SGU Episode 1034
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| SGU Episode 1034 |
|---|
| May 3rd 2025 |
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"An intricate fusion of technology and nature, where vision meets imagination." |
| Skeptical Rogues |
| S: Steven Novella |
B: Bob Novella |
C: Cara Santa Maria |
J: Jay Novella |
E: Evan Bernstein |
| Quote of the Week |
"It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error or ignorance." |
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6 |
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| Download Podcast |
| Show Notes |
| SGU Forum |
Intro[edit]
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, April 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Steven Novella. Joining me this week are Bob Novella. Hey everybody, Cara Santa Maria. Howdy. J Novella. Hey, guys. And Evan Bernstein.
E: Good evening everyone.
J: Hey Steve, you know that May, particularly May 4th, is Star Wars Day, right?
S: Yeah, may the fourth be with.
J: You there's a few things happening all at once. So this this show comes out on May 3rd, which is one day before Star Wars day. It also is our 20 year anniversary and the Volanaut Air bike looks like the speeder from Return of the freaking Jedi. It's. Real. It's real. Oh my God.
E: Way to lump all those.
C: This is like a. It's like a hovercraft moped.
E: Oh my God, this thing, it's.
S: Not really a moped, I mean it's a hover bike.
C: It's a bike though.
S: Yeah, it looks like it's a speeder. It does look like a speeder.
E: It looks like the speeder from episode 6, The Return of the Jet.
S: Which was an excellent marketing decision on their part.
E: I no doubt because they they did this in the in the forest among the trees and things. How could you not think of that when you're watching this video?
C: I do kind of feel like I've been on one of those hover bikes this whole week that I've been in Vietnam because we have been riding around on a scooter in the most insane traffic you can imagine. It would be nice to be able to go over the head of the scooter in front of us periodically, I think. Although what I don't like about these hovercraft is that they're basically like leaf blower like vertical leaf blowers.
S: So what? Yeah, you can see they go around. Yeah. So this is Bola. Not they did. They came out with their promotional video. It it looks damn impressive. But yes, you could see the the blast of air below the bike as it's going over the ground. It would not be pleasant, I imagine, like in an urban. No. Environment.
J: Wow. We haven't developed anti gravity yet. Could you give this company a break?
S: This thing is freaking awesome.
C: No. But here's the thing, like, how feasible is this technology really if you have to blast everything directly underneath it, if the whole point is that you, not you, want to be able to go over top of things?
E: But what other technology exists that mitigates that I?
C: No, no, no. But that's not the right question. Do we need this?
E: It it.
C: Looks too obviously.
S: I don't think this is for commuting to work. This is a recreational vehicle that's.
C: So long as it remains like an ATV kind of off roadie like here, go on dirt paths and have fun. But this doesn't seem like it's gonna be great for the environment, and it definitely is not gonna be good for any commuters underneath it.
E: Well, it's electric. It's not like it's pouring. It's not gas.
C: No, but it's blasting foliage. It's going over.
S: Well, the most of the video I'm looking at, it's in like the desert. It's like over.
C: Exactly.
E: Yeah.
C: But you see the video where there's a little bit of like tree something and there's just like leaf bits flying every flying, yes. If you took a leaf blower to it.
S: Here they're there. He's going over like gravelly terrain and from 1 camera angle you see rocks flying all over.
US#06: Yeah. Shipped windshields left.
J: I I think you guys are missing the the whole point of this thing.
US#06: I am missing the point, Jay. This is why this thing's so fun to have on us.
J: At 200 kilometers an hour, 124 miles an hour, this thing can go.
E: Oh my gosh. You got you better hold on. What? Range.
J: I'm I'm looking for it. I'm not seeing it. It's seven times. Electric It's seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle.
E: How could it hold the fuel, Bob? It wouldn't. I don't know that it could get itself propel itself if it had to hold the weight.
C: Yeah, it has to be lighter than a typical motorcycle or it wouldn't get off the ground.
S: I bet you it's like 5-10 minutes.
E: Yeah, 20 minutes, maybe something like that. But again, this is this is version, you know, 1.0, you know, and like all these other vehicles that are coming down this path, they, they, they intend to, you know, be able to increase their range.
S: No time soon is this going to be used for actually, you know, traveling from point. 8 if at all. This is, yeah, I said, if at all. This is a recreational vehicle. The only other just sort of brainstorm, the only other application I could imagine for it would be military. You know if you need to.
B: Search and rescue. Search and search and rescue. Yeah. Search and rescue, definitely.
C: Great for that. Or or needing to traverse, you know, something that's not traversable, like you're on some sort of vehicle and then you need to fly over something so that you can continue whatever you're doing.
J: It says it's Jet Propulsion, so it might not be electric.
E: Oh really? Jet Propulsion.
S: Hope that. What does that mean though?
J: Well, you know, we don't know. There's just not enough information.
E: There, Yeah.
C: Does that mean jet fuel or does that just?
E: It says 7 sometimes lighter than a typical motorcycle thanks to advanced use of carbon fiber materials, 3D printing and minimalistic approach that that. So not because sounds. Electric. So more.
J: Importantly, will they sell a a kit to make it look like the speeder from the Return of the Jedi?
E: That'll be the first kit that comes out, yes. Because that. Gosh.
J: That is something that I want. There's not many things out there that I want at this point in my life.
S: Looks super fun. Yeah, say that.
E: Yeah. Yeah.
J: I'd rent one I'd I would definitely rent that and check it out.
S: There might be a place like where you go and you pay 20 bucks to get. A Right, you go to Las Vegas, right?
E: They have a spot out in the desert. A bunch of people jump on these things for whatever, 50 bucks, 100 bucks and you take it up.
C: Or don't they already have like a water version of this though that's been around for ages that like nobody uses and is not for sailing, Yeah. I wonder how high it can go too.
E: I would imagine like a water.
B: Hose.
C: As the resident wet blanket of the group. No, that's OK.
S: We need you to keep us, keep us honest.
C: Keep your grounded. Yeah, I agree. This is this.
S: Is this is a product looking for a function, right? There's like not. Totally, this is a. It's just we can do it. It's cool.
C: It's a solution to a problem we don't have. Yeah, yeah.
S: But look at the video.
C: Exactly.
S: As I said, I. Mean that is an impressive. Maybe some niche things like search and rescue or storming a cast.
J: It's about freaking time, too. I mean, come on. Yeah, we've been watching all these products come and go and they're like, this is going to do this and that and everything. This thing looks like it's ready to go.
C: We'll see.
S: Looks like it's working.
B: Wonder if you could fit a ballistic parachute in it?
C: I will say one thing that's so strange to me being here. So I'm in Vietnam right now. I'm in a really remote kind of area outside of Langko, which is somewhat near about about an hour from Denang. I know that's terrible pronunciation, but I don't speak Vietnamese, which is near Hawaiian. And, and Hui Jay, when you first introduced this, you said three things, right? You talked about our anniversary, you talked about this, this hover bike, and then you mentioned the date. So, and, and Steve, when you introduced the show at April 30th, it was like really jarring for me because again, I am in the future, which really weirds me. Yeah. For some reason you're in May 1st. Yes, it's May 1st where I am. And I I realized when I was coordinating getting home that I arrive home before I leave.
B: Yeah. That's. Cool. That's. Craig and Cool. That's a great quirk you're. Just getting exact time that you lost.
C: I'm just getting back to yeah, because I got here two days after I left. That's true. But yeah, Jay, I definitely had one of those. Like, what time is it in the North Pole moments? Oh. My God, I still think about that from time to time.
S: Well, let's we have a good interview coming up later in the show, but let's get started with our news items.
News Items[edit]
Internet Fakes Precede Violence (07:58)[edit]
- Memes and conflict: Study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence [1]
S: Carrie, you're going to start us off with Internet fakes and their effects on public violence.
C: Yeah, so this is a really interesting article that I stumbled across. It was recently published in Information Communication and Society. It's that's an Open Access journal or maybe it's not, but the at least the article itself is Open Access published by a group out of Notre Dame and a couple of other kind of allied universities called visual narratives and political instability, a case study of visual media prior to the Russia Ukraine conflict. So these researchers who wrote about it in the conversation, one of them is a professor of engineering at Notre Dame and the other is a professor, professor of peace studies and global politics. They were interested in kind of investigating a new way to maybe not predict, but to understand violence and mass conflict by looking at propaganda online and apparently using AI, which many researchers have been using because it allows you to comb through just like mass quantities of of big data. Oftentimes when we use AI, we're relying only on written text because it's much easier for these models to be able to comb through all this written test text and categorize it or understand it. But as we know, when things go viral, what's usually going viral?
E: Videos of cats.
C: Videos of cats, that's one of them, yeah. But like visual imagery, right? We're usually seeing like memes with with photographs or drawings and there might be some text included, but there's not even always text necessary to convey a pretty complex kind of political message. And So what they're interested in understanding is how memes or how these different online propaganda approaches promote this is how they list it, promote beliefs and goals, gain support, dehumanize opponents, justify violence and create doubt or dismiss inconvenient facts. And so again, because these these different technologies are more and more sophisticated, like these deep fakes are getting better and better. AI is still pretty good at understanding this image is manipulated versus this image is, is genuine. But what it struggles with is understanding context. So an example that they use is, you know, they already know how to program to track posts online that say something like quote, and this is the example they use. Ukrainians are Nazis. But what's harder is to find images of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi Insignia on them. Does that make sense? Like it's just tougher for them to be able to comb through that. So combined with AI, they used basically a team of computer scientists and social scientists and they looked at a massive, massive kind of trove of data. So what they did for this, it's sort of like a proof of concept study. It's a, it's a case study is they looked at accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers. Have you guys heard that term mill Blogger before?
E: No. Yes, I have.
C: Yeah, like a like we mentioned.
E: Back in 20. Like a blogging sweatshop kind of thing.
C: Yeah, basically like a propaganda sort of machine. So these mil bloggers, they specifically focused on Telegram, which is a messaging app. Well, it's much more than that. They combed through the accounts of 989 Russian mil bloggers. So they came out with about 6,000,000 posts, including about 3 million images. And then they analyzed them in a detailed way by categorizing them, time stamping them, and then using a suite of AI tools that could detect image manipulation so they were able to know if the image was changed. And then they also used actual people, physical people to try and understand the context. And they put that information together. They use a couple of examples in the conversation write up like for example, there's an anti Putin journalist, actually an ex Russian soldier named Arkady Bebchenko. And they show so so apparently Ukrainian security services faked his death to expose an assassination plot against him. And so because his death was faked and that was discovered this there's a meme of him wearing like AT shirt that says gamers don't die. They respond right. And the idea here is to kind of like AB quote UN quote funny be so division and kind of increase that that distrust that was already starting to form. And they show other examples as well, doctored images of political officials from Ukraine spending time in in kind of more like submissive positions with Western leaders. And also we mentioned kind of the nazification, which is very kind of low hanging fruit, classic online meme. And, and here's the big take away. So they found this is really, really interesting that leading up to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I think in the two weeks, yeah, only two weeks leading up to it, there was a 9000% increase in the number of posts that were just produced by these, you know, nearly 1000 Russian mill bloggers and a 5000% increase in manipulated images from these Russian mill bloggers. They could only figure that out, Yeah, by actually screening to see what was manipulated. So.
E: Do things like take footage of prior incidents that didn't even have anything to do with that conflict and re tag them and. And totally. Call it current that that was a very popular method that they would employ quite a bit.
C: And we see that now. We see that, you know, in our kind of American political discourse right now all the time. Yeah, you'll see like some sort of March or some sort of rally. And it turns out that wasn't even in the same country, or it was, you know, from three years previous for a different reason. So basically what they were trying to proof of concept in this in this study was how can we analyze this visual content? How can we understand it contextually? Because that's the really kind of sophisticated portion that they show in this study. AI just simply can't do yet. It can't look at an image and understand the underlying propaganda message and understand how it might sow division, how it might dehumanize, how it might increase distrust. But what they also showed, which is really interesting, and they they did not, it's not that they didn't explain why. It's at the point of the study was not to try and understand why, but that this massive spike two weeks prior to the invasion was meaningful. I mean, it was like deeply statistically significant. And so, you know, as the title implies, memes and conflict study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence. You know, whether it's a chicken and egg situation, whether these mill bloggers and knew knew what was coming and they were trying to increase, I guess in some ways intentionally increase support from the citizenship or whether there was a lockstep kind of unrest that was occurring amongst the people that helped. I guess codify maybe that's not quite the right word, but justify the military action. You know, we don't we don't know the cause and effect here. But what we do know is that prior to a breaking point, in this situation at least where violence erupted in a meaningful way, there was a lot of online chatter and a lot of sowing of distrust and a lot of just, you know, negative memes that were being flown all around the Internet. And so this may be a way, as the authors argue, to predict conflict, to predict unrest, and to understand better where those thresholds and those breaking points are in, in a real world way, like like a measurable kind of geopolitical conflict way. We may be able to take that temperature online just in terms of the quantity of this type of chatter. It's disheartening, it's scary, it's but it's also fascinating and I think could be incredibly useful for promoting peace.
S: It reminds me a little bit of that show Person of Interest, which features.
C: I never saw.
S: An AI just surveying the Internet and seeing patterns. The kind of contrived bit was that for reasons of confidentiality, whatever, you know, you can't, you know, violate people's privacy. So it was skirting the laws on privacy by not telling the police, oh, this person is going to murder that person, so you better do something about it. They it would just spit out a Social Security number and say this is a person of interest. And then the police had to figure out who was going to kill who and why and when, you know, and then and then keep it from happening. But it was just the basic idea of, you have it, artificial intelligence, you know, monitoring all Internet traffic and picking up on these patterns and predicting what's going to happen, which I think is highly plausible.
C: Oh, it's I, it's already. It's already it's. Already happening. I mean, yeah, these researchers could do it with probably minimal clearance. So you can imagine that these NSA programs, I mean, we, we've been talking about this for decades. Yeah. These NSA programs that are collecting large data from citizens and you know, they would claim, oh, we only look at the metadata and whether that's true or not.
E: It'd be Amazon that I want to buy. I mean, how does it know that?
C: Exactly, exactly. And that. And there's also a big.
E: Difference or shopping for and hits me with it right No, I'm even related to these people. Of course they look.
C: But I do we have to be careful because what we're conflating here is like a is like a national security military spying on your own citizens Big Brother thing versus a monetary. But they have capitalist, of course it exists. Yeah. And we have probably, in the terms and conditions given them, permission to do this already. Oh, no doubt they hear everything that you say. What? Did you say Jeff?
J: I mean, you know, it's no mystery. Like our phones are constantly monitoring what we say, I mean.
C: Well, when you say what we say, you mean in multiple ways. You don't mean physically our voices. You mean all the things we're saying with our Internet activity, right?
S: Well, I think he meant with you meant.
J: No, I meant that listening in on you. Our phones are here, you know, we have, we have Alexa devices and Google, Google devices and our phones, their phones are, you know, where we are at all times, you know?
C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So through all these different. Yeah. And you're right, they do physically listen to our voices too, through things like Alexa and Siri. We do have a microphone there. Yeah. Whether it's listening in the background, I think you're right. We've yet to.
S: Well, it's listening in the background enough that it gets activated when you say like, OK, Google, it's yeah, it.
C: Gets searcher searcher.
S: Yeah, what's probably the most disturbing thing is how comfortable we're getting with all of this.
C: Well, and that's that's part of why I have a level and this feels a little weird talking about this in a hotel room in Vietnam prior to hopefully gaining reentry to my country where I am a natural born citizen in in only a few days. But having been in China and Hong Kong, because one of the reasons that I feel a little bit of just discomfort when I travel to China is the normalcy of, and maybe it's just because it's much more out in front. Like the same kind of stuff is happening in the background in a lot of Western countries. But the normalcy and the comfort level of like large monitoring and of having all of your banking transactions on the same app across the whole country in a closed way and being behind this great Firewall and having facial recognition. Yeah, to get into. Your apartment building and swiping the same card for all of the transit. And that's not to say that it's not like that in the US. It maybe we just have more of a Sheen of privacy and more of a whereas there's just sort of an openness to that quote Big Brother vibe. But I definitely when I'm in China, I do feel a little like I'm in a Black Mirror episode. And that's, that's an uncomfortable feeling. For me. Yeah. But again, I don't know how much of that is is a real difference or just a feeling difference between all these nations at this point.
S: Isn't that the point? How can you know?
C: Exactly, Yeah.
S: I think it's a real difference. It's both. I think it's both.
C: You're right. There is a demonstrably, you know, measurable difference. But I do think that we sometimes assume that while we have a lot of freedoms, which are, you know, question, we can question whether or not they're dwindling, but that we have a lot of freedoms in in like the United States, for example, in other Western nations comparatively, comparatively. Exactly. I think we often conflate freedom with lack of oversight. And that's just not, I don't think we can do that anymore.
S: Two quick things, one is just to make a point when I just said OK Google a minute ago, my phone popped up with the assistant and it just.
C: Yeah, I was going to say, how did you undo that after that?
S: And the microphone pops up listening to what I'm saying. And then the other thing is, since you mentioned Black Mirror, the new season is out and it's awesome. Oh.
C: Good, I need to watch when I get.
S: Home so. Good.
B: So good man. I'm still working my way through.
S: But I guess I could watch here on AVPN. First episode is brutal, but it's brutal in that Black Mirror. Like just a very realistic, like uncomfortably realistic way.
B: Anyway, totally believable, yeah.
S: It's the fact that it was believable to what made it so brutal, made it so scary.
C: Yeah, I mean, that's the yeah, that's, that's so many of those episodes. It's like, oh, we are right on the precipice of this. Or I'm I can feel it because like 5 out of the 10 aspects of this episode have already happened.
J: Oh my God. I mean, like, we're literally saying, guys, that our reality here in the United States is kind of similar to Black Mirror now.
E: Yeah, it's a quasi documentary.
J: Oh my God.
C: It's terrifying. I'm reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler right now. Aren't you guys proud of me? I'm reading sci-fi.
B: Proud of you. Wow. Liz got to talk to Liz about that.
C: Yeah, and part of the reason that this, this book is like such a bestseller impression. I mean, granted, she wrote about it in the 90s. It's not like it's, you know, hundreds of years old. But she it takes place today. That's what's the weird thing is you're reading these journal entries like labeled 20/25/2020 6:00 and you're like, this might be where we're going, but.
B: Is there someone who specifically says Make America Great Again?
C: Yeah, I haven't gotten to that part yet, but yeah, I think so. It may not be in the sewer, but there's, yeah, 'cause it's a, it's a what's a dualogy? That's not a thing. It's a two-part books. But, but part of the reason that I think these kinds of books are so jarring and things like Black Mirror are so hard is that Octavia Butler didn't sit down and come up with something fantastic. She was like, you know, a few left turns and this is where we could be.
B: Yeah.
J: Oh yeah, yeah. And we're always. On we took those left hand turns.
C: We did.
B: Yeah, I, I think even she would have been shocked at at where we're at right now.
C: Yeah, she probably didn't expect it to happen so soon.
Lab Grown Teeth (23:51)[edit]
J: Let's move on, Jay, tell us about lab grown teeth.
C: Yeah. Thanks, Jay. Yeah.
J: What we'll we'll.
E: Do they get up and walk?
J: Around click over to something a little bit more positive click over. So guys, what was your worst dental experience? I.
S: Don't know. No, I haven't really had any. They're all about the same. I haven't had.
C: Any I had.
E: One root canal and it was not fun.
J: I had a root canal. Yeah, some. Teeth cleaning is going to be brutal.
C: But don't root canals from what I understand. I've never had a root canal but my dentist I almost had to have one. My dentist told me they feel the same as when you have to get a deep like cavity drilled out. The only difference is your pocketbook. Like they cost three times as much.
B: I had, I had one and it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated. You know, I'd say it was worse than than a typical cleaning. Yeah, you're.
C: Not going to filling right? Like if you have to get the shots and get the drilling and get like a partial or a crown or something.
E: You know what I don't like about saying a little bit more dramatic? I don't like being prone for long periods of time like that. And I have gone through things like I remember when I had my braces and I had to have all those impressions done and things like that. It's felt like hours that I had to remain in that chair and my head tilted a certain way and don't move and do this and I. Hate that. Yeah.
C: Is it the body being for me it's the gap. It's like the holding your mouth open and trying not to like, choke on your own spit, right?
S: Yeah, I hate.
C: That's. It's the breathing through your nose and trying not to gag the whole time that's what bothers me.
J: Well, there are a lot of people, guys, you know, the, the world is filled with people that are having dental nightmares. You got to take care of your teeth and you got to do it every freaking day. It's a it is a lot of work and it's a commitment. I'm trying to train my kids right now to like, really want to do it.
B: Ah, they don't have to. They've got these tooth replacement things coming up, man. It's.
J: But the point.
C: You chompers.
J: The point is, though, there are, you know, we're lucky that we haven't had really bad dental surgery and stuff. There's a lot of things that people have to go through in order to have some semblance of teeth in their mouth.
C: Yeah, my mom has implants and things like that. It's funny. She's in her mid 70s and she like, refuses, she does not want dentures, right. So she's every time she has a tooth problem, she has to go through the implant thing. You guys know about these where you get like the post and you've got the bone travel. It's got a. Terrible. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
J: So the point is that these researchers that I'm about to talk to you about, the vision that they have is one day you'd go to the dentist and you know, they're not going to be giving you fillings or giving you these hardcore implants and stuff like that, that they're going to do something where your body regrows A legitimate biological tooth that occupies that space and it is a tooth. That's it. It's a new tooth. So their long term goal is that, you know, the researchers at Kings College London, they recently developed a new type of hydrogel that is a key factor in supporting the growth of teeth from stem cells in the lab. And the study that they published, it was it was published in ACS Macro Letters and it marks what I mean, I would consider this to be a significant step towards biological tooth replacement using their regenerative tissue engineering. So this is significant. Again, you know, we're not talking about you're going to go out and get this next year at the dentist. Like this is a step, but this was a big one. This was a really important step that they made. Today tooth loss is treated with, you know, the interventions like fillings and crowns and implants. You know, they work, right? You know, some of us have, you know, I, I definitely had to get a root canal as well, you know, and I've been hyper taking care of my teeth my whole life. It just, you know, it can happen to anybody. But these treatments, of course, you know, they work, but they have limitations. You know, fillings, they weaken over time and you, you, you could need to get them replaced. It's not uncommon for people to get their fillings replaced. You know, implants that people get, they can fail. And that is actually more common than I think most, most people who don't get implants don't realize that they do and can fail. And none of them really are restoring the structure or the real function of real teeth, right? You know, you get a root canal and now you have a numb spot in your mouth, right? Like, you have a, you know, those teeth are no longer registering the information that all the other teeth in your mouth give you, right? Your teeth actually give you quite a bit of information about temperature and, and, you know, chewing sensation and everything. The study's co-author, doctor Zhu Chen Zhang, said fillings and implants are stopgap measures, but they don't regenerate, they don't grow, and they don't integrate like natural tissue. And in nature, tooth development, it begins in the embryo through a complex exchange of chemical signals between two types of stem cells. Steve, you've probably heard of these. We have the epithelial and the menzechemo mesenchymal. Yeah, it's a tough word, huh? So these are two different types of stem cells that are set into motion in in an embryo and that eventually turn into teeth. And, and there's a very specific environment that teeth need to grow in. There's actually quite a, quite a complex thing going on for teeth to, to do what they do. So these cells that I mentioned, these two different types of cells, they self organize into a tooth bud and they progress through the, these developmental stages, right? It starts with a bud, then there's a cap, and then eventually, you know, the bell will grow and then they're forming the layers and structure of a complete tooth. And it absolutely doesn't just happen it it needs a specific environment and it has to be coaxed by the body in order for it to work. So they, the researchers, had to replicate this process in the lab. And it requires more than just putting the right cells together. It requires the right environment. And they came up with something that mimics the body's extracellular matrix, which supports the cell viability and enables this slow, coordinated signalling necessary for the tissue growth to take place. And that's where this hydrogel stuff comes into play. The researchers at Kings College London, they created this special gel like material that's made from gelatin that acts as a support structure for growing teeth in the lab. So they used a chemical technique called click chemistry to connect parts of the gel in a precise way using two ingredients, tetrazine and norborine. Have you guys heard of those two chemicals?
S: Yeah.
E: Tetrazine.
J: Right. OK, so there's this, there's these two chemicals, ingredients that they're using to make this happen. So by changing how much gelatin they used and adjusting the balance of the tetrazine and the norboramine, they were able to control how stiff or soft the gel was and how much it could swell and how quickly it released the signals to the cells inside. Right, You get you get a picture here. So it's like a lattice that they have control over where they can, they can regulate its stiffness and you know how well that the, how firm it is, how much support it's giving. And this was like a, a thing where they were like just trying to get it through this particular keyhole. So it works perfectly with how these how, how these two stem cells need to grow in order to, to successfully produce a tooth. Now the physical traits turned out to be critical here, right? Softer gels gave the dental stem cells room to talk to each other and arrange themselves into early tooth like structures, which are called tooth organoids. I've never heard of that before. Tooth organoids.
S: Well, you've heard of organoids because you've talked about it on.
J: The show, of course, I've heard of organoids, but tooth organoids it's it's like a, you know, it's like a a doll that I would play with our kids, the boys toy from the 90s. You know what I mean? Make part of cavity. Remember the Micronauts? You guys remember those?
E: Yeah, yeah.
J: Tooth organoids so gels that were too stiff made it harder for the cells to.
E: That's OK, Karen.
J: All right, so they, they, they tested all different types of gels and different and, and changing the, the stiffness of these gels and they, what they found was if the gel was too stiff, they made it harder for the the cells to develop properly. So the best results came from a gel that was made with 8% gelatin and a .5 to one ratio of the tetrazine and the norblamine within 8 days. This setup that they came up with consistently produced organized cell structures that showed the early building blocks of real teeth. And that is it right there. And that is that is the incredible feat that they did. You know, it's easy for me to talk about this and, you know, basically talking here for a couple of minutes about something that was an incredible amount of time and energy and research that it took to to get to the point where they realized the environment that needed to be there and how to simulate that environment. The researchers confirmed that the tooth organoid formation was happening using a couple of techniques, histological staining and fluorescein imaging. Right. These are just ways for them to be able to kind of see what's going on inside of the of the gel. Only the softer hydrogel group produced organized structures that had both of the two types of stem cells needed. And they also were able to detect that they were interacting properly. And this indicated that the scaffolding that they created successfully replicated the signaling environment of natural tooth formation because stem cells need to communicate with the environment that they're in and other stem cells in order to do the things that they do to build basically any part of our biology. So when you think about it, to grow a tooth, there's a little microcosm universe that has to exist there in order for everything to be just right, in order for the cells to to function the proper way to do what we want them to do. So this was a very difficult thing that they pulled off. Now the hydrogels that had higher stiffness produced either poorly organized tissue or they failed to generate the tooth organoids at all, right? They couldn't, it just didn't work. So the conclusion here is that the physical characteristics of the hydrogel scaffolding that they were able to figure out, it directly impacted the developmental outcomes. And therefore, and the good news is now that they can go on to the next step with moving on to the next phase here, which is actually going to be to fully grow the tooth. So they, the team said that they haven't implanted any lab grown teeth into a living subject yet, but their work demonstrates they basically created a bioengineer tooth, at least in the early stages. It's possible. And this was the hard part. This was the part I think that if this didn't work, nothing was going to work. And they were able to actually make it happen, which is fantastic. So the next round of research will focus on developing methods to transplant these organized into the jaw and guide their full, full match duration into a functional tooth. So I don't know, man, it doesn't sound like it's that that far away. You know, hopefully once they do this, the body will take over and actually finish the job. According to the authors of the study, though, they said this approach could definitely someday offer a biological alternative to regular dental procedures. You go into the dentist, they probably would have to take samples of your biology to to, you know, grow the culture, say like, you know, to get that beginning thing happening. And then they it's like a, it's like a little implant that they put in there that you probably can't even feel because it's tiny.
B: In your jaw and. They pop it in there.
J: Yeah, hell yeah, Bob. They pop it in there and like, you know what they take out? They take out the root canal. They pop this in there. And you know, I don't know how long it would take, but your for your body to grow the tooth. But imagine a tooth just comes up and out of your gum and you've got a new tooth.
B: That Yeah, but Jay, they, it may be functional, but my question is, is it aesthetic? Is it just like some freaky snaggletooth that works but you don't want to smile because it's like what's happening in there? The real question.
J: About this Can you grow vampire teeth?
E: Or shark.
J: Teeth, yes, Or shark teeth. Imagine they just keep folding out like shark teeth. That would be freaking awesome. All right, but. But all kidding aside, I know I'm being enthusiastic about this, but I happen to be like, I'm, I'm a big toothbrusher and teeth, you know, I take care of my teeth. I take care of my teeth. You know what I mean? I really do. I, I, you know, there's nothing better than having a clean mouth and dental, you know, having your dentistry, your, your, your mouth be healthy is very important. Lots of things can go wrong in your health if you don't have healthy teeth. And you know, it's it's been documented, you know, they're saying that heart disease could be affected by the health of your your teeth and the cleanliness and you know, you get cavities and you have like, you know, that going on in your mouth. Not only does it give you bad breath, but it is a health risk. So I just think this is awesome. I really hope that, you know, my kids at least get to get to experience this. If they ever have any major problems, which everyone will, you know, most people have some type of thing go wrong. You know, you can't really get through unless you're like a complete completely religiously like going in there and flossing and taking care of your teeth from childhood.
C: Even then, yeah, even then it doesn't always matter because a lot of this stuff is genetic.
J: Yeah, you're right.
C: Yeah.
S: I had what bacteria you happen to have living in your mouth?
J: I asked my exactly the last time I got a tooth cleaning. Well, I've talked to the hygienist on and off, like just out of curiosity my whole life. Usually make friends with them as they're in there. They you know how they make small talk, but they're in there. But, but I talk to you. I like to talk to them because they they see.
E: They're all up and in. There.
J: And I had a hygienist telling me I said kind of what was the worst? What was the worst thing you ever saw, You know? And it's probably first thing she did. She went. Oh.
E: That react.
J: She goes, the person had had not taken care of their teeth at all. And all of the tartar and the build up, which can be as hard as your teeth, you know, like it's unbelievable, like that stuff that grows on your teeth.
B: Calculus.
J: You're right. She said that when she tried to to do the initial cleaning for the person that the back, like the inside of their teeth, like the backside of their teeth, there were no bumps or ridges from their teeth. It was all smooth from the build up of that material. Yeah. And so when they cleaned it out and it took, it was an incredible amount of work and there was lots of bleeding and and terrible stuff going on. The person touched their tongue to the back of their teeth and commented, Oh my God, I feel bumps in my mouth.
E: Right, as opposed to this kind of wad of the. Wall. Rud that was otherwise.
J: Like just like space, you can't feel the difference between 1 tooth and the next. It's just one slick little situation going on there. And I, I guarantee you that's not even close to the worst stuff that's going on. But I mean, that you got to take care of your teeth folks. I mean, they will take care of you. You know, you don't want to like have chewing problem. Can you imagine like every time you chew you, it's painful. That's that's a nightmare.
B: I want a new damp Biome. I want a Biome that is benign and doesn't create goddamn tartar and calculus on my teeth. That's what.
C: I want, I want a Biome that makes them like, I don't know, calcified better. Like, I want, I want a Biome, Yeah. That's not just benign, that's like beneficial can.
S: You imagine if you replace all the the oral flora, first we get rid of anything that that secrets acid, anything that will eat away you're an animal, anything that will give you bad breath, anything that will cause a buildup of the tartar and replace them with ones that will actually protect your mouth. Take care of it, make it smell nice and repair your enamel.
C: Would be amazing.
E: If I made a product like that out of a tartar sauce.
J: But guys, keep in mind, you could you taking care of your teeth goes an incredibly long way. Get get a cleaning a couple of times a year, you know, go to the dentist, listen to what they have to say. They, you know, they don't just tell you, they they're telling you about your oral health, not just like how's your tooth doing, You know what I mean? It's like they're they're checking your gums are looking for cancer. You know this is an important thing to do.
B: And Jay, my hygiene has told me that you could be perfect brush floss every day and you still need to go get it cleaning because it only helps slow it down. The calculus will still build up no matter how good you are. So you got to still go in no matter how good. Like twice A at. Least.
E: I went last month. My hygienist said my gums look great. Yeah, OK. Thank you because I pay attention.
S: So guys, have any of you heard what RFK Junior had to say about autism in the.
RFK on Autism (40:22)[edit]
S: Last, yeah, but all over that stage.
B: But it's something new and stupid. Or old and stupid. What? What now?
S: Well, what he said was old, but he did say it recently. It's bad. It's really bad. So it's vintage RFK Junior, right? He as I like to say, I didn't make up this term so I forgot who said it first. He uses scientific data as a drunk, uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination, right? Yeah, he, he does. He makes a lawyer's case for whatever his narrative is because that's what he is. He's not a scientist. He has, no, he's a conspiracy theorist. He's, you know, he's a lawyer and that's what he's doing. So he said this is how he characterized autism. He's like, you have a normal child who regresses into autism when they're two years old. And these are kids who will never pay taxes, Never. They'll never hold a job. They'll never play baseball. They'll never write. A poetry. They'll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And he goes on to say. So I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, A tsunami or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don't understand. And it must be triggered or caused by environment, by environmental or risk factors.
E: Oh boy.
S: He further said that he's going to figure out what the what the cause of autism is by September. So don't worry about it. He's going to have it all sold out within is going to going to finally surpass 50 years of research in five months.
U: God, there's so much, Steve.
S: There's, I know it's, it's a tsunami of misinformation. Is what it is. So let's break, let's break this down a little bit. So first of all, he he's talking about autism and he's describing the absolutely most extreme end of the spectrum, right? Cuz autism is a spectrum. It's the autism spectrum disorder, which is interesting. The fact that they, I understand why they include such a broad spectrum under one diagnostic name, because there is a neurological similarity going on. There's a phenomenologically speaking, they, they are, there is some commonality there, but it does create a lot of confusion, right? If you're at one end of the spectrum, you have people who are above average in intelligence, completely functional, very successful in life, doing all the things he says that people with autism will never do. But they are just neurodivergent, right? They're not neurotypical.
C: Yeah, but let's be fair, Steve, those people usually are not diagnosed with autism.
S: No, no, they, but increasingly they are care that's.
C: Part of the point here, but what I'm saying is that part of the diagnostic criteria is that you require support. So if you don't require any support, you can't qualify for diagnosis.
S: I didn't say these people don't require any support. You can have all of those things that I said, but still have different sets of, of strengths and weaknesses. You still may have difficulty with social engagement, have difficulty with maintaining your you know, cognitive, you know attention, etc.
U: I just wanted to clarify because it kind of sounded like you're saying they're high functioning across everything.
S: No, they're not. Otherwise they wouldn't diagnose. Yeah, as I say, they're neurodivergent. That's that's what meant by that is. And that neurodivergent can include lots of things that that are just, they have different challenges than people who are neurotypical.
C: But that's the pop psychology concern that I have lately, is that so many people are self diagnosing ASD because they're neurodivergent when really they have ADHD or some other form of neurodivergence. And they're like, oh, but I'm on the spectrum and it's, it's confusing.
S: You shouldn't self diagnose and we don't have that. Yeah, but yeah, but but but the point being is that you can get diagnosed with autism beyond the spectrum and be extremely high functioning, even though you do need some you might need accommodations for for the challenges that you have. And then there's the entire spectrum down to people who are non verbal, right. So he but he's so he's talking about that end of the spectrum. We struggle with language here. That which I'm going to get into in a minute because again, because we're trying to capture this broad spectrum under one label it, there's no way to make everybody happy all at once. And when you say, well, this person has severe autism or Level 3 autism or profound autism, the people at the neurodivergent end of the spectrum that I described like, well, that implies that it's a bad thing or that, you know, even just using the term severe, they take exception to it pathologizes that we're just. And so it makes it challenging to even discuss it. But, and there's legitimate points on on, you know, all sides here. This is, it's, there's no perfect answer because there are just different trade-offs. We don't. Have the perfect language for deafness. Yeah, exactly. The deaf community says, you know, this is we are, this is part of us. We are deaf. This is our identity. We have a deaf culture. We, we don't need to be fixed. We don't need to be cured. We, we are what we are. And it's the same thing. The neurodivergent community, they support each other with that kind of approach was like, yeah, we're not diseased, you know, right. We are just different and.
C: Yet there still is a requirement of support even in the deaf community, right? Like if you are deaf, you need closed captioning in in certain situations you need types of support.
S: Some of them will say Cara, that the only reason they need quote, UN quote, support is because civilization was built by neurotypicals for neurotypicals. And they're they're neurodivergent trying to survive in a neurotypical world that's not adapted to them.
C: So absolutely, yeah. And that's. In some ways how you can define support.
S: There's some legitimacy to that. As like right-handed, left-handed. Right. It's like it's like considering left handedness a disorder because the world is made by right-handed.
C: People right, but which is why the the levels are at least in the DSM defined as level 1 requiring support, level 2 requiring substantial report and level be requiring very substantial. Support.
S: So that's how it had. The language has evolved the level of support you need, not the level of disease or or. Disability or or. Severity or whatever, it's just there's high, high support and higher support and low support, whatever. So in any case, RFK junior is living in 2005, right? He's living in the, a world before we even had this conversation. And he, he is looking at autism through the lens of the anti vaccine movement. 100% everything, everything he just said is from is the, is the, you know, again, we dealt with this in 2005 in from the anti vaccine movement. He is still locked into that narrative that the, his narrative is you have normal children, right? Typical children, healthy children who then regress into autism and it destroys their lives, it destroys their families. And this is something that is the environment that we are doing to them. That's literally what he said during that talk. That's his name.
C: And, and his narrative, let's be honest, is propagandizing something in a really major way. He's describing Level 3 autism in the same breath that he's talking about all these new cases and some sort of epidemic, but all these new cases are not Level 3.
S: Exactly, exactly. So that's. One, it's infuriating, yeah. That's one of the problems with what he's saying. He's saying that there's like the autism diagnosis are quote UN quote surging epidemic, wrong term. It implies you know that's the epidemic is a is a term you use if you're trying to imply that there's an environmental cause. And an infectious. Disease. Yeah, yeah. But even if you're saying, yeah, there's an increase in the autism diagnosis, that's a fact. Nobody denies that. But what the evidence shows is a few things. One is that it's, it's mostly could mostly be explained by diagnostic substitution, increased surveillance and the increased availability of support of services. And every way you look at the question, that's sort of the answer that we get. And the best studies are ones that that take a look at different cohorts and apply the exact same diagnostic criteria. And they find that when you do that right, you look at people from 20 years ago versus today and you apply the exact same diagnostic criteria. The rate is the same, right? It's the. It's flat because the difference is not in an A real increase, it's an.
B: It's a huge.
S: Point It's a It's a shift in diagnostic patterns in several ways, but the evidence also shows that the increase in the number of diagnosis is way skewed towards the level 1 end of the spectrum, right the.
C: Yeah, the people that weren't caught before.
S: Right, it's.
C: The people that we didn't that we just go like, Oh yeah, that person doesn't make eye contact. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they just didn't diagnose.
S: Them they would have had no diagnosis or they would have had some other diagnosis. There is.
C: Or like I just interviewed a wonderful a woman on my podcast recently who who specializes in neuroimaging and she talked all about like the female autism spectrum kind of pattern and how it's just been missed historically.
S: Yeah, right.
C: Like everything it was all about boys, boys, boys, boys, boys. So we just didn't recognize it in young girls who were more trained in sort of.
S: It manifests. Differently.
C: Yeah, totally.
S: Don't diagnose as many heart attacks in women because the criteria are all male centric and so the fact.
C: That we're getting better at this, this is a good thing. It's a good thing that we're diagnosing it more.
S: No, there's, that's the point. There was an increase at the Level 3 end of the spectrum. The profound is what some people call profound autism into the spectrum, but it's much, much, much, much less. And again, that's explained by diagnostic substitution. These people were diagnosed 3040, fifty years ago. They were just diagnosed with something else, schizophrenia or just mental retardation, you know, just something less specific, just not autism. So, but he conflates it all. He says there's a surge at the mild end of the spectrum and therefore there must be a cause at the severe end of the spectrum. But it completely gets it wrong because again, he's not a scientist, he's not a critical thinker. He's a conspiracy theorist and he's a crank and he completely gets it wrong. But again, he is starting with this 30 year old narrative that is from the the right out of the anti vaccine movement. So what about the regressed into autism thing? So first of all, he's getting that wrong on multiple layers as well. First of all, most people with autism do not regress. It's like 20% or so, 30%. And what that doesn't mean when it when we say regress, that's just any loss of milestones or any loss of function. It doesn't mean that they were that they were typical or normal to start right. He's he's misinterpreting regression as going from not having autism to having autism.
C: Well, but not just like it. The autism manifesting in a worse way.
S: It's like if you have autism and then you you have more difficulty with language, you have autism, you have more difficulty with socialization as you get older. You know, that's a complicated phenomenon. You know, it has to do with, you know, you know, things can get more challenging as you get older, but there may be also something in a subset of people in terms of what's going on. But in any case, they're not going from not having autism to having autism. But he's misinterpreting it that way deliberately because again, this is all about blaming vaccines. Let's not forget that, right? But we know from data that if you, if you look back at evidence that we have or if you follow cohorts progress, you know longitudinally that you can see clinically the signs of autism as early as six months. So not 2, not 2 years old. And you can see it in if you look at the brain and if you look at biomarkers, you could see it. Guess how early you could see it?
B: Like in utero.
S: In utero in the. Woe I was. Right in the fetal stage. So it's and also there's pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it is a complicated multi gene genetic disorder. It is dominantly genetic. There's like 100 and 5200 genes that have been implicated. And here's the thing, a lot of those genes they're they're not bad alleles or bad genes or they're not like, oh, if you have this, it's the only thing it does is increase your risk of autism. A lot of them have, are, are beneficial, you know, in, in, in other ways, right? That's, that's kind of how evolution works, right? People who get sickle cell anemia, that dream persists because it also protects you from malaria. It's the same kind of thing where genes that might make you more intelligent or whatever, in some high functioning, in some ways make it more likely for you to develop neurodivergent traits as well. It's complicated. It's super complicated, but it's not going away. It's mostly genetic, right? So we know it's really, it's not increasing, it's not, you know, happening to children who are not, who do not have autism in age 2. They're not regressing from non autistic to autistic. So he basically gets every aspect of this story wrong. He basically pissed off everybody with autism and everybody you know who had, you know, is connected to the neurodivergent community and now he's selling this complete snake oil thing and he's going to find the cause of autism by September again, everyone. And he hired of course, and he hired an anti vaccine fake doctor charlatan, you know, Guyer to do the study it this is it's everyone knows what the outcome of this. Fake study. He started with the conclusion absolute. That's what he does. That is what he does. There is a wrinkle to this though. While everyone's getting pissed off at RFK, I've read an interesting opinion piece, op-ed in the New York Times by a mother of a child with profound autism who's like, sometimes she feels like that end of the spectrum gets lost in the discussion, right? And the lost in the neurodivergent approach could, which includes things like we don't need a cure, we just need accommodation. And she's like my child, Yes, he needs accommodation, but he's again, nonverbal, not independent for anything. And it's like, you know, this is not just neurodivergence, this, you know, this, you know, my child is impaired and absolutely this is something that I would want to prevent or treat if we had a treatment for it. So let's not, you know, lose sight of that. And I do think like what this, what's the solution here? I don't know, because again, it's different trade-offs. We may, I think, I do think we need to make it more clear though that autism is such a broad spectrum and we might need to have, you know, more distinct subset names that.
C: We well and we used to, but we got away from.
S: That I know we went in the wrong.
C: Remember, yeah, we used to say Asperger's. Were they? Like Asperger's? Yeah. We we would say Asperger's. No, no, for individuals who were verbal. I mean, that's the general distinction. Basically. Now it's level 1 autism, whereas like, you know, if somebody is Level 3, for example, they would probably have all these specifications on their diagnosis. They would have perhaps with accompanying intellectual impairment, with accompanying language impairment, with catatonia maybe or with, you know, so they're all these specifiers, but that nuance, that minutiae gets lost. You're. Right.
S: So, but the, the label I go into this in some detail on, on Neurologica, but just very, very quickly, how we make diagnosis depends on what you're using those diagnosis for because there's different ways you could make diagnosis. Then again, they're not one's right and the other one's wrong and they're just different trade-offs. I feel like we've moved in the direction of a diagnostic scheme that was designed by researchers and not necessarily clinicians and certainly not people who are dealing with the public or regulations. And so you know what I mean? It's like we're let's they're emphasizing what is helpful for research, not necessarily what's helpful in terms of dealing with this as a society. And so we end up.
U: Yeah.
S: Right. So we end up with a with a diagnostic scheme that's confusing in every context except for research, where. It's emphasizing the phenomenological. Yeah. Trying to please both. It is, it is. But I, I, I remember very distinctly the director of the NIMH complaining that the DSM, that's the diagnostic and statistics manual of, of, you know, of psychiatric diagnosis, that it was specifically blaming it for problems with research because it was not, it was not optimized for research.
C: And that's the thing some it has to be both because what we know about what to do clinically comes from the research and what we do research wise comes from clinical feedback. And it's like they have to talk to each.
S: Other yes, but you can't optimize it for both.
C: No, I know. And that's the hard thing. Yeah, something's got to give and we've moved away. I mean, this is really in the weeds, but like really quickly we've moved away from more. DSM was historically very categorical. Yeah, if you have these things, you have this, if you have the. And now we've moved into more dimensional, which is more clinical. I mean, it's like it is a move in the right direction, but it's it maybe hasn't gone far enough.
S: So, yeah, so it's tricky. It's tricky. But there's one thing we could say for sure in that RFK has no idea what he's talking about, but he's worse than ignorant. Yeah, full of a misinformation and and a a completely biased narrative that is all about being anti vaccine. Essentially. He has a dangerous, dangerous quack, that guy.
C: Really.
AI Designed Gravitational Wave Detectors (58:31)[edit]
- https://scitechdaily.com/when-machines-dream-ai-designs-strange-new-tools-to-listen-to-the-cosmos/ [4]
S: All right, let's move on. All right, Bob, tell us how AI is going to help transform astronomy.
B: Sure, man. I really dig this one. All right, guys, What if researchers handed off the redesign of the most sensitive instrument we've ever created to an AI? That's exactly what researchers have done for gravitational wave detectors, and these new designs seem better than any we have come up with. The next gravitational wave detectors we build might not just represent the next generation, but a leap to the one after that. And imagine if, after the baby boomer generation, we went directly to millennials. This would absolutely not be like that. The paper is published in On Physical Review X Digital discovery of Interferometric Gravitational wave detectors. It's a good read, most of it. Of course, there's jargon everywhere, but some parts of it are eminently understandable, at least by me. So gravitational wave detectors, we've gone over them many times. So let's do it. Let's do a brief overview. They detect the those mind bogglingly faint ripple ripples in space-time caused by accelerating masses. Our current detectors like LIGO can now, it can now detect the ripples caused by neutron stars or some black holes that are orbiting each other ever closer, right until they collide. We can detect them and we have to do this. They use laser beams at right angles, l-shaped, right l-shaped, they say, to act as interferometers. Now gravitational waves change the length of one of those one of the beams, changing the interference pattern between the two beams that we can detect and then interpret and figure out what exactly caused them. Now these machines are fiendishly complex, but so sensitive. They can detect changes less than the width of a freaking proton, Less than the width of a proton. Incredible. We have plans for future gravitational wave detectors, but they they use tried and true design principles for the for the most part, even the ones that are that are space based. The lead the lead researcher here is Doctor Mario Kren, who Helms the artificial scientist lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light. For for this research that he and his team joined forces with LIGO researchers, which of course makes sense because that's their that's their babies. So together they made Urania. Where is it? Urania? You are ANIA. Urania is pretty slick. It's not an LLM, not a large language model, or it's not even a neural net. It's based on machine learning methods, and that means that it's a subset of AI that uses algorithms and statistical methods which learn from data to make decisions. All right. It's just a basic overview of what that is. Now Urania doesn't look at gravitational wave detectors and try to improve it. This is key. It starts with a performance goal and then it works backward to discover the optical designs that can reach that goal. That's that's critical here. So it's it's like an evolutionary algorithm. There's a lot of similarities with similarities between that and evolutionary algorithms that are based on physics that incrementally builds better and better gravitational wave detectors based on the performance feedback, feedback with like every generation that's created. So what did Urania, Urania discover? What do you think, guys? Tell me what you think would be the first thing researchers would love for Urania to discover. The first thing I would want to see. And, and what they saw was the gravitational wave detectors that we already have. Like basically, hey, here's LIGO that that was very, very important because because if, if it creates, if it designs LIGO from scratch, that means that that you're doing something right. Because you know, LIGO works when you use it every day. And if it if it says, hey, this will work, then you know that you're probably it's going to increase your confidence level that that that you were on the right track with the with, with the Iranian. OK, So that's, that's exactly what they what they got. They got designs that they know they've already created, and they know it works.
S: Yeah. So that's like any model. The first thing you want to do is show that it predicts what you already know.
E: Right, that's fair.
S: OK, but that's that's not enough. That's not enough. That just means that at least there's nothing broken about it.
B: Right. So, yeah, so it gives you. So this gives it to the fact that they that it it predicted or created designs that that you know already work, gives you confidence that other designs that it might come up with are probably probably have a greater chance of actually being actually decent. And Jorania did absolutely do that. And but it but it made designs. The cool thing here is that it created these designs that nobody thought of and nobody probably would have thought of maybe ever or for a very long time. And I'll describe some of the some of the designs that they came up with. It had designs that were very that had very non intuitive light paths. So they weren't the typical l-shaped right angle laser paths. They were like weirdly intricate nested paths that that don't use any type of normal beam splitter logic, right? Some designs had optical components that were arranged in such a way that no designer would ever put them together that way. It didn't make any sense. So the optimization logic for some of the designs were totally opaque to the researchers. Like they're like, why this optimization design doesn't make, doesn't seem to make any sense. Why would this optimize this, this detector? They, they didn't know. So but the, the next step, the next critical step here was testing the designs. And they, of course they have a way of testing them without spending millions of dollars by building them and testing them that way, right? Who, who you don't want to do that? That's ridiculous. They they would have built fifty of these. So to do do that to test these designs that Urania came up with, they use the tools and the simulations that they use that they already use for LIGO upgrades. And they use these tools to test other observatories like Cosmic Explorer and the Einstein telescope, which is the next generation interferometric gravitational wave detector. To use those tools that we know that they work extremely well and they know that these tools can say this design will most likely work and you could make you can spend, you know, it's worth risking millions of dollars because it's the tests have been so successful. So these are the kind of tests that they brought to bear on these new designs. These these weird, intricate, bizarre, unintuitive, non intuitive designs that you're on. It came up with that's what the tools that they used. The result of this was designs that were shown to be using these tools that were not only better than than current instruments, but better than anything that we have on the drawing board by like a jet, like A2 generations beyond anything that that they were even thinking of. So one of the designs that Urania made extended the sensitivity band deeper into the into the sub 10 Hertz range so that that sub 10 Hertz range would be critical for observing heavier black hole mergers earlier in the Co orbiting in spiral. And that's one of the the problems with with current gravitational wave detectors is, is the mass range of of black holes that you can detect. So this could help with that. But one of the most intriguing findings had really novel topologies, you know, design detector designs that look like they could expand our current observable volume in space up to 50 times our current detectors. Because right now these detectors can can find, you know, amazingly faint gravitational waves from from certain size black holes. But you can't keep going. You can't just detect them any at any, you know, distance in space because eventually it's going to be so attenuated we can't even detect it. These designs or some of these designs seem to be able to potentially increase our observable volume in space up to 50 times, which is amazing 50 times. That's that's incredible. Okay, so so how was how exciting is this? This is it's, I think it's pretty amazing. It's this reminds me specifically of Ted Chang's short story. Got it got to talk about my buddy Ted Chang here, one of my favorite authors. He he created a super short short story called the evolution of Human Science and the parallels here are really interesting. So in his story, human science discoveries stop. And it has stopped because there is these these benign meta humans that have been born, you know, genetically engineered. And all these meta humans make all the new discoveries and they make all the inventions because they're just so ridiculously smart, but they're also incomprehensible to us. So in order for for for neurotypical humans, if you will, to learn any new scientific principles, what they have to do is they have to employ what's called Herman hermeneutics, which Cara had mentioned, I think a couple years ago. Awesome word. So they employ hermeneutics and that means that they try to interpret and understand the science and technology of the metahumans who are so smart that we can't understand what they create or publish. So we so we have to try to infer new scientific principles by the objects that they create and what little documentation that there is that's that's comprehensible. So that so that's the story. And it seems like that's kind of like an era of this era of scientific discovery that we're that we're creating here with AI. We're kind of going down that road to a certain extent. And let me just say here a quote by by Kren, who seems to agree with me. He said we are in an era where machines can discover new superhuman solutions in science and the task of humans is to understand what the machine has done. This will certainly become a very prominent part of the future of science. So very interesting point of view there that I obviously agree with so So humans, let me just try to describe this in another way. Humans have relatively easy access to a portion of the design space for gravitational wave detectors, right? We've created them, we've theorized them, we we use them. So we kind of have this ability to access a portion of this design space or however, how big that is. But we obviously can have some insight into a part of it, but we're also in a bit of a straitjacket of old assumptions and design traditions, right? And even the limitations of the human brain is also kind of a straitjacket for, for solving some of these issues. So these AIAI tools don't have these limitations. It just optimizes based on physics and performance goals. That's what it does. So how much more of that total possible design space will they say, I, I want to see that. I want to see how far they can go and in creating these designs that we will may have never even dreamt up in a million years. So the researchers took the next step was that the researchers took the top 50 designs and put them in a catalog called the Detector Zoo. And this is, this is public. Other researchers, other scientific institutions can look at these designs, study them and learn from them and maybe even refine them and hopefully eventually even construct some of them. So I'm going to, I'll end my talk here with a ChatGPT quote on this topic, which I, which I liked this. So my ChatGPT said to me, he's like, it's like we taught AI the language of mirrors and lasers and it spoke back to us in a dialect we barely understand, which was I thought was a pretty good quote when it, when it said that to me, I said, where did you get that quote? Give me the reference to that quote. And it's like, and my ChatGPT said, I, I thought it out myself. This is from me probably telling me the truth. I'm not. You can't be 100% sure, but.
E: Fuck, Mark Twain said that.
B: There you go now was Abraham Lincoln. So so yeah, this is really fascinating. We're starting to see this, Steve, right, you'll agree, we're starting to see this in other, in other fields where the, the assistance that we are getting from AI is quite dramatic in scientific discovery. And I think we're just barely scratching the surface here. And this, this, to me, this, this Urania was one of the, one of the better examples that I've, that I've come across. And it's also being applied to particle physics and, and quantum physics as well. So I am really excited over the next 10 or 20 years to see, you know, what these, what these machine learning tools, these, these AI tools can come up with and design and design and think about, you know, in a way that we, you know, may never be able to do it. We may struggle. And I, I assume in the future we're going to be struggling even harder as these designs become even more complex and obtuse to our way of thinking. It's going to be fascinating to, to have these advances that we may never even be able to figure out. We know that they work, but like those characters and, and Ted Chang's a novel, we, we know that they work amazingly well. We just can't understand at all what's what's going on inside.
S: Bob, can we use this method to design A better hoverbike?
B: I would think absolutely you just did just give it a lot of data on hoverbike data and and studies and everything and I think it it probably could come up with a one that we never would have thought of.
S: All right. Thanks, Jay.
Who's That Noisy? + Announcements (1:11:27)[edit]
S: It's who's that noisy time?
B: All right guys, last week I played this noisy.
J: OK.
E: Doctor Zeus would make a human doll that talked.
J: A listener named Benjamin Davu said, Hey guys, been here. The Frenchie from Japan, I think I got this one. This is a bamboo leaf held between two thumbs and the user blows on it to make it vibrate. Also seems like a pinched rubber balloon, but I really think it's the leaf this one and a ton of people guessed that this was a blade of grass in a in a similar situation. This is not correct, but there is a definite similarity between that noise and you know, basically creating like a Reed instrument with with some type of plant or grass or whatever. Another listener name Brayden Ellis said I think this week sound is a baby goat having its teeth brushed. That sounds like a video that I missed, but sure, yeah, I could see that, Ben Borger wrote in said. Hello everyone. This weeks noisy is a rubber chicken. The change in pitch is controlled by how hard you squeeze the rubber chicken. I've had so many people e-mail in the rubber chicken answer. I think this might be the first time I mention it. I'm not sure, but it does kind of sound like a rubber chicken a little bit and I think it was a good.
C: Guess I think it sounds like a rubber chicken to me. Whatever it is, I do not want to be behind me on the airplane.
J: Yeah. Of course, God of.
C: Course not, it would be a nightmare flight.
J: Oh boy, Alexis Collins wrote in said to Jay. We like to listen to your podcast with our dad and Kill Dare Ireland. We think this week's noisy is a rollout party blower that has a small hole in it at the end. You know, those little party favors you blow and the thing rolls out, it goes black. Oh, yeah, It's not that, But there's a little bit of that in there. I can hear that. Another listener wrote in named Steven. Steven said, Jay, it's a cat pretending to be a baby. My cat is always pretending to be a baby. Very. So I wanna hear that. So if your cat pretends to be a baby and makes baby noises, e-mail me at at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. Listener named Omar Moinnadin. Omar, you gotta tell me how to pronounce your last name. He says, hey Jay, this noisy sounds just like my 2 year old. When you give him a mic and a speaker, he puts his mouth directly on the mic and makes these sounds. So this, that guess is actually not that far from what's going on here. Just keep that in mind. And then, you know, the closest one that we got was a listener named Michael Saucedo. Michael said, hey, Jay, it sounds like a small mammal, I'm going to say a porcupine getting its belly tickled. OK, So what this actually is is this is a baby Otter playing with its hand and its mouth.
B: What?
J: It's a little baby Otter who's using his hand to kind of go like that in his mouth. Listen again and you'll hear it.
B: Yeah, Jay, I caught a little bit of the. La La La La la of. Course you did.
S: I think that's utterly ridiculous.
B: Yes, it is you.
E: Steve did the heavy.
B: Lift baby Otter.
C: No, I love how you're like. Thanks man. I got you covered. Solid.
E: You're good man, Steve.
J: But I would rather have a baby Otter than one of those. What is it, a French bulldog? You know, the ones that talk a lot.
US#07: Oh, they do sound like that.
J: Yeah, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all. Sorts of crazy stuff. Those dogs, There's one of them I like in particular, this woman, like carries him around in a baby carriage and he goes blah blah blah blah blah. Like literally sounds like a guy with no teeth saying blah blah blah.
US#07: Oh, I know that Lady on the Internet and she's always like, you're embarrassing me. Stop.
J: Oh, that's yeah. My, my, my, the other one. I listen to him all the time. He's the one that did that song right. If you know it, you know it.
US#06: Yes, yes, that was the car, yeah.
J: That dog is awesome, but never would I own one of those dogs. Just never because they're they are so vocal and bad. You know, they're just, they sound like they're angry and upset all the time. Alright, I have a new noisy for you guys. This noisy was sent in by a listener named Kenny Haberman. It's a little long, but you got to hear the whole thing.
E: Wow, it's the hoverbike.
J: Yeah, I love those types of sounds. They are so freaking. I don't know, they're just very powerful. Anyway, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, e-mail us at theskepticsguide.org. Did I say that correctly? E-mail us at WTN at theskepticsguide.org. Now you might wonder, Jay, how did you screw that up after doing who's that noisy for so long? I am so busy that I I can't see straight getting ready for the conference. I've got so many details that I've got to handle, but the thing that that that you need to hear from me right now is that it's still not too late to go. You could hear this within a few days of when the show comes out and easily buy some tickets and show up in White Plains and have the time of your life. We are really excited. I mean, we just, we're going through all the details. You know, we have nine people involved as directors for this, for this conference. And you know, we're just constantly upping the ante on all the bits that we're doing and, and refining everything and it's really, really coming out awesome. I'm so psyched, guys. I can't wait. We're going to have such a good time. So if you're interested, just go to nauticoncon.com or you can go to theskepticsguide.org and there, there'll be a button on there on the homepage for you to get more information, but tickets are available. We'd love to have you a couple more quick things. You could join our mailing list. You can go to theskepticsguide.org and we have a way for you to join our mailing list on there. We send out a Mailer every week that that goes over everything that the SGU has done the previous week. You could also become a patron to help show your support, especially during these times when skepticism and critical thinking need to be out there. You know, we are expanding the amount of things that we're doing. We have new, new shows that we're working on. I told you guys this, they're going to be happening over the next few months. We're very excited, but your support would help a lot. So go to patreon.com/skeptics Guide. Steve, what else we got? We have the Kansas show.
S: Kansas.
J: Yeah, We will be in Kansas. We'll be not too far from Kansas City in a town called Lawrence. And we will be doing a private show. And we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza of special significance. That means the entire cast of the SGU, Cara, Evan, Bob, Steve, me, George, Rob, and if you look quick you might get catch a glimpse of Ian doing some fancy stuff behind the mixing board. Everybody loves Ian. Every single one of us thinks Ian is awesome and he hates when I say this, but that's. That's the truth. He's listening, right?
US#06: Why we love him?
J: And if you know, you know, but Ian might have another watermelon incident, you don't want to not be there because if another cool thing like that happens again, you want to be on home plate to see it happen for yourself. Anyway, those dates, September, the weekend of September 19th, I believe both of our shows are happening on the Saturday of that weekend. Please consider coming. It's going to be a great time and who knows when we'll be out to Kansas again. This might be a might be a very long time, so please try to join us if you're local. There you go.
S: Thank you, Jay.
Emails (1:19:32)[edit]
S: One really quick e-mail, this one comes from Jim from Michigan and Jim writes. Thanks for the informative and entertaining show. I had a friend recently questioned to me about miracles. I told him that I had not seen any evidence of a miracle. He then asked me if I believed The Big Bang Theory, not the show. I told him that I did and that it was, in my opinion, the most likely explanation for the beginning of our universe. He then stated that the cosmic inflation aspect violated our physics laws because it expanded faster than the speed of light. He stated that this would qualify as a miracle. I did not have a reply other than to thank him for giving me something to think about. I'm curious what your thoughts are regarding this. Keep up the good work. So what do you guys think that does?
B: Not break. It does not break any laws of physics because it's because you could. Space can expand faster than light, you just can't move within that space faster. Exactly.
S: So the premise is wrong. It's a, it's a, it's a faulty premise.
B: Next letter.
S: But this is. But there's also a logical fallacy in there. And what is that the good bet whenever someone claiming a miracle is? What is the logical fallacy?
E: God of the Gaps.
B: Yeah. The fact that we don't understand it, the fact that we don't understand something doesn't doesn't mean that you have to then.
C: Therefore, God.
B: Therefore, God, right God of the. Gaps.
S: So yeah, it's an argument from ignorance, the specific version of that being what we call a God of the gaps argument. You know, we insert God or a miracle into something that we don't currently understand. Could also frame it as confusing, currently unexplained with unexplainable, like there's no possible way to explain it, therefore it's magic. But yeah, so the premise is wrong. But even if it were correct, even we didn't currently understand it. That just means that we don't have a complete set of laws of physics for the universe at which we don't write our our laws are at present incomplete. And things like The Big Bang are where those laws breakdown, right? We don't have a quantum gravity law in physics, for example. We do not yet have a theory of everything. So it's also like saying, well, black holes couldn't exist. Therefore there there are miracles. It's like, no, that's pointing in the direction of we need more complete physics in order to describe what happens in weird situations like black holes and The Big Bang. But in this case, he's not even up to bat because as Bob said, the universe can expand faster than the speed of light. That's not the same thing as traveling faster than the speed of light within the universe. So he got he got his premise wrong, too. Double failure.
Interview with Melanie Trecek-King (1:22:04)[edit]
Website: www.ThinkingIsPower.com
S: OK, guys, let's go on with our interview. Joining us now is Melanie Teresik King. Melanie, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.
US#00: Thank you for having me, I'm so happy to be here.
S: And Melanie, you're an associate professor of biology at Massasoa Community College. And you are also an activist, skeptic, running the multiple things. Thinking is power, anything is that. Would you say that's your main outlet?
US#00: Yeah.
S: So tell us how you got started in all this, and why did you decide to incorporate this whole skeptical thing into your academic career?
US#00: My background is ecology, and I'm from the Midwest, and when my husband got a job across the country, I'm from Iowa, we moved across the country to Massachusetts. I started teaching at a Community College and I love teaching at a Community College, but I was finding myself teaching the science courses for people who don't want to be scientists when they grow up and loved those courses. But I finally realized with as much as I love biology, that was probably not the best use of their time. And so I thought, if I had a single semester to teach the average person what they need to know about science, what would that look like? And I'm a bit ashamed to say that I actually didn't know about the skeptic movement during that time and so. I How long ago are we talking about? Oh, this was five years ago. Maybe sick. Yeah. Not very long when I finally, when I found the skeptic movement, I found so many resources that I didn't know were there and I was incorporating basic concepts anyway. But this gave me so much more to including class. And so, yeah, then I started communicating that online on thinking his power, thinking maybe people who weren't my students would be interested and. Yeah, that's right.
S: Just took off from there. Do you have a like a specialty within the whole scientific skeptical thing that you focus on or are you trying to really hit like any issue? Like I say, a lot of your videos range from alternative medicine to, you know, to more biological topics to climate change and you trying to cover it all. Or do you have a specialty?
US#00: I mean, so I think broadly speaking, my specialty would just be misinformation. But I joke that my science communication is for the normals. I mean, that's who my students are. They're just people who are mildly curious, don't have lots of time to spend looking into these things, and are open to things. And so there's a lot of them out there. And So what I try and do is just take a lot of the different concepts that other people specialize in and then distill them to where maybe somebody who doesn't have a lot of time and interest can learn something about.
S: South starting off say, you know, 5-6 years ago basically as just a scientist, you know, a biologist and then trying to get into the host skeptical thing. How do you feel your science background prepared you for all of the content that is necessary to understand in order to fight misinformation in pseudoscience? Did you feel like, oh, you're basically we're starting from scratch or did you feel well prepared for that transition?
US#00: That's a really good question. I feel like. So the class that I designed ended up being it's for non majors, yeah. But what I realized in the process was that I didn't know a lot. Like there was a lot about pseudoscience and science denial and conspiratorial thinking that I didn't know about, and actually even basic philosophy of science. And so learning those things I think made me a better science educator. But then I actually think that we need to do a better job. I'd be curious your thoughts on this too. But we need to teach more science majors these things. I mean, we see way too many, you know, medical professionals and, and falling for, for example, anti vaccine or even thinking homeopathy works or. And so I think we we could do a better job teaching our future scientists. Me personally, I feel like my science background prepares me for a little niche within science, but not necessarily to help understand the the misinformation in the science.
S: Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you know, my experience as well. The, you know, all the critical thinking, media savvy, science versus pseudoscience, logical fallacies, all of that stuff. I, I was not taught that in school, you know, as part of my, my education, either undergraduate or medical school or whatever, at any, any time during that, that extensive education, right? That was all just completely separate from formal education. That information is out there. And I think you had a lot of a lot easier time in 2020 than we had in 1990 or 1995 because, yeah, there's a, the amount of resources that are out there now are massive. But you're right, it's very hit or miss. What I find like with my own residents, fellow students or whatever, is that they could be all over the map. Some of them, I think it's just all like what mentors you happen to come across, you know, in your, in your training. Some of them are, are very well equipped, you know, to deal with misinformation in pseudoscience. Others have absolutely no idea, not only straight, not only pseudoscience, but even pathological science within mainstream science, which you know, these these are two sides of the same coin, right? So it's you read. There's no systematic way of teaching it, which we absolutely need.
US#00: Yeah, I actually, I did have something that you did not have for sure, which is your book. Honestly, your book was so helpful in my process. Yeah. So thank you. Yeah.
S: Well, that's, that was why we wrote it. We basically we've got to put all this in one space. Yeah, I mean, there were. And we had, you know, predecessors too. We obviously read The Demon Haunted World, why people leave weird things. You know, there was there were, you know, books along the way. And so this I think there's we like talking with with younger skeptical activists because it does provide a lot of continuity, you know, like generational continuity. We've got to keep this movement going, right? You know, we're not going to be here forever. And so even though it's a lot of it is, you know, feels like reinventing the wheel, it's but it is, it's important, I think, for each generation to have new voices. Yes, we're going, we're debunking the same shit. We've been doing it for 200 years. I mean, it's amazing. You know, when we sometimes I do a deep dive on a topic, like I remember I was do it looking at magnet, you know, devices like fraudulent, you know, snake oil magnet devices. And I found a reference to a book that was written in 1850 systematically debunking snake oil, magnetic healing devices. All the same shit we're dealing with today. It's like, wow, they, they did this 200 years ago and it was amazing. It's like it's all just so it's, we're just passing it forward, you know what I mean? And we are building, I think a knowledge base. I do think we are more knowledgeable how to do this than previous. Generations of.
J: Course.
S: Yeah, we're standing on their shoulders.
US#00: I think one of the things the skeptic music movement really taught me was that so as a science educator, nearly every science course, especially for the introductory stuff, starts with chapter 1, the scientific method. And for those of you who can't hear me, I'm now air quoting scientific method right here are the the steps that you do to do a science and then it gets done. And then like, here's everything that we know and it's presented like a collection of facts that are tried and true and never going to change. And this is what we know for certain. And but the skeptic movement really taught me was why do we need the scientific method, right? We need it because we are irrational and biased and flawed and emotional and unreliable narrators of our own experience. Like, why isn't I tried it and felt better sufficient evidence? Or why isn't I saw it so I know it's real. And so you know what? I, I designed the course and I, it kind of scared me at first because I, I now spend probably the first, I want to say like third of the semester on what I call critical thinking. But it's basically epistemology, metacognition, the limits of perception and memory, cognitive biases. But all of that then gets to a place where when I introduce science, students know why we need science. And so other classes, when I start, you know, day one, here's a scientific method. I think I'm missing some really important stuff here because how are students to know why this information is more reliable than anything else? And so, so that was an important lesson. And the other thing was just the basic idea of including misinformation. A lot of study classes don't include them. So how are students to know the difference between reliable and unreliable information if you don't bring that into the classroom and help them grapple with it, help them understand the differences?
S: Absolutely. And but I still think there's a bit of a stigma within academia about, you know, touching upon fringe topics or talking about pseudoscience or bringing, as you say, you got to bring it into the classroom. They just feel uncomfortable with it. You know, I still get that a lot. Or at best, it's like, well, I'm glad you're doing it, you know, do you get that a lot? Do you get the well, good thing you're I don't have to worry about it now because you're taking care of it, you know, because I just it's which is unfortunate. It's like, no, you should, we shouldn't be embracing this with both hands. This is the most important thing that we need to do is to teach people how to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real. That is what science is all about. So why would do you not want to do that?
US#00: When I start the semester day one that I, I start by fooling students. I do the Randy James. Randy made it famous, but it came from Bertram for the, the fake personality or astrology reading. Astrology, yeah, classic. Yeah, it's great. I they fall for it hook, line and sinker, right? And it turns out I'm a decent liar, but it's for a good 'cause, right. So I, I tell students like giant, you know, back story. I have a friend who's a great astrologer and I'm not going to tell you who she is, but you know, and I, I get some basic information from them. I make them think I'm really deep diving into their personality. The next class I give them their readings. How accurate is she? And I've been doing this for a long time. And about 4.3 to 4.5 out of five, which is about what 4 are found. So now get with somebody around you and talk about reading and why do you think it's reliable or why do you think she was able to know this? And sometimes it takes them like 10 minutes before they realize they all all got the same reading because they're cherry picking like this worked for me. And this they're denying that it's a game, though. It's a joke. Like it, it's it's a low stakes environment where I'm able to OK, yes, I lied to you. Am I sorry, you know, like not really. Will I do it again? I might, you know, right. So I want you to be skeptical. I don't want you to just trust what I'm saying. But the real lesson is I could tell you, I could fool you and you'd be like, oh, sure. I'm writing a book on misinformation right now. And every time I talk to somebody about misinformation, they're like, oh, that's fascinating. Oh, Can you believe what people fall for? Oh my God, people are so stupid. And it's like, how long until I get to the misinformation that they believe, right? Because we all have something. So with the students, it's like, if I told you I could fool you, you wouldn't believe me. So I fool you, proved to you I can fool you now, if you don't want to be fooled, have the humility to recognize that. And now we need to practice our skepticism. And here's how we do that.
S: Yeah, I mean, that's, you know, that that is a tried and true method within skeptical seminars lecture. I do it all the time. What I find a little challenging, you have to really up your game. So yeah, I love talking to naive audiences, meaning they're not steeped in skepticism because everything works on them because they haven't seen any of it before. But then when you're talking to like people who are in the skeptical movement or who like, like you're telling them ahead of time, I'm giving you a lecture on how you could be fooled. And so then their, their guard is way up or they, you know, it's, it becomes a lot harder to get away with that. But you still can do it. You just got to know which ones will sell, even to a prepared audience.
US#00: And so if you find something that works on more skeptical audiences, you simply must share, because you're right. The ones in the skeptic movement, they know these tricks. You have to find one. And even if you find one where they know you're fooling them, they just maybe not are able to figure out how that even.
S: Works, but like you're not going to get them on the astrology one on the floor effect like that. Don't even bother or even like there's a you have to go one level deeper. So like, for example, you know that you know the gorilla video, right, the invisible gorilla. Well, there's a there's a follow up to that where it's meant for people who know the invisible gorilla video where they throw another deception in there, another in intentional blindness that so people think they know it, but they really don't. So that's the kind of thing that you have to do. You could find that on on the website. Of course, we're giving it away now to anyone listening to this episode. But.
E: Spoiler alert.
S: But that's the kind of thing you got to do. You got to figure out, all right, you got to get more obscure or, or you got to do it in a way they don't realize you're doing it or you got to do it. You got to divert their attention to thing you they think they know while you're doing something else. It becomes, yeah, it's a little tricky. And you're not going to get them on everything either. So, you know, you just got to accept that and just say this is a demonstration. I know you guys are skeptical. You've heard all these before, but for what it's worth, right? And you've got to pick the ones too. The last thing I'll say is you've got to pick the ones that work even when you know what's happening. For example, like anchoring is a great 1. You know about anchoring. Like you show people a picture of a house and you tell you know half the people without the other half knowing. Does this house cost more or less cost, You know, other than $1,000,000. You ask the other people, does this cost more or less than $200,000? And then you ask them to guess the actual price and of course, going to anchor to whatever you told them. And so even if they kind of know about anchoring and they know about the demonstration, it'll still influence them. It's kind of hard for it not to. So you still get a good effect out of it. Or there's although all the priming stuff like you can't not you can't make yourself immune to that. You know, even when you know what's happening, you know, it's like if you ever seen a really good mentalist like ban a check.
US#00: I was going to bring up mentalism because you know they're fooling you. You just don't know how.
S: You right? Exactly. If they're really good, they have to be good though, Like the one, the bad ones, not so much, but the good ones like Vanishek. Doesn't matter if you could know you, you know, even even have an idea of the kinds of things they could be doing. It doesn't matter. They still, they're just, they're good enough to fool you. There's just too many ways to do it.
J: So Melanie, you mentioned your book, so you're currently writing this book or you or is it, is it coming out soon? What's your? What's the status on that?
US#00: Yeah, it's coming out next fall, so I'm in the midst of writing.
J: How's it going?
US#00: Goodness, I have newfound respect for people who've written books. This is an emotional roller coaster. I'm having a great time doing it. On other days, they may tell you something else, but the book is a field guide to misinformation, and it's basically about understanding the different forms that misinformation takes. And not just so there's a lot of great organizations that focus on specific kinds of misinformation and they do great work, but I feel like a lot of what's missing there is why we fall for misinformation. And so it's also understanding ourselves and our own vulnerabilities to different kinds of misinformation. So the the threading the needle of why might I be vulnerable to this and how to understand how this particular kind of misinformation works.
J: Out of curiosity, are you discussing politics at all?
US#00: Oh, that's actually a really good question. I try. I use what I call a trading wheels approach, which is I purposefully weighed people into the shallow end. I'm giving lots of metaphors here and I don't mean to. I teach people how to think and how misinformation works using examples that aren't emotionally or identity triggering so that they learn the skills and then hopefully graduate to something else. That's why I start with like the astrology reading and then then I go into like witchcraft and psychics and I work my way to like evolution denial or climate change denial or vaccines. But I don't start there. So with a book, I'm trying really hard to spend most of my time on examples that would not trigger the vast majority of people. I'm also very aware that we're in a time where the concept of misinformation itself has become political and is the subject of a lot of conspiracies, skepticism, and that the people who most need to read a book like this, I don't want to turn them off right away.
J: Yeah. I mean, you have to thread that needle. We all have to do it from time to time. I mean, it's, it's for us, it's been very much like we don't discuss politics on the SDU.
S: To clarify, we are non partisan. A lot of the topics that we deal with, like we've talked about gun violence for example, you know, and gun safety laws, that's massively political. But we say we try to talk about the science and to try to stay as non partisan and politically neutral as possible, which is impossible. But you know, whatever we do the best we can say, at least let's talk about the science. Then there are topics where you could tell me what you think about this. It's just unavoidable. It's so unavoidable that even within the skeptical community, everyone has taken political corners, which is incredible. Like the whole trans issue, everyone has taken to their political corner on that issue. And we're not supposed to do that. Like we're the one movement who's not supposed to do that. And yet here we are.
US#00: Something like climate change comes to mind too, because climate change, like the one predictor, the the, the single most predictive factor, whether somebody accepts or denies climate change is political affiliation. And as soon as issues become attached to our identity, they're very hard to dislodge and especially if they become a tribal issue. And we obviously we need to be able to address those issues. But something else with addressing those issues is that like somebody who denies climate change or denies evolution or going in with the facts on those issues or going in with the science is not going to convince somebody because that's not how they got there.
S: It's not a knowledge deficit problem.
US#00: Right. And so helping them understand their own thinking, why they might, why they may have gotten there without following the science, it certainly feels like we did right. None of us think, oh, I'm denying science or I'm falling for pseudoscience. Yeah. So it's a dicey issue. I joke that with my class, it's way easier. My students are captive for a semester. They want a grade. And so they have to stick with me for four months as they walk them through and then finally get them to the deep end. And we can take off the training wheels online and in real world it it's much harder than that. And it requires somebody to take a deep dive into their own thinking and really be willing to be skeptical not of what they've heard, but of their own thinking processes.
S: And So what? And you have your, your, your mainly on YouTube. You're putting out your series of videos. I mean, you probably you have to do all the social media these days. You can't just do 1.
US#00: As far as social media channels, my biggest platform is Facebook. I try on Instagram. I don't understand Instagram. I am on TikTok and I'm trying on YouTube.
S: Stick with it. It is funny how they all have their their own sort of personality and they they skew to different demographics and they're different little subcultures. They all have their own little online subculture. Again, we try to do everything but like currently we're doing a lot of TikTok. It's very frustrating because the the culture on TikTok is so anti intellectual. It's overwhelming. It's really overwhelming.
US#00: I've watched your videos on TikTok if that makes you feel better.
S: Thank you. No, I mean, we're there. Obviously we think we're getting something done, but man, it's, it's rough some weeks. Facebook is great. It's just old. I mean, it's just for old people, which is fine, you know, But you, you can't just, you know, you can't just do Facebook because you're gonna be missing a whole generation. I think once once their parents got on Facebook, the kids all got off Facebook basically.
US#00: Well, there are at least a lot of people on. Facebook.
S: Yeah, yeah. So we do everything as well. But you just got to figure out whatever works for you. It's all an experiment. There's no formula.
US#00: And I have. I've heard, for what it's worth, that the largest podcasting platform is actually YouTube.
S: So Melanie, tell us where is the best place that our listeners can find you?
US#00: So my major platform is Facebook. I'm also on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube. All of those are at Thinking Powers and I have a website thinkingispower.com.
S: Great. So if they go to thinking is power, they'll get to everything.
US#00: Yes, everything.
S: Awesome. OK. Well, Melanie, thank you so much for joining us today.
US#00: Thank you for having me, I really appreciate it.
E: Thank you, Melanie.
Science or Fiction (1:43:41)[edit]
Theme: Metallurgy
Item #1: Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.[5]
Item #2: Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.[6]
Item #3: Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.[7]
| Answer | Item |
|---|---|
| Fiction | Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. |
| Science | Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. |
| Science | Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. |
| Host | Result |
|---|---|
| Steve | clever |
| Rogue | Guess |
|---|---|
Cara | Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, using nanopore membranes, that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. |
Evan | Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. |
Jay | Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. |
Bob | Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. |
Steve | Researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting Ni from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. |
C: It's time for science or fiction.
S: Each week I come up with three Science News items or facts, 2 real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake. I have 3 News items, but they all happen to be in the same theme. These all have to do with metallurgy. All right, here we go. Item number one, researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%. Item number 2 Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes. That it that is 3 times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. And I #3 Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods. Chair go first.
C: So in Max Planck or at Max Planck, they devised a single step method for extracting. You said that was nickel. Can you hear? Nickel. Yes, okay cool For extracting nickel from OR it reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% energy usage by 18. The total carbon footprint of the extraction process I'm assuming is what you mean. OK UT scientists developed industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal. Oh my God, I don't know. Nanopore membranes. So that would be like trace amounts of rare earth metals. 3 times faster than existing methods. Half the energy. OK, so we've got 84% carbon reduction, 18% energy reduction. Then we've got three times faster half the energy. And then at Penn State, we've got lithium extraction. Minutes rather than hours, no toxic chemicals, much less energy. So that one's vaguer. That one doesn't have any specific numbers. I don't know which of these things is harder to do. To extract nickel from ore, to separate rare earth metals, or to extract lithium? And which one do we need the most? I mean, we need the rare earth metals. So I think people are probably working on that faster. I'm going to say that that one is the science. It might be the fiction, because who freaking knows? But I'm say that one's the science because that's probably what there's more effort in right now and more money being put towards is the rare earth metals. So then that leaves nickel and lithium. We, I think we need lithium even more. I don't know if we need as much nickel. We probably do. But I'll call the nickel one the fiction. I don't know the total shot in the dark.
E: OK, Evan. It would be easier if I knew what the multi step method for extracting nickel was so I could make some kind of a good comparison here to these 84, to the carbon footprint, 84% reduction and the energy usage of 18% savings. The second one, the industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions, nanopore, nanopore membranes, I don't know that three times faster than existing methods. We're half as much energy. OK, Yeah, Yeah, I metallurgy. Really. Steve, can we have a different topic?
S: We're all news items you know from this week. This all happened to be.
E: Around Oh yeah, that's right, these were all over TikTok.
S: Metallurgy also involving things that we really need.
E: And the last one here about the new tech, new technique for extracting lithium. All right, whenever I see something like new technique for for something, I, I that that leans me towards the science section because yeah, you could have the technique down. Doesn't mean you're going to necessarily have the immediate results. It's more like a proof of concept kind of things. And I think those things turn out more to be more science rather than fiction. So therefore, tell you what, Cara, I'm going to join you. I'm going to say nickel extracting nickel is the fiction and I don't know why. Same same.
J: OK, Jake. I think it's the the the last one here. Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that could they could do it in minutes rather than hours.
E: That's right, the researchers were from some other university, right?
J: Yeah, I think that one is the fake.
B: Which one?
J: Penn State one.
B: OK. All right. And Bob? Yeah, I mean, I don't know enough about any of these technologies to have any big red flags. The only the main thing that stuck out to me is the lithium one that the third one and and my attitude is it's probably too good to be true or you know, because it'd be great for for batteries. So I'll say that one's fiction. I'll join with Jay.
S: So you all agree on the second one?
E: So you have a chance to sweep us right now, Steve.
S: We'll start. We'll start there. We'll see. Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes that is 3 times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy. You guys all think this one is science and this one is the fiction. Oh.
J: Wow, I did job with you. Just like that, people. Just like.
S: That Yep. But this is based on a real news item that does have to do with rare earth metals and nano pore membranes. But it's not an industrial process. This is just a laboratory proof of concept. So there's no data on how much faster, how much energy, nothing, because they just, they didn't do it. And on any scale, it was just like the basic science of trying to figure out how to make pores that will be selective in terms of which kinds of ions can pass through. So it's a good start. You know, might be the kind of thing we're down to 510 years from now. You might have something it was able to to have greater affinity for again for rare earths versus potassium, magnesium, like calcium, those kind of irons. But also it was able to to have differential preference for the lighter rare earths versus the middle rare earths, not the middle earths and the heavy, the heavy rare earths. So, yeah, it has potential, has potential, but this is, this is still a ways off. So yeah, the the the big problem with the rare earths, they're they're critical for tons of of modern technology electronics for batteries, for lots of things, but they're very difficult to purify from ore and they're also very difficult to reclaim from recycled electronics. They require a lot of toxic chemicals. They're very bad for the environment and they're they're slow, right. So the in fact it's the the refining of the rare earths is really more the limiting factor in terms of supply than mining the ore, right? We actually have rare earths in the US, not as much as in other parts of the world like China.
E: Minor point.
S: Yeah, but but we just have no capacity to refine it. You know that China has most of the world's ability to refine rare earths, so being able to come up with a a process that's more environmentally friendly and that is, you know, more of course, efficient would be fantastic. But there's a lot of work to do before we get there. All right, let's go back to #1 research at the that's.
B: All right, China will steal it and then make it. And make it, Yeah.
S: Yeah, they'll make it work. Research that the Max Plunk Institute have devised a single step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and use and energy usage by 18% is science. This is a pretty significant advance and this is, yeah, you know, well on its way to to application. So this process has a number of advantages. If one thing it can use lower quality ores, like right now we have to use sort of the the high quality nickel ores because the lower quality ones are way more complicated to extract the nickel. There's more more complex chemical compounds, you know, with nickel in them. And so it takes multiple steps using a lot of carbon and a lot of energy. In fact, if we make batteries, you know, batteries and EVs have a lot of nickel in them, you know, arguably we're not actually reducing the carbon by much. We're just shifting it to the battery production, right? Because we're just shifting it to mainly that the nickel production, it's still a net advantage, right? There's still a net gain, but a but a huge part of the carbon footprint of EVs is processing the nickel that's going in the batteries, you know, So they came up with the process that if you use green hydrogen, that's a huge F, right? If you use green hydrogen, these hydrogen plasma instead of carbon, so it uses 0 carbon. So the only carbon release would be in the production of the hydrogen itself. But if you use green hydrogen, then they're actually the process itself, this one step process, which uses a lot less energy and is a lot faster, which is also very important, releases no carbon. But if they include the mining and the shipping and all the other stuff and all that, that's still, there's still a carbon footprint. But all the carbon from the actual processing of the nickel itself and extracting it from the ore would be gone. Of course, if we're using Gray hydrogen, it's not as much of an advantage. Still an advantage, still better, but just not as much.
B: I like the difference between Grey Hulk and Red Hulk.
S: Remember, grey hydrogen is like you make it from. You're stripping the hydrogen off of hydrocarbons versus electrolyzing water versus pulling it out of the ground. There's like all different kinds of hydrogen depending on.
B: Can can we institute? Can we institute a laugh track for the jokes that I make that fail horribly? Just checking. Just checking.
E: We've been. We've been playing without a safety net for 20 years now. I'm about to start now.
S: So demand for nickel is probably going to double by 2040, which is not that far off double.
E: Double your nickel is a dime. See Bob? No laugh track.
S: Yeah, it sucks, doesn't it?
B: This means I tell you I'm getting depressed. No, no, we're saying. We're saying nickel so many times. I keep thinking of Joe Nickel every time you say it. All.
S: Right. This means that research that Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals and requires much less energy than existing methods is science. And this is also potentially huge because. Awesome. Yeah, right now the way they purify lithium is a couple of methods. They both suck. So one is you can, well, they're they're both energy intensive. So if you can purify it from, from lithium rich like brine, but that requires evaporating it, which means pouring a ton of energy into heating it up for hours in order to evaporate it off. And then you, you get left with sort of the lithium cake and then you have to purify the lithium further from there. The other thing you could do is if you, if you get like the lithium or is you have to bake it at high temperature with sulfuric acid, like you're baking it in sulfuric acid and then you leach it with water. It's a multiple step process. Then you have to add a basic chemical, what is that sodium hydroxide and then to, to neutralize it. And then you have to heat it again. And but it's a multi step process, uses a lot of energy. They figured out a way and what they did was they first they modeled it and then they tested it is they found that if you combine it first with sodium hydroxide, then you can go from that compound with a single step at a low temperature to a purified lithium without having to go through an acidic phase and then neutralizing the acid and all that. So it's the the whole process is, is an order of magnitude faster, does not use any toxic chemicals, uses a lot less energy. So this is obviously critical. The demand for lithium is going to increase even more than demand, Oh yes, for nickel.
E: But we keep finding more and more of it.
S: Again, the limiting factor is the processing of the lithium. It's not necessarily like the the the source deposits. Yeah, it's not the lithium deposits it's getting. It's get turning it into battery grade lithium. You know, it's got to be relatively pure. We have millions of metric tons of lithium deposits in the US We just cannot process it fast enough to meet our needs. So we get 97% of our lithium comes from Chile and Argentina, even though we have lots of lithium in the US. So, yeah, we need to develop these these techniques, you know, and get them at an industrial scale so that we can be more independent, but also just increase the world's supply, you know?
E: It helps everything.
S: Helps everybody. Yeah, we need to multiple times the amount of lithium. We need twice as much nickel. We need way multiple times the rare earths. We're having the same problem with copper. We don't have enough copper right now. If you calculate like how much copper we need to get to our climate goals by 2050, we don't have enough. We have like a third of the copper that we need. So we would have to like triple the world's production of copper, which again, the limiting factor is not the mining of copper, it's more the refining of it. OK, yeah. And and so we need to do we need to do it faster and we need to be energy and carbon efficient, right. If we, if we spend a lot of our carbon budget making this transition, we can actually make things worse in the short term. You know, it still might be worth it in the long term, you know, for electrifying these various industries, these various sectors, but if certainly if we could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the transition itself, that would be a huge help. So these all these news items are good news. They're all moving in the right direction and and hopefully they will pan out, you know, really well. So good news everyone, it's.
E: Actually quite a positive, yeah.
S: Even.
E: Though positive science or fiction?
S: I did sweep you OK, Evan?
Skeptical Quote of the Week (1:58:32)[edit]
"It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error or ignorance."
– —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 6, (description of author)
Voice-over: Get the quote.
E: It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man. What does hurt is persistence in error and ignorance. Written by my favorite Emperor and should be yours, Marcus Aurelius.
S: Yep, he was.
E: The 6th book of Meditations.
S: He was a real skeptical philosopher absolutely 2000 years ago. It's amazing.
E: Yes, Yep. And was in and a leader, Yeah, and, you know, a real leader of government so.
S: I think he's from the future.
E: Is that right? Because we have a chance. Then let's hope the future comes quickly.
S: Not to diminish the intellect of the ancients. He was, he was just a very, very, you know, he was a philosopher and as you say, and a leader and very accomplished.
B: Very.
S: All right. Well, thank you all for joining me this week. Thank you, Steve. Finally, thanks Steve and until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.
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- ↑ theconversation.com: Memes and conflict: Study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence
- ↑ www.livescience.com: Lab-grown teeth could offer alternative to fillings and implants, scientists say
- ↑ theness.com: How Should We Talk About Autism - NeuroLogica Blog
- ↑ scitechdaily.com: https://scitechdaily.com/when-machines-dream-ai-designs-strange-new-tools-to-listen-to-the-cosmos/
- ↑ www.mpie.de: Green nickel for sustainable electrification
- ↑ pubs.acs.org: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsnano.4c17675
- ↑ www.sciencedirect.com: Direct lithium extraction from α-Spodumene using NaOH roasting and water leaching - ScienceDirect