The Skeptics Guide #1042 - Jun 28 2025

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

Hello, and welcome to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is Wednesday, June 25th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella, hey, everybody, Kara Santa Maria, howdy, Jay Novella, hey guys, and Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

Just want to say, as I record this, two days I have two days left of work.

Oh, wow.

Basically, Steve, when people are listening to this, you'll be in bed.

Yes.

All right.

I want to know, Steve, what takes place in the last two days of work?

I have two full days of patients.

But do they know?

They haven't transitioned yet to another doctor?

No, a lot of my patients have transitioned, but I've scheduled patients to my last day, right?

So, and they just stop scheduling patients for me.

They're making use of my open slots.

Let me put it that way.

Whoa.

How sad that somebody you're doing coverage for, like, the patient sees you and is like, you're amazing.

Finally, I have this doctor.

I'm so, and you're like, sorry.

It happens every time.

Steve,

has anyone said yet, well, will you still be my doctor?

Yeah,

one or two people have sort of asked in that direction.

I'm like, you know, you don't get it.

I am fully retiring.

I'm out of here.

So, Steve, are you going to tell your very last patient that they are your very last patient?

I guess so.

Cool.

Are you going to like

load a a streamer or something?

Yeah, she's going to find the exam room.

Kara,

what I've come to realize after grilling Steve for the past couple of months is there is virtually zero drama coming from his office.

There's no one to like yell at or say something nasty to on the way out.

He doesn't want to steal any stethoscopes.

You're not going to defend a straight anything.

Yeah, like he doesn't like going to tell any boss off.

He's just going to like, okay, goodbye, Steve.

He's not going to burn any bridges.

You think they'll have cake?

I had my cake already.

It's going to come in.

That's right.

You're going to stuff your pockets with a bunch of medicine.

I'm out of here.

So long.

I'm happy to have finally realized that Steve is like super, super happy about this.

There is no like, I'm going to miss this or that.

He's just happy he's done.

I mean, I am going to miss aspects of my career.

It is sad to a certain extent, but I have something very exciting I'm moving into.

Well, here's an interesting question.

You're not going to play golf, right?

Are you going to to maintain your license?

At least for the first year, because there's no reason not to, and I've met all my requirements.

But it would take work for me to maintain my requirements going forward beyond that, and I probably won't.

Yeah.

It's a lot of work just for them.

Definitely not.

Yeah.

I guess the ability to step in in an emergency, which you can do anyway because of Good Samaritan.

Oh, yeah.

This is only about me working and getting paid.

Like, if I wanted to do locum tenants, I would need a license.

Yeah, and that would be fun.

Yeah, but I'm going to be too busy.

I'm going to be too busy doing

SGU work.

Too busy looking good.

All right, what movie is that from, Evan?

No, I don't know it.

Don't know.

Kara has no chance.

I'm twice.

Oh, yeah.

I thought that was just Bob being clever.

What is that, Bob?

Dagger?

It goes deep.

I'll be too busy looking good.

That's from Enter the Dragon.

Enter the Dragon.

Oh, hell, why don't I know that?

Which we just saw with a childhood friend of ours that we saw it with like when it was in the theaters, you know?

Yeah,

my old friend, best friend growing up, we were like Bruce Lee fanatic.

So, yeah, we, of course, watched Into the Dragon.

And, yeah, that's what that's just one of those quotes that you just

hardwired into our brains.

Lasered into our brains.

Anyway, I have to do it.

I found the perfect time to use it.

I'm so excited.

You did.

In context.

I want to keep everyone updated on the shenanigans of RFK Jr.

So very quickly, now he's withdrawing funding, the funding pledge, from Gavi, which is an international organization that vaccinates poor kids

under the Biden.

So every four years, you know, they have to get their funding for the next cycle.

And last time around, the Biden administration pledged one point two billion for this cycle.

And RFK Junior wants to claw that back.

Oh, so they probably already spent some of it.

I I think it's for the 26 to 30 cycle, is what the money is for.

And guess how he's justifying it?

He's saying vaccines are not.

They're not transparent or they're not, you know, they're in violation of some crap.

Yeah, basically.

He basically said that they, quote unquote, ignored the science.

And so he's weaponizing.

We got a question about this too, but we've talked about it on the show.

He's weaponizing the language of scientific medicine, right?

The gold standard science.

Yeah, we did a whole deep dive onto top of it.

I know.

That's exactly what he's doing.

So he's saying that they're just rubber stamping vaccines and

they're ignoring the signs and they're not considering the side effects and the

science.

The science

vaccine.

The world vaccine experts, you know, who are following the guidelines of the World Health Organization.

It's total nonsense.

It's like, they don't believe my bullshit conspiracy theories, therefore they're quote-unquote ignoring the science.

He wouldn't wouldn't know science if it hit him in the ass, this guy.

It's just

bullshit in the ass with it.

Let's just do it.

This is what he's doing.

He is weaponizing this notion of scientific standards.

He's using it as a weapon, not as a way of genuinely finding the truth, which has been his life.

This is what he has done his whole life.

To say it's predictable is an understatement.

And again, we have loosely keeping track of how many millions of people he's going to kill in his career.

This funding shortfall will probably...

In the next cycle, the estimate is it will save 8 million lives.

So it's some big chunk of those 8 million lives that should have been saved by 2030 will be lost because of RFK Jr.

I hope some benefactor comes along and does the right thing and fills the gap that the United States is about to fill.

Bill Gates funds this organization, too.

I just want Karma to come along and do some justice.

How about that?

No, I I get karma going.

Yeah, that would be satisfying, but also, you know,

let's hope it doesn't become this possible worst-case scenario that he's thrown us all into.

Yeah, but

when we're talking about his death toll, it's in the millions.

That's what we're talking about.

How many millions of people?

Yeah.

It's crazy.

It's already worst-case scenario.

It's just going to be worser.

Right.

And then the play, and then the play catch-up later on after all this stuff is out there and people are, oh my gosh, it's going to, this will last long beyond those four years.

This is generational, generational horror.

It's happening.

Yep.

I mean, we'll probably do what we can to reverse as much of this as possible if we, you know,

replace the current administration.

But, yeah,

so much damage will have been done, right?

Like, you can't go back and vaccinate those kids who weren't vaccinated and died, you know?

And it's whatever.

It's hard.

It's just a tiny little sliver of the horribleness.

Okay.

Shame.

Let's move on with the regular show.

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

Yeah, it's been a bit.

I am going to dive into a word that was suggested by Adam from Louisiana.

He said, hi, a word, etymology, research, or discussion possibility for the SGU.

Eco, as in ecosystem and economy.

Thank you.

Long time listener.

Thanks, Adam.

So yeah, those two words sound like they're pretty far apart, ecosystem and economy, but they both start with eco.

Maybe everyone but Steve,

any of you, do you see a similarity between the eco of economy and the eco of ecosystem or ecology?

They have to do with systems.

Okay, systems.

How would you put it?

I think what we might be looking at there, though, is the relationship between the

suffixes, not the prefixes.

So, system, or onomy, or olog.

And those, yes, do have to do with schools of thought.

But the prefix eco, what is it?

It's Greek, not Latin.

Peace or something.

It's like,

oh,

what is it?

It's Latin from the Greek.

What?

Not to hurt.

Do no harm.

Something like that.

It actually means home.

Yeah, home economics.

Remember remember home economics class decades ago they still even have that they do it comes from the greek oikos which means home or house or habitation or dwelling and really

the first use of the word economy that i could find is from home economics household management so the word economy would not have been called home economics back then because that would have been redundant redundant yeah it would have just been economy back in the 1500s.

So economy would have been household management back then.

And then eventually

it became

used to kind of describe resource management and frugality.

And then later it kind of evolved to become a larger system of political economy.

That didn't actually happen until the mid-1600s, even into the 1700s.

Apparently,

you know, the founders of the United States only use the word economy once in the federalist.

Like, they actually use the word frugality over and over instead of the word economy.

And then they described a political economy as a noun only once in those early recorded documents.

So it's pretty interesting that it's a relatively new word to describe the economy of a nation, but really, economy goes back to the home.

And it's the same thing with eco being ecology or ecosystems.

So when we talk about home, we're talking about our home, right?

So the living things in their environment, that would be the ecology coming from that

habitation, that dwelling place, that home.

And then same thing with ecosystems.

So the entire system or the organized whole of home.

So it's interesting that we don't, we think of those things as being quite separate, quite far apart, but they do come from that same root.

And I couldn't really find any other examples of the term eco, except for sort of branches of ecology or ecosystem, kind of that planetary usage, versus economy, that usage.

All of the different kind of related words that I could find were just variations on that theme.

Eco disaster, eco-housing, econometrics.

I couldn't find another kind of branched term there.

So it seems like there was a bit of a fork in the road, but they both lead back to home.

Interesting.

Nice.

Home.

Yeah.

All right.

Thank you, Kara.

I like that.

Jay, you're also going to talk about vaccines, but this has nothing to do with RFK Jr., but vaccinating the world is challenging.

Steve, this has to do with him a little bit because he is the person that is currently driving things in the U.S.

Yeah, it's pretty...

Pretty grim things going on here, guys.

Like, so after 50 years of vaccine progress, you know, I'm talking about childhood vaccination coverage, it's now slowing, and in some cases, it's slipping backwards.

So, vaccines, of course, have prevented an estimated what 154 million saved lives basically over the past few decades.

Their safety and efficacy are extremely well documented.

And, of course, none of this is up for debate.

It is that, and there is no information to the contrary.

I mean, sure, there's edge cases, but the vast, vast majority of people have a net benefit for taking vaccines.

So we made, in the United States, we made pretty decent gains between the 1980s and the 2010s.

But now we've hit a plateau, and we are starting to really see the consequences of the progress stopping and slipping backwards.

So from 1980 to 2023, vaccines against diphtheria, tetanus, and pertustus, measles, polio, tuberculosis, these helped drive the global coverage from under 25% to over 80%.

That's a huge increase.

In 1980, nearly 59 children did not receive a single dose of a routine childhood vaccine, but by 2019, that number dropped to about 15 million.

And many people, of course, consider this a public health victory.

When you really do understand and appreciate the power of vaccines, knowing that those numbers were increasing that dramatically, not only can we track the success and

see the changes in people's quality of life, but you know, the saved lives and the overall savings on medical costs and everything.

You know, because if you go unvaccinated and you need to be hospitalized for a few weeks because of something, you know, that raises medical costs.

So since 2010, though, all of that momentum has completely flatlined.

Measel vaccine coverage fell in over 100 nations, even in 29 high-income countries, coverage for at least one vaccine decreased.

And this is not a developing world problem alone.

It's a global backslide.

That's what the data is showing.

When COVID hit, routine vaccines, sadly, they were all disrupted.

And during lockdowns and resource reallocations, millions of children missed their scheduled vaccines, including vaccines for measles, polio, and DTP, which is diphtheria, you know, pertussis, and tetanus.

So it's all serious.

You know, and you know, the big hitting of the breaks happened during COVID.

So in 2023, the number of zero-dose children, now these are kids who had not received even a single vaccine.

So in 2023, the number of these zero-dose children had risen to 14.5 million, and that was up from 12.8 million in 2019.

So that's a

lot of kids not getting vaccinated.

Also, the percentage of vaccinated kids has completely plateaued, like I said, staying the same way for 10 years.

Now, if you consider that

we've had the percentage roughly be 84% for the last 10 years.

Now, the problem with that is population has gone up, which means if the percentage plateaus, that means more kids, because more kids are alive, more kids are actually going unvaccinated.

The numbers are higher because the population increase.

So, about 53% of all zero-dose children live in sub-Saharan Africa.

South Asia holds 13%.

Nigeria leads the world in unvaccinated children with 2.5 million, followed by India, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan.

And the problem that they're dealing with is they have fragile health systems and the programs are significantly underinvested.

Now, the typical problem with vaccine levels staying at the same percentage is that the population increase means, like I said, that as the population increases, there's a lot of things going on.

First off, with more people means more likely to spread because you have more vectors,

which is definitely a problem.

And then, of course, you know, you have the, as the percentage stays the same, you're not going to have, you know, more people.

You're going to have less people being vaccinated.

And now we're seeing the consequences, and they're pretty significant.

So,

measle cases are spiking.

We have over 100 countries reported with outbreaks last year.

There was an estimated 35 million children that lack full measles protection.

Polio, which we almost had completely eradicated, It resurfaced in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, and even in Europe and the United States, vaccine

preventable diseases are showing signs of returning.

And this pattern is crystal clear.

It's very easy to track, and the numbers are going in the wrong direction.

So what's causing all this?

It's super complicated.

You know, we could say things like vaccine confidence is a problem and misinformation and disinformation, particularly around COVID-19.

You know, there has been an erosion of public trust in vaccines across the board.

The disinformation is

routine and it's significantly affecting childhood immunizations.

And we're seeing a growing number of parents who are delaying and refusing to vaccinate altogether.

And this ties into RFK because he's all about, you know, you got to make your choice, you got to do your own research.

You know, that's all patent bullshit.

Another factor that came in was high-income countries are not immune to this.

Australia happens to rank sixth worth among developed nations in routine childhood vaccine coverage.

The United States, we have measles outbreaks, and they've claimed the lives of people living in communities with declining vaccine or vaccination rates.

UK, funding for Gavi, the Global Vaccine Alliance, is being slashed by nearly 40%.

And meanwhile, the political momentum for vaccines is faltering and it's failing.

Again, I can point to one man in the U.S.

government who is changing

the vaccine outcome in our country.

And it hasn't even really, you know, he's doing it, but we haven't even seen like direct results yet.

It's going to take a while for it to play out, but we will see it.

We will see kids die because of that man.

I assembled a list of all the reasons that are going on here, and it's a huge, complicated list of reasons, but I'll just give you the headers, right?

So we have the COVID-19 pandemic disruption, which disrupted the routine vaccines.

You know, there was a health worker crisis,

which is a

huge problem, very difficult to deal with, lack of resources.

Then we have rising vaccine misinformation and the public distrust.

We have false claims that are widely spread on social media.

We have people who are

a lot more people today

who are essentially fighting against vaccine and vaccine information.

It's not just misinformation.

We have a lot more people who are pushing hard against it because they have zero trust in any of of it.

We have political undermining of scientific institutions, right?

We can go into this for, we could talk about this for hours, you know, but everything that's going on in the U.S.

with Kennedy Jr., you know, he removed the CDC recommendations, removed the panel of the advisory panel.

You know, he's right now he's linked to 13% of all vaccine misinformation retweets on Twitter, more than any other individual source.

And the global health systems and funding cuts, you know, that's another big thing because the governments are choosing to not put the money into it anymore, which I just don't understand.

Now, just look at it like this.

This is the single most effective medical intervention ever created, and it's orders of magnitude more effective than anything else that we've ever done.

This is, if anything has proof behind it, if anything that we've ever done medically has been the massive success, it's vaccines, right?

It's unequivocal.

It's also very cost-effective.

Extremely cost-effective.

It saves tons of money.

Not only are you saving lives, not only are you improving people's quality of life, right?

Because you could get the measles and it can do bad things to you and it literally changed the rest of your life, right?

So you're literally keeping people healthy and happy.

We could see how much money it saves.

It's easy to track that.

And then, you know, we're talking about the amount of data because think about the number of people who historically were getting vaccinated.

We have the statistics and it's...

a massive body of statistics that shows the effectiveness.

And if that's not good enough, nothing ever will be.

And it isn't good enough.

And that's the sad state that we're in.

So, what do we have?

We have a bunch of skeptics out there and critical thinkers who fully understand this.

We have a strong medical community that understands this.

And then we have

people out there that are reading misinformation, can't tell the difference between the truth and lies.

We have people being appointed to government positions who don't have the skill sets, and they're being trusted over experts, right?

They'll trust RFK over Fauci.

we actually, you know, the smear campaign against Fauci is another thing that we have to be aware of that's happening here.

It's not just the misinformation, it's the disassembling of medical professionals who have been lifetime contributors to vaccines and to the well-being of a population.

So it's really concerning.

And this whole thing that I just said begs the question, what can we do?

And unfortunately, we can't do any big brushstroke stuff as a community here.

What we can do is try to be as calm and polite as you can with the people in your life that are buying some of this misinformation.

You know, try to talk to them, try to find some common ground.

You know, you could show them statistics, you could talk to them a little bit about that.

But it's difficult because once people get that idea in their head that they can't trust it, they don't even trust the statistics.

And there's just no way to reach them.

I'm not saying don't try, but it's, you know, that's what we're faced with.

And unfortunately, there is no panacea for this.

Yeah, obviously, we need to spread critical thinking skills, scientific literacy.

For individuals, I think informing yourself,

you have to do more than just say, yeah, I'm pro-vaccine.

I'll vaccinate my kids.

But also,

we need to arm ourselves so that we can deal with the spread of misinformation or disinformation.

You know what I mean?

Like being informed enough to promote vaccines, not just do the right thing for yourself.

Part of the problem is, is like, if you are just a rational science-based person, there's a thousand issues that we deal with, whereas like the anti-vaxxers have one issue, right?

Like they can dedicate their life to destroying vaccines, whereas we're trying to defend a hundred things, you know, all at the same time.

But that means, you know, we need everyone who's on the side of science and reason, et cetera, to be involved.

You know, professionals, the public.

You can't look the other way anymore.

Yeah, and the scary thing is, as an example, I know this is an anecdote, but it happened and it's worth repeating.

For example, there was a family in Texas whose child died from measles, and they were so anti-vax that they literally lost their child, could have easily prevented their child's death.

And they said, even though we lost our child, we still don't want you to go out and get the vaccine.

Like, that's how deep in the woods they are.

Well, that's complicated too, because otherwise they have to admit they killed their kid.

Right.

And like, that may just be emotionally unattainable to them.

So they kind of have to think that.

Although not some people do, like after a family death because they opposed vaccines or opposed medicine, they will come around.

But then usually they portray themselves as a victim.

Right?

So that's like you have to get to one of those two places.

Either I was victimized by misinformation or I was right all along.

Very few people can say, I was wrong, it was my mistake, and I killed somebody I love.

You know what I mean?

That's just a little bit too much for most people to bite off.

Yeah, I agree.

I mean, look,

it's a hard thing to look at a family that could have easily prevented the death of another family member by giving them something that was incredibly inexpensive and easy.

You know, we're not talking about surgery here.

We're talking about a shot that takes two minutes.

I can see it.

Yeah, I don't want to come out swinging and go, you know, I want those parents to

have a horrible rest of their life.

They'll have that anyway.

But the point being,

we have to hold them accountable, but we also have to give them an out because it's a terrible situation.

They are thinking that they're choosing what's best for their children.

They're not trying to neglect their children, and they're not being neglectful in that way.

It's not laziness with a lot of these people.

It's more they're just in the wrong information bubble, and there's no way to get them out.

It's always complicated.

To some extent, they failed, right?

They came to a bad decision.

But at the same time, they're also victims because, again, as you say, they are living in an information ecosystem that sort of led them down that road.

It's not as if our society, our government, our medical establishment, whatever, that we're doing such a good job of educating the public that they have no one to blame but themselves.

We can't say that.

It's tough.

It is a tough information environment to live in, to raise kids in.

It's very hard on individuals.

So it's not surprising when they fail individually, but they did fail at the same time.

So it's a combination.

It's a triple failure.

I mean, they could, they would, they, and I understand the psychology to an extent behind this, but they, they are in an amazing position, a horrible position, but also there's an opportunity they could prevent other kids from dying.

If they just picked up that mantle and said, yeah, we screwed up big.

Of course we did, but maybe we can save at least one kid.

Imagine the power of that voice.

And some people do go there, too.

That is one of the psychological mechanisms, is that it turns it into something good.

Yeah.

All right, let's move on.

This is an interesting, it's a bit complicated, but this is an interesting.

It's not really a study, it is a proposal, in a way, talking about how researchers can move forward, trying to answer the question of how children acquire language.

It is an amazing feat when you think about it, is that toddlers go from no language essentially.

Not that they're a blank slate.

They definitely are not.

They have a brain prepared to learn language.

But they don't really have any language.

And they go from that to being fluent, like fully fluent by the time they're seven or eight years old.

And it really is an amazing acquisition of knowledge, skill, and information.

Yeah, it's a hell of a window, man.

Yeah, so and researchers have been trying to understand that process in detail.

And the last 10 years has seen an explosion in research in this area because we have a lot of tools at our disposal now that we didn't have in the past, like infant EEG, head-mounted, eye-tracking, and other things.

Other technologies have really accelerated this research.

Now,

one other thing that caught my interest with this paper is the comparison that's sort of strewn throughout between how babies acquire language versus how AI, large language models, acquire language.

And they're very different.

I do want to say that

one of the things that caught my eye, which, as far as I could tell, I cannot source this claim.

It's not in the article, it's only in the press release.

But the press release says that, quote unquote, if a human learned language at the same rate as ChatGPT, it would take them 92,000 years.

So

that means that they're basically saying that people acquire language at 10,000 times the speed as ChatGPT.

I have no idea how they quantified that.

And I have no idea where that number comes from.

And I couldn't find it.

All references point to that press release.

And it's not in the study.

So I have no idea where they came up with that.

Is there something in the study that could give you

the data to at least calculate that?

No.

Did you ask an LLM?

I did.

They all point to this study.

That press release.

Oh, it's circular.

No.

Everything points to this press release.

But it's funny.

Anyway, I don't think it's true.

I can't even source it.

And again, I'm not, you know, there's no even explanation for how they would quantify it.

But the core idea here is

that the point is valid.

Again, just that I don't know where that number's coming from, but the point is that humans are way more efficient at acquiring language fluency than LLMs are.

At the moment.

At the moment.

Wait, wait, wait.

When does the clock start for an LLM to acquire language?

Are they talking about what, the beginning of research decades ago?

What are they talking about?

What's the story?

No, no, just training.

Training an LLM to acquire language.

They're talking about an individual one.

Yeah.

My best guess is that they're talking about processing power.

Training an LLM uses orders of magnitude more processing power than the human brain uses.

So I guess one way to interpret it is if you trained an LLM on the processing power of a single human brain, it would take 90,000 years.

So that is probably it, but

they didn't show me their work.

Is it too much comparing apples to oranges?

Yeah, so but that aside, that's just, I wanted to point it out because it's like this press science press release thing.

Like, I don't know where they pulled that number out of.

But anyway, and Kara, I don't know how much you've ever delved into this research as a psychologist as well.

It's very, it's fascinating.

Yeah, because I think not only is it fascinating from an evolutionary, developmental, genetic, psychological, neurological perspective, there are like huge camps within many of those fields who like wildly disagree.

And what this opinion piece really is trying to do is to pull it all together.

Because what they said was there's many different theories.

They're basically each looking at a piece of language, and there's really no way to compare them.

And they're trying to bring it all together.

So, what they said is that if you just look at all of the theories of language development that are constructivist, and by that, what they mean is that children construct language.

That's pretty much all that that means.

Language is not just representational, for example, right?

So, it's not just this word represents that.

True fluency requires that you construct language to have

abstract meaning.

And you use grammar to

little kids do interesting things with their grammar.

Complicated process for constructing language.

But they said that all of the theories, the constructivist theories of language, have the same four components.

They don't all have all four components, but these four components are part of every constructivist theory.

So

they said, looking at all of that, they think that these four are the core ideas of how we learn language.

So one is

that children,

and they focus on this as the key difference between kids and AI.

Kids engage in active, adaptive learning.

They are not passive learners.

So what the research shows is that children are

engaging with people.

They're engaging with their parents.

They're engaging with other people in their environment.

They're engaging with their environment, not just the people in that environment.

They will point at things they find interesting, for example, just to give a simple example.

They're actually actively seeking data.

And there's evidence to show that they optimize their data acquisition efficiency.

So they will seek out data that is at the perfect level of complexity for their current learning needs.

Right?

Does that make sense?

So they are attracted to things that are not so simple that they're not going to learn anything and not so complicated that it'll overwhelm them.

They're kind of seeking out things that are just beyond their conceptual grasp and then adding that to their knowledge.

Oh, cool, man.

Yeah, it's neat.

And when you think about all.

That comes in handy.

It's like baby steps, just taking the appropriate baby steps

over and over and over.

And it's meant to, you know, humans evolved this really adaptive process for learning in general and learning language specifically.

I guess there must have been a bunch of language papers coming out at the same time because I saw a couple of other papers as well that relate to this.

One

had to do with the fact that humans engage in baby talk with babies, and most of our primate relatives do not.

Like, baby talk is a fairly unique human thing.

And what is baby talk?

It's humans,

adults adapting their vocal interaction with infants to the infant's level to optimize their learning, right?

Yeah,

we kind of instinctively will talk at the level that the child needs to learn.

And if you're a parent, for those of us who have been parents, which is basically everybody but Kara, when you really obviously live every day with your child, you become

intimately.

differently, though.

You become intimately familiar with their precise level of ability, linguistic ability, and cognitive ability.

Like even day to day.

And if somebody else tries to interact with your child, they never get it exactly right out of the gate.

You know what I mean?

We've all had this experience.

How could they?

They either undershoot or overshoot.

And same thing, you do that with other people's kids.

You don't feel as comfortable with them because you don't know exactly where their level is.

But with your own kids, you kind of know exactly what they need.

So the adaptation goes both ways,

not just with the kids, but with the adults in their environment as well.

And that's just a function, right, of just like constant exposure.

Yeah, but the thing is,

somehow, again, we instinctively do this, and other species don't do this.

So this is, I think, part of the brains prepared to learn language thing, but also to teach language.

All right, another one one is: the children engage, and this is very different than AI, in multimodal input.

So they are physically interacting with their environment.

They're touching, smelling, tasting, mouthing.

We know kids mouth everything at a certain stage.

They are exploring their environment and they are using all of that information, visual, it's not just written.

So LLMs are trained on written words.

Yeah, kids don't even use written language by the way.

Can you imagine trying to teach a kid their colors without having access to physical

colors?

Color.

Exactly.

They learn words through doing, through interacting, through context, through how,

being in the world and using all of their senses to acquire this information.

So, again, that's very different than how LLMs operate.

The third one is structure building.

Again, they use this information to construct, to build language structures that get increasingly complicated as they learn and the fourth thing is that the children themselves are developmentally dynamic their brain is not done maturing so it would be as if the neural network on which an LLM is being is training right is actually adding new nodes and new connections and adapting its physical structure to the learning process.

As we learn, our brains are physically adapting to our needs and our problems.

It's like their brains are like

literally wrapping around the language.

Yes.

Right.

Well, and not only are they physically adapting, like are they highly plastic?

Because maybe you could sort of model that with an LLM, but they're physically growing.

Like they are metabolizing,

you know, and increasing like their glucose consumption.

Like that's a huge difference.

The LLMs aren't getting older and larger.

Right, exactly.

So what they're suggesting is that we recognize that these four components seem to be core to any constructivist model of how kids acquire language, but also this can really help model language acquisition in computers.

And maybe we want to completely rethink how we develop large language models in order to incorporate this constructivist framework because it seems to be way more efficient.

Again, I don't know that it's 93, whatever, thousand times efficient, but it seems to be way more powerful and efficient than the current method that we're using, which is really just brute force.

I hate to use the term brute force.

I know that programmers don't like when I do that.

But

we're training it in a limited way on a massive amount of data.

True, but also it's easier said than done that these researchers are like, you know, just kind of do it the way we do.

It's like, we don't even understand how we do it.

Yeah.

I hear you.

I hear you, Mark.

But we've talked about this one aspect of it before, the fact that AI, in order to really get to human-level functionality, may need to be embodied.

Oh, yeah.

There's no conception of interacting with a physical world.

That's why I like the idea of training models in a computer, in silico, if you will, and so to mimic a 3D environment that people can then log on and interact.

I mean, I think that's going to be a critical component.

Otherwise, how could it even relate to interacting with a physical world?

Maybe it's okay that they just stay in the digital.

Maybe that's not the worst thing in the world, that we don't embody the AI.

I was wondering.

I was wondering, when language is emerging in humanity, how much selective pressure do you think there was?

Like, were there bands of people?

I mean, but were there bands of people that just were not hardwired for language at all and they just died out because they just could not even remotely?

No, all our brains are the same.

Like there weren't like whole sections of people that had none of the architecture necessary to look at.

I think Bob is talking about Homo habilis versus Australopithecus or whatever.

Yeah, but we've got to look at who were contemporaries, right?

Yeah.

I think if you're talking about actual selection pressure temporally, of course, there's going to be, if you have different groups of, let's say, early Homo sapiens spread out across the globe, and some groups are able to communicate verbally, they have way more efficient capability to stay alive.

Totally.

Cooperation and hunter-gathering, I mean, just for one, just an interview.

It's going to be way better at reproducing and maintaining fitness of the species than those who don't have language.

I mean,

when did language emerge in terms of dispersal of humanity?

I'm trying to remember.

That's a hard question to answer.

Yeah, how do we even know?

Well, I know there's one piece of evidence is when did the hyoid bone move into the modern location?

And I'm trying to remember what species that was.

It was in the homo line genus, whether it was habilis or erectus, I don't remember which one.

But at some point, we could say, oh, yeah, this is like now a modern vocal cord where they had probably elaborate speech like humans do.

So somewhere along that line.

But it's hard to know how language doesn't fossilize.

According to

National Institutes of Health, they say Homo sapiens around 150 to 200,000 years ago, that's when the anatomically modern

features came.

But then you don't know what follows what.

Yeah, but we don't, but language

predates humans, modern humans.

And

there's different, you know, pretty inferential lines of evidence in terms of when and in what group language really took off to like modern human levels.

And also, it's also a fuzzy delineation, like what is language?

Yeah, right.

You know, grunting and pointing or using like higher level or lower level inflections,

question versus.

Proto-languages may have been earlier with homohabilos.

Well, my assumption is that it was proto-language, then the anti-modern dialed-in anatomy necessary for

oral language to fully evolve.

But they're going to be happening in lockstep.

You can't have the words without the architecture, and

you don't really have the pressure to develop the architecture without trying to make the words.

And the architecture is there.

I mean, did you know that children can distinguish, even infants who only babble, they will pay attention to forward speech more than backward speech,

speech versus non-speech, and they will pay more attention to sign language than non-language gestures of how do they know, City?

How do they know?

This is the eye tracking.

Yeah, this is the really interesting, like, this is the Noam Chomsky of it all, right?

Like, what is intuitive there?

I love, have you guys seen the really lovely videos of, I think there's one in particular I'm thinking of, it's a dad and his baby, and the baby is babbling, and the dad just kind of responds and he says something, and then the baby looks at him, and then they babble back, and it looks like they're having a fluid conversation.

Absolutely.

I love it.

And I love it so much.

It's like all kids

went through that phase where they're babbling.

I remember like Olivia, Jay's younger daughter, really did this a lot when she was 100% babbling, but she was having a conversation.

Oh, my God.

Every other aspect of

the

physicality of speech was there.

And

also, kids will take turns, even when they're just babbling.

Yeah.

It's so cute.

It's like they're asking you a question, and you're like, yeah, totally.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then they add to it.

It's so good.

Mommy and Dad make those noises and I can do it too.

Absolutely.

That's part of the dynamic process.

Okay, let's move on.

Bob, tell us about the Vera Rubin Observatory.

Yes, the new observatory, hearing about it.

all over the news, all over.

It's ubiquitous.

The Verisi Rubin Observatory has finally seen its first light, published astonishing images online for us astro geeks to drool over.

So pause the show right now if you haven't.

Check them out, check them out, the images, and come back.

I'll wait.

Doot, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, okay.

Ready?

Okay, let's drill down to the juicy details.

Okay, first, of course, we need to describe the observatory's namesake, Verisi Rubin, who I talked about back, way back in episode 520 in 2015

in 2015.

So, yeah, 10 years ago, what is happening right now?

Rubin was the first scientist to provide solid enough observational dark matter evidence for the scientific community to take it seriously.

Look her up.

She is a superhero of science.

Okay, the observatory itself is located in Cerro Pachon, a mountain in Chile.

It was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The instrument is incredible.

Wow.

I was so just really taken aback by how wonderful this is.

It's a tour de force of astronomical.

It's a tour de force.

It's a tour de force of astronomical observation.

As Douglas Adams might have called it, it is a ballet of technology.

Its camera, the LSST Cam Imager, is the largest digital camera in the world.

Steve, what did your digital camera cost?

The most recent one I just purchased was

like $800.

$800.

That's nice.

That's nice.

But what could 168 million USD do?

The LSST Cam weighs three tons, three tons, and captures images that are, get this, 3,200 megapixels.

3,200 megapixels.

If you're interested, that's 3.2 gigapixels or 0.003 terapixels, which I think I've never said before.

Steve, how many terapixels is your camera?

Never mind.

I'm only kidding.

Each full-size image, each full-size image would fill, this blew me away, 378 4K screens.

378.

This is one image.

That's amazing.

The full-sized image, the uncompressed, bam, 378 4K screens.

Incredible.

Well, I hope they have a big display there so you can look at their images that way.

Yeah, right.

That'd be amazing.

Each exposure, each of these exposures covers 45 full moons worth of the sky.

That's 9.6 square degree field of view.

Astonishing.

That's just immense.

All right, so as cool as that is, we're really just still getting started.

These huge images can be taken fast.

Essentially, every 30 seconds,

then it moves to the next location in a couple of seconds, and bam, it's ready for the next image.

So, like basically,

32 seconds, and it's taking an image and it's ready for the second for the next one.

In this way, Ruben can image the entire southern night sky in in three nights.

Three nights to do the entire sky.

That's pretty slick.

So now, researchers say that they describe this observatory as being built for the era of big data and automation.

And so why do they say that?

They say that because each of these huge images are sent over fiber optics to supercomputers in

California where systems, where the systems use AI to compare the images to previous images.

And And if anything's changed, like, you know, for example, brightness or position, those are the two big ones, right?

If that changes, an alert is then sent out to the interested parties.

They're actually going to have these, what do they call them, like image brokers, where people will sign up for different types of these alerts that they're going to get.

Hey, this thing changed.

This thing that you're interested in in the night sky, it has changed.

Here's your alert.

So give me a guess.

How many alerts do you think that they anticipate every night?

I mean, it doesn't depend on the threshold.

No, for instance.

They have,

no, they don't mention anything about what the threshold is.

But, I mean, hard to say.

But whatever, just throw out a number.

How many each night?

1,001.

1,000.

Oh, that's one more than I said.

10 million.

10 million.

That's their anticipation.

10 million alerts are going to be sent out to these.

It kind of makes the alerts point

though, doesn't it?

No, no, not at all.

Because the thing is, nobody's going to to subscribe to every alert.

You know, they're going to say, this area of the sky or this galaxy, I want alerts that apply to this.

So it's going to be fantastic for those people that can be granular enough.

And

how many, most of them are going to be interested in specific areas or specific things.

Like, send me all alerts about supernovae.

I assume that that's what you'll be able to do.

So, yeah, no one's going to get drowned in every damn alert because, yeah, what's the point?

So, now all of this, as amazing as all this is, of course,

this allows the observatory to fulfill its primary mission, right?

And this mission is called the Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

For 10 years,

this observatory will be taking an evolving time lapse of the cosmos.

And this has never been possible before because

we've never been able to have an observatory, a telescope that can take such high-resolution pictures so fast and then move to the next one, then move to the next one, and then send those incredible files over to be analyzed and then have those, all those alerts sent.

That infrastructure was just not in place.

And then to do that so fast that you could actually string together these movies.

So you're going to be seeing movies of the evolution of like anything you could imagine

in the universe and how it has changed over time.

I mean, I would love to go if I had, you know, if I could get some relativistic time dilation going on, go 10 years into the future.

One of the top 10, or maybe top 20 things I would do is look at these videos because that is going to be amazing.

Never been done before.

This is the first time we've ever been able to really do this type of thing.

Now, what are they going to detect?

They're expected to detect over the course of 10 years 20 million supernovas.

And that, of course, includes the

supernovae 1A, the ones that we use as the standard candles that basically showed us

the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

So, those, of course, as well, plus all the other types of supernovae, the core collapse, my favorites, the core collapse supernovas, and

every flavor.

Also, 20 billion galaxies and so much more.

I like also that

the Vera Rubin Observatory is going to essentially be taking an inventory of our solar system.

It's going to catalog, essentially, every planet, every dwarf planet, every moon, every asteroid, every comet in the vicinity over and over until it has basically just filled up.

Here's the contents.

Here's the latest and greatest.

Will it find rogue planets?

Yeah, I did see some mention of rogue planets, but that's I'm talking mainly right now about our solar system.

But yeah, rogue planets also can be identified.

They said that they're going to identify 90% of the possibly hazardous asteroids over 140 meters.

So that's encouraging, although 90%

was kind of a bummer to me.

I mean, I'm thinking, oh, with

this new observatory, you can't get that a little bit higher, maybe 95%, whatever, whatever.

I'll be happy with 90% if that's the best they can do, because it's that last 10% that's a little scary.

And of course, this is the Vera Rubin Observatory.

So they've got to honor her legacy.

So they're also, of course, going to be mapping dark matter and also poking at dark energy while they're at it as too, of course.

So please check out the images online.

They're a real treat.

I was just mesmerized looking at these immense images that they've already taken, zooming in, zooming out, just finding these

awesome pinwheel galaxies.

It's just amazing.

So, and I've only only also scratched the surface of the technology here.

There's so much going on here.

It would have taken me a half hour to even really cover it.

So, go to RubinObservatory.org.

There's a huge website ready to go, ready for you to go into any little nook and cranny of this technology that you'd be interested in.

It looks like a really cool site.

I'm going to dig in deeper later on.

But one other thing I wanted to cover, I'm sure many of you are wondering about the funding for the Vera Rubin Observatory, given the current decimation we're seeing in science funding.

So here's what I found out.

The current administration's proposed budget for 2026 cuts the overall NSF budget by a ridiculous 56%.

So I'm going to say that again.

The proposal is to cut our National Science Foundation's budget by 56 effing percent.

That's just...

56%.

The National Science Foundation.

All right.

The little sliver of good news, I think, from what I could tell right now, it seems that Rubin might not have a huge budget cut specifically for it in 2026, at least for that, for next year.

It might not have a huge cut, although it'll probably see some of it.

But many projects are going to be absolutely destroyed.

And I got so mad.

I just found out that LIGO, you know, the gravitational wave

detectors, they could see in the United States, because we have two LIGO detectors, I believe, at this point.

We could see 40% cut, a 40% cut.

And the NSF has already said that one of our two LIGO observatories will have to be shut down.

Shutting down,

I was just so livid when I read that.

These machines are our only way to look into the cosmos that doesn't involve some type of electromagnetic radiation.

You know, this is part of multi-messenger astronomy.

It's revolutionary.

It's already won Nobel Prizes.

And no, let's just shut it down.

Okay, let's just do that.

And

this is just one, I haven't talked about it that much, but this is just one of the many disasters that's happening right now for science research in this country.

And I'm just talking about science research.

I'm not even talking about anything else.

So that's where we are, people.

This is awesome, right?

So let's just go to the next news item.

I think I'm just going to get some coffee right now.

All right, thanks, Brad.

All right.

Evan, tell us about this new star in the sky.

Now, we reserve our predictions that we made early in the year, back in January.

We save that until December every year.

But, however, one of my 100% money-back guaranteed predictions has to do with my news item this week.

And as Steve said, a new star has exploded into the night sky.

Wait, who?

What, where, when?

Details.

Oh, yeah.

That's what he's about to give you.

I'm about to give you.

But before I give you the details, I want to know if anyone knows what the word for new star is.

What do we call a new star?

Nova stella.

Nova.

Nova.

Very good, Bob.

And this one.

And Kara.

And Kara.

Very good, Kara.

Thank you.

Nova Lupi, 2025, designated V462 Lupi, located in the constellation Lupus.

And here's the story.

About two weeks ago, astronomers with the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernova, also known as the ASASSN survey,

spotted something strange.

It was a faint star in the southern sky that suddenly started to get brighter.

Hmm, so fast forward a few days and boom, you've got yourself a classic Nova.

This happened on June 12th.

That was when the star was so faint, you could not see it with the naked eye.

It was faint.

But within about six days, June 18th, its intensity rose to the point of becoming visible, barely visible, but still visible.

And since then, in these last few days, boom, it is now peaking at about 4 million times its original brightness.

Whoa.

That is turning the dial way up.

Where is it exactly?

It is in the constellation Lupus, which is in the southern sky, but is still visible from the northern hemisphere.

If you're in a, you know, if you're at the right part of the northern hemisphere and looking to the south and a couple of degrees above horizon at sunset, you can see it.

But people in the southern hemisphere.

How far away, Bob?

Excellent question.

I was going to say that to the end, but since you asked,

let's talk about it.

They don't know.

They do not know how far this is away.

They're guessing right now, and guesses range from 1,500 light years away to almost 3,000 light years away.

And I don't know why they can't pinpoint it.

I didn't get that deep into the research.

This is big, though, but for one main reason, of course, is that this is in our galaxy.

That's kind of huge because we've been experiencing for quite a long time a dearth of supernovae.

They estimate that each galaxy sees about one supernova a century.

Okay, so what they're saying is that nova, okay, so different, and we're going to talk about this too.

Nova appear roughly once a year, or like once every 14 months, but a supernova is much more rare.

In fact, the most recent visible eye Nova was 2013 going back, but the most recent supernova, supernova visible,

1987.

You have to go back there.

So it's quite a big difference.

And what is the difference between Nova and Supernova?

Bob, you probably know.

Steve, you know, or Jay, Kara?

Size, brightness.

I'm sure there's a threshold, right?

Well,

the classic is the...

the core collapse supernova.

So you've got a giant

giant star.

But there's also many different types of classifications, like supernovae, like 1A, that's

the white dwarf that collects matter from

an orbiting star.

It reaches critical mass, and then that's recurring

because they don't.

It can recur, yes, but it can recur.

But there are lots of different types.

So how are they...

Did they have a specific classification?

Yeah, so this particular Nova, Bob, this one is a white dwarf in a binary system.

Okay.

That accumulates its hydrogen from its companion star.

This is a 1A

1A.

Yep, classic, they said.

Classic nova.

So what happens is the white dwarf star is, and this is described as in a tight cosmic tango with its companion star.

The white dwarf siphons off gas from its partner until it reaches a tipping point, and then kaboom, a thermonuclear explosion erupts on its surface, blasting out energy and light, and that is the nova that we can see.

So to clarify, this is not a 1A supernova.

This is a classical nova.

They both involve a white dwarf,

which is why the confusion.

But in a classical nova, a white dwarf accumulates hydrogen on its surface, and then the hydrogen experiences runaway fusion, causing the nova.

For a 1A supernova, it's different.

The white dwarf accumulates enough matter to reach the Chandra Secker limit, and then you get a core collapse.

You get oxygen-carbon fusion at the core, and in the 1A supernova, the white dwarf is destroyed with no remnant.

In a classical nova, it's just a surface hydrogen that explodes.

It's much less bright and it's not destructive, and these things can happen over and over again.

So this is a classical nova, not a 1A supernova, which is why they don't know how far away it is.

Yeah, so I suppose they're still going to analyze it more and try to make a better determination.

The range is pretty wide, right?

You know, too wide right now to make a definitive statement on the distance.

The star does not explode, though, right?

They said a nova is like a stellar burp, violent but not fatal.

So it just burped, you know, and basically outsourced its gas, its energy, and its light.

Does not destroy the star.

But the supernova, Bob, on the other hand, that's the death of the star.

And that's an enormous release of energy.

Yeah, the core collapses.

Yep, core collapses.

Life-changing.

It's the end of the life.

You end up with a neutron star or a black hole or

some flavor of neutron star.

Like a magnetar would be very cool, but

they're relatively kind of rare, but they're deadly.

600 miles away, what's it 600 miles away?

A magnetar would kill you.

The magnetic field is so strong.

Don't get me started.

So don't get too close to one of those if you can help it.

Please don't.

Plenty of cameras capturing the action, telescopes as well.

The G-O-T-O

observatory or telescope.

Yep.

Has caught the entire process in the act.

They're still watching it, and it's like watching a match ignite in slow motion in space.

Very, very cool.

It's most visible in the southern hemisphere.

It can be seen in the northern hemisphere if

you're at the right place.

I can't see it from my house.

I think I'm too far north.

But they're saying Arizona, California, other places like that will have a much better opportunity to see it because it's going to be around for a little while longer.

The rest of this week, they say probably next week as well, but then it will start to

disappear from our visual view and go back to the way it was.

So, yeah, very cool.

And they're hoping, you know, so again, this is remarkable, they say, for three reasons.

It's visible.

to the unaided eye, and that's an occurrence that is rare and unpredictable.

Second, they say it came with little or no warning,

showcasing the volatile nature of binary systems.

And third, it adds to a growing catalog of transient sky events.

So we can

underscore how dynamic the night sky really is.

And I wonder what the Vera Rubin Observatory might have seen in all of this as well, to be continued.

But very cool.

And part of my prediction, again, for the year has already come true.

Oh, yeah.

So, yay, me.

Well, you didn't say three or something?

I did say three.

Yeah.

I did say three.

One down, two to go.

Exactly.

I know.

I'm very excited.

I was really hoping I wouldn't be a total washout this year and be zero.

So I at least have one under my pillow.

That's true.

Partial.

Is it Beetlejuice?

Beetlejuice, yep.

They're still keeping an eye on that.

That would be awesome.

There are also a few others, they say, that are, quote, any day now, which means, right?

Could mean 10,000 years.

It would prove my psychic powers are awesome, and I'll be able to charge a lot of money per hour.

Prove something.

All right.

Tara,

is chat GPT rotting our brains?

Oh, I'm glad you asked.

And I'm so glad you asked just like that.

So I want to talk about three things for this news item.

The first one is the actual study, which was recently, I don't even want to say published.

It was published in the archive, but it is not peer-reviewed yet.

So we have to keep that in mind.

The second thing is, you know, well, the first thing is what the study found.

The second thing is what the authors of the study are

projecting, I guess is a good way to put it, are

preliminarily claiming.

And then the third thing is how the media is covering this, because those are

three very different things.

Yeah.

So here is the actual paper.

It is called Your Brain on Chat GPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt When Using an AI Assistant for Essay essay writing task.

This was submitted June 10th, 2025 to the archive under computer science, and it is not yet peer-reviewed as of a write-up by the study authors on their website.

One thing that was like, I gotta say, like, I don't like this, and this is just me personally.

I don't know how you guys feel about it, but they have a website dedicated to this study.

It's getting a lot of buzz.

And the website is, it's kind of of clean, easy.

You know, it's not over the top or anything.

But underneath one of the images from the article, it literally says, as seen on Salon, New York Times, Time, the New Yorker, CNN, like it's a product on Shark Tank or something.

Like doing advertisements for it, aren't they?

I don't like that.

But yeah, it is getting a lot of write-ups.

So let's talk about it, because you're probably going to read about this.

It's quite a trending topic right now.

But some of those write-ups do say things like ChatGPT is rotting your brain which in no way is what the authors say so what did they actually do well they took participants not that many 54 participants and they did a study utilizing eeg

where they divided the participants into three different groups and over the course of four months they had them write an essay like an SAT style essay.

In one group, they were able to use ChatGPT.

They called that the LLM or large language model group.

In another group, they were able to use a regular search engine like Google.

And in the last group, they could only use their brains.

They called that the brain-only group.

So they were given a tool, ChatGPT, a search engine, or no tool, their brain-only, to write this essay.

And then They did three different sessions over the course of three months.

In the fourth month, they took some of the brain-only people, some of the LLM people, 18 in total, and they had them switch.

So the brain-only people wrote an essay using an LLM, and the LLM people wrote an essay using only their brains.

But Karen, did they write their essay?

They did.

That's a deep-cut South Park reference.

I definitely remember that one.

And so during the experience, they used EEG, electroencephalography, to look at brain activity.

They describe this as an assessment of their cognitive engagement and their cognitive load.

We have to remember that these are constructs, right?

They can use the term cognitive engagement.

They can use the term cognitive load.

What they're actually looking at are brain waves.

And they analyzed it to sort of see neural connectivity.

They also

asked them questions after they wrote the essays, and they had both a human teacher and an AI judge, which was like a specially built AI agent,

score their essays.

And so collecting all of that data, let's see what they found, what they actually found.

They found that the brain only group exhibited what they're calling the strongest brain connectivity with the widest ranging networks.

So they were finding that more disparate parts of the brain were active together during the brain-only group, whereas the brain was less connected with less wide-ranging networks in the LLM group.

So they had what they called the weakest overall coupling.

And in the middle, the search engine group kind of was like intermediate to that.

They also found a couple of other interesting findings.

They found that when they asked, you know, how

well they felt like they owned the essay, like, was that my work?

Did I feel, you know, good about that?

Did I feel strong about that?

Obviously, the ownership was low in the LLM group.

They found that both the search engine group and the brain-only group had high

senses of ownership over their essays.

They also found that in just minutes after they completed their essays, when they asked them to quote things that they had written, the LLM group was significantly worse at that.

But that all makes sense, right?

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

So they then, oh, and then, of course, as I mentioned, that was across three months doing the same essay three different times.

On the fourth month, they took 18, so a very small sample, and they did a swip swap.

And the brain-only group used the LLM, the LLM group used only their brain.

They found that the LLM2 brains, so the ones that started by doing three essays using ChatGPT, and then they could only rely on their brain for the fourth essay, they showed, as they said, weaker neural connectivity and under-engagement of alpha and beta networks.

Whereas on the flip side, the brain to LLM participants had higher memory recall and re-engagement of large groups of the brain, like across kind of a lot of architecture.

So it looked more similar to the search engine group.

These were their kind of findings, but they also draw some conclusions.

And to be fair to the authors, okay, first of all, if you guys have lots of questions, I would love to field them.

I may direct you to the 206-page study because I can promise you I did not read it in full.

But there is one section on page 141 where the authors talk about a finding that they consider preliminary, but a lot of people are citing it.

They say perhaps one of the more concerning findings is that participants in the LLM to brain group repeatedly focused on a narrower set of ideas, as evidenced by blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

This repetition suggests that many participants may not have engaged deeply with the topics or critically examined the material provided by the LLM.

Okay, to be expected.

Then they said, when individuals fail to critically engage with a subject, their writing might become biased and superficial.

This pattern reflects the accumulation of cognitive debt, a condition in which repeated reliance on external systems like LLMs replaces the effortful cognitive processes required for independent thinking.

And then they talk more about cognitive debt, saying that it defers mental effort in the short term, but results in long-term costs like diminished critical inquiry and increased vulnerability to manipulation, decreased creativity, all things that we in the skeptic community do not want to see.

Right.

The problem is their study doesn't show that.

Yeah.

But a lot of people wrote that their study shows that.

And that's really disconcerting.

If you do like a cursory search

for MIT chat GPT study, you will find headlines like, MIT researchers say using chat GPT can rot your brain.

MIT study finds chat GPT can harm critical thinking over time.

Chat GPT use linked to cognitive decline.

Researchers scanned the brains of chat GPT users and found something deeply alarming.

Is chat GPT making us dumb?

But when you look at the actual press release that they put out, there's

an FAQ section, and literally the first thing in the FAQ says, is it safe to say that LLMs are in essence making us dumber?

And then the authors wrote, no, please do not use words like stupid, dumb, brain rot, harm, damage, passivity, trimming, and so on.

It does a huge disservice to this work, as we did not use this vocabulary in the paper, especially if you are a journalist reporting on it.

They specifically ask journalists not to do that.

And there's so many write-ups that do just that.

Oh, gosh.

So there is a good, but it actually bumps me out because they put brain rot in the title, but there is an interesting kind of hot take in the conversation written by some researchers from South Australia.

Unfortunately, yeah, their headline is: MIT researchers say using chat GPT can rot your brain.

They did not say that.

The truth is a little more complicated.

And they argue that, of course, there's going to be limited engagement when using chat GPT compared to when only using your own brain.

But they were saying that's not how you should use ChatGPT.

And they sort of use

an analogy to when calculators first came on the scene.

They were saying early on, when calculators first came on the scene, pedagogy had to change, right?

And the way that we tested had to change because math teachers were like,

if I want to test somebody's calculation abilities and they have a calculator, I'm not going to know if they're doing it themselves or if the machine is doing it for them.

But what they started to learn is that we can just ask more complex questions that require the ability to use a calculator, right?

And so what they're saying is that this study basically asked people people a basic calculation question and then said, how do you do it with and without a calculator?

Instead of asking a more complex question and saying, how do you do that with and without a calculator?

And that's really the difference and that's really their argument here.

And I think it's one that we all kind of echo.

They say, you know, current and future generations need to be able to think critically and creatively to solve problems.

And AI is changing what these things mean.

But producing essays with pen and paper is no longer a demonstration of critical thinking ability, just as doing long division is no longer a demonstration of numeracy.

Knowing when, where, and how to use AI is the key to long-term success and skill development.

But they argue our educational system has to catch up, and it's not.

So right now, it's a hack that a lot of students are using to offload the cognitive effort that is required to do a lot of the tasks that they've been given.

But when used correctly, I do think that chat GPT could be beneficial, but we do have to be careful because the one thing that's different here is that where their analogy breaks down is that graphing calculators always give you the right answer if you use them correctly.

Right.

You know, whereas like chat GPT, you can't always trust what it's telling you is true.

And so I think we have to think about that as well.

Well, that's why you have to use them correctly as well.

True, true.

But the problem is.

The calculations are a thing, man.

You got to be aware of that.

But the problem is even the best computer scientists out there are probably not in agreement about how to use ChatGPT correctly, right?

I mean, a lot of people are saying use your brain first and use ChatGP as like a validation tool, but don't go in first saying, answer me this or write me this paper and then go from there.

But I can see the concern, right?

I think I'm really sitting on both sides of this conversation that's happening online right now.

I don't like how over the top a lot of the coverage is, but I do understand the alarm bells ringing.

I didn't have this when I was in school.

But Jay, for example, your kids are right at that age.

This is going to be the tool that they use in school.

How are they going to be able to use it appropriately?

And how will it affect their cognitive development?

Yeah.

That's an important question to be asking.

And we need a lot more research into that.

And I think this is one of the early studies to tell us how

thinking is affected when we have tools like this at our disposal.

Yeah, it is interesting.

I mean, clearly, people are lazy, but from an evolutionary point of view, meaning that

we have a huge motivation for efficiency.

Yeah, I was going to say, let's say efficient, not lazy.

No, I mean, but it's lazy in that evolutionary, in a good way, I guess, in that we do crave efficiency.

We will try to get things done with the least amount of effort.

Shortcuts, yes.

And we have a desire for simplicity, all these things.

These are adaptive.

They don't really work perfectly well in a complicated civilization that we have.

And so you almost have to consciously do things the hard way just to do it, just to keep your skills up, just to, you know what I mean?

You could spend your entire life sitting on a couch letting machines do everything for you.

You know what I mean?

But we do things like exercise, which is, I mean, when you think about it, that's 100% inefficient in terms of getting something accomplished, right?

It's just for the physical activity.

Yeah.

So we have to do, like, we do puzzles.

You have chat GPT do your homework and then do puzzles and play video games.

You know what I mean?

It's like,

yeah, and what is that?

And I think that's really the main question is like, what is that balance?

Because I see the sort of okay boomer argument on the other side, too.

I see it with my parents where they're like, never using a GPS.

Right.

And they're like, I don't want to forget how to get there.

And I'm like, you are describing.

Yeah, I'm like, you are describing a skill you will need in a zombie apocalypse.

I get it.

If there is a big outage of all GPS, you will be ahead of the curve, that's great.

But all of my adult life, that has never applied.

And I'm more than happy to rely on

GPS.

I'm going to push back a little bit on that.

Interesting.

That's fine.

No, because uh like occasionally I will drive somewhere and deliberately not use GPS because it's not just that you need to be able to do it when you don't have GPS like a zombie apocalypse.

It's also I just want to exercise my understanding of the terrain, of the of the location, of the streets.

I don't want to be completely dependent on GPS and have like no idea where things are in relation to each other, which is what happens when all you do is just completely follow GPS and are not in

the process.

That's also, I think, kind of those are extremes.

I often have my GPS up because I want to know if there's traffic

and I want to know if there's a better route.

But that doesn't mean I'm staring at my GPS the whole time I'm driving.

When I'm going to work, my GPS is always up.

I know how to get to work.

You know what I mean?

I'm not looking at

it.

You're using it for other reasons.

Exactly.

Kara, there used to be a time, though, when we would say, you know, how do I get from here to there?

Oh, you go down, go to the main road, past the red brick house, and it's three buildings beyond that.

That's horrible.

And that was good enough.

You could navigate using that.

That could never happen now.

Right, but then the argument here is:

am I somehow less capable

of navigating my world?

And am I cognitively dulled or slowed because of my dependence on GPS?

Or, as you said, Steve, am I offloading that cognitive task so that I can focus on other cognitive tasks?

And I think for a lot of people, that's the question.

The problem with talking about chat GPT in an academic setting is that that's where we're learning how to learn.

Right, right.

That's totally different

than navigating the world after we've learned those things.

It's like going to the gym and having a robot exercise for you.

Exactly.

So, how do we then go to the gym and use the nice machine so that we can do the exercise we wouldn't have been able to do with just free weights?

We use the free weights when they're appropriate, use the machine so that we can get to even better muscle groups where we couldn't maybe do that specific thing

with the free weights, so that we're doing both.

And that's going to be something that our teachers, our professors, our researchers really need to prioritize for this next generation of children.

Hey, if the end result of this is that education focuses on critical thinking rather than memorizing facts, I'm all for it.

Me too.

100%.

And Steve, I'll just throw out there that you can do fitness that's not essentially not getting anything done.

It's rare.

I know it.

I hear it.

Like yesterday,

there's no idea.

You mowed the lawn.

You're doing

the lawn with a 16-pound pound weight vest on, and it was a a hell of a workout, especially in this heat.

Man, it was rough, but man, I felt good after when that was done.

So if you can do that, that's great, but it does not take any effort.

I do yard work as my exercise often, you know, like in the summer.

But you're right.

Yeah, we are efficiency machines.

So we've just got to make sure that we're not becoming so efficient that we're forgetting how to do the things that are actually foundational skills for all the other things we need to do in life.

Right.

Got to go analog sometimes.

All right, right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

All right, guys.

Hello?

Yep.

You guys want to hear last week's noisy?

Yeah, let's hear it.

Here it is.

What do you think, guys?

So

I know exactly what that is.

Is there another layer to this that we're supposed to get, or is it just a thing that it obviously is?

I'm not telling you.

All right.

Yeah, I don't know what that is.

The game Space Invaders.

The arcade.

It is.

I mean, this one, I did this one to make people of our generation smile because it's such a cool

the soundscape of that game was genius.

It was genius because it has like a heartbeat and it gets faster.

Yeah.

And it causes tension.

And I, you know, it's so funny.

Like when it, in the beginning, it's like, oh, this is so easy.

And then like 30 seconds later, you're like, oh my God.

So I had some fun guesses.

I mean, lots of people knew this.

I got this is one of those times where I got a tsunami of emails.

I finally know it.

So Brad Beam wrote in, said, What's up, Jay?

Oh my god, is this noisy from Math Blaster zapping the trash to fill up the spaceship gas tank to catch the bad guy that hates math or something?

So I had to look it up because Math Blaster rang a bell and Math Blaster is a 1983 educational video game and it was put out by a company called Learning Systems and created by Davidson and Associates.

Very cool.

I did check the game out.

I absolutely played it, I think, because it looked very familiar to me.

But it is not that.

Of course, you know, we did a reveal early, but it doesn't matter because everybody knows what it is.

Another listener named Russell Moverly said,

Yodel J-E-O.

Yodel J-E-O.

Okay, I see what he did there.

This week's Noisy, I can only be one of two things.

Either it is the original sound effects for the demo version of Frogger or one of the stems from a new skrill x song yeah so this this has there is a little bit of a frogger sound in here um if you know the game like yeah it has a little maybe a little bit of that i mean to me it's so crystal clear what it is um but what i found was i got a lot of emails from people who were just referencing other games of that era um which is funny because you know your your memory is very faulty and the wires can get crossed so another listener named tom uh tom howard wrote in i'm pretty sure this week's noisy is the old Tron game where they throw discs, the arcade cabinet makes you stand up at weird angles, and it's very fun.

It is not Tron, Tron, the two Dron's Tron games, the first one and Discs of Tron, were two of my favorite video games as a kid, by the way.

But anyway, this all, of course, is leading to

the winner, Joe Lanondria.

And Joe said, is this week's noisy?

Not just Space Invaders.

And I said, well, look, he guessed it.

It was Space Invaders.

I think he did what you did, Steve.

Is it just, you know, we just got as a guest Space Invaders?

It was funny because a lot of people guessed like right when the show dropped.

So Joe got on the jump there.

So let me tell you about Space Invaders, guys.

Back in the late 70s and early 80s, we had an unbelievably awesome thing happened.

Cabinet video games with game rooms took over, particularly here in the United States.

There were so many games to play, and they all cost a quarter.

And you begged money off your parents and you went and you uh you basically got to play video games for a half hour or an hour until your money ran out but man was it fun so space invaders was was released in anybody want to guess the year 1977 78 I think it was created in 1977

it was released in 78 in Japan published by a company called Tato T-A-I-T-O

and then it was released overseas later that year by Midway right midway is a a a name that a lot of people should recognize.

That game was huge.

Midway was an enormous arcade company, yeah, video game arcade company.

I'm not going to pretend like I knew this.

I'm just going to ask a question after doing some reading.

Do you guys know what Space Invaders did that was unique and formative for video games?

A joystick?

That's a great guess, Kara.

Space Invaders, ready?

It was the first video game.

Multicolor.

Yeah, in terms of how much money it made, it was was a blockbuster video game.

All good guesses.

It was a blockbuster video game, meaning it was highly loved and it was everywhere.

I mean,

everywhere.

It transformed the arcade video game, console video game.

It was the beginning of it, pretty much.

It wasn't the first one.

The first cabinet video game was Computer Space in 1971.

How many people have

no, but Space Aviator was the first popular game?

Space Adventures was the first massively popular cabinet.

I think it was the first video game I played arcade style.

Probably same for me.

So, wait, wait, I'm on pins and needles.

What is it, Jeff?

All right, this is

I really want you to understand this.

It was the first game that had endless gameplay, and it was the first fixed shooter.

So, the endless gameplay idea is that the game will continue to let you play forever if your skill can get that high.

Does that true with Space Invaders?

Because there were limits on other games.

Yeah, there was a limit on Technology.

There was 255th screen, right?

All that stuff.

Let me tell you.

This is what the the Wikipedia page said.

I'm trusting it.

Let me tell you that I never got past the third freaking screen ever.

You know what I mean?

I love it.

And they said it was the first fixed shooter, and I wasn't 100% sure what that is.

I can actually click this link here and see.

Wikipedia says

shoot-em-ups, also known as schmupps,

are a sub-genre of action games.

There is no consensus as to which design elements compose a shoot-em-up.

Some restrict the definition to games featuring spacecraft and certain types of character movement.

Okay, so I get it.

Oh, yeah, it's it's the screen is usually fixed, it doesn't scroll.

Okay, yeah, the screen is the screen.

Yeah, right.

It doesn't ever change.

It's just a new group of bad guys shows up on a screen.

Like Galaga.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, Jay, according to what I'm seeing here, the game does not have a, quote, kill screen.

In other words, where some other arcade games do have an end, even though they do generally, you can't usually get play to the end.

But apparently, Space Invaders doesn't have it.

You can go infinitely with it.

Yeah, there are actually console games that you can win.

You can actually, the game will say, you won.

Yeah, there's a lot like that.

Yeah.

So I'm going to say something to the people out there.

If you are of my generation or not,

find a local retro arcade near you.

And it's very likely that there's one within an hour of your house.

And go spend a few hours at the arcade because the smell of those machines and

just the whole ergonomic experience to me is just freaking amazing.

To this day, whenever I get behind one of the old arcade machines and I get to play, I'm like riveted.

We got to do that in Arizona.

You guys remember?

Yes, of course we got to go.

We went to that cool bar.

That bar was awesome.

Yeah, super fun.

All right, I have a new noisy for you guys.

Good job, everybody.

And I mean everybody.

My God, so many people.

I got to the point where I just had to stop looking at the emails.

Okay, I got a new noisy for you guys this day.

Wahaba?

Wahaba?

That's where you get, man.

You knew you'd be inundated with that one.

I got to throw one of those out there every once in a while.

I want people to feel like you know that they're not listening.

Everybody wins.

My god, damn, Steve.

Holy Christ.

Okay, here we go, guys.

This noisy was sent in by a listener named Bradford West.

And check this out.

I will tell you that the

noises that start and end the video, you should pay attention to those as well.

If you guys think you know what that noisy is or you heard something cool, email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

Also, guys, if you enjoy the work that we do and you want to support us going forward, you know, we have our new projects and we plan to increase the size of the SGU's footprint.

And it's a great time to become a patron and to give us some support.

Even a tiny bit can help.

Go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

You could also join our mailing list.

We have consistently been sending out a weekly mailer.

Lots of fun.

Yes, absolutely.

We spike out the things that we did here at the SGU over the last week.

There's other fun things going on in there.

Ian and I might be working on a secret project that I'll tell you all about because it's not a secret.

Basically, I'm trying to create a weekly SGU puzzle game that is going to go in the email.

So I'm coming up with ideas.

If you have any ideas, you can email me at info at the skepticsguide.org.

I do have a couple of things I'm narrowing down to, but I'm still completely open.

You know, if you have any cool ideas, just email me and

if we use your idea, I'll give you credit.

And also, we will be in Kansas on September 20th of this year.

And during that day, we will be doing two shows.

We'll be doing a live SGU recording probably sometime around noon.

And we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza of special significance.

This is our stage show.

Both of those shows will will include George Hobb.

The stage show is an hour and a half to an hour and 45 minutes of lots of different things.

We talk about essentially, it has a science backbone to it.

The entire show does.

We talk about how your brain can fool you.

And then everything else is improv by the SGU.

We have all these different things that we do, and it's a ton of fun.

We get amazing feedback on this show, and we deserve it because we've been shaping this show for over a decade.

So we've refined the hell out of it.

We know exactly what we're doing, and it's a ton of fun.

If you want to come check us out, you can go to the skepticsguide.org and there will be buttons on the homepage.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

We're going to do a name-that logical fallacy.

Haven't done one of those in a while.

This comes from a question from Alex Smith, and Alex writes: I'm currently attempting a through hike of the Pacific Crest Trail, and I'm in the Sierras currently.

And it is recommended that people can try an ice axe for the snowy areas so people can self-arrest if they fall.

I have heard a lot of people say they won't bring an ice axe into the Sierras because they don't know how to use it, anyways.

This feels like they are mostly trying to convince themselves that they don't need to spend the money on an ice axe and they don't need to carry the extra weight.

But this argument of I don't want to bring it because I don't know how to use it feels like a logical fallacy to me.

Though it is true that there are more effective ways to use an ice axe than others, it does feel like its main use is relatively simple in its design.

Then he comes up with an analogy about a personal flotation device, and people are not trained how to use it.

They would rather not use it at all if they can't use it perfectly.

And he wants to know what logical fallacy this is.

So, I definitely think there's a logical fallacy in there.

Although, remember, these are informal logical fallacies, they're totally context-dependent.

And you could come up with examples where it's reasonable to say that you don't want to use something because you don't know how to use it, it, and there are situations where it is a logical fallacy.

So, if this is a logical fallacy, which one do you think it is?

I don't want to go because I haven't learned how to use the thing, or I don't want to bring the thing because I haven't learned how to use the thing.

Yeah,

or like, I can't use this perfectly, so I'm not going to use it at all.

The perfect, the enemy of the good, whatever that one's called.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that kind of sets it up a little bit easier.

So, that's the Nirvana fallacy.

Yes, it's a perfect piping.

Which is the perfect is the enemy of the good or the good enough.

The idea that, well, I can't use this perfectly, so why should I use it at all?

And I think he may be right in that, yeah, okay, sure, you may not know how to use an ice axe.

I guess the idea is that if you're slipping on the ice, you can use it to slow your fall, right?

You jam it into the ice and it slows your fall.

It does seem pretty straightforward.

But I would point out that this can be a legitimate argument in certain contexts because sometimes not knowing knowing how to use a device might mean that you're actually

will hurt yourself if you use it.

You're more likely

to cause a bazooka, right?

Yeah, like being armed in a school.

So, well, we actually, there was a study we talked about on this show where people who confronted a brown bear with a gun were more likely to be killed than people who didn't have a gun.

And again, not that there aren't some people who are hunters and have the right kind of gun and know what they're doing.

False sense of security.

For a lot of people,

if you don't know how to use a gun or you don't have the right kind of gun, having it actually increases your chance of getting killed because you're just going to piss it off.

Well, it's two things there.

Evan, I think you're right, too.

It can give you a false sense of security and you may engage in riskier behavior.

There's that too.

You may get closer to the bear than you should because you're like, yeah, I have a gun.

I'll be fine.

I'm going to do that.

Yeah.

Right.

So, I don't know.

I mean, I would need to talk to an expert.

You need topic expertise to know

using an ice axe without training, does that have come with the risk of hurting yourself or making the situation worse?

Or will people engage in more risky behaviors?

Because, hey, I got the ice axe if I do fall.

It's not, it doesn't seem totally implausible that that might be the case, but you would need either some topic expertise or we would need specific evidence to really know.

But if you are saying this isn't perfect, so I'm not going to do it at all, even when that's not the correct formulation of risk versus benefit.

That is the nirvana fallacy.

Or this doesn't, this is useless because it's not perfect.

You know, like vaccines don't save 100% of people, so they're worthless.

Why get them?

Yeah, that's the nirvana fallacy.

Yep.

All right, guys, let's go on with science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

We just got three regular news items this week.

Are you guys ready?

Yep.

All right.

Item number one, scientists have discovered a new organelle inside human cells they are calling the hemifusome.

I number two, researchers have been able to genetically engineer immune cells to produce a protein that induces long-term dormancy in HIV.

And item number three, a recent graph of marine biomass over time shows that total biomass is mostly stable over geological time, punctuated by mass extinctions and later return to the longer-term baseline.

Bob, go first.

New organelle, that's a fascinating possibility, and I would think quite rare at this day and age, but just too cool.

I hope it's true, and I hope it's amazing.

Number two, let's see, genetic engineering: immune cells to produce a protein that induces long-term dormancy in HIV.

I mean, it seems reasonable to think that we would be, if we had that would be doable at this point.

They made so many amazing advances with drugs for HIV.

I mean, and now with genetic engineering, we're just becoming so good at it.

So, this is, it seems reasonable.

So, let's look at this last one here: marine biomass, total biomass is stable, interesting, over geological time, and then mass extinctions and later return to...

I mean,

this is a little bit wordy, so I'll explain it.

What do you want to say?

So they looked at it's 500 million years, right?

So basically over the last 500 million years,

not the number of species or the number of whatever, just the total biomass of things in the ocean, right?

The marine biomass has been roughly stable.

Not, you know, punctuated by the mass extinctions.

I mean, superficially, that sounds reasonable that all the niches were basically filled without dramatic changes.

I mean, it sounds reasonable, but plah, they all sound pretty decent.

Something's dropping me wrong, though, about this biomass one, though.

I could kind of see that this is just like, oh, no, this is all baloney.

It's not, you know, it's not stable over geologic time and change.

So I'm just going to say that that one's fiction.

Okay, Kara.

Biomass fiction.

Yeah, I mean, I think that the new organelle, I mean, it's really interesting that in, I mean, I don't know if it was this year or last year, but that we have to like make new models for all the classrooms.

Oh, yeah.

The same since like the 70s.

So

I mean, it's pretty cool.

I don't know what a hemifusome would do.

Something about half.

What?

Yeah, like, I don't know.

But we'll see.

So that's cool.

Then, so it's kind of between the HIV long-term dormancy, which I guess I think that there are dormancy proteins.

And I mean, part of me is like, why would they engineer?

Of course, they would engineer them for people because, like, most of our treatments aren't really like most of the research it looks like right now is about prevention.

You know, I think that there was just a twice annual shot that was released.

Like, how cool is that?

Yeah.

Right.

To prevent contracting HIV.

But of course, a lot of people already have HIV.

And so, how can we ensure longer, healthier lives?

That would make sense.

That's pretty cool.

And then the marine biomass mostly staying stable.

That's such a hard one.

Like, was there a time when it exploded because of like the Cambrian explosion or something?

I mean, 500 million is not that long ago, though.

Or was there a time, well, I guess mass extinctions don't count here because you're saying it's punctuated by mass.

Or like, has it been getting, has it been dwindling because of overfishing lately?

I don't know.

I feel like there's probably some sort of trend that I don't know about.

So yeah, it just seems the least likely to me.

Or the other two seem more likely.

So I'll go with Bob.

Go with Bob.

Go with Bob.

Okay, Jay.

Yeah, it's funny.

You guys are, you know, in referencing the biomass one in the ocean.

That one seems like science to me.

I mean, you know, Bob, you said it.

Like, once all of those nooks and crannies in the ocean have been filled, you know, it's I look at the ocean almost like it's a singular living organism, right?

And there's just a certain amount of creatures that live there.

The ocean has a robust ecosystem and food chain.

And also, like, you know, crazy stuff, in my opinion, doesn't happen in the ocean like it happens on land.

I just think it's more stable.

I don't know.

For some reason, I'm going to take a walk out on the ledge here, guys, and say that one is science.

The new organelle, to me, I agreed with what Bob said.

Like, you know, really?

Like, today they found that.

I would more think that if they

discovered a new organelle, it might mean that they figured out how the system works better inside the cell.

And and they're like, oh, actually, these three things

should be considered one organ, maybe, you know what I mean?

I'm just throwing that idea out there as what that could be.

Being able to genetically engineer the immune cells to produce a protein that pretty much puts HIV to sleep, that seems legit.

I mean, we have CRISPR guys, you know?

So I think that's science.

And I think the ocean one is science.

I'm going to go with the organelle as the fiction.

Okay, and Devin.

Oh, the organelle.

I don't know.

What I thought maybe is that it's not so much that maybe they discovered a new organelle, but rather they've identified something in a cell that they used to think was part of something else, but it actually turns out it's its own thing.

A redefinition.

I don't know, you know, they all of a sudden, hey, we didn't notice this before, and all of a sudden this is here.

So maybe a kind of a reclassification.

Is that considered a discovery of a new organelle?

It might technically qualify for that.

The one about the HIV, I agree with everyone that that one is going to be science, sure, genetically engineering immune cells.

Why not?

That tends to be science more often than not when we talk about that incredible.

And the last one about the biomass, no idea, right?

How do you quantify it?

How do you really know?

And yeah, geez, that's a specialty unto itself.

That one gives me the least bit of confidence.

I'll join Kara and Bob and say that that one's the fiction.

Okay, so you guys all agree on the middle one.

So we'll start there.

Researchers have been able to genetically engineer immune cells to produce a protein that induces long-term dormancy in HIV.

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

science.

All right.

Cool.

That's good so far.

Good.

Why would they want to do this?

Didn't we just talk about the fact that they were trying to bring HIV out of dormancy so that we could then target it with anti-HIV, like anti-retroviral drugs.

Well, they try all sorts of things, Steve.

Yeah, but if it's like

a permanent dormancy, then hey man.

Then if it's not going to affect you, it's not going to affect you.

Yeah, yeah.

Kind of works both ways, right?

Yeah.

So, and that's the idea, but it would have to like really put it into a, like, it's out of commission now for the rest of your life, yeah, sort of thing would be very effective.

Because when it's dormant, it's not reproducing, it's not transmissible, right?

So it's basically who cares.

But the only thing is, it could be reactivated at some point in the future.

And the advantage here is that because they're basically engineering the host's immune cells to make the protein, it's not like you have to take drugs for the rest of your life.

As long as the guess would survive for as long as those immune cells survive.

But if you can get, these are the CD4

positive cells.

Or if you could, I guess, get, you know, make these changes into the stem cells so that from that point forward, you're going to be producing cells that make the protein.

This is a proof of concept.

Obviously, this is not like a treatment.

They just wanted to say, hey, you know, would this work?

Like, if we made this specific protein, which is, you know,

which they know has been associated with dormancy and HIV,

it's actually made by the HIV itself.

It's the AST is the name of the protein.

HIV anti-sense transcript.

They said, but what if we make it ectopically, like make it outside, like the HIV isn't producing it, just the immune cells that the HIV is infecting are making it.

Would that work?

And they showed that it does work.

That's interesting.

I feel like that could be a different approach to shingles, too, right?

Because isn't that what happens with chickenpox?

Is it like dormant?

It's dormant, then it becomes activated.

Yeah, and then it becomes activated.

So again, basic science, interesting.

See if it leads to anything, but it seems very plausible that it could.

All right, let's go to number three.

A recent graph of marine biomass over time shows that total biomass is mostly stable over geological time, punctuated by mass extinctions, and later return to the longer-term baseline.

Bob, Cara, and Evan, you think this one is fiction?

Jay, you think this one is science?

So, this is a very interesting question, isn't it?

And you could kind of make sense of it both ways.

And, you know, Jay, I think, had some really good points.

Once you fill up the oceans, that's it, right?

Why would it change except something big happening like a mass extinction?

And this is interesting that this is the first time we've really been able to do this because it's a this was a Herculean study to do.

You have to think about it, you have to find some way to quantitatively estimate the total biomass, marine biomass, over different points of geological history.

They basically had to count shells and stuff in different strata and try to estimate the biomass based upon that.

Well,

this one

is

the fiction.

It is a fiction.

What do you think the study did find?

There was a change.

Less or more?

Yeah, and that is obviously less.

What was the trend?

What was the trend?

Over 500 million years?

Yeah.

A slow increase over time.

Yeah, I would say if it's slow, increase.

If it was fast, decrease.

If it was only like within the last.

It's 500 million years.

It's basically since multicellular life was established.

Yeah, it was probably an increase.

If there's a huge change in the last 500 years,

it's been steadily increasing over genealogical time, which is really interesting.

And they think that's why do you think that's happening?

They don't know from this study.

This is just showing that that's what was happening.

But what they more

food available?

Yeah, or gas, like oxygen or something in the water.

They think it's because of evolution that life is just becoming more efficient, right?

As it's evolving,

it's able to fill up

the resources, the space more effectively, more efficiently.

The ecosystems are getting more complex.

That's cool.

Yeah.

They think it's just an epiphenomenon of evolution.

Just a greater sort of overall efficiency in the ecosystem.

Yeah, which is really fascinating.

Which means that scientists have discovered a new organelle inside human cells they are calling the hemifusome is science.

Cool, man.

What was it?

Was it like a gorganelle?

Well, they were going to call it metachlorians, but that was taken away.

Yes.

No.

Only by a bad movie.

So it fuses things.

It does.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

It fuses half of things.

So then first of all, they say that the reason that this was recently discovered is because, when you think about it, we're looking at cells using mainly electron microscopy.

We're seeing slices of cells that are static, right?

We're not seeing them necessarily in life.

There are other forms of microscopy where you can do that, but not in as much detail.

And so they were just missing stuff that was happening,

like the

activity of these hemifusomes.

So it was really, they were identified by their activity, right?

Which it's hard to see.

And then they were able to find them?

Yeah, but they were able to see enough of them that they were able to identify them and what they do.

So basically what they do is they're the recycling center in the cell.

They are involved in sorting, recycling, and disposing of debris, of like protein debris.

Are they free-floating?

Or are they attached to another organelle?

No, I think they're just in

the cytoplasm there.

So whereas like a, what's it called, like a lysosome would like take in stuff and just get rid of it, these reuse reuse the stuff.

So they oh, yeah, it's like this protein, got to get rid of it.

This one over here, we need to recycle it, put it back into

the cycle there.

And this one needs to go over there to do whatever it's going to do.

So it's basically just this recycling center inside the cell where it's just sorting through the different bits of debris and figuring out what to do with them.

That's interesting.

So it connects to a lot of other parts of the cell.

You know, it's like this transfer station.

Oh, and now it now makes, I'm just googling it too.

It's characterized by

the hemifusion of two different vesicles.

Yes.

Right.

So it forms a structure with a membrane between.

That's cool.

Yeah, I guess I was like, why would you need to do that?

And they also didn't know this step was necessary, right?

So they thought that just things just went to where they were supposed to go to.

They didn't realize it was all being managed by this organelle.

Yeah, that's interesting because we've known about lysosomes for a long time.

Yeah.

That's just like, that's like throwing it away.

No, the other thing is that this may be the cause of some diseases, right?

And so

if you don't know something exists, you can't possibly know that it's the cause of a disease.

And so now

we can ask this question of, is this disease of, which we know is a protein problem in cells, is this a problem of the hemifusomes?

Is this something that we could now figure out and treat?

So obviously this is very basic science, but this is what creates the potential for translation into some kind of a treatment.

And there's already diseases on the short list that they think this might be playing a role in.

So pretty cool.

Yeah, that caught my again, caught my eye.

Like, really?

We're discovering right now now?

Like, those things that happen much later than you think.

You haven't discovered all these already?

It's like, hang on, we discovered a new planet within our solar system, you know,

within the Kuiper Belt.

That would be surprising.

All right, well, good job, guys.

Hey, Steve.

Hey, Steve.

I just played a game of Space Invaders.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How'd you do?

I am worse now than I was when I was a kid.

Sure.

Oh, that's nice.

It's not like right now.

But you're playing on an emulator.

Yeah, I just found one.

I just thought, hey, why don't I check it out?

And it's, I'm like, I'm telling you, like, what the hell happened to my reflexes?

I actually think sometimes, and maybe I'm, maybe I'm wrong here, but I have an emulator for NES, and I play NES games a lot.

And I wonder if the reason it feels like I'm off sometimes when I'm playing Tetris or Dr.

Mario is actually because we've gotten better at matching our emotions to our eyes.

And back then, there was a lag, but we were so used to the lag that that felt normal to us.

Does that make sense?

Video games now are faster than video games were back then.

They're also three-dimensional.

That's true.

Yes.

But I am curious if that's the case even with an emulator.

Like, is the reason that it feels like, wait, why isn't it working?

Is because we're actually ahead instead of the behind that we were used to being in the 80s and 90s.

Yeah, I mean, you're still a little bit young, Kara.

At 60, yeah, our reflexes are objectively slower than they were when we were 20.

I mean, that's just a fact of life.

Don't say that.

Yeah, well, and also, Jay, you haven't played it in a while.

Yeah.

Yeah, but again, I wasn't good then either.

Good God.

Cost you a quarter then.

But I still feel

like I could play a video game extremely well and keep up with kids.

Although it's always hard to know because, like, we were talking about this this past weekend.

Like, I play a game called Overwatch, which is player on player, right?

And it's 100% skill.

Like there's everybody can play the same characters, but there's inside the game, everyone is a level playing field.

So the only difference is the player's skill.

There are some players who are so much better than I am.

It's amazing.

Professional Overwatch.

But is that because they're sinking thousands of hours into this game?

Yes, it's everything, Steve.

It's kids.

I'm not.

It's thousands of hours.

Steve, don't forget, people cheat at these games, too.

Maybe they also have really good gear.

Like, I'm just using my keyboard, you know.

Optimized.

But at the same time, I can hold my own.

I could totally hold my own with most players, you know.

Anyway, but unfortunately, if you look at the research, our nerves are literally slower.

Good news, though, Steve.

In two days, you will have so much time to get better at that game.

Oh, my gosh, you'll have Overwatch

all day, all night.

We know that Steve's fully in when he starts wearing Overwatch t-shirts.

All right.

Evan, give us a quote.

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

Oh, yes.

Love that quote.

Werner Heisenberg.

Yeah, Heisenberg.

He's the best person probably to come out with that quote.

I mean, right.

Is that not Heisenberg in a sentence

right there?

You know, is it a particle or is it a wave?

Well, it depends how you interact with it, my friend.

I'm tired of hearing it.

It's a good reminder, though.

I'm so sick of quantum mechanics.

That's right.

Oh, that quote was from Einstein.

I'm so sick of this stuff.

Come on now.

Can we talk about space invaders or something?

Not that Eisenberg guy.

Well, let's see.

Congratulations, man.

Congratulations, dude.

I'm so proud of you.

Finish line.

SGU version 2, man.

Yep.

I'm looking forward to it.

And guys, especially those of us on the East Coast, stay cool out there.

We're in the middle of an epic heat wave.

Yeah, it's supposed to break soon.

Yes, definitely.

Well, we don't get triple digits in Connecticut.

Yeah, it's awesome.

But it's trending up.

You know, I mean, we're just waiting for the world to end, and nobody's doing anything.

Summer is only a couple days old.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

You too, brother.

Thank you.

And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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