The Skeptics Guide #1073 - Jan 31 2026

News Items: Artemis Getting Ready for Launch, New Extinct Branch of Life, Why We Need Wikipedia, Ideological Bias in Research, Expanding the Habitable Zone; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Kesterite Solar Panels; From TikTok: Coincidence?; 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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• 0:30Cara Santa Maria?

  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, January 29th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jane Novella.

• 0:49Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:51Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  It is freaking cold out there, like below zero Fahrenheit.

• 0:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, Steve, do you know what the high is here today in LA?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Uh, 60.

• 1:01Speaker 04

  Enviable.

• 1:01Cara Santa Maria?

  78.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. 78?

• 1:05Jay Novella?

  That's, that number is inconceivable to my brain right now. It's like, I took my kids to the bus this morning, and here's how the temperature went. I drove my son Dylan to the bus stop. It was seven degrees out. An hour later, I drove my daughter to the bus stop. It was six degrees out. It got colder.

• 1:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, it's 70 right now, and the high today is 78. And the low at night, in the middle of the night, is 51. The weather is gorgeous here in LA. I'm so sorry.

• 1:34Speaker 04

  That is nice.

• 1:35Jay Novella?

  Negative two Fahrenheit this morning, negative two. I haven't seen that in years locally, years.

• 1:41Cara Santa Maria?

  But hey, karma's a bitch because even though I get to enjoy this beautiful weather, I found out recently that I have to get a root canal next week.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 1:50Cara Santa Maria?

  So, this is my first ever. I do have, to be fair, a ton of dental work. I think genetically, I have pretty weak teeth because dentist always tells me my gums are beautiful, that I'm doing everything right, but I just get cavities. And so, I found out about a year and a half ago, I actually thought I lost a filling. I go to my dentist, and I'm like, mm, it feels like I lost a filling. And he's like, you never had a filling in that tooth. You've been grinding your teeth. And I think that you, like, it looks bad. So he was like, we're gonna get in there. Hopefully you don't need a root canal. He gets in there, he goes, okay, I think we're good. It wasn't quite as deep as I was worried, so we're gonna fill it, give you a crown, but you've gotta keep an eye on it. And then, of course, like, a year later, I developed

• 2:35Cara Santa Maria?

  the tiniest little, like, blister-y bubble on my gum line, and that is like a surefire indicator that you have an infection in your root and you need a root canal.

• 2:44Jay Novella?

  God, Kara, I have so much to tell you.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh.

• 2:48Jay Novella?

  Because you all know I love to take care of my teeth. And, and I have, I got a root canal myself, like, I think about two and a half, three years ago.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  And do it yourself.

• 2:58Jay Novella?

  And I want you to find a, what do they call them, Steven?

• 3:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Endodontist, I did. And she's amazing. She's gonna use a laser tip, she does it under a microscope.

• 3:08Jay Novella?

  Good.

• 3:09Cara Santa Maria?

  She already told me I have four channels but three roots, and the fourth channel is, like, kind of vestigial and hard to find, so, so she's like, I may not even be able to finish in one session. If I can't really find everything, we'll, we'll close it up and we'll bring you back to make sure.

• 3:25Jay Novella?

  I went to the equivalent of, like, the kind of, like, mechanic's garage you would find in the middle of the, like, driving on a highway.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  One of those horror scenes?

• 3:34Cara Santa Maria?

  So you went to, like, a dentist dentist for a root canal.

• 3:37Jay Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, and they, you know, they're confident, and oh, whatever. Bottom line is, I get it, it never felt right. There was a lot of pain afterwards, and, you know, just felt like my tooth wasn't in the right position, all this stuff, and then get to the punchline, it was like last summer, I, I had an infection. My dentist, I got a cleaning, my dentist says, you have an infection underneath your root canal, and you need to go to an endodontist, right?

• 4:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so you had to end up basically redoing all the work, but now it's harder because there's a chance they can't save your tooth.

• 4:08Jay Novella?

  Well, well, I haven't even gotten to the, to the endodontist yet. Like, I got the...

• 4:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Endodontist.

• 4:14Jay Novella?

  The pain is remac, is miraculous. It's remarkable and spectacular. It's like, it is...

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Remaculous. Add that to the list of words, Kara. You should keep it track.

• 4:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Remaculous.

• 4:26Jay Novella?

  Go to, you know, the next stage up, which in this case would be an endodontist.

• 4:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Endodontist.

• 4:31Jay Novella?

  Endodontist.

• 4:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Endodontist.

• 4:34Jay Novella?

  I have it. Kara, let's just call them super dentists.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 4:37Jay Novella?

  Go to the super dentist, because these are the people that get sent, people are sent to them when a regular dentist screws up. So just start with the...

• 4:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and

• 4:47Jay Novella?

  Top gun.

• 4:48Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, so they're all trained, like dentists and endodontists are trained in roots of teeth, but endodontia by definition is the study and practice of the roots of the teeth. So they are the dentists that do specialized training in pulp and roots. They have all the specialized tools and that's what they dedicate their practice to. So like when I was doing research, I realized most dentists do about two root canals a week and most endodontists do closer to 20.

• 5:17Jay Novella?

  There's a danger here because if you do have a real infection in your jaw and you, and you don't get it handled, you could actually like lose a part of your jaw, you could, you know, it, it's really bad. And you never want an infection in your head. Oh gosh. So you got your brain.

• 5:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. No, and so, so I learned all sorts of interesting things. So she was showing me because they, so also a big difference between a dentist and an endodontist is that endodontists will usually do a CT scan of your teeth. They don't just do an X-ray and it gives them a clearer view of the, of the root. So, and this I didn't realize either, I think most people don't, maybe I'm wrong. The roots of your teeth go into channels. A root canal is where they go in and they clean out those channels completely. And then they put a plastic kind of material inside of there and it completely seals them off. What happens with the infection, and this is going to sound super gross, but she assured me it's really normal. She was showing me the, the, the CT and I was like, is that bone?

• 6:18Cara Santa Maria?

  And she was like, yeah, so I'm, I'm having it in an upper molar. I was, and she goes, these are your sinuses. This is the bone above the roots of your teeth. And I was like, but that channel, there's no bone there. And she was like, yeah, sometimes the infection, because the bone is so thin between the top of where the channel ends and your sinus, that the infection will eat away at the bone. And I was like, is that dangerous? That there's just an open channel? And she was like, over time, yeah. But like, when we take care of this, it won't be an issue at all. And I was like, why not? It'll just be open to my sinus. And she was like, no, your body will start to regrow bone. So she said, the reason that it happens, you have this indolent infection and you have...

• 7:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So I never had pain, Jay. Like, isn't that crazy? I don't have any pain from this infection at all. And so she was like, in the background, it's sort of, it's festering. And your immune system is trying to attack it, but it can't get in. Because I have a crown. It's almost completely sealed, but there's just enough for the bacteria to get in. So your immune system's trying to attack it and it eats away at healthy tissue on its way to do that. So it literally eats away at the bone. Tell me that's not super gross.

• 7:36Jay Novella?

  And Kara, this is why you have to spend four minutes on your teeth a day.

• 7:39Cara Santa Maria?

  You do, and I do. And that's the thing. A lot of times what ends up happening, the reason people get root canals is because they'll have, yes, an infection, an untreated cavity, something like that. But in my case, which is also a common issue, is that they'll have dental work done, but the dental work just wasn't sufficient. And that's when you really have to be careful. If you have any pain, if you get something that feels like a little blister on your gum line, that's a dental abscess. Even if it's tiny, it is a surefire indicator that there's infection deep, deep in the root. So like, a little tiny blister on your gum line, go to your dentist or your endodontist right away. I'm not that nervous about it, though.

• 8:24Cara Santa Maria?

  I have a feeling it's not going to hurt any worse than a regular... Like, that filling with the crown was really intense. It just costs more.

• 8:32Speaker 04

  They're gonna numb you up really well for that one.

• 8:34Cara Santa Maria?

  They numb you up regardless. If anything, she said it might not be as bad because they put a block in your mouth. So you don't have to hold your jaw open the whole time, like I did when I got the fill-in.

• 8:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, that's not fun.

• 8:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God, it gets so sore.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  I've never had a root canal and I haven't had a cavity since I was a child.

• 8:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you're so lucky.

• 8:51Speaker 02

  How's that possible? No, I'm talking about Steve. It's not luck, sister. Yeah, go ahead.

• 8:54Bob Novella?

  His nether regions.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:56Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it is, it is luck, Steve. I'll tell you what, I never had a cavity my whole childhood. Never. And then as an adult, it's like after I hit puberty or something.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  You're saying I have dental privilege, is that what you're saying?

• 9:09Cara Santa Maria?

  You have dental privilege and I have dental genetic soft teeth.

• 9:16Speaker 02

  All right, Jay.

• 9:18Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Tell us about another update on Artemis. I hear they're in quarantine.

• 9:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I wanted to go over this again because I had been doing some reading about, like, what are these astronauts doing when they get into quarantine? And then, of course, that was a rabbit hole to learn all about, essentially, like, what is their training? Because they do do training during quarantine. But I asked the question, how much training do they have to do in total to do what they do? So let me give you some, some information here that I found.

• 9:49Speaker 02

  Do you know why they go into quarantine before the launch?

• 9:52Jay Novella?

  I do, Steve.

• 9:53Speaker 04

  I do.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  All right, you gonna tell us?

• 9:54Jay Novella?

  Yeah, well, they don't want, they don't want space aliens to catch any Earth heebie-jeebies.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:59Jay Novella?

  Right? No, they, they do that because if they get sick during the mission, it could scuttle the mission and, and put everyone's lives at risk and, you know, put billions of dollars at risk. Like, they have to make sure they're perfectly healthy before they'll send them up into space. Apollo 13 had the measles scare and, and the, um, one of the astronauts couldn't go up because of it.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  I remember when we interviewed Rusty Zweigert and he said, "When you're in space, in, in microgravity, in a space suit, if you puke, you die."

• 10:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah, I remember interviewing some astronauts on the ISS and I asked them, "What do you do if you need to puke?" And they said, "Swallow it."

• 10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, it's the only, it sounds like the only option, right?

• 10:40Jay Novella?

  Well, they're already picking people that, you know, don't puke, you know what I mean? Like, they're picking people like, that can handle all that stress and, and.

• 10:46Speaker 02

  You can't handle the puke.

• 10:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Didn't somebody puke like, non-stop in one of the early Gemini missions or something? Wasn't there a, a whole puke saga?

• 10:55Jay Novella?

  I, you know, I don't remember, and now I have to know.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  The NASA puke saga. I didn't know that.

• 11:01Jay Novella?

  All right, well, listen, guys, I'm going to give you a simulated timeline as if the launch is going to happen on February 6th, which is not unlikely. You know, this is one of the dates that they're saying is possible. So let's say that they do the launch on February 6th. Here's what the mission is going to look like from a, you know, 15,000-foot view. The mission launches from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Launch System. This will place the Orion capsule and the crew into Earth orbit. Then what they'll do is, within hours of that launch, as they're in low Earth orbit, the crew, of course, will check things like life support, power, propulsion. They run through everything, make sure everything's

• 11:42Jay Novella?

  working perfectly before they commit themselves to deep space. And then Orion will fire its engines to leave Earth orbit and head toward the moon. And again, I am summarizing here. There are more steps in here, but I just want to give you the quick one, too. They call this like the outbound cruise to the moon. What they do is it takes several days for the crew to get to the moon. They're monitoring things, you know, they're in constant touch with NASA. They're doing a huge and very important thing, which is massive data collection on just how everything is functioning and working. And, you know, NASA is always, always, always trying to make their systems better. And they do this by gathering tons of information. Then we are going to have the spacecraft, it's going to swing around the moon. So it

• 12:25Jay Novella?

  approaches the moon, then it swings around the moon. It's not going to enter orbit, and it will briefly pass behind the moon, and it will lose contact with Earth. Then the return trajectory towards Earth, you know, they're going to do their flyby. Orion is basically already heading home at that point, and it's allowing time to test these long-duration systems and crew endurance. Then they do reentry. I think you all know what that is. You have to get through the atmosphere. And they're going to be using the skip reentry profile, which if you don't know, just look it up real quick. It's pretty interesting. And then they have their splashdown and recovery. That's the basics. Now, these dates will be launched on February 6th. The initial orbit in low Earth orbit is also going to be on

• 13:08Jay Novella?

  the 6th. And then either the 6th or the 7th. They'll fire the engines and they'll they'll break Earth orbit and get you know head towards the moon. And then they'll reach the moon probably around the ninth or the 10th of February. Then they will be returning and that will be from the 10th to the 15th. And then reentry could be on the 15th or the 16th. So you might notice that the dates are always could be on this day or could be on that day. And I think a huge factor in that is how long do they spend orbiting the Earth? Before they they fire the rockets and head to the moon because they could orbit the Earth once or 10 times if they wanted to. But you know, but roughly the launch is on February 6th and the return is likely on the 16th.

• 13:53Jay Novella?

  And there's there's your 10 days.

• 13:56Jay Novella?

  But the real fun and interesting part of this is like, what is happening with like this pre? The pre work that they have to do to actually be able to get into the spacecraft and go up there. It's not just the astronauts training, it's everybody, everybody in NASA that's involved with the mission is training. So let me give you like a general look at like, what does it take to become an astronaut? In general, it takes about two years to do the astronaut training to become mission eligible, right? And of course, that means that they're they could be selected for a mission at that that point. Now, once they're assigned to a specific mission, they have something called mission specific training. And this lasts two to four additional years.

• 14:38Jay Novella?

  Like this is like how long it takes to become a medical professional, like, you know, get your get your MD. That that this is an incredible amount of time that they're training. When they're doing this training, they're working with the same flight controllers who will be, you know, on the headset during the actual mission, right? So they're calling into mission control and these are all familiar voices to them by the time they're up on the actual actual mission. And the prep time that they put in with flight control is so important because it's like a band rehearsing. Like they learn each other's instincts, they learn how to talk to each other, they build trust, they have a rhythm with each other. And that type of familiarity is essential in order for them to to have this speedy and and quick to understand communication with each other.

• 15:23Jay Novella?

  And all the while, they're monitoring how they're talking to each other and they're trying to make it more efficient. Now, the full mission simulations. Start, they have to, they have to get to a point where they're running through the entire launch and entire flight from the earth to the moon and back and everything. So they're, they do break it up, but they are running through the entire mission, front to back, up to 50 times, I read, which is, you know, quite a bit of training, you know, that's, that's significant amount of training. Now, when they enter formal quarantine, just about two weeks before launch, the crew enters what NASA calls their health stabilization program, and the goal is, is super simple, right? They don't want anyone to catch any

• 16:06Jay Novella?

  kind of illness whatsoever, even a mild cold. These could delay the missions, and, you know, as Steve said, like, if they have something really minor, and it leads them to have some type of nasal congestion, or they vomit, or whatever it is, this is deadly to a mission. It could, it could put people into a really compromised position. So, they have to be perfectly healthy with nothing going on. I, I love this because it's competency porn like nobody has ever seen. It blows away Star Trek. Like, the competency porn here is, is incredible. They, it's redundant, the people are trained to an extraordinary

• 16:47Jay Novella?

  level, you know, ground crew and, and the astronauts, you know, meanwhile, all the engineers and everything, like, they're doing their whole thing that they're doing with all the, the ships and the rockets and everything, like, you know, that would, that would have been another 20 minutes just to kind of dip into what that is happening over there. But you have all of these different crews that are working to do their thing, but working in coordination with everybody else. The fact that people aren't talking about this bothers me, because not only is it amazing, and not only is it a true Herculean effort to do this, but this is like, in human DNA, we're explorers. Like, I want people to start bending their attention to things like this, because these are some of the coolest things that humanity can do. You know, we create things, you know, we, we, we make beautiful

• 17:31Jay Novella?

  art, we could be wonderful people to each other, and we take risks and learn about the world that we live in, and this is a perfect example of that.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  I agree, although, there's, there's more, a few things out there that might be distracting people from news like this.

• 17:45Jay Novella?

  I know, but this is, but this is the gravy, this is the good stuff.

• 17:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Hey Jay, so I mentioned earlier, I just, I have to, because I was, I was digging a little bit deeper. It wasn't a Gemini mission, it was both Apollo 8 and 9, but, but very famously on Apollo 8, and... Okay, there's this book, I don't know if you guys have read Rocket Men by Robert Kurson. I had him on my show several years ago. That's why this memory is so crystal clear. Can I read you like a little tiny quote from the book? This is amazing. And then the vomit came. Wretching, Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them going in too many directions to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their

• 18:30Cara Santa Maria?

  escape from his flailing hands. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders' troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they'd been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. So literally hours, I think it was maybe one day, yeah, a few hours into their six day flight, the commander started puking and had diarrhea and it would just filled the capsule. And so by the time they got to the moon, they apparently left emesis and poop

• 19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  bags all over the surface of the moon. They were just trying to clean it up the whole time.

• 19:18Jay Novella?

  Well, you have to have some kind of a suction, like a vacuum to get rid of stuff like that.

• 19:22Cara Santa Maria?

  You would think, but you know, this was Apollo eight.

• 19:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It was a long time ago.

• 19:26Jay Novella?

  Live and learn. I would imagine that they have to actually spend the time to like clean up as best they can, right? You can't have that on the other.

• 19:34Cara Santa Maria?

  They just, they tried to capture as much as they could in bags and they just left it on the moon before they came back.

• 19:38Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 19:39Speaker 04

  Can I call it Gemini instead of Gemini, by the way?

• 19:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't know why they just NASA calls it Gemini.

• 19:44Cara Santa Maria?

  So I call it Gemini.

• 19:45Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I think they did that because they actually didn't know how to pronounce it. I could be wrong, but.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. Bob, how can a branch of life be both new and extinct at the same time?

• 20:00Bob Novella?

  Yeah, this one was fascinating. This was a mystery, Steve. It's a prehistoric mystery that began in the 1840s that they may have solved. And this is because the new insights, these scientists have shed some new insights on the first organism that existed on the land, Prototaxites. It's a weird tree-like structure that was absolutely not a tree. It's placed in the tree of life, if you will, has been debated for, yeah, you like that one, Evan?

• 20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 20:28Bob Novella?

  It's placed in the tree of life has been debated for over 165 years. So have they finally solved this mystery? Let's find out. So this is from researchers from the University of Edinburgh, published in Science Adventures. The paper is about an extinct genus from the Devonian period around 400 million years ago, and it's called Prototaxites, the first organism on land. It was about a meter wide and about eight meters tall. I guess that it's as tall as eight meters. I don't think it got too much taller than that. But that's pretty tall. That's like, what, 26 feet?

• 21:00Speaker 04

  That's almost three stories, yep.

• 21:02Bob Novella?

  It sounds like a tree. And if you get a quick look at it, you might think it's some type of weird tree. But this was entirely unlike a tree. It was essentially smooth, like pillars. Just imagine a smooth, pointy pillar, but there were no branches, there were no twigs, leaves, flowers, nothing on it, very plain. And underground, it was similarly bizarre. There was no root system at all. The researchers believed that it was anchored by some big globular base that kind of kept it upright. But since its discovery in 1843, it's been, there's been a debate. What kind of multicellular life was this damn thing? It's not easy to figure that out. What do you guys think it was? What would that fit? Broad, you know, broad paintbrushes.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Could be a fungus.

• 21:48Bob Novella?

  Fungus, yeah, that's a, that's a...

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Could be a plant, you know?

• 21:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, initially, they thought fungus, plant, maybe a massive collection of algae.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:56Bob Novella?

  Or potentially, hey, maybe it was an extinct branch of life that just doesn't fit neatly into anything we really have, right?

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Could it have been a proto-tree, or is that ruled out?

• 22:06Bob Novella?

  That's, yeah, that's basically, that's basically been ruled out. They...

• 22:08Speaker 04

  Because of no branches.

• 22:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, definitely, yeah, it was just, it's just too weird. And then from what they're, from what I'll discuss down below, it's just like, yeah, this is definitely, well, you'll see, let's discover it, shall we? So over the decades, they've, they've wintered these options down to two widely accepted possibilities. Uh, it was most likely either a fungus or an extinct lineage of eukaryotic life. We've, eukaryotic life, right? That's complex cells which are found in multicellular life, like animals, plants and fungi. Protists are unicellular and they still have these complex cells. Um, they're just kind of an outlier a little bit because we don't know where to put those. So the, uh, the researchers took a specific species of proto-taxites called Taiti, T A I T I. And this is from northern Scotland.

• 22:55Bob Novella?

  This place, Steve, you may have heard of this, this place, uh, specifically in northern Scotland called Rhine's Church. It's famous for extremely well-preserved plants, fungi and animals. Extremely, whatever the, the conditions are, the preservation is really, really dramatically good. So they used, they, they, they then took modern tools and techniques to examine these, this fossil, this Taiti species that they, that they had. Reading these techniques that they used, it would have made the scientists who first discovered it basically drool with jealousy and incomprehension. It was really fairly sophisticated. So they, they used imaging techniques that could look inside the fossil to optically slice the specimen into, into pieces. So they can see what's inside of it.

• 23:40Bob Novella?

  And then they, and then they rebuilt it as a 3D model. They put it all together into a 3D model that they, that they could examine. So that's one technique. The other technique they used is something like shining an infrared light onto the fossil to reveal what is essentially its chemical barcode, right? What, what chemicals this organism used. And then on top of that, they would look at that barcode with an AI. And this AI was trained specifically on many of the fossils from the site in, in Scotland. It was well-versed in these fossils. So the AI examined this chemical barcode to determine, you know, which of these other fossils that it already knows about, which of these fossils did it match most closely? You got that? So they used fossils that were in basically the same rock.

• 24:24Bob Novella?

  So that if they, they all fossilized together, they were fairly contemporaneous.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  At the Rhine Church.

• 24:30Bob Novella?

  Yes, yeah, I was trying to think of a good way to pronounce that.

• 24:35Bob Novella?

  So finally, they did a fungus clue test because they really wanted to rule out, you know, or rule in whether this was a fungus or not. And this fungus clue test essentially looked for a specific chemical marker that's found in many fossils in reinate shert that were definitively fungus. So they could see whether this was, is it related to the contemporaneous fungus that existed at that time? So that's one of the third major type of tests that they did. So then they took all of this anatomical and chemical information, they put it all together, and they concluded three basic things. First, Protaxites was terrestrial, heterotrophic, complex, multicellular, eukaryote.

• 25:21Bob Novella?

  Heterotrophic means it does not make its own food like plants or algae do. So right there, they're ruling out that this was a plant or any type of algae. Their second conclusion was that Protaxites didn't fit into any known group of fungi, whichever. And by that, I mean that they ruled out the major modern branches of fungi. And they also ruled out, though, the early branching fungal groups that we know of, going back, you know, many, many millions of years. The paper said more specifically that it was chemically distinct from contemporaneous fungi and structurally distinct from all known fungi. So probably not a fungus, right?

• 26:04Bob Novella?

  Fairly solid, can't be 100% certain, but it certainly looks like it was not a fungus at all. And then for the final part of their conclusion, then again, I'll quote from the study, "This finding cast doubt upon the fungal affinity, blah, blah, blah, instead suggesting that this enigmatic organism is best assigned to an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage." So that's their conclusion. So we basically have here an example of an independent, but now extinct branch of multicellular eukaryotic life that has no living descendants. So if I could speculate a little bit, could this be a kingdom? Could it be, could this level of distinctiveness... This be at the kingdom level, you know, on the par with plants, animals and fungi.

• 26:49Bob Novella?

  And now we have this, this other lineage. We, we don't know that it's.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Well, that's what I was gonna ask, because that's what it sounds like. You were saying it's not a plant, it's not an animal, it's not a fungus. If it doesn't belong to any known kingdom, it's gotta be its own kingdom, right?

• 27:04Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 27:04Bob Novella?

  Potentially. The problem is, is that we, and we may never know, because without DNA, right? You're not, we're not gonna really get DNA from this at all. That's, that's not gonna happen. And without, you know, without any descendants, it may be impossible, impossible for us, for anybody to conclude that this is at a level of kingdom, you know, kingdom level distinctiveness. Um, it's possible, they, they make no such claim about that at all. They couch it in safe terms that, you know.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  I know, because you kept using things like, you know, the group.

• 27:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Branch.

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Branch.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  I don't know. Why is it controversial if it is its own kingdom?

• 27:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't either, because the idea, like how we define all these things is just based on what we have.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  And if you have new information in the future, you change it then.

• 27:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. Like, it's not set in stone, no pun intended.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Well, I guess these researchers didn't wanna say that to be conservative.

• 27:57Bob Novella?

  They didn't wanna say, because you don't know how deep, how deep does it go? You know, where, does it branch off? Does it branch off, uh, at the, you know, so deep in time that, that it is a new, a kingdom? Or did it branch off, you know, one of the other existing kingdoms and potentially? And, uh, and so it's really not a distinct kingdom technically, not, we're not, you know, they, they can't say that. They can't get that information. They can't get that level of detail to make that conclusion. So we, we may never know. It could have been, but it's not necessarily, I'll say that. It's not necessarily, um, a, a new kingdom. It could have potentially have branched off later, later on, after those branches, those kingdoms have, have already, were already created. Um, but what this is, is it's a, it's a essentially a lost experiment in complex life on land.

• 28:43Bob Novella?

  And to think, you know, you know, I wonder why, why did it fail? And imagine if it didn't fail, what kind, can you imagine, you know, the, the life that could be, you know, all ubiquitous on earth? Uh, that, that was derived from that lineage that, that just happened to die out, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:59Bob Novella?

  Don't know, don't know.

• 29:00Speaker 04

  Came to be that we don't know about and may never know about.

• 29:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. There's so many things that just never fossilized, so we don't know. But did you see the reconstructed drawings of them?

• 29:10Bob Novella?

  No, uh, well, I've seen images. It just basically like, it looks like Pinocchio's nose coming out of the ground. It's like very smooth.

• 29:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I was gonna say they're quite phallic.

• 29:20Speaker 04

  A bit phallic.

• 29:21Cara Santa Maria?

  They just look like big.

• 29:21Bob Novella?

  You're going there, are you, Cara? Okay.

• 29:23Cara Santa Maria?

  They do, though.

• 29:24Bob Novella?

  No, you're right. You're right. Sure.

• 29:26Cara Santa Maria?

  They're so phallic. They don't have anything. It's like, and it's kind of smooth. And there's nothing coming, like you mentioned, no branches, no leaves, no flowers, no anything. How did it reproduce?

• 29:35Bob Novella?

  I suspect it might look even more phallic if you turned it upside down, including that big bulbous, you know, root system. I think it might look even more phallic.

• 29:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's, um, strange.

• 29:47Bob Novella?

  Interesting stuff. New, you know, just a extinct new branch of life that, you know, definitely not a fungus. That's what they're saying.

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 29:54Bob Novella?

  Or not definitely, but they're very confident. This is not, you know, you gotta just couch it. You gotta be, you gotta save your butt so people don't say, hey, technically, technically.

• 30:04Speaker 04

  Apparently, apparently.

• 30:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Apparently.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Cara, I understand that Wikipedia is just turned 25 years old. How's it doing?

• 30:16Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 30:16Cara Santa Maria?

  25, you guys. 15th of January this year. Wikipedia is 25. So that means that it started January 15th, 2001. And I think back to where I was, January 15th, 2001. I was in college. What about you guys? Where were you sort of in your careers?

• 30:38Jay Novella?

  I was in attending.

• 30:40Cara Santa Maria?

  You were in attending already?

• 30:41Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Steve and I were running a LARP, too.

• 30:43Jay Novella?

  We were.

• 30:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Nice.

• 30:44Bob Novella?

  So this is, yeah, I was, I was in IT. This is like a bunch of months before 9/11, right?

• 30:49Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, same here.

• 30:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, right before.

• 30:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I was in IT, doing my thing.

• 30:53Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I had a software company back then.

• 30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, fascinating. So, so when I think back to like my college courses and writing papers and, you know, all of the scholarship that you do as a young university student when you're really trying to learn how to make solid arguments and back them up, you know, learning critical thinking. I remember the adage was always, maybe not the adage, but the, the conventional wisdom was always, Wikipedia is not an appropriate citation.

• 31:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Because back then, it felt a bit like the Wild West. We didn't really know who was writing on it or how they were writing on it. And oh, have the times changed. So there was a publication in Nature, an editorial about the fact that, of course, Wikipedia is 25 years old, but it's titled, Wikipedia is needed now more than ever 25 years on. And the subtitle, which I think tells you a lot, the online encyclopedia is an antidote to an increasingly poisoned information ecosystem. And then they editorialize, researchers should help to nourish it. So Wikipedia is not what it used to be by any stretch of

• 32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  the imagination. It's actually multiple websites now, and it has more than 65 million entries. That's a lot. And guess how many languages?

• 32:20Speaker 04

  How many languages?

• 32:22Bob Novella?

  All of them.

• 32:23Cara Santa Maria?

  It's at least 300.

• 32:24Speaker 04

  70.

• 32:25Bob Novella?

  300.

• 32:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, at least 300 languages.

• 32:27Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 32:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Including Esperanto.

• 32:31Cara Santa Maria?

  How many do you think, we're working with the English version here in the United States, or at least those of us recording this podcast, how many new entries do you think are added every day to the English version?

• 32:43Bob Novella?

  Geez.

• 32:44Speaker 04

  Daily?

• 32:45Bob Novella?

  200.

• 32:46Cara Santa Maria?

  500.

• 32:47Speaker 04

  500, whoa.

• 32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  500 a day. And of course, as I mentioned, it's not just Wikipedia anymore, right? Have you guys ever used like Wikimedia Commons?

• 32:57Speaker 04

  Wiki Quotes?

• 32:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Wiki Quotes?

• 32:59Speaker 04

  There's all kinds of

• 33:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I love Wikimedia Commons because it's a huge repository of like images and audio files that are all open access. It's definitely the first place I go if I need to put like an image in a presentation. There's the Wiktionary, the free dictionary, which I use a lot because it has a like really rich ento- ento- etymological data, not entymological data. And you mentioned WikiQuote, Evan. There's Wikiversary, where they're just learning resources, all for free, right? There's, gosh, there's so much. WikiSpecies. Did you know they have a species directory?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 33:33Cara Santa Maria?

  That's pretty cool. And it shows you the full taxa. And yeah, it's, so far, they have 936,237 entries. So right there, Bob. I wonder if

• 33:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 33:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Actually, I'm gonna.

• 33:47Bob Novella?

  I'm gonna look, yeah.

• 33:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Prototaxites, are they in Wiki species? Let's see, prototaxites. Protokanites, but I don't see prototaxites. Oh, but I do see two, uh, two references to them. Just they don't have their own page. Anyway.

• 34:02Bob Novella?

  Technically, it's pronounced prototaxites.

• 34:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Taxites, okay. Thank you. So the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organization that runs it, um, it's in San Francisco and it employs around 700 people. But it's not just 700 people who keep the page going, right? As, as I think we all know, most of the edits on the page, um, are done by volunteers. And we've, you know, kind of talked before about like guerrilla skeptics and different initiatives to ensure that like women are represented fairly, especially women scientists, or that the scientific perspective is obviously represented. So I think that just under 300,000 editors are regularly volunteering on the page.

• 34:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So it truly is like a massively collaborative effort. One of the things that I think makes Wikipedia what it is, is basically their editorial stance, or what they call their working practices. And they talk about ensuring that they have a neutral point of view, which is accurate and fair, but how would they do that? Like, what is the best way to be accurate and fair? Like, how do we try to be accurate and fair?

• 35:14Bob Novella?

  Multiple sources.

• 35:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Multiple sources.

• 35:17Bob Novella?

  Contrferencing.

• 35:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, evidence, right? They don't just write things to write them, they have to have evidence to back them up. And if anything does feel partisan or biased, they will flag it, they'll tag it, and they'll work to ensure that there's legitimate evidence and that there is, like you mentioned, multiple sourcing there. Everything has to be verifiable and it has to be attributed to, as you mentioned, like these published sources, and they can't, and this is of course what we were taught when I was in school, they can't cite themselves. Like Wiki can't call itself a source for anything.

• 35:50Bob Novella?

  Mm hmm. That, that wouldn't make sense, right?

• 35:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And so this is the difference between, we often will. Talk about primary and secondary sources, or even tertiary sources. So it has become a really important bastion of information now. And I wonder if college professors are still arguing, like they did when I was in college, that Wiki is not a valid source. Maybe they would argue that the appropriate thing to do is to read the Wiki article, dig deeper, but then obviously chase down the primary sources within the Wiki article.

• 36:24Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, that's. That's, I thought that was kind of standard, like you just look at what the sources are for the Wiki article, and then you would vet them. And then there you go. And you probably, or most often, I think you can have some pretty damn good sources for what you.

• 36:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 36:37Bob Novella?

  You're talking about.

• 36:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I think early on, when I was in school at least, there was a lot of question about the accuracy of what was even on Wiki at the beginning. Because it was a bit of a black box. It felt like the Wild West. But actually, it's never been, I shouldn't say it was a black box. That's unfair. It's never been a black box. They've always had a talk page on each entry where you can basically, it's like looking at the backend and seeing the full discussion between all the editors and seeing every single change that has been made and every citation and how it came to be where it is. And sometimes these are like their own ecosystems, right? You see arguments and disagreements, but they have, you know, some editorial rules about respect and civility.

• 37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just like this, I know I already used the word bastion, but it's so different than the world that we live in right now. So basically, the author of this editorial is calling for more engagement from the scientific community and just a real effort to ensure that Wikipedia remains this robust repository of basically like all of human knowledge. Like, it really is our modern Library of Alexandria. And this wasn't imaginable before we had access to the web, right? I mean, this, Wikipedia really did change the game in so many ways.

• 37:59Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's interesting because it's, it's one of the few, like, straight up social media, whatever, web.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Success stories and it actually became the thing it promised to be.

• 38:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  Right. This is what it was supposed to be 25 years ago and it did it, you know?

• 38:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And why do you think it was able to do it and so many places couldn't?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  I think because it was managed. It was managed by a group of people who were dedicated to the ideals of Wikipedia and it was not, it was not destroyed by either commercialism or other secondary interests. And they found a sweet spot where it's, yeah, multiple people can contribute without it being the Wild West free for all.

• 38:41Cara Santa Maria?

  I completely agree. I think there was sort of a regulatory, we could call it like an oversight management, some sort of regulatory stance. And also, go click on Wikipedia right now. If you see an ad at all, the only ad is from Wikipedia asking for user support.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Asking for a donation.

• 38:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. It's self-funded. This is the NPR PBS model, right? This is, this is why they're able to keep interests out. The problem when you start to advertise and you start to take dollars is that you start to have moneyed interest and that can change editorial content. And we've seen that across the board with news, right? We've seen it just, obviously cable news is a huge example of that, but even network news, which again, we've talked about this before, but used to be funded by the entertainment arms of network television, now have to fund themselves, which means heavy ad sales, which also means, you know, who owns these, these different affiliate stations?

• 39:41Cara Santa Maria?

  And how much editorial oversight do the owners have? I don't know, I was just re-watching The Morning Show and it really reinforced a lot of these conflicts of interest and these moneyed interests. So I think that's a huge, a huge reason for it. One of the things that the article brings up that I think is important to flag is that very often now, when you use a search engine, back in the day, the Wikipedia article was the first thing you would see. But what do you see now above the Wikipedia article when you use like a Google or, you know, any other Yahoo, a search engine?

• 40:14Bob Novella?

  Just unrelated crap that you're, that's probably not very related to what you're searching for because they, because they paid to be on top.

• 40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So you'll, you'll see sponsored things at the very, very top. You're right. But what about at the, what about kind of usually what's the first entry now? It's not a website anymore. It's an AI overview.

• 40:29Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Right. It's, yeah.

• 40:31Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And the AI overview very often owes everything to Wikipedia.

• 40:38Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 40:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. So they're crawling the web, but where are they getting the most information on any topic? The Wikipedia article about that topic.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  It's already there. Why not go to the fertile field and start there?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I have noticed that. Like if you look at the AI summary and then you look up independent sources, I'm reading Wikipedia. I'm like, this is the AI summary I just read. It's almost word for word out of Wikipedia.

• 41:00Cara Santa Maria?

  But what ends up happening is that the search engines are, because they're dropping the summaries before Wikipedia, they're actually burying Wikipedia. Fewer people are clicking on the Wikipedia entry because they can just read the search engine and they're, they're really worried that, and also you've got to remember too, this isn't sourced and, and they're not paying to be able to do that. AI is just crawling and taking information. It's scraping and it's doing it without any sort of compensation. And because Wikipedia is user sourced, they need, they, they make about eight million, oh, they have about eight million donors a year. I actually don't know how much money they make.

• 41:40Bob Novella?

  At least eight million dollars.

• 41:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's a dollar a donor maybe. But yeah, so what they're starting to do, or at least attempt to do, is work with tech companies to make sure that their AIs are using their content responsibly, that they're actually compensated for this like massive repository of information, that these AI companies, these, you know, these are big tech companies that have profit.

• 42:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And they're just stealing the information from Wiki. And then what may happen, or at least what they're worried, the authors of this editorial are worried about, is that it won't be sustainable after that. And so we have to ensure, not only that we support outlets like this, but that we engage with them, especially if you're somebody who has editorial skills, if you're somebody in the sciences, or you have specialized knowledge or expertise about the topics, you know, the entry topics that relate to your field. Become an editor, you know, volunteer your time. It's a really good way to give back to humanity.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah, so you could support it financially, or you could work for it. Like, if you have expertise, lend your expertise, pay that forward, you know, to the rest of humanity.

• 42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  But, yeah, it is one of the real success stories of the internet.

• 43:01Bob Novella?

  It is. I try to donate as often as I can. I'm gonna, this is gonna make me donate again, like, right now. I'm gonna just donate some more.

• 43:07Jay Novella?

  I donate every year.

• 43:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  All right, thank you, Cara. All right, guys, this next news item is interesting. I like talking about these meta-science news items, like, science about science, like, studying how science works and how it gets done and how to improve it. Yeah, it's part of the self-corrective nature of science itself. And I'm gonna get really meta at the end of this, but, wait, so this, uh, this study was looking at, this is like a social science kind of study, looking at researchers who are trying to answer a specific question on immigration, the effects of immigration policy, right? So this is the question they had. Does the ideological bias of the researchers affect the outcome of the research? It's probably of no surprise to anybody that there's a massive impact, right?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  But the, but the details do matter. So what they did was, they had 158 researchers divided into 71 different teams, and they, you know, queried them about their attitudes about immigration and immigration policy, right? Their position on immigration policy. Then they had them independently look at the exact same set of data to answer the exact same question, right? So these are 71 different teams of experts trying to answer the same question with the same data.

• 44:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, they weren't expected to do their own analysis, right? They were expected to interpret the analysis.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  No, they were to do their own analysis and interpret it.

• 44:39Cara Santa Maria?

  So they were getting raw data?

• 44:40Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 44:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting, okay.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, they had to develop their own regression model of the data.

• 44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, this is fascinating. That's even deeper, yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  So their question was to estimate the impacts of immigration on people's attitudes towards social welfare programs, right? So if there's more immigration, does that make people either more positively associated or negatively, you know, feel about welfare programs?

• 45:08Cara Santa Maria?

  So regardless of the actual impact on social welfare?

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, just public support for social welfare programs. Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? Answer that question with this set of data. And unsurprisingly, again, the bottom line is there was a massive effect of the researchers' attitudes about immigration on the answer that they came, ranging from strongly positive to strongly negative, like opposite ends of the spectrum. But why is that is the interesting question. So the researchers conclude, again, sort of jumping to the punchline a little bit, is that's because of the, you're gonna love this technical term, Kara, the endogeneity of

• 45:56Speaker 02

  research design.

• 45:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Endogeneity?

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the research design was endogenous, meaning from within, right, as opposed to exogenous. And what that means is that the researchers were making decisions about the methodology that they were using.

• 46:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  And here's the problem is that they were doing that or they had the ability to do that as they went. Right. So in other words, they didn't have to completely design their research methodology before getting any feedback about the effect of those methods on the outcome.

• 46:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is sadly the way a lot of people do science.

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I know, I know. So what does that mean? So if you remember, this is similar to the researcher degrees of freedom paper that we talked about years ago. Where and P-hacking. So this is basically P-hacking in that if you, if you, if you are allowed to make decisions, right? If you have degrees of freedom and that those decisions are informed by their effect on the outcome. Because you've looked at data or you're like testing the effect on the data. So the researchers didn't know going in, you know, the researchers that are being studied, they didn't know what the effects were going to be. But they could very quickly get a sense of how their choices were going to affect the outcome. And they

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Oh, so they modified.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Probably unconsciously allowed those, that sense that they got to influence what design they chose. Now, keep in mind, this was, this particular research was chosen because it was maximally susceptible to this.

• 47:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Right?

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's the right.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  All right. So for example, there were, they calculated a, if you want to look at like the number of, they said, regression models, that's basically the methods that they're using. Meaning what data are you inputting into the model? What comparisons are you going to make? What's, what are the dependent variables? How are you measuring it, et cetera? They calculated there are at least 1,253 different regression models that researchers could have chosen. Which is another way of saying that you could slice and dice this data up any way you want and manufacture whatever outcome you want. There were just way too many variables that they have to work with.

• 48:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it oversimplifies it Evan to say it sounds like cherry picking. I think what we're looking at is two sides of a really interesting coin. The one side is that modern research approaches have become so sophisticated and the pools of just options for how you do statistics are so, like you mentioned, vast, that lots of people are going to pick things, not because they think it's going to support their outcome, but because that's just the only way they know how to do it, first of all. Like, nobody knows how to do all those different regression models. Probably every researcher that they had in this study, I could be wrong, was probably not a statistician, right? They were just researchers.

• 49:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, they didn't say what their background was in terms of how much statistical background they had. But they, most of, when you're doing this kind of research, either you are a statistician or you're using a statistician.

• 49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Or you're using statistic. And that's the thing. Like psychologists, for example, we are highly trained in statistics. We take multiple statistics courses throughout our training. But even we are not super sophisticated experts in this. We often will need to consult with statisticians or consult with other colleagues to develop what we think is the least biased and most appropriate approach. But see, the other thing I wanted to mention, Steve, and I feel like this often gets left out of conversations like this, and I'm curious if they wrote about this in their paper, is the bigger elephant in the room, which is that inherent in statistical analysis is bias. We talk about how it's a bug. Like,

• 49:54Cara Santa Maria?

  here it sounds like it's a bug. This is a feature, and I have to remind people that Francis Galton, who developed regression, was a eugenicist trying to prove the inferiority of black people when he developed the model.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:10Cara Santa Maria?

  That was the point. It wasn't just a side offshoot. He intentionally developed statistical approaches to prove that white people are superior. So, so we can't really talk about this like it's a modern problem. And we can't really talk about this like it's a little thing we need to fix.

• 50:28Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  It is baked in.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  Endemic. But, but I want to put it into a little bit more perspective as well. So, they did identify, they looked at all the variables that the researchers varied to see which are the ones that had the biggest effect on the outcome of the research. And they identified what they were. They're a bit wonky, but just to give you an idea of the kinds of choices they were making. So, the records they were using records public attitudes towards the government provisions of various types of programs. So, did they aggregate these responses or pull out a single type of program? The second factor was, is immigration measured as a stock or a flow? Meaning, are you, how many people are here or how many people are coming and going? Again, either one can sound legitimate, right?

• 51:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, for sure.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Does, does the analysis use multi-level modeling to account for variation in country year units? So, are they trying to adjust for that specific, you know, variable? Here, here Evan, the fourth one is cherry picking, like you said. So, it's part of the picture. Do the regressions use data from, for all the countries included in the data set or just some of the countries included in the data set? And, and which wave of immigration did they use? 2016, 1996, 2006?

• 51:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But even still, I think the idea of cherry picking, we have to be so careful because it's easy for us to go bad science cherry picking, trying to, you know, like acupuncture studies, that's what they do.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:53Cara Santa Maria?

  There's so much data, you have to pick cherries.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the implication-

• 51:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And so the question is, how do you pick your cherries?

• 51:58Speaker 02

  The implication of the term cherry picking is that you're doing it to engineer an outcome.

• 52:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, but are they saying that that's specifically what they did? Or are they saying-

• 52:06Speaker 02

  Yep, that's what they're saying.

• 52:07Cara Santa Maria?

  They chose subsets because that was a more manageable approach?

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Well, because, they're inferring that they, that they chose it to generate the desired outcome because there was a beyond chance alignment of the outcome with their previously stated attitudes towards immigration.

• 52:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but I don't think you can infer that they did that intentionally.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  No, no, it could have been subconscious.

• 52:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  They, they look at the data and say, oh, this one looks pretty, you know, these, this outcome looks right, you know, it wasn't necessarily deliberately doing it.

• 52:38Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's, but, but it, it's the way that you defined cherry picking then, it did sound implied that it was intentional.

• 52:45Speaker 02

  Well, it could, again, we don't know, we don't know how much was intentional and how much was subconscious. All we know is that they, they varied this, it influenced the outcome, and it influenced the outcome in the direction of their pre-existing bias.

• 52:58Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's such an important point when we talk about bias. It's not always nefarious, but it is.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  No, most p-hacking is subconscious, absolutely.

• 53:07Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not always nefarious, but it is always insidious. People don't do it on purpose, of course, like, these are, there's no reason to think that any of the scientists in this study were attempting to bias anything, but this is why it's so important to study bias.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Exactly. So, the meta point I'm going to make here is that people could look at this set of data and come to diverging conclusions based on their pre-existing biases too, meaning this study itself.

• 53:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course.

• 53:35Speaker 02

  And this is something that we confront all the time. Like, we look at this study, right, and we say, gee, isn't this good that scientists are trying to root out their own biases and correct for them? Science is awesome. Whereas other people look at this study and say, science is hopelessly flawed, you could produce any result you want, I could comfortably ignore anything quote-unquote "science" has to say.

• 54:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 54:01Speaker 02

  Experts are bogus, right? Same set of data, completely diverging conclusions. Now, of course, I, I have reasons for, to back what, what my interpretation is, because, first of all, this is scientists publishing, publishing this data about their own field of study, right? This is not criticism coming from the outside, pointing out, these guys are doing it wrong. This is researchers saying, hey, we have to be aware of the influence of our own bias. Now, let's talk about how we can prevent that. And of course, we know how to prevent it already, and that is, you decide on all of your methodological details before you look at any data.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  And be me like pristinely, like you have to say, all right, this is the question. This is the methods we're going to use. Let's decide on the methods based upon what on first principles and what probably is going to be the best approach. And then we'll follow that. And if you, if you didn't do that, if you didn't pre-register or, you know, predetermine your methods before glancing at any data, then what you have to do is internally replicate your research with fresh data. And so you could say, all right, we're going to divide the database up into two, you know, or whatever. And then we're going to do it on the first half, see what we get, and then we're going to use the exact same methods on the second half and see if we get the same results.

• 55:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, split half reliability.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there are so many approaches to ensuring validity and reliability that way.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 55:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And most researchers are readily using the, well, I would hope.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's the thing is, so we, so as experts, like we'll look at this and say, all right, was it pre-registered? Did they have internal replications? Was this an exact duplication of another set of research? Has this been independently replicated? All of those questions that, that compensate for the bias and the pee hacking and these kinds of things, the degrees of freedom. But if you're not, if you don't know this, right? If you're not a skeptic or an expert who understands this angle of research, you might just think, well, a study showed this and it looks pretty robust. The numbers are pretty solid. It's highly statistically significant, all things that are completely irrelevant to this concern, to the effects of systematic subconscious bias on the choices of research

• 56:25Speaker 02

  methodology that can dramatically affect the outcome.

• 56:28Cara Santa Maria?

  I want to see them do a follow-up where they choose the most extreme regression models, like the ones that almost always led to either a positive or a negative outcome. And then they have everybody do, or they, you know, randomly assign people and have them use those models and see if the, let's say, the people who they pre-tested as being like more pro-immigration.

• 56:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Using a regression model that tends to give a negative outcome, so one that they wouldn't have chosen to use if they actually get the same outcome.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:04Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, like, are they then interpreting the data in a weird way as opposed to, because there's so many different levels of bias.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  There was an interpretation bias as well.

• 57:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I would think so, for sure. But like, could they, if they use the same regression model, all things, you know, being equal, would they end up with wildly different outcomes still?

• 57:25Speaker 02

  There's a lot of different ways of following up on this, yeah. Okay, Evan, tell us about the habitable zone. Habitable.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  We love that word, don't we?

• 57:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's such a good word.

• 57:41Speaker 02

  We've got all the best words.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Earth is habitable, is it not?

• 57:44Speaker 02

  I like it.

• 57:45Speaker 04

  What ma- what makes us habitable?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Well, we can breathe.

• 57:50Speaker 04

  We can, yeah.

• 57:50Cara Santa Maria?

  We've got water.

• 57:52Speaker 04

  Water.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  Pressure. Not crushed by gravity. Gravity.

• 57:57Bob Novella?

  Magnetosphere is very helpful.

• 57:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we know the basics about why Earth is habitable, and then what? We're trying to look for other worlds in other parts of what our galaxy, in fact, our universe, to figure out if there are other planets that have the same kinds of, say, features that would make that planet habitable. And certainly, being in what is what? The Goldilocks zone is one of those definite features. And we've talked a lot about this in the past. What you try to do, or what researchers try to do, is for the most part, you find a rocky planet pretty relatively close to its parent, to its star, and you might have a promising candidate there. Is it outside of that habitable zone? Is it, you know, too far away or too close?

• 58:45Speaker 04

  But unless, how researchers have been looking at it, unless it's hits the kind of the sweet spot, then they'll kind of ignore everything else, ignore anything else that is outside of that sweet spot, which kind of makes sense. But there's a new paper that's been published that challenges that a little bit, pushes back on it and says, "We might be going about this in a too narrow a fashion." The paper was published in the Astrophysical Journal. The lead author, his name is Omri Wandell, and his team of researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem argue that the framework that concentrates on rocky planets in that habitable zone might be too restrictive, and that scientists studying potential candidates could be underestimating

• 59:28Speaker 04

  how many worlds could support liquid water. One of the major focuses of that paper were the tidally locked exoplanets, which are something else we've talked about before on the show. Those are the planets that will always show pretty much their same face to the star, locked in, and in a similar kind of way how the moon always faces the earth. You can look at it like that. One side's going to be in perpetual daylight and the other in eternal night. And for a long time, those worlds were written off as inhospitable, mostly inhospitable. You're either too hot on one side, too cold on the other, maybe you have this sort of, what, narrow band that could go around in which something could exist in there, but

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  tight, very tight, narrow margins. This new research suggests that, well, a planet could have a thick atmosphere, maybe even oceans, and that heat could be transported from, say, the day side, the side facing the star, to the night side. And under certain conditions, heat redistribution could allow parts of the night side to remain warm enough for liquid water, which is also one of the things we know can be a signal for your candidate for a habitable planet.

• 1:00:43Bob Novella?

  For life as we know it, yes.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  For life as we know it, right. Yep, yep. I think it's important because tidally locked planets are common, especially around red dwarf stars, and those stars are the majority of stars that are in our galaxy. And their habitable zones are very close in. They're exactly where tidal locking is likely. If tidal locked, tidally locked planets aren't automatically excluded, say, then hey, then your number of potential candidates grows.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so do be clear, 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, and the habitable zone of red dwarfs is at a distance where the planets are very likely to be tidally locked.

• 1:01:26Speaker 04

  Yep, close enough, right. That's right. Once a planet, though, is going to be far enough from its star, the surface water is assumed to freeze permanently, right? So you can, you know, go in the other direction is bad. But we've talked about before, we have some information, thank you, James Webb Space Telescope, among other probes and things that we've sent to other worlds that have told us, yeah, there are lakes and oceans trapped beneath thick ice layers, subglacial liquid water. You could have some forms of life existing in those kinds of environments as well.

• 1:02:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Speaker 04

  But especially with James Webb, what it's done is that it has helped detect water vapor in complex atmospheres on those exoplanets that initially seemed unlikely candidates for habitability. Seeing water on the outside of the traditional habitable zone is not surprising. In fact, it may be expected. But, you know, Steve, and I know you blogged about this recently, for as interesting as this new research is, there's still a lot of things, I think, working against the further expansion of these rocky worlds inside, close to these red dwarfs. And a lot of it has to do with radiation.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Speaker 04

  Among other things.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, every time a study comes out looking at the potential of life on red dwarfs, you know, around red dwarfs, there's always like, life is way more likely than we thought it was, or it's way less likely than we thought it was. Just stop. That framing is now ubiquitous. Like, every article about it is framed one way or the other. And this-

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  Dangerous to be close to that star for, at least for a chunk of its early life, right? Is it, what about later on?

• 1:03:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Just talked about this, just to reiterate very quickly, red dwarfs are very, they put out a lot of solar radiation early on in their lives. They do settle down and they're relatively less, but it's always more radiation than, say, our yellow sun puts out. But it does settle down to the point that it won't necessarily strip the atmosphere from an inner planet. So the only way for there to be a planet with an atmosphere and therefore liquid water on the surface is for it to have migrated in later, not necessarily, not even captured, just sometimes planets form in the outer solar system and they migrate into the inner solar system. So that's one possibility. Or the, or the atmosphere would have had to have been reconstituted later in life. It probably also would need to have a strong

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  magnetic field. So we're already talking about a subset of a subset of a subset of, you know, terrestrial planets around red dwarfs. Now they're saying, say, okay, but in that case, even if it's tidally locked, the, the night side could still be getting enough heat. So, okay, but is it getting any sunlight? No. And as Bob was told us a couple of weeks ago, what sunlight those planets are getting don't have the energy to support multicellular life. So.

• 1:04:20Cara Santa Maria?

  What about subsurface ocean life? I don't know. Tell me, tell me if I'm wrong here, but subsurface ocean life, just with the energy that comes from the tides, like if they're not tidally locked.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, it could be chemosynthetic life. Yeah, they, yeah, what they were talking about is probably chemosynthetic life.

• 1:04:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that would be life, right?

• 1:04:37Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:04:38Speaker 04

  It is life, absolutely. Yeah, shouldn't be.

• 1:04:41Cara Santa Maria?

  So it doesn't have to have surface water?

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  They're talking about two different things here. They're talking about moving the habitable zone inward because of this energy distribution and also moving it outward because of sub-ice liquid water. Right? So even when you get into the, but that could be into the colder zone, which could also be the night side of a tidally locked planet.

• 1:05:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's why we're looking at like some of Jupiter's moons.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  Oh, totally. Yes.

• 1:05:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we've got closer.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  Things to explore. It's nothing new. It's like, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Europa and then.

• 1:05:11Speaker 04

  That part's not, yeah, it didn't seem to be new.

• 1:05:14Speaker 02

  And it's also not new. This idea is not new either. I read an article about this exact thing a couple of years ago, I think, where it's like, yeah, the, the energy could be distributed and not only cool the near side, but warm the far side, the, that terminus zone may be a lot broader than you might think, if there's a good, robust conduction of water and atmosphere around the planet. Yeah, absolutely. But there is the red star problem where they're just not giving, it's just not a lot of light energy to support photosynthesis. So I, I, I'll buy that for microbial life. I don't think we're going to be finding civilizations around red dwarfs. Mm hmm. Uh, is the bottom line.

• 1:05:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they talk a little bit about the orange planets as well, or the, or the orange stars.

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Orange stars are the sweet spots for life. Uh, because they are calm enough that they're not going to interfere with the atmosphere of planets. They're bright enough where you could be outside. The habitable zone is far enough away that you're not necessarily being tightly locked, but they live really long times, 50 to 70 billion years. As, as opposed to our sun, which is going to be what, 10, 10 billion? And there's a lot more of them out there. So if we're, if we're going to focus our, if we had to focus on one color of star to look for life, a hundred percent, it would be orange stars. Red, I don't, I'm not holding out much hope for life around planets around red dwarfs. And yellow stars are fine. They're just, there are fewer, obviously, we live around a yellow star. There's fewer of them and they're shorter

• 1:06:45Speaker 02

  lived, which those two things go hand in hand, of course. All right. Thank you, Evan. Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:06:52Jay Novella?

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

• 1:07:03Jay Novella?

  Any guesses?

• 1:07:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Kind of sounds like a coin star.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 1:07:07Cara Santa Maria?

  But like from far away.

• 1:07:08Jay Novella?

  That's a good guess.

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  Is she right?

• 1:07:10Jay Novella?

  I can't say that right now.

• 1:07:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Wow.

• 1:07:12Speaker 04

  Ooh, suspense.

• 1:07:13Jay Novella?

  All right, I got several guesses on this one. I got a listener named John Paul Posada, and he said, "Hi, Jay. I listened to the show on a road trip with family, and we all have our guesses." So his wife and daughter, who's 12 years old, guessed grinding coffee beans. And this was a very popular thing that people sent in. His 14-year-old son guessed it's dry ice being dropped into water. I think that's another good guess. And he thanks us for the show. Thank you, John. None of those are correct. I have another listener named Dan Oberstey. Dan said, "I think this week's noisy is a gargantuan box of Legos being..." And then he says, "Oh, never mind." I don't know why, because there is like, you know, that kind of vibe there.

• 1:07:55Jay Novella?

  But then he says, "I actually think it's something, someone pouring coins into a coin-sorting counting machine." And Kara, lots of people guessed that, including a listener named Laurie Solgoth. Good job, guys. It's not correct, but you know, I definitely think, I've done that myself, and I know that sound, and I do think it's quite similar. Another listener named Josh wrote in and said, "Going off, this is something that Jay hears all the time. This noise is breadcrumbs being poured into a meatball mixture." And you know what? That's not a bad guess, because I hear that noise. I have heard it many, many times. I will hear it again. And you know, there is kind of that thing going on there. I have another listener, last guess here, this was sent in by Matt and Nev.

• 1:08:38Jay Novella?

  And Matt says, "My daughter Nev thinks this week's noisy sounds like someone slurping up noodles with ocean noises in the background, and he thinks it's a garbage disposal." Garbage disposal was guessed by other people as well. These are all good guesses, but none of them are correct, and there is no winner. And I'm kind of surprised, because I'm not the only breadmaker out there that listens to this show. That's another hint. Anybody have any idea?

• 1:09:03Speaker 04

  It's bread being made. It's a candle-making machine.

• 1:09:05Jay Novella?

  Bread being made.

• 1:09:08Jay Novella?

  Can you be less big? This noise is essential, guys, to bread making at home. And the way I bake bread, you may have seen me many times. Steve, we've talked about this last night, working with something that Liz was talking about.

• 1:09:27Bob Novella?

  Yeast, I'm saying yeast.

• 1:09:29Jay Novella?

  Yes, this is my starter. This is a sourdough starter. Now, how could a starter make this noise? The answer is that the-

• 1:09:37Bob Novella?

  The microphones.

• 1:09:38Jay Novella?

  There's a lot of activity going on in a starter. Essentially, what is a starter, Bob?

• 1:09:42Bob Novella?

  You know, it reproduces and creates, I don't know, Jay.

• 1:09:47Jay Novella?

  It's a yeast colony. You're keeping a colony of yeast alive. And those yeast are essential to make certain types of bread. Sour dough is one of them, and the yeast do-

• 1:09:58Bob Novella?

  Gas production?

• 1:09:59Jay Novella?

  Yes, that is a key factor in this. So the yeast produce gas, they produce alcohol, there's other stuff going on. But essentially, this noise is a yeast starter, which is very healthy, very, very, very active. Imagine a jar filled with flour, water, and all this yeast. But the yeast has pumped so much CO2 into the starter that when you jiggle it, or you put a fork into it or something, the yeast bubbles kind of collapse. The whole thing just collapses and it loses most of its built-up gas that's inside of it. Right? Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:10:35Bob Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:10:35Jay Novella?

  And that noise, which I'll play again, is the yeast collapsing and the release of all the CO2 bubbles that have built up in there.

• 1:10:41Bob Novella?

  Wow, man.

• 1:10:50Jay Novella?

  You hear all the popping?

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  I wonder how many dollars all those coins were?

• 1:10:53Jay Novella?

  Kara, I want you to calm down. I know this is super exciting. But you've got to just stop talking so much and let the people enjoy-

• 1:11:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I used up all my voice earlier in the-

• 1:11:03Jay Novella?

  I know. Look, I get it.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  You have to remember, Kara's not the biggest fan of things like pizza, right?

• 1:11:10Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 1:11:10Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  Bread is not necessarily like-

• 1:11:12Cara Santa Maria?

  I do love pizza, but not tomato sauce on my pizza. I love bread, are you kidding me?

• 1:11:19Bob Novella?

  Oh my god, cut that Steve, definitely cut that out.

• 1:11:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:11:21Jay Novella?

  No, Bob, you're thinking of this completely the wrong way. Next time Kara is out our way, we will take her for the best pizza in the world.

• 1:11:29Cara Santa Maria?

  You can, but I will tell you, it's not because I don't like the way it tastes. It's because I have a horrible reaction in my mouth.

• 1:11:35Jay Novella?

  To sauce?

• 1:11:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, to like red sauce.

• 1:11:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, you're a super taster.

• 1:11:38Jay Novella?

  Well, did you guys know that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family?

• 1:11:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like I have, there, something about the acid content.

• 1:11:46Jay Novella?

  Oh yeah, it's high acid. Okay, understood, no problem.

• 1:11:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a bummer.

• 1:11:49Bob Novella?

  Wow, I'm sorry.

• 1:11:50Jay Novella?

  Alright, so thank you, um...

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  But if you cook it properly, you neutralize the acid, that's...

• 1:11:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's true, and certain foods are cooked better than others and have like sugars in them and things. But sometimes, like I could never just bite into a raw tomato.

• 1:12:02Jay Novella?

  Ooh.

• 1:12:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I wouldn't want to do that either.

• 1:12:05Jay Novella?

  Sounds like a challenge. I love that. So it troubles me that, that, you know, are there no bread makers out there that heard this? I, I'm shocked. I thought this was gonna be a really easy one, but no, no problem. I just recommend all of you go out and start your starter.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Jay Novella?

  You can email me if you need help, and then I'll teach all of you how to bake homemade bread. How about that?

• 1:12:24Speaker 02

  Okay, you should come over to my house, teach me how to make a starter and make bread, and we'll film it and TikTok it.

• 1:12:30Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I'd love to. That'd be awesome.

• 1:12:31Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 1:12:31Jay Novella?

  Okay, Steve, I have a new noisy.

• 1:12:33Speaker 02

  Let's hear it.

• 1:12:33Jay Novella?

  This noisy, yep, this noisy was sent in by a listener named Rich Holm, and here's the noisy.

• 1:12:44Jay Novella?

  I'm gonna give you a hint, it's not Jabba the Hutt.

• 1:12:47Bob Novella?

  No, okay, well, I'm out of guesses.

• 1:12:50Jay Novella?

  Because it really does sound like Jabba the Hutt, man.

• 1:12:53Bob Novella?

  It was.

• 1:12:55Jay Novella?

  Jabba no bother. Anyway, if you think you know this week's noisy, or you heard something cool, you can email me at [email protected]. Steve, so many things to talk about, let me just cruise through it right away. We will be appearing at PSYCON this year. If you're interested in going, you can go to psiconconference.org, that's C-S-I-C-O-N-F-E-R-E-N-C-E dot O-R-G, for all the info, the dates and everything. But we will be there, and the conference is looking great. Our next live performance will be on May 29th and May 30th. We will have three different things going on. We'll have the secret SGU meetup on Friday, the 29th. On Saturday, the 30th, we will have the SGU Private Show Plus, and we will

• 1:13:39Jay Novella?

  have the Skeptical Extravaganza that evening. Those are both on the 30th. If you want to purchase tickets for that, go to the skepticsguy.org. Are you hearing me, guys?

• 1:13:49Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:13:49Speaker 04

  Yes. I hear you. I hear you, and I'll be there.

• 1:13:52Jay Novella?

  A couple more quick things. So, we are planning a massive, massive trip out to Los Angeles, to Sydney, and then to New Zealand, and back again.

• 1:14:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:04Jay Novella?

  You catch that? Thank you.

• 1:14:07Jay Novella?

  There'll be tons of shows. We will be doing at least two shows in Los Angeles when we're out there. We will be, of course, in July, we will be at the Nauticon 2026, and Skeptics's 42nd year of running conferences. This is a huge event. The entire event that you'll go to in Sydney will be run by the SGU. This is a Nauticon conference, and if you've ever been to one, you know the kind of content that we have. But to give you a quick summary, this conference is about socializing and having a really, really good time. The SGU, with Brian Wecht and Andrea Jones-Roy and George Robb, will be doing all sorts of different things, of course, on the main stage for two days. There'll be nighttime activities.

• 1:14:50Jay Novella?

  There'll be lots of other things going on. We have side things like the board meeting, which Evan is running, and this is basically, anyone can come, and we will play board games for a few hours together. There is an extravaganza, all sorts of stuff. It's just easier if you go to nauticoncon.com, or go to skepticon.org.au for all the information. Tickets are available now. Please join us. It's going to be a great time. And Dr. Carl will be there. And guys, if you want to support the work that we do, please consider becoming a patron of the SGU. We need your support, and we use your support to keep this program going, and all the other

• 1:15:30Jay Novella?

  things that we do collectively. It's, you know, it's 2026. We're living in the upside down. We can't personally stop it, but we can help educate people and help people find some sanity. And I think that, even those two things alone are enough, but we do lots of things to help people and to help each other, right? Like, we love Kara, and when her tooth hurts, we'll text her.

• 1:15:53Speaker 02

  We'll give her emotional support.

• 1:15:55Jay Novella?

  Yeah, we'll give her all the emotional support she needs. Anyway, please consider becoming a patron of ours. We would really appreciate it.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you, brother. One quick email. This comes from Brian from Cummings, Georgia. And Brian writes, "Here is the video I watched about Kesterite solar panels." He had mentioned it on the chat during our live stream. Now he's following up. "Kesterite does not contain lead and is very durable, unlike perovskite." "Scientists studying Kesterite have modeled a possible 33.56% efficiency." Obviously, that is just a model, but it looks promising. Matt Farrell does some pretty well researched videos on technology, and he gives a link. So I watched the video. I read a bunch of articles about it. And so here's the bottom line on Kesterite. When it comes to solar panels, much like battery technology, right?

• 1:16:45Speaker 02

  You want to have a bunch of features all at once in order to be marketable, right? To be competitive in the marketplace. Right now, most commercial solar panels out there are silicon-based. And the advantage for silicon is that now we have procedures to mass produce them. They're getting cheaper. They're getting more efficient. The efficiency is in the low 20s now for commercial silicon-based solar panels. Downside is they could be cheaper, except that they use silver in their construction. They also use rare elements in their construction, and they use toxic elements in their construction. So those are the three things we would like to avoid.

• 1:17:28Speaker 02

  Expensive, rare, and toxic substances. So enter perovskite, which we've talked about before. This has been studied now, I don't know, 20 years. This is a material that can replace silicon as the basis of a solar panel. The advantage is it has potentially higher theoretical efficiency and does not necessarily need to use any rare or expensive elements. Problem with perovskite is that it's not very stable. It tends to break down when exposed to things like sunlight, you know, which is a problem if you're a solar panel, but also like water and oxygen, you know?

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  So the main research has been how do we stabilize the crystal lattice of perovskite?

• 1:18:18Bob Novella?

  Which stabilizes.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, with stabilizers, right? And one of the big ones is lead, which is toxic, you know? So. The compromise with Perovskaya is that you've got to stabilize it with rare and toxic and sometimes expensive compounds. So we're back to sort of the same issue that we had with with silicon. But it doesn't mean that it won't overall be be better than silicon, but we're not quite there yet. The Perovskaya solar panels are hitting the market, but they're really just incremental and not, you know, it's more of a lateral move than a clear superiority to silicon. But the potential is greater if we could sort out these issues. All right, now enter Kesterite, which is a similar sort of crystal lattice, and it's

• 1:19:03Speaker 02

  comprised of four elements: copper, zinc, tin, and sulfur, all of which are cheap, abundant, and non-toxic. Great. So we have a new crystal that we could make solar panels out of, and it's tough and it's stable.

• 1:19:19Speaker 04

  There's gotta be a drawback.

• 1:19:21Speaker 02

  There's gotta be a catch, right?

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a catch.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  If there weren't a catch, we would all be using

• 1:19:26Speaker 04

  We would be doing it.

• 1:19:26Speaker 02

  The Kesterite solar panels these days

• 1:19:28Bob Novella?

  It explodes in sunlight.

• 1:19:29Speaker 04

  Like, what, 50 times the cost?

• 1:19:31Speaker 02

  So the theoretical, he's correct, the highest theoretical efficiency in models of the Kesterite-based solar panel is 33.5%. That's like compared to, say, 22% for silicon. That's huge in terms of, yeah, it's huge, it's a huge efficiency improvement. But that's theoretical. In a lab, like actually making and testing a Kesterite-based solar panel in the lab, what's the highest efficiency you think they've achieved so far?

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  22%.

• 1:19:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Less, 15.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  14.3.

• 1:20:02Speaker 04

  Oh, half.

• 1:20:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But do they know how to improve it?

• 1:20:05Speaker 02

  Less than half. And the threshold for marketability is generally considered to be about 20%. So, you know.

• 1:20:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Do they know why there's a difference between theoretical and practical?

• 1:20:16Speaker 02

  They absolutely do. And that's the core of the of the issue here. What is the difference? The difference is imperfections in the manufacturing of the Kesterite and the the crystal lattice structure breaks down over time, just because of the chemistry involved, like they Configure themselves like, oh, the zinc is combining with the copper when it's not supposed to do that, whatever. So they reconfigure themselves into a form that is highly inefficient, where there are pockets that trap electrons, et cetera. So again, it's kind of a stability issue. So they need to figure out a way to both make the kesterite with fewer imperfections

• 1:20:59Speaker 02

  and keep it from breaking down over time. So guess how they do that? Lead. That by introducing rare, expensive and toxic elements into the lattice structure.

• 1:21:12Speaker 02

  And that works wonderfully well at stabilizing. So and that's that, by the way, is how they get up to 14.3%. That's with the doping, like with these other things. Oh. So there's more work to be done, right? They need to figure out how to get kesterite above 20% efficiency with with the kind of stability that they require. You know, these things need to last for 20 years, basically, you know, cost competitive with silicon. And we're not there yet. So the question is, are we ever going to get there with kesterite? And by the time we do get there, where's the competition going to be? Where's perovskite

• 1:21:54Speaker 02

  going to be? Where's silicon going to be? And for that matter, where are the organic and flexible solar panels going to be? It's always not just where you are, but where all the competition is. So this is just another player. It's in the lab at this point. It's not being manufactured. It's promising. It theoretically has good potential, but they have to crack these technological hurdles, which is basically the same as, you know, the silicon and perovskite base in terms of how to make it without overrelying upon rare earths and lead and cadmium and things like that.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, they've also tested bladder skite, but it's all talk.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  So another one to add to my list to keep an eye on, but it probably will be 10 years, I think, before we're, if it works out, like if it crosses the finish line before like they're actually on roofs, you know, making electricity. That's what I suspect. But that's good. We often talk about things five to 10 years before they actually hit the market. I remember the silicon anode lithium ion batteries. We talked about that 10 years before they hit production. We talked about it on our show.

• 1:23:04Speaker 04

  And boom, there they are.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  But we've been doing the show long enough that that, you know, that loop gets closed. All right, one more, one more quick thing. This is a from TikTok segment, but it's also a name that logical fallacy. And it's, when I say name that logical fallacy, I mean, it's some kind of problem with critical thinking. Doesn't have to necessarily specifically be a logical fallacy. Could be a cognitive bias, could be a heuristic, could be something else. So I'll link to the video, but basically what the video, the person in the video is saying is that there's something funky going on with the killings of Rene Good and Alex Preddy. The reason for him thinking that there's something funny going on is that there's just too many coincidences.

• 1:23:52Speaker 02

  For example, both of their last names are adjectives. Good and he says pretty, which is mispronouncing his name in order to force the point. And then he says they're both 37 years old. What are the odds that they're both 37 years old? They both were not like professional agitators or protesters. They had like no business being there. Why were they even there?

• 1:24:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Wait, what does that even mean? What's a professional agitator?

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. He said that the building of the company that was involved in the, the welfare fraud was in the background of the video with Alex, Alex Preddy's killing. Okay, it's the same place, that's why they're there. It's not a big coincidence. You know, that's the same city, that's why you could argue, and some people believe that's why they were the ICE was sent into Minneapolis was to draw attention to the welfare fraud, which I think had the opposite effect, but that's beside the point. So he goes on like that, it's all numerology and coincidence.

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  Right, numerology, that's what I was thinking, yeah.

• 1:25:02Speaker 02

  So, so how would you characterize what is happening there? He's just saying, all these things line up, it can't be a coincidence, some conspiracy must be going on. That's basically the video. So what's the cognitive problem with that?

• 1:25:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Confirmation bias? I mean, that's like the overarching one for everything.

• 1:25:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's always confirmation bias going on because he's looking at the things that line up and not looking at the things that don't line up. Yeah, but that's almost always in there somewhere.

• 1:25:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Little things like, there's some sort of like, like a, he's probably got like a base rate problem here where he doesn't really understand like, how many, if you were to pick everybody in a group of protesters of something that's very politically relevant for them, 37 would be a common age amongst protesters.

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  Why wouldn't, right, so failure to recognize the proper statistics.

• 1:25:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, because most of the protesters are probably between 22 and 45.

• 1:25:57Speaker 04

  But they're 20s and 30s.

• 1:25:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Some older, but.

• 1:26:01Cara Santa Maria?

  So that's one of the things.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  So there's some innumeracy going on, for sure. There's another specific kind of innumeracy though, other than.

• 1:26:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Can you give us, sorry, just to direct us, like what part of what he's saying you want us to refer to?

• 1:26:14Speaker 02

  Just the whole thing, just the overall strategy of, look at these coincidences, something is going on. So first, I'll ask it this way, how does he find the coincidences? Like what?

• 1:26:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's like a sharpshooter kind of thing.

• 1:26:27Speaker 02

  Yes, there's so many fallacies and cognitive biases going on. Like every time you look at it from a different angle, there's another one. And he's basically using four, five, six, seven different fallacies and to build his narrative. So, what the sharpshooter refers to, it's kind of a post hoc analysis.

• 1:26:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  He says, this is significant, but he only says it's significant after he sees the results.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  He didn't say, oh, if those people are the same age, that's significant. Oh, look, they are the same age. He first noticed that they are the same age and then decided that was significant. That is exactly drawing the circle around the hole after you shot the bullet into the wall, right, into the barn.

• 1:27:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like if you had two people who were seemingly unrelated and you were a detective.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Cara Santa Maria?

  And you found out through your detective work that they went to the same elementary, middle and high school. You would be like, oh, they probably weren't related. They probably, or they aren't unrelated, they've probably crossed paths in their life. But if you found out that they had the same dentist and were never in the office together, that would be a very sharpshooter-y kind of a thing.

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  Or even worse, they both have blue eyes. What's going on with that?

• 1:27:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:27:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  They own pets. No way.

• 1:27:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  Right. You could come up with a whole bunch of.

• 1:27:51Cara Santa Maria?

  But also, what is their ultimate argument here? It's fish.

• 1:27:54Speaker 02

  It's coincidence?

• 1:27:55Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:27:56Speaker 02

  You know, that's it.

• 1:27:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. But then, okay, sure, you're right. There are coincidences that you identified.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  But it's the implied argument, which I think he says explicitly, is that it's too many coincidences to be explainable as happening at random. And that's the innumeracy part.

• 1:28:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and there's so many different types of innumeracy, like issues.

• 1:28:15Speaker 04

  This is all some kind of grand conspiracy.

• 1:28:16Speaker 02

  So let me wrap it up a little more concisely. So part of what he's doing is what we call anomaly hunting, right? He's looking for anything that appears strange. And the particular type of anomalies he's looking for are alignments, right? Just random alignments of things, like they're both 37 or their names both sound like an adjective or the name of the streets or where, like you could see the same street name in the background of both of their videos or whatever. It's all stuff like that. And then he, so it's partly anomaly hunting, partly pattern recognition is like looking for patterns and then imposing them on what he's seeing.

• 1:28:58Speaker 02

  And then the innumeracy part, part of it is underestimating how likely these things are. But even if they, even if they were, yeah, even if they were really unlikely, it's the lottery fallacy of it's, yeah, that one thing may be unlikely, but the probability of you finding anything unlikely is actually very high. Really high, yeah. Right. It's not like you sought out to find these things specifically. You sought out to find any coincidence. It's why when we do statistics, we have to do like bone for only connections because you can't just look at, you know, you can't compare two points of data 500 times. You will find stuff. You will find stuff. Then you have to correct for the number of times you did it.

• 1:29:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Or you have to do the internal replication thing. All right. So if you guys remember the entire, at least one entire book written about all the alignments between the Kennedy assassination and the Lincoln assassination.

• 1:29:54Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, my God. It was.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  The shooter of Kennedy shot him from a book depository, ran to a theater. Or like, right, went from a warehouse to a theater and Booth went from a theater to a warehouse.

• 1:30:05Bob Novella?

  Right. One had a Secretary Kennedy, the other had a Secretary Lincoln.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:09Speaker 04

  Eight, yeah.

• 1:30:10Speaker 02

  There's like all these things and you look at them like, oh, my God, what's going on? Like, there's so many things, but it's like, you take two massive historical events, there are probably thousands of individual factoids you can pull out of that, which means there are millions of comparisons that you could make. And the fact that you found a couple of dozen alignments out of millions of potential comparisons is not extraordinary. That's what you would predict by statistics. So the fact that he has found a few coincidences is statistically probable. It's highly probable.

• 1:30:47Bob Novella?

  If you didn't find him, that would be extraordinary.

• 1:30:49Speaker 02

  Right. If you couldn't find anything, that would be extraordinary. Absolutely.

• 1:30:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think there becomes a difference in interpretation where when you're exposed to this kind of stuff all the time, you can go, oh, that's neat.

• 1:31:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:31:01Cara Santa Maria?

  What a cool coincidence. And you can celebrate in the fact that it's cool without thinking it has any deeper meaning.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  Right. I noticed they were both 37 years old.

• 1:31:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It is cool that Lincoln had an assistant named Kennedy and Kennedy had an assistant. Like, that's cool.

• 1:31:14Bob Novella?

  That's a good one. That's a fun one.

• 1:31:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:16Bob Novella?

  It doesn't mean shit. Bottom line, doesn't mean shit.

• 1:31:19Cara Santa Maria?

  What are the odds? Pretty okay. Or maybe they're not, but it doesn't matter.

• 1:31:23Bob Novella?

  With statistical.

• 1:31:24Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just a coincidence.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:31:32Cara Santa Maria?

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to sniff out the fake. And you at home can play along if you wish. Three regular news items this week. You guys ready?

• 1:31:58Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:31:59Speaker 02

  Okay. All right. Item number one, a comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. All right, number two, engineers have demonstrated a self-powered nano-composite material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power. And item number three, a new study finds that since 2020, the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. Kara, go first.

• 1:32:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. I think the ozone one might be science, sadly. So you said since 2020. So in the last six years, because we did cut down CFCs. We know that. And that made a huge difference in the 1990s, right? Those chlorofluorocarbons.

• 1:32:59Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And we started to see a big improvement in the ozone. That said, that can't be the only thing that affects the ozone layer. And if I think about just the sheer pace of like industrial innovation and like what kinds of pollutants were releasing into the atmosphere, I wouldn't be surprised because I'm not sure if we've regulated anything since then for purely because of its ozone depleting properties. So I don't know, I worry that that one is science. So that leaves me with a comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations, no significant differences. And oh, that is so hard to believe. Ooh, that one bugs me. But also engineers

• 1:33:42Cara Santa Maria?

  demonstrating a self-powered nano-composite material that detects and wirelessly, self-powered? What does that mean?

• 1:33:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, no external power is needed. It does it by itself.

• 1:33:55Cara Santa Maria?

  How is anything self-powered? So like if something had like solar on it, that wouldn't be self-powered, right?

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Well, if it were solar, right, it'd have to be solar in and of itself, not have a solar panel attached to it. That would be external.

• 1:34:07Cara Santa Maria?

  It would have to be made of solar panels.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically.

• 1:34:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I see. Okay, okay. Self-powered nano-composite material. So something that somehow is able to store and use energy, detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for an, I do not understand this one. Crack formation in itself?

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  Yes. If a crack forms in itself, it will then send a wireless, it's like, hey, there's a crack here.

• 1:34:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And it'll tell like, yeah, that's cool. I like that. I want that one to be science. So I'm going to say the jury one is fiction.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay.

• 1:34:43Jay Novella?

  Okay, the first one here, there's a comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant difference in attentiveness. All right. So you're basically saying, are people, is this just about simply how much people are paying attention to everything that's going on?

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  That's attentiveness. Yeah. Are they paying attention? Are they engaged? Are they fair in their judgment? And what was the outcome? What was their decision at the end?

• 1:35:09Jay Novella?

  Well, how can you judge if they were fair?

• 1:35:10Speaker 02

  They measured it.

• 1:35:11Jay Novella?

  They used the ferometer. Okay.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:35:15Jay Novella?

  That's interesting, though. I mean, yes, right, Steve? Okay, second one. Engineers have demonstrated a self-powered nano-composite material that detects and wirelessly reports cracks formation without the need for any external power. How the hell could it do that? I mean, it would have to have some type of... If it's doing it itself, it would have to have a mechanism inside to know with some granularity what's going on inside the material. Okay, not impossible. The last one, a new study finds that since 2020, the ozone layer, which has been recovering since the 90s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. All right, because I did read that it was all back to normal, but sure.

• 1:35:58Jay Novella?

  I mean, why couldn't that happen again? Now, the question is, what's happening to affect the ozone layer? Because, you know, what we were having was the aerosols coming from... What were those particular aerosols, guys?

• 1:36:10Speaker 04

  Chlorofluorocarbons.

• 1:36:12Jay Novella?

  Yeah. And we, I think globally, we made a very strong effort to stop doing that. And that's why I came back. So what else would be doing it? That's the question. Okay, so between these three.

• 1:36:24Speaker 02

  Between or among? Would it be among three or between? It's one of those words where there's no... It's hard to know what the correct thing is.

• 1:36:31Jay Novella?

  All right. Considering all three of these options, Steve. I mean, the first one, I don't like the fact that what we are reading here doesn't really account for like how they're measuring fair-mindedness, right? Which could just be, maybe Steve has to deliver it this way with a lack of information in order to make it, you know, work for the game. That's one thing. But something seems a little weird there. You know, this self-powered nano-composite material, I would say sure. You know, because there's no details. We don't know how granular it is. We don't know how much power it would need. Whatever. You know, we just don't know enough to say no to that. And I think it's within the laws of physics, so I'll say sure, why not? And then the last one about the ozone layer, I mean, so the main question here is whether

• 1:37:15Jay Novella?

  or not it's depleting.

• 1:37:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:37:18Jay Novella?

  And I'd be like, what? I don't see what's so hard about saying, yeah, it depleted a little bit because of something, right? That we don't know what the cause is. But that thing has to exist, whatever it is. So it's just, I think that one's just a 50/50 or not 50/50. You have a one-third a chance with that one. Anyway. My gut is telling me that, I'm just gonna say that the first one is the fiction because Steve, you made me angry.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:37:43Speaker 04

  May, Kara, may I ask you again which one you believed was the fiction?

• 1:37:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I also went with the jury.

• 1:37:47Speaker 04

  Is it okay if I don't go with the jury?

• 1:37:49Jay Novella?

  No, you can do whatever, Evan, this is, I was gonna say, this is America, you can do whatever.

• 1:37:53Speaker 02

  It was a rhetorical question. You do you, Evan.

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  Why would this be the case? Why would there be no significant difference? Well, uh, yeah, I think that one might have inherently sort of the, or just sort of wiggle room to allow it to be fiction. That doesn't mean it is. And it could have gone either way, right? I mean, you could say, maybe the jury performed better in a virtual environment as opposed to falling asleep right there in the bench in the court, you know, in the courtroom in that environment. Uh, I don't know, though, that they were able to detect any significant differences. No significant differences. Hmm. Uh, the second one, uh, is the one, you know, I don't

• 1:38:37Speaker 04

  know about at all. Self-powered nano-composite material, wirelessly reports crack formations. Yeah, I just don't have a good feel for that one. The last one about ozone. Since 2020, I thought the ozone layer, so that means since 2020, there has been a trend in which it is becoming depleted again. Gosh, I, why do I think it's the opposite? I, I could have sworn, have we talked about the ozone in the last five or six years? But I could have sworn reading something not too long ago, maybe at some point last year, that that wasn't the case. That keeping an eye on the ozone, it's doing just fine.

• 1:39:21Speaker 04

  But, this is a new study, okay, so, huh, all right, I'll go out on the limb and say the ozone one is the fiction.

• 1:39:29Speaker 02

  Okay, and Bob.

• 1:39:30Bob Novella?

  All right, I'll start with, uh, with three here. The ozone layer, yeah, I mean, you say it's slight, so it's not, it's not much. I mean, volcanoes can do this. Um, maybe some, some country embraced CFCs because it was cheaper and said, "We're doing this. I don't care," type of scenario. I mean, it doesn't sound too egregious that that's possible at all. Number two here, uh, nano-composite. Yeah, this is, this is very interesting, um, if true. But I could potentially see something about the nano-composite that maybe the formation of the crack itself or some fluids that get in the crack can somehow make it do some sort of burst that is detectable by an outside device.

• 1:40:14Bob Novella?

  And that wouldn't violate the spirit of this news item if it, if, if it did create a burst that was detectable by a, a real bit of technology that could then signal, you know, send a text to the people who were tracking this stuff. Something like that I could, I can kind of envision happening there. So that seems reasonable. The one, of course, the one that's really rubbed me the wrong way is this virtual jury. It just makes so much sense. You know, maybe too mu- maybe it's just like too obvious, but I can't, I don't want to play that game this week, maybe next week. So I'll say, I'll say, uh, the virtual jury one is fiction as well.

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  Steve, before you reveal.

• 1:40:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 04

  I'd like to point out that this happened, uh, two, maybe three weeks ago, in which I broke off from the other three rogues and went in a different direction on the answer. And you swept us. Okay, so I just want to say.

• 1:41:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  Well, let's see if this happens again.

• 1:41:04Speaker 02

  We'll see if there's a pattern there. Coincidence? All right.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  So we will, so you guys all agree on the, the second one, the nano-composite? So we'll start there. Engineers have demonstrated a self-powered nano-composite material that, or is it nano-composite? That material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power. You all think this one is science, and this one? Is science. This is science. This is very cool.

• 1:41:36Speaker 04

  No sweep. Come on, what's up?

• 1:41:37Cara Santa Maria?

  That's neat.

• 1:41:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no sweep. So what is up? You tell me. What, how can this?

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  I already told you.

• 1:41:44Speaker 02

  Say it again.

• 1:41:45Bob Novella?

  That the, the, the formation of the crack itself could be responsible, or the fluids that gets in there?

• 1:41:52Speaker 02

  The crack itself, the crack itself absolutely is part of the signal.

• 1:41:56Bob Novella?

  A high pitched, like a high pitched?

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  Let me ask you this. Where's the energy coming from? Cause it is self-powered.

• 1:42:02Bob Novella?

  The propagation of the, of the crack?

• 1:42:04Speaker 02

  But what, but, but how do you, what's being converted into actual energy? To run a wifi, like to send a wifi signal. It's got a, like an internet of things kind of signal, you know? So what?

• 1:42:14Cara Santa Maria?

  The sound?

• 1:42:15Speaker 02

  Electricity's gotta be, it's-

• 1:42:17Speaker 04

  Electricity?

• 1:42:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it transduced from the sound?

• 1:42:19Speaker 02

  It's vibrations, but, but vibrations are turned into electricity through what effect?

• 1:42:25Speaker 04

  The piezoelectric effect.

• 1:42:26Bob Novella?

  Piezoelectric.

• 1:42:27Speaker 02

  Close. The piezoelectric effect.

• 1:42:29Speaker 04

  Whatever.

• 1:42:30Speaker 02

  The piezoelectric effect. Yes. You're close. This is, this nanocomposite, which is carbon fiber reinforced, has a piezoelectric effect. And so vibrations generate a small current. And when a crack forms, it disrupts the production of the current. And that can be measured. So it not only tells you, oh, there's a crack here. It'll give you an idea about the size of the crack as well. Cause of the degree to which it disrupts the energy coming, being produced by the piezoelectric effect.

• 1:43:04Speaker 04

  So cool.

• 1:43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty cool.

• 1:43:05Cara Santa Maria?

  What do they want to use this for?

• 1:43:07Speaker 02

  So like, for example, if it's, um, you have an airplane made out of this stuff, if tiny microcracks form in, in the hull. You know, you can be alerted to it automatically.

• 1:43:17Speaker 04

  Oh, sends out its own signal.

• 1:43:18Speaker 02

  Go repair it.

• 1:43:21Speaker 02

  Pretty cool.

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  I hope they call it the Kraken.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  The Kraken. By Kraky? Alright. Let's go back to number one, a comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations. Found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. Bob, Cara and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Evan is all by- ...his lonesome, thinking that this one is science and this one is...

• 1:43:47Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  Science. Good work, Evan.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  Holy crap.

• 1:43:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't buy it.

• 1:43:53Speaker 04

  It shouldn't have been science, but it is, right?

• 1:43:56Speaker 02

  Well, you could, you could read the article and judge for yourself. Again...

• 1:43:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I want to see this replicated.

• 1:44:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 1:44:03Speaker 04

  There might have been bias.

• 1:44:04Speaker 02

  But it seemed like a pretty reasonable study. Obviously, you never know from one study, you know, if the results are definitive. But, um, and they studied this because they were concerned about, you know, would this, would the jurors not be paying attention, you know, virtually, you know, online? The results are pretty robust, but again, maybe they're biased, maybe they were, but the, the, it's always interesting when the results conflict with what the researchers thought they were going to find. I always tend to think that, you know, to take that a little more seriously. So they had 54 mock juries, 24 of them met in person and 30 deliberated virtually using the same basic materials.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  They had the same information and yeah, they measured their attention to the proceedings, their, you know, their deliberations, the outcomes, et cetera. But anything that they measured, there wasn't any significant difference between the two groups. So that's reassuring, but obviously more, more research is always going to be needed for stuff like this. But there wasn't a big difference, you know, it wasn't like it was, oh yeah, these people were like not paying attention at all or anything.

• 1:45:07Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't buy it.

• 1:45:10Speaker 02

  Fair enough. So virtual doesn't mean they're at home in front of their own computer with their own phone next to them, whatever. You know what I'm saying? It doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't some constraints placed on their distractions.

• 1:45:22Cara Santa Maria?

  I guess, but if you are virtual...

• 1:45:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, they were virtual.

• 1:45:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But I guess that's the other thing that's frustrating is like, this was a mock thing? At home, they're not putting their phones in the little plastic baggies like they do in...

• 1:45:37Speaker 02

  Go over with them, hey, this is, you know...

• 1:45:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, they're like, hey, you can't use your phones. Everybody goes, okay.

• 1:45:44Speaker 02

  All right, which means that a new study finds that since 2020, the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, had slightly reversed this trend and is once again, once again, being depleted is the fiction because Evan is completely correct. It is doing just fine. The, it continues, the ozone layer continues to repair itself because we're no longer, you know, producing the CFCs. And the estimates are actually that it will be completely repaired by 2066. So we're still 40 years away from it getting to where it was before we started to deplete it. But this is based-

• 1:46:21Cara Santa Maria?

  So I thought that I had read in the past that there are a lot of new holes.

• 1:46:24Speaker 02

  The overall, I don't know, that's true enough, but the overall ozone layer-

• 1:46:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so this is more like the trend.

• 1:46:29Speaker 02

  The trend has not reversed. It's still getting, it's still repairing itself.

• 1:46:33Speaker 04

  My understanding is the hole does-

• 1:46:35Speaker 02

  There's fluctuations.

• 1:46:36Speaker 04

  Kind of get larger. Yeah, it fluctuates, but overall, it's, the trend is-

• 1:46:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:46:41Bob Novella?

  What a win for science that whole thing was. Oh, look at this problem. This isn't good. Let's fix it. They made, they fixed it and it's getting better. It's like-

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  But let me tell you the headline of the article that triggered this for me. A global strategy is needed to reduce ozone levels. So I'm like, okay, what are they referring to there? So there's a difference between the ozone layer and surface, surface, what we call surface ozone.

• 1:47:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yes.

• 1:47:08Speaker 02

  Surface ozone is bad. That's part of air pollution and it has a negative effect on human health. So we're trying to reduce surface ozone even while we're trying to let the ozone layer higher up in the atmosphere repair itself. Cause you know, it does important things like block ultraviolet radiation from, from hitting the surface of the earth.

• 1:47:27Bob Novella?

  And the nasty like UBC, uh, UV C, which is like nast, like give you cancer UV. I mean, there's, yeah, without the ozone, without the, if we had an intense ozone all over the earth, land life might never have evolved. Unless, they'd have to like deal with the, the, you know, the, the ionizing, is it ionizing at that point? But yeah, it gives you cancer. I mean, it's so-

• 1:47:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:51Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why I don't want to celebrate this win too loudly lest certain people in power hear us and decide to no longer stick with this.

• 1:48:01Speaker 02

  Oh, we're good then. We could start doing them again. So, yeah, I've got my underwater habitat.

• 1:48:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't believe in the ozone layer.

• 1:48:08Speaker 04

  But it's that ground level ozone. What we need are ground level CFCs to fight them.

• 1:48:13Speaker 02

  So where the ground level ozone comes from is from nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. Now, these also have been on decline between 2000 and 2018. Same thing. They are regulated and the regulations have decreased them. But the researchers were measuring it and they're like, huh, it's not decreasing as much as we would have thought based upon the decrease in the nitrogen oxides and the volatile organic compounds. Then they figured out that the reason is, well, first of all, they're measuring them in the US and Europe, and that's where the laws have been reducing the production of ground ozone. But they said,

• 1:48:58Speaker 02

  oh, but it's coming in from other places. So it's still being produced, like in Asia, for example. And it's being, so it's the transport of ozone produced abroad is preventing the decrease of ozone in Europe and North America in response to the regulations which decreased nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. That was the study. But I twisted it into the ozone layer, which is different. All right. So ozone up there, good. Down here, bad. That's the bottom line. So, good job, Evan. I always like it when somebody breaks away from the pack and is a lone winner. Good job.

• 1:49:36Speaker 04

  It's a bit, it's a little scary.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  Good job, man. But you did it. You could have gone with the herd and gone over the cliff with all of them.

• 1:49:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, there were reasons, and it almost seemed too perfect in a way.

• 1:49:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, but yeah, like Bob said, I didn't want to play that game.

• 1:49:50Speaker 02

  That game doesn't always work. Yeah, the meta-game, I try to be inconsistent about it. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:49:58Speaker 04

  I'd rather you be more consistent about it. "Am I not wholly wishful to reach the truth, or to rest in it, or obey it when found, is to that extent a mind impervious to truth and incapable of unbiased belief?"

• 1:50:14Speaker 04

  William Leslie Davidson, Scottish philosopher.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 1:50:16Speaker 04

  Born 1848 and died in 1929.

• 1:50:21Bob Novella?

  Can't handle the truth.

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Can't handle the truth.

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  I agree. You have to prioritize only believing what is actually true higher than anything else. Although that is, I would say, a necessary but insufficient condition for being, you know, a good skeptic and, you know, rationalist. But you also have to have the analytical skills to know how to do that. And those are the skills that have to be taught.

• 1:50:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And even, even the good science researchers can fall into the bias trap, as we've talked about.

• 1:50:54Speaker 02

  Yep. We all have blind spots. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:50:59Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:51:00Speaker 04

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:51:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:07Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:44Speaker 00

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