SGU Episode 943

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SGU Episode 943
August 5th 2023
"A new species of early whale might be the heaviest animal which has ever lived. While its exact weight is debatable, its unusual bones mean scientists can be certain it was no ordinary cetacean."
SGU 942                      SGU 944
Skeptical Rogues
S: Steven Novella
B: Bob Novella
C: Cara Santa Maria
J: Jay Novella
E: Evan Bernstein
Quote of the Week
Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.
Karl Popper, Austrian-British philosopher
Links
Download Podcast
Show Notes
Forum Discussion

Introduction, Florida DOE bans AP Psych; politicizing public education

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, August 3^rd, 2023, 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: Cara, you got your power back.

C: I did. It's still poor. It's still, it did stop, but it is again pouring down rain outside. Florida weather is out of control. I also, I got to drive in it for the first time a couple days ago in like a torrential downpour with lightning. So that was new. Speaking of something new in Florida, there's breaking news right now, I'm just sharing it on social. A statement was just released by the College Board that said, and for those who aren't, I guess in America, the College Board, I guess, regulates things like the SAT, right? The College Board regulates the SAT, AP course placement, AP meaning advanced placement, which are the courses you take at the high school level to get college credit or to be able to skip certain courses like introductory courses in college. Okay. So they just put out a statement that says, quote, "We are sad to have learned that today the Florida Department of Education has effectively banned AP psychology in the state by instructing Florida superintendents that teaching foundational content on sexual orientation and gender identity is illegal under state law." The state has said districts are free to teach AP psychology only if it excludes any mention of these essential topics. But then the statement goes on to say that these topics have been in the curriculum for the last 30 years and that it's required to prepare individuals for college level courses in psychology and ultimately for careers in this field and that they are unwilling to take it out of the curriculum because they see it as necessary and foundational. So for that reason, basically kids in Florida now won't be able to take AP psychology.

J: Unbelievable.

C: It won't be offered, which means that if I had come up in the state now, I would not be able to prepare for my own career starting in high school.

E: Okay. There will be generations of people coming out of Florida who will not be able, who will unlikely go on to careers in psychology.

C: Possibly. Or they will have to learn all of this stuff from scratch at the university level and hopefully they're going to a university that is not private where, even then the APA credits a lot of these things. So yeah, if they're going to want to be practising psychologists, they're going to have to go to an APA accredited university.

J: I know it's only one state, but it's a horrible thing, in a country that is completely suffering from a lack of mental health professionals to limit this type of education. We should be encouraging people to get into this career because of how few practitioners there are out there to help people, because we're having a mental health crisis in the United States right now.

E: Definitely need more health care people.

C: Absolutely. And from a broader perspective, we have to remember as well that this is not the only academic endeavour that's struggling in Florida due to restrictions on what can be taught. And so we're seeing that just like fewer and fewer ideas are being openly shared and expressed because of these types of restrictions, which is just worrisome for education as a whole. Education should be more open, not more restrictive.

S: Governments shouldn't be using education as a political football.

C: We're not the ones getting political. Education should be open.

E: But to push back on that a little, what if it's a referendum? What if it's, the public clamouring for it? Should it then be a political issue?

S: Well, that's really complicated because the whole issue of parents should have input into the education of their own kids in public school, yeah, I will agree with that in principle. Should they have absolute power? No. Should one parent have a veto over all other parents? No. That's the way it's being set up in Florida. One crank can ruin it for everybody, basically. Also the laws are deliberately vague in order to intimidate teachers so that they avoid entire subject areas because it's a landmine and they can get fired and even go to jail in some cases. It's ridiculous.

C: And we've got to remember, too, that like referendum or not, public education is protected by the Constitution. And what we're talking about here is public school. We're talking about individuals with the least amount of power and the least, the kind of quietest voices having access to free and unfettered education. If a parent doesn't want their child to learn something, they can send their child to private school. If they can't afford private school, they can send their child to a charter. There are a million loopholes available. But to restrict public education is exactly what you're saying, Steve. It's the voice of a loud few telling everyone else what they are and are not allowed to learn very often based on ideological reasons. And that's really disconcerting. Really disconcerting. Public education should be free and open. The ethic of education is the free exchange of ideas. That's the point of education, is to open your mind and to learn things.

J: And I would imagine that a lot of this is motivated by people's personal religions. I think it's like, this seems so basic in such like a, like, you should know this. Everybody should know this. But your religion limits you as an individual, as a practitioner of that religion. It doesn't limit me, the other person, who doesn't partake in your religion, right? It seems so basic, but religious people seem to be wanting to, certain religions seem to be very much wanting to express what their beliefs are and what they believe in as a practitioner of their religion on other people.

S: Well, this is the principle of separation of church and state. You can't have freedom of religion unless you have freedom from other people imposing their religion on you. But this isn't the worst violation of church and state in education recently. I think it's Oklahoma is trying to pass a law that says that charter schools can be run by religious organizations, so basically taxpayer funded public schools, right? Taxpayer funded public schools can be religious. And that's a blatant violation of the separation of church and state.

C: But it's clearly, it's clearly a long game that's already been, it's been being played with. That's what charter schools, I don't want to say it's the only function of charter schools, but charter schools have long been utilized as a loophole to get taxpayer funding towards ostensibly private education. And so that is, I mean, it's disconcerting, but I'm also not surprised by it. And I mean, obviously, we're not comparing, like, what's worse? But like, this is not a law that's been floated. This is happening right now. Like this past, this is happening. That's really, really scary. This is like 1984 stuff, right? We've got to be open our eyes to it. And I think we've got to not minimize it by saying, oh, it's just political. It's not political. It's, I mean, it is political.

S: But it's being politicized. But it shouldn't be.

C:' Yeah, in the sense that everything is political. You know what I mean? These are people's lives that we're talking about. These are these are children who are not able to learn about reality.

S: Yeah, I think that's why people get to get so, uptight about it, because it's because it is children, it's their children. And I get that. But there's got to be again, this is gets back to the deeper point. Is there there needs to be certain things that we can agree on as a society? Like, what are facts? Like, what are the facts? Let's talk about something lighter.

C: Please, thank you.

B: Yeah, what is science now?

C: Stupid psychology.

Glassblowing and other "experience parties" (8:16)

S: For my birthday last weekend we had like a party at a glass blowing forge.

B: Yeah, that was fun.

C: What did you guys make? Did you make stuff yourself?

S: Yeah.

J: Kind of. They they hold they're doing the work and they like let you hold the piece of wood or they let you spin the pipe or blow into the pipe. So they they have like an array of like, what, Steve, about 10 different things that you can make glasses, vases.

E: A harmonica.

J: So most of us made like a short whiskey glass type of thing, like a heavy drink with heavy glass. And, we've got all the glass this week. And oh my god, everybody's piece was gorgeous.

C: Oh, I love that. It just reminds me what you're about to say of like when I was in in Eswatini, there was a charitable organization where they hand carve these beautiful spoons. And they're teaching the kids who live in this orphanage to learn how to whittle and how to carve. And so I was talking to the guy about and I was like, the kids made this. And he was like, they helped. It's the cutest way that he was like, yeah, they made that. They're learning.

S: Well, the thing is, glass blowing is always at least a two person thing anyway. There's always had to always has to be an assistant. You can't do it by yourself.

E: Now, that's where robots would come in big time handy.

S: So basically, we were we were the assistant and they were telling us what to do, anything that took any skill they did.

C: That's so fun, though.

S: But the biggest thing we did was get to choose. We had to design it like we get to choose what we wanted to make and what colours and just all the design elements of it. And they did let us like my younger daughter, Autumn, wanted to make a pumpkin. And that wasn't one of the things that they were offering. But they let her do it. And it was amazing. I mean, absolutely amazing. Yeah, it was really, really good.

C: You know what I bet the most requested thing there is that they probably don't let you do.

S: What's that?

C: A pipe.

S: No, that wasn't one of the options.

C: Exactly. People are like, can I make a pipe? And they're like, no, read the sign.

B: Yeah, I was looking for the bongs. I didn't see any.

C: Exactly.

J: They were hippies. They were definitely self-proclaimed hippies.

C: They had them in the back. They were behind a curtain.

S: Yeah, but it's it was a fun, different kind of thing to do for like a birthday party. And I want to explore more of those things, like just like spending an afternoon doing something, artsy or crafty like that.

E: Build-a-bear.

B: Experiences, not things.

C: Yeah, a few years ago, I rented out a shop like, those like paint and party or like colour me mine kind of places. Do you guys have anything like that where you paint the potteries already made, but you paint it and then they glaze it and then they fire it for you?

E: No, I know of what you speak but I have not done it.

C: There's a place like that close to my house in L.A. that was like an adult, like a grown up version where it was all cool stuff, like robots and dinosaurs and stuff. And it was BYOB and we had it catered with food. And yeah, just a bunch of my friends came and we like painted really cool stuff. Like kitchen stuff or like little piggy banks. And it was a really fun way to spend the night. I felt like we were all bonding.

J: Yeah. Yeah, it is a bonding experience.

C: Yeah, it wasn't just like a dinner.

J: You're you're doing something where there's a directive, like you have a goal, something that's creative. You're also learning. I did that thing where you go in and like the person up front teaches everyone how to make this particular painting, and those those classes are a ton of fun. I mean, it's half the fun is watching 90 percent of the room do a horrible job at painting.

C: Oh, yeah. 100 percent. Yeah.

J: Mine sucked, too. But but still, it's a really interesting thing to do. I got to tell you, I learned something. I learned that those glass furnaces unbelievably stinking hot. Like when they open that door, I was 20 feet away from the furnace.

E: Oh, you were blown away.

J: They opened the doors.

B: It was a quarter of the temperature of the surface of the sun. A quarter.

J: But you feel the heat instantly.

B: It's 2100 degrees.

J: You know, maybe it is an instant. It seems instant. They guy opened the door and all of a sudden just felt like a Balrog was in your face.

E: Did you guys have to sign waivers?

J: Yes. Oh, yeah.

E: OK.

J: Yeah. Basically, if anything happens to you, it's your fault.

E: Wow. OK.

J: But it was a really great experience. And it was it was fun because you got to watch not only did you get to do it, but you got to watch everybody else do it. We have a collection of really funny pictures of all of us blowing into like that steel, that steel rod. You got to like everybody had a really, really ugly picture of themselves. Like doing this thing is really great.

C: That's awesome.

S: And you walk away with a little souvenir that you get the glass that you actually participated in the creation of it. So I'm looking for other ideas like that. All right. Well, let's move on with our show.

What's the Word? (13:13)

• Mereology

S: Cara, you're going to start us off with a what's the word word?

C: I am. I'm still not fully clear on the pronunciation of this word. I think it's mereology.

E: Oh, it's interesting. It's spelled M-E-R-E-O-L-O-G-Y. Whereas the word mirror, you would not pronounce the E, but in here you do pronounce the E, the second E.

C: I don't know. I could be wrong. It could be mirology. That's why I'm like I really haven't been able to quite figure it out. Yeah, I like miriology. So that's what I'm going to say. Oh, guess who recommended this? Our friend Visto Tutti.

J: He's all over the place.

B: He's a punk.

C: He said it's actually quite fun. He said, "I came across this word maybe for the first time in a discussion of ants." Because, that's what we do is we have discussions about ants. "Is an ant a being or is it only or is only a colony of being? Where is the information stored in an ant colony?" And so he was like, this word comes up in sociology, epidemiology and veterinary science, although that one may be a typo. Mereology, the theory of part hood relations. And that's a really good description right there. The theory of it's a theory of part hood relations or the relations of the part to whole and the relations of part to part. So mereology is is heavily discussed in philosophy. That's most of the citations that I found are in philosophy, specifically kind of within the discussion of ontology. So the idea here, and I've got a few things pulled up. We'll start maybe with the etymology. Oh, I looked up how to pronounce this guy's name and I know I'm going to butcher it. It was coined by to my Polish listeners. I'm so, so sorry, Stanisław Leśniewski, maybe.

E: Sounds good to me.

C: Thanks. I'm sure I butchered that really bad. It comes from the Greek root for part, which is meros. And of course, ology, logy, that's the science of something or the study of something. So there's a million ologies out there. Actually, a good friend of mine has a https://www.alieward.com/ologies podcast called ologies]. I highly recommend it. And she interviews different ologists every week, which is quite fun. But mereology in kind of formal logic is the discipline that deals with the relationships of parts with their respective wholes. Sometimes you'll see that people discuss it as the study of wholes and parts. But that's not really true. It's really just the study of how parts and wholes relate to one another. And so obviously, there are a lot of related terms like that we'll see in literature or like poetry, like what are some examples like gestalt or synecdoche? Like these are different terms that relate to this idea. But it's actually quite a deep philosophical investigation that started very, very early that describes part hood relations. How do these things work together to make up a whole and what arises from that? And sometimes it'll be discussed almost like as related to but alternative from taxonomy, which would be the discussion of the individual parts, kind of discrete units. Here, we're talking about the wholeness, the relationship of the parts to the wholeness. And it's quite abstract, but not I find it fascinating. I love this stuff. You see it in ontology, like I said, you see it a bit in phenomenology and in a lot of different philosophers writings. So, yeah, mereology.

E: Would you say the Borg is an example of mereology?

C: [whispers] I need more information.

E: Bob, Jay and Steve, would you say the Borg is an example of mereology?

S: The study of how the parts relate to the hole.

E: Yes.

S: I guess so in the way like the...

E: Sorry, Cara, it's a Star Trek. Right. Well, yeah.

B: Sure.

C: Is it like a hive mind kind of a thing?

S: Yeah, it's a hive mind.

C: Yeah, OK. Yeah, I would think that a hive mind would be a great example of that, of that kind of grappling.

E: Neat.

S: Cool.

E: Now it has a term.

C: It's fascinating.

S: All right. Thanks, Cara.

News Items

Glass-Coated DNA (17:15)

• Glass-coated DNA is 4x stronger but 5x less dense than steel

S: Bob.

B: Yeah.

S: Tell us about glass coated DNA.

E: Oh, you blew some at the party the other day, right, for Steve?

B: Yes. Glass and DNA.

E: Challenging.

B: Researchers claim to have engineered a new material that's surprisingly strong and at the same time, very, very light. But even more shocking is the fact of what it's made of. It's made of DNA and glass. So Seok-Woo Lee is a material scientist at the University of Connecticut. He and his colleagues from UConn, Columbia University and Brookhaven National Lab reported on their research in Cell Reports Physical Science. So, all right. How do you slap together DNA and glass and end up with something that's the opposite of squishy and brittle? What did they do this? What was their process? Let's start with the DNA component. They use strings of DNA that were coated in such a way that they self-assembled into essentially an inherently strong and lightweight 3D shape called a lattice. In this case, it's a nanolattice. And this has been done many times before, so there's really nothing new there. The next step, though, was the special one. The next step was to coat just the DNA comprising the lattices with glass. So now when you think of glass, what do you think? You think fragile. You think it shatters very easily. And it does because there's always flaws in the glass. There's going to be a crack. There's going to be like a scratch or maybe even some missing atoms in its molecular structure. Any one of those things would be enough to make it to make it shatter very easily. And that's why they do shatter very easily is because it's not flawless glass. It's flawed. So now, but how do you get around that? If you make a small enough piece of glass, something on the scale of like a like a micrometer. No, micrometer, isn't it?

C: No, micrometer is fine also.

E: I thought micrometer.

C: Both are acceptable.

B: OK, I don't like it, though. Then I'll go with micrometer.

C: It's just that sounds a little more like transformers, but you can say it.

B: Micrometer to me sounds like a device. Here's my here's the micrometer. It's not a unit of length in my mind and my stupid mind. All right. But if you make a small enough piece of glass on the scale of a micrometer, that's a millionth of a meter, then it won't have any of those flaws because that is what is what is going to make it incredibly strong. No flaws means immensely strong. So how strong is this stuff that's flawless? A cubic centimetre of such a glass could withstand ten tons of pressure. Cubic centimetre, ten tons on one cubic centimetre, no problem. Well, maybe a little bit of a problem, but they can go as high as ten tons. So now the researchers coated the DNA lattice with a thin layer of glass, only a few hundred atoms thick, so quite thin. So now we have what do we have? Two things. We have an inherently strong lattice shape made of DNA that's coated with a very strong, flawless glass. And since only only the DNA was covered with a lattice, that means that there was a lot of large empty voids. So you end up with a material that's both lightweight and amazingly strong at the same time. Now, if you if you find this on the news, you're going to hear the numbers, these numbers tossed around all over the place. You'll see it's four times stronger than steel and five times less dense. Now, I don't know why they say five times less dense instead of just one fifth, like most people, I think. But I'm not even going to get pulled into that debate. I saw too many debates online, whatever. I know what they mean. So Seok-Woo Lee said, he said, for the given density, our material is the strongest known. So big claim. But to me, the most interesting question after this was how, how can this material be both strong and light at the same time? And because it seems obvious, right, that if you increase one, the other one is going to decrease. So how do you increase both of them at the same time? And the answer to that comes back to something that we have discussed many times on the show. What is it? Metamaterials. This is a metamaterial and metamaterials are have been the darlings of material science for a while now. They're just so fascinating. They're they're engineered artificial materials that have the ability to transcend what we see in nature, right? They go beyond nature. And that's really they're they're defining characteristics that you can't see this. These behaviours in nature, even after billions of years of R&D, they haven't really they don't use this technique, if you will. So the properties of a metamaterial depend not on its chemical nature, but on its microstructure. That's what's important. Not the chemical nature, like everything else in your environment that you interact with the arrangement of the engineered nanoscale components of the material. That's what determines its properties. Now, we've seen most often and we've discussed it many times on the show what metamaterials can do with light, right? The way it can bend light, it can manipulate light in ways that we never see in nature. How many times have I read about, bizarre invisibility cloaks using metamaterials that not visible light, but, X-rays and other.

S: Seventeen.

B: Yes.

E: Two?

S: I thought it was 15, but I believe 17. So it's so that's so that's mainly that's got to be 95 percent of what I've read about metamaterials. It's all interacting with light. Well, this is different. These DNA nanolattices are so there are metamaterials, but they're mechanical metamaterials. So it's no surprise since they're a metamaterial that we're seeing such exotic mechanical properties with these nanolattices. OK, so in the future, what are we going to see in the future here? We're going to see these scientists are going to be experimenting with different DNA configurations. But more importantly, I think they're going to be using carbide ceramics instead of glass to see if they can make this even stronger, which may be hard, because I think I think what they're seeing is close to the theoretical maximum of what you could expect with these materials. It's so amazingly strong and light that it's going to be hard to really make any significant improvements over that. Now, it's also very hard to say where you're going to use this material, right? Because strength and weight, that's really what these articles are focusing on. And even the research is kind of hard to get through that dense jargon in the paper. But they they mention more than anything else, strength and weight. And but these are, Steve, I'm sure you're going to agree with me here. These are just two of the many critical characteristics that you need to be concerned with with a new meta material. There's sheer strength, there's tensile strength, there's hardness, there's toughness, there's ductility, there's melting point, there's wear resistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's a long list. And all of those characteristics determine what a material is good for. So I don't know where this one's going to pan out and what things are going to be focused on in terms of like what kind of uses it's going to be good for. So I think we'll see. But I think this definitely is an interesting advance. That's not going to just like go away. I think we're going to see some interesting ramifications to this. Seok-Woo Lee said, now, this quote kills me because you know, that when they interviewed him, they love this quote because it talks about Iron Man. So they every article I read throws this back out. So this is what he said. He's like, I've always wondered how to create a better armor for Iron Man. It must be very light for him to fly faster. It must be very strong to protect him from enemies attacks. Our new material is five times lighter, but four times stronger than steel. So our glass nanolattices would be much better than any other structural materials to create an improved armor for Iron Man. So just end it with the Iron Man quote. So interesting advance here. I love mechanical metamaterials.

S: Now, here's the thing. Whenever they say that is stronger than steel.

B: Yeah, that's almost a nonsense statement, right?

S: Are they talking about specific strength or absolute strength? They're usually talking about specific strength, meaning strength per weight, per mass, as opposed to just its absolute strength. That's the case here.

B: And I think they are. And also they're doing, they tested this at scale. I mean, this was very, very, very small, small sample that they tested. So, when you extrapolate that up, I mean, how is that going to impact the strength? And depending on the exact type of strength that it has, I don't know. This is very preliminary. And I still think we don't know. There's no way that they're going to, I think scale this up soon and have something that still is much stronger than steel and much lighter, except that maybe in a very limited domain of what you would call strength. Whether it's specific strength or, I don't know, what else?

S: And the other thing you always have to think about, is this a laboratory curiosity? Is there any way plausibly to mass produce this stuff?

J: Yeah. I was just going to say that. I mean, if we, Bob, they making like tiny little specs of this? Or do you know they make a chunk of it?

B: No, these are small amounts that they're making. They're basically just testing the concept of, let's create, let's do this origami DNA nanolattice and let's create that, but then coat it with flawless glass and see how strong it is. And it is very strong and it's stronger than anything that's ever been tested in this way, in this way. But I mean, this is a lattice. What they have is a very, very strong lattice structure. And that's something that's just like, lattices are a thing. I mean, they, lattices are in engineering throughout the world. I mean, those shapes are known and they're important. So I think there's probably a decent chance that this will scale and find some utility in some application, but who knows, what the environment would be, or, maybe it's not good with heat or maybe it wears too much and that's going to impact what it's going to be applied to, but we're talking, battery technology, superconductors. There's lots of possibilities for something like this.

Why Heat is Deadly? (27:01)

• Why Extreme Heat Is So Deadly

S: All right, Jay, tell us how these heat waves are going to kill us.

J: Yeah, it's been really an interesting roller coaster ride that we've all been on in the United States this summer. We had some really extreme heat. I mean, there was a week there where I was looking at the heat map of the United States and they projected throughout the week. This is where the, the extreme heat was going to be. And the lower half of the United States was in either the danger or extreme danger zone. And I wanted to learn what that was. What does that mean? You know, what's the heat index? Cause you read about the heat index and I wanted to learn more about that. So the question is that I'm going to, I'm going to answer tonight for you guys is how bad is this extreme heat to people? Because it's not just the United States that's experiencing this, global warming is happening everywhere and extreme heat is happening everywhere. So the short answer is extreme heat is very bad that, and that's largely because humans, live in a very narrow temperature range that we're comfortable in and that our bodies function well in, like 70 degrees Fahrenheit is like the, like that's a nice little average temperature that most people are comfortable that, but if you go up 20 degrees above that, you could start having heat problems, that is not a big temperature change. So nearly 210 million Americans or two thirds of the population live in counties that have temperature hot enough to cause harm. So that is due to global warming. That figure, wasn't the same, 10, 15, 20 years ago, heat is the number one weather related killer that blew my mind. You think, oh, wow, what about tornadoes and, and, you know, hurricanes and floods? You can add up all of the other weather related events and they don't even come close to what heat does as far as killing people and the danger that is caused by it. So it's been asked if the extreme heat is linked to climate change, people are, this question is still being thrown around, if you're listening to this show, you probably know the answer is of course yes. But to, to give you a more formal answer, climatologists agree that this summer extreme heat is 100% due to global warming, the world weather attribution collaboration analysed the heat changes that happened, they're constantly analysing all, all of the weather and what they have discovered is that it's actually impossible for these temperatures to exist without climate change. So how bad is the heat now? How bad was it this summer? So this summer in the United States, the heat levels were exceptionally high. Phoenix, Arizona had 31 straight days above 110 degrees or 43 degrees Celsius. This crushed the previous record, which was 18 days. So we went from 18 days to 31 days with 110 degrees. Death Valley, California experienced a scorching temperature of 130 degrees Fahrenheit or 54 degrees Celsius. That is not the hottest temperature that's ever been there, but the thing to note here is how consistent the heat was at these high temperatures. It stayed there for a long time where, in the past it might reach that temperature one day and it's very brief experience, now, it persists and that makes things very dangerous. There was a span of a week where a huge portion of the Southern part of the U.S. was labeled in the danger of, or extreme danger temperature categories. And I'm going to explain this to you guys in a minute. Heat records were broken all across the country. This tracks with the fact that last month was the planet's hottest June by a significant margin. The nine hottest Junes have all occurred in the last nine years. Global warming, right? Crazy. Scary and legitimately scary. This isn't like, we're not watching a movie here. This is real. You've all probably heard of the heat index. I wanted to talk about this. Steve and I were having a nice conversation about the heat index.

C: It's the story of my life right now, Jay, the heat index is cruel and punishing.

E: That was a heated conversation.

J: Let's talk about what it means. So people understand it a little bit better and can wrap their head around what's happening here. The heat index is what the temperature feels like to a human body when relative humidity is combined with the air temperature. So the higher the humidity, the lower the temperature needs to be in order for it to be dangerous. So humidity mixed with heat is bad. So if it's, you could be in a hundred degrees. And if the relative humidity, say, is that 20%, it's, it's not that bad. Most people can sustain that without a problem. But if the relative humidity was 70% at a hundred degrees, you're in danger at that point. So the humidity has a huge impact on just how bad the heat actually feels. Now, if we take a look at the heat index, it shows that temperature starting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit or 32 degrees Celsius can cause heat exhaustion and heat stroke in some people like the elderly. So even at this considerably, pretty low temperature, 90 degrees Fahrenheit, 32 degrees Celsius, we're not talking like it's not a scorcher, but already, the elderly or people that have medical conditions, asthma, as an example, that type of thing, you could go right to the worst forms of danger that heat can cause heat exhaustion and heat stroke. And I'm going to tell you about that as well, cause I think it's important for people to know the details. When the temperature gets to 103 degrees Fahrenheit or 39 degrees Celsius, heat exhaustion is likely to happen in healthy people with prolonged exposure. So already at 103 degrees, heat exhaustion, which is bad, could happen to any of us.

C: That's true 103 degrees or with the heat index.

J: The heat index in the 103 degree zone, right? So when the heat index gets to 125 degrees Fahrenheit or 51 degrees Celsius, it warns that heat stroke is likely. And you know what, 125 degrees was not that uncommon this past summer. We're already there. We're already at like the, you're going to get heat stroke and anything above 125 degrees, you really shouldn't even think about going outside. It doesn't matter what age you are. It doesn't matter what health you're in. It's just dangerous. And a thing I found out about the heat index is all of these temperature numbers, they're, they're assuming that you're in the shade.

C: Oh, wow.

J: Yeah. I didn't know that. It's like, if you're exposed to direct sunlight, it's even worse. You're already in a situation where it's bad in the shade. You walk out into the sun and things will happen faster to you.

C: I had to, Jay, I had to, like before I got my truck, which was just a week or two ago when I was walking to and from work every day, I found myself having to walk under my umbrella, like I had to. If I didn't open my umbrella, I was like, sweat was pouring off my body. And like you mentioned, I'm living in a place where the humidity is regularly 80%.

J: Yeah. Yeah, it's bad.

C: So it does not evaporate and it doesn't cool you off. You're just wet all the time.

J: Exactly. Exactly. When I get into the heat related illnesses, I'm going to really explain this. So let's do it right now. So there's different things that can happen to you in heat. There's mild heat related illnesses like heat cramps. These are pretty common. Heat cramps are typical in people who sweat a lot. Sweating depletes the body of what? Salt and water, right? So this can lead to muscle pains, spasms, usually in the abdomen, arms or legs. So that's a sign you need to get some fluids that have, some electrolytes in them, right? But you're okay. You can get, this type of, this mild heat, tight heat cramps or whatever, you're not going to die from that. It's your body's telling you go get some liquids. Another thing that's common is heat rash. This is caused by sweating. Sweating can cause skin irritations and hot and humid weather. It's most common in young children and it looks like red clusters of pimples or blisters, tends to be in places around the neck, upper chest, in elbow creases. And again, this is a warning sign. You see this, you got to do something about it right away. Now moving up a notch here, heat exhaustion is the body's response to an excessive loss of water and salt. Now, usually through sweating, of course, heat exhaustion is most likely to affect the elderly, people with high blood pressure or people who are typically working outside or exposed to the sun in these hot environments. If you get heat exhaustion, you're going to feel it. You're going to feel tired. You might even get some confusion happening. And if that's happening to you, then you need to move indoors immediately and you need to hydrate immediately. But the big gun here is heat stroke. And I didn't really know what heat stroke was. I've heard about it my entire life. I just never read about it before. Now heat stroke happens when a person's body can no longer cool itself. And now what your body does is when it, when it detects that it's hot outside and it needs to cool itself, the body increases your heart rate, right? Your heart rate is pumping your blood through all your organs and all your tissue, and then your body will start to sweat and that sweat will evaporate off of your skin and cool your body because evaporation has a cooling effect. Now, when this happens, the body's temperature, if you are getting heat stroke, what's happening is you're in an environment where your sweat is no longer working, it's no longer able to cool you because of either the humidity is too high or it's just flat out too hot for your body's cooling mechanism to actually work because it only works up to a certain temperature and then it's, it's, it's irrelevant at some point. And as soon as the heat stroke starts to happen, as soon as your body no longer can cool itself through its normal mechanisms, your body temperature rises rapidly and in most serious heat related illnesses, according to the CDC, when heat stroke happens, your body temperature can go up to 106 degrees in 10 to 15 minutes from a normal temperature. That's a short amount of time. If you really think about it, 10 to 15 minutes, you're not out there sweating away, digging a ditch or whatever. You could just walk like Cara walking from your car might take you 10 minutes and heat stroke can hit you. And if it's hot enough, it can cause permanent disability or, it can kill you just like that. And if people are suffering from heat stroke, this isn't like just bring them in and give them a cold compress and give them some water. Like this is like, take them to the hospital. You should do those things too, while you're taking them to the hospital.

S: Yeah, your cells can function basically. It's just like you start to get multi organ failure.

C: And proteins denature, like all sorts of stuff happens at, yeah, that's not good.

J: So, rule of thumb here is we live in a world now where people need to be looking at the heat index. Now I was also interested in the idea of how much of the population is going to be affected by extreme heat. And I wanted to know from a global perspective. So a study that I found was published in the journal Nature Sustainability, and they assessed the impact of global warming on the world population. And they calculated that population growth and the expected global warming, basically the amount of temperature, the way that the temperature is going to go up and how consistent that temperature is going to be. They concluded that by 2030, approximately 2 billion people will no longer be living in a location that temperature wise is considered safe. 2 billion people can't move somewhere else. There's nowhere for 2 billion people to go to. The rest of the world can't absorb 2 billion people. This means that we're going to our culture, our world culture needs is going to change. It has to change.

C: It also means a lot of people are going to die.

J: Oh, my god, Cara, it's it's frightening to think, like in the I'm talking a lot about the United States because it was I was not finding it hard to find studies. There's lots of studies that were going on about the temperatures this summer and everything, so roughly about 600 people died this summer from heatstroke. And I read an article and they're like, those numbers are going to skyrocket. People are going to be dying of straight up heatstroke left and right. As these temperatures go up, like here we are in 2023 and the temperatures that we had in the United States were in the extreme zone. So 125 degrees Fahrenheit or 51 degrees Celsius or higher, it's a heatstroke that that's basically the only thing that's going to happen to you at that point is you're just going to get hit with heatstroke. And these temperatures are were common this summer already. And here we are in 2023 and you're saying by 2030, which is, less than seven years away at this point, 2 billion people are going to be dealing with that with extreme danger.

C: Not it's not just people. And that's the thing that we, we focus on that, right? Because that's us. But like, I don't know if you guys were covering or we're following what's been going on in the water temperature in Florida. It was over a hundred degrees.

B: I heard that. That's nuts.

C: And I mean, we're seeing statements coming out from, different management experts here, the Coral Restoration Foundation, 100% coral mortality at multiple reefs off of the Florida Keys.

J: Yeah, a researcher said it was so depressing because I had to read a lot of like, information that wasn't just about people because they were talking about insect populations and, cattle and all this stuff. And they said, 100%, if we go above 1.5, there are no more coral reefs and they're gone and that's it.

C: And they're already dying. We're seeing it in a tiny, a tiny example of it right now in the Florida Keys, they're just, they're bleaching out completely and just going, they can't sustain these water temperature.

J: Once they go, I mean, I would like to know if they could even ever come back. It's like, once they're gone, are they gone forever? Or is there still like?

C: Are they extinct or can we bring them back from farmed coral? I don't know.

E: Banked enough of it to bring it back in the future.

C: Or would there be anywhere to bring it back to?

E: Well, right. It would have to have the conditions correct again to re-introduce it.

J: I didn't want to end on a, on a horrible note, right? So I'm like, let me try to squeeze something positive out of this. So here it is. It is possible that we, as a global community and governments around the world, we could limit this to 1.5, right? And 1.5, they say it's bad, but it's not, it's not horrible and it's completely livable and we're going to be fine if we, if we could do it, if we could, if we hit the brakes and we don't let it go above 1.5. But when we start getting to 1.7, 1.8, 1.9 and two, that's when things could get very bad. So what we need to do, again, I say this all the time. What can I do? I'm some guy sitting in my office right now. What the hell can I do about global warming? Hey, you start with voting. You start with, whatever effect you can have on local politics. Do it, get out and vote and put the right people in that are going to, that are going to focus on this because we can do it guys, we could still do it. It's not too late.

S: It's almost too late. If you look at all the projections, like all the, oh, here's like the 300 pathways forward that we vary all of these variables. There's like out of hundreds of ways forward, there's like four of them that keep warming below 1.5, literally four.

B: That's better than Dr Strange he only found one out of millions.

S: And that's where we do everything right. That's where we do absolutely everything at the maximally best end of the spectrum. It's not going to happen.

C: It's so frustrating is that we have the toolkit to do that. We're just choosing not to, it's not like a passive thing. We're like, oh, if we just like, it's like, no, we just got to do it.

S: A hundred percent, a hundred percent. We have the absolutely have the, we know what to do. We have the technology to do it. This is purely a function of political will. We do not have the collective political will to do everything that we have to do.

J: But that's why I don't want to sound dramatic right now, but everybody that listens to this podcast right now, we need to talk to other people and educate people and get them to vote and get them to talk to other people and have this, be, you tell 10 people and they tell 10 people that we have to do, we have to, it is, it is up to us. It really is because we, in most places around the world, we vote people in to political positions of power. And the, I look, I know that that's a super oversimplification.

C: No, but it's true. And those are the places where our will has to be flexed because in the places where we don't vote people in, they can just snap their fingers and make these changes, whether they do or they don't is, going to be, it's left to be seen, but it's actually in democratic places where we need to be doing this because these are the places where we can have such political failures. Interestingly.

S: I mean, we could spend the rest of the show talking about this.

J: Yes, you're right. So anyway, Steve, I just wanted people to have this information to be careful because most of us are going to have to deal with extreme heat. So read about it, educate yourself, make sure your friends and family know. And man, I'm telling you, when it's in the danger or extreme danger zone with the heat index, wherever you are, whatever, Fahrenheit or Celsius, figure it out and protect yourself.

S: You need a back a plan if you're air conditioning fails.

J: That's right. That's right.

Australian Psychics (44:41)

• 'I am the postal service person of the spirit world': Psychic says he's Australia's best

S: All right, Evan, tell us how things are going with Australian psychics.

E: You know, it's amazing what comes up in your searches and feeds. The other day, so, Hey, Evan, we want you to read about this brand new news item about a psychic from Australia. Oh my gosh. They know me so well. I cannot resist those kinds of things. Scary. So yeah, television show in Australia called A Current Affair. Remember our Current Affair?

B: Yeah.

J: Oh yeah.

E: Late eighties, early nineties in the United States, there was a show called A Current Affair. And this isn't unlike that. What do we call the magazine, television shows, TV shows, something like that. Well, in any case, A Current Affair, Australia did a piece on a psychic named Kale O'Donnell. He's 27 years old. He's got 1.1 million followers on TikTok. He is self-proclaimed the number one psychic in Australia right now, simply the best according to, well, himself. But don't ask me.

S: There's no better source than that, right?

E: Yeah. Well, how about you remember Shaman Durek, he of the belief that sadness causes cancer in children. Sad children that bring cancer about themselves. So he says, Kale is amazing. So powerful and so vibrant. That's Shaman Durek. So that's the kind of company that he keeps, but apparently O'Donnell's becoming something of a household name in Australia. He's been on several news shows this summer, and this is why A Current Affair sent an investigative reporter named Martin King to interview him and to watch him perform his gimmick. Here's a summary of his claims. Let me know if this sounds familiar at all to you. He claims to talk to dead people. He claims to talk to plants. He thinks there are spirit guides. He uses a spirit box to get messages in graveyards. We'll get back to the spirit box in a minute. He says that people should not overthink a psychic reading, and you should not put stringent expectations on a reading. Setting limits or expectations on a reading messes up the frequencies of that reading. And he states he has nothing to prove to skeptics. He says, I'm not really in the world to try and prove to skeptics. Instead, he says, my job is to convince the skeptics. I think it's the job of the psychic to convert a skeptic into a believer. Any of that sound familiar?

C: Oh, just like all the time.

E: Exactly. Every single other self-proclaimed psychic who claims they can communicate with dead people say pretty much the exact same thing. So basically the report consists of Kale and this reporter walking around a graveyard, listening to a device that, looks and sounds like a palm held transistor radio with an antenna, and they're just walking around, whereas this device is basically picking, making these noises and he's interpreting what the noises basically are saying and saying that that is dead people communicating. What is the device? It's called a spirit box, specifically the PSB7T model spirit box, a compact tool that is ideal for attempting communication with paranormal entities. This is from the manufacturer, by the way, it uses radio frequency sweeps to generate white noise, which theory suggests give some entities the energy they need to be heard. So while this occurs, you may hear voices or sounds coming through the static, these anomalies may be generated by spirit entities in an attempt to communicate and according to Kale, you have to train yourself to hearing it. So yeah, basically what it is, it is a radio, it scans the AM and FM bands, but it jumps. For a half of a second will remain at one channel and then it'll jump to the next channel and then the next one. So it says blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, blip, constantly changing of channels and you're getting little blips of sounds, static noises, the occasional perhaps word that comes through and ghost hunters, psychics, and others believe that this is a means by which ghosts, entities, spirits, everyone else can communicate with the living world through this device. Oh, and by the way, it has a plus or minus five degree hot and cold spot detection feature in there. I checked it out in the specifications.

J: Evan, it sounds like it's designed to create anomalies.

E: Yeah, that's exactly correct Jay. Look, you gotta have the right tool for the right job and if you're going to play this role in life, then this is the tool that you apparently you have to have. Remember when Perry wanted to invent his nope-a-meter? Nope-a-meter for skeptics, it was a box and all it said was nope, nope, nope, nope, but you turn the dial, it would go faster if you get near the nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Oh my gosh, correct. He cracked me up the nope-a-meter, right? So this is just good fun, right? No harm, what's the harm? Wrong. O'Donnell is Kale O'Donnell. He has the nerve to charge people $800 per hour for his services. And he claims to have a 2.5 year waiting list of people wanting these services. So what that means, if we put a conservative estimate on it of four hours per week, and that's, I think that's a conservative estimate, that would be at 800 bucks, $3,200 per week, 52 weeks a year, I call it 50 weeks a year, give him two weeks off, times 2.5 years, that's about $400,000 that people are willing to pay him or roughly $160,000 per year. Now either he's lying about the number of people who want this schtick, which I would not be surprised about, or he's really getting it, which is a sad reality indeed that this person is making bank off of this. He guarantees in that hour of work, he will make contact with at least three dead people, minimum of three, and he will record himself talking over the static of this frequency jumping radio dopometer and give that to you as proof of his work. He says, I connect people with their loved ones. I am basically the postal service person of the spirit world. Yeah, postal service charging 800 bucks for three deliveries. What a bargain. Now, fortunately for a current affair, they did the right thing and they contacted the Australian skeptics and our good friend, none other than Richard Saunders appeared on the show. And Richard Saunders is of course the host of the Skeptic Zone podcast, which we highly recommend to our SGU audience. Richard was given ample time throughout this eight minute segment. He made all the good salient points. He was not unfairly edited or cut short, and he correctly, Richard correctly reminded the audience that psychics will use cold reading and in many cases, hot reading techniques to get the results that their clients desire. Do I need to go into what cold reading and hot reading are for the audience? Do you think?

S: Give a bullet.

E: Sure. Cold reading when a psychic does not have any specific facts about their target, but they'll throw out a bevy of questions and phrases, which are so broad that anyone could believe that these loose statements are about the person they're trying to communicate with. It's like a game of 20 questions with the dead where the person who's paying the psychic will give feedback and reactions to the words and phrases being thrown around by the psychic. It's a powerful illusion that often leaves believers impressed, especially when they've invested their hard earned money in this reading in the first place. But a hot reading is when a psychic will find actual information and facts and data about say that dead person. Nowadays, that happens often by scouring social media pages where loved ones post facts and other things about the people who have passed on. That is out and out fraud, but a psychic might use that to wield great emotional and financial advantage over their victims who are paying for it. Now, Richard informs us in the current affair section that what Kale is doing as far as the meter and the devices is going is that it's audio pareidolia. Basically, he's going around, he's hearing the static that's jumping around to frequencies, and then he's basically telling the person what he thinks he's hearing and therefore bang, some kind of communication audio pareidolia. We've talked about it many times on the show before. Saunders and the Australian skeptics, they're urging O'Donnell to take up their challenge, offering a big cash reward, a hundred thousand dollars. If he can prove he has psychic powers, come on, test it and the money is yours. That's what Richard told the current affair. And so far they've not heard back from, I communicated with Richard about this last night and not a peep, although Kale in the interview that he did with the current affair, when this was brought up about the hundred thousand dollar challenge that the Australian skeptics have is that, he'd never heard of it before, how real could it possibly be if he somehow was never brought to his attention? I'll end on this according to an organization called ScamWatch, last year Australians were robbed of a reported $260,000 from psychic related scams, which is an increase of 219% compared to the previous year. So these things are on the rise up, up, up social media, TikTok, all these things, no doubt having an impact on it. But that number is conservative because a lot of victims of these scams don't report these incidents out of embarrassment. Beware the psychics always.

S: All right. Thanks, Evan.

E: Yep.

Speech Deepfakes (54:19)

• Study shows speech deepfakes frequently fool people, even after training on how to detect them

S: All right, Cara, tell us how good people are at detecting speech deepfakes.

C: Well, according to the authors of a new study, not great. Let's see, a few takeaways here, but first I want to introduce the study. It was just recently published in PLOS One, which means that it is open access, the Public Library of Science. Study was published by four researchers from University College London in the department of security and crime science and the department of computer science. And the title is Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes. A little bit of a spoiler alert on the title there. And actually the numbers, I think when you look at them alone are a little bit misleading because they found that listeners correctly spot deepfakes 73% of the time. That sounds like not bad, but it's also not that different from how often they correctly spot real speech. So that starts to become problematic and they break down the data in a lot of really interesting ways. So they basically ran a study where they looked at about 500 people, plus or minus 529 was their N and they presented genuine and deepfake audio. And they talk a lot in the study about how they, produced the deepfake audio. They did, the bona fide stimuli and the deepfake stimuli, both in English and Mandarin, because they wanted to see if there were any differences in detection capabilities of different language speakers. And then they presented them in interesting ways. So they did a unary presentation where they took 20 randomly chosen clips and they presented them to people separately, like separate screens or separate pages I guess you could say. They listened to about an equal number of bona fide and synthesized clips, but they didn't know what the proportion was going to be. And so they just were tasked with deciding whether they were real or fake. And then they did a binary presentation where they presented again, 20 randomly chosen, but this time they were pairs, not clips. And they had them choose which one's the real and which one's the fake, which was kind of similar to how you did this with us the other day, right Jay?

J: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah.

C: So yours was more like a binary presentation where it was a choice. Is it this one or that one? Whereas the unary was like, there was no context. It was like, just let us know if it's real or fake. And you have no idea how many of each there are. And then they did something called a familiarization treatment where they took half of the participants randomly assigning them to basically familiarization. So they told the participants that there were the synthesized examples that let them listen to the synthesized examples multiple times. They were separate from the ones that they were using in the main task, but they were of the same ilk and allowed them basically to, "train" on listening to deepfakes. And so let's talk a little bit about the results because they're pretty interesting. Ultimately, their takeaways were that overall people are not great at this, just like individual people. They do make the correct classifications 70.35 percent of the time in the unary scenario. So classifying whether it was real or fake, they were actually better at identifying deepfakes than at identifying bona fide things, which is interesting. There they only identified the bona fides about 68 percent of the time and the deepfakes 73 percent of the time. The researchers actually think that the reason for that is because people were like primed. And so now they had increased skepticism. They were like, oh, there's going to be a deepfake. So there were like false positives there. And then when they gave the binary scenario, there was a little bit of better performance. They were able to correctly recognize the defects in 85 percent of the trials. But this is not realistic in the real world, because in the real world, when you're presented with a deepfake, you're not going to be asked if it's real or fake. And you're not going to have another version of it next to it, which is the alternative. So even if this is a better scenario, the researchers said, this isn't this isn't realistic. People aren't going to actually ever be approaching the question of whether this is fake in the real world this way. So then let's talk a little bit about the interventions. So the training. They found that when there is a reference audio, it does help with deepfake detection. So when there's more context, it is easier to hear synthesized speech. But when they trained humans on deepfakes, it didn't really improve their accuracy that much. It increased their detection accuracy, they said, by four percent on average.

S: Yeah, that's negligible.

C: Yeah. So the familiarizations, they said it equates to an accuracy that's only slightly above chance. Fifty two point three one percent.

J: So that's basically where we're at already.

C: They said it's equally difficult to tell the difference between real speech and synthesized speech in Mandarin and English. Even like they said that, well, they said shorter deepfakes were deepfakes are not easier to identify, but I wouldn't have hypothesized that they are. They also found that listening to the clips more frequently did not aid in detection and spending more time on the task did not affect performance at all. And you really don't get better unless you get explicit feedback. So just listening over and over, you don't improve your ability to detect. You have to actually hear explicit feedback. You're correct. You're incorrect. You're correct. You're incorrect. It's the only way. So basically, the researchers big takeaway was we shouldn't be putting too much effort into training people to do this, because people aren't probably going to be able to learn how to do this. We need to be putting effort into training automated detectors. They did say, though, as kind of a secondary check that crowd speech detection is comparable to the top performing automated detectors right now. So there is strength in numbers interestingly. Individuals aren't very good at this, but crowds working together can do a good job of differentiating between the two. And so I think there will be some really interesting research now on the horizon of why that is and what exactly they're tapping into.

J: But my response to that is, isn't it just a matter of time? I mean, in three years.

C: Yeah, it's going to be so much better than even the ones that they used here.

J: Yeah, like it will get to the point very, very, very soon where you can't tell the difference.

C: And they even they even said, like, ours aren't that good. Like in this study, they were pretty crude and people still sucked at it. So it's not going to be good in the future.

E: We're going to need A.I. to help detect what is fake and what is not.

B: Absolutely.

C: Yeah, that's the outcome of this study.

B: And we all have our A.I. shields.

J: I don't like it.

C: Is it going to be that kind of rat race of like, we've talked about this before, Steve, I know it's like a weird analogy that I'm coming to in my head, but like designer drugs, it's like there's new designer drugs. So we have to come up with new designer drug tests and then there's new designer drugs that get out of the way of the drug test. And it's just this constant chase. It's like the deep fakes get better. The detectors have to get better. And then the deep fakes are going to try and outfake the detectors. And, we're constantly going to be catching up with our own tail.

S: That's all right, Jay. Eventually we'll just, have a deep fake voice of you do do all of your online activity.

J: It'll probably be better than me.

S: Thanks, fake Cara.

E: Wow, that was impressive.

S: You never know.

E: Yeah. How are you going to prove it? You only have a 4% difference.

Special Report: Electric Vehicle Myths (1:01:47)

E: ... _text_of_Evan_mentioning_Amprius_CEO_interview_

Quickie with Bob (1:27:11)

• New Whale Fossil – Possibly Heaviest Animal Ever
   (Note: this Neurologica article is not from the SGU show notes page, but obviously suffices here)

Who's That Noisy? (1:30:39)

Answer to previous Noisy:

Bald eagles chittering

New Noisy (1:33:47)

[Mechanical beeps]

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

Announcements (1:34:34)

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Science or Fiction (1:39:37)

Theme: Volcanos Item #1: About 30% of the world's population live under potential threat from volcanic activity. Item #2: The Pacific Ring of Fire contains 75% of the world's volcanoes and is the location of 90% of all earthquakes. Item #3: The largest recorded volcanic eruption was Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which killed about 100,000 people, and rated a VEI-7 out of 8 on the Volcanic explosivity index.

Answer	Item
Fiction	30% under potential threat
Science	Ring of Fire volcanos, quakes
Science	Mount Tambora eruption

Host	Result
Steve	win

Rogue	Guess
Bob	Ring of Fire volcanos, quakes
Evan	30% under potential threat
Jay	30% under potential threat
Cara	30% under potential threat

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

Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:50:16)

Insofar as a scientific statement speaks about reality, it must be falsifiable; and insofar as it is not falsifiable, it does not speak about reality.  – Karl Popper (1902-1994), Austrian-British philosopher, academic and social commentator

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
• Fact/Description
• Fact/Description

References

Vocabulary