The Skeptics Guide #1065 - Dec 6 2025

News Items: Cognitive Legos, China's Planting Lots of Trees, Misinformation and Birth Control, Dark Matter Detection, Asteroid Bennu Ingredients for Life; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Climate Denial, Calcium Cardiac Scans; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, December 4th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella,

• 0:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good afternoon, folks. Cara, you were away for a week, and some of our listeners were freaking out, like, where's Cara?

• 0:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I saw that. Is she coming back?

• 1:00Speaker 02

  They panicked. They absolutely panicked. Cara, if you're ever gonna walk away from the STU, you better give our audience, like, six months to get ready for it, you know?

• 1:08Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm just gonna go on vacation and never come back.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I'll take five years notice.

• 1:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Cara's on the roof.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  For the fiddler. So Cara, I understand that psychology is no longer a profession.

• 1:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my gosh. Is that in the list?

• 1:22Speaker 02

  What, people don't get paid for it anymore?

• 1:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I haven't been looking. I saw that social work was. Like nurses? I saw social work and nursing. The psychology in the list?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Counseling, psychology, psychotherapy.

• 1:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that got blacklisted, too? Yeah, but I'm in the psychiatry department, so I think I can skate by.

• 1:36Speaker 02

  Oh, good. Are you a clinical psychologist?

• 1:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I am. I'm clinical, not counseling.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Clinical psychology is included in the list, so that qualifies.

• 1:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay. So I'm not. Okay, that's good.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  So you are still a professional?

• 1:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But nursing isn't.

• 1:53Speaker 04

  So nursing?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Physician assistants, physical therapists, audiologists, speak language pathology, occupational therapists, social workers and educators, according to the Department of Education, no longer a profession. But to be fair, they're saying, we're not saying they're not a profession. They're just not listed as a profession when it comes to student loans. Which means.

• 2:13Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  They don't qualify. They don't qualify for professionals.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  A lot of people are screwed.

• 2:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:20Speaker 02

  There's a saying, right, we have a saying in academia, which probably goes beyond academia. Don't show, tell me your priorities, show me your budget. Like, I don't give a shit what you call these professions. You're not funding them as you do other professions.

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and the reason it matters is because professional degrees, which what's interesting is my degree actually is in a lot of ways considered a professional degree.

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:44Cara Santa Maria?

  It's very hard. I could have done a research oriented clinical psychology degree, but it, that's weird. That's rare. Usually a clinical psychology degree intends you to practice clinically. Which means my research program is not funded the way that a research psychology program is. You know, most researchers getting PhDs, their major professor, their PI, the lab they're in, is working on getting NIH funding or whatever, I mean, and where's that anymore? But they're trying to keep funding in the lab to pay for their graduate students. Professional degrees don't have that option, which means we have to pay out of pocket. That's why loans matter for these people.

• 3:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, a nurse is not going to get her education paid for, or his education paid for by, uh, you know, the department. Yeah. They have to pay for it themselves.

• 3:33Speaker 04

  We need more nurses.

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  We don't need fewer nurses.

• 3:36Cara Santa Maria?

  We need more counselors. We need more of all these things.

• 3:39Speaker 04

  It only makes good business sense to, to offer loans to these professions.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Exactly. So these are all professions that have a couple of things in common. One is they're dominated by women. Gee, I wonder if that's a factor. And the second is that we are, we actually need more of them, right? We are having shortages of nurses and psych, and mental health professionals, et cetera. So now there's good, it basically cuts the, the limit of. Student loans that you can get from 200,000 for a professional degree to 100,000 for a non-professional degree.

• 4:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, good luck getting your entire degree for $100,000 in this economy right now.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 4:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, do they not understand ROI? Like, over and over, you remember how Doge was like, let's cut everything that has a good ROI?

• 4:19Speaker 02

  They absolutely do not understand ROI.

• 4:20Speaker 04

  Well, this has been the problem with efforts to, you know, help the environment and, you know, go greener and all that as well. They don't see the ROI.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's return on investment, by the way, if anybody does know what that means.

• 4:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and like, often with environmental issues, and I hear what you're saying, Evan, because I 100% agree, we're often talking about like, externalized costs and ROI over like, decades or even millennia, but like, we can calculate an ROI on a nursing degree in like, three years.

• 4:49Speaker 04

  That's right. Yes, you're right.

• 4:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's insanity.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  Much more immediate. It's much more immediate.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  I mean, RFK Jr. is continuing to F with our vaccines. It's so easy to lose sight of this because it's so tiring and exhausting.

• 5:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  But we have to, you know, stay on top of this. So now they're trying to delay the hepatitis vaccines for infants.

• 5:12Speaker 04

  Why?

• 5:13Speaker 02

  Just because, this is, he's an anti-vaxxer, that's why. What do you mean, why?

• 5:18Speaker 04

  That's the reason.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  He's just, he is massively biased against vaccines. He's a conspiracy theory nut job who has no idea what he's talking about. It's based upon nothing, on just conspiracy-based fears of vaccines, and he completely does not understand how to interpret scientific evidence. So, basically saying that, you know, why give this vaccine routinely to infants when their mother does not have hepatitis, right? So, it ignores a couple of things. One, there's other ways to get hepatitis. It's not just from mother to infant. And two, some women who are, especially people who are poor, don't have good health insurance

• 6:02Speaker 02

  or whatever, aren't necessarily going to know their hepatitis status or disclose that to their healthcare professional or be getting good prenatal care. So, this is the reason why, in some cases, we just do universal precautions.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Just you cast the widest net possible to make sure that you capture everybody who's at risk. And that has reduced the incidence of infantile hepatitis by 99%. It completely works. And he wants to dial that back based upon his mythological fears. It's all insanity.

• 6:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, they couldn't hit 100%. I mean, gee.

• 6:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, do you think that there's like just this weird morality kind of slant, this bias around infections that are bloodborne, being specifically called an STI? And so when somebody's like, oh, well, you can only get that from sex, so we shouldn't be giving the vaccine to babies. And it's like, no, you can't only get it from sex. There are a lot of different ways you can get this disease. But it's like, oh, it's like this moral thing of like, oh, only IV, you know, drug users and like, I don't know, sex workers get these diseases. And it's like, what are you talking about?

• 7:17Speaker 04

  But if there was, you know, but there's, it's not based on any kind of real threat to the child to get the vaccine as it's scheduled now.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  So this is.

• 7:25Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like the argument they're always gonna be anti. Yeah, because it's a fake threat.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  But along those lines, Cara, this is something, you know, you learn when you, when you study one of, one of the health professions is that we do not stigmatize patients, right? We do not make judgments about how somebody came by their disease. Because that is a slippery slope to hell, right? You just cannot be a healthcare professional and constantly be thinking, oh, well, you earned, you know, you deserve your illness because of whatever. That's an endless game that you can play. We just have to completely eliminate that from your thinking. You take your patients as they are, you treat them for whatever they have without judgment. But this is, I do agree with you that there's often a stigma around bloodborne diseases,

• 8:13Speaker 02

  you know, dirty diseases, diseases you get from, from bad, bad behavior or from sex. And, and that, you know, that should not translate to, we do not treat you for it, though.

• 8:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, of course not. And like, yeah, the extreme version is when we're treating babies. Because that's because I've heard people who are like not magum, not Maha, but they're like lefty, you know, kind of wooey friends of mine out here in LA with the same rhetoric.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, why do I need to vaccinate my kid against hepatitis? My kid's not having sex. And I'm like, oh, God. Okay.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's talk about this. Or like, my kid's not having sex and I don't have hepatitis. And it's like, okay, but what is your kid being exposed to?

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:56Cara Santa Maria?

  What is your kid being exposed to in the hospital?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:58Cara Santa Maria?

  By the father, by, you know, it's like, you might not, but you don't know about your partner. Like, yeah, it's just, ugh.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  So we just can't, the thing, we can't get so exhausted that we take our eyes off the ball. Here, you know?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I know it's tough. All right, we're going to go straight into some news items. I'm actually going to start with an interesting, this is a really interesting piece. I titled this one, I didn't make up this term, this is from the, from the paper. Cognitive Legos. What do you guys think that's about?

• 9:26Speaker 04

  Cognitive Legos?

• 9:28Jay Novella?

  Legos.

• 9:28Speaker 04

  I know what Legos are.

• 9:29Cara Santa Maria?

  So building, things that build on each other?

• 9:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, building blocks of thought. How the brain?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Look, all I know is, you know, you walk around at night and you step on one of those. You are going to jump through the roof.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  In a barefoot, oh, yeah. That is an unforgiving material, Lego material.

• 9:44Cara Santa Maria?

  So my guess, Steve, is that it's like the idea that certain things, like, since we're talking cognitive, we're talking ideas and thinking, so that certain thought patterns build on other thought patterns or ideas build on other ones and they fit together?

• 9:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, pretty much. So here's, here's the question that neuroscientists have, right? We're trying to understand how the brain works. So the question is, when you learn a task, are you learning sort of the overall task? Or are there components of the task that are transposable to other tasks?

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I think it's 100% the latter.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  You think so?

• 10:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Everything builds on other things. Yeah.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  Well, it's interesting. Oh, no. As you might imagine. I hear a smile in your voice. It's never that simple. I know.

• 10:28Cara Santa Maria?

  But even memories, even ideas, you're always connecting them to other things in your brain that are already there.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so generally, sure. Oh, no. We're going to get back to that. It's interesting. But actually, the study that I'm talking about actually is supporting what you were saying. Okay. It's looking, it was trying to find the quote-unquote neuroanatomical correlates of this, what they call compositionality. The Legos is a metaphor. But the technical term is compositionality, meaning that you have these components that can be repurposed to other tasks. So they did an interesting study. Again, as we know, Kara, when you're doing any kind of research like this, you're using a construct. And here, they're looking at A model. Rhesus macaques.

• 11:19Speaker 02

  And they were looking at their brain function when they learned specific tasks. Now, the one task was, they had to tell the difference between a shape that was either bunny ears or a T. Now, you might think that they're completely different, but one can morph into the other. As the bunny ears come down, eventually, it becomes a T. And the shapes were also either blue or red. And that could also be progressively difficult because you could make them more and more muted to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell the difference, whether it's blue or red.

• 11:58Cara Santa Maria?

  We couldn't even tell the difference between black and gold.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Gold.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  The dress. And they taught the monkeys to indicate which of T versus bunny ears or red versus blue, to indicate which one it was by either looking to the upper right or the lower left. So, for example, in one task, like, if it's red, look to the upper right. If it's blue, look to the lower left. And then the other task is, if it's a bunny ear, look to the upper left. And if it's a T, look to the lower right. Then they scrambled them to see if the sensory and the motor components were compositional. Could they be essentially, once they learned one, does that make them learn the, another task that used one of the components more quickly?

• 12:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, good. Does it translate to a new learning thing?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Does it translate? Are the motor and the sensory tasks like independent of each other and they could be shuffled around like Lego blocks? So they found that the answer was to some extent, yes. So they did find evidence for compositionality in this construct with resis macaques.

• 13:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But, but of course, this is part of a ongoing research. So, you know, looking at the other research, you know, much of which was cited by the authors in this article, there's two other things to think about here. So one is that there's a downside to compositionality and what do you think that might be? So the benefit is, once you learn a task, you could learn related tasks easier because you can repurpose components of the earlier task that you already learned.

• 13:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, but it's hard, it's like, um, oh gosh, why am I blanking on his name? I mean, he famously said it, the researcher, that like, your mind is not a blank sponge. It's full of like preconceived notions and ideas. So if you're learning something to which it doesn't apply, it's really hard to unlearn stuff.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  It's hard to unlearn stuff. So that's called interference.

• 13:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  And what that operationally means is, when you learn a new task, your performance on the older task, components of which you've repurposed, goes down, right? Oh. So. Bummer.

• 14:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, sorry, David Dunning, that's the guy.

• 14:11Speaker 02

  David Dunning, yeah.

• 14:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that was, that was his old thing.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  You have all probably experienced this yourself. So we've all experienced, you learn a task, and then when you do a new task that's related, it's easier. As you said, everything relates to everything else and, and that makes it easier to learn new stuff when you're building on older stuff. But you've probably also experienced, when you learn a related but distinct task, it takes time to shift back to the older task, right?

• 14:39Cara Santa Maria?

  True. And also like things that are related, like my mom always used to struggle with Italian because she's a native Spanish speaker.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 14:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And it was easier for her to learn it, but she would like mix them up or like use rules she shouldn't be using all the time.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  George says the same thing about Russian and Ukrainian.

• 14:55Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go, yeah.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Here's a recent example from my experience. So we have two cars, one's an electric car with regenerative braking, one's a traditional ice vehicle.

• 15:06Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Good example.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  So when you drive with regenerative braking, when you lift off the gas, it causes resistance. It's like braking, right? So the car slows down, like when you're driving a cart, a golf cart.

• 15:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  And so you're driving on one pedal 99% of the time, and you're slowing down. There's a sort of a middle point, and then if you lift it up beyond that middle point, you slow down. If you push down beyond that point, you accelerate, versus a traditional gas and brake. Shifting from one to the other causes interference. You know, I have to, I unlearn the other one to sort of readapt to the new one. You know what I mean? All right, so here's what previous research said. This is why it's more complicated. It's not an unalloyed good to have compositionality, because it causes interference.

• 15:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  And so what previous research found is that people exist along a spectrum, right? From lumpers to splitters, where lumpers have a lot of high compositionality, right? They sort of learn the components that are good, that are useful across many tasks, versus splitters, who do not transfer skills as much, but also don't suffer interference as much. So the question is, so that's the trade-off. The question is, is it more important for you to be able to learn new skills quickly, or is it more important for you to be able to shift among skills with minimal interference? And those are trade-offs, right? You can't,

• 16:41Speaker 02

  generally speaking, the better you are at one, the worse you are at the other, and vice versa. And there's no real

• 16:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  right or wrong answers, is that we exist along a spectrum. You know, probably most of us are bell curved in the middle, right? You know?

• 16:53Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, this isn't the only thing that contributes to your ability to like, set shift.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  Of course not. This is just one-

• 16:59Cara Santa Maria?

  So you may be good at both.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  It's one spectrum among many.

• 17:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  You know, when it comes to cognitive function.

• 17:05Cara Santa Maria?

  These are probably all things that contribute to that, like Spearman's G or whatever, like this idea that, you know, high intellect people probably- Relate things back very readily so that they can learn very quickly and they can consolidate efficiently, but they're also, for some reason, better at, you know, set shifting because they have other reserves that help them do that or other pathways to that cognitive ability.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 17:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But yeah, along this one specific thing, my guess is efficiency. It's always about efficiency. That's how our brains evolved.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Right. But here's another question. There's a lot of downstream questions.

• 17:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  You know, one question is, are people lumpers or splitters? Or can one person be a lumper with some things and a splitter with other things? And can you choose to be a lumper or a splitter? In other words, you may decide to learn something the hard way, let's say, but when you do learn it, it's sort of isolated from interference. You know what I mean?

• 18:02Cara Santa Maria?

  My guess is that the answer is yes to all of those things.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  I know. I think probably everything happens, but it's always a question of like, of how much.

• 18:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Because we're always learning, right? Like, we learn without trying, but then you can also intentionally learn and you can use strategies for learning.

• 18:17Speaker 02

  And I wondered, do we start off as a lumper and then morph into a splitter the more you study something? In other words, you rely upon your Legos, right? Your already learned components, but if you do something a lot, you eventually wall it off into its own thing so that it's immune to interference or?

• 18:36Cara Santa Maria?

  I think that's absolutely true. Like, as I've been doing these jewelry classes, I remember when I was learning new skills or techniques, I was constantly saying, oh, that's kind of like how when you do this, you have to make sure that you do that. Or, you know, like when I'm knitting, I have to do this. But now when I do the things, I'm like, no, it's its own thing. It's nothing like these other examples I'm trying to tell you.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  So knitting is not like taxidermy, is that what you're saying?

• 19:00Bob Novella?

  Steve, that reminds me of Gould's talk on day date calculators, guys that, you know, you have savants that can calculate, you know, tell me what day of the week it is, January 1st, 2093, and they'll could tell you within moments. And somebody that he was talking about actually went through the algorithm of calculating that so much that he internalized the ability to such a degree that he didn't have to consciously think about it. So that's kind of like walling it off like you were talking about?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. Right.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  That become applicable to other tasks, though? Something like that?

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, well, that's it. That's the, if you learn to do that algorithm, would it make it easier to learn other algorithms?

• 19:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that is also like, I think this applies to this age-old question we talk about in the skeptic community, especially when it comes to debunking pseudoscience around...

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Brain training?

• 19:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, brain training.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Is that there are some things that are applicable across the board, and there are other things where the more you do it, you just get good at doing that one thing.

• 19:55Speaker 02

  You get good at doing that one thing, you get a little bit better at related tasks, but you don't get good, you don't get smarter across the board.

• 20:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, right. But, but that's why things like reading, or doing crossword puzzles, or things that have like broader application, do sort of increase, whatever you want to call your cognitive fitness, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to some sort of specific brain training computer program.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  Right, here, play these set of puzzles, and all of a sudden, you're 10 IQ points smarter.

• 20:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah, it doesn't work that way.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But read, read various books all the time, it's like eating, you know, various foods all the time.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  That's true. Exercise for your brain.

• 20:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Do a lot of different things, basically.

• 20:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we always come back to the same answer.

• 20:37Speaker 04

  We kind of do. But it's nice to see research sort of, you know, that adds to that collection of data.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  All right, Jay.

• 20:45Jay Novella?

  What?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  I understand China is planting a lot of trees.

• 20:50Jay Novella?

  Yeah, okay.

• 20:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I almost covered this, Jay. I got excited about this, too.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  That would be a canopy.

• 20:55Jay Novella?

  Well, excited, yeah, I'm not, I don't know about excited.

• 20:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I didn't read it all the way.

• 20:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, I did, and, oh, boy. So, okay, let me tell you guys a story about unintended consequences.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Gather round, kids.

• 21:09Jay Novella?

  As Perry used to say, consequences, schmonsequences. Schmonsequences, right?

• 21:15Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 21:16Jay Novella?

  All right, so China's been planting a lot of trees, and I mean, a lot, a lot, a lot, it's incredible. So this goes back to 1978. So, guys, how many trees do you think that they've planted since 1978?

• 21:28Speaker 04

  But a hundred.

• 21:29Jay Novella?

  Dozens, dozens, billions.

• 21:31Speaker 04

  Scores.

• 21:32Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, there's billions of people there, so I'm gonna say billions of trees.

• 21:35Jay Novella?

  All right, I'll tell you, I'll tell you in a minute, just keep that, keep your number in mind, everybody out there listening, keep, put a number in your head, and then we'll talk about it. All right, so some regions that they've planted trees in were simply to reforest lost forests that, you know, were once there, but they also created forests where there was never a forest before. It's another important note to, to remember. Let me ask you another question. What do you guys think their actual intention was? Uh... To hide what's amongst the trees from satellites?

• 22:06Jay Novella?

  Was it like wood production, like trade? Yeah, I was thinking timber. Timber. Timber? Climate change? Yeah, they definitely, definitely do some things about climate change. So there's actually a list here, I'll quickly get through it. So they want to reverse some of the damage that's been done to their land over the decades, you know. So for example, some regions have had severe soil erosion, which is partly due to lost plant life. Ah. There's also been an increase in desertification from overgrazing, from wild, you know, from animals. Uh, they, the water availability has changed due to man-made river diversion. And along with these, uh, man-made issues, they also want to improve problems that they have like flood control,

• 22:51Jay Novella?

  air quality, dust storm frequency. And in general, of course, just like everybody, they want to improve their agricultural efforts, right? To feed more people, you know, make sure that the foods are healthy and have, you know, have the nutrients and proteins that we need. So this reforestation effort has been incredibly massive. So they have all these programs that they came up with. They have like the Great Green Wall. They have Grain for Green Program, Natural Forest Protection Program. And the result of this is that China has planted between 50 and 80 billion trees. Whoa. Over, up to 220 million acres. Wow. Massive.

• 23:34Jay Novella?

  For example, to give you a sense of size, just in the past five years, China added trees that could cover the state of Texas in the United States. Just to give you an idea of like map size, that's how many trees they planted. Wow. And like forest style, but I'm not talking like, you know, 50 every, distributed among a mile. Like they're planting trees like the way trees grow in a forest. And their work, you know, it has produced legitimate ecological payoffs, right? They, they've increased, of course, carbon storage. There's greater forest connectivity to reduce soil erosion, which is a big deal. Uh, there has been fewer dust storms on average than previously, uh, you know, common regions where they occur in. But, and this is a big one, there's been an unforeseen outcome to all of this.

• 24:19Jay Novella?

  Do you guys want to dare take a guess? Wildlife? Wildlife. Kara?

• 24:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, you didn't say positive or negative outcome, right? You just said outcome.

• 24:27Jay Novella?

  It's an unforeseen outcome. It's bad.

• 24:28Speaker 04

  Oh, it's negative.

• 24:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it's bad. Uh, runoff, no. What's bad from having a lot of trees? A lot more trees? Uh, some sort of toxin that's spreading? Or like pests?

• 24:39Speaker 04

  They're burning the wood and creating. I know, Jay.

• 24:42Cara Santa Maria?

  What is it?

• 24:43Speaker 04

  There's a warlike, a warlike Bigfoot population.

• 24:46Jay Novella?

  Oh, God, you're right. Ah, the Bigfoots. No, so this will seem really obvious once I say it. So a new study that was published in 2025 in Earth's Future, they found that the incredible scale of China's greening, they call it the greening, it's the shinning. Um, this has altered how water moves between the land and the atmosphere due to changes in rainfall. Let me get into the details here.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 25:10Jay Novella?

  So between 2001 and 2020, the increase in vegetation cover boosted something called evapotranspiration. Transpiration. Evapotranspiration, okay? It's a long word. It's complicated, but I think you get the idea. This is the water that's.

• 25:27Speaker 04

  Is that a portmanteau?

• 25:28Jay Novella?

  No, it's a word.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  Evaporation and transportation.

• 25:38Jay Novella?

  Evapotranspiration, right? So this is water that's drawn from the soil and released into the air by the plants via the leaves.

• 25:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's transported via evaporation.

• 25:50Jay Novella?

  Correct. Now, this extra moisture that's put into the atmosphere can and typically does travel thousands of kilometers on wind currents and fall as rain really far away from where it came. And that's bad. And as a result, some areas have had really big increases in rainfall, while other areas have actually had a significant decrease in rainfall, which affects freshwater levels. And the study found that China's, you know, these densely populated east, their eastern monsoon regions and the arid northwestern zones, you know, both of these, you know, are about 74% of the country. And actually, um, they've actually experienced measurable and significant declines in water availability.

• 26:35Jay Novella?

  Meanwhile, the Tibetan Plateau, they've had an increase in water because, you know, it, you know, what comes around goes around and water has to go somewhere. And this is not a good thing because the northern and eastern zones, unfortunately, they have a big share of China's population and it's also affecting their arable land, right? The land that they can actually plant crops on. This is bad. So the study, the study's findings actually contradict this common assumption, and I believe it too from things that I've read, that, you know, if they plant trees, the more trees that are there, the more plant life will lead to more water being, you know, collected into the soil and improvement in ecosystems and agriculture. And I actually remember watching

• 27:17Jay Novella?

  a video where they turned a desert into like a beautiful, beautiful forest, you know, almost like a paradise type of thing, and the water table came back, which, yeah, that can happen. But what they're finding is on these massive scales that the aggregate is not, it's not a good thing here. Wow, man. Didn't see that coming.

• 27:36Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's always like, but this is how ecology works, right? Like deforestation happened quickly and caused all number of horrible consequences that, you know, they either did or didn't have a study to detail. Then they reforested very quickly, which is also going to do that. So the question is, what do they want to adapt to? The reforested, you know, view? Because yeah, there's gonna be pockets of flooding and pockets of drought and, but that's gonna be the new normal.

• 28:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's true. It's just that, you know, when you set up cities and populations, you know, you gotta get, people have to have access to water. I mean, look what the Romans did to get water to their cities. Like, you know, you have these- Aqueducts, baby. And you have trillions of dollars invested into these cities and it is becoming a problem. And it's not just-

• 28:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially with billions of people.

• 28:27Jay Novella?

  It's changing, it's changing landscapes and it's moving things around and it's making things, you know, unstable in a sense, right? So they're gonna cut all the trees down? They have more carbon capture, they have more soil stability, and they've increased biodiversity. But the study also goes on to say that, you know, these plants are pulling moisture from the soil aggressively and, you know, they're having rainfall decrease in places where they don't want it. And- You know, in these dry and semi-arid conditions, some, you know, the trees, they decreased available water, which is exactly the opposite of what they wanted. And, you know, now that we, this study has come to light, there's been other studies that have surfaced where there, there are other countries around the world have shown similar results.

• 29:12Jay Novella?

  So this is pretty damn solid evidence here that this is what could happen. Now, so China's programs that they've been running, like I said, have been showing these negative results and it's made some things very clear. So these large-scale afforestation efforts, it has to be intensely managed. You can't go in there and just plant whatever you want. Of course, it seems obvious, but this has been part of the problem here. The tree types that they pick have to be really carefully selected to match the ecosystems that they're going into. And it's kind of strange when you think about it because they might be creating ecosystems, which makes it even more difficult to, to pick the plants and, you know, the density of these plants.

• 29:56Jay Novella?

  You know, the landscape is a big factor in this as well. Like, you know, if the land is sloped and things like that, like you have to really, really, really think about what's going on and it takes experts to do this and you, and you need to be able to have experts, by the way. Have I mentioned that there's been a lack of, of respect for experts around the world? Well, yes, it's, that's, that's a problem.

• 30:14Speaker 04

  Even in China?

• 30:16Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know specifically if, if they're having an expert problem. I just thought I'd throw that in there, Bob, because it's something that really pisses me off.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Well, the problem is it's a very top-down authoritarian government, right? So they decide they're going to do something, they do it, and the, uh, the experts toe the line. That's unfortunately typically what happens in authoritarian-style governments, right? You don't speak truth to power. You say, yes, sir, and you do what they tell you to do.

• 30:42Speaker 04

  Even if it's illegal?

• 30:44Speaker 02

  The big problem with the whole project of reforestation, I mean, reforestation, like if you're taking the area that was forested and then you're trying to get it back to the way it was, that's, that makes more sense, but they're trying to-

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Like Connecticut happened, went through that phase, yep.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  It's one thing if it happens organically, because, you know, the trees will grow where they're supposed to grow, meaning where the climate is, it, there's enough water, et cetera, et cetera, for them to grow. But just planting trees where they are not inherently growing is probably not sustainable. Because if they, you're right, if the climate was, was amenable to trees growing there, they would be growing there.

• 31:21Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I agree. And you know, Steve, the problem is like, they don't know how long these new trees will last. You know, they don't have any data on like, how long will they last and what will they do?

• 31:31Speaker 02

  And it's not working everywhere. It's working in some places, probably where the, you know, it's natural for there to be forests, but in other locations in China, the effort's just not working. It's not, it's not slowing down the desertification because it's, you know, just planting a tree is a very much, we're just going to put a tree there because we want a tree there as opposed to creating the conditions that allow for trees to grow there. That's harder to do. So I think that there's an inherent problem with the whole top-down approach of just planting trees where you want trees. And this is one symptom of that, the fact that, yeah, that you're creating a new ecosystem that may not be what you wanted it to be, and it's going to shift things around. It's got to reach

• 32:12Speaker 02

  a new equilibrium. And you, it may be hard to predict what that new equilibrium is going to be.

• 32:18Jay Novella?

  You know, what China did, though, they came in there like, fully aggressively, you know, doing this. And I guess from the study, like, they really didn't have the foresight. You know, they didn't really think about all the details or even know, you know, what these unintended consequences could actually be.

• 32:35Cara Santa Maria?

  But the same can be said for all the deforestation that happened over the last few decades. Yeah.

• 32:41Jay Novella?

  Now, the good news is, though, is that we have this data now.

• 32:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. So we can model it after it if we do something, or if any nation does something like this.

• 32:50Jay Novella?

  I mean, if you asked me a week ago, you know, hey, you know, climate change and, you know, there's a lot of things that are happening around the world. And, you know, one of my typical responses is, yeah, we need to plant more trees. We got, we got to plant as many trees as we can. So, you know, it's, it is a complicated thing. I don't think a lot of people know about this. And now that the data's there and they have such a huge sample, I mean, China is just massive. It's a really big country. So this is really valuable data. Hopefully, China can, can steer themselves into a better position moving forward now that this study has been published. You know, like, let's stop just planting, you know, these trees because we happen to have access to them. You know, like, you know, pick better trees, pick better locations, you know, really, really think it through. There's something called hydrology, which

• 33:35Jay Novella?

  they, you know, they need to keep in mind. They need to figure out and perfectly understand the way water is moving in that land and, you know, what effects that process will have when they plant new trees and what kinds of trees and how dense those trees are planted.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay.

• 33:53Jay Novella?

  Bye.

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Kara, tell us about misinformation about birth control. Is there any misinformation about birth control?

• 34:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Is there any at all? So I want to tell a little story.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Misinformation's a myth.

• 34:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, right. I want to tell a little story about

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Ooh, gather round.

• 34:08Cara Santa Maria?

  a study that was published, um, let me see, I think it was just last month, end of two months ago, um, called Hormonal Contraceptive Formulations and Breast Cancer Risk in Adolescents and Premenopausal Women. So this was published in JAMA Oncology. It's open access. Anyone can read it. And guess who read it?

• 34:29Speaker 02

  You did.

• 34:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Social media.

• 34:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Social media influencers. Okay, so this is something that has been happening for some time now where you have influencers on, uh, different social media platforms. In this case, uh, specifically, we're talking about kind of like Instagram and TikTok influencers. They either mean well, but don't have the training to read the literature and to assess risk appropriately, or they already had an agenda going in and then they are cherry picking information and not understanding kind of the, uh, manipulation of statistics that can be used to tell the story that you want to use. So this story comes down to

• 35:17Cara Santa Maria?

  a question, and this is an important question that we often talk about on the show. Do you guys know the difference between relative risk and absolute risk? Of course. We talked about this. Of course. Yeah, it comes up, it comes up every now and then. It does. Shark tank. So, this is a very common way that statistics can be manipulated to make something seem more or less severe or intense, or have a higher or lower magnitude than it actually has. And one of the ways that we talked about it in the past had to do with, you guys remember that study where like bacon was, or like processed meats, we were talking about how they were? Yeah. Yeah. A carcinogen, and what does that mean?

• 35:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And what's the risk to, for, I guess it was colorectal cancer for people who are taking it? So, if we just talk about a relative risk, that's when we say something like, okay, there's a 50% increase, or a 100% increase in, you know, X, Y, or Z. So, looking back at that old study, we'll use an example of an 18% increase in risk of bowel cancer if somebody consumes processed meat at a typical, you know, rate. An 18% increase, that sounds like so much. But now let's, so, so the relative risk there is 18%. But now let's look at the absolute risk.

• 36:38Cara Santa Maria?

  If the lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer is about 5.6%, so, you know, five, 56 out of every 1,000 people, then the absolute risk of eating processed meat, 50 grams per day of processed meat, added to that lifetime relative, sorry, that lifetime absolute risk that already existed, is only a 1% increase. So, it goes from 5.6% lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer to a 6.6% lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer if you eat 50 grams per day of processed meat. But, from a statistical perspective, from simple mathematics, the relative risk has

• 37:23Cara Santa Maria?

  increased by 18%. That sounds huge. You can double your risk by going from 0.01% to 0.02%. Exactly. That's a double the relative risk. That's a double risk. And that's what we have to remember when we talk about this study. So, what did this study find? They found that women who used hormonal birth control had about a 24% higher rate of breast cancer than women who didn't. But we were here talking about young women, young women. It's already white love. Yeah, the range of adolescent girls and women between 13 and 49.

• 38:05Cara Santa Maria?

  And this was a Swedish study, but this study found very similar outcomes of two really, really large, one meta-analysis and one large, I think, yeah, meta-analysis and a large registry analysis that were performed previously. So when we're looking at young people, young women, and their risk of, their absolute risk of breast cancer, let's see what it is. Fifty-four to 67 breast cancer cases per 100,000 women per year in Sweden. And then after, or the group that took hormonal birth control, we saw 13 extra cases per 100,000 women.

• 38:50Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's one extra case per 7,800 users, which yes, does translate into a 24% higher absolute, or sorry, relative risk Right. of breast cancer. But what happened when a lot of social media influencers read this 24% higher rate? Well, they went ham on social media. TikTok is, as it says in the study, quote, flooded with factually incomplete warnings that contraceptives cause cancer and are as dangerous as smoking, which is just patently not true. Wrong. We know that it's not true. And so we see, you know, experts, OB-GYN experts, you know, different physicians and

• 39:34Cara Santa Maria?

  public health officials kind of ringing the alarm bells and saying, let's take a step back, let's look at all the benefits that hormonal birth control can offer.

• 39:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Let's look at all the alternatives that are on the market for individuals for whom this could be a massive boon, not just for preventing unwanted pregnancy, but for reducing pain and cramping and bleeding and, you know, problems related to endometriosis and all manner of treatments that hormonal birth control kind of are utilized for. And let's talk about relative versus absolute risk, because it's just something that's really, really tough for people to understand. We see this time and time again. I found some interesting write-ups about, you know, it's just about different social media kind

• 40:26Cara Santa Maria?

  of OMGs like all over. Like, there was like a whole scare about the pill causing cancer previously, and we saw, you know, all of these different social media accounts dedicating tons of information to it. Yeah, this was a great one. So a 2023 study that was performed by a researcher named Emily Fender, who is a fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and was a postdoc, I think, at the time at the Perlman School of Medicine at UPenn. She did a study specifically about social media influence on misinformation around, you know, birth control. And so this was two years before this new study came

• 41:10Cara Santa Maria?

  out. And she found that 74% of YouTube influencers who were sampled in their study, who did speak about birth control, encouraged discontinuation of contraception. 74% of influencers that they sampled. And so, you know, we don't know, does that have to do with the algorithm and sort of controversial things rising to the top, you know, why people are choosing to spread this kind of misinformation, or why the agenda there is...

• 41:38Bob Novella?

  Could be religious-based.

• 41:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it could be religious. It could be the sort of appeal-to-nature fallacy that we talk about a lot, you know, that, you know, we see people talking about how the rhythm method is superior. Spoiler alert, it is not. It is not superior.

• 41:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there are a lot of unwanted pregnancies that happen because somebody miscalculated there.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  Who even thinks that that's superior?

• 42:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, a lot of social media.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  My astrologer said so.

• 42:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and honestly, just a lot of young women on social media because they say it's quote "natural" because they're afraid of the quote "toxins" or the quote "chemicals" or, you know, whatever the kind of pseudoscience of the day is.

• 42:20Bob Novella?

  I wonder how many of those influencers actually understand the difference between relative and absolute risk?

• 42:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, probably none of them.

• 42:27Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 42:27Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, yeah, I don't think that this is always a nefarious spreading of misinformation. I don't, I don't, I wouldn't necessarily call this a disinformation campaign. I think it's a function of lacking the literacy necessary to be able to communicate these two different kinds of risk appropriately.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, to think about the absolute hubris of somebody who sets themselves up as a health influencer when you're not a freaking professional, right? When you don't have a medical degree or a healthcare degree, and you think, well, I'm just a smart person who can, you know, read the internet and decide what's true and what's not true and spread that to the world. I mean, it's an absolute lack of humility. It's a, it's complete scientific ignorance, right? Because they, it's a scientific illiteracy because they don't understand how much they do not know and how complex this field is. And so they're just speaking nonsense.

• 43:26Speaker 04

  It's Jenny McCarthy and her mommy instincts idea.

• 43:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but the problem is it's not always that overt. A lot of times it's, you know, women, or I shouldn't say women, but a lot of these social media influencers are women, obviously, because they are concerned about reproductive health. They are concerned about women's health. And a lot of times, it's, you know, people who are getting some of the science right some of the time, and then some of the science really wrong. And that makes it even more complicated. It's easy to just like discount everything Jenny McCarthy or, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow says. It's much harder, if you're a consumer of social media content, to tease out, well, what rhetoric is on this side of...

• 44:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Accurate and what rhetoric isn't.

• 44:10Bob Novella?

  It's insidious.

• 44:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so difficult.

• 44:12Bob Novella?

  For disaster. That's, those are the real tough ones where that are sometimes right and sometimes

• 44:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 44:17Bob Novella?

  egregiously wrong.

• 44:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think this is a good example of like the kind of study that falls into that landscape. And let's not forget to add insult to injury, as I was researching this article, and I can't believe I didn't see this before, I found coverage from July of this year. Here's an Undark article with the title, CDC Staff Dedicated to Birth Control Safety Eliminated by HHS.

• 44:42Bob Novella?

  Gone.

• 44:43Cara Santa Maria?

  You know? So until recently, a small team issued timely guidance on the types of contraceptants certain high-risk women should use. Well, they're not doing that anymore.

• 44:50Bob Novella?

  Hmm.

• 44:52Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's not helpful. So now, not only are we kind of having, I guess, recommendations by online pseudo, not even pseudo, just like health non-experts, we don't have any government pages to go to and say, wait, what are the trusted experts saying?

• 45:14Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 45:14Cara Santa Maria?

  So now we have to rely on the AMA, and we, and not that we shouldn't have before, but historically, if it said .gov, you could kind of be sure that like it was NIH vetted, that there were individuals that were at the absolute tops of their fields, who were on panels making decisions, so that we, as the consumer or as the citizen, you know, we're not expected to be experts in these areas. We have to be able to trust experts. But now our own government says, and we don't want experts, and we're gonna obfuscate the truth. So good luck.

• 45:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Go to TikTok now for your healthcare.

• 45:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's

• 45:50Bob Novella?

  Wonderful.

• 45:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's such a tough thing. But, you know, I'm here to say, I wish I could be on birth, I'm not allowed to be on birth control anymore because I had a blood clot, which is a bummer, but I wish I could be on birth control. I definitely enjoyed my life more when I was on estrogen.

• 46:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tough. When you don't have like easy access trusted sources to go to, it just makes the world all the more chaotic.

• 46:12Cara Santa Maria?

  And Steve, I'm curious, you know, as a physician, obviously, this isn't your, you know, specific area of expertise, but I can't help but like, kind of speculate, maybe, maybe it's not speculative, that when we're looking at studies of like, absolute versus relative or both risks of certain types of cancer, and specifically, we're talking about breast cancer here, because we do find over and over that oral contraception, oral and, I guess, we can't really call them just oral anymore, because we have patches and IUDs and injectables, but that contraceptives, pharmaceutical contraceptives, actually have, show a lower occurrence of, I think, uterine and ovarian cancers. So, a lot of times, we see that the heightened occurrence, even though it's small, in breast cancers.

• 46:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I can't help but wonder, is that not because these people probably already had a hormone receptor positive cancer in their body, or like, they were already genetically predisposed to develop a hormone receptor positive cancer? And so, when they took a hormone, you know, that is going to, that their cancer is going to feed off of, of course, then their cancer's going to grow.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's an absolute possibility, and you have to separate that out.

• 47:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And I don't think you can. I don't think the studies do. And I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of the increase in the absolute risk is accounted for by people who had previously undetectable cancers that were fed by birth control.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  It's also hard, just because the numbers are so low.

• 47:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Are so low, exactly.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay, thanks, Cara.

• 47:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 47:41Speaker 02

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

• 47:46Cara Santa Maria?

  All right, everyone. You know, the holidays are coming up, and so is that holiday panic where you forget somebody on your list until the last minute, and then they end up with a gift card. But if you want to give them something a little more personal, I think about my dad. He is very hard to shop for. And after hearing... You guys talk about how much your mom loved her Aura Frame. I can't wait to get my dad his very own Aura Digital Picture Frame. I know he's gonna love it and it's gonna feel personal because it'll be loaded with family photos.

• 48:17Jay Novella?

  So here's a few things to keep in mind, guys. You can put an unlimited number of photos and videos into the system so they will automatically appear on your Aura Frame. You could even preload photos for people before it ships out. So they, when you give it to them and you, they plug it in, it's already got all that stuff there. So it's a really, really good, solid gift.

• 48:37Speaker 04

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• 49:06Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Bob, did they really detect dark matter?

• 49:11Bob Novella?

  There we go. Let's see what the claims are. So this is dark matter in the news. A researcher, a researcher, looking at gamma radiation data from the center of the Milky Way, claims potential evidence for the existence of dark matter. This was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astrophysical Physics. So, dark matter. We've talked about it. Just to, gotta do a quick overview, I just have to. This is the hypothesized type of matter because ordinary matter, or baryonic matter that you see or touch, can't just keep itself all together gravitationally. So the one classic example at the, one of the, the first examples is galaxy rotation, right? There's just too much unseen matter there that's keeping it together.

• 49:54Bob Novella?

  Because otherwise, if it was all just what we could see, then it would, should be flying apart, and it's not. So there's gotta be something there. So ultimately, there's probably 85% of the total matter in the universe is this dark matter, it's like a five to one ratio. And it's called dark for really, I guess, a couple of reasons. First off, we don't know what the hell it is. And secondly, it doesn't interact with light or matter, it just interacts only gravitationally and through the, and through the, through the weak force. So that makes it incredibly hard to detect, and that's why we just still really have no idea what's going on with this stuff. So, we detect this stuff, this hidden, this hidden matter, this dark matter. So, there's some explanatory models that, that we use. There's MOND, which stands for Modified Newtonian Gravity. So in that model, that, there is no dark matter.

• 50:39Bob Novella?

  All you have to really do is tweak the laws of gravity, and that will explain these gravitational anomalies that we're seeing. So that's MOND. There's also the Macho Model, Massive Compact Halo Objects. So this would include things like small black holes, lots of them, right? Like primordial black holes, or even brown dwarfs. And they are somehow the, the cause of this, everywhere, like around galaxies and everything. Um, and then there's the WIMP Model, and that stands for Weakly Interactive Massive Particles. Now, the poster child for that model is called Cold Dark Matter, that's CDM. If you read about this, you'll be seeing the letters CDM, the initialism, CDM, quite often. So cold in this context means that it's much, much slower than light.

• 51:23Bob Novella?

  That doesn't mean it's not moving at all, um, relative to, say, if it were near you. It, it's probably moving, if it exists at all, maybe a few hundred kilometers per second. Sure, that's fast, but it's far, far slower than the speed of light, which is why they call it Cold Dark Matter. And it's slow enough that this could kind of clump together into these massive halos that we predict exist around galaxies. And they, so those formations, these halos of dark matter, basically grow the galaxy around it in, in a way. So it's safe to say, I would say, that most researchers support this CDM model, this Cold Dark Matter Model, most of them, I don't know how many, but definitely a majority, I would say. So, so let's talk about this research.

• 52:08Bob Novella?

  Uh, the study author here is Tomi Nori. Tamiuri Taitani, and I love that name, Tamiuri Taitani, really cool name. He's an astronomer at the University of Tokyo. So he looked at 15-year-old data, gamma ray data, from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. So the first thing he basically did was looking at all these gamma rays is he focused on a specific area, say, near the core of our galaxy. And he subtracted all the known sources of gamma rays, because there's plenty of places where gamma rays that we know of are being created, wherever, you know, basically, wherever you look, but also specifically at the core of our galaxy. So he kind of subtracted all that, using these special, like, software-based filters, I would assume.

• 52:51Bob Novella?

  After he did that, he found a source of unknown gamma rays that were detected, and they had a peak, a peak energy of 20 gig electron volts, which is a lot.

• 53:02Jay Novella?

  Bob, how the hell does dark matter even make gamma rays?

• 53:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I wasn't aware of this. This was really fascinating. In the CDM model, these gamma rays are created by dark matter particles annihilating each other, similar to the way normal matter and antimatter kind of annihilate each other. But in this case, in this specific case, as in many of these WIMP models, the cold dark matter is its own antiparticle. So if they, if they kind of meet, then they could just, you know, regular particles, these regular dark matter particles, if they meet, they can annihilate. But this is super rare. This is incredibly rare event that should not happen often at all. And the idea here is that we're seeing these gamma rays produced by annihilation only

• 53:49Bob Novella?

  because we're looking at an extremely dense area of cold dark matter in our galaxy. So that it's so dense that this extremely rare annihilation events are happening at, you know, much more often than you, than basically anywhere else where there's not that density of cold dark matter. Now, this model, this cold dark matter model, does not predict hard numbers, like, say, the mass of these, of these dark matter particles. But what this model does predict are patterns of gamma radiation. Okay, so for example, it would predict that the energy that you've, the energy, the gamma radiation energy should form a smooth, roughly round glow, a halo around the galactic center.

• 54:31Bob Novella?

  It also would predict something that, that this glow, the brightness of this glow should fade with distance in this specific way. So those are the kind of, kind of somewhat generic predictions. No, there's no hard numbers out there from, from this model. So the gamma rays do in fact match those predictions to a significant enough degree. It's not perfect, but it's to a significant enough degree that Tumani just thought that it would be worth writing a paper about it. So then what you can do from here then is you can kind of work backwards. You can take, you can ask what type of cold dark matter particles would create this 20 gig electron volt signal in this pattern. By, by running those calculations, they would say that if this is correct, if he is correct, and this is created by cold

• 55:16Bob Novella?

  dark matter, and they can self annihilate, if that's all correct, then the, then the cold dark matter particle would have a mass in the range of hundreds of proton masses. So it would still be quite a light particle, but it would be many times more massive than, than a proton, say. And that's, and that's fine, you know? Hey, that's, if that's what the mass of a cold dark matter particle is, that's great. But that's just kind of like, based on the observation, you're kind of retrofitting, so we still don't necessarily know. Who knows if this is even correct? Alright, so one of the questions that I asked is like, they've been looking for this gamma radiation for a while. Why, what makes this, this researcher special? Why did he potentially find it? And what did he do differently, I

• 55:59Bob Novella?

  guess was, was my main question. Well, for, for the first part here, he took a deep dive into this Fermi data, and he was focusing on an overlooked region near the core. So I guess this, this region, this specific region near the core of our Milky Way galaxy wasn't vetted nearly as thoroughly as other parts of the data. So that's, that's one. And also, I thought maybe he used really radical analysis techniques, and he really didn't, he didn't. He used basically standard analysis techniques, but he used them in kind of different ways. There's lots of different things you could do with these. ...standard techniques to come up with with new insights that that weren't discovered by all these other researchers that have looked. So it may be, maybe he used these analysis techniques in different ways, maybe he, because

• 56:41Bob Novella?

  of the region of space that he focused on, or maybe he, he also used very custom methods to remove some of the known gamma radiation, like there's globes, there's these lobes of gamma radiation I talked about a few years ago, up, you know, above and below our galaxy. And he had to subtract those because they they emit gamma radiation as well. So he, he came up with a, a custom template to, to remove that. Maybe something about that custom template that he created, maybe that's why he was able to, to see this, this gamma radiation potentially caused by cold dark matter. Don't know. So, uh, so he has done certain things differently than, than other researchers. So Tomonori Totani says regarding his data, "This could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter."

• 57:26Bob Novella?

  And so, sure, I would expect him to say that, but there is definitely skepticism. So the, the best quote I found regarding this skepticism for his find comes from Kinoa Wu. He's a theoretical astrophysicist at University College London. The quote here is, "I appreciate the author's hard work and dedication, but we need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim." Wait, I've heard that somewhere before. This analysis, this analysis has not reached this status yet. It's a piece of work which dessert, which serves as an encouragement for the workers in the field to keep on pressing. And I, I absolutely agree with, with that assessment. So this is definitely not a slam dunk. We need feedback from other CDM experts. Um, so we'll see what, what they say about the paper.

• 58:10Bob Novella?

  This is, this is also not, if you click on these articles about this specific news item, you're going to see a lot of news items that say, "The first direct evidence of dark matter." Yeah. And, and I, I came upon that over and over and it was, it was kind of frustrating. In my mind, this is not direct evidence. This is, it's, it's indirect evidence, much like, um, the gravitational evidence, right? The gravitational evidence that we've been going by for so long is, is itself a type of indirect evidence, right? So. This doesn't, direct evidence would be more like, um, yeah, they created them at a, they created, you know, cold dark matter particles in an accelerator, or they found it colliding with atomic nuclei, or something like that. That, that's a little bit more

• 58:53Bob Novella?

  direct evidence that I would, that what I would expect to be described by the words "direct evidence." This is indirect, in, in my opinion. In the future, I think it's, this is still encouraging and very interesting, and, and among the best news I've heard about dark matter in a while, you know, as, as a sheer possibility. So I think these new techniques will almost certainly be used and run against other gamma ray data sets. There's other gamma ray observatories out there besides Fermi. There's the HES telescope, there's the Veritas array, and there's an up and coming Cherenkov telescope array. That's, that's going to be very sensitive. So run these techniques by their other, by their data sets, and see if you get the same thing. If you get the same, you know, gamma radiation

• 59:35Bob Novella?

  signature, that would be interesting. Um, they could also be looking at other wavelengths, like x-rays and radios, and that, that may shed some light as well. The most promising future study, I think, would, would involve nearby galactic cores, say dwarf galaxies that are in orbit around the Milky Way. So they're, so they're not very far away, uh, they're relatively close, so the signal could still be somewhat robust. And a lot of these dwarf galaxies that are near the Milky Way, they have, um, they have a lot of dark matter. They seem to have a lot of dark matter, which is good. And, and most importantly, they have very little gamma radiation noise to muddy the waters. So it would be much easier to subtract that gamma ray background noise and see if there's a cold dark matter signature

• 1:00:18Bob Novella?

  in gamma radiation. So, so that's what I'll be waiting for, uh, to assess my, my, maybe have a revised opinion of this research. Right now, it's interesting, it's very tentative, and it's definitely not a slam dunk, and it's definitely not direct evidence. But it's very interesting. So check it out online if you're interested.

• 1:00:35Speaker 02

  I'm shocked that the headline writers over-called and sensationalized this research.

• 1:00:39Bob Novella?

  It got me to stop. I never saw before, Steve. It's just like, first time I ever came, yeah, it's frustrating. Whatever. I mean, ugh. It's part of the deal. Direct, I mean, you could, evidence of, you know, direct evidence is a real, it's an intention getter.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  It is a tease.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob.

• 1:01:01Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:01:02Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, tell us about the latest from asteroid Bennu.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, the latest. You remember a few weeks ago, I covered a news item that had a preposterous headline, "Human DNA Found in a Two Billion-Year-Old Meteorite."

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  We shredded that idea into two billion pieces of confetti, frankly. The real point of that news item, and this was in early November, it was a recap, "2020 NASA's Osiris Rex Mission Collected Material From Asteroid Bennu, Which Orbit's The Sun Beyond The Orbit Of Mars But Before Jupiter, And That Mission Successfully Brought Back Dust And Material From Bennu In 2023." Then researchers analyzed the samples. They found the presence of water, carbon, and several organic molecules. But next came the detection of amino acids, formaldehyde, and all five of the nucleobases found in RNA and DNA, along with phosphates.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  Certainly not human DNA. Totally wrong there, right? Yeah, all five nucleobases found in DNA and RNA. We know what those five are, right? At least by their letters?

• 1:02:12Bob Novella?

  Mm-hmm. What, adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine?

• 1:02:15Speaker 04

  And what's the...

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  And uracil.

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Uricil. Uricil, thank you. That's the one that I think kind of gets people.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  That's the one that's in RNA.

• 1:02:22Speaker 04

  Correct, not DNA, right? Oh, Steve, you get bonus points for that.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you have these components, not the molecules that carry genetic information, mind you. What you need for that is sugar, right? The ribose in RNA, or in DNA, it's deoxyribose. That was missing from the first sets of analyses from the Bennu material. But now, there's an update on this. They announced it a few days ago, super sweet, because the researchers have identified the presence of ribose, as well as other sugars, including lyxos, xylose, arabinose, glucose, and galactose.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Galactose!

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  Galactose, remember that? They did not find the oxyribose, so sorry, you can't have everything, but hey, the ribose and the other sugars, that's cool news. The lead researcher, his name is Yoshiryo Furakawa, from Tohoku University in Japan. He and his colleagues believe that the sugars formed from the brines of the asteroid, and from which there was formaldehyde as well. And this was in the parent asteroid from which Benyu came. And, you know, it's thought to have carried more fluid and featured more reactions in that main part of Benyu. And he says in a quote, "All five nucleobases used to construct both DNA and RNA along

• 1:03:53Speaker 04

  with phosphates have already been found in the Benyu samples brought to Earth by Osiris Rex. The new discovery of ribose means that all the components from the molecule RNA are present in Benyu." This is not the first time scientists have discovered ribose in an asteroid or a meteorite. There have been two samples that have fallen to Earth that contained it, but this is the first one collected in its natural state out there and brought back with ribose. So this is the first non-Earth-based sample that they were able to confirm. So that's what makes this different and new, and confirms it against what? Contamination, right?

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  Because there's always the consideration, you know, that's of contamination when it comes to analyzing these samples. There's also a quote from, her name is Sarah Russell, at the Natural History Museum in London. She works on Benyu samples as well, but she wasn't part of this particular study. But she said, "This is such a brilliant result from the Osiris Rex mission. The one missing ingredient was the sugar, which now has been reported, so now all of the ingredients of RNA are known to be in primitive asteroids. Earlier this year, we reported finding salts in the returned samples, and suggested there would have been briny pools of water on Benyu's parent body. Such environments would have been perfect places to cook up the complex organics that we see in Benyu."

• 1:05:21Speaker 04

  So this is really good new news. And they're continuing to study the samples to see what else might be in there. But I mean, I think finding the sugar probably is, boy, about as high as they could have possibly achieved, or at least their greatest expectations, I think, are now are now realized through this. What an amazing mission. Does that mean there was life on Bennu?

• 1:05:43Bob Novella?

  No.

• 1:05:44Speaker 04

  At some point? No, absolutely not. See, this is where you have to stop. And this is where the headlines often, like we said, Bob, you're a news news item and so many others.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  Human DNA found on asteroid.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Right, right. And others, and even, you know, even this, even the suggestions of that are so misleading. But that's how you get people to stop and click. But what Bennu does show is that complex organic molecules form naturally in space. They can survive the harsh environment of the solar system. They can be delivered intact to planetary surfaces. And the Earth was very likely the recipient of a steady rain of this material. So what do you think now about that?

• 1:06:20Speaker 02

  Well, it supports the RNA hypothesis, the RNA first, you know?

• 1:06:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 02

  To some extent, I mean, it means that at least all the ingredients of RNA were there. I mean, that's not, I don't think anyone is surprised at that, to be honest with you. I think that's kind of what we were expecting.

• 1:06:35Speaker 04

  Yes, but having this pristine example and analyzed and confirmed and confirmed, Bob, you know, multiple scientists have been working on these samples. They spread, they spread the material around among laboratories all over the planet so that everybody, so that a lot of different scientists could could do their analyses on this. And yeah, without the contamination factor, you can eliminate that.

• 1:06:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you just get RNA. I mean, once you have RNA, I remember reading something recently where it showed that it doesn't take much of a big mutation at all of RNA to become a storage molecule like DNA. And then once you've got that RNA and then DNA, it's like, damn, man, you're basically, you know, all set. It just seems like a no brainer. So, so Steve, it's like, in a sense, it is kind of like, you know, it's panspermia, because it's, it seems likely at this point that, that we were hit with asteroids that, that contained these basic components.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  Well, the weak version of panspermia.

• 1:07:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the weak, the weak version.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Panzpermia was originally the idea that life originated, you know, in the cosmos and that it spreads throughout the cosmos. So, there's no evidence that life spreads

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:07:47Speaker 02

  interstellarly. It's possible that it may have spread within our own solar system, but the fact that there's the building blocks of life, some people equate that to panspermia, but that was really never what panspermia was. It was just, it was that life was, was spreading.

• 1:08:05Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  Not, not the, not the

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Building blocks.

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  Not the building blocks of life. The fact that the building blocks of life are out there, that's pretty much, that's not controversial and that's what we would expect, right? I mean, this idea that, you know, life was built out of stuff that was common.

• 1:08:18Speaker 04

  Right. Microbes did not fall to Earth.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  Right? They were not assem- they were not assembled.

• 1:08:25Bob Novella?

  But the Lego pieces did.

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  Let me see, who, who, who wrote that? Gosh, I wish I could find the person who quoted this, but he said, they, they put it like this. "You can walk into a hardware store and find wood, nail, wiring, and copper pipes. That doesn't mean a house spontaneously formed in aisle nine."

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:41Speaker 04

  I thought that was a nice quote.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 1:08:44Bob Novella?

  Thanks.

• 1:08:45Speaker 02

  Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time? All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

• 1:09:23Jay Novella?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:24Speaker 02

  That, I, I know that was long, but there's so many cool sounds in there. I just had to play the whole thing. Um, so guys, what is this?

• 1:09:31Jay Novella?

  Hmm, video game?

• 1:09:32Speaker 02

  Not a bad guess, anybody else? Some kind of machine. You're a genius, Steve.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  Um.

• 1:09:41Jay Novella?

  All right, well, my old standby, Visto Tutti. Visto. He says, "This one sounds like a ping pong ball spinning in the airflow of a vacuum cleaner or air compressor." And he says, uh, he also says, "Probably a bird."

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  He always says that now.

• 1:09:55Jay Novella?

  So that is not correct, but I, I know what he's talking about. There is this thing where you could have, um, you know, like a, you could take a ping pong ball and if you put it into the airflow of a vacuum cleaner, it could spin in, in place. I've seen this done many different ways with, with air and something like a ping pong ball, but I didn't know it made any weird noises like that. We have another guess here by Daniel Osborne. Daniel says, "Hi guys, short time listener, first time emailer. Is the noisy this week, the bullet train in Japan getting up to speed?" And he says, "I love your podcast and I'm so happy to have been recommended to it by a friend. I can't get enough." Well, that is an interesting guess. The bullet train, I don't know. I mean, I've heard that. I don't hear those noises there, uh, but that's an interesting guess.

• 1:10:40Jay Novella?

  It probably makes a bunch of noises I've never heard, but it's not that. You're incorrect, but thank you for joining the HDU team. Uh, another guess here from Jacques Hemming and Jacques says, or Jake, he wants his name pronounced Jake. "This week's who's that noisy is definitely something spinning up to high speeds with something else added, so my guess is a disassembled 52X CD-ROM drive with the other sounds being the laser tracking to read it." That's a cool guess and yes, you know, CD-ROM drives make some weird noises. Not these particular weird noises though. Um, I have another guess here. This is from a listener named Chris. Chris says, "I've been a tech in the sound recording industry for many years and this week's noisy sure sounds familiar to me.

• 1:11:23Jay Novella?

  It sounds like an analog tape machine that has an alignment tape on as it's being shuttled up and down. You hear the speeding up and down of the tones on the tape as well as the transport buttons being pressed repeatedly to vary the speed of the tape machine." Chris, this is a fantastically close guess. This is a good guess because I say close, not because you're close to what the actual cre- the, uh, creation of the noise is, but that- You reminded me that I've heard that sound and it's very similar. If you listen to an old analog tape machine, they do make spin up noises like that and clicking noises and everything, so that was a fantastic guess. I have a close enough winner guess here, and I'll explain what's going on with that. Person's name is Burkhalp from Debu, Germany.

• 1:12:08Jay Novella?

  And they say, "My guess for this week's noisy is a copper smith or a metal sheet worker turning a sheet of copper into a pan, pot, or some other kind of vessel. I believe I'm hearing something turning and speeding up, which ought to be the copper sheet pinched into the apparatus. I imagine the squeaky noise is the result of the worker pushing onto the sheet to bring it into shape." Okay, so... That's right, copper. What this person is describing, it's some type of machine that, like a lathe, right, that spins up, that would spin something? Yeah. And it's also, you know, from reading about this thing too, like, it could be some type of CNC machine, but I do believe that this machine would be appropriately closer to a lathe that does this type of work.

• 1:12:53Jay Novella?

  Now, if I'm incorrect, you can let me know, but let me explain to you what is actually being shaped here. There is a, some type of metal instrument that has like a screw, the threaded screw end to it, that is being refurbished, right? The screws have been rusted and, you know, just are not defined anymore. And what they do is they're taking the cutting implement and they're running it along these threads as it's spinning, in time with the spinning. So like, for example, if you were to spin a screw perfectly in a machine, and then you ran like a metal pointer into the groove, that would reinforce the depth of the groove and everything, that's what's actually happening. It's fascinating. You know what, I realized, Steve, we don't have a place where we actually post...

• 1:13:37Jay Novella?

  I'll give Steve the link so you guys can see this, and you could, anybody who knows better can give me more information. So, good job there, that was a tough one. I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and it was sent in by a listener named Mark.

• 1:14:17Jay Novella?

  I'll give you a hint here, guys. This is not information being turned into a sound. This is an actual thing, physical thing, making a sound. If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, you can email us at [email protected]. Steve, it's getting close to these January shows. You could still buy tickets. The Friday night, you know, super special SGU meetup situation, the tickets are sold out. They sold out in about three days. And I hope everyone that's coming, I hope you guys have a great time, because I think it's going to be a really fun time.

• 1:14:54Speaker 02

  It's going to be a great time.

• 1:14:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's going to be cool. And we have tickets that are being sold for January 10. We have two shows. We have a private show in the morning, you know, be probably from like 11 to 2 ish, sometime timeframe in there. And we have a extravaganza that we're going to be doing that night, starting at 8pm. So if you guys are interested, please go to theskepticsguy.org and you'll find buttons on there for that show. And we have another show, which is a mirror of all the things that are happening in Seattle, but it'll be in Wisconsin. You can get all the details there as well.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. We have a couple of longish emails that I want to get to. These require a bit of an in-depth answer. So the first one comes from Sam Serene, who writes, "Recently, my father, who has been an extremely well-written individual with a degree in law and philosophy, has been diving deeper and deeper into what we would consider fringe or even pseudoscience. His latest target is climate. The issue for me is that he's generally a very clever man that thinks critically about things. So for him to come out and say things like this is concerning for me. He has linked me to this article in a move that seems like it's on the path to full-on climate denial. Is there some kind of logical fallacy in this article, or is it otherwise debunkable in

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  some other way that I'm missing? I'd love to get your take on it. Thanks for all that you do." So, I actually wrote a two-part blog post on this because it is a very interesting article, chock full of denialism tropes and logical fallacies. So, the article itself is by a guy named Paul McCray. You may be shocked to learn that he's not a climate scientist. He was previously a journalist. Sometimes I encounter journalists who think they know more than scientists. They just, you know what I mean? Like, they, yes, they know a lot about an issue and they confuse the fact that they understand a lot, or they have a lot of factual information, to being an expert.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  And then they violate the primary law of science journalism, which is you do not substitute your own opinion for the consensus of expert opinion. That's what he's doing. So, let me go through, and I just, I refer you to my blog post, "Is Climate Science Post-Normal Science?", part one and part two, to get into a lot of the details. And if you guys, by the way, have a chance to read the article or my blog post.

• 1:17:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I read some of the McCray article, and it was very frustrating.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's very frustrating.

• 1:17:24Speaker 04

  I wasn't familiar with the term "post-normal." Should I have been prior to this?

• 1:17:29Bob Novella?

  How common is that?

• 1:17:30Speaker 02

  That's bullshit.

• 1:17:31Bob Novella?

  Yeah, he claimed this on Wikipedia, but I didn't verify that. But, and some of the quotes from Wikipedia, I did not, you know, necessarily like very much either. So, I'm just, how much of a thing is it? I mean, are people actually referring to this post-normal science thing, especially applied to climate science?

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so. So, this is a very common science denier strategy, right? You limit the scope of what science is, and then you declare whatever science you're denying as not science, right? Or not normal science, or whatever. You try to ghettoize it in some way. So, he's saying, you know, "Regular science operates this way, you know, where you test hypotheses with experiment." And climate science uses modeling, which is based on guesses, and that's not real science. That's this post-normal science. But it's bullshit, right? This idea that science operates in this very limited way,

• 1:18:31Speaker 02

  or that only certain things that scientists do is quote-unquote "real science", is just all science denial. So creationists do this, right? They say, "Well, historical sciences are not real science, because you can't observe the past, and you can't do experiments on evolution." So it's just people making guesses about what they think happened in the past. You remember we had Kyle Johnson on recently, a philosopher who I thought put it very succinctly, and now I always quote him. "Science is inference to the best conclusion, the most plausible, the most likely conclusion, based on all the evidence." Yeah. And we marshal lots of different kinds of evidence. And that includes models, right?

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  Some people say, "Oh, models aren't really evidence." Well, listen, if you develop a model, and first you have to validate the model by hindcasting, right? You have to show that when you plug in the numbers, it reproduces what we already know happened. That's not a very high bar. That's a necessary but insufficient criterion for being a validated model. Sure, if it fails that, you start over again. Then you need to do the hard part. Yeah, but if it doesn't do that, that's the first pass. You need to at least predict the past, right? If it's inconsistent with what we know to be true, you reject it out of hand. But of course, there's lots of models that could be consistent with what we already know that is not actually correct. It's like astrology.

• 1:20:00Speaker 02

  Astrology is good at hindcasting, too. Then you have to make predictions about the future, right? And that's when models really get validated. Yeah. So in order for him to say that climate science is not real science, he has to argue that it's not falsifiable, and that climate sciences don't change what they say based upon the evidence. And in order to do that, he has to lie about the evidence. And he may think that he's telling the truth, but he's not. So his premise is that climate models have done a crappy job of predicting future warming. And that is a straight up lie.

• 1:20:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was like, that's not even true.

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  It's not true.

• 1:20:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's like, is he ignoring like error bars?

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  He's a cherry picking outlier climate denying scientist. The same three guys that all the climate deniers quote over and over again, right? And he's quoting one of them to say, look, this guy says the models didn't predict, were not accurate. It's like, okay, but if you look at all of the other published science, there are plenty of systematic reviews and plenty of studies which show that since the 1970s, the climate models have been very accurate. They have been very good at predicting future warming. Even the early cruder ones, and they've only gotten better as we learn more and add new detail,

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  right? So if you take that away, his whole argument collapses. Because, right, because he's saying they don't, their models don't work, but they stick with them anyway. No, they stick with them because they are freaking working really well. It's amazing how well the models have predicted future warming over the last 50 years, you know, given what we knew at the time. So we basically got like the 90% are correct. Now we're just tweaking it around the edges. Like, we didn't like know how clouds influenced, whatever. There's all kinds of things that we're learning about making them more, what what climate scientists call skillful, right? A skillful model is one that aligns with actual climate change over time.

• 1:22:19Speaker 02

  So he's citing, but McCray, the author of this, this journalist, author of this article, is citing Christie, who's one of the three guys. You see Lindzen, Spencer, and Christie, right? Their names crop up all the time in the climate denying literature. They're the three outliers.

• 1:22:36Cara Santa Maria?

  They're the reason we have to say 99.9%.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  Right, right. That's why it's 99%. So, yeah, but the bell curve of climate models since basically 1973 has been

• 1:22:49Speaker 02

  Within two standard deviations, right? So in science, that's correct, right? Is within two standard deviations. That's basically means that you're in, you're out, you're in the ballpark, right? You are basically correct. And it's just a matter of how precise you are, right? And we, again, nobody pretends that we can precisely, like, down to the tenth of a degree, predict exactly what the average temperature is going to be in, you know, some timeframe. It's, you look at the graphs, the graphs always have expanding error bars into the future, like all projections do, right?

• 1:23:22Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:23:23Speaker 02

  This is all part of legitimate science. The other big thing he does is say that there's no such thing as consensus in science.

• 1:23:32Bob Novella?

  Oh, what?

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, consensus-

• 1:23:34Bob Novella?

  He defended that statement.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. That is to say, well, you know, science is a democracy, like, we don't vote on what's real or isn't real. But the reason why consensus is important is because it is not a simple thing to go from the evidence to inference to the most likely conclusion, right? That is often extremely complicated. This is the thing that non-scientists don't get, that influencers don't get, that journalists often don't get, is that there is many different kinds of evidence in science with different trade-offs, different strengths and weaknesses, different perspectives.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  You can look at a question from many different angles, and then you have to put it all together to say, well, what's the most likely conclusion, given all, and sometimes the evidence is conflicting, or it just tells a slightly different story. And so you need to be an expert, and you need to look at the evidence from different angles, and then you need to say, well, if scientists in different related subspecialties, looking at this from different angles, are they seeing the same thing, or are they seeing different things? And that's why we say, well, is there a consensus? How strong is the consensus? Is there a significant minority opinion? How viable is it? Et cetera. Because unless you're one of those experts, you have no frequent idea how to interpret the evidence

• 1:25:03Speaker 02

  or how to translate it into a conclusion. And even if you are an expert, you need to know what all the other experts are saying. You yourself are not the final word on what the evidence says. If you don't understand the need for consensus in science, then you don't understand how science works. Now, here's the other thing, though. So we don't always need scientists to say, this is what we think is happening based upon all the evidence. Just, they just keep looking for new evidence and refining their models. But whenever there's a decision that's resting on the science, you absolutely need to know what the best current inference is. So that's why there are consensus statements in healthcare. Right, Kara? You know about this.

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  And this is panels of experts getting together, reviewing all the evidence, and saying what they think the final word is on this evidence. And you ignore these consensus statements at your own legal peril, right? And at the health peril of your patients and your clients. And for climate science, there's a massive policy question hinging on what the science says. And so we do want the IPCC to get together and have hundreds of scientists pour over all the data, talk to each other, and say, this is what we think is most likely going on. And here are the error bars. And this is what we recommend. This is what policymakers should know.

• 1:26:31Speaker 02

  You know, this should be informing policy. That's why there are consensus statements. Dismissing all of that is pseudoscience. It is completely, it is science denial, pure and simple.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  So, I mean, I sympathize with Sam. I know what it's like. Our father watched Fox News the last 20 years of his life, and it was a disaster. And I saw him get radicalized over time from that. Does it matter how smart you are, how, you know, you could be basically a critical thinker, clever person. I know lots of clever people who, when it comes to identity politics, are morons, right? They just, they suspend their critical thinking, they suspend their cleverness, or whatever smarts they have, and they buy the party line, you know? Or they just get radicalized by a narrative that's pounded over and over and over again. In this case, you have somebody who's smart, you know, McCray, who's a journalist,

• 1:27:27Speaker 02

  who, you know, knows stuff. He knows enough to be dangerous, right? So he could make a superficially compelling sounding argument to people who don't really know what they're talking about. But somebody who's generally smart, but not a scientific skeptic, who's steeped in this information, might fall for it. And so that is apparently what's happening with your father. I refer him to my two blog posts if he wants to get another perspective on it. All right, let's move on. It's another email. Kara, I was holding on to this one until you were here, because this one's about cardiac calcium scans.

• 1:28:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I remember when this one came through. You wrote him a very thoughtful response.

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  I did. I wrote him. He did not respond to my email, but he had plenty of time to respond, so it's fair game, I think, to talk about on the show. I won't use his name, I won't use his name. But he writes, "I've been listening to your show for a really long time and even bought your book. I saw my doctor today and paraphrased your segment about cardiac calcium scans. And to her, as I am a 50-year-old, generally healthy person with similar cholesterol numbers as Stephen Kara, stated in the segment, and I'm on a statin drug." That's a critical piece of information, by the way. "Imagine my embarrassment when my doctor told me that cardiac calcium scans are basically a scam, and whoever told me about them was most likely a paid spokesperson for a testing corporation." I didn't get my check yet, by the way, Kara. I don't know if you did.

• 1:28:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, me neither. I had to pay to get my scan.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  She went on to assplain pseudoscience to me and how to recognize when I'm being duped. This was doubly embarrassing because I've been involved in the skeptic community for almost two decades and considered you guys to be a solid source for legit medical science. A case can be made that I should have researched CCS before mentioning it to my doctor rather than just trusting your word. Lesson learned. Your book is in my recycle bin and I will not repeat this mistake. Thank you for reminding me to never be complacent and never trust any experts without evidence. All right, first, I have to point out that that's exactly what they're doing.

• 1:29:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, their doctor said one thing and they're like, "I will now not believe or listen to anything the SGU has ever said."

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  You're believing one expert. So, all right, so let's talk, let's back up a little bit and talk about the calcium, the cardiac calcium scan, because we talked about it in the opening banter. It wasn't a deep dive. I listened to it again, everything we said-

• 1:29:36Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I did a, I did do a deep dive on it. I did it a few weeks before that.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  But there is, there is more to say even, I think.

• 1:29:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, there always is. There is nuance here and the nuance is interesting. But I think the thing is that what this person's doctor is saying is not nuanced and it is, it is at odds with the consensus of expert opinion, right?

• 1:29:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the idea that this is a scam.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  It's, all right, so here's, here's the thing. So, for a quick review, cardiac calcium scans, look at calcium in the arteries of your heart and that is very predictive of your future risk of heart attack, right?

• 1:30:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a type of CT scan.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Yes, it's a type of CT scan. So, the question is, how useful are cardiac calcium scans and should you get them?

• 1:30:22Cara Santa Maria?

  And that depends on your age and your risk factors.

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  So, he specifically says, "I'm on a statin." The thing is, if you're already on a statin drug, there is no indication for a cardiac calcium scan, which I believe we said.

• 1:30:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because the purpose of it was to determine whether or not to start taking a statin.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's a very limited use case where you're somebody who's kind of on the edge in terms of your risk factors and it's not clear whether or not you should go on a statin drug or not. Like, if you have a super high cholesterol, then you go on it. If it's perfectly normal, you don't. But if you're, ah, you're 200, 205, 210 and you've got some moderate risk factors and you're, you know, you're kind of middle-aged-

• 1:31:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And you're otherwise very healthy, yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're otherwise healthy, you haven't had an event or you're not, you're asymptomatic. Then the cardiac calcium scan can be used to stratify your risk and decide if you're somebody who should go on a statin drug or not.

• 1:31:17Cara Santa Maria?

  And by the way, I went into great detail, and I know this is slightly different than what you're saying, but I went into great detail when I covered this about elderly patients.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:31:26Cara Santa Maria?

  And the fact that this is not usually indicated for elderly patients because by virtue of aging, most people are going to show some risk factor after a certain age. And so the scan is only going to tell the doctors what they already know.

• 1:31:40Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Or if you're already on a statin drug, there's no question.

• 1:31:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, same.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  Also, statin drugs increase your calcification. So the test becomes inaccurate when you're on a statin drug, too.

• 1:31:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Because you artificially look like your risk is higher.

• 1:31:55Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:31:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  But actually, it calcifies them in a way that stabilizes the plaque and reduces your risk. But if you're not on a statin drug, it does predict your risk. So the nuance here is there are people or companies who are overselling the cardiac calcium scan to make money.

• 1:32:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, but that happens with everything.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  Of course it does.

• 1:32:18Cara Santa Maria?

  That's like saying that chemo is a scam because there are certain types of chemo that spend a lot of money on marketing.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. Exactly. This is where the doctor's completely wrong here. It's totally wrong to say that the scan is a scam. When you're referring to people overusing or overselling the scan, that can be a scam. But that doesn't mean there isn't a legitimate use to it. So that's the nuance that they're missing.

• 1:32:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's an indictment of our regulation around how we advertise in the medical industry. That's not an indictment of the actual things that are being advertised.

• 1:32:55Speaker 02

  Right, right, exactly. So. What we said is absolutely consistent with what the American Heart Association says. And the cardiologists say that in this limited use, this is a reasonable use for a cardiac calcium scan. Now, I will say that there hasn't been a study looking at whether or not you do a cardiac calcium scan, does that improve your outcome? That would be a very difficult study to do, though.

• 1:33:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think I covered that when I covered this piece, too. Yeah. All we, I think all we knew, I'm trying to remember back, we don't know about like outcomes in terms of mortality. I think we only know about immediate outcomes in terms of treatment.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:33:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  So, you would have to randomize people and then, you know, you make a decision without the calcium scan, you make a decision with the calcium scan, and then you see if they, people who made the decision with the calcium scan do better over time. But because of the group of people that we're talking about, this would have to be a massive study. And there probably honestly would only be a small, I would suspect be a very small difference. Because again, we're talking about people with a low risk to begin with.

• 1:34:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And this, this isn't yet covered by many insurance carriers, and it's not yet utilized in common practice. So you can't do the kinds of studies you would do with like a pap test or a mammogram at the age of 40, for example. Like a screening test that is covered and that most people get.

• 1:34:21Speaker 02

  Right. So anyway, we accurately reflected the nuance, we accurately reflected the consensus of expert opinion. You know, the cardiac calcium scans themselves are not a scam. There are some people overselling them, just like those people overselling lots of medical procedures that, you know.

• 1:34:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, pushing them in situations where they're...

• 1:34:41Speaker 02

  It doesn't mean the procedure itself is a scam.

• 1:34:43Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:34:45Cara Santa Maria?

  But it may not be indicated for some people, and that's fine. And I think the thing that's frustrating, too, is that, I mean, he didn't specify here, probably this was his internist, or his GP, or his PCP, however you want to define it, not his cardiologist, I could be wrong. But from, when I remember when I covered this, one of the big points that was made in the write-up was that a lot of primary care physicians don't even know about this. Like, they just, they're not educated on this option because it's not covered by standard insurance. And so it's, you know, not in a lot of dropdown lists. So it's like, it's just hard to know if his physician...

• 1:35:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Did a bunch of research and for whatever reason determined herself that it's a scam. Maybe she had some bad experiences with some, you know, reps or something of that nature. Or she just hadn't really been exposed to the information anyway. But if he had gone to his cardiologist, something tells me he would have gotten a different response.

• 1:35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. Yeah, they just think that they're not somebody that, you know, first of all, I don't trust what this guy says his doctor said. Cause it just generically, I don't do that. Whenever I have an opportunity to compare what somebody says their doctor said and what the doctor actually said, they're radically different.

• 1:36:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:36:03Speaker 02

  So I don't, I won't take it at face value, but taking it at face value, it means they're not a very nuanced thinker. And you know what I mean? Like they're thinking very simplistically about this. Maybe they were misinformed about it, which is also not acceptable if they're a doctor and giving advice as a doctor. So they're, they're somewhere between misinformed or just not really thinking in a nuanced way.

• 1:36:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, cause I, I could see a physician saying, you're 50, we put you on a statin because your numbers were high. So your numbers are hovering around 200, 205 right now because of your statin. They've lowered your numbers to that level. That's why it would be dumb for us to get you a scan.

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  All they had to say was you're already on a statin. There's no indication for a cardiac calcium scan.

• 1:36:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:48Speaker 02

  That's it. That's all they had to say.

• 1:36:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It, it, it does sound a little bit like the listener maybe misunderstood because he did say, I am a 50 year old, generally healthy person with similar cholesterol numbers as Stephen Kara stated in the segment, and I'm on a statin. The big difference there is we are not.

• 1:37:06Speaker 02

  We are not on statin drugs, right?

• 1:37:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like that's a really big difference.

• 1:37:10Speaker 02

  That's the whole point. That was to determine if we should go on a statin.

• 1:37:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm. And so like, but, but that's the other thing is that if his numbers are the same as ours on a statin versus off of a statin, our risk factors are wildly different.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  Right. Different story.

• 1:37:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  Okay. Let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:37:30Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:37:39Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items for facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to sniff out the fake. We have three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready? Yes. All right, here we go. Item number one, researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. All right, number two, a recent systematic review finds that 20 to 30% of the world's population have biophobia, which is a general aversion to nature. And item number three, a new study finds that plants and phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methyl mercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury,

• 1:38:23Speaker 02

  providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury in the food supply. Kara, why don't you go first?

• 1:38:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like the one that's bothering me right off the top, maybe it's a, it's not recency effect, it's a primacy effect, maybe, are the small mechanical mice, because is it a myth that elephants are actually afraid of mice? I saw it in a cartoon once. Yeah, exactly. I feel like this is like a Disney cartoon myth or something. But I don't see why mechanical, I don't think elephants would even notice them. If there were mechanical mice, like hanging around crops, I think the elephants would just trample the mice. So yeah, that one bugs me a bit. A recent systematic review finding that 20 to 30% of the population have biophobia. I think that there's so much nuance in this.

• 1:39:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, using the word biophobia, I think is very biasing, but I could see there being some sort of study where they term it biophobia, like it's an aversion. That doesn't mean it's fear. And I think a lot of people, I mean, ask any of your, I camp all the time, and when I tell people I camp all the time, they're like, ugh, bugs, you know, like, ugh, why do you? I think a lot of people have become really dependent on their smartphones, have become really dependent on technology. There it's hard for them to be alone with their thoughts. I would not be surprised if a solid 20 to 30% of people were like, yeah, I don't want to go outside and do that for any extended period of time.

• 1:39:49Speaker 02

  And for the listeners, biophobias in quotes, because that's the term that was used in the study.

• 1:39:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That was used in the study. Yeah, that doesn't that doesn't surprise me then because that's a common, you know, nomenclature thing, as philias, you know, towards and phobias away from. But that doesn't mean, you know, likes and is afraid of necessarily. And then plants and phytoplankton, internal mechanism, detoxify methyl mercury, convert it back to atmospheric mercury. So a pathway to reduce mercury. Ah, that doesn't surprise. I feel like we're always finding out cool things that photosynthetic organisms can do, or just cool things that like, life does, you know. Life is really good at processing, metabolizing certain compounds and converting them into other things. Whether it's dangerous, whether

• 1:40:38Cara Santa Maria?

  it causes a buildup in the plants or the phytoplankton, and then they die. I mean, that's a separate question because we, of course, are people and we are selfish and narcissistic. And we're like, how can this help me? So I could see that being science. So yeah, I think it's the mechanical mice that one bugs me. That's the fiction.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob?

• 1:40:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I was thinking along similar lines. The first thing I thought of, Steve, what was that book as we read as a kids that?

• 1:41:00Speaker 02

  You had the lion, the cheese, and the mice?

• 1:41:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, they tried to get rid of the mice. So they they got other animals and eventually they got they but then the lions to get rid of the mice stuck around and they had to get a bigger, tougher animal. And eventually they got the elephants to scare away the lions or something. And then they had to get rid of the mice. They had to get the mice.

• 1:41:20Speaker 02

  I remember that, Bob.

• 1:41:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so it was like a big loop. That's funny.

• 1:41:23Bob Novella?

  It was a big, big crazy loop. So that's the first thing. And then my second thought was like, that's got to be baloney. I mean, I've never read anywhere that that that elephants are indeed afraid of mice. And Kara, you said, would they even notice them? I don't think so. I don't think so. And would they would mechanical mice even move naturally, normally, where they're just kind of rolling there on the ground? I doubt they're they're, you know, mechanical quadrupeds. I think probably very basic, little rolling robotic mice. Probably doesn't even look very realistic movement wise. Anyway, the other ones, like, I have no idea. The other ones seem totally reasonable to me. No red flags are being raised. So I'm going to go with the the elephant and the mechanical mice is fiction as well.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  Oh, boy, I'm in the same boat here. That when you, as soon as you read the first one, Steve, I was like, no way, this can't be right. Uh, mechanical mice, uh, deterrence for elephants. And yeah, the cartoon image came into my head. I remember reading years ago, many years ago, about this being, uh, incorrect, an incorrect perception. Uh, apparently, uh, what, the elephants don't even, either they don't recognize the mice, or if they, it's a startle response to something, not necessarily the mouse. It could be anything, you know, like, kinda out of the ordinary. So if, it's not even really a fear. So, yeah, I don't think that one's right, which kinda leaves the other two to be the science for,

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  you know, I think what Kara said was, sounded good to me. So I guess I'll leave it at that. I'll just join the folks and say, mice fiction.

• 1:42:58Speaker 02

  Okay, and Jay?

• 1:42:59Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's one of those things, like, when you hear, like, are elephants actually afraid of mice? And you have to really consider it. You know, because I think this, like Bob said, this came from a children's book, and it's like one of those, um, you know, just a collective idea, you know, it's in the, uh, what do you call it? The zeitgeist. The zeitgeist. I cannot, for the life of me, think of any legitimate reason why an elephant would be afraid of a mouse in any way. But, you know, the trick to this is that it's mechanical mice, and maybe they're just calling them mice because they're small, and, and, you know, if these are robot machines that are moving super fast, you know, maybe they drive them into their feet, I don't know. I mean, I don't know.

• 1:43:44Jay Novella?

  I just think in general, the whole mice thing, you know, they're not afraid of small things like that. I'm sure of it. So that one is like my 99% fiction. Uh, the other two about the biophobia, I would think, you know, the number's kinda high, but I do think there is a lot of biophobia, but, you know, if I think the mouse one is the fiction, then that one is probably correct. And then the phytoplankton have this internal mechanism to detoxify. That's amazing. It doesn't surprise me for anything biological to do anything incredible like that. So I'm just gonna go with the guys and say the mice, the whole concept of mice is false.

• 1:44:24Speaker 02

  Mice are false. Mice are fake. I really hope I didn't lead you guys astray. Let's start with number three. A new study finds that plants and phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methylmercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury, providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury in the food supply. You all think this one is science and this one is science. So yeah, this was actually known for a while but neglected, you know, it was not like well-known, even though it was sort of evidence of it previously. The idea is that, you know, methylmercury is the toxic form of mercury. It's a very toxic form and that could be increased because of mercury released in the atmosphere from coal burning, for example.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  And what they found was that many plants and phytoplankton, basically the primary producers, they do have a pathway by which they can reduce methylmercury to the less toxic inorganic form. And then they can convert it into gaseous mercury and it's basically release it back into the atmosphere. So they essentially eliminate it from themselves. They detoxify themselves of the methylmercury. And this might explain why there isn't a very tight correlation between atmospheric mercury and mercury levels in people, right? Because it's not getting to us through our food supply because it's being detoxified

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  at the plant level, at the primary producer level. And this pathway may be something that can be utilized, you know, the idea is it could be utilized to further eliminate toxic mercury. From the food supply. Let's go back to number one. Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. So I'm surprised that none of you have seen or remember the MythBusters episode where they specifically tested the notion that elephants are afraid of mice.

• 1:46:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  No, I don't know that one.

• 1:46:31Cara Santa Maria?

  What did they find?

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  So what they did was they had a mouse in a trap. A dead mouse? No, a live mouse, like in a little box. And they could open it up to release the mouse, you know, with a string. They have to just pull a string and a box comes up and the mice can run away. Release the dog. And on a path that elephants typically walk on, they waited for an elephant to come by, then they lifted the thing, the mouse ran away, and the elephant absolutely recoiled from the mouse. It noticed it. It stepped back and stepped around the mouse and took a different path. This was on MythBusters, watch it. Okay, you said recoil.

• 1:47:09Bob Novella?

  How many data points? Maybe this was an elephant with exceptionally good eyesight.

• 1:47:13Speaker 02

  Recoil does not mean fear, you know. I didn't say fear, just that they walked, they stepped away from the mouse. It was pretty clear, you know, when you watch the video, that the elephant noticed the mouse and avoided it. And that was their question, would they even notice, you know, the mouse? They were actually surprised. They thought they were going to debunk it, the whole, because the notion does sound silly. And it makes sense that you wouldn't want little vermin, you know, getting in your trunk or whatever, I guess.

• 1:47:42Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 1:47:43Bob Novella?

  That was quite silly, Steve. Can you imagine what they would do with a rat trying to get in their trunk? They would launch it into orbit.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  Is that how it works? All of that aside. Yeah. This one is.

• 1:48:00Speaker 02

  The fiction.

• 1:48:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yay.

• 1:48:03Speaker 02

  Thank you. But what is true is that elephants are a huge problem in Botswana.

• 1:48:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:48:10Speaker 02

  Guess how, how many elephants do you think are, live in Botswana?

• 1:48:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Too many, because they banned hunting.

• 1:48:16Speaker 02

  Too many. Like, five.

• 1:48:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Too many. I know they're, they destroy all the trees.

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  I don't know. All right, five. A hundred and thirty thousand. Hundred and thirty thousand. Hundred and thirty thousand. Oh, I knew it. It seems like a lot. Lot of poop. That's a lot in that area, and, and they're a menace to crops, to farmers. Because, you know, if elephants decide they're gonna come walk through your, your farm and eat whatever they want, there's not much you can do about it.

• 1:48:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Or just step on it. Yeah, they knock down fences, they trample water supplies.

• 1:48:45Speaker 02

  And, you know, the goal is to live peacefully with the elephants, right? You don't wanna do anything harmful to the elephants. So they're looking for kind of a gentle way to keep elephants away from the crops. Not mechanical mice. They found another way that has worked in other countries. Anyone wanna guess what that is? It is another small, it's a small creature that elephants are, maybe repelled by. I'm thinking high intensity laser beams. Maybe a bird or something.

• 1:49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Cats?

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Nope. Honeybees. Um.

• 1:49:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I could see that. They'd be like annoying to them.

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  They don't wanna get stung by them.

• 1:49:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the, right, but the sting isn't venomous. It won't hurt the elephant, right? Can it even get through their skin? It could be painful. Well, they could get stung in their eyelid, eyes, eyelids, or whatever. What if they're allergic?

• 1:49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  They might also just not like the buzzing and the swarming.

• 1:49:35Speaker 02

  They don't like the buzzing, yeah. So in other countries, it's worked pretty well. And they wanted to see if it was gonna work in Botswana, because it's a much, the elephants are a much bigger problem. And what they found was mixed results. It works maybe half the time. Well, that's better than zero. And the, some elephants would hear the buzzing. They basically had posts with, with bee nests on them, bee, beehives. And when elephants approached, they could hear the swarm of bees, and about half of them would turn away. The other half, they didn't seem to care.

• 1:50:05Cara Santa Maria?

  That's great.

• 1:50:06Bob Novella?

  Purely from the noise, they think?

• 1:50:07Speaker 02

  Yes, but the question is why

• 1:50:10Bob Novella?

  It's a recording.

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  Why do some elephants respond and others don't? And the guess is that it's if an elephant has been previously stung by a bee or harassed by a swarm of bees, they've learned to avoid them.

• 1:50:23Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 02

  And others

• 1:50:24Bob Novella?

  They need to sting. They need to sting every elephant.

• 1:50:26Speaker 02

  And others have not learned to avoid the swarm. So the question, the reason why they had to test it specifically in Botswana is because there are fewer bees in Botswana. And so the elephants are less likely to have learned to avoid them.

• 1:50:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:50:43Speaker 02

  Because it's a drier climate, there are just fewer bees, beehives.

• 1:50:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But if farmers bring in bees.

• 1:50:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:50:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe there's a downside, right? We talk about unintended consequences a lot.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  What could go wrong?

• 1:50:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but ultimately, have, keeping bees in harmony with farmland is generally a really good proposition.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then

• 1:51:01Cara Santa Maria?

  So it's, it's only going to help them pollinate their crops.

• 1:51:04Speaker 02

  And maybe the elephants will learn over time to avoid the bees. Even if the ones that are not initially repelled by them might eventually learn to avoid them.

• 1:51:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And it could be an additional revenue stream.

• 1:51:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:51:18Bob Novella?

  If you, if you release these bees, if you continue doing that, the ones that have been stung theoretically, right, will walk away. The ones that haven't been stung, won't. But the ones that haven't been stung will eventually be stung.

• 1:51:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. They will learn eventually to, to go away. So, yeah, so it may still end up being a mechanism that they use. Okay, let's go on. Number two, a recent systematic review finds that 20 to 30% of the world's population have biophobia, which is a general aversion to nature, is science. This is actually a complicated item, though. Because as Cara keyed in on, how do you define biophobia? And this was a problem with the systematic review because there is no universal operational definition of biophobia. So different studies may have used different thresholds or different measures of what is considered biophobia.

• 1:52:11Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:11Speaker 02

  But they said it's a Generally, it's like an aversion to nature, a negative emotional relationship with the idea of nature or with nature. So some of that is literal phobias, like people have animal phobias, but that's only about four to nine percent of the population. Like, as you say, Carol, like you might have a bugophobia, right? Or arachnophobia, or...

• 1:52:36Bob Novella?

  So one in ten, potentially?

• 1:52:37Speaker 02

  Four to nine percent, yeah. But, but some people, they don't have a specific animal phobia, but they just don't like nature. Like, they do think, and some of that is because they're not familiar with it. They live in a city. They think of nature as chaotic, as dangerous, as unclean, or whatever. They have basically a negative emotional attachment or relationship to nature. And the numbers are a lot higher than, than many people think, because the baseline assumption is that nature is healthy. People are less depressed when they're exposed to nature. That nature is this good, psychologically good thing, but actually, a significant proportion of the population have a negative emotional association with nature.

• 1:53:22Speaker 02

  The twenty to thirty percent is the middle of the bell curve. That's the middle of the range of these studies. Some were higher, some were lower. So the, the range could be broader, but that's like the two standard deviations kind of range. You know, one of the questions is, well, what do we do about it? You know, is this something that can be addressed through exposure, through education? Because, here's the thing. The people who generally ranked higher on a biophobia scale also were less concerned about the environment. And less concerned about conservation and about protecting animals, that they don't care. Because they, they don't have an emotional tie to the idea of nature.

• 1:54:06Speaker 02

  So that is, that could, it's potentially a problem, you know? In the end, the, the other trend in the studies is that this number is, if anything, getting higher over time. And so if the population is shifting in this direction of not caring about nature, that's going to make it even harder to find populist support for environmentalist and conservation programs. So this is an issue that we have to continue to study, think about, try to maybe find solutions for. It's not insignificant. To me, I don't get it at all. I love nature, but Jay and Bob will tell you, we grew up in rural to suburban kind of parts of Connecticut.

• 1:54:50Speaker 02

  We would spend our days in the woods. That was common for us to just go play in the woods.

• 1:54:55Speaker 04

  Eight AM, come home for dinner.

• 1:54:57Bob Novella?

  It's in our backyard.

• 1:54:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, our backyard was contiguous with the woods. So we would play in the backyard, then we'd go into the woods and we'd be there for hours, you know, just building a tree fort or just hunting around or whatever.

• 1:55:10Bob Novella?

  Climbing that huge tree that fell down, building a fort or...

• 1:55:15Speaker 04

  Falling out of a tree, breaking the wrist.

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Hey, you gotta break a few bones, right? Totally. But I could see somebody who grows up in New York City, they might think, oh, nature is dangerous, like it's unfamiliar to them. They don't know, like, are there snakes? Are there bugs?

• 1:55:34Bob Novella?

  And then there's people who think that we were deprived because we only had such little nature compared to the nature that they were supposed to.

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, it's all spectrum.

• 1:55:43Bob Novella?

  But that's, yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So interesting, interesting concept, the whole idea of biophobia.

• 1:55:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 1:55:50Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I still don't like that damn term. They didn't come up with like bioaversion or some other term that doesn't really lean into the whole phobia thing, which is like overkill.

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think Kara's right there. It's just generically filia phobia, you know, for against.

• 1:56:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but people think it means afraid of.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  Not necessarily a fear.

• 1:56:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Speaker 02

  I agree. Terminology in science is often tricky. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:56:16Speaker 04

  This week's quote was suggested by a listener, Tom, from Shoreham by Sea in the United Kingdom. Lovely place, I'm sure that is. I'm going to tell you who it's from first. He says, "The quote is from How to Read a Book," that's the name of the book, "by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren." Does anyone recognize? Yeah. Maybe not Mortimer Adler, but maybe the name Charles Van Doren is. Abs- yeah, definitely. I can't place it, though. Charles Van Doren was the academic who was tied up in the game show 21 scandal in the 1950s.

• 1:56:55Speaker 04

  And there's an excellent movie called Quiz Show that Robert Redford directed in the 1990s about that scandal.

• 1:57:02Speaker 02

  With Ralph Fiennes, right?

• 1:57:04Speaker 04

  And you know who's favorite movie or one of his favorite movies was? You remember who enjoyed that movie? Harry Potter? Perry.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  Perry loved that movie. I watched it several times with him. He was always a big admirer of that movie. So that's why I kind of stuck in my head and I want to now deliver the quote. "There is, of course, another sort of disagreement which is owing merely to inequalities of knowledge. The relatively ignorant often wrongly disagree with the relatively learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. The more learned, however, have a right to be critical of errors made by those who lack relevant knowledge. Disagreement of this sort can also be corrected. Inequality of knowledge is always curable by instruction." Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren.

• 1:57:53Speaker 02

  Nice. I agree.

• 1:57:54Speaker 04

  And Charles Van Doren had a master's degree in astrophysics, for the record. Whoa, nice.

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  Astrofysicist?

• 1:58:02Speaker 04

  Actually, his PhD was in English, but he was an academic. He was a teacher.

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  Mortimer is a great name. It's definitely one of those old timey names.

• 1:58:12Speaker 04

  It definitely.

• 1:58:13Jay Novella?

  It is, isn't it? It does not sound evil in any way.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  Twirl your mustache.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  It's like Morticia. So, guys, we're two weeks away from recording our year-end episode.

• 1:58:27Speaker 04

  The year's over?

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  What that means is we need all of you out there in the SGU listener land. We need you to send us your votes for the science, the most interesting or best science item of the year, the worst pseudoscience of the year, skeptical hero of the year, skeptical jackass of the year. Anything of your, you know, your, the interview that you liked the best, the funniest thing that was said on the SGU, just any feedback about the SGU this year. We're going to review it all in a couple of weeks. Any nominations for in memoriam, anybody who passed away this year, who, who want, you want to get mentioned. Yeah. So the more information you send us, the more we'll have for, for the review show. And there's a couple of

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  people who each year send us science fiction stats. So anyone out there willing to do that, we would greatly appreciate it. We'll do it ourselves if we have to, but there are people who, who have done that for us in the past. So now's the time, now's the time to send all of that in.

• 1:59:30Bob Novella?

  Please, because you know, we're getting old. I don't remember shifting the past year. Me neither.

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:39Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:59:40Speaker 02

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