SGU Episode 1071
|
This episode was created by transcription-bot. Transcriptions should be highly accurate, but speakers are frequently misidentified; fixes require a human's helping hand. |
|
This episode needs: proofreading, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing! |
How to Contribute |
| SGU Episode 1071 |
|---|
| January 17th 2026 |
 |
"Introducing the Donut Solid State Battery Module: portable power for your needs!" |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
“There is no such thing as a scientific truth believed by one person and disbelieved by the rest of the scientific community; an idea becomes a truth only when a vast majority of scientists accept it without question. That is, after all, what we mean by the expression 'scientific contribution': an offering that is accepted, however provisionally, into the common fund of knowledge." |
-Robert K. Merton |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello, and welcome to The Skeptic Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, January 15th, 2026, and this is your host, Stephen Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey, everybody, Tara Santa Maria.
E: Howdy.
S: J Novella, Hey guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good afternoon, everyone.
S: We are just back from our Seattle show. It was a good the fun weekend. Live events are always good.
E: A lot of fun.
J: Yeah, it was a lot of work. We did three different events in two and in like 2 days to wait. Let's less than.
E: 2 less than two.
S: Basically in 24 hours.
E: Yeah, yeah, you're right. Yeah, about there. Yeah, about that.
S: But those are always good, I enjoy them.
J: It was great. What a group of people. You know, like George was saying this on Facebook, like just everybody in Seattle was awesome. You know, like it Really great crowds a hell of a time. And also, you know, like the shows. The shows were, you know, ticket sales were very good. And people would seem to be really pleased that just overall the energy was fantastic.
S: Yeah, it was. But Jay, that's not what I want to talk about today.
J: Yeah, I know what you want to talk.
S: Tell us what? Tell us what your daughter said when she came home from school the other day.
J: Yeah, my wife and I have been launched into a very interesting and, you know, frustrating predicament, right? So let the day before we left for Seattle, my daughter gets home from school and I pick her up from the bus and on the ride back to the house she says you know, very with a lot of power in her voice. Daddy, we didn't go to the moon. The moon landing is not real.
B: What?
J: Yes, I'm likely.
B: What? It's like a nightmare scenario.
E: The first thing you do is look at the calendar to make sure it's not April 1.
J: Yeah, I mean, the first thing I did was literally say to myself, stay calm.
E: Don't panic, right?
J: Because I pieced it together immediately. So I'm like, OK, so you know, tell me what happened. You know, so she goes into it saying, you know, her science teacher, who he ended up telling the entire class, probably all the science classes that he taught that day, that there's lots of reasons why we should be questioning the moon landing. This was this was his way of, you know, handling it without coming right out and saying it. And then he gave her a laundry list of, you know, anti, you know, moon hoax talking points. And this is like, how come the photographs and the video don't have stars in them? And, you know, the astronauts couldn't couldn't get out of the radiation belt. Like no one has ever gotten past the radiation belt.
C: And by the way, this is not like a high school science teacher who's like trying to get people to think critically.
J: No, this is not teach the controversy and explain critical thinking. This is he says it. I guess most of them believed it, if not all of them.
C: Because they're in elementary school, right?
J: Yeah, this is. This is. 5th grade. Oh my. God, so it took, you know, so I'm unpacking everything that she's telling me. You know, my wife and I are interviewing her just to just as it's fresh. We just want to get the information. So then we have a long discussion. Of course, you know, we call up Steve, we're chatting with everyone in the family. Just say as a point of interest alone, like, wow, this happened, Can you believe it? And then we started to dig into like, what should we do about about it and what's the appropriate way to manage the situation? So the first thing that we did was we, you know, we emailed the teacher and the principal just said, hey, you know, I talked to Olivia. She got home from school. She gave me, she talked to me about what was taught in class today. And, you know, I understand that, you know, you were talking about the moon landing and how people should be questioning it. And she brought up these particular points that you made in class. I'd like to know why, you know, what was your intent on this instruction? You know, what was the context. Just please explain to me what the deal is, right? Just being as generous as I possibly can. And I got an e-mail back that I completely did not expect. The e-mail was a full admission that he doesn't believe that the moon landing moon landings happened. You know, he said. It's been proven they can't, you know, people can't go past the radiation belt and survive. Oh.
C: My God, the district is going to have to look into this. This guy's so science.
J: Yeah, We have a meeting with the principal after the show today. We're going to my wife and I are going to talk to the principal and we're going to express our deep concern over this. You know, and the principal did write us back in the initial e-mail, you know, trying to frame this the correct way. Like, you know, we take this seriously and talk to the Superintendent and some other.
S: People, it was, it was, I don't think it was good or bad. I think it was just a political response. It was a we'll look into it. We take it seriously, kind of.
J: Yeah, it was an.
C: HR. Response. Yeah, but at least they didn't just brush it off.
S: They didn't. They didn't express outrage.
C: Well, I wouldn't expect them to express outrage, but I might expect them to brush it off. They didn't say something about yeah, like edge academic freedom or some bullshit. So I.
J: Know it wasn't any of that. I mean, you know, The thing is, we're a long way down the road here from actually knowing what's going to happen, how it's actually going to be handled. Like, you know, I have an expectation that those kids need to be instructed about what happened in that classroom that day, and they need to be taught the real information. And I guess there needs to be an admission of some kind to them that their teacher was incorrect and giving them false information. And I would expect this. This is what I want. I want that to happen tomorrow like it's already been a week.
S: Yeah, sooner than later. So yeah, I took care of what I was saying is it wasn't it can go either way, right? We don't know if they're going to be an ally or a foe in this. It could be they didn't express outrage, but they didn't write it off either. It was middle of the road, non committal. So it all is going to depend on the conversation today and it's, you know, given this town just to say that it's hard. You could go either way and we just don't know. So my opinion is we just we give them every chance. We'd be charitable. We take it step by step, but we keep escalating it until we get satisfaction and we.
C: Well, yeah. And I was going to ask, are you in a position where you would be willing to have some sort of legal intervention if you need?
J: I don't even want to go there yet. Like I have to take this as it comes Cara like I I got. I don't I want to come out swinging like I want to see what they do. Like I'm going to give them all the time an opportunity that they need to to take this where my wife and I think it ultimately needs to go.
C: But you also said that you want some sort of correction to the record sooner rather than later.
J: I want the. Kids misinformation in their heads to be corrected because you know, we all know like, you know, the roots of pseudoscience, especially if sown early could be devastating.
C: Of course, but this is their science teacher. They're not going to replace him. So it's a, it's a, it's concerning that he has a passion about this.
J: It is, it is, and it's it's, it's an insidious problem because first of all, we don't know what other misinformation has been taught in that class.
C: Right, That means he's a conspiracy.
E: What is his teaching material? Yeah, it's. Terrible, Evan.
J: It's terrible every time. Every time that I, you know, there's a study guide sent home or I'm reading like questions for homework and everything. It is borderline, you know, unreadable.
E: Yeah, so. So it's part of a bigger problem.
J: Oh, it is. There's a much bigger, there's a much bigger problem here, and there's a lot of other information that I can't give at this time.
C: In a way that's good because that gives you an entree. It's not a one off issue.
S: Exactly.
C: Yeah.
S: Right.
J: Yeah, Yeah. So, but again, like Courtney and I are going to calmly and, you know, and pleasantly talk to the principal, give them any more information that they want, you know, really express our position just so they understand. You know, this is what I found troubling in my own mind. We live in a world where, like, there are things that are happening that are so unbelievably outrageous that comparatively, this seems like nothing. Like I could have easily brushed this off when I think about like the emotion that I feel for this versus like just reading the news today, you know what I mean? I had to remind myself, wait a second, this is terrible. This is a really, really bad situation. I hope it's not a systemic problem, but it But even on this singular thing that took place, there needs to be outraged parents and there needs to be action taken and there needs to be serious, serious consideration to what happened here. Because I want to live in that world. I don't want to live in the world where I'm emotionally tired and have to push away things that stress me out. Like I'm I'm not going to let that happen. I just want, I want everyone listening to this to trust me that I will. My wife and I will handle this. We are not going to softball this.
S: And you have some serious backup, Jay, so.
J: Absolutely. What's?
S: Funny is we all kind of reacted the same way. It's like this guy had no idea who was sitting in his class.
J: Who?
S: Was getting himself. Into like the what's the worst possible case scenario for this guy? So I mean, I do think just for the show, I want to say specifically that the Van Allen Belts argument is an old chestnut right in the moon.
E: Oh, that's one of the original ones.
S: Yes, there's a belt of radiation around the Earth, but you know the rocket's going pretty damn fast, right? Radiation is all about intensity times time, and the time is very, very tiny, and so you just zip through it quickly and that's fine. And what?
C: Wait, but what's their argument? Do they think that they would have?
J: Like that humans couldn't survive passing through that radiation that. Limited exposure would destroy them, yeah.
C: What? That's insane. Of course it is. So they're. Also full they're, they're, I mean, it's not like they didn't think about this. They're shielded, they're measuring suits. They're also doing things to prevent. And plus we, we don't know, maybe, you know, maybe these guys do have cancers because of this, but they wouldn't die instantly. That's cool.
J: I mean, a lot. You know, you list all the astronauts that actually went through it. And with a lot of them, you know, they, you know that their lives have ended and they lived full lives. You know, like we would know. We would know if any of them.
S: Died or this died this 90s, you know, Yeah.
C: But that doesn't mean that they didn't have cancers.
J: I know, but the point is, Cara, that you know, this wasn't like, Oh my God, it's so much cancer that they died in the four.
C: Exactly, this is not an atom bomb. Like I don't understand they.
J: Increased their exposure. Yeah, they increased their question.
C: They can't.
J: The astronauts in the ISS have an exposure.
E: Airline pilot to make a career out of flying.
C: And we do what we can do to mitigate it also.
J: Court My wife said something that I will never forget after we read the response e-mail from him, which he did not by the way, include the principal on. She turns to me and she goes. He doesn't know who he's fucking with, right? Because it's true, because you think about it like I alone, I know alone me and my wife could handle this, but I have you guys, I could call Bill Nye up if I wanted to, you know, you know, the fact of the matter is like, I don't, I'm, I don't feel like this is going to be challenging. I think it's just the order of events. Like what, what are they going to do? And we we will have a response to everything, particularly if it doesn't go what I what we deem to be the right way.
C: And that just goes to reinforce how unfortunately now you're going to have to be that much more vigilant. Yeah. And check in on her homework and check in on her readings. And with with a critical eye. Not that you've didn't have a critical eye before, but you you need to almost be looking for. Oh, we're monitoring it now.
J: I mean, we've already been monitoring like whenever she has a test, we we have to like rewrite the study guide for her.
E: But your. Ears are perked up more.
C: Exactly.
J: You guys need to hear this, Olivia said. My daughter, she said. Dad, how can I trust anything thing he tells me? Do I have to do I have to like think about the other teachers too. Like she now she's questioning a trip on this. She's in there in science class now, having to put everything that's happening through a filter now. From a skeptical point of view, I'm glad that she's going to be practicing like frontal lobe stuff here, right?
C: Yeah, but she's too young from a developmental stand. Exactly. Trusting of adults No.
J: She won't be able to navigate through any of it she needs.
C: To be able to trust adults like tested adults.
J: So where you?
E: In court will be.
J: I, you know, my wife and I had to get real with her and basically, you know, map this out. Like, look, you know, some people believe in things that are not true and we have to be careful. You know, there is definitely adults that absolutely know what's going on and can be trusted and, and our authority, you can trust their intelligence, their expertise and their authority and, and different things. But, you know, in this instance, my daughter at at 10 years old ran into a tricky adult, you know what I mean? Like an adult that isn't, that isn't like doing it the right way. You know, I don't know how else to paint it to her. I didn't want to. Like she doesn't understand everything we're talking about to her. She's feeling uncomfortable because it's like I can't trust him.
C: Well, what about, OK, can I ask you a quick question? How do you, how does your family and how does your daughter like in terms of her developmental level, deal with both like God and Jesus and then like Santa Claus? Where is she at with those things?
J: They they, OK, so the God and Jesus thing, you know, my, my wife and I have been careful to not demonstrably be like, no, no, no, no, no, like we just explained to them, you know, this is what some people think. This is what other people think, you know.
C: What you believe though?
J: Yeah, she'll ask, and I'm not gonna lie to her. I'll just say I don't think there's enough evidence to really believe it either way. I openly admit I don't know, but I haven't seen anything to make me think that this is real or any of this stuff is, is legitimate Santa Claus. They, they, you know, they found out on their own. You know, we didn't really have to do anything. Like they, it just kind of my son basically figured it out at a really early age. And bottom line is like we're teaching them to be skeptics. We're not telling them, you know, what the truth is as much as we're trying to teach them how to think. You know, again, they're surrounded by by skeptics. It's, it's infused into our family culture. And I think she navigated the whole thing really well. But man, I'll tell you when your kid comes home as a skeptic, when your kid comes home and tells you that the moon landings were fake, you know, boy, was that an exclamation point?
S: Yeah, so. This shows on the part of a science teacher, any teacher. This is a shocking level of credulity and not understanding how science, critical thinking and logic works and evidence works, right. He thinks it's been proven that we did not go to the moon. He thinks this that is, you know, incompatible with being a competent science teacher, in my opinion.
C: 100.
S: And also he shows a massive lack of judgment in saying that to a group of 5th graders. Even if he believed it, in his heart of heart, he should have known better not to say that in class to stick to the curriculum. And so that combination is deadly.
E: Well, that's why I was asking. Is this the curriculum?
S: No Of. Course. No, no, no.
E: OK, we have. We know this for sure. Well, we'll, we will definitely think. That's not out.
S: Well, it's certainly not in the state curriculum, right?
C: It might be in his curriculum that's different and.
E: Who but who okays these curriculum if?
S: This is. Anyway, part of an official curriculum at any level, then that makes it a much bigger problem.
C: And actually in some ways I don't think you can discount.
S: That but we'll but but so far there's no evidence of that. I'll be shocked if that's the case. I just think this is this teacher shooting from the hip.
J: We know, we know. It's not in the curriculum, guys. Like, this was inappropriate.
S: Yeah.
J: He clearly stepped outside out of bounds of what he should have been teaching them. And what Steve said is dead on. You know, even if he did have like an opinion like this or a belief like this, he should know better than to to to feed it to a bunch of kids who have absolutely no ability to to figure their way out of it.
C: Yeah, it, it shows a lack of a deep lack of judgement. And like, honestly, I think you can argue that this is a safety issue. It's a psychological safety issue at the very least. Like, I don't want to trust, I don't have kids, but I wouldn't want to trust kids in a classroom with somebody who has that blatant of a lack of judgement. That's worrisome to me.
J: Yeah, I'll leave you guys with one last thought. He has been recently elected to a Board of Education in Connecticut.
C: This does not surprise me. I come from Texas.
S: Yeah, that's that is a little surprising in Connecticut, which does elevate it because now he is a public official, which makes him fair game.
C: And he makes decisions about.
S: Curriculum at a much. Higher level. So stay tuned because this is not going to go away anytime soon.
News Items
Donut Lab’s Solid State Battery (16:26)
S: All right, let's move on to some news.
J: Skeptics assemble. Let's.
S: Do it. I do. I just do love the idea this local jamoke thinking can get away with this, and he's got a ringer sitting in this class that's going to just whip up a shitstorm. He has no idea what is coming his way. All right, keep us updated.
J: Hey Steve, Olivia will go to school one day with a bunch of robes and and blue eyes and be like like like because that satirac could be like. My father will destroy you. Oh my God. Cara That was about as geeky science fiction as it could possibly.
C: Get I I about 3 words and I realized oh oh I don't need to understand.
E: No, just laugh along. Trust us, it's hilarious.
S: All right, have you guys heard all of the hubbub from the Consumer Electronics Show about the Donut Labs solid-state battery? Oh boy.
J: I love Donuts. We.
S: Got a ton of e-mail about this. This is a big story and I wrote about it on my blog, but I've been because I knew I was talking about it today. I've been continuing to do research plus, This is why I love writing about topics before I talk about them on the show because a lot of information comes my way, you know, because of that in the comments and everything. Yeah. All right, so I've done more research and the story just keeps getting more and more complicated. So let me first just state what the claims are and and give a little bit of background. Obviously we talk about batteries a lot. I'm pretty sure we've talked about solid-state batteries previously and battery technology is now one of the cornerstone technologies of the, you know, electrification of our, of our civilization and conversion to green energy, etcetera, etcetera. It's massively important. So even incremental improvements can have a massive, you know, downstream effect. solid-state batteries have been in the works for over a decade. There are multiple big companies like Toyota and others who are putting billions of dollars into R&D to bring these to market. And what they are is if there's solid-state in that they do not have an elect, a liquid electrolyte, they have a solid electrolyte. That has a couple of advantages, one of the big ones being that they're more stable and they don't tend to catch fire, right? And they should also have a longer charge discharge life, right, because of that increased stability. But otherwise in terms of their energy density, that kind of depends on the chemistry of the battery that it's not specific to being solid-state. This is the kind of news that we've been following this news for a long time. Toyota says they think they'll be, they'll be coming out with solid-state batteries like commercial like in production by 2028. And then for EVs maybe 29 or 30. So that's basically what I had my eye like at 20-30, we might be seeing solid-state EV batteries. That's kind of an estimate. So now this guy comes out, the CEO of a company called Donut Lab at the CES comes out and says we're in production today with a solid-state battery. So this is at least two if not more years ahead of other competitors. So right there, that's like, OK, you know, let's see if this is legit or not. Not only that, he claims. That his solid-state battery has a specific energy of 400 Watt hours per kilogram 400 four 104.
B: 100, Thank you.
S: Which is again, it's like the individual claims that he makes are very savvy because they're right in the sweet spot of impressive yet semi plausible, you know what I mean? So the the current lithium ion batteries in production have a have a energy density of 175 to 250 Watt hours per kilogram. The amprious silicon anode lithium ion battery has 370 Watt hours per kilogram. So 400 sounds like a plausible but nice incremental improvement, right?
E: Yeah, right. Reasonable.
S: So this is still huge. I mean 400 is huge, but it's still, it's not like he's claiming 1000. It's like, all right, this is like ahead of schedule, but that's in what we were expecting from first Gen. solid-state batteries. He also said that the battery is stable for 100,000 charge discharge cycles, which is basically a forever battery. That's 100 year multi million mile, right, 100,000, that's 100,000.
C: What are they now?
S: If you think about 100,000 days, you know it's.
E: A while, yeah, that'll do it.
S: That's. Talking a long time, do.
C: You know how long they last now.
S: You know, in the 100.
C: Start cycle.
S: Right, or or.
E: 100,000 translates to about 30.
S: Yeah, 30 years as opposed to say 5 to 10 years maybe. That's a huge improvement plus stable. It only loses 5% of its capacity at -30°C and can function up to 100°C. Also, it could operate from zero to 100%, whereas lithium ion batteries, you really should be operating that between 20 and 80%. Yeah, and you could charge it all the way up in 5 minutes.
Voice-over: Oh wow.
E: These are all like sort of natural features of a solid-state. Battery. Not necessarily. In it.
S: No.
E: So this is so we're saying he has invented brand like some other aspects of new technology.
S: Yes, totally.
B: So you should be skeptical already. This is a wet battery wet dream at this.
S: But it gets better. It's now.
E: Cheaper.
S: Cheaper than lithium ion batteries?
E: All right, now now, now I'm.
S: Scheduled. It's you can make it any shape you want because it has, they call it like a clay kind of property where you could essentially like, for example, they show up a drone that's made out of battery, right? Like the structure of the drone itself is the battery.
E: That that's that's the only way you can deal with the.
S: Weight, well, it's a huge improvement.
B: Well, we, we that is, that isn't an idea that is. We've talked about, of course, structural batteries, where the structural batteries are an amazing thing. Can you imagine? Buildings will be that. The frame of your house being a batteries like come that's just like. Yeah, parts. Or the framers. Car.
C: Yeah, parts of your car that are.
S: So here's the thing. Each one of those claims is not outside of the realm of possibility. The fact that he is claiming to have a battery with all of those properties at the same time makes this a massively extraordinary claim.
C: There's.
S: No trade off, That's the thing. No try to everything is better. Every single aspect of battery life is better.
J: Ding Ding.
S: So so that's a.
J: Too good to be too good to be true.
S: Sounds too good to be true, right. So then we say, OK, so how did it's a small finish company, right? How did they get to market with a production solid-state battery with all of these features years ahead of massive companies putting billions of dollars into R&D to do the same?
B: Thing. Well, they they might have a huge research team, so you would expect that he has a huge research team.
S: So the all right, so here's where the story gets complicated, if it isn't complicated already. So the Donut Lab really is just a marketing company that that that obtained the technology, right? They have like 1 engineer on their payroll. Clearly one engineer did not invent this technology, but they got it from another company called Nordic Nano and and.
C: And why did that company send?
S: Well, it's, it's whatever. I mean, the it's not like it wasn't so simple. They merged. It's all corporate stuff.
J: It's very complicated.
S: I don't it's not worth getting into. But in and of itself it's not, it's not suspicious. It's just there's a number of different companies, you know, they, it sounds like they, the technology was mainly developed by Nordic Nano, but they developed, they acquired some pieces from some German company and now the Donut Lab is really doing the marketing and there's all the fight complicated financial relationship. But none of that is hanky. That's just the the complexity of modern tech industry stuff, right?
C: It is, except is Donut Labs a startup?
S: Yeah. These are all startups, yeah.
C: OK.
S: Even Nordic Nano, I think we started in 2024.
C: Yeah, that, that, that to me. I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, but that's why it's hinky to me, because there's no, there's no track record for any of these people.
S: It doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means we don't have a track record to give us confidence.
E: Yeah, this isn't a Boston Dynamics where we've seen the evolution of. The products. Right.
S: This is an LG or somebody who's like been working on battery tech for years and has batteries in production and blah blah blah. This is just the startups you know, with complicated entanglements and relationships.
C: And it's very easy to say, oh, we're ready to roll out well, but actually sounds like he's.
S: What he is. So I mean, I don't think there's any question that the announcement at CES was designed to get investment in order to build their manufacturing factory, right? That's on face level, that's what it seems like there are more engineers and people with who have, you know, the credentials to work on elements of this battery tech. And The thing is, nobody knows what the hell the battery is right? And for enough.
E: So it's a black. Box for a number of reasons.
S: So at CES, they didn't have a battery, they had an empty case.
E: Oh, that's a oh, we've seen this so.
C: Yeah, this is all Theranos like. I'm going to believe it's Theranos until proof. Exactly. Right, I have to go into the.
E: Who's that guy who made the charger the infant Charger up And yeah that I forgot his name, but the same idea.
S: So I've read now multiple sort of industry level analysis. So from the skeptical point of view. So it's an extraordinary claim, no doubt. Is it breaking the laws of physics? No. Is there a plausible path to this technology? Yes, is there, but is it years ahead of schedule? Yes, so, but here's the thing, the company has, they have no patents, which is suspicious. They have. Published the patents No white. Papers and no peer reviewed articles. Well, that says.
J: Supporting the technology, that's huge. All right.
S: So I've read 2 interpretations of that so and everyone seems to be on the same page in terms of like insider industry people. They're like all right, either these guys are scammers, right? This is all bullshit. Or they are going maximal stealth until they are actually in production and then they'll but then then they'll apply for all the patents and everything.
E: I have a question.
C: But then they wouldn't have done this massive CES. Well, but they.
S: Yeah, but so they're trying to have.
C: Money they.
S: Did the CES announcement to get investors but they but they're they're if you ask them any questions, they're like it's proprietary.
E: Steve, what about this scenario? If you had this, let's say it does work and it's everything, wouldn't you go to someone, for example, like an Elon Musk directly, privately and say I've?
S: They have they have a billion dollar investor, billionaire investor. They do.
B: I'd never, I'd never go to Musk.
S: So they have their. Billions Musk.
C: Has a. Investor Musk has an electric car.
S: Company that has already put it I think a few 100 million or something into the the Nordic Nano in these various companies, right?
C: That's something that there's.
S: Semi plausible sort of elements in here. It's like, yeah, they're claiming it's they're using carbon nano fibers and titanium this and this could theoretically work and blah blah blah. They're also 3D printing it as sheets. So that could explain why it can be in any form and it's cheaper and it's kind of all the pieces are semi plausible. But The thing is, no patents, no white papers, no peer reviewed publications, no third party independent testing, nothing has been tested. They didn't even have a battery at CES. So there's massive red flags and reasons to be skeptical.
E: They're selling an idea.
C: And let's not forget once again that Rupert Murdoch, Sam Walton and Bill Gates all invested in Theranos at the beginning. And they had a.
E: Kissinger, yeah, and the the former secretary.
C: Larry Ellison Estate and they had a huge contract with like, what was it, Walgreens, it was like.
E: I know it wasn't Walgreens.
C: I can't remember, but it's like a yeah, it was like a large pharmacy, so.
S: So the, the right they, they claim they're in production for a motorcycle, but it's their it's a one of their subsidiaries, right? Or it's Donut Labs is a subsidiary of the motorcycle company that was spun off whatever, you know, again, it's complicated and like it's.
E: Right. It's not owned.
S: By his brother you know and the other thing is the the CEO of donut lab two years ago claimed to have the first truly sentient AI so.
E: Oh, so this guy might be operating?
S: On a yeah, So that guy I don't trust as far as I could throw him, but again, he keeps he's like he.
J: Just keeps throwing shit at him. Is he?
S: Just the marketing asshole. Or and the only thing I don't because.
C: But this whole company feels like a marketing company, right?
S: Now, well, I think the donor lab basically is a marketing company, but the question is, is the other pieces legit like the and maybe this guy's just taking this technology that other people have and now he's exaggerating the claims and fake it till you make it and is premature.
E: Sounds like. Fake.
S: He's trying to drum up investment by making, you know, by, by, by, Yeah, by just doing all the marketing hinky stuff, but but that.
E: For some reason, the billionaire doesn't feel like cornering the entire system here, which it could translate to trillions of dollars.
S: But that doesn't mean that there isn't some real technology behind it. No, but but we have no evidence that there is either.
E: Wake me up.
S: Yeah, so exactly. Show me the money or shut up. So.
C: And and I think the thing that's so scary with this with like startup culture in general, living out here in California, I have a lot of friends who either work in different startups or own their own startups. And there's always that sort of on which side of the line are they between like fraud and just this is how the culture of startups is. It's very fake it till you make it. It's very like, oh, we did this one proof of concept thing and now we need to do a round of funding based on vapor vaporware. And yeah, it's, it's so scary that it's like perfectly legal. Like it's, it's completely legal until it's not anymore, right. And where's that line?
E: Yeah, I know. This happened the 4th time I sold the Brooklyn Bridge.
J: So. Let's say look, fake it, fake it till you make it has worked for a lot of companies. You know, it's, it's, it's something that does bear fruit every once in a while.
C: But why is that the model and the standard? Why I'm?
J: Not saying it's harsher the right way Carrot, but it's definitely like the way that that these things happen so.
S: No one would be happier than me if this all turns out to be legit. This would be fantastic for the world. You know, absolutely, you know, basically be three years or four years ahead of schedule with a solid-state battery that has wish list of features. I mean absolutely, sign me up. I'm I'm highly motivated, you know, for this to be real, but at the same time it's got every single red flag of fraud or of the fake until you make it kind of scam artist thing going.
E: On and how many times is something with this many red flags ever come bared fruit yeah that's the.
S: Track record of this CEO and of this kind of pattern of behavior is not good. But like we often say with some of these things where it's like, OK, semi plausible, but you know, I'm not seeing the meat is we'll know in a few months probably.
C: Exactly. And and I think important thing here is that as you mentioned, all of these different things collectively are plausible. Like there's a pathway to them. So they don't have any secret king sauce that nobody else has. Eventually this will be made by a legitimate company, right?
S: Except they're claiming they do have some secret sauce, right? That they do have this proprietary technology at the core. Of yeah, but I don't buy.
C: I don't buy that we have secret sauce. That's like we have secret physics that nobody else. Has, you know, yeah, it's more I.
S: Think right?
E: Yeah, they're not saying anti gravity.
C: Exactly like somebody else is going to get there.
S: They're also clap, but they're also saying no rare earths, no geopolitically significant elements. So.
C: I don't buy it. I don't buy. It's just.
S: It's literally a battery wish list. It is a bet it is a EV battery absolute wish list.
C: It's like the the bad science where you start at the end and then you work backward until you get.
S: There or or this guy, very tough asking his engineers, is it theoretically possible that we could do this without red Earth? Yeah, theoretically. OK, that's it. It's without rare Earth.
E: Do we have confirmation that this billionaire really put in mind?
S: This is what I'm reading. This is this is the industry reports. We don't have confirmation of anything, Evan. It's all super secret. It's all like they're doing, they're doing the trade secret approach rather than the everything approach. And so they're not even letting people into their factory. They're not letting people look under the hood. That's so they're only going to get away with doing that for so long. At some point they're going to have to put up or shut up.
B: What's the game plan here? What's they, they, they probably almost certainly know that there's no way they're going to produce anything like this. So what's their game plan? Get a bunch of investment and run away with it or I don't think this is Orbo level.
S: I don't think this is like just fraud, get money and disappear. I don't think that's the plan. I think no.
C: That's how you stay in business.
S: That there's a massive disconnect between engineering and marketing and the we have marketing, this is running away with it. And the engineers, like I didn't exactly say we had that Now, you know, I'm just saying theoretically we might have that or whatever. I think that's probably.
C: But that in and of itself can be fraud at a certain point. That's that's kind of what was going on at Theranos too.
S: Or there's whatever. There's a tiny chance that this guy managed to obtain, you know, the the the output of a lab that really did make a sincere breakthrough with nanotechnology or whatever with these carbon nano got a guy who's.
C: But I but I think if that had happened, they would have patented it. Yeah. I don't buy this whole trade secrets versus patents most people. Have both.
S: They don't have a patent yet, at least nothing. Somebody else can just maybe with getting. Ready to file. I mean, God, that's we'll know soon enough because if they don't have a patent, that means they're about ready to file 1.
E: Gosh, that's normally one of the first things.
C: Exactly. Because a patent. You patent an idea before it even works. Because a patent in and of itself prevents other people from stealing your stuff.
S: Like they're going the stealth approach, right, rather than the patent that risk is minimized.
C: But that's also the cover for fraud, right? So that's.
E: How many other things are we using today followed that approach that are in society now?
C: None of them. Everybody patents their ideas. It's just yeah, yeah.
J: So it's I agree with Cara, like them, not patent, it's very suspicious.
C: It just, I just can't see.
J: I don't understand this idea of trying to go stealth one one person in the company with an open mouth can ruin you know?
E: It's a two person company.
C: Yeah, but it's easier when the company is tiny.
J: Well, you're right. See, I wasn't thinking of the tiny company.
S: So yeah, I think this so many concerning features here, this is really stretching plausibility and credulity.
B: Oh, I'm looking at, I'm looking at their employee list is somebody named Doctor Emmett Brown and somebody named Stark.
S: Whoa, yeah.
E: And and and also, why do conferences let people come in this?
S: Is this, is it a tech conference? You know it's.
C: Not an academic because I guess.
E: Yeah, I guess they don't. I guess they don't care. They don't have any.
C: Well that's they don't care people to vet it all. They can't do that.
E: No, but I mean, do they really want people? You mentioned that, Evan Bogus.
S: Funny because we go to a lot of science and academic conferences, right? But when you go to an industry like a tech conference, it's a totally different vibe. It's a lot of big ideas and big showiness and not that much meat often.
E: Yes, but there are actually products, yes. OK, so right, that's.
C: But it's sales. It's all about Hawking your wares. And in startup culture, sales are not for the product, they're for the funding to keep working on the product.
E: Sure for the next right more and so we'll in.
S: A piece of the pie later. We will follow this story. And I, you know, I'm waiting with baited breath to see which this is going to rapidly, I think, go in One Direction or another. And and and we'll see enough. Hopefully we'll be surprised. And there's some meat on these bones, but I'm not holding my breath. All right.
J: Well, Steve, Steve, I'll bet my battery patent that this is BS.
S: It certainly has all the red flags.
Artemis Update (37:11)
- [None None] [2]
S: All right, Jay, give us an update on Artemis.
J: All right, So what we have here is the Artemis 2, right? So Artemis 1 was a uncrewed ship that was, you know, it's a rocket. And then there's a capsule that went around the moon. We gathered all the necessary Intel that we needed to progress to Artemis 2. Now, Artemis 2 is a crude mission. It they're going to do a lunar flyby, they're going to have something called a free return trajectory and it's going to take about 10 days to do the entire thing. There's no plan change toward like a lunar orbit insertion or landing like that's not happening. We're still functioning analogous to Apollo 8. If you remember the Apollo Eight thing, it's just a flyby. Again, further testing the systems now that it's crude, they'll be checking all of the systems that the crew needs to survive and scientific equipment they'll be using and everything. All right, so the crew is Reed Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen. Hansen is still the first Canadian assigned to lunar space. The astronauts are still serving dual roles as operators and biomedical research subjects, and there has not been crew changes or any role redefinitions announced. So it's very unlikely, like extremely unlikely that any changes are going to happen. Guys, remember that the heat shield issue was a big problem here. So Artemis 1 had heat shield erosion. And this is still a primary technical driver behind all the delays, which is perfectly reasonable because of course we want our astronauts to survive. NASA is saying that the heat shield performed with a new one that they tested, it's performed within safety margins. The erosion pattern was, they said it's unexpected. I'm not exactly sure what that means. I guess, you know, they, they, there were some findings that weren't 100% what they wanted. Artemis 2 does accept the revised risk model rather than a, a complete redesigned shield. This is not according to NASA, this isn't really a failure. It's just, you know, they're, they're reframing their approach to the whole thing. Bottom line is they are, they feel confident that everything is going to be OK. And in the end, it's not, it's not like a big hardware fix for them. What else is going on in this mission? So the, the re entry speeds remain the the central risk to the astronauts. It's really, you know, that is the, the point where I think most concern has been put on. Orion is still flying farther than any crude spacecraft since Apollo, which, you know, again, it's we're going to be breaking a lot of records here with these Artemis missions. They're saying that communications, life support, navigation and thermal systems are still being validated under these real world conditions. No systems have been de scoped or downgraded, which is fantastic because you'd think that they would be having funding issues, but apparently that's not playing in the timeline is, you know, we're they're keeping it at one month away, which could mean any time they're saying early 2026. I heard that it could be as soon as two weeks. Again, these are all conditional statements. Nobody really knows except the upper echelon. They, I think they, they have a very good idea, but we're not going to find out until they announce the actual date. And again, we don't have a firm launch date right now. The launch windows are extending all the way to April, which means that, you know, they've planned for a bunch of different scenarios. So how does this relate to Artemis 3? Right? Artemis 3 is the big, big one. This is where people land on the moon. So Artemis 2 is a a, you know, gateway mission for Artemis 3. This is absolutely essential. Before we could even think about launching Artemis 3, Artemis 3 needs, in order for it to happen, it needs an absolute 100% success for Artemis 2. SpaceX Starship human landing system readiness, meaning that, that that whole system has to be 100% developed and, and tested and ready to go. And they're saying that they're not going to be simplifying Artemis 3 in any way and are not going to try to accelerate the launch date of Artemis 3, right? They're, they're trying to keep things, you know, they want, they want to use all the technology and they want everything to be tested and all that. So they're, they're not really saying anything about like, hey, let's move the dates up or any of that, which I think is perfectly normal. So what should we expect? We should expect a launch, I'd say within the next two to three months. I think that we should expect an incredible amount of information coming from NASA about, about the missions and the astronauts and them talking to, talking back and forth to Earth. I don't think we'll find out if anything, quote UN quote bad happens if it isn't mission critical. I think it's likely we'll hear about most incidents, but I I don't think we'll hear everything until they get back and they can do a full analysis or whatever. I feel very good about these missions. I mean, there's been so much, you know, time, attention, money and rethinking about everything to make sure that this is as safe as it possibly can be. I feel strong and I'm super excited about the whole thing. I cannot wait to see astronauts leave the planet and go to the moon.
S: Jay, I have a question for you.
J: Go ahead.
S: How are these astronauts going to get through the Van Allen belts, man?
E: Yeah, well, let's ask yourself, let's. Ask. Yeah, we should, we should ask.
J: There is a person in Connecticut, Steve, that seems to have their thumb on this. We should call them up and have them explain to us and and you know, in full detail, like I want to hear the physics.
E: I want to see the math equations. I want to know who Van Allen was. I want to know it all.
C: But also explain it like we're 5th but yeah.
E: Explain it to us like a new film. I care. That's great.
J: But but guys, you know, we we when Artemis 1 launched, I said, hey, guys, this is the beginning of like a new era, right? It is. But this is really the big one, because this is not this is people, it's not just spacecraft. We are sending people all the way to orbiting the moon or or you know, a fly by of the moon. This is this is a big deal. When these systems work, we know, hey, we can get people to and from the moon and that is the game changer.
S: But my big question, my real question, Jay, is what comes after Artemis, right? Because the SLS is not reusable. It's basically a finite program. And when those missions are done, it's done. So isn't the big question what comes after that?
J: Well. We we kind of know, right? They mean that the the big brushstroke here was that they make the they make the Gateway platform around the moon. They're going to make some type of some type of encampment on the moon, right. You know, they're not going to call it space station alpha or anything that we want or was it moon based alpha? That's what we want. They're not going to call it that. They have some other stupid name, but but I think the ultimate goal here is to send people to Mars, right? I mean, that still seems to be there. I would have expected defunding to completely total all this a year ago. My prediction was, man, we're not going to see any of these things happen. So the fact that it's still happening to me is wonderful. I think we should all revel in it. It's going to be scientific achievement after scientific achievement. And, you know, we're having people, you know, with the insane bravery to put themselves on a, on a rocket to go fly around the moon. And then the next step is the moon.
S: Yeah. All right, again, a story that we have to continue to follow. See how it unfolds. But yeah, within a month or so, we could be seeing another rocket actually take people to the moon. That'd be cool.
E: That is a man. Yep, I right, our lifetime.
EPA Change (44:42)
S: All right, Cara, I understand that the EPA is tweaking some of their rules.
C: I know. So we go from one federal agency to another and I don't know, even I, I'm excited for your excitement, Jay, but I can't help but be so skeptical when it comes to anything that the federal government right now is funding this. This story is disheartening. And since it was published by The New York Times on January 12th, so we're recording this on the 15th. So three days ago, an investigative report was published. Since then, spokespeople from the EPA have fired back. And there's been a lot of complexity, but let's try and get to a bottom of it. So an article that was written and reported and written by Maxine, I think Josselow, maybe Josselow. I'm not sure how to pronounce her last name. Sorry about that. Entitled EPA to stop considering live saved when setting rules on air pollution was published and she references internal EPA documents that were obtained by the New York Times. I'm not going to dig deep into how journalists, you know, source their information and, and you know, how they utilize different sources. I will say that the EPA is a very large organization and even though a lot of people have been fired from the EPA over the last how long has it been now? One year only. Oh my God.
E: Yeah, almost, almost 360 days.
C: Yeah, even though a lot of people have been fired and removed from their posts, there are still a fair amount. I have very dear friends working at the EPA who are struggling, you know, with their own politics and and feeling muzzled within the organization. So it wouldn't surprise me if there were some leaks and some different documents being shared outside of the organization. So that said, basically these documents, these internal documents stated that the EPA's new policy is to stop calculating the gains that are made in health benefits. OK, So it's kind of backward. It's like a double negative, but it's AI guess a single positive. So what the EPA has historically done is they've calculated gains from health benefits that come from curbing pollutants. Specifically, they're talking about PM 2.5. We've talked about that before on the show Particulate matter 2.5. So that's anything that's in the air that's 2.5 microns or smaller, that means it's small enough to get into your lungs. And also specifically ozone. So historically, when different industries that produce pollutants have been regulated by the EPA, the amount of benefit to health that is calculated by adding lives or adding years of life has been a part of that calculation in terms of financial regulation. And historically that number has fluctuated like it was lowest. I think I was trying to dig a little bit, but in recent years it was lowest under Bush. It raised up again under Obama, and there was even new regulation that was put into place as recently as February 2024 where stronger standards were in place. So this was during the Biden Harris administration for soot pollution. And all of this is based on like actuarial statistics, right? So anytime you read an article about this, so let's say this EPA press release that was put out in February of 2024, they stated that their new air quality standard at the time was going to be strengthened by moving required levels from 12 micrograms per cubic meter to 9 micrograms per cubic meter. And of course, they calculated there that this would save lives. They said it would prevent up to 4500 premature deaths and 290,000 lost work days. And then they calculated that that would yield $46 billion in net health benefits by 2032. And so that's based on like, what is the cost of a life? So it's really interesting if you look back at the literature, like I found an old article from 2011 where the new cost of the life during that administration went up to 9.1 million under, like I mentioned, George W Bush, it was 6.8 million. In 2008 it was 5 million. So it's fluctuates based on politics, but also based on new calculations. So what the EPA is claiming or not claiming, what the EPA internal documents are saying, is that the the human life is going to be kind of, they're not saying a human life is worth $0.00, but they're saying that the calculation that we're going to use for our policies and regulatory work is going to be set at $0.00. And that's down significantly from, you know, 9,000,000 per person. We've talked a little bit in the past about externalized costs, right? Like social costs of carbon, for example, and how that number has fluctuated over the years. Just last year, the White House said that the social cost of carbon was going to be dropped down to 0. But now saying that the cost of a human life, at least when considering air pollution, is $0.00 is really frightening because obviously, what are the big outcomes of that? Like what? What happens when you set a human life as $0.00 when it comes to calculating taxes and regulatory expenses on big businesses like coal plants in oil refineries?
S: Yeah, well, now you're only going to be considering the economic costs, not the societal costs, basically.
C: Yeah. And so now all the sudden, we're back to A, and we've talked about this, but we're back to a system in place where there aren't 0 externalized costs at all, right? That just, they're only responsible for the cost of making their product and selling their product and not for all of the detrimental outcomes of those products. Here's something that's interesting. Since this article was written, and again, it was only three days ago as of this recording, The Hill published a new article saying that the EPA denies the reports that it will no longer consider harm to humans. So the the EPA administrator Lee Zeldin both spoke recently on I think X and also no, this is mostly on X wrote that this story is quote another dishonest fake news claim courtesy of the New York Times. He also wrote quote, not only is it the in all caps exact opposite of this headline, the actual truth, but the Times is already in all caps very well aware that EPA will be considering lives saved when setting pollution limits. And he called it entirely untrue. And he said it was a cute BS headline. But then the spokesperson or a spokesperson for the EPA, Carolyn Horon, when she was interviewed, I think by the Times, Yeah, for comment. This was her statement. EPA, like the agency always has, is still considering the impacts that PM 2.5 and ozone emissions have on human health. Not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health.
S: Yes it does.
C: Yes, it does. So they're claiming, they're trying to have it both ways. They're claiming that they're still considering it. And when you look at an official statement that was put out by the EPA and I just pulled this, it's called the economic impact analysis for the New Source Performance Standard standards review. Economic impact analysis for the new source performance standards review for stationary combustion turbines final rule. And this was just published, you know, this month when you search deep buried in here, the language says the EPA historically provided point estimates instead of just ranges are only quantifying emissions, which leads the public to believe the agency has a better understanding of the monetize impacts of exposure to PM 2.5 and ozone than in reality. Therefore, to rectify this error, the EPA is no longer monetizing benefits from PM 2.5 and ozone. But we'll continue to quantify the emissions until the agency is confident enough in the modeling to properly monetize those impacts. And then they restate that three different ways. So basically, they're trying to have it both ways. They're saying, don't worry, we're monitoring this, but we don't feel like our numbers are good. So instead of continuing to utilize what we think are overblown numbers, read from a political person perspective, we're going to remove them all together until we deem that we can add them back, which I'm not buying. And it's like it's in the same sentence. It refutes itself again. Caroline Carolyn Horan's quote literally says not monetizing does not equal not considering or not valuing the human health impact. No, that's what the word value means.
S: Totally. I mean, there's again, like the common saying, don't tell me your priorities, Show me your budget. Like what you put a dollar value on is your priority. It is literally how you value things. And just saying that we value it even though we're literally saying it has $0.00 value is meaningless. That that's just, that's just politics.
C: And I think that there's a really there was it wrapped it up better than anything I could read. But Representative Mike Thompson, who is represents California's 4th District, put out a statement after the New York Times article was published. And I just want to read it because I think it really summarizes what this means going forward. He said the EPA's decision to stop accounting for the lives saved by clean air rules is a dangerous abandonment of its core mission protecting human health. For decades, well established science has shown that reducing air pollution prevents asthma attacks, hospitalizations, chronic and premature deaths. Ignoring those benefits while counting only industry costs assigns a value of 0 to human life and makes it easier for polluters to do more harm. The EPA exists to protect people and the environment, not to promote corporate profits. Any cost benefit analysis that excludes human life is dishonest and contrary to decades of precedent. Clean air is not negotiable and obviously OK. There's some strong language there and it sounds political, but ultimately the point stands. Why was the EPA even founded? Why do we have an Environmental Protection Agency?
E: Yeah, that was established.
S: It's not the Corporate Profit Protection Agency.
C: No, right. It's, it's a citizen. It's, it's a, it's an agency that stands because we decided collectively as a democracy that we wanted our tax dollars, or at least a portion of them to go towards clean air and, and all of the benefits, not just a human life, but across the board that come from protecting our environment. And this is, yeah, a huge bastardization. And again, we know that this happens and we know that the priority shift and it gets weaker and it gets stronger depending on shifts in in different political administrations. But like the laundry list of unprecedented things that are happening to science under this administration, this is, you know, pretty beyond the pale. And we haven't seen anything like this in a, in a very, if at all actually, at least with the EPA.
S: Yeah, again, not you say, not surprising, but definitely disheartening.
C: And we'll, we'll have, you know, measurable impact like people again, it's, it's, it's not a stretch to say people will.
S: But even if you take a purely economic perspective, reducing illness is a huge money saver.
E: It's an investment.
S: Yeah, it's an investment. You're reducing direct healthcare costs and lost productivity. So yeah, I mean the programs that reduce harm to health, health generally pay for themselves.
C: Oh yeah, they have a huge ROI. The issue is when the stakeholders are the the American people or even the citizens of the globe, that argument holds up. But when you're concerned about short term profit for lobbying groups, when you're concerned when your stakeholders are, you know, corporate stakeholders and not the American people, that's not the ROI they're looking at. They want different statistics. What's going to save the, you know, the people who are funding their campaigns the most money? Well, we don't have to worry about Health and Human safety.
S: All right. Thanks, Cara. Well, everyone, we're going to take a quick break from our show to talk about our sponsor this week, Quints.
J: Quints is a company that sells luxury essentials and they're actually affordable. Cara and I have first hand knowledge about this. Their products are made from premium material, they come from trusted factories. They have very, very high standards and I really love this company.
C: Me too. And so for the holidays this year, I picked up the Mongolian Cashmere full zip sweater for my partner and it was completely affordable. I mean like a third of the cost that you would get it in a traditional retail store. Absolutely beautiful. And he's been wearing it literally every day since he opened it. He loves it so much. I think it's going to be his new staple for sure.
E: So refresh your winter wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com/SG Q for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada too. That's QUINC. e.com/SGU Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com/SGU.
S: All right, guys, let's get back to the show. Hi Bob, This is a story we've gone back and forth on a few times.
Life On Red Dwarf Planets (59:21)
S: What are the prospects of life on planets around red dwarf stars?
B: It's funny you say back and forth because I wanted to say in the most recent tennis match of life in the universe is more likely. No, Life is less likely. No. It's like back and forth, back and forth. So it's not a surprise. There's a new study suggesting that that complex multicellular life like Earth's is less likely in our Milky Way Galaxy than we thought since our most common stars. Right. Dwarfs basically cannot build up enough oxygen for what's called the great oxygenation event, like happened on Earth. Yeah, and, and was critical for the appearance or evolution of multicellular life. So this is from some study written by some scientists, blah, blah, blah. OK, first I'm going to upload the more core, the core concept concepts that you're going to need into your wetware. So they have red dwarf stars. We've mentioned these a few times. These these are stars that are the most common stars in all the night skies throughout the Milky Way. 70% of those stars are these red dwarf stars. Our eyes have actually never seen one. Because they emit mostly infrared light and they're small and they're dim. So we've never actually seen them with our naked eyes. They also live far longer than our sun. Get this. I didn't quite understand or know this. Trillions of trillions, trillions, trillions. So it's such a slow burn that they just last for ridiculous amounts of times. Our sun is like what, 10 billion years? So that was that's really dramatic. Next is this idea of the Great Oxygenation event. It's also called the Great Oxidation event. And also some other names talked about this a couple times. So let me refresh your memory. The great oxygenation event, not to be confused with the great meatball event. It's not a discreet event, right? This is something that didn't happen one day. This took literally millions of years to to play out, but it did happen around say, you know, 2.42 and a half billion years ago. Is the estimate a good reference point for approximately when this this happened, you know, when it occurred? Now this refers to the appearance of lots of free oxygen in our atmosphere. And as you might think, this was quite important. And this was largely due to cyanobacteria, which uses fancy new tool that they invented called photosynthesis, because you've heard of that. So this produced this produced enough of this poisonous byproduct called oxygen to fill the atmosphere with enough of it to to literally remake life on Earth from anaero aerobic to aerobic. And this was this was very roughly like jet fuel in the atmosphere, allowing the evolution of complex energy intensive metabolisms, multi cellular life like us to evolve. So yeah, this was pretty, pretty important in our in Earth's history. Now the time it took for this slow build up of oxygen, it these cyanine bacteria just didn't create enough oxygen for this oxygenation event. It was a slow build up. It's hard to say how long it took to reach critical mass, but estimates put it around 700 million years for this build up to happen Enough. OK, so that's that's the down though Now we can segue to the actual study itself. So these scientists essentially did a very cool thought experiment. This is fascinating. What if ancient Earth was swapped into a solar system with a red dwarf star and they likened it to with the Trappist one star. That's that solar system is about 40 light years away, like basically right in our backyard. But this is a red dwarf star, so so if we did that billions of years ago, how would that impact the Earth's great oxygenation event? And also how would that impact the famous Cambrian explosion that happened about 1.9 billion years later, where the fossil records essentially show a lot of these new multicellular body plans. First time we had seen them in in the fossil record. Some of these body plans of course, just disappeared, never to really be seen again are for much longer anyway. And but also many of them also set the stage for much of animal body plans for today. So so as you know, photosynthesizers on Earth take advantage of our Suns energetic wavelengths of light. We've cut, we've covered for the photosynthesis. George plays a photosynthesizer. Yeah, there you go. Photosynthesizers on an Earth orbiting a red dwarf star, however, would only see about 1% of those. Those energetic wavelengths that that our Earth sees, our photosynthesizer sees. So 99% of these wavelengths would be longer and weaker wavelengths of a typical red dwarf star. So they would be. So the the spectrum would be quite different if you're photosynthesizing on this hypothetical Earth. So what does that mean for a hypothetical, these hypothetical microbes on an Earth orbiting this red dwarf? It means that the time it took for the oxygen to build up and create this oxygenation event wouldn't be 700 million years like our Earth, but something as they calculate, you know, back of the envelope real quick extrapolation, 63 billion years on this hypothetical Earth. So the huge, a dramatic increase, kind of of a ridiculous number, but it just goes to show you how inefficient photosynthesizers on on Earth would be dealing with this infrared, infrared light just take a super long time. The Cambrian explosion of complex life on this hypothetical Earth would take instead of 1.7 billion years as it took here to perhaps 172 billion years to happen after the oxygenation event. So clearly a hugely dramatic increase in the time for these huge events to occur on this hypothetical Earth. So how I mean, how screwed up is that? But don't worry guys, it gets better before it gets a lot worse again. So it gets better if you do this, if you add in the really nuanced details about photosynthesis and how it really works, you know, if you include things like photo inhibition and and low light adaptation, things that I really don't need to go into detail about. But if you cover those, if you add that to the model, the calculations, the numbers get a lot better. So instead of the ridiculous 63 billion years to reach the build up of oxygen for the oxygenation event that goes down to 3 billion years with this new recalculation. So and also instead of 172 billion years to reach a Cambrian like explosion event, it might take something like 7 billion years around their give or take literally a few billion years still. So the numbers are a lot better right with this recalculation, but still it's much, much longer than it took on the on the earth. But except, except when you consider one thing that kind of blows all those numbers out of the water potentially. Now imagine this photosynthetic life on this hypothetical Earth that don't release oxygen, right? The first ones that we had on our Earth, they're photosynthetic, but they're not. But they're not really. They're not really releasing oxygen yet. They would have a huge competitive advantage, almost a game changing advantage. They think so. So not only might they evolve first like they did on the Earth, but in this case they would have access to a huge range of infrared wavelengths that would give them an immense competitive advantage, right? Because the the infrared wavelengths on the Earth now are nothing compared to what a red dwarf would would create. So if you evolved on this hypothetical Earth, you would have access and you can and you can photosynthesize those infrared waves, then you would have a huge advantage because the waves extend, you know, deep into the spectrum. It's a broad range that they that they could have that they could access that would give them a huge advantage potentially, you can't say definitive of course, but potentially allowing them to dominate most ecological niches and preventing the biosphere potentially from becoming oxygenated. So it essentially just would not even happen. We would more likely these scientists think we would very likely have a scenario where you could have, you know, non oxygen, you know, emitting microbes dominating dominating the planet and therefore no great oxygenation event, no Cambrian like explosion and no and no complex life. So all right, so the bottom let me just give you the bottom line after all of my jibber jabber here. The bottom line 70% of the stars in our Milky Way do not seem amenable at all to evolving multicellular life that uses oxygen for earth type planets. So that's the bottom line. So it's this part of the tennis match. You know, this back down where life is less likely. I find, of course, we all find very frustrating and discouraging to hear all these these these, you know, detailed studies saying that, yeah, life is less likely than we thought it, right? You get kind of bummed out, especially so in this case. This one hurts a little bit extra because it literally impacts many of the stars that dominate our Galaxy. Are these these red dwarfs which are which are all over the place. So that's like, damn, man, if that's really true with the worst case scenarios are not good. But as we know, got to throw a little, you know, little reality in here. To a certain extent, this is a very narrow case, right? This this is specific to an earth, like planet and oxygen based earth life. And that's all that we really know that that's the life that we know that that fits those categories. There's so much about life and the the potential for life that's potentially out there that's very different from the earth. I'm sure we are just not even scratching the surface of what of what's possible. So so I wouldn't be too discouraged by this. And you know, I don't know, Steve, what do you think is there? Are you would you, were you very discouraged by this or what's your thoughts?
S: I was not discouraged by it, but for a reason you're not going to like, and that is I've already written off the red dwarfs mostly okay, you have all right, because of the issue that early on in the life of red dwarfs, they're magnetically variable and chaotic, and they would likely strip the atmosphere off of any nearby plant, any planet in the Goldilocks zone. So the only real hope for a for a terrestrial planet around a red dwarf and a planet with an atmosphere is that either it migrated in from the outer solar system later on in the star's life or reconstituted it's atmosphere somehow after it was stripped away. Neither of those are very likely, so I think that chances are this is just one more knock against them. But chances are, I don't think red dwarfs are going to be a life friendly star, right? Unless we're talking about life that's only in the oceans and it's only chemosynthetic or whatever. Like it's just not land based oxygen breathing life like we know it.
B: Yeah, that's a good point. Because we have chemosynthetic life on Earth not based on photosynthesis at all. And yeah, they would be, they would be probably be fine.
S: Could there be multicellular chemosynthetic life?
B: That's that's a great question. Yeah. That's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write that one down. That's really interesting. That should go on our book. So. So.
E: Or science fiction.
B: So, Steve, so so you're saying like a rocky planet on the outskirts of the Goldilocks zone would still have problems with the Yeah, with the active red dwarf star?
S: I think so because Bob Goldilocks zone is not big because they're not that bright.
B: Yeah, it's close in. It's close in because it's such a dim, it's such a small, it's such a small star.
S: Plus there's the tidally locked problem. It's just, they're just bad locations.
B: Yeah, they're not great. And this just makes it makes it even worse. And oh, by the way, these red dwarf stars are about, they go up to about .6 solar masses. So they never really get too close that close to a solar mass. And that the lightest ones are very light, something like point O2 solar masses. So they, they've got a broad range there, but they're tiny. They're tiny. So, so there, so there we go right. But still, regardless of any of the things we talked about, I think microbial life is is all over this goddamn universe, all over. It just seems that's likely. Universe is crawling with more. Crawl. But they're less, it's less interesting though, obviously than multicellular life. So we'll see what happens always.
S: All right, Thanks, Bob.
Malaysia Air Search Resumes (1:11:22)
- Everything you need to know about the latest search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 aircraft [5]
S: So Evan, tell us about the update on the Malaysia Air search that they start that thing back up again.
E: They, they did start it up again. It's and, and I think we're all familiar with this, but just in case, because it is one of the most, well, infamous modern mysteries of aviation. Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which was a Boeing 7777. It carried 239 people and it vanished. But you know, practically on March 8th 2014, this was a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Have any of you watched the Netflix documentary on the on MH370?
C: Was this this was the one about the Boeing Max or no?
E: No, this was good. No, no.
C: Was that Singapore?
E: Specifically the Malaysia Airlines flight that that disappeared. I think there were five chapters in this minis in this miniseries about it was it was pretty well done, but it was, you know, it's a couple years old and you know, it kind of, you know, left. It's a it's a mystery. So you know, you don't you don't we don't know what happened, but here are the details. Here's the history. In case you don't know. Their last transmission from the plane was about 40 minutes after it took off. Captain's name was Zahir Ahmad Shah, and he signed off with goodnight Malaysian 370. And this was as the plane, it entered Vietnamese airspace, but then it failed to check in with controllers from Vietnam. Shortly thereafter, the plane's transponder was turned off. And when the plane's transponder goes off, that makes it very difficult to track at that point. But military radar picked up the plane, and they said that the flight path suddenly turned back over northern Malaysia and Penang Island and then out to the Andaman Sea. Andaman Sea towards the tip of the Indonesian island of Sumatra. And that's when radar contact was lost entirely. And what they're saying also is that after that, a satellite over the Indian Ocean continued to pick up pings from the flight every hour for the next 06 or so hours, 7 hours after takeoff specifically. And then the those signals suggested that the plane took a dramatic turn S into the depths of the Indian Ocean, you know, some of the most remote places on on the planet. And that was the last, last blip of information that we had on it. And almost immediately a massive search got underway and they were unfortunately not able to find the aircraft. They spent two years looking for the aircraft. It could not it could not be fined, could not be found. And then in the preceding years, they some 30 pieces of suspected aircraft debris have been collected and they've been able to confirm that three fragments were from this flight serial number or some kind of clearly identifying mark 3 fragments, three pieces of the plane. And that's that's where we've been. But now the search is starting up again. December 30, 2025. Using modern autonomous underwater technology and a refined target zone, the government of Malaysia has approved a renewed deep seed seabed search for the missing plane. Ocean Infinity is the name of the company that's been contracted for them to do this. They're a marine robotics company. They had previously conducted a search in 2018, but they've refined their equipment. They haven't, I looked online, they have not said how they've upgraded and, and improved their technology since then. But I don't know if it's because they're just trying to, you know, keep it from the competitors or whatnot. But who knows. That's what they're claiming. They're claiming they're using their latest greatest technology to resume a search again, They are not charging any fees for this resume search, which is really nice. Only if there is some kind of something deemed to be a success, then they'll send them the bill for the for the work. But other than that, they're going to be doing this of their own accord to I guess, you know, in a way test their new equipment, but also in a hopes that the information they have it plus the technology that they have will lead to its finding. It's supposed to be a 55 day mission. So we will have an update on this maybe in a couple months and see what they were able to pick up. It would be enormous news if they were able to make some kind of declaration that they have something confirmed here. And it will be that that will be, that will be front page news everywhere still, because there's so much mystery behind this, not only as to why it, it disappeared in the 1st place. You know, I mean, for the most part, most, most airline disasters do are investigated and you're able to investigate them and figure out where they are. But this particular one, they just don't have enough information on it. And do you remember when this was all happening? There were some wild and crazy ideas being floated out there almost immediately, like what happened? What happened to this plane? A lot of conspiracy theories, which is why it sort of has a sceptical angle to it as well, right? There's one claim that said it landed secretly was flown to Diego Garcia, which is AUS military base island in the Indian Ocean, because there was some sort of technology on board that the United States government wanted to procure or keep safe or keep out of the keep out of the hands of enemies or what have you, right? There was also another tale that was spun that it landed and was tied in with another flight, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine in July 2014. And they're they say, OK, So what happened here is that that actual aircraft was not flight MH 17. That was the real MH370. And they swapped it out as part of, again, some sort of sinister plot of some of some kind. And then, of course, you have the extraordinary kinds of kinds of kinds of kinds of claims that are out there, including that might have been swallowed by a black hole. I don't know if anybody remembers that being bantered about. And this was and and this was all because of just an innocuous thing that was said on CNN. Don Lemon, remember he used to be with with CNN. So Lemon mentioned receiving Twitter messages from viewers suggesting the plane could have been sucked into a black hole quote or experienced something like the TV show Lost. And then that OK, now people's imaginations are totally running away with them with themselves and and before you know it, all kinds of ideas out there about crazy stuff teleportation videos. That was a theory that saw that came actually back to life on TikTok in 20/20/23 due to viral leaked, supposedly leaked videos showing 3 orbs circling the plane before it vanished in a flash of light. As you know, as opposed to being some kind of visual effects that somebody just conjured on, on a computer somewhere, right? So there's all this sort of skeptical ideas and, and, and topics that, you know, that we touch on that are tied into the story as well. And that's normal in a sense for a mystery. Of course you're going to have range of ideas from things that are entirely plausible to outright lunacy and everywhere in between. So we'll know maybe in a few months if we're if this latest search is going to has yielded any new information.
S: What percentage of the ocean floor has been mapped with high resolution modern sonar?
E: Less than 1% would be my guess.
U: 5%.
S: Very low 27%.
B: Oh, that's impressive. That's a lot. They've improved.
S: It since the last time I checked this, yeah, so, but that's still a quarter basically. So we haven't met all of it. The Nippon Foundation GEBCO Seabed 2030 project, they plan to map the whole the whole floor by 20-30. What percentage of the ocean has been explored through visual exploration with with submersibles, whether crude or not crude?
E: No, that's probably less than 1%, yeah.
S: .001. Percent.
E: That's probably what I was thinking.
S: Yeah, yeah. Very, almost nothing. Basically, statistically nothing.
J: So, Steve, why? Why would we explore outer space if we haven't explored our own planet?
E: Our.
S: Own planet Steve so if but if that's true if we do map the rest of the sea floor by 2030, won't we find it by by doing that and and also we'll find what's her name's plane. Amelia Earhart. 'S plane, yeah.
E: Possibly.
B: What's the resolution though?
E: And think so.
S: This is with high resolution, high res.
E: High high res.
B: That but even high res, if there's if it's like some if it's like, you know, under the sea floor or or just so it's been so long where you'd have to real, you know, be hard to spot.
S: This is a this is a jump boat. This is a jet from only what? How many years ago was it Evan?
E: 20/14/20.
S: 141112 years old.
B: Regrettable.
S: Yeah. So that should you know, Earhart's plane. I could see you might be a little camouflaged by. Yeah, the processes of the ocean, but.
E: I mean, at least you had an idea, maybe on a flight route, where to search for Amelia Earhart's plane. This thing just took off S to the Indian Ocean. Yeah. You know, and in the, I mean really that is a difficult area of the planet to search.
B: Yeah, and see, don't forget, big sea floor doesn't want you to find it. You're not going.
E: To find it, there is that too all.
S: Right. Thanks, Evan.
E: Yep.
Special Report (1:20:32)
RFK Jr’s Recent Anti-science https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/rfk-decimates-vaccine-schedule/
S: So I actually planned on talking this week about two recent initiatives by RFK in junior and in his auspices as the HHS secretary. But I I decided I had to cover the the Donut Lab solid-state battery instead. So I'm just going to refer you to my blog posts on these two topics. RFK put out a new food pyramid, which is not completely nuts, but it's like most nutritional and pseudoscience, it's a mixed bag of stuff, right? But it is not evidence based. It is basically whatever RFK fixes, correct. And he also put out new policies that is essentially going to decimate the vaccine schedule, removing several vaccines from the vaccine schedule. But I wrote about both of these on a science based medicine, one this Wednesday, one last Wednesday. So just look for those articles there. The links will also be in the show notes. I just want to as a big picture. So all the details will be in those posts. But the big picture is RFK clearly is following a certain process and that process is just trust me bro, that the process is he doesn't listen to experts, he doesn't listen to scientific evidence. He doesn't understand scientific evidence or how to interpret it. He is a conspiracy adult thinker and he is putting out now these official U.S. policy is whatever conspiracy nonsense he happens to believe in rather than being an expert reviewed science based policy. That's what we have. And these are just two blatant examples of that and we should expect more of this. And in fact, if you've been paying attention or reading our articles on science based medicine, it's pretty clear that RFK is is engaging in a relentless plan to completely destroy the vaccine infrastructure in our country. Despite what he says, despite what he's promised, despite what he said when he was interviewed, you know, by the Senate, that is exactly what he is doing. It is blatantly obvious. We have been documenting it for the past year and he and he's continuing in that. In that vein, you have to be in denial not to think that he's doing that at this point. He's, you know, not going to outright ban vaccines, but he's doing everything he can short of that.
E: He's gutting the. System, yeah, to, to, to offers the system that we have, right?
S: Yeah. He's pulling every lever he can to reduce the number of vaccines that people are getting.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:23:09)
S: OK, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?
J: OK guys, last week I played this noisy. That's a pretty crazy sound.
S: Yeah, sounds like something's spinning up. I know it's not specific, but.
E: A turbine.
J: Well, all right, so, you know, this was a unusually light couple of weeks. I think people are still recovering from the holidays. But I did get some fun guesses in here. I have a listener named Burkhalp who said hey y'all Berkhalp from Hamburg in Germany here. This week's noisy is surely something spinning again, brought up to a high speed and then suddenly released. I've never heard one in real life, but I'm going to guess it is an electrical clay pigeon thrower. Hope you had better New Year's start than Maduro. Oh.
E: My.
J: God, does anybody know what an electrical clay pigeon thrower is?
E: I don't want a clay. Pigeon.
J: So it's supposed to be when you plug in, right?
E: I suppose as opposed to manually pulling a a release.
J: Yeah, it's something that it's an arm that like a a metal arm mechanism you used to to throw up a clay frisbee like thing that you would use to shoot like with a shotgun or whatever for sport. But yeah, I don't know. I I couldn't find one online and certainly couldn't find any sounds of it. So I just don't know. But that's that was an interesting guess. A frequent flyer here, Michael Blaney wrote in Hi Jay, Happy New Year. He's he was missed the Star Wars sound by less than a hair's breadth, but it misses a miss. He said the new one sounds annoyingly familiar when you reveal it. I'm sure I'll recognize it, but I have to guess something. So I'm guessing it's the isolated engineer noise from the classic 80s Sega game Outrun. Again, I could not find the noise that he's referencing, but I think it's interesting and I always love video game references, another listener named Rich Wrigley wrote in. He says. Guessing I might be too late, but I think this noisy is the sound of The Time Machine that Albert Einstein makes firing up in the video game Command and Conquer.
E: More video.
J: I have friends that have played that game. I don't remember. I don't think I played. I don't know. I'm not even sure at this point. But I will take your word for it. But that is not correct. We have not had a correct guess yet. And then the last one I have here is from John Kelly. He said it was great to meet you last weekend in Seattle. We'd love it if the SGU made a trip up to Vancouver sometime. If you guys remember this was the the dad who was there with his son.
E: Oh yeah, yeah.
J: Yeah, you must remember him because he was at all of our events and he.
E: Remember. Yes, Max. I think the boy's name is Max.
J: Yeah, correct his. So he continues. Max wanted to put in a guest for the January 3rd. Who's that noisy? We think it sounds like some sort of turnbine or spending machine. Final guess is a test engine that gets to a certain point and then fails and he he said. It's a good guess, hopes. We had a safe ride home, which we did. So first of all, I'd like to say a couple of things. One, seeing a parent bring a young person with them to an SGU event always gets my attention because First off, it's just awesome to see a parent spending alone time with their kids. It's important to do that. I think everyone, everyone involved benefits greatly from the whole thing. But bringing your son or daughter doesn't matter. But bringing your child to a skeptic conference or a skeptic meet up or a live podcast recording or whatever, I don't think Max is ever going to forget that weekend.
B: Nor nor all the new curse words we taught him.
J: That's really I. Know we have to apologize.
C: I doubt those were new for Max.
J: Probably not, but maybe not in the density that we had.
C: New and creative ways to use them for sure.
J: But Max really seemed to be paying attention and and seemed interested and you know, I asked them afterwards and they both said they had a great time. I'd love to hear that. So anyway, Max, I appreciate the guess you are incorrect, but let me tell you that most of science efforts of scientific efforts end up being incorrect. This is on the pathway to finding correct answers. So you're doing the right thing. This week's noisy did not have a a winner. And I'll tell you what it is. This is this is another another thing. It's similar to a noisy I had a couple weeks ago, but I couldn't help myself. It's I think it's one of the coolest sounds I've heard in a while. This is called friction welding. I'm sure a lot of you have heard about it. Let me give you a quick explanation of what it is. So friction welding is when you essentially like, imagine if you had two, two metal parts that were being spun up against each other, meaning one's spinning one way and one's spinning the other way. Or one is stationary and the other one is spinning really fast. And that friction actually heats up the metal to the point where both sides, the left and the right are the up and the down. They end up getting red hot and then they, they fuse because they, they liquefy a little bit and they fuse and they stop, they stop the spinning right then. So that's what you're hearing in this. There's a couple of interesting noises in here that I'd like to point out. That's them just spinning it up. Right. RPM going up? What was that? Like some wizard with a lightning bolt.
E: That's where it's with the DeLorean. Hit 88 miles an hour and opened the time rift.
B: And with a circuit breaker.
J: When that's that's basically the moment that the two things hit the critical temperature and they kind of bond together.
E: I see.
J: Yeah, very cool. You know, I, I guess this is a, a common thing. I've seen videos of this for, you know, many, many examples of this. I guess it's common. I don't know, you know, again, I I really don't know how how useful it is in in modern manufacturing and everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is something that's as broadly used for different purposes. But very cool sound. I'd like to thank Cameron for sending that in. I got a noisy for you guys this week. This noisy happens to be sent in from a person that we know. His name is Ian.
S: Yeah.
J: Yeah. This Ian, not a guy, not some rando Ian.
S: This is R Ian of Watermelon fan.
E: Yeah, we, we, yeah, we'd say his last name, but he has 12 of them.
J: He won't like yeah. That's. Right. Nobody really knows anything about this guy. He won't like hearing this, but he's an awesome guy and he does incredible work here at the SDU and has a enabled us to do, you know?
S: Here's our tech guru.
J: Yeah, he's fantastic. Now, to be fair, Ian was the first person that sent it to me, but a lot of people sent this in, so I get it. There's probably just dropped on the Internet somewhere and a lot of people identified this as a cool noisy.
E: I'll be the ones to guess. Correct.
J: Well, I was gonna say, if you really, if you already knew what this was because you just saw it, do me a favor and just give someone else a chance, because I think it would be. I want to hear the guesses where people are trying to guess what it is like. It's the reach. It's not the ACT. It's not the actual correct guess that's interesting to me as much as the other guesses of people not knowing what it is. So let's see what the randos out there that don't know what it is, what they think it is. So if you if you think you heard a cool noisy this week or you'd like to send in your guests, you can e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, it's a freaking amazing milestone moment right now. Not only did we launch Political reality, it's a new politics podcast that we launched. It's a video podcast. You can also get the audio version of it. You can go to politicalrealityitsyoutube.com/politicalreality. We are on all the socials. You can find us. You can go to politicalrealitypodcast.com. That'll be a link for you to get to our videos and to the latest audio podcast as well. You should be able to find it in any of your in any of your podcast apps out there. If there's one that you use that isn't showing it, you can e-mail us at info@theskepticsguide.org so we can see if we can make it happen. But there is something even bigger than that, Steve.
S: What is that, Jay?
J: We. Are now selling tickets to the Australia Conference. The the.
S: Nauticon Australia.
J: Yeah, so it's skepticon #42 and Nauticon. This is the latest version of Nauticon. It'll be happening in Sydney, Australia. So this conference is going to be happening on this year, 2026. On July 22nd, we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza. This is at a separate venue. It's a separate ticketed event. Then on July 23rd, 24th and 25th we will have the main conference. The 23rd, we're going to have the the boardroom event.
E: Yeah, it's an event in which we invite you, the attendees, to come and join us to play board games of all kinds with the entire team, with the entire team that's coming down and who knows, maybe a few special guests. So it's a time to, you know, be social, have a good time right around the gaming table, and you're going to be able to choose which games. We'll have more information on that coming up on how we're going to choose the games, but ultimately the attendees will be the ones who pick them.
J: So that's in the the mid to late afternoon. Then at 7:00 PM we will have the conference VIP event, which is going to happen from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. You could buy tickets to that as well. And then at 9:00 PM, it's open up to anyone that's attending the conference that has purchased a ticket to the main conference. And that could go as late as you want pretty much. And then the next morning, we'll the next two mornings and all day we'll be having our not a con conference. It's going to be specific to Sydney and it's going to be different than the other ones. Maybe a couple of crisscross things, but we're already talking about all the cool things that we want to do. We have a ton of ideas. As usual, George, Rob, Brian Wecht and Andrea Jones Roy will be joining us. And if you didn't know, Andrea is Steve's Co host on the Political Reality Podcast. There's a lot of fun happening. We really hope that you can join us. Oh yeah, don't let me forget. First of all, you can go to the OK blah, blah, blah. You're going to go to nadaconcon.com. OK, If you're in the US, you can go to nauticoncon.com or basically anywhere, but I would expect people who are already familiar with the website, you can go there. We'll link you over to the Australian Skeptics website, or if you're in Australia, I'm sure you already know the website. Just go to the Australian Skeptics website to see all the information and the ticket purchasing. If you have any problems whatsoever purchasing tickets, just e-mail us at info@theskepticsguide.org. We'll help you out with that. I'm sure that some people will run into a couple of hiccups here and there. And there's one last thing, Steve, I hear on the rumor mail that Doctor Carl is going to be there with us that for the conference. Nice. So Carl's awesome Doctor Carl. I'm pretty sure it's going to happen. I mean, we've talked to him. He said yes, but you know, the, the people like him or you know, they're, they're busy and things come up or whatever. But like he's confirmed that he's going to do it and we are going to reach out to him to see if he wants to get involved with any of our other events. Oh, and I forgot, Steve, we're also doing a live SDU podcast recording that'll be happening one hour on Friday today and one hour on Saturday. These are other options that you could pick all these different ticketing options, but most importantly, you could just buy the tickets to the main conference and you'll see us do everything that you want. The New Zealand conference is in play right now. Two guys, I'm talking to the main contact out in New Zealand. We are not 100% done with the planning on that, but it's going to happen very soon. I'm hoping with the next, you know, couple of weeks that we're going to going to be able to give you the link and everything to buy tickets to that as well. This is all happening. Keep your ears perked. We will give you more information as it comes in.
S: OK, thank you Jay.
Emails (1:35:09)
S: Guys, we're going to do 1 quick e-mail. This one comes from Vanessa who writes. I've been listening to you guys for many years and now I have published a paper that you might find interesting. Hope you enjoy, particularly Steve since he, I know he loves Bert. Then she gives a link to the paper, including the Open Access. Here's I'll just give you The upshot of the paper. It's a study of memory, right? And they're comparing the ability of people to remember associations of bird names and other words, right. And they're comparing birders to non birders. So what do you think the effect of being a birder has on your ability to remember bird names?
E: A very. Large. Positive effect? Well. It's got to be pretty significant.
S: All right, that's that was completely expected, right. And that is not surprising, of course, but what's interesting is the mechanism is how does being a birder help you improve your memory for novel bird word pairs in working memory?
E: Mechanism.
S: Yeah. What would be the mechanism? It's not necessarily intuitive. That's why it's interesting. So what they find is that so you might think that, oh, they they have a, they're familiar with these words. Therefore, working memory will take up these words more easily because of familiarity. But what they found was that working memory is outsourcing the task to long term memory. Does that make sense? So OK, right. So if you already know the word blue footed, booby or whatever, some bird name and it's in what you make up, it's in your.
E: That's a real you said blue.
S: It's in your long term memory. When you have a short term, like a working memory task involving a word that's already in your long term memory, you can outsource or offload.
B: Oh, and increase your short term memory.
S: Yeah, the cognitive, the cognitive load to your long term memory. So it decreases the demand on your working memory, which is, you know, as a neuroscientist like that makes perfect sense because working memory is finite and task.
C: Limiting, yeah, it wouldn't it be how anybody who has expertise in anything is able to operate at a higher sort of working level?
S: Well, there was 2 hypothesis here. You know, it could have been that it was helping working memory itself, but in this case it was, it's literally offloading it to your long term memory. But yeah, yes. And retrospect, it all makes sense, right?
C: Yeah.
S: And and yet I think we've mentioned many times on the show and we've personally observed that the more you know, the easier it is to know more stuff, to remember things as more things you're associating it with. So this is just providing one specific neuroanatomical sort of correlate for exactly how that's happening.
C: Yeah, because not only are you associating it and linking it to other things, but you're then able to see what's novel or differentiated from from that background kind of knowledge.
S: Right. OK, let's move on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:38:23)
Theme: Animals 2025
Item #1: Scientists have discovered a “death ball” sponge (Chondrocladia sp nov) which, unlike most sponges which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans.[6]
Item #2: Scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia maipoensis, with 24 eyes which are capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images.[7]
Item #3: Researchers discovered an entirely gynomorphic species of spider in Thailand, Damarchus inazuma, which is half orange (the female side) and half blue (the male side).[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Researchers discovered an entirely gynomorphic species of spider in Thailand, Damarchus inazuma, which is half orange (the female side) and half blue (the male side). |
| Science | Scientists have discovered a “death ball” sponge (Chondrocladia sp nov) which, unlike most sponges which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. |
| Science | Scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia maipoensis, with 24 eyes which are capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | sweep |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Evan | Scientists have discovered a “death ball” sponge (Chondrocladia sp nov) which, unlike most sponges which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. |
Bob | Scientists have discovered a “death ball” sponge (Chondrocladia sp nov) which, unlike most sponges which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. |
Cara | Scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia maipoensis, with 24 eyes which are capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images. |
Jay | Scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia maipoensis, with 24 eyes which are capable of forming low resolution 360 degree images. |
Voice-over: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or fax, 2 reel and one fake, and I challenge my panelist skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. There's a theme this week. It's one of the themes I've gone to in January many times before. It is interesting animals that were discovered in 2025.
C: OK, OK.
S: And of course, one of these is not either completely made-up or there is something incorrect about it.
E: Or it's not interesting.
S: OK, they're all interesting either way, right? Here we go. Item number one, scientists have discovered a death ball sponge, Chondrocladia. And then it says SPNOV, which stands for Species Nova. So it's like a placeholder for this is a new species, which unlike most sponges, which are filter feeders, is predatory, feeding mostly on small crustaceans. Item number 2, scientists have discovered a new species of box jellyfish, Tripedalia mypoensis, with 24 eyes, which are capable of forming low resolution 360° images. And item number 3, researchers discovered an entirely gyno morphic species of spider in Thailand, DeMarcus inazuma, which is half orange, the female side and half blue the male side. Evan, go first.
E: Death ball sponge. What a great name. It sounds like a cartoon character from Metaloc. Metalocalypse, right? Something like that, right. So this particular sponge is predatory and it feeds mostly on small crustaceans. Well, it So yes, these characteristics make it stand apart. Maybe that's why it was only recently discovered because they were thinking sponges, you know, don't usually do this. And you know, when we're looking for sponges or at sponges and things, we don't expect that kind of behavior. And if something else is happening, maybe don't even think it's sponge to begin with something else. So yeah, maybe because of those features, that's why it was only recently discovered. And then the second one about the jellyfish, which I will not repeat the the name, it's official name 24. I is capable of forming a low resolution 306, low resolution 360° images. Interesting. 360 degrees, 1024 divide equally into 360. Is that how many times is that? Yeah, So that's almost too perfect. Maybe it had like a number of eyes that were not divisible exactly by 360. I don't know it right. It sounds like. Sounds engineered, therefore not right to me. The last one about the spider in Thailand, half orange, half blue and the color represent yeah, I guess color would could represent male versus female. There are other examples of that among species, but gyno morphic, right? I mean, you know, Cardinals, right? The red Cardinals are the males and the brown ones are the what, you know, the more dull colored ones of the females. So maybe that 1 is OK. All right, I'll, I'll stick with my idea. I think the 24 eyes for a jellyfish is going to be the fiction.
B: OK, Bob, All right, so the idea of a gun amorphic spiders is too cool to. I mean, I love spiders. So I'm just gonna have to say, yeah, that's this. Too cool to say it's fiction. Although I haven't, I haven't read or seen anything about it. I'm gonna have to say that this predatory sponge death ball, it's just almost too awesome, too cool to too cool for school. And it it just seems to me that if you're a filter feeder, it's too much to ask that there's a species within there that is, that is not, and just as actively will be, you know, hunt and kill. But I just love this death ball idea. But I'm going to have to say that is fictione.
S: OK, Cara.
C: I feel like these could all be science and they could all be fiction, so I'm trying to identify the thing about them that would be what makes it a fiction. So the death ball sponge, maybe that's a thing. And the new species of boxed jellyfish, Tripodalia may myopoensis, Sure. And then finally, the dynamorphic spider, DeMarcus inazuma. So my guess is that these are all that you didn't just make anything up out of whole cloth, that these are all newly discovered species, and then there's something specific about them, which is the fiction. So either that the sponge is not really a filter feeder, but it's predatory. So I guess it's too late. But the distinction here would be that it's somehow has a mechanism to actively catch things.
S: Yeah.
C: OK. And then 24 eyes, that's probably the one there, right, capable of forming low resolution 360° images. So you're saying a single image is 360° or like they can see. Okay, they can see and.
S: Form images at 360.
C: Degrees it's.
S: Cool, but yeah, it's not necessarily one image. Whatever.
C: Right. So. So jellyfish I think are usually and actually aren't they jellies, not Jelly. Yeah, to. Get mad.
E: Yeah, geez, I should have picked that. I don't think.
S: That's correct, but oh shoot, so that was automatically the fix it's. Still so widely.
C: Yeah, it's colloquial.
S: That I used it, but I'm offended.
E: If I'm wrong, I'll put an answer. This one.
C: I think they have radial symmetry, so if they did have 24 eyes, my guess would be that they would be all the way around. So then it probably would give them 360° images. I don't know much about eyes on jellyfish, if jellyfish even have eyes or if they have eye spot, so I'm not sure about that. And then?
E: There's no eyes in jellyfish.
C: And then the species of spider in Thailand. So I think I've seen this before in in other creatures, but I think it's pretty rare where there's almost like a line drawn down the animal and one side has the features of the sort of male sex within that species and the other side has the features of the female sex. So they're sort of like intersex. I think the jellyfish is science. And so I'm kind of torn between what does it mean to be a predatory sponge? Like do they have little like grabbers? I don't buy that. I think they're probably still filter feeders, but maybe they just feed on bigger things. And then the half orange, half blue female male, that one is also bothering me because maybe it's just that they found like a like an intersex spider that has sort of all the different forms of genitalia or reproduction, but it's not so over. I don't know. I think it's so.
E: You're saying there's two fictions?
C: Cara No, I gotta pick 1. So I think it's gonna be this sponge. I think maybe the sponge is just a sponge, but it like preys on crustaceans. But that's what.
B: Freud said sometimes a sponge is. Yeah, exactly. Especially when it's smoking a cigar, OK? And Jay?
J: Yeah, OK. I'll start with the spider. So I mean a blue and an orange spider, Steve, weren't you and I just talking about the, the common science fiction colors that happen to be blue and orange? And I can't help but think like, damn, did Steve use those two colors because we talked about it. But I'm going to fully use my you know, my the fact that Bob, who is the spider guy in my life and the homunculus of Bob in my head is saying, you know, he accepts this. Bob actually said it. So the two of them together. I think that one is science. The second one here about the jellyfish, you know, I mean 24 eyes. It sounds weird, but how weird is it? You know, like it's sure they 360° vision seems like, you know, perfectly cromulent concept. It would be so helpful as particularly in the environment that they live in. Weird, but doesn't push me over the edge. Now a the the sponge, which is called the death ball that like is a killer, you know, just on the prowl looking to kill whatever it can get. Its little I don't know things on I don't know. I just don't think it I don't think that's for real, Although death balls a pretty bad ass name for a sea creature. You know, I just don't see it. I don't think that sponges can be predators. There it is. That's the fiction.
S: OK, so Cara and Jay and Bob, Bob went with the the death ball, yes. And Evan went with the Jelly, yes. OK, so you all agree with the third one. So we'll start there. Researchers discovered an entirely gyneomorphic species of spider in Thailand, DeMarcus in Azuma, which is half orange, the female side and half blue, the male side. You all think this one is science and this one is the fiction.
E: Holy. Crow, what is it? It's sweet.
S: So they found an individual spider.
E: Who was?
S: Gyno morphic of this species and it happened to be this is the weird thing the 1st it's the first specimen of this species they discovered and it was a super rare gyno morphic individual.
E: It's it's like finding the first what lobster and it's a blue lob.
C: It makes you wonder how often that happens in like that the type specimen historically like, especially with things that we only have one of.
S: Well, famously, famously, the first Neanderthal had crippling arthritis and that's why they thought they were hunchbacks.
J: So this happens.
S: Does anybody recognize the name in a Zuma?
E: In a Zuma, the song in. A God. Yeah, no, in a Zuma, no, I don't, no.
S: Say it, it comes.
E: Make it up.
S: No, I didn't make it up. It comes from a show called One Piece.
B: Oh, I know. One Piece.
S: Yeah. A character that changes sex from male to female.
J: Steve, So let me ask you a quick question. The spider is it legit really blue and orange? Or they stretch.
S: Look at the picture. It's cool. It's and Cara's correct. It's a line straight down the middle from front to back.
C: Oh, really?
S: And it's orange on one side, blue on the other and.
E: And they fight the ones that are blue on the other side and. Steve if.
J: This spider, if this spider bit you, you would become a trans superhero, right?
S: I guess so. So it is, it's not just blue and and orange. It's like female on the left side and and male on the right side, including different sizes of limbs and stuff like that.
J: What the hell? Oh my God.
S: It's very.
E: It happens. It's. A. Can it carry 94 lbs of something? We're going to get back to that, trust me.
S: So it's a it's an amazing specimen. They must have freaked out when they found it. But and it what happens to also be a new species, but the species is not kind of morphic. OK, OK, well, how?
B: How? Common. I wonder if it's, you know, since it's the first species of it that they found and it was this anomalous thing. Maybe, you know, a surprising percentage like 2% or 5% are like this.
S: Maybe it's more common in this species?
C: Yeah, that'd be cool.
S: OK, let's go back to #2 Scientists have discovered a new species of boxed Jelly fish, Tripedalia myopoensis, with 24 eyes, which are capable of forming low resolution 360° images. Is science again. Every write up use jellyfish. Like I'm just going to use jellyfish, but jellies? Jellies. But we're addressing it. Jellies.
J: I know.
S: Most jellies have no eyes. Some have eye spots.
J: They don't. See so good but. Keros.
S: But the box jellies do have 24 eyes.
J: Yep.
C: Oh. OK.
S: And Evan?
E: But their eyes are only on their asses, though they exist.
S: In four clusters of 6, right?
E: What you mean? So they're 4 and 20. What do you mean 4 clusters of 6?
S: Oh, I thought you meant that.
J: Oh, I got.
S: You the eyes exist in four clusters of six eyes, right? That's why they the number 24.
E: And are they symmetrical around the entire creature? Yes. OK, now that'll do.
S: It and their eyes. Their, you know their full eyes, you know they're not. Eyes.
E: I was I was thinking more like every 15° you. Haven't what? Yeah, yeah. That just seemed too. No, they're clustered. That's how I envisioned.
S: They're clustered and it is those clusters radial symmetry, right? Probably in terms of like how many images they form. Yeah, So probably is. That's why I didn't say it might not be one image. It may be that it's four different images in different directions, but it is 300. It gives them 360° vision. All right. And this means that scientists have discovered a death ball sponge, Chondrocladia species Nova, which, unlike most sponges, which are filter feeders, is predatory. Feeding mostly on small crustaceans is also science. And yeah, this is this is pretty cool. It has little spicules all over Acara and it uses them to ensnare its prey.
C: So it's still, it's still doesn't move, it just has barbs.
S: Yeah, it has barbs.
C: Interesting.
S: OK, it has barbs. Exactly.
B: So I got new respect for SpongeBob now.
S: I looked up. It's not the first predatory sponge. The harp sponge is discovered in 2000, in the early 2000s. Also a predatory sponge so I couldn't say it was the first, but it is. That's why I said most species are filter feeders. Couldn't say all species. Pretty cool. I usually don't get you guys on the critters. This might be.
C: The first.
S: Time you usually sniff them out.
C: Because they were all weird, but also all reasonable. And technically they did all happen, right? The difference was that it's not a whole species, right?
S: Well, yeah, I mean, an entire gyneomorphic species is a stretch.
C: Yeah, that'd be yeah, yeah.
S: But I mean, that was enough, I think, to be a fair fiction. Yeah, for sure.
B: Yeah.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:52:50)
“There is no such thing as a scientific truth believed by one person and disbelieved by the rest of the scientific community; an idea becomes a truth only when a vast majority of scientists accept it without question. That is, after all, what we mean by the expression 'scientific contribution': an offering that is accepted, however provisionally, into the common fund of knowledge."
– -Robert K. Merton, (description of author)
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.
E: The quote this week was suggested from Brian, a listener from Nova Scotia. There is no such thing as a scientific truth believed by one person and disbelieved by the rest of the scientific community. An idea becomes a truth only when a vast majority of scientists accept it without question. That is, after all, what we mean by the expression scientific contribution, an offering that is accepted, however provisionally, into the common fund of knowledge. And that's a quote from Robert K Merton. Robert Merton was an American sociologist who is considered a founding father of modern sociology and a major contributor to the subfield of criminology, Awarded the National Medal of Science for his contributions to the field and for having founded the Sociology of Science.
S: I like it. I'll tell you why I like that quote. Because a lot of science deniers or some people who are just confused say like, for example, they'll say that the the scientific consensus doesn't matter. What only matters is what's true. It's what the evidence shows. And it's like, yeah, but we don't know what's true. We only know the scientific consensus. In other words, unless you are an expert yourself to such a degree that you can plausibly contradict the consensus of all the other experts or many of the other experts, which is almost nobody. And, and, and for those people who are that level of an expert, it's only in one thing and not for everything else, right? So for most people, for most things, all we really have is the scientific consensus, meaning what you know, the, what comes out when you have a transparent evaluation of the evidence and, and the logic and everything by people who know what they're talking about and you sort of work it out. We don't have, as we say, we don't have the teacher's addition to the universe. We can't look up the actual answer that's objectively, metaphysically true in the back of the book, right? You all we have is the process, and that's and the, and the scientific community and the consensus. That's part of the process. So, yeah, the idea that, oh, the consensus doesn't matter. It's only what's true. You don't know what's true. You can't handle the truth. And so anyway, so this quote I think is spot on. I like it.
E: Dynamite.
S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
E: You're welcome. Steve, thanks.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
|
|
|
- ↑ theness.com: Is Donut Lab’s Solid State Battery Legit? - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ [None None: None]
- ↑ www.nytimes.com: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/12/climate/trump-epa-air-pollution.html
- ↑ phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2026-01-complex-life-planets-orbiting-galaxy.html
- ↑ www.cbc.ca: Everything you need to know about the latest search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 aircraft
- ↑ oceanographicmagazine.com: Carnivorous “death-ball” sponge among new deep-sea species - Oceanographic
- ↑ www.popularmechanics.com: A New Creature With 24 Eyes Can See In Every Direction At Once
- ↑ nautil.us: Half-Male, Half-Female Spider Discovered In Thailand - Nautilus