The Skeptics Guide #1107 - Sep 26 2026

Interview with Adam Kall and Troy Morris; What's the Word: Application; Whatever Happened to Lab Grown Meat; News Items: The Brain is a Composite Organ, Independence of Science Grants, NYT Shills for Fake Psychics; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, September 24th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  And Jay Novella.

• 0:21Jay Novella?

  Hey, guys.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  We have a short crew this week.

• 0:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that came on quick. I was like, ah.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  We do have an interview coming up later in the show. That should be very interesting about what to do with all this stuff we have in orbit. But in the meantime, yeah, it's just gonna be the three of us. Bob is away. He's on vacation this week. I do occasionally let you guys take vacations. Bob is in Disneyland.

• 0:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, I forgot. He's right around the corner, and I'm on a plane today, so I don't want to see him while he's here.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  You're swapping coast. Where are you headed?

• 0:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no, I'm just headed north. I'm going up to Oregon.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  I see. It's funny. So Bob left Monday, Tuesday, Bob left two days ago, to go on vacation. But before that, Kara, I don't think you heard about this, there was a bit of a saga with his cat. It's actually his wife's Liz's cat.

• 1:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:13Speaker 01

  So Bob was working in the garage, left the door open, and the cat got out. This is an indoor cat that has never experienced the outside world. And, you know, we live, as Kara likes to say, we live in the woods. We live, you know, in a suburban area. The cat was, so we all went over to help them look for it, look for the cat. You know, when indoor animals are lost outside, they panic and go to ground generally. They often do not respond to being called.

• 1:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and cats don't respond to being called anyway.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's true. Because they've gone to ground and they're hiding, they won't just, like, go in the house. You know what I mean? They basically are panicked. So we looked for this cat, could not find it anywhere. And guess how long the cat was missing for?

• 2:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Until now?

• 2:03Speaker 01

  11 days.

• 2:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoa.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  And we were getting more and more confident that the cat was probably dead.

• 2:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Coyote food, yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  As time was going by. And, well, we have coyotes and bobcats in the area. Bob actually saw a bobcat in the neighborhood in the intervening time, so we were getting very concerned. And Bob and Liz were going on vacation on Tuesday, right? Now, so we're all like, oh, what the hell are we gonna do when they leave? Are they gonna expect us to keep up the hunt for their cat?

• 2:34Jay Novella?

  Right, and we were gonna do it, you know?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  But then what happened was, like, two days before they were scheduled to leave, they sighted the cat. And it was, they saw it on their porch, and when they opened the door, ran away.

• 2:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Which, again, is like, this makes no sense, but that's what the cat's doing.

• 2:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Dumb cat.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  So now, it's like, okay, we can't even say, well, okay, it's probably dead, so we don't have to do anything. So now we know the cat is alive and local. So we're pretty much obligated to continue to try to hunt it down. And they had a trap, because that's the best way to get them, actually.

• 3:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, humane trap with food in it, yeah.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, they put a trap with food in it. They managed to trap a raccoon and a possum.

• 3:15Cara Santa Maria?

  All, but not their cat.

• 3:17Speaker 01

  And they had a camera on the trap. And so their cat was going into the trap for food, but would never setting it off.

• 3:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because they're so, like, gentle and, yeah, smart, yeah.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  So they said, all right. So they rigged it up, as we say, wily coyote style. They attached a string to it, and put the string through the window. And then they had a motion detector on the camera, so it would alert their phone when something moved in the view of the camera. And then they would manually shut the cage on the cat. And that failed because Liz forgot that she had a do not disturb period of time on her phone. And the cat was in the trap three times, and she slept through the whole thing.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  So now it's like, the day before they're supposed to leave, and the cat is actively coming to the house for food. It's clearly, probably hiding under the deck or something, whatever. It's like, well, shit, we're gonna have to now take this up when they leave. But they got the cat back the day before they left. They put food in the house, left the door open, and the cat came in the house.

• 4:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, my God. What if they had just done that from the beginning?

• 4:29Jay Novella?

  I know.

• 4:32Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I read statistics about cats doing this, and how long, you know, they're usually within 150 feet of the house. And the animals have a very high chance of showing up within the first two weeks, and then there's still a chance of them showing up months later, too.

• 4:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but that, yeah, you're right, that chance dwindles.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, it does. It dwindles, sure.

• 4:54Jay Novella?

  But we were all, like, pretty much like, oh, boy, the cat's gone. You know, like, we kind of thought after 11 days, you know?

• 5:00Cara Santa Maria?

  I've always thought it's so interesting when people have animals that are like, escape artists, you know, that like, try to run out when the door opens. Whereas, my sweet, sweet, not very bright little lapdog, he, when he's like, more than three feet from me, he's like, oh, where'd she go? Oh, no, I'm too far away. Like, he does not want to run off. And I will say, I brought him to the vet for his annual checkup, Mr. Little Killer, who turned 16 in May. I think this dog is gonna make it to 17 or later. Get this. So the last time I took him to the vet, a lot of his kidney markers were not doing so great. He's probably in kidney failure, which is, you know, common with geriatric

• 5:41Cara Santa Maria?

  dogs. And so I put him on a low mineral diet that supports his kidneys, as well as some supplements. And all his numbers are better. Like, he has a clean bill of health at the age of 16, his entire lab work. The doctor was like, yeah, it looks perfect.

• 6:00Jay Novella?

  Well, as long as he's pain free and can still do his thing, you know?

• 6:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he seems happy. I mean, he sleeps constantly, but when he's awake, he still play bows, he wags his tail, he gets so excited, he's incredibly snuggly, and he never, ever appears to be in pain. So, yeah, very, very lucky. This dog makes me realize why people clone their dogs. I won't do it.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I get it. Like, Jay and I both have dogs that have really, you know, wonderful personalities. And you totally fall in love with the personality. And it's, you could see, you know, how if people had money to burn, how they would entertain that idea. Again, I would never do it either, clone a dog, clone a pet, but.

• 6:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. But, yeah, totally, it's understandable.

• 6:43Speaker 01

  So, you know, you could think, well, if I had done that to the previous pet, I never would have found my current one, who's even more awesome than my previous pet.

• 6:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, see, I'm not there yet. Killer's my first, had him since he was 10 weeks, and his entire life, dog.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  No, I like the experience of a new pet, you know?

• 6:59Jay Novella?

  I also would not want a clone of my dog to take away my memory of the original.

• 7:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. Or what if he sucked?

• 7:10Speaker 01

  What if cloning didn't work?

• 7:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, what if it was, like, genetically the same, but it was just a jerk?

• 7:15Jay Novella?

  What if he's an asshole?

• 7:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. I think it's weird. I have friends who actually cloned a dog, because, of course, I live in LA, and there are people like that in LA, and they have a purebred. And I'm always like, you could just get, I know it won't be the same, but you don't have to clone a purebred.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:30Cara Santa Maria?

  You have basically clones of your friends already.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Very strange to me, but, yep.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Claudia, that's the cat's name. She's back. I was worried, partly because I know there's so many predators now in Connecticut. You know, just over the last 20 years, the number of these medium-sized predators, like bobcats, coyotes, has really increased. Over the summer, there are, like, a pack of coyotes that are howling in the backyard every night.

• 8:01Jay Novella?

  Yep.

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. If Killer really did get separated from me, he would be a coyote snack in no time. He has zero defenses, zero kind of evolutionary instincts to stay alive. So, yeah, that would be problematic, for sure.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. All right, Kara, get us started with a what's the word?

• 8:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Indeed. So, about a month ago, I got an email from John Cook in Melbourne. He wrote, question for the show, word of the week.

• 8:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Application. Why do a computer program and a form to request something have the same name? And what's that got to do with apples? It's a good question, John. Doesn't really have a lot to do with apples, but they do have the same name for some interesting reasons. And I'm always a big fan of a little bit of etymological sleuthing. So when we look at the word "application," it does have these Latin roots. It comes from "ad," which means "to," and "placere," which means "to fold or to plate." Or, you know, the bringing of something, and I'm actually quoting here the dictionary, the bringing of something to bear on something else, attaching oneself to.

• 9:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And so that starts to make a little bit of sense, what it means for something to be applied to something. So early on, when we talked about applications, it really was like applying a coat of paint to something, right? Like sticking something to something else. It started as early as the 15th century in Old French and Middle English. But then, in the 1600s, we started to see it evolve into a mental effort, right? You're going to apply your efforts to a task. And then, cut all the way forward to 1851, now we have job applications. We are applying for a job.

• 10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And then, of course, it wasn't until the 1950s where we saw this used in computing. You know, an application is a software program. And here's the part where I don't know if there's full and total agreement on this, because I've really dug deep into a bunch of Substacks and different forums. But the general consensus that I'm seeing is that software programs, which were first marketed to engineers, you know, long before the end user was able to use these things, what they did is they took a general-purpose computer, or a general OS, and they applied a specific task to it.

• 10:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, early on, when you would hear about a software application, it would always be linked to the OS. It would be like, here is a Linux application, or here is a whatever application. And then eventually, they dropped that part of the language, and it became a standalone. And now, of course, it's an app. And so that's really confusing to a lot of people when they think about the etymology of an app. But really, when it comes down to it, this idea of applying, or "applied," it being practical, it being a use, you know, an appliance, and "application," is really back at its roots, just bringing something on to something else and using it for a particular purpose.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And what about like the use, like "apply yourself"?

• 11:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 11:35Speaker 01

  You can see how that's related, but it is a little bit of a different connotation.

• 11:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, but weirdly, that actually happened earlier. It was one of the first uses. So when it first started to evolve, it evolved first to applying effort. And then, it became, you know, the job application. And then, only later did computing enter into it.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  What about applying deodorant?

• 11:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that was the first use. So let's apply plaster to this wall, let's apply deodorant. I mean, I don't know if deodorant existed back then, but let's apply something to our body. And then eventually, let's apply our mental effort, or our body, to a task. Yeah. And that really took many, many years, about 200 years to shift in there. And then, another 200, before we started talking about applying to jobs.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Interestingly, like a lot of, when you talk about technology, the word, because technology is new.

• 12:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  The words are almost all borrowed from older uses or older technologies.

• 12:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Like, even when we talk about launch windows, it's a metaphorical window, right? But applied to a period of time when it's, you know, when you can launch a rocket.

• 12:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And very often, it's sort of one person or a group of people who were like, ooh, how do I label this new thing in a way that feels understandable to me? And so, it is important, etymologically speaking, to go back and say, wait, who, what was the perspective of the group that first used this label? And then, then sometimes you can kind of undo the confusion around why my perspective, my feel like it's out of the blue, as an end user, for example. But if I'm marketing this thing to a bunch of coders and programmers, yeah, of course,

• 13:17Cara Santa Maria?

  they're going to be applying a particular usage to a more broad OS.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Cara. Jay, let me ask you a question. Whatever happened to lab-grown meat?

• 13:31Jay Novella?

  Yeah, this is a, there's a lot to this, because we were all, you remember when they were, it was being talked about a lot, it was in the news, there was a lot of hype. Claims were being made, some of them true, some of them not so true. You know, one of the things I liked about it was it could potentially lower or remove animal slaughter, right? That's always a good thing. You know, use less water and land, you know, would it be cheaper than meat? But, you know, it's been 13 years since the first, you remember that hamburger they made back in 2013?

• 14:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:06Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so it's been 13 years since then. So what are we talking about first? Let me just explain what lab-grown meat or cultivated meat is. It's not the Impossible Burger or Beyond Meat. Those are both plant-based substitutes. This is meat that's cultivated from animal cells. They take real animal cells of whatever the meat is that you want to grow. And after they get the cells, they grow a huge number of them in some type of bioreactor, floating in a nutrient medium, which is essentially all the things that it needs to grow. But this isn't the same as growing, for example, a steak or a chicken breast, right? A steak, it's organized, it has a biological structure, you know, it has different types

• 14:49Jay Novella?

  of muscle fibers, it has fat, there's connective tissue. You know, to make it three-dimensional, it's just a very difficult thing to really simulate that. But the basic science has proven to be legitimate. So now, getting back to that hamburger back in 2013, that hamburger cost 300,000 USD. Now, this wasn't intended to be any kind of commercial product, or this wasn't the beginning of selling $3,000 hamburgers, of course. It was just a big proof of concept. You know, the question was, can you grow enough animal muscle cells outside of the animal itself to make something recognizable as meat? And the answer was yes. You know, it was ground beef, very, very easy to simulate, you know, you can add fat

• 15:31Jay Novella?

  to it and things like that to make it really be almost identical, in a sense. But things have progressed a lot since 2013, right? The cultivated meat industry, it's, you know, this is more like not an industry, but more like trying to become an industry. That's the way to put it. Like, there is legitimacy here. The FDA completed something called the pre-market consultation process, which essentially means that they're checking on it, making sure that it is legitimate, that there is true science behind it, that it's safe and all that stuff. So, the FDA has done this, you know, pre-market consultation for chicken, pork fat, and salmon, a certain kind of salmon called Coho salmon.

• 16:15Jay Novella?

  The FDA and the USDA also share oversight for any applicable, applicable?

• 16:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. Either one.

• 16:24Jay Novella?

  You know, I say it many ways, Cara.

• 16:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. They are all correct.

• 16:28Jay Novella?

  The applicable meat in poultry products. And the inspection, you know, it applies during the harvesting of the meat and the processing for products that are under its jurisdiction. It's complicated, but essentially, they're getting, you know, a thumbs up from the FDA and the USDA. And we have crossed an important threshold. You know, now that we know it's safe, it's edible, it can be grown, the question is, can we grow it in enormous quantities, cheaply enough, to compete with existing agriculture? And this is completely outside any benefits that we might get from moving to cultured meat this way. So, here's the problem. In general, you might not agree with this, but you'll understand where I'm going with

• 17:13Jay Novella?

  it. Meat is relatively inexpensive, right? So one of the most important things here is that meat is largely accessible to a lot of people. And biotechnology, you know, we've been growing mammalian cells in bioreactors for a very long time. And they are, these are being used for pharmaceuticals, right? Steve, don't we make insulin that way and lots of other important medications, right?

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, from cells that have been, like recombinant DNA.

• 17:42Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, or just even just- Cultured cells, like you mentioned earlier, it's interesting that Impossible Burger, this is not the same thing as Impossible Burger, you are correct, Impossible Burger is plant-based, but the reason it quote bleeds is because they use a compound called leg hemoglobin that they actually get from industrially genetically modified yeast. So there are organisms in it, they're just organisms that are considered, you know, okay to eat if you're a vegetarian.

• 18:10Jay Novella?

  Right. And you know, those pharmaceuticals I mentioned, you know, these are largely very valuable products that can, there's a lot of profit in there, so they can afford to, you know, use a bioreactor to help create products that they need from the pharmaceuticals. Now, chicken, hamburger and pork, these are considered commodity foods and you need, you know, enormous quantities at a very low cost, right? That's essentially what we're talking about here. In a process that, that makes perfect sense for producing, you know, really valuable pharmaceuticals, it doesn't really work or, or transport over to producing hamburger. It's a, you know, we have to do it very differently than the way that they would, you know, run the bioreactors for pharmaceutical companies.

• 18:52Jay Novella?

  And, and a 2024 Nature Food Review of techno-economic analyses, they reached a pretty interesting conclusion here. They said, "Under the current technological paradigm, cultivated meat is unlikely to be cost competitive with conventional meat." That was only a couple of years ago, and that's very important because, you know, that is going to be, you know, a theme throughout, you know, things I'm going to be talking about, and it, it is pretty much the problem. And I'll get back to a little bit more later, but let's go on to what do you feed these cells that you've collected, right? So you've collected the certain cells that you want, you, you have a bioreactor that you can put them into, and the cells need to, to be able to reproduce, and if they reproduce, they need to eat.

• 19:35Jay Novella?

  They need, they need some type of, you know, nourishment. Animal cells don't, you can't just put them in water, they don't grow, they, they, they need like what they call a culture medium. And this provides lots of different things, right? There is glucose, amino acids, vitamins and minerals, salts and electrolytes, lipids, fatty acids, there are growth factors like proteins and T-cells that, you know, that are all involved, buffering compounds, like they're making sure that the pH is correct, and of course, water. So traditional cell culture ingredients, they've been developed for the biomedical applications, but they're way too expensive for making supermarket meat. It just isn't going to work.

• 20:17Jay Novella?

  So traditionally, animal cells, you know, like you ever hear of like the serum, like the bovine serum? Do you guys know what that is?

• 20:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:24Jay Novella?

  Yeah. Uh, this is a nutrient-rich compound, fetal calf blood-containing, these growth factors that help cells survive and multiply. This is also very, you know, very expensive to, to, to get this, you know, and if you want to use it for cultivated meat, it doesn't work because it's too expensive. So that's, there's a lot of research going into being able to come up with an alternate, you know, serum that they could use to, to help the meat grow. And this year, Nature Reviews Bioengineering had an article that identified high cost, the high cost of culture medium, and it is the limitating factor here, it's a big problem. So they're just, the researchers are trying to design something that can work for, for

• 21:06Jay Novella?

  specific cell lines that can essentially replace these really expensive food-grade sources. All right, so now, what else is a problem? Another big problem that they found is making a giant bioreactor. You want to grow, you know, cells in a laboratory? No problem, because you're, it's on a small scale and, you know, you're not trying to feed the world with this, you're trying to do science. You want to produce millions of kilograms? That's a completely different situation, and it's always a scaling problem. The scaling problem hits almost every single endeavor in science when they're trying to make something. Scaling is typically a massive limiting factor that kills lots of brilliant ideas.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  That is a huge red flag. Whenever I am reading any kind of promotion of a new technology and they say something to the effect of, "All we have to do is scale it up."

• 21:57Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  It's like, yeah, right, that is like the 99% deal killer right there.

• 22:02Jay Novella?

  That's not all you have to do.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's not all you have to do.

• 22:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah. So to give you a little idea of what it takes to, to ramp this up, right? They have to do a lot of different things. They have to distribute oxygen, they have to distribute nutrients, they have to maintain a certain temperature, a certain pH, they have to remove metabolic waste, which is not easy, they have to keep the cells alive, they have to prevent contamination, right? You know, animal cells are considered to be relatively fragile, they don't, they, they can die very easily. And then there's mechanical forces from mixing that can damage them, and these current peer reviewed, uh, reviews, they continue to show that the bioreactor scale up is just, you know, a major unresolved problem.

• 22:48Jay Novella?

  And then getting back to like, you know, what makes a steak? So a pile of cells, it isn't a steak. Ground meat is one thing, but if you want a ribeye or you want, you know, a, a real cut of meat that has structure like the real thing, that's super difficult to do because there's different types of muscle fibers, they're distributed in particular ways, the fat is distributed in a particular way, there are certain kinds of connective tissue that give it structure, there's vascular tissue, um, so if you're making nuggets or ground beef, that isn't really a problem, it's going to be like the higher-end stuff, um, that I think, we, you know, in the short term, I just don't see us getting there.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Jay, I mean, I would say to that, yeah, but we just won't make the high-end stuff, right?

• 23:31Jay Novella?

  Of course, I know.

• 23:32Speaker 01

  We'll use it to make the pink foam chicken nuggets, right?

• 23:35Jay Novella?

  Right. It's part of the equation though, because people want it, right? It is something that, that companies want to sell because there is a, you know, higher profit.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  I hear you, but I think, I, I think it's important to be cautious about criticizing a technology for what it can't do, as that nullifies what it can do. And so just like microwaves are terrible for cooking, but they're great for heating. And so I think that it, there is a possibility that, just in terms of the application, not the feasibility of scaling it up and all the other stuff, but just on this one question, you could argue that, well, maybe there is a kind of meat product that it will work well for, and then that's what they will produce. They won't try to produce the fully formed steaks with all of the different components in it, it'll be like ground meat or chicken nuggets or whatever. And maybe, hey, if it's better than the pink foam chicken nuggets, if it's somewhere in

• 24:28Speaker 01

  between those and, you know, like the, the, the real like white meat chicken nuggets, there's clearly a market for, market for the really shitty nuggets, right? I mean, that's what like McDonald's, for example, sells, so if they could do even slightly better than those, you know there'll be a market for it, right?

• 24:44Jay Novella?

  Well, they're already looking into, say, you use plant material that can provide inexpensive bulk and structure, but then you use cultivated animal fats to, uh, enhance the flavor and give it a certain feel when you chew on it.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:59Jay Novella?

  Right? That's a big deal, by the way, that isn't just a throw, hey, line. That, that is the difference between this industry actually existing or not. And this could dramatically reduce how mu, how expensive cultivated, cultivated tissue actually needs to be, because they, they could make the fat and use it, and it, you know, it's not as hard as making the actual, you know, a steak or, or, you know, a, a more complicated piece of meat. So I think that that is part of it, Steve, and I think if we see anything come out of this, it's going to be exactly what you just said, that they're going to use pieces of this and they're going to do different things and combine it with things that are less expensive and easy to grow and make, but still get there in certain ways.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, the bigger way to frame that is like, what's the use case? Right? It's, this is like the segue. You have to not only come up with the technology to be able to do it, you have to come up with a compelling economic use case. People will use it in this way, they'll like using it this way, and it makes economic sense to use it this way. And, you know, we won't know that until people try to market it, right? And then we see what happens.

• 26:02Jay Novella?

  Now, another big thing is the environmental argument, or, you know, what, what would its impact be in a positive or negative way on the environment? A lot of claims are being made. There is some legitimate research here, there was a, a systematic review this year that examined nine different life cycle assessment studies, right? They compared conventional beef and then modeled cultivated meat systems, and they, and this is what the numbers show. There was a 99% savings of land use and a 96% savings of water use. That's huge. That is like remarkable, right? Those numbers, like.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  With the lab-grown meat over conventionally grown meat.

• 26:42Jay Novella?

  There is a catch though, right? Because this is models of a future industry. We don't have like a mature system that we can, you know, measure firsthand. There's different models and, and that means that they're making different assumptions. Of course, energy use can vary, and, you know, the, the energy requirements, there was a huge variability in how much energy these systems could potentially use. But they said that in most of their scenarios, the cultivated meat did require more energy than conventional poultry or pork, but if they were using renewable electricity, it doesn't have an impact. So the greenhouse gas results, you know, could vary substantially if they were making it, you know, with electricity from coal or electricity from a renewable source. Big difference there.

• 27:27Jay Novella?

  Now, we, now, of course, they're assuming it's going to be renewable because of course, that's the right way to go. You know, as far as environmental concerns, that they're, potentially, they're saying dramatically lower land use, dramatically lower water use, particularly with beef. Energy use could potentially be substantial, substantially less, which is great.

• 27:50Jay Novella?

  Greenhouse emissions, highly dependent on the production systems and the energy sources that they use, like I just said. So we can't just flat out claim that it's going to be hands down a home run, but it certainly seems like it. But we have to wait until they actually build something on an industrial scale. And then they can really, really measure it and see what's what. But it's looking really, really good there. Another problem the industry has had is that they had a big investment bubble and that bubble has popped. The amount of dollars being put into this research is going down. Like, for example, in 2021, it peaked at 1.4 billion investment dollars.

• 28:30Jay Novella?

  By 2024, that went down to 144 million and now it's down to 74 million. So it's going down and companies have shut down. Others have merged. You know, the investors are becoming more demanding because they want a return on their investment. So, you know, it's just going to take more time, you know? Like as of 2026, can we grow animal meat without growing the entire animal? Yes. Can we make it edible and safe? Yes. Can it pass US regulations? Yes. Can we manufacture it economically? We don't know. Is it competitive with meat today? No. Do we know if it's going to be competitive? We don't know. We have to just extrapolate. So the science is legitimate.

• 29:14Jay Novella?

  The technology is legitimate, but there are still new technologies that need to be mastered. And will it be economically competitive? We don't know.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  So it's plausible, but it's just a matter of can somebody develop it and market it? Yeah. At scale.

• 29:30Jay Novella?

  So as these dollars go down though, you know, the investments go down. I mean, it could just go away because if they're not seeing anything that can potentially make money. And I'm not saying in the short, short term, you know, but can they do something in a decade? Because people will invest in that. That's the key. And I think, you know, the investment dollars going down really does mean something.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  And sometimes applications like this get backburnered or they basically just wait until there's a technological breakthrough that changes the game, right? That changes the numbers. And I don't know if you came across anything like that. If only we could do this, they would, the whole thing becomes an order of magnitude easier. You know what I mean?

• 30:10Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  I don't know if they were, if they're waiting for that kind of breakthrough. Sometimes it's just not possible to do things with the current technology, you know? But it sounds like this is just a matter of the, the technology has to be further developed. And will, is there a company that can see it through? You know what I mean? Sometimes you've got to keep dumping money into something until either you give up or you have a breakthrough. And there's no way to predict what will happen first.

• 30:38Jay Novella?

  Right.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Jay. So Carol, let me ask you this question. What basic tissue, what embryonic developmental tissue does the brain develop from?

• 30:50Cara Santa Maria?

  You mean like the same as skin?

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, from ectoderm.

• 30:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 01

  And?

• 30:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I was like, I'm blanking on the label. Ectoderm. Yeah, the same as skin. Yeah.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so from neural ectoderm.

• 31:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Do you think it all has a single origin or multiple origins?

• 31:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Ooh, what do you mean by that when you, when you talk about origin?

• 31:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in other words, can you identify a single progenitor cell?

• 31:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  That the entire brain develops from? Or maybe it's a combination of different developmental pathways?

• 31:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I mean, that's, that's, I feel like that's a complicated question because at this point of like, I guess the blastocyst phase, like there aren't that many cells.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, yeah, ultimately, if you go back far enough, everything comes from a single.

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Everything comes from a single cell. That's what I'm saying. At the point that it's like, all right, this is now a cell that is destined to be brain cells. Right? Is that can all brain cells, do all brain cells have a single common ancestor developmentally? Or not?

• 31:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, I would assume, I would assume that yes, that the neural tube cells all come from a single common ancestor, but then there's differentiation. And then when you say brain versus spinal cord, there's a single common. And when I say ancestor, I think people know what I mean, right?

• 32:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:05Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Developmental ancestor.

• 32:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Developmentally, yeah, not evolutionarily.

• 32:08Speaker 01

  And that's the same assumption that basically scientists have been making for a long time.

• 32:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, how could it be otherwise?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  How could it be otherwise? Right? But it turns out it is otherwise that the brain is actually a composite organ that had, that is a fusion of two independent developmental pathways that at no point overlap. Right? So in other words, you can't trace every brain cell to a common ancestor. You have to trace them to two different common developmental ancestors. Right? So there was two independent developmental origins. And keep in mind that developmental pathways, I know this is the, you know, it doesn't exactly recapitulate phylogeny, right? You know what I mean?

• 32:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Autogeny, recapitulate phylogeny. But, but generally speaking, broad brush stroke, the developmental pathways that cells go through does reflect evolutionary history. Right? And so researchers recently found that the forebrain and the midbrain derive from one, you know, original stem cell, neural stem cell. And the hindbrain develops from a completely independent neural stem cell. And that this, this holds not only in mammals, but holds for animals going back 550 million years.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  And therefore that, you know, back at that time, there were basically two nervous systems and that evolutionarily fused into the brain.

• 33:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  And that this is not unique. You know, that there are other animals, you know, that have sort of two brains, like jellies. You know, so that's not that unusual, right?

• 33:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And sorry, what was the source or the root of them?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  What do you, so there is the, there's anterior neural ectoderm and posterior neural ectoderm.

• 34:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  That arise independently of each other. At the point that they arrive, they already have, are committed to different genetic changes. You know, meaning like which genes are active. And so they've all, they're already differentiated and different from each other before they become neural cells.

• 34:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  This prompted a question and I said, well, what other organs are composite organs? I'll get back to the implications of this research and what they did in a minute. But just that I thought I found this to be a really interesting question. What do you guys think about this? It's actually a complicated answer. So the big hint, the brain's not the only composite organ.

• 34:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And what we mean by that is that the organ is a fusion of cells that derive from different embryonic layers. Right?

• 34:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, gut, heart?

• 34:56Speaker 01

  So the heart is one that is absolutely not a composite organ.

• 35:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  So the heart entirely derives from one single mesodermal cell layer. The other one that's pure not composite is the spleen.

• 35:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, the spleen itself.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  The spleen and the heart are actually the two that are, have a uniform origin.

• 35:18Cara Santa Maria?

  God, everything else is composite?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  Most everything else is composite to one degree or another. So there are a couple of organs, the kidneys and the lungs. Again, it depends on how you, it's all a definition, how do you define composite? They're like semi-composite. The, the organs themselves derive from one layer, but some of the structures, the blood vessels and the connective tissue derive from another layer. So that kind of makes sense, right?

• 35:40Jay Novella?

  So it's not surprising then, right?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  It's not surprising. But, but there are some organs that are functionally composite, meaning their functional components actually derive from different cell layers. The pancreas is interesting because the pancreas actually starts as two completely different organs. You have a ventral pancreatic bud and a dorsal pancreatic bud that during development fused together into the pancreas. And then you have, and the liver is another one where you have, you know, there's endodermal and mesodermal cells that actually form different functional components of the liver. So the liver's a fully composite organ as well. Interesting, right? And again, developmental biology is complicated. Weird stuff happens as we're developing.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  A lot of things move around and fuse and blah, blah, blah, develop and then die and all kinds of things happening. And again, largely reflecting our evolutionary history, sort of broad brush stroke. All right, so the brain, but this was surprising. We thought, you know, it's all nervous tissue. It should really all be just neural ectoderm.

• 36:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And it kind of makes sense, but it seems by this latest study that that's not true, that they, this is the first study where they actually observed the developmental pathway all as far back as you could go and found that, you know, using more like modern techniques of being able to trace these cells. And they found that, you know, there's these two independent stem cell origins that are already committed to their different pathways before they become like neural ectoderm. Right? So what is the forebrain and the midbrain? The forebrain is basically your cortex, your thalamus, your hypothalamus. And the midbrain is basically like the top of your brainstem,

• 37:27Speaker 01

  the periaqueductal gray and these other deep structures. And then, so that's the forebrain and the midbrain. Those develop from the same origin, the anterior neural ectoderm. Then you have the hindbrain, which is basically the brainstem and the cerebellum. And those develop from the posterior neural ectoderm. And this resolves actually a frustration within neurological research. It was very difficult, like researchers could not cultivate hindbrain neurons because they were trying to do it from the wrong stem cells.

• 38:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, yeah.

• 38:06Speaker 01

  And so

• 38:07Cara Santa Maria?

  They wouldn't grow into the right things.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  They were, they just didn't know, why can't we induce these neural stem cells into becoming hindbrain neurons? You know, they just couldn't do it.

• 38:16Cara Santa Maria?

  They didn't have the programming.

• 38:18Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's like, it's too late. It's already committed to other genetic changes. It's already passed that point, that branching point in the developmental pathway. So what these researchers did, this was, you know, they were, most of this work was done in mice. Once they showed that, oh yeah, there's definitely these two pathways, there's already committed to genetic changes on these two different pathways before they become neural. And they were able to cultivate hindbrain neurons from the posterior neural ectoderm stem cells. So they showed that, yes, that was the problem and this resolves that problem. And then they looked at other species to see how far back it goes in evolution. It's the research is, it seems pretty thorough and pretty rigorous. Of course, we always like to see it hold up in independent

• 39:03Speaker 01

  labs, independent replication. But in addition to just being fascinating, like this is like the evolutionarily, we have two brains fused into one, that this could be a huge boon to further neurological research if we're studying brain diseases like motor neuron disease that derive from hindbrain neurons. Now we can cultivate and study them, whereas before we couldn't do that because we didn't know how to do it. Because we were laboring under this misconception that there was a common stem cell origin of all neurons and they're not. The brain is a composite organ.

• 39:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Interesting.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 39:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Jay Novella?

  Now, is this like turning things over, Steve? Or is it a natural progression in your understanding?

• 39:51Speaker 01

  No, definitely. It's overturning the, what was really an assumption, which was a reasonable assumption and followed Occam's razor that, yeah, the, all, you know, the, all brain neurons derive from a common developmental stem cell. That seemed reasonable. It's the, the more complicated, more bizarre reality happens to be the case, whereas evolutionarily, our brain fused from two different brains that evolved independently.

• 40:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and it's also going to unblock some of the blockages that researchers have been facing.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, so hopefully this will be a good boon. Again, this is like basic science research. You never know where it's going to lead. You never know what the implications are going to be. But just the more deeply and more accurately we understand how things work, the better able we are, you know, to turn that into treatments for diseases or whatever you're researching. Of course, it may take decades, you know, for this to, to play out in terms of concrete translational research, you know, specific applications. Right? Like a lot of the stuff we're talking about today, you dig back, it was some basic science research 30 years ago, typically, right?

• 40:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course, yeah.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  And this is the kind of research, Kara, that comes out of federal funding.

• 41:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Good segue.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Science grants, science grants that are given based purely on just the merit of the ideas being put forward without any notion given necessarily to how it might translate one day or what the political implications of the research are, right?

• 41:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. That's an important point that you make there, Steve. And, you know, as I dive into this new story, I want to also remind folks that I'm talking about this against the background of literally seeing in my inbox, update after update that say things like, um, news outlets return to White House after fight over access. News outlets continue to be blocked from White House after fight over access. News outlets urging judge to allow access to White House. So we're seeing an assault on multiple fronts about some

• 42:09Cara Santa Maria?

  of the very pillars that allow independent inquiry. And I think an important one here does have to do with scientific inquiry. So we are recording this on September 24th. On September 20th, so only four days ago, The New York Times wrote an article titled, White House Moves to Take Control of NIH Grants. Now, this was not brand new. It was just the latest in a series of alarming steps where there is a detailing of a private Oval Office meeting where the Trump administration was drafting an executive order

• 42:54Cara Santa Maria?

  with the express intention of removing scientific autonomy from the National Institutes of Health, the NIH. I'm going to ask you, Jay, because Steve may know this already off the top of his head. How big do you think the budget is? How much money do you think the NIH gives for biomedical research?

• 43:14Jay Novella?

  Are we going to say now or, or, you know?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Per year now.

• 43:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, per year, typical budget.

• 43:19Jay Novella?

  God, I'd like to think like a few billion a year. It's 48 billion.

• 43:23Cara Santa Maria?

  48, yeah. $48 billion in biomedical research. You know, anybody who has worked for an institution that engages in biomedical research or research knows that a whole labs run on NIH funding. That when you lose NIH funding, you lose often the ability to keep your doors open and to be able to continue the research that you're doing. And what was the goal? What is the goal? The express kind of communicated goal of the Trump administration right now? To create an outside political panel to review and have veto power over biomedical research grants.

• 44:06Cara Santa Maria?

  So the board would be co-chaired by the Office of Management and Budget, or the OMB Director, Russell Vought, and the NIH, the current NIH Director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. The board would need to be unanimous. They would have to approve unanimously any grant that gets funded. And now let's talk about why this is political. I mean, we know why it's political because very particular people are, are being described as the arbiters of where money goes and where it doesn't. But really, what is the lens from which they would be acting? Well, according to Vought, he wants this panel to block research that is deemed, quote, woke.

• 44:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So we're talking things like health disparities research, equity related studies, the type of research that ensures that individuals have access to treatments and access to healthcare regardless of their socioeconomic status, regardless of their opinions, regardless of, you know, any number of demographic measures.

• 45:15Speaker 01

  But also, Kara, even just differential outcomes for different demographic groups.

• 45:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  You know, just genetic, genetic populations, anything that gets caught up in this very broad net. It's like, you know, do African, people of African descent and Asian descent, whatever, respond the same way to the same medication? No, I'm sorry, you can't do that research.

• 45:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, or how about women?

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, or.

• 45:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Do women?

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Who, who biologically have, you know, different metabolic thing, different levels of endocrine measurements, like, you know, across the board, this would wipe out a significant portion, because even research that doesn't expressly do that often engages in some amount of demographic descripting, so that there is, you know, an understanding later if people use those data pools. So there, there has been friction within this, within this group. And, and notably, Dr. Bhattacharya, the NIH director, has been resistant to the plan

• 46:21Cara Santa Maria?

  and refused a directive from Trump to cut funding to Harvard. And so the NIH and the OMB are dealing with some, some fractures right now. There's also been, been a ton of legal backlash. You know, the ACLU and other, other groups are bringing class action lawsuits alleging that this is obviously unconstitutional, it's censorship of scientific speech.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  But Kara, just to be clear.

• 46:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  Bhattacharya's plan was to basically purge NIH grants of anything DEI. He's already done that. That was sort of his solution.

• 46:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, here's the thing about Bhattacharya that I think is important to note, and I was going to kind of move into that direction in a little bit. He is at a really interesting, kind of conflicting impasse for himself. He actively supports these ideological goals of the administration, like eliminating DEI, but he resists these attempts to strip the NIH of administrative and scientific autonomy. And interestingly, if you dig into Bhattacharya's own research.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  He's done it himself.

• 47:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, he's done it himself. He's engaged in DEI research, he's engaged in health equity research. So it's like, what is even happening?

• 47:37Speaker 01

  But I wonder if this was like, his measure was like, all right, let's see if this could make Trump happy. We'll, we'll just purge the NIH grants of DEI. Most of them, by the way, have been reversed on lawsuits, because they, they clearly weren't legal.

• 47:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because this is not a new effort. This has been happening, you know, since Trump got in office.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  That's not enough, I want a complete takeover. And that's what they're fighting about.

• 47:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the thing about these goalposts constantly moving, like, we cannot get inside of Bhattacharya's brain. We don't know what he actually thinks or believes, and how much is just political maneuvering. But, I mean, he co-authored an op ed in, in an outlet called The Spectator, titled, How We Cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health. So it's like, at a certain point, if you're just trying to appease the powers that be, when do you become equally responsible? I mean, come on. So it's, it's a really difficult place, I think, in history right now, where, where these efforts have been pushed.

• 48:40Cara Santa Maria?

  This is not a new thing that happened four days ago, this, this kind of White House meeting. But, but now cut to yesterday, where a new investigative piece was published called, Trump Backtracks on Plan for New Controls on NIH Grants. And why do you think Trump is backtracking?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Because of bipartisan rational pushback.

• 49:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly, which is, to me, mildly hopeful. I don't want to get too Pollyanna about this.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  You can't say, you can't, yeah, you can't disagree with that. I mean, it's a good thing.

• 49:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 49:11Speaker 01

  That that happened. It's way too little for, for what needs to happen, but it's good to know that there's a, there's a line somewhere.

• 49:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And we're seeing that there was, you know, a lot of pushback from a lot of prominent lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, including Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins. And like, really, when we dig into it, especially this article, details a lot of the previous pressures that the Trump administration has put on this type of biomedical research, that over the course of its administration, they've frozen or cut more than 5,700 NIH grants worth $15 billion. And, and as you mentioned, some of that has been reversed, but not all of it. They've restored about 4,500 of those cut grants.

• 50:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But the rolling freezes, as we've talked about before on the show, sometimes you stop something in its tracks, it could take years, decades to get back to where you were, because there's a certain amount of momentum that has to occur when it comes to biomedical research.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  Well, that's what scientific research is like. You have to maintain a lab, you have to maintain the infrastructure, you have to maintain, you know, the institutions. And if you let the plates all go crashing to the ground, you know, right? You just can't start it all back up again.

• 50:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Or if you do, it just takes so much more time and money, to be honest.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Before.

• 50:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And it's dumb. It's like, you need more funding to do it.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very inefficient.

• 50:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's wildly inefficient. And as I mentioned before, this is not, you know, the first time this, this has happened. This has been an intentional agenda by the administration since the beginning. And, and we could detail a few of those things, like, there was an OMB rule change in 2026, where there was a restructure of federal funding and developmental funding. There have been specific targets of, quote, woke climate science. And of course, as we know, DEI, transgender health, different equity outcome researches. We've also seen that, you know, this executive order was only the, the most recent in this series.

• 51:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Now, historically, the NIH and the NSF and all of these government organizations that fund scientific research did it specifically and expressly through peer-reviewed panels of scientists, right? It operated the same way that we try to operate the sort of scientific machine to ensure as much balance, but also to ensure as much intellectual rigor as possible. Let's have the people who know about this stuff be the ones who are making decisions about where should, we should fund things, not the people who don't know about it.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  It's okay for the top level, you know, politicians who are ostensibly our representatives to set big goals, right?

• 52:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  And, and it's fine. And we expect when new administrations come in, that will affect the priorities, you know, of these kinds of agencies, sure. But this is different than that. This is micromanaging. This is setting up a political commission with power to veto any research Trump doesn't like.

• 52:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  This is naked Lysenkoism, just political takeover of the process, not just setting, you know, broad, broad brush stroke priorities, which is fine.

• 52:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Right? This is, this is so destructive to the, to the whole process.

• 52:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And really, by any means necessary. When we look back to 2018, he was proposing cuts, just budget cuts, right? 18% he proposed back then to the NIH and 31% to the EPA. Whereas for fiscal year 2026, he is aiming for a 41% slash to the NIH, a 57% cut to the NSF, and a 24% cut to NASA. So it's like, okay, let's first, you know, he has this multi-pronged approach. Let's first strip them of all of their money. Then we're going to use executive action tactics to, you know, if we can't cut the budgets completely, we'll just disrupt how the money flows here.

• 53:22Cara Santa Maria?

  We'll, you know, freeze some grants, we'll cap some indirect costs on these things. And, and then it's just like, okay, I'm just going to straight up say the quiet part out loud and veto this type of research altogether. He, even earlier this year, invoked a suspension and debarment proceeding against the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, and cited climate fraud, and said, like, I am going to cut you from all federal contracts and funding for three years because you're committing climate fraud. It's just, it's, it's every approach possible. It's constantly hammering, and this has been Trump's MO long before he was in a position of political power.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Now, the other layer here, which I think we should make explicit, is that the NIH is what we call a creature of Congress, right? This was created by Congress, it was funded by Congress. Congress, you know, sets the agenda and the priorities for this organization.

• 54:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And they don't want to lose it.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  And yes, the, the executive branch appoints the director and everything, that's sort of the balance of the two things. But, but the NIH really is like the funding, everything comes from Congress. And they have been, this is one thing that they have been very defensive about. So I'm not surprised this was their line in the sand. And I think it's more of an executive branch, legislative branch turf war than anything else. But good for them, they should be defending their constitutional boundaries. They, they've let Trump, you know, walk all over them in other contexts, but this really was very personal to a lot of members of Congress.

• 54:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, agree. And I think that's the one place where we can kind of say, while this is an abject attempt at modern Lysenkoism, it doesn't perfectly align with what happened during the Lysenko era, only because, yes, there is a huge push to induce ideological perspectives over empirical data. Yes, there is a huge push to have veto power. And there's a huge push to use intimidation tactics to do that. But in the Soviet Union, dissent meant the Gulag, right? Whereas here, dissent means, oh, he's walking it back.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:38Cara Santa Maria?

  He doesn't quite have the pull that he thought.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  We still have some resilience in our system.

• 55:42Cara Santa Maria?

  We do. And also, while we know that there's a lot of pseudoscience that's being promoted in different pockets of Trump's administration and cabinet, there is no blanket, like, we want to replace biomedical research as it has been existing with some new science. It's more, we want to cut out anything that might, I don't know, help vulnerable people, which is amazing. So it's, but, but it does kind of follow, and, and I'm continuing to sort of ring that Lysenkoism alarm bell too, because just because we're not there yet, doesn't mean that it doesn't have all the traffic.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  You don't want to wait till already there, that's then it's too late. I think, yeah, again, and I think the, you know, Trump and really the people around Trump, the Project 2025 people have been pretty explicit on what they, again, they're saying the quiet part out loud. They're trying to not just reshape the federal government in their image. They're trying to reshape American culture in their image.

• 56:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  And they are very much targeting universities to do that because they see universities as a bastion of liberal power, cultural-

• 56:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  -power. And what better way to control universities than to control their funding? And NIH and other research funding from the federal government is a huge, a huge deal for universities. So this is just saying, if you are, if you have total political control over the funding process, that gives you de facto control over these universities, right?

• 57:07Cara Santa Maria?

  100% because what's going to happen? You're either going to have these institutions saying, no, thank you, and shuttering, which is a really hard decision to make, or you're going to have these institutions saying, okay, fine, I'll do the research you want me to do. And then the entire narrative shifts.

• 57:23Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 57:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Our, our actual reality shifts.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's already happening because, you know, people who are writing for grants are already making them politically correct. You know, they're already purging them of any language that might trigger DEI labeling or whatever.

• 57:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. The hope is just that they're sort of doing it as a, as a means of appeasement, and then they're still collecting that data to be published later, you know?

• 57:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Or they're going to France, right?

• 57:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 57:50Speaker 01

  Which is, which is happening in droves.

• 57:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 57:53Speaker 01

  In, in a recent survey, 75% of American research scientists said they've thought about relocating to another country.

• 58:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 58:01Speaker 01

  And of course, many have.

• 58:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Huge brain drain. It's gonna be, yeah, that we're gonna take decades to come back from if, if we can.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is generational damage. Absolutely. Hopefully, yeah, we have to limit it as much as possible and then try to reverse it as quickly as possible. But, you know, it's just, you know, the thing is that the United States, you know, set up an incredibly fantastic system, whatever, you know, in the, in the 20th century, where the federal government funds research and, but lets universities and researchers decide where the money should best go, except for like the setting some broad, big picture goals, you know?

• 58:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  And that has made us a scientific powerhouse of the world and is arguably the number one reason for our status as a superpower is because we've had this scientific advantage over every other country. And Trump is just throwing it away. It's, it's so mind-bogglingly dumb. It's incredible. Our, this is arguably our single biggest advantage, you know, that we have crafted over decades.

• 59:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  And he, I don't think he understands it, and, and he's just throwing it away for some short-term political, you know-

• 59:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely.

• 59:13Speaker 01

  -maneuvering. It's just crazy.

• 59:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 59:16Speaker 01

  I think this will come down, you know, historians will look upon this as one of the most, the greatest blunders any American president has ever committed. Just gutting our own science research infrastructure. It's just crazy.

• 59:30Cara Santa Maria?

  This amongst many other blunders within this, within this administration. Yeah. My god.

• 59:37Speaker 01

  All right. Thanks, Kara. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, 11 Labs. I was a software engineer and I was helping the customer service department get all the information that they need to help people with complicated products that the company sold. The customer service people could, never were trained to the degree that they actually were benefiting all the callers. And it really was a company-wide problem because without people understanding the products, they weren't happy with the products.

• 1:00:09Cara Santa Maria?

  You could have used this new platform, 11 Agents by 11 Labs. It's, it's actually a platform for AI voice and chat agents that listen, they understand, and they resolve customer issues. And they can do a lot of things. They can look up your account, process requests, hand off to a real person when needed. It's made by a company that has realistic voice and audio models in over 70 languages, and it's enterprise scale, too. It handles more than 10 million conversations per week, and it's HIPAA compliant, compliant with, you know, a lot of different certifications.

• 1:00:44Speaker 01

  If you run a business or handle customer operations across support, sales, or marketing, you can start with a demo at 11labs.io/sgu. See how 11 Agents can fit into your workflows and help you build experiences that your customers will actually love. 11labs.io/sgu. All right, guys, let's get back to the show. I recently wrote about a New York Times article that I thought was shamelessly shilling for psychics. So depressing. I actually blame the editors more than the author because they're the ones who are supposed to make sure this kind of stuff doesn't happen. But,

• 1:01:26Speaker 01

  so here, here's, the article is, you know, it's by Sarah Wildman is the author. She's not a science journalist, and, and she's trying to do this thing that I think, you know, that a lot of journalists do when they're writing about UFOs or ghosts or whatever. And that is to sound like neutral and objective and agnostic.

• 1:01:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:48Speaker 01

  But clearly, she's a believer. You know what I mean?

• 1:01:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm. Oh, no.

• 1:01:51Speaker 01

  Like, she says I'm agnostic, but she's not agnostic. So she's writing about not just psychics, but mediums. And she's saying, like, don't be negative about mediums because they can provide a useful service, right? That's basically the, her editorial approach here. And she, of course, starts with an anecdote about her cousin contacting her and saying that, you know, the cousin went to a psychic and had a message for the two of them from, they, they share a grandmother and also the author's daughter who died a year earlier at the age of 14. This is partly why I don't harsh too much on the author

• 1:02:32Speaker 01

  themselves because I never expect somebody who's personally been through something so emotionally traumatic, you know, to necessarily be a hard-line skeptic. It's, she's fair game because she's a journalist and she wrote an article about it. But still, that's why I think an editor should have been like, maybe you're a little bit too close to this topic and we need to take a closer look at this. Anyway, while she professes to be agnostic, she basically makes every mistake that promoters and believers in psychic mediums make in writing her article.

• 1:03:03Cara Santa Maria?

  I know.

• 1:03:04Speaker 01

  And it's just very, very disappointing. So first of all, she says that in order to see her support of psychic mediums, I won't say it's based on, it's more justified by research showing that people who are grieving the loss of a loved one report good outcomes from feeling connected to that lost loved one, right? And, but feeling connected to could mean a lot of things. It could mean just thinking about them. It could mean looking at pictures of them, or, or watching video, or talking about them to other people. Some

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  people do say that they sometimes feel the presence of their lost loved one, which is completely understandable. None of that has anything to do with visiting a psychic medium, right? But that's the research that sees citing in order to support the benefit, the alleged benefit of seeing a psychic. So I don't think that necessarily carries. And it certainly does not establish that there's anything uniquely beneficial about seeing a psychic. So she's using, I think, bad analogies. She also concludes, and of course, I strongly

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  disagree with this, that it doesn't matter if it's real or not. What do you guys think about that? Just that particular claim? Does it matter if the psychic medium is real or not? Well, how could it not matter? Right. How could it not matter? Obviously, to us, it matters. I mean, to me, that's the most important thing, right? But she's saying, it's like, you know, it doesn't matter as long as the person believes that it's, it's real, then it could be helpful. But she actually contradicts herself because you also, the, the very research she cites shows that in order for the feeling of connection to be helpful, the person has to believe that it's genuine. So whether or not it's genuine does matter.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  You can't say it doesn't matter when the alleged benefit you're pointing to depends upon people believing that it's real.

• 1:05:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:05:18Speaker 01

  So now you're saying that people have to go to a fake psychic and be falsely convinced that it's real in order to derive an emotional benefit that they could derive from other means that don't involve deception. Right? She's saying that without saying it, right?

• 1:05:34Jay Novella?

  Right, yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  If you add up what she's saying, that's what it adds up to, but she's not seeing it, right? She's not recognizing that. The other thing is, she is writing and she is behaving as if the industry itself is benign and mostly operating in good faith, right? Which we all know is very far from the truth. You know, and again, like, I'm sure you guys have spoken to people who believe in psychics or whatever, and they go, sure, there's the occasional fraud, but my psychic is good, or these, you know, whatever, they vetted these psychics or whatever. It's like, no. You know, grifting and fraud and deception is not incidental to the industry. It is the industry. It is absolutely core to the industry.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  You know, you guys remember the book, The Psychic Mafia? That was about the fact that it's literally a criminal syndicate. You know what I mean? A lot of times, a lot of pieces of, you know, the psychic industry is controlled by these, like, criminal organizations. And even if they're not, you know, ostensibly part of such an actual organization, there is a tremendous amount of deception and grifting inherent to the industry itself. You know, just doing psychic readings is usually just sort of the first step to identifying people who are especially wealthy and vulnerable, right?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Who you could then bilk for thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars. That this happens on a regular basis in the industry. This is not incidental. It's all baked in. And so not mentioning any of this, right? Sort of recommending this industry without mentioning, and by the way, it is absolutely rife with fraud and exploitation of vulnerable people, is journalistic malpractice, basically. The other thing that she absolutely does not mention, what do you think? There's two words that do not appear together in her article.

• 1:07:45Jay Novella?

  I can think of a, yeah.

• 1:07:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Skepticism?

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  Cold reading, right? She does not mention cold reading. She mentions, quote unquote, inexplicable cases, including her own anecdote that she's telling, sort of throughout the story, her article, without ever mentioning the notion of cold reading and how you absolutely can reproduce these, quote unquote, inexplicable cases through just moderate cold reading, like not even being a skilled cold reader. You don't have to be a world-class mentalist to be able to do this, right? You could just, you could do a pretty basic, clumsy cold reading.

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  If you have a willing, receptive sitter, that's enough to produce the kind of results that she is characterizing as inexplicable. So that's just, again, a journalistic fail. She fundamentally misunderstands the nature of the subject that she's writing about. She also doesn't mention hot reading, but she does kind of dismiss it. You know, she says that her cousin doesn't share her last name and never wrote about, never wrote publicly about, like, the death of her daughter. It's like, so you think that's the only way that somebody can unravel your social connections today with social media and artificial intelligence? That's naive, right?

• 1:09:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, the, again, cold readings are powerful enough. Well, we live in a world where hot readings are now trivial. And so the question is, and we don't know any of this information because we're getting it third-hand, you know, through the author here, did the psychic who did this reading on her cousin, was that an appointment that was made? Did she have her real name? Did she have her address? Was she given a credit card? I mean, was, what information were they given that could have been used to do a hot reading? Certainly we can't dismiss that out of hand as she does, saying, oh, she had a different last name. Again, that just shows a level of naivete to what's actually going on in the world that is profound, you know, for a journalist.

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  Then I wanted to just end with the anecdote that she ends with, and you tell me what you think is going on here. So she's now talking about her call with another psychic that she was interviewing for the article. And, you know, as part of the interview, the psychic gave her her own little reading. And she writes now, "Just before we wrapped up our call, she asked me, did Orly," that's the name of her daughter who died a year earlier, "did Orly have a weird stuffed animal? Not like a teddy bear," she added. "I laughed, Orly had an anteater stuffed animal, pillow size," I said. "It is still on her bed. Ms. Jackson mentioned her own spiritual signs, armadillos, aardvarks, and anteaters.

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  Receiving a sign of an unusual animal like this one," she said, "was a wink to us both from Orly. She said I'd receive such a sign, and it would arrive as an image." She says, "I didn't tell anyone about this conversation," like that's supposed to, you know, be sufficient reassurance. And then she writes, "Some weeks later, one of my friends from college texted me out of the blue. It happened to be Orly's birthday. 'I just saw this,' he wrote. 'He attached an image of a belt buckle he said he planned to buy. It had,' he said, 'made him think of us. On it was a brass armadillo.'" So that's the end of her article, like, that's supposed to be profound. So what do you guys think about that? How would you deconstruct that sort of anecdote as evidence, as she is presenting it as some

• 1:11:25Speaker 01

  inexplicable spiritual experience?

• 1:11:28Jay Novella?

  Well, first of all, the stuffed animal thing is completely meaningless. Doesn't prove or disprove anything.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Well, what aspect of it?

• 1:11:36Jay Novella?

  Well, just the, you know, the fact that she said it was a strange or uncommon stuffed animal or whatever.

• 1:11:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, every child has a stuffed animal that's not a bear.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. That's like, okay, so she, that's one, so that and cold reading, like, we do, we do this sort of, these pretend cold readings on our show. And this is one of the things I mentioned, right? You make a statement that seems specific, but really isn't. So, yeah, did she have a weird stuffed animal? Not a teddy bear? But you're right, like, pretty much every child I know has non-teddy bear stuffed animals, multiple of them, in fact. This is just the baseline now. So that in and of itself is completely unremarkable. Then, then what does she do? She says, so armadillos, aardvarks, and anteaters.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  She kind of broadens the scope to increase the probability of a hit, right? So not just anteater, but it could be anything, even, like, even armadillos, which are not like anteaters, by the way, but whatever. She sort of just, she says, like these things. So trying to increase the hit, the probability of a hit, even, again, but in a way that still might seem very specific, because people will underestimate the probability of randomly encountering something like this. And then she uses open-ended criteria, like another degree of freedom, right? So this is what mentalists do. They will expand the degrees of freedom in stealthy ways.

• 1:13:09Speaker 01

  So one, by expanding anteaters, who include armadillos and aardvarks or similar things, and then saying, sometime in the future, this will happen. So that, that's another degree of freedom. So here, then we hear, "Some weeks later, she basically encountered an armadillo." Not an anteater, but an armadillo.

• 1:13:29Jay Novella?

  Yeah, so she connected those two events.

• 1:13:31Speaker 01

  She made the connection between those two events, right? So that's, that is classic cold reading. Absolutely, the person is using the techniques of cold reading. It's right there documented in the article, and the author here completely doesn't recognize it as such. So total journalistic fail, at least if not more, on the editors at New York Times to allowing this kind of story through. But of course, we know that this is catnip to newspapers, right? This kind of story. You know, it's like, just enough plausible journalistic deniability here. It's like, oh, I'm really agnostic, I'm not making any hard claims.

• 1:14:13Speaker 01

  It's like why there are so many articles now in the mainstream media about UFOs, because depending on, basically gave them permission to write about it without completely sacrificing, you know, the impression of journalistic integrity. Just terrible, very disappointing. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:14:31Jay Novella?

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

• 1:14:48Jay Novella?

  I know it's pretty long, but I had to play the whole thing because of, as I explained last week, there is possibly a recognizable pattern in there that some people might be able to find. So what happened? So Wendy Volker wrote in and said, "My guess for this week's noisy is a record player stylus needle scratching on a record after the side is over, scratching across the last section of the disc that does not have grooves." That is a good guess. You know, there is a definite record scratch type of sound there. You're not correct, but I thought you found something that was very similar. Another listener named Matt Soskins wrote in and said, "Velcro shoes being unVelcroed."

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:15:30Jay Novella?

  Which I thought was interesting. I think it went on a little too long for Velcro, and it was too, you know, Velcro is kind of more of a chorus of sounds, right, of all these different little individual sounds coming together. Another guess from a listener named Ben. Ben said, "I think this week's noisy is a Geiger counter being swept past a radioactive source." Lots of people guessed Geiger counter. Yes, absolutely, Geiger counter sound there without a doubt. This was definitely something different, though, and I didn't get a winner, and I didn't get anybody to make a close guess, so I am assuming that this was very difficult. I would have had no chance of guessing this. But I will ask you, Steve, do you have any idea what this is?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it sounds electronic to me.

• 1:16:16Jay Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  And there is kind of a progression, but I didn't really recognize explicitly what it was.

• 1:16:23Jay Novella?

  Well, why would I ask you specifically? Is it something medical?

• 1:16:26Speaker 01

  Possibly.

• 1:16:28Jay Novella?

  So is it EMG related?

• 1:16:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I thought you said EEG.

• 1:16:33Jay Novella?

  It is definitely neurological based.

• 1:16:35Speaker 01

  Okay, there's a lot of, yeah, so electrical stuff in neurology. So it could be, is it brain function, or is it peripheral? Okay, here we go. So Anton Fomenko was the person who sent this in, and I'll read to you what he attached with the sound. He said, "Hi, Jay. I'm a neurosurgeon who does deep brain stimulation, and listening and interpreting the sounds, noises of the human brain is something our team does weekly. This one is a very characteristic noise, which is the sound of individual neurons firing in the subthalamic nucleus."

• 1:17:07Jay Novella?

  Subthalamic.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  Thank you. "This is of an awake patient with Parkinson's disease. To the layperson, it will sound like popcorn or maybe a rainstorm on a tin roof. They implant electrodes into this target and provide, they get a significant relief of the patient's symptoms, especially the rigidity and tremor. It allows them to enjoy a better quality of life. Listeners who are neurologists, neurosurgeons, or neurophysiologists may recognize this one, although there is a trend now to do the surgery without recording the brain, so the art of brain noises may be lost with time. Big fan of the show."

• 1:17:41Jay Novella?

  I thought that was a really cool, really, really cool noisy there. So they're recording synaptic firing, right, Steve?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Jay Novella?

  And then there is specific patterns that people who do this specifically, and I wasn't sure if you ever did anything like this, Steve.

• 1:17:57Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:17:58Jay Novella?

  But, yeah, but there are specific patterns that they can find that are meaningful, apparently. And I thought that was really interesting. So that is the human brain and its electrical activity. Very cool.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 1:18:10Jay Novella?

  All right, I have a new noisy for you guys this week. Of course, this was sent in by a listener named Morgan Hall, and here it is. I will add that this is three different versions of the same thing happening.

• 1:18:34Jay Novella?

  So if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at [email protected]. Steve, if people listening to this podcast enjoy the work that we're doing and want to help support what we do, you can become a patron of the STU. You can go to patreon.com/skepticsguide to find out more information. Thank you.

• 1:18:54Speaker 01

  All right, thanks, Jay. We're gonna do a quick named-logical fallacy. This is an email from Evan Drury from North Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada. And they write, "Thanks for the great show. I've been a listener for a number of years and love the time-to-time segment where logical fallacies are broken down. I was watching this video describing when Jordan Peterson appeared on Jubilee's "Surrounded." And at the 150 mark, he describes the Mott & Bailey fallacy, which I've never heard of before, but as soon as he described it, I realized it's been hiding in plain sight this whole time." Okay, then he says quickly what it is. But do you guys know what the Mott? We've talked about this before. You guys remember the Mott & Bailey?

• 1:19:37Cara Santa Maria?

  Remind us.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  All right, so you know what a Mott & Bailey is? In medieval history, it's a fort design. It's a design of a castle, right? So where you have a central castle, and which is surrounded by outer defenses, right? So the design is such that if, you know, the castle is being sieged, if they break through the outer defenses, you can retreat to the inner defenses.

• 1:20:08Jay Novella?

  Sure, okay.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Right? And then if you hold them off well enough, you could then rush forward to the outer defenses again. So that's the Mott & Bailey. So the metaphor is that people hold the position, if you overwhelm their outer defenses, right, if you break down like one level of denial, or defense, or whatever, they'll retreat to a more defensible position. But when they feel like they can, they will surge forward again to the more extreme version of them, of their position. So, for example, I think the most common example of this is with climate change deniers, right?

• 1:20:50Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Often, they will say, "Well, climate change isn't happening." And then if you show them proof that climate change is happening, they say, "Okay, well, maybe it's happening, but it's not man-made." And then if you show that it's, "No, it's clearly anthropogenic, and we've, you know, pretty definitively ruled that other causes," they'll say, "Well, all right, it may be happening, and it may be anthropogenic, but it's not bad." And then if you show that it's not bad, they'll say, "Well, it may be bad, but there's nothing we can do about it," or whatever. Or the cost of fixing it is greater than the problem itself, or whatever. So, but then, at a later time, if it's snowing, you know, they'll say, "But look, it's not even happening." They'll like reassert their more extreme

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  version of their position. Does that make sense?

• 1:21:38Jay Novella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:39Speaker 01

  So this does happen a lot among denialists, like anti-vaxers will, you know, they'll do the same thing. They'll make whatever claim they feel they could make at the moment, as long as it's anti-vaccine. They may retreat from that to what they perceive as an easier to defend position when they need to, but then they'll rush back out to the more, you know, complete version of their denial, or their position, when they feel they can. The Mott & Bailey logical fallacy. Keep an eye out for it. People do that a lot.

• 1:22:21Speaker 01

  We are joined now by Adam Kall and Troy Morris. Guys, welcome to The Skeptic's Guide.

• 1:22:26Speaker 04

  Thank you for having us.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  Happy to be here. And you are both, and you are two of the co-founders of a company, KMI, who is involved in dealing with or managing satellites that are already in orbit and other stuff. You tell us, what does your company do?

• 1:22:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so KMI Space, Adam and I are two of the three co-founders. So Austin's, you know, actually building space tech today. But we're here to tell you guys about the tow trucks for space that we are building. So exactly for that purpose, moving assets already in space.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Right. So you would launch a capsule that would grab onto a satellite and put it somewhere else?

• 1:23:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we call it a spacecraft. It's got the name of Lelaps, for those who are fans of their Greek history. That's the dog of mythology that always caught what it was hunting. And so the Lelaps spacecraft, exactly. We launch with a traditional launch provider, go up, rendezvous with a client or, you know, customer that's struggling, and either help them de-orbit, help them go higher, help them go somewhere else. All the silly things we use tow trucks for on Earth, just at Mach 23 speeds.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  So tell us about the technology. How does it grab on to what I'm assuming are many different configured satellites? Normally, when trying to

• 1:23:45Speaker 05

  Grab something in space or trying to grab anything, you would think of three solutions, either magnets, suction, or adhesion. And all three of those fail in space. You don't have suction because you're already in a vacuum, so there's no suction force. You don't have magnets with most spacecraft. They're designed to not be magnetic, to not interfere with payloads. And adhesives tend to kind of sublimate in the vacuum of space. They're not effective either. We had to get creative and look to actually nature for inspiration. The key animal being the gecko. A gecko lizard will crawl up a sheer vertical surface, hop off at the end and leave no residue, no marks. And it had no difficulty doing that time and time again. Its approach enables something called van der Waals forces, which is basically being so close to a material

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  that your material starts believing it's the other material. And you get a little bit of adhesive force. We were able to artificially create that same dynamic and put it into a spacecraft so that when we grab a satellite, we get a space-enabled adhesion on the end of all of our, we're going to call them tentacles, at the end of our end effector. So it's a nature-inspired approach that we have proven to work in space and are quite excited for its use case amongst all the satellites it can grab.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  And it's actually using the van der Waals forces?

• 1:25:01Speaker 05

  Correct. That is the main component of the adhesion.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  I did notice that it kind of unfurls. And then I guess when it disconnected, it uncurls, which is interesting because that's how geckos release too. They have to actually uncurl their toes. They can't just pull them straight out.

• 1:25:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, the biomimicry comes in many layers of, you know, learning from the hundreds of thousands of years of octopus tentacles and how they grab a variety of shaped objects, whether it's coral or prey. You know, the octopus is pretty darn successful. But then adding in that element of directly developed off of the gecko materials. It's something that has been a huge nexus point of being able to bring all those innovations together and then apply it to one of those challenging environments docking in space.

• 1:25:47Speaker 01

  All right, so you can grab onto a satellite even if you don't have a pre-existing connection. That's great, but it's challenging. As you mentioned orbital mechanics, that's always, that's the big bugbear, right? Of doing anything like this is you have to not just get to a satellite. You have to match its orbital vector. And if you're going to move it somewhere else, that's going to take additional fuel. So was that a big challenge to design? Are you using your own rockets, using space S rockets? Or how do you make sure you have enough fuel to then relocate the satellite once you grab onto it?

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  So the first answer is that I am not a rocket scientist. And it's always funny when someone says, oh, my friend Adam, he's a rocket scientist. I'm like, no, that's the part I skip over. There's plenty of people with rockets. They get us out of atmosphere. As soon as we're out of atmosphere, that's when we can switch over to electric propulsion. It is incredibly efficient. You do not need as much mass of fuel to be able to move a long distance. The trade-off is in time. So we made a decision very early on where we said, this approach, the way we're going to do this is going to be highly efficient, commercially viable, but it's going to take time. This is going to be a long look at how we approach a target, not a, oh crap, something went wrong, I need a solution in two hours. That's not what we're trying to offer with this product. We're trying to offer the long view of,

• 1:27:08Speaker 05

  if you can get there over the course of four weeks or four months, then you can go grab the object and remove it at a very efficient price point because the fuel you're using is measured in single-digit kilograms, not thousands of pounds of kerosene.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Right, so using electric propulsion. So tell us a little bit more about that.

• 1:27:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a concept called Hall effect thrusters, which are an amazing technology where you take a noble gas. So something for RK Xenon, the densest, stable one. But you can also use Krypton, that's the common one in Starlink's, who also use electric propulsion. And you are applying and forcing an electron into this noble gas that doesn't really want it. And then giving it a grid or an array where it can shed that electron. And that small gap between where it's given power and where it can shed the power, it travels incredibly fast. We're not relativistic, but an incredibly fast escape velocity that allows you to be highly efficient, but you're only doing it with a little propellant at a time. So it's a small thrust, it's a small push, but it's constant

• 1:28:11Speaker 05

  and you're going very far with each little push.

• 1:28:14Speaker 01

  So is it also technically an ion drive? Or is it not the same thing?

• 1:28:18Speaker 05

  It's a blurry line. And I'll be honest in admitting to my own thing of I'm not an electric propulsion engineer either. That is again, another area where there's the space economy, the modern space economy is a beautiful thing of hundreds of companies that all want to specialize in their one part. And that's why we had the confidence to start the company that we did because we looked at what we would need for a total solution and realized someone else already makes every single step of it, except for the end. Someone could have sold us seven years ago a full satellite that would get up to a meter away from a target, but it had no way to grab onto it. And so we focused on that product to complete the whole step.

• 1:28:55Speaker 04

  I will say as a fan of Star Wars and their twin ion engines and knowing some of the technologies we've developed, Adam, I'm actually a little bit mad we didn't ever call what we developed with some of our partners on that contract, a twin ion engine is the Tie Fighter. So we'll have to retcon that later.

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  So the piece that you're adding to this puzzle is the technology to grab onto the satellite. Let's talk about applications. So you talk about moving a satellite from one orbit to another. I'm assuming that's to extend the lifespan of that satellite?

• 1:29:28Speaker 05

  In that application of moving from one orbit to another, it's changing the life of a satellite. So you might have a national security satellite that's launched 10 years ago. What was our geopolitical target 10 years ago? Is that the same that it is today? You can imagine a satellite that was launched for a critical purpose when it was launched. And 10 years later, the situation has changed. And now you wish it was in a different orbit where it could be more effective. It maybe has enough fuel to do that, but only one time. So that service of in-space to a new in-space location is basically saying, instead of launching a whole new satellite, use the one you already have up in there and just move it into a better orbit for your new purpose.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so repurposing existing satellites rather than having to launch a new one every time, a satellite in a different orbit.

• 1:30:15Speaker 05

  And repurposing always imagines, oh, you've got to, you know, take a car tire and turn it into a swing set. That's what repurposing means. It also can be using the thing the way it was intended, but in a new location that it wasn't originally placed.

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  Right, right. And reading your material, it also seems like you can de-orbit satellites or other stuff if you want to as well?

• 1:30:39Speaker 05

  Exactly. And de-orbit is actually fun because that's where the life extension comes from. And specifically not because we're holding on to the target and giving it more life, but because the target isn't holding on to its de-orbit capacity. Right now, if the satellite has to de-orbit itself, it's holding on to fuel, quite a lot of it, to perform that final enormous journey down to the atmosphere. If it doesn't do that, the operator gets years of additional operation, additional revenue out of the satellite. And for us to come and remove it at the end only takes a portion of that extra revenue that they gain.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I didn't think about that. So yeah, because you can de-orbit the satellite, they could use their onboard fuel to extend the lifespan of the satellite itself.

• 1:31:20Speaker 05

  Exactly. It's the same amount of, it's the same amount of delta V. It's just are you spending it all at once or in a very short burst? And for a lot of them, they are optimized for that little in-orbit maneuvering, which is why they need so much to de-orbit because that's not the intended design of the equipment. For us, our intended design is to go a long distance. And that's exactly what de-orbit is, many long journeys.

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  And you can also de-orbit satellites that were never designed to de-orbit themselves?

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  Correct.

• 1:31:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, very few things were launched with the intention of ever removing them. Most things were launched of it'll never be touched by human hands again. And so that was one of the, you know, baked assumptions that we came into this industry with is how do you start with that? And so working from the most challenging of objects, you know, space debris and old rocket bodies and discarded, destroyed, damaged satellites. We started working with customers to understand, okay, there is no one universal through line for helping customers and the other objects out there. So that's how we ended up at the hardware of the Reach Tentacle System that we have today. But exactly that is, it's unprepared. It doesn't tell you where it is. It doesn't, you know, point the right police to it.

• 1:32:29Speaker 04

  There is no dock here, hook attached to the side of most satellites. So it's a lot of challenges in having multiple docking solutions per multiple objects. Now we can start to bring scenarios together. It's not just, okay, we can only do it this one way. That's really challenging and really inefficient for some of the propellant use. But that we can do multiple choices.

• 1:32:54Speaker 04

  Now we're somewhere.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  Now, can your satellite de-orbit another satellite without de-orbiting itself?

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  How does it do that?

• 1:33:02Speaker 04

  That was one of the very early design pieces of bringing it to a low enough altitude so we can release the client and our spacecraft can then propel itself back up to a higher orbit. Because otherwise, it's just one to one. That's not a very good ratio. So being able to do multiple missions, whatever that mission end case is, was a very early design requirement.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  So when you do send up one of your satellites, how many different missions can it carry out with the fuel that it has?

• 1:33:29Speaker 04

  The nominal use case is, you know, launching the sun synchronous orbit where there's a plethora of objects. And after we de-orbit one, we can immediately go for the next optimally placed object. In a case like that, we may be able to get five to six pretty decently sized objects, 200 kilograms to 400 kilograms, de-orbit five to six of them out of space. If it is in a, you know, more operational orbit, which is to say there's less objects, and so we may have to wait or spend fuel maneuvering to the next object. That's where you may get three or four de-orbits with each spacecraft. That's going from 1,000 kilometers operating orbit down to 300 to de-orbit them. What we would like to do in the future is bring them to a collection station, one that's placed at 950, and it's a short journey.

• 1:34:14Speaker 04

  And when you do that, the same spacecraft design with no changes to it now captures 30 objects.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I read that on your website, too. I was going to ask you about that. One question is, I mean, obviously, it's better to de-orbit stuff that's not being used than to keep it up there because that, you know, space junk is a huge, huge problem. But also, having a lot of objects that you de-orbit, we're starting to learn that burns up in the atmosphere and it's dumping a lot of materials and some of it not safe into the atmosphere. So wouldn't it be better just to keep it all up there? But, but what do you do with it? Let's say you're collecting a bunch of space debris. And I know you're calling this like a shepherd system. Is that correct?

• 1:34:57Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  And so what do you do with it?

• 1:35:00Speaker 04

  This is one of my favorite questions because I'm inspired, I'm inspired by companies that say they want to repurpose satellites or repair satellites. That is a noble endeavor and we absolutely need to do it. But I watch these companies struggle because going from where we are right now to that future, it's, it's hard to get the revenue to achieve that. What we're proposing is collecting all of the broken objects in one place, not because those objects are valuable right now, but because our service of removing them generates revenue. So this is an economic driver, not because we are collecting, but because we are more efficient at removing. Once you do that, this, you know, garbage can in space filling up is valuable.

• 1:35:42Speaker 04

  And if I can empty the garbage can, that has value in its own right as well. I can't just jettison it. Like you said, that's just creating more space debris. I've solved no problems. But if I can process the material into something usable, that's a way to empty the trash can. There's two main versions of that. It's taking two satellites from the same constellation, ripping the working parts out of one, putting them in the other and relaunching a working satellite. That's how repair happens. And it's not because that new satellite is sold at full price. It's because that new satellite cleared space for another collection. So that's one use case. The other use case is make more tin cans. The collection stations are made out of metal. The thing we're collecting is made out of metal.

• 1:36:25Speaker 04

  Find out a way to combine a lot of things into one more collection station and put that in orbit. So those are the two approaches by which we can use the thing we're collecting to be able to collect more things. And none of it is driven by the economic value of a reused satellite. That will be an economic outcome, but it's a side effect, not the driving factor. And I'll just shortly add that for people trying to get a sense of scale of, okay, I don't know how much a spacecraft weighs, let alone satellites. There's trackable 10 million kilograms of usable aluminum on Earth's orbit. That's a lot of beer cans or other ideas. So it's something that there's a, an entire, you know, mother load of opportunity just in the raw materials, let alone you look at the finished goods of microchips or solar

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  cells, et cetera. So there's, there's a lot up there as, as we get going down this path of collecting it carefully to have that next economy launch.

• 1:37:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So just like a summarize, it sounds like what you're saying is that the getting paid to remove the junk pays for the whole thing. You'll worry about what to do with the junk later. Even if you do nothing with it later, it's cost effective just to get paid to remove it.

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  Exactly. If you were challenged to clean up an entire, you know, large backyard or park, you'd probably want to bring a few, you know, trash bags with you, whether you're going to recycle it and, you know, turn it into mulch, or you're just, you know, burning it at the end. Either way, just out of your own convenience, it's the human nature of how can I make my life easier? Oh, wait, it turns out then I can also do something beneficial at the end. So that's, that's what we're aiming for is we'd rather reuse than just dispose.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  And repurposing, it sounds like what you're suggesting would require some sophisticated robotics to be able to do that.

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  Sophisticated robotics or bio robotics? That's the current debate within the office is are we doing this because we'll have robots that can do the repair? Or are we finally launching Austin into space and he gets to fulfill a lifelong dream of getting to work on satellites at a station at 1,000 kilometers?

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so they actually have people up there to do it.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  Correct. Yeah, there's, there's an economic case to figure out, does that make sense to have a person doing it? But the benefit of a person is they are extremely adaptable. They know how to adjust in the environment.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  Well, there's a lot of companies that are working on orbiting space stations, especially now the ISS is coming at the end of its life. There's Axiom, there's other ones. So it seems like there could be a pretty obvious marriage between what you're doing and these other private companies that are, that are planning on putting up private stations because they're going to have a lot of material needs. You've already paid, paid the price of putting this stuff into orbit, right? That's like the, what's the cost of getting a pound into orbit now or a kilogram? It's still like $5,000 per kilogram or something.

• 1:39:03Speaker 04

  Exactly. Every, everything in space starts at 5,000 and only goes up from there. So it's a lot of valuable things, even if it just looks like a chunk of aluminum.

• 1:39:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So collecting a bunch of garbage in orbit, it sounds like a good idea.

• 1:39:15Speaker 04

  Correct. And, and on that note of people at the stations, so the other space stations, first off, those are incredibly complex and expensive space stations because they have to host humans. We would love to piggyback off of that where our engineers live at those stations, but they fly up to a collection station, once it fills up, are able to process it over a matter of weeks and then fly back. So, you know, it's a bit of, it's a bit of travel as required in the job description, but I hope that the space engineers would be okay with that.

• 1:39:42Speaker 01

  Cool. All right. So another question I had is, because you're, you're talking about, oh, if we're going to go into an orbit that has a lot of stuff in it, we can get five, six satellites. But does that necessarily mean that you then have to contract? Are you then approaching the companies that own each of those satellites to say, hey, we're going to be in your orbit while we're there? Do you want us to service your satellite? Or are there now governments or other entities that are paying you? Or are you working on this to just clean up sections of orbit?

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  A number of operators, government and commercial, they operate plenty of satellites in one orbit themselves. So it's not something that you have to go to these different providers and, you know, try and collaborate. Okay, we're making a terrible marriage between seven different groups, some of them who might not like each other. It's, it's not that problem. Many times you'll see these constellations are in the exact same orbit with often the exact same spacecraft, which then often have the exact same failures.

• 1:40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. So give us an idea of where you guys are right now. You say you've, you've actually captured satellites in orbit, right? So the technology works.

• 1:40:44Speaker 04

  We have, to be fair, we have captured test targets hundreds of times in the microgravity of the ISS. We've also done all the environmental and T VAC and related testing on Earth. Putting all that together is challenging. And so that's, that's the next stage. And that's what we were able to announce with our government partners last month is that KMI has been selected to go do a government funded mission to go up, dock and de-orbit multiple US government satellites. So we've done, you know, practice shots 172 times in very challenging environments with a bunch of worst case scenario wrenches thrown our way. But it's something that we'll be going up for the full proof. We are ready with our vehicle by the end of 2027.

• 1:41:28Speaker 04

  Launch windows, as we're looking at them, it's likely going to be operational Q1 2028.

• 1:41:32Speaker 01

  Okay. So tests end of 2027 and you'll actually be doing this commercially in early 2028?

• 1:41:39Speaker 04

  That's the timetable as we have it. And that of course is for the first lay laps. So the first spacecraft going up there, we can build multiple. And so there is a exciting parallel, parallelism to this mission of you launch the one spacecraft, it's doing its thing, but you can have many going at one time.

• 1:41:58Speaker 01

  So how, how many satellites per year does that translate into in terms of either de-orbiting or repurposing or collecting?

• 1:42:06Speaker 04

  We are targeting a removal of about, about 40 satellites per year without collection stations. And once you start putting the collection stations into the ecosystem, you're getting into the hundreds per year. NASA did release a report several years ago that said, if we can remove 12 critical debris objects per year, we stabilize the entire orbit.

• 1:42:28Speaker 05

  Environment. Right now is not stable. There are debris objects that run into other debris objects, creating a lot more problems for us to deal with. And that will continue forever unless something is done about it. But the something to be done is not removing all 47,000 debris objects. It's removing 12 a year. So that is entirely within the grasp of just a single company, let alone multiple companies.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Do you guys have any competitors?

• 1:42:51Speaker 04

  Got, you know, friends astroscale from out in Japan. We've got the friends ClearSpace in Switzerland. There's a few groups and the famous examples of SJ 21 and 23 from China. And then there's some entities working on different aspects of the problem here in the States. But it's something that, again, when there's 40,000 of an object or, you know, very different cases of our friends over at Northrop Grumman Space Logistics Group, they just launched this summer to go up and dock with another set of satellites because they were able to really build into that special, you know, use case. Great. There will be cases where something specialty built might be better for a customer or for a mission profile. We are really getting the lion

• 1:43:35Speaker 04

  shares where we focus is how do we solve those edge cases? And once we solve the edge, it turns out it actually covers most of the field. So there's a number of different groups out there. There's been different technology for honestly now decades. We're the first to be able to do it as repeatably and as non-destructive. That's what I was looking for, non-destructive of not having to remove pieces of the satellite we are going to service.

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Great. Well, I love the idea of cleaning up and recycling low-worth orbit rather than just leaving, letting stuff continue to accumulate up there. As you say, it's not sustainable. So good luck with everything, guys.

• 1:44:12Speaker 05

  Thank you very much.

• 1:44:13Speaker 01

  Thanks for coming on the show to talk with us.

• 1:44:15Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 1:44:18Speaker 00

  It's time for science or fiction?

• 1:44:28Speaker 01

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Are you guys ready? Of course. Yep. We got three regular news items this week. Here we go. Item number one, pharmaceutical companies are now using agentic AI to fully automate drug development, orchestrating multi-step workflow from beginning to end. Item number two, scientists have developed a contact lens that can monitor biomarkers like serotonin continuously and in real time for over 28 days at a time. And item number three, researchers find that black tip sharks are able

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  to detect and respond to low-frequency sounds up to 620 meters away. Jay, go first.

• 1:45:16Jay Novella?

  Pharmaceutical companies are now using agentic AI to fully automate drug development, orchestrating multi-step workflow from beginning to end. Man, if that's not happening now, it's probably going to happen very soon. I don't know about it, the AI doing everything. But again, you know, I've said it before, like, there's probably a lot of, you know, a lot of these systems that have been developed that we are not really that aware of, you know, companies could have been spending so much money just to make something specific for them. All right, I'll put that one on hold a minute. I gotta think more about it. Scientists have developed a contact lens that can monitor biomarkers like serotonin continuously and in real time for over

• 1:45:58Jay Novella?

  28 days at a time. Okay, so again, with the contact lens thing, and is it powered? And if it's powered, how is it being powered? I don't know about that one. I like that one even less than the first one. This is the third one here. Researchers find that black tip sharks are able to detect and respond to low-frequency sounds up to 620 meters away. I mean, I think that one, that one feels like science to me right out of the gate. I mean, why wouldn't they be able to? 620 meters? I mean, that's far, but it doesn't seem like a crazy distance away. Okay, I'm going to say, Steve, that the contact lens one is the fiction because I just don't think, I simply can't figure a way of powering it, let alone having it do any kind

• 1:46:39Jay Novella?

  of data analysis. And I just don't see it happening. There's too many, too many different things here that don't make sense to me.

• 1:46:45Speaker 01

  All right, Kara.

• 1:46:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so Jay thinks it's the contact lens. I'm always really wary when one of the topics is scientists have developed a thing that they claim can do this thing. And it's like, okay, yeah, in a lab, maybe in a, you know, specific setting, maybe. That one doesn't really bother me that much. I mean, I don't see why, if there is detectable serotonin, like in your tears, in, you know, the water in your eyes, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to come up with a biomarker to detect it. And then, of course, tracking the data is not hard. So sure, that one actually doesn't bother me. So the two that stick out to me is whether pharma companies are using agentic AI. I think they are using agentic AI, but are you trying to catch us here by saying

• 1:47:31Cara Santa Maria?

  to fully automate, you know, this multi-step workflow from beginning to end? Or is there still some stage where people have to intervene? That I think that would be the reason it's the fiction versus black tip sharks able to detect and respond to low-frequency sounds 620 meters away is very far and sharks don't use echolocation. Whales use echolocation. So that one bothers me too. Like, I think sharks probably just notice movement, right? Or they hear stuff, but I don't think they're like clicking and, you know, they don't make the same noises that whales and dolphins do. So I don't know, maybe there's some new mechanism that was discovered there, but that

• 1:48:16Cara Santa Maria?

  one bothers me more. So I'm going to say that it's the sharks. I don't think that they could detect something that far away.

• 1:48:23Speaker 01

  Okay, so you all agree on the first one. So we'll start there. Pharmaceutical companies are now using agentic AI to fully automate drug development orchestrating multi-step workflow from beginning to end. You guys both think this one is science. And this one is

• 1:48:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God.

• 1:48:38Speaker 01

  Science.

• 1:48:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, good. It's like, not again.

• 1:48:41Speaker 01

  You're both good so far. So yes, this is happening. And all right, so here's the situation. So already we know, and we've talked about the fact that drug companies are using specifically created foundational models, right? So models that are trained on specific sets of data so that they could do things like design an antibody that has affinity for a specific receptor. And it can predict how much affinity that will have. And it could design how to build it. And it could just, and it could model, you know, they could basically do all these individual steps on the process from starting with a specific problem to ending with a specific either antibody or

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  protein or drug or chemical or whatever. But people were doing, were carrying it from one step to the next, to the next, to the next. But now they have agentic AI, which is essentially going through the entire process by itself. It will use, so the agentic AI is using these specific foundational models in order, each step of the way, it's interfacing with them and taking the results to the next step. And so you have a workflow that's entirely managed by the agentic AI, which again is, we saw coming and now it's happening. So that's pretty powerful, you know,

• 1:50:07Speaker 01

  when you could basically just give the AI a problem and it will squirt out an answer without having to hold his hand each step of the way. And that's kind of the purpose of agentic AIs, right, is to do the sort of multi-step process to basically to manage a workflow so that you're not managing it each step of the way. I feel compelled to say, I know we got a lot of feedback on last week from talking about AI. And I just want to point out that we try as hard as we can to be balanced when we talk about AI. We can't say everything every time, but we know there's a lot of problems with it. We know that it puts a lot of power in the hands of tech companies. There are issues in terms of power use. We, you know, we know there's a lot of hype surrounding

• 1:50:52Speaker 01

  it. But I, but I disagree with people who take the concerns with AI and turn that into this morally pure message of you can't say anything positive about AI ever. It's just not reality. The fact is that these AI foundational models and now these agentic AIs are powerful tools. And they are being used in research in many different aspects of research, and they are incredibly effective. And you just can't take that away. That is absolutely what's happening. Whatever your other concerns are, that's simply a fact. And it's, it's not, you know,

• 1:51:34Speaker 01

  scientific or skeptical or whatever, to deny that just so that your message is more morally pure. Does that make sense? You guys, you guys agree with that?

• 1:51:44Jay Novella?

  Well, yeah, I mean, we, first off, we're covering artificial intelligence largely because it is, it is the most rapidly changing and influential new technology, you know, that's out there. And, you know, it's, it has the potential to be so incredibly intrusive and changing to everything from our jobs to, you know, shaping the way that we think and perceive reality. I mean, it's, it could have such a profound effect on humanity. We have to cover it. We have to talk about it. And there, and no matter what we say here on this podcast, you know, things, these things are going to happen. Yeah. So we all need to be educated about it. We all need to, you know, be able to look at it from multiple different perspectives. One of them,

• 1:52:29Jay Novella?

  of course, from a skeptical perspective. But, you know, just because, you know, Steve, Bob and I use ChatGPT to help us do work and things like that, doesn't mean that we are giving all of artificial intelligence a pass and deeming it completely safe and nothing to worry about. As a matter of fact, we are very, we are very, very concerned about artificial intelligence and the negative impacts that it can have in a plethora of ways. But we do need to talk about it. We do need to understand it as much as we possibly can. And we do need to educate people about it so they can understand it and they, and they can deal with it in their own way as it affects their lives.

• 1:53:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. The fact is, it's high risk, high reward, and it's complicated. And we got to look at it in as thorough and nuanced a way as possible.

• 1:53:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  Okay, let's go on to number two. Scientists have developed a contact lens that can monitor biomarkers like serotonin continuously and in real time for over 28 days at a time. Kara, you think this one is science. Jay, you think this one is fiction. And this one is? Science. This is science. This is pretty cool. How is it measuring it, do you think?

• 1:53:40Jay Novella?

  Was it through the liquid in your eye?

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, the tears. Yeah.

• 1:53:44Jay Novella?

  But Steve, what's powering it? And is it data processing on it? And what's happening?

• 1:53:49Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like an assay, right? Like, it's got some reagent.

• 1:53:51Speaker 01

  It's a lab-on-a-chip technology, right? Which we've also been talking about for years. You know, where they sort of, they build all of the processes into a tiny little chip. This is just built into a contact lens.

• 1:54:04Cara Santa Maria?

  And like, your tears are salty. Like, that probably powers it.

• 1:54:08Speaker 01

  It can detect things to as little as 72 picomolar. And it has a pretty, yeah, the dynamic range of 0.1 to 500 nanomolar. And so, yeah, they had one that was calibrated to monitor for serotonin levels. And it was able to function for more than 28 days. So, and it's also able to reset itself. So it can continue to function, like, it could be in between each measurement. So, they demonstrated, and it is also, this is still in the lab. They demonstrated it in a porcine eye model. So, obviously, we need to do clinical research to approve it for use in people. But the technology appears to work.

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  And this is just an extension of, again, stuff that's been in development for years. But this would be pretty cool. Again, the question is, how would it be used? Like, any time where we could monitor some useful biomarker in a non-invasive, real-time way, that has lots of applications. So, we'll see. They chose serotonin because that would be a good marker for, like, overall biological stress levels. But whatever, there might be other things that are more useful. Okay, that means that researchers find that blacktip sharks are able to detect and respond to low-frequency sounds up to 620 meters away. Is the fiction? Because Kara is absolutely right. The study showed they could only detect sound, well, they, not necessarily only,

• 1:55:36Speaker 01

  but it detected only that they could detect sounds up to 62 meters away. So, I did the order of magnitude thing.

• 1:55:44Cara Santa Maria?

  What do they use to detect sound? Is it, like, ears?

• 1:55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:55:50Speaker 01

  And the construct that they used was that they would emit a sound at different frequencies and different intensities. And they would look to see if the shark responded to it. So, they were much better at detecting low-frequency than high-frequency sounds. You needed to up the intensity as you up the frequency. But they were able to, like, instantly respond by changing the direction of their movement, away, usually away from the sound. Now, they do mention, the reason why they were testing at this distance, though, have you guys ever heard of the difference between near-field and far-field sound? Yeah, it's just a technical term.

• 1:56:33Speaker 01

  And I hadn't encountered it before, but specifically with sound researchers. So, near-field sound is sound that's relatively close to you, as you might imagine. But it's close enough that, basically, the source of the sound dominates the sound characteristics. So, before it has a chance to sort of bounce off things and, you know, interact with the environment, right? Far-field sound is at enough of a distance that the room reflections are now playing an important role, mixing with background noise is playing a more important role. So, it just has different characteristics.

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  So, the question for this study was, it was previously believed that sharks could really only detect near-field sound. They wanted to see if they could also detect far-field sound. So, 62 meters is in the far-field sound range. And they were. So, this is the first time they've been, they've demonstrated that sharks can respond to far-field sound. But still, that's only 62 meters. 620 meters, remember, that's 6/10 of a kilometer.

• 1:57:39Cara Santa Maria?

  That's insane.

• 1:57:40Speaker 01

  That's, yeah. Now, whales can hear at that distance. But you're right, whales, you know, they communicate with each other over those distances. Sharks do not do that. So, yeah, it was a cool study. But yeah, I exaggerated it considerably to make it the fiction.

• 1:57:58Jay Novella?

  Well, you lied to us.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  I did. I lied like a bastard.

• 1:58:00Cara Santa Maria?

  As he does every week.

• 1:58:01Speaker 01

  Okay, guys, I'm gonna do the quote this week, since Bob's not here. This one comes from Sally Ride. Do you remember who she was?

• 1:58:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 1:58:08Speaker 01

  Physicist and NASA pioneer. She was the first American woman and the youngest person to date in space.

• 1:58:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, wow, I didn't know that.

• 1:58:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, she said, "I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals." It's very inspiring.

• 1:58:31Jay Novella?

  I like that.

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  "I wasn't sure, so I checked." And Sally Ride died in 2012 at the age of 61 from pancreatic cancer, which she had been battling for 17 months.

• 1:58:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure we talked about that on the show.

• 1:58:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just didn't remember off the top of my head.

• 1:58:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's so long ago now, yeah.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, well, thank you, guys, for joining me this week.

• 1:58:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:58:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

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