SGU Episode 1073
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| SGU Episode 1073 |
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| January 31st 2026 |
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"Mystical stone rises amidst vibrant flowers, evoking ancient mysteries in the landscape." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"A mind not wholly wishful to reach the truth, or to rest in it or obey it when found, is to that extent a mind impervious to truth an incapable of unbiased belief." |
William Leslie Davidson - (1848–1929) Scottish philosopher |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
Voice-over: You're listening to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.
S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, January 29th, 2026, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria.
C: Howdy.
S: Jane Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good afternoon, everyone.
S: It is freaking cold out there, like below 0 Fahrenheit.
C: Oh, Steve, do you know what the high is here today in LA?
E: 60 enviable.
C: 78.
J: Oh my God. 78 that's. That number is inconceivable to my brain right now. It's like I I took my kids to the bus this morning and here's how the temperature went. I drove my my son Dylan to the bus stop. It was 7° out. An hour later, I drove my daughter to the bus stop. It was 6° out.
B: That's colder.
C: Now it's 70 right now and the high today is 78 and the low at night in the middle of the night is 51. The weather is gorgeous here.
B: That's so awesome, but hey. -2 Fahrenheit this morning -2 I haven't seen that in years locally. Years.
C: But hey, karma's a bitch because even though I get to enjoy this beautiful weather, I found out recently that I have to get a root canal next week.
J: Oh no.
C: So this is my first ever, I do have to be fair, a ton of dental work. I think genetically I have pretty weak teeth because dentist always tells me my gums are beautiful, that I'm doing everything right, but I just get cavities. And so I found out about a year and a half ago, I actually thought I lost a filling. I go to my dentist and I'm like, it feels like I lost a filling. He's like, you never had a filling in that tooth. You've been grinding your teeth and I think that you like it looks bad. So he was like, we're going to get in there. Hopefully you don't need a root canal. He gets in there, he goes, OK, I think we're good. It wasn't quite as deep as I was worried. So we're going to fill it, give you a crown, but you've got to keep an eye on it. And then of course, like a year later, I developed the tiniest little, like, blistery bubble on my gum line. And that is like a surefire indicator that you have an infection in your root and you need a root canal.
J: God, Cara, I have so much to tell you No, because you all know I love to take care of my teeth and and I have I got a root canal myself like I think about 2 1/2 three years ago.
E: Then do it yourself.
J: And I want you to find a what do they call him? Stephen.
C: Endodontist. I did, and she's amazing. She's going to use a laser tip. She does it under a microscope.
J: Good.
C: She already told me I have 4 channels but three roots and the fourth channel is like kind of vestigial and hard to find so so she's like, I may not even be able to finish in one session if I can't really find everything. We'll, we'll close it up and we'll bring you back.
J: To make it work I went to the equivalent of like the kind of like mechanics garage you would find in the middle of the like on a highway.
E: Like one of those horror scenes.
C: I just went to like. A dentist? Dentist for? Yeah.
J: Yeah. And then, you know, they're confident and whatever bottom line is, I get it never felt right. There was a lot of pain afterwards and, you know, just felt like my tooth wasn't in the right position and all this stuff. And then get to the punchline. It was like last summer, I I had an infection. My dentist, I got a cleaning. My dentist says you have an infection underneath your root canal and you need to go to an endontist right you.
C: Had to end up basically redoing all the work but now it's harder because there's a chance they can't save your tooth.
J: Well, well, I haven't even gotten to the to the endontist yet. Like I got the. The Endodontist. The pain is is ramaculous. It's remarkable and spectacular. It's like.
S: It is ramaculous mad that to the list of words, Karen, you will keep it trying.
C: Incredible. Yeah.
J: Ramaculous go to, you know, the next stage up, which in this case would be an endodontist because they're endodontist.
C: Endodontist.
J: I have it, Karen. Let's just call them super dentists. Yeah, go to the Super dentist because these are the people that get sent. People are sent to them when a regular dentist screws up. So just start with the.
C: The top.
J: Good.
C: And so, so they're all trained like dentist and endodontist are trained in roots of teeth, but endodontia by definition is the study and practice of the roots of the teeth. So they are the dentist that do specialized training in pulp and roots. They have all the specialized tools and that's what they dedicate their practice to. So like when I was doing research, I realized most dentists do about two root canals a week and most endodontists do closer to 20.
J: There's a danger here because if you do have a real infection in your jaw and and you don't get it handled it, you could actually like lose a part of your jaw. You could, you know it, it's really bad and you never want an infection in your head. Oh gosh. So. You got your.
C: Brain. Yeah, no. And and so, so I learned all sorts of interesting things. So she was showing me because they so also a big difference between a dentist and an endodontist is that endodontists will usually do ACT scan of your teeth. They don't just do an X-ray and it gives them a clearer view of the of the roots. So and this I didn't realize either. I think most people don't. Maybe I'm wrong. The roots of your teeth go into channels. A root canal is where they go in and they clean out those channels completely. And then they put a plastic kind of material inside of there and it completely seals them off. What happens with the infection? And this is going to sound super gross, but she assured me it's really normal. She was showing me the the the CT and I was like, is that bone? And she was like, yeah, so I'm, I'm, I'm having it in an upper molar. And she goes, these are your sinuses. This is the bone above the roots of your teeth. And I was like, but that Channel, there's no bone there. And she was like, yeah, sometimes the infection, because the bone is so thin between the top of where the channel ends and your sinus that the infection will eat away at the bone. And I was like, is that dangerous that there's just an open channel? And she was like, over time, yeah, But like, when we take care of this, it won't be an issue at all. And I was like, why not? It'll just be open to my sinus. And she was like, no, your body will start to regrow bone. So she said, the reason that it happens, you have this indolent infection and you have. So I never had pain, Jay. Like, isn't that crazy? I don't have any pain from this infection at all. And so she was like in the background. It's sort of it's, it's festering and your immune system is trying to attack it, but it can't get in because I have a crown. It's almost completely sealed, but there's just enough for the bacteria to get in. So your immune system's trying to attack it and it eats away at healthy tissue on its way to do that. So it literally eats away at the bone. Tell me that's not super gross.
J: And Cara, This is why you have to spend 4 minutes on your teeth a day.
C: You do and I do. And that's the thing. A lot of times what ends up happening, the reason people get root canals is because they'll have, yes, an infection, an untreated cavity, something like that. But in my case, which is also a common issue, is that they'll have dental work done, but the dental work just wasn't sufficient. And that's when you really have to be careful. If you have any pain, if you get something that feels like a little blister on your gum line, that's a dental Abscess. Even if it's tiny, it is an A surefire indicator that there's infection deep, deep in the root. So, so like a little tiny blister on your gum line. Go to your dentist or your endodontist right away. I'm not that nervous about it, though. I have a feeling it's not going to hurt any worse than a regular like my. That filling with the crown was really intense. It just costs more now.
E: They're going to numb me up real well.
C: For yeah, they, they numb me up regardless. If anything, she said, it might not be as bad because they put a block in your mouth so you don't have to hold your jaw open the whole time like I did when I got the filling.
E: Yeah, that's not fun.
C: Oh. God it gets so sore.
S: I've never had a root canal and I haven't had a cavity since I was a child.
C: You're so.
J: Is that possible? No, I'm talking about Steve.
S: 'S sister, yeah.
B: His nether region. Yes. No, I remember.
C: It is luck, Steve. I'll tell you what, I never had a cavity my whole childhood. Never. And then as an adult, it's like after I hit puberty or something and you're.
S: Saying I have dental privilege, is that what?
C: You're you have dental privilege and I have dental genetic soft teeth.
S: All right, Jay.
J: Yes.
News Items
Artemis Getting Ready for Launch (08:51)
S: Tell us about another update on Artemis. I hear they're in quarantine.
J: Yeah, I wanted to go over this again because I had been doing some reading about like, what are these astronauts doing when they get into quarantine? And then of course, that was a rabbit hole to learn all about essentially like what is their training because they do do training during quarantine. But I asked the question, how much training do they have to do in total to do what they do? So let me give you some some information here that I found.
S: Do you know why they go into quarantine before the launch?
J: I do, Steve.
E: I do.
S: All right, you gonna tell us?
J: Yeah, well, they don't want, they don't want space aliens to catch any Earth heebie jeebies. Mm, Hmm. Right now they they do that because if they get sick during the mission, it could scuttle the mission and, and put everyone's lives at risk and, you know, put billions of dollars at risk. Like they have to make sure they're perfectly healthy before they'll send them up into space. Apollo 13 had the measles scare and the and the one of the astronauts couldn't go up.
S: Because of it, I remember when we interviewed Rusty Swikert and he said when you're in space, in in microgravity, in a space suit, if you puke, you die.
C: Yeah, yeah. I remember interviewing some astronauts on the ISS and I asked them what do you do if you need to puke? And they said swallow it.
J: Yeah, well, it's the only, sounds like the only option, right? They're already picking people that you know, don't puke. You know what I mean? Like they're picking people like that can handle all that stress and and you can't.
S: Handle the puke.
C: Did somebody puke like non-stop in one of the early Gemini missions or something? Wasn't there a whole puke saga?
J: I, you know, I don't remember and now I have to know.
S: The NASA puke saga. I didn't know anything.
J: All right, Well, listen guys, I'm going to give you a simulated timeline as if the launch is going to happen on February 6th, which is not unlikely. You know, this is one of the dates that they're saying is possible. So let's say that they do the launch on February 6th. Here's what the mission is going to look like from a, you know, 15,000 foot view. The mission launches from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Launch System. This will place the Orion capsule and the crew into Earth orbit. Then what they'll do is within hours of that launch, as they're in low Earth orbit, the crew, of course, will check things like life support, power, propulsion. They run through everything, make sure everything's working perfectly before they commit themselves to deep space. And then Orion will fire its engines to leave Earth orbit and head toward the moon. And again, I am summarizing here, there are more steps in here, but I just want to give you the, the quick one too. They call this like the outbound crews to the moon. What they do is it takes several days for the crew to get to the moon. They're monitoring things. You know, they're, they're in constant touch with NASA. They're, they're doing a huge and very important thing, which is massive data collection on just how everything is functioning and working. And, you know, NASA is always, always, always trying to make their systems better. And they, they do this by gathering tons of information. Then we are going to have the spacecraft, it's going to swing around the moon. So it approaches the moon and it swings around the moon. It's not going to enter orbit and it will briefly pass behind the moon and it will, it will lose contact with Earth. Then the return ejectory towards Earth. You know, they're going to, they're going to do their fly by. Orion is basically already heading home at that point. And it's allowing time to test these long duration systems and crew endurance. Then they do a re entry. I think you all know what that is. You have to get through the atmosphere. And they're going to be using the skip re entry profile, which if you don't know, just look it up real quick. It's it's pretty interesting. And then they have their splash down and recovery. That's the basics. Now these dates will be launched on February 6th. The initial orbit in low Earth orbit is also going to be on the 6th and then either the 6th or the 7th, they'll fire the engines and they'll, they'll break Earth orbit and get, you know, head towards the moon. And then they'll reach the moon probably around the 9th or the 10th of February. Then they will be returning and that will be from the 10th to the 15th. And then reentry could be on the 15th or the 16th. So you might notice that the dates are always could be on this day or could be on that day. And I think a, a huge factor in that is how long do they spend orbiting the Earth before they, they fire the Rockets and head to the moon? Because they could orbit the Earth once or 10 times if they wanted to. But you know, but roughly the launch is on February 6th and the return is likely on the 16th. And there's, there's your 10 days. But the real fun and interesting part of this is like what is happening with like this pre the pre work that they have to do to actually be able to get into the spacecraft and go up there. It's not just the astronauts training. It's everybody, everybody in NASA that's involved with the mission is training. So let me give you like a general look at like what does it take to become an astronaut in general? It it takes about two years to do the astronaut training to become mission eligible, right? And of course that means that they're they could be selected for a mission at that that point. Now, once they're assigned to a specific mission, they have something called mission specific training. And this last two to four additional years like this is like how long it takes to become a medical professional, like, you know, get your get your MD that, that this is an incredible amount of time that they're training. When they're doing this training, they're working with the same flight controllers who will be, you know, on the headset during the actual mission, right? So they're calling into Mission Control. And these are all familiar voices to them by the time they're up on the actual, actual mission. And the prep time that they put in with flight control is so important because it's like a band rehearsing. Like they learn each other's instincts, They learn how to talk to each other, they build trust. They have a rhythm with each other. And that type of familiarity is essential in order for them to have the speedy and quick to understand communication with each other. And all the while they're monitoring how they're talking to each other. And they're trying to make it more efficient. Now the full mission simulations start, they have to, they have to get to a point where they're running through the entire launch and entire flight from the Earth to the moon and back and everything. So they're, they do break it up, but they are running through the entire mission front to back up to 50 times I read, which is, you know, quite a bit of training. You know that that's significant amount of training. Now, when they enter formal quarantine just about two weeks before launch, the crew enters what NASA calls their health stabilization program. And the goal is, is super simple, right? They don't want anyone to catch any kind of illness whatsoever, even a mild cold. These could delay the missions. And you know, as Steve said, like if they have something really minor and it leads them to have some type of nasal congestion or they vomit or whatever it is, this is deadly to a mission. It could. It could put people into a really compromised position so they have to be perfectly healthy with nothing going on. I love this because it's competency porn like nobody has ever seen. It blows away Star Trek like the competency porn here is incredible. They, they, it's redundant that people are trained to an extraordinary level. You know, ground crew and, and the astronauts, you know, meanwhile, all the engineers and everything like they're doing their whole thing that they're doing with all the, the ships and the Rockets and everything like that. You know, that would, that would have been another 20 minutes just to kind of dip into what that is happening over there. But you have all of these different crews that are working to do their thing, but working in coordination with everybody else. The fact that people aren't talking about this bothers me because not only is it amazing, and not only is it a true Herculean effort to do this, but this is like in human DNA. We're explorers. Like, I want people to start bending their attention to things like this because these are some of the coolest things that humanity can do. You know, we create things, you know, we, we, we make beautiful art. We could be wonderful people to each other and we take risks and learn about the world that we live in. And this is a perfect example of that.
S: I agree, although this there's more a few things out there that might be distracting people from news like this.
J: I know, but this is the. This is the gravy. This is the good stuff.
C: Yeah, yeah. Hey, Jay. So I mentioned earlier I just, I have to because I was, I was digging a little bit deeper. It wasn't a Gemini mission. It was both Apollo 8:00 and 9:00. Yeah, but but very famously on Apollo 8. And OK, there's this book. I don't know if you guys have read Rocket Men by Robert Curson. I had him on my show several years ago. That's why this memory is so crystal clear. Can I read you like a little time? Yeah, Go for in the back. This is amazing. And then the vomit came retching. Borman reached to capture the floating green globules, but there were too many of them going in too many directions to corral at once. Even when he caught them, they just split in two or four or eight and made their escape from his flailing hands. Lovell reached for a towelette and tried to wipe the mess away, but his and Anders troubles were only starting. Floating toward them from below were spinning blobs of feces, each turning on its own axis. If they'd been solid clumps, Lovell and Anders might have had a chance to dodge or capture them, but Borman had diarrhea. So literally hours, I think it was maybe one day. Yeah. A few hours into their six day flight, the the commander started puking and had diarrhea and it would just filled the capsule. And so by the time they got to the moon, they apparently left emesis and poop bags all over the surface of the moon because they were just trying to clean it up. To. Hold.
S: Well, you have to have some kind of a suction like a vacuum to get rid of stuff like that.
C: You would think, but you know, this was Apollo 8. Yeah, it was a long time ago.
S: Live and learn.
J: I would imagine that they have to actually spend the time to like, clean up as best they can, right? You can't have that.
C: No, they did. They just, they tried to capture as much as they could in bags and they just left it on the moon before they came back.
J: Yeah.
E: Can I call it Gemini instead of Gemini by the way? Yeah, I don't know why they just.
C: They call it Gemini, so I call it Gemini.
J: Yeah, I think they did that because they actually didn't know how to pronounce it. Could be wrong but.
S: All right.
New Extinct Branch of Life (19:24)
S: Thanks, Jay. Bob, How can a branch of life be both new and extinct at the same time?
B: Yeah, this one was fascinating. This was a mystery, Steve. It's a prehistoric mystery that began in the 1840s that they may have solved. And this is because the new insights, these scientists have shed some new insights on the 1st Organism that existed on the land, Prototaxites. So it's a weird tree like structure that was absolutely not a tree. It's it's placed in the tree of life, if you will, has been debated, debated for. Yeah, You like that one. It's placed in the tree. Of life has been debated for over 165 years so have they finally solved this mystery Let's find out so this is from researchers from the University of Edinburgh published in Science Adventures. The paper is about an extinct genus from the Devonian period around 400 million years ago and it's called protax. Its the first Organism on land. It was about a meter wide and about 8 meters tall at. I guess that is as tall as 8 meters. I don't think you got too much taller than that, but that's pretty tall. That's like about 26 feet.
E: That's almost three stories.
B: It it sounds like a tree, and if you get a quick look at it, you might think it's some type of weird tree. But this was entirely unlike a tree. It was essentially smooth, like pillars, like just imagine a smooth pointy pillar. But there were no branches. There were no twigs, leaves, flowers, nothing on it. Very plain and underground. It was, it was similarly bizarre. There was no root system at all. The researchers believe that it was anchored by some big globular base that kind of kept it upright. But since its discovery in in 1843, it's been there's been a debate. What kind of multicellular life was this damn thing? It's not easy to figure that out. What do you guys think it was? What could what what, what would that fit? And broad. You know, broad paintbrushes.
S: Could be a fungus.
B: Fungus. Yeah, that's a. That's a.
S: Could be a plant, you know?
B: Yeah, I mean, initially they thought fungus plant, maybe a massive collection of algae. Mm.
S: Hmm.
B: Or potentially, hey, maybe it was an extinct branch of life that that just doesn't fit neatly into anything we really have, right?
S: Could it have been a proto tree or is that ruled out?
B: That's yeah, that's basically that's basically been ruled out. They they because. Of no branch. That's definitely yeah. It was just, it's just too weird. And then from what they're from what I'll discuss down below, it's just like, yeah, this is definitely what you'll see. Let's discover it, shall we? So over the decades, they've, they've winded these options down to two widely accepted possibilities. It was most likely either a fungus or an extinct lineage of eukaryotic life. We've eukaryotic life, right? That's complex cells which are found in multicellular life like animals, plants and fungi. Protists are unicellular and they still have these complex cells. They're just kind of of an outlier a little bit because we don't know where to put those. So the the researchers took a specific species of prototaxites called Taiti TAITI. And this is from northern Scotland. This place, Steve, you may have heard of this, this place specifically in northern Scotland called Riney's Church. It's famous for extremely well preserved plants, fungi and animals. Whatever the the conditions are, the preservation is really, really dramatically good. So they used the, the they then took modern tools and techniques to examine these this fossil, this teddy species that they, that they had reading these techniques that they used, they would have made the scientist who first discovered it basically drool with jealousy and incomprehension. It was really fairly sophisticated. So they, they used imaging techniques that could look inside the fossil to optically slice the specimen into, into pieces so they can see what's inside of it. And then they, and then they rebuilt it as a 3D model. They put it all together into a 3D model that they, that they could examine. So that's one technique. The other technique they used is something like shining an infrared light onto the fossil to reveal what is essentially it's chemical barcode, right? What, what chemicals this Organism used. And then on top of that, they would look at that barcode with an AI. And this AI was trained specifically on many of the fossils from the site in, in Scotland. It was well versed in these fossils. So the AI examined this chemical barcode to determine, you know, which of these other fossils that it already knows about, which of these fossils what did it match most closely? So you got that. So they used fossils that were in basically the same rock, so that if they they all fossilized together, they were fairly contemporaneous.
S: At the rainy church.
B: Yes, yeah, I'm trying to think of a good way to pronounce that. So finally they did a fungus clue test 'cause they really wanted to rule out, you know, or rule in whether this was a fungus or not. And this this fungus clue test essentially looked for a specific chemical marker that's found in many fossils in Rhine eat shirt that work that were definitively fungus. So they so they could see whether this was is it related to the contemporaneous fungus that existed at that time. So that's, that's the one of the, the third major type of test that they did. So then they took all of this anatomical and chemical information, they put it all together and they concluded 3 basic things. First, Protaxities was terrestrial heterotrophic complex, multicellular eukaryote. Heterotrophic means it does not make its own food like plants or, or algae do. So right. So right there they're ruling out that this was a plant or any, any type of algae. Their second conclusion was that Prototaxities didn't fit into any known group of fungi, fungi, whichever. And by that I mean that they, they ruled out the modern, the major modern branches of, of, of fungi fungi. And they also ruled out though the, the early branching fungal groups that we know of going back, you know, many, many millions of years. The paper said more specifically that it was chemically distinct from contemporaneous fungi and structurally distinct from all known fungi. So probably not a fungus, right? Fairly soft, can't be 100% certain, but it certainly looks like it's it was not a fungus at all. And then for their final part of their conclusion. Then again, I'll quote from the study this finding cast out upon the fungal affinity blah blah blah, instead suggesting that this enigmatic Organism is best assigned to an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage. So that's that's their conclusion. So we basically have here an example of an independent but now extinct branch of multicellular eukaryotic life that has no living descendants. So if I could speculate a little bit, could this be A Kingdom? Could it be, could this level of distinctiveness be at the Kingdom level, you know, on the par with plants, animals and and fungi? And now we have this, this other lineage. We we don't know that it's.
S: That's what I was going to ask, because that's what it sounds like you're saying. It's not a plant, it's not an animal, it's not a fungus. If it doesn't belong to any known Kingdom, it's got to be its own Kingdom, right?
B: There you go. Potentially. But the problem is, is that we and we may never know because without DNA, right, you're not, we're not going to really get DNA from this at all. That's, that's not going to happen. And without, you know, without any descendants, it may be impossible, impossible for us, for anybody to conclude that this is at a level of Kingdom, you know, Kingdom level distinctiveness. It's possible they, they make no such claim about that at all. They couch it in safe terms that you know you.
S: Kept using things like group.
C: Branch.
S: Branch.
E: I don't know why is it controversial if it is its own.
C: Case I don't either because the idea like how we define all these things is just based on what we have.
E: And if you have new information in the future, you change it then.
C: Exactly like it's not set in stone, no pun intended.
S: I guess these researchers didn't want to say that they didn't.
B: Want to say, because you don't know how deep, how deep does it go? You know, where does it branch off? Does it branch off at the, you know, so deep in time that it that it is a new a Kingdom or did a branch off, you know, one of the other existing kingdoms and potentially. And and so it's really not a distinct Kingdom, technically not we're not, you know, they they can't say that they can't get that information. They can't get that level of detail to make that conclusion. So we we may never know. It could have been, but it's not necessarily, I'll say that it's not necessarily a, a, a new Kingdom. It could have potentially have branched off later, later on after those branches, those kingdoms have, have already were already created. But what this is, is it's a, it's a essentially a lost experiment in complex life on land. And to think, you know, you know, I wonder why, why did it fail? And imagine if it didn't fail, what Can you imagine, you know, that the life that could be, you know, all ubiquitous on Earth, that that was derived from that lineage that that just happened to die out, you know, hundreds of of years ago.
E: Failures came to be that we don't know about and may never know about.
C: Exactly. There's so many things that just never fossilized, so we don't know. But did you see the reconstructed drawings of them?
B: No. Well, it's just, yeah, it's just basically like it looks like Pinocchio's nose coming out of the ground. It's like very smooth.
C: Yeah, I was going to say, they're quite phallic.
B: Phallic, they just look like. You go in there. Are you Cara? OK.
C: They do though.
B: No, you're right. You're. Right.
C: They're sure they're so phallic they don't have anything. It's like and it's kind of smooth and there's nothing coming like you mentioned, no branches, no leaves, no flowers, no anything. How did?
B: It I suspect it might look even more phallic if you turned it upside down, including that big bulbous, you know, oh, the root system, I think it might look even more phallic.
US#00: Yeah, it's interesting.
B: Stuff new, you know, just a extinct new branch of life that you know, definitely not a fungus. That's what they're saying. OK, so or or not definitely, but they're very. Confident this is not. You know, you got to just couch it, You got to be, you got to save your butt. So people don't say, hey, what? Technically. Technically.
E: Apparently apparently.
S: All right.
Why We Need Wikipedia (29:41)
S: Thanks Bob Cara, I understand that Wikipedia is just turned 25 years old. How's it doing?
C: Wow, 25 you guys, 15th of January this year. Wikipedia is 25. So that means that it started January 15th, 2001. And I think back to where I was January 15th, 2001. I was in college. What about you guys? Where were you sort of in your careers?
E: I was in attending you.
C: Were in attending already, yeah.
E: Steve and I were running a LARP.
C: Too were nice.
B: So this is, yeah, I was, I was in IT. This is like a bunch of months, months before 9/11, right?
C: Yeah, yeah. Same here.
J: Yeah. Right.
B: But I was in IT, doing my thing, yeah.
J: I had a software company back then.
C: OK, fascinating. So, so when I think back to like my college courses and writing papers and you know, all of the scholarship that you do as a young university student when you're really trying to learn how to make solid arguments and back them up, you know, learning critical thinking. I remember the adage was always maybe not the adage, but the the conventional wisdom was always Wikipedia is not an appropriate citation because back then it felt a bit like the Wild West. We didn't really know who was writing on it or how they were writing on it. And oh, have the times changed. So there is a publication in Nature, an editorial about the fact that of course, Wikipedia is 25 years old, but it's titled Wikipedia is Needed Now more than ever, 25 years on. And the subtitle, which I think tells you a lot, the online encyclopedia is an antidote to an increasingly poisoned information ecosystem. And then they editorialize. Researchers should help to nourish it. So Wikipedia is not what it used to be by any stretch of the imagination. It's actually multiple websites now, and it has more than 65,000,000 entries. That's a lot in in guess how many languages How?
E: Many languages. All of them.
C: It's at least 300.
E: 300. 100.
C: 300 languages.
E: Oh my God.
C: And.
E: Including Esperanto.
C: How many do you think we're working with the English version here in the United States, or at least those of us recording this podcast? How many new entries do you think are added every day to the English version?
B: Jeez, Daily 200.
C: 500500500A day. And of course, as I mentioned, it's not just Wikipedia anymore, right? Have you guys ever used like Wikimedia Commons?
E: Wiki quotes.
C: Wiki quotes.
E: There's all kinds.
C: Of I love Wikimedia Commons because it's a huge repository of like images and audio files that are all Open Access. It's definitely the first place I go if I need to put like an image in a presentation. There's the Wictionary, the free dictionary, which I use a lot because it has a like really rich end to end to etymological data, not entomological data. And you mentioned wiki quote, Evan, there's wiki versary where they're just learning resources, all for free, right? There's, gosh, there's so much wiki species. Do you know they have a species directory?
E: No.
C: No, it's pretty cool and it shows you the full taxa and and yeah, it's so far they have 936,237 entries. So right there, Bob, I wonder if. Yeah.
B: Right.
C: Actually, I'm going to, I'm going to look. Yeah, proto tax sites. Are they in Wiki species? Let's see proto tax sites, proto canites. But I don't see proto tax sites. Oh, but I do see 22 references to them, just they don't have their own page anyway.
B: Technically it's pronounced proto tax. IT's.
C: Tax ideas. OK, thank you. So the Wikimedia Foundation, which is the organization that runs it, it's in San Francisco and it employs around 700 people. But it's not just 700 people who keep the page going, right? As, as I think we all know, most of the edits on the page are done by volunteers. And we've, you know, kind of talked before about like guerrilla skeptics and different initiatives to ensure that like women are represented fairly, especially women scientists, or that the scientific perspective is obviously represented. So I think that just under 300,000 editors are regularly volunteering on the page. So it truly is like a massively collaborative effort. One of the things that I think makes Wikipedia what it is, is basically their editorial real stance or what they call their working practices. And they talk about ensuring that they have a neutral point of view, which is accurate and fair. But how would they do that? Like what is the best way to be accurate and fair? Like how do we try to be accurate and fair?
E: Multiple sources. Multiple sources, yeah.
C: Evidence, right? They don't just write things to write them. They have to have evidence to back them up. And if anything does feel partisan or biased, they will flag it, they'll tag it, and they'll work to ensure that there's legitimate evidence. And that there is, like you mentioned, multiple sourcing there. Everything has to be verifiable and it has to be attributed to, as you mentioned, like these published sources. And they can't, and this is of course what we were taught when I was in school. They can't cite themselves like Wiki can't call itself a source for anything that.
E: Wouldn't make sense.
C: Right, exactly. And so this is the difference between we often will talk about primary and secondary sources, or even tertiary sources. So it has become a really important bastion of information now. And I wonder if college professors are still arguing, like they did when I was in college, that wiki is not a valid source. Maybe they would argue that the appropriate thing to do is to read the wiki article, dig deeper, but then obviously chase down the primary sources within the wiki article and.
B: Yeah, that's that's I thought that was kind of standard, like you just look at what what the sources are for the Wiki article and then you would vet them and then there you go, you and you probably or most often, yeah, I think you can have some pretty damn good sources for what you. Absolutely you're. Talking about.
C: I think early on when I was in school at least, there was a lot of question about the the accuracy of what was even on wiki at the beginning, because it, it was a bit of a black box. It felt like the Wild West. But actually it's never been I, I shouldn't say it was a black box. That's unfair. It's never been a black box. They've always had a talk page on each entry where you can basically, it's like looking at the back end and seeing the full discussion between all the editors and seeing every single change that has been made and every citation and how it came to be where it is. And sometimes these are like their own ecosystems, right? You see arguments and and disagreements, but they have, you know, some editorial rules about respect and civility. It's just like this. I, I know I already used the word bastion, but it's so different than the world that we live in right now. So, so basically the author of this editorial is calling for more engagement from the scientific community and just a real effort to ensure that Wikipedia remains this robust repository of basically like all of human knowledge. Like, it really is our modern library of Alexandria. And this wasn't imaginable before we had access us to the web, right? I mean, this Wikipedia really did change the game in so many ways.
S: Yeah, it's interesting because it's it's one of the few like straight up social media, whatever web success stories. And it actually became the thing it promised to be.
C: Yeah, right.
S: This is what it was supposed to be 25 years ago, and it did it, you know.
C: And why do you think it was able to do it and so many places couldn't?
S: I think it because it was managed. It was managed by a group of people who were dedicated to the deals of Wikipedia, and it was not. It was not destroyed by either commercialism or other secondary interests. And they found a sweet spot where it's, yeah, multiple people can contribute without it being the Wild West free for all.
C: I, I completely agree. I think there was sort of a regulatory, we could call it like an oversight management, some sort of regulatory stance. And also go click on Wikipedia right now, if you see an ad at all, the only ad is from Wikipedia asking for user support. It's support, it's self funded. This is the NPR PBS model, right? This is This is why they're able to keep interests out. The problem when you start to advertise and you start to take dollars is that you start to have moneyed interest. And that can change editorial content. And we've seen that across the board with news, right? We've seen it just obviously cable news is a huge example of that. But even network news, which again, we've talked about this before, but used to be funded by the entertainment arms of network television, now have to fund themselves, which means heavy ad sales, which also means, you know, who owns these these different affiliate stations and how much editorial oversight do the owners have? I don't know. I was just watching the morning show and it really reinforced a lot of these conflicts of interest and these moneyed interests. So I think that's a huge, a huge reason for it. One of the things that the article brings up that I think is important to flag is that very often now when you use a search engine back in the day, the Wikipedia article was the first thing you would see. But what do you see now above the Wikipedia article when you use like a Google or you know any other Yahoo, a search engine?
B: Unrelated crap that you're that's probably not very related to what you're searching for. Because they because they paid to be.
C: On right, so you'll you'll see sponsored things at the very, very top. You're right. But what about at the? What about kind of? Usually, what's the first entry? Now it's not a website anymore, it's an AI overview.
B: Oh yeah, yeah, right. It's.
C: And the AI overview very often owes everything to Wikipedia, right? So they're crawling the web, but where are they getting the most information on any topic? The Wikipedia article about.
E: That it's already there. Why not go to the fertile field and start there?
S: I have noticed that like if you look at the AI summary and then you look up independent sources, I'm reading Wikipedia. I'm like, this is the AI summary I just read. It's almost word for word out of Wikipedia.
C: But what ends up happening is that the search engines are, because they're dropping the summaries before Wikipedia, they're actually burying Wikipedia. Fewer people are clicking on the Wikipedia entry because they can just read the search engine and they're, they're really worried that and also you've got to remember too, this isn't sourced and, and they're not paying to be able to do that. AI is just crawling and taking information. It's scraping and it's doing it without any sort of compensation. And because Wikipedia is user sourced, they need, they, they make about 8 million. Oh, they have about 8 million donors a year actually. Don't know how much money they make.
B: At least 8 million. Dollars. Yeah.
C: At least. Yeah, exactly. Well, that's, yeah, a dollar. A donor, maybe. But yeah. So what they're starting to do, or at least attempt to do is work with tech companies to make sure that their AIS are using their content responsibly, that they're actually compensated for this like massive repository of information that these AI companies, these, you know, these are big tech companies that have profit and they're just stealing the information from wiki. And then what may happen, or at least what they're worried the authors of this editorial are worried about is that it, it won't be sustainable after that. And so we have to ensure not only that we support outlets like this, but that we engage with them, Especially if you're somebody who has editorial skills, if you're somebody in the sciences or you have specialized knowledge or expertise about the topics, you know, the entry topics that relate to your field, become an editor. You know, volunteer your time. It's a really good way to give back to humanity.
S: Absolutely, yeah. So you could support it financially or you could work for it. Like, if you have expertise, lend your expertise, pay that forward, you know, to the rest of your humanity. But yeah, it is one of the real success stories of the Internet.
B: It is. I try to donate as often as I can. I'm going to this is going to make me donate again. Like right now I'm just going to do more.
J: I donate every year.
B: Yeah.
S: All right. Thank you, Cara.
Ideological Bias in Research (42:42)
S: All right, guys, this next news item is is interesting. I like talking about these meta Science News item. You like science about science, like studying how science works and how it gets done and how you prove it. Yeah, it's it's part of the self corrective nature of science itself. And I'm going to get really meta at the end of this. But wait, so this this study was looking at this is like a social science kind of study, looking at researchers who are trying to answer a specific question on immigration, the effects of immigration policy, right. So this is the question they had. Does the ideological bias of the researchers affect the outcome of the research? It's probably of no surprise to anybody that there's a massive impact, right? But the but the details do matter. So what what they did was they had 158 researchers divided into 71 different teams. And they, you know, queried them about their attitudes about immigration and immigration policy, right? Their position on immigration policy. Then they had them independently look at the exact same set of data to answer the exact same question, right? So there these are 71 different teams of experts trying to answer the same question with the same data.
C: Like they weren't expected to do their own analysis, right? We're expected to interpret the analysis.
S: No, they're to do their own analysis and interpret.
C: It so they were getting raw data.
S: I think so.
C: Oh, interesting. OK.
S: Yeah, they they had to develop their own regression model.
C: Oh, OK. This is fascinating. That's even deeper. Yeah.
S: So they were. Their question was to estimate the impacts of immigration on people's attitudes towards social welfare programs, right? So if there's more immigration, does that make people either more positively associated or negatively, you know, feel about welfare programs?
C: So, regardless of the actual impact on social welfare.
S: Yeah, just public support for social welfare programs. Does immigration affect public support for social welfare programs? Answer that question with this set of data. And unsurprisingly, again, the bottom line is there was a massive effect of the researchers attitudes about immigration on the answer that they came ranging from strongly positive to strongly negative, like opposite ends of the spectrum. But why is that is the interesting question. So the researchers conclude, again, sort of jumping to the punch line a little bit is that's because of the you're gonna love this technical term, Cara, the endogeneity of research design. Endogeneity. Yeah. So the the the research design was endogenous, meaning from within, right, as opposed to exogenous. And what that means is that the researchers were making decisions about the methodology that they were using.
C: Yeah.
S: And the here's the problem is that they were doing that or they had the ability to do that as they went. Right. So in other words, they didn't have to completely design their research methodology before getting any feedback about the effect of those methods on the outcome. Yeah, right.
C: Which? Is sadly the way a lot of people do science.
S: I know, I know. So what does that mean? So if you remember, this is similar to the Researcher Degrees of Freedom paper that we talked about years ago, where and P hacking. So this is basically P hacking in that if you, if you, if you are allowed to make decisions, right? If you have degrees of freedom and that those decisions are informed by their effect on the outcome because you've looked at data or you're like testing the effect on the data. So the researchers didn't know going in the, you know, the researchers that are being studied, they didn't know what the effects were going to be, but they could very quickly get a sense of how their choices were going to affect the outcome. And they?
E: So they modified.
S: Probably unconsciously allowed those that sense that they got to influence what design they chose. Now keep in mind, this was. This particular research was chosen because it was maximally susceptible to this of.
C: Course right.
E: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's the right.
S: All right. So for example, there were they calculated a if you want to look at like the number of they said regression models, that's basically the methods that they're using, meaning what data are you inputting into the model, what comparisons are you going to make? What's what are the dependent variables, how are you measuring it, etcetera. They calculated there are at least 1253 different regression models that researchers could have chosen, which is another way of saying that you could slice and dice this data up any way you want and manufacture whatever outcome you want. There were just way too many variables that they have to work with.
C: I think it oversimplifies it Evan, to say it sounds like cherry picking. I think what what we're looking at is two sides of a really interesting coin. The one side is that modern research approaches have become so sophisticated and the pools of just options for how you do statistics are so, like you mentioned, vast, that lots of people are going to pick things not because they think it's going to support their outcome, but because that's just the only way they know how to do it. First of all, like nobody knows how to do all those different regression models. Probably every researcher that they had in this study, I could be wrong, was probably not a statistician, right? They were just researchers.
S: Yeah, they didn't say what their background was in terms of how much statistical background, but they most of when you're doing this kind of research, either you are a statistician or you're using a statistician.
C: Or you're using statistics and that's the thing. Like psychologists for example, we are highly trained in statistics. We take multiple statistics courses throughout our training, but even we are not super sophisticated experts in this. We often will need to consult with statisticians or consult with other colleagues to develop what we think is the least biased and most appropriate approach. But see the other thing I wanted to mention, Steve and I feel like this often gets left out of conversations like this, and I'm curious if they wrote about this in their paper. Is the bigger elephant in the room, which is that inherent in statistical analysis is bias. We talk about how it's it's a bug, like here. It sounds like it's a bug. This is a feature. And I have to remind people that Francis Galton, who developed regression, was a eugenicist trying to prove the inferiority of black people when he developed the model.
S: Yeah.
C: That was the point. It wasn't just a side offshoot. He intentionally developed statistical approaches to prove that white people are superior. So. So we can't really talk about this like it's a modern problem, and we can't really talk about this like it's a little thing we need to fix. It is based in.
S: Endemic, but, but I want to put it into a little bit more perspective as well. So they did identify, they looked at all the variables that the researchers varied to see which of the ones that had the biggest effect on the outcome of the research and they identified what they were. They're a bit wonky, but just to give you an idea of the kinds of choices they were making. So the records they were using records public attitudes towards the government provisions of various types of programs. So did they aggregate these responses or pull out a single type of program? The second factor was did is immigration measured as a stock or a flow? Meaning are you how many people are here or how many people are coming and going? Again, either one can sound legitimate, right? For sure. Does the analysis use multi level modelling to account for variation in country year units? So are they trying to adjust for that specific, you know, variable here here Evan, the 4th 1 is cherry picking like you said, so it's part of the picture. Do the regressions use data from for all the countries included in the data set, or just some of the countries included in the data set? And and which wave of immigration did they use? 2016, 1996, Two, 1006.
C: But even still, I think the idea of cherry picking, we have to be so careful because it's easy for us to go bad science, cherry picking, trying to, you know, like acupuncture studies. That's what they do. Yeah. There's so much data. You have to pick cherries. Yeah. Well, the question is how do you pick your cherries? The.
S: Implication of the term cherry picking is that you're doing it to engineer an outcome.
C: Exactly. But are they saying that that's specifically what they did or are they saying they chose subset that's because that was a more manageable.
S: So.
C: Approach.
S: Well, because they're inferring that they that they chose it to generate the desired outcome because there was a beyond chance alignment of the outcome with their previously stated attitudes towards immigration.
C: Right, but I don't think you can infer that they did that intentionally.
S: No, no, it could've been subconscious.
C: Yeah.
S: They, they look at the days like, oh, this one looks pretty. You know, these, this outcome looks right. You know, it wasn't necessarily deliberately doing it.
C: So that's but but it it's the way that you defined cherry picking, then it did sound implied that it was intentional.
S: Well, it could and we don't know. We don't know how much was intentional and how much was subconscious. All we know is that they they varied this. It influenced the outcome and it influenced the outcome in the direction of their pre-existing bias.
C: So that's such an important point. When we talk about bias, it's not always nefarious, but it is.
S: Most P hacking is subconscious, absolutely.
C: It's not always nefarious, but it is always insidious. People don't do it on purpose, of course, like these are. There's no reason to think that any of the scientists in this study were attempting to bias anything. But This is why it's so important to study bias.
S: Exactly. So the meta point I'm going to make here is that people could look at this set of data and come to diverging conclusions based on their pre-existing biases, too, meaning this study itself. And this is something that we confront all the time. Like we look at this study, right, and we say, Gee, isn't this good that scientists are trying to root out their own biases and correct for them. Science is awesome. Where other people look at this study and say science is hopelessly flawed. You could produce any result you want. I could comfortably ignore anything quote UN quote. Science has to say experts are bogus, right? Same set of data, completely divergent conclusions. Now, of course, I have reasons for to back what what my interpretation is, because first of all, this is scientists publishing, publishing this data about their own field of study, right? This is not criticism coming from the outside pointing out these guys are doing it wrong. This is researchers saying, hey, we have to be aware of the influence of our own bias. Now let's talk about how we can prevent that. And of course, we know how to prevent it already. And that is you decide on all of your methodological details before you look at any data and be me like pristinely, like you have to say, all right, this is the question. This is the methods we're going to use. Let's decide on the methods based upon what on 1st principles and what probably is going to be the best approach. And then we'll follow that. And if you, if you didn't do that, if you didn't pre register or, you know, predetermine your methods before glancing at any data, then what you have to do is internally replicate your research with fresh data. And so you could say, Laura, we're going to divide the database up into two, you know, or whatever. And then we're going to do it on the first half, see what we get. And then we're going to use the exact same methods on the second-half and see if we get the same results.
C: Yeah, split half reliability. Yeah, there are so many approaches to ensuring validity and reliability that way. Yeah, right. And most researchers are readily using the well, I hope. Yeah.
S: But The thing is, so we so as experts like we'll look at this and say, say all right, was it pre registered? Did they have internal replications? Was this an exact duplication of another set of research? Has this been independently replicated? All of those questions that compensate for the bias and the P hacking and these kinds of things, the degrees of freedom. But if you're not, if you don't know this right, if you're not a skeptic or an expert who understands this angle of research, you might like, well, a study showed this and it looks pretty robust. The numbers are pretty solid. It's highly statistically significant. All things that are completely irrelevant to this concern to the effects of systematic subconscious bias on the choices of research methodology that can dramatically affect the outcome.
C: I want to see them do a follow up where they choose the most extreme regression models, like the ones that almost always led to either a positive or a negative outcome. And then they have everybody do or they, you know, randomly assign people and have them use those models and see if the, let's say the people who they pretested as being like more pro immigration using an A regression model that tends to give a negative outcome. So one that they wouldn't have chosen to use if they actually get the same outcome, you know, like, are they then interpreting the data in a weird way as opposed to because there's so many different levels of bias?
S: There was an interpretation bias as well. It wasn't.
C: Just I would think so for sure, But like could they, if they use the same regression model, yeah, all things, you know, being equal, would they end up with wildly different outcomes still?
S: There's a lot of different ways of.
C: Yeah.
S: Following up on this, Yeah.
Expanding the Habitable Zone (57:02)
S: OK, Evan, tell us about the habitable zone. Habitable.
C: Habitable. Habitable.
E: We love that word.
C: Don't such a good word.
S: We got all the best words, Earth.
E: Is habitable, Yeah. Is it not?
S: I like it.
E: What make? What makes us habitable? Well, why? What is?
S: We could breathe.
E: We can. Yeah, we got water, Water. Pressure. Not crushed by gravity.
B: Gravity magnetos magnetosphere is very helpful.
E: Yeah. So we know the basics about why Earth is habitable. And then what we're trying to look for other worlds in other parts of what our Galaxy are in fact our universe to figure out if there are other planets that have the same kinds of, say, features that would make that planet habitable. And certainly being in what is what, the Goldilocks zone is one of those definite features. And we've talked a lot about this in the past. What you try to do or what researchers try to do is for the most part, you find a rocky planet pretty relatively close to its parent, to its star, and you might have a promising candidate there. Is it outside of that habitable zone? Is it, you know, too far away or too close? But unless how researchers have been looking at it, unless it's hits the kind of the sweet spot, then they'll kind of ignore everything else, ignore anything else that that is outside of that sweet spot, which kind of makes sense. But there's a new paper that's been published that challenges that a little bit, pushes back on it and says we might be going about this in a too narrow a fashion. The the paper was published in The Astrophysical Journal. The lead author's name is Amri. Wandel and his team of researchers at Hebrew University in Jerusalem argue that the framework that concentrates on rocky planets in that habitable zone might be too restrictive, and that scientists studying potential candidates could be underestimating how many worlds could support liquid water. One of the major focuses of that paper were the tidally locked exoplanets, which of something else we've talked about before on the show. Those are the planets that will always show pretty much their same face to the star, locked in, and in a similar kind of way of how the moon always faces the Earth. You can look at it like that. One side is going to be in perpetual daylight and the other in eternal night. And for a long time, those worlds were written off as inhospitable, mostly inhospitable. You're either too hot on one side, too cold on the other. Maybe you have this sort of what narrow band that that could go around in which something could exist in there, but tight, very tight, narrow margins. This new research suggests that, well, a planet could have a thick atmosphere, maybe even oceans, and that heat could be transported from, say, the day side, the side facing the star, to the night side. And under certain conditions, heat redistribution could allow parts of the night side to remain warm enough for liquid water, which is also one of the things we know can be a signal for your candidate for a habitable planet.
B: For life as we know it, yes.
E: For life as we know it, right? Yep, Yep it. I think it's important because tidally locked planets are common, especially around red dwarf stars, and those stars are the majority of stars that are in our Galaxy and their habitable zones are very close in. They're exactly where tidal locking is likely. If tidal locked, tidally locked planets aren't automatically excluded, say, then hey, then your number of potential candidates grows.
S: Yeah, so do be clear. 70% of the stars in the Milky Way are red dwarfs, and the habitable zone of red dwarfs is at a distance where the planets are very likely to be tidally locked.
E: Yep, close enough, right? That's right. Once a planet, though, is going to be far enough from its star, the surface water is assumed to freeze permanently, right? So you can, you know, go in the other direction. Is is bad. But we've talked about before. We have some information. Thank you. James Webb Space Telescope, among other probes and things that we've sent to other worlds that have told us, yeah, there are lakes and oceans trapped beneath thick ice layers, subglacial liquid, water. You could have some forms of life existing in those kinds of environments as well. But especially with James Webb, what it what it's done is that it, it has helped detect water vapor and complex atmospheres on the, on those exoplanets that initially seemed unlikely candidates for habitability. Seeing water on the outside of the traditional habitable zone is not surprising. In fact, it may be expected. But you know, Steve, and I know you blogged about this recently for as interesting as this new research is, there's still a lot of things I think working against the further expansion of these rocky worlds inside close to these red dwarfs. And a lot of it has to do with radiation, yeah, among other things.
S: Yeah, So I mean, every time a study comes out looking at the potential of life on red dwarfs, you know, around red dwarfs, there's always like, life is way more likely than we thought it was or it's way less likely than we thought it was. Just stop. That framing is now ubiquitous. Like every article about it is framed one way or the other. And.
B: This thing is to be close to that star for at least for a a chunk of its early life, right? Is it? Yeah.
S: So about later on, Yeah, we just talked about this. So just to read very quickly, red dwarfs are very, they put out a lot of solar radiation early on in their lives. They do settle down and they're relatively less, but it's always more radiation than say, our yellow sun puts out. But it does settle down to the point that it won't necessarily strip the atmosphere from an inner planet. So the only way for there to be a planet with an atmosphere and therefore liquid water on the surface is for it to have migrated in later. Not necessarily. Not even capture, just sometimes. Planets form in the outer solar system and they migrate into the inner solar system. So that's one possibility. Or the OR the atmosphere would have had to have been reconstituted later in life. It probably also would need to have a strong magnetic field. So we're already talking about a subset of a subset of a subset of terrestrial planets around red dwarfs. Now they're saying say, OK, but in that case, even if it's tightly locked, the night side could still be getting enough heat. It's like, OK, but is it getting any sunlight? No. And as Bob was told this a couple weeks ago, what sunlight those planets are getting don't have the energy to support multicellular life, so.
C: What about subsurface ocean life? I don't know, tell me if I'm wrong here, but subsurface ocean life just with the energy that comes from the tides. Like if they're not tidally loft?
B: Yeah, it could be chemosynthetic life.
S: Yeah, then we're talking about it's probably chemosynthetic life.
C: Yeah, but that would be life, right?
S: Sure.
B: It is life, Sure. Absolutely.
E: Yeah.
C: Shouldn't be so it doesn't have to have surface water.
S: They're talking about two different things here. They're talking about moving the habitable zone inward because of this energy distribution and also moving it outward because of sub ice liquid water. Yeah, right. So even when you get into the but that could into the colder zone which could also be the night side of a title like planet.
C: Well, and that's why we're looking at like some of Jupiters moons, right?
S: Totally. Yes, that.
C: We've got closer things to explore.
S: It's nothing new. It's like, yeah, yeah, Europa and yeah.
E: Seem to be new.
S: And it's also not new, but this idea is not new either. I read an article about this exact thing a couple of years ago, I think, where it's like, yeah, the the energy could be distributed and not only cool the near side, but warm the far side. The that terminus zone may be a lot broader than you might think if there's a good robust conduction of water and atmosphere around the planet. Yeah, absolutely. But there is the Red Star problem where they're just not giving, it's just not a lot of light energy to support photosynthesis. So I, I, I, I'll buy that for microbial life. I don't think we're going to be finding civilizations around red dwarfs is the bottom line.
E: Yeah, and they talk a little bit about the orange planets as well. The OR the orange stars?
S: Orange stars are the sweet spots for life because they are common enough that they're not going to interfere with the atmosphere of planets. They're bright enough where you could be outside the habitable zone is far enough way that you not necessarily being tightly locked. But they live really long times 50 to 70 billion years as as opposed to our sun, which is going to be what, 1010 billion? And there's a lot more of them out there. So if we're if we're going to focus our if we had to focus on one color of star to look for life, 100% it would be orange stars, red. I don't I'm not holding out much hope for life around planets around red dwarfs and yellow stars are fine. They're just there are fewer. Obviously we live around a yellow star. There's fewer of them and they're shorter lived, which those two things go hand in hand, of course. All right. Thank you, Evan.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:06:23)
S: Jay, it's who's that noisy time?
J: All right guys, last week I played this noisy. Any guesses?
C: Kind of sounds like a coin star. Yeah, but like from far away.
J: That's a good guess.
E: Is she right?
J: I can't say that right now.
C: Wow.
E: Oh, suspense.
J: All right, I got. Several guesses on this one. I got a listener named John Paul Posada and he said, hi, Jay. I listened to the show on a road trip with family and we all have our guesses. So his wife and daughter, who's 12 years old, guessed grinding coffee beans and this was a very popular thing that people sent in. His 14 year old son guessed it's dry ice being dropped into water. I think that that's another good guess and he thanks us for the show. Thank you, John. None of those are correct. I have another listener named Dan Oberstein. Dan said I think this weeks noisy is a gargantuan box of Legos being. And then he says, oh, never mind. I don't know why because there is like, you know, that kind of vibe there. But then he says, I actually think it's something someone pouring coins into a coin sorting counting machine and Cara, lots of people guessed that, including a listener named Laurie Salgoth. Good job, guys. The it's not correct. But you know, I've definitely think I've done that myself. And I know that sound and I do think it's it's quite similar. Another listener named Josh wrote in and said, going off, this is something that Jay hears all the time. This noise is bread crumbs being poured into a meatball mixture. And you know what? That's that's that's not a bad guess because I hear that noise. I have heard it many, many times. I will hear it again. And you know, there is the kind of that thing going on there. I have another listener, last guest here. This was sent in by Matt and Nevada. And Matt says my daughter Nevada thinks this week's noise, he sounds like someone slurping up noodles with ocean noises in the background. And he thinks it's a garbage disposal. Garbage disposal was guessed by by other people as well. These are all good guesses, but none of them are correct. And there is no winner. And I'm kind of surprised because I'm not the only bread maker out there that listens to this show. That's another hint. Anybody have any idea?
S: It's bread being.
E: It's a candle making machine.
J: Bread bread being made. Can you be less vague? This noise is essential guys to to bread making at home and the way I bake bread. You may have seen me many times, Steve. We've talked about this last night, working with something that Liz was talking about.
B: Yeast. I'm saying yeast.
J: Yes, this is my starter. This is a a sourdough starter. Now why? How could a starter make this noise? The answer is that the microphones there, there's a lot of activity going on in a starter, essentially. What is a starter, Bob?
B: It you know it, it reproduces and creates. I don't know, Jay.
J: It's a it's a yeast. Colony. You're keeping a colony of yeast alive, and those yeast are essential to to make certain types of bread. Sourdough is one of them and the the yeast do a couple of.
B: Production.
J: Yes, it's very that that is key factor in this. So the, the yeast produce gas, they produce alcohol, there's other stuff going on, but essentially this noise is a yeast starter which is very healthy, very, very, very active. You know, the imagine a jar filled with flour, water and all this yeast, but the yeast has pumped so much CO2 into the starter that when you when you jiggle it or you put a fork into it or something, the the yeast bubbles kind of collapse. The whole thing just collapses and it and it loses most of its built up gas that's inside of it. Right? Do you understand what I'm saying?
B: Yep.
J: And that noise, which I'll play again, is the yeast collapsing and, and the release of all the CO2 bubbles that have built up in there.
B: Man, hear all the popping.
E: Well, how many dollars all those coins were?
J: Cara, I want you to calm down. I know this is super exciting but like you got to just stop talking so much and like let the people enjoy.
C: Up all my voice earlier in the.
J: Show, I know.
E: Look, I get it. You have to remember, you have to remember Cara's not the biggest fan of things like pizza, right? Yep.
C: That's true. Bread is not necessary. I do love pizza, but not tomato sauce on my pizza. I love bread. Are you kidding me?
B: I'm like, I cut that, Steve, definitely cut that, no.
J: No, but you're thinking of this completely the wrong way. Next time Cara is out our way, we will take her for the best pizza in the world. Or you.
C: Can, but I will tell you it's not because I don't like the way it tastes, it's because I have a horrible reaction in my mouth.
J: To sauce?
C: Yeah. To like red sauce.
E: Oh, you're a super taster.
J: Well, did you guys know that tomatoes are part of the nightshade family?
C: Yeah, like I have there something about the acid content.
J: Oh yeah, it's high acid.
C: OK, understood. No problem. It's a bummer I'm.
S: Sorry.
J: All right, so thank you.
S: But if you cook. It properly you neutralize the acid that's.
C: That's true and certain foods are cooked better than others and have like sugars in them and things. But sometimes, like I could never just bite into a raw tomato.
J: Yeah, I. Wouldn't want to do that.
E: It sounds like a challenge.
J: So it troubles me that that, you know, are there no bread makers out there that heard this? I I I'm shocked. I thought this was going to be a really easy one, but no, no problem. I just recommend all of you go out and start your starter.
S: Yeah.
J: You can e-mail me if you need help, and then I'll teach all of you how to bake homemade bread. How about that? OK, here we go.
S: Over my house, teach me how to make a starter and make bread and we'll film it and TikTok it.
J: Yeah, I'd love to. That'd be awesome. OK, Steve, I have a new noisy. That's his noisy. Yep, this noisy was sent in by a listener named Rich Home. And here's the noisy. I'm going to give you a hint, it's not Jabba the Hutt.
E: Well, I'm out of guesses.
J: It really does sound like job Jabba. No bother. Anyway, if you think you know this weeks noisy or you heard something cool, you could e-mail me at wtn@theskepticsguide.org. Steve, so many things to talk about. Let me just cruise through it right away. We will be appearing at Sycon this year. If you're interested in going, you can go to sciconconference.org, that's CSICONFERENC, e.org for all the info, the dates and everything. But we will be there and the conference is looking great. Our next live performance will be on May 29th and May 30th. We will have three different things going on. We'll have the Secret SDU meet up on Friday the 29th. On Saturday the 30th, we will have the SDU Private Show, Private Show Plus and we will have the Sceptical Extravaganza that evening that those are both on the 30th. If you want to purchase tickets for that, go to theskepticsguide.org. Are you hearing me guys? Oh.
E: Yeah. I hear you and I'll be there.
J: A couple more quick things. So we are planning a massive, massive trip out to Los Angeles, to Sydney and then to New Zealand and back again.
B: Yeah, you catch that.
J: Thank you. There will be tons of shows. We will be doing at least two shows in Los Angeles when we're out there. We will be, of course, in July. We will be at the Nauticon 2026 and Skepticons 42nd year of running conferences. This is a huge event. The entire event that you'll go to in Sydney will be run by the SGU. This is a Nauticon conference and every, if you've ever been to 1, you know the kind of content that we have. But to give you a quick summary, this conference is about socializing and having a really, really good time. The SGU with Brian WEC and Andrea Jones, Roy and George Hobb will be doing all sorts of different things, of course on the mainstage for two days. There'll be night time activities. There'll be lots of other things going on. We have side things like the board, the board meeting which Evan is running and this is basically anyone can come and we will play board games for a few hours together. There is an extravaganza, all sorts of stuff. It's just easier if you go to nauticoncon.com or go to skepticon.org dot AU for all the information. Tickets are available now. Please join us. It's going to be a great time and Doctor Carl will be there. And guys, if you want to support the work that we do, please consider becoming a patron of the SGU. We need your support and we use your support to keep this program going. And all the other things, things that we do collectively. It's it's, you know, it's 2026 that we're living in the Upside Down. We can't personally stop it, but we can help educate people and help people find some sanity. And I think that even those two things alone are enough. But we do lots of things to help people and to to help each other. Right. Like, we love Cara. And when her tooth hurts, we'll, we'll text her.
S: We'll give her emotional support.
J: Yeah. We'll give her all the emotional support she needs. Anyway, please consider becoming a patron of ours. We would really appreciate it.
Emails (1:15:34)
S: All right, thank you brother 1 quick e-mail. This comes from Brian from Cummings, Georgia and Brian writes here is the video I watched about Kesterite solar panels. He he had mentioned it on the live on the chat during our live streams. Now he's following up. Kestrite does not contain lead and is very durable, unlike perovskite. Scientists studying Kestrite have modeled a possible 33.56% efficiency. Obviously that is just a model, but it looks promising. Matt Farrell does some pretty well researched videos on technology and he gives a link. So I watched the video. I read a bunch of articles about it. And so here's the bottom line on Kestrite. When it comes to solar panels, much like battery technology, right, you want to have a bunch of features all at once to in order to be marketable, right? To be competitive in the marketplace. Right now, most commercial solar panels out there are silicon based. And the advantage for silicon is that now we have, you know, procedures to mass produce them. They're getting cheaper, they're getting more efficient. The efficiency is in the low 20s now for commercial silicon based solar panels. Downside is they could be cheaper, except that they use silver in their construction. They also use rare elements in their construction and they use toxic elements in their construction. So those are the three things we would like to avoid, expensive, rare and toxic substances. So enter perovskite, which we've talked about before, but this has been studied now I don't know, 20 years. This is a material that can replace silicon as the basis of a solar panel. The advantage is it has potentially higher theoretical efficiency and does not necessarily need to use any rare or expensive elements. The problem with perovskite is that it's not very stable. It tends to break down when exposed to things like sunlight, you know which.
C: Is Oh no, that's.
S: A problem if you're a solar panel, but also like water and oxygen, you know, so it's main research has been how do we stabilize the crystal lattice of perovskite, which stabilizes with yeah, with stabilizers, right. And the one of the big ones is lead, OK, which is, which is toxic, you know, so the, the compromise with Perovsky is that you've got to stabilize it with rare and toxic and sometimes expensive compounds. So we're back to sort of the same issue that we had with with silicon, but it doesn't mean that it won't overall be be better than silicon. But we're not quite there yet. Then porovskite solar panels are hitting the market, but they're really just incremental. And it's more of a lateral move than a clear superiority to silicon. But the potential is greater if we could sort out these issues. All right. Now enter castorite, which is a similar sort of crystal lattice, and it's comprised of four elements, copper, zinc, tin and sulfur, all of which are cheap, abundant and non-toxic. Great. So we have a new crystal that we could make solar panels out of, and it's tough and it's stable.
E: There's got to be a drawback. There's.
S: Got to be a catch right there's because if there if there weren't a catch we would all be using we would be doing a castorite solar panels these days it.
B: Explodes in sunlight.
E: Like what, 50 times the cost?
S: So the theoretical thing, he's correct, the highest theoretical efficiency in models of the castorite based solar panel is 33.5%. That's like compared to say 22% for silicon. That's huge in terms of, yeah, it's huge, huge efficiency improvement. That's theoretical in a lab, like actually making and testing a Castrite based solar panel in the lab. What's the highest efficiency you think they've achieved so far?
E: 22%.
C: Less 15.
S: 14.3 Yeah, oh half of 14 point.
C: Three, do they know how to improve?
S: Less than half so and the threshold for marketability is generally considered to be about 20%. So, you know, do.
C: They know why there's a difference between theoretical and practical.
S: They absolutely do, and that's the core of the of the issue here. What is the difference? The difference is imperfections in the manufacturing of the castorite and the crystal lattice structure breaks down over time just because of the chemistry involved, like they reconfigure themselves. Like, oh, the zinc is combining with the copper when it's not supposed to do that, whatever. So they reconfigure themselves into a form that is highly inefficient, where there are pockets that trap electrons, etcetera. So again, it's kind of a stability issue. So they need to figure out a way to both make the castorite with fewer imperfections and keep it from breaking down over time. So guess how they do that? That by introducing rare, expensive and toxic elements into the lattice structure. And that works wonderfully well at stabilizing. So, and that's that by the way, is how they get up to 14.3%. That's with the doping like with these other things. So there's more work to be done, right? They need to figure out how to get Kestrite above 20% efficiency with, with the kind of stability that they require. You know, these things need to last for 20 years basically, you know, cost competitive with silicon and we're not there yet. So the question is, are we ever going to get there with Castorite? And by the time we do get there, where's the competition going to be? Where is perovskite going to be? Where is silicon going to be? And for that matter, where are the organic and flexible solar panels going to be? It's always not just where you are, but where all the competition is. So this is just another player. It's in the lab at this point. It's not being manufactured. It's promising, it's theoretically has good potential, but they have to crack these technological hurdles, which is basically the same as, you know, the silicon and perovskite base in terms of how to make it without over relying upon rare earths and lead and cadmium and things like that.
C: Yeah.
E: Yeah, they've also tested blather Skype, but it's all. Talk.
S: So another one to add to my list to keep an eye on, but it probably will be 10 years I think before if it works out, like if it crosses the finish line before, like they're actually on roofs making electricity. That's what I suspect, but that's good. We often talk about things 5 to 10 years before they actually hit the market. I remember the silicon anode lithium ion batteries, we talked about that 10 years before they hit production. We talked about it on our show and. Boom, there they. Are, but we've been doing the show long enough that that yeah, that loop gets closed.
E: All.
From Tik Tok (1:22:44)
Coincidence? https://www.tiktok.com/@knightfallenangel/video/7599671324679671071
S: Right, one more one more quick thing. This is a from TikTok segment, but it's also a name that logical fallacy. And it's when I say name that logical fallacy, I mean it's some kind of problem with critical thinking. Doesn't have to necessarily specifically be a logical fallacy. Could be a cognitive bias, could be a heuristic, could be something else. So I'll link to the video. But basically what the video, the person in the video is saying is that there's something funky going on with the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretty. The reason for him thinking that there's something funny going on is that there's just too many coincidences. For example, both of their last names are adjectives Good and he says Pretty, which is mispronouncing his name in order to force the point. And then he says they're both 37 years old. What are the odds that they're both 37 years old? They both were not like, professional agitators or protesters. They had, like, no business being there. Why were they even there?
C: Wait, what does that even mean? What's a professional agitator?
S: Yeah, exactly. He said that the building of the company that was involved in the the welfare fraud was in the background of the video with Alec Alex Predde's killing. OK, It's the same place. That's why they're there. It's not a big coincidence. You know, that's the same city. That's why the you could argue and some people believe that's why they were the ICE was sent into Minneapolis was to draw attention to the welfare fraud, which I think I had the opposite effect, but that's beside the point. So he goes on like that. It's all numerology and coincidence.
E: Numerology. That's what I was thinking, yeah.
S: So, so how would you characterize what is happening there? He's just saying all these things line up. It can't be a coincidence some conspiracy must be going on. That's basically the video. So what? What's the cognitive problem with?
C: That confirmation bias, I mean, that's like the overarching one for everything.
S: Yeah, there's, there's always confirmation bias going on because he's looking at the things that line up and not looking at the things that don't line up. Yeah, but that's almost.
C: Always in there somewhere, little things like there's some sort of like like a he's probably got like a base rate problem here where he doesn't really understand, like how many. If you were to pick everybody in a group of protesters of something that's very politically relevant for them, 37 would be a common age amongst protesters.
E: Why wouldn't right so failure to recognize the the proper statistics?
C: Right, because most of the protesters are probably between 22 and 45, and then you've got some outliers. Yeah, exactly.
E: Some older but.
S: So there's some innumeracy going on for sure. There's a another specific kind of innumeracy though, other than.
C: What can you give us? So what? Just yeah, so he could. Be like what part of what he's saying you want us to refer to?
S: Just the whole thing, just the overall strategy of look at these coincidences, something is going on. So first I'll ask it this way. How does he find the coincidences? Like what?
C: Oh, that's like a sharpshooter kind of thing.
S: Yes, there's so many fallacies and cognitive biases going on. Like every time you look at it from a different angle, there's another one and he's basically using 4567 different fallacies and to build his narrative. So what the sharpshooter refers to, it's kind of a post hoc analysis. He says this is significant, but he only says it's significant after he sees the results. He didn't say, oh, if those people are the same age, that's significant. Oh, look, they are the same age. He first noticed that they are the same age and then decided that was significant. That is exactly drawing the the circle around the hole after you shot the bullet into this into the wall, right into the.
C: Barn Yeah, it's like if you had two people who were seemingly unrelated and you were a detective and you found out through your detective work that they went to the same elementary, middle and high school, you would be like, oh, they probably weren't related. They probably or they there aren't unrelated. They've probably crossed paths in their life. But if you found out that they had the same dentist and were never in the office together, that would be a very sharp shootery, kind of or.
S: Even worse, they both have blue eyes. What's going on with that?
C: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
S: Yeah.
E: They own pets? No way.
S: Yeah. So right.
E: Come up with a whole bunch of.
C: But also, what is their? What is their ultimate argument here? It's fish.
S: It's coincidence.
C: Yeah.
S: You know, that's it.
C: OK.
S: It's.
C: But then, OK, sure, you're right. There are coincidences that you identified.
S: But it's the the the implied argument, which I think it says explicitly, is that it's too many coincidences to be explainable as happening at random, and that's the innumeracy part.
C: Yeah, and there's so many different types of innumeracy, like.
E: Issues kind of grand. Conspiracy.
S: So let me wrap it up a little more concisely. So part of what he's doing is what we call anomaly hunting, right? He's looking for anything that appears strange. And the particular type of anomalies he's looking for are alignments, right? Just random alignments of things like they're both 37 or their names both sound like an adjective or the name of the streets, or were like you could see the same street name in the background of both of their videos or whatever. It's all stuff like that. And then he so it's partly anomaly hunting, partly pattern recognition is like looking for patterns and then imposing them on what he's seeing. And then the innumeracy part part of it is underestimating how likely these things are. But even if.
E: They.
S: Even if they were, yeah, even if they were really unlikely, it's the lottery fallacy of it's yeah, that one thing may be unlikely, but the probability of you finding anything unlikely is actually very, very. High.
C: High, yeah. Right.
S: It's not like you sought out to find these things specifically, you sought out to find any coincidence and.
C: Why when we do statistics, we have to do like Bone Ferroni connections because you can't just look at, you know you can't compare 2 points of data 500 times, right? You will find stuff you will find. Then you have to correct for the number of times you did it.
S: Absolutely. Or you have to do the internal replication thing. All right, so if you guys remember the entire, at least one entire book written about all the alignments between the Kennedy assassination and the Lincoln assassination.
B: Oh, yeah, My God.
S: The shooter of Kennedy shot him from a book Depository ran to a theater, like right went from a warehouse to a theater, and Booth went from a theater to a warehouse.
B: Yeah. One had a Secretary Kennedy, the other has.
S: Secretary Lincoln, Yeah.
E: Eight, yeah.
S: There's like all these things and you look at them like, Oh my God, what's going on? Like there's so many things, but it's like you take two massive historical events. There are probably thousands of individual factoids you can pull out of that, which means there are millions of comparisons that you could make. And the fact that you found a couple of dozen alignments out of millions of potential comparisons is not extraordinary. That's what you would predict by statistics. So the fact that he has found a few coincidences is is statistically probable. It's highly probable he's committing.
B: Him. That would be extraordinary.
S: Right. If you couldn't find anything, that would be extraordinary. Absolutely.
C: And I think there becomes a difference in interpretation where when you're exposed to this kind of stuff all the time, you can go, oh, that's neat. Yeah, that what a cool coincidence. And you can celebrate in the fact that it's cool without thinking it has any deeper meaning.
S: Right, I noticed they were cool.
C: 37 years. Old had an assistant named Kennedy and Kennedy had an like. That's cool.
B: That's a good one. That's a fun one, Yeah. Doesn't mean shit. Bottom line. Doesn't mean shit.
C: What are the odds? Pretty OK, Or maybe they're not, but it doesn't matter statistical, it's just a coincidence.
S: Right, all right, let's go on with science or fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:31:05)
Theme: None
Item #1: A comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/[6]
Item #2: Engineers have demonstrated a self-powered nanocomposite material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power.[7]
Item #3: A new study finds that since 2020 the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | A new study finds that since 2020 the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. |
| Science | A comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ |
| Science | Engineers have demonstrated a self-powered nanocomposite material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Cara | A new study finds that since 2020 the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. |
Jay | A comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ |
Evan | A comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ |
Bob | A comparison between in-person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair-mindedness, or outcomes. chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/ |
Voice-over: So it's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 genuine and 1 fictitious. And then I challenge my panel of expert skeptics to sniff out the fake. And you at home can play along if you wish. Three regular news items this week. You guys ready?
J: Yes.
S: OK, All right. Item number 1A comparison between in person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair mindedness or outcomes. Item number 2 engineers have demonstrated a self powered nano composite material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power. And I number 3A new study finds that since 2020 the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. Cara, go first.
C: OK. I think the ozone 1 might be science, sadly. So you said since 2020, so in the last six years, because we did cut down CFCS, we know that and that made a huge difference in the 1990s, right, those chlorofluorocarbons and we started to see a big improvement in the ozone layer. That said, that can't be the only thing that affects the ozone layer. And if I think about just the sheer pace of like industrial innovation and like what kinds of pollutants were releasing into the atmosphere, I wouldn't be surprised because I'm not sure if we've regulated anything since then for purely because of its ozone depleting property. So I don't know, I worry that that one is science. So that leaves me with a comparison between in person and virtual jury deliberations. No significant differences in oh, that is so hard to believe. Oh, that one bugs me. But also engineers demonstrating a self powered nano composite material that detects and wirelessly self powered. What does that mean?
S: Yeah, no external power is needed. It does it by itself.
C: How is anything self powered? So like if something had like solar on it that wouldn't be self powered right?
S: Well, if it were solar, right? It didn't have to be solar in and of itself, not have a solar panel attached to it that would be.
C: Extra, it would have to be made of solar panels basically. I see. OK OK, Self powered nano composite material. So something that somehow is able to store and use energy, detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for an. I do not understand this one. Crack formation in itself, yes.
S: If a crack forms in itself, it will then send a wireless it'll say, hey, there's a crack here.
C: And it'll tell.
S: Geez.
C: Yeah, that's cool. I like that. I want that one to be science. So I'm going to say the jury one is fiction.
S: OK, Jay, OK.
J: The first one here, there's a comparison between in person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant difference in attentiveness. All right. So you're basically saying, are people, is this just about simply how much people are paying attention to everything that's going on?
S: That's attentiveness, you know, Are they paying attention? Are they engaged? Are they fair in their judgement and what was the outcome? What was their decision at the? End well.
J: How can you judge if they were fair?
S: They measured it.
E: They used the Farrah meter.
S: OK, OK.
J: That's interesting though. I mean, yes, right Steve? OK, second one, engineers have demonstrated a self powered nano composite material that detects and and wirelessly reports cracks formation without the need for any external power. How the hell could it do that? It would have to have some type of, if it's doing it itself, it would have to have a mechanism inside to, to know with some granularity what's going on inside the material. OK, not impossible. The last one, a new study finds that since 2020, the ozone layer, which has been recovering since the 90s, has slightly reversed this trend and is once again being depleted. All right, because I did read that it was all back to normal. But sure. I mean, why, Why couldn't that happen again? Now the question is what's happening to affect the ozone layer because you know what we were having was the aerosols coming from, what were those particular aerosols guys?
E: Chlorofluorocarbons.
J: Yes. And we, we, I think globally we, we need a very strong effort to stop doing that and that's why I came back. So what else would be doing it? That's the question. OK. So between these three.
S: I mean between or among? Would it be among three or between? That's one of those words where there's no there's hard to know what the correct thing is.
J: Right. What's considering all three of these options, Steve? I mean, the first one, I don't like the fact that what we're what we're reading here doesn't really account for like how they're measuring fair mindedness, right, which which could just be maybe maybe Steve has to deliver it this way with a lack of information in order to make it, you know, work for the game. That's one thing. But something seems a little weird there. You know, this self powered nano composite material. I would say sure, you know, because there's no details. We don't know how granular it is. We don't know how much power it would need, whatever, you know, we just don't know enough to say no to that. And I think it's it's within the laws of physics. So I'll say sure, why not. And then the last one about the ozone layer, I mean, so the main question here is whether or not it's depleting.
E: Yes.
J: And I what I don't see what's so hard about saying, yeah, it depleted a little bit because of something, right, that we don't know what the cause is, but that thing has to exist, whatever it is. So it's just, I think that one's just a 5050 or not 5050. You have 1/3 of chance with that one. Anyway. My gut is telling me that I'm just going to say that the first one is the fiction, because, Steve, you made me angry.
E: OK, Evan, may, Cara, may I ask you again which one you believed was the fiction?
C: I also went with the jury.
E: Is it OK if I don't go with the jury?
J: No, you can do Evan. This is I was going to say, this is American. You can do everyone.
E: You do you, Evan. Why would this be the case? Why would there be no significant difference? Well, yeah, I think that one might have inherently sort of the largest sort of wiggle room to allow it to be fiction. That doesn't mean it is. And it could have gone either way, right? I mean, you could say maybe the jury performed better in a virtual environment as opposed to falling asleep right there in the bench, in the court, you know, in the courtroom in that environment. I don't know though that they were able to detect any significant differences. No significant differences. The second one is the one you know, I don't know about at all. And self powered nano nano composite material wirelessly reports crack formations. Yeah, I just don't have a good feel for that one. The last one about ozone since 2020, I thought the the ozone layer. So that means since 2020, there has been a trend in which it is becoming depleted again. Gosh, like, why do I think it's the opposite? Yeah. I, I could have sworn that we talked about the ozone in the last five or six years, but I could have sworn reading something not too long ago, maybe at some point last year, that that wasn't the case, that keeping an eye on the ozone, it's doing just fine. But this is a new study. OK, so all right, I'll go out on the limb and say the ozone one is the fiction.
S: OK. And by all.
B: Right. I'll start with with three here. The ozone layer, Yeah. I mean you say it's slight, so it's not, it's not much. I mean, volcanoes can do this. Maybe some some country embrace CFCS because it was cheaper and said we're doing this, I don't care type of scenario. I mean, it doesn't sound too egregious that that's possible at all #2 Here nano composite, yeah, this is, it is very interesting if true. But I could potentially see something about the nano composite that maybe the formation of the crack itself or some fluids that get in the crack can somehow make it do some sort of burst that is detectable by an outside device. And that wouldn't violate the spirit of this news item. If it if if it did create a burst that was detectable by a real bit of technology that could then signal, you know, send a text to the people who are tracking this stuff, something like that. I could I can kind of envision happening there. So that seems reasonable. The one that, of course, the one that's really rubbing me the wrong way is this virtual jury. It just makes so much sense. You know, maybe 2, maybe it's just like too obvious, but it can't. No, I don't want to play that game this week, maybe next week. So I'll say I'll say the virtual jury one is fiction as well.
E: Steve, before you reveal, yeah, I'd like to point out that this happened 2 maybe 3 weeks ago in which I broke off from the other 3 rogues and went in a different direction on the answer and you swept us. OK. So I just want.
C: To say Oh no.
E: Well, let's see if this happens again.
S: We'll see if there's a pattern there coincidence. All right, so we will. So you guys all agree on the the second one the the nano composite. So we'll start there. Engineers have demonstrated the self powered nano composite material that or is it nano composite that material that detects and wirelessly reports crack formation without the need for any external power. You all think this one is science and this one is science. This is science.
B: This is very cool. No sweet. Come on, what's up? That's.
C: Neat.
S: Yeah, no sweep. So what is up? You tell me what? How can this?
B: I already told you.
S: To say it again.
B: That the the formation of the crack itself could be responsible or yes, the fluids that gets in there. It's the crack itself.
S: The crack itself absolutely is part of the signal.
B: A high pitched like a high pitched. What's good?
S: Let me ask you this, where's the energy coming from? Because it is self powered.
B: The propagation of the however they crack.
S: But what's being converted into actual energy to run a Wi-Fi like to send a Wi-Fi signal? It's got like an Internet of Things kind of signal, you know, So what that is.
C: Sound.
S: Electricity's gotta be it's.
J: Electricity.
C: Is it transduced from the sound?
S: It's vibrations, but but vibrations are turned into electricity. Through what effect?
J: The piezo motor effect.
S: Piezoelectric close The piezoelectric effect. Whatever the piezoelectric effect, yes, you're close. This nano composite, which is carbon fiber reinforced, has a piezoelectric effect. And so vibrations generate a small current. And when a crack forms, it disrupts the production of the current. And that can be measured. So it not only tells you, oh, there's a crack here, it'll give you an idea about the size of the crack as well because of the degree to which it disrupts the energy coming being produced by the piezoelectric effect.
B: So cool.
S: Yeah, pretty.
C: Good they want to use this for.
S: So like for example, if it's you have an airplane made out of this stuff, if tiny micro cracks form in in the hull, you know, you can be alerted to it automatically, you know, so you go repair it Pretty cool.
E: I. Hope they call it the Kraken the.
S: Kraken by Kraken All right, let's go back to #1A comparison between in person and virtual jury deliberations found no significant differences in attentiveness, engagement, fair mindedness, or outcomes. Bob, Cara, and Jay, you think this one is the fiction? Evan is all by his lonesome, thinking that this one is science and this one is.
E: Come on.
S: Science. Good work, Evan I. Don't buy it.
E: It shouldn't have been science. But I don't buy.
S: It well, you could. You could read the article and judge for yourself again.
C: I want to see this replicated.
S: Yeah, absolutely.
E: There might have been bias.
S: But it seemed like a pretty reasonable study. Obviously, you never would know from one study, you know, if the results are definitive. But, and they studied this because they were concerned about, you know, would this would be the jurors not be paying attention, You know, virtually, you know, online the results are pretty robust. But again, maybe they're biased. Maybe they were. But it's always interesting when the results conflict with what the researchers thought they were going to find. I always tend to think that, you know, to take that a little bit more seriously. So they had 54 mock juries, 24 of them met in person and 30 deliberated virtually using the same basic materials. They had the same information. And yeah, they measured their attention to the proceedings, their, you know, their deliberations, the outcomes, etcetera. But anything that they measured, there wasn't any significant difference between the two groups. So that's reassuring. But obviously more, more research is always going to be needed for stuff like this. But there wasn't a big difference, you know, it wasn't like it was. Oh yeah, these people were like not paying attention at all or anything.
C: I don't buy it. Fair enough.
S: So virtual doesn't mean they're at home in front of their own computer with their own phone next to them, Whatever, you know what I'm saying. It doesn't necessarily mean that there wasn't some constraints placed on their distractions.
C: Just means that they weren't.
S: If you are, but they were remote, yeah, they were virtual.
C: There, But I guess that's the other thing that's frustrating is like this was a mock thing at home. They're not putting their phones in the little plastic Baggies like they do.
S: Well, they make in. Go over with them. Hey, there's, you know.
C: Yeah, they're like, hey, put your phones, OK.
S: All right, which means that a new study finds that since 2020, the ozone layer, which had been recovering since the 1990s, had slightly reversed this trend and is once again, once again being depleted. Is the fiction because Evan is completely correct. It is doing just fine. the IT continues, the ozone layer continues to repair itself because we're no longer, you know, producing the CFCS. And the estimates are actually that it will be completely repaired by 2066. So we're still 40 years away from it getting to where it was before we started to deplete it. But this is I thought.
C: That I had read in the past that there are a lot of new holes.
S: The overall I don't know there's that that's true enough, but the overall ozone layer is the trend has not reversed it's still getting it's still repairing itself now my.
E: Understanding is the hole does. There's fluctuations trying. To get larger yes fluctuates, but overall it's the trend is. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.
B: What a win for science. That whole thing was, oh, look at this problem, this isn't good, let's fix it. They made that. They fixed it, and it's getting better. It's like.
S: But let me tell you, the head of the article that triggered this for me, a a global strategy is needed to reduce ozone levels. So I'm like, OK, what are they referring to there? So there's a difference between the ozone layer and surface surface, what we call surface ozone. Surface ozone is bad. That's part of air pollution, and it has a negative effect on human health. So we're trying to reduce surface ozone even while we're trying to let the ozone layer higher up in the atmosphere repair itself because, you know, it does important things like block ultraviolet radiation from from hitting the surface of the Earth.
B: And the nasty like UBC, UVC, which is like nest, like give you cancer UV. I mean, there's yeah, without the ozone, without the if we had an intense ozone all over the earth, land life might never have evolved unless they'd have to like deal with the the I you know, the the ionizing is it ionizing at that point? But yeah, it gives you cancer. I mean, it's so. Yeah. We.
C: Need I don't want to celebrate this win too loudly, lest certain people in power hear us and decide. So no longer stick with this like.
S: Oh, we're good. Then we could start doing them again. So.
B: Yeah, I've got my underwater habitat.
C: I don't believe in the ozone layer.
E: But it's that ground level ozone. What we need are ground level CFCS to fight them.
S: So where the ground level the ozone comes from is from nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. Now, these also have been on decline between 2000 and 2018. Same thing. They are regulated and the regulations have decreased them. But the researchers were measuring it and they're like, ha, it's not decreasing as much as we would have thought based upon the decrease in the nitrogen oxides and the volatile organic compounds. Then they figured out that the reason is, well, first of all, they're measuring them in the US and Europe and that's where the laws have been reducing the, the, the production of ground ozone. But they said, oh, but where it's coming in from other places. So it's still being produced like in Asia, for example. And it's being, so it's the transport of ozone produced abroad is preventing the decrease of ozone in Europe and, and North America in response to the regulations which decreased nitrogen oxides and volatile organic compounds. That was the study, but I, you know, twisted it into the ozone layer, which is different. All right, So ozone up there, good down here. Bet that's the bottom line. So good job, Evan. I always like it when somebody breaks away from the pack and is a lone, lone winner. Good job.
E: It's a it's a bit, it's a little scary. Good job man.
S: But you did it. You could have gone with the hurt and gone over the Cliff at all.
E: Yeah, there were reasons and it it almost seemed too too perfect in.
C: A way I know, but yeah, like Bob said, I didn't want to play that game.
S: I thought that game doesn't always work yet the meta games, I try to be inconsistent about it.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:49:29)
"A mind not wholly wishful to reach the truth, or to rest in it or obey it when found, is to that extent a mind impervious to truth an incapable of unbiased belief."
– William Leslie Davidson - (1848–1929) Scottish philosopher, (description of author)
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.
E: I'd rather you be more consistent about this. Am I not wholly wishful? To reach the truth, or to rest in it, or obey it when found? Is to that extent a mind impervious to truth and incapable of unbiased belief? William Leslie Davidson, Scottish philosopher, born 1848 and died in 1929.
B: You can't handle the truth.
E: You can't handle the. Truth.
S: I agree. You have to prioritize only believing what is actually true higher than anything else. Although that is, I would say, a necessary but insufficient condition for being, you know, a good skeptic and, you know, rationalist. But you also have to have the analytical skills to know how to do that, and those are the skills that have to be taught.
E: Yeah, absolutely. And even even the good science researchers can fall into the bias trap.
S: As we've talked about, Yep, we all have blind spots. All right, well, thank you all for joining me this week.
E: Thank you.
B: Steve, Thank you, Steve.
S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ www.space.com: Artemis 2 astronauts enter quarantine ahead of historic NASA moon launch
- ↑ phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2026-01-scientists-extinct-life.html
- ↑ www.nature.com: Wikipedia is needed now more than ever, 25 years on
- ↑ www.science.org: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adz7173
- ↑ theness.com: Rethinking the Habitable Zone - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ www.apa.org: https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/lhb-lhb0000643.pdf
- ↑ www.tandfonline.com: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19475411.2025.2610182
- ↑ acp.copernicus.org: ACP - Explaining trends and changing seasonal cycles of surface ozone in North America and Europe over the 2000â2018 period: a global modelling study with NOx and VOC tagging