SGU Episode 357

Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, you're escape to reality.

S: Hello and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, today is Tueday, May 15th 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: Evan Burnstein...

E: Top of the evening to you.

S: And we have a special guest rogue with us this evening, the Bad Astronomer himself, Phil Plait...

PP: Hey, hey. You know...

R: Wow! For the first time ever.

PP: I was going to say...

S: Finally we got you on the show.

PP: This is like the 300th time I've been on this show I don't think I'm special anymore.

R: Awww... you'll always be special to us.

PP: Oh thank you, Rebecca.

J: God! Alright, can we please start with the science? Let's go...

This Day in Skepticism (00:51)

R: You know what, Phil? If you were to die I would put your head in a device that maintained your life somehow. Much like the one that was Patendend... Patented.

J: Patendend.

S: Patendend.

R: It's a hard word to say

B: Paten-tated.

R: On May 19th 1987, a device for perfusing an animal head from Chet Flemming. Chet created a machine, or at least the drawings for a machine, which he called a cabinet, that wouldand I quote, "Provide physical and biochemical support for an animal's head which has been discorporated. (i.e. severed from its body). The device can be used to supply a discorped head with oxygenated blood and nutrients by means of tubes connected to arteries which pass through the neck." And there's al sorts of interesting little tubes and stuff in the drawings that provide for waste disposal and all that stuff.

B: Oxygenation, yeah.

R: Yeah, 1987, that was the year that the Futurama head in a jar became... well not a reality but... ah...

PP: A drawing.

S: A fiction.

E: A living breathing concept.

R: A slightly less implausible reality.

PP: So this guy had a drawing and Futurama is basically all drawings so I don't really think that's a step forward.

R: That's a good point.

S: In this guy's diagram it has the animal head which looks suspiciously like a human head.

R: It could be a chimp.

PP: Is it Richard Nixon?

S: It could be a chimp.

R: It's from the back so it's hard to tell.

S: I don't know, those ears are awfully humanoid.

J: But why? All kidding aside, and the Futurama thing, why the hell would you want to do that?

S: I think this actually a script for a horror movie.

E: Real horror show.

R: Jay, aren't you the one who is having his head frozen?

J: Oh my god. Yeah, because I want it in a box? No.

B: Cabinet. Cabinet.

S: Well, Jay, what if that's all they can do when they thaw out your head it's just going to be in a cabinet attached to tubes. Iit's not going to be actually attached to a robot or a flesh body, it's just going to be a head in a box.

J: Then I would tell them to kill me.

R: You'd still take it.

J: I would say melt my head down for spare parts.

R: No, come one, head in a box, they could put a monitor in there. You could still watch TV.

PP: What happens to the body? Does he talk about that? Do you become one of the headless monks from Doctor Who.

R: If he had plans for the body they're in another patent I haven't found yet.

E: That's a different category.

J: They have a cabinet that keeps a body alive without a head.

R: Oh yeah, I think Dr Caligari actually patented that. That'a a german expressionist joke there, thank you.

News Items

Ghost Box (03:34)

http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/ghost-box/

This section is in the middle of being transcribed by Thejmii (talk) as of {{{date}}}. To help avoid duplication, please do not transcribe this section while this message is displayed.

Mayan Calendar (11:06)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18018343

Electricity from Viruses (17:52)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18018343

UK Libel Law Update (23:13)

http://skepchick.org/2012/05/uk-parliament-will-tackle-libel-reform/

S: OK well let's move on. Rebecca, you're going to give us a quick update on libel reform in the UK.

B: Yay!

R: There's very exciting news. We haven't talked about this for a while because there hasn't really been a whole lot of forward movement on it and in fact the past few years of the fight for libel reform in the UK has been two steps forward, one sometimes two steps back. So just to catch everyone up, you know we've spoken about libel reform in the past on the show particularly as it relates to science writers like Simon Singh who criticised the British Chiropractic Association several years ago in an article, they sued him for libel in the UK. The problem is that in the UK it's very very expensive to defend yourself against a libel case and the burden of proof is on you, you're guilty until proven innocent. It's more expensive than anywhere else in the world and you don't actually have to live in the UK to sue for libel or to be sued for libel if someone in the UK reads your blog post, that's considered good enough reason to be sued there. So there's, that's just a really brief overview of some of the problems with the current libel laws in the UK. You can learn more if you like by going to libel reform.org. But the great news is that after years of scientists and writers and other people petitioning the UK government to reform their libel laws, finally on May 9th, during the Queen's speech, it was revealed that the government will in fact be reforming the libel law this year. The Queen's speech is the opening for parliament, it usually happens at the end of the year but they've just moved it for the first time this year so from now on it happens in May and they open parliament by having the Queen read out this list of all the things they're planning to tackle this year, and that was one of them. And sure enough just a few days later on the next Friday, they introduced a bill that will in fact reform libel law and it's got a lot of support behind it and everybody is optimistic that at last they're going to fix that so science writers particularly, around the world and skeptics around the world can breath a sigh of relief soon because they'll be able to use scientific facts to criticize people like Andrew Wakefield, who is another one who has used the libel laws to his advantage, without being afraid of being completely bankrupted in British courts.

S: Phil, have you ever been sued for anything you've blogged?

PP: No, makes me kind of sad.

R: Yeah, you need to get on that.

PP: I've been threatened a few times, but yeah.

S: Yeah.

PP: In America, happily the truth is a decent legal argument but it would still tie me up in knots for months if somebody did, so I'm hoping that won't happen.

R: Well yeah and it was only just last year that the United States I believe passed a federal law that prevents American citizens from being sued in UK courts but before that there actually have been several American writers who have been sued in UK courts and it's been quite disastrous for them.

PP: Yeah, how screwed up is your legal system when the American legal system looks over at you and goes dude... dude.

S: Yeah.

R: Yeah, and in fact that law was, I think a really great push because it was very embarrassing, it was very embarrassing for them to see other countries, particularly the US actually enacting laws to protect their citizens from British law, so yeah I think that was a huge wakeup call for British politicians.

S: All right well it's good news and we'll see what actually comes from that intuitive.

Who's That Noisy? (27:24)

Answer to last week: a Wilsford flute, sounding as if it were played within the walls of Stonehenge http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17080299

Questions and Emails

Corrections (31:03)

Rosalind Franklin and Jocelyn Bell Bernell

SuperMoon (33:23)

The "BBC News" thread had this on it "'Supermoon' graces the night sky" A "supermoon", bigger and brighter than usual, is seen in the night sky as it comes closer to the Earth - bringing with it the chance of higher tides. I commented "nonsense, it's an optical illusion when the moon is near other objects we associate as big, the moon does not have an elliptical orbit, it never gets bigger or get's closer." was I right? this is my understanding, that the moon can look small when it's way up in the sky with nothing but stars to look at it next to, but when it's right next to a massive silo our brain says "this is now much more massive the normal" if I'm wrong please correct me, it's the only way I learn. Kieren, from australia

Interview with Chris Lewicki (37:55)

http://spacegrant.arizona.edu/node/438

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/04/24/breaking-private-company-does-indeed-plan-to-mine-asteroids-and-i-think-they-can-do-it/

S: All right, well let's go on with our interview. We are joined now by Chris Lewicki. Chris, welcome to the Skeptics' Guide.

C: Why thank you.

S: And Chris is the president and chief engineer of a new company, planetary resources, but also the former space grant intern and formerly JPL's flight director for the Mars exploration rovers and the Phoenix Mars Lander.

B: Holy crap.

S: So Chris, we're having you on the show, it actually came to our attention through a couple of blog posts that Phil Plait wrote about you. What's the idea behind this venture?

C: Well, the general idea is that we've come to a time an place in the development of technology and our history in space exploration and our knowledge places out in place including the near earth asteroids that my founders and myself and my team all think that it's time that we start to try and develop that area and make a business around it and align a team and get them perusing space resources.

S: So, not to get too quickly to the punch line but the ultimate goal, it sounds like, is to start mining asteroids, but you apparently have a plan on how to get there, so tell us about how you're going to get to the point where you're mining asteroids.

C: Well, to even actually take it beyond mining asteroids, the vision of the company and the vision that we all shared when we signed up was really identifying those ways that we can develop space and explore space that extends our human activities and our business and our economic sphere of influence off the surface of the planet, off geostationary orbit and out into the solar system. And we feel that a critical way of doing that is the resources that are out there in space whether we use those resources to help explore the rest of space or whether we use those resources to develop facilities and capabilities in space and maybe even eventually bring some of those resources back for use on Earth.

S: So yeah it sounds like you want to, the goal here, the concept is that for in order for mankind to really have a permanent presence in space, there has to be some financial or economic angle to it.

C: Yeah, it uh...

S: Is that the goal?

C: Precisely, it has to be self-sustaining is a good way to describe it. If we had settled the Americas by constantly repeating shipments from Europe, our duration of our stay on the continent here would not have lasted that long, and of course what we learned to do and pioneers and the frontiers was to live off the land and this is just the 2012 version of that, and it's a little bit more technically advanced but it's the same general concept.

S: You think we'll be able to find all the resources we need in space, specifically among asteroids?

C: Um, I don't know, if it may in the long run be all of the resources, every last one of them, but certainly the majority of what we need to live and conduct operations and sustain ourselves in space, we find on the asteroids, the near Earth asteroids, potentially the surface and the poles of the moon and maybe even the surface of Mars one day.

S: The asteroids too can have a lot of volatiles like water and oxygen, those are obviously the two biggest resources that humans would need if we were going to have any prolonged presence in space.

C: Yeah, certainly the volatiles of carbonaceous asteroids in particular, starting with what everyone knows is water, the essence of life really, water is useful for so many things, you know beyond just drinking and growing plants and hydration, it's a critical part of various industrial processes where we use it to create solutions and process things, we can use it from a human exploration standpoint, for radiation shielding, just because of the mass that it provides and the dampening capability it has for cosmic rays and the like. If you want to get a little bit more complicated than just using straight water that you could potentially distil off of a near earth asteroid, you can electrolyse water into its hydrogen and oxygen components and then you have something to breathe and a fuel to burn and hydrogen and oxygen of course are the components that make up the rocket fuel that propelled the shuttle for so many years and we can use those same components for propellant in space. And beyond the water, there are other volatiles on asteroids that are useful for a number of different chemical and industrial processes and other techniques, ammonia and nitrogen, nitrogen is very rare in the solar system, things like carbon dioxide and even carbon in some forms is considered a volatile. These things are relatively plentiful on carbonaceous asteroids and the real benefit of them isn't that there are things that are rare here on Earth, but there are things that if we don't have to ship them into space and pay the shipping expense so to speak, it's a lot easier to use them where we find them.

S: Yeah, so obviously it would be pointless to go into outer space just to get water and then bring it back down to Earth.

C: Yeah, water would be interesting to bring it back down to Earth to study it but certainly no commercial interest.

S: But are you saying that it could become cheaper to get water from asteroids to use on say a space station like the international space station, than it is to bring water from the Earth to the space station?

C: Yeah, absolutely if you consider the least expensive capability that we have to launch any payload, whether that's water or a block of aluminium or a complicated space ship, you pay by the kilogram, and a litre of water is a kilogram and to take that litre of water and send it to the space station is, on the cheapest launch vehicle today if you filled the whole thing up is over $5000 a kilogram. If you wanted to send that water out to the orbit of the Moon for example, that price more than quadruples, you know more than $20000 for a litre of water, and to be able to get water en masse from a near earth asteroid and bring it back, it's a lot easier to ship it in space because you don't need as much rocket propellant since you're not escaping the gravity of the Earth and that's where the real benefit of space resources lie and even in the case where it becomes cheaper to launch it off the surface of the Earth, what that really means it's even cheaper then to send the thing back to the asteroid to go back and bring the water back so it's really kind of an amplification ratio of you know, every little bit of mass that you can send into space, you can leverage that to return a bunch more back to the various points of use for water as an example.

J: Hey Chris, I think a lot of people would thing that we're far away from having the technology for this type of space exploration, you know asteroid mining. How close are we actually, what technologies are your company developing or purchasing and how long until we get there?

C: So you know certainly, everything is science fiction right up to the point that someone figures out how to do it and it becomes a science fact, and the course that we're charting with planetary resources is trying to do something, as one of our investors Larry page says, is maintaining a healthy disrespect for the impossible. Asteroid mining has not yet been demonstrated to be possible and our plan that we're working through aims to change that, and for us it starts with decreasing the cost that it takes to actually go out and explore space with robotic spacecraft and to use what we learn from those robotic spacecraft to take the next step on how to develop the resources from the asteroids, how to extract them and how to deliver them to a point where there's a market for them. So what we're doing today is developing our core technology with the Arcade 100 series of space craft, and the Arcade 100 is a design of a spacecraft that we, if we had that spacecraft at the asteroid in orbit around it, we would be able to use it to learn about enough of the asteroid's properties to assess its value. But we don't put everything on that space craft that we needed, it doesn't have the propulsion for example, it doesn't have the deep-space communications, but in the internet view of development it's our first opportunity to learn how to make a really low-cost, innovative, better spacecraft and do it for really cheap. And so we will use that core technology in Earth orbit with a space telescope and that space telescope will be available to kind of a new class of users that aren't a circle of a limited audience in the scientific community that are using it for an extremely specific purpose, but this is something that we hope to make a use of a remote sensing platform in space more commonplace, something that maybe even college students and high school students and grad-school students could experience as a part of their education, maybe we could make it even that commonplace.

B: Hey Chris, you're targeting just near earth asteroids, correct?

C: That's correct.

B: What's the population, the estimated population of near earth asteroids that you think you'd have access to?

C: The current population of near earth objects if you go look at the minor planet centre's website is 8898 objects and these are not necessarily all asteroids, but they primarily are and they are near Earth because they have an orbit that crosses near a particular defined vicinity of Earth. So this is the number by the end of next summer it'll be crossing 10 thousand and it's really about doubled in really the past six or seven years and for planetary resources, the thing that has changed in our knowledge about the asteroids is not necessarily the number of the ones that are classified as near earth but if you consider the fraction that are really close to us, that are very easy to get to from an energy standpoint, there's over 1500 of those objects today that are actually as easy to get to as it is to land on the surface of the moon, and some of them even easier, and it's the energy that is really the most important in terms of being able to collect material from an asteroid, to potentially get that material back to Earth and in the near term what's most important for Planetary Resources is that it's very easy, it's on the easiest end of the scale to make a spacecraft that is able to make that trip out to the asteroid to study it in the first place.

S: Chris it sounds like what you're saying is the more we could access in space, the easier it will be for people to then exist in space, but also the more people there are in space then you'll have somebody to use those resources, so it sounds like you're trying to just bootstrap that whole process a little bit.

C: Yeah, it's you know, how do you start an economy from scratch? And that economy today extends out to geostationary orbit and the government has part of that economy that makes occasional visits out to the planets and other interesting places in between and it's just gotten to a point where the capability to build the spacecraft and to do it at a cost that can be considered privately or commercially is something that we are actually at today and we're just charting the course on how we can best navigate that space to develop this area to continue to grow that economy in the future.

S: You said before that you would want to put like a telescope in orbit near or around an asteroid evaluate if it had anything valuable, so are there asteroids that would not be worth it for you to mine, like just a regular nickel/iron asteroid, would that not be worth it?

C: Well, it's a matter of what steps we're prepared to take from our resource extraction and development standpoint. The resources of a carbonaceous asteroid are conceptually among the easiest to extract because it could be something as simple as a solar collector and a reflector and simple distillation process whereby you melt and evaporate water and condense it into a storage vessel, and of course conceptually that's rather simple, the implementation details of course are always a bit more difficult but to consider that problem is a much easier problem to start with than trying to figure out how to extract iron for example from a metallic asteroid. So our first targets that are of most interest are of course the easiest ones to develops and the ones that have the highest payout for the resource itself and that's our interest in water in space.

B: Chris, regarding the volatiles on the near earth asteroids, wouldn't the sun have vaporised a lot of them off of the asteroid?

C: Actually no, one of the most fascinating things in the space environment in what goes on and physics and chemistry of the solar system is the asteroid kind of after a while, and comets may actually be this case as well, they end up being self-insulating so you do boil off and evaporate a percentage of the exterior of an asteroid after a certain amount of time but what you leave behind in solid material is an excellent insulator and this is all things that have been lightly tested, probably the deep impact mission might be the one that has provided the best direct data for this in understanding what the bulk properties of a near-earth object might be, but you have this self-insulating thing that could be just a meter below or so that exterior crust if you want to call it that, it may not be a hard crust, are materials that are as high as 20% by the weight in water.

S: But are you hoping that you're going to find an asteroid that's essentially a huge chunk of platinum or something, could that be the most valuable kind of find?

C: (laughs) Well it's probably not the case that it's a huge chunk of platinum, this is something that we actually know fairly well from meteoritic science, the near earth asteroids that end up on the surface of the earth are the meteorites and the things that we see streaking through the night sky, and laboratory tests have revealed that certain types of meteorites have a very high concentration of platinum-group metals and by very high we're talking about still parts per million, so I think the highest is on the order of 200 parts per million, which as it happens is still more than 20 times as concentrated as the most productive platinum mines on Earth, and when you consider just the massive amount of material that exists in a large object, say a 500 meter asteroid, that still at 200 parts per million is a lot of platinum and this relates to in the long term when you become more of a master of space exploration and the extraction of space resources, especially enabled by the development of the fuel source that you can get from carbonatious asteroids, you then have a capability which you can turn to the development of resources like platinum-group metals, even in those quantities that I'm talking about, all that, all those other technologies have to precede it before it might be economically viable to return things like platinum-group metals back to the Earth.

B: How would you get vast quantities of a metal back to the Earth, what's the plan on actually doing that?

C: There's a number of options, this is an area that NASA is actively researching in terms of advanced re-entry technologies, getting things back to the surface of the Earth. We of course know a number of ways to come back in terms of re-entry capsules and space shuttle and the military is working on winged aircraft that are in orbit right now and then the office of the chief technologist has recently funded work in inflatable re-entry shields that are much lower mass and can be deployed to precisely, you know maybe in that particular application bring humans back to a precise landing location. And you know, the time-line that we're talking about returning the material back to the Earth will allow us plenty of time to perfect and develop the most appropriate technologies to bringing back significant quantities of metal to a terrestrial market.

PP: One of the things that I didn't ask you before when I actually interviewed you for the blog was specifically the technology used to mine these asteroids to get out the volatiles like water and air and eventually the metals.

C: Yeah, I can speak a little bit more to that in terms of a number of concepts, what I'll speak to first though is getting out and doing the prospecting activity, starting with our Arcade 100 series space telescopes and getting out to the Arcade 300 prospecting capability. We realised that we needed a capability to visit asteroids, get out to their native environment, where they're at, to be able to essentially do that development work that will allow us to develop the best process for extracting any given resource, and at the cost of the way that we're doing it right now and what it typically costs within the government, these are on the order of a billion dollar proposition and of course that is not necessarily commercially viable. But to be able to visit an asteroid, a particular one repeatedly or a number of them to develop a technology for extraction and recovery and storage and transport is probably going to require many visits and we need to be able to do that as economically as possible. So when we do that, we'll be able to do small-scale techniques in terms of demonstrating touching down on the surface of an asteroid, demonstrating technologies for staying on the surface with the manner of an anchor so to speak, to use a simple terminology for that, and how you can in the case of extracting volatiles, how you can use solar concentrators or other techniques to do that. For small asteroids, and this is something that was studied in the Keck Institute of Space Studies, move an asteroid study which myself and our advisor Dr. Tom Jones participated in, what was considered there was cosying up to a relatively small near earth asteroid about 7 m or so across, you know not very big at all but still something that weighs hundreds of thousands of kilograms, that's something that you could envelop with a material to essentially be a vapour barrier and you can slowly heat up the entire object and through evaporation and condensation using both the solar energy from the sun and the cold sink of the rest of the 3 Kelvin sky, you can work a process where you might not be able to extract 100% of the volatiles, but you can get a fair recovery in terms of something as simple as water. Now, when you get into for example, separating platinum-group metals from the matrix that they're in and the rest of the asteroid, that requires much more exotic techniques and there's a number of concepts there that have been discussed over time that we'll of course have to consider and develop but that really is work that will require a detailed understanding of the asteroid itself and that's been our primary focus today.

S: Well Christ it's really, this is very interesting, we're definitely going to want to keep track of how you guys do. Is there anything that we didn't ask you about that you really want to talk about?

C: You know we certainly appreciate that what we're trying to do is audacious and it's something that is a very hard task and we expect that we're going to stumble along the way in terms of figuring that out, but we feel that it's important enough to develop this area and important enough to do it in a way that sustains itself that we as a company are committed to doing that and are going to use the best resources that we have available to us, both in terms of who we have working here in the company, and the other opportunities of the other exciting businesses that have similar goals in space and similar goals here on the planet, is just to kind of move all areas of humanity forward in all the ways that we have opportunities to do and it's great work if you can get it, I enjoy it tremendously.

S: Yeah, it sounds exciting, you know I mean seriously, it doesn't sound like you're over selling it, you're acknowledging that there are a lot of unknowns, it's going to be very difficult, you have, you're just figuring your way as you're going along, but it sounds like you have a pretty reasonable plan for how to go forward.

C: It just might work.

S: It just might work. Well hopefully we'll be able to get you back on the show sometime in the future when you guys hit pay dirt.

J: (laughs)

C: Certainly.

S: (laughs)

B: Pay platinum, pay platinum.

S: Pay platinum? All right, thanks a lot Chris.

J: Thanks Chris.

B: Thanks Chris.

R: Thanks.

E: Thank you Chris.

Science or Fiction (60:09)

Iszi Lawrence: It's time for Science or Fiction.

S: Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine and one fictitious and I challenge my panel of skeptics (and Phil) to sniff out the fake. And you all can play along at home. We have a theme this week because I couldn't find jack for news items this weeks So I had to go to a theme. The theme is, this as about actually a very interesting character that I've been interested in for a while, Florence Nightingale.

PP: She was the mother in the Brady Bunch, right?

S: That's right. So see how much you guys know about Florence Nightingale. All right, here we go. Item number one. In 1860 Florence Nightingale founded the first secular nursing school, essentially establishing the modern nursing profession. Item number two. An early believer in the benefits of sanitation, Nightingale's policies during the Crimean war quickly dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from a high of 42% to as low as 2.2%. And item number three. Nightingale suffered from a mystery chronic illness and lived as an invalid from 1857 to the end of her life in 1910 at the age of 90. Phil, as our guest, you get to go first this week.

PP: All right, so let's see, we've got her establishing a secular nursing school, and I've got to say I know very little about Florence Nightingale except they named a bird after her, so um that may not be true... so if you'd said that I'd probably say that one's the fake one. But the establishing the modern nursing profession sounds legit. An early believer in sanitation. I'm not really buying that she dropped the death rate that much. And the chronic illness is just a coin flip for me. So I'm going to say number two is the fiction.

S: The uh, the sanitation.

PP: Yeah.

S: OK, Bob?

B: First secular nursing school. Yeah, I mean I can't think of anything out of whack with that one. The third one, the mystery chronic illness, I mean that is a hell of a long chronic illness, from 1857 to 1910. Wow, yeah that one, that's possible sure, like Phil said, a coin flip. It's the second one that I'm having trouble swallowing, that's such a huge drop, 42%, 2.2$ and you say here British Army hospitals, so multiple hospitals. I would think that they just could not ignore that kind of a drop and just kind of like abandon it, if they even did. Yeah, I'll have to go, I'm going to go, I'm going to do a GWP here and I'll go with Phil, uh it just seems like too much of a drop, because I think that would have been too early, you know far too early in, you know the benefits of sanitation. So yeah, I'll say that one's fake. Dammit.

S: OK, Rebecca?

R: Yeah, that's the, I do know that Nightingale was a huge proponent of sanitation, and that she did have some huge successes I think in her life with establishing sort of sanitation routines in her hospitals but yeah, that's a huge, that's a big drop. And also I'm not sure that she would have been able to institute all those policies during the Crimean War. I guess what I'm stuck on is whether or not she would have been that in control of that many hospitals in order to create that kind of drastic difference and be credited with it, even if that drop did happen, which I'm not convinced it did because it's a huge drop. So yeah, I'm going to have to go with that one as well as being the fiction.

S: OK, Evan?

E: Well, I'll agree, I think perhaps the issue with the Crimean War one is that she probably did have some kind of affect, maybe it wasn't as dramatic as it says here, but was more like it was a piece of the puzzle, not the only reason or even the primary reason, I'll bet you there were other reasons for it as well, other people of less notoriety working on the same issues perhaps because this was a pretty significant war. Whereas the other ones, the first secular nursing school, establishing the modern nursing profession, I seem to recall this somewhere, I can't exactly say where, somewhere in my reading over the last 20 years or so. And then the chronic illness that she suffered from, a mystery chronic illness. See, I don't see any issue with that, I have no reason to think that that one would be fiction, it seems pretty straight forward, I'll have to go with the crowd.

S: And, Jay.

J: So I'm it, hey? Well, everyone had something intelligent to say, I think it makes a lot of sense to say that 2 is fake because you know, 42% down to a 2.2% drop is so dramatically significant. I'm going to go with the group and say that that's the fake.

S: OK. So you all agree on number 2 so we'll take these in order I guess, we'll start with number one. In 1864 Florence Nightingale founded the first secular nursing school, essentially establishing the modern nursing profession. You guys all think this one is science, and this one is science. That is absolutely true, she really did, I remember growing up you hear the name Florence Nightingale, it's like iconic but I always heard and just thought of her as just a particularly compassionate nurse, when in fact she really established the modern nursing profession in terms of a lot of the, not only the role of nurses but the discipline and the dedication to the quality of care and the quality of life of their patients and sanitation, cleanliness, nutrition, you know a lot of things. She was a massive advocate for proper nursing prior to her, you know it really wasn't a profession like it is today, it was more run by churches and religious institutions and they were female volunteers who just helped, not that there wasn't any knowledge before her, but I mean she really did bring it together into a profession. Let's go on to number two, an early believer in the benefits of sanitation, Nightingale's policies during the Crimean War quickly dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from a high of 42% to as low as 2.2%. You guys all think this one is the fiction. Let me first say that everything you said about this item is wrong.

R: That means we got it right.

B: Yeah, it does.

S: But it's still the fiction.

B: Yay!

E: All right!

J: Sweet!

S: This is the most massively you have all been correct for the wrong reasons and I, this is what I suspected was going to happen, I debated with myself whether to put the actual percentages in there...

J: Uh huh.

B: Come on.

S: Because it kind of made it easy. There is actually a belief, and you will read this on a lot of sites, that Nightingale dropped the death rate in British Army hospitals from 42% to 2% and those figures are correct, they did drop during the Crimean War from a high of 42% to as low as 2% but Nightingale doesn't get the credit for that although a lot of people do give it to her only because she's the most famous person associated with the British Army hospitals during that war. And Rebecca, she absolutely did have the authority to dramatically control and essentially the secretary of war who was a personal friend of her said you can do whatever you want, you have any resources you want, you're in charge. And she really had a tremendous amount of authority. It's questionable how much credit she should get for the drop, but here's the sequence of events that occurred. When Nightingale brought her little army of nurses into the hospitals in the Crimean War, the British Army hospitals, the conditions were deplorable. The soldiers were in their own, in their uniforms, they did not have clean clothes or hospital clothes to wear, their nutrition was horrible, they had really no good food to eat, no fresh water, they were not being cleaned, their wounds were dirty, they were really completely scandalous and deplorable conditions. And Nightingale immediately became an advocate for massively changing the conditions, and she did have a huge effect and instituted a nutrition program and a laundry and a lot of basic things that you associate with a modern hospital she initiated. But the one thing she, although she advocated for cleanliness she didn't think that the high death rate among the soldiers was due to...

B: Oh no.

S: ...was due to infection, she thought it was due to poor nutrition. In fact, after she and her nurses started working at the hospitals, the death rate went up although that had nothing to do with her, it had just to do with the war progressing and the hospitals getting overwhelmed and then epidemics started to break out, of Cholera and Typhoid etc. Then the army did bring in a sanitation unit and measures to increase the sanitation in the hospitals and the death rate dropped from a high of 42% to around 2% which is dramatic and incredible, and certainly Nightingale was, you know her advocacy was probably part of that, but that wasn't really, she refused to take credit for it because she really didn't do it, and the death rate didn't drop just because of her policies, it actually was increasing after what she was doing, but again not as a result of it just it was kind of incidental. But that myth is repeated in many online histories of Nightingale, that the death rate plummeted as a direct result of her ministrations, where in fact she, it was after she returned to England from the Crimean War, and she looked over her statistics, because she kept really good records, did she see the connection to infection and sanitation. And this is around the same time that Ignaz Semmelweis was advocating for sanitation in hospitals and showing that instituting hand washing, you know, physicians shouldn't be going from the morgue to the delivery room without washing their hands, because that was literally what was happening, the death rates from hospital-acquired infections plummeted. And Nightingale later came to accept that as part of, as good hospital and nursing practice but she was not an early believer in the benefits of sanitation, she learned that lesson after sort of looking over the statistics that she had gathered during the Crimean War. I figured that's what, those numbers would be so dramatic that would make you think that would make you think that the item was fiction but for the wrong reason. Anyway, let's move on to number three, Nightingale suffered from a mystery chronic illness and lived as an invalid from 1857 to the end of her life in 1910 at the age of 90. That one is science. There's, I could not find any definitive answer as to what the illness was, there are some historians speculate in fact that it was psychosomatic. Others have speculated that she was faking it deliberately just as a way of gaining privacy because she was already famous at that point in time and she wanted to work and write her books and she didn't want to be bothered by people so she kind of used it as a way of titrating her own visitors and keeping the public at bay.

R: I had no idea that you could titrate people.

S: Yeah, sure. She could choose who to see and who not to see and just would blame her illness whenever she didn't want to see somebody. But she also might have, in the 1800s, could have had some chronic illness, who knows, that made life miserable for her. A very humble person, by reports, it's hard to know how much of this is really historically accurate, but multiple reports that I read indicated that while during the Crimean War which is really where she became famous, that she was working 20 hour days. That just really her work ethic was incredible. She, do you know what her nickname was during that time?

J: Worky McWorkerson.

E: (laughs)

PP: All day and Nightingale.

S: Oh that's pretty good!

E: Nice, Phil!

J: That's good Phil, nice.

E: Not bad.

S: Good one.

E: Not bad.

S: No, the lady of the lamp, because she would make her evening rounds with a lamp.

R: Oh yeah.

PP: Oh right.

S: That became her sort of symbol.

J: Was it a lava lamp?

S: No, it was probably a torch lamp, you know.

E: Whale oil.

S: Yeah. You know a really very interesting historical figure, had a profound effect, again I don't, I don't really think that most people know what a profound effect she had on nursing, they know she's a famous nurse but didn't realise what she actually accomplished during her lifetime was actually amazing.

E: She's rolling over in her grave about that whole therapeutic touch thing.

S: Oh my god, you'd hope. But good job everyone, you guys came to the right answer.

R: Thank you. That's what really matters.

PP: That may be the first time I got it right.

B: Hah.

PP: Oh, whenever I'm on to do this I get it wrong. I don't know, I can't remember.

E: All right then, it's the first time.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (74:03)

S: All right, Jay you got a quote for us?

J: All right, I've got a quote from a man named Benjamin Graham, and the quote was sent in by a listener named Holly from Minnesota, thanks for the quote Holly. And the quote is:

You are neither right nor wrong because the crowd disagrees with you. You are right because your data and reasoning are right.

J: Benjamin Graham!

E: Inventor of delicious crackers.

J: Influential economist and professional investor, Graham is considered the first proponent of value investing which means you know you want to earn money, so you buy things of value.

S: Hmm, really? Someone had to come up with that?

PP: Wow.

R: Good description.

(laughter)

S: OK.

B: Someone's got to be the first.

Announcements (74:44)

R: Steve, a quick announcement. Because we've recorded so many shows leading up to and during NECSS, we missed what I originally said would be the deadline for the magnetic poetry contest, so let's extend it to June 1st.

S: June 1st.

R: If anyone wants to send in a work of art using their magnet, their word magnets for skeptics which you can get on skepticalrobot.com, you can still send that to us through our email, info@theskepticsguide.org. And the winner will get a t-shirt.

S: Phil, what have you got coming up?

PP: I'm giving a bunch of public talks, and I'll be putting those up on the blog. Dragon Con for sure, probably Comicon. And you know, I'll throw in a plug. My wife and I have started a company called science getaways, and you can find that at sciencegetaways.com where we are taking vacation packages and adding science! So our first one is in September and it's going to be at a luxury ranch basically in the Rocky Mountains. And it's going to be, it's a dude ranch.

J: Dude!

E: (laughs)

PP: All inclusive dude ranch. But yeah, it's great. Think City Slickers except totally different. And we'll have a geologist, a biologist and me, so we'll be having some talks and then hikes and star gazing and all kinds of stuff. It's going to be awesome.

S: Cool!

PP: I've been out to this place and it's beautiful and the food is fantastic.

S: And if there's anyone out there who doesn't know, Phil writes a very popular blog called bad astronomy, you can find him at discovermagazine.com/badastronomy and is a frequent flyer among several podcasts including Big Picture Science, you're on there once a month with Seth who was just on our show recently, great guy.

PP: No way, yeah.

S: And occasionally you'll find him on the Skeptics' Guide podcast, every now and then, occasionally.

(laughter)

S: Well Phil, thanks so much for joining us this week.

PP: It was great as always, thanks to all you guys.

R: Thanks Phil.

B: Thanks Phil.

E: Thank you doctor.

R: Thanks Steve.

S: Thank you, and may I thank of you for joining me as well.

E: Thank you Steve.

J: Doctor.

S: Doctor.

E: Doctor, doctor.

S: And until next week, this is your Skeptics' Guide to the Universe.