SGU Episode 364

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Introduction

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 Wednesday, June 27th 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: Ladies and gentlemen, how are you tonight?

S: Quite well, quite well, Evan, thank you.

This Day in Skepticism (0:29)

• 1712 - Newcomen Steam Engine

R: Guess what today is?

S: Hit us.

R: Today is the anniversary that the first usable steam engine, known as the Newcomen steam engine, was invented. It was a fore-runner of the slightly more famous Watt steam engine. Though the Watt is more famous, the Newcomen was first and so should rightfully deserve our praise. So, that happened in ... 1712.

S: 1712.

R: Shut up, Steve.

B: Whoa!

R: 1712, which – I was actually going to take a guess before I looked it up and I was going to guess something much, much later. So yeah, it's really impressive that someone developed a working steam engine that early.

S: Yeah, so this is the 300th anniversary. It's actually not today, 'cause obviously it was the process of developing and installing it; I think it went on-line in September of 1712, but –

R: Steve, there was no Internet back then.

S: I know. But the – (laughs) on-line – a machine going on-line was still the – a cromulent term. So ...

R: You've embiggened my vocabulary. Thank you, sir.

S: The U.K. is gearing up for – for the – a year-long 300-year anniversary of the Newcomen steam engine. Do you guys know what the engine was used for?

J: To make steam.

E: Hanging witches. Burning witches.

B: For flying airplanes.

S: For getting water out of the bottom of coal mines.

B: Oh, wow.

S: Which was a huge problem.

E: Oh, very practical.

B: That was my second – my second choice.

S: This was at a time when the U.K. was – had pretty much burned all of – through all of their wood. So they needed coal as a fuel source, and how deep you can dig a coal mine was a limiting factor, 'cause water tends to flood and build up at the bottom of the mines. And by using a pump action, like a suction pump, there's a height limit based upon the amount of pressure – that one atmosphere of pressure can produce, and it's something like 30 feet. If you go deeper than 30 feet, there's no way to suck the water out, you have to physically pump it out, and that was not practical by hand or by any mechanism that they had. So, developing a powerful automated steam engine that works as a pump to get the water out of those mines was huge. Although that was the purpose for which the engine was created, it then led to industrial use of the steam engine, the later Watt engine, and then it actually was credited as a major spark of the Industrial Revolution.

J: And Steve, do you think that it inspired people, kind of like, you know, NASA projects inspire us today; maybe back then it was something that got people into technology and into manufacturing.

S: Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what the cultural response to it was, but certainly, industry responded very – saw the potential of it and it exploded, you know, in terms of its utility.

R: Yeah, the corollary to NASA would probably be explorers who were, you know, sailing around and things like that. But this would definitely be, you know... I mean, industry's such a huge driver of technology, particularly, you know, Industrial Revolution.

S: And even though it was primitive by modern standards, it was actually a pretty developed piece of engineering.

B: Hey guys, you know there's – I think there was a precursor to the Newcomen engine, though: Thomas Savery built the first crude steam engine in the late 1600s, so I think we should mention Thomas Savery, who produced a prototype that I think the Newcomen engine was inspired or based on.

R: The nice thing about Thomas Savery's pump is that he called it "The Miner's Friend", which is ready-made for current-day infomercials. Right? OK, it's just me. (chuckles)

J: Go ahead, do it.

R: Go on, like you know, come on! "Get the Miner's – Do you have trouble pumping water out of your mine?" Water goes everywhere. "Get the Miner's Friend!" Come on, you can see it. You can see it.

B: And also guys, before we get lots of emails on this, even the Savory engine, which was the first crude steam engine, even that was based on some guy Denis Papin's digester or pressure cooker of 1679, so.

R: Obviously, though, that's how technology works. There's no – rarely is there ever any miraculous machine that just appears, you know, springs full formed from the brow of an inventor. Every machine is some, you know, improvement over a previous iteration.

S: Yeah, and as I said, there was already signs of some incremental improvement in this; the – but this was the first one that was put into industrial use. That was the milestone.

R: Yeah.

B: OK. Yeah, just wanted to be clear on that.

E: Isn't this how science works, guys, right? You know, you start with simple ideas and then it refines, improves upon –

S: Yeah. And this is engineering; you know, engineering works that way. You try something and then you tweak it and fix it and add another lever here, and that's – those kinds of incremental advances were necessary to get to a full-scale functioning industrial model, but yeah. Newcomen was the first one to get over that threshold.

News Items

Water on The Moon and Mars (5:51)

Space.com: Water Ice in Moon's Shackleton Crater Identified
Phys.org: Extensive water in Mars' interior

Swiss Report on Homeopathy (13:59)

Science-Based Medicine: The Swiss Report on Homeopathy

Twisted Light (25:56)

BBC News: 'Twisted light' carries 2.5 terabits of data per second

Embodied Cognition (32:17)

io9.com: What Finger-counting Says About You and Your Brain

Who's That Noisy? (41:23)

Answer to last week: gamma ray burst

News Update - Causeway Cannibal (44:17)

Neurologica: Causeway Killer Mystery

R: Hey guys, I have some interesting breaking news for you related to a previous news item we discussed.

E: I love breaking news, Rebecca!

R: Don't we all? Well, a couple weeks ago, we talked about the "Causeway Cannibal", which is the guy who was suspected to be high on all sorts of drugs, including bath salts or-- I think it was assumed that maybe synthetic marijuana, a bunch of different drugs-- attacked a homeless man and ripped his face off, basically; chewed off pieces of his face. And we had one update to this, I think, didn't we? Am I mis-remembering?

S: We did. We had email-- an email where we said yes it was speculation; we're waiting for the toxicology.

R: Right. Well, the coroner's report is now in, as of just-- the day that we're recording this, which is Wednesday, June 27th, and according to the autopsy, the man, named Rudy Eugene, was not high on bath salts or synthetic marijuana or any drug that could be detected in his system. It was understood that he had smoked marijuana-- regular marijuana-- earlier in the day, but that was unable to be detected, I guess, with the limits of the test that they were running.

S: No, I think that they did detect marijuana, but they can't say how recently he ingested it because it stays in the system for so long.

R: Ah, OK. Thank you. Yes. They did confirm the absence of bath salts, synthetic marijuana and LSD.

S: Yeah. Although, this does make the story more interesting. So, I think there's two possibilities here. Something either-- so, if he had only marijuana in his system, which really couldn't account for this behavior, then we have no way to account for this rather extreme behavior, although he does have some history of mental illness, nothing like this. I don't know what another possibility would be; there's no neurological condition that causes people to behave this way. The other possibility is that he was under the influence of some drug but it just wasn't one that they tested for. Toxicology doesn't test for any possible drug, but only for specific known drugs that you're looking for. That still is an open possibility, and it'll be interesting to see if further information comes to light. We may never have the final answer in this case if it wasn't a drug that can be tested for or that was tested for.

Interview with Jann Bellamy (46:45)

• Campaign for Science-Based Healthcare
• jbellamy@sciencebasedhealthcare.org
• http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-19350-wireless_waste.html

Science or Fiction (1:01:12)

Item number one. An international team of scientists have discovered that super-sized space tornadoes may explain why the sun's atmosphere is much hotter than its surface. Item number two. Astronomers have detected what they believe to be the first trinary planetary system - three exoplanets sharing the same orbit. And item number three. Astronomers have developed a new method for both accurately weighing exoplanets and detecting the composition of their atmosphere, even those that are non-transiting.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:16:48)

I have noticed even people who claim everything is predestined, and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road.

J: Prof. Stephen Hawking!

References