SGU Episode 1022
|
This episode needs: proofreading, links, 'Today I Learned' list, categories, segment redirects. Please help out by contributing! |
How to Contribute |
| SGU Episode 1022 |
|---|
| February 08th 2025 |
 |
"Two playful bonobos share a moment of curiosity and connection in nature." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"The most important thing that illusions can teach us is that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found being right.” |
― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error |
| Links |
| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro
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 Wednesday, February 5th, 2025, 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, folks.
S: Everyone keeping their sanity, at least recently?
B: No.
E: I stay grouded.
S: It's so hard. I watched some of the RFK Jr. testimony, the hearings. The information that we have is going to be outdated by the time you listen to the show because I think one thing or another will have happened. But there was a slight chance that he would not make it through the committee before getting to the full Senate vote because RFK Jr. is an absolute crank and pseudoscientist who does not have the skills or ability to head federal healthcare. The best hope was that Cassidy would have voted against because he is actually, he's a Republican and he's a physician. He's actually the guy who invited me down to the testimony in front of Congress.
E: Yes, that's right.
S: He's the one who gave me the double finger guns, you know, when he's leaving the room.
E: He in the past has been very critical of RFK.
S: Absolutely. And he definitely is, I think, at the more reasonable end of the spectrum for his side of the aisle and because he's a physician that has informed some of his policies. So this was it. This came right down to, was he going to go with the politics or go with his oath as a physician and his absolute knowledge? He knows that RFK Jr. is full of it. And nobody knew how he was going to vote and he voted to pass it through the committee. So I think that was the death of the, I'll be very surprised now if RFK Jr. does not get confirmed. We'll see. Again, if you're listening to this, you might know the answer to that.
E: What is the chance, Steve, that Cassidy will vote no in the general vote?
S: Yeah. I mean, I guess it's non-zero, but I think if he were going to vote no, he would have just done it during this committee vote.
C: Yeah. Because that would have stopped it.
S: Yeah. That would have been over.
E: He could play both sides of the fence, like, because he can vote yes once and no once in this scenario.
S: Does that really help?
E: I don't know. I'm not so politically astute to know if that helps him politically or not.
C: But if he votes, if he voted no, then it would be dead. If he votes yes and then no, it's going to live.
J: But what would the strategy be if that was his intent? Why would he do it that way?
E: Well, I mean, we've seen it has happened before in which to just get things out of committee to keep things, quote unquote, moving so that it can get the real full vote. And then if you're going to kill it based on however the what they call it, whipping, where they pre count the votes and how it's going to go. Maybe he knows something. Maybe he knows that it's-
S: It's tight and it's only going to fail with his no vote, though. So he's still going to be come down to him.
E: Hmm. Yeah. I mean, you're right. I mean, chances are he will still vote yes.
S: But anyway, listening to the testimony was so painful because they're asking him, do you think that vaccines cause autism? And he and R.K. saying, if you show me the evidence, then I'll go with the evidence. It's like, so the last 30 years of you looking at the evidence wasn't enough. You're going to suddenly change your mind.
E: It was billions of vaccinations, transparent bullshit at that time.
S: It was such transparent bullshit. He was just lying through his teeth, you know, just saying the things he needed to say, although even, you know, you could. It was very easy to tell, you know, for somebody who knows his history and knows his rhetoric. You can't rail against the vaccines for 2030 years and say, I'll listen to the evidence. Of course, him listening to the evidence is completely butchering the science.
E: We have to hope somehow.
S: I mean, I just I'm I'm prepared for him to get through and then we'll just see what horribleness ensues.
E: Oh, boy.
S: Oh, well, it's really just.
E: Yeah.
S: The only question mark is how big the death toll is going to be.
J: Yeah, exactly.
S: And of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg, the shock and awe that we are being-
B: They're just getting warmed up.
C: And that's the point. It's a feature, not a bug.
S: Yeah. No, I agree.
C: Open up the fire hose.
S: No, I mean, Bannon directly said it like we are going to flood the zone with so much stuff that they'll never be able to mount an effective resistance against any one of the things that we're going to do.
C: Yeah. A lot of it will still get through, even if we can block certain things.
E: Right. They'll throw everything against the wall and you can only and you can only goal keep so much of this stuff.
C: And one of the biggest things that is being that is on the chopping block right now, which is like very scary, is sort of a follow up, but more intense to what I talked about last week, which was PEPFAR, which got swept up in the freeze on January 20th, you know, the very first day in office when Trump implemented this 90 day freeze on foreign assistance. Another thing that has gotten deeply, deeply swept up in this is a much larger, I guess we could call it appropriation called USAID.
S: Yeah.
C: For those who don't know what USAID is, if you remember when I was talking about PEPFAR, which was started under George W. Bush, USAID was started under Kennedy during, you know, the Cold War. It stands for the U.S. Agency for International Development. It is the main agency that we use at the federal level for assistance for disaster prone countries, poverty, disease, democratic reform. So this isn't just-there are political reasons behind USAID as well. But because of this freeze and then subsequent scattering to go, oh, God, this freeze actually is causing a lot of pain and suffering. You know, let's put certain parts of the freeze on hold. You know, Rubio came out only a few days later and said, no, no, no wait. We need strictly lifesaving emergency programs to not be frozen. But these different departments don't know if that applies to them. And since then, we've seen thousands of contractors get laid off. We've seen, let's say, tens, maybe dozens of officials that were put on leave. Employees were told just this week that they cannot enter the Washington headquarters. And USAID's website and its accounts on social media platforms have been taken down.
E: It's effectively shut down.
C: And a lot of people are scrambling because we've got to remember that this is all over the world. So boots on the ground that are doing important peacekeeping, that are doing important human rights work, refugee work, hunger, they don't have access to the aid that they need or the trucks aren't coming or, you know, any number of problems are preventing them from being able to do the work that ultimately is life-saving work. We're talking about like HIV treatment. We're talking about, well, that's more PEPFAR, but we're talking about like malaria treatment. And as we mentioned last week, when you pause, it's essentially the same as stopping as, you know, like for certain people who are caught in that pause, the downstream effects can happen months to years later, and it can still end in death, even if you open up the pipeline days later. It's really, really dangerous to just stop a bunch of moving parts all at once. And so, yeah, every day there's a new article about it, and we don't know what's going to happen.
S: Yeah. It's really bad for the NIH as well, you know, the biggest biomedical research organization in the world. They just canceled meetings. So these are like meetings that take months to put together. Like you can't just flip the switch back on. These are meetings determining funding. So now you have researchers across the country who don't know if their career is going to go forward or not. Like you survive from funding to funding, you know, from grant to grant.
C: Well, yeah. I mean, but that's happening across departments right now.
S: Yeah, I know. I know.
C: It's not just NIH. It's everybody's EPA. I mean, it's so scary.
S: It's so reckless. It's going to be extremely disruptful to biomedical research. Again, it'll take years to really feel the long-term effects of this, but it is amazing how quickly you can absolutely disrupt things like that.
C: Oh, yeah. And I mean, I think that's why I just can't help but go back to it. That's why this USAID thing is so, so scary. There's even a quote in a New York Times article here from an unnamed scientist who said, you could open the funding floodgates again tomorrow and you would still have children dying months from now because of this pause.
S: Yeah.
C: You cannot stop their medication or their anti-malarials, their mosquito nets, their, you know, food programs. It's, yeah, it's terrifying.
J: It's scary how quickly that they can knock all this down. And the reality is that, you know, it would take a huge amount of time to repair the damage. Just to try to set up the government agencies again and everything, you know, it's just like, you know, people aren't just waiting for the job. You know, you want the right people in those positions. They're going to go get employed in other places.
C: And what is the purpose really? Like what is the sort of elephant in the room that we're not talking about? It's money. If we shutter all of these programs, we save trillions. Why do we need to save trillions?
S: But if you look at each individual program, you actually, most of these programs actually save more money than they cost.
C: Of course they do. Because, but that requires foresight.
S: Yeah.
C: Right? That requires actually doing the calculations. But tomorrow I can claw back cash. And that's really what this is. It's a massive money grab. It's so scary.
S: I think it's more than that, though. You're correct.
C: Of course it is.
S: But it's way more than that. You know, like even with PEPFAR, it didn't just get swept up in this. Republicans have been gunning for PEPFAR for years because they are afraid that some of that money may go to fund abortions. And so therefore it's been on the chopping block for a while.
C: It's the same thing with USAID. I mean, it's, yeah, Republicans have said, why are we, you know, giving healthcare to the rest of the world? Why are we, you know, it's the same with EPA. It's the same with NOAA. It's the same with the U.S. Department of Education. But ultimately both of those things can be true. Part of the reason that these things are argued to be gutted is for a money grab purpose, because politically certain ideologies say that's not where our money should go. It should go over here instead.
S: Right. But most of these, yeah, again, I'm sure there's fraud and abuse and waste in the federal government. Any institution that's huge is going to have fraud and waste. But that takes careful eye, you know, close examination and a scalpel to sort of peel that away. This is just, you know, shut it all down and we'll sort it out later.
C: And that's, that was Musk's approach at the companies that he works at. He fully has said, this is what we're going to do. Stop the pipeline and then make an argument for why you need that funding back and we'll see if we'll give it back to you. It doesn't work that way.
S: Yeah. I mean, if you're running Twitter, that's fine.
C: I know. But if you're running healthcare across the globe, that's not fine.
S: Yeah, exactly. Okay. This is not going to change.
C: We got it out of our systems, guys. Now we can talk about science.
S: This is not going to change anytime soon.
J: Not at the moment.
B: I feel so much better.
E: I feel whoozy.
S: All right, let's completely change track here.
Quickie (11:51)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/nuclear-x-rays-deflect-earth-asteroids
S: Bob, you have a quickie for us.
B: Thank you, Steve. This is your quickie with Bob. Scientists have been doing lab experiments testing the idea that the X-rays from a nuclear blast could divert asteroids. Now large asteroids need more energy to be diverted from a collision course with Earth, right? I mean, they're bigger. So much more momentum. A kinetic impactor like DART, remember that dude that smashed into an asteroid and actually changed its trajectory?
E: Oh, right. Right, right, right.
B: That's from a few years ago. So that wouldn't be good enough for this case. It would just have to be far too massive and be traveling far too fast. Some techniques, though, could work with a very large asteroid, and that includes things like fusion engines, focused lasers, and neutron bursts. Those are all things that they think could do a much better job. The best option, though, seems to be what they call standoff nuclear explosions, which generate X-rays. So these scientists had at their disposal, conveniently, a device called a Z-machine at Sandia Labs in New Mexico. I think we've mentioned this before. It's a high-frequency electromagnetic wave generator, the largest in the world. This thing can make incredible X-ray beams. So they created a 6.6 nanosecond X-ray blast from the Z-machine, and they used it on a blueberry-sized bit of quartz in free fall. Now, these bits of quartz were, of course, stand-ins for asteroids. The X-rays rapidly heated and vaporized the surface, which creates this powerful, expanding gas plume on the surface. As you might guess, that plume pushes on the quartz like a rocket exhaust, very similar to a rocket exhaust. In this case, the quartz shot away at 250 kilometers an hour. So pretty impressive. I don't think they were expecting quite that much. But those results were then incorporated into part two of this experiment into a lab simulation, and it was scaled up, of course, to see, all right, how would this work? We take what we've learned from this lab experiment, recreate it in the computer simulation, and see how it scales up, what happens. So they showed that the X-rays from a nuclear blast a couple of kilometers away from a large asteroid could deflect it, assuming, of course, it has similar composition, right, to what they tested in the lab. But get this, it could deflect an asteroid up to four kilometers wide. It was four kilometers plus or minus one kilometer, so potentially even five kilometer. That's huge. That's really big. Similarly, though, and also pretty important, this technique, if it works scaled up in reality, it could also be used on a smaller asteroid that's going to hit Earth really soon, like within a year. So just a regular, any of the other techniques, like a kinetic impactor, wouldn't be good enough for a small one, being that close. So that's it. So they made a point of saying that. This also could work in that scenario, which is also, oh, it's very encouraging. So deflecting any asteroid is mostly about what? Making a change in its trajectory soon enough to make it miss the Earth, right? That's all that matters. So obviously, the farther away it is, even the tiniest nudge can eventually make it miss the Earth. But that's really difficult because you have to be able to get there when it's really, really far away and know that it's going to hit the Earth in the first place. So using powerful x-rays from a nuke means that we need less lead time than we would need from a kinetic impactor. Now we know the Earth will be hit by a large asteroid at some point, right? It's just a matter of when. It's going to happen. It could happen tomorrow. It could happen in 1,000 years. Who knows? But it will happen. And so this one bit of technology could potentially save humanity and prevent some life form in the distant future from digging us up like we do the dinosaurs from 66 million years ago. I am totally behind this kind of research. It could save our butts. Absolutely. And this has been your X-ray Nuke Quickie with Bob. Back to you, Steve.
S: That's interesting. Yeah. We definitely need to improve our technology for deflecting asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, ones that potentially could cross our path.
B: Imagine, Steve, we could find one like, oh, look, there's a huge asteroid. This is going to definitely hit us. Oh, crap. It's just too big and too close. We can't do anything. Oh, well. Enjoy the next three months.
S: Yeah.
B: That could absolutely happen.
S: And in fact, there's a candidate that we have to keep an eye on, right, Bob?
B: Oh, me again, huh? All right.
E: Double-header.
B: Let's do the asteroid-
S: Asteroid double-header.
B: Double-header.
News Items
Asteroid Chance of Hitting Earth (11:51)
B: So, all right. So, I'll start with, don't panic, yet.
E: I knew that was coming.
C: Thanks, Bob.
B: Yeah, come on. You got to make the Hitchhiker's Guide reference.
E: Don't panic any more than you're already panicking.
J: Bob, when you say, don't panic, that makes me panic.
B: Yeah.
E: Well, that's- Don't think about elephants.
B: I'm being serious. No, there's no need to panic here. But it has happened. I'm a little nervous, little, about a near-death asteroid. Wait, I mean a near-Earth asteroid.
E: Oh, my gosh, Bob. You're killing us here.
B: No, I'm a little nervous about it. Worst-case scenario is not good. But it's going to be fine. Don't worry. All right. Let's see. So, this asteroid is perhaps the size of a football field. This was detected last December. The latest estimates point to a one in 66 chance it could collide with the Earth three days before Christmas, 2032. So, the question is, do we need to, and I'm going to say it, do we need to gird our loins for this one? Do we need our towels? The last question always has an answer yes.
E: Oh, yeah.
B: FYI. So, the asteroid's name is 2024 YR4. And I'm going to name him Chucky because it's small. But if it gets close, you're toast. It was detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System in Chile, funded by NASA, and was moving away. It was moving away from us and was already millions of miles away. So, it's like, oh, look it. Look what's moving away.
E: Bob, did you say the Last Alert System?
B: That's what it's called.
E: That sounds terrible.
B: Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System in Chile.
E: That sounds so terminal. I mean, right?
B: Yeah. I mean, hey, they're doing great work over there. So, it's 40 to 90 meters wide or 130 to 300 feet. Numbers are all over the place. And let me say right here, it probably won't hit us. And even if it did, this would never be an ELE event. Steve, what does ELE stand for?
S: Extinction Level Event.
B: Right. This never can be an extinction level event. It's just not big enough. But this does represent a potential city destroyer, which is, of course, horrific.
E: For them, it's an extension.
B: Oh, my God. This would be a local event with no major global repercussions. So, stop thinking about the movie Deep Impact. So, yes, horrible, but not maximally horrible. How's that? So, the size, though, that we have is solely based on its brightness. So, there's a large uncertainty. So, it's very limited wavelengths that we got from it that we're judging its size on. It could be darker than we think and, therefore, bigger. Or it could be brighter than we think and smaller. We don't know. So, when astronomers find a near-Earth asteroid like this, what they need to do very quickly is extrapolate its orbit, its trajectory, and see if Earth is in danger. So, the next approach to us is going to happen in 2028. So, in three years. And they've determined that we are safe. 2028, they are damn certain that, you know, the risk corridor, I think they call it, is large, but it's nowhere near the Earth. So, we're good. The next orbit, though, after that, that's the one that's problematic. You know, of all the possible trajectories in that corridor that it could be orbiting through, more than 1% of them put the Earth and asteroid in the same place on 12-22-32. So, greater than 1%. You know, all right. So, now, as the days have passed, I've been tracking this the past 10 days or so, they refined their predictions. They've been refining it. And we often see the risk increase a bit before eventually just disappearing. They're like, oh, it's, you know, the risk is worse. The risk is worse. Oh, there's no risk. That's kind of the history of these things. It gets a little bit riskier based on the estimates. And then it goes away once they have enough critical mass of observations. But this one, though, you know, end of December, it's still getting a little bit worse every time I look at it. When I first saw it, it was a 1 in 88 chance that it's going to hit the Earth. Then it was 1 in 77. And then as of earlier today, it was 1 in 63. So, that's a 1.6% chance. So, still, you know, hey, there's still almost a 99% chance that Earth's going to be fine. And there's no astronomers are losing sleep over this. So, take that.
E: Well, one out of a hundred should be.
B: Well, yeah.
C: That's how statistics works. I love it.
B: So, the asteroid–
J: I'm worried now. Jesus.
B: Well, I mean, you know.
E: And there's the 1.
B: So, the asteroid is only a 3 on the Torino Impact Hazard Scale. And I love this scale.
J: 3 out of what?
B: 3 out of 10. It goes from 0 to 10. So, 0 is don't even think about it. 8, 9, and 10 means it's going to hit the Earth. But the smaller ones that are going to hit the Earth are an 8. And the biggest ones that are going to hit the Earth are a 10.
C: Well, I want all my asteroids to be 0s. I don't know about you.
B: Yeah, 0, 0, maybe even a 1. But a 0 is good. So, a 3 means that this is mainly – this merits attention by astronomers. Astronomers need to track this. That's what a 3 means. But, you know, this is not a ho-hum scenario at all. If you haven't gotten that vibe from me, get it. This is not like, yeah, you know, whatever. The problem is, as I see it, this is heading away from us fast and in nearly a straight line. So, it's very hard to study it now. And it's only going to get harder as it gets farther and farther away. It's entirely likely – this is the crux of this entire talk. It's entirely likely that we will not be able to rule out an Earth impact until 2028. So, probably, maybe, for the next three years, we're not going to know for sure. And this is going to stay number one on the list, the watch list. So, what's going to happen in 2028? So, say three years pass. We never got a good beat on it. We don't know if it's going to hit the Earth. We don't know what the real odds are. So, 2028 comes. And that's when we hit it with radar specifically. Because the radar will tell us pretty much most of what we need to know about it. And let us know, okay, the likelihood is still 1% or a tenth of a percent. Or completely negligible. Or, you know, maybe 70%. We don't know. But we need to hit it with some radar. And that probably will only happen in 2028. Maybe they can do it now. I don't think. But we may have to wait those three years. And that's what I really do not like. So, yeah, our worst fears could be realized. And we calculate in 2028. Oh, look, Chucky is probably going to hit the Earth. And by then, it's going to be probably way too late to do anything to deal with it. So, once we calculate that this is going to hit us, it automatically jumps from a three to what? What do you think?
C: Eight.
E: Eight.
B: Very good. You've been paying attention. I'm so happy right now. It jumps to an eight. And it could never go to a nine or a ten. Because it's just not big enough for that. So, I know you're all thinking it. What would happen if we were hit? So, like I said, this is a city killer.
E: Depends.
B: But more specifically, what does that mean? John Tone reads in Astronomy University Hawaii. He likens the impact to a ten megaton bomb. He says, specifically, everything within three or four kilometers will be incinerated. Everything out to maybe ten kilometers is smashed. It's not a nuclear explosion, but it's an extremely hot explosion. There would be a huge fireball that would start fires out to 15 kilometers. Something like that. It would kill a lot of people if they haven't moved out of the way.
E: That's the point, right? I mean, there'll be time to evacuate.
B: Absolutely.
C: Well, and that's assuming that it's going to land in a city. But most meteorites, at least, land in the middle of the desert or the ocean.
E: That's that.
B: Exactly. And that segues nicely into where is this going to hit? And they can calculate that with a certain degree of confidence. And so they've defined a swath, a swath of the earth that would be under threat.
E: Earth swath.
B: If things don't change too much. They call it a risk corridor. And this extends from the Pacific Ocean through the northern South America, then the Atlantic Ocean, and then Sub-Saharan Africa, the Arabian Sea, and parts of South Asia.
E: That's like most of the planet.
C: It's a specific latitude, right? That's what they're calculating. As it wraps around the globe. Because we're spinning.
B: Right. Exactly. But you're right, though. That's where it could hit. But it could just hit the ocean. But then you have to deal with a tsunami. And I couldn't find too much detail out there. How bad would the tsunami be? I'm sure if you're anywhere near where it hits in the ocean, the tsunami could be bad. But then there's another option here. There's an airburst scenario. Now, Chucky seems like he's rocky. He's more rocky than metallic. So he could potentially explode in the upper atmosphere and never even reach the ground in one piece. This could be similar to the famous Tunguska event in 1908, which flattened 2,100 square kilometers in a remote Siberian forest. Very good, Evan. Still, that could be pretty nasty. If this happens over a city, it would obviously be bad. You guys remember the Russian city Chelyabinsk?
E: Yes, 2014.
B: It was 10, 11 years ago. Windows were shattered. Hundreds were injured. And that rock was only 20 meters wide. This could be three, four times that. So yeah, even an airburst over a city, over a populated area, could be kind of nasty. But after all that doom and gloom, we are lucky, though. We are lucky in 2025. There's not much luck flying around, but we're lucky with this because the world has been taking the possibility of an asteroid strike much more seriously for years now. I was so glad when they started listening to my rants on the show. 20 years ago, spotting Chucky and extrapolating its orbit like we have done already would have been very, very hard to do. And I think we would have missed it entirely in 2025. And maybe we would have caught it in 2028. I don't know. It would have been very difficult. Now it's much easier to do it. So we're also lucky because once an asteroid is detected that is more than 50 meters wide and has a 1% chance or greater of hitting the Earth, then our planetary defenses kick in. Now I'm not talking about force fields surrounding the Earth. I'm not even talking about an obelisk that shoots a beam that moves the asteroid conveniently out of the way. We don't have those cool toys yet. And of course that was a reference to Star Trek. So the first step that we have now is we mobilize available telescopes worldwide to gather data about the new asteroid. So once this was announced, lots of telescopes were utilized to get more information about this. So that's the first step. The other part of this first step is that two UN-endorsed groups are activated. There's the International Asteroid Warning Network chaired by NASA. And then there's a Space Mission Planning Advisory Group chaired by the European Space Agency, ESA. Now NASA's group coordinates worldwide detection and warning strategies. But the ESA group has the cool job. They're going to evaluate the spacecraft options to deflect the asteroid. If the collision odds remain high, that's what they're going to be doing. So now both groups very closely monitor Chucky's trajectory, of course, because that impacts what they're actually going to be doing. The ESA group is already holding meetings this week. They have already held some meetings as we speak. And so what they said, one of the things they said is that no immediate actions are required right now. They're premature. April or May, they're going to formally evaluate. So if the probability stays above 1%, then they're going to work with the UN and evaluate mitigation possibilities, including using a spacecraft to hit the asteroid to deflect it like DART craft a few weeks ago. Or who knows? They may have another arrow in their quiver which could include an X-ray nuke to push it away, kind of like that obelisk from Star Trek. I doubt they're going to have that tech ready. Totally, I totally doubt they'll have that ready. But the thing is, the key though is not to sit on our hands until 2028, because that's going to really piss me off. They need to make, I think, if we, by April, if we don't know, if we still don't know its exact orbit and think it's still like 1.6%, above 1%, I think we absolutely need to have something ready to fly in 2028. I don't care what the hell it is. Have something ready. Probably an impactor will be enough. A kinetic impactor, because the one that DART was used against was about the same size, and it worked. So I think they need to really seriously consider it. Of course, they've got to do their due diligence, and they don't want to make sure that they're not diverting it to hitting the Earth even more straight on than before. Whatever. But we may need to really just be ready. And if it turns out it's not going to hit the Earth when we look at it in radar, fine. But we'll be ready for the next one that comes, and who knows when that is.
E: Oh, I have a correction to make on something I said that Chelyabinsk meteor was not 2014, it was 2013. In fact, February of 2013, so we're coming up on the anniversary.
B: Ah, OK. Yeah, I remember that day. I was in the cafeteria at work. I'm like, oh, wow, an airburst.
E: And they had like 100 cameras pick it up. It was great.
B: Yeah, that was intense. People caught it. A lot of people caught it on their dash cams in their cars.
C: Oh, I love all of the Russian dash cam footage videos.
E: Oh, crashes and stuff?
C: No, no, like the ones of really meteorites, right, where they're just driving and there's a fireball in the sky and they just do not react. And it is so funny. They're just like, huh, and just keep driving.
E: They love dash cams in Russia. That seems to be a thing.
C: Yeah, it may be a taxi thing. I don't know. Like every Uber has one. Not every, but a lot of Ubers have them. I don't know.
S: All right, thanks, Bob.
Does the Internet Affect Our Memory (31:44)
S: Jay, is the internet adversely affecting our memory?
E: What'd you say?
J: Yeah, I mean, it could be, Steve. It could be, but there's details. It's always these little nuances that we've got to pay attention to. The interesting thing here is that our species has always been looking for ways to help us remember information. We rely on external tools to store data. So historically, what did we do? Maybe we made cave paintings that told a story. And then later on, people created scrolls to write stuff on, right? Today, we have computers. And also the amount and kinds of data that we can store on it, right? Very different than just writing words and drawings on a scroll. Today, a computer could do a huge number of things when it comes to data. So the question is, does the internet, artificial intelligence, and modern computing fundamentally alter the way that we learn and remember information? Before I continue, I'm curious to hear what's your gut telling you guys?
C: That's such a broad question. There's no way to answer that question without saying yes. But in what regard?
J: Well, is it having a negative impact?
C: Oh, a negative impact. It's probably both.
E: Probably?
C: It's probably affecting certain types of retrieval, but increasing certain types of processing.
J: To work on the answer, we have to look at how we interact with information. So what do we do today? We Google things. We use search engines. We have GPS. And those two things, if you're just looking at them alone, they've dramatically changed the way that we search for information and the way that we navigate in our vehicles. And studies have shown that relying on GPS, it reduces our ability to remember routes. And it's pretty true. I remember everything from my childhood. I mean, I know my childhood neighborhood really well. I have all the street names memorized and everything. But my adult home, not so much. Like, I know how to get in and out. But I mean, there's a million side streets that I never even pay attention to. If I'm going to go somewhere that's not 15 minutes to the store, I put GPS on, even if I'm going to the doctor, which I might do once a year. I don't completely remember where every doctor is. My kid's doctor, my wife's doctor, my doctor. So I think it does have a profound influence or effect on just the way that we're paying attention when we're driving in the car. So today we use Google and other search engines when we want to find information online. But earlier, you know, years and years ago, people had to read books to get information. And that's a totally different experience than quickly searching something and getting right to the heart of the matter, like the fact that you're looking for. Instead of sifting through, you know, one or more books to learn something, which is just, again, like it's a different way of interacting with the information. People would have to commit a lot more time to learning. And there's a phenomenon that's sometimes called the Google effect, which means that we're shifting away from internal memory and instead we're using the internet and our computers to give us the answers. The Google effect. Yeah, I mean, sure, I see that. I definitely use the computer way more than I'll crack open a book if I'm, you know, going to ask questions and want quick answers. My gut tells me, like, as I was reading this information, my gut was telling me, yeah, I do think that technology has been kind of ruining my personal memory on lots of different things that I do. But research suggests-
C: I don't think it has to mind.
J: What's that?
C: I don't think it has to mind because you're forgetting the second half of that equation and maybe it's a function of volition. Because sure, if you want to just engage in this sort of attentionally thin way and just find what you need and move on, and then all of that architecture, all of that space that you now have available to you, you can fill with whatever you want. You can fill it with trash TV or you can fill it with other types of knowledge.
J: Yeah, I guess overall, we're not talking about specifics. We're talking about, like, in general, with all the different things that we do and the way that we're interacting with information, you know, what's the overall effect? So there is research on this and the research suggests a couple of things. One, that it can impair our performance on specific tasks like navigating or recalling facts, but there's not significant evidence that suggests an overall decline in our cognitive ability. And that makes me very happy because it's always like, you know, use it or you're going to lose it, right? And I know that with your brain that that is in play. Like, if you're not using your brain, exercising your brain, that your cognitive ability will decrease, right, Steve?
S: Yeah, I mean, that fits with my understanding of the research, but the thing is, at the same time, what the research shows is that it's very task-specific. If you do a task, you get better at that task, right? And if you don't do it, then you get worse at that task, but that doesn't necessarily have global or generalizable benefits or detriments to your cognitive function. I think that probably the better way to look at this is not that it's, like, having a negative effect on us. It's just that we are changing the kinds of things we're good at. We are adapting to the new information landscape that we have before us. So we're not developing some skills that are no longer relevant, and we're developing other skills that are relevant. And, of course, if you choose to test the irrelevant skills, they will test worse.
C: Yeah, it'll look like a decrement. It's like, when I think about the generational difference between myself and my parents, yes, I probably don't have as much mental mapping from a navigational perspective, but I'll tell you what, watching them drive with their sat-nav makes me want to scream. They are such Luddites when it comes to the sat-nav. They don't know how to use it. They don't know how to preempt turns. They don't know, you know. Whereas I'm very fluid. I put Apple Maps up every time I go anywhere, even places I know where I'm going, because I want to know down to the second and I want to know if there's a better path.
J: Researchers are not 100% aligned, right? You know, this is early in the research. So some researchers are arguing that offloading memory to digital devices, it's not necessarily harmful, and some of them think it can free up cognitive resources for more complex mental processes.
C: That's what I just said.
J: Should you memorize your grocery list? Should you write it down? Or should you just have it already created on your smartphone when you go to the store, right? Instead of spending time on that, you could spend time on more complicated things that take more attention. And then now there's the whole thing with AI, right? So AI is having an impact, and they're trying to figure out exactly what that impact is. So search engines changed how we retrieve data, but AI has the potential to reshape how that data is formed and how we absorb that data. So generative AI, things like ChatGPT, they provide information in a new way that really hasn't existed before. It's interactive, and it's conversational. And that is so true. I mean, the way that I use ChatGPT when I'm doing research, it's a conversation without a doubt. And I find that to be a much better way for me to get information. I like that about it. But, you know, it is more immersive than any other kind of way that we've done traditional searches. And some experts worry, though, that this could make users cognitively lazy, which could reduce the effort needed for critical thinking and deep learning. So that was troubling for me, right? So we could slowly, over time, become kind of lazy mentally. And, you know, general critical thinking skills and deep learning could suffer from that. Again, these are what the experts are doing. This is what they're saying. This is what they're researching. There isn't massive conclusive data yet because this is very hard to research, right? It's not like you just, you know, run a study for a couple of weeks and you have great data. Like, these things could take, we might need a huge number of people, and it might take, you know, a decade to really suss this out. So another concern that researchers have brought up is that AI has the ability to shape personal and historical memories. So let me explain that. So we have digital assistants, they curate memories for us. They can assemble past photos and videos. They can influence how people recall events. There's also something called deadbots, right? These AI-driven avatars that mimic deceased loved ones, which I think is horrible, by the way. But these could create virtual conversations with the past that create, you know, create new memories and potentially, you know, unreliable data could be transferred. You know, someone could be, you know, interacting with an AI. And it's not accurate. You know, please, you know, I want to have a conversation with my father who passed away and I want you to sound exactly like him and I've given you, you know, a half hour audio of the guy talking. You know, but the AI isn't the person. And the AI could say a lot of things that it's trying to simulate who the person is. But, you know, how accurate could that be? I mean, even in Star Trek, on the holodeck, remember that one on Next Gen, Bob? He like fell in love with like this engineer that was like a warp drive engineer.
E: Oh, I might remember that, too.
B: Right, he created her on the holodeck and yeah, he was behaving horribly.
J: And the computer told him, like, as it goes on, the chances of it being accurate dramatically drop off to where like, you know, I just found that interesting and it reminded me of that.
C: Yes, that documentary Star Trek.
J: Yeah, but it's pretty cool because some science fiction writer like, you know, called that out and something like that was even remotely possible. Another idea here is there like one factor that complicates all of this is something that a lot of us complain about. And this is information overload. This has become one of my massive pet peeves or maybe that's not even strong enough. Like I really have a problem with information overload, right? People are exposed to, you know, huge amounts more data than previous generations. Like the volume of information we have to attempt to retain could make memory lapses feel more frequent, right? Because we're faced with more information, right? We're not living in a small town of 30 people and, you know, we know everyone and basically that's all we know and it's a very short list of things. Like we are all like doing things online and getting bombarded with information and God forbid you go on social media and then you're even bombarded with more information. You know, it seems like it's overwhelming. To me it is. I don't know about you guys. But if our cognitive function is unchanged, right? Then let's say that, you know, cognitively we're the same as we were 30 years ago, 40 years ago, but you add this factor in of all this, you know, information coming to us, it does have an effect. Now it could be a perceived effect that we have a decline in our memory because we're getting hit with so much that we really can't possibly retain it, right? And we feel that. I don't remember this. I don't remember that. Like, you know, when I look at people, you know, famous people, Bob's really good at names and remembering, you know, detecting their faces and all that. To me, you know, I don't know. Anything that happened in the last 15 years, I have a vague understanding and memory of any of it. I mean, I guess I'm not paying that close of attention. But like, you know, when I was 20, I knew every single person, every single musician that was out there, you know, I had it all, like, drop of a hat. I could name any of them. Today, I have no idea what's going on.
C: But, Jay, I think you just tapped into such an important point.
J: What?
C: And that's attention. Like, I'm curious why, and I get it, like, you know, researchers investigate the things that they have expertise in and the areas of their interest. But does the internet affect our memory? Okay, that is an interesting question. Does the internet affect our attention? Yes! That's a part of memory. And that's a really important part, because it's the first part. You can't remember things you don't attend to. You just can't.
J: Yeah, but do you feel like the information overload thing?
C: Yeah, but I think that a lot of that is a choice. And I get it, it's hard when you're a digital native, and this is the water that you swim in, because it probably doesn't feel like a choice. You probably don't feel like you can stop scrolling, or you can put your phone in the other room. That's a very very difficult thing to do when it's an extension of yourself and your sense of self. But ultimately, you have a volitional choice to cut off that information stream and give yourself solitude and calm. But we're not trained in that. And we don't prioritize it as a culture.
S: Yeah, so I think we really need to divide this up into two questions. Is the current environment with AI and the internet and social media and everything, is that having a negative neurological effect on us, on our cognitive function? I think there is no evidence to conclude that it is, and I think if anything, the evidence is going the other way. And if you look, just to ask the question, what's happening over time, over historical time, over decades, people are basically getting a little bit smarter every decade.
C: But their attention spans are getting shorter.
S: Right, but then the other question is how are we using our cognitive function? Cara brings up an excellent point about attention. It's not just about your raw memory. It's about what are you choosing to do with your attention, with your cognitive function. What do you spend your time doing? And I do think it's a good idea to be thoughtful about how you're spending your time, not just going with the flow of what is happening around you. Not only because of your mood and how it affects you that way, but also because what you do, you will get good at. If you spend your time engaging with interesting information and thinking about things deeply, you'll get better at that. If you spend your time on the most superficial entertainment, then that's what you're going to be good at.
J: Steve, what if we're spending a lot of time learning this behavior of being avoidant to the crush of information that's being thrown at us?
S: I think we all need to figure out how to survive in the current information ecosystem. Part of what I do, again, I try to be very thoughtful about what I'm going to do and how I'm going to do it in terms of reading articles versus watching the news, listening to the radio, etc. The sources of information that I'm spending my time exposing myself to. But also, this gets a little bit back to your original point about using GPS or whatever. I do, you know, will try to not be entirely reliant on modern technology. Not for neurological reasons, but just because I don't want to be completely helpless when the power goes out, you know what I mean? Or when the app goes down. So I occasionally will drive places without GPS just to do it. Just to exercise my ability to navigate without being told turn for turn what to do. I commit certain phone numbers to memory just so if I don't have access to my address book and my phone, I'm not completely helpless, right? Do you ever have that situation where, whatever, your phone's dead or you don't want your phone, you have to borrow somebody else's phone and you realize you don't know a single person's number.
J: That's crazy, man. Totally right, Steve.
E: Which all you had was to memorize the numbers.
C: I still don't know my own office line because I've worked in this fellowship for less than a year. To this day, when somebody asks me for my phone number, I have to open my email and look at my signature.
S: Right.
C: Yeah.
S: I made an effort to commit certain numbers to memory.
B: You guys remember Dad? Dad was famous for having literally 200 phone numbers at his fingertips. It was amazing, his memory for phone numbers. Incredible.
C: It is a zero-sum game, memory. And yes, some people have more memory capacity than other people. They probably do have certain increased skills in that area, but when we commit certain things to memory, there is literally less space for other things. That's why we have to connect things to things that are already there. When we have a lot of disparate information, it's really hard to remember it.
S: It's complicated.
The Growing Rat Problem (48:44)
S: Alright, Cara, tell us about this growing rat problem that we're having in the world's cities.
C: Yeah, so I came across, I don't know, I always kind of scrub these different science articles every week thinking about what I'm going to talk about on SGU, and every so often something kind of quirky, interesting, terrifying.
E: When you say growing rat problem, are you talking about the size of the rats or the size of the problem?
C: We're talking about how much the rats are growing. No. So let's, what do you think, Steve, you know the answer to this already, everyone else, what do you think is the number one variable that seems to be driving growing numbers of rats?
E: Population.
C: Well, the population of the rats?
E: No, direct population of humans.
E: Oh, okay. So you think, direct. Good guess, and it's up there, not the number one.
B: Poorly stored food?
C: Poorly stored food, I don't even know if that's in the top five, but it's kind of a component of the top five. It's sort of a component of what Evan said, right?
S: I'll have to say, I know the answer you're getting to, Cara, but I have to say along Bob's line, I read some very interesting articles basically saying that the rat population is directly proportional to the food supply. That's it. They will grow to the food supply and the only way to really deal with the problem, like in New York City, we go to New York City, like you're walking, there's a rat walking down the street next to you. I mean, they have a really bad rat problem. But essentially, their population will grow to meet the food supply and the only way to reduce the rats is to reduce that food supply.
C: So you're talking about that upper limit?
S: The upper limit of their population.
C: Yeah, sort of like how if you put a koi in a pond, it'll grow to the size of the pond or whatever. But there is, you know, this study that was just recently published in Science Advances, increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to blank, blank, and blank. Really, they did a pretty intense, sophisticated analysis to try and determine what these larger predictors were. And human population was the third. Urbanization was the second. Both of those have direct implications on food supply. The very first, da-da-da-da, climate change.
B: Oh, no way.
C: Increasing rat numbers in cities are linked to climate warming, urbanization, and human population. This was a study that was done by a group of urban ecologists. And what they actually did, it's kind of interesting, is they looked at public complaint and inspection data. So people complaining about the rat problem in a city, and also data from inspectors. They looked at 16 cities around the world, and they used that information to sort of estimate the trends in the rat populations, because I don't think anybody actually knows how many rats are in any of these cities. Obviously, we have to estimate those numbers. And of the 16 cities, 11 of them, so that made up 69% of them, had significant increasing trends in their rat numbers. Only 3 cities had declines, and in 2 cities, there was no change. And let's talk about what the researchers found using their sophisticated statistical analyses. So, first and foremost, the city with the largest increase across their data set, they looked at a study period, right? But they looked at the kind of before to the after. And here are some interesting takeaways. So, like I mentioned, 11 of the 16 cities had significant increases, and those increases varied widely in their magnitude. So, what city do you think had the largest increase across their kind of test period?
S: New York.
C: Right? Everyone thought New York. New York was number 3. No, New York was number 4.
E: Mexico City.
C: Washington, D.C.
S: Were they talking about the rodents or the politicians?
C: Right. It didn't clarify. No, so the increase, the trend in the rat population in Washington, D.C. was 3 times greater than in Boston and 1.5 times greater than in New York City. Fascinating. So, we saw increases. The 5 strongest trends were Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Toronto, New York City, and Amsterdam. And then that was followed by Oakland, Buffalo, Chicago, Boston, Kansas City, and Cincinnati. They looked at New Orleans where they had a greater decrease. New Orleans, Louisville, and Tokyo all had decreases. New Orleans had the largest decrease. And then Dallas and St. Louis didn't show any real statistically significant change in their trends. So, basically, they did an analysis, a relative weights analysis, to figure out the variance, right? What percentage of the change was attributed to these different variables, these different factors? And their weights turned out to be that 40.7% of the variation in trend was linked to the mean temperature increase that the city had relative to long-term temperature averages. So, cities where the temperature went up the most were cities where they had more rats. And there was a pretty strong correlation there. Cities, it tended to be that way. The larger increase meant larger increases. Larger temperature rise meant larger increases in rat sightings. They also looked at what they called urbanization. It was actually a proxy for that. They saw what percentage of that area's land was vegetated, right? Like, how much green was there in the city? And they found that that attributed to about 34.3% of the variance. So, cities with less vegetation had greater increase in rats. So, more urbanized areas had more rats. Human population density, the weight there was 19.4%. And then the rest, the smaller variables that they looked at were GDP, that was only 3.4% of the variance, and mean minimum temperature experienced by a city, that was 2.3%of the variance. So, it wasn't really that the hottest cities had the most rats. It was that the cities that gained temperature over time the most had a larger increase in rat populations. And so, let's talk about why would rats want to be places where we have greater increases in average air temperatures. Rats' activity is constrained by cold temperature. So, when it gets colder, the rodents themselves get slower, they remain sheltered for longer, or they might forage for food and then store that food and hang out kind of more latent for longer. And so, we see a lot of seasonality when we look at rats at certain latitudes, whereas there's not as much seasonality.
E: Ratitudes.
C: Ratitudes.
E: Don't mind me.
C: Less kind of seasonality in equatorial or tropical or subtropical areas. So, there are seasonal cycling in places like New York City or D.C. anyway, but we saw that those increases increased when there was a change in average temperature due to climate change. Yeah. And so, there is a real fear here because long-term climate change is occurring across most of the globe. We also see that it's more intense in cities because cities have something called the urban heat island effect. Places where there's a lot of concrete, places where there's not as much green space, we don't have as many sinks for those temperatures, they increase exponentially. They increase significantly more than these more rural areas. And it's not uniform across the globe, right? So, as the researchers write, urban areas of northern North America, southern and central Europe, and the Middle East are projected to have faster increases in temperature and this may lead to cities in these regions experiencing different trends in rat numbers over time, as well as associated human-rat conflict. So, when we talk about associated human-rat conflict, what are we actually talking about? We we need to be worried about lots of rats?
S: Disease vectors?
B: Disease spread.
C: Massive disease vectors, yeah. And that can be a really good indication of sort of the epidemiologic health of that region. They're almost like the opposite of the canary in the coal mine, right? If the rats are doing well, I think we need to be careful. But we don't know if these increases are due specifically to lower mortality, if they're actually breeding more, right? Increased fecundity, or if they just have increased foraging opportunities, but it's likely that all of the above are contributing to that due to climate change. The researchers also, you know, they kind of drill down into why areas that are more vegetated tend to have fewer rats. They also drill down into not just urbanization, but the other ecological impacts and ways that more research along these lines may help us understand how to control rat populations in the future. But yeah, rats as a proxy is really interesting, but also just increasing rats has its own, comes with its own public health concerns.
S: You know what doesn't work to control rat populations?
C: Cats?
S: Trapping, hunting, none of that works. They will outbreed any attempt to control their population you have. It's all about the environment generally, which includes temperature, food availability, spaces to nest. They will fill the space that's given to them.
C: Hygiene.
E: I always thought farms would have cats around to eat the mice and the rats. Ships.
S: Yeah, on a small scale that's correct. On a city scale, no. Way too many places to hide and breed. It's like, you know, I lived in Baltimore, right? When you live in Baltimore, one of the skills you learn is cockroach control, right? You have to learn that skill. You can't just kill them when you see them. You know what I mean? It's like you're just nibbling around the edges there.
E: Yeah, you're seeing the very limits.
S: Yeah, you have to get to the source, which basically means you have to use poison that they bring back to their nest.
C: What you also have to do is ensure, just like with mosquito mitigation strategies, you ensure that the places where they're most likely to hang out are not hospitable to them.
S: You can't have breeding locations. You can't just have a bug zapper. I mean, it's fine to have a bug zapper on your patio, but that's not going to be population control for mosquitoes.
C: And a lot of this can be thought of as urban hygiene. And urban hygiene includes clearly temperature.
S: Yep, urban hygiene.
C: The cat thing wouldn't work at a city level anyway, because really, is it bad to have lots of rats? It's actually really bad to then have lots of feral cats.
S: Yeah, I think what we should need to do is release millions of feral cats into the city. And then when they get out of control, then we're going to release coyotes or dogs into the city. And then when they get out of control, we'll introduce mountain lions into the city. There was a book, one of our favorite childhood books, was it?
B: Yes.
E: Yes.
S: The King, the Mice and the Cheese. Then the elephants.
B: But then, to get rid of the elephants, you need the mice again.
S: Gotta bring the mice back.
E: Doh!
C: Amazing.
B: Guys, I wish I could remember, I read about some small country somewhere that has, they have it in for the rats to such a degree that they have declared the country rat-free. Literally rat-free. And if somebody spots a rat, it literally makes the news. It makes the news. And they're just like, I want to find it, because I'm still, I'm skeptical because how is that possible?
C: Alberta, Canada.
B: Huh?
C: And the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. Alberta, Canada. Rat-free.
B: There you go.
C: Since 1950.
S: They'll freeze in the winter, so you know.
C: They have a dedicated rat control program.
S: Yeah, I know.
C: They've got propaganda posters saying, kill a rat if you see it. They've got rat patrol agents.
E: Remember the rat catchers from medieval times? Oh yeah, that was a real booming economy.
Do Apes Have a Theory of Mind (1:01:03)
S: All right. Cara, let me ask you this question. Do you think that any apes have a theory of mind?
C: I do. Well, first of all, we're apes, and we know we do.
S: Non-human apes.
C: I do think so, yeah.
S: So this has actually been a very controversial research question.
B: Really?
S: Yeah, it has been. Let me explain what a theory of mind is. That is the ability to think about the fact that other people have the ability to think and feel things. I can imagine what you're thinking. I know that you think.
B: I know you can.
C: You have to know that you think to be able to-it's a precursor to empathy. You can't have empathy without theory of mind.
S: Right. If I do something, you will feel something in response. But it's also strategizing. If I'm going to manipulate your behavior, I have to have some internal model of how your behavior works, which has to do with how you think, what you know, what you don't know, how you feel. It's all theory of mind. People obviously have it, and it's been controversial whether or not any non-human animal has it. Obviously, our closest primate relatives, our closest ape relatives, are the ones who would be most likely to have it, unless some other line, unless we think like birds or dolphins or whatever, might have a theory of mind. But the research is focused mainly on apes. When you do that kind of research, you cannot read the minds of your subject. You have to infer what's going on inside the mind of a bonobo or a chimpanzee or a gorilla or whatever.
B: Bonobo, baby.
S: You have to use some kind of a research paradigm, some kind of a construct, where you say, if they do have a theory of mind, then this is what we predict they would behave on this research situation, on this test. But that still doesn't prove that they do. The more you do that, and it kind of builds up this case that they have a theory of mind, the more likely we think it is. But then there's always different ways to interpret it. Nothing is ironclad. So up until now, most of the research addressing this question has tried to answer the question, does the study subject, like a chimpanzee or bonobo, do they understand that another creature, whether a fellow ape or a human researcher, that they know something, that they have some piece of information in their mind. Some of that research has been positive. It has suggested that maybe they do have a theory of mind. They seem to act on the belief that another agent has a piece of information. But that has come under question because it's hard to know if they're acting on their own knowledge or their beliefs about the knowledge of the other entity, the other, either human or ape in the research. So now there's a new study that says, okay, so we're going to do something different. We're going to see if the research subjects, the apes, have knowledge of another creature's absence of information, not the presence of information, about, right, if they can think about another creature's ignorance, because that would sort of flip things around a little bit and be harder to say, well, they're just acting on their own knowledge. Does that make sense? So here's the research paradigm. A lot of behavioral studies with chimpanzees use, exploit the fact that chimpanzees are very greedy. They will always go for the treat, right? So their behavior is very predictable. And so that becomes a variable that you can sort of count on in the research design. So this actually used bonobos, which are a type of chimpanzee. And the bonobos—
B: The best kind.
S: The study subject, the bonobo, was sitting across a table from a human researcher, while another human researcher sat at 90 degrees to those two, right? So they were at another side of the table. Then the game master, that's the person sitting at right angles to the subject and the target, they would then hide a treat under one of three cups. Right? Doing this, they would do it in front of the person, in front of the bonobo, and then wait five seconds, and then reveal the treat and give it to the bonobo. So the bonobo learns that there's a treat under the cup, and then one of the humans will reveal it and give me the treat. Then, that was just the setup. That was just like the training phase. Then they introduced a barrier between the human sitting across from the bonobo and the cups and the bonobo. So now the human cannot see the cups. But in some of the situations, there's a window in the barrier where they could see the cups, and then in some situations, there was no window, so they could not see the cups. Right? So they're setting up a situation where the bonobo should easily be able to see that the human sitting across from them either knows where the treat is being placed or doesn't know where the treat is being placed. Right?
C: If they have the ability to see that, are they guaranteeing that they are attending to that information?
S: Well, I mean, they're sitting right across from them. So, yeah, I don't know if they were specifically trying to control, or are they attending to it? I think they're paying close attention to what's going on.
C: So the paradigm assumes that the bonobos know.
S: Yes.
C: Or they're asking, do they know?
S: They witnessed whether the human saw where the treat was being placed or not. Then, the question was, in the condition where the human, then they remove the barrier, right? And the person waits. And then, the question is, if the bonobo thinks the person knows where the treat is, will they behave differently than if they think the person doesn't know where the treat is? And specifically, they said the bonobo, if the bonobo has a theory of mind, in the situation where they know that the human does not know where the treat is, they will try to communicate where the treat is more insistently and more quickly than in the scenarios where they think the person does know where the treat is. Right? Does that make sense? And that's what happened pretty strongly. The statistics are pretty robust. So the bonobos were able, they got very insistent at pointing out where the treat was in the situation where the human did not see where it was placed. Because they know that the human needs to know where the treat is, otherwise they will not give it to them. They won't get the treat.
C: Whereas, if you had done the exact same experiment but modified it for their height or whatever with a dog, a dog probably would have acted the same way. Like, bro, there's a treat there. Bro, give me the treat. I need the treat. Check it out.
S: Exactly. Without regard to their knowledge of whether or not the person knew that piece of information. So they were able to act on their knowledge of the ignorance of the other person in the situation.
C: That's awesome.
S: Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. So the thing is, bonobos hunt cooperatively. They don't, not as much as chimpanzees do, but they do. And so that's an obvious situation where you might think, yeah, coordinating your activity among the various troop members and especially being able to think about, oh, my fellow bonobo over there doesn't know that the thing that we're hunting is behind the tree or whatever. They could change their behavior based upon their theory of mind of the other members of their troop.
C: And babies don't have theory of mind. This is something that's so interesting. Even kids don't develop it until they're toddlers.
S: Yeah, that comes on over time.
B: Jay took you until you were 20 years old, right?
S: So Jay does have a theory of meatballs though. That goes back even farther. So the thinking is that, again, this makes sense that our closest relatives would have at least a pre or a proto theory of mind. In this case it might actually be fairly well developed. Which is what we find. Clearly humans have some unique cognitive abilities, right? We evolved huge brains, language, etc. But the more we research our closest relatives, especially the more we find that the precursors of those abilities are all there already. They didn't just come out of nowhere. Which evolutionarily makes total sense. We had to evolve from something. These abilities did not come out of whole cloth. They derived from more primitive versions in our common ancestor with our closest relatives. So not surprising. And again, this is one study. This is not going to put the debate to rest. But this is one notch in favor of the conclusion that bonobos, in this case, do have a theory of mind. It makes the evidence for that a little bit more robust. We'll see if it replicates. We'll see if it replicates in different setups.
C: I wouldn't be surprised if you also saw it in chimps. If you saw it in orangutans.
S: All right. Interesting.
NASA Harassed by Aliens (1:10:52)
- https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/nasa-astronauts-are-harassed-by-125ft-aliens-with-wings-who-peek-into-space-shuttles [5]
S: Evan, is NASA being harassed by aliens?
E: Well, I guess it depends what kind of articles you read, videos you watch. Kind of what we were talking about earlier. Yeah, that's a headline that'll make you spit out your coffee while drinking. Right, Bob?
B: Oh, every time.
E: The headline, NASA astronauts are harassed by 125-foot tall, I guess, aliens with wings who peek into space shuttles. Oh, boy.
C: What?
E: That gives a whole new meaning to the famous...
C: [inaudible]
E: Boy, a whole new meaning to the famous words of Jim Lovell. Houston, we have a problem. Even though it's really Houston we've had a problem, but that's another story. But, you know, Hollywood does things to famous lines and there you have it. So I went to NASA's website and I looked around and did word searches for things like, oh, I don't know, 125-foot aliens. Can't seem to find anything there. No reports of astronaut harassment of any kind and certainly no news concerning or new news concerning space shuttles. You know, those went the way of the dodo 14 years ago. So where did this very legitimate sounding line come from? It came from a man named Chris Bledsoe and he said it on his son's podcast which I won't mention the title here. Sorry, no freebies on the backs of us. But this fellow, Chris Bledsoe, let's see, here he is. His credentials are nothing. He's a guy. He's a, well, a very religious guy.
B: He's just this guy, you know.
E: But Bob, back in 2007, he claims he had a life-altering encounter with UFOs. Life-altering, really? Because this encounter cured him of a debilitating chronic illness and led him to a profound spiritual awakening. He claims he had Crohn's disease and he became cured because he interacted with UFOs at the time. Yeah. Lost four hours of his memory, right? He cannot account for four hours of time during that day or that evening, so that's it. He attributes it to that. So Chris Bledsoe decided to become a public speaker and write a book about his experience. And of course, the UFO community welcomed him with open arms because that's what they do. Somewhere along the line since then, he also became a prophet.
C: Of course he did.
E: Yeah, right, exactly. Because if you're going to go deep into the weird fusion of religion and UFO, it doesn't hurt to start to proclaim things like psychic abilities and superpowers. So why not? Bledsoe has a thing for orbs. UFO orbs, he calls them. And if you dig a little deep into it, one might say he has a fetish for UFO orbs. He loves them. He describes ongoing interactions with these glowing orbs, which he believes are connected to spiritual entities. And he asserts that these orbs have appeared around his property and have been witnessed by others. These glowing orbs are in fact translucent beings from other worlds. And there's your very cursory background on this fellow, Chris Bledsoe. It kind of helps make sense of the headline. It makes it a little easier to understand, at least from his perspective. So he's on his podcast. He and his son run a podcast in which they talk about UFOs and things. And he was sharing his experiences and he said he was contacted by NASA. He got involved with NASA, apparently some people there. We don't know exactly who, but he had interactions with them. And during those discussions, they revealed to him that astronauts, this is according to him, had experienced extraterrestrial life during their missions. This was back in the days of the space shuttle. And they had been harassed by them. In other words, kind of appearing outside the ship while in orbit and making faces at them and things. That's basically what he said. Bledsoe says he was drafted into the Independent Government Organization, whatever that is, to help them understand what the aliens wanted with them. So basically, help us understand exactly what it is we were seeing and experiencing. Let's try to make some sense of this. He told them, yeah, these orbs are supernatural beings, that now he has learned to communicate with them. He has a very special connection with these entities, these orbs. Here's some quotes. He says, this is him, everybody's wondering how'd you get into NASA? Were you there? Why were you studying with NASA? When I asked them, why you need me? I said to them, you've got rockets, you've got space shuttles, you've got satellites, you've got a space station, all the money in technology and telescopes in the world. They told him, this is according to him, we know that they, these orbs, these spirits, like you and they communicate with you. They don't have anything to do with us at all, the people at NASA, and we'd like to know why and what they want. Why are they harassing our astronauts? So he said, I'm consulting with them about what they're now calling a plasmoid, which is an angelic being that come out of these orbs.
B: Plasmoid.
E: Plasmoids, right.
B: I kind of like that word.
E: So, you know, okay. These are wild, pretty wild claims, obviously. He said that these created beings, they're made of energy, these beings, but they get around in a ball of light, essentially, is how they, I guess, travel around the universe or wherever it is they go. And the glowing beings will emerge from these balls. Sometimes they're human size, six or seven feet. 125 feet is apparently the largest one that has been seen, or reported to have been seen. And they can mimic anything, such as flying saucers. Right? And they can divide. One orb can become two. One orb can become a hundred orbs all of a sudden. Oh my gosh. All right. That's what he claims. So, somewhere along his fantastical journey into a life of being entirely unmoored from reality, he apparently also claims that he's discovered how to summon these orbs, summon these UFOs. And he's had gatherings where he's invited people, lots of people, he said, to come and witness his ability to do so. However, here's the thing. If you are skeptical, if you are a doubter, you're not going to see it. Right? Where have we heard that before?
B: Here and there.
E: The shy ghost, you know, the shy UFO whenever the skeptic is around. Yep. Chris Bledsoe says you can't see the UFOs he summons if you are skeptical. They wait until you're not looking, and then they reveal themselves to only the faithful people who happen to be standing right next to you. So, I'll bring Mick West into this discussion because he comes up, which is sort of a backdoor way in which I found this article because Mick West has been talking about him lately and I'll explain why in a second. And Mick asks a great question. So, okay, even if, let's say that the skeptical people there don't see them and that is the case, whatever, then how come everybody who has their cameras and stuff that are constantly recording, nothing shows up on camera ever? Yeah. And Chris Bledsoe has an answer to that. He says they know your free will and they don't want to go against your free will. Whatever.
C: What does that even mean?
E: I don't even know what that means, but that is a direct quote.
E: That's what we call Cara Vague Lay Mass Special Pleading.
C: Yeah.
E: Exactly. Exactly.
S: V-L-A-S-P for short.
E: This fella, Chris Bledsoe, he got some notoriety this week because he took footage of what his son describes. I'll just write it right there on his feed. He had it all over social media. His son said this, In all my life, this is the best orb footage I've ever seen. This needs to be spread far and wide for all to see the beauty of these beings. This was footage shot by Chris Bledsoe the other night on February 1st, so just a couple of nights ago, in which he's got his camera pointed to the sky and there it is, an orb kind of moving across the sky, moving across. In fact, so perfectly that it lines up and the moon, which is in a crescent phase, the orb actually crosses across the moon, the face of the moon. It's a very neat-looking visual. You can obviously go online and find it. Hard to describe on an audio podcast, but that's what you see. What Mick West basically did, he and his sleuths that he works with over the internet, basically say, where did he take the footage? Because they figured out where he was when the footage was recorded. Then what you do is you can use computer software to position yourself on the earth, look up at the sky, and you can see what the night sky was from your vantage point on anywhere in the earth on a given day, given time. What do you think the orb that was crossing across the sky really was instead of...
C: The ISS?
E: The ISS. That's exactly what it was. It's perfect because Mick gives you the exact simulation. He matches the video footage to the computer modeling and the two are exact. They shadow each other perfectly. It's an absolute 100% match that what he was seeing was the ISS. But there you go. That's the best orb footage that they've ever seen and that they've recorded. It turned out to be nothing more than the ISS.
S: I believe that. I believe that that was the best orb footage they've ever had.
E: I agree. I agree, too.
S: Now, does NASA respond to them being name-checked?
E: Nope. Couldn't find anything from NASA having any comment to make with Chris Bledsoe directly.
S: The only question for me is, is this guy completely lying out his ass, or is he... Does he have an actual questionable relationship with reality? Is this guy this far down the self-deluded rabbit hole? I mean, that's like diagnosable. Either this guy is diagnosable, or he's a lying con artist.
E: Right. Fool or fraud, as Randy used to say. They're your choices, or some combination of the two.
S: Right.
E: How do you know? But, made headlines this week, and there you have it.
S: Thank you, Evan.
E: Thanks.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:23:18)
S: Alright Jay, it's Who's That Noisy time.
J: Alright guys, last week I played Who's That Noisy. [plays Noisy] What is that guys?
E: I can name that tune in 12 notes.
J: Alright, so I had arguably, I think this might be the one that had the most guesses.
B: Really?
J: Yeah, it was really incredible. Like I had I counted, it was about 320 I think is when I ran out of time. But could have been more like 350. That's a lot of responses to Who's That Noisy. So a listener named Ben said this week sounds like a singing Tesla coil, aka Zusophone. And that is a really good guess. If you listen to people play music using a Tesla coil, there is a lot of similarity between that sound and what you just heard. Not correct, but that's a good guess. Visto Tutti said sounds like a steam train with tuned steam pipes like an organ. A very musical little engine, probably a good friend of Thomas. I've never heard that or I can't remember if I have. So I can't tell you whether it's close or not, but that is I think that's a perfectly cromulent guess. And Michael Blaney wrote in and said, Hi Jay, it sounds like a really early recording of some kind so I'm guessing it's a recording of a tuba on an early phonograph. And that guys was the number of wrong guesses I got. And I'm not exaggerating. I'm not exaggerating.
E: That was the whole enchilada right there.
J: So what is that? So many people know it so this isn't going to be a surprise to a lot of people. But the first person to write incorrectly was Bill Whites. Bill, unbelievable job being that you blew away that number of people. You got it right. You were first. I'm impressed and I give you two SGU points. And then there were two other people of note. Jeremy C got it pretty soon after and he gave a good explanation so I'm going to read his explanation. And then there was one other person a listener named Michael said that his stepson who's 15, he guessed it correctly and I'm going to tell you what it is. Okay, so what is this thing? This is something that comes out of Lancaster, California and it is famously out of tune. Any guesses guys? It was built by Honda and was meant to play a song called William Tell Overture.
S: A car horn?
J: No, it's actually those rumble strips where they carve grooves in the highway.
C: That's cool.
J: You drive over it with your tire and then what happened with this particular one was the construction workers actually made a mistake in the spacing of the grooves which changes the pitch.
E: They're fired.
J: And next thing you know you have something that doesn't really sound like anything. So let me play for you the actual song that they're playing because I think for those of you who don't know what that is, you'll hear this and then you'll realize just how wrong they got it. [plays song] And you know what comes next. So listen again. Not even close guys. [plays Noisy] I mean not even close.
E: Okay. At least it's something.
J: And then why wouldn't they fix it? I don't know. Maybe it costs a ton of money.
E: Yeah, you know.
J: I thought that was interesting. So these things exist in many places around the globe. Some probably done much better than that. I think when I was in Sweden I did one of these but it was a long time ago. Anyway, thank you for watching. Anyway, thank you for all of you who wrote in. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun. I will never pick something that obvious again just because it took so long. Because I read all the emails, you know. I don't want to not read people's emails. Bottom line is when you drive and you hear music sometimes it's not a hallucination. I have a new noisy for you guys and I'm going to play it for you and I want Bob to pay attention.
B: Okay.
J: [plays Noisy] If you think you know what this week's noisy is or if you heard something cool, please email me at WTN@theskepticsguide.org. Steve.
S: Yeah, jay.
B: Somebody choking a duck.
J: I know, right Bob, you bastard. Few things to announce real quick. You may have heard that Steve is the end of June. Steve's retiring from his medical profession and Steve will be coming to work for the full-time work at the SGU which means that we have plans to do some new shows. There's going to be multiple new things that we're going to be doing. We're working on all of the pre-production stuff right now and when we finalize the details we will announce what those projects are going to be. But if you want to help, if you think that things are not right in this world, my God, if you feel like you appreciate the work that we do, if you like Cara, you know, Cara's very likable. I like her.
B: She's all right.
J: But seriously, please consider supporting the work that we do. It'll definitely help with Steve's transition. Anything, any dollar amount would be welcomed and very much appreciated. We have a lot of work to do, guys. I feel like the next 10 to 20 years are going to be probably more important than the first 20. That said, you can join our mailing list. You can go to theskepticsguide.org and we have a link there to join our weekly mailing list. You could also give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using. I'm pretty sure that people are still checking ratings and making decisions on what they want to listen to. It'll help new people find the podcast. And we have a conference coming up in May, May 15, 16 and 17. It's called NOTACON2025 and we have a Beatles theme, guys. I think you all know this. It's very cool, very excited. We finalized the schedule and it is now on the website if you're curious. We will be adding more detailed descriptions on what the different bits are that we're doing. But right now I think you'll get a kick out of what we have up there. We have really fun stuff that we're doing this year that we didn't do the last time. We're trying to keep it fresh and not only that, but all of us are very excited because we had such a good time last time and I'm really happy that we're doing it again. If you're interested, you can go to notaconcon.com That's concon.com notaconcon.com Thank you very much, Ian. Or you can go to theskepticsguide.org. We also have links on there. To find out more information check out our schedule and we'd love to have you there with us.
S: Thank you, Jay. Alright guys, let's go on with Science or Fiction.
Science or Fiction (1:31:13)
Theme: None
Item #1: Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia.[6]
Item #2: Archaeologists have identified 4,000 year old writing that likely represents proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages.[7]
Item #3: Researchers calculate that the probability of reentering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually.[8]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Archaeologists have identified 4,000 year old writing that likely represents proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. |
| Science | Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. |
| Science | Researchers calculate that the probability of reentering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | win |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Jay | Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. |
Evan | Scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. |
Bob | Archaeologists have identified 4,000 year old writing that likely represents proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. |
Cara | Archaeologists have identified 4,000 year old writing that likely represents proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. |
Voice-over: It's time for Science or Fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake. I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. Just three regular news items this week. You guys ready? Alright, here we go. Item number one, scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. Item number two, archaeologists have identified a 4,000-year-old writing that likely represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. And item number three, researchers calculate that the probability of reentering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually.
J: Oh boy, that's not good.
S: Jay just volunteered to go first.
J: Alright, scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia. Inguinal.
S: Inguinal.
J: What is that, Steve?
S: A hernia.
E: That's when an iguana gets a hernia.
J: But why do they call it inguinal?
S: Because that's where it's herniating. The word hernia just means that tissue is going from one body cavity to another body cavity. That's it. This is an inguinal hernia, meaning that usually that abdominal tissue is getting pushed through the inguinal ligament into your testicles.
J: Oh.
B: What other kinds of hernia are there?
S: There's every kind of hernia. Any time.
E: None worse than that.
B: Neuronal hernia.
S: Yeah, there are neurological hernias. You can have tonsillar hernia where the very bottom of your brain herniates down through the skull. That's usually deadly. That's usually fatal. You can have an uncle hernia where you get basically that's more like the middle of the brain herniating medially. Those are the two big ones, uncle and tonsillar. Tonsillar is the deadly one. They're all bad. I mean, if you're herniating your brain, that's bad.
J: You're toast. Alright, so Steve, the claim here is that there's a medicine that can prevent and reverse a testicular hernia, which I find to be... I can't imagine how a medicine would reverse that tissue from entering your testicles. Can I say that on this podcast?
S: Testicles, sure.
J: Okay, I mean, wow, that's a huge claim. You know, I'm not a medical doctor. I am not one by trade. I just can't... I can't understand how medicine could help something like that, but I'm going to go on. So, archaeologists have identified 4,000-year-old writing that likely represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian. That's a cool name, Anatolian. This is the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. Okay. So, this means... Basically, what you're saying here is they found writings that predate this language, so it was like the early version of Anatolian. That's really cool. So, I think if anything's wrong with this, it's going to be the number 4,000. For some reason, I'm thinking, how long did we have... Okay. It's complicated, because there's lots of different things I think I'd need to know in order to smartly answer that. I'm going to move on to the next one. Researchers calculate that the probability of reentering space junk, entering busy airspace is about 26% annually. So, Steve, when you say reentering, what exactly are you talking about there?
S: Come on. That's pretty self-explanatory.
J: Reentering, meaning the space junk is coming down into the atmosphere?
S: Yeah.
J: Entering busy airspace.
S: Yeah. It's coming from orbit to where our planes are flying.
J: Oh. I can't be the only person here that didn't fully understand that. Okay. 26% annually. Wow. That's a lot. Right out of the gate, my gut's saying, no way. That's too dangerous. I mean, hold on a second. You could say that that airspace is, what, 30,000 to 45,000 feet. The globe is huge. It is a huge place. Air travel is happening largely in these particular areas. It's not going like, you know, basically, if you look at a globe, a lot of it is ocean that people are not flying airplanes through largely. I don't know, man. That seems like a lot, though. That's kind of scary. So, I'm going to say this. I'm going to say that I have no reason to not believe that the Anatolian, there was a proto language there. I think that's cool, and I find that one easy to understand, and that it seems very likely. This airspace one is bothering me because it's scary, but I don't know about medicine preventing and reversing a hernia. How could it possibly do that? They have to do surgery to fix things like that. I'm going to say that one is the fiction.
S: Okay, Evan.
E: I thought hernias could only be fixed with surgeries. I didn't realize medicine can prevent and reverse. Both? Prevent and reverse. Medicine. No surgery. That's what we're saying here, Steve, right? No surgery. I mean, define medicine. We're talking non-surgical medicine. A drug. Okay. That does seem fantastic, and I'm also leaning towards that one being the fiction. I have no idea about the writing, the 4,000-year-old writing. No clue on that one. Wouldn't even know really where to begin with that. I know nothing of it, and then the other one, though. Oh, boy. The space junk entering busy airspace at 26% annually. That seems high at the same time. There's a lot of space junk, and most of it's small, I think. So, the fact that the junk is entering the airspace, I mean, it could be small enough, I suppose, to not have an impact directly or be a direct threat. I'll just go with Jay. I think the one with the hernia is too fantastical.
S: Okay, Bob.
B: Yeah, the hernia one's too fantastical, but I think there's something funky there, and Steve's just trying to get us with that.
E: Exactly.
B: That's kind of too obvious, unless, of course, that's what he wants me to think. I'm going to say that's too obvious. The space junk entering 26% sounds like a lot, but I mean, entering busy airspace, low enough altitude that it's not burned up before it gets to that altitude. Also, I suspect that if we knew what the probability of a plane hitting one, it would be pretty dramatically low. What's kind of bugging me is this proto-Indo-Anatolian. 2000 BC It just doesn't seem far enough in the past to have the mother tongue for Indo-European languages. I think it would be farther in the past. Maybe it's that one, so I'll just say that's fiction.
S: Okay, and Cara?
C: It's funny, because I think I misread I was going to go with the guys before Bob, because I think I completely misread the archaeologist one and read that as 4000 BCE. But now they're saying it's 4000 years old. It's 2000 BCE. I'm like, I might be going with Bob on this. The medicine one is hard for me, but if I know anything about a hernia, and I actually don't know much about a hernia, but I think about it the same way I think about aneurysm. I think the reason that things push into places where they're not supposed to be or they balloon out or they shift is because there's a weak spot. What if there was a medication that actually strengthened that potential weakness? Then that would prevent it, or maybe even reverse it.
J: How about fix it?
C: If it made that weak spot strong, then it's just a physics problem, right? Push it back in. I don't know. That's the only way I could think of a medicine working on this, because otherwise you're right. It would have to be surgical. That's why I was thinking, prevent and reverse? I don't know. It has to do something to do with the weakness. It's annoying. The space junk one, it's funny because I didn't even think about I was thinking busy airspace in terms of where on the planet there's busy airspace, but all of the planet is probably relatively busy airspace. It's more like how far away from the surface of the earth does it make it to? Maybe just to make things interesting, I think I'm going to go with Bob. I thought that we had written language from like 3,000 or 4,000 BCE. This feels like it's not old enough, so I think I'm going to go with Bob.
B: GWB!
S: You all agree on the third one, so we'll start there. Researchers calculate that the probability of reentering space junk entering busy airspace is about 26% annually. You all think this one is science, and this one is science. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff coming down, basically.
E: What goes up?
C: There's a lot of stuff up there.
S: There's a lot of stuff up there. Busy areas of airspace, such as that found in the northeastern United States, northern Europe, around major cities, etc., 26% per year that space junk will be landing through that area. That doesn't mean that that's going to have the probability of it hitting an airplane. That is about 1 in 4,500 per year. But still, it could be disruptive. Even if it doesn't directly hit a plane, it could still be incredibly disruptive. This is going to be an increasing problem. There are 2,300 rocket bodies. These are not satellites. These are just rocket bodies already in orbit and will eventually reenter in an uncontrolled manner. That's a lot of space junk. These are big. These are not little things. These are big enough that they would cause damage. When you think about it, unless it's designed to self-deorbit soon after putting up a satellite, if a rocket is putting a satellite into orbit, that rocket is also in orbit. Unless it then releases a satellite and then it deorbits. There are regulations to force companies that are launching rockets into orbit to do that. You have to get your rockets out of orbit. You can't leave them up there. You have to have a controlled reentry. Ditch it in... I forget what it's called. There's a part of the Pacific Ocean that's the farthest away from anything. Put it there. Have it ditched in the ocean where it's not near anything. Okay. Let's go backwards. Go to number 2. Archaeologists have identified 4,000-year-old writing that represents Proto-Indo-Anatolian, the language that gave rise to all Indo-European languages. Bob and Cara, you think this one is a fiction. Jay and Evan, you think this one is science. Cara thinks that we should have older writing. We do. I didn't say this was the oldest writing. The oldest writing is 3,200 BCE or 5,200 years ago. That was Sumerian. That was cuneiform writing. Was that Proto-Indo-European, though? Or Proto-Indo-Anatolian? Or was it something else? That's the question.
E: Yes. Tune in next week when we do the answer.
S: This one is the fiction.
B: Yeah baby!
C: Yeah, Bob!
S: They did not identify Proto-Indo-Anatolian writing. What they did do is they identified the genetic population that was likely the population that spoke Proto-Indo-Anatolian.
E: That's what I was thinking. Not at all.
S: Not the actual writing itself. That was the switch that I made. The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans, they found that a group, a genetic population they're calling the Caucasus Lower Volga, the CLV, and that they demonstrated that this group was related to all groups that spoke Indo-European languages. They traced them back. And they lived somewhere between 4,400 BCE and 4,000 BCE. I also changed the year. I wanted to make sure it wasn't older than the oldest writing that we have. Okay.
E: Why would you lie to me and Jay?
S: Yeah, I know. I'm a bad person. This means that scientists have demonstrated the effectiveness of a medicine that prevents and reverses inguinal hernia is science. And, yeah, I thought that is damn strange.
C: It is.
S: You would think that you would require surgery because this is an anatomical problem. Anatomical problems usually have anatomical fixes. Two things. First of all, this was a study in mice. But they say that it should work in people. But, of course, it needs to be studied in people. So it should work. So what's happening is... Cara pretty much hit it on the nose. We know that inguinal hernia has happened because of a weakness in the inguinal ligament. That weakness is there because when the testicles descend, they have to go through it, leaving a pathway. That's why it doesn't happen in women. It does, but it's like... For every one that happens in women, there are 45 that happen in men. So men are way more likely to get it. It's because we have testicles. That's why. It also is related to genetics. What happens is that the muscles that hold that whole thing together, they start to... They get weakened and form scar tissue because of an estrogen receptor, alpha, ESR1. So they used an estrogen-blocking drug, one that's already approved, for other purposes. The mice who have inguinal hernia, if it blocks the estrogen receptor, then that muscle tissue, the connective tissue, will repair itself. Not only will it prevent a hernia, it may even reverse it. And it did. It actually reversed the hernia.
B: Damn.
S: If the connective tissue repairs itself, there you go.
C: That's amazing.
S: So, about 50% of men will get an inguinal hernia by age 75.
B: 50?
E: Wait, what?
S: I'm really looking forward to this getting approval in people for this treatment before I hit the age where I'm likely to have it. That kind of surgery, whenever you're doing surgery in order to repair connective tissue so that it works, it keeps things where it's supposed to be, it's always dodgy. It's always tricky.
B: Don't tell me that when I'm going into the knife. It's going to be fine, Bob.
S: And about 10% of people who have the surgery, the hernia recurs.
J: Great.
B: To hell, man.
E: More medicine.
C: Medicine.
S: medicine. So hopefully this will all work out in people. But now if you're a mouse with a hernia, you're good.
E: Yeah, right? Lucky mice.
B: Unless you're on some of those islands, then you're already dead. Your kid's dead.
S: All right, Evan, give us a quote.
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:47:22)
"The most important thing that illusions can teach us is that it is possible, at least some of the time, to find in being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found being right.”
– ― Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error, (description of author)
E: "The most important thing that illusions can teach us is that it's possible, at least some of the time, to find being wrong a deeper satisfaction than we would have found being right." That was written by Katherine Schultz, who's the author of the book Being Wrong, Adventures in the Margin of Error.
S: Yeah, celebrating being wrong is a good thing.
E: Yep. Learning from being wrong. How often do we learn from being wrong? Quite a bit.
S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week.
C: Thanks, Steve.
B: Sure, man.
E: Thank you.
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.
|
|
|
- ↑ www.space.com: Astronomers discover 196-foot asteroid with 1-in-83 chance of hitting Earth in 2032
- ↑ www.nature.com: Are the Internet and AI affecting our memory? What the science says
- ↑ www.livescience.com: Rat numbers are skyrocketing across US cities — and it's only going to get worse
- ↑ theness.com: Do Apes Have a Theory of Mind - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ www.msn.com: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/other/nasa-astronauts-are-harassed-by-125ft-aliens-with-wings-who-peek-into-space-shuttles
- ↑ [https://www.jci.org/articles/view/179137 www.jci.org: JCI - Estrogen receptor alpha ablation reverses muscle fibrosis and inguinal hernias]
- ↑ www.nature.com: The genetic origin of the Indo-Europeans
- ↑ www.nature.com: Airspace closures due to reentering space objects