SGU Episode 876

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SGU Episode 876
April 23rd 2022
876 projectile fusion.jpg
(brief caption for the episode icon)

SGU 875                      SGU 877

Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella

B: Bob Novella

C: Cara Santa Maria

J: Jay Novella

E: Evan Bernstein

Quote of the Week

Stupid entropy ruins everything.

Jennifer Ouellette, American writer

Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Bermuda Vacation

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 Tuesday, April 19th, 2022, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Cara Santa Maria...

C: Howdy.

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Good evening everyone!

S: So I am back from Bermuda, I had a little vacation last week. It was my 30th anniversary 3-0.

C: Oh yay.

E: Wedding anniversary?

S: Yes my wedding anniversary.

J: So you you what, you flew out to Bermuda?

J: Yeah.

E: You called how long Jocelyn, you said, hey, I'm here. (laughter)

S: We got a direct flight from JFK, it was 90 minutes.

E: Oh beautiful.

J: That's really close.

S: A little faster than average but less than two hours basically from New York to Bermuda. It's a lot further north than people think. It's actually not in the Caribbean, it's not a Caribbean island.

C: No it's the, it's the outermost point of the "triangle".

S: Well yeah, by definition.

C: It's far up.

E: You said the magic word.

C: I mean the triangle is made up of what? Like it's Miami or the Keys, Puerto Rico and Bermuda. So it's like really far away from those two places.

J: Steve did you see any planes like actively being sucked into the ocean?

S: I didn't see, I saw very few planes. So the planes land on the east side of the island, that very tip, like very end of it. And they don't fly over the island. So when you're on the island, you're not really seeing a lot of planes. I don't know if you guys are familiar with it, it's shaped like a J but tilted like 45 degrees on this side. So it's a very very long skinny island.

C: What's the water temperature out there in the middle of the Atlantic?

S: So it's in the jet, it's in the gulf stream, right? So that's why it is semi-tropical, right, because even though it's so far north, it's basically like equal to the Carolinas but it's subtropical because, it's because of the gulf stream. So it gets a lot of warm water. However at the end of the winter is when the water is at its coldest and then it warms up in the spring. So when we were there actually the water was warming up while we were there. We go from day to day it was a little bit warmer. But when we first got there it was fairly cold. The locals tell us that they start swimming in the ocean in May. So by then it's swimmable. And then through through the summer of course it'll be swimmable.

C: Nice. Yeah, Atlantic waters can be, well I guess it all depends on where you are, but so warm. I remember going to Puerto Rico and being like oh my gosh the ocean feels like bath water.

S: Yeah.

C: And I'm so used to the ocean out here in California it's like frigid, you can't get in it unless you're in a wetsuit.

S: Yeah I think it's just all the gulfstream.

J: So did you ride scooters?

S: We didn't, you know, so it, it's again, getting around the island was interesting. So here's my quick skinny on Bermuda especially if you're in the northeast of the United States, it's actually a it's the closest, you know, like tropical paradise you can get to. It's beautiful, you know, we had a great time there. On the plus side it's, you know, they definitely, like tourism is one of their major industries, the whole place is set up to be tourist friendly. They make it very easy to even though it's a foreign country, you know, it's very easy to get in and out of. And they accept the American dollar one-to-one with the Bermuda dollar. I think they must just fix the Bermuda dollar to the American dollar, so everyone just accepted the American currency one to one. And everyone is super friendly, like everyone is incredibly friendly.

E:' That's their, that's their industry.

S: And not just like at the hotel like I mean we were, we were at one point we walked up like the middle of the island on the old railroad trail, there used to be a railroad that goes there, and, but that's gone, there wasn't even any railroad ties or anything, it's just a path now, it's just a trail. But it's basically going mostly through residential areas and we would walk by people in their backyard and they would be super friendly to us. Also like like when you ride in a taxi like the taxi driver like beeps and points and waves at every other driver. Because, you know, obviously there's like 60 000 or something people who are─

C: A small town.

E: Oh everyone knows them.

S: ─yeah live permanently in Bermuda, yeah, residents. And yeah but they say, all the taxi drivers chatted with us while we were you know getting a ride and they said yeah it's a small small place. And not that everyone knows everyone but, you know, especially if you're like I guess all the taxi drivers know each other. Sometimes they were shout out by name. But it was just like a super friendly environment and culture. Very, very nice. The downside is it's kind of expensive.

B: Oh really?

S: Yeah.

C: Well you when you said that they fixed their dollar to the dollar one to one that definitely right there tells you, and plus you're going to be paying a, well hey it's it's a remote island, so shipping is expensive, just getting supplies there.

J: You can't drive anything there it's like all imported.

E: Yeah for example, do you have a for example Steve on that?

S: On the, on the expensive thing?

E: Yes.

S: Well yeah, just everything, the restaurants were the worst. They were like twice as much as what you would pay for the same food here.

B: Oof.

S: I don't think that's a shipping, think about it─

C: There's also a tourist situation there too.

S: ─all of our food is shipped in too. Like even in Connecticut, we're not, we're mostly eating food that is shipped a lot farther away than getting to Bermuda, so I don't really think that's the issue.

C: Well there, I do think there are some like if you think about Hawaii that is a real, supply chain issues are real.

S: That's different yeah, that's different Bermuda is close.

C: Yeah it's further away, that's true.

S: It's not that big a deal you think about it, you buying, you're eating your potatoes from Idaho, does it matter? It's closer to Bermuda than probably to some parts of the United States.

B: What about fish dinners?

S: A lot of seafood, of course, it's an island.

B: You'd think that would be cheaper.

C: No but you're also paying for tourist prices.

S: So here's the thing, it's not, it's actually not tourism is part of it but here's the big reason and─

B: Aliens right?

S: ─no it's in the 90s I think finance eclipsed tourism as the number one industry in Bermuda. And the guy, so one of the taxi drivers who's been born and raised or lived there his whole life he gave us the whole history like financially at Bermuda is like. It was great in that it brought a lot of money into the island. But he said but that was the inflection point where everything became expensive. Because now you have a bunch of millionaires buying up 10 million dollar homes and willing to pay lots of money for everything and so everything became expensive. So that was, that was the point at which it really got out of control. And to the point, to the point where like a lot of younger Bermudans had to leave. They couldn't make a living there. Just became too expensive to live there.

C: So even when you like leave the the hotel kind of areas─

S: Oh yeah, everywhere.

C: ─yeah unlike when I was, I was just in Puerto Vallarta and it's like you know the peso is is weak compared to the dollar, I think it's 120th. And when you're out in the city everything's really cheap. But of course when you go to like tourist trap areas, thing were more expensive.

S: It wasn't just a tourist trap. Although that that did add a yet another layer to the expense. But it was it was basically just an expensive cost of living is expensive there, that's the problem.

C: That's unfortunate.

S: Yeah, yeah it is. So it's kind of a double-edged sword, you know, that the finance coming in because it did, it did bring money to the island but it raised, raised the cost of living there. The, so getting around the island so if, you're if you're not a permanent resident you cannot rent a car, right, it's not an option.

B: Wow.

S: So there was a bus system we used that a few times, it was fine, you know, the bus system is fine. They have, the taxis are fine. We were happy to, to give money to the locals who were driving the taxi, so we didn't really care about that. If you really, if you want to rent something to get around, you could rent scooters or twizzies. You guys ever heard of twizzy?

B: Nope, never.

S: That was I think the most popular thing for visitors to do, so it's basically an all-electric vehicle, it's one person wide so you're basically sitting in the middle of it and it only sits one person across. But it's it's two people front to back. But it like barely fits two people. It is small.

J: It's kind of like a quad, right? It's like a quad that has a cabin.

S: Yeah, kind of, it's four four wheel but it's two people─

C: But not big crazy off-road tires.

S: ─the person would have to squeeze into the back. And the thing is the traffic, there's there's no highways, right? I mean the traffic is all slow everywhere. And it's, you know, it's a it's a British colony so everyone drives on the left. You know you wouldn't, I wouldn't feel like the traffic is not dangerous but here's one thing about it. It's not very pedestrian friendly because, you know, it's a volcanic island, right? And the, you know, geologically it's basically all volcanic rock and it's not a huge cliff or a mountain but it's very hilly and so the roads are essentially cut out of the volcanic rock. And they made them just wide enough for the two lanes of traffic, there's no shoulder there is no place to walk.

E: Nowhere to walk.

S: And some of the bus stations are literally a pole on the side of the road. Like I don't even know where you're supposed to stand.

B: Jesus, wow.

S: No so you really, so a couple of times, now some of the more residential areas did have shoulders and did have there were a couple of sidewalks here and there, but you couldn't really walk the main roads. I mean you could but you have to just count on cars driving around you, because you're walking in the road you know you there is no side of the road and sometimes it's literally a wall, you know, on the side of the road. So it's not very pedestrian friendly, so that's why we generally either took a taxi or took a bus. We did do a little bit of walking then it was a little bit scary at times. We would look both ways for traffic and then run to the next sidewalk, you know, before too many cars had to go by. But very very nice, I definitely think we'll be going back. It's, you know, just a very close, quick. You could, you could take a long weekend there, you know what I mean? Like it's so close.

C: Did you get a tan?

S: I did. I got a little bit of a tan, more than I wanted to but yeah.

B: UV sucks.

S: Yeah, I just don't, I don't like to expose my skin to UV light.

J: So what was your absolute favorite thing about the experience?

S: I probably, there was, there was some birding there, you know, so we went to this, is called Spittle's Pond and it was, that was, that was a fun day. So it was yeah, there was lots of good pictures, just good nature walks. We went to the, we were there on Good Friday and Good Friday apparently is Kite Flying Day on the island. They flight─

C: Kites? Fun.

S: kites on other times but that's like the big day. And there's a traditional Bermuda kite. It's like round or octagonal and it's called a hummer because it has a thing in the middle that spins it makes a humming noise when you─

E: Cool.

S: ─when you fly it.

C: I haven't flown a kite since I was a child. I don't think.

S: Yeah.

C: How fun.

S: Yeah it was a lot of fun.

B: Last time I saw a kite it was on Reddit and it was lifting a little kid up in the air. I mean.

E: Okay.

B: I mean it was crazy. And I think it was real.

E: Right. 70% chance of it being real.

News Items

Vaping and Brain Inflammation (10:55)

S: All right let's move on to our news items. We haven't spoken about vaping on the show, I don't think. Cara, you're going to tell us about the effects of vaping on brain inflammation.

B: What?

C: Right, so, you know there's a lot of literature out there on vaping but when you read most articles about vaping one of the main things they say is there's not a lot of literature out there on vaping. And I think it's it's because it's new and because very often we're comparing it to the bananas huge body of literature on cigarettes, right, and on the the detriments of cigarettes. So there's a study that was published in a journal, I didn't know this journal before but I have to admit I really like it, it's an open access journal called eLife and so anybody can read this study and this, I'm gonna take a quick aside because this was my favorite part of this, reading this study. It's got all these different sections right like most scientific articles have the abstract, they have the introduction, the results or the materials and methods, the results, the discussion, the different appendices with all the data. They also have all of the raw data available to you. But, they fully, openly publish their editor's notes. So basically when scientists submit there's always like something that the editors don't like. So they say hey we'd like for you to do like this much further investigation or can you explain this better or we think your language was strong here. And then the scientists reply and say thank you for that, this is how we think about it and here's a change that we made and there's a back and forth. This journal publishes that entire back and forth.

B: Wow.

C: I know, it's really cool.

B: That's cool, I like that.

C: Yeah, so you can really see like what, they maybe were a little too, their language was too strong at the beginning or where they needed to clean up and add a little bit to make the study more robust.

B: Remove curse words, you know.

C: (laughs) Yeah, you know, some of some of the f-bombs we should take out. So this was a a study with a lot of authors it looks like from like VA San Diego, UCSD, so University of California San Diego. In this study they said okay we would like to know how one very specific type of vape affects the whole body. And so they, you know, they say in their introduction, a lot of studies look at specific organ systems but they were like we want to see what happens if we expose mice to vape. And we want to do both an acute model and a chronic model so they do this, it's a twice a day paradigm in one group for one month. Oh sorry, it's a three time a day paradigm, I apologize, three times a day daily. In one group they do it for one month and then they also do it for three months. Because they want to see the difference. And they look at not just the brain, because you did mention neuroinflammation, but they also look at the lungs, the heart and the colon. Mostly what they were looking at were inflammatory markers. So although they didn't often see direct evidence of inflammation, they saw upregulation of genes or proteins that are responsible for inflammation. And that's, that's mostly what they reported on. There were some examples where they actually saw. And there were some examples where they actually saw a reduction, which is why very often the, the authors use the word in their, in their discussion immunomodulation. As opposed to just inflammation or upregulation because there are some places where they actually saw down regulation. If I could kind of generally summarize, oh and there's another really interesting thing about the study but we'll get there, they looked at two different flavors and they saw different outcomes. So that's kind of weird. But there's a possible explanation here. So, the thing that they were really interested in. It was, they wanted to look at one of the most famous products on the market, JUUL, and they wanted to look at their sort of fourth gen, their most recent style of vape which is these pods. And these pods are interesting because most studies a, are done with like the older version of the vape pens. But these pods actually have more nicotine than basically anything on the market. I think at one point they described it as a single pod, because you both, I guess you basically just vape off of the pod until it's empty. A single pod has more nicotine than a whole pack of cigarettes.

J: What? Wait, how long would it take to use a single pod, like is it?

C: It probably completely varies based on the person. But you know given that there's no marker, the way that, with cigarettes there's a marker. Like people can say I smoke a pack a day or I smoke a half a pack a day or I only have two cigarettes a day. But with this it's like they just smoke it until it's empty. And I wonder if there is a psychological difficulty there in in being able to modulate your own use. If you don't have any of those, you know, I'm not lighting a new cigarette. And so you know I think we very often hear conversations about e-cigarettes as smoking cessation tools. And although sometimes the literature I think kind of poo-poos on that a little bit more strongly than they could, I think the concern is that if we really think about this in a binary way. Either they're good for you or they're bad for you, this becomes really dangerous. Because of course there are e-cigarettes on the market that don't have nicotine. And of course there are some good papers that show that people who slowly but surely drop their nicotine level until they're no longer smoking nicotine at all and then quit, but it helps them quit. But what these researchers were looking at were pod-based e-cigarettes. These JUUL devices that only came out in the last five years or so, that have high levels of nicotine in them. And there are a lot of users of these and sadly the, I think it's 12 million adults that use e-cigarettes totally, and the highest rates are among 18 to 24 year olds. And they're flavored, right? And so that's that's a whole other conversation, a regulatory conversation. So here they looked at mint flavor and mango flavor. But get this, at the time they were the most popular choices, that's why they chose them. I know. Now they're no longer made these two specific pods that they were doing the research on. And so they modeled the use, like I said by exposing young adult mice three times a day for three months. But they also looked at changes after a single month and then they looked at the aggregate changes after three months. And they did see neuro inflammation after three months. They specifically saw it in in the nucleus accumbens, both in the core and in the shell. And they saw it in the hippocampus. And the reason that these two regions are important and the reason that the researchers talk a bit about these two regions being important with this gene expression of inflammatory markers, is that uh they're involved in behavior modification and and heavily in, you know, reward, drug reward, drug seeking behaviors, addiction behaviors. And even some, I mean they call it like anxious or depressive behaviors. I think they're more referring to mood in the nucleus accumbens but there is a concern here that that if there is inflammation in this area that that could have some bearing behaviorally on addiction levels and on mood which can sort of be associated with addiction. They also did find some changes to cardiac tissue and the weird thing is these alterations to the inflammatory state were not very easy to point to. There was actually some down regulation at the three-month part in the cardiac tissue. And so you might think sort of on the surface maybe that mean, you know, it's reducing inflammation, maybe that's heart healthy. But what they found or what they're concerned about is no maybe that actually means that it's it's depressing an immune response in the heart. And that's, you know, disconcerting as well. So we don't know how these things translate to actual health in human subjects. Because we're looking at gene expression in adult mice. But what they found again was that the nucleus accumbens both the core, accumbens, both the core and the shell and the hippocampus saw some neuromodulation. They saw changes in these inflammatory markers in the in the heart. They saw changes to inflammatory markers in the colon and they also saw some changes in the lung. But they were not what they expected, they expected pathophysiologic changes in the lung and they actually didn't see them. So they didn't see alteration to airway response. They didn't see some of the expected alterations that they, that they thought that they might see. And I think that's an interesting outcome in and of itself. They didn't see emphysema and they didn't see overt inflammation. But of course there are massive limitations to this study. Number one, three months is their chronic condition, that's not really that long. So you know it's like there's always going to be limitations when you're doing laboratory work because it doesn't directly translate to people. And then lastly there was this interesting effect that they saw, where the mint pods seem to have a stronger inflammatory effect, especially in cardiac and colonic tissue. Compared to the mango pods. And when they looked they recognized that the nicotine concentrations were the same, but the flavoring compounds the chemicals that actually make the flavorings were different. One of them was based on something called ethyl maltol, that's how they made the mango flavors. And then they actually used menthol concentration to make the mint flavor. And there is a concern here that there is a negative outcome simply from the flavor ends not specifically due to the nicotine.

E: And is that consistent with tobacco.

C: I was gonna say, it kind of jives with the idea of all those different carcinogens that you would see in tobacco. When you would burn the paper and the glue and there was like so many different compounds that were discovered over the years. And so yeah it's an interesting study because it's not as clean as you would think. You know, they had some hypotheses and not all of them were confirmed. Their, their sample size was small and that was one of the concerns from the editors. But they also replied that they did do a power analysis in advance and they didn't want to collect more data beyond what their power analysis told them to collect, you know, because they didn't want to alter those outcomes.

B: What's the power analysis?

C: Oh power analysis is is, there's different software programs that you can use but it's a statistical way to in advance to say okay, I'm going to do this type of statistic. Like I'm going to do a chi-square or I'm going to do an ANOVA or an ANCOVA and I want to make sure that if I'm looking for a difference between groups that the difference is large enough to recognize. Right? Like it's going to be 25% difference or 5% difference. And you set all those parameters and then you calculate how many samples you need to collect in order to achieve that power in your study. Because if you're doing let's say 20 contrasts, you're going to need way more, a much higher n than if you're going to do one contrast.

B: Right.

C: And so a power analysis allows you to set your statistics in advance so that you don't end up inadvertently p-hacking for example.

B: I was going to ask about that. I like that, if it's trying to deal with that, even indirectly.

C: Yeah that's one of the things that I thought it's funny, because this study is interesting and of course the write-ups around it are interesting like hey, vaping is not great you guys. Like look at these things that we're seeing, we're seeing inflammation in the brain, we're seeing changes to cardiac immuno response, we're seeing changes in the colon, we're seeing changes, you know, across the the body of these mice. This is not, this is worrisome at minimum. But the other thing that I thought was interesting was this study is a very cool explanation of how science is done. Because the curtain is completely peeled back. And so for those of you who are interested in reading more about the process of doing science, this this allows you to kind of peep into that in a cool way.

E: eLife.

C: eLife, yeah. Very cool.

S: Yeah so it's, it is complicated, the whole vaping thing. It may be helpful in some situations but it's not entirely benign itself. And there's been a lot of hand-wringing in terms of like public health policy should be before it or against it.

C: Right and in some ways it may be, it may be worse, you know, in some ways it may be better, like we said, helping people quit smoking if they follow these protocols and they do it appropriately. But for some people, you know, I think they make a false dichotomy. They go, well at least I'm not smoking cigarettes and it's like or maybe you should not be smoking at all.

S: Yeah, right.

C: Because a lot you know vaping is attractive to younger people, it doesn't make you cough as much it does it's not as aggressive like it doesn't feel as aggressive so it probably feels safer there are these psychological issues that come into play.

S: And it does lead some people to to smoking tobacco.

C: Oh for sure, for sure. And also like one of the, the mint ones that I was telling you that they had different effects in the lungs specifically. They found that some of the changes, the gene expression changes, actually are correlated with sensitivity to downstream infection. So for example the changes after they used the mint vape as opposed to the mango vape made those mice more sensitive to catching and becoming sicker from bacterial pneumonia. So so it's it's it's even more complicated than just is it or isn't it bad for you in and of itself.

J: You know, I think a good rule of thumb is breathe in air only.

S: Yeah.

E: Yeah you kind of wonder if there were no tobacco or no none of those products, would would vaping have ever come into existence, would they've ever stumbled upon.

C: Right, like it's just the, the faster horse, right, is this the car. And I think there was one other thing that I didn't mention because it wasn't directly studied in this study but they did mention it in the introduction, so it has been studied before. Apparently the size of the actual molecules when you vape are smaller so they get deeper into the lungs.

S: And of course you have to you know emphasize that because of the way they did this research these results should be considered preliminary and need to be confirmed. Because they were kind of shotgunning like looking for everything and just to see what was out there. So until these results get replicated we really can't say you know if they're real let alone what the implications are.

All right but thanks for going over all of that Cara

C: Yep.

Projectile Fusion (25:20)

Facilitated Communication Still Pseudoscience (41:30)

Gamma Rays and Gravitational Waves (58:56)

AI Emotion Detection (1:10:32)

Who's That Noisy? (1:21:05)


New Noisy (1:24:37)

[in and out puffing sounds similar to heavy breathing]

J: ... If you think you know what this week's Noisy is, or if you heard something cool like the sound that you just heard, then you should just email me very quietly and very sincerely to Who's That Noisy, WTN@theskepticsguide.org. That's all you have to do.

Announcements (1:25:12)

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups (1:26:10)

Email #1: Communicating Skepticism

I work at a not-for-profit (https://www.digitalpublicsquare.org/) and one of things we try to create are interventions when it comes to things like public health. In terms of vaccine misinformation, we have a site that offers information in a quiz-like format (https://knowitornot.com/). Now, I know you all have discussed the efficacy of these types of interventions and wanted to know your thoughts. I've heard that sometimes these types of true/false paradigms might not be the best and don’t do well to "vaccinate" folks against mis/disinformation. Personally, I can see how such a paradigm talks down to someone who's deep in the hole, and it might not communicate the "skeptical" mindset. I'm wondering what the Skeptics think of strategies like these, and if there are any particular insights you could offer based on your experiences. Love the show, thanks!

– Wahid Shafique, Toronto


Science or Fiction (1:33:44)

Theme: Bermuda

Item #1: There are no native mammals in Bermuda, only introduced species such as mice, rats, and feral cats.[6]
Item #2: There are more than 300 shipwrecks in the waters off Bermuda, making it the shipwreck capital of the world.[7]
Item #3: When Bermuda was first discovered in the 1500s and later settled by Europeans, it had no native or indigenous population.[8]

Answer Item
Fiction No native mammals
Science Shipwreck capital
Science
No native population
Host Result
Steve clever
Rogue Guess
Evan
Shipwreck capital
Jay
No native population
Cara
No native mammals
Bob
No native mammals

Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.

Evan's Response

Jay's Response

Cara's Response

Bob's Response

Steve Explains Item #3

Steve Explains Item #2

Steve Explains Item #1

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:54:41)

Stupid entropy ruins everything.
Jennifer Ouellette, American writer

Signoff

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

S: Skeptics' Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking. For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org. Send your questions to info@theskepticsguide.org. And, if you would like to support the show and all the work that we do, go to patreon.com/SkepticsGuide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community. Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

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Today I Learned

  • Fact/Description, possibly with an article reference[9]
  • Fact/Description
  • Fact/Description

Notes

References

Vocabulary


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