The Skeptics Guide #1009 - Nov 9 2024

Interview with Brian Cox; Quickie with Bob: Superheavy Element Chemistry; News Items: Biogenome Project, Ancient Solar Magnetic Field, MAHA, Miranda Ocean, Club 27 Myth; Who's That Noisy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Speaker 01

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

• 0:40Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, November 6, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jay Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:54Speaker 04

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Let's see what's going on in the world today.

• 0:58Speaker 04

  Oh, I think it's a waxing crescent moon out.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  You think so?

• 1:02Speaker 03

  It's warm. It's very warm.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  It's unseasonably warm out there. It's true.

• 1:05Speaker 04

  And Connecticut has been just beyond.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Seventy-seven.

• 1:08Speaker 04

  Twenty degrees above normal temperature.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, and Trump won the election.

• 1:11Speaker 04

  Fahrenheit.

• 1:12Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

• 1:13Speaker 04

  Oh, Halloween happened.

• 1:14Speaker 02

  Halloween.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  I didn't forget about that. That was pretty awesome.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Thanksgiving coming up.

• 1:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, something's happened, so.

• 1:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like a random assortment of miscellaneous stuff.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  So, listen, you know, obviously, we're recording this the day after the election. Trump, we just found out, you know, whatever, half a day ago that Trump won. We're still processing it. This is sort of a big thing to wrap your head around. We're not happy. We're not going to pretend we're happy. There's a great deal to be concerned about. He thinks global warming is a hoax. He wants to roll back anything, you know, that we're doing about it. He's going to probably put an anti-vaxxer in charge of our health care. I mean, there's a lot to be concerned about, but we're not going to talk about the politics of this. Obviously, there's a lot of scientific and skeptical considerations that we'll be exploring this episode and in the future, but we're going to move on. So, a lot actually happened. It's been two weeks since we've recorded a show, and we went to SciCon last weekend. That was a lot of fun.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  That was great.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, we had a nice time.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Skeptical events are always, always recharging for me, like getting together. We got to see some of our old friends. I gave a talk on controversies within the skeptical world, things that skeptics disagree with each other about. Cause I think we should focus on that more at these conferences. We should be working out with each other, you know, in a positive constructive way, the things that we disagree about. Cause while you still learn some stuff, it gets kind of boring talking about the stuff we all agree on over and over again. You know what I mean? Yeah. And then there's this like big elephant in the room. Right, right. And everyone's like, don't talk about the thing we can't talk about now. I was like, I just talked about it.

• 2:44Speaker 04

  Oh gosh. That's what you, that's when you should talk about.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That was an amazing talk. The best one I've ever heard, Steve, that you've done, standing ovation.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  Well, certainly the feedback.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  Accolades and tears afterwards by people. It was amazing to just experience.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Well, people were clearly hungry to address that issue, you know?

• 3:02Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 3:02Speaker 02

  Avoiding it is not the way to do it.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Nope.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Part of the talk was on the biological sex controversy. If you want to read about it, I actually blogged about it on Neurologica. Cause there was a bit of disagreement, which again, I think is healthy and good, but you can read about that there. We'll probably be putting out a video at some point. SciCon will be putting out the just recordings of the talks at some point. So I do think we, you know, need to explore these issues. And I think, you know, we can, if, hey, if there's a, if there's a group of people who should be able to disagree politely and constructively and focus on logic and evidence, it's us, right? I mean, we can't do it. Who, how could we expect anybody to do? We have to practice what we preach. You know what I'm saying?

• 3:45Speaker 04

  I agree. Holy, holy agree.

• 3:47Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, it's, look, not gonna lie, it's hard. You know, we've been, we've been doing this a long time. We've been trying to teach people critical thinking and, and sometimes the world doesn't bend the way that you'd like it to. And it's quite, actually often.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  And it's good to remind ourselves of a lot of these things as well.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that was one of the themes as well. It was an exercise in humility. It's like, look, we disagree pretty much along political lines. As much as we like to pretend we are trans partisan or whatever, we're not, you know, we are just as susceptible to ideological bias as anybody else. We just have to be more aware of it and confront it. You know what I mean? That's the whole metacognition angle, not ignore it or pretend like the other side is the only side that's ideologically biased and your side isn't.

• 4:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  You know, but motivated reasoning is so powerful. I think that's one of the hardest things, even for seasoned, knowledgeable skeptics to deal with. Cause we're good at it. We're good at motivated reasoning ironically, because people who are able to argue in a sophisticated way and put forth a nuanced argument and have a lot of knowledge at their fingertips are actually better at cognitive, at motivated reasoning. And they're more confident in it as well. Yeah. So that, so we have to be very aware. It's like our big Achilles heel in the movement. We have to be very aware of it. Yeah, so that was fun.

• 5:06Cara Santa Maria?

  I think also kind of understanding, oftentimes we talk about causation and the directionality of causation. It's such an important part of science literacy. And I think we have to remember it when it comes to our own moral standings and our own decision making around things like policy.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Because very often we may think that something is a decision or an ideology that we came to via evidence, when actually we came to it because, well, I agree with them about this, why wouldn't I agree with them about that? You know, is my position based on my investigation? Or am I open to somebody telling me what my position should be because, eh, we're on the same team?

• 5:54Speaker 02

  That was one of the controversies I referred to is the idea, the question of can all even ethical and moral questions be resolved with science? Or does it require philosophy and morality and ethics, you know, separate from science? I tend to align myself with the philosophers in the movement on this issue. I've engaged with that discussion and I think the philosophers absolutely crush it. You know, when they come up against the other people like, we don't need to do philosophy. Philosophy is irrelevant to science. Like, no, you're doing it, whether you know it or not, you are doing it. You're just doing it wrong. And then you guys went home and I went to Dubai. That was first time in an Arabic country.

• 6:39Speaker 02

  It was a very, you know, it was a good experience. So Dubai is a very interesting city. It's very wealthy. It's an international city. There was English everywhere. The only one touristy thing I did was like entirely in English. And but there's this layer of Arabic Muslim culture there as well. So it's kind of like you're in an alternate universe in a sci fi movie. You know what I mean? Where everything's the same but different?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  So I gave a gave what turned out to be a nine hour seminar on scientific skepticism. It's not a lot of time. It went by super fast.

• 7:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Really?

• 7:14Speaker 02

  I had the perfect audience because they were very smart, very engaged. They knew why they were there and they wanted something out of the conference. But this was all new to them.

• 7:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, that's exciting.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So they asked tons of questions, like every question was anticipating a future slides. Like, that's a good question. We're going to get to that or let's talk about that or that, you know. And you realize when you're doing, I didn't, I realized when I was writing it, but especially when I'm giving it, what a massive body of knowledge we have amassed under the umbrella of scientific skepticism. There is so much to talk about. Nine hours was nothing. It was scratching the surface.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  I can't talk nine hours about anything, even if it was counting numbers. I couldn't do it.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Well, Bob, I wasn't giving a nine hour lecture. You have to engage. It was asking questions. They were asking me questions. We were doing demonstrations. I know the psychological stuff that we do. You know what I mean?

• 8:05Speaker 04

  The Socratic method.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  It wasn't me blabbering for nine hours.

• 8:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Assuming you had breaks, too.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  And there were breaks in there. Yeah. There's three, three hour sessions with a break in the middle of each session. So I did what I usually do at these longer, longer classes that I give. I gave a quiz that I've come up with, which is, which is, you know, a quiz focusing on scientific literacy, critical thinking skills, media savvy, and just like belief in the paranormal, you know, kind of stuff. 30 questions. They were able to like do the questions on their phones and then I was able to like get. You did it all in Google Form, so you got like a chart, pie chart of all the answers.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Sure, yeah, everybody, yeah.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, so then we went over them at the end of the seminar, and it was a lot of fun. But what was really interesting is that they basically were average. They did their results, their results were aligned with a lot of published surveys about these questions. Like, one of the questions was, did humans and non-avian dinosaurs live at the same time? Sixty percent of them got that question wrong.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  What?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Oh. Yeah, so you, yeah, you, we're all science nerds, right? So like, to the, to us, these questions are blazingly obvious, but to even well-educated, these are all like CEOs, very power, you know, very high-end, high-achieving business people, but they're not science nerds. Very few of them were. There's a couple engineers thrown in there. But, and you just realize how, you know, how compartmentalized knowledge can be, you know?

• 9:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Part of the whole theme of the talk was to be humbling, you know? It's like, yeah, even you, you know, the whole idea, like, even though you might be very successful in one area, you don't know everything. No one's an expert in everything, and that was part of the demonstration, you know, of that.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  What was the name of your talk?

• 9:49Speaker 02

  And you still have a brain, you still have a human brain. What's that, Bob?

• 9:52Speaker 03

  What was the name of the talk? You Don't Know Squat?

• 9:54Speaker 02

  No, that was just, um, well, the whole theme of the conference was futurism, actually. So it was like,

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Science, Critical Thinking in the Future, or something is what I called it. But I did a little futurism at the end as well, like, from our book.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  Oh, damn, yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was good. It was very good.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Oh, so it wasn't specifically a skeptical conference?

• 10:12Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't. It was really, and it's month-long. It was a month-long conference where people were coming and going, you know? And it was just a series of lectures and seminars and classes on a bunch of topics. The guy who is the dean of the Dubai Future Foundation, Mohamed Kassam, he's a big, you know, fan of the show, has been listening to us for years. He's the one who,

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  who invited me there, and he, like, wants to inject skepticism into, you know, the United Arab Emirates and the whole region, you know, not just the UAE, not just Dubai, but like the whole, like, into the whole culture. He, you know, we may all get invited there in the future. Like, this is, he made it sound like this is the Beginning of our relationship, you know what I mean? This is a sort of a building.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 10:55Speaker 07

  Nice, nice.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's good. It's that's why it's great to like, because we've obviously been operating within our own culture for 30 years. It's nice to go somewhere else that where like there is there isn't, you know, an organized skeptical movement. Like it's just a virgin territory. It's like, oh, my God.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  I could be packed in 20 minutes.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  15 hour flight, just warning you, but.

• 11:18Speaker 07

  Bobby, you have to talk for nine hours about something.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  But the food, the food was incredible. I'm a fan of Middle Eastern food. Not as if that's a monolithic thing. It's a thing, it's like I had Iraqi food, never had Iraqi food before. It was Middle Eastern food, same spice palette, same kind of vibe, but it was different. It was everything was was just nothing I've ever had before. It was awesome. It was incredible. Anyway, that was a lot of fun. Yeah, I hope I expect we will be, we'll be going there sometime in the future.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Just please not October.

• 11:48Speaker 07

  No promises.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  But yeah, and it was, it was really interesting how similar it was. I had conversations with people who were, you know, like from the UAE. But I talked to somebody who was heavily involved in the power industry, you know? I could have been talking to somebody here. It was really no different. They had all the same issues, all the same information, you know? As far as that was concerned, pretty much the same attitudes. I was kind of surprised, but it's interesting how similar things were. But I think that's because it's an international city. And also they are looking to, I think they're looking to like elevate the UAE as a modern technological sort of state and Dubai as a, as an international modern city.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  So they're very interested in, in that sort of thing. Hey, George is here. George, how you doing, man?

• 12:38Speaker 03

  George.

• 12:38Speaker 07

  Hi, everybody. What's going on? What's going on? Do you, are you as excited as I am for December to like get here? Can we get the holidays happening? Can we get the vibe of the holidays, please, happening?

• 12:49Speaker 02

  I think we need to celebrate Pearl Harbor Day with a special event or two.

• 12:54Speaker 07

  Ooh. Perfect. So we've got this monster day, December 7th in Washington DC of all places. Are you ready for it? I hope you're ready for it.

• 13:04Speaker 05

  We're ready. Steve and I are working on supplementing the SGU swag stuff. So if you're gonna be there. The best and pretty much only time that you're gonna get good SGU swag is if you come to a live event. Cause we bring all the premium stuff. George, the question is, are you excited?

• 13:19Speaker 07

  We rarely do a big double day, a double show in one day like this. And what's so great about doing both a private show earlier in the day and then doing the extravaganza at night is we get so wonked out, giddy, funny, silly, almost like skeptic drunk by the end of it. It's a long day and those are the best shows. So if you're gonna go to one show this year, go to the extravaganza, go to the private show that's happening on the 7th. Cause it's gonna be this marathon day. It is such a blast. And what's super cool is this is one of our very special holiday themed extravaganza shows. We've only done this one other time. I think it was in Arizona, right?

• 14:00Speaker 05

  I think, yes.

• 14:01Speaker 07

  During that Arizona show, we had the famous Yukon Cornelius incident. Do you remember that?

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Of course I do.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 14:07Speaker 07

  One of the biggest laughs of all time. Ask us about that sometime. If you see us, ask us, we'll tell you in DC about the Yukon Cornelius incident that happened in Arizona. It's fantastic. We'll try to recreate that on some level.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  It's also important to say, guys, that the private show is a private show plus, which means there's an extra hour of content. Basically, we do audience interaction. It's different every time.

• 14:32Speaker 07

  Yeah, we've done it. We did a scavenger hunt once. We did a bunch of trivia things once. We did like some song stuff once. Every time it's different, every time it's special. So even if you've done this before, come to it again, cause it's guaranteed to be different. Same thing with the extravaganzas. Every extravaganza, the framework is the same, but there's so much improv and incidental stuff that happens. Every show is different. We literally had people going to two shows in a row and we did this back a couple of months ago and they, they fully enjoyed both shows.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  I love doing, I love doing those shows because we've had weekends where we've done like six shows in three days. Like we've had some pretty serious tours that we've been on. But I really like it when the, all of us have to like really work together to make it all happen. And it's such a feel good when we, when we do the shows and we finish them. It's like, oh my God, guys, it was so awesome. Right?

• 15:19Speaker 07

  And then we get to see, we get to see everybody, you know, for the most of our lives, we're sitting here talking to microphones in our basements. So it's kind of nice to see people's faces and hear everybody laugh and interact and enjoy themselves. There's a lot of audience participation that happens at the Extravaganza as well as the private show. So come on out. Uh, it's, it, talk about a great gift for someone who likes the show. I mean, could you think of a better present?

• 15:41Speaker 05

  And George, everyone should know that you are one funny bastard.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  It's true.

• 15:47Speaker 07

  I, I just had my license renewed.

• 15:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. Funny bastard license renewed. That's good.

• 15:52Speaker 07

  Funny bastard licensed renewed, freshened. I got the new, the new test taken for that. So yeah, all good. No, we're excited. I'm excited. I hope you guys are as excited as I am because that means that you'll be equally as excited. And then the equation's all even and good.

• 16:06Speaker 05

  Go to the skepticsguy.org and Ian has put these special buttons on there that you can click. And if you're interested in either show, you just click the button that you like. And also don't forget, I do think there's some VIP tickets left for the Extravaganza. And also let's not, while we have George on, let's, let's plug one more thing because it's actually a huge deal.

• 16:28Speaker 07

  Not a con?

• 16:28Speaker 05

  Yes. We have Not a Con coming up. This is, yes, the weekend of May 15th. It's going to be in White Plains, New York. And let me tell you, we had a goddamn awesome time.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  It was epic.

• 16:40Speaker 07

  Fabulous time.

• 16:41Speaker 05

  It really was the best conference I've ever been to, and it was the best conference I was involved with. And real quick, I must've said this story, but I'll just say it really quick. There was this one guy that came up to us and said, you know, I came here. I didn't have any friends. I didn't know anyone. I was almost not going to come. And I said, what the hell? I gotta force myself to do it. And we have a, a, an event wide puzzle that you have to live through the entire event to be able to figure out the entirety of this puzzle. And he like picks up the puzzle sheet and he said, the next thing you know, I'm sitting down with like six people I don't know and we're hanging out like we're friends and that was it.

• 17:12Speaker 07

  Bingo.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Bingo. Yeah, he was hooked in.

• 17:15Speaker 07

  The magic of not a con.

• 17:16Speaker 05

  But isn't that what we saw, guys? I mean, you know, we've known for a very long time that we've curated an amazing group of listeners and patrons. But this group of people, man, I gotta tell you, like, I feel like I have a lot of friendships with people that come and there's a lot of love and a lot of affection and a lot of awesome stuff. So if you're interested to come have a great time, you know, this conference is about socializing. If you're interested, you can go to noticoncon.com. Remember, George, that Ian made this weird URL?

• 17:48Speaker 07

  Noticoncon.com.

• 17:49Speaker 05

  Noticoncon.

• 17:50Speaker 07

  Check your con con.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  Or you go to our homepage and just click on the Noticon button.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's a Noticon button there.

• 17:55Speaker 07

  Noticon two skeptical mystery.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  And George, what's happening at Noticon this year? My God, what's happening at special?

• 18:02Speaker 07

  I can't even keep track of it. We have so many fantastic ideas happening. We got this kind of Beatles theme that's going through. We might have like a special super game show, another game show, more audience participation. We're gonna have SG University where you get to learn stuff in 15 minute chunks from all these experts on stage. It's just overwhelmingly cool, but the most important thing is like you just said, Jay, you get to hang. We've built it in so that there is this time to just meet and greet and hang and talk about stuff and have that very wonderful beer that Westchester is famous for. It's just, it's just the best. It's the best time.

• 18:37Speaker 05

  Well, George, thank you for popping in.

• 18:40Speaker 07

  Thanks. I'll pop in anytime. I'm gonna go pop out now.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  And we'll see you on the other side, friend.

• 18:44Speaker 07

  Alrighty. Bye, guys.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  While we were at SciCon, we actually did a number of interviews. We have a really great interview coming up later in this episode with Brian Cox.

• 18:56Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  The Brian Cox.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  And Brian Wecht, who is our friend and collaborator on Noticon and other things, who's also. The Brian Wecht, who's also a physicist and a ninja and an actual ninja.

• 19:08Speaker 05

  Don't even ask, because we can't.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  He was there for the interview and made it extra special. He was the special sauce. So that'll be later in. The show, but now we're going to go on with our new items. Bob, you're going to start us off with the quickie.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Sure. Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. So an international team of scientists have actually determined the chemical properties of some super heavy elements, moscovium, element 115 and nehonium, element 113. So this makes moscovium the heaviest element ever chemically studied. And you might be thinking, how the hell do they test an element chemically if that element lasts for milliseconds? Before decaying. Very good question. So that's what I'm going to describe. The lab setup was very slick. Essentially, they create super heavy particles and using gas chromatography, they quickly kind of shuttle those elements through various detectors that are lined with quartz and gold.

• 20:06Speaker 03

  Now, if the element, say moscovium, if it binds with the quartz or the gold, that is detected and recorded, as well as how long it binds with that, with the gold or the quartz and where that super heavy element ends up. So that binding information is invaluable data as to how these elements behave chemically. Now they found generally, the results said that both super heavy elements, moscovium and nehonium, they had weak interactions with quartz, and this actually lines up with their predictions. So here's where it gets really interesting. I wasn't aware of this. They predicted that relativistic effects would make super heavy elements less reactive than similar elements on the periodic table with fewer protons, say like lead.

• 20:50Speaker 03

  For various reasons, they think lead and moscovium should behave similarly in how it binds with quartz and gold, for example. And it didn't. The moscovium did not react, did not bind as well, and that was predicted. So it's believed that relativistic effects come to play with super heavy elements because they have more protons. All right. So imagine that you've got, you've got a super heavy element with 115 protons. There's so many protons in the nucleus. Now that increases the electromagnetic forces that are available, that are in play in the nucleus, and that alters the electron, the electrons in the atom. Now classically, if you look This classically, you could say that the electrons get closer to the protons because

• 21:33Speaker 03

  the electromagnetic force is stronger and that makes them move at speeds closer to the speed of light and doing that, you're gaining mass. Now, you can look at it quantum mechanically, you can look at it as the electron cloud around the atom becoming distorted because of the stronger electromagnetic forces because of the protons, right? You're with me? So either way you look at it, whether you look at it classically or quantum mechanically, the super heavy elements should change how they interact with other elements chemically and that's exactly what they showed with this experiment. These relativistic effects come into play with these super heavy elements, causing them to behave differently chemically. That's exactly what they showed. So sure, this doesn't mean that we're going to add moscovium or nehonium to the iPhone

• 22:18Speaker 03

  20, but understanding the chemical properties of super heavy elements could lead to breakthroughs in material science and other fields. Who knows what kind of interesting breakthroughs could happen with a deeper understanding of relativistic effects influencing super heavy elements. So this has been your Relativistic Super Heavy Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 22:37Speaker 02

  Thank you, Bob. Jay, give us the first news item. You can tell us about the Biogenome Project. What is that?

• 22:44Speaker 05

  All right. This is awesome, guys. The Earth Biogenome Project, it's also called EBP. This is a really amazing effort. They started it in 2017 and their goal is to sequence the genomes of all 1.67 million named eukaryotic species. There's 8.7 known species, but they're just talking about the ones that are currently named. This encompasses, ready? Plants, animals, fungi, and other microbes. So the eukaryotic organisms include, let me give you the bigger list. There's animals, plants, fungi, and protists encompassing all multicellular life and some unicellular species.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  So basically, Jay, that's everything but bacteria and archaea.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Is there anything else like algae, single cell?

• 23:29Cara Santa Maria?

  It depends on the type of algae. Blue green algae is not.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  So there's some of each. Okay.

• 23:34Speaker 05

  Well, guys, they specifically are distinguishing eukaryotes from simpler, you know, the non-nucleated prokaryotic organisms like bacteria. So I think we define that pretty good. So the Project Scale, literally, it's so massive, bigger than earlier efforts that have come before, like the Human Genome Project, and you know, that was a cool thing that they did. That project, it focused on mapping a single species genome, so the human species, right? The Earth Biogenome Project's ultimate goal is to revolutionize this understanding of all the Earth's biodiversity, which will improve conservation strategies. It'll drive advancement in agriculture and human health.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  So there's three phases. It's structured, the first phase is in 2026, they want to sequence 10,000 species. This should be covering one representative per eukaryotic family. Then Phase 2, 2030 is the end date. They want to expand that to 150,000 genomes, which includes one for each genus. And then by Phase 3, which is 2032, they want to complete the genomes for all 1.67 million named species. It's huge, absolutely, but they have a plan. So let's go into that. They don't have an idea or a concept. They actually have a plan. So far, the EBP, right, remember I told you that's what they call it?

• 24:58Speaker 05

  They've sequenced 3,000 genomes from 1,060 families. And this covers a lot of work, but that's far from its Phase 1 target. And the initial cost estimates for Phase 1 were over 600 million. But they were able to reduce that to 265 million, because why, guys?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  AI.

• 25:16Speaker 05

  That's a great idea, but that wasn't it. Ah. Because of rapid advancements in sequencing technology. And again, keep in mind, like sequencing technology is constantly being improved on as the years go by. It's been in a constant state of flux, which is awesome because look at that price difference. 600 million to 265. So by comparison, the Human Genome Project's first draft of their genome project cost over $100 million. But again, keep in mind, the Human Genome Project work on one species. The EBP is going to work on 1.6, somewhat more, you know, 1.6 million. That's so much more, it's ridiculous. So despite the advancements, the EBP's progress needs to happen faster than it currently is. And they're trying to figure out how they're going to do it.

• 25:57Speaker 05

  So what they want to do is they want the weekly genome production to scale from 20 to 721 by Phase 2. And they've scoped it out that that'll meet their deadlines. So unlike its predecessors, EBP is a decentralized global project. This is great. It involves affiliates from 28 countries. Two major hubs are BGI in China and the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. So the project needs regions that have massive biodiversity to get funds to keep the project moving forward. So the problem is, is that a lot of these places that have a huge biodiversity, they just don't have enough money to make it all happen. Some regions have funding, they have these funding issues, but the people behind the EBP came up with a solution to help them out.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  And this is a great idea. They developed a portable sequencing lab they call G-boxes. And I could not find anything on why they call it G-boxes. So these labs, you know, they can be deployed wherever they need to. Each unit costs approximately 5.5 million to install and operate over a three-year period. And they can sequence between 1,000 and 3,000 genomes annually. And they can just pump these, you know, these G-boxes out where they need to go. And they're relatively, you know, inexpensive, all things considered. So the funding has been ongoing and it's been a huge challenge for them. You know, right now, guys, as everybody knows, there's geopolitical tensions and they get in the way. And it really matters when countries don't agree and don't have good relations with each other.

• 27:26Speaker 05

  You know, science basically suffers a lot, and particularly between the US and China. And you'd think, you know, why can't they just talk and fix it? But they can't, because we can't even agree in, you know, each country can't even agree on what's going on. Even a partial success here would still be awesome. You know, if they don't actually get all the way and and they're actually describing it as transformative. You know, a high quality reference genomes could do lots of things. It could accelerate conservation efforts for endangered species. It could identify genes critical for crop resistance, as an example, or it can improve our understanding of ecosystem dynamics. There's a lot, a lot to this. It's not just getting the information, but there are applications there that they know of. So as it stands, EBP right now, it's the most ambitious genome initiative in history.

• 28:10Speaker 05

  And if it's fully successful, it'll mark a new era in science, which is offering insights into intricate tapestry of life on Earth. You know, great, it sounds great, but really they're saying we're going to basically have a backup of the genome of all these named species. And it will be the foundation for lots of future solutions and global challenges that are coming up. Right? Because if we want to save species, we can understand, you know, what their needs are better. And if we lose the species, we might someday be able to bring it back, which would be great. So even in the project's early stages, the project does demonstrate, I would consider it to be extraordinary potential and and a hugely collaborative workspace for for science on a planetary scale. You know, that's the exact environment that science, I think, is best when there's

• 28:54Speaker 05

  tons of people involved globally and it's something that's happening all over.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the cool thing is like, essentially this will give us a map of all living things like at the genetic level. And we've got to start, we can start asking really interesting questions, evolutionarily and otherwise. You know, it's just a massive data set. And imagine that we stick AI after it to try to find

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Stick them.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Patterns and stuff, yeah, in in that vast data.

• 29:17Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I mean, you would think this would be something that would have hopefully already been done, but it's still incredibly laborious. It's very hard with today's technology. But, you know, this type of science actually drives innovation as well. So it's really good when, for example, I just read a cool statistic that like NASA. In 2022, NASA brought tens of billions of dollars of industry by its inventions and everything that all the science that they're doing like it's really valuable downstream. When you know they literally hand over the technology that they're creating to companies in the United States. So bottom line is I you know, I'm 100% behind this project. I think it's wonderful. It's the exact type of science that needs to be funded globally.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  And I can't wait to hear that, you know, that bell ring when they finish.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  Jay, let me ask you one more question.

• 30:05Speaker 05

  Yo.

• 30:05Speaker 02

  Does the sun have a magnetic field?

• 30:07Speaker 05

  It's gotta. Of course it does.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does. Um, how strong is it?

• 30:11Speaker 05

  It's Steve, it's it's wicked strong. Yeah.

• 30:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's like a 18 slash 23 in Dungeons and Dragons.

• 30:20Speaker 05

  It's it's the strongest force I would imagine in in the galaxy, no?

• 30:26Speaker 03

  It extends past Pluto. I mean.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  It's big. It's big. It's actually, it's very variable. So the earth's magnetic field at basically the earth's surface is.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  One gauss?

• 30:38Speaker 02

  It's point six gauss.

• 30:41Speaker 04

  Oh, not even one. Okay.

• 30:42Speaker 02

  The sun's mag, the average magnetic field of the sun at its surface is one gauss. So just slightly stronger, average strength around one gauss, but it's highly variable. With sunspots being the strongest, that's why that's what sunspots are. You can get the sunspots can reach magnetic field strengths of 2,000 to 3,000 gauss.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  That's attractive.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  That's huge, right?

• 31:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, you got, yeah, you got very powerful magnetic effects like reconnection happening that could unleash very powerful.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Now, it's very, it's a very big magnetic field. It's bigger than earth's magnetic field, but it still decreases with distance. So at the earth, how strong do you think? The sun's magnetic field is at the earth's distance?

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Probably pretty weak because.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  It's pretty weak. It's 50 micro gauss.

• 31:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Ooh, wow. One 500,000?

• 31:35Speaker 02

  It's a, yeah, a micro is a million, so 50 millionth of a gauss.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  50 million.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  Or five micro tesla. So I guess a tesla is 10 gauss.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  Well, that's barely detectable, right?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  What about at Pluto?

• 31:47Speaker 04

  Oh, it has to be.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  Nano gauss.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  I mean, really?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, 2.2 nano tesla.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Got it. Oh, Tesla.

• 31:55Speaker 03

  I got nano right.

• 31:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  Or, so what would that be? That would be, or 20, or 2 nano gauss.

• 32:02Speaker 03

  Ah, still right.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  Awesome. What, what does that even do at that?

• 32:06Speaker 02

  It's negligible, right? That's basically negligible. I don't even know if we can measure, basically, calculating it.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  But it, it still keeps out the, um, the interstellar medium, the infamous ISM.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  To some extent, yeah.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. It, it defines the boundary.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Until you get to the heliopause, right?

• 32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And helio shock and all, helio sheath and all that other stuff.

• 32:26Speaker 02

  Now, the question is, has this always been the case? Or has the, in the past, especially the distant past, especially the very early solar system, was the mag, the sun's magnetic field stronger?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I'd say much stronger. Aren't there a lot, don't some young stars have, are very kind of chaotic, like, are they, were they like Wolf-Raifert stars?

• 32:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. How could we answer that question, do you think?

• 32:51Speaker 03

  Well, we, how do we know? You know, time machine would do it.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, that'll do. Is it the amount of?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Look at other stars.

• 32:56Speaker 04

  The amount of elements, uh, present in the current, uh, star versus the, what we estimate was in the early star.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Or, we could measure it.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Huh?

• 33:06Speaker 03

  From other stars?

• 33:07Speaker 02

  No, because.

• 33:08Speaker 04

  Through telescopes, looking.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  How do we know what the Earth's magnetic field was in the past?

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Oh, you look at like fossilized magnetism.

• 33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  Oh, they, yeah.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:17Speaker 04

  Or, or the water samples?

• 33:18Speaker 02

  No, water. You're looking for rocks that have elements that will align themselves to a magnetic field. And you basically, you dealign them and however much energy you have to put in, to dealign them is how much energy was put in to align them, basically. I think this is how it works. So then we could say that, well, that's how strong the magnetic field was when this thing crystallized, right? When this formed. So how could we get rocks from 4 billion years ago?

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Oh, asteroids.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Asteroids, exactly.

• 33:46Speaker 04

  Meteors?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Asteroids and meteors. So for meteors that hit the Earth, basically, those are going to tell us about the magnetic field of the inner solar system. Because most of the meteors that are going to land on the Earth probably formed in the inner solar system, and we have done that. But if we could get an asteroid from the outer solar system, then we could get a measure of the magnetic field, you know, when that asteroid formed, probably 4 billion years ago, whatever, 4.6 billion years ago, in the outer solar system. So this is what was just done. Do you guys remember Ryugu? The Japanese-

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yes. It went and landed on an asteroid and took a sample.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  So the asteroid was Ryugu, right? We talked about this, I think, when they recovered it and they got the grains from-

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Just like we talked about, Ben New was the NASA project. This was the Japanese one. So they recently, a team analyzed particles from Ryugu for signs of an ancient magnetic field in the outer solar system. And what they found was nothing, right? They didn't, they found no evidence of a magnetic field. But what they said, what this means is, given the techniques that they used, they can only say that there's an upper limit to how strong the magnetic field could have been, and that's 15 microtesla. So if there was a magnetic field in the outer solar, so past Jupiter, when I say outer solar, I'm talking about past Jupiter.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  If there was a magnetic field beyond Jupiter, it would have been, you know, basically where that asteroid formed, it would have been less than 15 microtesla. Which is not negligible. It's small, but it's not negligible. It's not in the nanotesla range. And what do I mean by not negligible? Something very specific here. Because one of the questions was, what was the impact of the sun's magnetic field in the formation of planets and other objects circling the sun? They analyzed other data than the-

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Researchers concluded that there may have been a, a, um, other data basically indicated that there was a five microtesla magnetic field in the outer solar system, which fits with the, it had to be less than 15 microtesla. So this is not completely confirmed. They are hoping to get the same analysis from the material brought back by asteroid Benu and to see if they can confirm that. But the data that we have so far is kind of lining up to there was probably a weak magnetic field, but not insignificant magnetic field in the outer solar system. So what, what effect does the magnetic field have on the formation of the solar system? You know, when the solar system condenses out of a cloud of gas, like it becomes a

• 36:36Speaker 02

  basically a spinning disk, the sun forms it in the middle and you have a cloud of ionized gas, like a disk of ionized gas surrounding the sun. It's ionized, so it responds to a magnetic field.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  The thinking is that in the inner solar system, that magnetic field, the sun's magnetic field would have caused clumping to occur, which probably formed into the inner rocky planets. And so the question was, could the same process have been happening for the outer planets and even other stuff out there? And this, so this is sort of moving in that direction to say, yeah, it could have. You know, if there was this five microtesla or whatever field out there, um, it was probably 50 to 200 microtesla in the inner solar system. If it was like five or whatever, microtesla in the outer solar system, that could have contributed to the formation of the gas giants and, and basically everything condensed into like asteroids and comets and stuff past Jupiter.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  Uh, so that's why they're so interested in this question, you know, because this affects their models of early planetary formation, right? In the early solar system. Yeah. So the next step I think is going to be doing the same analysis of particles from Benu to see if that also lines up with the, maybe they can get a more precise number or confirm that, that there is, what there was like a five microtesla magnetic field in the outer solar system at that time. So that's pretty cool.

• 38:03Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, we're going to go in a bit of a different direction here. Tell us about the possibility of RFK being in charge of our health.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Oh geez.

• 38:14Speaker 02

  RFK Jr., I should say.

• 38:15Speaker 03

  Oh wow.

• 38:16Cara Santa Maria?

  RFK Jr., who Trump has publicly verbalized he plans to put into a, quote, "position of power," actually, I guess the real quote was "to go wild on health."

• 38:29Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 38:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, I think that's actually what he said, and possibly, quote, "declare war on the FDA." He's a proponent of this sort of newly dubbed "health freedom movement," or what some are calling "Maha," Make America Healthy Again. When he suspended his campaign for the presidency in August of this year and backed Donald Trump, he promised to make him, to give him a big position. He hasn't verbalized, or he hasn't specified what that position might be, heading up health policy. You know, some have speculated positions with the FDA or the CDC, although those require approval, like congressional approval, whereas, let's

• 39:14Cara Santa Maria?

  see, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, or possibly a czar role, I think would be possibly easier to put him into.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wouldn't require approval.

• 39:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  If you just appoint him. You're the health czar, and that's it.

• 39:28Cara Santa Maria?

  You're the czar, and now you do the things.

• 39:29Speaker 04

  Right, which is like his personal advisor, in a way.

• 39:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  To the president.

• 39:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And so a lot of people that are writing about this are showing a tweet. I mean, there's so much data to mine here. There's so much evidence of what will happen, that this is not crystal balling. This is just saying, well, this is what the dude said he was gonna do. But here is a tweet from RFK Jr., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who, quickly, like, I guess for those of you who don't know who he is, he is, he is an environmental lawyer and actually has a very long track record of sort of working to protect vulnerable people against environmental disaster. But also, he's a hardcore anti-vaccine activist,

• 40:16Cara Santa Maria?

  and I love that according to his Wikipedia page, he's an environmental lawyer, American politician, anti-vaccine activist, and conspiracy theorist, just right there in the first line. So he Founded the Children's Health Defense, which is an anti-vax group. They're one of the biggest peddlers of COVID-19 vaccine misinformation. Obviously, he tried, he attempted to run for president. And he is a Kennedy, so he's the son of Robert F. Kennedy. And he's the nephew of JFK and Ted Kennedy. Back to the tweet here. So this was October 25th, 2024. So only about a week ago, two weeks ago. FDA's war on public health is about to end. This includes its aggressive suppression of psychedelics, peptides, stem cells,

• 41:01Cara Santa Maria?

  raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals, and anything else that advances human health and can't be patented by pharma.

• 41:17Speaker 02

  At last.

• 41:18Cara Santa Maria?

  At last.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  We will be able to use sunshine without the FDA's interference.

• 41:23Cara Santa Maria?

  If you work for the FDA and are part of this corrupt system, I have two messages for you. One, preserve your records. And two, pack your bags.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 41:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, boy. Okay, so.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  David Gorsky describes this as an extinction level event for science-based federal health policy.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Ouch.

• 41:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's in the headline of a very long piece that he wrote about how dangerous this would be. And he, of course, wrote it the day before the election. So let's kind of talk for a second about some of the things that RFK Jr. wants to see changed. A lot of people are focusing on fluoride. I think we'll come back to fluoride because, Steve, you wrote a piece about fluoride.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, because of this, yeah.

• 42:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Because of this, exactly. But there are other things that have been highlighted across the board that are problematic. Obviously, he is one of the biggest anti-vaccine voices out there. The New York Times did a post where they sort of dug deep into whether or, like, can he actually affect real change here? Like, could Trump ban vaccines, for example? And what the New York Times. What this article at least is saying is that, you know, the short answer is no, because public health in the US is mostly controlled by the states, not the federal government. And then where there is federal kind of oversight, that's with the FDA.

• 42:52Cara Santa Maria?

  They license the vaccines and the president can't just remove a product that's lawful and licensed from the market, at least not without like trying to do so through legal maneuvering. But the president could put pressure on the FDA. The president could make sure that the judges that are appointed limit the power of federal agencies. We also know that he, before he left office last time, where he changed the classification of a lot of federal agents.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I forgot the name of the order, but yeah.

• 43:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, federal employees so that they could be let go and their jobs were not protected. And so he passed this before he left office last time, like week one Biden reversed that, but it's very likely that he's just going to dive right back in once he takes office. So yes, there could be a lot of change here. One person is quoted in this article saying, there's a lot of mischief that can be done, but a flat out ban, no.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  But they could, you know, pull funding if anybody doesn't follow their dictates. That's how the federal government works. The state controls it, but the federal government could just pull funding.

• 44:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, exactly. Affordable Care Act, you know, recently, and I think that this was in a, in a final bid to get elected, Trump kind of pulled back a little bit on his rhetoric around the Affordable Care Act and said that he like never mentioned ending the program. He never would have thought about such a thing, but there's a lot of, like, he's on tape, you know, saying that he did want to appeal Obamacare or the ACA. As we know, that actually requires an act of Congress, but he could use executive power to undercut the law or to restrict access to the law. And this article really detailed. Details a lot of the ways that he would be able to do that.

• 44:49Cara Santa Maria?

  So like, for example, in January of 2021, Biden issued an executive order that strengthened Medicaid and the ACA, and Trump could just undo that as soon as he's in office. And then if Congress were to repeal the act, what would come next? Well, going back to what you said, Jay, well, there's concepts of a plan.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they don't have them.

• 45:11Cara Santa Maria?

  You have no idea.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  They got nothing.

• 45:14Cara Santa Maria?

  They got nothing.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  There is nothing. There's only so many levers you could pull there. You know, that's, there's no magic here, you know?

• 45:20Cara Santa Maria?

  And so then we're gonna backtrack a little bit to fluoride. But I did want to point out, a friend of the show, Dr. Andrea Love, she has a blog called Immunologic, and she wrote a piece back in September about the Congressional American Health and Nutrition Roundtable. The headline of her article is, "The Congressional American Health and Nutrition Roundtable Was An Egregious Display Of Anti-Science Disinformation." So basically, what happened is that on Monday, September 23rd, a GOP Senator for Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, hosted a public taxpayer-dollar-funded event where he put together what he claimed to be a panel of,

• 46:05Cara Santa Maria?

  quote, "experts who will provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health," end quote. But what really he put together was a panel, including, I'm going to list some names, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jordan Peterson, Michaela Fuller, Casey and Callie Means, Vani Hari, Max Lugavere, Courtney Swan, Marty Makary, Alex Clark, Jason Karp, Brigham Buehler, and even more, scrolling, scrolling, Jillian Michaels, Chris Palmer, and Grace Price,

• 46:48Cara Santa Maria?

  none of whom have any expertise relevant to what this panel is supposed to cover.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  They're all a bunch of cracks and shovels.

• 46:56Speaker 03

  Harry, that's, that's a

• 46:57Speaker 02

  That's the food babe.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Food babe, right?

• 46:59Cara Santa Maria?

  All of whom are notorious anti-science quacks.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:04Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, they all peddle misinformation. And not only do they peddle misinformation, the vast majority of them benefit financially from misinformation. Many of these individuals have, make their money having outlets, whether it's books or blog posts or podcasts or whatever, that are directly funded by supplement industries. So what they did during this panel is they demonized Big Pharma, they demonized big food, but then they talked a big game about, quote, "big wellness and big organic food" without calling them that, right? And this is the sort of playbook that we've seen over and over and over.

• 47:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Why would you trust the, the kind of mainstream individuals who have, you know, the FDA and the CDC have their boots on their necks, when instead you can trust the wellness industry? Because they have the real answers.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:03Cara Santa Maria?

  And the reason that they're able to tell you what's real is that the FDA isn't, you know, tying their hands behind their back. And this is really the basis for the Make America Healthy Again movement. Deregulation.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:17Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just about going in and deregulating, deregulating, deregulating. The funny thing is, when we, we are already quite deregulated when it comes to alternative medicine, but when we start to deregulate legitimate medicine, that's when the pseudoscience is no longer compartmentalized. It now bleeds its way into the legitimate medicine game.

• 48:40Speaker 02

  It becomes mainstream.

• 48:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And Big Pharma, the very, quote, "industry," and I'm saying that in, you know, air quotes, "Big Pharma," the industry that they are so angry with, is going to start peddling pseudoscience.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  Totally. They're happy to be deregulated. It's like, oh, we could sell crap, we don't have to research and charge up the wazoo for it? Sure. We're all in. This is not an anti-big pharma bill. It's a pro quackery, pro snake oil, you know, movement. That's what it is.

• 49:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep. Deregulation will hurt so many people.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 49:13Cara Santa Maria?

  People will die.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  They are dying.

• 49:16Cara Santa Maria?

  They are dying and they will continue to die. And very often, the people that will die are women and children, individuals of color, LGBTQIA, individuals, people who are vulnerable.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and low socioeconomic status.

• 49:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 49:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And so now I guess we should talk a little bit about fluoride. I don't want it to take up the whole thing because we have covered it in the past. But basically RFK Jr. is touting lines from Dr. Strangelove. And I think, you know, it's, the argument is that fluoride, I've got to find his quote because...

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I got it right here.

• 49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  You got it right here. Oh, here, I have it too. He described fluoride as an industrial waste. Industrial waste is associated with arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. And then in an interview just this past Sunday, Trump said that the idea of doing away with fluoridation, quote, "sounds okay to me."

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 50:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And so Steve, you did a really great job of going through each of the things in that list and debunking. You know, we know that although some fluoride is produced through industrial processes, it is not industrial waste.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  And it doesn't matter. It's like one of those, it's a chemophobia thing. Because at the end of the day, it completely dissociates into fluoride ions. That's it. It's a fluoride ion. It's an element. It doesn't matter. It's like saying this hydrogen atom came from poison. Who cares? It's now a proton. You know what I mean?

• 50:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 50:46Speaker 02

  It doesn't matter where you sourced it from. It's, that's just fear mongering chemophobia. That's what that is.

• 50:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course. But that's, that's totally from the playbook, right?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 50:54Cara Santa Maria?

  That's from all of the rhetoric. Arthritis, bone fractures, bone cancer, IQ loss, neurodevelopmental disorders, and thyroid disease. You do a great job of going through and saying, okay, this was this one study, or this was when, you know, the levels that were looked at were, you know, X number of times greater than any acceptable level by the FDA. And time and time again, what we have seen...

• 51:18Speaker 02

  It's the EPA, actually, but...

• 51:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, thank you.

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the fluoride is naturally occurring in water and the US has

• 51:25Cara Santa Maria?

  So they have to mandate it.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  high levels of fluoride. The EPA sets limits. If it gets higher than that, we actually reduce the level of fluoride. We only add it up to a very tiny amount that's well below anything that causes any issues.

• 51:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Doses. And by the way, again, this is a decision that's made at the local level.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:45Cara Santa Maria?

  There are states in this country that don't, or I guess I should say cities within states in this country that don't fluoridate the water. Seventy-two point three percent of the US population has access to fluoridated water, according to the CDC. And the CDC calls fluoridation one of the 10 great public health achievements of the 20th century because fluoridated water helps with oral health. It reduced cavities and tooth decay by 60% in the Grand Rapids experiment in 1945, where the first efforts to fluoridate water began. It was such a resounding win that other jurisdictions decided to do this because the evidence was overwhelming.

• 52:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it saves money. And then they say, well, yeah, with fluoridated toothpaste, you don't really need it these days, but when they take it away, tooth decay goes up.

• 52:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 52:39Speaker 02

  So clearly we do, right?

• 52:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Because of course, when we democratize something like fluoride in the drinking water, everybody has access to it. As opposed to requiring it to be viewed, I mean, I hate to say this because it shouldn't be a luxury item. It should be a necessity item, but for some people, it is a luxury item. And for some people, they just don't have access to the oral hygiene that they need. Maybe they're using fluoridated toothpaste, but they're not brushing their teeth multiple times a day. Maybe they don't have an opportunity to go to the dentist and use the fluoride that they give to children at the dentist.

• 53:14Speaker 02

  Well, this is what we're headed for.

• 53:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It's really, really scary. And that's just one of, you know, the ACA fluoridated water and vaccines, that's just scratching the surface. There is so much pseudoscience that RFK has peddled. And when you, again, look at the things that were covered by the panel, that's sort of like a good. Early taste of what we could be up against, all of the wellness industry bullshit that they were peddling, it really, really scares me. Just so much pseudoscience and just outright lies.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  That's a nightmare.

• 53:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Cara. All right, Bob, I understand the moon Miranda has water and maybe something else.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Perhaps. We may, tentatively, perhaps, maybe have yet another icy moon in our solar system with a subsurface ocean. And we know what that means, right? My first thought is like, oh, maybe there's chemosynthetic life in there. But that's definitely jumping the gun. The moon, though, doesn't orbit Jupiter or Saturn, but the far more distant and less well-branded planet Uranus. How could such an interesting oceanic possibility be teased out of such a distant, small object? The study published in the Planetary Science Journal, led by Tom Nordheim, planetary scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. So this starts with Uranus, the second farthest planet at 19 AU's, that's 93 million miles,

• 54:40Speaker 03

  the distance Earth to the sun. Jupiter's only five AU's, so this is like a lot farther away. This is the planet that rotates on its side. You know, that one giving it crazy seasons, like at the poles, it's 42 years of sunlight and then 42 years of darkness. Wow. Yeah, that's nasty. The star of the study, so to speak, is Uranus's innermost moon, Miranda. The moon is tiny. It's got a surface area of Texas. Texas is big, but it's small for a moon. With a diameter of only 470 kilometers, it's one of the smallest observed objects in hydrostatic equilibrium in our solar system. If it's in hydrostatic equilibrium, that means that it is round because of gravity.

• 55:22Speaker 04

  Like the moons of Mars are not round.

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Right, right. Depending, of course, what it's made of, but you know, they're rocky moons. So how do we go about determining that there might be water under the ice on a moon that's 2.7 billion kilometers away?

• 55:36Speaker 04

  Call the water company.

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Yes. Another option would be to, well, in this case, it's ironically about what's on the surface of the moon. And we first got a look at Miranda from the pictures Voyager took way back in 86.

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  It looks like a patchwork of different moons that got stitched together. It's really kind of bizarre. There's like these, these grooves or canyons that are 12 times deeper than the Grand Canyon. And there's these huge cliffs, and there's these weird trapezoidal shapes, geological shapes called coroni. They think it just be, it might be dense, you know, metallic or rocky material from previous collisions with meteors. Clearly, Miranda has a strange and complicated geological past. So to reconstruct that past, the researchers combined the old with the new. They used the old Voyager pictures, and because that's really the best images that we have of Miranda, even though it's, you know, some 86, I mean,

• 56:31Speaker 03

  Voyager got pretty damn close. And we incorporated those old pictures into modern modeling techniques. Nordheim described it as squeezing the last bit of science we can from Voyager 2's images. So how does the surface of Miranda shed light on its interior? They say in their paper, "In this paper, we will attempt to constrain Miranda's interior structure from interpretation and modeling of surface stress patterns." So the researchers claim that by determining what caused these, those weird deformed surface geological shapes and structures, they, they will be able to winnow the possibilities of what the interior of Miranda is like, based

• 57:12Speaker 03

  so, based primarily on the surface. Now, the model showed that, or concluded that 100 to 500 billion years ago, Miranda could have had a subocean, a subsurface ocean more than 100 kilometers deep. So now, how do you actually create an ocean on a small moon so far from the sun? The most likely culprit, they think, are orbital residences with nearby Moons, these are really fascinating. Resonances like this are like pushing a kid on a swing. You know, the kid's swinging and you push at the right time and the kid goes farther and farther and farther. Orbital resonances are like that. The tidal forces between the moons of Uranus can be amplified by these resonances to

• 57:54Speaker 03

  the point where the moons actually experience a change in their orbits. And that's why Miranda's orbit's inclined a bit, they think. But it's not only the orbit that changes because of these resonances. You can change the axis of rotation itself and the tilt of its axis. So it just wreaks havoc with these moons, these resonances, when they line up, you know, when they're properly set up. So this can also, obviously, wreak havoc on the moon's surface. And they calculated that all of this resonance movement and stuff actually compressed one side of the moon and stretched the other side. And that's probably one of the main reasons why we're seeing such a weird surface going on there. Now, all of this also creates friction and heat in the interior, and that's what they

• 58:38Speaker 03

  think could have created the ocean there. So it basically kind of almost boils down to tidal forces again, which is what we see in the moons of Jupiter as well. We've got moons that, some of the most volcanically active moons around Jupiter are because of the tidal forces. It's just constantly kneading and compressing the interior. So it's kind of related to what we're seeing here, although these resonances are a little bit different. So how can that ocean still exist, though, after a half a billion years? Because this happened, you know, 100 million to a half a billion years ago. Why is this ocean still there? So they say that one reason is that this tidal heating could persist because of this eccentric orbit that the moon is now in. Now, they're not saying that the ocean is still, you know, 100 kilometers deep.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  They say it's probably smaller, but it's probably still there. And the other bit of evidence for that is that if it were frozen solid, if the moon had no subsurface ocean, they say that there would have been evidence of that on the surface, and they do not see that evidence. So that's basically the gist of their argument. In the future, they may be able to more definitively demonstrate that Uranus still has a subsurface ocean. That would be very cool. I mean, I don't think, I mean, this is so far away. I mean, imagine three times farther away than Jupiter. I mean, I don't think we're going to be getting there anytime in our lifetimes at all. But, uh, but maybe someday we will be able to say that this is one subsurface ocean that not only exists.

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  And like I said at the beginning, perhaps if there's a subsurface ocean, there could potentially, potentially be some sort of, of life, some, you know, a single-celled organism, some microorganisms that are, that are based on the chemo, you know, chemosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. And that will be, of course, mind-boggling, but actually I hope, I'm hoping that we'll find that nearby with Saturn and Jupiter and not have to go all the way to Uranus, but.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  Right, so much closer.

• 1:00:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  One more thing to keep an eye on. Yeah, but not going to be a probe there anytime soon.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  No, which is the, the process they went to, to, to model this and come to that conclusion was, was different and fascinating to me.

• 1:00:39Speaker 04

  Yep, no probing of Uranus. Got it.

• 1:00:44Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, what's the Club 27 myth?

• 1:00:46Speaker 04

  Have you heard of this before?

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:00:50Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 1:00:50Speaker 04

  Yes, I think you, I think maybe you have, but you don't know it as the Club 27 myth, or, or what they call the 27 Club, that's for sure. But, um, this is a cultural phenomenon referring to a group of famous musicians initially, and then artists and some other actors who got folded into this group, who have all died at the age of 27.

• 1:01:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Like Kurt Cobain.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  Right, right, right. But, but Kara, it didn't start there. It's not a modern phenomenon.

• 1:01:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right, Janis Joplin too?

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, this dates back to, actually, the first one was 1969. That was when I was born. And Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones, he dies at age 27. He drowned. It was tragic and the rock world was stunned by that loss. But then in 1970, Kara, Janis Joplin also at age 27 died. And Jimi Hendrix, age 27, dies in 1970. So, all right, you got Brian Jones, 69. Now Janis and Jimmy are gone in 1970, all age 27. And then one year later, 1971, Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, he was 27.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  Dies at age 27.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  He's in the club.

• 1:02:06Speaker 04

  In the club. Holy crap. What is going on with our music stars dying at age 27? Is it some kind of curse? But regardless, forever there it was, cemented in our culture. If you were a fan of any kind of music growing up in the seventies, even the early eighties, my guess is you have some kind of memory of discussions about the 27 Club phenomenon.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  And then what started happening is people started taking a peek back in time before the club was realized. And you'll find out that legendary bluesman, Robert Johnson, he was aged 27 when he died. So that, yeah, you add that big name to the club. Going forward, like you said, Kara, Kurt Cobain from Nirvana in the 1990s, Amy Winehouse, also aged 27. In 2011, she passed away. And so you wind up casting sort of this larger net because you wind, because what people will do is they'll start throwing actors and artists and other media people effectively into this more, and you get more relevant data points.

• 1:03:09Speaker 04

  So what do, what do our brains do? Well, we like to soak up these types of celebrity related cultural phenomenon and accept them sort of as, I don't know, like a quasi fact or fact-ish sort of thing that exists. And maybe you think, wow, what are those odds? All these amazing musicians and artists and celebrities dying at age 27? What are those chances? Are we really capable of knowing and understanding what those actual chances are with statistical significance? Probably not. But this has been studied before. I went back to an article from over at Vox from 2015. And there was researched on that year by a professor of psychology and music at the University of Sydney. Her name was

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  Diana Theodora Kenny. And the most common age of death for musicians was not 27 in her study. Do you want to guess what the age was most common death for these artists?

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  68.

• 1:04:06Cara Santa Maria?

  69.

• 1:04:07Speaker 04

  Bob's a little closer. 67. 56. 56 was the age.

• 1:04:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Because musicians live hard.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  11,000, over 11,000 musicians were in that study. And she studied people who died between 1950 and 2010. Only 1.3% of those musicians died at age 27. 2.3% were the most at age 56. So, yeah. And if you, she graphed it on a, on a chart, it makes a very nice, you know, bell curve statistically speaking. But regardless of that and other studies.

• 1:04:42Speaker 04

  This continues to be a subject of revisiting and more studies, but in different ways. And this is where we ran into the news item this week. It's being covered by a lot of places, but Scientific American, and her name is Rachel Newer, N-U-W-E-R. She wrote an article about this titled "The Myth That Musicians Die at 27 Shows How Superstitions Are Made." Yeah. And she's referring to a new study that appeared in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, P-N-A-S, titled, all right, bear with me here, "Path Dependence, Stigmergy, and Memetic Reification of the Formation of the 27-Club Myth," with authors Zachary Donovan

• 1:05:27Speaker 04

  and Patrick Kaminsky. What they were trying to do here is basically get into how a legend or a myth that emerged out of random but strange series of events went on to have a real-world impact by shaping the legacies of other famous people who subsequently died at age 27. In effect, they're saying, yeah, it's a myth, but there is maybe something going on here that is of some significance. And what they did is they looked, they used Wikipedia and they looked at various languages, obviously, throughout the world. And they used an analysis of people who were born after 1900 and who died before 2015.

• 1:06:10Speaker 04

  And they came up with over 344,000 Wikipedia pages. But then they used page visits as their proxy for fame, right? So this is based on that. So they put that model together. And do you know what happened when they looked at it? And as far as looking at all the artists who died at age 27, was it a, was it a significantly different number? Was there, was it the same? What do you guys think?

• 1:06:37Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  It was the same. It was the same.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  That's why we didn't know.

• 1:06:40Speaker 04

  It was the same. That did not change. But here's what they did find. They said, among those in the 90th percentile of fame and higher, for those that did die at age 27, they experienced an extra boost of popularity in the form of more page visits to their Wikipedia page that could not be accounted for by other factors. They say the effect was particularly pronounced for the most famous of the famous or individuals who roughly achieved the 99th percentile of fame. And that bump, they say, indicates that people who die at age 27 are considerably more likely to be more famous than comparatively those who even die at just age 26 or 28.

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  So that's confirmation bias.

• 1:07:25Speaker 04

  I suppose so.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  That's what that is. Yeah, 100%. Yeah, so you have, like, people underestimate how many potential musicians there are, right? Especially if you include celebrities. It's thousands and thousands. You could come up with the same kind of number of people who die at any age, and there's a bell curve, you know, that has nothing to do with the age 27. That's just a, you know, people notice a pattern, and then they include the data in subsequent formulations. You know what I mean? They carry that quirky observation forward. And then, especially then you engage in confirmation bias, you're looking for data to fit the pattern and without looking at all the data. It's just classic. You know, this is why, even if, like,

• 1:08:08Speaker 02

  we see this same phenomenon happen even, like, in the clinic, where you, by coincidence, see a couple of patients with some kind of a correlation, and say, oh, maybe there's something here. So you look to see if there's other cases, and you find them, and you include the original observations in the data, and you have a case series that makes it seem like something's happening. It's all just random quirkiness that has nothing to do with anything. You need an independent, thorough evaluation with new data to see if this holds up. And of course, it doesn't. It's just random nonsense.

• 1:08:37Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 1:08:38Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan. Jay, it's Who's That Noisy Time?

• 1:08:41Speaker 05

  All right, guys. Going back at least two episodes, here's the noisy that I played.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  You guys have any guesses?

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's Donald Duck maneuvering inside of a tank.

• 1:09:10Speaker 05

  That's pretty good, okay. I got so many good, good guesses, meaning ones that I thought, you know, just were worthy of that sound. The first one was from Joe Vandendenden, and he says, "Is that the walker bringing the spacecraft carrier, the Europa Clipper, back out of the launch pad?" Very cool guess. I mean, yeah, I could see that. I hear what you're saying there, and I think that's a great guess. You are not correct, and I would like to actually hear that sound if you ever can get it. Another listener named Matthew Morrison said, "Hi, Jay. My daughter Neve, and I think it is a ship moving through the water where there is a layer of ice on top that is breaking as the ship moves through it." Another fantastic guess, because there are water-like sounds going on in that clip, so, you know, I think that was a pretty cool guess.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  You are incorrect, and tell Neve, no big deal. Everybody tries. It's great to try. Sometimes we actually win, right? So keep trying. Next one is Matt Soskins, and he said, "Jay, great to meet you at SciCon. Before I give you my guess, I want to tell you about my grandmother's brownie recipe and how it led to me, led me to know this noisy." And then, of course, he's kidding, because I ask people, you know, "Please don't write me these big stories." Oh, that's funny. And then he said, "Water-powered organ, or bird." Now, whenever anybody says "or a bird," I just ignore that, because, of course, you know, I shouldn't even be taking guesses from people with more than one guess, but it was a joke, I get it.

• 1:10:36Speaker 05

  Water-powered organ, it is not a water-powered organ, but again, there is, you know, there is a water kind of noise in there, and I can see where he's coming from. Next one is from Ben Simon. He said, "This week's noisy puts in mind movie scenes of nervous naval officers quietly glancing at each other during a tense submarine dive." So I'm going to say this is a recording of a record-breaking deep dive by a research submersible. Another awesome guess. It's not correct, but damn, that's an awesome guess. But there was no- Winner this week, and that's perfectly okay. Like I said, you know, we try, sometimes we fail. What did you want to say? Try or do not? There is no fail, right?

• 1:11:13Speaker 02

  Do or do not, there is no try.

• 1:11:15Speaker 05

  Right, that's it. Well, that's not, does not apply to who's that noisy. So I want to thank everybody for being honest, because since nobody won, that means I'm 100% sure that everybody that listens to this show that sent in a guess respected my request to not write in if you knew the answer, because I knew a lot of people knew the answer out there. So you know what? Props to you guys. More, more reason to go to Nauticon, because we have high-quality people that listen to this show. So guys, what is that sound? I was really excited to hear it after I knew what it was, and then I listened to it, and it ended up being as cool as I hoped it should be. Okay. This is the sound of molten metals swirling in the Earth's core as its magnetic field flips.

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  Can't record that. The tape recorder would melt.

• 1:12:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I thought. No, but that, guys, that is the internal swirling sound of the Earth's core, and it made me think of something really interesting, and luckily, it's not the case. Imagine if we constantly heard that noise. But that noise is, you know, think about how loud that noise must be. It just can't penetrate all the rock and regolith and everything. But I just thought that was a wicked cool noise. Let's listen to it again.

• 1:12:34Speaker 04

  That's loud. I still hear Donald Duck in there a little.

• 1:12:37Speaker 05

  There's a Bow Creek noise in there, so I get all those guesses.

• 1:12:41Speaker 03

  Jay, you mentioned as the magnetic field flips. Wait, what does that mean?

• 1:12:45Speaker 05

  I guess they were recording it in anticipation of the flip. I don't think it has anything to do with the flip, but that's why they were recording. And before I move on to the new noisy for this week, I have a response to something that we talked about. You know, Kara was mentioning that, let me see, back in episode 1007, we heard the voice of both Helen Keller and her interpreter. Kara commented on how strange it is to hear the accent that was used by the interpreter whenever recordings from that time period are played. Because nobody speaks that way anymore. And then Kara speculated that that's probably just how people spoke back then, but it sounds affected. So a couple of people wrote in about this. This particular email is from someone named Stephen Hopkins.

• 1:13:28Speaker 05

  And he says, it absolutely was affected as it was manufactured. It was a manufactured accent, which did not evolve organically. It's called mid Atlantic accent or the transatlantic accent. And it was a basically, it was a put on accent by northeastern American upper class in the early 20th century. And it was adopted by many broadcasters and actors of that time period. Because it made them sound cultured and because they felt it helped their voice come through more clearly. Okay, so the voice is BS, right?

• 1:13:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's an affectation.

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Well, we've spoken about this before.

• 1:14:02Speaker 05

  We absolutely have.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  The mid Atlantic accent. What's yeah, what's interesting about it is that it's not a regional accent. Like it doesn't exist anywhere. It is a learned accent. It's taught like in finishing school or whatever. And it is essentially like an eastern American accent with some British affectations and you know, and mixed in. Like British sounds mixed in. And so, and it is supposed to be a very like you enunciate things very clearly and you, you know, like.

• 1:14:33Cara Santa Maria?

  But it's also got this like high and mighty sound to it. Yeah.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  Right, exactly. But the thing is, so then, and so that person might not have been speaking that way because she was being recorded. She might've been speaking that way because she was educated at one of the schools who taught her to speak that way. And maybe she did lay it on a little bit thick because she was being recorded. We don't know because everyone has their own individual manifestation of like what their mid Atlantic accent is. But that doesn't mean there isn't also temporal accents. Because if you watch documentaries of like, I've watched a lot of World War II documentaries. And you watch people in the 40s being interviewed on film. And they're not actors and they're not, you know, they're not upper class affectations.

• 1:15:18Speaker 02

  They speak in an accent that doesn't exist today. You know, it's like the, that's right.

• 1:15:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, the war effort.

• 1:15:26Speaker 02

  It's not that exactly.

• 1:15:27Speaker 04

  1920s is roaring along.

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  Mercy.

• 1:15:33Speaker 02

  But that's what, that's when you, that's when you hear like what real people sounded like at the time, because they're not actors, they're just people in the war, you know, or whatever. So there is absolutely temporal accents as well, but I do agree that that person's accent was probably a learned, you know, transatlantic or middle-.

• 1:15:50Speaker 05

  I really don't like it. It sounds so put on, you know?

• 1:15:54Cara Santa Maria?

  It does. It sounds snobby.

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Just don't like it.

• 1:15:57Speaker 02

  Right. It was snobby. It was literally snobby. I mean, that was kind of the point.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Roger that.

• 1:16:02Speaker 02

  And it just sort of faded away after World War II.

• 1:16:03Speaker 05

  All right. So, good job, everyone that sent in all those great guesses. I have a new noisy for you this week. Check this out.

• 1:16:24Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 1:16:24Speaker 04

  That's Ready Whip Whip Cream being dispensed.

• 1:16:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, we know that. Like, it's like 11 o'clock at night and you get it in the refrigerator.

• 1:16:34Speaker 04

  That.

• 1:16:35Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  That's straight into the mouth. Yeah.

• 1:16:37Speaker 05

  That is like, that's a right goddamn passage in the United States.

• 1:16:41Speaker 04

  Oh, we should all take one tonight.

• 1:16:43Speaker 05

  So, um, okay, guys, if you know this week's noisy, or if you heard something really cool, email me at [email protected].

• 1:16:51Speaker 02

  All right. So let's go on with that interview with Brian Cox and special guest Brian Wecht. And for those premium patron members, you get to listen to the full uncut version of that interview. That'll be up this weekend.

• 1:17:15Speaker 02

  Well, joining us now is Brian Cox. Brian, welcome to The Skeptic Sky to the Universe. Ah, pleasure. Pleasure to be here. You are one of the people that we've been hoping to get an interview with for a very long time. You are obviously one of the superstar science communicators in the world. We really appreciate what you do. So, we were talking about, you know, making the transition from being basically an academic, a scientist, to being a science communicator. How, how has that worked out for you? How do you feel that, about that? Well, I mean, the first thing to say, it was an accident. So I didn't really plan In fact, in my early career as a PhD student and then postdoc, all I tried to do was get research fellowships. So no one would bother me and then just do research and I didn't even want to teach. I just wanted to avoid everything about, apart from doing particle physics.

• 1:18:01Speaker 02

  And then I got involved in one of the sort of funding crises that happen every now and again in all all countries, I think, in the UK. So I began to get involved in arguing for more funding for research. And that brought me into contact, I suppose, with the media and the press. And so it was an accident, really. And then the BBC in the UK interviewed me a few times and then said, why don't you make a little documentary on the radio about particle physics? And then why don't you make a little TV show, a little low budget thing about particle physics? And so it happened by accident. And now, I mean, I love to teach, so now I choose to teach at the University of Manchester. I teach first years, quantum mechanics and relativity, actually.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  And I, and I, obviously, as you've said, I get involved in making television programmes and so on. So it was, it was something that I came to later in my career. But I very strongly believe that it's an important part of an academic career if you choose to do it. And in fact, I was at the University of Manchester last week. We had a big sort of worldwide universities conference there. And I spoke at that and said that I think it's extremely important that if academics want to engage in whatever capacity, it doesn't have to be making television programmes, but just in speaking about climate science, as we spoke about today, for example.

• 1:19:27Speaker 02

  Then that should be seen as not only positive, but it should be part of an academic career if the academic chooses for it. So promotion case and so on. And so I've come to believe that it's extremely.

• 1:19:39Speaker 07

  Extremely important, of course, now to engage and we can talk about why the older reasons why I think that's the case.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, obviously, I completely agree with you. Also, being an academic myself, I'm always curious, asking my fellow sort of academic science communicators, how's that going for you? And how specifically, how does the university, do they agree with you that this should be part of an academic career? And that you get credit for it for promotion? And I know there's a little bit of a divide. I think it's worse in the US than in the UK. So what is, what's your experience been?

• 1:20:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, the University of Manchester, actually, we have a, so we have the promotion, they call it the legs of the promotion case. And they are research, teaching, administration, and we call it social responsibility.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:20:23Speaker 07

  We, so we have the, so it's a quarter, basically, of the case it can be, which is public engagement, as we might call it. So, but I think it depends very strongly on your vice chancellor, the head of the president of the university. But also, and I spoke about this at this conference last week, it can often be that, I do find that the people right at the top are very, that they understand, as I think we all understand, that it's vitally important to communicate science. Of course, in a, in a democracy, as Carl Sagan said, the idea that you have a, if you have a population that has no contact with the way that we acquire reliable knowledge about the world, then the decisions that democracy makes will be flawed. So.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:05Speaker 07

  So, and I think people at the top know that, that you can have problems in universities with the kind of middle management, the heads of department level and things like, you know, because of the funding streams and so on. So I think that's where the, in the UK, if there's going to be a problem, it will be with your kind of line manager. It won't be with the people at the top who understand the wider picture.

• 1:21:28Speaker 03

  Brian, I talk a lot about particle physics on the show, and I want to get your sense of how you feel about your confidence in the future. You know, you've got the LHC, who's, they've scaled up now to what, 14 tera electron volts? And the Higgs boson is still like the biggest thing that they've done. They've made a lot of discoveries. But how is your optimism in the future for being able to reveal some new physics beyond the standard model? Do you think we'll ever, in a reasonable amount of time, get to a regime where we can discover new physics? Or is it probably forever beyond?

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Technology that we can build and finance to discover is it just too far beyond us for a long time now.

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  It's a very good question and the answer is for the first time in the history of particle physics, we don't know.

• 1:22:11Speaker 03

  It's a little scary, right? It's a little scary.

• 1:22:14Speaker 07

  So the LHC, I should say, it was, why was it built at that energy? It was built at that energy because we knew that the standard model without a light Higgs broke down mathematically speaking at those energies. So what that means in reality is you either discover a Higgs boson of some kind or some other mechanism.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:22:37Speaker 07

  And in fact, I worked on physics without a light Higgs at the LHC before we turned the LHC on. So signatures, the model breaks down. One of the places it breaks down most obviously is in the scattering of W bosons, for example. So you can bang W bosons together, WW scattering it's called.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 07

  And if you calculate that process without a Higgs boson in the theory, then it gives you nonsense, basically, energies of actually 1.4 TV, right? So well within the scope of the LHC.

• 1:23:11Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:23:12Speaker 07

  So that's why you could, you could with absolute confidence build that machine because you knew you were going to discover something. It's also true to say, many of my colleagues who've been in particle physics longer than I have would say, but it's also true that most of the machines that we built discovered things they weren't built to discover.

• 1:23:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:29Speaker 07

  So this is, you know, so, but, but at least you knew there was an energy threshold, which was within the scope of that machine, that you'd see something.

• 1:23:38Speaker 03

  Right. Justify the billions of dollars spent, is it?

• 1:23:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. Now, you're absolutely right now that at the moment with LHC, we're in a, it's exciting that we're in a precision physics regime. So we're still looking for, obviously, new particles. Most people, I think, would have put money on supersymmetry.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  That was my field when I was a theorist.

• 1:23:57Speaker 07

  String theory, it comes out of string theory. I'm sure that nature is supersymmetric at some scale.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  It seems very plausible, right? And also plausible that the LHC might have seen some. Sure, but nothing from the LHC. But nothing.

• 1:24:11Speaker 07

  So you're right that, what do you do? I mean, it's true that particle physics goes. In phases where you then go into a precision measurement phase, like the accelerator before it, LEP, in the same tunnel.

• 1:24:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24Speaker 07

  You know, we were making high precision measurements on the W and Z bosons and that that was necessary information. So you you kind of go to a Higgs factory type model, for example, if there's nothing else. You start making high precision measurements on the Higgs, which is what we're doing with the LHC at the moment with the upgrades. Um, while still looking for new signatures. So so we know that there's it's not complete, right? We we know that.

• 1:24:48Speaker 03

  The standard model.

• 1:24:49Speaker 07

  But we don't know where the energy scale is.

• 1:24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  So we don't know how big to make the next one. Is that basically the answer?

• 1:24:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  No, the word.

• 1:24:55Speaker 03

  But it's not just big, it's the type. So you could do a muon collider or something like that. If you're gonna do a baryonic collider, then you'd have to just scale it up, but you can do lots of other stuff.

• 1:25:04Speaker 07

  Yeah, oh, you, um, so the, but then again, having said all that, I'm a strong supporter of the the the the big machine, whatever whatever it's currently called, that CERN wanna build the super LHC.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Speaker 07

  Which is a hundred kilometer tunnel, I think.

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, amazing, but.

• 1:25:19Speaker 07

  Because because what you do find is that, and we, I saw it firsthand with LHC. Is that there aren't many people who know how to build accelerators on that scale. And they're really difficult and you can forget, you can lose the expertise and it's hard. And actually, a lot of the people who worked on the LHC were at the, towards the end of their careers. They're highly experienced people. And so I I think there's a very strong argument that it it's not a lot of money, actually. When you look at the, the, these are decadal projects, they're, they're, we're talking about the the machine for twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years.

• 1:25:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:56Speaker 07

  In the future. And so the the level of, you know, a billion dollars a year or something in total, which CERN is. It it looks expensive, CERN, but but actually its budget is less than my university, the University of Manchester. So it's it's it's yearly budget, out of which it builds the machines, is of a medium sized university. It's a lower budget than Harvard and Princeton, those universities, right? So so I think at that level, that the idea that the world has this capability to build these machines and builds one of them. And it takes decades to build them and then you operate it and do good physics with it for fifty years is is compelling to me. And and you know, I'd put.

• 1:26:40Speaker 03

  Money on there being interesting stuff. It it's not, you know, theoretical physics. It's it that you get into problem if you don't see. It's getting narrower and narrower. Right, yeah, so so but but having said all that, as I said earlier, it is the case that we we couldn't guarantee it, knowing what we know at the moment.

• 1:27:02Speaker 01

  It it does seem like, I mean, supersymmetry, the constraints are getting tighter and tighter for them, right? So who knows what's going to happen with that. But then you have something which is possibly related, although a priori, not necessarily, dark matter, where, right, that seems like a much more plausible discovery to me at some point in the nearer future.

• 1:27:19Speaker 03

  Sure, and the standard model doesn't say anything about that. So we need to go beyond, we need to go beyond the standard model.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  That's right. And is that supersymmetry or something else?

• 1:27:27Speaker 03

  I saw this very, there's a very cool, some work that I heard of the other day, um, where from string theory, so maybe you know where, um, you you're looking at the parameter space of string theory and looking at this, you know, landscape possibilities. And then saying, I I think it's true to say that if you go, if you take the cosmological constant, which is, what is it, ten to the minus one hundred and twenty-two, I mean, in Planck units, right? It ridiculously tiny number. And you use that as the parameter that you don't know, you don't know why that's the case, but you've used that. That I think there's some theories now that are suggesting that you could link that to dark matter

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  in the sense that you get, it it can be sort of slight largest extra dimensions about the micron scale that are implied by that low value of the cosmological constant, which, and then you had the gravitons, that the tower of excited states of gravitons seem to have the right properties to be dark matter. So it was.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  Oh, the Kaluza Klein states from that or?

• 1:28:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I heard it. It's actually, it's on a.

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, Vafa is a collaborator of mine.

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Right, so it's it's his work.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  So I don't, I don't know this word. Yeah, so Swampland is kind of the, the, there's a, I've been a while, so I thought about this, so I might be getting this wrong, but there's a question of is everything that's possible out there described by some theoretical model or not?

• 1:28:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  So is how complete are, you know, is your theoretical framework? And he coined this term Swampland to,

• 1:28:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  you know, to ask what can we actually, you know, what's allowed in terms of the parameter space versus the actual theory?

• 1:28:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was. It was, I, I think there's a review paper. I haven't read it yet. I was only made aware of it the other week. So I'm on the plane back tonight. Okay. I don't know. All right, cool. But it looks really fascinating. So it's just an example of where this theoretical progress that, and, and string theory is a good example because I get asked a lot, you know, that people tend to think, oh, it kind of went away. It kind of failed us. But it's not. It's not at all. Tremendous amount of progress. Yeah. With holography as well, which is coming in there and ADS-CFT and linked to the work, the tiny bit of research that I do into black holes. And then, then it, it, it does seem that we're on the verge of a, I think, a really exciting transformation.

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  The, the, the way I have always explained it to people is I think the original, so when string theory was first, you know, kind of out there in the, in the mid eighties, some very optimistic people said, you know, we're going to be, we're going to have the, you know, electron mass from, from first principles in ten years, which was just completely not true. Because what they wanted is write down the theory, we get to a four dimensional universe with the standard model and that's it. That's not true. That didn't happen. I think it's never going to happen. But what string theory does provide is this tremendous toolbox that you can use to understand hard problems, like with holography. And people are using this all the time to study amazing things that we didn't have access to before from, from a variety of standpoints.

• 1:30:20Speaker 05

  Is it a show up and calculate kind of moment where it's like, it works, don't worry about what it, how it relates to reality?

• 1:30:25Speaker 03

  I think there, I, I think that's a valid philosophy. I, you know, what came, we calculate with this that we couldn't calculate before. It's also valid to ask, and what does this mean for the real world?

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Can you use these techniques to actually calculate anything useful? That is an open question right now. There are some people who are just really digging deep and trying to get the standard model out of string theory. Even just getting the standard model with the right particles and masses and interactions, that's very, very hard to do.

• 1:30:50Speaker 05

  Guys, if we had, if we could just magically have these answers appear in front of us, right? What's the practicality behind it? Is the goal here to just understand how the world works? Or are there actual applications that people like me could relate to?

• 1:31:04Speaker 03

  Well, liquid flow from quantum mechanics, I mean, industries, whole industries.

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  I'm not talking to you. I want to talk to you.

• 1:31:12Speaker 03

  So one of the fascinating areas, which I've been involved in a little bit, so I work with, I have a, a co-supervisor PhD student at Manchester.

• 1:31:21Speaker 05

  To be funded, by the way, by an information technology company, but he's working on black holes, quantum information. And there's a direct link between the, at least the techniques that have been developed to try to understand things like the black hole information paradox. And the techniques you use to build error correction codes, quantum computers, you know, to try to protect the memory from errors and so on. Oh, yeah. So if you'd have said, and I say this to funding agencies when I speak to them, if I'd have said to you, fund research into collapsed stars. Because that will help you build quantum computers and understand them, then they would have just laughed at you. Right, of course, of course.

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  But it turns out that the skill sets, at least, are the same. And it could, I mean, basically, you know, it's not only that. It is that this field of emergent spacetime, which is very popular at the moment. And where essentially what you have, the simple way to say is you have spacetime emerging from a quantum theory, from quantum entanglement. Yeah. Of some objects, which are probably at the scale that from the Bernstein entropy, right, the scale that you tile the event horizon to work out the entropy of a black hole. It's probably, we probably know the distance scales, actually. It's probably string, it's a string scale. But so the idea that spacetime is emerging from entanglement.

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  And that's becoming an experimental science now. I find it interesting. I find it fun. The use, probably the best use from a physicist's perspective of quantum computers, like the Google quantum computer and Microsoft. Is not actually as a quantum computer, but as a load of qubits. Because they're really good arrays of qubits. That's not why they spent billions of dollars building the things. But if you're a physicist, you go, this is brilliant, I've got a lot of qubits. And there was a paper recently where there's this filament, I don't know if you saw it, there's a, so it's in a particular configuration of the qubits. A particular entanglement structure of the network. You get something that you could interpret as a filament of space emerging.

• 1:33:28Speaker 05

  It's sometimes described as a one dimensional wormhole. Right. Right, so, but that's a remarkable paper. It's not, it's a published paper, you can look at it. There's some controversy about if that's the right interpretation of it. But it's fascinating that quantum gravity is becoming an. Experimental science, potentially. We seem to be on the verge of that.

• 1:33:50Speaker 07

  For years now, too, the, I mean, another question that a lot of people say, oh, it's nonsense, extra dimensions, right? There's a, I don't know if they're still doing it, but for a while, there was a group, the Adelberger Group in Seattle, which was, so the idea is that if you have access to extra dimensions at very small scales, you'll see deviations from the inverse square law of gravity. Right? Because the gravitational flux can spread into the extra dimensions. So what they were doing is they were moving things, you know, together in very tiny distance scales and checking for deviations from one over R squared. There's one extra dimension and it's one over R cubed, et cetera, et cetera.

• 1:34:22Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 1:34:22Speaker 07

  These are, yeah. If they had, you would know about it.

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Right. I would have talked about it on the show.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  This is an experimental question. This paper from Baffert I heard of, that I said I haven't read in detail yet, so I'll read it tonight. But it does suggest that there may be a large-ish dimension at the micron scale. Which I, so it'd be interesting to see what the experimental.

• 1:34:41Speaker 07

  Because they can put bounds on it, it's like the number and size of the extra dimensions.

• 1:34:45Speaker 03

  Does that relate to the, as an explanation for the weakness of gravity compared to the other fundamental forces? Is that like kind of leaking into these other potential dimensions? Is that where you were going with that?

• 1:34:55Speaker 07

  No, not quite. I mean, it's not totally unrelated, but it wouldn't be the same thing.

• 1:34:59Speaker 05

  Historically, that was a thought, wasn't it?

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  So I'm not sure, you know more than me in modern string theory, whether that's. Guys, why, why do physics change when you go smaller, but they don't change when you go bigger? Why do? You know what I mean? Like, you know, because we know that when you go, when you get into a certain.

• 1:35:17Speaker 03

  We got the quantum regime and classical regime.

• 1:35:20Speaker 07

  Right, that you're asking why isn't there a new regime of validity?

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  Like, if you, if you just opened up, you made the scale tremendous, would, would, would our, would concepts of physics change?

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  Well, some people think that's exactly what happens and that's why, um, that dark matter is actually gravity behaving differently at the super.

• 1:35:37Speaker 05

  Okay, so we have theories about, about, about that.

• 1:35:40Speaker 07

  That's, that's theoretically possible. I think that's a minority viewpoint.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  It's a minority viewpoint, yeah. You you you think dark matter is the answer to the observations?

• 1:35:49Speaker 05

  Well, I don't know. I mean, we've operated under the assumption that the thing is that the assumption that it's a weakly interacting particle of some description. And that fits quite a lot of things, including in particular the cosmic microwave background. It's it's an important component of the way that the sound waves move through the plasma in the early universe before three hundred and eighty thousand years after the big bang. And that that so we have very good data there. And essentially, what you're seeing, if you look at those pictures of CMB, you're seeing sound waves going through the plasma. And and the the the presence of some kind of weakly interacting particle in there, the the not electromagnetically interacting

• 1:36:32Speaker 05

  is is is a component of those fits that fit very well. And that fits also gravity rotation curves and other things as well. So so it's it's a good model. But it's not to say it's right, because, you know, we we

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  but it does fit multiple different diff- uh independent phenomena that we see, not only the gravitational phenomena, but also the CMB. And it tends to be the case, you said, when you modify general relativity, for example, it tends to be the case you can modify it and fit something, but you mess up a lot of other things. It's quite difficult, isn't it? Or near impossible, actually.

• 1:37:10Speaker 01

  And I think if you polled most working physicists now, they would, you know, for a while, there was this wimp versus macho data on dark matter. I think it it seems fairly consistent that most people would say wimps at this point. But you could find some people who want to, yeah. Well, I mean, until we know, we know, right? Anything is possible.

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  But but I find it, this idea, clearly, dark energy is even more perplexing, to say the least. Certainly. Uh uh this idea that the, I find it fascinating that there may be a link between And of course inflation, which looks similar and the the the fact that our universe is not is on the edge of stability. Because which we know from measurements of the Higgs mass and the top quark mass and so on. So I think there's quite a few of my colleagues you speak to think that maybe these things are related in some way. I mean, inflation looks it's a very much a different energy scale, but then you've got the inflation, you've got the Higgs, which is not contributing to anything, it seems.

• 1:38:09Speaker 05

  This this scalar field that doesn't blow the universe apart. And then you've got dark energy that I I.

• 1:38:15Speaker 07

  It's fascinating, yeah.

• 1:38:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I that's the cutting edge at the moment. I think it's one of the most interesting fields in theoretical physics. Trying to understand if those things are the same. Maybe they're not all different.

• 1:38:26Speaker 02

  Does it feel to you that we're still missing something absolutely fundamental about the universe that, you know, is making it impossible for us to really understand what's going on?

• 1:38:35Speaker 05

  I mean, the the example, you could talk as well, is is holograph holography, I think. You know, ADS CFT, which is an example of a holographic theory. That, I think, is is really radical. It's this idea that we can we can find dual descriptions of reality. You know, so we that toolbox surely is going to be.

• 1:38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, the the rough idea is that a you can use a ten dimensional string theory to describe essentially a four dimensional field theory. And we're in the regime where one problem gets hard, the other gets easy. So you can do kind of geometrical calculations in the gravity regime to give you field theory data in the particle thing. And in very special supersymmetric cases, there's an exact dictionary between, okay, the mass of this baryon is the dimension of this operator. And you can get these really non trivial matchings, you know, these crazy like irrational numbers that, you know, pop up very nicely in both. And it's it's a wild thing. It's people, there's no proof of it per se, but there's so much data to indicate that it's it's

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  correct, that I think it has to be true. Now, does that help us describe our universe is another another question entirely.

• 1:39:50Speaker 02

  One last question, guys.

• 1:39:52Speaker 05

  Who gets it?

• 1:39:52Speaker 02

  Will AI help this field in any way?

• 1:39:55Speaker 01

  It's a really, it's a question that gets asked a lot, isn't it? The, and it does, you know, in, in data analysis, then you'd have to say yes, right? Large data sets and so on. Whether or not creating new physical, asking ChatGPT to build a quantum theory of gravity.

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

  That's a different thing.

• 1:40:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:17Speaker 01

  I don't know what the answer is to that.

• 1:40:19Speaker 02

  Have you tried plugging that in?

• 1:40:21Speaker 01

  You can try, it won't do it.

• 1:40:24Speaker 05

  A big thing, so I left physics about 10 years ago, and one of the big things that I see different that a lot of my colleagues are doing is a lot of them are doing machine, applying machine learning to complicated systems to see what they can do. So it's not, it's not AI in a.

• 1:40:38Speaker 02

  It's not going to solve the problem, it's going to accelerate the research.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  That's right. And it's kind of like what I would say a good analogy is what AI did with protein fold.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45Speaker 05

  Right, okay, so it could speed things up a lot.

• 1:40:49Speaker 02

  So Brian, tell us about your current project, the Horizons show that you're doing.

• 1:40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been doing these, she said, show, my, my friend, Robin Ince, comedian that I work with on the BBC, said, you know, it's, you should call it a lecture. And then he says, not at those ticket prices, though, you can't call it a lecture. So it is true that, so I ended up developing this, this live show, which is big LED screens, basically. And then all, many of the concepts we've just discussed, actually. But so it has become a show. And we, it was built for arenas in the UK, so we've got 14, 15,000 people in the O2 Arena in Wembley and things like that. Stadium cosmology.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  And, and so I've enjoyed doing it a lot. We've, we've done it, over 400,000 people have seen the show across the world in the last.

• 1:41:39Speaker 02

  That does make me feel good about humanity, that we can get that many people to sit for a sign show.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  15,000 people listening to you describe the Penrose diagram is kind of strange. So, so just to finish it off, because we came to the, the US actually very early on in the development of it, and it was just after Covid and we did some small places. And I just wanted to finish it off. So, so we're bringing it back in a, at the end of April, start of May to a few cities. LA, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Seattle, Portland. And to, to just, and it's just me really saying, I want to say goodbye to this, this particular show. And I'd like to do it here because we started here in a sense, a long time ago and it's changed a lot.

• 1:42:23Speaker 02

  Where can people find dates and get tickets?

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  There's a website called bryancoxlive.co.uk. It's dot co.uk because I think bryancoxlive.com, I don't know, probably we couldn't get it. So it doesn't matter, does it? So it's bryancoxlive.co.uk and the tickets are there. And then, you know, we might try and extend it a bit and come to, you know, I've never done a show in Vegas, for example, so I think we could just ask Davy Copperfield to move out for a night and put it in there. But yeah.

• 1:42:54Speaker 02

  Well, Brian, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for sitting down with us.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:42:57Speaker 03

  Fantastic. Thank you.

• 1:42:59Speaker 01

  Thanks.

• 1:43:00Speaker 02

  It's time for Science or Fiction? Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake, because panel is the plural of skeptics. Or the collective. All right, you guys ready? Three regular news items. Yep. Here we go. Item number one, new research finds that higher penetration of weather-dependent renewable energy sources, wind and solar, on the grid does not increase vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur.

• 1:43:44Speaker 02

  All right, number two, a recent study finds that coyotes are thriving in North America and in fact, direct hunting by humans results in larger populations.

• 1:43:56Speaker 02

  And I number three, a population-based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. Bob, go first.

• 1:44:06Speaker 03

  Okay, so wind and solar do not increase the vulnerability of blackouts. Yeah, that kind of makes sense. I'm think I'm just gonna buy that, although I haven't read anything specific about that. Coyotes are thriving in North America and direct hunting by humans results in larger populations. Ah, I don't know about that last bit. Let's see, I did not even absorb this third one at all. Population-based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. So basically being preterm has no bad side effects.

• 1:44:45Speaker 02

  Lasting into adulthood.

• 1:44:47Speaker 03

  All right, tell me everything that you can say about these three for the first person going.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  They're all pretty self-explanatory.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  All right, I'm gonna say the wolves.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  The coyotes, you mean?

• 1:44:57Speaker 03

  Fiction. Wolves, coyotes. Wait, you said coyotes?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  It's coyotes, yeah.

• 1:45:01Speaker 03

  Coyotes, wolves.

• 1:45:02Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:45:03Speaker 03

  I'll say that's fiction.

• 1:45:04Speaker 02

  All right, Jay.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Because I feel like it.

• 1:45:06Speaker 05

  This first one, about the higher penetration of weather-dependent renewable energy sources. It doesn't increase the vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't think it would increase vulnerability. I think it, but these are, you know, these are things that definitely need electricity and have a lot of wiring and everything. Yeah, so this is a really interesting thing here, Steve, because you're saying increase, they do not increase vulnerability to blackouts.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  So there aren't more blackouts.

• 1:45:35Speaker 05

  Because of them.

• 1:45:36Speaker 02

  Right. And when they, and when blackouts do occur, they're less severe.

• 1:45:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, all right, I think that's science. That, that just makes sense. It took me a while to parse through it because at first, for some, for some reason, I thought you meant during like an EMP or some, some, you know, solar flare or something, but I was just mistaken. Okay, so that one, to me, 100% science. The second one, a recent study finds out that coyotes are thriving in North America and in fact, direct hunting by humans results in larger populations. So why would direct hunting by humans result in larger populations? Maybe because they, they're killing off the weak ones and, you know, is that, that possibly be it? That one's a maybe. That doesn't seem to track with me. The third one, a population-based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood. Preterm infants. Okay, so

• 1:46:25Speaker 05

  Does it matter like how early they are?

• 1:46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a cutoff.

• 1:46:30Speaker 05

  Okay, so preterm.

• 1:46:31Speaker 02

  To qualify as preterm.

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  Can you tell me what the cutoff is?

• 1:46:34Speaker 02

  So if you're born before 37 weeks, you are considered preterm.

• 1:46:38Speaker 05

  Okay, so yeah, that's early.

• 1:46:40Speaker 04

  I wish I knew that.

• 1:46:42Speaker 02

  That'll change your answer?

• 1:46:44Speaker 04

  Nah, just saying.

• 1:46:46Speaker 05

  Alright, so let's think about this. So if a baby comes out early, I would imagine that there's reasons why that happens, but it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with the baby. So then it comes down to, you know, I mean, guys, what I'm about to say, I am not an expert, right? I'm thinking off the cuff here, the baby's kind of nutrition changes. I don't think nutrition is a maximum, a maximal problem here. I mean, there might be other things that the baby would be getting from the mother that could affect its development. And you know, babies can't breathe until they hit a certain age range. So the baby would, that that could be a factor. This is a messy one.

• 1:47:24Speaker 05

  I think that today, with proper care, babies are okay if they're born in Steve's preterm timeframe. But this whole thing about like, you know, hunting the coyotes, something rubs me the wrong way. That was a fiction.

• 1:47:40Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan?

• 1:47:41Speaker 04

  Well, uh.

• 1:47:45Speaker 04

  Alright, the grid and not increasing vulnerability to blackouts, I believe that. But this part about reducing their severity when they occur, I'm having a hard time understanding why that's the case. Why would it reduce the severity of the blackout? Yeah, I did, hmm.

• 1:48:06Speaker 04

  I'm gonna be interested to hear that one if that one turns out to be science. I have a feeling it's kind of fictiony. Coyotes, I have no idea. Thriving in North America, I don't know. And in fact, direct hunting by humans result in a larger populations. Why would that be? Because they cluster more and then is that how that will work, would work? Cause it creates pockets? I don't know. I don't know about that one either. And the last one, oh boy, preterm. Infants, no significant economic. That one's like the one I know the least about. I, I, they're all fiction. Thank you.

• 1:48:43Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:48:44Speaker 04

  And Kara says, darn it.

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  Automatic failure, but okay.

• 1:48:47Speaker 04

  No, that's not an automatic failure. It's an automatic win.

• 1:48:50Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a forfeit.

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  I'm going to use my get out of jail free card on this episode. Don't we all get one for the year? No?

• 1:48:56Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:48:57Speaker 04

  All right. How about the preterm infants one? I can't put my finger on it, but I think there's something, there's maybe an educational effect that lasts into adulthood that they've found. So I'll say that one's a fiction.

• 1:49:08Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:49:10Cara Santa Maria?

  I think coyotes is science. They are thriving. They are everywhere, at least in LA. I think that there are many examples of what's called conservation hunting, where culls are done intentionally to maintain or even grow populations. I think it's about distribution more than anything, because animals are not, you know, spread out evenly. I think that the weather dependent, so like wind and solar energy being in higher numbers. I don't think it would increase vulnerability to blackouts. I know that the problem was with the severity, reducing the severity when they occur, but maybe they're just faster to get online.

• 1:49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, or maybe they're cheaper and easier to fix, like who knows? So, yeah, the one that's really, really bothering me is this idea, because you said a study of preterm infants. So just because 37 weeks is the cutoff, doesn't mean that we're not also talking about babies that are born at 25, 26 weeks. Babies that are born early do not have fully developed organs. They're sick. They need surgery. They undergo a lot of treatments. There is no way that that doesn't affect them economically well into adulthood. This one just seems impossible to be science. So I have to say that that's fiction.

• 1:50:28Speaker 02

  All right. So you all agree with the first one. So we'll start there. New research finds that higher penetration of weather dependent renewable energy sources, wind and solar, on the grid does not increase vulnerability to blackouts and reduces their severity when they occur. You all think this one is science and this. This one is science. This is science.

• 1:50:49Cara Santa Maria?

  That's great.

• 1:50:50Speaker 02

  Now, this was part of the reason for this study was, I don't know if you guys remember the whole Texas blackout thing, where they were blaming the renewable, you know, resources on the grid when it was in fact, it was in fact, the coal fire plants or gas plants that were going down. So what they found was that, yeah, that the renewable, having renewables, weather-dependent renewables on the grid, does not make it more vulnerable, even to weather-based events, right? So even if there's a storm or whatever, it doesn't make it more likely for these sources of energy to go down than traditional sources. And when a blackout does occur, the amount of people who lose power is less because this is a more distributed

• 1:51:34Speaker 02

  power source, and they do come back more quickly. So, yeah, this, it actually lends resiliency, if anything, to the grid.

• 1:51:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's great.

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. All right, I guess we'll just keep going in order. A recent study finds that coyotes are thriving in North America, and in fact, a direct hunting by humans results in large populations. Bob and Jay, you think this one is the fiction. Evan and Carrie, you think this one is science. And I guess the question comes down to, how could directly hunting coyotes increase their population? This wasn't a call to increase their population. This is like when you try to reduce the population by hunting them.

• 1:52:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And it backfired?

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  And it backfired, yeah. So, this is science. This is science.

• 1:52:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  This one is science because, yeah, this is all true. What happened, what they think is happening is that even in locations where they have very liberal coyote hunting laws, meaning like it's open season, like there's no restricted season, there's no limit on how many you can kill. And that with those populations actually, over time, increase. And the reason why they think this is happening is that their, the hunters are disproportionately killing older coyotes. And then the younger coyotes have more resources and they have more pups. And so they're just breeding more. And so essentially their conclusion was is that hunting is not an effective population control mechanism for coyotes. They just bounce right back in even bigger numbers.

• 1:53:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So we're disproportionately hunting older coyotes because they're slower and easier to kill.

• 1:53:06Speaker 02

  I guess they're easier to kill, yeah. It must be, must be the case.

• 1:53:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Whoops.

• 1:53:11Speaker 02

  This study also did a lot of other things. So coyotes also do not suffer when their, when their region overlaps with wolves. Except for certain, that's very, that's regionally dependent, but in many locations, basically depends on food supply. They do fine even when they're competing with wolves, but they don't do fine if they're competing with bears.

• 1:53:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's because coyotes and bears, I think, they both hunt, but they also scavenge.

• 1:53:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's, that's a good point. So there's actually a mixed effect when, when coyotes overlap with other predators, there's a decrease in prey availability, but the, especially the larger predators tend to leave behind carcasses that the coyotes can then scavenge.

• 1:54:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  So they actually increase their food supply sometimes. So depending on a lot of variables, sometimes it actually increases the coyote population because now they have more scavenging available.

• 1:54:11Cara Santa Maria?

  And bears and coyotes also scavenge. Their garbage dump, ugh, garbage dump scavengers.

• 1:54:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:54:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So they, they come into urban areas and take food.

• 1:54:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but coyotes are a meso predator. Ever heard that term? They're in the middle, they're not small, they're not large, they're meso. And they're, they're just thriving. They're just adapting really well to human civilization, doing just fine. All right, all right, that means that a population-based cohort study of preterm infants finds no significant economic or educational effects lasting into adulthood is the fiction because they found significant economic and developmental effects and educational effects. Yes, they have lower rates of enrolling in a university, graduating from a university with a degree, they have lower Come per year, 17% lower. So yeah, there are lasting effects. It's hard to tease out exactly what that might be. Is this due to just they're not as healthy?

• 1:55:06Speaker 02

  Or maybe the neurological development is delayed? And the question, the reason why this is an important research question is because clearly they are starting at a loss, you know, farther back. They have, they have to make up ground.

• 1:55:20Speaker 03

  How early?

• 1:55:20Speaker 02

  The question is, do they eventually catch up? Or do they, do their deficits persist? So this was, they were looking at 18 to 28 year olds. They say they had followed them for, you know, a long time, like two couple of decades. So this is a long, long follow up.

• 1:55:37Speaker 03

  How long, how did you define preterm? How many weeks early?

• 1:55:40Cara Santa Maria?

  37 or less.

• 1:55:42Speaker 02

  Or less. So some of them were a lot, were a lot less. Yeah.

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  37?

• 1:55:45Cara Santa Maria?

  It's the cutoff. Yeah.

• 1:55:46Speaker 03

  And that, what's, what's typical? 40, what? I was, so I mean, I was four weeks. I was a whole month premature.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it obviously, it gets worse the more premature you are. So they looked at, you know, like 34 to 36 weeks, 32 to 33, 28 to 21, 24 to 27. And the effects got worse, you know, the, the more preterm you were. Yeah. So it wasn't much for like, just 36, you know, that.

• 1:56:13Cara Santa Maria?

  So 40 is the average, but a full term baby is 37 or 37 plus, up to 42.

• 1:56:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, but you know, but it is still true that with modern medical management, they do fine, but they, you know, they, they are starting, you know, at a deficit. And they don't quite make that up, at least not in the, in their twenties.

• 1:56:34Speaker 03

  That sounds, preterm sounds like a way too broad of a term, at least for this specific science fiction.

• 1:56:38Speaker 02

  Mm hmm. But it was true, no matter how you slice it.

• 1:56:41Speaker 03

  I was biased because I'm preterm and I'm awesome.

• 1:56:46Speaker 02

  But think of how much more awesome you would be.

• 1:56:49Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:56:51Cara Santa Maria?

  So mean.

• 1:56:54Speaker 04

  Right, fighting for resources.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  You don't want to think about all that stuff. You were a twin. Twins also are at a deficit because your twin was using up some nutritional resources.

• 1:57:02Speaker 04

  So you overcame multiple options.

• 1:57:04Speaker 02

  And our mother smoked when she was pregnant with all of us.

• 1:57:07Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:57:09Speaker 02

  And that takes a hit as well. And we were exposed when we were kids.

• 1:57:11Speaker 04

  Literally takes a hit.

• 1:57:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Did she drink too?

• 1:57:13Speaker 03

  I'm gonna sue her.

• 1:57:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. She wasn't a drinker. My parents weren't drinkers. They were not drinkers, but they, yeah, they both smoked.

• 1:57:20Speaker 04

  Smoky.

• 1:57:21Speaker 02

  It was terribly.

• 1:57:21Cara Santa Maria?

  But all that meth.

• 1:57:22Speaker 02

  Hated it.

• 1:57:23Speaker 04

  Hated it.

• 1:57:24Speaker 02

  The worst thing about my childhood was having to deal with that.

• 1:57:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 04

  The worst?

• 1:57:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. I was like this one annoying, constant presence in my childhood. Otherwise, I think our childhood was great.

• 1:57:35Speaker 04

  Oh, barely was a blip on my radar.

• 1:57:37Speaker 02

  I hated it. Totally hated it. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:57:40Speaker 04

  When you get in a tight place and everything goes against you till it seems as though you could not hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the time and the place that the tide will turn. Very comforting words from Harriet Beecher Stowe.

• 1:57:57Speaker 02

  Ah.

• 1:57:58Speaker 04

  American abolitionist and author from the 19th century and so key and critical to helping end slavery in America.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:07Speaker 04

  Can't be understated how important she was. Overstated how important she was.

• 1:58:11Speaker 02

  Political change is a never-ending marathon.

• 1:58:13Speaker 04

  Right. So keep this in mind, folks, especially these days.

• 1:58:17Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Evan.

• 1:58:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

• 1:58:21Speaker 04

  You're welcome, Steve.

• 1:58:22Speaker 03

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:58:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:58:23Speaker 02

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

• 1:58:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:08Speaker 05

  What's that? My fresh detector. Uh, your what? There it is. What is it detecting? Fresh produce? Fresh meat? Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

• 1:59:22Speaker 05

  Apparently, we celebrate. At Food Lion, you can count on fresh food at fresher prices. When your fresh detector is going off, head to your local Food Lion or shop at foodlion.com.