The Skeptics Guide #1048 - Aug 9 2025

Quickie with Bob: Water from Air; News Items: Depleted Uranium Batteries, Russia Earthquake and Volcanoes, New Shroud of Turin Analysis, Web of Space; Your Questions and E-mails: Hydrogen Powder, Lab Leak; From TikTok: Lyme Lab Leak; 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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• 0:30Speaker 01

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

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, August 6, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me, the speaker Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria.

• 0:48Cara Santa Maria?

  Howdy.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  And Evan Bernstein.

• 0:50Speaker 04

  Good evening, folks.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Jay is still on vacay in Alaska.

• 0:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Vacay.

• 0:54Speaker 02

  He'll be back next week.

• 0:56Speaker 04

  The 49th state.

• 0:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Has he been, like, checking in with anyone?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, sending pictures, you know.

• 1:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, nice.

• 1:01Speaker 04

  He sent us the link so we could record this podcast.

• 1:03Cara Santa Maria?

  True, he did do that. I appreciate that.

• 1:07Speaker 04

  He keeps the keys to this recording device.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  So, it's the 80th anniversary of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  It's amazing, 80 years, literally a lifetime ago.

• 1:20Speaker 04

  I was born in 1969, which, in a way, always fascinated me, because that was only 24 years removed from the end of World War II. 24 years, that's nothing. 24 years ago was 2001. I mean, it's, you know, right?

• 1:37Cara Santa Maria?

  It's amazing how much, like, so people who are born around, you know, 9/11, that's like a lifetime ago to them, obviously, or people who are born after that. It's amazing how much, when you're not alive during a time period, it seems really far away. Like, anything that happened before you were born is like ancient history. And then the things that happened while you were alive were like, not that long ago.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Right, but then, right, you back up, you take a little closer look at it, and you realize, wow, it really was not that long ago. But 80 years removed now from, from that is...

• 2:12Bob Novella?

  Yeah, eventually even college becomes very long ago.

• 2:17Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 2:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Which really hurts.

• 2:19Cara Santa Maria?

  All the really horrible memes about like how, you know, the time between like nine 11 and now, I mean, what is it? So that's 25 years. So yeah, like 2050 or whatever.

• 2:31Bob Novella?

  It's a whole generation.

• 2:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, stop, don't remind me.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  So I'm sure you guys have heard about RFK's latest shenanigans.

• 2:40Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, which ones?

• 2:41Bob Novella?

  What the hell, man?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  I mean, the big thing is that just happened today, I think it was yesterday as we're recording.

• 2:46Bob Novella?

  mRNA, man.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, pulling $500 billion from mRNA research to develop vaccines for respiratory viruses. You know, like COVID and the flu.

• 2:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Bob Novella?

  And just basically, basically lying through his teeth, saying that, that it wasn't performing well. And meanwhile, the CDC researchers are saying, wait a second, you know, we've tested it and it's done incredibly well. So he, it seems like to me, from what I could tell, he's just making up or distorting stuff so dramatically so that he could just end the research on mRNA vaccines and other technology that mRNA could allow. Just like, it's tragic.

• 3:22Speaker 04

  It's also kind of remarkable that the system is designed in such a way in which this one person, the head of this one agency, has this level of control. Why isn't there a board or a panel that votes on this?

• 3:33Bob Novella?

  Well, Steve, you were saying at the livestream today, though, that Congress, though, could not necessarily follow exactly what he says.

• 3:40Cara Santa Maria?

  A lot of people are capitulating to this one person.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, the way the law, the way it's, the law is, the, you know, the Congress could allocate money for, for whatever they wanted to, right? But they often then will defer to the executive branch and the specific agencies to spend that money, right? To allocate it to specific programs. Cause they don't want to, this, this is partly legitimate, right? They don't, they don't want to have to spell out. In legislation, like really micromanage where every dollar goes, you know, they just say, "The EPA is going to invest $100 million on research into this question, and the EPA decides where that money goes."

• 4:20Bob Novella?

  Because they're the experts.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  So now, of course, you have RFK Jr. in charge of HHS, he gets to decide where the money goes. And he's like, "Nope, we're not gonna, we're gonna claw back this money that was allocated to mRNA research. Here's a bunch of bullshit, completely unscientific and incorrect reasons why we're gonna do that." But Congress could just pass further legislation saying, "No, this is where the money's going," and take it out of the hands of the HHS. Of course, they'd have to pass that.

• 4:46Bob Novella?

  Will they?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  Trump might veto it, and they'd have to pass it

• 4:48Bob Novella?

  Right, and then it goes through that process.

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Over his veto. If he would do that, I don't know. I mean, it certainly is very plausible that he could. It's not very plausible that Congress is gonna step in and fix the problem here.

• 4:59Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Right?

• 5:00Bob Novella?

  I agree with that.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Not the way it's currently configured. So I wrote about it on Science-Based Medicine, read it if you want the details, but basically everything RFK Jr. says is demonstrably, factually, empirically wrong. This is not about opinions or priorities. What he says is factually incorrect. He said that the mRNA COVID vaccines had more risk than benefit. That's a, that's a specific factual, number-based claim. It's not true. It's been, you know, clearly demonstrated that the benefits vastly outweigh the risks, which are very tiny. Even the things that we know the vaccine does, those rates are higher from getting COVID, right, from not being vaccinated, than they are from the vaccine itself.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  So, you know, it's just utter nonsense, everything that he said. And it's clear he's just working backwards from his anti-vaccine position.

• 5:54Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  You know, he's not following the evidence or looking fairly at the evidence. Just, this is just justification for, you know, clawing back mRNA research and vaccine research.

• 6:06Bob Novella?

  I love these decisions that clearly were gonna have body counts associated with them. I mean, and it could be dramatic. Get hit with the bird flu, and we're not, and we're, get caught with our pants down because we haven't done the mRNA research that would have been done? I mean, that's, that's a lot of deaths right there, and it could be, worst-case scenario is pretty dramatic.

• 6:26Cara Santa Maria?

  It also makes you really worry about what will happen when something like that is our reality, if we're face-to-face to it. Are we going to be dealing with an administration that's so proud that when they realize that they actually do need an mRNA vaccine, are they gonna say, no, we don't, no, we don't, and just watch people die? Or are they gonna do what they'll probably do, which is scramble at the last minute? And we'll know that people will die because of that. Maybe not as many, as if they just say, straight up, no.

• 6:58Bob Novella?

  Well, how about this? How about when they get the numbers of the people that have died? They're like, no, that's fake news. Those numbers aren't real, and I'm gonna fire whoever gave me those numbers.

• 7:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, that did, like, just happen, didn't it?

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the point.

• 7:09Bob Novella?

  Because that's the point. That's what he will do in this even more dire situation. That's what he does.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, hey, let's shut down satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Let's just not measure it.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  As a parallel to the mRNA vaccinations, are they also working on traditional vaccinations for COVID?

• 7:29Bob Novella?

  So... He wants to roll back to the live attenuated viruses.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  He wants to go back to 20th century technology. He's like, saying, we need to go back to, like, the whole virus vaccines, under the false belief that they're more effective than more modern vaccines. It's just not true.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  They just take longer. They have a lot of...

• 7:48Speaker 02

  It takes longer. He also is saying he wants to focus on a universal vaccine.

• 7:52Bob Novella?

  Sure.

• 7:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Sure, for everything?

• 7:54Bob Novella?

  Nirvana fallacy.

• 7:55Speaker 02

  We've been working on that for a long time. It is, it's the Nirvana fallacy. I think, you know, again, if you're being cynical, you could say, this is very deliberate. He's like, let's focus on this unattainable goal and shelve all of this attainable research that we should be doing. It's just a, it's just a backdoor way to be anti-vaccine and pretend to be scientific.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:15Speaker 02

  It's like, exactly like his...

• 8:16Speaker 04

  Sneaky.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  We're gonna do gold standard science, but that just means they're gonna nitpick anything they don't like and find a reason to, to shut it down. It's not unbiased scientific evaluation.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  Horrible.

• 8:30Speaker 02

  It's just science denial. It's straight up science denial is what it is.

• 8:32Bob Novella?

  And don't forget, I mean, mRNA vaccines, you know, it's not just, you know, mRNA is not just for vaccines, but mRNA is for creating proteins in specific places, specific proteins. Proteins in specific places and we are, what I say earlier, we're ugly bags of protein. We are protein, we got protein everywhere. So a tool that can create the desired protein where we want it, when we want it, that could be an amazing therapeutic tool, not just for vaccines, but for a whole host of other possibilities that we are not going to be exploring now, not for, you know, it's going to be delayed. Right. Eventually, we'll get back to it, I'm sure. Yeah. But we could be losing many, many years and never catch up to where we would have been.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  All right, let's change the subject. Yeah, please. Bob, tell us about getting water from thin air.

• 9:19Bob Novella?

  Thank you, Steve. This is your Quickie with Bob. Very annoyed Bob right now. All right, guys, imagine harvesting drinking water from the air. But that's not, that's not entirely new. I've read about it, I've been reading about that technology for years. It has been done before, but never has it been done as simply or efficiently as what these MIT engineers have recently achieved. Really fascinating, really excited about this. So they've created a window-sized device, which was a nice size for such a device, that passively extracts clean drinking water directly from the air, even in incredibly dry environments. Now, what's the magic word here? It's passive, because that's one of the major breakthroughs.

• 10:00Bob Novella?

  It needs no external energy, no electricity, no solar panels, and no batteries. And that's just, that really sets it above and beyond any other similar device. So how does this guy work? Key here is this special vertical panel using aerogel that's enclosed in a glass chamber. Now, you guys remember, we've talked about aerogels a few times in the past. Typically, though, the context is that it's the lightest material ever engineered, near the density of air. It really is like you could hold it in your hand and not even realize it's in your hand. Amazingly rarified, but they also have other amazing properties. And one of them, the specific amazing property in this specific type of hydrogel is that

• 10:41Bob Novella?

  it absorbs water from the air at night, causing it to swell. So when it cools down, it swells, pulls the water out of the air, and then the following day, it shrinks. As the heat gets hotter and hotter during the day, it shrinks and it makes it release the water vapor, which then condenses on the glass, and then that condensation just flows down into a, into a collection tube. Now, they did field tests. Where do you think they did field tests? The Sahara. Sahara, Death Valley. They went to one of the driest places on the earth to test this. Because if it's going to work there, that's pretty amazing. And they show that they could collect 160 milliliters, or about two thirds of a cup, in desert conditions.

• 11:22Bob Novella?

  And they haven't done tests yet, but they extrapolate that in the more humid environments, it would be even, of course, even more dramatic, because there's water everywhere in the air. But Bob, that was how much volume, though. How big a device gets you that much water? It said window-sized device is what there is. A window-sized device. A window-sized device, okay. So now, and of course, that anticipates my next statement here, that multiple panels then could produce enough water for an entire family. So imagine you have a few windows with this device in it, and then the whole, it could give enough drinking water for the entire family. I don't know about that. I mean, not in a desert, because that's like a few cups. You need gallons a day. I think they were talking about, all right, more than a few windows. I mean, they would have to scale it up.

• 12:07Bob Novella?

  Or it would have to be in a more humid area, not in the desert.

• 12:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, maybe they made like, in your home, that's how much you could produce.

• 12:13Bob Novella?

  You're not going to be cooking, and you're probably not going to be... Showering. I mean, if you want to stay alive, here's a few. I mean, that's the logistics of this situation. What's it going to cost? And how many can the families get? But they were saying in the research that if you scale this up, it could hydrate an entire family. So I don't know what that means, whether that's a device that's much big. It's going to be bigger. I just don't know how much bigger it's going to be. But they said that this can give drinking water to an entire family. Say, three or four people, I assume. Bob, would this work on Tatooine?

• 12:50Bob Novella?

  And would you need a droid that speaks Baji? Yeah, Baji, it wouldn't need to be a droid, but it's got, whatever it is, it's got to speak Baji. That's the critical piece right there. Kara, that's a Star Wars reference.

• 12:59Cara Santa Maria?

  I got that from the Tatooine.

• 13:02Bob Novella?

  Oh, yes, very good.

• 13:03Cara Santa Maria?

  The context clues.

• 13:05Bob Novella?

  They farmed the moisture with moisture evaporators. This is so refreshing. You know, such a wonderful invention. Just try to think of how many lives that this can improve. Even save, it's really just smart engineering at its best. You're essentially harvesting the second most important thing that humans need to live, water. And right, they're talking about, you know, future water wars. We know when, when water becomes scarcer and scarcer in the future and how crazy it's going to get because

• 13:32Speaker 04

  It's not Mad Max?

• 13:33Bob Novella?

  Everybody, everybody needs water, right? Yeah, water and fuel for, right, for Mad Max. So, and of course with, with the no power source, which just makes it incredible. I mean, um, this, this is the kind of stuff that, that billionaires should be like, yeah, this is, I'm going to spend a hundred million dollars and buy as many of these as I can and just, and just distribute them to places that really, really need them. It's just, that's the kind of thing that, you know, that almost none of them do, of course.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  And we don't have a sense yet of how much this would cost because like we won't, we wouldn't really know until they were mass produced.

• 14:03Bob Novella?

  Right, but I mean, you're, you're talking about some hydrogel and these, these enclosed glass chambers. I mean, it's, and there's no power source. I'm not thinking it's going to be, it's going to be prohibitively expensive, but I have not seen any, um, any, you know, potential prices. Who knows? I hope, it sounds like it could be reasonably priced. But hey, if somebody buys them, a lot of them and gives them away, then they're going to be free to a lot of people. But, uh, that, that kind of stuff just doesn't happen as often as it should with all these super rich people around. So enough of that. This has been your condensation quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. I want to talk about a technology development thing too.

• 14:42Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  This may sound counterintuitive at first, but this is batteries made from depleted uranium.

• 14:50Bob Novella?

  Wait, this thing again?

• 14:51Speaker 02

  No, no, it's not what you think. It's not atomic batteries. It's just regular chemical batteries.

• 14:57Speaker 04

  Isn't that what the Batmobile used? Atomic batteries?

• 15:00Bob Novella?

  Atomic batteries to power, right?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Right, these are not atomic batteries. They do not get their electricity from beta decay or radioactive decay of any time, any type. These are regular chemical batteries, but depleted uranium is the

• 15:15Bob Novella?

  The active ingredient?

• 15:16Speaker 02

  Is the active material of the negative electrode. They, and they use iron as the positive electrode, right? So it's a uranium iron battery with a liquid electrolyte. So the, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency reported that they have built a prototype of this battery and tested it and it works.

• 15:37Bob Novella?

  Okay. Ah, yeah, devil's in the details.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Devil's in the details, as always.

• 15:40Bob Novella?

  How dangerous and how, what's the energy density?

• 15:44Speaker 02

  The bad, the prototype that they built produced 1.3 volts, which is a little bit less than a AA battery, which is 1.5 volts. Better than nano volts. That doesn't matter that much because you just link these things together. Yeah. They're like, this would be a cell in a big battery pack, right? Depleted uranium is very heavy. This is not the kind of thing you would have in your cellphone or in your car. This would be entirely for grid storage, right? Because it's way too heavy to use for anything mobile. Okay. Especially in iron tube, also heavy. So this is, these would be Yeah, right. Very heavy batteries, but it doesn't matter if it's grid storage, right? Typically, a grid storage battery operates in the 400 to 800 volt range. But again, you can get up there with a battery pack.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  What they said about the capacity is that 650 tons of uranium, of depleted uranium, would have a capacity of 30,000 kilowatt hours or roughly equivalent to the daily electricity supplied to 3,000 households in Japan. Okay. Japan currently has 16,000 tons. The US has 750,000 tons of depleted uranium. So if Japan used its entire supply, that would be enough to power 73,000 homes entirely. In the US, it would be, if we used our entire supply, that would power 3.4 million homes. For, well, for how long?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  That's just how much, like, for, basically that it would, it would hold enough electricity to power that many homes for a day. Does that make sense? Yes. You know, it depends on how, what percentage of the energy the homes are using needs to be stored in a battery throughout the course of a day. If you're like, using solar panels, storing up that energy during the day and then using it at night, what percentage are you using? So if it's like 50% of your daily energy use, then that would be 6.8 million homes. Typically, grid storage, short-term battery grid storage is anywhere between two hours at the short end and six hours at the long end.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  So if we say, over the course of six hours, but that might be the six hours of peak energy use, that could be half or a third of your energy use for the day. So it's going to be, like, in the US, it would be millions of homes, right? It'd be hard to know exactly how much that would be. So anyway, that's, again, that wouldn't be the only grid storage we would need, but it could be significant. Now, why do we care? Like, why is this even, why are they even researching this? So first of all, batteries for grid storage are great, but we don't want to use lithium ion batteries, right? Because we need them for cars. Yeah. And we don't, yeah, right? We don't want to choke off that, you know, that raw material

• 18:37Speaker 02

  for something that it is not optimally suited for. We want to make, for grid storage, we want to make batteries out of cheap, abundant material. It does not matter how heavy it is. And so, sure, uranium and iron, go right ahead, right? The iron, there's iron salt batteries. There's other, you know, batteries like that that we're thinking of for grid storage, where weight is not an object, but we need lots of it and it needs to be cheap. Cheap and abundant, right? So the reason why the Japan Atomic Energy Agency is interested in this and researching it is because, as I said, Japan currently has to pay for 16,000 tons of storage of depleted uranium.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  So if it's going to be sitting there anyway, why not make a battery out of it, right? That's the idea. So what is depleted uranium? Essentially, if you get uranium that's, you mine it, you, you know, you purify it, the ore into uranium. But then, when, for nuclear power plants, you have to enrich the uranium. When you enrich it, you basically increase the percentage of the visible, like the more highly visible uranium. So enriched uranium is mostly U235, which is highly radioactive. It's mostly removed from these, the highly radioactive isotopes are removed from the uranium. That's your enriched uranium.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  What you're left with is the very low, is the low level radioactive uranium. That's the depleted uranium. All right, so it's low level, that's good. Yeah, so depleted uranium is mostly U238, which has a half-life of 4.468 billion years.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Now you think, "Oh, my God, it's never gonna go away." But the thing is, the longer the half-life, the lower the level of radiation.

• 20:31Bob Novella?

  Right, right.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  So that's what you want, that's what... So low-level radiation has super-high half-life, that's the point. The stuff with a shorter half-life, it's decaying faster, so it's more radioactive more radioactive over a shorter period of time. So that makes sense. Yeah, so U238 depleted uranium, it's very, very low-level radioactivity. You would still wanna have some shielding, but again, it's so low-level, it's not a big deal at all. But there are laws, right? So you'd have to make sure you're complying with the International Atomic Agency rules on storing depleted uranium. But again, it's not that big a deal.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  This way, rather than just having it sit in storage that you're paying for, you could build batteries out of it, right? And just, and now it's sitting in storage as a grid battery. And you're using up the material that you don't have to use other raw material for.

• 21:30Bob Novella?

  What's the relationship, though, between this radiation and the battery?

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 21:34Bob Novella?

  All right, so there's no link there? I thought they were maybe using it for some part of the process?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Nope, nothing. Absolutely nothing.

• 21:41Bob Novella?

  So what's the benefit?

• 21:43Speaker 02

  As I said, the benefit is you're using up something you need to store anyway.

• 21:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Okay. Sitting around. And that's the only benefit?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  And you're not using something that's better suited for other uses. You're not using lithium.

• 21:55Bob Novella?

  Lithium.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:56Bob Novella?

  Got you.

• 21:57Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 21:57Bob Novella?

  The den... All right, I guess that's fine.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  That's really it. The energy capacity is kind of irrelevant, as long as it's reasonable order of magnitude. Again, it doesn't matter if you have...

• 22:08Bob Novella?

  It's not nanovolts.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, a silicon block that weighs tons, and that's your grid storage, who cares?

• 22:14Bob Novella?

  For a double-A battery, yeah.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Here's an idea, so you know that with wind turbines, they have to sit upon a massive block of concrete. Right?

• 22:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, make that the power source.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  To anchor it, to anchor it. Otherwise, the thing would blow over. And that is the most significant part of the carbon footprint of building a wind turbine is it's

• 22:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Is it's cement base. It's concrete base.

• 22:44Bob Novella?

  So this can, this can store the energy from the windmill and hold it in place.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's really heavy. In this case, the heaviness is a, is a feature, not a bug.

• 22:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  And you say, all right, just gonna put, you put that wind turbine on a massive base of a uranium iron battery. And now that's the, that's the grid storage for that wind turbine.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Sweet. I like that.

• 23:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:05Bob Novella?

  And the birds won't die, and the birds will die not from hitting it, but from the radiation.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  The radiation is so low. Yeah, it's not really hazardous. It's like almost background radiation at that point. And again, it's gonna by definition be under the ground, right?

• 23:18Bob Novella?

  So that's, that's cool.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a good synergy of ideas in there. I think that's what we need to do. I really hate the idea of using lithium ion batteries for grid storage.

• 23:26Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  But that's what's happening now. It's happening just because it's cheap. You know, it's like, it's, it's cost effective in the short run, but it's short sighted. It is like, oh, you're using up these resources we need for EV batteries and, and maybe plane batteries, you know? Don't use it for grid storage.

• 23:44Bob Novella?

  That's humanity now. They don't even care about the next quarter.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:47Bob Novella?

  No, no long-term planning.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  I mean, there are people developing batteries that are better suited for grid storage. This is one of those ideas. I think the iron salt battery is the other idea, which I, which I'm hoping also, it was already working to some extent, but it needs to like, you need to scale it up. You need to mass produce it. You know what I mean? So these things need to happen and we need to stop using lithium ion batteries for grid storage.

• 24:09Bob Novella?

  All right, we need more depleted uranium.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Yes. And we, yeah, and it gets rid of that, gets rid of a huge component of, of nuclear waste.

• 24:17Speaker 04

  I like that, too.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  All right, Kara, tell us about earthquakes in Russia.

• 24:22Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, what's going on over there? Yeah, if you all remember, I hope you remember, it was what, like six days ago now, maybe seven.

• 24:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, big earthquakes, tsunami and...

• 24:32Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so there was an 8.8, it's called a mega thrust earthquake. So very high magnitude, lots of damage. I don't know why I picked this news item today because it is full of names I cannot pronounce. I think I'm filling in for Jay this week, yeah. So it's in the, it was in the Kamchatka region. So that's the Kamchatka peninsula off the eastern coast. And it wasn't the first large earthquake that occurred even in this area. I think that there have been sort of mega thrust earthquakes in 1737, 1841, 1923,

• 25:15Cara Santa Maria?

  twice in 1923, actually, 1952, and, and then this one in 2025. Some of them were even larger, but they weren't, they were prior to using the kind of modern tools that we have. So when you look at earthquakes from, let's say, here, we're looking at like 50, 60 years ago. No, 50 years ago, we were already assigning.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake is recorded as 9.0. There's also one in 19-

• 25:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it was revised to 9.0. Yeah.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  1964 in Alaska, 9.2. That's the biggest that I'm seeing.

• 25:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, there was a, but here's the problem, like 1737, we couldn't actually measure it. So we had to estimate it, but the estimate is that it was a 9.3.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:58Cara Santa Maria?

  So like it could have-

• 25:59Speaker 02

  One in Chile, 9.5.

• 26:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it could have been larger, but-

• 26:03Speaker 02

  In 1960.

• 26:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, for sure. This was not the largest earthquake on record.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  These are all ring of fire.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  That's getting close to the theoretical maximum, 9.5. Remember, this is a logarithmic scale. Nine is 10 times more energetic than eight.

• 26:17Cara Santa Maria?

  Than eight. Yeah. So this earthquake was thought to be the sixth strongest, but it's tied with two others for that title. A 1906 Ecuador-Columbia earthquake and a 2010 Chile earthquake. Again, we're only talking about earthquakes that were actually recorded by seismometers prior to that. There's estimates, but we can't really rank them. It was the most powerful earthquake recorded since 2011. So there's been some, you know, amount of time since we've had-

• 26:45Speaker 04

  The one that caused the Fukushima?

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, no, it wasn't the Fukushima. That was the last one. It was the Tohoku earthquake. Great East Japan earthquake.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  It was a 9.0 in March of 2011.

• 27:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Which earthquake, was it the Tokiohima, the one that I just mentioned?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  That was it.

• 27:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, so that was the most recent stronger earthquake. So this is the next strongest since then. And here's the thing that's so interesting about, I mean, whatever, we could go off on a tangent when it comes to the kind of strength or, you know, the seismic strength of an earthquake as measured by seismometers. It's not always directly correlated to loss of life, to damage, obviously, like when there's a nuclear power plant right there, that's a bad thing. This earthquake, for example, in Kamchatka, we thought there was going to be pretty horrific tsunamis, right? Like, there were warnings

• 27:43Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Across the Pacific Ring. And what we found was that they really weren't too bad. There were tsunamis. It seems like the worst damage was actually in Russia itself and then in Japan. But pretty much the waves were about three feet or less in most of the places where people expected much, much larger waves.

• 28:08Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that's a bullet, really. 8.8 could have produced amazingly destructive tsunamis, but it's all, but it's all very contingent. There's lots of, there's lots of reasons for them to be amplified or not, you know? So it's kind of hard to predict exactly what's going to happen and where.

• 28:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what Kara was saying.

• 28:27Bob Novella?

  They got lucky, yeah.

• 28:27Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, 100%. It's, it can be very, very hard to predict these things. And one thing that's very hard to predict, and that's really what I wanted to focus on today, is the, you could call it a co-occurrence, but probably like an immediate following of a large earthquake with volcanic eruption. So there have been six different Russian volcanoes that have erupted since that earthquake.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  You don't hear much in the news about Russian volcanoes, right? When did the last time we talked about that?

• 28:57Cara Santa Maria?

  But as you said right at the beginning, Evan, this is part of the Ring of Fire. And there are many volcanoes in this region. So six have erupted since the original earthquake and its aftershocks. And there's one more that scientists think might erupt. But I think that part of the reason this is so intriguing to me is because it's one of these areas where we're just not good at prediction. We're not great at predicting earthquakes. We've talked about this a lot, right? We have like huge error bars on this sort of thing. We're really good at recognizing them when they start happening and then putting out really quick alerts.

• 29:38Cara Santa Maria?

  We have some indications when there is, you know, kind of perturbations or like seismic activity that's abnormal. But we still don't really know, and I think it's really hard to say that the earthquake itself caused the eruptions. A lot of people are really cautioning using that kind of language. They're saying it's more likely that the quake intensified these eruptions. Or that the same thing that caused the quake caused the eruptions. But the quake itself was not the direct instigator of the eruptions. So like, why would, I could read you all the different, actually, maybe I will because I gotta be Jay right now. Because why not? It looks like we're gonna get emails here.

• 30:23Cara Santa Maria?

  Shivaluk, Bezmyany, Karimsky, Avachinsky, and, ooh, this one's really fun. Krascheninikov all followed suit after the earthquake. That last one that I just said, again, Krascheninikov. This had been dormant for hundreds of years. I think the last eruption, I'm seeing it some places 500 and some places 600. Yeah, between 5 and 600 years ago was the last time that that volcano erupted.

• 31:00Bob Novella?

  That was a nice, long sleep.

• 31:01Cara Santa Maria?

  What would cause a volcano to erupt very quickly after an earthquake?

• 31:06Bob Novella?

  Well, it collapses a magma, what do they call it, a dome or something under the volcano? That gives magma access to the volcano again, something like that.

• 31:18Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, if we, if we think about what an earthquake actually is, right? Like the setting, earthquakes are different in different parts of the world.

• 31:26Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 31:27Cara Santa Maria?

  But the setting of the Kamchatka earthquake is a convergent plate where the Pacific is subducting underneath. The plate next to it, it looks like it's a between three and 3.5 inches every year, give or take. It's been continuous since the Cretaceous. So there's been seismic activity in this area for a really long time. We mentioned before these huge earthquakes that were both recorded and estimated prior to that. But when you have that type of seismic activity, that's very similar, or it's the same seismic activity that contributes to volcanic activity.

• 32:08Cara Santa Maria?

  And so it's very difficult to say that the shake of the earth is what caused these volcanoes to actually erupt, like click into sort of going from dormancy to eruption. And it's much more likely that their seismic, that the seismic activity that was occurring in this region was already churning those volcanoes and getting them ready and that the magma was, the steam was already starting to build up and that the earthquake itself, you're right, Bob, it may have like collapsed something, shifted something in such a way that some of that energy could escape. But ultimately, it's very likely that they were going to erupt

• 32:48Cara Santa Maria?

  around this time anyway, and that maybe they were just exacerbated. I love this quote from, from the USGS where they said, if the conditions exist like we've been talking about, where these volcanoes are like poised to erupt, and they have like a lot of eruptable magma and pressure that's been building up, they said, quote, "It's possible that large tectonic earthquakes might cause dissolved gases to come out of the magma like a shaken soda bottle, increasing the pressure and possibly leading to an eruption." But they really don't know. So it's really interesting reading about this online because all these different experts who are like giants in the field are still kind of speculating exactly what's going on and why it's happening.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  To a degree.

• 33:31Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah. But, but it does seem like there could be, as I mentioned, a seventh volcano that could erupt because they are recognizing some seismic activity beneath it that are recognizing some like perturbations. And so, you know, it may, it may not, but they have identified that seventh volcano as well to, as something to keep an eye on.

• 33:54Bob Novella?

  It would seem to be a great place to do some scientific research to answer some of these questions.

• 33:59Cara Santa Maria?

  And, and even if it were, I mean, think about it like the crash in Inukam, like you've just got to wait around 500 years. You know, it's, it's hard with volcanoes because they're just, they're hard to predict. So yes, I think obviously there probably is research going on. There are seismometers in place and there are individuals collecting data. But you can't just set up and go, okay, we know it's going to blow tomorrow. So let's see what happens.

• 34:23Bob Novella?

  All right. Thanks, Kara.

• 34:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yep.

• 34:25Bob Novella?

  Cool. Evan, what's the update on the Shroud of Turin?

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, Shroud of Turin update. It was about a year ago.

• 34:32Bob Novella?

  Is he still dead?

• 34:33Speaker 04

  Oh. Well.

• 34:37Speaker 04

  Uh, who's he?

• 34:40Speaker 04

  We'll get to that, Bob.

• 34:41Bob Novella?

  Who knows, right?

• 34:42Speaker 04

  But, um, it was a year ago when we last visited the subject of the Shroud of Turin. Kara, I had asked you at that time if you had ever heard of it.

• 34:52Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 04

  I wrote it down in my notes. Yes, you did.

• 34:58Speaker 04

  How, and, and yes, but today I know, I don't have to ask that question. I know you heard of it because we at least discussed it a year ago. But what has changed in a year? What's the latest and greatest news about the shroud that brings it back into the news this week? I'm going to tell you, but first for the benefit of those in the audience, especially younger listeners who may have never heard of the Shroud of Turin, I will give you the quick background. It all started about thirteen eight, thirteen point eight billion years ago. Fast forward to the year thirty three A C E. When the headlines at the time was that a man from Nazareth was convicted of treason against the Holy Roman Empire. His name, Jesus Christ. The punishment, death by crucifixion. Nasty way to go, but go he did.

• 35:41Speaker 04

  Once dead, a man named Joe from a place called Arimathea took his body down. And with the help of a friend named Nicodemus, they cleaned the body, clothed it, wrapped it in a linen shroud and buried it in a rock tomb. It is that linen shroud, that burial cloth, the one and only burial cloth that shrouded Jesus's dead body. It is believed by many faithful people to have found its way after some time to a temple in Turin, Italy in the sixteenth century. Yep, that's about fifteen hundred years after Jesus's death.

• 36:12Bob Novella?

  But he was mostly dead, right? Mostly dead?

• 36:15Speaker 04

  No, he was dead. They declared him dead.

• 36:18Bob Novella?

  No, man, they went in there a few days later. He wasn't there. I'd say he's, he was mostly dead.

• 36:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, that's a fair point, Bob. I'll, I'll give you a fair point.

• 36:27Bob Novella?

  Out of scope, out of scope, though. Move on.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Where was the shroud for those 1,500 years prior to that? Most of that time, that is unknown as to where it was, but.

• 36:38Bob Novella?

  Is that the new bit? They found.

• 36:39Speaker 04

  No, not really. I'm getting, I'm getting to it. But, but the shroud is considered to be a holy relic by the, by the faithful. It bears the image of a man, perhaps the radiance of the supposed resurrection impressed an image of Jesus's likeness onto the cloth itself. That's the story. You know, it has his facial features, his facial hairs on there, beard, mustache, some red pigmentation resembling that of blood stains, ooh, which he would have had.

• 37:08Bob Novella?

  And it's in the negative though, that it, the details really come out though, right?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, that is true. If you were to take it and, and do the negative and like, do the negative like a photograph, right, you'd really be able to see it. And this is what they're saying, they are saying, therefore this is the Shroud of Turin. But is it true? What's the evidence? Has it been looked at and investigated properly? Absolutely it has. None of this holds up under examination. Most notably, the late, great Dr. Joe Nickell, gentleman detective. Oh, we miss him. He delved as deeply as anyone into the origin of the Shroud of Turin. Here's what he found. The linen was of medieval origin, 13th to 14th century, not the first century. Radiocarbon dating, thank you very much.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Three independent analyses have come back to the same conclusion. And like I said, there's no documented history of this artifact until the 14th century, as all of a sudden it just really started to exist around that time. The image is not the result of a miraculous or supernatural process, but was likely created using a combination of artistic methods, including painting or rubbing pigment onto the cloth. And there was something not quite right about the blood. The flow and distribution of the blood are inconsistent with what would be expected from a real crucified body. But it's easy enough to artistically apply it using known methods of art on fabric during the mid 14th century, also in line. And what else was going on at the time of the 14th century?

• 38:38Speaker 04

  There was an industry of relic creation occurring, you know, craftspeople selling arts to churches all over Europe to help local orders attract parishioners. So this would be consistent with the evidence that the linen cloth was in the 14th century and 15th century, a contemporary item, not a relic, a holy relic. So that's what the science and the evidence has to say about it. Here's the news.

• 39:02Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine the guy, the guy who created that, if he was alive? Holy crap, man.

• 39:08Speaker 04

  Have the rights to that.

• 39:10Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine it's a religious relic centuries later? He'd be laughing his ass off.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  Or retaining the rights and cashing in big time on that one. But that, you're right, that's neither near here nor there. But what is here is that a new, a new analysis of the shroud has been done. And here's the title of the article I read, "Image on the Shroud of Turin may not belong to a real human." Okay.

• 39:38Bob Novella?

  Cthulhu?

• 39:38Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 39:41Bob Novella?

  That would make me so happy.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  There's a gentleman named Cicero Morias, who is a 3D designer and researcher. And he has written a paper which has been published in the journal called Archaeometry. And he claims that the image is not the likeness of a real human. His work supports a hypothesis, which was put forward first in the 1970s, that argues the shroud's image is what artwork, right? Under his hypothesis, the image was probably made by placing a sheet on top of a low relief sculpture, slightly raised from its background, and then rubbed, you know, a rubbing. Did you ever, I did?

• 40:23Bob Novella?

  Tombstone rubbing?

• 40:24Speaker 04

  Yes. When we, in elementary school, they would take us to a place in which you, you know, whatever, a church or wherever, you would get your cloth and your chalk or your charcoal and do rubbings. Same idea, right, on something that was slightly raised. Same idea here.

• 40:44Speaker 04

  The title of his paper is called "Image Formation on the Holy Shroud: A Digital 3D Approach." This is it. So this is where he used a different technique to sort of come to his conclusion. I'll read from the abstract on his paper.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  "Using free and open source software, parametric modeling of a human body, fabric dynamic simulation, and contact area mapping was what was used to do this analysis. Two scenarios were compared: the projection of a three-dimensional human model and that of a low-relief model." So, a real human body, as if you use a three-dimensional human model, as if a real full body, versus a low-relief, the rubbing that I described. "The results demonstrate that the contact pattern generated by the low-relief model is more compatible with the shroud's image, showing less anatomical distortion and greater fidelity to the observed contours, while the projection of a 3D body results in a significantly distorted image."

• 41:45Speaker 04

  So if you were to have taken that shroud and wrapped it around a body, okay, and let it sit there and let, you know, the blood or whatever else images, features of the body get into the cloth, and then you would take the cloth off of that person, everything about it would be distorted. It would not look as the Shroud of Torren looks, in which it looks like, you know, just a piece of artwork of a person with normal proportions. If you did it with a real body, it would stretch everything out. It wouldn't look the way it does if it was really wrapped in a body. I think Joe Nichol would have been delighted to read this.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, but he said that. He concluded that himself, and this is just a confirmation of prior analyses.

• 42:28Speaker 04

  Correct, this is a confirmation.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is just with more high-tech detail, but this is exactly what real scientists have been saying for decades, that it's just exactly what you're saying. If this was an actual person, it would be distorted, and so this is consistent with a relief. So this is not surprising in the slightest.

• 42:50Speaker 04

  And he used and and he said, anybody could have done this analysis. It's free, open source software readily available by anyone. Anyone can do it. In fact, when I, when I went to the paper to read it, he gives a link to a video that he made in which you can do this on yourself at home. Here's what you do. Take some makeup and put it on your face.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  First, you get crucified.

• 43:11Speaker 04

  Well, he skipped that part. But put it on, you know, put it all, put it all over your face, your ears and everything. Then go ahead and take like a paper towel. Okay? And then press it up against your face, right? Make sure rub it so that it's all there. If you take that off and then you look at it, what do you have? You have a distorted, stretched out face, face on your, on your cloth. He said, you, it's so easy. You just do it at home yourself to, to get the idea of what's really going on here.

• 43:37Bob Novella?

  It's not too dissimilar to a, a projection mapping, you know, of the, of the earth. I mean, because you're taking a three dimensional globe and you're turning it into two, a two dimensional flat object. So there's distortion. That's why Mercator projection is so distorted because of that, that transition from 3D to 2D. So it's the same thing here. You're going, going from a 3D body to a 2D, you know, shroud has more distortion than a, than a less 3D body, if you will, like the, the relief.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  And that he, and that he did this using the Shroud of Turin, which is a well-known, you know, item, artifact, something that a lot of people on the planet are, are very familiar with. He says it highlights the potential of digital technologies to address or unravel historical mysteries, intertwining science, art and technology in a collaborative and reflective search for answers. So, good on him.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. As Joe like to point out, like there's multiple independent lines of evidence that all point to the same period of time, right? The, what was it? The 16th century?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  13th century. It was the same artistic tradition, techniques used, the dating, you know, the carbon dating of the cloth itself and the provenance.

• 44:46Bob Novella?

  Its appearance.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. The appearance and the tradition of, again, there was a, there was a vibrant market, market of fake.

• 44:53Speaker 04

  Relics.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Relics.

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Right. Chalices, all sorts of trinkets.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So it's like all lines up perfectly well, right?

• 45:00Speaker 04

  Yep. Yep. No miracles required. Thank you.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Did you come across any of the, the shroud apologist responses to this? Like the special pleading has got to start at some point.

• 45:11Bob Novella?

  Well, I think they said something like, oh, yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Not specifically, not, no, not specifically to this article.

• 45:18Bob Novella?

  It's a classic.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  But you're right, Steve. This will not dissuade those of, you know.

• 45:24Bob Novella?

  The believers, no.

• 45:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, the strongest faith, by any stretch, by any stretch. It's all part of the miracle, Steve. You see, right? Normally, yes, if this were not the son of God or something like that, yeah, on a normal human, you're right, you would have all those distortions, but not the son of God.

• 45:39Bob Novella?

  Oh, God. All right. Thanks, Evan. Bob, tell us about the web of space. What is that?

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Ooh, ooh, ooh.

• 45:46Bob Novella?

  Web of space.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  The space web.

• 45:49Speaker 04

  Space web?

• 45:50Bob Novella?

  The spatial web.

• 45:51Speaker 04

  Well, there's a James Webb telescope. Does it have to do with that?

• 45:54Bob Novella?

  They're completely unrelated.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  No.

• 45:56Bob Novella?

  But close. So recently, the IEEE ratified a new internet standard called P2874.

• 46:04Bob Novella?

  So, sounds unremarkable, right? But this new standard could usher in what many are calling Web 3.0. So you guys have heard of the IEEE, right? You've heard of them?

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 46:14Bob Novella?

  This is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and it has its roots that go back to the late 1800s. Didn't know that. But it officially formed as it is now about a year before Steve was born, which, as we know, is also a really, really long time ago. And they're just doing amazing things. This is, so this is the biggest technical professional organization with 420,000 members, including engineers, scientists, and technologists around the globe. And their prime directive, if you will, is to foster technological innovation and excellence to benefit humanity. So that sounds pretty good to me. But why do these punks get to create the influential standards for global technology, including the internet itself, no less? Why do these guys get to do that?

• 46:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:59Bob Novella?

  The answer is because, because they have, well, they have everything our current government doesn't have. They've got broad technical expertise and authority. They've got impartiality and transparency, and probably most importantly, they have global credibility.

• 47:13Speaker 04

  You mean, there isn't one figurehead at the top, just kind of?

• 47:16Bob Novella?

  No, they have all those things. So this makes IEEE and what's called an SDO, a Standards Developing Organization. And in that role, they have, over and over again, gained the trust of businesses and innovators all over the world. So why do you think that trust is specifically important in this scenario?

• 47:35Speaker 04

  Safety.

• 47:36Bob Novella?

  Yeah, there's safety, but what does really, though, is it gives countries, businesses, and innovators, worldwide, these are people all over, business people all over the world, the confidence, right, the confidence to adopt and invest in these new IEEE standards, right? Because if this was just some fly-by-night company that's like, oh, here, I've got these standards for Web 3.0, no one's going to, who's going to, you know, put millions of dollars into adopting and investing in these standards? Nobody. So you need, you need an SDO if you want worldwide corporations involved in technology development to actually incorporate these standards. So it's quite, it's a really special organization. So what do these standards do? The key here is to help tech speak the same language, right,

• 48:21Bob Novella?

  Steve? Like botching. That's the goal. To ensure they can work together, no matter how diverse the products or the technologies are, you know, nobody likes dealing with proprietary technologies and cords and stuff.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  And connectors, oh, my God.

• 48:37Bob Novella?

  Oh, my God. Right.

• 48:38Speaker 04

  And USB connectors versus USB 2 versus.

• 48:41Bob Novella?

  It's, yes.

• 48:41Speaker 04

  Firewire and all that craziness.

• 48:43Bob Novella?

  And so IEEE has given us critical standards that we use all the time. Listen to this list: Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, HDMI, floating-point arithmetic, hello, to name just a few of these. And I try to imagine life without those standards, those specific standards, and it kind of hurts. It's like, wow, I can't even imagine that. So to understand these latest approved standards, they were just approved, I think, just a couple of months ago, to understand these new standards, let's start, though, with Web 1.0, and we'll work towards the modern day. So Web 1.0 started in the 90s and started with very simple, static, read-only pages connected through these standards that we use all day, every day, but rarely think about.

• 49:28Bob Novella?

  And standards that you don't think about, those are the successful standards right there. That's the goal. So these standards for web 1.0 in the 90s was URLs, right? Uniforms, resource locators, the addresses, getting it, pointing us to the webpages. Then there's HTML, hypertext markup language. That's the code that's formatting these pages. And then there's HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol. This communication protocol lets computers request and receive these webpages. And by the way, these standards, these specific standards were not created by the IEEE. These initial standards for the web were created by the famous Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

• 50:10Bob Novella?

  This guy's name should be known by many, many more people. This is the guy that really started this. So kudos to Berners-Lee there. But of course, IEEE has come up with other standards involved with the web that's related to the web, of course, as well. So, all right, so as I said, these pages were initially static and they were read-only, right? Nothing, they were great, but they weren't very special compared to, you know, what we're seeing today. And that's web 2.0, which started in the early 2000s. It saw the appearance of things like interactivity, really for the first time. It saw user-generated content like, what are we doing right now? We're podcasting. Right, that's web 2.0 right there, classic. And blogging.

• 50:53Bob Novella?

  2.0 also famously, or should I say infamously, saw the rise of the now ubiquitous, what? Social media platforms that may or may not actually eventually destroy our civilization as we know it. But the jury's still out on that one.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  It's a slow decay with a short half-life.

• 51:10Bob Novella?

  Yes, oh man, nobody saw, maybe some people did, but don't get me started. Okay, next is presumably, wait, one, two, yes, three. After that, it becomes web 3.0, and the spatial web... Could become synonymous with that term. Who knows? I think it seems likely, but you never know how things are going to turn out. But so a good way to think of Web 3.0 is it's not necessarily Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0. It kind of is, but it's really the third foundational protocol layer to the Internet, right? Something that these foundational layers are truly transformative. So in the 70s, we had, what did we have in the 70s? This one might be a little tougher.

• 51:53Bob Novella?

  We had TCP/IP, which is a protocol that created essentially modern networks, computers, basically the Internet before the Web. So this is a lot, this allowed computers to be networked together and to share information. So, I mean, it's not the Web, but it's the Internet. This is like the basis of the Internet before the World Wide Web became a thing. And then in the 1990s, we had the second foundational protocol, and that's the HTTP and HTML. That's what created the World Wide Web as we know it today. And then today, this third foundational protocol could potentially be HSML and HSTP,

• 52:33Bob Novella?

  which are, which is transforming webpages essentially into a dynamic, real-time, spatial web. So let's go over these new protocols here. So instead of HTML, right, the markup language that formats the Web 2.0 and Web 1.0, we have HSML. That's Hyperspace Modeling Language, okay? So HSML doesn't just describe static pages. Instead, it describes the nouns and the verbs of the spatial web, if you will, the things, the people, the places, and crucially, though, how they behave and interact over time. That's an important one. That's a critical component. So it's the nouns and the verbs, the people, places, and things, but also how they behave and interact over time.

• 53:16Bob Novella?

  Then next, we have, instead of HTTP, you know, all the addresses use that protocol, Hypertext Transfer Protocol, we now have HSTP. That's the Hyperspace Transaction Protocol. This protocol describes the rules and the policies. It's all about the rules and the policies. So if there's a transaction taking place, or if two entities are actually interacting within the Spatial Web, the HSTP describes how that happens and how it happens securely. I love how security is an integral part of this new protocol, this new standard that they're coming up with. So, all right. HSTP talks about the rules and the policies and how they interact with transactions or anything that interacts, whether it's a person and a bot, whether it's a drone and

• 54:01Bob Novella?

  an automated vehicle. It's just like how they deal with each other. That's what the HSTP deals with. The final element here that ties all this together is what's called UDG. That's the Universal Domain Graph. So this is analogous to the social graph in Web 2.0. Are you guys familiar with the social graph? Nope. I hadn't heard too much about it either. The social graph maps relationships and interactions, primarily between people. So Facebook uses this, Twitter uses this, because it's critical for those tools, Facebook and Twitter and others, to know the relationships and the interactions between people. So that's the social graph. So this UDG is related to that.

• 54:45Bob Novella?

  It's similar to that, but it's for Web 3.0. So all of these entities and rules that I've mentioned, they live on this UDG. So it's kind of like a shared, real-time map of everything everywhere that's interconnected in the Spatial Web. It's a map. The UDG is a map of everything and how it's connected everywhere within the Spatial Web. It's kind of like a live directory of the Spatial Web universe. I've been trying to find a good definition, a good description of the Spatial Web beyond what I've been laying out here. I found a good one on the Global News Wire. It said, "Just as past IEEE standards like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have catalyzed global

• 55:27Bob Novella?

  device interoperability, the Spatial Web standards aim to standardize secure communication, collaboration, and control among..." AI agents, Internet of Things devices, robots, digital twins, and human users in digital and physical environments. That's a decent overview as any that I came across for the spatial web. Alright, so the last segment here is how is the spatial web gonna work? Because it might be hard to extrapolate from all these initialisms and complex ideas that I've mentioned. So how is it gonna work? So here's a couple of examples of how it could be utilized. So let's use drones as a first example. Today, we've got drones and the behaviors of drones are typically hardcoded right at the factory.

• 56:12Bob Novella?

  They're kind of limited and they're difficult to enforce. You can just fly them anywhere you want and do whatever you want with them. But with the spatial web, regulators can define drone behaviors dynamically within the H S M L code. Okay, so for instance, a spatial policy could state something like, "No drone can fly above 120 meters after sunset or within 500 meters of a hospital." So that could be encoded within these protocols for drones. So if you're an entity that's defined as a drone, then you will have to follow those rules. So the drone then would automatically query the real-time spatial data and enforce those rules instantly.

• 56:56Bob Novella?

  No humans are needed. So as the drone moves into the airspace within 500 meters of a hospital, that would kick in from the spatial web. It would kick in and be like, "Oh, I can't go in there." And it would be stopped. And another thing that occurred to me is that on top of that, if you wanted to change that rule, say you wanted to change the rule that no drone can go within 600 meters of the hospital, then you would just change it on the spatial web and that would propagate through the web. And then that would affect all the drone behavior and all the drones that happen to go near that. You wouldn't have to update, say, the firmware on every drone that's made. Right, so it would be a simple update to change that. Let's go through another scenario here. So you've got an ambulance.

• 57:41Bob Novella?

  You're in an ambulance and the ambulance needs to notify the area that it's driving through. That hey, that I'm coming, that it's coming, it's going really fast, it's gotten, it's on, it's an emergency, it's got to get to the hospital, and it wants to notify an area that it's coming. So normally, you just like, you listen for the, you listen for the, you know, the sound, the iconic sound of the ambulance. And if you, if you notice it, if you're not listening to music, or if you're not, say, an autonomous vehicle, that might not be optimized to deal with an ambulance, there could be some problems. It could slow down the ambulance, and as you know, with an ambulance, minutes could be the difference between life and death. So, so what the ambulance could do is that it could, it could issue a spatial web query, and that query would be, "Find all autonomous vehicles and traffic infrastructure within

• 58:26Bob Novella?

  200 meters along my route." And then using HSTP, the ambulance would then automatically coordinate all the green lights, it would redirect traffic safely out of the way, and it would even, it could even warn pedestrians through their, their smart devices that

• 58:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, wait, give them a Waze blast or something, right?

• 58:44Bob Novella?

  Right. So they would, so that could, they would, everything would be automatically coordinated. There wouldn't, there wouldn't need to be any people in the loop to slow it down and cause any delays. So this would be something that would be embedded within the spatial web itself, and it would happen automatically, based on these rules that have been set up in the HSL code and things like that. So that's just a few of the examples of what the spatial web would be capable of. It's only, there's probably a thousand you could give, and, but I hope it gives you just a little bit of a flavor of what we may see in the coming years as the spatial web becomes implemented, if it does become more fully implemented. I mean, these standards have been, have been signed off for by the IEEE, so, so businesses

• 59:25Bob Novella?

  and innovators will start taking, potentially taking advantage and creating, and creating this. There's still a lot of questions to be answered, on how things like, where are these files going to live? Are they going to live on, you know, cloud servers? Are they going to live elsewhere? They're not, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these answers haven't been answered yet. A lot of these questions haven't been answered yet, but, but it's just the beginning of it, really, and we'll see if it really takes off, and we'll see if Web 3.0 actually becomes a thing.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always really hard to think about things like this, you know, how things get implemented in the real world. You never know until you actually try to do it, you know? Like, what's the workflow going to be? Who's going to enter in this information? How's it actually going to function in the hands of people? And of course, you always give examples of, "Here are the wonderful things we can do with it," but You also want to think of, here are all the horrible things people will do with it. You know what I mean?

• 1:00:16Speaker 04

  And there are other agencies that ring in on this, like there's HIPAA requirements for medical stuff, right? So there has to, it has to, it has to not, it has to peg all those holes, whatever, whatever bureaucracies or things are in place to protect people.

• 1:00:28Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm glad that they're taking security very seriously. It's embedded within the system.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  It has to be.

• 1:00:34Bob Novella?

  And it's gotta be, especially if you're gonna, you know, if you're, if there's gonna be a digital duplicate of you, you know, your current status, medical status, say, you know, you can't just have anybody grabbing that, that, that most private information. It'd have to be extremely secure. And will that security slow it down? Will it become vulnerable? Who knows? So yeah, there's lots of questions to ask, but this is, this is kind of the direction that, that, that could be possible. We could be potentially seeing the beginnings of this in, in really in the next few years. I mean, in 1991, the, the World Wide Web protocols and standards were laid out by Berners-Lee, and the first web browser was two years later in 19, in like 1993.

• 1:01:15Bob Novella?

  So, you know, it takes a little while, but you know, a few years, five, even five years is not really that long after all. We could potentially be seeing some of this. They have done examples of this, small networks that are, that use this with, with some success for sure. So that, that has happened. But I think we need to do this bigger, more testing and bigger errors, and they'll, they'll just get bigger and bigger, and from there, they could potentially become what we eventually will call Web 3.0.

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  All right. Thanks, Bob. All right, we're gonna do one or two emails. First one comes from Graham, and Graham writes, "I just read this, and it seems too good to be true. Opinion?" And then he links to an article from the Good News Network.

• 1:01:57Speaker 04

  Good news, everyone.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  "Australia's revolutionary hydrogen powder is easier and cheaper to use for clean energy."

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  So this is, you know, this is, the article reads like a lot of hype, you know what I mean?

• 1:02:16Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  But let's, let's, let's look at the specific details. A company has developed a powder, sodium borohydride, uh, which they say is a convenient way to store hydrogen. It's combined with sodium and boron, whatever, some chemical process. It creates NaBH4, has four hydrogen in there. And then, they said it's a component in the dyeing of paper. So it's already something that exists in industry. And then to get the hydrogen out, you have to heat it up. So they say this is more, more energy efficient than liquid hydrogen, right? Cooling it down to negative 250 degrees Celsius. And it's also more energy efficient than compressing the hydrogen.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  Compressing the hydrogen in a tank takes a lot of energy, actually.

• 1:03:05Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  It's also safer, you know, than storing, uh, tanks of compressed hydrogen.

• 1:03:11Bob Novella?

  How's the density in terms of, um, energy density compared to those other methods?

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, they, they didn't give a specific number there, but they compared it to, uh, the cost of transporting hydrogen in different forms. So you could transport hydrogen as like liquid hydrogen, as water, right? As ammonia and as sodium borohydride. And previously ammonia would be like the cheapest way to just transport a lot of hydrogen. And that, they said $7.9 per kilogram. They said this would be 15% cheaper. First of all, it's not toxic like ammonia is, so it's easier to store. So why is this a big deal? Why do we care about this? Uh, and this is coming out of Australia, and so they, they are particularly interested

• 1:03:59Speaker 02

  in this because one of the main limiting factors in the hydrogen economy is transporting the hydrogen, moving it around. Hydrogen is a very light element. It's the lightest, right? And it's very hard to contain. It leaks easily and it erodes the containers that it's in. And so if you're piping it around is very inefficient. Compressing it again is very inefficient. So there's just no great way to move it around, which is a huge limiting factor in any heavily hydrogen-based system.

• 1:04:38Bob Novella?

  What about dehydrated water?

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so you could, yes, you could certainly.

• 1:04:41Bob Novella?

  That was a joke.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  No, but you could transport water around and then you electrolyze it on site to produce your hydrogen, right? That's one way to do it.

• 1:04:49Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but dehydrated water, that would take.

• 1:04:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, dehydrated water.

• 1:04:53Bob Novella?

  Yeah, that would come in.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Gotcha.

• 1:04:56Speaker 02

  But what Australia plans on doing, so Australia is, we've been there, right? It's a big country and the middle of it is not a lot of people.

• 1:05:07Bob Novella?

  Nope.

• 1:05:08Speaker 02

  And the vast middle is a lot of desert. So they have a lot of sunshine, not a lot of people. And they're one of the countries where it's actually very entirely feasible to have like an entire renewable energy system. Because they can just, it's very easy for them to just, they don't, first of all, they don't need nearly as much energy, say, as the US does. And they can overproduce solar power very easily because they have the land and the sunshine to do it. They're also looking into pumped hydro. They might be an early adopter there. But what they're planning on, they have so much sunshine. What they're planning on doing is overproducing solar power.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  And then using that overcapacity of solar power, like more, far more than they need just to power their own country, to produce green hydrogen and then sell that hydrogen to the world, right? So they're trying to develop a green hydrogen industry, which would be great. Because right now, something like 1% or less than 1% of hydrogen in the world is green hydrogen. It's mostly gray hydrogen.

• 1:06:21Bob Novella?

  Okay.

• 1:06:22Speaker 02

  Remember, the hydrogen has all the colors to bring out where it comes from. Most of the hydrogen we're using in industry is basically sourced from fossil fuel. And it's worse than actually just burning the fossil fuel. So if you are driving a hydrogen fuel cell car and you think you're doing something good for the environment, you're not. It's actually worse.

• 1:06:41Bob Novella?

  Worse.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  It's just a bunch of inefficiencies in the system, you know? Uh, you, it would only be better for the environment if the hydrogen were either white or green. The white hydrogen means we, we mine it directly from the earth. But that's, we've talked about that before on the show. We don't know how much hydrogen is down there. This is just in the experimental and exploration phase at this point. We, you know, the hope is that we'll find significant deposits of naturally occurring hydrogen trapped in pockets, you know, in geological locations where it won't leak out to the surface. And, and since that's already in hydrogen form, we don't have to spend energy

• 1:07:21Bob Novella?

  Oh, man, yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  to make the hydrogen, right? So that would be fine.

• 1:07:24Bob Novella?

  That's the dream.

• 1:07:25Speaker 02

  Uh, or green hydrogen, which is almost entirely from electrolyzing water. But then the question is, where did the energy come from to electrolyze the water? If you're burning diesel fuel to electrolyze the water or whatever, it's not green, right? You have to be using renewable energy. But if you're using solar power to hydrolyze the water to create the hydrogen, then you're converting the hydrogen into a storable, transportable form, then that's a green system. So that's what, that's what Australia is hoping to do. I wish them luck. I hope it all works out. Uh, I think it's, you know, it's, it's perfect. I don't think it's a game changer because again, this is not a source of energy, right?

• 1:08:07Speaker 02

  This is just a way of storing one form of energy. I also don't think, even with this powder, you know, so that, you know, the boron, sodium borohydride, it's not, still not going to make it a good idea to, in my opinion, to like have a hydrogen fuel cell car. Battery EV cars are always going to be more efficient. It's going to be better. But there are some industries that are hard to decarbonize. And they're hard to electrify, like the steel industry, for example.

• 1:08:35Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Right? And so, but if you have a source of a lot of green hydrogen, that can vastly decarbonize that industry. So hydrogen is most useful for industrial use, not for like the transportation sector, but it's only good if it's green hydrogen. And we just don't have, again, it's less than 1%, we just don't, we're just not cranking out green hydrogen. And so until we do, there's really no point in trying to use a lot of hydrogen to do stuff. It's actually could in many contexts be a net negative. And again, part of the reason why, and the other thing to think about is, and this is why I think Australia and places like that might be an exception.

• 1:09:15Speaker 02

  Like in the US, it would be pointless to build a solar farm that was making hydrogen. Cause we could just use it to make electricity. You know what I mean?

• 1:09:26Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  And until we, our energy sector is low carbon entirely. You're far better off using green energy as energy rather than to make hydrogen. Cause every time you add a step, second law of thermodynamics, you add a certain inefficiency into the system.

• 1:09:46Bob Novella?

  Unavoidable, yeah.

• 1:09:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you get the more bang for the buck just by having the direct, a direct path as possible from creation to use of any energy. So, yeah, I don't, again, it doesn't really make sense, but if you're like Australia, just as a country, not looking at the world, but just as a country. Like, yeah, we, they could easily get to the point in the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, or whatever, where they can have massive solar overcapacity, they could use that to, to make this green hydrogen industry, which would be great, which would be, which could be used then to decarbonize industry sectors that would otherwise be very difficult. Like concrete, steel, fertilizer, things like that. So, yeah, it's good. It's nice.

• 1:10:27Bob Novella?

  Interesting plan.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  It may end up being part of this whole thing. It's not a game changer in and of itself, you know, because it is just, it's just a way of storing hydrogen, transporting it. It doesn't make the energy, right? It doesn't make the hydrogen green or whatever.

• 1:10:41Bob Novella?

  But right, but it solves a big problem.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  It solves one of the problems. It improves it. I wouldn't just solve is a big word, you know, it just makes it a little better. All right, next email comes from Jeff, who writes, "Hey guys, I've been seeing, hearing lately from, in my experience, reputable scientific sources that the coronavirus lab-leak hypothesis conspiracy is now generally accepted by the scientific community as being the most likely way that human infection started. I'd love to hear your take on it and evaluation of the current state of the evidence."

• 1:11:11Bob Novella?

  Well, that's news to me.

• 1:11:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hadn't heard about that. I don't think that that's true, but let me give you a summary of what my reading of the evidence is, and I've read many, many, many articles on this, and I'm pretty up to date on it. There's basically two approaches to this. So there's, the question is, what's the ultimate origin of the COVID-19, you know, the SARS-CoV-2 virus? And there's two main hypotheses. One is-

• 1:11:36Bob Novella?

  SARS-CoV-2, nobody says that anymore. What are you doing?

• 1:11:39Speaker 02

  SARS-CoV-2 is the virus.

• 1:11:41Bob Novella?

  I know, but nobody says it.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  But we're talking about the virus, Bob. We're talking about the virus.

• 1:11:46Bob Novella?

  I know, but nobody says it.

• 1:11:47Speaker 02

  Well, I just did, but I'm not nobody.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  That's very true. So, one is the zoonotic spillover, right? The virus was mutating and maybe hybridizing in animal hosts, and then it jumped to humans, probably in the Wuhan wet market. And that's how it got to the human population. The other hypothesis is the lab-leak hypothesis, that they were in the Wuhan, also in Wuhan, very close to the ground zero where the virus came out, is the Wuhan virology lab, and that they were doing research on coronaviruses, and that this coronavirus, even if they weren't trying to weaponize it or deliberately release it, that it leaked from, they weren't, they didn't modify the virus, they were just studying it.

• 1:12:36Bob Novella?

  Or create it, right?

• 1:12:37Speaker 02

  Well, the lab-leak specifically is not, they didn't create it. They were just studying it, and it leaked from the lab. A couple of lab techs got sick, went out into the community and spread the virus around. That's the idea. So, what's the evidence for these two hypotheses? And again, there's two basic approaches, right? There's scientists who are taking essentially an epidemiological and virology approach, right? You could study the virus and say, yep, this has not been modified artificially. But also, that doesn't mean it wasn't leaked from a lab, right? Just it is what it is. But they said, but it does look like the virus epidemiologically, like the earliest cases

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  emerged in the vicinity of the web market and that a zoonotic spillover is the most likely explanation. So that is the, in the scientific community, that is still, I think, the dominant hypothesis. But they acknowledge we haven't found the smoking gun. We haven't found the species in which this crossover happened. So we, so there's still a question mark, and that's not a solid conclusion. It's just the preferred hypothesis at this time, open to revision with new evidence. But there's also the intelligence community take on it. And I think this is what Jeff is talking about, and I think he's confusing it with the scientific community.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  The intelligence community looked just forensically at what happened, you know? And what they're finding is that China is being very squirrely. That they're not being transparent, they're not giving the access that they promised they would give. And so the question is, what are they hiding? So if you're a CIA officer or an intelligence officer, and you're trying to answer this question, and you feel like there's a cover up here, then they say, yeah, we think that China did, is covering up something. What would that be, other than a lab leak? And so that's what they think is the most likely answer. So the intelligence community thinks it was a lab leak, the scientific community thinks

• 1:14:45Speaker 02

  it was a zoonotic spillover, there's no smoking gun evidence for either, this is not a closed question, we basically don't know. I personally find the scientific argumentation more compelling, but I would happily change my mind if new evidence came to light. We may never know, is the unfortunate answer definitively.

• 1:15:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Right? Like, there would need to be, one hypothesis or the other would need to find smoking gun evidence, which is possible, just haven't found it yet. But until that happens, there's, I think there's going to be this schism. You know, there's, there's two schools of thought about, about what happened. And I think which one of those two you believe says a lot more about you than it does about the evidence personally. Fair enough. About your predilections and you know where you're coming at this question from. I'm just saying, not even taking a strong case one way or the other, I'm just laying it out there. I do want to say, because I do get into a conversation about this all the time, and my memory historically of what happened, I've researched it and confirmed it, because

• 1:15:52Speaker 02

  there has been actual research looking at this. So my memory of how things evolved is this, that initially, in early 2020, the hypothesis arose that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioengineered virus, a weaponized virus. And there were some people who were saying, "Look at the cleavage thing," or whatever, that this is evidence that it was engineered. That was quickly researched and dealt with, you know, because Very fast. Very quickly, they already had, within days, they had the genome of the virus. And so there was, immediately, papers came out and said, "This was not a bioengineered virus, this is a naturally occurring virus." And then the bioengineered theory became a conspiracy theory.

• 1:16:36Speaker 02

  Because once it was pretty definitively disproven, you could only really cling to that idea by some kind of conspiracy theory. And it became the favorite hypothesis of the conspiracy theorists. And then it died down for about a year. Yeah. There wasn't really much talk. By the summer, it kind of died down, and it was like, it wasn't a bioengineered virus. And then the next June, people started talking about it being a lab leak, not a bioengineered virus. Why a lab leak? Because a lab leak is harder to disprove, because you can't disprove it by studying the virus itself, right? Because it's not bioengineered.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  It's naturally occurring, not bioengineered, but accidentally leaked from the lab.

• 1:17:25Speaker 02

  And there was actually a paper which looked at the incidence of news reports of mentions of quote unquote lab leak in the news media. And it started, I think the first one was in March of 2021, and then like trickle in April, trickle in May, and then June it took off. That's when it went quote unquote viral, pun intended. It was never mentioned the previous year. And the reason why I say this is because I still have people tell me it's like, oh, they said the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory, but now they're saying it's true. It's like, no, that's not the way things happened. You are rewriting history. It was an engineered virus. That was disproven. Then a year later, the whole

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  thing was resurrected as this offshoot lab leak theory. And here, that's been investigated for the last three years, and here we are. There was no suppression of the lab leak theory, right? There was no conspiracy of silence, none of that. But that history has been so frustratingly rewritten for this narrative of the powers that be tried to shut down the lab leak theory when it turns out that's the most plausible theory. That's not the way things happened. All right. Going to do one issue that Bob and I talked about on the live stream today from TikTok. There was a, we were sent a video of an interview that Joe Rogan was doing on his podcast. So you know, this is going to be problematic,

• 1:18:48Speaker 02

  right? Touting the, the idea that Lyme was a lab leak. Which is, it's interesting to bring this up because, and David Gorsky has wrote about this quite a bit on science-based medicine, that the lab leak hypothesis is raised for every viral pandemic or epidemic. It comes, it was HIV, like everything was like, first it was bioengineered. When you prove it wasn't bioengineered, it was a lab leak. Every time. So it's no surprise that this is a persistent conspiracy theory for Lyme. Lyme isn't a virus. It's a, it's a bacterium. It's a Borrelia burgdorferi, you know, Spirochet, the same sort of family of bacteria that causes syphilis, actually. With a very similar natural history.

• 1:19:33Speaker 02

  I hate that family. Primary, secondary, tertiary infection. With the tertiary infection could be neurological and it could be very similar between those two, actually. But in any case, the question is, was the Lyme bacterium originally leaked from a bioweapons lab, like on Plum Island? You guys have probably heard about the Plum Island thing.

• 1:19:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, not far from us.

• 1:19:55Speaker 02

  Not far from us, not far from Lyme, Connecticut, which is why they focus on that.

• 1:19:58Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  So in the little clip, you know, on TikTok, it wasn't the whole interview, again, we're just responding to the little clip, the guy he's interviewing is saying that, you know, they were doing research on Lyme in this lab and Lyme, Connecticut is ground zero. It's where it started and their ticks did escape from this lab. So here's the thing, we know 100% that this is not true and there's a few reasons. One is when he said that, you know, Lyme epidemic started in Lyme, Connecticut, that is not true.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  That's not true.

• 1:20:32Speaker 02

  It was not, first of all, it wasn't even the first local case. It was just the case, the index case, the one that was named, you know, that the disease was named for. And that work was actually done at Yale. But the first modern case was actually in Wisconsin, just wasn't recognized as the same disease as Lyme disease until after it was named for Lyme. And also there are three populations of the bacteria of the spirochete, one in the east coast, the Midwest and the west coast, and they're different and they've been in the wild in circulation for hundreds of years.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:09Speaker 02

  So we know just epidemiologically, we know from, we could look at ticks in museums that are 100 years old that have, you know, the spirochete in them. There's archaeological evidence of Borrelia.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  They have old bodies.

• 1:21:23Speaker 02

  They've been around for thousands of years, right? Yeah, I've found mummies with it. It didn't come out of nowhere. It's not a new bacteria. It did not start in one place. It's been simmering in multiple different geographical regions. It absolutely in no way fits a lab leak epidemiologically. The lab in question that they're talking about wasn't doing research until after Lyme was already out in the wild. None of the timeline adds up. There is zero evidence that this was, you know, leaked from a lab and it really can't have been, given what we know about it. None of this, of course, comes up, you know, on the Joe Rogan Show.

• 1:22:03Speaker 02

  But this information is transparent, easily available. It's out there. If you have the slightest intellectual integrity and curiosity, it's there. All right. Are you guys ready to move on with science or fiction?

• 1:22:16Speaker 04

  Here we go.

• 1:22:19Speaker 01

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:22:29Speaker 02

  Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake. There's a theme this week.

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 1:22:39Speaker 02

  The theme is

• 1:22:40Speaker 04

  Lab leaks.

• 1:22:41Speaker 02

  Stars. Stars. You know, stars up in the sky.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Oh, them. Okay.

• 1:22:46Speaker 02

  Those stars. Not celebrities.

• 1:22:48Speaker 04

  Not celebrities.

• 1:22:48Speaker 02

  You know, the big balls of gas that are on fire in the sky. Those things. All right, here we go. Item number one, the fastest observed star in the universe is S4714, moving at 24,000 kilometers per second, or 8% the speed of light.

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Item number two, HV2112 is the first confirmed Thorne-Zeitkau object, which is a red giant star with a neutron star for a core. And item number three, EBLMJO555-57AB is the smallest known star about the size of Saturn, or 0.05% the volume of our sun. Evan, go first.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  Is there a reason why Bob's not going first? I'm just wondering. Okay. Fastest observed star in the universe. Is this relative to something else? I mean,

• 1:23:49Speaker 02

  It's all relative, Evan.

• 1:23:50Speaker 04

  Well, of course it is. And 8% the speed of light, fastest. We're not talking about its rotation. We're talking about its

• 1:23:58Speaker 02

  Movement across the sky.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  Right. Oh, I see. Okay, movement across the sky. Yeah, yeah. How and why would this be the, would that be the case? Ah, geez. I don't know. I've never considered really the speed of an individual star. I thought it was all kind of linked to a lot of other things. And wouldn't all that stuff be also traveling? 8% the speed of light of the star? What about, does that mean the planets that are going around it also? If that's speed as well? I don't know. Seems sketchy.

• 1:24:30Speaker 04

  I'll move on to the next one. HV 2112 is the first confirmed whatever object.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  Imagine it's the names of the people who discovered this object.

• 1:24:39Speaker 02

  It is, yep.

• 1:24:41Speaker 04

  A red giant star. Okay, I'm familiar with those. With a neutron star for a core. I thought neutron stars happened after, after the explosion. They have.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:52Speaker 04

  So can you have, can something be both at the same time? Apparently they can. Can be both a red giant and a neutron star for a core?

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  I guess I'll tell you, since you're going first. This is what happens when a neutron star merges with a red giant.

• 1:25:08Speaker 04

  Merge. Thank you. Okay, okay. And just, okay, that makes a little more sense. Um, all right. I, again, it's, this is going to be a total guesswork because really, how am I supposed to really know about any of these things? The last one, the smallest known star. The size of Saturn, the volume of our sun. Ah, there are some very, there can be some very small stars. I mean, as small as Saturn? Yeah. I mean Jupiter was, is not too far off from the size of Saturn and Jupiter was almost a star. So I don't see why that one's a problem. Uh, I guess the one I'm having the hardest time with is the speed of light one.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  I mean, that seems so obscure. So, so it defies sort of your, our understanding, my understanding, the speed of light, which I guarantee you, I totally admit is, is insignificant, is insufficient for this. But that could mean that the red star neutron star one, it could be the curve ball. And the red giant star with neutron star for a core is the fiction. Okay, I'll say that the thorn Zeitkau object is going to be the fiction.

• 1:26:21Speaker 02

  Okay, Kara?

• 1:26:23Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't know.

• 1:26:25Speaker 04

  Nobody knows.

• 1:26:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Uh, one is the fastest star, one is the smallest star, and one is the first confirmed thing that's a weird thing. So, there's probably a fastest star. Maybe you're just listing, maybe it's actually S6942, but that would be annoying. And there's probably a smallest star. Maybe it also has a different name, but that would be annoying. So, I think I have to go with that.

• 1:26:52Speaker 02

  I wouldn't give it a different string of numbers and letters. It would be because of the... You've never done it. It wouldn't be that fast or that small, right?

• 1:27:00Cara Santa Maria?

  Right, it would be the size of something else, okay? So, the smallest star is the size of Saturn. The fastest star is 8% the speed of light. Well, I don't think it's 80% the speed of light, but I guess it could be .08 or .8.

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  8%.

• 1:27:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Speaker 04

  That is fast.

• 1:27:18Cara Santa Maria?

  I know, I just really think that like, one of these things is not like the other, so I'm gonna go with that and say it's a thorn.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  Thanks Kara.

• 1:27:25Cara Santa Maria?

  It's a cow object.

• 1:27:28Speaker 02

  All right, Bob?

• 1:27:29Bob Novella?

  All right, um...

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  Take these in reverse order, blah blah blah.

• 1:27:33Bob Novella?

  No, not this week. So, this first one here, this fastest star, 8%. It seems a little fast, but it's around the speed, I would think, for orbiting Sagittarius A star, the supermassive black hole at center of Milky Way. Uh, yeah, man, you get close to a black hole, you can get some wicked, uh, wicked velocities going on there as you go around and around the star. So, yeah, so that one doesn't surprise me too much. This thorn Zeitkau object is fascinating. Sounds very bizarre. It's easy to jump to this as the obvious fiction, but I do think that they, that this was... I think there's some evidence. I don't think it's definitive. I think there's some evidence that they detected a star that potentially could be this.

• 1:28:18Bob Novella?

  Uh, but the one that really leaked out to me was that, uh, the smallest star, the size of Saturn? I think that's just, no, that's just too small. So, I'm gonna say that that one is fiction.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  Okay, so you all agree on the first one, so we'll start there. The fastest observed star in the universe is S4714, moving at 24,000 kilometers per second, or 8% the speed of light. You all think that one is science, and that one is? Science. That one is science.

• 1:28:47Bob Novella?

  Can you imagine the kinetic energy of that star?

• 1:28:50Speaker 02

  Oh my goodness. Bob, you're correct. It's, you probably know this. This is whipping around the black hole, at the massive black hole at the center of...

• 1:29:00Bob Novella?

  I've seen videos, man. That thing's whipping...

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  The Milky Way, yeah. Sagittarius A. Zip it around there.

• 1:29:04Bob Novella?

  A star.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  It's because of that, but also because its orbit is very eccentric. So when it gets close to the black hole, it's going the fastest, right? And that's just whipping around that thing, super, super fast.

• 1:29:19Bob Novella?

  As video I saw, it almost seemed to be going too fast. Like, what?

• 1:29:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:23Bob Novella?

  That was, it's ridiculously fast. But, you know, 8% speed of light, it's pretty damn fast.

• 1:29:27Speaker 04

  It probably doesn't have any planets, then.

• 1:29:31Speaker 04

  Those things are long gone.

• 1:29:33Speaker 02

  Bob, what do you think is the fastest star not whipping around a black hole?

• 1:29:39Bob Novella?

  Oh, probably kicked out of the, its parent galaxy.

• 1:29:42Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:29:43Bob Novella?

  Yeah. That's, that's the only thing I could think of that would be, you know, really high.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's...

• 1:29:48Bob Novella?

  But I couldn't guess, though, what the velocity would be, though.

• 1:29:52Speaker 02

  So there's a star that is going at 2,285 kilometers per second. So about a tenth of the speed. That's like the next fastest star, right?

• 1:30:05Bob Novella?

  Yeah. It's probably launched from a similar scenario around its black hole.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  What they think is, no, not a black hole. And so this one's flying through the Milky Way. It's not bound by the Milky Way gravitationally. It's gonna pass right through. It's going so fast. This is J O 927, if you want to know the string of letters and numbers. And the hypothesis is that it got that velocity because it was a binary star, part of a binary system, and the other star went supernova and blasted it away.

• 1:30:40Bob Novella?

  Oh, damn.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, is that interesting?

• 1:30:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah, interesting.

• 1:30:45Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a hypothesis. I don't know if that's been proven, but that's what they think would have the energy to like, why is the star going so fast? And it's not captured by a black hole or anything, you know what I mean?

• 1:30:55Speaker 04

  Something else propelled it.

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you know, again, I wouldn't be surprised if they said, no, that's actually something else, but

• 1:31:01Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  That's fine. Um, okay, let's go to number two. HV2112 is the first confirmed Thorne-Zeitkau object, which is a red giant star with a neutron star for a core. Evan and Kara, you think this one is the fiction. Bob, you think this one is science. And this one is the fiction. Sorry, Bob.

• 1:31:24Bob Novella?

  It is.

• 1:31:25Speaker 02

  No way. Of course, the key word here is confirmed. There are no confirmed TZ objects. Uh, this is a hypothetical, a theoretical object that was been modeled. Like, yeah, this could happen if a neutron star collided with a red giant that could form this type of object. Now, you're correct, Bob, there are candidates. There are multiple candidates.

• 1:31:50Bob Novella?

  I remember, I remember reading about one.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but.

• 1:31:53Bob Novella?

  We talked, I think we even talked about on the show a bunch of years ago.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  But later refuted, later refuted. Including this one that I mentioned. This is a candidate, but later evidence like, nah, probably not. So there are no confirmed TZ objects. Just, just a few candidates.

• 1:32:10Speaker 04

  So they reported on it and then retracted it?

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  Well, they just said later, no, it doesn't look like, the probability went down with later evidence.

• 1:32:17Speaker 04

  I see.

• 1:32:17Speaker 02

  Further observation. So moving in the wrong direction. Not looking like it's going to be confirmed.

• 1:32:23Bob Novella?

  Jesus, so that means.

• 1:32:25Speaker 02

  That means that.

• 1:32:26Bob Novella?

  A star the size of Saturn, what the hell kind of star?

• 1:32:29Speaker 02

  That's right. EBLMJO55557AB is the smallest known star about the size of Saturn.

• 1:32:35Bob Novella?

  What kind of dwarf? Is it like a black dwarf?

• 1:32:37Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a red dwarf. It's a red dwarf. So this is the smallest star known. And it's also the lowest mass star. So why is it so small? For two reasons. So they think this is right at the limit of the ability to fuse hydrogen, which is why it's a star and not a brown dwarf, right?

• 1:33:00Bob Novella?

  Right, but I, but I remember reading many times that a brown dwarf would need to be bigger than Jupiter.

• 1:33:06Speaker 02

  Well, more massive, Bob, more massive than Jupiter.

• 1:33:10Bob Novella?

  All right, more massive, more massive.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  It is more massive than Jupiter. It's at, it's right at the limit.

• 1:33:13Bob Novella?

  Oh shit.

• 1:33:14Speaker 02

  It's like eight times the massive Jupiter or something. It's, it is more massive. But, but, think about this, because it's not fusing that much hydrogen, it's like just barely fusing hydrogen, there's no outward pressure, there's very little relatively speaking for a star outward pressure to, to oppose the gravity. So it shrinks down to a small size. It has to be this size to fuse hydrogen. Does that make sense?

• 1:33:39Bob Novella?

  Wow, man.

• 1:33:40Speaker 02

  But, so this is basically as small as a star probably can be based on the laws of physics, is this specific star.

• 1:33:48Bob Novella?

  Wow, I didn't think, I didn't think it could get that small, but.

• 1:33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, neither did I, which is why I include it in the science fiction.

• 1:33:53Bob Novella?

  That's why you nailed me, you son of a bitch.

• 1:33:55Cara Santa Maria?

  And me and Evan were like, well, I don't know.

• 1:33:56Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 1:33:57Bob Novella?

  Jesus.

• 1:33:58Speaker 04

  It's almost like Jupiter.

• 1:34:00Bob Novella?

  A little knowledge is a dangerous damn thing.

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  Sometime, yes. All right. Sometimes pure ignorance is more helpful in a case like this.

• 1:34:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's like those first time poker players. Shouldn't have been in that hand.

• 1:34:15Speaker 04

  Oh, I, I, yeah.

• 1:34:18Speaker 02

  You don't deserve to be right. All right. Bob, now you're living in my world, right? Evan just totally talks himself into the right answer at the last minute, like, you bastard.

• 1:34:33Bob Novella?

  Where the hell does that come from? How did you do that? Yeah. Damn, it sucks being dissimilar to Steve sometimes, you know? That's got me, it's surely gonna get Bob.

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  You knew enough, you knew enough to be fooled by science fiction, I know.

• 1:34:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Speaker 04

  It's the power of prayer.

• 1:34:49Speaker 02

  I feel your pain, Bob. All right. Yeah, all right, all right. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience. Cecilia Payne Gepostian.

• 1:35:08Speaker 04

  Oh, I had never known before, finding this quote, "She was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist. Her work on the cosmic makeup of the universe and the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics."

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  Cool.

• 1:35:25Speaker 04

  She was born in 1900, died in 1979. So, another forgotten superhero of science right there. No doubt about it.

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  And I completely agree with this quote. This is what gets scientists up in the morning, right? This is what they're excited about. This is being the first person to figure something out.

• 1:35:44Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:35:45Speaker 02

  What a feeling that was.

• 1:35:46Speaker 04

  Could you imagine?

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  Nobody knew this before me. Wow.

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  I can only imagine what that would feel like. It's gotta be euphoric.

• 1:35:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:35:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Thanks, Steve.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  Thank you, Steve.

• 1:35:58Speaker 02

  Jay will be back next week. He better be.

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  Alaska Stories.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

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

• 1:36:10Speaker 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.

• 1:36:47Speaker 06

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