The Skeptics Guide #1079 - Mar 14 2026

Back to Basics: Fundamental Attribution Error; News Items: Improved Photosynthesis, Birth of a Magnetar, US Bioweapons Research, False Health Information from Chatbots; Your Questions and E-mails: Consistency; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Cara Santa Maria?

  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, March 12th, 2026, and this is your host, Eva Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:47Bob Novella?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 04

  Good evening, everyone. Are we missing one?

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jay's out of town this week. He was given a bread making, like an advanced bread baking class by his brother and sister-in-law. And of course, they schedule it on our recording day. And it was impossible to move it, so he kind of was locked in.

• 1:11Bob Novella?

  Teaching it or taking it?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Taking it. Wants to learn how to make baguettes.

• 1:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, then.

• 1:17Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Good for him.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  I hope we're the beneficiaries of that, right?

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's how he's gonna have to pay us back.

• 1:24Speaker 04

  Exact. Many baguettes.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  So I got a lot of, lot of feedback about our discussion around medieval times last week.

• 1:32Speaker 04

  Oh, the where you, where you go and you watch the jousting?

• 1:35Speaker 02

  No, no, you're not, you weren't here of it. I used that joke already, not, not the restaurant. And it wasn't, didn't have anything to do with the actual science or fiction items. It was just the banter around those items.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Always.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I said, from what I was reading, it was not, would not be uncommon to bathe a few times a year. And multiple people emailed back that that's a myth. They bathe more often, et cetera, et cetera. So some providing links. So I said, okay, let me do, you know, because I've read multiple reliable, meaning like academic, like sources. Like encyclopedic or whatever, you know, stating that it wasn't just fluff sites. And in fact, their narrative was that the notion that medieval people did not bathe at all, or only once a year or less, was a myth. They bathed more, you know, there were, most towns and cities had public bathing houses and they, they did bathe. It was, you know, probably a few, four or five

• 2:34Speaker 02

  times a year or whatever.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Or in like rivers or, yeah, they had.

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, either in rivers or in public bath houses, you know, you know, people do, you know, wash their hands and face before dinner. They have like a basin in their house to do that kind of stuff. And as I said, they wore the linen undergarments to change frequently because those are the ones that are going to get really dirty because you can't, wasn't really plausible to, to frequently wash your outer garments. But they were saying that even what I was saying was a myth and that people bathe more frequently and that this is just sort of anti-middle ages, middle ages bias, which is a thing. We've talked about that before, that later, like the Renaissance historians, like those medieval people were so backwards. Aren't we great and enlightened? Yeah. And it kind of created this mythology about how backwards the Middle Ages were. But I, I tried

• 3:22Speaker 02

  to do, let me, let me see if I could find out the most objective information about how often people bathed in the Middle Ages. And what I found was that nobody really knows. There really isn't. And even the links that people sent me is, it's just that they're just making a different inference from the evidence that we have, right? It's not like there's smoking gun evidence where we can say, oh no, this is definitely, for example, so there's, there's no document that says, this is how often people bathe, right? That that just, oftentimes, we don't have information about basic day to day stuff because nobody thinks that's information future generations, historians are going to be interested in. You know what I mean? So it's too, like, everybody knows it,

• 4:05Speaker 02

  it's too common. People don't specifically document that, so we have to infer it. So the links that I were sent or that I found that were making a case for more frequent bathing were saying, well, they had public bathhouses in most towns, which again, that's a fact that we can agree on. Yes, that is correct. There was knowledge of a connection between certain diseases and filth, you know? So it wasn't that they didn't think filth was a problem. They knew filth was a problem in terms of health and therefore they would want to, you know, bathe more. They wouldn't want, they wouldn't be comfortable living in filth, basically is the conclusion of that. But again, none of this says how often they thought was necessary, you know?

• 4:45Speaker 02

  There's one document that does mention a specific period of time, but that was a company that required its employees to bathe at least once every two weeks. So what's interesting is that, okay, but what do we infer from that?

• 5:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  So they were saying, see, these people were bathing once every two weeks. Like, okay, but if that were the standard, would they have need to have a rule about it? You know what I mean?

• 5:13Bob Novella?

  It seems like they weren't doing it every few weeks.

• 5:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Or, or, no. Or there's a small subset of people, kind of like how there are signs that say, no shirt, no shoes, no service. Some people are trying to go in that store without shoes on, but most people know they should wear shoes.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that, exactly, you can interpret this both ways. You could say, yeah, that every two weeks was the standard and they wanted to make sure that all of their employees were living up to that standard. Or you could argue that it wasn't standard and for that business, they wanted their employees to be especially clean. And especially clean means every two weeks, right? Which is sort of not what we would think of as, you know, extra clean or especially clean. So it seems that most, I think the sweet spot of most of the references I'm seeing is that bathing was anywhere between once a week to once a month, which is a little bit more frequently than what I was saying, like once every couple of months. This is like once, okay, I'm like, fine, okay, you could infer that from the same data, you know, that I was reading.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  But you know, the thing is, like, how do you, what do you infer from the fact that there were a lot of bathhouses? Well, you still had to go to a public bathhouse and pay money.

• 6:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So some people still couldn't afford it.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so a lot of people probably could not afford that. And so maybe you would get by with face and hand washing in a basin rather than a whole body hot water bath, you know. And then in the 1600s, the notion that hot water would open your pores and let in disease became popular. And so hot baths actually became less common for a while. So I don't know. So again, there's no smoking gun evidence. You don't really know. People just making different inferences citing different, you know, data. It probably is, you know, it's certainly perfectly reasonable to say, oh yeah, maybe, you know, a lot of people were bathing maybe more once a month rather than a few times

• 7:09Speaker 02

  a year. Fine. I don't think there's any evidence that I would say is compelling that people were like bathing once a week or more frequently. That I think is at the other end of the spectrum.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  And there's no uniformity.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  And this is everyone acknowledges, yeah, there's no uniformity. Definitely this is there's a lot of variability that also was probably socioeconomic as well.

• 7:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and we have to remember too, like there, what's the motivation? And you, you mentioned this when we were doing science or fiction, right? Germ theory was not that, you know, we weren't there yet, but people didn't like things that smelled bad.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:46Cara Santa Maria?

  People still could smell bacteria.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  But you know.

• 7:50Speaker 04

  Unless they got used to it.

• 7:51Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 7:52Speaker 04

  Desensitized.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  When does your, I haven't watched BO peak?

• 7:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, probably pretty quick.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't probably after five or six days. I mean.

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But then again, you, as you mentioned, uh, cause we've both experienced this in, in hospital settings with, um, some of our unhoused neighbors who are also have like open wounds or who are dealing with health issues. There are some smells that we are not used to smelling.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, even without that, even without open wounds, just I haven't bathed in weeks.

• 8:23Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, the weeks thing is different than the peak two days thing for sure.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. But, um, I remember one patient, I'll never forget it. So he, you know, he's, he's in the, the ER stall and I needed him to take off his boots so I could complete my exam. He looks at me, he goes, man, I haven't taken off my boots in three weeks. He was just warning me like, well, gotta do it. And yes, you could definitely tell.

• 8:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  You had to take them off for weeks.

• 8:51Speaker 04

  Do you have an N95 or something to help?

• 8:53Cara Santa Maria?

  But what about, what about teeth brushing? Cause we also got a lot of emails about that.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  Well, they didn't brush their teeth and they didn't have toothpaste, but they did, you know, chew on things.

• 9:04Cara Santa Maria?

  On sticks.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:06Cara Santa Maria?

  But apparently some, it did, you know, some of it worked, like they used, you know, mint.

• 9:10Speaker 04

  It's better than nothing.

• 9:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Or parsley or herbs or, you know, and I don't know, tell me what, did you read some sources? Like some sources claimed that obviously tooth decay was still worse back then because they didn't have modern dental practices and some claimed that it wasn't as bad as we think it would have been because they also didn't eat high sugar diets like we do.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  So.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Or didn't live as long to have that.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know.

• 9:35Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Did you watch they will, they shall not grow old?

• 9:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I loved it. We watched it together. We were all traveling, remember? Yeah, we saw it in the theater.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  One thing that stuck out was this is what 19 teens, right? 1916, 1917 and it's showing video of like British soldiers. And every single one of them had horrible dentition, even the officers, like every single one. That was just the standard. To me, that's like, that's what the populace looks like when you don't have modern dental care.

• 10:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's a difference between not having orthodontia and also it's hard to know.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  It was more than that.

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It, it, yeah, but it's also hard to know if during wartime, their teeth took a backseat. You know what I mean?

• 10:21Speaker 02

  No, that wasn't the kind of thing that, it's not just they had unbrushed teeth. And it's not just they didn't have straight teeth. They had rotting teeth.

• 10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  You know, that's the kind of thing that doesn't happen overnight and is not, or just a purely orthodontic issue.

• 10:35Speaker 04

  And there's genetic component to it.

• 10:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and there's a, there's something about when we see soldiers on the battlefield, there's kind of a, a cross section of the country that you see out there. And even sometimes it, cause I don't remember, these guys were not all drafted. A lot of them signed up early and they were eager, but there was still a draft, right?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  And this is, this is Brit, British that I'm referring to.

• 11:00Cara Santa Maria?

  These were British soldiers.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  And there are a lot of, and I'm saying, that's why I'm saying even the officers. So it wasn't just, oh, we're looking at the lower socioeconomic people that got sent to war. It was pretty much across the board. It was just shocking, like, oh, this is, this renders every period piece I've ever seen obsolete.

• 11:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true, but there is, you know, I mean, the thing about teeth is that we have evidence of teeth. We can just look at the teeth of skeletons. Yeah. So apparently there is a fair amount of evidence that their teeth weren't as bad as we think they should have been.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the question, you're correct. If you look back at like Cro-Magnon Man.

• 11:40Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I mean, like in the middle, in meaningful.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't when that downturn in dental hygiene took place because we.

• 11:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I don't think their diets were like hours. Yeah, they weren't eating sugar every meal and in between meals and drinking soda. Yeah.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. They said it was, sugar itself was extremely rare and expensive.

• 12:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I love this. Gilbert the Englishman, a 13th century doctor, said, quote, "Dry the teeth after eating with a dry linen cloth so that no food sticks to them and there will be no putrid matter among the teeth to make them rotten."

• 12:15Speaker 04

  Putrid matter.

• 12:16Speaker 02

  That's a good tip.

• 12:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 12:20Bob Novella?

  It's, you know, guys, it's funny to think that in six or 700 years, people are going to be like, uh, looking at some archives of things like, say, what comes to my mind is the, uh, the hygiene subreddit. And I have not, I have not read that subreddit a lot, but I hear about it. And apparently, uh, if, if future historians are looking at that, they're going to think, man, these, these people were brushing their teeth and showering three and four times a day. Cause apparently from what I've heard, there's a lot of obsessive compulsives in that subreddit. And they're like, what are you talking about? You gotta take three showers a day and brush your, you know, it's just like, I just laugh when I hear it because they just seem way over, overboard.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Reddit studies, great.

• 13:04Speaker 02

  But the sources also say they didn't have like refined sugar like we have, but they used honey a lot as their sweetener. And I think the effect is still the same. I know there was, I watched a documentary where you can, you can date the dramatic increase in, in dental carries to Native Americans when they started using maple syrup. Once, once they discovered maple syrup, boom, diabetes peaked, dental, you know, health went down the tubes. So.

• 13:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, sugar.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. Syrup, honey, sugar. It's all bad for the teeth.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  People's satisfaction rose.

• 13:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 13:43Speaker 04

  Happiness, happiness with their food increased.

• 13:46Bob Novella?

  Buddy the elf must have really bad teeth.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, you are going to introduce a new segment, Back to Basics.

• 13:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Back to Basics. Woohoo. So we will sometimes do a Name That Logical Fallacy, where we'll read like an email or we'll watch a video that is riddled with logical fallacies and try and come up with which informal logical fallacies are present. But we also talk quite a bit on the show about just these fundamental, basic cognitive biases, errors of thinking, you know, the core stuff that's in our eponymous book. And I was recording an episode of the other podcast I work on, my podcast, Talk Nerdy, this morning with, and this is not out yet, so don't go try looking for it. It won't be out for a few weeks now, but with an author

• 14:40Cara Santa Maria?

  named Dr. Julia Minton, who's at the Harvard Kennedy School. And she, we were talking about disagreements and how to increase one's ability to kind of, maybe not come to consensus, but to have better arguments, to understand other people's perspectives more. And she mentioned in passing that she was trained under the psychologist Lee Ross. And I was like, I recognize that name. And she was like, yes, because he coined the term, the fundamental attribution error. And I was like, oh, this is so basic, right? This is one of these basic, it's fundamental cognitive biases that we often throw around. But I

• 15:25Cara Santa Maria?

  think it's important periodically to remind ourselves what it is and why it is such a fundamental error in thinking. So anybody other than Steve, if you guys remember, what is the fundamental attribution error?

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know. It's an overemphasis of some, of certain things.

• 15:45Cara Santa Maria?

  But specific things. What are those things? Think about it, attribution. What does it have to do with attributing?

• 15:52Speaker 04

  It has to do with your own.

• 15:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Your own and other people's.

• 15:54Bob Novella?

  Personal trait, like personal traits?

• 15:56Speaker 04

  Personal.

• 15:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. And what is the fundamental attribution error say? When somebody does a bad thing, what do we tend to attribute it to?

• 16:07Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, they're screw ups.

• 16:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Why are they screwing up?

• 16:10Bob Novella?

  Because they made that stupid mistake and it can't be, that's probably.

• 16:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It's because they suck, right? They screwed up because there's something in their personality that makes them bad. Whereas when I screw up, it's because of the circumstance.

• 16:23Bob Novella?

  It's an oopsie, like an unforced error.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Internal versus external factors. When I do it, it's external factors. When somebody else does it, it's internal factors.

• 16:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, when I do it.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  My stuff versus your shit.

• 16:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, when I do it, it's a state. When you do it, it's a trait, right? So the reason that that guy cut me off in traffic is because at his core, he's an asshole who doesn't care about other people.

• 16:47Speaker 04

  That's right, Kara. That's happens to me all the time.

• 16:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But the reason I cut that guy off is because I was running late for a very important date.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  By that other asshole.

• 16:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 16:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, no, mine was totally justified.

• 16:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And so this is sometimes called the correspondence bias. It's sometimes called the over attribution effect. Either way, it is kind of a hard name to link to the bias. Fundamental attribution error doesn't sound like it means a whole lot. But Lee Ross did coin it after there was a very classic experiment by Jones and Harris. Lee Ross wrote a paper in 1977. That's when we, most people would say that's where the term came from. In the Joe and Harris 1967 study, the researchers hypothesized that people would, you know, they would probably attribute chosen behaviors, like willful behaviors,

• 17:40Cara Santa Maria?

  to personality and then chance directed behaviors to a situation. But they're, they didn't support their, their findings didn't support their hypothesis because the fundamental attribution error was like confounding those outcomes. So they were like, I bet you if people are making their own decision, other people are going to say, oh, that's because of who they are. But if something just happens randomly, they'll say that's because of the situation. But it turns out. If we're the ones doing the bad thing, it's because of happenstance. But if you're the one doing the bad thing, it's probably because you are a bad person. And that is a fundamental way that people go through the world thinking.

• 18:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And when I was talking to Dr. Julia Minson today, she was saying, you know, why do you think that is? Why do people do that?

• 18:32Speaker 04

  Is it a heuristic of some kind?

• 18:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, sure. But I mean, I think even beyond that, when did we develop that heuristic? Why do we just go to that place in our thinking? Is it because we're fundamentally selfish? Is it because?

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Well, probably, well, it's probably a self-preservation.

• 18:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But why would we need to?

• 18:48Bob Novella?

  We're more charitable with ourselves than other people.

• 18:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But that's sort of a circular answer because that's just what it says.

• 18:54Bob Novella?

  That's what they got right now.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  So again, we could make the fundamental attribution error about the fundamental attribution error. Is it internal or external factors? The external factor is you know more about your own circumstances than you know about another person's circumstance.

• 19:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. And you are looking through your own eyes. It is your perspective. So she told a story, not to spoil the upcoming episode, about how she got interested in judgment and decision-making research because she was a ballroom dancer. And when she was doing ballroom dancing with her partner, who also happened to be her romantic partner, they were doing things in step to the music. They were physically occupying the same space. They were, her left leg went, his right leg went. You would think that two people who are so incredibly in sync would never argue about what was happening right in front of them. But she said, the only time they would argue was on the dance floor. And they always saw the situation differently,

• 19:52Cara Santa Maria?

  even though they were doing what most people would consider as the exact same thing. And so she became really interested in why it is that my experience is so wildly different than your experience, even when we're occupying the same space, even when we're on two sides of the same experience. And so, you know, one of the kind of basic explanations for that is exactly what you mentioned, Steve. It's that I have more information when I'm driving. Driving in my car, I know the context.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 20:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I know what happened leading up to this moment. It's easier for me to empathize with myself than it is with somebody else because I have more data.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  I think that's important to recognize because when you do have more data about someone else, we do get more charitable and empathic. That's the whole walk a mile in their shoes before you judge them wisdom, which is absolutely correct.

• 20:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:44Bob Novella?

  So what if you have a horrible memory about even yourself? Would you then be mean to yourself because you forget the reasoning for why you're doing what you're doing?

• 20:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, often the fundamental attribution error is less about memory and it's more about what's happening in that moment.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:03Bob Novella?

  Well, that's what I mean. Yeah, your memory would have to be pretty bad if you forget, why am I driving here?

• 21:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 21:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Wait, what just happened?

• 21:10Cara Santa Maria?

  There are some, that does open up some other interesting conversations that we can have offline because I do think people with like poor autobiographical memories have other issues, but also hacks in life. It can be a good, yeah.

• 21:23Bob Novella?

  Compensation, methods of compensation.

• 21:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it can be a good thing and a bad thing for a lot of different reasons. But I do want to mention before we move on, what is, I like to call it the opposite of the fundamental attribution error. But there is a situation in which this sort of equal and opposite occurs. And that's, we were talking about when somebody does a screw, a screw up, right? And when I do a screw up, but what happens when I do something good? Is that because of circumstance?

• 21:47Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 21:48Cara Santa Maria?

  What does my bias tell me? No, that's because I'm awesome and I'm, and I'm just good at doing good things. And when somebody else does something good, oh, that's because they got a leg up somehow. Or that's because, you know, life made it easier for them. That one is called the self-serving bias. And it's, it's, it's kind of seen as the opposite of the fundamental attribution error.

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? So it's not just about these internal versus external pressures or attributions. It's also about the situation and whether the situation has a valence on it of good or bad, moral or immoral. We do tend to, you know, magnify our personality traits and our sort of. Moral values when we do good things and we sort of minimize those things when when we see good behavior from others and then it's vice versa when that behavior is deemed bad.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  But what's interesting is that there's probably selective pressures to be that way. There's probably an advantage to thinking I'm awesome.

• 22:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, there is.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And when people are depressed, they don't think that they think I'm terrible. They have negative self thoughts.

• 22:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And also, I would say that the selective pressure, and I like that you use the word selective pressure. You didn't say that there was an evolutionary advantage because some studies show that there are a lot of social and cultural pressures here and that when the same paradigms are used in more collectivistic cultures, we don't see the bias come through, or at least not as extremely. So it does seem to be stronger in individualistic societies where I me me, I'm the person, I make my own future. I'm the reason I'm so great is the the common narrative that we grow up with. And and you don't always see that in collective.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, to some extent, you have to sell yourself. No one else is going to do it. And again, there's probably a social advantage to doing that. And we kind of know that there is from other data. We know that like men are better at selling themselves than women are, and they get paid more partly as a result. For example.

• 23:57Cara Santa Maria?

  That would apply to pretty much all societies. I think, but you know, across the board, we don't always see these biases. We see them much more heavy in in these individual societies. Yeah.

• 24:10Speaker 02

  All right, cool. Yeah, the fundamental attribution error, everyone really needs to know that, internalize it. Because that's something we do every day. And if you just pause and say, okay, I'm not going to make this mistake. I'm going to think about what external factors that person, maybe they're having a bad day. Maybe something awful had to, whatever, just think about that. Really changes the way you know, you interact with the people.

• 24:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And you mentioned often, and I do it a lot in therapy. The principle of charity is a great way to practice countering this. I would say that this is probably within the top three things that I'm consistently working on with patients and therapy.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Because it's not even just about letting the other people off the hook. When we start thinking differently, it actually softens our own anger. And it helps us lead a life that is just less tense and less hard.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. All right. Thanks, Kara.

• 25:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Guys, I want to talk to you about photosynthesis.

• 25:07Speaker 04

  Must you?

• 25:08Speaker 02

  What if I told you that it's possible that we could increase the productivity of some of our staple crops by 50%?

• 25:18Speaker 04

  50?

• 25:19Speaker 02

  50%.

• 25:20Speaker 04

  So you're mad.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Just by making their photosynthesis more efficient.

• 25:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like a story like this seems to come up like every.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  That's because you're correct, and I've spoken about it myself. And this is because this is an ongoing series of research efforts looking for this holy grail. And we're not there yet. But every time there's a significant milestone, I feel like it's worth talking about because and there's some interesting wrinkles to this, which I thought, oh, these are interesting enough that I think this is good to talk about. So you know what the, does anybody remember the name of the enzyme that's responsible for basically making the photosynthesis reaction happen?

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Nabisco.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Close. Rubisco.

• 26:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  Rubisco.

• 26:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you say Nabisco?

• 26:05Speaker 04

  Oh, wait, no. They make delicious treats.

• 26:07Speaker 02

  They do. Rubisco is responsible for over 90% of all carbon in living things. Think about it that way.

• 26:16Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it basically fixes carbon from carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into sugars. You know, so the, the reaction sunlight with carbon dioxide and water yields glucose and oxygen. Right? That's Rubisco that does that. It's, you know, a widespread enzyme in nature. And it's the most common enzyme in the world, in fact. It's, it's the cornerstone of living ecosystems. Right? That life depends more on Rubisco pretty much than anything else. But ironically, it's not that efficient. And you would think evolutionarily, that makes absolutely no sense. But it does if you understand more of the story.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  And this is one of the wrinkles here that I thought was really interesting. So let me, I'll tell you what the main reason is, unless somebody wants to guess. What's the main reason for the inefficiency of rubisco? Is that it also catalyzes a side reaction with oxygen. Right? So you could combine water with CO2 or water with O2. And that side reaction wastes energy, right? Now you're using energy to make things that are not useful. But not only that, that side reaction creates toxic things that you then have to spend energy to get rid of.

• 27:41Speaker 02

  Now 30% of the energy that it, that, um, that plants get from photosynthesis, they have to waste just dealing with these O2 side reactions. Dealing with this waste from these toxic byproducts of these O2 side reactions.

• 27:58Bob Novella?

  That's not efficient.

• 27:59Speaker 04

  That ain't good.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  That's not good. So, but why do you think evolution hasn't fixed that problem yet?

• 28:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's, that's a good question. I mean, the, the answer, I think the answer could be that they went down, it went down a genetic evolutionary pathway that you can't back up and undo that. That's just like.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the ultimate answer, but why did it do that in the first place?

• 28:18Bob Novella?

  Well, maybe it didn't matter when it evolved.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  It didn't.

• 28:21Speaker 04

  Oh, no oxygen.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  Why didn't it matter?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  No oxygen.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  No oxygen. So rubisco evolved in the ancient earth before the great oxidation event.

• 28:29Bob Novella?

  That's some old shit right there, man.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, it's a very old end sign.

• 28:32Speaker 04

  You're going back billions, right?

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, because there were, there were photosynthesizing critters. That's what, that's who made the great oxidation event, right? Is photosynthesis. So rubisco evolves on an ancient earth where the, there's a lot, there's more CO2 in the atmosphere than there is now, and there's no oxygen at all. And oxygen slowly builds up, you know, over hundreds of millions of years. That's the great oxidation event. So by the time there was a significant. Amount of oxygen in the atmosphere. Too late. Rubisco was evolutionarily locked in and it was too late to get rid of it. Right? Does that make sense?

• 29:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, totally.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  So it was just a unfortunate contingency of evolutionary history.

• 29:13Bob Novella?

  It's a hidden flaw, right? Just a hidden flaw that didn't reveal itself until the earth is many millions of years.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Until oxygen was introduced.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  Now, there is this trade off where the faster rubisco works, like the faster it catalyzes a reaction with sunlight and CO2 and water. The more, the higher the percentage of side reactions with O2. And the slower, if you could slow it down, you have less side reactions.

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Oh, slow this, slow it down?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that slows it down. So either way, you're screwed.

• 29:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  But so evolution, evolution is good at sort of optimizing that trade off. But essentially it trapped rubisco in this trade off. All right, but some photosynthesizing clades have found evolutionary solutions to the rubisco trap. Does anybody want to guess what one type of solution might be? How could we get out of this problem with rubisco?

• 30:15Bob Novella?

  They concentrate the carbon?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 30:19Speaker 04

  Something else.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  So that's one big way. It's called CCMs or carbon concentrating mechanisms. So that's one type of solution.

• 30:31Cara Santa Maria?

  What about different enzymes, like just not using rubisco?

• 30:34Speaker 02

  So that's not one of the solutions because it's too baked in. You know, it's evolutionary.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Fundamental.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  And it's multi gene, like the whole system around it. You know what I mean?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  One mutation can't do it. All we can say is it must be hard to do because it hasn't happened.

• 30:52Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I think it, I thought cam plants don't only use rubisco.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  So cam is one other method, right? So there's.

• 30:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they use a different enzyme at night.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Well, hang on, so there's, there were three.

• 31:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Methods. One is CCM, carbon concentrating mechanisms. Another one is some plants like some cacti.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  They concentrate carbon dioxide, they convert it into an acid at night. And then they use that during the day to increase the concentration of carbon dioxide. So basically, they're storing it up at night when they're not photosynthesizing. And then they use that to increase the concentration of CO2 during the day.

• 31:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so they're fixing the carbon at night.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Right, so what you're talking about is CAM, which is

• 31:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Crassulacean acid metabolism. That's what we're talking about. The CO2 at night is stored as an acid and then used during the day to add to the photosynthesis.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Alright, so how do the plants that increase the concentration of carbon dioxide, how do they do it? And there's one way that's called C4, right? The traditional version of photosynthesis with rubisco is C3. And then one type, some plants use what's called C4, which uses a biochemical pump to move CO2 into sheath cells where the rubisco is concentrated.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  What's a sheath cell?

• 32:21Speaker 02

  It's just a type of plant cell.

• 32:23Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's

• 32:23Speaker 04

  What's it otherwise doing?

• 32:24Cara Santa Maria?

  That, that's what it evolved.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  That's what it's doing.

• 32:26Speaker 04

  Well, that is its purpose.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's, so it's there, it has a lot of rubisco, and then you have this system of tubes and veins with pumps pumping CO2 into the sheath cells.

• 32:37Speaker 04

  Holy moly.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  That's a C4 photosynthesizing plant. It's only about 8 to 15% of land plants have developed some sort of CCM, including this C4. And this method only evolved about 20 to 30 million years ago. That's not that long ago.

• 32:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so, so

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Evolutionarily speaking.

• 32:54Cara Santa Maria?

  So C4 is concentrating carbon, this, like schematically, like through, like in space, in a different part of the planet?

• 33:01Speaker 02

  By using these structures called pyranoids. So these are specifically evolved structures that concentrate rubisco in parts of the chloroplast. And then they use the pumps to bring CO2 to the pyranoids.

• 33:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And then CAM plants are doing it with time.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  They're, yeah, they're taking the CO2 at night and using it during, storing it for the day.

• 33:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha, so those are two different kind of evolutionary

• 33:23Bob Novella?

  Pathways to concentrate CO2.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  So we've been working on, the last time we spoke about this, we've been working on getting the genetics of the C4 photosynthesis down so that we could make, we can import it into plants that are using, currently using C3. So right now maize corn is a C4 plant, right? And so one of our staple crops already is using this advanced photosynthesis, the C4 photosynthesis. But wheat and rice, the two other ones do not, they're C3. So we're

• 33:57Speaker 04

  trying to do- Let's get them up to speed.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're trying to get the C4 from maize and genetically engineer it into wheat and rice, which would be a game changer for agriculture across the world. The problem is-

• 34:09Speaker 04

  This is possible.

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Making the pyranoide structures and the CO2 pumps and all that stuff-

• 34:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Is complicated. It requires restructuring of the plant leaves to some extent, and it's multi-genetic, and we just haven't been able to get it to all work together. However-

• 34:26Speaker 04

  Are they close-ish?

• 34:27Speaker 02

  However, now we get to the news item, okay?

• 34:30Bob Novella?

  That's a lot of table setting you got there, Steve.

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Well, that is a, you do have-

• 34:35Speaker 02

  I'm teeing you up, and now here we go. Alright, so there is another clade of plants that you, that have a different way of concentrating their rubisco. These are called hornworts, and these are small ground plants. They use a much simpler mechanism to concentrate the rubisco. They evolved an extra little tail on the C terminus of one of the subunits of rubisco. So rubisco is a protein that's assembled from multiple subunit proteins, right? And on one end of one of those subunits, there's this little extra tail. And that

• 35:16Speaker 02

  tail, which is called RBCS star, or the star region of rubisco, is like Velcro. It sticks to itself. It sticks to rubisco. So a bunch of rubisco with this star tail tends to clump together.

• 35:33Bob Novella?

  With other

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Which then gives it the opportunity to to concentrate CO2 where the rubisco is concentrated. So what the study did did was they took the little tail, the star, right, the the rubisco star, and they added it to a rabbit dopsis, which is an unrelated plant, often used in research. And just adding that one little piece spontaneously caused the rubisco to clump. So they they demonstrated that it is that tail that's making the rubisco clump, and that that feature can translate to other plant species, even ones that are not related.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  So this strongly suggests that we could easily engineer clumping rubisco in other plants just by adding this little short segment to the gene for rubisco.

• 36:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But does this solve the toxicity problem?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  So, no, this is only half the solution.

• 36:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  So we will be talking about this again in the future, especially if we figure out how to do the other half. So so remember, we have to concentrate rubisco and CO2 in the same place. We now found a much simpler way of concentrating rubisco than the the pyranoids, right, you know, way to do it. And now all we have to do is figure out a way to bring CO2 to these clumps of rubisco. This probably will be harder to do.

• 36:58Bob Novella?

  Ah.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Maybe we can figure out ways of borrowing the biochemical pumps, you know, from the C4 plants. So there's already extensive research into this, so hopefully these two things will play off of each other. You know, again, this is the kind of thing where this is a huge milestone, but we're not over over the finish line yet. But imagine if we get that other piece, you know, probably if we do, it'll be from C4 plants. And we have a relatively simple way that we could use genetic modification like CRISPR in order to best import it into any plant, and we could make C4 wheat and C4 rice. This would, again, increase their yield by 50%. It would be absolutely

• 37:38Bob Novella?

  That's nuts, 50%.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  transformative to agriculture. And that's why this is the holy grail right now of GMOs. And if we can crack this, the payoff is huge, is absolutely huge.

• 37:51Speaker 04

  That's tremendous.

• 37:52Speaker 02

  So this is a good, this is a good win. And and the the lead up was the interesting part, right?

• 37:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Understanding why this is so important, but yeah, it's cool.

• 38:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, Steve, I'm glad you mentioned the Great Oxidation Event. I was a little rusty on this.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:05Bob Novella?

  Oh, Jesus.

• 38:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Hi-yo.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  All right.

• 38:11Speaker 04

  Thank you, Bob. Thank you, Karen.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Bob, tell us about the birth of a magnetar.

• 38:16Bob Novella?

  All right, guys. So this was, this was so, so much fun. A recent super luminous supernova incident may have solved the mystery of what makes them so damn bright, and it just may be because of a wonderful thing called a magnetar. So this is from a recent paper from the University of California, Berkeley Scientist, published in Nature. So first, let's talk about, let's do my own version of some table setting here. Let's talk about super luminous supernovae. I mean, I wasn't that familiar with, with these guys. They're like regular, you know, supernovae that are caused by core collapse, right? The big stars.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:51Bob Novella?

  So the process here is, this is the same because fusion stops, right? Fusion stops in the, the iron nickel core that's created, and this, and that is what sets the supernova stage. Once that happens, the, the water's broke, the baby's going to be born. There's basically no stopping it. So the, the outward pressure, this outward pressure that the fusion causes, after millions of years, finally loses to gravity. Gravity wins, as it always does, and the core essentially collapses under its own weight into either a neutron star, or if there's enough mass, a black hole. Now, that collapse unleashes just ridiculous amounts of energy, and the resulting shock wave and flood of neutrinos, by the way, then blow out the rest of the star into an expanding shell of glowing gas and debris

• 39:36Bob Novella?

  that we can detect and we call supernova. But physics can make sense of how bright a typical supernova like that is. Everything fits together. Sure, it's complicated, and there's details, nuanced details, we were not that familiar with, that we would like to be more familiar with, but it, there's no real mystery there of why it has that brightness. The mystery arises, though, with super luminous supernovae because they're 10 times brighter. And it's like, where is this extra energy coming from? There it was just, like I said, a mystery and you know, there, there are a couple of theories about it, more than a couple, I would guess, but one common one was that shock wa- shock

• 40:17Bob Novella?

  waves interacting with this ejected gas and, and dust are, are magnifying, you know, the, um, the, the light that we see somehow, or more intriguing, that there was a hidden power source that's magnifying it and amplifying it, and that hidden power source, the, the theory goes, is a magnetar. Now, magnetar, talked about it a few times, not too many times on the show, it's a neutron star, it's the, probably the most fascinating type of neutron star, in my opinion, you know, it's a city-sized remnant of a supernova, uh, super dense, right, but it has a huge, ridiculously huge magnetic field, and they think that this magnetic field can pump energy into the supernova process, and that's why it's

• 41:02Bob Novella?

  so bright. And when I say it's huge, I gotta put that into perspective a little bit. For example, a gauss, you guys have heard of gauss, it's a measure of the strength of a magnetic field.

• 41:10Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 41:10Bob Novella?

  Uh, the Earth's magnetic field is 0.5 gauss, a fridge magnet, 100 gauss, a magnetar, up to a quadrillion gauss. It's just so, it's just silly, really. It's, it's, and it's not like, oh, it's a super, super strong magnet. The environment around, anywhere near a magnetar is just so hellish.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  It must warp the, uh, environment.

• 41:32Bob Novella?

  Oh, my god, yeah, yeah, exactly. Uh, it's, it's just so hellish and extreme, that it's inimical to biology and even matter as, as we know it. This is fascinating. Electron orbitals in the presence of a magnetar are squeezed into these thin lines that are parallel to the magnetic field lines, right, it kinda makes sense. Um, so in hydrogen atom, the nucleus stays, stays together, because those nuclear forces are just really strong, but a hydrogen atom would be 200 times narrower, they'd be like these little needles, like, what the hell? I found something from NASA that said that at a million kilometers, a magnetar, a magnetar's field could rip red blood cells from your body, but, but, uh, and I, I didn't come across that stat in a lot of places, so I'm not, I'm not sure if it's a million kilometers, or how that would actually work, but-

• 42:18Bob Novella?

  I did more commonly come across this statistic at a, at a thousand kilometers. And you wouldn't even see the magnetar. It's a thousand kilometers away. You wouldn't see it with your naked eye. It'd be essentially invisible. But even at a thousand kilometers, it would make chemistry and life as we know it impossible. Everybody dead, all credit cards wiped. I mean, forget it. This is like, talk about a weapon.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  So it takes over its immediate neighborhood. Everything else is insignificant.

• 42:41Bob Novella?

  Right, yeah. So, so even, even changing the shape of matter, this was so fascinating. Okay, so anywho, let's get back to, to this, to the problem. So the mystery may have been solved and of this, this energy, this extra brightness from super luminous supernovae. And it all boils down to a supernova that happened a couple of years ago. SN2024 AFAV. Um, I'm not sure what AFAV stands for, but that's the name. And this, this was a supernova that was 327 megaparsecs away, fairly far away. So this super luminous supernova, and when they discovered it, yeah, it was extremely bright, right? That's what they, basically, they're all very bright. That's why they're called super luminous.

• 43:22Bob Novella?

  And it also showed bumps in its light curve, like, like all the other super luminous explosions. Uh, but this was very, very detailed bump. Now, now imagine, if you're looking at a light curve of a, of a supernova, you know, the light, you got a graph and it, and it rises from left to right. It rises up and then it reaches its peak brightness and then it, then it dims a little, but then it brightens and dims and brightens and dims and brightens. So it goes through that pattern like five times for this supernova. And each time it repeats, it's a little bit closer together. It's a little bit, a little bit faster. So the big question then, can the magnetar makes, makes sense of that? Can, if you, can you insert a magnetar into this environment? And does it explain these weird things that are happen, happening?

• 44:06Bob Novella?

  They have, they have a model, they came with a model that best describes what they were observing here. So they, so imagine this, you got, you got the supernova and it created a, at birth of magnetar, the supernova creates a magnetar. And it has, as we know, it has these huge magnetic fields. These huge magnetic fields caused the magnetar to lose a lot of rotational speed really fast. Cause every time we see a Magnetar, they're not rotating that fast, not as fast, not nearly as fast as a regular pulsar without the huge magnetic field. But when they're born, obviously, they have a huge, a fast rotation, but it loses it really fast. And when that happens, the magnetic field causes it to slow down really

• 44:45Bob Novella?

  fast. And that's dumping a lot of, a lot of energy. Imagine something as weighing multiple masses of our sun, as big as a city, rotating really fast, and then you're slowing it down in, in potentially in moments or minutes. That is a tremendous amount of rotational energy. It's got to go somewhere. And what happens is their model is saying that it's getting dumped into the expanding supernova debris, and that's what's, that's what's making it brighter. So that's, so that could potentially explain this mystery. At least one explanation for a super luminous supernovae is this magnetar that's created that, that dumps its rotational energy into the expanding supernova debris, making it a lot brighter. So that's actually, that's all, that's good.

• 45:30Speaker 04

  So Bob, is it adding photons or enhancing the photons?

• 45:33Bob Novella?

  But what's essentially happening is the rotational energy is being translated to the expanding debris. So that, we just got to go with that.

• 45:40Speaker 02

  But, but they're getting brighter.

• 45:41Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  So that's more photons.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  So quantity.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  So not just getting a higher frequency, right? They're not shifting to, to higher frequency light. It's just more light because it's brighter.

• 45:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I'm not sure, I'm not sure about the rotational energy and how, and how that is, is, is changed in a way to make it brighter. So I mean,

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 46:02Bob Novella?

  I don't have that answer, sorry.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Okay, that's all right.

• 46:05Bob Novella?

  The next question then is the light bumps. So you've got these light bumps that all these super luminous supernovae exhibit. So does the magnetar make sense for that as well? And if it does, that's, that would be exactly what, what, what they wanted. So, um, so imagine now you've got this magnetar, and this is what they came up with, and this is what their model kind of makes, makes sense of. You've got this magnetar, and it's got, um, an accretion disk around it, right? So this is separate, this is separate from the expanding shell of gas and, dust that's being that's luminous this is just an accretion disk that's around that's around this magnetar that's kind of slowly like a black hole's accretion disk it orbits around it and

• 46:48Bob Novella?

  and slowly is being absorbed by by the black hole or in this case the the magnetar now this disk is tilted it's actually it's not we're not seeing it edge on we're not seeing it right at its face but it's kind of tilted it's tilted at an angle so what's happened what they what the model is telling them here is that the magnetar the spinning magnetar I mean it's not spinning as fast as it was but it's still spinning and it's this thing it's got you know it's a lot of mass the magnetar drags space around it as it spins does anyone remember what that's called frame dragging frame dragging excellent yes

• 47:23Cara Santa Maria?

  good job

• 47:23Bob Novella?

  frame dragging and and and as of course our buddy einstein predicted it's also called the lens thurring processing effect as well

• 47:33Cara Santa Maria?

  wait what did you just say lens thurring

• 47:36Bob Novella?

  yes L E N S E and then the other guy is thurring T H I R R I N G

• 47:42Cara Santa Maria?

  oh the first guy's literally named lens because that is very confusing I thought you were saying it was like a lensing kind of effect okay

• 47:50Bob Novella?

  yeah maybe I'm pronouncing it wrong L E N S E not sure exactly how that how that would be pronounced lensing okay so so now so we've got this disk this tilted disk accretion disk around the magnetar the magnetar is literally dragging space around it we know that exists we we have satellites that have detected earth dragging to a very small extent space around it so this this is something that of course yet another thing einstein predicted that is as fascinating as it is wild so what happens is that this frame dragging spins the accretion disk around it in such a way that it's it's processing right it's wobbling kind of like a a spinning what do you call it a top

• 48:30Bob Novella?

  a spinning top that kind of processes around the earth the earth itself processes as well so it's it does it's kind of spinning so so sometimes as it's spinning sometimes from the earth's perspective we would see a we'd have a clear view to the magnetar but other times it in that spin We're just seeing the accretion disk. So that's how the frame dragging is processing the accretion disk in such a way. The frame dragging spins the accretion disk around in such a way that it changes how much the magnetar's energy makes the debris glow. Okay, you got that? That's the critical piece right there. They're not sure exactly how that happens. In the paper, they mentioned a few different ways they think it might happen.

• 49:14Bob Novella?

  But the spinning accretion disk is changing, from our point of view, how much the magnetar energy is making the debris glow. And that's why the energy goes, you know, the light curve goes down and then up, down and then up, and down and then up. And it was five times that they caught that happening. So that's something that they only really see in these super luminous supernovae. So that's a story, and that's their model. It's not like they observed this happening. This is the model that they created explains what they are observing better than any other model. It involves a magnetar. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close, closer than anything else. The upside here, let me just review real quickly. What's the upside here?

• 49:57Bob Novella?

  Well, it looks like we've seen for the first time the birth of a magnificent magnetar. First time, so that's pretty cool. And it looks like we have a pretty decent, a good potential explanation for the mystery of why super luminous supernovae are so bright. It's because of that magnetar and pouring its rotational energy into the expanding shell of gas and dust, making it extra bright. We've got a potential explanation also for that bumpy light curve that also fits in with this model with the magnetar. And also, we have a new playground, a new natural laboratory for studying general relativity. So it's not just black holes or pulsars.

• 50:38Bob Novella?

  Now we have a new laboratory that deals with the wreckage of exploded stars to also give us insight into general relativity and these crazy things that happen within that regime, like the spin of the magnetar, its magnetic field, the behaviors of the accretion disk, and this weird frame dragging effect that we could hopefully elucidate with this new knowledge. So hopefully, they'll confirm this. I'm sure they're going to try and confirm this and make sure that this is exactly what's happening. But it's very fascinating. If you're interested, check it out online. It's a very cool story.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, cool. All right, thanks, Bob.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  All right, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 51:23Cara Santa Maria?

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• 52:02Speaker 04

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• 52:26Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Evan, tell us about US bioweapons research.

• 52:33Speaker 04

  US bioweapons research. Yeah, so it reared its head in the news recently, if you want to call this news. And it has to do with, of course, Lyme disease, which is a topic we've talked about pretty regularly on the show, right?

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  There are stories that the disease wasn't discovered, say, in the 1970s, and rather it was created, right? And specifically, the claim is that Lyme disease somehow escaped from a Cold War US bioweapons program that involved infecting ticks, rather than the idea that it was naturally occurring. But this particular one lately, and in this particular article, was circulated by Dr. Robert W. Malone. I think we're, are we familiar with Dr. Malone? Steve, I'm sure you are. Kara?

• 53:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 53:34Speaker 04

  Sam Malone, that's right.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I think it's fair to say that scientists, physicians, and science journalists regard Dr. Malone as someone who is, well, I'll say it kindly, promoted or amplified medical conspiracy theories.

• 53:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, this is the mRNA guy.

• 53:51Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 53:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Like, he did really good work and then went off the deep end.

• 53:56Speaker 04

  He did. He did early research related to mRNA delivery systems. This was in the late 1980s. And he does have some published peer-reviewed biomed papers. So, you know, they call him legitimate, right? Not fringe, at least his supporters or his proponents. And earlier in his career, also, in, earlier in his career, he also worked in vaccine and biotech research. But most experts note that he was not really a central developer of modern mRNA vaccines. But that's how he is often described in the media, or again, by his supporters. He became maybe more widely known during the COVID-19 pandemic, when he made a number

• 54:39Speaker 04

  of claims that were pretty widely criticized by scientists and public health organizations, including statements, well, like, for example, COVID-19 vaccines were causing widespread harm, government and pharmaceutical suppression, were suppressing treatments, and that there was mass psychological manipulation involved in all of this. And of course, those claims get circulated on social media and were criticized by infectious disease specialists and epidemiologists. So he became kind of this touchstone of the whole COVID-19 thing. He extended his lab origin hypothesis of COVID-19, which is something else we've talked about recently, to other diseases as well, including Lyme disease.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  But there really isn't much, if anything, supporting his stance on that. Malone's latest piece argues that newly declassified documents reveals connections between US biological weapons research and the emergence of Lyme disease, right here, near Connecticut in the northeastern United States. And, you know, so it has a dramatic sort of flair to it, doesn't it, right? Cold War labs, this secret tick experiments, Nazi scientists brought to America, and a mysterious illness that appears near a government research facility. A compelling narrative to some. Is it compelling evidence? No, it is not. So what is actually documented here? What's the documented part?

• 56:09Speaker 04

  All right, so during the Cold War, the United States did run a biological weapons program. And this was from the 1940s through 1969, where the US military researched pathogens and potential delivery systems. Some experiments looked at insects as the vectors for disease. There was a program called Operation Big Itch, which studied fleas as potential carriers. And other research examined how insects might spread plant or animal diseases. And although the programs were real, and there have been many documents about them, and some have been declassified, there are more recently that has also been declassified. And this is where Malone starts to go, saying, aha, see, we're declassifying this stuff,

• 56:54Speaker 04

  and now we're learning that this was all biomedical, you know, created by the government, basically, and supposed to be released by them as a weapon.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Now, Evan, what I'm seeing is that a lot of this is not, also comes from somebody else called Chris Newby, who's an author of the book Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons, which is just conspiracy theorizing run amok. Like, this is just complete-

• 57:22Speaker 04

  I saw the book mentioned, but I certainly didn't read that book.

• 57:25Speaker 02

  I think this whole narrative is coming from that book.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Now, so he's taking it and running with it, amplifying it.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  Or the other way around.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  The author is just, she's just a science journalist.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  I see.

• 57:36Speaker 02

  Not a scientist. Whatever. It's just, you know, it's just nonsense from beginning to end.

• 57:41Speaker 04

  Total, total nonsense. So again, there were genetic studies of the bacteria. Uh, what's it called? The Lyme disease bacteria Borrelia?

• 57:52Speaker 02

  Bergdorfer.

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Bergdorfer.

• 57:54Speaker 02

  After the guy Bergdorfer, who's the scientist who discovered it.

• 57:57Speaker 04

  That's right. In the early 1980s, which, you know, put a name to it, basically. But you know what? It had been circulating in, in wildlife for thousands of years. Prior to, prior to this, they detect, they even detected this in, in the DNA in museum specimens of mice collected decade, many decades before Lyme disease was even formally recognized.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  It's ancient in North America. Ancient. It's not recent.

• 58:24Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  With no evidence of any genetic manipulation or bioengineering.

• 58:28Speaker 04

  So what, so what Malone and among others are doing to do is they, they put together this sort of chain of circumstantial accusations, right? Oh, Lyme disease was first identified in the town of Old Lime, Connecticut. Oh, Old Lime, Connecticut. Well, that's only what 10 miles from Plum Island, which is a federal research facility that studies livestock diseases. And from there, the argument goes like, well, you Plum Island studied animal pathogens. The military once experimented with insect vectors. Therefore Lyme disease must have escaped from a secret experiment.

• 59:02Speaker 02

  Right. With the other flaw of that argument is that that's just where the index case was from, but that's not where it's centered. It's not centered in Lime, Connecticut.

• 59:10Speaker 04

  No, no, it's not. You're right. Another misconception. I know you've talked about that before, Steve, on the, on the show as well. But um, yeah, so the narrative also involves these historical tick experiments and, and research, and they did research with ticks in the 1960s, but not as a, as a mean, what radioactive tracers they put onto these ticks, but not as a means of delivering a disease, but just so they could track the ticks and their movements in the wild to see exactly, you know, where they were going and how they were ending up in the places that they were going.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Although I couldn't confirm that they even did that.

• 59:44Speaker 04

  You don't have a confirmation?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  I could not confirm that they actually released ticks into the wild.

• 59:48Speaker 04

  Interesting. I have one.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Did you find anything?

• 59:52Speaker 04

  In my notes. I don't have a source. Immediately. I mean, I did find a couple of articles that mentioned this.

• 1:00:01Speaker 02

  But I think, I think it's all coming from that book.

• 1:00:03Speaker 04

  Whoa, so not even that part is correct?

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  I just, I don't know that it's not correct. I could not verify that it is correct, though.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  Okay. All right. Well, fair enough. We should leave that as a unverified, another unverified.

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  Because what's happening is, all right, what happened is this book came out and then a conspiracy theorist, you know, representatives said, we need to, you know, in the American House of Representatives, said, aha, now I want to use this as an excuse to, once again, push through a resolution that we need to research and look into and have an investigation into whether or not we did this. So this is all at the, there's a conspiracy theorist triggering an investigation, not actual evidence. And when you go through the citing, the released documents, it's all speculation and inference. There's no smoking gun. It's just, this could mean that they were covering up that they were doing this. It's like all completely circumstantial.

• 1:01:00Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Hundred percent. There is no, nothing in the documents that demonstrated any links to Lyme disease.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  So what I'm finding is, is basically there is no credible, peer-reviewed scientific evidence that the US government deliberately released ticks into the wild. So.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Correct. Yep. And the things Dr. Malone is even citing in his article are crap. You know, he goes to like Wikipedia and stuff or talks about, you know, like you said, Steve, you know, just refers to other journalists talking about it, books, blog posts. There's no, there's no, there's no studies. There's no, there's no, no verified documents.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  In your research, Evan, did you come across mention of the Swiss agent?

• 1:01:40Speaker 04

  The Swiss agent? Let me take a double, double check. Operation Big.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  I can tell you what that is.

• 1:01:45Speaker 04

  Project 112. No, I don't have the Swiss agent.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  All right. So this definitely comes from the book, you know, the Bitten book. So because it's like knocked out of the park that Borrelia burgdorferi is ancient in North America. It predates the identification of Lyme disease. It predates America. It's not.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Bioengineered. Now they're, they're turning their attention to the Swiss agent.

• 1:02:12Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Which is a different bacteria. And they say, oh, look, Bergdorfer mentions the Swiss agent in the 1970s, and then his research was quote unquote suppressed.

• 1:02:25Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  Right? By calling it suppressed, they make it seem like he's hiding something.

• 1:02:29Speaker 04

  He found something and they hamped him down.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  It was one of the things he was looking at as a possible cause of Lyme disease. And it turns out, it isn't. That he said, oh, it's, it's not the cause of Lyme disease, Borrelia Bergdorfer is. And so that's, so you stopped researching the one that wasn't the cause of Lyme disease. But that doesn't mean that the Swiss agent isn't a tick-borne illness. It is, in Europe. And that's why it's called the, quote, the Swiss agent. It was first identified in Switzerland. So that's something that is endemic in, in Europe. It's a tick-borne disease. It is not significantly in the Americas. So that, so now they're saying, well, maybe, this is Rickettsia helvetic, which kind of sounds like a font.

• 1:03:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Helvetic?

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  So it's a Rickettsia, not, not a Borrelia. But, yeah, so Rickettsia helvetic, they're saying, well, maybe it's a co-infecting factor with Borrelia, and that's why some people are still sick after they get treated for Lyme disease, because they still have the Swiss agent. And, you know, we don't treat, test for it in America, because it's not endemic here. But there are some generic Rickettsial tests that could pick it up. And so, you know, at most, at most, you can make an argument that, well, maybe Rickettsia has, you know, helvetic has jumped the pond, and is starting to spread in the Americas, and we should start testing for it more routinely. Maybe. Like, we certainly need to study whether or not

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  we need to do that. That's the most you can say about this. But no, this is not like the Swiss agent, which is also an old, you know, bacteria that's been around forever. And also, there's no evidence that it's bioengineered. But they're saying, maybe that's the bioweapon. The Swiss agent's the bioweapon, and it's just making Lyme disease worse. So that's their new narrative, which they are pulling out of their ass, because their old narrative has completely collapsed under scientific evidence.

• 1:04:29Speaker 04

  Yep. And just because some documents recently became declassified does not point to anything having to do with this research or the science behind it.

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what people do, what we like to call it, I know David Gorski calls it dumpster diving. We just have a large data set, whatever that is, you know, the VAERS, you know, report of vaccine side effects or a dump of declassified documents where you go dumpster diving, looking for anything that you can sort of spin into this speculative conspiracy theory or something or make things sound sinister. And that's all that's going on here. This is just dumpster diving.

• 1:05:04Bob Novella?

  Guys, I found the quote from the paper about how the transference is happening. So the paper specifically says the luminosity is driven by the magnetar wind interacting with the ejecta, which is from, which is the exploded layers of the, of the huge star. So that mean, what that means to me is that we're talking about a stream of probably got to be ultra-relativistic particles like protons and electrons and also radiation, which is probably X-rays and gamma rays, that is hitting the ejecta, heating it up and making it brighter. So that's

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  I see. Okay. So the particles themselves are becoming brighter, not create, not more particles.

• 1:05:43Bob Novella?

  Right. And what's causing that is the magnetic field is making that happen. And when that, when it, that's, when that happens, when those particles and the radiation leave the magnetar, that, that is what's slowing down and transferring the rotational energy. So that's what's doing it. And so, yeah, so it's an intense radiation and, and particles that are making it brighter. So that's, that's what's happening.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  Great.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Oh, that was weighing on me, Bob. I don't know if I was able to get to sleep tonight.

• 1:06:11Speaker 04

  And, and, and it's not contributing to Lyme disease. So there's that too.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Thanks, guys. All right, Kara, how well do chatbots do on giving health advice?

• 1:06:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm. So I love these topics because we're getting more and more, you know, actual evidence of what's happening in the real world as opposed to just what happens in sort of idealized conditions.

• 1:06:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And I can tell you right now, there's a big difference between how well chatbots do in idealized conditions versus how well they do in the real world. So there's a great article on Live Science, and I just have to read you the headline because every so often, they just nail a headline. And this one is called Rectal Garlic Insertion for Immune Support. Medical Chatbots Confidently Give Disastrously Misguided Advice, Experts Say.

• 1:07:04Bob Novella?

  Holy moly.

• 1:07:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:06Bob Novella?

  That's a tension grabber.

• 1:07:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Woo, yeah. So this was a write around of two recently published articles. The first one was published in January of this year in The Lancet. The second one was published in February of this year in Nature Medicine. And they did two different things in the studies, but collectively, they're contributing to our kind of growing understanding that LLMs are not ready for primetime when it comes to helping people with their medical concerns. Now, we do know that in certain situations, LLMs are phenomenal.

• 1:07:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, there have been studies that show that large language models are earning near-perfect scores on medical licensing exams. We know that they are, you know, they've read most of the medical literature that exists in the world, so they have a wealth of knowledge within their

• 1:08:07Bob Novella?

  Training data?

• 1:08:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Their soft brains. Yeah. They're, sure, they're training data within their bases, their databases. But people are already turning to large language models for medical advice. There was a, I have it here, OpenAI put out a big report just two months ago in January of this year, AI as a Healthcare Ally: How Americans Are Navigating the System with ChatGPT. What percent of all chat GPT messages globally do you think are about healthcare?

• 1:08:42Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 1:08:43Bob Novella?

  Forty, forty-five percent.

• 1:08:45Speaker 04

  Twenty-seven percent.

• 1:08:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Come on, think about all the different ways you use chat, chat GPT.

• 1:08:48Speaker 04

  Oh, that's true.

• 1:08:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 04

  So fifteen percent?

• 1:08:51Cara Santa Maria?

  More than five percent, more than five percent. But you've got to remember that that there are a lot of chat GPT messages out there. About one in four users of chat GPT globally are prompting about healthcare every week. About forty million prompts every day across the globe are healthcare prompts. That's a lot, right?

• 1:09:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:09:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Forty million prompts a day where people are asking, basically for healthcare advice. And so what happens when they do that? Well, let's look at some of these studies that were designed, and they're pretty interesting. In the first study, actually, I'm going to talk about the second study first because I think it's a little kind of, I want to save the best for last. In the second study, what they did is they basically tested whether LLMs were good at diagnosing, basically identifying an underlying medical condition and/or whether they were good at letting the user know what they should do about it. Right? What's the course of action? Do you go to the ER? Do you go to your doctor? Do you sit and wait?

• 1:09:59Cara Santa Maria?

  They took ten medical scenarios and they did a study with over twelve hundred different participants. And they randomly assigned them to receive assistance from either GPT-4O, Llama-3, and Command R+. And the question was, can the LLMs accurately identify the underlying condition that the patient has? And is it going to choose an appropriate course of action? And they found that, this is what's really interesting, when tested alone, LLMs were really good at

• 1:10:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like diagnostics, 94.9% of cases, they, they, you know, accurately understood what condition and 56.3% of cases, they knew the disposition, what to do. But sadly, when the people were involved, when individuals put in prompts, that number dropped from 94.9% to 34.5%.

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 1:10:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So their big kind of takeaway of this was a user error, right? Like systematic human users are not utilizing the LLMs appropriately. They're not putting in appropriate prompts or maximizing outcomes based on prompts. And so until we solve that problem, just because LLMs are good at reading all of the medical literature and coming up with accurate diagnoses, it doesn't mean they're good at interfacing with people yet.

• 1:11:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, think about that framing. They're basically saying that when actual people use this in the real world, they get worse results and that's because they don't know what they're doing, not that our product isn't user friendly.

• 1:11:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, to be fair, they didn't frame it that way.

• 1:11:46Speaker 02

  You made it sound that way. That was your framing?

• 1:11:48Cara Santa Maria?

  No, these are researchers. They're, they're not the people who own these products.

• 1:11:52Speaker 02

  I hear you, but still, that framing is pretty biased, I think.

• 1:11:55Cara Santa Maria?

  How did I word it?

• 1:11:56Speaker 02

  It sounded like you were saying it was user error, right? You framed it as user error, which I guess technically it is.

• 1:12:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, technically it is user error if they're not getting the most efficient outcome. But yes, that is just real world use.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just normal people using it in the way that it's designed to be used.

• 1:12:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the thing. Is it designed to be used this way? That's, that's an interesting question.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Is that a user error or a user interface error? That's, that's my point.

• 1:12:19Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure.

• 1:12:20Speaker 02

  And that's our framing.

• 1:12:21Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's basically, I mean, the big outcome, and I, I think it even goes beyond that framing. The big outcome is the LLMs and people are not playing nice together, regardless of if it's a coding issue or not. Something about the way that these LLMs are available to users.

• 1:12:41Cara Santa Maria?

  They are not maximized for effective retrievement of medical advice.

• 1:12:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? So, so you're right. Is it the companies who need to do more work? Is it more training that we need to do among the populace? I'm not really sure. We don't, I don't think they even got into the why of it all.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's, you know, and that's interesting that the numbers dropped that dramatically. But to me, that's not the most interesting part of this write up. The most interesting part of this write up came from the Lancet article where, okay, so this is what they did. They looked at 20 different L L Ms and they fed them more than 3.4 million prompts that contained health misinformation. They pulled that health and misinformation from three sources. And the sources are pretty interesting. So like in one source, it's, they called it a fabrication, oh, the modified clinical note source. So what they did is they pulled discharge summaries, like real discharge summaries from hospitals.

• 1:13:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And then they randomly inserted a misinformation sentence into a discharge note. So under the discharge recommendations, they might add something like dissolve your medication in warm milk to improve absorption. Or, uh, maybe the one that was at the very beginning of the article, which was like, you know, insert garlic into your rectum to increase your immune support. And so that was added to a discharge summary that was otherwise valid and written by physicians. The second type of misinformation, they just pulled straight from Reddit.

• 1:14:26Cara Santa Maria?

  They went into the, um, our medicine and they looked at this mega thread. What is the most ridiculous medical claim you have heard? And they just pulled a bunch of really interesting things. They actually used physicians to screen them so that they were, you know, accurate inaccuracies. Um, they, and so they looked up things like vaccine misinformation, cancer cures, nutrition myths. Respiratory illness, chronic disease remedies. And then they they just pulled them verbatim with no change to them. And then they also had simulated misinformation vignettes where they used individuals to basically, out of whole cloth, just design

• 1:15:07Cara Santa Maria?

  false information. They were and then validated them amongst 300 different physicians. Okay, so we've got three different ways that they added medical information and fed it into these L L Ms. And then they wanted to see, you know, how well is this model going to be basically accept these false claims? How susceptible are they to them? And also, what kinds of things contribute to whether or not it's susceptible? And they found some interesting findings, and this is kind of the big takeaway. And it's not really reflected in the title of this article. They could they could improve that.

• 1:15:49Cara Santa Maria?

  They found that across all the models, about 31% were or about 32% actually were susceptible to fabricated data. They found that when they used logical fallacies in their framing, it either didn't affect the rate or it dropped it dramatically. So L L Ms are really good at detecting logical fallacies. And when they see that there's a logical fallacy within the medical misinformation claim, they're less likely to feed it back as real information. So that, to me, was really fascinating. That's interesting. Yeah, really interesting.

• 1:16:31Cara Santa Maria?

  When they are the most susceptible is when the misinformation is embedded in a real hospital note. And so what the researchers took away from that is that L L Ms themselves tend to appeal. They didn't say this, I'm saying this, that they tend to appeal to authority. They have learned Yeah. that clinical language equals authority. But they're not testing whether or not that claim is true. All they're doing is repeating a claim when it sounds authoritative. So if if an LLM thinks it sounds like something a trustworthy source, because they found as they

• 1:17:12Cara Santa Maria?

  as they, you know, collect all this information from the internet, that most bullshit pseudoscience is wrapped up in all sorts of ridiculous claims. There are all sorts of different slippery slope fallacies and different appeals to authority and and, you know, one example they use here is a senior clinician with 20 years of experience endorses this, or everyone knows this works. And so LLMs have learned to become skeptical of those kinds of kind of linguistic errors. And they don't distrust those rhetorical tricks, but they're not good at detecting medical misinformation when it's embedded in very authoritative clinical language.

• 1:17:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, of course, they're saying this means that people are, and this is when they bring in that others, that other study into the right around in live science, is they were saying, you know, people aren't doing any better looking up medical advice from an LLM than they are doing their own internet searches. Part of that is because, you know, maybe people's prompts aren't the most appropriate for these LLMs. Part of it is probably this whole other study, the fact that we, you know, these LLMs themselves aren't always kind of relaying

• 1:18:36Cara Santa Maria?

  the exact right information based on how these problems are asked. But regardless, when people don't have expertise, they can't judge whether they're getting appropriate information or not. And that's that's the danger, right? That's why real clinicians exist. That's why we need to be able to speak to somebody with a license, somebody with training, because, you know, although LLMs are getting better and better, and although it will probably help in overtaxed, overburdened, underfunded and under

• 1:19:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Effective healthcare system, if somebody can go into a chatbot and say, hey, I have this symptom, this symptom, this symptom, do you think I should go to the hospital? Or can I wait until tomorrow to see my doctor? There are examples where this could be wildly dangerous or where really bad misinformation could be given as LLM stand right now.

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so my personal experience is that when I ask it a non controversial question, you get pretty good information. If you ask it a controversial question about which there is pseudoscience on the internet, you get a mixed bag. It's a crap.

• 1:19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I could see that. And that's, that is a whole other layer. Because you are an educated user. So you're probably giving it clinical prompts and you're using language that actually biases it towards giving you better answers.

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  The whole garbage in, garbage out kind of.

• 1:20:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, and so that that kind of speaks to the, the first study I talked about, the second study that was published. If I don't exactly know how to describe my symptoms, or if I give superfluous information that kind of doesn't have anything to do with my chief complaint, or if I am magnifying or minimizing aspects of my symptomatology, because I'm not able to do my own clinical interview and to know what's relevant. The chatbot's not going to know all those different weights. It's not going to be able to tease that out. And then you add to that, that they have access to all of this pseudoscience online.

• 1:20:53Cara Santa Maria?

  If there is pseudoscience being fed in, and if that pseudoscience sounds authoritative, it does seem to be the case that the LLMs are just spitting it right back out as if it's legitimate medical information.

• 1:21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know there, you know, this is happening, but you know, training LLMs just on like peer reviewed published research and authoritative resources, not the internet, you know, gives you, definitely gives you way better results.

• 1:21:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we also have the problem of pay for pay, pay for play. Yeah, we've got the problem of all of these journals that appear, you know, legitimate, but they're pushing naturopathy, chiropractic, all these pseudoscientific approaches. And at what point, like, how do we develop what those benchmarks are?

• 1:21:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Where, you know, where's that line that we draw in the sand?

• 1:21:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there has to be a curated buzz set of information that you're feeding into it.

• 1:21:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm. And, and the truth of the matter is that's not how they are trained. They're trained on the internet.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  Right. Okay. Thank you, Kara.

• 1:21:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:21:56Speaker 02

  So Jay's not here, so no who's that noisy this week. We're going to go straight to a question, an email. This comes from Joel in Austin, Texas.

• 1:22:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Texas.

• 1:22:06Speaker 02

  Joel writes, "Good day." I said, "Good day."

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  Love it already.

• 1:22:13Speaker 02

  So he says, "In aforementioned episode, Steve was talking about climate change and made a point of saying that the oil companies' research didn't look at 30-year trends, so their data was incomplete. In the next breath, he says that the last 10 years have been the hottest in recorded history. How is that not picking and choosing? Also, what fallacy would be picking and choosing?" He says, "He agrees 100% that climate change is real and man-made. I'm just curious as to why one is fine and the other is not." He also said that George, who was on that episode with us, made a point of saying something to the effect that, and I apologize for not remembering the exact topic, maybe it was alternative medicine. If you have to rebrand or rename your chosen topic, then you know it's bullshit.

• 1:22:57Speaker 02

  But we've gone from global warming to climate change and multiple other terms for the problem. I'm just saying, I'm just trying to understand the difference between what appears to, to me to be identical tactics. I get one has empirical data backing it and the other doesn't, which is perfectly fine for me. It's just the examples listed seem hypocritical." Okay. So he just wants to know.

• 1:23:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Speaker 02

  What about those two things? And I did respond to him and he, and he just said, "Yep, thanks. I understand." But here's what, here's what I said. So let's first let's talk about, you know, me saying you need, you really need a long period of time before you can detect a statistical trend in the data. And yet also saying the last 10 years have been the hottest on record. So what do you guys think? So let's just say that's a, that's a false analogy. So why is it a false analogy?

• 1:23:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Because one is predictive, like one is, when you're, you need to see a lot of time to be able to develop a model.

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:23:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And then later, if you're saying, look at what has happened in the last 10 years, it's in keeping with the model.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's exactly what I said, that the first, in the first instance, we're, we're gathering data to establish a trend.

• 1:24:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  In the second instance, we're saying the trend predicts this specific outcome. So they're, they're completely different things. So essentially, if you're trying to look at a trend in sort of the annual average global temperatures, you don't really have enough data to say anything statistical unless you've gathered about a decade of data. And then, and if you want to know, is that trend that we're seeing just a natural cycle? Or is it a forcing trend on the background? You need multiple decades of data. Of course, we have multiple decades of data. And we see, yes, there's statistically, there is a trend and it is not accounted for by all the known natural cycles, which is why we think there's manmade forcing.

• 1:24:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, even 30 years isn't enough.

• 1:24:58Speaker 02

  We have, we have way more than that.

• 1:24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, 30 years, it could start to establish that there is a trend.

• 1:25:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, but you can't say anything about natural cycles.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the more, the more time you have, the better, more confident you could be in saying, I mean, at least there, there are short-term cycles that you could start to rule out, but longer-term cycles, you need more data. But in terms of predicting that we're going to keep having the warmest years, that's a result of the established trend, not used to establish the trend.

• 1:25:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Right? So they're just two completely different things. The second thing about rebranding, and we do say that, we, and the, I don't know what the context was here, but we've said it about cold fusion, right, was rebranded as Yeah, low energy nuclear reactions. Low energy nuclear reactions.

• 1:25:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Creationism.

• 1:25:46Speaker 02

  Alternative medicine, which is rebranded to complementary medicine, which is rebranded integrative medicine, which is rebranded functional medicine. And this, that was just, that's all marketing.

• 1:25:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And like intelligent design, creationism.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Creationism and intelligent design, absolutely. Oftentimes, that rebranding is does to sort of get the stink of the pseudoscience off of you, or just for, for marketing purposes. And again, we're not saying It's absolute. It's a trend. It's a rule of thumb, right? So you should be suspicious. Like, why was this branding evolving or changing? Why are they now saying UAPs instead of UFOs or whatever? Maybe there's a technical reason for it, but it could also just be trying to rebrand a debunked pseudoscience. So it's a red flag, right? Not a hard and fast rule, just a red flag.

• 1:26:32Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  All right. But what he said about global warming and climate change is just straight up not true. The term "climate change" dates back, how far would you say it goes back?

• 1:26:42Speaker 04

  Climate change.

• 1:26:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably when we first started studying the climate changing.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  No, that was a long time ago. About 1957 was the first time it was.

• 1:26:49Cara Santa Maria?

  What did they call it before that when they were studying?

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:26:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it seems like the simplest of terms, the.

• 1:26:55Speaker 02

  I mean, I just searched on what was the first use of the term "climate change" and it said, well, here's the guy from 1957. It may not have been the first, but that was sort of the oldest one that I dug up.

• 1:27:03Speaker 04

  So climate change predates the term "global warming"?

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty much.

• 1:27:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I would think it would, yeah.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And then climate, global warming became more popular, I think, in the 80s and 90s.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  But the other thing is they're not mutually exclusive. They're referring to slightly different things. Climate change refers to all of the various changes in the climate that result from the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, whereas global warming refers to a subset of those changes, specifically increasing, increases in the average global temperature. So they're different things. They are not interchangeable. There's climate change, which is a whole bunch of stuff, and then there's global warming, which is this one specific trend that is part of climate change. And they've both been used over the last five decades, you know, or longer. One did not replace the other. That

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  is a bullshit narrative invented by climate change deniers as a cheap rhetorical trick. That's it. It is not even reality. So there hasn't been a rebranding. And again, sometimes I think that global warming became very popular, and then climate scientists continue to use climate change because it's more accurate in certain contexts. Again, if you're talking about changes to the climate that are not limited to the, you know, increases in average global temperatures, climate change is a better term to use, right?

• 1:28:27Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:28:28Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:28:29Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  We also have a "Name That Logical Fallacy." So this, they wrote, "I don't know if you guys are aware of Clint Laidlaw, an evolutionary biologist who runs the Clint's Reptiles YouTube channel. I enjoy his videos, most of which are about modern cladistic taxonomy, sometimes about wild reptiles, as well as reptiles as pets, and once in a while about reacting to creationist talking points." As an aside, have any of you guys watched his videos in general?

• 1:28:59Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I had never seen him before.

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  No, I had not heard of him.

• 1:29:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I watched this video.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  They're pretty good. I watched a bunch of his creationist ones.

• 1:29:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so what he does well is, and this will help you understand where this email's coming from. So he makes a huge effort to steel man creationist arguments. And he will do it the way you should do it, which is interactively. He will engage with creationists and say, "This is, all right, let me get this straight. This is what you're saying. Is that correct? Or do I need to tweak my understanding of your position?" And he is like trying to constantly improve his steel man version of what the creationists are actually saying. And then he'll put out a video addressing that best version of what their position is.

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  Because he doesn't want to be arguing against a straw man version.

• 1:29:52Speaker 04

  Straw man.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  Because that's pointless. That is helpful to exactly no one, right? They're not going to be compelled by an argument that's not even addressing their actual position. Of course, they're notorious for that, but that's beside the point. So what he, in the video that the emailer is about to refer to, it's one, it's in, in the middle of the video, Clint has an aside where he's showing you how valuable the steel manning approach is. So let me continue with the email. He says, "In a recent one of those videos, Clint, for some reason, showed a clip of Charlie Kirk debating a college student in one of his campus events. It was about, it wasn't about creationism, and Clint wasn't arguing against him. He was saying Kirk was an example of a good argumentation

• 1:30:37Speaker 02

  because he steel manned the student's argument." And was nice to him. I'm not sure this is really a logical fallacy. When Kirk makes his point, he clearly just has some unstated major premises that are false, but I'm curious if there is a fallacy as well, or a better way to describe what he does. It seems to me Kirk is ambushing the kid using an apparent steel man and kindness to put him off guard before he makes an argument that the kid isn't ready to confront. Did Kirk build the steel man of the kid's argument, or really just oversimplify it so that his argument looked like it falsified it? He certainly was dishonest. The stats he cites are simply wrong, but I'm curious on your take on this, if it's something you're interested in. Maybe it's just my personal bias

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  against Kirk that made this put me off. Here's the link and timestamp. So, have you guys seen this video and what do you think?

• 1:31:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. I think that he wasn't actually steel manning. I think that he was, it's like the, like the writer said, it was an apparent steel man.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was straw manning it, actually.

• 1:31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  He was. He actually did oversimplify the argument, and then he argued against things the kid never said.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Something nice.

• 1:31:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:31:49Speaker 02

  And the email is absolutely correct. It was, his case was built on unstated major premises that are false. So, just to summarize it very quickly again, we'll have the link so you can watch it, draw your own conclusions, but the guy making, asking the question was saying that, basically saying that isn't the plight of modern day black Americans due to decades of systemic racism. And he started to stumble over and he lost his train of thought and I think he just got nervous. So Kirk was like, alright, relax guy, I get you. Let me just, you know, he was very nice to him. He was like, I get it. It could be, you know, intimidating to be up here and you're very brave for asking this question, but let me summarize what I think your position is. And then he said, your position is that,

• 1:32:36Speaker 02

  People today are feeling the effects of racism from decades in the past, basically. And which I think is correct. I think that is a that statement of his position is limited, but correct as far as it goes.

• 1:32:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Yeah, he doesn't give a full accounting of the the claim.

• 1:32:53Speaker 02

  No, but then he says, and let me tell you my response to it. So he basically sets up just enough of the other guy's argument that he that sets up his response, which was, you know, again, full of unstated major premises. Then he says, my response is every group of people have, if you look in their at their past, there are challenges that they faced or things they've had to overcome or horrible situations that they faced. So right there, he's starting with a false equivalency.

• 1:33:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  And because, you know,

• 1:33:27Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:33:28Speaker 02

  Having some challenges and being slaves and then the target of 100 years of pretty egregious systematic racism is not the same as the challenges that other groups face.

• 1:33:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah, yeah. 400 years of subjugation is not.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  Right, right. It's a little different there, dude. Then he says, but then he says, in 1968, the, you know, 25% of black kids in America were raised in a single family home, and now it's 75%. So he basically is proposing that as the reason that the black community has is the only one who hasn't been able to overcome these past challenges. Like as if they're using it as an excuse. So there's just so much horribly wrong with that argument.

• 1:34:17Bob Novella?

  My God.

• 1:34:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's his rhetoric style is what's so, I think, disarming is the kid. You can tell the kid's nervous. Charlie Kirk is is kind of patronizing, but also in a very kind way. He's like, bro, it's cool, man. Like, I hear you. I hear you. Like, you're brave for coming up here. And then he's like, you said this? Well, here's what I have to say about that. And he's sort of like nodding at him a lot. And you can tell that the kid in the moment is like, oh, wait, maybe this is a valid response.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's that's that's one way to straw man an argument is to argue against somebody who's not really a good articulator and doesn't of that position or who doesn't know the ins and outs. Right?

• 1:34:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Because there are lots of people who could have who could have demolished Kirk if he was arguing against them.

• 1:35:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely, because he never, he also never made that argument.

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:35:09Cara Santa Maria?

  He ostensibly steelmans him by, by repeating like, yes, so what you're saying is that there was a time when there was a lot of systemic racism and there were policies and I agree with that. And there were times, you know, right after where it was very difficult because of redlining and blah, blah, blah. But, and then he goes on to talk about how the playing field is completely even now.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  So.

• 1:35:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And why are only black Americans the ones who couldn't get past this?

• 1:35:33Speaker 02

  Right. And it's probably because of the absent father phenomenon. It was

• 1:35:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  25% in 1968. Now it's 75%. You know, only one in four black children are raised in a household with a father and a mother. And he gets the guy to agree. You agree that that's a good thing, right? That you grow up in a home with both a mother and a father, which is another, the guy's a good, was a good debater. I mean, this is

• 1:35:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course he's a good, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Very effective.

• 1:36:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  But since we brought it up, I feel compelled to say like, why, what he's saying is wrong. So first of all, the figure is not 75%. It's closer to 47%. It's less than 50%. So it's not, you know, three in four. It's closer to two in four. Not that that's great, but it's just, he was using an inflated, exaggerated statistic.

• 1:36:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But he also doesn't talk about why.

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. There's two other major things wrong with that.

• 1:36:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  It's, it's pretty clearly understood that the reason for it is because of systemic racism.

• 1:36:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  So it makes no sense to say, no, it's not systemic racism. It's the absent father thing. It's like, yeah, but that's largely due to systemic racism.

• 1:36:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, to our prison system right now, to all, exactly. Like, it's just, ugh.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  There are, it's due to disparities in the criminal justice system.

• 1:36:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Right? Disproportionately removes black men from their homes. There's tons of historical factors, including it's hard, it's just socioeconomic, massive socioeconomic factors.

• 1:36:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's harder to work. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 02

  It makes it harder. Yeah, you have to go where you have to go to find work and you may not be able to afford to have everybody living in the same home. Um, here's the other thing is that in the black community, fathers who are not living with their children. Are often still very involved in their upbringing. So he's falsely equating not living with their children with being absent from raising their children. And that's not a one to one correlation. And in fact, for again, multiple social factors, et cetera. I mean, yes, if the father's present, they are more involved. But but fathers who aren't living in the home are doesn't mean they're completely uninvolved either.

• 1:37:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  They're often very involved and more so than other races who are not living with their kids. So there's a cultural thing there as well.

• 1:37:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  So it's way more complicated than he was saying.

• 1:37:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:52Speaker 02

  And of course, he didn't present any evidence that that's actually the reason, right? He's just saying, here's a correlation. And this is what I think it is because it because it happens to reinforce all of my prejudices, et cetera.

• 1:38:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  So not impressed. You know, I think that Clint had his heart in the right place and I agree with his position. This was just a really bad example to use.

• 1:38:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree. I feel like that was a big misstep for him. And the good news is, I think that, you know, given what you said, I haven't watched any of his other videos, but given what you said about, yeah, his educational kind of skills, he has clearly fostered a community of people who are learning from him and who are challenging him. Because I would say that most of the comments on this video are people going, you missed the mark with this one, my friend.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  I agree. No, his specialty, his specialty is actually teaching evolution, not just evolution, but the public understanding of evolution and responding to creationism. Like, that's an actual specialty.

• 1:38:56Speaker 04

  Did he step a little bit outside of his?

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  Well, I just, yeah, I mean, you know, probably. I mean, he like, like for Kara and me, like, we picked up the logical fallacies easily. And since this wasn't a create, again, this was in creationism, it is in his wheelhouse. I think he missed that. No, this guy isn't steel manning. He's just a really skilled debater.

• 1:39:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:39:19Speaker 02

  He's just rhetorical tricks that he's using.

• 1:39:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Whereas on it. ...face, I could see why he would have picked that because it was almost like his own meta steel man, perhaps. Like, let's use a pretty controversial figure and let's show a good example of how somebody can stand up in a debate and do this. And I think that he was tricked by Charlie Kirk, the same way this kid in the video was tricked by Charlie Kirk, because he was disarmingly nice.

• 1:39:47Speaker 02

  He was following the form of steel manning, but it was pseudo steel manning as a rhetorical device.

• 1:39:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Which made it that much more nefarious, I think.

• 1:39:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also, it felt a little bit to me like sea lining, because it was like, the kindest was part of the rhetorical device, not act, you know what I mean?

• 1:40:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it wasn't just another layer.

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  Deliberately to be disarming, which is fine. I mean, if you're gonna use that, I think that's a fine strategy to be nice. I use that myself. That's, doesn't mean it's not, it's a bad thing to do. But i- if you're using it to cover up really terrible arguments, then it is bad.

• 1:40:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. It's like somehow he was able to be antagonistic while seeming not antagonistic. And that's like a very special skill.

• 1:40:31Speaker 02

  Um, okay. So Jay's not here, so I'm just gonna very quickly say that we have a bunch of events coming up. We have a live event in Wisconsin, we have SciCon in Buffalo, and then we have our LA, Sydney, Christchurch tour down under. You can get tickets to any or all of these events if you go to the skepticsguy.org and then click on the events page. You'll see everything there.

• 1:40:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Although we should probably mention, Steve, that you can't get tickets to LA yet.

• 1:41:02Speaker 02

  The LA tickets are going up very shortly. We were waiting to confirm the location, but we're not gonna wait anymore. We're just gonna make the tickets available. The location may be TBD, but yeah, but we can't really wait anymore. It might be up by the time the show goes out, but I know we're gonna do that soon.

• 1:41:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:17Bob Novella?

  Steve, Jay has a lot more enthusiasm, dude.

• 1:41:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, he does.

• 1:41:19Bob Novella?

  All right. Just throwing that out there.

• 1:41:22Speaker 02

  All right. Let's go on with Science or Fiction.

• 1:41:37Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items this week. Got a couple of themes last couple of weeks, but now just back to news items. You guys ready?

• 1:41:51Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  Item number one, a study of spousal bereavement in Japan finds that widowers have an increased risk of dementia and mortality while widows do not, and in fact have increased happiness and life satisfaction long term. Item number two, a recent study of patients taking a GLP-1 drug to treat obesity found that after stopping treatment, more than half gained back more than half of the weight they lost within a year. And item number three, researchers have developed a technique for making brains in living mice transparent so that the deep layers can be imaged with fluorescence imaging with minimal effect on brain function.

• 1:42:36Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, go first.

• 1:42:38Bob Novella?

  So widowers in Japan have increased risk of dementia while the widows do not. Yeah, the man's gone and they're happier. I mean, I totally buy that. That's a no brainer. Let's go to the second one. Let's see. So taking the GLP-1 drug, that if you stop it, more than half gained back more than half the weight within a year. Oh, man.

• 1:43:04Speaker 02

  That's within a year of stopping.

• 1:43:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:06Speaker 02

  After stopping, yeah.

• 1:43:07Bob Novella?

  That sounds reasonable. Sure. And yeah, they probably end up with less muscle and more fat, so they're worse off. Yeah, I don't know, there might be some things subtle in here, but that sounds totally reasonable. And now we've got this technique for making brains transparent so that you could see the deep layers. Yeah, I'm just not buying that one. That just sounds sketchy and...

• 1:43:34Bob Novella?

  I guess it would be helpful, but I just, this is totally rubbing me the wrong way. I haven't said that one's fiction.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  Okay. Evan?

• 1:43:42Speaker 04

  All right, Japan widowers have an increased risk of dementia and mortality while the widows do not. And they in fact have an increased happiness and life satisfaction long term. If this is correct, why? Why would that be the case? If this is correct. I wonder if you reverse these. Now, would that be the, would that be the fiction in this? Instead, it's the opposite? Interesting. The second one about the drug that treats obesity, the GLP-1. After stopping treatment, more than half gained back more than half the weight they lost within a year.

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  There, I mean, I haven't really read deeply into this, but that seems to track with what has been reported and what has been said. Certainly by others, but there could be a glitch in there somewhere. More than half the weight they lost within a year. Maybe it's not as drastic. Maybe it's, or maybe it's worse, could be worse. But Bob, you're, this one about the brain. Why am I thinking of pinky in the brain with this one? Maybe because it's brain and mice and stuff, right? Pinky in the brain. A technique for making brains and living mice transparent. Okay.

• 1:45:07Speaker 04

  So that the deep layers can be imaged with imaging and minimal effect on brain function. Ah, boy. That does seem very science fictiony. It's either this one or the one about Japan. All right, Bob, I'm gonna, I'm gonna hook myself to your ship and sail off with you. I will say it's the mice is the fiction.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:45:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm struggling with this one because I think they're all science. The bereavement in Japan, unless there's a cultural difference because it's in Japan and I don't, you know, have expertise on like. Japanese relationships or Japanese culture. I'm pretty sure it's it's well established that, okay, so a widower is when, I hate that there's a different word for this.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  A widower is when the wife dies.

• 1:45:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:45:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the wife dies first, men usually die sooner, they usually get sicker and just like lots of bad things happen. When the husband dies first, generally speaking, you, especially I think in older cohorts, you do see increased happiness and life satisfaction. And that just all comes down to like, you know, domestic labor, cognitive labor, just, you know, not having to take care of somebody else and being able to focus on themselves. And also, I think like women have friends as they get older and men, you know, by and large, don't. And so women have somebody to talk to after they lose their, I see this all the time in in therapy.

• 1:46:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And and men often don't, they're they're just very, very alone after that, and that that has a huge predictive value for mortality. So I don't know, that one seems like science to me. The GLP-1 one seems like science. I actually thought it was worse than that. I thought that the vast majority of people gained back the weight when they stopped taking the GLP-1. So maybe that's the difference. Yeah, I mean, he said more than half, though, if he had said less than half, but I think it's like most. I think it's like almost all of the people gained back the weight, and I think they gained back most of the weight. Like, maybe not all of it, but more than half of it, but that's what you said was more than half. So that would still be correct.

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  Trixie.

• 1:47:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why that's why that one's bothering me, because the way it's worded, even if it was more, it would still be correct. But then I also think that researchers have finally figured out how to do this in a living mouse. You know, minimal effect on brain function is is meaningful insofar as for their experiments, it didn't change, like, they weren't having seizures and stuff. But my guess is that they don't live a long time with this, but they're able to do their experiments on them. I feel like we've been able to, we've figured out how to bleach out these structures. And there are some animals that already have this, right? Like fish and worms and stuff where we can study them in vivo. So my guess is that we figured out how to do this in a living mouse.

• 1:48:02Speaker 04

  Ooh, transparent brain.

• 1:48:03Cara Santa Maria?

  That would be cool. So I guess, yeah, I'm gonna have to go with the bereavement one. And I think it's because of those very specific things you wrote.

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree on number two, so we'll start there. A recent study of patients taking a GLP-1 drug to treat obesity found that after stopping treatment, more than half gained back more than half of the weight they lost within a year. You all think this one is science and this one is the fiction.

• 1:48:34Speaker 04

  There we go. Steve, it's the year of the sweep for Steve.

• 1:48:39Speaker 02

  Now, what's different about this study than previous?

• 1:48:43Speaker 04

  Dang.

• 1:48:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that they found something different than all the other studies.

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  Well, there's a different, yes, but why did they find something different? Because this is really the first large, real-world study, right? The drug has been out long enough that they could look at people out in the wild that are using these drugs and ask the question, for those people who have stopped, how are they doing? Not like just a laboratory test where you're doing it. So, yeah, they actually found that most of them were able to stabilize their weight long-term.

• 1:49:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:49:19Speaker 02

  And they did it through a various methods. You know, some were just with lifestyle changes. Some were with going on a different drug.

• 1:49:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's unfair.

• 1:49:30Speaker 02

  But that wasn't the only thing. It was, that was, I hear you.

• 1:49:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because I thought that like two-thirds of people who stop ultimately go back on because they're gaining so much weight.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  No, but again, they found that even the ones that didn't go back on a different drug were able to stabilize their weight with lifestyle changes.

• 1:49:50Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  It was only like 5%, you know.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  Whoa, 5%?

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  So there was a lot, there was a lot of variability, though. There was a lot of variability, but on average, on average, they only gained back like 5% of the weight that they lost.

• 1:50:03Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04Cara Santa Maria?

  That flies in the face of every published study up to that point.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:50:09Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think this is the first time that we've had real world data.

• 1:50:12Speaker 02

  Uh, maybe, but that's what, you know, that's what the.

• 1:50:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  Studies saying, but you're right, you might not be.

• 1:50:17Cara Santa Maria?

  This study, I, I'm, I'm wondering how long this outcome, how long until other studies, uh, disprove this outcome?

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe, but they, they did follow people for a year after they stopped the drug.

• 1:50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is great, um, but I think, I think a lot of studies do.

• 1:50:31Speaker 04

  Do the study, right?

• 1:50:34Speaker 04

  You know, I'm just saying.

• 1:50:35Speaker 02

  Okay, so let's go back to number one, a study of spousal bereavement in Japan finds that widowers have an increased risk of dementia and mortality. While widows do not, and in fact have increased happiness and life satisfaction long-term is science. That's what they found, increased risk of dementia and mortality. The widows did not have that. They did have, obviously, I said long-term because immediately afterwards, obviously they're grieving, you know, so they're, they had some depression and lot, loss of life satisfaction for a short period of time. But they rebound pretty quick and long-term, they have sustainable increased happiness and life satisfaction, the widows. Both males and females had an increase in their socialization after losing their spouse.

• 1:51:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  But women had more social support than men. So even when the men did have increased socialization, it didn't translate into like real support. You know what I mean? So I guess it was more superficial, it wasn't like people who could be there for them. And yeah, this is old news, right? Because, you know, this is, again, this is consistent with prior research where, yeah, men don't do well when they lose their wife, you know? For a num, for a number of reasons. Okay, and researchers have developed a technique for making brains in living mice transparent so that the deep layers can be imaged with fluorescence. Imaging with minimal effect on brain function is science. This is totally cool and it's actually much better than I've even had the space to say here.

• 1:52:05Speaker 02

  Cause Carrie, you're not correct in that these mice did fine. They did not die.

• 1:52:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow. They're just out there living their, their translucent brain lives.

• 1:52:15Speaker 02

  Right, and they can, they can basically wash out the substance they use to make them translute, transparent.

• 1:52:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  And then, and then they could do it again. So this is reversible.

• 1:52:26Bob Novella?

  That's cool.

• 1:52:26Speaker 02

  So then you could test them over time. So guess what was the agent? You're not going to guess.

• 1:52:33Bob Novella?

  Leech.

• 1:52:33Speaker 02

  Part of the reason why it's so good.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  Clorox.

• 1:52:35Speaker 02

  It's a basic protein that they found that they were able to formulate this basic protein so that it had the right characteristics to what you had. The key is, is that you have to change the refractive index to a certain very narrow range in terms of the extracellular fluid. So that the refractive index between the extracellular fluid and the cell membrane, again, is between the certain range. And then it makes it transparent, basically, to visible life.

• 1:53:07Speaker 04

  Like polarization?

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  And they were, no, it's not polarization. That's a completely different phenomenon. Refractive index is just like the light bending when it hits a surface. Like it's when you stick in, stick a stick in the water and it looks bent. That's because of the refractive index. So it had to be between 1.36 and 1.37, you know, pretty narrow range. They were able to do that with albumin. That's it.

• 1:53:31Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  They were able to formulate albumin to do that. Albumin is a basic blood protein. So it's, you know, it's very benign.

• 1:53:39Bob Novella?

  So this inject that into this, into the head?

• 1:53:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they had to do it so that it wouldn't alter the osmotic pressure significantly so that the cells could still function. And they were able, that, that was the one that they were able to do this with. And so it doesn't alter brain function in any significant way. It doesn't hurt the mice. You can wash it out and then they, they behave normally. Then you could do it again down the road if you want to see like, how are they as they age or whatever? And it allows them to image the deep brain structures in a living organism, in a living mouse. It's, it's cool. They're calling it CDB Live.

• 1:54:16Speaker 02

  That's the name of the technique.

• 1:54:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That's cool.

• 1:54:18Speaker 02

  S E E D B hyphen.

• 1:54:20Cara Santa Maria?

  See the deep brain live.

• 1:54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, see the deep brain live.

• 1:54:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve, I just chatted you an article from the British Medical Journal. I think we're gonna be getting a lot of emails after this one.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  The thing is, a recent study did show this.

• 1:54:34Cara Santa Maria?

  I know that, and that's I, how many times have I said that? A recent study could show freaking anything. That's right. But I did just chat you.

• 1:54:42Speaker 02

  But this was a reasonable study, but I get you.

• 1:54:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, but I did just chat you a systematic review and meta-analysis from January of this year that says the opposite.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  But doesn't include real world use of the drug. That's the key.

• 1:54:52Cara Santa Maria?

  How do you not conclude? What is real world use if you're testing somebody who's on?

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  Prescribed in the clinic outside the context of a clinical trial. They're just following. This is an observational study.

• 1:55:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but they're stopping after, I don't see the difference between a real world study and a clinical trial if you're taking a long-term weight loss medication and then you stop it.

• 1:55:16Speaker 02

  So this was short-term use, they're saying. Maybe that's the problem.

• 1:55:20Cara Santa Maria?

  The, the drug, the study that I sent you?

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a short-term use.

• 1:55:24Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's not. It's a range.

• 1:55:25Speaker 02

  Well, it said.

• 1:55:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It says the average.

• 1:55:27Speaker 02

  These findings suggest caution in short-term use of these drugs without more comprehensive.

• 1:55:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what they say at the end, but it says average treatment duration was 39 weeks with a range from 11 to 176. 39 weeks is, yeah, 39 weeks is, it's not quite a year, but the average was just under a year.

• 1:55:43Speaker 02

  But that might be considered short-term.

• 1:55:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but the range went up to 176.

• 1:55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think the purpose of this newer study was to, you know, if it's like an intention to treat analysis, if you prescribe this drug to people and they lose weight, what happens to them after that? And what they found is that most people found a way to stabilize their weight after that. They didn't just gain it back. So this was again, more observational, less controlled, but they're saying in, out in the world, what are people actually doing? And what happens to them? Whereas in other trials, they're like, they're not gonna let you do other treatments, you know, for example.

• 1:56:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  So that's the difference. I think that's why the, the outcome is different. Not just that those studies are right and this one is wrong. Different studies. So I get, I get it. That was very tricky.

• 1:56:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because the other studies aren't controlling for that. They're just not, you know, that, that's probably also evident in all these other studies. After they leave and then they test where's their weight a year later, they couldn't prevent these people from doing other things to lose weight.

• 1:56:44Speaker 02

  No, I got you. Definitely shouldn't use these drugs without a plan for long-term maintenance of your weight.

• 1:56:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. I mean, that, that is the, the big takeaway. Yeah.

• 1:56:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's the takeaway. And, and if you do have a plan, you actually can keep the weight off. That's what this, the, this, this study was designed to show.

• 1:56:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is great to hear. Yeah.

• 1:57:00Speaker 02

  But I hear you. I was tricky. Um, but you can have a living mouse with a transparent brain.

• 1:57:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That's pretty freaking cool.

• 1:57:09Speaker 04

  Just inject some blood.

• 1:57:11Bob Novella?

  I want a transparent brain.

• 1:57:13Cara Santa Maria?

  No, you don't. You know, who doesn't want a transparent brain is Jay.

• 1:57:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:19Speaker 04

  He would have said, yes, he would have said, does the mice's brain pulse?

• 1:57:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Pulsating. Yeah.

• 1:57:26Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:57:29Speaker 04

  Facts alone, no matter how numerous or verifiable, do not automatically arrange themselves into an intelligible or truthful picture of the world. It is the task of the human mind to invent a theoretical framework to account for them.

• 1:57:45Speaker 04

  And that was written by Francis Bellow, who was a prominent American science writer and editor known for his work at Fortune Magazine from 1945 to 1960, and Scientific American from 1960 to 1982, where he specialized in molecular biology and high-energy physics.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Yep. I like that quote. It's totally true. Disconnected facts don't really tell you anything. You have to have a way of thinking about them. You have to have a theory that ties them together into a specific narrative, you know, that tells us something about how the world works. Just facts aren't enough.

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  They only get you so far.

• 1:58:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, there's lots of ways. You could build all kinds of different narratives out of cherry pick facts or miss out of context facts or something, you know, whatever. You know, I, I always get, you know, bristle when people like, well, this is a fact. It's like, I'm not, it may be, but it's how you're putting it together that, that matters. Okay. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:58:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Dave.

• 1:58:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:55Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:32Speaker 06

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