The Skeptics Guide #1048 - Aug 9 2025

You're listening to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe: Your Escape to Reality.

Hello, and welcome to The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

Today is Wednesday, August 6th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, folks.

Jay is still on vacay in Alaska.

Hopefully he'll be back next week.

49th state.

Has he been checking in with anyone?

Yeah, sending pictures, you know.

Oh, nice.

He sent us the link so we could record this podcast.

True, he did do that.

He keeps the keys to this recording device.

So it's the 80th anniversary of dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

It's amazing, 80 years.

Yeah.

Literally a lifetime ago.

I was born in 1969, which in a way always fascinated me because that was only 24 years removed from the end of World War II.

24 years, that's nothing.

24 years ago was 2001.

I mean, it's, you know,

right?

It's amazing how much, like, so people who are born around, you know, 9-11, that's like a lifetime ago to them, obviously.

Or people who are born after that.

It's amazing how much when you're not alive during a time period, it seems really far away.

Like, anything that happened before you were born is like ancient history.

And then the things that happened while you were alive were like, not that long ago.

Right.

But then you, right, you back up, you take a little closer look at it and you realize, wow, it really was not that long ago.

But 80 years removed now from

that is

eventually even college becomes very long ago.

Yes, that's true too, which really hurts.

All the really horrible memes about like how, you know, the time between like 9-11 and now, I mean, what is it?

So that's 25 years.

So yeah, like 2050 or whatever.

It's a whole generation.

Like, stop.

Don't remind me.

So I'm sure you guys have heard about RFK's latest shenanigans.

I mean, which ones?

What the hell, man?

I mean, the big thing is that just happened today, I think,

or yesterday as you record.

mRNA, man.

Yeah, pulling $500 million from mRNA research.

to develop vaccines for respiratory viruses.

You know, like COVID and the flu.

And just basically, basically lying through his teeth, saying that it wasn't performing well.

And meanwhile, the CDC researchers are saying, wait a second, you know, we've tested it and it's done incredibly well.

So it seems like to me, from what I could tell, he's just making up or distorting stuff so dramatically so that he could just end the research on mRNA vaccines and other technology that mRNA could allow.

It's just like it's tragic.

It's also kind of remarkable that the system is designed in such a way in which this one person, the head of this one agency, has this level of control.

Why isn't there a board or a panel that votes on this?

Well, Steve, you were saying at the live stream today, though, that Congress, though, could not necessarily follow exactly.

A lot of people are capitulating to this one person.

Yeah, so I mean,

the way the law is the

Congress could allocate money

for whatever they wanted to, right?

But they often then will defer to the executive branch and the specific agencies to spend that money, right, to allocate it to specific programs.

Because they don't want to -

this is partly legitimate, right?

They don't want to have to spell out in legislation, like really micromanage where every dollar goes.

They just say, the EPA is going to invest $100 million on research into this question.

And the EPA decides where that money goes.

So now

you have RFK Jr.

in charge of HHS.

He gets to decide where the money goes.

And he's like, nope,

we're going to claw back this money that was allocated to mRNA research.

Here's a bunch of bullshit, completely unscientific and incorrect reasons why we're going to do that.

But Congress could just pass further legislation saying, no, this is where the money's going, and take it out of the hands of the HHS.

Of course, they'd have to pass that.

Trump might veto it, and they'd have to pass it

over his veto.

If he would do that, I don't know.

I mean, it certainly is very plausible that he could.

It's not very plausible that Congress is going to step in and fix the problem here.

Right.

Right.

I agree with that.

Not the way it's currently configured.

So I wrote about it on science-based medicine.

Read it if you want the details.

But basically, everything RFK Jr.

says is demonstrably, factually, empirically wrong.

This is not about opinions or priorities.

What he says is factually incorrect.

He said that the mRNA COVID vaccines had more risk than benefit.

That's a specific factual number-based claim.

It's not true.

It's been clearly demonstrated that the benefits vastly outweigh the risks, which are very tiny.

Even the things that we know the vaccine does, those rates are higher from getting COVID, right, from not being vaccinated than they are from the vaccine itself.

So, you know, it's just utter nonsense, everything that he said.

And it's clear he's just working backwards from his anti-vaccine position.

You know, he's not

following the evidence or looking fairly at the evidence.

This is just justification for

clawing back mRNA research and vaccine research.

I love these decisions that clearly we're going to have body counts associated with them.

I mean, and it could be dramatic.

Get hit with the bird flu and

get caught with our pants down because we haven't done the mRNA research that would have been done.

I mean,

that's a lot of deaths right there.

And it could be, worst case scenario, is pretty dramatic.

It also makes you really worry about what will happen when something like that is our reality if we're face to face to it.

Are we going to be dealing with an administration that's so proud that when they realize that they actually do need an mRNA vaccine, are they going to say, no, we don't, no, we don't, and just watch people die?

Or are they going to do what they'll probably do, which is scramble at the last minute and we'll know that people will die because of that.

Maybe not as many as if they just say straight up no.

Well, how about this?

How about when they get the numbers of the people that have died?

They're like, no, that's fake news.

Those numbers aren't real.

And I'm going to fire whoever gave me those numbers.

Well, that did just happen, didn't it?

Right,

yeah.

Because that's the point.

That's what he will do in this even more dire situation.

That's what he does.

Yeah, hey, let's shut down satellites that measure CO2 in the atmosphere.

Let's just not measure it.

As a parallel to the mRNA vaccinations, are they also working on traditional vaccinations for COVID?

So he wants to roll back to the live attenuated viruses.

He wants to go back to 20th century technology.

He's saying we need to go back to the whole virus vaccines under the false belief that they're more effective than more modern vaccines.

It's just not true.

They just take longer.

It takes longer.

He also is saying he wants to focus on a universal vaccine.

Sure.

Sure.

For everything.

It's the Nirvana fallacy.

We've been working on that for a long time.

It's the the Nirvana fallacy.

I think, you know, again, if you're being cynical, you could say this is very deliberate.

He's like, let's focus on this unattainable goal and shelve all of this attainable research that we should be doing.

It's just a backdoor way to be anti-vaccine and pretend to be scientific.

It's like exactly like his,

we're going to do gold standard science, but that just means they're going to nitpick anything they don't like and find a reason to shut it down.

It's not unbiased scientific evaluation.

Horrible.

It's just science denial.

It's straight up science denial is what it is.

And don't forget, I mean, mRNA vaccines, you know, it's not just, you know, mRNA is not just for vaccines.

mRNA is for creating proteins in specific places, specific proteins in specific places.

And we are,

what did I say earlier, we're ugly bags of protein.

We are protein.

We got protein everywhere.

So a tool that can create the desired protein where we want it, when we want it, that could be an amazing therapeutic tool, not just for vaccines, but for a whole host of other possibilities that we are not going to be exploring now.

Not for, you know, it's going to be delayed.

Eventually, we'll get back to it, I'm sure.

But we could be losing many, many years and never catch up to where we would have been.

All right, let's change the subject.

Yeah, please.

Tell us about getting water from thin air.

Thank you, Steve.

This is your cookie with Bob.

Very annoyed, Bob, right now.

All right, guys.

Imagine harvesting drinking water from the air.

But that's not entirely new.

I've read about it.

I've been reading about that technology for years.

It has been done before, but never has it been done as simply or efficiently as what these MIT engineers have recently achieved.

Really fascinating.

Really excited about this.

So they've created a window-sized device, which was a nice size for such a device.

that passively extracts clean drinking water directly from the air, even in incredibly dry environments.

Now, what's the magic word here?

It's passive because that's one of the major breakthroughs.

It needs no external energy, no electricity, no solar panels, and no batteries.

And that's just that really sets it above and beyond any other similar device.

So, how does this guy work?

Key here is this special vertical panel using aerogel that's enclosed in a glass chamber.

Now, you guys remember we've talked about aerogels a few times in the past.

Typically, though, the context is that it's the lightest material ever engineered near the density of air.

It really is like you could hold it in your hand and not even realize it's in your hand.

Amazingly rarefied, but they also have other amazing properties.

And one of them, the specific amazing property in this specific type of hydrogel, is that it absorbs water from the air at night, causing it to swell.

So when it cools down, it swells.

pulls the water out of the air and then the following day it shrinks as the heat gets hot it gets hotter and hotter during the day it shrinks and it makes it release the water vapor, which then condenses on the glass, and then that condensation just flows down into a collection tube.

Now, they did field tests.

Where do you think they did field tests?

The Sahara.

Sahara.

Death Valley.

They went to one of the driest places on the earth to test this.

Because if it's going to work there, that's pretty amazing.

And they show that they could collect 160 milliliters or about two-thirds of a cup in desert conditions.

And

they haven't done tests yet, but they extrapolate that in the more humid environments, it would be even, you know, of course, even more dramatic because there's water everywhere in the air.

But, Bob, that was how much volume, though.

How big a device gets you that much water?

It said window-sized device is what there is.

A window-sized device.

A window-sized device.

Okay.

So, now, and of course, that anticipates my next statement here: that multiple panels then could produce enough water for an entire family.

So, imagine you have a few windows with this device in it, and then the whole, it could

give enough drinking water for the entire family.

I don't know about that.

I mean,

not in a desert, because that's like a few cups.

You need gallons a day.

I think they were talking about, all right, more than a few windows.

I mean, they would have to scale it up.

Or it would have to be in a more humid area, not in the desert.

Right, more humid area.

It's like in your home, that's how much you could produce.

You're not going to be cooking and you're probably not going to be.

Showering.

I mean, if you want to stay alive,

here's a few.

I mean,

that's the logistics of this situation.

What's it going to cost?

And

how many many can the families get?

But they were saying in the research that if you scale this up,

it could hydrate an entire family.

So

I don't know what that means, whether that's a device

that's much bigger.

It's going to be bigger.

I just don't know how much bigger it's going to be.

But they said that this can give drinking water to an entire family, say three or four people, I assume.

Bob, would this work on Tatooine?

And would you need a droid that speaks bocce?

Yeah, the bocce.

It wouldn't need to be a droid, but it's got, whatever it is, it's got to speak bocce.

That's the critical piece right there.

That's a Star Wars reference.

I got that from the Tatooine, but

context clues.

They farmed moisture with moisture of astronomers.

This is so refreshing.

Such a wonderful invention.

Just try to think of

how many lives that this can improve or even save.

It's really just smart engineering at its best.

You're essentially harvesting the second most important thing that humans need to live, water.

They're talking about future water wars.

So, you know, when water becomes scarcer and scarcer in the future and how crazy it's going to get because

everybody needs water, right?

Yeah, water and fuel

for Mad Max.

So, and of course, with the no-power source, which just makes it incredible.

I mean,

this is the kind of stuff that billionaires should be like, yeah, I'm going to spend $100 million and buy as many of these as I can and just distribute them to places that really, really need them.

That's the kind of thing that, you know, that almost none of them do, of course.

And we don't have a sense yet of how much this would cost, because

we wouldn't really know until they were mass produced.

Right.

But I mean, you're talking about some hydrogel and these

enclosed glass chambers.

I mean, and there's no power source.

I'm not thinking

it's going to be prohibitively expensive, but I have not seen any

potential prices.

Who knows?

I hope it sounds like it could be reasonably priced.

But hey, if somebody buys a lot of them and gives them away, then they're going to be free to a lot of people.

But

that kind of stuff just doesn't happen as often as it should with all these super rich people around.

So enough of that.

This has been your condensation quickie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

I want to talk about a technology development thing, too.

This may sound counterintuitive at first, but this is batteries made from depleted uranium.

Wait, this thing again?

No, no, it's not what you think.

It's not

atomic batteries.

It's just regular chemical batteries.

Isn't that what the Batmobile used?

Atomic batteries,

batteries to power, right?

Right, these are not atomic batteries, they do not get their electricity from beta decay or radioactive decay of any time, any type.

These are regular chemical batteries, but depleted uranium is the

active ingredient, is the active material of the negative electrode.

And they use iron as the positive electrode, right?

So it's a uranium-iron battery with a liquid electrolyte.

So the the japan atomic energy agency reported that they have built a prototype of this battery and tested it and it works

so

yeah devils in the details

as always

how dangerous and and how what's the energy density

the battery the prototype that they built produced 1.3 volts which is a little bit less than a double a battery which is 1.5 volts but nano volts that doesn't matter that much because you just link these things together

This would be a cell in a big battery pack, right?

Depleted uranium is very heavy.

This is not the kind of thing you would have in your cell phone or in your car.

This would be entirely for grid storage, right?

Because it's way too heavy to use for anything mobile.

Especially an iron tube, also heavy.

So these would be

very heavy batteries.

But it doesn't matter if it's grid storage, right?

Typically, a grid storage battery operates in the 400 to 800 volt range, but again, you can get up there with a battery pack.

What they said about the

capacity is that 650 tons of uranium, of depleted uranium, would have a capacity of 30,000 kilowatt hours, or roughly equivalent to the daily electricity supplied to 3,000 households in Japan.

Japan currently has 16,000 tons.

The U.S.

has 750,000 tons of depleted uranium.

So

if Japan used its entire supply, that would be enough to power 73,000 homes entirely.

In the U.S., it would be, if we used our entire supply, that would power 3.4 million homes.

Well, for how long?

That's just how much, like, for a basically that it would hold enough electricity to power that many homes for a day.

That makes sense?

Yes.

It depends on what percentage of the energy the homes are using needs to be stored in a battery throughout the course of a day.

If you're like using solar panels, storing up that energy during the day and then using it at night, what percentage are you using?

So if it's like 50%

of your daily energy use, then that would be 6.8 million homes.

Typically, grid storage, short-term battery grid storage, is anywhere between two hours at the short end and six hours at the long end.

So for say over the course of six hours,

but that might be the six hours of peak energy use.

That could be half or a third of your energy use for the day.

So it's going to be like in the U.S., it would be millions of homes, right?

It'd be hard to know exactly how much that would be.

So anyway, that's, again, that wouldn't be the only grid storage we would need, but it could be significant.

Now, why do we care?

Like, why?

is this even

why are they even researching this so first of all batteries for grid storage are great, but we don't want to use lithium-ion batteries, right?

Because we need them for cars.

Yeah.

And

we don't want to choke off that, you know, that raw material for something that it is not optimally suited for.

We want to make, for grid storage, we want to make batteries out of cheap, abundant material.

It does not matter how heavy it is.

And so, sure, uranium and iron, go right ahead, right?

The iron, there's iron salt batteries, there's other batteries like that that we're thinking of for grid storage, where weight is not an object, but we need lots of it and it needs to be cheap, cheap and abundant, right?

So the reason why the Japan Atomic Energy Agency is interested in this and researching it is because, as I said, Japan currently has to pay for 16,000 tons of storage of depleted uranium.

So if it's going to be sitting there anyway,

why not make a battery out of it, right?

That's the idea.

So what is depleted uranium?

Essentially, if you get uranium,

you mine it,

you purify it, the ore, into uranium.

But then for

nuclear power plants, you have to enrich the uranium.

When you enrich it, you basically increase the percentage of the fissible, like the more highly fissible uranium.

So enriched uranium is mostly U-235,

which is highly radioactive.

It's mostly removed from these, the highly radioactive isotopes are removed from the uranium.

That's your enriched uranium.

What you're left with is

the low-level radioactive uranium.

That's the depleted uranium.

That's what's low-level.

Yeah, so depleted uranium is mostly U-238, which has a half-life of...

4.468 billion years.

Now you think, oh my god, it's never going to go away.

But the thing thing is,

the longer the half-life, the lower the level of radiation.

Right, right.

So that's what you want.

So low-level radiation has super high half-life.

That's the point.

The stuff with a shorter half-life, it's decaying faster, so it's

more radioactive over a shorter period of time.

So that makes sense.

Yeah, so

U238 depleted uranium.

It's very, very low-level radioactivity.

You would still want to have some shielding.

but again, it's so low level, it's not a big deal at all.

But there are laws, right?

So you'd have to make sure you're complying with the International Atomic Agency rules on storing depleted uranium.

But again, it's not that big a deal.

This way, rather than just having it sit in storage that you're paying for, you could build batteries out of it, right?

And just, and now it's sitting...

in storage as a grid battery and you're using up the material that you you don't have to use other raw material for.

What's the relationship, though, between this radiation and the battery?

Nothing.

All right, so there's no link there.

I thought they were maybe using it for some part of the process.

Nope.

Okay.

Absolutely nothing.

So what's the bone?

What's the benefit?

As I said, the benefit is you're using up something you need to store anyway.

Yeah, it's

magic.

And that's the only benefit?

And you're not using something that's better suited for other uses.

You're not using lithium.

Lithium.

Yeah.

Got you.

That's it.

All right, I guess that's fine.

That's really it.

The energy capacity is kind of irrelevant as long as it's reasonable order of magnitude.

Again, it doesn't matter if you have

nanovolts.

Yeah, a city block

that weighs tons, and that's your grid storage.

Here's an idea.

So you know that with wind turbines, they have to sit upon a massive block of concrete, right?

To make that the power station level, I suppose.

To anchor it, to anchor it.

Otherwise the thing would blow over.

And that is

the most significant part of the carbon footprint of building a wind turbine is its

cement base.

Its concrete base.

So this can store the energy from the windmill and hold it in place.

Exactly.

It's really heavy.

In this case, the heaviness is a feature, not a bug.

And you say, all right, just going to put that wind turbine on a massive base of a uranium-iron battery.

And now that's the grid storage for that wind turbine.

Sweet.

I like that.

Yeah.

And the birds will die.

And the birds will die not from hitting it, but from the radiation.

No, if the radiation is not going to be a lot of money.

Oh, no one knows even it's so low.

Yeah, it's not really hazardous.

It's like almost backward formation at that point.

And again, it's going to, by definition, be under the ground, right?

So that's cool.

Yeah, there's a good synergy of ideas in there.

I think that's what we need to do.

I really hate the idea of using lithium-ion batteries for grid storage.

Oh, my God.

But that's what's happening now.

It's happening just because it's cheap.

You know, it's like

cost-effective in the short run, but it's short-sighted.

It is like, oh, you're using up these resources we need for EV batteries and maybe plane batteries.

Don't use it for grid storage.

That's humanity now.

Don't you care about the next quarter.

No long-term planning.

I mean, there are people developing batteries that are better suited for grid storage.

This is one of those ideas.

I think the iron saw battery is the other idea,

which I'm hoping also, which is already working to some extent, but it needs to like you need to scale it up, you need to mass produce it, you know what I mean?

So these things need to happen, and we need to stop using lithium-ion batteries for grid storage.

All right, we need more depleted uranium.

Yes, and we

get rid of that,

gets rid of a huge component of nuclear waste.

I like that too.

All right, Kara, tell us about earthquakes in Russia.

Yeah, well,

yeah, if you all remember, I hope you remember, it was what, like six days ago now, maybe seven.

Yeah, big 8.8 tsunami.

Yeah, so there was an 8.8, it's called a megathrust earthquake.

So very high magnitude, lots of damage.

I don't know why I picked this news item today because it is full of names.

I cannot pronounce it.

I think I'm filling in for Jay this week.

Yeah.

So it's in the

it was in the Kamchatka region.

So that's the Kamchatka Peninsula Peninsula off the eastern coast.

And it wasn't the first large earthquake that occurred, even in this area.

I think that there have been sort of megathrust earthquakes in 1737, 1841, 1923, twice in 1923, actually, 1952, and then this one in 2025.

Some of them were even larger, but they weren't, they were prior to using the kind of modern tools that we have.

So when you look at earthquakes from, let's say, here, we're looking at like 50, 60 years ago.

No, 50 years ago, we were already assigning.

Yeah, so the 1952 Kamchatka earthquake is recorded as 9.0.

Yeah, it was revised to 9.0.

1964 in Alaska, 9.2.

That's the biggest

thing.

Well, there was a potential.

But here's the problem.

Like 1737, we couldn't actually measure it, so we had to estimate it.

But the estimate is that it it was a 9.3.

Yeah, like in quite chili 9.3.

Yeah, it could have been larger.

But in 1960, oh, for sure.

This was not the largest earthquake on record.

These are all ring of fire.

That's getting close to the theoretical maximum, 9.5.

Remember, this is a logarithmic scale.

9 is 10 times more energetic than 8.

So this earthquake was thought to be the sixth strongest, but it's tied with two others for that title, a 1906 Ecuador-Colombia earthquake and a 2010 Chile earthquake.

Again, we're only talking about earthquakes that were actually recorded by seismometers.

Prior to that, there's estimates, but we can't really rank them.

It was the most powerful earthquake recorded since 2011.

So there's been some amount of time since we've had the one that caused the Fukushima?

Oh, no, it wasn't the Fukushima that was the last one.

It was the Tohoku earthquake, Great East Japan earthquake.

There There was a 9.0 in March of 2011.

Which earthquake?

Was it the Tokohohima, the one that I just mentioned?

That was it.

So that was the most recent stronger earthquake.

So this is the next strongest since then.

And here's the thing that's so interesting about, I mean, whatever.

We could go off on a tangent when it comes to the kind of strength or, you know, the...

the seismic strength of an earthquake as measured by seismometers.

It's not always directly correlated to loss of life, to damage.

Obviously, like when there's a nuclear power plant right there, that's a bad thing.

This earthquake, for example, in

Kamchatka, we thought there was going to be pretty horrific tsunamis, right?

Like there were warnings

across the Pacific ring.

And what we found was that they really weren't too bad.

There were tsunamis.

It seems like the worst damage was actually in Russia itself and then in Japan.

But pretty much the waves were about three feet or less in most of the places where people expected much, much larger waves.

8.8 could have produced

amazingly destructive tsunamis,

but it's all very contingent.

There's lots of reasons for them to be amplified or not.

So it's kind of hard to predict exactly what's going to happen and where.

So that's what I think.

They got lucky, yeah.

Yeah, 100%.

It can be very, very hard to predict these things.

And one thing that's very hard to predict, and that's really what I wanted to focus on today, is the ⁇ you could call it a co-occurrence, but probably like an immediate following of a large earthquake with volcanic eruption.

So there have been six different Russian volcanoes that have erupted.

You don't hear much in the news about Russian volcanoes, right?

When did the last time we talked about about that?

But as you said right at the beginning, Evan, this is part of the ring of fire.

And there are many volcanoes in this region.

So six have erupted since the original earthquake and its aftershocks.

And there's one more that scientists think might erupt.

But I think that...

Part of the reason this is so intriguing to me is because it's one of these areas where we're just not good at prediction.

We're not great at predicting earthquakes.

We've talked about this a lot, right?

We have like huge error bars on this sort of thing.

We're really good at recognizing them when they start happening and then putting out really quick alerts.

We have some indications when there is, you know, kind of perturbations or like seismic activity that's abnormal, but we still don't really know.

And I think it's really hard to say that the earthquake itself caused the eruptions.

A lot of people are really cautioning using that kind of language.

They're saying it's more likely that the quake intensified these eruptions, or that the same thing that caused the quake caused the eruptions, but the quake itself was not the direct instigator of the eruptions.

So, like, why would I?

I could read you all the different, actually, maybe I will because I got to be Jay right now.

Because why not?

It looks like we're going to get emails here.

Shivaluk, Besmiani, Karimsky, Avachinsky, and ooh, this one's really fun, Krushininikov all followed suit after the earthquake.

That last one that I just said, again, Krushininikov, this had been dormant for hundreds of years.

I think the last eruption.

I'm seeing it some places

500 and some places 600.

Yeah, between 500 and 600 years ago was the last time that that volcano erupted that was a nice long sleep what would cause a volcano to erupt very quickly after an earthquake well it collapses a um a magma what do they call it a dome or something under under the volcano that gives magma access to the um to the volcano again um something like that

well if we If we think about what an earthquake actually is, right?

Like the setting, earthquakes are different in different parts of the world.

But the setting of the Kamchatka earthquake is a convergent plate where the Pacific is subducting underneath the plate next to it.

It looks like it's between 3 and 3.5 inches every year, give or take.

It's been continuous since the Cretaceous.

So there's been seismic activity in this area for a really long time.

We mentioned before these huge earthquakes that were both recorded and estimated prior to that.

But when you have that type of seismic activity, that's very similar, or it's the same seismic activity that contributes to volcanic activity.

And so it's very difficult to say that the shake of the earth is what caused these volcanoes to actually erupt, like click into sort of going from dormancy to eruption.

And it's much more likely that their seismic activity that the seismic activity that was occurring in this region was already churning those volcanoes and getting them ready.

And that the magma was, the steam was already starting to build up.

And that the earthquake itself, you're right, Bob, it may have like collapsed something, shifted something in such a way that some of that energy could escape.

But ultimately, it's very likely that they were going to erupt around this time anyway.

And that maybe they were just exacerbated.

I love this quote from the USGS where they said, said, if the conditions exist like we've been talking about, where these volcanoes are like poised to erupt and they have like a lot of eruptible magma and pressure that's been building up, they said, quote, it's possible that large tectonic earthquakes might cause dissolved gases to come out of the magma like a shaken soda bottle, increasing the pressure and possibly leading to an eruption.

But they really don't know.

So it's really interesting reading about this online because all these different experts who are like giants in the field are still kind of speculating exactly what's going on and why it's happening.

To a degree.

Yeah, yeah.

But it does seem like there could be, as I mentioned, a seventh volcano that could erupt because they are recognizing some seismic activity beneath it.

They're recognizing some like perturbations.

And so, you know, it may, it may not, but they have identified that seventh volcano as well to as something to keep an eye on.

It would seem to be a great place to do some scientific research to answer some of these questions.

And even if it were, I mean, think about it, like the crash in Innikov, like you just got to wait around 500 years.

You know, it's hard with volcanoes because they're just hard to predict.

So, yes, I think obviously there probably is research going on.

There are seismometers in place and there are individuals collecting data, but you can't just set up and go, okay, we know it's going to blow tomorrow.

So let's see what happens.

All right.

Thanks, Kara.

Yep.

Cool.

Evan, what's the update on the Shroud of Turin?

Yeah, Shroud of Turin update.

It was about a year ago.

Is he still dead?

Oh,

who's he?

We'll get to that, Bob.

Who knows, right?

Bob,

it was a year ago when we last visited the subject of the Shroud of Turin.

Kara, I had asked you at that time if you had ever heard of it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I wrote it down in my notes.

Yes, you did.

And yes, but today I know, I don't have to ask that question.

I know you heard of it because we at least discussed it a year ago.

But what has changed in a year?

What's the latest and greatest news about the Shroud that brings it back into the news this week?

I'm going to tell you, but first, for the benefit of those in the audience, especially younger listeners who may have never heard of the Shroud of Turin, I will give you the quick background.

It all started about

13.8 billion years ago.

Fast Fast forward to the year 33 ACE, when the headlines at the time was that a man from Nazareth was convicted of treason against the Holy Roman Empire.

His name, Jesus Christ.

The punishment, death by crucifixion.

Nasty way to go, but go he did.

Once dead, a man named Joe from a place called Arimathea took his body down, and with the help of a friend named Nicodemus, they cleaned the body, clothed it, wrapped it in a linen shroud, and buried it in a rock tomb.

It is that linen shroud, that burial cloth, the one and only burial cloth that shrouded Jesus' dead body.

It is believed by many faithful people to have found its way after some time to a temple in Turin, Italy in the 16th century.

Yep, that's about 1,500 years after Jesus' death.

But he was mostly dead, right?

Mostly dead.

No, he was dead.

They declared him dead.

No, man.

And then went in there a few days later.

He wasn't there.

I'd say he was mostly dead.

Yeah, well,

that's a fair point, Bob.

I'll give you a few.

Out of scope.

Out of scope, though.

Move on.

Where was the shroud for those 1,500 years prior to that?

Most of that time, that is unknown as to where it was.

Is that the new bit they found?

No, not really.

I'm getting to it.

But the shroud is considered to be a holy relic by the faithful.

It bears the image of a man.

Perhaps the radiance of the supposed resurrection impressed an image of Jesus' likeness onto the cloth itself.

That's the story.

You know, it has his facial features, his facial hair is on there, beard, mustache, some red pigmentation resembling that of bloodstains, ooh, which you would have had.

And it's in the negative, though, that the details really come out, though, right?

The negative.

Yes, yes, that is true.

If you were to take it and do the negative and like

do the negative like a photograph, right, you'd really be able to see it.

And this is what they're saying.

They are saying, therefore, this is the Shroud of Turin.

But is it true?

What's the evidence?

Has it been looked at and investigated properly?

Absolutely, it has.

None of this holds up under examination.

Most notably, the late great Dr.

Joe Nicol, gentleman

detective.

Oh, we miss him.

He delved as deeply as anyone into the origin of the Shroud of Turin.

Here's what he found.

The linen was of medieval origin, 13th to 14th century, not the first century.

Radiocarbon dating, thank you very much.

Three independent analyses have come back to the same conclusion.

And like I said, there's no documented history of this artifact until the 14th century, as all of a sudden it just really started to exist around that time.

The image is not the result of a miraculous or supernatural process, but was likely created using a combination of artistic methods, including painting or rubbing pigment onto the cloth.

And there was something not quite right about the blood.

The flow and distribution of the blood are inconsistent with what would be expected from a real crucified body.

But it's easy enough to artistically apply it using known methods of art on fabric during the mid-14th century, also in line.

And what else was going on at the time of the 14th century?

There was an industry of relic creation occurring.

You know, craftspeople selling the arts to churches all over Europe to help local orders attract parishioners.

So, this would be consistent with the evidence that the linen cloth was in the 14th century and 15th century a contemporary item, not a relic, a holy relic.

So that's what the science and the evidence has to say about it.

Here's the news.

Can you imagine the guy who created that?

If he was alive,

holy crap, man.

Have the rights to that.

Can you imagine it's a religious relic centuries later?

He'd be laughing his ass off.

Or retaining the rights and cashing in big time on that one.

But you're right.

That's neither near

here nor there.

But what is here is that

a new analysis of the Shroud has been done.

And here's the title of the article I read: Image on the Shroud of Turin May Not Belong to a Real Human.

Okay.

Cthulhu?

Yeah, exactly.

That would make me so happy.

There's a gentleman named Cicero Moraeus.

who is a 3D designer and researcher, and he has written a paper which has been published in the journal called Archaeometry.

And he claims that the image is not the likeness of a real human.

His work supports a hypothesis which was put forward first in the 1970s that argues the Shroud's image is what?

Artwork, right?

Under his hypothesis, the image was probably made by placing a sheet on top of a low-relief sculpture.

slightly raised from its background, and then rubbed.

You know, a rubbing.

Right.

Did you ever, I did...

Doomstone rubbing?

Yes.

In elementary school, they would take us to a place in which you, you know, whatever, a church or wherever, you would get your cloth and your chalk or your charcoal and do rubbings.

Same idea.

Yeah.

On something that was slightly raised.

So,

same idea here.

The title of his paper is called Image Formation on the Holy Shroud: A Digital 3D Approach.

This is it.

So, this is where he used a different technique to sort of come to his conclusion.

I'll read from the abstract on his paper.

Using free and open source software, parametric modeling of a human body, fabric dynamics, simulation, and contact area mapping was what was used to do this analysis.

Two scenarios were compared, the projection of a three-dimensional human model and that of a low-relief model.

So a real human body, as if it, you know, use a three-dimensional human model, as if it was a real full body, versus a low-relief, rubbing that I described.

The results demonstrate that the contact pattern generated by the low relief model is more compatible with the shrouds image, showing less anatomical distortion and greater fidelity to the observed contours, while the projection of a 3D body results in a significantly distorted image.

So, if you were to have taken that shroud and wrapped it around a body, okay, and let it sit there and let the blood or whatever else images, features of the body get into the cloth, and then you would take the cloth off of that person.

Everything about it would be distorted.

It would not look as the shroud of Taurin looks, in which it looks like,

you know,

just a piece of artwork of a person with normal proportions.

If you did it with a real body, it would stretch everything out.

It wouldn't look the way it does if it was really wrapped in a body.

I think Joe Nicol would have been delighted to read this.

Yeah, but he said that.

He concluded that himself.

And this is just a confirmation confirmation of prior including the correct.

This is a confirmation.

Yeah, that this is just with more high-tech detail, but this is exactly what real scientists have been saying for decades, that it's just exactly what you're saying.

If this was an actual person, it would be distorted, and so this is consistent with a relief.

So this is not surprising in the slightest.

And he said anybody could have done this analysis.

It's free, open source software, readily available by anyone.

Anyone can do it.

In fact,

when I went to the paper to read it, he gives a link to a video that he made in which you can do this on yourself at home.

Here's what you do.

Take some makeup and put it on your face.

First, you get cleaned.

Well, he skipped that part.

But

put it all over your face, your ears, and everything.

Then go ahead and take like a paper towel, okay?

And then press it up against your face, right?

Make sure, rub it so that it's all there.

If you take that off and then you look at it, what do you you have?

You have a distorted, stretched-out

face on your cloth.

He said,

It's so easy, you just do it at home yourself to get the idea of what's really going on here.

It's not too dissimilar to a projection mapping

of the Earth, because you're taking a three-dimensional globe and you're turning it into a two-dimensional flat object, so there's distortion.

That's why Mercator projection is so distorted because of that, that transition from 3D to 2D.

So, it's the same thing here.

You're going going from a 3D body to a 2D shroud has more distortion than a less 3D body, if you will, like

the relief.

And that he did this using the Shroud of Turin, which is a well-known item, artifact, something that a lot of people on the planet are very familiar with.

He says it highlights the potential of digital technologies to address or unravel historical mysteries, intertwining science, art, and technology in a collaborative and reflective search for answers.

So

good on him.

Yeah, as Joe would like to point out, there's multiple independent lines of evidence that all point to the same period of time, right?

What was it, the 16th century?

Yeah, 14th century.

It was the same

artistic tradition, techniques used,

the dating, the carbon dating of the cloth itself, and the provenance.

The appearance.

Yeah, the appearance and the tradition of, again, there was a vibrant market of fake

relics, fake chalices, all sorts of trinkets.

Yeah, so it it's like all lines up perfectly well, right?

Yep.

Yep.

No miracles required.

Thank you.

Did you come across any of the the shroud apologist responses to this?

Like what the special pleading has got to start at some point.

Well, I think it's something like, oh, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Not specifically to not no, not specifically to this article.

It's a classic.

But you're right, Steve.

This will not dissuade those of

the strongest faith by by any stretch by any stretch it's all part of the miracle steve you see right normally yes if this were not the son of god or something like that yeah on a normal human you're right you would have all those distortions but not the son of god

no god all right thanks sevan bob tell us about the web of space what is that oh oh web of space the space web

space web the spatial web well there's a james webb telescope does it have to do with that completely unrelated um but close So recently the IEEE ratified a new internet standard called P2874.

So sounds unremarkable, right?

But this new standard could usher in what many are calling Web 3.0.

So you guys have heard of the IEEE, right?

You've heard of them.

This is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and it has its roots that go back to the late 1800s.

Didn't know that.

But it officially formed as it is now about a year before Steve was born, which, as we know, is also a really, really long time ago.

And they're just doing amazing things.

So, this is the biggest technical professional organization with 420,000 members, including engineers, scientists, and technologists around the globe.

And their prime directive, if you will, is to foster technological innovation and excellence to benefit humanity.

So, that sounds pretty good to me.

But, why do these punks get to create the influential standards for global technology, including the internet itself, no less?

Why do these guys get to do that?

And the answer is because they have, well, they have everything our current government doesn't have.

They've got broad technical expertise and authority.

They've got impartiality and transparency.

And probably most importantly, they have global credibility.

You mean there isn't one figurehead at the top, just kind of.

No, they have all those things.

So this makes IEEE

what's called an SDO, a standards developing organization.

And in that role, they have over and over again gained the trust of businesses and innovators all over the world.

So, why do you think that trust is specifically important in this scenario?

Safety.

Yeah, there's safety.

But what it does really, though, is it gives countries, businesses, and innovators worldwide, these are people all over, business people all over the world, the confidence, right, the confidence to adopt and invest in these new IEEE standards, right?

Because if you, if this was just some fly-by-night company that's like, oh, here, I've got these standards for Web 3.0,

Who's going to put millions of dollars into adopting and investing in these standards?

Nobody.

So

you need an SDO if you want worldwide corporations involved in technology development to actually incorporate these standards.

So

it's a really special organization.

So what do these standards do?

The key here is to help tech speak the same language.

Right, Steve?

Like, botch it.

That's the goal.

To ensure they can work together no matter how diverse the products or the technologies are.

Nobody likes dealing with proprietary technologies and cords and stuff.

And connectors only.

Oh, my God.

Right.

USB connectors versus USB 2 versus

FireWire and all that craziness.

And so the IEEE has given us critical standards that we use all the time.

Listen to this list.

Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB,

HDMI, floating point arithmetic.

Hello, to name just a few of these.

And I try to imagine life without those standards, those specific standards.

And it kind of hurts.

It's like, wow, I can't even imagine that.

So to understand these latest approved standards, they were just approved, I think, just a couple of months ago, to understand these new standards, let's start, though, with Web 1.0, and we'll work towards the modern day.

So Web 1.0 started in the 90s and started with very simple, static, read-only pages connected through these standards that we use all day, every day, but rarely think about.

And standards that you don't think about, those are the successful standards right there.

That's the goal.

So these standards for Web 1.0 in the 90s was URLs, right?

Uniforms, resource locators, the addresses

pointing us to the web pages.

Then there's HTML, hypertext markup language.

That's the code that's formatting these pages.

And then there's HTTP, the hypertext transfer protocol.

This communication protocol lets computers request and receive these web pages.

And by the way, these standards, these specific standards, were not created by the IEEE.

These initial standards for the web were created by the famous Tim Berners-Lee at CERN.

This guy's name should be known by many, many more people.

This is the guy that

really started this.

So kudos to Berners-Lee there.

But of course, IEEE has come up with other standards involved with the web that's related to the web, of course, as well.

So, all right, so as I said, these pages were initially static and they were read-only, right?

Nothing, they were great, but they weren't very special compared to what we're seeing today.

And that's Web 2.0, which started in the early 2000s.

It saw the appearance of things like interactivity really for the first time.

It saw user-generated content like, what are we doing right now?

We're podcasting.

Podcasting.

Right, that's Web 2.0 right there, classic.

And blogging.

2.0 also famously, or should I say infamously, saw the rise of the now ubiquitous what?

Social media platforms that may or may not actually eventually destroy our civilization as we know it.

But the jury's still out on that one.

That's a slow K with a

short half-life.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Man, nobody saw.

Some people did, but don't get me started.

Okay, next is presumably, wait, one, two, yes, three.

After that, it becomes Web 3.0.

And the spatial web could become synonymous with that term.

Who knows?

I I think it seems likely, but you never know how things are going to turn out.

But so a good way to think of Web 3.0 is it's not necessarily Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0.

It kind of is, but it's really the third foundational protocol layer to the internet, right?

Something that these foundational layers are truly transformative.

So in the 70s, we had...

What do we have in the 70s?

This one might be a little tougher.

We had TCPIP, which is a protocol that created essentially

modern networked computers, basically the internet before the web.

So

this allowed computers to be networked together and to share information.

So, I mean, it's not the web, but it's the internet.

This is like the basis of the internet before the World Wide Web became a thing.

And then in the 1990s, we had the second foundational protocol, and that's the HTTP and HTML.

That's what created the World Wide Web as we know it today.

And then today,

this third foundational protocol could potentially be HSML and HSTP,

which is transforming web pages essentially into a dynamic real-time spatial web.

So let's go over these new protocols here.

So instead of HTML, right, the markup language that formats the web 2.0 and web 1.0, we have HSML, that's hyperspace modeling language.

So HSML doesn't just describe static pages.

Instead, it describes the nouns and the verbs of the spatial web, if you will, the things, the people, the places, and crucially, though, how they behave and interact over time.

That's an important one.

That's a critical component.

So it's the nouns and the verbs, the people, places, and things, but also how they behave and interact over time.

Then next, we have, instead of HTTP, you know, all the addresses use that protocol, hypertext transfer protocol, we now have HSTP.

That's the hyperspace transaction protocol.

This protocol describes the rules and the policies.

It's all about the rules and the policies.

So if there's a transaction taking place or if two entities are actually interacting within the spatial web, the HSTP describes how that happens and how it happens securely.

I love how security is an integral part of

this new protocol, this new standard that they're coming up with.

So, all right, HSTP talks about the rules and the policies and

how they interact with transactions or anything that interacts, whether it's a person and a bot, whether it's a drone and an automated vehicle.

It's just like how they deal with each other.

That's what the HSTP deals with.

The final element here that ties all this together is what's called UDG.

That's the universal domain graph.

So this is analogous to the social graph in Web 2.0.

Are you guys familiar with the social graph?

Nope.

I hadn't heard too much about it either.

The social graph maps relationships and interactions primarily between people, right?

So, this so Facebook uses this, Twitter uses this, because

it's critical for those tools, Facebook and Twitter and others,

to know the relationships and the interactions between people.

So, that's the social graph.

So, this UDG is related to that.

It's similar to that, but it's for Web 3.0, right?

So, all of these entities and rules that I've mentioned, right,

they live

on this UDG.

So, it's kind of like a shared real-time map of everything everywhere

that's interconnected in the spatial web.

It's a map.

The UDG is a map of everything and how it's connected everywhere within the spatial web.

It's kind of like a live directory of the spatial web universe.

I've been trying to find a good definition, a good description of the spatial web beyond what I've been laying out here.

I found a good one on the Global News Wire.

It said,

just as past IEEE standards like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth have catalyzed global device interoperability, the spatial web standards aim to standardize secure communication, collaboration, and control among AI agents, Internet of Things devices, robots, digital twins, and human users in digital and physical environments.

So that's a decent overview as any that I came across for the spatial web.

All right, so the last segment here is how is the spatial web going to work?

Because it might be hard to extrapolate from all these initialisms and complex ideas that I've mentioned.

So, how is it going to work?

So, here's a couple of examples of how it could be utilized.

So, let's use drones as a first example.

Today, we've got drones, and the behaviors of drones are typically hard-coded right at the factory.

They're kind of limited and they're difficult to enforce.

You can just fly them anywhere you want and do whatever you want with them.

But with the spatial web, regulators can define drone behaviors dynamically within the HSML code.

Okay, so for instance, a spatial policy

could state something like: no drone can fly above 120 meters after sunset or within 500 meters of a hospital.

So that could be encoded

within these protocols for drones.

So if you're an entity that's defined as a drone, then

you will have to follow those rules.

So the drone then would automatically query the real-time spatial data and enforce those rules instantly.

No humans are needed.

So as the drone moves into the airspace within 500 meters of a hospital, that would kick in from the spatial web.

It would kick in and be like, oh, I can't go in there.

And it would be stopped.

And another thing that occurred to me is that on top of that, if you wanted to change that rule, say you wanted to change the rule that no drone can go within 600 meters of the hospital, then you would just change it on the spatial web and that would propagate through the web and then that would affect all the drone behavior and all the drones that happen to go near that and they would you wouldn't have to update say the firmware on on every drone that's made right so it would be a simple update to change that let's go through another scenario here so you've got an ambulance you you're in an ambulance and the ambulance needs to notify the area that it's driving through that hey that i'm coming that it's coming it's going really fast it's gotten it's on it's an emergency it's got to get to the hospital and it wants to notify um an area that that it's coming so normally you just like you listen listen for the you listen for the sound, the iconic sound of the ambulance.

And if you notice it, if you're not listening to music or if you're not, say, an autonomous vehicle that might not be optimized to deal with an ambulance, there could be some problems.

It could slow down the ambulance.

And as you know, with an ambulance, minutes could be.

the difference between life and death.

So what the ambulance could do is that it could issue a spatial web query.

And that query would be, find all autonomous vehicles and traffic infrastructure within 200 200 meters along my route.

And then using HSTP, the ambulance would then automatically coordinate all the green lights.

It would redirect traffic safely out of the way.

And it could even warn pedestrians through their smart devices that there's an ambulance coming right through here.

It's a big past or something.

Right.

So

everything would be automatically coordinated.

There wouldn't need to be any people in the loop to slow it down and cause any delay.

So this would be something that would be embedded within the spatial web itself, and and it would happen automatically based on these rules that have been set up in the HSML code and things like that.

So, that's just a few of the examples of what the spatial web would be capable of.

It's only, there's probably a thousand you could give, but I hope it gives you just a little bit of a flavor of what we may see in the coming years as the spatial web becomes implemented, if it does become more fully implemented.

I mean, these standards

have been signed off for by the IEEE, so

businesses and innovators will start potentially taking advantage and creating and creating this.

There's still a lot of questions to be answered on how things like, where are these files going to live?

Are they going to live on cloud servers?

Are they going to live elsewhere?

A lot of these answers haven't been answered yet.

A lot of these questions haven't been answered yet.

But it's just the beginning of it, really.

And we'll see if it really takes off and we'll see if Web3.0 actually becomes a thing.

Yeah, it's always really hard to think about things like this.

How do things get implemented in the real world?

You never know until you actually try to do it.

You know, like, what's the workflow going to be?

Who's going to enter in this information?

How's it actually going to function in the hands of people?

And of course, you always give examples of, here are the wonderful things we can do with it, but you also want to think of here are all the horrible things people will do with it.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, and there are other agencies that ring in on this.

Like there's HIPAA requirements for medical stuff, right?

So

it has to peg all those holes,

whatever bureaucracies or things are in place to protect people.

Yeah, I'm glad that they're taking security very seriously.

It's embedded within the system.

It has to be.

And it's got to be, especially if

there's going to be a digital duplicate of you,

your current status, medical status, say,

you can't just have anybody grabbing that most private information.

It has to be extremely secure.

And will that security slow it down?

Will it become vulnerable?

Who knows?

So, yeah, there's lots of questions to ask, but this is kind of the direction

could be possible.

We could be potentially seeing the beginnings of this in really in the next few years.

I mean, in 1991,

the World Wide Web Protocols and standards were laid out by Berners-Lee, and the first web browser was two years later in

1993.

So,

you know, it takes a little while, but a few years, even five years is not really that long after all.

We could potentially be seeing some of this.

They have done examples of this, small networks that use this with some success for sure.

So, that has happened.

But I think we need to do just bigger, more testing and bigger errors, and they'll just get bigger and bigger.

And from there, they could potentially become what we eventually will call Web 3.0.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

All right, we're going to do one or two emails.

First one comes from Graham, and Graham writes, I just read this, and it seems too good to be true.

Opinion?

And then he links to an article from the Good News Network.

Good news, everyone.

Australia's revolutionary hydrogen powder is easier and cheaper to use for clean energy.

So

this is, you know, this is the article reads

like a lot of hype, you know what I mean?

Yes,

but let's just do.

Let's look at the specific details.

A company has developed a powder, sodium borohydride,

which they say is a convenient way to store hydrogen.

He combined it with sodium and boron, whatever some chemical process, it creates NaBH4, has four hydrogen in there, and then they say it's a component in the dyeing of paper, so it's already something that exists in industry.

And then to get the hydrogen out, you have to heat it up.

So they say this is more energy efficient than liquid hydrogen, right, cooling it down to negative 250 degrees Celsius.

And it's also more energy efficient than compressing the hydrogen.

Compressing the hydrogen in a tank takes a lot of energy, actually.

It's also safer, you know, than storing tanks of compressed hydrogen.

How's the density in terms of energy density compared to those other methods?

Yeah, they didn't give a specific number there, but they compared it to the cost of transporting hydrogen in different forms.

So you could transport hydrogen as like liquid hydrogen, as water, right?

As ammonia, and as sodium borohydride.

And previously, ammonia would be like the cheapest way to just transport a lot of hydrogen.

And that they said $7.9

per kilogram.

They said this would be 15% cheaper.

First of all, it's not toxic like ammonia is, so it's easier to store.

So why is this a big deal?

Why do we care about this?

And this is coming out of Australia, and so they are particularly interested in this because one of the main limiting factors in the hydrogen economy is transporting the hydrogen, moving it around.

Hydrogen is a very light element.

It's the lightest, right?

And it's very hard to contain.

It leaks easily and it erodes the containers that it's in.

And so, you know, if you're

piping it around is very inefficient, compressing it, again, is very inefficient.

So there's just no great way

to move it around, which is a huge limiting factor in any heavily hydrogen-based system.

What about dehydrated water?

Yeah, I mean, so you could, yes, you could certainly.

That was a joke.

No, no, but you could transport water around and then you electrolyze it on site to produce your hydrogen, right?

That's one way of doing dehydrated water.

That would take

dehydrated water.

Yeah, that would do it.

Gotcha.

But

what Australia plans on doing, so Australia is, we've been there, right?

It's a big country, and the middle of it is not a lot of people.

No.

But the vast middle is a lot of desert.

So they have a lot of sunshine, not a lot of people.

And they're one of the countries where it's actually very entirely feasible to have an entire renewable energy system.

Just

very easy for them to just, they don't first of all don't need nearly as much energy, say, as the US does, and they can overproduce solar power very easily because they have some they have the land and the sunshine to do it.

They're also looking into pumped hydro.

They might be an early adopter there.

But what what they're planning on they have so much sunshine.

What they're planning on doing is overproducing solar power and then using that overcapacity of solar power, like more far more than they need just to power their own country,

to produce green hydrogen and then sell that hydrogen to the world, right?

So they're trying to develop a green hydrogen industry, which would be great.

Because right now, something like 1% or less than 1% of hydrogen in the world is green hydrogen.

It's mostly gray hydrogen.

Okay.

Remember, the hydrogen has all the colors depending on where it comes from.

Most of the hydrogen we're using in industry is basically sourced from fossil fuel.

And it's worse than actually just burning the fossil fuel.

Oh, geez.

So if you are driving a hydrogen fuel cell car and you think you're doing something good for the environment, you're not.

It's actually worse.

Worse.

It's just a bunch of inefficiencies in the system.

It would only be better for the environment if the hydrogen were either...

white or green.

The white hydrogen means we mine it directly from the earth.

But that's we've talked about that before on the show.

We don't know how much hydrogen is down there.

This is just in the experimental and exploration phase at this point.

The hope is that we'll find significant deposits of naturally occurring hydrogen trapped in pockets

in geological locations where it won't leak out to the surface.

And since that's already in hydrogen form, we don't have to spend energy

to make the hydrogen, right?

So that would be fine.

That's the dream.

Or green hydrogen, which is almost entirely from electrolyzing water.

But then the question is, where did the energy come from to electrolyze the water?

If you're burning diesel fuel to electrolyze the water or whatever,

it's not green, right?

You have to be using renewable energy.

But if you're using solar power to hydrolyze the water, to create the hydrogen, then you're converting the hydrogen into a restorable, transportable form, then that's a green system.

So that's what Australia is hoping to do.

I wish them luck.

I hope it all works out.

I think

it's perfect.

I don't think it's a game changer because, again, this is not a source of energy, right?

This is just a way of storing one form of energy.

I also don't think, even with this powder,

the sodium borohydride, it's still not going to make it a good idea to, in my opinion, to have a hydrogen fuel-celled car.

Battery EV car is always going to be more efficient.

It's going to be better.

But there are some industries that are hard to decarbonize and they're hard to electrify, like the steel industry, for example.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

And so but if you have a source of a lot of green hydrogen, that can vastly decarbonize that industry.

So hydrogen is most useful for industrial use, not for like the transportation sector.

But it's only good if it's green hydrogen.

And we just don't have again, it's less than 1%.

We just don't don't have we're just not cranking out green hydrogen.

And so until we do, there's really no point in trying to use a lot of hydrogen to do stuff.

It actually could in many contexts be a net negative.

And again, part of the reason why and uh the other thing to think about is and this is why I think Australia and places like that might be an exception.

Like in the U.S., it would be pointless to build a solar farm that was making hydrogen because we could just use it to make electricity.

You know what I mean?

And until

our energy sector is low carbon entirely,

you're far better off using green energy as energy rather than to make hydrogen.

Every time you add a step, second law of thermodynamics, you add a certain inefficiency into the system.

Unavoidable, yeah.

Yeah, you get the more bang for the buck just by having the direct path as possible from creation to use of any energy.

So, yeah, I don't, again, it doesn't really make sense.

But if you're like Australia, just as a country, you're not looking at the world, but just as a country, it's like, yeah, they could easily get to the point in the next 10 years, 15 years, 20 years, or whatever, where they can have massive solar overcapacity.

They could use that to make this green hydrogen industry, which would be great,

which could be used then to decarbonize industry sectors that would otherwise be very difficult, like concrete, steel, fertilizer, things like that.

So, yeah, it's good.

It's nice.

It may end up being part of this whole thing.

It's not a game changer in and of itself, you know, because it is just a way of storing hydrogen, transporting it.

It doesn't make the energy, right?

It doesn't make the hydrogen green or whatever.

Right, but it solves a big problem.

It solves one of the problems.

It improves it.

I wouldn't solve is a big word.

It just makes it a little better.

All right.

Next email comes from Jeff.

who writes, hey guys, I've been seeing, hearing lately from, in my experience, reputable scientific sources sources that the coronavirus lab leak hypothesis conspiracy is now generally accepted by the scientific community as being the most likely way that human infection started.

I'd love to hear your take on it and evaluation of the current state of the evidence.

Well, that's news to me.

Yeah, that's not.

I hadn't heard about that.

I don't think that that's true, but let me give you a summary of what my reading of the evidence is.

And I've read many, many, many articles on this, and I'm pretty up to date on it.

There's basically two approaches to this.

So the question is: what's the ultimate origin of the COVID-19, you know, the SARS-CoV-2 virus?

And there's two main hypotheses.

One is.

SARS-CoV-2, nobody says that anymore.

What are you doing?

SARS-CoV-2 is the virus.

I know, but nobody says it.

But we're talking about the virus, Bob.

We're talking about the virus.

I know, but nobody says it.

I just didn't.

I'm not nobody.

That's very true.

So

one is the zoonotic spillover, right?

The virus was mutating and maybe hybridizing in animal hosts, and then it jumped to humans, probably in the Wuhan wet market.

And that's how it got to the human population.

The other hypothesis is the lab leak hypothesis that they were in the Wuhan,

also in Wuhan, very close to the ground zero where the virus came out,

is the Wuhan Virology Lab, and that they were doing research on coronaviruses, and that this coronavirus, even if they weren't trying to weaponize it or deliberately release it, that it leaked from,

they didn't modify the virus, they were just studying it.

Or create it, right?

Well, the lab leak specifically is not, they didn't create it.

They were just studying it, and it leaked from the lab.

A couple of lab techs got sick, went out into the community, and spread the virus around.

That's the idea.

So, what's the evidence for these two hypotheses?

And again, there's two basic approaches, right?

There's scientists who are taking essentially an epidemiological and virology approach, right?

You could study the virus and say, yep, this has not been modified artificially.

But also, that doesn't mean it wasn't leaked from a lab, right?

Just

it is what it is.

But they said, but it does look like the virus epidemiologically, like the earliest cases emerged in the vicinity of the wet market and that a zoonotic spillover is the most likely explanation.

So, that is the in the scientific community, that is still, I think, the dominant hypothesis.

But they acknowledge we haven't found the smoking gun.

We haven't found the species in which this crossover happened.

So, there's still a question mark, and that's not a solid conclusion.

It's just the preferred hypothesis at this time, open to revision with new evidence.

But there's also the intelligence community take on it.

And I think this is what Jeff is talking about, and I think he's confusing it with the scientific community.

The intelligence community looked just forensically at what happened, you know, and what they're finding is that China is being very squirrely, that they're not being transparent, they're not giving the access that they promised they would give.

And so the question is, what are they hiding?

So if you're a CIA officer or an intelligence officer and you're trying to answer this question and you feel like there's a cover-up here, then they say, yeah, we think that China is covering up something.

What would that be other than a lab leak?

And so that's what they think is the most likely answer.

The intelligence community thinks it was a lab leak.

The scientific community thinks it was a zoonotic spillover.

There's no smoking gun evidence for either.

This is not a closed question.

We basically don't know.

I personally find the scientific argumentation more compelling, but I would happily change my mind if new evidence came to light.

We may never know is the unfortunate answer.

Definitively.

Right?

Like there would need to be one

hypothesis or the other would need to find smoking gun evidence, which is possible, just haven't found it yet.

But until that happens, I think there's going to be this schism, you know, there's two schools of thought about

what happened.

And I think which one of those two you believe says a lot more about you than it does about the evidence, personally.

But

your predilections and where you're coming at this question from.

I'm just saying, I'm not even taking a strong case one way or the other.

I'm just laying it out there.

I do want to say, because I do get into a conversation about this all the time, and my memory historically of what happened, I've researched it and confirmed it, because there has been actual research looking at this.

So my memory of how things evolved is this, that that initially in early 2020, the hypothesis arose that SARS-CoV-2 was a bioengineered virus, a weaponized virus.

And there were some people who were saying, look at the cleavage thing or whatever, and that this is evidence that it was engineered.

That was quickly researched and dealt with.

Very fast.

Very quickly, they already had, within days, they had the genome of the virus.

And so there was immediately papers came out and said, this was not a bioengineered virus.

This is a naturally occurring virus.

And then the bioengineered theory became a conspiracy theory.

Because once it was pretty definitively disproven, you could only really cling to that idea by some kind of conspiracy theory.

And it became the favorite hypothesis of the conspiracy theorists.

And then it died down for about a year.

There wasn't really much talk.

By the summer, it kind of died down.

and it was like, it wasn't a bioengineered virus.

And then the next June, people started talking about it being a lab leak, not a bioengineered virus.

Why a lab leak?

Because a lab leak is harder to disprove, because you can't disprove it by studying the virus itself, right?

Because it's not bioengineered.

It's naturally occurring, not bioengineered, but it accidentally leaked from the lab.

And there was actually a paper which looked at the incidents of news reports of mentions of quote-unquote lab leak in the news media.

And it started, I think the first one was in March of 2021 and then like trickle in April, trickle in May, and then June it took off.

That's when it went quote unquote viral, pun intended.

It was never mentioned the previous year.

And the reason why I say this is because I still have people tell me, it's like, oh, they said the lab leak theory was a conspiracy theory, but now they're saying it's true.

It's like, no, that's not the way things happened.

You are rewriting history.

It was an engineered virus.

That was disproven.

Then a year later, the whole thing was resurrected as this offshoot lab leak theory.

And that's been investigated for the last three years.

And here we are.

There was no suppression of the lab leak theory, right?

There was no conspiracy of silence, none of that.

But that history has been so frustratingly rewritten for for this narrative of the powers that be tried to shut down the lab leak theory when it turns out that's the most plausible theory.

That's not the way things happened.

All right.

Gonna do one issue that Bob and I talked about on the live stream today from TikTok.

We were sent a video of an interview that Joe Rogan was doing on his podcast, so you know this is going to be problematic, right?

Touting the idea that Lyme was a lab leak.

It's interesting to bring this up because, and David Gorski has wrote about this quite a bit on Science-Based Medicine: that the lab leak hypothesis is raised for every viral pandemic or epidemic.

It was HIV, like everything was like first it was bioengineered.

When you prove it wasn't bioengineered, it was a lab leak.

Every time.

So it's no surprise that this is a persistent conspiracy theory for Lyme.

Lyme isn't a virus, it's a bacterium.

It's a Berylia bergdorphy, you know, spirochete, the same sort of family of bacteria that causes syphilis, actually.

Ooh.

With a very similar natural history.

Primary, secondary, tertiary infection.

And the tertiary infection could be neurological, and it could be very similar between those two, actually.

But in any case, the question is: was the Lyme bacterium originally leaked from a bioweapons lab, like on Plum Island?

You guys have probably heard about the Plum Islands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not far from us.

Not far from us.

Not far from Lyme, Connecticut, which is why they focus on that.

Uh-huh.

So, in the little clip, you know, on TikTok, it wasn't the whole interview.

Again, we're just responding to the little clip.

The guy he's interviewing is saying that they were doing research on Lyme in this lab, and Lyme, Connecticut, is ground zero.

It's where it started, and their ticks did escape from this lab.

So, here's the thing: we know 100% that this is not true.

And there is a few reasons.

One is

when he said that the Lyme epidemic started in Lyme, Connecticut, that is not true.

That's not true.

It was not from a first of all, it wasn't even the first local case.

It was just the case, the index case, the one that was named, you know, that the disease was named for.

That work was actually done at Yale.

But the first

modern case was actually in Wisconsin.

Just wasn't recognized as the same disease as Lyme disease until after it was named for Lyme.

And also there are three populations of the bacteria of the spirochete, one in the East Coast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, and they're different.

And they've been in the wild in circulation for hundreds of years.

So we know just epidemiologically, we know from we could look at ticks in museums that are 100 years old that have

the spirochete in them.

There's archaeological evidence of Borrelia.

But they have old bodies.

They've been around for thousands of years.

Right.

Yeah, I found mummies with it.

It didn't come out of nowhere.

It's not a new bacteria.

It did not start in one place.

It's been simmering in multiple different geographical regions.

It absolutely in no way fits a lab leak epidemiologically.

The lab in question that they're talking about wasn't doing research until after Lyme was already out in the wild.

None of the timeline adds up.

There is zero evidence that this was leaked from a lab, and it really can't have been, given what we know about it.

None of this, of course, comes up on the Joe Rogan show.

But this information is transparent, easily available, it's out there.

If you have the slightest intellectual integrity and curiosity, it's there.

All right, are you guys ready to move on with science or fiction?

Here we go.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake.

There's a theme this week.

Oh boy.

The theme is

stars.

Stars.

You know, stars up in the sky.

Celebrities.

Those stars.

Not celebrities.

Not celebrities.

You know, the big balls of gas that are on fire in the sky.

Those things.

All right, here we go.

Item number one: the fastest observed star in the universe is S4714, moving at 24,000 kilometers per second, or 8% the speed of light.

I number 2, HV2112, is the first confirmed Thorne-Zeitkow object, which is a red giant star with a neutron star for a core.

And I number three,

EBLM JO555-57AB

is the smallest known star about the size of Saturn, or 0.05% the volume of our sun.

Evan, go first.

Is there a reason why Bob's not going first?

I'm just wondering.

Okay.

Fastest observed star in the universe.

Is this relative to something else?

I mean, it's all relative, Evan.

Well, of course it is.

And 8% the speed of light.

Fastest.

Fastest.

We're not talking about its rotation.

We're talking talking about its

movement across the

sky.

Right.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

Movement across the sky.

Yeah.

How and why?

Would that be the case?

Ah, geez.

I don't know.

I've never considered really the speed of an individual star.

I thought it was all kind of linked to a lot of other things.

And wouldn't all that stuff be also traveling?

8% the speed of light if the star, whatever.

Does that mean the planets that are going around it also are going?

That speed as well?

I don't know.

Seems sketchy.

I'll move on to the next one.

HV2112 is the first confirmed whatever object.

I imagine it's the names of the people who discovered this object.

It is.

A red giant star.

Okay, I'm familiar with those.

With a neutron star for a core.

I thought neutron stars happen after

the explosion.

They have.

Yeah.

So

can something be both at the same time?

Apparently they can.

It can be both a red giant and a neutron star for a core.

I guess I'll tell you, since you're going first, this is what happens when a neutron star merges with a red giant.

Merge?

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay.

And it's okay.

That makes a little more sense.

All right.

Again,

this is going to be a total guesswork because, really, how am I supposed to really know about any of these things?

The last one, the smallest known star, the size of Saturn, the volume of our sun.

There are some very, there can be some very small stars.

I mean,

as small as Saturn?

Yeah, I mean, Jupiter is not too far off from the size of Saturn, and Jupiter was almost a star, so I don't see why that one's a problem.

I guess the one I'm having the hardest time with is the speed of light one.

I mean, that seems so obscure.

So, so it defies sort of

our understanding.

My understanding, the speed of light, which I guarantee you I totally admit is

insufficient for this.

But that could mean that the red star, neutron star, one that could be the curveball, and the red giant star with neutron star for a core is the fiction.

Okay, I'll say that the Thorn Zeitkow object is going to be the fiction.

Okay, Kara?

I don't know.

Nobody knows.

One is the fastest star, one is the smallest star, and one is the first confirmed thing that's a weird thing.

So there's probably a fastest star.

Maybe you're just listing, maybe it's actually S6942,

but that would be annoying.

And there's probably a smallest star.

Maybe it also has a different name, but that would be annoying.

So I think I have to go with that.

I wouldn't give it a different string of numbers and letters.

It would be because

you've you've never done that.

It wouldn't be that fast or that small, right?

Right.

It would be the size of something else.

Okay.

So the smallest star is the size of Saturn.

The fastest star is 8% the speed of light.

Well, I don't think it's 80% the speed of light, but I guess it could be 0.08 or 0.08.

80%.

Yeah.

That is fast.

I know.

I just really think that like one of these things is not like the other.

So I'm going to go with Evan and say it's a thorny.

Oh, thanks, Karen.

It's that cow object

all right and pop all right um take these in reverse order uh blah blah blah no not this week

so this first one here this fastest star eight percent it seems a little fast but it's a it's around the speed i would think for orbiting um sagittarius a star the supermassive black hole at center of the milky way uh yeah man you get close to a black hole you can get some wicked uh wicked velocities going on there as you go around and around the star so yeah so that one doesn't surprise me too much.

This Thorne Zeitkaus object is fascinating.

Sounds very bizarre.

It's easy to jump to this as the obvious fiction.

But I do think that this was,

I think there's some evidence.

I don't think it's definitive.

I think there's some evidence that they detected a star that potentially could be this.

But the one that really leaped out to me was that

a smallest star, the size of Saturn, I think that's just, no, that's just too small.

So I'm going to say that that one is fiction.

Okay, so you all agree on the first one, so we'll start there.

The fastest observed star in the universe is S4714, moving at 24,000 kilometers per second, or 8% the speed of light.

You all think that one is science, and that one is

science.

That one is science.

Imagine the kinetic energy of that star.

Oh, my goodness.

Bob, you're correct.

You probably know this.

This is whipping around the black hole at the massive black hole at the center of

the Milky Way, yeah.

Sagittarius A, zipping around there.

So it's

because of that, but also because its orbit is very eccentric.

So when it gets close to the black hole, it's going the fastest, right?

And that's just whipping around that thing super, super fast.

As video I saw it, it almost seemed to be going too fast.

Like, what?

Yeah.

It's ridiculously fast.

But, you know, 8% speed of light is pretty damn fast.

It probably doesn't have any planets then.

Those things are long gone if it has.

Bob, what do you think is the fastest star not whipping around a black hole?

Probably kicked out of its parent galaxy.

Yeah.

That's the only thing I could think of that would be

really high.

I couldn't guess, though, what the velocity would be, though.

So there's a star

that is going at 2,285 kilometers per second.

So about a tenth

of the speed.

That's like the next fastest star, right?

Yeah, it's probably launched from a similar scenario around its black hole.

What they think is, no, not a black hole.

So this one is flying through the Milky Way.

It's not bound by the Milky Way gravitationally.

It's going to pass right through.

It's going so fast.

This is J0927, if you want to know the string of letters and numbers.

And the hypothesis is that

it got that velocity because it was a binary star, part of a binary system, and the other star went supernova and blasted it away.

Oh, damn.

Interesting.

Yeah, is that interesting?

Yeah, interesting.

I mean, that's a hypothesis.

I don't know if that's been proven, but that's what they think would have the energy to, like,

why is the star going so fast?

And it's not captured by a black hole or anything.

You know what I mean?

Something else propelled it.

Yeah.

But, you know, again, I wouldn't be surprised if they said, no, that's actually something else.

But

that's fine.

Okay, let's go to number two.

HV2112 is the first confirmed Thorn Zeitkow object, which is a red giant star with a neutron star for a core.

Evan and Kara, you think this one is the fiction.

Bob, you think this one is science.

And this one is

the fiction.

Sorry, Bob.

It is.

No way.

Of course,

the key word here is confirmed.

There are no confirmed TZ objects.

This is a hypothetical, a theoretical object that has been modeled.

Like, yeah, this could happen if a neutron star collided with a red giant that could form this type of object.

Now, you're correct, Bob.

There are candidates.

There are multiple candidates.

I remember reading about one.

Yeah, but.

I think we even talked about it on the show a bunch of years ago.

But later later refuted, later refuted, including this one that I mentioned.

This is a candidate, but later evidence like, yeah, probably not.

So there are no confirmed TZ objects, just a few candidates.

So they reported on it and then retracted it?

Well, they just said later.

Now it doesn't look like the probability went down with later evidence

with further observation.

So moving in the wrong direction.

Not looking like it's going to be confirmed.

Jesus.

So that means

a star the size of Saturn?

What the hell kind of Saturn?

That's right.

E-B-L-M-J-O-555-57AB is the smallest known star about the size of Saturn.

What kind of dwarf?

Is it like a black dwarf?

It's a red dwarf.

It's a red dwarf.

So this is the smallest star known, and it's also the lowest mass star.

So why is it so small?

For two reasons.

So they think this is right at the limit of the ability to fuse hydrogen, which is why it's a star and not a brown dwarf, right?

Right, but I remember reading many times that a brown dwarf would need to be bigger than Jupiter.

Well, more massive, Bob.

More massive than Jupiter.

More massive.

More massive.

It is more massive than Jupiter.

It's right at the limit.

It's like eight times the mass of Jupiter or something.

It is more massive.

But think about this.

Because

it's not

fusing that much hydrogen, it's like just barely fusing hydrogen, there's no outward pressure.

There's very little, relatively speaking, for a star, outward pressure to oppose the gravity.

So it shrinks down to a small size.

It has to be this size to fuse hydrogen.

Does that make sense?

Wow, man.

So this is basically as small as a star probably can be based on the laws of physics.

Is this special?

I didn't think it could get that small, but.

Yeah, neither did I, which is why I

sit in the science of fiction.

That's why you nailed me, you son of a bitch.

And me and Evan were like, well, I don't know.

I don't know.

Jesus.

It's almost like Jupiter.

Yeah, you little knowledge

damn thing.

Sometimes, yes.

All right.

Sometimes pure ignorance is more helpful in a case like that.

Yeah, it's like those first-time poker players.

Oh,

yeah.

You don't deserve to be right.

All right.

Bob, you're living in my world, right?

Evan just totally talks himself into the right answer at the last minute.

Like,

how does that come from?

How did you do that?

Yeah.

Damn it, sucks being dissimilar to Steve sometimes, you know?

That got me.

It's surely going to get Bob.

It's true enough to be fooled by science fiction.

I know.

It's the power of praise.

I feel your pain, Bob.

All right.

All right.

Give us a quote.

The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.

Nothing can compare with that experience.

Cecilia Payne Gapostin.

Who I had never known before finding this quote.

She was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist.

Her work on the cosmic makeup of the universe and the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

Cool.

She was born in 1900, died in 1979.

So another forgotten superhero of science, right there.

No doubt about it.

And I completely agree with this quote.

This is what gets scientists up in the morning, right?

This is what they're excited about.

This is being the first person to figure something out.

Oh, my God.

What if

nobody knew this

before it was?

I can only imagine what that would feel like.

It's got to be euphoric.

It's going to be cool.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Thanks, Steve.

Jay will be back next week.

He better be.

Alaska Stories.

And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Skeptics Guide to the Universe is produced by SGU Productions, dedicated to promoting science and critical thinking.

For more information, visit us at the skepticsguide.org.

Send your questions to info at the skepticsguide.org.

And if you would like to support the show and all the the work that we do, go to patreon.com/slash skepticsguide and consider becoming a patron and becoming part of the SGU community.

Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.