SGU Episode 380

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SGU Episode 380
27th October 2012
(brief caption for the episode icon)
SGU 379                      SGU 381
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
The Web is great for finding a list of the ten biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is merely littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.
Samuel Arbesman
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Introduction

You're listening to the Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

This Day in Skepticism (1:07)

• October 27, 1780: The first U.S. astronomical expedition to record an eclipse of the sun observed the event which lasted from 11:11 am to 1:50 pm.
• October 27, 1891: Philip B. Downing, inventor, was awarded a U.S. patent for an improvement to the street letter (mail) box.

News Items

Genetic Logic Circuit (3:34)

• Washington University in St Louis: A complex logic circuit made from bacterial genes

Efficient Language (13:26)

• PNAS: Language learners restructure their input to facilitate efficient communication

S: Lets go on to the next news item, this one realy caught my interest. We talk about language a lot on the show, I mean this is a podcast made of words so language is important.

E: (chuckles)Yep, pendantic!

S: Yes, I have a bit of a fascination with this. This is a study looking at how people react to artificial languages, so they had their subjects, they made, it was a very small artificial language they made up for the study, and they wanted to see how the subjects would spontaneously alter or change the language depending on various situations. But, before I tell you the results, I'll give you a bit of background, there is a few different hypotheses or theories about why languages are structured the way they are or um, specifically why certain patterns or structures seem to recur in many different or even disparate languages. One possibility is that modern languages all have a common root. If you went back far enough in time two seemingly disparate languages may have evolved from the same root language, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that there is something inherent in the way our brains work that guide languages in certain directions and the third related to that, it there is some inherent logic to language that asserts itself over and over again as languages evolve. So this study was really, was partly addressing that question, are these patterns that we see in languages the same because theres a logic to how people see and use languages and that is in fact what they found.

Closest Exoplanet (22:01)

• Independent: Scientists find Earth-like planet Alpha Centauri Bb in neighbouring star system but rule-out possibility of life thanks to its 1,500C surface

Alien Hacker (30:34)

• Slate: U.K. Will Not Extradite Alien-Hunting Hacker With Asperger’s Who Broke Into NASA, Military Computers

Who's That Noisy? (43:17)

• Answer to last week - revealed in three weeks

Questions and Emails

Zombie Bite (44:36)

Hey Guys, I got a fun Medical Question for you all and maybe a little bit more aimed towards Dr. Novella due to his medical background. If you've seen the new season of the Walking Dead (spoilers), in the first episode the old guy gets bitten on the leg and the main character decides to amputate his leg because he thinks it's like a venomous snake bite. The rationale is even though they all know they're all infected already, that zombie bites cause a secondary infection that makes you sick and you die thereby allowing the primary infection to turn you into a zombie. Is the choice to amputate really stupid even if the infection was like a venomous bite? You would think they made a relatively moderate problem of a huge bite into an enormous problem given that there's going to be massive blood loss now, chance of incidental infection, and well....the old guy is really old and he probably can't take the shock of getting his leg hacked on repeatedly by a handaxe. If they intended to cauterize the amputation later, wouldn't it have been better to just cauterize the huge bite wound instead and hope that would be enough? It seems like anything they could do to help the amputation they've could have done to the bite wound and it wouldn't have been as bad. Dr. Novella has talked about in medicine that usually treatments have risks but the benefits outweigh the risks. In this case I'm wondering if the Amputation is causing more damage than it's helping, given their fictional situation. Thanks, Henry Loo

Announcements

SGU Nominated For The 2012 Stitcher Award (54:46)

• The Stitcher Awards

Science or Fiction (55:17)

S: Item number one. The hagfish can rapidly produce as much as 20 liters of slime as a defense against predators. Item number two. The oldest fossil hagfish is 300 million years old and shows remarkable similarity to modern hagfish, demonstrating unusual evolutionary stability. Item number three. Molecular analysis has confirmed that hagfish are transitional between vertebrates and invertebrates. And item number four. Hagfish are the only creatures known to have a skull but no vertebral column.

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:09:45)

The Web is great for finding a list of the ten biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is merely littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum. There simply is no substitute for skepticism.

J: Samuel Arbesman!

References