The Skeptics Guide #1044 - Jul 12 2025

Dumbest Word of the Week: Orthomolecular; News Items: Ban Left Turns, Bird Flu Shenanigans, Interstellar Comet, Artificial Blood, Beekeeping Benefits; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: AI Tech Support; 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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• 0:40Speaker 01

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

• 0:47Jay Novella?

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Monday, July 7th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:57Jay Novella?

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:59Jay Novella?

  Jay Novella.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 1:02Speaker 05

  Good evening, Monday.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're recording on Monday because I'm leaving for two weeks.

• 1:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this feels weird. It feels weird recording on a Monday.

• 1:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, very strange, unusual.

• 1:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, typically, by Monday, I have not gotten a lot of responses to who's that noisy? And just very coincidentally, I did get a ton of responses this time because usually I'm telling Steve, oh, my God, Steve, I didn't get enough. You know, what are we going to do? And because it takes days for people, the numbers to really go up. You know what I mean?

• 1:31Speaker 05

  Yes, not everybody listens in the afternoon on Saturday when the episode drops.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  So if this ever happened to you guys, we have a bird trapped in our garage. Hell, yeah, of course.

• 1:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:42Speaker 05

  I had one trapped in a chimney once.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, this is a, it's a baby red-bellied woodpecker.

• 1:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, baby.

• 1:49Speaker 03

  And it's just dumb. It's just, it hasn't learned yet, I think. It's just, it's very confused and panicky. Well, you have to teach it, Steve. Well, I don't, you know, we've tried everything we could think of at this point. It's been, it's been like trapped in our garage for three days.

• 2:03Speaker 05

  Trapped in the sense it's unwilling, it's afraid to fly out?

• 2:06Speaker 03

  I don't think it can find the way out.

• 2:09Jay Novella?

  Did you try opening the garage door?

• 2:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, that'll help.

• 2:12Speaker 03

  We haven't tried that yet. You think that might work? Give it a shot.

• 2:16Speaker 05

  Unlock it so it can use the handle.

• 2:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, is there not a bird rescue near you?

• 2:20Speaker 03

  There probably is somewhere. I don't think they make house calls.

• 2:24Cara Santa Maria?

  They might, I don't know. I have a friend who volunteers in Oregon for a bird rescue and she'll go out and pick up the injured bird and take it back.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  Not quite, it's not injured, it's fine.

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  But maybe we'll try that if we get desperate, but it's, the thing is, we have kind of a high ceiling in our garage and it's up in the upper half of the garage.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  No.

• 2:41Jay Novella?

  Ooh.

• 2:41Speaker 03

  And it just keeps trying to escape by going up, you know what I mean? It doesn't, it has to go down to get out the garage door.

• 2:50Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  And it just won't do it. It will not get low enough to get out. It just keeps trying to go through. You know how you have like a little?

• 2:57Speaker 05

  Vent.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  Vent, yeah, in the upper part. It keeps trying to go through the vent, which isn't working.

• 3:02Speaker 05

  I see.

• 3:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you have food out for it?

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Well, we put, my, my daughter put food and water out for it, but I'm a little concerned that we'll sort of teach it to stay there, which we don't want to do.

• 3:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  We don't want it to die, you know, from, from lack of water, but we're trying to encourage it to get out. So like today, we've had both garage doors open, the door, the window, like everything open that we can, keep the dog away, you know, keep, keep him inside the house and just hope it'll see the light, you know, and follow the, because they will, they look for the light to get their way out. But I just think it's just too young to like know what to do.

• 3:34Speaker 05

  Aren't there bird catching devices? I know they have them for other animals.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Put some food in the box, they go into the box, the box closes, you take the animal in the box out and off it goes.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  As I, we haven't gotten to the point yet where we're asking for professional help. We're just trying to encourage it to leave.

• 3:50Jay Novella?

  Steve, why don't you put a little bit of food like outside?

• 3:53Speaker 03

  We did that, we did that.

• 3:54Jay Novella?

  No?

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Okay. We have a trail, we, so these, these birds really love oranges. I mean, we see, I'm sure I've seen this bird on my deck eating, you know, oranges. And so we have like a trail of, of half, half oranges leading outside and it's just not biting.

• 4:11Jay Novella?

  Oh boy.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  And you're saying it's young?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It's, it's a baby, yeah. A fledgling, yeah.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  So nor, under normal circumstances, Steve, would the bird be taking cues from its parents or would this be an independent bird by now?

• 4:23Speaker 03

  No, we still see it mostly with its parents.

• 4:27Speaker 05

  So where are its parents?

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Don't know. Probably just the other side of the house. They might not, just don't know where it is.

• 4:33Speaker 05

  I mean, but does that send the parents into, you know,

• 4:36Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 4:36Speaker 05

  a state of, you know, or they just think, oh, our, our baby bird left. We're gone. We're good.

• 4:41Cara Santa Maria?

  There are some, I wonder if it's right at that age, though. There's some fledgling, like mourning doves that we get each season right outside of my house. And they're on their own, but they're so stupid.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:52Cara Santa Maria?

  They'll just like sit right in the open, like right in, you know, full predation zone and be like, duh, and stare at you. And then you get, you get within like an inch before they fly away. And then they like hit the side of the building or, you know, they're like, have a hard time landing. And you're like, oh God, you left too early. You are not ready for prime time.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  Exactly. No, we could see like, the, these birds, you know, the, the, these particular birds, the red bellied woodpeckers, you know, we could see the family. They like to, come to the, to the feeders at the same time. And they're at the point where they're eating on their own, but they'll also be fed by the mother. You know, like they're, they're literally being weaned.

• 5:33Speaker 05

  Oh yeah. You show me one last time I was out. Yeah.

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. They, they do that. They sort of puff up and flap their wings and open their mouth and like, feed me, feed me. Uh, and the mother was like, will feed them a little bit, but it's like, but no, you gotta do it on your own. And suddenly then they will eat on their own as well. So they're just right at that point. So it just doesn't, I guess, have the experience to know how to navigate the situation. And it's clearly panicked. You know what I mean? Like it's desperately trying to fly up and out and just cannot calm down long enough to see that the light is down.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Is, is it pecking on the wood?

• 6:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:04Speaker 05

  In the, oh, so you can hear it going for the,

• 6:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's running back and forth along like the eaves on the inside.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  Oh boy.

• 6:10Speaker 03

  And then we won't see it for a couple of hours like they did get out, but nope, it's just hiding. You know what I mean? Like it's just, because there's places it can hide that we can't see.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  It's a hybrid.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'll keep you apprised.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 6:24Speaker 03

  What happens to, all right. Well, let's move on with the regular show. Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest word of the week.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  Yes. Thank you, Steve. This is the dumbest word of the week. My second go at it, and I hope you enjoy this word. I found it entertaining. I'm going to get to the word, but I'm going to use some other words to get to the word. The first word I'm going to use is Wimbledon. Do you know what Wimbledon is?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Yes. Town in the

• 6:51Speaker 05

  Tennis tournament. A suburb of London. Yeah, tournament, tennis tournament, right? Right? The oldest tennis tournament in the world.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  Grass courts.

• 6:58Speaker 05

  Grass courts. Yep. Yep. One of the, uh, one of the four tournaments that is considered part of the grand slam of tennis. Like very high, the highest crowning achievement for any pro tennis player. And that brings us to the tennis player, Novak Djokovic, who we've spoken about, I know I've spoken about many times before on the show. I bring him up because Wimbledon is happening this week. Djokovic is again in the tournament. I believe he was played today and won. He's going to go on to the final eight is where it stands. So by the time you hear this, who knows what will have happened. However, in his career, he has won this tournament seven times.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  What?

• 7:37Speaker 05

  And he has won grand slam tournaments, a total of 24 of them. 24 grand slam wins he has.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  And how many grand slams does he have?

• 7:45Speaker 05

  Tournaments.

• 7:46Speaker 03

  So technically now a grand slam is winning all four in a row.

• 7:51Speaker 05

  Yes, right. Not on the calendar year.

• 7:52Speaker 03

  It used to be, yeah, it had to be the same calendar year. And then at some point in the eighties or something, they changed it over to, if it's four in a row, that'll count.

• 8:01Speaker 05

  Six? But I could be, I could be wrong. I'm not getting it.

• 8:02Speaker 05

  I don't know. That sounds, that sounds a bit high. I haven't been following tennis in a while. No, it is, it is high, but you have to understand, this is like, all, he was one of the all time great tennis players. He's also one of the all time great, crank, you know, cranky athletes as far as medicine, pseudoscience, beliefs, anti vax and all that stuff goes. Great. So I bring it up. A couple of years ago, he, uh, he became buddies with this person named Chirvin Jafari. You've probably not heard of that name before. Uh, used to be a real estate agent and a, uh, hedge fund dealer, but he turned into a wellness guru. A wellness expert, a supplement vendor, targeting brain health, immunity and detoxification, and a lifelong seeker of truth and knowledge in quotes.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, so he's kind of a guru in that sense. So the two of them hooked up a few years ago and became buddy buddy and did some live streaming and he has a podcast and Joe Kevits spun on his podcast. So they kind of hang out together, you know, birds of a feather. So Chirvin, uh, let's see, has a website. It's called symbiotica, C Y M B I O T I K A. So, uh, let me read. And if you go to his website, it's about, you know, you go to the about section. I always do that when I go to websites. I want to know what the website is about I'm delving into. And here's what it, and here's how it reads. Chirvin is a pioneering force in advanced wellness, blending cutting edge approaches

• 9:30Speaker 05

  from functional medicine, epigenetics, and orthomolecular science. Ooh, orthomolecular science. There's our word, orthomolecular. Now, orthomolecular. So it's a what?

• 9:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Molecules of bones?

• 9:47Speaker 05

  A molecule. Well, no, ortho means a couple of different things. It could mean straight, upright, right, or correct. Orthogonal? Uh, yeah, in the sense orthogonal is, is used, but ortho means in this, in this context, right or correct. And molecular obviously comes from the noun molecule, which means extremely minute particle from the Latin molecular, tiny mass. Orthomolecular. Who came up with the word orthomolecular? Do you know? Linus Pauling. Linus Pauling. Bang. See if you got it. Definition of orthomolecular, relate, adjective relating to, based on, using, or being a theory according to which disease

• 10:29Speaker 05

  may be cured by providing the optimum amounts of substances such as vitamins normally present in the body. Linus Pauling, two-time Nobel laureate, credit with coining the term orthomolecular medicine and defining its core principles. He introduced the concept in his 1968 orthomolecular psychiatry article in Science Magazine.

• 10:52Speaker 05

  Pauling's vision was to restore and maintain health by using the right amounts of substances naturally found in the body. And among the things that he was talking about was high dose vitamin C as a potential treatment for what?

• 11:06Speaker 03

  Cancer.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Cancer. Oh, boy. Cancer. How the mighty, mighty have fallen.

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Not just high doses, but really, he was the first proponent of mega doses, like super high doses. You know, he like going beyond treating vitamin insufficiency or vitamin deficiency. This is we're getting the whole orthomolecular concept. It's not like you had, you're just not just making sure you don't have a deficiency. If you have this magical amount, you know, in the body, the body then functions supernormally, you know, and you could do things like treat cancer just by having the these high levels of vitamins in your body. Pure pseudoscience, just absolutely pure pseudoscience.

• 11:46Speaker 05

  That's right. And it's not just dismissed, oh, that sounds crazy, or that shouldn't work pseudoscience. It's been studied. In fact, it's been studied extensively and the trials have found no consistent benefit. In fact, harm has come from it. Right?

• 12:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's been 60 years. It's not like we don't have any idea. It's complete nonsense.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  It's complete nonsense, yet it persists still, obviously, because we have, you know, health, health gurus like Jafari here, who's hanging out with Jovan Djokovic, helping him and whatever his crazy, crazy pursuits are when it comes to medicine and health. And being that this is the week of Wimbledon, therefore, our dumbest word of the week is orthomolecular. And now you know a little bit more about it. Thank you, Steve.

• 12:35Speaker 03

  By the way, Djokovic achieved the Grand Slam three times.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  Three.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  The only, only man to achieve the triple Grand Slam. Kara?

• 12:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That's me.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Do you have this one crazy trick for getting rid of traffic jams?

• 12:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, well, apparently, apparently, there's a one crazy trick that would actually help make commutes faster, easier, lower our emissions. What do you guys think it is? Not you, Steve.

• 13:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Anyone else, if there was one thing we could change about traffic in cities?

• 13:07Bob Novella?

  Banned cars. Well, there's a couple of them, but no left turn is one, and then the traffic circle is the other one that I like.

• 13:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so it's interesting, so I'm going to talk about both of those, Bob. So no left turns is the solution put forward by, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly, Dr. Vikash Gaya. He is a professor, an associate professor of civil engineering at Penn State, and he is a big proponent of banning left turns. He does talk about traffic circles quite a bit in his publications and cites a few different journal articles where traffic circles, or what they call roundabouts, were described. His opinion is that although that can sort of solve the problem, it's actually not as effective as just banning left turns altogether.

• 13:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Cara Santa Maria?

  So let's talk about that. Left turns. Okay, if you are listening to this podcast in a country that was at some point colonized by Britain, you probably don't drive on the same side of the road as us here in the United States. So we may be talking about right turns in your country, but we're going to have to all kind of adjust to this left turn vernacular, because that's, you know, what this news article is about the US. So obviously, in the US, we drive on the right side of the road. When you turn right, you're merging into the traffic that's flowing in the same direction as you. When you turn left, you're merging into a traffic that's flowing in the opposite direction, and you're crossing oncoming traffic.

• 14:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Does that make sense to everybody? That's the main reason that it's really unsafe. So we'll talk about safety first. You have to cross oncoming traffic, and if you do crash your car at this stage because you either miscalculate how long it's going to take for you to get across before a car comes, or because another car shows up before you saw it, or because you hit a pedestrian, which would be terrible, but it can happen. The car-to-car crash is called an angle crash. I've learned so much here. And reading about angle crashes from the US Department of Transportation, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Taught me that they are some of the most dangerous crashes that you can be involved in. They can be fatal. They're often fatal. Okay, let's talk about statistics here. This

• 15:24Cara Santa Maria?

  is a little bit hard to understand, but intersections make up almost half of all crashes. So 40% of all crashes, here in the US at least, occur at an intersection. Within that 40%, 50% of those, so that would be 20% of all crashes, involve a serious injury. 20% of those 40%, somebody help me with that math?

• 15:47Speaker 03

  Eight percent.

• 15:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you. Eight percent of those involve a fatality. So again, when we look at the 40% of crashes at intersections, we can further break it down as well. 61% of those 40% involve a left-hand turn. And if you look at, I don't have the numbers on this, but if you look at all of the different ways that one can go through an intersection, and you actually look at the number of cars going through any intersection at any given moment, the frequency or the percentage of that being left-turning cars is quite low, right? There are way more people going straight through an intersection or turning right than there are turning left, unless it's a very particularly left-hand-heavy intersection. Most intersections,

• 16:29Cara Santa Maria?

  the vast majority of cars are not left-turning cars, but it accounts for 61% of crashes at intersections, so well over half. That tells you that it's quite dangerous. But it's not just dangerous, it's also inefficient. And obviously, it's inefficient for a lot of different reasons. You have to wait for oncoming traffic to give you a break if you're at a solid green light. If you have a green arrow, sometimes you're luckier because you know that you can go across safely. But that actually, they call this a specific phase of traffic where all of the lights are red otherwise. That's called all-red time. And it doesn't serve many vehicles, and it makes intersections, it's like one

• 17:12Cara Santa Maria?

  of the top reasons that intersections are lower in efficiency. Here in California, I don't know if you guys have spent a lot of time in California, but I can say in LA... Especially for some reason, maybe it's because the infrastructure is older. It is an older city, maybe, I don't know. I don't know what was going on with our civil engineers. But left turn arrows are exceedingly rare here. They just don't really happen. There's, I can, I can kind of see a few intersections with them in my head. Most intersections don't have them, and many intersections in LA don't even have left turn lanes. And so now you're talking about breaking the flow of most of the forward momentum traffic. There's kind of an unspoken rule here.

• 17:56Cara Santa Maria?

  This is just a hint for anybody who drives in LA so that people think you're a local and they don't get mad at you and honk at you, is that you pull out, you don't wait behind the line if you're going to turn left. You pull into the intersection, and as the light turns to yellow, so long as nobody's speeding through, you have to check. You start going, and then it's two to three cars into the red. That's just how it works in LA. It's how everybody does it. If you wait until you're fully in the clear, you're never going to get across. And so these are, you know, just, just that, just knowing that. Think about how inefficient that is. So what does this researcher recommend? Dr. Gaya, he says, especially in downtown areas of, of cities, and he cites a few different

• 18:38Cara Santa Maria?

  cities where this is happening, like San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Birmingham, Alabama, left turns are either being banned altogether, or they're being restricted in off, during peak periods. Do you guys have any of those restrictions where you live, where there's like certain traffic rules at certain times of day?

• 18:56Jay Novella?

  No.

• 18:57Speaker 05

  Not a lot in Connecticut.

• 18:58Speaker 03

  Not in the country like this.

• 18:59Speaker 05

  No.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Parking, but not traffic.

• 19:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Parking, yeah, we've got parking too for like, street cleaning and stuff. But in LA, one of the things you see a lot are signs that say anti-grid lock zone.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  Yes, New York City has those.

• 19:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm thinking of Melrose is a good example. Melrose is not a very wide street. It's mostly two lanes on either side, but the outside lane is a parking lane for most of the day. And so really, it takes it down to one lane, but between, I'm guessing here, I'm probably wrong on these numbers, let's say, seven to nine AM, and then four to seven PM, it's anti-grid lock zone. You cannot park, you'll get a ticket, the meters don't run, you'll get towed, because they need to widen the street for all the traffic that comes through it.

• 19:37Speaker 05

  I just got a kick out of how you just casually said Melrose, as if...

• 19:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a very common.

• 19:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a very LA thing.

• 19:44Cara Santa Maria?

  A very LA thing. It's funny, living in a city where people are used to references because they see it on TV. So like, Sun Tzu Boulevard.

• 19:51Speaker 05

  It's like that skit on, sorry, Night Live, The Californians. Oh, gosh, that's hilarious.

• 19:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so sad because that is our lives. It's like, oh, God, how'd you get here tonight? Well, I took the 101. Why did you take the 101? You should have taken the 110. 118?

• 20:05Speaker 05

  What a kick.

• 20:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like we're also one of the only places in the country where we say "the" before the street name.

• 20:11Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 20:11Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys don't do that, do you?

• 20:13Speaker 05

  Ah. Well, we say "the Boston Post Road," maybe, but that's about it.

• 20:16Cara Santa Maria?

  But what about a number?

• 20:18Speaker 05

  No, I don't think so.

• 20:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, growing up in Texas, you would take 35 or 75. You wouldn't take "the" 35.

• 20:23Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, we don't say "the" number.

• 20:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but in California, we all say that. The 110, the 101, the 114. I know, and that's how you can just tell when somebody's from here. That's weird. So, okay, what about roundabouts, as you mentioned? Well, Dr. Gaia says, obviously, roundabouts are safer because you never cross opposing traffic in a roundabout. And for those of us in the US who go, "Ah!" every time we approach a roundabout because they're really uncommon here, they actually are really smart and safe. You just have to know that you're the one yielding. Just remember that when you enter a roundabout. You yield. Other people don't yield to you, and then you'll be fine, right? Wait until you can get in, go in, and then exit. But don't wait to exit, just exit. That's how it works. And so, and in, like, every country that I've visited in the world, people use roundabouts,

• 21:09Cara Santa Maria?

  and then they come to the US and they're like, "What is your four-way-stop situation deal? This is so frustrating."

• 21:14Speaker 05

  You can imagine.

• 21:15Cara Santa Maria?

  But what's interesting is that roundabouts aren't always more efficient, especially in situations where there's a lot of traffic, because roundabouts can fill up. And when they're completely full. Yeah, then there's gridlock again.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  Well, it's circle lock, actually.

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 21:33Speaker 03

  I've never seen it though.

• 21:35Cara Santa Maria?

  It's round lock.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  Round lock.

• 21:36Cara Santa Maria?

  You're right. I've never seen it either. But then again, I've never seen a roundabout in a really busy part of town. And also, I think part of the problem with roundabouts here in the US versus other countries where they were built that way from the beginning is the retrofitting problem. They're bigger than a four-way intersection by definition. The circle is larger.

• 21:56Speaker 05

  Takes up more space.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you might have to lose lanes, or you may have to lose buildings even, or tear down sidewalks, and that's just not going to cut it in places where there's not enough physical space to build it. And as Dr. Gaia says, putting up a sign that says no left turns, or no left turns during peak periods, is a lot cheaper. That's a lot faster and easier just to ban left turns in certain areas at certain times of day. And then, here's the last thing that kind of surprised me. Most people would say, hey, but if I can't turn left, that means I have to turn right three times, right? In order to go the same place. I have to completely circle the block. But if you are calculating for no left turns

• 22:39Cara Santa Maria?

  in your GPS, you're likely not going to be doing a bunch of full-block circles. Your GPS is going to calculate a shorter route where you're not turning that many times. So, calculations show, like this has been studied statistically in a typical downtown in the United States, you will drive one extra block on average if you avoid left turns.

• 23:00Speaker 05

  It's not bad.

• 23:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's really not that bad. And here's something interesting that I didn't realize. Even though you might be driving longer, you spend less fuel. 10% to 15% less per trip.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  Because you're not stopping and idling.

• 23:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you're not stopping and going as much.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Is that already a GPS option? Like, give me a route with no left turns?

• 23:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think so. I think it's something that... I know you can do no tolls. I know you can do... Actually, I'm going to look at both of mine right now.

• 23:24Speaker 05

  I remember the Mythbusters episode where they tested this, and it turned out... That it is confirmed. Right, you know, avoiding left turns is the most efficient way of driving. Or left turns add the most inefficiencies.

• 23:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, so on Apple Maps for me, I can only avoid tolls or highways.

• 23:42Bob Novella?

  They should add that.

• 23:43Cara Santa Maria?

  They should, yeah, why not? Especially if you're doing like local driving. As you mentioned, I heard you quietly mention, Bob, I think it's since like 2017, maybe even earlier. But wow, in the early 70s, they started using what they called loop dispatch. Where they planned routes in a right turning loop to avoid left turns. And then in the 2000s, they implemented a new system which minimized them. So they, they may make them if they absolutely have to, but generally speaking, their routes are planned. So they just don't make left turns and it's much more efficient and safer.

• 24:16Bob Novella?

  Millions of gallons of fuel.

• 24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Bob Novella?

  They've calculated.

• 24:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Why don't we all do that? Why don't we design our cities for that?

• 24:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's get on it, people. Let's get on it.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  There's one place that I am personally familiar with, where I drive that has a no left turn sign. It's out of the garage where I work, where I used to work.

• 24:38Speaker 05

  Used to work.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I used to work. And because there's a very, the way it is, if you're waiting for somebody who's trying to make a left hand turn, it'll really block traffic. So they just say, don't make a left hand turn. People always do it anyway. I'm always behind some jackass making a left hand turn. The sign's right there. And we're waiting because you're not supposed to do this.

• 25:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, it's like my Trader Joe's has a no left turn, the place where I work as well. The hospital has a no left turn sign for that same reason. Cause people in the parking structure would be waiting for ages.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's better for me to go left out of both of those places. But what do I do? I turn right and then if there is a nice big break in traffic, I just pull a U-turn. That's fine. Or I go right, right, right. And even though it does add a little bit to my trip, I'm moving at least, right? At least I'm driving and I'm not just sitting there waiting and waiting and waiting. Cause we've all been there. We've all been behind somebody trying to turn left out of like a parking structure or out of a parking lot. And eventually they're like, and they get in the right lane and they turn right anyway. And they're like, ah dude.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  I also hate the double lights. You know, basically, people who are backed up from one light are blocking the previous light.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  Or you have a light right after an intersection, so people stop at the light, or they, you know, they go into the intersection before they're positive they can get through it. And so it's constantly blocking traffic. It's just really bad design.

• 26:08Cara Santa Maria?

  It's bad design, but it's also, I think, bad civic engagement when people just ignore no left turn signs or do not block intersection signs.

• 26:18Speaker 05

  But the fact that they don't correct it, or don't correct it fast enough, they let it go like that for years sometimes without putting something else in is mind boggling.

• 26:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I think for a lot of people, their view, especially, I mean, obviously, we know bureaucracy moves very slowly, but like, if it's not broken, don't fix it, I think is often a view, or other things are more broken and we have to put money into fixing them first. But we do see situations where community members raise a fuss, they document, they do their due diligence, and they go to the city and they say, "Look, look at these accidents. Look at what's happening outside of my home. Look at this problem." Uh, yeah, your government is not going to do anything unless they hear from you that you want it done. Doesn't mean they're still going to do it, but that's always a good start.

• 26:57Speaker 03

  All right, thanks, Cara. Jay, what's going on with the bird flu?

• 27:01Jay Novella?

  Oh, God, Steve. Oh, boy. Well, first of all, it's no longer something we can ignore. Let me just tell you guys a horrifying statistic. Uh, in birds and many mammals, H5N1 is close to 100% fatal. And in humans, depending on the strain, the case fatality rate ranges from 30 to 60%. So this is a really, really bad, bad, bad, bad virus that we do not want. But we're not here to tell you that. I'm here to tell you guys something completely different. First off, what do you guys think we should be doing about this virus from a government perspective?

• 27:38Cara Santa Maria?

  All the things we can.

• 27:39Speaker 05

  Gaming, uh, vaccines to help prevent that.

• 27:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Vaccines, culling animals when we know that there's a serious outbreak, quarantining.

• 27:49Speaker 05

  Outreach, public outreach, more and more information.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  And Bob, you don't care?

• 27:55Jay Novella?

  No.

• 27:55Cara Santa Maria?

  He got the left turn thing.

• 27:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 27:57Jay Novella?

  I mean, research, throw money at research, mRNA, all that, all that crap, man, just, uh...

• 28:02Speaker 05

  All that crap.

• 28:03Jay Novella?

  All right, well, I'm gonna tell you, uh, soon what the experts say we should do, but...

• 28:07Speaker 05

  Ooh, okay.

• 28:07Jay Novella?

  Even more interesting, I'm going to tell you what RFK has planned. And there's a spoiler here, he's, it's biologically inco-freaking-herent what this guy wants to do.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  Tell me it's not homi- is it homi-ophy- I mean, it might as well be, right?

• 28:22Jay Novella?

  But this all reminds me, the situation that we're in, if you remember, back in 2020, a group of scientists signed something called the Great Barrington Declaration. You guys remember this?

• 28:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 28:32Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm. This was a, uh, you know, misguided document that argued that we should let COVID-19 spread through the general population and that we would build, like, this herd immunity, um, while somehow protecting...

• 28:45Speaker 05

  After millions of...

• 28:46Jay Novella?

  All the vulnerable people, which is, you know, children and, and old people or people that had pre-existing conditions. You know, it was condemned by nearly every freaking reputable, uh, medical institution on earth. The WHO called it unethical, Fauci said it was nonsense, and, you know, they were both right, basically. So now, here we are, 2025. Jay, you left out that science-based medicine roundly criticized it as well. I should've led with that, Steve, I'm sorry. Most importantly, yeah. And who was the author on that paper? Uh, David Gorsky actually wrote those articles. He's, that guy is so freaking awesome. So now, it's 2025, the H5N1 bird flu is teetering on something much, much, much larger. So what does our Secretary of Health and Human Services

• 29:30Jay Novella?

  suggest? Not only him, but he and the Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, they're floating this idea of letting the H5N1, in quotes, "rip through poultry farms." And their idea is that the birds who are naturally immune could be identified and then they can be used to breed stronger, resistant animals. The animals will be bred, Steve.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  They're raised and slaughtered?

• 29:52Jay Novella?

  They're bred and slaughtered, um...

• 29:56Jay Novella?

  The problem with this idea, right? Because this is like, you know, a five-year-old can come up with this. Let the animals get sick, the ones that survive, we breed them and we make a super-strong chicken, right? The problem is, there's zero science to back any of these comments up at all. And he's also argued that natural infection creates more durable immunity than vaccines. And in one case-

• 30:18Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 30:19Jay Novella?

  And in one case, he even said that he'd move these infected ostriches from Canada to his colleague's Florida ranch to further study it. Like, you know, not like a scientific study, just let's see what happens when we move these birds down to this ranch, you know? Like, hello? You can't just do that. And the problem is, this is the worst idea of all time, what they're proposing. First, commercial poultry doesn't breed on-site, right? The chickens that are there, that they're going to eventually use for whatever it is they're going to use them for, they don't breed there. Chickens raised for meat and eggs come from these centralized breeding lines that are not in the places where the farming happens, right? The birds on farms don't pass on traits because they don't reproduce.

• 31:04Jay Novella?

  And he doesn't know this. So even if some do survive the H5N1, which is very unlikely since the virus kills like, pretty much 100% of the infected chickens, there is no heritable immunity happening in his scheme at all, under any circumstance.

• 31:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And even if there were like, five chickens that were super resistant to the bird flu, and even if we could breed them, how many people are not going to have access to that protein source for how long?

• 31:35Jay Novella?

  Oh, exactly.

• 31:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we're talking about just no chicken for like, three years while we figure this out?

• 31:39Jay Novella?

  No eggs, no chickens. I mean, you know, you thought egg prices were crazy. You know, it's going to be a million times worse than that.

• 31:45Cara Santa Maria?

  The entire global, like, food system would be affected by that.

• 31:49Jay Novella?

  But the biggest-

• 31:50Cara Santa Maria?

  People would die.

• 31:51Jay Novella?

  The biggest problem here, though, you know, I totally agree with you, Kara, and that's an issue, because we have to talk about it, because that's a whole protein source. You know, it's a huge part of the protein source in the United States, probably globally, but definitely in the United States. But there's something even more pressing than that. This isn't a virus that you want circulating. The H5N1, it already infects dozens of mammal species, right? It's out there, including dairy cows. It's made occasional jumps into humans. So far, the human-to-human spread of, you know, thank Christ it hasn't happened yet, but letting the virus persist in these high-density poultry operations all over the country just gives it more chance to mutate, right?

• 32:33Jay Novella?

  More shots on goal means more goals. At any given time, there are about 9.5 billion chickens in the United States. 9.5 billion, right now. Imagine all the chances that the virus would have to friggin mutate if all of them got the virus. Just think about that. It would be, it would be like, this would be-

• 32:54Speaker 05

  Cataclysmic.

• 32:55Jay Novella?

  Right. Evan, this is the way that you would do it if you want it to go bad. This is what you would do.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, essentially what he's saying is, let the chickens evolve resistance to the virus. But if you're gonna enter into an evolution arms race between a virus and poultry, the virus is gonna win.

• 33:14Speaker 05

  Virus is-

• 33:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Obviously.

• 33:15Speaker 03

  Virus evolve much quicker.

• 33:16Speaker 05

  They will be the last thing on earth.

• 33:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why we always talk about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and different types of resistances in fungus and in viruses. We don't talk about, you know, measles-resistant people. That's only from vaccines. We can't evolve that quickly.

• 33:32Speaker 03

  Species can go extinct from a bad pandemic.

• 33:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's not just chickens. It's like all these other birds and mammals.

• 33:40Speaker 05

  Right, and what about the other birds? That's a good point, Carrie. And we're not talking about just chickens.

• 33:43Jay Novella?

  And they're firing on multiple cylinders here because a couple of factors are very important. The longer that the virus circulates and mutates, and the higher the number of, you know, animals that are out there that are doing it, directly relates to the odds that it evolves to infect humans. So this, to me, is like, it's this goddamn surefire way to have it evolve so humans get it. And then what? Because the fatality rate right now is 30 to 60%. That could get worse with mutations. Doesn't mean it's gonna get better with mutations.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 34:14Speaker 03

  And of course, increasing infections means more exposure to infected animals from farm workers and other animals.

• 34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so it is gonna get worse, even if it were to get better in the future, which we have no evidence to support that it would. More people will die.

• 34:28Jay Novella?

  You guys remember Vincini from The Princess Bride?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:31Jay Novella?

  I'm just getting started. I have more to tell you guys. The CDC laid off around 1,300 staff, including these field epidemiologists and the lab leadership fellows. These were the frontline responders for outbreaks. They're gone. The USDA's National Animal Health Laboratory Network, this was central to bird flu detection. They lost a quarter of their staff and their staff started at 14 people, just so you know. State and local public health programs lost funding due to an $11 billion rollback in COVID-related support. Global early warning systems like USAD predict these were shut down or completely defunded.

• 35:12Jay Novella?

  Federal communications around outbreaks became erratic and weekly reports were paused and local agencies were left completely in the dark. And that's just my summary of all the things that I read because it was an entire page worth of things that were going on that got into more details. This was just like the highlights, which is, you know, unbelievable. All right, so now let's get down to reality. So everybody understands what the experts are saying in this. The experts, you got, you got a couple of hits there, Kara. One of them was immediate culling of the infected flocks, right? But this isn't, you know, brain surgery. This is- No, we've been doing this forever. Yeah, we know what to do. And every other country in the world does it. We need expanded surveillance for the, you know, for the evolution of the virus.

• 35:56Jay Novella?

  We need improved farm biosecurity. We need rapid response outbreak teams, but they're gone. Accelerated poultry vaccine development and financial aid for farmers that will incentivize the true reporting and, you know, not, like it discourages them from covering it up by saying, hey, it's perfectly okay. We'll give you financial support. And again, this is the, the highlight list. This isn't the complete list of all the things, but like, these are the things that we've learned, you know, how to handle situations like this and they work. And it's as simple as that. So, you know, what we have is we have someone who is clearly anti-vaccine and anti, you know, anti-science for the most part, who with one decision could put the entire country at risk, like serious risk.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  Well, let's also remember, Jay, that the, this is also coming from the Secretary of Agriculture, who's Brooke Rollins, who is also an anti-scientist. So she's a climate change denier. She really has no experience in the last 30 years in agriculture. She has like a bachelor in agriculture from in 1994. Other than that, she's basically just been working in right wing think tanks, not dealing with agriculture policy. And she's a climate change denier, right? So she basically was picked because, you know, of her politics, not because of her qualifications, her topic expertise.

• 37:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  So it's a recipe for disaster. That's a position that should be somebody who, you know, lives and breathes agriculture, right? Who understands that specific topic and who respects science, who puts science before politics. We have the opposite. So between the two of them, yeah, I'm not, I don't have much faith in any good decision making. So, all right, we'll see what happens over the next few years. But this is, I think the bird flu is the most likely next pandemic that we're gonna see.

• 37:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And it'll be some horrible mutant version.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  We could get blindsided by something else. It could happen, another crossover virus.

• 37:57Speaker 05

  Can the rest of the world save us?

• 37:58Speaker 03

  No.

• 37:59Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I mean, they can prevent it from being a worldwide pandemic, I guess. Is it still a pandemic if it's all of America?

• 38:10Speaker 03

  It's an epidemic. No.

• 38:12Cara Santa Maria?

  It's still just an epidemic, even if it's millions?

• 38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think by definition, you need multiple countries.

• 38:16Cara Santa Maria?

  More than one country, yeah. So, I mean, the world could potentially prevent, I mean, but that's really hard to do if you have something just exploding in a country like ours where there's so much global trade, where there's so many people coming and going. It's not an isolated epidemic in a country that's less connected. You know what I mean?

• 38:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. It's just, you know, I hope some other countries come up with some vaccinations and some other solutions, at least to make it not totally cataclysmic.

• 38:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, and they are, like, in spite of us.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, in spite of us, right, right. We have to rely on other countries now to maybe save the day.

• 38:53Jay Novella?

  I wouldn't count on that.

• 38:55Speaker 05

  I know, I know.

• 38:56Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so sad.

• 38:57Speaker 05

  I know.

• 38:58Jay Novella?

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

• 39:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So if you've ever looked in my closet, you would recognize pretty quickly that nothing in there is overly trendy. I'm not into fast fashion, but I do love clothes that feel good, that are made out of good material, that last, and that's why I just keep going to Quince. I buy a lot of their clothing and a lot of their housewares for that reason. They've got one of a kind stuff you'll actually wear on repeat, and everything there is like half the cost of similar brands. We're talking luxury pieces without the markups because they work directly with artisans and cut out the middlemen, and they only work with factories that use safe, ethical, and responsible manufacturing practices.

• 39:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Kara, I actually bought my wife some jewelry from Quince for Mother's Day. I got an awesome deal on it, like they had an awesome sale going on. These are the gold diamond U-shaped Huggie Loops.

• 39:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Pretty.

• 39:54Jay Novella?

  You ever see these? They're very high quality. You know, Quince just has a lot of good products across the board. I personally own quite a number of items of clothes from theirs as well. Like, they really, really, like Kara said, it's very high quality.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  So stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from Quince. Go to quince.com/sgu for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com/sgu to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com/sgu.

• 40:28Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Bob, tell us about this interstellar comet.

• 40:35Bob Novella?

  Oh. Did you guys know our solar system is being invaded?

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Yes, I did know that, and I welcome our new invaders.

• 40:42Bob Novella?

  Yes, thank you. The third, this is the third interstellar object flying through our solar system since 2017. It has been spotted and confirmed by astronomers.

• 40:53Speaker 05

  Did it make left turns?

• 40:54Bob Novella?

  No left turns. It's been spotted and confirmed by astronomers and its name is Atlas. Have you guys heard about this?

• 41:01Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. It's all over social media.

• 41:03Bob Novella?

  You know, scientists have theorized for decades, literally, that these rocky and icy objects from other stellar systems should be passing through our solar system. And now it's basically now we have the technology to start really seeing these. And you could tell this is the third one in what, in eight years? The first one, I'm sure everyone listening to the show has heard about because we've talked about it multiple times and in multiple different contexts. This is the Oumuamua, right? Oumuamua?

• 41:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And so this was the first confirmed interstellar object within our own environs. It traveled the inner solar system way back in autumn 2017. Not immensely huge, I mean, 377 feet, 115 meters long, but it was traveling 16, almost 16 and a half miles per second, 26 kilometers per second relative to the sun's motion. That's pretty speedy. Oumuamua was observed as it was leaving. So that makes it different than the other guys there because so there's not a lot of data that can absolutely confirm, you know, the nature of that object. So, and part of that's why we saw some so many crazy theories like Avi Loeb saying that it was a spaceship. Oh, my God.

• 42:16Bob Novella?

  You know, it didn't look like a comet, but it did outgas like one and that made its trajectory very complicated. And both of those facts actually contributed to some of these outlandish hypotheses that we're seeing. All right, so that's Oumuamua. The second one, I didn't really hear that much about in 2019. This was the second interstellar object. Borisov appeared in August 2019. This was also the first observed rogue comet, which I was not aware of. It was discovered by Crimean amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov. How cool would it be to have your name attached to an interstellar object like this? That would be so cool. Borisov was a kilometer long and it did actually look like a normal comet.

• 42:59Bob Novella?

  It had a coma, it had a tail, but it just was not from anywhere around us initially. Okay, now the third object. This is Atlas. Technically, it's 3I Atlas. What do you think the 3I stands for? It's the third interstellar. So that's the naming convention here. Let's see, it was first spotted, geez, today's the 7th, 6 days ago, July 1st, 2025, by the Deep Random Survey Remote Telescope in Chile. This telescope was part of the Atlas project. This is the Atlas in this context stands for the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System, which is a global network of four telescopes. So Kara, the comet is called Atlas, right?

• 43:43Bob Novella?

  And it was discovered by a project called Atlas. So is this some sort of astronomical nomenclature nepotism? Only asking questions here, it's like a coincidence. But, you know, I like to think that the discovery of the true nature of Atlas and similar objects starts with a scientist somewhere saying, "Hmm," and then that would evolve eventually into, "Whoa," because that, I think that's, that describes that, that the process. So that's because of something called a hyperbolic orbit, and Atlas has a whopper of a hyperbolic orbit. Hyperbolic orbit in this case means that it's just, it's unbound. It doesn't even sound like an orbit to me because it's unbound, it's not gravitationally bound to an object like, like the sun. So it may get close to

• 44:28Bob Novella?

  the sun, but it's never going to come back. It's, it's just, it's not bound like a planet is, right? A planet has an elliptical orbit, not a hyperbolic orbit. Elliptical orbits just don't have the energy to, you know, a planet in an elliptical orbit just doesn't have the energy to leave. And it comes back, you know, it's, it's periodic. These, these hyperbolic orbits that these interstellar objects have are not anything like an elliptic orbit. They're just like, they're just like going out into infinity. So, so that means that once they calculated Atlas's velocity and trajectory, then they could see that, "Oh yeah, this thing is going to approach the sun, and then it's just going to fly out, out of, entirely out of the solar system, and it's never going to come back." And that's

• 45:10Bob Novella?

  when, that's that epiphany moment, moment where you're like, "Oh whoa, man, this is an interstellar object." Whoever was the person or people that were there when they did those calculations, they must have been like, "Holy crap, we found number three." So that must have been very exciting. So, how were these guys created? I, I came across two major ways that we think that these are created. The first one is, involves a gas giant. Imagine a gas giant in some solar system. Pulling in an asteroid, say, and the tidal forces of the, from the immense gravity and proximity of that, of that gas giant, just kind of ripped the asteroid to shreds. And then they're just kind of accelerated it towards the gas giant and then accelerated out at really high velocity.

• 45:55Bob Novella?

  So they think that's one way some of these objects can get, uh, sent to other, uh, solar systems. The other option is, is something is, what do I, my notes here, I have moon fling. What did I mean? Moon fling? Okay. So that means. What the hell is that?

• 46:11Speaker 05

  It's a different podcast, I think.

• 46:14Bob Novella?

  That means that you've got colliding, you have colliding planets, essentially, like the early universe, what do they call it? The great bombardment area?

• 46:22Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:23Bob Novella?

  When, uh, yeah, you've got planets colliding all over the place and the energies involved there are of course immense and they could fling chunks of, of these asteroids out into, out of the solar system and into other solar systems eventually. Oh yeah, I see, I see the connection here now. So that means that some aliens could be looking right now at small chunks of the earth caused when it collided with another planet billions of years ago and created the moon. So that, that event where the earth collided with, uh, Thea, um, that formed the moon could have potentially, we don't know, we'll never know, but could have potentially accelerated a chunk of earth or Thira out of the solar system and is now interacting with some other solar, some other star light years away. So that's an interesting idea.

• 47:08Speaker 05

  Does Atlas pose a threat, Bob?

• 47:09Bob Novella?

  This is good. It's not. There is no threat and don't be, so don't be afraid. Don't, don't be afraid. It's only gonna get, it's only gonna get about two AUs from the sun at its closest and that's this December 19.

• 47:23Speaker 05

  So it's about 180 million miles, right?

• 47:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so it's, so, um, it's never, it's not gonna, it can't even get possibly close to earth if it's only, if it's never gonna get closer than two AUs. But this is actually better news than you might imagine, cause I found, I read that an impact of Atlas on the earth would be about a hundred times worse than the Chixalube. Dino killer, 65 million years.

• 47:45Speaker 05

  One hundred times.

• 47:46Bob Novella?

  A hundred times worse.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  That's, yeah, that's a world killer.

• 47:49Bob Novella?

  That's, yeah. What the hell, Bob? Beyond devastating.

• 47:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 47:53Bob Novella?

  Bob, is this thing even gonna be visible? Oh, it's gonna be visible, but just not, not to the naked eye, Jay.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  Aw.

• 47:58Bob Novella?

  You're gonna need some beefy instruments to see Atlas, or you're gonna, you can be an amateur astronomer with some good equipment, because the equipment is just getting so good, even for, even for amateurs. Um, but what I can't wait for is for some of the big boys or big girls to take a look at Atlas, including specifically the telescope I talked about not too long ago, the Verouben telescope. That instrument is actually, you know, that's part of its mandate, you know, that's something that is absolutely expected. The Verouben telescope can find many objects like this over its lifetime. In fact, I saw a 2020 paper that estimates seven of these interstellar objects could enter our solar system every year, seven every year.

• 48:39Bob Novella?

  So we may get the technology up to the point where we're seeing, we're detecting one of these every few months, potentially. I mean, if they're super tiny, that would be extremely difficult, even for really advanced hardware to check it out. But we could be seeing, you know, multiple detections every year before too long. That's fascinating. The other, the other angle here is, oh, the physical, a physical sample. That's what I find most intriguing. Um, I see a lot of people asking online, what are the chances of getting a physical sample? And, um, it would be amazing, and, you know, we've seen some amazing, right, some amazing geology in the museums that we've visited over the years, right, guys? You know, holding a moon rock or rock that's billions of years old, or Mars rock, it's

• 49:23Bob Novella?

  really cool, but imagine if you had in your hands another, a rock, a piece of rock from another solar system. That would be just beyond the pale, right? Not beyond the pale, that, that expression doesn't work. That would be beyond the beyond. That would be fantastic, right? The bottom line, though, is that Atlas is just, is wickedly fast. It was something like 26 miles a second. This is a lot bigger than any of the other ones. This one's, it's bigger and brighter, and because of that, we could potentially learn a lot more from Atlas than we. could have from Oumuamua and Borisov. Let's see, yes, 68 kilometers per second. This thing is going so fast. And that's one of the reasons why this this hyperbolic orbit is is far more powerful than

• 50:07Bob Novella?

  the other interstellar objects we've found. The the other interstellar objects, Oumuamua and Borisov, were just barely hyperbolic. If one is not hyperbolic, they were like two and three or four, whatever. This one is like is, I think, had a had a eccentricity of like a six. So this was extremely hyperbolic. There was no way this thing was going to stay in this solar system. Yeah, it's just going, Atlas is going too fast right now for a rendezvous. Let's see, I had a quote from somebody, yeah, Professor Martin Bartstow at the School of Physics and Astronomy at University of Leicester. He said, "We need a spacecraft ready to do it in space, fully checked out with a rendezvous capability, and we obviously do not have anything like that. It would need to be there right now."

• 50:51Bob Novella?

  And in fact, the European Space Agency, ESA, is working on a comet interceptor project, and I think they're going to launch that, I think, around 2029. But even that might not be enough to catch these guys. They're just generally going way too fast because they're they're hyperbolic. They're going to be going very fast right out of the gate. So we so we might not be able to catch them for a while until we, you know, until we step up some of the technology to be able to do that and have something ready to go. So there's not a lot more detail here. I mean, as I said, we discovered this about a week ago. There's not too many more details that I could find. But I'm really excited to see what we can learn from these things. I mean, they, think about it, they represent a direct physical connection to other solar systems, and they're and they're coming right to us. We don't even have to leave.

• 51:35Bob Novella?

  And that's pretty convenient because if you if you read our book, Skeptic's Guide to the Future, you know that going out, going traveling out light years away physically to interact with these things is just like, it's just basically not going to happen. It's just way too much energy, way too much time. If we do it, it probably wouldn't be even for for centuries. So they're coming right to us, and I'd love to see what we can learn from them, learn about the origins of our of our solar system and and other exoplanetary systems that we already have a lot of information about through our telescopes. So yeah, definitely going to keep an eye on this on this guy and see what we can learn from him or her before they leave the solar system.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, if that thing hit the earth, then we would be toast, right? That would be an extinction level event. It's like a bullet.

• 52:19Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine a hundred times? I can't even imagine. I mean, it wouldn't be like Thea, but it would be basically, yeah. It would be extinction level event beyond probably anything.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Let me ask you guys a question. Hmm. How much blood do you think is used every year? Oh. In terms of units of blood, units of blood that are donated in order to be used, you know, transfused into people.

• 52:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Is a unit one bag?

• 52:46Speaker 03

  It's one bag, yeah. Steve, does this include vampire activity? Not including vampires. Okay.

• 52:51Cara Santa Maria?

  You mean in the world or in the US?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  World.

• 52:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, God.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, how the hell could you even?

• 52:55Cara Santa Maria?

  A billion?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  So how many units? It's in the billions, it's gotta be the billions.

• 52:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Twenty billion?

• 52:59Speaker 03

  It's gotta be the billions. It's one of those numbers that is too big for you to wrap your head around. It's a hundred and eighteen million. Hundred and eighteen million units. That's all? I said it, I said a hundred.

• 53:08Cara Santa Maria?

  That's less than I thought.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Ah, Bob, I didn't hear that. Check the tape, Bob said a hundred million. They're recording, Bob wins. So, but here's the problem, it's a lot of blood. Yeah. It only lasts for a certain amount of time. And so you need a constant supply of basically blood donations from people, right? And that's, there's no one figure for how much of a shortfall we have, but shortages are basically constant. Like, we never really have enough. And it's, as you might imagine, it's far worse in less developed countries. A disproportionate amount of that donated blood is donated in high-income countries.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Even though it's a lot, it's an overall shortfall and there's a mismatch between supply and demand. So, it would be awesome if we could have an artificial supply of blood, right? Impossible. Imagine if we could manufacture blood. Yep. It would have several advantages. We wouldn't need constant donations.

• 54:11Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  We wouldn't have to worry about blood type.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Make exact matches.

• 54:15Bob Novella?

  Vampires would be offset.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Yep, vampires would be offset.

• 54:19Bob Novella?

  No murder, no murder involved. How cool is that?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  We wouldn't have to worry about getting infections through transfusions.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Right? So it could be a huge advantage. The problem is, it's really hard to do. Blood is a very particular fluid that's highly evolved, obviously for its purpose. And it's just hard to mass produce, right? Because if you make a little bit of it, it doesn't really help. If you, we need to make hundreds of millions of units of artificial blood per year.

• 54:50Bob Novella?

  You just get some water, some red food coloring, some sugar. I mean, what else?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 54:55Bob Novella?

  Salt, what else?

• 54:55Speaker 03

  So what do you think? What is the big feature of blood that we need to replicate?

• 55:02Speaker 05

  Plasma.

• 55:02Speaker 03

  What does the blood do? What does the blood do?

• 55:04Bob Novella?

  It transports food and oxygen to your body.

• 55:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it needs to have like heem.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the oxygen that's the trouble. Just carrying other stuff is just, water can do that, plasma can do that, right? But it has evolved to be very good at carrying both oxygen and carbon dioxide, right? Carries oxygen from your lungs to your tissues and carbon dioxide from your tissues to be excreted in your lungs. That's a critical part of its function. And you know, the molecule that does that, right, is hemoglobin. Yeah, hemoglobin. So that's the trick, right? And there's basically three approaches, different approaches to try to mass produce a blood replacer. One, I'm not going to talk much about, is just coming up with another chemical other than hemoglobin

• 55:51Speaker 03

  that binds oxygen, you know, and could, you know, basically a liquid that you could put into the blood that...

• 55:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Or like that you could make, like, I know, okay, this is gonna sound kind of silly, but I did a bunch of research back when Impossible Burger came on the scene. Because I had to do coverage for a lot of, yeah, TV shows. So they use something called leg hemoglobin, which comes from plants. Well, actually, which comes from yeast. They genetically engineer yeast. And then they take the leg hemoglobin from that genetically engineered yeast. That's what they put in the mixture so that it like, quote, bleeds and tastes right.

• 56:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you can't just put hemoglobin in plasma. That doesn't work. So the other two approaches are ways of getting the hemoglobin in a functional state in the plasma. One, which is being pioneered by a Japanese company, is essentially you make a lipid nanoparticle, right? You guys remember those?

• 56:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  Right? A bilipid little bubble. And then you attach hemoglobin to the outside of it, right? Can you imagine that? So it's just a bunch of hemoglobin attached to the outside of a lipid bubble. And that's your fake red blood cell. So the advantage there is it's just pure hemoglobin on the outside. There's no other proteins, so there's no blood type. You have hemoglobin, so it works just as well as regular hemoglobin. Downsides are, it does not last as long as blood lasts for days. Blood cells last about 120 days. But still, if you're in a hospital after trauma or getting surgery and you're having catastrophic blood loss, you know, this could buy you time to get through the acute phase, you know? So that's still in development.

• 57:29Speaker 03

  It sort of works in, you know, proof of concept, but it's not... They need to figure out how to mass produce it and they need to make it a little bit... It can still provoke some immune response, so they need to deal with that. They need to stabilize it better so it lasts longer. So that's still a work in progress, but that's one approach. Then there's the third approach, which is the subject of the news item for this week, is basically making artificial red blood cells, right? If we could... Why can't... We can mass produce cells, right? You just get stem cells.

• 58:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we can build them from scratch.

• 58:02Speaker 03

  We're gonna make artif... We're gonna make lab-grown meats, right? We're just gonna make lab-grown red blood cells. Yeah. What's the limiting factor there? That gives us just the technology of... Really, it's the mass production part. That's the bugbear there. So the original kind of approach to this was to get bone marrow stem cells, like blood stem cells, and to culture them and to produce the red blood cells through them. But that's really slow and laborious and is, again, never going to be scalable to the point where it's gonna have an impact on the blood supply. More recent attempts, so as stem cell technology progressed, you know, we got to the point where we could take skin cells, fibroblasts, whatever, and then turn them

• 58:44Speaker 03

  into stem cells and then make them turn into the kinds of cells that we want. So with that kind of more updated stem cell technology, that opened the door to mass-producing red blood cells through stem cells. But this technology is tricky too, and there's one particular piece of it that they've had a difficult time with. And that is, so you know what's different about red blood cells than most other cells in the body? No nucleus. They have no nucleus. They have a nucleus when they're being formed, but they're stem cells that make them have a nucleus. At some point, the nucleus is ejected from the cell. That's why they look squished in the middle. Exactly. They have that little squished-in-the-middle shape.

• 59:27Speaker 05

  What becomes of the nucleus? Just weight?

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, it just gets broken down and recycled. When we are growing red blood cells from these modified stem cells, only about 40% of the time does the nucleus get ejected from the cell. So that makes the whole process very inefficient. Then, of course, you'd have to find some way of separating those from the other cells. Here's the somewhat of a breakthrough is that scientists have found a way to improve that one step of the process, getting the red blood cells to extrude their nucleus. What they found was they identified a signal, the CXCR4 signaling protein, that promotes

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  what they call terminal erythroblast differentiation and anucleation. So basically, it triggers that last step in the blood stem cell to differentiate into a red blood cell and to eject the nucleus. So this opens the door to essentially adding this, either genetically modifying the stem cells so that it does what we need it to do, or adding this to the culture, whatever. We have to figure out now how to exploit this piece of information to, so then the study, they found that they could increase the excretion rate from 40% to 80%, which, of course, is a lot better. So it makes mass production of artificial red blood cells way more likely, more viable as a technology.

• 1:00:55Speaker 03

  We're not there yet, but it's a big step on the way in that direction. Cool. Yeah, it's just the interesting technology. Like you think at this day and age, well, you can't make artificial blood, you know, it seems like we should be able to do that, but it's actually really tricky.

• 1:01:09Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:01:10Speaker 03

  And again, the key limiting factor being, we have to be able to not only do it, we have to be able to make hundreds of millions of units a year. Otherwise, its utility is limited. So...

• 1:01:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Do we have other artificial blood products? Did I miss that? Like the other components like plasma?

• 1:01:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can make plasma.

• 1:01:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  But it's not as good as real plasma, though. Because the plasma, the real plasma has the proteins in it, like the albumin.

• 1:01:31Cara Santa Maria?

  But that seems like it's something we could add. No? Like, it's just in eggs.

• 1:01:34Bob Novella?

  Speaking...

• 1:01:35Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess we gotta worry about the...

• 1:01:36Speaker 03

  It's all the immunogenicity. It's gotta be a...

• 1:01:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. The reaction.

• 1:01:39Speaker 03

  It's gotta be human, yeah, albumin.

• 1:01:42Bob Novella?

  Hemoglobin is, it's a protein. It's just a protein. And we could build proteins from scratch, amino acid by amino acid. We can build them. I guess that's just ridiculously slow process to even consider.

• 1:01:53Speaker 03

  And yeah, it's not just that, Bob. Because just having the hemoglobin isn't enough, because you can't just inject hemoglobin into the blood. It's gotta be...

• 1:01:59Bob Novella?

  I know, but I mean, that's one, that's a critical component, as you say.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, but, so, you know where we get the hemoglobin right now? We just wanna get just naked hemoglobin.

• 1:02:08Bob Novella?

  Cows?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Pigs?

• 1:02:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeast?

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  No. No, they get it from expired...

• 1:02:13Bob Novella?

  Amazon.

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  Expired blood donations.

• 1:02:16Bob Novella?

  Oh, they can extract it?

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so if a blood, if a unit of blood that's been donated is just aged out, it's too old to give to somebody, they could then use that.

• 1:02:24Bob Novella?

  They'll take the blood.

• 1:02:25Speaker 03

  So it's human blood. They can use it to get the hemoglobin out of. So they can get the actual human hemoglobin. But then again...

• 1:02:30Bob Novella?

  And is enough of it? Enough expired stuff?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  Not really. That's the thing. So not enough of it, and you still have to then attach it to that lipid nanoparticle. You know what I mean? And then stabilize it and do other things to it so that it actually functions. Because otherwise, if you just inject hemoglobin into the blood, it'll just get broken down in two, three days. You know what I mean? But proteins don't survive long. Proteins are constantly being turned over, right? So they need to be stabilized.

• 1:02:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  Anyway, it's interestingly difficult technology, but we are making good progress. And it's the kind of thing where we may cross the line to a viable product in the next 10 years or so. Something like that. It could be, have a huge impact on medicine, you know, just to be able to crank out.

• 1:03:09Bob Novella?

  And vamp.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Get rid of all the transfusion reactions, all the infectious disease that gets transmitted through blood donations. Don't, you don't have to constantly be having blood donation campaigns and constantly just trying to make up for a shortfall of blood. It'd be really transformational.

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  What about typing? Is that, like, would they just by default be in like an O, universal donor?

• 1:03:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably.

• 1:03:29Speaker 03

  For the hemoglobin, there's no type. That's an advantage. For the red blood cells, it is a type. But the thing is, you can manufacture rare blood types, right? So that's, that's another advantage there.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  Oh, negative.

• 1:03:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, you could also manufacture, I mean, I hope we get to this point where you just take somebody's blood. If, if the issue is just that they need more, not that they need their blood to be different.

• 1:03:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Cara Santa Maria?

  That you can just take somebody's blood and make more of it.

• 1:03:54Speaker 03

  Well, you could take somebody's skin cells, turn them into stem cells and make blood from their own cells. You could do that theoretically.

• 1:04:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  All right, guys, let's move on. Evan, tell us about the wonderful benefits of beekeeping.

• 1:04:07Speaker 05

  I will. And it's also a local science news item because this article talks about New Haven, Connecticut? Yeah, this one was written up over at ZME Science, a very good science website for interesting science news. The author is Ben Seal. He writes about, yeah, beekeeping. Tucked away in the shaded corner of a community garden in New Haven, Connecticut, a beehive awaits. It's called the Honeybee Project, a nonprofit that offers youth beekeeping training in a therapeutic context focused primarily on those with experience in the foster care system. They've been around since 2018 and they have graduated 11 cohorts from its 15-week program,

• 1:04:50Speaker 05

  which helps teens develop job skills and build community with humans and insects alike while tending to a hive. This is neat. The founder, the founder and board member, her name is Sarah Taylor. She's a licensed clinical social worker with a background in child and family therapy. She says that the process helps the young beekeepers navigate and heal from the depression, anxiety, and trauma many of them have experienced during their often turbulent childhoods. "The interconnectedness of the bees seems to strike a chord," she says. Okay. So, is keeping a beehive a legitimate form of therapy? I mean, is it good for a person's psychological health?

• 1:05:33Speaker 05

  On the surface, just, just thinking about that alone, without digging into it at all, you would think, yeah. You know, you give somebody a project, you know, it gives them a focal point, something to focus their attention on. This one happens to be outdoors, you know, you're not in front of a screen, um, so yeah, that should be good. You're tending to animals, almost in the form of a pet in a way, you're caring for it, you're interacting with it, you're helping it out, hopefully you're not getting stung in the process. Make sure you're not allergic before taking up the practice. Now, the only way to know if you're allergic to a bee sting is to get stung by a bee, is that right? Steve, I don't know that there's a test to see if you are, if a person is allergic.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  They can always expose you to, yeah, so there is.

• 1:06:19Speaker 05

  But it's a bee sting, yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's how all allergy tests work, all the real ones, you know, not the fake ones.

• 1:06:27Speaker 05

  Give you just a small, very small, minute dose of whatever it is.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  You give a little intradermal, you know, dose of the thing and you see if you get a reaction.

• 1:06:34Speaker 05

  Got it. Well, at least that aside, you know, this seems to touch on some of the broader aspects of therapy that should do more good than harm, at least that's what it seems. The article suggests that there's been a very longstanding set of anecdotal evidence that beekeeping can help people who are dealing with mental health issues. One example has to do with the actual buzz, the noise generated by the bees. They say it can help people address issues such as dislocation and disconnection. Where dislocation refers to a state of being displaced from one's usual context, leading to feelings of loss of identity and a sense of not belonging. Disconnection refers to a state of feeling separated, alienated from oneself, others,

• 1:07:18Speaker 05

  or one's environment. Here's another example they give. There is an army veteran who turned scientist. He published some early research showing reductions in anxiety and depression and improvements in overall health among military veterans engaged in beekeeping as a recreational therapy. The title of the study was called Healing Hives: Exploring the Effects of Beekeeping on Veterans' Mental Health and Quality of Life. Here's a little piece from the abstract. Veterans experience higher risks of suicide and mental health disorders due to traumas of military service, disabilities, and the difficulties of reassimilation into civilian life. Therapeutic interventions using human-animal interactions have shown promising results in reducing many risk factors affecting veterans' quality of life.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  This quality improvement project sought to consider if veterans participating in a recreational therapy program focused on beekeeping and administered by the Department of Veteran Affairs would experience quality of life improvements using a standardized EQ 5D 5L assessment. Our results indicate significant changes in mobility, anxiety, depression, and overall health for veterans participating in beekeeping as a recreational therapy. Okay. There's another study found a positive effect on stress and well-being among college students who took part in beekeeping. This one was titled "Beekeeping as a Therapeutic Modality to Address Stress and Increase Well-Being for Undergraduate Students." Also from the abstract, the purpose of this study was to develop a pilot program to explore

• 1:08:47Speaker 05

  the impact and therapeutic potential of beekeeping as a modality to reduce stress, improve mental well-being, and increase nature connectedness among undergraduate students. Evidence from the participant interviews indicates that experiences with beekeeping activities and education engendered an overall beneficial impact to patients' perceived stress, nature connectedness, and well-being. Okay. Back to the veterans for the moment. Here was a more robust evidence-based study. His name is Adam Ingrao, who has a PhD in entomology, former veteran as well, has shared his experience with over 15,000 veterans who have taken part in something called Heroes

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  to Hives, which is a nine-month program that combines beekeeping, education, and training with mindfulness and therapeutic practices. Well, they describe it as "the first evidence-based findings on beekeeping's benefits for veterans in therapeutic..." in a journal called Therapeutic Recreation Journal. The research documented the beneficial effects on mental health of a program run at the VA by a recreational therapist, including reductions in feelings of anxiety and depression, as well as increases in positive feelings regarding overall health. And there are others. So I guess, you know, and the efforts here are to, what? Quantify and measure these effects of beekeeping as a therapy, but trying to do it more in

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  an evidence-based way rather than just relying on anecdotes and other stories of the past. I mean, hopefully, there will be more science-based studies in the future as a result of these early efforts, but I don't know that... Can we conclude anything at this point?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  Now, these are basically pilot studies.

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:29Speaker 03

  They're not really isolating beekeeping as a separate variable. You know what I mean?

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  Right, it could be any kind of animal related therapy.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  It's like you combine it with these three other things and people say they feel better. That's kind of the level of evidence that we have at this point.

• 1:10:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I struggle with my opinions on these kinds of things. Like, these kinds of studies make me roll my eyes a little bit. I don't know, you guys are gonna hate what I'm about to say.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  Well, I mean, but how do you know it's the beekeeping part of it?

• 1:10:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I'm saying. I don't, but I also don't know if everything has to be sliced and diced so scientifically. When I'm working with a patient and they're struggling and they engage in activities that help them build community and feel responsible for something and it improves their, their mental health, you know, self-reported mental health, okay, then do that thing.

• 1:11:16Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:11:17Cara Santa Maria?

  That thing is healthy for you. It is psychologically healthy for you, is not causing harm. You're engaging in, in something that is, you know, contributing to your, uh, your, your positive mental health. Like, there's just so many variables.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:32Cara Santa Maria?

  There are gonna be some people who aren't helped by beekeeping because they're like, I don't like bees.

• 1:11:36Speaker 05

  Or have a fear of bees.

• 1:11:37Speaker 03

  I, I agree with you, Kara, totally. Where I have a problem is why, when somebody then takes it to the next level and creates, like, the Beekeeping Therapy Institute, you know, where they claim some kind of magical benefit from bees and they, you know what I mean?

• 1:11:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, it's like, it's not the bees, it's all the other ingredients here. And that's why it's important to understand the difference between the actual ingredients that have an effect and all of the stuff in between.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And my guess would be if we could, and you can't always do this with complex behaviors, but if we could tease out all the different variables, we'd be talking about exactly what you mentioned at the beginning, Evan. Feeling responsible for something, creating something with your own two hands, engaging in nature, engaging with other organisms.

• 1:12:26Speaker 05

  Right, not being in front of a screen. Yep, that's generally good.

• 1:12:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Not hoarding up in your house.

• 1:12:30Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:12:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  Getting out, fresh air, all that good stuff.

• 1:12:34Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's the same thing if you're riding a horse and, you know, petting a horse and changing a horse's shoes.

• 1:12:39Speaker 05

  Volunteering to walk dogs or something.

• 1:12:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's fine if you want to call that, I guess, animal-assisted therapy, but it's no different than just going to a farm and hanging out with animals.

• 1:12:49Speaker 03

  Or art therapy, where you're drawing pictures to get the same effect, right? It's nothing, it's, just don't confuse the nonspecific effects with something very super-specific. You know?

• 1:12:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. We know that socialization is important for mental health. We know that feeling like you are in control of something, we know that caring for something, feeling responsible for the outcome of something is deeply important for mental health.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, and if it's a hook or a gimmick, that's fine. Just again, just don't-

• 1:13:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, just don't charge 10 times as much for it, because all of a sudden it's therapy.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  With something magical or specific, yeah.

• 1:13:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:13:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, and don't start making the leap that, oh, all of a sudden, bee venom therapy is going to be good as a result of this as well, right? You can start going in different directions with it.

• 1:13:32Speaker 03

  Because bees are psychic!

• 1:13:36Speaker 03

  Alright, thanks, Evan.

• 1:13:37Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 1:13:38Speaker 03

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

• 1:13:40Jay Novella?

  Alright, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:13:52Jay Novella?

  That's strange, huh?

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  It sounded like there was a bird in the background. Is that important to the noiser now?

• 1:13:57Jay Novella?

  If there are birds in the background, what does that tell you?

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  In nature.

• 1:14:01Cara Santa Maria?

  It's outside, or it's in Steve's garage.

• 1:14:03Speaker 05

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Steve's garage. But that wasn't the sound of a red-bellied woodpecker?

• 1:14:09Jay Novella?

  No, it wasn't.

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  Ah, because you used the app to tell you that.

• 1:14:12Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:14:13Speaker 05

  Got it.

• 1:14:13Jay Novella?

  So, a listener named Joe Lanandrea wrote in and said, "Hello, Jay, this week's noisy immediately reminded me flapping dragonfly wings, so combined with the background sounds that are perfectly consistent with this, I'm going to make this my guess." It is not the flapping of dragonfly wings, but thank you for sending that in. Shane Hillier wrote, "It's a woodpecker fighting something, some hive of bugs or a nest of rattlesnakes." That is also incorrect. Correct. David Kleparek wrote in and said, "Hey, guys, we're finishing up our two-week-long road trip while we listen to the podcast. Our family guessed that this week's noisy is a box of bugs that are complaining loudly when someone bangs on it." And that's actually got some truth in it. They hit on a couple of things there. So,

• 1:14:56Jay Novella?

  we have a winner. The winner was Hakan Lund. And Hakan said, "Hi, what you're hearing is someone banging their fist on the surface of a termite mound, resulting in the termites making their warning sound by banging their heads on their surrounding surface." So, this is actually a whole bunch of termites that are inside some piece of wood. You'll hear someone tap on the wood with their hand, and then you'll hear like that rattling noise, and that's the termites banging their heads against the wood. Listen.

• 1:15:33Jay Novella?

  Crazy!

• 1:15:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That's intense.

• 1:15:34Jay Novella?

  That's a lot of termites.

• 1:15:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, have you ever seen one of those mounds in nature? They're insane.

• 1:15:38Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they're huge. Think these were soldier termites? And that's like a noise defense mechanism, essentially. So, don't mess with those guys, because they'll bang their heads like crazy.

• 1:15:48Speaker 05

  Jay, if you want to extract them, what you do is you take a stick, okay, and you poke it into the mound and pull it out, and then you can eat them.

• 1:15:54Jay Novella?

  You can eat them, yeah.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  Just letting you know.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Like a lollipop.

• 1:15:56Jay Novella?

  That was my plan. So, Shane Hillier actually wrote in to guess this week, and Shane Hillier sent me a very cool noise this week, so I'm going to play you the sound right now.

• 1:16:30Jay Novella?

  Does that sound familiar to any of you?

• 1:16:32Speaker 05

  Not to me.

• 1:16:32Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a spinning up sound. I don't know specifically.

• 1:16:36Jay Novella?

  Well, this is definitely something, and it's very cool. And if you think you know what it is, or you heard something cool this week, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have a show in Kansas on September 20th. It's going to be a really good time. We're all really looking forward to it, because we haven't seen Kara in a while.

• 1:16:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's been too long.

• 1:16:57Speaker 05

  And we've never been to Kansas before. Well, not as the SGU.

• 1:17:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so we're gonna be doing two shows. We're gonna be doing our private SGU recording, which means that you'll be sitting there watching us record an episode and there is audience interaction. These shows are a lot of fun because we kinda go off the rails. And we let it all hang out, right Bob?

• 1:17:19Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, always hanging.

• 1:17:21Jay Novella?

  And then that night, we're gonna be doing our stage show. This is called A Skeptical Extravaganza Aganza? Aganja? Agonja?

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  It's a different show.

• 1:17:31Bob Novella?

  Extravaganza.

• 1:17:32Jay Novella?

  It's the Aganza. Right, okay. The Aganza of special significance. And how do we describe this show? Well, first of all, we basically during this show show you how you cannot trust your senses. And we will absolutely prove to you that you can't trust your brain. Your brain is trying to kill you. Or at the very least, your brain is trying to give you a version of reality that is nicely smoothed out and isn't actually that accurate. And many, many times during this show, we do some improv stuff that George is leading and it's super fun. It's really funny. We really do get a great response. We've been working this show for, god, is it 15 years now? And it's been refined to the point where every single second of it is just awesomeness. So I hope you go. If

• 1:18:17Jay Novella?

  you're interested, you can go to the skepticsguy.org website and you can find ticketing information for both of those shows.

• 1:18:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Jay?

• 1:18:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Cara Santa Maria?

  As long as we've been doing this show, I still always mis-title it. A Skeptical Extravaganza of some significance.

• 1:18:33Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's of special significance.

• 1:18:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Of special significance, okay.

• 1:18:37Jay Novella?

  Which is, it's fine. I mean, you know, if you think about it, you're correct. You're just not at the right magnitude.

• 1:18:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  You're conflating what Perry used to say when he would do the quotes. He would say, "A skeptic of some note."

• 1:18:49Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 1:18:50Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  So at some point, that, you know, those two things blended for you.

• 1:18:56Jay Novella?

  I have an idea, Kara. We'll leave that up to the audience. They can, some people might think some-

• 1:19:00Cara Santa Maria?

  You can determine how much significance.

• 1:19:01Jay Novella?

  Yeah, some people might think special.

• 1:19:04Speaker 03

  All right. Thanks, Jay. One got one email. I'm not going to say who it's from. I'm only going to paraphrase it because it's from an insider at Verizon. This is a response to my discussion last week of all the tech difficulty I had in transferring my phone over to my private account and then updating my phone. And it did seem like the experience that I had was certainly different than my prior experience with tech help. Usually if you get with an actual person, they walk you through the process and everything goes well, right? I don't know if that's the experience you guys have had.

• 1:19:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Sometimes.

• 1:19:42Speaker 03

  With this kind of thing. So the insight that they, what do you think is the thing that may be different recently that might be?

• 1:19:52Speaker 05

  With Verizon?

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  Or just in general, that might be frustrating this tech help experience?

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  AI.

• 1:19:59Speaker 03

  AI. That's correct.

• 1:20:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 1:20:01Speaker 03

  So, you know, what they said was that there's now, it used to be that the tech support would have access to the backend, right? They would know, they could do everything themselves, right? So they could walk you through the process. They could troubleshoot it, et cetera. Now, essentially, AI does that. And that's kind of being forced upon them. And it was rolled out too quickly. And now the agents themselves don't have the control that they used to have. And also, he said that the AI is optimized for upselling.

• 1:20:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course it is.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Not trying to get you to get more services or whatever, not necessarily, you know, to optimize your experience.

• 1:20:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:20:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's why people call us tech support, because they want to buy more stuff.

• 1:20:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, right. Have you considered upgrading to the blah, blah, blah?

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So which, you know, kind of makes sense because it, you know, it was different than my experience in the past. Usually, like, you go to the tech genius, you know, those kind of people, they kind of know what they're doing. So he, you know, basically, he was saying, because that's, this is what his job is. And he's like, yeah, this is the problem is they're forcing this, these, you know, AI on us that is premature, it's not really working well, you know, it's, and this is causing all sorts of problems, like getting error codes that nobody knows how to interpret, like, nobody understands how it works. So, and I do think this is a problem that goes beyond AI, and the problem in general is that, again, as we were saying, if you're trying to move very quickly, constantly

• 1:21:41Speaker 03

  turn over new versions of things, you know, and it's very easy to, you know, it's the whole move fast, break things kind of approach. I think, I think the companies themselves are kind of overwhelmed with their own technology. They don't really understand it, that doesn't really work very well, and, and it shows, you know. My fear is that this is going to become the norm. It's kind of like the difference between calling a helpline and talking to a person, and calling a helpline and getting an AI assistant. You guys have all had that experience, right?

• 1:22:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, yeah. Or like, oftentimes, you, I mean, I like it when there's a choice, right?

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Cara Santa Maria?

  You go on a website, you have a simple question, it's like, here's the chatbot, ask it the question, and if they can't figure it out for you, then here's the number you call.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Exactly. If it's simple, if it's like the thing, I just need to know the hours, or whatever, something really simple. Right. Then it could be handled with a chatbot, or an AI assistant, or whatever, that's fine. But they do need to make it easy to get to a person if it's something that's more complicated. And I get it, it costs money to have people crewing lines, and you need to, you know, this is a money-saving feature.

• 1:22:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But that should be calculated into the cost of the technology that we are paying for.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Because it's when a mediocre option becomes, maybe it's good enough, you know, becomes available, then that's, you know, but it's cheaper, you know, it's cheap and mediocre, that's what we're going to get. And it just kind of sucks, you know?

• 1:23:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It does. And like, it's one thing if you're buying a piece of hardware, a piece of tech, that has a certain shelf life. It's another thing if you're buying a service. When you're buying a technological service, it needs to work. And if it doesn't work, that should be factored into the cost of the service, is fixing it.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. But in a capitalist system, the customer service does count for something. You know, you can, you know, customers do have some power to vote with their dollars, to vote with, you know, what they use. But we have to demand it. So I think the biggest problem is if we become complacent with mediocre service. And right, and we don't think we deserve or don't demand better.

• 1:23:54Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that sort of, I don't want to call it an idealized view, but that view only works if we're in a true capitalist system where there is choice. But when you're talking about, oh, I have a choice between four multinational corporations who all own each other and are different subsidies of each other, and have like similar kind of levels, then that, it's sort of an illusion of choice.

• 1:24:18Speaker 03

  Well, that's why we're supposed to have trust busting, right? We're supposed to not have that.

• 1:24:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  But that has to be functional itself, which it sort of is. And it's never perfect, but it's not nonexistent either. It's somewhere in the middle. And that sort of fluctuates from administration to administration too. But that's why it's so critical. You need, without competition, the whole system fails, right? Because then there is no, there is no incentive then to do better. I always use the DMV as my example. It'd be like, with no choice and no incentive, whatever, everything's the DMV. Not that they don't get their job done, but you know what I mean? That's sort of the classic example of a horrible customer service experience.

• 1:24:55Speaker 05

  Right, yeah. It's a poster child, if you want to call it that.

• 1:24:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But I will say the DMV does get everything done and in a relatively.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  It has gotten better over my life. It has.

• 1:25:07Speaker 05

  And some of it's now online. You can renew your license online. You don't have to go, right? So there are some things that is finally doing better.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Yes. So it's better than when I was younger. Yeah, 20, 30 years ago, you go walk into the DMV, there's that massive line. You're like, oh, my God.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  Worse than going to the dentist. I'd rather have a tooth pulled. Yeah, it was bad.

• 1:25:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:25:40Speaker 03

  Each week I come up with three science news items or a fact, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We got three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready?

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:25:54Speaker 03

  Here we go. Item number one, MIT scientists have used forced mutation to increase the efficiency of a key photosynthetic enzyme by 25%. Item number two, researchers have published a clinical trial of an anti-rejection treatment that allowed 95% of kidney transplant recipients to come off all immunosuppressive drugs and 75% to remain off for greater than two years. And item number three, a new study finds that space ice is entirely amorphous, lacking any form of crystallization as seen in typical ice on Earth. Evan, go first.

• 1:26:33Speaker 05

  Number one, scientists have used forced mutation to increase the efficiency of a key photosynthetic enzyme by 25%. I don't see a problem with this, but it's one of those things where, oh, my gosh, you really should be, you know, going crazy. That's a huge number in this regard, but I don't know. But it doesn't seem like a problem just on its surface. The second one about this published research, a clinical trial of an anti-rejection treatment. 95% of kidney transplant, that's big. Okay, that I, that I do know. 95% of kidney transplant recipients to come off all immunosuppressive drugs. 75% to remain off for greater than two years.

• 1:27:17Speaker 05

  That seems very, very impressive. I don't know if I can ask this question. Is this based on it already being like pre-matched in a sense? Like you've already, you've already qualified, done as much matching as you possibly can?

• 1:27:31Bob Novella?

  Since you're going first, this is, this is also a dense item. So I'll give you some background. So these are just people who've already had their kidney transplants, right? They, they, the kidney transplants came from living related donors.

• 1:27:45Speaker 05

  All right. That's very impressive. I have a feeling that's science and that one's very cool. This last one is about space ice lacking any form of crystallization as seen in typical ice on Earth.

• 1:28:00Speaker 05

  I suppose that could be, you know, a lot of things going on, on the earth that just don't happen other parts of the universe. So why wouldn't this crystallization be different? It could be different. It would be different. Well, I guess based on just my ignorance alone, I have to go with the forced mutation one. Maybe as the fiction, just because I really don't have a good way of quantifying that one. Where the other ones, at least I have some idea of what's going on.

• 1:28:28Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob, for this first one here, forced mutation of photosynthetic enzyme by 25%. Yeah, that seems nice. I know that there's, there's various enzymes related to photosynthesis. So it's not like, and you do say it's key, but I think there's more than one key enzyme here. So just one, having one changed by this amount isn't necessarily like a Nobel Prize moment necessarily. So I'm just going to use that, that little tidbit of information to maybe think that that's probably science. The rejection, the, yeah, 95%. 100% kidney transplant and you did say that it was a family member and this is just a clinical trial. I mean, that would be wonderful if this translates through, you know, to, um, you know, just everyday use.

• 1:29:13Bob Novella?

  That'd be fantastic if these stats didn't change that much. That'd be great. I could potentially see that more so than I could see this third one with this different type of a entirely amorphous ice. Yeah. What's getting me is that it's lacking any form of crystallization as seen in typical ice on Earth. Well, you do say typical ice. Fuck.

• 1:29:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that kind of kills it because I mean, I would, I, well, I would have thought that we would, we would have noticed this. I mean, it's not like we, we can't reproduce, you know, the environment of space. Whatever key attributes they're keying in on here, whether it's, you know, whether it's vacuum or temperature. Or maybe, maybe I'm just, space ice is a thing that I'm just not familiar with what the attributes are here in terms of what they, you know, what their environment is. Ah, man, I don't know. This is a good one. I mean, I'll, I'll just go with the amorphous ice as fiction.

• 1:30:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:30:07Bob Novella?

  Very confident.

• 1:30:08Cara Santa Maria?

  The one that I would know the least about is the amorphous ice one. Can I, you may not be able to answer at this point, but does space ice mean any ice that's not on Earth?

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  It's formed in space.

• 1:30:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Could it be on Mars?

• 1:30:19Speaker 03

  No, no, it can't be on Mars. It can't be, it has to be formed in deep, in space, not on a planet.

• 1:30:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. Okay. And so it sounds like Evan was saying that we've long thought that space ice is amorphous. And this is reinforcing that. I don't know anything. So amorphous, meaning that it's right, like I'm assuming it's like random. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like ordered. Yeah. It's on random. So the one that bugs me, I guess in that one is that it says entirely. Like anytime it's like completely 100%.

• 1:30:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know about that. But the other two are both amazing if this is true. Increasing the efficiency of an, and I, I do like that Bob pointed out, so thank you for that of a key photosynthetic enzyme. Not all photosynthetic enzymes, but by 25% either way, that's incredible. I wonder how much it increases the efficiency of photosynthesis, probably not 25%. But that's incredible and really important. And then a published clinical trial, I don't know if that's a, so that would be a phase.

• 1:31:27Speaker 03

  It was phase three.

• 1:31:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It was phase three. Okay, yeah, cuz I was gonna say it just says recipients. It doesn't say if they're animals.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  No, they're human.

• 1:31:33Cara Santa Maria?

  So they are people.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  It's a human phase three clinical trial.

• 1:31:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing. Okay, so this means that like, these folks did it. They did it. This is probably gonna be the the norm now. And if that's the case, that's credible. And so I think out of hope, I want this one to be science. So I'll go with Bob and say, uh, maybe space ice is not entirely, but somewhat amorphous.

• 1:31:57Speaker 05

  Okay, Aunt Jay.

• 1:31:58Jay Novella?

  You know, my question about the amorphous ice thing is, you know, if there's liquid water or, you know, some form of water in space, and it's not ice, and it's gonna turn into ice, then there had to be a reason why it wasn't ice. Some type of heat source or whatever, right? You follow me?

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:17Jay Novella?

  So. So that means that there would be te- temperature variations enough for there to be some type of water and then, and then it do- then there's ice forming from from some of that water. I mean, I know this sounds kinda obvious, but like, I it felt like it needed to be said, Steve. So therefore, how could all the ice be amorphous if if there's different, if water is in different states in outer space for some reason or another at certain times or not, right?

• 1:32:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that a big assumption?

• 1:32:44Jay Novella?

  Bob?

• 1:32:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That there's such a thing as space water?

• 1:32:47Speaker 05

  Oh, we can call each other.

• 1:32:48Bob Novella?

  What do you wanna know? I can't say anything to you.

• 1:32:52Jay Novella?

  Well, I mean, this makes sense because if, at some point, right? I don't know. This is, this is like, it's one of those things that I'll just be up tonight fricking thinking about it. Like, I can't figure this out.

• 1:33:02Speaker 05

  Ninety-two pounds.

• 1:33:03Jay Novella?

  Um, but I mean, you know, I mean, when when I agree with Bob and Kara, I, how could I not go with them, you know?

• 1:33:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Because Evan, I think statistically is the one who gets it when he's on his own the most.

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  I don't, yeah, I don't recall, but I occasionally nail it that way.

• 1:33:19Jay Novella?

  I was, I would've gone with Evan, but before we started recording this show, Evan just flatly said to me, I don't know shit. So. No, he didn't say that.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  No, wait.

• 1:33:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go with the ice, Steve. I mean, you know, the thing that Kara said that makes a lot of sense to me is like, all ice? Like, all of it? No, come on, it can't be.

• 1:33:38Speaker 03

  Okay, so you guys all agree on the second one, so we'll start there.

• 1:33:42Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:33:42Speaker 03

  Researchers have published a clinical trial of an anti-rejection treatment that allowed 95% of kidney transplant recipients to come off all immunosuppressive drugs and 75% to remain off for greater than two years. You all think this is science.

• 1:33:55Speaker 05

  Wonderful science.

• 1:33:56Speaker 03

  And this one is science. This is cool. It's a deets. So, yeah, this is a phase three human clinical trial. There were 30 people in the trial, 20 in the treatment group, 10 in the control group, which was just usual care. You know, they got their immunosuppressive treatment, whatever they needed. So, what do you guys think the treatment is?

• 1:34:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Some sort of, okay, anti-rejection treatment. I think it's similar to what we might have been talking about before, where it's like their own cells did something.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  CRISPR.

• 1:34:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like targeted genetic engineering.

• 1:34:35Speaker 05

  Uh, nano something.

• 1:34:36Speaker 03

  mRNA. So, these are people who already had their kidney transplants, right? So, you can't do anything with the transplant itself, it's already in them.

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  Right. It's...

• 1:34:46Bob Novella?

  But it's from a family member.

• 1:34:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But maybe their own immune systems were changed.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  Yes, how were they changed?

• 1:34:53Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:34:53Cara Santa Maria?

  To not attack certain types of antigens.

• 1:34:58Speaker 03

  Dancing right up to it.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  They delivered something to the immune system to make sure it didn't reject?

• 1:35:03Cara Santa Maria?

  No, that it didn't recognize the...

• 1:35:05Speaker 05

  Didn't recognize.

• 1:35:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Something in the kidney.

• 1:35:06Speaker 03

  So...

• 1:35:07Bob Novella?

  Modified bubble boy scenario.

• 1:35:09Speaker 05

  Oh, was it the lipids delivery system?

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  What they did was, they gave them a bone marrow transplant from the same person who gave them the kidney.

• 1:35:22Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:35:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow. So then their

• 1:35:23Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:35:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Their immune cells were like, hey, that's just me.

• 1:35:27Speaker 03

  They gave the donors, they gave them the donor's immune system. Basically.

• 1:35:31Cara Santa Maria?

  That's really cool.

• 1:35:32Bob Novella?

  So they Yeah, but what's the downside to that?

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  Well, you have to get a bone marrow transplant. So they have to go through a process where they, they use low-grade radiation to wipe out their bone marrow. And then they give them bone marrow from the same person who donated the kidney. That way, you know, they're making immune cells that have the same characteristics as the kidney itself. So they don't reject it. And so they were

• 1:35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  We already do this for certain types of blood cancers.

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, but yeah, but this was doing this tandem, like you got the kidney from this guy. Now you're getting the bone marrow from this guy.

• 1:36:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's so smart. It's like, it's not like this is old techno, or it's not like this is brand new technology.

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  It's a new application.

• 1:36:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's so smart.

• 1:36:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and, and yeah, so 95% of the 20 people, you know, so that's 19, were able to come all the way off their immunosuppressive drugs. And 15 of them were able to remain off for greater than two years, which is huge. You know, because the immunosuppressive, like the lifelong immunosuppressive drugs, that's the big downside to transplants.

• 1:36:34Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure. And I think a lot of people would be willing to go through some short-term. I mean, it's, it's probably painful what they went through, but some short-term pain for that, like, lifetime gain.

• 1:36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:46Bob Novella?

  But would their immune system, like, slowly drift and kind of reset to their?

• 1:36:51Speaker 03

  It depends on how thoroughly they wiped out their immune system to begin with. But yeah, but it did last for more than two years, you know, in most of the patients. Let's go back to number one. MIT scientists have used forced mutation to increase the efficiency of a key photosynthetic enzyme by 25%. Evan, you think this is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is?

• 1:37:14Speaker 03

  Science, this is also science.

• 1:37:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  This is very cool. There's a lot of research looking into how to improve the efficiency of photosynthesis. But this one is great. So they used, you know, they used treatments to increase the mutation rate in order to basically create more raw material. And then they, first of all, what do you think the enzyme was? Guys know anything about photosynthesis?

• 1:37:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but it's pretty complex, like.

• 1:37:42Speaker 03

  It is complex. This is the, we've talked about it before, which is the only reason why I ask. This is the.

• 1:37:47Bob Novella?

  Like a one and a two, something with those two?

• 1:37:49Speaker 03

  This is the rubisco enzyme. R U B I S C O. So this is the step where carbon, carbon is taken from carbon dioxide and incorporated into the sugar molecule, right? So photosynthesis uses light energy, right, to make ATP? And then it uses that energy in order to incorporate, you know, take in carbon dioxide, take the carbon and build a backbone of a sugar, right? It's how it makes its own food from the sunlight. That step of incorporating the carbon into the sugar is the rate limiting step. That's key.

• 1:38:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:38:27Speaker 03

  So while, yes, there are more enzymes, this is by far the slowest step. It's massively rate limiting. So any improvement in this step improves the whole process by basically that same amount. Because the other steps are not rate limiting. Does that make sense?

• 1:38:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  Right. That process, the rubisco enzyme catalyzes the first reaction in this process called carboxylation. Carboxylation is taking the carbon from the CO2 and adding it to the ribulose by phosphate, which is the sugar backbone.

• 1:39:04Cara Santa Maria?

  The sugar.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  But the other reactions happen as well. It's also possible that oxygen will combine with the ribulose instead of carbon dioxide. And that is a huge waste because it's, it's not making the, the sugar, but it's using up energy produced by photosynthesis, right?

• 1:39:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting. So did they change it so it can't bind to oxygen?

• 1:39:30Speaker 03

  Yes, that was the whole goal. The whole goal was to reduce the percentage of reactions that are to oxygen instead of carbon. And so they did that, so they, they took the enzyme from a bacteria that typically lives in a low oxygen environment. And then they, they used quote unquote directed evolution, right? So they sped up the random mutations and then they bred it in a high oxygen environment so that it would, it would, it would basically introduce a selective pressure to make it tolerant to oxygen, meaning it doesn't react, their, you know, rubisco enzyme does not

• 1:40:15Speaker 03

  catalyze, you know, so it's a mutation to that enzyme so that it does not react with oxygen.

• 1:40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And it doesn't affect its, its respiratory ability, right? It doesn't like mess up that side of the function of the plant.

• 1:40:28Speaker 03

  Well, this is bacteria, but no.

• 1:40:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, in bacteria, okay.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  So does that make sense? So this way, so now you have a, an enzyme that has a higher percentage of reacting with carbon, a lower percentage of reacting with oxygen, and that increases the efficiency of the whole process because you're not wasting photosynthetic energy on this side reaction that's not what you're, what you're trying to accomplish.

• 1:40:51Cara Santa Maria?

  That's great.

• 1:40:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:54Cara Santa Maria?

  How, did, did they say, I mean, I know that your wording here says that it increased the efficiency of this key photosynthetic enzyme by 25%. Did they say how much it increases the actual efficiency of photosynthesis?

• 1:41:05Speaker 03

  They haven't incorporated into a plant. So if you include, if you include in quote unquote photosynthesis, the process of turning sunlight into sugar, it's 25%, right? Because the rate limiting step was increased by 25%. But the, I, you know, just doing background research for this item, there's multiple other research efforts in this direction that have increased the plant growth by 40 to 60%. So this does translate really well into increased plant growth, you know, increasing the efficiency of this sunlight to sugar, basically. So there's other things as well, like, you know, there's basically two kinds of

• 1:41:49Speaker 03

  photosynthetic pathways, the C4 and the C3.

• 1:41:53Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:41:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:54Speaker 03

  C4 is more efficient than C3, like corn has C4, but rice and wheat have C3. So they're trying to get wheat with the C4 pathway, so it'll be more efficient. But they're also improving the efficiency of the corn, the C4 pathway. But again, and a lot of that is featured around limiting the oxygen side reaction, right? That's a major source of inefficiency in the whole process. But also just speeding up the rate at which it does the reaction, because it's only like 10 per second, they said. It's really slow, and it's the rate limiting step. So they want to increase the rate, decrease the side reaction, increase the overall efficiency, and get that more efficient pathway into the plants that don't have it.

• 1:42:38Speaker 03

  And there's like multiple research efforts that are all getting pretty close to the finish line here. So we could be seeing GMO varieties in the next decade incorporating this. Yeah, that's gonna be, that's just a huge direct boost to production, you know?

• 1:42:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I love too, like, I love how things are named in the sciences. Rubisco is short for Ribulose 1.5 Biphosphate Carboxylase Oxygenase.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:09Speaker 05

  If anything's gonna be shortened, that needs to be shortened.

• 1:43:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, but I mean, if you really, if you really look at what it, so it's Ru Bi Sco. But if you look at what it, I mean, it's in the name. It's so cool.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I love it when names are technical like that. Absolutely.

• 1:43:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. It tells you exactly what it does, and then they shorten it and make it kind of roll off the tongue.

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, like Bodie McBoatface.

• 1:43:29Speaker 03

  Now, this last item is more interesting than it may at first seem, but let me tell you about it. So a new study finds that space ice is entirely amorphous, lacking any form of crystallization as seen in typical ice on Earth. That is the fiction, but there's interesting pieces here. So first of all, space ice is, Kara, you got it right, it's mostly amorphous. So why is that? Why is, why would ice that forms in space be mostly amorphous when ice on Earth crystallizes?

• 1:43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, is it implied that ice is made from water?

• 1:43:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Or is it made from other things?

• 1:44:00Speaker 03

  This is water ice. This is water ice.

• 1:44:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  It's interesting.

• 1:44:03Bob Novella?

  The amount of energy involved?

• 1:44:05Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly, Bob. So if you're freezing at near zero temperature, there isn't enough energy for crystals to form, right? So I guess that crystallization process takes a little bit of energy, and if you're close to absolute zero, you don't even have that little bit of energy to form crystals. And so you get just this amorphous structure. So they, but they used to think that space ice was entirely amorphous, but the new research finds that it's actually partially crystallized, but the crystals are these nanocrystals. They're very tiny. So it's a mixture of amorphous and nanocrystals. That's the new part. We used to think it was entirely amorphous. So that's what made this fiction. So it does have crystals.

• 1:44:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:44:51Speaker 03

  But what I found interesting was the reason why space ice doesn't have crystals, like there isn't enough energy for crystals to form.

• 1:44:57Bob Novella?

  So they've never made ice near absolute zero then, in lab, in lab work? They've never looked at ice formed at those incredibly, incredibly cold temperatures? I guess not, if they would have seen this.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess so. I mean, this is, this is partly experimental and partly simulations, you know?

• 1:45:15Cara Santa Maria?

  That sounds really hard to do, though, practically, right? Like, you have to produce a vacuum chamber that is at absolute zero or close to it, and then somehow, without breaching it, introduce water. Because if you have the water already there, it's just going to crystallize as it goes to temperature.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:45:31Bob Novella?

  Even if it's flash frozen?

• 1:45:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. You'd have to either go to temperature immediately. Can you flash freeze to absolute zero?

• 1:45:40Bob Novella?

  I mean, we've gotten down to nano Kelvin. I mean, it probably would be, I mean, it's a complicated process to get down to that temperature just by itself.

• 1:45:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. But to do it instantly?

• 1:45:51Bob Novella?

  But yeah, adding the water would be complicated.

• 1:45:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's going to go through a phase in between where it crystallizes, probably.

• 1:45:55Speaker 03

  They also, it's also hard to, to see the nanostructure of the ice. They have, they use X-ray diffraction studies. But I guess they're, it's not like they could directly look at it, you know?

• 1:46:05Bob Novella?

  Steve, is what I said happening, by the way, about the ice and the heat and all that?

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, it depends on what the temperature was in the environment where the ice formed. Right? Like, if you have water in a geyser shooting out of Enceladus, it's shooting out into, you know, very cold space. Right? Yeah. As opposed to freezing at just below freezing temperature, you know, on Earth, basically. A very different environment. All right, so good job, guys. So, comet ice would be this almost amorphous. Yeah. And, and what's interesting, again, reading this, this is, this should be obvious, but it's fun to think about it. Most of the ice in the universe is space ice. Yeah.

• 1:46:46Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:46:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 05

  That makes sense.

• 1:46:48Speaker 03

  Um, okay, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:46:50Speaker 05

  You know what you get when you combine space and ice, right?

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  Spice.

• 1:46:54Speaker 05

  Spice.

• 1:46:55Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 1:46:59Speaker 05

  Here's the quote. "That the scientific literature contains errors and that attempts to replicate the findings of published studies frequently fail is surprising to many who are new to science. However, failures to replicate and challenges to the published literature are common in all branches of science." And that was written by Gregory McCarthy, professor of psychology, Yale University.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:26Speaker 05

  Hmm. Steve, you ever had any run-ins with, uh, Professor McCarthy?

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  No. No. I have not.

• 1:47:31Speaker 05

  You sure? It's a small school.

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, there are thousands of people there. Yeah, that's, that's, I frequently have to remind people of that in the comments, you know, we were like, talking, you know, of my blog, for example, when people are like, oh, they, you know, they changed this, or they discovered that this was wrong. It's like, yeah, that's the normal process of science.

• 1:47:53Speaker 05

  Welcome to science.

• 1:47:54Speaker 03

  Discovering that things were, are wrong and then correcting it. I had to, I talked about this on TikTok. So, it was on, like, Joe, you know, somebody was on Joe Rogan's site, on Joe Rogan's show, and they were laughing about the fact that, you know, some of the research that claimed to find dinosaur DNA, uh, and that dinosaur DNA was very bird-like, or, you know, specifically T. rex DNA, and that it turns out that it was chicken DNA, and that it could have come from contamination, this is the greasy finger hypothesis, right? Contamination from the researchers themselves, the archaeologists, they would have chicken for lunch, they would get their greasy fingers on. To the the the material and even a tiny bit of contamination could be amplified,

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  you know, by PCR, etc. and and cause that signal. So some contamination, whether it's the greasy finger or not, is probably the case. But it's like, yeah, and there's a kind, you know, it's just a clip of them laughing about this. It's like, all right, little perspective here. First of all, the claim of dinosaur DNA was met with immediate profound skepticism within the scientific community. No one bought it because DNA is not supposed to survive that long. And then it was fairly quickly found to be probable contamination and end of story. You know, but what do you, that's just the normal process of science. It was met with it with skepticism and pretty quickly rooted out. That's that's the process of science.

• 1:49:19Speaker 05

  It's a part of it. That's a piece of it, folks. I mean, come on. How could it not be?

• 1:49:24Speaker 03

  Right. And the replication is so true. Like, you know, you can, you talk to scientists, like, until something replicates, it's not real.

• 1:49:31Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:49:32Speaker 03

  Like, you don't take things seriously until it reliably replicates.

• 1:49:34Speaker 05

  And that's where every pseudoscience fails.

• 1:49:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. That's why even like, like, you know, Kara and I responding to this bee study, it's like, okay, you know, until this is a reliably replicatable phenomenon, it's nothing, you know, it doesn't mean anything.

• 1:49:49Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, sometimes it's like, why are we spending so much money on these things that, I don't know, by definition, aren't, they don't lend themselves to like randomized controlled trials.

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:50:00Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  Right, testability, right, falsifiability.

• 1:50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like, by definition, they're not that testable. And then you add to that the fact that the the risk benefit analysis is only, there's only an an upside. There's no huge risk to being like, patient, go do this thing that engages you.

• 1:50:18Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:50:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. Like, walk every day for exercise.

• 1:50:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, a doctor's gonna tell you that, right? Like, unless you have some sort of horrific injury where walking would be detrimental to your health, no, no physician is gonna be like, I need to study this more before I determine if walking is gonna improve your health.

• 1:50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. Or, and again, it's like, this specific activity is like, you know, claiming that that's especially good for you. Like, I'm gonna be giving you soccer therapy, where you play soccer as a form of physical, you know, therapy. It's like, or you're just doing physical activity.

• 1:50:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:50:53Speaker 03

  And there's nothing specific or magical about soccer, you know, or whatever.

• 1:50:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's just, it's rampant in psychology.

• 1:51:03Speaker 05

  It is.

• 1:51:04Cara Santa Maria?

  That like, people love to, I mean, that's like EMDR. It's like all of it, right? It's like, if you can, if you can trademark something and sell it for more money, people are going to try and tell you that it's like somehow more valuable than other equivalently valuable activities.

• 1:51:18Speaker 05

  But in defense of the beekeeping thing, it's at least it's nonprofit that's, that's running that particular one out in New Haven. So we can't say, you know, there's not really a profit motive there behind that.

• 1:51:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, but again, Evan, it's fun.

• 1:51:30Speaker 05

  And even the other ones, I'm not, I'm not sure that, you know, that you can tie it to something.

• 1:51:35Cara Santa Maria?

  But what the group is trying to say, and I'm not saying this is nefarious. The group is trying to say this thing that we dedicate our lives to is specifically beneficial for these applications.

• 1:51:46Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:51:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's not specifically beneficial.

• 1:51:49Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It is beneficial and that's great.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  There could be a thousand different things and this is one of them that is beneficial.

• 1:51:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. You're welcome again.

• 1:51:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Eve.

• 1:52:00Speaker 03

  And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  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.