The Skeptics Guide #1071 - Jan 17 2026

News Items: Donut Lab's Solid State Battery, Artemis Update, EPA Change, Life on Planets Around Red Dwarfs, Malaysia Air Search Resumes; Special Report: RFK on Vaccines and the Food Pyramid; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Birding and Memory; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, January 15th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Howdy.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:51Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  We are just back from our Seattle show. It was a good, a fun weekend. Live events are always good.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  A lot of fun.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, it was a lot of work. We did three different events in two, in like two days, two, wait, less than two days.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Less than two, less than two.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  And basically in 24 hours. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, about there, yeah, about that. Uh, but those are always good. I enjoy them.

• 1:15Jay Novella?

  It was great. What, what a group of people, you know, like George was saying this on Facebook, like just everybody in Seattle was awesome. You know, like it really was.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Great crowds.

• 1:24Jay Novella?

  A hell of a time. And also, you know, like the shows, the shows were, you know, ticket sales were very good and people were seemed to be really pleased. It just overall, the energy was fantastic.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was. But Jay, that's not what I want to talk about today.

• 1:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I know what you want to talk about.

• 1:37Speaker 02

  Tell us, tell us what your daughter said when she came home from school the other day.

• 1:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, my wife and I have been launched into a very, um, interesting and, you know, frustrating predicament, right?

• 1:49Speaker 04

  Uh oh.

• 1:50Jay Novella?

  So the day before we left for Seattle, my daughter gets home from school and I pick her up from the bus. And on the ride back to the house, she says, you know, very, with a lot of power in her voice, Daddy, we didn't go to the moon. The moon landing is not real. What? Yeah, so I'm like.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  What? It's like a nightmare scenario, basically.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  The first thing you do is look at the calendar to make sure it's not April 1.

• 2:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, the first thing I did was literally say to myself, stay calm. Don't panic, right? Because I pieced it together immediately, so I'm like, okay, so, you know, tell me what happened, you know, so she goes into it saying, you know, her science teacher, who, um, he ended up telling the entire class, probably all the science classes that he taught that day, that, um, there's lots of reasons why we should be questioning the moon landing. This was, this was his way of, you know, handling it without coming right out and saying it. And then he gave her a laundry list of, you know, anti, you know, moon hoax talking points. Like, how come the photographs and the video don't have stars in them? And, you know, the astronauts couldn't, couldn't get out of the radiation belt,

• 2:55Jay Novella?

  like, no one has ever gotten past the radiation belt.

• 2:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And by the way, this is not like a high school science teacher who's like trying to get people to think critically and come up with arguments.

• 3:05Jay Novella?

  No, this is not teach the controversy and explain critical thinking. This is, he says it, I guess most of them believed it, if not all of them.

• 3:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because they're in elementary school, right?

• 3:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this is, this is, uh, fifth grade.

• 3:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 3:17Jay Novella?

  Oh, my gosh. It took, you know, so I'm unpacking everything that she's telling me. You know, my wife and I are interviewing her just to, just as it's fresh, we just want to get the information. So then we have a long discussion. Of course, you know, we called up Steve, we're chatting with everyone in the family, just say, as a point of interest alone, like, wow, this happened. Can you believe it? And then we started to dig into like, what should we do about it? And what's the appropriate way to manage the situation? So the first thing that we did was we, you know, we emailed the teacher and the principal and just said, hey, you know, I talked to Olivia, she got home from school, she gave me, um, she talked to me about what was taught in class today. And, you know, I understand that, you know, you were talking about the moon landing and how people should be

• 4:00Jay Novella?

  questioning it. And she brought up these particular points that you made in class. Um, I'd like to know why, you know, what was your intent on this instruction? You know, what was the context? Just please explain to me what the deal is, right? Just being as generous as I possibly can. And I got an email back that I completely did not expect. The email was a full admission that he doesn't believe. That the moon landing, moon landings happened, you know, he said it's been proven they can't, you know, people can't go past the radiation belt and survive.

• 4:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my God, the district is gonna have to look into this. This guy's teaching science.

• 4:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we have a meeting with the principal after the show today. We're gonna, my wife and I are gonna talk to the principal and we're gonna express our deep concern over this, you know, and the principal did write us back in the initial email, you know, trying to frame this the correct way, like, you know, we take this seriously and we talked to the superintendent.

• 4:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Good.

• 4:56Jay Novella?

  And some other people.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  It was, it was, I don't think it was good or bad. I think it was just a political response. It was a, we'll look into it, we take it seriously, kind of.

• 5:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was an HR response.

• 5:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but at least they didn't just brush it off.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  They didn't, they didn't express outrage.

• 5:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I wouldn't expect them to express outrage, but I might expect them to brush it off.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  They didn't brush it off, right.

• 5:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And say something about, yeah, like academic freedom or some bullshit, so.

• 5:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah, no, it wasn't any of that. I mean, you know, the thing is, we're a long way down the road here from actually knowing what's gonna happen, how it's actually gonna be handled. Like, you know, I have an expectation that those kids need to be instructed about what happened in that classroom that day.

• 5:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:38Jay Novella?

  And they need to be taught the real information, and I guess there needs to be an admission of some kind to them that their teacher was incorrect.

• 5:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 5:48Jay Novella?

  And giving them false information. And I would expect this, this is what I want. I want that to happen tomorrow. Like, it's already been a week.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, sooner than later. So, yeah, so Kara, what I was saying is, it wasn't, it can go either way, right? We don't know if they're gonna be an ally or a foe in this. It could be, they didn't express outrage, but they didn't write it off either. It was middle of the road, non-committal. So, it all's gonna depend on the conversation today. And it's, you know, given this town, just to say that, it's hard, it could go either way, and we just don't know. So, my opinion is, we just, we give them every chance, we be charitable, we take it step by step, but we keep escalating it until we get satisfaction.

• 6:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Well. Yeah, and I was gonna ask, are you in a position where you would be willing to have some sort of legal intervention if you need to?

• 6:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't even want to go there yet. Like, I have to take this as it comes, Kara. Like, I don't want to come out swinging. Like, I want to see what they do.

• 6:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 6:45Jay Novella?

  Like, I'm gonna give them all the time and opportunity that they need Of course. to take this where my wife and I think it ultimately needs to go.

• 6:53Cara Santa Maria?

  But you also said that you want some sort of correction to the record sooner rather than later.

• 6:58Jay Novella?

  Well, I want the kids' misinformation in their heads to be corrected because, you know, we all know, like, you know, the roots of pseudoscience, especially if sown early, could be devastating.

• 7:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, but this is their science teacher. They're not gonna replace him.

• 7:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:14Cara Santa Maria?

  So, it's concerning that he has a passion about this.

• 7:18Jay Novella?

  It is, it is. And it's an insidious problem because, first of all, we don't know what other misinformation has been taught in that class.

• 7:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, that means he's a conspiracy theorist.

• 7:28Speaker 04

  What is his teaching material?

• 7:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah. It's terrible. Evan, it's terrible.

• 7:32Speaker 04

  What are the references?

• 7:33Jay Novella?

  Every time, every time that I, you know, there's a study guide sent home, or I'm reading, like, questions for homework and everything, it is borderline, you know, unreadable. Incoherent, yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 04

  So, it's part of a bigger problem?

• 7:45Jay Novella?

  Oh, it is. There's a much bigger, there's a much bigger problem here, and there's a lot of other information that I can't give at this time.

• 7:51Cara Santa Maria?

  In a way, that's good, because that gives you an entree. It's not a one-off issue.

• 7:54Jay Novella?

  Exactly.

• 7:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 7:56Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So, but again, like, Courtney and I are going to calmly and, you know, and pleasantly talk to the principal, give them any more information that they want, you know, really express our position, just so they understand. You know, this is what I found troubling in my own mind. We live in a world where, like, there are things that are happening that are so unbelievably outrageous, that comparatively, this seems like nothing. Like, I could have easily brushed this off. When I think about, like, the emotion that I feel for this versus, like, just reading the news today, you know what I mean? I had to remind myself, wait a second, this is terrible. This is a really, really bad situation. I hope it's not a systemic problem, but even on this singular thing that took place...

• 8:41Jay Novella?

  There needs to be outraged parents and there needs to be action taken and there needs to be serious, serious consideration to what happened here because I want to live in that world. I don't want to live in the world where I'm emotionally tired and have to push away things that stress me out. Like I'm, I'm not going to let that happen. I just want, I want everyone listening to this to trust me that I will, my wife and I will handle this. We are not going to softball this.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  And you have some serious backup, Jay.

• 9:10Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  It's funny, we all kind of reacted the same way. It's like this guy had no idea who was sitting in his class.

• 9:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Who was getting himself into.

• 9:19Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Like what's the worst possible case scenario for this guy? So, I mean, I do think, just for the show, I want to say specifically that the Van Allen belt's argument is an old chestnut, right? And the moon landing. Oh, that's, that's one of the original ones. Yeah, yes, there's a belt of radiation around the earth, but you know, the rocket's going pretty damn fast, right? Radiation is all about intensity times time. And the time is very, very tiny. And so you just zip through it quickly and that's fine. And you know what?

• 9:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But what's their argument? Do they think that they would have like?

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  That humans couldn't survive passing through that radiation.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  That limited exposure would destroy them. Yeah.

• 10:00Cara Santa Maria?

  What? That's insane.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Of course it is. So.

• 10:02Cara Santa Maria?

  They're also fully, they're, I mean, it's not like they didn't think about this. They're shielded, they're in spacesuits.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  Or measurable, right?

• 10:08Cara Santa Maria?

  They're also doing things to prevent, and plus, we, we don't know, maybe, you know, maybe these guys do have cancers because of this, but they wouldn't die instantly. That's crazy.

• 10:17Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, a lot, you know, you list all the astronauts that actually went through it and a lot of them, you know, they, you know, their lives have ended and they lived full lives, you know, like we would know, we would know if any of them died early from cancer.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, some level just died in his 90s, you know?

• 10:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Cara Santa Maria?

  But that doesn't mean that they didn't have cancers.

• 10:33Jay Novella?

  I know, but the point is Kara, that, you know, this wasn't like, oh my God, it's so much cancer that they died in their 40s.

• 10:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. This is not an atom bomb. Like, I don't understand.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  They increased their exposure.

• 10:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they increased their exposure.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  The astronauts in the ISS have a exposure. So do airline pilots who make a career out of flying.

• 10:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:51Cara Santa Maria?

  And we do what we can do to mitigate it also.

• 10:52Jay Novella?

  My wife said something that I will never forget. After we read the response email from him, which he did not, by the way, include the principal on, she turns to me and she goes, He doesn't know who he's fucking with. Because it's true, because you think about it, like, I alone, I know alone, me and my wife could handle this, but I have you guys, I could call Bill Nye up if I wanted to, you know what I mean? The fact of the matter is, like, I don't, I don't feel like this is going to be challenging. I think it's just the order of events, like, what are they going to do? And we will have a response to everything, particularly if it doesn't go what I, what we deem to be the right way.

• 11:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And that just goes to reinforce how, unfortunately, now, you're going to have to be that much more vigilant.

• 11:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 11:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And check in on her homework, and check in on her readings, and with a critical eye, not that you didn't have a critical eye before, but you, you need to almost be looking for things now.

• 11:48Jay Novella?

  Oh, we're monitoring it now. I mean, we've already been monitoring, like, whenever she has a test, we have to, like, rewrite the study guide for her. Now your ears are perked up more than ever.

• 11:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 11:56Jay Novella?

  You guys need to hear this. Olivia said, my daughter, she said, "Dad, how can I trust anything he tells me?"

• 12:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good for her.

• 12:03Jay Novella?

  Do I have to, do I have to, like, think about the other teachers too? Like, she, now, she's questioning, now, trip on this, she's in there, in science class now, having to put everything that's happening through a filter. Now, from a skeptical point of view, I'm glad that she's going to be practicing, like, frontal lobe stuff here, right?

• 12:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but she's too young from a developmental standpoint.

• 12:22Jay Novella?

  Exactly. Can't do it at a large age appropriate. No, she won't be able to navigate through any of it, that's for sure.

• 12:27Cara Santa Maria?

  She needs to be able to trust adults, like, trusted adults.

• 12:30Jay Novella?

  That's where you and Court will be. I, you know, my wife and I had to get real with her and basically, you know, map this out, like, look, you know, some people believe in things that are not true, and we have to be careful, you know, there's definitely adults that absolutely know what's going on and can be trusted, and are authority, you can trust their intelligence, their expertise, and their authority in different things. But, you know, in this instance, my daughter, at, at 10 years old, ran into a tricky adult, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, an adult that isn't, that isn't, like, doing it the right way. You know, I don't know how else to paint it to her, I didn't want to, like, she doesn't understand everything we're talking about, to her. She's feeling uncomfortable because it's like, I can't trust him.

• 13:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, what about, okay, can I ask you a quick question? How do you, how does your family and how does your daughter, like in terms of her developmental level, deal with both like God and Jesus and then like Santa Claus? Where's she at with those things?

• 13:24Jay Novella?

  They, they, okay, so the God and Jesus thing, you know, my, my wife and I have been careful to not demonstrably be like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, we just explain to them, you know, this is what some people think, this is what other people think, you know.

• 13:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Do they know what you believe, though?

• 13:39Jay Novella?

  Yeah, she'll, she'll ask, and I'm not gonna lie to her. I'll just say, you know, I don't think there's enough evidence to really believe it either way, you know, I openly admit, I don't know.

• 13:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 13:47Jay Novella?

  But I, but I haven't seen anything to make me think that this is real or, or any of this stuff is legitimate. Santa Claus, they, you know, they found out on their own, you know, we didn't really have to do anything, like they, it just kinda, my son basically figured it out at a really early age. And bottom line is, like, we're teaching them to be skeptics, we're not telling them, you know, what the truth is, as much as we're trying to teach them how to think, you know, again, they're surrounded by, by skeptics, it's infused into our family culture. And I think she navigated the whole thing really well, but man, I'll tell you, when your kid comes home, as a skeptic, when your kid comes home and tells you that the moon landings were fake.

• 14:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 14:26Jay Novella?

  You know, boy, was that an exclamation point.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so it shows on the part of a, a, a science teacher, any teacher, this is a shocking level of credulity and not understanding how science, critical thinking and logic works and evidence works, right? He thinks, it's been proven that we did not go to the moon. He thinks this. That is, you know, incompatible with being a competent science teacher, in my opinion.

• 14:52Cara Santa Maria?

  A hundred percent.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  And also, he shows a massive lack of judgment in saying that to a group of fifth graders.

• 14:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Speaker 02

  Even if he believed it in his heart of heart, he should've known better not to say that in class, to stick to the curriculum. And so that combination is deadly.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  Well, that's why I was asking, is this the curriculum?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  No, of course not. No, no, no.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, we have, we know this for sure.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Well, we will definitely think that's- Not out. Well, it's certainly not in the state curriculum, right?

• 15:20Cara Santa Maria?

  It might be in his curriculum, but that's different.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  And who, but who okays these curriculums? If this is any way part of an official curriculum at any level, then that makes it a much bigger problem.

• 15:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And actually, in some ways, an easier problem.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  But, but so far, there's no evidence of that. I'll be shocked if that's the case. I just think this is this teacher shooting from the hip.

• 15:40Jay Novella?

  We know, we know it's not in the curriculum, guys. Like, this was inappropriate.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:44Jay Novella?

  He clearly stepped outside, out of bounds of what he should have been teaching them. And what Steve said is dead on. You know, even if he did have like an opinion like this or a belief like this, he should know better than to, to, to feed it to a bunch of kids who have absolutely no ability to, to figure their way out of it.

• 16:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it, it shows a lack of, a deep lack of judgment. And like, honestly, I think you can argue that this is a safety issue. It's a psychological safety issue at the very least.

• 16:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I don't want to trust, I don't have kids, but I wouldn't want to trust kids in a classroom with somebody who has that blatant of a, a lack of judgment. That's worrisome to me.

• 16:25Jay Novella?

  Yep. Yeah, I'll leave you guys with one last thought. Uh, he has been recently elected to a board of education in Connecticut.

• 16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  This does not surprise me. I come from Texas.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. That's, that is a little surprising in Connecticut, which does elevate it because now he is a public official, which makes him fair game.

• 16:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And he makes decisions about curriculum.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  At a much higher level. So, stay tuned because this is not going to go away anytime soon.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on to some news items.

• 16:55Jay Novella?

  Skeptics assemble.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Let's do it. I do, I just do love the idea. This local jamoak thinking he can get away with this, and he's got a ringer sitting in his class that's going to just whip up a shitstorm. He has no idea what is coming his way. All right.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  Keep us updated, hey?

• 17:13Jay Novella?

  Steve, Olivia will go to school one day with a bunch of robes and, and blue eyes and be like, like Chris Satterach and be like, "My father will destroy you."

• 17:28Jay Novella?

  Kara, that was about as geeky science fiction as it could possibly get.

• 17:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I, about three words and I realized, "Oh, I don't need to understand this."

• 17:36Speaker 04

  No, just laugh along, trust us, it's hilarious.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  All right, have you guys heard all the hubbub from the Consumer Electronics Show about the Donut Labs solid-state battery?

• 17:49Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 17:50Speaker 04

  I love donuts.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  We got a ton of email about this, this is a big story. And I wrote about it on my blog, but I've been, because I knew I was talking about it today, I've been continuing to do research, plus, this is why I love writing about topics before I talk about them on the show, because a lot of information comes my way, you know, because of that, in the comments and everything, yeah. All right, so I've done more research and the story just keeps getting more and more complicated. So let me first just state what the claims are and, and give a little bit of background. Obviously, we talk about batteries a lot, I'm pretty sure we've talked about solid-state batteries previously, and battery technology is now one of the cornerstone technologies of,

• 18:34Speaker 02

  you know, electrification of our, of our civilization and conversion to green energy, et cetera, et cetera. It's massively important. So even incremental improvements can have a massive, you know, downstream effect. Solid-state batteries have been in the works for over a decade. There are multiple big companies like Toyota and others who are putting billions of dollars into R and D to bring these to market. And what they are is they're solid state in that they do not have a liquid electrolyte. They have a solid electrolyte. That has a couple of advantages. One of the big ones being that they're more stable and they don't tend to catch fire. Right?

• 19:19Speaker 02

  And they should also have a longer charge discharge life, right? Because of that increased stability. But otherwise, in terms of their energy density, that kind of depends on the chemistry of the battery. It's not specific to being solid state. This is the kind of news that we've been following this news for a long time. Toyota says they think they'll be coming out with solid state batteries like commercial, like in production by 2028. And then for EVs, maybe 29 or 30. So that's basically what I had my eye like, yeah, 2030, we might be seeing solid state EV batteries. That's kind of an estimate.

• 20:02Speaker 02

  So now this guy comes out, the CEO of a company called Donut Lab at the CES, comes out and says, "We're in production today with a solid state battery." So this is at least two, if not more, years ahead of other competitors. So right there, that's like, okay, you know, let's see if this is legit or not. Not only that, he claims that his solid state battery has a specific energy of 400 watt hours per kilogram. 400. 400. 400, thank you. Which is, again, it's like, the individual claims that he makes are very savvy because

• 20:47Speaker 02

  they're right in the sweet spot of impressive, yet semi-plausible. You know what I mean? So the current lithium ion batteries in production have a have a energy density of 175 to 250 watt hours per kilogram. The Amprus silicon anode lithium ion battery has 370 watt hours per kilogram. So 400 sounds like a plausible but nice incremental improvement, right?

• 21:17Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right, reasonable.

• 21:19Speaker 04

  Sweet.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So this is still huge. I mean, 400 is huge, but it's still, it's not like he's claiming 1,000. It's like, alright, this is like ahead of schedule, but that's in what we were expecting from first gen solid state batteries. He also said that the battery is stable for 100,000 charge discharge cycles, which is basically a forever battery. That's a hundred year, multi-million mile, right? 100,000, that's 100,000.

• 21:46Cara Santa Maria?

  What are they now?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  If you think about 100,000 days, you know.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, that'll do it.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  That's talking a long time.

• 21:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you know how long they last now?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  You know, in the hundreds, right?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  100,000 translates to about 30 years.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, 30 years as opposed to, say, five to 10 years, maybe. That's a huge improvement. Plus, stable, it only loses 5% of its capacity at minus 30 degrees Celsius and can function up to 100 degrees Celsius. Also, it could operate from 0 to 100%, whereas lithium ion batteries, you really should be operating that between 20 and 80%.

• 22:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  And you could charge it all the way up in five minutes.

• 22:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  These are all like sort of natural features of a solid state battery.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Not necessarily.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Right? In it, oh, so this is, so we're saying he has invented brand, like some other aspects of new technology.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  Yes, totally.

• 22:35Bob Novella?

  So you should be skeptical already. This is a battery wet dream at this point.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  But it gets better.

• 22:41Bob Novella?

  I know.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  It's cheaper, cheaper than lithium ion batteries.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Alright, now, now, now I'm skeptical.

• 22:46Speaker 02

  And it's, you can make it any shape you want, because it has, they call it like a clay kind of property where you could essentially, like, for example, they show up a drone that's made out of battery, right? Like, the structure of the drone itself is the battery.

• 23:00Speaker 04

  That, that's, that's the only way you could deal with the weight, right?

• 23:02Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's a huge improvement.

• 23:04Bob Novella?

  Well, we, that is, that is an idea that is, we've talked about that before.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Of course, structural batteries.

• 23:09Bob Novella?

  Where this, structural batteries are an amazing thing. Can you imagine?

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Buildings will be batteries.

• 23:14Bob Novella?

  The frame of your house being a battery is like, that's just like such a game changer.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  Cars right now, or?

• 23:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, parts of your car that are.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  So here's the thing, like, each one of those claims is not outside of the realm of possibility. The fact that, that he is claiming to have a battery with all of those properties at the same time. Makes this a massively extraordinary claim.

• 23:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And commercially.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  There's no trade off. That's the thing. No trade off. Everything is better. Every single aspect of battery life is better.

• 23:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Ding ding ding ding.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  So that's a.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Too good to be, too good to be true.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  He's lying, you know?

• 23:49Speaker 04

  Too good to be true.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  It sounds too good to be true. Right? So then we say, okay, so how did, it's a small finish company, right? How did they get to market with a production solid state battery with all of these features? Years ahead of massive companies putting billions of dollars into R and D to do the same thing.

• 24:10Bob Novella?

  Well, they must have a huge research team, right?

• 24:13Speaker 02

  So you would expect that he has a huge research team. So the, all right. So here's where the story gets complicated. If it isn't complicated already. So the Donut Lab really is just a marketing company that, that obtained the technology. Right?

• 24:30Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  They have like one engineer on their payroll. Clearly one engineer did not invent this technology. But they got it from another company called Nordic Nano and.

• 24:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And why did that company sell?

• 24:43Speaker 02

  Well, it's, it's whatever. I mean, the, it's not like, it wasn't so simple. They merged. It's all corporate stuff. It's very complicated. I don't. It's not worth getting into, but in and of itself, it's not, it's not suspicious. It's just, there's a number of different companies. You know, they, it sounds like they, the technology was mainly developed by Nordic Nano, but they developed, they acquired some pieces from some German company and now the Donut Labs is really doing the marketing. And there's all the complicated financial relationship, but none of that is hinky. That's just the complexity of modern tech industry stuff, right?

• 25:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, except is Donut Labs a startup?

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are all startups. Yeah.

• 25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  Even Nordic Nano, I think was started in 2024.

• 25:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that, that to me, I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but that's why it's hinky to me. Cause there's no, there's no track record with any of these people.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  It doesn't mean it's wrong. It just means we don't have a track record to give us confidence.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. This isn't a Boston Dynamics where we've seen the evolution of their products roll out.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Right. This isn't LG or somebody who's like been working on battery tech for years and has batteries in production and blah, blah, blah. This is just these startups. You know, with complicated entanglements and relationships.

• 25:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's very easy to say, oh, we're ready to roll out.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Well.

• 26:00Cara Santa Maria?

  But actually rolling something out.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Well, he is. So, I mean, I don't think there's any question that the announcement at CES was designed to get investment in order to build their manufacturing factory, right? That's on face level, that's what it seems like. There are more engineers and people who have, you know, the credentials to work on elements of this battery tech. And the thing is, nobody knows what the hell the battery is, right? And for a number of reasons. So at CES, they didn't have a battery. They had an empty case.

• 26:38Speaker 04

  Oh, that's a, oh, we've seen this before.

• 26:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this is all Theranos. Like, I'm gonna believe it's Theranos until proven otherwise.

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:45Cara Santa Maria?

  I have to go into these things.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Who was that guy who made the charger, the infinite charger up in, I forgot his name, but same idea.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  So, I've read now multiple sort of industry level analyses. So, from the skeptical point of view, so it's an extraordinary claim, no doubt. Is it breaking the laws of physics? No. Is there a plausible path to this technology? Yes. Is there, but is it years ahead of schedule? Yes. So, but here's the thing. The company has, they have no patents, which is suspicious. They have published no white papers and no peer reviewed articles supporting the technology.

• 27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's huge.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  All right. So I've read two interpretations of that. So, and everyone seems to be on the same page in terms of like insider industry people. They're like, all right, either these guys are scammers, right? This is all bullshit. Or they are going maximal stealth until they are actually in production. And then they'll, then they'll apply for all the patents and everything.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  I have a question.

• 27:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But then they wouldn't have done this massive CES announcement.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so they're trying to have it both ways. They did the CES announcement to get investors, but they, but they're, if you ask them any questions, they're like, it's proprietary.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  Steve, what about this scenario? If you had this, let's say it does work and it's everything. Wouldn't you go to someone, for example, like an Elon Musk directly, privately and say, "I've got this, come test it."

• 28:12Speaker 02

  They have a billion dollar investor, billionaire investor. They do.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  I'd never, I'd never go to Musk.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  So they have their billions.

• 28:17Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but Musk has a, Musk has an electric car company.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  That has already put, I think, a few hundred million or something into the Nordic Nana and these various companies, right?

• 28:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But they do that anyway.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying, like, there's semi plausible sort of elements in here. It's like, yeah, they're claiming it's, they're using carbon nanofibers and titanium this, and this could theoretically work and blah, blah, blah. They're also 3D printing it as sheets, so that could explain why it can be in any form and it's cheaper. It's kind of, all the pieces are semi plausible, but the thing is, no patents, no white papers, no peer reviewed publications, no third party independent testing, nothing has been tested.

• 28:56Speaker 04

  Major.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  They didn't even have a battery at CES. So there's massive red flags and reasons to be skeptical here.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  They're selling an idea.

• 29:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And let's not forget, once again, that Rupert Murdoch, Sam Walton, and Bill Gates all invested in Theranos at the beginning.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Henry Kissinger, and the former secretary, the other former secretary of state, right?

• 29:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And they had a huge contract with like, what was it, Walgreens? It was like a-

• 29:22Speaker 04

  Oh, no, it, was it Walgreens?

• 29:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't remember, but it was like a, yeah, it was like a large pharmacy, so.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  So the, right, they, they claim they're in production for a motorcycle, but it's their, it's one of their subsidiaries, right? Or it's, Donut Labs is a subsidiary of the motorcycle company that was spun off, whatever. You know, again, it's complicated. And like, it's-

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Right, it's not Honda.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Owned by his brother, you know? And the other thing is, the, the CEO of Donut Lab, two years ago, claimed to have the first truly sentient AI.

• 29:54Speaker 02

  So.

• 29:55Speaker 04

  Oh, so this guy might be operating on a different.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that guy I don't trust as far as I could throw him.

• 30:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  But again.

• 30:02Jay Novella?

  He just keeps throwing shit at the wall.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Is he just the marketing asshole or and you know what I mean? I don't because.

• 30:09Cara Santa Maria?

  But this whole company feels like a marketing company right now.

• 30:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I think the Donut Lab basically is a marketing company. But the question is, is the other pieces legit like the? And maybe this guy's just taking this technology that other people have. And now he's exaggerating the claims and fake it till you make it and is premature.

• 30:28Speaker 04

  It sounds like fake it till you make it.

• 30:29Cara Santa Maria?

  And what's so scary.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Investment by making, you know, by, by, by, yeah, by just doing all the marketing hinky stuff. But, but that.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  For some reason, the billionaire doesn't feel like cornering the entire system here, which could translate to trillions of dollars.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  But that doesn't mean that there isn't some real technology behind it.

• 30:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  But, but we have no evidence that there is either.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Wake me up when we see.

• 30:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so exactly. Show me the money or shut up. So.

• 30:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and I think the thing that's so scary with this, with like startup culture in general, living out here in California, I have a lot of friends who either work in different startups or own their own startups. And there's always that sort of on which side of the line are they between like fraud? And just this is how the culture of startups is. It's very fake it till you make it. It's very like, oh, we did this one proof of concept thing. And now we need to do a round of funding based on vapor.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  It's all vaporware. Yeah.

• 31:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's so scary that it's like perfectly legal. Like it's, it's completely legal until it's not anymore.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And where's that line?

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know. This happened the fourth time I sold the Brooklyn Bridge.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  So listen.

• 31:37Jay Novella?

  Look, fake it, fake it till you make it has worked for a lot of companies, you know? It's, it's, it's something that does bear fruit every once in a while.

• 31:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But why is that the model and the standard?

• 31:47Jay Novella?

  I'm not saying it's the, it's the right way, Kara, but it's definitely like the way that, that these things happen.

• 31:53Speaker 02

  So no one would be happier than me if this all turns out to be legit. This would be fantastic for the world, you know, absolutely. Uh, you know, basically be three years or four years ahead of schedule with a solid state battery that has a wish list of features. I mean, absolutely. Sign me up. I'm, I'm highly motivated.

• 32:13Speaker 02

  You know, for this to be real, but at the same time, it's got every single red flag of fraud or of the fake until you make it kind of scam artist thing going on.

• 32:21Speaker 04

  And how many times has something with this many red flags ever bared fruit?

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the track record of this CEO and of this kind of pattern of behavior is not good. But like we often say with some of these things where it's like, okay, semi plausible, but you know, I'm not seeing the meat is we'll know in a few months, probably.

• 32:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And, and I think the important thing here is that, as you mentioned, all of these different things collectively are plausible, like there's a pathway to them. So they don't have any secret fucking sauce that nobody else has. Eventually this will be made by a legitimate company.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Right. Except they're claiming they do have some secret sauce, right? That they do have this proprietary technology at the core of it.

• 33:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I don't buy, I don't buy that we have secret sauce. That's like, we have secret physics that nobody else has, you know what I mean?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more, I think-

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Right, yeah, they're not saying anti-gravity.

• 33:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, somebody else is gonna get there.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  They're also clear, but they're also saying no rare earths, no geopolitically significant elements. So-

• 33:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't buy it. I don't buy it.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  It's just, it's literally a battery wish list. It is a, it is a EV battery absolute wish list.

• 33:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like the, the bad science where you start at the end and then you work backward until you get there.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Or, or this guy could be asking his engineers, is it theoretically possible that we could do this without rare earths? Yeah, theoretically. Okay, that's it. It's without rare earth.

• 33:42Speaker 04

  Do we have confirmation that this billionaire really put in money?

• 33:45Speaker 02

  This is what I'm reading. This is, this is the industry reports. We don't have confirmation of anything, Evan. It's all super secret. It's all like, they're doing, they're doing the trade secret approach rather than the patent everything approach. And so they're not even letting people into their factory. They're not letting people look under the hood. That's, so they're only gonna get away with doing that for so long. At some point, they're gonna have to put up or shut up.

• 34:08Bob Novella?

  Okay, what's the game plan here? What's, they, they, they probably almost certainly know that there's no way they're gonna produce anything like this. So what's their game plan? Get a bunch of investment?

• 34:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 34:19Bob Novella?

  And run away with it or just-

• 34:20Speaker 02

  I don't think this is Orbo level. I don't think this is like just- Fraud, get money and disappear. I don't think that's the plan. I think my sense is that there's a massive disconnect between engineering and marketing. And we have marketing that's just running away with it and the engineers like, I didn't exactly say we had that now. You know, I'm just saying theoretically, we might have that or whatever. I think that's probably what's happening.

• 34:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But that in and of itself can be fraud at a certain point. Cause that's, that's kind of what was going on at Theranos too.

• 34:51Speaker 02

  Or there's whatever. There's a tiny chance that this guy managed to obtain, you know, the, the output of a lab that really did make a sincere breakthrough with nanotechnology or whatever, with these carbon nanof-

• 35:05Jay Novella?

  Maybe they got a guy who's-

• 35:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But I, but I think if that had happened, they would have patented it. I don't buy this whole trade secrets versus patents thing. Most people have both.

• 35:12Speaker 02

  It's suspicious that they don't have a patent yet. At least nothing in the public realm. They may be getting ready to file. I mean, again, that's, we'll, we'll know soon enough. Cause if they don't have a patent, that means they're about ready to file one.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  Gosh, that's normally one of the first things that happens.

• 35:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Because a patent, you patent an idea before it even works. Because a patent in and of itself prevents other people from stealing your stuff.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Well, again, they're going the stealth approach, right? Rather than the patent approach.

• 35:36Jay Novella?

  That risk is minimized.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  But that's also cover for fraud, right? So that's-

• 35:40Speaker 04

  How many other things are we using today? Followed that approach that are in society now? I don't know.

• 35:45Cara Santa Maria?

  None of them. Everybody patents their ideas. It's just, yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's-

• 35:49Jay Novella?

  See, I agree with Kara. Like them not patenting things to me-

• 35:51Speaker 02

  It's very suspicious.

• 35:52Jay Novella?

  It just, I just can't see, I don't understand this idea of trying to go stealth. One, one person in the company with an open mouth can ruin, you know, take away all their power.

• 36:03Speaker 04

  That's a two-person company, Jay.

• 36:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's easier when the company's tiny.

• 36:05Jay Novella?

  Well, you're right. That is, you see, I wasn't thinking of that.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  It's a tiny company. So, yeah, I think there's so many concerning features here. This is really stretching plausibility and credulity.

• 36:17Jay Novella?

  Oh, I'm looking, I'm looking at their employee list. There's somebody named Dr. Emmett Brown and somebody named Stark.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Whoa.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  And also, why do conferences let people come in and do this?

• 36:29Speaker 02

  This is a tech conference.

• 36:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, because it's because of eyeballs.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  I guess they don't care. They don't have any...

• 36:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's not their job either to vet it all. They can't do that.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  No, but I mean, do they really want people selling bogus things?

• 36:43Speaker 02

  You mentioned that, Evan. It's funny, because we go to a lot of science and academic conferences, right? But when you go to an industry, like a tech conference, it's a totally different vibe. It's a lot of big ideas and big showiness and not that much meat often.

• 36:59Speaker 04

  Yes, but there are actually products there.

• 37:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:01Speaker 04

  Okay, so, right, that's the difference.

• 37:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's sales. It's all about hawking your wares. And in startup culture, sales are not for the product. They're for the funding to keep working on the product.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Sure, for the next, right, more and...

• 37:14Speaker 02

  And a piece of the pie later. We will follow this story, and I'm waiting with bated breath to see, which this is going to rapidly, I think, go in one direction or another. And we'll see, and hopefully we'll be surprised, and there's some meat on these bones, but I'm not holding my breath. All right.

• 37:31Jay Novella?

  Well, Steve, I'll bet my battery patent that this is BS.

• 37:36Speaker 02

  It certainly has all the red flags. All right, Jay, give us an update on Artemis.

• 37:41Jay Novella?

  All right, so what we have here is the Artemis 2, right? So Artemis 1 was a uncrewed ship that was, you know, it's a rocket. And then there's a capsule that went around the moon. We gathered all the necessary intel that we needed to progress to Artemis 2. Now, Artemis 2 is a crewed mission. They're going to do a lunar flyby. They're going to have something called a free return trajectory. And it's going to take about 10 days to do the entire thing. There's no plan change toward like a lunar orbit insertion or landing. Like, that's not happening. We're still functioning analogous to Apollo 8, if you remember the Apollo 8 thing. It's just a flyby. Again, further testing the systems.

• 38:23Jay Novella?

  Now that it's crewed, they'll be, you know, checking all of the systems that the crew needs to survive. And, you know, scientific equipment they'll be using and everything. All right, so the crew... Is Reid Weisman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. Hansen is still the first Canadian assigned to lunar space. The astronauts are still serving dual roles as operators and biomedical research subjects. And there has not been crew changes or any role redefinitions announced. So it's very unlikely, like extremely unlikely that any changes are going to happen. Guys, remember that the heat shield issue was a big problem here.

• 39:02Jay Novella?

  So Artemis 1 had heat shield erosion, and this is still a primary technical driver behind all the delays, which is perfectly reasonable because of course, we want our astronauts to survive. NASA is saying that the heat shield performed, or the new one that they tested, it's performed within safety margins. The erosion pattern was, they said it's unexpected. I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess, you know, they, there were some findings that weren't 100% what they wanted. Artemis 2 does accept the revised risk model rather than a re, a complete redesigned shield. This is not, according to NASA, this isn't really a failure. It's just, you know, they're, they're reframing their approach to the whole thing.

• 39:46Jay Novella?

  Bottom line is, they are, they feel confident that everything is going to be okay. And in the end, it's not, it's not like a big hardware fix for them. What else is going on in this mission? So the, the reentry speeds remain the, the central risk to the astronauts. It's really, you know, that is the, the point where I think most concern has been put on. Orion is still flying farther than any crewed spacecraft since Apollo, which, you know, again, it's, we're going to be breaking a lot of records here with these Artemis missions. They're saying that communications, life support, navigation, and thermal systems are still being validated under these real world conditions. No systems have been de-scoped or downgraded, which is fantastic because you would think that they would be having funding issues, but apparently that's not playing in.

• 40:31Jay Novella?

  The timeline is, you know, we're, they're keeping it at one month away, which could mean anytime. They're saying early 2026. I heard that it could be as soon as two weeks. Again, these are all conditional statements. Nobody really knows except the upper echelon. They, I think they, they have a very good idea, but we're not going to find out until they announce the actual date. And again, we don't have a firm launch date right now. The launch windows are extending all the way to April.

• 41:01Jay Novella?

  Which means that, you know, they've planned for a bunch of different scenarios. So how does this relate to Artemis III, right? Artemis III is the big, big one. This is where people land on the moon. So Artemis II is a, a, you know, gateway mission for Artemis III. This is absolutely essential before we can even think about launching Artemis III. Artemis III needs, in order for it to happen, it needs an absolute 100% success for Artemis II. SpaceX starship, human landing system readiness, meaning that that, that whole system has to be 100% developed and tested and ready to go. And they're saying that they're not going to be simplifying Artemis III in any way and are not going, going to try to accelerate the launch date of Artemis III, right?

• 41:45Jay Novella?

  They're, they're trying to keep things, um, you know, they want, they want to use all the technology and they want everything to be tested and all that. So they're, they're not really saying anything about like, hey, let's move the dates up or any of that, which I think is perfectly normal. So what should we expect? We should expect a launch, I'd say, within the next, uh, two to three months. I think that we should expect an incredible amount of information coming from NASA about, about the missions and the astronauts and them talking to, talking back and forth to Earth. I don't think we'll find out, if anything quote unquote, bad happens, uh, if it isn't mission critical, I think it's likely we'll hear about most incidents, but I, I don't think we'll hear everything until they get back and they can do a full analysis or whatever. I feel very good about these missions.

• 42:30Jay Novella?

  I mean, there's been so much, you know, time, attention, money and rethinking about everything to make sure that this is as safe as it possibly can be. I feel strong and I'm super excited about the whole thing. I cannot wait to see astronauts leave the planet and go to the moon.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Jay, I have a question for you.

• 42:47Jay Novella?

  Go ahead.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  How are these astronauts going to get through the Van Allen ballots, man?

• 42:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, let's ask your son, let's ask your daughter's science teacher. There is a person in Connecticut, Steve, that seems to have their thumb on this. We should call them up and have them explain to us and, and, you know, in full detail, like, I want to hear the physics, I want to hear everything.

• 43:04Speaker 02

  I want to see the math equations.

• 43:05Jay Novella?

  I want to know who Van Allen was, I want to know it all.

• 43:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But also explain it like we're fifth graders.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Explain it to us like we're fifth graders.

• 43:11Jay Novella?

  Exactly.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  Kara, that's great.

• 43:14Jay Novella?

  But. But guys, you know, when Artemis 1 launched, I said, "Hey, guys, this is the beginning of like a new era," right? It is. But this is really the big one, because this is not, this is people. It's not just spacecraft. We are sending people all the way to orbiting the moon, or, you know, a flyby of the moon. This is, this is a big deal. When these systems work, we know, hey, we can get people to and from the moon. And that is the game changer.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  But my big question, my real question, Jay, is what comes after Artemis? Right? Because the SLS is not reusable. It's basically a finite program. And when those missions are done, it's done. So isn't the big question, what comes after that?

• 43:55Jay Novella?

  Well, we, we kind of know, right? I mean, the, the big brush stroke here was that they make the, um, they make the gateway platform around the moon. They're going to make some type of, some type of encampment on the moon, right? You know, they're not going to call it Space Station Alpha, or anything that we want. Or was it Moon Base Alpha? That's what we want. They're not going to call it that. They have some other stupid name. But, but I think the ultimate goal here is to send people to Mars, right? I mean, that still seems to be there. I would have expected defunding to completely total all of this. A year ago, my prediction was, man, we're not going to see any of these things happen. So the fact that it's still happening to me is wonderful. I think we should all revel in it.

• 44:37Jay Novella?

  It's going to be scientific achievement after scientific achievement. And, you know, we're having people, you know, with the insane bravery to put themselves on a, on a rocket to go fly around the moon, and then the next step is the moon.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yep. All right. Again, a story that we have to continue to follow, see how it unfolds. But yeah, within a month or so, we could be seeing another rocket actually take people to the moon. That'd be cool.

• 45:05Speaker 04

  That is amazing. Wow, man, it's. Yep, right, our lifetime?

• 45:09Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, I understand that the EPA is tweaking some of their rules.

• 45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I know. So we go from one federal agency to another and I don't know, even I'm excited for your excitement, Jay, but I can't help but be so skeptical when it comes to anything that the federal government right now is funding.

• 45:32Cara Santa Maria?

  This, this story is disheartening and since it was published by the New York Times on January 12th, so we're recording this on the 15th, so three days ago, an investigative report was published. Since then, spokespeople from the EPA have fired back and there's been a lot of complexity, but let's try and get to the bottom of it. So, an article that was written, reported and written by Maxine, I think Joselau, maybe Joselo, I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name, sorry about that, entitled EPA to Stop Considering Lives Saved When Setting Rules on Air Pollution, was published and she references internal

• 46:15Cara Santa Maria?

  EPA documents that were obtained by the New York Times. I'm not going to dig deep into how journalists, you know, source their information and, you know, how they utilize different sources. I will say that the EPA is a very large organization and even though a lot of people have been fired from the EPA over the last, how long has it been now? One year only? Oh my god.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  Almost, almost 360 days.

• 46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, even though a lot of people have been fired and removed from their posts, there are still a fair amount, I have very dear friends working at the EPA who are struggling, you know, with their own politics and feeling muzzled within the organization. So, it wouldn't surprise me if there were some leaks and some different documents being shared outside of the organization. So, that said, basically, these documents, these internal documents stated that the EPA's new policy is to stop.

• 47:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Calculating the gains that are made in health benefits. Okay, so it's kind of backward. It's like a double negative, but it's, I guess, a single positive. So what the EPA has historically done is they've calculated gains from health benefits that come from curbing pollutants. Specifically, they're talking about PM 2.5. We've talked about that before on the show, particulate matter 2.5. So that's anything that's in the air that's 2.5 microns or smaller. That means it's small enough to get into your lungs and also specifically ozone.

• 48:00Cara Santa Maria?

  So historically, when different industries that produce pollutants have been regulated by the EPA, the amount of benefit to health that is calculated by adding lives or adding years of life has been a part of that calculation in terms of financial regulation. And historically, that number has fluctuated. Like, it was lowest, I think, I was trying to dig a little bit, but in recent years, it was lowest under Bush. It raised up again under Obama. There was even new regulation that was put into place as recently as February 2024,

• 48:44Cara Santa Maria?

  where stronger standards were placed. So this was during the Biden-Harris administration for soot pollution. And all of this is based on, like, actuarial statistics, right? So anytime you read an article about this, so let's say this EPA press release that was put out in February of 2024, they stated that their new air quality standard at the time was going to be strengthened. By moving required levels from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to nine micrograms per cubic meter. And of course, they calculated there that this would save

• 49:23Cara Santa Maria?

  lives. They said it would prevent up to 4,500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost workdays. And then they calculated that that would yield $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032. And so that's based on like, what is the cost of a life? So it's really interesting. If you look back at the literature, like I found an old article from 2011 where the the new cost of the life during that administration went up to 9.1 million. Under, like I mentioned, George W. Bush, it was 6.8 million. In 2008, it was 5 million. So it fluctuates based on politics, but also based on new calculations. So what the EPA is claiming, or not claiming,

• 50:08Cara Santa Maria?

  what the EPA internal documents are saying is that the the human life is going to be kind of, they're not saying a human life is worth $0, but they're saying that the calculation that we're going to use for our policies and regulatory work is going to be set at $0. And that's down significantly from, you know, 9 million per person. We've talked a little bit in the past about externalized costs, right? Like, social costs of carbon, for example, and how that number has fluctuated over the years. Just last year, the White House said that the social cost of carbon was going to be dropped down to zero. But

• 50:52Cara Santa Maria?

  now, saying that the cost of a human life, at least when considering air pollution, is $0, is really frightening, because obviously, what are the big outcomes of that? Like, what happens when you set a human life as $0 when it comes to calculating taxes and regulatory expenses on big businesses like coal plants and oil refineries?

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, now you're only going to be considering the economic costs, not the societal costs, basically.

• 51:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And so now, all of a sudden, we're back to a, and we've talked about this, but we're back to a system in place where there aren't zero externalized costs at all, right? That just, they're only responsible for the cost of making their product and selling their product, and not for all of the detrimental outcomes of those products.

• 51:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Here's something that's interesting. Since this article was written, and again, it was only three days ago as of this recording, The Hill published a new article saying that the EPA denies the reports that it will no longer consider harm to humans. So the EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin both spoke recently on, I think, X, and also, no, this is mostly on X, wrote that this story is, quote, "another dishonest fake news claim," courtesy of the New York Times. He also wrote, quote, "Not only is it the," in all caps, "exact opposite of this headline, the actual truth, but the Times is already," in all caps, "very well aware

• 52:27Cara Santa Maria?

  that EPA will be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits." And he called it entirely untrue, and he said it was a cute BS headline. But then, the spokesperson, or a spokesperson for the EPA, Carolyn Horon, when she was interviewed, I think by the Times, yeah, for comment, this was her statement. "EPA, like the agency always has, is still considering the impacts that PM 2.5 and ozone emissions have on human health. Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact." Yes, it does. Yes, it does. So they're claiming, they're trying to have it both ways. They're claiming

• 53:10Cara Santa Maria?

  that they're still considering it, and when you look at an official statement that was put out by the EPA, and I just pulled this, it's called "The Economic Impact Analysis for the New Source Performance Standards Review, Economic Impact Analysis for the New Source Performance Standards Review for Stationary Combustion Turbines Final Rule," and this was just published, you know, this month. When you search "deep buried in here," the language says... The EPA historically provided point estimates instead of just ranges are only quantifying emissions, which leads the public to believe the agency has a better understanding of the monetized impacts of exposure to PM 2.5 and ozone than in reality. Therefore, to rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits

• 53:54Cara Santa Maria?

  from PM 2.5 and ozone, but will continue to quantify the emissions until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts. And then they restate that three different ways. So basically, they're trying to have it both ways. They're saying, don't worry, we're monitoring this, but we don't feel like our numbers are good. So instead of continuing to utilize what we think are overblown numbers, read from a political perspective, we're going to remove them all together until we deem that we can add them back, which I'm not buying.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:25Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's like, it's, in the same sentence, it refutes itself. Again, Carolyn Horan's quote literally says, "Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact." No, that's what the word "value" means.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Right. Totally. I mean, there's, again, the common saying, "Don't tell me your priorities, show me your budget." Right? What you put a dollar value on is your priority. It is literally how you value things. And just saying that we value it, even though we're literally saying it has zero dollar value, is meaningless. That's just, that's just politics.

• 55:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that there's a really, there was, it wrapped it up better than anything I could read, but Representative Mike Thompson, who is, represents California's 4th district, put out a statement after the New York Times article was published. And I just want to read it because I think it really summarizes what this means going forward. He said, "The EPA's decision to stop accounting for the lives saved by clean air rules is a dangerous abandonment of its core mission, protecting human health." For decades, well-established science has shown that reducing air pollution prevents asthma attacks, hospitalizations, chronic disease, and premature deaths. Ignoring those benefits while counting only industry costs assigns a value of zero to human life and makes it

• 55:52Cara Santa Maria?

  easier for polluters to do more harm. The EPA exists to protect people and the environment, not to promote corporate profits. Any cost-benefit analysis that excludes human life is dishonest and contrary to decades of precedent. Clean air is not negotiable. And obviously, okay, there's some strong language there and it sounds political, but ultimately, the point stands. Why was the EPA even founded? Why do we have an environmental protection agency?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. It was established in 1970. It's not the corporate profit protection agency.

• 56:24Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 56:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 56:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a citizen, it's a, it's an agency that stands because we decided collectively as a democracy that we wanted our tax dollars, or at least a portion of them, to go towards clean air. And, and all of the benefits, not just to human life, but across the board that come from protecting our environment. And this is, yeah, a huge bastardization. And again, we know that this happens and we know that the priorities shift and it gets weaker and it gets stronger depending on shifts in, in different political administrations. But like the laundry list of unprecedented things that are happening to science under

• 57:08Cara Santa Maria?

  this administration, this is, you know, pretty beyond the pale. And we haven't seen anything like this in a very, if at all, actually, at least with the EPA.

• 57:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, again, you say not surprising, but definitely disheartening.

• 57:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And will, will have, you know, measurable impact. Like people, again, it's, it's, it's not a stretch to say people will die.

• 57:30Speaker 02

  But even if you take a purely economic perspective, reducing illness is a huge money saver. It's an investment. Yeah, it's an investment. You're reducing direct healthcare costs and lost productivity. So, yeah, I mean, you know, the programs that reduce harm to health, health generally pay for themselves.

• 57:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh yeah, they have a huge ROI. The issue is when the stakeholders are the, the American people, or even the citizens of the globe, that argument holds up. But when you're concerned about short-term profit for lobbying groups.

• 58:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:12Cara Santa Maria?

  When you're concerned, when your stakeholders are, you know, corporate stakeholders and not the American people, that's not the ROI they're looking at. They want different statistics. What's going to save the, you know, the people who are funding their campaigns the most money? Well, we don't have to worry about health and human safety.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Cara.

• 58:35Speaker 02

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

• 58:39Jay Novella?

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• 58:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Me too. And so for the holidays this year, I picked up the Mongolian cashmere full zip sweater for my partner and it was completely affordable. I mean, like a third of the cost that you would get it in a traditional retail store. Absolutely beautiful. And he's been wearing it literally every day since he opened it. He loves it so much. I think it's going to be his new staple for sure.

• 59:21Speaker 04

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• 59:42Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Hi Bob, this is a story we've gone back and forth on a few times. What are the prospects of life on planets around red dwarf stars?

• 59:53Bob Novella?

  It's funny you say "back and forth" because I wanted to say, in the most recent tennis match of "life in the universe is more likely," no, "life is less likely," no, it's like back and forth, back and forth. So it's not a surprise, there's a new study suggesting that that complex multicellular life, like Earth's, is less likely in our Milky Way galaxy than we thought, since our most common stars, red dwarfs, basically cannot build up enough oxygen for what's called the "great oxygenation event," like happened on Earth.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Bob Novella?

  And was critical for the appearance or evolution of multicellular life. So, this is from some study written by some scientist, blah blah blah. Okay, first, I'm going to upload the more core concepts that you're going to need into your wetware. So, they have red dwarf stars. We've mentioned these a few times. These are stars that are the most common stars in all the night skies throughout the Milky Way. Seventy percent of those stars are these red dwarf stars. Our eyes have actually never seen one, because they emit mostly infrared light, and they're small and they're dim, so we've never actually seen them with our naked eyes. They also live far longer than our sun. Get this, I didn't quite understand or know this, trillions of years.

• 1:01:06Speaker 02

  Trillions.

• 1:01:07Bob Novella?

  Trillions. It's such a slow burn, that they just last for ridiculous amounts of time. Our sun is like, what, 10 billion years? So that's really dramatic. Next is this idea of the "great oxygenation event." It's also called the "great oxidation event," and also some other names. Talked about this a couple of times, so let me refresh your memory. The "great oxygenation event," not to be confused with the "great meatball event," it's not a discrete event, right? This is something that didn't happen one day. This took, literally, millions of years to play out. But it did happen around, say, you know, 2.4, 2.5 billion years ago, is the estimate, a good reference point for approximately when this... This happened, you know, when it occurred. Now, this refers to the appearance of lots of free oxygen in our atmosphere.

• 1:01:52Bob Novella?

  And as you might think, this was quite important. And this was largely due to cyanobacteria, which used this fancy new tool that they invented called photosynthesis. God, have you heard of that? So this produced, this produced enough of this poisonous byproduct called oxygen to fill the atmosphere with enough of it to, to literally remake life on Earth from anaerobic to aerobic. And this was, this was very roughly like jet fuel in the atmosphere, allowing the evolution of complex, energy-intensive metabolisms, multicellular life, like us, to evolve. So, yeah, this was pretty, pretty important in our, in Earth's history. Now, the time it took for this slow buildup of oxygen, they, these cyanobacteria just

• 1:02:37Bob Novella?

  didn't create enough oxygen for this oxygenation event. It was a slow buildup. It's hard to say how long it took to reach critical mass, but estimates put it around 700 million years for this buildup to happen enough. Okay, so that's, uh, that's the down, though. Now, we can segue to the actual study itself. So these scientists essentially did a very cool thought experiment. This is fascinating. What if ancient Earth was swapped into a solar system with a red dwarf star? And they likened it to the Trappist One star. Uh, that's, that solar system is about 40 light-years away, like basically right in our backyard. But this is a red dwarf star. So if we did that billions of years ago, how would that impact the Earth's great oxygenation event?

• 1:03:22Bob Novella?

  And also, how would that impact the famous Cambrian explosion that happened about 1.9 billion years later, where the fossil records essentially show a lot of these new multicellular body plans, first time we had seen them in, in the fossil record. Some of these body plans, of course, just disappeared, never to really be seen again, are for much longer, anyway. And, but also, many of them also set the stage for much of animal body plans for today. So, um, so as you know, photosynthesizers on Earth take advantage of our sun's energetic wavelengths of light. We've, we've covered photosynthesis.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, George plays a photosynthesizer.

• 1:03:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there you go. Photosynthesizers on an Earth orbiting a red dwarf star, however, would only see about 1% of those energetic wavelengths that our Earth sees, our photosynthesizers sees. So 99% of these wavelengths would be longer and weaker wavelengths of a typical red dwarf star. So the spectrum would be quite different if you're photosynthesizing on this hypothetical Earth. So what does that mean for these hypothetical microbes on an Earth orbiting this red dwarf? It means that the time it took for the oxygen to build up and create this oxygenation event wouldn't be 700 million years like our Earth, but something, as they calculate, you know,

• 1:04:43Bob Novella?

  back of the envelope, real quick extrapolation, 63 billion years on this hypothetical Earth. So a huge, a dramatic increase, kind of of a ridiculous number, but it just goes to show you how inefficient photosynthesizers on Earth would be dealing with this infrared, infrared light, just take a super long time. The Cambrian explosion of complex life on this hypothetical Earth would take, instead of 1.7 billion years as it took here, to perhaps 172 billion years to happen after the oxygenation event. So clearly, a hugely dramatic increase in the time for these huge events to occur on this hypothetical Earth. So I mean, how screwed up is that?

• 1:05:27Bob Novella?

  But don't worry, guys, it gets better before it gets a lot worse again. So it gets better if you do this. If you add in the really nuanced details about photosynthesis and how it really works, you know, if you include things like photo inhibition and low-light adaptation, things that I really don't need to go into detail about, but if you cover those, if you add that to the model, the calculations, the numbers get a lot better. So instead of the ridiculous 63 billion years to reach the buildup of oxygen for the oxygenation event, that goes down to 3 billion years with this new recalculation. So and also, instead of 172 billion years to reach a Cambrian-like explosion event, it might take something like 7 billion years, around there, give or take.

• 1:06:09Bob Novella?

  Literally a few billion years. Still, so the numbers are a lot better, right? With this recalculation, but still it's much, much longer than it took on the, on the earth. But except, except when you consider one thing that kind of blows all those numbers out of the water, potentially. Now imagine this photosynthetic life on this hypothetical earth that don't release oxygen, right? The first ones that we had on our earth, they're photosynthetic, but they're not, but they're not really, they're not really releasing oxygen yet. They would have a huge competitive advantage, almost a game-changing advantage, they think. So, so not only might they evolve first like they did on the earth, but in this case, they would have access to a huge range of infrared wavelengths that would give them an immense

• 1:06:53Bob Novella?

  competitive advantage, right? Because the, the infrared wavelengths on the earth now are nothing compared to what a red dwarf would, would create. So if you evolved on this hypothetical earth, you would have access, and you can, and you can photosynthesize those infrared waves, then you would have a huge advantage because the waves extend, you know, deep into the spectrum. It's a broad range that they could have, that they could access. That would give them a huge advantage, potentially, you can't say definitively, of course, but potentially allowing them to dominate most ecological niches and preventing the biosphere potentially from becoming oxygenated. So it essentially just would not even happen.

• 1:07:34Bob Novella?

  We would more likely, these scientists think, we would very likely have a scenario where you could have, you know, non-oxygen emitting microbes dominating, dominating the planet and therefore no great oxygenation event, no Cambrian-like explosion, and no, and no complex life. So, all right, so the bottom, let me just give you the bottom line, after all of my jibber jabber here. The bottom line, 70% of the stars in our Milky Way do not seem amenable at all to evolving multi-solar life that uses oxygen for earth-type planets. So that's the bottom line. So it's this part of the tennis match, you know, that's back down where life is less likely. I find, of course, we all find it very frustrating and discouraging.

• 1:08:19Bob Novella?

  Encouraging to hear all these, you know, detailed studies saying that, "Yeah, life is less likely than we thought," right? You get kind of bummed out, especially so in this case. This one hurts a little bit extra because it literally impacts many of the stars that dominate our galaxy, these red dwarfs which are all over the place. So that's like, "Damn, man, if that's really true, the worst-case scenarios are not good." But, as we know, gotta throw a little, you know, little reality in here to a certain extent. This is a very narrow case, right? This is specific to an Earth-like planet, an oxygen-based Earth life, and that's all that we really know. That's the life that we know that fits those

• 1:08:59Bob Novella?

  categories. There's so much about life and the potential for life that's potentially out there that's very different from the Earth. I'm sure we are just not even scratching the surface of what's possible. So I wouldn't be too discouraged by this. And, you know, I don't know. Steve, what do you think? Were you very discouraged by this? Or what's your thoughts?

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  I was not discouraged by it, but for a reason you're not going to like. And that is, I've already written off the red dwarfs, mostly.

• 1:09:29Bob Novella?

  Okay, you have, alright.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Because of the issue that, early on in the life of red dwarfs, they're

• 1:09:35Bob Novella?

  Magnetic fields?

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  Extremely variable and chaotic.

• 1:09:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  And they would likely strip the atmosphere off of any nearby planet, any planet in the Goldilocks zone. So the only real hope for a terrestrial planet around a red dwarf, and a planet with an atmosphere, is that either it migrated in from the outer solar system later on in the star's life, or it reconstituted its atmosphere somehow after it was stripped away. Neither of those are very likely. So I think that chances are, this is just one more knock against them, but chances are, I don't think red dwarfs are gonna be a life-friendly star. Right? Unless we're talking about life that's only in the oceans, and it's only chemosynthetic, or whatever, like it's just not...

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  Land-based oxygen-breathing life like we know it.

• 1:10:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's a good point, because we have chemosynthetic life on Earth not based on photosynthesis at all.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:10:32Bob Novella?

  And they would be, they would probably be fine.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Could there be multicellular chemosynthetic life?

• 1:10:37Bob Novella?

  That's, ooh.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  That's a great question, isn't it?

• 1:10:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah. That's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write that one down. That's really interesting.

• 1:10:43Speaker 02

  That should go in our book.

• 1:10:44Bob Novella?

  So, so Steve.

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  Or a science fiction novel or something.

• 1:10:47Bob Novella?

  So Steve, so you're saying like a rocky planet on the outskirts of the Goldilocks zone would still have problems with the, with the active red dwarf star?

• 1:10:56Speaker 02

  I think so. Because Bob, their Goldilocks zone is not big because they're not that bright.

• 1:11:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 02

  It's close in.

• 1:11:03Bob Novella?

  It's close in because it's such a dim, it's such a small, it's such a small star.

• 1:11:07Speaker 02

  Plus, there's the tidally locked problem. It's just, they're just bad locations for life.

• 1:11:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're not great, and this just makes it, makes it even worse. And oh, by the way, these red dwarf stars are about, they go up to about .6 solar masses, so they never really get too close, that close to a solar mass. And the lightest ones are very light, something like .02 solar masses. So they, they've got a broad range there, but they're tiny, they're tiny. So, so there, so there we go.

• 1:11:31Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:11:31Bob Novella?

  But still, regardless of any of the things we talked about, I think microbial life is, is all over this goddamn universe, all over.

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  Likely, yeah.

• 1:11:40Bob Novella?

  That's likely.

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  The universe is crawling with microbes.

• 1:11:42Bob Novella?

  But they're less, it's less interesting, though, obviously, than multicellular life, so we'll see what happens.

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  Always.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Bob. So Evan, tell us about the update on the Malaysia Air search. Did they start that thing back up again?

• 1:11:57Speaker 04

  They did start it up again. It's, and I think we're all familiar with this, but just in case, because it is one of the most, well, infamous modern mysteries of aviation. Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, which was a Boeing 777.

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  It carried 239 people and it vanished, you know, practically on March 8th, 2014. This was a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Have any of you watched the Netflix documentary on, on MH370?

• 1:12:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Was this, this was the one about the Boeing Max or no?

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  Uh, no, this was the, no, no.

• 1:12:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Was that Singapore?

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Specifically the Malaysia Airlines flight that, that disappeared. I think there were five chapters in this mini, in this mini-series about it. It was, it was pretty well done, um, but it was, you know, it's a couple of years old and, you know, it kind of, you know, left, it's a, it's a mystery. So, you know, you don't, you don't, we don't know what happened. But here are the details. Here's the history in case you don't know. Their last transmission from the plane was about 40 minutes after it took off. Captain's name was Zahir Ahmad Shah and he signed off with "good night Malaysian 370." And this was as the plane had entered Vietnamese airspace. But then it failed to check in with controllers from Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, the plane's transponder was turned off.

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  And when the plane's transponder goes off, that makes it very difficult to track at that point. But military radar picked up the plane and they said that the flight path suddenly turned back over northern Malaysia, um, and Penang Island and then out to the, uh, Andaman Sea, Andaman Sea, towards the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. And that's when radar contact was lost entirely. And what they're saying also is that after that, a satellite over the Indian Ocean continued to pick up pings from the flight every hour for the next, oh, six or so hours, seven hours after takeoff specifically. And then those signals suggested that the plane took a dramatic turn south into the

• 1:14:05Speaker 04

  depths of the Indian Ocean, you know, some of the most remote places on, on the planet. And that was the last blip of information that we had on it. And almost immediately, a massive search got underway. And they were unfortunately not able to find the aircraft. They spent two years looking for the aircraft. It could not be found. And then in the preceding years, some 30 pieces of suspected aircraft debris have been collected. And they've been able to confirm that three fragments were from this flight. Serial number or some kind of clearly identifying mark. Three fragments, three pieces of the plane. That's where we've been. But now the search is starting up again.

• 1:14:48Speaker 04

  December 30, 2025, using modern autonomous underwater technology and a refined target zone, the government of Malaysia has approved a renewed deep-seated seabed search for the missing plane. Ocean Infinity is the name of the company that's been contracted for them to do this. They're a marine robotics company. They had previously conducted a search in 2018. But they've refined their equipment. They haven't, I looked online, they have not said how they've upgraded and improved their technology since then. But I don't know if it's because they're just trying to, you know, keep it from the competitors or whatnot, but who knows? That's what they're claiming. They're claiming they're using their latest greatest technology to resume a search again. They are not charging any fees for this resumed search, which is really nice.

• 1:15:32Speaker 04

  Only if there is some kind of, something deemed to be a success, then they'll send them the bill for the work. But other than that, they're going to be doing this of their own accord to, I guess, you know, in a way, test their new equipment, but also in a hopes that the information they have, plus the technology that they have, will lead to its finding. It's supposed to be a 55-day mission. So we will have an update on this, maybe in a couple of months, and see what they were able to pick up. It would be enormous news if they were able to make some kind of declaration that they have something confirmed here. And it will be, that will be, that will be front-page news everywhere. Still, because there's so much mystery behind this, not only as to why it disappeared in

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  the first place, you know, I mean, for the most part, most airline disasters are investigated and you're able to investigate them and figure out where they are. But this particular one, they just don't have enough information on it. And do you remember when this was all happening, there were some wild and crazy ideas being floated out there, almost immediately, like what happened to this plane? A lot of conspiracy theories, which is why it sort of has a skeptical angle to it as well, right? There's one claim that said it landed secretly, was flown to Diego Garcia, which is a US military-based island in the Indian Ocean, because there was some sort of technology onboard that the United States government wanted to procure, keep safe, or keep out of the, uh, keep out of the hands of enemies, or what have you, right?

• 1:16:59Speaker 04

  There was also another tale that was spun that it landed and was tied in with another flight, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014. And they say, okay, so what happened here is that that actual aircraft was not Flight MH17, that was the real MH370, and they swapped it out as part of, again, some sort of sinister plot of some kind. And then, of course, you have the extraordinary kinds of, kinds of, kinds of, kinds of claims that are out there, including that might have been swallowed by a black hole. I don't know if anybody remembers that being bantered

• 1:17:41Speaker 04

  about. And this was, and this was all because of just an innocuous thing that was said on CNN. Don Lemon, remember he used to be with CNN? So Lemon mentioned receiving Twitter messages from viewers suggesting the plane could have been sucked into a black hole, quote, or experienced something like the TV show Lost. And then that, okay, now people's imaginations are totally running away with themselves, and before you know it, all kinds of ideas out there about crazy stuff. Teleportation videos, that was a theory that saw, that came actually back to life on TikTok in 2023, due to viral leaked, supposedly leaked videos showing three orbs circling the plane before it vanished in a flash of light, as, you

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  know, as opposed to being some kind of visual effects that somebody just conjured on a computer somewhere, right? So there's all this sort of skeptical ideas and topics that, you know, that we touch on, that are tied into this story as well. And that's normal, in a sense, for a mystery. Of course, you're gonna have range of ideas, from things that are entirely plausible to outright lunacy, and everywhere in between. So we'll know, maybe in a few months, if this latest search is gonna, has yielded any new information.

• 1:18:56Speaker 02

  What percentage of the ocean floor has been mapped with high resolution modern sonar?

• 1:19:03Speaker 04

  Less than 1% would be my guess.

• 1:19:05Cara Santa Maria?

  5%?

• 1:19:06Bob Novella?

  Very low.

• 1:19:07Speaker 02

  27%.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  Oh, that's impressive. That's a lot more than my thought.

• 1:19:11Bob Novella?

  They've improved it since the last time I checked this.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, but that's still a quarter, basically, so we haven't mapped all of it. Uh, the Nippon Foundation G E B C O Seabed 2030 project, they plan to map the whole, the whole floor by 2030. What percentage of the ocean has been explored through visual exploration with, with submersibles, whether crude or not crude?

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  Now, that's probably less than 1%.

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  0.001%.

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  That's probably what I was thinking, yeah.

• 1:19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, very, almost nothing, basically, statistically, nothing.

• 1:19:44Jay Novella?

  So, Steve, why, why would we explore outer space if we haven't explored our own planet?

• 1:19:49Bob Novella?

  Internet space.

• 1:19:49Jay Novella?

  Our own planet, Steve.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  So, if, but if that's true, if we do map the rest of the seafloor by 2030, won't we find it? By, by doing that, and, and also, we'll find, what's her name's plane?

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Oh, Amelia Earhart?

• 1:20:03Speaker 02

  Amelia Earhart's plane, yeah.

• 1:20:05Speaker 04

  Possibly.

• 1:20:07Bob Novella?

  What's the resolution, though?

• 1:20:09Speaker 04

  Think so.

• 1:20:09Speaker 02

  This is with high resolution.

• 1:20:11Bob Novella?

  High res.

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  Hi, high res.

• 1:20:13Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but even high res, if there's, if it's like, if it's like, you know, under the seafloor, or, or just so, it's been so long where you'd have to reel, you know, it'd be hard to spot.

• 1:20:21Speaker 02

  But this is a, this is a jump boat, this is a jet from only, what, how many years ago was it, Evan?

• 1:20:27Speaker 04

  2014.

• 1:20:28Speaker 02

  2014, 10, 11, 12 years ago.

• 1:20:30Bob Novella?

  That should be totally gettable.

• 1:20:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that should, you know, Earhart's plane, I could see you might be a little camouflaged by the processes of the ocean, but

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  I mean, at least you had an idea, maybe, on a flight route where to search for Amelia Earhart's plane. This thing just took off south to the Indian Ocean. You know, in the, I mean, really, that is a difficult area of the planet to search.

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, and see, don't forget, big seafloor doesn't want you to find it, you're not going to find it.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  There is that, too.

• 1:20:58Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:20:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  So I actually planned on talking this week about two recent initiatives by RFK Jr. and in his auspices as the HHS secretary. But I decided I had to cover the Donut Lab solid-state battery instead. So I'm just going to refer you to my blog posts on these two topics. RFK put out a new food pyramid, which is not completely nuts, but it's like most nutritional pseudoscience, it's a mixed bag of stuff, right? But it is not evidence-based. It is basically whatever RFK fix is correct. And he also put out new policies that is essentially going to decimate the vaccine

• 1:21:41Speaker 02

  schedule, removing several vaccines from the vaccine schedule.

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  But I wrote about both of these on Science-Based Medicine, one this Wednesday, one last Wednesday, so just look for those articles there. The links will also be in the show notes. I just want to, as a big picture, so all the details will be in those posts, but the big picture is RFK clearly is following a certain process. And that process is, just trust me, bro, that the process is, he doesn't listen to experts, he doesn't listen to scientific evidence, he doesn't understand the scientific evidence or how to interpret it. He is a conspiracy-addled thinker, and he is putting out now these official US policy

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  is whatever conspiracy nonsense he happens to believe in, rather than being a expert-reviewed, science-based policy. That's what we have. And these are just two blatant examples of that, and we should expect more of this. And in fact, you know, if you've been paying attention or reading our articles on science-based medicine, it's pretty clear. That RFK is engaging in a relentless plan to completely destroy the vaccine infrastructure in our country. Despite what he says, despite what he's promised, despite what he said when he was interviewed, you know, by the Senate, that is exactly what he is doing. It is blatantly obvious. We have been documenting it for the past year.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  And he's continuing in that vein. You have to be in denial not to think that he's doing that at this point. He's, you know, not going to outright ban vaccines, but he's doing everything he can short of that.

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  He's gutting the system that offers the protections that we have.

• 1:23:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. He's pulling every lever he can to reduce the number of vaccines that people are getting. Okay, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:23:38Jay Novella?

  Okay, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:24:00Jay Novella?

  That's a pretty crazy sound.

• 1:24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sounds like something's spinning up. I know it's not specific, but.

• 1:24:05Speaker 04

  A turbine?

• 1:24:06Jay Novella?

  Well, all right. So, you know, this was an unusually light couple of weeks. I think people are still recovering from the holidays, but I did get some fun guesses in here. I have a listener named Burkhalp who said, "Hey, y'all. Burkhalp from Hamburg in Germany here. This week's noisy is surely something spinning again, brought up to a high speed and then suddenly released. I've never heard one in real life, but I'm going to guess it is an electrical clay pigeon thrower. Hope you had better New Year's start than Maduro."

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:24:38Jay Novella?

  Does anybody know what an electrical clay pigeon thrower is?

• 1:24:41Speaker 02

  I don't know what a clay pigeon is.

• 1:24:43Jay Novella?

  So this must be one you plug in, right?

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  I suppose, as opposed to manually pulling a release.

• 1:24:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's something that it's an arm that, like a metal arm mechanism you use to throw up a clay frisbee-like thing that you would use to shoot, like with a shotgun or whatever for sport. But, yeah, I don't know. I couldn't find one online and certainly couldn't find any sounds of it. So I just don't know. But that was an interesting guess. A frequent flyer here, Michael Blaney, wrote in, "Hi, Jay. Happy New Year." He goes, "Missed the Star Wars sound by less than a hair's breadth, but a miss is a miss." He said, "The new one sounds annoyingly familiar. When you reveal it, I'm sure I'll recognize it, but I have to guess something. So I'm guessing it's the isolated engineer noise from the classic 80's Sega game, OutRun." Again, I could not find the noise that he's referencing, but I think it's interesting,

• 1:25:32Jay Novella?

  and I always love video game references. Oh, I can. Another listener named Rich Wrigley wrote in. He says, "Guessing I might be too late, but I think this noise is the sound of the time machine that Albert Einstein makes firing up in the video game Command and Conquer." More video games. I have friends that have played that game. I don't remember. I don't think I played it. I don't know. I'm not even sure at this point. But I will take your word for it, but that is not correct. We have not had a correct guess yet. And then the last one I have here is from John Kelly. He said, "It was great to meet you last weekend in Seattle. We'd love it if the SGU made a trip up to Vancouver sometime." If you guys remember, this was the dad who was there with his son. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yep. You must remember him, because he was at all of our events. Yes, I remember, yeah.

• 1:26:16Jay Novella?

  Oh, yes. I think the boy's name was Max. Yeah, you're correct. So he continues, "Max wanted to put in a guess for the January 3rd, who's that noisy? We think it sounds like some sort of turbine or spinning machine. Final guess is a test engine that gets to a certain point and then fails." That's a good guess. And he hopes we had a safe ride home, which we did. So first of all, I'd like to say a couple of things. One, seeing a parent bring a young person with them to an SGU event always gets my attention, because, first off, it's just awesome to see a parent spending alone time with their kids. It's important to do that. I think everyone involved benefits greatly from the whole thing. But bringing your son, or daughter, doesn't matter,

• 1:26:59Jay Novella?

  but bringing your child to a skeptic conference, or skeptic meetup, or a live podcast recording, or whatever, I don't think Max is ever going to forget that weekend. Nor all the new curse words we taught him. That's right. I know. We have to apologize.

• 1:27:14Cara Santa Maria?

  I doubt those were new for Max.

• 1:27:17Jay Novella?

  Probably not, but maybe not in the density that we had.

• 1:27:19Cara Santa Maria?

  True.

• 1:27:20Jay Novella?

  You never know.

• 1:27:20Cara Santa Maria?

  New and creative ways to use them, for sure.

• 1:27:23Jay Novella?

  But Max really seemed to be paying attention and seemed interested. And, you know, I asked them afterwards and they both said they had a great time. I love to hear that. So, anyway, Max, I appreciate the guess. You are incorrect, but let me tell you that most of science efforts, of scientific efforts, end up being incorrect. This is on the pathway to finding correct answers. So, you're doing the right thing. This week's noisy did not have a winner. And I'll tell you what it is. This is another thing. It's similar to a noisy I had a couple of weeks ago, but I couldn't help myself. I think it's one of the coolest sounds I've heard in a while. This is called friction welding. I'm sure a lot of you have heard about it. Let me give you a quick explanation of what it is.

• 1:28:08Jay Novella?

  So, friction welding is when you essentially, like, imagine if you had two metal parts that were being spun up against each other, meaning one's spinning one way and one's spinning the other way, or one is stationary and the other one is spinning really fast. And that friction actually heats up the metal to the point where both sides, the left and the right, or the up and the down, they end up getting red hot and then they fuse because they liquefy a little bit and they fuse and they stop the spinning right then. So, that's what you're hearing in this.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:28:38Jay Novella?

  There's a couple of interesting noises in here that I'd like to point out.

• 1:28:44Jay Novella?

  That's them just spinning it up.

• 1:28:50Jay Novella?

  Right? RPM's going up. What was that? That some wizard with a lightning bolt?

• 1:28:57Speaker 04

  That's where the DeLorean hit 88 miles an hour and opened the time rift.

• 1:29:02Bob Novella?

  That's where the circuit breaker went.

• 1:29:04Jay Novella?

  That's basically the moment that the two things hit the critical temperature and they kind of bond together.

• 1:29:09Speaker 04

  I see.

• 1:29:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, very cool. You know, I guess this is a common thing. I've seen videos of this for many, many examples of this. I guess it's common. I don't know, you know, again, I really don't know how useful it is in modern manufacturing and everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is something that's broadly used for Different purposes, but very cool sound. I'd like to thank Cameron for sending that in. I got a noisy for you guys this week. This noisy happens to be sent in from a person that we know. His name is Ian. Yeah. Yep.

• 1:29:39Speaker 02

  The Ian.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't know any-

• 1:29:41Jay Novella?

  Not a guy, not some rando Ian. This is our Ian. The Ian of watermelon fans.

• 1:29:45Speaker 04

  We, we, yeah, we'd say his last name, but he has 12 of them.

• 1:29:47Jay Novella?

  He won't like, yeah, that's right. Nobody really knows anything about this guy. He won't like hearing this, but he's an awesome guy and he does incredible work here at the SGU and has enabled us to do, you know- He is our tech guru. Yeah, he's fantastic. Now, to be fair, Ian was the first person that sent it to me, but a lot of people sent this in. So I get it. This probably just dropped on the internet somewhere and a lot of people identified this as a cool noisy.

• 1:30:12Speaker 04

  They'll be the ones to guess correct.

• 1:30:13Jay Novella?

  Well, I was gonna say, if you really, if you already knew what this was because you just saw it, do me a favor. Just give someone else a chance because I think it would be, I want to hear the guesses where people are trying to guess what it is. Like it's the reach. It's not the, it's not the actual correct guess that's interesting to me as much as the other guesses of people not knowing what it is. So let's see what, what the randos out there that don't know what it is, what they think it is.

• 1:31:05Jay Novella?

  So if you, if you think you heard a cool noisy this week, or you'd like to send in your guess, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, it's a freaking amazing milestone moment right now. Not only did we launch political reality, it's a new politics podcast that we launched. It's a video podcast. You can also get the audio version of it. You can go to political reality. It's youtube.com forward slash political reality. We are on all the socials. You can find us. You can go to political reality podcast.com. There'll be a link for you to get to our videos and to the latest audio podcasts as well. You should be able to find it in any of your, in any of your podcast apps out there. If there's one that

• 1:31:47Jay Novella?

  you use that isn't showing it, you can email us at info at the skeptics guy.org. So we can see if we can make it happen. But there is something even bigger than that, Steve. What is that, Jay? We are now selling tickets to the Australia conference. The, the

• 1:32:04Speaker 04

  Nauticon Australia?

• 1:32:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So it's Skeptics number 42 and Nauticon. This is the latest version of Nauticon. It'll be happening in Sydney, Australia. So this conference is going to be happening on this year, 2026. On July 22nd, we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza. This is at a separate venue. It's a separate ticketed event. Then on July 23rd, 24th, and 25th, we will have the main conference. The 23rd, we're going to have the, the boardroom event.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's an event in which we invite you, the attendees, to come and join us to play board games of all kinds with the entire team, with the entire team that's coming down. And who knows, maybe a few special guests. It's a time to, you know, be social, have a good time, right around the gaming table. And you're going to be able to choose which games. We'll have more information on that coming up on how we're going to choose the games. But ultimately, the attendees will be the ones who pick them.

• 1:33:01Jay Novella?

  So that's in the, the mid to late afternoon. Then at 7pm, we will have the conference VIP event, which is going to happen from 7 to 9pm. You could buy tickets to that as well. And then at 9pm, it's open up to anyone that's attending the conference that has purchased a ticket to the main conference. And that could go as late as you want, pretty much. And then the next morning, the next two mornings and all day, we'll be having our Nauticon conference. It's going to be specific to Sydney. And it's going to be different than the other ones. Maybe a couple of crisscross things, but we're already talking about all the cool things that we want to do. We have a ton of ideas. As usual, George

• 1:33:42Jay Novella?

  Robb, Brian Wecht, and Andrea Jones Roy will be joining us. And if you didn't know, Andrea is Steve's co-host on the Political Reality Podcast. There's a lot of fun happening. We really hope that you can join us. Oh, yeah. Don't let me forget. First of all, you can go to the, okay, blah, blah, blah, you're gonna go to noticoncon.com. Okay. If you're in the US, you can go to noticoncon.com or basically anywhere, but I would expect people who are already familiar with the website can go there. We'll link you over to the Australian Skeptics website. Or if you're in Australia, I'm sure you already know the website. Just go to the Australian Skeptics website to see all the information and the ticket purchasing. If you have any problems whatsoever purchasing tickets,

• 1:34:25Jay Novella?

  just email us at [email protected]. We'll help you out with that. I'm sure that some people will run into a couple of hiccups here and there. And there's one last thing, Steve. I hear on the rumor mill that Dr. Carl is gonna be there with us for the conference.

• 1:34:39Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:34:40Jay Novella?

  So...

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  Dr. Carl's awesome. Dr. Carl.

• 1:34:42Jay Novella?

  I'm pretty sure it's gonna happen. I mean, we've talked to him. He said yes. But you know, the people like him, you know, they're busy and things come up or whatever. But like, he's confirmed that he's gonna do it. And we are gonna reach out to him to see if he wants to get involved with any of our other events. Oh, and I forgot, Steve, we're also doing a live SGU podcast recording that'll be happening one hour on Friday and one hour on Saturday. These are other options that you could pick, all these different ticketing options. But most importantly, you could just buy the tickets to the main conference and you'll see us do everything that you want. The New Zealand conference is in play right now, too, guys. I'm talking to the main contact out in New Zealand. We are not 100% done with the planning on that, but it's gonna happen very soon. I'm hoping within

• 1:35:25Jay Novella?

  the next, you know, couple of weeks that we're gonna be able to give you the link and everything to buy tickets to that as well. This is all happening. Keep your ears perked. We will give you more information as it comes in.

• 1:35:35Speaker 02

  Okay. Thank you, Jay. Guys, we're gonna do one quick email. This one comes from Vanessa, who writes, "I've been listening to you guys for many years, and now I have published a paper that you might find interesting. Hope you enjoy, particularly Steve, since I know he loves Bert." Then she gives a link to the paper, including the open access.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

  Here's, I'll just give you the upshot of the paper. It's, there's, it's a study of memory, right? And they're, look, they're comparing the ability of people to remember associations of bird names and other words, right? And they're comparing birders to non-birders. So what do you think the effect of being a birder has on your ability to remember bird names?

• 1:36:20Cara Santa Maria?

  It increases it.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  A very large positive effect.

• 1:36:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's gotta be pretty impressive. All right. That's, that was completely expected, right? And that is not surprising, of course. But what's interesting is the mechanism is how does being a birder help you improve your memory for novel bird word pairs in working memory?

• 1:36:49Speaker 04

  Mechanism.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, what would be the mechanism? It's not necessarily intuitive. That's why it's interesting. So what they find is that, so you might think that, oh, they, they have, they're familiar with these words, therefore, working memory will take up these words more easily because of familiarity. But what they found was that working memory is outsourcing the task to long-term memory. Does that make sense? So.

• 1:37:16Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  Right, so if you already know the word blue-footed booby, or whatever, some bird name.

• 1:37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  And. That's what you make up? It's in your.

• 1:37:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's a real bird.

• 1:37:26Speaker 04

  You said blue.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

  It's in your long-term memory. When you have a short-term, like a working memory task involving a word that's already in your long-term memory, you can outsource or offload. Oh, and increase your short-term memory. Yeah, the cognitive, the cognitive load to your long-term memory, so it decreases the demand on your working memory, which is, you know, as a neuroscientist, like, that makes perfect sense, because working memory is finite and task-limiting.

• 1:37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, wouldn't it be how anybody who has expertise in anything is able to operate at a higher sort of working level?

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  Well, again, there was two hypotheses here. You know, it could have been that it was helping working memory itself. But in this case, it was literally offloading it to your long-term memory. But yeah, yes, and retrospect, it all makes sense, right?

• 1:38:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:16Speaker 02

  And I think we've mentioned many times on the show, and we've personally observed that the more you know, the easier it is to know more stuff, to remember things, there's more things you're associating it with. So this is just providing one specific neuroanatomical sort of correlate for exactly how that's happening.

• 1:38:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because not only are you associating it and linking it to other things, but you're then able to see what's novel or differentiated from that background kind of knowledge.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  Right. Okay, let's move on with science or fiction.

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:39:00Speaker 02

  Each week, I come up with three science stories, either one's real and one's fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. It's one of the themes I've gone to in January many times before. It is interesting animals that were discovered in 2025. Okay?

• 1:39:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:39:23Speaker 02

  And of course, one of these is not either completely made up, or there is something incorrect about it.

• 1:39:30Speaker 04

  Or it's not interesting.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Okay, no, they're all interesting either way.

• 1:39:34Speaker 02

  All right, here we go. Item number one, scientists have discovered a deathball sponge, Chondrocladia, and then it says SP NOV, which stands for Species Nova. So it's like a placeholder for, this is a new species, which, unlike most sponges, which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. All right, number two, scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia mipoensis, with 24 eyes, which are capable of forming low-resolution 360-degree images.

• 1:40:12Speaker 02

  And item number three, researchers discovered an entirely gynomorphic species of spider in Thailand, Demarcus inazuma, which is half-orange, the female side, and half-blue, the male side. Evan, go first.

• 1:40:27Speaker 04

  Deathball sponge, what a great name. It sounds like a cartoon character from Metallo... Metallophips, right?

• 1:40:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:36Speaker 04

  Something like that, right?

• 1:40:39Speaker 04

  So this particular sponge is predatory, and it feeds mostly on small crustaceans. Well, it... so, yes, these characteristics make it stand apart. Maybe that's why it was only recently discovered, because they were thinking sponges, you know, don't usually do this. And, you know, when we're looking for sponges or at sponges and things, we don't expect that kind of behavior. And if something else is happening, maybe don't even think it's a sponge to begin with, something else. So, yeah, maybe because of those features, that's why it was only recently discovered. And then the second one, about the jellyfish, which I will not repeat the name, its official

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  name, 24 eyes capable of forming a low-resolution 360... low-resolution 360-degree images. Interesting. 360 degrees, doesn't 24 divide equally into 360? Is that, uh... how many times is that? Yeah. So that's almost too perfect. Maybe it had like a number of eyes that were not divisible exactly by 360. I don't know. It, right, it sounds like, it sounds engineered, therefore not right to me. The last one, about the spider in Thailand, half-orange, half-blue, and the color represent...

• 1:42:02Speaker 04

  yeah, I guess color would, could represent male versus female. There are other examples of that among species, but gynomorphic?

• 1:42:11Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, you know, Cardinals, right? The red Cardinals are the males and the brown ones are the, you know, the more dull colored ones are the females. So maybe that one is okay. All right, I'll, I'll stick with my idea. I think the 24 eyes for a jellyfish is going to be the fiction.

• 1:42:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:42:29Bob Novella?

  All right. So the idea of a, a gynomorphic spider is too cool to, I mean, I love spiders. Uh, so I'm just gonna have to say, yeah, that's, that's too cool to, to, to say is fiction. Although I haven't, I haven't read or seen anything about it. I'm gonna have to say that this predatory sponge, death ball, it's just almost too awesome, too cool to, too cool for school.

• 1:42:52Speaker 04

  It's how the name is.

• 1:42:53Bob Novella?

  And it, it, it just seems to me that, um, if you're a filter feeder, it's too much to ask that there's a species within there that is, that is not, and just as actively will be, you know, hunt and kill. But I just love this death ball idea, but I'm gonna have to say that is fiction.

• 1:43:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, Kara. I feel like these could all be science and they could all be fiction. So I'm trying to identify the thing about them that would be what makes it a fiction. So the death ball sponge, maybe that's a thing. And the, uh, new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia may, maya poensis, uh, sure. And then finally, the gynomorphic spider, Demarcus inazuma. So my guess is that these are all, that you didn't just make anything up out of whole cloth, that these are all newly discovered species. And then there's something specific

• 1:43:53Cara Santa Maria?

  about them, which is the fiction. So either that the sponge is not really a filter feeder, but it's predatory. So I guess it's too late, but the distinction here would be that it's somehow has a mechanism to actively catch things? Yeah. Okay. Um, and then 24 eyes.

• 1:44:14Cara Santa Maria?

  That's probably the one there, right? Capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images. So you're saying a single image is 360 degrees?

• 1:44:23Speaker 02

  Not necessarily.

• 1:44:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:44:25Speaker 02

  Just that it's able to form images at 360 degrees.

• 1:44:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 1:44:28Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's not necessarily one image, whatever that means.

• 1:44:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, so jellyfish, I think, are usually, and actually, aren't they jellies? Not jellyfish?

• 1:44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:44:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I used to get mad at them.

• 1:44:38Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, geez, I should have picked that.

• 1:44:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think that's true.

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  You are correct, but it's jellyfish is-

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  Oh, shoot, so that was automatically the fish?

• 1:44:44Speaker 02

  It's still so widely used-

• 1:44:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's colloquial.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  That I used it.

• 1:44:48Speaker 04

  Well, I'm offended. If I'm wrong, I'll put an analysis after this one.

• 1:44:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I think they have radial symmetry. So if they did have 24 eyes, my guess would be that they would be all the way around. So then it probably would give them 360 degree images. I don't know much about eyes on jellyfish, if jellyfish even have eyes, or if they have eye spots. So I'm not sure about that. And then, uh-

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  There's no eyes in jellyfish. Oh, there's one eye in jellyfish.

• 1:45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Hi, ooh. And then, um, the species of spider in Thailand. So I think I've seen this before in other creatures, but I think it's pretty rare, where there's almost like a line drawn down the animal. And one side has the features of the sort of male sex within that species, and the other side has the features of the female sex. So they're sort of like intersex. I think the jellyfish is science. And so I'm kind of torn between what does it mean to be a predatory sponge? Like, do they have little, like, grabbers? I don't buy that. I think they're probably still filter feeders, but maybe they just feed on bigger things.

• 1:45:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And then the half-orange, half-blue, female-male, that one is also bothering me, because maybe it's just that they found like a, like an intersex spider that has sort of all the different forms of genitalia or reproduction, but it's not so overt. I don't know, I think it's the-

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  So you're saying there's two fictions, Karen?

• 1:46:14Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I gotta pick one. So I think it's gonna be this sponge. I think maybe the sponge is just a sponge, but it, like, preys on crustaceans, but still-

• 1:46:26Speaker 04

  That's what Freud said. Sometimes a sponge is just a sponge.

• 1:46:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  Especially when it's smoking a cigar.

• 1:46:33Speaker 02

  Okay, and Jay?

• 1:46:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay, I'll start with the spider. So, I mean, a blue and an orange spider. Steve, weren't you and I just talking about the, the common science fiction colors that happened to be blue and orange? And I can't help but think like, damn, did Steve use those two colors? Cause we talked about it. But I'm gonna fully use my, you know, my, the fact that Bob, who is the spider guy in my life, and the homunculus of Bob in my head is saying, you know, he accepts this, Bob actually said it, so the two of them together, I think that one is science. The second one here about the jellyfish, you know, I mean, 24 eyes, it sounds weird, but how weird is it? You know, like, it's, sure, the 360 degree vision seems like, you

• 1:47:19Jay Novella?

  know, perfectly cromulent concept, it would be so helpful, particularly in the environment that they live in. Weird, but doesn't push me over the edge. Now, a, the sponge, which is called a death ball, that like, is a killer, you know, just on the prowl, looking to kill whatever it can get its little, I don't know, things on. I don't know, I just don't think, I don't think that's for real, although, death ball's a pretty badass name for a sea creature, you know? I just don't see it. I don't think that sponges can be predators. There it is, that's the fiction.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  Okay, so Kara, and Jay, and-

• 1:47:55Speaker 04

  Bob.

• 1:47:56Speaker 02

  Bob went with the, the death ball.

• 1:47:58Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:47:59Speaker 02

  And Evan went with the jelly?

• 1:48:00Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree with the third one? So we'll start there. Researchers discovered an entirely gynomorphic species of spider in Thailand, DeMarcus inazuma, which is half orange, the female side, and half blue, the male side. You all think this one is science, and this one is the fiction.

• 1:48:20Speaker 04

  Holy crow!

• 1:48:22Speaker 02

  What is it?

• 1:48:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It's sweet.

• 1:48:24Speaker 02

  So, they found an individual spider-

• 1:48:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:48:29Speaker 02

  -who was gynomorphic-

• 1:48:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

  -of this species, and it happened to be, this is the weird thing, the first, it's the first specimen of this species they discovered, and it was a super rare gynomorphic individual.

• 1:48:43Speaker 04

  It's, it's like finding the first, what, lobster, and it's a blue lobster?

• 1:48:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. It makes you wonder how often that happens in, like, the type specimen historically, like, especially with things that we only have one of.

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  Well, famously, famously, the first Neanderthal had crippling arthritis, and that's why they thought they were hunchbacks.

• 1:49:02Jay Novella?

  So this happens.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  Does anybody recognize the name Inazuma?

• 1:49:07Speaker 04

  Inazuma?

• 1:49:08Jay Novella?

  It reminds me of a song.

• 1:49:10Speaker 04

  In a god.

• 1:49:12Jay Novella?

  No.

• 1:49:12Speaker 04

  In a zoom.

• 1:49:13Jay Novella?

  No, I don't.

• 1:49:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:49:15Jay Novella?

  Why? Say it.

• 1:49:16Speaker 02

  It comes.

• 1:49:16Speaker 04

  Did you make it up?

• 1:49:17Speaker 02

  No, I didn't make it up. It comes from a show called One Piece.

• 1:49:22Bob Novella?

  Oh, I know One Piece.

• 1:49:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, and a character that changes sex from male to female.

• 1:49:28Jay Novella?

  Steve, so let me ask you a quick question. The spider, is it legit really blue and orange?

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Yes, look at the picture. It's cool. And Kara's correct. It's a line straight down the middle from front to back. Oh, really? And it's orange on one side, blue on the other.

• 1:49:41Speaker 04

  And they fight the ones that are blue on the other side.

• 1:49:44Jay Novella?

  So Steve, if this spider, if this spider bit you, you would become a trans superhero, right?

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  I guess so. So it is, it's not just blue and, and, and orange. It's like female on the left side and, and male on the right side, including different sizes of limbs and stuff like that.

• 1:50:00Jay Novella?

  What the hell? Oh, my God.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  That's very cool. It happens. It's a big.

• 1:50:03Speaker 04

  Can it carry 94 pounds of something?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:50:08Jay Novella?

  We're gonna get back to that, trust me.

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  So it's, it's an amazing specimen. They must have freaked out when they found it. But, and it happens to also be a new species. But the species is not gynomorphic. Hmm, okay. Okay.

• 1:50:21Bob Novella?

  Well, how, how common? I wonder if it's, you know, since it's the first species of it that they found and it was this anomalous thing, maybe, you know, a surprising percentage, like 2% or 5% or like this.

• 1:50:33Speaker 02

  Maybe it's more common in this species. Yeah, that'd be cool. Okay, let's go back to number two. Scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia myopoensis, with 24 eyes, which are capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images. Is science? Again, every write-up used jellyfish. I'm just gonna use jellyfish. But jellies.

• 1:50:54Speaker 04

  We're gonna get emails.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Jellies, but we're, but we're addressing it. Jellies.

• 1:50:57Bob Novella?

  I know.

• 1:50:58Speaker 02

  Most jellies have no eyes. Some have eye spots.

• 1:51:03Jay Novella?

  They don't see so good.

• 1:51:04Speaker 04

  That's what Kara said.

• 1:51:05Speaker 02

  But the box jellies do have 24 eyes.

• 1:51:09Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. And Evan.

• 1:51:11Jay Novella?

  But their eyes are only on their asses, though.

• 1:51:13Speaker 02

  They exist in four clusters of six. Right?

• 1:51:17Jay Novella?

  What do you mean?

• 1:51:18Speaker 02

  So they're.

• 1:51:18Speaker 04

  Four and 20.

• 1:51:19Speaker 02

  What do you mean? Four clusters of six?

• 1:51:21Jay Novella?

  Oh, I thought you meant that. Oh, I got you.

• 1:51:22Speaker 02

  The eyes exist in four clusters of six eyes. Right? That's why they. The number 24.

• 1:51:30Speaker 04

  And are they symmetrical around the entire creature?

• 1:51:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:51:33Speaker 04

  Okay, now that'll do it.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  And their eyes, their, you know, their full eyes, you know, their eye spots.

• 1:51:37Speaker 04

  I was, I was thinking more like every 15 degrees you have an eye.

• 1:51:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:41Speaker 04

  That just seemed too weird. That's how I envisioned it.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  They're clustered. And it is because of the radial symmetry thing.

• 1:51:46Jay Novella?

  Probably, Steve, right?

• 1:51:47Speaker 02

  Probably, in terms of like how many images they form.

• 1:51:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:51Speaker 02

  There probably is, that's why I didn't say, it might not be one image. It may be that it's four different images in different directions. But it is 300, because of 360 degree vision. And this means that scientists have discovered a death ball sponge, Chondrocladia species nova, which unlike most sponges, which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. Is also science. And, yeah, this is, this is pretty cool. It has little spicules all over a kara and it uses them to ensnare its prey.

• 1:52:24Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's still, it still doesn't move. It just has barbs.

• 1:52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has barbs.

• 1:52:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, interesting, okay.

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  It has barbs. Exactly.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  I got new respect for SpongeBob.

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Now, I looked up, it's not the first predatory sponge. The harp sponge was discovered in 2000, in the early 2000s, also a predatory sponge. So I couldn't say it was the first, but it is, that's why I said most species are filter feeders. Couldn't say all species. Pretty cool. I usually don't get you guys on the critters. This is, might be the first time. You usually sniff them out.

• 1:53:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Because they were all weird, but also all reasonable. And technically, they did all happen, right? The difference was that it's not a whole species.

• 1:53:08Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I mean, an entire gynomorphic species is a stretch.

• 1:53:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that'd be, yeah.

• 1:53:12Speaker 02

  That was enough, I think, to be a fair fiction. Yeah.

• 1:53:15Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:53:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:53:19Speaker 04

  The quote this week was suggested from Brian, a listener from Nova Scotia. There is no such thing as a scientific truth believed by one person and disbelieved by the rest of the scientific community. An idea becomes a truth only when a vast majority of scientists accept it without question. That is, after all, what we mean by the expression "scientific contribution," an offering that is accepted, however provisionally, into the common fund of knowledge. And that's a quote from Robert K. Merton. Robert Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology, awarded the National Medal

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the sociology of science.

• 1:54:07Speaker 02

  I like it. I'll tell you why I like that quote.

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:54:11Speaker 02

  Because a lot of science deniers, or some people who are just confused, say, like, for example, they'll say that the scientific consensus doesn't matter. What only matters is what's true. It's what the evidence shows.

• 1:54:24Speaker 04

  Oh, God.

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  And it's like, yeah, but we don't know what's true. We only know the scientific consensus. In other words, unless you are an expert yourself to such a degree that you can plausibly contradict the consensus of all the other experts, or many of the other experts, which is almost nobody, and for those people who are that level of an expert, it's only in one thing and not for everything else, right? So for most people, for most things, all we really have is the scientific consensus, meaning what, you know, what comes out when you have a transparent evaluation of the evidence and the logic and everything by people who know what they're talking about and you sort of work it out.

• 1:55:07Speaker 02

  We don't have, as we say, we don't have the teacher's addition to the universe. We can't look up the actual answer that's objectively metaphysically true in the back of the book, right? All we have is the process.

• 1:55:19Speaker 04

  Yes, the process, right.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  And the scientific community and the consensus, that's part of the process. So, yeah, the idea that, oh, the consensus doesn't matter, it's only what's true, you don't know what's true. You can't handle the truth. And so...

• 1:55:33Speaker 04

  (laughing)

• 1:55:34Speaker 02

  Anyway, so this quote, I think, is spot on. I like it.

• 1:55:38Speaker 04

  Dynamite.

• 1:55:39Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:42Speaker 04

  You're welcome, Steve. Thanks.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

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

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

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

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