The Skeptics Guide #1053 - Sep 13 2025

Quickie with Evan: Earth's Quasi-Moon; News Items: Guiding Tiny Robots, Tylenol and Autism, Music Choices as we Age, Wearable for Subtle Communication, Decreasing Science Scores; Who's That Noisy; Your Questions and E-mails: Gold Nanowire Gel Batteries, Otters; Science or Fiction

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

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• 0:32Speaker 03

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

• 0:39Speaker 04

  Hello and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, September 10, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody. Kara Santa Maria. Howdy. Jane Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein. Good evening, everyone. So, did you guys hear the announcement today from NASA about a possible biosignatures on Mars? Uh-huh.

• 1:03Bob Novella?

  I did, and I'm cautiously whatevered.

• 1:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  Well, I think it builds more evidence in the correct direction, saying that there was once life on Mars, yes?

• 1:12Speaker 04

  It's a candidate, you know what I mean? It's not confirmation. So, they found, basically, they found speckles, you know, like, these are visible, like, naked eye visible with the camera from Perseverance. You know, they found rocks that have deposits which on Earth can be created with microbes.

• 1:33Bob Novella?

  Yeah, so, yeah, there's two minerals that they found. One's associated with decaying organic matter, and the other one is created by microbes on Earth. But, of course, these minerals can be generated abiotically, so don't get really excited at all, really, about this. But you would need high temperatures and acidic conditions to create these on Earth. So, the most important "but" here is that there is no evidence currently for any high temperatures or acidic conditions in this area. So, what they've basically done is that they've reduced the non-biological origin probability a little bit, but you can't rule it out yet. More studying to be done. And I think chances are, it's abiotic, you know, it was created, you know, either at low temperature, you know, low temperature,

• 2:17Bob Novella?

  which we're not sure how that would, how possible that is in that area, but it's probably, you know, the real reason here.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  The bigger point, Bob, is we can't really know for sure unless we get them in an Earth lab. Yeah, we gotta retrieve those samples and bring them back to Earth before we could resolve that question.

• 2:34Speaker 00

  Had they cut funding in order for that program to retrieve the vials?

• 2:38Bob Novella?

  Ooh.

• 2:39Speaker 00

  Jay, did you talk about that on a prior news item?

• 2:43Jay Novella?

  Oh, yeah, that was like scrapped and then there was like talk about trying a different way to do it.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  So NASA's Mars sample return mission has faced significant funding cuts and potential cancellation.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh.

• 2:55Bob Novella?

  Cancelization.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Cancelization, yeah.

• 2:57Bob Novella?

  Did you hear the NASA Administrator Sean Duffy give a little shout out to Trump to try to, you know, you know, save, you know, to help NASA here? He said, "This finding by Perseverance, launched under President Trump in his first term, is the closest we've ever come to blah, blah, blah." Like, he just threw that out there, like, wait, okay, I understand why he didn't do

• 3:17Speaker 00

  it. What good is it gonna do unless we get the samples back?

• 3:19Bob Novella?

  Yeah, well, I mean, at this point, I think any extra funding from the government would be, would have them, would make them overjoyed at NASA. Absolutely. And save, you know, saving any jobs, I think, a little, like, you know, Schindler, like, I could have saved, you know, 10 more jobs if I just got some more, a little bit more money out of Trump, you know, that kind of scenario.

• 3:38Speaker 04

  Or the legislative branch could do their job, you know?

• 3:41Speaker 00

  Right, and appropriate, correct money.

• 3:42Bob Novella?

  Well, that's silly, what are you talking about, really?

• 3:44Speaker 04

  But they did appropriate the money, they should just assert their right to the purse strings, which is in the Constitution, rather than just laying down and letting

• 3:51Bob Novella?

  Constitution's monitition.

• 3:53Speaker 04

  The executive branch steal their power.

• 3:55Bob Novella?

  Really think it has much meaning anymore?

• 3:56Speaker 00

  Well, back to the point of the significance of this particular news is that it says here, NASA's science mission chief Nikki Fox said, and this is a quote, "It's the closest we've actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars." And I understand we're inching that direction, but for her to say that seems pretty significant.

• 4:12Bob Novella?

  It's news, it's certainly news, but I'm just not getting my hopes up.

• 4:15Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 4:16Bob Novella?

  Burned too many times. It's, you know, if there's an, if there's an abiotic pathway, that's probably gonna be it, you know?

• 4:23Speaker 04

  At least so far, every time that's turned out to be the case.

• 4:25Bob Novella?

  Right, just get back to me when you got something that's three incremental steps and not just one.

• 4:30Speaker 04

  But I mean, the bottom line is we gotta get that, those rocks back from Mars.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  And perhaps today's announcement is a, in a political sense, a way of reestablishing the political will to get the funds to get this back.

• 4:45Speaker 04

  It could be a strategic announcement, like, we really do have to get these samples back to Earth.

• 4:50Jay Novella?

  Bob, most importantly, I just want you to be happy, you know?

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Oh, Bob's happy.

• 4:54Speaker 04

  Evan, tell us about Earth's new quasi-moon.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  Uh, yes, I will do that. Uh, may I start by giving a hat tip to Bob for allowing me to borrow the title of his reoccurring segment on the SGU?

• 5:06Bob Novella?

  Yeah, man, I was meant to re- actually read this and I just got too hip deep into my stuff. So like, please, I'm curious to see what this is all about.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  Well, Bob, I know you can't see it right now, but I am raising my hat off my head in your direction. This is your Quickie with Evan, and I'm going to let you know about Earth's newest moonish thing that has been added to Earth's slate of naturally occurring companions. Earth, okay, so to review, Earth has one official permanent solid natural satellite object. All those words. That is what?

• 5:38Speaker 04

  The moon.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Our moon, the moon.

• 5:40Speaker 04

  The moon.

• 5:40Speaker 00

  And, and then we have these mini moons. You know what these are? I think we've talked about these.

• 5:45Speaker 04

  That's no moon.

• 5:46Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I think we briefly mentioned them. They're like, they're like temporary, temporary moons in a sense, right? They're just kind of, oh yeah, we're kind of sharing an orbit for a little while and then they move off, right?

• 5:55Speaker 00

  Correct, yeah, small asteroids temporarily captured by Earth's gravity entering the orbit. And it could be just for a couple hours and some last several months, but eventually the sun's pull reclaims it.

• 6:06Bob Novella?

  Mine, mine, mine.

• 6:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Like the ring of power getting cast back into the fires of Mount Doom. Almost like that. As a side note, I looked, there's this thing called Kordylowski clouds? K-O-R-D-Y-L-E-W-S-K-I clouds?

• 6:20Bob Novella?

  Cloud.

• 6:20Speaker 00

  Stable clouds of dust located at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points?

• 6:24Bob Novella?

  Okay, yeah, that's a good place to hang out.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and they call them ghost moons. Ed Boorn would be so proud of that.

• 6:31Bob Novella?

  Oh, God. But they're just, they're just clouds. They're not like real aggregations.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  They will never form. They will never congeal together to form, but they, but they are clouds that orbit, so that's pretty cool.

• 6:40Bob Novella?

  They're ghostly.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  They call them ghost moons, yes. Uh, back to mini moons though, for a second, and I'm going to get to the quasi moon. Earth doesn't, uh, no fixed number of mini moons. Um, average of 6.5 of these, six or seven, orbiting Earth at any given time. Now, here's the question. Have we talked specifically on the SGU about quasi moons? I don't remember. We did?

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, we could, yeah, we, last time they discovered a new...

• 7:07Speaker 00

  One of these temporary satellites, we talked about it. And that's what we've got again. Quasi, a brand new, well, a announced newly, recently confirmed and newly announced quasi moon. Two thousand twenty five P N seven is its designation. Uh, this is courtesy of earthsky.org. By the way, meet earth's new quasi moon. Uh, detected on August twenty nine, twenty twenty five by the Oh, wow. By the Pan Stars Observatory. Yeah. On Haleakala, Hawaii. I hope I pronounced that right. Haleakala. Haleakala. Um, they looked at some data on this thing. They had it back in as far as two thousand fourteen from what I could find and that they've added it all up and they've observed it recently.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  But twenty twenty five P N seven, it has been co orbital with earth for sixty years now. What, what? I know, I know. It's been hanging around for a long time, but only, but only now is essentially effectively official. And it's expected to remain for another sixty years before it will transition back to its original horseshoe orbit. And I don't know that we've talked about horseshoe orbits, but that is a co orbital motion in which a smaller body moves in a path that appears horseshoe shaped relative to a larger body. Um, and they described it like two planets or a planet and an asteroid sharing an orbit around a star. The smaller body's orbit oscillates, but its overall path, when viewed from the reference frame that rotates with the primary body, it forms a horseshoe.

• 8:37Speaker 00

  So that's why it's called the horseshoe orbit. But for a while, this thing is, uh, the earth has it for now and it will have, continue to have it for about sixty more years. Two big questions. Yeah. How big and how far away? Yes, those are my next two. Nineteen meters in diameter, far away, closest, two point eight million miles, farthest, thirty seven point two miles. So it's out there. I mean, what? That's like a third of the way to the sun practically. Thirty-two, thirty-seven point two million.

• 9:04Bob Novella?

  Yeah, right.

• 9:05Speaker 00

  So, two point eight million miles, it will not, uh, yeah, so it's nothing that's gonna, uh, come that close to Earth. So, our regular telescopes can't see it. You have to detect it using, uh, using very special equipment. So.

• 9:17Bob Novella?

  I was wondering if it was worth even, imagine if we can just grab it.

• 9:20Speaker 00

  I know, wouldn't that be, I know, that would be cool. But we have it for, yeah. But at least, you know, hey, it's, we do have it, in a sense, for a little while, sixty more years in that far, far out orbit. But there were seven known current qua, there were seven known quasi-satellites of Earth known before this, and now PN7 makes number eight. So, a heartfelt ahoy to twenty twenty-five.

• 9:42Bob Novella?

  Ahoy, ahoy.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  PN7.

• 9:45Bob Novella?

  Welcome to the crew, man.

• 9:46Speaker 00

  Welcome, and we're sorry we have ignored your presence these past sixty years. It was not, nothing personal. This has been your Quickie with Evan. I now send it back to Bob, who will send it back to Steve.

• 9:55Speaker 04

  Back to you, Steve. Thank you, Bob and Evan.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, welcome.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  Jay.

• 9:59Jay Novella?

  What?

• 10:00Speaker 04

  I know people are developing these tiny robots, but, but how can we get them to, to move where we want them to go?

• 10:08Jay Novella?

  All right, well, I mean, this is, uh, this isn't like a, oh, my God, I can't believe it, research, but it is a incremental and very important piece of research for the idea that we would like to control very, very small machines to do a lot of different things. Um, I mean, just, just alone, you know, with the ability to help people, uh, you know, like, an example of it would be that it could deliver medication to a very targeted area in your body. You know, instead of taking a pill that, you know, essentially gives your entire body the medication, right?

• 10:41Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Jay Novella?

  It could be like a targeted delivery that can go exactly where a tumor is, for example, or something like that.

• 10:47Bob Novella?

  It's not a tumor.

• 10:48Jay Novella?

  So, these, these tiny robots, like, historically, they, they, pretty much, they have to be dumb, right? They don't, they don't have the, the space, because they're microscopic, you know, they don't have the space for, like, a processor, or a camera, um, onboard sensors and that type of stuff, like, that, those components right now, like, they're, they just can't be shrunk down that small. So, that means that these, you know, microbots, they can only respond to, um, you know, like, environmental cues. If you want to make them do something useful, like, you want them to deliver drugs, like I said, or clean a contaminated water supply, you're gonna need to control them from the outside.

• 11:29Jay Novella?

  And you like to control them real time to figure out, you know, a way to make them navigate, to get to where they're going or they need to go without them themselves having to do real processing. That's it at its core. So researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, they came up with a different idea about this. So in a new study, William Reinhardt and Mark Miskin, they describe a method they're calling artificial spacetimes, which sounds pretty interesting. And I'll tell you why they picked the word spacetime. So what happens is they let their microbots follow a complex path without any central controller or onboard intelligence, like a real processor onboard these tiny microscopic robots. The trick

• 12:10Jay Novella?

  is that they're actually changing their environment in just the right way, so they will automatically go to where they want them to go. And I'll explain how it works. So the microbots are made out of silicon, and they're powered by these tiny, tiny, tiny photovoltaic panels. And those photovoltaic panels act like motors, but only under specific conditions. So when light hits one of those panels, it produces an electrokinetic reaction, which actually pushes the robot forward. So each robot has two of these. So think of them as like a really small tank, right? With two treads, one on the left and one on the right. If both of the motors get the same amount of light, the robot will move

• 12:53Jay Novella?

  in a straight line. But if one side is brighter than the other, the motor on the left, say, which is getting more light, will move faster. And it'll make the robot turn. Turn. And I know that sounds simple, but it was a very difficult thing for them to achieve. And what they had to come up with is, you know, what they do is they project patterns of light onto the bottom of the Petri dish, using a digital projector. And from above, you know, it looks like a map, say, with light and dark regions. And that the light and dark regions are very specific, because as the little robots move through this, they can make them go to any point that they want to, just by changing the light and dark areas of the projection. Like I said, because they're reacting to the light

• 13:37Jay Novella?

  that they're seeing. So the robot... Robots can't see the map, they're not aware of the map in any way. All they're doing is reacting to their environment, which happens to be an environment that has that has light as a cue, right? The light actually is making the whole thing happen. So the bright regions pulls them forward, the darker ones slow them down, and this allows them to change direction. I watched a video of it, and it works remarkably well. I know that they're incredibly small, but they look like they're moving pretty fast. It's a pretty interesting thing, and it does kind of look like a flat tank. It's really cool. The researchers were saying like, you could think of it like the grooves on a record. Like, the robots are the needle, and they're blindly tracing the path that are etched into the landscape, in a sense, right? Because that's what the light and dark regions are actually doing.

• 14:22Jay Novella?

  So what makes this study different from the past ones is essentially the math behind it. So Reinhard and Miskin noticed that the motion of the robots follows the same rules of light moving through curved, a curved region of space. How about that? So the starlight, for example, that is bending, that goes too close to a black hole. And what they did was that they made a connection between their robots in a light and dark space and essentially the way that relativity works. So this connection that they made means that they can borrow mathematical tools from general relativity and optics to describe or design their light fields. And it tracks, it works. Interesting, yeah.

• 15:06Jay Novella?

  So they're using equations now that the big man came up with. You know what I mean? They don't have to guess, they don't have to do a lot of testing. They could just calculate exactly how a given pattern will guide the robots, and it could be a very complicated environment, like mazes, branching channels, whatever it is, and they can come up with the light pattern as a mathematical equation. They make it, and it works, and they're doing it. So in one experiment, they designed a light field. It caused the robots to patrol a circular path, like security guards walking around, right? In another example, they built a maze, and they projected a pattern that let multiple robots find their way to a specific area that they chose, without ever touching any of the walls of the dish.

• 15:49Jay Novella?

  I think the most impressive one was when they created a sorting field, a single static light pattern that made different robots, different robots exit a junction through different paths purely based on where they started. So it's complicated and it's working. And the important thing here is that they didn't have to make any real-time adjustments, meaning, you know, let's say they're looking at the activity of the robots. The robots are just doing what they're going to do by the way that they're designed, meaning they have the photovoltaic sensors that produce the charge. And it really comes down to the design of the light and dark areas. They don't have to tell, "Hey, robot number 25.7, do turn a little bit to your left."

• 16:33Jay Novella?

  There is none of that real-time communication necessary. The robots will go to where the light directs them to go. So, once the projector turns on, that pattern stays fixed and the robots don't need any individual instructions or monitoring. It's really cool. It makes it inherently scalable and you could release thousands of microbots and they'll all follow the same rules all at once. So you're now, you know, you're controlling thousands of, or even more of these tiny robots instead of only being able to communicate to a handful of them. And they can't even be as small as they are if they're being communicated to. I feel obligated to tell you, this is just a lab setup. The robots aren't, you know, they're operating in a shallow Petri dish, Petri dish with liquid,

• 17:15Jay Novella?

  you know, of a certain height under carefully manipulated lighting. In real-world applications, there'd be a lot of noise in the system, right? There'd be random disturbances, there'd be imperfect, you know, manufacturing, you know, the projected light field today, like it can't work deep inside of a human body or in a murky river, right? So there's restrictions, of course. But again, this is just the beginning and it's a really cool thing that they came up with. Going past the idea that it's a leap, you know, this is a conceptual leap that they came up with, what would the real-world applications be for things like this? Like, why are they even doing it? The scalability aspect here is really important because the current systems that exist can only control a few of these microbots at a time.

• 17:59Jay Novella?

  Because each one of them needs constant tracking and external commands, like constant. This method uses a single static light field and it can handle swarms of these things. So it's no problem. It just makes it super easy that way. The simplicity brings down the cost dramatically. So the robots are cheap to make, they're simple, they don't need onboard computers, they don't need onboard power sources. It's just all, there is no intelligence, it's all by the design of the light field. I don't think we should just shrug off a lot of these interesting little things that happen like this because it took thousands and thousands of these to make an iPhone, right? It had to start somewhere a long time ago with people coming up with, taking small steps

• 18:43Jay Novella?

  in an unknown direction that later got picked up by other engineers and, you know, using research that was done 50 years ago to help them figure out how to do something today. So I think this one seems pretty obvious that there's a cool benefit to it with other labs taking this in other directions as well. I just think overall, like this type of research is the exact type of things that need to be done and this is why we shouldn't cut science funding because we want people to do wacky stuff like this because, again, it's all part of the aggregate knowledge base that other researchers and scientists and people in the lab can use to make even bigger and more cool things. Eventually, you know, maybe they will be able to put these things in somebody's body

• 19:27Jay Novella?

  and it goes right to where they want it to, to do something very specific.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, this kind of technology is one of those, I think, for now, it's like a sleeper technology. They're doing, they're working out the basics, doesn't really have a lot of applications. But if we get to this threshold, you know, in terms of like the level of control and the level of functionality, there could be some amazing applications of it medically, you know?

• 19:51Jay Novella?

  Yeah, it's important.

• 19:52Speaker 04

  But we just don't know at this point.

• 19:53Jay Novella?

  I think it's really important for people to understand the idea that nothing, no new technology today is just invented out of whole cloth and they have a finished exquisite technology. Like, it is dependent on just millions of hours of human research that came before it, just to find out, you know, to, you know, figure out small things, you know, make, you know, all these little things. Okay, look, we know how this functions now. We know what the chemical reaction does over here. Not one of them by itself really means that much, but it's the aggregate knowledge base that allows more complicated things to develop later on. So, we need researchers doing stuff like this.

• 20:34Cara Santa Maria?

  Hey Jay.

• 20:34Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 20:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Did you see the most recent Last Week Tonight? Because that, it was like the thesis statement of John Oliver's main piece.

• 20:42Jay Novella?

  No, tell me what he said.

• 20:44Cara Santa Maria?

  I mean, it was basically just that. We can talk about single studies all we want, and we can sort of poke fun at studies that ostensibly look like they're not doing something important for humanity. But ultimately, all of the great discoveries we have are made up of thousands of human hours and hundreds of published studies, and it all has to work together.

• 21:07Speaker 04

  And it's often researchers pursuing some quirky interests or curiosity with no idea of what it was going to lead to.

• 21:15Jay Novella?

  Definitely. I mean, looking at it like a web, right? Like, you can have all of these different epicenters on that web that are discreet pieces of research and stuff. But eventually, they do start to connect and people will start to go, "Oh, we could take from here, take from here, take from here." And exactly what you said his show was about, like, absolutely. Yes, it costs a lot of money and it takes a lot of time, but that's where science gets all its cool stuff from, right? So, we have to, we have to be okay with that. And that's, I think, the sad part here is that the government is just stripping all of this research, anything like this. It's just so much of it now is being destroyed, and we're not funding it anymore.

• 21:53Speaker 04

  And we're destroying our scientific research infrastructure. It's terrible.

• 21:57Jay Novella?

  It sucks.

• 21:57Speaker 04

  But anyway, this is cool. Don't get depressed. Be happy. This is cool. Little robots now will drive around on a light beam, Steve. Thank you, Jay. So you guys remember back in April when RFK Jr., sorry to bring it down with RFK Jr., when he predicted that, and this is in quotes, "By September, we will know what has caused the autism epidemic and will be able to eliminate those exposures."

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Let me check the calendar. It's September.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  It's September, and he hasn't been able to surpass decades of research in five months, shockingly. Of course, you know, we all suspected that he's making statements like that because he already thinks he knows what quote unquote "those exposures" are, right?

• 22:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 04

  You know, you can't like start from scratch and complete any kind of reasonable scientific study in five months. Like, we're not going to unravel whatever aspects of autism are, remain to be unknown in those five months. He was just setting up this idea that he's going to be blaming vaccines for autism. So here we are, it's September, and there's a report from the Wall Street Journal and some other outlets that an upcoming HHS report, you know, by RFK, is going to tout a link between Tylenol, acetaminophen, or paracetamol in Europe, and autism risk, you know, exposure to Tylenol in pregnancy in,

• 23:30Speaker 04

  you know, mothers and the risk of their child having autism.

• 23:35Cara Santa Maria?

  Isn't that debunked already?

• 23:36Speaker 04

  It's already debunked, which is the great, it's great to leak of that that's what the announcement's going to be, gives us, you know, science communicators the opportunity to pre debunk it before it even comes out. And maybe they won't bring the paper out, who knows? But let's just review the evidence really quickly, just so you have the information in case family members like, "Oh, I heard there's a link, blah, blah, blah." But let me back up a little bit, because I always like to draw generic. Critical thinking, scientific literacy lessons from these individual stories. It's important to recognize that whenever you look for correlations, you'll find them pretty much, you know what I mean, there's gonna be correlations pretty much everywhere. It's like, if you're looking for patterns, you will find them.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Right. And oftentimes, when people are looking, like, they're doing observational research, I mean, they're not doing a controlled study, where they're randomizing subjects and either giving them a placebo versus a treatment. They're just looking at the world and saying, "Oh, if we look at this cohort of people, what happened to them? Like, what did they do and what happened?" They're just observing what's happening out in the world. There's lots of confounding factors, obviously, because you're not controlling for everything. There's lots of variables. And if you just, you know, slice and dice the data in a few different ways, chances are pretty good you're gonna find some correlations. And that's often how preliminary studies are done. You may look for 20 correlations, or you may look for 100 correlations.

• 25:06Speaker 04

  And this is not really to confirm any kind of cause and effect relationship. You're, literally, you might just, you're just on a fishing expedition. You're just saying, "Hey, is there any signal out there?" And then that is meant really only to create a hypothesis that there may be a correlation there. Then you have to confirm it with a fresh set of data, where you're looking just at that, right? Also, these kind of studies tend to have a massive false positive. That's just by their design. Again, this is like, screening tests are meant to have false positives. That's how they are designed, statistically, et cetera. Because you're screening, right? You wanna capture everything.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  And then you follow up with a more careful, or detailed, or precise analysis, to see if what you're finding is real. Does that make sense? Yeah. So, what that means, from a practical point of view, is that there's, there's always going to be these preliminary evidence for all kinds of correlations. Of course. Right. And not only that, it goes both ways. If you just look at, oh, let's look at some exposure to some food. If anything gets worse, it's a risk. If anything gets better, it's a cure. You know what I mean?

• 26:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Right.

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Anything can happen and it becomes either, oh, this will prevent this disease, or this will cause that disease. It's meaningless. It's noise in the background. That's meant for researchers to say, okay, let me pick up the ball and see if this is real, right? To really confirm or deny this hypothesis.

• 26:42Cara Santa Maria?

  That's the important point there, too. It's like, you have to actually be doing hypothesis testing.

• 26:46Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 26:47Cara Santa Maria?

  You can't just go, let's look at big data and see what trends in a certain direction, because everything's correlated with everything.

• 26:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, yeah, right. You're just, you're gonna find things. You gotta, that's not a confirmation. You have to then later confirm it. Okay. Although there are analyses you could do to see how strong that correlation is and how, and if it's applying a particular or favoring a particular causal relationship. There's always a lot of details in there.

• 27:13Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  All right. But if you're, if you're RFK Junior, right, or you're a wellness warrior, or I'm now, I guess, a Maha loser, or whatever, right? If you're somebody whose, whose career is based upon this kind of thing, eat this superfood to be healthy, or avoid this cancer risk, or whatever, then all of these preliminary correlations are gold, right? I mean, you could dumpster dive through all of these preliminary, mostly incorrect correlations to weave whatever tale will sell your supplement, or make people afraid, or whatever it is that you're trying to do, right? Build your guru career, you know, as a wellness idiot, right?

• 27:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:57Speaker 04

  This is the world in which RFK Junior lives. He clearly has demonstrated he has no idea how to properly interpret the scientific literature. And he just cherry picks these scary preliminary data to tell whatever story he wants to tell. And of course, sometimes he will cherry pick studies that were done by pseudoscientists that there are, there are terrible studies, just to make whatever point he wants to make, like that vaccines cause everything, for example. Okay. So, yes, there is, having said all of that, there is preliminary Data where if you just look at the raw data, there is this tiny effect, really. There's this tiny correlation between mothers using Tylenol in pregnancy and increased

• 28:41Speaker 04

  association with either autism or ADHD or other neurodevelopmental disorders. Right? However, so that's almost certainly what RFK Jr. is going to be touting if he does go through with this report or what others have stated that there's this correlation. But the thing is, we've already done the follow-up research in this case, right? If we hadn't, I would be saying, we have to wait, we have to do the follow-up studies. We don't really know, this is preliminary. But now I get to say, we've done the follow-up studies. Right? So in 2024, which is fairly recent, there was a pretty high-quality review. They looked at a national, the Swedish National Database, and this review included data on

• 29:25Speaker 04

  185,000 children. So it's pretty statistically robust. Again, this is an observational correlational study, not a cause and effect study. So they did find, yes, there's this very small increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders with Tylenol use in pregnancy. But there are two reasons to think that this is not a real cause and effect. One is, there was no dose-response curve. Right? So if a drug is causing a benefit or a substance is causing a risk or harm, you would expect that more of it would cause more of a harm. Of course. You call that a dose-response relationship or a dose-response curve.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  And so it's good to include that analysis. What they did was they said, okay, if we go, if we compare the lowest 25th percentile of exposure to acetaminophen, and then the middle, medium, you know, 25 to 75th, and then the highest 75th, greater than 75th percentile, is there an increase? And there wasn't. It was a flat line. There was, it was random. There was no dose-response curve. So that really argues pretty strongly. Against there being any kind of causal effect here. But even more definitive than that, the authors did what's called a sibling control analysis. And this is a way to control for confounding factors.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  Right, remember with observational data, the biggest weakness is that there are confounding factors, meaning there are factors you are not controlling for and you are not randomizing, and that could be seen in the data. For, you know, and like the simplest way to think about this is if A correlates with B, you can't assume, if it's an observational study, that A causes B. It's possible that B causes A. It's possible that C causes A and B. Right? So it's possible that pregnant women who are more likely to take Tylenol have something else going on that could also make them more likely to have a child with a neurodevelopmental disorder.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  So one way to control for this is to do a sibling control analysis. With that, what you do there is you use the subject's sibling as a control. And so you have like one sibling with the exposure of interest and one sibling without the exposure of interest. Right? So you could say during my mother's pregnancy with me, she took Tylenol, but with my mother's pregnancy with Jay, she did not take Tylenol. Right? So you've kind of isolated the Tylenol exposure from all of the familial and genetic and some of the environmental factors.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  There's enough of those kinds of case of candidates to make a study?

• 32:20Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And so they did that kind of sibling control analysis and the correlation completely goes away. There is no correlation once you control for that basic familial confounding factors. Right? And that's for any of the three, any neurode, either autism, ADHD, or other, you know, neurodevelopmental disorders.

• 32:46Speaker 04

  So that's pretty definitive. That means that the, there is no real correlation between Tylenol use and autism or other disorders. And the authors conclude that prior studies showing a possible link may have been attributable to familial confounding, right? To these confounding factors. So this is pretty robust evidence. It's a large study. It's well done. And again, those two things, lack of a dose response curve, the effect goes away when you control for confounding factors. That's always the death now in an observational study. Like when you control for confounding factors, the effect goes away.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  Eh, it wasn't real to begin with, right? It was, it was due to the confounding factors that you're now controlling for. So, but this is like three layers too deep for somebody like RFK, right? He doesn't care about this. He's just saying, oh, look, there's a possible link. That's enough to scaremonger about it. Look, I kept my promise. I found the, the exposure that's causing our autism epidemic. Or whatever, he'll do a victory lap, is what I predict. So, you know, we'll see what, what actually happens. But it's good that the data's already there, that science communicators are already getting out, they're saying, nope, there's no evidence for this. The evidence does not support a link.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  The other issue here is that Tylenol's really the only safe way to treat fever in pregnancy. Scaring women against using that could have harm. It's not just like, oh, who cares? You know, so generally speaking, we tell pregnant women not to take any medications they don't absolutely have to take. That's sort of standard procedure. But if you're having a lot of pain, that's not benign. That, that is potential risk for a pregnant woman. And if you may not be getting enough nutrition or whatever, there's all kinds of things that you may be spending too much time in bed or whatever you may, you know, there's, that's a risk factor. Also fever, you know, can be a risk factor. So telling

• 34:54Speaker 04

  women, don't treat your fever or pain during pregnancy is not a benign thing to do.

• 34:59Cara Santa Maria?

  No, it also just perpetuates, I think, these, I don't want to even say decades, centuries long biases in healthcare against treating women's pain. Just being like, just deal with it, you know?

• 35:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:12Cara Santa Maria?

  Even if, let's say, a woman who is pregnant is having a severe pain that is not linked to anything dangerous, right? Even if she doesn't have a fever, or it's not indicative of some sort of harm, it will cause bad psychological outcomes.

• 35:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:29Cara Santa Maria?

  She will, like, it will contribute probably to depression during the pregnancy. It will contribute to negative emotions about her pregnancy if she feels unwell and she doesn't have options in front of her. It's like, it, I don't, it just feels like another one of these ways to like blame mothers like we used to do in the 50s.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  Totally. People have brought that up as well. This is just an, an extension of the idea that mothers are to blame for their child's conditions.

• 35:56Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Even when it's, we know from mountains of evidence that autism, for example, is dominantly genetic. That doesn't mean to say there are no environmental factors that might affect that, but it's dominantly genetic. It's not dominantly, you know, environmental, which RFK seems to believe, again, against all evidence. And also keep in mind, like, Tylenols are first line treatment for migraines. We're not just talking about, oh, I have a, I stubbed my toe or something. And, you know, a migraine during pregnancy could mean significant disability, nausea and vomiting, things that are, again, not benign for the pregnancy or the mother themselves. And so, everything is a risk versus benefit, right? Everything

• 36:40Speaker 04

  in medicine is risk versus benefit. So it's not as simple as saying, well, just avoid all risk, you know, at all costs. Like, ah, life is not that easy. You avoid one risk, you incur another. By if you're by avoiding that risk, you're also avoiding the potential benefit. And so you have to make a more rational sort of decision about where is the optimal balance, you know, of risk versus benefit in any for each individual patient in each individual situation. This kind of fear mongering based upon misreading of the evidence is harmful. It is literally harmful.

• 37:16Cara Santa Maria?

  And I don't even, I mean, like, I feel like it's even charitable to call it misreading of the evidence.

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:21Cara Santa Maria?

  I think it's it's confirmation bias in a group of people who fundamentally are pushing an agenda that's anti medicine.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  Completely.

• 37:29Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it's basically this weird sort of paleo viewpoint that somehow more medicine is worse. And if you can live a quote, clean lifestyle.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the clean living bullshit.

• 37:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, avoid any pharmaceuticals and avoid any sort of intervention that it's going to be healthier for you. I mean, it's the same, it's the anti vax, it's all of it. And it's just so dangerous.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  Absolutely. All right, well, Cara.

• 37:57Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Speaker 04

  You're going to talk next about the music choices we make as we age.

• 38:03Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I'd love to take a mini poll just of the of the rogues today. How many of you, okay, first and foremost, do you tend to listen to more music from when you were younger or more music from the recent past?

• 38:21Speaker 04

  Younger, yeah.

• 38:22Speaker 00

  I'm influenced by my daughter in this regard, so I don't know how typical I am. But one of the things Rachel and I do, we go to concerts together, so a lot of my music is more contemporary.

• 38:35Speaker 04

  You're listening to what she listens to.

• 38:37Speaker 00

  Exactly, right. And I do like keeping up with what she is listening to.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  I agree.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  It's our way of bonding.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  The second category of music I listen to is music my daughters listen to.

• 38:46Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 38:47Cara Santa Maria?

  And would you say that that makes up like half of your listening, like most of your listening?

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, probably half and half, my youth, their youth, very little like current, you know, music that is not, I'm not being exposed to to somebody I know.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  I'm definitely a blend. I'm a 50 50 blend.

• 39:05Cara Santa Maria?

  Okay. And then for, let's say for like Jay and Bob, do you use any sort of service like Spotify or something like that that recommends music to you?

• 39:16Jay Novella?

  I don't let anybody recommend music to me.

• 39:20Cara Santa Maria?

  So you only listen to what you want to listen to? That's right.

• 39:23Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I will hear stuff that my kids like and, you know, there's a few few recent artists that I definitely like and I'll, every once in a while, I'll hear some of their new stuff. But I mean, in my mind, you know, I just can't find anything that's better than the stuff from the late 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s. Like, I, you know, I just, I don't know. Is it my age? I don't know, Kara.

• 39:46Cara Santa Maria?

  And so I'm going to talk about a study that is not going to tell us the why. It's going to tell us more the what. And it's going to tell us something that we already knew. But this is the first time, apparently, that we have like scientific evidence to back up the claim that as we get older, we focus on fewer and fewer favorite songs and our musical taste narrows. But what I love is that the authors, instead of talking about our musical tastes narrowing, they use, I don't want to call them euphemisms, but I guess their their language bias is probably because they're older as well, towards, um, our musical taste becomes more refined as we.

• 40:33Cara Santa Maria?

  And so here's what they did. It's actually a really interesting approach. So it's three. More seasoned. Yeah, more seasoned.

• 40:40Jay Novella?

  And I want to hear what your answer is too, Kara.

• 40:43Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, I'm 100% same. Like, I listen to stuff I listened to in high school all the time, all the time. And and some kind of vintage stuff from before that. I do listen to some current, modern music, but by and large, I would say that, so I work at a gymnastics gym and I'm definitely the oldest person. Well, I think technically the second oldest person there. And oftentimes, when they're playing music, I'm like, I've never heard this before. I have no idea who this is. They'll mention the name of the artist and I'm like, okay.

• 41:15Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. And and I'm, by the way, 41 years old. Like, I am, I'm not old, I'm not young.

• 41:25Cara Santa Maria?

  But so these universities, this international study, what they decided to do is try to understand people's music habits a little bit more, especially focusing on like different artists and different genres that individuals listen to. And the way they did it is by looking at big data from a service called Last FM. This is a music service where you can sort of feed in your listening habits like from a place like Spotify and build out a profile so that you can get more sort of, more of an analysis of your own musical

• 42:05Cara Santa Maria?

  habits and tastes. And when people make profiles on Last FM, they put in their age. Now, we don't have a lot of data on how these algorithms work over long periods of time because they haven't been around for that long. So this is one of the earliest studies that was able to look at 15 years of data and they looked at over 40,000 users. So we're talking like almost 550 million plays and they looked at over a million different songs across those 15 years. So they wanted to see how people's music listening habits changed

• 42:45Cara Santa Maria?

  over time. And they were especially curious because this was actually published as an extended abstract in a proceeding, like a conference proceeding at UMAP, which is user modeling, adaptation, and personalization. So these are, you know, scientists who are interested in how these different services feed you what you want to hear. Like, how do these algorithms work in such a way that the end user is enjoying their experience? And basically, they found that programs like Spotify or companies like Spotify,

• 43:26Cara Santa Maria?

  they're not targeting older people in a different way than they target younger people. But older people's habits are different than younger's, younger people's habits. Younger people are really interested in new music. They're really interested in novelty. They're interested in trying on different hats, different personalities, different genres. They want to hear stuff they haven't heard before. Older people, by and large, not everybody, but by and large, they tend to, and this is their quote, which I think is lovely. Middle-aged listeners appreciate a balance between new and familiar, while older listeners want more tailored recommendations that reflect their personal tastes and nostalgic reminiscences.

• 44:10Cara Santa Maria?

  So what they found is that older people's music habits, by and large, focus on songs from their youth, that people do go back and listen to songs from when they were younger. And as they put it, musical taste becomes more, quote, "unique" the older the listener is. So like, they claim that teenagers will often find a lot of common favorite songs with other people their age, even if they're sort of in different cliques or, you know, go to different schools. Whereas, as you get older, your musical taste may become more specific, and it may be harder for you to meet other people your age who are into the same kind of music you are.

• 44:53Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, like, I have an ex-boyfriend who just listened to, like, death metal all day, every day. I mean, he would hate that that's how I'm classifying his musical taste, because in his view, it was incredibly varied, right? But it was all just hard. He listened to a ton of hardcore music. And, you know, he was in his mid-40s. I don't think he had a lot of friends who were listening to music that was as intense as the music that he listened to. He had a handful of them, but for the most part, people were like, "Bro, I can't get into this. It's like loud. Can you turn it down?" And I see that across the board, you know, I've got a lot of friends who still listen to punk rock. They love their punk rock. And for my friends who aren't into punk rock, they just don't like it.

• 45:36Cara Santa Maria?

  And so it's hard to find commonality and to talk about music with your friends and to go do musical things with your friends unless you maybe went to school with them or you already bonded over those musical similarities. But definitely kind of making new friends as an adult, you do learn that you might have a ton of stuff in common and then you're kind of surprised by how different their musical taste is than yours. I've found that that's happened a lot.

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Kara, I just reconnected with someone I hadn't spoke to since 1991. I mean, this year. And this was during, this was my last year of college. This person was into heavy metal, I mean, real heavy stuff. I asked him kind of what he's listening to now. He's like, oh, Billy Joel. Just like, what? No way. It took me for, it threw me for a loop. I had no idea.

• 46:30Cara Santa Maria?

  That's interesting.

• 46:31Speaker 04

  I wonder how much of it is just a changing music itself versus our changing life situation. Like, when we were younger, we were in school and we had lots of exposure to people who were like playing new albums and you would get to hear them. And you know what I mean? Like, there seemed like there was a set of new stuff coming out that you got exposed to and you could sort of choose what you liked. And now I wouldn't know where to go. Like, there's just so much out there.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Oh, it's.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  And the stuff you hear on the radio is largely crap, you know?

• 47:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but that's also an older person's perspective. You have to remember that, too, because like, if we take any cross-section of time, the older set is going to say that that, that new fangled music is crap.

• 47:15Speaker 04

  It's not just that, because when I had, when my daughters were at that stage, when they were still living at home, they were in high school or whatever, and they were sampling a lot of different groups. First of all, they were into a lot of older groups. They were listening to Foreigner and, you know, like, stuff from our generation. Then they were listening to new groups that they otherwise weren't heard about. So I was able to select the ones that I liked. And then I got into, you know, Muse and.

• 47:41Speaker 04

  Arctic monkeys and stuff like that that I otherwise never would have gotten into.

• 47:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Which is now old again.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  I know, it's now old again. So there's gotta be good bands out there that I would get into now if I had the ability to get exposed to them. But I just don't think it's the pop stuff that you're hearing. It's more like the next layer, stuff that's maybe not. Alternative music. It's alternative stuff.

• 48:01Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, but even if we're talking about one genre like alternative, which is a, has a million subgenres within it. I think probably what, not just what these researchers are kind of getting at, but also what individuals working behind the scenes at companies like Spotify and Pandora, hopefully are focusing on, is the idea that people get dialed in to their tastes and they like the nostalgia of their youth. But there is always new music that has some sort of connective tissue, some sort of flavor, some sort of vibe. And it is hard to pick out what those variables are, right? Is it a tempo? Is it like a beat?

• 48:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Is it, you know, the, the timbre of somebody's voice? Is it sort of the sounds of the guitars? But there will always be.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Why isn't Spotify doing that? Why aren't they feeding you new stuff that I should like?

• 48:58Cara Santa Maria?

  They are. And, and so you, there are settings within all of these different apps where you can have a mix and then you can put it on like a smart mix or whatever they call it, where it will recommend things to you. But what these individuals are saying is that they're doing that to an 18 year old and to a 65 year old the same way. And what they probably should be doing is narrowing that algorithm for the older individuals so that there's not as broad a mix being kind of thrown at them because they're less likely to go, oh, I like this. And they're more likely to just downvote everything that doesn't sound just like what they liked before. They're just not intentionally searching for new music.

• 49:40Cara Santa Maria?

  And so it's not to say that older people wouldn't engage with newer music. But that newer music probably needs to be more narrowly focused on their established tastes as opposed to having, I guess, a really eclectic, let's throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks approach, which works with younger people.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  What do you think, Jay?

• 50:01Jay Novella?

  I mean, you know, if it weren't for Rick Beato, I would be agreeing with Kara. I mean, it seems like every generation kind of has this experience. The bottom line is, I think that there's very, very real world reasons why music, the quality of music in general, is not as good as it used to be. And this comes from a deep analysis of the complexity of the popular music today. So I think it's kind of both. I think that because of companies like Spotify and Pandora and that whole streaming model, it's denuded bands from being able to make money. And it's changed the industry so much that, you know, there isn't the same quality of bands out there. You know, the vetting process is not the same.

• 50:45Jay Novella?

  There used to be promoters and people that, you know, their job was to find new talent. And there was a, you know, cream rising to the top effect here.

• 50:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I disagree. I think now we have a cream rising to the top effect. It doesn't rise as high to the top, but we're not in-

• 51:00Speaker 04

  It's also buried in more stuff, though. There's just so much out there.

• 51:03Cara Santa Maria?

  But that's the thing, to us, it's buried. But not to people, you know, a 17, 18-year-old right now who is on TikTok knows who the hot people are, who is like using SoundCloud, who is looking at these different outlets. And they're finding people who have a completely democratized approach to music. There aren't the barriers to entry that they used to have. And yes, there is so much more music out there, and it's harder for us, like old people, to figure out how to dig through it.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  We're just not plugged in, is that what you're saying?

• 51:30Cara Santa Maria?

  We're just not plugged in. But the thing is, I would argue, Jay, that actually- Removing all of those barriers to entry. Yes, it might make it harder for you or for me to find that incredible music. You know, pop's gonna always be pop. There's always gonna be the stuff where we're like, I don't get this. I don't get this top 40. Like, why is this so popular? But when you can, when anybody can self-produce an album and publish it, the quality of music is going to go up. It just is. Because there are gonna be people who didn't have access before that now have access.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  I think it's largely the pop music that Rick Beato is talking about. And sure, I mean, there could be millions of diamonds in the rough throughout all these streaming services that I just don't have a pathway to get to.

• 52:20Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and that's, I think that's really what this is about is how can these music services improve that pathway for older adults who just don't want to dedicate that much time or energy? But I think we all have to be careful not to fall victim to, I mean, I guess this could be a name that logical fallacy, where we tend to compare the best of our tastes to the worst of other people's tastes.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  You know, that's not fair.

• 52:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Because I hear, I hear it a lot, especially with the like, older people argument that like, in my day, music was amazing because we were rocking out to the, yeah, the Beatles were great, but now what is this crap? And it's like, well, but you're picking like a top 40.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  No, I agree with you. I just want people to tell me who are the great bands of today so I could listen to them.

• 53:02Jay Novella?

  Yeah, why would it be so hard for them to, for people like us to even find out about them? If they're that freaking good, you'd figure we'd know about them.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  And I'm sure we're gonna get emails with people telling us, giving us their recommendations. And do it, I want to hear them. I seriously, I would love to be plugged in to ways of finding great new music.

• 53:19Cara Santa Maria?

  Well, this is how you do it, right?

• 53:21Speaker 04

  I love the stuff from the, from the old days, but I'm getting bored with it.

• 53:24Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and here's the thing, here's the big difference, right? Teenagers. Have more time than we do.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:30Cara Santa Maria?

  They put their time and effort into this. Young people go to festivals. I just don't go to festivals anymore.

• 53:37Speaker 04

  No, I know. When I was young, I would listen to the radio when I was in the car. Now I listen to the news.

• 53:42Cara Santa Maria?

  Exactly. And like, when I want to see a band, which is rare anymore, and that's not because I don't love music, but I need to, I need to have my earplugs and I need to have a seat. You know, like, I don't want to be standing all night. But when I want to see a band, I'm gonna go see a band I love and I want to, you know, and I actually am annoyed if a band that I love just put out an album and I haven't really had a chance to get into it and that's all they play at the show.

• 54:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:06Cara Santa Maria?

  Like, I want to hear the stuff that I love. Whereas when I was young, I would go to huge musical festival, like, music festivals that had like fifteen, twenty bands playing, and I might go, oh, I've never heard this before. This is pretty good.

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:17Cara Santa Maria?

  I don't do, I don't seek that. I don't seek novelty out the way I used to.

• 54:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:21Cara Santa Maria?

  And so we've got to remember too, it's, it's a lot of this is user error.

• 54:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. I totally agree with that.

• 54:26Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  You know, forty-one is kind of old.

• 54:32Jay Novella?

  Listen, if they can't sing like Sinatra, it's crap.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Get off my lawn.

• 54:39Speaker 00

  And we didn't even talk about AI creating music.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  Well, that, the AI slop is going to be, we're gonna get buried in that for sure.

• 54:45Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 00

  Oh, my gosh, there's gonna be millions of songs every year that come out.

• 54:49Cara Santa Maria?

  Do people like AI slop? Nobody actually likes AI slop, right?

• 54:53Speaker 04

  No, but it's out there. The thing is.

• 54:54Cara Santa Maria?

  I know it's out there and it's burying everything.

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:56Cara Santa Maria?

  But are people actually choosing to listen to it, or is it like that U2 album that was on the iPod?

• 55:01Speaker 04

  They might listen to it and not know they're listening to it.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:04Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, that's sad.

• 55:05Speaker 00

  Or it may be the favorite music of other AIs.

• 55:06Speaker 04

  And the thing is, it's gonna get just good enough that it's like mediocre and, but it's.

• 55:11Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, it already is. I've already, yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  It's in the range of the shit that's already out there. You know what I mean?

• 55:16Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, I've definitely come across songs before where I'm like, I don't think these are, this is a real band.

• 55:21Speaker 04

  It's gonna explode the low end of the music distribution. Make it even harder to find the, the good stuff.

• 55:28Jay Novella?

  Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quince.

• 55:34Cara Santa Maria?

  You know, here at SU, we love Quince. They have all the fall staples that you will wear all the time, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at just $60. And they partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. So you get top-tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. But it's not just clothes. They've got all sorts of things for your home and jewelry, too. Right, Jay?

• 55:59Jay Novella?

  So last Mother's Day, I gave my wife those earrings. Remember I told you about the Quince earrings? So my wife goes ahead and loses one of them. So the bottom line is, she calls up Quince and they said, "Send us back the one you have and we will send you a brand-new pair." Who does that today?

• 56:16Cara Santa Maria?

  That's amazing.

• 56:17Speaker 00

  Great customer service.

• 56:18Jay Novella?

  This brand is fantastic. You know, that cinched it for me. I love their clothes, but like, their customer service is fantastic.

• 56:25Speaker 00

  So keep it classic and cool this fall with long-lasting staples from Quince. Go to quince.com/SGU for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash S-G-U. Free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince dot com slash S-G-U.

• 56:47Jay Novella?

  All right, guys, let's get back to the show. All right, Bob, tell us about mind-reading wearables. I'll premise this by saying, the article you sent me, I did not like.

• 56:58Bob Novella?

  Yeah, actually, there was. There's not a lot about this out there, so I'll take some of this with a grain of salt. Some of the text seemed interesting, but let's just jump in and we can discuss it. Alter Ego, as a startup spinoff from MIT, was recently in the news again, describing a wearable device that allows people to silently communicate back and forth with either an AI or a computer or other people just by thinking the words. They claim their primary focus is to help people with speech disorders, but it also has a plethora of other, potentially interesting uses as well. The MIT website describes the device like this. Alter Ego is a non-invasive, wearable, peripheral, neural interface that allows Allows humans to converse in natural language with machines, artificial intelligence,

• 57:42Bob Novella?

  assistance, services, and other people without any voice. So yeah, so this started as a project at the MIT Media Lab in 2018 and was spun off officially, I guess, this year as a for-profit company called Alter Ego. Arnav Kapoor is an MIT graduate, Harvard Medical School researcher, and of course, CEO of Alter Ego. So he said this, he describes his technology at a TED Talk back in 2019, so what, six years ago, he said, "Imagine talking to yourself without vocalizing, without moving your mouth, without moving your jaw, but simply by articulating those words internally, thereby very subtly engaging your internal speech systems such as your tongue

• 58:26Bob Novella?

  and the back of your palate. When that happens, the brain sends extremely weak signals to these internal speech systems." Kapoor then describes next that they had developed a sensor that they developed for your face and neck that could pick up those subtle signals, allowing an AI to turn these patterns into the words that they represented that you were consciously subvocalizing. The AI then silently answers your query with whatever it may be by using bone conduction that travels to the inner ear that you can then hear seemingly normally, but without apparently drowning out, apparently without drowning out whatever else that you may be hearing at the

• 59:09Bob Novella?

  time, right? So you could, it's not going to disrupt what you may be hearing necessarily. So that's how Alter Ego works in a nutshell. That process kind of makes sense, how this works. One question I had here, you may have as well, why does this inner speech even send these faint muscle signals in the first place? They don't even move the muscles, but these signals are being sent when you're just thinking about words, specifically thinking about, why does that happen?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  It's the motor planning area, Bob.

• 59:38Bob Novella?

  Yeah, well, yeah, there was a lot of technical reasons why that's the case. One, one way to describe it that made, that made some sense, and see if you agree with this, Steve. One answer is that it's ultimately faster and cheaper for the brain to allow some of this signal leakage to the speech muscles than, than it would be to perfectly isolate those muscles from inner speech. So it's just like, oh yeah, some of the signal gets out. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't really, it doesn't move any muscles really, but it's just like, it's easier to do, to do that than to, than to really isolate, you know, the muscles.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  I would go further than that because.

• 1:00:12Bob Novella?

  Go further.

• 1:00:13Speaker 04

  You know, I wrote recently on neurological blog about a study where they're charting the brain process. This isn't a mouse brain, but they basically totally mapped out everything that's happening in a mouse brain when the mouse is doing certain tasks, right?

• 1:00:29Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:00:30Speaker 04

  Some specific decision-making tasks. And what they found was, is that the sensory and motor areas were far more involved in that process of thinking and decision-making than was previously suspected. So we actually think with our motor cortex, if that makes sense, to some extent. It's involved.

• 1:00:48Bob Novella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  That's why we're so embodied, you know, and it's.

• 1:00:53Bob Novella?

  Absolutely.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  These circuits are all related, so it makes perfect sense. Like, if you're thinking about yourself hitting a tennis ball, the muscle, the motor part of your brain that is involved with that task is lighting up even if you're not moving, right?

• 1:01:08Bob Novella?

  Right.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  So it's, it's actually a nice feature that, that we can exploit to do this sort of thing, right?

• 1:01:14Bob Novella?

  Exactly. And that's exactly what we're doing. And Steve, it also reminds me of, I remember studies that I read many years ago, hopefully it's probably still correct, that when you're dreaming and doing things in your dream and moving, that they could detect those same, those, those same patterns in your brain that are, that are being activated because you're, because you're, you know, you are moving in the dream, so your, your brain kind of thinks you are moving.

• 1:01:37Speaker 04

  Right. And when you're thinking of a picture, you're, the same part of your brain lights up as when you're looking at the picture. It's the same thing, right? So it works with perception as well. Neat.

• 1:01:50Bob Novella?

  So Kapoor says at this point in his TED Talk, he was very clear that, he said, "Just to be very clear, the device does not record or read your thoughts. The control resides with the user." And so, yeah, he said that. It seemed like he was making a very important point. And of course it is. You don't want to think about some device actually reading your thoughts and you having no control, because that's obviously quite scary. And that's not the case with this specific tech. And this idea, though, ties into the big distinction between this specific technology and most brain interface technologies that we've discussed in the past. Directly recording brain activity, you need something that's somewhat invasive. Either it's going to be a full-on implant, like, under your skull, in your brain somewhere,

• 1:02:35Bob Novella?

  maybe even on the surface of your brain, but beyond your skull. But also, it could be all the way down to something like electrodes that are attached to your bare scalp, right? So is that accurate enough, Steve? That's kind of like the range of invasiveness that you'd be dealing with with the conventional...

• 1:02:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are scalp electrodes. There are stent electrodes in the vessels in your brain. Then there's like brain surface electrodes and then deep brain electrodes.

• 1:03:00Bob Novella?

  So those are obviously quite problematic. They're effective for that type of technology, but it's invasive. It's invasive. And they really need to nail down how to make it less invasive and more permanent, because even connections in the brain eventually will drift and need to be addressed. So alter ego is less invasive than in two ways. It slips on easily and it gives users more control over what is shared. It's only things that you are specifically and volitionally saying or thinking with your mind. So it's less invasive in those ways. And this technology, I guess it's not a surprise. It fits very well with what Kapoor has, his earlier beliefs about the relationship

• 1:03:44Bob Novella?

  of humanity with technology. He's long advocated for technologies and AI to be developed that integrate and extends human capabilities, but to augment us instead of diminishing us, as he said. Says or replacing us. And I'm sure many people would agree with that these days with what's going on with AI, especially with with artwork and things like that. So Kapoor describes alter ego as giving you the experience of a conversational AI that lives inside your head that you could talk to like you're talking to yourself internally. It's like basically your alter ego, if you will, this your other mind in a sense is the entirety of the internet could eventually be accessible

• 1:04:23Bob Novella?

  as a way of talking to yourself. So that he finds that very interesting. So what are some of the potential uses for this technology? Technology. So I kind of categorize this into several several buckets here. So one category of use cases, if you will, would be for disabilities. So people that have trouble communicating due to due to conditions like ALS or stroke, cancer, laryngectomy or dysphonia, which I think, is that what RFK Junior has? He has dysphonia. Yeah, exactly what I said. So so that's that's like the they said this was their primary focus is to help people with these disabilities. And I mean, people that can't really talk or communicate like that, they can use a computer in some ways and

• 1:05:06Bob Novella?

  and craft sentences, but it takes it takes a while to do that. This is something that could help them communicate so much more simply and easily and quickly. So I think it could be an incredible boon for a lot of these these sufferers. But another use case category here is for when obviously when silence is important. So when, for example, when talking to somebody in a medical setting could increase infection risk, right? Because sometimes you just don't want droplets being shared, you know, being launched into the air. So the less you talk, the the the lower the infection risk. So that so this could be used for that specific example. But also there's broadcast sets, there's courtrooms, libraries, covert research,

• 1:05:49Bob Novella?

  where silence is important, that this technology could be very helpful. Another another category is if hearing is obscured for whatever reason. So fire rescue teams are trying to coordinate information amongst other rescue team members and their sirens and other noises on. You could communicate this way without worrying about people not hearing you. But also, construction sites, concerts, factories, motorcyclists. All these are all scenarios where hearing could be greatly impaired. And this type of communication could be greatly helpful. Now, a lot of this technology, I was surprised that a lot of this technology seems to have already been fairly well-developed, at least according to the demos that I saw.

• 1:06:32Bob Novella?

  For at least, like, for five or six years, they had the basics of what I've been discussing. It seemed, it seemed to me. So, some of the limitations that they, that they experience, I think, would be something like speaker training. There's probably a deal, a great deal of speaker training that's probably going to be required if you had this technology right now. Also, I think that, remember when I said that this, this device will read those signals and map, using an AI to map those signals to words? Well, I found out that they had a 92% accuracy rate. But that was only with a very constrained vocabularies. So that, so, and so these weren't really real-world testing with people that you have normal vocabularies.

• 1:07:15Bob Novella?

  So, so 92%, you gotta take that with a, you know, with a grain of salt. That's not, I mean, yeah, so that's, so maybe this is one of the areas where they've improved in the past five or six years. And there's also reliability issues that are, that are very likely. Like, what if you're walking and sweating? And what if you're, you're, you're walking fast and the motion of your body interferes with this device? It's, and this isn't a subtle device. This is hanging over your ear, down the side of your face, across the top of your neck, and then up, under your lips. I mean, this is not a subtle thing that you're wearing. It's not very covert at all. If you wear this, it's like those Google glasses with the, with the beeping light, the beeping, you know, the flashing light on it. I'm, I'm just curious what improvements have been made in the past half-decade on this.

• 1:08:00Bob Novella?

  And I think we're going to find out pretty soon. Kapoor will discuss alter egos technology live this September 17th at Axios AI Summit in Washington DC. So, next week, I might be able to have a quick little update on this technology and where, where it is now, as opposed, as opposed to a lot of the information, which is kind of at a date. Probably by this point right now. But it seems interesting and has got some possibilities for some niche scenarios that could help a lot of people. But Steve, so what's your take? What's your take on this and what I said?

• 1:08:33Speaker 04

  My take is that it looks dorky. The guy's wearing the device.

• 1:08:39Bob Novella?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's not subtle. It's not subtle at all.

• 1:08:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, sure, it's not implausible that if you're like, subvocalizing, basically, and it's picking up on your muscle contractions and interpreting that with 90 something percent accuracy, that's not implausible. But the question is, how transparent are they being about how big the whole thing is and like, what it's connecting to and what its real functionality is? I'm just trying to find like, really solid technical details and there's just not a lot out there.

• 1:09:12Bob Novella?

  Right, not a lot of that out there. Hopefully next week, we'll have more information. So I'll definitely chime in next week as to what was released, you know, since then.

• 1:09:21Speaker 04

  I don't like them calling it telepathy, though. That's just bullshit.

• 1:09:24Bob Novella?

  No, I think that's all like, other, you know, I didn't see MIT referring to it as telepathy at all. I mean, I have seen like, near telepathic, you know, in some places. So, yeah, they're not saying that this is telepathy. And it's not, of course, you know that websites are going to grab onto that idea and couch it in those terms.

• 1:09:45Jay Novella?

  I worry about this technology because it sounds like it could really mess people up.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  Why?

• 1:09:50Jay Novella?

  Because, you know, if you're like, have a direct connection in your brain just by thinking to access the internet and all that stuff, like, come on.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. You're just talking about the application of being plugged in.

• 1:10:00Jay Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Bob Novella?

  Plugged in at a deeper level than we are now.

• 1:10:03Speaker 04

  Have it interact overtly with the world, yeah.

• 1:10:04Bob Novella?

  Right. It's definitely a deeper connection than we can experience now. Hands-free, voice-free. You know, and it kind of is. Imagine, imagine, you think a question and then you hear an answer with no, you know, external keyboards or voice interactions. That's gotta be a weird feeling.

• 1:10:27Jay Novella?

  I think we need to, we gotta like, stop moving in the direction of being insular and actually like, you know, have communities and kids gotta go out and ride their bikes, you know?

• 1:10:38Bob Novella?

  How the hell did we survive those days? I don't know.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  Evan, tell us about these decreasing science scores.

• 1:10:44Speaker 00

  Uh, yeah, sorry. I wish I had better news here. Latest results from the nation, uh, from the nation's report card officially known as the National Assessment of Education Progress, or N A E P. We have some, uh, we have some problems here about science education in America. Okay, so this assessment, uh, they assessed 23,000 eighth grade students or at 600 different schools that participated in this science test, which covered physical science, life science, as well as earth and space sciences. And this test was taken in 2024, but the assessment is now been analyzed and they've released the results. 2024 eighth grade science scores dropped by four points.

• 1:11:28Speaker 00

  And that erases all of the gains that had been made since 2009, when they started to perform this particular assessment. So we can't go back more than 15 years on this particular one. And we also need to point out that this is the first time they've resumed it since the pandemic. So for, for, for what that's worth. On the test, the scores ranged from zero to 300. And a four-point drop on a scale like that, you know, it doesn't sound huge, but i- in the world of educational assessments, they say that's considered a serious decline. Only 31% of eighth graders scored at, at or above the proficient level. And that means roughly two thirds of middle schoolers do not have a solid grasp of science

• 1:12:11Speaker 00

  concept that they are expected to know by the end of middle school. More than one third of the students scored below the basic level, indicating they don't fully understand fundamental concepts. For example, plants need sunlight to grow, a concept like that. This particular assessment parallels a trend in math and reading scores for fourth and eighth graders, which was done by another assessment that was released in, earlier this year in January, which showed similar declines. They also did an analysis or a, as part of the assessment, um, students enjoyment and interest in science. In 2019, 52% of 8th graders said they enjoyed science activities.

• 1:12:56Speaker 00

  2024, 42%, a 10% decline. Interest in learning science fell from those years, 47%, down to 39%, 8% drop. Fewer students are believing that doing well in science actually matters in the real world, either for their future careers or understanding how the world actually works around them. And you can, you know, there's, there's reasons they, they believe are attributable to this. You know, they call them the equity gaps, who's being left behind. Unfortunately, girls' scores dropped by five points. Boys' scores dropped by three. So we have another gender gap here in science that is on the widening path again,

• 1:13:40Speaker 00

  and that reverses years of, of having made progress in that particular area. Asian-American students were the only group to improve, gaining two points. Caucasian students averaged 161, just above the basic threshold. Hispanic students averaged 137 on the scores. American Indian and Native Alaskan, Alaska Native students, 132. And Black students, 130, all considered below basic level.

• 1:14:09Jay Novella?

  Cool.

• 1:14:09Speaker 00

  Yeah. A little bit of, you know, if you, if you pick through it a little bit, you do find maybe a sliver or a, you know, a, what is it called, silver lining? The science test scores, they don't contain state-level data that would paint a better picture, say of how California is faring compared to the rest of the country. There's something called the California Science Test, C A S T, CAST. And that test that is done annually has increased a point, actually went up one point. So maybe we need to, you know, turn to states like California to see kind of what they're doing to help reverse this, this overall trend nationwide.

• 1:14:52Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, sure, but who's going to actually do that? I mean, we still-

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  We're so polarized, you know, the government isn't going to do anything that California is doing.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a fair point, Jay. We're kind of in a climate right now in which that's less likely to happen maybe than more likely.

• 1:15:09Speaker 04

  But Evan, I wonder how much of this is still just all the pandemic effect?

• 1:15:13Speaker 00

  It could be. Experts point to several factors and many of them are COVID-19 pandemic.

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, to identify a long-term trend.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Right, right.

• 1:15:22Speaker 04

  We're in the midst of this, yeah, this short-term effect.

• 1:15:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I'm not even sure how long 15 years is. I mean, that's, it's, you know, it's a decent amount of years, but I don't know if that's really, if that's really long enough even. I mean, we have to, they're going to run this test again apparently in 2028. And we'll get results in 2029 and figure out, you know, and let's see how another post-pandemic set of tests come out. So let's remain a little optimistic there, you know, that this is limited, but we do have to be aware of it. We need to make sure that teachers get the resources and support and training that they need to do the job, the real hard job that they have.

• 1:16:06Speaker 00

  And, you know, and spread out. We got to, we got to do better in making sure that all students have, have as much access to science learning as possible and not make it, you know, just spotty, you know, for some students rather than others. And I don't know, anything we can do to help reignite students' curiosity, you know, and make it applicable to real world, which is, which is exactly what it is. We have to get them to get into that mindset as well.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, I know, it's easily said, but.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  I know, we have to be aware of it, though. We have to be aware.

• 1:16:38Cara Santa Maria?

  And we have to want it.

• 1:16:40Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:16:41Cara Santa Maria?

  We have to, like, parents have to want this. They have to vote for people who are promoting this.

• 1:16:46Speaker 00

  Correct.

• 1:16:46Speaker 04

  All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

• 1:16:48Jay Novella?

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

• 1:17:06Jay Novella?

  Alright, you guys recognize this?

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  Yes, that's from the band Tangerine Dream from the 1970s. Speaking of old music, thank you, next one.

• 1:17:14Jay Novella?

  Okay, well, I'm gonna start here with Visto Tutti because he is my standard bearer. Visto says, "This sounds like the sounds one hears when under a steel bridge as vehicles pass over or above. The bridge, in quotes, sings as it resonates with the load of traffic." I really, really like this guess, and I've heard that sound that he's talking about. I get it, and it definitely has a very similar vibe to it, but that is not correct. Michael Sausido said, "Hey Jay, sounds like audio from an external camera on the ISS during a spacewalk or external repair." That one too is a cool guess. That is not it. I have not heard that sound. I'd like to hear that if I can find it. And, you know, again, of course, that sound has to be like

• 1:17:57Jay Novella?

  vibrating through solid matter because it's not gonna go from an external source outside to anywhere because there's no atmosphere. But, yeah, I could see that it would have a similar sound because it would have to go through metal, of course, right? Michael Blaney wrote in, he said, "Hi Jay, really getting the Star Trek: The Original Series vibes here. Some glowing orbs making a weird sound. Kirk is keeping an eye out for danger, not really paying attention, while Spock is raising an eyebrow, scanning away, and saying, 'Fascinating.'" That's funny, because I see what you're saying with this guess. He says, "To what made the noise? I'm going to guess it's some underwater steel pipe being struck by a hammer." These are all good guesses, however, none of them are correct.

• 1:18:41Jay Novella?

  But a listener named Paul Levine wrote in and said, "Hi Jay, this sounds like it could be an excerpt from 'I Am Sitting in a Room' by Alvin Loosier." So do you guys know what this is? Have you heard this?

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  No. I don't think so.

• 1:18:52Speaker 00

  No, I don't recognize it.

• 1:18:53Jay Novella?

  Let me play this for you. Let me play the original for you real quick. So this is the original recording.

• 1:19:00Speaker 08

  I am sitting in a room, different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice.

• 1:19:09Jay Novella?

  Okay, so he talks for, I think, a couple of minutes. Then what they do is they, so they record that, then, as an example, they upload it to YouTube, and then they download the audio, and they repeat. So, let me go a few generations forward.

• 1:19:27Speaker 08

  Articulated by speech.

• 1:19:29Jay Novella?

  Right, you hear the difference?

• 1:19:30Speaker 08

  I regard this activity-

• 1:19:32Jay Novella?

  Now I'll go forward a few more generations.

• 1:19:36Speaker 08

  Holding the sound of a speaking voice-

• 1:19:39Jay Novella?

  You can still hear words.

• 1:19:40Speaker 08

  And I'm going to get back into the room again.

• 1:19:44Jay Novella?

  Now let me jump ahead, like dozens of iterations.

• 1:19:56Jay Novella?

  So there is a, there's a, um, this is not lossless, right? This is there, there is a definite audio quality loss and there is anomalies that are happening that have an effect on the audio that comes out after the compression process. Does that make sense to you guys? Mm-hmm. So there's a degradation and it's just a cool experiment. I don't know how many times they did it. I think overall it, it, I don't know what point it actually makes. I do think it's interesting in its own right, though, and I, and I do find the sound very, like, I, I picked one where you could just barely maybe make out some words. Um, because if, if people could make out the words, then they would be able to figure it out by looking it up. But anyway, you know, this was a hard one.

• 1:20:41Jay Novella?

  I didn't get a lot of guesses and I, I only got one person that guessed it correctly. It's, if you know it, you know it. That's the thing. So now you guys know it and you, you could not be fooled by this. I have a new noisy, Steve. Mm-hmm. I don't know why I said your name right there, but, uh, this was sent in by a listener named, uh, Ada, who is from Seattle. What a coincidence. We were just talking about Seattle.

• 1:21:22Jay Novella?

  I'm gonna help you guys on this. It is not someone using an electric razor while riding in a helicopter. So that's not the guess, so don't send that in. I think this one's cool and I'm really looking forward to telling you what is actually going on here. So if you're interested in submitting a guess, or you heard something cool this week, email me at [email protected]. Steve, this show comes out on Saturday.

• 1:21:47Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:21:48Jay Novella?

  The date on Saturday is going to be the 13th. So people who are hearing this, like on the 13th, or the 14th, or the 15th, even the 16th, you could still buy tickets to our shows. I've been deliberately booking venues that have large audience sizes, just so I don't have to turn anybody away, because I really hate to do that. So we have seats available. The private show, the VIP, and the extravaganza are all going to be in the same theater. And this is about the Kansas shows that we're doing on the 20th of this month. So if you're interested in attending any of those shows, or if you heard the show last week where George was giving details about what we'll be doing, it's going to be a ton of fun. There's a lot, a lot of good entertainment here. You can go to the

• 1:22:33Jay Novella?

  skepticsguy.org to buy tickets for those things.

• 1:22:36Speaker 04

  All right. Thank you, Jay. I'm going to do a couple of emails. First one comes from Wichita, Kansas, speaking of Kansas. Oh, hello. Have you, or can you cover, gold nanowire gel electrolyte batteries, pros and cons? Thank you for your very informative and entertaining show. Curtis. All right. Thank you, Curtis. Have you guys heard of this? Gold nanowire gel batteries? Nope.

• 1:23:03Jay Novella?

  Nope.

• 1:23:04Speaker 04

  Well, they are great. They are- Then why don't we have them? They're extremely durable. So it has a gold nanowire core with a manganese dioxide shell. And the coating kind of fixes, it stabilizes it, so it prevents the, like, the cracking and disintegration that is a problem. And then the entire assembly is then encased in flexible plexiglass-like gel. And that is the electrolyte, right? So, advantages: extremely durability, huge lifespan, 200,000 cycles without any significant degradation, right? High performance, high-

• 1:23:39Jay Novella?

  High.

• 1:23:40Speaker 04

  ...specific density of, you know, energy density. So they're great, except for the fact that you are never, ever going to see them in any device. Well, right. I mean, yeah. So, this information is all from 2016.

• 1:23:56Speaker 04

  It's been nine years. So I looked for updates since this was reported in 2016 and there are no updates, basically. If there is anything happening in some lab somewhere, I have, I was not able to find information about it. The problem is that they like did the proof of concept. Yep, this all works. It's great. It's completely economically not viable.

• 1:24:19Speaker 00

  Right.

• 1:24:20Speaker 04

  Number one reason.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  That's a con. That falls into the con.

• 1:24:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's it. It's just not going to happen. Number one reason, what do you think?

• 1:24:26Jay Novella?

  They can't get the resources.

• 1:24:27Speaker 04

  Gold, gold nanowire. Whenever you see like gold or platinum or whatever, like if that's the key, it's like not going to happen. We're not going to be mass producing gold nanowire batteries.

• 1:24:38Jay Novella?

  So you hate gold, Steve? That's what you're saying?

• 1:24:40Speaker 04

  I'm just saying, when a precious metal is involved, that dramatically decreases the probability it's going to be economically viable. Number two, it's really hard to manufacture. This may be the bigger reason. It's just very hard to manufacture. So making a cost effective mass production process is not in the works, right? So no time soon are we going to see this technology. And I suspect they either have to reformulate it so that it is not made out of gold and it's easier to manufacture, or it's going to have to wait 10 or 20 years. And who knows if it'll even be cutting edge by then. Maybe some of the insights they got from this battery can be applied to other batteries, but it's just.

• 1:25:20Speaker 00

  A step towards something else.

• 1:25:21Speaker 04

  Whatever. It's just, it's stuck. It's stuck because it's of those two big problems that are, that are insoluble. So it's a great proof of concept, not practical, unfortunately, because it would be great. All right. Question number two. I don't have the person's name in here. This is about our otter discussion from last week. I get the appeal. I personally like river otters more than sea otters, but otters are monsters.

• 1:25:47Speaker 04

  And then he links to an article by Vox, Otters, the violent necrophiliac serial killers, killing fur monsters of the sea. Yeah. We've spoken about this before as well. Yeah, otters. So listen, here's the thing. We tend to anthropomorphize animals and we tend to think of this cute furry animal that holds hands and float on its back and, you know, puts stuff in his little pouches. They are adorable. They're absolutely adorable. But they are wild animals. We can't, these are not domesticated animals. They're wild animals. They are in the weasel family. And

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  they are, their behaviors are typical of wild animals, but even at the extreme end of the bell curve. You know what I mean? So they're one of the species that their, their typical mating behavior is violent, right? The males push the females' heads underwater. They bite them. They cause injury. They kill them sometimes. They're, they're, you know, that's where the necrophilia comes in. They won't necessarily stop their raid, their mating behavior if they kill the female in the middle of the process. So, yeah, they, they're wild, vicious animals, right? Just like you would expect a giant weasel to be. So, and it's, and every site you read about it is like, listen, I get it. They're cute. They're adorable.

• 1:27:11Speaker 04

  If you encounter them in the wild, keep your distance. They are wild animals. Do not be put off by the fact that they're cute and fuzzy and adorable.

• 1:27:21Jay Novella?

  Steve, so they do store shanks in those little folds?

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  They might. They might. Yeah, that's right. Of course they do.

• 1:27:26Jay Novella?

  Steve, we got some emails from people saying that they don't have favorite tools.

• 1:27:30Speaker 04

  But there's a video. They said, the one said that they don't store rocks. Oh. But I saw them putting a rock in its pouch.

• 1:27:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, yeah. They definitely store rocks.

• 1:27:40Jay Novella?

  I don't think it's because it's their favorite. They just happen to be using it, I think, at that.

• 1:27:44Cara Santa Maria?

  No, I think that a lot of them do use the same tool over and over. I think that's pretty well established.

• 1:27:49Jay Novella?

  I'm just telling you the emails we got. I don't want, you know.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  I sourced it pretty well.

• 1:27:53Cara Santa Maria?

  I agree with the person who wrote in, I also prefer river otters. They are definitely always my favorite to watch when I go to a zoo. Cause they're just really active and really fun.

• 1:28:05Jay Novella?

  Yeah, they do seem like they have even like a little sense of humor there, you know what I mean?

• 1:28:09Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, and they're so playful, like they play with toys.

• 1:28:12Jay Novella?

  But it's a perfect example though, Steve, right? Like it looks cute, it's doing cute things. I mean, it'll take a chunk out of you. Like you gotta stay away, it's a wild animal. Like, don't put honey on your kids' faces to get a good picture, you know?

• 1:28:26Speaker 04

  Clearly.

• 1:28:28Speaker 04

  Alright guys, it's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:28:35Speaker 03

  It's time for Science or Fiction?

• 1:28:45Speaker 04

  Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one they think is the fake. There is a theme this week. Do you guys know what happened 10 years ago?

• 1:28:59Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:29:00Speaker 04

  What? A lot of things, but anything science, technology related, having to do with astronomy? A new way of detecting stuff in the universe?

• 1:29:11Bob Novella?

  Oh, was that the Einstein thing?

• 1:29:13Speaker 04

  Multi-messenger astronomy? No, it's gravitational, yes, LIGO gravitational waves.

• 1:29:17Jay Novella?

  2015, wasn't it?

• 1:29:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, so that was LIGO coming online and detecting.

• 1:29:21Bob Novella?

  10 years already?

• 1:29:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been 10 years. 10 years of LIGO.

• 1:29:24Bob Novella?

  That was awesome, man. That was a big, big, a new category of astrophysics, like a new course.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  So the theme is gravitational waves. Okay?

• 1:29:35Jay Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:29:35Speaker 04

  Here we go. Item number one. Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks.

• 1:29:50Speaker 04

  All right, number two, a recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease, and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. And all right, number three, the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. Let's see, Bob, you are not going first, so Jay, go first.

• 1:30:23Jay Novella?

  Oh, Christ. I literally just said to myself, well, at least I'll hear what Bob says. All right, you want to play it this way? So the first one here, Steve, gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instrument in science in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks. I like what I'm hearing here. This is a hard question to answer, because, you know, if you're not in the field and you're not intimate with these instruments, you know, you have to have been very lucky to read about this at some point. But I do find this one to seem very sciencey. I think it's true.

• 1:31:04Jay Novella?

  The second one, a recent detection of LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole, they cannot decrease, and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas.

• 1:31:20Speaker 04

  I'll give you a little bit more info, since this is a very wordy one. So what Stephen Hawking said was that the area of, and some other guy too, but the area of a black hole's event horizon is proportional to entropy. And because entropy can never decrease in any closed system, this area also cannot ever decrease. And so when two black holes collide, if thermodynamics applies, right? So not only can the surface area can't decrease, it has to increase by at least a little bit. And A recent collision detection confirmed that.

• 1:32:01Jay Novella?

  I mean, how could I, you know, that sounds great, right? I mean, it's so complicated and it's so specific. I couldn't possibly, you know, give a good answer here. I'm just going by what my gut is saying. And I, I mean, I just feel like that made sense with what you just said. What else could I possibly do? So the third one, the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars. You know, Steve, this one sounds like BS to me. There's something about this I don't like. I don't know, Ev, you feeling that? I don't like it. That one's a fiction.

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  Okay, Kara.

• 1:32:38Cara Santa Maria?

  So you went with the smallest is two neutron stars as the fiction?

• 1:32:43Jay Novella?

  Yeah, I don't like it.

• 1:32:44Cara Santa Maria?

  All right, I'll go with Jay. I have no idea.

• 1:32:49Jay Novella?

  Oh, please let me be right.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  Okay, Evan.

• 1:32:53Speaker 00

  Ligo next?

• 1:32:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:54Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, God, Evan.

• 1:32:55Speaker 00

  Nice, nice.

• 1:33:01Speaker 00

  I hope everyone stayed around for the payoff on that. Okay, I'll, I guess I'll try to nail these in order a little bit. Second most precise measuring instrument in science. So what, they, Steve, was Ligo, was Ligo the first? Or there were gravitational wave detectors before that?

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  No, that was the first. And there's now two other ones.

• 1:33:21Speaker 00

  So in 10 years, we have the second most precise measuring instrument in science? In a 10-year window? That seems quick. I don't know, right? I mean, how did that happen? But I, look, I have no idea about any of these. The second one about colliding black holes confirming Stephen Hawking's theorem? Sure. I mean, I'm glad you gave a little extra descriptor there, Steve. It helped me definitely understand it a little better. And I don't see why that, I'm trying to find something in there to see why that would be wrong. The last one, Jay and Kara, about the smallest. Why is smallest in quotes here?

• 1:34:01Speaker 04

  Well, because you know, what does small mean? You know what I mean. This is the, this would be the least amount of disturbance in the gravitational spacetime continuum, whatever, that is getting picked up by LIGO.

• 1:34:12Speaker 00

  Not, not even Luke could detect that disturbance in the.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:34:17Speaker 00

  It's right. Uh, all right, well, I don't, I, so I'll go with my gut. I don't think in 10 years, they made the second most precise measuring instrument in all of science. That seems like, that would be incredible, but I don't know. I'll, I'll take the odds and say that one's fiction.

• 1:34:32Speaker 04

  Okay, and Bob?

• 1:34:33Bob Novella?

  All right, start with two here. Um, so LIGO detected two colliding black holes and confirmed Stephen Hawking's theorem that, okay, so the surface area of two colliding black holes, the event horizon cannot decrease greater than the sum. That's true. That is correct. I don't know, however, if they've confirmed this based on LIGO. That's, that's what I'm not sure of. Um, if they actually confirmed it, but it is true. The theory is that it's the, you know, it's going to be greater and not, not less, not, not, it's not going to be, it's not going to decrease. So, so huh, I don't know about that one. Um, the smallest gravitational type of event, two merging neutron stars. That's correct. That's the smallest. So it's, so it's like two, it goes like two neutron stars and a neutron star

• 1:35:18Bob Novella?

  and a black hole, and then two black holes. So yeah, the smallest is two neutron stars.

• 1:35:22Speaker 04

  Damn you, Bob.

• 1:35:23Speaker 00

  Combinations on a slot machine.

• 1:35:25Bob Novella?

  Pretty damn confident on that one. I mean, I mean, I like bet.

• 1:35:29Speaker 04

  But could you be wrong, Bob?

• 1:35:30Bob Novella?

  On that one? Probably not. Unless, unless he pulls his typical Steve baloney and comes up with some weird, weird crappy thing that I hadn't, I would be, but I would be shocked. I would be shocked. There's nothing, no, there's nothing smaller that it can detect. I mean, what's smaller, what, two colliding?

• 1:35:47Speaker 04

  I don't know. You tell me, man.

• 1:35:49Speaker 00

  What else makes gravitational waves?

• 1:35:50Bob Novella?

  Well, anything. Move your hand up and down. You're making gravitational waves.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  There you have it.

• 1:35:54Bob Novella?

  So, all right. So then let's go to, let's go to one now. Um, the most precise measuring instrument. So you're saying the second, LIGO is second, that technology.

• 1:36:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:36:04Bob Novella?

  Um, the second most precise. See, that one, I'm pretty skeptical of. I mean, LIGO can, they, that is so precise, it can detect, imagine this, something on the order of five or 10,000th the diameter of a proton.

• 1:36:20Speaker 04

  What?

• 1:36:20Bob Novella?

  It's, yeah, it can detect that, that, that type of movement, because that's what's over across, over, what, four kilometer arms of a LIGO? I mean, it's ridiculous. And even, even a, um, even an atomic clock, I think, isn't quite, but it depends how you define, you know, most precise. How you, how do you define that? I mean, a second over billions of years is pretty damn precise.

• 1:36:42Speaker 04

  So I'll tell you, since you're asking.

• 1:36:44Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  It's change in x over x, right? That's it. It's just how much of a change can it detect versus the size of the thing that it's detecting? So that's how you compare time and distance. Otherwise, you have to make it dimensionless, right? Otherwise, there's no way to compare those two things. So if you're just saying this relative uncertainty, you know, regardless of units, which one is more precise?

• 1:37:07Bob Novella?

  Yeah, I'm gonna say, I'm not certain on this one. I'm gonna say that, that this one is, is the fiction. Because the other ones are probably, probably correct with the, with the.

• 1:37:17Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:37:18Bob Novella?

  The caveat of number two.

• 1:37:19Cara Santa Maria?

  So what's the split?

• 1:37:20Speaker 04

  Okay, even split between one and three. So you all agree on the second one, so we'll start there. A recent detection by LIGO of colliding black holes confirms Stephen Hawking's theorem that the surface area of the event horizon of black holes cannot decrease, and the combined area of the merged black holes will be greater than the sum of the two areas. You all think this one is science. I guess the question here is, was it recently confirmed?

• 1:37:43Bob Novella?

  That's it. That's the question.

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Was it, was it just neither confirmed nor disconfirmed, or was it disconfirmed, right? So which of those three possibilities? And this one?

• 1:37:56Speaker 04

  Hopefully not like. Maybe not like a. Science, this is like, I wouldn't make it, no, it was Atlas that did it, not like, I wouldn't do that to you, obviously. Bob would. But yeah, so it was, uh.

• 1:38:06Bob Novella?

  Nice.

• 1:38:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, two, two merging black holes, they were able to, you know, estimate the surface area of the event horizons. And it's like, yep, it confirms what Hawking's predicted.

• 1:38:16Bob Novella?

  So from the gravitational waves, they confirmed the, the area of the, wow.

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  Pretty cool. Now, this only includes classic relativistic understanding of black holes. It does not, the idea that the, it's the, uh, event horizon can never decrease. It can because of quantum effects, because of Hawking radiation, exactly. So if you include that, it, it can. But the idea that other than that, other than Hawking radiation.

• 1:38:47Bob Novella?

  Yeah, but that's not really happening.

• 1:38:49Speaker 04

  It is, but it's interesting that black holes are thermodynamic objects.

• 1:38:54Bob Novella?

  Yes.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  That are, obey the laws of thermodynamics in terms of entropy and.

• 1:38:59Bob Novella?

  Huge revelation.

• 1:39:00Speaker 04

  Energy and everything. Yeah, it's massive. Um, very interesting. All right, let's go back to number one, I guess. Gravitational wave detectors are the second most precise measuring instruments in science in terms of relative uncertainty, second only to atomic clocks. Bob and Evan, you both think this is fiction, but for opposite reasons. Bob, you think it's the most sensitive. And Evan, you think that even second is too much because it's only been, had this technology for 10 years. Right. Well, this one is the fiction.

• 1:39:32Bob Novella?

  Yeah, baby.

• 1:39:33Cara Santa Maria?

  Oh, man, Jay, we were on a good streak for a while.

• 1:39:36Speaker 04

  You were, but why? Is Evan right or is Bob right?

• 1:39:39Bob Novella?

  I took you guys down.

• 1:39:40Speaker 04

  Bob's right? Bob is right. It is the most, the most precise by several orders of magnitude. Atomic clocks are the second, are number two. And it's interesting because I was thinking about that, what's more precise? Atomic clocks are getting pretty damn precise.

• 1:39:55Bob Novella?

  They are.

• 1:39:56Speaker 04

  I would have thought that.

• 1:39:57Bob Novella?

  And they've been jumping up in the past 10 years. They've been like, oh, now 10 times more.

• 1:40:02Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's why it was like, until you look at the specific. I wouldn't, I don't know that I would be able to have guessed the answer to this question.

• 1:40:09Bob Novella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  Why make that comparison, except when you're ma- formulating a science or fiction, right?

• 1:40:14Bob Novella?

  Right, right. Do you remember, we did a news item about atomic clocks where the, if one atomic clock is higher on the wall than the other one, then their times drift because they're, because they're in a gravity.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  That's precise. But it's like 10 to the 18th versus 10 to the 21 in terms of their relative uncertainty. So it's three orders of magnitude.

• 1:40:32Bob Novella?

  Alright.

• 1:40:33Speaker 04

  For LIGO.

• 1:40:34Bob Novella?

  That makes sense. I mean, yeah, LIGO's, LIGO's king, man. That's ridiculous. The, a, a fraction of the width of a proton, it could extinguish. It's nuts.

• 1:40:42Speaker 04

  Now, there are some, some, uh, particle physics, yeah, calculations, like we could make statements about the size of particles, but that's not the same thing as relative uncertainty, right? So it didn't really apply. Um, alright, that means that the smallest gravitational type of event current gravitational wave detectors can detect is the merger of two neutron stars is science. Um, and those are Bob's correct, those are the three types of events. Neutron star with neutron star, neutron star with black hole, black hole with black hole. That's it. Those are the three types of events.

• 1:41:13Bob Novella?

  See, if you guys paid more attention to me, you wouldn't have gotten that wrong.

• 1:41:16Speaker 04

  Now, but Bob, the thing is, the thing that might have thrown you on that was what if we just discovered a gravitational wave from the merger of a neutron star and a white dwarf? Or a black hole and a white dwarf? Then, right, for example.

• 1:41:30Bob Novella?

  Right. But that, I, I would consider that incredibly unlikely based on what I know about LIGO.

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  I agree. But that's the other thing is like, so definitely nu- two neutron stars colliding is the quote unquote smallest gravitational event that gravitational wave detectors have detected, definitely. But I don't know if that means that's the theoretical limit, but it probably is.

• 1:41:51Bob Novella?

  No, I, I would, I would think that it would require a change to the technology. Like, like to detect, to detect massive black hole collisions, you need to tweak the tech to do that. As it is now, it's not going to do it.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  But they are getting way more precise. And they're in that they are decre- mainly because they're decreasing the background noise. So this is the reason why this is the first time we've confirmed.

• 1:42:13Bob Novella?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:42:14Speaker 04

  The, you know, Hawking.

• 1:42:15Bob Novella?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  Because the previous ones, we didn't, there was too much background noise to say this with any certainty. But now, it's, the signal is just way cleaner. And that allowed for this calculation and, and the confirmation of, of. Hawkins theorem.

• 1:42:30Bob Novella?

  Yeah, yeah, probably the processing of the signal is just so much better with the software. Maybe even AI, maybe even AI being used as well. Ooh, so this was, Jay, this was my, uh, what you call it, how did you describe? Slumdog millionaire.

• 1:42:42Speaker 04

  This is your slumdog millionaire.

• 1:42:44Cara Santa Maria?

  Slumdog moment, yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 00

  Slumdog millionaire.

• 1:42:46Speaker 04

  All right, well, good job, Bob and Evan.

• 1:42:49Speaker 00

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:42:50Speaker 04

  Evan, give us, give us a quote.

• 1:42:52Jay Novella?

  I'm offended by you not telling me and Kara that.

• 1:42:56Speaker 04

  You feel bad about yourself?

• 1:42:57Jay Novella?

  Well, I don't like that you hurt your self-esteem. Why are you singling us out?

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  No. Evan, give us a quote.

• 1:43:04Speaker 00

  Don't pay attention to my stuff.

• 1:43:08Speaker 00

  We have heard the expression, "The pen is mightier than the sword."

• 1:43:12Speaker 04

  The penis mightier.

• 1:43:13Speaker 00

  The penis mightier. Been joked about many times, many times. Well, you know, you go to, you go to make that your quote for the week, and then you go to look up exactly where it came from. And guess where you go down? The rabbit hole. The rabbit hole. Where did this come from? Oh, it was actually, yes, it was made popular in 1872, but it was also written in 1700. It was also written in, you know, 1690. It was, and it goes all the way back, the way, way, way back to the earliest iteration of this. "The word is mightier than the sword." By Ahikar, the Assyrian sage from the folklore titled "The Story of Ahikar."

• 1:43:53Speaker 00

  Earliest written version of this appeared in Egypt in the 5th century BCE. And the folklore is said to be even hundreds of years older than that. And that is the earliest written substantiation for this, for this particular phrase. I like that they say the word is mightier than the sword, you know, as compared to the pen is mightier. Because the word is, is not, it can be also the written word, the spoken word, language itself. Using our words, using, using our brains, using our ideas. As opposed to, you know, resorting to, you know, some of the, well, shall we say, weaker parts of the human character.

• 1:44:38Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, but the pen is a tool, like a sword.

• 1:44:40Speaker 00

  The pen is, the pen is a tool.

• 1:44:42Cara Santa Maria?

  And the pen didn't exist back when this was, when, right? There were no pens, were there?

• 1:44:46Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:44:47Cara Santa Maria?

  That's why, that's why they didn't call it that to begin with.

• 1:44:50Speaker 00

  They were just chisels.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  The clay tablet is mightier than this.

• 1:44:53Cara Santa Maria?

  Yeah, it doesn't roll off the tongue.

• 1:44:55Speaker 04

  The chisel is mightier than this.

• 1:44:57Speaker 00

  It would have been good in a Mel Brooks movie to have fun with that. But the word is mightier than the sword.

• 1:45:04Speaker 04

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

• 1:45:15Speaker 04

  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.

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