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| SGU Episode 1061 |
|---|
| November 08th 2025 |
 |
"Meet the future of home assistance: a robot tackling dish duty with ease!" |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"An informed appraisal of life absolutely requires a full understanding of life’s arena – the universe. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe." |
— Brian Greene |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| 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, November 6th, 2025 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody. Cara, Santa Maria.
C: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good afternoon. Folks.
S: So Cara, guess what? I had my own cardiac calcium scan earlier this week.
C: MCC Can I ask how it went?
S: Yeah, my score was 0.
C: Zero. That's the only good score that's.
S: The best score, I mean one to 100 is very mild risk.
C: But it's still a risk.
S: Yeah, but zeros the best. Yeah, I'm very happy about that. So I did a deep dive on it just to see like how good is this? Has the scan and it's actually pretty, pretty good.
C: Yeah, Everything I've read says it's it should be standard practice, and it's pretty bananas that insurance companies are not paying for it for the most part.
E: I don't know what it is. Can you explain what it is? Yeah, so.
S: Basically, we talked about when do you? Think the the calcium scan for cardiac risk factors was first introduced.
C: Probably like way longer ago than we would think.
S: Yeah, 1990. Yeah, 35 years ago.
C: Wow.
E: But before the Internet, yeah.
S: But medical research didn't just adopt it. They, even though it's because even though it sounds good, they, they researched it in every way you could possibly imagine. So basically, Evan, this is a way of looking to see if there's calcium in the arteries in your heart, which calcium forms inside the plaques. And that is a better predictor of whether or not you're going to have a heart attack then stenosis, let's say just the narrowing of the arteries. It's actually as good as your previous history, your previous cardiovascular history, which is always the best indicator. It's better than but any other predictor though.
C: Right. And and just to clarify, like when you get an echocardiogram, for example, it can tell you a lot, but it can't tell you if you're starting to get calcifications in those vessels. And when you get a cholesterol test that only tells you how much cholesterol is circulating in your blood. It doesn't tell you how much is like stuck in your vessels. So all those things collectively and your blood pressure collectively are indicators. But from what I understand, yeah, this is the single best indicator other than I have had a cardiac event in the past.
S: Which is as good as, but the other thing is it's independent, right? It's not like, yes, if you have these other risk factors, you're more likely to have calcium and to have a heart attack. It's that it's independent of age. It's independent of whether or not you've had a previous event. It's independent of all your other risk factors. So that's important too.
C: The only time I read that it's kind of not independent of age and tell me if you came across this same research, but what there's an upper limit once you get to a certain age, it's very likely that you that it's kind of a moot point because everybody has a risk score after a certain age. Like they were saying that like I think above 80 or maybe 85, it was a pretty high age. Nobody has a clean calcium because just by age you start to have some calcification in your in your vessels and so they they wreck. At least the recommendations I read was to use other indicators. Well, you always you always put them in the.
S: Context of other indicators and your cholesterol and your family history and all those.
C: Other well, and that's the question, right? So for me, I had a cholesterol of 202 my total and I have a family history of high cholesterol. And so the question was, do I need to take a statin because I'm sort of in the like, borderline Gray zone. But the fact that my calcium coronary test was 0, it's not. At least my doctor's like, no, we don't want to put you on a statin yet.
S: That's exactly where I am. In fact, my cholesterol is also 2O2. I have the exact.
C: Same. Oh, look at.
S: That by coincidence and we're cholesterol buddies, but, and it was the same thing. It's like, all right, we'll do the calcium scan. If it's zero, we will not start. We'll we'll wait on the statins. If it's not, we'll maybe we'll put you on statins.
C: Yeah.
E: Are people who need calcium supplements at a higher risk therefore, of heart attack?
C: No, totally different completely.
E: Different because that's a deficiency that they're.
C: Making no this is a calcifications in your vessel. It's not like it's a.
S: Calcified plaque, that's what they're I.
E: See.
S: OK plaques form on the inside of the vessels and then they calcify and then they rupture and form a thrombus, which causes a heart attack. That's why there's, so it's the mechanism. So it's not so this is this stems from our basic understanding of how heart attacks occur. They don't occur from from the plaques blocking the artery. They occur from the plaques ulcerating platelets forming a clot on that ulcerated plaque and that acutely blocking the artery. So it's just a different mechanism. So that from that flows a lot of our current recommendations in terms of cardiac management, including anti inflammatories, anti platelet therapy and calcium scans to predict risk.
B: Steve, who should take? Who should get this test?
S: Talk to your primary care doctor.
C: Yeah, and if your primary care doctor hasn't heard of it?
S: Well, I can't.
B: Imagine your primary care doctor.
C: Well, but a lot of them don't recommend it. They may have heard of it, but they may be like, oh, we don't do that because, because here's the problem. A lot of insurance companies don't cover it. And so and it and it's not often done in house because it's ACT scan. But like I live in the greater LA area, right? So I live in an expensive region and I still, my doctor knew of a place where she wrote me a referral where it cost me $100 out of pocket to do this test. So to me it was worth it.
S: Yeah, For me, I like nothing because I'm basically in like the LHMO, you know?
C: And so they all, oh, they offered it, Yeah.
S: They offered it to me.
C: Yeah. See. Part of my care. We didn't. We didn't. Maybe it's because I'm of my age, but it was definitely not considered an in network option.
S: Yeah. But if you have any concerns or any risk factors, it's not a bad addition. You know, it's very reassuring when it's very low or zero. And if it's high, you know that in and of itself could make it seem like you you should be on antiplasotherapy and statins, etcetera. So it could be a lifesaver.
J: You know, yeah, I mean, Steve, I think, I think the recommendation is talk to your primary care physician and and try to get this test done because it really does give you a snapshot of, you know, if you have any blockages or something that is something, you know, something that needs to be dealt with so.
C: Yeah, not even blockages, Jay. Like literally the very start of something. That's that's what it can detect, which is so great.
S: Yeah, it detects the thing. That's the mechanism of having a heart attack. You know, it's looking directly at your risk of her heart attack. All right, let's go on with our show.
Quickie with Bob: Nanotech Cancer Drug (06:47)
S: Bob, start us off with a quickie.
B: Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Researchers have taken an existing cancer drug and improved it so much. I was actually startled. This is researchers at Northwestern University, which is in the Northwest somewhere. They've taken Chicago. They've taken a common chemo cancer drug called 5 Flora uracil 5 FU and transformed it. They've transformed it. Typically, this drug is far from ideal. Sounds a little scary, but I mean, it is chemo, but I think it's a kind of like the scarier end of some chemo drugs of the popular ones perhaps. It doesn't dissolve well. It doesn't get taken up efficiently by cancer cells and it has bad side effects because healthy cells are impacted as well. But still, it's apparently it's common, it's a common 1. So I guess it's still has some decent utility, right. So the researchers essentially rebuilt 5 FU as a as a coated nanoparticle. And this is called a spherical nucleic acid or SNA. And I predict you will be hearing that initialism a lot in the future. SNA, these are these are essentially strands of DNA or RNA pointing outwards, forming a sphere around a central core. You got that. So, so in this case case, the core contains the chemo drug 5 a few, but it can contain other things as well. So this radial orientation of the DNA or the RNA is critical because that that's what changes the drug's behavior and makes it play nice with the cells in our body. So in this form, the drug can now dissolve more easily and cancer cells can now absorb it like a sponge. So listen to these numbers. Animal test showed leukemia cells took up the SNA drug about 12 and 1/2 times more efficiently. The cancer cells were killed up to 20,000 times more effectively. Not sure how that was measured though, but 20,000 times seems pretty awesome. Disease progression slowed by a factor of 59. And the icing on the cake, the usual chemo side effects did not appear at effective doses. So it just sounds incredible. Steve Carey, is that anything about this?
S: Is that because the effective doses were so much lower?
B: Possibly, I didn't see specifically why the chemo was, but the the side effects were so much more, you know?
C: Yeah, I don't, I don't, I guess I'm not understanding is it that they're using less and it's more targeted like what is this? Target both.
B: That's more. I think it's, I think it's both. I mean, they're using less because it's it's used because it's it's so much more efficient and targeted that yeah, that makes sense that it's just because it's it's the new effective dose is is much lower than it used to be. That just makes perfect sense. Although. I. Didn't and that's. Explicitly.
C: That's great because as I'm reading a little more about 5 FU, I'm seeing that it has for a long time been a first line treatment, but very often it's given with adjuvant treatment. It's it's like not rarely, but it's not often given a loan. It'll usually be combined with like cisplatin or something else to make it more effective. And so if they can not have to do that, that's also great.
B: Right, so now, now, so this technique being employed here has a bigger category. It's structural nanomedicine. And I think you'll probably be hearing a lot about that in the future as well. I hadn't really heard too much about it, but structural nanomedicine's approach is not to invent necessarily a completely new drug, but to take an existing drug and change its shape and packaging so the body handles it better and tumors are targeted with more precision. So that's, I mean, so that sounds like something that's definitely, I'd love to follow structural nanomedicine because what a great idea to take. Here's drugs that we know they work, but for some, but for whatever reasons, they're not used as efficiently, nearly as efficiently as as it could in the body. And this just makes takes the drug and just makes your body just absorb it where you needed it and absorbed it super efficiently. So I'll definitely be following this. This has been your structural nanomedical quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.
News Items
NEO Robot (10:41)
S: Thanks, Bob. So, Jay, tell us about this neo robot I'm hearing so much about.
J: The Neo robot Steve.
B: Oh boy.
J: This robot will do everything for you.
B: Everything.
J: But there's a big but Steve.
S: Yeah, because they.
J: Give it a big but the. Robot. There's there's like.
S: These details, but why'd they do that?
J: Well, if it falls down, it doesn't make a noise. Let me get into the details because I think you're going to be as surprised as I am about what what this thing is and what they are saying and everything. So first of all, it's a built by a company called 1X Technology. They're based in Palo Alto and also in Norway. They are marketing a humanoid robot. They're saying it, you know, it's a in the near future household, which means very soon, like within the next year. And this thing will assist you in your home. Not it's not laboratory. This is in the home, right? So according to their website, and this is, you know, this is their marketing, they say take on the boring and mundane tasks around the house so you can focus on what matters to you. And here are their key claims that they're making about their robot. Soft and safe design with tendon driven actuators. It has a 3D lattice polymer shell and it has pinch proof joints which are suitable for human environments. These are all legit. You know the the robot is indeed soft. It kind of looks like the whole thing is wearing a sweater. Oh, if you have animals, you know, think about how stinky that would get. I guess you'd have to wash it. I don't know. It's they say the intelligence it hose it down in the back. No, it hoses itself down in the backyard, right?
E: You have two of them. One hoses the other.
J: They're saying the robot can integrate visuals and the spatial orientation of your house has language cat capabilities. It can answer questions, it can remember context and adapt to your home. So, you know, this is, this is a question mark for me on whether or not it's it can do all this. I could, I don't see why it can't do this. Essentially, you know, it would be similar to what I would think of as a standard LLM that you're used to interacting with. Then they say the home service tasks and from the press coverage, they're saying that it can fold laundry, organize shelves, it can answer the door, it can go and get objects for you and more to come. Now that's where things get a little dicey, and we'll cover that in a second.
S: That's where things get dicey. I think we're dicey already.
E: Yeah, right.
J: Well, everything I said up up until up until that last bit, Steve, I mean, I feel like all that is completely doable. Sure it has it has pinch proof joints, no problem. You know, it's light. It's not going to, you know, it's not going to be like fall down and kill anybody. But when they get into what it can do physically, that's where we're going to focus in on. But there's a couple of other things. 1X says that Neo is built for home. So it's lighter weight, it's quiet operation. You know, it makes the sound of like a no louder than a refrigerator and that they're going to start deploying it in 2026. And the price and availability, they say you can order it, pre-order it now and it's around $20,000 or a monthly subscription, which I think is about $500.
S: Yeah.
J: And you'll get it sometime in 2026. OK, Out of all this, the claims that I, I have to zoom in on are of course, like what it can actually accomplish this. And this is the reason why I think most of us want a robot. Sure, some people might want one as a companion. Some people might want to have just another presence in the house. Whatever. The bottom line is, can it do stuff for me that I don't want to do? I don't want to wash dishes. I don't want to load and unload my dishwasher. I don't want to do laundry I don't want to pick up after my kids. You know, all the stuff that parents are supposed to do, I don't want to do.
E: You've had your filled in, I mean.
B: Just those few that you mentioned, you know, laundry, dishes of just those two things alone I think would be like, yeah, here's my take my money, please take my money. That would be fantastic.
J: I mean, we've been talking about this for decades, you know, And Bob, Bob, Steve and I and Evan, I mean, I know you feel the same way because we're all part of the same generation. We were. We were essentially sold this subliminally through science fiction.
B: Oh, yeah. For decades. Yeah.
J: It started off with cartoons when we were kids. The Jetsons had a full, fully functioning role. Success. But the problem is, is that even though they have built this thing to be autonomous, you know, the people that have seen it in person and the the reviews that have have happened so far, you know, they're flat out saying that this thing can't do complex tasks. And and here's the kicker now, Cara. Yeah. Most of the time when I tell you I hope you're sitting down before I say something, it's usually a joke. This one is not a joke. This is OK. What the hell was this company thinking?
S: I know you guys know, but Cara, what do you think? The big gotcha. Is with all of this.
C: With this robot.
S: Yeah, yeah. So.
C: It's like, I don't know, $100,000.
S: No, it's 2020 grand. It's 20,000.
C: Dollars.
S: So it's a soft robot that could be in your home and can do all these tasks, but there's one thing in the fine print that changes the whole picture.
C: You have to put it where it goes.
J: No, I'll give you worse than that, Jay. I'll give you a hint. Right. So Cara, they say you can do all these things. And here's the hint. It can do all these things, but it actually can't. But it actually can.
E: There's certain circumstances it actually can do it.
C: Theoretically do that.
J: But there is something happening behind the scenes when you clear away the the smoke and mirrors.
C: Wait, there's a person operating?
J: There is a person operating.
C: Robot.
E: Yes, there's a Tele. How do? They sit in there.
J: And, and I said to these guys, I go, we had some guy that's high in California that's driving this freaking robot around your house that is acting like a robot.
S: No, the joke is it's powered by AI and Indian.
E: Oh no.
S: That's like the really.
B: Bad, Oh my God. But but guys, but remember, it's not it's not designed out of the gate that it needs a teleoperator all the time. It's designed to do stuff autonomously. And the stuff that it can't do, it can get help by a, by a, you know, a teleoperator. So it's not designed, it has a lifeline.
J: Basically makes it unusable though guys, because it's not like there's always someone sitting there at the ready, like you kind of have to make an appointment. Do you have to make an appointment? You have to make an appointment to get your freaking washing machine emptied. It's like, are you kidding me? You know it doesn't really take that freaking long. I'm not going to like get on that some app and wait on a waiting list just to watch this stupid robot do something I can do in 3 minutes.
C: But OK, but what if the lifestyle change was that you had a list of chores for the next day and you just queued them up the night before and then as teleoperators became available, they did them in time so that when you got home from work they were all done?
J: Two, I have two responses to that, Cara, and I'll start off by saying you're, you're very smart, but we have to, we have to think about this. There is a person in your house at that point.
C: Well, that's the thing, right? So basically they, they should be targeting this as remote domestic helpers. But right, this is a machine that'll it, it prevents them from actually entering your house. But they do have access to, you know, take a look at your computer version.
E: Yeah, they can. See. Your computer, everything.
S: There's a huge security issue here, plus that's that's like the person who's supposed to be operating it. What if somebody hacks into it, right? Because you can't tell me that the security is going to be airtight on the sea in.
C: The, and that that's much less of a risk when you actually hire a housekeeper, I think. And also there's an abuse potential here, right? Oh yeah. If you, if you hire a housekeeper, you know who they are, you can vet them. I've had a relationship with, you know you.
S: Probably get a different tell operator every time.
J: Here I have you covered. OK, because I'm launching a new business. It's maids that are dressed up like robots and they will cost you a lot less than getting the robot.
B: You got a call.
C: That's the thing too, because then at least they're employed here in this country, you know, that they're getting a fair wage. Like that's the thing that really worries.
J: So you want to invest in my company, right?
S: You can purchase a lot of domestic help for $20,000. Oh my God, the 20,000 only gives you services for three years, you know what I mean? Right.
C: And then you have to start paying for the services.
S: Exactly. It's Five Guys a month or whatever it is, yeah.
B: Yeah. But for extra context, extra context here, the right now when people that have used it now, they, they basically say it really needed help for most anything it did. It really didn't do anything fully autonomously like like, you know, like emptying the, the dishwasher or anything like that. It it needed help, the CEO. Great.
C: So it's like having a man in your house. So wonderful.
B: You wanna go? Exactly.
C: OK, let me help you the whole time.
B: Exactly. Exactly, but the seat.
J: She's right. It'll yell from across the house.
B: Hey, do you know where the pasta is? Hey, do you know where the car keys are?
C: Do we use fabric softener? Where do? We keep it. Oh, I can't.
B: So, but also guys, importantly though, but wait, importantly though, what the CEO says is this, the CEO says that this is how it is now. And the plan is, is to get this in houses because it's using deep reinforcement learning. So it's like hands on training, trial and error. So the the more right, the more that people use it, the better and better it's going to get. So it will improve. And the CEO does say this. He says that the plan the the plan now is that the next year when this is offered to people. That it should be able to do most things autonomously, but the more complicated things we'll need a teleoperator so that so that's his plan. And if that if that's what really comes to fruition in a year where it where literally most of what it does is autonomous, that would that would be great. But that's that's the question. That's the question. How can?
S: He reach that the optimistic projections of a CEO of a tech company worth exactly.
C: Exactly and also in.
B: My opinion? Exactly. But.
C: We talk all the time about bias when it comes to AI and when it comes to these like, training algorithms. I say this only half in jest. The people who are going to adopt this technology early are like lonely tech Bros who have a lot of money. And I don't want my domestic robot trained in one of his Silicon Valley apartment.
S: But they will be but the whole.
J: World Cara, you know, look the training thing, it's not a bad idea. Like if we take out the fact that they're putting in like something that I wouldn't say half baked, it's you know, look, there is a lot of legitimate technology in this thing. It's not.
S: A joke but but it is half baked as an actual home appliance and it's utility.
C: Yeah, like.
S: This is a $20,000 rumba. I mean, come.
C: On yeah, when we know we're beta testing, they got to do it for free. That's like they should. Understand they're making people pay to be their tester.
S: Still needs to be trained. Call it a beta, give it, you know, give it, give it to people or give it to them at a really cheap price and let them do the beta training rather than selling it with this wink wink, nod, nod. It's really a Tele operator and we're really doing it so we could train it because hopefully then it will get better. The other, the other thing, we'd actually talked about this on the live stream yesterday with Christian Hubecky, who's a robot, who's a roboticist.
B: I knew it. I knew. It. Oh man, now I gotta, Now I gotta kill all of you, Dave.
S: He's a robot roboticist. Anyway, we're talking about the fact that, you know, within home is like the hardest place for a robot to function because there's a chaotic environment, it's very open-ended, etcetera. Especially if you have kids or pets. I mean, forget about it.
C: Stairs. I have so many.
S: Stairs, yeah. So it's a very, very challenging environment and it's the, the probability of this being actually cost effective and useful is almost negligible at this point in time. And you also have to consider the, the, the safety issues, like with driving cars, like 95% may be a technological Tour de force, but it's pretty useless for the end user. If it's dropping your plates 5% of the time or even 1% of the time, that's unacceptable. You need to get the error rate of these things down to 1,000,000 to one or something in that order for magnitude and that we're a long way away from.
E: That oh, that ain't happening anytime soon.
S: No, other than that, it's great. My.
J: My, my primary question is, let's say that you could Fast forward five years and you take all the training data that they collect and you put it into the current NEO system, right? This, this particular robot, how much better would it be able to perform? And I think the answer is it probably would be able to perform a lot better.
S: So of course it's going to get better.
J: There's a silver lining here because and I wanted to, I wanted to talk about this very briefly. The idea is like companies are starting to and I think, you know, this is the first real, real, real like robot in your home thing. Everything else has been from what I can tell and talking to Christian and just being, you know, a fan of all this for my whole life. It's all a non.
S: Starter humanoid robot or. Android.
J: Yeah, a humanoid robot, right? No Roomba. I'm talking about something walking around and doing stuff. For you, yeah. So this.
E: Great interacting.
J: With this is like the first one that a company is selling, like, you know, this is a milestone and I think it's an important one because money is being put into this and companies are developing this technology. And it means that just like autonomous cars, that even though the the bell curve, you know, that it might be super steep to get up to the really high end things that he'll be able to do. It's not unreasonable to say that within the near future, 5 to 10, that there could be a real robot in in some people's houses that are getting some stuff done. Yeah. But Jay.
S: Remember the the other question is, is an Android robot the way to go and why are we even focusing attention? And development. Why does it have to look like a person? Because that's maybe not the best form for a domestic robot to be.
C: And also, does it need to be such an intense multitasker or can we have small hubs of specialized robots around the house?
S: Yeah, right.
C: That to me makes way.
S: More sense we talked about the robot arms that cook for you or whatever you could have like the laundry arms or whatever but the the there is some utility to an all-purpose robot I could see that just.
B: Like absolutely your everything, a lot of tools we use are designed for a a humanoid shape. That's ergonomics of.
C: Course. Oh, so that's the utility of it being humanoid, but the utility of it being a single multitasker. There is, there is utility in that, yes, but there's also a massive downside, which is when something goes wrong. Now you don't have any of your tasks completely.
S: That's right. And I think we might be in the phase for the next decades, 50 years or whatever, where we should be focusing on whatever shape works best. Doesn't have to be Android and maybe more limited range of activity so that it gets good at some things rather being crappy at everything.
C: Yeah, like what if there's a laundry bot that's dedicated to your laundry room and it learn it does multiple tasks within one room, it doesn't ever leave that room of your house.
S: That's like building on the Roomba example, like it does one thing, it does it well. It's not an all-purpose robot. It's not a humanoid robot.
C: That doesn't have security breaches because it can't right it. Doesn't.
S: Need a Tele operator? Yeah.
C: Or even if it does need a Tele operator, it stays in that room.
B: I mean, what would this thing look like though? I mean, would you have to change the layout of your entire laundry room? And that's, that's what I think is problematic. Like, all right, you're working to change the structure of your laundry room.
C: Every time we've had huge improvements in appliances that's happened though, like when the shape and size of washing machines and dryers or you know, go to a house in the UK and often they'll have a washing machine in the kitchen. Ours are in a dedicated space. Refrigerator sizes have changed, but Bob ranges have changed. But you're not.
S: But what if it it is your washing machine, right?
C: Exactly.
S: Buy a new washing machine and the and it incorporates robotic arms that will load it, unload it, run it, fold the laundry. When it's done, put it in the dryer.
B: I don't know when the last time you bought a laundry of, you know, a washing machine. Man, I they are ridiculously expensive and thinking about quintupling the price, I'd rather just do my own laundry. You mean that's a lot of money?
C: I would too, but I think that there, you know, some people wouldn't, but some people.
S: And that's and then the price will come down and then the. Idea of a look at refrigerators. That does not have robotic arms would be crazy, you know.
C: Yeah, look at every single appliance in your home. There's a version that costs a few $100 and a version that costs 10s of thousands of dollars.
S: Yeah, that is true.
C: And there's there's a market for all of it.
S: And there's everything in between. We just bought a dishwasher and the range was crazy. And every increment gives you some new functionality, like, oh boy, that would be nice, you know? But you have to figure out where you where you land. And it's just this, yeah, this would definitely be at the high end. But then the high ends come down overtime. That's usually what happens when technology.
C: And ultimately, that is the direction we're going. I know it sounds like a leap because we're talking about humanoid robots, but like I just bought a new washer and dryer when I moved back into my house after I had tenants when I was in Florida for a year and it has sensor features that are robot. I mean, they must be robotic, right? Or at least it's the technology is massively improved.
B: You know, it's funny though, despite all of these problems, sure that this is problematic and it's probably not going to do nearly as well as as the as the company hopes, right? It's all these problems we laid out still still though, I I get a little excited thinking about holy crap, a company is is going going to be selling. That's. Robots for the home next year. And it's just like, Oh my God, we're there. We're at that point where this is happening. And hopefully it won't be like Google Glass, where it's just like it fails so horribly that no one even thinks about it. But.
S: It might be 10 to 15 years set the industry of domestic robots back by failing hard.
B: I know, so hopefully that won't that won't happen, but just the idea is so like wow, 2026 baby.
E: This can't be the first company offering this.
B: Right, this type of thing, yes, this is yeah, for this what?
E: Japan doesn't have this. China doesn't have something like this.
B: Happening as far as I know this for this type of like universal like type of robot that get that can do many different tasks in your in your House of humanoid you know bipedal robot I'm not aware of anything that that is at this point where you could I.
E: Don't know, other countries tend to be ahead of the curve.
B: I know, but. Also. Christian. Ubiki said that this is this is pretty sure he said that this was a first of its of its specific kind.
C: It's a first of its kind if it actually does what they say it does. But to me, this is a gimmick. This is a way because they know that they can get funding because it's sexy, but it's not reasonable and it doesn't make sense to jump 10 steps ahead like.
S: This it's also part of the fake it to you make it culture. It's like we're going to create damage of Kickstarter, but it's all teleoperated and then just to sell people on the idea and then eventually we'll make the tech work. Trust me bro, it'll work when we train.
C: And if they just said that outright, it would.
E: Be a self driving car and someone in a desk driving.
S: That's that's what Christian said. Cara's Like I said, if you had one wish, what would it be? He said. Transparency. Just tell us what it actually is.
C: Because some people would want that. Like we have robotic laparoscopic surgery where we know it's not a robot making the decisions. Yeah, it's a it's a surgeon operating it. We have things like that. There are plenty of people in this world who who want like live in or not live in, but like domestic help. But they have like such crippling social anxiety or they really can't afford.
S: It I think for like elderly barely able to live on their own, that's going to be an early.
E: Adult Oh my God, imagine if our mom had simply. A physical limit. Like this that worked.
C: And one more quick thing, at risk of sounding a little bit ageist over here, but like we often will say this, right, that the, the population who things like this could help the most are, let's say, older individuals who are medically frail or who have, or folks with disabilities who need additional support in their home. But then there's of course, the we'll call it a stereotype because it doesn't always hold. But I'm only reminded of it because I I rewatched an SNL, you know, those like fake commercials they do on SNL about Alexa when it like first came out where all of the actors were playing, you know, elderly and they were calling it like Audra Amanda. And then they're like what you're saying depends on like.
S: Competence of the older people.
C: Yes, like there's a sort of weird paradox here where the very people who might benefit the most from this, it's such a complex tool for them to have to learn how to use.
S: Well, that's The thing is to to make it user friendly and that's part of why like the Android form might be helpful. It's. You really can't. If it had powered by chat bots that are good enough and it can do certain things, you could interact with it as if it were a person.
C: But we're so far. But we are. I had a hard time chatting with a chat bot at my bank the other day.
J: Cara, I have to close this off by directing this at you because you're younger and you'll see these wonderful things when you finally do get a robot in your house. Just tell him about me, OK? I.
C: Will.
J: Or her, whatever it is, you know, I don't care.
C: It's yeah, your. Your memory will live on in robot space.
J: I could just see you, you know, sitting there, really old. You're knitting, you know.
C: Knitting, knitting. Knitting.
J: I was on the podcast with the boys. You know, you just tell.
S: Podcast. Tell it about us.
UN Climate Report (32:37)
S: All right, Cara, tell us about the new UN climate report.
C: Oh wow, what a segue. Let's just bring it down. Bring it down. I'll keep it kind of short and sweet there. I could get in the weeds here, but basically there's a climate report that's put out every year by the UN Environment Program called the Emissions Gap Report. This year's Emissions Gap report is depressingly called Emissions Gap Report 2025 Colon off target. So that's fun. We've never been on what you need to know. Yeah, exactly. We haven't been on target, but there there are a few kind of hopeful and then I'll just take that hope right back away. Things that are are kind of interesting here. So the the big, I would say the big takeaways of this 76 page report, first and foremost is that under a third of the they call them parties. So basically the countries or the the nations who were in the Paris Agreement submitted new versions of what they call their NDC's, which stands for nationally determined contributions. So basically that's the calculation or the record of how their country is actually performing based on their targets. And that's really what this report is, right? It's called the emissions gap report. And what the emissions gap report does is it compares the target, the sort of aspirational goal to what the countries are actually doing. It's the disparity between their promise and what they're actually doing in order to reduce, you know, emissions and and therefore limit the rise in in climate change in global temperature. Under a third of the nations who were involved in the Paris Agreement. So that this is interesting because it's it's 10 years on submitted new NDC is nationally determined contribution. So we only really have the data for, you know, less than 1/3 of of the countries anyway. Now there is one cool thing. So last year, global temperatures, based on all of the algorithms were predicted to reach 2.6 to 2.8° of warming. And remember, that's a Celsius measurement. This year it's down to 2.3 to 2.5. So that's, you know, that's a drop of .3° in terms of the prediction, But there's a few problems with that. What do you think contributed to the drop?
S: COVID.
C: Anybody COVID maybe, but this is I think this is only over the last year.
S: Increased spiking prices of fossil fuels because of the Ukraine war.
C: That might have and they, I don't even know if they even touch on that, but basically what they say is the main driver of that change is just a improvement in their methodological ability. So yeah, like they've, they've dialed in their algorithm better. And so the new method says, oh, it's a little bit less. So that is good, but it doesn't mean we've done anything to. Get there.
E: Yeah, it just means the measurement is tighter. But we're not. We haven't changed our behaviors or.
S: Not well, that's there have been improvements in the projections of technological advances in green energy and how that will decrease our carbon.
C: And that's a big contributor.
S: Yeah, it's.
E: Not tough to measure year year by year though. Doesn't it take five years, 10 years?
C: Well, no, but that's the thing. Remember what this report looks at is just the gap. So they look at the estimates versus the actual delivery on those estimates. So if, if a nation says we plan to implement policy that increases the number of electric cars and, and you know, increases the the tax on greenhouse, and then we look at the last year and say, did they actually do that and to what extent did they do it? So that's why they do it year after year. And then they take all that data and they update their projections based on that data. So yes, Steve, you're right. They do as part of the algorithm, they do look at cheaper technology and more ubiquitous adoption and that is actually improving. When you look at all the graphs, they don't go up like they go up. How do I put this? The trend is up, but the individual countries are curbing emissions. They really are like we're we're seeing change. But here's the kicker, and this is the big take away from this. Even though we've seen a .3° reduction between last year and this year, the United States alone is estimated to contribute a .1% increase because we have fully left the Paris climate accord. We have not vowed to do anything that we said we were going to do before. And we've taken basically an exact opposite stance with regards to how we're going to proceed. And that's detrimental. And so all of the reports are like the US is undoing any progress that we've made based on new policies. That's the real, like, scary thing. So, you know, the executive summary basically says, and I'm just going to quote this directly. While holding global warming to 1.5°C by 2100 remains possible, the size of the cuts at 55% off 29 emissions levels by 2035 and the time available to deliver them amid A challenging political climate means that a higher exceedance of this level will now happen. They're basically saying it's possible, but it's not happening. And we don't think it's going to happen because we're not doing it. And so then they talk at at great length about what would happen if we did overshoot. But then we're able to dial it back. And that would mitigate a lot of risk. It wouldn't solve the problem. There would still be a lot of detriment. There would still be a lot of like life lost. There would still be a lot of probably drought and famine and extreme weather and all of the things that happened when we have escalation of climate risks. But they are starting not to predict just because, you know, when we often talk about this, we couch in terms of like, if we can keep to this, this is what we'll mitigate if we can keep to this. And now the language is changing too. If when we pass it, we can fix it faster. If when we pass it, we can work to come back sooner. These are the things that will probably happen. So those are like the big takeaways. They're basically saying it's possible, but lack of ambition and action means exceedance of 1.5 is approaching. It's it's, it's pretty much inevitable that we're going to have at least a temporary overshoot above 1.5, but it's still possible not to. It's very unlikely. And so now if we're going to be reasonable about this, we have to talk about what it looks like if we overshoot it. Also, they do not hold back in saying the new American stance and policy is detrimental. We have historically been one of the largest polluters per capita, right? We make a massive difference per human being living in the country because we have a relatively small population compared to the other large polluters. And our new sort of policy stance is undoing all the progress that collectively a lot of countries are making. And I think that. You know, they didn't want to hold back in in saying that maybe, maybe the hope here is that blame and shame is going to help. I worry that it won't with this administration. And it's just a function of waiting I mean.
S: Trump stood up in front of the UN and said climate change is a hoax.
C: Exactly.
S: Don't do anything about climate change. There's no way that in this administration, anything good is going to happen. He's climbing money that was already approved for, you know, climate mitigation strategies.
C: Yeah. And and we've already set seen, I think it was the Secretary of State. I've got to find where this was written already disavowed this report and said like, we do not, you know, not we don't believe in it, but we don't promote it or we don't, you know, I want to.
S: Find whatever BSPS yeah.
C: Yeah, exactly. Like, we don't think, I think, and their argument is always, we don't think the US should have undue burden. It's like they completely forgot about history. Nobody's asking the US to carry the sins of the rest of the world. They're asking them to clean up. They're asking us to clean up our own mess.
S: Now Cara, did you read Bill Gates infamous memo on climate change?
B: Already. Infamous.
C: Huh, about it. And I'm really curious, like where I'm, I'm curious so many different people's stances because on the one hand, it's like, I don't know, I kind of get what he's doing psychologically, but also like, is that what he's doing? There's a there's a meta level here. There's what he said, and then there's why he's saying it.
S: I, I think if you look at his actual prescriptions about what we should do, they align pretty much 100% with what I've and we've all been saying for the.
C: Yeah, and what he's been saying.
S: And what he's been saying, the framing is horrible. It is a horrible piece of science communication because he frames it like this. And I get his ultimate conclusion is we should be spending our finite resources in a way that have the maximal impact on the quality of life for people, especially vulnerable people, people who are poor and starving, etcetera. And it's hard to argue with that. But the way he gets there is so bad. I mean so his because he starts with this premise, which is in my opinion a blatant straw man and other.
J: People have called them his.
S: Premise is that climate activists often say that climate change is an existential threat that is going to have mass it's going to decimate the human population in the next few decades. That's just not true. The scientists have never said that, that the UN has never said that. We have never said that that is not.
C: But he's saying that, some activists say.
S: It I think even among activists, I think that's an extreme fringe thing to say. Who is going to be, I don't think I've ever read somebody argue the human population is going to be decimated by climate change within a few decades. Who is saying that? I don't know. And it's certainly that is not part of the conversation. It is an absolute straw man argument. Even if there's like some fringe guy far on one end of the spectrum, who cares that that's not where the conversation is happening. And so if that's if he's reacting to that and he's saying and the other thing is he threw out, he acts as if it is a 0 sum game in a way that it really isn't right.
C: Like we have these. Little like paying for and paying for climate change mitigation strategies like somehow divorced from Health and Human safety is going to take away. But that's not true because he he counters his own argument by saying reducing emissions will only serve to increase life years. So it's a it's a strange thing, like if he had just said from the beginning, we need to change our messaging on this. We need to put people at the front and center. We can't talk about the globe as some arbitrary, ineffable thing. We have to talk about how climate change is killing people. And I I get that argument.
S: But, but that's not really what he was saying. And this was he was not about messaging. He was talking about strategy. He's talking about where we should put our our funds. And he the specific things that he called out are things that we have called out ourselves. It's like, I agree with that. Like, for example, he's like 1 poor country decided to just ban artificial fertilizer and then they ended up starving their people and having to buy it from other countries. Like, yeah, he didn't mention it by the name, but we've yeah, I agree that's that was a bad thing to do. That was short sighted, but he he could have talked about it from a completely different framework that wasn't totally tone deaf about how the right was going to predictably respond to what he is saying because they responded in the way that we would have 100% predicted. Namely, like Trump tweets out, Bill Gates admits he was wrong about climate change and I was right all the time. And. And he Gates lamely responds. That's a misreading of what I wrote. Yeah, yeah.
B: Good job. It was totally predictable. That was totally predictable.
C: But here's the thing, here's the thing, here's the thing. Do you think that that was intentional?
S: I don't think so. I think it was you.
C: Think that because Gates is a smart man and it's yeah, it's better for Trump to be high and mighty and haughty and then still talk and still engage and still adopt certain policies and and have that, you know, it's the South Park thing, right? Like, you are such a great president and no, you don't have a small penis. And then he's like, thanks, guy, and moving on. Like if if it's better to do that with an authoritarian figure than it is to have him be your adversary.
S: I don't think he was talking to Trump. I think he was just like this is. And he actually specifically talking to reasonable people he was.
C: I think he's talking to everybody and he's saying we only get everybody page.
S: He's basically, he thinks that he has this massive insight into how we need to realign our priorities when it comes to climate change. And he said, 20 years ago, I said for my company, we have to realign our priorities to, for the Internet. And I was right. And now I'm saying this about climate change, and I'm right this time too. And it was a.
C: Little and he said the same thing about human health right and how they.
S: Listen, I think a lot of what he's doing is great and he and again his, a lot of his prescriptions are like we need to invest in green technology. We need to invest, you know, in policies that work. And he says we the climate change is a problem. We need to address it. We need to, you know, continue policies and investments that will fix it. But he's just saying don't do that. Instead of helping poor people accomp, you know, be resilient in the face of climate change. It's like, well, who's saying that? The thing is the thing. I think he's partly responding to the fact that the the wealthy nations of the world are dialing back their support for aid, you know, to to poorer parts of the world. It's like, yeah, the people who are doing that are the people who are not doing anything about climate change. So who? Right. So who are you talking about? The people who are in like, Trump is the guy who gutted USAID. And now your response to that is to say we can't. It's because we're putting too much emphasis on climate change. Plus he's way too much of A, he's way too much of A techno optimist. Like he's like, we're gonna have fusion power. Like we're near, near economic readiness for fusion power. Like dude, we are nowhere.
B: Say that.
S: Yes, we are nowhere.
B: Near rolling, he listened to this show.
S: But he like when he says we need solutions, we need to focus our research on getting the green premium down to zero, 100%. I've been saying that for years. IA 100%.
C: Agree that that's his number one priority.
S: You keep doing that because that is fantastic that and that will be the ultimate solution. But that's probably but there's the green premium is basically if you have, you know, low carbon energy or or industry or whatever, how much more it costs than high carbon alternatives. So if fossil fuels are way cheaper than non fossil fuel, like, you know, green technology, people aren't going to do, they're not going to pay for that. The expensive green technology over cheap fossil fuels, I get that, 100% get that. But there's basically three ways to reduce the green premium. And he talked as if there was only one way, right? His way is we have the technology our way out of this. We need to invest in technology that brings down the green premium. But there's a couple of other things you could do too. One, although he mentions like we need to have policies that support green energy, but he doesn't. He does in no way talks about how policies like subsidizing fossil fuels, for example.
C: Exactly. Like, it's also not even about having a, what do you call it, like a fossil fuel premium because we could do that too.
S: That's right. So.
C: We could have a fossil fuel premium that's arbitrary, but but we do the opposite of that. We subsidized the.
S: Other The other way to to reduce the premium is to essentially tax carbon, which nobody wants to do.
C: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's an that's.
S: Really don't let them externalize the cost of the carbon that they're emitting on health and the environment and which, you know, some people consider that to be part of this subsidy, but whatever however you frame it. So you could say you could, yes, invest in technology that reduces the premium, also have policies which support in which reduce the green premium and also make sure that we're fairly pricing carbon and that's another way to reduce the green premium.
C: Yeah. And take all that money from the fair pricing, the taxing that feels like it's going to be pressure, because that's always the argument, right, Is that the individual end user is going to feel that economic pressure and put it into subsidies so that they can easily get the electric car or so they can easily ride the bus or for the.
S: Port, you know, you're so worried about. Yeah, exactly.
C: Exactly. Make it so that they don't carry the cost of this.
S: So it did at the end of the day. I mean, I like Bill Gates. I think he does a lot of great chairs. I like the fact that he's investing billions and building like a salt. My God, your power plant. You know, I agree with all that, but it did come off a little bit as a kind of a tech bro kind of a perspective on all this. It's.
C: Like that is who he is. I.
S: Know, I mean I guess he couldn't get away from that enough for this and just also I felt it was just tone deaf. It's like you're as if you're not aware there are climate change deniers in the world and you didn't make this bulletproof against them, completely misinterpreting what you're saying.
C: What do you think about this, Steve? What if, and I mean, I'm speculating here, so Bill Gates runs in very particular circles, right? He runs in these billionaire tech bro Silicon Valley circles. And we're seeing a very explicit movement with like the Elon Musks of the world. He's a very interesting character because he was an early innovator of climate change mitigation strategies that were very capitalistically oriented. But he's also increasingly becoming right wing. He's always been a bit right wing, but increasingly that sort of libertarian bank. What if that's his audience, the tech Bros of the world who aren't climate deniers but who are increasingly becoming more libertarian, more MAGA, and he wants to catch? Them.
S: But if that were his audience, he failed. Because what they're taking from that is, oh, we were right all along. We don't have to do anything about climate change.
C: What if what they're taking is we were right all along, and here's more things we can do?
S: But yeah, well, I hope I I'd love to see that. That's not what I'm.
C: Saying I hope that's the case too because I, I do think it, I, I don't want to give him too much credit, but I feel like he does get something that we aren't getting here, which is they're not even a part of the conversation if they feel insulted, but they become a part of the conversation if you.
S: Yeah, but but he basically just insulted the left in order to do that.
C: Yeah, but we know. But the straw man, he did insult the left, but we're all like, we still like him. That's the problem, right? He insulted the left, but we're like Bill Gates, you know? Really. Ultimately, he's saying all the same thing. He knows he's not going to lose.
S: It to arguments that something which at face value doesn't look good is really 3 dimensional chess if we just give them like super credit. I'm usually not receptive to those kinds of arguments.
C: I wouldn't be if we were talking about Trump's messaging, but I might be if we're talking about Bill Gates messaging. I really do. I really, yeah. I think he has a lot of advisors and he's a very smart man.
B: I wonder if he ran this by anyone and it's just he needs to be more savvy with this kind of statement, though, that he just doesn't didn't display the necessary level of savviness if you if you would. I mean, it's just it's it's disappointing that, you know, maybe he should have run through ChatGPT. I don't know what he should have done, but we should.
S: Have run it by his skeptic is what he should have done.
B: Well, ideally. Ideally, yeah.
C: I think he is.
E: That should always be the case, Frank.
C: It should be. But again, I don't think we're his audience. I think he already has us. And my guess is that this is actually very savvy messaging for a particular audience that we have a hard time understanding.
E: He's trying to reach out to make a broader tent out of it. Is that?
C: The baby.
E: Idea may.
C: That's my hope.
E: Well, yeah, we can hope.
C: That's the charitable way to look at this without very charitable. I agree, Tara.
B: I just, I keep thinking of the the many people meant countless people that now will think probably forever. Yeah, Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and we were right. That's their take away forever.
S: I am already doing damage control on this and I think I'm going to be doing this for a long time. Let me just.
C: Say, what's the difference between somebody saying Bill Gates admitted he was wrong and Bill Gates won't admit it, but he's wrong? What is the difference ultimately in their position? I don't think that. Makes any practical change.
S: That's a big difference right there.
E: I want to take Gates down a peg because he's vaccinate, you know, because he's pro vaccination, you know, that's another. Point.
C: But what does that mean? Take him down a peg? He's still affecting change with his billions of dollars.
S: But if you get to write now an article like like Trump did and like a lot of people on the right are doing, but just, you know, a lot of lot of now a lot of people on the right are who people who like try to come off as semi reasonable. Like you see, people were overreacting about climate change. We don't have to focus our attention on it. You know, the, you know, conservative approach was correct all along. And but that's.
C: Also a massive straw man. Of course it is saying any of the.
S: Point is, he gave them a gift and the majority of the people are not going to read this entire report and figure out that that's not what he was saying at all. You know, it's just I think the net effect is going to be people like us are going to have to do a lot of damage control. That's what I think the net effect is going to be, and it's already.
C: Happening. I don't know, I guess, yeah. But I want to see what the long term effect is. I think it's a ripple right now. And my guess is that he's going to actually have some connections and some conversations that he wasn't able to have prior to this.
Human Toolmaking (55:11)
C: But we'll see all.
S: Right, let's move on. All right guys, let me ask you a question. How long in the past you think human tool use go then? I mean like hominid human ancestor? How long have our our clade been using tools?
C: Are you asking for years or like who the species was?
S: Well, if you want to years ago and if you want to name me the species, you get bonus points.
C: I think it was.
E: Australopithecus 2 million.
C: Yeah, I think it was pre homo sapiens, but I have no idea. I have no idea. Probably yeah. 1.5 to 2,000,000 years ago.
B: That seems like an overestimate. It's getting the hundreds of many hundreds of thousands I don't.
C: Know well we've been people for 250,000 years.
S: All right, so the oldest known stone tools date back to 3.3 million years ago.
E: Wow. What?
C: Price is right rules, you win.
E: What was what was crawling around the Earth 3.3 million years ago?
S: So at that time, you know, there were there were australopithecenes.
E: Australia this.
S: Is like at the end of the Australopithecenes. These were from tools found at the Lamequi 3 site in Kenya. However, the stone tools were found only intermittently.
E: I don't.
S: Meaning, what does that mean?
C: Like it's an early evolution.
S: There So in other words, they, they, would, they, we would find them in one place and A and a time for a number of years, then they would not, then we wouldn't see them anymore.
B: So they they were they reinventing the wheel, so to speak.
S: Yeah, so the thinking was, the thinking was that the use was sporadic. And so definitely Australopithea scenes were the first tool users and then Homo habilis and Homo dolphinsis came into the picture around 2.8 to 2.75 million years ago.
C: Oh, OK.
S: But the But among the australopithecines, they've only found evidence of sporadic tool use, right so.
C: When you say the australopithecines, it's a whole, it's, it's a genus, right? There are a lot of different. Yeah, it's a. Genus.
S: There's different species.
C: But we don't.
S: Often know, Karen, we I'm saying that because we like here are some stone tools. We don't know who was using them, but these are the creatures that were around at the time.
C: So it could be that only one species was using them and other species weren't.
S: It's also possible that only some populations were using them and then they would.
B: It died out, died out. Knowledge died out.
S: And then it would have to get rediscovered by a later population.
E: Interesting.
B: So that was the thinking.
S: That, that was what then the evidence for continuous, like a continuous culture of stone tool use. The, the evidence for that goes back to 2.4 to 2.2 million years ago. And that was now we're getting close to the emergence of Homo erectus. So this is now like the tail end of Homo habilis, Homo rudolphenzis and the beginning of Homo erectus is when we had clear evidence of a continuous culture of tool use. Anybody know what the name of that tool use culture is?
E: This is. About something Flint knapping.
S: No, Flint knapping is a technique. It's the that's the older one. Older one. Not Obi Wan but old Du Wan toolkit from old Dubai Gorge which is where they were they.
E: Were, of course, that I know, old. Dubai. Yeah, old Dubai gorge.
Worst Panspermia Headline Ever (58:26)
S: All right, so now here comes the news item, right? So paleontologists have now found evidence of continuous stone tool use going back 400,000 years earlier than previous. Previously known back to 2.75 million years ago, which is like the very beginning of Homo habilis and this.
C: But still, Australopithecus was.
S: They were still around, but this was this was the beginning of Homo habilis and the the evidence that they present shows continuous tool culture spanning a 300,000 year period. So that's a pretty, that's pretty good evidence for continuity, right?
B: Wow man. Could it be that they 1/3? Of a million years, that hell.
S: So what kind of tools were they using? So they, this was so, yeah. So they, they would find good rocks, right? So part of the culture was there was some geological knowledge. They knew how to find and identify rocks that were good for Flint knapping, right. And then they would they would have like a core and they would knock off flakes. The flakes themselves could be used as cutting edges, but also as.
B: Hell, man.
S: Yeah. But also they would, you can sometimes you just had a core that was like you're just making, you're flaking tools off the core, but the core itself is not a tool. And at other times, like if you're making something bigger like an axe, you're flaking the edge, you know, to make a cutting edge there. And then they would also sharpen it by refreshing, you know, flaking off new pieces to keep the edge sharp. And yeah, it's, you know, even today, like the paleontologist, like if you're not careful, you'll cut your fingers on these stones. Even today they can be very, they can be very sharp.
B: And this.
S: So the other component, there's a couple of interesting components here. 1 is tool making would definitely expand their dietary range because now they could hunt more, they could hunt bigger game and they can get more meat off the bones and break the bones for bone marrow. And there's definitely also evidence of tool marks on bones. So we know when they were the ones who were working in the bones. And so that enabled bigger brains, right? So there was this reinforcement between tools allowing for bigger brains, allowing for more tool use, you know, and that's when things really started to take off, you know, right when, when this continuous tool culture and hunting, that's basically with Homo erectus, that's when things really started to take off. But probably beginning with, you know, the, the Homo habilis, Homo eredolphensis leading to like Homo erectus, and then, you know, the Neanderthal, Homo sapiens clayed, right? So, so paleontologists had this chicken and the egg question of, well, what came first? Did you need big big brains to have continuous tool culture, or continuous tool culture to have big brains?
E: Sounds like tools first.
S: It sounds like tools first now, right? Because it because now we pushed it back to the, you know, the 400,000 years earlier than we thought, like before the emergence of Homo erectus, which is really when, you know, the brain size really started to take off.
B: Yeah, you needed some baseline brain development to even conceptualize doing this, right? I mean well.
S: But that's apparently like what is big? Brain epitheans had that right. So yeah, brains are not really much different than, say, chimpanzees were able to make these tools. And yeah, but.
B: Yeah, but are you implying that chimps could potentially do this?
S: Well, I said they were not that different, but they were bigger than chimps. But they really are not that.
B: Different enough, I mean. Different they clearly had. Chimps. They crossed the Rubicon between chimps and and them, I think, and there was some critical mass that made that.
S: But it seems like, yeah, we crossed this threshold of tool use, which then allowed for much better nutrition. That and fire, by the way, also did keeping food. And then that really allowed brains to explode.
E: Not literally.
S: The other interesting question here is, well, how do we know how far back tool use goes, right? And we're basically our window into that question is rocks, because rocks can survive for millions of years. But how do we know they weren't using wooden tools? And of course we don't and we think they probably were using wooden tools. But the questions are relevant scientifically, unless you could think of a way to test it right now. Do you guys?
B: Clearly they must have. I mean chimps now will use rudimentary, you know, wood based tools like branches. So I think it's pretty clear that they probably almost certainly did, but unfortunately it doesn't fossilize.
E: So you don't get the evidence of it.
S: Yeah. So evidence for wooden tools, like actual wood that was worked and used by by humans and human ancestors goes back hundreds of thousands of years, several 100,000 years. However, there's indirect evidence, and the indirect evidence comes from they're looking at the wear patterns on stone tools.
B: Yeah. Was it attached to wood? Yeah.
S: Or was it working wood, right? Were they using this to work wood? And the other thing is wood residues on stone tools, right so and they have found wood residues on stone tools going back 1.5 million years like however.
E: Pores of the stones you.
S: Know yeah, like there's like, oh there's Acacia wood on this stone like microscopic, you know, residue. But by definition if you're indirect evidence depends on stone tools, it'll never go back further than stone tools. So we may never know for sure what, you know, wooden tools, perishable tools they were using prior to, you know, 3,000,000 years ago, prior to use of stone tools.
B: Too bad.
S: Yeah, just unless somebody could figure out some way of getting indirect evidence or some wooden tool somehow got it right, got mineralized or something.
E: Yeah, Amber, you know, fell on a bunch of amber. So far, yeah, whatever.
S: So far we don't have any evidence of it. Interesting. I'm going to throw in a quickie, guys, because there was another paleontological item I just want to mention very, very quickly. Have you ever heard of Nanotyrannus? Nanotyrannosaurus.
E: Sounds like an oxymoron but OK.
S: Yeah. So this has been a debate among paleontologists whether these smaller specimens of what look like they're in the same clade as Tyrannosaurus Rex, were these young Tyrannosaurus or these young T rexes, or these mature specimens of a different species of small tyrannosaur. This this debate has been answered. We found a near complete specimen of a clearly mature Nanotyrannus. It was definitely a separate species. Actually, we found there was, it was 2 specimens, A tyrannosaur, A tyrannosaur, A nanotyrannosaur and a triceratops who were in combat and killed each other. Basically mutual demise. Yeah, so they actually did fight each other. So interesting. The reason why it's so hard is because dinosaurs really change a lot as they age. Yeah, you know, they're, they're extra epidermal appendages can, can change shape and, you know, size and everything.
C: Yeah, and they're so small. I mean, a lot of them are are laid in eggs, so they're so small when they're even the I mean, they're big eggs, but still. Yeah, they they started. Small and really. Really big.
S: They can continue to grow throughout their life. We know really nothing about them except from the bones. So figuring out male, female, adult, juvenile, these the same species or different species, whatever, is really challenging and we have to wait until we get really good specimens where we could say, Oh yeah, based upon the growth rings and the bones and other features, we could say this is definitely mature like that. That helps. There was also some other anatomical differences, like the cranial nerve paths through the skull, which were different enough. Like, yeah, this can't be the same species. This has to be two different species. So probably what this means is that, you know, again, T rexes were at the very end of the Cretaceous, so they were part of the end Cretaceous ecosystems. So we want to know as much as we can about them. Like what we what was the dinosaurs? What was happening with them when the asteroid hit? And it seems that the the Tyrannosaurus clade was a much bigger and more diverse, you know, group than we previously thought, which means that because they're probably apex, all apex predators, that the ecosystems were probably fairly robust. You know, there's there's an older theory that maybe dinosaurs were on the way out when the asteroid hit, but that is clearly not the case. All right, Evan.
E: Yep.
S: You're going to talk about Pantsmermia, but I love it when you set this to be. I agree, this is the worst headline ever.
E: I mean, isn't. It ever. Isn't it though? Every once in a while you come across a headline of a Science News article that is so ridiculous it makes you ask yourself, At least I ask this, does the editor really even care about this item or are they under orders to come up with something so click baity that basically they cash in all their integrity chips out the window on this one. How's this for a headline, folks? Human DNA found in a 2 billion year old meteorite. Wow. I mean. What human?
B: DNA.
E: Now that is some tabloid level cramp right there. That that's the kind of stuff that gets splashed on the front page of the National Enquirer. But no, this comes from an online magazine called Geekspin, which I looked it up. It's a New York City based publisher that covers a range of topics for a geeky audience, including tech, lifestyle and pop culture news. Their content also includes entertainment and embrace a wide variety of geek subcultures such as cosplaying Android and Apple fans, Lego builders and science enthusiasts. All right, so they're not specifically science, but you know, at least they try to put on a patina that they do care about science, but not with a headline like this. Yeah. I mean, based on your description, it sounds like something that I would might want to probably check out but but not now. Not exactly exactly human DNA detected in a 2 billion year old meteor, right? New NASA data revives the theory that life on Earth came from space. So is NASA really saying that about human DNA in a 2 billion year old meteorite? No, not whatsoever. What the hell is this article talking about? Well here's they're the basically just rehashing some already reported news from months ago. Frankly, Osiris Rex, that mission that brought back dust from asteroid Bennu and Japanese Hayabusa 2 did the same from the asteroid Ryugu. And Jay, I think you last talked about this maybe a few months back. I recall you mentioned having a news item about the retrieval of dust from space and rocks from space and things. So I mean, this is an ongoing Science News item that I've also touched upon over the years. It's unfolded. It's been unfolding for many years. When the research researchers analyzed those samples that they got back OK, they found carbon compounds, amino acids and nucleobases, you know, chemical precursors of DNA and RNA to be generous. But that's a long way. I mean, my gosh, that is such a leap from DNA itself and then human DNA for I mean, you're, you're way out of your league there. No freaking way. How the heck did this even go wrong? One person I saw online commented, I don't know if it's a scientist or not, but they said this is the equivalent of saying I found flour and sugar, therefore I discovered cake, right. I mean, you know, so many you have to jump so far, so far ahead. So here's how how it works. You get this, You get a technical paper that uses phrases like what organic compounds or nucleobases? And then some wire service picks it up and summarizes that as what ingredients of life maybe. And then the headline writer, Yep, trying to grab attention says, oh, life discovered and finally social media gets a hold of it and says human DNA on a meteorite. So that's kind of for one possible evolution or of how of how these things become kind of runaway trains looked for it, NASA. NASA says no way, no biological molecules, there's no DNA, there's no RNA or no proteins. They absolutely, you know, said that clearly. There's not even room for interpretation there.
S: What they find are amino acids and base pair and bases, you know from the, the you know, adenine, guanine, the building blocks of DNA, the building blocks of proteins, but not proteins or DNARNA as you say and not life. And so tying this to panspermia is just not accurate. Panspermia says that life started elsewhere and was seeded onto the earth, not the building blocks of life are are out there. Which is a completely different claim, right? Is is not panspermia?
E: And I, and I went further to look for recent news articles about panspermia to see if perhaps they were really maybe alluding to, to, to something else here and maybe got their wires crossed or something. But no, there's really not a lot that's new about it other than what I did find out though, is that panspermia is kind of now being subdivided into into different kinds of categories which help define it a little bit better, such as molecular panspermia. It's also known as pseudo panspermia, which is the idea that the building blocks right those amino acids you talked about, Steve.
S: Form otherwise known as not panspermia. Am I?
E: Right, right. Oh, litho panspermia is a term being, you know, used now microorganisms or spores that travel inside rocks between planets. And, you know, there's still has very scant hard evidence that panspermia is really something that scientists are willing to to throw their hat on.
S: Also evident because make a distinction between stellar panspermia and interstellar panspermia like it's it is perfectly plausible. Mars critters from Mars got to Earth, Yeah, I'll buy that, sure, but not interstellar. That is a completely different picture and it's the plausibility plummets to basically so.
E: Down, Yeah, yeah, yeah. Origin versus local emergence, absolutely. Such, such a huge, huge component of that. So yeah, worst headline of the year, I'm going to say, and I'll probably be bringing this up at our end of the year review show.
B: Yeah, right.
S: And basically I read the article like there's nothing new here. This is exactly where we have been for years. You know that there's components are out there. Maybe we're still think we're still thinking it's possible life may have come from within our own solar system, but but not interstellar. This is, yeah, just absolute unforced error of bad headline writing. Even the article itself wasn't that much better.
B: No, there was no meat on that bone, frankly. And the Super click Beatty rehash of the old. News.
S: Yeah, that's exactly click Beatty rehash of old news. That's a perfect description. All right, Bob, tell us about this AI powered wound.
AI-Powered Wound Healer (1:13:52)
S: Healer Yeah.
B: sci-fi band aids in the news. This one was fascinating as hell. Researchers have developed a smart bandage with AI in the loop to optimized to optimize wound healing. Results in pigs are quite promising I think. This was developed by Professor Marco Rolandi and colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So this was published in the journal Biomedical Innovations, Said the title of their paper was Towards Adaptive Bioelectronic Wound Therapy with Integrated real time diagnostics and machine learning driven closed loop control. So alright, So what does that actually mean?
S: And can I say at this point, Bob, I am not impressed. But really, it seems like a really overly complicated way to do things that we already do. And the only justification I saw for this was, well, maybe in places that don't have access to real health care, if this might be a well.
B: That's that's kind of what they what they stress. Yeah. So let's go through, let's go through what I have here. So the authors of this paper, this was funny. They estimate that humans have about 24 billion wounds a year. OK, yeah, they 4 to 3/3.
S: Each 3 Each.
B: Yeah, 1 to, they say one to three each. Yeah. And that, of course, runs the gamut from from scrapes, little minor scrapes to to to surgeries, you know, so it's all over and.
C: Imagine by having three scrapes a year.
E: I have more than that.
C: I have 3 scrapes a month easily right?
B: Well, I mean, the way I looked at it was like, how many times you need a Band-Aid? Yeah, a few times a year is close, is close enough.
C: I think I am not a careful person.
B: All right, so maybe so maybe that's it was closer to 30 billion, I don't know. So this device went when and if ever it's available won't be designed for most of those wounds, obviously, right They say in their paper. While many wounds heal with basic at home care, others require timely medical intervention to ensure proper healing. Delays in access to healthcare can lead to complications including scarring, permanent tissue damage, infection, sepsis and even death. A wound type and individual variability further complicate the selection of optimal treatments. So this is aimed at clearly this is aimed at chronic high risk, hard to monitor wounds, not paper cut. So that's that's kind of the slice of wounds we're dealing with here.
S: So Bob, I agree with that, but that contracts a little bit what they're saying there because they're saying like timely, what does that mean when they say time? Because this is these interventions are for chronic wounds, right Wind. Also, if you have a chronic wound, these are mostly in a medical setting, which again, So what? What's the use case here? What exactly are are they aiming this at?
B: OK, well, and one thing I did was I looked at, I looked at Waze and I looked at for urgent care near me and I found eight of them within within 5 miles. So I think part of the things that they're saying is that many people just aren't, aren't that lucky. They just don't have the access that we have. We know we're very lucky in that regard. Again, where they've got.
S: Here this is not for urgent care, this is not for urgent wounds, acute wounds, this is for chronic wounds.
B: I thought of it as chronic wounds is as definitely part of what of what it's for and not necessarily the whole Tamale right there. So yeah, I didn't think Chronic was.
S: The interventions have only been shown to work on chronic wounds, so.
B: What do you mean what intervention?
S: The electricity that only works on chronic wounds.
B: It doesn't work on just generally evidence.
S: The evidence is only exists for things like chronic pressure ulcers or chronic non healing wounds.
B: OK, they also say that even with standard care, it's often A1 size fits all approach that's only checked occasionally. So any important wound changes that that might have happened in the interim could kind of get worse before anyone really realizes it. If, if nobody's looking at it. And this reminded me of Jay's, Jay's hand wound where he actually where the, the, the material actually grew into your skin because.
J: Because my skin grew into the material.
B: Oh, yeah, right, right. So, yeah, I never, never forget that that image day. That was pretty nasty. All right, so this this new device is called a heel, right? How would you pronounce this a dash heel, a heel, a heel a heel. It seems like a weird the heels a heel that heel. So the, the major components of this device is you got a camera with ring LEDs for consistently being able to image the wound. You've got electrodes for electrically stimulating the wound site and reservoirs and actuators for storing and delivering liquid medication. So those are the major players. And plus of course the power source and all of this, it adheres directly over, over the, over the wound, kind of like some of those, you know, those, those diabetes, what they're like diabetes pumps for, for diabetics that you see, there's just like heavy duty, heavy duty, you know, adhesion onto the wind, onto the skin that doesn't really, you know, fall off easily like a regular Band-Aid. So, so how does it work all together? So every every two hours, images of the wound are taken and wirelessly transmitted to an AI agent that they call ML physician software. So ML here clearly means machine learning. And the machine learning angle was interesting. And that manifests itself in two ways. There's they have a trained model to estimate which healing phase the wound is in, right? So it can distinguish visually the clotting phase, which is, which is the initial phase of, of, of the wound, the clotting phase. It can distinguish that from the inflammation phase, which which is also distinct from the rebuilding tissue phase. And then towards the end, there's this remodeling phase that that happens. But the AI also uses deep reinforcement learning, which is trained, which is essentially a training through trial and error, right? And it, and I'm sure it wasn't training on real people, but through the, the literature or, or virtual training or whatever, it learns to recognize what treatment actions help most, you know, what kind of incremental intervention is warranted at this stage based on what it's seeing. So after the images are received, the AI assesses the wound and it builds an ideal healing timeline, which is essentially the fastest reasonable path from a fresh wound to a closed wound. And it tries to keep the wound on that path by giving it little, little nudges. And it, it can determine if the wound is say, is it stuck in the inflammation stage or is it just generally lagging too far behind where it should be. So then once it. It makes that decision. The AI has essentially 2 knobs it can turn to nudge the wound along on its healing trajectory. It can use an electric field which has been shown from what I've researched deep. This electric field has been shown to accelerate healing by doing things like promoting cell migration and enhancing growth factors needed for tissue repair. You're saying that this is a really only for chronic wounds and not?
S: Well, those are the mechanisms, yes. Yes, those are the mechanisms, primarily they promoting cell migration to the wound.
B: Right, but it hasn't been necessarily shown to work for for regular wounds.
S: Yeah, everything I've read is all in chronic wounds.
B: OK, it can also so the AI can also release into the wound a dose of drug in in this study they used fluoxetine which is which is which is anti-inflammatory and it can help with wound closure. So that's the that's what.
C: The fluoxetine is Prozac. That's.
S: Prozac, yeah.
C: I don't think that's an anti-inflammatory.
S: Well they they say it decreases inflammation. Wouldn't be my choice.
C: For the.
S: Drug decreases.
C: Yeah, I would. I wouldn't call it an anti-inflammatory though Bob. They might have anti-inflammatory properties or.
B: Something so they used it then to reduce inflammation and help with wound closure. Maybe that's a better way to say it. Interesting how they didn't use a specific and, you know, anti-inflammatory. So, OK, so this can all be adjusted 2 hours later based on the next batch of images that, that, that the AI gets. Now you're probably thinking how safe is, how really how safe is this? And so there's two major safety features that, that they, that they use. First off, there's preset safe ranges on how much it can ZAP a wound or use that drug. So it know, it knows what these, these safe ranges are and it will never go beyond them. So that's one. And secondly, and probably most importantly, there's a dashboard available where, where human doctors can see what the AI is doing. And if necessary, it could, it could, it could change the, the decision that the AI makes, you know, it could override it if, if it's necessary. So the AI, according to the research, is the AI component here. It continuously watches, it makes small but informed adjustments and it's all under these human set boundaries. So that's kind of like an overview what the AI is doing. So testing of a heal was on pig wounds, as I said, and, and they use pigs because pigs have a lot of similarities to humans, especially, you know, regarding the skin. So they, they, they followed it for the healing for 22 days. I think the device was used for I think for seven to 10 days and they continued tracking after that. This was like a they called the closed loop where the the AI just had basically had full control and did what did what it was did what it did without really any intervention. I'm sure it was they were tracking it, but they didn't change any of the decisions that the AI made. So compared to controls, the wounds healed 25% faster, the new skin was thicker and more mature. The inflammation was, was less then controls and and most importantly, all the chemical and structural cues that indicate that the wound just didn't close faster, right. The wound was further along the healing process itself. It just didn't like accelerate the wound closure. It was it was clearly in their mind from what they're saying, the healing process was further along than the than the control. So I thought that was pretty slick. So, but keep in mind this is a proof of concept. They still need large, longer and larger studies using more, you know, more types of wounds and eventually with people, of course. Now, this isn't the healing laser thing that was used in Logan's run. Do you guys remember that, Steve? Remember that, Of course, forgot that image, right. But it's for problematic wounds, especially for people with limited access to facilities that we take for granted. And I think this it sounds like this could be a game changer. But Steve, you're not as a. Game changer.
S: This is nowhere near a game changer. This is an overly technological way of doing something that we already do way more simply. And the justification for it seems to be this is places where doctors are not available and yet you're supposed to have a doctor monitoring it. And you know what I mean? I don't know. Again, I'm thinking what's the use case here? What's the scenario where this is going to be an advantage over just doing what we already do? This just seems like an overly high tech way of doing something that and when they, they compared it basically to doing nothing. What they really need to compare this to is usual care. That's the standard. And I wonder not to do it may not even be as good as usual care. I don't know. We they didn't provide any data for that. So this is a it's an interesting idea, but it's also like an overly complicated way of doing something fairly basic. And I'm not convinced there's any advantage to this. And is the extra expense and complexity worth it, Right. In what scenario? I'm still confused about what scenario this is. This is, yeah.
B: One thing, yeah, one thing I was thinking like if if you don't have access to good to good healthcare or or urgent care.
S: Are you going to have access to this high tech?
B: How are you going to get how are you going to get this thing then that that struck to me. So, so, so my take away then is that maybe I should wait for this the the Logan's run healing laser thing. Maybe that I'll I'll hope for that. And this one.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:25:07)
J: All right, all right, Jay, it's who's that noisy? Time. All right guys, Last week I played this noisy.
E: I know what that is. What is it? That is Cara forging a ring and.
C: You. I mean, it does sound like that.
E: Hit the anvil first and you bounce the hammer onto the ring, right? You know, no.
J: It's a good guess. Actually, somebody else guess something that I thought was a little bit similar was funny.
S: Yeah. I mean, I think I know exactly what this is.
J: Well, don't say it. When we get to the end, I'll let you go. OK, So somebody said I thought this was very funny. A listener named Ben Brown said this one was tricky. Tricky. There were 48 distinct high pitched pings in that noisy. And Cara has been present on 48 out of the last 52 shows. So I think this week's Noisy is an audio representation of all the times that Cara didn't understand a sci-fi reference over the past year of. Shows.
E: Or it's faster than that? Or.
C: It's yeah, yeah.
J: OK, so it's not Cara and there's no nothing like, you know, data derivative of Cara or anything. But that was a wonderful guest, a listener named Kevin Clare wrote in said. Hi Jay, long time listener, first time guesser. The noise to me sounds like some some stone Masons splitting a large stone. That's the sound of them hitting the splitting tools. He says he was a stone Mason for 20 years and he wants to thank us all for everything that we've ever done. I appreciate that.
S: Well, that's pretty good. That's it's really everything we've ever done.
J: Well, everything you guys do, if you want to be specific, OK, pretty much, You know. Anyway, another listener named Joe, Andrea. Joe, you know, I came close to that last name. He says, hello, Jay. I'm going to guess this week's noisy was a group of workers driving in a railway spike with sledgehammers. Since that's the picture I had my head listening to it. This is a good guess. There's a lot of elements in that guess I think I would consider to be mostly correct. You're not completely correct, though, and I'm going for a perfection here, so let's move on. Another listener named Ben Simon, that's the second Ben this week. He says, hello, Jay. I have guessed. Who's that noisy A few times before, but this is the most confident I have been about it. I've been wrong every time so far, and I could still be wrong in this week. But all my guesses Of all my guesses, this feels most likely to be right. This sounds like a video of a team of people pounding a stake into the ground with sledgehammers. My social media algorithm is constantly feeding me clips like this of workers performing skilled tasks. Anyway, that's a good guess. These guesses here are very reminiscent of the vast majority of people who wrote in. And as you guys know, I usually use the person who wrote in first about that particular idea. Now we're going to move on to something a little bit closer, and this is from a listener named Ben Neal. What are the chances, guys? 3 bends in one show. Oh yeah, We have Ben Simon, we have Ben Brown and we have Ben Neal.
S: Out of how many? It's how many choices.
J: Not hundreds of thousands.
B: Hundreds of that. That means an it's an octillion to 1.
J: No, I mean, what? I got like 100 people, 150 people each.
B: Week. Yeah.
S: So it's pretty good.
J: All right, so Ben Neal says, hammering a large piece of metal, possibly an anvil, with nothing on it. Sounds like the hanger is being dropped and allowed to bounce freely, making the increasing frequency before the next drop. All right, that was about as close as as anyone has gotten. So Steve hit me. What do you think it is?
S: So yeah, I'll promise this by saying I've heard the sound so many times because I've watched every episode of Forging a Fire. It's definitely metal pinging, right? This is the sound of somebody forging iron on an anvil, because you could tell the sort of frenetic pace of them because you have to, once you heat the metal, you got to work it very quickly. And then as it cools towards the very end, they do some high frequency lighter taps because they don't want to hit it as hard because you'll stress the metal out. So that that sequence of pinging again you, I've heard it a million times. Did somebody?
J: Forge it so you're close, You're close. Another listener was close to this is Aaron Allison and he says, hey, Jay and all I think this noisy is 2 blacksmiths at a Renaissance fair. So far he's correct. Maybe working on one thing together. Well, yeah, that's you're correct, but that's pretty general. And then he said my son recently found his love of going to those, I guess Renaissance fairs. So we have gone multiple times. Anyway, lots of near misses, including Steve. Now again, this could be many things is what's the guy building these people, whoever the hell they are, like swords? That's what everyone thinks.
S: I. Was correct, just incomplete. I didn't miss.
J: But go ahead, complete it.
S: He's yeah, Two guys out of Renfair forging something. I'm like, so something small maybe like a nail.
J: Holy shit, Steve, very. Good. Yeah, it's a, it's a medium sized nail. I'd say that the, the head of the nail was probably around the size of 1/4, you know, not like the, the, the Super small nails that we use like for a 2 by 4 or whatever this nail was, you know, much bigger, but not like a spike. Yeah, I had a spiky little nail thing going on there. You never know. So look, we got a lot of, lot of close guesses. You know, this one had a very specific thing. It would have sounded pretty much exactly like that if they were making almost any thing right, Steve?
S: Yes, right. Something small. That's the only thing you could really say about it, but it's again, that freak, that increasing frequency just towards the very end is the typical thing.
J: Well, that was a good piece of information that you gave me there, Steve. I'm going to play it again just to see how close Steve was ready. Farley, Farley. Farley. Yeah. So there you have it. That's the people making nails. I have a new noisy for you guys this week. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Mike. And here it is. That is the noise. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, please just e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steven, I have things to tell you. Yes, we will be at Scicon, the Scicon conference. You can go to sciconconference.org. That's CSICONFERENC. e.org. This conference is happening. Where is it? It's the 50th 1.
S: Buffalo.
J: It's happening in Buffalo, NY from June 11th to the 14th. They say on the the conference homepage celebrate our history chart, our future. So there is somewhat of a theme here and I'll give you a little a little list of who's going. Bill and I will be there. Jump everybody. Michael Mann. Mann, Carrie, you just interviewed him. Did he say that he's looking forward to seeing you at the conference?
C: He did. He'll be there for sure.
J: What a gentleman. Then we got Leanne. Lord, she's going to emcee it. Of course we will be there. It looks like Banachek and Richard Wiseman are going to be there, and Eugenie Scott. The list is growing. I think it's going to be a really awesome conference and we will definitely be there. We have 3 show weekends, two of which are right now you can buy tickets for. So we're going to be in Seattle. This is going to be the weekend of January 9th. We have 4 four things you can join us at Friday night. We're going to have a a low number get together Saturday morning, like starting between 11:00 and 12:00. We're going to be having our private show, then we're going to be having the Extravaganza VIP and then we're going to be having the Extravaganza show itself. You can go to our website to find out all the details on that. And the same exact thing I just said. We will also be doing in Madison, WI. And then future plans are we'll be doing this in New Haven, CT Details will come on that.
S: All right. Thank you, Jay.
Emails (1:33:20)
S: We're going to do a couple of questions and emails. The first one was a correction. Last week I talked about horse evolution in that name, that logical fallacy segment, and I oversimplified this story, which means I got Europe and North America reversed. So what this is, this is how this is the hit the actual history of horse evolution. Horses evolved in North America with repeated migrations to Europe and Asia, including modern horses. So modern horses evolved in North America, migrated to Europe and Asia, then they went extinct about 10,000 years ago in North America and were reintroduced from Europe.
C: I thought you said that.
S: I said that they evolved in Europe and were imported to North America.
C: You did.
S: I did.
C: The whole time, maybe you said both of those things. Maybe I did that. That's what I just. Like I knew horses evolved here then went extinct. The thing I missed was.
S: That they evolved here, went extinct and then were reintroduced.
C: Yeah, right. Right.
S: Yeah, right. OK, just said just getting that straight. And then we get an e-mail from Mad Brad and Mad Brad writes. Did you hear about the three tiger knots stranded in orbit? They were. They were preparing to head home when their return craft was struck and damaged by a chunk of irony. I think he meant iron.
C: Yeah, that's so I'm just.
S: Going to assume you want iron there. So this is true. What happened was they, you know, they were in the, in their satellite in their, their space station and the the craft they were going to use to come out. They'd already brought the new astronauts there. They were there's a brief period with where both sets of astronauts are on board and then they were about to leave to these guys have been there for like a year and a half. They've been there since April of 2024 and they and something, a bit of space debris hit it. So they're investigating it. They think they're not going to be able to use it. They're probably end up sending it back uncrewed, and then they'll have to wait for the next mission to go up and get them back. So yeah, so this is not uncommon. And what's interesting and what's worthy about mentioning here is that there's a lot of space debris up there and this is going to probably be happening more often, not less often.
E: Yeah, we talked about that a lot.
S: Yeah, this is like, and so it begins, you know, like you can't even be in space without being constantly menaced by space debris.
E: So this was not naturally occurring iron. No rock in space this was. This was debris, 100%.
S: This is space debris, yeah.
B: Steve, you said this isn't this isn't uncommon. What? What exactly is not uncommon about this?
S: Stuff getting hit by space debris.
B: OK, fair enough. I mean being stranded because of it. Oh.
S: Yes, this is the second time, right?
B: Yeah, it's kind of yeah, but they work at home.
S: But I think just, yeah, just being menaced by space debris is going to get increasingly frequent. I.
B: Think Oh yeah, yeah, until we get it to the point where nothing can go in space for a few centuries.
S: Like, like Wally. All right, let's go on to science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:36:19)
Theme: Frogs
Item #1: Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth.[7]
Item #2: Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water.[8]
Item #3: While most frogs leg eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets from their womb.[9]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. |
| Science | Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. |
| Science | While most frogs leg eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | clever |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Evan | Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. |
Bob | Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. |
Jay | While most frogs leg eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. |
Cara | Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. |
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 1 fictitious, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake. We have a theme this week. The theme is frogs. What do you guys know about frogs? All right, well, we'll find out. Let's find out. All right, here we go. Item number one. Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. All right #2 Frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can sense vibrations, especially through the water and eye #3 While most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles and even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Evan, go first.
E: OK, most frogs have teeth, but one species has a full set of upper, upper and lower jaw teeth. Yes, that species is called the Michigan Jay Frog. I saw it in a documentary on WB once. I don't, I don't know, frog teeth. I can't recall I've ever paid close enough attention to frogs to notice teeth. My memory is saying there are no teeth but I but that's doesn't mean anything. Like, you know, be misremembering #2 about frogs not having ears and therefore do not have true hearing. But they can sense vibrations, especially through the water. So there's a thing called, if I recall from my biology class, what a tympanic membrane is what they have instead of the ears. And it would be, yeah. So vibrations or, you know, the timpani aspect of that. Certainly that seems to make sense with what I know about no ears on the frogs. I'm going to say that one science and the last one here about while most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles. Yep. Some give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Well, I don't have a problem. I don't think with that. I mean, certainly we know about, you know, tadpoles is something you do learn about. But giving species to live tadpoles and froglets, Oh boy. So it's either that or the teeth. Which one am I going to go with? I I'll, I'll say the teeth one. That one's just of the three, that's that one I have the least positive feeling about, so I'll say the teeth one is fiction.
S: OK, Bob.
B: Well, I'm not too sure about the teeth and the, the, the hatching thing, but I would classify that membrane on the side of a frog's head as ears. They're not like human ears, but they, they, the vibration of that membrane is translated into sound. So I think those are ears. So I'll say that one's got to be fiction, assuming, you know, depending on the definition of ear here. But I'll just go with that, OK?
J: And Jay, OK, so this one with the most frogs have teeth, most is is a nice general thing because it could it can lean heavily either way. So I'm just going to say that science frogs do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing. But they can sense vibrations. Yeah. I mean, especially through the water. That makes perfect sense. I mean, I've seen the little areas on there on some frogs heads where there might be like an ear type of thing happening, but I don't ever think I saw like a hole or anything like that. So that makes sense to me too. OK, so most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles. Some species give birth to live tadpoles or even birth fully formed froglets. Well, look, that's that's fiction. Thank you.
S: OK. And Cara.
E: You know it's fiction if Jay can't get through it without laughing.
S: Cara actually all spread out so you have no help on the. Road.
C: Yeah, I'm struggling because these all seem like science to me. I do think frogs have teeth, but I don't think they're like our teeth. They're probably like teeny tiny and kind of soft. I agree with what and who said it. Bob said that like a tympanic membrane is still an ear. How do you define ear? That the the important part of the ear is what's on the inside. The outside is just like a cone. So that's not your ear. Yeah. The ear is the eardrum, right, The canal, the hair cells, all that gets done. Yeah. And then I don't know, I mean, I, I'm assuming that yes, there's always an exception to the rule, like there are dinosaurs that gave, or I guess not dinosaurs, but marine reptiles that gave live birth even though most of them laid eggs. So why wouldn't there be a frog? I think the one thing that nobody brought up is I don't know the difference between a frog and a toad. And what if, like, some of these things happen in toads, but not frogs? That would screw me. Like if you did a, if you did a news item about rabbits and you're like, well, that's not really a rabbit that's in a hare, I would be like, OK, whatever. So that could get me on this. But I think I have to go with what Bob said. Like I do think those are ears. So that's got to be the fiction.
S: OK, so you guys are spread out so we'll take these in order. Most frogs have teeth, with one species having a full set of upper and lower jaw teeth. Evan, you think this is the fiction? Everyone else thinks this one is science and this one is science. Yeah. You don't think of frogs as having teeth, but they do.
B: But they do.
S: They do not use them for chewing. They just use them for holding on to prey. Right. It's just a gripping mechanism. But there is this one dude who's got a full grill like upper and lower teeth, but they are these like small pointy teeth. They're not like our teeth. Yeah, it's not like the frog smiles. It's got a full set of human like teeth. There is a fish though. That's strangely.
B: Yeah, I've seen that. Oh yeah, it's so creepy.
S: Yeah, but not frogs, all right Is. That the moment, the clear head. No, that's the the transparent head. I don't think so.
C: I think there's a few.
B: Mean, I would, I would totally. Who's with me here? How would you say totally? Totally. I would totally. Trade my teeth for their their lasso tongue because how cool would that be?
S: All right. All right, let's go on #2 frogs that do not have ears and therefore do not have true hearing, but they can't sense vibrations, especially through the water. Bob and Cara, you think this one is the fiction? Jay and Evan, you think this one is science? Now, Cara, to answer your question, toads are a type of frog. So all toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads.
C: Oh, so this would be harder if it was the opposite? Yeah, yeah.
S: So it's the so I can't say like no, it's only in toads because they are frogs. So it would still.
C: Nice.
S: Right. So, and I guess, yeah, you, I think you guys hit upon the, the question here is because, yes, those are tympanic membranes, those round areas behind the eyes usually that you could see how many frogs. But are they just sensing vibration or are they, as Bob says, translating that vibration into sound, right. And in order to do that, you need to have an inner ear, right? That inner ear with hair cells that does that are connected to neurons that does translate it into actual sound. So the question is, do frogs have an inner ear?
B: Is it, is that the question? I mean, to me it's like sound is vibrations. If you're using a membrane to sense vibrations and act on that information, that's a primitive ear in my in my every lap.
S: Yeah, but then it's like it's. An ice is the fiction because they do have baby. Yeah, they actually do have an inner ear. They have a they just don't have an external ear, right. But they have the tympanic membrane connected to with.
C: Inner ear again.
S: And they hear just like we hear. It's just through is exposed to panic membrane.
C: What's the external ear called again? The foldy bit? The meat meatus no Malleus met.
S: Those are the bones. No, no the.
C: Yeah.
B: On the human, Yeah, yeah, yes, we have. Yeah, I think it's called the EE external ear.
C: Oh, the Oracle.
S: There there's.
B: Oh, is that it? I'd like that.
S: There's the external auditory canal and then there's the pinna, which is the ear part that you see.
C: On the yeah, the pinna or the OR. It's called the Oracle.
S: Right.
C: Yeah.
S: So they don't have an ex, they don't have an auditory canal, they don't have the bones, you know, and they don't have any, any external ear. They just have it's their ear starts with the tympanic memory, but then they have an internal and inner ear with all the usual components of an inner ear.
B: That's cool.
S: Yeah. So it is. It is true hearing. And that means that while most frogs lay eggs that hatch as tadpoles, some species give birth to live tadpoles and even birth fully formed froglets from their womb. Some of them are toads, and they're called toadlets, which is adorable. Even froglets are adorable. Yes, They are what we call viviperous or viviparity, like nimbatodes, for example. They give, they just, they give birth to live children from their womb and some of them as tadpoles, but some they carry them until they are fully formed, you know, froglets or toadlets, which is cool. But yeah, and you're right, like in amphibians and reptiles, like all kinds of things happen. Like, the idea that they all lay eggs is not true. It's not true of snakes. It's not true of other reptiles. It's not true of dinosaurs. So, yeah, this is not surprising. All right. Well, good job, Bob and Cara.
J: Yeah, good job guys.
E: Yeah, thanks.
J: Enjoy a while less you.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:45:50)
"An informed appraisal of life absolutely requires a full understanding of life’s arena – the universe. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe."
– — Brian Greene, (description of author)
S: Get worse, heaven, give us a quote.
E: An informed appraisal of life absolutely requires a full understanding of life's arena, the universe. By deepening our understanding of the true nature of physical reality, we profoundly reconfigure our sense of ourselves and our experience of the universe. Brian Greene.
S: Brian, very nice. Love it. All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
E: Sure man, you got it. Thank you, Steve.
S: Hey, next week's episode is the live show. We recorded that we when we were in Kansas because I'm going to be out of the country next week. I'll be in Dubai. But next week's episode will definitely be our Kansas show. And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ www.sciencedaily.com: Nanotech makes cancer drug 20,000x stronger, without side effects
- ↑ www.1x.tech: NEO Home Robot
- ↑ www.nytimes.com: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/climate/climate-emissions-united-nations.html
- ↑ theness.com: Human Tool Use Earlier Than We Thought - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ www.yahoo.com: Human DNA detected in 2 billion year old meteorite
- ↑ newatlas.com: AI device accelerates wound healing by 25%
- ↑ www.nationalgeographic.com: This mysterious frog re-evolved a full set of teeth
- ↑ pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: Mechanics of the frog ear - PMC
- ↑ vertebrate-zoology.arphahub.com: Museomics and integrative taxonomy reveal three new species of glandular viviparous tree toads (Nectophrynoides) in Tanzania’s Eastern Arc Mountains (Anura: Bufonidae)