The Skeptics Guide #1054 - Sep 20 2025

News Items: Conspiracy Physics, Cancer Misinformation, Improved Nuclear Thermal Propulsion, Oldest Mummies, Not The Screwworms; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Ethics in Research; Name That Logical Fallacy; 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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• 0:47Speaker 01

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

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

• 1:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 1:10Speaker 04

  Good evening, folks.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  So what's new, everyone? We're going to Kansas this weekend.

• 1:14Speaker 04

  Well, I think if you're hearing this now, we are in Kansas.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  We are there. We're probably like starting the private show as this comes out.

• 1:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, fascinating. Time travel's so weird.

• 1:25Speaker 04

  And chances are, we're going to run into a traveling potion salesman on the road. And then a tornado will come. I saw it in a movie once, I think.

• 1:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I had no idea where you were going with that.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  What's happening? And we'll all be in black and white?

• 1:39Speaker 04

  Yes, the world will be black and white once again.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And you know, something we missed last week, I'm not sure if you guys saw, but on September 6th, we lost a scientific great. David Baltimore died. I think we've talked about him before on this show. He, I think most recently, was at Caltech, which is how I knew of him. He was 87 years old when he died. He won a Nobel Prize when he was, I think, 38. Yeah, I know. He's really, really young.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Because, yeah, wow, because not only because they have to, you have to wait a while after the science that you performed actually gets recognized for that prize. So he must have been what?

• 2:21Cara Santa Maria?

  He was thirty seven. Okay, so he was thirty seven and split the prize with Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin for, quote, "their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell." Specifically, they discovered the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which is like huge. And then he went on to study all sorts of different aspects of cancer research, recombinant DNA research, immunology, virology. He was really, really instrumental in HIV research because of the work that he did on reverse transcriptase. He was also

• 3:01Cara Santa Maria?

  part of the Cancer Center at MIT. He, you know, worked at the Salk Institute early on. He ended up ultimately at Caltech doing continued, you know, important research on gene editing. And, and yeah, died at the age of eighty seven of cancer.

• 3:23Speaker 04

  She was.

• 3:24Jay Novella?

  That is like right in the average age, you know, like that's a very common age for men to die at.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Well, what's life expectancy is like seventy eight, seventy nine. So it's past that.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  Well, upper eighties is a good run.

• 3:40Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I thought eighty six was the number.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 3:42Speaker 04

  No, that seems, no, that seems high.

• 3:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And this man, I mean, I'm looking right here at his legacy. He published over seven hundred peer reviewed articles.

• 3:54Cara Santa Maria?

  He won way back in like nineteen seventy, he won the Gustave Stern Award in virology. He's won awards from major companies, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, National Medical, National Medal of Science. Of course, he was in all of the big institutions.

• 4:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And yeah, won a Nobel Prize. He was president of AAAS. I mean, just incredible career.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  Oof, wow. What a resume.

• 4:26Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot. And he has honorary degree, like twenty honorary degrees.

• 4:30Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy.

• 4:31Cara Santa Maria?

  That's such a weird thing, the honorary degree.

• 4:33Jay Novella?

  It is, right?

• 4:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  Well, it's just a nice tribute, a very nice tribute. It's like, here's an honorary IQ.

• 4:39Cara Santa Maria?

  How would you like some honorary dinner?

• 4:44Speaker 04

  How was it?

• 4:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:47Speaker 04

  Here's your honorary mint.

• 4:52Speaker 04

  It's waftin'. Poor David.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  All right, well, let's go straight to some news items. I'm gonna start us off with a discussion of conspiracy physics. What do you guys think that refers to?

• 5:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that like quantum bullshit?

• 5:08Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, like Deepak Chopra kind of thing?

• 5:10Bob Novella?

  Is that what we talked about a few, a bunch of years ago? We were talking about that, you know, the probabilities of these, of conspiracies actually working.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It's not the physics of conspiracy theories.

• 5:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it like what the bleep do we know stuff?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, sort of. I mean, it's that and everything else. So there was a Wall Street Journal article recently called "The Rise of Conspiracy Physics", which discusses the popularity of social media influencers, influencers who claim that there is a vast conspiracy among academic physicists. So this is, again, nothing new, and this is not unique to physics. But it is interesting, you know, having been, and Jake can attest to this as well, you know, we do TikToks every week and we're constantly, you know, combing social media for good skeptical topics, and it's a bottomless pit of these conspiracy narratives, which have a very

• 6:04Speaker 02

  familiar format, you know, where it's, I noticed this strange thing, and then leap to some massive ridiculous tin hat conspiracy theory, right? And it could be the earth is flat, or, you know, the electrical universe, or quantum healing, or whatever, just some weird thing. And then justifying, justifying it, and the fact that, you know, they get zero attention among academic physicists or scientists, well, that's because they're all lying to you. It's a giant conspiracy, right?

• 6:39Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 6:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And why?

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's how, so, you know, if you, if you have an alternate theory of reality, and it's not accepted in physics, then you, either you're wrong, or all of physics is wrong. So they claim, well, all of physics is wrong. This is like, everything you think you know is wrong.

• 6:56Speaker 04

  Big physics is out to get you.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  NASA lies about everything.

• 6:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But what's their explanation for why all of physics would be lying to us? I guess is the question.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  They don't really have one.

• 7:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  No, that's what I find is that...

• 7:08Speaker 04

  You can't handle the truth.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  It's, yeah, it's whatever. It's because reasons. You know what I mean? It's just, they're...

• 7:15Jay Novella?

  Aren't they looking for it, though? I mean, they want to slip into that pocket.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Into what pocket?

• 7:21Jay Novella?

  Into the, you know, into the like, "I know better and I found this thing." You know, like, that's what, we see that all the time.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, they are doing the "I know better and I found this thing." But I feel like, at least with the like, anti-medical establishment conspiracy theorists and their, you know, what Big Pharma doesn't want you to know, they have some whole narrative about how like, it's really a cabal to keep you sick so they can keep selling you drugs and make all that money and...

• 7:45Speaker 02

  The best they got is that, you know, scientists are doing it. You know, usually it's something, it could be super vague, like, they don't want you to know how the world really works. Like, who is "they" and why don't they want you to know that? And what's they really doing? They don't have to really spell it out. If they, for the, the more sophisticated version of that is that they're all just ginning up these lies to get research grants to keep the grant money going. It's like, okay, but how does that work?

• 8:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, big grant money.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, how does making up lies fund more research than doing good science? You know? And wouldn't other scientists immediately sniff them out? So then, everybody has to be in on it. Again, it just gets ridiculous really fast. So, when I wrote about this, I went over a little bit, like, the, this is just crank, these are cranks, right? And the history of crank behavior. So, we've been doing this long enough, you know, basically pre-saturation of the web, pre-web 2.0. So, back in the analog days, what cranks would do to get the attention of anybody is they would send their manifesto to a scientist and say, "Look, I've proven Einstein wrong," or whatever.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  We used to get these.

• 8:57Cara Santa Maria?

  We still get them sometimes.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  We still get them. Now it's more email. But we used to get, like, I've had two, 300-page manifestos of pure nonsense.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  You've read them all, right?

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Went line by line.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  And then there's the web 1.0 kind of cranks. You guys remember the, the classic example? Is you guys remember the time cube?

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Oh gosh, the time cube. Oh my ancient history.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Vertical scroll of incoherent nonsense.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  Oh yeah.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  And also self congratulatory, I'm the smartest person on the planet. And wow. So that was the sort of the standard for a while. And now it's more the social media version, which is you make a video or you write a blog post or whatever. And it's just encapsulated, although though sometimes they still do the manifesto. I did this one Tik Tok video on a woman who I don't even know what she was claiming. That's the crazy thing. I'm not even sure what her claim was. It's just that she thinks she's solved autism and ADHD and everything. And it's just this incoherent meandering kind

• 10:08Speaker 02

  of linking to different articles and, but there's no thesis, like there's no hypothesis.

• 10:15Speaker 04

  If you can't express your own theory, you're, you're in trouble right off the game.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  No, so you have 150 page, whatever, 200, whatever big it was. It's like, I don't care.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  Say it in 10 words or less.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, you know, you should be able to make an executive summary, like an elevator pitch. Give me a paragraph, give me a page, you know, if it's, if you can't summarize it in that sort of coherent way, then you probably don't, you probably don't have anything.

• 10:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, every peer reviewed journal article requires that an abstract be included with it. That's what an abstract is.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  I love abstracts.

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Give me the abstract. So, you know, a lot of the, um, so the question is, why is this taking off? Why is there so much of it? And there's a lot of blaming the victims going on. So blaming physicists or scientists or academics or experts, right? It's all their fault that the cranks are out there on YouTube and Tik Tok. So, but, and it's really not, in my opinion, it's not fair. It's not accurate. Cause again, they will say contradictory things. Well, academics ignore the cranks and let them flourish, or they respond to the cranks and give them attention. So whatever you do, it's your fault. Whether you respond to them or ignore them, you're just, you're enabling the cranks.

• 11:31Speaker 04

  Not a new problem. We've seen it for a long time.

• 11:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That's infuriating.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  But here's the big thing. So this is the thing that really makes me furious is that, oh, it's scientists' fault for for lying to the public so much, right? Oh, yeah. And so this usually comes in one of two flavors. One flavor is, well, they lied to us about global warming, so why should we trust them now? So it's basically using one conspiracy theory to justify other conspiracy theories.

• 11:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. What about the masks during COVID?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, or the big one is they lied to us about the flat earth. So that's the point. I think that's like the point of the flat earth is to say, well, if we could prove this, then we could deny everything that they say. Because clearly they're lying to us about everything. That's actually the point of their conspiracy theories, right? Is to justify all other conspiracy theories, essentially.

• 12:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  It's just anti-elitism, anti-expert, anti-institutionalism. Like, just, we could ignore everything, shoot from the hip, do our own research, because they lied to us. But sometimes, even if you don't believe in a specific lie or denialism, like, you know, global warming denial, or, you know, flat-eartherism, or, you know, again, COVID, like, I think about COVID. You know, say, well, they lied to us about COVID, or about masks, or ivermectin, or whatever, again, whatever crap you believe in. It's just the sort of generic, well, you know, scientists can't be trusted because they're, you know, they're always coming out with these announcements that are not true. Like cold fusion and string theory, or whatever.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Say, okay, but, you know, they kind of, they're looking at fringe cases, or, like, cases don't really illustrate a systemic problem within science. These are, some of these are one-offs, or they were an example of the media getting way ahead of a story, or reporting preliminary evidence. So, yeah, there's a media, there's definitely a media problem. And as we have discussed many times, sometimes scientists play into that, or journals play into that, absolutely.

• 13:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and they often blame when we have, like, incomplete, you know, when we Update our information instead of being like, look, they updated their information. They were wrong before and now they're flip flopping.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  No clue how science works. Part of this, like ninety percent of it or whatever, is just the normal process of science. There's preliminary findings, they get, people try to replicate them, they don't replicate, then they get discarded, right? That's what, the way it's supposed to work. But it, if the media is breathlessly sort of reporting every preliminary finding, it seems like the scientists are lying to us or they're taking away all of these big claims. It's like, no, this is just the normal grinding of the meat of science. And you're just not being given the, the correct perspective on it. You know, you, you know what I mean? You're, you're misinterpreting the mainstream media for scientific activity.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  These are not the same thing.

• 14:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Uh, but it just gener-, you know, it generates this sense of, well, we can't trust anything we read about from scientists in the media. So we can just believe whatever we want. And of course, you know, even if you correctly identify a problem, like, oh, whatever, this, the researchers are too cozy with industry or whatever. Or sometimes they fall for fads or they're closed minded. You know, that doesn't mean that your wacky idea is true, right? You could be correct about a problem existing without being correct about your proposed solution. Which the proposed solution is, anything goes, my crank ideas must be true. I have no burden of proof. They have an impossible burden of proof. They have to be a hundred percent correct all the time, out of the gate.

• 15:23Speaker 02

  And I just need to have a wacky idea with the flimsiest of, you know, of correlations or whatever. And don't have to prove a thing. Like, the double standard is absolutely overwhelming. Uh, but that's what exists. That's the, that is this, basically the, what is common on social media, you know?

• 15:44Cara Santa Maria?

  What, how much, like, when I think about conspiracy theories and, you know, what kinds of conspiracy theories are peddled, I often think that there's, you know, there's a million ways to slice and dice, right? You could lump and split, whatever. But there are the people who are, who are promoting certain types of conspiracies in an effort to sow disillusionment, you know, in an effort to, let's say, interfere with, like, elections or stability of a government. There are the people who, who are promoting conspiracy theories because they want to make money off of their version of a thing. Stop paying these people. I want to take your money.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I worry with the, like, physics conspiracy theories that I, they read to me the most, like, there's a higher percentage of people with, like, severe mental illness.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Or propagating them. Have you ever noticed that, too?

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally. Like, the Time Cube guy had schizophrenia, almost.

• 16:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, they often feel like this frenetic, like, somebody was up all night on acid, solving all the problems of the universe, like, turning to them.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that attracts that, sure.

• 16:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Because it's like, if I can just make everything fit, then you'll see.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  There's different flavors, totally. Yeah, and the medical ones are snake oil salesmen, you know what I mean? They're not necessarily...

• 16:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. They just want to sell their vitamins.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Right. Exactly, exactly. They want to just sell their snake oil.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  I think our previous experience having to do with physics and things probably are the perpetual motion machine peddlers.

• 17:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, man. And free energy believers.

• 17:03Bob Novella?

  Remember, that was in the news every week back in the day. It's...

• 17:05Speaker 04

  In the 90s?

• 17:06Bob Novella?

  Never, never goes fully away, but, man, it's...

• 17:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, because that's one of those, like, it's too good to be true. This could solve all our problems.

• 17:13Speaker 04

  And they're trying to sell a machine or finance their machine at the same time.

• 17:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 17:16Speaker 04

  They have an ulterior motive, effectively.

• 17:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And it makes sense why people buy into the things that are the solutions to all of their problems. I mean, that's what everybody wants.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Oh, sure, yeah. Who doesn't want that?

• 17:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Which is why I think, again, these, like, these physics ones are kind of weird. They're in their own camp, because, A, yeah, you have a lot of these, like, I've made sense out of a nonsensical world, but then, like, the, the people on the receiving end don't understand them either, you know?

• 17:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're not necessarily tied to a product they're trying to hawk, or a, you know, something like that. They're just looking for intellectual credibility, where, you know, seeking, seeking it in, in alternative ways.

• 17:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I think so, because they feel so esoteric to the everyday sort of citizen. They're not like, oh, I want, I want to buy that manifesto. Right? Like, I don't even understand your manifesto.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  My manifesto by Dr. Crank. Available now on Amazon.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Well, Carrie, you're gonna talk about something very similar. Tell us about cancer misinformation. What's going on with that?

• 18:16Cara Santa Maria?

  I was about to segue, and then I was like, that's not my job.

• 18:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, this aligns perfectly with an article that I came across recently in The Conversation, written by a psychologist named Andy Levy. And it has a British lens, right? This is a British psychologist who is writing from that perspective. And so I found it interesting because he highlights some sort of misinformation, some pseudoscience on British TV. So the article is called "How Cancer Misinformation Exploits the Way We Think." And he spends some time talking about a specific incidence on television, followed up with, you know, some of the things we often talk about on the show,

• 19:05Cara Santa Maria?

  like what is misinformation? Why does it happen? How does it happen? And then what are some of the ways that we can sort of protect ourselves against it? But this one specifically, he's focusing on cancer misinformation. I think that's why it piqued my interest. That's the world that I'm in, and I cannot tell you, as somebody who works with people who have cancer, I work with them from a psychology perspective. It is rampant. I've had patients who, everywhere from, you know, a small kind of off-the-cuff statement about something that's patently untrue, to patients who seek out just like rank pseudoscience and, you know, harmful non-treatments and everything in between.

• 19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  So apparently, our listeners who, wow, I just fully, "apparently."

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Apparently.

• 19:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I heard it.

• 19:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Our listeners in the UK may recognize the name Danielle Lloyd. It was new to me. But she's a TV personality and actress. I guess she was a former Miss Great Britain. Winner. She recently announced earlier this year that she was diagnosed with melanoma. And she had to have a mole that was on her collarbone removed. And throughout her process of then getting treatment, she had to have a second biopsy and and second treatment. And so there's, you know, it's, the news is reporting it. And she's sort of taken to social media to do the opposite of what we're often talking about on the show. This was a breath of fresh air for me. She's not going online and spreading misinformation.

• 20:43Cara Santa Maria?

  She's going online and debunking misinformation and cautioning her followers and her listeners to not listen to these social media influencers who don't have credentials and don't know what they're talking about. She had a big wake up call when she, I guess she was filming or she was at a press junket. It's not really clear why she was there, but she was traveling. And she was talking to a reporter from Vogue and she was like, oh, sunscreen is really toxic. There's all sorts of harmful chemicals in it. And the reporter from Vogue said, absolutely not. It's dangerous that you're saying that out loud.

• 21:19Bob Novella?

  Oh, I love that.

• 21:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Like, that is not true.

• 21:22Bob Novella?

  Say that more, people.

• 21:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. Like, sunscreen is one of the best preventive measures we have to prevent skin cancer. And there is good evidence to support that. And there may be some, you know, products on the market that are, that are, I guess, better or worse than others. But by and large, wearing sunscreen is safe and it could save your life. And so she started to really dig into a lot of the messages that she had been fed on social media and recognized how many people out there who don't have any credentials, who have no idea what they're talking about, are spreading deeply dangerous misinformation. And so she's now become something of kind of a role model to other individuals, teaching people

• 22:08Cara Santa Maria?

  about checking, you know, your body for moles, looking for signs that they're changing color, that they're changing shape, you know, going to your dermatologist, wearing sunscreen and seeking out evidence-based intervention when there's a risk of, of cancer.

• 22:25Cara Santa Maria?

  That's kind of one side of the story. The other side of the story in this article really does focus on why cancer misinformation seems to be so, not just so prevalent, but so, I don't know, like, why people are so credulous toward cancer misinformation? And it does seem like it hits on a few things that are, that we're especially vulnerable or sensitive to. I mean, obviously, fear is a big one, right? People are afraid of cancer. They're afraid of sickness. They're afraid of pain. They're afraid of death. And cancer, sort of, for a lot of people embodies a lot of these taboo fears. I have had patients who were diagnosed who couldn't use the word, right?

• 23:09Cara Santa Maria?

  And we would refrain from the word cancer in our sessions because it was such a triggering and taboo word for them. Cancer carries a lot of weight for a lot of people. But what are two of the things, or what are some of the things, I guess I should ask you guys, that you can think of when you think of the types of cancer misinformation that you've seen online? Like, what are some of the ways that cancer misinformation is spread, or like, the tactics that the pseudoscientists use?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  So a common one is to scare people away from standard treatment, right? This is the burn, poison, and cut, you know, is how they characterize it. And so, like, don't take chemotherapy, don't get surgery, don't do radiation therapy.

• 23:56Cara Santa Maria?

  And these claims are things like chemotherapy actually is toxic, or like, I shouldn't say it's toxic because it is in a lot of ways, but chemotherapy actually causes cancer to spread, or chemotherapy will kill you faster, chemotherapy is worse than the disease. You'll hear these kinds of claims a lot. And then what happens when somebody hears that and they're afraid and they want to make the best decision? They put off treatment.

• 24:17Speaker 02

  And they die.

• 24:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And they die, yeah. Either they never get conventional treatment, or they wait so long that it's no longer as effective, because that's the, that's one of the toughest things about cancer. The more and faster it spreads, the harder it is to treat, right? The earlier you can catch it. Before it has spread, the easier it is to treat. Yes, this is a very common tactic that they use. And one of the ways that they do it, and this is something that the, um, the writer of this article really points out, is that there's a negativity bias, a principle that we, we talk about in psychology where the bad is stronger than the good. And that could partially explain why a lot of this type of pseudoscience is so triggering

• 25:02Cara Santa Maria?

  for people and works better than hopeful or fact-based messages. Because people are going to react more strongly to, this is gonna, like you said, you know, the burn, the cut, right? This is gonna disfigure you. This could make you disabled. This could, you know, the cancer spreading and eating away at you more than, you know, you could get 15 healthy months if you start on this treatment now. Or by and large, people who take this treatment, you know, have this many better days in front of them. When, when they're sort of hopeful or fact-based, they don't seem to stick as much because of that negativity bias.

• 25:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Another thing that they talk about quite a lot is the idea of highlighting losses as opposed to potential gains. So they're kind of related, that when we see cancer messages that talk about, you know, losing health, losing comfort, losing actual years of life, it does feel a lot more urgent and a lot more motivating than when we, when we flip the script and we talk about improved survival or better quality of life. And so I think knowing that there is a bias toward loss, there is a bias toward sort of bad stronger than good or negativity can help those who are messaging, position their messages in a way that are more effective.

• 26:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we see this so often, right? That the misinformation, the pseudoscience, their messages are unfair. They, they hit below the belt. They don't play by the rules. And, and unfortunately, they're often more effective to people who are vulnerable and who are afraid. And so we could be thinking about how to improve our messaging so that it feels just as urgent or just as necessary. And also, the writer of the article talks at length about pre-bunking. I think we've all talked about pre-bunking before, so we don't have to get into it too deeply. But the idea of pre-bunking is just that when you sort of are aware of common techniques that pseudoscientists, grifters, you know, snake oil salesmen

• 27:10Cara Santa Maria?

  use, when you're aware of them in advance, you can spot them before they get to you, before they take hold, and you're more likely to be able to resist those messages. And so a lot of things is like, understanding scare tactics, understanding mechanisms of deception, like exaggerated risks, like fear mongering, like promises of cures or miraculous, you know, treatments that don't seem to carry any weight. But being aware of that before they hit you, you're less likely to fall victim to them. It's much harder to undo than it is to prevent. And, you know, they end their article, which I think is an important

• 27:54Cara Santa Maria?

  one. We've probably used this quote within the first, you know, I wasn't here at the very beginning of the SGU, but I can imagine that, maybe Evan, you know, the Carl Sagan quote, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I mean, we use that quote all the time. Was that ever one of the quotes on, at the end of the SGU?

• 28:11Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh, probably in episode two.

• 28:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. That's what I was saying. It must have been really early on, because it's such a mantra. But it is such an important quote. And I think we have to go back to it over and over and over. When we hear a claim that sounds too good to be true, there better be a whole lot of evidence backing it up, because it likely is too good to be true.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  But often the evidence is, "I heard it from someone on the internets."

• 28:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  That's the entirety of the evidence.

• 28:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So much cancer misinformation, so much cancer pseudoscience falls into that bucket of too good to be true. And we have to remember that. But good on Danielle Lloyd for, for sort of changing that narrative. And it's always nice when, when we can talk about how a public figure, a celebrity is using social media for good, right?

• 29:01Speaker 04

  Rare.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the other thing I often point out too is that when you're disconnected from reality, right, you don't have a process which constrains your claims and your message and your narrative because you have to defend it with evidence and logic and review, you know, of some sort. And then you get to craft your message purely for psychological appeal.

• 29:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 29:28Speaker 02

  So that's, these things, and these things evolve, the ones that have, it's adaptive radiation, the ones that have the best, you know, psychological appeal, those are keepers, man. You can, you just get variations on those themes. And then over time, they get fine tuned to be pushing the psychological buttons of people, you know?

• 29:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And I mean, that's why I sort of use the analogy, without making it so overt, of like hitting below the belt or not playing by the rules. Like, that really is what is happening here. There are no constraints. And so when there's a, when there's a fight and there are rules to how you fight, and then somebody just comes in with a weapon, it's very easy for them to win the fight. And that, that's what we see over and over and over. And I think that is the eternal problem, is how do we continue to, I mean, I hate that I'm using like a violent analogy here, but to, whether it's fight back or be on the offensive, without stooping to the level of also using weapons, right? How are

• 30:31Cara Santa Maria?

  we able to make sure that the, the narrative that is an evidence-based and, and scientific narrative is, is factual, but it's also persuasive? And, and that it can even find a voice within the cacophony that is pseudoscience?

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tough when one side's ethically constrained and the other one isn't.

• 30:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  And that's the, the catch 22 of trolls, right? Is they, they poison the dialogue because of... They're not acting in good faith. And there's no real solution to that. There's just, there are things you can do, but it's all a trade off. There's no real solution to it.

• 31:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. It's flagging misinformation. It's, it's education that allows for that type of pre bunking. And it's, you know, I think those of us in the community who are in those sort of authoritative positions, physicians, scientists, psychologists, you know, individuals who have that type of education and training, continuing to maintain really, really meaningful relationships with their patients, with their community members, and continuing to be that trustworthy voice. Because when it comes down to it, yes, people are listening to all the bullshit that's out there on social media, but when they get sick and they go to the doctor, polls continue to show us that they trust what their doctors tell them.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:57Cara Santa Maria?

  We have to keep, you know, fostering those relationships.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  All right. Bob, give us an update on thermal nuclear propulsion. I know you love this.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  Ooh.

• 32:09Jay Novella?

  I thought you were gonna say thermal nuclear war. I'm like, what?

• 32:12Cara Santa Maria?

  You love it, Bob. You love it.

• 32:14Bob Novella?

  I don't love that. So, yes, it has been, I calculated, it's been 34 episodes since I've talked about nuclear rockets in some way. So, we are due.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  Way overdue.

• 32:23Bob Novella?

  Yes. Tried to keep it to 20, you know, so we hit 34. This time we have, this time we have an advance for nuclear thermal rockets that use liquid or molten uranium to potentially, it seems, double the efficiency of nuclear rockets using an ingenious centrifuge design. This is from researchers at Ohio State University collaborating with University of Alabama in Huntsville. They've published in Acta Astronautica, a paper called "Addressing Challenges to Engineering Feasibility of the Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket." I never heard of this type of rocket before, CNTR. So, why do we even want rockets that are nuclear? Well, if you haven't listened to me talk about this, the 40 or 50 times I have, chemical

• 33:07Bob Novella?

  rockets, they're just annoying. You know, they've served us quite well. Done an amazing job and they will probably help us get off the planet for a really long time. But in space, they're just, they've hit, chemical rockets have hit an efficiency wall, a physics wall of efficiency. And we've got the technology, you know, we don't have to use chemical rockets in space anymore. Now, this ceiling that chemical rockets have been hitting stems from the fact that the energy released from chemical reactions, it's just paltry and inefficient compared to the energy from nuclear reactions. So that's why this is the preferred rocket, if you really want to, you know, move cargo and get places fast in space.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  And you know what, what fuel, what chemical rocket fuel has the highest specific impulse? Which means, you know, basically change in velocity for the mass of fuel.

• 33:58Bob Novella?

  Well, it's gotta be, it's gotta be hydrogen, it's the lightest, right?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it, hydrogen. That's it, that's as best we could do. Yes, just burning hydrogen with oxygen, that's as good as chemical rockets are going to get, basically.

• 34:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so nuclear thermal rockets use fission instead of chemical energy to heat the rocket propellant and shoot it out of the ship to fly through space. We've had and we've tested these nuclear thermal rockets since the 60s. And we're finally seeing a resurgence now in this technology for various reasons. And which I don't really need to go into right here, but we are, but we are having this renaissance, which is making me very happy. Now, these types of rockets are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets, meaning that you can transport more cargo with the same amount of propellant or the same cargo with less propellant. So huge advantages that would save a lot, a lot of money, millions to billions of dollars.

• 34:49Bob Novella?

  So this news item is essentially a new idea, how to make these nuclear thermal rockets even more efficient, perhaps twice as efficient, which would make them about four times as efficient as chemical rockets. So one of the best ways to do this is just, let's do a comparison because it took me a bit to figure out, why is this better? Well, how is this centrifuge even working and why is it better than a nuclear, than a run-of-the-mill nuclear thermal rocket? So let's look at a solid core nuclear thermal rocket. So we start with a uranium composite. So this uranium composite It's filled with thousands of little tunnels. Now imagine that the uranium is undergoing fission while hydrogen gas is flowing through those tunnels. You could imagine what's going to happen, right?

• 35:31Bob Novella?

  All that heat from the fission is conducted through the metal to the tunnels, which heats the gas inside tremendously. And this superheated propellant is then directed to the ship's nozzles to essentially push the ship through space, right? Simple, uh, simple design, at least, you know, at that high level. Uh, complex to pull off, but it's, that's essentially how it works. Uh, so, but now we've got this CNTR, this centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket. So what is this guy doing? In this proposal, the researchers primarily, primarily imagine a beefy centrifuge. You're going to need, yeah, a very strong centrifuge for this, obviously. So now remember that carnival ride, guys? Steve, Jay, you know this, when you, when you're, you know, when you or your parents, which I have to say now, were kids,

• 36:14Bob Novella?

  the Gravitron, that's, that thing you would get in it, it would spin you around and pin you against the wall with like, say what, like two and a half to three Gs, which is, which is three times the force of gravity that you feel right now. So we were pinned against that wall really hard. Well, this new nuclear centrifuge would spin at literally thousands of Gs. So instead of spinning you into a thin paste against the wall, which is what that would do, it spins a liquid or molten uranium around and around. And of course, that uranium is also undergoing fission.

• 36:44Speaker 02

  Bob, let me ask you a question. So in, in your description of how this works, is hydrogen the propellant?

• 36:51Bob Novella?

  Yes, hydrogen is the propellant and uranium is the fuel.

• 36:55Speaker 02

  Cause hydrogen, while it's a great fuel, it's not that great a propellant. So I'm wondering why they use that. Cause it's light, right, which makes it a great fuel, but means you don't get that much bang for the buck as a propellant. Anyway, just.

• 37:06Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah, but actually that, that's actually part of the benefits of this, this design. This design can run on many different fuels, including methane and other, other things that we can get from asteroids and the moon. So one of the huge benefits of this technology is that it could be self-sustaining. You could go out into space and then just pick up more fuel in an asteroid.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  Fuel or propellant?

• 37:28Bob Novella?

  Propellant, propellant, I mean propellant. Because it's so adaptable, it can use so many different types of propellant that, that, um, I mean, I was just focusing on what is, what is the process? But they do mention, they do mention hydrogen a lot. Okay, so let me just finish up here. So we've got, so you've got this huge mega centrifuge. It's spinning this, this thin film of kind of a liquefied uranium, you know, in the centrifuge. And what happens is that the gaseous propellant then bubbles through the fusing uranium and that heat is transferred directly to it through direct contact. And that's the key there, that's the key difference there. There's something like millions or billions of these little gas bubbles of propellant percolating through that fusing uranium.

• 38:10Bob Novella?

  And those bubbles, uh, you know, all those billions of bubbles have an incredibly large surface area, far larger than those tunnels that, that I had mentioned with the other technology. And that's what makes the heating so much more efficient than conventional nuclear thermal rockets. That's, that's one of the keys right there. So I tried to come up with some other analogies for how this works. So the, the typical, the, the conventional, um, nuclear thermal rocket would be like blowing air through a red hot radiator, right? So you, you're blowing your air through the red hot radiator and that, and the, the air that's coming out at the other end is going to be, is going to be hotter, obviously. But with a CNTR, it's like bubbling that air through molten metal. So what's coming out at the other end is just going to be much hotter. And that's, that's what we're seeing with this CNTR technology.

• 38:55Bob Novella?

  So the end result is the propellant reaches much higher temperatures, which creates higher exhaust speeds, meaning less propellant is needed for the same job. But one of the things, and Steve, you alluded to this, you mentioned it, one of the key things here to compare these technologies is to look at specific impulse. So specific impulse, it's, it's essentially the miles per gallon, or should I say kilometers per liter for rockets. That's what's one, you know, one good way to look at it. Higher ISP means you get more push per unit of propellant. That's all it really is saying here. So now, but you got to remember, ISP is not equivalent to thrust. It's not the same thing. Cause you could have crazy high ISP with tiny thrust, like ion engines, or you could

• 39:37Bob Novella?

  have a lot of thrust with modest ISP, which is chemical rockets. And that's why chemical rockets are great for getting us off of the, the surface of the planet.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Need that thrust, baby.

• 39:47Bob Novella?

  The thrust is, is huge, but that, but you can't thrust like that for very long. So it's ISP is, is crap.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  So Bob, you can't thrust long?

• 39:55Bob Novella?

  Oh, boy. Somebody went for it. Alright Jake, congratulations, bro.

• 40:00Jay Novella?

  Thank you. I want to go Bob thrust lung.

• 40:02Bob Novella?

  The ISP, so the ISP for chemical rockets is 450. For solid core nuclear thermal rockets, it's 900. Which is, I mean, that's just a huge improvement over chemical rockets. It's so beneficial. Now CNTR has a potential ISP of 1500 to perhaps, perhaps the best it might be able to achieve is 1800 seconds of ISP. And that's one hell of an incremental improvement. That's, what did I say, four times, that could be four times better than chemical. So it's so, it's so efficient. It's great. So what might this mean? Okay, what's the bottom line in terms of what we see on the ground, if you will, or in space? I guess would be more accurate.

• 40:45Bob Novella?

  If you, if we wanted to, using this technology, we could add extra propellant, and extra propellant on top of that to do really cool things, and still have room for cargo. Now that's something that you can't do with chemical rockets. You can add more and more, you know, chemical components for your, for your propulsion, more propellant, but there's a limit. There's actually a limit. You can't go beyond. And you will have, at the end of the day, what's going to happen, Steve? You're not going to have any room for cargo. If you add, you just keep adding more and more propellant. But you're not in that, in that situation necessarily with these, with these other nuclear options. So that means that you could add extra propellant for the CNTR rocket. And that means you could push the ship harder. You can burn the engines longer.

• 41:26Bob Novella?

  You could, you could brake harder. You can get to your destination a lot faster and then just hit the brakes really hard. Turn and burn or whatever. Meaning that you could, you could potentially bring a trip to Mars down to two to three months. Whereas for a chemical rocket, you would need probably something like eight or nine months. So you could, you can, if you do this, get somewhere faster. But this, this technology really shines, though, for just the amount of cargo that you can carry. So for example, you could double the cargo for Mars. With the same, basically, the same ship mass, you could just double your cargo, which is, which is a huge benefit. Doubling the cargo, that's, that's something amazing right there. You could also do the... You could do a direct to Jupiter, you know, the pinball in space where you gotta do

• 42:10Bob Novella?

  gravity assists for this planet, then you gotta go to this planet and do another gravity assist. Very, takes a long time, takes a long time. Right, right, with this technology you can go essentially, you know, pretty much direct to Jupiter without years of gravity assists. You could also, how about this, you could use this technology to add, you could take, you could trade away some of your spare propellant that you no longer need for a given cargo, and then you could just add extra radiation shielding for space to make people extra safe, right, with all that nasty radiation out there. How about this one, you could do faster intercepts for, if there's a surprise comet or asteroid coming to the earth, you can do a much faster intercept with a, this CNTR, centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket compared to a chemical rocket.

• 42:54Bob Novella?

  And then finally, you could also do bigger science, bigger and better science, you could have, you could loft heavier instruments into space, you can have more power, you can more data, it's just, you could just do bigger and better science when you have this much power behind you. Alright, so before I finish, of course, we gotta go over some of the potential issues. CNTR is quite complex, it's definitely, it's more complex than NTR, nuclear thermal rocketry. So there's definitely some engineering challenges ahead, and they just briefly mentioned things like, you know, ensuring that the new design is stable, that the startup and even the shutdown is actually, you know, stable and won't blow up on you, and also, they also need to make sure that they don't lose a lot of uranium fuel during the operation, that's another classic problem that they could have with this.

• 43:38Bob Novella?

  But, the researchers hope that they may have a design ready for real-world tests within five years, so, in five years, we might have something substantial ready to go with this in terms of either, either having the design pinned down so they could build it, or have something that's already partially built in five years, I'm not sure, I'm not sure, you know, how fast they can, they can get this stuff ready, but it looks very promising, and anything that makes nuclear rockets better and more efficient is great to me, because that, that is clearly, I think we, Steve, you would agree, we could say with confidence that, that nuclear rockets are our future, it could be literally for centuries, for centuries, we could continue tweaking this. Into fusion.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Until we get fusion.

• 44:18Bob Novella?

  Fusion and then fusion and then and then after that it would be maybe directed energy. But clearly we could tweak this, just this general idea of nuclear rockets, fission fusion for for literally for centuries. I mean, this is this is the way people will be, people won't even remember chemical rockets eventually.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Well, I still think we're gonna need them to get off planets for a

• 44:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's true. That's so annoying. Isn't that frustrating? You have all this amazing efficiency and power behind you, but you can't really there. You can't really just launch from the planet using a nuclear rocket, not easily. I've heard I've come across a designer too that could potentially do it. They're not sure if a nuclear rocket could actually launch people and cargo off of the earth. One design that might work would actually spew the entire continent with radiation. So that open cycle and engine is not probably going to be very useful if it's going to irradiate most of the planet. But if they come up with some a closed cycle, that would be great. I don't know. But yeah, chemical rockets will be with us for a while on the earth, but in space, it's going to be all nuclear.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  Yep. All right. Thanks, Bob. Jay, tell us about these old mummies.

• 45:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, when I first looked at this, the first thing I thought of was that

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Mummy.

• 45:30Jay Novella?

  Bob would want to make one of these for his haunt because they're so crazy looking.

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Careful, he might have.

• 45:36Jay Novella?

  You know, so historically, you know, most people are like, you know, when mummies come from Egypt, right? That's a that's like a common piece of knowledge there or South America. But that's not the whole story. And there's a lot of complexity to the to the history of I was gonna say zombies, Bob, but I of mummies. So there was a PNAS study and verified that the earliest known mummification happened somewhere in Southeast Asia. And it was not in the regions that most people are think of when they think of mummies. So this discovery, now it's rewriting the timeline of human mortuary practices, which is interesting, right? Because we don't know, when you think about this type of thing,

• 46:20Jay Novella?

  like people, people did this to mummies or did this to people, turn them into mummies for religious reasons, for Munal reasons, you know, it's a very important thing. It wasn't just like, hey, we're gonna just do this because we like it. You know, it's more revolved around, you know, there's a lot of culture involved with it. So there's complexity to how they do it. There's different ways that they do it. This way, though, I've never heard of, and it's really, really cool. This research team was led by Hung, Deng, and Matsumura, and they examined human remains from 95 different archaeological sites. And this was across southern China, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Eleven of these sites were analyzed in extreme detail.

• 47:03Jay Novella?

  And what they found was that this wasn't just burial. There were many bodies that they found that were bound tightly in like this compact, compressed thing. It's like, it looks almost like an impossible contorted pose. With the arms like crossed under the thighs and the knees were pulled up all the way super tight up into the upper chest. What? Yeah. That's weird. And these positions were, you know, they found them to be really extreme. And the people that who prepared the corpses also did something where they removed soft tissue before, you know, in the start of this process. So they can make these bodies even more compact and tight looking. So what they confirmed was that the bodies were deliberately dried and they were preserved

• 47:48Jay Novella?

  before interment. So there's a few things that they had to do to get the full picture. The first thing they did was with the, they looked at the bones and there was some really important evidence that were found. Look at the bones! So many of the bones showed a blackening or charring on very, you know, specific places on the body. Foreheads, elbows, knees, pelvises. Now, these areas have the thinnest layers of muscle and skin. And the pattern wasn't random. What they found was, so the pattern didn't match a cremation pattern that they find. It suggests that there was some type of controlled deliberate process that they were using.

• 48:28Jay Novella?

  And to confirm it, the researchers used two advanced techniques, you know, X-ray diffraction or a four-year transform infrared spectroscopy. Right? Almost said it right. These methods detect microscopic changes inside bones and reveal whether they were exposed to heat or smoke. And I found that interesting that they they use these devices specifically to track heat and smoke. You know, I guess it was the charring that led them to that. So even even when there was no visible signs of burning left in what they found. And anyway, the results were really cool. So they they more than 80% of the samples showed a clear sign of low temperature heat exposure. And this confirmed that the bodies

• 49:11Jay Novella?

  were treated over smoldering fires for an extended period of time before they were buried. So think about that. They were like heat treating and smoking the corpses to preserve them. Right?

• 49:22Cara Santa Maria?

  When was this?

• 49:24Bob Novella?

  Maybe it's a big cannibal barbecue scenario.

• 49:27Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I mean, these were intentionally preserved.

• 49:29Jay Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 49:30Cara Santa Maria?

  So when, sorry, what year are they from? When, how old are they?

• 49:33Jay Novella?

  14,000 years ago.

• 49:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 49:36Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's older than any other any other mummifications.

• 49:40Bob Novella?

  I mean, what's the goal, Jay? What's the goal? I mean, wasn't mummification used to prepare kings for like the afterlife, right? So why would you?

• 49:48Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's one culture. But you know, this was more of, I don't think they have a complete picture, but the their understanding is that it would be for like, you know, leaders or a religious leader or someone that was really valuable to the community. And they would preserve them and then, you know, use them for for rituals and things like that, you know, just have them there as, you know, as something else, you know, it keeps them connected to their dead. It's a way to honor their dead and also have them be a part of their rituals and everything.

• 50:18Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 50:19Jay Novella?

  So they also did radiocarbon and they calibrated the readings. And what this means is they they corrected them to match true calendar years using data that they found from tree rings and other sources, which is pretty cool. So that 14,000 year timeline is accurate. So again, like, you know, when we say they they go back 14,000 years, that's significantly farther in the past than, you know, other mummies that we know from around the world, like Egypt and Chile, you know, they've embalmed dead. Examples in Egypt. So this means that the hunter gatherers in tropical Asia were smoking their dead long before all the other zombies that I'm sorry, all the other mummies, vampires, werewolves.

• 51:01Jay Novella?

  So the process itself they found is actually similar to practices that are still found in the highlands of New Guinea, like actively happening today. So some communities out there, what they do is they have, like I said, a revered leader, they would smoke them over the fires for months. You know, they'd bind the limbs in a very similar way in these compact positions. And this was all to preserve the bodies. I think it's pretty interesting, you know, that there's cultures that are still doing that today. They found a lot of these bodies in buried caves or in shell middens. You ever guys hear of a shell midden?

• 51:34Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I haven't.

• 51:36Jay Novella?

  It's like a pile that they collect over time of of shells and different things of bones and all that stuff. And what happens is if they bury it in this collection of shells and bones and whatnot, it preserves it much better than if it were buried in dirt.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  You got that, Bob? That's your tip for the day.

• 51:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Bob, you got to make one of those at your hunt.

• 51:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Thank you. Well, and what's interesting is they probably didn't know that it's, you know, it's a it's a survivor bias. Obviously, they didn't survive. But the reason that we know they're preserved better is because they preserved better.

• 52:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah. When you see one, I highly recommend you go take a look at a picture of this. They have a really good picture of something that is looked to be completely intact. And it is fascinating. I mean, it is really cool. It's it's kind of scary, too, but it's really, you know, from a history perspective, it's it's really incredible. You should take a look. So they also, you know, with this new interpretation of what was going on with these with these corpses, you know, what they they have to rethink a lot of the finds that other archaeologists have made when they find jumbled bones, right? So they'll find skulls tucked inside of rib cages or limbs bundled together. And what they assumed historically was that this was like ritual dismemberment.

• 52:51Jay Novella?

  But this evidence now points to the fact that, you know, after months or years of smoking and exposure and all that to the corpses, you know, some of these Mummies did naturally decay and break apart, which I'm sure a lot of them do that. So when it came time to bury them, the remains weren't, weren't in regular human form like they would have been if they buried them in, from death immediately, right? So they just grabbed all the bones and you know, that's why we find a lot of burials in these weird configurations with like the head inside the ribs and all that stuff. It's more like, you know, they're just picking them up and then burying them without laying them down in a, in a fashion that you would think is, is a human body form, right?

• 53:31Cara Santa Maria?

  It just makes you think how much of modern and even historical, even more so probably historical, physical anthropology is so culture bound. Like that all of the assumptions that were made based on minimal evidence were so shaped by like our modern death practices or our modern ideas about gender roles or about families or about whether a, a, a culture would have been violent or would have been peaceful. I mean, it's fascinating to hear story after story coming out that like, you know, women hunter gatherers were by and large actually hunting and you know, these things that historically

• 54:12Cara Santa Maria?

  they thought were like ritualistic dismemberments and like these violent practices might've actually been a way to honor, you know, religious leaders or, or dead that they wanted to honor. It's fascinating.

• 54:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And also, you know, when you look back on these different burial practices and everything, like you were saying culturally, you know, the norm today, I'm sure it, there's a lot of variation here, but in my country, you know, the norm is you put someone in a coffin and you put them six feet down and you bury them. But you know, to them culturally, it was more meaningful to have the, the representation of that person physically there.

• 54:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course. And we think of the norm today being some sort of amalgamation of thousands of years. It's not. It's really new. Our death practices are really, really new and they're probably more different than these historical death practices than they are similar, but we're constantly comparing everything to what we think is normal.

• 55:08Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:08Jay Novella?

  Yeah. It's hard to get out of your own lens, you know?

• 55:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 55:11Jay Novella?

  You have that, you have, we have a narrative and that's our first thought when interpreting things like that.

• 55:17Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay.

• 55:18Jay Novella?

  You got it.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Evan.

• 55:20Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Not the screw worms.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  The screw worms, yes.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  I did an update. I gave a report on the screw worm a couple of months ago, and there is an update this week, but I'll go back a little bit and remind you of what we talked about. What is a screw worm? A screw worm is the larval or maggot stage of a parasitic fly known for infesting and feeding on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals, including livestock, pets, and yes, we humans. Human deaths from screw worms are rare. The condition is known as myiasis, and it can be fatal if it's not promptly diagnosed and treated. And again, the key here is that these larvae must eat living flesh to survive, whereas ordinary maggots, they feed on the dead tissue.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  The update is that last week, the Center for Disease Control here in the United States confirmed a fear that we've had. We do have the first human case of New World screw worm in the United States. The patient, who was a Maryland, is a Maryland resident. They had recently traveled to El Salvador, and that's where screw worm infestations are rampant in both livestock and wildlife. The doctors spotted the larvae burrowing into this person's living flesh, and they immediately sent samples to the CDC for confirmation. This case is considered the first travel-associated human case from an outbreak-affected country since at least the early 2000s, so almost 25 years.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  But here's the good news. The infection was treated quickly and successfully, and the patient has fully recovered. And even better, there's no evidence that it had spread with, no evidence of that. So, we don't have an outbreak, but definitely this is a bit alarming, and people are on alert now, you know, veterinarians and other health officials about this particular case. We had, there was a time where we did eradicate this problem in the mid-20th century.

• 57:27Speaker 04

  Because the US had faced constant livestock losses from these infestations of the screw worm. But then they used something called the sterile insect technique in which they bred millions of screw worm flies. They sterilized them with radiation and released them by airplane over huge areas. And those sterile males mated with the wild females, they produced no offspring and collapsed the population. They said by 1966, it was wiped out. It was done. The screw worm was done in the United States. And it remained that way until 2023. But then they started to, there was evidence it was coming back.

• 58:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So in the 60s, they did this massive sort of public health campaign where they sterilized worms. I mean, that's amazing to me.

• 58:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like we were talking about genetically engineering mosquitoes.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Mosquitoes is the one, yeah, where we've talked about it before.

• 58:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And from an ethics perspective and a modern, there's like so much, you know, argument around it and should it be done? And what would happen if it got out there and blah, blah, blah? That's, I don't, I don't know why, but that's like really stunning to me that that would have happened in the 60s.

• 58:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, right. And Yeah, right. It is a bit amazing to think about in that, in that particular time period. But that's how, that's how bad this threat was. I mean, it was like an all hands on deck. We have to get this under control. We're going to lose our livestock and probably lose a lot of people.

• 58:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And how cool that it worked.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  That it worked. Yep. And they're, and they're doing it again. This is also a current intervention that they're, that they're doing as well to be particularly safe. Because while they were able to during much of the latter half of the 20th century, keep it contained Panama and South and South America. They were able to get it mostly out of Central America. It has, it has come back. And in 2023, again, right on the border with us is Mexico and Mexico had reported cases in 2023. So we knew this has been knocking at our doorstep for the last couple of years. And we've been trying to, you know, get this back, you know, at least back under control as best as we can here, here in the United States on this particular problem. They're setting up surveill- they have set surveillance traps across several states,

• 59:42Speaker 04

  a lot of them in the east, but also in the south. And what they do is they detect signs of wild screw worm flies. And so far, the traps, anything that's trapped, they've not detected any screw worms yet. So that's good. But the USDA is also expanding that sterilization program that we talked about. And the FDA has issued emergency authorization so veterinarians can rapidly access treatments for animals if the outbreak occurs in among the, among livestock and other things. So you have to, you have to pregame this thing. That, that, that's the key. And that's kind of the, maybe the main takeaway here. They say the return of screw worm is a reminder of how fragile eradication victories are.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  And even though things might have been gone for decades, you know, in this particular case, a parasite kept at bay, you know, in good, using good science vigilance and cooperation mostly. You know, we could see this, we could see this comeback, we could see other things come back. This definitely, definitely parallels what's happening with vaccinations. No doubt, no doubt about it. It's, it's the same thing. So there's a lot of different ways that things like this manifest. And we don't realize how, how fragile our protections really are until it's too late, until we've done a lot of dumb things and bad things in order to make these things relevant again in our, in our day to day lives.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:01:07Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Jay, who's that noisy time?

• 1:01:09Jay Novella?

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

• 1:01:25Jay Novella?

  Any guesses?

• 1:01:27Speaker 04

  I know it's not right, but it has a helicopter sounding quality to it.

• 1:01:30Jay Novella?

  Yes, it does.

• 1:01:31Speaker 04

  But I doubt it's a helicopter of any kind.

• 1:01:34Jay Novella?

  Okay, I got a new listener here named John C. Edwards, and he said, "Long time, first time. Sounds like the interference on ham radio from the woodpecker, the Russian OTH ultra-long range radar. If it's not that, I'm suspecting it's some kind of similar radio phenomenon." Lots of people guessed this. John happened to be the first one. It's a very good guess, but that is not correct. Visto Tuti said, "The noisy sounds like those big lawn sprinklers where the water jet powers its circular spraying around the green." You know what I'm talking about? Like those ones that spin around in a circle?

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 1:02:07Jay Novella?

  And it does have that, that "bap, bap, bap, bap, bap" vibe, but this is not it. He is not correct. This is from a listener named Scott Williams. He said, "Hey, Jay, first time guesser from San Antonio. My guess is a pulsar as picked up by a radio telescope. Big fan of the show. Thanks." Many, many people guessed this as well, and it, you know, it sounds like that, but it doesn't happen to be that. I have one last guess here, Caleb Chrome or Crom, and he said, "This sounds like the mechanism that moves film when projecting. It's a pretty slow rate, maybe an old Super 8 or older," right? So he's talking about a projector that...

• 1:02:43Speaker 04

  The reel-to-reel projectors.

• 1:02:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, reel-to-reel projector, which there's not that many of those out there anymore.

• 1:02:48Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. Science, science biology films in 1974 and...

• 1:02:53Jay Novella?

  Yep. I really, really liked this guess. And as a fun, interesting side note, did you know that the part of the lightsaber sound was taken from a film projector?

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:03:03Jay Novella?

  Yeah. It's one of the sounds that, that makes up the aggregate sound.

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Cool.

• 1:03:07Jay Novella?

  So no winner this week, guys. There was no winner.

• 1:03:10Speaker 04

  Thought everybody was a winner.

• 1:03:12Jay Novella?

  So I'm gonna tell you what this is, and then I'll play it for you again. So this is called the photoacoustic effect. So this effect happens where sound waves are generated from light. And, you know, think about that. Like, sound waves are actually, you know, being generated from light exposure. So it happens when a material absorbs a pulsed or modulated beam of light, like a laser, right? So step by step, there's a short burst of light that hits the material, and then if the material absorbs the light... Its molecules gain energy and heat up very, very slightly and very quickly. And what happens is there's thermal expansion. And the thermal expansion happens almost instantly.

• 1:03:55Jay Novella?

  And then, and of course, then there is like a pressure wave that's created. And that turns into sound. So the light actually heats up the material. And the air gets heated up and that air gets pushed out and makes sound. So listen to it again.

• 1:04:16Jay Novella?

  Now, of course, you need special equipment to hear this. Or else we'd be hearing it every day, all day long. And that's that. What did you guys think of that?

• 1:04:23Bob Novella?

  Cool.

• 1:04:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Cool.

• 1:04:24Jay Novella?

  You love it?

• 1:04:24Speaker 04

  Very neat, Jay.

• 1:04:25Jay Novella?

  You didn't love it?

• 1:04:26Speaker 04

  Good fun.

• 1:04:26Bob Novella?

  Liked it a lot. Didn't love it.

• 1:04:32Jay Novella?

  All right, I have a new noisy for you guys.

• 1:04:37Jay Novella?

  I'm sorry, that's a fast one up here. There we go. Right here, Steve.

• 1:04:59Jay Novella?

  So normally I would take out the white noise in the background. But I didn't do it this time. So that's a clue for you. If you guys think you know what the noisy is this week, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected]. As you listen to this, it's probably too late to have bought the tickets for the Kansas shows unless you're listening to it at noon on Saturday, the 20th. And we will tell you next week how much fun we had and it turned out so far. We have great ticket sales, very excited to go. I can't wait to see Kara.

• 1:05:29Speaker 04

  Yay. Hey Kara. Hey.

• 1:05:32Jay Novella?

  And by the way, guys, if you enjoy the work that we do and you want to support us, you can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. And you can support the work that we do. And we have lots of new stuff coming, as we've discussed. Steve, when is our political podcast going to drop? Like in about two weeks, three weeks?

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  So I think we've got our recording days in three weeks and then however long it takes us to do post-production. So hopefully within a month, we'll have the first episode out.

• 1:06:01Jay Novella?

  But we are making great progress and, you know, we know what we're doing now. How about that?

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Yep. I have one question. This comes from Alex, who writes, hi, folks. Little Alex. On your show of 19th July, 2025, the opening discussion was flu vaccines. And in that discussion, it was mentioned that no study could ever be done, which gave a placebo to participants because we know the flu vaccine works. Would a way around this be to invite participants who would, who wouldn't normally get the vaccine due to personal choice, but who wouldn't mind either way if they did or did not get it? Surely there would be enough people who fall into this category. The question, I suppose, can be applied on a wider basis than just the flu vaccine. Alex, so what do you guys think? Do you get what he's saying there?

• 1:06:52Speaker 02

  And so to get around the ethical problem of randomizing people to not getting a known effective treatment, which is unethical. Like, you could never get IRB approval for that protocol, right? For that study.

• 1:07:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's the operative word there. They're no longer randomized.

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Well, yes, they're they're no longer randomized.

• 1:07:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. So if you have a bunch of people who are willing to take a placebo, they know that they're getting the placebo. Or even if they don't, even if they say, I'm willing to get the drug or the placebo, there's a there's a variable there in those types of people.

• 1:07:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Cara Santa Maria?

  That's different than the other group.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  So it's so it's not necessarily a representative sample. Exactly. So it's not a substitute for like the scientifically optimal study, which is to, you know, have no selection bias, to completely randomize people to whether or not they're getting a treatment versus a placebo. So this this wouldn't do that. But I still I also think that even within that group, you're still withholding an effective treatment from people. So even if they say, that's okay, you can do that. It doesn't get around. It does not obviate the ethical consideration.

• 1:08:06Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true. It's one thing for somebody to refuse treatment. It's another thing for a physician-led study, which usually these are, for the for the researchers and or physicians to say, we are withholding treatment.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, just because if someone says, it's okay to do unethical research on me, doesn't mean it's okay.

• 1:08:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  This is not about informed consent. What they do do is, they do observational studies where, or cohort studies, or even prospective studies, where they do follow people who choose not to get vaccines. But again, that's a self-selective group. So it's not randomized. So it's not a substitute.

• 1:08:43Cara Santa Maria?

  This is why clinical trials for new chemotherapies, for example, are often full of people who have failed out of all their other treatments.

• 1:08:52Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:08:53Cara Santa Maria?

  They are people for whom this is the best option they have in front of them. But they're not foregoing treatment that we know works in order to try out treatment that may or may not work.

• 1:09:02Speaker 02

  Right. Or, this is the other way around it, looking at the new treatment as adjunctive therapy.

• 1:09:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  So we do this with seizure therapy, too. Like, you know, at some point, I noticed, like, every new anti-seizure medication, they get their first indication as an add-on therapy. And that's purely for pragmatic reasons, because you can't withhold effective anti-seizure medication from somebody to see if this new experimental drug works. You have to give them the effective medication, plus placebo versus the new medication. So it's always studied first as add-on therapy. So same thing with chemo. It's like, if we add this to the proven therapy, does it work even better? Or people who can't take the other ones because they've already failed it, or whatever.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  So you're not withholding anything that somebody would otherwise get. All right, we're gonna also do a named-out logical fallacy. This one comes from Mark. It's kind of a long email. I might not read the whole thing, but I'll give you the gist here. He says, "Over the past few years, I have seen people using this reasoning in different contexts more and more. I grew up in the Bible Belt and went to a Catholic school, and I used to hear comments like this much more often in the 80s. But it seemed that it died out a little, but now it seems to be coming back regardless of political or religious views. Here are the 80s versions that I remember, mostly the extremely religious." So then in quotes, he says, "He was killed by a drunk driver, and I don't feel sorry

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  for him at all. He spoke out against prohibition." So in other words, saying that, well, because he was against prohibition, it kind of serves him right for getting killed by a drunk driver. Or he caught HIV and deserved it because he advocated for gay marriage.

• 1:10:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, what?

• 1:10:59Speaker 02

  That's a weird one, but basically saying, well, HIV is spreading because of the gay lifestyle. And that's your position of advocating gay marriage has come back to bite you because now you got HIV.

• 1:11:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Is there a logical fallacy called blaming the victim?

• 1:11:18Speaker 02

  Well, so we'll talk about what logical fallacies you think here. Or he was killed in an armed robbery and he deserved it. He was an attorney that defended an armed robber. So things like that. And then he says, some newer ones are, you guys probably know what news item this is from. I'm glad those girls died in the flood. Their parents probably supported government funding cuts. Or Kirk was against gun control, therefore he deserved to die via gun violence. So the question is, you know, is there a logical fallacy in there? And if so, what do you think it is? I mean, most of these definitely strike you as a non sequitur, right? But that's sort of the generic logical fallacy.

• 1:12:00Cara Santa Maria?

  And some ad hominem maybe. I mean, anytime you say somebody deserves to die, there's probably an ad hominem in there.

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they're not really saying that they had a negative attribute. It's more that they took this position, therefore it's, you know, part of it is that, isn't it ironic? You know, like, isn't it ironic that somebody who was against gun safety laws died of gun violence? But then you take it a step further and say, well, you know, he has some guilt in his own killing. You know, he, he kind of deserved it because he was, you know, against gun control to begin with. So it's hard to feel sorry for.

• 1:12:44Speaker 04

  It is non sequitur.

• 1:12:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Speaker 02

  It's like, so it's reap what you sow kind of logic.

• 1:12:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Which, which I hear with the. Other examples? I don't know. I struggle with that because that's actually not the argument that's being made with that last news item, but okay.

• 1:13:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, these are not really coherent. We could think of examples that might... It always depends on the, again, with informal logical fallacy here, it depends on the precise formulation and how you look at it.

• 1:13:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely. And I guess I'm curious if there is an informal logical fallacy in the argument, not that anybody deserved to die, nobody deserves to die, but that an individual who is quoted as saying that some deaths, you know, you've got to crack some eggs to make an omelet, basically, that some deaths are the cost we pay for maintaining a Second Amendment, then dies in that very way. It's ironic.

• 1:13:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Cara Santa Maria?

  You could say it's ironic.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Right. I think that you could say it's ironic, right?

• 1:13:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I don't think there's like a logical fallacy in that. And to claim that anybody deserves death is, yeah.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. But even in irony, again, depends on the specific details, that could sometimes be a false dichotomy, I think. So, you know, so if you formulated to say, look, you're either for us or against us, and if you ever said anything against us, then you deserve everything you get, rather than saying, well, there are nuanced positions in the middle here, you know? Like, you can think that armed robbers deserve a legal defense and not think that armed robbery is okay, you know?

• 1:14:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:14:30Speaker 02

  So that, I think, so if you're banking on that notion of, well, you defended this, therefore you're on team, whatever. So like, there's no nuance in the middle. Like, again, like with Kirk saying that, well, he was against gun control, therefore, you know, he's pro-gun violence. Well, it's not the same thing. Right. You know, or, you know, saying, like, if you're being pro-gay marriage, then you're pro-HIV, or...

• 1:14:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, what?

• 1:14:59Speaker 02

  You're against public health measures to minimize HIV, or whatever, you know? It's like, no, there's like, there's no nuances. I do think it's that us versus them, you're on what, you're in this tribe, or you're in that tribe. And anybody in that tribe believes and advocates and deserves everything that goes in that one direction. You know, that goes along with this one issue.

• 1:15:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It also feels like there's a straw man there.

• 1:15:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:15:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  It's a, totally, yeah, that, and again, often, those things are linked. Like, the straw man is the false dichotomy, and also a false equivalency in some of these arguments. And also a slippery slope, you know, so like, all of these elements can be there. So like, saying that, like, equating, speaking out against prohibition with being okay with there being drunk drivers on the road. It's like, nope, that's...

• 1:15:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other. There's a little bit of a false equivalency there.

• 1:15:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Or, you're right, like, it's a slippery slope, that if somebody is somehow not okay with one thing, it means it downstream. I mean, it's the same argument. It's, the gay marriage one is a perfect example, like, oh, he's, he's pro-gay marriage, therefore, he thinks everybody should get AIDS and die. It's like, what?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, you don't, you don't think prohibition's good? Yeah, so you're okay with drunken drivers roaming the streets, killing people at random, you know, I mean, like, that kind of...

• 1:16:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like, that is not...

• 1:16:23Speaker 02

  Arguments all the time. So this is a complicated one, because like, there's a ton of logical fallacies, potentially, in these kinds of statements, depending on the details.

• 1:16:33Cara Santa Maria?

  I also, I wonder, for, just, kind of, an open question to the, to the person who wrote in the question. How often are those arguments that we hear lacking that much nuance? Like, how often do you actually hear people saying, so-and-so deserves to die because of X, Y, and Z? Or is it more likely, a more nuanced question of, like, I wonder if they hadn't made those claims so publicly, if this hadn't happened? Or, you know, it's almost like they're advocating for some sort of horrific karma.

• 1:17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right.

• 1:17:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know how many people would publicly say that.

• 1:17:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not just pointing out the irony. It's aligning with their pre-existing political beliefs and biases.

• 1:17:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  Okay, well, thanks for that question, Mark. All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:17:37Speaker 02

  Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Three regular news items. Here we go. Item number one, for the first time, astronomers have discovered a five-pointed Einstein cross, which modeling suggests is due to intergalactic dark matter. All right, number two, a recent study of the two most common anti-phishing training campaigns found no significant benefit or reduced susceptibility to phishing attempts.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  And item number three, a recent analysis finds that current vertical lettuce farming has 20 times the yield per area and only 1/8 the water use as traditional farming, but still has a significantly higher carbon footprint. Who hasn't gone first in a while? Kara, go first.

• 1:18:39Cara Santa Maria?

  All right, so we've got a five-pointed Einstein cross. I don't even know what that is.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  I'll tell you. So it's a rare phenomenon in which if you have, let's say you have a galaxy far like 10 billion light years away, but 2 billion light years away, there's a galaxy cluster. And because of gravity bending light, you see what's called an Einstein cross because Einstein predicted it, you'll see four galaxies, like around.

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:19:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, the light bending source. So typically, right, they are four, it's a cross, there are four points. So for the first time astronomers have discovered a five-pointed one. So there was five images instead of four images.

• 1:19:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, okay, and that suggests this due to intergalactic dark matter.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  Because it's a gravity lensing, gravity bending light phenomenon.

• 1:19:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, I don't know. Two most common anti-phishing training campaigns found no significant benefit or reduces, oh geez, really? So, teaching people how to spot phishing attacks made them no more protected against it. Well, I hope that's not science, because that would suck. And then, current vertical lettuce farming, 20 times the yield per area, 1/8 the water use, but a significantly higher carbon footprint. I'm worried that that might be science, only because it is really good with, because you can reuse the water, like you can capture it, because usually, vertical farming happens indoors. Not always, but it often happens

• 1:20:21Cara Santa Maria?

  indoors on drip irrigation, where you can recapture the water. And of course, it doesn't take up space, because it's vertical. But I think it calls for, like, really intense lights. So, and I think, you know, and like maintaining humidity exactly right and all of that. So I wouldn't be surprised if that's science. So, I don't know, the first one, I have no idea on. I'm gonna say, I hope that the phishing scam one is the fiction. I have no idea if it is, but it's gonna bum me out if we can't teach people how to, like, how to recognize phishing, because like, we're pretty screwed if that's the case. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna call that one the fiction.

• 1:21:00Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:21:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, and by the way, that's pH fishing. To a listener, this might sound pretty funny.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, for the audience, right, yeah.

• 1:21:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah, Kara, I hear what you're saying about the phishing thing. Like, I want it to be the fiction. All right, so let's just talk about this. I'm not gonna even go for the first one. I don't know enough to even comment on that. So the basic question here is, of the people who are, you know, learning about fishing, like getting training on how to avoid fishing, would they have not any, not have any significant benefit of, you know, learning those skills? And I find that hard to believe. If someone's gonna take the time to like, sit down and learn skills. Yeah, I think I'm gonna agree with Kara. I mean, the, the vertical farming thing, there's tons of, of vegetables that are grown indoors,

• 1:21:52Jay Novella?

  in indoor environments that need, you know, they need humidity control and lots of water and irrigation and all sorts of stuff. So I, I don't know if, I don't know if vertical farming would have like a, a much worse footprint than those other methods. Yeah, it's an interesting question. I don't know, I just don't know. I, I would think it'd be more similar than dissimilar. So I'll go with Kara. I'll say number two is the fiction.

• 1:22:14Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:22:15Bob Novella?

  So, all right, we got a five-pointed Einstein cross here. I'm having, I'm having problems with that because my understanding is that an Einstein cross is four points. And that's just what it is. And if it's somehow doesn't have that, if it has, say, you know, five, then it's not an Einstein cross. I mean, it just seems like it might, is, the implication is that, is it even possible? Now, I, I know of an Einstein ring and Einstein cross. The Einstein ring is when it's, the alignment's perfect and you have a beautiful ring. It's just like a solid ring. I've seen some of those. But the cross is from misalignment. So maybe five is impossible. Um, but I've only seen four. I've only heard of like four, four.

• 1:22:57Bob Novella?

  Ah, so it's either between that or going with the crew here. Ah, screw it, I'll go off on my own. Even though I'm not quite sure that this is fiction, uh, I'll say the Einstein cross is fiction.

• 1:23:08Speaker 02

  Okay, and Evan?

• 1:23:09Speaker 04

  Uh, it's my first time hearing about the Einstein cross, so, um, it's interesting. It suggests it's due to intergalactic dark matter. Dark matter causes this?

• 1:23:22Speaker 04

  Does seem strange, right? I don't know, but the fishing one also. No significant benefit, zero. Oh, gosh, I don't know which one of the two. I'll go, I'll go with the fishing one, I think, as it's a coin flip. I don't really know how else to describe it. I'll just say it's the fishing. I don't mean to leave you alone, Bob, but I won't be surprised if you get a solo win this week.

• 1:23:45Bob Novella?

  Nah, probably not, but.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  All right, well, you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Recent analysis finds that current vertical lettuce farming has 20 times the yield per area, and only one eighth the water use as traditional farming, but still has a significantly higher carbon footprint. You all think this one is science, and this one is? Is it? Science, this is science. So you're all safe so far. And Kara, you pretty much got it. So, I mean, not surprising. It uses 20 times less land because it's vertical. That's kind of the whole point. And it's a closed system usually, so water use is going to be much less, but it's more energy intensive, no question.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  This was actually comparing it to vertical farming using renewable energy.

• 1:24:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow. And it's still that much worse?

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's even then it's worse. So it's not as simple as just saying, well, we'll power it with electric, with solar panels. And the, and carbon footprint is not all about energy use, although that is a big part of it. But there is some good news in here in that there are ways to reduce the carbon footprint. That's what this study was partly saying, like, we've got to. Because, you know, so from one perspective, this vertical farming can be very sustainable, right, in terms of land use and water use. And especially on, in a country like Great Britain, where it's landlocked, you know, they, they, they're thinking, we're really going to need to do this in order to produce enough, enough food.

• 1:25:23Speaker 02

  But they're worried about the carbon footprint. However, they found that you're making certain changes to the process. Like, here's one. Researchers found that switching to alternative materials, so right now they use jute fiber plugs and fibrous blocks made from jute in order to support the plants because they're not in soil, right? Said if you switch over to coconut coir, C-O-I-R, how would you pronounce that? I guess it's like the coconut fibers rather than the jute fibers, could cut the land footprint of vertical farms by more than 95%. That sounds good. They should do that. Because that sounds, that sounds pretty good. The, the carbon footprint difference was it's

• 1:26:07Speaker 02

  not, was not as profound as the other thing. So, the vertically farmed lettuce produced 0.93 kilograms of greenhouse gases for every kilogram grown, while conventional farms used 0.57. So, not even twice. But still, that's a, you know, 0.93 to 0.57 is significant. So, you know, it's still, has it, again, it's a trade-off, still advantages. Hopefully, we'll be able to get that carbon footprint more in line with traditional farming. And then, I do think, you know, vertical farming can be significantly, you know, helpful. All right. Which one should we do next? I guess I'll go, just go, keep going backwards. A recent study of the two most common anti-fishing training campaigns found no significant benefit

• 1:26:49Speaker 02

  or reduced susceptibility to fishing attempts. Evan, Jay, and Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Bob, you think this one is science. All by your lonesome. And this one is science.

• 1:27:06Jay Novella?

  Whoa, baby!

• 1:27:07Speaker 04

  Wow!

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Yep, the cybersecurity training programs had That's a bummer. No effect. No effect?

• 1:27:14Bob Novella?

  I'm not surprised.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:27:16Bob Novella?

  People are people.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  You know, you know how they partly assessed the effectiveness?

• 1:27:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Just see if people clicked on the links over and over?

• 1:27:24Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:27:25Jay Novella?

  They, they

• 1:27:25Speaker 02

  They used internally generated phishing campaign, like they faked phishing attempts to see who would click the links. And they just did it, just they did it at the same frequency.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  Here's your training.

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  Any of the training.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  Hey, look a link, click.

• 1:27:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:40Bob Novella?

  Wow, man.

• 1:27:41Speaker 04

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Obviously.

• 1:27:44Speaker 04

  We're too tempted to press the big button, right?

• 1:27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:48Speaker 04

  Like you see the big button.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  And this is a study of 19,500 employees over eight months. So it's pretty, pretty robust. And so the, um, so here's, here's actually, they also were trying to look at what were the phishing campaigns that were more likely to succeed? So here they, in this study, give two examples. So recipients clicked on a phishing link to update their Outlook password only 1.82% of the time. So I guess because it was like a password, they were more alert to that.

• 1:28:25Speaker 02

  But then 30.8%, almost a third clicked on a link that was purported to update the institution's vacation policy. Right? So it's like, click here to update your vacation, whatever thing. A third of the people clicked on the link. So the authors conclude that anti-phishing educational programs don't work and that they basically should just not use them as a means of reducing the.

• 1:28:56Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man.

• 1:28:57Speaker 02

  You know, phishing campaign impact, that they basically should rely on countermeasures. So two factor authentication is one that they mentioned. And also you could program password managers so that they only work on legitimate domains. Right? So your passwords will not interact with. The password managers will not interact with bogus domain names.

• 1:29:22Speaker 04

  Oh, I like that.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  But those are just two. So it's, that's it. You have to build, you have to bake it into the technology itself. You have to, you have to build in, like I do two factor authentication on everything now.

• 1:29:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I pretty much do.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  And most sites require it. You know, it's like not even an option, but if it's ever an option, I always do it. Of course, if anybody actually got, well, I guess if they got a hold of my phone, they'd have to break into, they have to break into it. But if you could break into

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  Get cracked the phone.

• 1:29:50Speaker 02

  Into my phone, yeah, I'd be effed.

• 1:29:51Speaker 04

  But as soon as you knew your phone was missing, you'd call it in and they'd shut it down, right?

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  Before they could break into it, I'd have to like change everything and

• 1:29:58Speaker 04

  And that's not something you'd let 24 hours go by

• 1:30:00Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:30:01Speaker 04

  For, right? You'd know in an hour or two that something's wrong.

• 1:30:04Speaker 02

  Whenever, I mean, there have been, I don't know about you guys, but there have been times when, like, I got a whiff of some security breach.

• 1:30:13Speaker 04

  Sure. Oh, yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  Like some company I work with says, hey, we've had a data breach. Your data may have been compromised and blah, blah, blah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 04

  Gosh.

• 1:30:20Speaker 02

  Or something, whatever, anything weird happens. Like I get a phishing email that's like, that uses, sometimes they'll bait you with some information about you that they just purchased from, from some third party.

• 1:30:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Whenever that happens, I just purge all my passwords. You know, especially the critical ones, you know?

• 1:30:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Speaker 02

  Like my Google password, the one that gets you access to my Google password manager. Like that, you know, I, I will not keep around old passwords if there's been any kind of data breach at all.

• 1:30:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. And you can do health checks on your passwords and things like that. Google has tools for that. It's actually pretty good. I've used it. And I've found a few old things in which it's like questionable. Nah, this may have been compromised. I'm like, I'm not questioning it. I'm changing it. It's out.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  All right. So here's one more thought I had though about this study. Because you could also conclude that these cybersecurity training programs were just not optimal. I don't think this necessarily means that no training can possibly be effective. It's just that these, now these were the most common ones used. And it's basically like you have to, you know, people had to get certification, right? You had to go through the cybersecurity training program, get your certification that you did it.

• 1:31:36Cara Santa Maria?

  But how many people even pay attention to those?

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Right, that's, you know, I mean, you know, so I've had to do twenty whatever certifications every year, right? In medicine. I'm sure you'd have to do that all the time as well, Kara. And they do make you take a test at the end of it to show that you absorbed the critical information. And so just going, even if you're trying to like minimize the work you're doing to get the certification, you still, you can't help but learn stuff because you know, there's just, you know what I mean? But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's optimal, like that you really like retained and pay attention to the information.

• 1:32:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and a lot of us know things cognitively, but that doesn't mean our behaviors reflect that.

• 1:32:19Speaker 02

  Right, so maybe, exactly. So maybe they have to just use more interactive and active training programs like with a person who's telling you. And they might, the other thing is like doing it once a year is not enough. And we know this from, you know, educational research that you have to reinforce it. And so doing these phishing things where they're pretending to be a phishing campaign to test how the employees were responding. How about doing that and then saying, "You just fell for a phishing scam. This is the lesson that you, that you, you know, whatever, didn't retain from your certification." Or you have to redo, you have to come, now you gotta come to class.

• 1:33:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you best believe people would be incentivized not to have to do that.

• 1:33:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm not convinced. Public embarrassment is, public embarrassment is powerful, man.

• 1:33:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and just having to do more training.

• 1:33:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right. That's a pain in the ass. Yeah, so I'm not convinced that this means that it couldn't possibly be effective, but certainly just this, "Get your online certification," is not good enough. That is not good enough. All right, this means that, for the first time, astronomers have discovered a five-pointed Einstein cross, which modeling suggested due to intergalactic dark matter is the fiction. But Bob, you were right for the wrong reasons. They did just discover a five-pointed Einstein cross. This is the fiction, because it's not the first time.

• 1:33:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  They've discovered several. This is just the latest one. I also made another aspect of it, the fiction.

• 1:33:57Bob Novella?

  Dark matter.

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  Not dark matter. Intergalactic. What the hell is dark matter doing intergalactically? This was a... So what they... It's a five-pointed cross.

• 1:34:07Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, I totally didn't even see that word, "intergalactic."

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  What I meant... And what that means is, it's not like the Pentagon or whatever, not like a star. It's four... It's like the cross with a fifth image in the middle. So it's five images.

• 1:34:21Bob Novella?

  Wait, they all have that?

• 1:34:23Speaker 02

  No, they don't have that. They have just the four. They do not have a central image. And the ones that have been discovered previously, oftentimes, that central image is really faint. But in this one, it was very bright. It was as bright as the other images. And it's very rare. And so it's got to be some kind of rare situation. With the other ones, what they think is going on is just that there... It's not like one galaxy that's causing the gravitational lensing. It's multiple galaxies. So it's creating a more complicated lensing pattern that gives you these five images

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  instead of the typical four. In this case, they modeled it, and the only model that could explain the image was a dark matter halo around the lensing object. So not intergalactic, but a halo around the object, which makes way more sense, because that's where dark matter is supposed to be. Yeah, so this was sort of fiction for two reasons. Wasn't intergalactic dark matter, and it wasn't the first time we've discovered a five image Einstein cross.

• 1:35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Steve, you could change the wording of this one and give it to us next week and I would still get it wrong.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know this one's a bit wonky. But yeah, I didn't know if any of you, this is in the news, you know, you might have heard it.

• 1:35:55Speaker 04

  No, I hadn't seen it. First time I've heard of it is you bringing it up right now.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  Good job, Bob.

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  Way to sniff it out, Bob.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  "Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader process of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure that eventually the best ideas prevail." That was written by Chris Mooney.

• 1:36:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:36:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, we haven't spoken to Chris in a while. Chris was on the show a long time ago, wasn't he?

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's been a while. It's been a minute.

• 1:36:28Speaker 04

  Has been.

• 1:36:28Speaker 02

  That's right. This exactly dovetails with my news item.

• 1:36:33Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:36:33Speaker 02

  The idea that, yeah, yes, there are problems with individual researchers with, you know, again, falling in love with your own theories, trying to sex up your theory, your grants to get, you know, whatever, to increase the chance of getting attention or getting grant. All these things happen, but these are around the edges, right? At its core, there is, you know, with the mainstream institutions and journals and legitimate scientists, at the end of the day, the best ideas do have a tendency to prevail over time, right? There is no substitute with, for actually being true and having real world evidence support, you know, your ideas. You can only fake it for so long, you know?

• 1:37:15Speaker 04

  Right. Yep. Good reminder.

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  You guys. Thanks, Steve.

• 1:37:23Speaker 04

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:37:23Speaker 02

  Looking forward to seeing you all in Kansas.

• 1:37:26Cara Santa Maria?

  So soon.

• 1:37:26Speaker 02

  Me too, man.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  Hey, there you are right now.

• 1:37:28Speaker 02

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

• 1:37:36Speaker 02

  Skeptics 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.

• 1:38:13Speaker 07

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