SGU Episode 1060

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SGU Episode 1060
November 1st 2025
"Stunning cosmic view: a comet streaks through the darkness of space."
SGU 1059                      SGU 1061
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.
— Ernst Mayr
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Show Notes
SGU Forum

Intro

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 Thursday, October 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara Santa Maria, Howdy Jane Novella. Hey guys. And Devin Bernstein.

E: Good afternoon, everyone.

S: So, Bob, tomorrow's Halloween, you all ready? You set you cramming or what?

C: Is I? Oh, it's a screen. That's Bobby wife.

E: She's under the table. I usually ask if Halloween is ready for Bob.

C: Yeah.

B: Yeah, I'm in decent shape for Halloween and the party, which is the next day not not too bad shape for that either. Of course, no matter how ready you are, you will you. I will still work to the last minute trying to tweak, tweak, tweak the final tweakings of of various things, but I'm very happy with my output this year.

E: Bob, you to Halloween is what Stanley Kubrick was to movie making. Oh, Cooper. How's that huge?

J: Isn't that him too?

S: It's Cooper Kubrick. It's all like Q from Star Trek, alright?

C: Well, it's emu, not emu, and we all say emu, we all say it's emu.

S: I'm probably gonna say that wrong. Later Uri Geller, not Yuri Geller if you.

J: Understand what the person is saying. You gotta be cool, you know?

C: Also, we got an e-mail from somebody in Australia this week who was like really mad that we all say solder instead of solder, I guess.

E: Wow, I would. Oh my God. There's actually 3L's in solder.

C: But I looked into the etymology and it comes from the French, but then it was changed so it's like the original. It doesn't even have an L in it. But this happens a lot in American English because it's so informed. That's.

S: Like saying why don't we say kanigut?

C: Well, they do say like, why don't, why don't you say fill it or herb? And it's like because it comes from the French and we pronounce it like the French cause American English is a mix.

J: Yeah, yeah. You know what's funny, though? You could see your own language evolving overtime. Like herbs with an H to me sounded so utterly ridiculous. And I've been kind of like training myself to realize it's probably the better way to pronounce it. You. Don't.

C: I don't like it? I don't think so. I think it's and.

E: But then there's the name Herbert, which adds a layer of confusion to the whole thing, because you do pronounce the H in that sense. Herb for short.

C: Well, what about Houston and Houston? That one always gets people in Texas. It's Sam Houston, right? But. In New York City. In New York, it's Houston, yeah.

S: What about honor? You don't pronounce the H in honor.

C: Honore, honore. And like Hodor, Brits don't say ballet. They say ballet, but then they say fillet.

E: Fillet, Fillet.

S: It's all chaos, Yes. Where do you stand on the Halloween? Should be the last Saturday in October rather than October 31st.

C: Oh, good question. It should always be a weekend so.

S: It always be on a Saturday because.

C: It's a party.

B: Day, I get it, I I say I'm a traditionalist. I say stick with the 31st because it doesn't matter because wherever Halloween is, if it's Wednesday, I'm not working. I'm not going to to a. Job. So that doesn't matter to me.

J: That's a Bob centric thing, right? Like, what about all the kids whose Halloween could be significantly truncated if it's on a school night?

B: Well, don't get me started, because the the the the tradition that we need to worry about is this stupid trunk or treat where there where a lot of families, a lot of families are doing trunk or treat and then instead of trick or treating, which to me is scandalous and should be illegal, I did.

E: See a bunch of cars the other day in a park not doing that.

C: But you have to remember there are parts of this country where people don't want you coming to their homes. It's not safe to go into neighborhoods, people. All the lights are off. Trunk or Treat does allow kids to like, trick or treat safely.

B: If that's the only option, that's fine, but I don't think that's as common as.

C: I do. I literally, I'm in the middle of LA in a very, very family friendly neighborhood in a development of houses where half of the people here have kids and on Halloween nobody has their lights on. And it's so sad. One year I turned on my light. I had the whole thing. I had all the candy. I got like, you know, king size candy bars from Costco ready. Not a single person came to my door. It was depressing.

S: It's, I know it's terrible. I think partly this is a COVID holdover because the whole trunk or treat thing started in COVID and we did.

C: It when we were kids.

S: It's just ratcheting down our actual physical interaction with other people. I mean Halloween.

C: I think it. Increases it. I actually think that kids who trunk or treat are more likely to get more FaceTime with people.

S: I don't know. The thing about taking your kids around the neighborhood is you get to, you know, to an event every year where you meet every neighbor in their house. They your kids, you know what I mean?

C: That died like 30 years ago. No, my kids were young.

S: We did that. And now, like again last year, zero people came to our home.

C: OK, we'll say 20 years ago because your kids are getting when they were young. Yeah, I was like, oh, time. I know I trick or treated when I was young too, But I also stayed out with my friends until the streetlights went out. My parents had no idea where I was. We don't live in that era anymore. We live in an era where kids can't walk home from school without being released by an adult. Like it's just a different time.

S: Is that good or bad thing?

C: I think it's bad.

S: Yeah, I think sounds bad.

C: It's the helicopter parenting. Which, yeah, it's just a. It's a holdover. Room. Well, it's not even their fault. It's like school policy now it's you know what it is? It's CYA.

E: Yes, it's all CA.

C: Yeah, yeah.

E: Liability. Right Accountability.

B: But kids who are kids who are relevant for Halloween, almost adults. Adults in the United States have taken over Halloween. The kids are just like this. Oh yeah, that's kind of cool too. So let's focus on what's really important. The parents, they're the ones that are spending the money on decorations, costumes, candy. They're they're making it the second most popular holiday in terms of like money that people spend. And Halloween's the best because you throw a Halloween party, you invite people that you care about that you're talking Thanksgiving or Christmas, you got to go to family shit and nobody, you know, a lot of people don't want to do that because family is fan is full of drama and craziness. So that's one of the things that makes Halloween special is that just from the party angle. But the idea of adults taking it over, it's just like it's a done deal. And the kids are just ancillary like, yeah, get some, get some candy, which is which is interesting. And I, I like talking to other people from other countries who love Halloween, but they're like, damn, man, you know, we're just not embraced in our country yet. But it's kind of like a slow, kind of like a slow migration that is happening for a lot of countries. It's just interesting to see this, this particular American United States export, an export that I agree with, you know, going out there and finding kindred souls all over the place. So people just love this, the macabre aspect of Halloween, and want to embrace it.

C: Jay, don't you love how Bob? See, This is why I love doing throw downs with Bob. You asked him if he thinks it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month and he said no and then made a compelling argument for why it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month.

B: Can I push back on that? It's another reason not to change. It's not. It's really not really about one day. It's the fall season, all of it's all of October, all the things that that embrace Halloween. It's not just that that one night.

C: The problem though is, is when it's on a Thursday or Friday because you do all the parties the weekend before and by the time Halloween comes it feels over a little bit and then it feels weird to have parties on November 1st or November 2nd it.

B: Feels only a little bit weird. It's still fine. I think it's still totally fine. First off, you can get amazing deals on because it's after Halloween. You can get the cheapest costumes, pumpkins, all sorts of of great stuff. Also, if you're like me and a few people that I know where it's actually a little bit of it's a bummer when Halloween's over and that builds is done. It's kind of not. I don't get depressed about it, but it's like November 1st sucks. It's a worst day of the year. But if I but for years now I've been throwing the party after the first Saturday after Halloween and it's great because it extends the season for me a little bit as well. But it's also means that no one's going to a Halloween party after Halloween. So you get a bigger party because everyone bails on parties when I tried to throw them in October because you know they because they're going to so many parties. There's so much competition for really essentially only two weekends is the big competition and then that's it. So it's so there's so many good reasons to to do it right after Halloween. I mean, maybe next year Saturday is Halloween I think, right. That would be a good a good. Is it moving?

C: Forward or backward for?

B: So yeah, it'll go, Oh yeah, unless it's leap year, I don't know. No, it's not. So yeah, Saturday, Halloween, man, that's big.

C: I love having an October 19th birthday for that reason. Every year from the time I was a kid, my birthday parties were epic. Epic. Because like you said, it's a friend holiday.

B: Yes. It's not a family, not. Necessarily a family holiday, but if you.

E: If you move Halloween off of October 31st, aren't you decoupling it from All Saints Day? And doesn't that kind of defeat half the purpose? Do we?

C: Really care.

B: Not at this point.

E: Not in 2025, but those are the origins, right? Yeah, but.

C: Nobody. Nobody thinks about that.

E: Except me. OK, Well, you know, I mean, there were maybe there are people. How many?

C: People who celebrate Easter and are like hiding eggs and stuff or thinking dress.

E: Up for All Saints Day next time, Yeah, but.

C: Like, you know, it's how many people who are celebrating Easter are thinking about like fertility. They're not. They're thinking about Jesus, or they're just like candy. Easter.

E: Is one of those holidays. It does fall differently each year.

C: No, I know, but I'm saying like it's coupled to a fertility, like a Pagan fertility festival. But yeah, it's.

E: Coupled to the solstice, I thought.

C: And fertility festivals, that's why we have, like, bunnies and eggs. Yeah. That's what most of our holidays are. They're like amalgamations of multiple, like, cultures.

B: Yeah. Yeah.

E: No, I I get it. I get it. But there's a reason why Easter drifts and All Saints Day does not.

B: Yeah, Easter is calculated and it was very important historically to get that calculation correct. Otherwise you're going to hell.

U: Well, I.

E: Suppose it was a way of people tracking exactly where the heck they were in any given year. Yeah, all.

S: Right, let's move on to our news items.

E: Wait, why can't we?

C: Just spend 3 hours talking about that.

News Items

Therapeutic Nanoparticles (10:24)

• Scientists reverse Alzheimer’s in mice with groundbreaking nanotech 

S: Jay, you're going to start us off by talking about therapeutic nanoparticles.

J: Alzheimer's disease has been blamed on what Steve the sticky clumps of amyloid beta protein that builds up between the brain cells, right?

S: I mean, it's complicated. Alzheimer's is a complicated disease that has lots of pieces, lots of things are happening at the same time. And the complexity is we don't know what is driving the disease and what's an effect of the disease. And there may be multiple different things driving it in different people, right? There also could be feedback loops where like A causes B which reinforces A which causes C, You know what I mean? Yeah.

C: But those are markers, right? Those are good markers of the. But The thing is, it's.

S: Not all pure markers like amyloid beta is the big thing, right, Is amyloid beta just because that just that's a waste product that builds up in in the brain cells and it definitely causes problems. But is that what's driving the disease? And the only way we're going to ultimately really know is if if we fix that problem, does it fix the disease? Which is why there was so much excitement about the recent treatments for, you know, that are amyloid based that did have some clinical improvement. It was not dramatic, so which means it's probably not the whole story. What?

C: Did they do? Did they slow the progression? They.

S: They did slow the progression, yeah, they didn't stop or reverse it, but they did slow the progression well.

J: I thought that this study was pretty cool. I mean, again, it's still in mice, but there was a team Co led by the Institute of Bioengineering at Catalonia and West China Hospital, Szechuan University. They were in collaboration with partners in the UK and they published a study that suggests the real problem may be broken cleanup system, not just excess waste, right. So right now, like Steve said, the amyloid beta is is building up. It's a protein that builds up in the the brain. And this is one of the things that they find that people that suffer from this disease, you know, they can see that build up. And in the past, of course, you know, like there really isn't that much we can do about it, although we do think that it is, you know, one of the very important markers, the human brain, our brains rely on the blood brain barrier brains.

B: We can.

J: Call it BBB if you want.

B: Easy, Bob, it's.

J: Main job is to control what can pass from the blood into the brain and it also is there to help remove waste from the brain, right? So it does a couple of critical things. One critical protein that's called LRP. One, it almost says the word LARP, which I thought was funny. That works like a conveyor belt system that brings the amyloid beta out of the brain and into the bloodstream. And, and actually when we see that happen, we can tell we can detect it in the blood. So, so with Alzheimer's that system fails LRP 1 levels fall, it's function weakens in the brain's waste begins to pile up and that pile up can actually, you know, stop your brain from functioning well, could even be doing damage to your brain. Those leftover proteins and and protein fragments clump into these plaques that disrupt and the damage the nearby neurons. So instead of trying to invent new drugs, though, this team decided to try something different. They they wanted to try something that isn't based on chemicals. It's based on more like the plumbing of the brain. I thought that was a really cool way to put it. They look for a way to fix the brains natural waste removal system. They built these tiny hollow particles and these, you could visualize them as microscopic bubbles and they call them polymersomes. And these bubbles were coated with a molecule called Angio ET2, which can attach to the LR one and the protein that normally carries waste like amyloid beta out of the brain. So each bubble has just enough of this Angio PEP 2 to get the LRP one working again, but not so much that it would overload or damage it. And that was a big issue, you know, and, and a very hard thing for them to do. They had to find the right balance and how to tight how tightly the particles stick to the LRP 1. And they ended up finding the the right balance there. And again, like, that little detail was difficult and it just shows you how cool science is and how they can actually change the properties of things like molecules, which I find, you know, just incredible. So in the Alzheimer's model mice, a single injection of these optimized polymerosomes reduced the amyloid beta in the brain by about 45% within a few hours. Now, Steve, that sentence, that idea that I just said to me is that sounds amazing. Like what? Yeah, don't.

S: Get excited. It's a good proof of concept, right? That's what they get it. That's what these mouse models are for. But I mean, you know how good mouse models are at predicting Alzheimer's treatments, Not much basically almost 0, right? I mean they're they're like famously terrible at predicting the outcome of clinical trials in humans because it's not the same disease. It is a model. It is a model to test very specific mechanisms. It really, it isn't the disease, it's not the same disease as it is in humans. And so you just cannot extrapolate at all clinically from mice to humans. What you can do is ask very specific mechanistic, mechanistic questions. Will this increase the clearance of amyloid beta from the from neurons and in in these mice It does. Will that have a clinical benefit in humans? We'll know in 10 to 20 years, sure.

J: But the point. The point is though, and again, this is just science doing its thing. This is another test that they found and other, you know, they, they created something that has an effect and they might be able to to someday have a version of this that works in humans. Yeah.

S: As but as is often the case with these kinds of news items like don't get so focused on the Alzheimer's bit. In my opinion, what's really cool about this is they are engineering these polymersomes and that they can fine tune to have very specific effects. It's the therapeutic model that I find more interesting, not this very specific application which may or may not pan out. Yeah.

J: I was just, I was just saying what you just said, but not as cool. That's what I meant. Like the idea that they can modify. These. These molecules and have them have you know varying properties and they're like we gotta change this property like that to me is is such a fantastic thing that they're able to do today. So anyway, the point is that when they when they applied this, they were able to detect in the blood that there was an increase of amyloid beta, which shows that the brain was actually moving it outside the brain barrier and dumping it into the blood, which means it's waste product. And it was. So they were able to 100% verify that that that process was happening. It showed that the peptide was being, you know, essentially flushed out, and that's exactly what we want to have happen. Microscopy confirmed that the nanoparticles restored normal placement of the LRP on blood vessel cells and shifted the the blood brain barrier internal machinery back towards healthy function. Then they were testing the mice's behavior and the mice treated with the new therapy performed almost as well as healthy animals in memory and navigation tasks. The improvements also lasted up to six months. So there were, there's some very interesting outcomes here from this study that they did and that, you know, they are also, they made sure that the researchers obviously know what Steve knows, that the, you know, there are cool things about this and there's some early, early things that are happening that might pan out to humans one day. But it's too early. And you'll see some headlines actually say, you know, like, you know, Alzheimer's completely eradicated in mice, you know, that type of thing. That's not, that's not what's going on here, but they're the the nice thing about what what they're doing again, is this isn't giving somebody medication and trying to figure out medications that can sneak through the blood brain barrier and again, becoming dependent on chemicals like they're they're changing the function of the plumbing in your brain, which I find to be well.

S: They're they're optimizing it, right. They're restoring it is really what they're what they're arguing. And just As for further background, which I think impacts on this study, there's a huge correlation between vascular health and Alzheimer's and the, you know, what the number one risk factor for Alzheimer's is?

U: What?

J: What do you think?

S: Age. Well, yeah, age, age just like the universal risk factor. Yeah, let me just say other than age.

C: Heart disease, like cardiovascular problems, yeah.

S: Specifically high blood pressure and what does high blood pressure do? It damages these small blood vessels, the very the very same small blood vessels that this study is saying are necessary in order to clear the amyloid. And so that's yeah. So which again, maybe be a coincidence, but I think it probably all has something to do with itself that you get, you know, you get the build up which damages the vasculature, which worsens the build up. And this is kind of reversing that by and introducing this sort of optimized, you know, polyrusome that's in that sweet spot right where it's binding just strong enough to get it, but not so strong that it gets backed up. And so it facilitates the clearing of the amyloid, which restores the the blood brain barrier and the vascular health so that it could it could clear it even more.

C: Yeah, that's so interesting because I feel like it's it's always more complicated than that first idea, right? Like, oh, we see this stuff, something about Alzheimer's must be causing us to make more of this stuff. Or maybe we'd always make this stuff and something about Alzheimer's causes us to not be able to clean it out, right? Or both.

S: Or both.

C: Yeah.

S: And then there's Tau. Don't even get me started on Tau. It's a totally different waste product, which again, there's probably different subtypes in different people. Then there's different genetic subtypes as it's very complicated.

C: And what you're, you're talking about is, is what commonly known as the plaques is what we've been talking about in your talk. Well, the plaques.

S: Form from these waste products, yeah.

C: Right, so you so there's.

S: You you have like amyloid for example, then you have amyloid plaques. These are two different things. And then you also have other pathological features that form like the tangles then you have, then you have inflammatory activity which how much of that is driving it? How much of that is reactive or secondary? Even if it is second secondary, does it exacerbate and worsen it would is there any room for clinical improvement by treating the specific components of the inflammatory reaction? These are all open questions and.

C: There's not going to be 1 answer. There's not going to be one. That's the thing. It's too complicated A disease for there to be 1 simple treatment.

S: Yeah, you may get to the point where we need to, you know, unless we find this missing key that we've been missing all this time and it's like, oh, if we change this one thing, the whole cascade doesn't happen. I doubt it's going to happen at this point. Can't rule it out though. But more likely we're going to have a suite of treatments. It like with cancer, you have to. I was. Going to say that yeah.

C: And the way to the way to get rid of cancer is to prevent it from ever happening. That's that's hopefully what we could do with Alzheimer's, right. If we could get to a point where we prevent it, then we don't have to treat 1,000,000 components. Well, that's the.

S: Promise of the treatments that prevent like the build up of amyloids like, oh, if we can get to people 20 years before they would become symptomatic, maybe they'll never become symptomatic but how do we identify people that early Well, it's it's easy if they have a genetic form and we could say you're going to get it because your parents had or whatever it's harder if it's not genetic and and we have to figure out some way to accurately screen people and in a way that actually predicts who should get treated early on who should not or if the.

C: Treatments become cheap and they're not very invasive. We just do it to everybody, like we do with vaccines. But.

S: That we're not there right right the treatments are are have a high risk they're expensive and they have high bad side effects so yeah that's the thing you can't just give it you can't put it in the water as we like to say even though.

C: They're.

S: Putting aside whether that's practical or not, just meaning we can't just give it to everybody because you get, you end up causing way more harm than good. We're definitely, yeah, we're not at the vaccine point where we can just give everybody an Alzheimer's vaccine. You know, that would be great if we do get to that point, but we're not there.

U: Yeah.

S: All right. Thank you, Jay.

What Killed Napoleon’s Forces (22:50)

• DNA Finally Reveals What Really Killed Napoleon's Forces : ScienceAlert 

S: Cara, what killed off Napoleon's forces? Oh.

C: So this is a really interesting study that I came across and I have to admit I'm not a war buff and I definitely haven't done deep dives onto or into the 1812. I even had to look up what was this called because it has like 5 different names. The French invasion of Russia, the Russian campaign, the second Polish war, and in Russia they actually call it the Patriotic War of 1812. Anybody here have any sort of like personal interest?

S: In that particular war, are we?

E: Yeah.

C: Like have you been reading books about it or a.

E: Lot but no.

S: You know, it's like that.

C: How often do you think about the Roman Empire? Yeah, I've.

S: Read about the Roman Empire just now. Right.

C: Not so much.

S: Napoleon.

C: Not so much Napoleon. So I had to read up a little bit on the background. So I want to talk about the background first so that then I can talk about this study that sort of challenges some of the previous held ideas. So, Long story short, and like very short, Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812 with over half a million soldiers. Big.

E: Mistake, Yeah.

C: Like, a lot. Yeah, we, we know Russia's not. And it's never a good idea to invade Russia with. Yeah, with a ground war. And so then there was this big battle on September 7th that was super, super bloody. And Napoleon and his troops actually were able to invade and occupy Moscow. So they thought they were doing pretty well. The problem is when they got to Moscow, it was like empty and had been burned. So under the orders of the governor there and military officials, Russian military officials, they burned the city and, and, and left. So Napoleon gets there and he's like, we got here, look, we're going to take over. But there was nobody there to take over King of. The Ashes. Yeah. And then after that, he kind of like, squatted for a while to to, you know, try to supply up and figure out a new way to leave. The problem is he probably waited too long. He was also looking for a peace offer that never came. So on October 19th, actually my birthday, they started to retreat. They already had lost quite a few soldiers, you know, during battle. Then as they started to retreat, you know, all the terrible things happened, right? There were some ongoing attacks. So they did lose more soldiers to battle, but really they were devastated by, what do you think, Weather and disease, right Russian.

E: Winter kind.

C: Of and so there was this is goes down in like military history books as one of the most devastating military campaigns in history. There are estimates that he lost over 90% Napoleon of his army. So over 500,000 soldiers and horses died. And a lot of people think that typhus was the cause of the vast majority of disease. And there have even been some early studies where DNA was taken from fallen soldiers, you know, in their graves. And, but, but older, like PCR techniques were used to amplify some of these DNA, these broken DNA fragments. And, and, and it was kind of estimated that typhus was the cause. So typhus is also known as Ricketts. I can never say this Rickettsia. I always want to say Ricksetia, but it's not Rickettsia prowa zeki and that's a parasitic aerobic bacilliform bacteria and it's, you know, the main agent of epidemic typhus. And then they also, there were some ideas that there was another pathogen called Bartonella Quintana, which is spread by body lice. So OK, let's cut to this new study, which was just published this month, where the authors say not so fast. We used more modern techniques to look at the remains of a very, very small sample of this much larger group of soldiers who died. So these soldiers died in Vilnius, Lithuania in December of 1812 and were buried there. So they were able to collect samples from 13 teeth of these different soldiers and they looked at it kind of made-up about 20 million different DNA reads. And then they used some pretty complicated, I could get into it if you like, but some pretty complicated new approaches that are kind of being called adna. Have you guys heard adna? I had to Google it. And then I was like, oh, that's so obvious. Ancient DNA. So there there's like a whole field now called adna. So there's like all these really state-of-the-art methodologies that go far beyond PCR. It's not just about amplification now it's about using much more sophisticated techniques. How do they?

E: Define ancient. Is there a number there?

C: Is actually, I looked it up. Obviously we know there's an upper boundary for for sufficient DNA for sequencing, which is between half a million and one and a half million. But there have the oldest this DNA that's ever been sequenced was from mammoth molars from that are about a million years old. And we we've recovered genetic material from sediments that was 2,000,000 years old but but they couldn't sequence it. But it looks like most of it we're talking thousands of years. OK yeah, a few studies have succeeded. Only a few studies have succeeded in amplifying DNA from remains older than several 100,000. Most of it was is within like the 10s of thousands. So, so researchers in this study are using, and there's a name for this field too, which I hadn't heard before either, metagenomics. Metagenomics, which is the study of genetic material from entire communities of organisms. So that's where they will often look at like environmental samples collectively so that they can try and understand something. So these are metagenomics researchers that I guess are borrowing from those techniques and they apply them to these 13 different teeth. And obviously this is 200 year old DNA. What they did after this really sophisticated kind of extracting and analysis, what they realized is they couldn't find any typhoid at all. They couldn't they actually couldn't find either Rickettsia or the Bartonella Quintana. And actually it would be like R pro azeki. Usually you'd, you would say the species name or B Quintana, but they did find a couple interesting things. They found Salmonella enterica and specifically a specific type of salmonella enterica that causes something called paratyphoid fever. So it's similar to typhoid. They're both types of enteric fever. And so comparing that to the the records of the time, like what was actually written about how these soldiers were acting and what their symptoms were, it would makes sense then that it could have been paratyphoid when maybe they didn't know about it or they just kind of misdiagnosed it as typhoid. So they found not only paratyphoid caused by this Salmonella enterica strain, but they also found a bacterium in the DNA called Borrelia recurrentis or recurrentis. So this is another body lice transmitted bacterium and it causes something called louse born relapsing fever. It's not necessarily deadly, but combined with the paratyphoid and the exhaustion and the starvation and the, you know, hypothermia that a lot of the soldiers were experiencing, it could have exacerbated or caused their death in addition. So these two main diseases these researchers found, you know, they, they say in their discussion, you know, we only looked at 13 teeth. So it could be that there actually was some typhoid and that there actually was some B Quintana too, but we didn't see any of it. And so, you know, maybe we just didn't sample the right people or maybe what we thought caused the the majority of this death was not actually the the pathogen that caused it. And maybe it was more likely this paratyphoid problem along with this body lice disease called relapsing fever, which is super, super rare now. I mean, both of these diseases are rare in developed countries. You do see a louse borne relapsing fever in some regions of Africa where it's still endemic. Para typhoid. I actually don't know how common para typhoid is because there's no, there's no vaccine for it. The typhoid vaccine can help a little bit, but there is no vaccine for para typhoid. Oh, here we go. 6 million people a year are affected, most common in parts of Asia, very rare in the developed world. Can cause 30,000 deaths a year. It's very similar to typhoid. So we're talking fever, headache, abdominal pain, malaise, wasting like muscle wasting, non productive cough, slowed heart rate, and I guess spots. You get rosy spots. Not everybody does, but some people do. And abdominal pain with them, nausea, vomiting, vomiting, diarrhea, all that good stuff. But Karen?

S: Do you think is it fair to say, because you know, a lot of ancient armies, they die of like disease and exhaustion and malnutrition and and climate, whatever. I know Alexandria, Alexander the Great's army, like half of them or more died from dysentery or other illnesses. So we're, and I know the same is true of Napoleon's army, especially during this retreat from Moscow. But do you think is it fair to say that they died of diarrhea, whether it was typhus or another disease that could also cause diarrhea, I mean?

C: Probably basically they originally thought that, you know, dying of whatever this disease is. They actually in the documented symptomatology they do say fever, diarrhea and jaundice. Those were the three things that were like heavily documented. So I think it is safe to say. But historically we thought it was typhus and what's called trench fever, which is that beat Quintana. And now the researchers are saying actually it may have been para typhus, louse born relapsing fever, not typhus and trench fever. Fun trench.

S: Fever is one of those wonderfully archaic sounding diseases, right? Yeah, it's old. Time like trench fever and trench in foot. The drop season.

C: Yeah, it's which is why I couldn't come up with it, because when you actually look at modern write ups of Bartonella Quintana, CDC or NIH or WHO write ups of it, they don't call it trench fever anymore. So you have to specifically Google Trench Fever to learn about the fact that that's what caused it.

S: Shell shock, yeah.

C: Exactly. There's so many of those things. Trench foot.

E: Trench foot. Yep. Yeah.

C: World War 2, that was still pretty big. What was?

E: It foot do they still call it foot, mouth disease, puff and. Mouth disease. Both in mouth disease.

S: Yes, that is correct I think.

C: But trench foot specifically is that's.

S: Just from having your feet wet for weeks wet.

C: Yeah. It's, we now call it immersion foot syndrome, cold and wet for a long period of time. And it can cause, you know, all sorts of horrible things and eventually you can lose your feet. Yeah.

S: Terrible. Yeah.

C: Horrid.

U: All right.

S: Thanks Karen, not.

C: How Napoleon's army died. Yeah. Hi there.

Making Better Photosynthesis (34:51)

• Reprogramming encapsulins into modular carbon-fixing nanocompartments 

S: All right, guys, I'm going to talk to you about photosynthesis. You guys know what photosynthesis is, right? Of course, yes. Yes. All right, Evan, tell me what it is. What's the core of photosynthesis?

E: By the core, By core you mean like what happens? You mean plants? Or when plants absorb the energy from the sun and turn and do and have a chemical process by which it derives its energy? And yeah, what's? That chemical process? Carbon. Dioxide they're.

C: Fixing carbon, Yeah.

S: The key piece is the taking of carbon from carbon dioxide in the air to build the sugars, right? That is the food, the carbohydrate, and then.

C: They also respire they. Respire oxygen, yes. They still they respire and they photosynthesize now does.

S: Anybody know what the key enzyme is that fixes carbon from the atmosphere?

B: Is it enzyme 4716? No. Are you sure it?

S: Is Rubisco, OH?

C: Rubisco ribulose 15 biphosphate carboxylase, oxygenase obviously, right? We'll call it Rubisco. What?

S: No, obviously, don't worry.

C: I looked. That up. I did not know that up.

B: Sounds like a hot sauce. It's. Impressive this.

S: Process of, of photosynthesis using Ribisco as a the main enzyme driving it is the key to all life on earth, right? I mean most of the energy that is consumed by life is produced in this process. And you know, we most of our food we grow is dependent on this process. What's interesting is that in plants the Ribisco based photosynthesis is really inefficient. It's massively inefficient.

C: Well, it never needed to be, right? There's just plants everywhere. Need.

S: Is an interesting concept evolutionarily. Right.

C: There was no and there was no environmental pressure for it to become more efficient. So I.

S: I don't think that's accurate. I think it's easy. It's better to say that plants found a very inefficient solution to the Rubisco inefficiency problem. Their solution was just to mass produce Rubisco, right?

B: It's what about the idea of like, it's much harder to go back then. Well, there's continue forward, right? There's the.

S: Evolutionary constraints, you know that may why didn't we hit upon other solutions? You know, like once plants hit upon that solutions like we're going to it's basically yeah, we're good brute force our way to to making more food from sunlight by just making tons of Rubisco. It was just an easy Yeah, maybe it's.

C: Cheap and easy for a plant. Easy.

S: Way to do it by some estimates like you know that half of the protein in a photosynthesizing part of a plant could be Rubisco, you know and.

C: Wow. So well, but then again, that is it's like main driving. Yeah, so. Yeah, so.

S: So for plants, it was fine. Yeah, just make a ton of this stuff. We can do it. It's it is an easy, evolutionarily easy solution. Just make more. But the problem is when now we are trying to feed the, you know, 8 billion plus people by growing crops as efficiently as possible that just brute force your way through it and make a ton of Rubisco is becomes the limiting factor in the efficiency of agriculture. Right, right.

E: Like. Silicon to computer chips, right? Yeah.

S: And so specifically the very high need of nitrogen fertilizer comes from the fact that you need nitrogen to make Rubisca, right? So that a lot of that fertilizer and a lot of water. So water use and fertilizer use in crops, you know, a lot of that is due to this very brute force solution that plants evolved, you know, in order to maximize their photosynthesis. Now there's a couple of other living organisms that also photosynthesize that are not plants that hit a pod.

U: A.

S: Different solution. What were you called, Ribisco?

C: Blue-green algae, yes.

S: Algae, absolutely algae and and some bacteria and they came up with a different solutions rather than just like producing tons of ribisco. Do you know what solution they came upon? A.

E: Different enzyme?

S: No, not A. Bad thought. What's called CO2 concentrating mechanisms or CCM. So they evolved to get as much CO2 next to the Rubisco as possible so that it the enzyme becomes more efficient. So rather than having 10 times as much, you make it 10 times as efficient. Just to throw a number out there.

B: Right. Just by having CO2 closer, yeah.

S: Yeah, it's a reaction.

J: Why it's a?

S: Reaction, right? So you need to have lots of interaction between Rubisco and CO2 by having lots of Rubisco. Or you could maximize that interaction by concentrating the CO2 over a little bit of Rabisco. That makes sense.

B: Yeah, that's. That relatively. Easy fix evolutionarily, why didn't more? Well.

S: What it's not.

C: A good thing, necessarily. Think about the fact that our oceans are acidifying and we're seeing these massive algal blooms everywhere that kill everything else off.

S: Well, it's.

C: Probably because they're able to use that carbon so much more efficiently than like the other organisms. Right.

S: But I mean, it wasn't a problem in nature, we're making it a problem, right?

C: But it's a problem now because.

S: We are because, yes, because we are part part of the reason for that is we have to give so much nitrogen to our agricultural plants to make them grow optimally. And if some of that fertilizer gets washed into the ocean, now you have these very efficient organisms with all this nitrogen and they just go crazy, right?

C: Yeah, tons. Of that, not just some tons of yeah. It's a lot, all right.

S: So but what if, what if we could get that CO2 concentrating mechanism, that CCM as they call it, into our crops? That's this has been the goal for decades of researchers. They were looking for. How can we do this? Now, one of these specific mechanisms is what's called a Rubisco containing compartment. You put the Rubisco in a box and you get CO2 in that box and that's how you increase its concentration of CO2. That makes sense. It's very conceptually very simple. Just put it in a box with a bunch of CO2 and the reactions happen in the box and you're good. That's how the box the the algae solve the problem rather than just making a bunch of of Rubisco. All right, so researchers have made a proof of concept, right? By creating their own box for Rubisco and showing that it can actually work. It can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis. Now what do? What do you think they make the box out of?

B: Polymerosomes.

S: Very close. The same kind of idea, right? Basically, liposomes, this is that technology that we're talking about, right? Where you just encapsulate things into fat. Yeah, these bubbles. All right, so they made one, but you have to get Rubisco inside these cages, right? So what they figured out is that you have to make the cage around the right the Rubisco. You can't get it in there after the fact.

B: Why? Why can't you shove the Rubisco in there after you make the cage?

S: Whatever they couldn't they this has been the trick, right? Making this happen, you know, at a nano level. So they they are they were working with the Rubisco containing compartments from cyanobacteria specifically called part carboxysomes. So we had the polymerosomes from J. Now we have the carboxysomes from Photosynthesis and they were able to tag it with this 14 amino acids so that that would load the Ribisco inside of it, right? So basically something that would latch onto the Ribisco and then build the cage around the Ribisco. Does that make sense? So they had to build it at the right time, you know, as the plant develops so that it's the cages are forming when the rubisco's being made. Yeah. Yeah. Because they didn't do that. Then the then the IT didn't assemble properly and didn't work. This is all the technology, right? You got to get stuff to work. There's always these little, these little how many?

E: Trials in there, yeah.

S: There's a lot of trials, a lot of little things you got to go through all right, so but eventually, eventually they were able to make the carboxysomes package up the Rubisco and they they worked, you know, they they you know, but they they haven't, you know, completely develop the technology yet, right? This is this is just a proof of concept and there are additional components that they're going to need to get in there in order for this to fully work, right. And then of course, we need to get them into crops so that our wheat and corn and rice are using this method. And this isn't the only research being done into, you know, again, this carbon concentrating methods is this is the whole approach. But the good news is you could look at always look at in terms of good news. Good news is there's a lot of headroom on efficiency photosynthesis in our crops because by chance plants evolve this inefficient method, which means all we got to do is figure out a way to get this either algae or cyanobacteria method into crops and again this is a significant progress in doing that and then if we do that what that means is not only will our produce be way higher yield, but they will use significantly less water and nitrogen fertilizer. So this could be an absolute game changer for agriculturist yes, be an absolutely good. So it's that's why it's worth, you know, doing developing this technology and investing a lot in in this kind of research and also multiple different ways like we can not put all our eggs in one basket. Like we could try to, you know, address this issue with multiple different approaches. How?

B: Beneficial. Would this be just massive during during the especially though? Especially during like the zombie apocalypse, all the canned food's gone. You got to actually grow your own food. Oh look, I've got this new plant 2.0 that's much more efficient. That's going to be a lot easier to it.

S: Could be in a second green revolution, right? Oh my.

B: God, yeah, if it works as we hope, I can't see how it wouldn't be. Well, the. Potential is there, right?

S: That's the bottom line is the potential is there. They're making progress on the technology. Conceptually, I think we have our heads wrapped around this. We just got to keep track of it and see how it goes. And obviously there's a lot of GMO research that's going on to do the same thing, you know, to get right some kind of of carbon concentrating technology going. There's also different types of Ribisco that are more efficient and, and some plants have them and some don't. So getting the C4 versus C3 into all the plants can also give a boost of 1020% to productivity, which is huge. You know, you have the potential here is just massive.

Second Generation Black Holes (46:13)

• Gravitational wave events hint at 'second-generation' black holes 

S: All right, Bob, tell us about second generation black holes. All right.

B: So my title for this is well, kind of as Black hole zombies in the news. They're dead stars and they Raven ravenously eat their own. Now, at least that's what a pay a recent paper is saying. But not in those words, of course, not even close. Did they even use those words? But a more conventional opener for this news item might go like this gravitational wave. Astronomers report 2 unusual black hole mergers that are the best evidence yet for second generation black holes. The paper was recently published on this in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. OK, from these collisions were revealed by not just LIGO, we're talking LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA collaboration these respectively. Those are the gravitational wave observatories for the United States, Italy and Japan. And three together they make quite a team up. So they we know this, right? They measure subatomic scale distortions in space-time caused by distant cataclysmic events like colliding black holes or neutron stars. So it's a new, it's a new era in astronomy, multi messenger astronomy where you can look at the radiation from objects in space, but you could also look at what it does to the fabric of space-time itself. OK, so last year they came across 2 unusual but similar black hole collisions within a month, within a month of each other, although one was 700 million light years distant and the other was over 2 billion light years distant. Imagine there's they're traveling through space all that time and they they hit our observatories within one month. LSE spokesman Stephen Fairhurst described it as among the most novel events among the several 100 that the LIGO Virgo KAGRA network has observed. So why, why was this special? So both of these collisions were interesting in that now imagine you've got 4 black holes, 2 and they're binary. So they got 2 binaries for. For each of these binaries, one of the pair was extra massive, right? It was more like more than twice as massive as as its partner that it that it's orbiting around. So for example, one was 17 solar masses and its partner was 7, and the other binary pair had a 16 solar mass primary and an 8 solar mass secondary black hole. So they were much, they were unbalanced in terms of of their mass. But these larger black holes also had very unusual spins. 1 was among the fastest spinners ever, ever seen. I was trying to figure out, OK, this, this star is spinning really fast, almost the fastest ever detected. So how do you put that into context? And it's really hard because there's there's no solid surface here. It's the it's dimensionless. So it's hard to actually describe it. But so the best I can come up with was a fair way to think about it is that the space-time at the black holes horizon like 83 kilometers wide was frame dragging around and around about 400 times per second. It's literally pulling space with it and sounds pretty disorienting and potentially spaghettifying as well. So the other, the other larger black hole was bizarre as well in that it's spin wasn't necessarily as as fast, but it was the the spin was in the opposite direction of its orbit. So that that's a retrograde spin that has literally never been seen with this level of clarity and confidence before. We they think they've seen them before, but it was just very fuzzy and hard to make out. This one was like basically crystal clear as far as I could tell. Retrograde, retrograde spin on a black hole. So what does this all? What does this all mean? So what seeing that seeing binary black holes where one member has twice the mass and in addition, this atypical rotation implies what it implies a violent history for that black hole. Something happened in its past that was pretty, pretty nasty. So the simplest explanation is that those larger black holes, but they weren't just simple remnants, you know, they they didn't form from just one step dead star and have been hanging out ever since. They likely formed from previous collisions and the resulting larger mass and the weird spins that they saw initially were, were basically, you could look at it as like scars from those previous, those previous mergers that had happened in its past. So it let these, so when these black holes smashed together in the past, it left these fingerprints on it when they merged with other black holes in the future. They, they show that these scars from having already, you know, already merging previously. So they liken these now to what, what they're calling second generation black holes, which experience what they refer to as hierarchical mergers. Black holes that merge over and over suggest that they formed in these dense environments like star clusters where this can happen. So it's not like a typical, when you think of a black hole, you know, an ordinary stellar mass black hole, you know, you know, a very large star goes to its life cycle and it explodes in a supernova and it becomes a classic black hole. They kind of like stay there and encounters with other black holes are a very, very rare, rare because you're kind of like in your solar system and there's not the nearest star or black hole could be many, many light years away. But these look like they, they formed in dense environments, so dense that the, the, the closest black holes and other stars were close enough where they could over the, over the years, of course, many millions of years, they could merge together over and over and over. So this helps us elucidate this, this, this life cycle or you know, this life cycle of some black holes and what you know, you know, what their journey through, through their existence is like compared to say, other black holes. So, So for me, though, the real take away and potential of these of these observatories, it was expressed by Gianluca Jeme. He's a spokesperson of the Virgo collaboration. He said these detections highlight the extraordinary capabilities of our global gravitational wave observatories. And he couldn't be more right with that. I'm constantly amazed at what these with what these a wave observatories can do. No instrument, no instrument ever created by humanity can detect changes in distance better and smaller than than than a proton like LIGO and and its siblings do basically on an on a daily basis. It's amazing how exquisitely sensitive they are. They help us interpret these distant laboratories in space that could never exist on Earth with the with the tremendous energies that they unleash. We would never be able to. I mean, we could model it on supercomputers probably, but actually observe serving real reality and as a as a laboratory, these are colliding black holes. We're only ever going to just observe these in distant space. This allows us these, these devices, these, this technology allows us to stress test general relativity in ways that we'll never, that we'd never be able to do otherwise. And the fact that, that LIGO and Virgo and Kagrg and, and their future descendants continue to be refined and become even more sensitive than ever means that they will be even more sensitive to any new physics that may go beyond Einstein's general relativity or our standard model of physics. So the more sensitive they become, the better, the better they will be to to sense new physics when it finally, you know, finally, if ever emerges out out of there brand new branches of physics like that is a is a Holy Grail, obviously, and would certainly win future Nobel prizes and offer insights into deeper layers of our universe. If any of that interests you. Of course, that's all I got, Steve all.

More on 3I/ATLAS (53:53)

• Everything we know about mystery ‘alien spaceship’ expert warned could 'change course for Earth' today 

S: Right. Interesting. Thanks, Bob. All right, Evan, Avi Loeb is at it again. What's going on? Oh my. God, yeah.

E: Well, there's news this week because, well, October 29th was just yesterday and comet three I Atlas made its closest approach to our sun. So that has to do with Avi Loeb in the news. I'll get to him in a moment. The anticipation for this day was built up for several months, actually, as scientists and the public have anxiously, maybe not anxiously, but but they've been waiting to see if this stranger from outside our solar system is going to swing around the sun as well. Standard models would predict. Or is this something other than a comet that has the capability of altering its own trajectory in some way, which would be a very strong indicator that it's not a comet at all, but rather something out of a science fiction novel. Hmm, I wonder what the results are. We're going to find out. But comet three I Atlas, Yes. First of all, a little history was discovered on July 1st, 2025, and since then, astronomers have been doing everything they can to learn as much about it. Because unlike other comets, 3 I Atlas doesn't orbit our Sun. It's an interstellar comet, one of only three that we've ever seen. Hence the designation 3I3 Interstellar. It is thought to be at least 7 billion years old, which is almost twice as old as Earth and apparently the oldest comet that's been observed. So that alone makes the study of this comment a rare chance to try and learn something about ancient objects hurtling around from outside of our solar system. But it also, unfortunately, opens an opportunity for fringe scientists, crank pseudo scientists and conspiracy theorists to have a field day playing with this chunk of debris from a distant part of our universe. Yeah, so here's something unusual to our understanding. Let's go crazy with our imaginations. They say it doesn't work that way, folks. We've mentioned Three Eye Atlas on the show many times over the last few months since that July discovery. And not the least of reasons why is because of that astronomer from Harvard University, Dr. Avi Loeb. He's made quite a name for himself occupying that fringe science or fringe scientist category in my opinion. He made international headlines back in 2018 for arguing that the interstellar object O mua mua might have been a light sail sent by an ancient civilization. And more recently he led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to recover debris from IM one. That was that 2014 meteor that he also suggested could be of interstellar origin and possibly artificial. Both cases drew wide attention, but none of Loeb's extraordinary interpretations have stood up to any peer reviewed scrutiny. But three I Atlas. Loeb's theory is that, well, yet again, here's another candidate for extraterrestrial technology. It is cleverly disguised, maybe, maybe as a comet, yet revealing, because the comet does not behave like other comets that scientists have been able to study, the ones that originate and continue move in orbit in our own solar system. He describes these anomalies as such. These are jets of material that apparently pointing toward the sun rather than away from it and almost complete lack of a visible tail and an emission of nickel without any sign of iron where you would normally have the two of those coming out in a predictable ratio. So this is an that's considered an extremely unusual mix. It's.

S: Almost as if we've never seen an interstellar comet before. Well, that's.

E: The point right is that's what this all boils down to is that we're learning you.

S: Know it's the first interstellar comet. It's a third interstellar object. Third.

E: Interstellar object, so.

S: It's the first time we're seeing something like this and he's saying, but there's unusual stuff we've never seen before, therefore we need to seriously consider aliens. It's for.

C: Aliens.

E: Yeah, I went to Earth's guy. Earth's guy's a good website. They they they've done good work on tracking Three I Atlas and its movements and the plausibility at all of what Avi Loeb has to say about this. And there's really nothing here that requires any alien engineering degree whatsoever. It's moving on a hyperbolic trajectory. It's going to sling it back out of the solar system after it passes near the sun as the models describe. And this is observations from multiple observatories. This isn't just one source looking at this the the pan stars 2 telescope has been tracking it. NASA's neo wise mission is tracking this as well among among others. And it really has all the hallmarks of a typical, it's volatile, but it's typical interstellar comet that they say it's losing water and gas as it warms. And it's faint it, it has a faint coma. You know, it's not they say it's just not dramatically seen as some of the other comets that we've been, you know, have have observed in the past. Jet's pointing towards the sun that can be explained away by as an optical geometry effect because of our viewing angle and solar illumination. So there are there are answers to all of the questions, all of the anomalies that are being that are being posed here. Again, none of it you have to go to alien engineering for. Yeah. So what happened? Yeah, it reached the sun just yesterday. And again, the latest observations, it's it's on its way back out of the solar system now. But it has not made any dramatic turns. It has not done anything out of out of the usual that is not displaying any kind of of behavior that would say, hey, we need to really scrutinize this and take a second look at it and maybe Avi Loeb or someone else is on to something. None of that is occurring. This is acting as a comet should act. Oh, did you know I hadn't heard this one before I researched it for this news item. There's speculation that the objects reversed engineered trajectory points towards the same direction as the WOW signal that was detected back in 1970.

B: 7.

E: Really.

B: No way man. I mean.

E: That's, you know, how accurate could that?

B: Be a.

E: Point for creativity but you know I mean trying to stir up old controversies and old you know old conspiracy theories is is rather interesting I thought that they were able to bring back the wow signal and fold it into this into this event as well he's.

S: Spiraling down the crank drain, this guy. So now he's saying that NASA's withholding photographic evidence that could prove that he's correct. Yeah.

J: Just just for him to anything for him to be correct, right?

S: So this is the pattern he's falling into and it's actually weight may work worse than weight, worse than we've already documented. So for example, he said, oh, it doesn't have a coma. A coma should have a comma. And then there was a paper that showed that it does have a coma. And they said the papers wrong because because why? Because it shows that he then he had to admit that it that it did have a coma and said, well, maybe it has a coma because the interstellar craft picked up dust from its interstellar travel. Oh my God. Therefore it so it just keeps, you know, just changing what he's claiming. You know, it's just getting more and more silly. They said, oh, it's you know, it's glowing with its own light, you know, which is not true. Yeah, the anti tail, the tail pointing forward is likely because the stuff that's coming, you know, what happens is the the the comet gets heated up by the sun. That's what creates the coma. And then the solar wind creates the tail, right. So it's blows the stuff away. But if the particles are very heavy, they won't quickly get pushed away by the solar wind. They will. They will just keep going and radiating out from the comet. And the brightest point on the comet is the one that's facing the sun, right? So you're going to have ejected material going towards the sun. And if it's heavy particles, it won't get pushed into a typical cometary tail, hence you're left with an anti tail. Does that make sense? And this, and we've seen this before. And then you would expect well, overtime it still will get pushed into a regular tail. It'll just take longer because the particles are heavier. And that's what's happening. That's what we're seeing as time goes on. But he, you know, The thing is, again, I don't have a problem with saying, oh, could this observation be consistent with an alien craft, whatever. But this is just not the kind of thing that should be shopped to the public at this stage, because this is completely consistent with just a regular comet or, you know, an interest in interstellar comet with some unusual features that we've never seen before. Because it's interstellar. That's it. It's, you know, the probability of this turning into something fantastic like an alien spacecraft is negligible. But maybe it's not technically 0, but it's pretty damn low. And it's certainly Occam's razor dictates that, you know, we have to rule out, you know, non alien, you know, interpretations first, just regular old astronomical object stuff first. And he's just making a career going on. Joe Rogan now talking about how NASA's hiding data. I mean, this is he's.

C: Been coming just a straight.

S: Up crank now.

C: People aren't just picking this up. He's got a publicist, you know? He is, yeah.

B: He, he has, he has sullied these interstellar close calls for, for years, for years whenever and, and we're we're going to get to the point where we could literally, you know, potentially detect 2/3 of these every year and, and now for years. If everyone's going to be talking about what is this also an alien craft? It I also expect him at this point to say these, those aliens are so smart that they made this one look just like an icy ball of rock and not, you know, not what it really is. That's how good they are. Like really, I expect to hear that from him anytime now, how good the aliens are at disguising real. Shame. It detracts.

E: It detracts from the wonder of the science of all of this. That's what really should be on showcase here is how amazing these things are and the fact that we are able to learn these new things about them. That's that's the real how excitement here as far as I'm how American.

B: Is this whole thing right? It's just like. There's a chance. Of real interesting science. No, it's aliens. I don't.

S: Think that's uniquely American as.

E: Far as NASA not releasing the photo, not all of their devices spit out photos as fast as others. And you know the I think it was the what, the high rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. That takes time to, to get those images to, to come out of that particular 1. And that's the one he was referring to. So he, he doesn't bring that into his discussion at all when he's talking about it. You know, that this is, this is, this is this particular instrument does take a long time to render these pictures. No, no, no. Instead it's NASA's hiding stuff. So yeah, that that's what throws him into the crank category when he starts doing stuff like that.

J: Yeah, I mean, the guy is probably drunk on money and the, you know, the the thing that he's getting for it.

E: Yep. And that's he's selling.

J: It's a good lesson here, you know, like you can watch it in real time. Just watch him slide down the crazy hole, you know, just because he's getting other things that are apparently more important than real science. Well, even.

S: If you put the motivations aside, I do think there's a feedback loop of why aren't I being taken seriously for my crank ideas and to people are just closed minded to their hiding data to their wrong to there's a conspiracy and it's all you know what I mean. You just keep that. I think the feedback loop that he is going down right now.

Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:05:35)

S: All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time? Yes.

J: It is all right guys, last week I played this noisy. That's pretty weird. What do you think?

E: Did anyone suggest it was a Morse code signal of something? No, no. OK, you.

J: Did though maybe? Are you gonna stick with that?

E: Possible that's what they were going for. I just don't know what what made the noise though. All right, well.

J: We got, I got a lot of guesses, some fun ones. There was a lot of people sending in a lot of jokey stuff. Thank you for the laughs. But I, you know, obviously I can't really, I can't go, I can't go all in on that. But this one, this one made me laugh. This guy is named Kevin Walsh. And he says, hi, Jay, I think you're at the point where if it sounds like a bird, it's probably not. But if it's a bird, it doesn't sound like one. That being said, this doesn't sound like a bird, so I'm going to guess it's a woodpecker. I'm like, OK, it is not a woodpecker. And Steve, have you ever heard a woodpecker make any kind of sound like that? No.

S: They're usually way more rhythmic, yeah.

U: And they?

E: Laugh a lot to into the cartoons.

J: Absolutely.

S: That's only the pileated woodpecker.

J: I have another listener named Gary Blandford, Gary said. To me it sounded like a lead worker flattening or shaping the lead sheet prior to welding or other processes. Keep up the great work. That's an interesting guess. I, I haven't worked with lead, I've only worked with iron. So I don't, I don't hear, I don't hear that, but that was interesting. I actually want to, I want to know what that sounds like now. Another listener named Nicole H said hi. This is my first time writing. I was bummed a few weeks ago because I recognized the roller coaster noise, but I didn't send an e-mail. This is a lesson to everyone out there. Take the chance, send the e-mail sometimes. You're going to be right. She continues. This week's noise sounds like liquid filled bottles rolling downstairs.

B: Interesting I've.

J: Heard this noise. This is is not correct, but thank you for the guess. Scott Wesley writes in sounds too simple and I think you've done it before, but it sounds like one of those playground pipes where you can tap with your hands or slip on flat shoes to make these sort of noises. It sounds very clean, though, either either well practiced or I'm wrong. So Scott, did you mean did I have I played the playground pipe noise before or I wasn't crystal clear on what you said or what you meant by that. But the bottom line is almost sure I have never played this noisy before. I mean, it is a hard thing because the noises go back into when Evan used to do it as well. So I don't have perfect clarity. I have OK clarity on that, particularly things that are like over five years ago. Anyway, you are incorrect and that's all fine. It's OK to be wrong. As Steve says, he's wrong all the time, right? No, he never says that. Hi. Anyway, so nobody won and I you know it. Always completely baffles my mind when people don't guess that it's a bird. When it's a bird, and this is a bird, Steve, you want me to play it again and you want to try to guess sure.

S: All right.

J: Here we go. What do you think?

S: I have no idea, Bird. It's an emu. What you. Doing you're.

J: Right, I actually wrote down how to pronounce it. It's an emu.

B: Nice, I told.

J: You later in the show, I was going to mispronounce it, you hear? Me say that all right. So it's an emu, emu, emu and these are large flightless birds. They live in their native to Australia. They are the second largest bird in the world after the ostrich. The adults can grow to about 6 1/2 feet tall and weigh around 100 to 130 lbs. And of course they have long necks. That's how they get up that high. Strong legs, brownish feathers that look shaggy because each feather has a double shaft. Very cool bird. I have a new noisy for you guys this week and here it is. I'll say it now. You got to put it in before Steve ready. Yeah. So this noisy this week, guys. This one has very high pitched, somewhat annoying tinging sounds. So if you want, turn your volume down a little bit just to make sure you don't don't hurt yourself. The people in the background have nothing to do with this, just so you know. All right, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, e-mail me at WTN. Finish it Steve at.

S: Theskypethisguy.org there.

J: You go. All right, Steve, There's stuff.

S: Yeah, there is stuff.

J: OK, so First off, we have tickets for sale. We have a bunch of shows planned. We're calling this the ERE, the Exclusive Rogue Encounter. What is it, you might ask? This is the result of people emailing us like, for a very long time asking us they want something they, they like the VIP things that we do, but they want something more intense, you know, like an intense VIP thing. So we thought we'd turn this kind of like, into, you know, a Disney World attraction where you will encounter us like we are dinosaurs. No, that's not what it is. This is going to be this. This is going to be exclusive, meaning the numbers are going to be very low and it's going to be more intimate. We are going to have, you know, it's going to be like you and a handful of other people hanging out with the SGU. We don't know exactly.

C: We're not. Performing we're engaging, we're.

J: Talking, yeah.

C: Yeah.

E: Private. Time with the SGU. Yeah.

J: I mean, it's going to be a lot of fun. We, we don't know exactly what we're going to do because we'll, you know, we'll think about it. We could do anything. It could be anything from listening to music to, you know, to playing games, to slap and George around, just whatever, you know, whatever we decide. But it'll be fun and this will happen on Friday night. I'm not going to say anything else about that because the the tickets are not up yet, or they might be by the time this episode comes up, if not exclusive.

US#02: This is, yeah.

J: They'll be next week. Bottom line is watch out for that on the home, on the SGU homepage. Then you know that will be January 9th. And on January 10th we have two shows. We have the SGU Private show and we have the SGU Extravaganza with George Robb. All those tickets are available on thesgu.org site. And then we Fast forward now to Saturday, May 16th, that's in Madison, WI at the Atwood Music Hall. It'll be the same exact arrangement. I just said Friday night exclusive rogue encounter the Saturday, which is actually the 16th, we'll have both the SGU private show and the Skeptical Extravaganza stage show. And just to let you know, we're going to be doing a show in New Haven at some point, that's New Haven, CT. Those those dates will be coming out soon. It'll be sometime in the probably early spring. And also if guys, if you want to support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com for slash skeptic's guide. Thank.

S: You, Jay.

Emails (1:12:32)

S: All right, we got a quick e-mail. This one comes from Norbert, who asks. Here is my paraphrase of what a psychologist said on a radio program many years ago. Humans have reflexes, drives, and urges, but humans do not have or act on instinct. At the time, I simply accepted the comment as accurate, but what are your thoughts? I thought that this might make an interesting segment for the show. All right. Well, thank you, Norbert. I think it is an interesting question, Cara. What do you think about that? Do humans have instinct?

C: I have to look at specifically how they worded this your.

S: Immediate reaction is it depends on the details which I mean.

C: How to define reflexes? Drives and urges, but they do not have instinct. Well, how isn't a reflex not an instinct? Like this is all just operational definition Exactly.

S: But I'd rather like this is. It depends on your definition. This is a semantic argument because we.

C: We do have reflexes and drives and urges, and I don't think there's a difference between an instinct and an urge or a drive. I think what they're asking is do we have things that are innate versus environmentally influenced? And we do, totally.

B: We totally have innate flight thoughts, feelings, behaviors.

S: Yeah, and.

C: Like suckling exactly. Yeah. Coughing, like, yeah, all of those things. So we have these basic kind of neurological ones, but I think.

S: Even more complicated, I think the parenting instinct is absolutely real, yeah.

C: There are definitely instincts. I mean, and, and people have them when they have pets even. I think whenever there's something in your charge that you're caring for, there are certain, you know, neurotransmitters, there's certain brain states that you experience. But then again, there's always an exception to the rule because there's some people who have weaker versions of that. There are people with psychopathy who might struggle with, you know, empathy and probably those things aren't triggered.

S: Yeah. Now I think where where people might make a distinction is that because all of these things, reflexes, drives, urges, instinct, whatever you want to call it, the more neurologically sophisticated a species species is, the more higher level cognitive processes will be affecting these behaviors and feelings, etcetera, right. So just because, like, as human beings, we can think about stuff and alter our behavior accordingly, doesn't mean we don't have the instincts, right? Doesn't mean the instincts aren't there I think.

C: There's also a big difference between what we're talking about like quote neurological, what I would actually not use the word instinct, I would use the word reflex or drive or urge. And what we often think of as instincts are can be learned, but there's still instincts because we have heuristics and we have biases. And so even though there's a lot of environmental influence, there is still the quick reaction, you know, the thinking fast and slow. And when we have the quick reaction, whether it is socially influenced or whether it is biologically influenced, there it's the immediate reaction versus the higher level. I need to sit and think about this. Yeah. And so some people might call that an instinct. It depends on how you define it, right?

S: But I think by any reasonable definition we have, there's instincts in that, you know, the, the core part of the definition is it's, there are some things that are, are innate that affects our thoughts, feelings that behaviors, absolutely.

C: Yeah, and pulling away your hand from a hot fire, you can call it a reflex, sure, but we also have the cognitive ability to override that and force our hand there even if it burns. So it's like even a reflex is more complicated than that. So I think the word instinct is just a loaded word and they're using it. Whatever your professor was or the the the psychologist on the radio program was, my hope is that they contextualized it more than that. They didn't just say that sentence and then like, go dead silent, right?

S: You can't leave it there, Yeah.

C: Yeah.

S: I mean, I reflexes have a very specific definition in neurology, so I would reserve them for that. Those are, those are usually things that are happening at a peripheral level, you know, or if they are.

C: In the knee with or if they are.

S: In the brain, they're in a subconscious level. It's like a circuit. It is literally a circuit that does not involve any higher level thought and may in fact be completely independent of it. Like you can't even impact it with your higher level thought right?

C: So like instinct, for example, as opposed to reflex would be like maybe pulling, pulling your hand away. Or it's like there's all the obviously famous little Albert experiments, which were flawed, but whatever. And most psychologists generally agree that there are two main fears that infants have loud noises and heights falling.

B: Yeah.

C: Yeah, like falling and loud noises that those are just things that quote UN quote innately, they're instinctive.

B: Reactive.

C: They're instinctive, yeah, But then they can learn all sorts of other ones and they feel instinctive. It feels instinctive to recoil to a snake, but that is learned. That's.

B: That's totally fully learned.

C: There's all sorts of cool experiments where they put babies with snakes and the babies are just like, grabbing at them and like, totally not concerned at all, right? Yeah, right.

Name That Logical Fallacy (1:17:44)

Topic: Argument from Ignorance https://www.tiktok.com/@latterdaylogic/video/7564860024363732238?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc

S: OK, we're going to do a name that logical foul as well. This one comes from TikTok. So this is also a from TikTok. But this was someone who care. I believe is a Mormon who who according to their their faith, there were horses, modern horses in the Americas prior to contact with the Europeans, right. But of course scientists, you know, historians say that there is no modern horses in the Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans that.

C: Only. Only like extinct horses, yes.

S: Yeah. And those extinct horses probably all migrated over from Europe. The horses evolved in Europe and Asia, and then there were waves of immigration from over the Bering Strait when that was passable, et cetera. And then modern horses evolved in Europe and Asia and were brought to the Americas by Europeans basically.

C: According to the Mormons, Native Americans are a quote lost drive of Israel. I know.

S: Right. This is all, yeah, we don't have to get into for this piece, but this guy is saying that that argument that there were no modern horses in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans is a logical fallacy. It is the argument from ignorance and and then he backs it up by saying the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So he's trying to use skeptical logic. You know, the kind of arguments that we make in order to say we don't know that there weren't, you know, modern horses in the Americas prior to Europe. You're just basing it on this conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence. But that's.

C: Just another semantic argument. We can't prove that there were no horses, but we can say reasonably that there's no evidence that there were horses, so it's likely there weren't. I don't understand why. Yeah, yes, we say the same thing all the time. We operate as if there were no horses because there's no evidence to think there were.

S: Exactly. You weren't here for the interview with a philosopher a couple weeks ago where he made a very good point, which I think we need to constantly reinforce, which we have, but he put a good term on it. Science operates by the inference to the best explanation, and that's it's all inference to the best explanation based upon the totality of evidence and not proof, right? It's not math, it's not proof. And so in the context of science, we can see that if you look at all the evidence, right? There's evidence that horses evolved in Europe. And Asia right there, they did not evolve in the Americas. There's no evidence for horses in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans. And we know that Europeans brought their horses over here. And so the simplest actually have Occam's Razor kicking in. The simplest explanation, the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions, as we'd like to say more accurately, and the the best inference to, you know, to the most likely conclusion is Europeans brought modern horses to north to the Americas. They were not here before. Him trying to call that a logical fallacy means it's the fallacy fallacy, right? He does not understand how these these fallacies work. I also often point out that saying absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is technically wrong. It is evidence of absence. It's just a.

C: Proof of absence. It's a form of evidence. It's a form. Of evidence stuff.

S: And how good is the evidence? Well, it depends on how much you've looked and how effective whatever your survey technique is.

C: And we expectation can we sample, Yeah.

S: Would we have expected to find horses, evidence of horses pre Europeans if they were here? Like would we have expected to find typhus in the remains of Napoleon soldiers? It doesn't prove they didn't have typhus, but we didn't find what we expect to find if they did. And that is absolutely evidence of yeah.

C: It's just not proof. I use the same argument when people ask me why I call myself an atheist and not agnostic. And I always tell people I think that the term agnostic is a global label. We are all agnostic. We are either theistically agnostic or we are atheistically agnostic. Meaning nobody has full proof. All we can do is operate as if there is no God or as if there is a God or multiple gods. I operate as if there is no God, meaning I am an atheistic agnostic. Some people operate as theistic agnostic, so I drop the agnostic label because it's redundant. But I feel like it's the same thing. Like there, there's evidence of absence all around me, which is why I choose to subscribe to that view. But I cannot prove that there is no God and for.

S: Instance. The best explanation is we don't need to hypothesize God or gods or supernatural things to explain the world that we see, and it's not a very useful hypothesis anyway. Exactly.

B: What makes it extra frustrating is the fact that a lot of people will say that they absolutely do have evidence, which of course is no, which of course. They don't, yeah.

S: They're wrong, so.

B: Frustrating I.

S: Always say both. I'm an atheist and an agnostic. I have just a slightly different formulation. I agree with what you said, but I think this is a communication thing because agnosticism operational.

C: Yeah.

S: Agnosticism professes the inability to know which you are saying. So you are agnostic.

C: So I am professor and you're right some people don't profess it but but my argument is I don't care if you profess it, you still.

S: Atheist, right? There's there's and I got into this argument people before too. 8th there's a strong atheism and weak atheism, right. And strong atheism is, you know, I know there is no God, whereas weak atheism is. I don't believe in God. Yeah, that's my faith in God.

C: Yeah.

S: So we are weak atheists and agnostics, which is the only scientific stance it is.

C: And etymologically speaking, I'm sorry, but atheism is a lack of theism, yes.

S: Right. That's all that is.

C: It's not, it's not an assurance that theism is wrong. It's not anti theism. It's atheism, OK?

S: But we'd like to be philosophically accurate. Yes, how we describe our beliefs. All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

Science or Fiction (1:23:58)

Theme: Good News Item #1: Engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. Item #2: A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results. Item #3: Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anticancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen.
Science	A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results.
Science	Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anticancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.

Host	Result
Steve	sweep

Rogue	Guess
Jay	Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anticancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.
Cara	A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results.
Evan	A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results.
Bob	A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses <1% of the energy of current methods, while achieving equal or better results.

Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to snip out the fake. There's a sort of theme here, and the theme is Good News Everyone, which I've used many times before. These are all news items. They're all current news items, but they all tend to also be good news. All right, here we go. Item number one, engineers have created a form of gallium, doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. Item number 2A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. And now #3 researchers demonstrate a liposomal delivery system that can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti cancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug resistant cancers. Jay, go first, all right?

J: First one engineers have created a form of gallium, doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen. What is Gallium?

B: Doped to me so dope.

S: It just means that you come in, you include it just.

B: Yeah, OK.

S: It's an engineering term, which means you've added it to the gallium. Atoms have been added to the germanium.

J: So, Steve, instead of superconduction happening at a much lower temperature, it's happening at the liquid nitrogen level. That's essentially what you're saying here, right? For that for that you're.

S: Framing it, interestingly, we already have superconducting material that's it at this temperature range, but it's like it's ceramics, right, so.

J: This is the.

S: First time we're using like metals, we're already using electronics getting into that range and that's.

J: A big deal. I can clearly see that. OK. I mean, you know, that's it would be fantastic. I can't think of anything off the top that would go against this being a possibility. Yeah. So I'll just say that's a maybe #2A new framework for deep learning models, trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results less than 1% of the energy of current methods. And that, if true, would be a massive, massive gain and and help in so many freaking ways not using all that energy and all the heat that's produced. When you say deep learning, are you including LLMS?

S: Whatever uses. You know the deep neural net learning methodology.

J: OK, I mean, I'm pretty, I think.

S: Yeah, I'm pretty sure that includes LLMS. I mean.

J: This. That's massive, sub 1% of current energy use. I can't imagine how that could how they could have figured that out and that the framework allows them to to use 100th of the energy. I don't know. OK, that's a big what if. No, I don't think so. That's that's that one is is on my top list now. Third one, here researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti cancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug resistant cancers. Well the good news is it's either like this awesome cancer thing or the 1% less than 1% energy usage, which either one of those being true would be fantastic. You know, for some reason I think the cancer thing is true and the energy one is false #2 Steve, the deep learning using less than 1% of the energy usage of current methods. Is is is a fiction for me?

S: OK, Cara.

C: Yeah, I'm kind of leaning that way too. I don't really understand the first one, the gallium doped germanium. So we've got these materials that they're already using electronics and they've created this form that's now superconducting an ambient. We Dang it, I feel like we get this all the time, superconduction at ambient temperatures and we haven't been able to crack it in the temperature range if it of liquid nitrogen. OK, it's still pretty cold, so that's considered ambient temperature.

S: Ambient pressure.

U: Oh.

C: Sorry, ambient pressure, but still really cold. OK, yeah, that one actually seems like it could be true.

S: Because, you know, some superconducting materials are like millions of atmospheres, like, yeah, that's nice, good.

C: Happy for you. But yeah. Yeah, because I feel like I've seen like the yeah, maybe it was ceramics like you guys mentioned, but the displays of like the thing like floating, but it had to be super, super cold deep learning models. Yeah, less than 1% of the energy of current message. What I don't like about this news item is it doesn't say something like a new framework for deep learning models has been shown, has been shown to train faster or like has been modeled to train faster. It just says it does train faster and it uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods. So it that makes it sound like it's not theoretical or it wasn't a proof of concept. They actually did it. And so that's like, wow, that's a big deal. I think the liposomal delivery system being used to safely deliver anti cancer drugs is I think that's already science. So the big question here is it was previously an unusable drug and it had 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, but now it can be used safely. That would be the new bit because I think we're all, we already have liposomal delivery systems for for anti cancer drugs. So that's why that one seems like it's closer to reality. So I'm going to say the the deep learning model is also the fiction. That's what you said, right, Jay?

U: Yeah.

S: Yeah, yeah, I'm with you. OK, Evan.

E: I can't really add much more to that than what Jay and Kerry have already said and led me to the same conclusion. I don't know how you get to the less than 1% of the energy of current methods and achieve equal or better results. That's like, you know, win and winning, winner, winner. Beyond that, win, win. So I think that's the least plausible of the three. I'll just say that that's the fiction. That's all I've got.

S: OK. And Bob, all right.

B: Well, I mean, this super conducting advance seems interesting, as you said, Steve, yes, we for many years we've had we've matched this with with ceramic based materials and and it's been great. But one of the classic problems was, well, how do you, you know, how do you turn ceramic into like, you know, wire, you know, super conducting wire or something like that. So perhaps this was mainly beneficial because it's since it's metallic based, it would be better to use at the liquid nitrogen temperatures and ambient pressures. I don't know how much of A of a of a big plus this one is, considering that we're we can already do, we could already do it with ceramics. But yeah, there certainly can be some huge advantages potentially that I'm just not really can bring you to mind here. Let's see the less than 1% of the energy isn't that what do you remember early in this administration, Trump was talking about spending like what some crazy money, a billion dollars for, for these these, you know, super, super, you know, these computer centers to, you know, for AI. And then was it was it China that just came out with, with the similar AIS that or LLMS that were just like use much less energy? I'm forgetting the details. I try to try to forget that period of my life, but I don't. So it reminds me of that. So in that sense, it seems very similar to what we've already knew or seemed that that that China could do or admitted to being able to do many, you know, many months ago. I don't know. It's just too foggy to really remember those details. So let's look at the third one here. Yeah, this liposomal delivery system. That sounds great. And that I want that to be true so much. So much. But yeah, I'm going to just have to go with the crew here. Less than 1% still. That's so dramatic. I hope it's true, but it just seems less likely than the other one. So fiction.

S: OK, so let's let's start with #3 Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable cancer drug with 1000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug resistant cancers. You guys all think this one is science and this one is science. This is very cool science. So yeah, the question is like, was the thousand? Like the guy could easily have been 100, even 10 times the toxic, you know what I mean? So and as we've discussed before, and I know his Cara is very well aware of, you know, chemotherapy is very toxic. It is poison. And there's a therapeutic window. The therapeutic window is it has, you know, clinically significant anti cancer effects with tolerable side effects, right. The benefits are more than the sock effects, but like.

C: And so toxic that, for example, in chemo centers, there's a dedicated bathroom. The workers and the guests do not use the same bathroom as chemo patients and chemo nurses. The infusion nurses have to get their blood tested regularly. It's that toxic. Yeah.

S: It wipes out your immune system so they.

C: Like the nurses working around chemo have to make sure they are not getting, yeah, that they're healthy to be able to use it and that they're not getting any chemo, right.

B: Contamination happened. Well, some.

C: Of it's so toxic, like I think it's what's it called red oof, not red devil, but there's this one like for triple negative breast cancer treatment that's so toxic that like if you spill a vial of it, it like burns a hole in the linoleum. Like it's, it's pretty intense blood.

B: What the hell? Right.

C: Yeah, right.

S: So there are lots of drugs which kill cancer cells quite nicely, but there isn't a therapeutic window because at the at the they're so toxic that there's no safe dose for people basically.

B: So like injecting bleach for COVID?

S: Something like that. Yeah. So, but but as Carol said, this the idea of what we're going to take liposomes, this is the third some, you know, news item now that we're talking about this week. We take these little packages and if we can deliver, deliver them selectively to cancer cells, that then might open up a therapeutic window. It might increase the amount of toxicity to the cancer while decreasing the amount of toxicity to non cancer cells. So this is just doing that really well. Basically they developed this, you know, liposome that can target cancer cells specifically, like certain certain genetic changes that make cancer cells cancer cells and they make it so that they can't repair their own. It causes DNA damage that can't be repaired. So eventually those cells die because it is so super selective in its delivery. It was encapsulated what's called a pedulated liposome. the IT says in vivo efficacy, this is all animal studies, but in vivo efficacy was evaluated in three allograft models of cancer, Melanoma, breast cancer, lung, and a xenograft model of uterine sarcoma. So basically they're trying to give mice human cancers, right? And they were highly effective even in the very drug resistant cases and in some in some of the mice like eliminating the tumors completely.

B: Because it's damn, man, I want, I want to be a mouse. Cancer, Alzheimer's, what else? Yeah, they, they got it going. So.

S: This is this could this approach could open up a whole new list of possible anti cancer drugs that previously were just too toxic to use and now we can use them and they're more effective even against previously drug, you know, drug resistant tumors.

U: How?

B: Are the side effects though?

S: Well, again, we're harsher.

B: Than conventional no. No, that's the thing. No, it would be.

C: It would be less the.

S: Idea is to make it even less. Certainly, Yeah, no.

C: It would be because it's it's it's more targeted. Yeah, the.

S: Targeting is, yeah, this is a mice, so it's hard to say like what it would be like in people, but the idea is to get it at the same or less than conventional chemotherapy, hopefully much less.

B: If it's more targeted than what? Couldn't you just use this for all chemo drugs? Then? Yeah, it's more target. That's.

S: That's where we're headed. That's where we're headed.

C: Absolutely the. Idea there is a correlation. I wouldn't say they're the same thing, but there's a massive correlation between toxicity and side effects. Yeah, like side effects are function. They're the. Effect, right?

S: The side effects are the effect. It's just you you you want to use drugs that where cancer drugs are more susceptible than non cancer drugs for whatever that's.

C: Why? That's why disease is like triple negative breast cancer. You have to hit people with just like this horrible toxic drug because it doesn't have any genetic markers, the markers.

S: That do sometimes use the target therapies, yeah, yeah.

C: It's triple negative. That's what that means. There's no markers in it, all right.

S: Let's go back to #2A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results. You guys all think this one is the fiction and this one is science. This is science.

US#02: Oh. Man, this is.

S: Awesome, Now how do you think they did it?

U: Who?

US#02: Cares, you got the sweep.

S: So this is the title, this is the title of the paper Topographical sparse mapping, a neuro inspired sparse training framework for deep learning models. So they model it after the brain and specifically so, you know, in these neural Nets, this is now the, this my oversimplified understanding based upon the articles that I'm reading, right? So I know the experts will be cringing at like how inaccurate it is. But this is the basic concept that they're discussing in this paper, that neural Nets, the, the nodes all connect to nodes at the next level, right? Like every node connects to every node from one, one level to the next. But in the sparse mapping, you only hit the node only connects to the nearby nodes at the deeper level. And there, that's it.

B: That's the breakthrough.

S: That's that's a big piece of it. And so there's far fewer fine tuning that you have to do in the training. You don't have to use, you don't have to. They say they, they call the old models over parameterization, right?

B: Yeah, yeah.

S: And, and by getting rid of that, you know, basically you're getting rid of a lot of the, you know, parameterization that you have to the tweaking that you that gets done to these connections so that it's uses less than 1% of them, right? And you still achieve the same results. And in fact, you get there faster and the. Yeah, because of course the training is faster because you're not having to make as many computational changes each step of the way, right? So essentially you're using a sparse connectivity patterns rather than an over unnecessarily overly robust connectivity patterns. The other thing that they do, also inspired by brain function, is pruning the connections that don't get used get pruned. Oh my.

B: God, what a great idea. Yeah.

S: So again, just for evolution is trying to just use only the connections that are absolutely necessary for the functionality, rather than just having this default everything connects to everything, right? Because that's the oversimplified way to say, and the results were impressive. They, the training work went a lot faster, used less than 1% of the energy, which is, you know, huge in terms of obviously one of the big issues with AI is the massive energy footprint that they have. But also the reason, that's the reason why it costs 10s of millions of dollars to train AI models because of all the energy usage. So this could also make it a lot cheaper, you know, to train these models as well. So yeah, that's pretty cool. I hope this all pans out. Yeah. All right. And that means that engineers have created a form of gallium doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting an ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen is the fiction because they did make, you know, gallium doped germanium. That is superconducting, but only at 3.5 K, 3.5 Kelvin, whereas the liquid nitrogen starts at 77 Kelvin, right?

B: So it's so it's super expensive if you want to get it done, but you just. Can't use it.

S: Yeah, it's just not.

B: It's not using nitrogen, so it's much cheaper.

S: It's funny because I was reading first the press release and then the the study itself. And in the press release they don't mention I'm like the whole time. Like at what temperature? At what temperature, At what temperature? They didn't mention it till the very end.

E: Bullshit. I know. Come on. That's. That's your first paragraph hanger. Yeah. God, that's how. They keep you reading to the end, actually, so.

S: I mean, obviously like a lot of superconducting research, like the very high ambient, very high pressure superconductors or whatever. The idea is that this is sort of a new way of achieving superconductivity. And then hopefully we'll be able to keep going with this research and get to the point where it is at liquid nitrogen temperature, which is still super cold, but because you can cool it with liquid nitrogen, it becomes which is actually relatively cheap. It becomes functionally very, you know, useful whereas.

B: I've read once that's as cheap as milk, yeah. It was, you know, so it's night and day, right?

S: Like when the the first superconductors that hit the public awareness in the 80's, the breakthrough was getting those ceramic superconductors up to liquid nitrogen temperature. Oh yeah, that's, that was the big breakthrough, not room temperature. We're not, we're not there yet. Not.

B: At ambient pressures, yeah.

S: Now if we could make germanium is to silicon germanium, germanium and silicon are kind of the are the workhorses of electronics, right and computing. So it is a big deal that we can get to superconducting in germanium at all. That's great. Now we just have to figure out how to get it at much higher temperatures and and it does essentially work in the same way ultimately as other superconductors, Bob, Which you know, is what?

B: Well, Cooper. Pairs is one level.

S: Way that it's it's the Cooper pairs talk about yeah yeah the the doping of the of the gallium allows them to get 2 electrons to form together to form a Cooper pair and then they're superconducting yeah but.

B: It's so so more complicated than it. Is, yeah, yeah.

S: But that's the simplistic level description. So it seems, it seems to be work. Eventually you get to that same end point of Cooper pairs. Interesting, but not useful at present. Just maybe might lead to something in the future. Yeah, but the other two are massive. And those are and are very, very good news indeed.

E: I had a Cooper, Paris once. He gave me both barrels, did he?

S: I don't get it.

E: I didn't either. Cooper. Cooper in a barrel. Barrels.

S: Yeah, Yes, that was pretty weak, Evan. Pretty weak.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:43:09)

All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly in a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.  – — Ernst Mayr, (description of author)

S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.

US#02: Wouldn't describe it as weak.

E: Some might say clever. All interpretations made by a scientist are hypothesis, and all hypothesis are tentative. They must forever be tested, and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory. Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness, but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

S: Ernst Meyer. Yeah, correct, although said in an age before science denial was a thing.

E: True so.

S: He's missing a lot of nuance that was not necessary back in the day.

E: The good old days. Right.

U: Yeah.

E: That's a good point.

S: But now we would say, but I'm not saying that we can't act upon science that we have now. You know what I mean?

E: Yeah, Yeah, he did.

S: He died in 2005, right? Right before we started this podcast, basically.

E: We could have had him, I know, clarify that for us, but he was gone.

S: And then you could mention he was an evolutionary biologist. You could say that was his claim to fame.

E: All right.

S: Thanks, Evan.

E: Thanks and.

S: Thank you all for joining me this week you. Got it, brother.

C: Thanks, Steve.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.