The Skeptics Guide #1084 - Apr 18 2026

News Items: Artemis Recap, AI Biology Research, AI Security Disruption, Superconductivity Breakthrough, Red Light Therapy; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Mach, Missing and Dead Scientists; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, April 16th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Cara Santa Maria.

• 0:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Jay Novella.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  Hey, guys.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:50Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, everyone.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Evan, you finally emerged from your tax hell.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  I liken it to a cocoon, you know, when a

• 0:58Speaker 02

  Chrysalis.

• 0:59Speaker 04

  Bug or something. Yeah, chrysalis, thank you. An insect has to go into this state and makes a hard shell around them. And only whatever exists in their world is inside of that shell. And then crunch, crunch on April 15th at the end of the day, you can finally start to break out.

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Now you're saying you're a butterfly? Is that what I'm hearing?

• 1:16Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I'm spreading my wings.

• 1:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Or a moth.

• 1:19Speaker 04

  A moth. Can other things?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  If you were a moth, what kind of moth would you be?

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Ooh, not the death's head moth. Oh, I would. Death's head moth.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  I'd do mothra. Mothra?

• 1:28Speaker 04

  Nice, Jay.

• 1:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm over here Googling prettiest moth.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Okay, it's, no, it's easy. Lunar moth.

• 1:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, those are the big furry ones, right?

• 1:35Speaker 04

  They're big boys. Oh, those, right, is that the one that Gandalf had in Fellowship of the Ring?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Remember, he talked to a moth and sent it away?

• 1:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That look like they have birds on the tips of their

• 1:48Speaker 04

  They got big eyes.

• 1:49Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a lot like that, actually. There's a lot of moth.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  The kind of moths you don't want are the ones that, you know, hide in your pantry moths, are they called?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, pantry moths are horrible if you get them.

• 1:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. Don't you have to, like, burn down your house?

• 2:02Speaker 02

  You already had them once. It was basically like a one year campaign of search and destroy.

• 2:08Speaker 04

  Oh, wow.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  And you also have to put all food that comes into your house or that already is in your house in the freezer.

• 2:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  To stop the eggs.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  To stop the eggs from hatching.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Well, that will kill them. That will freeze and kill. So the things like a box of pasta, forget about it. There's no way you can keep them out of there. But if you put it in the freezer for three days, you know, you know, you're not bringing it into your house. And if they were in there, they're dead. So you got to do that. Basically, everything's got to pass through the freezer. And then you also have to just, you know, just every time you think you might see one, you kill it. And you have to look in the corners of your pantries and look for their little egg sacs. And you got to eradicate them constantly until eventually they'll you'll just stop seeing them.

• 2:53Cara Santa Maria?

  That is awful.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Oh, and I thought tax season was uncomfortable. Imagine having to deal with pantry moths.

• 2:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, the atlas moth. That's the one.

• 3:00Speaker 04

  The atlas moth.

• 3:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Atlas moth. That's my pick.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  The Madagascan Luna, well, moon moth is very pretty. That's no moth. Wow. All right. That's my new favorite. So I got the Luna moth and the Madagascan moon moth. Those are my two favorites.

• 3:13Cara Santa Maria?

  You like them. Oh, yeah, that one's cool, too. Check out it's it's also known as the Comet moth. Check out the Atlas, Steve. I think you'd like it, too. Because the the top wings are very mimic mimicky. They look like snakes almost.

• 3:26Speaker 04

  I'm kind of grossed out by moths. I mean, they're not in the in the area of favorite insect for sure.

• 3:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Really? Oh, I love them. They're so like, I don't know, witchy.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  They're fuzzy butterflies.

• 3:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Well, you know, we we have a day to celebrate moths in the United States. It's the what? The second Sunday in May, that Mothers' Day?

• 3:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no. It's raining. I was like, where is he going with this?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  That was too bad to anticipate, right?

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  I did not see that coming.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  Oh, high compliments, guys. I appreciate that.

• 3:58Cara Santa Maria?

  We're gonna chalk that up to tax brain. He's free now. He's free.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  I am free. I am free. This was a tough season.

• 4:07Speaker 04

  There were lots of changes to the tax codes that happened mid-year in 2025. So, so the IRS isn't quite, wasn't quite ready to handle everything. And in fact, we had a couple of cases, some unusual cases, that the, they wouldn't accept the returns from some of our clients because of these very specific things having to do with those tax laws. So then these clients, we have to go back to them and tell them, oh, you have to file manually on paper, as opposed to electronically.

• 4:36Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 4:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. In a couple of cases, we had to do that. We had more rejects this year of electronic filings than we've had in many, in many years.

• 4:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, gosh.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  A lot to that. Plus, the problem with the IRS in the United States right now is it's woefully understaffed. You know, there's been cuts everywhere, everywhere. And it's, and it's, and it has all these downstream impacts on everything having to do with IRS. So.

• 5:01Cara Santa Maria?

  I assumed that it would have the opposite effect. Like, you guys remember, I don't know if any of you have had to re-up your global entry in the last several years?

• 5:09Speaker 04

  I'm supposed to. I haven't yet.

• 5:11Cara Santa Maria?

  When I was due to re-up my global entry, it was like, you need to make a new appointment. And then it would show me the calendar and it was booked for all of the dates. Like, it just didn't have any opening. Yeah. And I was like, well, how do I do this then? And then out of the blue, I just got a new card in the mail. And they were like, congrats, we renewed you for another 10 years. I figured the IRS worked kind of the same way. They were like, eh, just like pass it through. We don't have time to check, but.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Well, normally, and in prior years, they have done things like that, in which they pretty much let everything go through and they just sort it out on the other side. But this, this year was just a real challenging year.

• 5:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yikes.

• 5:48Speaker 04

  The states actually did a better job than, than IRS did.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, yeah. Can I ask you a personal, like, you know, I'm a psychologist, Steve's a neurologist, like, you know, often we joke, do as I say, not as I do. Do you file your taxes early? Or are you like, doing it on the last day also?

• 6:07Speaker 04

  I, mine was the third to last tax return I did. I did it yesterday. Now, I had already pre-done a lot of it, right? So I had gamed out. Exactly where I was going to be. I had all my documents ready to go.

• 6:20Cara Santa Maria?

  That's funny.

• 6:20Speaker 04

  So I was not in a position where I was scrambling to find information. It was really just entering the data and hitting the button. So.

• 6:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That's hilarious.

• 6:27Speaker 04

  But yeah, no, I just could not find a free moment. The last four weeks, I tell you, I averaged, because Jennifer, my wife and I kind of went over, last night, we kind of did a recap of how my schedule was the last four weeks. I was not home much. And I was working anywhere, I was out of my house, anywhere from 16 to 18 hours a day.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  Every day.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Oh damn, that's crazy.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  I mean, the fact that I was able to come back once a week and participate in SGU is actually quite remarkable. I don't, I missed.

• 6:55Cara Santa Maria?

  We were your break. That's saying something.

• 6:58Speaker 04

  So, but you know, hey, this is, this is my passion. This is my love. I love doing this. So I don't want to miss it for any, for anything. So I'm very motivated.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Oh, you mean the SGU, not taxes?

• 7:09Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  I was confused there for a second too.

• 7:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Deep in there about taxes being your passion, but yeah, you're right.

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, you know, it's fine. I can do the job. I would not describe it as my passion. Certainly it's not my identity.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Well, welcome back to the living, Evan.

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Thank you. Happy to be here.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Jay.

• 7:27Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Last week, we were on the phone together, watching the Artemis 2 mission splash down in the Pacific. So this is, you're, you're completing your series, you know, live covering, you know, sort of the Artemis 2 mission. So give us the recap. What, what happened? How did it all go?

• 7:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So it went very well. You know, we definitely were watching, I was calling Bob and Steve as things were taking off and coming back to Earth. But it was a very, very successful mission. The bottom line is, this was a test mission. It absolutely wasn't trying to accomplish anything other than getting data to find out how well the entire stack performs. At the top level, the launch, the trans lunar flight, the lunar flyby, the reentry, the parachute descent, splash down and recovery, they all succeeded, which is great. And we, you know, we've been doing, we've done enough of these where we have a ton of background on all of that, but this was largely a new system. There are definitely going to be.

• 8:26Jay Novella?

  Details for each one of these where they could make improvements and tweaks and everything, but there was no major problems with any of that. The Orion capsule itself, that's the, you know, that's where people are. That appeared to have functioned really well. It completely did its job of shuttling people through deep space. So, you know, we have a whole set of data now coming that wasn't on Artemis one because there were people on board. NASA says the crew tested life support, cabin, atmosphere, monitoring, food preparation, waste systems, communications, navigation, stowage, suit operations, emergency procedures. They also performed manual piloting demonstrations and these are very important because the future

• 9:10Jay Novella?

  missions, particularly when we land on the moon, they're going to involve very complicated spacecraft operations, maneuvering, docking, all of these different things. So they had to test that, you know, those systems were working properly. And from the testing that they did, things are looking good. But again, you know, NASA is going to be digging into this for a very long time. So there's going to be more details coming out that we don't have now. So in general, everything worked well and Orion did its basic job that it was created to do. There were a few, a few things that are worth talking about that happened. One of them is this.

• 9:48Jay Novella?

  NASA, we have a toilet problem. Yeah. The toilet partially failed. So what happened? Oh, no. The, there are two different things that they had in the toilet. There's a urine collection and then there was a solid waste collection. And a tidy bowl, man. Yeah. The urine side didn't work. It was down and what the crew ended up having to do was use CCUs. These are collapsible, collapsible contingency urinals. Basically they're plastic bags. They pee into those, they, they, then they squish that liquid into like the, a system that the Orion has where it can push liquids into outer space. There was a fan problem. They fixed it during the flight. Jay. Yeah. Did this shit hit the fan? This shit did not hit the fan. It didn't.

• 10:33Jay Novella?

  The pee, the pee also did not hit the fan. So they did. Fix it NASA figured out and the and the crew figured out how to get that system working again. So it was a temporary problem, but again, you know, I'm sure because it broke that there are things that NASA is going to do to make sure that doesn't happen again. NASA also planned, but ended up skipping a demo showing how the crew could build a a temporary radiation shelter inside of Orion in case of a solar storm or something unexpected. Right. So they it's like a pop up tent type of situation. They quickly put this thing together. They get inside of it and it gives them much more the protection from anything going on that has to do with solar radiation. It's interesting. I wonder why they just can't can build that into. Cause it takes up space.

• 11:14Bob Novella?

  I wonder, Jay, did they do what they did in Apollo 13 like, okay, we have this important problem. Here's all the things that they have at their disposal. Let's figure out how to fix this. And then when they fix it on the ground, they tell them, all right, this is what you do. I wonder if it was even at that level of, I mean, it wasn't a life or death thing.

• 11:30Jay Novella?

  For the for the shielding?

• 11:31Bob Novella?

  No, for the for the crapper.

• 11:32Jay Novella?

  I mean, that's I'm sure that they have a list of every single thing that's on there. And the engineers on the ground would be in a similar situation if there was an emergency. But I I felt like it was much more of a like, open this up and move this thing to the left type of fix, you know, it didn't seem to be a major problem. But Bob, I'm sure they're always capable of doing some heavy lifting when it comes to being creative and figuring out, you know, solutions to problems that they didn't already figure out how to fix. But that wasn't the case here. Before launch, you guys might have noticed that the rocket had a helium flow problem, which they fixed before the launch, of course, took place. This was simply a displaced seal between the ground to rocket quick disconnect.

• 12:15Jay Novella?

  It's basically a pipe that feeds the rocket helium and the flow wasn't happening and then engineers figured it out and they fixed it quickly. But of course NASA is also now turning that into like, oh, we have to figure out why that happened. And, you know, they're 100% error correction here with NASA. Now, the heat shield, heat shield's a big guy here. This is a big player. It was talked about a lot. I talked about it a lot. The heat shield is what keeps the Orion capsule, which is again, this is where the humans are. They're inside this capsule. When they re-enter the earth's atmosphere, the heat shield is in a blade. Material that burns away as it protects the capsule from heat. And on Artemis one, there was some char loss, which is essentially like if you just think of it as them painting on.

• 12:56Jay Novella?

  Imagine if it's a layer of black protective paint. It's not that, but I'm just using it as something to think about. And that protective layer is thick enough that as it enters the earth's atmosphere, it wears away. And there's it's still, there's still enough of it there to protect, but it is meant to displace heat by, by it burning away as they go. Artemis one had some issues. There was some, some, some of it that was flaking off. It wasn't working properly. They made an adjustment to the reentry. It, on the surface, as far as the general public knows, it worked very well. It did work very well. But we don't know the details and NASA is going to take a lot of time to analyze that to see, you know, how well it performed. And if they do need to make a final decision to fix it or upgrade it or whatever.

• 13:40Bob Novella?

  Now, you know, if you remember the shuttle had the shuttle tiles and they weren't ablative, I don't think. So I wonder why they went in a different direction.

• 13:51Jay Novella?

  I don't know if there were or not, Bob. I, I think they were though, because NASA had to replace tiles. I don't know how extensively the replacement was, but I know that they did replace tiles. So I guess there was some wear and tear on them, but I don't know if it was ablative.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  No, they were not. They were technically not ablative, but they, but they would crack and break down or whatever. They didn't. Something that they all didn't survive every reentry.

• 14:13Jay Novella?

  I do, I do remember seeing or reading something where there was a person whose job it was to refashion those tiles for the space shuttle and literally had to handcraft them like to fit perfectly. Like it wasn't done by a machine at that time.

• 14:26Speaker 04

  Each tile has a specific dimension, right?

• 14:29Jay Novella?

  Yep. All right. So here's the questions about the heat shield, the ablative material that need to be answered. Did it behave exactly as predicted? Did it erode more than expected? How much margin was there, right? Meaning how much of it was left at the end of that reentry? Was there enough to make it safe? Did the reentry profile perform as they hoped? It seems like it did. And did it reveal any concerning items for Artemis three, which is essentially. A summary of everything I just listed, but bottom line is we'll find out all that. But the first on first blush, it worked. NASA also has a list of things that they data they collected about the astronauts themselves.

• 15:09Jay Novella?

  Right. So they wanted to, they tracked and wanted to get more information on astronauts, sleep, their stress, their cognition, their teamwork, their immune response, their general physiology, and the amount of radiation that they were exposed to, and then what effect would or could that have on them? So overall, double thumbs up. Everything worked. It worked well enough to make the mission a complete success. They did, you know, in the end, they did test an enormous amount of things and they have an incredible amount of collected data that they have. You know, we didn't lose the Artemis two capsule, right? The Orion made it back and it made it back in very good condition. So they're going to get data on everything.

• 15:51Jay Novella?

  And, you know, we've talked about this, you know, people were saying how low res the images were, you know, when they were sending them back to earth. Yeah, of course, they're sending lower res images from the capsule because they, you know, it's very difficult to send data over a lot of data over a very long distance. So they were sending back data that will get here and that can be processed in a quick enough way where we can see it before the Orion capsule comes back. But now they have access to the full res pictures of everything, all video and right? So yeah, we're going to see all that. That's going to be coming out.

• 16:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, just search on like best pictures from Artemis two. This is stunning.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Forget those are images of the century so far, some of these shots.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  That's my new wallpaper now. Image of the earth from the far side of the moon.

• 16:36Speaker 04

  The earth rise.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  And then I threw in a picture of Artemis there, you know, that's not a real picture.

• 16:40Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Real quick, guys. I just saw something quick about the difference between the shuttle tiles and the the blade of Artemis. Yes, it's single use. It's absolutely single use, as we said, and designed to burn away. But the reason why they went from a tile to this AV code or is it AV code? This AV code, a blade of. Material is that that the lunar reentry is higher energy. So these shuttle tiles would are meant for, you know, low Earth orbit. They're not meant for lunar reentry and that so more heat is generated. So you need something apparently ablative and better than the tiles.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I also have more details on the solar radiation fort that they make. So what they basically do is just make a pillow fort. They they stack up all of their supplies and equipment and food and water into a little cocoon. And they they go in there and they stay there for as long as they need to.

• 17:37Speaker 04

  I know what that feels like.

• 17:40Bob Novella?

  Why do they do this, Steve? What do we do? What's the context here?

• 17:42Speaker 04

  In case of a solar.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  There's going to be increased solar radiation. That's their extra radiation protection is to basically just build a fort out of all their stuff and get inside of it.

• 17:53Speaker 04

  So their stuff, the material that make that comprises that stuff is has has properties to it that that help. That's interesting.

• 18:00Bob Novella?

  Wait, they don't have a shielded section of the of the craft?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Well, the craft is shielded. Bob.

• 18:05Speaker 04

  It's an extra layer.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  A shielded section, there's one section. This is a little capsule, right? There's no section.

• 18:11Bob Novella?

  Oh, so you're talking about the the landing.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  The Orion capsule.

• 18:15Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 18:15Speaker 02

  If at any point during the journey, there's like, there's going to be a solar, they're going to be hit by a CME or a solar flare or something. That's too much radiation. That'll exceed their safe limits. So the the capsule itself is shielded, but not shielded well enough for that kind of intense radiation. So then they stack up all their stuff, get inside of it for the duration to for extra protection from a radiation event. Having to answer your question, water is a great radiation shield. And so anything with a high water content would be good. Plus, anything, I guess, that's like metal or whatever would also be adding to protection. It's just basically to reduce the amount of radiation as much as possible.

• 18:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  But that's what it can't be, obviously can't be up all the time because they they're just sitting inside a little fort, you know? All right, Kara, tell us how artificial intelligence is affecting biology research.

• 19:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so we've talked about this a few times in the past, but I feel like this is one of those topics that's often maybe ancillary to whatever the main story that we're covering is. So I thought that I would dig a little bit deeper into an article that was published recently in The Conversation by Dr. Stephen D. Turner, who is an associate professor of data science at the University of Virginia. As he says, "I'm a data scientist who studies genomics and biosecurity, and I research how AI is reshaping biological research and what safeguards that demands." And so I thought we would talk about the two sides of the coin here,

• 19:50Cara Santa Maria?

  because very often on the SU when we discuss technology, we are tasked with really digging deep into what all of the incredible benefits could be of this technology, but also every time a new technology allows us to do some pretty incredible things, it also has a potential dark side, right? Like, what happens if this gets into the wrong hands? What happens if this is used by nefarious actors? So that's really what this article that he wrote is all about. So he mentions how, basically, it all starts with a conversation about OpenAI

• 20:33Cara Santa Maria?

  along with a biotech company called Ginkgo BioWorks, who just this year announced that GPT-5 had run on its own autonomously, not just run, but actually designed and run 36,000 biological experiments.

• 20:49Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 20:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So how does a large language model run a biological experiment? Because I think often we kind of gloss over the specifics, and when you hear the word "biological experiment", you think like wetware, right? Like biology. And that is what they're talking about. And I think that's an important... Point, because sometimes when we talk about studies on this show, what we're really talking about are studies where things are modeled or simulated, right? That would be a perfectly cromulent description of what an LLM could do, is they could simulate a bunch of different biological experiments. But no, in this,

• 21:31Cara Santa Maria?

  in this case, they actually built a robotic laboratory that was all accessible through the cloud. Does that make sense? Yeah. And there's pictures and like, I remember actually way back when I was in graduate school, the first time. So that would have been 2007 is when I got my, my masters in, in the neurobiolab. We had a robot that looked somewhat similar. We were doing a lot of electrophysic experiments. There was a lot of chemistry involved and we had a little robotic arm that could pipette, that could lift up, you know, tubes, move them to other places, put them on the belly dancer to mix them, put them in centrifuges and put little pH test strips and things like that in there. This is very similar. You see a, you know,

• 22:13Cara Santa Maria?

  a robotic arm and, and it's, but here it's controlled remotely. And the difference is it's not just people putting in the inputs. The large language model is actually learning and developing the experimentation as it goes. So what kinds of experiments do you think that this would be like really helpful for? We've mentioned it a million times on the show. Drug development. Yeah. Right? Like whether it's developing specific exogenous compounds to bind to receptors in the body, or it's actually developing new proteins, for example, or, you know,

• 22:53Cara Santa Maria?

  just working towards that intersection between what is already in the body, what is endogenous to the body, what is outside of the body that we can make, like drugs, but also- Exogenous? Yeah, exogenous, exactly. Yeah. Like drugs, but also I think even the word drug at this point, Steve, would you agree, is sort of like, we need almost like a bigger word than the word drug, because now we're talking about all sorts of like synthetic biological compounds. And different elements and and smart drugs and and even potentially biological weapons that all sort of act like drugs in a way.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the drug has different definitions based on context. You know, drug from a regulatory point of view in the United States is anything that treats or cures a disease.

• 23:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, that's therapeutic.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Uh, if you'd mentioned a disease, it's by definition a drug, it gets regulated as a drug. But it doesn't necessarily mean a chemical pharmaceutical, that's only one category. As you say, there are protein therapeutics, there's lots of lots of different things, antibodies, monoclonal antibodies, et cetera. So, yeah, it's sort of the bigger, like, biological therapeutics, you know, which has many subcategories.

• 24:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And then let's-

• 24:09Speaker 04

  We need something catchier than that.

• 24:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the biological-

• 24:11Speaker 04

  Biofairs or something.

• 24:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, then, let's look at the flip side of that, because the way that biological therapeutics work, and there's, you know, myriad ways that they can work, depending on, like you mentioned, if if we're talking about monoclonal antibodies, or, you know, we're talking about synthesizing new proteins, blah, blah, blah. But I think the key word that you mentioned there, and that's what makes them, you know, kind of fit within that drug, or be related to that drug category, is therapeutic. But of course, any technology, any protocol that we use to make something that could help, could also potentially harm, right? And not just, you know, because of side effects, or because it wasn't, you know, tested in

• 24:55Cara Santa Maria?

  full, but intentionally developing compounds that when they bind to certain receptors in the body, or when they cause downstream changes to, you know, the genetic coding, will intentionally cause harm. So now we're talking about bioweapons, right? So what this data scientist talks about, basically, is that for all of our kind of biomedical history-

• 25:24Cara Santa Maria?

  We had benchwork. Anybody who's ever worked in a bio lab has done classic, traditional benchwork and they've had to learn how to use all the machines. They've had to learn how to test the pH and the osmolarity and, you know, pull out all the different buffers and compounds and mix together things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And this is like, oh, this is part of the experience of working in a lab. Part of it is designing your experiment, coming up with all the protocols, figuring out how you're going to measure everything and then how you're going to, you know, iterate as you go. And the other part is, is the dexterity component. It's, it's actually being good at doing the physical lab work. Often you have lab techs

• 26:06Cara Santa Maria?

  who are involved in that, a lot of graduate students and undergraduate students. But that part is more and more, we are capable of completely taking that part over with machines. That doesn't feel risky to most people, right? It actually feels like a boon. Okay, so people introduce error, but a robot can do it faster, more efficiently, with less waste, you know, with less contamination. That all sounds great. But then what happens when the design part of the experiment starts to fall into the hands of AI? Now we're applying all of those same improvements,

• 26:44Cara Santa Maria?

  faster, more efficient, cleaner, with less waste, to a protocol that used to take hours to days to months to years, now can happen in seconds to minutes. And so what does that mean for biosecurity?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And this is a real concern. So, you know, they call this the dual-use problem. You know, the same AI tools that could cause great benefit to an entire people can also be misused and cause a real harm. They can be repurposed, but they can also be, you know, very intentionally used in that way. So, we've got a few studies already that have been, you know, published and are, are available. About ways that this has been done. So we're not just talking, you know, pontificating and saying, hmm, what could happen? But a few studies where they're like, okay, let's see if this actually can and has happened. So I've got a study here I can cite

• 27:46Cara Santa Maria?

  where protein evolution was enhanced using large language models and they were able to improve enzyme activity, mutation rate and evolution significantly from traditional methods. We've got a study here where viral spread was optimized. So that's fun, right? So the AI was able to figure out how to make the virus as good at spreading through a population as possible. Yeah, that's good.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  That's gain of function research, which is illegal.

• 28:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. And, um, and we've got also, how can we recover live viruses from synthetic DNA? There are large language models that can just walk somebody through that. And so the main point here, there are a lot of main points, but one of the main points that stuck out to me, it was salient for me, is there was a study that showed basically what LLMs offer even beyond ease of use, more efficiency, improved timelines for expert researchers, is that individuals without expertise are more readily able to use these

• 29:06Cara Santa Maria?

  tools. And that's a real concern because before there was a certain kind of bottleneck to doing bioterrorism that meant you just kind of had to be smart enough to do it, right? Like you had to at least have the training to be able to use these tools efficiently and effectively. But now you don't even need that. So. Here is a statement by the Center for Security and Emerging Technology that was put out three years ago, talking about bio risk. They said that "without AI, a scientifically knowledgeable user can follow existing protocols and produce known existing pathogens and toxins.

• 29:51Cara Santa Maria?

  They can also develop novel or modified pathogens and toxins through directed experimentation. With AI, a scientifically knowledgeable user can use biological design tools to design new or modified pathogens and toxins, or to evade screening or enhance production. This could increase design efficiency, reduce physical burden, and then chatbots could help brainstorm new approaches." So this was 2023. And then they mentioned that a scientifically naive user without AI often is just doing beginner-friendly, you know, anarchist cookbook style stuff, and they're probably more likely to produce a known existing pathogen or toxin. They're not likely to modify something new, or do too much cutting-edge work. And with

• 30:35Cara Santa Maria?

  AI, through the use of these chatbots, they're probably still more likely to produce a known pathogen or toxin, but they may lower the perceived barrier, so more actors may engage in bio risk. Now, this has been blown wide open with LLMs entering the picture, because now a naive user, and there are studies that are beginning to compile to show this, a naive user can produce novel, and let's just say dangerous on a lot of levels, different pathogens. And specifically, there's a lot of research now into the development of proteins.

• 31:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Proteins before were a huge bottleneck, because they're complicated. Proteins are one of the most complex macromolecules in nature, and they do so much. Proteins are just, they're ubiquitous. They're involved in so much metabolic activity.

• 31:33Bob Novella?

  Everything, so much, they're all it. If somebody says to you, guess what this tissue is in the body? If you say protein, you're probably going to be right.

• 31:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, ends up, most every enzyme is a protein. Like, proteins do a lot of stuff. So I did, did a little bit more digging and I found a really great kind of position paper from an individual ethicist who writes about technology and power and the risks of powerful AI. And he basically detailed some of the benefits and some of the concerns and some of the things that we should be thinking about and highlighting. So these are the things he said, when we think about the benefits, it's important to discuss risk in a careful and well-considered manner. I think it's critical to, number one, avoid doomerism, not just of this, in the sense

• 32:25Cara Santa Maria?

  of believing doom is inevitable, but also more generally thinking about AI risks in like a more religious way. He said, we should acknowledge uncertainty. Of course, we need to do this. We should intervene as surgically as possible. So sometimes broad restrictions and regulations actually can do more harm than good because they can prevent legitimate research from taking place. But then he said, what should we actually be worried about? Well, number one, autonomy risks. What are the intentions and goals of the country or the actor who is utilizing this technology? Is it hostile? What values does it share? Could it militarily dominate the world? Blah, blah, blah.

• 33:09Cara Santa Maria?

  A misuse for destruction. Assume that they follow instructions. Could existing rogue actors who want to cause destruction, like use or manipulate an existing armed force in that country to do this? Is there a misuse for seizing power? How could this affect economic disruption? And then, of course, as we often talk about, what are the indirect effects of utilizing this new technology? So there, there was a Biden-era executive order in, in 2023 on the safe, secure, and trustworthy development and use of artificial intelligence, which had a lot of

• 33:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Potential regulations and safety nets put in place, but what do you guys think happened to that?

• 33:58Speaker 02

  We went bye bye? Oh, boy.

• 34:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, well, the Trump administration just fully revoked it, so that's fun. And we do see that a lot of individual AI companies are putting out policy statements, are trying to introduce their own safety checks. But of course, that's self-regulation, and we know that that's not going to ultimately be the standard that we need. Anthropic has activated its highest safety tier when it released its most advanced model in 2025. OpenAI updated its preparedness framework. So we do see that people are, you know, working on this and they are concerned about this. But, for example, we have a biological weapons convention, that an international treaty

• 34:44Cara Santa Maria?

  that prohibits the production and use of bioweapons. Well, it was agreed upon and published in 1975. The word AI is nowhere in it.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:52Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, and so we have to be really careful about the fact that some governing rules, they don't account for the speed at which this can happen, and they absolutely don't address it specifically in their language. So, yeah, cheaper, more accessible, more naive users can potentially cause a lot more harm a lot more quickly. And our regulation and our policy is just not keeping up.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Well.

• 35:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  So Kara, it's funny, because we both chose an AI news item for this week. You could pretty much take everything you just said and swap out my topic, and it's the exact same discussion.

• 35:32Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing. Well, then let's dive in.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think it's interesting to compare these two topics. So, but first, let me ask you guys a question. Do any of you know what the term vibe coding refers to? Yes. Vibe code. Anyone but Jay. Code or coding?

• 35:48Bob Novella?

  Coding, C O D I N G.

• 35:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So is that just like, kind of like writing code based on like how you feel about it?

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 35:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Jay went in.

• 35:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Going with the vibe?

• 35:58Jay Novella?

  You know, it's software, it's a software development approach where, you know, it's basically like using natural language, right, to code?

• 36:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so it's like, I don't need, I don't have to be a coder. I can just go, hey, hey.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  You can use English.

• 36:10Bob Novella?

  That's what AI does when you talk to it, when it makes code out of your words.

• 36:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that would be like.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  It'll do this. It's not coders coding using AI by just telling the AI, make me an app that does this. And then you just natural language describe exactly what you want and then AI makes it for you.

• 36:26Cara Santa Maria?

  But let's be honest, that's freaking amazing.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Of course it's amazing.

• 36:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It's also like the best use for AI because that's like what it does.

• 36:32Speaker 02

  All right, but what do you think the downsides might be of that?

• 36:36Jay Novella?

  The developers don't really understand the inner workings.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Right, so you have, again, you have naive people who don't have the skills, they didn't, you know, so again, partly the coding universe is controlled by the fact that relatively few highly trained people are doing it. But now if we open up coding to everybody, what could be the unintended consequences of that? And as Jay and Bob are saying, like, these are now, not that it isn't awesome that anybody can create some code for themselves, but what do you think the quality control is of that code? Zero. Or?

• 37:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, we don't know where the weaknesses are.

• 37:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, what's the security vulnerabilities of that code? How is that going to integrate with all the other code that's out there, et cetera, et cetera? It's the same kind of problem opens up. So this, this news item actually focuses around a company called Anthropic. Have you guys? Yes. Familiar with that company? I've been reading about that in the news lately. This has been in the news partly because they're fighting with the Pentagon and this is an interesting overlap, I think, between that episode and what's going on now. So the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth, was mad at Anthropic because Anthropic said, you know, there's a couple of guardrails built into the software that the Pentagon's already using from Anthropic, the Claude software, and, and there are two red lines or guardrails.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  The Anthropic CEO Dario A. Modi said, "We're absolutely not compromising on these." "One is, you can't use our software for massive domestic surveillance." Okay. And he said, "This is due to, this is just an ethical issue." "We just ethically do not think that our, this software, we don't, we don't want our software being used for this purpose." And the second one was, "We do not want our software being used to target weapons without a human in the loop." For military targeting by itself, you know, completely 100% AI military targeting with no human who is in the loop and able to review it, right?

• 38:36Speaker 02

  And they said, "This is, this is not so much of an ethical issue as our software is not reliable enough for this. It still can hallucinate and, you know, so the reliability is not high enough to not have a human in the loop. So the software doesn't do either of those two things." Now Pete Hexeth, you know, and the Pentagon's, he thought that this was just the company being quote unquote woke, which is a ridiculous thing to say. Thank God. But their, their real position is that, "Well, we're only using the software for legal purposes. We should be allowed to use it for any legal purpose and we decide what it gets used for,

• 39:18Speaker 02

  not the CEO of some company, you know, gets to you, gets to decide what it's used for." That's it, you know, it sort of brings up a very interesting discussion about where this power should be. And of course, you know, my feelings about it are affected by the current people who are, would be making these decisions on the federal government side. And also, but not that I'm like happy to leave, to be at the tender mercies of, of tech bros either, you know what I mean? It's like, I'm not really happy with either answer, but for right now, I think the more conservative answer of sure, leave the guardrails in place. Yeah, why wouldn't you? Anyway, that's being fought about in the court. And that's not really what I'm talking about, but Anthropic is now at the center of another,

• 40:02Speaker 02

  maybe even bigger issue.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  And that is another piece of software that they're coming out with called Mythos. And Mythos is coding software. And they claim they're about 12 to 18 months ahead of the competition. And this is the most powerful coding software ever made, right? Vibe coding. AI, oh my God. This is AI powered coding that is ahead of anything else, according to Anthropic. But here's the concern. Wait, give me some details. What does that mean? How are they ahead and what way? It's just better. It's more powerful. It's just it's more accurate, everything. But here's the thing, when they were testing it, they discovered that the ability to write code also gave it another ability that's ahead of everybody else.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  It can read minds? No. It can make its own code. Well, that's the whole point. It can make a lot of paper clips really fast. No. What else might it really be good at finding?

• 41:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, vulnerabilities in other people's code.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Vulnerabilities in existing code.

• 41:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So it is its own hacker.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  It'll hack everything. Not only its own code, any code. This thing can hack anything.

• 41:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  It has found vulnerabilities that have been hiding in core software for years that no other system has been able to detect. And not only can it find it. It's gonna wreak havoc. It could reliably exploit them. It's like, oh, there's a vulnerability and I'm going to exploit it. And there you go. And damage done.

• 41:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And a white hat and a black hat is only, you know, distinguished by who is behind it.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Of course. This has no hat.

• 41:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 41:43Speaker 02

  So Anthropic, to their credit, they like, they had an oh shit moment where they're like, pull the plug, pull the plug. They, they realized that, first of all, if this gets out, we're screwed. Right. Oh yeah, they're gonna get sued into oblivion. I mean, I don't, I don't mean we, the company, I mean we, civilization. Humanity. Like taking down the entire financial system of the world. And number, number two.

• 42:10Bob Novella?

  I buried the headline on that one.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  In 12 to 18 months, or maybe sooner, everyone's gonna be there, right? Because they're only 12 to 18 months ahead of the competition. So, so what did they do in response to this realization that they now have the, like, the ultimate vulnerability finding and exploiting software in the world? What did the company do, Steve?

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Put all their money into gold.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  What did the company do?

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Oh, they wrote a new program to stop the old program.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Anything I say is gonna be horribly negative.

• 42:39Speaker 04

  They invented an AI to stop the, stop.

• 42:41Bob Novella?

  Holy crap.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  Myth, myth.

• 42:43Bob Novella?

  We, we're kinda screwed. Wow.

• 42:45Speaker 02

  So.

• 42:46Bob Novella?

  I mean, what they do is irrelevant, is almost irrelevant.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  They did something that actually is kinda reasonable, right? So they essentially put together a consortium of 40 big giant software companies, including their competitors, pretty much everybody, the big 40 software people in the world. They gave them.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  All the access.

• 43:07Speaker 02

  They, an access to Mythos review, like a review, uh, version of Mythos. So it's not fully activated, but it is like a, you know, a preliminary release of, of Mythos. They call this Project Glasswing, by the way, which is interesting. And it's basically, alright guys, you've got some time to use this to find and fix the vulnerabilities in your software. You better do it now.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Oh, so they put on a white hat, basically?

• 43:33Speaker 02

  They basically are using it to white hat, you know, basically lock down and secure core software functionality. Now, you gotta keep in mind, like, we think of, you know, software, I mean, I say we non-experts, experts know this, but like, we, we think of like, big corporations with big software packages, but those are often built upon open source software. Right. And, right, like, the core engines that are driving a lot of even private corporate software is all open source. And open soft, software is mainly produced and run and maintained by volunteers working on a shoestring budget. And if you find a vulnerability in a core piece of software like that, that affects

• 44:17Speaker 02

  thousands of applications, not just one application. That's at, that's at the core, you know, of our entire software infrastructure, right? Like I'm at, like, one of the things they mentioned was they found a vulnerability in like the JPG format. I mean, how common is that? Yeah. You know, when you could, when you could use that as a way to get into any system, you know? Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. So anyway, so it's really scary, you know, to think about where we are. Now, I'm saying hopefully in five years or 10 years, we'll look back at this as like a Y2K situation, you know, those of us who follow this sort of stuff. Yeah. Like, okay, remember when that almost happened, but we fixed it by preventing

• 44:58Speaker 02

  it from happening in the first place? So essentially, we are relying upon what I call the noblesse oblige of tech CEOs. Yeah. To sort of realize how the incredible, you know, power and vulnerability of their, of their own products and to actually do something responsible and proactive about it because no one else is doing it, right? Yep. The, the Trump administration. Or they just can't keep up. The Trump administration has basically decided, and again, this is the same dilemma that you mentioned. Like again, you mentioned all the same kind of dilemmas. We're giving it in the hands of many people, which is good, but it's also bad. And it, you know, we've lowered the bar and it's a powerful tool, which is good and it's also bad. And we want common sense regulations, but we don't want to stifle innovation, especially

• 45:43Speaker 02

  with China breathing down our neck. And from what I'm reading, China's poised to kick our ass in AI. So I get it. And the Trump administration has basically taken a no regulation approach. We don't want to do anything to stifle AI. In fact, they're trying to prevent the states from regulating AI. They're like anti-regulation, not no regulation. They're trying to, to completely deregulate or not, or preemptively not regulate the entire industry, which is not good. You know, it's, uh, we need industry and the government and internationally to get together and say, all right, how do we not destroy civilization with these products? And which gets back to a conversation we've had many times like AI doesn't need to be malevolent

• 46:28Speaker 02

  or sentient or whatever.

• 46:30Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  This kind of

• 46:32Bob Novella?

  It's clever and powerful.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  It's a disruptive technology. It's disruptive enough and it's moving so quickly that before regulations could be put in place or before we can prevent really bad things from happening, this kind of powerful application can proliferate. We're just lucky in a way that a company like Anthropic, this is as far as I could tell from everything I'm reading, that are putting on the white hat and going, hey, guys, we should, you know, do something responsible about this before this turns into a disaster. You could easily imagine a even slightly less conscientious company being in their position and how much worse this could this could go.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  So this is a story we got to keep an eye on because this is like, this is just happening.

• 47:19Bob Novella?

  Holy shit.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  This is like, this is almost science fiction movie trope level of plot. You know, it's like, there have been movies where exactly this happened. Some company develops a piece of software that could basically hack, you know, anything in the world and cybersecurity is about to become worthless.

• 47:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, like quantum computers have raised that specter for years now, but it's, you know, but we've been prepared for that and been thinking about that. And there are things that you can do now with your classical computers to safeguard them against quantum computers wreaking havoc on your encryption. But this is, this is something that could affect, you know, not the super encrypted secret data, but every computer system on the planet could be impacted.

• 48:03Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And again, similar to what Kara was saying, if you look at a cybersecurity, cyberterrorism perspective, we're now giving the tools of cyberterrorism and putting them in the hands of anybody. You don't need a coder, you don't need a world-class coder in order to be a cyberterrorist. You all you just need is access to an off-the-shelf app. So it's a brave new world we're heading towards with this. We have to keep our eyes open. We have to talk about stories like this and the powers that be need to get their shit together because they have got to almost Manhattan project this stuff like we need the consortium is a good start. Hopefully the consortium will evolve into something

• 48:46Speaker 02

  more, but we need an international organizations like we now like there's now we talked to, you know, an astronaut about, oh, there's an international organization to look for asteroids which can hit and destroy the earth. That's a good idea. You know, how about an international consortium whose job it is to look for ways that these emerging technologies could also destabilize our civilization?

• 49:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And I think we also have to be kind of careful from our American perspective often when we talk about these things because we are practiced in existing in a society and a governmental structure that had a fair amount of like democratic morals built in. And so we're often saying like when a nefarious actor, instead of realizing that we may be that nefarious actor.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Totally. Absolutely.

• 49:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Like we are definitely at risk of our own government doing some pretty disgusting things with this technology. It's not just them versus us. It's not some boogeyman out there.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think I said anything to imply that, but it's good to point that out specifically.

• 49:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. We're often like, China could. And it's like, no, but we could.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  No, but the point, I'm saying we need to do this, but not only us. The this needs to be international. And if we're just looking at who are the top players in AI right now? Yes, America is up there, but China is right there, too.

• 50:09Jay Novella?

  Steve?

• 50:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:10Jay Novella?

  Can their software be used for good? Meaning, could it figure out all the vulnerabilities that another piece of software has and then give them the ability to fix all of that?

• 50:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. That's the point. And that's what they're doing. That's their goal of Project Glasswing. Identify and fix all these vulnerabilities before this this tech gets out there. Because it's happening. It's, you know, again, 12 to 18 months, probably it's going to be everywhere, if not sooner. You know what I mean? So you better fix those vulnerabilities now. That's the whole idea.

• 50:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, we're gonna be hearing a couple of words more in the near future, and those two words are air gapped.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Air gapped.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Air gapped, oh no. I don't like the sound of that.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  No, that's a good thing. Air gapped basically means that you have a piece of hardware that is not in any way connected to anything. Right? So you can't connect, it's not connected to the internet, you can't access it through wifi, so it's completely isolated. And therefore, you could have protected information on there that is invulnerable for that reason.

• 51:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah. And then, of course, that reminds me of the book I read years ago, Robo Apocalypse, where an AI was so clever, it got around air gapping in some freaky cool way. Like, oh, man.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, you could use like just a flickering light to code or something. Yeah. Interesting. All right, we're not trying to be alarmist here. But be alarmed. We're pretty.

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Is it time dependent?

• 51:36Speaker 02

  We're trying to be realists about AI in every way, right? It's not overhype it, not underhype it, not overwarn about it or underwarn. This is the company itself. This is Anthropic. They're saying this is a huge vulnerability, and we need to do something about it now, or this could be a disaster. And they make a pretty compelling case for it.

• 52:00Bob Novella?

  I'm thinking, what's the cool side to this? This is powerful hacking, but how is it powerful in other ways that could be dramatic, dramatically awesome?

• 52:10Speaker 02

  When I first read about vibe coding, I'm like, I want to do that. That sounds fun. I mean, if I could just make an app for myself that does something that actually functions. I mean, the possibilities there are huge, and I think that is an awesome tool to have. But it just, so part of the recommendation is that security and quality control needs to be baked into those apps. Not an option, not an add-on, not a premium feature, but absolutely baked in. So that you can't, nobody should be able to use one of these sophisticated applications to make code that doesn't already incorporate reasonable security, if not ironclad as much as we could make it.

• 52:52Speaker 02

  So that's like one of the recommendations going forward, but that that is if that's going to be ubiquitous, that has to be regulation. Either that, or we're just counting on an entire industry to all do the right thing. And that doesn't seem realistic, right?

• 53:08Bob Novella?

  And Steve, what's the government angle here? Because they because they need to secure their stuff, but maybe even more so than than than securing, you know, my personal computer type stuff. I mean, they write, I mean, they have access to, you know, computer access to reactors and water filtration and all this, you know, huge things. I hope that the government is also intimately involved in this in this white hating.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I didn't see that piece of it like specifically. But the thing is, most of that software also uses the sort of core open source stuff. So they will be protected by that as well. But then like this, all the proprietary stuff that they have also needs to be specifically analyzed to vulnerabilities as well. So yeah, got to hope that happens.

• 53:56Bob Novella?

  One of my one of my major concerns is that is that, yeah, you use Mythos to to make your software really secure. But then what's that going to do to the user and experience, you know, user experience of your software? And what's it going to break? It's it's secure as hell. But but now it's like almost unusable.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  I usually that's not the case, though. Like, these vulnerabilities are like, oh, you could do this clever little hack to get into the back door, whatever. It doesn't necessarily it's just all back end stuff that I think will be seamless to the end user.

• 54:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, if you really think about it, their software that can do this is the most important piece of software on the planet.

• 54:30Speaker 02

  In a way, yeah.

• 54:32Jay Novella?

  And it's the most desired, you know, what government or what other software company wouldn't want it, or at least be able to use it on their own stuff. You know, it's this is profound. This is one of the biggest, you know, software related, technology related things that I've heard in a long time that.

• 54:48Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. I hope Anthropic, that one of the first things they did is to use it to shore up their security. Because you know, when other countries have heard about this, they trying that they they must have tried to to hack Anthropic just to get their hands on it, right? First.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  It's got to be like an arms race.

• 55:04Jay Novella?

  We are in an arms race. We are in an AI arms race.

• 55:06Bob Novella?

  I hope they used it. I hope they used it to secure their own stuff.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 55:11Bob Novella?

  Oof. All right. All right. We'll keep you updated. All right, Bob, tell me about this superconductivity breakthrough. Is breakthrough fair? Is it really? Is it a breakthrough? It depends how you look at it, but I'm just having trouble following your talk. It seems kind of less interesting at this point. Okay, let's do this. This was really fascinating. So scientists, is that the first word I use for all of my talks? Scientists or researchers have for the first time, guys, directly imaged a new layer of the process that allows superconductivity to happen. So how do they do this? And why do I keep reading about ballroom dancing metaphors to describe it? Because of Cooper pairs?

• 55:50Bob Novella?

  Uh, maybe. That's a good guess. Researchers include an interesting mix of experimental physicists and theoretical physicists. The former is from the French National Center for Scientific Research in Paris, CNRS. The latter is Simone Foundation's Flatiron Institute. So, okay, the name of the paper, the paper was published in Physical Review Letters just recently, this April 2026. The name of the paper, got some jargon in here, observing spatial charge and spin correlations in a strongly interacting Fermi gas. It's much more interesting than it sounds. So, all right, superconductivity. We've mentioned this many times on the show, and I think most everyone is comfortable with what's going on with superconductivity

• 56:33Bob Novella?

  at a, you know, at a high level, electricity flowing without resistance, and it happens in very cold regimes. That's where you're going to see things like superconductivity happening. And do you guys, do you guys know the key prediction of modern superconductivity theory? What's the key thing? And Steve kind of just ruined that because he basically said it's Cooper pairs, right? And you were right, Steve. That's the critical thing. That's what I would guess. That's much less, much less well-known. Well, you should have just set me up with that dancing part. I know. I know, you bastard. So, uh, so this is called, this is BCS theory, named after the physicist who developed it in the 50s, physicist John Bardine, Leon Cooper,

• 57:16Bob Novella?

  and John Robert Schreifer. They won the Nobel Prize, as you, as you might I'd imagine. And yes, it's this idea of Cooper pairs of electrons kind of getting together and traveling together. And that being a critical component to what allows superconductivity to happen. Electricity flowing without any resistance through wires, whatever it's moving through. So, but this theory, this BCS theory, it's only an approximate framework. I wasn't really aware of how approximate it really is. It can't describe all the aspects of superconductivity or even all the different types of superconductivity. So researchers have known for years that there is critical stuff missing in this BCS theory.

• 58:01Bob Novella?

  And they've been searching for years and have really hadn't had any major breakthrough. There's been some developments for sure, but actually understanding it at a much more, at a fundamental level has been kind of very elusive. So this gets us to their new experiment. They used a new imaging method. This involved an ultracold atom microscope, which is fascinating, out of scope for this talk. Maybe I'll talk about it some other, some other day. But they used, using this ultracold atom microscope, they were examined essentially a Fermi gas. Now, in this case, this is a, this is a gas of lithium atoms. And they cool it to, to make it into a Fermi gas. They got it, they have to cool it

• 58:43Bob Novella?

  down to a few billions of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. And that always just gets, makes me so impressed. I mean, they're so close. I mean, we all know absolute zero is essentially impossible to reach, but they're within a few billions of a degree. The low temperatures are critical here, right? Because that removes the thermal noise that infests everything that's not this cold, right? So when you get that low in temperature, it allows this group quantum behavior. I mean, these, these atoms are always quantum beasts, no matter what. But once you cool them down and that thermal noise kind of disappears and gets really minimized, it allows this group quantum behavior to take over.

• 59:26Bob Novella?

  And that's what allows things like superconductivity to happen, superfluidity to happen. Bose-Einstein condensates to happen and of course Fermi gases to happen as well. You need something to be really, really cold. So this is why, essentially why electrons will require these really, really cold regimes in order to pair up, to form Cooper pairs and do their superconductivity bit. So in this state, then lithium atoms essentially act like electrons. And it all comes down to the fact that they're fermions. If you're fermionic, I don't need to go into detail about that, but they essentially act like electrons. They pair up, they get together, do their thing.

• 1:00:07Bob Novella?

  So that makes it, when the atoms are pairing up, it turns it into a much more controllable investigation. You know what I mean? So if we can't examine electrons in this way, using this ultra-cold atom microscope, we need to use these lithium atoms to make it so that it's something that we can investigate in a very controlled, accurate way. So that's why they're using this method. Does that make sense why, guys, they're creating this Fermi gas, ultra-cold Fermi gas, using lithium atoms and they act like electrons? They pair, they form Cooper pairs together and that way we can see what's going on a lot easier than if we were using electrons. So what did they find?

• 1:00:48Bob Novella?

  After they paired up, after they formed Cooper pairs, these atoms moved in what they described as a synchronized dance. So if you have one pair, if you're looking at one Cooper pair of atoms or electrons, the position of that pair is actually dependent on the position of other pairs. And that's the key breakthrough right there. So this is where, of course, where the ballroom dancing metaphor crops up. That's why I'm seeing it everywhere I look. Because when you're ballroom dancing, you pair up with somebody and as you're dancing, there's a part of your brain that's making sure that you don't hit other dancers, right? Even though you may be doing complicated moves, you always make sure that you're not going to hit anybody else. So that's kind of what these Cooper pairs are doing.

• 1:01:31Bob Novella?

  To Tariq Yefsa, who's the Experimental Research Lead at the French National Center for Scientific Research, said, "The BCS theory gives us a view from outside the ballroom." Right, so he means here is that the the old theory, the way we understand it right now before this experiment, it gives us a view from outside the ballroom where we can hear the music and see the dance come out. But we don't know what's going on inside in the ballroom. Our approach is like taking a wide angle camera inside the ballroom. Now we can see how the dancers are pairing up and paying attention to one another so they don't bump into each other. So that's his that's his metaphorical description of what of the advance. So the important the takeaway here is that this was not predicted by the 70 year old theory.

• 1:02:14Bob Novella?

  This is a new this is a new insight into what's happening with superconductivity that we did not have before. So and and it's advances like this, you know, having a better, more fundamental understanding of of superconductivity itself at its at its lowest level that could lead to a whole whole new industries essentially, and that's what gets me really excited about this. And that and that leads me to like, what's the what's the the future hold for this? And one of the big takeaways, one of the biggest takeaways from this is that it could lead to the solution to one of the one of the holy grails of modern physics. And what's that? Room temperature superconductors. If we had that, the the impacts to to our lives and to to industries are it's it's kind of hard to predict and it just how dramatic it would be.

• 1:02:59Bob Novella?

  I mean, we're talking about ultra efficient electric grids, electric the changes to electronic devices. It would be a game changer. I tried to come up with a list of some of the things that we that that you would notice, some of the big, big changes, like imagine if all the power grids had almost no transmission losses. Imagine if your if your electric motors and generators were were fairly quickly cheaper, denser and much more powerful because of this. Magnetic levitation and friction and frictionless transport would be ubiquitous eventually, right? Massively stronger magnets, far superior energy stored on the on the grid. And the list goes on and on. It could be extremely dramatic and and people have been waiting and hoping for this.

• 1:03:42Bob Novella?

  But of course, I gotta bring in some caveats, right? To be really revolutionary, room temperature itself, just having room temperature S con cable, you know, S con cables is not To be all and end all, you need, there needs to be a lot, other things need to also happen. It would also need to be cheap. It would also need to be stable. You would also need to be, have it manufacturable. You know, if you, if it caused, you know, if it's too hard to manufacture, then all of this means nothing, essentially, except maybe in the lab. It also is going to need to carry very high currents in strong magnetic fields. That might not even be possible. So we don't know. So there's a lot of things that would need to come into place to make this truly revolutionary, as I hope it could be.

• 1:04:21Bob Novella?

  But if we're ever going to get there, this, it's a fundamental breakthrough like this, that that's going to do it. So let's, let's see what happens. So all I can say.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  Machines operate at higher than room temperature. So.

• 1:04:33Bob Novella?

  Right. Well, that's true. That, that's an interesting point. Yeah. Cause sometimes, um, you know, will they be able to operate at a, you know, at one, at a hundred degrees Fahrenheit or, or, you know?

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:43Bob Novella?

  That, that's an interesting point that I haven't really, can't remember even coming across in terms of super conductivity and, and room temperature. But yeah, that would, see, that's another thing that's potentially limiting, even if you have room temperature, does it mean, oh, we got, we're going to have all this great stuff. You know, the, it's, it's a very complicated interplay of all these other characteristics that also need to work.

• 1:05:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Usually technology has to function at a range of temperatures, including, you know, much hotter and much colder than room temperature.

• 1:05:10Bob Novella?

  Yeah. I mean, even if they got it to superconduct and just barely above freezing, that would be fantastic, amazingly fantastic.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be huge. Yeah. Evan, could superconducting cables be used in red light therapy?

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Sure, why not? Red light therapy, it's a, it's, it's, it's a boundless, a boundless horizon. Anything's possible.

• 1:05:31Bob Novella?

  The therapy, the therapy would be cheaper.

• 1:05:33Speaker 04

  So how about this, from Gentleman's Quarterly, how often do we refer to Gentleman's Quarterly?

• 1:05:38Bob Novella?

  Never on this show, ever.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  Oh, I love, I love firsts on our, on our show anytime. How about the title of this article, The Skeptic's Guide to Red Light Therapy? How does that not make me slam on the brakes and stop and read that?

• 1:05:52Bob Novella?

  Better than red light districts.

• 1:05:54Speaker 04

  Red light therapy, sometimes called photobiomodulation. Yeah, a treatment that uses specific wavelengths of red and near infrared light directed at the body. Now, it's unlike ultraviolet light, which can damage skin. You know, these longer wavelengths, which are penetrate the surface and are absorbed by cells, particularly within the mitochondria. You know, the structure is responsible for producing cellular energy. The idea is that this light exposure, red light therapy exposure can boost energy production at the cellular level, potentially enhancing repair processes, reducing inflammation and

• 1:06:37Speaker 04

  improving overall tissue function. Now, in practice, red light therapy shows up in a wide range of settings and places you'll find it. For example, dermatologists will use it in clinical environments to help with skin conditions like acne, wound healing, and signs of aging like wrinkles. But it's also used in treatments for hair loss, where they apply light to the scalp to stimulate hair follicles. Now, outside of medicine, it's been embraced by the wellness and fitness world, where it's marketed for things like muscle recovery, reduced soreness after exercise, and even improved athletic performance.

• 1:07:18Speaker 04

  And more recently, it's been promoted for things like chronic pain and improving your mood and brain health. So a pretty wide range of things there. Red light therapy can be called a non-drug and non-invasive solution. So you can see why it would have an appeal to many people who, for whatever reasons, have a distrust of modern medicines and treatments. And red light therapy is very much in fashion right now. It's being touted for all sorts of things, some of them within the scope of reasonableness and things really outside on the fringes. But is it some kind of panacea? Hardly. I don't think so. But what do physicians who understand science-based medicine have to say about red light therapy?

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  Steve, you directed me to an article that Scott Gavura wrote for Science-Based Medicine recently about red light therapy. And I'll give you a couple of lines from his article there. "Proponents claim that this light stimulates mitochondria, the powerhouses of our cells, to produce more energy, ATP, which supposedly improves healing, reduces inflammation, and accelerates fat breakdown. How red light stimulates mitochondria is thought to be through interaction with cytochrome C oxidase, CCO for short, which is a key enzyme in the mitochondrial electron transport chain. Bob has nothing to do with the electrons you were talking about. Red and near-infrared light are thought to be absorbed by CCO, displacing nitric oxide,

• 1:08:47Speaker 04

  NO, which otherwise blocks mitochondrial respiration. The idea sounds appealing and astonishingly simple. You know, you shine light, energize your cells, and your body performs better. But while this effect on mitochondria has been observed in vitro," very important there, you know, "cells in a lab," "when you're translating that effect into outcomes that we actually care about, like weight loss or some other measure of improved health, that is a very different challenge." That's what Scott wrote. And that's, and this is where the skepticism is definitely warranted. What are the quality of the studies that have been done on people as opposed to, you know, seeing cells react in Petri dishes or test tubes? Well, apparently, it's not all that impressive.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  You have small studies, short-duration trials, manufacturer-sponsored trials, relying on less accurate surrogate measures, and the risks of biases, of course, are always high. Do they also look at things like the longer-term safety and frequent prolonged exposure to red light therapy? That's not really been well-studied. And ultimately, the safety depends on the specific product in use and how it is used. And there are a lot of these products out there. You'll see them in face masks, lamps, wearables, all sorts. I've seen, they what, have pictures of dogs? You sit your dog in front, in front of, in red light for red light therapy. And there are thousands, actually, of these products that get marketed.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  So, you know, does it have a real scientific basis to it? Yeah, you know, maybe it does. But how does that translate to all the uses that red light therapy claims it can it can help with? It depends. Are you using it to help with your skin condition? Okay, dermatologists will do that. But are you using the same red light therapy products to help lose weight, stimulate muscle growth? It becomes a problem with devices or techniques that have limited actual scientific underpinnings to it. Right? You have this kernel of truth upon which is built this whole marketplace, basically, for people seeking these non-invasive and non-drug treatments.

• 1:10:54Speaker 04

  And the GQ article, actually, I thought, did a pretty sensible take on it. It was not a bad approach. It treated red light therapy as something that has limited benefits, skin, hair, and maybe a little inflammation, maybe some muscle recovery. But again, it acknowledged that a lot of the evidence is early, it's fragmented, and definitely, definitely oversold. Red light therapy is not magic. It's not one of those rare treatments that somehow improves everything in your life, you know, including workout, brain fog, and all sorts of claims. You're not going to get those kinds of results from these things that you're picking up at your at your local mall. And there's plenty of studies that have looked into this. I'll give you a couple of examples.

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  Stanford Medicine says the evidence is fairly robust for hair regeneration and wrinkle reduction, but the other applications, such as enhanced athletic performance, fat reduction, fat burning, they describe it as less well-supported. And that means it's wanting. Even the American Academy of Dermatology, where dermatologists say, yeah, we use red light therapy, but it's a complementary therapy. It's not a replacement for standard treatment. It's just something that you use in addition to other treatments. So how do you really suss that out of what is doing the work here? Where are you getting the real results from? Is it from the red light therapy product? Or is it from the other things that your doctor

• 1:12:20Speaker 04

  is asking you to do for yourself? And these home devices are so wild and variable, different products, what kind of, how much light are they putting out? What are the doses? What are the protocols? You know, there may be a signal there, but there's a standardization problem. And one mask that you're wearing is not necessarily like another mask, you know? And of course, whatever you're being told, they're going to oversell it. They're going to hype it. And Scientific American recently noticed about that very problem. It's the hype machine, right? They say they've got something a little plausible here, but the enthusiasm is racing ahead of the clinical evidence. It was a 2026 study on how at home red light

• 1:13:03Speaker 04

  therapy devices are promoted on social media, of course, and explicitly framed those promotions in the context of that limited evidence. You know, and we see this a lot, you know? It's all over wellness culture. You take a real mechanism, you add some small studies, strip away all the caveats, and then you market it as some kind of life hack or life upgrade. But before long, the modest possibility that something may help a little becomes almost a certainty that it will help a lot. There's the hype machine for you, overselling what it is actually doing. So we have every reason, I think, to be skeptical, lots of reasons to be skeptical about red light therapy, except for some maybe very specific uses.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  I don't buy the whole mitochondria thing.

• 1:13:48Speaker 04

  Even that?

• 1:13:48Speaker 02

  I think it's a weak mechanism. It's not very plausible. The reason is, is that energy production is incredibly regulated within cells because it's a massive trade off. It's not like more energy is always better. Like, there's no downside to it. When mitochondria make more ATP, that is like the main metabolic stress on cells, right? You don't want to make more energy than you need. And so you're taking a homeostatic, carefully regulated, very complex system, and you think you're just going to Boosted in one direction, that's going to be an unalloyed good. It's nonsense that never works out, right? Any of these claims of this is going to boost this aspect of biological function and it's going to be a good thing.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  That almost never works out.

• 1:14:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Or it has like a downside to it.

• 1:14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but there's trade offs.

• 1:14:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I also don't.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  Okay, you're going to age faster though, too, because that's what happens.

• 1:14:41Speaker 04

  Oh, it turns into, oh, I see.

• 1:14:43Cara Santa Maria?

  I also don't get how it's so it's only talking about skin cells, though, right? Because how does it get to any other cells?

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  Well, some frequencies of light can penetrate deeper into tissue than others. And the hot, the longer wavelength, you know, redder frequencies can penetrate more.

• 1:14:59Cara Santa Maria?

  But how deep? They're not getting down to your organs.

• 1:15:01Speaker 02

  Well, you would need near infrared.

• 1:15:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, which would be dangerous for other reasons.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  That gets to the heating.

• 1:15:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:08Speaker 04

  Right. And I don't think the, the products you're buying in the mall are doing that.

• 1:15:12Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I think it's just like a red light bulb.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  Basically.

• 1:15:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I think it's just reaching like the top layer. Maybe it's penetrating a little bit into more dermal layers, but beyond that, I don't see how it could have any claims for anything beyond healing superficial wounds or and even then I don't think it's, it's feasible. But I just don't even understand the mechanism of how it would get to an organ system, for example.

• 1:15:35Speaker 04

  And it's interesting what you brought up, Steve. Is there a condition by which a person could be have an ailment in which their cells are not producing enough?

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  Well, if you're talking about treating something that's out of whack, that's different than boosting a healthy system to be even more effective. Those are two very different claims, right? So if you were saying, oh, there's, there's a condition where people, their mitochondria are dysfunctional and they can't produce enough ATP and we're going to compensate for that by boosting their production with red light. I would buy that chain of argument.

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  But they're not, they're not saying that.

• 1:16:12Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's what the wellness industry does. They make everybody think that their, their cells aren't working well enough. They make everybody think that they have some sort of failure inside of their body that they need to optimize. But you're right, Steve. It's, it's the same as all the claims we hear all the time about boosting your immune system. You don't want that unless you are immune deficient. You do not want a boosted immune system. Exactly. Right. Because then you have an autoimmune problem.

• 1:16:39Speaker 02

  Even the antioxidant thing is crap too. It's the same thing. It's a homeostatic system. Let it do what it does. Unless you have an abnormality, a disease of it, you don't want to mess with it.

• 1:16:48Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's the same thing with vitamins and supplements.

• 1:16:51Speaker 04

  That's what I was thinking as well, right? Unless you have scurvy or something and need more vitamin C.

• 1:16:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, some of us.

• 1:16:57Speaker 04

  Don't hyper dose on vitamin C.

• 1:16:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And do it based on your numbers. Don't just assume that you can take 10,000 times the, you know, dosage of something and that more is better. It does not work that way.

• 1:17:09Speaker 02

  I always check my patients' vitamin levels before supplementing.

• 1:17:13Speaker 04

  They seem to have studies though that say it's good for wrinkles. I mean, that's, that's what they, that's what they point it to.

• 1:17:18Cara Santa Maria?

  It's hard too, because a lot of, a lot of like skincare studies are based on self-report. And it's a really hard thing to say, like, does your, is your hair fuller? Does your skin look, you know, less wrinkly?

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  And what else are they doing at the same time? Right. And what else are they doing at the same time? What other actually topical creams and stuff are they putting on to their body?

• 1:17:38Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, like putting moisturizer on your face makes your wrinkles less, you know, apparent.

• 1:17:43Speaker 04

  Noticeable?

• 1:17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:45Speaker 02

  All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:17:47Jay Novella?

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

• 1:17:59Jay Novella?

  Now, I was impressed because a lot of people got this right. Of course, I usually pick the first person that sends it in. So let's go through this. Listener name Mike Johnson said, Jay, and everyone, my guest for this week's noisy is a hydro power grain mill. Thank you for all that you do on this podcast and elsewhere. And they always look forward to the banter and analytical and critical thinking each week. So a hydro powered. Grain mill is one of those mills that is powered by water flow, right? They have that large wheel on the outside of the building. And that wheel turns like, you know, a stone grinding disc inside of the building. And that's where they would, you know, that's how it's powered. You guys can visualize that, right? Mm hmm.

• 1:18:44Jay Novella?

  That is not correct, but that is the first time anyone has ever guessed that specific thing. I think that's really fun and cool. Another listener named Dan Lee wrote in and said, Dear Jay, this week's noisy is some people doing sprints in a gymnasium or playing racquetball. I can't spell racquetball and I am happy and I'm too sleepy to look it up. Maybe I should have said pickleball. I can spell that. Well, yeah, but wouldn't your email program spell corrected for you? Or are you right? I'm just curious, but Dan, thanks for sending that in. You're not correct, but after re-listening to it, I don't think it's a bad guess at all. I had a couple of people have close guesses. The first one was David Seer.

• 1:19:26Jay Novella?

  It sounds to me like someone standing under a raised subway track and the weight of it going by is making a support or something squeak. That's a very good guess, although it's not, it's not correct. And then Shane Hillier. Shane Hillier wrote, it sounds like the BART Bay Area Rapid Transit when it goes under the San Francisco Bay, right? So you guys are getting a better idea what this thing is. I did get someone who nailed it. This is Corey Belak and Corey says, long time, first time. I think this week's noisy is of cars driving over an expansion joint on a bridge. Specifically, the expansion joint is made up of two or more metal plates which overlap each other as the cars drive by or over the joint. The joint flexes a little bit, which causes the plates to rub against each other and makes a squeaking noise.

• 1:20:11Speaker 04

  I thought you were going to say specifically they identified which bridge, which highway, which exactly where.

• 1:20:17Jay Novella?

  Well, the previous guesser said it was the BART, you know, that BART Transit.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Like San Francisco?

• 1:20:24Jay Novella?

  No, that's not the correct thing, but someone did pick a very specific thing and I guess where they live. So anyway, that is correct. So let me play this for you again.

• 1:20:44Jay Novella?

  Yeah, and that's basically the expansion joint squeaking as the cars go over.

• 1:20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, once you know it, like, yeah, of course, I've heard that a thousand times.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  And it's designed, right, to do that. In other words, expansion make, there is supposed to be that sort of gap, in a sense.

• 1:20:57Jay Novella?

  Absolutely. Yeah, that gap allows, like, in the winter or the summer, when the size of the bridge changes due to temperature, that expansion joint allows it to move.

• 1:21:06Speaker 04

  And it's perfectly safe.

• 1:21:08Jay Novella?

  Oh, hell, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you didn't have them, the bridge would eventually break from the, uh, the temperature changes.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  That's what I want to hear.

• 1:21:15Jay Novella?

  Yep. Yeah, it's good. That's a good thing. All right, I have a new noisy for this week. This was sent in by a listener named Matt Tinnenberg, and check this out.

• 1:21:49Jay Novella?

  This might be one of the weirdest noises. I mean, once you find out what it is, it'll make perfect sense. I think it's going to be very hard to guess what it is, but there are, I'm going to just straight up tell you, there are different voices in there, and there's properties about those different voices that you should pay attention to. And I think you're really gonna like it. It has a very funny element to it, to me personally. I think it's kind of, it's wacky and funny.

• 1:22:15Speaker 04

  Okay, good.

• 1:22:16Jay Novella?

  So, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. You guys know, there's a ton of, um, events that the SGU are doing. You can go to theskepticsguy.org to check out the varied list of events. I'm not going to list them again on the show, but I just want to, I want to put a highlight on our Nauticon Conference, which is happening in Australia. This is going to be, uh, happening in July of this summer. Uh, depending on where you are in the world, it could be winter. The exact dates are going to be, going to be July 20- Like Australia? Yeah, I'm in Australia. The exact dates are July 23rd to 25th. Uh, there's lots

• 1:22:58Jay Novella?

  of different tickets to be bought at that specific conference. Um, if you're interested in learning more, you can go to nauticoncon.com.

• 1:23:07Jay Novella?

  Or you can go to skepticon.org.au. And the other thing that we'll be doing when we're on that trip is we will be doing a conference in New Zealand and you can get more information about that conference at conference.skeptics.nz.

• 1:23:22Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Jay. I'm gonna do a couple of quick emails. First one's just a correction. A couple of weeks ago, we were talking about how fast the Artemis 2 was going, and I believe at some point it said it was going Mach 32.

• 1:23:36Jay Novella?

  You did.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  And it was correctly.

• 1:23:39Jay Novella?

  You were mocked for that.

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  I was mocked. So I did not know this, but do you guys know what the technical definition of Mach speed is?

• 1:23:46Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:47Speaker 02

  No. It's the sound at sea level?

• 1:23:50Jay Novella?

  No, but if you go like Mach 2, you're going twice the speed of sound. Mach 3 is three times the speed of sound.

• 1:23:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you're missing a detail. Which speed of sound?

• 1:24:00Jay Novella?

  Oh, it's gonna be at sea level, of course.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  No. No, that's the mistake we all make. Oh, well, I'm wrong then.

• 1:24:06Jay Novella?

  To do with the medium?

• 1:24:07Speaker 02

  In air? Mach is a unitless ratio defining the object speed relative to the speed of sound in the surrounding medium.

• 1:24:16Jay Novella?

  Ah, there you go. Yeah, it's relative.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. So when you're in space, there's no Mach.

• 1:24:20Jay Novella?

  No Mach.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  So saying the Artemis was going Mach 32 while outside the atmosphere is wrong. And although that's what I was just quoting the sources that I was reading, so I guess it's a common misunderstanding. So you could say it was going 32 times the speed of sound at sea level. That's fine, but you can't say Mach 32. Does that make sense? Nice, nice wrangle. Interesting. Unitless ratio. That's cool. I did not know that. So thanks for sending that in, those who did. All right, this one's interesting. This comes from Adam Pesci. He said, pronounced like Joe. I'm assuming he means Joe Pesci.

• 1:24:54Jay Novella?

  Oh, maybe they're related.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  And Adam writes, "The talk around my Tuesday morning pickleball games often revolves around conspiracy theories like aliens on Earth, UFO talk, etc. I haven't seen concrete evidence to take any of this seriously, although any help from aliens would be welcome. This week, the discussion was around the missing or strange deaths of US scientists tied to NASA JPS." Or nuclear space departments that a ninth scientist was just announced to pass a few years ago. I've seen reporting from the Daily Mail and most recently this week on Fox News. Not exactly reliable outlets. My skeptical antenna are raised. However, the numbers do seem higher than coincidence. Would love to get your take. And this subject touches on both

• 1:25:40Speaker 02

  science and critical thinking regarding conspiracy theories. Love your work. Thanks for all that you do. Have you guys seen this? Yes.

• 1:25:47Speaker 04

  I've heard of it. No.

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  It's going around social media. And I think there's been one or two more have been added like in the last week since we got this email. But there's at least nine now like on the list. So I'd looked into it as much as I could. There isn't a lot of specific information on it. And it seems like the individual cases are all true, although I've looked at these kinds of conspiracies before, meaning like the mysterious deaths of people and they're not always that mysterious. You know what I mean? Like the mystery is being kind of ginned up, but it's and the same is largely true here, although, you know, missing is missing, right? There are some people who just vanished,

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  who just went missing. And at least one of the people was was murdered, like it was a murder. Carl Grillmeyer, a Caltech scientist, shot dead on his porch on February. So part sometimes the elements are misleading. And and in this case, it looks like some of the deaths were just deaths. Some were violent, you know, a couple people were shot dead and some people are missing. But the question is, could this all be a coincidence? Right? And so I think that is the default answer that would need to be rejected before you would leap to any notion that there's a conspiracy going on.

• 1:27:14Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:27:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, of course. And what people say nine scientists or so, first of all, they do another thing that they inflate the numbers by first of all, going back in time, right? Like, well, how far back are we going to go? You know, they just added somebody from 2023. So

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, keep going till you get some kind of result that you like.

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's at least over three years now, right? It's between 2023 and 2026.

• 1:27:37Cara Santa Maria?

  How many scientists are there?

• 1:27:39Speaker 02

  That's the other thing. What's the baseline? How many scientists are? Is this unusual for the number of people that you could potentially be drawing from? And so that's the other thing. It's not like all these people worked in the same lab, right?

• 1:27:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:27:53Speaker 02

  They're pulling in anyone who might possibly have any kind of relations. Like, one person is retired Air Force Major General. Okay. How does that relate to a lab worker from Los Alamos National Laboratory? He's not even a scientist, right? He's a lab worker. Another one is a laboratory employee, right? It's not even, again, not even a scientist.

• 1:28:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. How many deaths were there at Google over the last, you know, five years?

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  They're throwing the widest net. One is a MIT science, plasma scientist, fuser. Okay, so how does that relate to Los Alamos? How does that relate to a retired Air Force Major General? So they're spreading it out a lot. You know, it's like saying celebrity deaths occur in threes, but you're really stretching the definition of celebrity. Yeah. Cast the widest net possible and you'll catch everything. Exactly. So they're catching a very wide, it's almost like a mentalism game. You know, they're casting a deceptively wide net over a period of time and stretching the definition of mysterious as well. Because, you know, I mean, so if you, that's called subjective validation, right? When you're able to play with the definitions enough to make a pattern appear when there isn't really one.

• 1:29:06Speaker 02

  The only thing I would say, so I think that's enough to explain this, right? But the only thing I would say is that, is it possible that one or more of these people were bumped off by international spies who were trying to, you know, whatever, kill? Or maybe they were, they were spies and they got bumped off by their handler because they were selling secrets in North Korea? Who knows? I don't know that there isn't anything actually nefarious mixed in here. Because again, it hasn't really been long enough for people to do it. Do investigative journalism type stuff on each individual case and the government's not saying anything.

• 1:29:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, but base rates, what is more likely that somebody died by suicide?

• 1:29:45Speaker 04

  Statistically, what it was.

• 1:29:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:29:47Speaker 02

  I'm just saying, we can't rule out that there isn't anything nefarious going on buried in here, but the overall claim of, you know, these nine scientists are connected, they're not that connected, and that they're missing or their deaths are too unusual to explain by coincidence just isn't true. This absolutely could simply be, could be a coincidence, it could be the lottery fallacy. It's like, somebody noticed this and then they went looking for other instances to bulk up the numbers, and this is exactly what you would expect by chance in similar situations. So, not impressed.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  Would you like an allegory?

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:30:23Speaker 04

  Gerald Posner, the author of the book Case Closed, who did a very deep dive into the JFK assassination. He has an appendix in his book titled The Non-Mysterious Mystery Deaths. And here's what he recently wrote. It's a quick paragraph. "For case closed, I spent months investigating the 101 mystery deaths," air quotes. "JFK theorists claim provided key witnesses that had been silenced. Not one of them held up under scrutiny, not one. Sensational headlines, zero real examination." So, and that is an investigative journalist who actually did that work on 101 of them in this particular case, and they were all explainable.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it'd be interesting to see what that kind of investigative journalism reveals about this case. I'm speaking from skeptical first principles, like, wasn't able to find much in like, internet research in terms of the specific cases. But older conspiracies, yes. Usually, like, if someone's talking about something from 20, 30 years ago, it's like, usually that they've been completely sussed out by now.

• 1:31:28Speaker 04

  It's sussed us out.

• 1:31:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Alright, guys, let's go on to Science or Fiction.

• 1:31:44Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys ready? Yes. For this week? Okay. All right, I think we got three interesting news items this week. Here we go. Item number one, a comprehensive review finds that stingers, horns, and teeth across a broad swath of the plant and animal kingdoms share a similar shape largely due to remarkable convergent evolution. Item number two, a new technique can simultaneously improve the strength and ductility of titanium

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  alloys in just milliseconds, using less than 50% of the energy of heat treating. And item number three, researchers have put the final nail in the coffin of MAND, that's the Modified Newtonian Dynamics, by demonstrating stable gravitational force laws at vast intergalactic distances. Jay, go first.

• 1:32:45Jay Novella?

  Uh, the first one, a comprehensive review finds that stingers, horns, and teeth across a broad swath of the planet and animal kingdom share a similar shape largely due to remarkable convergent evolution.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  It's totally anything with a point, you know?

• 1:32:59Jay Novella?

  They've come to be in similar shapes because of convergent evolution, and not just because it works.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Well, that is convergent evolution.

• 1:33:09Jay Novella?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:33:10Speaker 02

  It's functional. It's because that's, yeah, because it's functional, the selective pressures lead to the same outcome.

• 1:33:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah, like, I think this is totally science. I mean, imagine asking people to, you know, you have, you have boats and you're like, you know, build something to push into the water so you can move forward, and I think, you know, there'd be a lot of things that look very similar to modern paddle, right? I mean, I think it makes perfect sense. Second one, a new technique can simultaneously improve the strength and ductility. What does that mean?

• 1:33:42Speaker 02

  Like, the ability?

• 1:33:43Jay Novella?

  Ability to stretch like taffy without breaking. All right, so to improve the strength and ductility of titanium alloys is just milliseconds using less than 50% of the energy of heat treating. Certainly, it seems like a big claim, but, okay, all right, I don't know about that one. Last one, researchers have put the final nail in the coffin of MONT by demonstrating stable gravitational force laws at vast intergalactic distance.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  So we've talked about this a lot on the show, you're going first, so I'll give a little bit of background on this, because that word MONT is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Remember, that's modified Newtonian dynamics. This is the alternate hypothesis to...Bob?

• 1:34:23Bob Novella?

  Dark matter, man, it's obvious.

• 1:34:26Speaker 02

  I mean, dark matter, exactly.

• 1:34:28Bob Novella?

  Jesus. It was such a silly question, I thought you were joking. What's 2 plus 2, right?

• 1:34:35Speaker 02

  I wanted you to say it, I'm just trying to be interactive here, Bob. Right, and so, the idea is that Newtonian dynamics, the MONT hypothesis, that no, we don't need dark matter, but gravitation behaves differently at different scales. That's MONT, basically. This is saying, nope, MONT is proven false, because gravitational force laws are the same even across vast intergalactic distances.

• 1:35:02Jay Novella?

  All right, so I'm gonna first say, who the hell am I to even comment on this? Right, because you know, I'm not an enthusiast like Bob is, so this is like, completely based off of nothing other than what's in my head right now, without any like, empirical understanding, or nothing, right? I'm just guessing here. So this is what, this is what my skeptic, you know, my critical thinking guess is gonna be on this, that, that gravity functions the exact same way, no matter how small or far the distance is, everywhere in the universe at the same time. So that one, apparently, I'm agreeing in saying that this is, that one is science as well.

• 1:35:43Jay Novella?

  So, the obvious one here that seems crazy is the one that's making, you know, this milliseconds claim about strengthening titanium, both in its overall strength, because there's different types of strength, as we know, which you didn't specify. And it's dulc- dulcetility. Ductility. Ductility, right there. It's very ductile.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  Very dulcet.

• 1:36:07Jay Novella?

  You know, the thing that bothers me in this, in this position, particularly because I'm going first is that, you know, I could clearly see that Steve would be playing with this one, meaning it sounds like it's claiming too much. It's a perfect one to put in there as the trick and it's true. But the problem is that the other two items to me seem perfectly reasonable. So I'm just gonna go with my gut and say the one about ductility is the, uh, is fake. It's not true. Don't believe it. Okay, Evan.

• 1:36:34Speaker 04

  All right. The first one about the comprehensive review finds that stingers, horns, teeth and toes, teeth and toes, across a broad swath of the plant and animal kingdoms, share a similar shape. Uh, okay, I believe this to be true as well. Boy, the util- I mean, why not? It's such an effective, uh...

• 1:36:58Jay Novella?

  Shape?

• 1:36:59Speaker 04

  Shape, thank you.

• 1:37:01Jay Novella?

  Orphology?

• 1:37:02Speaker 04

  Thank you. Uh, you know, that wine, sure, yeah, convergent evolution, absolutely. Of the three, I'm probably most confident about that one. The second one, uh, about the technique that simultaneously improves strength and ductility. Perhaps the simultaneously part here is, would be the fiction on this one. Couldn't tell you which of the two, maybe it could be one or the other, or maybe it doesn't happen simultaneously. You know, in just milliseconds, like snap your fingers, Thanos kind of thing, and it's done. I'm skeptical of that. And Mond, you know, I didn't hear Bob talk about it yet, so I would kind of reserve myself there.

• 1:37:46Speaker 04

  I'm leaning towards what Jay is thinking and I will join him in his skepticism of the titanium alloys being fiction.

• 1:37:55Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:37:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course you're gonna call on me next. I don't know anything about the titanium alloys or Mond. So that is, it's so hard when you kind of have some understanding of some of the stuff for one of them, but not for the other two, because that can trick you in both ways. Because I'm not confident that stingers, horns and teeth are due to convergent evolution, mostly because I don't think of those as like fundamental evolutionary properties. Are they that old?

• 1:38:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Stingers, horns and teeth, they feel like adornment or like new techniques for capturing prey or for eating or for, you know, fighting or sometimes just display, only display. And that kind of stuff, I think, usually kind of evolves out of control after time. But maybe it's one of those things like the circle, you know? It's just, it just works in nature. So we see it over and over. And new techniques simultaneously improving the strength and ductility of titanium in just milliseconds using less than 50% of the heat of heat, energy of heat treating. Okay. Is that a crazy, you're gonna be like, this is amazing. When you tell us that it's fine. Oh, okay.

• 1:39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And then the fact that the Mond thing, you're like the final nail in the coffin. I mean, does that mean that they're, that like, nobody believes it? There's always gonna be some diehards, right? Who dedicated their whole career.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  Of course, that does not imply that there isn't somebody's outlier somewhere who's gonna cling to Mond.

• 1:39:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:39:36Speaker 02

  Scientifically speaking, like.

• 1:39:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Like it's not holding water.

• 1:39:39Speaker 02

  This was the one piece to the puzzle that we were waiting for to say that that closes the door on Mond.

• 1:39:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so. Stable gravitational force laws at vast intergalactic distances. I'm just gonna say, I think we live in a relativistic universe and we're not gonna see something very like Newtonian like that, like that we're not gonna see the same, you know, the stable laws at all these different places where there's like massive differences in mass, basically. So I don't know, I'll say that one's science and I'll say that the titanium alloys, just because I don't know enough about it. I'll go with the stingers. Is that just me?

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. You're all alone.

• 1:40:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so you're not swept?

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:40:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, you could be. Okay.

• 1:40:20Speaker 02

  Could be.

• 1:40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:40:23Speaker 02

  All right, and Bob?

• 1:40:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, no, I'm not picking the Mond one. That makes absolut-- the Mond one, number three here, makes a lot of sense. Dark, you know, dark matter always had scenarios where Mond really had no say, right, Steve? Like the Bullet Cluster. There were things that were evidence for dark matter that just Mond, I think, couldn't touch. It's like, well, explain that then if Mond is a thing. It just didn't make any sense. The only arena where Mond may have had some, something important to say was these vast distances and gravity might be, you know, the laws of gravity might change in not insignificant ways when you're

• 1:41:05Bob Novella?

  dealing with thousands of light years or at the galactic scale or beyond. So I'm not, I don't have a problem with that at all. The other two that are tough, the stingers and horns and stingers, yeah, it could be convergent evolution, potentially. I mean, they basically need to pierce something that could be tough. You know, they're piercing something generally. But then Kara makes a good point about, you know, like horns, like could be, could be, could have, you know, eventually changed to a sexual display. But I wouldn't be surprised if they had, you know-- Also important piercing function. I don't know. So that, so this one's tough. And then the alloy, the, uh, this, this titanium thing is interesting, but I mean,

• 1:41:50Bob Novella?

  heat treating metals, complex processes, a lot of components to it. Um, I'm not sure less than 50% of the energy of heat treating them. So that, I assume that means heating, you know, uniformly heating up the metal, uh, doesn't have to be done. The energy, that, that energy wouldn't need to be done. So what does that mean then? Sure, you could be doing something sneaky because number one here with the horns and stingers and teeth sounds, sounds much more reasonable than this, uh, heat treatment one. But I'm, I'm going to go with Kara and just say there's something about that is not convergent. Um, and I could be wrong because my, my, uh, my knee jerk reaction here is, is that, is this heat treatment is, is out of whack, but I don't know enough about it to comment really. All right.

• 1:42:32Speaker 02

  This happened last week, didn't it? You guys are divided between the first one and the second one. But let me say something about each of them though, before I do the reveal. Please. Cause I don't know that any of you hit upon

• 1:42:43Bob Novella?

  Uh oh.

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  The key piece of any of these. So the thing with Mond, it's not so much about whether or not you believe Mond can be true or not. It's whether or not you think we have a way of measuring gravitational force laws at vast intergalactic distances. Right? That's really the key claim in that item. Don't we? Well, that's the question. And if we do, why haven't we done it until now?

• 1:43:06Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah, that is a valid question. Why, what's taken so long to do it? This theory, this experiment apparently has.

• 1:43:12Speaker 02

  The, the, the real key piece of the, the heat treating one, the titanium alloy one is simultaneously improving strength and ductility. That's what I said. As Evan said, because those are usually properties that are a trade off. Yeah, that's true. You improve one, you reduce the other one.

• 1:43:28Bob Novella?

  Well, correct.

• 1:43:29Speaker 02

  That's true. When we have talked about this before, but in situations that can improve both are always great because you're not, you're not having to do the trade off.

• 1:43:38Bob Novella?

  It's not impossible. It's not impossible by definition.

• 1:43:40Speaker 02

  And the first one about the stingers, horns and teeth is if it's not a converged evolution, then why do they look so similar? Why do they have that same conical shape? Coincidence. At the end. Well, that's, that's, that's what you need to think about.

• 1:43:53Bob Novella?

  Intelligent design?

• 1:43:55Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:43:56Bob Novella?

  I wasn't gonna say it.

• 1:43:58Speaker 02

  Let's go. We'll start with number three, since you all agree on that one. Researchers have put the final nail in the coffin of MAND by demonstrating stable gravitational force laws at vast intergalactic distances. You all think this one is science. And this one is science. It is science. So two of you are okay. So Bob.

• 1:44:21Bob Novella?

  What'd I miss?

• 1:44:21Speaker 02

  Man, massive bonus points if you could tell me what technique they used to measure the gravitational force law on cosmological scales. I'll give you partial credit if you just tell me what data it involved. Because when you're measuring anything at cosmological scales, what information are you usually using?

• 1:44:39Bob Novella?

  Um, well, it's gotta be, um, it's gotta be, um.

• 1:44:43Speaker 02

  Say it.

• 1:44:44Bob Novella?

  Background radiation.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:44:47Bob Novella?

  Right. Evan, way to go, man.

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Good, good, Evan. I didn't. So they, they combined data from the cosmic microwave background intensity maps from the Atacama Cosmology Telescope and a galaxy catalog to measure, you'll, there's no way. This is like two levels of, of expertise behind us. The kinematic Sunyev-Zeldovich effect.

• 1:45:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, that, the Zeldovich. Yeah.

• 1:45:11Speaker 02

  And I had to look up what that was. It's a subtle distortion in the cosmic microwave background caused by the motion of galaxy clusters or other large scale structures. So they used that effect to measure the motion of these large galaxy clusters and then use that to measure the force of gravity that was in effect at that scale. And what they found was that it's exactly what we predicted to be. It's exactly the same as, as it is at both Newtonian and Einsteinian, right? Both relativistic and classical Newtonian gravitational effects match what, what we measure at any other scale. So again, this is one paper. You always have to, if this holds up, et cetera.

• 1:45:53Speaker 02

  But this, this data being true, pretty much is the final nail in the coffin of MAND. It closes the door, as they say, because that was their holdout. Like, we don't know that. Gravity isn't different at cosmological scales. Well, yes, we do. It's it's the same.

• 1:46:11Bob Novella?

  Steve, I would not have guessed that the cosmic microwave back radiation would would be used in that in that determination. I just would. That's not obvious to me that that. Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not. I agree. I agree. That's why I said you get you get bonus points for that.

• 1:46:24Bob Novella?

  That's that's a surprise. Yeah, good work, man, because I would not have. I would have. That would not have been on my top five guesses at all. We we can stop right here.

• 1:46:32Speaker 02

  Let's go back to number one. A comprehensive review finds that stingers horns and teeth across a broad swath of plant and animal kingdoms share a similar shape largely due to remarkable convergent evolution. Bob and Cara, you think this one is the fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. And this one is the fiction.

• 1:46:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 1:46:55Speaker 02

  This is the fiction. Good job, Bobby and Cara. So if it's not convergent evolution, what is it? Because the study showed that something else is largely responsible for the the shape, the similar shape of stingers horns and teeth.

• 1:47:12Cara Santa Maria?

  When you say something else, is it an evolutionary principle?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:47:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Nothing to do with evolution.

• 1:47:17Bob Novella?

  Environment.

• 1:47:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, well, that is kind of evolution. Well, it would be then if it wasn't like, you know, having that trait and and and passing it on, then it would be that the environment is shaping those things it like more Lamarckian.

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  Thinking kind of, well, shaping them how?

• 1:47:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, like physically, like morphologically.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  So here's the here's the the title. The geometry of nature's stingers is universal due to stochastic mechanical wear.

• 1:47:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, so it is kind of like circles.

• 1:47:49Speaker 02

  It is. It's the mechanical wear on them. And how did they show this? Because they showed that over age, these features be take on that shape through wear and use. They don't have that shape at the beginning.

• 1:48:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nature's pencil sharpener.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  It's they use pencils as an example.

• 1:48:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's funny.

• 1:48:08Speaker 02

  It's nature's pencil sharpener. Absolutely. Pencils have the same shape. Pencils have the same shape. So, yes, it's it's, you know, they they have like they. Mathematically defined that roughly conical shape, you know? The slope increases with the radius, you know, it's proportional to the radius, et cetera. That gives you sort of that, that pointy shape that you see with like horns and stingers and thorns and teeth or whatever. And they, they showed in multiple examples that those, those shapes develop with use and wear. They're not there without use and wear. And so it's, it's, it's a weathering, what they call stochastic weathering process. It is not entirely, that doesn't mean there's no role. That's why I had to say largely, there's no role for evolution.

• 1:48:52Speaker 02

  But it's, it seems to be largely due to this stochastic wear, not.

• 1:48:58Bob Novella?

  So Steve, juvenile bees with stingers have stingers that are different than adult stingers?

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  That's what they're saying in this study.

• 1:49:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe they're just wider.

• 1:49:08Bob Novella?

  Well, what about bumble, are they bumblebees that disembowel themselves and when they sting? I mean, so what's their stinger like? Cause they only use it once.

• 1:49:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that's only one animal. They're talking about the entire like animal and plant kingdom. There's probably some conversion.

• 1:49:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, as I said, it doesn't rule out evolution at all. But they're saying that it's, that seems to be, it seems to be dominantly wear and tear, not convergent evolution.

• 1:49:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:49:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, interesting, right? Okay, that means that a new technique can simultaneously improve the strength and ductility of titanium alloys in just milliseconds, using less than 50% of the energy of heat treatment is very cool.

• 1:49:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Speaker 02

  Material science.

• 1:49:46Bob Novella?

  What's the text? So what's the deal?

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  What's the, what is, we are, give me, throw something at me. What do you think? It's not heat, it's not heat.

• 1:49:52Bob Novella?

  Vibration?

• 1:49:53Speaker 02

  Not light, not vibration.

• 1:49:55Bob Novella?

  Sandblasting.

• 1:49:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Chemical treatment.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  No, not chemical, not sandblasting.

• 1:50:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Electricity.

• 1:50:01Speaker 02

  Electricity.

• 1:50:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:50:03Speaker 02

  It is a massive electric current.

• 1:50:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  That's what they use. That's why it only takes a millisecond. It's like boom, you just shock the hell out of it.

• 1:50:11Bob Novella?

  And then what?

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  And that takes the place of heating? Yeah, so what does heat treatment do? Like, just in a broad, you don't have to get me too specific, just in a broad sense, what does it do to the metal? It hardens it. Yeah. How? How? It realigns the grains of the metal, right? Yes. It affects the microstructure of the molecules of the alloy, right? The grains of the crystals of the alloy. So it's affecting the architecture. Like a snap to attention. Nano-architecture, if you will. And so, they do that, like with heat treating, what you're doing is by heating it, you're allowing the crystals to flow, basically.

• 1:50:52Speaker 02

  And then, depending on what temperature you get it up to, and depending on how quickly you cool it down, affects how the grains reform. And so you're trying to give it a structure that allows it to either be hard, or tough, or ductile, or whatever, depending on what properties you're looking for. So what they did, they took titanium alloys, took multiple titanium alloys, they shocked it, you know, with these millisecond shocking. And that itself aligns the microstructure with the electrical current. That's how it works. Right? It's basically moving the atoms of the metal into alignment at the nano-scale.

• 1:51:32Speaker 02

  And this increased the strength, well, the strength by 13 to 14%, the ductility by 12 to 13%. So no trade-off. They both improved. Damn, man. And the total energy used was less than half of a typical heat treatment for the same alloys. So yeah, pretty good. And so it's a quick, more energy-effective process that gives you, without any trade-off, you get a bold increase in ductility and strength. Now, these titanium alloys are used in all kinds of things, like aerospace, you know? Oh, yeah, man. And so that where you need light, strong metals, and so anything that could make them stronger. You know, then is could have a lot of applications.

• 1:52:11Bob Novella?

  Well, Steve, how does grain size? I know grain size is also a critical component here, right? The smaller, the smaller it is, the tougher the metal is, right? Is that how it works? The smaller, the better in a lot of?

• 1:52:23Speaker 02

  The smaller, the harder.

• 1:52:24Bob Novella?

  Right, the harder.

• 1:52:25Speaker 02

  The larger, the stronger. So that's why when you flat, but that's for steel. I don't know if that applies to

• 1:52:31Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:52:32Speaker 02

  Titanium. But like for steel, that when you you mentioned quenching,

• 1:52:37Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:38Speaker 02

  you want it to to harden so fast that larger crystals don't have time to form. So they're all very small.

• 1:52:45Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:52:46Speaker 02

  And that makes it very hard, but also very brittle. Whereas if you have larger crystals, you cool it slowly, you temper the metal, then that makes it stronger but softer. That's why you would, you know, usually what you do for steel is you you quench it to harden it and then you temper it to take away some of that hardness. So it's not brittle.

• 1:53:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so interesting. Silver is like, I mean, I guess it's not different. It's all the same principles. But like, we anneal silver to make it more, I guess ductile, more workable, but it's way softer.

• 1:53:15Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:53:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And then when you hammer it, when you work with it, it becomes work hardened and needs to be softened again.

• 1:53:20Speaker 02

  Well, yes, some metals are hardened by hitting them.

• 1:53:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24Speaker 02

  Because it compresses them. They're compression hardened. And that includes silver and that also includes bronze.

• 1:53:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. Bronze, silver, any jewelry metal is like that.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, if you look at like a handmade bronze item, it looks like it has all these hammer marks on it.

• 1:53:37Bob Novella?

  That's right.

• 1:53:37Speaker 02

  And you think it might be an aesthetic and it is.

• 1:53:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  But it's also functional. They're compressing the bronze to make it stronger.

• 1:53:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, otherwise you just have to like rub something against the surface back and forth a lot and that can strengthen it as well. But you have to do that with jewelry.

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you can mechanically strengthen it. Yeah, or you could heat strengthen it or electrically strengthen it, I guess.

• 1:53:57Bob Novella?

  Or you could dope it with other metals like gold to make it to make it less ductile. Like pure 24 karat gold, you don't want any jewelry like that because it's too soft, right?

• 1:54:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Same with fine, yeah, same with fine silver. 999 silver is way too soft. Like you can't get it hard enough. So only the bands or those little bezels around stones are made of fine silver because they're soft enough to to like push to the stone. But you'd never want the shank of your ring to be fine silver. It would deform.

• 1:54:23Bob Novella?

  Good one, man.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Titanium in there or whatever. Yeah, that's what alloys are for.

• 1:54:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:54:28Speaker 02

  Okay, good job, I've been Kara. Advin, give us a quote.

• 1:54:31Speaker 04

  "We will explore. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will inspire, but ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other." Christina Cook, Artemis II astronauts.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Thanks. Yes.

• 1:54:51Speaker 02

  Yep, we are explorers, but home is always home.

• 1:54:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, there is no planet B.

• 1:54:56Speaker 02

  More true of the Earth than anything else. I mean, the Earth is more hospitable, like, the most inhospitable place on Earth is more hospitable than any other place that we know of in the universe.

• 1:55:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, it's why our scientists at NASA study the Mariana Trench, study, like, the most extreme parts of Earth, just to prepare for space travel, and it's still not good enough.

• 1:55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week. You're welcome. Steve. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:56:09Speaker 07

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