The Skeptics Guide #1094 - Jun 27 2026

Evan Leaves SGU; News Items: Paying attention, How Queen Bees are Made, Canceling Wind, Goodbye International Space Station, US Military Restores Flu Vaccine; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, June 25, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  And Jay Novella. Hey, guys. So, of course, you've noticed that Evan was not on the show last week. He's not on the show this week. And this is because we have a sad but serious announcement that we have to make. Evan has resigned from the SGU. So he will no longer be on the SGU. I know this is not a surprise to many of you, but to many others who are not involved in our online communities, where this has been a topic for over a week. This may be coming as a total surprise. So we'll give you the background on it. These are events that are very, very rapidly developing. It really started just, really now, just like a week and a half ago. Is that correct?

• 1:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it came to our attention that unbeknownst to any of us, Evan had a private X slash Twitter account. And on that account, he was expressing his political views and a lot of personal views. And over 2025, I think is when really this started to happen. So it was over the last year or so. And he said a lot of hateful, un-skeptical, dehumanizing, terrible things on his Twitter account on X.

• 2:01Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be clear, the account wasn't private. We knew back, back when we were all, maybe not we all, but back when many of us were on Twitter, like I've followed. Hello, Devin. I haven't touched Twitter since it became X. I might have like auto-posted some episodes. But from what I understand, he was posting under his moniker that he's always had, Evan SGU.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23Cara Santa Maria?

  But he was posting almost like in a pretty under-the-radar way. Like, he wasn't even doing a lot of public posts. He was making a lot of replies to other people's posts.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think, you know, Jay Bob and I are not on X. I post the show there, but I don't read a single post. I mean, I'm not following anybody. I'm not reading anything there. So we just, I think because of the character of X, you know.

• 2:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the climate very much changed. And yeah, yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  But the more important thing here is the content of what Evan was posting. It's all on our SGU Reddit and on Discord, if you're interested. A lot of it involved the Israeli-Gaza war and just American politics in general. So first and foremost, none of the rest of us share any of these views, find them even acceptable. But to clarify, this is not about Evan's politics. It's not that they were, you know, leaning right or that they were conservative. It's that they were hateful, dehumanizing, and a lot of them were like conspiracy theories and unskeptical, and there's no other word for it. Which is just,

• 3:33Speaker 02

  you know, it's sad and shocking to the rest of us. How could this have happened under our nose? Right? I mean, that's an obvious question that a lot of our listeners are asking. Like, how could we not have known this? You know, for again, for background, a couple of things. Again, obviously, we knew Evan's basic political leanings. But he was systematically keeping these views from us over recent years. And he admitted to that. Like, he didn't feel comfortable talking about them with us. We all know he's a very private person, even more so after Perry passed away. I think that was his sort of primary outlet for this kind of stuff. And he just kept it to himself. And I think he compartmentalized it from, not only from us, but from his skepticism. You know, he

• 4:16Speaker 02

  basically became radicalized in an echo chamber on this one issue, yes, for a range of issues. And we never had the opportunity to talk to him about it, which might have had a moderating effect, you know, never had, we never worked through any of it with him. It was just all happening in the background.

• 4:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Walled off from everything else.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  That bears sort of like deeper explanation. Like when, when, when you say, we never had the opportunity to talk to him about it. Um, just to clarify, what I'm hearing is not, we didn't have the time or the energy.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  No, he didn't tell us.

• 4:49Cara Santa Maria?

  We didn't know.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:51Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, Steve, you're not going to go around every week going, uh, what is your most radical view this week? You know, like we just, we had no reason to believe that this was something we needed to talk about. We have always known that there have been a range of political opinions on the show and we have been friends. You guys have been friends with him for so much longer than, than I have, but there's nothing wrong with having a deep and me, actually there's something very right about having a deep and meaningful friendship or like think about all of your family members and all of their views. You know, it's important that there are a lot of various views that individuals hold and it's important that we develop the skills to be able to engage with people even when

• 5:35Cara Santa Maria?

  you don't agree with them. But there are boundaries to that.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 5:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And there is a line in the sand where when somebody's views move into what, you know, may be deemed as hate, what may be deemed as dehumanization. And as you mentioned, Steve, just like fly in the face of skeptical principles.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:53Cara Santa Maria?

  There is no room for that. The problem here, and it, I think it's a problem that makes me very sad to my soul, is that Evan, whether he didn't feel safe or for what other reason, he chose not to open that side of himself up to us and we were blindsided by this.

• 6:10Speaker 02

  Well, Kara, and that's, that's where I think we could have done a better job as his friend because. You know, I remember several times talking to Bob where we would be like, you know, we had a big discussion, say, about whatever, just, you know, current politics. And we both noticed that Evan just gets dead quiet. It was his, that's just the way it was for the last, I mean, we can go back a decade on that. I chalked it up as him being private and him not being comfortable. But none of us prodded him and none of, you know, out of respect for him, I was thinking, I'm just not gonna drag information out of him if he's not comfortable sharing it.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  But I had no idea, you know, that there was, you know, there was some very serious things that he was thinking and feeling that he wasn't sharing, you know?

• 6:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, Jay, I felt similarly, except that for me, it was more of, my assumption was that they were, you know, more extreme conservative takes on topics that he didn't want to, didn't want to discuss. And I was okay with not hearing that, you know, especially in the political climate of the country these days.

• 7:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And there's a difference, Bob, to your point, between an extreme conservative view, which, fine, if that's what you have, and a dehumanizing view.

• 7:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 7:26Cara Santa Maria?

  I just think none of us imagined that it went into this realm that it, that it clearly went into. It just seemed so far beyond the pale.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  And we shouldn't conflate those things either.

• 7:36Bob Novella?

  Exactly.

• 7:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 7:38Speaker 02

  But I had more conversations with Evan than, than you guys do. And so we've got to keep in mind, in 2016, remember what happened that year? There's been a massive political realignment in the United States. And all of us, this affected all of our politics, all of our views, the way we talk about it, et cetera. And I've been paying close attention to what Evan says over this time. And my sense has been that he has shifted considerably over the last 10 years. When he does talk, you know, talk to us about anything in the political realm, he's, you know, he's been very anti-Trump, very anti-MAGA, in, you know, when, when they are anti-science and anti-democracy and all, and authoritarian and all those things.

• 8:23Speaker 02

  So he was, I thought, okay, so Evan is kind of moving along with all of us in this direction in response to this political realignment that happened. But again, that was, that was all a systematic illusion that he was generating. Not that he, I think he honestly, he was, what he did say, I think, was sincere. He was just very selective in what he was saying. It was kind of disarming, wasn't it? Like, okay, yeah, yeah.

• 8:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think he is secretly MAGA. I don't think that is what the conversation we're having. But I also think it's important for people to understand that it's not like Evan was making similar statements to the statements he made on X and Steve was just editing them out of the show. Like, we were blindsided by this.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 9:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Like Evan has played it very, very, very close to the vest. And obviously that was a choice he made and it has, it had an impact on us.

• 9:16Jay Novella?

  Well, Kara, I think Evan knew, I mean, we are, we are not quiet people that keep our opinions to ourselves. He knew very clearly that anything that he brought up, it would have been a heated and very, you know, very complicated conversation to have with people like us, right?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  But they would have been great.

• 9:36Jay Novella?

  I don't disagree, Steve.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  I wish, right?

• 9:38Jay Novella?

  But I think that was part, it could be part of the calculus here.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was avoiding, he was avoiding the very conversations he needed to have to put a check on himself. So there's a certain amount of hubris in what he did, right? He didn't check himself. He didn't check with the people that are closest to him, that his skeptical colleagues, to bounce his, like, guys, I'm really affected by what happened in October and, you know, what do you think about this?

• 10:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I guess we never said that, did we? That like a lot of the, his words, a lot of this was sort of exacerbated by October 7th.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Oh, I think he's been radicalized in the last couple of years.

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And I, I can't help but see parallels here, you know, and I, this is not to, I don't want to psychoanalyze Evan. I only want to take him at his word. That's, that's the, the fair and just thing to do. But, you know, when I think about my perspective, coming from like a psychologist's perspective, it's so similar to what I see over and over when I work with patients who have this tendency to avoid feeling their feelings. Anytime something feels intense or difficult or conflicting, there is a very human tendency that some of us have to compartmentalize, to wallow, to tamp it down. But what ends up happening, it leaks out in very inopportune, dangerous and problematic ways.

• 11:00Cara Santa Maria?

  You cannot keep your feelings at bay forever. They will come out. And so the most healthy and appropriate thing to do is to feel them when they're happening and process them appropriately. And I think there are a lot of parallels with what was going on with Evan. He had a lot of thoughts and feelings. Instead of bringing them out into the daylight with us, he hid them.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  So let's talk a little bit about what we've been doing over the last 10 days or so. When this sort of came to our attention.

• 11:29Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we're just hanging out, you know.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, we have a lot going on and then we had this dumped on us. But we've been, you know, this has been consuming a lot of our time trying to deal with this. So first of all, we made a very concerted effort to be completely honest and transparent with Evan and supportive in the way that we can be, not of what he did or what he said, but personally. Because he's still our friend, you know. I had to remind people, I'm wearing three hats in this situation at all time. I'm his very close friend. I'm the producer of the SGU and I'm the CEO of a company that does all these things. And I have to think of those three things at the same time. But also, we are all members of a broader community as well. And so are we, you know, thinking of all these things at the same time, like, all right, Evan, let's talk about what happened here.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Let's talk about how we got to this place and how we can get you through this. Again, just both personally and professionally. And we were working on that. We were working on that very hard. Now, it became immediately clear, you know, how big a problem it was. And that this was going to be a long and painful process. But we were willing to work through this with him. He was sort of indefinitely suspended from the show. And, well, you know, to basically give us time to sort of get our bearings and figure out what we need to do to move forward.

• 12:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And for him to do some of this work.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  And just begin this work so I could see, like, all right, what am I starting with here? What's, how's this going to go? And everyone was trying, but he clearly had a long way to go. And then, just a couple of days ago, Evan called me and he said, "Steve, you know, given everything that's happening, I am going to resign from the SGU." So he, without, I mean, it's funny, it never even occurred to the rest of us that this was like a pathway, but...

• 13:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, we were all like, "What? Wait, what?"

• 13:06Speaker 02

  But Evan, and I think, in retrospect, like, "Yeah, that was actually the right decision to make." It's good in a number of ways, because, first of all, it just clarifies things. It does make it easier in terms of us managing this situation going forward. It also means, on the personal side, we could focus on Evan without it being tied to the professional and community aspects of it. It's like, we could say, you know what I mean? It's like, "I could talk to Evan about this without it being like his eventual return to the SGU weighing in the balance." It isn't.

• 13:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, yeah, his role on the show would have been a massive variable in that conversation, otherwise. But now it can just be out of humanity, out of, you know, out of a goal to better ourselves.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:49Jay Novella?

  I think it's important to note, just from reading all of the feedback, my god, there's been so many people commenting. A lot of people just felt that the breach in trust makes him incompatible with the show moving forward. And we discussed that extensively, you know? And we were trying to both make a good decision for Evan as his close friend, and also as the producers of the show, like, what is the right thing to do?

• 14:16Speaker 02

  So, I think that part, because again, I've been talking a lot with Evan about this. Evan, I think that's the first thing that he understood. And no one expected him to change his ideological views on a dime, right? That's going to be a long process. But the thing that he really got, and I think the thing that brought him to that decision, that he knew he just had to resign, was that he sort of breached a professional trust with our community and with us and his fellow rogues. That you cannot, as a science journalist, science communicator, as a skeptical activist, as a member of a podcast where we have a pretty intimate, even if it's a parasocial, one-way, whatever, it's a pretty intimate relationship with our community.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  You can't have this secret life where you have all this stuff going on that is, you know, anathema to skepticism and critical thinking. It was a complete breach of trust. It was a betrayal on many layers. And I think when he really fully wrapped his head around that, he's like, oh shit, I just, I can't do this. I have to resign.

• 15:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, it's like if you, as a physician, you know, who's always like helping your patients understand a science-based approach to their, to their neurological treatment, secretly was just, never saw a doctor and only saw chiropractors.

• 15:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, guys are taking homeopathy on the side. Never told you.

• 15:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, no, no, no. Like, and I, I just want to address something really quick to any listeners. So, so first of all, like, I'm not on Reddit, but my partner has been like updating me of some of the things that have been, that he's been reading. So, so part of the reason that I have been quote silent, because I'm hearing that a lot, like where's Kara in this? Like where's her perspective, blah, blah, blah. A, we have been having conversations, all of us, and we don't need to issue, you know, separate statements. Steve's issuing statements, he's not pulling those out of nowhere. We're, we're talking about these things.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Everyone's approving anything that I post online, from the crew, yeah.

• 16:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. B, I'm not, I'm not on Reddit, which is partially why I'm not engaging on Reddit. I don't, and I don't want to change that anytime soon.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  And it's fine.

• 16:16Cara Santa Maria?

  But see, I do want to share from a personal perspective. So, aside from the fact that I wasn't on the show last week because I was getting a colonoscopy endoscopy, which we can talk about in a bit if you'd like. And like, don't get weirdly conspiracy, some people are getting kind of conspiratorial about that, like this was an avoidance mechanic. No. Have you ever made an appointment for a colonoscopy? You can't just get one real quick.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  I know, I've been avoiding that decision for a whole year.

• 16:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, this has been on the books, you, I'm not going to change it, you know, so, so I had to go and do that. Unfortunately, so a lot of this information started to break for us, sort of just as we were leaving and getting home from a conference that we were at a couple of...

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, PsychCon.

• 16:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, PsychCon, like two weeks ago. Unfortunately, at the exact same time while we were actually there, my entire group at the hospital where I work, which is a very small, I mean, it's a huge hospital, but we have a very small department. We received word that my direct supervisor, who is also the direct supervisor of 35 of us, I think somewhere around 35 or 40 of us, that she had a recurrence of her cancer and that it very swiftly metastasized and that she had, she had to have a pretty severe surgery and had complications from that surgery and ultimately died due to that sequence of events. And it all happened very quickly. Many of us were shocked by it. We were really taken

• 17:41Cara Santa Maria?

  aback. It's been a very difficult week personally and professionally for myself and for my colleagues because we had very deep emotional ties to her, but also she was a linchpin within our department professionally. And so I've been dealing with all of the fallout from all of this complicated stuff with Evan on top of seeing my patients and having to be there for them, on top of my own personal grief and loss and the larger community of that. And that's why I've been MIA. And I think this goes to, this speaks to a larger concept that we've been grappling with collectively, which is you do not know what is going on

• 18:24Cara Santa Maria?

  behind closed doors in somebody's life, good or bad. You know, I think there are a lot of people who have asked, how could they not know? Clearly they knew and they were just, you know, keeping it from us or they were in cahoots or, no, no, no, no. Just like you never know which terrible person is committing a terrible, you know, assault. Like you hear these, you hear news of people all the time. Oh, he was a nice neighbor. I can't, how could he have possibly done this? Because you don't know. You just, you don't know. Just like you had no idea that I was dealing with all of this stuff in the background because it's personal and I didn't want to share it.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  But Kara, I think my perspective is for both Discord and Reddit is that that was a minority opinion.

• 19:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope so.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  I do think most people were like.

• 19:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I hope so.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Because I asked, the first thing I did was like, guys, give us a time to like, get, get our bearings here and make sure that we get our response right. And most people heard that. There's always going to be speculations and I understand it. This is an upsetting thing that happened. It's upsetting. The community, there's a lot of outpouring of support, which we greatly appreciate, a lot of outpouring concern for Evan, which I'm sure he also, he appreciates.

• 19:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  But of course, there's going to be some, you know, kind of speculation, maybe not the most charitable speculation, filling the uncertainty here. That's why we're trying to be as open about it as possible, and why we're talking about it for so long on this episode.

• 19:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  I do think it's important that we say, you know, something very, you know, surprising happened here, something very upsetting, and we're all trying to work through it. We're trying to work through it as the SGU, we're trying to work through it as his friend, we're trying to work through it as a community. But yeah, it's good to keep in mind, there's a lot, we're not all just living in podcast land over here, we all have lives going on in the background. It hasn't been that much time, we have a lot of stuff that we're dealing with over a very short period of time, more than you know.

• 20:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Jay Novella?

  I mean, it's been, it's been a huge emotional toll on all of us.

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 20:13Jay Novella?

  I mean, you know, as much as, um, you know, you'd like to think that we could handle things like this, like easily in stride or whatever. It has, it has been one of the most grueling week, you know, 10 days that we've had since Kara joined the podcast. I can't, can't tell you how many conversations and how many reactions and how many, you know, ways that we came at this and thought about it from every angle that we could. And then, you know, I'm like lying in bed at night and I just keep turning it over and over and over in my head, like, you know, the same questions you guys have. Because, you know, again, you know, we're telling you, you know, as it, you know, as it was in reality, like I still don't fully wrap my head around this. I still don't, there's a part of me that doesn't believe that it happened.

• 20:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 20:59Jay Novella?

  You know, I love Evan and I've known the guy for 30 years, you know, I want him to get better and I, and we all have hope that Evan is going to find his way out of this.

• 21:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And we're there, we're here for him to help him every step of the way.

• 21:12Jay Novella?

  Absolutely, absolutely. You know, and then the SGU component, you know, Steve and I just trying to figure out how to deal with this. And that the trip to Australia and New Zealand coming up. It's been a nightmare.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Timing is terrible.

• 21:26Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the timing has been horrific.

• 21:28Speaker 02

  I do, you know, did want to talk a little bit about our editorial policy, since that's kind of, that's partly at the center of all this. Yeah. And we do talk about it every now and then. It's just a good opportunity, I think, to have a little bit of a meta discussion about this. So, as we've said in piece, let me just wrap it all up. We are not a political podcast, which means it's not the focus of what we talk about. We talk about science, critical thinking, media savvy, reason, those kind of things. We try our best to be non-partisan. That doesn't mean that we do not address political issues. We do, all the time, because politics intrudes on science, and science informs politics,

• 22:10Speaker 02

  at least it should. And we're seeing recently, like, you know, if you have an anti-science administration, how much damage they could do to the infrastructure and institutions of science. We're talking about all of that, but we're trying to, as best as we can, to talk about it from a, you know, objective, scientific perspective, and not just like a narrow partisan perspective.

• 22:31Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  And that's definitely going to be our policy going forward. And everybody knows that. Definitely all the rogues know that. And, you know, maybe I need to be even tighter, sort of, and maybe policing those fuzzy boundaries. But that's, that's the editorial policy of the show. And then, again, it's sort of, the expectation is that we are going to model good skepticism, critical thinking, and also just being honest, ethical people in our, our lives, you know, because we are part of a community. And we have put ourselves out there, you know, as, as, you know, prominent people in that community. And that's, of course, the thing that I think Evan most violated, was that, you know, not only our editorial policy, but also just that, again, that trust in the community, that perception in the community.

• 23:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  And again, just letting himself get radicalized without, without having the humility to address that. The final question I think we need to talk about, because there's been so much speculation about this, is how do we move forward here? Again, Evan sort of clarified things for us by just simply resigning, which again, I think was the right thing to do, and we're all grateful that he did that. But, you know, when Rebecca left the show, we went, took us six months to settle on Carrie, even though, I know we've told you, Carrie, you were the frontrunner from day one, but still.

• 23:50Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, you, you, you did a bunch of, uh,

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Interviews slash.

• 23:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  So, yeah, slash auditions, I should say. So, I, you know, we've had to think about this, among everything else, like, what do, what do we do going forward? We're not going to make any quick decisions, don't expect any quick or rapid decisions here, we're going to take our time. This is, this doesn't happen often on the SGU, right? We've had the same five rogues for the last 11 years.

• 24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  And, yeah, so.

• 24:21Bob Novella?

  Jeez.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  In a way, we're, you know, we're going to.

• 24:23Bob Novella?

  Shouldn't we be retiring soon?

• 24:25Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's part of our thinking going forward. I mean, seriously, is that we have an opportunity to, you know, rare opportunity to see, well, how can we use this situation to improve the SGU? And some things come to mind, it would be nice if we had more diversity on the show. And I mean that in every possible way, like diversity of background, perspective, not just like race and gender, but also maybe even country of origin, whatever, there's all kinds of ways in which there could be, we could bring different perspectives to the show. I'd like to bring younger talent on the show as well. So, we're, and everything's on the table, which is again, it's a rare opportunity where you could say that, where we have a situation where, hey, we could rethink everything at this point.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  So we are going to take our time to do that. We are open to suggestions, as always. It's going to be a process, and it's a busy summer for us, so don't expect anything to happen rapidly. But we will move forward. I think we will come out of this stronger than we went into it. And again, I think we're going to leverage this as an opportunity going forward. And I'm kind of looking forward to it, actually.

• 25:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 02

  All right, well, thanks everyone out there for listening to us. I mean, you know, it's hard to know exactly what to say. We actually have a lot more going on than what we could cram into the opening of our show. This has been a painful emotional process. We do appreciate the support that we've gotten. But we will move forward, and in fact, we're going to move forward on this very show. We're going to, I know, we have to transition from this to a regular show. Cara, did you want to tell us more about your colonoscopy?

• 26:01Cara Santa Maria?

  You want to hear about it, you guys?

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Was it good? Was it no polyps?

• 26:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah. So first, I want to ask, you guys have all done this before.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Have you done a colonoscopy endoscopy?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've had both times.

• 26:14Bob Novella?

  No.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Both times you had both? Okay, yeah.

• 26:16Bob Novella?

  One entrance.

• 26:18Cara Santa Maria?

  So mine, I'm getting a little early. I think the guidance here in the US is to start at 45, but because I'm iron deficient and because I don't have a uterus, because I'm post hysterectomy, so I don't have a period, and because I eat meat, we're all like, where, why can't I, why don't I have enough iron? This doesn't make sense. So one of the ways to look into that is to get a colonoscopy endoscopy, which by the way, there's a chance I'll have to do a camera swallow test to look at my small intestine next, because they can't get to that with an endoscopy or colonoscopy. I mean, the only thing I'm really going to say is, I think that all of the anxiety around this procedure at this point in time is not necessary. I think maybe histor-, you know, there's the saying, like, I'd rather get a colonoscopy. Like, there are a lot of things I would rather.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  It's no biggie.

• 27:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I would rather get a colonoscopy than do many things.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Anesthesia is so good now.

• 27:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It's amazing. And so, and the prep isn't that bad.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  That's gotten better, too.

• 27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, this might be my unique experience. I can't speak for, you know, my hospital had like five different options and you could choose. The prep that I chose was a very straightforward prep. It was just like, basically like seven doses of Miralax, mixed in with an electrolyte drink of my choosing, the night before and then the morning of.

• 27:28Bob Novella?

  Seven?

• 27:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's a lot of Miralax, but it goes in perfectly clear. You cannot taste it. It's the flavor of whatever, Deteraid, Pedialyte, whatever you chose.

• 27:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Cara Santa Maria?

  It was very easy. I never felt sick once. I mean, it is a weird experience, basically. This is how I always, you guys are gonna be so grossed out. Basically peeing out of your butt is a very weird experience when you don't also have norovirus. I know all about that. Yes, that's the weird thing that you-

• 27:55Bob Novella?

  Well, not so much peeing, more of like towards the fire hose spectrum, but okay.

• 27:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, yes, just clear, like it's very straight, it's like, but the thing is, the only other time in my life I've done that is when I was violently ill with norovirus. So when you're doing it, but you're not sick, it's kind of an interesting experience. Like, you're like, this is throwing everything off. Like, I feel very strange. But anyway, long story short, I get there, she was amazing at placing the IV, she talked me through, my pre-op nurse talked me through everything. They took me in very quickly. My operating nurse and my GI specialist slash surgeon and my anesthesiologist were all incredible. And then my post-op nurse was amazing, all women, by the way, which was a wonderful experience. I will say, those nurses are phenomenal because every patient they see is dehydrated.

• 28:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And so finding that vein, I was like, how do you do that? She was like, I do like seventeen a day. I was like, okay. And yeah, it's, I just got propofol anesthesia, you know, she said, you're gonna be out in like, no time. And then I was out and I woke up and it was like a nice little nap. Would have never have known anything happened.

• 29:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 29:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Felt great. And yeah, it was like, actually one of the easier doctor's appointments I've had. And I just share that, and I know not everybody has the same experience, but I just share this because if you've been putting it off, because you're afraid of the prep or you're afraid of the anesthesia, or you're afraid of just what it means to undergo, it's- It's actually a lot easier than it used to be.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's no biggie now. You should do it.

• 29:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Really, really, you should.

• 29:27Speaker 02

  It could save your life.

• 29:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It can save your life, absolutely.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Which drives me nuts how there's this movement on TikTok now, TikTok now, to tell people not to get colonoscopy. It's some kind of conspiracy. Screw that. Get your colonoscopy.

• 29:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's infuriating.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Don't listen to idiots on TikTok telling you not to get basic preventive care. My goodness.

• 29:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Ugh.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  All right. All right, guys. Jay, you paying attention?

• 29:51Jay Novella?

  I'm here.

• 29:52Speaker 02

  Pay attention over here. I'm gonna talk to you about paying attention.

• 29:58Bob Novella?

  I see what you did there, Steve. Nice.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  So, we've talked about this on the show before a little bit, that the neuroscience, the neuroanatomical correlates, what's happening in your brain when you're paying attention? Did you even know that attention is a thing that your brain has to do?

• 30:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  Of course, even just as a clinical neurologist, very aware of this because when the brain gets injured, attention is the first thing to go. It's like the canary in the coal mine. And, and why is that, Bob, do you think?

• 30:29Bob Novella?

  Because...

• 30:29Speaker 02

  So, let's say you get just a tri-

• 30:30Bob Novella?

  Why would it be the first thing to go?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Traumatic brain injury, right? You hit your head, you get knocked unconscious, you have sort of diffuse injury to the brain. It's like the first thing, the most affected function is attention.

• 30:42Bob Novella?

  Is it all in the, um, the outer layer of the brain? The, uh, was it cerebrum?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Not a bad guess, but no. I said, I said diffuse, so it's be-

• 30:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, part of it is. I mean, part of it in the, in the frontal lobes, but I think are, what is what you're getting at, uh, Steve, the fact that it requires so much interconnectivity?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Uh, that and just energy, right? It is the most de-resourced demanding thing that your brain does. And yet, we don't really think about it. It happens in the background. And I'm including in that not only just directing your attention, but also filtering out all of the extraneous information and attending to only a subset of that information. And so

• 31:22Bob Novella?

  That's why, that's why you can be, you could focus for so long that you actually feel exhausted

• 31:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:27Bob Novella?

  Because of that.

• 31:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and just, just like, I deal with this a lot with, with patients that I work with who, after a surgery or after some major toll on their body, they don't understand why they can't get through their workday. They're like, I'm just sitting all day.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And I'm like, yeah, because your brain is so metabolically active. It requires so much just fuel. It requires so much sugar to function.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  You get mental fatigue.

• 31:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, and your body is trying to use all of that fuel to heal from your surgery. Like, it doesn't have enough left for your brain. Um, it's, yeah, it's, it's a lot.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  And there are people who have attention deficit, right? Attention deficit disorder. And so even when they're optimally functioning for them, they have impaired ability to manage their attention. And so knowing exactly what's causing that obviously helps us address it. So this is all bringing me to a recent study, which adds to our knowledge of the neuroscience of attention. The classic understanding is that attention, as Kara said, is mostly frontal lobe, and it's mostly top-down kind of control, like executive function. Um, although there are, it's recognized that there are two basic types of attention, right?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  There's the top-down, goal-oriented attention, when you're doing work, for example. But there's also bottom-up stimulus response attention. Somebody throws something at you and you respond to it, right? So there, there's always these, these two types. Uh, like, when you're reading a book, you're focusing on the words that you are reading. That's your top-down, goal-oriented attention. But if some, a loud noise goes off, that will involuntarily grab your attention, right?

• 33:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 33:12Speaker 02

  But it turns out that this goal-oriented attention also has some other structures that are involved. Um, and this is a study actually in mice. And what they were doing is basically looking at the parts of the brain that were active during different, um, tasks that they gave the mice. I always like Reading about like, what do you have a mouse do to see if they're paying attention?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  So what they did was they trained the mice to pay attention to certain stimuli. And if they hit, they pushed their nose against the screen. When the stimuli appeared, they would get a treat. So they would have to pay attention, waiting for that stimuli. And it would either be-

• 33:56Cara Santa Maria?

  It's very easy to train a mouse to do that if it if they're food oriented.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Now, the stimuli would always occur in front of them. And on the sides, and their peripheral vision was distracting information. So the question was, how well are they able to filter out the distracting information? And pay attention to the information that's going to give them the treat? Right? Does that make sense?

• 34:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, what information were they actually looking for?

• 34:18Speaker 02

  A trained visual cue. Like when the square shows up, you touch it, you know? Or whatever. So then what they did was they inhibited a specific part of the brainstem. To see, called the PLTI, that's the name of the structure. And to see what effect it had on their ability to do the task. And it turns out, so these neurons in the PLTI contain inhibitory neurons. That connect to the superior calliculus. Now, the superior calliculus is a structure in the midbrain where we know it is involved with visual processing. And we thought originally going back, you know, it was only involved with visual processing.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  But it turns out, it's actually a main relay center for all sensory input. And in fact, there's visual and auditory and visual spatial information. All sort of going through the superior calliculus. And this is actually a very important mechanism for our multi-sensory processing. Does that make sense? And so what they found was that there's these inhibitory neurons in the PLTI that go to the superior calliculus. And to actually inhibit distracting information.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Right, that makes sense?

• 35:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Ah, and so did they, they knocked, they inhibited the inhibitory neurons?

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Yes, so they inhibit the PLTI, and then now the might, the mouse, the mice cannot inhibit the distracting information.

• 35:49Cara Santa Maria?

  They gave the mice ADHD?

• 35:51Speaker 02

  They gave them ADHD, and they, and their ability to do the test tanked, right? They're, they could not filter out the distractors. Then they, they allowed it to function normally, and they returned to their baseline performance.

• 36:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Right, and they, there's a little detail where they say that the effect was mainly, so the effect of the PLTI was mainly to increase the accuracy and categorical precision of the decision boundary separating the target from low priority distractors. Bob, that's some of that jargon that you love, right? Yeah, right. Where it's like, when you understand every word in that sentence, like, it's perfect. It exactly says what's happening.

• 36:30Cara Santa Maria?

  And it perfectly describes, like, what my partner does when he is reading.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:36Cara Santa Maria?

  You know what I mean?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, he cannot filter out the, just the important part of the sentence, or the word he's on. He's got, he keeps getting distracted by the words around it, and so then it makes it so that what he's reading is impaired, and is like, he's reading the wrong words, and he's reading them out of order.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  So, yeah, right.

• 36:55Cara Santa Maria?

  How do we turn this into a drugs deal?

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Well, that's the, that's the ultimate goal, right? So, anyway, to further just, to describe, uh, explain that jargon, what they're saying is that it, what, it helps in, um, when you're trying to, cause again, you know, if you're trying to, to pick a, an image, they would give, you could have an image that looks sort of like the target image, right? So that's the boundary, you know, separating the target from the low priority distractors. You, how do you, how precise can you delineate between the target and a distractor? As they get closer and closer and closer together, when does your ability to separate those two things break down? And the PLTI helped the mice accurately make that categorical separation between...

• 37:41Speaker 02

  You know, the, the target and similar looking distractors. Does that make sense?

• 37:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Cool.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  All right. So because this isn't a mouse and because it's in the, a part of the brain that's extremely primitive, evolutionarily speaking, and an ancient part of the vertebrate brain, they think that this may be, this exists in all vertebrates. This is just common to all vertebrate brains, which means it probably exists in human brains.

• 38:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we got it too.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  Right. Um, so, but of course we have to confirm that because, you know, our brains have evolved quite a bit and maybe it's there, but not important anymore. Who knows, right? So we have to confirm this finding. We have to confirm that it is meaningful in humans and see how it affects be the, this kind of attentional behavior, separating things you're trying to pay attention to from distracting information that's not important, right? And if, if that holds up, then it's possible that this may become a new target for a subset of people with ADHD because now it, we have to think, and, and to back up a little bit, because I know I've said this on the show before, but it's a really important concept.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  For some diseases, they start out with a clinical description, right? This disease is, I, is defined as having these signs and symptoms. And in neurology, that usually means that there's some neurological function that's impaired, but there may be many underlying causes for that function being impaired, both anatomically and biologically.

• 39:18Cara Santa Maria?

  There, there likely are.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Like the brain is complicated. Yeah.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. We're almost always dealing with a category of diseases, you know, like migraines are a category of disease. ALS is a category of disease. Multiple sclerosis is a category of disease. It's not one disease. And so maybe ADHD, similarly, maybe there are subtypes that are like executive function ADHD and PLTI, you know, brainstem ADHD. And of course, if you're treating one like it's the other, it's not going to be effective, right?

• 39:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  Um, so stimulants may not. Work in this subtype. Who knows?

• 39:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Or maybe that's this is the subtype for whom the stimulants don't work as well as they do for some.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  As well or at all, whatever. So, but there may be some other thing that we could do to, um, to make people with this type of, of ADD. Because usually, I would imagine this is not the hyperactive type. This is probably the inattentive type.

• 40:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  Um, but there may be a subset within the inattentive type, you know, where you, you know, again, you have the frontal lobe version versus the PLTI version, the, the, the brainstem version. So.

• 40:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Or both. Maybe this during evolution, or not during evolution, during development. Yeah. Affects some frontal lobe function. You know, there may be a downstream change from these neurons too.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  And that's what we see happen in general as, as we learn more about the underlying pathophysiology of these diseases. We start to redefine them based upon their underlying cause rather than just how they look superficially clinically. Right? So hopefully we will develop a diagnostic scheme for ADD that reflects the underlying neuroanatomical cause. And that will direct treatment.

• 41:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Very clear.

• 41:01Jay Novella?

  Steve, I have a question.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, go ahead.

• 41:03Jay Novella?

  How do they know a mouse isn't paying attention?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Because again, I told you the, the model they used was how well they were able to press the button on the target. You know, push their nose against the screen when they see the target and not be distracted by non-target images.

• 41:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't help but point out that the rogue with ADHD asked that question.

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:27Jay Novella?

  Well, I can give you guys some insight.

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 41:30Jay Novella?

  About the paying attention thing.

• 41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 41:32Jay Novella?

  And, and again, this isn't like exactly the way it manifests in everyone that has ADHD, but people that have ADHD can slip into like an alternate dimension with their attention. It's incredible. Like I could be sitting on the couch and I just go into a thought. And my wife can be talking to me. My kids can be bouncing off the ceiling and I perceive none of it.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  That's your excuse, huh?

• 41:58Jay Novella?

  Well, it's worked so far, Steve. So, yeah, but it is, it is interesting. I mean, you know, these are some of the things where you could say, hey, that's like a, that's a perk, you know, because you can hyper-focus. But it really does take, you know, it just bleeds away all the other reality around you at times. So you can be in...

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're hyper-focusing on what you want to focus on, and you're not managing your attention. You're not shifting it to something new that you need to be paying attention to, like your wife talking to you. Yeah.

• 42:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and that's just a, a general complaint about the novella genome.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, tell us how to make a queen bee.

• 42:41Jay Novella?

  Okay, Steve, to answer your question, first you have to create the universe.

• 42:45Bob Novella?

  Nice one.

• 42:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this is, this is like, I think, to be very cool. It's very illustrative of how science functions. Because even when we have answers, you know, scientists and researchers are always looking to have further understanding of things. And that's exactly what happened here. So what is the common understanding about, you know, how is a, a queen bee brought into being? First of all, you know, bees kind of function as a single organism, even though, you know, there are individuals. They are really all communicating with each other, and they all are following, you know, rules, or however you, however you would define that, that shape all their activity, and they are working with each

• 43:29Jay Novella?

  other. The current knowledge has been that bee larvae become a queen because the, the queen is being fed something called royal jelly.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:39Jay Novella?

  Do you guys know what that is?

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. There's a whole pseudoscience based on royal jelly.

• 43:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, there is. Yeah.

• 43:44Jay Novella?

  Well, it's pretty cool. Like, royal jelly is one of those weird insect things. So first of all, you know, it's thick, it's whitish, it's a nutrient-rich secretion.

• 43:54Speaker 02

  Gets everywhere, it's sticky.

• 43:55Jay Novella?

  Gets everywhere. It's, it comes out of the worker bee, the worker honeybee's glands in their heads, right? So they're just excreting...

• 44:05Jay Novella?

  Royal jelly out of their faces. It's not honey, you know, honey's made from nectar. Royal jelly is a, it's a specialized like larval food.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  Can I say, by the way, that whenever I see like science fiction movies where they have aliens and they're so human. And you think there are animals on earth that are way more alien than that thing that you're trying to convince me. We have animals that squirt jelly out of their head to feed their queen. I mean.

• 44:33Jay Novella?

  So this stuff is a concoction of water. It has proteins, there's sugars in there, there's fats, there's minerals, there's a small amount of vitamins. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty decent food source. I wouldn't, I wouldn't think it would be for humans, but. So they feed this to any larva, could be anyone. Does, there's nothing special about the, the egg. And then what happens? It turns into a queen, right? This was what we previously thought. And when we say that, like it, it literally sends that larva down a very different developmental pathway than a standard worker bee. Now, all honeybee larvae get some royal jelly early in their life. This is like, you know, one of the things that they give. It's a food source for them.

• 45:16Jay Novella?

  But the larvae that are, that they select to become queens, they keep feeding it to them throughout their development. So, you know, as the adult queen continues to eat it, it had, it was thought that this was, you know, one of the factors or a primary factor in why that larva turns into a queen. However, we are talking about this today because there was a new study in nature and they found evidence that that is not the complete story. So royal jelly is still an important factor, but according to the research, queen bees, you know, they're, they're also shaped by literally the structure, like the cell that they, that they gestate in. It's built specifically to develop a queen.

• 46:00Jay Novella?

  So a typical structure in a beehive is like the hexagonal, you know, five sided thing that we're all very used to seeing. You know, that is not where they're stored. They actually have a separate little cocoon that they make for them that hangs off the bottom of the hive. And it's peanut shaped. That little thing that they make specifically to, to grow a queen has some properties to it that they found that we did not know about. So the future queen is.

• 46:27Jay Novella?

  So that peanut shaped chamber that they put the larva into, what's different about it? Well, first of all, the wax that's that is it's created out of is not just like standard honeycomb wax. It's a special wax, has different properties. It actually retains heat better and it get the chemistry of it is very different. It's not as dense, it's a little more flexible. It just overall has a different chemical profile and it also appears to be suited for, you know, like keeping the larvae warm and moist during that developmental period. And they tested it, and this is what this is something that really matters here.

• 47:08Jay Novella?

  They raised the queen Destin larva with the same food, but changed the wax environment. Right? So they just took a, you know, a queen larva. They kept doing everything that the worker bees were doing, but they just popped it into a regular wax cell. Right? And the, the queens that grew from that did not grow as large. They weren't very, they weren't as robust, they just weren't up to it.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  I sense a new pseudoscience here, Jay. There's going to be a whole queen wax based pseudoscience.

• 47:38Jay Novella?

  Oh, the products are already coming out, Steve.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  You have to do your ear candling with queen wax, not just regular old shitty wax.

• 47:45Jay Novella?

  So they call it the worker cell wax. You know, this is like the they'll eat cake level of people down in the hive. You know, like they don't get the good stuff, but that worker cell wax just does not do the same thing to the larva. Now I'm curious, of course, there's so many other tests that they can do with this. Like would that wax cell that they make for the queen only produce a queen? Or is it, could they be used for other things? I don't know. It's just, it's such a cool dimension here that they've added to it. They also identified that there are these young worker bees that seem to be specialized for building these cells. They, they call them the queen cell builders. I mean, what a unique name and they're generally younger than the other builders.

• 48:29Jay Novella?

  They run hotter, they have a hotter body temperature. They show different gene activity while doing the job. They're not a permanent cast, like these are just. Certain subset of bees that that come about when they have to build the chamber for the queen and then they go away.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  They should call them the queen's guard.

• 48:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and they so they do appear, they just shift temporarily into these specialized roles when the colony needs them. And that's what's so weird about honeybees. That's so weird about the these bees, like, they literally can change who and what they are in the moment when the hive needs it. And then they go back to being just regular worker bees. And, you know, there's a million questions in there I have, like, who gets picked? How? How? What? What part of the hive makes a decision that these certain bees are going to get picked? You know, I know that that pheromones play a big part, but who, you know, what? Where are these decisions being made?

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I suspect it probably is a diffuse metabolic decision. I doubt it's like, it's not like there's a foreman of the colony who's saying, hey, you go here, you go there, you're now a queen bee, you know?

• 49:34Jay Novella?

  So you could think of, you know, a beehive or any, any group of bees as a super organism, because

• 49:41Speaker 02

  They're a colony organism.

• 49:42Jay Novella?

  They, yeah, they really do function as one. And, you know, it's, it's incredible to think that, you know, all of these, all of these things that happen inside the hive are coordinated and they're, they're constantly working and they seem to all know exactly what they're supposed to be doing at every given time. You know, as an adult male with ADHD, I'm largely confused in my life. You know what I mean? Like, I wish, I wish I had some pheromones in my room that were just telling me, like, what to do from moment to moment.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Jay, you could always join the board collective.

• 50:13Jay Novella?

  That's true. I gotta look them up.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  I recommend it. All right. Thanks, Jay. All right, Kara, tell us how the Trump administration is going to cancel wind projects.

• 50:25Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I was like, I love that you put in our show notes for this week, it just says canceling wind. I was like, the wind is canceled? Oh, no. Um, no, but this is actually

• 50:35Speaker 02

  No more wind.

• 50:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, like, I'm making light of something that is Making me very angry and it's making me very angry for for multiple reasons. Let's get one level deep. Okay. Did you guys know that the Trump administration is about to pay $765 million to cancel four wind turbine product projects?

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's not the first time.

• 51:01Bob Novella?

  It's just.

• 51:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Not the first time.

• 51:02Bob Novella?

  This so ridiculous.

• 51:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, two and a half billion, two and a half billion across all these different companies and all these different deals. So for context, these deals were in place during the Biden administration. So this money has already been, you know, exchanged. There has already been land that was leased and there have already been deals in place to start developing and building these wind farms, basically these big turbine projects in different aspects or different areas of the United States. This specific one, the 745 or 765 million dollar four projects that I'm referring to

• 51:44Cara Santa Maria?

  right now are in, uh, let's see, New York, the central coast of California and the Gulf of Maine. They were all in the early stages of development, so they hadn't really started to move forward and they were likely going to be killed anyway. But basically what what the Trump administration is doing is using our tax dollars to reimburse this company, Invenergy, $765 million, which is a little less than what the company had originally paid for the leases. But it doesn't end there. Like, if that doesn't make you angry enough, guess what the deal is also for? It's not just to cancel wind turbines.

• 52:27Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so that Invenergy will then put the money towards the development of five new natural gas fire, uh, fire power plants.

• 52:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So we are paying tax dollar money to kill deals that are already in the place for green energy and induce more carbon emissions.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  The hypocrisy here too is just amazing because aren't these supposed to be the free market people who want the market to work things out and are against and what they're essentially doing is putting their big fat thumb on the scale to say no, kill this project and burn more gas over here.

• 53:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And the thing that's so infuriating is there's a quote here, let me find it. There's a quote here by Interior Secretary, because this is the Department of the Interior that's sort of like spearheading all of this. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who said, quote, "The offshore wind leases were sold under the assumptions that taxpayers would indefinitely subsidize costly, unreliable projects," which obviously is a very weighted quote, but then basically they're turning around and doing the same thing. They're doubling down on their taxpayer dollar to then subsidize dirty energy projects.

• 53:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, I should be clear here that part of the deal is also, at least in this specific deal, is also to invest in geothermal plants, which are lower emission approaches and they are more renewable. Interestingly, the Trump administration does seem to favor geothermal. It's pretty much, I think, the only, can you guys think of any other renewable energy approaches that this administration is promoting other than geothermal?

• 54:19Speaker 02

  No, I mean, they do support nuclear, but that's not really renewable.

• 54:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, of course. Nuclear, nuclear.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  That's low carbon, but it's not renewable.

• 54:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So they're low carbon, yes, but of course, geothermal is also renewable. And so, as I mentioned before, you know, this is just one in a series of deals. This one is, you know, a $765 million deal, but it takes the collective cancellation and again, these are taxpayer dollar payouts for these companies that had these leases up to $2.5 billion. So it's not just we're not going to pay for renewable energy, it's we are so spiteful about the concept of renewable energy that we are going to pay out these deals. It's the opposite of we're going to cut these projects and abandon them and not pay for future development.

• 55:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It's we're actually going to pay these companies back to not build.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  It is spiteful and it's so disruptive to the industry because now they can't like from administration to administration, they don't know if their long-term investments are going to be viable. It's terrible for business. Uncertainty is the worst thing for these kinds of businesses.

• 55:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Jay Novella?

  And it just seems to be like, it just all seems to be like a revenge motivation. Because this, you know, the statistics show how beneficial these are. There's no reason to not, there's no reason to not be funding those wind term by turbine projects. I mean, they're, they're effective.

• 55:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, these are offshore and they're big, which are the more effective ones. They, they're more efficient and they, they had the potential of generating a lot of cheap electricity. I mean, this is, this is the way we should be going. This is the way the market is spontaneously going to.

• 56:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's, that's the thing that I think we have to remember here is that this, this new contract or this new change to the contract is with a company called Invenergy. They are really playing ball, but at least they negotiated to be able to invest in, in geothermal and not just natural gas. But the, the contracts that have been turned over and paid back out previous to this had a clause in them that they have to only invest in, in natural gas or in fossil fuel energy attempts. And it's, and also it's not just American companies here. I think we, we also, we, I shouldn't be using the royal we here.

• 56:45Cara Santa Maria?

  The administration did the same thing with a French energy company. So it's exactly as you mentioned, Steve, like we're not just talking about American companies trust in their own government to commit to long-term projects, but these are also, you know, I think they have geopolitical consequences as well. When, when international or multinational companies are looking to invest, they're just going to choose not to invest here.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  But also just imagine that you could only build fossil fuel, you know, resources. And of course, this is all based upon Trump saying that he thinks climate change is a hoax. So it's all based on science denial. Whether he believes it or not, who can ever know. But the bottom line is, climate change denial is pseudoscience.

• 57:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I think we also have to remember that this stuff isn't, it's just like when we talk about, I don't know, a good analogy, I think, is, is conservation efforts across the globe when it comes to critically endangered species. When we talk about energy necessity, you can't just paint everything with a broad brush. Like, specific to these deals, a lot of these communities, especially in the, in the Northeast, were relying on these wind farms. This, this was part of their calculus to meet their energy demands. And so there's a quote here from Hillary Bright, who is the executive director of an offshore wind advocacy group, who said, "Replacing coastal offshore wind with geothermal or natural gas infrastructure in another region does nothing to address rising ratepayer

• 58:17Cara Santa Maria?

  affordability concerns, reliability challenges, or potential gaps in power supply in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic." Because basically, in their deal, they said, "Okay, you need to make these natural gas and geothermal plants," and they're in different states.

• 58:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They're like in the Midwest. Like, that's not helpful to these communities that are blindsided by this. So just across the board, this is just yet another example of a series, I think, of decisions by this administration that are going to have knock-on effects that leave people in more harm and leave people needing more. It's a, it's a waste of money, it's ideologic only, it is not science-based. And it reminds me of, do you remember those old studies where, back when we were moving over to LEDs, and they were giving people the choice from an incandescent or an LED, and then they were measuring hard political persuasion?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And the people who had the most extremist views were willing to choose an incandescent bulb, even if it costs more than the LED?

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Just, just to make a point.

• 59:18Speaker 02

  It becomes like a culture war.

• 59:20Cara Santa Maria?

  What that point is, I still don't understand exactly.

• 59:23Speaker 02

  It's like making a political statement with your light bulbs. I mean... Come on.

• 59:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Come on.

• 59:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, it's crazy. This is another one of those issues where politics intrudes upon science, right?

• 59:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, 100%.

• 59:35Speaker 02

  Science denial is sort of winning the day here. It is, it is so counterproductive. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moves on and leaves us in the dust. It's like, it's not, it's not good politics, it's not good policy, it's not good for our economy, it's not good for, you know, for climate change, it's not good for anybody.

• 59:51Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not good for the people. The people will suffer from this.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Um, except maybe the fossil fuel industry that, you know, that Trump said, give me money and I'll do whatever you want to do.

• 1:00:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's good for the pockets of the people who already have a lot of money and power.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  All right. Bob, give us an update on the International Space Station. It's going to be there for decades to come.

• 1:00:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I've been seeing discussions pop up and, and news items popping up about, about the now essentially inevitable demise of the ISS, the International Space Station. Thought it'd be interesting just to dive into some of these details. Of course, the history, we, we're, you know, generally familiar with the history of the International Space Station. Who remembers, I remember this day when, when the first module was launched, that was towards the end of November in 1998. And this, the first module, I mean, I had forgotten the name of this, but the, this was the Russian-built Zarya module. It was US-funded, but Russian-built. The name means sunrise. And this, this is the first component that really went up, that provided the initial

• 1:00:56Bob Novella?

  power and propulsion, which is obviously the, you know, critical components that you need for this. And then by around 2000, I think, is when the time that astronauts basically started living there and spending serious time there. And now it's like basically the size of a football field and it has a mass of about 400 and 400-plus metric tons. This is a behemoth in orbit around the earth. The legacy of the ISS, I mean, it's not over yet. I mean, there's still definitely, you know, a few years of, I think around 2031 is when they're thinking of de-orbiting it. But, so we still got some time here to do some, to, to even improve on its already dramatic legacy. You know, one of its legacies is clearly going to be biology, because when you're

• 1:01:36Bob Novella?

  Orbiting the earth, you have a unique microgravity laboratory that you can use 24/7. So studying the, over the years, we've studied the impact on the human body to microgravity. And we're learning how bones lose density and how muscles atrophy when you're in that environment. And certainly, this information has helped us to better treat and understand osteoporosis here on earth. But also beyond biology, biology, there's also experiments on climate change that they've done over the years. Material science, physics, and more. But one of my favorite legacies, I think, is the idea that the ISS showing that nations can work together pursuing science. And these are nations that don't generally get along anywhere else but in low earth orbit.

• 1:02:21Bob Novella?

  So from this perspective, I think the ISS is as much of a diplomacy success as it was, or it is, an engineering success. So that's something that might not be generally recognized. But scientists get along, and they have been getting along in low earth orbit. So then, why are we scuttling this thing then? Why are we trying to get, why are we planning on getting rid of it? Well, I mean, the structure itself is kind of creaky. And I'll say that it's become increasingly problematic. They've identified many small leaks and cracks in some of the older modules. I have kept reading about air leaks that have been identified in certain areas. And in the past, NASA has even had to initiate the safe haven posture,

• 1:03:05Bob Novella?

  where they make the astronauts isolate themselves inside docked spacecraft. Especially, this was done during, you know, there were very strict precautions during, you know, if there's like a lot of heavy maintenance or repair work going on, especially by the Russian cosmonauts. So that's when they would have to initiate this safe haven posture, just to be extra, extra safe for worst-case scenarios. But, you know, with all of these issues, they have been able to manage the maintenance of the space station. And it's been going okay, but the repair costs are rising year after year. That's definitely getting worse and worse. And also, by the time 2030 rolls around, the ISS will be well beyond its design life. So, you know, we got a...

• 1:03:46Bob Novella?

  More out of it than we had initially anticipated. So we got that going for it at least. And also NASA just has, I don't know how to say, how do I say it? They just have far less interest in managing and being 100% responsible for such a thing, right? It's kind of going to follow its plan that it has with the moon, right? You know, letting private companies build their own commercial space stations in the future. And some companies are already out there. They're already doing the designing. So they, they want to follow that template that they followed with, you know, after Apollo, with the second major push to get, you know, to get boots on the moon.

• 1:04:26Bob Novella?

  And also, don't forget, I mean, NASA spends about $3 billion a year on the ISS. And that's, you know, $3 billion, that's not just going to disappear. That money then will be available for other things like deep space exploration, specifically the Artemis program. So that's, so that money will be put to good, to good use, hopefully. Who knows in this, this age of like budgets? We don't know what's going to be happening necessarily with NASA budgets in the near future, but we'll, we'll see. So, all right, so how are they going to de-orbit this guy? This is something that you, you can't just like wing it, right? Because, or you can't leave it to just like let the orbit decay and see what happens. Cause this thing is so big that you've got to absolutely be as safe as possible.

• 1:05:09Bob Novella?

  Cause even though, you know, a lot of it's going to burn up and during re-entry, there's going to be still a lot of stuff that could potentially hit the land. You got to absolutely make sure that it, that it lands in a very safe place. So what they're going to do is they're going to actually contract, NASA is contracting with SpaceX to develop a US de-orbit vehicle. And this is fascinating. I like calling this, this de-orbit vehicle a space station killer. Cause that's exactly what it's doing here. Now, Jay, you're like this, this is, this US de-orbit vehicle is a Dragon derived spacecraft. And one of the cool things about it is that it's got a much more powerful propulsion trunk, as I heard it described. So we're talking 46 Draco thrusters.

• 1:05:52Bob Novella?

  It's going to have six times the propellant that it would typically have and roughly three To four times the power generation and storage of the of the standard design. So this is going to be quite a beast that that essentially docks with the ISS and pushes the station towards the earth. And it's going to just like kind of guide it through the ISS through. It's kind of like they described it as like a death spiral. It's it's just not going to push it down to the earth. It's they just it's described, I've seen it described as this death spiral. And this expect this to happen around 2031. I was wondering why it would take so long if this is going to happen. And if this process is going to start in 2030, why is it going to? You know, why aren't they expecting this until 2031?

• 1:06:32Bob Novella?

  But the sequence of one, you know, the sequences that they are planning to make this happen is kind of complicated. So one of the the sequences that that have been tossed around is like is having the final crew depart the space station. Once it's been lowered to about 330 kilometers. So they they're going to lower it and get it at that point, you know, as low as 330 kilometers. Then the the crew is going to depart. There will be good, that's it. There'll be no more people on the station ever again. And then after that, it's going to go through potentially months of just a natural orbital decay before this final deorbit operations at at lower altitude take place. So that's kind of one of the plans that they have. But who knows if they're going to alter that a little bit here and there? Hard to say right now.

• 1:07:17Bob Novella?

  This following point here was really interesting. So where are they? Where is it going to land? Where are they going to dump this? And they're going to make they're going to aim it anyway towards a place called Point Nemo. This is it's the most remote location in the South Pacific Ocean. Have you guys heard of Point Nemo? No. Yeah, I love the name. So this is about 2,600 kilometers or 1,600 miles from the nearest dry land. So it's it's known as the spacecraft cemetery. It's also known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, which is such a fun name. So this is an area in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. That's really not used much by any other human activity. So there's not a lot of shipping there. There's not a lot of fishing there. So not much actually is happening there.

• 1:08:02Bob Novella?

  That's one of the reasons why it's it's so safe to have this potentially, you know, tons. Of of metal come crashing down onto it. The ironic part here is that the nearest humans to to point Nemo is essentially the astronauts themselves and the ISS. When the ISS passes overhead, the astronauts would literally only be about 415 kilometers or 258 miles away. So they will be the closest people to that area, at least, you know, you know, in their orbit as they pass by. Also, this place, I didn't know that this was essentially a dumping ground of space objects. And there's and all the space powers essentially use this area as a dumping ground. United States, Russia, Japan, and Europe, they've they've in total crashed more than

• 1:08:45Bob Novella?

  263 space objects into this area, including the the Mir Space Station, which you you guys may have remembered. Most of the ISS is going to burn up during reentry. And then whatever remains is just going to sink to the bottom of the ocean fairly deep at that point. And but what you what you're going to have left is what they expect is, you know, fragmented pieces of metal. Primarily, they say that the large dense components that can survive the reentry like like a lot of the the pressure tanks that they use are very, very hardy and will likely survive. And most of the materials used in the ISS are considered relatively safe for that ecosystem. It's a lot of aluminum, a lot of titanium. So they they say that it's basically not it's not toxic toxic to marine life in the quantities

• 1:09:30Bob Novella?

  that, of course, that survive the reentry. And they could even act as artificial reefs once they once they settle down there after a while. But of course, it's it's not that I don't think it's going to be that simple in terms of the environmental impact, because, yeah, it's probably it's not going to be toxic. But really, a lot of environmental researchers are argue that there's still too many unanswered questions on this topic. There's been very limited research. When you've got this spacecraft debris, right, and whatever reentry residues that may have been created as it's being de-orbited, you know, how are these going to impact these ecosystems over time? We're we're really not that not sure. No one has gone down there and said, all right, let's go down right now and just see

• 1:10:12Bob Novella?

  what's going on with the with the de-orbited debris that's already down there. Nobody has has taken a look. So it's to me, it's a little bit dicey like what what kind of impact this could have over the long term. Sure, the footprint of debris that's been sent down there is Super tiny compared to what we've done to the, you know, similar, you know, pollution like on the land. So it's the footprint's far smaller, but still I think it's important to find out, you know, if we, especially if we continue doing this, that, you know, what kind of impact are we having on these ecosystems? So that's an important point. But, uh, but otherwise, yeah. So, uh, we've only got like four or five years before the ISS is gone. It's very, it's really sad. I really wish they could have just lifted it to a higher

• 1:10:54Bob Novella?

  orbit and left it there for, I don't know. I mean, imagine having this in a museum. And I know to make that happen is probably close to impossible and ridiculously expensive, but it would have been nice to have it in a higher orbit. Um, just to know that it was there, that maybe in the future, it could be something that would be, you know, an artifact in some, maybe it's some orbital museum. But of course, if this thing is in, in a higher orbit for a long period of time, it's also a target for potentially causing a disaster in debris in space. If that thing was hit and, you know, causing the classic issue of, uh, you know, of, of this cascading effect of debris, creating more debris. Um, it could be very risky as well. So maybe that wasn't even, not even a good idea, even if it were

• 1:11:39Bob Novella?

  possible. But, uh, but we will, we will miss it. But it, but in its place, I think it's good to know that, that NASA or not just NASA, but NASA will be working with private companies to, to create their own, you know, orbital, uh, commercial platforms in low earth orbit. And, and so I think this push to, uh, you know, to expand industry into low earth orbit and potentially like, like hotels are talking about orbiting hotels. Uh, who knows how long that's going to take, but it should be an, an interesting evolution of the space program, uh, in the, in the coming decades.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think I was reading that there's like, there's multiple, multiple, um, proposed replacement space stations from some US, some Europe, China and private industry.

• 1:12:21Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm curious to see how these, you know, these private companies can do in terms of creating and creating such a, you know, a fiendishly complex systems to launch in the low earth orbit. But I mean, they've done some great stuff with Artemis and going back to the moon. But I'm sure they're capable of it. But it won't be cheap, right? To create a brand new, if smaller, kind of space station in orbit. I mean, imagine, wow, that's got to be quite expensive, but so much fun to contemplate. I keep, I can't, Steve, I can't help but think about For All Mankind, that show on Apple, that shows an alternate history of really intense investment and development of low earth orbit, the moon,

• 1:13:03Bob Novella?

  and even Mars. I wish, you know, I wish we're in, I want to be in that universe, sort of.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Sort of.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. So there's one more news item. I couldn't let this one go.

• 1:13:14Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  And not talk about it. So.

• 1:13:19Bob Novella?

  This is great.

• 1:13:20Speaker 02

  Couple of months ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth abandoned our longstanding policy to require flu shots at military bases in the US. This is across all of the branches of the military. And he got rid of it. He claimed that flu shot requirements were quote unquote, not rational, and that he was going to restore freedom to military members. And guess what happened?

• 1:13:48Bob Novella?

  Everything was fine.

• 1:13:50Speaker 02

  So, so, yeah, what happened was flu is ripping through military bases. So last week, there was an outbreak sweeping through the Lachland Air Force Base with at least 222 cases and four hospitalizations and one death. So.

• 1:14:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they, they just say, okay, maybe that wasn't such a good idea. And they just restored the flu mandates for military bases.

• 1:14:18Bob Novella?

  I wonder how he's rationalizing this, Steve. Like, how does he, you know, save, yeah, who cares?

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  Again, it's another example, you know, just, again, this is not by design, this is by coincidence, but we had to talk about this. Another example of ideology and political whatever trumping just basic science, right? I mean, there's a reason why, you know, you pack a bunch of people together in closed quarters. You know, you have, what, I don't know, how many people sleeping in one, in barracks? And it's just, it's ripe for disease. Militaries have known this for thousands of years. This is like the biggest threat to a military.

• 1:14:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, remember the Spanish flu?

• 1:14:52Speaker 02

  Historically, yeah. Is when you put a bunch of people in closed quarters, you know, that infectious diseases can, can wreak havoc. And so just to, you know, basic precautions like a flu vaccine is, is necessary. So, I mean.

• 1:15:07Bob Novella?

  Steve, interesting aside, I recently read that World War I was that, like, the first big, like, war, I guess.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Bob Novella?

  That, that actually had more people killed by the war rather than just like disease and other unrelated things.

• 1:15:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, jeez.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Uh, well, like, you know, as Kara was saying, the 1918 flu pandemic killed 43,000 US soldiers. In World War II, dysentery, like, especially on the, um, the Pacific Islands was, you know, had a horrible death hole. I also remember, like, Alexander the Great, great military leader, like, most, he died of dysentery, if I recall. Like, he would lose more soldiers to things like dysentery than to actual wounds on the battlefield.

• 1:15:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, does the Spanish flu, which of course is a misnomer, does that even, does that obviate what I just said about World War I? Cause we had so, so many people died from that.

• 1:16:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, but a lot of people died from the war, too.

• 1:16:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, true.

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  And, well, the other thing is that then the two were synergistic, right? The war also spread the flu, you know? Because you're moving people around. It's bad. Yeah, just vaccinate your soldiers. I mean, just common sense, common, basic, you know, preventive health. But just the rapidity with which this bit him in the ass is dramatic.

• 1:16:29Bob Novella?

  I just kind of confirmed it here. World War I is the first major global conflict where more soldiers died from combat than from infectious diseases.

• 1:16:37Speaker 02

  It was also the first really mechanized war.

• 1:16:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:41Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  It was a meat grinder, an absolute meat grinder.

• 1:16:44Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:16:45Jay Novella?

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

• 1:17:02Jay Novella?

  Right, Kara? Like, what's going on there? Anybody got any guesses?

• 1:17:08Cara Santa Maria?

  None.

• 1:17:09Jay Novella?

  All right. Well, it's a tough one. It's a strange sound, for sure. A listener named Mark Penny wrote in and then Kara, he said his name is pronounced Meppy. But I can read the words that he wrote. Mark Penny. I can read that. I guess that's his nickname. Anyway, Penny, Meppy, Meppy says, "My guess this week is 90% likely wrong, but it sounds like a door or maybe a screen door with an old-style, big, fat spring and/or gas closer on it making most of the noise. So basically, hold the door." Yeah, it is not that. But yeah, of course, it has that creaky door sound. That is one of the things I thought someone would guess, but you are not correct, and

• 1:17:54Jay Novella?

  thank you. Another listener named Garrett Volino wrote in and said, "Good afternoon, Jay. Guess for this week's who's that noisy? Someone stripping bamboo to create bamboo paper." Thanks. Steve, have you ever heard of someone stripping bamboo?

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:18:10Jay Novella?

  Does it sound like that?

• 1:18:11Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 1:18:13Jay Novella?

  So you haven't heard it.

• 1:18:14Cara Santa Maria?

  He's heard of it.

• 1:18:15Speaker 02

  Heard of it. I thought you said to be heard of it.

• 1:18:17Jay Novella?

  Anyway, that is not correct. I have another guess here. This is from Michael Saucido. And Michael says, hi, Jay. I hear what sounds like something elastically stretching to a set point and some kind of machinery. My first thought was crossbows being loaded, but it sounds bigger than a crossbow. So I'm going to guess that what we heard was three ballista being loaded by some machinery. Why people are loading ballista in modern day, I could not tell you. That's a, that's a really cool guess. And now I want to know what that sounds like. That's not correct, but definitely a fun guess. And then we have a listener named Seth Beach and Seth writes, hello, my name is Seth from Central VA and I'm a new listener. This is my first time guessing, but I think it's some sort of door opening in a video

• 1:19:02Jay Novella?

  game, probably Call of Duty or a game similar to it. Have a great time in the, in the land down under. It absolutely does sound like a video game door creaking open because it has like a very pronounced over the top, you know, squeak to tell you the door is opening. But that is not correct. And we did not get a winner. So let me tell you what this is. This is something called a hydraulic rock splitter machine.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  A rock splitter?

• 1:19:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So imagine this, it looks like, um, kind of like a jackhammer, except it doesn't do the motion of a jackhammer. It just pushes the piston out. And, you know, the operator could be like holding it and leaning into the rock and pushing in that single piston. And then it's, it punctures the rock and it cracks it open.

• 1:19:49Bob Novella?

  It sounds like a jackhammer.

• 1:19:51Jay Novella?

  Take a listen again.

• 1:20:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you wouldn't expect a rock to make that creaky noise, but that is the sound of the rock breaking apart and opening up. Yeah, very powerful tool. Do not operate while intoxicated. That's my advice. I have a new, I have a new noisy for you this week sent in by Jethro Pugh. Kara P U G H. Pugh, right?

• 1:20:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Probably.

• 1:20:28Jay Novella?

  Okay. Pew pew. And here it is.

• 1:20:53Jay Novella?

  What is that?

• 1:20:54Speaker 02

  I don't know what it is, but it was gorgeous.

• 1:20:56Jay Novella?

  Did you hear that guy? Yeah, so if you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, what do you do? You gotta email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have accomplished so much this year. Many conferences and events have come and gone, but we have just a few more and we'd like to tell you about them very quickly. So our next thing that we do is gonna be three things, which is actually 10 things. So we will be appearing in LA.

• 1:21:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yay!

• 1:21:30Jay Novella?

  This is right where Kara and Brian Wecht live.

• 1:21:34Cara Santa Maria?

  It's true.

• 1:21:35Jay Novella?

  And July 17th, that's a Friday, that night, we will be having the SGU secret meetup. This will be at the Center for Inquiry West. This will be at the Carl Sagan and Andrea and Theater. 6 to 9 PM, there will be food. I always cater these events. It's a ton of fun. It's a low-number event, which means that you'll be able to hang out and talk to any of us about anything that you want. It'll be the SGU. It'll also be Andrea Jones-Roy, Brian Wecht, George Krab, and if you look closely, Ian will be lurking in the back of the corner there with something covering his face. But please do consider joining us. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Then the next day, July 18th, we have something called SGU Live and Beyond.

• 1:22:20Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 1:22:21Jay Novella?

  The origin of this show was that, you know, that night, we will be flying to Australia, and we didn't have enough time to do a private show and a skeptical extravaganza. So we did a semi-mishmash of these two shows. So it'll be a live SGU Live podcast recording. I mentioned that that's live. It's live. And then we will also be doing a lot of other bits and fun things to entertain the audience that will last about two hours, right? So the private show's two hours, there'll be a lunch break for an hour, and then there will be two hours of just having a ton of fun, hanging out, audience interaction. It's going to be a really good time, and we hope you join us.

• 1:23:04Jay Novella?

  If you'd like to go to either of those events, of course, go to the skepticsguy.org, go to the events page. And if you have any issues or questions, you can email us at [email protected]. But that is just the beginning, because that is literally our layover city to get to the other two conferences.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  Then we go to Sydney.

• 1:23:24Jay Novella?

  That's right. So we fly to Sydney. We prepare ourselves for our final push to get there for the conference. We will be hosting the SGU's Natacon Conference. That is being co-hosted by the Skeptics Committee. This is Skeptics number 42.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Forty-two.

• 1:23:42Jay Novella?

  If you're interested in joining us at that conference, there's lots of things going on at that conference. It's not just come to the conference, because there's all these different things that you could buy tickets for. The best thing for you to do would be just go to skepticon.org.au. I do know that we have tickets left for the Skeptical Extravaganza. We have tickets left for the Friday and Saturday live podcast recording. And of course, you could buy tickets to go to the conference itself. So if you'd like to see us live in Australia, and sadly, this might be the last time we do it. We, you know, we've been talking about it, just don't know if there's going to be another one after this.

• 1:24:22Jay Novella?

  It would be a great chance to come. Now, let me remind you, Natacon is a community-building conference. This conference is about having a lot of fun, meeting people, and having the time to hang out and learn about the other people that are in the community. We will thoroughly entertain you. We have so much content that we couldn't even get to all the content that we wrote. But it's going to be a lot of fun. It's going to be a lot of exciting stuff that we're doing. There will be a ton of humor. You'll learn stuff. And most importantly, I promise you, you will have a really, really good time. So please consider joining us at skepticon.org.au. That's the website to go check out if there are tickets you want to get to see us. And Steve, there is another conference that's happening.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:25:06Jay Novella?

  Steve, have you ever been to New Zealand?

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  Yes, three times.

• 1:25:09Jay Novella?

  You have been to New Zealand and how much do you enjoy New Zealand?

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  It's gorgeous.

• 1:25:13Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so I, um, two countries. Well, one's a country and one's a state in the United States. New Zealand and Alaska were the two prettiest places I've ever been to in my life. I do think New Zealand wins out because it's just got so much more. But still gorgeous, amazing, and we're very excited to go back to New Zealand. Um, we're going to be doing the New Zealand conference. Uh, you can go to conference.skeptics.nz. Um, we, we will be doing a few things there. One is there's a ticketed event. Uh, we will be doing our Skeptical Extravaganza that we hope you guys, uh, come check us out. If you've never seen it, it's an incredibly fun show. We've been doing this show, I think, now we're on our, our 12th year. It's a blast, so consider buying tickets to that.

• 1:25:58Jay Novella?

  And then we will be at the Friday night dinner and then we'll be at the conference and, and handling all of the content of the conference on Saturday. So if you're interested in seeing us in New Zealand, go to conference.skeptics.nz.

• 1:26:12Speaker 02

  And Jay, don't forget, we will be in, at Dragon Con in Atlanta, September 3rd through 7th. We have several panels that we are booked for. We're going to be doing a couple of panels with Christian Hubicki on different kinds of robotics. And we are setting up a private SG recording there as well. Details are forthcoming. All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction?

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

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

• 1:26:59Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Okay, item number one. Examination of proteins taken from the Homo naledi burial site indicates significant interbreeding with contemporary Homo sapiens.

• 1:27:12Speaker 02

  Item number two, a new analysis finds that the life cycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from switching from diesel to fully electric medium and heavy duty trucks is as much as 92%. And item number three, in a study of balanced bilingual subjects, scientists found that different languages share a common semantic map in the hippocampus. Kara, you're up first, and I'm happy to explain it, since you're going first.

• 1:27:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm going to take them in reverse order, because I'm taking them based on my comfort level. What is balanced bilingual?

• 1:27:48Speaker 02

  So like, the subjects spoke English and Spanish equally fluently. They were balanced in how fluent they were in each language. They weren't like, English speakers who learned some Spanish, right?

• 1:27:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:28:00Bob Novella?

  A bilingual.

• 1:28:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. So this is interesting, because we do think of the hippocampus as a memory center, and we think of it often as like, sort of like, visual, like procedural, like, this is over here, this is over there, that's my map. And so it's a semantic map now. I love this. So sort of grammar, like, you know, how do words form, how do sentences form? Are they sort of using the same regions, but just flexing them with different, different languages? I like that. I like that. I'm not mad at this one, so I think this might be science. The life cycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from switching, okay, so far that makes sense. From diesel to fully electric medium and heavy duty trucks.

• 1:28:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so you're saying that if we were to switch over the course of that truck's life, right? That's the life cycle?

• 1:28:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, life cycle is from soup to nuts. It's from creating it to recycling it, the whole life cycle, yep.

• 1:28:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow, diesel to electric, 92%. Does that assume that they are using like, facilities that also use renewable energy?

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  So that's, I'll tell you, that's in the as much as. So that means that's the best you could do.

• 1:29:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. So it would be, yeah, basically taking all fossil fuel out of the production side as well. Well, um, okay.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  If you're charging it up with coal fired electricity, it's probably not as beneficial.

• 1:29:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right, right. I'm not so mad at that. Let's see. So did Homo naleti inbred with Homo sapiens? Oh, I don't know how old Homo naleti is. So that's probably a really important part of this. Okay.

• 1:29:45Speaker 02

  You're going first. So I could sort of, whatever I tell you, I'm also telling the guys. So they were around, as far as we know, between 335,000 and 241,000 years ago. So that's within the timeframe of Homo sapiens.

• 1:30:00Cara Santa Maria?

  That is interesting. Now the question is, where were they? Which you probably also won't tell me. Um, so there's a burial site and it is a Homo naleti burial site. So there they only found Homo naleti. So this isn't a function of seeing them intermingled with Homo sapiens. It's a function of looking at protein analysis, which I'm assuming they're doing because the DNA is too degraded. Like you can't actually look at the DNA directly. Significant interbreeding. You know, I think I'm going to say this is fiction. This could be, I could be very wrong only because a fair amount of sort of like the consumer DNA test love to harp on like how much Neanderthal you are.

• 1:30:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and even how much like Denisovan, but I don't think I've ever seen anybody be like, you're this percent naleti. So, uh, maybe it's because it's too new. So I could be wrong for that. But this one feels like maybe I would have heard something. So I'm going to call that the fiction.

• 1:30:55Bob Novella?

  Okay, Bob. Yeah. For naleti, I'm thinking that this might be just new. Um, so that's, that's what I'm just going to assume there. Of course, I could absolutely be wrong. Let's see. So the, the life cycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Yeah, that, um, that kind of makes sense. As my mom loves to point out, look at all the trucks on the road. Like, yeah, there's a lot of damn trucks on the road. It's the lifeblood of our economy. That makes sense that if you can, I guess the assumption here is that you're switching um, all the, all the diesel to, um, to electric. What the impact would be, is that?

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  So, I think you're misinterpreting this. This just means like per truck. Like if you turn that truck from a diesel burning truck to a fully electric truck, that truck's carbon footprint is reduced by 92%.

• 1:31:42Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  This is not like in the US or in the system.

• 1:31:45Bob Novella?

  So it's on a, on a truck by truck level? Yeah.

• 1:31:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, the hope would be that that would translate, but yeah.

• 1:31:52Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly, to dramatic differences. And that still, that still makes sense to me. The one that, the one that got me though was this third one here about balanced bilingual subjects. I just think the semantic map, you know, having, having, you know, studied, I mean, I don't have a lot of experience with other languages, but, but, but just even Spanish and Italian, I think that semantic map would be, would be more different than, than this is saying here. Let me read it again, because there's always some like one word that kind of I miss. Um, yeah, I think that, that, that semantic map would be more different than it seems like you're saying right here. So I'll say that one's fiction.

• 1:32:28Speaker 02

  Okay, and Che.

• 1:32:29Jay Novella?

  All right, so Steve, the Homo naledi, did you tell Kara when they existed?

• 1:32:33Speaker 02

  I did.

• 1:32:34Jay Novella?

  And Kara, you heard Steve say this?

• 1:32:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I did.

• 1:32:37Jay Novella?

  Okay, good. Thank you.

• 1:32:39Speaker 02

  335,000 to 241,000 years ago.

• 1:32:43Jay Novella?

  Um, so how could they coexist with contemporary Homo sapiens?

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I mean, contemporary to them at the time, obviously. And Homo sapiens, you know, were around then.

• 1:32:56Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:32:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we 250,000, something like that.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  I mean, they were early, early Homo sapiens.

• 1:33:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:33:02Jay Novella?

  All right, you say significant interbreeding. Okay, so that's, uh, shocking. Okay, let me just put a pin in that one real quick. The second one, a new analysis finds that the life cycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from switching from diesel to fully electric. Yeah, 92%? Absolutely. I wonder why there's still 8%, you know, what would be the difference? Like, why would there be even that, you know, that left over? But sure, 92%, I totally buy that. The last one here about the bilingual subjects and about the common semantic map in the hippocampus. I mean, I would imagine that your brain just stores all of your semantic mapping in one place.

• 1:33:47Jay Novella?

  And that whatever ones you have learned are all there, doesn't matter what language they come from. So that one sounds very sciencey to me as well. Yeah, this first one, like the two words that that trouble me are significant breeding. If there was significant breeding, then I think we would have heard about this and it would be a very, a very well-known part of human history that, you know, we would have a lot more clarity on and everything. Like, just finding out about this now, to me, seems absurd. So that one is definitely the fiction to me.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree on the second one, so we'll start there. A new analysis finds that the life cycle reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from switching from diesel to fully electric medium and heavy-duty trucks is as much as 92%. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. Yep, this is science. And so the life cycle analysis is always the best way to address these questions, because you have to consider, like, that 8% Jay is like, it costs carbon to build the batteries and to build the trucks and to then recycle them, right? And I know a lot of the, again, like, the deniers, the anti-EV people, like, oh, it costs more to make the batteries. And you know, it doesn't. The life cycle analysis of any EV, you know, has shows it reduces overall carbon.

• 1:35:03Speaker 02

  It costs overall less money. And the same is, the same is true here. What they found was now the 92% is if you're charging the trucks with entirely renewable energy, right? It was, the estimates range from 87 to 92%. So 92 was, again, the as much as. What do you think it was if you based upon the current grid?

• 1:35:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Sixty-five percent?

• 1:35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, close forty-four to sixty-eight percent.

• 1:35:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, nice, Kara.

• 1:35:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, alright, alright. Forty-four, woof. That means we got a ways to go, yeah.

• 1:35:36Speaker 02

  And then, I love it. Yeah, for...

• 1:35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And is that assuming then, on the low end, it's not, it's not only that the grid itself has, like, I don't want to say dirty energy, but like, carbon energy a- as a source, but also like, when they're building the batteries, the factories, all of that, they're being lit with carbon energy, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Um, but I think it's mainly what's charging up the battery. This could be the, the biggest part of that. And they also did it for hydrogen fuel cells, and it's much worse. Uh, so the hydrogen fuel cells, again, using current methods, it's twelve to fifty-one percent. Using the, uh, electrolysis powered entirely by renewable energy is seventy-two to eighty-two percent. So, electric, battery electric vehicles are just more efficient than hydrogen vehicles. And Hydrogen? Yeah, and also we are nowhere near, you know, being able to, you fuel these trucks with, uh, green hydrogen. Green hydrogen's like one percent of the hydrogen that's being produced. It's a very small amount.

• 1:36:35Speaker 02

  Um, but that would change if we find that there's tons of like hydrogen sitting under the earth that we could just tap into, that will change the calculus. But for now, the best thing to do is just to go, just go fully electric. And Bob, to answer your question, thirty percent of the carbon footprint of transportation is in the, this category of medium to heavy trucks.

• 1:36:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:36:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  So this, it's a huge chunk of it, yeah. So this, this could go a long way to, to reducing our carbon footprint. Okay, let's go back to number one, examination of proteins taken from the Homo naledi burial site indicates significant interbreeding with contemporary Homo sapiens. Jay and Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Bob, you think this one is science. So you guys, you know, Jay, you, it sounds like you don't remember the whole Homo naledi story. Uh, this was a fairly recent find, and this is a very unusual group of, of early hominids.

• 1:37:28Bob Novella?

  Like hobbits, right?

• 1:37:29Speaker 02

  No, no, the hobbits are the, you're thinking of the, uh, the other ones, the, uh, from the small island. This is in Africa.

• 1:37:36Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Remember, this is the cave that they had to get women to like crawl crawl.

• 1:37:39Bob Novella?

  Yes, because it was so scarily narrow.

• 1:37:42Speaker 02

  And it's like a massive burial site of a whole bunch of fossils.

• 1:37:47Bob Novella?

  What a find.

• 1:37:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was a, yeah, it was an amazing find. And the thing about them is that they have fairly modern features anatomically, but pretty small brains. And the thinking is that this is an offshoot deep in the Homo sapiens tree that has been isolated for a very long period of time.

• 1:38:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that makes sense. So they had a common, like an immediate common ancestor, possibly.

• 1:38:13Speaker 02

  Maybe, but, but probably a long time ago. And so it's very unusual, like, you know, this is a really weird, probably means they were isolated for a long time. Now, the overlap of the fossil evidence suggests that Homo sapiens go back 300,000 years.

• 1:38:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, not 250, 300.

• 1:38:29Speaker 02

  But the, so right in the middle of the Homo nelethi time period. But the genetic evidence suggests it could be as deep as 800,000 years.

• 1:38:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Really?

• 1:38:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:38Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting.

• 1:38:40Speaker 02

  But it's always, again, remember, it's a continuum. So it depends on where you, where you draw the line of what is a Homo sapiens. But yeah, so somewhere between 300 and 800,000 years ago, so definitely overlap with Homo nelethi. And humans were in Africa at the time, so there's spatial overlap as well. But this is the fiction.

• 1:38:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:38:58Speaker 02

  It is.

• 1:38:58Jay Novella?

  All right.

• 1:38:59Speaker 02

  God damn it. They didn't find this. In fact, the thinking still is this, they were probably isolated from other hominid populations for a very long period of time. Now, there was a study, however, looking at the proteins taken from the teeth of this population of Homo nelethi found in this cave. And what they found was very unusual, but it's hard, but we don't know exactly how to interpret it. They were looking for a number of things, but one of the things they were looking at was a protein that only males have.

• 1:39:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:39:30Speaker 02

  And that, the, uh, uh, mellow genin Y, right? I probably pronounced that wrong. Um, emelogenin, maybe emelogenin Y. They found, they did not find it in any of the fossils. So that could mean that all of the people buried there were females.

• 1:39:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  And if, if true, that would mean, you know, a sophisticated kind of burial practice with some, you know, developed ideas about, you know, how to go about burying people. Like they decided to only bury females in this one location. But because this population is so weird, basically, and so isolated from other hominids, they're saying, we can't rule out that they simply don't have this protein, that they evolved away from it.

• 1:40:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:40:17Speaker 02

  Right? So if, so either one of those two things, I mean, it can't just be a coincidence, right? It's just too many samples. So one of those two things is likely true. For some reason, they only buried, buried females here, or they simply lack this protein. The males lack this protein.

• 1:40:32Cara Santa Maria?

  So they could probably figure this out if, if there's another.

• 1:40:35Speaker 02

  Yes, we need other sites.

• 1:40:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, yeah, gender marker. Or if there's just like, there's another gender marker in the protein.

• 1:40:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. They need to find some other gender marker, or they need to find another, they need to find more fossils.

• 1:40:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 02

  If they find, so, but here's the thing. They, and part of the reason why they did this study, there's very little sexual dimorphism among these fossils, less than other hominids. So this, right? So this could be why. There's less sexual dimorphism because they're all females. So either that, or there just is less dimorphism, and the males don't have this protein. So, you know, Occam's razor, you know, I don't know, what does that favor? Makes it, makes it seem like these are probably all females, which would be, which would be weird. But we don't know yet for sure. Okay, which means that in a study of balanced bilingual subjects, scientists found that different languages share a common semantic map in the hippocampus is science. This is freaking cool. Now.

• 1:41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  That's very cool.

• 1:41:32Speaker 02

  There's a couple of cool things here. So the semantic map means, so they looked, they were looking at which neurons fire when they, people say or hear a specific word, right? So they were listening, they were doing directed speech production and naturalistic conversation, right? All three conditions. And they found, they found that the neurons would fire related to a specific word, and that now, even if we're just looking. At a single language that there was kind of a conceptual map to where these words would physically localize. And words whose meaning were closer together were physically closer together.

• 1:42:14Speaker 02

  Think about that. If two words are very similar, they would be close to each other in this semantic map. And if two words were completely different in terms of their meaning, they would be further away from each other on this semantic map. So Farther. Farther away.

• 1:42:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Makes sense, yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  Well, it makes sense that you think about like how we think of words and how we relate the meaning of words to other words and everything. That there's actually a physical underlying against semantic map that kind of produces that is really interesting. So then they said, okay, well, what about different languages? So they looked at individual neurons and it turns out that individual neurons are different. When you say the same word like big and grande, right? So do they use the same neuron or different neurons? Well, it turns out they use different neurons. They're not using the same neuron, but they map to the same place.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  You have, you know, the two maps superimpose over each other pretty much, right? And which is really interesting. So we're using this, it's like there's a common semantic map and then we attach words to those maps. Even in different languages, but the, the neurons that would produce the output are different. So you would either output big or you would output grande, but basically from the same location, even if not the same specific neuron. Does that make sense?

• 1:43:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It makes perfect sense.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  That is cool.

• 1:43:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it's, it's, it's funny how actually elegant it is when you think about it. It's, it's like, it's not at all surprising and yet it's like very, very cool that they figured this out.

• 1:43:52Speaker 02

  And know what it reminds me of? Do you guys remember what our friend from Google told us that when Google made its language translator? What the

• 1:43:58Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah. It had its own language.

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  It created its own machine language so that it, right? You wouldn't go from French to English. You would go from French to its language to English.

• 1:44:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:07Speaker 02

  So it had this, you know, so it's like our brains kind of work the same way. We have a universal sort of conceptual map and then we just output to different languages.

• 1:44:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And the map itself reminds me of, have you guys ever played the atrocious and anger inducing online game, Cemental?

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:44:25Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:44:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Highly recommend. It's ridiculous. You basically just say any word and then it gives you a percentage. It'll be like 10% and you're like, oh, that's bad. So then you can pick another word and you're aiming to increase your percentage. And once you start like hitting, it tells you you're like 1,000 words away from the target word or you're 500 words away. And it uses AI to figure out how all words are connected, but it is so infuriating because you're trying to just guess semantically what their target word is based on yeses and nos of all your guesses and basically how hot or cold you are.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 1:45:04Bob Novella?

  But what are they based, what is it based on?

• 1:45:07Cara Santa Maria?

  They use some sort of AI that basically looks at all words and then connects them all. Like it's black box.

• 1:45:13Bob Novella?

  It's a semantic. Can you give us, can you give us an example of, of, of a word that's far away and then another word that was very close but not quite there?

• 1:45:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like you would say like, and then it would say like 2%. And then you would say dancing and it might say 90% or 90, you know, it actually, at that point, it gives you how close it is, like I think within a thousand. And then you're like, okay, so dancing. And then you'd be like dancer or you'd be like ballroom or shoe. And, and based on that, you start narrowing in.

• 1:45:44Bob Novella?

  It's kind of like charades.

• 1:45:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of, but like, trust me, you will be throwing your phone against the wall, but it's, it's fun. But yeah, it's, it's the semantic map. It's just here. The cool thing is you're actually talking about like a topographical map too, right?

• 1:46:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a physical map.

• 1:46:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, that's very cool. It's like the way we think about the somatic sensory mapping in our brains.

• 1:46:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Somatic topic.

• 1:46:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I love that. That's very cool.

• 1:46:09Bob Novella?

  Oh, the. The what you call it.

• 1:46:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the homunculus.

• 1:46:12Bob Novella?

  Homunculus.

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:13Jay Novella?

  It's a homunculus man.

• 1:46:14Bob Novella?

  I love that little dude.

• 1:46:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:46:17Bob Novella?

  So goofy looking.

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  And, and the fact that there is a semantic map is a good thing if we want to interface with the brain, right? Um, cause all we have to do is figure out that map. And, but I wondered now how similar it is between people or does everybody have their own semantic map and they don't?

• 1:46:33Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, that's true.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true. It's probably a little bit of both, but it, it, it's validating for me all those times when I feel like I have a word at the tip of my tongue and I'll use a different word that's not anything like it, but it is semantically like it, you know, like I use it in different senses, but it's sound, the word itself sounds different. It's because it's probably mapped in a similar area.

• 1:46:57Bob Novella?

  Steve, I wonder how this map would change if, like, what if you, like, tripled your vocabulary? Is there a limit to a vocabulary then, based on how many points you have available?

• 1:47:10Speaker 02

  I don't know. And does it interpolate or expand outward? I don't know.

• 1:47:15Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like how much, I guess, how much, um, neurogenesis is actually happening here? Because we have found that there are places in the brain where we are creating new cells all the time.

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  And the hippocampus is one of those places.

• 1:47:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. So my guess is that just the density becomes more intense. Yeah. You just develop more connections and you might even grow actual new neurons.

• 1:47:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Imagine like, oh, I've reached my limit. If I, if I learn a new word, I'm going to have to forget another one. So pick on wisely.

• 1:47:45Speaker 02

  All right, Bob, you are taking over the Skeptical Court of the Week segment.

• 1:47:49Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:47:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Bob.

• 1:47:50Bob Novella?

  Yes, sir. Um, okay. So I'm going to start with the, the context of the quote, uh, to put it into a little perspective before I actually say it. I've been thinking even, even more recently about the sorry state of scientific, scientific literacy in the U.S. and also not just literacy itself, but just incuriousness. Right? It's like, well, how could you not want to investigate and learn and discover? I mean, whatever, all of that and what we could do about it. I, I saw this quote, uh, by, by May Jamison. May Jamison is. Engineer, physician, former NASA astronaut. She was a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. And, not to bury the lead, but first black woman to travel in space ever, which is fantastic.

• 1:48:32Bob Novella?

  And on top of all of that awesomeness, she did a cameo on Star Trek: Next Gen. So, how cool is that? So, May Jemison said, "A big part of engaging kids in science is not getting the single correct answer, it's being willing to work with students to discover the correct answer." And I know Steve Jay and I, you know, try to do that with our kids. But Steve, I remember you specifically have-

• 1:48:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:48:55Bob Novella?

  -an interesting story of how you would interact with your kids when they asked a question like that. So, could you say that again?

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  Well, one example I think I gave was like, one of my daughters asked, "What color were dinosaurs?" And I said, "Well, how could we possibly know what color they were?" And then, you know, it's good to ask questions where there's no like right or wrong answer. It's just, let's think about it creatively, let's come up with ideas. And then we sort of worked towards what we could know about them, you know, based upon fossils, etc. I didn't expect her to say, "Well, we could look at the chromatic proteins that we could, you know, whatever." But, yeah, I was so, yeah, just forcing them or encouraging them to think rather than saying, "Here's the answer, kid, now go away, you're bothering me," you know?

• 1:49:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because then they, sometimes they're sparked with a lifelong mission when you do that. Like, "How could we know?" "Well, we could know if we looked at this." Well, we don't have the tools to do that yet, but we're working on it. Maybe that'll happen in your lifetime.

• 1:49:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and as people are fond of saying quite frequently is that kids are born scientists, and they really are, asking questions that, we know the questions are endless. So, and so, and I just don't, I hate the idea of having that beat out of kids, you know? And, so yeah, so I want to encourage the parents out there, they're listening, you know, if they ask you a question, sure, you can answer it depending on the context, but also, don't try to avoid being like, "No, Jimmy, that's a cow." Jay, right? Is that funny? That's from one of our favorite comedians. But instead of answering it, yeah, bring them on this, this journey of discovery and figuring out how could they answer that question? Because what a powerful tool to have in their, in their toolkit.

• 1:50:32Bob Novella?

  And also, you know, instilling this, this love of science and discovery is just so invaluable for the, for the entire world.

• 1:50:40Speaker 02

  Well, thank you guys for joining me this week.

• 1:50:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:50:44Jay Novella?

  You're welcome, Steve.

• 1:50:44Speaker 02

  I mean, this was, you know, especially at the beginning, this was a difficult episode. Obviously, we're all, you know, we're trying to go on and do a normal show. We are all devastated by this, you know? And we still have a lot of work to do to get through this. But thank you all for continuing on this journey with us. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:51:09Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

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