Pod Insights The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe The Skeptics Guide #1083 - Apr 11 2026 About this episode Dumbest Thing of the Week: Waffle House Teleportation; News Items: Artemis II Heat Shield, Fairness in the Brain, Genetic Engineering Humans, Self-Healing Composite; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction
Transcript 22,045 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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0:30 Speaker 01 You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
0:37 Jay Novella? Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 9th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
0:51 Speaker 03 Good evening, everyone.
0:52 Jay Novella? How's everyone doing? Pretty good. You know, I did something. Proud of you. Earlier today. So I was, you know, I'm trying to, I'm always trying to come up with, you know, things to talk about in the SGU, and I'm particularly trying to come up with ideas that we could use on all of our traveling, right? We're going to do a bunch of shows, and we don't know when those shows are going to drop, so we have to come up with content that isn't time-sensitive, right? So I stumbled on these two top-leading flat-earthers watching the launch of Artemis II. Oh, God. And it was, it was actually so bad that I would, it would only come off as me making fun of them. Do you know what I mean? Like, they were, they were trying their absolute hardest to shoot holes in everything that they saw.
1:37 Jay Novella? For example, the engines of the SLS are covered in this ablative material that is like a sound dampening thing, and it protects the engines from all the water that comes down, right? And the typical thing that they would say is they would say something derogatory about it in a way where you could tell that they have absolutely zero prior knowledge of anything that they're talking about. Oh, yeah. And they were riffing, which is even worse because they weren't repeating well thought out, but wrong, but well thought out arguments, you know, like to the uneducated ear, when they say that the, you know, the light coming from the sun wouldn't look that way or whatever. It's a hard thing to answer if you don't know the physics of, of light and, you know,
2:20 Jay Novella? is the light parallel, whatever, there's a lot to it. These comments that they were saying were utterly ridiculous. Like he was commenting on, you know, one of the booster engines had, like, he goes, "Look at that. What is that made out of? Like, was that PVC pipe on the outside of that thing? Like, who the hell designed that? What the hell are they doing?" You know, like commenting on the engineers designing the rocket booster. And the ship isn't moving fast enough. The smoke coming out the back, it clearly is only going about 30 miles an hour, you know, like comments like that. And I got to the point after, you know, I put in like 45 minutes into this and I, I'm like, you know what? I am not gonna talk about these guys because it, because it is, it's just one joke after another. Like it was as if, if we were pretending to be flat earthers, trying to come up with
3:05 Jay Novella? the worst arguments we could. That's what I heard.
3:07 Speaker 03 Yeah. At a certain point, you don't know if it's parody or not. That's how bad it gets.
3:11 Cara Santa Maria? Right. And you don't have to comment because they do the work for you.
3:16 Speaker 03 That's for certain.
3:17 Jay Novella? All right, guys. Last week, in our opening banter, we were riffing about your favorite color, which was fine. It was unscripted. We were talking, just giving our personal opinions, you know, wasn't pretending to be anything else, but I did feel-
3:31 Speaker 03 Color with the letter U in it, Steve?
3:33 Jay Novella? Well, it's optional, you know, if you, depends on what side of the pond you're on. But I felt myself was unsatisfied by that conversation because I felt like, all right, you know, this is interesting, but I bet you there's some science here that we could weave in.
3:46 Cara Santa Maria? Right. Because that was all just opinion.
3:49 Jay Novella? Yeah, it was all just our subjective opinion. Absolutely. So, so I looked into it and I actually wrote a blog post about it earlier in the week. So I do think that there is some psychological and neurological evidence that we could bring to bear on our discussion.
4:05 Speaker 05 And just a few interesting. So the the main contention was, do people really have favorite colors? Or is it just an arbitrary thing that we say because we're under social pressure to pick a color? And so we sort of do it and stick with it. Right? Is that a fair characterization of what you were saying last week, Kara?
4:24 Cara Santa Maria? Maybe I wouldn't say, yes, I think that's fair, but also kind of, is there not a spectrum? Do some people feel really passionate about this and other people are like, I could give?
4:33 Speaker 03 It's not so, yeah, binary.
4:35 Speaker 05 And I suspect there's some neurodiversity in there that some people do and some people don't. But here's some interesting tidbits about it. So this is pretty much, it's one of those cross-cultural phenomena. Pretty much no matter what country you go to, what's people's, what's the most common favorite color, do you think?
4:52 Jay Novella? I think blue or green.
4:53 Cara Santa Maria? It'd be blue, blue.
4:54 Speaker 05 It's blue. Yeah, like far and away. In China and the US and India, like, it doesn't really matter. In the UK, it's the favorite color, followed by reds, greens, purples. And then what's the almost, I won't say universal, but the almost universal least favorite color?
5:13 Speaker 03 Brown.
5:14 Speaker 05 You're right, brown.
5:15 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
5:16 Speaker 05 And Jay, orange is right behind it.
5:18 Jay Novella? That's fine with me.
5:19 Speaker 05 So you're, you're atypical.
5:21 Jay Novella? Mm hmm. And also, I don't just like orange, I really love it. Like, I actually feel something when I see it.
5:27 Speaker 05 So it doesn't seem to be individual, it doesn't seem, it's not randomly distributed. So that doesn't mean it isn't arbitrary, but it is interesting that it's so cross-culturally consistent. You would think.
5:38 Cara Santa Maria? But that doesn't mean it's genetic. That could be very central.
5:41 Speaker 05 No.
5:42 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
5:43 Speaker 05 But psychologists do use how cross-cultural something is to say, well, how fundamental is it versus is it just purely cultural? Purely cultural things don't tend to be so universally cross-cultural. But again, this is just inference. This is other.
5:56 Cara Santa Maria? Used to be. Yeah, I would argue that that's actually not the case because of globalization.
5:59 Speaker 05 It may be less true.
6:00 Cara Santa Maria? We live in a very different world. Yeah.
6:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's, that is a fair point. And that's true across demographics, by the way, too, which, you know, again, makes it seem like it's something that's other than purely cultural going on. It's, now, that doesn't mean there aren't. Demographic differences, women are more likely to say that pink is their favorite color and reds in general. But they still prefer prefer blue overall. And in the US where we have, you know, the red, blue thing politically, Republicans still prefer blue more than than any other color, even though, again, more of them say they prefer red than Democrats. So there's differences, but not enough to erase the basic pattern of blue is the most common favorite color and the basic order of favorite colors.
6:44 Speaker 05 That's interesting, too. It seems to be cross demographic as well. And then there have been studies looking at personality. Does does your favorite color predict anything about your personality? Again, you could you could see both ways how like, yeah, if you have like an outgoing personality, you're going to choose vibrant colors, you know? And if you're of a more introspective personality, introverted personality, you might pick more muted colors, you know? But there wasn't a strong signal here. It's the and the evidence is pretty mixed and there's a lot of complexity there. But there are some signals in there.
7:25 Speaker 05 But here's the thing, we in our conversation last week, we were talking entirely about hue, right? Not H U G H, but H U E, not some guy named Hugh. We were talking about just red versus blue versus green versus yellow. However, people's color preferences also depend on saturation and brightness as well.
7:46 Speaker 03 Sure.
7:47 Cara Santa Maria? Right, right.
7:48 Speaker 05 Not just hue. So when you consider all of those things, extroverts prefer bright colors. Adults prefer more saturated colors. So that's another layer of complexity as well. So the the current inference amongst psychologists who study this sort of thing, again, this is far from proven. This is just, you know, what a theory that seems to be consistent with all of the available evidence. Is what's called the ecological valence theory. What do you think that is?
8:20 Speaker 03 Ecological valence.
8:22 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, valence would be like the meaning or the, you know, that you add to the thing. And then that it is ecologically salient, right? So it's going to have a lot to do with your environment.
8:35 Speaker 05 Yeah. So this basically, this is what they think, that the totality of your experiences are associated with colors. And therefore, when you're exposed to a color, you kind of react to it based upon that totality of associated experiences.
8:54 Cara Santa Maria? And I could see like a situation where you took a bunch of lab rats.
8:58 Speaker 05 Yeah.
8:58 Cara Santa Maria? And you, you know, you inflicted pain or pleasure and you put them in a red room when they were in pain and a blue room. And a hundred percent that would be the case. I think the reason that I'm like, not rolling my eyes, but I'm like taking it with a big grain of salt. Is because colors are everywhere, all the time.
9:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:16 Cara Santa Maria? And it's really hard to say, that was a very red experience for me. I think there are probably flashbulb memories people have.
9:21 Speaker 05 Well, that's what they're saying. It's kind of like gestalt, right?
9:24 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
9:25 Speaker 05 So, for example, they say, well, maybe blue is such a common favorite color because we associate it with the blue sky and blue water. And, you know, being out in nature and there's a lot of good.
9:35 Cara Santa Maria? We all wear blue jeans and.
9:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, a lot of good feelings and everything associated with it. And brown is.
9:42 Cara Santa Maria? Is poo.
9:42 Speaker 05 Is associated with poo, with poo, yeah, with feces.
9:44 Speaker 03 Decay.
9:45 Speaker 05 And certain shades of green are associated with rotting food and puke, you know, and those, the things that are associated commonly with bad things. Tend to be less often cited as a favorite color, where things which are associated with things that are usually good experience. You know, are more common to be. So anyway, again, this is just a theory. It is not.
10:07 Speaker 03 Color theory.
10:08 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly.
10:11 Jay Novella? Well, this is so subjective.
10:13 Cara Santa Maria? It is.
10:14 Jay Novella? You know, you, yeah, you pretty much just have to take, take, you know, people for their word. Like if someone says, I love this color. It makes me feel good. I like having it around me. It makes, you know, and they might even have some vague ideas of why they might like it. But the bottom line is, you know, there are people who really don't care and there are people who really do care.
10:35 Speaker 05 Yeah.
10:35 Jay Novella? And infinite shades of gray in between. And I think even trying to assign plausibly, you know, like a sign, like how the person came to that conclusion, I think is, I think it's very risky.
10:48 Speaker 05 It's like, I think it's similar to dream interpretation. It's really hard to say.
10:54 Cara Santa Maria? There's a lot of bullshit in there.
10:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, because of A, B, and C. But that doesn't mean your dreams don't have, are not influenced by your experiences and your relationships or whatever's going on in your life. It's just so individual and quirky that it's hard to, to reverse engineer, like why you had a certain dream. In the same way, it'd be very hard to say why Jay loves the color orange so much.
11:16 Cara Santa Maria? Orange, yeah.
11:16 Speaker 05 And I, and I know Jay had a very bad experience with green in his life and he really doesn't like the color green, but that's a rare case where we could say this one case is probably the cause of that.
11:26 Jay Novella? I didn't like it for a long time. Now I love it.
11:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, but it, you had a negative, I mean, for years you said you hated the color green.
11:32 Jay Novella? I did.
11:33 Cara Santa Maria? I also think it's an interest, it's a very polarizing conversation, clearly, because we got a lot of emails and the emails were, we got very few emails were like, that was interesting. I'm somewhere in the middle. All the emails were either, what is Kara talking about? Like, this is so important.
11:49 Speaker 05 Kara crossed her mind.
11:50 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. And then other people being like, thank goodness, somebody finally said what I've been thinking of, you know? And so I think it's polarizing because a lot of people are very passionate about their favorite colors and a lot of people literally don't care.
12:03 Speaker 05 Have no idea what the whole thing feels about.
12:05 Cara Santa Maria? And there's a social assumption that it's one way or the other. And I think that's when things become passionate, is when there's a, a sort of assumption that everybody thinks the way we think.
12:17 Speaker 05 Yeah, we all think that.
12:18 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. And so it's like, I brought it up because I, I was just so sick of people being like, what's your favorite color? And I'm like, I don't think that's a, you know, that doesn't apply to me. And they're like, what? I'm like, that is insane.
12:29 Speaker 03 How could it not?
12:31 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, my God.
12:32 Speaker 05 Yeah, just say, I don't really have one. Yeah, it's fine. So Kara, being the neuroscientist I am, I wanted to find out, is there any neuroscientific studies that say, that elucidate this? The short answer is no, but there are studies that say, this is what's happening in the brain when people are looking at colors. And that, I don't think that it tells us anything about the why somebody might have a favorite color.
12:57 Cara Santa Maria? No, it just tells us that some people have preferences and some people don't.
12:59 Speaker 05 Yeah, it was just like, okay, sure, the, the part of the brain that processes information and that also assigns a preference to things is, are being activated. It's like, okay. But it doesn't tell us why we're making certain value judgments. There was no big light bulb go off and go, oh, this explains color preference. It was just that, yeah, pretty much the parts of the brain you thought would be lighting up are lighting up. So anyway, so interesting question. You know, I think we were more informed, but no really different than where we were before, which is like, some people have favorite colors, some people don't, you know? And it's kind of a Gestalt kind of chaos situation. All right.
13:38 Speaker 05 Evan, tell us the dumbest thing of the week.
13:41 Speaker 03 Oh, we do have a dumbest thing of the week this week. This was brought to my attention by our friend, Adam Russell. Good friend, in fact. Longtime listener, joined us at Nauticon last year. Also a rock star with the band Story of the Year.
13:57 Speaker 05 Yeah. I got to know him pretty well and he is an awesome guy.
14:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, he is. He really is.
14:03 Speaker 05 We have so much in common. Like, we just chit chat with each other and he, um, you know, we are bonded by our love for Star Wars.
14:10 Speaker 03 Yes. Oh, gosh. Yes. His Thank the Maker podcast is, is a popular Star Wars podcast. You should check it out. Oh, and also their latest album is called Arson, A-R-S-O-N, All Rage Still Only Numb, Story of the Year. Check them out. It's a great album. Shameless plug right there, but I don't care. All right. Here's my question before we get to the dumbest thing of the week. Who here likes waffles?
14:32 Speaker 05 I like waffles.
14:33 Cara Santa Maria? I like waffles. Yeah.
14:34 Speaker 03 I like one.
14:35 Cara Santa Maria? My neighbor's dog is named Waffles.
14:38 Bob Novella? That's a great name.
14:40 Speaker 05 Evan, I have a waffle maker that makes waffles that look like the Death Star.
14:44 Speaker 03 Oh, come on. That's next level. That is next level.
14:48 Bob Novella? No, you want next level. You take two waffles and you have like vanilla ice cream in the middle and make a sandwich out of it. That's next level waffle work right there.
14:58 Jay Novella? I mean, let's face it, guys. Breakfast is largely dessert.
15:00 Speaker 05 Yeah. Oh, yeah.
15:01 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. That's why we love it so much.
15:02 Bob Novella? That's why it's called pancakes.
15:06 Speaker 03 I think I like waffles, but I'm not really sure. Anywho.
15:13 Speaker 03 His name is Greg Phillips, and he was appointed head of the Office of Response and Recovery at the Federal Emergency Management Agency here in the United States. That's FEMA. And that happened back in December of 2025. Prior to that, during an interview, he was being interviewed in January of 2025, he claimed that he has involuntarily teleported multiple times. Here's some quotes, some things he has said in this interview. "Teleporting is no fun. It was scary in a way. I mean, you don't really know, okay? Is this evil? Is this good? What is this? What do I do with this? I was on the phone and I thought, oh
15:56 Speaker 03 my God, what's happening? And I landed about 40 miles away in a ditch outside of a Baptist church in a tiny little town. It was an incredibly frightening moment to experience yourself in your car flying through the air." On another occasion, he also claimed-
16:12 Speaker 05 Wait, wait. Did he fly? Was he teleported?
16:14 Speaker 03 This is his quote. I mean, yeah, right. Did he fly? Was he teleported? Right. So it's a bit unclear, but these are the quotes. These are his quotes. Oh, here's another quote. "I was with my boys and I was telling them I was going to go to the Waffle House and get waffles. And I ended up at a Waffle House. This was in Georgia. I ended up at a Waffle House like 50 miles away from where I was." He said he told his friends where he'd ended up and they didn't believe him. But they told him, that's not possible. You just left here. You like have a long way to go. But it was possible. It was real.
16:53 Speaker 05 Is he teleporting in his car?
16:56 Speaker 03 He might be conflating two different things here, two different incidents. I think the Waffle House teleportation moment that he had is different from the other one where he was in his car. So he's, he's, he appears to be going in and out of, I don't know, phase shifting? I don't know what the heck you would, you would call this. Okay. This is the head of the Office of Response and Recovery at FEMA saying this. And of course, what do reporters do? But they go to FEMA and they ask them, hey, what are your thoughts about this? And FEMA, FEMA spokesperson responded to this by saying, it is so silly, it is barely worth acknowledging, meaning the question, right?
17:41 Speaker 03 DHS, FEMA and Mr. Phillips are focused on the critical mission of emergency management and ensuring the safety of the American people. Many of the comments cited are taken out of context or represent personal, informal, jovial, and somewhat spiritual discussions made in the context of barely surviving cancer in a private capacity prior to his current role. Okay. So that's basically what the spokesperson at FEMA has to say, running cover for their, for this person. Phillips also posted on Truth Social, which is what? Donald Trump's social media platform. God will not be mocked. People can debate me, question me, even ridicule what they don't understand. But here's the real question.
18:25 Speaker 03 What's harder to believe? That God could move in a moment during a spiritual battle or Jesus Christ rose from the dead and is coming again? I know what I've experienced. I know who I serve. Okay. So the, it was reported, then they went to the Waffle House, they went to several Waffle House locations within 50 miles of where Phillips was and interviewed the employees. And they said, well, did you see this person? Did, you know, did anybody witness something strange? Did somebody suddenly pop in, you know, and pop out, you know, like teleport in, teleport out? And no, there's no, there's no evidence, there's no eyewitnesses of all the employees
19:07 Speaker 03 they interviewed at the Waffle Houses that say, that can say they saw anything out of the usual or even remember seeing him at all.
19:15 Speaker 05 But one of them did add, I can say I've been drunk and ended up in a Waffle House. Don't know how I got there, but I was there.
19:24 Cara Santa Maria? Probably teleported.
19:25 Speaker 03 Now, so I did the thing, you know, that, you know, I think a good skeptic would do. And I went ahead and did a little research as to, okay, let's take him at his word. What would it take to teleport? What's, what's, what in physics, Bob, would it take for somebody to teleport? And, and the answer revealed itself in a couple of different ways. Okay.
19:49 Bob Novella? Quantum, quantum leap.
19:51 Speaker 03 Let me tell you what, what, what there is. They did this two different ways. That one called the energy, uh, energy calculation in terms of mass energy. In other words, teleporting a human being as commonly conceptualized in science fiction, you know, disassembling, transmitting and reassembling a person would require a large, very large amount of energy. Essentially the entire mass energy content of the human body, plus massive amounts of power for data calculation and transmission. A 70 kilogram person contains roughly 6.8 times 10 to the 18th power joules of potential energy, equivalent to over 50 times the energy of the largest nuclear bomb ever tested. All right. So here's the calculation in terms of mass energy.
20:35 Speaker 03 For, this is for a 70 kilogram person. Okay. The energy required to convert them into pure energy would equal approximately 6.3 exajoules.
20:46 Bob Novella? Yeah.
20:47 Speaker 03 That's 10 to the eight, power of 18 joules, uh, which is pretty enormous.
20:53 Bob Novella? A lot of joules.
20:53 Speaker 03 Now, and an alternate calculation says, well, some estimates for a person calculate this total is roughly 8.96 times 10 to the eight joules, or six, or 89,600 megajoules. Basically, if you want to put that into, into practical terms, that would be the equivalent of the amount of energy a house uses.
21:15 Speaker 03 Over the course of the lifetime of its home, I guess 50 years or more, and you have 2 million of those. So you'd have 2 million homes using their lifetime energy. Right, all at once.
21:24 Cara Santa Maria? Wouldn't that like affect the human body in some way?
21:28 Speaker 03 You would think so.
21:29 Cara Santa Maria? Teleporting sounds dangerous.
21:31 Speaker 05 Evan, it was a miracle, so all that doesn't matter.
21:33 Speaker 03 It was. It was. But before I wrap up, I want to also say there's another way to look at this. It's called the information transmission cost. If teleportation involves sending the data that makes up a human, the energy requirements are as such. It's been calculated that the information needed to describe a human body is roughly 2.6 times 10 to the power of 42 bits. Okay? So we're gonna do this in bits, right? 2.6 times 10 to the power of 42 bits. To transfer that amount of data within a reasonable timeframe, the required bandwidth would take roughly 10,000 gigawatt hours of power. Using high bandwidths, it would take trillions of years to transfer this information, far
22:16 Speaker 03 longer than the current age of the universe.
22:19 Speaker 05 And that's why the Star Trek transporter is bullshit.
22:21 Speaker 03 Exactly. Right. And I think we've talked about that before on the show. I will end with this. The story has a somewhat satisfying conclusion to it. This FEMA official's Truth Social posts have all been taken down as of April 4th. So he basically scrubbed himself and this entire conversation off of his posts. That is the dumbest thing of the week.
22:42 Bob Novella? Yeah, okay.
22:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's like, I'm gonna lose my job, I gotta undo all this.
22:47 Speaker 03 Maybe, that could be, Jay. Could definitely be.
22:50 Cara Santa Maria? We're not saying something.
22:52 Speaker 05 All right, thanks Evan.
22:53 Speaker 03 You're welcome.
22:54 Speaker 05 Jay, so Artemis 2, back on its way to Earth. It's splashing down tomorrow, right? As we record this on Friday?
23:01 Jay Novella? Yeah, so by the time most people hear this, it'll have landed.
23:04 Speaker 05 Which is kinda tricky, we're talking about this before it happens, and yet when you're listening to this, you know what happened.
23:09 Jay Novella? Yeah, I'm just gonna read this as if it successfully lands, right? I'm not gonna like, I think the chances of anything bad happening are so, so small that, you know, we don't have to harsh a nice mellow here, you know?
23:22 Speaker 03 I agree.
23:23 Jay Novella? So
23:23 Speaker 05 Let's hope this episode ages well.
23:25 Jay Novella? I was, yeah, we could be wrong, but you know, it's NASA has a good record. I wanted to talk about this because it's not 100% agreed upon whether or not the the heat shielding on the the Orion capsule is 100, 100% verified to to work perfectly. And the details here are very interesting. So Orion is the name of the crew module where the astronauts live during their time in space. The Orion has heat shields and the material that they use in that part of the Orion craft is called AV coat or AV coat. It's an ablative material that that binds to the bottom of Orion and it's designed to
24:09 Jay Novella? protect the capsule by slowly burning away, right, during reentry. So the material is supposed to literally like, you know, burn up and, you know, go away while the the heat gets super, super hot. And that's how they're dispersing the heat. And this is all happening during reentry. If you guys remember, after Artemis 1 returned from the moon back in December of 2022, NASA engineers, they found, the way that described it, they found more char or more char lost than expected in over 100 locations on the shield. So if you imagine, you know, the Orion capsule is roughly in the shape of a triangle, right? Like a rounded triangle.
24:48 Jay Novella? And the the bottom side where the where the ablative material is, they coat it with this with this AV coat. And then what happened was, was when the spacecraft was bouncing off of the atmosphere, it was creating, I think, hotspots that were over charing. And it was also like making gases expand inside of the ablative material and some of it was flaking off. So not, you know, not what you want. It still worked. Everything was fine. And later, later NASA concluded that it was most likely caused by, like I said, the internal gas pressure that built up. And
25:29 Jay Novella? They have to now, they had to make a decision at some point and they decided that they were not going to do the skip entry, reentry profile, that they were going to create a different way for the ship to enter the Earth's atmosphere. You know, the skipping thing is cool and you know, on paper it looks fantastic and it did work. It's just that the, the, the material that they had on there didn't jive well with it. And it's cool. So it comes down into the atmosphere and then it, it pops back out and it comes back down and it pops back out, like skipping off of the, the upper layer of the atmosphere. So NASA decided to not redesign the Artemis 2 heat shield and instead NASA says it's
26:10 Jay Novella? going to reduce any risk of changing the mission's reentry conditions. What the agency stated was that Artemis 2 will use a shallower, less aggressive return profile than Artemis 1 and it will avoid those specific conditions that created these unexpected gas pockets that made the char, it's called char loss. So NASA has also said that Artemis 1 data showed Orion's internal temperatures would still have to be acceptable for the crew, of course, even with the observed shield loss. NASA's formal position is that the heat shield behavior from Artemis 1 is understood and it's acceptable, but here's where there's a tiny, tiny little, you know, controversy, whatever you want to call it. NASA's views are not universally accepted.
26:54 Jay Novella? A 2024 NASA Office of Inspector General reported that the heat shield anomaly posed a significant safety concern and noted that the underlying cause was not fully resolved at the time of the report. And the inspector general also warned that any change in reentry conditions could introduce additional uncertainty that would need to be validated. That's roughly their words. Now, I get this. I get that they want these things overtested, but as you guys know, you know, it's cost a lot of money every time you delay, you know, it's just ridiculous how costly this is. I don't think that NASA would, would choose to send people up if they knew that there was something that was very dangerous.
27:38 Speaker 05 Well, we gotta say though, they did, they have done that in the past with the Challenger and the Columbia. You know, those were failures. There were problems that they knew about. They were like, "It'll be fine." And it obviously wasn't fine.
27:53 Jay Novella? Yeah, I guess what I was saying, Steve, is I'm like, "Did they learn their lesson?"
27:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, well.
27:57 Jay Novella? We don't know. We honestly don't know. So legitimately, though, NASA did delay Artemis II, the Artemis II launch, in part due to completing this heat shield investigation and redesigning the re-entry trajectory. And it wasn't an insignificant amount of time that these caused. So they did do a lot of investigation. They had to retool how the Orion capsule was going to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere. And, you know, it was a lot of time that they lost to that. Now, a key takeaway here is that NASA is not claiming that there wasn't an anomaly. There was. They're saying that the anomaly did not compromise the shield's
28:37 Jay Novella? core safety function on the Artemis I spacecraft. That, you know, the likely cause that they identified it, and that Artemis II can avoid the same conditions operationally. This all sounds wonderful, written out. And, you know, in the words that they're choosing to pick, it all sounds like, "Okay, very meteor and all that." Now, since we're talking about the Orion capsule re-entry, I wanted to dig into the details of what actually happens when it re-enters, because I don't think you could fully appreciate just how, you know, how good this material is that they use as a heat shield, because it's an intense experience, and it is the most dangerous part of the entire flight, which you would
29:21 Jay Novella? think, you know, for me, when I'm landing in an airplane, getting to the airport, coming to the ground again, I am joyful in an airplane. In a spacecraft, you really, it's a hurdle to get over, because it's a very dramatic experience, and there is danger. It is dangerous.
29:40 Jay Novella? But this is cool. Let me go through this for you as quickly as I can. So Orion returns from the moon, right? It's coming back from the moon. It approaches the Earth on something called a free return path. Now, what that means is that even if the capsule lost engines, anything, you know, no matter what happens on that ship, it will still come all the way back to Earth on its own because it's in, essentially, it's being controlled by the gravity wells that it's flying through. And they set up that course so well that it goes to the moon and that's it. The engines don't have to be on and it goes around the moon, it slingshots around, it comes back to Earth and it'll re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, whether they do anything or not. Now, the only thing that the astronauts need to do
30:22 Jay Novella? to make this as safe and accurate as possible, they have to make some small course corrections before re-entry. So this happens about five hours before reaching the Earth's atmosphere. So they'll do their, the final adjustment burn and the crew module separates from the service module at this time. Only the crew module has the heat shield and there's no reason to bring the service module back to Earth, right? So the service module, it's not crew accessible, you know, it has, it has mission things that it's in charge of, like it helps with propulsion, you know, this is for all the major course corrections and maneuvers. It has power from the solar arrays. There's thermal control inside of the crew capsule and water and air support. It's not intended to come back and there's
31:05 Jay Novella? just no reason to bring that extra piece with them. So they, they eject it and eventually it'll burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. Now, at this point, the crew module is oriented for re-entry, right? They, they actually, you know, will, will change the, the, not the trajectory, the attitude of the spacecraft. So the heat shield is pointing down towards Earth. So when it hits the atmosphere, the heat shield is going to be the thing that's going to be in between the astronauts and the, the plasma that literally forms around the bottom of this, right? So the heat shield is, is essentially the only thing that protects them at this point. NASA defines the start of re-entry. They call this the entry into
31:49 Jay Novella? And this happens at about 75.76 miles or 122 kilometers above the earth. Now, at this point, Orion begins compressing the thin upper layer of atmosphere in front of it. And what happens is it creates this superheated plasma sheath because it gets so hot that it literally creates plasma from essentially friction, right, guys? We talked about this before.
32:15 Speaker 05 No, no, no, it's not friction.
32:16 Jay Novella? What is it?
32:17 Bob Novella? Compression.
32:18 Jay Novella? It's the compression.
32:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, that's a very common misconception. It has nothing to do with friction. It's all about compressing the air.
32:23 Jay Novella? You said it. I know, I caught myself when I said it because I've been saying that since I was a kid with every frickin' reentry there was, you know, it's all friction. Anyway, you know, that's what everyone thought, but yeah, it's cool.
32:36 Bob Novella? Leads to meteors too, of course.
32:38 Jay Novella? So during this early phase, NASA says temperatures around the spacecraft reach about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,650 degrees Celsius. And this is the scary part. Communications are briefly lost at the most critical moment as that plasma interferes with radio signals. So there's a communication blackout that I've estimated for Artemis that lasts about 2.5 minutes out of a total of 14 minutes of reentry. So now Orion is descending deeper into the earth's atmosphere and it's now it's slowing down from what we call lunar return speed, which is the speed of the spacecraft as it's coming back from the moon. It has to slow down a lot.
33:21 Speaker 05 And this is going to be the fastest reentry ever, right?
33:24 Jay Novella? Yeah, I believe you're right, Steve.
33:26 Bob Novella? Oh, damn.
33:27 Jay Novella? So the heat intensifies, right? Because now visualize it, it's coming into the thin layer of atmosphere, gets, starts to get really hot, the compression builds and builds and builds. And as it comes down, the atmosphere is thickening. So it's getting even worse and even worse as it comes down, thicker and thicker and thicker, right? Now NASA says the heat shield. Has to withstand a highest temperature of 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,760 degrees Celsius at peak reentry, the peak meaning the hottest. And this is the highest published temperature associated with Orion's return from the moon. That is the top number that they have to protect them from. And I guess it's going to get there. So NASA hasn't published how long, but like I said, I think it's about two and a half minutes.
34:10 Jay Novella? So, you know, it's a lot of, you know, that ablative material has a lot of work to do for, that's a long time with that temperature. Now, after peak heating phase, right, this is when it starts to slow down and the temperatures now starts to drop. The main, they call it thermal danger, right, the heat danger, it's largely over at that point. I wouldn't completely say it's wiped away because there's still very high temperatures, but not, not, nowhere near as high as 5,000. Now Orion continues slowing until something called the forward bay cover is jettisoned. Now, if you, if you picture the Orion capsule, it's kind of like a triangle with a little, like a little hat on top of it, right? That's the forward bay. The forward bay cover comes off and the first round of parachutes deploy.
34:54 Jay Novella? NASA says that these are, they are two small drogue parachutes. They, they open, this happens around 25,000 feet or 7,620 meters. And then it slows the capsule to roughly 307 miles per hour or 494 kilometers per hour. And they, and these also stabilize Orion. Now about 9,500 feet or 2,900 meters, the pilot parachutes deploy. And what they do, their sole job is to pull out the three main large chutes. Now these three large chutes, these are the ones that you typically see when you see historic pictures of a space capsule coming down. The, this will slow Orion from about 130 miles per hour or 209 kilometers per hour to around 17 miles per hour.
35:38 Jay Novella? That's 27 kilometers per hour till splashdown. So they go from roughly, you know, 25,000 miles per hour to 17. With the help of, it's slowing down, the Orion spacecraft is slowing down because it's You know, it's hitting all of that air, which would slow anything down. Like, there's a, there's a, you know, basically, if it just kept going, it would, it would go at the, at the typical speed of things dropping.
36:05 Speaker 05 It would terminal velocity.
36:07 Jay Novella? Exactly. But they have to get it to a cozy 17 miles per hour, 27 kilometers per hour. Now, parts of Orion's exterior are still hot or warm at splashdown. But the capsule is not arriving as this glowing furnace because the temperatures have dramatically dropped as it gets lower. Now, either way, the water cools it down too. And the entire process, like I said, it could be, take up to 14 minutes. NASA, their current timeline for Artemis 2, the entry interface begins at 7:53 PM Eastern Standard Time. And splashdown happens at 8:07 PM Eastern Standard Time. Now, reading astronauts' depictions of what it's like to be in the ship.
36:49 Jay Novella? You know, communications are out. Any windows that they have are just covered in orange, yellow, and red flame. And, you know, I've heard several astronauts say, like, once they finally realize they're out of that danger zone, it's, it's huge relief because it's, you know, smooth sailing from there on out. So if you have a chance, definitely check it out, guys. They're gonna have great camera footage of this. You know, I don't, I don't think you should miss it. Now that you really know what's going on, you'll see the different steps as it comes down. And you're gonna see a fireball, you know, and it's gonna be awesome. And I, I want to experience that relief when I see the astronauts get out of that capsule.
37:27 Speaker 05 Yeah. And these capsules have these large orange balloons that inflate once it hits the water. It's part of their upwriting system. The Apollo didn't have that. And they lost one of the Apollo capsules, right? Because it sank. So this would keep that from happening, it looks like.
37:45 Jay Novella? They picked the color orange for a very specific reason.
37:48 Speaker 05 Cause it's your favorite color?
37:49 Jay Novella? Cause Jay likes it.
37:52 Speaker 05 Or visibility, one of the, one of those two.
37:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:54 Speaker 05 What's more important here?
37:55 Speaker 03 Orange.
37:57 Speaker 05 So Kara, this is again, another one of these neuroscience studies showing stuff happening in the brain. This one having to do with our sense of fairness. Tell me about that.
38:07 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I'm actually more interested in the behavioral psychological study that was performed by these authors than what lit up in the brain. What did I just miss? What did you say? Of course you are.
38:18 Speaker 05 Yeah.
38:19 Speaker 03 Keep going Kara, you're good.
38:21 Cara Santa Maria? So this, I like this study because it is sort of a mixture of neuroscience meets computational science meets like psychology meets philosophy, all the things we love here on, on SGO. So some South Korean researchers put some students in a scanner. They gave them a few bucks and said, sit in a scanner and make some decisions for us. And they were like, okay, we're going to do it. And it's a small study, you know, anytime we talk about FMRI studies, the, the numbers are usually pretty low. This one's actually kind of more than, than typical. I think it was, yeah, like 50 some odd students that they put into these scanners.
38:58 Cara Santa Maria? And what they were really interested in is a question about decision-making and really moral philosophy. They were curious about whether people tend to go with a more utilitarian approach or a Rawlsian approach, which may be meaningless for those of you who haven't studied these aspects of, of ethics. So does anybody know the difference between utilitarianism and Rawlsianism? Possibly, maybe not. That's okay. Don't worry about it. We'll, we'll cover it right now.
39:38 Speaker 05 I do, because I read the article.
39:40 Cara Santa Maria? Because you read the article. Yeah. So utilitarianism, that kind of happened first. Utilitarianism is an ethical theory that was sort of originally founded by Jeremy Bentham, but then later discussed kind of in more detail by John Stuart Mill. And the idea here is that basically the best action to do, the best decision to make is the one that maximizes.
40:08 Speaker 03 Right that one.
40:09 Cara Santa Maria? I gotta add it to the list.
40:10 Speaker 03 That's a good one.
40:13 Cara Santa Maria? Maximizes, make it a little simpler, whatever the positive thing is that you're looking for, for the most people. So if we're going to make some sort of political decision, a policy decision, we're going to pick the one that, you know, brings the most people fairness, or justice, or, or health, or wealth, and that minimizes the harm to the, the greatest number of people. So that would be a utilitarian approach to decision making. How do we make a decision that maximizes joy, or, or happiness, or pleasure, and minimizes pain for the greatest number of people? Then comes along John Rawls, who in 71 wrote A Theory of Justice, and he
40:56 Cara Santa Maria? proposes justice as fairness. And in this work, he basically says, I've got an alternative to utilitarianism. I don't think it's about what's the best for the most people. I want to talk about something called the difference principle, which states that we should make decisions that offer the greatest benefit to the least advantaged people. So when we make decisions, let's not make decisions based on the most people, like maximizing the efficiency of the decision, and the most people having happiness, whatever, money, whatever the case may be. Let's think about the people who are the most disadvantaged, and how can we benefit them, right? How can we have, we are only as strong as the weakest
41:40 Cara Santa Maria? among us. That would be a good way to put it, as opposed to a rising tide raises all boats. Does that make sense? The two different approaches? Okay. Okay. So these researchers said, okay, let's figure out a paradigm for that, that we can put on a computer screen so that our students can lay in an FMRI machine and only move their finger. And so their paradigm had to do with ice water. Stay with me. They said, what happens if we give students the option to, basically, like, I don't remember if they pulled the lever, or they rolled a ball, but basically to have a screen in
42:18 Cara Santa Maria? front of them on the FMRI, where they can choose either that one person is subjected to A certain amount of ice water on their hand, like they put their hand in ice water and it's painful, right? So, one person is doing that for a certain amount of time versus a lot of people doing it for less time each, but when you add it all together, there's actually more pain minutes or pain seconds calculated. Does that make sense to everybody? So, over here in the one group, one person deals with, let's say, one minute of cold ice water and ow, ow, ow.
43:02 Cara Santa Maria? And over here, three people each have 30 seconds. So, each individual person has less than the one person, but collectively, yes. And collectively, they're sharing more pain, not the same amount of pain. That makes sense to everybody?
43:18 Speaker 03 Okay.
43:19 Cara Santa Maria? What do you think people would choose? Anybody but Steve. I'm simplifying it for the podcast, but because they didn't do, you know, one minute versus one and a half minutes.
43:28 Speaker 03 What would they choose?
43:29 Cara Santa Maria? So, once again, over, over there, we've got one person with 60 seconds of ow, ow, ow. And over here, we've got three different people, each with 30 seconds of ow, ow, ow, for a total of 1.5 minutes.
43:42 Speaker 03 Well, maybe they, maybe the thought is that because it's just one person as opposed to three, the number matters. And if you, you know, have three people with some level of discomfort, that's worse than having one person with, with some level of discomfort. So, you go with the one.
43:57 Cara Santa Maria? So, that's interesting. So, that would be a utilitarian approach. And what would be then?
44:03 Speaker 03 Is that what people, is that what, how people went with that decision?
44:05 Cara Santa Maria? We'll, we'll get there in a second. What would be, so, so does that make sense, why that would be utilitarian versus the other one being Rawlsian? We're spreading out the pain a little bit, but now that one person is not in more pain than anybody else? That makes sense, right?
44:19 Speaker 03 Yes, I follow.
44:21 Cara Santa Maria? People go Rawlsian.
44:24 Cara Santa Maria? They want to spread the pain around. So long, though, here's an important part. So long as that pain stays within a specific threshold. If it gets to the point where the pain is, let's say, just as bad per person as it would have been for the weakest person or the most vulnerable person, then it no longer is Rawlsian.
44:47 Speaker 05 Even though when you add it all up, there's still more pain going that direction.
44:50 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly. People don't think in a more utilitarian way when they are faced with that dilemma, or at least the students in this, in this study did not think that way. And that does follow previous research that shows that up to certain parameters, because you can kind of push this in either direction and people will change their approach. But given a sort of middle ground choice, people tend to choose the Rawlsian approach. They tend to protect the person in the worst position over minimizing total harm. And so the question first and foremost is, why would they do that? And then the question that these researchers also wanted to ask is, what's happening in
45:35 Cara Santa Maria? the brain while they're doing this?
45:36 Speaker 05 Karik, I tell you, I have a huge problem with this paradigm. You want to know why?
45:40 Cara Santa Maria? Sure. Yeah, yeah, tell me, tell me.
45:42 Speaker 05 The problem is that it assumes pain is linear, and I don't believe it is. And I think we all know that intuitively. So in other words, they might think, oh, 30 seconds in ice bucket, yeah, you can get through that, but a minute? I mean, it's not as if it's twice as much pain. A minute in cold, it's cumulative.
46:01 Cara Santa Maria? It's a lot worse.
46:02 Speaker 05 That could be 10 times as much pain as 30 seconds in it.
46:06 Cara Santa Maria? For sure.
46:07 Speaker 05 So I think that, you know, basically could confound their entire interpretation of the results.
46:12 Cara Santa Maria? Well, especially if you had people with different understandings in the scanner of that reality, right? That some people might know that and some people might not know that. On average, though, I will tell you, the participants were willing to deal with or choose 68 additional seconds, so over a minute of additional total discomfort, split up amongst the kind of shared group, just to ensure that the individual person wasn't, you know, suffering unfairly. So that was like, you know, there's, that's a big, a big, as you mentioned, 68 seconds of, of ice on your hand is pretty painful.
46:52 Speaker 05 Yeah. But again, it could be, that's still assuming, that's making an assumption, which may not be true. For some people, the utilitarian decision might be to have the three people suffer for 30 seconds than one person for a minute, because the total amount of pain for a minute might be much more than what the three people are experiencing.
47:12 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I think you're right. The only way for this experiment to work and to make sense is to assume that the parameters that we're working with are low enough that you're not crossing some sort of threshold where the pain becomes exponentially worse.
47:27 Speaker 05 I think, I think ice is a bad pain giver here, because we've all experienced, I don't know if you've ever done the challenge, how long would you keep your hand in the ice bucket? That pain is not linear, right? That, the pain, the discomfort of being in there gets, is like geometrically increasing.
47:43 Cara Santa Maria? I also don't even know why they chose a paradigm that is actually like a reasonable paradigm, because they didn't, they, they could have picked like stabby stabby, it's not actually happening. They're, they're looking at schematics, you know what I mean?
47:57 Speaker 05 Do I have to use a pain box like in Dune? No, but.
47:58 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, I, I don't understand, like, why they didn't pick something a little more aggressive.
48:02 Speaker 05 The ice bucket is a common paradigm that we use to study pain thresholds.
48:06 Cara Santa Maria? Which is fine in an actual experiment where people are doing it, but that's why I think this is strange, because they're just in a scanner, making decisions about what would happen. And, and so you could, it could be fake, it could be actual pain.
48:22 Speaker 05 Were they asked why they made the decision they did?
48:26 Cara Santa Maria? No.
48:26 Speaker 05 That would have been interesting to hear what they said.
48:29 Cara Santa Maria? Here's what they did, is they did another layer to this that's even, I, I find even more interesting than the, I'm going to choose to spread around the pain versus have the one person deal with the, with the bulk of it. They also did this paradigm, which I actually really love, where the decision was already made, because basically it was two groups. You had the single person and you had the three people, and then there was a ball that rolled. Towards them and the ball would either roll in one direction or the other direction based on a lever.
49:01 Speaker 05 Oh, the lever, yeah.
49:02 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, so you had to choose to move the lever or not. You weren't choosing left or right. You weren't choosing, you know, one person or three people, even though, yes, technically you were, you were actually choosing act or don't act. And that brings in a whole Kantian dimension to this. So now we're talking about deontology, deontological ethics, which is an ethical theory about morality, right? That basically says there are rules and you do the rule, you like follow the rules always. And if you follow the rules, whatever happens is the right thing that happens. And if you don't follow the rules, the outcome is the wrong outcome. And it's, it's, it's pretty kind of concrete.
49:45 Speaker 05 It's like the opposite of utilitarianism in a way.
49:48 Cara Santa Maria? I mean, yeah, in a way, right? It's, it's, they're all kind of related, but they were interested and they hypothesized that people will choose not to act if it means them that they don't have to feel responsible for whatever outcome happens. But they found that even when they were faced with the act, don't act choice, they chose to act to induce a Rawlsian option. They chose to move the ball away from the single person who was going to bear the brunt of the pain to spread the pain out amongst more people, even when they could have just sat back and done nothing and said, it's not my fault, the ball was rolling that way anyway. And that actually I found fascinating because that adds a whole other
50:32 Cara Santa Maria? dimension of intentionality to this study. Now, the neuroscience part, I'm not interested in at all. I mean, like, I don't know how you feel about it, Steve, but basically they're saying, hey, look, the medial prefrontal cortex lit up. Hey, look, the caudate lit up. Hey, look, the cingulate gyrus lit up. And it's like, yeah, because these are areas that are involved in reward, in emotion. I think the one thing that is really, I guess, interesting is that the medial prefrontal cortex, what their claim is, here, there is a requirement of sort of.
51:06 Cara Santa Maria? Empathetic, like, high-level executive function here. Like, probably the reason, not the reason, but probably what is happening when these people are making this Rawlsian decision is they are empathizing, they're mentalizing with the person who may be about to carry the brunt of the harm. And they're saying, "That looks painful. I'm putting myself in your shoes. I don't want to carry that much pain. I don't want to do that to you. So I'd rather spread out less pain individually amongst multiple people, even though if I add up all the pain together, it's not as, uh, it's, it's, it's more." And to me, when we really take a step back, it's like a duh answer. And maybe it's because this is how I think, you know?
51:51 Cara Santa Maria? And I'm just relating it to my own biases. But yes, the collective harm may be worse, but that's not how harm is interpreted by the human mind, right? If everybody gets 50 cents instead of a dollar, everybody still has 50 cents. That's the part that I don't really, it's hard for me to wrap my head around a utilitarian approach. So it's really interesting, Evan, that that was your choice at the beginning, because it made sure.
52:20 Speaker 05 No, no, you asked me what I thought.
52:22 Cara Santa Maria? What you thought people would do. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
52:24 Speaker 05 I wasn't, I wasn't expressing.
52:25 Cara Santa Maria? You weren't saying that's what you would do.
52:26 Speaker 05 Necessarily, right.
52:27 Cara Santa Maria? But it is interesting that, that you hypothesized that that is how people would respond, because I think along the lines of, okay, what does harm feel like? Do I want this one person to feel 100% of harm? Or do I want four other people to feel 50% each? Yes, that is 200% harm, but we don't add our harm to our friend's harm. We don't experience harm that way. You know what I mean?
52:54 Speaker 05 Yeah.
52:55 Cara Santa Maria? From a personal perspective, we don't carry the weight additively. But that is often how we make policy decisions. It's often how we think from an economic, governmental, sociopolitical perspective.
53:09 Speaker 05 Which often seems cold-hearted, right? If you're just making.
53:11 Cara Santa Maria? Right.
53:12 Speaker 05 Number-based decisions, because emotionally, we're worried about the extremity of the harm, not how many people it's affecting.
53:21 Cara Santa Maria? But ultimately, I wonder if that is always appropriate because are, you know, more people having a smaller reduction, let's say, in their wages versus a handful of people having a dramatic reduction in their wages? How does that affect the economy? Is the catastrophic harm actually going to have knock on effects that are worse than a little blip across more people?
53:47 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think another way to look at it is we are more bothered by the idea of one person experiencing a lot of pain than we are by multiple people experiencing less pain. The amount of pain features larger in our calculation emotionally than the number of people being affected.
54:05 Bob Novella? Yeah.
54:06 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, and I can't help but think about, I think I've told you guys that I've been rewatching Friday Night Lights, Coach Taylor. I don't know if any of you ever watched it.
54:13 Speaker 05 Oh, I love that show. It was great.
54:15 Cara Santa Maria? I do, too. Clear ass, full hearts, can't lose. It is very, yeah, that is my childhood. But I think about in every, you know, big sports show, there's always that big scene where somebody does something, but nobody wants to rat him out. So then they all have to go like run, you know, up and down the bleachers for three hours because no one person will stand up and say, he did it. It's like more harm spread out amongst anybody to prevent that one person from getting maximum harm. And you see that sort of moral code play out over and over. It's really interesting that that seems to be pretty fundamental.
54:50 Speaker 05 And if you flip, I think there's another, there's always multiple elements with these kind of decision making, you know, paradigms. Another element is, is this being inflicted upon these people or are they choosing it? It's like, we respect somebody who takes a hit for the team, right? No, I'll take all the pain to spare everybody else the pain. And we respect that, but we wouldn't inflict it upon them without their consent.
55:11 Cara Santa Maria? No, yeah, we don't like a rat. Yeah, but we, but we do like the honor of somebody standing up. That's for sure.
55:17 Speaker 05 Right, right.
55:18 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, it's really, really interesting. And it comes back to all these cool, like moral philosophy questions, like trolley problem questions and things like that. And I'm always just super fascinated by how, how people react. Then again, just like you said, it is a big problem that the pain thing isn't linear. I think it's also a big problem when we try to make. Inferences about actual human behavior based on paradigms like this.
55:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
55:42 Cara Santa Maria? Because there are no stakes here, none. It shows you what you think immediately, like what your initial reaction is and what's happening in your brain. But once the stakes get higher, I think, you know, the decision making becomes different or at least more difficult.
55:58 Speaker 05 Yeah, this is the kind of study that needs to be replicated a lot of different ways so we could see, you know, the how the confounders will kind of average out. Think about it this way, would you rather give five people first degree burns or one person third degree burns?
56:13 Cara Santa Maria? Five people first degree.
56:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, of course.
56:15 Jay Novella? Can I pick who that one person is?
56:17 Cara Santa Maria? Exactly. That changes things a lot. I think we have to do these studies with random people that we don't know.
56:23 Speaker 03 It's on random.
56:25 Speaker 05 Or both.
56:26 Jay Novella? No fun.
56:27 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, exactly.
56:28 Speaker 05 You could vary everything and see how it influences the outcome. I think you'd be surprised.
56:32 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, and that's what they did in the study too. You're right, Stephen, that's an important thing to point out. There is a certain point where the paradigm breaks, right? Where the individual has less harm or the groups start to carry more harm and there's a point where it crosses over. Because would you rather give one person a second degree burn or four people a second degree burn? Well, probably just one.
56:53 Speaker 05 Yeah. Right. But it is, it is like literally a calculation that's happening somewhere deep in our brain that we're not consciously aware of. It's like an algorithm running in the background that that eventually makes the decision for us in a way.
57:06 Jay Novella? The pain.
57:07 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. Yeah. Fascinating.
57:10 Speaker 05 All right, thanks, Cara.
57:11 Cara Santa Maria? Yep.
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58:23 Speaker 05 All right, guys, let's get back to the show. So guys, let me ask you a question. What do you think about genetically engineering humans?
58:32 Bob Novella? I'm all for it.
58:32 Cara Santa Maria? That is fraught. I think it is very fraught.
58:36 Bob Novella? It's the future of mankind. It's inevitable.
58:39 Speaker 03 Is AI gonna, is AI gonna do it?
58:41 Speaker 05 I don't like it. Who gets to actually decide what, what's good and what isn't?
58:44 Cara Santa Maria? All right, well. Like eugenics.
58:47 Speaker 05 Let's start to break it down a little bit. Okay. So first, we, the FDA has approved genetic engineering for humans. As, as a treatment for disease. Remember we talked about this for like sickle cell and thalassemia? But these are genetic engineering to somatic cells.
59:06 Bob Novella? Yeah, not germline.
59:07 Speaker 05 Meaning that they only affect that person and they cannot be passed down to future generations. So I think we've already sort of collectively decided that this is okay. You know, that we could make somatic cell mutations to treat disease, right?
59:23 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, it's not that different than taking medicine or having a surgery or, yeah.
59:27 Speaker 05 The question is, there's a couple of questions. One, can we use genetic engineering to do things other than treating cheat? Than treating diseases? And two, should we do genetic manipulation to the germline so that whatever we do can theoretically be passed down to future generations? It gets into the human gene pool, right?
59:51 Bob Novella? Yeah.
59:51 Speaker 05 That's scary. So.
59:53 Cara Santa Maria? I say yes and no.
59:54 Speaker 05 Yeah. So, so far, you know, the, there is no hard and fast ban, by the way. There's no straight up ban against genetically modifying human germlines.
1:00:06 Speaker 05 Uh, anywhere. There is sort of an international standard, norm, if you will, but there isn't, there aren't any enforceable international laws. And in the US, which is typical of other countries, so in the US, there's no federal ban, but there is a ban on funding for federal, for research, like so federal dollars will not go to fund research into human germline genetic engineering.
1:00:35 Speaker 03 I remember.
1:00:35 Cara Santa Maria? But some billionaire could fund it, no problem.
1:00:38 Speaker 05 But it could be privately funded.
1:00:39 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:00:40 Speaker 05 Now.
1:00:40 Speaker 03 Uh oh.
1:00:41 Speaker 05 But what if you did the private funding?
1:00:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:00:44 Speaker 05 Could you get FDA approval? And the answer is no, because in order to get FDA approval, you need to do, you know, federally approved studies, and you do FDA approved studies, and you can't do them because those are illegal, right?
1:00:56 Cara Santa Maria? Right, but billionaires are like putting the blood of the youth in their veins already. Like, that's not FDA approved either.
1:01:03 Speaker 05 But what could happen, well, first of all, you could do it illegally, sure, but you could also just privately fund the research and then give the treatment in a country that doesn't have a ban, which this already exists. This is sort of the tourism, you know, healthcare tourism. Go to a clinic somewhere in some country that doesn't have, that has lax regulations. That's where you get your treatment, that you're not going to be outlawed as a person, right? So it's just, the research may be not fundable federally, and the treatment may, you may not be able to do in the United States or in other, you know, industrialized nations. But so, but, you know, there's so far no mechanism to keep this from happening
1:01:44 Speaker 05 anywhere, right? This is all concerning because startups are starting to take an interest in commercial genetic engineering, including germline engineering. They're not doing it, but they're taking an interest in it. They're like exploring the possibility.
1:02:04 Speaker 05 Of doing it. And to me, that's a problem because I certainly you said someone asked, who decides? I think having a startup decide is probably the worst case scenario. You know, I think this should be something that is carefully regulated, like many technologies we deal with these days, crypto, AI, blah, blah, all these things. If it's properly regulated, it could be a powerful force of goodness and a useful tool, but improperly or unregulated, there's a lot of potential for abuse.
1:02:35 Cara Santa Maria? Well, yeah, it's gonna be like gene maxing. Like that's gonna
1:02:39 Speaker 05 Gene maxing.
1:02:40 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. Oh, my God.
1:02:41 Bob Novella? Karen, a new horrible term. Thank you.
1:02:44 Cara Santa Maria? You're welcome.
1:02:45 Speaker 05 Oh, my God. Why am I so confident that's gonna be a term now?
1:02:49 Cara Santa Maria? It is. Of course it is. It's a low hanging fruit, you guys.
1:02:52 Speaker 05 All right. So I I wrote about this today. I broke it down into three broad categories of the types of genetic engineering you could do, whether germline or somatic.
1:03:03 Bob Novella? And I think the first Do superheroes or supervillains come into play here at any point?
1:03:06 Speaker 05 Yes, it does. It does.
1:03:08 Bob Novella? Awesome. Awesome.
1:03:08 Speaker 05 The first one is treating genetic disease, right?
1:03:12 Bob Novella? No brainer.
1:03:13 Speaker 05 And I think that's the one that's kind of a no brainer. The only thing that you would worry about is that there would be unintended consequences. But if it's properly studied and we're like, all right, we're just going to turn your disease causing allele into a healthy allele version of the same gene.
1:03:32 Bob Novella? Maybe we do it now. Right. This is done. This is happening.
1:03:35 Speaker 05 Not in the germline.
1:03:37 Cara Santa Maria? No, not in the germline.
1:03:38 Bob Novella? Okay.
1:03:38 Cara Santa Maria? That's the difference. But if we could turn off a BRCA positive, you know, like if we could just turn that off so that people just no longer get that gene. Like, I think that humanity would rejoice.
1:03:51 Speaker 05 There's a lot of horrible genetic diseases.
1:03:54 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:03:54 Speaker 05 And yes, if we could just, I mean, there's, we could never make them all go away forever because there's a spontaneous mutation rate. But basically, we can get them down to the spontaneous mutation rate. And then if if and then test for them at a young age and or even, you know, in the womb or with IVF. If you could do it on the eggs and the sperm or whatever, then you could treat it, either prevent it early or treat it as soon as it's identified. But we would pretty dramatically reduce the incidence of genetic diseases if we could eliminate all known existence of them. And then we're just down to the spontaneous mutation rate. Right? Everybody understand that? What I mean by say this?
1:04:34 Jay Novella? Yeah, I got you.
1:04:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean, you have a genetic disease that mutated in you, like you didn't inherit it from your parents.
1:04:41 Cara Santa Maria? Right. A lot of cancer is like that, right? You've got mutated tumor suppressors or mutated oncogenes. It's just, we have certain known ones that we look for now. And when we find them, we target treatments towards them.
1:04:53 Speaker 05 All right. So I think I don't, I don't see any serious objection to that. Once it's properly studied, you know, they can FDA approval, blah, blah, blah, you know, but ethically, in terms of unintended consequences, probably not much of a downside to curing genetic disease, right?
1:05:08 Cara Santa Maria? Right. Because it's super targeted.
1:05:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, totally.
1:05:11 Cara Santa Maria? And we've studied these genes up the wazoo. Like, it's not like we don't know everything there is to know about these genes.
1:05:16 Speaker 05 All you're doing them, doing is giving them alleles, versions of the gene that are already in the population. You're not introducing something novel to the human gene pool. You're just removing something partially from the gene pool. Okay. The next category is not treating genetic disease, but modifying risk factors for disease. And so that gets a little tricky, but you, there's, this is, I think, kind of a spectrum. And so some of it is probably okay. But so like, for example, what if we could alter your genes to make it so that you don't get cholesterol built up, right?
1:05:58 Speaker 05 You know, there are some people in the world that have genetically just don't get carding of the arteries. They just don't get cholesterol built up. While other people are like almost guaranteed to get it and have heart attacks when they're in their 40s.
1:06:10 Cara Santa Maria? No matter how good their diet is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:06:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. So if, yeah, so and then where do you, where's the cutoff? So certainly there's like familial hypercholesterolemia, right? You have a bad gene. That means you're going to have really hard to treat, very high cholesterol. And that's almost a disease where you could say, we're just going to treat this disease, right?
1:06:31 Bob Novella? Is it hard to treat?
1:06:31 Cara Santa Maria? It's in the whole population.
1:06:32 Bob Novella? Statins won't help?
1:06:34 Speaker 05 They do help.
1:06:34 Cara Santa Maria? They do, but you have to then take statins for the rest of your life. And what if we just didn't have to do that?
1:06:39 Speaker 05 You have to take them and then you're still going to be riding high. Just not super high.
1:06:45 Cara Santa Maria? This would be an economic boon for an entire population, right? Because right now, we spend a lot of money treating chronic disease.
1:06:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, so if you're very selective in what you're treating, it's very cost effective. It is good health promotion. Then there are things like Alzheimer's disease. Now, there are familial forms of Alzheimer's disease, which is basically a genetic disease. But there's also genes that confer increased risk. It's not a guarantee that you're going to get Alzheimer's disease, but your risk could be 10 times the background risk or the risk of other alleles. And so, again, it's hard to say that we shouldn't do that. Like, if you knew you had a high-risk genes in your family, would you want them to be turned into the low-risk genes? Sure. But here's a potential downside. So, this does convey risk for unintended consequences. What would you?
1:07:35 Bob Novella? Supervillains, right?
1:07:37 Speaker 05 No, no, we're not there yet. That's the third category. What would you say might be a potential? Again, I'm just myself just speculating here, but I thought of one pretty big potential for unintended consequence. Anybody have any thoughts on what?
1:07:49 Bob Novella? Well, for which one specifically?
1:07:51 Speaker 05 For just in general, altering genes that are associated so that you have the genes that are associated with a lower risk of a specific disease.
1:08:02 Bob Novella? Yeah, but that could totally backfire. The interactions are so complex. You can't predict it. You can't predict what's going to happen.
1:08:09 Speaker 05 It could backfire. And there's a specific reason why that is. And you have to ask yourself, why does this gene exist in the gene pool in the first place? Right, yes.
1:08:18 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, what is it protecting against?
1:08:19 Speaker 05 Right, because most genes that are quote-unquote "bad" are actually really a trade-off. So, yeah, it may confer high cholesterol or high blood pressure or an increased risk of Alzheimer's disease or whatever, but it might mitigate other risks at the same time.
1:08:37 Bob Novella? Like spontaneous human explosion.
1:08:39 Speaker 05 Exactly.
1:08:40 Cara Santa Maria? Well, yeah, I mean, think about like a gene that causes Alzheimer's or contributes to an Alzheimer's diagnosis in somebody's mid to late 80s. What if it was protecting something else that could have happened in their 20s, 30s, 40s?
1:08:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:08:54 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, we don't know.
1:08:55 Speaker 05 Or maybe it's associated with higher intelligence, you know, or whatever.
1:08:59 Cara Santa Maria? And the other, I think the other thing on this, not even getting to the superhero part yet, but, but the one and the two of it all, right? The, the genetic diseases and then the like predispositions. We're not even talking about the social justice conversation here, which is who gets these treatments?
1:09:15 Speaker 03 Right.
1:09:16 Cara Santa Maria? Because as soon as only a certain percentage of the population has access to this, you're just dramatically increasing the division between rich and poor.
1:09:26 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah. I agree. And I was going to get to that after I told you what the third category is. But yeah, absolutely. I mean, this, you know, this is where I think regulation comes in. We would want such treatments to be, you know, fairly distributed and regulated, you know, and researched so that we could minimize the probability of unintended negative consequences.
1:09:49 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:09:50 Speaker 05 So even, I was going to say the, like, even sickle cell, you know, protects against malaria. That's why it persists in populations.
1:09:59 Cara Santa Maria? That's a good, that's a perfect example.
1:10:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, where malaria is, it was rampant. Yeah. So essentially what the, the way I'd look at it is all we would really be doing would be reducing genetic diversity in the human population.
1:10:11 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, which is not good.
1:10:12 Speaker 05 Which is not good. We're selecting for things that we know to be beneficial, but we may be also narrowing the genetic resilience in our population.
1:10:21 Speaker 03 Short-term gain, long-term consequences.
1:10:23 Jay Novella? So see, what would they have to do? Like, they would genetically change people and then they keep them in there for like 50 years to study them?
1:10:30 Speaker 05 Well, that's the thing. It would take a long time to study them. Here's one way in which this very easily could bite us in the ass. Maybe things look great for a while and then we get hit with a pandemic and it turns out all those genetic changes that we're making made us more susceptible to whatever infection. Earlier. This is, this is how species get wiped out by an infection. They have a narrowing of their genetic diversity. Usually genetic diversity makes a population resilient to things, stressors like infections, like pandemics. So that's a, that's a problematic one, but I think if we research the hell out of very specific changes, there could be some that where yes, the benefits clearly outweigh the risks and, and I could see incorporating
1:11:12 Speaker 05 some of these, but I wouldn't just open the door like willy nilly to any of these without carefully researching them.
1:11:18 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:11:18 Speaker 05 Because it's so. Definitely not willy.
1:11:20 Cara Santa Maria? It's like we do with GM crops.
1:11:21 Speaker 05 Maybe nilly, but not willy. Yeah.
1:11:23 Cara Santa Maria? Well, like how many, how many genes does the human being possess?
1:11:27 Speaker 05 20,000.
1:11:28 Cara Santa Maria? So like, it's like with GM crops, right? Like if we determine that 15 genes can be the target of these therapies and you know, 15 of 20,000 is much less likely
1:11:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:11:39 Cara Santa Maria? to cause widespread, you know, damage when they're super targeted. But yeah, you're right. Once we're editing a thousand of our 20,000.
1:11:48 Speaker 05 The risk obviously goes up the more we do.
1:11:50 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Huge impact.
1:11:50 Speaker 05 All right. Now here's my third category. Yay. And this is what I call gain of function alterations. Augmentation, baby.
1:11:57 Cara Santa Maria? This is the one where.
1:11:58 Speaker 05 That's a, that's a trigger term, Steve. So this could be. So for this. But sir, this is what, this is what gain of function research is. So this is, gain of function means now you're introducing novel genes into the human population, either ones from other animals or ones that have, that are novel genes that have been genetically engineered. Never evolved. Yes. And they are designed to give humans.
1:12:21 Speaker 05 You know, preternatural abilities that they don't already have, that are not already present within the human population.
1:12:27 Cara Santa Maria? You're skipping a step in between, which is the, the not so much to reduce.
1:12:33 Speaker 05 Restore a function.
1:12:34 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, like, like the, the maxing step, right?
1:12:36 Speaker 05 Well, yeah.
1:12:37 Cara Santa Maria? Like, we take Lance Armstrong's genetics that gave him more mitochondria or whatever. And we, so yes, it does exist naturally in the population.
1:12:46 Speaker 05 Super soldier serum.
1:12:47 Cara Santa Maria? Mm hmm.
1:12:48 Speaker 05 You're right. You could include that. I mean, I was including that in the gain of function.
1:12:51 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, see, I would think of it too.
1:12:52 Speaker 05 Because it's not, you're not treating anything or preventing any disease. You're just improving strength or beauty or intelligence.
1:12:57 Cara Santa Maria? Stronger, better, faster.
1:12:58 Speaker 05 And that could be within the, within the bounds of existing human.
1:13:01 Cara Santa Maria? Start with natural genes.
1:13:02 Speaker 05 Yeah, variation, or it could exceed beyond those bounds. So you could split them up into two subgroups, but yeah, but that's all sort of gain of function. And that's where the, the concern about unequal distribution really gets, you know.
1:13:17 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, that's, I mean, this is eugenics, right?
1:13:19 Speaker 05 Yeah, then you have like a super race.
1:13:21 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:13:22 Speaker 05 Right? This is Gattaca, right? You have a super race of genetically modified people, and then you have the regular schlubs who are an inferior race now. And this is where unintended consequences can be huge. And this could do, there's lots of potential concerns here, you know, blurring the lines of what it means to be human, for example, you know what I mean? And, and again, unequal distribution or access to things that would give some people a completely unfair advantage over everybody else.
1:13:51 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, how would we even like, how would we even regulate things like the Olympics or college admissions or, you know, like if people can just say, I want to be this tall, this fast. Brave new world. Yeah, exactly. It's gonna happen.
1:14:05 Speaker 05 Plus also, these kids are not making decisions for themselves, right? And so.
1:14:08 Cara Santa Maria? That's the real, I mean, that, it's hard enough to grapple with what, you know, what the existentialists call throneness.
1:14:15 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:14:16 Cara Santa Maria? I think that's a big thing that in, in my therapy, throneness, it means that you just came into existence. You did not consult with your parents before they made you. And so you just had awareness one day and realized that you are saddled with. This life and this world and you have to do with it what you choose to do with it and come to grips with that.
1:14:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:14:36 Cara Santa Maria? And that is such a crisis for so many people. Now imagine that you were thrown into existence with, you know, the premier genes or without access to the premier genes.
1:14:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. Or what if there's a backlash against the technology now everybody who has them is suddenly their second-class citizens.
1:14:54 Cara Santa Maria? Right, right.
1:14:55 Speaker 05 You know?
1:14:56 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, because there, of course, there's going to be a stigma around all of this.
1:14:59 Bob Novella? Let's just do it. Let's just do it.
1:15:02 Speaker 05 Couple of other possibilities. So what if?
1:15:04 Bob Novella? Come on, it's gonna be a fun ride no matter what happens.
1:15:08 Speaker 05 All right, what if some countries decide they're going to use this technology to make super soldiers?
1:15:12 Bob Novella? Well, then we gotta do it too.
1:15:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:15:14 Speaker 05 Right.
1:15:14 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, the what if is, is a, yeah.
1:15:16 Jay Novella? Steve, we cannot have a super soldier gap.
1:15:19 Speaker 05 Then you're gonna have super mutants like Fallout 4, right Jake, going around?
1:15:23 Jay Novella? Yeah, I mean, ultimately, we're gonna end up there anyway, Steve, so what's the most
1:15:26 Speaker 05 I don't know, I'm not willing to say that. I'm not willing to say it. We're gonna end up there anyways, so let's do it. I think we don't have to end up with these worst-case scenarios.
1:15:34 Jay Novella? Well, I hope you're right, but it certainly seems like it over the past year that we're heading that way.
1:15:37 Bob Novella? Well, what if we can increase empathy, give everyone superhuman empathy? Would that be a bad thing? How about that? Let's start there.
1:15:43 Speaker 05 I don't know.
1:15:44 Cara Santa Maria? Maybe if we did that, then none of the other stuff would follow.
1:15:47 Speaker 05 But maybe if we did that, there are, I mean, I could so easily see unintended consequences to that as well.
1:15:52 Cara Santa Maria? Well, yeah, hasn't anybody read A Parable of the Sower? I mean, isn't that right?
1:15:57 Speaker 05 We need neurodiversity. Now, which would?
1:16:00 Cara Santa Maria? The main character is so empathetic that it's like painful for her to exist.
1:16:03 Speaker 05 Yeah, there might be certain jobs that people would never do if they had, if everyone had ramped up empathy. I even was thinking, well, but surely we could prevent people from being psychopaths, but there's actually good evidence that some psychopaths are high-functioning and actually are kind of necessary for society.
1:16:23 Speaker 03 What do they do?
1:16:24 Bob Novella? For pruning this, for pruning people?
1:16:26 Cara Santa Maria? I wouldn't say they're necessary, but I would say that there is evidence that some people with psychopathy are in very high positions at
1:16:33 Speaker 05 But they may, there might be certain advantages for certain societies to have a certain percentage. But anyway, it's very complicated and you can't assume that there's like no potential downside here.
1:16:44 Bob Novella? Well, sure, but.
1:16:45 Speaker 05 And then there's, then there's just a lot of potential for weirdness. Like, can you imagine if the furries get their hand on a gene for fur-iness?
1:16:53 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, I like that. I know. That's great.
1:16:56 Bob Novella? That would be adorable.
1:16:58 Cara Santa Maria? That would be my favorite outcome of this, I think, would be everyone getting to be in the body they want to be in.
1:17:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, but yes, people could be in the body they want to be in, but what if that entails changing your biological sex or your race? Your apparent, I'll say apparent race, right?
1:17:16 Cara Santa Maria? I think that's only bad because there is already so much stigma and inequality. In a utopian world, it doesn't matter. Everybody can be affirmed and be who they want to be.
1:17:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, but also you're not being who you want to be. You're being who your parents wanted you to be.
1:17:30 Cara Santa Maria? That's true too. That's why I think the somatic editing is way less of, of like an ethical dilemma than germline editing.
1:17:39 Speaker 05 Yeah.
1:17:39 Cara Santa Maria? Because then it's your choice. It's your, I mean, yes, parents could still make the choice on a, on an infant, which is already, you know, an ethical dilemma for, especially for like gender-affirming surgeries, but
1:17:51 Speaker 05 Yeah, I think.
1:17:52 Cara Santa Maria? Ultimately, yeah, it's, it's one generation.
1:17:55 Speaker 05 Yeah, if this is all somatic, so and it's, and an adult makes this choice and it only affects them, I have very different feelings about it than if this is we're affecting the gene pool of humanity by doing this.
1:18:08 Bob Novella? Yeah, well, let's at least start there. Just go full, full hog. Let's just do it. Let's just do it.
1:18:13 Cara Santa Maria? It would be interesting to have like two, we've got the Olympic, because you know, like right now we have the Olympics and we also have Paralympics. What if we have like the mod Olympics and it's just like the, all the machine?
1:18:23 Bob Novella? The two-minute, two-minute mile.
1:18:25 Cara Santa Maria? Against each other, but then the normies are like, we're not, we're in a different like category than you guys. We're not, we're not running against you.
1:18:33 Bob Novella? Yes, I need to see this.
1:18:35 Speaker 05 Definitely the technology for this is coming. You know, it's largely here, but you know, we're just going to keep getting better and more and more knowledgeable and able to do it more reliably going forward.
1:18:44 Speaker 03 See what they come up with.
1:18:45 Speaker 05 Totally.
1:18:45 Cara Santa Maria? Oh my god.
1:18:46 Bob Novella? Called, called human slop.
1:18:48 Speaker 05 So, yeah.
1:18:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, also known as Swelling Green.
1:18:54 Speaker 05 I mean, Bob, would you genetically modify yourself to look like a Vulcan?
1:18:58 Bob Novella? No, like, that's not, that's not in my top 10.
1:19:00 Speaker 05 What would be your sci-fi race of choice?
1:19:02 Bob Novella? Yeah.
1:19:02 Speaker 05 What would be your, give me one choice?
1:19:04 Bob Novella? Oh, sci-fi race of choice, interesting. How about, maybe, I think organians are pure energy being.
1:19:11 Speaker 05 Uh, but something, something you could actually do.
1:19:14 Bob Novella? If you gotta, if I gotta do that, uh, Jesus, I don't know, man. A Deltan?
1:19:18 Speaker 05 Jay, do you have any shortlist of your Deltan? How about a, uh, Andorian? They're pretty cool.
1:19:25 Cara Santa Maria? What, what's their vibe?
1:19:26 Bob Novella? Antennas, kind of a whitish skin, right?
1:19:29 Speaker 05 No, blue skin, white hair, antennas.
1:19:31 Bob Novella? Blue?
1:19:31 Speaker 03 Well, people do like the color blue.
1:19:32 Bob Novella? Nah, the antennas, they can, classic.
1:19:34 Cara Santa Maria? So this is all aesthetic for you? I'm, I'm, I'm like, what is, what would be like a cool skill to have? Do any of them fly?
1:19:41 Speaker 05 It's hard to have a human-sized creature that could really fly well.
1:19:44 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, that's true.
1:19:46 Bob Novella? Yeah, you'd need, yeah, real major reorganization of your biology, but, um,
1:19:51 Speaker 05 I mean, this isn't something I can, I can answer off the top. Like, if I'm really gonna go there, I'd have to do my research.
1:19:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:19:57 Speaker 05 All right.
1:19:57 Cara Santa Maria? That's fair.
1:19:59 Speaker 05 Uh, but, you know, that it's, it's coming. And I do think, again, like many technologies, the world would be a better place if we have thoughtful regulation about this, rather than just
1:20:12 Bob Novella? That's the takeaway.
1:20:13 Speaker 05 Yeah, letting
1:20:13 Cara Santa Maria? Right.
1:20:14 Speaker 05 the free market go wild. I just, what could possibly go wrong?
1:20:18 Cara Santa Maria? And the scary thing is, like, when we think about the free market going, what, what that really means is the tech bro, like, the people whose decision-making got them to the place where they amassed the millions and billions? Are, like, what of their behavior?
1:20:36 Speaker 05 But Kara, they did a great job with social media. That's not a good example, but, or the crypto.
1:20:41 Cara Santa Maria? It's like, I don't
1:20:43 Speaker 05 Or AI, no, wait, wait.
1:20:45 Speaker 03 Please.
1:20:45 Cara Santa Maria? Right. It's like, you think about all these people and how they got to where they are and the very, oh, that's exactly why I don't want them to have this power.
1:20:55 Speaker 05 Now, they have a bad recent track record.
1:20:58 Cara Santa Maria? They do.
1:20:58 Speaker 05 Quite. I mean, in my opinion.
1:21:01 Bob Novella? And a lot of power.
1:21:02 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:21:02 Speaker 05 All right, Bob, tell us about this self-healing composite.
1:21:07 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, thank you, Bob. Pellet cleanser.
1:21:10 Bob Novella? Yes, absolutely. Okay, this is a fun one, guys. Researchers announced a new self-healing or self-repairing fiber composite technology that could repair itself and maintain its strength, forget the centuries, even potentially a half a millennium. This is from researchers at North Carolina State University, PhD candidate Jack Turasek and Zach Phillips, along with Dr. Kalyana Nakhshetrala, who's a professor of civil and environmental engineering at University of Houston. They reveal how their materials self-healing techniques work in their paper, "Self-Healing for the Long Haul, Et Cetera." Now, this reminds me of some
1:21:52 Bob Novella? science fiction scenes where it's kind of a classic scene where the heroes find an abandoned city or alien artifacts that still work after centuries or millennia. You know, it's like, how is this, how are these things going to still be functional after so much time? Now, this latest advance doesn't have to do with obscure machinery, but it deals with this fiber-reinforced polymer composites. Guys, what's a common composite that I'm talking about that you think most people would have heard of?
1:22:22 Cara Santa Maria? Like, most plastics are composites?
1:22:24 Bob Novella? Well, not like this. I'm talking fiber-reinforced.
1:22:28 Speaker 05 Fiberglass?
1:22:28 Bob Novella? Polymer composite.
1:22:29 Cara Santa Maria? Concrete?
1:22:31 Bob Novella? The one that, no, the one that hit me is something that a lot of people would have heard of, fiberglass. Fiberglass is a common example, using the fibers are glass fibers. That's why they call it fiberglass. So, that's something that I think most people will have heard of.
1:22:45 Speaker 05 So, you didn't hear me say fiberglass 30 seconds ago?
1:22:47 Bob Novella? I did not, did not.
1:22:48 Speaker 05 No, he didn't.
1:22:49 Bob Novella? So, this has been, these composites have existed since the 1930s, and you've got two major components. You've got the fibers, hello, duh. They're glass or carbon or even Kevlar fibers can be used for that. And then you need the plastic, like a resin or polymer, that kind of just surrounds it and swamps it and just bathes in it and holding it all together. The advantages are, you probably know some of these. Strength to weight ratio is a huge, huge thing. Some of these composites are 60% lighter than metals if metals were used instead. But there's also other ones that I wasn't quite aware of. There are some composites that are specifically chemical and corrosion resistant.
1:23:33 Bob Novella? And there's also design flexibility. If you've ever seen fiberglass being created, I mean, you could custom engineer very complex shapes, you know, and just put down the fibers on the template that you want. And then put the polymer resin over it and it hardens into that very customized, complex shape. So that's another huge advantage of this. So you see these all over many industries, aerospace, automotive, construction, marine. They're very, very common. So you could see them as like carb body panels, right? Wind turbine blades is a big example. High-performance sporting goods like clubs and bicycles have these composites.
1:24:15 Bob Novella? And these, they last, how long do you think a composite like these would typically last?
1:24:21 Jay Novella? 25 years.
1:24:22 Cara Santa Maria? What do you mean by last?
1:24:23 Speaker 03 27 and a half years.
1:24:24 Cara Santa Maria? Do you mean like before they're no longer functional or before they disappear from the environment?
1:24:30 Bob Novella? Okay, no longer, you know, no longer functionalized designed in terms of say structural integrity.
1:24:36 Cara Santa Maria? 15 years.
1:24:37 Bob Novella? Yeah, I mean, Jay was a little close. I mean, 14 to 40, you know, something like, you know, a couple of decades. Or, you know, three, maybe up to four decades. So that's, and that's not bad. I mean, that's pretty good. But what would you say, what do you, would you say dooms the composites? What's going, after 40 years, what's going to be like the big problem that you think would be very, very common? You know, not just like a discreet kind of like a damage, like a cut in it. But it's what happens very often is this delamination. That's the biggest problem with this because think about it. You've got, it's got multiple thin layers of these fibers. Sometimes the fibers are put at different angles so that it's strong in multiple directions.
1:25:21 Bob Novella? Sometimes the fibers go in one direction because it really needs to be strong. Maximally strong in one direction. So some things like a simple panel for a car could have two to eight panels. But then if you have a structural part, that's going to take a lot of stress. You could have 10 to 30 layers. And if it's like at the high end of that spectrum in terms of, say, a high stress aerospace part, it could have as many as 100 layers in like some of the thicker parts. So you're talking a lot of very thin layers that are put together. And the delamination is when some of those layers come apart. And that's the death of these composites. Because if that happens, if that delamination happens in the critical areas, then you're losing a huge amount of your structural integrity.
1:26:06 Bob Novella? And this thing has failed. But you could have it for decades before that happens. And you always have options to potentially repair it if it's been spotted. So now, so this is where we get to the crux of this news item. What if these delaminations can be auto repaired? If the repair itself is part of the structure itself? And this is exactly what these-
1:26:27 Speaker 03 Smart material.
1:26:28 Bob Novella? Kind of, not technically smart material, but it's, in a sense, I think, depending on how this is handled, it could potentially be called smart in a sense. And this is what these UNC researchers have done. So in between specific layers, not every layer, but in between the critical areas and the critical layers, they have two things that they've created that makes this happen. One is a 3D printable thermoplastic layer that goes in between, or strips. Okay, so you could print this out, thermoplastic, and it can be melted. And it's melted by the second component that they've created here. And this is kind of like a hot wire or a warming sheet.
1:27:12 Bob Novella? So it's a component that's nearby, that's like a resistive layer. So if you send electricity through it, it will then warm up the thermoplastic. And that layer will kind of get gooey and melty and kind of like go into the areas that have delaminated or have failed and then rebond it together. So to do the repair, it would go something like this. So electric current would be applied to the heating layer. So like I said, this is a- Resistive layer, it's just, it's just, you know, the electricity has, you know, doesn't flow easily, so it just creates heat. So that's, those things are all.
1:27:44 Cara Santa Maria? So it's almost like they're, they're being soldered with, with polymer or with a portion of the plastic.
1:27:49 Bob Novella? Right.
1:27:50 Cara Santa Maria? And then filling in those gaps.
1:27:51 Bob Novella? Now, I was wondering, now, what would initiate this process? And this is going to be pulled out, there's lots of different ways that this heating could be, you know, this, this electrical charge can be, can be applied. It could be initiated by a maintenance system. There could be some sort of onboard electronics that, that makes it happen. They, they could have damage sensors and specify, okay, this area of the composite has, has been damaged. Let's send some electricity through there and melt the thermoplastic and repair this.
1:28:19 Cara Santa Maria? But wait, what happens if, if, if it doesn't need repair, but it gets electrified somehow?
1:28:24 Bob Novella? Then it would just, um, I would, the melted thermoplastic would just kind of go where it could go and then just harden.
1:28:30 Cara Santa Maria? Okay, so it'd probably just reinforce it regardless.
1:28:32 Bob Novella? Right. And the other interesting, interesting thing about this is that just by adding this, the researchers found, but by, by adding this thermoplastic layer, it makes, it makes the composite even stronger than conventional composites. So you're already starting off with a composite that's stronger than, than, than what's conventional. And now it's got this added bonus that it could last for, you know, for a really long time. Now, every time, every time this thermoplastic melts and, and does a repair, it becomes, it becomes minutely less strong as it was before. Right? So it's not, it's not perfectly, it's not a perfect repair.
1:29:09 Jay Novella? So why is it less strong?
1:29:10 Bob Novella? Yeah, this was interesting. They found in their, in their research that every, every time you melt the thermoplastic and it does a repair, that this fiber debris builds up in the thermoplastic. So it's kind of like, it decreases the, the, um, the functionality of these, of the bonding sites. And the other thing they found was that the chemical reactions, uh, there's, there's some weird chemical reactions happening between the composite and the, and the thermoplastic kind of decreasing the strength. But the thing was that it was just a, it's a very minute decrease because you're already starting with a composite stronger than what's conventional. And then every time you, it, it, you melt the thermoplastic. Plastic to fix it, it's not just not quite as strong, but it's so little that
1:29:51 Cara Santa Maria? It's just like people.
1:29:52 Bob Novella? It lasts for
1:29:52 Cara Santa Maria? They get a wound.
1:29:53 Bob Novella? Right, right. It lasts
1:29:54 Cara Santa Maria? And then there's like scar tissue. I love that. So that's what it sounds like to me.
1:30:00 Bob Novella? So they did some serious research on how long it would last. And one and one of the words, a couple of words they used was really, really long time. And this was, this was the really fascinating part. They did a thousand heating cycles over like 40 days. And they found that after a thousand of these cycles, it still had 60%. It was still 60% as strong as conventional, as conventional composites, which is still quite strong. So what, so their conclusion was that, that their prediction, I would call this a prediction, that, that if you had to do this cycle of like a repair cycle, uh, once per season, it would last, the material would, would retain its structural integrity for 125 years.
1:30:42 Bob Novella? And if it was happening only once a year, like maintenance happening once a year, it could last 500 years and still be strong enough to be very, very functional. So that's, that was the big, the big takeaway is that this stuff, um, every time it's repaired, it repairs itself. It, it loses just the tiniest amount of its already initial very high strength. And that even many repairs a year can give it well over a century and maximally potentially up to 500 years is what, was what their predictions are at this point. And the other, there's not really much more to say right here, but the one thing that I found really interesting is like, this isn't just a study, hey, if we did this, this will be really cool. This has already been patented and they're already licensing this tech. That's already happened.
1:31:27 Bob Novella? I don't know how many, you know, you know, how much they've licensed it, but this is already being, being created here. So this seems like a really fascinating idea. I mean, composites are already fantastic creations, but that to think that they could absolutely outlive their creators by, by multiple generations, because they just last forever is, is fascinating. And, and, and think about what it could save. I mean, if you don't have to maintain, you don't have to spend the money to maintain these composites and examine them and go and, and do all the work and all the resources that are needed to do the, the repair, um, cause it's doing it all by itself. It's just like that it also saves a lot of money. It's better for the environment. It's just so many wins here. It's a really interesting tech.
1:32:10 Speaker 05 Self-healing anything is great, sounds great to me.
1:32:12 Bob Novella? Oh, yeah.
1:32:13 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:32:14 Speaker 03 Especially if it's people.
1:32:15 Cara Santa Maria? Just like people, exactly.
1:32:17 Speaker 05 Imagine if you weren't self-healing?
1:32:19 Bob Novella? Oh my god.
1:32:20 Cara Santa Maria? That would be horrible.
1:32:21 Bob Novella? I'd put some thermoplastic under my skin.
1:32:23 Speaker 03 How long would you live?
1:32:24 Cara Santa Maria? Don't do that.
1:32:25 Speaker 05 That always reminds me of that movie Death Becomes Her.
1:32:28 Bob Novella? Yes.
1:32:28 Speaker 05 Like, you're immortal, but there's no self-healing, so you accumulate every piece of damage that your body takes, and after years, you're just a mess.
1:32:36 Bob Novella? And I would, I would still do it.
1:32:37 Speaker 03 Yikes.
1:32:38 Bob Novella? In a heartbeat.
1:32:39 Speaker 05 Really? That, I don't think so.
1:32:42 Bob Novella? Absolutely. I mean, I'm not saying I do-
1:32:44 Speaker 05 So you did not internalize the whole lesson of that movie.
1:32:45 Bob Novella? Oh, I've seen it many times. I've internalized it more than you know. The thing is, and if, if, hey, at the end of the movie, that, you know, you remember the ending of that movie? Do you know the original, the original ending was gonna have them be not busted apart, but like totally pristine? And still like, you know, saying, still bad talking, throwing shade at Bruce, down, at Bruce Willis's death and making fun of him. But Steve, I'm, I'm not saying I would take that drink right now, but in about fifteen, twenty years, I'm drinking that so fast. It's ridiculous.
1:33:17 Cara Santa Maria? When you've already, already accumulated a lot of damage?
1:33:19 Bob Novella? Right.
1:33:20 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:33:22 Speaker 05 I underestimated the degree to which you thought this through, Bob.
1:33:25 Bob Novella? It didn't take much thought, man.
1:33:27 Cara Santa Maria? And you overestimated the degree to which the guys knew what their superpower would be if they could genetically engineer it.
1:33:33 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's true.
1:33:33 Cara Santa Maria? I figured you'd all know exactly the answer to that.
1:33:36 Speaker 05 Oh, I blindsided in that, that question.
1:33:38 Bob Novella? What? What are you talking about? You didn't-
1:33:39 Cara Santa Maria? I thought you guys dream about that every night.
1:33:41 Speaker 05 I thought, what alien would you be, would you genetically engineer yourself into, and you guys didn't know?
1:33:46 Bob Novella? Yeah, that's, that's very different from what augmentation would you have? That, that I've put much more thought into than what alien. Cause Steve, wanting to be a different alien, that's just silly.
1:33:56 Speaker 05 Why is that silly?
1:33:59 Bob Novella? I'm kidding. I would, I would still be a Vulcan, Steve.
1:34:03 Speaker 05 Alright, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?
1:34:05 Jay Novella? Alright guys, last week I played this noisy.
1:34:22 Jay Novella? Very cute.
1:34:23 Speaker 03 Hmm.
1:34:24 Jay Novella? Uh, do you guys wanna guess?
1:34:26 Speaker 03 Well, I don't know, but it was wearing little tiny tennis shoes, making that squeaking noise that we talked about the other week.
1:34:31 Cara Santa Maria? I want it to be a little baby, a little baby raccoon or something.
1:34:35 Jay Novella? Alright, so a listener named Stephen Hunter wrote in and said, "Jay, is this an axolotl?"
1:34:41 Cara Santa Maria? What?
1:34:42 Speaker 03 What?
1:34:43 Jay Novella? And I thought, well, they don't really come out of the water, so they, how can they make noises? But, um, sure, he says, "I don't know what they sound like, but the kids these days are crazy for them." They, that's true, the kids are crazy for them. "It's not an axolotl, but if it could make a noise, I think you're right." Um, Evil Eye wrote in and he said, "It sounds a little like a catfish, but in a cooler with just enough water on a boat lit open."
1:35:06 Cara Santa Maria? Ah.
1:35:07 Jay Novella? Um, very specific, sir.
1:35:08 Cara Santa Maria? I think catfish are kinda squeaky, right?
1:35:11 Jay Novella? It's according to him, and he would know, so I don't know, um, but sure, that's cool. I'd like to hear it. If anyone got, has a recording, let me, let me hear that. Um, Carlos from Chihuahua, Mexico.
1:35:22 Speaker 03 Wait, really?
1:35:23 Speaker 05 Jay, it's pronounced Chuhuahua.
1:35:25 Speaker 03 No, Jay, don't listen to him.
1:35:27 Speaker 05 Is there really a Chihuahua, Mexico?
1:35:28 Cara Santa Maria? Only if you live in West Texas. Of course there's a Chihuahua.
1:35:31 Speaker 03 Never heard of it.
1:35:32 Speaker 05 Where do you think Chihuahua's come from?
1:35:33 Jay Novella? So Carlos and his son, um, are guessing a DJ bird, also known as a lyrebird. The thing is, they can make any noise that has ever occurred on the planet.
1:35:43 Speaker 05 Every, who's that noise? It could be a lyrebird, basically.
1:35:45 Jay Novella? That's true.
1:35:46 Speaker 05 That's like saying it's a tape recorder of some sound, you know?
1:35:49 Cara Santa Maria? But do they have their own noise also?
1:35:51 Jay Novella? No one knows.
1:35:56 Cara Santa Maria? That's amazing.
1:35:58 Jay Novella? So, uh, Giann Kroger wrote in, and this was a close guess. She said, "Is it a baby hedgehog?" And, uh, it's not, but let's, let's get to this. So Kathy Taylor, who has a family, um, a few people guessed in her family. Um, her guess is a porcupine. That is incorrect. Uh, Sam, um, I'm not sure who Sam is, but Sam's guess is the, an audio tape being rewound. I thought that was a really fun guess. Then her mom, who's 79, says it sounds like a monkey. And her dad, who's 80, says it sounds like a fussy baby waking up.
1:36:28 Speaker 03 Fussy baby.
1:36:29 Jay Novella? So all fun guesses, but Finn, the 13-year-old, first said it's a sparrow, but changed his answer to a squirrel, and he is correct. It's a baby squirrel. A little baby squirrel. Listen up.
1:36:52 Jay Novella? Now, Steve, you can't tell me that we all don't have genetic dispositions to think that that animal is both cute and needs our protection.
1:36:59 Speaker 05 Totally.
1:37:01 Jay Novella? No, but you can't tell me it isn't.
1:37:02 Speaker 05 I wouldn't tell you that.
1:37:03 Cara Santa Maria? Meat me.
1:37:03 Jay Novella? Nah, you suck. Okay. All right. So, good job on that one. I appreciate when a young person wins like that. Good job, Finn. I do have a new noisy for you guys this week, and the noisy was sent in by a listener named Beau, and here it is.
1:37:27 Jay Novella? My spidey sense is telling me that might be a difficult one, so good luck on that. If you heard a cool sound this week, or you'd like to guess, you have to email me at [email protected] . Steve, so many things going on. I would like to say, though, upfront, you know, we live in a world that is clearly misinformation and disinformation are growing faster than we can all keep up with it. There are many outlets out there that try to right the ship. We happen to be one of them. We've been doing this for 20 years as a podcast. We could definitely, we will, first off, we would appreciate your support. If you want to support the work that we do, if you think that it's relevant and the world needs us, then please consider becoming a patron of the SGU.
1:38:12 Jay Novella? You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide. You know, we all, I don't think any of us are going anywhere anytime soon, so we're in the fight and we plan on sticking with it. So, please consider supporting our work at Patreon. The PR podcast that we started, Steve? It's going very well. As a producer of the show, I always find it fun to listen to Steve and Andrea record each episode, and, you know, the discussions that we have. We're trying to figure out how to navigate the intensity of all of the miss and disinformation that's going on out there without getting bogged down in what's happening day to day, right? Because we want people to learn about... You know, how politics works with this podcast.
1:38:57 Jay Novella? It is a fantastic podcast to learn about how the government works and you know what, and where things are potentially going wrong. If you're interested, you can go to Political Reality Podcast to learn more about our new show, and if you have been listening, thanks a lot.
1:39:13 Speaker 05 Also, we dropped our first episode of the new season of Alpha Quadrant Six.
1:39:18 Jay Novella? That is correct.
1:39:18 Speaker 05 People will be asking about that as well, so you can go to alphaquadrant, the number six, dot com.
1:39:25 Jay Novella? Yep, Alpha Quadrant Six is our science fiction review show. We have, this is our third season, and this season, we're focusing on the science and science fiction. So if you're one of those people that likes to go, what the hell was that? Right? You're watching science fiction, and you're like, that is so bad. It takes me out of the movie. It makes me angry. This is the show for you. You want to watch. Well, I mean, Kara, think about it. You're watching a science fiction show, and they, they clone someone into a full adult instantly.
1:39:53 Cara Santa Maria? This is why I struggle with science fiction.
1:39:56 Jay Novella? But this is why you need to listen to Alpha Quadrant Six, because we will right the ship, right there, live on TV.
1:40:02 Speaker 03 Right there.
1:40:04 Jay Novella? Anyway, you can go to alphaquadrantsix.com. If you know, you know. So anyway, we continue down this crazy list, Steve. You know, we're gonna be at SciCon. SciCon is a wonderful conference that is happening in Buffalo, New York. You guys, June 11th to 14th of this year, go to C S I C O N F E R E N C E dot com. That's SciCon, that's SciConference.org, I'm sorry, dot O R G. We will be there with a huge list of wonderful speakers. You should just go check it out. And if you haven't been to one, you owe it to yourself to go. It's a great time with a lot of great talks. We will be in Australia and New Zealand. We're gonna be at, we're gonna be in Sydney, and we're gonna be in Christchurch.
1:40:47 Jay Novella? Those are two different cities in two different countries, but you should know this by now. So if you want to see us in Sydney, Australia, you can go to skepticcon.org.au for ticket information. If you want to see us in New Zealand, you can go to conference.skeptics.nz. And guys, we're going to be in Madison, Wisconsin very soon. This is going to be the weekend of May 30th. We have three different shows going on. One of them is the Super Secret Friday Night exclusive meetup. The other thing is, we will be doing a live podcast recording. And then we will be doing a Skeptical Extravaganza at night. All three of these shows, the tickets can be found on the skepticsguy.org.
1:41:29 Jay Novella? If you haven't been to one of our extravaganzas, you should definitely check it out. We've been working on this show, I mean, I think it's like 15 years now. I can't remember, it's been so long, but the show is a lot of fun. I think we'll have a great time. Live podcast recording, these are always a ton of fun. We do two hours of podcast recording and then we have an hour of mayhem and fun stuff that we do with the audience. So there it is, Steve. Got a huge stack of shows. I am probably more busy now than I've ever been working for the SGU and I'm enjoying most of it.
1:42:01 Speaker 05 All right, thank you, Jay. All right, guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction.
1:42:08 Speaker 01 It's time for Science or Fiction?
1:42:17 Speaker 05 Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. And I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three news items this week. Are you guys ready?
1:42:31 Jay Novella? We are.
1:42:32 Bob Novella? Yep.
1:42:32 Speaker 05 All right, here we go. Item number one, despite diverging over 600 million years ago, before the evolution of eyes, insect and mammal vision not only use the same protein family, opsins, but tune their red color sensitivity at the same exact amino acid location. Item number two, a new study finds that a single nucleotide change in a non-coding regulatory region was able to cause XX mice to develop as fully male.
1:43:05 Speaker 05 And I number three, researchers described the oldest fossil egg of an early mammal relative, Lystrosaurus, indicating they laid small, hard-shelled eggs and likely fed their young through lactation. All right, Bob, go first.
1:43:20 Bob Novella? Okay, diverging over 600 million years ago, insects' vision and mammal vision not only use the same protein family, opsins, but tune their red color sensitivity at the same exact amino acid location. Huh. I mean, they've got compound eyes, right? Many or most insects, or some, I don't know what the actual ratio is. That sounds a little bit sketchy. Let's see these other ones here. Okay, study finds a single nucleotide change in a non-coding regulatory region was able to cause, so female mice to develop as fully male. And it's because of a single nucleotide change in a regulatory gene.
1:44:03 Bob Novella? I mean, just, it sounds feasible. Well, I'm not sure what I'm missing there, but that sounds not entirely unreasonable. That's something, a single nucleotide could do that, I think. All right, let's try this other one here. This one seemed the most plausible to me, which means maybe I should just, just pick it. The oldest fossil egg of an early mammal relative, Lystrosaurus. An early mammal relative. So, yeah, I mean, platypus lays eggs. I mean, but they're totally bizarre. Sure, at some point in the mammal lineage, it's not unreasonable to think that they would have characteristics of a mammal and not a mammal.
1:44:48 Bob Novella? Yeah, this is good, Steve. This first one, I don't know what to think of this mammal vision and insect vision. But I think something rubbed me the wrong way about the mammal and insect vision. So I'm just gonna have to say that that one's fiction.
1:45:02 Speaker 05 Okay, Jay.
1:45:03 Jay Novella? Okay, so I just wanted to see a picture of the Lystrosaurus.
1:45:07 Speaker 05 Lystrosaurus.
1:45:08 Jay Novella? Lystrosaurus. And he looks a lot like one of the aliens from Star Wars.
1:45:14 Speaker 03 Which one?
1:45:15 Jay Novella? Yeah, I just didn't, you know, I, I, I don't know, is that cheating? I'm sorry. I wanted to see how mammalian they were.
1:45:21 Speaker 05 Just a little.
1:45:22 Jay Novella? So researchers described the oldest fossil egg of an early mammal relative, indicating they laid small hard-shelled eggs and likely fed their young through lactation. I mean, that's-
1:45:30 Cara Santa Maria? Can you tell us what type of relative of mammals?
1:45:34 Speaker 05 Lystrosaurus.
1:45:34 Cara Santa Maria? Or no? Yeah, but can you tell us what family they're in?
1:45:37 Speaker 05 They're therapsids.
1:45:39 Bob Novella? Oh, wait a second. All right, never mind.
1:45:44 Bob Novella? New information.
1:45:44 Speaker 05 Does that help you?
1:45:45 Bob Novella? Not at all.
1:45:46 Cara Santa Maria? Maybe.
1:45:47 Bob Novella? I've heard of it, but-
1:45:48 Jay Novella? Oh, you had me going there for a second, Bob.
1:45:52 Jay Novella? Yeah, this is one of those news items. I'm like, you know, of course, this is not, not an area of expertise that I have. It's not Thanksgiving. It's not Abraham Lincoln, and it's not bread making.
1:46:01 Speaker 03 Or teeth.
1:46:02 Jay Novella? Or teeth. Oh, by the way, did you guys see that, that, that regrowing of teeth thing from the Chinese, um, Japanese, um, research? They, they actually progressed farther. They're like, this, this thing looks likely to happen by 2030.
1:46:16 Speaker 05 All right, you're delaying. Come on.
1:46:17 Bob Novella? Wait, I'm just gonna stop brushing my-
1:46:18 Jay Novella? I'm sorry. Okay, I'll go to number two.
1:46:20 Bob Novella? I'm gonna stop brushing my teeth now.
1:46:21 Speaker 03 So, so they're on the cusp of a breakthrough.
1:46:23 Jay Novella? A new study finds-
1:46:25 Cara Santa Maria? Incise.
1:46:28 Speaker 05 Yeah, very insightful.
1:46:34 Jay Novella? All right, a new study finds that a single nucleotide change in a non-coding regulatory region was able to cause XX mice to develop for the male. I think this one is science. I think that, sure, you change something and a male pops out. It happens all the time, cherry for the gods. So, yeah, I don't see any reason why that can't happen. I mean, with all the variation in, in creatures out there. I see. That's what's fine. Fine with me. First one, diverging over 600 million years ago before the evolution of eyes, insects and mammal vision not only use the same protein, Opsins, but tune their red color sensitivity at the same exact amino acid location. Now,
1:47:15 Jay Novella? the question I have for you, Steve, is, is that the place you have to go to see red? It might be. And maybe that's why, you know, they line up so nicely. So I think that's science, too.
1:47:27 Speaker 05 Therefore.
1:47:28 Jay Novella? But the last one seems like science, too. But is this, is it so early in mammal history that there was, maybe they didn't even have breasts, you know, maybe there was no lactation happening back then? And how do you, how do you lactate and feed a baby egg? Steve, it sounds ridiculous to me. Would he drill a hole in there and drop some, drop some, you know, milk? What, what's happening? I know I'm missing something huge, Cara. I know you're laughing on the inside. I just can't make it make sense. I don't know. I like the first two as science. This last one is fiction. Thank you.
1:48:03 Speaker 05 The Listerosaurus, why do you think is fiction?
1:48:04 Jay Novella? The Listerosaurus, yes, he is, he looks like a freaking alien. He doesn't even exist.
1:48:09 Speaker 05 All right, Evan?
1:48:10 Speaker 03 Yeah, they're wonky. I'd never heard of Opsins before. Should I have?
1:48:14 Speaker 05 Oh, yeah.
1:48:15 Bob Novella? Maybe.
1:48:15 Speaker 05 It's a biology thing. I don't know how.
1:48:17 Bob Novella? Yeah, I mean, well.
1:48:18 Speaker 05 I may have quickly mentioned it a couple news items.
1:48:20 Speaker 03 I know a little biology. Just never, you know. Now, we've been talking about colors. Um, so red sensitivity at the same exact amino acid location. All right. I'll say that one's science, but I'll, I think the fiction is going to be the single nucleotide change. Eh, one single nucleotide. That doesn't seem like enough. It's too limiting, too narrow. Uh, and no, something else is going on here. It's not just a single nucleotide. I'll say that one's fiction.
1:48:54 Speaker 05 Okay. Cara, the boys are all over the place. No help to you.
1:48:58 Cara Santa Maria? Ah, great. Well, the one that feels the most like science is the one that Evan just said is the fiction to me. Uh, yeah, single nucleotide, that is kind of surprising, but like, I don't know. The Y chromosome is real little bitty and don't code for much like it's kind of just getting smaller and smaller evolutionarily. It would be super surprising if you were like a new study finds that, you know, a change in a non-coding regulatory region was able to cause XY mice. No, that wouldn't be that interesting to me either. I guess with no Xs, that would be interesting. But yeah, it's, there's not a lot there. Like most, we evolve female first and then we maleify.
1:49:38 Cara Santa Maria? So I just don't, yeah, I don't see that being an issue. Okay. So like, maybe you can add some factors, some proteins through this change that, you know, induced like growth of, you know, all you need is testosterone, bathe it in testosterone. So maybe that's what it would do. So the other two are tough because basically you're asking, did all of evolution from 600 million years ago diverge from that? From, you know, even before eyes evolved, were these proteins present, these opsins present? And did they, and I guess it would make sense, right? Because red, I don't remember what wavelength it is, but it's in the visible spectrum and like
1:50:20 Cara Santa Maria? most organisms can see it. And so it would kind of make sense that we all evolved from that sort of pinch point. But then the other one, yeah, that could be science too. Lister Source, did you say it was a synapsid or did you say it was a diapsid?
1:50:33 Speaker 05 I mean, synapsid is the bigger clade, like they're all synapsids.
1:50:38 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
1:50:38 Speaker 05 Therapsids are within the synapsid clade and then mammals are within that clade.
1:50:45 Cara Santa Maria? So, but I'm assuming this is similar to some of these other like mammal-like reptiles.
1:50:49 Speaker 05 It's definitely, they're all mammal-like reptiles.
1:50:51 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay.
1:50:52 Speaker 05 At this period of time.
1:50:53 Cara Santa Maria? Dimetrodon or something like that. Yeah. So these are really, really old. They eventually did evolve. Yeah. So I mean, if they're mammal-like, we call them that for a reason. So maybe it's because of lactation, but it seems weird that they would have hard-shelled eggs if they're mammal-like because you mentioned that platypus lays eggs, but platypus doesn't lay like bird eggs. Yeah, exactly. And if These aren't in the bird evolution. I don't know why they would have hard eggs. So that one's getting me. The lactation thing, I don't, I don't know if that's, no, it seems early. It seems like they, if they're mammal-like, then they're not mammals. So they're not lactating because that's mammary. Right? That's like where the word comes from.
1:51:37 Speaker 05 Mammarys.
1:51:39 Cara Santa Maria? So yeah, I'm going to say the mammarys one is the fiction because it could be either that their eggs were different. Uh, or they didn't lay eggs at all, or that they didn't lactate.
1:51:50 Speaker 05 Okay.
1:51:51 Cara Santa Maria? That one has more options.
1:51:52 Speaker 05 You guys are spread out, so we'll just take them in order. Despite diverging over 600 million years ago before the evolution of eyes, insect and mammal vision not only use the same protein family, Opsins, but tune their red color sensitivity at the same exact amino acid location. Bob, you think this one is the fiction?
1:52:08 Bob Novella? Yes.
1:52:08 Speaker 05 Everyone else thinks this one is science and this one is.
1:52:13 Bob Novella? Say it.
1:52:13 Speaker 05 Science. This is science. Sorry, Bob.
1:52:15 Cara Santa Maria? Yay.
1:52:16 Speaker 05 This is surprising though, guys. So pick about it. 600 million years ago, this is like late, this is either early Cambrian or late pre-Cambrian.
1:52:25 Cara Santa Maria? Were there eye spots then?
1:52:27 Speaker 05 Maybe. There maybe have been eye spots or they might not even have been involved in vision, just light sensitivity.
1:52:34 Bob Novella? Oh, my God.
1:52:35 Speaker 05 Circadian rhythm, like for example.
1:52:37 Bob Novella? Wow.
1:52:38 Cara Santa Maria? Right.
1:52:39 Speaker 05 But yeah, so Opsins are a light, you know, are a protein that does respond to light, right? Changes configuration and then blah, blah, blah. You know, that could be a light sensing protein, basically. And, you know, mammals have three, or humans have three, you know, we have the RGB, red, green, blue. So they were studying actually dragonflies and they found that, first of all, dragonflies could see deeper into red than humans do.
1:53:03 Bob Novella? Oh.
1:53:04 Speaker 05 Than mammals do. And they wanted to find out, well, where on the protein? What, what is the, what is the genetic change that allows them to see deeper into the red than mammals do? And it turns out it's that, it's just one point mutation that does that. And they were able to manipulate it so they could see even further. I mean, to create Opsins that would. React to even further like near infrared, you know, which is amazing. And so we're talking about, so you know, for mammals, the peak is like 580 nanometers. And they were able to get it up to like 720 nanometers. And so it's a longer wavelength, there's more red, right? So now you're getting into sort of the near infrared range.
1:53:49 Speaker 05 But then they found out that that is that that one amino acid chain change, right? That one mutation is also the same location where mammals will vary their red sensitivity as well. So you could, you could also make, you know, mammal ops and red ops and more sensitive to red light at that same locus. Position 292, if you want to know. So what this means, you know, this is, this is convergent evolution. This is not, this is not common ancestor kind of thing. Cause again, the, the last common ancestor was over 600 million years ago. It's the, yes, the last common ancestor had the same protein family.
1:54:32 Speaker 05 But it's obviously evolved quite a bit since then. You know, 600 million years of evolution.
1:54:37 Bob Novella? Didn't you imply a common ancestor? Wasn't that the implication?
1:54:40 Speaker 05 Diverging over 600 million years ago. So their last common ancestor was over 600 million years ago.
1:54:45 Cara Santa Maria? So you're saying they re-evolved this?
1:54:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. So both lines independently evolved the same mechanism for tuning their red color sensitivity. So this is a really extreme example of convergent evolution, basically.
1:54:58 Bob Novella? Sweet, man. Yeah.
1:54:59 Speaker 05 Yeah. So which is obviously it's constrained by physics, right? This is, yeah, this is the change that you need to make in order, as Jay said, I think this is how you see red. Yeah. So this is, doesn't matter what, what lineage you're in. But that was, yeah, they were a bit surprised at how much convergent evolution there was. Okay. Let's go to number two. A new study finds that a single nucleotide change in a non-coding regulatory region was able to cause XX mice to develop as fully male. Evan, you think this one is the fiction and everyone else thinks this one is science. This is, you know, the thing, this is tricky because what I think is surprising about this, whether it's true or fake, is that
1:55:34 Cara Santa Maria? It's non-coding?
1:55:35 Speaker 05 One change, one single nucleotide change can Make genetically female mice develop as fully male. It's, there's multiple things going on. It's not just all about testosterone, although that's a big part of it. There's also genes that determine whether or not a uterus develops and you know, other things, there's other, there's, there are also, yes, female is the default, but there are, there are genes that are necessary for certain aspects of female development to happen. Um, it's not
1:56:04 Cara Santa Maria? Right, but if you bathe, but early enough, if you bathe an embryo in testosterone, doesn't it have downstream effects that suppress some of those genes?
1:56:13 Speaker 05 But you won't develop testes though.
1:56:14 Cara Santa Maria? Hmm, okay.
1:56:16 Speaker 05 But this, you know, cause, cause testes produce the testosterone, right? Testosterone doesn't produce the testes.
1:56:21 Cara Santa Maria? Right, right, right, right.
1:56:22 Speaker 05 But this genetic mutation produces testes.
1:56:26 Cara Santa Maria? The testes.
1:56:27 Speaker 05 Which produces testosterone, which makes them develop as fully male. This is science.
1:56:32 Cara Santa Maria? Single nucleotide makes testes.
1:56:35 Speaker 05 Nucleotide change would make these mice, it's mice who are genetically female, develop as fully male.
1:56:41 Bob Novella? That's crazy.
1:56:41 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, cause all they need are testes, like functioning testes.
1:56:44 Speaker 05 Once you get testes, everything else goes from there.
1:56:45 Cara Santa Maria? Follows, that's interesting.
1:56:47 Speaker 05 Which means that researchers described the oldest fossil egg of an early mammal relative, Lystrosaurus, indicating they laid small hard shelled eggs and likely fed their young through lactation is the fiction. But here's what's really going on. They did describe, they discovered this fossil egg in 2008, but they just recently had the technology to really examine it, like the CT scanning technology. And they, it is an egg with a little curled up baby Lystrosaurus in there. It's the first confirmed fossil egg of a mammal relative.
1:57:18 Bob Novella? Hope they can get it to hatch.
1:57:20 Speaker 05 So, um, but the, the egg is big, soft shelled. And, and which means they probably did not lactate, did not feed through lactation. So.
1:57:33 Cara Santa Maria? Why?
1:57:34 Speaker 05 Well, that's, I'm about to tell you. So why was, why is the egg big? Why do you think the egg is big for the size of the animal?
1:57:41 Bob Novella? Lots of nutrients inside?
1:57:43 Speaker 05 Yes, and the nutrients are where?
1:57:46 Cara Santa Maria? In the yolk.
1:57:46 Speaker 05 In the yolk. So it had a, if, if, if the egg is bigger than it needs to be, that means there's a lot of yolk. Why is there a lot of yolk? Because that's gonna feed.
1:57:55 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, cause that's what it fed.
1:57:55 Speaker 05 It's gonna feed the embryo, so it's gonna develop more before it hatches. So, so Lystrosaurus was probably what we call a precocial animal. They're literally precocious.
1:58:07 Cara Santa Maria? So it was pretty mature when it was born.
1:58:08 Speaker 05 So they hatch very mature. They probably were hatched able to walk and feed, which is di- different than mammals. Mammals are usually born helpless. They're the opposite of precocial, right? And, and mammals have small eggs, right?
1:58:23 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah, very small.
1:58:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, and then, and other later mammal ancestors probably also had small eggs. So we evolved towards small eggs, born or hatched helpless, and then had to be fed through lactation. What's interesting is that lactation probably started for other reasons, again, very common in evolution. Like, they were just secreting fluid that would keep the soft-shelled eggs moist and whatever. That would be, would serve some other purpose. But then, you a, you could also, you know, suck on it and ta- and get a little bit of nutrition out of it. And that enabled them to be born quicker, right? And more helpless, cause they could then feed on the, the lactation for a while. Whereas Lystrosaurus, big egg, born late
1:59:08 Speaker 05 and mature, ready to go right out of the, right out of the shell. Again, large, soft-shelled egg. Now, Lystrosaurus is an interesting animal, uh, which I knew about before this study, uh, because he or she was the, um, the main terrestrial survivor after the late Permian extinction.
1:59:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:59:28 Speaker 05 So they emerged.
1:59:30 Cara Santa Maria? Get it.
1:59:30 Speaker 05 So guess, guess what percentage of animals on the land were Lystrosaurus?
1:59:36 Bob Novella? It was like ridiculous, like, like forty percent or something ridiculous.
1:59:39 Cara Santa Maria? Like twenty percent?
1:59:40 Speaker 05 Ninety-five percent.
1:59:41 Cara Santa Maria? Oh, that's, that's bananas.
1:59:44 Speaker 05 That's crazy. Almost every animal on land was a Lystrosaurus. They were everywhere. They just had no competition, no predators. And they were.
1:59:52 Speaker 03 Did they eat each other?
1:59:53 Cara Santa Maria? Festival, festival. They had to.
1:59:55 Speaker 05 They were mammal, they were probably vegetarians. They were mammal-like reptiles. So the, the mammal-like reptiles had an early. Advantage, but then
2:00:04 Bob Novella? Then.
2:00:04 Speaker 05 The reptiles kicked their ass and outcompeted them and eventually the led to the dinosaurs, right?
2:00:09 Bob Novella? Yep.
2:00:10 Speaker 05 And the surviving, the surviving animals in that lineage were like the small rodent like things living
2:00:15 Cara Santa Maria? We'll get you back in the end.
2:00:18 Speaker 05 Good for them when the asteroid hit. Now, Kara, you were asking about
2:00:21 Bob Novella? See on the other side.
2:00:22 Speaker 05 What's the relationship or so the synapsids is the, that's the overall clade with all the mammal like reptiles are the synapsids. Dimetrodon's are in that clade. Then there's also several other, yeah, there's several other clades that, that died out, including the ones with the Lystrosaurus, which were the Dysinodons, right? The Dysinodons, they died out. The Sinodons are the ones that mammals evolved from. So, so that's why it's a mammal relative, not a mammal ancestor. This was in a, this is a cousin.
2:01:01 Cara Santa Maria? Yeah.
2:01:01 Speaker 05 It's a cousin, not an ancestor to mammals.
2:01:03 Cara Santa Maria? Is this, is it safe to say then that all of the early mammal relatives and then also the mammal ancestors, did they all have soft shelled eggs?
2:01:15 Speaker 05 It's not safe to say that at all. That's why this, this specimen is so important.
2:01:20 Bob Novella? Don't say that.
2:01:21 Speaker 05 While we suspected that at this stage, they probably all had soft shelled eggs because duck billed platypus does, right? So that means probably are the last common ancestor between the monotremes and the rest of the mammals probably laid eggs. And that would mean everything prior to that did as well. So we suspected that at this stage, they were still laying eggs, but this is the first fossil specimen that proves it.
2:01:48 Cara Santa Maria? That's cool.
2:01:49 Speaker 05 Yeah. So this, this is a really important specimen.
2:01:52 Bob Novella? What else is a monotreme besides a platypus? What's that creature?
2:01:55 Speaker 05 Achidna.
2:01:56 Bob Novella? Achidna, yeah.
2:01:57 Cara Santa Maria? We'll, we'll see them when we're there.
2:01:58 Bob Novella? Yeah. Yeah.
2:01:59 Cara Santa Maria? Ooh. Yeah, they're in Australia.
2:02:01 Speaker 05 All right. So good job, Jay and Kara.
2:02:04 Bob Novella? Thank you.
2:02:04 Cara Santa Maria? Yay.
2:02:06 Speaker 05 All right.
2:02:06 Bob Novella? Done it.
2:02:07 Speaker 05 And then give us a quote.
2:02:08 Speaker 03 It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man, social and political, and to the entire universe as a whole. Written by Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev.
2:02:29 Bob Novella? Yeah, Ben.
2:02:31 Speaker 03 He of the periodic table of elements.
2:02:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, talk about putting order on the universe. The periodic table is huge. Like, we take it for granted that, but that was such a breakthrough in understanding the universe.
2:02:43 Speaker 03 I, it still fascinates me to this day. I just stare at that table in fascination.
2:02:49 Speaker 05 They had no idea what was going on before that. I mean.
2:02:51 Bob Novella? I have dinner on that table.
2:02:55 Speaker 03 Literally.
2:02:57 Cara Santa Maria? You have dinner of that table, too.
2:03:00 Speaker 05 All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
2:03:03 Speaker 03 You got it, Steve. Thanks, Steve.
2:03:05 Speaker 05 And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
2:03:12 Speaker 05 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.
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