SGU Episode 653

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SGU Episode 653
January 13th 2018
Astronaut John W. Young
SGU 652                      SGU 654
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Even when I have no power over important events in my life, I gain a feeling of control from understanding them. And I, too, have a sense of wonder. For me, discovering the workings of nature is a vibrant, satisfying experience that is both intellectual and emotional. To recognize the astronomical relationship between the Sun and the Earth, or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light, does not strip the sunset of its beauty.
Stuart Vyse, American psychologist
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Introduction

Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday, January 10th, 2018, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening folks!

Jay's Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease (0:26)

S: Jay is back from the dead.

J: The land of the dead is a terrible place, guys. You don't want to go there. I had hand, foot, and mouth disease.

C: Ew. Ew.

J: So before you get totally grossed out, it's a virus, okay? So you can think of it like it's a cold, it's a flu, it's another virus out there. So you get cold symptoms. The first thing that can happen and what does happen to most kids and adults is you get like a fever and some flu symptoms. Kids, you know, have a varying degree. They can have like – they'll get some rash a little bit here and there, some kids worse than others. But a lot of times, I think kids for the most part, they don't get it as bad as adults. Very similar to chicken pox. Like if you get it as an adult, it's really bad. So I got it as an adult. Let me tell you, it was really bad. It was really bad. Like this was the worst sickness I've ever had in my entire life. It's been a week and a half. I'm not contagious anymore, but I still have cold symptoms. I still feel lousy. But the worst part of this whole thing was that you get sores all over your hands, your feet, your legs, your backside, and your throat.

S: And your ass neck.

J: Yeah, your ass neck. It started, I got one little bump on my hand. That's nothing. And my wife was like, you're not going to work this week. And I'm like, you're out of your mind. It was right after New Year's. It was New Year's Day when she says that to me. She's like, hey, we had a kid at the house that had this virus and that was for Christmas Eve. Our kids got it. They got the fever and they were fine. She's like, you're showing the adult fever blisters. You're going to get covered in this stuff. And I'm like, oh, my God. Maybe it won't be bad and all that. And I'm telling you, like, 11 in the morning, I noticed a red dot in my hand. And by 4 o'clock that night, I wanted to rip my hands off with, like, a mechanical chicken de-skinner. That's where I was at with this. And it lasted four full days of just not knowing what to do with my hands.

E: Oh, agony.

J: Agony. The itchiness was so profound. Like, calamine lotion, that stuff is a joke for this. Like, it doesn't do anything. You know, you've got to keep your hands moisturized, too, because your skin starts to get super dry. And at some point, I'm just literally walking around the house, well, hobbling around the house because I had the blisters on my feet. But you're walking around the house, like, holding my hands out in front of me like, what do I do with these? They're not usable. They're no longer 10 digits. It's just area of skin that is causing you so much pain and discomfort. you can't believe it.

S: It's like being in the agony booth with Captain Warthog.

J: Right. So by Thursday afternoon, I felt the itchiness start to drop. And it was like, oh my God, you know, I could start to like bend my fingers and like actually like flex my hands a little bit. And then just every day since then, it's a little bit better, a little bit better. And the blisters like dried up and now turned into like, super deep tissue calluses.

S: Yeah. We saw you on Sunday when we did the show, and your hands looked like they were polka dotted. They were bad.

J: It's very humbling. I dislocated fingers on my right hand in a very, very two-mile-an-hour slow mountain biking accident that I did all by myself. I was almost going in reverse. That's how slow it was. But when you lose the use of part of your body, It's profound. Your life stops. You're not living when things like this are happening. You are just going from moment to the moment, just trying to get through it. You know what I mean? I think the lesson here is you got to be really, especially in colder climates where people spend a lot more time indoors and things like that, you really got to be careful sanitize-wise. Wash your hands often in the winter. Just leaving the restroom at work, I was thinking like, wow, I can't go to work. I can't be around my coworkers. Even if I had extraordinarily good etiquette, I just touch one surface with something like hand, foot, and mouth, and it could live on that surface for long enough for a lot of people to get it.

S: Well, that's the thing. I know we've said this before. It's like just don't be a hero. If you have a communicable disease, stay home. Don't share it with the whole office.

C: I don't know. Steve, I'm interested in your opinion on this. But like I had – I think I had norovirus for about two days earlier this week, which is horrible. But I'm feeling much better now. And when I was looking at hashtags like norovirus hashtags on Twitter, there were so many hospitals saying like, if you think you have this, wait it out. Don't bring it to the hospital. Like we've had to shut down wards because it's so contagious. And so it must be a tough thing to be in that position where you're like, am I so sick? I should go to a hospital or am I so sick? I shouldn't bring this to the hospital. Yeah.

J: That's interesting to think. You could be in a situation where the hospital doesn't even want you.

C: Yeah, because you're not so sick that you can't take care of yourself. It's a virus. It'll pass on its own. You're going to feel miserable, but you have to wait it out. But you could make a lot of people who are immune suppressed really sick.

S: Yeah, you have to use judgment. You have to use judgment. Ironically, if you're sick, you should not go to the hospital. If you have a communicable disease and you don't need to be hospitalized yourself, stay away. That's always a good rule of thumb. And if you have kids, be alert to your kids' symptoms and if – when in doubt, keep them isolated too. Because that's a large reason why there are so many viruses going around in the winter. As Jay said, people are crammed together. Kids are in school. They're all together. Kids are just slobbering all the time. So yeah, they're just shedding viruses everywhere.

B: Maybe we should make more use of general purpose hazmat suits.

E: General purpose ones? Yeah.

B: I could see that.

J: It really is the little things like, on a personal level, keeping your hands clean and trying to be aware of all the different things that you're touching. When you pay attention and you build up a little bit of a mind for how much surfaces you're touching, even walking through the office, I found myself, just because I like stimulation, I like to run my hand on countertops when i walk by them.

S: don't do that you know.

J: you just do these things unconsciously and then you know i know it might be weird. it's true bob but you know we we live in a physical world. it's like i just like the way things feel. i like the tactile stimulation and i'm like wow i'm i'm sick. you know if i do that well first off junkie you don't want to get more sick like steve freaked me out with like the super virus. what did you call that steve?

S: No, it's just if you get sick on top of already being sick, it's a super infection, which is not uncommon because it's usually more than one thing going around. And if your immune system is busy fighting off one thing, it's going to be more susceptible to getting another infection. But Jay, there's some good news.

J: Yes.

E: Good news, everyone. (in Professor Farnsworth voice) "Good news, everyone!"

Steve and Bob's VR fun (7:19)

S: I got a virtual reality headset for Christmas.

J: Well, be fair, Steve. You got it because I texted your wife and said, this is what you should get Steve for Christmas.

S: Yeah, you basically convinced my wife that that's what I needed to get. And it was a great recommendation. It is awesome. Really, really loving. I got the Vive. We've talked about it on the show, but it's just different when you experience it firsthand. It is. And I know Bob was over a couple of days ago on Sunday, and I had already explained my experience to him. And then he put the head – Bob, you put it on. What was your experience? You wrote it.

B: It was amazing. I haven't been in real VR in quite a while. Just waiting for it to mature enough. And it was amazing. I mean, you had me. I put it on. First off, the interface was fantastic. The graphics were really good. I love how it tells you, oh, by the way, there's a wall here. She was like a grid.

E: Puts up a grid.

B: Yeah, like a holodeck grid. There's a real wall there. So that was great. So Steve's like, go in the elevator. Hit the top button. I go to the top button. The door opens. And there's like a pirate's plank walking out. Into the open air above 40 stories. And I've jumped out of planes. I've been in a hang glider. I've been in a sail plane. I mean, I've done this crazy stuff. I was intimidated as hell because it was so realistic. The immersion was so good. And it was fun because... Because I knew I was safe, of course, but I was kind of just kind of embracing the visceral fear because it was so realistic. I was hesitant. It took me like eight to ten seconds to step off that plank because it was just so real. And of course, once you step off the plank, you fall and you die. But it didn't hurt or anything. But it was amazing.

E: That's an upgrade if you want the pain simulation module.

C: That's excellent.

J: You had a legitimate moment of pause because – Your brain was telling you this is real and this is dangerous.

B: Jay, it was visceral. It was surprisingly realistic.

S: Yeah, so that's what I was surprised at too with that. The immersion is seamless. It works. You are in the physical space that you appear to be in. I was playing – I'm exploring some of the different games that I'm playing with my daughters. So I was playing a Rick and Morty VR game with one of my daughters.

C: You're basically in their house. You guys just salivated. Rick and Morty.

S: It's cartoon but you're in their world. You're in their house. You're in the garage and you can interact with everything. You can pick up anything in the garage.

B: Wait, and you didn't put me in Rick and Morty's universe? Why didn't you do that?

S: I hadn't done that. Next time.

B: Okay.

S: But the immersion and the feel is so real. I actually almost fell because I tried to lean against a virtual counter. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. That happens all the time. Yeah.

B: Whoops.

J: Better make sure that you don't go into any virtual toilets, Steve, right? Yeah.

B: When I – I was in VR in Steve's house for like what, Steve? Ten minutes?

S: Yeah, yeah.

B: When I handed him the goggles and stuff back, I said civilization – not civilization is doomed but I am even more convinced now that in the future, we are going to be spending a significant fraction of our life in VR. It's just going to be like why – Why deal with reality when you could create your own universe and still communicate? You could still do work. You could still buy – you could still do a lot of useful things besides goofing off. You could do a lot of great stuff. I mean it's going to be – people are going to just be so addicted. They're going to be like smelly and unshaven and unclean in their chair because they've been in VR for three days.

S: Some people will do that. It's going to happen. Some people will.

J: It's a cool coincidence that Ready Player One is coming out soon, I guess, right in April.

B: There you go.

J: I read the book. The book is fantastic. The book is wonderful, especially if you have any knowledge of the 80s. You will completely appreciate the book. But I mean, I agree with you, Bob. I think when you think about the way we could use augmented reality or use virtual reality to enhance our experiences, I mean, you could, as an example – There will be apps like this. Like do you want to walk around Rome? Do you want to walk around places in foreign countries?

S: Jay, they already exist. I mean so I've been dabbling with partly because I wanted to talk about it on the show in as many different kinds of things as possible. So here's like the quick overview. For video games, it's awesome. It's just an awesome video game interface. The ability to look around corners, for example, to interact in three-dimensional space with everything there. My favorite game right now, it's The Lab produced by Valve and it's in the Portal universe, which is fun. But this one game is you're defending a castle. So you're like standing on a tower. You have a bow and you shoot arrows and the shooting of the arrows – and I'm an archer. I shoot arrows – Obviously, if you're not physically doing anything, the technical skill isn't there. But in terms of the aiming and the physics of the arrow and everything, it's pretty realistic. And you're defending your castle as the barbarians or you have to shoot all the barbarians before they break down your gates. It's really fun. You could peek down the wall and – It's an amazing, amazing gaming interface for entertainment. So I watched like a little short vignette. It's like a little – like a movie short animated and it was really good. You're like standing in the middle of the action. You can look anywhere. What are those people doing down there? What's going on over here?

J: You watched something that was cinematic. In a 3D environment that you could actually move around in.

S: Yes.

J: Steve, you were also saying, and I have read about this extensively. I know that you could do this. You could watch a movie inside the headset as if you were in a movie theater, like a big screen movie theater.

S: Yeah, there's that mode too. I downloaded the VR virtual desktop, and that's basically – it's like a theater view where it's just a hovering screen and you're in the middle of a 360-degree space. But that's kind of gimmicky right now. That's like a novelty. I think for productivity, not quite there yet. There's no reason why I would use a virtual desktop. There's no real advantage to it at this point. You just have a downgrade in resolution.

B: But for gaming, for entertainment – Steve, that said, HTC Vive just showed at CES their new upgrade.

S: Yeah, I know.

B: It's like 78 percent more pixels. So the resolution might have crossed that point at this point or it might still be very, very close. But I mean it's just a no-brainer. It will get there. You'll have 8K goggles at some point, 10K.

S: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, real vision. And they're working on eye tracking so they can have high definition where you're looking.

B: Yeah, like a fovea. Excellent.

S: Yeah, exactly. That would be it. So if I'm trying to read small text, it will come into focus. But yeah, that's not there yet. The other thing is like with the entertainment, it's like it's actually a new medium. So yeah, at first, you'll just be watching movies in VR. But when they explore how to optimize the entertainment for VR – Which you're already starting to do, then it will really take off. Like for example, action can wait until you look at it, right? So there's another one of the games within the – which Bob, you experienced very quickly in the lab is just like a wizard's lair. Yeah. That was excellent. Yeah, that's just a proof of concept. Not really anything going on yet. But like for example, when you look up at the ceiling, there are bats hanging from the ceiling and they fly away when you look at them, no matter when you look at them. At some point when you're in there, if you look up at the ceiling, that's when they'll fly away. And there are like creatures in the lab that will follow you, that will look at you wherever you go, for example. So yeah, there's an interactive three-dimensional immersive layer to the game or the entertainment. That's off the hook. And Jay, for educational purposes or vicarious, you know, just visiting places, like again, proof of concept types of things, you can visit Mount Everest. I've stood on the top of Mount Everest, you know, in virtual reality. It's pretty damn good. Yeah. For that kind of stuff, even with the resolution that they have now, it was a very, very visceral experience. So I think absolutely the sense that you are there is complete. That's the thing. It really is complete.

E: Do they have a program where you're standing on the surface of the moon yet and you're looking out?

B: Oh, I love it.

S: I've stood on the surface of Mars. Nice. And you're on Mars. That's as close as we will get, guys, to being on the surface of Mars. True.

B: But it's really like Mars. I mean it's the real data. It's not like made up.

S: No, it's real pictures. It's pictures.

B: If you were there, this is how it would look. The thing is to me, this technology is like – it's like the high-end phones. Say what? In the 90s, maybe in the early 90s where they were good phones. They were elaborate. They could do lots of stuff. But they were still kind of tethered to the desk and on the cusp, on the verge of becoming portable phones and then eventually smartphones. Smartphones, yeah. I mean this is the progression. This is the start. But it's there. I mean it's worth buying. now I think. I'm seriously considering spending the money, $600 to get this.

S: I'm totally getting my money's worth out of this. Absolutely. It's above the waterline. It's totally there. And every incremental improvement will make it a lot better. We're still on that steep part of the curve. A little bit more resolution, you'll notice it. It will be great. A little bit more peripheral vision, it will be fantastic. They're coming out with wireless, so you don't have to – the wires are not that big a deal, but it would be nice to get rid of them. That will make the experience a little bit better.

B: So those are the keys, Steve, I think. Your Vive was fantastic. It needs a little bit more peripheral vision like you said. It needs to be wireless. That we're probably going to see very – the next big thing. And then the resolution is already kind of there. The latest version is already out and at least it's being demonstrated. And then the only other thing is portability. And like I've said on the show before, I'm waiting for the point where it's pretty much like glorified sunglasses that could do all of this, wraparound sunglasses, full peripheral. Or augmented. To me, that's the end game. Or if you want to go a little farther and say like contacts. But that's the track that they're on. And those are all so doable. It's just a matter of money, research, and a little time. We're going to see this stuff in 10 years. Imagine in 10 years it's going to be like smartphones at that point.

J: I want to play the penetration. I want to play City of Heroes, like a superhero's MMO inside a virtual reality.

E: That's it. That's the end game for me too.

S: I agree. Yeah, because the thing that I was showing Bob where you're on the plank, you could fly around that virtual city. And while I was doing that, I'm like, holy crap, this is City of Heroes.

B: Totally, totally. Yes.

E: Makes sense. Yeah.

S: That would be incredible.

B: The other critical thing that will come is the tactile feedback. Like I was pressing a button on the bridge of the Enterprise, which is awesome just being on the bridge. But I was saying if we just had some tactile glove so that you could feel when you hit that button, that would add a whole new dimension because, of course, it's the haptic feedback. But that's the other big thing.

S: There's a little bit. It vibrates, whatever. That's all you need, just a little bit.

J: I'm saving up to get the headset you have, Steve.

S: I would like to put boots on or just ankle bracelets or something for it to know where my feet are. So if I want to kick something or if I'm walking, you could walk or run in place and then your character would run because it knows where your feet are.

C: Yeah, there are VR companies that have that now, but you have to have these like – I've done a few shoots with them. You basically have to have these posts around you. Like let's say if you're in the middle of a room, you've got four posts almost like microphone stands that are really tall and they have these little like balls on the top and they're sensors. And then you can operate within that space. But until – like the space itself has to be mapped. Yeah. in order to know where you are relative to the story.

S: That's what I had to do too. So I have two sensors. I just have two sensors at corners of my office. I had to map the space so it knows where to put the walls, so where the obstacles are. And then, yeah, it knows where I am in that space. It knows where my controllers are, which basically means it knows where my hands are. It knows where my head is because it knows where the visor is. So just add feet and then it pretty much can infer where I am. Yeah.

C: Yeah, add feet and also maybe like weapons. I've done a really cool thing.

S: I have weapons.

C: Oh, you have weapons. Okay, cool. And it can see where they are in space. Yeah, that's awesome.

S: The thing is the controller can become a virtual weapon.

C: Gotcha, gotcha.

S: And then it has a trigger. The controller has a trigger.

J: Cara is saying though instead of holding the Vive controller – You should be able to get some type of blaster or a gun or something that it feels like has the shape of a different kind of weapon. that is a controller as well.

C: They'll do that eventually.

S: The controller has a trigger and it totally feels like you're holding a weapon. It does.

B: It really does. It didn't matter. Not two-handed.

E: It feels the same.

S: Not two-handed, but it feels like any pistol, any one-handed weapon, it's perfectly fine.

C: Yeah, I'm sure that if people are really into certain games, you know, you get to a point where like you're so into Call of Duty that it's really important that you have like the feel of your weapon or you're really into a driving game and you really want a wheel. Like those things will come out. Someone's going to develop that. Or a guitar, whatever.

S: Exactly. There will be accessories for all those kinds of stuff.

C: But to approximate it now is a good start. The fact that they thought to do that. Yeah, that's cool.

S: Right. And the games that they're making for VR are so much – are so fantastic. The games that they're adapting to VR are still good. But yeah, you could tell that this is not really optimized for it. Like I've been playing Fallout 4 in VR and it's fun. but Fallout 4 is not optimized for VR. But even these cheesy little games that were made for VR are incredible, incredible.

E: Fallout 5. I'm sure they'll have that ready for VR, I'm sure.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely. Yeah, so... I think we're just crossing that waterline where the technology is there. I think interest is there and the software is starting to come out because it's always a chicken and egg thing. Like you need the applications for people to want to get the hardware but people need to have the hardware for the companies to invest in the software. It has to sort of bootstrap itself up. But I think we're there and now I'm hoping that like the software is going to really explode and then everyone is going to need to get the VR headset. It's already kind of happening, like even among our group, right? Like we got – I downloaded the Star Trek bridge crew and my god, guys. That is like our life stream. We are on the bridge of Star Trek.

B: Nerd.

E: heading to SETI Alpha 6.

S: I gotta tell you that the intro you're in a shuttle and you're like just sort of circling around the ship and it's not a constitution class. it's an aegis class starship but it's actually better than a constitution class. it's gorgeous it's freaking gorgeous and that is also because it fills your entire visual field. you know it's like you're in orbit around the earth circling around this beautiful ship and you're there and it's awesome. When you're on the bridge and your controllers look like hands and when you pull the trigger, it's like you're moving your fingers and you're actually pushing buttons on a console.

E: Spotted hands in Jay's case. That's right.

S: So anyway, that's the kind of application that's going to make people want to get VR and then the more people get VR, the more awesome applications are going to come out.

J: I think I'll have it soon, Steve. I mean I just got to bend reality to make it happen. Yeah.

S: Okay.

E: Soon.

S: So we'll keep you updated on the VR experience. But so far, two thumbs up. It's awesome. Okay. Cara, get us started with what's the word?

What's the Word? (23:23)

• Eutrophication

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C: Absolutely. So the word this week was recommended by Ben Allison from New York. I love this word mostly because I really learned something new, like really learned something new when this word was recommended because I had never used it, but I know I had come across it before. So the word this week is eutrophication, E-U-T-R-O-P-H-I-C-A-T-I-O-N, eutrophication. And eutrophication is an interesting phenomenon wherein a lot of chemical nutrients, mostly nitrogen or phosphorus or some combination of both of those— end up in an ecosystem, usually a liquid ecosystem. So think about a lake. This is a pretty natural process that occurs in lakes as lakes age through geological time. So there's stuff that lives in it. There's stuff that lives near it. That stuff dies and decays and all of the bacteria die. from the decaying matter ends up in that lake. And over time, the nutritional content, especially with that nitrogen and phosphorus builds up and builds up and builds up. Unfortunately, that process is massively accelerated by inorganic compounds that run off, usually from agriculture, from development, from pollution, things like detergents and pesticides and things like that. And what ends up happening is that these nutrients cause certain organisms like phytoplankton algae to bloom. It causes them to develop really rapidly and grow and grow and grow. And that chokes off oxygen to lower levels of the lake. So you've got all this life existing on the surface because there's all this great nutritional content and no light can pass through. And so the lake actually dies. And this is responsible for a lot of the quote unquote dead zones that we read about in the ocean. These algae blooms are usually secondary to this process of eutrophication. So I read up a little bit about the different types of the different terms that are used here, the different bands, I guess. There's dystrophic, meaning that there's like no nutrients, very little. There's oligotrophic, meaning that there's a little amount. A few? Yeah, a few. Mesotrophic, right there in the middle. Eutrophic means that there's a lot of nutrition. And then hypertrophic is... Too much. Yeah, but eutrophic actually is too much too. So in the Wikipedia article, it even does say precisely hypertrophication, although it does seem like eutrophication is the term. that is most often used in the scientific literature and also in the media. So this term was actually coined by George Heinrich Weber, spelled Weber, but I'm sure it's Weber because it's German. I'm not sure, but I'm assuming. In 19... And the word actually is a direct translation from the Greek, which really means exactly what it is, well-nourished. That root, which was mentioned by Ben Allison, who wrote this in, said he's super interested in the root eugenics or eukaryote, which seems to have a broad range of uses. But the truth of the matter is that word-forming element means good word. And so almost any time that you see it, the original usage was some form of that, good nutrition, for example. Or like you said, eugenics, unfortunately, at the time, that was what they meant by that word.

S: Good genes.

C: Yeah, we won't get too deep into that. But yeah, they did. That's why they used that word forming, the prefix at the beginning. Yeah. So yeah, it's a really interesting term because it's really, I think, relevant for a lot of what we talk about on the show, a lot of trending news items about climate change and about acidification in the ocean, but about specifically these algae blooms. And I guess I didn't fully understand that full phosphorus cycle, that full cycle wherein there's actually more nutrition, which leads to a choking off or like a hypoxic environment than in which organisms can't grow because they're not getting enough light and they're also not getting enough oxygen.

S: And that's – yeah, there's a big problem with that in the Gulf of Mexico because of agricultural runoff through the Mississippi and a lot of it just ends up in the Gulf. And then you get the algae bloom and then the dead zone.

C: Yep. And we've seen this, I think, historically in certain lakes. We started really learning about this several decades ago and have been able to affect change in certain lake ecosystems to try to save those lakes when we first realized that they were really suffering.

S: That's why we need to genetically modify crops to fix their own nitrogen from the atmosphere so we don't have to use as much nitrogen fertilizer.

C: Yeah. That would be great.

S: That would solve that problem. All right. Thanks, Cara. Jay, so I understand that another astronaut has passed away this past week.

News Items

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B:

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J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Astronaut John Young Dies (28:48)

• Astronaut John Young, Who Walked on the Moon and Led 1st Shuttle Mission, Dies at 87

J: Yeah, that's right. So NASA's longest-serving astronaut, John Young – Died on January 5th at the age of 87. I think he succumbed to pneumonia. But what a life John Young had. He flew two Gemini missions, two Apollo missions, and two space shuttle missions. So the two Apollo missions he flew both went to the moon, and he was one of the first three astronauts to fly two moon missions. Actually, there was only three astronauts that ever did fly two moon missions, and he was one of them. And he was the ninth person to walk on the moon, and he got to spend over 20 hours moonwalking. And, Bob, just so you know, that's a lot more than Michael Jackson. So Young logged in a total of 34 days in space. And by today's standards, right, because of the International Space Station, that might not seem like a lot. But keep in mind, he was traveling in some of the most cramped, horrible quarters that you could ever imagine, you know, ever want to even pilot. The space station today is palatial compared to the Gemini capsules, right? I mean, think about it. I mean, there's a lot of areas in the space station where you could do somersaults and do all sorts of maneuvers, and they have actually – have real space in there where you don't feel so claustrophobic. But Young piloted the very first Gemini missions along with Gus Grissom, and those capsules were tiny. I mean, you're in there with another person. You're almost on top of each other.

S: Yeah, you could see them at the Air and Space Museum. You look inside like, oh, my goodness. There were people crammed in there for days.

J: Yeah, like you're in a chair shaped like your body, and there's a person sitting a foot and a half to your left in a mirror version of what you're in, and there is no place to go. You just have the front of that capsule in front of you, and that's it. So did you guys know that John – Actually, it was the astronaut that smuggled the corned beef sandwich aboard the Gemini 3.

E: Oh, he's the corned beef sandwich astronaut. I forgot about that.

J: He just pulled it out and started eating it when he was up in space. I love that. Awesome. Like the balls, right? Like, oh, my God. He's really like, yep, I'm bringing this with me.

S: At least they sell it like. that was kind of the culture of the astronauts, especially in the early days. They were mavericks.

B: Yeah, they were like test pilots, man.

J: Oh, yeah. Most of them came up as test pilots. And all of the astronauts were heavily educated, very intelligent, very, very accomplished even before they became astronauts. So Young was the first astronaut to orbit the moon alone. And this was on the Apollo 10 mission. He walked on the moon. like I said, for Apollo 16. And during that mission, he lived on the moon in the Orion lunar module for close to three days. It was almost three full days. And he also drove the lunar rover on the moon. And he collected 211 pounds or 96 kilograms of moon rock that they brought back to the Earth. Think about that. He actually drove a vehicle on another celestial body. And he lived there. He woke up on the moon. He had a night of sleep, woke up on the moon.

B: Wow.

C: That's amazing.

B: I never really thought of that.

E: That's still amazing to think about.

J: And during that mission, NASA told him that the government had decided to create the space shuttle. So he heard about the space shuttle money being approved while he was actually on the moon. Which I think is really, really cool. And by coincidence, nine years later, in 1981, Young would command the flight of the very first space shuttle mission aboard Space Shuttle Columbia.

E: Columbia, number one.

J: He worked for NASA for 42 years. Behind the scenes, he had, of course, also many other positions. He spent a lot of his early years being an astronaut, but then while he was an astronaut and then for the second half of his career, he was a very highly influential person working behind the scenes at NASA doing a lot of different things. In 2005, he won the NASA Ambassador of Exploration Award. I look up to people like this. I really do. Their nerve alone is something to marvel at, the fact that they can do these things and not freak out and be able to keep their cool under extraordinary circumstances. These are James Bond-level people. and Captain Kirk-level cool heads. You know what I mean? Yeah. Steve, I think, is the most cool person I know, and I question if Steve's level of cool could take going into outer space.

S: No, I agree. I totally agree. I mean, I'd like to think that I'd be able to do that, and maybe I'd be able to muscle through, but I can't guarantee it. I don't know if I would freak out being cramped up in a capsule like that for extended periods of time. I've never been tested in that way. I know I got claustrophobic when I went into an MRI scanner. I got through it though. I just closed my eyes and got through it.

C: I don't think you can keep your eyes closed during a launch.

S: I don't think that's allowed. I get stir crazy during like a bad winter storm. I'm cramped in my house for a couple of days. I get stir crazy.

B: VR, baby.

E: Solves everything.

J: But that's why when you see movies like The Right Stuff, you see a little bit of how they test their claustrophobia and their ability to deal with loud noises and cramped conditions and weird things. I mean they're putting the astronauts through their paces. And John Young, man, I mean this guy – He was – they called him the astronaut's astronaut. He was an example for other astronauts. He was like the person that they said, you got to be like him in order to do this.

S: Yeah. So 12 people have walked on the moon and now with the passing of John Young, there's only five left. There's only five living people who have been on the moon. They're all in their 80s and it's not going to be too long before there's going to be no one alive who walked on the moon. That's sad.

E: Until the new crop of moonwalkers comes along, hopefully soon.

J: So I have a cool quote here from John Young. John said, Anyone who sits on top of the largest hydrogen-oxygen-fueled system in the world, knowing they're going to light the bottom, and doesn't get a little worried, does not fully understand the situation. He said that when he was asked if he was worried about making the first space shuttle flight. So that funny comment that he said came at one of the last missions that he flew. Ladies and gentlemen, John Young! Thank you. Thank you for dedicating your life to space exploration and being an eternal badass, awesome, you know, I love the fact that at one point in the history of the country that I was brought up in that we looked up to people like this. These were the things that kids looked at and said, yes, I want to be like those guys.

S: They are rock stars. I agree. Absolutely. But there's some other spaceflight news going on this week. Bob, tell us about SpaceX's latest launch.

Space X Loses Satellite (37:16)

• Classified satellite fell into ocean after SpaceX launch, official confirms

B: Yeah, baby. So this past January 8th, SpaceX launched a classified military satellite made by defense contractor Northrop Grumman. Unfortunately, the mission failed and the exact cause is actually a bit of a mystery, which is kind of odd because typically they're like, you know, pretty quickly these days. They don't. Yep. OK, this messed up. Whatever. This one is definitely a horse of a different color. So these failures are so selfishly disappointing to me. Because every time this happens, I think, oh, well, me walking on the moon just got delayed again. So this was called – this satellite was called Zuma after the Southern California Malibu Beach. But I don't like Zuma. It sounds too much like Zima to me. Remember Zima, guys?

E: Oh, the drink. Yeah, the alcoholic drink.

B: So – So this was a billion-dollar spy satellite. Now imagine – this kills me. A billion dollars. Imagine spending months or probably years building this billion-dollar piece of awesome classified hardware only to lose it in just an hour just after it reaches orbit. I mean I would just totally cry. These people must be devastated.

J: Whose fault was it, Bob?

B: Oh, yeah. That's coming, babe. That's coming. Don't ask me to jump the gun. So the launch of Florida's Cape Canaveral seemed to go very well. I mean the first stage went up and it separated and then it landed back, right? We've seen the first stage – Thank you for watching. Now, that doesn't prove some false flag Alex Jones ridiculous conspiracy. That's actually routine for classified military launches. They don't want anyone to know what the orbit is or anything about it. So pretty much after the first stage, you really don't see or hear anything about what happens. So what happened then is understandably much more difficult because for us to find out what happened with a classified launch is a lot harder. Now, some experts initially were claiming that the satellite was dead in orbit. It was in orbit, but it was dead. Then Bloomberg News report offered that the mission failed following a malfunction in the latter stages of its ascent. Then we had Wall Street Journal reporting that government officials said Zuma failed because it didn't separate as planned from the upper part of the rocket. That might be it right there. SpaceX, though, were saying things like this. They said reviews of the data indicate Falcon 9 performed nominally, which means good, normally. Then they further said that they did everything correctly. Obviously, just saying we did nothing wrong. Everything went fine for our stuff. President Gwynne Shotwell said in a statement. Shotwell? Shotwell? Shotwell? S-H-O-T.

S: That's like a cartoon name for somebody involved in spaceflight.

E: Yosemite Sam's counterpart.

B: Shotwell. So Gwynne Shotwell said – this is the president of SpaceX. She said in a statement, the data reviewed so far indicates that no design, operational or other changes are needed, which makes sense because if you have a launch and something goes wrong, you see what the problem was, then there's clearly something that you need to redesign or whatever. You got to make a change so that it doesn't happen again. So she was saying that there's no information pointing to anything that they could have done any better. Later she said, for clarity, after review of all data to date, Falcon 9 did everything correctly on Sunday night. So clearly she was getting – she seemed to be getting a little pissed about people speculating that they screwed up. Then she said that information contrary to this statement is categorically false. So at this point I was thinking, damn, maybe they did screw up. It's like the rocket didn't put the satellite in orbit. I mean you probably did something wrong. So then I just – then of course I did more research and then we had a US official confirming to ABC News that – that the satellite ended up diving into the Indian Ocean. So that's pretty much where we are on January 10th. So what are the options here? Let's go – what are the options? So SpaceX is either lying their asses off, which they would not do. I'm sorry. They just – they would not.

J: Hold on. I agree with you. Slow down there, Sporty.

S: OK.

J: I agree with you because SpaceX historically has been a non-averse to failure. Remember that whole thing?

S: Yeah, that's kind of their philosophy. Failure is okay. We'll learn from it.

B: Absolutely. But I mean when you got a billion-dollar satellite, you could change your tune. But even then, I think they would absolutely fess up. So I don't think they're lying. For me, that's off the table. The other option is that SpaceX, they did screw up in some way. But no information that their systems delivered to them pointed to that screw up. But I don't think that happened either. I don't think that happened either. The thing that I think is happening here is that there's been speculation and the Wall Street Journal hinted at it. There's been speculation of a possible failure of the adapter that was made by Northrop Grumman that connected the satellite to the upper stage of the rocket. And to me, from everything that I know, that seems to be the most viable option, the most likely option because that was their responsibility. That adapter was Northrop Grumman. They designed it and they connected their satellite to the upper stage. Right.

E: What does Northrop Grumman say about that?

B: Well, they can't comment. This is classified.

S: They say, yeah, we don't comment on classified missions.

J: It isn't that convenient.

E: Well, I mean – But that's how it has to be. Otherwise, it's not a classified mission.

B: I think that type of thing I think will come out eventually. So yeah, so that's their domain and that's why SpaceX was saying everything, all of our shit was good and it seems that it was because that was their domain. SpaceX had everything up until the top of that top speed, the second stage rocket. It was all them. But everything above that, including the adapter and the satellite, that was all Northrop Grumman. So it seems like the adapter could be the culprit here, and that's what I would lay my money on. But also remember, don't forget, this is a high-tech classified military satellite. I think that it's possible that the satellite's neogenic laser grid deteriorated the tachyon filament, causing a catastrophic thoron dump. I'm just throwing that out there. Just throwing that out there. That's possible.

S: Bob, you know what I thought? Bob, it's clearly an Axion field failure.

C: I mean, let's not go crazy here.

J: Bob, I thought that the satellite did get up there, and it's possible. they're saying it didn't.

S: It's a cover? Yeah.

J: No, seriously. I mean, I wouldn't put that past reality. It's not like a ridiculous idea. They're like, oh, yeah, it failed. Yeah, sounds good. Go with it. Yeah, the billion-dollar government satellite did get launched.

E: And that's a conspiracy. I've got major companies in on this conspiracy at that point, Jay.

S: It's all – it's defense contracting. They're sworn to secrecy. I think that's probably not the case.

E: But it contradicts what SpaceX is saying.

B: Yeah, but you can't completely rule that out at this point.

S: SpaceX is saying our shit worked and we can't say anything else because it's classified. That's all they're saying. By the way, so the Falcon Heavy rocket is set to do a test launch later this month.

E: Oh, my god.

S: They're going to do like a demonstration launch. And they're just about ready as we're recording this to do a test fire of all of their engines. I was hoping it was going to be today. But it turns out it's going to be tomorrow at the earliest that they're going to do that. Yeah. But before this podcast comes out, they probably will have done the test firing. If that goes well, then they're going to actually launch the thing.

C: You guys should come here for the launch.

S: It's big enough to go to Mars, this rocket.

C: Are they launching it out of the same place that they always do their launches? Yeah.

S: The 39A, Pad 39A. Kennedy.

B: It's Kennedy.

S: Pad 39A, the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Not for the Heavy. Not for the Falcon Heavy.

C: That's for the Heavy. I see. Yeah, they have to do it up there.

S: That's the same pad that they were launching the shuttle off of, and it's the same pad they launched the Saturn V, the Saturn V off of.

B: Saturn V. Finally. How many decades? We finally got a contender for the Saturn V and air to the Saturn V. Jeez.

S: The Falcon Heavy is twice as powerful as the next biggest rocket in the world in service today.

C: Yes.

B: So what is – now I know this is like very upgradable. This version that they're at right now with the 27 Merlin engines, what is that in comparison to the Saturn V?

S: I think it's – Saturn V was 261,000 – I mean 118,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit. So it's 54,000 kilograms versus 118,000. Yes, a little bit more than twice.

E: Yeah, twice.

S: For the Saturn V. Saturn V was way overbuilt. It was built – Wow. It was built to go to Mars even though we only used it to go to the moon.

B: I'm looking at a little video of the Saturn V right next to the heavy lift. Damn, the Saturn V was big. Wow, it dwarfs the Falcon. That's so amazing. The Falcon Heavy. Wow. Steve, do you remember? Jay, you were there too. Do you remember when we saw a Saturn V on its side and we're staring at its engines? It's five engines. To me, that was like looking at the statue of David in Italy. That was just like a jaw drop. My jaw dropped. It was like – pictures cannot do that rocket justice.

J: Well, when you walk in the room, it's weird to be standing so close to an object that big. that is that complicated. It consumes you, right? Yeah. You get like blown away by it because you're like this thing was standing up and – went into outer space. like look at the size of that. you know it was. it's a marvel. it really is like a titan.

S: it's bigger than the titan. actually titan was a different different rocket. all right let's move on. so have you guys heard about the latest health trend? uh-oh raw water health trend.

Raw Water (47:42)

• "Raw water": The latest dangerous "natural health" fad

E: those two words don't go well together.

B: raw water

C: I know uncooked

S: uncooked water uncooked

E: huh.

S: So this is – to me, this is just crass marketing. Of course, this is another form of snake oil. Water. snake oil is very common. A lot of people essentially market either magic water like oxygen water. Yeah.

C: Oh, yeah, you're right.

S: Or like clustered water or alkaline water or the like natural water, right? Yes, pure water. There's no fluoride or whatever. And so it's very, very common, a lot of water woo out there. And this is another form of – this is the natural water. It's raw. It's unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water. So it's loaded with – Giardia. Yeah, Giardia.

B: Narcidic.

S: And bacteria.

C: Deer pee. Deer pee.

S: So it's like, okay, yeah, we're going to take crappy water and then we're going to sell it for $36.99. What? For 2.5 gallons. Wait, $36? No. No, $36. What the hell? Yeah.

C: That's like more expensive than oil.

S: I know. Yes. Crazy. That's crazy. And they even say that – yeah, like if you don't use it within a couple of weeks, it will turn green.

C: Well, yeah, because it's full of algae.

B: That's not a good sign. Which is natural. Which is natural by the way.

E: Oh, yeah. So it must be good for you.

S: I don't want to drink water that's going to turn green.

J: I mean is there anything dangerous about this?

E: Except on St.

S: Patrick's Day. Yeah.

C: Absolutely that's dangerous.

E: Sure.

S: It's like the raw milk thing. There's a reason why we pasteurize milk is to kill all the bacteria that are going to cause infections. Thank you.

C: Yeah, that was like a marvel of science and it like prevented so many deaths. Right? People need to get in a time machine and go back to what it was like before we had all the perks that we have now because it was all a function of convenience.

S: They could just get in a plane and go to another country. Exactly.

C: They could just go to Africa. Exactly. When I travel, I carry a SteriPen with me because I do. I go to developing countries a lot and I am scared to drink the water because I don't want to get parasites. Yeah.

S: So this is such a privileged first world nonsense when you think that there's a lot of people in the world who don't have potable water, don't have clean water to drink. And now some jackass is going to charge rich Americans extra money to drink unfiltered, unpurified water. There's something advantage to it.

B: This is – Isn't this a little bit self-correcting though? Don't you think that people are going to get sick? Some could even die and then we're going to be like, well, okay, no one's going to buy this crap anymore. Or are they going to be like kind of making sure it's not that bad so that doesn't happen?

C: Well, it's probably not like toilet water, right? They're probably pulling it from a semi-clean. Oh, God. They're probably not even testing it.

E: Unfiltered, untreated, unsterilized spring water.

C: So a spring just right out of the top of the spring. It could have God knows what in it.

S: You don't want to kill the water. You're going to kill its vital essence, Cara.

C: Where is there a spring in the United States that isn't full of horrible toxic garbage that we've dumped into it?

S: There's probably some mountain spring water where it's pretty good.

C: Yeah, like melted glaciers. We've got plenty of those.

S: But whatever. I mean I do think this is a fad and it will probably just go to the fringe. These things rarely go away entirely but it will just persist on the fringe. And, you know, just one more way just to charge people a lot of money to do stupid things to hurt themselves.

C: But, yeah, there is a chance, Bob. Like you said, there's a chance somebody's going to get very, very sick from this.

B: Sure.

C: It's very scary.

S: People get sick from raw milk. It doesn't stop that from existing on the fringe. Drink it within one lunar cycle for super freshness.

C: Mysticism of the stars now. Doucheiest thing I've ever heard.

E: 100% marketing.

C: I'm going to start using that phrase all the time now. Within one lunar cycle, you'll be feeling much better. Oh, my God. What hippie nonsense. It's so L.A.

E: Within one revolution of Mercury. Oh, wait, can't use the word mercury. Oh, well.

C: Yeah, there's no mercury.

S: Let's move on. Evan, this is an interesting story about human Wi-Fi. I think this is just silly reporting, but what's going on here?

Human WiFi (52:07)

• How 'wi-fi' connects human brains and explains why people have 'gut feelings'

E: Yeah, it caught my attention. I stopped to read it. It appeared in The Telegraph a few days ago. And the title of the piece is called How Wi-Fi Connects Human Brains and Explains Why People Have Gut Feelings.

C: What?

E: Yes.

C: People didn't have gut feelings before Wi-Fi?

E: Apparently not. Or they didn't know exactly how it worked, but now – Wi-Fi is in quotes.

S: It's like a metaphor. OK.

E: Yes, that is true.

C: OK, OK, OK.

E: So his name is Digby Tantum. He is a clinical professor of psychotherapy. Digby. At the University of Sheffield, I say. And he believes human brains are...

S: Hold on, can you get more British? Professor Digby Tantum from University of Sheffield. Natural service.

E: On His Majesty's Secret Service. And he believes human brains are interconnected through a type of, in quotes, Wi-Fi, which allows us to pick up far more information about other people than we are aware of. Hmm. He describes the phenomenon as the interbrain and outlines his hypothesis in a brand new book of the same name. So he's selling a book called The Interbrain.

C: Wait, is he just talking about instinct?

S: Yes.

E: Not even.

C: Or like perception?

S: It's just perception. It's just, yeah, we perceive other people's emotions. Yeah, no shit.

C: Yeah, even when they don't know that they're expressing them.

S: Yeah.

E: But he's putting some sort of mechanism to it, purported, with no science to back it up.

C: People have done that before.

S: I don't think he's even doing that, Evan. I think what this guy's doing is he's taking just the normal psychology of nonverbal communication, which is nothing new, nothing controversial, nothing supernatural, nothing extraordinary.

C: And totally scientifically described. Yeah.

S: Totally scientifically described. and he's just repackaging this idea with these new metaphors and inventing a term for it that adds nothing to it. It adds no concept, no understanding. It doesn't dig deeper. It doesn't expand our understanding of it phenomenologically. He's just slapping a weird name on old known psychological phenomena.

C: You know what it adds to it? It adds his speaker fee to it. Yeah, that's right. That's what he's doing.

E: Do you remember that Simpsons episode where Homer's learning about the internet and wants to create an internet company?

S: Interslice. Interslice.

E: That's what I thought of when I read Interbrain, eh? Now, wait a minute. But according to PubMed, there is something called the interbrain. It's an actual thing. Or more – well, in medical terms, it's the diencephalon. You ever heard of that? Diencephalon.

C: Oh, like the midbrain.

E: Right. The centrally located – is surrounded by other pieces. It includes the thalamus, hypothalamus, and pitothalamus.

S: He's using that term. He thinks he made it up, but he's just using it in a different way.

E: So to me, that's a red flag of what a crank does. They borrow these scientific jargons and sort of co-opt them for their own.

C: Oh, I'm bummed out that he's an actual clinical psychologist too. Why are you making us look bad?

S: He's just trying to – yeah, just repackaging stuff to make it pop.

C: It's a bummer.

S: What's the actual concept here? What's he actually saying? When you dig down, it's just nonverbal communication. Oh, big BFD. That's it.

E: Right. That's all I got from it. He's talked about it before. He's written a few books. It's not his first book.

S: Yeah. But the thing – the real disappointing thing is how the media just runs with it. It's like, oh, there's this new thing about how this Wi-Fi connects our brains together.

C: Do people think that actual Wi-Fi is just like internet juice that's like in the air? Internet juice. You tap into it. Like it existed before we came along and now we just use it to our advantage. Like how is the Wi-Fi metaphor – At all relevant here.

E: So people can wrap their brains around a concept that otherwise needs to be repackaged and be resold.

C: No, but it's an easy concept. It's such an easy concept to understand without the Wi-Fi metaphor. Right.

S: The metaphor detracts from understanding. It does. It doesn't add anything. It actually makes it less clear.

B: Except clicks. Except clicks.

C: There you go, Bob.

E: Here we go. Here's a quote. Tantum writes, Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. then our brains act and react to other brains well before each brain can provide the substrate for a mind to call into doubt whether or not the other brain is there.

J: Well, that makes sense.

C: You know what I think his problem is? I think he's probably a dualist and he legit thinks that like the brain architecture, like the physical brain is like putting out brain juices that the next brain is receiving.

S: I don't think he even needs to hypothesize that.

C: It's like obviously like our brains are behind our behavior and then we behave and then another person experiences our behavior and then their brain reacts to that. Like that has been known for hundreds of years.

S: Yeah, it's called vision. You see other people and we respond. Seriously, what's the guy talking about?

C: My dog does that. Yeah, like if I point across the room to where his ball went, he looks where I pointed and goes and gets his ball. My brain is not Wi-Fi-ing with my dog's brain.

E: He seems to tie it into the autism spectrum disorder in the sense that he's studied that apparently extensively. And he makes comparisons of brains that are deemed to be autistic versus the other brains out there. And he sees these disconnects basically in the people who have these autism features. Yeah. And makes – his decisions are – it influences how he perceives all other brains working based on how the autistic brain is working.

S: Again, nothing new. We know that people with autism don't respond as much to – To social cues. To social cues, yeah, and to nonverbal communication. That's – Their brains don't talk to themselves as much. They don't mirror what other people do as much as typical people do. So this is nothing new. He's just repackaging other people's science with his own sort of terminology. And using metaphors that actually detract from our ability to understand what's really going on.

C: My head is literally cradled in my hands right now. I'm so annoyed by that.

S: Horrible science communication. This is horrible science communication.

C: Yeah, it's horrible science communication. It's bad. Jesus.

J: That's your interbrain. My gut brain, though, is telling me that you're feeling something, Cara.

E: All the way down in my gutty-wutties. Cockroach orange.

S: Thank you. So now we're going to end with some good news.

J: Good news, everyone.

Cancer Deaths Declining (59:25)

• Cancer Deaths Continue to Decline

S: Cara, cancer deaths continue to decline.

C: Yes, yes. So I've been reading about this and then you actually wrote about this, right, in Science-Based Medicine?

S: Yeah, I wrote about it today, yeah.

C: Today, which is great. There's a new study, I guess, kind of not a study but a new – what would you call it?

S: It's a study. It's a study. OK. All right. Survey. They brought together all the information that exists about the epidemiology of cancer.

C: There you go. And it was published in CA?

S: It's the Journal of the American Cancer Society.

C: Yeah. So it's called CA, a cancer journal for clinicians. I don't know if you're supposed to call it CA or CA.

S: No, CA is like our shorthand for cancer. Gotcha.

C: Cool, cool, cool. And yeah, so the study is called Cancer Statistics 2018. And really what the researchers in this did is exactly what you said, looked at cancer data, epidemiological data across several, several years. And so going back all the way to, I think, 1991 up to 2015, and then they have predictions looking forward in 2018. Yeah. So the top line here, and then we can talk about like why these are the top lines or kind of dig a little deeper into the numbers as to what they mean, is that from 91 to 2015, the death rate from cancer dropped about 1.5% per year, resulting in a total decrease between 1991 and 2015 of 26%. So that's estimated at 2,378,600 fewer deaths than Yeah. And now some of that is somewhat artifactual, but most of that is due to... increase in treatment, increase in early prevention. So new cases of cancer, it varies from men to women. Men and women get different types of cancer. Not surprisingly, the top type in men is prostate cancer. Women don't have a prostate, so we don't get that. And the top type in females is breast cancer. Men do have breasts and can get breast cancer, but it's not nearly as common. Number two for both of them is lung cancer or lung and bronchial cancer. Number three for both males and females is colon and rectum. Number four is actually quite similar. In men, it's urinary and bladder cancer. And in women, it's uterine cancer. And then it goes on from there, thyroid, melanoma, and they vary. But those are the top causes or cases, I'm sorry. But deaths, what do you think is the most common type of cancer that kills you in both men and women?

E: Lung cancer?

C: Lung cancer. Is it? Both men and women. And that's kind of different because historically more men died from lung cancer than women. But now it still kills less women per year. But percentage-wise, 25% of cancer deaths in women are lung and bronchus. And 26% of cancer deaths in men are lung and bronchus. And then it goes to prostate and breast, colon and rectum. And then number four leading cause of cancer deaths is pancreas cancer. Yikes.

B: Lung cancer has gone down, right? Absolutely.

C: And that is part of the reason that all cancer has gone down. Lung cancer is terrible and lung cancer has gone down. And why do you think lung cancer has gone down?

B: I mean, many people are smoking it as much.

C: massive decrease in the number of smokers.

S: Tobacco use was at 42% in the 1960s, and it's down to 17%. Wow.

C: Yeah, that's a massive decrease. And of course, these numbers in the US, and these numbers in the study are from 91 to 2015. But still, there was a big decrease between those years. So that's one thing. The prostate cancer screening issue is a little more complicated. Steve, do you mind kind of helping me make sense of that?

S: Yeah, so in the 1990s, they introduced a prostate-specific antigen, PSA, which is a blood test which screens for prostate cancer. And so when they did that, we had a huge spike in prostate cancer diagnoses because we were finding all of these early prostate cancers. And then we figured out that a lot of those people never would have had any problems if we just didn't even know that they had prostate cancer. In other words, it's cancer but it would take so long to become problematic and it usually happens in older guys that they would have died from other reasons before they ever manifested clinically their prostate cancer. And so – Knowing about it early, super early with PSA screening led to unnecessary treatment and didn't really help. So actually we started phasing out early – just routinely screening with PSA. Now we only do it when there's clinical suspicion. And so the numbers then went back down. So you just have this sort of artificial peak in the 90s from the PSA screening. And so part of the decline, prostate cancer incidence, the changes in prostate cancer are just largely artifactual from changes in our screening practices. So that's why there's so much to unpack in these numbers.

C: There's a lot.

S: Part of it is just how we screen for cancer. Part of it is improvements in risk factors. Part of it is improvement in treatment outcomes.

C: Yeah, and all those things add together.

S: Yeah, for every different kind of cancer in every demographic group, age and gender and race even, you have to sort of tease those numbers apart. I did a pretty deep dive into the numbers when I wrote about it on science-based medicine.

C: Yeah, yours is deep. Yours is deeper than some that I've seen in some other kind of popular write-arounds. Like you talked about the lead time bias, which I think is really interesting.

S: So lead time bias basically is the earlier you diagnose the disease, the longer people are going to live with it from the point of diagnosis, right?

C: Of course. So it seems like survival time has increased, but it's really that you diagnosed it earlier.

S: So you have to adjust for that. And the way you do that is to look at survival time by stage, right?

C: Stage four means it's like metastatic over a lot of the body.

S: Right. So if like people with stage two cancer are surviving longer than they were 10 years ago with stage two cancer, that's not lead time bias. That's got to be improvement in treatment because stage two is stage two, you know.

C: But all those things improve, right? Like diagnosing something earlier means that you have a better shot at it because, of course, treatments are generally better during stage one.

S: But it means incidence goes up, right? It means we diagnose more people. We may be diagnosing people who we never would have known they had cancer. There's been some redefinition of some borderline dysplasia in the tissue. We're calling that cancer now.

C: Yeah, I wonder if we're going to see a big change with cervical cancer simply because they've recently changed the recommendations for how often women get PAPs. It used to always be annually no matter what. And now they're going every three to five years depending on your history.

S: Yeah, everything we do like that will change the numbers. And then we have, of course, the human papillomavirus vaccine, which is actually decreasing PAPs. cervical cancer incidence. We're doing more colonoscopies, which is reducing colon cancer. We're actually removing precancerous polyps before they ever become cancer. And so that's a real improvement. And if you just look at people with cancer at every age and every stage – are doing better, are living longer with their cancer. Although most of the gains are in early stages. The later stages, not quite as much, but still they're smaller.

C: But that also makes sense if you know anything about how cancer is treated. It's so hard to fight against this monster once it's spread all over the body.

S: The more spread out it is, the harder it is to treat. Yeah, we're just making these incremental advances in treating cancer every year. It's a little bit better, a little bit better, you know.

C: And so what you wrote about in Science Based Medicine, I really appreciate because a lot of people have written about this because it is really good news. You know, we're sort of in a way making good progress in this quote unquote war on cancer. And then you took that a step further and said… Let's take a step back and see why this is important for the conversation as skeptics. Because one of the common points of rhetoric for, you know, natural medicine, homeopathy, Chinese traditional medicine proponents is that mainstream doctors are trying to keep you sick. They don't know how to treat cancer. Cancer treatments just make you worse. That's a very common argument. Chemotherapy is terrible for you and it's just going to make you die sooner. That's why you should take this natural approach. And this is just really good, hard data that shows that, no, there are improvements that are being made. And if you look at them over the long enough span of time, they're pretty massive.

S: Yeah, it adds up. And also, I also pointed out that, you know, with people, the other alternative medicine narrative is that our environment is increasingly toxic. And that's why people are getting so sick. But actually, the incidence of cancers are decreasing, too. Not only are people surviving longer with cancer, but the incidence is decreasing, partly because physicians are taking preventive steps, you know, colonoscopies, vaccines, you know, decreasing smoking, etc., But also there isn't any big mystery increase in cancer. that's happening. Like we're missing something, you know?

C: Yeah, you go type to type and they're either getting slightly better or they're not changing. But nothing's getting worse.

S: There's no weird unexplained spikes or shifting in the slope or anything. It's like, oh, look, when we introduced GMOs, cancers took up. Now there's none of that. None of that's happening in there. So the numbers are the numbers. Things are getting slowly better basically. Yeah. Okay, Jay, you missed last week, so you've got to get us caught up on who's that noisy.

Who's That Noisy? (1:09:40)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Tuba playing a very low note

J: Okay, last week I played this noisy. What is it? I got a ton of responses on this, and not one person guessed it correctly. What?

S: Oh, boy.

J: So, yeah, I'll read a couple of these, too. So somebody said, it sounds like a money bill counter. Yeah. That was sent in by a listener named Thor Peel. Very cool name. Very. Another listener said, I've been on and off listening to the SGU for three, three and a half years, and I'm not quite sure what the noise is, but it sounds like percussive as if something is hitting a large mass of wood very quickly. So I'm going to guess it's a woodpecker.

S: No, it's not a woodpecker. I would have recognized a woodpecker.

J: Yeah, it's not a woodpecker. Someone said it's a jackhammer. Another person said it's a power drill.

B: I first thought it was an old school movie projector.

J: Oh, yeah. Another person said that it's a moth releasing flatulence.

C: Hi-yo.

J: It was sent in by Jim. All of you are incorrect, sir. If any of you remember, Cara made a comment on the show about two months ago, three months ago, that why don't we ever play something? that's just what it is? You know, something that's like, I don't know. Why don't you just play like, I don't know, a tuba?

C: And then be like, it's a tuba.

J: Cara.

B: So it's a slowed down instrument.

C: What is it? Is it a tuba?

J: It's a tuba.

C: Is it somebody's lips up against the mouth?

J: That's a tuba. I'll read to you what's going on. A listener very astutely was paying attention to our conversation and decided to send me in something very real and non-altered or slowed down or whatever that he figured it wouldn't sound. It would be super obvious. So this is John Wittner. And John plays the tuba full time in an orchestra called the RSNO or Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Neat. He said, Hi, Jay. I'm playing an F natural three octaves and a fifth below middle C. For comparison, this is a major third below the lowest note on the piano. And he stuck the microphone just in front of the bell on the instrument. And that's what he thinks gives it more of that jackhammer effect. But he has done absolutely nothing to the audio. Wow. So there, Cara. So there. Bam.

C: Cool.

J: It's a tuba. Love it.

C: It's a tuba. It's a tuba.

J: It's awesome.

S: The frequency was just so low, you could make out the individual.

C: The tremolo kind of to the, yeah, that's cool. Yep.

B: Pretty cool. Wow. I like it.

S: And what do you got for this week?

J: This week, hey, don't push me along, okay? This week, someone that you and I know, Steve, Rob Palmer.

S: Yeah.

J: Come on, Palmer. Rob is a well-known skeptic, and he's a good guy. And Rob had an interesting experience. That's all I'll say. Rob sent me in this noisy. I thought this was really, really, really cool. I'm dying to hear what you guys think this is.

B: Three reallys.

S: That's horrifying. Nails on a blackboard is not, it sounds like.

C: Yeah, I think that was nails on a chalkboard.

S: That's really bad, Jay. People are going to hate us if we play that on the phone. That's painful.

J: Do you guys think that's painful?

E: It's a little more annoying than painful.

C: I guess Jay doesn't have misophonia.

J: Yeah. You're phony? So phony.

E: I do.

C: Me so phony, yeah. If you don't like nails on the chalkboard.

S: I have really bad. Ooh.

B: Aliens screeching when they've been like revealed.

S: Yeah. You got that too, Steve? That would be a good sound effect for that. Yeah, I did. Wow.

E: Because I'm intimately familiar with the movie Time Bandits. If you remember in one of the last scenes when those horned kind of creatures come out and attack the dwarves and stuff, they make a noise that sounds like that. That's sort of their call. Cool.

J: Those are all good guesses. If you have any idea what that is or if you heard any cool noisies in 2018 and beyond, you must email me at WTN at theskepticsguide.org.

C: You must.

S: Thanks, Jay. All right. Well, let's go on with science or fiction.

New Noisy (1:23:23)

[_short_vague_description_of_Noisy]

short_text_from_transcript

Science or Fiction (1:15:32)

Theme: Robots Item #1: Engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder that can target and remove individual weeds with >99% accuracy. Item #2: Scientists successfully tested an implantable robot that can be used to stretch and lengthen organs such as the esophagus or intestines. Item #3: Scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces 6 times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Robotic weeder
Science	Organ stretcher
Science	Soft artificial muscle

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Organ stretcher
Evan	Robotic weeder
Cara	Soft artificial muscle
Bob	Soft artificial muscle

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. We got a theme this week. The theme is robots.

J: All right. Robots. 72% of the time, Bob and I guess robot questions correctly.

E: Robot. So there's always the 28%. Yeah. Okay.

S: You ready? Do your best, sir. All right, here we go. Danger. And item number three, scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle.

J: The penis mightier.

S: Penis mightier. It's still funny to me. Swords for 400.

J: He says, I'll take S.

S: Swords. I'll take swords for 300. That's S words. All right. Jay, since you're very confident, why don't you go first?

Jay's Response

J: Confident? All right. I'll go first, you rogue. All right. This one about the engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder, and it can target and remove individual weeds with 99% accuracy. I like this idea, like engineers have unveiled, like there's a whole room full of engineers and they're like, okay, ready, pull the tarp on three. Okay. The 99% accuracy thing, I think if you're growing plants, you need it to be probably even more than 99% accurate because you don't want it to kill 1% of your crop. Right. It's interesting. I mean, I'm sure that there are autonomous robot weeders in the farming industry on some level, but this one, to me, seems like it has hands and does things. But okay, let's move on to the next one. These scientists who have tested implantable robot... It's an implantable robot, Cara. And it can stretch and lengthen your organs... I mean, is this a torture device or is this a medical device, Steve?

S: Yes.

C: You should have known.

J: They have tested this thing and it's implantable. All right. Well, all right. So let's think about why would we need this. Somebody has a short esophagus or intestine. Intestine.

C: Yeah, that's true.

J: Right? That's weird. The esophagus, though, that's crazy. Like, you're going to stretch that out? I mean, I could see maybe stretching on an intestine. That one scares me. And this last one here, scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscle for robots that produces six times greater force. per unit than mammalian skeletal muscle. Soft artificial muscle for robots, and it's six times greater force. Damn! We are so obsolete, it's ridiculous. I kind of want the third one to be true, just because we want strong robots to do cool stuff for us. And I could see them coming up with, you know, here we go, soft artificial muscle. Those three words are the key thing in this item here. When you talk about artificial muscle, is it similar to human muscle? Does it work? and chemically like a human muscle does or not. I could see scientists coming up with artificial muscle type system. I don't know how much it mimics human muscle and the mechanism of human muscle, but I could see that one as being true. The one about the implantable robot, I mean, I think that that seems plausible, but I still don't get why they'd have to lengthen stretching length in your esophagus, I mean, wouldn't you have to remove it from someone to fix it first? Like, oh, God, I don't know. This is horrible.

C: I don't think so, Jay. You think they take out your esophagus? I don't know. I mean, they're stretching it.

J: They got this robot pulling on it. That sounds really intense. The robot basically has hands and feet, and all it's doing is it puts its feet down and just pulls on the esophagus. It's ridiculous.

C: It's like Bender, except it's Stretcher.

E: Stretcher the robot. Call me Bender.

J: All right. So my gut is telling me that the muscle one is the fake, but I think it's this middle one. This is esophagus intestine one, the stretcher robot. I think that's the fake.

S: Okay, Evan.

Evan's Response

E: Okay. The weeder targeting and removing individual weeds, 99% accuracy, greater than 99% accuracy. So the key here is that the robot has to determine what's a weed and what's not a weed. and how is it doing that exactly? Yeah. I wonder if they somehow grew the weeds with some trait that the robot had to specifically be able to identify and pull out. I don't see how it can otherwise distinguish. weed from plant. Greater than 99% accuracy. That's tough. That's a tough one to digest. The one about the stretching and lengthening of the organs, esophagus and intestines. Yeah, I think I have a feeling this one's going to turn out to be right because we're not necessarily talking about people here. Other animals have esophaguses and intestines and other things. And they only tested it. It's not like... So testing it in a small animal or something is certainly... The way to go. I have a feeling that one's going to be right. And then the last one about the artificial muscle. This one I have the least sort of feeling for. Six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle. Yeah. That sounds impressive. It's probably even more impressive than I'm thinking it is. I'm going to go with the weeds because I don't think it was able to get that level of accuracy and be able to distinguish. You know, you throw this robot into your flower bed. How the hell is it going to know your petunia from your dandelion? I just don't see how it will know that. It would have to pull it out at the root level too. That's how you really remove the weeds. So I'm going to say that one's the fiction.

S: Okay, Cara.

Cara's Response

C: I think that the muscle one's the fiction. I think that – I feel like I've seen really cool farm robots before. Like I've done stories back when I worked for Al Jazeera. There was this amazing strawberry-picking robot that had all these crazy arms and could like gently pick just strawberries because it had computer vision. And the thing is if it has computer vision, then it can totally tell the difference between its target plant and a non-target plant. Yeah. I feel like that's possible. I don't know how like how cost effective it would be, but it does seem possible. So I'm going to go with that being science. The implantable robot that can stretch and lengthen organs as I feel like this was the sleeper clue. Like this one's totally real, but you put it in because it sounds insane. Because I do know that there are people who suffer from like weird developmental problems where they don't have their organs are like the wrong size. I don't know though. And maybe if they're young enough, you know, if you get this robot in while you're still in a developmental stage and you can like stretch your organs during that thing, then you're not going to have all these like downstream problems as you grow up. But the soft artificial muscle that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle is First of all, I don't know the point of it. Maybe there's a reason to do it. But if you have a robot, why does it have to work like a human, like human physiology? Like, we already have machines that are way stronger than people. And we can just use hard pieces for that. I mean, maybe there's a reason for it, but I don't understand. Like, how soft is soft? Yeah. You're not going to tell me that, are you? But what you are saying here is that the soft muscle is what's actually pulling the load. Like the six times greater force per unit is done by the soft muscle, not by the hard pieces of the robot. Yeah, I think that's crazy. I don't think that's true. I'm going to say that's the fiction.

S: Okay. And Bob?

Bob's Response

GWB

B: So, all right, the autonomous weeder. Yeah, I mean, Cara kind of read my mind on a lot of these, so I'm going to kind of retroactively say that she's pulling a GWB. I mean, the weeder, yeah, you got a database of plants.

C: It's the Wi-Fi brain.

B: A database of plants. I mean, and if you got even a marginal AI, you could kind of figure out what it looks like from other angles, you know, so you don't know the plant from just one angle. Yeah. And yeah, just pull that effort up out of the dirt. You don't even have to get the weeds because if you go back a few days later, pull it up again. It doesn't even have to be that thorough. So I think that didn't surprise me at all. And yet again, like Cara said, number two here, this stupid robot to stretch organs. What? That's just bizarre. And I think we're just meant to have some visceral reaction to it. I think I said visceral too many times this past hour. So I won't say it again. So yeah, that's just like bizarre and I'm sure they have some weird torture reasons to justify that. So yeah, I'm going to go with that one. But the muscle one – but here I will disagree with Cara. I think there's plenty of reasons for soft muscle. One is just weight. It could be just a lot lighter. Oh. A lot lighter and also depending on what the robot is going to do. So sure, they've been talking about soft muscle. I've been reading about it for literally for decades. It's to the point like battery technology. Like I don't even care anymore. Just come up with something cool and then tell me about it. It's like I saw this. There is an article on this. out there, and I kind of scanned the title. You don't know what it says. Right, and I didn't dive into it because I'm just so sick. I'm just so sick of artificial muscle news. I don't care. Just do it. You know, it's like I've read it a million times, a million iterations, so... Yeah, I believe it, but I still think that Steve is messing with this six times. I think that's probably too strong. Maybe it's not even near human strength, but it's very promising, blah, blah, blah. It looks cool, but you're never going to hear about this ever again. Typical stuff. So I'm going to say that the artificial muscle is fiction.

Steve Explains Item #1

S: Okay, so we got Bob and Cara for the artificial muscle, Jay for the esophagus stretcher, and Evan for the weed puller.

C: No sweep. Right. No sweep.

S: You guys are spread out, so there's no reason not to take these in order. We'll start with number one. Engineers have unveiled a fully autonomous robotic weeder that can target and remove individual weeds with greater than 99% accuracy. Evan, you think this is the fiction. Everyone else thinks this one is science. And this one is... The fiction. Oh, weed. Good job, Evan. No.

E: Solo weed. I smoked out the weeds.

J: Good job, brother.

C: So what's the trick? What's the trick?

B: You're full of crap. This is totally possible.

C: Did you make this up from nowhere?

B: This is totally possible.

S: But it doesn't exist.

E: It doesn't exist. Did

C: something like it exist or did

B: you just pull this

S: one out of your ass?

B: Northrop Grumman had it. Northrop Grumman had it in that satellite and you just don't even know about it.

E: Bastards.

S: All right. So there are robotic weeders. Yes. Okay. And they've been around for a long time, mechanical weeders, robotic weeders. But they don't target individual plants or weeds. You just align them with the rows of the plants and they just go through there and basically till around the plants and pull up the weeds. So the new bit is that they are – a company did come up with a new design for a robotic weeder that does try to target individual weeds but it's really bad at it because it's hard to do. They say this is 1.0. It really has a hard time telling the difference between weeds and plants. You have to put the plants like in super straight rows so it knows to avoid them. They are working – I think Evan, you came up with the idea of tagging the plants. They are coming up with a way of tagging the plants so that the robot knows to avoid them. Not tagging the weeds but tagging the crops. So then they can basically pull out everything that's not tagged and then you're good. But I really felt – I found this idea compelling. I mean the technology is very primitive at this point. They're not really doing what you might imagine like a robot going through like what a human would do. Like we can recognize plants from weeds and we pull out all the weeds individually. That's really what we need.

B: I think you read an article from 1995. is what you read.

S: No, this is January 10th, 2018. Think about it. So for some crops like the massive crops like corn, wheat, you have to use herbicide. Hand pulling is just – it's not cost-effective and it's massively inefficient. But for certain specialty crops like lettuce, for example, where it's still a big area of land but it's a lot smaller than the millions of acres of corn, for example, it is more plausible to hand weed. It's still expensive though. It could cost a lot of money to like $150 to $300 per section of land to hand weed it.

C: Can't you just spray it with Roundup?

S: Yeah, but some plants – That sounds easier. Yes. Yeah, like corn, you can do that, soybeans, whatever. But some things don't – we don't have Roundup-ready versions of them. That's true. Yeah, the Roundup would kill the plants. So like for lettuce, no, you cannot spray lettuce with Roundup. So you pretty much have to hand weed. But it would be cool. I mean if we can get robots that were good enough, that were as good as people at recognizing weeds from plants, they could just continuously crawl around pulling the weeds out. That could really be an effective way of controlling weeds and reducing herbicide use and this is I think going to be one more piece to the pest management overall strategy that we have. So it's interesting. But yeah, but the tech isn't there yet. Again, they're saying it's 1.0. It really is going more on just the rows, just trying to avoid the rows.

B: They're not even trying. They're not even trying.

S: I agree. I don't think this is – I agree with you, Bob. I think this is a technology that could be there if they really developed it. I don't think this is beyond our current technology. They would just need to really develop it. It seems like we should be able to – computers should be able to do pattern recognition to like identify – like pull out everything here. that isn't a tomato plant, right? That shouldn't – I can't imagine that would be too hard.

C: Well, yeah. And like I said, they have like strawberry pickers that do that.

B: Yeah. It's so weird.

C: Yeah.

Steve Explains Item #2

S: Yeah, but they just don't exist yet. So let's go on to number two. Scientists successfully tested an implantable robot that can be used to stretch and lengthen organs such as the esophagus and intestines. That one, of course, is science. And yeah, I mean, Cara is correct. There are indications for this. So some children are born with an incompletely developed esophagus. For example, they have esophageal atresia. And they try to stitch the two ends of the esophagus together, but they're not long enough. So they have to stretch the esophagus so that it's touching so they can sew the two ends together. Now, the current treatment for this – They have to essentially put in a hard device, a rigid device, and they have to essentially paralyze the child for weeks. So they basically put them in general anesthesia for several weeks. Oh, how sad. That's insane. Yeah. While they stretch the esophagus because they can't have them moving around with this device in place. But this new robot is soft and they've tested it in large animals like pigs. They haven't tested it in humans yet. But the pigs were able to be awake and move around and even eat and it's fine. And it basically is like two rings that they sew into the esophagus and it pulls them together. Yeah. They increased the length by 2.5 millimeters each day. You do that for eight to nine days and you move it a couple of centimeters. you need to get them in place. Some people are also born with a short intestine. They don't have enough intestine. You can implant this device and it will just stretch out your intestine. Now when you – on a tubular organ, when you apply those kind of forces, those stretching forces, they actually make new cells.

C: They – Oh, good. So it doesn't make it weaker.

S: Yeah, it doesn't just stretch out. It actually makes it longer. The cells actually reproduce and fill in to account for the stretching. And so you actually do increase the size of the organ, of these tubular organs. So that's why it works. That's really neat. Yeah, it's neat. It reminds me of a technique that I learned about in medical school. I think it's called the Alizarov technique where they put pins in bones and then they pull them apart and they cause the bone to lengthen. So like you could use this in somebody like who has dwarfism, for example, and you could add an inch or two to their limbs. It can make a huge difference in their overall stature.

C: Well, especially if somebody has like one leg that's shorter than the other. It can cause so many problems.

S: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some parts of the body do respond to those forces by literally growing to fill in what's left behind by the stretching. Okay. All this means that scientists have developed a system of soft artificial muscles for robots that produces six times greater force per unit area than mammalian skeletal muscle. is science.

B: Wow.

S: Yeah, Cara, you're totally wrong, and Bob is correct. Soft muscles for robots are huge. Huge. This is a big focus of research because it would produce so many applications for robots that are hard to do, difficult to do with hard parts.

C: Yeah, whatever.

S: They need to be able to manipulate delicate things, for example. That's what I was saying. Yeah. And also having soft muscles means they'd be quieter. They also might use less energy. They might be also more flexible, be able to get themselves into different shapes and different environments. It adds a lot of functionality to a robot to make it out of soft parts. So you could also interact with humans a little bit more nicely because they're soft.

B: Also, ultimately replace human muscle with this stuff.

S: Well, yeah. Yeah, sure.

B: That's always kind of like implied.

E: Nice.

S: This uses a pneumatic device to cause the muscles to stretch, to contract. They were actually – the scientists were surprised at how strong it was. It exceeded their expectations. He said it can contract down to 10% of its original size. It could lift a delicate flower off the ground and twist it into a coil. And the movement is pneumatic. It's done by air. And they were surprised at how strong it was. It generated six times more force per unit area than mammalian skeleton muscle can. Very lightweight, as Bob pointed out. It's a huge advantage. It's very lightweight. A 2.6-gram muscle can lift a 3-kilogram object, which is the equivalent of a mallard duck lifting a car.

J: What?

E: A duck.

B: Wow. That's awesome.

J: We are so screwed, man.

S: And it can be constructed quickly out of cheap material. A single muscle can be made within 10 minutes out of material costing less than $1.

E: Whoa.

Steve Explains Item #3

S: Cockle. Pretty cool. This was by – this is like an origami-inspired artificial muscles. This was from the MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and the Weiss Institute at Harvard University. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cara's favorite journal. Very cool. Actually, this came out in late November. This is about a month old, this new sign. But I needed a third robot item, so I had to go back a little bit. Cool. So good job, Evan. Thanks. Good job.

E: I've spent many, many hours pulling weeds out of gardens. So I believe I'd be very much looking forward to a robot that could do that.

S: It would be nice. It would be nice. Farming in the future will just be a lot of little robots crawling around pulling out weeds. I just saw Minority Report again recently with my daughter.

E: Yes.

B: How did that hold up?

S: It holds up pretty well. I mean there's definitely some of the things are dated. But it's – the Minority Report did a good job because first of all, it's in the 2050s. So they went far enough into the future. Thank you. Although maybe we'll reassess that in 2050. It wasn't like 10 years or the future. They went a good 50 years in the future. So that was good on them for that. And they had the self-driving cars and everything. So it was pretty good. The one thing that I noted about it was that the cell phones were really small. So they kind of missed the whole smartphone. This was before smartphones. And also I think they missed the virtual reality thing. So the whole – the classic, the now iconic scene of Tom Cruise in front of the monitors with the gloves on, flipping the images around. He would have VR goggles on.

B: Also, that would be so tiring. His deltoids would be fried.

C: Come on. Well, maybe he had contacts in and you just didn't see them.

B: Or maybe he had artificial muscle in his deltoids.

J: He never had to do it for more than two or three minutes. He always figures that stuff out quick.

B: Because he couldn't do it longer.

C: But eventually our VR headsets are going to be miniaturized and put inside of our eyes. I would think so.

J: Yeah, and then they'll stretch out our eyes.

E: Along with our esophagus. But those little spider robots running all over society doing all sorts of stuff is very creepy in that movie.

S: Yeah, those spider robots are creepy.

Announcements (1:38:02)

• Britt Hermes lawsuit: Cancer quack Colleen Huber sues Britt Hermes over criticism

S: Hey, quick announcement. You guys remember Brit Hermes. We had her on our show recently. She is the former naturopath who realized that her profession was basically a scam and has been trying to raise public awareness about this. Well, Britt, in recognition of her fine work, is being sued. She has been taken to court in Germany by U.S.-based naturopath Colleen Huber, H-U-B-E-R, who is claiming that Britt has defamed her on her blog. Huber is a critic of chemotherapy and radiation therapy and cancer treatment. Instead, she uses, quote-unquote, natural therapies that include intravenous infusions of vitamin C and baking soda, which, by the way, is pure nonsense. The international skeptical community is obviously very concerned that this will have a chilling effect on legitimate criticism of unproven medical claims and practices. So the Australian skeptics has taken it upon themselves to set up a fundraising campaign to help cover Brits' legal costs. If you want to contribute to Britt's campaign, go to skeptics.com.au. slash Britt Hermes. That's B-R-I-T-T-H-E-R-M-E-S. This is definitely a worthy cause. And we are also thinking, assuming that this all ends well, of parlaying this into a general legal defense fund to protect people who are legitimately criticizing quackery and unscientific medical claims. All right, Evan, give me a quote.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:39:38)

Even when I have no power over important events in my life, I gain a feeling of control from understanding them. And I, too, have a sense of wonder. For me, discovering the workings of nature is a vibrant, satisfying experience that is both intellectual and emotional. To recognize the astronomical relationship between the Sun and the Earth, or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light, does not strip the sunset of its beauty.

– Professor Stuart Vyse, American psychologist, teacher, speaker and author, from Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition

E: Or to understand the optical phenomena that create its rosy light does not strip the sunset of its beauty. And that was written by Professor Stuart Weiss from his book Believe in Magic, Psychology of Superstitions.

S: He's a friend of ours, a friend of the show.

E: He is. Yeah.

S: I actually was a co-author with him on a letter to the editor about a bit of pseudoscience. I got published. Nice. And he's spoken for us as well. He lives in Connecticut.

E: He has. Yes, he does. He's a professor at Connecticut College, New London, Connecticut. And he was, I believe, one of our first speakers when we used to host a speaker series for our local skeptics group back in the 90s. So we've known him quite a while.

S: Good guy.

E: Very good.

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

J: Happy 2018.

E: Yes. Welcome to 18, Jay, and thank you.

Signoff

S: —and until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

S: The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information on this and other episodes, please visit our website at theskepticsguide.org, where you will find the show notes as well as links to our blogs, videos, online forum, and other content. You can send us feedback or questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. Also, please consider supporting the SGU by visiting the store page on our website, where you will find merchandise, premium content, and subscription information. Our listeners are what make SGU possible.

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