SGU Episode 1065
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| SGU Episode 1065 |
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| December 06th 2025 |
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Unable to acquire caption for image from OpenAI. |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"There is, of course, another sort of disagreement, which is owing merely to inequalities of knowledge. The relatively ignorant often wrongly disagree with the relatively learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. The more learned, however, have a right to be critical of errors made by those who lack relevant knowledge. Disagreement of this sort can also be corrected. Inequality of knowledge is always curable by instruction." |
from "How to read a book" by Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren |
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| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, December 4th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara, Santa Maria.
E: Howdy.
S: Jay Novella. Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good afternoon, folks.
S: Cara, you were away for a week and some of our listeners were freaking out. Like where's Cara?
E: They panic. Absolutely.
J: Cara, if you're ever going to walk away from the Stu, you better give our audience like 6. Months. To get ready for it, you know I'm.
E: Just going to go on vacation and never. I'll take five years notice Cara is on the roof for.
S: The Fiddler So, Carol, I understand that psychology is no longer a profession.
C: Oh my gosh, is that in the list?
E: What people don't get paid for. It I haven't been looking, I saw that like nurses. Like nurses?
C: I saw social work and nursing with psychology.
S: Counseling Psychology.
C: Counseling.
J: Oh, they that got blacklisted too?
C: Yeah, but I'm in the psychiatry department, so I think I can skate by.
J: Oh good.
S: Are you a clinical psychologist?
C: I am. Oh, that I'm clinical, not counseling.
S: Clinical psychology is is included in the list, so that qualifies.
C: Oh, OK. So I'm not OK. That's good.
S: So you are still you are still a professional.
C: But nursing is a nursing. Are they?
S: Physician assistants, physical therapists, audiologists, speak language, pathology, occupational therapists, social workers and educators, according to the Department of Education. No longer a profession. But to be fair, they say mean. We're not saying they're not a profession. They're just not listed as a profession when it comes to student loans, which means they don't qualify.
B: They don't qualify for Professionals A. Lot of people are screwed, yeah.
S: There's a saying, right? We were saying in academia, which probably goes beyond academia, don't show. Tell me your priorities. Show me your budget. Like I don't give a shit what you call these professions. You're not funding them the as you do other professions.
C: Well, and the, the reason it matters is because professional degrees, which what's interesting is my degree actually is in a lot of ways considered a professional degree. It's very hard. I could have done a research oriented clinical psychology degree, but it that's weird, that's rare. Usually a clinical psychology degree intends you to practice clinically, which means my research program is not funded the way that a research psychology program is. You know, most researchers getting pH, DS, their major professor, their Pi, the lab they're in is working on getting an AH funding or whatever. I mean, and where's that anymore? But they're trying to keep funding in the lab to pay for their graduate students. Professional degrees don't have that option, which means we have to pay out of pocket. That's why loans matter for these people. Like a nurse is not going to get her education paid for or his education paid for by private department. Yeah, they have to pay for it themselves.
E: We need more nurse.
C: Exactly. You're a nurse. We need more counselors. We need more of all these things.
E: It only makes good business sense to to offer loans to. Exactly.
S: So these are all professions that have a couple of things in common. One is they're dominated by women. Gee, I wonder if that's a factor. And the second is that we are, we actually need more of them, right. We are having shortages of nurses and and mental health professionals, etcetera. So now there's good, it basically cuts the the limit of student loans that you can get from 200,000 for a professional degree to 100,000 for a non professional degree. But that's.
C: Good luck getting your entire degree for $100,000 in this economy right now. Exactly. So do they not understand stand ROI like over and over? You remember how dosh was like let's cut everything that has a good ROI.
S: Do not have been the problem. Why?
E: Well, this has been the problem with efforts to, you know, help the environment and, you know, go go greener and all that as well. They don't see the ROI.
S: Yeah, that's return on investment, by the way, if anybody does know what that means.
C: Yeah, and like often with with environmental issues and I hear what you're saying Evan because IA 100% agree. We're often talking about like externalized costs and ROI over like decades or or even millennia. But like we can calculate an ROI on a nursing degree in like 3 years.
E: That's right. Yes, you're right.
C: It's much, much. More immediate.
E: It's much more immediate.
S: I mean, RFK Junior is continuing to F with our vaccines. It's so easy to lose sight of this because it's so tiring and exhausting.
E: Yeah.
S: And but we have to, you know, stay on top of this. So now they're trying to delay the hepatitis vaccines for infants. Why? Just because just this is he's an anti vaxxer. That's why. What do you mean why? That's the reason He's just he is massively biased against vaccines. He can he's a conspiracy theory nut job who has no idea what he's talking about. It's based upon nothing on on just conspiracy based fears of vaccines when and he he completely does not understand how to interpret scientific evidence. So basically saying that, you know, why route why give this vaccine routinely to infants when their mother does not have hepatitis, right. So it ignores a couple of things. One, there's other ways to get hepatitis, not it's not just from mother to infant. And two, some women who are especially people who are poor, don't have good health insurance or whatever, aren't necessarily going to know their hepatitis status or disclose that to their healthcare professional or or be getting good, you know, prenatal care. So this is the reason why in some cases we just do universal precautions, just you cast the widest net possible to make sure that you capture everybody who's at risk. And that has reduced the incidence of infantile hepatitis by 99%. It completely works. And he wants to dial that back based upon his mythological fears. It's all insanity.
B: Yeah, well, they couldn't hit 100%, I mean.
C: Also, do you think that there's like just this weird morality kind of slant, this bias around infections that are blood borne being specifically called an STI? And so when somebody's like, oh, well, you can only get that from sex. So we shouldn't be giving the vaccine to babies. And it's like, no, you can't only get it from sex. There are a lot of different ways you can get this disease, right? But it's like, oh, it's like this moral thing of like, oh, only IV, you know, drug users and like, I don't know, sex workers get these diseases. And it's like, what are you talking about?
E: But if there was, you know, but there's, it's not based on any kind of real threat to the child to get the vaccine as it's scheduled now, so. This is what is.
C: That's like they're always going to be anti yeah 'cause they. Imagine threats. Yeah, yeah.
S: But along those lines, Cara, this is something you know, you learn when you when you study one of the health professions is that we do not stigmatize patients, right? We do not make judgments about how somebody came by their disease because that is a slippery slope to hell, right? You just cannot be a healthcare professional and constantly be thinking, Oh well, you've earned. You know you deserve your illness.
J: Because.
S: Of whatever that's an endless game that you can play. We just have to completely eliminate that from your thinking. You take your patients as they are, you treat them for whatever they have without judgement. But this is AI do agree with you that there's often a stigma around blood borne diseases. You know dirty diseases, diseases you get from from bad, bad behavior or from sex and and that you know that should not translate to. We do not treat you for it though.
C: Oh, of course not. And like, yeah, the extreme version is is when we're treating babies. Because that's because I've heard people who are like, not Magum, not Maha, but they're like Lefty, you know, kind of wooey friends of mine out here in LA with the same rhetoric. Like, why do I need to vaccinate my kid against hepatitis? My kids are not having sex. And I'm like, oh God, OK, let's talk about this. They're like my kids not having sex and I don't have hepatitis. And it's like, OK, but what is your kid being exposed to?
S: Yeah, you can keep.
C: Being exposed to in the hospital right by the father. But you know, it's like, you might not, but you don't know about your partner. Like, yeah, it's just.
S: So we just can't everything. We can't get so exhausted that we take our eyes off the ball. Here you.
C: Know, I know it's tough.
News Items
Cognitive Legos (08:44)
S: All right, we're going to go straight into some news items. I'm actually going to start with an interesting This is a really interesting piece. I titled this one. I didn't make up this term. This is from the from the paper Cognitive Legos. What do you guys think? That's about cognitive, Cognitive Legos. Lego, I know.
B: What Lego like?
S: So building things that build on each other.
E: Yeah, building blocks of the brain.
J: Look, all I know is, you know, you walk around at night and you step on one of those, you're going to jump through the roof and a barefoot.
E: Oh yeah. It is an unforgiving material Lego. Material.
C: So my guess, Steve, is that it's like the idea that certain things like since we're talking cognitive, we're talking ideas and thinking, so that certain thought patterns build on other thought patterns or ideas build on other ones, and they fit together.
S: Yeah, yeah, pretty much. So here's here's the question that neuroscientists have, right. We're trying to understand how the brain works. So the question is, when you learn a task, are you learning sort of the overall task, or are there components of the task that are transposable to other tasks I.
C: Think it's 100% the latter.
S: You think so?
C: Everything builds on other things, yeah.
S: Well, it's interesting. It's not smile in your. It's not. It's never that simple. It's never.
C: But even like memories, even ideas, you're always connecting them to other things in your brain that are already there.
S: Yeah. So generally, sure, but we're going to get back to that. It's interesting. But actually the study that I'm talking about actually is supporting what you were saying that it's looking, it's, it was trying to find the quote UN quote, neuroanatomical correlates of this, what they call compositionality, right? The Legos as a metaphor, right? But it's the technical term is compositionality, meaning that you have these components that can be repurposed to other tasks. So they did an interesting. So again, as we know, Cara, when you're doing any kind of research like this, you're using a construct, right? So, and they were in here, they're looking at rhesus macaques and they were looking at their brain function when they learned specific tasks. Now they 1 task was they had to tell the difference between a shape that was either Bunny ears or AT. Now you might think that they're it's completely different, but but one can morph into the other right at the as the Bunny ears come down. Eventually it becomes AT right the and the and the shapes are also either blue or red. And that can also be progressively difficult because you could make them more and more muted to the point where it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between whether it's blue or red.
C: We couldn't even tell the difference between black and. Gold. Gold, Yeah.
S: So the dress and they got the monkeys to indicate which of T versus Bunny ears or red versus blue to indicate which one it was by either looking to the upper right or the lower left right. So for example, in one task like if it's red, look to the upper right, if it's blue, look to the lower left. And then the other task is if it's a Bunny ear, look to the upper left and if it's AT look to the lower right. Then they scrambled them to see if if the the sensory and the motor components were compositional. Could they be essentially once they learned 1, does that make them learn the another task that used one of the components more quickly?
C: OK, OK. Does it translate to a newer?
S: Does it translate? Are the are the motor and the sensory tasks like independent of each other and they could be shuffled around like Lego blocks? So they found that the answer was to some extent, yes. So they did find evidence for compositionality in this construct with rhesus macaques. OK, but but of course, this is part of an ongoing research. So, you know, looking at the other research, you know, much of which was cited by the authors in this article, there's two other things to to think about here. So 1 is that there's a downside to compositionality and what do you think that might be? So the benefit is once you learn a task, you could learn related tasks easier because you can repurpose components of the earlier task that you already.
C: Learned, of course, but it's hard. It's, it's like, oh gosh, why am I blanking on his name? I mean, he famously said it the the researcher that like your mind is not a blank sponge. It's full of like preconceived notions and pre and ideas. So if you're learning something to which it doesn't apply, it's really hard to unlearn stuff.
S: It's hard to unlearn stuff. So that's called interference, right? And what that's that operationally means is when you learn a new task, your performance on the older task components of which you've repurposed goes down, right, so.
B: Bummer.
C: Sorry, David Dunning. That's the. David Dunning.
S: Yeah, yeah.
C: That was that was the old thing, yeah.
S: You have all probably experienced this yourself. So we've all experienced you learn a task and then when you do a new task that's related, it's easier. As you said, everything relates to everything else and and that makes it easier to learn new stuff when you're building on older stuff. But you've probably also experienced when you learn a related but distinct task, it takes time to shift back to the older task.
C: Right, true and also like things that are related. Like my mom always used to struggle with Italian because she's a native Spanish speaker and it was easier for her to learn it but she would like mix them up or like use rules she shouldn't be using all the time.
S: George says the same thing about Russian and Ukrainian.
C: There you go. Yeah.
S: Here's a recent example from my experience. So we we have two cars. One's an electric car with regenerative braking, 1's a traditional.
B: Yeah, good example.
S: So when you drive with regenerative braking, when you lift off the gas, it it causes resistance. It's like braking, right? So the car slows down like when you're driving a, a cart, a golf cart, yeah. And so that, so you're driving on one pedal 99% of the time and you're slowing down. There's a so there's sort of a middle point, and then if you lift it up beyond that middle point, you slow down. If you push down beyond that point, you accelerate versus a traditional gas and brake. Shifting from one to the other causes interference. You know, when I have to unlearn the other one to sort of readapt to the new one. You know what I mean? All right, so here's what previous research said. This is why it's more complicated. It's not an unalloyed good to have compositionality because it causes interference. And So what it, what previous research found is that people exist along a spectrum, right from lumpers to splitters, where lumpers have a lot of high compositionality, right? They sort of learn the components that are good, that are useful across many tasks versus splitters who do not transfer skills as much, but also don't suffer interference as much. So the question is, so that's the trade off. The question is do you, is it more important for you to be able to learn new skills quickly or is it more important for you to be able to shift among skills with minimal interference? And those are trade-offs, right? You can't. Generally speaking, the more the better you are at one, the worse you are at the other, and vice versa. And there's no real right or wrong answer. It's just that we exist along the spectrum, you know? Probably most of us have bell curved in the metal, right? You know.
C: But also, this isn't the only thing that contributes to your ability to like such. Of course, this is just so you may be good at both.
S: It's 1 spectrum among many.
C: Yeah, you know.
S: That when it comes to cognitive function.
C: These are probably all things that contribute to that, like Spearman's G or whatever. Like this idea that, you know, high intellect people probably relate things back very readily so that they can learn very quickly and they can consolidate efficiently. But they're also, for some reason, better at, you know, set shifting because they have other reserves that help them do that or other pathways to that cognitive ability. But yeah, along this one specific thing, my guess is efficiency. It's always about efficiency. That's how our brains evolved.
S: Right. But here's another question. There's a lot of downstream questions. You know, one question is, are people lumpers or splitters? Or can one person be a lumper with some things and a splitter with other things? And can you choose to be a lumper or a splitter? In other words, you may decide to learn something the hard way, let's say, but when you do learn it, it's sort of isolated from interference. You know what I mean?
C: My guess is that the answer is yes to all of those.
S: Things I know, I think it probably everything happens, but it's always a question of like of how much?
C: Because we're always learning, right? Like we learn without trying. But then you can also intentionally learn, and you can use strategies for learning.
S: And I wonder, do we start off as a lumper and then morph into a splitter the more you study something? In other words, you rely upon your Legos, right? Your already learned components, but if you do something a lot, you eventually wall it off into its own thing so that it's immune to interference.
C: Or I think that's absolutely true. Like as I've been doing these jewelry classes, I remember when I was learning new skills or techniques, I was constantly saying, oh, that's kind of like how when you do this, you have to make sure that you do that. Or you know, like when I'm knitting, I have to do this. But now when I do the things, I'm like, no, it's its own thing. It's nothing like these other examples I'm trying to tell so.
E: Dating is not like taxidermy.
B: Steve, that reminds me of Gould's talk on day day calculators, guys that yes, you know, you have you have savants that that can calculate, you know, tell me what day of the week it is, January 1st, 2093. And they'll could tell you within moments. And somebody that he was talking about actually went through the algorithm of calculating that so much that he internalized the ability to such a degree that he didn't have to consciously think about it. So that's kind of like walling it off like you were talking about similar, I guess, right?
E: Become applicable to other tasks though. Something like that.
S: Yeah, Yeah. Well, that's it. That's the IT would. If you learn to do that algorithm, would it make it easier to learn other algorithms?
C: Well, and that is also like, I think this applies to this age-old question we talk about in the skeptic community, especially when it comes to debunking pseudoscience around brain training. Yeah, brain training, yeah. Is that there are some things that are applicable across the board and there are other things where the more you do it, you just get good at doing that one thing.
S: And you get good at doing that one thing. You get a little bit better at related tasks, but you don't get good. You don't get smarter across the board.
C: Right, right. But but that's why things like reading or doing crossword puzzles or things that have like broader yeah, application do sort of increase like whatever you want to call your cognitive fitness, blah, blah, blah, as opposed to some sort of specific brain training computer program.
E: Right here, play these set of puzzles and all of a sudden you're 1010 IQ points. Yeah.
C: Right. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. But read of various books all the time. It's like eating, you know, various foods all the time. Yeah.
E: That's true exercise for your brain.
S: That do a lot of different things basically.
C: Yeah, we must come back to the same answer and.
E: We kind of do. But it's nice to see research sort of, you know, that adds to that collection of data.
S: All right, Jay, what I understand, China is slapping a lot of trees.
China’s Planting Lots of Trees (20:20)
C: Yeah, I almost covered this, Jay. I got excited about this too.
E: That would be a canopy.
J: Well, excited, yeah. I'm not. I don't know about excited.
C: Well, I didn't read it all the way. Yeah, well, I did.
J: Oh boy. So OK, let me tell you guys a story about unintended consequences.
E: Gather round.
J: As Perry used to say, consequences. Small sequences. Small sequences, right?
E: Yes.
J: All right. So China's been planting a lot of trees, and I mean a lot, a lot, a lot. It's incredible. So this goes back to 1978. So guys, how many trees do you think that they've planted since 1978?
B: But dozens. Dozens.
C: And billions, I mean, there's billions of people there, so I'm going to say billions of trees all.
J: Right, I'll tell you, I'll tell you in a minute. Just keep that, keep your number in mind, everybody out there listening, keep put a number in your head and then we'll talk about it. All right, So some regions that they've planted trees in were simply to reforest lost forest that you know, were once there, but they also created forest where there was never a forest before. It's another important note to to to remember. Let me ask you another question. What do you guys think their actual intention was?
B: To hide what's amongst the trees from satellites.
C: Was it like wood production? Like trade?
E: Yeah, I was thinking a good guess. Timber, timber, timber.
C: Climate change.
J: Yeah, they definitely, definitely due to some things about climate change. So there's actually a list here. I'll quickly get through it. So they want to reverse some of the damage that's been done to their land over the decades. You know, so for example, some regions have had severe soil erosion, which is partly due to lost plant life. There's also been an increase in desertification from overgrazing from wild, you know, from animals. They the water availability has changed due to man made river diversion and along with these man made issues, they also want to improve problems that they have like flood control, air quality, dust storm frequency and in general, of course, just like everybody, they want to improve their agricultural efforts right to to feed more people, you know, make sure that the foods are healthy and have, you know, have the nutrients and proteins that we need. So this reforestation effort has been incredibly massive. So they have all these programs that they came up with. They have like the Great Green Wall, they have Grain for Green program, natural Forest Protection program. And the result of this is that China has planted between 50 and 80 billion trees over up to 220 million acres massive. For example, to give you a sense of size, just in the past five years, China added trees that could cover the state of Texas in the United States. Just to give you an idea of like map size, that's how many trees they've planted. And like forest style, when I'm not talking like, you know, 50 every distributed among a mile, like they're planting trees, like the way trees grow in a forest and their work, you know, it has produced legitimate ecological payouts, right? They they've increased, of course, carbon storage. There's greater force connectivity to reduce soil erosion, which is a big deal. There has been fewer dust storms on average than previously, you know, common regions where they occur in. But, and this is a big one, there's been an unforeseen outcome to all of this. Do you guys want to dare take a guess wildlife?
E: Wildlife.
J: Cara.
C: You didn't say positive or negative outcome, right? You just said outcome.
J: Unforeseen outcome.
E: It's bad.
C: Oh, it's bad. Run off. No. What's bad from having a lot of trees? A lot more. Trees. Some sort of toxin that's spreading or like I know.
E: They're burning the wood and creating. I know, James.
C: What is it?
B: There's a war like war like Bigfoot population.
J: Oh. God, the bigfoots, no. So this will seem really obvious once I say it. So a new study that was published in 2025 and Earth's future, they found that the incredible scale of China is greening. They call it the greening, it's the shining. This is altered how water moves between the land and the atmosphere due to changes in rainfall. Let me get into the details here. So between 2001 and 2020, the increase in vegetation cover boosted something called evapotranspiration. Transpiration. Evapotranspiration. OK, it's a long word. It's complicated, but I think you get the idea. This is the water.
E: Portmanteau.
J: No, it's a word.
E: Evaporation and transportation.
J: Evapotranspiration, right? So this is water that's drawn from the soil and released into the air by the plants via the leaves.
C: Yeah, it's transported via evaporation.
J: Correct. Now, this extra moisture that's put into the atmosphere can and typically does travel thousands of kilometers on wind currents and fall as rain really far away from where it came. And that's bad. And as a result, some areas have had really big increases in rainfall, while other areas have actually had a significant decrease in rainfall, which effects fresh water levels. And the study found that China's, you know, these densely populated E eastern monsoon regions and the arid northwestern zones, you know, both of these, you know, are about 74% of the country. And actually, they've actually experienced measurable and significant declines in water availability. Meanwhile, the Tibetan Plateau, they, they've had an increase in water because you know it, you know, what comes around, goes around and water has to go somewhere. And this is not a good thing because the northern and eastern zones, unfortunately, they have a big share of China's population. And it's also affecting their arable land, right? The land that they can actually plant crops on. This is bad. So the study, the study's findings actually contradict this common assumption. And I believe the two from things that I've read that, you know, if they plant trees, the more trees that are there, the more plant life will lead to more water being, you know, collected into the soil and improvement in ecosystems and agriculture. And I actually remember watching a video where they turn a desert into like a beautiful, beautiful forest, you know, almost like a paradise type of thing. And the water table came back, which, yeah, that can happen. But what they're finding is on on these massive scales that the aggregate is not. It's not a good thing here.
B: Wow man, didn't see that coming.
C: But it's always like, but this is how ecology works, right? Like deforestation happened quickly and caused all number of horrible consequences that, you know, they either did or didn't have a study to detail. Then they reforested very quickly, which is also going to do that. So the question is, what do they want to adapt to the reforested, you know, view because yeah, there's going to be pockets of flooding and pockets of drought and but that's going to be the new normal.
J: Yeah, that's true. It's just that, you know, when you set up cities and populations, you know, you got to get people have to have access to water. I mean, look what the Romans did to get water to their cities. Like it would. You know you have these aqueducts baby, and you have trillions of dollars invested into these cities and and. It it it is. Becoming a problem and it's not.
C: Especially with billions of people.
J: It's changing, it's changing landscapes and it's moving things around and it's making things, you know, unstable in a sense, right? So.
B: There's a couple of things.
J: They have more carbon capture, they have more soil stability and they've increased biodiversity. But the study also goes on to say that, you know, they're these plants are pulling moisture from the soil aggressively and you know, they're, they're having rainfall decrease in places where they don't want it. And, you know, in these dry and semi arid conditions, some, you know, the trees, they decreased available water, which is exactly the opposite of what they wanted. And, you know, now that we this study has come to light, there's been other studies that have surfaced where other countries around the world have shown similar results. So this is pretty damn solid evidence here that this is what could happen now. So China's programs that they've been running, like I said, had been showing these negative results and it's made some things very clear. So these large scale A forestation efforts, it has to be intensely managed. You can't go in there and just plant whatever you want. Of course, it seems obvious, but this has been part of the problem here. The tree types that they pick have to be really carefully selected to match the ecosystems that they're going into. And it's kind of strange when you think about it because they might be creating ecosystems, which makes it even more difficult to pick the plants and the density of these plants, you know, the landscape is a big factor in this as well. Like, you know, if the land is sloped and things like that, like you have to really, really, really think about what's going on. And it takes experts to do this. And you and you need to be able to have experts. By the way, have I mentioned that there's been a lack of of respect for experts around the world? Well, yes, that's that's a problem.
B: Even in China.
J: Yeah, I mean, I, I don't, I don't know specifically if, if they're having an expert problem. I just thought I'd throw that in there, Bob, because it's something that really pisses me.
S: Off Well, the the problem is it's a very top down authoritarian government, right? So they decide they're going to do something, they do it and the the experts toe the line. That's unfortunately typically what happens in authoritarian style government, right? You don't speak truth to power. You say yes, Sir, and you do what they tell you to do.
B: Even if it's illegal.
S: The big problem with the whole project of reforestation, I mean reforestation like if you taking the area that was forested and then you're trying to get it back to the way it was, that's that makes more sense, but they're trying to.
E: Connecticut, Yeah. Went through that phase. Yep.
S: It's one thing if it happens organically because you know the trees will grow where they're supposed to grow, meaning where the climate is, there's enough water, etcetera, etcetera for them to grow. But just planting trees where they are not inherently growing. Is probably not sustainable because if they eat right, if the climate was was amenable to trees growing there, they would be growing there.
J: Yeah, I agree. And you know, Steve, the problem is like they don't know how long these new trees will last. You know they don't have any data on like how long will they last and what will they do?
S: And it's not working ever. It's it's working in some places probably where the, you know, it's natural for there to be forest. But in other locations in China, if the efforts just not working, it's not, it's not slowing down the desertification because it's, you know, just planting a tree is a very much we're just going to put a tree there because we want a tree there as opposed to creating the conditions that allow for trees to grow there. That's harder to do. So I think that there's an inherent problem with the whole top down approach of just planting trees where you want trees. And this is 1 symptom of that. The fact that, yeah, that you're creating a new ecosystem that may not be what you wanted it to be and it's going to shift things around. It's got to reach a new equilibrium. And you it may be hard to predict what that new equilibrium is going to be.
J: You know what China did, though, They came in there like fully aggressively, you know, doing this. And I guess from the study, like they really didn't have the foresight, you know, they didn't really think about all the details or even know, you know, what these, you know, unintended consequences could actually be.
C: But the same can be said for all the deforestation that happened over the last, Oh yeah, decades, yeah.
J: Now the good news is though, is that we have this data now.
C: So we can model it after it if we do something or if any nation does something like this.
J: I mean, if you asked me a week ago, you know, hey, you know, climate change and and, you know, we're we're there's a lot of things that are happening around the world. And, you know, one of my typical responses is, yeah, we need to plant more trees. We get, we got to plant as many trees as we can. So, you know, it's, it is a complicated thing. I don't think a lot of people know about this. And now that the data is there and they have such a huge sample, I mean, China is just massive. It's a really, really big country. So this is really valuable data. Hopefully China can can steer themselves into a better position moving forward. Now that this study has been published, You know, like, let's stop just planting, you know, these trees because we happen to have access to them, you know, like, you know, pick better trees, pick better locations, You know, really, really thinking through. There's something called hydrology, which they, you know, they need to keep in mind, they need to figure out and perfectly understand the way water is moving in that land. And you know what effects that process will have when they plant new trees and what kinds of trees and how dense those trees are planted.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay.
J: Bye.
Misinformation and Birth Control (33:27)
S: Karen, tell us about misinformation about birth control. Is there any misinformation about birth?
C: Control. Is there any at all? So I want to tell a little story. Yeah, I want to tell a little story about a study that was published. Let me see. I think it was just last month, end of two months ago, called hormonal contraceptive formulations and Breast Cancer Risk in Adolescence and Premenopausal Women. So this was published in JAMA Oncology. It's Open Access. Anyone can read it. And guess who read it? Social media. Social media influencers. OK, so this is something that has been happening for some time now where you have influencers on different social media platforms. In this case specifically, we're talking about kind of like Instagram and TikTok influencers. They either mean well but don't have the training to read the literature and to assess risk appropriately, or they already had an agenda going in and then they are cherry picking information and not understanding kind of the manipulation of statistics that can be used to tell the story that you want to use. So this story comes down to a question, and this is an important question that we often talk about on the show. Do you guys know the difference between relative risk and absolute risk? We.
S: Talked about this.
C: It comes up. It does. So. This is a very common way that statistics can be manipulated to make something seem more or less severe or intense or have a higher or lower magnitude than it actually has. And one of the ways that we talked about it in the past had to do with you guys, remember that study where like bacon was or like processed meats? We were talking about how they were. Yeah, carcinogen. And what does that mean? And what's the risk to for, I guess it was colorectal cancer for people who are taking it? So if we just talk about a relative risk, that's when we say something like, OK, there's a 50% increase or a 100% increase in, you know, XY YRZ. So looking back at that old study, we'll use an example of an 18% increase in risk of bowel cancer if somebody consumes processed meat at a typical, you know, rate, an 18% increase. That sounds like so much, but now let's so so the relative risk there is 18%. But now let's look at the absolute risk. If the lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer is about 5.6%, so you know, 5 or 56 out of every thousand people, then the absolute risk of eating processed meat, 50 grams per day of processed meat added to that lifetime relative. Sorry, that lifetime absolute risk that already existed is only a 1% increase. So it goes from 5.6% lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer to a 6.6% lifetime risk of developing bowel cancer. If you eat 50 grams per day of processed meat, but from a statistical perspective, from the simple mathematics, the relative risk has increased by 18%. That sounds huge.
S: You can double your risk by going from point O 1% to point O 2%.
C: Exactly. Double the relative. Risk. That's a double risk, and that's what we have to remember when we talk about this study. So what did this study find? They found that women who used hormonal birth control had about a 24% higher rate of breast cancer than women who didn't. But we were here talking about young women, young women, the, I think the range, yeah, the range of adolescent girls and women between 13 and 49. And this was a Swedish study, but this study found very similar outcomes of two really, really large, one meta analysis and one large, I think. Yeah, meta analysis and a large registry analysis that were performed previously. So when we're looking at young people, young women and their risk of their absolute risk of breast cancer, let's see what it is. 54 to 67 breast cancer cases per 100,000 women per year in Sweden. And then after or or the group that took hormonal birth control, we saw thirteen extra cases per 100,000 women. So that's one extra case per 7800 users, which, yes, does translate into a 24% higher absolute or, sorry, relative risk of breast cancer. But what happened when a lot of social media influencers read this 24% higher rate? Well, they went ham on social media. TikTok is, as it says in the study quote, flooded with factually incomplete warnings that contraceptives cause cancer and are as dangerous as smoking, which is just patently not true. We know that it's not true. And so we see, you know, experts, OBGYN experts, you know, different physicians and public health officials kind of ringing the alarm bells and saying, let's take a step back. Let's look at all the benefits that hormonal birth control can offer. Let's look at all the alternatives that are on the market for individuals for whom this could be a massive boon, not just for preventing unwanted pregnancy, but for reducing pain and cramping and bleeding and, you know, problems related to endometriosis and all manner of treatments that hormonal birth control kind of are utilized for. And let's talk about relative versus absolute risk because it's just something that's really, really tough for people to understand. We see this time and time again. I found some interesting write ups about, you know, it's just about different social media kind of OM GS like all over. Like there was like a whole scare about the pill causing cancer previously and we saw, you know, all of these different social media accounts dedicating tons of information to to it. Yeah, this was a great 1. So a 2023 study that was performed by a researcher named Emily Fender, who is a. A fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics and was a postdoc, I think at the time at the Pearlman School of Medicine at Upenn. She did a study specifically about social media influence on misinformation around, you know, birth control. And so this was two years before this new study came out. And she found that 74% of YouTube influencers who were sampled in their study who who did speak about birth control encouraged discontinuation of contraception, 74% of influencers that they sampled. And so, you know, we don't know. Does that have to do with the algorithm and sort of controversial things rising to the top, you know, why people are choosing to spread this kind of misinformation or why the agenda there is. Yeah. It could be religious. It could be the sort of appeal to nature fallacy that we talk about a lot. You know, that, you know, we see people talking about how the rhythm method is superior. Spoiler alert, it is not. It is not superior. Yeah, there are a lot of unwanted pregnancies that happen because somebody miscalculated there, thinks.
J: That that's superior.
C: Like a lot of social media.
J: My astrologer said so.
C: Yeah, and honestly, just a lot of young women on social media because they say it's quote natural because they're afraid of the quote toxins or the quote chemicals or, you know, whatever the kind of pseudoscience of the day is.
B: And I wonder how many of those influencers actually understand the difference between relative and absolute risk.
C: Oh, probably none of them, right.
B: I mean, yeah, yeah.
C: I don't think that this is always a nefarious spreading of misinformation. I don't, I don't, I wouldn't necessarily call this a disinformation campaign. I think it's a function of lacking the literacy necessary to be able to communicate these two different kinds of risk appropriately. I.
S: Mean it's, you know, to think about the absolute hubris of somebody who sets themselves up as a health influencer when you're not a freaking professional, right when you don't have a medical degree or a healthcare degree and you think, well, I'm just a smart person. You can, you know, read the Internet and decide what's true and what's not true and spread that to the world. I mean, it's an absolute lack of humility. It's a, it's complete scientific ignorance, right? Because they, it's a scientific illiteracy because they don't understand how much they do not know and how complex this field is. And so they're just speaking nonsense.
E: It's Jenny McCarthy and her mommy instincts, yeah.
C: Yeah, but the problem is it's not always that overt. A lot of times it's, you know, women or I shouldn't say women, but a lot of these social media influencers are women, obviously, because they are concerned about reproductive health. They are concerned about Women's Health. And a lot of times it's, you know, people who are getting some of the science right some of the time and then some of the science really wrong. And that makes it even more complicated. It's easy to just, like discount everything. Jenny McCarthy or, you know, Gwyneth Paltrow says it's much harder if you're a consumer of social media content to tease out, well, what rhetoric is on this side of accurate and what rhetoric.
B: Is insidious it's. So difficult. For disaster that that's those are the real tough ones with that are sometimes right and sometimes.
C: Yeah, and I think this is a good example of like the kind of study that falls into that landscape. And let's not forget to add insult to injury. As I was researching this article and I can't believe I didn't see this before, I found coverage from July of this year. Here's an Undark article with the title CDC staff dedicated to birth control safety eliminated by HHS. You know, so until recently, a small team issued timely guidance on the types of contraceptives certain high risk women should use. Well, they're not doing that anymore, so that's not helpful. So now not only are we kind of having, I guess, recommendations by online pseudo, not even pseudo, just like health non experts, we don't have any government pages to go to and say, wait, what are the trusted experts saying? So now we have to rely on the AMA and we, and not that we shouldn't have before, but historically, ifitsaid.gov, you could kind of be sure that like it was NIH vetted, that there were individuals that were at the absolute tops of their fields who were on panels making decisions so that we as the consumer or as the citizen, you know, we're not expected to be experts in these areas. We have to be able to trust experts. But now our own government says, and we don't want experts and we're going to obfuscate the truth. So good luck.
E: Yeah. Go to TikTok now. Yeah, healthcare, it's. Wonderful.
C: It's such a tough thing. But you know, I'm here to say I wish I could be on birth. I'm not allowed to be on birth control anymore because I had a blood clot, which is a bummer, but I wish I could be on birth control. I definitely enjoyed my life more when I was on estrogen.
S: Yeah, it's tough when you don't have, like, easy access, trusted sources to go to. It just makes the world all the more chaotic.
C: And and Steve, I'm curious, you know, as a physician, obviously this isn't your, you know, specific area of expertise. But I can't help but like kind of speculate maybe maybe it's not speculative that when we're looking at studies of like absolute versus relative or both risks of certain types of cancer. And specifically we're talking about breast cancer here because we do find over and over that oral contraception, oral and I guess we can't really call them just oral anymore because we have patches and IU D's and injectables. But that contraceptives, pharmaceutical contraceptives actually have show a lower occurrence of I think uterine and ovarian cancers. So a lot of times we see that the heightened occurrence, even though it's small in breast cancers. I can't help but wonder is that not because these people probably already had a hormone receptor positive cancer in their body or like they were already genetically predisposed to develop a hormone receptor positive cancer. And so when they took a hormone, you know that is going to that their cancer is going to feed off of, of course then their cancer is going to grow.
S: Yeah, that's that's an absolute possibility. You have to separate that out.
C: And I don't think you can. I don't think the studies do. And I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of the increase in the absolute risk is accounted for by people who had previously undetectable cancers that were fed by birth control.
S: It's also hard just because the numbers are so low.
C: Are so low exactly.
S: Yeah, OK. Thanks, Cara. Well, one, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Aura Frames.
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S: All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Bob.
Dark Matter Detection (48:41)
S: Did they really detect dark matter?
B: There we go. Let's see what the claims are. So this is dark matter in the news. A researcher. A researcher looking at gamma radiation data from the center of the Milky Way claims potential evidence for the existence of dark matter. This was published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astral Particle Physics. So dark matter, we've talked about it, just I've got to do a quick overview. I just have to This is the hypothesized type of matter because ordinary matter or baryonic matter that you see or touch, it can't just keep itself altogether gravitationally. So the one classic example at the one of the the first examples is Galaxy rotation, right? There's just too much unseen matter there that's keeping it together. Because otherwise, if it was all just what we could see, then it would should be flying apart and it's not. So there's got to be something there. So ultimately there's probably 85% of the total matter in the universe is this dark matter, like a 5 to 1 ratio. And it's called dark for really, I guess a couple of reasons. First off, we don't know what the hell it is. And secondly, it doesn't interact with light or matter just interacts only gravitationally and through the and through the, through the weak force. So that makes it incredibly hard to detect. And that's why we just still really have no idea what's going on with this stuff. So we detect this stuff, this hidden, this hidden matter, this dark matter. So there's some explanatory models that that we use. There's MOND, which stands for modified Newtonian gravity. So in that model that there is no dark matter, all you have to really do is tweak the laws of gravity and that will explain these gravitational anomalies that we're seeing. So that's MOND. There's also the MACHO model, massive compact Halo objects. So this would include things like small black holes, lots of them, right, Like primordial black holes or even brown dwarfs. And they are somehow the the cause of this everywhere, like around galaxies and every thing. And then there's the WIMP model, and that stands for Weekly interactive massive particles. Now the poster child for that model is called cold dark matter. That's CDM. If you read about this, you'll be seeing the letters CDM, the initialism CDM quite often. So cold in this context means that it's much, much slower than light. That doesn't mean it's not moving at all relative to say if it were near you, it's probably moving if it that exists at all, maybe a few 100 kilometers per second. Sure, that's fast, but it's far, far slower than the speed of light, which is why they call it cold dark matter. And it's slow enough that this could kind of clump together into these massive Halos that we predict exist around galaxies. And they, so those formations, these Halos of dark matter basically grow the Galaxy around it in, in a way. So it's safe to say, I would say that most researchers support this CDM model, this cold dark matter model. Most of them, I don't know how many, but definitely a majority, I would say so. So let's talk about this research. The study author here is Tamanori Totani, and I love that name. Tamanori Totani, really cool name. He's an astronomer at the University of Tokyo. So he looked at 15 year old data, gamma ray data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope. So the first thing he basically did was looking at all these these gamma rays. Is he focused on a specific area, say near the core of of our Galaxy and he subtracted all the known sources of gamma rays because there's plenty of places where gamma rays that we know of are, are being created where wherever, you know, basically basically wherever you look, but also specifically at the core of our Galaxy. So he he kind of subtracted all that using, using these special like software based filters. I would assume after he did that he found a source of unknown gamma rays that that were detected and they had a peak a peak energy of 20 giga electron volts, which is a lot.
J: Bob, how the hell does dark matter even in make gamma rays?
B: Yeah, I wasn't aware of this. This was really fascinating. In the CDM model, these gamma rays are created by dark matter particles annihilating each other, similar to the way normal matter and antimatter kind of annihilate each other. But in this case, in this specific case, as in many of these WIMP models, the cold dark matter is its own antiparticle. So if they, if they kind of meet, then they could just, you know, regular particles, these regular dark matter particles, if they meet, they can annihilate. But this is super rare. This is incredibly rare event that should not happen often at all. And the idea here is that we're seeing these gamma rays produced by annihilation only because we're looking at an extremely dense area of cold dark matter in in our Galaxy. So that it's so dense that this extremely rare annihilation events are happening at, you know, much more often than you then basically anywhere else where there's not that density of cold dark matter. Now, this model, this cold dark matter model does not predict hard numbers like say the mass of of these of these dark matter particles. But what this model does predict are patterns of gamma radiation, OK. So for example, it would predict that the energy that you've the energy, the gamma radiation energy should form a smooth, roughly round glow, a Halo around the galactic center. It also would predict something that that this glow, the brightness of this glow should fade with distance in this specific way. So those are the kind of kind of somewhat generic predictions. No, there's no hard numbers out there from from this model. So the gamma rays do in fact match those predictions to a significant enough degree. It's not perfect, but it to to to a significant enough degree that Tamani just thought that it would be worth writing a paper about it. So then what you can do from here then is you can kind of work backwards. You can take, you can ask what type of cold dark matter particles would create this 20 giga electron Volt signal in this pattern by by running those calculations. They would say that if this is correct, if he is correct and this is created by cold dark matter and they can self annihilate. If that's all correct, then the then the cold dark matter particle would have a mass in the range of hundreds of proton masses. So it would still be quite a light particle, but it would be many times more massive than than a proton say. And that's and that's fine. You know, hey, that's if that's what the mass of a cold dark matter particle is, that's great, But that's just kind of like based on the observation, you're kind of retrofitting. So we we still don't necessarily know who knows if this is even correct. All right, so one of the questions that I asked is like they've been looking for this gamma radiation for a while. Why? What makes this this researcher special? Why did he potentially find it? And what did he do differently? I guess was it was my main question. Well, for for the first part here, he took a deep dive into this Fermi data and he was focusing on an overlooked region near the core. So I guess this this region, this specific region near the core of our Milky Way Galaxy wasn't vetted nearly as thoroughly as other parts of the data. So that's that's one. And also, I thought maybe he used really radical analysis techniques and he really didn't, he didn't, he used basically standard analysis techniques, but he used them in kind of different ways. It's lots of different things you could do with these standard techniques to come up with with new insights that were that weren't discovered by all these other researchers that have looked. So it may be maybe he used these analysis techniques in different ways. Maybe he because of the region of space that he focused on, or maybe he, he also used very custom methods to remove some of the known gamma radiation. Like there's globes, there's these lobes of gamma radiation I talked about few years ago up above, you know, above and below our Galaxy. And he had to subtract those because they, they emit gamma radiation as well. So he, he came up with a custom template to, to remove that. Maybe something about that custom template that he created. Maybe that's why he was able to, to see this, this gamma radiation potentially caused by cold dark matter, don't know. So he, so he has done certain things differently than than other researchers. So Tomanori Totani says regarding his data, this could be a crucial breakthrough in unraveling the nature of dark matter. And so sure, I would expect him to say that, but there is definitely skepticism. So the the best quote I found regarding the skepticism for his find comes from Quinoa Wu. He's a theoretical astrophysicist at University College London. The quote here is I appreciate the author's hard work and dedication, but we need extraordinary evidence for an extraordinary claim. Wait, I've heard that somewhere before this analysis. This analysis has not reached this status yet. It's a piece of work which dessert which serves as an encouragement for the workers in the field to keep on pressing. And I, I absolutely agree with with that assessment. So this is definitely not a slam dunk. We need feedback from other CDM experts. So we'll see what they say about the paper. This is, this is also not, if you click on these articles about this specific news item, you're going to see a lot of news items that say the first direct evidence of dark matter. And, and I came upon that over and over and it was, it was kind of frustrating in my mind. This is not direct evidence. This is it's, it's indirect evidence, much like the gravitational evidence, right? The gravitational evidence that we've been going by for so long is, is itself a type of indirect evidence, right. So this doesn't direct evidence would be more like, yeah, they created them at a they created, you know, cold dark matter particles in an accelerator or they found it colliding with atomic nuclei or something like that. That that's a little bit more direct evidence that I would that what I would expect to be described by the words direct evidence. This is indirect in, in my opinion, in the future. I think it's this is still encouraging and very interesting and, and among the best news I've heard about dark matter in a while, you know, as a sheer possibility. So I think these new techniques will almost certainly be used and run against other gamma ray data sets. There's other gamma ray observatories out there besides Fermi. There's the Hess telescope, there's the Veritas array, and there's an up and coming Trenkov telescope array. That's that's going to be very sensitive to run these techniques by their other by their data sets and see if you get the same thing. If you get the same, you know, gamma radiation signature, that would be interesting. They could also be looking at their wavelengths like X-rays and radios and that that may shed some light as well. The most promising future study, I think, would involve nearby galactic cores, say dwarf galaxies that are in orbit around the Milky Way. So they're, so they're not very far away. They're relatively close. So the signal could still be somewhat robust. And a lot of these dwarf galaxies that are near the Milky Way, they have, they have a lot of dark matter. They seem to have a lot of dark matter, which is good. And, and most importantly, they have very little gamma radiation noise to muddy the waters. So it would be much easier to subtract that gamma ray background noise and see if there's a cold dark matter signature and gamma radiation. So, so that's what I'll be waiting for to assess my, my, maybe have a revised opinion of this research right now. It's interesting. It's very tentative and it's definitely not a slam dunk and it's definitely not direct evidence, but it's very interesting. So check it out online if you're interested.
S: I'm shocked that the headline writers overcalled and sensationalized this reason.
B: I you don't. Want me to stop? I never saw it before, Steve. It's just like the first time I ever came. Yeah. It's frustrating. Whatever. I mean, that's. Part of the deal. Direct, I mean you get evidence of, you know, direct evidence is a real don't intend to get it.
S: Yeah, right.
E: It is a tease.
S: All right. Thanks, Bob.
Asteroid Bennu Ingredients for Life (1:00:34)
B: Sure.
S: All right, Evan, tell us about the latest from asteroid Bennu.
E: Yeah, the latest you remember a few weeks ago I covered a news item that had a preposterous headline. Human DNA found in a 2 billion year old media. Right. Yeah. We shredded that idea into 2 billion pieces of confetti. Frankly, the real point of that news item, and this was in early November, it was a recap. 2020 NASAS OSIRIS Rex mission collected material from asteroid venue which orbits the Sun beyond the orbit of Mars but before Jupiter. And that mission successfully brought back dust and material from from venue in 2023. Then researchers analyzed the samples. They found the presence of water, carbon and several organic molecules. But next came the detection of amino acids, formaldehyde, and all five of the nucleobases found in RNA and DNA, along with phosphates. Certainly not human DNA. Totally wrong there, right? Yeah. All 5 nucleobases found in DNA and RNA. We know what those five are, right? At least by their letters.
B: What add an inguan anytime inside is in.
E: And what's the? Uracil. Uracil, thank you. That's the one that I think kind of gets people.
B: That's the one that's in RNA.
E: Correct. Not DNA, Right. Oh, Steve, you get bonus points for that. Yeah. So you get, so you have these components, not, not the molecules that carry genetic information. Mind you. What you need for that is sugar, right? The ribose in RNA or in DNA, it's deoxyribose that was missing from the first set sets of analysis from the venue material. But now there's an update on this. They announced it a few days ago. Super sweet. Because the researchers have identified the presence of ribose as well as other sugars including Lyxos, xylose, arabinose, glucose and galactose. Galactose. Galactose. Remember that they did not find deoxyribose. So sorry, you can't have everything. But hey, the ribose and the other sugars, That's cool news. The lead researcher, his name is Yoshirio Furakawa from Tohoku University in Japan. He and his colleagues believe that the sugars formed from the brines of the asteroid and which from which there was formaldehyde as well. And this was in the parent asteroid from which Ben you came. And, you know, it's thought to have carried more fluid and featured more reactions in that main part of venue. And he says in a quote, all 5 nucleobases used to construct both the DNA and RNA, along with phosphates have already been found in the venue samples brought to Earth by Osiris Rex. The new discovery of ribose means that all the components from the molecule RNA are present in venue. This is not the first time scientists have discovered ribose in a in an, in an asteroid or a meteorite. There have been two samples that have fallen to Earth that contained it, but this is the first one collected in its natural state out there and brought back with ribose. So this is the first non Earth based sample that they were able to confirm. So that's what makes this different and and new and confirms it against what contamination, right? Because there's always the consideration, you know, that's of contamination when it comes to analyzing these samples. There's also a quote from her name is Sarah Russell at the Natural History Museum in London. She works on venue samples as well. But she wasn't part of this particular study. But she said this is such a brilliant result from the Osiris Rex mission. The one missing ingredient was the sugar, which now has been reported. So now all the ingredients of RNA are known to be in primitive asteroids. Earlier this year we reported finding salts in the return samples and suggested there would have been briny pools of water on venue's parent body. Such environments would have been perfect places to cook up the complex organics that we see in Venue. So this is really good new news and they're continuing to study the samples to see what else might be in there. But I mean, I think finding the sugar probably is boy about as high as they could have possibly achieved or at least their greatest expectations, I think are now are now realized through this. What an amazing mission. Does that mean there was life on venue? No, at some point, no, no, absolutely not. So you have to this is where you have to stop and this is where the headlines often. Like we said, Bob, you're news, news item and and so many.
S: Human DNA found on asteroid.
E: Right, right. And other and others and even, you know, even this, even the suggestions of that are are are so are so misleading. But that's how you get people to stop and click. But what venue does show is that complex organic molecules form naturally in space. They can survive the harsh environment of the solar system, they can be delivered in tact to planetary surfaces, and the Earth was very likely the recipient of a steady rain of this material. So what do you think now?
S: About that, well, it supports the RNA hypothesis, the RNA first, you know. Yeah, to some extent it means that at least all the ingredients of RNA were there. I mean, it's not. I don't think anyone is surprised at that, to be honest with you. But having what we? Were expecting.
E: Yes, but having this pristine example and, and analyzed and confirmed and, and confirmed, Bob, you know, multiple scientists have been working on these samples. They spread, they spread the material around among laboratories all over the planet so that every, so that a lot of different scientists could, could do their analysis on this. And yeah, without the contamination factor, you can eliminate that.
B: Yeah, I mean, you just get RNAI. Mean once you have RNAI, remember reading something recently where it showed that it doesn't take much of a big mutation at all of RNA to become a storage molecule like DNA. And then once you've got that RNA and then DNA like damn, man, you're basically, you know, all set. It just seems like a no brainer. So. So, Steve, it's like, in a sense it is kind of like, you know, it's panspermia because it's, it seems likely at this point that that we were hit with asteroids that that contain. Well, the weak. Components of pants. Yeah, the weak. The weak version.
S: The pants Fermi It was originally the idea that life originated, you know, in the cosmos and that it spreads throughout the cosmos. So there's no evidence that life spreads interstellarly. It's possible that it may have spread within our own solar system. But the fact that there's the the panspermia, but that was really never what panspermia was. It was just, it was that life was, was spreading, right? Not, not the not the building blocks, not the building blocks of life. The fact that the building blocks of life are out there, that's pretty much, that's not controversial and that's what we would expect, right? I mean, this idea that, you know, life was built out of stuff that was common, you know, that was microbes did not fall to Earth. Yes.
E: Right, they were not. They were not assembled, but the Lego pieces did. Let me see who.
B: Who? Who wrote I? Gosh, I wish I could find the.
E: Person who quoted this, but he said they put it like this. You can walk into a hardware store and find wood, nail wiring and copper pipes. That doesn't mean a house spontaneously formed in aisle 9. Yeah, I thought that was a nice quote. All right. Thanks. Evan, thanks. Jay. It's who's that?
S: Noisy time, all right.
E: Guys, last week I.
S: Played this noisy?
U: That I I know that was long, but. There are so.
J: Many cool sounds in there, I just had to play the whole thing. So guys, what is this video game? Not a bad guess. Anybody else Some.
S: Kind of machine.
J: You're a genius.
US#02: Umm, all right, well. My old standby visto tutti.
J: He says this one sounds like a ping pong ball spinning in the airflow of a vacuum cleaner or air compressor. And he says he also says probably a bird. This always says that now, so that is not.
S: Correct, but I know what he's talking.
J: About there is this thing where you could have, you know, like a you take a ping pong ball and if you put it into the airflow of a vacuum cleaner, it could spin in place. I've seen this done many different ways with with air and something like a a ping pong wall, but I didn't know it made any weird noises like that. We have another guest here by Daniel Osborne. Daniel says, hi guys, short time listener, first time emailer is the noisy this week, the bullet train in Japan getting up to speed and he says, I love your podcast and I'm so happy to have been recommended to it by a friend. I can't get enough. Well, that is an interesting guess. The bullet train. I don't know. I mean, I've heard that I don't hear those noises there, but that's an interesting guess. It probably makes a bunch of noises I've never heard, but it's not that you're incorrect. But thank you for joining the SDU team. Another guest here from Jacques Hemming and Jacques says or Jake, he wants his name pronounced Jake.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:10:23)
J: This week's Who's that noisy is definitely something spinning up to high speeds with something else added. So my guess is a disassembled 52 XCD ROM drive with the other sounds being the laser tracking to read it. That's a cool guess. And yes, you know, CD-ROM drives make some weird noises. Not these particular weird noises, though. I have another guest here. This is from a listener named Chris. Chris says I've been a tech in the sound recording industry for many years, and this week's noisy sure sounds familiar to me. It sounds like an analog tape machine that has an alignment tape on. As it's being shuttled up and down. You hear the speeding up and down of the tones on the tape as well as the transport buttons being pressed repeatedly to vary the speed of the tape machine. Chris, this is a fantastically close guess. This is a good guess because I say close, not because you're close to what the actual the creation of the noise is, but that you, you reminded me that I've heard that sound and is very similar. If you listen to an old analog tape machine, they do make spin up noises like that and clicking noises and everything. So that was a fantastic guess. I have a close enough winter guess here and I'll explain what's going on with that. Person's name is Burkhaup from debut Germany and they say my guess for this weeks noisy is a coppersmith or a metal sheet worker turning a sheet of copper into a pan pot of some other kind of vessel. I believe I'm hearing something turning and speeding U, which ought to be the copper sheet pinched into the apparatus. I imagine the squeaky noises is the result of the worker pushing onto the sheet to bring it into shape. OK, so that's right Copper, what this person is describing.
E: It's.
J: Some type of machine that like a lathe, right, that spins up, that would spin something. And it's also, you know, from reading about this thing too, like it could be some type of CNC machine. But I do believe that this machine would be appropriately closer to a lathe that does this type of work. Now, if I'm if I'm incorrect, you can let me know. But let me explain to you what is actually being shaped here. There is a, some type of metal instrument that has like a screw, the threaded screw end to it that is being refurbished, right? The screws have been rusted and you know, just are not defined anymore. And what they do is they're taking the cutting implement and they're running it along these threads as it's spinning in time with the spinning. So like, for example, if you were to spin a screw perfectly on in a, in a machine and then you ran like a, a, a metal pointer into the groove, that would reinforce the depth of the groove and everything. That's what's actually happening. It's fascinating. You know what I realized, Steve, we don't have a place where we actually post. I'll give Steve the link so you guys can see this and you could anybody who knows better can give me more information. So good job there. That was a tough one. I have a new noisy for you guys this week and it was sent in by a listener named Mark.
U: I'll give you a hint here guys, this is not.
J: Information being turned into a sound. This is an actual thing, physical thing, making a sound. If you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, you can e-mail us at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. Steve, it's getting close to these January shows. You could still buy tickets the Friday.
S: Night.
J: You know, super special SGU meet up situation. The tickets are sold out. They sold out in about 3 days. And I hope everyone that's coming, I, I, I hope you guys have a great time because I think it's going to be a really fun time. It's going to be a great time. Yeah, it's going to be cool. And we have.
S: Tickets that are being.
J: Sold for January 10th. We have two shows. We have a private show in the morning, yeah, be probably from like 11:00 to 2:00-ish sometime time frame in there. And we have a extravaganza that we're going to be doing that night starting at 8:00 PM. So if you guys are interested, please go to theskepticsguide.org and you'll find buttons on there for that show. And we have another show, which is a mirror of all the things that are happening in Seattle, but it'll be in Wisconsin. You can get all the details there as well. All right. Thanks, Jay. We have a couple of longish.
Emails (1:15:01)
S: Emails that I want to get to these, these require a bit of an in depth answer. So the first one comes from Sam Serene who writes recently. My father, who has been an extremely well rated individual with a degree in law and philosophy, has been diving deeper and deeper into what we would consider fringe or even pseudoscience. His latest target is climate. The issue for me is that he's generally a very clever man that thinks critically about things, so for him to come out and say things like this is concerning for me. He has linked me to this article in a move that seems like it's on the path to full on climate denial. Is there some kind of logical fallacy in this article or is it otherwise debunk able in some other way that I'm missing? I'd love to get your take on it. Thanks for all that you do. So I actually wrote a two-part blog post on this because it is a very interesting article chock full of denialism tropes and logical fallacies. So the article itself is by a guy named Paul Mccree. You may be shocked to learn that he's not a climate scientist. He was previously a journalist. Sometimes you I encounter journalists who think they know more than scientists. They just, you know what I mean? Like they, yes, they know a lot about an issue and they confuse the fact that they understand a lot or they have a lot of factual information to being an expert. And they, and then they violate the primary law of science journalism, which is you do not substitute your own opinion for the consensus of expert opinion. That's what he's doing. So let me go through and I just I refer you to my blog post is Climate Science Post Normal Science Part 1 and Part 2 to get into a lot of the details. Do you any of you guys by the way, have a chance to read the article or my blog posts? Yeah, I read, I read some of the McRae.
B: Article and it was very frustrating. Yeah, yeah, it's very frustrating. I'm not, so I wasn't familiar with the.
S: Term post normal.
E: Should I? Prior to? How common is that? Yeah, it's bullshit.
B: Yeah. He claimed it's on Wikipedia.
S: But I didn't.
B: Verify that but and some of the quotes from the Wikipedia. I did not you know necessarily like very much either. So I'm just how much of a thing is it I mean the people actually referring to this post normal science thing, especially applied to climate science. No, I don't think so. So this is a.
S: Very common science denier strategy, right? You limit the scope of what science is, and then you declare whatever science you're denying as not science, right or not normal science or PO, whatever. You try to ghettoize it in some way. So he's saying, you know, regular science operates this way, you know, where you test hypotheses with, with experiment and climate science uses modeling, which is based on guesses. And that's not real science. That's this post normal science, but it's bullshit, right? This idea that science operates in this very limited way or that only certain things that scientists do is quote UN quote real science is just all science denial. So creationists do this, right? They say, well, historical sciences are not real science because you can't observe the past and you can't do experiments on evolution. So it's just people making guesses about what they think happened in the past. You remember we had, you know, Kyle Johnson recently, a philosopher who I thought put it very succinctly. Now I always quote him. Science is inference to the best conclusion, right? The most plausible, the most likely conclusion based on all the evidence. And we Marshall lots of different kinds of evidence, and that includes models, right? Some people say, oh, models aren't really evidence. Well, listen, if you develop a model and 1st you have to validate the model by hind casting, right? You have to show that when you plug in the numbers, it reproduces what we already know happened. That's not a very high bar. That's a necessary but insufficient criterion for being a validated model. But then you need that. Then you need to do the hard part. You need to.
B: Yeah.
S: But if we don't do that, it's like that's like the first pass. You need to at least predict the past, right? If it's inconsistent with what we know to be true, you reject it out of hand. But of course, there's lots of models that could be consistent with what we already know. That is not is not actually correct. It's like astrology. Astrology is good at hind casting too. Then you have to make predictions about the future, right? And that's that's when models really get validated. Yeah. Yeah. He in order to so in order for him to say that climate change, climate science is not real science, he has to argue that it's not falsifiable and that climate scientists don't change what they say based upon the evidence. And in order to do that, he has to lie about the evidence. And he may think that he's telling the truth, but he's not. So his his premise is that climate models have done a crappy job of predicting future warming. And that is a straight up lie that was like, that's not even true. It's not true.
C: And it's like, is he ignoring?
S: Like error. Bars.
C: He's he's a cherry picking.
S: Outlier climate denying scientists, The same three guys that all the climate deniers quote over and over again, right? And quoting one of them to say look this.
C: Guy says the.
S: Models didn't were not accurate. It's like, OK, but if you look at all of the other published science, there are plenty of systematic reviews and plenty of studies which show that since the 1970s, the climate models have been very accurate. They have been very good at predicting future warming, even the early cruder ones. And they've only gotten better as we learn more and add new detail, right? So if you take that away, his whole argument collapses because, right, 'cause he's saying they don't, their models don't work, but they stick with them anyway. No, they stick with them because they are freaking working really well. It's amazing how well the models have predicted future warming over the last 50 years, you know, given what we knew at the time. So we've basically got like the 90% are correct. Now we're just tweaking it around the edges. Like we didn't like know how clouds influenced whatever. There's all kinds of things that we're learning about making them more. But what climate scientists call skillful, right? A skillful model is one that aligns with actual climate change over time. So he's he's, he's citing, but, but McCray, the author of this, this journalist author of this article is Christie, who's one of the three guys. So you see Lindsen, Spencer and Christie, right? Their names crop up all the time in the climate denying literature. They're the three outliers. They're the reason we have to say 99 points, right? Right.
C: Here's why it's 99%.
S: So, yeah, but the, the, the bell curve of of climate model since basically 1973 has been within 2 standard deviations, right. So in science, that's correct, right, is within 2 standard deviations. That's basically means that you're in, you're out, you're in the ballpark, right? You are basically correct and it's just a matter of how precise you are right. And we, again, nobody pretends that we can precisely like down to the 10th of a degree, predict exactly what the average temperature is going to be in, you know, some time frame. It's you look at the graphs. The graphs always have expanding error bars into the future, like all projections do, right? This is all part of legitimate science. The other big thing he does is say that there's no such thing as consensus in science. What? Yeah, like a consensus.
B: Defend that statement. Yeah, yeah.
S: That is to say.
B: Well, you know.
S: Science is a democracy. Like we don't vote on what's real or isn't real, but the the reason why consensus is important is because it is not a simple thing to go from the evidence to inference to the most likely conclusion, right? That is often extremely complicated. This is the thing that non scientists don't get that influencers don't get, that journalists often don't get is that there is many different kinds of evidence in science with different trade-offs, different strengths and weaknesses, different perspectives. You can look at a question from many different angles and then you have to put it all together to say, well, what's the most likely conclusion given all? And sometimes the evidence is conflicting or just tells slightly different story. And so you need to be an expert and you need to look at the evidence from different angles. And then you need to say, well, if scientists in different related subspecialties looking at this from different angles, are they seeing the same thing or are they seeing different things? And that's why we we say, well, what is there a consensus? How strong is the consensus? Is there a significant minority opinion? How viable is it, etc. Because unless you're one of those experts, you have no frequent idea how to interpret the evidence or how to translate it into a conclusion. And even if you are an expert, you need to know what all the other experts are saying. You yourself are not the the final word on what the evidence says if you don't understand the need for consensus in science and you don't understand how science works. Now, here's the other thing though. So we don't always need scientists to say this is what we think is happening based upon all the evidence. Just they just keep looking for new evidence and refining their models. But whenever there's a decision that's resting on the science, you absolutely need to know what the best current inference is. So that's why there are consensus statements in healthcare, right? Carrie, you know about this and this is panels of experts getting together, reviewing all the evidence and saying what they think the final word is on this evidence. And you ignore these consensus statements at your own legal peril, right? And at the at the health peril of your patients and your clients. And for climate science, there's a massive policy question hinging on what the science says. And so we do want the IPCC to get together and have hundreds of scientists pour over all the data, talk to each other and say this is what we think is most likely going on, and here are the error bars. And this is what we. Recommend this is what? Policymakers should know, you know, this is should be informing policy. That's why there are consensus statements. Dismissing all of that is pseudoscience. It is completely, it is science denial, pure and simple. So I mean, I sympathize with Sam. I know what it's like. Our father watched Fox News the last 20 years of his life and it was a disaster. And I saw him get radicalized over time from that. Does it matter how smart you are, how you know you could be a basically a critical thinker, clever person. I know lots of clever people who when it comes to identity politics are morons, right? They just, they suspend their critical thinking, they suspend their cleverness or whatever smarts they have, and they buy the party line, you know, or they just get radicalized by a narrative that's pounded over and over and over again. In this case, you have somebody who's smart, you know, McRae, who's a journalist, who, you know, knows stuff. He knows enough to be dangerous, right? So he could make a superficially compelling sounding argument to people who don't really know what they're talking about. But somebody who's generally smart but not a scientific skeptic, who's steeped in this information might fall for it. And so that is apparently what's happening with your father. I refer him to my 2 blog posts if he wants to get another perspective on it. All right, let's move on to another e-mail. Cara, I was holding on to this one until you were here because this one's about the cardiac calcium. I remember when this one came through. You wrote him a very thoughtful I did, I wrote.
C: Him like he did not respond to my e-mail, but he had plenty of time. To respond.
S: So it's fair game, I think to talk about on this show. I won't use his name. I won't use his name, but. He writes. I've been listening to your show for a really long time and even bought your book. I saw my doctor today and paraphrased your segment about cardiac calcium scans and to her as I am a 50 year old generally healthy person with similar cholesterol numbers of Stephen Cara stated in the in the segment and I'm on a statin drug. That's a critical piece of information. By the way, imagine my embarrassment where my doctor told me that cardiac calcium scans are basically a scam and whoever told me about them was most likely a paid spokesperson for a testing corporation. I didn't get my check yet by the way Cara, I don't know if me neither. I had to pay to get my scam.
C: She went on to a scam pseudoscience to me. And how to recognize when I'm being duped.
S: This was doubly embarrassing because I've been involved in the skeptic community for almost 2 decades and considered you guys to be a solid source for legit medical science. A case can be made that I should have researched CCS before mentioning it to my doctor rather than just trusting your word. Lesson learned. Your book is in my recycle bin, and I will not repeat this mistake. Thank you for reminding me to never be complacent and never trust any experts without evidence. All right, first I have to point out that that's exactly what they're doing. Yeah, they, their doctor said one thing and they're like, I will now.
C: Not believe or listen to anything the SGU has ever. You're believing one expert, so. We all right, so let's talk.
S: Let's back up a little bit and talk about the calcium, the cardiac calcium scan, because we talked about it in the opening banter. It wasn't a deep dive. I listen to it again everything. But I did a, I did do a deep dive in it. I.
C: Did it a few weeks before that, but there is it. There is more to say, even I think course.
S: That's yeah, there always is. There's, there is nuance here and the nuance is interesting, but I think The thing is that what this person's doctor is saying is not nuanced and it is, it is at odds with the consensus of expert opinion, right? So yeah, the idea that this is a scam, it's.
C: All right, so here's the thing. So for a.
S: Quick review, cardiac calcium scans look at calcium in the arteries of your heart and that is very predictive of your future risk of heart attack, right? It's a type of CT scan. Yes, it's a type of CT scan, so.
C: The question is.
S: How useful are cardiac calcium scans and should you get them? And that depends on your age and your risk factors, so.
C: He specifically says I'm on a.
S: Statin. The thing is, if you're already on a statin drug, there is no indication for a cardiac calcium scan, which I believe we said yeah, because the purpose of it was to determine.
C: Whether or not to start taking exactly, it's a very limited use case where.
S: You're somebody who's kind of on the edge in terms of your risk factors, and it's not clear whether or not you should go on a statin drug or not. Like if you have a super high cholesterol, then you go on it. If it's perfectly normal, you don't. But if you're 202, oh, five to 10 and you've got some moderate risk factors and you're, you know, you know, you kind of and you're otherwise very healthy. Yeah, you're otherwise healthy. You haven't had. An event or you're not you're.
C: Asymptomatic.
S: Then the cardiac calcium scan can be used to stratify your risk and decide if you're somebody who should go on a statin drug or not. And by the way, I went into great detail and I know this is slightly.
C: Different than what you're saying, but I went into great detail when I covered this about elderly patients and the fact that this is not usually indicated for elderly patients because by virtue of aging, most people are going to show some risk factor after a certain age and so the the scan is only going to tell the doctors what they already know. Yes, exactly. Or if you're already on a statin. Drug.
S: There's no, there's no question. Also, statin drugs increase your calcification, so the test becomes inaccurate when you're on a statin drug too because you artificially look like your risk is higher. Yes.
C: But actually it calcifies it in a way that stabilizes.
S: The plaque and reduces your risk, but if you're not on a statin drug, it does predict your risk. So the, the nuance here is there are people or companies who are overselling the cardiac calcium scan to make money. And yeah, but that happens with of course it does. That's like saying that.
C: Chemo is a scam because there are certain types of chemo that spend a lot of money on marketing. Yes, exactly, exactly. This is where the.
S: Doctors completely wrong here. It's totally wrong to say that the scan is a scam when when you're referring to people over using or over selling the scan. That can be a scam, but that doesn't mean there isn't a legitimate use to it. So that's and that's an indictment. Yeah, that's an indictment.
C: Of our regulation around how we advertise in the medical industry, that that's not an indictment of the actual things that are being advertised, right? Right. Exactly so.
S: What we said is absolutely consistent with what the American Heart Association says, and the cardiologists say that in this limited use, this is a reasonable use for a cardiac calcium scan. Now I will say that there there hasn't been a study looking at whether or not you do a cardiac calcium scan. Does that improve your outcome? That would be a very difficult study to do though, because yeah, I think I covered that when I covered this piece too. Yeah.
C: All we, I think all we knew, I'm trying to remember back, we don't know about like outcomes in terms of mortality. I think we only know about immediate outcomes in terms of treatment. Yeah, right. Yeah. So yeah, you would have to randomize.
S: People and then, you know, you make a decision without the calcium scan, you make a decision with the calcium scan, and then you see if the people who made the decision with the calcium scan do better over time. But because of the group of people that we're talking about, this would have to be a massive study. And there probably honestly would only be a small, I would suspect be a very small difference because again, we're talking about people with the low risk to begin. And this this isn't yet covered by.
C: Many insurance carriers and it's not yet utilized in common practice. So you can't do the kinds of studies you would do with like a Pap test or a mammogram at the age of 40, for example, like a screening test that is covered and that most people get right. So anyway, we we accurately.
S: Reflected the nuance, we accurately reflected the consensus of expert opinion. You know this. The cardiac calcium scans themselves are not a scam. There are some people overselling them just like those people overselling lots of medical procedures that Yeah, pushing them in situations where their procedure.
C: Itself is a scam.
S: But it may not be indicated for some people and. That's fine.
C: And I think the thing that's frustrating too is that he, I mean, he didn't specify here, probably this was his internist or his GP or his PCP, however you want to define it, not his cardiologist. I could be wrong, but from when I remember when I covered this, one of the big points that was made in the write up was that a lot of primary care physicians don't even know about this. Like they just, they're not educated on this option because it's not covered by standard insurance. And so it's, you know, not in a lot of drop down lists. So it's like it's, it's just hard to know if his physician did a bunch of research and for whatever reason determined herself that it's a scam. Maybe she had some bad experiences with some, you know, reps or, or something of that nature. Or if she just hadn't really been exposed to the information anyway. But if he had gone to his cardiologist, something tells me he would have gotten a different response. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. They just think that they're.
S: Not somebody, you know, first of all, I don't trust what this guy says his doctor said because it's just generically, I don't do that. Whenever I have an opportunity to compare what somebody says their doctor said and what the doctor actually said, they're radically different. Yeah, that's true. So I don't I won't take it at face value.
B: But.
S: Taking it at face value, it means they're not a very nuanced thinker. And, you know, I mean, like they're thinking very simplistically about this. Maybe they were misinformed about it, which is also not acceptable if they're a doctor and giving advice as a doctor. So either there's somewhere between misinformed or just not really thinking in a nuanced way. Yeah, because I, I could see a physician saying.
C: You're 50. We put you on a statin because your numbers were high. So your numbers are hovering around 202O5 right now because of your statin. They've lowered your numbers to that level. That's why it would be dumb for us to get you a scan. They had to say was you're already on a statin. There's no.
S: Indication for a cardiac calcium scan. Yeah, that's it. That's all they had to say. There's no way it. It does sound a little bit like the listener maybe.
C: Misunderstood because he did say I am a 50 year old generally healthy person with similar cholesterol numbers as Stephen Cara stated in the segment and I'm on a statin. The big difference there is we are not we are not on statin drugs, right. Yeah, like that's a really.
S: Big difference. That's the whole point.
C: That was to determine if we should go on a statin.
S: And so like, but but that's the other thing is that.
C: If his numbers are the same as ours on a statin versus off of a statin, our risk factors are wildly different. Different story. Yeah, OK.
E: Let's.
C: Go on with science or.
Science or Fiction (1:36:56)
Item #1: Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana.[6]
Item #2: A recent systematic review finds that 20-30% of the world’s population have “biophobia”, which is a general aversion to nature.[7]
Item #3: A new study finds that plants and phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methymercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury, providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury in the food supply.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. |
| Science | A recent systematic review finds that 20-30% of the world’s population have “biophobia”, which is a general aversion to nature. |
| Science | A new study finds that plants and phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methymercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury, providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury in the food supply. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | swept |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Cara | Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. |
Bob | Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. |
Evan | Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. |
Jay | Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrents to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. |
S: Fiction, it's time.
Voice-over: For science or fiction, each week I come up with three Science News items for Fax 2.
S: Wheel and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to sniff out the fake. You have three regular news items this week. Are you guys ready? Yes. All right, here we go. Item number one, researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrence to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. Item number 2A recent systematic review finds that 20 to 30% of the world's population have bio phobia, which is a general aversion to nature. And item number 3A new study finds that plants and phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methyl mercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury, providing, providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury in the food supply. Cara, why don't you go first? I feel like the one that's bothering me right off the top maybe?
C: It's a it's not recency effect, it's a primacy effect. Maybe are the small mechanical mice? Because is it a myth that elephants are actually afraid of mice? I feel like this is like, yeah, exactly. I feel like this is like a Disney cartoon myth or something. But I don't see why mechanical. I don't think elephants would even notice them. If there were mechanical mice, like hanging around crops, I think the elephants would just trample the mice. So yeah, that one bugs me a bit. A recent systematic review finding that 20 to 30% of the population of biophobia. I think that there's so much nuance in this, like using the word biophobia. I think it's very biasing, but I could see there being some sort of study where they term it biophobia. Like it's an aversion. That doesn't mean it's fear. And I think a lot of people, I mean, ask any of your, I camp all the time. And when I tell people I camp all the time, they're like bugs, you know, like, why do you? I think a lot of people have become really dependent on their smartphones. They've become really dependent on technology. They're it's hard for them to be alone with their thoughts. I would not be surprised if a solid 20 to 30% of people were like, yeah, I don't want to go outside and do that for any extended period of time. And for the listeners, biophobia is in quotes 'cause that's the.
S: Term that was used in the study, that was used in the study, Yeah, that doesn't, that doesn't surprise me then, 'cause.
C: That's a common, you know, nomenclature thing as Phileas, you know, towards and phobias away from, but that doesn't mean you know, likes and is afraid of necessarily. And then plants and phytoplankton internal mechanism detoxify methyl mercury converted back to atmospheric mercury. So a pathway to reduce mercury. That doesn't surprise. I feel like we're always finding out cool things that photosynthetic organisms can do or just cool things that like life does. You know, life is really good at processing, metabolizing certain compounds and converting them into other things. Whether it's dangerous, whether it causes a build up in the plants or the phytoplankton and then they die. I mean that that's a separate question. Because we, of course, are people and we are selfish and narcissistic and we're like, how can this help me? So I could see that being science. So yeah, I think it's the mechanical mice. That one bugs me. That's the fiction, OK, Bob. Yeah, I was thinking along some similar lines. The 1st.
S: Thing I thought of Steve.
B: What was that book as we read as a kid so that we had to buy in the cheese and the and the mice?
S: Yeah, they tried to get rid of the mice, so they they got other.
B: Animals and eventually they got they, but then the the lions to get rid of the mice stuck around and they had to get a bigger, tougher animal. And eventually they got the elephants to get to scare away the lions or something. And then they had to get rid of the mite. They had to get the mice to scare away, right. So it was like a big loop. That's funny. It was a big, big crazy loop.
C: So that's the first thing.
B: And and then my second thought was like. That's got to be baloney. I mean, I've never read anywhere that that that elephants are indeed afraid of mice. And Cara, you said would they even notice them? I don't think so. I don't think so. And would they would mechanical mice even move naturally normally where they're just kind of rolling there on the ground? I doubt they're they're, you know, mechanical quadrupeds. I think probably very basic little rolling robotic mice probably doesn't even look very realistic movement wise anyway. The other ones, like, I have no idea. It's like the other ones seem totally reasonable to me. No red flags are being raised. So I'm going to go with the with the elephant and the mechanical mice as fiction as well. OK, Evan. Oh boy. I'm, I'm in. I'm in the same boat here.
E: That when you as soon as you read the first one, Steve, I was like no way this can't be right. Mechanical mice deterrence for elephants and yeah, the cartoon image came into my head I remember reading years ago, many years ago about this being incorrect, an incorrect perception. Apparently, what the elephants don't even they don't recognize the mice or if they it's a startle response to something, not necessarily the mouse. It could be anything, you know, like kind of out of the ordinary. So if it's not even really a fear. So, yeah, I I don't think that one's right. Which kind of leaves the other two to be the science for, you know, I think what Cara said was sounded good to me. So I guess I'll leave it at that. I'll just join the folks and say mice fiction, OK. And Jay, yeah, I mean, you know.
S: It's one of those things like when.
J: You hear like, are elephants actually afraid of mice? And you have to really consider it, you know, because I think this, like Bob said, this came from a children's book. And it's like one of those, you know, just a collective idea. You know, it's in the, what do you call it, the collective, the zeitgeist. I I cannot for the life of me. Think of any. Legitimate reason why an elephant would be afraid of a mouse in any way. But you know, the trick to this is that it's mechanical mice. And maybe they're just calling them mice because they're small. And, and you know, if these are robot machines that are moving super fast, you know, maybe they drive them into their feet. It would, I don't know. I mean, I don't know, I just think in general, the whole mice thing, you know, they're not afraid of small things like that. I'm sure of it. So that one is like my 99% fiction. The other two about the biophobia, I would think, you know, the numbers kind of high, but I I do think there is a lot of biophobia. But you know, if I think the mouse one is the fiction and that one is probably correct. And then the the phytoplankton had this eternal mechanism to detoxify that. That's amazing. It doesn't surprise me for anything biological to do anything incredible like that. So I'm just going to go with the guys and say the mice. The whole concept of mice is false. All right? Mice are false. Mice are fake.
S: I really. Sorry I didn't meet you guys this. Straight #3.
C: A new study finds that plants.
S: And phytoplankton have an internal mechanism to detoxify methyl mercury and convert it back into atmospheric mercury, providing a potential pathway to reduce mercury and the food supply. You all think this one is science and this one is science. So yeah, this was actually known for a while but neglected, you know, it was not like, well known, even though it was sort of evidence of it previously. The idea is that, you know, methyl mercury is the toxic form of mercury. It's a very toxic form. And that could be increased because of mercury released in the atmosphere from coal burning, for example. And what they found was that many plants in phytoplankton, basically the primary producers are they do have a pathway by which they can reduce methyl mercury to the less toxic inorganic form and then they can convert it into gaseous mercury and basically release it back into the atmosphere. So they essentially eliminate it from themselves. They detoxify themselves of the methyl mercury. And this might explain why there isn't a very tight correlation between atmospheric mercury and mercury levels in people, right? Because it's not getting to us through our food supply, because it's being detoxified at the plant level, at the primary producer level. And, and this pathway may be something that can be utilized. You know, the idea is it could be utilized to further eliminate toxic mercury from the food supply. Let's go back to #1 Researchers find that small mechanical mice were effective deterrence to keep elephants away from crops in Botswana. So I'm surprised that none of you have seen or remember the Mythbuster episode where they specifically tested the the notion that elephants are afraid of mice. How interesting. I don't know though, what did they find?
C: So what they did was they had a mouse in a in a.
S: In a trap, a dead mouse, no live mouse like in a little box.
B: And they could.
S: Open it up to release the mouse. You know with a string. They have to just pull a string and box comes up and the mice can run away. And on a path that elephants typically walk on, they waited for an elephant to come by. Then they lifted the thing and the mouse ran away. And the elephant absolutely recoiled from the mouse. It noticed it. It stepped back and stepped around the mouse and took a different path. This is a lot of Mythbusters watching. How many data?
US#03: Points Maybe this was an elephant that had exceptionally good.
B: Eyesight. It does not mean fear or, you know, I didn't say fear.
US#03: Just that they, they. Walked. They stepped.
S: Away from the mouse it was pretty clear, you know when you watched the video that the elephant noticed the mouse and avoided it and that was their question would they even notice you know the matter they were actually surprised they thought they were going to debunk it the. Whole because the. Notion does sound silly, and it makes sense that you wouldn't want little vermin, you know, getting in your trunk or whatever, I guess.
US#03: Anyway, that was quite silly. Steve can.
S: You imagine what they would do.
B: With a with a rat trying to get in their trunk, they would, they would. They would launch it into orbit. That all works the. All of that aside this.
S: One is the fiction. This is the thank you. But what is?
US#03: True is that?
S: Elephants are a huge problem at Botswana. Guess how? How many elephants do you think are live in Botswana? Too many because they banned hunting. Too many, like 5.
C: Too many I know they.
E: They destroy.
S: All the trees.
C: 530,100.
E: And 30,130. Thousand. Oh, I know, estimating population.
S: A lot of poop.
E: That's a lot. In that area. And and there are.
S: Menace to crops, to farmers. Because, you know, if elephants decide they're going to come walk through your your farm and eat whatever they want, there's not much you can do about it. Or just step on it.
B: Yeah.
S: They knock down fences. They trample.
C: Water supplies and you know, the goal is to live peacefully with the elephants.
S: Right. You don't want to do anything harmful to the elephants, so they're looking for kind of a gentle way to keep elephants away from the crops, not mechanical mice. They found another way that has worked in other countries. Anyone want to guess what that is? It is another small It's a small creature that elephants are. Maybe like a high intensity laser, maybe a bird or something.
B: Nope, honey. Bees.
S: Oh yeah, I could see that.
B: They'd be like, annoying.
S: To them want to get stung by them yeah, yeah, but the right but the sting. Isn't venomous. It won't hurt the.
E: Elephant, right? It could even get through their skin. It could be painful. Well, they could get stung in their.
S: Eye, eyes, eyelids or whatever. I don't know they they might also just not like the buzzing and.
C: They don't like the buzzing. Yeah. So in other countries that's.
S: Worked pretty well and they wanted to see if it was going to work in Botswana because it's a much the elephants are a much bigger problem and what they found was mixed results. It works maybe half the time. That's better. And some elephants would hear the buzzing. They basically had posts with with bee nests on them, bee bee hives. And when elephants approached they could hear the the swarm of bees and about half of them would turn away. The other half, they didn't seem to care. That's purely from the noise. They think yes. But.
B: The the question is why you're recording.
S: Why? Do some elephants respond and others don't? And the guess is that it's if an elephant has been previously stung by a bee or harassed by a swarm of bees, they've learned to avoid them and others they need to sting. They need to sting every elephant well.
B: Others have not learned to avoid the the. Swarm.
S: So the question, the reason why they had to test it specifically in Botswana is because there are fewer bees in Botswana and so the elephants are less likely to have learned to avoid them, right? Because it's a drier climate. They're just fewer bees, beehives. But if farmers bring in bees, yes.
C: Maybe there's a downside, right? We talked about unintended consequences, yeah, but ultimately. Have it keeping. Bees in harmony with farmland is generally a really good proposition. Yeah. And then so it's it's only going to help them pollinate their crops. And maybe the elephants will learn.
S: Over time to avoid the bees, even if they the ones that are not initially repelled by them might eventually learn to avoid them so and it could be an additional revenue stream yeah, if you.
C: If you release these bees, if you continue.
B: Doing that the ones. That have been stung, theoretically right will walk away. The ones that haven't been stung won't, but the ones that haven't been stung will eventually be stung. The numbers to to go. Away.
S: So yeah, so it may still end up being a mechanism that they use. OK, let's go on #2A recent systematic review finds that 20 to 30% of the world's population have biophobia, which is a general aversion to nature is science. This is actually a complicated item, though, because as Cara keyed it on, how do you define biophobia? And this was a problem with the systematic review because there is no universe reversal operational definition of biophobia. So different studies may have used different thresholds or different measures of what is considered biophobia. But they said it's generally it's like an aversion to nature, a negative emotional relationship with the idea of nature or with nature. So some of that is literal phobias, like people who have animal phobias, but that's only about 4 to 9% of the population. Like as you say, Kelly, you might have a bug of phobia, right? Or arachnophobia or so one in 10, potentially 1/4 to 9%.
B: Yeah, but.
S: But some people, they don't have a specific animal phobia, but they just don't like nature like they, they do think they, and some of that is because they're not familiar with it. They live in a city. They think of nature as chaotic, as dangerous, as unclean or whatever. They have basically a negative emotional attachment or relationship to nature. And the numbers are a lot higher than than many people think of the the baseline assumption is that nature is healthy. People are less depressed in when they're exposed to nature, that nature is a good psychologically good thing. But actually a significant proportion of the population have a negative emotional association with nature. That the 20 to 30% is the middle of the bell curve. That's the middle of the range of these studies, somewhere higher, somewhere lower. So the, the range could be broader, but that's like the two standard deviations kind of range. You know, the one of the questions is what do we do about it? You know, is this something that can be addressed through exposure, through education? Because here's the thing, the people who generally ranked higher on a biophobia scale also were less concerned about the environment and less concerned about conservation and about protecting animals, that they don't care because they don't have an emotional tie to the idea of nature. So that is like, it's potentially a problem. You know, if in the end, the other trend in the studies is that this number is, if anything, getting higher over time. And so if the population is shifting in this direction of not caring about nature, that's going to make it even harder to find popular support for environmentalists and conservation programs. So this is an issue that we have to continue to study, think about, try to, you know, maybe find solutions for. It's not insignificant to me. Like, I don't get it at all. I love nature. But Jay and Bob will tell you, we grew up, you know, in rural to suburban kind of parts of Connecticut. We would spend our days in the woods, You know, that was common for us to go damages in the woods, come home for dinner. Yeah, It's in our backyard.
E: Yeah. We. Have. Yeah, our backyard was.
S: Contiguous was contiguous with the woods, so we would play in the backyard. Then we'd go into the woods and we'd be there for hours, you know, just building a tree Fort or just hunting around and climbing that, climbing that huge tree that fell.
B: Down here, building a Fort or falling out of a tree, breaking the hiding from each.
E: We got to break. A few bones, right?
S: So totally. But I could see somebody who grows up in New York City, you know, they might think, oh, nature is dangerous. Like there's unfamiliar to them, you know, they don't know, like are there snakes? Are there bugs? You know, is. And then there's people who think that we were deprived because.
B: We only had such little nature compared to the nature that they. Oh yeah, it's all spectrum. But that's, yeah, absolutely sure. So. Interesting, interesting concept.
S: The whole idea of bio phobia, yeah, definitely. Yeah, I still don't like that.
U: I still.
C: Don't like that damn term? They didn't come up.
B: With a good like bio aversion or some other term that doesn't really lean into the whole phobia. Phobia. So overkill, yeah. Yeah, I think care is right.
C: There just generically phyllophobia you.
S: Know for against, yeah, yeah. But people think it means afraid of not necessarily a fear.
C: Yeah, yeah, I. Agree.
S: You know terminology.
C: In science is often. Tricky.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:55:44)
"There is, of course, another sort of disagreement, which is owing merely to inequalities of knowledge. The relatively ignorant often wrongly disagree with the relatively learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. The more learned, however, have a right to be critical of errors made by those who lack relevant knowledge. Disagreement of this sort can also be corrected. Inequality of knowledge is always curable by instruction."
– from "How to read a book" by Mortimer J Adler and Charles Van Doren, (description of author)
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote. This week's quote was suggested by a listener.
E: Tom. From Shoreham by Sea in the United Kingdom. Lovely place, I'm sure that is. I'm going to tell you who it's from first. He says the quote is from How to Read a Book. That's the name of the book by Mortimer Jay Adler and Charles Van Doren. Does anyone recognize maybe not Mortimer Adler, maybe the name Charles Van Doren?
B: Yeah.
E: Definitely can't place it though.
B: Charles Van Doren was the academic.
E: Who was tied up in the game show 21 scandal in the 1950s and there's an excellent movie called quiz show that Robert Redford directed in the in the 1990s about about that scandal with Ralph Fiennes right and it and get and you know whose. Favorite movie or one? Of his favorite movies was you remember who enjoyed that Harry Potter Perry. Oh yeah, he really loved that movie.
S: I watched it several.
E: Times with him, he, he was always a big admirer of that movie. So, so that's why I kind of stuck stuck in my head and I want to now deliver the quote. There is, of course, another sort of disagreement, which is owing merely to inequalities of knowledge. The relatively ignorant often wrongly disagree with the relatively learned about matters exceeding their knowledge. The more learned, however, have a right to be critical of errors made by those who lack relevant knowledge. Disagreement of this sort can also be corrected. Inequality of knowledge is always curable by instruction. Mortimer Adler and Charles van Dorn Nice. I agree, and Charles van Dorn had a master's degree in.
S: Astrophysics for the. Record.
E: Whoa, nice astrophysical system.
S: Actually his PhD was in English.
E: And he but he was a he was. An academic, he was a teacher. Mortimer is a great name. It's definitely it is a great.
S: Name old timey names it definitely it it does not.
E: Sound evil in any way? Twirl your mustache like Morticia. So guys.
S: We're two weeks away from recording our year end episode, the year's over. What that means is we.
E: Need all of you. Out there in.
S: The SGU Listener Land, We need you to send us your votes for the science. The most interesting or best science item of the year. The worst pseudoscience of the year. Skeptical Hero of the Year. Skeptical Jackass of the Year, anything at your your you know, your the interview that you liked the best, the the funniest thing that was said on the SGU or just any feedback about the SGU this year? We're going to win a review it all in a couple of weeks. Any nominations for in Memoriam? Anybody who passed away this year who, who want you want to get mentioned? Yeah. So the more information you send us, the more we'll have for, for the review show. And there's a couple of people who each year send us science and fiction stats. So anyone out there willing to do that, we would greatly appreciate it. We'll do it ourselves if we have to, but there are people who who have done that for us in the past. So now's the time. Now's the time to send all of that in, please. Because, you know, we're getting old. I don't remember shit in the past.
B: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
S: And until next week, this is your skeptics.
B: Guide.
S: To the universe.
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- ↑ theness.com: Cognitive Legos - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ www.livescience.com: China has planted so many trees it's changed the entire country's water distribution
- ↑ undark.org: Misinformation About Birth Control and Breast Cancer Swirls
- ↑ futurism.com: Scientists Claim to Detect Dark Matter for the First Time Ever
- ↑ www.newscientist.com: Asteroid Bennu carries all ingredients to kick-start life as we know it
- ↑ pachydermjournal.org: https://pachydermjournal.org/index.php/pachyderm/article/view/1337/1334
- ↑ esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/fee.70019
- ↑ www.sciencedirect.com: Incorporating in vivo demethylation and reduction into mercury mitigation for sustainable development - ScienceDirect