The Skeptics Guide #1078 - Mar 7 2026

Quickie with Bob: Thatcher Effect; News Items: Lunar Chickpeas, Sea Level Rise, Latest Study Shows Reiki Does Not Work, Brain Cells Playing Doom; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Glyphosate Safety; 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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• 1:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, March 5th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Kara Santa Maria, and Jay Novella.

• 1:22Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Evan is out this week because his schedule was not flexible enough because of this whole, you know, taxes.

• 1:28Jay Novella?

  The work situation.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, sneeze deep in taxes.

• 1:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, he's always so railed, you know, at this time of year. I feel bad for him because it is like a slow...

• 1:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Death?

• 1:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's a slow death until the end happens. When's the last date? I always forget that day.

• 1:43Cara Santa Maria?

  April 15th, usually. Sometimes it's like weirdly a day or two different.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  It's like the first Monday closest to the April 15th or whatever. It can't fall on a Sunday, right?

• 1:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, right, right.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  So Jay, I know we've been talking about Artemis a lot, so I'm sure you've heard that Artemis 3 is no longer going to land on the moon.

• 1:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we gotta talk about this. I mean, first of all, they figured out what was wrong with Artemis 2. They moved it to April of this year. The bottom line is that they found out that there was a helium flow interruption. And that, of course, is not good. That helium, from my understanding, the helium is what they pump in when they're using the rocket fuel. They're pumping in the helium to take up that empty space. And I think it balances the pressure and all that. Very, very important to pressurize those tanks and make sure everything is flowing at the speeds and everything that they want. And without that working perfectly, who knows what the result could have been? It could have been fatal. And that's what all of this worry is about.

• 2:44Jay Novella?

  They want to make sure that nobody dies, there's no explosions, the basics, right? It was a non-trivial fix, but it didn't require a major redesign, which is fine. It's okay to have delays and it's all part of the system.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Well, talk about delays. So Artemis III is no longer scheduled to land on the moon.

• 3:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and Steve, the detail about that is they changed Artemis III to essentially another...

• 3:10Speaker 02

  They added a mission.

• 3:11Jay Novella?

  Test.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  So they're keeping the numbers sequential, but the Artemis III mission is now the Artemis IV mission, and Artemis III is now a low Earth orbit, just complete testing mission, which is something I was interested, I was curious about anyway, because I know they're still trying to nail down which lander they're using and all that stuff. And how could they possibly go land on the moon in 2027 if they haven't tested all of the new stuff out? So that's what they're doing in Artemis III. Now in low Earth orbit, they're going to check rendezvous and docking maneuvers between Orion spacecraft and commercial lunar landers. There's two now, SpaceX and Blue Origin are each making a commercial lunar lander. And the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, Spacet suits.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  So they are going to be testing all that out in low Earth orbit in 2027. And then in 2028 now, their Artemis IV is scheduled to go to land on the moon.

• 4:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they do that, right? Like, this is what they did preparing for Apollo.

• 4:09Cara Santa Maria?

  What were one and two then?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  One was uncrewed trip around the moon. Two is accrued trip around the moon. Three was land on the moon. But now three is low Earth orbit, test out all these systems. Four is land on the moon.

• 4:22Bob Novella?

  Sounds reasonable.

• 4:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it does, except I guess the question is, why did they add a bunch of systems between two and three?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  They didn't add these systems. I think they were expecting to have them available earlier.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  But I don't know how they were expecting to land on the moon without ever explicitly testing the landers.

• 4:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it seems like too, if they're gonna do a crude orbit around the moon, it should have all the stuff.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:51Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, and like, new stuff shouldn't be breaking.

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Well, remember, Apollo, the first Apollo mission to land on the moon was Apollo 11.

• 4:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we'd never done this before.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  To check each piece of equipment out. I know, but we're going with all new equipment.

• 5:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  It all has to be checked out. I was actually surprised. They're gonna, really? They're gonna, they're gonna land on the third go? That's pretty bold. I guess it was too bold.

• 5:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 5:16Bob Novella?

  I wouldn't be surprised if they throw another one in there.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Nothing would surprise me at this point.

• 5:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 5:21Jay Novella?

  So when, when is Artemis 4 supposed to happen?

• 5:25Speaker 02

  28. But they're also, again, they're trying, this is the NASA spin they're putting on this, and it may all be true, but they're saying, alright, so we're gonna add this other mission to really make sure all these individual components work, then we're gonna land on the moon on Artemis 4. But, but they're saying, with this extra mission, it will set us up to be able to have like, annual missions. Like, we will be able to frequently launch ships. So that, that's what they're trying to get to.

• 5:50Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 5:51Jay Novella?

  Huh. I mean, I get that. And you know, it's complicated, right?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:55Jay Novella?

  The funding is complicated, the, the political will is complicated. You know, NASA isn't just a space organization, but they, they have to deal with politics on a level that I don't think most of us realize.

• 6:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, the director is politically appointed.

• 6:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's a big deal. And, and I'm sure that there's a lot of that going on. And we only can find out so much, and they're only gonna talk about so much. But I'm, look, I'm disappointed, I really am, just because I get kinda psyched up, and it's, it's always a hard letdown, you know, when I'm feeling like something's gonna happen next week, you know? And it's like, oh, it's gonna be two years from now.

• 6:28Speaker 02

  But you, yeah, but you, that, you just have to be in that mindset.

• 6:31Jay Novella?

  You can, I got you.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 6:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but imagine what it's like for, like, I have a friend who granted, she doesn't work on crude missions at all, but she does a lot of low earth, like, fly airplane missions for data collection, and she's also involved in a lot of spectrometers that go into space. And the disappointment that she feels when something gets scrapped, you know, somebody who's worked on this for so long. And then it's like, imagine what that's like when you hear, okay, we're not even, or we're pushing back, or we didn't make the window, or something went wrong. It's like, oh, all those hardworking scientists and engineers.

• 7:03Bob Novella?

  Imagine a horrible accident, that could kill it, the entire thing.

• 7:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Way worse.

• 7:09Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine, oh, we did it on the first go in the 60s, and we, you know, and we can't do it now without killing people. Not that people didn't die in the 60s, which they did, especially that nasty fire, but it could absolutely kill it. So yeah, take your, you know, do what you gotta do to be very, very safe.

• 7:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Still better. Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they were planning essentially on using some of these systems for the first time, like when they were landing on the moon. And I guess they thought that wasn't a great idea.

• 7:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not a great idea.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  All right. Bob, you're gonna start us off with a quickie. Tell us about the Thatcher effect.

• 7:46Bob Novella?

  If you insist. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. I recently came across this article. It really helped me appreciate at a deeper level, probably one of the creepiest optical illusions that I know. In 1980, Professor Peter Thompson, psychologist at the University of York, introduced it. Write that one down. Write that one down, man. Introduced the Thatcher effect, or Thatcher illusion. So this is essentially two upside down pictures of Margaret Thatcher, who was then British Prime Minister. Now, the two upside down faces seem basically the same, or at least very similar. There's no red flags that something is seriously out of whack when you're looking at them. But when you flip them right side up, though, one pic

• 8:29Bob Novella?

  is basically a bit of a horror show. And it's just creepy and wrong. And it's because the eyes and the lips are upside down.

• 8:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I've seen this before. Yeah.

• 8:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's fairly common. If you don't know this illusion, just Google it. Thatcher, Google Thatcher effect, come back. And Steve, we'll just pause the show and wait. Wait a second. It doesn't work that way. It doesn't, we're sorry. So why can't we see this monstrous face when it's upside down? Why is there, like I said, no like real red flags that something is wrong? And the answer is, of course, interesting, and it illuminates how our brains evolved to process faces. It's thought that when our brains see a face, it boots up, if you will, a specific cognitive module that's optimized to see faces holistically, right? And I hate that word holistic. I don't, I want to say gestalt, right? As a gestalt, it sees the face as a gestalt. We don't process the individual parts of a face, but the whole thing together, right?

• 9:21Bob Novella?

  The spatial relationships, the proportions, all that good stuff. This is called configural processing. This takes place in which area of the brain, do you think? Do you know offhand?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  The facial recognition area.

• 9:34Bob Novella?

  Close enough. It's the FFA, fusiform face area.

• 9:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:39Bob Novella?

  What does fusiform mean? I didn't look that up.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Specifically, fusiform means that it's tapered at both ends.

• 9:45Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay.

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Like, I imagine like what a muscle looks like, right? It's bulging in the middle and tapered at both ends.

• 9:50Bob Novella?

  Okay, so when a, when a face is upside down, though, our brain doesn't process it as a face anymore, right? The FFA says, that's not my job. So a more general purpose object recognition process is used, and that's less efficient. And this is called featureal processing, as you might assume, that this evaluates the individual components of objects, and it works fine for chairs and cars, and especially things that are not clear or unfamiliar. It's great, it's great for that, but it's just not as efficient as the, as this holistic processing. So this is how important our faces to our species, which, which makes a lot of sense since we're so social, right?

• 10:31Bob Novella?

  We need like a hyper optimized recognition system just for faces, and it's really primarily for faces. I'm trying to think of what else it would be used for.

• 10:41Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why we see faces and things that aren't faces.

• 10:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 10:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  No, it's dedicated cortex. I mean, that, that's the whole idea.

• 10:48Bob Novella?

  Right, and then, so, so cartoon faces, it would work, it would work for that too, right? And, but it's interesting, though, because you're looking at this upside down face. So when you're looking at it using featureal processing, you see the eyes, and the eyes are actually right side up in the upside down face, and you see that as like, oh, those are eyes, but you You're just not looking at the whole, the whole Gestalt of it, right?

• 11:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so somebody, somebody with prosopagnosia probably wouldn't fall for the illusion. Because they have a hard time recognizing the Gestalt of faces and they recognize people by specific features.

• 11:20Bob Novella?

  Good point, exactly. I mean, maybe, is that one of the primary problems, though? That it's not engaging that specific module in the brain?

• 11:29Cara Santa Maria?

  There's different versions of prosopagnosia and it can, it can vary. Like there's acquired and there's, you know, congenital. And so it probably, there probably are different etiologies of it. But I can imagine that there's a form where they just don't have that Gestalt-like processing.

• 11:46Jay Novella?

  That is correct. Some, some people with prosopagnosia do not experience the Thatcher effect.

• 11:52Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 11:52Jay Novella?

  That's certainly not as, not as profoundly as people without prosopagnosia.

• 11:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Do you know who else might experience this Thatcher illusion? There's evidence that chimpanzees and even rhesus monkeys may experience it. I'm not sure how confident they are in it, but that, that makes sense. Especially for chimpanzees, rhesus monkeys, maybe not as much. But there is some evidence, apparently. So this has been your Weird Face Quick Eat with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 12:19Jay Novella?

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, you're gonna tell us about some more lunar news. You're gonna tell us about lunar chickpeas. All right, before I get to that, would you guys eat moon regolith?

• 12:30Bob Novella?

  Only if I want to lacerate my lungs.

• 12:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, would you eat it?

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Of course not.

• 12:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, he didn't say he'd breathe it. He said eat it, but...

• 12:38Bob Novella?

  I don't want it anywhere near me.

• 12:40Jay Novella?

  But what about if it was in a milkshake?

• 12:42Cara Santa Maria?

  If it was safety tested?

• 12:42Jay Novella?

  No.

• 12:45Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 12:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Just purify.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  You would not want to eat that.

• 12:49Jay Novella?

  All right, but, but in a weird, in a weird way, I'm going to tell you about how you wouldn't actually mind eating moon regolith.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  If it was converted into something else.

• 12:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'm talking about growing food and using the moon regolith for this, right? So, you know, in a way, in a way, you would be eating it. You know what I'm saying? You see that? Wasn't clever enough for you, Steve?

• 13:07Bob Novella?

  No.

• 13:08Jay Novella?

  Okay. It's kind of the same thing as eating moon dirt. All right.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Is it? So that means we're eating cow renewal every time we crop.

• 13:14Jay Novella?

  From a certain point of view, okay? The Artemis moon missions are delayed, whatever. They are underway, though. We're in midstream here. I'm not, it seems likely that, you know, people will be spending time on the moon in the future at some point. And what the NASA scientists are doing is they're trying to prepare for this and trying to think about everything, all the technologies that they're going to need. And scientists are actively working on figuring out how to grow food on the moon. And it's not just growing food on the moon. They want to use the moon's regolith to do this. Now, why would we worry about that? Well, first of all, of course, it's going to be incredibly expensive and risky to constantly be shipping food from the earth off to the people at the

• 13:58Jay Novella?

  moon. It's expensive. It's impractical. It just isn't the right way to go about it. Like, maybe in the early missions, sure, but eventually, we want them to be as, you know, self sufficient as possible. And at some point, astronauts are definitely going to need to grow some of the things that they eat on the moon. And hence, this is why scientists are looking into this. There was a new study published in Scientific Reports, and they looked at whether that might actually be possible using the lunar regolith. Now, if you don't know, this is the material that covers the moon's surface. It's not soil. It's regolith. It doesn't have all the properties of soil. Soil has microbes, organic matter in it, right? And regolith is essentially just

• 14:43Jay Novella?

  crushed up rock. And some of it has been crushed up so much, it's a fine powder. And because it doesn't have this biological complexity that soil has, it's impossible to grow food in it. You know, and the particles are sharp, they're chemically reactive, they're structurally unstable, and from a farming perspective, it's essentially the worst possible growing medium.

• 15:03Speaker 02

  There's also some toxic elements in there, like heavy metals.

• 15:06Jay Novella?

  Definitely.

• 15:07Bob Novella?

  And it was the bane of the existence of the astronauts. They hated that crap. It's nasty, nasty stuff.

• 15:15Jay Novella?

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, Bob, this was like an Anakin Skywalker level thing here. I mean, it's like, it's coarse, it gets into everything. It's bad stuff. It really is something that you don't want to have to deal with. So what did they do? They wanted to figure out how to test if plants could grow in the moon's regolith. So- What they did was first they had to get a lunar regolith simulant, right? And we have it. It mimics the chemistry and the physical properties of material collected during the Apollo missions. And it's a very good similarity, right? It is going to show similar results as the real thing. They mix that simulant with something called vermicompost. And this is an organic fertilizer that's produced when earthworms break down organic waste, right?

• 16:00Jay Novella?

  Because they're breaking down organic waste and then they're pushing things into the soil that they're moving through. So vermicompost, it's important because it has nutrients, organic matter, it has microbes, all the things that lunar regolith doesn't have that the soils on Earth have. And that's why we have such a fertile planet.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Now Jay, these are specifically with the red worms, which you can use to compost on Earth. You know, so when you're, there's like basically a couple of different ways of composting. And one of them is just throw those red critters in there and they eat everything.

• 16:33Jay Novella?

  Now Steve, is there any worry about overfeeding these red worms? Then they grow big.

• 16:38Bob Novella?

  Spice?

• 16:39Jay Novella?

  And then they'd start to produce.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  They turn into sandworms?

• 16:44Jay Novella?

  Are you worried about this?

• 16:45Bob Novella?

  Not until now.

• 16:47Jay Novella?

  All right, well, we gotta start looking into it, you know? All right, so the researchers chose to grow chickpeas of all things.

• 16:54Bob Novella?

  Garbanzo beans.

• 16:55Jay Novella?

  These are also known as garbanzo beans. My first, our first in collective family interaction with chickpeas was that my mom used them for a soup that she made, which I still am trying to figure out how, and it was fantastic.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  It was chisita.

• 17:09Jay Novella?

  It was called chisita. That definitely is a local Italian slang word.

• 17:13Bob Novella?

  Little like elbow macaroni with it, right? And parmesan?

• 17:17Jay Novella?

  So this crop makes sense for a number of reasons. You know, for potential space agriculture, they want something that's going to be high in protein, right? Because we're all freaking out about protein, right, Bob?

• 17:28Bob Novella?

  Yes, we are these days.

• 17:30Jay Novella?

  Chickpeas are nicely compact. They form, you know, helpful relationships with microorganisms in the soil. It's a good plant that they selected. So to strengthen the partnership that I'm talking about, the researchers coated the chickpea seeds with something called arbustular mycorrhizal.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Not even close.

• 17:51Jay Novella?

  All right, whatever. Say it. Say it, I tried. Arbustular mycorrhizal. It's a fun guy.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's a fun guy to hang out with.

• 18:00Jay Novella?

  All right, look, you could look it up in your own time. These fungi colonize plant roots and send out microscopic filaments. You may have seen this in, what's that TV show, Steve?

• 18:13Cara Santa Maria?

  The Last of Us.

• 18:14Jay Novella?

  The Last of Us, yeah. You've seen this in The Last of Us, right? The little filaments come out. What they do is they act like extensions of the plant's root system. And I'm not making fun of that. That's really powerful. It's very useful. It essentially allows the plants to gather more water and nutrients and everything that they need. So it's very helpful. And once it's in place, they help the plants survive. And particularly in environments where there might not be a lot of the things that the plants need to survive. So these plants were grown in several different mixtures of the regolith simulant and the vermicompost. Some mixtures had relatively small amounts of regolith. Others were dominated by it.

• 18:55Jay Novella?

  And of course, there was one that was pure regolith with no compost at all as the baseline. And the results were promising. And it's, you know, I'm very interested in what they found because it was even more viable than I think they suspected it would be. The chickpeas were able to grow and produce seeds in mixtures of the soil containing up to 75% lunar simulant, which is a lot, you know, a lot of the regolith. But as the amount of regolith increased from there, the plants clearly started to struggle and they grew smaller and produced fewer seeds. And in the treatment that used 100% of the regolith, the plants germinated, which they would essentially do with liquid, but eventually died before producing seeds, as expected. But something interesting was observed.

• 19:40Jay Novella?

  They thought that plants growing in the regolith that were heavy with regolith mixtures would produce fewer seeds. And they did. But the size of the seeds didn't change, and that's what surprised them. They expected the stressed plants to grow smaller seeds, but they always grew normal-sized seeds, which is good because even if any of these plants that they're using would get stressed out, they would still be growing something that's edible and that could be replanted. They also observed that the mycarizol? Mycarizol? Michael Raisel. Michael Raisel.

• 20:14Cara Santa Maria?

  You're saying that right, Jay.

• 20:15Jay Novella?

  Thank you, Kara. So who was this guy?

• 20:17Bob Novella?

  Mike, anyway.

• 20:19Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so.

• 20:21Jay Novella?

  The fungi, right, it successfully colonized the chickpeas roots even in the harshest regolith mixtures that they made, their presence, you know, improved the planet's survival and growth. So, all the numbers were pointing in the right direction. Maybe the most interesting thing, though, was that the microbial activity actually began changing the regolith itself. So, what that means is, there were biological processes happening that helped bind these tiny regolith particles together into larger clumps. And that might not sound significant, but it is, because it's actually making the regolith turn into something that behaves more like real soil, rather than loose dust. So, over time, you would imagine, after doing this on the moon for long enough, that they would have quite

• 21:04Jay Novella?

  a body of soil up there, which would be great.

• 21:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're right, though. Like, the, once they have a patch of regolith that they're farming, and they've mixed in enough of the stuff, so that it's workable soil, over time, it'll get better and better and better.

• 21:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  You know, but they all, you didn't mention also, that they found that the mycorrhizal, that that was self-sustaining in the regolith. Like, once, they just put that in the regolith, and it was able to reproduce and self-sustain. So, they may only have to do that once, you know, and then it'll keep going.

• 21:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I couldn't find any information on how much area they'd need, you know, what would the real numbers look like, you know, what would the enclosure be like? They don't really have answers for any of that yet. You know, I just read another news article that was talking about, they're gonna be sending robots down into the lava tubes, and really check them out, and really, really, actually, like, say, you know, should we use these? Which I think they should. And I know Bob does, because that's why I think they should. Anyway, this is cool, you know, they're gonna probably be testing other plants, other things, to vary the diet up, and hopefully, you know, within the, how many years would it be at this point, before, like, people would actually need to harvest food on the moon? Five, 10 years?

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, something like that.

• 22:22Jay Novella?

  You know, they'll get there, I'm pretty sure.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is pretty cool. They're doing similar research for Martian regolith as well. I think the Martian regolith is worse, actually, than the lunar regolith.

• 22:32Bob Novella?

  It's no, like, uh, there's some pretty nasty toxins. It's no nitrates, yeah, it's not, it's not good soil, man.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  pH is terrible, yeah. Yeah, they need to do more than just throw some red worms at it.

• 22:44Cara Santa Maria?

  There's at least some evidence, right, that some things have existed in Martian regolith in the past as opposed to the moon.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  They've also used simulated Martian regolith and they were able to grow stuff in it, but they just have to change it a lot more than their lunar regolith to get it to be soil, basically. So doable, but it would, yeah, it would take some work. The good news with this, though, is that the astronauts can just take any of the, any of the food waste they have, or even just organic waste, doesn't have to be food waste, they can compost all the stuff that they bring with them to the moon. They don't have to dispose of it, they just sort of compost it all with these red worms and have it there when, when they, to use to make soil.

• 23:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. What about their own poop?

• 23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, everything. Generally, you don't use your own poop in.

• 23:31Jay Novella?

  No, you can eat it.

• 23:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I wonder if there's a way to clean it.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, they would have to make sure they treat, you don't want the path, obviously the pathogens to.

• 23:38Cara Santa Maria?

  You don't want the pathogens, but you want the good bacteria.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but Steve, they mix it in with the soil, like, what would be the bad situation?

• 23:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, you, yeah, it's bad. You don't want to do that with animal excrement or human excrement. Don't put poop in your compost. You'll make people sick.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah, you don't put poop in compost, but also. What can you put it in? You know, there's, if you're going to use humanure, right, human manure to grow crops that we eat, then that's what they call it, humanure. I love portmanteaus. Then you have to treat it, you have to make sure that you're not passing, you know, GI pathogens through to the food.

• 24:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I mean, we can drink toilet water now because we have, you know, ways to purify it, so.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, Kara, I understand that sea level rise is far worse than we thought.

• 24:21Jay Novella?

  Shocker.

• 24:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Good news, everybody. So there's a really interesting article that was published in Nature, I think just yesterday, called "Sea Level Much Higher Than Assumed in Most Coastal Hazard Assessments." Yeah, this is a really, I think this is like making a lot of waves in the scientific community right now, no pun intended. And it really comes down to, why do you think one study could somewhat confidently say, I'm gonna ask you, Bob and Jay, one study could it kind of confidently say, um, everything we thought we knew is probably an underestimate?

• 25:05Jay Novella?

  So what, why do you think that is?

• 25:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. How could one study say that?

• 25:09Bob Novella?

  Is it a, is it a meta study? Is it a meta study?

• 25:12Jay Novella?

  Is this the first one that was properly funded?

• 25:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, what the authors are claiming is that this is the first one that actually used the methodology correctly.

• 25:20Bob Novella?

  Oh geez. Okay.

• 25:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what they did is they looked at, yes, you're right, Bob. They looked at 385 other studies. Between all peer reviewed, between 2009 and 2025, and more than half of them were just in the past five years. And they were looking at like coastal flood exposure, vulnerability and risk, looking at global and regional hazard assessments. And they looked at the methodology that was used in all of these and they found that 99% of those studies likely used incorrect or insufficient methodology in order to estimate the height of the ocean. So how could so many people have gotten it so wrong?

• 26:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's an important question, but I think we first have to go back to how do we know how high the ocean is?

• 26:13Jay Novella?

  Well, doesn't it, are we just measuring the average averages and then we could know how much above that average it is?

• 26:19Bob Novella?

  It reminds me of the snowfall that we've had, like trying to estimate how much snow do we get? Well, how do you know? Because it does drifts and all these different things that the environment makes it hard to get, to get you that average. I know there's good ways to do it, but I, I don't know exactly what they are. It seems kind of related.

• 26:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Moving beyond averages, and let's say we're talking about pretty specific measurements and very specific parts of the earth. We only know how high the ocean is relative to how high the land is, right? That's what we're concerned about. When we talk about sea level rise, we're talking about how does the sea level compare?

• 26:54Bob Novella?

  That's all that matters. Yeah.

• 26:55Cara Santa Maria?

  We don't really, yeah, we don't really care how tall the ocean is from the floor to the surface. We want to know, is the sea rising up in such a way that it is starting to flow over the land? And are low lying coastal regions going to be flooded out? So how do we measure land height?

• 27:17Bob Novella?

  Well, you see those, those guys with those things.

• 27:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  Those guys with the things. I mean, you could do it from the sea level, right? Or you could do it from, you know, the, from the ocean bottom, right? To the top. There's different, different types of measurements you can make.

• 27:36Cara Santa Maria?

  But you're right, Bob. It's like, it's the guys with the things, right? Like, we have tools that are available to us that allow us to measure how high a coastline is. And those tools are pretty much consistently used across the globe. The problem is the tools that we use to measure how high the water is, aren't consistently used. And what these researchers found is that amongst those 385 peer reviewed papers, 99, well, actually 90% of them only relied on something that was called the geoid model. Do you guys know anything about the geoid model?

• 28:19Bob Novella?

  It's the shape of the earth, right?

• 28:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I had to, I had to dig into it. So it's a, it's a modeling technique. And I love the way that Bethany Brookshire defined it. She said, "A geoid can be imagined as an irregular, undulating blue ball representing the global ocean, based on data about Earth's gravity and rotation." So it's, it's a model that takes into account both gravity and rotation. The problem is, and it's, it's, it is irregular and it is undulating. So it's a little bit more precise than just saying we live on a smooth, round earth, right?

• 28:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, gravity is different over different parts of the earth because of the, the mass that's below you varies enough where it's actually measurable. So the gravity maps you might have heard of.

• 29:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Mass, density, and pull all together help map out this full geoid model. The problem is what geoids don't take into account are ocean circulation, currents, winds, tides.

• 29:22Bob Novella?

  Not even tides.

• 29:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Water temperatures. All of those things influence the sea level.

• 29:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what you're apparently supposed to do when you use geoids to predict or to model out sea level, right, and then compare it to the more accurate, actual measurements of the height of the earth in the different areas where you're measuring, is you're supposed to use model corrections that account for ocean circulation, currents, winds, tides, water temperature, all those different things. And what they found is that in this study, 90% or across all of these studies, 90% of them only used the geoid as their comparison. Just straight up, they used this model that at one point in time was really state of the art and was the standard. So a lot of scientists who were in training during the

• 30:12Cara Santa Maria?

  time when the geoid was like the hot new science, that became their anchor, right? That became their standard. And so they found that 90% of studies that were published between those years only use the geoid as a comparison to land height. And then another 9% use the geoid along with other measurements, but they didn't apparently align the data appropriately. So their comparisons between sea level and land elevation did take other factors into account. But when they reran their statistical analyses or the different techniques that they use, they found that they weren't modeled appropriately. So they

• 30:54Cara Santa Maria?

  found that only 1% of all of the studies that they looked at used both a sophisticated understanding of geoids and all of those other ocean measurements, and then compared them appropriately to the sophisticated land elevation measurements that we already have.

• 31:11Bob Novella?

  I feel like I want to go to those guys, those people, the scientists that did those 1% and just shake their hands like, you got it. You're in the 1% club.

• 31:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what they did, this was a postdoc, ooh, don't remember where she was. I'm so sorry. And then, and then the primary author was at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. And what they did is they actually Were able to look at this big data set of sea levels that were based on satellite measurements of the ocean's surface and they compared those to the models that were used in all of these studies at different locations throughout the earth and they found that they were sometimes really far off. And so on average, they were 24 to 27

• 32:02Cara Santa Maria?

  centimeters too low. So that's about 10 inches. But sometimes the discrepancy was way worse. They found that in Southeast Asia and around Indonesia and parts of the Pacific, there was like a meter difference. So these places under, uh, overestimated or sorry, underestimated sea level by upwards of a meter. And then in other places, it was overestimated, like all around Antarctica. And you can see the model maps online if you, if you look it up. Um, there's a great New York Times article that shows sort of the differences, but you see that most of the discrepancy is happening sort of in the Indian and Pacific Oceans around Southeast Asia. And most of the accurate readings are

• 32:46Cara Santa Maria?

  happening around Europe and, uh, the Atlantic part of the Americas. And so we're finding that different techniques were being utilized in different parts of the world. And unfortunately, some of the places where the underestimation is the greatest are the places where the detriment from sea level rise will also be the greatest. And so, you know, there are different takes on this data. Some people are saying, ew, this is a big deal. We've been kind of, I like this quote from, um, Torbjorn Torvquist at Tulane, who said, this is a big wake up call. We finally have a robust effort to sort this out. And then he said, it turns out we've been comparing apples to oranges nearing all, nearly all the time because

• 33:28Cara Santa Maria?

  we can't take the data from land measurements, which is really exact and compare it to the data from ocean measurements, which is, which is uses a totally different approach. That's much more of a smooth model. But then there are other scientists who are saying, listen, people who are near high tide flooding know what high tide flooding looks like. This is not really going to change a lot of policy. We know that the sea is getting higher. We know that these people are at risk. Okay, maybe it's a lot worse, but it's not, it doesn't really affect our scientific study of the rates of sea level rise. It just means that we're starting from a worse point than we thought we were.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's terrible. It reminds me of studies over the last few years, which found that, oh, you know, the warming is maybe not going to be as much as we thought it was going to be, but the negative effects of that amount of warming is worse than we thought it was going to be.

• 34:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, right, right.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  So, this is similar. It's like, oh, okay, the sea level rise is worse for any given level of warming than we thought, which of course increases the urgency to do something about it.

• 34:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And we've got to remember too, that most of these studies, like one thing that's important to note in a science news write-up, is that 45 of the reference studies were by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. So, like, these studies are directly influencing policy. And what they're basically saying is that, you know, or I'm sorry, if we're talking one meter higher than we thought, and add to that a one meter rise that we predict will happen over the next century, we're talking millions, hundreds of millions of people who are now just homeless, who have to move inland, who are climate refugees. It's, yeah, it's a slow process, but we

• 35:21Cara Santa Maria?

  can't just ignore that it's happening. We have to plan for it. And we have to, and one way to plan for it is to accurately measure it.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Yep. All right. Thanks, Cara. So, guys, I get email. I get lots of email. And one type of email I get is people who are pushing stories or interviewees or whatever, right? They're like, hey, you should, this would be good for you to talk about on SGU or to write about on science-based medicine or whatever. They're almost all crap, right? It's almost all just people marketing themselves, or they're, you know, publicists marketing their people. And rarely is it useful to us. But occasionally, people market pseudoscience to me, which I always find amusing. And I do use sometimes as a source of material

• 36:11Speaker 02

  to write about critically, which I know wasn't their intention when they sent it to my attention. Yeah. And that's what happened this time. So somebody sent me a, like a press release kind of, hey, this is people who are interested in treating chronic pain, might want to look at this study. And it's basically saying, finally, there's evidence that energy healing actually works. Right?

• 36:36Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. So of course I'm interested in this. And it says, there's a placebo controlled trial, randomized clinical trial, showing that Reiki, Reiki specifically, is effective for chronic pain, chronic knee pain specifically.

• 36:53Cara Santa Maria?

  But Reiki isn't a thing. So how can you have a placebo against Reiki?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  What do you think?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  What's, what is placebo Reiki?

• 37:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they call it in the study I just looked, they call it.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Fake key. Yeah, it's fake.

• 37:05Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. I love it.

• 37:08Jay Novella?

  My God, it's happening.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  So it's essentially you train, this is the study, people who were doing the study did it. They're not Reiki people, right? They were just trained to mimic Reiki while distracting themselves so they don't accidentally do it. Right? Because, you know,

• 37:25Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 37:25Speaker 02

  If you have any intention to heal the person, that may trigger some actual energy healing. So you got to make sure that the people doing the fake key are not accidentally doing real Reiki by intending to help or treat the people, that they're waving their hands over. So they're, they like count backwards or do some things to distract themselves. So they don't do.

• 37:50Cara Santa Maria?

  So this would be like if somebody, if you were comparing prayer

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:54Cara Santa Maria?

  to somebody going blah, blah, blah, blah, Jesus, blah. Okay.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Okay. So there were actually four arms to this study and it's of 164 adults total. So that's not a lot of patients.

• 38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  That's 40 per and as Kara and I've said multiple times, 50 is a good rule of thumb. So it's a little bit below like per group.

• 38:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's for like,

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 38:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's for like an FMRI study.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. For this kind of study, this is, this is a pilot study at best. But that's not my major problem with the study. I knew, I knew exactly, I'm gonna just brag, I knew exactly what this study was going to show before I looked at it.

• 38:37Bob Novella?

  Bragger.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  So I was not surprised at all. But what do you guys think? So again, I don't think this is a positive study. So let me tell you what the four groups are, and then you tell me what you think the results showed. So one group was Rekey, one group was mindfulness, one group was Fakey, and one group was a waitlist control. So they, they're like, in the study, they're waiting to be allocated, they're getting their usual treatment, and that's it, nothing else happens. So what do you think the study showed?

• 39:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably that anything, any interaction with a provider showed an improvement in pain.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Over waitlist control.

• 39:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Over waitlist control.

• 39:18Bob Novella?

  I agree. I like that one.

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Close.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  What it showed was that if you compare Rekey to waitlist control, there was statistically significant benefit. If you compare mindfulness to waitlist control, there was statistically significant benefit, and there was a little more. If you compare Fakey to the waitlist control, it was improved over the waitlist, but it wasn't as much, and I don't think it was statistically significant. And if you controlled Rekey to mindfulness, I think the mindfulness was a little bit better, but I don't think that was statistically significant either.

• 39:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I also, I'm looking here, and all they report are p-values. I don't see any effect sizes.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:04Bob Novella?

  Any p-hacking going on?

• 40:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And their Rekey is p of .02.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  So if you compare, so this is the only comparison that matters with all of this. There's only one comparison that matters, and that's Rekey versus Fakey. Cause that's the only, at least has a chance of being blinded comparison. Now-

• 40:29Cara Santa Maria?

  True. Everything else is just provider effects.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Right. Is placebo effect-

• 40:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Non-specific effects. Yeah.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  You're comparing to waitlist control, that's unblinded worthless, worthless for chronic pain. It's totally worthless.

• 40:41Cara Santa Maria?

  It's people who don't feel well, having somebody listen to them and say, "I'm gonna do something to help you," and then experiencing what they think is help.

• 40:48Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 40:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, that's going to have an effect.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, does mindfulness, and by mindfulness, you can read just relaxation. Does that help you feel like your chronic pain is not bothering you as much? Lowering your stress? Sure, sure.

• 41:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and also, like, it totally depends on how you do this, but mindfulness for pain relief is a common practice in psychology, and it works very well. Like, we have a lot of good studies that show that it works very well.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Because pain is distractible.

• 41:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, because pain is subjective. Like, and so if you can do things psychologically to help people not focus on their pain, or just to have a different relationship with their pain, of course, it's going to have a positive benefit. But usually, that's not a single session, and it's not, you know, it's like, what is, quote, mindfulness? That's way too vain.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, even in the mindfulness literature, we talked about this on the show years ago, there was a paper by mindfulness researchers that said, "We do not have an operational definition of mindfulness. There's no consistency in the literature as to what it actually is." But anyway, that's a distraction. So the only comparison that actually mattered, in my opinion, in this study, was Reiki versus Faiki, and it was not statistically significant.

• 42:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God. So they're saying the Reiki was better because, look, this many more people responded, but if you compare the two...

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Right, so that is...

• 42:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's chance alone.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  That is a very common statistical error that clinical papers make. They compare placebo to baseline and treatment to baseline and show that they're different. But you need to compare treatment to placebo. That's the only comparison that matters. And this comparison was not statistically significant. They said there's a trend, which is means negative, right? So this is a negative study, and they are selling this completely negative study as if it shows, finally, that energy healing works. It's complete nonsense. This is every time somebody sends me an acupuncture study, that's what it shows. So that's why I knew what it was going to show. This is like, that's always my number one hypothesis.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Oh, I bet you, they compared, they compared to no treatment, and that was significant. And then they compared to sham treatment, and that wasn't significant. And that's exactly what it showed. Yeah. So don't fall for it. But they're marketing it as if it shows it works, which is basically a lie, right?

• 43:16Speaker 02

  And as you say, Kara, it can't work because it's nothing, right? Because there is no energy, there's no life energy, they're not doing anything. But here's the thing, I'm shoot, you know, it's very likely, and there's lots of evidence to back this up, that the attitude of the treater affects the degree of the placebo effect. It's the, as you say, it's the therapeutic interaction. So if you're telling the fey key people to look distracted and don't engage and count backwards, of course, of course, you're not going to get as much of a placebo effect as somebody who is having that therapeutic connection with their client.

• 43:55Cara Santa Maria?

  This is not double blind.

• 43:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's what I said.

• 43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  That's by definition, it needs to be double blind.

• 44:00Speaker 02

  It's not properly blind. They made an attempt to blind it, but I questioned the blinding. And what they didn't do is measure the blinding, right? So what you could do is ask participants, do you think you were in the treatment group or the control group and see if there's a difference? And I don't see that they did that here unless I miss them looking through it again.

• 44:22Cara Santa Maria?

  But even if they did, I still don't think that's robust enough because it, what they can verbalize is different than what they're feeling in the moment. And I also just think by definition, it's, it's just not double blind, it's single blind. Like the people, and it's not even well blinded, as you mentioned.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  It wasn't single blind, because if you're doing Reykey, you know it. And if you're doing fey key, you know it. It was not blinded at all.

• 44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's true. I was going to say that the practitioners were not blinded, but the patients were, but the patients aren't really either.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were, they were not blinded to the weightless control. They were, they were, they were blinded to, yeah, you're right. They were technically blinded to the treatment, but as we're saying, probably not well.

• 45:01Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 45:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's why we double blind things, because if the provider knows that they're giving a placebo or a therapy, they are going to act differently towards the patient.

• 45:10Bob Novella?

  Even if it's unconscious, absolutely unconsciously, they could do that.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Totally. And again, there's direct evidence that that has a huge effect. In fact, that's the only effect. The only effect is basically the therapeutic relationship. And the better you are at that, the more of an effect there is. The experience of the practitioner doesn't matter. Whether it's real or for sham doesn't matter. Nothing else matters except that interaction with the therapist.

• 45:35Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent. And especially with a population like this. I mean, there is no underestimating the power of somebody who has chronically been in pain, who feels like they're not being heard, not being seen, and who is desperate for an answer. And somebody saying, hey, I've got something that might help you.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:53Cara Santa Maria?

  You're, you're going to have expectation effects there.

• 45:56Bob Novella?

  Absolutely. Steve, did you reply to the email? And what'd you say? Oh, yeah.

• 46:01Cara Santa Maria?

  We just did.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll probably write about this on Science-Based Medicine next week, too. Bob, so this is your second neurological news item this week. You encroaching on my territory?

• 46:12Bob Novella?

  I'm totally taking over, dude. You're done. Guys, I've been seeing this all over the news lately, at least in my news feeds, anyway. Researchers are now using neurons on a chip to play the video game Doom. Have you guys seen this? Have you come across any stuff on this? So what I want to explore about this is, why is this actually funny? How exactly are they pulling this off? And why should you care? Okay, so we're starting with Cortical Labs. This is the Australian biotech startup that is doing this. They actually did something similar in 2022 using Pong. You guys remember Pong? It's just probably one of the earliest, earliest games.

• 46:54Bob Novella?

  Basically, you control a paddle on one end and your opponent controls it on the other end of the screen. The ball goes back and forth and you gotta move the paddle up and down. Basic stuff. Here, and for that, for Pong, they used mouse and brain cells on a chip. This time, they are using basically Doom. It's not exactly Doom. Well, you guys remember Doom, right? This was 1993. It was the first consolidated first-person shooter genre game that really took off. It was kind of horror and science fiction, you know, demons essentially invading from hell. I remember playing it. It was a lot of fun.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  That was the only game, that was the only game I deleted from my computer because I was too addicted to.

• 47:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow, Steve. Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's awesome.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't delete games that I'm addicted to.

• 47:42Jay Novella?

  That's like the good part.

• 47:44Bob Novella?

  Right. So, so they went to Doom because for multiple reasons, but it was, it's far more complex, right? This is a 3D environment, whereas Pong was basically just 2D on your screen. Technically, though, Doom is 2.5D. Have you heard, have you guys heard of that one? And that just means that the creatures, they're, they're not 3D models. You know, they're just more two dimensional kind of creatures that kind of seem 3D in a way, kind of in a way. So it's 2.5D, but whatever, doesn't really matter. And it wasn't really even necessarily Doom that they are using in this scenario. It's a copy, it's a copyright free game called Free Doom, which uses the Doom engine, but it's basically essentially

• 48:24Bob Novella?

  Doom for all intents and purposes. Now, this is funny because the phrase, can it run Doom? Is an internet meme. This is a big internet meme, if you're in the biz. This is in 1997, Doom released its source code. And over time, Doom had been ported to all sorts of different hardware systems, ATMs, cell phones, digital cameras, graphing calculators, all sorts of things, oscilloscopes and pianos, printers. They, they just ported this stuff everywhere. So Doom, the idea that can it run Doom is basically this universal benchmark for testing, you know, hardware versatility. So it's a, it's a just a goofy meme that you may have

• 49:05Bob Novella?

  heard often. So, so running this on Doom was just kind of like a hat tip to that in, in a lot of ways. So what we're dealing with here is a biological computer that's called CL1 for cortical labs, right? CL1. The operating system is called BIOS, which is lowercase b i, uppercase O S. BIOS for biological operating system. It's not BIOS as the, the firmware that's stored on the motherboard, you know, your motherboard chip. Was it basic input-output system? It's not that. So it's, you know, sounds identical. At least that's how I think you would pronounce it. BIOS. That's the O S. Alright. So the neurons. It's called a biological computer because there's neurons in, in this loop here. And they use 200,000

• 49:47Bob Novella?

  neurons, which sounds like a lot, but people have about 86 billion neurons. So you know, it's not a lot, but these are genuine neurons. They're not simulated neural networks, which you probably have heard about a lot. They essentially took donated adult skin or blood cells, right? And they reprogrammed them to become induced pluripotent stem cells. And then these stem cells become differentiated into cortical brain cells. So this is where these brain cells are coming. They're not like harvesting brain cells from people. They're creating them.

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Bob, how long do those neurons live in that system?

• 50:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I was thinking the same thing, Jay. They have an enclosed internal life support system for these neurons. So they are protected. It's temperature controlled. There's even waste filtration. There's, you know, special gas mixing and circulation. So they're really taking care of these neurons and they can live for up to six months. So not bad, except after six months, like damn, they all died. They gotta do all this again.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  Sounds like the precursor to brain in a jar.

• 50:49Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, absolutely. And it's funny, Stephen, I've seen like AI-generated images for this news item and it showed a full ass brain connected by wires. And it's like, come on, 200,000, not 8.6 billion. So, okay, so we've got the neurons and the neurons are sitting on an array of electrodes. And these electrodes have access to all the neurons and they can stimulate the neurons and they can also read the cellular activity, the spikes, right, from these neurons as well. So that's critical. So how does this interact with the video game? So what's happening

• 51:29Bob Novella?

  is they take the video feed and they convert that into patterns of electrical stimulation. And the neurons have a specific firing pattern, right? That when they're stimulated by the video output, the neurons fire and that pattern is mapped to the game action. So the way the neurons fire can be mapped to the actions like moving and shooting and ducking, right? The main things that the character can do in Doom, these neurons can also control that. And of course, initially,

• 52:02Bob Novella?

  Very haphazard. So it made me think, well, how do they train these guys? How do they, how do they get better at what they're doing? So they have a reward correction feedback loop. That one really confused me because I'm like, how do you reward neurons? I mean, you're not going to give them dopamine. You're not going to give them little peanut butter cups. How does it, how does a neuron get rewarded in a way that it will actually take note of? You know what I mean? So when, when a goal is achieved, this is how it works. When a goal is achieved in the game, like, oh, look, the neurons fired and shot that demon. When that goal is achieved, signals are sent. These are like reward signals. And if a mistake is made, like it gets killed after doing something stupid, then corrective signals get sent as well.

• 52:47Bob Novella?

  So, so what is that, what does that mean? If there's a reward, if the neurons do something correct, it's a, gets a very structured stimulation. All right, it gets a quick little burst of stimulation that's structured and quick and nice. You know what I mean? If it's good, if the neurons do something incorrect, it, instead it gets a random noisy stimulation. Now, I didn't know this, but apparently neurons will self-organize to avoid noisy, chaotic input. And they want, and they will keep predictable inputs. So that is actually a way to make the neurons self-organize by sending the, the corrective stimulations, whether it's a, it's a reward or whether it's a mistake. So that's how that works. And that was a

• 53:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they're, they're inducing like kindling, basically, which is what you typically want to see in a network when you're doing

• 53:36Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 53:36Cara Santa Maria?

  research. Yeah, they're just inducing regular organized firing. But I wouldn't say that like the neuron wants to fire in an organized way and it doesn't want noise. I think that's kind of going a bit far.

• 53:48Bob Novella?

  Well, it's the way they, the way they put it that is that the neurons self-organize to avoid, the self-organization is structured in a way that it avoids the noisy, the noisy chaotic inputs. And it self-organizes to optimize the predictable inputs. Maybe that's a better way to put it, but that's, that's basically why I think

• 54:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think it's just neurons are going to self-organize in this like predictable Pattern when they're in vitro, like when they're in a disconnected network. And so if it gets chattery and weird, you'll find that they tend towards self organizing. But I don't know if they're like, quote, avoiding the noise. I think they're just doing what they do.

• 54:29Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. They're absolutely doing, doing what they're doing. But my understanding, as I said, is that they're going to self organize in a way that seems, my take is that they're going to self organize to optimize the behaviors that produce the predictable inputs.

• 54:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes. It's like the quote, good inputs or the ones that are quote, wanted, aren't really good or wanted. They're just more efficient.

• 54:49Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 54:50Cara Santa Maria?

  And the other ones are less efficient, so it's more work for the neurons.

• 54:53Bob Novella?

  Right. So then I came across a quote by Alan Luffler, who's a scientist at Cortical Lab. So he explains this in a different way. He says that when a demon appears on the left of the screen, specific electrodes stimulate the sensory area of the neural culture on the left side. The neurons react to that stimulation. We then listen to their response, the spikes, and interpret that activity as motor commands. If the neurons fire in a specific pattern, the doom guy shoots. If they fire in another pattern, he moves right and so on. So that's another way to look at what was happening here. How do you guys think this system performed? How good do you think their performance was?

• 55:32Speaker 02

  I think it was able to play, but very badly.

• 55:34Bob Novella?

  Essentially, yeah, it was not great, not going to win any, any competitions. Essentially beginner, like it played like a beginner who was maybe even worse than a beginner because they never really even like saw a computer before in a way. So not, not great, but that doesn't matter. The takeaway is that they observed cell, the cells learning in, in real time. And that's, you know, with these rewards, it showed real learning in real time, as they say. So they also described this as, this was interesting, Steve, you'll like this, and they described it as synthetic biological intelligence, not artificial intelligence, but synthetic biological intelligence. And that's obviously because these are actual neurons doing some of the computing.

• 56:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Intelligent. I don't, I struggle with this. And this has been done a million times before. It's just, okay, they're playing Doom, but they're not really playing Doom. They're either choosing A or B, and then they're interpreting that as go left, go right. And then they're interpreting that as, look, they're playing Doom. Like it's like they're hooking up an external representation of the neuronal activity and saying then that the neurons are playing doom.

• 56:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 56:45Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't like this study. This bothers me. I feel like we've, we were doing this in our lab decades ago. Like this is not that interesting to me that we can train brain cells. That's like their whole job. Like that's what they do naturally is learn from inputs.

• 57:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but I think we, there's never been a system quite like this. And here's an, here's an interesting angle here. They are describing this as a commercial platform that they can, that they're selling their CL1 biocomputer. So they actually, you can buy these. I don't know if it's available now, but they actually have, I've seen prices for these, like $35,000 per unit. And, and the, they have 30 unit racks and it takes, you know, it uses like a thousand watts per rack. So they actually want to sell these to

• 57:29Cara Santa Maria?

  You're buying the

• 57:31Bob Novella?

  to researchers. Well, I mean, this, this then gets into, um, you know, uh, what are you going to do with this? And they said they can do things like, uh, drug intoxicity testing, uh, disease modeling. They could, they say they can do brain plasticity, learning experiments. And that seems, these seem like interesting, uh, research models that they can, they can use this for.

• 57:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But sorry, what I'm asking is what are they actually selling? Is it the hookups?

• 57:56Bob Novella?

  Everything.

• 57:57Cara Santa Maria?

  So I worked in a lab in

• 57:58Bob Novella?

  The CL1 biocomputer include, including, uh, including everything, everything that you need.

• 58:04Cara Santa Maria?

  To me, the interesting advancement there is actually being able to take a nerve cell network and freeze it and ship it and have it be functional. But all the other stuff, I don't know. It's like, I was working in a lab in like 2007 where we had, uh, mono layer neuronal networks that we were using as, um, exactly what you were talking about, like they were drug. Yeah. Like a detector, like a bio detector. Because we could watch how the nerves were, the nerve cells were reacting to the different patterns of different drugs. So we drop a drug on the nerve cell and then we see how they chatter. Drop a different drug, see how they chatter. And then that tells us based on our very

• 58:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Elaborate setup. For us, it was it was linked to listening. So we could listen to different, basically nerve songs based on their chatter. Here, they're hooking it up to a video game. But it's all this, I don't know. I just don't understand why this is new. Steve, am I missing something?

• 59:01Speaker 02

  I just think it's a it's an incremental, you know, advance in complexity. I agree. It's not anything fundamentally different. I think, first of all, the headlines are because brain cells playing Doom and that's it.

• 59:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  But otherwise,

• 59:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Smart on their part.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Otherwise, this is an incremental advance. It was playing Pong. Now it's doing something that's more complicated. And it is doing stuff. It is navigating the maze and shooting stuff. It's just not good at it.

• 59:24Bob Novella?

  And they describe it as programming, like they can program it to do it. And I think that's an interesting aspect. But also, it's important to keep in mind that these neurons are not running Doom. There's a silicon computer in there that's running Doom in the sense of rendering the graphics, updating the physics, game state things and handling the inputs. The neurons are essentially acting as the player controller. That's it. That's really what it's doing. It's not, but the whole system itself, though, the CO1, which is everything, that's essentially, you know, running Doom. It's basically doing the entire thing. Farther in the future is trying to think, where can we go with this? There's some speculation that in the future, if this takes off and works well enough,

• 1:00:09Bob Novella?

  there could be potentially like hybrid systems where you have this subset of your of your computer system that's that's a living systems of neurons that can do some narrow jobs really, really well. That's optimized for. There is also some talk of

• 1:00:24Cara Santa Maria?

  But I don't think they'll be able to. That's my thing. Like, I don't think this wetware is going to be nearly as good as your actual hardware and software. They suck at playing Doom. And it's like really expensive to do this.

• 1:00:37Bob Novella?

  Dealing with like messy environments, like biological systems, and it can, I mean, this is at least what they're saying. They could, they might be able to be optimized for working with messy systems that are not, that are conventional digital systems don't do extremely well. I mean, that's kind of what they're Saying.

• 1:00:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't buy it.

• 1:00:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  I don't think there's going to be any near term application. I think this is a proof of concept and we have to see where the tech goes.

• 1:01:01Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 1:01:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And I just don't think living neurons inside of our hardware is ever personally is ever going to be a viable approach to technology.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  Not in the short term. This is not going to be in your desktop.

• 1:01:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's not going to be in anything. It's way too expensive. It's too finicky. It's, it just seems like we're.

• 1:01:17Bob Novella?

  Even, but even for research.

• 1:01:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It seems like they're going in the wrong direction.

• 1:01:20Bob Novella?

  Just even pure research. You don't think this, this has any potential at all for like drug and toxicity testing, disease modeling?

• 1:01:26Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but what I'm saying is we already do research like this. It's, that's not new. We've been doing it for decades.

• 1:01:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but not, not like this. I don't think, I don't think we've done it like this where you can actually, you know, you're talking about, you know, freezing, you know, neuronal networks. This is, this is more on the programming side of having the network do optimize for some specific task.

• 1:01:45Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no. I wasn't talking about free. No, no, no. I think you misunderstood me. Everything we did was on the programming side. What I'm saying is I'm, I, the part to me that is so cool is that they're able to freeze them and ship them out and then they're still viable when they, when they thaw them. That was always our hurdle in the two thousands was actually being able to make these cells remain viable for long enough for these systems. We could ship people all of the tech and then they could grow their own neurons on them and then they could use the tech to do all these interesting experiments, but shipping it out with neurons on it is actually really hard to do.

• 1:02:24Speaker 02

  And how would their life, how would the life of those cells be maintained?

• 1:02:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It's hard. You have to like feed them. You have to keep them sterile.

• 1:02:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I told you, six months. They can get them for six months in their life support system.

• 1:02:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And not everybody can.

• 1:02:35Bob Novella?

  I mean.

• 1:02:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, life support systems are important there. That's like the main thing because they get buildup of all these, you know, urea and you have to constantly feed them and take out all the toxins.

• 1:02:45Bob Novella?

  Well, that's exactly what they have. They, they can make these live for six months. So they'll.

• 1:02:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Sorry, this is near and dear to my heart in, in some ways, and I, I probably need to dig deeper into it. And yes, I'm sure there are some incremental advances here, but the pie in the sky. Hey, one day we'll be able to. Not only do I not believe that, but I don't see why you would. That's like saying, one day, instead of using gas, we can put blood in our cars. They'll work so much better because blood is biological.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  You think that would work?

• 1:03:11Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:03:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And I know that's a simplistic metaphor, but I think in a way, like, there's this, oh, brains, once we just figure out how to put the brain in the computer, our computers are going to be way better. And it's like, brains aren't computers.

• 1:03:29Bob Novella?

  Brains aren't computers. They kind of are.

• 1:03:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Aspects of them are.

• 1:03:34Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 02

  They're biological computers, basically.

• 1:03:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I see what you're saying, Carrie. There's no, there isn't necessarily, but you're actually undermining your own point. Brains are computers. That's why doing something with neurons isn't fundamentally different than doing them with computer components that are not living. So why use a living neurons?

• 1:03:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that's a metaphor. I think a brain being a computer and a computer being a technological, a hardware brain is a metaphor.

• 1:04:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not.

• 1:04:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I think you're right. They're not the same thing.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  They're not the same thing. Brains are wetware. They're, they're, they operate fundamentally different. But if you have a neural network, that does kind of act like a brain. That's

• 1:04:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It kind of acts like a brain, but I'm saying you can't just take it and drop it into a brain. And you can't just take brain cells and drop them into a computer because they are fundamentally different.

• 1:04:24Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I don't know. I don't know that I agree. If you're using neurons as a component, and you're using them to build a computer, you're building a computer out of neurons. Just like if you, you could certainly interface a silicon computer with a human brain.

• 1:04:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. You can interface those things. I agree with that fully, but I don't think that they are swappable components. And I don't think they will ever be swappable components. I think anything that uses neuronal architecture has to be optimized for using neuronal architecture.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:04:55Cara Santa Maria?

  It will, and it will always work with the way that neurons work. It won't be like, oh, it's just a different kind of circuit.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  No, I agree with that, but I think they're trying to do a brain-like process using a computer they're building out of neurons.

• 1:05:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree, but I'm saying they are definitely not the first lab.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, this is not new.

• 1:05:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably a lot of people read this article and they're like, what the F, dude? My lab's already doing.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  No, that's, that's like most of the science news items I read. Like, this is a new and amazing. It's like, no, this is actually one in a long line of studies. At most, this is an incremental advance.

• 1:05:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think the pie in the sky thing of like, one day we'll be able to is just.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  That's usually BS.

• 1:05:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's marketing so that they can get more funding.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  Or just the press needs, that's how, that's their formula. You have to say, everything sucked, then this awesome thing did something no one's ever done before. And now it's, everything's going to be awesome. That's basically every news item. And you have to just completely look past that sort of journalism spin at what actually happened here. And it's, it's interesting, but it's incremental.

• 1:06:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I think that, that's the only point, Bob, that I was trying to make is like, my skepticism came from like firsthand experience working with a lab that did something not the same as this, but earlier versions of it that were somewhat similar. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on. Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:06:17Jay Novella?

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

• 1:06:36Jay Novella?

  You guys have any guesses?

• 1:06:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, something's spinning.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Something's spinning.

• 1:06:40Jay Novella?

  Not bad, Kara, not bad. All right, well, let's dig into this. Joey Wilson wrote in and said, uh, good morning. Thank, this is very nice when people start with that. I said, long time, first time. This week's noisy sounds like a fishing reel for deep sea fishing. Yeah, and I thought about this and I've actually been deep sea fishing a few times in my life. And I've heard the noise of the reel spinning out and everything. And there's a similarity between that, but you are not correct, Joey, but thanks for writing in. Another listener named Josh said, hiya, Jay. This one sounds like a laser engraver etching into a piece of metal. Probably making an SGU challenge coin. That sound is one of the number one thing, things that people send me in. I've used it and I've heard lots of different variations on it.

• 1:07:24Jay Novella?

  And there is a little similarity for sure. If you, if you're familiar with that noise of a laser engraver type of thing. It does have like a, you know, a repetitive kind of noise like that. The, the laser engraver is a little bit more harsh with, with more tonal change, but that was a good guess. And then Kirk from Indianapolis writes in. He said, my kiddos would like to take a stab at who's that noisy this week. So he has a 13 year old Cameron. He said, blowing air into a hole. And Darren, who's 11, said gears turning each other really fast. Catherine at six said glass falling on other glass. And Andrew at four said glass falling on a car. I think all of these are very good guesses. They're not correct, but guys, keep in mind, this is hard to do. It's hard.

• 1:08:08Jay Novella?

  Most people cannot guess correctly. There's only very few people that guess correctly. So it's no big deal. It's good to learn here. So bottom line is this is something that I think all of us should have known about, but I learned about it because of this noisy. So what is this thing? This thing is, I'll do a slower reveal. This thing is a pseudoscience device. Does that help you guys?

• 1:08:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:32Speaker 02

  Is it a perpetual motion machine?

• 1:08:35Jay Novella?

  No, but that was a good, good stab in the dark. It, it helps your ability to learn telekinesis. Steve, anything? I don't know.

• 1:08:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Something that like spins around your head?

• 1:08:47Bob Novella?

  Learn telekinesis.

• 1:08:49Jay Novella?

  Um, it's marketing says you can discover and unleash the power within you and get the most out of your hidden abilities. This is a edgily wheel. E G E L Y. So what is this thing? It's a complete nonsense instrument. It, it, it's a handheld device that has a, you know, kind of like a wheel in there that's spinning around. And it makes that clicky noise. Let me play it for you again.

• 1:09:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so it doesn't of course help you learn anything other than how to lose your money on the internet. You know, they say that it can help you develop telekinesis, you know, trying to find out more about its functioning. I think your mind is trying to slow or speed up the wheel against the motor or whatever, and that's why there's different tones and everything. I haven't used one, I haven't held one. I've seen it now a couple of times because I did some searches on the web for it. It's complete bunk. It's funny looking too, but take a look at it. It's a good thing to know. Some people out there might be using it. You might run across this in the real world and to know what it is, is good as a skeptic. Anyway, that was fun. Thanks a lot, guys. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and this noisy was sent in by a listener named Mark

• 1:10:09Jay Novella?

  Cookson. You guys know who Mark is, right? Sure. Mark is a patron of the SGU. He has helped us out in many, many ways. Like, for example, Mark, when we were stranded in Chicago, Mark saw our show, was at the airport, saw us in distress because our plane was like delayed, delayed, delayed, delayed, and then it was finally canceled. And what he did was he got us all in to the United, you know, like the, what do you call it? The lounge. The lounge. The lounge. So we could eat real quick, use the bathrooms and all that stuff. It was awesome. And since then, Mark has continued to support the SGU. So I'd like to thank you, Mark. But I didn't pick him because he's a patron. I picked him because he sent in a really fun and interesting noisy, and I'm going to play that for you guys right now.

• 1:11:01Jay Novella?

  That's it. It's short. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected].

• 1:11:11Jay Novella?

  Steve, a few things.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:11:13Jay Novella?

  So, you know, we're planning our trip to Australia and New Zealand. I've been working like crazy and you know what? I'm starting to get excited. I usually don't get excited until a couple of months out, but this trip is, there's a lot of great things to be looking forward to. So we will be doing two conferences while we're, while we are in Australia and New Zealand. One will be in Australia, one will be in New Zealand. We're going to be doing a full Nauticon conference in Australia. And there are multiple other ticketed events that we have planned for that, you know, weekend, long weekend, right? It's going to be going from, it'll be Thursday, July 23rd to Saturday, July 25th. So if you want to find out more about those tickets and events, like an extravaganza,

• 1:11:56Jay Novella?

  private show, lots of different things, just go to the skepticsguy.org and you'll see a button there that'll link you over to the appropriate website for tickets for that. We are also currently selling tickets to our Madison, Wisconsin suite of shows, right? We have three different shows that we'll be doing there. We'll have our SGU exclusive meetup that happens on Friday night. That's a very low number, number of people. I think we'll have like 20 people that will be able to get tickets for that. And you'll be hanging out with all of us. It's exclusive and you get a lot of FaceTime, which is a lot of fun. Then we'll be doing the private show plus, which is our three hour Skeptic's Guide live show that we do in front of you. And then we do an hour of fun stuff with the audience.

• 1:12:41Jay Novella?

  And then of course, the Skeptical Extravaganza. If you want more information about those tickets, go to our website, the skepticsguy.org. We will also be at SciCon this year. This is the June 11th to 14th conference that they're doing in Buffalo, New York. You could just go to sci-conconference.org, C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C dot O-R-G to get ticket information. And if you're interested in going to see us in New Zealand, you can go to conference.skeptics.nz. And you'll see all the information there to buy tickets. We'll be doing a Skeptical Extravaganza there as well if you're interested. So please go check that out. One more thing, we're also going to be in Madison, Wisconsin. This is going to happen the weekend of May 30th. We

• 1:13:25Jay Novella?

  will have, again, the same three shows that we always do. On May 29th, we'll be doing our SGU, you know, the exclusive SGU meetup with low numbers. And then we'll have our Private Show Plus on May 30th and the Extravaganza on May 30th as well. All of this, all the tickets you want to find can be found on thiskeptiski.org.

• 1:13:45Speaker 02

  Okay, we're going to do one question this week. This comes from Michael Kaut, K-A-U-T, Kaut. What do you think? He writes, "Could you do an update on the status of glyphosate Roundup safety? I recall you were previously mostly positive to it and skeptical of the claims of its dangers. I was therefore surprised by this episode of Veritasium, which I generally consider to be trustworthy, repeating both the carcinogenicity claims and the claims about Monsanto's seed practices." And then he goes on to say some other stuff, but that's any links to the, to the episode. Yeah, I have seen that episode of Veritasium. Other people have emailed us about this actually as well. I did write about this recently on Science-Based Medicine, so I have the latest info.

• 1:14:30Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess I'm curious about your take on this, Steve, too, and you writing about it. Not because I, you know, am believing the hype, but because it is curious to me, the environmental impact, especially on bees. I feel like there's been a lot more evidence of that lately.

• 1:14:49Speaker 02

  So it's complicated, is the answer. But I'll give you my evaluation of it. So again, we always have to think about hazard versus risk, right?

• 1:15:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  And that's why I think that's always at the core of why there's so much confusion. And hazard is just, is there a potential for harm and risk is what is the actual risk of harm? So is there a hazard to it? Sure, like pretty much any chemical, you know, high enough dose, it's going to cause some problems.

• 1:15:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And you're talking specifically about like ingestion and health in humans.

• 1:15:24Speaker 02

  So, and well, there's two populations. There's the general population who gets exposed to it through eating food. And then there's the worker population who gets exposed to it because they're spraying it on crops, right?

• 1:15:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  So obviously, the exposure levels are very different. Let's talk about the general population first. So what we have is there is some evidence to suggest that there are carcinogenic effects. And if you recall, we talked about this, the IARC, International Agency for Research on Cancer designated glyphosate as a probable carcinogen. But, you know, so is caffeine and hot liquids. You know what I mean? Like, this is, that's a very low bar.

• 1:16:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So is meat.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  And that's all hazard based. But regulatory agencies around the world, this is again, there's not just the USA involved here, have all repeatedly found glyphosate to be of low risk, to be safe in terms of just the public exposure to it. And I said repeatedly because often they'll approve it for five years and then it has to get reapproved. And so they look, they do an updated look at the evidence, they go, yep, it still looks good. The most-

• 1:16:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Still safe.

• 1:16:30Speaker 02

  There was also a, a good summary of the regulatory agency's data on glyphosate. What they found is that the EPA, the EPA's maximum daily exposure is based on a 1/100th for sensitive populations and 1/1,000th for children of the no observed effect level, right?

• 1:16:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:16:50Speaker 02

  So if you, the lowest level where there's any effect, you take 1/100th to 1/1,000th of that. And so that's why the risk is super low, even though that there may be technically a hazard at high enough dose.

• 1:17:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Like, if you're somebody who's producing the stuff and you're not wearing a safety-

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, but that's like, again, like you mentioned, any chemical that we use is different when it's concentrated. That's why we have to be- Careful about regulation around, you know, safe storage and safe shipping and you don't dump these things and you don't whatever, but like the amount that reaches us in a daily basis and the amount that's actually, is there even any in our food?

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is and it's very, very low, but there are some studies which find that it exceeds those levels, but none that exceed, none that exceed the observed adverse, the lowest observed effects level, right? So even though it's like technically over the EPA limit, it's nowhere near, that's why they build in a two to three orders of magnitude buffer so that nothing gets close to that minimum effect. So that's the reason why regulatory agencies approve it and there's no epidemiological, there's just no evidence of any association between exposure to glyphosate in the general public and any adverse effect, right? Like that 2022 review I spoke about.

• 1:18:13Speaker 02

  Now, the only question for which there, I think there is some signal here is the association of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and workers with the highest level of exposure. So that's really, I think, where there's still an open scientific, a scientific controversy or a scientific question, not just a public controversy, you know what I mean? So there are, there are reviews which come to the conclusion that there is a persistent signal in the research, like we keep seeing that there is this association between high levels of glyphosate exposure and the, and a small increased risk of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

• 1:18:54Speaker 02

  However, the most recent review from 2023 says that those studies are flawed mainly because they do not control for exposure to other pesticides. And so the properly controlled studies that, yeah, that control for the variable of other pesticides show no signal, that there's no, so essentially the best epidemiological study found no association between glyphosate exposure even at the highest levels and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, when you eliminate the variable of other pesticides. The studies that do find the association all mix it with other pesticides. Don't control for other pesticides. And that's important because the reason why glyphosate,

• 1:19:36Speaker 02

  part of the reason why it's so popular and so widely used is that it's the least toxic herbicide, right? Other alternatives, even organic ones are more toxic, you know, than glyphosate.

• 1:19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and so when, when you were talking about these high exposure individuals, they're mostly probably talking about farm workers.

• 1:19:54Speaker 02

  It's all workers. It's all workers.

• 1:19:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So what they're not looking at are factory workers, and that would be really interesting. I'm sure somebody has looked at that, but if the people who are making and handling this stuff aren't getting sick.

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  So, but that's the other thing. Well, I think when they say workers, they're just looking at high, it's not, it's not limited to farm workers. It is including factory workers. It's anybody with any kind of work exposure, including at the highest levels of anybody who gets exposed to it. They found no, no signal when you control for other pesticides. So that's very reassuring. The other thing is that's kind of reassuring in that if there, if we're not seeing a signal with the super high levels of exposure, then it becomes super implausible that there's any adverse effect for just consumer exposure, which is

• 1:20:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, completely.

• 1:20:39Speaker 02

  much, much lower.

• 1:20:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But that still doesn't answer the, the question of environmental.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  What's the effect on the environment? Yeah. So.

• 1:20:48Cara Santa Maria?

  And on, on populations of, of organisms.

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so the evidence there is mixed and complicated, but it's, it overall, it's showing that it's probably not as bad as other, other herbicides. Especially the thing is like organic herbicides are worse because you, they're short-lived and they're, they're less effective. So you have to use a higher dose more often and they have more short-term effects, more acute toxicity. So the alternatives are, are basically worse, you know?

• 1:21:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I'm reading. Even with colony collapse in bees, like I'm reading that it, there is direct toxicity, but it's much lower than like insecticides, right? Which like people are using insecticides on their crops.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  Right. And that's where again, the risk approach is, well, what's the actual net effect here? Like not the theoretical, it could possibly do this. There is something happening, but what is actually the net effect? And how does it compare to all the alternatives?

• 1:21:45Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that's when people get all up in arms about like, it's when people make the, I guess it's not really a straw man, but they, they make the argument, they're not really talking about glyphosate, the same way that very often people aren't really talking about genetic modification, when they sort of move into an argument against monocropping, or against, you know, farming practices, which of course require that we use large quantities of chemicals.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Or you have to do, you have to pick weeds by hand, which, forget about it.

• 1:22:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. And it's just like, it's a function, it's a function of our modern farming system, and it is honestly one of the best options that we have, which is why farmers use it.

• 1:22:31Speaker 02

  Why they use it, absolutely.

• 1:22:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Nobody's forcing them to. But then, then there's the question, and this was in the email, about like, what, what do you say to people who say, I read that Monsanto, there's a conflict of interest, and they were ghostwriting a lot of these studies, or funding a lot of these studies?

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, there was one study from 2000, and this is the one that gets shopped around a lot, to make that point, that was retracted, because there was undisclosed funding from Monsanto. And so, yeah, that's a real, it's a real problem, because it does undercut the, you know, faith in this science. But these are isolated examples, right? This is not the entirety of the research. And that study was retracted. That was, that, that one study. And again, it was from 26 years ago. There's been a ton of research since then. And let, you know, let's point out also that Monsanto no longer exists. It was absorbed by Bayer. And also, the other complexity in the research is that you might read some studies that are looking at glyphosate-containing herbicides.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  Not glyphosate.

• 1:23:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Because they

• 1:23:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 1:23:38Speaker 02

  contain other things.

• 1:23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because they're compounded now because it because it works so well, it's become a staple in the industry.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Um, so again, that makes it hard to draw firm conclusions. So the bottom line is, yes, there's some complexity in the research here. And yes, you know, industry has been less than pristine, which is a problem and it's unfortunate. But if you look at the totality of the evidence, which multiple, multiple regulatory agencies have done, uh, even ones that are friendly to organic farming and not friendly to GMOs. They say, yeah, the evidence is shows that it's safe for consumers and it's even probably safe for workers, um, although it kind of depends on which studies you think are more reliable. I tend to, the best studies are the ones that are negative.

• 1:24:27Speaker 02

  To me, that's the most important, you know, pattern to look for. What do, what do the best studies show? But does, does it require more research and better research? That's, it's always hard to say no to that. And in this case, absolutely, especially since there are these lingering questions in the research. So I would say, yes, we should do clearly independent studies that are fully transparent, where we control, do the best design that we now know that we could do and need to do and let the chips fall where they may. But let's also do that with all the alternatives, right?

• 1:25:04Speaker 02

  You, you can't just single this out and then, you know, favor using other herbicides that are less well studied and probably more toxic, you know? Because that's not what we're going for here, right? We know that's the, the great irony of the big anti glyphosate narrative is that it results in the use of, of more toxic herbicides, which is not good.

• 1:25:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you gotta look at it in context.

• 1:25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:25:40Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. You have a theme this week. The theme is medieval times.

• 1:26:02Jay Novella?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:26:03Speaker 02

  Not the restaurant, but just deep everyday life in medieval times. Okay. Here we go. Item number one. It was standard practice to dispose of waste in the streets or in piles of hay with the first municipal sanitation systems or regulations not appearing in Europe until the Renaissance. Item number two. Chronic infestation with fleas and lice was more the norm than the exception and was considered just a part of daily life. And item number three. It was a common and widespread practice to divide sleep into two shifts, first sleep and second sleep, with one to three hours of activity in between, the practice not ending until the Industrial Revolution. Kara, go first.

• 1:26:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so I feel like so many of these are like the, you know, common conventional wisdom kinds of things. They're all, and like, I feel like you're trying to get us with the first sleep and second sleep thing, but I feel very strongly that first sleep and second sleep was common. I just don't know when. I know that historically that this is how we slept, but I don't know if it was during medieval times. I don't know if it ended in the Industrial Revolution. It seems like before, like when people had kind of their local jobs, like I'm a cobbler and I'm a butter churner and I do this thing

• 1:27:30Cara Santa Maria?

  and I'm a goldsmith, that people could have lived this way, but the minute that people had to go to factories and then, you know, school times changed and all of that, the first sleep and second sleep thing would have changed. So it seems reasonable that the Industrial Revolution was the pinch point, but it could have been earlier than that. Okay, so disposing of waste in the streets or in piles of hay. And they didn't come until the Renaissance. Oh, God. I mean, every movie about like the plague, that's what they're doing. And I thought that that's why people were always getting so sick. And then infestation with fleas and lice, more the norm than the exception. I, yeah, I think that's probably true because we didn't have treatments for them. And I think probably people

• 1:28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  just had to pick them out. Fleas and lice were everywhere.

• 1:28:17Bob Novella?

  Steve.

• 1:28:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean.

• 1:28:18Bob Novella?

  Define waste. You talking excrement?

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:21Bob Novella?

  Or garbage?

• 1:28:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I thought you meant.

• 1:28:23Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Like poo.

• 1:28:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, poo and pee and poo. Yeah. To understand, you're talking about common people here, though, right? You're not talking about like nobility during the Middle Ages.

• 1:28:31Speaker 02

  Obviously, it would be worse among the 99% of commoners, but pretty much everybody was susceptible to it.

• 1:28:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Like, I could say, rich people still got fleas and lice, but they just probably were able to keep better hygiene because they could afford to bathe every day and things like that, or bathe whenever they needed to. So, I don't know, they all seem like science. So, I think the one that's like the most obvious, which is the waste in the streets one, maybe that's the fiction. Maybe it actually wasn't common practice in the Middle Ages. Maybe there was another way that people disposed of their, their waste and they didn't just pour it out the windows like in every movie. So, yeah, I'll go with that as the fiction, but I have no idea.

• 1:29:08Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. My thinking was very similar. These all seem good, but the one that kind of, that kind of rubs me a little bit the wrong way is, I mean, just everybody just throwing their stuff out in the streets, everyone? I mean, over even a tiny short term, that just sounds wickedly horrible. They, there had to be some other, it couldn't have been that common. It just sounds way too nasty. The other ones, yeah, I've, I've heard of the, the two-sleep thing. I've, I've definitely read about that and yet, and like, like Kara, what, when exactly did it happen and when exactly did it go away, of course, is, is very vague in my, in my head. But I know there's something like that, that did happen. And the infestation with fleas, yeah, man, oof, that, that makes

• 1:29:52Bob Novella?

  total sense. So, yeah, so the outlier, just by a little bit, is the waste in the streets. I'll say that's fiction as well.

• 1:29:58Jay Novella?

  Okay, and Jay? Yeah, the first one, throwing waste in the streets. It, you know, this is one of those things, you've seen it in the movies so many times, but it's good to question it. I, I've just read. You know, quite a bit and think that that is is science just because of all the different places that it's come up and the different, you know, the different downstream effects of that happening. So I do think that's science. The flea infestation thing, you said fleas and lice. Yeah, I'd say I would agree with that. I think that's science. You know, they didn't have any real way of handling things, but like handling insects like that back then. And once they were there, they're there, you know, and like, what would

• 1:30:39Jay Novella?

  you do? You know, there's a, there's only a few ways that you can mitigate that. And I don't think they really could, could have access to, you know, being able to heat these things up or use chemicals and all that. The last one, you know, this one, this is the one that's giving me pause more than the other two, because you said it's widespread practice. Like, what do you specifically mean widespread?

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  More the norm than the exception.

• 1:31:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, if anything, I would say that's the part of it I don't like. I don't think this was, was the norm globally.

• 1:31:10Speaker 02

  It specifically says Europe.

• 1:31:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I know. I know you're saying that, but I'm just, in general, I'm saying, this was something I think happened. It wasn't as regimented as, or typical, as I think most people understand. When you, once you find out about it, like, when the first time I've read about this, it was like, oh, I never knew about this. And it's like, everyone was doing it or whatever. And I don't think it was that widespread. So I'll say that one's a fiction. The sleep one is the one I picked as fiction.

• 1:31:33Speaker 02

  All right. So you all agree on number two. So we'll start there. Chronic infestation with fleas and lice was more the norm than the exception and was considered just a part of daily life. You all think that one is science and that one is science. That is science. Yeah, they were basically, there's so much evidence, like, from, from articles of clothing and writing and, you know, and the ubiquity of flea combs, you know. So basically, everyone was infested with lice and fleas, pretty much. Like, it was, you know, it's hard to have put a firm number on it, but it was definitely way more than 50%. It was just a chronic part of life. Some people just dealt with it, just itched, you know. There were things, so they, they, they wore flea traps.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Have you ever heard of that? So it's like a cylindrical thing you wear around you that has holes in it. So I guess fleas crawl in, but they don't crawl out kind of thing, which is not going to rid you of fleas, but it will reduce the number of fleas, I guess, that are on you at any given moment. And this problem was partly because they, it was also very common to live in much closer proximity with animals than we do. Like animals, not talking about pets, but like farm animals being in the home was very common. You know, it also explains why the black plague was so bad, right? It's like this disease was spread by fleas. Everyone had fleas, you know? All right, let's go back to number one.

• 1:33:02Speaker 02

  It was standard practice to dispose of waste in the streets or in piles of hay with the first municipal sanitation systems or regulations not appearing in Europe until the Renaissance. This is kind of related to the second one. You know, the poor sanitation certainly increases the incidence of fleas and lice. This one is the fiction. It is the fiction. And because that classic movie trope of throwing the waste out the window is, is an exaggeration. Did it happen? Sure. Was that the standard practice? No.

• 1:33:40Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:33:41Speaker 02

  Especially in cities, there was, first of all, there were lots of regulations and some cities had elaborate systems of waste disposal. But even those, even in the Renaissance, so the first, the idea that the first sanitation system was not, did not appear until the Renaissance is definitely wrong. There were cities that had-

• 1:34:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm sure they had that in like ancient Greece.

• 1:34:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's why I had to focus on Europe. The Romans, though, the Romans and the Greeks, the Romans had famously way more hygiene than Europe did in the Middle Ages. There's definitely a lot of backsliding in terms of hygiene. Romans bathed very frequently, for example, whereas Europeans bathed two or three times a year. You know, they just didn't bathe. Bathing was not their way of handling it. This is also partly why they had the fleas and lice. They didn't manage their hygiene with bathing. They did it by, they also rarely washed their clothes, because washing clothes was like beating it with a stick or rubbing it over stones. It was very damaging to the cloth. So they had linen underwear and they would just change those frequently.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  But they would keep their outer clothes and they wouldn't really bathe. Bathing was like an event you did a couple of times a year, you know?

• 1:34:54Bob Novella?

  I am totally reconsidering where I want to go and when, when I get a time machine. It's just like, I'm just not gonna do it.

• 1:35:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I always think about how in like medieval depictions and movies, there's all these like sexy sex scenes and people are like making out with their tongues. And I'm like, nobody was kissing like that with those mouths.

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  No, yeah, first of all, their teeth were wrecked. They were disease ridden. They were flea and lice ridden. And their homes, a lot of them had sod roofs with no wood or anything. So there were like mice and rats living in their ceilings. I mean, they were-

• 1:35:26Bob Novella?

  Not in their teeth though, right?

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  It was-

• 1:35:28Bob Novella?

  You know.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  They were completely infested. And I almost used this as an item, but I thought it was too obvious, that it was, there was a lot of communal sleeping going on. Yeah, beds were expensive, you didn't have a lot of beds. So families would share beds. If you went to an inn, chances are you'd be sleeping in a bed with a stranger and that was just accepted.

• 1:35:47Bob Novella?

  Woof.

• 1:35:48Speaker 02

  So there was basically no privacy. And so, yeah, like you had sex in front of other people because like you didn't have a private bedroom. That was not a thing, you know?

• 1:35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And I would have kept my mouth closed.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Oh my god. You imagine, no brushing of the teeth.

• 1:36:01Bob Novella?

  Oh my god. Don't forget though, I mean, you can get used to some pretty nasty smells over time.

• 1:36:10Speaker 02

  Over time, yeah.

• 1:36:11Bob Novella?

  It wouldn't be nearly as noticeable as if you just popped in the past and be like, we would have probably passed out from this smell.

• 1:36:17Speaker 02

  So I have experienced what it smells like when somebody doesn't bathe for a very long period of time. Because occasionally in the emergency room, somebody who is unhoused would come in, who doesn't have access to bathing.

• 1:36:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  And man, was that bad. That was-

• 1:36:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's brutal. And especially if they have like unhealed wounds and things.

• 1:36:40Speaker 02

  Right. It was horrible. So, common waste disposal practices, they would have communal outhouses that were basically positioned over rivers, so they would wash away the waste. That was common. In a private home, you would have a pit, right? You just, you wouldn't throw it onto the street. You'd never, would pee, basically had an indoor outhouse, or an outhouse. There'd just be a big pit that you crapped in. And then somebody would have to manually clean it out. And there was, there were people who did that.

• 1:37:11Bob Novella?

  I don't want that job.

• 1:37:12Speaker 02

  Oh, Christ. Yeah. That was probably the worst job. So, yeah, they did stuff, you know, they, they weren't just throwing it in the street. But, not that that never happened, it did happen, just wasn't just as widespread as, as is depicted in the movies.

• 1:37:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  As being like ubiquitous.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  Which means?

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  Which means that it was common and widespread practice to divide sleep into two shifts, first sleep and second sleep.

• 1:37:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:34Speaker 02

  With one to three hours of activity in between, the practice not ending until the industrial revolution. Which prompts the question, what about second sleep? Then you have second breakfast. Alright, so, yeah, so then it was because, yeah, remember, there's no, not a lot of artificial lighting. And, you know, worked, you know, people, you know, work time was work time. They weren't going to a factory. There's also people that didn't have clocks and stuff, you know.

• 1:38:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And biologically, it makes sense.

• 1:38:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you would sleep for a few hours.

• 1:38:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of come out of round.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Probably, you know, I, I wonder, I didn't read this, but I wonder if how much of it is, probably four hours at a shot is probably all you could do on the crappy sleeping conditions that they had.

• 1:38:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That too.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And then they would wake up, and they would do productive work for a couple of hours. You know, it wasn't like they're just lounging around, they'd actually do stuff. But also, that was sexy time. Which gets back to that, because, you know, you and your wife wake up in the middle of the night, that's a good time to, you know, to, to be intimate.

• 1:38:33Bob Novella?

  To hold your nose and be intimate, yeah.

• 1:38:37Speaker 02

  And then you'd go back, then you'd have your morning sleep. So you have your evening sleep and then a couple of hours of activity and then your morning sleep. And that was this, that was standard and pretty widespread. But then industrial revolution, now you're punching a clock. You have to get up at seven in the morning. So you got to sleep straight through in order to get up early enough to go to the factory or whatever. So that, that was the impetus for the change.

• 1:38:59Bob Novella?

  So even more interesting, I think, would be, how did we evolve to sleep? I mean, you know, over those critical times when we're actually evolving, what was sleep like for humanity or proto-humanity?

• 1:39:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's hard to say, but, but there was a study which found that if people do do the two sleep shift thing, their melatonin circadian rhythm adapts to that. And so it becomes, that becomes their biological sleep, not just their behavioral sleep.

• 1:39:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting. I do it unintentionally and I don't have as long a period in between, but because of the medication that I take for my sleep disorder, I sleep for four hours and then I naturally wake up and I'm wide awake. I usually go to the bathroom. I take my second dose. I read a little bit and then I go to sleep again. And sometimes it's, you know, shorter. It's like 15 minutes, but sometimes it can be like an hour in between. And I always feel very, very rested.

• 1:39:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Now that I don't have to get up at an alarm, I've kind of fallen to that pattern too. I get up at two in the morning or something because for various reasons, mainly because I have to pee. And I, you know, usually up for about an hour and then I go back to sleep and sleep for as long as I need to.

• 1:40:12Cara Santa Maria?

  People, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people sort of stir during that in-between cycle, right? Because your sleep architecture is about four plus four.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:40:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's not a full eight. Like the architecture is four.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  Maybe that's more artificial than natural.

• 1:40:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  All right. Good job, Bob and Kara.

• 1:40:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Thanks a lot, guys.

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  All right. Evan's not here, so I pulled a skeptical quote. I think it's been a while since we quoted Carl Sagan. So I pulled a good Carl Sagan quote.

• 1:40:45Bob Novella?

  Good move. Good.

• 1:40:46Speaker 02

  It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

• 1:40:55Speaker 02

  I like that quote. Kind of captures what one of the things that I think was very good about Sagan as a science communicator is he understood this sort of duality of science and skepticism is that you have to, you have to throw a bunch of crap against the wall, right? You got, you got, you have to have that creativity, think outside the box, you know, where kind of anything goes. But then you have to combine that with skepticism. You have to then weed away all the stuff that doesn't work. A lot of pseudosciences, they sort of stop at the creativity part, then they just believe whatever nonsense they make up.

• 1:41:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 02

  And they don't ever do the skepticism part, which is, we have to study this skeptically and see if it's actually true. Right? But you need both. You need, in order to drive science forward, and that creativity aspect, that's the thing that I always admire most in scientists, when they come up with some really new hypothesis. It's like, I never would have thought, it's like, oh, that's, that is brilliant, you know? Whether it's true or not, obviously, if it turns out to be true, they win the Nobel Prize, right? Or whatever, you know? Then they get all the accolades there are to give in science. When you think of something totally outside the box, and then you prove that it's actually true, that's the best of science, right? But you need both of those aspects. And I think Sagan was good at, at representing that.

• 1:42:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man. When I can go back in time, I'm hanging out with Carl Sagan.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:42:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, for sure.

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

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

• 1:42:19Bob Novella?

  Sure, man.

• 1:42:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:42:21Speaker 02

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

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