The Skeptics Guide #1022 - Feb 8 2025

Quickie With Bob: Using Nukes to Deflect Asteroids; News Items: Near Earth Asteroid Threat, Does the Internet Affect Our Memory, Growing City Rat Problem, Do Apes Have a Theory of Mind, NASA Astronauts Harassed by Aliens; 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, February 5th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Hey, everybody.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jane Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:54Speaker 03

  Good evening, folks.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  Everyone keeping their sanity, at least recently?

• 0:58Speaker 03

  No, stay grounded.

• 0:59Speaker 02

  I mean, that's, you know, it's been so hard. I watched some of the RFK Jr. testimony, the hearings. He was, you know, this is gonna, the information that we have is gonna be outdated by the time you listen to the show, because I think one thing or another will have happened. But, you know, there was a slight chance that he would not make it through the committee, you know, before getting to the full Senate vote, you know, because RFK Jr. is an absolute crank and pseudoscientist who does not have the, the skills or ability to head federal healthcare. The best hope was that Cassidy would have been the, would have voted against, because he is actually, he's a Republican and he's a, a physician. He's actually the, he's the guy who invited me down to the testimony.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Yes, that's right.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  In front of Congress.

• 1:46Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  He's the one who gave me the double finger guns, you know, when he's leaving, leaving the room.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Um, but.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  Well, he's been very, he in the past has been very critical of RFK.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And he definitely, you know, is, I think, at the more reasonable end of the spectrum for his side of the aisle and because he's a physician that has informed, you know, some of, some of his policies. So this was it. This came right down to, was he going to go with the politics or go with his oath as a physician and his absolute knowledge? Like, he knows that RFK Jr. is full of it. And nobody knew how he was going to vote, and he voted to pass it through the committee. So I think that was the death of the, I'll be very surprised now if RFK Jr. does not get, does not get confirmed. We'll see. Again, as you're listening to this, you might know the answer to that, but.

• 2:35Speaker 03

  What is the chance, Steve, that Cassidy will vote no in the general?

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I guess it's non-zero, but if, I think if he were going to vote no, he would have just done it during this committee vote.

• 2:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because that would have stopped it.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  But is he, but is he trying to play both sides of the fence? Like, because he can vote yes once and no once in this, in this scenario?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  Does that really help? I mean?

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I don't know. I, I'm not, I'm not so politically astute to know if that helps him politically or not.

• 3:02Cara Santa Maria?

  But if he votes, if he voted no then, it would be dead. If he votes yes and then no, it's going to live.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  But what would the strategy be if he, if he, if that was his intent, why would he do it that way?

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, we've seen, it has happened before, in which to just get things out of committee to keep things quote unquote, "moving," so that it can get the real full vote, and then if you're going to kill it based on however the, what do they call it, whipping? Where they pre-count the votes and how it's going to go. Maybe he knows something. Maybe he knows that it's, it's tight and.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  It's only going to fail with his no vote, though. So he's still going to be, come down to him.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. You're, I mean, you're right. I mean, chances are he will still vote yes.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  But anyway, listening to the testimony was so painful because they're asking him, "Do you think that vaccines cause autism?" And RFK saying, "If you show me the evidence, then I'll go with the evidence."

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  The last 30 years of you looking at the evidence wasn't enough? You're gonna suddenly change your mind? It was such

• 4:06Speaker 03

  Billions of vaccinations

• 4:07Speaker 02

  Transparent bullshit. It was such transparent bullshit. He did, he was just lying through his teeth. You know, just saying the things he needed to say, although even, you know, you could, it was very easy to tell. You know, for somebody who knows his history and knows his rhetoric, I mean, you can't rail against the vaccines for 2030s and then go say, I'll listen to the evidence. Of course, him listening to the evidence is completely butchering the science, right?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  We have to, uh, hope somehow.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I mean, I just, I'm, I'm prepared for him to get through and then we'll just see what horribleness ensues.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. Well.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  It's really just

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 02

  The only question mark is how big the death toll is gonna be.

• 4:47Jay Novella?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg. We can all be shocked and awe that we are being

• 4:52Speaker 03

  They're just getting warmed up.

• 4:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And this, and, and that's the point. It's a feature, not a bug.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I agree.

• 4:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Open up the fire hose.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  No, I mean, I mean Bannon directly said it, like, we are gonna flood the zone with so much stuff that they'll never be able to mount an effective resistance against any one of the things that we're gonna do.

• 5:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, a lot of it'll still get through, even if we can block certain things.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Right. They'll throw everything against the wall and they can only, and you can only goal keep so much of this stuff.

• 5:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And one of the biggest things that is being, that is on the chopping block right now, which is like very scary, is sort of a follow-up. Uh, but more intense to what I talked about last week, which was PEPFAR, which got swept up in the freeze on January 20th. Um, you know, the, the very first day in office when Trump implemented this 90-day freeze on foreign assistance. Another thing that has gotten deeply, deeply swept up in this is a much larger, uh, I guess we could call it, um, appropriation called USAID.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:50Cara Santa Maria?

  For those who don't know what USAID is, if you remember when I was talking about PEPFAR, which was started under George W. Bush, USAID was started under Kennedy during, you know, the Cold War. It stands for the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is the main agency that we use at the federal level for assistance for disaster-prone countries, poverty, disease, democratic reform. So this isn't just, there are political reasons behind USAID as well. But because of this freeze and then subsequent scattering to go, oh, God, this freeze actually is causing a lot of, you know, pain and suffering, you know, let's put certain parts of the freeze on hold. You know, Rubio came out only a

• 6:34Cara Santa Maria?

  few days later and said, no, no, no way. We need strictly lifesaving emergency programs to not be frozen. But these different departments don't know if that applies to them. And since then, we've seen thousands of contractors get laid off. We've seen, let's say, tens, maybe dozens of officials that were put on leave. Employees were told just this week that they cannot enter the Washington headquarters, and USAID's website and its accounts on social media platforms have been taken down. So a lot of people- Effectively shut down. Yeah, and a lot of people are scrambling because we've got to remember that this is all over the world. So boots on the ground that are doing important peacekeeping, that

• 7:16Cara Santa Maria?

  are doing important human rights work, refugee work, hunger, they don't have access to the aid that they need, or the trucks aren't coming, or, you know, any number of problems are preventing them from being able to do the work that ultimately is lifesaving work. We're talking about like HIV treatment. We're talking about, well, that's more PEPFAR, but we're talking about like malaria treatment. And as we mentioned last week, when you pause, it's essentially the same as stopping, as, you know, like for certain people who are caught in that pause, the downstream effects can happen months to years later, and it can still end in death, even if you open up the pipeline days later. It's really, really

• 8:01Cara Santa Maria?

  dangerous to just stop a bunch of moving parts all at once.

• 8:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And so, yeah, we're just, we're seeing, we just, every day, there's a new article about it, and we don't know what's gonna happen.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really bad for the NIH as well, you know, the biggest biomedical research organization in the world. They just canceled meetings, so these are like meetings that take months to put together, like you can't just flip the switch back on. And this are meetings determining funding. So now you have researchers across the country who don't know if their career is gonna go forward or not. Like, you survive from funder, you know, funding to funding, you know, from grant to grant.

• 8:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, yeah, I mean, but that's happening across departments right now.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 8:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's not just NIH, it's everybody, it's EPA, it's, I mean, it's so scary.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  It's so reckless, because like, again, it's, it's, it's going to be extremely disruptive to biomedical research. Again, well, it'll take years to really feel the, the long terms effects of this, but it is, it is amazing how quickly you can absolutely disrupt things like that, you know?

• 9:08Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah, and I mean, I, I think that's why, I just can't help but go back to it, like, that's why this USAID thing is so, so scary. There's even a quote in a New York Times article here from an unnamed scientist who said, "You could open the funding floodgates again tomorrow, and you would still have children dying months from now because of this pause."

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 9:26Cara Santa Maria?

  You cannot stop their medication, or their anti-malarials, their, their, their mosquito nets, their, their, you know, food programs. It's, it's, yeah, it's terrifying.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  It's scary how quickly that they, they can knock all this down, and the reality is that, you know, it, it would take a huge amount of time to repair the damage. Just to, just to try to set up the government agencies again and everything, you know, it's just like, you know, people aren't just waiting for the job, you know, you want the right people in those positions, they're gonna go get employed in other places.

• 9:57Cara Santa Maria?

  And what is the purpose, really? Like, what is the, the sort of elephant in the room that we're not talking about? It's money. If we shutter all of these programs, we save trillions. Why do we need to save trillions?

• 10:08Speaker 02

  But if you look at each individual program, you actually, well, most of these programs actually save more money than they cost.

• 10:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course they do, because, but that requires foresight.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? That requires actually doing the calculations, but tomorrow, I can claw back cash.

• 10:27Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's really what this is. It's a massive money grab. It's so scary.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  I think it's more than that, though. You're you're correct.

• 10:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, of course it is, but.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  It's way more than that. You know, like even with PEPFAR, it didn't just get swept up in this. The Republicans have been gunning for PEPFAR for years because they are afraid that some of that money may go to fund abortions.

• 10:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  And to therefore, it's been on the chopping block for a while.

• 10:52Cara Santa Maria?

  It's the same thing with USAID.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it's, yeah, Republicans have said, why are we, you know, giving healthcare to the rest of the world? Why are we, you know, it's the same with EPA. It's the same with NOAA. It's the same with the US Department of Education. But ultimately, both of those things can be true. And part of the reason that these things are argued to be gutted is for a money grab purpose. Because politically, certain ideologies say that's not where our money should go. It should go over here instead.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Right. But most of these, yeah, again, I get, you know, I'm sure there is fraud and abuse and waste in the, in the federal government. And not any institution that's huge is going to have, going to have fraud and waste. Uh, but that takes careful eye, you know, close examination and a scalpel to sort of peel that away. This is just, just, you know, shut it all down and we'll sort it out later.

• 11:46Bob Novella?

  Sled jammer, yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of thing.

• 11:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's, that was Musk's approach at the companies that he works at.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 11:52Cara Santa Maria?

  He fully has said, this is what we're going to do. Stop the pipeline and then make an argument for why you need that funding back and we'll see if we'll give it back to you. It doesn't work that way.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if you're, if you're running Twitter, that's fine.

• 12:04Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, but if you're, if you're running healthcare across the globe, that's not fine.

• 12:08Speaker 02

  That is not fine. Yeah, exactly. Okay.

• 12:11Cara Santa Maria?

  This is not going to change. We got it out of our systems, guys. Now we can talk about science.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  It's not going to change anytime soon.

• 12:15Bob Novella?

  I feel so much better.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  All right, let's completely change track here. Bob, you have a quickie for us.

• 12:24Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Scientists have been doing lab experiments testing the idea that the X-rays from a nuclear blast could divert asteroids. Now, large asteroids need more energy to be diverted from a collision course with Earth, right? I mean, they're bigger, so much more momentum. A kinetic impactor like DART, remember that? That dude that smashed into into an asteroid and actually changed its trajectory. Oh, right, right, yeah. That's from a few years ago. So that wouldn't be good enough for this case. It would just have to be far too massive and go be traveling far too fast. Some techniques, though, could work with a large, a very large asteroid. And that includes things like fusion engines,

• 13:09Bob Novella?

  focused lasers, and neutron bursts. Those are all things that they think could do a much better job. The best option, though, seems to be what they call standoff nuclear explosions, which generate X-rays. So these scientists had at their disposal, conveniently, a device called a Z machine at Sandia Labs in New Mexico. I think we've mentioned this before. It's a high-frequency electromagnetic wave generator, the largest in the world. This this thing can make incredible X-ray beams. So they created a 6.6 nanosecond X-ray blast from the Z machine, and they used it on a blueberry-sized bit of quartz in freefall. Now, these bits of quartz were, of course, stand-ins for asteroids. The X-rays rapidly

• 13:51Bob Novella?

  heated and vaporized the surface, which created which creates this powerful, expanding gas plume on the surface. And as you might guess, that plume pushes on the quartz like a rocket exhaust, very similar to rocket exhaust. And in this case, the quartz shot away at 250 kilometers an hour. So, pretty impressive. I don't think they were expecting quite that much. But those results were then incorporated into like, part two of this this experiment into a lab simulation. And it was scaled up, of course, to see, all right, how would this work? We take what we've learned from this lab experiment, recreate it in The computer, it's a computer simulation and see how it scales up what happens.

• 14:32Bob Novella?

  So they showed that the X-rays from a nuclear blast, a couple of kilometers away from a large asteroid, could deflect it, assuming of course it has similar composition, right, to what they tested in the lab. But get this, it could deflect an asteroid up to four kilometers wide. It was four kilometers plus or minus one kilometer, so potentially even five kilometer. That's huge. That's really big. Similarly, though, and also pretty important, this technique, if it works scaled up in reality, it could also be used on a smaller asteroid that's going to hit Earth really soon, like within a year. So just a regular, any of the other techniques like a kinetic impactor, wouldn't be good

• 15:17Bob Novella?

  enough for a small one, being that close. So that's it. So they made a point of saying that. This also could work in that scenario, which is also, all of it's very encouraging. So deflecting any asteroid is mostly about what? Making a change in its trajectory soon enough to make it miss the Earth, right? That's all that matters. So obviously, the farther away it is, even the tiniest nudge can eventually make it miss the Earth. But that's really difficult because you have to be able to get there when it's really, really far away and know that it's going to hit the Earth in the first place. So using powerful X-rays from a nuke means that we need less lead time than we would need from a kinetic impactor. Now, we know the Earth will be hit by a large asteroid at some point, right? It's just a matter of when.

• 16:01Bob Novella?

  It's going to happen. Could happen tomorrow, could happen in a thousand years, who knows? But it will happen. And so this one bit of technology could potentially save humanity and prevent some life form in the distant future from digging us up like we do the dinosaurs from 66 million years ago. I am totally behind this kind of research. It could save our butts, absolutely. And this has been your X-ray nuke quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Yeah, we definitely need to improve our technology for deflecting asteroids, near Earth asteroids, ones that potentially could cross our path.

• 16:38Bob Novella?

  Imagine, we could, Steve, we could find one, like, oh, look, there's a huge asteroid. This is gonna definitely hit us. Oh, crap, it's just too big and too close. We can't do anything. Oh, well, enjoy the next three months. You know, that could absolutely happen.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  And in fact, there's a candidate that we have to keep an eye on, right, Bob?

• 16:56Bob Novella?

  Oh, me again, huh? All right.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Oh, a double header.

• 16:59Bob Novella?

  The asteroid.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  Asteroid double header.

• 17:01Bob Novella?

  Double header. So, all right. So, I'll start with, don't panic, yet.

• 17:07Speaker 03

  I knew that was coming.

• 17:08Bob Novella?

  Thanks, Bob. Yeah, come on, you gotta make, you gotta make the Hitchhiker's Guide.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  Don't panic any more than you're already panicking.

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Bob, when you say, "Don't panic," that makes me panic.

• 17:18Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's, well.

• 17:20Speaker 03

  Don't think about elephants.

• 17:21Bob Novella?

  I'm being serious. No, there's no really, there's no need to panic here. But it has happened. I'm a little nervous, little, about a near-death asteroid. Wait, I mean, a near-Earth asteroid.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh, Bob, you're killing us here.

• 17:32Bob Novella?

  No, it's, it's, I'm a little nervous about it. It's, you know, worst-case scenario is not good. But, Chan, it's gonna be fine. Don't worry. All right. Let's see. So, this is, this asteroid is perhaps the size of a football field. This was detected last December. The latest estimates point to a 1 in 66 chance it could collide with the Earth three days before Christmas 2032. So, the question is, do we need to, and I'm gonna say it, do we need to gird our loins for this one? Do we need our towels? The last question always has an answer yes.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:06Bob Novella?

  FYI. So, the asteroid's name is 2024 YR4, and I'm gonna name him Chucky, because it's small, and, but if it gets close, you're toast.

• 18:18Bob Novella?

  It was detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System in Chile, funded by NASA, and was moving away. It was moving away from us and was already millions of miles away. So it's like, oh, look at, look what's moving away. So

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Bob, did you say the last alert system?

• 18:33Bob Novella?

  That's what it's called.

• 18:34Speaker 03

  That sounds terrible.

• 18:35Bob Novella?

  Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System.

• 18:38Speaker 03

  That sounds so terminal. I mean, right?

• 18:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it's, I mean, hey, they're doing great work over there. So it's 40 to 90 meters wide, or 130 to 300 feet. Numbers are all over the place. And let me say right here, it probably won't hit us. And even if it did, this would never be an ELE event. Steve, what does ELE stand for?

• 18:59Speaker 02

  An extinction level event.

• 19:02Bob Novella?

  Right. This is not, this never can be an extinction level event. It's just not big enough. But this does represent a potential city destroyer, which is, of course, horrific.

• 19:11Speaker 03

  For them, it's an extension.

• 19:12Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. But this would be, this would be a local event with no major global repercussions. So stop thinking about the movie Deep Impact. So, yes, horrible, but not maximally horrible. How's that? So the size, though, the size, though, that we have is solely based on its brightness. So there's, so there's a large uncertainty. So it's very limited wavelengths that we got from it that we're, that we're judging its size on. It could be, it could be darker than we think and therefore bigger, or it could be brighter than we think and smaller. We don't know. So when astronomers find a near earth asteroid like this, what they need to do very quickly is extrapolate its orbit, its trajectory, and see if Earth

• 19:51Bob Novella?

  is in danger. So the next approach to us is going to happen in 2028. So in three years. And they've determined that we are safe. 2028, they are damn certain that would, you know, the risk corridor, I think they call it, is, is large, but it's, it's nowhere near the Earth. So we're good. The next orbit, though, after that, that's the one that's problematic. You know, of all the possible trajectories in that corridor that it could be orbiting through, more than 1% of them put the Earth and asteroid in the same place on 12/22/32. So

• 20:28Bob Novella?

  Greater than 1%, you know, all right. So now, as the days have passed, I've been tracking this the past 10 days or so. They refine their predictions, they've been refining it, and we often see the risk increase a bit before eventually just disappearing. They're like, oh, it's, you know, the risk is worse, the risk is worse. Oh, there's no risk. That's kind of the history of these things. It gets a little bit riskier based on the estimates, and then it goes away once they have enough critical mass of observations. But this one, though, you know, ended December, it's still getting a little bit worse every time I look at it. When I first saw it, it was a 1 in 88 chance that it's going to hit the Earth. Then it was 1 in 77. And then as of earlier today, it was 1 in 63. So that's a 1.6% chance.

• 21:13Bob Novella?

  So still, you know, hey, there's still almost a 99% chance that Earth's going to be fine. And there's no astronomers are losing sleep over this. So, take that.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Well, 1 out of 100 should be.

• 21:25Bob Novella?

  Well, yeah.

• 21:26Cara Santa Maria?

  That's how statistics works. I love it.

• 21:30Jay Novella?

  So, the asteroid, I'm worried now, Jesus.

• 21:34Bob Novella?

  Well, I mean, you know.

• 21:36Speaker 03

  And there's the one.

• 21:37Bob Novella?

  So, the asteroid is only a 3 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale, and I love this scale.

• 21:43Jay Novella?

  3 out of what?

• 21:44Bob Novella?

  3 out of 10. It goes from 0 to 10. So 0 is, don't even think about it. A 10, 8, 9, and 10 means it's going to hit the Earth. But the smaller ones that are going to hit the Earth are an 8, and the biggest ones that are going to hit the Earth are a 10.

• 21:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I want all my asteroids to be zeros. I don't know about you.

• 22:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah, 0, 0, maybe even a 1, but 0 is good. So a 3 means that this is mainly, this merits attention by astronomers. Astronomers need to track this. That's what a 3 means. But, you know, this is not a ho-hum scenario at all. If you haven't gotten that vibe from me, get it. This is not, this is not like, ah, yeah, you know, whatever. The problem is, as I see it, this is heading away from us, fast, and in nearly a straight line. So it's very hard to study it now, and it's only going to get harder as it gets farther and farther away. It's entirely likely, this is the crux of this entire talk, it's Entirely likely that we will not be able to rule out an earth impact until 2028.

• 22:44Bob Novella?

  So probably maybe for the next three years, we're not going to know for sure. And this is going to stay number one on the list, the watch list. So what's going to happen in 2028? So say three years pass, we never got a good beat on it. We don't know if it's going to hit the earth. We don't know what the real odds are. So 2028 comes and that's when we hit it with radar specifically because the radar will tell us pretty much most of what we need to know about it and let us know, okay, the likelihood is still 1% or a 10th of a percent or or completely negligible or, you know, maybe 70%. We don't know, but we need to hit it with with some radar and it's that probably will only happen in 2028. Maybe they could do it now, I don't think, but we may have to wait those three years.

• 23:29Bob Novella?

  And that's what that's what I really do not like. So, uh, yeah, our worst fears could be realized and they, you know, we calculate in 2028. Oh, look, Chucky is probably going to hit the earth. And by then it's going to be probably way too late to do anything to deal with it. So once we calculate that this is going to hit us, it automatically jumps from a three to what? What do you think? Oh, eight.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  Eight.

• 23:52Bob Novella?

  Yeah, very good. You've been paying attention. I'm so happy right now. It'll be, it jumps to an eight and it could never go to a nine or 10 because it's just not big enough for that. So I know you're all thinking it. What would happen if we were hit? So like I said, this is a city killer.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  Depends.

• 24:07Bob Novella?

  But more specifically, what does that mean? John Tonry is an astronomer at University of Hawaii. He likens the impact to a 10 megaton bomb. He says specifically, everything within three or four kilometers will be incinerated. Everything out to maybe 10 kilometers is smashed. It's not a nuclear explosion, but it's an extremely hot explosion. There would be a huge fireball that would start fires out to 15 kilometers, something like that. It would kill a lot of people if they haven't moved out of the way.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  That's the point, right? We, I mean, there'll be time to evacuate.

• 24:38Bob Novella?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 24:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and that's assuming that it's going to land in a city. But most, right meteorites at least land in the middle. The desert or the ocean?

• 24:49Bob Novella?

  Exactly, exactly. And that segues nicely into where is this going to hit? And they can calculate that with a certain degree of confidence. And so they've defined a swath, a swath of the earth that would be under threat. If things don't change too much. They call it a risk corridor. And this extends from the Pacific Ocean through the northern South America, then the Atlantic Ocean, and then Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian Sea, and parts of South Asia. Those are the areas.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Most of the planet.

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, no, but it's a specific latitude, right? That's what they're calculating.

• 25:25Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's a nice big swath.

• 25:26Cara Santa Maria?

  As it wraps around the globe. Because we're spinning.

• 25:29Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly. So.

• 25:35Bob Novella?

  But you're right, though. That's where it could hit, but it could just hit the ocean. And but then you've got the, you know, you have to deal with a tsunami. And I couldn't find too much detail out there. How bad would the tsunami be? I'm sure if you're near, anywhere near where it hits in the ocean, the tsunami could be bad. But then there's another option here. There's an airburst scenario. Now, Chucky, Chucky seems like he's rocky. He's more rocky than metallic. So he could potentially explode in the upper atmosphere and never even reach the ground in one piece. This could be similar to the famous Tunguska event in 1908, which flattened, what?

• 26:16Bob Novella?

  2,100 square kilometers in a remote Siberian forest. Very good, Evan. Yeah, still, that could be pretty nasty. If this happens over a city, it would obviously be bad. You guys remember the Russian city, Chelyabinsk?

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Yes, 2014.

• 26:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it was like 10, 11 years ago. Windows were shattered, hundreds were injured. And that rock was only 20 meters wide. This could be, you know, three, four times that. So, yeah, even an airburst over a city, you know, over a populated area, could be kind of nasty. But after all that doom and gloom, we are lucky, though. We are lucky in 2025, there's not much luck flying. Around, but we're lucky with this because the world has been taking the possibility of an asteroid strike much more seriously for years now. I was so glad when they started listening to my rants on the show. Twenty years ago, spotting Chucky and extrapolating its orbit

• 27:14Bob Novella?

  like we have done already would have been very, very hard to do. And I think we would have missed it entirely in 2025. And maybe we would, maybe we would, we would have caught it in 2028. I don't know. It would have been very difficult. Now it's much easier to do it. So we're also lucky because once an asteroid is detected, that is more than 50 meters wide and has a 1% chance or greater of hitting the earth, then our planetary defenses kick in. Now, I'm not talking about force fields surrounding the earth. I'm not even talking about an obelisk that shoots a beam that moves the asteroid conveniently out of the way. We don't have those cool toys yet. And of course, that was a reference to Star Trek. So the first step, the first step that we have now is we, we

• 27:59Bob Novella?

  mobilize available telescopes worldwide to gather data about the new asteroid. So once this was announced, lots of, lots of, lots of telescopes, you know, were utilized to get more information about this. So that's, that's the first step. The other part of this first step is that two UN endorsed groups are activated. There's the International Asteroid Warning Network chaired by NASA. And then there's a Space Mission Planning Advisory Group chaired by the European Space Agency ESA. Now NASA's group coordinates worldwide detection and warning strategies, but the ESA group has the cool job. They evaluate the spacecraft options to deflect the asteroid if the collision odds remain high. That's what they're going to be doing. So now,

• 28:40Bob Novella?

  both groups very closely monitor Chucky's trajectory, of course, because that, that impacts what they're actually going to be doing. The ESA group is already holding meetings this week. They have already held some meetings as we speak. And so what they said, one of the things they said is that no immediate actions are, are required right now. They're premature, but in April or May, they're going to formally evaluate. So if the, if the probability stays above 1%, then they're going to work with the UN. And evaluate mitigation possibilities, including using a spacecraft to hit the asteroid to deflect it like DART craft a few weeks ago, or who knows, they may have another arrow in their quiver, which could include an X-ray nuke to push it away, kind of like that obelisk

• 29:23Bob Novella?

  from Star Trek. I doubt they're going to have that tech ready. Totally, I totally doubt they'll have that ready. But the thing is, the key, though, is not to sit on our hands until 2028, because that's going to really piss me off. They need to make, I think, if we, by April, if we don't know, if we still don't know its exact orbit and think it's still like 1.6% above 1%, I think we absolutely need to have something ready to fly in 2028. I don't care what the hell it is, have something ready. Probably an impactor will be enough, a kinetic impactor, because, because the one that DART was used against was about the same size, and it worked. So I think they need to really seriously consider it. Of course, they've got to do their due diligence, and they don't want to make sure

• 30:07Bob Novella?

  that they're not diverting it to, you know, hitting the Earth even more straight on than before, whatever. But we may need to really just be ready. And if, if it turns out it's not going to hit the Earth when we look at it in radar, fine, but we'll be ready for the next one that comes. And who knows when that is?

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Oh, I have a correction to make on something I said, that Chablins, Chilovinsk meteor was not 2014, it was 2013. In fact, February of 2013, so we're coming up on the anniversary.

• 30:34Bob Novella?

  Ah, okay. Yeah, I remember, I remember that day. I was, I was in the cafeteria at work, and like, oh, wow, an airburst.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  And they had like, 100 cameras pick it up. It was great.

• 30:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that was intense. People caught it, a lot of people caught it on their, their dash cams in their cars.

• 30:49Cara Santa Maria?

  I love all of the Russian dash cam, like footage.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Oh, crashes and stuff?

• 30:55Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, like the ones of really meteorites, right? Where they're just driving, and there's a fireball in the sky, and they just do not react. And it is so funny. They're just like, huh, and just keep driving.

• 31:08Speaker 03

  They love dash cams in Russia. That, that, that seems to be a thing.

• 31:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe like, it may be a taxi thing. I don't know. Like, every Uber has one.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 31:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Not every, but a lot of Ubers have them. Yeah, I don't know.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Curiosity Weekly. Guys, science and technology, they're moving faster than ever, and science and tech are constantly evolving. And if you want to keep up with the latest information,

• 31:37Jay Novella?

  You should definitely listen to the Curiosity Weekly podcast from Discovery. On Curiosity Weekly, they make sense of some of the biggest questions and ideas shaping our world.

• 31:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And, I mean, I know you love science podcasts. You're listening to one right now. So you can learn all sorts of things on Curiosity Weekly, from information about the latest neuroscience, to neural networks, algorithms, sleep science, and so much more.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Listen to Curiosity Weekly wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:12Jay Novella?

  Well, everyone, let's get back to the show. Jay, is the internet adversely affecting our memory?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  What'd you say?

• 32:20Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, it could be, Steve. It could be, but there's details. You know, it's always these little nuances that we gotta pay attention to. The interesting thing here is that our species has always been looking for ways to help us remember information. You know, we rely on external tools to store data. So historically, what did we do? We, you know, we, maybe we made cave paintings that told the story, and then later on, you know, people created scrolls to write stuff on, right? Today, we have computers. And also, the amount and kinds of data that we can store on it, right? Very different than just writing, you know, words and drawings on a scroll. Today, a computer could do a huge number of things when it comes to data.

• 33:04Jay Novella?

  So the question is, does the internet, artificial intelligence, and modern computing fundamentally alter the way that we learn and remember information? Before I continue, I'm curious to hear, what's your gut telling you guys?

• 33:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's such a broad question. There's no way to answer that question without saying yes. But like, in what regard?

• 33:24Jay Novella?

  Well, is it having a negative impact?

• 33:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, a negative impact? Well, it's probably both.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Probably?

• 33:30Cara Santa Maria?

  It's probably affecting certain types of retrieval, but increasing certain types of processing.

• 33:37Jay Novella?

  To work on the answer, we have to look at how we interact with information. Right? So, you know, what do we do today? We Google things, like we use search engines, we have GPS. And those, those two things, if you're just looking at them alone, they've changed the way, dramatically changed the way that we search for information and the way that we navigate in our vehicles. And studies have shown that relying on GPS, you know, it reduces our ability to remember routes. And it's pretty true, like I remember everything from my childhood. I mean, I know my childhood neighborhood really well. You know, I have all the street names memorized and everything, but you know, my adult home, not so much, like I know how to get in and out, but I mean, there's a million side streets that I never even pay attention to.

• 34:22Jay Novella?

  And I, you know, if I'm going to go somewhere that's, you know, not 15 minutes to the store, I put GPS on, even if I'm going to the doctor, which I, you know, I might do once a year. I'm like, I don't completely remember where every doctor is, that, you know, my kid's doctor's, my wife's doctor, my doctor. So I think it does have a profound influence or effect on just the way that we're paying attention, right? When we're driving in the car. So today, we use Google and other search engines when we want to find information online. But earlier, you know, years and years ago, we, people had to read books to get information. And that's a totally different experience than quickly searching something and getting right to the heart of the matter, like the fact that you're looking for. Instead of sifting through, you know, one or more books to learn something, um, which

• 35:05Jay Novella?

  is just, again, like it's a, it's a different way of interacting with, with the information. People would have to commit a lot more time to learning. And there's a phenomenon that's sometimes called the Google effect, which means that we're shifting away from internal memory and instead, we're using the, the internet and our computers to give us the answers. The Google effect. Yeah, I mean, sure, I, I, I see that. I definitely use the computer way more than I'll crack open a book if I, if I'm, you know, going to ask questions and want quick answers. My gut tells me, like, as I was reading this information, my gut was telling me, "Yeah, I do think that technology has been kind of ruining my personal memory on lots of different things that I do."

• 35:48Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think it has to mind.

• 35:49Jay Novella?

  But research suggests... What's that?

• 35:50Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't think it has to mind, because you're forgetting the second half of that equation, and maybe it's a function of volition, because sure, if you want to just engage in this sort of attentionally thin way, and just find what you need and move on, and then all of that architecture, all of that space that you now have available to you, you can fill with whatever you want. You can fill it with trash TV, or you can fill it with other types of knowledge.

• 36:17Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I guess overall, we're not talking about specifics, we're talking about, like, in general, with all the different things that we do and the way that we're interacting with information, you know, what's the overall effect? So, there is research on this, and the research suggests a couple of things. One, that it can impair our performance on specific tasks, like navigating or recalling facts, but there's not significant evidence that suggests an overall decline in our cognitive ability. And that makes me very happy, because it's always like, you know, use it or you're gonna lose it, right? And I know that with your brain, that that is in play. Like, if you're not using your brain, exercising your brain, that your cognitive ability will

• 37:02Jay Novella?

  decrease, right, Steve?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that fits with my understanding of the research, but the thing is, at the same time, what the research shows is that it's very task-specific. If you do a task, you get better at that task, right? And if you don't do it, then you get worse at that task, but that doesn't necessarily have global or generalizable benefits or detriments to your cognitive function. I think that probably the better way to look at this is not that it's like having a negative effect on us, it's just that we are changing the kinds of things we're good at.

• 37:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  We are adapting to the new information landscape that we have before us.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  We're we're we're not developing some skills that are no longer relevant and we're developing other skills that are relevant. And of course, if you choose to test the irrelevant skills, they will test worse.

• 37:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it'll look like a decrement. It's like when I think about the generational difference between myself and my parents. Yes, I probably don't have as much mental mapping from a navigational perspective, but I'll tell you what, watching them drive with their sat nav makes me want to scream. They are such Luddites when it comes to the sat nav.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Like they just, they don't know how to use it. They don't know how to preempt turns. They don't know, you know, whereas I'm I'm very fluid. I put my I put Apple Maps up every time I go anywhere, even places I know where I'm going because I want to know down to the second when I'm going to arrive. And I want to know if there's a better path.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Researchers are not 100% aligned, right? You know, this is early early in the research. So some researchers are arguing that offloading memory to digital devices, it's not necessarily harmful.

• 38:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Right. It gives you more.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Some of them think it can free up cognitive resources for more complex mental processes like,

• 38:52Jay Novella?

  That's what I just heard.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Should you memorize your grocery list? Should you write it down? Or should you just have it already created on your your smartphone when you go to the store, right? Instead of spending time on that, you could spend time on more complicated things that take more attention. And then there now there's the whole thing with AI, right? So AI is having an impact. And they're and they're trying to figure out exactly what that impact is. So, you know, search engines changed how we retrieve data, but AI has, you know, the potential to reshape how, you know, how that data is formed and how we absorb that data. So generative AI, you know, things like ChatGPT, they provide information in a new way that really hasn't existed before. It's interactive and it's conversational.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  And that is so true. I mean, the way that I use, the way that I use ChatGPT when I'm doing research, it's a conversation without a doubt. And I find that to be a much better way for me to get information. I like that about it. But, you know, it is more immersive than any other kind of way that we we've done traditional searches. And some experts worry, though, that this could make users cognitively lazy, which could reduce the the effort needed for critical thinking and deep learning. So that that. It was troubling for me, right? So you could, we could, we could slowly over time become kind of lazy mentally. And, you know, general critical thinking skills and deep learning could, could suffer from that.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Again, these are what the experts are doing. This is what, saying this is what they're researching. There isn't like massive conclusive data yet. Because this is very hard to research, right? It's not like you just, you know, run a study for a couple of weeks and you have great data. Like, these things could take, we, we might need a huge number of people and it might take, you know, a decade to really suss this out. So another concern that researchers have brought up is that AI has the, the ability to shape personal and historical memories. So let me explain that. We have digital assistants and they can curate, you know, memories for us by, they, they could assemble past photos and videos. They can influence how people recall events.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  They could, there's also something called dead bots, right? These AI-driven avatars that mimic deceased loved ones, which I think is horrible, by the way. But these, these could create virtual conversations with the past that create, you know, create new memories and potentially, you know, unreliable data could be transferred. You know, someone could be, you know, interacting with AI and it's not accurate, you know? Please, you know, I want to have a conversation with my, my father who passed away and I want you to sound exactly like him and I've given you, you know, a half hour audio of the guy talking. You know, but the AI isn't the person. And the AI could say a lot of things that it, it's trying to simulate who the person is, but you know, how, how accurate could that be?

• 41:43Speaker 02

  I mean, even the, in Star Trek on the holodeck. Remember that, that one on the next gen, Bob, with like, um, Geordi like fell in love with like this engineer that was like a warp drive engineer?

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Well, I might remember that too.

• 41:56Bob Novella?

  Right. He created her on the holodeck and yeah, he was behaving horribly.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  And the computer told him like, as it goes on, the, the chances of it being accurate. Dramatically drop off to where like, you know, I just found that interesting and it reminded me of that.

• 42:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes, that documentary Star Trek.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's pretty cool because some, some science fiction writer like, you know, called that out a very long time ago before anything like that was even remotely possible. Another idea here is there like one factor that complicates all of this is something that a lot of us complain about, and this is information overload. This has become one of my massive pet peeves, or it, maybe that's not even strong enough. Like, I really have a problem with information overload, right? People are exposed to, you know, hu- huge amounts more data than previous generations. Like, there's the volume of information we have to attempt to retain could make memory lapses feel more frequent, right? Because, because we're faced with more information, right?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  We're not living in a small town of 30 people, and, you know, we know everyone, and basically that's all we know, and it's a very, very short list of things. Like, we're, we are all like, doing, doing things online and, and getting bombarded with information, and God forbid you go on social media and then you're even bombarded with more information, you know? Just, it seems like it's overwhelming. To me, it is. I don't know about you guys. But if our cognitive function is unchanged, right? Then, let's say that, you know, cognitively, we're the same as we were 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but you add this factor in of all this, you know, information coming to us. It does have an effect. Now, it could be a, a perceived effect that we have a decline in our memory because we're

• 43:39Speaker 02

  getting hit with so much that we, we really can't possibly retain it, right? And we feel that. I don't remember this. I don't remember that. Like, you know, when I look at, when I look at people, you know, famous people, Bob's really good at, at names and, and remember, you know, detecting their faces and all that. To me, you know, I, I don't know, any, anything that happened in the last 15 years, I have a vague understanding and memory of any of it. I, I mean, I guess I'm not paying that close of attention, but like, you know, when I was 20, I knew every single person, you know, every single musician that was out there, you know, I, I had it all, like, you know, drop of a hat, I could, I could name any of them. Today, I, I have no idea what's going on.

• 44:17Cara Santa Maria?

  But Jay, I think you just tapped into such an important point. And that's attention. Like, I'm curious why, and I get it, like, you know, researchers investigate the things that they have expertise in and the areas of their interest. But does the internet affect our memory? Okay, that is an interesting question. Does the internet affect our attention? Yes, that's a part of memory. And that's a really important part because it's the first part. You can't remember things you don't attend to. You just can't.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, but do you do you feel like the information overload thing?

• 44:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but I think that a lot of that is a choice. And I get it. It's hard when you're a digital native and this is the water that you swim in because it probably doesn't feel like a choice. You probably don't feel like you can stop scrolling or you can put your phone in the other room. That's a very, very difficult thing to do when it's an extension of yourself and your sense of self. But ultimately, you have a volitional choice to cut off that information stream and give yourself solitude and calm.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But we're not trained in that. And we don't prioritize it as a culture.

• 45:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think we really need to divide this up into two questions. Is our the current environment with AI and the internet and social media and everything, is that having a negative neurological effect on us, on our cognitive function? You know, I think the there is no evidence to conclude that it is. And I think if anything, the evidence is going the other way. And if you look just to ask the question, you know, what's happening over time, like over historical time, over decades, people are basically getting a little bit smarter every decade.

• 46:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but their attention spans are getting shorter.

• 46:05Speaker 02

  Right. But then the other question is, how are we using our cognitive function? You know, Cara brings up an excellent point about attention, not just about your raw memory, it's about what are you choosing to do with your attention, with your cognitive function? What do you spend your time doing? And I do think it's a good idea to be thoughtful about how you're spending your time, not just going with the flow of what is happening around you. Not only, you know, because of your mood and how it affects you that way, but also, you know, because what you do, you will get good at. If you spend your time engaging with interesting information and thinking about things deeply, you'll get better at

• 46:47Speaker 02

  that. If you spend your time on the most superficial entertainment, then that's what you're going to be good at, right?

• 46:55Jay Novella?

  But Steve, what if we're spending a lot of time, you know, learning this behavior of being avoidant to the crush of information that's being thrown at us?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  I think we all need to figure out how to survive in the, in the, in the current, again, the current information ecosystem. And part of, part of what I do, again, I try to be very thoughtful about like what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it in terms of, you know, reading articles versus, you know, watching the news, listening to the radio, et cetera, and the sources of information that I'm spending my time exposing myself to. But also, and this gets a little bit back to your original point about like using GPS or whatever. I do, you know, will try to not be entirely reliant on modern technology. Not for neurological reasons, but just because I don't want to be completely helpless when the power goes out. You know what I mean? Or when something, when the

• 47:45Speaker 02

  app goes down. So I occasionally will drive places without GPS just to do it. Just to exercise my ability to navigate without being told turn for turn what to do. I commit certain phone numbers to memory, just so if I don't have access to my, my address book in my phone, I'm not completely helpless. Right? Do you ever have that situation where you're like, whatever, your phone's dead, or you don't want your phone, you have to borrow somebody else's phone, and you realize you don't know a single person's number? Yeah, that's crazy, man.

• 48:15Bob Novella?

  Oh, man.

• 48:16Jay Novella?

  Totally right, Steve.

• 48:17Bob Novella?

  Which all you had was to memorize the numbers.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:19Cara Santa Maria?

  I still don't know my own office line because I've worked in this fellowship for a short, you know, less than a year. To this day, when somebody asks me for my phone number, I have to open my email and look at my signature.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  So I made an effort to commit certain numbers to memory.

• 48:34Bob Novella?

  You guys remember Dad? Dad was famous for having... Literally 200 phone numbers on his fingertips, at his fingertips. It was amazing, his memory for phone numbers. Incredible.

• 48:46Cara Santa Maria?

  It is a zero sum game, memory. And yes, some people have more memory capacity than other people. They probably do have, you know, certain increased skills in that area. But when we commit certain things to memory, there is literally less space for other things. That's why we have to connect things to things that are already there. When we have a lot of disparate information, it's really hard to remember it.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  It's complicated. All right, Cara, tell us about this growing rat problem that we're having in the world's cities.

• 49:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I came across, I don't know, I always like kind of scrub these different science articles every week, thinking about what I'm going to talk about on SG. And every so often, something kind of quirky, interesting, terrifying.

• 49:29Bob Novella?

  When you say growing rat problem, are you talking about the size of the rats or the size of the problem?

• 49:32Cara Santa Maria?

  We're talking about how much the rats are growing. No, um, so let's, what do you think? Steve, you know the answer to this already. Everyone else, what do you think is the number one variable that seems to be driving growing numbers of rats?

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Population.

• 49:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Popu- well, the population of the rats?

• 49:51Speaker 03

  No, direct population of humans.

• 49:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  Because where people go, rats go.

• 49:54Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a good, good guess, and it's, it's up there, not the number one.

• 49:59Bob Novella?

  Poorly stored food?

• 50:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Poorly stored food. I don't even know if that's in the top five, but it's, it's kind of a component of the top five. It's sort of a component of what Evan said, right? Lots and lots of people.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  So I'll have to say, I know, I know the answer you're getting to, Cara, but I have to say, along Bob's line, I read some very interesting articles that basically saying that the rat population is directly proportional to the food supply. All, that's it. They will, they will grow to the food supply. And the only way to really deal with the problem, like in New York City, we go to New York City, like you're walking as a rat walking down the street next to you. I mean, they have a really bad rat problem. But it's essentially, they will, their population will grow to meet the food supply, and the only way to reduce the rats is to reduce that food supply.

• 50:43Cara Santa Maria?

  So you're talking about that upper limit?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  The upper limit of their population.

• 50:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, sort of like how if you put a koi in a pond, it'll grow to the size of the pond or whatever.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there is, you know, this study that was just recently published in Science, Science Advances, increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to blank, blank, and blank. Really, they did a pretty intense sophisticated analysis to try and determine what these larger predictors were. And human population was the third, urbanization was the second. Both of those have direct implications on food supply. The very first, da-da-da-da, climate change.

• 51:22Bob Novella?

  Oh, no way.

• 51:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh huh. Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization, and human population. This was a study that was done by a group of urban ecologists. And what they actually did, it's kind of interesting, is they looked at public complaint and inspection data. So people complaining about the rat problem in their city and also data from inspectors. They looked at 16 cities around the world and they used that information to sort of estimate the trends in the rat populations because I don't think anybody actually knows how many rats are in any of these cities. Obviously, we have to estimate those numbers. And of the 16 cities, 11 of them, so that made up 69% of them, had significant increasing trends in their rat numbers.

• 52:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Only three cities had declines and two cities, there was no change. And let's talk about what the researchers found using their sophisticated statistical analyses. So first and foremost, the city with the largest increase across their dataset, they looked at a study period, right? But they looked at the kind of before to the after. And here are some interesting takeaways. So like I mentioned, 11 of the 16 cities had significant increases and those increases varied widely in their magnitude. So what city do you think had the largest increase across their kind of test period?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  New York.

• 52:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Right? Everyone thought New York. New York was number three. No, New York was number four.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Uh, Mexico City.

• 52:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Washington DC.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  So were they talking about the rodents or the politicians?

• 53:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, right. It didn't clarify. No, so the the increase, the trend in the rat population in Washington DC was three times greater than in Boston and one and a half times greater than in New York City. Fascinating. So we saw increases, the five strongest trends were Washington DC, San Francisco, Toronto, New York City and Amsterdam. And then that was followed by Oakland, Buffalo, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City and Cincinnati. They looked at New Orleans, where they had a greater decrease. New Orleans, Louisville and Tokyo all had decreases. New Orleans had the largest decrease. And then Dallas and St. Louis didn't show any real statistically significant change in their trends.

• 53:45Cara Santa Maria?

  So, so basically they did an analysis, a relative weights analysis to figure out the variance, right? What percentage of the change was attributed to these different variables, these different factors? And their weights turned out to be that 40.7% of the variation in trend was linked to the mean temperature increase that the city had relative to long-term temperature averages. So cities where the temperature went up the most were cities where they had more rats. And there was a pretty strong correlation there. Cities, yeah, it tended to be that way. The larger increase meant larger increases, larger temperature rise meant larger increases in rat sightings. They also looked at what they called urbanization. It was actually a proxy for that.

• 54:30Cara Santa Maria?

  They, they saw what percentage of that area's land was vegetated, right? Like, how much green was there in the city? And they found that that attributed to about 34.3% of the variance. So cities with less vegetation had greater increase in rats. So more urbanized areas had more rats. Human population density, the weight there was 19.4%. And then the rest, the smaller variables that they looked at were GDP, that was only 3.4% of the variance, and mean minimum temperature experienced by a City, that's 2.3% of the variance. So it wasn't really that the hottest cities had the most rats.

• 55:10Cara Santa Maria?

  It was that the cities that gained temperature over time the most had a larger increase in rat populations. And so let's talk about why would rats want to be places where we have greater increases in average air temperatures? Rats activity is constrained by cold temperature. So when it gets colder, the rodents themselves get slower, they remain sheltered for longer, or they might forage for food and then store that food and hang out kind of more latent for longer. And so we see a lot of seasonality when we look at rats at certain latitudes, whereas there's not as much seasonality, sort of.

• 55:54Speaker 03

  Ratitudes.

• 55:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Ratitude, ratitude. There's more, yeah, don't.

• 56:01Speaker 03

  Don't mind me.

• 56:02Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm gonna stop. Less kind of seasonality, you know, in equatorial or tropical or subtropical areas. So there are seasonal kind of cycling in like places like New York City or DC anyway. But we saw that those increases increased when there was a change in average temperature due to climate change. Yeah, and so there is a real fear here because long-term climate change is occurring across most of the globe. We also see that it's more intense in cities because cities have something called the urban heat island effect. You know, places where there's a lot of concrete, places where there's not as much green space.

• 56:44Cara Santa Maria?

  We don't have as many sinks for those temperatures. They increase exponentially. They increase significantly more than these more rural areas. And it's not uniform across the globe, right? So as the researchers write, urban areas of northern North America, southern and central Europe, and the Middle East are projected to have faster increases in temperature. And this may lead to cities in these regions experiencing different trends in rat numbers over time, as well as associated human rat conflicts. So when we talk about associated. Human rat conflict, what are we actually talking about? Why do we need to be worried about lots of rats?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Disease vectors?

• 57:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, disease spread.

• 57:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Massive disease vectors, yeah. And then that can be a really good indication of sort of the epidemiologic health of that region. They're almost like the opposite of the canary in the coal mine, right? Like, if the rats are doing well, I think we need to be careful. But we don't know if these increases are due specifically to lower mortality, if they're actually breeding more, right, like increased fecundity, or if they just have increased foraging opportunities. But it's likely that all of the above are contributing to that due to climate change. The researchers also, you know, they they kind of drill down into why areas that are more vegetated tend to have fewer rats. They also drill down into not just urbanization, but the other ecological impacts

• 58:06Cara Santa Maria?

  and ways that more research along these lines may help us understand how to control rat populations in the future. But yeah, rats as a proxy is is really interesting, but also just increasing rats has its own, comes with its own public health concerns.

• 58:26Speaker 02

  You know what doesn't work to control rat populations?

• 58:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Cats?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  Cats.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  Trapping, hunting, none of that works. They will just, they will outbreed any attempt to control their population you have. It's all about the environment generally, which includes temperature, food availability, spaces to nest, you know. They will fill the space that's given to them, yeah.

• 58:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Hygiene.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  I always thought, you know, farms would have cats around to, you know, eat the mice and the rats.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:53Speaker 03

  Ships.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, on a small scale, that's that's correct. On a city scale, no. There's way, there are way too many places to hide and breed. You cannot, it's like, you know, I lived in Baltimore, right? When you live in Baltimore, one of the skills you learn is cockroach control, right? You have to learn that skill. And you can't just kill them when you see them, you know what I mean? It's like you're just nibbling around the edges there.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're seeing the very limits.

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, you, you have to get to the the source, like, you know, which basically means you have to use poison that they bring back to their nest.

• 59:28Cara Santa Maria?

  And what you also have to do is ensure, just like with mosquito mitigation strategies, you ensure that the places where they're most likely to hang out are not hospitable to them.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Right. You can't have breeding locations.

• 59:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 59:41Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, it's, it's just.

• 59:41Speaker 02

  Can't just have a bug zapper. I mean, it's fine to have a bug zapper on your patio, but that's not going to be population control for mosquitoes.

• 59:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And a lot of this is almost can be thought of as urban hygiene. And urban hygiene includes clearly temperature.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Yep. Urban hygiene.

• 59:55Cara Santa Maria?

  So, yeah. The cat thing wouldn't work at a, at a city level anyway, because really is it, is it, okay, it's bad to have lots of rats. It's actually really bad to then have lots of feral cats as well.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think what we should need to do is release millions of feral cats into the city. And then when they get out of control, then we're going to release.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Dogs.

• 1:00:14Speaker 02

  We're going to release coyotes or dogs into the city.

• 1:00:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  And then when they get out of control, we'll introduce mountain lions into the city. There was a book, there was a child, one of our favorite childhood books was.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  Yes, but yes.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  The king, the mice and the cheese.

• 1:00:26Bob Novella?

  After the mountain lion.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  Then the elephants, then the elephants.

• 1:00:29Bob Novella?

  But then to get rid of the elephants, you need the mice again.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Got to bring the mice back.

• 1:00:32Bob Novella?

  Don't.

• 1:00:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Amazing.

• 1:00:36Bob Novella?

  Guys, I wish I could remember, I read about some small country somewhere that has, they have it in for the rats to such a degree that they have declared the country rat-free, literally rat-free. And if, if somebody spots a rat, it literally makes the news. It makes the news. And they're just like.

• 1:00:56Cara Santa Maria?

  I'm looking this up. This is great.

• 1:00:58Bob Novella?

  I want to find it because I'm still, I think, I'm skeptical because how is that impossible? But they somehow.

• 1:01:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Alberta, Canada.

• 1:01:05Bob Novella?

  Huh?

• 1:01:06Cara Santa Maria?

  And the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Alberta, Canada, rat-free.

• 1:01:09Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:01:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Since 1950.

• 1:01:11Bob Novella?

  That's.

• 1:01:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, but they'll freeze in the winter. So, you know.

• 1:01:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, they have a dedicated rat control program.

• 1:01:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:01:18Cara Santa Maria?

  They've got propaganda posters saying, kill a rat if you see it. They've got rat patrol agents.

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Remember the rat catchers from medieval times? Oh, yeah. That was a real.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  The rat catchers.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Booming economy.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  All right. Carol, let me ask you this question. Do you think that any apes have a theory of mind?

• 1:01:39Cara Santa Maria?

  I do. Well, first of all, we are apes and we know we do.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  Other non-human apes, non-human.

• 1:01:44Cara Santa Maria?

  But I do, I do think so. Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  So this has actually been a very controversial research question. And let me explain.

• 1:01:51Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:01:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it has been. Yeah, let me explain what a theory of mind is. That is the ability to think about the fact that other people have the ability to think and feel things, right? Like, I can imagine what you're thinking. That I know that you think. I know you can.

• 1:02:07Cara Santa Maria?

  You have to know that you think to be able to. It's a precursor to empathy.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, you can't have empathy without theory of mind.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, if I do something, you will feel something in response. But it's also like strategizing, like, if I'm gonna manipulate your behavior, I have to have some internal model of how your behavior works, right? Which has to do with how you think, what you know, what you don't know, how you feel, right? It's all theory of mind. People obviously have it, and it's been controversial whether or not any non-human animal has it. And obviously, our closest primate relatives, our closest ape relatives, are the ones who would be most likely to have it, right? Unless some other line, like, unless we think like birds or dolphins or whatever might have a theory of mind. But the research has focused mainly on apes.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  When you do, when you do that kind of research, right, you cannot read the minds of your subject. You have to infer what's going on inside the mind of a bonobo, or a chimpanzee, or a gorilla, or whatever, right?

• 1:03:09Bob Novella?

  Bonobo, baby.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  So you have to use some kind of a research paradigm, some kind of a construct, where you say, if they do have a theory of mind, then this is what we predict they would behave on this research situation, on this test. But that still doesn't prove that they do. It's just, you know, the more you do that, and it kind of builds up this case that they have a theory of mind, the more likely we think it is. But then, there's always different ways to interpret it, right? Nothing is ironclad. So up until now, most of the research, you know, addressing this question, has tried to answer the question, does the study subject, you know, a chimpanzee or bonobo...

• 1:03:53Speaker 02

  Do they understand that another creature, whether a fellow ape or a human researcher, that they know something, that they have some piece of information in their mind? And some of that research has been positive, right? So it has suggested, well, then maybe they do have a theory in mind. They seem to act on the belief that another agent has a piece of information. But that has come under question because it's hard to know if they're acting on their own knowledge or their beliefs about the knowledge of the other entity, right?

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  The other, either human or ape and the research. So now there's a new study that's, okay, so we're going to do something different. We're going to see if the research subjects, the apes, have knowledge of another creature's absence of information, not the presence of information, about, right? If they can think about another creature's ignorance, because that would sort of flip things around a little bit and be harder to say, well, they're just acting on their own knowledge. Does that make sense? So here's the research paradigm. A lot of behavioral studies with chimpanzees

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  exploit the fact that chimpanzees are very greedy. They will always go for the treat, right? So their behavior is very predictable. And so that becomes a variable that you can sort of count on and the research is on. So this actually used bonobos, which are a type of chimpanzee. And the bonobos-

• 1:05:35Bob Novella?

  The best kind.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  So the study's subject, the bonobo, was sitting across a table from a human researcher, while another human researcher sat at 90 degrees to those two, right? So they were at another side of the table. Then the game master, that's the person sitting at right angles to the subject and the target, they would then hide a treat under one of three cups.

• 1:06:02Speaker 02

  Right, doing this, they would do it in front of the person in front of the bonobo, and then wait five seconds, and then reveal the treat and give it to the bonobo. So the bonobo learns that there's a treat under the cup, and then one of the humans will reveal it and give me the treat. Then, that was just the setup, that was just like the training phase. Then, they introduced a barrier between the human sitting across from the bonobo and the cups and the bonobo. So now the human cannot see the cups. But, in some of the situations, there's a window in the barrier where they could see

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  the cups, and then in some situations, there was no window, so they could not see the cups. Right, so they're setting up a situation where the bonobo should easily be able to see that the human sitting across from them either knows where the treat is being pushed, placed, or doesn't know where the treat is being placed.

• 1:07:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  Right?

• 1:07:05Cara Santa Maria?

  So they have the ability to see that, are they guaranteeing that they are attending to that information?

• 1:07:10Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, they're sitting right across from them.

• 1:07:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:07:13Speaker 02

  You know, it's, so, yeah, I don't know if they, like, if they were specifically trying to control, are they attending to it? I think it's, they're paying close attention to what's going on, was sort of the sense of that.

• 1:07:23Cara Santa Maria?

  So the paradigm assumes that the bonobos know?

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:07:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Either, or they're asking, do they know?

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  They witnessed whether the human saw where the treat was being placed or not.

• 1:07:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  Then, they, the question was, in the condition where the human, then they remove the barrier, right? And the person waits. And then, the question is, if the bonobo thinks the person knows where the treat is, will they behave differently than if they think the person doesn't know where the treat is? And specifically, they said, the bonobo, if the bonobo has a theory of mind, in the situation where they know that the human does not know where the treat is, they will try to communicate where the treat is more insistently.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  And more quickly than in the scenarios where they think the person does know where the treat is. And right, does that make sense?

• 1:08:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  And and that's what happened, you know, pretty strongly, like the statistics are pretty are pretty robust. So the Bonobos were able, like, they got very insistent at pointing out where the treat was in the in the situation where the human did not see where it was placed. Because they know that that's the human needs to know where the treat is, otherwise they will not give it to them. They won't get the treat.

• 1:08:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Whereas like if you had done the exact same experiment, but modified it for their height or whatever with a dog, a dog probably would have acted the same way like, bro, there's a treat there, bro, give me the treat.

• 1:08:51Speaker 02

  Either way, yeah, without without exactly without regard to their knowledge of whether or not the person knew that piece of information. So they were able to act on their knowledge of the ignorance of the of the other person in the situation.

• 1:09:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Awesome.

• 1:09:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, which which makes a lot of sense. So the thing is Bonobos hunt cooperatively. They don't not as much as chimpanzees do, but they do. And so that's an obvious situation where you might think, yeah, coordinating your activity, you know, among the various, you know, troop members. And especially like being able to think about, oh, like my fellow Bonobo over there doesn't know that the thing that we're hunting is behind the tree or whatever, like they could change their behavior based upon their theory of mind of the other members of their troop.

• 1:09:43Cara Santa Maria?

  And and like babies don't have theory of mind like this. This is something that's so interesting, like even kids don't develop it until they're toddlers.

• 1:09:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, that cool comes on over time to be they're not born with it. Yeah.

• 1:09:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:55Bob Novella?

  Jay took you till you were 20 years old, right?

• 1:09:58Speaker 02

  So Jay does have a theory of meatballs, though, that.

• 1:10:02Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  That goes back even farther. So the thinking is that, again, this makes sense, that our closest relatives would have at least a pre or a proto-theory of mind. In this case, it might actually be fairly well-developed, which was what we find. Clearly, humans have some unique cognitive abilities, right? We evolved huge brains, language, etc. But the more we research our closest relatives, especially the more we find that the precursors of those abilities are all there already. They didn't just come out of nowhere, which evolutionarily makes total sense, right? We had to evolve from something. These abilities did not come out of whole cloth. They derived

• 1:10:48Speaker 02

  from more primitive versions in our common ancestor with our closest relatives. So not surprising. And again, this is one study. This is not going to put the debate to rest. But this is one notch in favor of the conclusion that bonobos, in this case, do have a theory of mind. It makes the evidence for that a little bit more robust. We'll see if it replicates. We'll see if it replicates in different setups, you know.

• 1:11:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and I wouldn't be surprised if you also saw it in chimps, if you saw it in orangutans.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yep. All right. Interesting. Evan, is NASA being harassed by aliens?

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Well, I guess it depends what kind of articles you read, videos you watch, kind of what we were talking about earlier. Yeah, that's a headline that'll make you spit out your coffee while drinking, right, Bob?

• 1:11:43Bob Novella?

  Oh, every time.

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  The headline, "NASA Astronauts Are Harassed By 125-Foot-Tall, I Guess, Aliens With Wings Who Peek Into Space Shuttles." Oh, boy.

• 1:11:57Cara Santa Maria?

  What?

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  That gives a whole new meaning to the fame.

• 1:12:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Inquirer?

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Boy, a whole new meaning to the famous words of Jim Lovell. Houston, we have a problem. Even though it's really Houston, we've had a problem, but that's another story. But, you know, Hollywood does things to famous lines and there you have it. So I go, so I went to NASA's website and I looked around and did word searches, you know, for things like, oh, I don't know, 125 foot aliens. Can't seem to find anything there. Hmm. No reports of astronaut harassments of any kind and certainly no news concerning or new news concerning space shuttles. You know, those went the way of the dodo 14 years ago. So where did this very legitimate sounding headline come from? It came from a man named Chris Bledsoe.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  And he said it on his son's podcast, which I won't mention the title here. Sorry, no freebies on the backs of us. But this fellow, Chris Bledsoe, let's see, here he is. His credentials are, mm, nothing. He's a guy. He's a, well, a very religious guy.

• 1:13:03Bob Novella?

  He's just this guy, you know?

• 1:13:05Speaker 03

  But Bob, back in 2007, he claims he had a life altering encounter with UFOs. A life altering, really, because this encounter cured him of a debilitating chronic illness and led him to a profound spiritual awakening. He claims he had Crohn's disease and he became cured because he interacted with UFOs at the time. Yeah. Lost four hours of his memory, right? He cannot account for four hours of time during that day, so that evening. So that's it. And it's, he attributes it to that. So Chris Bledsoe decided to become a public speaker and write a book about his experience.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  And of course, the UFO community welcomed him with open arms because that's what they do. Somewhere along the line, since then, he also became a prophet. Because if you're gonna go into, yeah, right, exactly. Because if you're gonna go deep into the weird fusion of religion and UFO, it doesn't hurt to start to proclaim things like psychic abilities and superpowers. So why not? Bledsoe has a thing for orbs, UFO orbs, he calls them. And if you dig a little deep into it, one might say he has a fetish for UFO orbs. He loves them.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  He describes ongoing interactions with these glowing orbs, which he believes are connected to spiritual entities. And he asserts that these orbs have appeared around his property and have been witnessed by others. Ooh. These glowing orbs are in fact translucent beings from other worlds. And that's, there's your very cursory background on the spell of Chris Bledsoe. It kinda helps make sense of the headline a little, it makes it a little easier to understand, at least from his perspective. So he's on his podcast, he and his son basically run a podcast, which they talk about UFOs and things. And he was sharing his experiences and he said he was contacted by NASA.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  He got involved with NASA, who apparently some people there, we don't know exactly who, but he had interactions with them. And during those discussions, he revealed, they revealed to him that astronauts, this is according to him, had experienced extraterrestrial life during their missions. This is back in the days of the space shuttle. And they had been harassed by them. In other words, kind of appearing outside the ship while in orbit and making faces at them and things.

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  Basically what he said.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he was, oh yeah. Bledsoe says he was drafted into the independent government organization, whatever that is, to help them understand what the aliens wanted with them. So basically, help us, help us understand exactly what it is we were seeing and experiencing. Let's try to make some sense of this. Okay. So he told them, yeah, these orbs are supernatural beings that now he has learned to communicate with them. So he has a very special connection with these entities, these orbs. Here's some quotes. He says, this is him, "Everybody's wondering, how'd you get into NASA? Were you there? Why were you studying with NASA?" When I asked them, "Why you need

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  me?" They said, "I said to them, "You've got rockets, you've got space shuttles, you've got satellites, you've got a space station, all the money and technology and telescopes in the world." And they told him, this is according to him, "We know that they, these orbs, these spirits like you and they communicate with you. And they don't have anything to do with us at all, the people at NASA, and we'd like to know why and what they want. Why are they harassing our astronauts?" So he said, "I'm consulting with them about what they're now calling a plasmoid, which is an angelic being that come out of these orbs."

• 1:17:00Bob Novella?

  Plasmoid.

• 1:17:01Speaker 03

  Plasmoids, right.

• 1:17:03Bob Novella?

  I kind of like that word.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, you know, okay, these are wild, pretty wild claims, obviously, obviously. He said that these created beings, they're made of energy, these beings, but they get around in a ball of light, essentially is how they, I guess, travel around the universe or wherever it is they go. And the glowing beings will emerge from these balls. And sometimes they're human size, seven, six or seven feet. 125 feet is apparently the largest one that has been seen or reported to have been seen. And they can mimic anything, such as flying saucers, right? And they can divide. One orb can become two. One orb can

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  become a hundred orbs all of a sudden. Oh my gosh. All right. That's what he claims. So somewhere along his fantastical journey into a life of being entirely unmoored from reality, he apparently also claims that he's discovered how to summon these orbs, summon these UFOs. And he's had gatherings where he's invited people, lots of people, he said, to come and witness his ability to do so. However, here's the thing. If you are skeptical, if you are a doubter, you're not gonna see it. Right? Where have we heard that before?

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  The shy ghost, you know, the shy UFO whenever the skeptic is around. Yep. Chris Bledsoe says, "You can't see the UFOs he summons if you are skeptical. They wait till you're not looking, and then they reveal themselves to only the faithful people who happen to be standing right next to you." So I'll bring Mick West into this discussion because he comes up, which is sort of a back doorway in which I found this article, because Mick West has been talking about him lately, and I'll explain why in a second. And Mick asks a great question. So, okay, even if, let's say that the skeptical people there don't see them, and that is the case, whatever,

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  then how come everybody who has their cameras and stuff that are constantly recording, nothing shows up on camera, ever? Yeah. And Chris Bledsoe has an answer to that. He says, "They know your free will, and they don't want to go against your free will." What does that even mean? I don't even know what that means, but that is a direct quote.

• 1:19:30Speaker 02

  That's what we call, Kara, vague, lame-ass special pleading.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  Exactly. And one other thing, because this fellow, Chris Bledsoe, he got some notoriety this week because he took footage of what his son describes, right there on his feed, and he had it all over social media. His son said this, "In all my life, this is the best orb footage I've ever seen. This needs to be spread far and wide for all to see the beauty of these beings." This was footage shot by Chris Bledsoe the other night, on February 1st, so just a couple of nights ago, in which he's got his camera pointed to the sky, and there it is, an orb kind of moving across the sky, moving across, in fact, so perfectly that it lines up and the moon, which is in a crescent phase, the orb

• 1:20:19Speaker 03

  actually crosses across the moon, the face of the moon. So it's a very neat-looking visual. And you can obviously go online and find it. Hard to describe on an audio podcast, but that's what you see. So what Mick West basically did, he and his sleuths that he works with over the internet. Basically, you know, say, where did he take the footage? Because they figured out where he was when the footage was recorded. Okay. And then what you do is you can use computer software to position yourself on the earth. Look up at the sky and you can see what the night sky was from your vantage point on anywhere in the earth on a given day, given time.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  And what do you think the orb that was crossing across the sky really was instead of?

• 1:21:08Cara Santa Maria?

  The ISS?

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  The ISS. That's exactly what it was. And it's perfect because Mick gives you the exact simulation. He matches the video footage to the computer modeling and the two are exact. They shadow each other perfectly. It's an absolute 100% match that what he was seeing was the ISS. But there you go. That's the best orb footage that they've ever seen and that they've recorded. And it turned out to be nothing more than the ISS.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  I believe that. I believe that that was the best orb footage they've ever had.

• 1:21:42Speaker 03

  I agree. I agree.

• 1:21:44Speaker 02

  Now, does NASA respond to them being name checked?

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  Couldn't find, nope, couldn't find anything from NASA having any comment to make on with Chris Bledsoe directly.

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. The only question for me is, is this guy completely lying out his ass? Or is he, you know, like, does he have an actual questionable relationship with reality? Is this guy that this far down the self-deluded rabbit hole? I mean, that's like diagnosable. Like, either this guy's diagnosable or he's a lying con artist.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Right. Fool or fraud, as Randy used to say. There are your choices or some combination of the two.

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:22:23Speaker 03

  How do you know? But made headlines this week and there you have it.

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Thank you, Evan.

• 1:22:28Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:22:30Speaker 02

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about one of our sponsors this week, Rocket Money.

• 1:22:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you guys know that 85% of people have a paid subscription that they just don't use every month? And I know we've all done this, right? We've signed up for something because we wanted to like use it during the trial period and then we forgot. So the Trial period ended, we started getting charged every single month and we didn't even notice that that was happening. But thanks to Rocket Money, I can see all my subscriptions in one place and cancel the ones I'm not using anymore.

• 1:23:02Jay Novella?

  Yeah, the great thing about Rocket Money is that it's really easy to use. I have it set up to send me alerts if any of my bills increase, or if anything just seems out of the ordinary.

• 1:23:12Bob Novella?

  Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved a total of 500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to $740 a year when using all the app's premium features.

• 1:23:30Speaker 03

  Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Go to rocketmoney.com/sgu today. That's rocketmoney.com/sgu. Rocketmoney.com/sgu.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.

• 1:23:51Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

• 1:24:13Jay Novella?

  What is that, guys?

• 1:24:15Speaker 03

  I can name that tune in 12 notes.

• 1:24:17Jay Novella?

  All right, so I had, arguably, I think this might be the one that had the most guesses.

• 1:24:24Bob Novella?

  Really?

• 1:24:25Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it was really incredible. Like, I had, I counted, it was about 320, I think, is when I ran out of time. But could have been more, like, 350. That's a lot of responses to Who's That Noisy. So a listener named Ben said, "This week, sounds like a singing Tesla coil, aka Zeusophone."

• 1:24:47Jay Novella?

  And that is a really good guess. If you listen to people play music using a Tesla coil, there is a lot of similarity between that sound and what you just heard. Not correct, but that's a good guess. Visto Tuti said, "Sounds like a steam train with tuned steam pipes like an organ, a very musical little engine, probably a good friend of Thomas." I'd never heard that, or I can't remember if I have, so I can't tell you whether it's close or not, but that is, you know, I think that's a perfectly cromulent guess. And Michael Blaney wrote in and said, "Hi, Jay, it sounds like a really early recording of some kind." So I'm guessing it's a recording of a tuba on an early phonograph. And that, guys, was

• 1:25:32Jay Novella?

  the number of wrong guesses I got. And I'm not exaggerating, not exaggerating.

• 1:25:38Speaker 03

  That was the whole enchilada right there.

• 1:25:40Jay Novella?

  So what is that? This is, you know, so many people know it, so this isn't going to be a surprise to a lot of people. But the first person to write in correctly was Bill White. Bill, unbelievable job being that you blew away that number of people. You got it right. You were first. I'm impressed. And I give you two SGU points. And then there were two other people of note. Jeremy C. got it pretty soon after, and he gave a good explanation, so I'm going to read his explanation. And then there was one other person, a listener named Michael, said that his stepson, who's 15, he guessed it correctly. And I'm going to tell you what it is. Okay, so what is this thing? This is something that comes

• 1:26:23Jay Novella?

  out of Lancaster, California, and it is famously out of tune. Any guesses, guys? It was built by Honda and was meant to play a song called "William Tell Overture."

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:26:38Jay Novella?

  Okay. A car horn? No, it's actually those rumble strips where they carve grooves in the highway. You drive over with your tire, and then what happened with this particular one was that the construction workers actually made a mistake in the spacing of the grooves, which changes the pitch.

• 1:26:56Speaker 03

  They're fired.

• 1:26:57Jay Novella?

  And next thing you know, you have something that doesn't really sound like anything. So let me play for you the actual song that they're playing, because I think, you know, for those of you who don't know what that is, you'll hear this, and then you'll realize just how wrong they got it.

• 1:27:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Jay Novella?

  And you know what comes next.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:27:26Jay Novella?

  So, listen again. Not even close, guys.

• 1:27:37Jay Novella?

  God.

• 1:27:45Jay Novella?

  I mean, not even close.

• 1:27:46Speaker 03

  Okay. At least it's something.

• 1:27:49Jay Novella?

  And then why wouldn't they fix it? You know, I don't know. Maybe it costs a ton of money.

• 1:27:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, it's like a...

• 1:27:55Jay Novella?

  I thought that was interesting. So, these things exist in many places around the globe. Some probably done much better than that. I think, I think when I was in Sweden, I did one of these, but it was a long time ago. Anyway, thank you for all of you who wrote in. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. I will never pick something that obvious again, just because it took so long. Because I read all the emails, you know? I don't want to like not read people's emails. Bottom line is, when you drive and you hear music, sometimes it's not a hallucination. I have a new noisy for you guys, and I'm gonna play it for you, and I want Bob to pay attention.

• 1:28:36Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:28:50Jay Novella?

  If you think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you heard something cool, please email me at [email protected]. Steve?

• 1:28:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jay.

• 1:28:59Bob Novella?

  Somebody choking a duck.

• 1:29:01Jay Novella?

  Right, Bob? Bastard. Few things to announce real quick. You may have heard that Steve is, the end of June, Steve's retiring from his medical profession, and Steve will be coming to work for the full-time work at the SGU, which means... That we have plans to do some new shows. There's going to be multiple new things that we're going to be doing. We're working on all of the pre-production stuff right now. And when we finalize the details, we will announce what those projects are going to be. But if you want to help, if you think that things are not right in this world, my God.

• 1:29:42Jay Novella?

  If you feel like you appreciate the work that we do, if you like Kara, Kara's very likable. I like her.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  She's all right.

• 1:29:53Jay Novella?

  But seriously, please consider supporting the work that we do. It'll definitely help with Steve's transition if you could. Anything, any dollar amount would be welcomed and very much appreciated. We have a lot of work to do, guys. You know, I feel like, you know, the next 10 to 20 years are going to be probably more important than the first 20. That said, so you could join our mailing list. You can go to theskepticsguy.org and we have a link there to join our weekly mailing list. You could also give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I'm pretty sure that people are still checking ratings and making decisions on what they want to listen to. It'll help new people find the podcast.

• 1:30:33Jay Novella?

  And we have a conference coming up in May, May 15, 16, and 17. It's called Not a Con 2025. And we have a Beatles theme, guys. I think you all know this. It's very cool, very excited. We finalized the schedule and it is now on the website, if you're curious. We will be adding more detailed descriptions on what the different bits are that we're doing. But right now, I think you'll get a kick out of what we have up there. We have really fun stuff that we're doing this year that we didn't do the last time. You know, we're trying to keep it fresh. And not only that, but all of us are very excited because we had such a good time last time.

• 1:31:16Jay Novella?

  And I'm really, really happy that we're doing it again. So if you're interested, you can go to notaconcon.com, right? That's concon.com, notaconcon.com. Thank you very much, Ian. Or you can go to theskepticsguy.org. We also have links on there. Find out more information, check out our schedule, and we'd love to have you there with us.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  Thank you, Jay.

• 1:31:38Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

• 1:31:43Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake. And I'll challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items this week. You guys ready? Mm-hmm. Yep. All right, here we go. Item number one: Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. Item number two: Archaeologists have identified 4,000-year-old writing that likely represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. And item number three: Researchers calculate that the probability of re-entering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually.

• 1:32:36Jay Novella?

  Oh, boy. That's not good.

• 1:32:38Speaker 02

  Jay just volunteered to go first.

• 1:32:40Jay Novella?

  All right, scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia.

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  Inguinal.

• 1:32:48Jay Novella?

  Inguinal. What is that, Steve?

• 1:32:49Speaker 02

  A hernia.

• 1:32:50Speaker 03

  It's when an iguana gets a hernia.

• 1:32:52Jay Novella?

  But why do they call it inguinal?

• 1:32:54Speaker 02

  Because that's where it's herniating. The word hernia just means that tissue is going from one body cavity to another body cavity. That's it. This is an inguinal hernia, meaning that usually that abdominal tissue is getting pushed through the inguinal ligament into your testicles.

• 1:33:15Jay Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:33:16Bob Novella?

  What other kinds of hernia are there?

• 1:33:18Speaker 02

  There's every kind of hernia. Anytime-

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  None worse than that.

• 1:33:21Bob Novella?

  Neuronal hernias.

• 1:33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are neurological hernias. You can have tonsillar hernia, where the very bottom of your brain herniates down through the skull. That's-

• 1:33:33Jay Novella?

  What?

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  That's usually deadly. That's usually fatal.

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  Could have an uncle hernia where

• 1:33:38Jay Novella?

  Uncle.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  Where you get, basically, that's more like the middle of the brain herniating medial. Those are the two big ones, uncle and tonsillar. Tonsillar is the deadly one. They're all bad. I mean, if you're herniating your brain, that's bad.

• 1:33:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, you're toast.

• 1:33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:54Jay Novella?

  All right, so Steve.

• 1:33:55Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:33:55Jay Novella?

  The claim here is that there's a medicine that can prevent and reverse a testicular hernia, which I find to be like, you know, I can't imagine how a medicine would reverse that tissue from entering your testicles. Can I say that on this podcast?

• 1:34:11Speaker 02

  Testicles, sure.

• 1:34:12Jay Novella?

  Okay, I mean, wow, that's a huge claim. You know, I'm not a medical doctor. I am not one by trade. I just can't, I can't understand how medicine could help something like that. But I'm going to go on. So archaeologists have identified 4,000-year-old writing that likely represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian. That's a cool name, Anatolian. This is the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. Okay. So this means, basically what you're saying here is they found, they found writings that predate this language. So it was like the, the early version of Anatolian. That's really cool. So I think if anything's wrong

• 1:34:54Jay Novella?

  with this, it's going to be the number 4,000. And for some reason, I'm thinking like, how long did we have? Okay, it's too, it's complicated because there's lots of different things I think I'd need to know in order to very smartly answer that. I'm going to move on to the next one. Researchers calculate that the probability of re-entering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually. So Steve, when you say re-entering, what exactly are you talking about there?

• 1:35:21Speaker 02

  I mean, come on, that's pretty self-explanatory.

• 1:35:23Jay Novella?

  Re-entering, meaning the space junk is coming down into, into the atmosphere?

• 1:35:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Jay Novella?

  Entering busy airspace.

• 1:35:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's coming from orbit to where our planes are flying.

• 1:35:33Jay Novella?

  Oh, see, that's, I don't, I can't be the only person here that didn't fully understand that. Okay. 26% annually, that, wow, that's a lot. Right out of the gate, my gut's saying like, no way, that's too dangerous. I mean, hold on a second. You know, you could, you could say that that airspace is what, like 30,000 to 45,000 feet? The globe is huge. It is a huge place. You know, air travel is happening largely in these particular areas. It's not going like, you know, like basically if you look at a globe, a lot of it is ocean. That people are not flying airplanes through largely. I don't know, man. That's that seems like a lot, though. That's that's kind of scary.

• 1:36:17Jay Novella?

  So I'm going to say this. I'm going to say that I have no reason to not believe that the Anatolian, there was a proto-language there. I think that's cool, and I find that one just to be easy to understand, and that it seems very likely. This airspace one is bothering me because it's scary. But I don't know about medicine preventing and reversing a hernia. How could it possibly do that? They have to do surgery to fix things like that. I'm going to say that one is the fiction.

• 1:36:45Speaker 02

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:36:46Speaker 03

  I thought hernias could only be fixed with surgeries. I didn't realize medicine can prevent and reverse both. Prevent and reverse. Medicine. No surgery. That's what we're saying here, Steve, right? No surgery. Does medicine, I mean, define medicine. We're talking non-surgical, a drug, okay. That does seem fantastic. And I'm also leaning towards that one being the fiction. I have no idea about the writing, the 4,000-year-old writing. No clue on that one. Wouldn't even know really where to begin with that. I know nothing of it. And then the other one, though, oh, boy, the space junk entering busy airspace at 26% annually. That seems very, that seems high.

• 1:37:31Speaker 03

  At the same time, there's a lot of space junk. And a lot of it's, you know, most of it's small, I think. I mean, so the fact that the junk is entering the airspace, I mean, it could be small enough, I suppose, to not have an impact directly or be a direct threat. So maybe, I'll guess go with Jay. I think the one with the hernia is too fantastical.

• 1:38:01Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:38:03Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the hernia one's too fantastical, but I think there's something funky there, and Steve's just trying to get us with that. Exactly. So that's kinda too obvious, unless of course that's what he wants me to think. I'm gonna say that's too obvious. The space junk entering 26% sounds like a lot, but I mean, how, I mean, entering busy airspace? I mean, low enough altitude, that it's not burned up before it gets to that altitude? Also, I think if we found out, I suspect that if we knew what the probability of a plane hitting one, it would be pretty dramatically low. What's kinda bugging me is this Proto-Indo-Anatolian.

• 1:38:48Bob Novella?

  2000 B.C. just doesn't seem far enough in the past to have the one, you know, the mother tongue for Indo-European languages. I think it would be farther in the past. So maybe it's that one, so I'll just say that's fiction.

• 1:39:03Speaker 02

  Okay, and Kara?

• 1:39:05Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, it's funny, because I think I misread, I was gonna go with the guys before Bob, because I think I completely misread the archaeologist one and read that as 4000 BCE.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  No, it's a year old, not 2000.

• 1:39:19Cara Santa Maria?

  But now they're saying it's 4000 years old, it's 2000 BCE. I'm like, I might be going with Bob on this. The medicine one is hard for me, but if I know anything about a hernia, and I actually don't know much about a hernia, but I think about it the same way I think kind of about like aneurysm. Like, I think the reason that things push into places where they're not supposed to be, or they balloon out, or they, you know, kind of shift, is because there's a weak spot. And so what if there was a medication that actually strengthened that potential weakness? Then that would prevent it, or maybe even reverse it. Oh, if it, if it made that weak spot strong, then it's just a, it's a physics problem,

• 1:40:03Cara Santa Maria?

  right? Push it back in. So I don't know. I don't know. That's the only way I could think of a medicine working on this because otherwise you're right, it would have to be surgical.

• 1:40:13Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and that's why I was thinking, prevent and reverse?

• 1:40:16Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the reverse is what gets you, I think.

• 1:40:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, it's annoying. The space junk one, it's funny because I didn't even think about, like, I was thinking busy airspace in terms of like where on the planet there's busy airspace, but like, all of the planet is probably relatively busy airspace. It's more like, yeah, like how far away from the surface of the earth does it make it to? So I, maybe just to make things interesting, I think I'm gonna go with Bob and I'm gonna say, because I, I thought that we had written language-

• 1:40:44Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 1:40:44Cara Santa Maria?

  From like three or 4,000 BCE. So, yeah, this feels like it's not old enough. So I think I'm gonna go with Bob.

• 1:40:52Bob Novella?

  Right. GWB.

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Researchers calculate that the probability of re-entering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually. You all think this one is science, and this one is-

• 1:41:08Bob Novella?

  Science.

• 1:41:08Speaker 02

  Science. This is science. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff coming down, basically, and-

• 1:41:13Bob Novella?

  What goes up-

• 1:41:14Cara Santa Maria?

  There's a lot of stuff up there.

• 1:41:16Speaker 02

  There's a lot of stuff up there. So, this is busy, busy areas of airspace, such as, as they say, such as that found in the northeastern United States, northern Europe, around major cities, et cetera. 26% per year that space junk will be, you know, landing through that area. That doesn't mean that that's how the probability of it hitting an airplane, that is about one in 4,500 per year.

• 1:41:45Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Speaker 02

  But still, it could be disruptive. Even if it doesn't directly hit a plane, it could still be incredibly disruptive. This is going to be an increasing problem. There are, they say, 2,300 rocket bodies. These are not satellites, these are just rocket bodies, already in orbit and will eventually re-enter in an uncontrolled manner. That's a lot of space- And these are big. These are not like little things. These are big enough that they would cause damage, right? Because when you think about it, unless it's designed to self de-orbit, like soon after putting up a satellite, if a rocket is putting a satellite into orbit, that rocket is also in orbit, right? Unless it then, like it releases a satellite and then

• 1:42:25Speaker 02

  it de-orbits. But then, so there are regulations to force companies that are launching satellites into orbit to do that. Basically, you have to get your rockets out of orbit. You can't leave them up there. You have to have a controlled re-entry, you know, ditch it in. I forget what it's called. Like, there's a part of the Pacific Ocean that's the farthest away from anything. So put it there. You know, have it ditch in the ocean there where it's not near anything. Okay, let's go backwards. Go to number two. Archaeologists have identified 4,000-year-old writing that likely represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. Bob and Kara, you think this one is a fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  one is science. So Kara thinks that we should have older writing. We do. I didn't say this was the older writing, oldest writing. The oldest writing is 3,200 BCE, or 5,200 years ago. That was Sumerian. That was cuneiform writing. But was that, was that Proto-Indo-European, though? Or Proto-Indo-Anatolian? Or was it something else? That's the question.

• 1:43:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:43:38Cara Santa Maria?

  What's the answer?

• 1:43:38Speaker 03

  Tune in next week when we give you the answer.

• 1:43:41Speaker 02

  This one is the fiction.

• 1:43:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby!

• 1:43:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, Bob!

• 1:43:48Speaker 02

  They did not identify Proto-Indo-Anatolian writing. What they did do is they identified the genetic population that was likely the population that spoke Proto-Indo-Anatolian.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Oh, cool. All right. That's what I was thinking. It was more plausible. Not at all.

• 1:44:06Speaker 02

  Not the actual writing itself. Yeah, that was the switch that I made. So the genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans, they found that a group, a genetic population, they're calling the Caucasus Lower Volga, the CLV, and that they demonstrated that they...

• 1:44:29Speaker 02

  You know, this group gave, was related to all groups that spoke, you know, Indo-European languages. They traced them back. And they lived somewhere between 4,400 BCE and 4,000 BCE. I also changed the year. I wanted to make sure it wasn't older than the oldest writing that we have. Okay.

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  Why would you lie to me and Jay like this?

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, because I'm a bad person. This means that scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia is science. And yeah,

• 1:44:59Speaker 03

  How does that work?

• 1:45:00Speaker 02

  It's very, I thought like, that is damn strange, you know, because It is. You would think that you would require surgery because this is an anatomical problem. Anatomical problems usually have anatomical fixes. Two things. First of all, this was a study in mice, but they say that it should work in people. But of course, it needs to be studied in people, but it should work. So what's happening is, Kara pretty much hit it on the nose. The, we know that, you know, inguinal hernia has happened because of a weakness in the inguinal ligament. That weakness is there because when the testicles descend, they have to go through it, leaving a pathway, right? That's why it doesn't happen in women. It does, but it's like, there's, for every one that happens in women, there are 45 that

• 1:45:45Speaker 02

  happen in men. So men are way more likely to get it. It's because we have testicles, that's why. But it also is related to genetics. And what happens is that the, that the, the muscles that hold that whole thing together, they start to, they get weakened and form scar tissue because of an estrogen receptor, alpha, ESR1. And they, they, so they used an estrogen blocking drug, one that's already approved for other purposes, say, well, maybe this will, in, in, you know, the mice who have inguinal hernia, if it blocks the estrogen

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  receptor, then that muscle tissue, the connective tissue will repair itself. And that might even reverse, not only will it prevent a hernia, it may even reverse it. And it did. It actually reversed the hernia. Because, you know, if the

• 1:46:39Bob Novella?

  Damn.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, if the, if the connective tissue repairs itself, there you go.

• 1:46:43Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So about 50% of men will get an inguinal hernia by age 75.

• 1:46:50Bob Novella?

  What?

• 1:46:51Speaker 03

  Fifty?

• 1:46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, what?

• 1:46:53Speaker 02

  So, yes, I'm really looking forward to this getting approval in people for this treatment before I hit the age where I'm likely to have it. Because, yeah, that kind of surgery, whenever you're doing surgery in order to repair like connective tissue so that it works, you know, so it keeps things where it's supposed to be, it's always dodgy. It's always tricky, you know? Um, yeah.

• 1:47:18Bob Novella?

  Well, don't tell me that when I'm going under the knife.

• 1:47:22Bob Novella?

  That's gonna be fine, Bob.

• 1:47:23Speaker 02

  It'll be fine. Everyone does fine.

• 1:47:26Speaker 02

  And about 10% of people who have, um, the surgery, the hernia recurs.

• 1:47:32Jay Novella?

  Great.

• 1:47:34Bob Novella?

  To hell, man. All right.

• 1:47:35Speaker 03

  More medicine.

• 1:47:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, medicine.

• 1:47:37Speaker 02

  Medicine. So hopefully this will all work out in people. But now if you're a mouse with a hernia, you're good.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, right? Lucky mice.

• 1:47:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:47:46Bob Novella?

  Unless you're on some of those islands, then you're already dead. Kid's dead.

• 1:47:52Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:47:56Speaker 03

  "The most important thing that illusions can teach us is that it's possible, at least some of the time, to find being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found being right." That was written by Katherine Schultz, who's the author of the book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.

• 1:48:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, celebrating being wrong is, is a good thing.

• 1:48:20Speaker 03

  Yep. Learning from being wrong. How often do we learn from being wrong? Quite a bit.

• 1:48:26Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:48:30Speaker 03

  Sure, man. Thank you.

• 1:48:31Speaker 02

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

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

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

• 1:49:15Speaker 07

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