SGU Episode 942

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SGU Episode 942
July 29th 2023
"Scientists have announced the development of a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor."  Click for further caption "Superconductors transmit electricity without resistance and have magnetic properties that make them invaluable in technological applications. Usually they need to be cooled down to very low temperatures; superconductors capable of working outside the lab in regular conditions would be revolutionary."
SGU 941                      SGU 943
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.
Daniel J. Levitin, American-Canadian cognitive psychologist
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, hot water...hot world

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 Thursday, July 27^th, 2023, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella...

B: Hey, everybody!

S: Jay Novella...

J: Hey guys.

S: ...and Evan Bernstein.

E: Happy almost birthday, Steve.

S: Yeah, two days.

E: Yeah.

B: Yeah, man.

S: My daughter's birthday is tomorrow.

E: Right, Julia.

S: Yeah, the day before I was on the calendar.

J: That's pretty cool.

E: That's very cool.

S: It was, we didn't know if she could have been born on my birthday. It was getting pretty close. Yeah, but she came out a day before. So it's good. So now we always do like the doubleheader. She always has her special day, but it is nice that, it actually is convenient to have the doubleheader birthday.

E: Definitely.

S: She's coming up this weekend. Looking forward to it. So Cara's not here.

E: Yeah, what happened?

S: There's a storm brewing. She's having some nasty weather in Florida and her power's out. And there's simply no way. She still has her phone. So she's like texting me on her phone. And I just asked, is there any possible logistical way we could still do this with the power? I think, we could talk over the phone. You could just record off on your laptop on battery power. But the microphone doesn't work without power. So she has no microphone. So we're done.

J: So did you guys hear that the ocean temperature in Florida is bathtub hot?

S: Yep. Over 100 degrees.

E: Over 100 for Fahrenheit. Crazy.

J: That's got to be uncomfortable to go into.

S: Yeah.

E: Think about what the everything that lives in that ocean. Oh my gosh.

B: Yeah. But at what depth are we talking about? I could see a five foot depth being that hot. But once you get out into the deeper water, I guess it could still be the surface.

S: Colder water is heavier than hotter water down to four degrees Celsius. So it's always going to get called colder as you get deeper. And the water at the bottom of the oceans is going to be four degrees Celsius. But yeah, so they must be talking about this water, like the surface temperature.

E: Yeah. Buoy I suppose, measures it. So that would be surface, right?

J: Cara's weather is going to be basically like torrential downforce for the next week. Jesus.

E: Oh boy.

S: She may join us later if she somehow gets her power back, but we can't count on it.

J: This is, and the thing that scares me is this is just the beginning of the global warming effect. This is it. We're not like 50 years into it. It's going to get so much worse than it is now.

S: So there was a recent study out where the scientists were basically calculating what's the probability that we would be having the heat wave that we're experiencing now? Were it not for global warming, like the increase in the average global temperatures in the last 50 years? And it basically said it wouldn't be happening. It would be "virtually impossible" without human induced climate change. So, and of course, we've read sources that are saying, it's not climate change. It's El Niňo. Well, it's both, as I think we said last week or the week before, there are two different things happening and now we're getting both the peaks overlapping. So yeah, it's warmer than average because it's El Niňo, but it wouldn't be this warm without global warming.

E: That makes all the sense in the world actually.

S: Yeah. I hate it when people do that. It's like, it's not, hey, it's B, it's everything, right? It's every factor that goes into it combined. And it makes no sense to pull out one factor as it, as the cause. I remember a funny example of that. We remember this guys. I know you remember Evan, cause you, you hated this. We were coming off from dragon con and we missed our plane. It was, it was me, Evan and Bob. I think Jay was not there for some reason.

E: And it was only for one reason, right Steve?

S: It was only for one reason. Of course there was, there was literally like about 12 different things, each of which made us a few minutes late. And it was the toll. And of course there was the argument, we're late because you had to go to the bathroom at the last minute. It's like, no, because Bob tried to get his dagger onto the plane and, no, it was because they changed the gate on us at the last minute. We had to go to a different gate.

B: It was an awesome dagger.

S: Yeah. But it was, it was obviously the combination of factors that did it. It was true that any one of them were not present, we wouldn't have missed the plane because we'd literally closed the door one minute before we got to the gate.

B: And I remember, do you remember we actually walked by our new gate and didn't know it. And then we, we got to our old gate and they said, no, you got to go to your new gate. We backtracked.

S: Comedy of errors.

E: But hey, it's good to have a scapegoat. So, yeah. Sorry, Bob.

J: Missing an airplane like that, that is an intensely stressful situation.

S: Very stressful.

E: Oh my gosh.

S: Oh, they were on standby. It was terrible. I only missed a plane one other time in my life. I was coming home from Chicago. I was by myself and I left for the airport like three hours before my flight. Coming from the airport to the hotel was like a half an hour trip, right? So I said, all right, I'm going to leave three hours before my flight time. And the, we were in traffic the whole time. I literally, it was literally a four hour trip to the airport. And you know how like you're sitting in the car and time's going by and you're like, am I going to make it? Am I going to make it? I'm not going to make it. Like it just, it's a slow creeping lateness. That's just painful. But fortunately they literally just put me on the next flight like 30 minutes later. It was, it turned out to be nothing.

B: That's the benefit of using a big airport. They got lots of flights.

Quickie Followup with Steve (5:38)

• Alzheimer’s drug donanemab helps most when taken at earliest disease stage, study finds
   (Note: no article was given from the SGU show notes page)

News Items

S:

B:

C:

J:

E:

(laughs) (laughter) (applause) [inaudible]

Can AI Learn Like Humans? (19:06)

• Future AI algorithms have potential to learn like humans

(Transcriptionist's note: Another AI news item, "AI and Politics" is noted on the shownotes page, likely the news item Cara would have covered if she had regained power.
The associated article: The Conversation: 6 ways AI can make political campaigns more deceptive than ever)

Room Temperature Superconductor (30:49)

• First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor Achieved, Claim Scientists 

A Galaxy Without Dark Matter (45:48)

• A Galaxy Without Dark Matter

Men Convicted For Mineral Solution (59:19)

• Federal jury convicts 4 Florida men for selling bleach solution as ‘miracle’ cure for diseases

Who's That Noisy? (1:08:45)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Sound of water freezing and crystallizing

New Noisy (1:11:58)

[squeaking, as of birds or wheels]

J: ... what this week's noisy is

Questions/Emails/Corrections/Follow-ups

Question #1: Talent vs Skill (1:16:58)

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Science or Fiction (1:28:08)

Item #1: Scientists have been able to reanimate nematodes taken from Siberian permafrost that were frozen for 46 thousand years. Item #2: New research finds that, despite diverging evolutionarily 179 million years ago, the honeycomb design of honey bee and paper wasp nests derives from a common ancestor. Item #3: Researchers were able to transplant mitochrondria into damaged kidney cells improving energy production and reducing toxicity and physiological stress.

Answer	Item
Fiction	Honeycomb: common ancestor
Science	Reanimated nematodes
Science	Mitochondria transplantation

Host	Result
Steve	clever

Rogue	Guess
Evan	Mitochondria transplantation
Bob	Reanimated nematodes
Jay	Honeycomb: common ancestor

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:45:36)

Critical thinking is an active and ongoing process. It requires that we all think like Bayesians, updating our knowledge as new information comes in.  – Daniel J. Levitin (1957-present), American-Canadian cognitive psychologist, from A Field Guide to Lies: Critical Thinking in the Information Age

Signoff (1:48:07)

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
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References