The Skeptics Guide #1088 - May 16 2026

News Items: The Interstitium and Acupuncture, Climate Change Food Insecurity, Neanderthal Dentistry, Tiny Robots, More UFO Nonsense; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: AI Consciousness; 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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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, May 14th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:50Speaker 02

  Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:53Speaker 04

  Good afternoon, folks.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  How's everyone doing today?

• 0:56Speaker 04

  All right. Pretty good, you know? Pretty good.

• 0:59Cara Santa Maria?

  These are Thursdays? I'm so tired after clinic for three days. How did you do this for how many years?

• 1:05Speaker 02

  30 years.

• 1:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God. It's so exhausting.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Got to have endurance, Kara.

• 1:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Working on it. I'm too old for this, dude. I started too late.

• 1:16Speaker 04

  You have to have patience.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  So last week, I famously went on a rant about user interface in shitification.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  We got a lot of feedback about it.

• 1:30Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I was going to give you the gestalt of the feedback and not, you know, call it individual people. So a couple of things, a couple of people, a lot of experts emailed, which is great. I always love it when people who know more than we do engage with us about the topics.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  Listening, right?

• 1:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. Well, I thought that's great.

• 1:46Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like we're right in the sweet spot for a user. Oh, wait, yeah, a user experience expert.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of these people are programmers, things like that. Yeah, there's a lot of them out there. So just to clarify a couple of things, a couple of people pointed out that there are experts in the user interface, that's UI, but there are also now experts in the user experience, that's UX.

• 2:12Bob Novella?

  UX.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  And there are also UX engineers who kind of bridge the gap, but it was unclear to me exactly what role they play. So the difference is like the user experience experts are the entire user experience, not just the software user interface, right? Everything from purchase to use to fixing, everything. Whereas the UI is basically the software engineers who are experts in the user interface. And they all pretty much agreed that, yeah, I was right. It is getting worse and it's pretty bad. They appreciated the call out to their specialties, like, we're really underutilized. And those that expressed that opinion were pretty aligned in saying that, yep, they

• 2:57Speaker 02

  just don't want to spend the money. That's basically the reason. Well, I like one emailer broke it down a little bit, because I said, yeah, what I don't get is that the really successful companies, you know, and I'll name two, Tesla and Apple, right? So these are two of the biggest, most successful tech companies in the world. Both famously had awesome user experience, right? And user interface.

• 3:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course. That's what put them on the map, I think.

• 3:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, right. I mean, Steve Jobs was famous for like perfecting the user experience of using the Apple products, which were cool and intuitive.

• 3:37Bob Novella?

  Even taking it out of the box was an experience. That box was like the best box I ever saw.

• 3:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  And so I said, why don't more companies emulate that? And so, well, it comes down to a couple of things. So one is, some companies do try to do that, but it's hard and they fail.

• 3:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And most of them just rip off Apple. It just looks like an Apple product.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Well, some people, yeah, that's the cheap way to do it. I mean, we know that from the movies, too. It's like, this movie was successful, let's replicate the most superficial aspects of that movie.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  But others don't even try to do it. They say they're like business oriented where they just, they basically say, what's the least amount of money we could spend to get a product to market fast? And that's just a completely different approach. They're not trying to make the best project, product or the best user interface. They're trying to get quick ROI, get to market quickly. And it's just a completely different approach as opposed to the sort of the engineering oriented, which is trying to make the best product. And it's like, okay, I get that. But I guess most companies are just, and again, I think this is, I think, a problem with our world in that it's, there's a lot

• 4:49Speaker 02

  of rushing for barely adequate mediocrity. Right? And I think AI is going to make that so much easier and so much more tempting. This is the AI slot problem where it's just really easy to be barely adequate. And so that's mostly what we get rather than striving for excellence, which is hard and is more risky and takes a lot of expertise.

• 5:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And I think people need to recalibrate their like, old assumptions about laissez faire capitalism that somehow, you know, just having a free market of ideas means that the cream is always going to rise to the top. No, the fastest, most profitable thing is going to happen until it burns itself out. And then a new one is going to fill that niche or niche.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  I agree. I've spoken to a lot of people who are sort of stuck in a very simplistic algorithm of what they think capitalism is, that it favors only the most successful, best product, best quality. It's like, I mean,

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Have you seen Amazon? Have you seen Alibaba? Like, come on, people. Well, no, it's like, when there's a market, when there's an unfettered free access market, you're just going to get flooded with garbage. And it's going to be hard to find the good stuff. And also, we're living in a culture where cheaper, faster, better and disposable has become the norm.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  I think also part of what they miss is that free market Versus sometimes only favor the appearance of quality and utility, not its reality. And you have to understand in each individual, you know, industry sphere product, how much does the end user really perceive about the actual quality? How easy are they to fool? Do they have all the information they need? I mean, I've had people make this argument to me about drugs. Like, we don't need an FDA. The free market can sort out which drugs work and which don't work. Like, no, they absolutely cannot. We have a free market drug industry. It's called the supplement industry and it's 99% crap. So we don't have to imagine what that would be like. We know what it's like.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  We knew what the world was like before the FDA with patent medicine and snake oil. We know what it's like in the post sort of regulation supplement market. And it's mostly useless products with all hype and deception. And so, no, that's what the free market does also.

• 7:16Cara Santa Maria?

  So what you're saying, Steve, is that we need to be reading more Upton Sinclair? The jungle people, like, come on, go back to school.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  You gotta balance Ayn Rand with Upton Sinclair. You can't just read Rand and think that you understand everything about free market.

• 7:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And to be clear, you're not saying those are equal in opposites. You're saying those of you who only read Ayn Rand need to go out and read Upton Sinclair.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Well, just you need to have a more nuance to you. Nothing is simple, right? The world is complicated. The people are complicated. There's always nuance. And, yeah, the markets, like, just say, again, it's like, I do, again, I've had many conversations with people who just treat free markets like a magic wand. Just wave the magic wand at the free market and everything will work out. It's like, no, that's not, that's not history. We have, we have so much knowledge about how that is not true. You know, markets themselves need rules and they need, again, there needs to be selective pressures. And we have to, to some extent, engineer those so that you do favor transparency and quality and all whatever, user experience, all those things. If it's just about profit.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  If it's just about profit, then there are many other ways that the market forces can sort themselves out. And it is like evolution is you can make a very good analogy to evolution. Evolution doesn't want you to be happy and have a live a long fulfilled life. It just wants you to pass your genes into the next generation.

• 8:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Regardless of how you do.

• 8:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, regardless of how you do it. And sometimes it means you live a miserable, brutal existence, but it doesn't matter. It only matters that you're passing those genes on to the next generation. Or you make other people's lives brutal and misery, you know?

• 9:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm hmm.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And miserable. So yeah, evolution creates like the horrible parasites, like things like, why would nature ever do something like that? Because that's how narrowly defined selective pressures work.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  So Steve, is your printer working? What's up?

• 9:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is working. I actually had to use it and it worked.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  Also, someone said, hey, you could always just plug it in, which is what I do with my printers, frankly.

• 9:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  A lot of the problems do go away.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Yes, but a lot of them were again, this is again, I think another layer here where you have sort of engineers who are like, oh, I just plug it in. And if this happens, I do this troubleshooting thing. And if that happens, it's like, okay.

• 9:41Speaker 04

  I rewrite the code.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically it's like, okay, but that is again, as an end user, I don't want to have to spend any of my mental energy getting my freaking printer to work. You know what I mean? It's I just want it to be plug and play. And I don't want to have to think about it. And so you're just replacing one elaborate, you know, method for another one. And that may be something you're comfortable with, if that's what you do for a living or whatever, that you have that expertise. And again, I'm not saying that I'm not computer literate. It's just that saying you could substitute this alternative elaborate procedure doesn't really address my concern.

• 10:18Cara Santa Maria?

  You know? Didn't a lot of people say that most of these companies are trying to get you to download their software? So they can upsell and so they can do whatever. But like most of the time, there is a driver present for your laptop or your phone to just recognize the the online printer and bypass any software downloading.

• 10:37Speaker 02

  Yes, and then hopefully the operating systems will make that more plug and play in the future. You really just need to plug it in and it'll handle everything, which is the way it should be. There's no reason why it's not that way. So yeah, they said, yeah, they're, they're, don't download that. They tell you here, you download this convenient app and we'll walk you through the process. But really, it's like, and we'll use this to sell you our own toner or anchor, whatever, and keep you sucked into our products and our product line. And even though it's completely unnecessary. Again, that's the business model versus the user experience model.

• 11:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, which should just be, push the button that gets your printer online, if it's an obvious button, and then go into your printer settings on your computer and find your printer.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  I think that-

• 11:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Recognize each other.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Again, one of my fears is that, you know, a generation of people are so used, so used to crappy user interfaces, that they think that's necessary and normal. They don't realize how terrible they have it, how good it could be, and that this is a choice by industry, not an inevitability. You know? Jay and I were just talking, because Jay and I build a lot of our computers because it's cheaper and we can get exactly what we want. And it's unnecessary, unnecessarily complicated. Although recently, right, Jay, you were, the latest computer you built, they, they definitely moved significantly in the direction of making it easier. It's like, why wasn't it always this way? Why?

• 12:01Jay Novella?

  And still, Steve, it's not as easy as it could be. Like, as a, as someone who builds computers frequently, you know, I'm, I have so many ideas on how they could just simply make it easier. And I don't know why it's, you know, I'm sure there's some reasons for some things, but other things, it's just money.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Here comes the next-

• 12:19Bob Novella?

  But it makes, it makes a lot of sense.

• 12:22Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a trade-off, guys. Like, I know we've talked about this before. You guys are all PC people and I'm an Apple person. And like, I don't ever have these problems. Like, I just open things and they work. And yes, I know I'm giving up customizability and I know I'm paying a premium for that. And I know that, you know, there's all these other reasons why you guys prefer to have these like slottable, upgradable things. But, you know, my U I- is amazing.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  That's a personal choice.

• 12:49Bob Novella?

  That's apples to oranges, though. That's totally apples to oranges.

• 12:51Speaker 02

  It is.

• 12:52Bob Novella?

  Most people, if you buy a system out of the box, you don't have these problems. But they assume that since you want to put them together, you want to subject yourself to that torture, that you have a certain amount of expertise that could handle these weird, stupid problems.

• 13:06Speaker 04

  PCs are the oranges in the equation.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  You can easily have the best of both worlds if they just built them to be more modular. And this was Apple or PC. There absolutely is a world where you can have a completely plug and play, but customizable computer you could build yourself. And when you want to upgrade something, you just take it out, put a new one in, without it being a major project.

• 13:26Bob Novella?

  Ah, but come on. Did they want you to do that? Or did they want you to buy a whole new system?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  That's the question.

• 13:32Speaker 04

  Putting a new battery in your phone. Come on.

• 13:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you will pay a premium for that. Anytime it becomes easier, cleaner, you're going to be paying more for that.

• 13:40Speaker 04

  How many documents have you printed so far, Steve?

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Just one. I don't.

• 13:44Speaker 04

  The test page.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Don't use it often.

• 13:46Cara Santa Maria?

  The test page.

• 13:48Speaker 02

  Not the test page. I actually printed something out.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  All right.

• 13:53Speaker 04

  That's so great.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  So the second most common email that I got this week, that was probably the first most common. Or this might have been the most common, was, you know, about 40, 50 people pointing me towards this New York Times Magazine article on the interstition. But not because it was about the interstition, because it was about acupuncture. This was terrible, terrible, epic fail.

• 14:19Bob Novella?

  We just got an email on that eight minutes ago. I saw it come through.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, just three minutes ago. So I wrote about it both on Neurologica and on Science-Based Medicine.

• 14:27Speaker 04

  Ooh, doubled up.

• 14:28Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a good teaching moment, but it is extremely frustrating. So what do you think that, you guys remember what the interstition is? This is, we talked about this a few years ago when the research was first coming out.

• 14:41Bob Novella?

  Something that's in between some other things.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's

• 14:44Bob Novella?

  That's interstitial. That's interstitial, yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  If you might, if you recall.

• 14:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's all of it.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  It's all the interstitial.

• 14:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  So we used to think, so interstitial, yeah, like it's a connective tissue around organs or between muscles or whatever that is, you know, fibrous tissue and fluid filled, et cetera.

• 15:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It's fluid filled. I think that's a big part of it.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And, but, but we used to think that they were each separate, like, you know, the heart has its interstitial, it has no connection to the spleen's interstitial or whatever. And, but several years ago, a study came out where they showed that you could get dye, for example, to communicate from one interstitial to another, and that therefore they're connected. And we didn't know that they were connected.

• 15:30Bob Novella?

  It's its own network.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  In fact, all of the interstitial in the body appear to be connected, and they suggest that this should be considered its own organ, organ, the interstitial. Now, all the headlines were, you know, doctors discover new organ, right? It was like, how could you, you know, this day and age. It's like, we knew the interstitial was there. What was discovered was just that they're all interconnected. Fine.

• 15:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that it's a fully, it's a full system, and it's, it's a, it's a pathway for like immune cells and even cancer cells to go from here to there.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. Right. And there may be other things that are going on. So it's great. Updates our knowledge. Now we could answer, ask questions about, like, yeah, how important is this from cancer metastasis or immune function, et cetera. And there have been subsequent studies that, that did support the conclusion that the interstitial is all one connected fluid-filled system in the body. If that were the article, I would have no problem with it. And there are other, you know, fluid-filled systems in the body, the lymphatic system, right, which drains excess fluid from the tissues. There's the cardiovascular system, which distributes nutrients and oxygen and takes away waste. There's the spinal fluid system, which is critical for central nervous system function. So this just adds

• 16:45Speaker 02

  to these various fluid-filled systems in the body. Fine.

• 16:50Bob Novella?

  It just supports the whole idea that we are just ugly bags of mostly water.

• 16:53Speaker 02

  Ugly bags of mostly water. Absolutely.

• 16:56Bob Novella?

  Next generation quote.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So.

• 16:58Bob Novella?

  Karen.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  The author of this New York Times Magazine article, though, went from that to, "And this may explain how acupuncture works."

• 17:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Needle scratch.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  So, uh, it's very frustrating. Shocking. And it was just, again, just gullible, horrible journalism, not a hint of skepticism. He didn't consult any experts who believe something else. He just was completely buying this, you know, the one guy's like, oh, I was at a conference in China and a TCM practitioner came up to me and said, oh, we've known about the interstition for 4,000 years. It's like, first of all, no, you haven't. And the interstition has nothing to do with acupuncture and acupuncture doesn't work. So all of the premises are wrong. So they took for granted, like, oh, clearly acupuncture works. And I don't think they even explored it.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  I think they just absorbed that from the culture and assumed it was true or just listened to proponents. Of course, I've reviewed this. I'm actually published in the peer-reviewed literature on this very topic and I've wrote, written about it many times on science-based medicine. You know, if you do, if you review all of the acupuncture literature, I think the best way to phrase it from a scientific point of view is that there is insufficient evidence to reject the null hypothesis. And the reason why I think it's important to state it that way is because that's how science works, right? You begin with the null hypothesis. This new idea isn't true. It is not true. Now prove that it is true.

• 18:33Speaker 02

  Give me enough evidence to reject that starting assumption. And we've never gotten anywhere close to that for acupuncture, where we can reject the null hypothesis, because the evidence in a word is crap. Now, of course, I talk, I write extensively about why that is the case. I'm not just being dismissive. There's lots of problems with the acupuncture literature, but there's, and there's a couple of clear patterns in there. One is that the better the quality of the study, the smaller the effect and the best studies are negative, right? So when you have it, when you finally get to a good design where you have good controls...

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Placebo acupuncture, sham acupuncture, et cetera, double-blind controls. There does not appear to be any effect from acupuncture itself. They're negative. So proponents have done basically two things. They misinterpret those studies. And you know how they do that?

• 19:36Speaker 04

  They cherry pick them up.

• 19:37Bob Novella?

  By having a predetermined conclusion and then reading the evidence.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they do something very specific. So if there's no difference between verum acupuncture, true acupuncture, right? And sham acupuncture, that's a negative study, right? That shows you that acupuncture doesn't work. But they literally conclude, and this is really a quote, acupuncture works, but so does sham acupuncture.

• 20:04Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  That's a take. Why?

• 20:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Then what they're saying is that there are nonspecific effects that we measure.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  No falsifiability to anything.

• 20:14Cara Santa Maria?

  They're literally saying, we found some placebo nonspecific effects in the noise.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  But that, yes, but they, but they don't say it that way. They say acupuncture works.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Why would they?

• 20:25Cara Santa Maria?

  So they're saying the placebo group works.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Yes. Hey, our drug works, but so do placebos, so.

• 20:32Speaker 04

  That's how powerful.

• 20:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we're not allowed to prescribe the placebo.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  I know that. So, but that's literally what they say. And the other response is to stop doing well-controlled trials, which they've basically done.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Don't need them.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's no further utility to like doing well-controlled, double-blind acupuncture. We're just gonna study, we're just gonna compare it to no intervention or the usual, basically meaning unblinded. And of course, you're gonna get, you're gonna get the placebo effect, you know, from unblinded pain studies where you're sticking needles into people. And other people, you're literally doing nothing to just usual care. So they just gave up. And that's where we are. Yet they constantly, one after another, there's always, oh, new study shows that acupuncture works. No, it doesn't. And there's tons of other problems too. But, and a lot of those other problems derive from something very specific, which is playing loose with the definition of acupuncture. So in science, right?

• 21:30Speaker 02

  You have to carefully and operationally define what you mean by things, what you're talking about. So if I ask the question, does acupuncture work? You first have to answer the question, what is acupuncture? Do any of you guys want to hazard? A definition, an operational definition for acupuncture.

• 21:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Hunkers. Okay, it's using needles.

• 21:54Bob Novella?

  To tap into the meridians.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Bob Novella?

  Jay or Evan, finish?

• 21:58Cara Santa Maria?

  In an effort to alleviate symptoms.

• 22:01Speaker 04

  Or to focus the chi to come in and.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  All right. So I'll, I'll give you what I think is the most generous steel man definition. And this is consistent with every definition that acupuncture proponents get, right? And that is, yeah, in this case, it's literally steel man. And that is if you're sticking needles into acupuncture points in order to have some effect, some physiological effect, whatever that is. So it's not, it could be relieving pain, it could be relieving nausea, it could be curing cancer, it's whatever. But the, but you're sticking needles in acupuncture points. Those are the two features that are universal in any definition of what acupuncture is.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  So then how can you say that not sticking needles, not in acupuncture points works? And therefore acupuncture works. But wait a minute, your definition that it matters where you stick the needles and if you stick the needles. But the literature clearly shows neither of those things matter. It doesn't matter if you stick the needles or just poke the skin. It doesn't matter where you stick them, true or fake sham, you know, acupuncture points. It doesn't matter how much training the acupuncturist has. They could have been doing it for a year or 20 years, doesn't matter. Do you know what matters? There's only one thing that really matters to the perceived benefit of getting.

• 23:22Cara Santa Maria?

  That they want, that they want it to work and somebody's paying attention to them?

• 23:25Speaker 02

  That's that the, that the acupuncturist talks to the patient.

• 23:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  That's really it.

• 23:30Cara Santa Maria?

  That they're getting attention.

• 23:32Speaker 02

  And there have been.

• 23:32Cara Santa Maria?

  And I don't mean that in a, in a negative way. I mean, like somebody, they feel that they're getting care.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  And there have been studies that specifically varied that variable. It's like you be nice to the patient, talk to them, be hopeful. You just go in, do the procedure, don't talk to them. And that makes a difference. Nothing else does. Experience doesn't matter, where you stick the needles doesn't matter. If you stick the needles doesn't matter. So by any reasonable scientific definition. Acupuncture does not work. Further, acupuncturists can't agree on where the acupuncture points are.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  That's true.

• 24:04Speaker 02

  And what they do. And there are various traditions that are completely at odds with each other. So it does not in any way behave like a genuine or scientific phenomenon. It acts exactly like a superstition-based cultural phenomenon. None of that is reflected in the article. What he's saying is finally, you know, I love the headlines. This is not in this specific article, but a lot of articles writing about this. Finally, we understand how acupuncture works, which I've heard for the last 30 years. So does that mean all the previous times, somebody has claimed that finally we know how acupuncture works, they were wrong? And then why aren't they going to be wrong this time too? Or, "Western science now explains how eastern medicine works." I mean, they love that headline.

• 24:46Speaker 04

  Oh my gosh.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  It's all bullshit. The idea that because we found a system in the body that's connected, that somehow that's going to explain how acupuncture works, even though it doesn't work, is just retconning. It's just nonsense. I also like to point out that, and again, the guy's saying, "We knew this 4,000 years ago." All right, first of all, there's no record of acupuncture prior to 2,000 years ago, so you just doubled it. You know, just the fact that there were

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Sounds better.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Like needles, you know, bone needles 4,000 years ago, doesn't mean anything, because we don't know how they were being used. But if you actually read the history of acupuncture, what you find is that there were all kinds of different mutually incoherent traditions.

• 25:33Speaker 04

  Mutually incoherent.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there were, sometimes it was bloodletting. It was straight up bloodletting. Or you were lancing things, or you were sticking it where it hurt. You know, sometimes they invoked chi, sometimes they didn't invoke chi, sometimes they did moxibustion. You know, they would burn herbs on it, sometimes they didn't. You know, whatever. There were all these different beliefs and traditions that were not the same. And again, different patterns, different numbers and locations and things, and different explanations for how it might work. And then, in the early 20th century, what happened? Mao Zedong said, "All right, we're going to make

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Traditional Chinese medicine. We're going to manufacture this by fiat. And I'm going to take these threads from different mutually incompatible traditions, and this is now canon, right? And that's what they did. And so what we, what modern people think of as acupuncture was invented 100 years ago.

• 26:26Bob Novella?

  So Steve, is this a good description of it? Like, well, people are gonna die. We can't really do anything about that. So let's make them okay with it by believing this baloney.

• 26:36Speaker 02

  Well, it's partly, they didn't have the money and infrastructure to provide healthcare to, you know, everyone in China. So they created the sort of the barefoot doctor program where they were gonna, they created this textbook of traditional, textbook of traditional Chinese medicine. They empowered their, you know, army of practitioners with it. And so go out and pretend you're doing medicine, you know, basically. And that's traditional Chinese medicine. It's not 4,000 years old. It's not 2,000 years old. It's 100 years old. And it just, they just reconned a bunch of different traditions together and said, this is now canon. And I think that term is appropriate, because this is all just culture and story. And so then, like, the Meridians and Qi and, you know, not that those ideas didn't exist, but, you know, that all-

• 27:21Bob Novella?

  They just got folded in.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  They all got folded in into one, sort of, one textbook, basically. So it's completely wrong to say that it's 4,000 years old or 2,000 years old. It's completely wrong to say that they had any ancient knowledge. Here's the one last thing I'm gonna say. This, obviously, I have a lot to say about this. But a lot of this is built on this idea that, again, like, the ancient Chinese wisdom, right? That they somehow figured out that this is how the body works. So, no, they didn't. There's absolutely no way they figured out hundreds of points on the body that relate to specific conditions or physiology or anything. They didn't have science. They were pre-scientific.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  They didn't even, you know, for 2,000 years, up until, I think it's like 1921 or something, it was illegal to dissect dead bodies in China. So they had even less anatomical knowledge than most other ancient cultures did.

• 28:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  They had no idea what the organs did. They had no idea about anatomy, physiology, biochemistry. They didn't know what the blood did. They didn't know how the blood circulated. You know, that's another thing. Sometimes Qi was carried by the blood, sometimes it was separate, sometimes, whatever. It was all basically astrology, right? Meridians and the acupoints were never intended to be physiological or anatomical. They were always, in their conception, cosmological, right? They were always astrological. And so the, you know, again, retconning this as they had some kind of incredible knowledge of anatomy and physiology that we don't have today. There's no way. That's complete ahistorical pseudoscience. There's, they didn't have the methods that would have been necessary, right?

• 29:05Speaker 02

  To figure that out. And in the absence of any scientific ideas about biology or medicine, it's basically impossible. You know, it's one thing to say, and some people have, you know, responded, saying, well, they figured out that willow bark would make, you know, has

• 29:22Cara Santa Maria?

  That's different, though. That's medicine.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, it's like, first of all, you know, chewing on a bark and feeling a little better, it doesn't require scientific methodology to figure that out, right? A lot of, there was a lot of knowledge of herbalism. People did figure out what plants in their local environment made them shit, made them have hallucinations, helped with their pain, maybe helped wounds heal a little bit better. And that's basically it, right? They figured out some basic herbalism and which were poisons.

• 29:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and you know how they did that? Because they wanted to eat. And so they ate things.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Because you could figure that out.

• 29:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And sometimes they died, and sometimes they felt good.

• 29:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, because you could reasonably figure that out anecdotally. But you cannot develop an elaborate system like acupuncture anecdotally and have it reflect underlying reality. It's really just impossible. Or it would just have been an astronomical stroke of luck, which is, again, just magic. And so, no, it makes absolutely no sense. This is a cultural, superstitious belief that is being foisted onto modern people, and there is no evidence to support it, and it makes no sense in, really in any way. And it was just a complete and utter Journalism fail for the New York Times to write about it in such gushing and gullible ways, complete fail.

• 30:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it in the actual article about the interstitial? Or is it just in the newsletter?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  No, it's in the article. The article pivots to acupuncture.

• 30:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 30:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Huge bummer.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Okay, Jay, tell us about the effects of climate change on food insecurity. I bet it's not good.

• 30:59Jay Novella?

  Well, do all you guys know what food insecurity is?

• 31:03Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  So people come and steal your food, right?

• 31:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, basically, it means that.

• 31:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 31:10Jay Novella?

  You know, there's a lot of people who don't know where they're getting their food from.

• 31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Jay Novella?

  They either can't afford it, or it's not available.

• 31:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you know who the most food insecure people in California are? This is the saddest thing.

• 31:21Jay Novella?

  The politicians?

• 31:22Cara Santa Maria?

  No, the actual farmers that produce the food for everybody. Yeah, yeah.

• 31:26Speaker 04

  How ironic.

• 31:27Jay Novella?

  See, this is why I'm not a fruit farmer, because I would be eating it all day and I'd get fired.

• 31:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, you would.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Jay's like, I picked three strawberries. Here you go.

• 31:35Jay Novella?

  And like, my face is all, all red. There's a lot of ways that climate change can affect, you know, the amount of, you know, what we get out of our crops. And if you guys want to try, why don't you try to guess a few of these, these things that are affecting the output of our crops?

• 31:52Cara Santa Maria?

  So actual heat.

• 31:53Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 31:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Storms.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Rain, rainfall, too much, too little.

• 31:58Jay Novella?

  That's correct, yeah.

• 31:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Sea level rise, so like salty soil going inland. I guess that's more like dramatic, but it is starting to happen someplace.

• 32:07Speaker 04

  Erosion, I would think, would be a problem.

• 32:09Jay Novella?

  Yeah, there's a lot. So essentially, just like temperature rise, Kara, which is the big one. That is the one that does the most damage. You know, increased droughts, there's increased pests, right? Which, you know, temperature can have a dramatic effect on. You know, the farmers themselves, like, can they, is it too hot for them to do the work at certain times during the day or certain times during the year? The climate, the fact that the places around the globe that, that can actually grow food, it's shifting and changing. And then there's also for, for farmed animals, there's the increased heat risk to the animals themselves. And this climate change is having like very measurable stresses on agriculture

• 32:53Jay Novella?

  systems around the world. And this includes wealthy countries too, because you know, a lot of people from wealthier countries, there was that, you know, a lot of the idea of it's not happening here type of thing. And it is starting to happen everywhere now. And to be clear, you know, this doesn't mean we're all heading towards the ridiculous Hollywood style global famine and zombies soon to come, right? It's all, that's all nonsense. I mean, no data supports that. What the data does support, though, is something that's happening a lot slower, it's more complicated, and it's a lot more realistic. You know, we have food systems that are becoming less stable, they're less predictable, and they're more expensive.

• 33:35Jay Novella?

  And this means that as time goes by, food is going to become harder to grow and more and more and more expensive. And it's gonna, you know, it's going to affect everybody. So heat being the major factor, I have some examples here. It was very troubling to see how, how small of a heat increase or a temperature increase need to take place in order for there to be stressors on the plant. So for example, wheat, the, the heat stress begins at 86 degrees Fahrenheit or 30 degrees Celsius, which, that's not that very, that's not high. So for wheat, 86 is the start of it having trouble. And then when it gets up to like

• 34:14Jay Novella?

  95 degrees Fahrenheit or 35 degrees Celsius, it's really bad. And then corn, 95 degrees Fahrenheit, 35 degrees Celsius, when a trouble starts, and anything above 100 degrees Fahrenheit or 38 degrees Celsius. And then I could just go down the list, and they're all basically in that same temperature range, which we're starting to dip into in a lot of places where these things are farmed. And I said before, you know, livestock are also vulnerable to a lot of these effects. Cows, pigs, and chickens can get heat stress. And that immediately reduces their growth or fertility, you know, milk production. And chickens are really

• 34:56Jay Novella?

  sensitive because they can't sweat. And that puts them into a very compromised position because, you know, chickens are typically, you know, these are, a lot of people have them outdoors. I know a lot of places have them indoors too, but we'd like to think that the bulk of them are outdoors. There's documented cases of massive poultry die-offs just because of heat. And what are we going to do? We'd have to bring them indoors. We'd have to give them air-controlled living spaces. That all drives up the cost. Another big troubling side to the whole thing is that, of course, modern agriculture depends on outdoor labor. And farmworkers typically, they spend their days working outside. They're working long, hard hours and they're under direct sunlight for a lot of the time

• 35:42Jay Novella?

  that they're working. And as the temperatures rise, there's going to be more days where it's just simply not safe for them to be out in the heat. And then, do we have laws that say that they can't be asked to work in certain temperatures? Well, I'm sure it goes state by state, but it is something that's going to be coming to the forefront because there will be problems with workers. There will be like maybe weeks where they can't work, which would be devastating. And then how do you mitigate that? More cost, right? It's just going to take more money. This is a very hard number to guess, but the United Nations has an estimate on the number of work hours lost due to temperature worldwide annually. What do you guys think it is? It's 500 billion.

• 36:26Jay Novella?

  500 billion lost work hours. And that's an incredibly high number. And it sounds like a very large number, but Steve, you read, how many hours per worker does it turn into?

• 36:37Speaker 02

  24 hours per year per worker. That's now. Of course, that will increase as global warming increases.

• 36:45Jay Novella?

  And that's an average. That's not like, oh, one worker misses one day of work per year. It's regionally, it's probably like they miss a week or a couple of weeks or sprinkled throughout their growing and picking season.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Well, generally speaking, this is not evenly distributed, as you say. Northern climates actually benefit. So Canada, Russia, China actually may have a net benefit from warmer temperatures shifting north, but the rest of the world will have a net negative, which outweighs it. So there's a net negative effect, but it also does shift the growing seasons and optimal temperatures a little bit to the north. So if you're already in Canada, there may be a net benefit. But yeah, workers in Europe, Africa, obviously, you know, United States, we're losers in this equation.

• 37:35Cara Santa Maria?

  And we've got to remember too, that we don't live in a segmented farming culture anymore.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:42Cara Santa Maria?

  We have massive agro business that happens in specific areas and then we export a lot of that crop to the globe. So the places where we have these very, very large farms, like the Central Valley of California, this is going to be devastating to food all over the country, for example.

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Interestingly, my daughter, who lives in Pennsylvania, just told me about this and I was looking it up. So, you know, we've had an unusual spring in, on the East Coast this year. You had, you know, unseasonably warm days and then we had unseasonably cold days, which absolutely devastated Pennsylvania's fruit growers because you had this warm April days and everything bloomed and then you had a frost and it killed everything. So the, the total fruit losses were 70 to 90% crop loss for the year in Pennsylvania.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  Some were 100% loss, you know, but on average, like 70 to 80% is, that's, that's, that's the variability, the unpredictability. So it's not just, right, because the global warming increases the swing, right? And the unpredictability of the weather. And so you get just one frost could wipe out a tremendous amount of crop.

• 38:57Jay Novella?

  You know, and as an example too, like if we had a late winter in Connecticut, then there will be more ticks that summer because there's a die-off when they, you know, when the ground freezes, you know, that all the ticks don't survive and that kind of balances things out. There was a dramatic increase in temperature and there was no die-off. You know, what would that turn into for all the different insects out there? And, you know, we've had reports from the Lancet Countdown recently that estimated, you know, how many people in Europe were, um, you know, going to be having trouble getting food? And the numbers increased dramatically by a million people from one year to the next because of just what happened with the weather that year. So, you know, these historical baselines are going to get blown away.

• 39:42Jay Novella?

  They're, we're going to see more and more groups of people having trouble getting consistent, healthy food. The article also talks about how climate change acts more like a stress multiplier than just like a single thing, you know, like a drought is a single thing, right? That could, you know, happens for a certain amount of time. But what it does is it starts to affect lots of things at the same time. Like you might have a drought that increases wildfire risk, that will put strain on water supplies, that will then reduce labor productivity, and then it will disrupt transportation infrastructure, right? And all these things are happening at the same time. So what can we do? And there's a lot we can do.

• 40:25Jay Novella?

  There is no panacea, but there are many different strategies that are known that can be applied. You know, luckily agriculture isn't static. You know, we can selectively breed heat resistant strains. We do it. We use GMOs.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  I mean, it puts some numbers on it. So the estimates are by 2050, which is nothing, right? That's right around the corner, that climate change will reduce crop yields by 8%.

• 40:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Meanwhile, the population's going to be increasing by what? 10% or so? And so that will, that's, we need to be increasing our productivity, not decreasing it. If we don't mitigate climate change by 2100, it could be down by 24%. That's when you start to get into famine territory, you know?

• 41:14Jay Novella?

  Yeah. We have to get, we have to try to get ahead of this as much as possible, too. That's why talking about it now is important. Like if you want to selectively breed heat resistant strains, or you want to change the crop varieties, improve irrigation, you know, alter planting schedules or whatever, like you need to know it, do it, have the money and the technology either poised or, or ready to go. It has to be there.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and I think we have to remember too, that like when we talk about things like, oh, 8% here, 10% there, these are global statistics and averages. But like, we're in famine territory now because the most vulnerable people on this planet are hit the hardest the soonest.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 41:56Jay Novella?

  You know, and all these changes that we can do, they have limits, they do cost a lot of money, they take time, and you know, wealthier countries will have more of an ability to implement them, poorer countries, they can't, you know, unless they're getting support. And even if they're well-funded, and even if they're well-executed, it doesn't mean that the problems completely go away, it just means that we're pushing the problem down to a certain degree. So, the strongest evidence-based conclusion that we have right now, it's not like climate change is going to destroy agriculture, again, stay away from that. It's more that climate change is going to make it harder, you know, more volatile, it's going to be more expensive, it's going to be, you know, it's overall just going to cost

• 42:38Jay Novella?

  a lot more money to do the same exact thing. And, you know, unlike some environmental predictions, it's not theoretical anymore. Like, the data's clear, it's here, it's happening, it's, you know, it's happening on a yearly basis now.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Jay. Kara, were there Neanderthal dentists?

• 42:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. Jay, this one's for you.

• 42:59Jay Novella?

  All right, let's do it.

• 43:00Cara Santa Maria?

  You excited? All right. So, there is a study that was published, as of this recording, yesterday in PLOS One, so it's open access, anyone can read it, titled "Earliest Evidence for Invasive Mitigation of Dental Caries by Neanderthals." So, what do we think the earliest evidence before this study of dentistry, what we kind of consider to be dentistry, would have been?

• 43:27Jay Novella?

  I think they were just pulling teeth.

• 43:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Like? Yeah, that's probably true. So, let's, let me, yeah, let me specify, doing dental work with tools.

• 43:37Jay Novella?

  Like, you want to know when it happened, or what they were doing?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  I would guess maybe 14,000 years ago.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  10,000 would be my guess.

• 43:43Jay Novella?

  I say 14,001 years ago, Kara.

• 43:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Prices right.

• 43:47Bob Novella?

  14,000 and two.

• 43:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was 14,000 years ago in Homo sapiens. And so we're jumping back to 59,000 years ago, according to this study. They found the tools, huh? Bold claim. They found the tooth. Uh, they found the tooth, yeah. Oh, the tooth. Yeah, so here's what happened. They were looking in the Chagurskaya Cave, which is, you know, a lot of these artifacts have been pulled for many, many years. People have been studying for a long time. This is how, uh, uh, physical anthropology and archaeology works. This is a cave in Siberia and it's known to have a lot of Neanderthal remains and also different tools and different artifacts. And the artifact itself is, is known as Chagurskaya 64.

• 44:34Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a Neanderthal lower left second molar that was found in the cave. And it's got a big old hole in it. And so as they're looking at this tooth and they're going, eh, what could have caused that big old hole? Maybe the crown of the tooth fell off. Maybe that happened during the life of the person. Maybe it happened after the person died. But there's an anthropologist on this, uh, team, uh, named Alisa Zubova, who was like, mm, I'm a tooth expert and I don't think that's what happened here. Let's dig a little deeper. So they started to look at it under the microscope and they found tool marks, very clear tool marks. And they described them as clear linear marks typical of a rotating drilling motion.

• 45:17Cara Santa Maria?

  They also found that there were three overlapping depressions at the chewing surface of that tooth. And, uh, based on that, they said, we don't think that this was disease. We don't think this was accident. This looks like intentional treatment that is done by hand. Now, obviously they didn't have electric drills, but you know what else they didn't have? Anesthesia.

• 45:40Bob Novella?

  Not even some primitive booze?

• 45:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Woof, I don't know, but it sounds to me like- Chew on the willow bark here. So, they did have a stone in that region at that time called jasperoid, and they were known to make tools out of jasperoid. They napped it. I didn't know that word, napping. Yeah, I guess, yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, napping is like the technique you use to break off flint, for example, like blades.

• 46:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Make arrows, things like that, yeah. No, it's not called flinting, it's called napping. But with a K, right? K-N-A-P-P. I believe so. Napping, kuh.

• 46:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Knappkming, kuh, kuh. And so they, they had found different jasperoid tools inside the cave at the time, and they described them as complex asymmetrical, bifacial knife scrapers, and tools with small retouched points. So, they already had a good understanding that the fine motor skills and the kind of engineering knowledge would have been there, because it's, it's, it's known that some tools already existed, which, you know, they thought and probably likely were for other purposes. So then how did they, the team, argue that this was dentistry, and that this dentistry was done with some of these tools?

• 47:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, they were like, "Let's take a tooth and let's use some tools like this, and let's see if we can make the same." Yeah, just like they do in forensics, criminology, you know, courtroom recreations of crime scenes and things like that. They grabbed some of these tools, they took some old teeth first, from, you know, old anthropological collections, and they were able to do it, but it was like, "Man, these teeth are not as easy to work with." And luckily, good old Lydia Zotkina of the team had just had to have her wisdom teeth extracted. So she donated her freshly extracted tooth to the cause, and they actually used these tools on her tooth, and then they were able to come-

• 47:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Hair the markings under the microscope to a modern tooth. Yeah. So it may have been different, but of course it would have been fresher in terms of its composition. So they drilled into her tooth. Luckily, it was outside of her mouth. They, they joked that it was the most personal contribution to the project that any one scientist made. And they used these spikes of jasperoid by, you know, when they used it pretty intensely, they, they kept cracking the teeth. But when they used what they called a gentle, careful rotating motion. So a manual drilling motion, they were able to replicate the same tool marks that they found on the tooth.

• 48:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And actually, they claim in the paper that this was more advanced than that Homo sapiens method that was first described from 14,000 years ago. So, you know, here's the caveat that we always have to say when we talk about old things that we have very little evidence to support, like it's a one-off, hopefully. I mean, it would be really cool if we started finding more evidence of this. And it is in keeping with some of the things that we understand about these Neanderthals that did live in these caves at the time. There's evidence that they buried their dead. There's evidence that they engaged in art and, and jewelry making, and maybe even some medicinal evidence. But, you know, like Steve said before, like chewing

• 49:08Cara Santa Maria?

  on willow bark is very, very different than using tools to undergo a painful, potentially very painful treatment. But here's the reason, like the additional reason that they think that this worked, that this actually happened and that it worked. Well, just like when we see evidence of ancient trepining, we didn't so much see healing of the tooth, but what we saw was later grooves from chewing on top of the tool mark grooves. So it seems quite evident that this individual was eating, eating, eating, owie, owie, owie. I need to do something about

• 49:51Cara Santa Maria?

  this tooth. Maybe they tried to pull it because what surprises me is that they didn't just extract the tooth.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, why wouldn't you just yank it?

• 49:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But it was A molar, maybe it was not an easy extraction to do and they were in so much tortuous pain that they decided, I'll, I'll, I'll handle anything. See if you can get whatever's in there that hurts.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  Also, how many teeth did they have?

• 50:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. They may have needed this tooth.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:13Cara Santa Maria?

  I cannot imagine. I just had a root canal. I cannot imagine doing that without anesthesia. Maybe their root was dead at that point, but still this would have hurt. And then, uh, and then they lived and they continued to eat. And there's good evidence on the tooth that that happened. So, you know, there may be a different explanation that other researchers come up with as they continue to investigate here, or maybe we find more specific examples that corroborate this compelling evidence. But either way, according to these scientists, this would be the earliest example of dentistry and actually possibly, one of the write-ups was saying quite possibly

• 50:53Cara Santa Maria?

  the earliest example of this complex of a medical procedure overall. Pretty interesting.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's fascinating.

• 51:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Dental surgery and Neanderthals.

• 51:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  Bob, tell us about tiny robots.

• 51:08Bob Novella?

  All right, guys. Scientists have built tiny, light-controlled micro drones, far smaller than the human here, and they can be steered through water to corral bacteria into one place, kind of like a, like a microscopic cleanup crew that don't have, there's no brain, there's no battery, and there's not even any tiny little face masks. So this is from researchers at University of Wurzburg in Bavaria, Germany. The study's posted or published in Nature Communications. Very simple title here, a nanoscale robotic cleaner. All right. So I've got a problem with even just the word robot in this context. It's just frustrating. The popular media in this case just invariably are describing these as robots or nanobots.

• 51:50Bob Novella?

  The paper calls them micro drones. So keep that in mind as I describe what these things are and what they can do. Maybe we could talk about it at the end, see what you guys think. So, okay, so these micro drones, what are they all about? So these are, these are definitely not miniaturized R2D2s as the, the, you know, ...nanobot may conjure. They're also, they're not simple particles that have been press-ganged into service either, like you see from some of these other nanobots that have been created in the past. The media describes it as 50 times smaller than a hair, which is roughly accurate, but more specifically, these are 920 nanometers and they have a mass of about 0.26 picograms. So that's about, you could think of that as roughly a thousandth

• 52:33Bob Novella?

  of a millimeter and less than a trillionth of a gram. So yeah, super, super tiny. Their construction is fascinating. I was wondering, how do you even make these guys? What's going on? So they have, they have, they use helium ion beam milling, which I hadn't even heard about before, and they, and they use this on gold flakes, and then they embed this into this transparent silica. So essentially, they use a beam of helium ions to use as a cutting tool, and they carve these structures into the gold flakes at this nanometer scale. It's kind of like a nano CNC tool, in essence. So the main thing about this that actually isn't new is this whole idea of photon propulsion. So these gold flakes that they have milled,

• 53:18Bob Novella?

  that they have carved, they create these shapes that are optical antennas, right? So they absorb light and they re-emmit it in a directed way. Now, we know light has no mass, but we do also know that it has momentum, right? We've talked about that multiple times on the show. So, and so that is, this momentum is transferred to the microdrone, giving it a push, similar to how a solar sail works. So in this case, these antennas have been created in such a way that the light scatters asymmetrically. So that asymmetric scattering is preferential, right, in one direction, and that's what is giving it its push. People may try to invoke also kinetic energy, and kinetic energy is a factor as

• 53:58Bob Novella?

  well, but it's very, very tiny in this context. So that's, like I said, that's not new. That's been done many different times. So what is new? What have they done that is different? One thing that they've done is miniaturization. This robot is below one micron, so that's kind of like a scale. That once you get below it, things change in a certain way that are very advantageous. It's at that size, you're small enough to work at the bacterial scale, right? At this biological scale, that could be very helpful. So that's one thing. It's also small enough that this micro drone is very, very light. It's light enough for this photon recoil to make it move very, very fast. What this means in this case is that these micro drones can move, I think it's something like

• 54:43Bob Novella?

  five or 10 times faster than anything else that we've done with this type of technology. And it also means that when it's this small, that it's also optically stable enough so that it can steer well at that size. So it's three advantages that happen once you get it below this micron scale. So what else is new? The external control of these devices is very, very simple. So this is new as well. It's much simpler than previously. So there's no complex laser beams for steering this like they've needed in the past. There's no complicated optical traps to hold on to these things. Instead, what they use is an unfocused laser beam. And the other thing that they use, which is one of the most interesting things about this,

• 55:26Bob Novella?

  is that they use the polarization of light for steering. So now, we've talked about polarization in the past, right? It's how the magnetic and electric fields that make up light are oriented to each other. So that's the polarization. The gold antennas are designed to treat very specific polarizations of this laser beam like a steering rail, right? Like those, remember those lame cars at the Disney parks? Where you just kind of sit there and there's a rail and it just kind of steers you and you don't really have to do anything? So we have these different patterns of polarization, whether it's circularly polarized or linearly polarized. The different ways you can polarize this light can make the drone follow pre-programmed paths in different directions.

• 56:08Bob Novella?

  So that's one of the big new things about these new micro drones or nano robots. The other interesting thing is the self-orientation. So by that, I mean that these gold optical antennas are designed so the drone can automatically align itself with the polarization direction. So now there's a question coming, people. So please pay attention. And it's going to happen very fast. The gold antennas do two jobs, right? The first job is to scatter the light unevenly. So it gives the drone a push. But the antennas also make the drone automatically line up with the with the laser polarization. So the antennas do two things. They make these micro drones get pushed by the light.

• 56:50Bob Novella?

  And it also points the micro drones in a specific direction. So why do you think it's important for the drone to auto align with the polarization? Think about the it's the environment that it's in. What's going on at that environment? So what's happening is that you've I'm sure you've probably heard of Brownian motion. Right? At that level, there's this thermal motion, this thermal noise that's constantly kicking things around at that scale. This Brownian motion in this specific scenario causes what they they call Brownian rotation. So you've got this micro drone in there and it's being pummeled by by atoms going left and right because of because of the thermal motion. And it can it can rotate your your little micro drone. And then and then you're going to lose track of where you're going.

• 57:33Bob Novella?

  And it's it's just going to make it much more inefficient and annoying to use. So what happens is that these antennas make the drone align perfectly with the polarization. So it stays on track and goes where you want it without messing up. So without it, it would kind of like be this micro sized shopping cart with a busted wheel that's always a pain in the ass to get where you want it to go. So that's so this this self orientation, this polarization locking, I think they call it, is a is a really interesting solution to that problem. And the final big new thing about this technology is is just the pure biological manipulation. Right? I was so curious how such as a relatively simple device, how can that gather and relocate

• 58:16Bob Novella?

  multiple bacteria, you know, functioning as like this little these little tiny cleaners? In this case, they're using they use E. coli and Stephalococcus carnosus. So how do you guys think that these devices can gather and basically move the bacteria to a specific location? Do you have any ideas on how they would accomplish that? I mean, my first thought was, oh, obviously, this is a little robot. So it's going to have little robot arms and it's going to grab it.

• 58:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I was thinking like some sort of chemical.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was thinking.

• 58:46Bob Novella?

  Adhesion, like maybe some kind of chemical.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  Something a bacteria would react to or be repulsed by. And you kind of push it along.

• 58:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Something it's attracted to.

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Are they just going to surround and push the bacteria?

• 58:58Bob Novella?

  Nope, nope. It's the, the, the effect that's happening is thermophoresis and the word thermo in there, you know, that's something that's got to do with, with, you know, with, with the heat. So you have these, these micro drones are absorbing light. So it's also creating this local temperature gradient, right? So the temperature is changing. I guess you would be getting cooler the farther away you move. And that is actually what is pulling the bacteria towards the micro drones is this temperature gradient. So now this temperature difference stays below 10, 10 K. So because if it was, you know, if it was much more than that, you did be like photodermal damage and all this stuff. So they, so the, the temperature difference isn't great enough to

• 59:38Bob Novella?

  cause any damage, but it is enough so that it actually kind of sucks in the bacteria. So it's following these micro drones. And then to detach it, how do you think, how do they detach the bacteria? Do you think just turn the laser off? Real simple. Turn the laser off, bloop. And then it's kind of all detached. So it's kind of takes all the bacteria, it can take all the bacteria and you can, and you can grab a bunch of them. Each, each micro drone can grab a bunch of them. And it's interesting how it doesn't even, all these bacteria kind of following it doesn't really slow it down that much. It slows it down a little bit, but not a lot. So, all right. So let's go through some, a couple of quotes that I thought were interesting for this. So Jean Chien, lead experimental scientist of the study said, "In essence, we have built a

• 1:00:19Bob Novella?

  light-driven nano-robot that can track down and collect bacteria. By simplifying the design, we've reached a size at which these robots can operate directly in the microbial world, almost like microscopic cleaning devices." Got a little bit of a better quote from professor, team leader, Professor Bert Hecht said, "This is a striking example of how light can be used not only to observe the microscopic world, but also to actively shape it. The idea of tiny robotic cleaners may sound futuristic, but we are already demonstrating the physical principles that make this possible." So interesting, interesting stuff here, but now we got some caveats. So this is not autonomous. There's no decision-making happening onboard these micro drones of where to go. The researchers are steering it with this laser polarization.

• 1:01:04Bob Novella?

  Not a medical nanobot. This is, this is really just a controlled lab demonstration at this point. This is not something that is ready to swim through your bloodstream at all. It, it obviously needs light access, right? If the laser can't reach a, it's a place or a destination with negligible distortion, then control obviously is going to become a major problem. Cause if you can't see the polarization, you're not going to be able to steer it. And you're basically done at that point. As I said, these are microscope scale environments. I guess I didn't say that before specifically, but yes, these are microscope scale environments. These are not large, messy biological systems. So that would just add so many complications. There's no onboard AI or anything like that at all. The, the intelligence that's behind this is mostly, you know, in the external optical setup,

• 1:01:48Bob Novella?

  in the, the engineered shape of the device itself. And let's see, the, the final real caveat here that I, that I could figure out is the scaling up of this would be really hard. You know, you can control one or few of these micro drones without too much of a problem. But if you were going to control swarms of them, you were talking about it's something, a system that's far, far more complicated. And it might just become way, way too unwieldy for this technique to use. So yeah, so this is absolutely impressive nano engineering. There's nowhere near fantastic Voyager. So, all right, so let's cover, I'm curious of what your sense is, is this, are these robots or not? Is, am I just being totally anal about the term robot?

• 1:02:33Speaker 04

  Sounds like a new segment, robot or not?

• 1:02:35Bob Novella?

  Robot or not, right? I mean, cause for me, when I got so many images in my mind is from like 1990s, Bob, when I was discovering nanotech and all that stuff of, of what these micro robots would be like. And we have not even come close to anything that I was imagining. And sure, it's ridiculously complicated to do that. But would you guys call these a robot or not?

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  I think they're robot adjacent.

• 1:02:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's fair. I think in the terms of the scientific field itself, this is, this is, it's a legitimate term. There is a controlled, purposeful motion that's happening. It's, it's, this is an engineered construct that converts input into action, and it can manipulate things. So yeah, I mean, I could see how you could fairly call this or justifiably call this a robot, but there's other things, you know, to say that it's not a robot. And it did, maybe a lot of this is a judgment call. There's no onboard sensing, there's no computation onboard, there's no autonomy. I found one description where this was more of like a tool tip than an independent machine. And that, I liked that description. It is more of like a tool tip, this remote tool tip. The biggest, though, the biggest problem that I had with it is that

• 1:03:43Bob Novella?

  it's, the term robot in this case can mislead the public, right? If you're, especially in our jobs as science communicators, the term robot can be extremely misleading. The images that it conjures can really be misrepresent what's happening here. So, so I think you have to be careful when you're describing these things, especially if somebody said about this news item, scientists built tiny robots that hunt bacteria. That would not be a reasonable way to describe this. It would be a quick soundbite, right? A sexy title to a, to a news item that might get clicks, but this is really not what's happening here. This is not a good representation of what is actually happening here. But I just wanted to just to throw that out there, how annoying this kind of was for me to see

• 1:04:26Bob Novella?

  robot and nano robot all over the place. That's technically kind of justified, but for a science communication, I really don't think it is, but whatever.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Evan, there's more UFO nonsense coming out of the Pentagon. What's going on?

• 1:04:43Speaker 04

  You call it nonsense?

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  This is major. I have, and I will.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  This, by the way, is the second massive mainstream journalism fail that's happening.

• 1:04:55Speaker 04

  No doubt about it.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  This week.

• 1:04:56Speaker 04

  This was everywhere. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my God, it is all over. You couldn't turn around without running into this particular news.

• 1:05:05Speaker 02

  And we're not bitter at all, Evan, right?

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  In case you live under a rock, last week, the Trump administration released a tranche of what it says will be hundreds of declassified files related to UFOs, or of course, UAPs. The initial release, or this release, included about 160 documents, photographs and videos, spanning nearly eight decades, from the 1940s FBI reports to modern military infrared footage and NASA mission transcripts. Ooh. The internet declared that disclosure had finally arrived. Uh huh. Well, as with every major UFO and UAP document dump before it, these extraordinary interpretations

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  go far beyond what the evidence actually shows. There's a lot. I'm not going to talk about 160 individual pieces, but there are three, I think, that have been getting quite a bit of attention and have been on many, many news shows, internet and everywhere else. Number one, the Wind Farm UFO video. Number two, Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 debrief. And number three, the Apollo 17 triangular lights. Oh, my gosh. Why don't we start with the Wind Farm, shall we? This one was very much visually compelling, this footage, an infrared video showing a bright object moving over a field of wind turbines. Have all of you here on the Skeptics Guide seen this footage?

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:36Speaker 04

  Yes. Yep. Looked impressive.

• 1:06:38Speaker 02

  Dot of light.

• 1:06:39Speaker 04

  But, but that dot, Steve, look, did you see it just maneuvering through that Wind Farm and going at that super spectacular speed? How could it possibly? So, yeah, spinning turbines and, you know, providing a clear, you know, you have this terrestrial reference, okay? And then you've got this object. The motion is dramatic and purposeful, right? The kind of video that all UFO enthusiasts love because it appears to show something maneuvering intelligently over a known recognizable landscape. There was an interview on CNN, I'll pick this one out, out of many. Rear Admiral Tim Goddett, well, retired Rear Admiral, you know, US Navy, you know, very, very, very credible source.

• 1:07:23Speaker 04

  Here's, here's his quote. "This UAP that is moving around a wind farm in the Indo-Pacific region is absolutely remarkable that this object was maneuvering around these wind turbines. It can't be explained." That's the retired Rear Admiral Tim Goddett who said that on CNN. But, okay. You have this bright white blob. Thermal imaging really doesn't tell us much by itself, but could it be? What could it be? What could it possibly? Could it be a balloon, a drone, a bird? An aircraft? Or was it an artifact created by the camera's tracking and image processing systems perhaps? Well, maybe.

• 1:08:06Speaker 04

  Who could we go to, to analyze footage like this? Mick West. Mick West. Who did a very nice thorough job of analyzing this particular footage. Allow me to read to you a few sentences of what he said. Okay, he says it's thermal and it's really zoomed in. It's shot from a moving aircraft, the MQ-9 drone. This is Mick talking, which is cruising at around 200 miles per hour. Right? So that's the speed of the drone. It's also being manually tracked. There's no lock on the object, so the drone operator is following it around with manual controls using a joystick, kind of like an Xbox controller. So the camera sways around a lot. This creates the illusion that the object itself is moving erratically.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  That happens because there's lots of stuff on screen that is fixed in position relative to the camera. There's the on-screen display, mostly covered by these black boxes, but there's also a layer of sensor noise that's easily mistaken for background. The object moves relative to this and when the operator tracks it. But how is it actually moving relative to the real background? The way to find out is to stabilize it, which I did with Citrix's built-in tracking tools, generating a stabilized video. How often in our investigations and things have we seen this? You've got this shaky video and you just stabilize it and the truth reveals itself. Mick says, so now we see rather than weaving around the screen, the object is actually traveling

• 1:09:34Speaker 04

  in a straight line with respect to the background. Very consistent with something like a balloon and the parallax effect from the camera moving like we see in many other videos such as Go Fast and Agwidia, which are, you know, things that Mick has analyzed before, applied these tools to and basically showed, oh yeah, balloon, basically. So, so much for Rear Admiral Godet's talking about this being inexplicable. The second item, Buzz Aldrin's Apollo 11 debrief. According to multiple reports, Buzz Aldrin described three unusual observations during a post-mission technical debrief conducted shortly after the Apollo 11 moon landing.

• 1:10:18Speaker 04

  A sizable object observed near the spacecraft while en route to the moon had these intermittent flashes of green, of light seen in the cabin while the crew was trying to sleep. Buzz described it as a fairly bright light source that the crew thought might have been a laser. One widely quoted line from Aldrin is, here's a quote, "The first unusual thing that we saw, it has a sizable dimension to it, so we put the monocular on it, a tool for analyzing it." Another line states, "There was a fairly bright light source which we felt could be a laser." And these quotes have been covered by, you know, mainstream press, all of them picked it up.

• 1:11:01Speaker 04

  But here's the context for it. This is not a newly discovered confession. This has been known for many, many years that Aldrin has said these things and he's talked about this very, very thing. He has discussed the sighting so many times over and has consistently said that the most likely explanation was a discarded component from the Saturn V or another piece of mission hardware. And in deep space, when you get sunlight reflecting off of debris like that, you get these unusual visual effects. So this was supposed to be some kind of, oh my gosh, Buzz Aldrin, finally, they have, they have him talking about this and then it's been covered up all these years. Nope,

• 1:11:40Speaker 04

  not at all. Just basically the transcript of what he's originally been talking about for so many years now. Nothing to see here. The third item, Apollo 17 and the triangular lights. This is not something I was familiar with before. A photograph from the Apollo 17 moon landing mission shows three bright dots arranged in a triangular pattern. How else would three line, you know, dots make?

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  Could be a line.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  It could be a line, but other than that, it would be.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  Cause not a line, it's a triangle.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  Right. It has to be a triangle.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Or a point.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Well, three points, but three dots. Yes, I get what you're saying.

• 1:12:15Bob Novella?

  Well, if they were, if they were over each other.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. Or you had them lined up all in the same plane. Um, right. But if there's one thing that triggers the pattern recognition circuitry of the human brain, that would be this geometry. Three lights in a triangle practically beg to be interpreted as a structured craft of some sort. During lunar missions, astronauts frequently saw flashes and bright fragments caused by floating debris. Here we go again. Reflections, micrometeorite impacts, camera artifacts. In the Apollo 17 transcript, the crew described some of these spark-like events as looking like the 4th of July. Oh, wow. That means, you know, something of intelligence was out there making, making these lights, right? Uh, yeah. So, but that's what you would sort of expect in this, from tiny particles catching sunlight in the vacuum

• 1:13:01Speaker 04

  of space. So a photograph showing an unusual arrangement of lights is not evidence of anything, frankly. Nothing, certainly nothing extraordinary. And actually, it's quite mundane. But that's what we do. We find patterns. We love these patterns and a big part of the entire UFO and UAP phenomenon is based on the patterns that our brains love to see. Nothing at all to see here. Nothing in this release is, it reveals anything resembling extraterrestrial intelligence, spacecraft, or...

• 1:13:38Speaker 04

  Anything close to it. In fact, it's more negative evidence as far as I'm concerned for the entire phenomenon.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, at the end of the day, it's lights and people saying they saw lights. Right, but there's

• 1:13:50Speaker 04

  That's the disclosure, yeah.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  What, but what are we not seeing, right? This is the Pentagon who apparently is hiding aliens and spacecraft, right? They're, we're not, we didn't see any aliens. We didn't see any clear spacecraft. We didn't see any clear alien technology. I mean, I always think to myself, because there was a time when we were young where we believed in aliens and UFOs and stuff.

• 1:14:15Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, man.

• 1:14:16Speaker 02

  Imagine how disappointing this would be. Right? Like, this is the big government disclosure. And it's freaking a nothing burger. It's

• 1:14:25Speaker 04

  Show me the body, right?

• 1:14:27Speaker 02

  There's nothing that did, so then, maybe, and again, let me put it this way. It didn't end the debate, right? Nothing that we saw ended the debate.

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 1:14:35Speaker 02

  It's just more vague crap. But the, the big problem is, I think, the way that media is responding to it. They're like, oh, the Pentagon is saying that UFOs are real now, and they're taking it seriously. Did you guys see the recent interview with Neil deGrasse Tyson?

• 1:14:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  You know?

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  Frustrating.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  So, it was very frustrating. I get it. You know, Neil is promoting a book, and he's trying to be positive, and he says all the right things, but he comes off, I think inadvertently, kind of supporting the overall vibe in the media, like, there's something really interesting going on here. We need to take this seriously.

• 1:15:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:15:13Speaker 02

  It's like, no, there really isn't anything interesting going on here. This is the same crap we've been seeing for 60 years, and that's it. It's really nothing. I guess you don't sell a lot of books by saying, by saying

• 1:15:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 1:15:27Speaker 02

  But, I mean, can you really forgive skeptics for being unimpressed by this low quality evidence? These things are UAPs because they're low quality, not because they're strange or unusual. That's an important distinction. It's not like we're seeing something that we can't identify because it's so unusual. No. If it can't be identified until you do a more careful analysis, it's because the quality of the evidence is so low.

• 1:15:51Speaker 04

  And that's where, yeah, and that's where the entire phenomenon exists.

• 1:15:54Speaker 02

  It's right. That is the phenomenon. The blurriness of the photos is the phenomenon.

• 1:15:59Bob Novella?

  Should I read some of Michio Kaku's quotes, or no, Kaku, should I read some of his quotes? So interviewed by Fox News and he's, he's asked about what, what he thought about these fast 90 degree turns that the objects take. And here's what, this is his, this is a quote from what he said. The laws of centrifugal force should crush the bones of the people inside the flying saucer. So either there's basically an automated flying saucer, so there are no bones to crack as the things go zigzagging left and right. Or it represents a very high level of intelligence to create something like that. So in other words, when humans cannot get into a spaceship that goes zigzagging like that, only aliens can. But even their bones would break. So it must be a very high level of automated computer technology.

• 1:16:39Bob Novella?

  So that's his analysis. He doesn't even acknowledge the possibility of, of what this really is, what we know it is, right? Come on. It's the evidence of so low quality that your, your imagination plays more of a role than anything else.

• 1:16:53Speaker 02

  Shame on them.

• 1:16:54Bob Novella?

  But that doesn't make good, that doesn't make good sound bites.

• 1:16:56Speaker 04

  He, he, this is somebody who should know better. This is not some novice. This is not someone who is not at all familiar.

• 1:17:03Bob Novella?

  That's what he does for many years now. So we're not surprised. It's just frustrating.

• 1:17:08Speaker 02

  But I'm just going to say, and this is across the board, that this is the difference between a science communicator and a skeptical science communicator. You could be a good scientist and a good science communicator, but not be steeped in critical understanding, critical thinking, and scientific skepticism. And these are the topics where you fail. Cause you don't, you don't have deep topic specific knowledge. And you don't have specific critical thinking knowledge of how pseudoscience works and is promoted, including conspiracy thinking and anomaly hunting and misinterpretation of all that stuff.

• 1:17:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's just, they're, they are distinct. Scientific skepticism and straightforward science are distinct specialties. And when scientists try to communicate on skeptical topics, they generally. are cringey, they don't get it right. I mean, again, Michio Kaku is like among the worst now. He really has, you know, lost it in my opinion.

• 1:18:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  With comments like that. But it's just, you know, this is a, this is a legitimate specialty that you do not have. And you need to respect that. But, but I don't see that as being the case.

• 1:18:19Jay Novella?

  And Steve, we also have to factor in, we're questioning whether or not they're doing this to make money.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, that we do, but in some time, if it's brazen and blatant, I think it's worth pointing out. But otherwise, I think it's pointless to speculate about it. Right? Then it just becomes subjective validation. People say that about us, you know what I mean? Just keeping the lights on is legitimate. But when somebody has sold their soul, you know, and money is the primary thing and it's obvious, then that's different, you know, versus just, oh, they have a book out. Okay, we all have books to sell. That's okay. I don't, I think it's pointless to get too obsessed about that. All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:18:59Jay Novella?

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

• 1:19:34Jay Novella?

  That's a long one, but it is very specific. Do you guys have any idea?

• 1:19:39Speaker 04

  I really do not.

• 1:19:40Speaker 02

  I mean, I've seen the video, so I know what it is.

• 1:19:42Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know.

• 1:19:43Jay Novella?

  Come on, Kara, you, you probably have.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  How about just a general category? What kind of thing do you hear going on?

• 1:19:48Speaker 04

  It's a race, yeah, of some kind, yeah.

• 1:19:51Jay Novella?

  It has that sports event vibe, without a doubt.

• 1:19:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, cheering crowd, announcer and, and something speeding by.

• 1:19:58Jay Novella?

  I always wanted to be one of those announcer guys, you know, it's like.

• 1:20:03Jay Novella?

  It'd be fun.

• 1:20:04Speaker 04

  It's not too late, you can still do that.

• 1:20:05Jay Novella?

  I know. All right, so Shane Hillier wrote in and Shane said, it sounds like a steam engine and that part of the sound seems to have a bit of a Doppler effect. Then there's something that sounds like a soccer player announcer who's very excited. So my guess is that this is a tractor pull competition with a steam powered tractor pulling something very heavy. Shane, this is a really good guess. You know, you called out the elements that you need to listen to. And you know, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you saw one of these tractor pull events, if it wasn't similar to that. It wasn't that, but you know, I liked what your guess was. Another listener named Dennis wrote in. Dennis said, judging from the rhythmic sound of the German diatribe in the background,

• 1:20:49Jay Novella?

  truly the language of love and the equally rhythmic sound of a locomotive. My guess for this week's noisy is one of the three DRG class 05. And these are called the Deutsche Riesbon. Riesbon. I'm not pronouncing that right.

• 1:21:06Jay Novella?

  All right. So he's saying essentially it's trains and these trains are considered. Right. So these were like a class three train. These were steam locomotives used on express passenger trains in continental Europe. They think they go back to like the 30s. I don't even know if they're used at all today anymore. Absolutely. It has a train sound. Absolutely. And there is a Doppler effect in there. You're not correct, but that, you know, we're getting close or closer. Another listener named Ron LeBlanc wrote in. He said, hello, I think this is that circus trick where five motorcycles are driving in a sphere cage upside down and all around each other. If you've ever seen that, you don't forget it. You know, you ever see this? It's like they're on the interior of a cage ball.

• 1:21:48Jay Novella?

  And you got multiple people riding motorcycles and they're going around inside the loop and they're not hitting each other. Probably during practice, they hit each other. It's not that, but I've never actually heard that in person. I don't know what it really sounds like, but it's a cool guess. All right. This leads us to the winner. This week's first entry winner is Brian Burns. And Brian says, hey, Jay, my guess for who's that noisy is one of those large spinning fireworks I've seen on YouTube from Thailand. Amazing to watch those giant rings soaring into the skies sometimes. You know, they're, he's saying sometimes not so much soaring, but you know, they're, they're a little awkward when they're going up. It was great seeing you guys in Seattle. Wish I could see you in Australia. All right. So what are we talking about here, guys? This is something called a Thai gondola.

• 1:22:33Jay Novella?

  It's locally known as a tali. It's a traditional, large, circular bamboo-based firework, right? It's built out of bamboo. Okay, so imagine if you will, it's a disc that's about, I would estimate, anywhere from one to two feet deep, right? So it's like a cross-section of a circle. And then, on the inside of that, there's, there's like a cross that holds it, that is part of the infrastructure of it, and they attach fireworks to that. And then, when this thing takes off, and it's huge, this thing could be five to 20 feet in diameter. What happens is that the fireworks are placed in such a way where it kind of spins, right? Because they have it set up so it can spin as the fireworks are starting to gain, as like, you know, the pressure from, the downward pressure from the fireworks is picking up

• 1:23:17Jay Novella?

  speed, and as it spins, it starts to lift because there is some type of airflow happening as well. And then it spins, and it goes up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and up, and they go up about, you know, several hundred meters into the sky. So what they say is, they spin rapidly to gain altitude, they release colorful sparks as it rises, primarily used in festivals in northeast Thailand and Laos, and they're often part of the Bun Bang Phi, which is a rocket festival to invoke rain. Let me play a little bit for you, and that guy is just yelling about how awesome it is, and making the people get excited. I'll clip in here in the middle a little bit.

• 1:24:09Jay Novella?

  You got it?

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:24:11Jay Novella?

  Pretty cool, you should watch a video of it. It's a lot of fun. All right, I have a new noisy guys. This one was sent in by a listener named Brian Hart, and here it is.

• 1:24:36Jay Novella?

  So this one, I'm sure some of you are going to recognize it, but this one has a little twist to it as well. So think about it. If you're like, I know what that is, keep thinking about it and see if you can figure out what the twist is. If you know this week's noisy, or you think you know, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Steve, we have many events, all of which can be seen on the skepticsguy.org, but we're going to focus on two of them because we have some cool and fun ideas for you. Steve, take it away.

• 1:25:06Speaker 02

  All right. So Wisconsin's coming up. We're going to be there on this month, May 29th. This is a Friday night event where we're going to have a very intimate meeting with just a few people. And then we're doing a private show and then an extravaganza, both on Saturday, the 30th. These are all separate ticketed events. What we're going to do, however, we haven't done this before, is we're going to provide a combo ticket. Now, we can't do that for the extravaganza or the extravaganza VIP, because we don't do the ticketing for those events. That's handled by the venue. But we do have control over the Friday night event and the Saturday private show, private show plus. It's a recording plus an hour of

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  extra content. We want to make a combo ticket where you can get both of those at the same time. So a lot of people ask us about that, or that there was a little confusion. If I got one, did that give me the other? So we'll make it very clear. You can get either tickets separately, or you can get them together. And that will be at a significantly discounted price if you get both of them together. Now, this applies to people who have already bought one or the other ticket. So if you say, for example, you bought the private show ticket already, you just need to pay the difference between that and the combo price in order to then also include the Friday night, super special VIP, very low number intimate, as you encounter. Does that make sense to everybody?

• 1:26:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so if you are interested, so if you've purchased a ticket to the private show, which is happening on Saturday morning, then you can go to the skeptiski.org, go to events and you'll see a ticket there that says-

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  Well, so there's gonna be a combo ticket that if you don't have a ticket and you want to get both, you get, then there'll be the combo upgrade for existing private show ticket holders.

• 1:26:53Jay Novella?

  Okay, so there'll be two separate tickets, one for people buying new and one for people who have already purchased the private show.

• 1:26:59Speaker 02

  And want to upgrade to the combo, yeah.

• 1:27:01Jay Novella?

  All right, yes, to go on the website, I'll have those up for you guys by the time this, this episode publishes, and then we have another idea.

• 1:27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so for the Australia Nauticon happening in Sydney, again, all the dates are there, but if this is July 23rd through 25th, we want to do something special for the people who come to this conference. I have to say, we've been talking about this a lot, it's quite possible that this is the last time the SGU is gonna make a trip down under to Australia and/or-

• 1:27:35Jay Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:27:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I talked, I mean, I know, I hate to say that, I think we try to avoid thinking about this, but, you know, we were planning out like our next international trip, like the next three or four that we're gonna take, and given the, given the, how old, the oldest of the rogues are, we have to be realistic, that there's probably not another Australia trip in us. I gotta be honest with you, because there's other places we want to go, and we don't have that many big international trips. This is what, our third or fourth trip down under? This is our fourth one, right?

• 1:28:06Speaker 04

  This will be the fourth time.

• 1:28:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't, I don't think there's gonna be a fifth one. So if you want to see the SGU down under, this is probably your last chance. In any case, you want them to make something special for the Nauticon, so what we're gonna do is everybody with a Nauticon ticket, not any of the other tickets, it has to be just to the main conference. I think most people who had other tickets are also going to the main conference. And this is whether you have an existing ticket or you buy one in the future. We're going to do a drawing from everybody who has a ticket to the main Nauticon in Sydney, and whoever wins will get to come up on stage with the SGU for- One event and you get to choose what that is because we don't know like which events people are going to. So if you want to play one of the extravaganza games with us, you could do that.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  If you want to come up and play science or fiction with us, you can do that, whatever you want and we'll work it out with you. But you will be able to join the SGU for a fun event for winning the prize. And we, I'm gonna, we're also, I think we've talked about this. We've, Jay and I finalized the design of the SGU hero coin. This is a coin you cannot buy, you can only win or earn. So that person will, that'll be one of the ways that you can get a hero coin. Yeah, I guess you could steal them. Don't do that, though.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  Sell it on eBay.

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Well, you can't, you can't buy it from us. You may buy it secondarily in the secondary market, I guess.

• 1:29:30Jay Novella?

  If you're an existing ticket holder to the, the entire conference, right? This includes the everything pass, which is everything that's happening that, that week. Or it's just the conference, right? It's Thursday, Friday and Saturday. If you bought either of those two tickets, then you qualify for this and you, and you could buy those tickets all the way up. I think till, let's say about a week before the conference, because I do want to contact the person and email with them and not, I don't want to have them to have to pick it when we're standing there. I'm going to be so busy, I might not even have time to go into the details.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  That's a good point. Yeah, we'll probably do the drawing a week before the conference.

• 1:30:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So anybody that bought one of those two tickets, you're going to be entered in. And I'm looking forward to it because anytime we do bring up people from the audience, particularly with the extravaganza.

• 1:30:14Speaker 02

  It's always fun.

• 1:30:15Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's always crazy fun.

• 1:30:16Speaker 02

  All right, guys, just a quick email. Again, I'm not going to talk about a specific email, just going to gestalt the tons of email we got about the discussion last week about Richard Dawkins, thinking that Claude LLM is conscious. And it was interesting, most people agreed with the discussion that we had. A few people pushed back, basically saying, well, how could we really know if it's conscious? And couldn't consciousness be an emergent behavior? And so I wanted to just explain that in a little bit more detail. The thing is, and again, it's easy to fall back on, we don't know what consciousness even is.

• 1:30:54Speaker 02

  But again, not knowing 100% about something is not the equivalent of knowing nothing about something. We actually know a lot about human consciousness. We know what's necessary for for human consciousness, you know, wakeful consciousness to exist. We know things like you need 45% of your cortex to be functioning. Less than that, and you cannot generate wakeful consciousness. We know that you need your brainstem activating system to be functioning. If that's not working, you're in a coma, period. So you need at least those two things, you know, about half your cortex, and it needs to be continuously activated.

• 1:31:35Speaker 02

  We know that your consciousness can be altered pharmacologically. We know it could be altered anatomically, that pieces, like when you're dreaming, you're conscious, but it's an altered state of consciousness where not every part of your brain is working. We know that it's not located in one piece of the brain, but that all the parts of the cortex seem to be contributing their component to consciousness, which is kind of more like this committee than anything else. We also know that the brain can do conscious things and subconscious things, right? It could process information subconsciously that you're not aware of. And then it could also process things consciously.

• 1:32:15Speaker 02

  We also know that a large part of the frontal lobes are dedicated towards determining your attention, what you are paying attention to, how you are attending to information, how you are processing it. And many, there's a vast amount of psychological and neurological research on, that informs us about human consciousness. So it's not like we're, we don't know anything about it. We have no idea how to think about it. So now with LLMs, or with any computer AI, we don't, I'm not saying that that would have to be human consciousness, but we at least can think about what kinds of things must be going on for there to even be the possibility that it's conscious.

• 1:32:57Speaker 02

  And none of those things are going on with LLMs. I think what people are confusing is they're confusing just like intelligence with consciousness.

• 1:33:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  And I think the best analogy is, think of a calculator. Calculators, from a mathematical point of view, are geniuses, right? I mean, they could do- Complex mathematical calculations really fast. They do subconsciously what people do mostly consciously. Right? I know there are mathematical savants that could do, can do a lot of subconscious mathematical processing too. But the point is they're doing it without conscious. I don't think anybody would argue that a calculator is conscious. Right? But LLMs are a lot, they're a lot closer to calculators than they are to us than to human brains. They're just dealing with language and that gives a much more powerful illusion of thinking

• 1:33:54Speaker 02

  than just dealing with numbers. Because we get the fact that computers crunch numbers. We get, we get that. But you know what? LLMs are crunching numbers too. They're just, they're doing it with language tokens rather than with numbers. And again, that is not to say that there isn't some really sophisticated logical operations going on with LLMs. And that's the thing that's really advancing very, very quickly. I just don't think consciousness is going to accidentally emerge out of that process for all the reasons we said last week. And for these reasons, nothing is happening there that would create the phenomenon of consciousness. It just doesn't emerge out of crunching enough numbers or doing enough operations per second

• 1:34:38Speaker 02

  or even engaging in logical operations. Does that make sense?

• 1:34:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you ever feel like we get so caught up in the language? These are labels that we're using.

• 1:34:48Speaker 02

  It is partly a language problem, I agree.

• 1:34:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It is because ultimately, I think it's solved if we were to say, and I think through all of human history, this has been true. Consciousness requires a brain. LLMs don't have a brain.

• 1:35:04Speaker 02

  Well, I mean.

• 1:35:05Cara Santa Maria?

  They don't.

• 1:35:05Speaker 02

  What kind of brains? Are you saying electrochemical, organic brain is really the only game in town?

• 1:35:11Cara Santa Maria?

  It has been through all of history.

• 1:35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And so what we're asking is, should we have a special category for this? Should we expand the category? Exactly. Should we expand the historical definition of consciousness to include this? That's really the argument that's happening here. It's not, is this slotting into our understanding of what consciousness has always been? Because by definition, it can't. Because by definition, consciousness is an emergent property of wetware.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a brain.

• 1:35:44Bob Novella?

  But not necessarily an absolute requirement. I mean, there's, there's a lot of people, a lot of smart people think that if you can duplicate a human brain, you know, the neural network of a human brain, you know, in a computer, that you have a, you know, a potentially decent chance of, of replicating human-like consciousness without wetware. I mean, that's not a completely unreasonable position.

• 1:36:05Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's still, what you're saying is, is, is a, it's, it's a label and a categorical distinction. It's not what we define as consciousness. It's a replication of what we define as consciousness.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know. I disagree with that. I would go further even than Bob and say that if we had a powerful enough computer running a virtual simulation of a human brain in all of its functionality, it would be conscious. I think that thing would be conscious.

• 1:36:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Or would it be simulated consciousness?

• 1:36:34Speaker 02

  Consciousness is a phenomenon. I don't think the substrate matters. And I think there might be different ways to get there. We know there's different ways to get there because I think there's a lot of animals in the world that are, have their own consciousness.

• 1:36:44Cara Santa Maria?

  And all those animals have brains.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's only because that's the only thing we have in, you know, organic evolution.

• 1:36:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And so, so that's why I think we're just arguing semantically at this point.

• 1:36:53Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so. I think that would, the real question, in my opinion, is what is the functionality of LLMs? And does that functionality, regardless of the substrate, does that functionality include the potential for, for something like consciousness? It doesn't have to be human consciousness, but some kind of experience of its own existence, some kind of stream of consciousness. Yeah, some kind of quality. I think the answer to that is no. It's not doing anything that can generate any phenomenon like that. It doesn't have to be biological conscious, doesn't have to be human consciousness. I don't think it's conscious at all. It's amazing how much of an illusion of consciousness it can create. But I think that's because we are wired to fall for that illusion. That's

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  how our brains decide whether something is an agent or alive or conscious because it acts like it does. And LLMs act conscious, so we fall for that illusion. We evolved to fall for that illusion. That's how our consciousness works.

• 1:37:53Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't you think that regardless of if it were a quote agent or not, which I agree with you, it's not an agent, but regardless of if it were a quote agent or not, by definition, we struggle to define these things even in animals, even though we know, we know that animals are conscious, but they can't tell us that they are, and we can't see their subjective experience by definition.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  Right. Ultimately, consciousness is a subjective experience.

• 1:38:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And so it's like we're constantly all arguing about something that's kind of a moot point. It's like, why don't we just speak in terms of new categorical distinctions?

• 1:38:31Speaker 02

  It's not moot if we talk about should LLMs have rights as individuals?

• 1:38:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And that's what we should be talking about, because we know for a fact they are not individuals. And we can very easily argue that. But the minute we start going, are they conscious or are they not? That's like saying, that's like arguing about something metaphysical. Like, we can't measure that anyway.

• 1:38:53Speaker 02

  I agree that we need to come up with an operational threshold for when we give things rights as a conscious sentient being. And that will be with the absence of absolute knowledge as to whether or not they're conscious. I've been writing this for years. We're going to get, we are going to get to the point where we have an AI where we have no way of knowing whether it's a P-zombie, or it's aware of its own existence.

• 1:39:15Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  Because we will not be able to tell. And it's plausible that it is. I just think we're not at that threshold now because it's not plausible.

• 1:39:22Bob Novella?

  At that point, Steve, we will look at its behavior, and not just its behavior, obviously, but also look at its internal construction. And then put those two together and say, yep, it potentially could be conscious. We can't really know. So we're going to have to assume at this threshold that this is something that is experiencing quality.

• 1:39:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. We're just not there yet. We're clearly not there yet.

• 1:39:43Bob Novella?

  And we're not there yet. Right.

• 1:39:45Speaker 02

  All right, guys. It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:39:50Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:40:00Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items for facts, two real and one fake. And then I challenge my panelists to have to tell me which one is the fake. We have a theme this week inspired by two of our news items. Which two news items have something in common?

• 1:40:15Speaker 04

  It was the acupuncture and UFOs.

• 1:40:18Speaker 02

  The acupuncture and Neanderthal dentistry.

• 1:40:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and the dentistry.

• 1:40:22Speaker 02

  They both deal with ancient medicine.

• 1:40:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Medicine.

• 1:40:25Speaker 02

  So that's the theme, ancient medicine. Are you guys ready? Here we go. The earliest direct evidence for suturing of wounds dates back 12,000 years in Gobekli Tepe in the region of modern day Turkey. I number two, scientists have reported evidence for a successful surgical amputation of a lower limb 31,000 years ago, with the individual surviving for at least six to nine years afterward. And I number three, as early as 1,000 BCE, Indian and other ancient cultures used ant jaws as surgical staples to close wounds, allowing live ants to bite the wound edges. Jay, go first.

• 1:41:10Jay Novella?

  Okay, so we have the earliest direct evidence for suturing of wounds dates back 12,000 years ago. I mean, there's no reason not to believe that. The only thing is, would we think would it have happened earlier? And I'd like to think that it would, but that seems like a, you know, it does seem like a very long time ago, but sure, like the, the very beginnings of suturing someone? Sure, 12,000 years ago, I don't have a problem with that. Second one, scientists have reported evidence for a successful surgical amputation of a lower limb 31,000 years ago. What? With the individual surviving at least six to nine years afterwards. Now, Steve, if they didn't have sutures 31,000 years ago, then I don't know, I don't know if anyone could even survive that.

• 1:41:53Jay Novella?

  What would they do with the end of the limb if they couldn't sew them up?

• 1:41:57Speaker 04

  The end of the limb.

• 1:41:59Jay Novella?

  So the first one and the second one are, they don't like each other, Steve. Okay, the last one here, as early as 1,000 BCE, Indian and other ancient cultures used ant jaws as surgical staples. Okay. That one is, you know, it's like, it's just right on that perfect sweet spot, Steve, where, okay, you know, they had the ants bite people and it may have pinched the skin together. I mean, what ants were they? Can you tell me what kind of ants they were?

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  Big ants.

• 1:42:26Speaker 04

  The giants.

• 1:42:26Bob Novella?

  The old jaws.

• 1:42:28Jay Novella?

  I don't know, man. I mean, you know, they'd have to be big. They'd have to be pretty big. And then how would they, I mean, when they clamp down, what would keep them shut? I don't know. That just sounds so obviously not it. And then, and this is exactly what Steve likes us to feel. But how could the first two, they don't work with each other? Because if, if stitches go back 12,000 years, then how can you do an amputation 31,000, unless they burned a guy? Or whoever.

• 1:42:54Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, you saw Day of the Dead. Remember the guy got baited in his lower arm? She hacked it off and then burned the crap out of it. Done.

• 1:43:04Jay Novella?

  You make it all sound so easy, Bob.

• 1:43:05Speaker 04

  I miss that documentary.

• 1:43:07Jay Novella?

  But it doesn't seem crazy to think 31,000 years ago that someone might want to do something like that. I just don't know. All right, I am in an impasse here. I'm going to go with my gut. So the first one about sutures happening 12,000 years ago, it seems legit. The second one, Bob might be right. They hack it, burn it, next, you know? I, yeah, you know, Steve, I think this last one here about the ant jaw suture thing, this unknown species of ant roaming the wild, playing doctor out in the woods, no, that's false. Okay, Evan?

• 1:43:42Speaker 04

  The ant jaw one, it does seem, I think of the three choices, the most spectacular perhaps. And, and that's why I think it's science. If you, if you follow my, my, my logic here. Plus insects have been part of the medical world for some time, you know, like plying the maggots to the wounds and stuff. So why, why wouldn't they do something like this? You know, it closed the womb, you know, maybe it wasn't a great fix, but maybe they still did it. And there's evidence of it. So I think the, the intersection of insects and medicine, if you want to call it that, has some legitimacy here. That's why I think it's science.

• 1:44:26Speaker 04

  The second one about the lower limb amputation 31,000 years ago.

• 1:44:31Speaker 04

  Likely a foot, I would think, you know, the smallest part of the leg at the ankle, you know, or I don't know, you know, you do, you have to cauterize that thing to prevent it from, you know, infecting, bleeding out and everything else that goes along with amputation. Thirty one thousand years ago, yeah, it seems extreme, maybe a little bit like the ant one, which is also why I think this one is science. I think the first one about suturing wounds back 12,000 years is going to be the fiction. And I, and I think, I, I think that's, I think it happened earlier than that. It did, really, the first time, really, the first time someone thought to stitch a wound like that, that needed it

• 1:45:13Speaker 04

  was only 12,000 years ago. Why wouldn't that have occurred before that? The material was available. It's not like, you know, you had to figure out what to do. It's kind of a basic concept. So I just have a feeling that that one's going to wind up being the fiction and it dates back earlier.

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:45:31Cara Santa Maria?

  This is tough on the heels of what we talked about today. I mean, 59,000 years ago, drilling into a tooth, not even a Homo sapiens doing it. And then like, oh, could this have been 12,000 years ago? But there's a part of me that agrees with, it's funny, I agree with both Jay and Evan that the ant jaw thing is ridiculous, which is why it's probably science. I disagree with Jay. On that note, the amputation one is the one that really sticks out to me as being so early. But I think there's a, there's a lot of ways, you know, if they, if they did like heat up whatever tool they use, like if it was a stone tool that they used to, to cut off a leg and they heated it up hot enough

• 1:46:15Cara Santa Maria?

  when they did it, yeah, it might've cauterized as they cut and stopped all that bleeding. Or maybe it was like, I don't know, maybe it was an accidental surgical amputation. I don't know if you can still call it amputation, but the person living, we've seen this with trephination, right? Where there's healing.

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  By definition, a surgical amputation is not accidental. That would be an accidental amputation.

• 1:46:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:43Speaker 02

  But it does happen.

• 1:46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But it worked.

• 1:46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And the 12,000 years in Turkey for suturing, I think this one might be the fiction, but Evan, I actually think it's for the opposite reason.

• 1:46:56Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it's later.

• 1:46:56Cara Santa Maria?

  While I agree, it's probably way older than that, that they had sutures. I'm always so careful to read what Steve wrote, and he wrote direct evidence, not indirect evidence. And I'm thinking about in the archaeological record, like what survives 12,000 years? What survives 30,000 years? We don't need direct evidence of the amputation. We just need to see that the bone healed. But sutures themselves are going to be made out of like gut or fiber.

• 1:47:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, some kind of string and...

• 1:47:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not going to survive. So my guess is that we don't have the sutures themselves. We only have...

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  Unless they wrote about it.

• 1:47:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, would that be direct evidence? Well, hmm, yeah, shoot, that's true. If they wrote about it or they described it in detail. Yeah, because then, then I would think it would be back in like, oh gosh, this one is tough. Yeah, maybe they didn't have writing then. So in that culture, I have no idea. So yeah, I'm, I'm still going to go with that one because I think there's too many variables that could be wrong here. So it's the suture one.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  Okay, and Bob?

• 1:48:06Bob Novella?

  All right, start with three here. Yeah, the ant thing, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's in your face and like what the hell reaction for that? But I could kind of see that happen. I could, I could see these, these jaws are locking in nicely and knowing how to trigger it and having it stay there once it's locked in. And that, so that's just like, just too cool to be, to be fake. So I'm going to go with that one for sure. The amputation as well, I can kind of see that. I mean, we had hatchets around that time, you know? I'm not sure exactly when, but it's just like right around that totally makes sense that they could, that they could do that. And dealing with the bleeding, I mean, like I said, fire or maybe they had the presence of mind to tie it off to minimize bleeding. I don't know. Infection was another thing. How long did it last?

• 1:48:51Bob Novella?

  Six to nine years? Oh, wow. Okay. So totally dodging that bullet. of infection. So that's pretty cool, too. But yeah, there's something about number one here with this needle and thread from 12,000 years ago. Something's probably going to be wrong with that one way or the other. There's so many possibilities. I like the other two much more. So I'll say the needle, the suturing 12,000 years is fiction.

• 1:49:13Speaker 02

  All right. So Jay chose the ant draws as the fiction. Everyone else chose the suturing as the fiction. So we'll start with number two. Scientists have reported evidence for a successful surgical amputation of a lower limb 31,000 years ago, with the individual surviving at least six to nine years afterward. You guys all think this one is science. And this one is science. No sweet for me. All right. So yeah, 31,000 years ago, that's a long time.

• 1:49:40Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  Bob, you hit upon probably the most challenging aspect of that was that it didn't become infected and kill him. The person.

• 1:49:49Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah, man, that's huge.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  So that is such a factor that it suggests that they had some technique that would have limited the, because that's a massive open wound. So again, we don't know what they were exactly how they did it. And this is from the bony evidence. We know that it was surgically removed. We know that they survived afterwards. We don't have the soft tissue evidence we would like to have to really know more about the techniques they use, but

• 1:50:16Bob Novella?

  could there have been skin flaps that they just kind of wrapped around the open and then just tied that around?

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  We use skin flaps today.

• 1:50:24Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, man.

• 1:50:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they did whatever they did at work. They could have used a combination of cordery and just packing the wound. They might have put some, some, you know, something in there that would have had some antibacterial effects.

• 1:50:36Bob Novella?

  Or some bugs climbed into it and ate all the bacteria.

• 1:50:38Speaker 02

  They could have covered it in honey. You know, I don't know. Who knows? They did something that the person may have just got lucky to.

• 1:50:46Cara Santa Maria?

  This person might have just had a really robust immune system.

• 1:50:49Speaker 02

  Hey, we finally got one that lived. Yay. But they survived. So that that's the the oldest evidence of that kind of a surgery.

• 1:51:00Bob Novella?

  My god, 31 millennia ago.

• 1:51:03Speaker 02

  So the what's the next oldest evidence of surgery? What kind of procedure do you think it is?

• 1:51:09Speaker 04

  Oh, drilling holes in the brain or something.

• 1:51:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, trepanning. That's it.

• 1:51:13Bob Novella?

  Wow, was right.

• 1:51:15Speaker 02

  So we're going.

• 1:51:16Bob Novella?

  From science to pseudoscience surgery.

• 1:51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, no, it's probably actually quite scientific for a lot of people.

• 1:51:22Bob Novella?

  For the trepanation?

• 1:51:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because if they had swelling in their brain and they were acting a fool because of that, and then they drilled a hole in their brain, they that's why they kept doing it, because for a lot of neuropsychiatric acute onset.

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  That is the treatment for certain things, just make a hole in the brain. But they might have also done it for spirits and other stuff, too.

• 1:51:40Speaker 04

  That's where I was thinking, yeah.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  They did it for like headaches, and sometimes it might have been the right thing to do, but often it probably wasn't.

• 1:51:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but the thing is, acute brain swelling can cause neuropsychiatric symptoms that mimic spiritual symptoms.

• 1:51:55Speaker 02

  They were probably accidentally correct, often enough that they kept doing it. So that the oldest trepanning goes back to 10 to 13,000 years ago. Now we have this jump to 31,000 for this.

• 1:52:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and now we have a jump to 59,000.

• 1:52:09Speaker 02

  Dentists, if you include that.

• 1:52:11Speaker 04

  Nose will come next.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  All right, I guess we'll go back to one, the earliest direct evidence for suturing of wounds dates back 12,000 years in Gobekli Tepe, in the region of modern day Turkey. Bob, Evan, and Kara think this one is the fiction. Jay thinks this one is science. Kara, before I give the answer, you definitely hit upon some of the key words here, direct evidence, right?

• 1:52:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the sutures themselves.

• 1:52:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we don't know when the how far back in time suturing goes because it's soft tissue. And also, we have evidence of needles going back a long time, tens of thousands of years.

• 1:52:49Speaker 02

  But we don't know what they were using them for. They were probably using them for clothing, leather, you know, whatever. But were they also using them to close wounds? We have no idea. So it could go back, as you're saying, Evan, it could go back really far. But direct evidence, what do we need for direct evidence? We need either writing, something in writing, or we need sutures, which mostly were organic material, or we need mummies with suture marks in their skin, right?

• 1:53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Some sort of preserved, yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 02

  So the oldest evidence for suturing goes back about 5,000 years. This is the fiction, and that evidence is writing. It's written descriptions of suturing techniques. So we don't really have, all we have are needles and stuff from that time. We don't have soft tissue evidence of suturing. So the 12,000 years, I was very deliberate because that's about when we transitioned from hunter gatherer to agriculture and when civilization started. So that is like pushing it to say that we were doing sophisticated stuff back then, or that there were writings or anything else that might have indicated that. So that really pushed it, the credibility of that a lot to go, you know, to 12,000 years.

• 1:54:02Speaker 02

  But the Go Beckley Tepa is, you know, one of the oldest civilizations. I think the oldest civilizations, that's why I chose that. All right, this means that as early as 1,000 BCE, Indian and other ancient cultures used ant jaws as surgical staples to close wounds, allowing live ants to bite the wound edges. Is science, how do we know about that? What's the evidence for that?

• 1:54:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Writing?

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Writing. Yep, we have, we have a direct. So this is the, an Indian physician, Sisruta and Chakara, physicians, Sisruta and Chakara, as early as 1,000 BCE, gave detailed instructions on how to do this. So we knew exactly what they were doing, that doesn't leave anything to interpretation. What they would do is they would have like these giant black ants. They would, you know, close the wound, put the ant's mandibles on the edges of the wound. They would bite down and lock, and then they would remove the body. So you just had the head and the jaws left behind, and they would be locked in that position. Um, cause you kill the ant, right? So it's just, so it's, that's amazing.

• 1:55:08Speaker 02

  They were surgical staples of, you know, 3,000 years ago.

• 1:55:13Speaker 04

  That's resourceful.

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  That is damn resourceful.

• 1:55:15Cara Santa Maria?

  I feel like this needs to be in a cartoon somewhere.

• 1:55:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:17Speaker 04

  Flintstones, yeah, the Flintstones.

• 1:55:19Speaker 02

  I still don't believe it.

• 1:55:20Bob Novella?

  It's just so crazy.

• 1:55:23Jay Novella?

  Did they have the ants bite them themselves and they chop the heads off or something?

• 1:55:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Or they chop the body off?

• 1:55:29Speaker 02

  They would remove the body and leave the head and the mandible behind.

• 1:55:31Speaker 04

  And then the body would be a craning.

• 1:55:33Speaker 02

  And then they just walk around with ant heads. Yeah.

• 1:55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  And they probably fell out after a while and they had to do it again.

• 1:55:37Speaker 02

  If it lasts for a few days, it could be long enough for the wound to close.

• 1:55:40Speaker 04

  And Jay, the head lived for several hours after.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  Oh my God. That is so cool.

• 1:55:49Speaker 04

  Define cool.

• 1:55:51Speaker 02

  All right. Well, good job, guys.

• 1:55:53Jay Novella?

  Thank you all for them.

• 1:55:54Speaker 02

  Evan, give me a quote.

• 1:55:56Speaker 04

  Nothing more strikingly betrays the credulity of mankind than medicine. Quackery is a thing universal and universally successful. In this case, it becomes literally true that no imposition is too great for the credulity of men. Henry David Thoreau.

• 1:56:14Speaker 02

  Can't agree more.

• 1:56:16Bob Novella?

  Proven in the modern days.

• 1:56:18Speaker 04

  My gosh. Written, you know, well over 150 years ago and like, oh my gosh.

• 1:56:23Speaker 02

  Now, even like when I wrote the, the recent article about acupuncture, people saying, well, there has to be something to it. How could people, you know, believe in it for so long? Like, no, you are vastly underestimated.

• 1:56:32Bob Novella?

  Have you met people?

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  Have you met people? You're vastly, it's, the placebo effects are so powerful, a deceptive technique and, and, you know, anecdotes and storytelling that all you need is a good story. That's it. And a good, some bedside manner and you could sell people anything. Doesn't matter. I mean, it could be the at most rank nonsense. It just doesn't matter.

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  Colonel Victory's nerve tonic. Good for Will. I'll buy five.

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:57:02Cara Santa Maria?

  You're welcome. Thanks, Steve.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  And until next week, this is your skeptic's guide to the universe.

• 1:57:11Speaker 02

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

• 1:57:48Speaker 00

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