Well, they say it decreases inflammation. Wouldn't be my choice for a drug to decrease inflammation, but it's interesting.

• 1:21:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I wouldn't call it an anti-inflammatory, though, Bob. I would say it might have anti-inflammatory properties or something.

• 1:21:38Bob Novella?

  Okay, so they used it then to reduce inflammation and help with wound closure. Maybe that's a better way to say it. Interesting how they didn't use a specific anti-inflammatory. So, okay, so this can all be adjusted two hours later based on the next batch of images that the AI gets. Now, you're probably thinking, how safe is this? And so there's two major safety features that they use. First off, there's preset safe ranges on how much it can zap a wound or use that drug. So it knows what these safe ranges are and it will never go beyond them. So that's one. And secondly, and probably most importantly, there's a dashboard available where human doctors can see what the AI is doing. And if necessary, it could change the decision that the AI makes. You know, it could override it if it's necessary.

• 1:22:23Bob Novella?

  So the AI, according to the research, is the AI component here. It continuously watches. It makes small but informed adjustments, and it's all under these human-set boundaries. So that's kind of like an overview of what the AI is doing. So testing of AHEAL was on pig wounds, as I said, and they use pigs because pigs have a lot of similarities to humans, especially regarding the skin. So they followed it for the healing for 22 days. I think the device was used for, I think, for seven to 10 days, and they continued tracking after that. This was like, they called it a closed loop where the AI just had, basically had full control and did what it did without really any intervention. I'm sure they were tracking it, but they didn't change any of the decisions that the

• 1:23:08Bob Novella?

  AI made. So compared to controls. The wounds healed 25% faster, the new skin was thicker and more mature, the inflammation was was less than controls and most importantly, all the chemical and structural cues that indicate that the wound just didn't close faster, right? The wound was further along the healing process itself, it just didn't like accelerate the wound closure. It was it was clearly in their mind, from what they're saying, the healing process was further along than than the control. So I thought that was pretty slick. So but keep in mind, this is a proof of concept. They still need longer and larger studies using more, you know, more types of wounds and eventually with people, of course. Now, this isn't the healing

• 1:23:51Bob Novella?

  laser thing that was used in Logan's Run. You guys remember that, Steve? Remember that?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 1:23:55Bob Novella?

  You forgot that image, right? But it's for problematic wounds, especially for people with limited access to facilities that we take for granted. And I think this it sounds like this could be a game changer. But Steve, you're not as optimistic as I about this.

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  No game changer. This is nowhere near a game changer. This is an overly technological way of doing something that we already do way more simply. And the justification for it seems to be this is in places where doctors are not available, and yet you're supposed to have a doctor monitoring it. And

• 1:24:23Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? So I don't know. Again, I'm thinking, what's the use case here? What's the scenario where this is going to be an advantage over just doing what we already do? This just seems like an overly high tech way of doing something that and when they they compared it basically to doing nothing, what they really need to compare this to is usual care. That's the standard. And I wonder Yeah, not to doing nothing. It may not even be as good as usual care. I don't know. We they didn't provide any data for that. So this is it's an interesting idea, but it's also like an overly complicated way of doing something fairly basic. And I'm not convinced there's any advantage to this. And is the extra expense and complexity worth it?

• 1:25:07Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:25:07Speaker 02

  In what scenario? I'm still confused about what scenario this is. This is a good idea.

• 1:25:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, one thing I was thinking, like, if you don't have access to good to good healthcare or urgent care.

• 1:25:18Speaker 02

  Are you going to have access to this high tech piece of equipment?

• 1:25:21Bob Novella?

  Right. How are you going to get? How are you going to get this thing then? That struck to me. So so my takeaway then is that maybe I should wait for this, the Logan's Run healing laser thing? Maybe that, I'll hope for that and this one.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:25:37Jay Novella?

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

• 1:25:54Speaker 04

  I know what that is.

• 1:25:55Jay Novella?

  What is it?

• 1:25:56Speaker 04

  That is Kara forging a ring. I mean, it does sound like that. You hit the anvil first and you bounce the hammer onto the ring. Right. No? No? It does sound like I'm shaping or, yeah.

• 1:26:06Jay Novella?

  Somebody else guessed something that I thought was a little bit similar was funny.

• 1:26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think I know exactly what this is.

• 1:26:14Jay Novella?

  Well, don't say it. When we get to the end, I'll let you go, okay?

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:26:18Jay Novella?

  So somebody said, I thought this was very funny. A listener named Ben Brown said, "This one was tricky. There were 48 distinct, high-pitched pings in that noisy. And Kara has been present on 48 out of the last 52 shows. So I think this week's noisy is an audio representation of all the times that Kara didn't understand a sci-fi reference over the past year of shows."

• 1:26:39Speaker 04

  It would've been a lot faster than that.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  Or it's a bird.

• 1:26:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay, so it's not Kara and there's nothing like, you know, data derivative of Kara or anything, but that was a wonderful guess.

• 1:26:51Speaker 04

  I like it.

• 1:26:51Jay Novella?

  A listener named Kevin Clare wrote in, said, "Hi, Jay. Longtime listener, first time guesser. The noise to me sounds like some stonemasons splitting a large stone. That's the sound of them hitting the splitting tools." He says he was a stonemason for 20 years and he wants to thank us all for everything that we've ever done. I appreciate that.

• 1:27:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty broad. It's really everything we've ever done?

• 1:27:13Jay Novella?

  Well, everything you guys do, if you want to be specific.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:27:17Jay Novella?

  Pretty much, you know? Anyway, another listener named Joe Iandria. Joe, you know I came close to that last name. He says, "Hello, Jay. I'm going to guess this week's noisy was a group of workers driving in a railway spike with sledgehammers, since that's the picture I had in my head listening to it." This is a good guess. There's a lot of elements in that guess that I think I would consider to be mostly correct. You're not completely correct, though, and I'm going for perfection here, so let's move on. Another listener named Ben Simon, that's the second Ben this week, he says, hello Jay, I have guessed who's that noisy a few times before, but this is the most confident I have been about it. I've been wrong every time so far, and I could still be wrong in this week, but of all my guesses, of all my guesses, this feels most likely to be right. This

• 1:27:59Jay Novella?

  sounds like a video of a team of people pounding a stake into the ground with sledgehammers. My social media algorithm is constantly feeding me clips like this of workers performing skilled tasks. Anyway, that's a good guess. These guesses here are very reminiscent of the vast majority of people who wrote in, and as you guys know, I usually use the person who wrote in first about that particular idea. Now, we're going to move on to something a little bit closer, and this is from a listener named Ben Neil. What are the chances, guys? Three Bens in one show. Oh. We have Ben Simon, we have Ben Brown, and we have Ben Neil. Out of how many, how many choices? Hundreds of thousands.

• 1:28:39Bob Novella?

  Hundreds of, that means it's an octillion to one.

• 1:28:43Jay Novella?

  No, I mean, what, I got like a hundred people, a hundred fifty people this week? I just wanted to say octillion.

• 1:28:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Jay Novella?

  So, that's pretty good. Alright, so Ben Neil says, hammering a large piece of metal, possibly an anvil with nothing on it, sounds like the hanger is being dropped and allowed to bounce freely, making the increasing frequency before the next drop. Alright, that was about as close as anyone has gotten. So, Steve, hit me, what do you think it is?

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  So, yeah, I'll premise this by saying, I've heard this sound so many times, because I've watched every episode of Forge and Fire. It's definitely metal pinging, right? This is the sound of somebody forging iron on an anvil, because you could tell the sort of frenetic pace of them, because you have, once you heat the metal, you've got to work it very quickly, and then as it cools towards the very end, they do some high-frequency, lighter taps, because they don't want to hit it as hard, because you'll stress the metal out. So, that, that sequence of pinging, again, I've heard it a million times. Is somebody forging iron?

• 1:29:39Jay Novella?

  Okay. You're close, you're close. Another listener was close too. This is Aaron Allison and he says, "Hey Jay and all, I think this noisy is two blacksmiths at a Renaissance fair." So far, he's correct. "Maybe working on one thing together." Well, yeah, that's, you're correct, but that's pretty general. And then he said, "My son recently found his love of going to those, I guess Renaissance fairs, so we have gone multiple times." Anyway, lots of near misses, including Steve. Now again, this could be many things. Is, what's the guy building? These people, whoever the hell they are, like swords? That's what everyone thinks, knives?

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  I was correct, just incomplete. I didn't miss.

• 1:30:19Jay Novella?

  Well, go ahead, complete it.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Uh, he's, yeah, it's two guys at a ren fair forging something. I'm gonna, so, something small, maybe like a nail.

• 1:30:30Jay Novella?

  Holy shit, Steve, very good.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Yay!

• 1:30:33Jay Novella?

  It's a, it's a medium-sized nail. I'd say that the, the head of the nail was probably around the size of a quarter. You know, not like the, the, the super small nails that we use like for a two by four or whatever. This nail was, you know, much bigger, but not giant. Yeah, it had a spiky little nail thing going on there, you never know. So, look, we got a lot of, a lot of close guesses, you know, this one had a very specific thing. It would have sounded pretty much exactly like that if they were making almost anything, right Steve?

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  Yes. Something small, that's the only thing you could really say about it. But, it's again, that freak, that increasing frequency just towards the very end is the typical thing.

• 1:31:11Jay Novella?

  Well, that was a good piece of information that you gave me there, Steve. I'm gonna play it again, just to see how close Steve was. Ready?

• 1:31:30Jay Novella?

  Farley, Farley, Farley. Yeah, so, there you have it, that's people making nails. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Mike. And here it is.

• 1:31:55Jay Novella?

  What the hell did I hear? That is the noise. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, please just email me at [email protected]. Steven, I have things to tell you. Yes. We will be at CSICON, the CSICON Conference. You can go to csiconconference.org. That's C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C-E dot O-R-G. This conference is happening, where is it? It's the 50th one. Buffalo. It's happening in Buffalo, New York, from June 11th to the 14th. They say on the conference homepage, "Celebrate our history, chart our future." So there is somewhat of a theme here, and I'll give you a little list of who's going.

• 1:32:38Jay Novella?

  Bill Nye will be there, everybody. Michael Mann, Mann. Carrie, you just interviewed him.

• 1:32:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:32:45Jay Novella?

  Did he say that he's looking forward to seeing you at the conference?

• 1:32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  He did. He'll be there for sure.

• 1:32:50Jay Novella?

  What a gentleman. Then we got Leigh Anne Lord, she's gonna emcee it. Of course, we will be there. It looks like Banacek and Richard Wiseman are gonna be there, and Eugenie Scott. The list is growing. I think it's gonna be a really awesome conference, and we will definitely be there. We have three show weekends, two of which are, right now, you can buy tickets for. So we're going to be in Seattle. This is going to be the weekend of January 9th. We have four things you can join us at. Friday night, we're gonna have a low-number get-together. Saturday morning, like, starting between 11 and 12, we're gonna be having our private show. Then we're gonna be having the Extravaganza VIP, and then we're gonna be having the Extravaganza show itself.

• 1:33:32Jay Novella?

  You can go to our website to find out all the details on that. And the same exact thing I just said, we will also be doing in Madison, Wisconsin. And then, future plans are, we'll be doing this in New Haven, Connecticut. Details will come on that.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, Jay. We're going to do a couple of questions and emails. The first one's a correction. Last week I talked about horse evolution in that name logical fallacy segment, and I oversimplified this story, which means I got Europe and North America reversed. So what this is, this is how this is the actual history of horse evolution. Horses evolved in North America with repeated migrations to Europe and Asia, including modern horses. So modern horses evolved in North America, migrated to Europe and Asia, then they went extinct about 10,000 years ago in North America and were reintroduced from Europe.

• 1:34:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I thought you said that.

• 1:34:28Speaker 02

  I said that they evolved in Europe and were imported to North America.

• 1:34:33Cara Santa Maria?

  You did?

• 1:34:33Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:34:34Cara Santa Maria?

  The whole time. Maybe you said both of those things.

• 1:34:36Speaker 02

  Oh, maybe. But that's what I just said.

• 1:34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I knew horses evolved here, then went extinct.

• 1:34:40Speaker 02

  The thing I missed was that they evolved here, went extinct, and then were reintroduced.

• 1:34:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:34:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:46Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, just that just getting that straight. And then we get an email from Mad Brad, and Mad Brad writes, "Did you hear about the three tyconots stranded in orbit? They were they were preparing to head home when their return craft was struck and damaged by a chunk of irony." I think he meant iron.

• 1:35:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's so funny.

• 1:35:06Speaker 02

  I'm still assuming it was iron there. So this is true. What happened was they, you know, they were in the in their satellite, in their their space station, and the craft they were going to use to come home. They had already brought the new astronauts there. There were there's a brief period where both sets of astronauts are on board. And then they were about to leave to re. These guys have been there for like a year and a half. They've been there since April of 2024. And they and something that bit of space debris hit it. So they're investigating it. They think they're not going to be able to use it. They'll probably end up sending it back uncrewed. And then they'll have to wait for the next mission to go up and get them back. So, yeah, so this is not uncommon.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  And what's interesting, what's worthy about mentioning here is that there's a lot of space debris up there, and this is going to probably be happening more often, not less often.

• 1:35:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, we talked about that a lot.

• 1:36:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is like, and so it begins, you know, like, you can't even be in space without being constantly menaced by space debris.

• 1:36:08Speaker 04

  So this was not naturally occurring iron or rock in space? This was...

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  This is debris. 100% this is space debris, yeah.

• 1:36:15Bob Novella?

  Steve, you said this isn't uncommon. What exactly is not uncommon about this?

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  Stuff getting hit by space debris.

• 1:36:22Bob Novella?

  Okay. Fair enough. I mean, being stranded because of it?

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Oh, yes. This is the second time, right?

• 1:36:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's kind of, yeah.

• 1:36:30Speaker 02

  Uh, but they will get home. But I think, yeah, just being menaced by space debris is going to get increasingly frequent, I think.

• 1:36:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Until we get it to the point where nothing can go in space for a few centuries.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  Like Wally. Alright, let's go on to science or fiction.

• 1:36:47Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:36:56Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is frogs. What do you guys know about frogs? Alright, well, we'll find out. Let's find out. Alright, here we go. Item number one: Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Alright, number two: Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. And item number three: While most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles

• 1:37:40Speaker 02

  and even birth fully-formed froglets from their womb. Evan, go first.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Okay, uh, most frogs have teeth, but one species has a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Uh, yes, that species is called the Michigan Jay Frog. I saw it in a documentary on WB once. Uh, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:38:07Speaker 04

  Frog teeth? I can't recall I've ever paid close enough attention to frogs.

• 1:38:13Speaker 04

  To notice teeth. My memory is saying there are no teeth, but that's doesn't mean anything. I could be misremembering. Number two about frogs not having ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. So there's a thing called, if I recall from my biology class, what a tympanic membrane is what they have instead of the ears. And it would be, yeah, so vibrations or, you know, the tympanic aspect of that certainly that seems to make sense with what I know about no ears on the frogs. I'm going to say that one's science. And the last one here about while most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, yep.

• 1:38:58Speaker 04

  Some give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Hmm, well, I don't have a problem, I don't think with that. I mean, certainly we know about, you know, tadpoles is something you do learn about, but giving species to live tadpoles and froglets. Oh, boy. So it's either that or the teeth. Which one am I going to go with? I'll say the teeth one. That one's just of the three, that's that one. I have the least positive feeling about, so I'll say the teeth one is fiction.

• 1:39:32Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. Um, well, I'm not too sure about the teeth and the, the, uh, the hatching thing, but I would classify that membrane on the side of a frog's head as ears. They're not like human ears, but they, they, the vibration of that membrane is translated into sound. So I think those are ears. So I'll say that one's got to be fiction, assuming, you know, depending on the definition of ear here, but I'll just go with that. Okay. And Jay?

• 1:39:58Jay Novella?

  Okay. So this one with the most frogs have teeth. Most is a nice, general thing because it could, it can lean heavily either way. So I'm just going to say that's science. Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations. Yeah. I mean, especially through the water. That makes perfect sense. I mean, I've seen the little areas on their, on some frogs' heads where there might be like an ear type of thing happening, but I don't ever think I saw like a hole or anything like that. So that makes sense to me too. Okay. So most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles. Some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets. Well, look, that's, that's fiction. Thank you. Okay. And Kara?

• 1:40:39Speaker 04

  You know it's fiction if Jay can't get through it without laughing.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Care actually all spread out, so you have no help on the road.

• 1:40:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm struggling because these all seem like science to me. I do think frogs have teeth, but I don't think they're like our teeth. They're probably like teeny tiny and kind of soft. I agree with what, who said it? Bob said that like a tympanic membrane is still an ear. How do you define ear? The important part of the ear is what's on the inside. The outside is just like a cone. So that's not your ear. Yeah, the ear is the eardrum, right? The canal, the hair cells, all that good stuff. Yeah. And then, I don't know. I mean, I'm assuming that yes, there's always an exception to the rule.

• 1:41:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Like there are dinosaurs that gave, or I guess not dinosaurs, but marine reptiles that gave live birth, even though most of them laid eggs. So why wouldn't there be a frog? I think the one thing that nobody brought up is I don't know the difference between a frog and a toad. And what if like some of these things happen in toads, but not frogs? That would screw me. Like if you did a, if you did a news item about rabbits and you're like, well, that's not really a rabbit. That's in a hare. I would be like, okay, whatever. So that could get me on this, but I think I have to go with what Bob said. Like I do think those are ears. So that's gotta be the fiction.

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  Okay, so you guys are spread out, so we'll take these in order. Most frogs have teeth with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Evan, you think this is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science and this one is science. Yeah, you don't think of frogs as having teeth, but they do.

• 1:42:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  But they do. They do not use them for chewing. They just use them for holding on to prey, right? Just a gripping mechanism. But there is this one dude who's got a full grill, like upper and lower teeth. But they are these like small pointy teeth. They're not like our teeth. Yeah. It's not like the frog smiles and it's got a full set of human like teeth. Uh, there is a fish though, that strangely has human like teeth.

• 1:42:47Bob Novella?

  Yes, I've seen that.

• 1:42:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, it's so creepy.

• 1:42:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, but not frogs. All right.

• 1:42:52Bob Novella?

  Is that the one with the clear head?

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  No, that's the transparent head. I don't think so.

• 1:42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I think there's a few fish with clear heads.

• 1:42:57Bob Novella?

  I would totally, who's with me here?

• 1:42:59Speaker 02

  You said totally.

• 1:43:01Bob Novella?

  Totally. I would totally trade my teeth for their lasso tongue. Cause how cool would that be?

• 1:43:09Speaker 02

  All right, let's go on to number two frogs that do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. Bob and Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. Now Kara, to answer your question, toads are a type of frog. So all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.

• 1:43:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so this would be harder if it was the opposite.

• 1:43:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So it's the, yeah, so I can't say like, no, it's only in toads because they are frogs. So it would still.

• 1:43:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Nice.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  Right. So, and I guess, yeah, you, I think you guys hit upon the question here is because yes, those are tympanic membranes, those round areas behind the eyes usually that you could see on many frogs. But are they just sensing vibration? Or are they, as Bob says, translating that vibration into sound, right? And in order to do that, you need to have an inner ear, right? That inner ear with hair cells that does, that are connected to neurons that does translate it into actual sound. So the question is, do frogs have an inner ear?

• 1:44:13Bob Novella?

  Is it? Is that the question? I mean, to me, it's like, sound is vibrations. If you're using a membrane to sense vibrations and act on that information, eh, that's a primitive ear in my, in my.

• 1:44:22Speaker 02

  All right, relax.

• 1:44:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but then it's like, is an eye spot.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  This one is the fiction because they do have.

• 1:44:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, they actually do have an inner ear. They have a, they just don't have an external ear, right? But they have the tympanic membrane connected to an inner ear.

• 1:44:36Cara Santa Maria?

  What's that thing called again?

• 1:44:36Speaker 02

  And they hear, just like we hear, it's just through this exposed tympanic membrane.

• 1:44:41Cara Santa Maria?

  What's the external ear called again? The foldy bit? The metus? No, malleus?

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Those are the bones. No, no, the.

• 1:44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:44:48Bob Novella?

  On humans?

• 1:44:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yes, we have.

• 1:44:49Bob Novella?

  I think it's called the EE, external ear.

• 1:44:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, the oracle.

• 1:44:53Speaker 02

  There's.

• 1:44:54Bob Novella?

  Oh, is that it? I'd like that.

• 1:44:55Speaker 02

  There's the external auditory canal, and then there's the pina, which is the ear part that you see on the.

• 1:45:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the pina, or the, or it's called the oracle.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Right. So they don't have an, they don't have an auditory canal, they don't have the bones, you know, and they don't have any, any external ear. They just have, it's, their ear starts with the tympanic membrane, but then they have an internal, an inner ear with all the usual components of an inner ear.

• 1:45:16Bob Novella?

  At school.

• 1:45:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it is, it is true hearing. And that means that while most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles and even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Some of them are toads and they're called toadlets, which is adorable. Even froglets are adorable. Yes, they are what we call viviparous or viviparity, like nimba toads, for example. They give, they just, they give birth to live children from their womb. And some of them as tadpoles, but some, they carry them until they are fully formed, you know, froglets or toadlets, which is cool. But yeah, and you're right, like amphibians and reptiles, like all kinds of things happen.

• 1:46:01Speaker 02

  Like the idea that they all lay eggs is not true. It's not true of snakes, it's not true of other reptiles, it's not true of dinosaurs. So, yeah, this is not surprising. All right, well, good job, Bob and Kara. Yeah, good job, guys. Yay. Joy a while less. If you get worse. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  An informed appraisal of life absolutely requires a full understanding of life's arena, the universe. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe. Brian Greene. Incomparable, but Brian.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  Very nice. Love it. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. Sure, man. You got it. Thank you, Steve. Hey, next week's episode is the live show we recorded that we, when we were in Kansas, because I'm going to be out of the country next week. I'll be in Dubai. But next week's episode will definitely be our Kansas show. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Skeptic's Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to [email protected].

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:47:45Speaker 07

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