The Skeptics Guide #1047 - Aug 2 2025

From TikTok: More on 3I/Atlas and Aliens; News Items: Artery Calcium Scan, Microwave Beam for Geothermal Drilling, World's Largest Cargo Plane, Dental Floss Vaccine; Your Questions and E-mails: Apes Sign Language, Mama Cass; Name That Logical Fallacy; Science or Fiction

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

• 0:00Speaker 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, July 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella, Kara Santa Maria, and Evan Bernstein.

• 0:52Speaker 03

  Good evening, everyone.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  Jay is on break this week. He's actually on his way to Alaska. He might be there by now. I'm not sure.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  Flying, I hope.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Yes, flying to Alaska.

• 1:04Speaker 03

  It's a hell of a drive.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  And while he's there, he's gonna visit with Bob's daughter, who works in Alaska.

• 1:09Bob Novella?

  Ashley. Hi, Ashley. Wish I could be there. Moved back to Connecticut.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Where in Alaska? Is it Juneau? Is it?

• 1:16Bob Novella?

  Gerd, about an hour from Anchorage. Gerdwood.

• 1:20Speaker 03

  So the Greater Anchorage.

• 1:21Bob Novella?

  So I found an interesting Reddit post that got my attention, and within 15 seconds, I emailed the entire SDU crew about it. It's like, whoa. I have not read it. What was it?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  It's a video.

• 1:33Bob Novella?

  Oh, it's a video. Okay. This is Dr. Peter Carter, Dr. Peter Carter, expert IPCC reviewer and director of Climate Emergency Institute. Basically, he's calling it. He joins David Suzuki in official recognition of unavoidable endgame on planet, climate and homo sapiens. And that's a weird ending to that sentence, but.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  It's the beginning of the end, huh?

• 1:55Bob Novella?

  So I didn't see the full video, Steve, so what was your take on it?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  You know, I disagree with him.

• 2:00Bob Novella?

  Well, good, because it was a little concerning that this guy would be saying, "Game over, kids."

• 2:06Speaker 02

  The game isn't over.

• 2:07Bob Novella?

  That's the thing.

• 2:08Speaker 03

  Well, it can never be over.

• 2:09Bob Novella?

  Right, right. You could always make it less worse than it would have been if you didn't do anything. So that's why I was a little surprised. But his pessimism seems extraordinary. Like, "It's too late, we're doomed."

• 2:22Speaker 02

  It's fine to be pessimistic.

• 2:24Bob Novella?

  It doesn't really help.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  And the specific things that he's saying are correct. It's just the way he's framing it as, quote-unquote, "too late," which is bullshit. And that's what, you know, as we discussed with Michael Mann when he was on the show last time.

• 2:40Bob Novella?

  Right. Mann.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  That's the latest denialist strategy. "Well, it's too late, so why do anything?"

• 2:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Do you think it's that, well, I don't know. This is a devil's advocate position, because I don't know really, like, we're not inside of his head. But do you think that it's that, like, the emergency, emergency, like, that that approach isn't working? And so saying, like, "We're past the point, guys. Like, we are effed." Is that a hope that people will act?

• 3:07Speaker 02

  It's fine to say, it's not calling for action.

• 3:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm, I see.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  He's basically saying, "The fossil fuel industry won, the climate deniers have won, the big bankers who are backing it all have won, we have lost, game over." He doesn't think we could now, that we have the capability to do anything about it. So it's not that he's saying that interventions won't have any effect. Right? Like, what we're saying is it could be worse. If we do something, it will still make it less bad, et cetera, et cetera. He's saying, "Yeah, whatever. Even if that's true, we have lost the political game." It's, the political game is over, we lost. And so, nothing is gonna change, you know?

• 3:50Speaker 02

  And I think the final nail in the coffin for him, as, you know, as he said it, was Trump's election. Because in his mind, that represents the victory of all of those forces. The victory for climate denial, for fossil fuel, for the current economy as it is set up.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  And

• 4:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but in four years, that'll all change again.

• 4:14Speaker 02

  And exactly.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, it definitely can.

• 4:17Cara Santa Maria?

  One presidential election is not permanent.

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Right? I don't find this dialogue helpful that when they, when people say these things like this.

• 4:26Bob Novella?

  Here's one quote from the video. I assume it was him saying this, but the IPCC's sixth assessment said that global emissions had to be in decline by 2025. At the latest 25, at the latest, this year, it's too late. So it's basically this big deadline.

• 4:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Too late for what?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  You always have to say for what? To avoid, you know, negative consequences. So

• 4:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but we already know we're too late to avoid negative consequences. We've been there.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  We are too late to avoid negative consequences. Sure. That's not a big revelation. But, but the problem is, you know, when you throw up your hands in defeat, it's not too late to continue to work on this. You know what I mean? I'm, I'm, I mean, why, you know, why give up in defeat? That's completely worthless strategy.

• 5:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Also, I'm sorry, but we're not the only country in the world.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  True.

• 5:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Why such an Americocentric? I mean, I get that we have sort of an outsized influence and that this administration is quite detrimental, but other places are doing really big things. And there are a lot of people within our borders that are doing really big things. I don't know. That's, I don't get that.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  The numbers are still, haven't turned around.

• 5:41Cara Santa Maria?

  No.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  The amount of CO2 we're releasing into the atmosphere is still increasing every year, you know, barring COVID and things like that, barring temp, short-term, temporary reversals, but the overall trend is still up. We have not turned the ship around yet.

• 5:55Cara Santa Maria?

  No, of course not.

• 5:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, which we have said all of this. Like we said, the, yes, we are increasing our renewable portfolio. We are building a lot of wind and solar. But to the, but that's just the increase in our energy demand. We haven't started displacing fossil fuel. We're just, some of the new energy capacity that we're installing is renewable, is carbon neutral or whatever.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  You gotta get nuclear going.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  We have to do everything. We have to do everything. I keep getting into arguments with well-meaning skeptics who insist that we can do this all with just solar and batteries. What the hell, man? I mean. You can't, no. It's like an article of faith. You need a bridge. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Where do you think it's coming from?

• 6:46Speaker 02

  I think it's, you know, it's generally coming from that political segment that was always anti-nuclear and they're just, this is how they're remaining anti-nuclear in the face of reality, in my opinion. Yeah. And the thing is, they're, when you get into an argument with somebody, a discussion, and they don't address your key points, that's a problem, you know? They just reiterate, so like they're, they always say, hey, listen, solar and battery is the cheapest form of new energy that we could add to the grid. And solar plus battery, obviously, you know, the battery backup helps extend, you know, the solar and et cetera, et cetera. So, okay, I acknowledge all of that, but there's multiple problems.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  The amount of new energy that we have to add to the grid. So, the old estimates were we have increased by a hundred and, you know, to 150%, by 50% by 2050. I think those estimates are outdated because of crypto and AI. Mm-hmm. So, we're gonna have even more increase in energy demand. There, there isn't enough copper in the world, you know, we were not producing enough copper in order to build all the batteries we have to build, even just for EVs, let alone grid storage, you know, update the grid like solar and, and wind requires, and build the solar panels. We do not have the resources to do it, and it's, you know what I mean?

• 8:14Speaker 02

  It, it, it's just silly, and plus in parts of the world, it just doesn't work. You know, like in the northern half of the United States, there's no way we're gonna displace, um, solar energy production seasonally. You know what I mean? I have solar panels on my roof. I'm in Connecticut. I produce almost all my electricity over the late spring, summer and early fall. I produce almost no energy over the winter. So I would have to store three months of energy or more in order to be completely on solar. So then the only other option is you gotta get solar from Arizona to me, or Florida, or whatever to me. Right. It's like, okay, that's fine, too. And who's and how, when is the grid gonna be upgraded to allow that to happen?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  The argu- they just don't address those issues. Well, nuclear's the bridge to getting there. It's not, I mean, it's whatever. We are, we already are at nineteen, whatever, twenty percent nuclear. You want that to go away? You wanna replace all existing fossil fuel, add fifty plus percent and replace twenty percent nuclear all with wind and solar and massive grid storage? And you don't, and you think that's the fastest way? That's the fastest way to decarbonize the grid? Forget about it. We gotta do everything. We have to do everything. There's just no reason to take it off the table. But they're just so dedicated to like, no, it's gotta be all renewable. It's this purist, it's just so frustrating.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  And again, you add it to like people, you have the doom and gloom people we gotta deal with. It's too late already. The renewable purists.

• 9:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Do the renewable purists tend to make anti-nuclear arguments? Or do they just kind of not touch nuclear?

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Though they do, they say it's, you know, it takes, it's too expensive, it takes too long.

• 10:00Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not that it's dangerous? That's not their argument?

• 10:02Speaker 02

  They don't, yeah, they don't really fall on that any, I don't, that's not one of their go-tos. Cause it's not dangerous. It's simply, it's like, it's one of the safest. Just built it on the verge of fire, yeah. In terms of like, the lives lost per, I mean, unit of energy produced, it's one of the safest. And it's not too expensive if you include the entire cost of any of the infrastructure, right? Because if you're, yeah, you know, wind and solar are cheap, but not when you consider to get past a certain percentage. And that's what we're talking about. It's cheap at this end of the spectrum. It's cheap when, you know, we have five percent penetration of, of wind, of solar, rather, like ten of wind. That's cheap, but when you say if you're gonna do 100%, then first of all, wind, way

• 10:47Speaker 02

  too much land use, just way too much land use. Solar, it's, you know, it's only during the day and it's only, you know, year round in sunny parts of the country, which means we need massive grid storage. You know how long it's gonna take to build that grid storage? Longer than it would take to build nuclear. So the, so the duration argument doesn't hold. It literally takes just as long to build pumped hydro as it does to build nuclear. And the newer, like the, the natrium nuclear power plants can do grid storage too. They can, they can keep their molten salt and do grid storage.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  And burn their own waste fuel.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Well, they have, they have fewer spent nuclear fuel than the older designs, so. And are they, are those the ones that are meltdown proof? Yeah, they're pretty much meltdown proof. Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  If you don't put them in an earthquake zone.

• 11:35Cara Santa Maria?

  To get out of the weeds and like, you know, stop looking at the trees and just back off to the forest, isn't it better to just invest in all roads because they all lead to the same place?

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:47Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I never understand about purest arguments.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  It's like, you, don't divert money from wind and solar to nuclear. It's like, well, you haven't demonstrated that this is a zero sum game. We're saying, build nuclear instead of coal and, and natural gas.

• 12:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, we need to stop, you know, expanding those things for sure.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  And the other advantage is like, you can swap a coal plant out one for one with a nuclear plant in the same infrastructure, the same land, and the same grid connections. And you just can't do that, you just can't do that. I, listen, I love wind and solar, I have solar on my roof, I'm all for it, for what it does, but it has a downside. Too much rare earths and copper and all that stuff, too much grid storage, too much upgrading the grid, all that will take a super long time, and it's too much land use. Right, to do to do 100%. We're just we're just not to get, you know, not anytime soon. Again, maybe in 100 years, fine, I don't care. That's fine. But if if the goal is to get carbon neutral as fast as possible, there's no reason we should

• 12:51Speaker 02

  take anything off the table. And nuclear's advantages are huge. If the if the only disadvantage is money, who cares? Spend the money. It's cheaper than

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  the climate change, right?

• 13:04Speaker 03

  Yes. Well, that's the point. Yes.

• 13:06Cara Santa Maria?

  But then I I can kind of see what, I mean, I hate to say it, what the guy who posted the the piece is saying in the sense of like, I hear that argument and also to some extent, it's moot for the next three and a half years because they're not going to spend the money on any of it.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  Well, there's a much better chance they'll spend money on nuclear than renewables.

• 13:22Cara Santa Maria?

  True.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 02

  That's my hope is that.

• 13:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, at least kind of like, I don't know, cater or pander to that.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. Daniel Wett Carrot.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Right, but we'll see.

• 13:32Bob Novella?

  Just tell them you can burn the Epstein files in the nuclear reactor.

• 13:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Let's not go there. All right.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Let's move on. I'm going to start you off with something that Bob and I talked about on TikTok today because it's an update to the evolving three I Atlas story.

• 13:54Bob Novella?

  Wait, thirty one Atlas?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, thirty. So one of the conspiracy theorists on YouTube is like, thirty one Atlas fail. Sorry, dude. Three I Atlas, minor point, but you know.

• 14:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the I stands for interstellar bug.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  The sloppy, the sloppiness is, you know, throughout his argument. That was just one funny example. Okay. So Bob first presented it a few weeks on the show. Third interstellar object confirmed. Total first one that is a interstellar comet.

• 14:24Bob Novella?

  And it's bigger than the other two.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  And it's bigger than the other two. What's, yeah, there's three of them. It's the biggest of three. And that was it. And we were, you know, it's it's heading towards its close approach to the sun, which will be in October, November. It'll come around the other side in early December, and then it will leave the solar system.

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Oh, sad.

• 14:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, because that's, it's on a hyperbolic orbit. That's how we know it's interstellar, right?

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  And then, our old friend Avi Loeb chimed in, saying, "This could be an alien artifact, just like Amu Amua and, you know, the other interstellar objects."

• 15:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, equally as plausible.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  And gave a, yeah, list of completely ridiculous arguments for why that is. So now, that has broken out into the mainstream, and there's tons of, you know, internet, TikTok, conspiracy theorists saying, "A Harvard physicist is saying we're going to be invaded by aliens." What?

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Isn't that great when, isn't that great when these, when, when the people like this lend their quote-unquote credibility to the, to the crazy people out there, like?

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  I hate it. I hate when that happens.

• 15:34Bob Novella?

  It's so frustrating, and this, despite the fact that, in his paper, he actually says, he, you know, at the very end, I guess near the end, he says, "By far, the most likely outcome will be that 3i Atlas is a completely natural interstellar object." He even admits that, and these people still, of course, didn't, didn't read the paper, and don't even know that he said that, but that's what he said.

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Right, Bob.

• 15:55Bob Novella?

  And they're still running away with, with the worst clickbait titles that I have, like, ever seen.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Oh, here's one. This is from MSN, right? This is mainstream journalism. Here's the headline, "Hostile 'alien spacecraft,' in quotes, 'may strike Earth in November." Oh, gosh.

• 16:11Cara Santa Maria?

  What? That's like, tabloid.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  That's tabloid level. That's just straight up lying. Yeah. You know, and putting it in quotes makes it seem like somebody said that.

• 16:21Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Right?

• 16:22Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  First of all, the, the hostile was completely just inserted into the narrative at some point.

• 16:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right?

• 16:29Speaker 02

  Avi Loeb didn't say that. He just said, you know, he said, "They're, they're, they're a probe. They're trying to communicate with us. Look, you know, examine us, etc." He never introduced this notion of being hostile. Now that's now the narrative that we're going to be invaded by aliens, that there is an alien ship. And then all the reporting gets loaded now. It's like some, they're saying it's going, it's going to be passing behind the sun. So they report that it'll be hiding behind the sun.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 16:58Speaker 02

  So that it could maneuver in secret. It's not hiding.

• 17:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  It's just a

• 17:04Cara Santa Maria?

  It's just where it's coming from.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  It's just where the orbit's going.

• 17:07Bob Novella?

  Somebody said that that's a tactical maneuver. It's tactical.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  That's a tactical maneuver if ever I saw it.

• 17:13Bob Novella?

  Oh my god.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Or it's just a random path of a random chunk of ice.

• 17:19Cara Santa Maria?

  People really need something right now to hold on to, I guess.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  But why, they're rooting for the earth to be invaded?

• 17:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't know. I think they just want like, it's like reality TV, right?

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Clickbait.

• 17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 03

  It's clickbait. Total clickbait.

• 17:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, it's not just that. It's, yes, it is clickbait, but the idea is something to pull your attention away from the

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Join a LARP.

• 17:40Cara Santa Maria?

  There you go.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, much more satisfying.

• 17:43Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like a hobby, yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Do something that's pure fantasy and you know it. That's your distraction. Don't make reality your fantasy game.

• 17:51Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree.

• 17:51Speaker 02

  But that's totally what they do.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yes, they do.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's just galling that Avi Loeb, he's getting a lot of shade from, you know, anybody with any scientific chops and intellectual integrity, you know, for doing this. But it's like this, this guy.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I, I think he's, he's too far. He's too far gone now. He can't retreat.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't, I don't know that that's true. He's acting that way for now, but I haven't talked to the guy. I don't really know what, you know, what his motivation is or why he's so far gone. I mean, you could, you know, you always speculate.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  I would argue that if he didn't come up with these sorts of ideas, nobody would know the name Avi Loeb at all.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  That's certainly true. And he wouldn't have his institute being funded by tech bros.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  But, I just think he, he's one of these scientists who may be technically, you know, good in his field, but he does not understand the difference, difference between pseudoscience and science. He doesn't understand critical thinking. And so he's falling for really basic critical thinking fails.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. When was the last time he corrected himself?

• 18:55Speaker 02

  And there's no learning curve, apparently, because he's just making the same mistakes over and over again.

• 19:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Is he a pretty magical thinker in other areas? Do we know?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Not that I know of.

• 19:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, is he religious?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  No, this seems to be his lane. I've not seen him comment on other things other than he's.

• 19:10Bob Novella?

  I've read some of his papers that were, you know, I guess in his, more in his lane and they were, they were interesting. I talked about them, but this stuff is like, I mean, I might not, every paper I see from him now, even if, even if it's completely unrelated, I'll just be suspect like, because I don't trust this guy's thinking.

• 19:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's what I'm always confused when I see, like, I know plenty of academics who are religious, but like secular religious, you know what I mean? But I'm always really amazed when I meet academics, especially in STEM fields or related fields, who believe in magic, but only in this one area. I'm like, hmm, how do you keep it, you know?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  I see it all the time.

• 19:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  You could be technically proficient. You can be, you could function as a physician, as a PhD, as a researcher, and not understand the philosophical underpinnings of science, not understand the logical nuance of science versus pseudoscience. You are just technically proficient in your area and that you're a setup for falling for what to us is really obvious pseudoscience.

• 20:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Especially if you're already in sort of community that reinforces that. Like, I remember when I was in graduate school, the first time, so I was getting my masters, there was a woman in our lab getting her PhD. She was an older woman, not older, but like older than most of us that were, you know, fresh out of undergrad. And she was a Seventh Day Adventist, but she was very literal in her beliefs. And she would talk about dinosaurs as though Jesus put them in the ground. And our professor would literally be like, I, he would put his fingers in his ears and he'd be like, I cannot hear this or I will not graduate.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Wow, she would actually outwardly talk about that?

• 20:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like, we would go to the bar after like lab and she would just like talk about her beliefs. And he would be like, I'm your science professor. Like, you're getting a neuroscience PhD in my lab. You can't talk like this.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's interesting. It's interesting they don't have, they're not able to control themselves, I guess is the way to put it.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  Well, they just, they think this is the way reality works, you know, so why should they hold back? But, you know, we've talked about this before, like, should, like, should that be a problem? Should you have an issue graduating a science PhD because they believe magic? And I think the best approach is, what you believe in your heart of hearts is your business.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  But you have to demonstrate knowledge. You have to demonstrate you understand evolutionary theory. But the thing is, I would say you have to demonstrate that you understand the philosophy and logic of science. And it's kind of hard to demonstrate that and profess belief in pseudoscience.

• 21:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and profess things that go against it.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's like, okay, well, which one is it then? Are you just saying what you need to say to graduate? What do you actually think?

• 21:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Because that's what scholarship is.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I, I can't think of a single field where, when you write your dissertation, you're not expected to have your own thoughts and ideas. Like, that's the whole point. A dissertation is, is a creative work. It can't just be, look, this is what other people said.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:12Cara Santa Maria?

  That's not a dissertation.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you don't go off the rails and talk about creationism and things.

• 22:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  That's obviously not going to be part of whatever it is the dissertation has to do with.

• 22:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I would hope not, God. I mean, unless you're a theology student.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Well, okay.

• 22:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. But even then, they're not usually, right?

• 22:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I was still saying, we can't police the faith of our students.

• 22:34Cara Santa Maria?

  No, of course not.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  They, they have to understand the difference between faith and empirical claims.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  If they get those things confused, that's a problem. So you're basically forcing them to, you know, essentially wall off their faith from science. And not just like, yes, this is what the scientists say, even though I don't believe it. They've got, at the graduate level, like, the doing research level, as you say. They have to be able to think, live and breathe science to its core, or they're not going to be a competent scientist.

• 23:05Cara Santa Maria?

  No, and it's one thing if we're talking about an undergrad trying to get a degree. It's another thing, when you're going for a PhD, it's not like, look, I took these classes and I earned my PhD.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:14Cara Santa Maria?

  It's, look, I did this creative research project and I proved that I am of sufficient knowledge and, and theoretical and applied knowledge to be able to defend these views to the very person, my major professor, who holds the ability to pass me in their hands.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Don't talk about that stuff to them. It's not a good idea.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's bad, yeah, it's a, it's a bad strategy.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Bad judgment.

• 23:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about this artery calcium scan.

• 23:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so I came across an article in the New York Times. They have a, I guess, a vertical called New Old Age. It's, it was written by Paula Span on July 26th, then updated on July 29th. The headline is, "This Test Tells You More About Your Heart Attack Risk." And the very, the, the subhead is, "The coronary artery calcium scan can offer blah, blah, blah, blah." And I was like, ah, I just did one of those like two weeks ago. So I got excited because I wanted to read more about it. When my primary care physician recommended that I get a coronary artery calcium scan, I had never heard of it before. And in this article, the journalist mentions that most people haven't heard of these scans. Have you guys heard of a coronary artery calcium or coronary calcium CT?

• 24:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Sometimes it's called that.

• 24:31Speaker 03

  Never once, but I'm not surprised I haven't heard of it.

• 24:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, and Bob, you haven't either?

• 24:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 24:36Cara Santa Maria?

  So here's, here's what it is, and this is so, I mean, interesting. And throughout the article, the, the journalist, you know, talks to different cardiologists, different individuals in the medical profession, and kind of across the board, they're singing its praises and saying like, I, I often recommend this to my patients. What it does, it's a CT scan that images the vessels around your heart. When I went into my doctor's appointment, I, I had my kind of regular physical. She was like, we're going to get your blood work, we're going to look at everything and see where we're at. And she's like, okay. As has been the case for the past few years, my cholesterol, my total is a little bit high. This is something that is in my family. So, you know, maybe I have genetically high

• 25:21Cara Santa Maria?

  cholesterol. Maybe it's due to some lifestyle factors. A lot of my family struggles with obesity. I don't, and I'm quite active and I eat pretty well. So she's like, you know, when we take your cholesterol in your blood, all we're looking at is circulating cholesterol, right? We're seeing how much cholesterol is like in your actual blood sample. And that's all that it can really tell us. When we, and then I was like, well, I've had like an echocardiogram, right? So that's where they image your heart. It's not just like an EKG. It's like, I've had a full echocardiogram before. And she was like, yeah, they're looking at your muscle and they're looking at your, your valves and everything like that. But they don't look at the arteries of your heart when you do an echocardiogram. What this coronary

• 26:04Cara Santa Maria?

  calcium CT does is it looks for small calcifications that could be the beginnings of that plaque buildup in your arteries. And so this is a test that is relatively cheap. It's very easy. It's non-invasive. But here's the kicker, and it's probably the reason that most people don't know about it and haven't gotten it. It's not covered by your insurance. You may be lucky enough that your insurance does cover it, but I, I have very, very good insurance through the hospital where I work and I, it wasn't covered by my insurance either. Luckily, my, my primary care found me a lab that will do it for a hundred dollars flat. So you can get it done relatively cheap. I mean, I know for some people, that's quite

• 26:49Cara Santa Maria?

  a lot of money. For other people, that's what their copay would be anyway. But what it does is it images your heart and the, those that interpret the test, they look for these small kind of calcifications and they use an algorithm based on a bunch of different risk factors. And based on what they see, they give you a percentage, like the, the score that you get on the test is a percentage. I was very lucky. My calcium CT score was zero. When you have a score of zero, that means there's no calcification in your vessels at all. That means that you are at what they're calling 0% risk of a major cardiac event within the next 10 years. Anything between, I want to see where the

• 27:33Cara Santa Maria?

  cutoffs are. Anything between 10, or sorry, 0 and 5%, they consider

• 27:40Cara Santa Maria?

  Unlike unnecessary to treat. So you don't need statins. You don't need any other intervention. Five to 20% is the gray zone for a lot of cardiologists. And then over 20%, for example, Dr. Philip Greenland here, preventive cardiologist at Northwestern. He said over 20%, quote, "There's no doubt the risk is sufficiently high to justify medication." Okay. And sorry, I may have been a little bit unclear because 0% is the same thing as a score of zero. Right. And that means no calcification and 0% risk of a major cardiac event within the next 10 years. Based on that algorithm I mentioned, they take the score from the coronary CT scan. And a lot of other things like your age, whether or not you smoke, your activity level, your diet.

• 28:24Cara Santa Maria?

  And they'll calculate a risk percentage. So 5% or lower risk, you don't need drugs. 20% or higher, you probably do need drugs. But looking at the actual score itself with no other sort of ancillary information. Different cardiologists will recommend different things. So any score over zero, some cardiologists might offer statins. A score over 100, they'll suggest higher intensity statins. And if your score is 300 or higher, you've, you've got about the same risk as somebody who's already had a heart attack. So your intervention is probably going to be similar to that of somebody who's had a heart attack.

• 29:04Cara Santa Maria?

  So this gives you what, you know, cardiologists argue is a better understanding of the actual disease process taking place. It's not just a proxy for that disease process, which is what you're kind of circulating. Cholesterol is yes, that's a cheap and easy test, and it's really important to do as part of your physical. But it's definitely not the whole story. Couple caveats here. The main one is that there's been no randomized controlled trial linking the calcium cardiac score specifically with disease outcomes.

• 29:37Cara Santa Maria?

  But there have been studies that show, obviously, statin use and its capability to prevent heart attack or stroke. And then there is a new study, I think, that came out of Australia where they looked at asymptomatic patients with family histories, and they found that after three years, those had undergone the scans, had a sustained reduction in cholesterol and lower risk of heart disease than those who had not been tested. So that same Dr. Greenland said, "The test leads to more statin prescriptions, better adherence to statins, less progression of atherosclerosis, and less plaque growth." It kind of tips the

• 30:19Cara Santa Maria?

  scale. Who is this test for? It's for asymptomatic individuals between the ages of 40 and 75. It gets a little bit less clear cut over 75, because over 75, most people are going to have arterial plaque anyway, and so the scan may not tell you much. And also, I guess, those who already have heart disease or other histories of coronary problems, probably they have other interventions and other screening tools that are that are less broad, I guess you could say. So those who don't have a history between 40 and 75 are those who most cardiologists say would really benefit from this test. And I was so glad that my primary recommended it, because I was like, "I've never heard of that." And

• 31:02Cara Santa Maria?

  now I know. My score is zero. And it makes me feel better and less stressed about, basically, I'm not going to go on statins if I don't need to. And I may have been one of those people who started statins early without necessity. And, you know, drugs come with some side effects. They're relatively low with statins. They're pretty safe drugs, by and large. But usually, when you start a statin, you don't come off of it. So, you know, they said, we'll repeat the study in five years and we'll see if anything has changed. But for the time being, it was, I don't know, it was kind of validating for me to have that test and to know that at least my arteries look healthy, even if sometimes the numbers in a blood test aren't exactly where you want them to be.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, couple little things. So

• 31:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, please.

• 31:47Speaker 02

  The, the score considers the area and density of the calcium.

• 31:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  They also can express it as a percentile.

• 31:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, there's a percentile that has other, I guess, variables put into it. Yeah.

• 31:58Speaker 02

  But, but the calcium score is like zero, one, zero to 100 is low risk, 100 to 300 is moderate risk, over 300 is high risk.

• 32:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And it could, the score could get over, get over 400 if it's, you know, super high. In terms of statins, I just wrote about statins on Science-Based Medicine today.

• 32:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no.

• 32:14Speaker 02

  There was a recent review article that reviewed all the evidence for cholesterol, LDL, HDL, and statins and other interventions. And they concluded that, yeah, the best evidence supports the use of statins versus any other intervention. You should always do the lifestyle stuff, right?

• 32:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Of course.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  But obviously, most people don't adequately do that. But in any, and even if you are doing all of the lifestyle stuff, you should be doing statins, still help. It's not like you don't have to do that if you do the lifestyle things.

• 32:43Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's good to know.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  And they said that the evidence for high doses is better and that they recommend starting at the high dose because people will generally stay at whatever dose they start on. Just from a public health, you know, perspective, you're better off just starting at the most effective treatment that has the best evidence for reducing LDL and reducing cardiac events and morbidity and mortality. So they are, they are extremely effective.

• 33:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's good to know because like, you know, they, they kind of talked about different patients in this article. Like one guy who went in and his, you know, it sounds like his cholesterol was kind of like mine. It was like a little too high, but not high enough. And, and they were like, I'm not sure. And then he did the scan and his score was like 175. And they were like, geez, we need to get you on statins right away. And he was like, thank goodness. Like this could have saved my life.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:29Cara Santa Maria?

  But then they talked about another person who, you know, she Ran every day and she ate a really good diet and like there wasn't really a lot of room for her on the lifestyle stuff.

• 33:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And that can be frustrating when all you hear every time you go in is, well, just kind of reduce your fat intake and make sure you're active. And you're like, well, I'm already doing all of that. So what's next?

• 33:52Speaker 02

  That means it's familial.

• 33:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And that's, that's what I think is going on with me. Cause every single person in my family has.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. And which means you need statins.

• 33:59Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Which means I will need statins.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  You will need.

• 34:01Cara Santa Maria?

  But not at 41. Thank goodness. Five years, we'll, we'll find out.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Reassess. Yeah. All right. Thanks, Cara. Bob, talk about everything, right? Not taking anything off the table. Tell us about perhaps, possibly a new technique for geothermal drilling.

• 34:17Bob Novella?

  Yes, I agree. Perhaps, possibly. Got, I mean, lots of, it is caveats here for sure, but this is really interesting. So extracting geothermal energy from the earth, I don't know where else you would extract it from, may be on the verge of a renaissance. Researchers have demonstrated that a device called a gyrotron, basically a high-powered microwave cannon, can efficiently vaporize rock, potentially replacing, you know, mechanical drill bits and enabling geothermal energy almost anywhere on the planet. Uh, this is fascinating and I'm a little excited about it. I hope it pans out, but you know, so many things can go wrong here, but let's, let's go over what's happening here. Geothermal energy, it's a renewable energy resource.

• 35:02Bob Novella?

  I don't think we've mentioned it much on the show, right? Not, not too much. We're just focusing on so many nuclear and, and solar and wind primarily, but um, this energy takes advantage of two types of heat under, under the ground. One is simply the leftover heat from the earth's formation, right? The other is the heat caused by radioactive decay. Now, geothermal energy currently provides less than 1% of global energy. So not a lot going on there right now, but the amount of geothermal energy available in the earth is vast. It's really dramatically gargantuan. The earth's total heat content is estimated at a whopping 10 to the 24 megajoules. It's an octillion. Jules, trust me, that's a lot of jewels.

• 35:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, you know that. So, uh, so we'll never tap into all that because that's all of it. That's never going to happen. But the usable potential thermal energy is estimated at 10 to the 18 megajoules. The caveat there is that it implies using modern, modern technology. Some estimates say that humanity could survive on just that for like 5,000 years. Um, which would be pretty awesome, right? Um, that's with nothing else, no other energy sources, but geothermal. We could just tap into that, you know, what's extractable 5,000 years. Now, uh, modern geothermal plants drill down to where the hot rocks are, right? Like hundreds of degrees and they send water down there to turn it into supercritical steam. That comes up and turns a turbine and then from there, of course, you get electricity.

• 36:29Bob Novella?

  Just a classic energy, uh, electric, electricity production, right? So why don't we just have these everywhere? And the answer to that is primarily because it's just too damn expensive, right? And the good heat is generally too deep. We just really can't get deep enough. The modern geothermal plants that, uh, that exist now, but they're in special places near volcanoes. They're near hot springs or tectonic plate boundaries. And these areas only need, you know, very shallow drilling, like something like 400 feet.

• 36:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'm pretty sure like all of Iceland uses geothermal. Like the whole country.

• 37:02Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yup, Iceland, but also California, Philippines and Kenya.

• 37:06Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but I mean, I think Iceland is 100% geothermal.

• 37:09Speaker 02

  Iceland is 100% renewable, but that is 65% geothermal. So they're mostly geothermal, but not quite 100%.

• 37:17Bob Novella?

  So yeah, that's, that's damn impressive, but they're just in a lucky spot. They don't have to go very deep. 400 feet is nothing, is nothing. You, what you would need to do is go down elsewhere kilometers, many kilometers. Now, if we could just dig deep enough easily, right? If we could just dig, go anywhere and just dig deep enough. Um, and we could extract energy anywhere that we wanted. And that would be, I think that would be potentially a game changer. Since geothermal is, is reliable, it's predictable 24/7. Doesn't matter what the weather, it doesn't matter the wind, doesn't matter even battery technologies, all irrelevant. It's just always going to be there. So it would be for a baseline, right, Steve? It would just be beautiful, it would just be beautiful. Big, big, beautiful geothermal energy.

• 37:58Bob Novella?

  So this would also, of course, change the total amount of extractable geothermal energy. If we could just go anywhere, then that number that I gave, 10 to the 18 megajoules, would go way up. It would go up from like the quintillion megajoules, which is 10 to the 18, or perhaps you can go as high as a sextillion megajoules. That's just back of the envelope right there. But I mean, it seems reasonable that it could be a few orders of magnitude greater.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  Well, the deeper you can go, the more area is accessible to geothermal.

• 38:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so, but if you could, using this, being able to go down anywhere, that would be enough for our society if you just extrapolate. That'd be like 500,000 years of all the energy that we would need at our current levels, of course. Crypto, couple thousand years from now. Yeah, right. Yeah, you include crypto and AI, that would go down to, you know, 250,000 years.

• 38:47Bob Novella?

  Probably. So this technology, the technology that makes this potentially happen is just one word, gyrotron, which I had heard of in the past, but I really didn't appreciate. It's like a transformer or something. Right, right. It really didn't get a full sense of what a gyrotron really is. Now, this, these exist, gyrotrons exist. It's a specialized type of vacuum electron tube that generates really high-powered electromagnetic waves. Now, these devices exist, they're used routinely today. When a tokamak fusion reactor is heating plasma to 100 million degrees Celsius, they're using, they're using a gyrotron to heat that. In other industries, like some specialized industries, they use them today for precisely melting and vaporizing materials. So this is, this exists, but now it's never been used to vaporize rock, right?

• 39:32Bob Novella?

  And now that this is what they're using it for. Now, this device starts with an electron gun. It's kind of complicated, but it's actually not too hard to explain. So it starts with an electron gun. So the electrons that the gun produces, right, encounters a very powerful magnetic field, which causes the electrons to move in circles as they move forward, okay? So imagine the Earth, I'm trying to think of, how would you picture this in your mind? Imagine, it's like the Earth's moving around the Sun as the Sun moves through space, right? So it's kind of orbiting, but it's also in a spiral, can you picture that? Yes. That's a spiral or helical, it's a helical path. And since accelerating charges emit radiation. The gyrotron emits very powerful radiation. In this case, the radiation is in the millimeter wave range.

• 40:14Bob Novella?

  Essentially, high-powered, rock-melting microwave beam is what's coming out of this bad boy. And it's far more powerful than a maser, which is essentially a laser that uses microwaves. So even more powerful, which really took me by surprise. So of course, there are differences between a maser and the gyrotron. So using a gyrotron to drill holes is now no longer in the lab, and that's why it's in the news. The company QuasEnergy tested their new 100-kilowatt gyrotron in the field in Texas. They successfully dug a 100-meter hole in the test site. And they have a second, apparently, they have got a second 100-kilowatt gyrotron. They got two of them. And so they're doing another test. And I think that's ongoing right now, and that's also going very well.

• 40:56Bob Novella?

  So the next big step for them would be testing a gyrotron that's 10 times more powerful. So this would be in the megawatt range, because the old one, the second one, was in the kilowatt, 100 kilowatts. So this is in the megawatt range. And it would probably end up being maybe 3 or 4 kilowatts, I mean megawatts, because there's all this support equipment and stuff. And this thing wouldn't be just shooting a beam into the earth like the Enterprise. Remember that episode, they just drill the hole with their phaser into the planet to release some tectonic stresses?

• 41:25Speaker 03

  I do remember. Original series.

• 41:27Bob Novella?

  Right? No, I'm talking about the one from Next Gen, where they...

• 41:31Speaker 03

  Oh, was that a Next Gen?

• 41:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Why do I remember it not? Original series. Oh, well, in any case.

• 41:35Bob Novella?

  I think they might have done it in classic, but they didn't actually show the hole like they did in Next Generation. Okay, so they've got a lot of support equipment. And also, they wouldn't be just shooting the beam from the surface, you know, all the way down as deep as they want to go. There's equipment going down, and the wave guides have to go actually in the ground as well. So it's never really far away from the melted rock. Because then it's got to also clean it up and get it...

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, what happens to the material?

• 42:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah, the stuff that doesn't just vaporize out of there. There's a device that's going down there with it, and it just kind of sweeps...

• 42:06Speaker 03

  A vacuum or something.

• 42:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, it kind of sucks it up, because it's got to pull it all out of there.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Right.

• 42:11Bob Novella?

  So now, this megawatt gyrotron, that would be the next stage, should be able to bore holes that are 8 inches across. And would be basically, it seems, as powerful as a commercial-scale system would be. So you wouldn't really need to go too much higher than multiple megawatts. Like, you know, you don't need to go to gigawatts in this scenario. You could dig the holes that they need to dig, just if it's a megawatt scale. Matthew Hood... Who was the co-founder and chief of staff at Quaze says, "If we can scale those depths to 10 to 20 kilometers, then we can enable super-hot geothermal to be worldwide accessible." So 10 to 20 kilometers, yeah, that's deep as hell.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but when I hear those words, "if we can scale,"

• 42:56Bob Novella?

  Yep, that's, of course.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  I always pucker up at that point. Those are, those are big words, you know, that's, that's the, the whole deal right there. If we can scale, that's where these technologies live or die often.

• 43:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah, and it, it seems to me that this is, this is all about getting deep. If you can get, if you can get deep with, with this technology, and it seems like they can, they can.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  Bob, let me, let me add to that. It's about getting deep and hot regardless of depth. I think, so the, from my reading, this tech, this is, costs more than conventional drilling. It's more expensive, but they are hoping that when they scale it, right, they'll be able to get to deeper depths.

• 43:38Bob Novella?

  Faster.

• 43:39Speaker 02

  But, and hotter, and they could do what's called super geothermal, or super-hot geothermal.

• 43:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, supercritical, yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Which can extract five to 10 times more power per well, and that will offset the higher cost of the drilling. So if you don't get to hotter rock, it's not cost-effective.

• 43:58Bob Novella?

  Right, exactly. You gotta get that deep enough where the, the water creates a supercritical steam, which is, which is the, which is the sweet spot right there. And they, they think, you know, conventional drilling, you know, you, you imagine that drill that's going down, that drill, you know, has got to, has got to come all the way back up, it's got to be changed, it's got to be fixed, whatever. There's lots of things, like non, they call it like non-production episodes where, where nothing's really, you know, you, you're not digging because you're, you're, you're doing stuff that a physical drill is, is required, that, that wouldn't be required for using this Gyrotron. So yeah, they, they would like to do, I think they were talking about a few meters an hour continuously, and yeah, yeah, we, we don't know if they're gonna be able to pu, to pull this off, but if they can, if they can do it fast, because you can't wait years, like

• 44:43Bob Novella?

  the deepest holes that we have ever dug, Steve. It took like 10, 15 years or more. That's not what we're talking about here. If they can't do it much, much faster, then this is just going to be ridiculous. So the company does mention, they did mention one hurdle that I came across that they say they need to overcome. And that's like, that is drilling non-vertical holes because some sites, depending on, I think, depending on the geology, you may, you may need to drill holes at an angle. This is designed to go basically just vertical all the way down. So that, so that could potentially be one of the hurdles. But of course, other experts are talking about some other hurdles. And of course, some of these other skeptics are more skeptical in general. And, you know,

• 45:26Bob Novella?

  they're skeptical essentially that Quas is going to essentially reinvent drilling. And it's a huge ask. I mean, this is a huge endeavor. Of course, the rewards would be, would be tremendous. But yeah, this is changing an industry like this. Of course, you've got to be skeptical about it. Let's see, Roland Horn, he's a lead, lead of the geothermal program at Stanford University. He said, burning holes in rocks is impressive. However, that's not the hole of what's involved in drilling. So sure, yeah, it's a lot more complicated than just phasing your way into a deep hole in the ground. So in other words, melting rock is just one of the challenges, right? The system still needs to be able to withstand the immense heat and pressure at those depths because it just keeps getting hotter and hotter. The deeper you go, I can't even imagine, you know, what it would be like when you're,

• 46:09Bob Novella?

  if you're, if you're 10 kilometers down, 15, 20 kilometers down, how hot it's going to get. And, and the rock is kind of like, it's kind of like a gooey mess down there. It's really not even rock, I think, when you, when you go that deep. So I'm not sure how that would work, but I'm sure they've thought about that. So that, so we're going to have to wait and see how, how the rest of this testing with this, this new stage of the gyrotron goes. So we'll see how that goes. And, but I know what else you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. Geothermal energy is cool and all, but what kind of sci-fi weapon would a gyrotron make?

• 46:40Cara Santa Maria?

  That is not what I was thinking, Bob.

• 46:42Bob Novella?

  That's, alright. I'm disappointed, Kara. I'm sorry. But that's what I was thinking, so of course I did some research. And what kind of weapon would this damn thing make? Now, remember, this energy beam, this microwave beam is very energy dense. 10 megawatts per cube, per square meter. It can boil metals or punch a hole through tough rock continuously. This isn't like those pulse lasers. This is meant to deliver that continuously for potentially hours at a time. So this is just an amazing amount of energy transfer here. If this was a weapon on a planet's surface with an atmosphere, it could be effective, but it would have some drawbacks.

• 47:24Bob Novella?

  If you guys have ever used a microwave in a kitchen, you know how water absorbs microwaves? So it would not work that great in our atmosphere, for example, or some alien world that's got humidity, because the water's just going to absorb it. So that's going to attenuate the beam, so that wouldn't be good. And it's also, it's not a laser beam, so you can't do a tight focus with the gyrotron microwave beam that you could do with a laser beam. So it doesn't have that. But, actually, we do have this technology, very similar technology for crowd control. You guys have probably seen that the past 10 years. It's a device, it's a truck-mounted device that emits, it's a similar type of technology. I don't necessarily think that it's got an actual gyrotron in there, but emits microwave beams that essentially makes you very hot and very uncomfortable.

• 48:09Bob Novella?

  So if you want to disperse a crowd, they've used it. This is a device that's been available for many years now, and it's very effective. If you've got, let's say, rioters or something and you want to disperse a crowd, this thing will make them running, because all of a sudden, it doesn't really damage your skin, but it makes you feel like your skin is on fire. You will just run away from wherever you are if you get hit with this thing. So this thing actually exists as a type of weapon. It could also be used for anti-drone or electronics warfare. But the gyrotron would really shine, though, in space. A gyrotron would kick some serious butt, because, of course, there's nothing in space to absorb the microwave beam. There's no water to absorb it or anything like that, so it would be much more effective.

• 48:54Bob Novella?

  And then with its megawatts of continuous output, it could last a lot longer. Most lasers would would just overheat before the Jeratron would even really get going. Now, to be fair, though, a lot of lasers aren't really meant to be, you know, to operate continuously for hours at a time, so it's not necessarily a very fair comparison. Let's see, against other ships, a Jeratron would be very, very effective. It would damage optics, it would disable electronics, it could even deal, it could even deal with the common countermeasures that lasers have to contend with. They put out like a fog of material that would scatter the beam, you know, microwave, these microwave beams would kind of go through a lot of those countermeasures, apparently. So, bottom line, if you're writing some sci-fi for space battles, you might want to include

• 49:39Bob Novella?

  a fusion reactor powering a petawatt-class Jeratron, and that would be really cool science fiction.

• 49:44Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Bob. So my news item is also about alternative energy, this one about wind power. This isn't by design, this just caught my eye, and it happens to be, have an angle for wind power. So a company is planning on building the largest cargo plane ever built in order to increase wind power. So how does that, how do those two things relate to each other? No clue. How would?

• 50:13Bob Novella?

  I do. I read it, so I know.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 50:17Speaker 02

  Cara, did you read it?

• 50:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I did not, I do not know. Okay. The largest cargo plane ever for wind power, are they gonna like capture wind off the plane?

• 50:27Speaker 02

  No.

• 50:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  It's very indirect, but this shows you how, how things relate. So let's back up a little bit. So right now, the wind industry is building bigger and bigger wind turbines with bigger and bigger blades. And the reason they do this is because they are more efficient at bigger size, right? You get more bang for the buck, you get more energy for the inputs. The biggest-

• 50:56Bob Novella?

  The buck coming.

• 50:56Speaker 02

  The biggest wind turbines are offshore. We're building these like mega wind turbines offshore with blades that are 100 meters.

• 51:06Bob Novella?

  Ever see a, ever see a blade up close?

• 51:09Speaker 02

  They're massive.

• 51:10Bob Novella?

  It's like something out of science fiction, you're like, that can't be that big, it's, they're ridiculous.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Now, the biggest ones on land are not as big. They only get up to about 70 meters. Why do you think that is?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Roads.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  It's the delivery. We can deliver these 100-meter blades on a ship to an offshore wind turbine, but we don't really have a convenient way and a cost-effective way to deliver something that big over land.

• 51:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Enter the cargo plane?

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Enter the cargo plane. Exactly. So the, this is exactly why

• 51:45Speaker 03

  How big is that mother?

• 51:46Speaker 02

  The idea even came into being. So, this is the idea of aerospace engineer Mark Lundstrom. He founded a company called Radia in 2016, specifically to build what he's calling the Windrunner. That's the name of the aircraft. If built, if it ever gets built, it would be the largest aircraft in the world.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  Ooh, Spruce Goose.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  It's specifically

• 52:10Speaker 03

  In what way? The heaviest?

• 52:12Speaker 02

  I just think the physics, volume-wise, the biggest and has the biggest cargo area. Important, that's the important bit.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Still the largest before this?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  The what?

• 52:22Speaker 03

  Spruce Goose, you know, the Howard Joseph's airplane?

• 52:25Speaker 02

  I think this would be bigger. Yeah.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would have to be, wouldn't it?

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  But I think to date, that is still the largest cargo plane that was built. No? Something else? Maybe Russians built one.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  The Russians built one, yeah.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  An Anatov, one of their Anatov planes.

• 52:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it actually was destroyed, it was in Ukraine and it was destroyed in the invasion of Ukraine by Russia.

• 52:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh my god.

• 52:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Anatov AN-225 Mirya.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  So, yeah, there are some big, big boys out there, but nothing this big, nothing as big as the Windrunner is planned on being. It's actually being designed so that it's big enough to carry a 100-meter wind turbine blade.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Or it could carry two 90-meter ones or three 80-meter ones. You know, it can carry the big ones, but it can carry a 100-meter blade. So, this would enable it to transport the blade anywhere where you could land a plane, right? So, it's designed to be able to land on standard runways, but also to be able to land on a makeshift runway, right? So, one that you just set up near a field where you want to build a bunch of mega wind turbines. Okay.

• 53:40Bob Novella?

  I think, I would think that'd be, that'd be pretty damn important because even if you could land it at an airport, you still gotta get it on site.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 53:46Bob Novella?

  Which could be, you know, a half hour away, an hour away.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  No, they definitely specifically wanna, wanna be able to land it on a rough airstrip that was, you know, built just because it's in the airfield, the field where the turbines are. They actually considered whether or not they should use

• 54:02Bob Novella?

  Vertical takeoff and landing?

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Dirigibles, no.

• 54:04Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 54:05Speaker 02

  What is that word?

• 54:06Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Dirigibles. I don't know that word. A, a dirigible is a, uh,

• 54:12Bob Novella?

  Lighter than, lighter than air?

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Lighter than air, yeah. What do you, what else, what are the other words for it? Ultralight, not ultralight. Ultralight what, though? A blimp. Oh, blimp. I think blimps are different. Oh, zeppelins. Zeppelin. Zeppelin? I think blimps, zeppelins, and dirigibles are all a little different, so. Oh, okay, but it's in that, it's in that general. Airships is the general. An airship. Airship, okay. Yes. They specifically were gonna, they looked into building an airship, which would be better in some ways, but it would not, there's no infrastructure. We don't have an infrastructure for landing airships, you know, where we would need to land them, and they wanted to be able to land them at standard air, airports. So they decided to go with an airplane, you know, a jet, and, uh, so they're designing the windrunner.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  So, if this comes to being, this would make inland mega wind turbines economically and logistically plausible. And Lundstrom says he hopes, once, you know, he builds these windrunners, to, uh, build a million of these super wind turbines around the world, not just in the US, in the world. Which, which, you know, that's the kind of order of magnitude that we need, you know, to, to really take a bite out of fossil fuels, so, which is the goal here. Because again, as I said earlier in the show, the big limitation of wind turbines is the land use. There's only so many places we can put them where they, you know, they have good wind,

• 55:42Speaker 02

  it's near infrastructure, it's not in the middle of a raptor's breeding zone, whatever, you have to. Put it someplace where it's not going to have too much of an impact on the environment, et cetera, et cetera.

• 55:53Bob Novella?

  Velociraptors are extinct. What are you talking about?

• 55:56Speaker 02

  Not velociraptors, the other dinosaur raptors. So yeah, so I wish them well. I hope this all works out. It'd be, it'd be nice to see. And also just amazing to see one of these things. They're, you know, going to be so massive.

• 56:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  But who knows? At this point, it's just the plan of a company, you know, to, to build these things. It doesn't exist yet. But, but it's not implausible. Again, it's not really, it's only a little bit bigger than planes, you know, jets that are functioning and in existence. So it's not like it's pushing the limits that much. It's just designed specifically to take these giant blades, you know?

• 56:32Speaker 03

  The pictures I'm seeing of these things are just computer generated pictures?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Concepts?

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Yep. Doesn't exist yet. Yeah.

• 56:39Bob Novella?

  I wonder how they designed it specifically to be able to land in a field? Is it just like the landing gear and shocks?

• 56:44Speaker 02

  I guess so. Yeah.

• 56:46Bob Novella?

  I guess, right?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, Evan, tell us about this new dental floss vaccine idea. What is this?

• 56:55Speaker 03

  Isn't that interesting? Hadn't heard of this one before. I wish Jay were here for this news item, right? It has to do with dentistry and he, I think he has a fascination with teeth and...

• 57:07Bob Novella?

  More of a fetish.

• 57:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay. I guess we could call it the flossing your teeth. That is generally considered good for your health for several reasons. Among them, it helps prevent gum disease by removing plaque and food particles between teeth and along the gum line, reducing the risk of gingivitis and periodontitis. It reduces tooth decay, cleaning areas your toothbrush can't reach. It improves your breath. We're all grateful for that. Reduces halitosis. Halitosis? Eesh, bad breath.

• 57:41Speaker 03

  Enhances overall oral hygiene, contributing to a cleaner mouth, helping to maintain healthy teeth and gums, supporting long-term oral health, and can reduce the risk of disease, because there are studies that suggest a link between gum disease and heart disease, diabetes, and other conditions. So, these are good flossing habits that can really help improve your overall health.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  But Evan, can I say, can I say, if you dig into the medical literature, there really is a good evidence for any of those claims of any of those health benefits, above and beyond good brushing. If you do a good, solid, thorough brushing of your teeth, there really isn't evidence that flossing on top of that has clinically significant benefits. This doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, or that it shouldn't be part of your routine. I'm just, just if you have to be pedantic and just say that there isn't like this home run clinical evidence that, that all of those claims are true for flossing above and beyond thorough brushing.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Are there any dentists out there who are, who do not recommend flossing?

• 58:50Speaker 02

  I don't think they go that far to like not recommend flossing, but it's like thorough brushing is really effective. That's the, that's the point here. But, but Steve, again, a lot of people don't necessarily do thorough enough flossing. I mean thorough enough brushing.

• 59:04Cara Santa Maria?

  How do you get it between your teeth?

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Flossing on top of that can help close the gap, right?

• 59:08Cara Santa Maria?

  But like you can't, like toothbrushes don't go in between your teeth.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, they, they do a little bit. I mean, you know, when you.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Well.

• 59:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. I mean, up under the gum line. Yeah. But not like deep in between.

• 59:18Speaker 03

  Right. Certainly. I think our experience has been we've brushed our teeth and then flossed and seen the things that come out.

• 59:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 59:25Speaker 03

  On the actual thread.

• 59:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 59:28Speaker 03

  But I, I understand what you're saying, Steve, and maybe, I don't know. Do you think the reason for that, and I'm sorry to get off, a little off topic here, is because you would have to test it by having people not brush their teeth and only floss and see what happens in those cases?

• 59:44Speaker 02

  I think there's just not that much room for improvement. And so that means that you would have to do a really big study. To have the statistical power to detect that small effect. We run into this in medicine all the time. Where the benefits, there's just not that much headroom for benefits. In fact, this just came up when I was writing about statins. Because the question is, does supplementing HDL, you know, the good cholesterol, does that reduce heart attacks? And the evidence there is also very weak, except for this one particular type of HDL, which has some recent positive evidence. But the researchers were saying, this is probably because of all, because, you know,

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  people who need to reduce their cholesterol are on statins and other treatments. And so there's just no room left for improvement. Right? Because we don't do it, like as you say, we can't do it instead of effective therapy. So if one effective therapy can obscure the benefits of other interventions, because you're just not left with that much room for improvement. So I think that's what we're talking about. Again, that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to floss. I'm not saying don't floss. I'm just saying, because you said it has all these health benefits, just because we've said it before on the show, they're actually not that proven. Because, again, if you take good care of your teeth, otherwise, you've already gotten 90% of the benefit or whatever. And it's just really hard to detect what's left.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Does that make sense?

• 1:01:15Bob Novella?

  Didn't we interview a dentist and he said that there just hasn't been enough good quality?

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, you would need, as I said, you would need really big, solid studies to detect the small clinical benefit that's remaining to a statistically significant, you know, point.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  That's interesting that they don't have it. Wouldn't have thought that, but okay. All right, well, all that considered, and good food, good food for thought there. What if, what if you could floss and deliver a vaccine to yourself all at the same time? I would consider that an added potential, I'll call it potential benefit. On top of the other potential benefits that flossing is said to have. And I read this first, this headline over at science.org in which they write dental floss could be the future of vaccines. Engineers transform dental floss into needle-free vaccines. Hmm.

• 1:02:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Why?

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  Primarily for people who are reluctant to get shots, basically.

• 1:02:28Cara Santa Maria?

  But don't we already have nasal spray vaccines?

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  They do. They do. And they compare this as far as its effectiveness from what they've tested from this particular study as comparable with nasal vaccines. But I don't know enough about nasal vaccines to know if not. My understanding is, though, that not all vaccines can be delivered.

• 1:02:49Speaker 02

  No, that's usually just like the live virus ones.

• 1:02:51Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, right. Yeah, there's like certain flu ones that you can use.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  Right. And this is what they tested. They did use influenza in this particular test. Medical researchers worldwide are simultaneously discovering that one of the most effective ways to reach the body is through the gum line. There's a new study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering where researchers revealed they could trigger immune responses in mice by coating floss with proteins and an inactive flu virus, then jamming it between their tiny teeth. Flossing little mice to make this test.

• 1:03:26Cara Santa Maria?

  How did they make floss that small?

• 1:03:28Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:03:29Cara Santa Maria?

  The little mice teeth are so tiny.

• 1:03:32Speaker 03

  So, how does one floss a mouse? That was one of the major, basically, questions about this. Like, okay, we have this idea. How are we going to do this? I think they researched it and it had never been done. They couldn't find any research about it. So they had to come up with the technique themselves. So they say it's a two-person job. One scientist gently pulls the mouse's jaw down. I imagine the mouse is knocked out for this, I would hope. And you pull the mouse's jaw down with a metal ring from a keychain. While the other scientist administers the floss. So it's definitely a two-person job here is what they did.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  The title of the study is called "Floss-Based Vaccination Targets the Gingival Sulcus for Mucosal and Systemic Immunization." In mice, I'll read from the abstract. "In mice, floss-based immunization induced strong and sustained immune activation across multiple organs, robust systemic and mucosal antibody responses, and durable protection against lethal influenza infection, independent of age, food, and liquid consumption. Floss-based vaccination was superior to sublingual and comparable with intranasal vaccination."

• 1:04:51Speaker 03

  There was also a test, not of the flu, but of a fluorescent dye in humans, in which human participants took this fluorescent dye delivered via floss picks that effectively reached gingival sulcus, supporting clinical feasibility. These findings establish floss-based vaccination as a simple, needle-free strategy that enhances vaccine delivery and immune activation compared with existing mucosal immunization methods. There's an immunologist from Yale University, Steve, maybe you knew him. You know everyone at Yale. Akiko Awasaki, who is quoted as saying, "I had honestly never thought of using floss as a vaccination strategy.

• 1:05:34Speaker 03

  The results are quite impressive." Vanderbilt University immunologist James Crowe said, "It's tough to develop an effective vaccine that can be administered through those entry points because they have naturally tough defenses against foreign molecules, like your mouth, basically, what helps protect you." But the scientists were able to do it. During a test run, the team found that when researchers coated floss with fluorescently labeled protein, 75% of the protein was successfully delivered to the mouse's gums, back to the mouse. And even two months after flossing, the mice had elevated levels of antibodies in their lungs, noses, feces, and spleens, suggesting a robust immune response to the protein.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  You know, why not? If it works, and I don't know how many people do not get vaccinated simply because of their fear of a shot. Steve, maybe you have some insight into that.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  It's not insignificant. I don't have a number off the top of my head.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Okay, but right, so not insignificant. And if you can go this route, that sounds...

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  Well, we still need to prove clinical efficacy. This is just proof of concept. Yeah, the proteins get in the body, but does it actually work?

• 1:06:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, because I guess, and my fear is like, and I don't know, maybe you guys can speak to this, but like, when you get a shot, it's measured and all of it goes into you.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:06:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Like when you are flossing your teeth, how much of the drug are you actually getting?

• 1:06:58Bob Novella?

  My thoughts exactly on that.

• 1:07:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I don't want to get a subclinical dose, and I also don't want to have to take so much that I'm guaranteed to get enough in me, because what if there is a dose response, you know, issue here?

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  That would be, is that just an engineering tweak? Or is it just come down to the user following the directions correctly in order to get enough of the medicine, you know, of the vaccination into them?

• 1:07:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I just foresee different people getting different uptakes.

• 1:07:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Cara Santa Maria?

  There's no way that that could be controlled, I don't think.

• 1:07:30Speaker 02

  It's probably a better-than-nothing strategy.

• 1:07:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yes.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  But not a preferred first-line strategy.

• 1:07:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  It's also always better for any public health measure, the one-and-done, always better than you have to do this, you know, a number of times over time or whatever. So, but you know, it's more tools in our toolbox, the better. Again, there's a lot of people out there, not everything works for everybody, so...

• 1:07:55Cara Santa Maria?

  I see this actually being like less for vaccines and more for like just drugs.

• 1:08:00Speaker 03

  Well, sure, right, Kara, that's a good point. What else can you deliver into the body through the gun line at this point? I imagine they'll do some more research in those other areas as well.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Evan.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:08:12Speaker 02

  So, no Jay this week, so no Who's That Noisy Jay will be back in two weeks to pick up where he left off there. So I'm going to go to a couple of questions.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Bob can make a noise.

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Bob can make a noise.

• 1:08:25Cara Santa Maria?

  Bob does that a lot.

• 1:08:26Speaker 03

  This is Bob sipping coffee.

• 1:08:31Speaker 02

  All right, so the first email comes from Jeremy from Melbourne, Australia. And Jeremy writes, "In the show two weeks ago," he's referring to episode 1,045, "during science fiction, Kara said something like, 'We know that apes can learn sign language,' when discussing the river pigs' alleged intelligence. I thought the narrative of signing apes had been debunked. I re-listened to Skeptics Podcast, number 630, on the subject to confirm my memory wasn't flawed. Love the show and love seeing you guys in person in Melbourne a few years ago. Thanks for writing, Jeremy." So Kara, I did look up exactly what you said, because you asked me like-

• 1:09:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I asked, I was like, "Did I say sign? Did I say sign language?"

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  You said gorillas can communicate with sign language, was the exact quote. So that's vague, and I'm not sure what you remembered or meant by that. So why don't you just tell us what you know?

• 1:09:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, just that they can represent objects, like they can use symbolic, they can communicate.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, they can communicate.

• 1:09:31Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's the difference, right? Language is a slippery word.

• 1:09:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Cara Santa Maria?

  It's super slippery. And it's funny, because I just looked at, you know, just a quick sampling of the literature from like, maybe 2020 forward. It's all over the place. It does look like most researchers agree that gorillas, or even chimpanzees, they're not using grammar.

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:09:53Cara Santa Maria?

  And that they are babbling from time to time. But they also all agree that they can learn specific signs for specific things, even if it's just operant conditioning.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:10:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:04Speaker 02

  That's what I found as well. So, yeah, so chimpanzees, gorillas can learn to associate a specific sign with a specific thing, like banana. And when they want a banana, they will make the sign for banana. They can also, at times, represent their immediate state of being, right? An immediate desire, or an immediate state. But they can't communicate thoughts and ideas. They can't use language, they can't use syntax. So essentially, what they, when, a lot of the times, like the trainers who were saying, "Look what I showed, you know, what I taught Coco the gorilla, or whatever, to do." They're cherry picking from a vast-

• 1:10:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  You know, data set and only picking out the things that seemed that they could weave a story, you know, retrofit to some kind of communication. But if you look at all of the data, which has been done, what you basically find is that it's nonsensical, babble, babble, babble, banana, babble, babble, babble. Right? Or banana, blah, blah, blah, banana, me, banana, banana, me, blah, blah, blah. Right?

• 1:11:14Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  It's just very simple, me, banana. You know, that's it. That's the extent of what they can. So that is communicating.

• 1:11:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it is communicating. And some people argue that it's a type of language that is just very simplistic. But no, it doesn't have grammar.

• 1:11:28Speaker 02

  No, but it's not like they're not using language the way we do. They're not conveying thoughts and ideas. And, and it has been massively overinterpreted over the years.

• 1:11:39Cara Santa Maria?

  Absolutely, it's been overinterpreted.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  And then clawed back by a more objective skeptical reviews of the actual evidence.

• 1:11:46Cara Santa Maria?

  But what I don't like is then the, the kind of counterclaim that, and, and even, I mean, not to call you out, Jeremy, but like the way that you worded it, and of course, I get it because you're calling me out on, on my wording, which was quite broad, is I thought the narrative of signing apes had been debunked. Well, no, apes sign.

• 1:12:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, they do sign.

• 1:12:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, like there's no debunking there.

• 1:12:04Speaker 02

  They can learn signs for a specific thing.

• 1:12:06Speaker 03

  But it's not language.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  It's not language. I think that's a better way.

• 1:12:09Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not language. Yeah, if, if you, yeah, depending on how you define language. Like, I'm, I'm reading an article that's kind of an interesting one and, and like the end of their abstract where they looked at, you know, studies from the 1960s up until they published in 2020. And they said, focusing on symbol use by chimpanzees and bonobos, we describe evidence that argues for understanding of words, including capacities for declarative communication. We conclude that the many decades of research using a variety of symbol systems challenges the absolutist position that chimpanzees and bonobos cannot learn or understand the concept of a word. So it's like, it's, it's, it's wiggly.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  Has that been confirmed by studying the brains of the chimpanzees and the gorillas?

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  Well, they don't have.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  Like they don't, like the physical components just are not there that.

• 1:12:59Speaker 02

  That is correct. They do not have the language area that we do.

• 1:13:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but is that a question of they don't have it because it wasn't used?

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  Well, no, but they have a, they have a proto-language area.

• 1:13:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  Right? It's a continuum. They did definitely much less than humans, but it's not zero. We didn't-

• 1:13:16Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not zero.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Human language didn't start from nothing. It evolved out of primate language.

• 1:13:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  Which is very, because it's a proto-language. It's very primitive. It's very simple. It's straightforward. But we obviously elaborated on it tremendously. So it's really just where along that spectrum are they? It's not zero. It's not human level. It's not full sentences with grammar. It's one or two words, simple, immediate, "I want banana." Like, "me banana."

• 1:13:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  That's it. That's about as complicated as it gets.

• 1:13:49Speaker 03

  And is this true with other mammals that, you know, maybe dolphins or?

• 1:13:55Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, dogs, a good example of dogs, they can't do expressive or declarative, but they have receptive.

• 1:14:01Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:14:02Cara Santa Maria?

  So you can say, "get fox," and it knows to get the fox toy.

• 1:14:06Speaker 03

  You can recognize words.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  Can. They can.

• 1:14:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm. Yep. So, but they can't do declarative. But no, like dolphins are not signing.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  But you know the dog mats where they have like a dozen words and the dogs will put their paw on the words to communicate?

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  Oh, I've seen that.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  That's all bullshit. I've seen those videos. I am not convinced at all. It's the same-

• 1:14:29Cara Santa Maria?

  I know. I think we need more studies to show that. It feels like bullshit to me, too.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  Words and then the person overinterprets what they're saying and maybe-

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  Or reacts in a certain way, right?

• 1:14:38Speaker 02

  Maybe they've learned to, again, like operantly associate this button with going outside or something, but they're not putting together words to communicate.

• 1:14:45Cara Santa Maria?

  No, yeah, they're getting, they're putting, they're doing "top left" means go outside.

• 1:14:50Speaker 02

  This one over here means, "I get a treat." That's like the, I think probably the extent of it.

• 1:14:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and the annoying thing is those grids always have some combination that always makes sense, no matter what you say. It's like, "Treat me, mom. Mom, me treat."

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Meaningful to a dog. There's nothing in there as a trick, you know, that would trip them up.

• 1:15:09Cara Santa Maria?

  But the reason that we know that dogs can do the receptive when it comes to symbols for objects is, like, I have a friend whose dog can do this, I've, like, seen it, but also, obviously, it's been studied really well, is that you can say the name of the object, the dog gets the object, like, from the, from a basket in the other room, and then you can say the name of something that's not in the basket, and they'll get something that they don't know the name for.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:33Cara Santa Maria?

  So they do know, like, these are the things I've learned, and these are things I don't know, so maybe it's one of those.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:39Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's pretty cool.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  They're pretty smart.

• 1:15:41Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're just, they're just, nothing evolved language the way we did.

• 1:15:45Cara Santa Maria?

  No, no, no, no, and I think ultimately, the question is, and, and, it's an operational definition question, I'm not a linguist, so I don't know where the, where the threshold is, but at what point does communication become language?

• 1:15:56Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:15:57Cara Santa Maria?

  What do we call, because they definitely communicate, most animals communicate.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Sure, of course, yeah.

• 1:16:02Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Bob Novella?

  I mean, I think you need syntax, syntax, grammar, and a few things like that in order to classify it, right? I mean, not just a-

• 1:16:09Cara Santa Maria?

  You think, yeah.

• 1:16:09Speaker 02

  It's also, how sophisticated are the ideas that they're communicating?

• 1:16:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:14Speaker 02

  Right? Can they philosophize? No.

• 1:16:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm, yeah.

• 1:16:17Speaker 02

  Um, okay.

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  No evidence of that, right?

• 1:16:19Speaker 02

  We have another email that comes from Erin, who says, "Hi all, just writing in to note that in this week's episode, Evan mentioned that a ham sandwich was how Mama Cass went. This is fairly humiliating, this is a fairly humiliating myth, she actually died of a heart attack. It's so easy to hear pop culture myths and not question them, especially if one has no real interest in the person in question and doesn't care enough to look into it. So no judgment here, I just think it's important that this myth, like any, doesn't keep on being perpetuated. Love the show, keep up the amazing work that you do." Evan, what do you have to say for yourself?

• 1:16:54Speaker 03

  Jay was the one who brought up the ham sandwich, uh, in, in, I can't remember what he was talking about, but death by a ham sandwich was his general comment, and then my reaction to, to that, I just blurted out that that's how Mama Cass went, because that sort of is the, what it's known for, right?

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:15Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, because, what, what else could, could it be? That, Jay, so it was just more of a play off of what Jay was saying, rather than a statement of fact, "I take the point."

• 1:17:27Speaker 02

  I hear you. It's funny, because I never heard this myth, or if I did, I didn't remember it.

• 1:17:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, really?

• 1:17:32Speaker 02

  So I, I really never did.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  I've known this a long time.

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  Because, no, I'm not big into the mamas and the papas, or whatever. I assumed, I knew she died of a heart attack. I assumed you used ham sandwich as a metaphor for a heart attack. You know what I mean?

• 1:17:46Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:17:46Speaker 02

  Because people do that. People say, like, he died of a pork sandwich or whatever. Like, that means he died of a heart attack.

• 1:17:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that's funny.

• 1:17:54Speaker 02

  That's what I thought you meant.

• 1:17:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Maybe you had heard it, but you didn't.

• 1:17:56Speaker 02

  I didn't think you meant she literally died of a ham sandwich.

• 1:17:59Cara Santa Maria?

  No, but that's what people said.

• 1:18:00Speaker 02

  But now that's the, so yeah, so apparently, apparently.

• 1:18:03Bob Novella?

  Apparently.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  It's that word gets used so often.

• 1:18:07Bob Novella?

  I know.

• 1:18:08Speaker 02

  She was just coming off like a 36-hour stint. And her assistant did prepare a ham sandwich and leave it on her nightstand. But she went to bed without ever touching it. She didn't eat the ham sandwich. And she had a heart attack. There was an autopsy, and the autopsy determined that she died of a heart attack and that there were no drugs in her system. And so, natural causes. She had a heart attack, she pushed herself too far. There's also, you know, she had obviously issues with obesity. She did, at the time, nobody knew what they were doing, like, in terms of treating obesity. She was treated with amphetamines, which is like the worst thing you could do.

• 1:18:49Bob Novella?

  Oh, gosh.

• 1:18:49Speaker 02

  Although apparently she wasn't using them at-

• 1:18:51Bob Novella?

  1974, by the way.

• 1:18:52Speaker 02

  She wasn't using them at the time, because nothing was found in her symptoms, in her system. But that would not have been a healthy way to treat her, her weight. And just sort of crash dieting with amphetamines would, could have done harm, you know? Certainly would not have been healthy for her heart. So, she was only 32, very tragic.

• 1:19:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, that's so young.

• 1:19:14Speaker 02

  You know, yeah, I mean, yeah, just a victim of circumstance, of the poor medicine of the time, you know?

• 1:19:19Bob Novella?

  It's funny, I had a completely different reaction, I remember that. I remember Evan saying that, and I remember thinking, wait, I recently read somewhere that she didn't die from the ham sandwich, that she died of a heart attack. I was trying to remember where my source was, and then, and then it was just like, too late to-

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  The conversation moves on, I know.

• 1:19:36Bob Novella?

  Right, yeah, it moved on, because it was a-

• 1:19:37Speaker 02

  It was a throwaway.

• 1:19:39Bob Novella?

  Jay was just being, you know, trying to be funny, and I just, you know, threw in the follow-up comment.

• 1:19:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, I should have chimed in, though, I should have chimed in.

• 1:19:47Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's all- Often how these things are. It's like when I said the sign language thing, it was like I was, we were doing science or fiction.

• 1:19:52Speaker 02

  It's an off the cuff, throwaway comment that we didn't vet. But we do, we do have to be careful about that. I need to be careful about that in post-production, which I do, actually. I do filter out a lot of these offhand comments. I'm like, is that actually true? And then, and then I will either make a correction or I'll just edit it out. So in this case, though, I didn't think you were making a claim. I thought it was just being a euphemism. So that's why I didn't trigger, you know, my post-production edit.

• 1:20:17Speaker 03

  And you, you did all, you also did not have knowledge of the, of the history of the comments.

• 1:20:23Speaker 02

  I didn't know that that was a thing. So I do think this is an important myth to correct because her family is really hurt by it. They really find that it's very, more than annoying. Like, it is really depressing that this is how she's remembered. You know, that this persistent myth dogs her, you know, 50 years or whatever after she passed away.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Culture in a way.

• 1:20:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 03

  We know how hard it is to expunge the record, you know, and get it correct. Once it's in the culture, it's very hard, if not impossible, to get it corrected.

• 1:20:55Speaker 02

  Very hard. So we certainly don't want to contribute to that. We're happy to correct that and to, you know, increase awareness that that is a myth. It's not, not how she died. She died of a heart attack. So, yeah, keep that in mind. All right.

• 1:21:07Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  We're gonna do a name that logical fallacy. This comes from Jason in Massachusetts. And Jason writes, "I've been listening for many years and this is my first time contacting the show. For context, my earliest memories are the inflating earth and birds versus monkeys." That's like first, second year.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  That's way back. Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Way back. "I was watching a clip of some internet rando saying, 'Evolution couldn't have happened because,' paraphrasing, 'half an organ wouldn't work,' e.g. an incomplete eye wouldn't have vision as we know it."

• 1:21:40Cara Santa Maria?

  It's not the Bee argument.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

  "Obviously, we've heard the whole eye thing a million times, and this betrays a lack of understanding of adaptation and evolution, and is quite ableist, but I had a sudden realization that this might be a very specific logical fallacy." So that's, yeah, we could talk about what, what's wrong with that claim and then see if that one or more logical fallacies are occurring. Jason, in a postscript, said which fallacy he thought it was. I won't say that until we discuss it. So for background, it is a very common evolution-denying creationist.

• 1:22:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 02

  Intelligent design.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Very annoying as well.

• 1:22:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, claim that, well, you know, how could you evolve wings? Like, what purpose would they serve until you got to the point where they were good enough to fly? Right? What good is half a wing? I've actually had somebody say that exact quote to me. What good is half a wing? Or, you know, like, were our ancestors walking around with, like, half an eye hanging out of their head? Like, really ridiculous drama, right? But of course, that's not what evolutionary biologists think. That's not what would have to have happened. You know, and things work for what they evolved to do at every step of the way. But the key bit that they're missing is that a current structure, right?

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  Did not necessarily have to evolve directly to its current function. It could have evolved through a series of other functions that it was perfectly adapted to, or adapted to just fine, and then got co-acted to a new use. Right? So, for example, wings, like feathers, were probably for

• 1:23:26Speaker 03

  Thermal.

• 1:23:27Speaker 02

  insulation, and then maybe display, and then maybe helping to capture prey, and then

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Jumping from branch to branch.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Extending the duration of a leap or a jump, and maybe gliding, and then flying.

• 1:23:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, we know for a fact that our hands were flippers.

• 1:23:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 1:23:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we know that.

• 1:23:46Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:23:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, we crawled out of the ocean.

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 1:23:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Early mammals were

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  We watched for a weapon.

• 1:23:52Cara Santa Maria?

  No, they were, they came from, like, flipper hands.

• 1:23:54Speaker 02

  They were flipper hands, and then they were walking on the bottom of the floor of the ocean.

• 1:23:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 02

  So they adapted to be able to hold up weight, and then to on land, and then to claws, and then to hands, yeah, whatever.

• 1:24:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And eyes too, like eye spots.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Every step of the way.

• 1:24:10Cara Santa Maria?

  Detect light.

• 1:24:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:11Cara Santa Maria?

  That's all they do. They just detected whether it was light or dark.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 1:24:14Cara Santa Maria?

  And then they got better and better and better.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Eyes are useful every step of the way. Yeah, even just being able to say, light is that way. You know, the surface of the ocean is in that direction, and that dark is this way, that's going deeper into the ocean, is adaptive and useful. So a half an eye is actually extremely useful, and it's not a half an eye. Right. It's a whole, but less evolved eye. Proto eye, I don't know what you want to call it. Well, but even, even, that's the thing, like, our terminology is so biased, like, if you say it's a proto eye, you're implying that it's on its way to becoming an eye. Right, which you can. Right, we have the benefit of hindsight. Exactly. Pun intended. We only know that in hindsight. At the time, it's not a proto anything.

• 1:24:57Speaker 02

  It's, it is what it is, and it's adapted to what, how it functions.

• 1:25:02Cara Santa Maria?

  And there are organisms alive today who have those versions of things.

• 1:25:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:25:06Cara Santa Maria?

  We have to remember that, too, and those things are alive right now.

• 1:25:08Speaker 02

  They still exist, and all, you could see all the intermediary steps that our eye went through. Is extant, right, so are we going to try to guess fallacies? But what's the logical fallacy specifically here? I mean.

• 1:25:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, I, I think it's black or white thinking.

• 1:25:20Speaker 02

  I think straw man and. I thought straw man. And personal incredulity are kind of like in the ballpark.

• 1:25:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, interesting. See, I see it as black and white, like, it's either this, or it's not that at all.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  Oh, the this or that? Mm-hmm. Like a false dichotomy?

• 1:25:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, I think, this, I think the reason why this can be so hard is because the informal logical fallacies are so context-dependent. It kind of depends on how exactly you formulate your claim. And so we could, we're just, we're like, we're not responding to someone's specific claim here. It's more of just the idea of the, this kind of argument. But the, the, the only thing we have in quotes here, here is half an organ wouldn't work. And so I think it is absolutely a straw man. I think definitely that is happening here, because.

• 1:26:11Cara Santa Maria?

  For sure, because nobody's claiming that.

• 1:26:13Speaker 02

  Nobody's claiming that. Right, nobody. That is a straw man version of evolutionary theory, that, you know, you, it would require evolving through a half-formed version of the final, quote-unquote, "final" structure. And all of that is, is. Hindsight bias, it's not a half anything, it's not a proto anything, it's not a pre anything. It is what it is. It doesn't know what future descendants will you use it for and evolve it in other directions. It just is what it is. So I think that's the biggest one. I do think there's a lot of non sequiturs in there, which is kind of just a generic logical fallacy.

• 1:26:53Speaker 02

  But I could see the, I think, so he said, I'll tell you what he said, because I think you're kind of on the same page as him. He said it was a Nirvana fallacy, because, which I'm not sure if that fits really. Nirvana fallacy is it's not perfect, so it's useless.

• 1:27:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I mean, he's kind of making that claim.

• 1:27:11Speaker 02

  Kind of.

• 1:27:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I think it's all of them.

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, so again, it depends on how you frame it. It's like, yes, a half an organ's not perfect, so it's worthless. That's kind of a Nirvana fallacy, but it's, there's a piece that you need, that it's, it's only half of, or whatever, it's only partial current utility. But it's a fully formed something else, right? So it's just, that's what makes it a non sequitur and a straw man. It's, you know what I mean, it's looking at it incorrectly. Right, that's fast, I always find it fascinating to deconstruct, you know, logic. But I guess you could also say it's not purely a logic problem, it's a false premise, right?

• 1:27:51Speaker 02

  And the false premise is, what I said, the false premise is that things evolved to their current use. Evolved, you know, the only possible history of things that it evolved to its current use.

• 1:28:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, and it's hard to blame somebody for seeing evolution that way, because sadly, until you're at like a college level, it's often taught that way.

• 1:28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:28:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Which I don't like, and it's represented that way in

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  Totally agree.

• 1:28:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Popular culture. But, you know, I think a lot of this, and often when we talk about pseudoscience, or like Wu. Or especially when we're talking about like charlatans, we'll ask questions like, do they know that it's bullshit? Or like, are they peddling intentionally? Or have they like bought what they're selling? And often the answer is, does it really matter? But I think in these situations where you're talking to a friend and your friend is like, wait a minute, but how could this happen? It is important to know where they're coming from and to dig deep into what their actual argument is. Are they making a black and white assumption? Are they making a straw man? Is it a Nirvana fallacy? And you can figure that out by asking follow up questions.

• 1:29:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Because sometimes you can actually counter it if you know what they're trying to say.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:29:07Cara Santa Maria?

  And maybe, you know, maybe this person is just like, I'm a creationist and I'm dyed in the wool and I'm never changing my mind. But maybe they're like, I just don't get it. Help me get it.

• 1:29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they rarely are saying, help me get it in my experience. But I hear what you're saying, but the thing is, it's important to understand. So the, the, the false premise, right? Or the unstated major premise is really hard to detect in yourself, right? Cause you are, it's a premise you are not aware you are making.

• 1:29:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And that's why it's unstated.

• 1:29:38Speaker 02

  It's unstated, it's unknown, right? He doesn't realize that that's, the, the thing is, how, how does he react? How do they react when it's pointed out to them? Right? And that of course, they never, you know, in my experience say, oh gee, I didn't realize that I was wrong. You know, it's usually they double down in some way and then maybe later they may realize that their thinking, you know, was.

• 1:30:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I guess I give it the benefit of the doubt. I think of like a child. If a child is conceptualizing evolution, the way that, you know, popular culture has taught it to them, and they're sophisticated enough to go, but half an eye wouldn't work.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Then you go, oh yeah, that, I could see where you would go from here. Let's back it up.

• 1:30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I was gonna say along those lines that oftentimes pseudoscientists and science denialists, et cetera, are debating against like a fifth grade understanding of the science. Really elementary school level of scientific understanding. And they think that's the science. It's like, no, that's not the science. That's how it's poorly explained to elementary school students. That's the level at which you're operating.

• 1:30:45Cara Santa Maria?

  That's literally dumbed down science.

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:48Cara Santa Maria?

  It's like, you know, whenever we do good sci-com, I always avoid the term dumb it down because you don't want it to be simplified to the extent that it's no longer correct.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Right. It can't be so simple it's wrong. It's gotta be true as far as it goes. Hello Michio Kaku.

• 1:31:05Speaker 02

  Okay, let's move on to science or fiction.

• 1:31:12Speaker 01

  It's time for science or fiction.

• 1:31:21Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts. Two real, one fake. And I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular old news items this week. You guys ready? Okay.

• 1:31:36Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:31:36Speaker 02

  All right, here we go. Item number one, scientists have built and confirmed a neutrino detector able to detect neutrinos with just three kilograms of detector mass compared to the multiple tons of other detectors. All right, number two, a new study finds that Roman concrete is more sustainable than modern concrete, requiring 10% less water and releasing 20% less CO2 in its manufacture. All right, number three, researchers have developed and now successfully tested gene therapy to prevent HIV infection that works in infants for several years after a single treatment. Kara, go first.

• 1:32:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Um, okay, so a neutrino detector, it's both been built and confirmed. Uh, it detects neutrinos with just three kilograms of detector mass, whatever that means, uh, compared to the multiple tons of other detectors. So just like the size of the, they, they made it with carbon fiber. I don't know, they just made it lighter? The detector itself? Is that what you mean by detector mass?

• 1:32:43Speaker 02

  Three kilograms of detector mass? So I'll tell you that you're going first. The detector mass is basically the substance that's interacting with the neutrinos.

• 1:32:50Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, okay, okay. Got it. So it's like what, what's ever like in the tube when the neutrino, well, I don't know how neutrino detector works. I'm thinking of a, of a particle accelerator. But yeah, whatever the neutrinos are passing through or something that they're measuring. Okay, um. Roman, a new study finds that Roman concrete is more sustainable than modern. 10% less water, releasing 20% less CO2. Ugh, God, I mean, that could be the case. I mean, they definitely weren't using like, modern synthetic chemicals when they built it. Developed and successfully tested gene therapy. So you don't say if it's in peop- Oh, no, you said that works in infants. Okay, so that means people infants?

• 1:33:29Speaker 02

  Not necessarily.

• 1:33:30Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, all right. So did it tested gene therapy to prevent HIV infection for several years after a single treatment? So this is some sort of genetic modification that makes the babies... So instead of like antiretrovirals that moms are taking during pregnancy, the little baby, what would be the point of that? Is it in utero? This is confusing to me. Why would you want that? You would need it earlier than when they're infants.

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  So this is to prevent vertical transmission from the mother to the baby?

• 1:34:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so it is. Okay.

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  Mainly through breastfeeding.

• 1:34:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay, so in case she gave birth to a ba- Even if she had HIV, she gave birth to a baby that was HIV negative if she's going to continue to breastfeed. Okay, we want to reduce that risk. So the gene therapy would make it so that somehow it's not transmissible. I mean, if that's the case, that gene therapy should be able to be applied then to adults later. So we just can't catch it? I mean, that would be cool. To just make a whole generation of people who are HIV resistant? That one seems least likely, but it could have just been in mice. I have no idea on the neutrino one. And the Roman concrete, I'm glad you didn't say that it was like stronger or something, because I feel like we just talked about that last week. And even though it was really strong, I doubt it's stronger than modern concrete. But is it

• 1:34:50Cara Santa Maria?

  more sustainable? Ugh.

• 1:34:56Speaker 03

  I like those noises, but...

• 1:34:57Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, this is so tough. Maybe I'll- I'm gonna say the concrete one's the fiction.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  Thinking noises.

• 1:35:02Speaker 02

  Okay, Bob.

• 1:35:05Bob Novella?

  Let's see, so for the third one, gene therapy, HIV, yeah, I think we've made so many advances in HIV therapies over the years, especially recently, that this doesn't surprise me at all, so I'm gonna definitely have to go with that one as science. Let's see, Roman concrete is more sustainable. I mean, I'm trying to remember the latest that we heard about whether it was actually superior to, what is it, what is it called, Cortlande cement? If I remember, it is better in some ways, but the fact that it could be better, but also more sustainable, seems less likely, so I'm gonna say that it's less sustainable. So I'll say, oh wait, oh fuck.

• 1:35:40Cara Santa Maria?

  What about the neutrinos?

• 1:35:42Bob Novella?

  Roman is more sustainable. No, I'm gonna say that it's less, so I'm gonna have to say that one's fiction then, the concrete one. But I'm really having a hard time doing that because of number one, neutrinos with just three kilograms of detector mass, that's crazy, because, I mean, neutrinos, if you've listened to anything I've said about neutrinos in the past 20 years, you know, they can go through, like, literally, a neutrino can go through like, light years of lead before interacting with an atom. It's just like, they're so ghost-like, they just don't interact with anything. And the modern detectors that I'm aware of have like, ultra pure, like, many, many tons, many swimming pools worth

• 1:36:25Bob Novella?

  of like, ultra pure water, and they collide with an atom, and they create like, Trinkoff radiation. So the fact that they can do it with three kilograms, now, all right, three kilograms, it must be aerogel mass, that's super lightweight, super diffuse, so it's a large area that a lot of neutrinos would go through. That's the only way that that makes sense, but I'm super curious about that one, but I think you were trying to totally screw me on that one, Steve. So I'm gonna go with the Roman concrete is more sustainable is fiction. Okay, and Evan?

• 1:37:01Speaker 03

  Bob, you clearly did not see that scientific documentary called 2012, in which neutrinos, it turns out, definitely impact, and have an impact on the Earth's core, right, which causes a shift of some kind, and the crust becomes unstable, and starts to, and John Cusack goes crazy. So, you, I think you missed that in your analysis of this particular news item.

• 1:37:29Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  Had you brought that into this discussion...

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  You'd come to the same conclusion that this one is probably science. I know, you know so much more about neutrino detectors than I will likely ever know. So congratulations on that. The Roman concrete one, more sustainable. I was, when Kara was discussing this or speaking her mind on this, I was having many of the same thoughts. So, thank you for confirming my thoughts there Kara.

• 1:38:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  Because I, we did talk about this last week when Steve was discussing his trip to Malta and the concrete there, so that's when it came up. And how durable, I mean, you know, long lasting it is. But that does not mean more sustainable than modern concrete. So I have, I think I'm going to join both of you in saying that that one's going to be the fiction. And then Kara, you also brought up a good point about the third one about the gene therapy that works in infants for several years. You asked if it was human infants and Steve said not necessarily. So it's some other animal they probably tested this on, I don't think.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Which led me to believe, I was thinking, maybe this one's the fiction, but you brought up that point. Now I'm pretty sure that that one's going to be science. So I agree, concrete fiction in this case.

• 1:38:56Speaker 02

  All right. You all agree on number two, so we'll start number one. Scientists have built and confirmed a neutrino detector able to detect neutrinos with just three kilograms of detector mass compared to multiple tons of other detectors. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:39:16Speaker 02

  This is surprising, I know Bob was going to be the most surprised by this.

• 1:39:19Speaker 03

  Holy crap, man.

• 1:39:21Speaker 02

  So yeah, this is the Konis experiment. They set it up outside of a fission nuclear power plant because nuclear fission creates neutrinos. And they were able to use it to detect the excess neutrinos from the nuclear power plant. They knew like what the background number would be and over a very long period of time said, yeah, we had extra neutrino detections. So coming from the nuclear power plant. So yeah, Bob, this was, it's a new sort of interaction. So

• 1:39:52Bob Novella?

  Whoa, wait.

• 1:39:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is

• 1:39:55Bob Novella?

  A new type of neutrino interaction with matter?

• 1:39:58Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna pretend I fully understand it, but let me just tell you what the description is.

• 1:40:00Bob Novella?

  All right.

• 1:40:02Speaker 02

  So it's, so it's the, it's, I think the key is that the neutrinos are scattering off of the atomic nuclei of germanium. So they, they, it says, "In this process, neutrinos do not scatter off the individual components of the atomic nuclei in the detector, but rather coherently with the entire nucleus. This significantly increases the probability of a very small but observable nuclear recoil." So I guess because

• 1:40:29Bob Novella?

  Oh.

• 1:40:29Speaker 02

  it's hitting the nu, like the whole nucleus, the nucleus reacts in an observable way. The, says the recoil caused by neutrino scattering is comparable to a ping pong ball bouncing off a car, with the detection being the changing motion of the car. So not very much, but this was above the threshold of detection. So the scattering partners are the atomic nuclei of germanium. Observing this effect requires low-energy neutrinos, such as those produced in large numbers in nuclear reactors. But yeah, the dramatic thing here was just three kilograms of detector mass in this detector. So they said, this is a proof of concept, they've actually proven this technique works. This really opens up neutrino research. Because

• 1:41:13Speaker 02

  then you don't, you don't necessarily need these vast underground pools of pure water or whatever as your detector, or, or the ice, you know, like the Antarctic neutrino detector.

• 1:41:25Bob Novella?

  Right. Maybe that's how Geordi detects neutrinos with his little visor on his face.

• 1:41:30Speaker 02

  Maybe. Yeah, sure.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  That's a Star Trek reference, Kara.

• 1:41:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:41:35Speaker 02

  All right, let's move on to number two. A new study finds that Roman concrete is more sustainable than modern concrete, requiring 10% less water and releasing 20% less CO2 in its manufacture. You guys all think this one is fiction.

• 1:41:51Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:51Speaker 02

  Although it sounds like for various reasons. And this one is

• 1:41:57Speaker 02

  The fiction. The fiction.

• 1:41:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yay.

• 1:41:59Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:42:00Speaker 02

  So frustrating, Cara. Well, I wish you would not have guessed.

• 1:42:05Speaker 02

  But all for the wrong reasons? So, what the study showed was that Roman concrete is exactly, has exactly the same water use and CO2 release as modern concrete. However, they said it's more sustainable because it's stronger and more durable. So, it's only more sustainable in that it would have to be replaced less often, which I think, Evan, you alluded to. It is because it's stronger and more durable. But otherwise, like, in the manufacturing process, it's the same. It's same amount of water use, same amount of CO2 release. But they did say, you know, long-term, could

• 1:42:44Speaker 02

  be useful to, you know, use the older recipe, if you will, because it is more durable. All right, all of this means that researchers have developed and now successfully tested gene therapy to prevent HIV infection that works in infants for several years after a single treatment is science. This is actually potentially very huge. There's a few details in here, so Cara, I could understand why you're a little perplexed without knowing these details. So, this was done in primates, in macaques, because there is a, like, whatever, a primate version of HIV that they can use as their...

• 1:43:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's called SIV, simian.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, simian, that's right, that's exactly right. And they're testing something that's been around for a while called broadly neutralizing antibodies. Now, this already exists as a treatment to prevent infants from contracting HIV from their mothers. The problem is, it requires an infusion, and it only lasts for a short time, so you need repeated infusions of these broadly neutralizing antibodies. And that is not practical in the parts of the world where this is the highest risk, right?

• 1:43:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 02

  So, unfortunately, lots of newborns, lots of babies get infected with HIV. It's a huge problem. 300 children are infected with HIV every day.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh.

• 1:44:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. More than 100,000 children acquire HIV annually, primarily through mother-to-child transmission after birth from breastfeeding. So it's a major vector for HIV. And of course, you're infected as an infant, like that's your life, right?

• 1:44:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 1:44:30Speaker 02

  What they were testing was using a dino-associated virus, AAV. So this is a virus that itself can insert genes into DNA. So you don't, it's not, there's no CRISPR involved here. It's just AAV that's been altered with a gene that, and the gene makes the broadly-neutralizing antibodies. So they infect the muscle with the virus, which inserts the gene into the muscle tissue. Muscle tissue survives for a long time, which is good. And the muscle tissue then starts cranking out the broadly-neutralizing antibodies. Now, there's a reason why we're not going to be using this in adults.

• 1:45:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Unfortunately. It's because when you do this, even in older children, and I mean just like even if you wait a couple of months,

• 1:45:21Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:22Speaker 02

  there tends to be a lot of immune rejection.

• 1:45:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Hmm.

• 1:45:26Speaker 02

  And so you-

• 1:45:27Cara Santa Maria?

  So you need like a pretty naive immune system.

• 1:45:28Speaker 02

  You need to get the babies when their immune system is naive enough that they accept it and they don't reject it. And this study showed that it works better in the younger infants. You know, you want to get them within a couple of weeks of being born. But it worked for the macaques. It provided good protection from HIV infection for three years, which is like their adolescence. So the hope is that it would work in human babies, you know, until they're like older children or even until they're adolescents. Definitely, you know, to get, definitely, if it's a couple of years even, that's through the breastfeeding period, right?

• 1:46:07Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:08Speaker 02

  So that would get you through the point where you're, where most children who get infected are getting infected through breastfeeding. And again, it's a one and done treatment. One injection, you're done.

• 1:46:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's way better than like crap or something where you have to.

• 1:46:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's very practical for, again, the people who need it the most.

• 1:46:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  So very hopeful, very, very hopeful.

• 1:46:28Cara Santa Maria?

  Because there's still parts of the world, I mean, I remember when I was in Esuatini, it's got the highest HIV rate in the world and like, most of the kids we worked with were HIV positive.

• 1:46:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's so sad.

• 1:46:38Cara Santa Maria?

  It is, yeah.

• 1:46:40Speaker 02

  Okay, so that's a hopeful technology. Good job, everyone. Sniffed it out again.

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for your help, friends.

• 1:46:48Speaker 02

  All right, Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:46:50Speaker 03

  Be not astonished at new ideas, for it is well-known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many. Baruch Spinoza.

• 1:47:02Speaker 02

  Yep, that's kind of the inverse of the logical fallacy of argument ad popular.

• 1:47:09Speaker 03

  The popular.

• 1:47:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's popular, therefore it must be true. This is the, it's not popular, therefore it must be wrong.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Right, same idea, though.

• 1:47:16Speaker 02

  Neither of which are true, it's irrelevant, you know, popular acceptance.

• 1:47:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  Is irrelevant to whether something is true or not. I would say a broad consensus of experts is different, again, logical fallacy, the informal logical fallacies are context-dependent. If you're talking about, yeah, pretty much all climate scientists think that anthropogenic global warming is happening, that's not an argument ad popular. That's a consensus of expert opinion.

• 1:47:44Speaker 03

  But we can use this, say, on a more modern concept, UFOs, for example. Our culture is saturated with UFO belief. All the saturation in the world does not make any of it true.

• 1:47:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:47:58Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:58Speaker 02

  And the popular unpopularity of GMOs doesn't mean that they're not good.

• 1:48:03Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:48:05Speaker 02

  Because they are, in my opinion, and the opinion of the vast majority of scientists. That is the issue still where there's the hugest disconnect between popular opinion and scientific opinion.

• 1:48:15Cara Santa Maria?

  And especially scientists who work in agriculture.

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  In that area.

• 1:48:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So, yeah, so it depends on who you're talking about. But, yeah, it's a good, the general idea here, popular, you know, opinion doesn't really predict whether a scientific idea is true or not. And I think he's focusing on new ideas because new ideas generally take time to become accepted.

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:48:38Speaker 02

  Depending on what they are, you know.

• 1:48:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he was, you know, what, was he Renaissance, Baruch Spinoza? I think it was, or just after the Renaissance. So, we're talking about some new idea, new ideas or ideas that were lost for a very long time that had just started coming back.

• 1:48:53Speaker 02

  Or in 1632, so, yeah. Right, yeah, where you are in history kind of puts a different spin on that. If you're in this sort of nascent scientific era, pretty much everything that was, all of the established ideas were wrong.

• 1:49:09Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:49:10Speaker 02

  You know, new scientific ideas were probably way more likely to be true than whatever they were replacing. So, that would definitely, you could see how somebody who was living at that time would be like, "Don't reject new ideas because they go against the authority, or because they're unconventional, or because they're new." Imagine living at a time where pretty much most of the things that the authorities believed were wrong.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:49:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Imagine that.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  Imagine that.

• 1:49:37Speaker 03

  Thank goodness we live in the modern age.

• 1:49:41Speaker 02

  Scholars at the time, not talking about the politicians.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Right, right. Controlled by the churches and so much other.

• 1:49:49Speaker 02

  And even, that is not like, you know, doctors believed nonsense back then.

• 1:49:54Cara Santa Maria?

  But nobody knew that they, that it wasn't true.

• 1:49:57Speaker 02

  I know, that's the thing.

• 1:49:58Cara Santa Maria?

  They thought it was true, yeah.

• 1:49:59Speaker 02

  But then somebody says, "I think there might be germs causing these," like, "He's crazy."

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  He's a witch.

• 1:50:04Bob Novella?

  Burn him. I don't know, I just want out of this timeline.

• 1:50:08Speaker 02

  You're gonna roll the dice for a random timeline, or you want to be able to pick your timeline?

• 1:50:14Bob Novella?

  Oh, picking it would be nice.

• 1:50:16Speaker 02

  Picking it would be.

• 1:50:17Speaker 03

  Well, sure.

• 1:50:20Speaker 02

  All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Thanks, Steve. See you next week. And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

• 1:50:32Speaker 02

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

• 1:51:09Speaker 06

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