The Skeptics Guide #1095 - Jul 4 2026

Back to Basics: Scientific Skepticism; News Items: Synthetic Cells, Trust in Science, Geothermal Update, Solar Corona Heating; Quickie with Cara: Radiation Eating Fungus; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Responses to Evan; 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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• 0:33Speaker 02

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

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, July 2, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:51Speaker 03

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:52Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:53Speaker 03

  How's everyone doing?

• 0:54Jay Novella?

  Well, it's so freaking hot, Steve. How hot is it? It's like, um, it was 88 degrees yesterday and humid.

• 1:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Ew.

• 1:02Speaker 03

  It's in the 90s today.

• 1:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, come to LA. Oh, you're going to.

• 1:06Jay Novella?

  Cara, it's so nasty. God damn it.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  It's like you go outside and you can't do anything. You can't work in the sun. My dog is constantly going out and coming back in because when he's inside, it's like, oh, I gotta be outside. The moment he gets outside, it's like, it's too hot in here, out here. He wants to come back inside.

• 1:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, the hot, the, right now, it's earlier here. It's, I'm obviously three hours behind you, so we're recording this at like 11 something. It's 71 degrees and cloudy.

• 1:30Jay Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And the, I think the high today is 80. That's pretty typical. And then the low is 60. So 80 to 60, we get in, we, we cool off at night. That's the really helpful thing. The humidity right now is 65%.

• 1:45Jay Novella?

  So the weird thing that happens, that's been happening the last two days is if I'm inside, and you know, my house isn't like exceptionally air conditioned, you know, it's just feels regular, you know, like it's probably like 73 degrees or whatever. The second I go out, my glasses get covered in water from condensation.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's how it was growing up in Texas.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  Guys, we haven't had the worst of it yet. The heat dome, we're just outside the heat dome. It's still gonna hit us.

• 2:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Europe, of course, got hammered, and they're gonna get hammered again.

• 2:14Bob Novella?

  Is that kinda like Thunderdome? Just raggedy, man.

• 2:18Speaker 03

  But it's worse.

• 2:20Jay Novella?

  So Steve, when you say the dome, explain, I know we talked about it, but I kind of forget. Like, is it where like the hot air gets parked somehow?

• 2:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, it stalls, right? So you have this stalled heat dome that just sort of sits over an area and then the temperature goes way up.

• 2:35Jay Novella?

  Now, can't we just like inject bleach in there?

• 2:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Shine a UV light? What? So how long is this supposed to last?

• 2:42Speaker 03

  I don't know, a week or two.

• 2:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, so, so LA will be nice respite for you and then we get to travel to the land of winter. It'll be lovely.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  I actually don't mind going to the winter in the middle of July.

• 2:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Me neither.

• 2:57Jay Novella?

  Okay, so yeah, we were having our discussion, Cara, right? Like I sent an email to you guys to let you know that the, that Iran and Laura, who are the people I'm working with in Australia for the conference, I'm always quizzing them about like, you know, anything Australian, like, so what's the weather, guys? Like, give me, you know, what's this winter about? And they're like, Iran's like, I was out in a t-shirt today, you know, it's like, it's not going to be bad there during the day.

• 3:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Sydney's nice. It'll be a lot, I shouldn't say it'll be worse, but it'll be weatherier in New Zealand.

• 3:26Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 3:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially Wellington, I think, yeah, as we go south. Christchurch, different island completely, but I think because of where Wellington is, there's just more chance of like wind and rain. So it can be kind of crummy when we're like outside. So just make sure we have our raincoats.

• 3:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, when you go on a two week trip, like a large checked bag can easily not cut it, you know?

• 3:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Totally, especially when you're going to different climates.

• 3:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Now, guys, I found out something cool about tomatoes that I actually got, you know, a little excited about because I didn't know about this.

• 3:58Bob Novella?

  What did you discover? They're, what is it, culinary varies or they're, what's the other way to phrase that?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  They're botanical fruit and culinary vegetables.

• 4:06Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 4:07Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Now, you might think I'm going to tell you that when you, when you plant a tomato, that, you know, when you're, when you're putting in like the plant, if you buy one or if, you know, at some point, you're supposed to lay it down and put dirt on top of it because it'll make it root more because a tomato plant will root wherever it's touching soil. That's not it. I found out that you are not supposed to let your tomatoes ripen on the vine.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Hey, you pick them when they're just start to turn.

• 4:33Jay Novella?

  Right, and I never knew that. And the thing that really interested me was that what happens is if they're all green, they have not gotten any sugars from the plant yet. And it hasn't, and they're essentially like, you'd have to cook them like, a lot to make them edible. But when they start turning red, when they're like, half red and half green, like, kind of going over to red, what's happened already is that the plant has shut off giving the tomato anything. It's just connected superficially to the plant at that point. And that's when you're supposed to pick it because when it starts to ripen, that's when the bugs become interested, or the other animals. So you're supposed to pick it before it goes fully, fully ripe. Like, you know, what you would consider to be like halfway done, you know, it's not there yet.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  They also will split on you if you leave them on too long.

• 5:20Jay Novella?

  Exactly. That's the other thing it says. You're very smart, Steve.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  I grow tomatoes, Jay.

• 5:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they said that the, you know, that weather can actually do them damage when they're in that stage. Because again, they're not being maintained by the plant anymore, like, they're just sitting there on their own. So bring them in. So, I thought that was fun.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  I had a nature encounter this past weekend. My wife and I were at our cabin on the pond. And the best thing about this pond is there's a family of loon that nest on the pond. And have you guys ever seen a loon in person?

• 5:52Cara Santa Maria?

  I think I've heard them.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  They're gorgeous. I've met lots of loonies. They're these big gorgeous birds. So we were kayaking on the pond, and at one point, we saw the loon. Like, we were at the other side of the pond from our cabin. And so we thought, let's see how close he'll let us get to him. And here he was really chill. He let us get close, and then he dove underwater. So we, like, start heading back. And then he surfaces right next to our kayaks, and is swimming alongside of us, like, five feet away, six feet away, 10 feet away. So we just keep going and he kept, you know, they dive underwater, they fish and then they resurface and they could be underwater for 30 feet, 100 feet, whatever.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  And like four or five times, he resurfaced right next to our kayaks and just swam alongside of us. So we had a real, and then at one point, he stretches out his neck and did the loon noise, like right next to us.

• 6:47Cara Santa Maria?

  So loud.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  It is so, it echoes across the, like, that's why they, that's every primeval swamp-like setting in the movies.

• 6:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  There's a loon sound, right? That is the sound echoing, even whether they're native to that type of region or not.

• 7:02Jay Novella?

  Can you imitate it real quick, Steve?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  No, it's really hard to imitate. I could clip one in.

• 7:06Jay Novella?

  Isn't it like, "hoo, hoo, hoo"?

• 7:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's very loud.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  I'll clip it in.

• 7:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, also for, for our British listeners, apparently in the UK, they're called divers.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  Divers?

• 7:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they don't call them loons.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  They're so pretty, there's so much detail, you know, they're black and white, but they're...

• 7:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Red eyes.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  The feathers are so, yeah, with the red eyes, feathers are so detailed. Okay, just a quick note before we get on to the regular show, we will be talking about the Evan situation, giving a follow-up, we did get a lot of feedback, we'll, we'll discuss that in the email section of the show, just to let you know, we're still engaged with this, it's not like we're gonna forget that it ever happened and just move on, but we'll be talking about this a little bit later in the show. But we're gonna start today with a back to basics, which I'm really starting to like this new segment of the show, and this one is inspired by an email we got from Fredrik Granlund from Sweden. I'm not gonna read the whole email, but he basically says that, you know, he loves the

• 8:11Speaker 03

  show and he thinks, he thinks that we often, like, we use foundational terms like skepticism and the scientific method, but we haven't really defined it any time recently.

• 8:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 8:23Speaker 03

  And he's constantly referring new people to the show and, yeah, we're assuming a common Language, you know, so again, that's kind of what the back to basics is about. Partly it's like, let's, you know, go back and like, and we should do this every now and then, like really define what it is that we're doing. So I thought I would do for this episode, a back to basics about what is scientific skepticism, which is kind of the prevailing philosophy that we are promoting on the skeptics side to the universe. Do any of you want to take a crack at sort of a short, pithy definition of what you think scientific skepticism is?

• 8:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh gosh, that's tough.

• 8:59Jay Novella?

  I, I think I could do it. I mean, so you're making a distinction between skepticism and scientific skepticism.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  Well, because skepticism is, can be used in a lot of contexts, right? Which what we mean by skepticism, what are, we are skeptics. We're not like vaccine skeptics or global warming skeptics or whatever. We're scientific skeptics. And that term was coined, by the way, or at least promoted, I don't know if it was actually coined, but it was promoted by Carl Sagan to define his own skepticism, right? Sort of the modern skeptical movement is based upon scientific skepticism. What do we mean by that?

• 9:33Cara Santa Maria?

  There's also, before you go, Jay, there's also the differentiation between scientific skepticism and skepticism. There's also the differentiation between science and scientific skepticism.

• 9:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, and also philosophical skepticism, which is something else entirely.

• 9:47Jay Novella?

  Okay, so scientific skepticism is a method of thinking where you're evaluating claims or information or, you know, using the scientific method. So it's, it's an organized way of thinking in order to get you to a, you know, verifiability or false, or false, to be able to falsify something.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  That's certainly a component of it, absolutely. So you could, you could frame it in a number of ways. You could frame it as, well, what's the goal? And I think that's what you're talking about. The goal is to only believe things that are true and not believe things that are not true. Or as T H Huxley said, a quote that I like, to portion your belief to the evidence, right? We don't want to believe things just because they feel good or because they're popular or because somebody told it to us or we're trapped in some narrative or there's some secondary gain, right? We want to believe things because it's actual reality and we're constantly questioning what we think to make sure that it's as close as possible. But how do we do that, right? So that's the goal.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  I think, and I think most people go, yeah, I want to believe things that's true. You know, although in practice, they don't do that, you know, they they state they want to do that, but then they just, they believe lots of things that aren't true.

• 11:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Would you define it as an epistemology, like it's a specific way of thinking? It's a, it's an attempt at knowledge to differentiate between, I guess, believing something to be true and being able to say, well, we have consensus evidence and it is likely that this is true.

• 11:22Bob Novella?

  I think so. I mean, to me, the, the definition relies on the term, half of the term here, scientific skepticism. So it relies on the pillars of science, which means like an evidence-based evaluation and falsifiability. Those are the two critical components, I think, of scientific skepticism.

• 11:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It uses the scientific method.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  So absolutely. So there is an epistemological basis to scientific skepticism that we follow. And epistemology is basically the philosophy of how we know what we know, right? So how we, how do we know things? And the epistemology of scientific skepticism is, well, there's one reality out there. It actually exists. You know, there is a reality and it is knowable. And the only way to have any kind of reliable, actual knowledge about it is what we call methodological naturalism. Some people also take that to the next step, which is philosophical naturalism. And that just means that you follow the methods. That's the philosophical

• 12:22Speaker 03

  basis of science, that everything, every effect has a cause and there is nothing supernatural or magical out there. So, science is methodological naturalism, which means it acts as if there is nothing supernatural. Philosophical naturalism says you believe there actually isn't anything supernatural.

• 12:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha. So there is a distinction there.

• 12:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah. So Steve, you say everything has a cause, but do they actually, does anyone ever address quantum, you know, quantum mechanics and things like superposition in that context?

• 12:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it all is within the, the naturalistic philosophy.

• 12:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it does. It does fit in, but it's kind of, you know, sometimes you just can't really give a cause to, to some of these phenomena that we, that we see, but.

• 13:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess the idea here is that.

• 13:09Bob Novella?

  Quantum level, of course.

• 13:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but I guess the idea here is that there is an explanation and a, there's the potential for knowledge across everything that exists in the natural world. And if we don't know something yet, it's not because it's fundamentally unknowable. It's because we don't yet have the tools.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  But it may not be, yeah. So it distinguishes between unknowable and currently unknown.

• 13:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And things that are unknowable are just outside the realm of methodological naturalism by definition.

• 13:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I mean. Yeah. So within that frame, everything is knowable. We just may not have the tools yet to know them. Yeah.

• 13:46Bob Novella?

  What about things that are outside the possibility of human minds understanding them?

• 13:52Speaker 03

  So again, it's, it's the shut up and calculate kind of approach of you need to phrase things in a falsifiable way. And if it can't be falsified in theory or in practice, it's simply outside of our knowledge.

• 14:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  Now, if it's only outside of our, of our ability to falsify in practice for now, then that may change in the future. If it's theoretically forever outside of our, like, are there other universes that we cannot interact with? Well, by definition, we can't know that. Right? It has zero effect on our, like, if you could state, like, God made the universe 10 minutes ago to look exactly as if it evolved over 13.4 billion years. It's like, okay, that is by definition unfalsifiable.

• 14:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So it's no different than something being metaphysical at that point.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So, so it's outside of the realm of scientific skepticism.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  It's not even wrong, as we say. It's like, can't even be subjected to the scientific methodology.

• 14:47Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  So that's kind of the purpose and the philosophy of scientific skepticism. But then there's the, like, what do we do nuts and bolts as a movement? And I think there are three pillars to what we do. The first one is promote a basic level of scientific literacy, right? Understanding all the things that we talked about, having a working knowledge of science so that you can think about, understand, participate in issues that have a scientific basis. Like, if you don't have even a basic understanding of how the universe works or how the world works, it's hard to even really think about things, you know? And we encounter this all the time where people say things which are just like gobbledygook, like, what are you even talking about? Like, they're not even getting on first base because they

• 15:29Speaker 03

  don't even have a basic understanding of like physics and the laws of nature. You know what I mean?

• 15:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  The second component is critical thinking. And this is huge. This is so many things. But it's thinking about thinking, metacognition. It's examining all the ways in which our thinking can go wrong. So logical fallacies and heuristics and cognitive biases and all of that. And information theory and misinformation and all the ways in which our brains tackle, how we come to beliefs, how we get, what is conspiracy thinking? How do narratives affect and ideology affect how we think? Motivated reasoning, all of that. And then the third component is media savvy. It's the information ecosystem in which we live. How do we get information? How does it come to us? How do we evaluate it? How do we consume it?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  So those three areas, I think, are the nuts and bolts of scientific skepticism. We want, you have to have basic level, you know, functional level of scientific literacy. You have to have metacognition where you're thinking about your own thinking. And you have to have some kind of media savvy to be able to evaluate the information that you come to. And with that, again, this is a huge hot topic, obviously. We are constantly trying to more and more closely align what we think is true with actual reality.

• 16:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is why on the show, we do segments where we talk about metacognition and we talk about, you know, tricks and tips and tools. But we also share new, interesting science news. Because that beefs up science literacy. And we also talk about times when journalists or other media approaches get things wrong or even governments, right? Like just different arbiters of thought that a lot of people follow. We want to call them out when they're doing things that are antithetical to skeptical principles.

• 17:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. And the best news items do all of those things at the same time.

• 17:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, right.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  Here's the actual science. Here's how it's being misrepresented, you know? And here's the biases and how people are thinking about it.

• 17:33Bob Novella?

  Steve, what about the distinction between evidence-based and science-based?

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's a pretty wonky thing that is specific to medicine and how I formulate it, but because there is a movement of evidence-based medicine. Medicine and you can't apply it to all fields, but this is sort of developed within

• 17:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's heavy in psychology, too.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So there, the difference is evidence-based medicine tends to focus too much on just the clinical evidence without taking into consideration the Plausibility. The prior probability or the scientific plausibility. Plausibility, right. And the problem is you can't do that, right? You just can't do that. You can't do that even statistically or scientifically. You have to consider any evidence in the context of prior plausibility. So that's what science-based medicine. Science-based medicine also takes other things more explicitly into consideration. It's basically what EBM should be. We're like, now you're kind of doing it wrong. This is what, this is how you have to do it. And I just wrote an article on science-based medicine about this, how like the death of

• 18:37Speaker 03

  EBM is what they called it because like the World Health Organization came out with, we talked about this on the show, you know, their 10-year plan for promoting alternative medicine. And it is, represents everything wrong with evidence-based medicine, you know, where you could basically call anything evidence-based, it just becomes a marketing term, but they're, they're doing it wrong, you know?

• 18:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because they're not actually looking at whether the evidence is good. They're often just looking at whether something was published.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, and worse than that, and they always give the game away, and I don't think they even realize they're doing it. They always give the game away by saying, we're, the purpose is to find evidence to support these modalities. It's like, no, that's not the purpose. The purpose is to look at the evidence, to see whether or not these things work, not to shore up the evidence base for them, but to use evidence to find out what works and what doesn't work. And they never, ever talk about the negative. They never say to find out what doesn't work and stop doing it. Never. Because that's not at all what they're doing. And that's the difference between EBM and SBM. Again, the way that it is practiced out there, I know EBM proposing, no, that's, they'll

• 19:47Speaker 03

  basically define EBM as science-based medicine. Like, fine, you're right, that's what it should be. It's just not that way in practice. And, and these very Very specific ways, but that's kind of related to what we do. Like that's because that's my area of specialty, you know, science-based medicine. It's applying all of these skeptical tools in a specific area to make sure that we're we're like really, you know, again, very carefully calibrating what we do to reality, knowing if something works or not, you know?

• 20:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so theoretically, those terms theoretically should be interchangeable.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  They should converge.

• 20:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But in practice, they're not.

• 20:28Speaker 03

  But they don't. But there is a real philosophical underpinning where like if you wait, since you bring it up, you know, if you can't even know what a p-value means, right? You can't know what a statistical analysis of how likely it is that a treatment effect works or not based upon the evidence, unless you put it in the context of the prior plausibility, you can't do it. And EBM pretends like you can, right? If it says, oh, if you got to, you know, a point oh five p-value, that tells us that it works. Well, not if it's impossible at baseline, it doesn't tell us.

• 21:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and the good news is, I think, more and more stringent journals and statisticians are pushing for it. Like, you can't just publish a p-value without an effect size. You can't like need all these different checks and balances and.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Words getting out, absolutely. And it's the statisticians who are doing it because they know this is bullshit. They know it doesn't work.

• 21:26Bob Novella?

  So how, so where is evidence-based medicine on a spectrum from, say, mostly dead to dead?

• 21:33Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, when I say it's dead, what I meant by that was that its purpose is dead, right? It's, it still exists as an institution and as a, as a thing, but its goal was to have the highest standards of evidence dictate medical practice. And what it has turned into is a marketing term that could be used to support anything.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 21:58Speaker 03

  And the, the World Health Organization's document is such a classic example of it. It basically. Proves all of our points, you know, it's like, you know, you could support anything you want. You can call it evidence based. You could, you could pay lip service to gold standard science. It's all meaningless unless you're actually freaking doing it. And that means trying to prove that things do not work, right? Just like that's a core rule of skepticism. Try to prove yourself wrong. We're not trying to prove ourselves right. Science is trying to always prove itself wrong.

• 22:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And if you see a scientist that doesn't do that, that's not a good scientist.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Right. So evidence based medicine has turned you to looking for evidence to support what you already believe. Right? Not using evidence to find what does work and does not work, and then not doing what doesn't work.

• 22:47Jay Novella?

  Steve, I like it when you get emotional about this, like things like this in particular, like, you know, you're not like yelling out because of politics. You're like, you know, this is scientific skepticism, guys. Bayesian analysis, Jag. Do you hear me, brother?

• 23:01Speaker 03

  All right. Kara, tell us about this new synthetic cell.

• 23:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, this is a really interesting and exciting development.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yes, it is.

• 23:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, it's both incremental and also kind of a new step, which I guess is what incremental means. But I think it opens, it opens the door. It's, it's a, it's a bottleneck.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  It's a milestone. Is it incremental to advance, but a milestone?

• 23:29Cara Santa Maria?

  But a milestone. It's both at the same time. Okay. So the cell is called Spud Cell. And it's a synthetic cell that was produced at the University of Minnesota in the lab of Dr. Kate Ademala. The synthetic, synthetic biology is not a new field, right? Like, we've talked for years about Craig Venter, who recently died. I think we mentioned that on the show. When was that now? A few months ago? A year ago? Gosh.

• 23:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, somewhere in 2025, I think.

• 24:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Does time exist? Is this like, it's so confusing.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Always a good question.

• 24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. He died in, oh, April of 2026. So, yeah, I knew it was somewhat recent. And so.

• 24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so we've talked for, you know, years and years and years about the attempts that different laboratories around the world have been making in developing, quote, synthetic life. Sometimes they don't like to use the word life, so they'll say synthetic biology. What exactly does that mean? Well, it can take a lot of different forms, and there have been countless approaches to how to create synthetic life or synthetic biology. Now, what is, I mean, if we want to be reductionistic about it and say like, what is a building block of biology, we could probably go down real, real small. But if we're talking at sort of the micro level, what do you think is a good place to start

• 24:58Cara Santa Maria?

  when it comes to biology? What is like a structure? Cell or DNA? Yeah, a cell membrane. Exactly, a cell. So when we look at a cell, it includes the DNA, Bob, that's very important for biology, but it includes a lot of other things that are really necessary for life to exist. And there have been a lot of approaches, as I mentioned, but two major ways that scientists have gone about this. They've taken top-down approaches and bottom-up approaches. The top-down approaches often involve taking pre-existing living tissue and doing different treatments to the cells to sort of wash out all of the biological

• 25:38Cara Santa Maria?

  material, but to still maintain and utilize what you just mentioned, Steve, the membrane, that's what Ventnor did, right? Yeah, that's how Ventnor's lab first kind of went about it. And other labs have done the same thing. Let's, you know, and we think about it when we look at cloning attempts and different attempts at like artificial wombs, very often, or artificial gestation, very often we're like, well, what do we already have in nature that works? How do we use it and just put the synthetic stuff inside of it, right? It's a good starting point, and it worked well. But what this lab did, which was very, very different, is they said, well, we want to start bottom up. We want to build the whole thing from scratch. And so it's real hard to build the fundamental

• 26:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Structure of a cell, especially if you're mimicking a very simple cell that's not, let's say, like a plant or a fungus cell, partially because they have cell membranes, not necessarily the hard structural cell walls. And cell membranes are confusing, right? They're phospholipid bilayers. They have to allow certain things in and keep certain things out and maintain different ionic differentiation on the inside and the outside of the cell. And then, not only do they have to exist to sort of maintain the structure of the cell, cells don't just exist in a vacuum. If something is to be alive, or at least, I keep struggling with that life question, or at least to be biology, what does it ultimately need to be able to do?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Well, grow, reproduce, eat.

• 27:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's got to be able to persist. And the only way it's going to persist is to like, grow, reproduce, like change in some sort of way. You could probably make something that is quote unquote, synthetically alive, but how is it going to be any different than taking life, removing it from any sort of life support, and then watching it slowly die? That's not really synthetic biology. So what these individuals in this new lab did is they started from scratch. They managed to build a cell membrane, which is very, very cool. And then they managed to build the fundamental things that they found to be necessary for the cell to be able to continue and to reproduce. So what do you think cells

• 27:56Cara Santa Maria?

  need to be able to do all of that?

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Well, they need, of course, some type of energy source.

• 28:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Energy source, sure.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Mitochondria, ATP.

• 28:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So it's like, okay, are they producing their own energy? How are they making all of this stuff? And what are some of the fundamental, think about the simplest cells that exist in the world?

• 28:15Speaker 03

  It needs some kind of raw material in addition to energy.

• 28:17Bob Novella?

  Right. And you got to make proteins, like ribosomes.

• 28:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Ribosomes, right? If you look at every cell across the, across all of the history of life, ribosomes are really fundamental. And what do ribosomes do? Why do we need ribosomes?

• 28:31Bob Novella?

  They make proteins, right?

• 28:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they do. They do a little more than that, but that is a basic.

• 28:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 28:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That is a basic function of them. So they are considered molecular machines and they make proteins. They're responsible for protein synthesis across all cells. So they read the messenger RNA and they translate it into amino acids, which then later become proteins. These synthetic cells can do some of that work on their own, but they also need a little bit of help for some of that work as well. So we're not quite a hundred percent there yet. One of the main things that we're still, we, as if I had anything to do with this, that researchers are still working on is that very, um, that very process. They cannot make their own ribosomes.

• 29:22Cara Santa Maria?

  They carry all the genes that they would need to make ribosomes. But so far, researchers haven't figured out how to get the, the blueprint material, the genetic code to actually do the work to make the ribosome. So right now they have to feed ribosomes to the cells.

• 29:40Bob Novella?

  Ends like enzymes?

• 29:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. So they're giving them ribosomes and the cells are able to utilize those ribosomes, but they're not able to make their own ribosomes. And because of that, it does seem like their ability to reproduce for a long time is cut very, very short. Right now they're surviving. Yeah, they're surviving between five and 10 generations. And then the ribosomes are just becoming defective. They're breaking down because they're not producing new ones and they're not able to kind of fix the ones that are already there.

• 30:13Bob Novella?

  What about, what about the DNA anomalies? There's also weird DNA stuff going on here too, right?

• 30:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and before we even get to the anomalies of the DNA, we should talk about, you know, what, what the genetic code actually looks like. So. How many genes, coding genes, do we have as human beings?

• 30:32Bob Novella?

  Twenty, wait, twenty thousand or so, yeah.

• 30:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And when we think about a simple cell, like an E. coli cell, right, bacteria, how many genes do you think, and that's like a research model organism, how many genes do you think that they have?

• 30:48Bob Novella?

  Five, six hundred?

• 30:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Four thousand, four hundred sixty.

• 30:51Bob Novella?

  Four thousand, okay.

• 30:52Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot, yeah. So Spud Cell, because if you're gonna be starting from scratch, you're gonna want parsimony, right? You're gonna want to make the simplest possible thing. You want it to be elegant, simplest possible thing.

• 31:03Bob Novella?

  Minimalist cell.

• 31:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, absolutely. They made this cell with only thirty-six genes.

• 31:08Bob Novella?

  That's nuts.

• 31:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they were like, we just want the basic stuff that we know that we need for the cell to do the stuff we're asking the cell to do.

• 31:17Bob Novella?

  No ornamentation, just the bare minimum for life, right? That's the goal, that's Ventor's goal, that's been their goal, his corporation, you know, for many years. And, you know, they've made progress, but they still haven't cracked that nut.

• 31:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and the thing is, I think it's a loaded question in a lot of ways. How can we know what the bare minimum is for life? If we haven't actually, we are not yet at a place in our basic research where we know what all of the genes in a very complex cell even do. Back in 2016, one of the scientists in Ventor's lab was studying a really kind of simple microbe. It had less than a thousand genes, and they were able to pare it down to five hundred twenty-five genes. So that was kind of the smallest functional synthetic cell before Spud Cell. I shouldn't make that claim, but it was one of the smaller synthetic cells before Spud Cell came on to the scene.

• 32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And they still couldn't figure out what a third of the genes were doing. They got it down to five hundred twenty-five genes, and they were like, we have fifty-six of them, we don't know. No matter what we do, we can't figure out what they actually do.

• 32:23Bob Novella?

  They could be totally superfluous or critical.

• 32:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they don't know. So it's hard when you're going bottom up. This is how you do the work. You go, okay, we add this gene, does the cell, can it persist? You know, is this critical for survival? They also developed some really interesting, and I don't want to get too into the weeds on it, but some really interesting physical machining, like structures in order to feed these cells and in order for these cells to be able to reproduce. Because we have pretty complex structures within our cells that allow different materials. I don't, the word fuel feels so, almost like elementary, but like different materials to enter into the cell. And we have very intricate structures that allow the cell to build these like microtubule things

• 33:10Cara Santa Maria?

  and like pinch down and divide in a very specific way with the spindles on the end. They wanted to emulate that. They were like, these are two very basic things that cells need to be able to do. And they were able to do it by building these little, what they called feeder liposomes. So they're these smaller lipid containing packets that can fuse to the outside. And then the, the stuff inside can go to the, to the spud cell. So that's how you get those ribosomes, the different enzymes, the different fuel that they're still having to feed to these cells for them to persist. They don't have waste management either. So obviously as things break down, they get used. They just build up in the cell and that seems to be contributing to the, to the cell. I don't want to use the word death.

• 33:53Bob Novella?

  Things get shitty fast, I guess.

• 33:54Cara Santa Maria?

  They do get, things get shitty fast in bodies. We just have really good systems in place to unshitify them. But if there's no system in place to do that, because it's too simple, it's going to build up and eventually the cell won't be able to keep going. They also use these really interesting proteins. So they added this, the cell didn't make it itself, but they added these proteins that would stick to the outside of the cell, to the membrane. And the weight of it would force the membrane to bend and pinch. And so as that continued, that weight continued to push, the membrane would actually bud. And that one cell would become two. And that's how they were able to like synthetically induce basic reproduction, which was really, really ingenious.

• 34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  No, that's what bacteria do all the time.

• 34:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but it, it needs help to deuce that critical thing.

• 34:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, well, it needs to help to do everything critical. Like if that's cheating, so is the fact that it can't make its own ribosomes.

• 34:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they're not there yet.

• 34:51Cara Santa Maria?

  They're not there yet.

• 34:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 34:52Cara Santa Maria?

  But they're like, these are two, like if we can get past these things, if we can get to the point where we don't have to give it this stuff, but we can give it the genetic coding to make this stuff on its own. Were there and that's like, that's what they're hoping to get to.

• 35:07Bob Novella?

  It's funny, when I was reading this article that when I, when I, they first mentioned this, that it would, it needed help, like especially with the ribosomes. I was thinking, wait, do they do an act so that it doesn't go like get lot loose in the wild and start taking over? But like, no, it's like, this is the best they could do.

• 35:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. So there's, there's a researcher that they quote in one of the articles, actually the article Carl Zimmer wrote for the New York Times. They quote a research Drew Endy, who's a synthetic biologist, but was not involved in the project. And he said, I love this, the right flyer flying for 12 seconds doesn't get you a 737. This is just the beginning. Like this is Wright Brothers era right now.

• 35:47Bob Novella?

  Oh my God, right. But, but I think obviously, and this is probably entirely predictable. I think this has an amazing future ahead of it. I mean, any science fiction that doesn't try to at least address this once in a while is going to be missing out because the man, synthetic life is going to be big, probably, maybe.

• 36:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, probably, maybe. I love that. And, and, and the researchers agree, and that's why they have formed, this is also very cool. They have formed an organization called Biotic and their mission is really to have an open sourced community of scientists who are, as they say, it's stewarding foundational advances in bioengineering. So that all people can benefit from this and that across the globe, individuals can be involved in both the ethical conversations around it. And the, the actual science. And so some people argue like, man, giving everybody access to all of this information is kind of scary because what about the bad actors? But then the counter argument to that is, well, if there are going to be bad actors, don't you want to have everybody having access to this information?

• 36:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So that they can develop the, I don't want to call it the antidote, but you know, the response to that bad action.

• 36:58Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah, that's, that's a reasonable reaction to a lot of disruptive technologies, like, like nanotech even. It's like, you can't have, you know, you can't have one bad actor having control of this tech. You need a way to deal with it, um, using, you know, uh, you know, to level the playing ground essentially.

• 37:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. So the researcher, the research team from the University of Minnesota, they have published, they're, they're still going through peer review. So the peer reviewed article that talks about all of this is still not available, but in the meantime, they've published a 190-page tome on their website called "A Chemically Defined Synthetic Cell Capable of Growth and Replication" that really goes through every major step because their hope is, we don't want to keep this from people. We want people to learn all of the recipes and do it on their own and see what they can, you know, see how they can improve on this.

• 37:51Bob Novella?

  Open source, baby.

• 37:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:52Speaker 03

  But then like, you can imagine a not-too-distant future where you have like a kit, you know, where you could make these synthetic cells and you can have AI design them with all the parameters and obviously that-

• 38:06Bob Novella?

  It lives its life hallucinating.

• 38:10Cara Santa Maria?

  And what, what are the outcomes really here? Like, why, why? I mean, I guess that's the question that we just sort of assumed in this conversation, but it's an important one to at least point to.

• 38:21Speaker 03

  Well, there's a lot of cells, a lot of biology that's critical to industry, right? The entire cheese industry, for example, or beer, or like, for example, in bread, like yeast is a very simple thing. Also, we now use recombinant DNA and genetically-altered bacteria to make a lot of drugs like insulin. So, yeah, the pharmaceutical industry is hugely dependent upon this.

• 38:46Bob Novella?

  How about, how about designing your gut bacteria to do all, because we know how, we know how important the bacteria in our body, that's basically, you know, a huge, such a huge chunk of our body, where, you know, we're like humans slash bacteria, basically. But imagine being able to build them from scratch with custom-made abilities. I mean, that, to me, that is, that's another thing that I think has tremendous potential in the future.

• 39:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I, I think about the drugs that people have to take on a daily basis to maintain optimal health or to, to keep a disease at bay. If we could produce a biologic version of that drug, and I know there are biologics on the market, but I mean this in a different way, a synthetic biologic version of that drug that reproduces in the body-

• 39:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 39:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And that, you know, it continuously forms new versions of itself. But that's so stripped down and so simple. Because that's another issue is very often when we're talking about this kind of development and we're using things like, like you mentioned, Steve, recombinant DNA, living organisms, bacteria, viral vectors, things like that. We either have to manipulate them by stripping them down to their basic parts, or we have to just deal with all of the offshoots, all of the secondary effects of that living organism being involved in the research. If we can build a living organism from scratch and give it only the fundamental things it needs, that helps us kind of make this much more targeted, much more clean.

• 40:14Bob Novella?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:15Cara Santa Maria?

  It's fascinating.

• 40:15Bob Novella?

  And then, of course, you extrapolate to things like synthetic pets. You know? Maybe we shouldn't go there yet.

• 40:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm like, let's not jump to multicellular organisms.

• 40:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 40:26Cara Santa Maria?

  We gotta, we gotta get this one done. Yeah.

• 40:28Bob Novella?

  Don't tease me.

• 40:29Speaker 03

  All right, Jay, do people trust science still? Well, I'm gonna ask you that. Do you guys think that the public has lost their trust in science, or has it lowered going back, say, 20 years?

• 40:43Bob Novella?

  Oh, man.

• 40:44Speaker 03

  That's one of those things. I mean, I do follow that kind of, I didn't read your most recent article, but I do follow that generally. It's always pretty high. And while it does wax and wane, so it may have taken a little bit of a hit post-COVID, it generally still runs pretty high. What do you guys think?

• 41:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I agree. I think you're gonna say that it took, yeah, it's down a little bit, but still generally high. I hope, geez, I hope that's what it is.

• 41:11Cara Santa Maria?

  I also have a feeling that it depends on how you frame the question.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 41:15Cara Santa Maria?

  That the concept of science, institutions, you know, the idea of science and scientists, I think people still see those as like some of the most trustworthy sources. But when you start to talk about the content, I think then all of a sudden, the trust number probably goes down.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'd say like my...

• 41:34Jay Novella?

  My take on it has been that there has been a big shift in just trusting science in general, you know, like it is, I think, associated with the decay of trust in institutions and everything. Certainly felt like very politically motivated, you know, that there was, there was a lot of change of mind about, about science and science institutions because of all that. But, you know, this study is really incredible because they, they shine some light on, on some of this and like, for example, like scientists have been accused of being corrupt and like I said, politically motivated, they're controlled by corporations is another big

• 42:16Jay Novella?

  thing, a perception out there, or unwilling to admit when they're wrong, or scheming behind the scenes, you know, like there's just a lot of that going on that you see out in the wild. And also, you know, pretty much every major scientific subject now seems to be a part of some type of culture war, like vaccines, at the top, climate change, nutrition has always been, you know, it's been something we've been talking about for a long time, but that's a heavily contested thing. AI now is in the arena and even public health has entered that arena. So I do think that social media is giving us a distorted picture. It is, I mean, you know, in varying degrees, of course, depending on, you know, how far

• 43:01Jay Novella?

  down into some algorithm you are and depending on what site you're on. But the angriest and most distrustful voices, as you guys know, these are the ones that people are hearing because they're yelling the loudest, meaning that they're the one, a lot of people out there that have a lot of this distrust or, you know, believing in conspiracy theories and everything, you know, they're publishing a lot of content on the web and that has a big factor in what people see. But the question is, you know, is it, is it representative of what people actually think? And that's what they were trying to get to. So what does the survey actually show? What is that, what did he say? Survey says, remember that?

• 43:40Jay Novella?

  So there was an international study, had 72,000 people across 68 countries. That's a really, really sizable study that they did. So the results said that overall trust in scientists was moderately high. Oh, good. Which makes me very happy to hear because I, you know, I was fearing that there was like a huge shift. You know, I didn't have the same takeaway that you did, Steve, and I guess it's partly because I've been polluted by what I'm hearing online. Researchers didn't find any country where the population as a whole had low trust in scientists. And here are some key results. 78% of the people questioned believe scientists were qualified to conduct important research.

• 44:23Jay Novella?

  75% agreed that scientific methods are the best way to determine whether something is true or false. 83% wanted scientists to communicate with the public. And most respondents also supported scientists participating in policymaking, which is great. I'm so happy that these are the results that came out of this. So, basic takeaways were the public has not broadly rejected science, and the claims of a total collapse in trust have been very exaggerated and have been, we've been pummeled with it, but it's not true. Now, let me go into some more specifics here. So in Britain, the British survey found that 84% had at least some trust in science. Only 2% said that they had no trust in science.

• 45:08Jay Novella?

  In the United States, 77% said that they had a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in scientists, particularly to act in public interest. And scientists are still trusted more than many other public institutions. Wow. Surprising. I don't know, I'm curious to know what our listeners, what their experience is and how surprised they are at hearing these statistics.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  It's not surprising in that, that's always the surprising result of these surveys, that it's higher than you think. That's why I was just predicting it's going to be the same as it's been the last 20 years I've looked at these kinds of surveys. But Kara is right. As soon as you drill below the surface, because people support science in the abstract, or maybe like the institution of science, or the idea of science. But as soon as you get to a specific issue, do you trust them on global warming? Then you start to see the erosion, or on vaccines.

• 45:58Jay Novella?

  Totally. The survey covers some of this, Steve.

• 45:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 46:00Jay Novella?

  So here are some warning signs that they also identified. One of them was, in Britain, the percentage of people saying that they trusted science, you know, a lot, dropped from 63% in 2020 down to 34% in a more recent survey. The US, like for example, confidence in scientists declined after early stages of COVID-19. Trust also became more politically polarized. The actual story is not now that trust has dramatically decreased. The data is showing that trust has become softer, that it's becoming more conditional. It is becoming more politically divided, and trust may have less influence on what people actually believe, or what they do. So here, now getting right to what Kara was saying.

• 46:44Jay Novella?

  So people say that they trust science in general while rejecting the scientific consensus on particular subjects. Like, for example, someone might trust their personal physician but have a general distrust for public health agencies. Or someone might support scientific research, but, you know, for whatever their reasons, they reject very specifically climate science. Or same situation, but they might reject vaccine health, where they might accept general medicine, but vaccines are something that they're not, they're not believing the consensus. And then again, you know, this covers all the topics that I listed, nutrition and everything. You know, people could trust certain scientists, and certain institutions, or certain subjects,

• 47:27Jay Novella?

  but then everything else could fall into the gray zone for them. And, and here's the other, other thing that I found troubling, of course. They were saying that people are increasingly encountering scientific claims through friends, podcasts, influencers, social media posts, you know, video platforms, of course, artificial intelligence systems, that's a big one. To answer the question, why is science struggling online? Why? Because real science is typically slow. It's very cautious. It's complicated. It's filled with a lot of uncertainty and a lot of qualifications. And a lot of time to pedestrian readers that we don't fully understand it. And a lot of people can't wrap their head around or don't put the time in to fully understand

• 48:10Jay Novella?

  just how complicated and slow these processes are. And then Steve, you say all the time, oh, man, that's a 20-year cycle. That by the time, we're at the very beginning of a 20-year thing where we might get a medication on the other end of this. Misinformation is crazy fast. It's simple. It comes off highly confident. It's typically emotionally charged. And these things work because we are emotional beings. And this is why when Steve asked to throw some definitions around on scientific skepticism, it's not a sexy thing. And it is to maybe a lot of us who are in the weeds here. We love it and we really appreciate it because we were probably, most of us were probably born with a little bit of a skeptical backbone.

• 48:55Jay Novella?

  But for a lot of people, it's not digestible. And all of these emotionally charged things that they're seeing online can easily be absorbed because they're appealing to people's fears and things like that. So they're effective. That's communication style is very, very effective.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  I was just having a conversation with a friend the other day about this and brought up the fact that it always seems like the bad guys have the best slogans.

• 49:19Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  You know what I mean?

• 49:20Jay Novella?

  They have the best clothes too, Steve.

• 49:21Speaker 03

  I know. They always have the best fashion. But I mean, lots of things which I completely disagree with, but like too many too soon. You know, it's like, okay, that's a bumper sticker. It's a slogan. People could wrap their head around it. It sounds kind of commonsensically right. It's complete bullshit. But then if it takes you 10 minutes to explain why a pithy phrase is wrong, you've kind of lost the PR war, right? There's an asymmetry, there's a fundamental asymmetry here where it takes a lot less time to create a misconception than it does to correct it. And so we're constantly working at a disadvantage, trying to sell a nuanced, complicated, thoughtful

• 50:03Speaker 03

  opinion about something versus something that's optimized to be a good slogan, right? That asymmetry is just so frustrating.

• 50:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and I think overall, we don't have the number of science communicators out there that we should, I think, as far as like the very, very charismatic, right? We need, you know, we have, there's a lot of good people out there. I mean, I don't want to be misinterpreted here, but I'm talking more not about the quality, but about the reach. You know, how many really, really famous science communicators are there? And I, you know, you can't just snap your fingers and make one, like, there has to be a very charismatic and very intelligent person to become a future world famous science communicator, but there's a handful.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  It's not just that, I think there's probably a lot more than you think. It's just hard to peek through the top of, you know, in the terms of the media.

• 50:57Jay Novella?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Right? It's like, are there really more like incredible guitar players out there than there are knowledgeable scientists who will enthusiastically talk about their science? I'm not convinced of that. It's just really, it's just a lot easier to get media attention, you know, if you're one than the other. So, I would love to live in a society where, where we were silly with science communicators. They were all over the place, you know what I mean?

• 51:21Jay Novella?

  So Kara, that's why I've been thinking, you know, you need to step up.

• 51:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Doing what I can, Jay. Doing what I can.

• 51:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're such a slacker, Kara.

• 51:30Jay Novella?

  Maybe we need to come up with like a catchphrase like, "Dr. Kara," something like that. We need something like that.

• 51:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what my patients call me.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  That was great, Jay. What? How'd you come up with that?

• 51:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what my patients call me, because Dr. Santa Maria is like such a mouthful.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  Dr. Kara.

• 51:49Jay Novella?

  Well, we need something pithy and fun. We gotta, we gotta work on Kara.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  All right, thanks, Jay. So guys, what do you know about geothermal energy?

• 51:58Jay Novella?

  I know everything about it.

• 51:59Speaker 03

  All right, tell me.

• 52:00Jay Novella?

  Well, there's hot, there's hot stuff, and you can, you can get energy from it, Steve. It's just pretty awesome.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:07Bob Novella?

  It's all about the temperature gradient.

• 52:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and there's ways to do it artificially, with like burying, like, tubes and stuff. And then there's also ways, like Iceland's, most of their infrastructure is geothermal, but they have a lot of natural geothermal energy under the ground.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you're confusing two things there, Kara. So like, the burying the tubes underground, I think, it sounds like you're talking about like a geothermal heating system.

• 52:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  For a house. I'm talking about generating electricity.

• 52:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, just generating the electricity? Okay.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Geothermal electricity.

• 52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And is that from natural sources of geothermal energy?

• 52:42Speaker 03

  It's always from natural sources by definition.

• 52:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 03

  It's geothermal.

• 52:46Cara Santa Maria?

  So it depends on where you are in the world, whether you can tap into it, right?

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you guys know like the basic physics of how it works?

• 52:53Bob Novella?

  It ultimately relies on radioactive decay.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  That may be the ultimate source of some of the heat.

• 53:00Jay Novella?

  So Steve, are you saying like harnessing energy from vents?

• 53:03Speaker 03

  How do geothermal plants make electricity? What do they do?

• 53:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. So it's not, it's not how does the heat exist under the ground? It's how do they take that?

• 53:11Bob Novella?

  Take the heat, boil, boil water, you know, get, get steam. And from there, that's when you got steam, you're, you got electricity essentially.

• 53:20Speaker 03

  You turn a turbine and it makes electricity. How do they get the heat?

• 53:22Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So what happens is Steve, you would take, you would pipe down cooler water that goes down to the ground. It gets heated up. When it comes back in, you could harvest the energy off of that. And it's, it just goes through a continuous cycle of, of pulling the heat up and out and using it to generate electricity somehow.

• 53:40Bob Novella?

  Totally, totally wrong, Jay. It's all about earthbenders.

• 53:43Cara Santa Maria?

  So is it about the differential between the hot and the cold?

• 53:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the gradient.

• 53:47Speaker 03

  It's just a way of heating water, right? It's really the gradient itself is, it's the absolute temperature that's important. Now, the gradient, we, we talk about gradients as like, how deep do you have to go to get to the temperature you want to get to? In order to generate the electricity?

• 54:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, which is why in places like Iceland where it's all volcanic, like right under the surface, they don't have to dig that deep.

• 54:09Bob Novella?

  Are you saying the gradient's not important?

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's the absolute temperature you get the water up to.

• 54:14Bob Novella?

  I mean, if everything was the same temperature, man, you ain't, you ain't getting any electricity.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  All right.

• 54:20Bob Novella?

  So gradient's critical.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  But, but you're, that is.

• 54:22Bob Novella?

  I understand. There's a nuance. There's a nuance.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, but yeah, when you say that, it's not like you're generating electricity from the gradient in the temperature. You are.

• 54:30Bob Novella?

  It's a prerequisite.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  You're heating the water to the point where it boils. The steam turns a turbine and that makes electricity, but it's more complicated than that. There's a few pieces here. So, and the reason why I'm talking about this, by the way, is because geothermal has been in the news a lot. There's the recent Geothermal Research and Development Act, which was passed, but with bipartisan support. Kara, you mentioned this not that long ago, you know?

• 54:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that the Trump admin, this is like one of the few renewable sources that they're pro.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Why is that, do you think? Why? Anyway, we'll get to that.

• 55:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Money?

• 55:05Speaker 03

  So the simplest geothermal power plant is what it does, you basically drill in down it to a depth, because you know, as you go deeper underground, the temperature gets hotter, right? And, and when we talk about temperature gradients, how hotter does it get per depth? The average gradient in North America, for example, is 25 to 30 degrees Celsius per kilometer. But that, that's the average. But in a young volcanic region like California or Iceland, it could be as much as 50 to 100 degrees Celsius per kilometer.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  And on the east coast where we are, it's 15 to 25 C per kilometer. So do you have to go down two kilometers? Or do you have to go down 10 kilometers? Do you have to go down 20 kilometers? Right? That's how far down do you have to drill to get to earth that's hot enough to, to, to generate electricity with geothermal? Make it worth it, yeah. It depends on what kind of geothermal you're doing. So the easiest type is when you have a hot spring, right? Like again, in Iceland, the water's already there. You're just tapping into a hot spring. You pump up the steam, basically, and that turns your turbines. But far and away, the most common geothermal is what we call a dry well geothermal, because

• 56:32Speaker 03

  you're not tapping, you have to put the water down there yourself. So then you have to drill two different types of wells. A production well, which brings up the hot water, and an injection well, which sends down cool water. And that's Jay, where you get to this closed loop system. You're, you're sending water down, it gets heated up at depth, then you pump up the hot water, and you use that to generate steam. But there's, there's two different ways you could generate steam from bringing up the hot water. One way is you simply, you essentially pump that water up under pressure.

• 57:13Speaker 03

  So now you have water that's at greater than 100 degrees Celsius, which is the boiling point, right? So let's say you're at greater than 150 degrees Celsius. This is the most common type of geothermal. Typically operates greater than 150 degrees Celsius. This is called the flash steam system. Where you bring up this superheated water and then when you release the pressure, it flashes into steam and then that steam turns to turbine. And then, you know, some of that condenses back down or the water that doesn't turn to steam, you pump back down as cooler water so it gets reheated. And then you just keep going around. Does that make sense?

• 57:49Bob Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Pump it up under pressure, it flash steams, that's where you get your steam. At lower temperatures, you can use a binary cycle where the water isn't turning into steam, it's heating up another fluid which has a lower boiling point.

• 58:04Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  And that steam drives the turbine. The advantage of those is that they can operate from 70 to 100 degrees Celsius, but typically they're operating between 1 and 150. Right, so you have your low temperatures, say 70 to 150, where you have to use this binary system. You have the flash steam system, which operates at greater than 150 C. And then you have supercritical systems.

• 58:26Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 58:27Speaker 03

  Which operate at greater than 374 degrees Celsius. These supercritical systems, basically they superheat the water under pressure until you get it into this supercritical phase where it's like a hybrid of gas and fluid. And so it behaves differently. And essentially, with a supercritical system operating at greater than 374, you can get four to five times the amount of electricity with the same drilling, right? With the same setup otherwise.

• 58:56Bob Novella?

  Wow, that's the gold standard, man.

• 58:58Speaker 03

  Yes, but that's for the future, right? Right now, we're mainly operating in this typical flash steam system between 150 and 250, like around there. And there's a sweet spot. Obviously, the hotter it is, the more electricity you're going to be able to generate, but the more it costs to drill. And so, you know, there is this sort of sweet spot of between 150 and 250 where it's economically optimal, right? You don't drill any deeper than you have to, but you're at a comfortable temperature for using the flash steam method.

• 59:33Bob Novella?

  So supercritical, is supercritical steam then is not optimal economically?

• 59:38Speaker 03

  Well, the problem, it is if you can drill down deep enough to get to those temperatures.

• 59:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  Now, again, if you go back to the, the temperature gradients I talked about, even with a, a volcano, a young volcanic sort of hot zone, if you're getting 100 C per kilometer, you're still drilling down four kilometers, right? That's deep. That's, that's a deep well to, to drill. But, uh, but you, but if you could do it, then it's worth it. You're never going to get there in Connecticut, right? Cause we're, we have crappy temperature gradient.

• 1:00:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Uh, all right. So how much of the world's energy do you think is geothermal right now?

• 1:00:19Jay Novella?

  About 5%?

• 1:00:20Cara Santa Maria?

  2%?

• 1:00:21Speaker 03

  Bob?

• 1:00:22Bob Novella?

  Um.

• 1:00:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Price is right rule. Say six, say six.

• 1:00:24Bob Novella?

  5%.

• 1:00:26Speaker 03

  0.3%.

• 1:00:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I win.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  Zero, which is basically a write-off error, right? It's, it's negligible.

• 1:00:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just Iceland.

• 1:00:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, uh, it's, uh, it's, you know, it's the places that you would think. In the United States, it's 0.4%, so not much different. So what, two states make up 93% of our geothermal. What are they?

• 1:00:48Cara Santa Maria?

  California?

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:00:49Cara Santa Maria?

  And Oregon?

• 1:00:50Speaker 03

  And Nevada. California and Nevada, because they have young volcanic geology. With the rest coming from Utah, Hawaii, Oregon, Idaho, and New Mexico.

• 1:00:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Hawaii. Oh, but that's older volcanic.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, but still, that's relatively better, right? But that's it. So basically, all of it's coming from California, Nevada, with a little bit more from those other states I mentioned. That's all about geology, right?

• 1:01:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  And this is basically where we're going to be unless we can get cheaper, deeper drilling. So that's what all the talk about geothermal now is. It's all about the drilling.

• 1:01:21Bob Novella?

  And for context here, the deepest well is seven kilometers ever. Seven, that's it. Seven, I mean.

• 1:01:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Isn't this, isn't this why we should be moving away from just having one large connected grid? And just having smaller regional grids that are tied to whatever is locally the cheapest type of energy?

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure that that makes that that much of a difference. You know, you can still produce what the optimal energy locally.

• 1:01:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true. We can still, if we have excess, we can still, you know, send it away.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Bigger grids are actually better because you could then balance out energy production.

• 1:01:56Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true, because like we saw what happened in Texas.

• 1:01:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, Texas is a problem because it wants to be all by itself. So how are we gonna get beyond this 0.3%, 0.4% if we're already sort of picking the low hanging fruit by building geothermal where we can? And again, it's about drilling deeper.

• 1:02:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Drilling deeper and also maybe doing more where we are.

• 1:02:18Bob Novella?

  How about seafloor drilling?

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  I don't know. That I don't know if that's gonna be economically practical to put a geothermal plant at the bottom of the ocean. So, and Kara, remember I said, why, why is geothermal so bipartisan?

• 1:02:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And Oh, yeah, money.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I threw out why that is. It's because, now this, I'm gonna get a little political here, but this is the, I'm just reflecting the consensus of opinion that I'm reading, right? This is not my opinion. This is sort of conventional wisdom out there. The Republicans are pretty much favorable to the fossil fuel industry, right? How does the fossil fuel industry get their fossil fuel?

• 1:02:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Geothermal.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:03:00Cara Santa Maria?

  No, from drilling.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  From drilling. They're already drilling, so they don't care if they drill a hole and pump out oil or drill a hole and pump out geothermal energy. It's all about the money, right? So they

• 1:03:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not like fossil fuel companies are ideologically tied to fossil fuels.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  No, they're tied to money.

• 1:03:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're tied to money, which is why they all have alternative fuel, like, portions of their business.

• 1:03:24Speaker 03

  But they are happy to shift over to geothermal because they already have the drilling infrastructure. They're just, they're drilling holes and pulling out money, right? They don't care what form it's in. It's just a matter of the economics of it.

• 1:03:36Bob Novella?

  There's not enough sites for them to do it.

• 1:03:38Speaker 03

  They're tickled pink to expand geothermal because that's, that's them, right? They're, they're the drillers. Alright, so we're basically though stuck where we are. Yes, we could expand within existing sort of low hanging fruit areas, but there's gonna be an inherent limit to that.

• 1:03:55Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Speaker 03

  And it's gonna be hard to get beyond a few percentage points, you know, of geothermal with existing drilling technology. And that's again not enough, it's not gonna be enough to really move the needle significantly in terms of decarbonizing our electrical infrastructure.

• 1:04:11Bob Novella?

  So we need new tech.

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's, and that's kind of the news item too, is what new drilling tech is there on the horizon? Because if we could, let's say we could economically drill to 20 kilometers, let's say. Then you could build geothermal plants freaking everywhere, right? You could put them almost anywhere. And the number of geothermal plants that can get to supercritical temperatures goes up also.

• 1:04:41Bob Novella?

  Oh yeah.

• 1:04:41Speaker 03

  So you have more, more supercritical plants operating at greater than 374. You have more of the hotter geothermal plants operating between 150 and 250. You could put them anywhere, but it's gotta be economical to drill.

• 1:04:54Bob Novella?

  Plus, if we, if we ever wanna reach a Kardashev level one civilization, we gotta do this.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So if we, how much geothermal energy is there within, you always have to say within a certain amount of miles, say within 10 miles of the crust?

• 1:05:09Bob Novella?

  Four.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  How many, how much geothermal energy is there in terms of how many years could it run our current civilization?

• 1:05:18Jay Novella?

  Oh wow, within 10 miles?

• 1:05:20Bob Novella?

  Did you say 10 miles, Steve?

• 1:05:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Jay Novella?

  I'd say that there's enough energy there that could be...

• 1:05:25Bob Novella?

  Millennia dude.

• 1:05:26Jay Novella?

  It could be infinite, you know, as long as the earth is there, as long as there's a...

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  Millions of years. It's a million, it's basically limitless. So we are sitting on top of limitless energy, we just need to drill down to it, right?

• 1:05:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I, I mean, again, what I know about this, I know from having spent some time in Iceland. That's country is like 100% renewable. I don't think they're 100% geothermal, but it's mostly geothermal.

• 1:05:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, geothermal is considered renewable.

• 1:05:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they're just, you know, existing. Like, it's just, it's just gonna keep on going. And what I love, this is so cool. It's like the simple version of geothermal. A lot of the houses in Iceland, their hot water taps just go straight into the ground.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, right.

• 1:06:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just hot water from there. So you can't drink it. Like, you have to boil it if you want to drink it.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:15Cara Santa Maria?

  But, um, yeah, it's like you fill up a hot bath, you're literally just getting, your bath water's coming from underneath your house.

• 1:06:20Speaker 03

  A hot spring, yeah.

• 1:06:21Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so cool.

• 1:06:22Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:06:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Cause the whole, the whole island is a hot spring.

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Bob Novella?

  That's a great apocalypse power source.

• 1:06:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. I was like, oh, I'm definitely coming here during the apocalypse.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  So what are the challenges of the drilling? Let's talk about that.

• 1:06:35Speaker 03

  So the deeper you go, the hotter it gets.

• 1:06:37Bob Novella?

  Hot, and, and the softer the, the ground becomes.

• 1:06:40Speaker 03

  The harder the ground, because it's under more pressure.

• 1:06:42Bob Novella?

  More pressure, but it is gooey, though. It's ultimately a gooey.

• 1:06:46Speaker 03

  You have to get really deep.

• 1:06:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I think you gotta get really deep for that.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  We're not going anywhere near the gooey part. We're just, so it gets harder and hotter. And so the hotter destroys equipment, right? Destroys electronics.

• 1:06:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  So we need better alloys that could tolerate the hotter temperatures. You also, you wear out the drill bits. What happens when you wear out a drill bit? You're two kilometers down, your drill bit goes out. You have to pull it up and replace it and put it back down. So it massively slows down the whole process. It costs a ton of money. So harder drill bits that could survive longer would also, uh, and make drilling deeper, more economical. But there's a company working on a new technology.

• 1:07:24Bob Novella?

  Particle beams?

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  Close. Uh, it's using energy rather than physically drilling the, uh...

• 1:07:30Bob Novella?

  What kind of energy?

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this is, this is the way to go, man. I think I read about this.

• 1:07:35Speaker 03

  When you say energy, an energy beam? Like, what are you talking about? So they use a gyrotron, which is similar to what you have in your microwave oven, to generate powerful millimeter wavelength electromagnetic waves, right?

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  And these could be directed down metal pipes and then focused on the rock in order to vaporize them. They could vaporize rock with this powerful millimeter wavelength, the MF. And then, not only that, there's nothing physical touching the rock, so nothing wears out.

• 1:08:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  And debris removal, you still have to remove the vapor. It's not going, right? It's not like on Star Trek where you vanish into nothingness. You have to remove the vapor, but you could pump it out with gas, right? It's not rock. You're not pulling out rock debris, you're pulling out vapor debris.

• 1:08:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It sounds so dangerous.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  I'm sure. You don't want to get anywhere near this thing, but it will be deep underground.

• 1:08:29Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think deep drilling is dangerous anyway.

• 1:08:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know if you get too deep, you drill too greedily and too deep, Kara, and that's where the demons are.

• 1:08:36Bob Novella?

  The bow run over there.

• 1:08:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But aren't there all sorts of horrific toxic gases that are released when you drill?

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Ah, we could deal with that. I don't know how much of an issue that is, especially, this is where geologists come in, they know where to dig, where to drill. But there's a company called Quays, Q-U-A-I-S-E, who has a working prototype. They plan on completing a one-kilometer test well in 2027, then a multi-kilometer test well in 2029. And if everything works out well, that big if, right? If everything is sunshine and rainbows, then they plan on having their first working geothermal plant drilled with their technique by the mid-2030s. And again, if all that works out, we may have widespread use happening in the mid-2040s.

• 1:09:26Speaker 03

  So, and that's, you know, if everything goes well, and, which has never happened in my life, that when we sort of map out a technology over 10, 20 years, that the optimistic timeline is what happens. Maybe with one exception. And what's the exception?

• 1:09:44Bob Novella?

  Solar.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  No. No, I don't think solar has exceeded.

• 1:09:48Bob Novella?

  Oh, I know it's a computer-mediated, um, brain interface.

• 1:09:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Crisper?

• 1:09:55Speaker 03

  Crisper. Crisper's the only thing that's really exceeded, if anything, expectations. But other than that, you always say, yeah, it's like, yeah, in 20 years, this will be happening. It's 30 or 40 years. You know what I mean?

• 1:10:05Bob Novella?

  How do they power such a millimeter wave energy beam? I mean, it's like, do they need like a nuclear reactor?

• 1:10:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I was gonna say, geothermal power, perhaps?

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a, that's obviously a good question, you know, you know. Obviously, if you use clean energy to, to power the process, it's better than burning fossil fuel to.

• 1:10:25Bob Novella?

  Fission reactor, man.

• 1:10:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So long as it takes less energy to run the thing than it does to, you know.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, it takes less energy to build it than you get out of it.

• 1:10:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, then it doesn't matter. It's a net win.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  It does matter because we want to minimize our CO2. And the number of years it takes of operation to get to your, to your payback time, you want to keep that as short as possible.

• 1:10:46Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:10:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But wait, where's the CO2?

• 1:10:48Speaker 03

  To get your payback time for either money or CO2 or whatever it is you're doing.

• 1:10:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Where's the CO2 in this?

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Well, just like, you know, we're trying to prevent CO2 release by, by burning fossil fuel.

• 1:10:58Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's what I'm saying.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  But there's CO2 released in the process of drilling the well. You just want to keep that to a minimum so that your payback time is shorter.

• 1:11:07Bob Novella?

  You're right.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:11:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I didn't realize that it, does it release a lot of CO2?

• 1:11:11Speaker 03

  Well, it's a lot of energy, as Bob was saying, if you're, if you're burning fossil fuel to power your drill.

• 1:11:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, but that's a big if. If, what I'm saying is that it's, it's a closed system so long as it literally takes 1% less energy to fuel the thing than it does to take the energy out.

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, we're talking more about building it, not fueling it, right?

• 1:11:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but if you use green energy to do all of that.

• 1:11:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:11:37Cara Santa Maria?

  And in the, in the end, what I'm saying is so long as it just makes a little more than it takes.

• 1:11:43Speaker 03

  It's a net positive. But almost always when you read evaluations of this technology, they say, what if we build this all with renewable electricity? Here's your payback time. What if we build this using the current mix on the US grid? This is, which is whatever, so like 40, 50%.

• 1:11:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the real payback, yeah.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  This is your payback time. What if we just burn? Natural gas, this is your payback time. Or what if we build a nuclear power plant and then use that to build up 10 geothermal plants, whatever. So there's different scenarios. We like it to be all renewable, but it's probably best to assume the current mix of electricity production in the country.

• 1:12:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And ultimately, wouldn't you rather just like, I mean, it's already bad. Wouldn't you rather just like burn it now, knowing that then that many years down the road, it'll be 100% renewable?

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  Sure, but

• 1:12:31Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, it's all gonna be like, is it all, I guess, is it all gonna come out in the wash? That's the question. If it takes more upfront, but the investment means

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  It's a good investment, but it's, but it's still better to minimize the upfront

• 1:12:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, if we can.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  But frustratingly, every time I read about these big projects that are gonna revolutionize our energy grid, it's always a multi-decadal project, right? Oh, if we're gonna increase our nuclear, it's gonna take 20 years. Oh, if we're gonna build pumped hydro, it's gonna take 20, 30 years. Oh, if we're gonna, you know, do widespread geothermal, it's gonna take 20, 30 years. So that's where we are. Every option on the table, even if we just wanna update our grid, it's gonna take 20 years. You know, we, oh, but we need more copper and lithium, but we're developing those mines is gonna take 20 years. Everything we need to do is gonna take 20 years, or whatever, something like multiple, multiple decades. So that's why we kinda have to do everything now, in my opinion, because, you know, we can't look back in 20 years and go, oh, we should have done this, you know, it's

• 1:13:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, I guess that was kinda the argument I was making, is like, no matter what the mix is now, it's still better to just do it. Yeah.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  Okay. So that's your update on geothermal. We need this new millimeter wavelength drilling technology. So hopefully that'll work out. All right, Bob, tell us about solar corona heating.

• 1:13:49Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir. So this is a major mystery about the sun. Seems a little bit less mysterious now, potentially. The sun's outer wispy corona is hotter than its surface. And now we may know

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  A lot hotter, right?

• 1:14:02Bob Novella?

  A lot, a lot hotter.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  A million degrees.

• 1:14:03Bob Novella?

  And right, and we may know now, at least partially why, and that reason could be dust, just dust. So let's talk about this. This is From a researcher, the University of Alabama Huntsville, he published a study in the Astrophysical Journal. The title is Parker Solar Probe Observations of Dust Mass and Charge densities and Their Impact on Kinetic... Dot, dot, dot. Just a lot of techno babble there. But, uh, so let's go into the details of what this title is actually talking about. The lead author is Sayed Ayaz. Okay, so, let's talk about this a bit. So, the corona. What's the corona? This is the, obviously, the linchpin for this entire study. The corona is the outermost layer of our sun's atmosphere, right?

• 1:14:47Bob Novella?

  It's the wispy plasma that you've, I know we've all seen, all of us hearing me right at this moment, right? We've seen it because we saw totality. We saw, you know, in Dallas, you see the corona when the sun is blocked either by, either by the moon or using, you know, some sort of technology to block the sun. And you could see this wispy, glowy plasma around beyond the disk, and it extends millions of kilometers into space. So, this is big. So, yeah, here's the mystery that Steve alluded to here. The surface of the sun, or the photosphere, is about, you know, this is where the, basically, the visible light comes from. It's being emitted from there, essentially. That surface, the photosphere, is 5,500 degrees Celsius, 9,900 degrees Fahrenheit.

• 1:15:31Bob Novella?

  The corona is 1 to 3 million degrees Celsius, or more. It's far, far hotter. So, how does that even work? But remember, when you think of this, you've got to remember, the corona is very rarified, right? The particles, there's far fewer particles per unit volume, but they're moving a lot faster. And that's what temperature ultimately is, right? Temperature is the average energy per particle. It's not the total heat. So, it's, you've got to keep that in mind when you're thinking of this disparity between these temperatures. So, in this study, in the context of the study, dust in our solar system and near the sun, it's not house dust. When everyone uses the word dust, this is, of course, obviously, not the same thing. What I'm talking about here is zodiacal dust.

• 1:16:15Bob Novella?

  This is tiny interplanetary debris from, say, comets and asteroids. And it's composed of lots of different... Things silicate minerals, carbon-rich material, metal grains, sulfides, lots of different components. That's that's the dust that you will find throughout our entire solar system. Now, the previous research on trying to deal with this mystery focused on a few things. If when they were trying to study why the corona was so much hotter, they would look at the near-sun environment, the electrons, the ions, the magnetic fields and the plasma waves, right? And and how they how all of those transport and dissipate energy in the solar atmosphere. So that's what previous research focused on, those things.

• 1:16:59Bob Novella?

  The dust was long assumed to be largely irrelevant so close to the sun. I think a lot of them thought that the dust didn't even survive the close environment to the sun. So it was kind of irrelevant. And that was until the Parker Solar Probe, which we I think we've discussed this on the show. It's been a while. This was launched in 2018. It was the first spacecraft to fly into low so into the low solar corona of the sun. And it's kind of funny because the Parker Solar Probe does not have a dedicated dust collector. So how the hell does it even know about dust? Well, it turns out that the tiny charged dust grains in that environment in the lower corona hit the spacecraft.

• 1:17:42Bob Novella?

  And when it hit, when those dust particles hit the spacecraft, they vaporized into plasma clouds. And that produced a sharp voltage spikes on the antennas. So in a sense, the entire Parker Solar Probe was acting as a dust collector. And they they that's how they found out that dust existed. So that was the big surprise. The dust grains not only survive that close to the sun, but the even more interesting part of that is that it it it appears to interact with the plasma. And and this is what really sets this study apart from all the others. It adds it adds to the typical models, the possible interactions with these charged dust grains. No other major studies really incorporated dust grains in their models because it would it was thought

• 1:18:28Bob Novella?

  basically universally that they were, you know, irrelevant or not even not even. A player, uh, because they weren't even there. Lead author Sayed Ayaz says, "This, this matters for solar physics because charged dust grains are not just passive particles. Once dust grains acquire an electric charge, they interact with electric and magnetic fields, they influence plasma waves, and modify how energy is transported and dissipated." So these charged dust grains could have a, a critical impact onto the, the exact reason why the corona, the solar corona is so, has such a high temperature compared to, compared to this photosphere of this, of the sun. As they explore this in the future and get a better handle on it, it could turn out

• 1:19:12Bob Novella?

  to be basically the ultimate reason why it's, it, there's that, there's such a temperature disparity. Um, Ayaz, uh, envisions a future emissions using dedicated dust and plasma instruments. And yes, this could give a much more definitive answer to this coronal mystery. Ayaz concludes, "The bigger question is fascinating. Is dust simply passing through the near sun environment? Or is it helping shape how electromagnetic energy becomes heat and solar wind motion?" So, uh, my, my takeaway, um, that I like to end with is that this, this is, this is not academic, right? This isn't just, "Oh, isn't that interesting? This little mystery is solved." There, there's a much larger implication. The dust in this plasma may not be just passive debris as, as, as we thought.

• 1:19:57Bob Novella?

  It could become an important, an important part of plasma physics itself. This could matter anywhere in the solar system or the universe where dust and plasma coexist, uh, around stars, planets, moons, comets, spacecraft, even industrial plasma reactors. It could potentially impact future moon or asteroid missions, right? It could help predict how the, how fine dust moves, how this dust sticks to equipment and interferes with instruments. That would be critical information in many scenarios. It could improve our understanding of space weather. I mean, that could actually save lives potentially. Um, and closer to Earth, this isn't all just taking place, you know, up well beyond the Earth. On the Earth itself, this kind of information could help with semiconductor manufacturing and plasma etching. And

• 1:20:42Bob Novella?

  The one that I was interested in here is that this charged dust may help us understand and control this, you know, this boundary layer of fusion plasmas, like if you have a Takamak, you've got plasma, but that plasma is within a magnetic field, but it's also within these walls and it's really damaging to the walls and it actually creates this dirty plasma. Now, in this scenario, this would be an impurity. You do not want this type of dust within your Takamak reactor because that's not going to, you know, having the dust there is not going to make it hotter like it might do in the solar corona, but

• 1:21:23Bob Novella?

  this information could help us deal with that and control this type of, the bad plasma dust, if you will. So, interesting paper. Check out some of the treatments on this online. It's fascinating.

• 1:21:34Speaker 03

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Kara, you're going to do your first quickie. What do you got to tell us?

• 1:21:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa. Oh, gosh. So much pressure, Bob.

• 1:21:42Bob Novella?

  Ah, roll with it. You're fine.

• 1:21:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't listen too closely, okay? It's not going to be pithy like yours, but hey, gird your loins, Bob.

• 1:21:47Bob Novella?

  Oh, my goodness. All right. I deserve that totally. Thank you. They're girded.

• 1:21:52Cara Santa Maria?

  So, did you know that inside of the walls of the damaged nuclear reactor in Chernobyl, there are all sorts of life forms that are thriving? Now, part of that is because human beings are no longer there and so without our messy hands getting in the way of things, a lot of things are just like, you know, enjoying life. But another part of that has to do with ionizing radiation. So, there is a really interesting organism. It's actually a fungus, I think a black mold. It's called Cladosporium spherum. And a lot of scientists

• 1:22:34Cara Santa Maria?

  think that the pigment inside of this mold, the melanin that it possesses, is actually allowing it to utilize a process. It's really a theoretical process right now called radiosynthesis. They do think it's happening, but they don't know how. And the idea is that it's similar to photosynthesis, but instead of utilizing light, they're utilizing that ionizing radiation.

• 1:23:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, because ionizing radiation usually kills things, right? It usually is not good for life. But interestingly, within the exclusion zone, scientists recognized as far back as the 1990s that there was this interesting fungus. And they actually found 37 different species of fungus. And a lot of them tended to be really, really dark and full of melanin. But they were dominated by this one specific species. And the more that we dig into it, the more interesting things that we learn. It continues to thrive and overwhelm in the presence of ionizing radiation. They even did an experiment, you're gonna love this, Bob, a paper that was published in 2022,

• 1:23:48Cara Santa Maria?

  where they took this mold into space, slapped it on the outside of the ISS, and exposed it to cosmic radiation. It did great.

• 1:24:00Bob Novella?

  Wow. Wow, so cosmic and probably also solar radiation was a factor two, probably?

• 1:24:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, who knows? And so they didn't, you know, they still don't understand whether radio synthesis is a real thing. They still don't understand how in the hell that it would work. But they do know that when you expose this fungus to radiation, it just lives and lives and it loves it.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  It's like the ghouls from Fallout.

• 1:24:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and so scientists are thinking, hey, what if we coat our spaceships with this? You know, could this be something that reduces the amount of radiation getting in? Or just something that continues to thrive that we can utilize as a food source? Who knows?

• 1:24:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 1:24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  There's so many possibilities.

• 1:24:41Bob Novella?

  How cool is that?

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  Throw it on the inside of the capsules.

• 1:24:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:24:44Bob Novella?

  So, Cara, do they think that this was a, just kind of a normal fungus that then got irradiated and mutated? Or has it existed for longer than we know? And it just kind of thrived so much in this environment?

• 1:24:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, there are classes of melanated fungus, right? Of like deeply melanated fungus. And so it could be that there was something in it already. And also, it, you know, got mutated to...

• 1:25:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah. It's ionizing after all. Yeah. Oh, how cool is that? It's funny, you take a microscope and you look down, you see little hulks down there, like feeding off the radiation. Thank you.

• 1:25:19Speaker 03

  All right. Good job Kara.

• 1:25:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:22Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:25:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I did it.

• 1:25:24Speaker 03

  All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:25:26Jay Novella?

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

• 1:25:49Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:25:50Jay Novella?

  Uh, okay, so, did you guys guess? Did you have any ideas?

• 1:25:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, some cute baby bird.

• 1:25:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like it's some sort of experimental something because there's somebody in the background looking at it going, gorgeous.

• 1:26:04Bob Novella?

  Oh, I didn't hear that.

• 1:26:05Jay Novella?

  Okay, well, Kelly Eckerslay wrote in and said, hey, Jay, is this a gyro ball? Tell Bob they're great for improving forearms and grip strength.

• 1:26:13Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:26:14Jay Novella?

  So gyro ball is, um, it's a thing you hold in your hands, but let's say it's the size of like a tennis ball. And you pull, it's like a, um, it has a gyroscope in it, right? But it's a heavy duty one. And then when you rotate your wrist as you're holding it, it gives you significant resistance. So you can actually exercise your wrist with one of those. It's not a gyro ball. I thought that was a really good guess. Another listener named Joe Ian Andrea wrote in and he said, I'm guessing this week's noisy is some sort of hand cranked centrifuge, specifically one of those salad spinners used to spin dry lettuce leaves after washing. I thought his guess was very funny because the guy says in there, what did he say? It's gonna be fantastic in the beginning of that? You hear their voice in there?

• 1:26:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I hear him go gorgeous.

• 1:26:57Jay Novella?

  Or gorgeous, yeah, I'm sorry, gorgeous. Yeah, so that's a, that's a fun response to somebody spinning up some lettuce. Anyway, that's not correct, but thanks you for the guess. Another listener named Lacey Hageman wrote in and said, this sounds like a diamond drill or core drilling where water is used to keep the bit from overheating. Now, I've heard that sound. And this was a very good guess because there are some elements of that sound here. So I thought you did a good job on that, but Lacey, you're not correct. And I have another guess. This is from a listener named Kathy Taylor and Kathy said, uh, the noisy made me think of a fishing reel spinning out with a big fish on the line. Can't be deep sea fishing because I don't hear ocean waves, but I'm guessing they caught a gorgeous fish.

• 1:27:41Jay Novella?

  So, uh, that is not correct, but many people wrote that one in, so I guess there was something to that. There was no winner, guys.

• 1:27:48Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:27:49Jay Novella?

  This is an ice screw for climbing, right?

• 1:27:52Bob Novella?

  Oh geez.

• 1:27:53Jay Novella?

  There are people who climb sheer ice faces, um, widely known as an incredibly dangerous sport. They have, um, two sickle-shaped tools in their hands. It's like, imagine like a big hammer, but it's just the teeth part and it's really long. They use those to climb. Now, they can put this screw in. The cool thing about this screw, it's a hollow screw. So imagine this thing is about 10 inches long and maybe the, uh, maybe an inch across. And it screws into the ice, but the center of it, the ice that's being cut away is actually falling out of the center of the screw. So you could screw it right in without a problem.

• 1:28:29Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:28:29Jay Novella?

  So let me play it for you again. I won't play the whole thing, cause you don't need to hear it all again, but this will give you the idea.

• 1:28:42Jay Novella?

  You get it?

• 1:28:43Bob Novella?

  Is it manual or electric?

• 1:28:44Jay Novella?

  This one is manual. I don't know if there are electric versions, Bob. There might be, I've never seen it.

• 1:28:49Bob Novella?

  So you, so you need two hands to screw this in as you're climbing?

• 1:28:52Jay Novella?

  No, I think they just put it on the face of the ice and they, the guy just starts turning it, cause the end of it has like a little, like ratchet handle. You know what I mean? So as soon as it catches, it just goes and, and seemingly without any resistance, it looked like an easy thing to do.

• 1:29:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and then you use that to go up a certain amount, right? And then you do another one?

• 1:29:11Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it could also be used for a safety hook, I think. Like you climb up and you can, you know, you.

• 1:29:16Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:29:16Jay Novella?

  You hook yourself to it, then you disconnect and keep going.

• 1:29:20Bob Novella?

  If you fall, you're not like dead.

• 1:29:21Jay Novella?

  Guys, I have a new noisy this week. It was sent in by a listener named Jody. Let's go, and here it is. Guys, this one can sound pretty annoying or painful, so lower your volume a little bit. But I assure you that the end result of this one will be fun.

• 1:29:43Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, we've done so many shows this year already, but we have the big one coming up. This is a two-week jaunt to Australia and New Zealand. I think you already know what I'm about to say, but we're going to be doing a first stop in LA, right? I always forget LA, Kara.

• 1:29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  How dare you?

• 1:29:58Jay Novella?

  Well, it's because it's in our country and it's not like the big, it's not the big move.

• 1:30:02Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it's pretty big. I'm excited.

• 1:30:05Jay Novella?

  All right, so in LA, we're going to be doing a super-secret meetup on Friday, the 17th. And then the next day, we're doing something called SGU Live and Beyond, because it goes beyond a live SGU podcast, because there is four hours of content. It's a live podcast recording, and then we're going to be doing two hours of fun and entertainment. Don't forget that George, Andrea, and Brian will be joining the SGU crew. So it's going to be a lot of fun. If you're interested, go to theskepticsguy.org and click the Events button, and you'll see ticket and information on the Events page. Then we're going to be in Australia. We will be doing our Not a Con Conference in Australia. It's called Not a Con 2026: Life, the Universe, and Everything.

• 1:30:48Jay Novella?

  This is going to be an incredibly fun conference. If you've never been to one, it's a socializing conference. You're going to meet people, you're going to make friends. There's going to be a lot of audience interaction with the things that we'll be doing on stage. There will be an extravaganza, and there'll be live podcast recording, and there'll be a board game event, and there's VIP, and there's all sorts of cool stuff. So please join us. Go to theskepticsguy.org or go to notaconcon.com. And then for our New Zealand friends, right? Is it Z-Zed? So it's New Zealand. Hey, it's legit. They pronounce the letter Z differently. Which, you know, is that weird? Like, they think we're weird, we think they're weird, but we all love each other. It's a, it's a fine relationship we have.

• 1:31:32Jay Novella?

  So you could go to conference.skeptics.nz to find out all the details about our conference there. So at the New Zealand Conference on Friday, the 31st of July, we will be doing a live extravaganza show in the afternoon, and then that night will be all... We will be attending the dinner and then on Saturday, August 1st, we will be running all the content for the conference that day. There'll be live talks and there'll be probably panel discussions and some fun content for you guys, plus an SGU live recording. You can go to conference.skeptics.nz.

• 1:32:05Speaker 03

  All right, guys, I just wanted to just generally go over all the feedback we've been getting on Evan leaving the show. And, you know, I've tried to read as much of it as I can, both emails, Reddit, Patreon, Discord, you know, all of it. I think the good thing is that the vast majority of the feedback has been very supportive, thoughtful, kind, and we really, really appreciate that. You know, that's sort of the two standard deviations, I like to think about it, response. There have been a number of responses all along the same lines that I wanted to address, because a few people, and it's interesting because they, all of them, they said something along the lines of, "I haven't read what

• 1:32:47Speaker 03

  Evan actually wrote, but..." and then they, you know, were critical of the way that we handled it, you know, basically interpreting it as us censoring Evan for his political opinions, even though we said explicitly, "That's not what we're doing." So in each case, you know, I basically said, "Well, you can't really understand why we did what we did without knowing what he wrote." And then I gave some examples, which I think most people of those people said, "Oh, now I understand," basically. So I just wanted to basically do that here. So, again, the reason Evan decided to resign from the SGU is that I think he understood why what he did was wrong. So just to recap here, Evan

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  created an account on X branded with the SGU, right? Evan SGU. He did that without informing me, without my permission, without any discussion about what would be appropriate or inappropriate. He just did it on his own. And then, under the SGU brand, he started to tweet, make a lot of tweets that were divisive, some people would say are hateful, were insulting, provocative is sort of, I think, the most charitable way to say it, essentially breaking our policy, right? Doing the exact kind of communication that is anathema to...

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  Scientific skepticism to thoughtful discussion. And again, it's not, it's not as if he was expressing nuanced thoughtful political opinions that we disagreed with. It wasn't about that. These were just cheesy tweets that were unnecessarily provocative and insulting.

• 1:34:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, and we're not going to sit here, obviously, and read these tweets out loud. You can go online and look at these things. But I, just to be explicit, like, he was advocating for war crimes online.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, they were, they were intense tweets.

• 1:34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I think people listening who haven't looked and are like, "Man, you guys really canceled him." Or you guys, like, "No, he did this. It was brought to our attention. We were deeply disappointed. He was deeply apologetic, and he chose to resign."

• 1:34:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That is what happened.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  The thing that got him to that point, based on my discussion with him, was he understood that, yeah, this kind of communication is incompatible with the kind of communication we do on the SGU. You can't do both. And he's like, "I don't know what I was thinking. I, you know, this, yeah, I just can't, can't, can't continue." And I agree. You know, that's, yeah, this is why, these are the rules. You know? This is why you should have talked to me about it before you decided to do that. I mean, obviously, we have to address the opinions themselves. That's, I'm not saying that's not the issue. It is the issue. But, you know, he essentially put us in an absolutely no-win scenario, and the critical emails are actually evidence of that.

• 1:35:35Speaker 03

  He created a situation where, no matter what we did, or didn't do, or said, or didn't say, we were going to piss off a huge chunk of our listeners.

• 1:35:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  Right? That, that's the reason why you don't communicate like that. If we're, you know, unless that's what you want to be. You've got to be one or the other. You can't be both. You can't be a skeptical science communicator and a, and a political provocateur on X. You can't be both of those things at the same time.

• 1:36:01Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the part that I've found myself being so frustrated by. I don't know if Steve, this has been your experience, but the people who are basically like, you didn't go far enough. And then in the same breath, other people saying, you went too far.

• 1:36:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. That's the two standard deviations I'm talking about. Like, most people are like, yeah, you guys did as good as you could do, given the situation. But then on one side, with people like, you didn't go far enough. On the other side, people you went to, said you went too far. And it's like, hey, well, you know, there's no, there's no point, there's nothing we could have done to have prevented that kind of response, that range of response. It only could be worse, I think.

• 1:36:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree.

• 1:36:40Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 1:36:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And we also cannot control another human being.

• 1:36:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think that's an important point here. I feel like there are a lot of fingers being pointed, saying, why did you let? How could you have allowed? Why didn't you stop? He is a human being with his own voice. And he chose to use his voice. All we can do is choose boundaries around that.

• 1:37:02Speaker 03

  I think he somehow convinced himself he could isolate that from his work on the SGU.

• 1:37:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so too. And clearly, he couldn't. But I think the onus that people are putting on us to have somehow been in his head when he was choosing to prevent us access

• 1:37:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:20Cara Santa Maria?

  to those thoughts, like intentionally preventing it. How could you be friends with somebody for so long without? That's why I said last week, like, don't have the hubris to think you know who everyone in your life is.

• 1:37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Or what they are like behind closed doors.

• 1:37:35Speaker 03

  And people can be multiple things at the same time. Listen, Evan is still our friend. He's been my friend for over 30 years. He and his wife babysat my kids. You know, I'm still reaching out to him. You know, I still love the guy. I want to work through this every way I can. I'm feeling for him. I know he's hurting a lot right now.

• 1:37:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 1:37:52Bob Novella?

  And I invited him to my birthday party. I mean,

• 1:37:54Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 1:37:55Bob Novella?

  we are still absolutely friends.

• 1:37:57Speaker 03

  But he also has this part of him that we didn't know about that was really dark. And we're trying to, we're trying to deal with that as best we can.

• 1:38:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And at the very least, it should not be a voice on the SGU.

• 1:38:07Speaker 03

  But that's a separate issue from what's appropriate on the SGU. Absolutely.

• 1:38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be clear, he resigned.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that's a point that like, needs, like bears repeating. I think there's a lot of weird speech online that I've had my attention drawn to of like, oh yeah, he quote resigned. Like, no, he resigned.

• 1:38:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, don't question that.

• 1:38:27Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but guys, also, should we, should we address the point that they make is that, yeah, but you gave him no choice but to resign.

• 1:38:33Speaker 03

  That's not true.

• 1:38:34Bob Novella?

  I know, but I know.

• 1:38:35Speaker 03

  That's literally not true. Our choice, the choice we gave him was you have to work through this with us. And we were doing that. It's like, you're gonna take a break from the show while we wrap our head around this and while we talk about what all this means and how we could move forward. And we were in that process. And he just, I think, got overwhelmed by everything. And, you know, he also said to me, more is gonna come out. Like, like, this is not done. And he didn't want there to be this steady drip of, you know, controversy. Like, he did what a lot of people do in a situation like this. You take a hit for the team and you resign. When you created a mess that is now gonna be a huge problem for, for other people. So, and the, and the truth is, we didn't come to a conclusion. It was open-ended. Evan knew he may never come back to the show. He knew that there

• 1:39:20Speaker 03

  was a lot of work ahead if he ever were going to come back to the show. It was an open question. We were, it was a process. We don't make snap decisions about something so complicated. And then he said, okay, well, we could short circuit this process because I'm resigning. And, you know, we talked last week about why I think that actually simplifies things for him and for us and for the whole, for the whole process.

• 1:39:42Cara Santa Maria?

  But I think it's also Bear's saying, and maybe you agree, maybe you don't, like, there's no universe in which there's not a path for him to come back. Yeah, like, but, but we, we can't do that work for him.

• 1:39:54Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:39:54Cara Santa Maria?

  So, you know, we're here.

• 1:39:56Jay Novella?

  You know, I think, for me, you know, the friendship is, is a hundred percent in play. I'm not, you know, I love Evan and I'm not gonna abandon him because of something like this. Like, if anything, he, you know, he needs us. He needs his friends. He needs, he needs people around him that have rational voices and everything. In regards to him being on the SGU, though, I mean, that, that is a different animal because we do have an editorial policy and we do have, there's a lot that we all sacrifice to do this show, right? There's, there's just a lot of things that we've all agreed to and things that we, you know, behaviors and things that we have because it's, it's the appropriate way to be when you have a show like this. You know, we, we have a lot of things that are unspoken on the show that are spoken between us of, this is the kind of show we

• 1:40:40Jay Novella?

  want. This is the messaging that we want to push out. And Evan broke out of that. And he knows it. Everybody that listens to the show knows it for the most part. And I just find it very important to note that there's a very big difference between us managing the show and us managing our friendship with Evan.

• 1:40:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. But I have very little tolerance for people who just straight up say, oh, you're lying. I don't believe you. Like, really?

• 1:41:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, me too.

• 1:41:04Speaker 03

  I mean, come on, we're being so honest and transparent here. Plus, people confuse cynicism with skepticism. It's like, you're not clever just because you're being cynical. That's cheap. Anybody can do that, right? You don't know what's going on. You don't, you know, it's a complicated situation. You have no secret insider window into it. We're telling you as transparently as we can what's happened. And, you know, whatever, you choose not to believe us, good, fine.

• 1:41:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I've also, I just have long struggled with the tendency that a lot of people have. And, you know, I think the internet is just like not the healthiest place for this. But the tendency that a lot of people have to pass judgment or criticize without in the same breath saying, this would have been a different approach, or this would be the, like, I don't want criticism. I want constructive criticism in my life. You know what I mean? Like, it's not helpful to be like, that's horrible, and everything you did was wrong, and, uh, screw you, you know, I'm never listening. Okay, I'm sorry. I hate that we're, you know, if we lose a listener over this, I hate that. But also, it's like, I think we were put in a really tough situation. We, this was really hard for all of us. We did what we

• 1:42:13Cara Santa Maria?

  could. I think a lot of people online have reinforced that, you know, we handled it as best we could. But it's not helpful to tell us that everything is wrong, and there's no path to betterment.

• 1:42:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. Like, the emails of not, oh, have you considered doing this? But just, I'm out. I didn't like that. I'm out. You know, it's like, okay, well.

• 1:42:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah, sure. Like, that's, you know, that's your choice. That's how boundaries work, right? Like, we can only set boundaries for ourselves. That's the way the world works.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  But it is, and sometimes it's also a profound lack of humility, which, again, I think was the part of Evan's problem, was a lack of humility, where people think that they can know what's going on from whatever limited perspective they have. I mean, people were casting judgment without even reading any of his tweets.

• 1:43:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think there was an assumption that they just couldn't be that bad, right? And it's like, no, but they were.

• 1:43:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and look, you know, it's interesting. This whole thing is such an interesting situation, like just analyzing it and being on the receiving end of all this communication from all these different people around the world in response to this. And our responses as well, right? Because, you know, we would like to think that we're all going to behave in a particular way that's the most rational and the most critical, you know, all that stuff. But bottom line is, our emotions are heavily engaged in this. And emotion can typically trump higher levels of thinking, right? And that's why we wanted to take our time and not rush our decisions and everything. Because the first few days, the way it felt to us over those first three to four days,

• 1:43:52Jay Novella?

  say, are very different than two and a half weeks out.

• 1:43:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:43:57Jay Novella?

  And also, I think a lot of responses we got were very knee-jerky by a lot of people. And we get that, you know? But, look, we are all fallible, too. There's been a lot of responses that we got that, you know, I would say, like, weren't really practicing, you know, critical thinking and skepticism as well. Again, because of the emotion. And it's all okay.

• 1:44:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It is. Yeah, to that end, we also got a lot of responses that were very thoughtful.

• 1:44:20Jay Novella?

  I do want to emphasize, most responses were awesome. People were being very critical thinking, very supportive, very thoughtful.

• 1:44:29Speaker 03

  And generous.

• 1:44:30Jay Novella?

  And generous.

• 1:44:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we really appreciated that.

• 1:44:32Jay Novella?

  That is the 95 percenter. I do want to emphasize that.

• 1:44:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Agreed, yeah.

• 1:44:35Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's move on. It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:44:41Speaker 02

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:44:50Jay Novella?

  Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme, and the theme is, what's it in two days? When this show airs, it's going to be what day?

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  Uh, today's the second.

• 1:45:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Fourth of July.

• 1:45:05Jay Novella?

  Fourth of July. It's Bob's birthday. Happy birthday, Bob.

• 1:45:08Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:45:09Jay Novella?

  So to celebrate the Fourth of July and the America's 250th anniversary, I have an American history-themed Science or Fiction.

• 1:45:16Speaker 03

  Ugh.

• 1:45:17Jay Novella?

  Are you guys ready?

• 1:45:20Jay Novella?

  I'm with you.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  All right, here we go. Item number one, George Washington, while a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, committed an epic blunder which was responsible for starting the French and Indian War. All right, number two, during part of the Revolutionary War, Abigail Adams was a spy for the Continental Congress, engaging in espionage to gather intelligence and plant misinformation. And item number three, Thomas Jefferson popularized macaroni and cheese in America, and even designed his own pasta-making machine. Bob, you go first.

• 1:45:54Bob Novella?

  I mean, I thought this would seem hard, but it doesn't seem hard to me. So for the second one, Abigail Adams, spy for the Continental Congress, I love this. I want to learn more about it, and I hope it's true. And it's kind of weirdly ringing a bell, but, you know, my memory's basically untrustworthy when you go back a bunch of years. It's like, who knows what memory, what bells are ringing, but that kind of makes sense. The third one here, the macaroni and cheese one, I'm totally buying that from Thomas Jefferson. The only one that I had a really negative gut reaction to was George Washington essentially starting the French and Indian War. I think we would all know this. I mean, and that's, of course,

• 1:46:36Bob Novella?

  a classic blunder that we have made many times on this segment of the show, and I could be wrong again, but that just seems something that, yeah, did not happen. So epic blunder by Washington, fiction.

• 1:46:47Speaker 03

  All right, Jay?

• 1:46:48Jay Novella?

  Wow, that was...

• 1:46:49Speaker 03

  Bob, you went right to it, man.

• 1:46:51Jay Novella?

  He did, yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  Okay, so the first one, George Washington, while he was a lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, he committed an epic blunder, which was starting the French and Indian War. I mean, how can that possibly be true, right?

• 1:47:08Jay Novella?

  That's what he wants us to think.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  If I didn't hear that, like, is this a complete failure of every history I've ever read? I don't know.

• 1:47:14Jay Novella?

  That one seems very likely the fiction to me. Then during a part of the Revolutionary War, Abigail Adams was a spy for the Continental Congress. Wow, that's cool. I agree with Bob. I hope that's true. Very cool. And of course, Thomas Jefferson, I mean, my God, if anybody is going to popularize macaroni and cheese and even design his own pasta-making machine, it's gotta be him. So that to me, like, I'm just gonna write out and say, that's science. The first one seems so unbelievably off, I just can't believe it. You know what? That's gotta be the fiction. George Washington did not start a war. Goodbye.

• 1:47:46Bob Novella?

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:47:47Cara Santa Maria?

  I disagree.

• 1:47:48Bob Novella?

  Oh, goddammit.

• 1:47:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know about the macaroni thing.

• 1:47:52Jay Novella?

  And they called it macaroni.

• 1:47:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I was thinking that too, but then I was like, there is no way those two things are related. And they called it macaroni and cheese in his hat. So I, I don't know, maybe Thomas Jefferson did popularize macaroni and cheese. I mean, I know a lot of these guys traveled a lot to Europe.

• 1:48:10Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe he discovered this, yeah, while he was in his travels and brought it back. So, sure, that one's science. But for me, between George Washington being, you know, a young military leader in a Virginia militia, which means that at the time, was he fighting for the British? I mean, this was prior.

• 1:48:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Cara Santa Maria?

  So, right, in the French and Indian War, which is French, like, yeah, these were the places that were in dispute, and he was probably part of these battles. I mean, ultimately, didn't we choose him to be the first president because of his military history in America and because of his ability to kind of stand up on the quote patriot side? But prior to that, it was pretty complicated where the allegiances were. So I don't know, that doesn't bother me, the way that it seems to.

• 1:49:05Bob Novella?

  Don't you think-

• 1:49:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Something had to start the war.

• 1:49:07Bob Novella?

  Don't you think his opponent, when he was running for president, say, "And you wanna vote for this guy who started this war?"

• 1:49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  No. Because he also was responsible for America becoming independent, right? There probably were more focusing on that at the time. So I- I don't know, that one doesn't bother me. Putting spin on it. Yeah, but I feel like I, I don't know, like I watched that whole series about John Adams, Paul Giamatti, and like I loved Abigail Adams' role. Giamatti, I love him. Oh, Laura, no, it wasn't Laura Linney. I can't remember who played her, but I loved that series. I didn't see that damn series. I don't remember her ever being a spy. That one's bananas to me. I don't think that the second first lady

• 1:49:51Cara Santa Maria?

  of the very, very young United States was spying and engaging in actual espionage and planting misinformation. I want it to be true. Yeah, she was probably like, you know, really, well, not probably, I think she was really guiding her husband and offering a lot of support and advice at the time, like many of these women did. But I don't think she was a spy. I'm gonna say that's the fiction.

• 1:50:20Jay Novella?

  Wait, can I say something in response to Kara now that she made her choice?

• 1:50:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:50:23Jay Novella?

  Spies don't necessarily have to be doing backflips away from atomic explosions and things like that. Like, they could pass a note, you know, they can do like minor things too that are still cool, but not like overt or impossible.

• 1:50:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but this says she was engaging in espionage.

• 1:50:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, but that could, that literally could be like spilling coffee on a document.

• 1:50:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It could if it results in those charges.

• 1:50:47Jay Novella?

  Well, we can only wait and see, Kara.

• 1:50:50Speaker 03

  All right, well, you all agree on the third one, so we'll start this. Thomas Jefferson popularized macaroni and cheese in America and even designed his own pasta making machine. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. This is science. Yeah, these guys are doing all kinds of things, and Jefferson was, did travel in Europe a lot. He learned how to make macaroni and cheese in France, although he didn't learn how to make it. His slave chef did. Yeah, so he, while he was there, his enslaved chef got trained by French cooks, you know, and learned how to, to make macaroni and cheese.

• 1:51:31Speaker 03

  Jefferson did then, um, he didn't, like, no one thinks that he quote unquote invented it. He just brought it back to the US. He did have his own sort of version of it. Again, he did write a recipe for it, but it was probably dictated to him by his chef.

• 1:51:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:44Speaker 03

  And he did make it, it was a drawing of a pasta making machine that he invented in the Library of Congress.

• 1:51:50Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, if he hadn't brought it back, someone would have, because mac and cheese is just too good.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:51:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  Uh, but this was like hu- high cuisine for the elite of the American colonies in the end of America at the time.

• 1:52:01Jay Novella?

  Well, that was like when chocolate first came around. Like, it was like a, you know, an upper-class drink.

• 1:52:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mac and cheese. All right. Let's go to number two. During part of the Revolutionary War, Abigail Adams was a spy for the Continental Congress, engaging in espionage to gather intelligence and plant misinformation. Kara, you think this is the fiction. The boys think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

• 1:52:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  But Abigail Adams was awesome. Now, she, sometimes people have referred to her as a spy, or includes her in the list of female spies during the, the Revolutionary War, but she never actually did anything that can be considered espionage, and never planted misinformation. What she basically did is when she was living in Boston, and, you know, the Continental Congress is in Philadelphia, she was sending letters to John Adams and basically telling him all, public information, if you were somebody living in Boston, but remember that there was no telephones, no telegrams, whatever. So she was a major source of tactical information to the Continental Congress, telling them

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  everything that was going on in Boston, including troop movements and what, and what, you know, and whatnot. So it was-

• 1:53:18Bob Novella?

  Sounds like a spy to me.

• 1:53:19Speaker 03

  It was, it was military-

• 1:53:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Not if you could see it, not if anybody could see it with their own eyes.

• 1:53:23Speaker 03

  Right. It was all publicly available information. She never committed any actual espionage and never planted misinformation.

• 1:53:28Bob Novella?

  Spy-ish.

• 1:53:29Speaker 03

  But she was a very important source of tactical information for the Continental Congress. She also did a lot of other awesome things. She was-

• 1:53:38Cara Santa Maria?

  She was a badass.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  She was a badass. So when, uh, when, when her husband, John Adams, was, was busy doing stuff, um- Yeah, she, it was up to her to run the business, the family business. And now, at the time, women couldn't own property. They couldn't do anything, right? It was, their husbands owned everything. But he just basically signed off on whatever she wanted to do. And she made bank. She, he basically said, invest in the farm and farming. And she's like, nope, I'm not gonna do that.

• 1:54:09Bob Novella?

  I'm gonna invest in cryptocurrency.

• 1:54:10Speaker 03

  Well, the equivalent of cryptocurrency at the time, Bob. What she did was buy up a whole bunch of really depreciated war bonds.

• 1:54:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Because if they lost, these would be worthless at the end of the Revolutionary War. So she was basically betting on the Revolutionary War winning the war. And when she did, she was, basically made the Adams fabulously wealthy. So she was much better at financial investments than her husband. She was just better at running the household. She actually managed to get her whole family inoculated against smallpox, which was a feat at the time.

• 1:54:46Bob Novella?

  Wow.

• 1:54:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so she was an absolute badass. All right. I didn't want to take away from her from being, her this being the fiction, but that's why I wanted to make sure I mentioned all that stuff. Which means that George Washington, while lieutenant colonel in the Virginia militia, committed an epic blunder which was responsible for starting the French and Indian War is-

• 1:55:04Bob Novella?

  What the hell?

• 1:55:05Speaker 03

  Science, this is true. And, right, you think Washington started the French and Indian War, him?

• 1:55:12Bob Novella?

  Why would they bury that lead?

• 1:55:13Speaker 03

  It's amazing, right?

• 1:55:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, cuz he made up for it later.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  Washington, yeah, so the Virginia militia, they were fighting for the British. He wasn't a British officer, he was a Virginia militia officer, but basically the militias were operating under British commanders, right? We were still, at the time, we were loyal to the British. This is before all the problems. And the Ohio territories were disputed between the French and the British. And Washington was sent with his group to basically send a notice to the French saying, these are our demands. And at the same time, the French sent an emissary, basically a diplomat, to the British to try to work it out so they could peacefully resolve their differences.

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Washington comes across his group and the, the American Indian scouts that he was with convinced him that they were, they were hostile and he attacked them, killing the diplomat. Ooh. So then, the French were pissed off because they basically ambushed and killed their emissary, their dip, their... So they launch a counter-attack against Washington's unit. He had to retreat. He then built a makeshift fort called Fort Necessity in a terrible area that couldn't be defended. It was a complete piece of crap. And he gets the shit kicked out of him and he has to surrender to the French.

• 1:56:34Bob Novella?

  Let's vote for him for president.

• 1:56:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Good thing he lived.

• 1:56:37Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, yeah.

• 1:56:38Cara Santa Maria?

  He did some really good stuff after that.

• 1:56:39Speaker 03

  He may not have survived. And then it's worse because...

• 1:56:43Bob Novella?

  Oh no.

• 1:56:44Speaker 03

  So he didn't speak French. The French delivered their terms for peace. And the only translator Washington had access to was a Dutch person who spoke a little English and a little French. And so he sort of translated the document for Washington, who signed it, not realizing, he claimed to his dying day, not realizing that the document said that Washington was guilty of murder and accepted full responsibility for killing their emissary. And when that document got to London and Paris, it started the French and Indian War.

• 1:57:23Bob Novella?

  Holy crap, man.

• 1:57:25Speaker 03

  Washington resigns in disgrace, basically. So his goal was always to become a British officer and, and that was done.

• 1:57:35Bob Novella?

  Are you British? So what's the takeaway, Kara?

• 1:57:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Pay attention in your foreign language classes.

• 1:57:41Bob Novella?

  Now, my takeaway is this. I may need to watch more historical documentaries and not so much about quirks and quantum fields, but I don't think I'm gonna do that.

• 1:57:50Speaker 03

  I am burning my way through a whole bunch of American history documentaries. Washington and Jefferson.

• 1:57:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, are those the new ones that are on, um?

• 1:57:59Speaker 03

  And Grant and Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt. They are all awesome.

• 1:58:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Aren't there some new ones on Netflix? Is that what you're watching?

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, over like the last three or four years, these have all been coming out. They're all really, really good. Teddy Roosevelt, also huge badass. I did, I under-appreciated how great a president he was.

• 1:58:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he had some, he had some shortcomings too.

• 1:58:18Speaker 03

  They all do. They are all complicated with lots of shortcomings, but he was incredibly progressive for his time. He had a lot right. His biggest mistake, honestly, was not running for a third term. He trusted Taft. It turned out to be a disaster. Anyway, I highly recommend those historical documents. Basically, that's my patriotic thing to do. I'm gonna watch all these American history documentaries, and you learn so much. I was surprised that Washington started the French and Indian War, because I don't remember that from my history class.

• 1:58:48Bob Novella?

  Uh huh.

• 1:58:49Cara Santa Maria?

  But how much do you really remember about the French and Indian War?

• 1:58:52Speaker 03

  Well, everything I remember about it, I learned from The Last of the Mohicans.

• 1:58:56Bob Novella?

  I'm right, Steve. You read my mind. I'm right there with you. That movie's been going through my mind to pass four and a half minutes.

• 1:59:03Speaker 03

  Great movie. Still one of my favorite movies.

• 1:59:05Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. I will find you.

• 1:59:09Speaker 03

  All right, Bob, give us a quote.

• 1:59:11Bob Novella?

  All right. I refuse. I'm gonna give you one, two, I'm gonna give you four quotes. So how about that? So yeah, a little bit of twist here. So this is, this first quote is from mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who made one of the most famous fractals, as Mandelbrot said. He said, "Asking the right questions is as important as answering them." But that sentiment, which I love this sentiment, this sentiment's not unique. You have writer and philosopher Voltaire said, "Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers." Then you've got anthropologist and ethnologist Claude Levi Strauss, who said, "The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers. They are the ones who ask the right questions."

• 1:59:54Bob Novella?

  And I will end on Einstein's, maybe this is the best one of the bunch. Maybe I should have led with this. Oh, well. Einstein said, and I had never heard this before, "If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask. For once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes," which is such a great variation on that whole sentiment that these people are trying, we're trying to get across here. And I think this, I mean, I think this absolutely ties into scientific skepticism, which we were discussing earlier, in a sense, not caring about the answer, not having an emotional Investment where the facts lead, but asking the right questions will absolutely

• 2:00:38Bob Novella?

  get you to your goal faster. And the other connection this brings to mind is what we refer to as Google foo. If when you're just trying to Google around, trying to get an answer to a question, sometimes you just need to Google first what the right question is before you before you're going to find what you're looking for. So knowing the right way to the right question is often the most important part of that whole process.

• 2:01:01Speaker 03

  And Bob, I would go even farther than that.

• 2:01:03Bob Novella?

  Keep going.

• 2:01:04Speaker 03

  Because scientists, I think, will look at this and say, yeah, this is like where all the genius and all the work of science is mentally is in figuring out the right question. That's everything. Once you have the right question, then it's just a matter of doing the research and answering it. But the hard work, the real brilliance, the real brilliant scientists are the ones who can figure out the right question to ask.

• 2:01:26Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 2:01:27Speaker 03

  That's it's so important, so much more important. And then the answering it is the technical part, you know?

• 2:01:33Bob Novella?

  Right. And perhaps a corollary to that would be some of the best scientific discoveries are ones that not definitively answer something, but that raise their own whole set of questions after that. Those are the kind of discoveries that that scientists really love.

• 2:01:47Speaker 03

  And pseudoscientists often ask the wrong question.

• 2:01:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Speaker 03

  Right. And that's part of their problem. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 2:01:55Bob Novella?

  You're welcome, Steve.

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

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

• 2:02:03Speaker 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.

• 2:02:41Cara Santa Maria?

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