SGU Episode 352

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Skeptical Rogues

• S: Steven Novella
• B: Bob Novella
• R: Rebecca Watson
• J: Jay Novella
• E: Evan Bernstein

Introduction

Steven Novella: Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Today is Wednesday April 11th 2012 and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

B: Hey everybody.

S: Rebecca Watson

R: Hello everyone

S: Jay Novella

J: Hey guys

S: And Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everybody.

J: Hello.

S: How's everyone doing this evening?

R: Super

B: Pretty good

J: Quite well

This Day in Skepticism

Titanic Disaster

R: Guess what today is.

S: uuuh, it is 100 years after the Titanic struck an iceberg.

R: Steve, why do you have to step all over my stuff?

S: Because you asked!

R: It was a rhetorical question, Steve.

S: Oh, I don't know Rebecca, what is today?

R: Today is the 100th anniversary of the Titanic sinking, you see how I said that even better that you did?

S: Except you were wrong.

R: Shut up.

S: The Titanic did not sink on the 14th, it struck the ice burg at 11:40 on the 14th. It sunk on the 15th.

E: Aaah. Sunk on the 15th, that's right.

R: I was going by Australian time, Steve.

S: (laughs) But not local ship time. I'm going by local ship time.

R: No.

E: Local shipwreck time.

R: I was trying to be kind to our Australian friends.

E: They said it hit a Goldberg? What? Oh, an iceberg.

S: (laughs) an iceberg, right.

E: That old joke.

S: But tell us the story.

R: You know the story, Steve. You know the story. Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet got on a boat. The boat sank. One of them died I guess, I didn't make it to the end.

(laughter)

R: Really long. Long movie. Yes, in 1912, the Titanic was the hot ticket supposedly unsinkable liner. And they were wrong. They hit an iceberg and sunk, there were not enough lifeboats to go around, lots of people died, we talked about this last week I believe.

S: We did, a lot of interesting details about the story. As I said last week, 1514 people died. There were only enough lifeboats on the Titanic for half of the current passengers, only a third of maximal capacity.

E: Yeah, and they didn't even fill those boats, like some of them launched with a dozen people. Cos it was a big mess, yeah.

S: Yeah, it was poor training. The crew didn't know how many people were supposed to go in the boats so they were launching them half-full yeah. It was crazy. And most of the men died, they did women and children first. Most of the men, even first class. 67%, two thirds of men in first class died. Most people who died, died from hypothermia. As soon as they hit the water, they lasted a minute. They died almost immediately. Were you guys aware that there was a ship that could have rescued everybody? The SS Californian was very close at hand, had spotted the Titanic, had spotted the flares, the rockets that were launched. The captain who was asleep, Captain Stanley Lord, he was awakened by a junior officer and he was like aaaah waah, alright whatever, he rolled over and went back to sleep. He basically said, well what colours were they, were they just trying to identify themselves or something? I guess the ships would use different coloured flares as ID. He said nope all the flares were white captain. It's like, alright keep me posted. But they didn't do anything. They could have. They arrived at 5 o'clock in the morning after the Carpathia had already rescued everybody who was in the lifeboats. It was too late to be of any use. So it was, really a tragedy. I mean, just no idea.

B: Oh my god, Steve now it's kind of worse.

E: Yeah.

J: Could you imagine that guy a week later?

S: Yeah.

R: Yeah.

J: He must have... it probably ruined his life.

S: Oh it did, he was actually, an enquiry found that he acted improperly. So probably his career was over at that point.

B: wow.

R: yeah, I hate to say this, but good. I mean it should ruin his live.

S: It should!

R: He ruined the lives of thousands of other people.

J: Yeah I agree.

B: Wow. Hey guys, I read, I went through a website that was just talking about the common myths of the Titanic, and one that surprised me was that this whole idea of the ship being unsinkable, according to this website anyway, the company that made the ship didn't really promote hardly at all this idea of it being unsinkable. And it seems to be a myth that was created after the sinking. And if you looked you really won't be able to find too much that said hey it's unsinkable before it actually sank. But after it sank, that's when that whole idea just kind of exploded. Which I thought was really, kind of odd.

S: I never heard that. That is interesting.

B: If that is true, I never heard of it either.

S: It's not odd, that makes perfect sense, that's exactly what happens. People change stories to make them more profound. How many times have you heard someone said, oh the doctors said I would never walk, and here I am walking. You know what, no doctor ever said that. You made that up after rehab and you were able to walk again. So it's the same, I totally believe that because I see that happen all the time in other contexts. But that is interesting because I'd never heard that before about the Titanic.

B: Yeah, I'm not surprised either, it just surprised me that after a century I would guess most people have no idea about that, if it's true. This is just based on one website that I read.

S: Yeah.

E: The Titanic had a sister ship, the Olympic.

S: There were two other ships in that class.

B: Britannia was one, was another one. Actually this website had another interesting titbit. You know there wasn't actually much recorded footage of the Titanic because, what was it, what was the first one that had its maiden voyage previously.

E: Olympic was in service in 1911. And it's Britannic, not Britannia.

S: So the Olympic had its maiden voyage previously, and the captain of the Titanic was also the captain of that ship. And they went and they sailed the exact same route by the way. So the fanfare wasn't as special of an event because it had already happened and some of the footage that you may see for the Titanic was actually not the Titanic, it was one of its sister ships. Because there wasn't a lot of footage for the Titanic because it was just kind of like, like almost like ho-hum here we go again type thing.

R: That reminds me of one of the other problems that people who really love the whole Titanic thing, one of the problems they face is that it's difficult to get any kind of souvenir that has the word Titanic on it. Because most of the things on the ship just said White Star Line because it was one of several basically identical liners.

S: Yeah.

J: Oh, that's interesting.

E: The Britannic was sunk by a mine during World War One.

S: A mine!

E: 1916! But the Olympic lasted quite a while, it was retired out of service in 1935, so it was the only one to not see a disastrous end.

S: Well happy 100th...

R: Sink day.

B: (laughs)

S: No, iceberg day.

R: Iceberg hitting day.

E: Ice burg day.

J: For the record, I thought the movie sucked. I know I'm in the minority, did not like the movie.

R: No it was an awful movie, are you kidding?

E: I saw Kate Winslet in an interview recently about the movie and it made me very happy when she said whenever she hears the Celine Dion song, her eyes roll, and in her mind she's thinking, wow I really can't stand this song at all.

R: Yeah I love her, Kate Winslet is awesome.

(laughter)

News Items

Blow Up Space Junk

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46980575/ns/technology_and_science-space/#.T4V1ZatSRLp

S: All right, well let's move on to the next item. Bob, there is yet another crazy scheme to deal with this whole space junk hubbub.

B: Yeah, resident space objects have been in the news lately. Have you ever heard of those? That's a euphemism I came across for common old space junk. I think NASA uses that term. Specifically, NASA is seriously considering a new way to get rid of our dangerous orbiting debris. The idea is to literally blow up some of the Earth's atmosphere so that it goes into space and cause some of the space junk that's there to de-orbit and burn up in our atmosphere. When I first saw that I was like, well you've got to be kidding, right. But actually I more I read, the more interesting it becomes. And this is a really cool idea for many reasons. First though, just a quicker primer on space junk. Space junk consists primarily of spent rocket stages and dead satellites and collision degree and etc. and all that. There's quite a bit of it out there, about 22,000 pieces as large as a softball or bigger. There's 500,000 pieces approximately bigger than a marble. And if you count everything bigger than a millimetre, you're talking literally hundreds of millions of items just careening around at orbital velocities. And the tiny ones can pack a punch, you think oh, you know it's smaller than a millimetre, big deal, but these high orbital velocities though really give it tremendous kinetic energy. For example, a marble travelling at 22,000 miles per hour has the kinetic energy of a 400 pound safe dropped from 100 feet.

S: That would crush a rabbit.

(laughter)

S: A rascally rabbit, in particular.

B: You know, what really scares me though, the most. Many people believe that we've already passed what's called this critical threshold. It's possible that now or some time in the near future, that even if we do nothing from this moment on, the junk will multiply, causing a cascade as it hits itself making more little pieces which then hit other pieces, etc. etc. until it gets so bad that nothing could survive a journey in space, could you imagine that?

S: I predict that if we just completely ignore this problem, it will just go away.

(laughter).

B: Just wait your 20 centuries and you're all set. Did you guys know that the international space station recently had a really close call? A real close call with space junk.

J: How recent?

E: How close, close?

B: Well, the astronauts aboard, imagine you're an astronaut on the ISS and you get a call, and they're like um, guys, could you go into the closest Russian Soyuz spacecraft and just wait for further instructions OK guys?

S: (laughs)

B: That's what they were told, scary.

J: When was this, Bob?

E: A week ago, two weeks ago?

B: Yeah, just this past month. The other scary part is that no-one knew about this potentially imminent collision until it was too late to move the ISS. They actually can and have moved the entire space station out of the way, but there was like not enough time, because they do need a lot of hours to actually, you know, get this thing moving. It turned out that a piece of a disabled Russian rocket was bearing down on them at 17,000 miles per hour. Luckily it missed them by seven miles, which might seem like a lot, but it really isn't when you're in orbit. But last June, a piece missed them by get this 1000 feet.

J: D'oh!

E: That's close. That's close.

B: 1000 feet, would be just like a bullet grazing your forehead.

S: Eerily, by the way, it's similar to the Titanic, they saw the iceberg a long time before they hit it but it just takes so long to turn that ship around that they just couldn't turn it around fast enough and the scraped past it.

J: Bob, did they shoot this thing with lasers? What did they do?

B: Hah no. Actually, yeah that is possible and China actually tested that a bunch of years ago, and they of course created lots of debris. Really pissed me off. But you know, you might think you could just clean it all...

S: That's good work boys.

B: Yeah, right. It's kinda easy to think, well just clean it all up, right? Just go gather it. But physics and economics just kind of giggles at you a bit when you say that. General William Shelton is head of the air force space command, what an awesome title that is. He's very pessimistic. He recently said, there's no solution just don't generate new debris.

E: There's no solution!

B: He said, if you look at the problem of trying to clean up debris, the physics just don't close. That's a direct quote, I get his gist but his phrasing seems kind of awkward.

S: Does not have way...

B: He finished with, with what we know about propulsion, there's no way to get there. So um...

S: So NASA's going to blow up the atmosphere.

B: Yeah, right. But if you look at the ideas that have been posited in the past, generally it involves a ship going from satellite to dead satellite picking them up. And really, I mean really it doesn't work, it's not practical at all, I mean think about it you have to change orbits and positions and velocities so often, the cost and weight to accomplish all that would be just, would be a joke. But the really important point there is that there's a lot of debris that you can't see. We can't see it. I mean there's literally millions of things in orbit that we cannot see, and that stuff is incredibly dangerous even if it's really tiny. You know, we can't track any of that stuff. Are you going to go and find and intercept all of them? There's no way we're going to do that, not with today's technology. Anyway, but that's where SPADE comes in. That stands for Space Debris Elimination which has been proposed by Daniel Gregory of Ratheon BBN Technologies in Virginia. And it is an interesting idea. The idea is to somehow fire focussed pulses of our atmosphere at the junk flying above it to change its trajectory, causing it to de-orbit and burn up faster. This is actually being seriously vetted by the NIAC or NASA's Innovative Advanced Concept project. And two ways they think they can pull this include a high-altitude plane or balloon being used to ignite enough fuel to cause this directed explosion. And calculations show that it wouldn't even need that much fuel, perhaps, I think the number was 500 gallons, I mean it was not a lot to accomplish this. Daniel recently said, or preliminary results show that we can affect the orbits of low earth orbit debris. We think we have a viable solution. And the beauty of this whole idea I think is threefold. We can handle all of the junk in the size spectrum from the biggest to the smallest, there's really no limitation. There's also no chance of adding new debris, and that's really key. You know, you're not putting machinery into orbit to accomplish a task so there's no chance of a mishap like, say an explosion and then just adding more mass to the space junk that's already there. Now, of course there could be, you know it's not foolproof. You could ignite prematurely or too late and affect the orbit of something you don't want to affect, or you could just change the orbit in such away that it causes the debris to careen into some other debris, so yeah, it's not foolproof. But it's good that you're not actually putting, you know, more objects into space than you have to. And the atmosphere that gets exploded into space just settles back down into the atmosphere like nothing happened, so that's not a problem. Also, many pieces can be dealt with at once, and the thinking is that you only need 3% change in velocity and that could probably be enough to de-orbit most debris. Now remember, orbital mechanics is not like flying in an atmosphere. If you're in orbit and your velocity decreases, you will enter a lower orbit, no if, ands or buts. That's why the Moon is moving away from us as it steals angular momentum from the Earth, it moves faster and therefore enters into a higher orbit, just getting farther and farther away. So I hope this idea pans out, I'd rather not have future generations, you know, curse us because we're so messy and short sighted. And please, China and other nations, please don't show off and test your lasers by blowing up satellites and creating thousands more pieces of these resident space objects. We have enough there, thank you very much.

Aristolochia Nephropathy

http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/herbal-medicine-and-aristolochic-acid-nephropathy/

S: All right well, thanks Bob. Going to come down to earth a little bit for the next one. This one is about an herbal product that's deadly toxin. Did you guys ever hear of Aristolochia Clematitis.

B: No!

R: No.

B: What the hell is that?

S: Well, yeah, they're actually the same root.

R: Actually yes.

E: Chlamydia?

S: These are flowers that, yeah not to put too fine a point on it, the flower kind of looks like the exit from a womb. The birth canal.

(laughter)

R: Very well put.

S: You know what I'm saying there Evan?

E: OK, there you go.

B: Gotcha.

J: I do now.

R: I think you're really going to have to spell it out here, Steve.

B: No wait, let me google this so I can see what you're talking about.

E: Visual aids?

S: A lot of natural, herbal or whatever remedies were based upon the notion that whatever the plant looks like, that's what it's used for. So this has been a traditional remedy in a lot of cultures for easing birth. You know, to use during birth, the birthing process. It was a very popular herbage in traditional Chinese medicine. However, it was recently found in the 1990s, and so again used for hundreds, perhaps a couple of thousand years as an herbal remedy for lots of things, again birth symptoms, but also snake bites and rashes and other things. For this reason, because it has had a long traditional use, a lot of people make the naturalistic argument, well it's natural, it's been used for thousands of years, it's got to be safe, right? Turns out, it's a deadly nephrotoxin. It will destroy your kidneys. This was first discovered in the 1990s as I said when there was a rash in kidney failure among young Belgian women. And it was discovered they were all visiting the same herbalist and were getting treatment for weight loss which included an aristolochia species. It was found that the aristolochic acid which is produced by some species of aristolochia is a nephrotoxin. Another similar case, this one in the Balkans. It was discovered that again, there was an increase in kidney damage and it was found that aristolochia seeds, which is a weed that commonly grows in the wheat fields was finding its way into the bread that was being made, so people were eating the aristolochia seeds. Now, researchers believe that these were both the same syndrome rather than having, they called the first syndrome Chinese Herbal Nephrotoxicity and the second one Balkan Nephrotoxicity, but now they're saying actually they're both just aristolochic acid nephropathy. They're both the same entity. And a lot has been discovered about the mechanism and how this toxin works. Well now there's a new study that shows in addition to causing kidney failure, the aristolochic acid also causes or increases the risk for urinary tract cancers. The researchers originally became suspicious of this because it was known that in Taiwan there is about four times the rate of bladder and other urinary tract cancers than in the Western World. So there's a cluster, you know. And whenever there is a cluster it always makes Epidemiologists interested. What is it, genetic or is it environmental? Researchers were able to find a strong correlation between Taiwanese with urinary tract cancers and mutations that are known to be caused by aristolochic acid. So it's one line of evidence that is correlating use of, again herbal aristolochia with significant increase in cancer. This is a very important story because in many countries, including the U.S., herbal remedies are not well regulated. In the U.S. in 1994 they were taken essentially away from the FDA in that the FDA no longer had to approve herbal remedies before they can go on the market and companies could also make these pseudo-structure, function claims for herbs. They became regulated like supplements, as if they were vitamins. And since 1994 the FDA has only been able to pull one herbal remedy from the market, and that was ephedra. You guys remember the whole ephedra thing?

B: Yeah.

J: Sure.

E: Sure do.

S: About a hundred people dropped dead from heart attacks because of ephedra. That's what it too, so only one case where the FDA was able to do that, so now we have an herbal product that is a known kidney toxin and can increase the risk of cancer and the FDA cannot pull it from the market. It doesn't really have the authority to do it. It can ban its import and it has done that, so you can't import it, but there's no ban on selling or using it once it's in the country.

R: Sometimes it seems as if the FDA is just completely useless.

S: But it's not their fault, they were made that way by congress. Laws were passed to make them powerless, essentially.

R: Right, I'm not saying it's necessarily their fault, I'm just saying it's really frustrating to have something called the Food and Drug Administration that can't administrate drugs.

S: This is an ongoing battle, but unfortunately the two senators, Orin Hatch and Tom Harkin, who are behind Duchet, the 1994 diet supplement health and education act, they're powerful, and they keep successfully squashing initiatives to revise that law and give more authority back to the FTA, so I think that as long as they're in the Senate it's not going to happen.

R: And I think that one of my big frustrations is with the fact that often times we get into arguments with alternative medicine proponents. It would be nice to have an administration that had pull and that was somehow helpful in rebutting claims of alt- matters. So, to say something like, well I know that you like that homeopathic treatment, but look here at the fact that the FDA has issued these warnings about it and made it illegal and, you know, it would help us a lot, it would help our jobs a lot if we had an organisation that provided real, solid oversight. It would help give our arguments more heft.

S: Unfortunately, so called complementary and alternative medicine is one of the pseudo-sciences that enjoys bipartisan support. It's not one where only one party that's really behind it and the other party can criticise them for being unscientific. It's really bipartisan. And it is Harkin and Hatch, that's one Democrat and one Republican, they get together and that's when problems happen, right? It's unfortunate.

E: In this case yeah.

S: There's just no political will, really, to deal with this, to deal with this issue. And again, the other lesson here is that herbs are drugs. People think of them as supplements or food or whatever, that they're somehow different because they're natural. They're drugs. They have a pharmacological activity, they contain chemicals, they have drug-drug interactions, they can cause the same kind of side effects that drugs can. The only difference is we don't really know what their pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics, we don't know how much of what active ingredients you're getting and there's lots of hidden toxicity. This is something that was used for thousands of years and nobody noticed that people were getting more bladder cancer, how could they really? I mean we need to do epidemiological studies to figure out that this increases the risk of cancer so it really isn't reasonable to expect that, just because something has been used for a long time that people would have casually observed a medical or a health risk from that substance. But that's what we're left with now, so really we are in a situation where the consumer has to be savvy and has to be aware, it's why it's important for these stories to get play.

Homophobia

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120406234458.htm

Toilet Water

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2126007/Bill-Gates-funds-new-machine-filters-toilet-waste-drinkable-water.html

Monkey Bill Update

http://ncse.com/news/2012/04/monkey-bill-enacted-tennessee-007299

Questions and Emails

Gulf of Cambay Ruins

Question #1 - Grover's Algorithm Hi skeptics, really enjoy the show, but as a computer science student I just wanted to correct something Steve said in the explanation of one of the Science or Fiction items from the show for April 7. In the item about the quantum computer in a diamond, Steve said that the scientists tested it with an algorithm that finds an element in an unsorted database on the first try. I don't blame Steve, as it said this in the article too, but this is wrong. The algorithm used is called Grover's algorithm, and it does indeed search an unsorted database much faster than a classical computer, but not in one step. As Steve said, with a database with n elements, a classical computer would take on average n/2 steps to search it, or as we say in computer science, it has a time complexity of order n (represented as O(n) ). Using Grover's algorithm, a quantum computer can search the database with a number of steps that is the square root of the number of elements in the database, ( O(n^(1/2)) ), which is much faster but still not 'on the first try'. Too bad you couldn't have Gripp on for Science or Fiction, I'm sure he would have corrected this as well. Cheers, George Daole-Wellman Sunderland, Massachusetts http://www.bell-labs.com/user/feature/archives/lkgrover/

Gulf of Cambay Ruins OMG What will young earth creationist say. Then again now the believers of atlantis will be insufferable. http://www.spiritofmaat.com/announce/oldcity.htm. Theron from Battle Mtn NV

Science or Fiction

Item #1 Scientists have created a power cell inside a living snail that can generate usable electricity from the snails own energy stores. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120411120508.htm Item #2 A new study finds that fungal infections affecting the top five crops are responsible for destroying enough food to feed 600 million people each year. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120411132000.htm Item #3 A new survey finds that cancer patients prefer safe treatments with predictable outcomes to more risky, but possibly more effective, treatments. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-04-cancer-patients-risky-treatments-larger.html Announcer: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fictitious, then I challenge my panel of sceptics to tell me which one is the fake. Is everybody ready for this week.

Skeptical Quote

Superhero Pseudoscience "One sure mark of a fool is to dismiss anything outside his experience as being impossible." -Farengar Secret-Fire

S: Alright, well thank you for joining me this week everyone. And until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.

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