The Skeptics Guide #1040 - Jun 14 2025

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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 11th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me in the speaker, Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, folks.

Kara, how is LA?

I hear it's on fire again.

Well, that's what people want you to think, I think.

But it's not.

Okay.

Obviously, stuff is going on in LA.

There are protests.

There is a curfew downtown at night, but it's quiet at night, like the curfew is being heated.

It's not affecting my day-to-day, and I know that most citizens in LA feel the same way.

LA is a large area.

LA is really, really, really big.

And yes, there are protests in pockets.

The protests are largely peaceful.

And if you ask not only our Mayor, Karen Bass, but also our governor, Gavin Newsom, we don't want the National Guard here.

We don't want the Marines here.

Nobody asked them to come.

Actually, it's a violation of the Constitution for them to be asked to come here without our permission.

And they're not doing anything.

They're not needed.

They're mostly just standing around, quote, guarding government buildings.

From what I'm not sure.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty thin pretext and

something that Trump was spoiling to do just to do it.

Yeah, I mean, say that he could do it.

It's this same game of make a problem and then publicize the problem,

exaggerate the problem, and then, quote, solve the problem.

And then you get to be the hero.

But in doing so, engage in a lot of government overreach, which is quite.

frightening.

So, I mean, this all started with these ICE raids.

And some of these ICE are scary.

Some of them were really obviously we've seen the news all over the country of these like intensive maneuvers by immigration enforcement that like entering schools, you know, elementary schools attempting to enter without parental consent.

But so that's what the protests are about, right?

So for anybody who like has not been watching the news this week, I mean, this is global news, but for anybody who's not been watching the news this week, that's what the protests have been about.

They've been about ICE, like these militarized forces going in with, you you know, rubber bullets and flashbangs and fatigues and body armor into neighborhoods, into peaceful neighborhoods, and pulling people from their homes, trying to enter schools to pull children from the classrooms.

And so people are protesting and they're saying, no, you're not going to enter our community.

We're not okay with this.

And those protests, again, have been marches, largely peaceful marches.

And there has been some LAPD kind of retaliatory violence.

But for the most part, there haven't even been that many arrests.

And then, of course, Trump called in the National Guard and a few days later called in the Marines, which I don't think has ever happened.

Has that ever happened?

The Guard hasn't happened since desegregation.

Well,

it happened in 92 with the

Los Angeles.

And it happened during World War II.

No, but that's different.

In 92, it was called in with permission.

Oh, I see.

Los Angeles asked for the guard to

yeah, I don't think the Guard has been called into a state without that state's requesting.

I couldn't tell you when.

I don't think since desegregation.

Yeah, since desegregation.

Yeah, since the 60s.

And so this is

a massive overreach.

But then have the Marine,

have our troops, which are meant to protect our citizens from foreign threats, ever been called in against our own citizens?

The most recent time that a president invoked the Insurrection Act to deploy military troops domestically was in 1992.

President George Bush did that to quell the Rodney King riots in L.A., again in L.A.

That didn't go well, and they pulled the troops out after a few days because they fired on civilians because of miscommunication between officers and soldiers.

So this would be the first time in 33 years.

that that's done.

The big question is, is Trump's invocation of the Insurrection Act legitimate?

Is there a cause?

And the courts are going to be fighting that out.

So we are seeing conscientious objectors.

I'm starting to see more and more interviews online with Marine Corps

men and women marching in marches across the country.

Yeah.

But here in the United, here in Los Angeles, I think it's a, what do you do, right?

What do you do if you're in that position?

Yeah.

But yeah, so we'll see what comes of this.

But this is, you know, this is dress rehearsal.

And my concern is that we see a lot of people kind of saying, oh, oh my gosh, the riots.

It looks so dangerous and scary there.

LA's on fire.

Everybody's rioting.

Media will frame that, you know, to their fullest extent.

Yeah, that's how it's been framed left and right.

Cell viewers, right?

You know, my mom texted me yesterday, and my mom lives in Texas, and my mom is 76 years old.

And she said, how are you doing with this manufactured fiasco masking Trump's coup of taking over LA?

And I was like, you get it, mom.

But I don't think that that's how a lot of people are looking at this.

It's peaceful here.

I can go to the grocery store.

I can drive wherever I want to in my town.

Yeah, it's sad to watch happening in our own country.

Super scary.

Yeah.

That's what the voters that showed up wanted, apparently.

They may have, but regardless, there are a lot of legal scholars out there

talking about how this is a massive violation of the Constitution.

So I guess we'll see what happens.

All right, Evan, you're going to start us off with the dumbest thing of the week.

Thank you, Steve.

Yes, the dumbest thing thing of the week is water.

Specifically, gourmet water, often called fine water, and the so-called connoisseurs who will try to convince you that the difference between gourmet brands of water are superior tasting to, say, the water from your tap.

And this was, I found this at the New York Times, an article written by Kim Severson titled, You've Heard of Fine Wine, Now Meet Fine Water.

Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz with tasting sommieres and even water cellars.

Did I pronounce that right?

Sommieres.

Sommelières.

Sommelières.

I didn't know if the L was silent or not.

And even water cellars, yes.

No, you say the L.

Sommelier.

Sommelier.

Yeah, but you can say psalm.

It sounds like smellier.

You can say psalm.

Psalms.

Psalms.

I like that.

That's better.

Here's how the article starts.

I got a kick out of this.

She says: I recently spent 90 minutes watching six very serious people taste 107 varieties of mineral water.

Each container was hidden under a cloth bag, its contents dispensed by small pores into wine glasses.

The judges swished and gazed thoughtfully into the middle distance.

They dumped the excess into buckets at their feet and joked about needing a bathroom.

They each gave the water a score between 90 and 100.

Fine water is the preferred term of its growing cadre of enthusiasts.

The taste is distinct to a place rich with minerals it picked up as it traveled to the surface of the earth.

The Fine Water crowd shuns giants like Perrier and Aquapana, both owned by Nestle.

Fine Water has a better story, you see.

Winners at April's Wine Tasting, part of the ninth annual Fine Ninth Annual Fine Water's Taste and Design Awards in Atlanta included melted snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, deep sea water that had been pumped 80 miles off the coast of South Korea, and there was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, along with a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.

It's also gaining traction among the what wellness crowd, which has grown increasingly skeptical of municipal tap water and purified water in plastic bottles.

I wonder if part of that skepticism of municipal tap water is

fluoride-related.

I would not be surprised if that whole thing is taking root here.

She also reminds the readers that back in this is the early 2000s, Penn and Tellers

show bullshit when they had an episode about water and they made basically

their own little

fine water bar in which

it was very pretentious and they had fancy names for everything.

And what they did is they went out back and turned on the hose from

the spigot, filled up a bunch of water and served it to people for $7 a bottle.

$7 a bottle, that seems like a bargain.

How about $100 a bottle for a Slovenian water enriched with magnesium?

Or what do you say about $150 a bottle for water collected from a 4,000-year-old glacier?

And yes, so, and the rise of influencers, this person, Martin Ries,

your personal water psalm, an energetic German who spreads the gospel for fine water.

from everywhere from National Geographic to Instagram,

among others.

So,

the water you buy falls into one of two categories, purified and natural.

Purified water is tap water, stripped of minerals and impurities.

Natural water, which includes brands like San Pellegrino and Deer Park, those go from the earth to the bottle with little intervention.

They are microbiologically safe, they say.

Bottom line, can you taste the difference between tap water versus fine water?

I would say no.

Yes, most blind taste tests are saying no.

And it has been studied many times, mostly in formal experiments, but universities have done this, consumer advocacy groups have done it, TV shows, obviously Penn and Teller, among others, have also done it.

And they've shown that the average person struggles to distinguish high-priced bottled water from tap water in blind tasting.

So, what is the allure?

Well, it's marketing and presentation, of course, along with some of the claims having to do with perhaps a more natural and healthy kind of lifestyle associated with the type of water you decide to drink.

But, you know, again, this is all about perception and status rather than what you're actually putting in your body or exactly how it tastes.

So, for all the fine water connoisseurs out there believing in water superiority and trying to convince others to spend unreasonable sums of money on the most basic and widely accessible commodity of water, these sops are the dumbest thing of the week.

Back to you, Steve.

Thank you, Evan.

Yeah, and there is something untasteful, I guess, about, or distasteful, about somebody spending $150 on a bottle of water when there are people who don't have just basic clean water to drink.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Right.

Yep.

That's quite a gap.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Jay, how's NASA's budget looking?

This new development is that NASA has a potential crisis.

It looks like

it's going to manifest.

That has nothing to do with anything that they're developing or people on the moon or any of that.

It has to do with economics and the government.

So we have a combination of

massive proposed budget cuts and the political feud between Trump and Musk.

This has created a really bad outlook for NASA.

If the current newly proposed budget, if that goes through, guys, then there'll be decades of investments that have already been made in space science and climate monitoring,

international partnerships and everything, and all that stuff could just simply go away.

So, the basics of this situation are: the White House has submitted their 2026 budget.

This is what is being referred to as the Big Beautiful bill.

And it cuts NASA's total funding from $25 billion to $19 billion.

That's a significant drop.

Slashes the science directorate by up to 52%,

reduces Earth science funding by 53%, cancels or suspends 40 active or planned missions.

And the only thing that they did was they boosted funding for human missions to the moon and Mars by 100 million.

So collectively, this is what is considered a complete train wreck.

All of it is being oddly justified where they're saying that they want to refocus their quote-unquote strategic priorities.

It seems though, but all they want to do is they want to plant flags on the moon and on Mars.

So here's some missions that are on the chopping block.

This is not all of them, this is just some of them.

The Mars sample return.

You guys remember we talked about the fact that the rover was dropping regolith samples and that they

came up with ways to return those to Earth.

They did come up with a way.

So that has been canceled.

Oh, no.

And you guys can look these up because there's a lot of them, and I won't get into descriptions on everything, but they're canceling MAVEN, DaVinci.

Wait, wait, they're canceling MAVEN?

Yeah.

But the probe's already there around Mars, isn't it?

I believe it is, Steve, and they're just canceling it.

I guess the future funding for it has been pulled.

They're canceling Veritas, OSIRIS-APEX, New Horizons, Juno.

We've talked about so many of these probes.

We talked about all of it.

Earth observation, the land sat next.

PACE, which is plankton, aerosol, cloud, ocean ecosystems.

Geocarb, this is where George goes on a carb-free diet.

Surface water and ocean topography, and then the collaborative missions or international missions, the ESA's Roseland Franklin rover, which is a Mars rover, ESA's Envision, which is a Venus rover, and support for lunar gateway contributions.

Lunar Gateway, guys.

Oh, no.

So these aren't

speculative future projects.

A lot of these are already operational, and most are in development

with their launch costs already paid.

So what's being cut now are

relatively low-cost operating budgets.

You see what that's happening?

Meaning, like they bought the car, they paved the street, but they don't want to pay the cheap price of gasoline to run it.

That's essentially what they're doing here.

So, this war between Trump and Musk has a very powerful and negative downstream effect.

After Musk criticized Trump's immigration rhetoric and this recent spending bill, Trump threatened to cancel federal contracts with SpaceX.

And Musk responded by hinting he could withdraw the Dragon capsule from service, which currently

is used to move astronauts and cargo to and from the International Space Station.

That would be devastating.

Now, I'm hoping it's posturing because who wants to lose all that money?

And we can't, of course, strand our astronauts up there.

But who the hell knows, right?

Because we've seen crazy stuff going on.

SpaceX holds about $22 billion in U.S.

government contracts.

So if that relationship dissolves, NASA's in big, big trouble and there's no backup ready to fill the gap.

As much as other companies are scrambling to try to do that, there's no one close to where SpaceX is.

Next thing is the phasing out of the SLS.

So another shift here is the plan to phase out the Space Launch System, right?

This was after Artemis III.

The SLS costs about 4.1 billion per launch.

And that's very expensive compared to the $100 million for SpaceX's Starship.

That's crazy expensive.

However, that's what it costs.

And Blue Origin's New Glenn is expected to be in a similar price range, I think, to SpaceX's, which is great, right?

So we have these much less, you know, less expensive ways to launch.

But Starship has failed three of its last test launches, and New Glenn hasn't even reached orbit yet.

So both rockets are still significantly under development and NASA is, however, betting on the future of human spaceflight programs on private systems.

And these private systems aren't ready, and their funding depends on essentially two billionaires staying interested in all of it.

So, the climate science that's happening is taking a hit.

And, you know, it's already had lots of problems, but now things are getting kind of worse.

You know, they're making these cuts to the budgets, and these budgets are essential for monitoring, right?

So, what are we monitoring?

Atmospheric CO2 levels, ocean temperatures, and health, ice melt in the Arctic and Antarctic, and severe weather patterns.

Now, I couldn't pick one of these to remove from this list, let alone all of them.

These programs are basically our early warning signs, right, to all sorts of bad things that we already know are in motion, right?

We know that atmospheric CO2 levels are rising.

We know ocean temperatures are rising.

We know that there's significant ice melt, and we know that weather patterns are going to become more and more severe as more energy is put into Earth's atmosphere.

So what the hell, right?

We won't be able to model or predict any climate events with any real accuracy, and it's just a

dangerous way to move forward.

Now, hopefully, here, Congress might step in.

You know, we have some Senate Republicans, they've pushed back.

They're proposing $10 billion to restore Artemis, SLS.

you know, some other science missions.

But if Congress can't agree on a new budget, then these proposed cuts very very likely will take effect, you know, and just completely

hit our science programs like a tsunami and just drag it all away, you know.

And the problem is, once you shut these

very expensive and lots of gears moving at the same time with these missions, right?

Once you shut them down, it is cost prohibitive to start them back up again because you lose that momentum, you lose the people, you lose the hardware.

You can't just shut shut them down and then a year later start them back up.

Because that would probably end up costing a ton more money.

And

people are not sitting on their hands.

Right.

Part of these cuts are going to be

we're going to lose the personnel.

They're going to go elsewhere.

And you're right.

You can't easily just bring these people back and start where you left off.

No, I mean, you know, we already saw it with Doge cutting all the 100,000 jobs from the U.S.

government.

And a lot of those people are administrators, but they have this knowledge and know-how and skills that you can't just snap your fingers and hire new people, right?

It's the kind of stuff that, you know, is passed on from generation to generation, particularly when you are, you know, when you're a rocket scientist, when you're in charge of even the, you know, even the people that are in charge of just dealing with, you know, fueling the rockets before they launch, these are all super specialized jobs.

You know, you shut them down and they either get other jobs, they retire, they do what they do, but these people aren't sitting there waiting for the U.S.

government to change its mind in four years.

That's not how it goes.

They just go away.

It's also massively inefficient.

The way they're going with.

It's the opposite of efficiency.

So the massive loss of efficiency.

They're doing it in the name of efficiency, which is ironic, but

the wastage is just profound.

It's also the arbitrary nature of so much of it is difficult.

Jay, you're talking about the recent fight between Trump and Musk,

like Trump threatening to cut off funding for SpaceX and SpaceX threatening to like stop taking our astronauts from the space station and whatnot.

I mean, is that kind of thing really just at the whims of these two guys?

You know, isn't that scary?

It is scary.

Plus, you know, SpaceX,

you know, as part of this, I learned that SpaceX

in 2024, they launched more missions, launched more tonnage into space, launched more satellites, 83% of all satellites, and the rest of the world combined.

That's how critical SpaceX has become.

We know through government contracts to our

aerospace industry.

You can't just

turn that off because you're having a spat.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, where's the process?

We do have a little bit more crazy to talk about.

I could not avoid it.

Could not avoid this topic this week.

Better not have avoided this one.

So I wrote about this on Science Base Medicine.

It's actually an update even since I wrote my article.

RFK Jr.

just sacked the entire U.S.

vaccine committee.

Oh, that's brilliant.

Yay.

Great job.

Yeah, this is the advisory committee on immunization practices or ACIP.

Who needs that?

So this is the committee.

It's a 17-member committee that reviews all the scientific evidence.

It makes recommendations for the CDC in terms of, you know, which vaccines to recommend for which populations and which conditions.

Like what's the vaccine schedule for childhood?

You know, who should get a COVID vaccine, who should get a flu vaccine, who should get the Shingles vaccine, et cetera.

Do they also choose which, like, which

flu strain?

Like, you know, what do we need to make for the next flu season?

I don't know if that committee makes that decision, but they definitely make the recommendation.

So we saw this coming, and I've got to give credit to David Gorski four months ago when RFK became the HHS secretary.

He said, this is how he's going to destroy the vaccine infrastructure in America.

And

he's been doing everything that David said he was going to do.

And this was on his list as well.

But what David said was, all right, you know, the committee members have staggered terms.

And over the next four years, he'll be able to replace all of them.

But of course, he said, but he might not, he could decide not to wait and just replace them all now, which is what he did.

The fear now is that he's going to pack the ACIP committee with anti-vaccine cranks.

And that's the, and now just looking at the news,

that's exactly what he's doing.

He's already appointed eight people to this committee, anti-vaxxers, pretty much all.

One person is Martin...

Kuhldorf, who's one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.

Do you guys know what that is?

I've heard that.

Look it up on science-based medicine.

We go into great detail about it.

Basically, they were the ones who were saying we should not be vaccinating people for COVID.

We should just let COVID rip through the population to create herd immunity that way.

That was their recommendation, which, of course, is batshit crazy.

Because then,

of course, you get all of the death and disease and long COVID and everything from that, as opposed to the vaccine, which gives you immunity without the disease and without the risk and all the downside.

It was just nuts.

So that guy's on the committee.

Then there are other people, again, who are

known associates of RFK or who are prominent vaccine critics, who have been members of anti-vaccine groups.

So again, that's like our worst fear.

Just firing all the actual experts and then putting in his anti-vaccine crank buddies who are going to, going forward, base their decisions on their ideology.

Now, what what he wrote, what

RFK wrote on X was: all of these individuals are committed to evidence-based gold standard science and common sense.

They each have committed to demanding definitive safety and efficacy data before making any new vaccine recommendations.

Definitive safety and efficacy data, which means you could set that bar as arbitrarily high as you want.

We talked about this last week, Kare, about the gold standard, using gold, weaponizing basically standards, not to have the optimal outcome, but to

basically get rid of anything you don't like.

So actually use the rhetoric to your licential advantage.

So it's like a denier portraying themselves as a skeptic, right?

It's the same thing, using the language of skeptics, but with the foreordained conclusion of denying signs they don't like.

In this case, they're like, yeah, we're only going to accept definitive safety and efficacy data, which is code for no vaccines are getting through.

Yeah, like no vaccines are going to get through this committee.

They're not going to be recommending any new vaccines.

They're going to be pairing back their, which is already happening, recommendations for existing vaccines.

And so this means that it's going to basically shut, you know, bring any progress or any new vaccines to a halt.

And, you know, removing recommendation, like removing vaccines from the schedule, for example, means that insurance companies could stop covering it, right?

They won't pay for it.

And even if they do, some people won't get it.

And the vaccines are, you know, it's all about compliance, like how what percentage of people get the vaccine.

And in order to maximize as any public health measure, if you're going to maximize any outcome, you have to make it as easy as possible.

You have to make it affordable to everybody.

And you have to have consistent and persistent messaging on it, right?

We need people to understand vaccines are important.

Get them off their butt, get them to their doctor, get their vaccine.

Now, all of that's going away, right?

He's altering the messaging, saying, you know, emphasizing personal choice.

He's pulling funding for new vaccine research, like they pulled funding for the end of bird flu mRNA vaccine.

Gee, I wonder if bird flu is something we need to worry about.

It's only like the most likely candidate for the next pandemic.

So no research to develop a vaccine for that.

And

now he's packing the the CDC committee that reviews vaccines.

So, this is the worst case scenario.

This is, you know, again, David called all of it.

He said, this is what he's going to do.

He's doing all of it.

He completely lied through his teeth to his confirmation

hearings, saying that he wasn't going to take vaccines away, that he would look at the evidence.

It was all bullshit.

It was all completely transparent BS.

And they knew it.

They absolutely knew it.

The senators who voted for him.

Crazy.

And now

exactly what we said was going to happen is happening.

And as we said last week, the only real question is how many millions of people is RFK Jr.

going to kill?

Is he going to be responsible for the death of how many people?

Because

it's all luck of the draw at this point depends on how bad is this measles epidemic going to get?

When's the next pandemic going to happen?

What is the nature of that going to be?

Are we going to to start dropping below herd immunity now on

all of our vaccines because they're not going to be recommending or paying for them anymore or whatever, including them in the schedule?

So we'll have to keep an eye on this and see how it actually plays out.

But right so far, it's the worst case scenario that we predicted.

Absolutely terrible.

And you can say, what do we do about it?

Well, certainly

individual people should be up to date on all their vaccines.

Despite RFK Jr.'s efforts, you should get vaccinated.

But also write to your congressman and representative.

Make sure, you know, give them as much hell as you possibly can for inflicting this boil on American medicine.

And, you know, when the time comes, get out there and vote.

That's the ultimate answer to all of this because this is

horrific.

I mean, we're trying to be objective and scientific and rational and nonpartisan here.

And I think we are being all of those things.

But this is what's happening.

An anti-vaccine crank is in charge of healthcare, and he's packing the CDC Committee on Vaccine Recommendations with anti-vaccine cranks.

They were in charge now.

Just think about that.

It's insane.

It is absolutely insane.

Hopefully, doctors will still continue to ignore what they have to say and give the correct advice to their patients.

But what are you going to do if insurance is like we're not going to pay?

We only pay for these.

That's a real big problem.

Massive problem for that.

Especially Medicare, you know, these large insurance.

They set the standard and they're government-funded or government-run at least.

Jeez.

Yeah.

All right.

We're going to pivot away from this type of stuff now.

Yeah.

Kara, tell us about our digital life after our death.

Yeah, I thought this was an interesting.

No, Bob, that's not cool.

No, I mean, it's an interesting topic, right?

And I don't think it has to be dark or depressing.

It obviously is in line with the work that I do.

I counsel patients with cancer and I kind of focus on end of life, although I see them across the lifespan.

Oftentimes, when I'm counseling patients about end-of-life, the things that come up, some of the larger things that come up, have to do with advanced care planning, right?

Like filling out an advanced directive, doing some of the legal work, but also the emotional work that comes along with saying goodbye, that comes along with feeling like you've completed certain relationships.

And it can give a really important sense of psychological calm.

You know, it can be a really good alleviation of anxiety to know that you have a bit of control in what happens to your things, what happens to your assets.

But one of the things that we often ignore is your digital assets or your digital life.

You know, very often when we're talking about, oh, these paintings or, you know, my home or the furniture or the jewelry, These are physical things.

So whether somebody allocates them or doesn't in a will, when they die, something has to happen to those physical things.

But when it comes to a digital legacy, many times people not only don't think about it, but there's no, obviously, physicality to it.

So you're not confronted with like a house full of things.

So a couple of researchers from the University of Colorado, Boulder wrote a piece in the conversation

about how to prepare for digital life after death.

And they introduce a really interesting concept.

They have a student-run clinic at their campus that actually serves people, of course, online.

So I think across the country, I don't think you have to be in Colorado to access this clinic, but it's called the Digital Legacy Clinic.

And in that clinic, they help folks understand

sort of the tech side of what is online, what can they do about it, everything from like social media pages to different online accounts that may be password protected, that once you die, your password may be dying with you.

So they cover, as they mention, a lot of digital, what they call digital estate concerns.

So like having trustees or trusted contacts across like Google or Apple or meta accounts,

choosing people to manage your profile, and also guidance on what to do with public-facing accounts like social media accounts.

Like I guess I didn't realize before, did you guys know this?

That like if you have a Facebook account, right?

Yes.

When you die, you can either request that that account be removed or you can memorialize it.

And in order to do that, somebody has to be entrusted with providing proof of death, the date of death, so either a death certificate or an obituary, and verification of their relationship to you.

And then they can request that that account become memorialized or shut down.

But also, think about all the things that exist now in the cloud, all the things that are online, photos, videos, important documents, legal documents, music, exactly.

What do we do with those things?

So in this clinic, these students, which it's pretty cool, like, because they're obviously students from across different disciplines who are learning how to engage with older adults or with

sicker individuals to help them both understand sort of the technical side of it, like I mentioned, but also navigate this psychologically difficult conversations.

It's hard enough to talk about end-of-life planning.

It's even harder when you're talking about something that maybe is difficult to even understand how it works.

And so the students are learning how to, you know, communicate these difficult topics with empathy and how to navigate things like privacy laws, how to manage sensitive data.

So I guess anybody can visit.

They said that they sort of operate it kind of like a pro bono law clinic.

So community members

can contact the clinic for help.

They fill out a form and then they'll often meet via Zoom and have like a personal plan developed for free.

It's only been around for several months, so it's still kind of an experiment, but it's an interesting approach and hopefully we'll see more and more of this kind of guidance, whether it just be online kind of lists, you know, checklists or books that you can purchase to walk through the process or individuals with expertise, much like, I don't know, an accountant or a lawyer who you would maybe hire for a consultation to help you walk through how to manage your digital assets, which, gosh, I don't think I thought about very much.

Did you guys?

I mean, I've definitely thought about it in the context of

the music that you own, right?

That's your collection that you pay for.

And I know it's been a controversial question over whether or not you can

give it to somebody.

Yeah, can somebody inherit your digital music collection?

They can certainly inherit your records or your C D's or whatever.

Why shouldn't they be able to?

You bought them, you own them, you should be able to turn them on.

Well, and more and more younger people don't own music at all.

They just pay for

Wi-Fi service.

That's why they're going to part of the reason why they've moved to that model, because then there is nothing to own, so it's not an issue anymore.

Right.

So then it's just about what do you do with the account so that you're not still getting billed, so that

if there is any personal information there, that it is is not open to the public or that it's still, you know, the privacy is still maintained after death.

And that's a

complicated issue that when you die, all of your passwords die with you.

I mean, I remember when I attended a medical aid in dying death, a maid death here in California with a younger individual who had brain cancer.

The day of, prior to taking the medication, he was talking to his family about, oh, yeah, make sure you write down the password to my bank.

Make sure that you, oh, I'll make sure, you know, I emailed you guys this so that you can have access to that.

Like things that we don't often think about, but it's really important.

Yeah,

because I deal with people for their taxes on an annual basis, part of our reminders to them are certain things, not having to do directly with taxes, but these related sorts of topics, such as who has your power of attorney, who makes your medical decisions for you, who are your beneficiaries for your accounts, you know, and make sure that they're properly.

And we do also remind people to have a book, have a physical book or piece of paper with the list of your important accounts, your passwords, put it somewhere safe in a safe, safe deposit box, wherever you have, and

let someone you trust assign it to them, along with your instructions and your wishes on how to handle all of that.

So it is something that I, because of my profession, I regularly do think about and I'm constantly reminding my clients about these things.

Well, and what's interesting is that, you know, we think about, oh, yeah, I've got like a few accounts I would have to worry about, but there's

over 100.

Yeah, there's a study listed here that's recent studies by both NordPass and Dashlane, which are

password management companies.

The average internet user maintains more than 150 online accounts.

Yeah, I think I'm at 111 or 112 last time I checked.

And that's just that you were able to access and know about.

There's probably some that, you know, are slipping off.

That could be.

Yeah, some that I've forgotten about or just don't use anymore.

I probably still have a MySpace password.

Right.

Isn't that funny?

And then they also mentioned that many tech companies haven't really gotten hip to this.

So fewer than 15% of popular online platforms have clear kind of protocols for what to do when a user dies.

And customer support's like, I don't know.

And so it's obviously something that the tech companies have to keep up with or catch up to as well.

But something to think about, you know, I mean, it's hard enough.

We've got to think about, like you mentioned, advanced care planning, including things like advanced directives.

So that's your healthcare proxy, wills, power of attorney, all these different things.

But yes, more and more, our digital lives are deeply woven into our regular lives.

And we've got to think about that as well.

Cause

there's so much personal information there and things that are valuable.

Like

again, photos, videos, like Bitcoin.

what will happen for people who start to pass away who are bitcoin investors and where what you're doing if you don't have the keys if you don't have the keys it's over it's over that that yeah that bitcoin dies with you all that money is just gone and and oh my gosh

that could be a nightmare for families

more importantly what about you know my zombies and skeletons geez that's do you have directives for each one

as far as you have a note

are they digital bob you have digital zombies no I'm just talking

about not yet.

Kara, what do you think about having a digital avatar that lives beyond your death?

Yeah, I mean, that's another conversation.

As I was linking out to some of these articles, I was seeing that there was a Holocaust educator who died, I think, two, three years ago.

And because of the vast amounts of

talks that she had given online, they were able to use AI to develop a tool to interact with friends and family at the the funeral.

And I think, I think about all of us, like we have thousands of hours of online content.

So an AI could easily learn me and engage with people as me.

And so you just map that to an avatar and right there, how difficult will it be to tell the difference?

I don't think podcast listeners would be able to tell the difference.

And I wonder if the people I'm like the absolute closest to would be able to tell the difference.

You may be in AI right now.

Sure, true.

It's very meta.

Yeah.

And imagine when we, you know, when we've got hard drives that are just,

you know, yadabytes of hard drives.

And, you know, imagine, I think we'll get to the point where people will basically be just live recording most of their lives, all the time.

Imagine having literally decades of film of you in your normal life,

not just when you're trying, not just when you're blogging or podcasting or writing a speech, but just like you're every day, you know, hanging out and chatting and just doing little quotidian things that just everyday things that aren't very special.

Imagine the fidelity of the avatar at that point.

Well, and Bob, it's interesting that you use terms like hard drives and film.

It's so funny that you used those terms because the truth of the matter is all this stuff is in the cloud now.

It's not, it's all digital.

And so it's not even on a physical drive anymore.

And so, I mean, it is somewhere, but not one that you have access to.

I would think, though, if you're recording your entire life, I don't think you'd want a lot of that going to the cloud.

I mean, if you could have

a problem.

If you could have a button on your chest that's like a yada-byte, I mean, it's all there, and you could back it up to your local home-based computer.

I wouldn't want some of that shit on the cloud.

Bob,

your entire photo collection on your phone is on the cloud right now.

Oh, yeah, on purpose.

I don't want to lose it.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Like, we don't want to carry all of that that storage.

Wait, Kara, like even all those nudes I took, I mean, what?

Well, that's the thing.

If you put them in a hidden folder, they're still on the cloud.

Like we are more than happy to offload a lot of this very private stuff to the cloud simply because of

convenience.

So I disagree that people are going to be that careful.

I think it's just going to be normalized.

Oh, gosh.

But the real question is then, what happens when you die?

Does, you know, is it in the fine print that Meta gets to, or that Google or whoever Alphabet gets to just take that data?

You know, oh, you don't need it anymore.

You're dead.

The privacy laws don't apply anymore.

You're dead.

You know, these are things we have to think about.

Yeah.

Your estate needs to own that.

And we have seen some really interesting legal arguments with, I don't know if you guys remember when the whole like Pepper's ghost phenomenon where like Tupac was made into a quote hologram.

Pepper's ghost.

How did that play into that?

Well, that's the actual, it wasn't a real hologram.

It was a Pepper's ghost.

Oh, was it a Pepper's ghost?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, there was a lot of conversation around that time of like, who owns the likeness of of a dead person and their, you know, we can kind of have conversation about who owns their musical library, but what about their voice?

What about their likeness?

You know, their likeness.

Yeah.

Are you allowed to just use that?

Or does the estate have to approve it?

If it was a Pepper's ghost, what was the actual Tupac thing then?

What was creating the reflection?

Mirrors?

No, but yeah, but for a Pepper's Ghost to work, you need to reflect something onto a mirror that makes it look transparent.

Yeah, if it was on a stage, so I don't know if it was like a a mesh or something, but yeah.

The Tupac thing was a little bit more like a picture.

I don't think it was a Pepper's ghost.

I'm almost positive it was a Pepper's ghost.

Huh?

I'm almost positive it was a Pepper's ghost.

No, a Pepper's ghost is a reflection of something, an object, onto a mirror, onto a glass that makes it look ethereal and transparent.

So you need something, you need a solid object in order to reflect it off of the glass.

Oh, you can, a Pepper's ghost can also use a

projector.

What's being projected.

Yeah.

A Pepper's Ghost.

I'm looking up even the Wikipedia article here.

It's an illusion technique used in theater cinema, amusement parks, museums, in which an image of an object off stage is projected so that it appears to be in front of the auto audience.

And they specifically cite the Tupac and Elvis and Michael Jackson.

That's an alternate version, Bob.

You can use a projector.

So oftentimes people call that a hologram or a holographic, but it's not.

It's not actually.

It's a Pepper's ghost.

Yeah, that's weird.

I've never heard of Pepper's Ghost referring to a pure and only of a reflection.

No, not a reflection, a projected image.

I mean, a pure, you know, just a pure projected image.

I've never heard of that as a.

So, yeah, if Pepper's Ghost encompasses that use as well, then that's fine.

But typically, well, no, that is the actual definition.

Well, the classic Pepper's Ghost is like the haunted mansion where you were passing in front of

a grand hall that's actually got a pane of glass five feet from you that you don't see.

And the dancing ghosts, you see ghosts, and those dancing ghosts are actually physical animatronics that are below you and above you, being reflected on the glass to your eye.

So this is like from the late late 1700s.

This is a

very old, very old illusion.

And they never used projectors.

It's always been with a solid object that is being lit up and reflected onto glass into somebody's eye at an angle.

That's the classic Pepper's ghost.

Pepper's ghost is named for John Henry Pepper in 1862.

No, 1790s.

1862.

We have a controversy.

The technique was been used into the late 1760s.

That technique might have been used, but the actual naming of what we now know to be the Pepper's Ghost was named for a guy in 1862.

Yep.

He had a degree.

He was Dr.

Pepper.

He was a scientist, so he may have been Dr.

Pepper.

I'm not familiar with the original name then, but

okay, it says here, 1860s Pepper's Ghost has become a universal term for any illusion produced via reflection.

Any illusion.

So yeah, so it has a broader definition than

I'm aware of, and I've read about this many times.

And I've also come across that late 1700s.

It's been used in stage work since the late 1700s.

I've just read that over and over and over.

Yeah, they weren't using projectors then because they didn't have projectors then.

No, but it was.

But as soon as they could project,

I've read that the term Pepper's Ghost was first,

the techniques was used in the late 1700s.

Yeah, it was popularized by him in the 1860s.

So maybe he made it popular, but that technique has been used in stage work

know, for, for, since then.

According to the, you know, the many, many sites that I've, that I've come across.

Okay, but either way, you're, yeah, you're being like a purist about something that is not the pure definition.

Okay.

You're a panic.

That was cool.

Anyway, that was such a weird assignment.

It was jarring to have something that I've read over and over just swept away.

It's like an impromptu throwdown.

It was cool.

Oh, that's funny.

All right, Bob, can we get light out of nothing?

Oh, let's see, shall we?

Scientists have for the first time simulated how extremely intense lasers can interact with a vacuum to produce bizarre effects that could potentially help discover new physics, which I love.

This comes from scientists from the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the University of Lisbon researchers, published in Communications Physics, called the paper's called Computational Modeling of the Semi-Classical Quantum Vacuum in 3D.

Sounds cool, huh?

But it gets even cooler.

This one can get heady kind of pretty quickly, but I got you covered, guys.

Don't worry.

The news item has at its foundation one of the most well-tested and validated theories out there, QED, quantum electrodynamics.

This is essentially a fusion of special relativity and quantum mechanics.

It's really an amazing theory.

It deals with fundamental particles we know, like photons of light and charged particles like electrons.

It describes them as excitations of an underlying field.

So in QED's view, there are many fields permeating the universe, one being the electron field, which means that any and all electrons, according to that theory, are an excitation in that electron field.

It's really a fascinating topic.

Look it up.

There's some really good YouTube videos too as well.

So QED also represents a vacuum as something special.

a quantum vacuum.

Classic physics sees 100% pure vacuums as what?

Just it's like a parcel of profoundly empty space, right?

Just devoid of particles, as nothing as nothing gets.

That's classic vacuum.

QED, though, has this conception of the fields permeating everything, right?

So even within what we would consider the purest of pure vacuums,

they're still in there.

In such a place, these fields would still be there, but they would be at their minimum, right?

Their minimum activity, if you will, of course, their so-called ground state, as it's called.

But that minimum doesn't mean that the fields are perfectly still within that vacuum.

And that's because of what famous principle?

Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.

So in this context.

Oh, I wasn't sure about that.

Okay.

In this context, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle means that you can't know precisely both the amplitude of a field and how fast it's changing or its momentum.

Therefore, the fields within a vacuum can't have

no values, okay?

So now the ground state of fields within the quantum vacuum jiggles then, right?

There's this inherent jiggling that won't go away,

these subtle energy fluctuations, kind of like a restless nothing of sorts.

So these minimal fluctuations are described as virtual electron pairs.

Virtual is the critical word there.

These are strange mathematical blips that aren't real particles in the traditional sense.

And they are undetectable and ephemeral at the same time.

Absolutely.

Yeah, they're very weird.

Check those guys out

if you're interested in them, if you haven't heard about them.

I know we've talked about them a few times.

So now we get into the crux of this newsletter.

QED predicts that very intense electromagnetic fields, like from wickedly strong laser beams, right, can alter the vacuum in such a way that light interacts with the vacuum differently than it otherwise would.

Now, specifically, the theory says, all right, get this.

Jay, you're going to like this one.

Yeah.

The theory predicts that three high-powered laser beams can interact in such a way within this in a vacuum that the energy is redistributed into an entirely new beam with a different frequency and direction.

So it's like this beam

comes out of the vacuum out of nowhere, in a sense.

That's how it could seem to you.

So this process has a very boring name, this theoretical prediction has a very boring name.

It's called vacuum four-wave mixing, but I'm giving it a new name.

I'm calling this Death Star Photon Convergence.

Now, right, doesn't this sound like the Death Far, that the Death Star?

You've got beams converging, and then another beam emerges from them.

You know, the beams don't pass through each other as they would classically, right?

But they converge and a new beam comes out, and it's, of course, it can blow up planets.

It's so funny how

it made me think of the Death Star.

And the Death Star, I actually got images of the Death Star firing its lasers, and I counted nine beams, which is three sets of three beams that the theory predicts.

So, all right, it was just totally funny, and I'm just totally gonna run with that.

All right, now, guys, you gotta remember, this theory was confirmed through models and simulations.

No real lasers have been used yet.

All right, this is confirmed in this process.

This is just simulated, yes.

So, if you're interested, the simulation software package that they use is called OSIRIS, which models the interactions between laser beams and matter or plasma.

The timing for this simulation's confirmation of the theory is actually pretty fortuitous because there's multiple facilities that recently either came online or are being constructed that use this latest generation of experimental multi-petawatt class lasers.

And many of them are going to want to test this theory because previous lasers just were not powerful enough

to even do this.

So some of the facilities that are either online or soon to be online includes the 10-petawatt beams in Romania as part of their extreme light infrastructure.

I mean, I didn't even know that Romania even had petawatt beams.

That's pretty amazing.

I didn't know they were even in that industry to such a level to create these multi-petawatt lasers.

Pretty cool.

Way to go, Romania.

Let's see.

There's also the 20-petawatt Vulcan 2020 laser in the United Kingdom, and there's two 25-petawatt beams proposed as part for the United States for the EP Opel project.

Now, the way science, I gotta say, sorry, gotta say, the way science funding is going in the U.S., though, I'm sure that they will use, that they will either probably cancel those lasers or use them to fire at alien spaceships.

So one of those two.

The most exciting new facility, though, where do you think the most exciting new facility is with these multi-petawatt class lasers?

that's being built.

Who would be building it?

Huh?

You mean capability?

What are they building?

What country?

What country?

What What country?

Oh, what country has the most exciting new petawatt lasers?

China.

It's China.

You call it.

Absolutely.

They've got, get this.

They're creating a hundred petawatt beam at the station of extreme light.

So they're building that in China.

I don't know when that's going to be completed, but that is just, that is, a hundred petawatt laser is just off the hook crazy.

A hundred quadrillion watt pulsed laser.

That's just like nuts.

Bob, when I, when we did our special episode, in which it was the year 2035, if you recall.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

My news item that I made up had to do with petawatt lasers that they were going to use.

But at the time, and I predicted 50 petawatt lasers at the time.

And I got feedback from listeners.

They wrote me and said that that's ambitious, even for 2035.

Oh, my God.

So if they're talking about 100

in the near future, wow,

that's a big deal.

Of course, I got to riff a little bit on this 100-petawatt laser.

That's over 5,000 times the total power consumption of the earth at any given moment.

Yeah, it's 5,000 times.

Now, but you got to remember, though, this is a pulse laser.

This isn't a continuous laser.

A continuous laser at 100 petawatts is just ridiculous.

No, that's just, we are so far from being able to do that.

So this is a 100 petawatt laser, pulse laser.

Remember, now this is delivering just a few paltry kilojoules.

It's not a lot.

That's not a lot, but the key here is that it does it over.

the tiniest sliver of a second of femtos over i think it's femtoseconds so they're delivering a little bit of energy over a ridiculously brief period of time.

So that means that the power of it, now the power is what?

Energy over time, right?

So you've got a little bit of energy over a ridiculously little amount of time, which means the power is really, really high, right?

So you don't need a lot of energy.

Study co-author Professor Louis Silva, as a visiting professor in physics at the University of Oxford, said: a wide range of planned experiments at the most advanced laser facilities will be greatly assisted by our new computational method implemented in OSIRIS.

I think these new laser facilities are going to be singing the praises of these researchers that I've been talking about, the ones that ran these simulations, because these simulations and models described in this paper should be critical for these experimenters.

Because when they're setting up their petawatt lasers and they want to do their experiments, this paper will describe to them critical things they need to know, like realistic laser shapes, the exact pulse timings, and how the interactions are going to evolve, you know, evolve over time, and how the subtle asymmetries and the beams geometry can change the outcome.

These are just critical things that

they're going to be testing and going over and over.

And with this paper, they can basically just dial it in a lot faster instead of spending, who knows, days, weeks, months trying to learn what this paper has already learned in their simulations.

So, this paper's confirmation that death star photon convergence

is real would clearly not just be of academic interest, in my opinion, and a a lot of these scientists as well.

It could really be a landmark achievement when they actually do this in real life.

The quantum vacuum itself could go from something that's mostly theoretical, right, at this point, into an object.

The vacuum can become an object that can literally be manipulated by experiments.

Manipulating the

quantum vacuum is just so amazing and interesting.

The real laser tests in the near future could help confirm some of these deepest foundations of quantum electrodynamics,

theories and predictions that haven't been fleshed out yet.

On the other hand, perhaps these new experiments will find some very subtle cracks in the foundation of the theory that could lead to the holy grail of new physics that we've been trying to get for so many years now.

It's ridiculous.

So, either way, we have these scientists to thank, these scientists from Oxford and Lisbon.

We have to thank them because the guys are the first to confirm that

this theory is actually legitimate, at least according to their simulation.

And as I finish,

there's even more here that I couldn't even cover.

Their simulation showed interesting things about weird stuff called vacuum birefringence and even photon-photon scattering, which I didn't even want to go into because this is already ridiculous.

So look it up online if you're interested.

Really fascinating stuff.

Adios, I'm out of here.

I want to point out you've used the terms Yattabyte, Femtometer, and Hedawatt in the same podcast.

So

thank you.

I appreciate that.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Evan, tell us about about this new possible treatment for HIV.

Yeah, I read about this over at The Guardian with their headline, Breakthrough in Search for HIV Cure Leaves Researchers Overwhelmed.

And by overwhelmed, they mean that in a good way.

The human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.

HIV can hide.

in the body, making it difficult to detect and cure.

And that's primarily due to the formation of latent reservoirs, where the virus remains dormant and inactive inactive in infected cells, and that can escape the detection and control of ART or antiretroviral therapy and the immune system.

But even when treatments

suppress HIV, some of the virus lies dormant and it rests within something called the CD4 positive T cells.

And a C D4 plus T cell is a type of white blood cell that plays a crucial role in the immune system, especially in coordinating the body's response to infections.

So, this dormant HIV virus can come back if the treatment stops in the person.

Researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, Australia, have demonstrated a way to make HIV visible, paving the way to fully clear it from the body, or at least get a lot more of it than they used to be able to get.

This paper was published in Nature Communications, and

the researchers have shown, this is for the first time, that mRNA can be delivered into the cells where HIV is hiding by encasing it in a little specially formulated fat bubble.

The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus.

This was previously thought impossible to deliver mRNA to the type of white blood cell that is home to HIV because those cells do not take up the fat bubbles or lipid nanoparticles, LNPs, that are used to carry it.

But here's what the researchers did.

They created a new delivery tool, which they call LNPX,

which is a tiny, fat-based bubble designed to carry RNA, mRNA.

And it delivers it to those T cells, but it does so without damaging the cells, which they were very

surprised at, I believe,

as the result.

They loaded LNPX with mRNA instructions for HIV's TAT, TAT protein.

This is something else I really hadn't known about before.

Transactivator of transcription, TAT, a crucial regulatory protein produced by HIV.

It's a protein which helps switch on the hidden virus.

And delivering the TAT mRNA woke up the virus in infected T cells without overactivating those other T cells.

They successfully delivered mRNA into testing CD4 plus T cells and achieved activity in over 70% of the cells, which they have declared, quote, an unprecedented success.

And again, the cells didn't experience harmful side effects or mass activation, and that's extremely important.

First time that this mRNA has been shown to effectively work this way.

It offers, they're saying this will offer a new path towards an HIV cure using what's known as a shock and kill strategy.

You wake up the hidden virus and then you destroy it.

Now, it was, you know, they did this in the laboratory with cells.

So, there's we don't have animal testing yet, we don't have human testing yet.

So, you know, there's we're way off from that.

They say it's going to be many years before we get to these stages, but this they will continue to research this.

And it's very promising, surprisingly promising.

Thank you, mRNA technology.

So, a couple of things to add to that.

So, first of all, we already have treatments that do exactly this, meaning that they take HIV out of its latent stage.

These are called latency reversing agents, LRAs.

There are several drugs already on the market that do this.

Verinostat, for example, aromadepsin, panobinostatate, right?

So these are already part of the protocol, of an HIV treatment protocol.

You give the LRAs, they keep the virus from...

remaining dormant so that the other anti-HIV drugs can kill more of the virus.

And this reduces the overall viral counts much greater.

It's not a cure, but it does help keep the viral counts minimal, which is, you know,

effectively keeps the disease at bay.

So what's the new bit here?

Is it a different mechanism?

Just a different mechanism.

Just a different way.

It's just a new mechanism of an LRA, a latency reversing agent.

As Evan said,

the virus is transcriptionally silent, right?

It's not transcribing, and therefore it can't be seen by the immune system or by drugs that target HIV.

And this forces them to become transcriptionally active so that they're no longer latent and they can be targeted by anti-HIV drugs.

So it's another way, it's just another mechanism.

I doubt it's going to lead to a cure.

I mean, it would be nice if it does,

when combined with other strategies, if it's so effective that it could be a quote-unquote a cure.

But

the probability is it'll just be yet another drug in the armamentarium that'll make overall HIV treatment incrementally more effective,

keeping the viral loads

minimal and reducing the risk of

reactivation of the disease or of

people stop

or pause their anti-HIV drugs of it coming back.

Yeah, so it's not, I mean, the headlines always make it seem, they always do this, right?

There's such a pattern.

They always exaggerate how poorly we're doing now and how great the new thing is going to be.

That's just par for the course when it comes to mainstream science news reporting.

They either ignore or underestimate current treatments and they say this is going to be a cure for HIV.

Well, no, this is an incremental,

you know, a new strategy that we're already doing that will make things incrementally better.

Right.

Once we have whatever five to ten years it's going to take to get this to the actual clinic.

Do many viruses have

latency, latent reservoirs like this?

No, not typically.

But most viruses don't cause this kind of a chronic, like, lifelong infection.

Ones that do, you know, have a way of hiding.

Another virus that I could think of off the top of my head that does this is chickenpox.

It goes into the anterior horn cells.

So the the chickenpox virus goes into, you know, a

part of the spinal cord, basically.

And it goes dormant there, and it could be there dormant for decades.

decades.

And then it could become activated, and that's what causes shingles.

Yeah, is that it's activated, it comes out to the skin, causing the rash,

it goes into the nerves and causes neuropathic pain, and it's really bad.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So have they been looking at, so have they been using those other

procedures that you mentioned to try to

bad as well?

No, totally different mechanism.

The treatment there is just get the shingles vaccine so that if it does get activated, your immune system can pounce on it and prevent it from causing shingles, basically.

HIV

has pretty unique mechanisms for causing the infection that it does.

So preemptively taking out the immune system.

That's what

causes AIDS, basically, the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

Other infections do that as well.

So a lot of bugs evolved ways of undercutting the immune system as a way of surviving, right?

But HIV is just really good at it.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Isn't it there's something kind of unique about HIV being a retrovirus?

Yes.

I mean, it's not the only retrovirus, but yes, but there's not that many.

I mean, there are a few, but there's not that many.

That adds to why it's so nasty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It can insert its DNA into

the host cell.

And it can be like dormant for a really long time.

Yeah.

Right.

And then it comes out and it wipes out your immune system.

Yeah.

Nasty virus.

Yep.

So yeah, any new tool in fighting it is most welcome.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Yep.

Jay, it's who's that noisy time.

Okay, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

What do you got, guys?

That's really fun noise.

Yeah.

That feels like a toy that you would play with in the water.

Yeah, I was thinking like Squidward makes that noise when he walks around a little bit.

Okay, so I had some fun guesses here this week.

So

Hunter Richards wrote in and said, Howdy Jay, the noisy sounds like slush, snowmelt off a roof maybe that is landing on and falling through a tube or a cylinder of some kind that has just the right size aperture to create a pop that then changes in pitch as the slush moves through the cylinder and then finally plops on the ground.

I thought this was a very, very good guess because, you know, you have like that tube sound and everything, which which kind of does explain part of what we're hearing it's not correct but i thought that was a good guess uh michael socedo said hey jay this week's who's that noisy sounds like it could be one of those golf ball cleaners with a microphone inside of it um have you guys ever seen a golf ball cleaner yes i used to work on a golf course right so it's kind of like a there's a handle and the golf ball kind of goes into a tube and then you kind of lift it up and down the handle to wash it and everything.

Again, not a bad guess because, you know, again, there's that tube thing.

And then the guy said he also hears birds, which I think was correct.

Next guess comes from Ryan Pintek.

And Ryan says, is that a sound of a person making a balloon animal with a microphone up close to their hands?

Now, this would be one of those like balloon animals that's made out of the long, skinny balloon.

You know, and if you do it really quick, it makes all those squidgy noises.

You know what I mean?

Again, I thought this was a good guess, but not correct.

Mitch Brown wrote in, said, hello, all.

I've been listening as long as I can remember.

First time guessing.

Given the ambience of the background sounds, we appear to be a microphone sitting in a pond somewhere.

Then I hear diarrhea, but that can't be it.

So I'm going to guess that it's some kind of swamp creature having an explosive egg release.

Now, I know there was like some joking in here, but again, the idea of

something moving through an aperture or whatever

could make that noise.

But Mitch is not correct.

And then we had a winner, which I find amazing under certain circumstances.

Like noises like this, find that this one is relatively difficult in the big scheme of things.

But Travis Bailey guessed correctly, and Travis said, Hello, Jay and fellow skeptics.

The noises always puzzle me, and I rarely officially guess.

However, while playing this one at work, I had a co-worker immediately jump up claiming to know it.

Now, guys, as long as the person submits the right answer, does it matter how they got the answer?

I don't think so.

I think it's just in that person's sphere, if they can get the answer, they get the answer.

So, yeah, right, ask people, that's totally fine.

So, the sound is of live bamboo being split apart, probably by hand as opposed to using a knife or tool.

Travis got it perfectly correct.

So, you have young bamboo that it's

the bigger kind of bamboo, not the very narrow shoots of bamboo.

This would be like a three, four, five-inch diameter.

And when it's young, it's not as hard.

And this particular kind of bamboo is you could walk up to it.

Let's say it's you know four feet tall, and you grab the top of it and you just rip it apart like in half with both hands, and you're ripping it down the line of the bamboo pole, right?

So, if you know how bamboo grows, bamboo has these individual sections that grow.

So, there could be in one

branch of bamboo, there could be like these sections that separate it into even parts, for example.

If you've ever like cut into bamboo or whatever, have seen it, like, yeah, there's these,

like, what would you call them, Steve?

Segments?

So the segments are called nodes and internodes.

The nodes are the rings or the joints.

That's it.

That's a good way to put it.

So I'm just trying to describe this noisy.

People are ripping the bamboo

in two parts evenly.

And as it goes down and hits those nodes, you know, that's where you're hearing some of these noises are coming out of that.

So let's play it again and see if you can visualize this.

It still sounds like a cartoon.

It's so cartoony, yeah.

But

each internode, I guess, is that's what the increasing sound is, the frequency of the sound.

The pops.

So the branch is then ripping the bamboo apart, and then the pops are those nodes.

Yeah, the nodes.

And then, you know, if you see the video, like water is like popping out of this thing, too.

It's a very wet thing that's happening.

Very cool, you know.

And bamboo, my God, talk about a useful plant in so many ways.

I've seen videos of people doing all sorts of different things with bamboo.

It's incredibly useful.

It's like people would use it for pipes early on.

You could build furniture with it.

You can do all sorts of things with it.

Very useful.

So I have a new noisy for you guys.

Hey, good job, Travis, by the way.

Good guess on that.

Do you know what kind of plant bamboo is?

Yes, I do.

It's a carnivorous.

It's grass.

It's grass.

Yeah, it's a type of grass.

Such a great answer.

Thanks, Sarah.

Carnivorous.

Isn't it funny how

when you know you're going to make up something, you can feel even before you can think it, you feel that your brain is going to spit out something.

It's such a weird, you know, the working with your brain and feeling like these movements that your brains do is fascinating.

I always have a little premonition that I will say something funny or interesting or whatever, even though I have no idea what's going to come out of my mouth.

I have to admit, I'm annoyed that I didn't get that one because when I was in China, I went to a giant panda reserve and saw pandas like munching down on so much bamboo.

And it's the cutest thing ever, but I guess all you hear is the crunch of their jaws.

You don't really hear them ripping the bamboo because they're too far away.

But they like rested on their bellies.

Kara, I saw a panda in a video

who was using it as a kung fu stick.

Yeah, they used to be swinging it around.

You know, like doing moves on it.

He got pretty proficient at it.

It was like his toy, you know, and I just thought he was so he's like kung fu panda for crying out.

And then when he was done, he just ate it.

Yep.

So cute.

Okay, I have a new noisy for you guys.

This noisy was sent in by a listener named Victor Weindel Mayer.

Victor, you know damn well I cannot pronounce your last name.

And you didn't send me the pronunciation.

So from henceforth, you will always be known as Victor Weindelmayer.

If I got that right, man, somebody better send me a prize.

Anyway, Victor sent in a really cool noisy, and here it is.

Good luck.

Oh, those are the minions from Despicable Me.

Good luck, man.

I heard this.

The second I heard it, I'm like, this is awesome, and I think it's going to be really hard.

I'm not going to give you any clues because there's a lot of people out there.

So if you heard something cool this week, guys, or if you think you know the answer to this noisy, email me at wtn at the skepticsguy.org.

Please, if you're sending me noisies, please attach the file and give me a description if you can.

That's always helpful because most of the time, if people don't send me a description, I really don't, I can't use it.

So you've got to let me know what's happening there.

A very quick few announcements.

Steve: The big thing is in two weeks, Steve will be retired.

Two weeks, yeah, retired, and then I'm gonna let Steve take a week off.

Thank you, and that, and then we hit it hard.

We've got good stuff coming your way, guys.

We have new programming.

Um, we're working with uh, well, we'll give you full disclosure pretty soon, but we're working with uh some great people on one of our projects.

We're bringing AQ6 back and more to come.

So, we'll give you information as that

the timing becomes right.

A couple of more things.

We have a show in Kansas, guys.

This is happening the weekend of September 20th.

Actually, it's all happening on September 20th.

That's a Saturday.

We're going to be doing a private show, and we'll be doing an extravaganza that's hosted by George Hobb.

The extravaganza, if you don't know, it's a stage show.

And the private show is a panel show where we just record the podcast live.

Both of these shows are a lot of fun.

And the extravaganza a great ride.

If you've never seen it, please do join us.

It's a really good show.

We've been working on it and fine-tuning it for a decade and it shows because we are all very proud of it.

You can go to the skepticsguide.org and you can find a button on there on the homepage that will take you to the tickets.

You can also become a patron.

We've had a very generous year with our patrons when people found out that Steve was coming full-time.

They wanted to show their support, particularly for the new stuff that we're about to do.

And we're getting awfully close to the 24-hour show.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

I really want to inflict that upon my fellow rogues.

I've decided that I'll do it, Steve.

Thank you.

I really, I swear I'll do it.

We've committed.

I know, but all these years, I've been like, I'm not doing another debilitating, like, screw-up an entire week of my life show, but I had so much fun doing that 24-hour show.

So I really am looking forward to that.

One last thing, guys.

You can give our show a rating,

and you could join our mailing list.

That was two things I turned into one thing.

So, Steve, there's one other thing that I think it's time to announce this.

We have been discussing possibly having a conference in Australia.

So, we got ourselves to the point where we were doing like late in the game, negotiating with the venue,

trying to obviously get the cost down as much as possible.

Now, this would include this conference that we're having, by the way, is not a con.

We would do not a con Australia.

For those of you who've been, you know what I'm talking about.

For those of you who haven't been, this conference is essentially all about community building, you know, having fun, socializing.

You know, it's really revolves around interacting with other people that go to the conference.

The bits that we do are highly audience interactive, especially this most recent one.

The conference is a ton of fun.

We've had two very successful conferences that we ran in White Plains, New York, but we have been asked to bring it to Australia.

So we're wanting to do it, but of course we have to have a couple of safeties in play here because we don't know how many people would be interested.

So we created a survey.

The audience in Australia, if you're listening to us in Australia, you'll be receiving this email from

either the Australian skeptics.

I'm not exactly sure who's going to send it, but it could be one of many people.

But I just did send them the survey.

So you'll get it through those channels.

And

if you're not on their mailing list and you want to get it, then I will be sending out an email to all the SGU patrons and to our mailing list.

So I think for now, if you want to, you know, just help us gather some information to find out whether or not there's enough interest, you could go to our homepage and you could join the mailing list.

Or I could put the link up there as well.

I have to,

I will get that done.

I'll definitely put that up on the home page.

Bottom line is, we need you guys to let us know what the level of interest is.

Of course, the more people that are interested, the less the ticket prices are.

And we ask you to answer this survey as quickly as possible because time is really

at the core of this right now.

We have to move quickly to make sure that we get the dates that we're proposing.

So it would be May 2026.

It'd be our NATACON special

Australia conference.

This will be...

you know, tailored for the people in Australia.

We want to give you guys everything that you want, and the questions that we ask in the survey are going to give us the answers that we need in order to figure out whether or not we're going to do it.

So please do answer the survey and do it quickly because time is of the essence.

Thank you, Jay.

Got one email.

This comes from Jay in Boston.

Different Jay, obviously.

And he writes, I wanted to bring the experiment that Simon Dan is organizing to A, disprove a flat Earth, but B, have a massive, possibly largest replication of Aristosthenes.

On June 21st, the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere, he wants as many people to measure the angle of the sun at noon, that's solar noon, as possible and send photographic or, better yet, video evidence of the measurements.

Seemed like something up your alley.

Have a good one.

And he gives a link to the YouTube video where Siman Dan describes the experiment.

You guys get this?

So if

Eratosthenes heard a rumor that

in a a certain city that at noon on the summer solstice

there would be no shadow inside deep wells.

Basically, the sun was directly overhead, it would shine directly down the well.

But that wasn't the case in the city where he lived.

So he paid somebody to pace out the distance between those two cities, measured at the same time, basically measured

the shadow,

basically solar noon, measured the shadow of a stick of a certain height.

And he used that to calculate the circumference of the Earth.

And he came within just a few percentage points

of accurate, very accurately.

He wasn't trying to prove the Earth was a globe because the ancient Greeks knew the Earth was a globe for various reasons.

He was just trying to calculate the circumference of the Earth and got it pretty close to the modern value.

So, what Sai Man Dan is proposing, if we have a bunch of people can do this around the northern hemisphere, then

that would replicate the experiment on a massive scale.

And also, it would prove that the Earth is a globe, right?

More so.

Yeah, if

there's a

strict correlation between how far above the equator you are and how much of a shadow a stick of a certain height

leaves at solar noon,

then

that would only happen on a spherical earth, right?

If the earth were flat, they should all be the the same.

I'm sure the flat earthers will have some bullshit explanation for why this wouldn't work or whatever.

Yeah, Carl Sagan explained this in Cosmos.

He did.

That's where I first learned about that.

Very cool.

So we should do it.

So this show is coming out on Saturday, the 14th.

That's one week from the day this show comes out.

So this is really the only time we have to spread the word.

So go to the YouTube

video that we link to in the notes, or you can just look up Sai Man Dan replicates

Global Earth Experiment or whatever you'll find it.

And it's a fun little science experiment that you could participate in and be part of this massive replication.

You have to go to a website and look up where the solar noon is, where you live.

It just means the sun's at its zenith, right?

It's at the highest point.

It's at the highest point.

It's not necessarily noon.

It's not noon.

It's very rarely would it be actually noon.

Right.

Right?

Because, you know, you're in a time zone.

It's noon for a very broad range.

You have to look it up for where you are, like, you know, where the

solar noon is.

And then you have to measure the stick.

You got to make sure it's vertical.

And you got to then measure the shadow.

Just videotape it as evidence.

And Simon Dan will do all the hard work.

He'll do all the calculations and everything.

You've got to send the data to him.

Should be fun.

It's a good way to teach a little bit of science to your kids or whatever.

Okay,

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 genuine, one petitions, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake Aruni.

Just got three regular news items this week.

You ready?

Yep.

Yep.

Alrighty, here we go.

Item number one, researchers have demonstrated a brain-machine interface system that allows a subject with ALS who cannot physically speak to speak in real time and with 97% accuracy.

Item number two, a new genetic analysis finds that Florida alligators are actually two distinct species, which may have resulted from interbreeding with introduced Asian alligators.

And item number three, for the first time, engineers have built a working computer entirely of two-dimensional material without any silicon.

Bob, go first.

Okay, brain machine interface.

Somebody with ALS speaks in real time, 97%.

Oof, I did hear some advances about that, but this was like a news item from like a year ago, and it was somewhat accurate.

All right, so basically, somebody with ALSD just can't muster

the muscular strength to

talk.

Right.

Simple as that.

Yeah, the muscles just aren't up to it anymore.

All right.

Hmm.

All right, number two, alligators interbreeding.

Yeah.

Sounds reasonable.

That sounds totally likely.

Too likely, perhaps.

Third one,

let's see, working computer.

What do you mean two-dimensional material?

What kind of two-dimensional material?

Two-dimensional material.

One molecule thick.

All right.

Not exactly two-dimensional.

You know, Bob, that's what they call 2D materials.

If it's one atom thick, it's a two-dimensional material.

Yes.

Interesting.

A working computer.

Yeah, that's just such a broad statement right there.

What does that mean?

Many different things.

These are good.

Nothing's really totally leaping out.

You know, screw it.

I'm going with the alligators fiction.

Okay.

Kara?

Brain machine interface that allows the subject who cannot physically speak to speak in real time.

I mean,

is speak in quotes here?

Like, what is that?

So, it's a brain-machine interface.

So, the computer is speaking,

physically speaking for them.

Right, right.

It's not like making a mouse.

But in real time, and with 97% accuracy.

Just from the brain-machine interface.

I mean, we've been working towards this, right?

Like, this is the holy grail.

So, if we figured it out, and if it has been at least proof of concept shown with a patient, that's incredible.

97% accuracy is incredible.

But also I think we've been getting closer and closer to, you know, thinking.

And, you know, we can do a lot of motor activity with brain machine interfaces.

Speech is significantly more complicated than like playing a video game.

But yeah, I think we have been working towards this.

Hey,

what about blocked-in syndrome?

Holy shit.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And anybody who has a difficulty, a motor difficulty speaking.

Bob, you said that the alligator one is fiction, but you didn't say why.

That's helpful.

From what I understand, there are only two species of alligator that are like alive.

Like we have one, and then there's one somewhere else.

Maybe it is in Asia.

But I don't know if you interbred those two, you would get a third species.

I don't think you call like a, I don't know, like a hybrid between two distinct species a new species.

I wonder if it could have been a garile.

Well, they're crocodiles.

Alligators are crocodilian,

but I think there are only two alligator species.

And I think we only have one of them.

But I don't know, maybe if you bred it with the other, it would like naturally it would make a new species.

And then engineers have built a working computer entirely of two-dimensional material without any silicon.

I have no idea.

But the fact that that didn't make Bob go, what?

That's impossible.

Means I'm going to go with Bob.

I think there's only two alligator species.

Okay, Jay.

All right, the first one about researchers demonstrating the brain-machine interface.

I know that people have been working on this.

I know that we've come a really long way with this technology.

I mean, 97% accuracy is like pretty much 100%.

You know what I mean?

Like it's good.

It's so good that

essentially these people can really.

So what are they doing?

They're talking through it like they're typing on a screen, Steve?

No, they're not.

No, it's pure thinking.

No, just interview.

But what are they, how is the communication happening?

It's through a computer.

The computer is speaking in their voice.

Okay.

And they're just thinking the thoughts.

Brain-machine interface, yep.

Damn, that's freaking amazing.

It sure is.

Damn, Kara, what's happening?

We literally could be a brain in a jar, for Christ's sake.

Okay.

Number two, a new genetic analysis about the Florida alligators.

There's two distinct species which have resulted from interbreeding.

Okay.

and you guys don't think that's true.

And then the final one, for the first time, engineers have built a working computer entirely of two-dimensional material without any silicon.

So, two-dimensional material meaning what?

It's one molecule thick, Steve?

As I said, yes.

Okay, just checking and make sure.

It hasn't changed since Bob went now.

People make mistakes.

I mean, sure, what the hell, right?

Like, we've been working on this stuff for so long.

There's a huge amount of money in miniaturization, and this is basically as far down as it it can go.

That's freaking amazing.

I mean, they just need enough material there for the current, for electrical currents to function.

This is electricity or light computer, Steve.

I didn't tell everybody else, so I'm not telling you.

But they were too stupid to ask,

that's true.

All right, I'm going to figure it's electrical, and I'm going to say that's definitely science.

And then we got the okay,

and then if Kara believes that the ALS computer thing thing is real, then it's got to be the alligators is the fiction.

Okay, and Evan.

Let's see.

That is incredible about the real time

speaking for people with ALS and the brain machine interface.

Remarkable.

That's wonderful.

That news, that has to be science because, you know, that would be such a letdown and such a bummer to say that was fiction.

And Steve, you're not going to do that because, you know, you're AL, you know, you know some things about ALS and neurology.

So I believe that one's science.

And about the engineers, the two-dimensional.

Oh, I have a question, Steve.

If material is two atoms thick, does that make it three-dimensional?

It's no longer considered a 2D material.

Aha, uh-huh.

All right.

And that leaves us with the alligators.

Did you know that,

so in Florida, in Florida,

the name of the mascot for the University of Florida is the Florida Gators, right, for alligator.

And that Gatorade, the drink, was developed in 1965 by a team of researchers at the University of Florida.

And therefore, this one is the fiction.

Thank you.

Perfectly chronicled logic.

All right.

We'll take things in order.

Researchers have demonstrated a brain machine interface system that allows a subject with ALS who cannot physically speak to speak in real time and with 97% accuracy.

You guys all think this one was

science.

I'm a little surprised.

Until Evan, you guys didn't focus on the real-time bit, right?

The 97 accuracy,

that's not that amazing, but in real time?

Yeah, that's true.

Real time's crazy.

That is, yeah, true.

Holy grail.

I mean, there's still a slight delay between your brain thinking and your mouth moving.

Well, yeah, but it's like the same delay as anyone speaking.

Yeah, yeah.

So, like, it's not actually real time, but it's real time.

It's the same as, yeah, it's real time.

In other words, it's not like with Stephen Hawking, where, you know, it's like 30 minutes later.

Well,

this one is

science.

This is

science.

Yeah, this is amazing.

Holy crap, man.

So they implanted three strips of electrodes on the motor cortex of this subject.

And it reads his intention to speak, right?

His motor cortex is trying to speak, but he doesn't have the muscles to do it.

And the brain-machine interface, the software learns what he intends to say from training, you know,

and says it.

I don't know how much training there was, but

it wasn't bad.

Of course, this is using artificial intelligence to interpret the signals, which has really caused a huge leap.

I think I've said earlier, you know, in a previous episode, that the introduction of the latest sort of AI technology has caused the brain machine interface, this kind of application, to leap forward like 20 years.

It really is amazing.

20.

Oh, yeah.

We are now where I thought we would be 20 years from now.

Oh,

real-time interpreting speech,

just like the guy's thinking what he wants to say, and the computer's freaking saying it.

Real Steve, so technology is advancing quicker than you thought, huh?

It is.

In this very narrow, specific application.

Yes, that is correct.

So this one is a very cool science.

Now, of course, I've only done this to one person so far.

This is a proof of concept, but there's no reason why this wouldn't work in

a lot of individuals.

You know, the reporting on it says it could also work in people who have other neurological diseases like stroke.

I'm like, well, stroke, that's not, wouldn't be on my short list because if they can't speak because they have aphasia, this won't help them.

And if they can't speak because their motor cortex is damaged, this won't help them.

So what's the scenario in which this is helpful for somebody who has a damaged brain as opposed to just they don't have the ability to activate their muscles?

So, like a high spinal cord injury, yes.

ALS is the perfect application for this.

Stroke, not so much.

Unless they're, as you say, Bob, locked in.

So, yes, a brainstem kind of stroke?

Yes.

Think about that.

With locked in, you'd have to really the only way to communicate would be through, like, say, eye communication with whether you have a code

with eyes yeah it's the worst or possible they've got programs that will that could read your gaze and so to pick out word you know letter by letter or word by word this could you could just like think the words in real time that's just oh can you imagine it's like going from typing 10 words a minute

to 300 words a minute it's absolutely life changing changing for people with these conditions now what about what about uh covert communication covert yeah what do you mean when you want to speak to somebody through a communication device.

You have wires coming out of your head that's not exactly covert.

No, but like you could text somebody with your mind.

Yeah, sure.

Easily.

They started doing that.

They started with texting, right?

But then they had recordings of this guy's voice from earlier before he got sick.

And they basically programmed the computer to speak in his voice, which was cool.

But yeah, texting is easier.

You don't have to reduce the speech itself.

What else?

What else could that thing?

Some application that we're not thinking about.

I mean, it's a brain machine interface.

There's a million applications, especially from the motor cortex, controlling a prosthetic limb.

You know what I mean?

That's

what they're working on.

Again, the limiting factor here is these electrodes on his brain, and those are not going to survive for very long, you know.

Although I hate to say it this way, but neither is he, probably.

Unless he gets intubated.

That's the thing.

If you have ALS,

it's either death or intubation, meaning you get put on a breathing machine.

But he may decide, hey, if I could talk, maybe it's worth hanging out, you know?

Oh, my gosh.

Do you know how old the patient was?

It didn't look that old, like in his 40s, 50s.

Yeah, so yeah, I think obviously the younger people are, totally, not always, but the older they are, the more likely they are.

Having dropped this diagnosis on a lot of patients, it absolutely makes a massive difference how old the patient is in terms of their emotional reaction.

And

their interest in intubation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My gosh.

All right.

So let's go on number two.

A new genetic analysis finds that Florida alligators are actually two distinct species, which may have resulted from interbreeding with introduced Asian alligators.

You guys all think this is fiction.

Now, Carrie, you said something which is interesting.

You said that there weren't three species, but that's not what this is saying.

This is just saying that the Florida alligators are two species.

Yeah, but I was saying I think that there are only two species.

Yeah, there are only only two species.

So if the Florida alligator is two species, there's the American alligator.

Then there would be three.

And no, there's the American alligator and the Asian alligator.

And what they're saying is that in Florida, there's basically both species from the interbreeding with the Asian alligator.

There's basically Asian alligators in Florida.

So there's two species.

But if they interbreeded, why would they be Asian alligators?

No, there's enough of them.

They basically decide they're different enough that they're going to consider them no longer Florida alligators.

So American alligators.

Okay, so that there are that.

So what what you're saying is that there is a, maybe not native, but a wild population of Asian alligators living in Florida.

Right.

That's what this is saying.

Well, that could be true.

I don't know.

But I mentioned Gatorade.

Does that mean that?

So it can be.

This one is

the fiction.

I got it.

Noise.

Thanks back into this one this week.

I just made this up.

What made you, though?

I saw a news news item on alligators that was not usable for science or fiction.

I'm like, all right, I'm going to work on something with alligators.

So, yes, there are only two species of alligators, the Florida alligator, the American alligator and the Asian alligator.

There are only American alligators in North America.

At first, I'm thinking I almost did crocodiles, but crocodiles and alligators cannot interbreed.

No.

They are different.

They are really different.

They cannot interbreed.

Yeah, I think they diverge like millions of

Yeah.

There are multiple species of crocodile, but they cannot interbreed with alligators.

Where does the garile fit into this?

That's a crocodile.

What about a caiman?

Yeah, I think.

Caimans are crocodilian, but I think they're more recently related to alligators.

But still millions of years ago.

There's basically the crocodiles and the alligators.

It's just the two groups.

Yeah, but alligators are crocodilian still.

They're the same order, crocodiliae.

Oh, they're the same order.

Yeah, that's pretty high.

Different families, alligatoridae and crocodilidae, or dilidae, or whatever.

Yeah, so same order, different families.

That's pretty far up the taxonomical tree.

Well, like I said, I think that

they split off millions plural of years ago.

Totally.

Yeah.

If this was about crocodiles, I would have brought up the inventor of the Crocs.

The footwear.

But I didn't.

All right.

This means that for the first time, engineers have built a working computer entirely of two-dimensional material without any silicon silicon is also science.

Tell me about that one.

Yeah, so you're right, Bob, in that computer is a sort of a broad term here.

It's not a desktop computer.

Basically, it's an

integrated circuit.

And again, this is not a practical application.

This is just a proof of concept.

They wanted to see, because the whole idea is, as you scale down silicon semiconductors, they start to lose their physical properties when they get too small.

So So, that puts limits on how much we could miniaturize silicon-based circuits.

But with two-dimensional materials, they maintain their properties, their physical properties, even at the smallest possible size of two-dimensional single, you know, atom-thick or

molecule-thick

sheet.

And so, they made basically the two types of transistors that you need out of two different types of two-dimensional material.

There's the n-type and the p-type transistors, and

they were able to do an operation that constitutes a computer on circuits made of these two-dimensional n and p-type circuits, transistors.

So it's again proof of concept.

They did it.

This is the first time they were able to do that.

There's no silicon involved.

So

they hope this is going to be a significant milestone in the development of 2D materials in microelectronics.

Obviously, this can get a lot smaller, you know, and use up a lot less energy

and produces a lot less heat, et cetera, all those things than silicon transistors.

That's huge.

Yeah.

Heat's a big problem.

Yeah, I mean, again, who knows how long it's going to be before any actual commercial application of this kind of technology, but it is a good milestone.

All right.

Well, good job, job, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Seem to guess your way to this one.

All right, Edvin, give us a quote.

The progress of science depends less on the accumulation of facts than on the emergence of new ways of thinking about them, often by specialists deeply immersed in a problem.

Stephen Jay Gould.

Great science communicator.

Love him.

Oh, yes.

I miss him.

I got to read some of his books again.

I know.

I read all of his books.

I've really, you know, he was very influential in my own science writing, deliberately.

He really perfected the essay format of science writing.

Yeah, he was.

He wrote your essay, Steve.

He wrote his essay.

Definitely.

We went there again.

Damn it.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Thank you for staying here.

Anytime, bro.

And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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