The Skeptics Guide #1039 - Jun 7 2025

So, when I ask what is Odo, what comes to mind?

Well, Odo is a bit of everything.

Odoo is a suite of business management software that some people say is like fertilizer because of the way it promotes growth.

But you know, some people also say Odoo is like a magic beanstalk because it grows with your company and is also magically affordable.

But then again, you could look at Odoo in terms of how its individual software programs are a lot like building blocks.

I mean, whatever your business needs: manufacturing, accounting, HR programs, you can build a custom software suite that's perfect for your company.

So, what is Odoo?

Well, I guess Odoo is a bit of everything.

Odoo is a fertilizer, magic beanstalk building blocks for business.

Yeah, that's it.

Which means that Odoo is exactly what every business needs.

Learn more and sign up now at odoo.com.

That's odoo.com.

You're listening to the skeptics guide to the universe.

Your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the skeptic's guide to the universe.

Today is Wednesday, June 4th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

We got the OG, the original crew, back on the show this week.

Jay and Kara were out last week.

Welcome back.

Welcome back.

Thanks.

Hi.

We're back.

Okay, is this a big deal?

You know, we make 52 shows a year.

You got to make this weird now?

Actually, you know, whatever you just pop out, whenever you're going to be talking about it.

You told me not to speak about Disney, so what do you want me to say?

Yeah, I always have gone.

Now I'm back.

Yep, that's it.

I had a great time.

I had a wonderful time.

If you want to know more, watch the live stream that we recorded on 6-4.

That was today.

That was today.

You'll get everything.

Well, not the day you're listening to this.

But, Steve, I got to say just one thing.

Sure.

Wait, before you do, I noticed while I was away, I was in Prague for the last week and so couldn't handle the time difference yet again.

Did you get defenestrated while you were there?

Oh.

What?

Hopefully.

Good historical reference there.

The defenestration of Prague.

I see.

I noticed that we got a lot of emails.

We always get a lot of emails, but sometimes I I notice themes in our emails because I have acute powers of perception.

And one of the themes that I saw coming in over and over had to do with the archive.

And I'm wondering, did somebody mispronounce the archive on the show?

It's AR capital X IV, Arcsiv.

George thought it was AR-14.

Right?

But no, we landed on its pronounced archive.

We pronounced it correctly.

But none of us knew how those letters translated into the pronunciation archive.

Never didn't realize that that X in the middle is really a chi.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Greek letter.

Yeah.

Which is cool.

Yeah, we've pronounced it correctly on the show many, many times.

But yeah, I didn't know where that came from.

And that's cool.

Interesting to learn.

So thank you.

Kind of smashing up alphabets like that, I suppose, can be cool-ish.

I always have a problem with too clever branding like that.

It is a little, It's generally frowned upon to have a brand that not 100% of the population is going to intuitively know how to pronounce it.

They should

staff identify it.

I don't think it's a pre-print outlet.

I don't think it was ever meant for the general population.

That's probably me for nerdy scientists to use.

Not for the gen pops.

It reminds me of that movie.

You guys remember the movie The Wonders?

Yes, Top.

It was about a pop band.

They spelled their band O-N-E-D-E-R-S, Wonders, but everyone pronounced it O-Neaders.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

So once a professional got their hands on, they're like, it's W-O-N-D-E-R-S.

It's Wonders.

Right.

How about the band?

How about the band Leonard Skinner?

I think for their first album, they actually had a pronunciation key, like, like, right there.

Pronounced.

Oh, because people were like Leinard.

Leinard.

Leinard.

Yeah.

Well, you know, I mean, and I understand George's take, too.

Anytime you see X, 1, V

together,

if that were the case,

the X, the I, and the V would all be capital.

Yes, I agree.

I agree.

But at the same time, you know, our brain will very easily make that correlation.

To my point, it was confusing, and people were just making the best fit they could, and were mostly wrong.

That's right.

So, therefore, what?

Archive's going to change it?

No.

Nope.

It's Archive.

Not a chance.

Nope.

All right.

Well, we have a great interview coming up later in the show, so let's get right to some content.

Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

Yes, thank you, Steve.

This is your quickie with Bob.

Dealing with quantum encryption threats in the news.

We've talked about this a few times on the show.

The coming revolution of quantum computing does pose a serious threat to today's powerful encryption methods like RSA 2048.

Is that how it's pronounced?

2048?

Whatever.

You know, RSA.

So now we're paranoid.

Yeah, now we're all paranoid.

Don't say it incorrectly.

Yeah, sometimes you read something a trillion times, but you don't really hear it spoken aloud.

So RSA, we're all familiar with RSA.

Cyber criminals are increasingly using a technique called harvest now, decrypt later.

So these strategies, that's a strategy where they steal encrypted data today that they can't decrypt it because it's just too powerful, especially with classical computers.

It would take, you know, a billion years or so to decrypt it, but they hope to hold, they want to hold on to it and hope to be able to decrypt them eventually in the future once quantum computers are robust enough.

And this is pretty scary if you're an owner of online banking data or health records or even trade secrets, that kind of data could still be valuable, even if it's 20 years.

You got to sit on it for 20 years before it can be quickly decrypted by quantum computers.

So that's a strategy that we're seeing increasingly happen

in the modern world.

So now researchers at Boston University University, Cornell University, and University of Central Florida, they're developing physics-inspired encryption method that could not only enhance current data security, right, make it more robust, but also prove problematic for quantum computers in the future.

And that could hopefully minimize this modern, you know, harvest now decrypt later thinking and make it less attractive.

These physics-based solutions that they're working on are essentially a bridge solution, right?

Instead of basing encryption keys on purely mathematical complexity, like the large prime factors of RSA, they could be based on

natural physical phenomena.

So for example, microscopic imperfections on a silicon chip, right?

Every chip has these microscopic imperfections.

They don't matter.

They still perform well.

But there's something that is just so random that even the manufacturer couldn't precisely predict what those are or recreate them because they're different for every chip.

So that's something that if you if you know what those imperfections are, then two people can create these encryption keys based on that information.

So they use the variable consistency of Jay's meatballs.

Maybe, you know, one specific meatball.

Yeah.

Because I'm sure he's got some variability in there between the meatballs.

Let me give you another example then.

Using chaotic physical systems.

So like chaotic light waves that you need specifically tuned layers to decode them.

So if two parties had knew how to tune their layers, lasers, I mean they would share that information,

then

they could encrypt things that that nobody else would really be able to decrypt because it's just too

completely unpredictable.

So, here's a good analogy.

Think of it like encoding data based on the unpredictable flickering of a candle flame, right?

So, unless you know exactly how the air moves around the flame, you can't really decode it.

So, that's something that two parties can share that information as well.

And then, bam, you can't, it's not something that could be brute force decoded using even quantum computers to a certain extent because it's just inherently unpredictable.

You just got to have that information.

So basically, it's a key that cannot be derived because it's way too complicated.

It's not just complicated.

I mean, RSA is complicated because you've got large-scale.

But I mean, it's like quantum computer level

complicated.

Yeah, it's basically since they're physical systems that have this, that are unpredictable.

So if you just don't, if you don't have that key, you're not going to be able to brute force it, essentially.

All right, so

these are quantum resistant algorithms we're talking about.

Another big benefit here is that these could be integrated into modern systems without requiring major disruptions.

You don't have to basically redo

a lot of the components of the infrastructure because they can just be kind of more easily integrated than if you were trying to incorporate real quantum computers into the whole decryption encryption schemes here.

But

of course, it's not going to be easy.

It's going to take a lot of work.

It's going to take also a lot of cooperation between academia, industry, and government.

So will they do that?

Who knows?

We're going to see.

But it's going to become increasingly important.

And after a while, it's just going to be too late.

Like, oh, too late.

The quantum computers are going to be here soon anyway.

So, you might as well start planning for that.

Whatever.

So, we'll see what happens.

It's definitely not going to be boring in this regard after a period of time.

So, this has been your quantum cookie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

So, you're saying, Bob, we can't afford a quantum computer gap?

Yeah, that's what you did there.

That's a good one, Steve.

All right, thanks.

That was very

condescending, but thanks.

All right.

Kind of like whenever you say, Steve, whenever you go, proud of you afterwards.

Yeah,

that's what I'm doing.

That's horribly condescending.

That's like on purpose.

Right.

So much so that.

So what are you assuming I wasn't doing that?

It jumps right from condescendence to humor at that point.

All right.

What do you guys know about seed oils?

Oh, seed oil, yes.

I hear horrible things about them.

They're terrible

born to you.

Exactly.

And RFK told me.

Yep, RFK.

Oh, God.

Is this an RFK thing?

No, it's not.

It's just the latest health fad thing where they're demonizing seed oils.

But of course, RFK Jr.

has jumped on that cranky bandwagon.

He posted on X, for example.

He writes, interestingly enough, this began to drastically rise around the same time fast, he's talking about obesity, began to drastically rise around the same time fast food restaurants switched from beef tallow to seed oils in their fryers.

He's blaming the obesity epidemic on seed oils based upon this spurious correlation because he is

a total crank.

It's rather simplistic, isn't it?

Oh my God, what a nut job this guy is.

Nut job, hat.

Good one.

There has been like, again, health influencers, I even hate saying that term, you know, have one of the things that they do is they fear monger about specific foods, right?

Everything is either going to make you live forever or kill you instantly.

And so there would be no self-help industry, essentially, if everyone were honest, basically.

You could say the same health advice has been true for the last five decades.

Eat everything in moderation, and for most people, you're probably okay.

You know, like you're 95% of the way there, and everything else is just window dressing.

And the same is true of seed oils.

So but interestingly, seed oils are actually good for you if anything, right?

It's a plant-based oil.

This, of course, seed oils are oils derived from seeds, right?

Like sunflower or canola.

And there's two ways you can get the oil out of the seeds.

You could either cold press them,

which is a little bit more expensive, or you can chemically get it out of the seeds.

And then you have to treat the oil to remove anything that you don't want in the resulting seed oil.

Here's, I think, it's hard to track down who started this fad of demonizing seed oils, but it comes from, as it often does, a simplistic misinterpretation of preliminary scientific data, right?

Usually they're extrapolating from basic science data they don't understand, leaping over to clinical conclusions that are not justified by the data.

But here are some of the details to give you an idea of what they're doing.

Plant-based or seed oils contain omega-6 fatty acid.

Omega-6 fatty acid is one of the good fats, right?

The evidence shows that it actually reduces the risk of heart disease, especially fatal heart attacks.

This is partly why nutritionists were puzzled, you know, quote-unquote puzzled, by this health influence or pushback against seed oils.

Plant-based oils are healthier overall than animal-based oils.

And we should be eating a lot of it.

And omega-6

fatty acids like linoleic acid, not only is it essential, it's actually polyunsaturated essential fat.

And it reduces LDL, which is the bad cholesterol, and it's overall a good thing.

A recent systematic review of all the clinical studies that were published so far found that increased levels of linoleic acid reduces the risk risk of fatal coronary heart attack.

So, the clinical evidence shows that the net effect of this is reduced heart disease.

But this is where the influencers and RFK Jr.

and those types of cranks get things wrong.

The question is: what is the optimal level ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, right?

Omega-3, also a healthy, usually nut-based or fish-based fat, right?

The omega-3 fatty acids.

So,

in pre-industrialized societies, a typical omega-6 to omega-3 6 to 3 ratio is anywhere from 1 to 1 to 4 to 1.

Industrialized diets, however, because we mass produce seed oils, it can be closer to 20 to 1.

So I think they're extrapolating a lot from that.

It's like, oh, it's not natural.

We're consuming way more omega-6 than omega-3, and we have to get back to our quote-unquote natural ratio.

That's essentially the chain of logic.

Now, they have sort of tied it to a couple of things.

One is the claim that omega-6 can increase inflammation, and two, that it can increase blood clotting.

On the first score, actually,

the majority of the evidence shows that omega-6 decreases inflammatory markers.

So it's just not true that it increases inflammation.

And again, you know, we're talking about the the difference between increasing some inflammatory marker in the blood versus like increasing the risk of autoimmune disease, right?

Those are two different things.

The immune system is one of those homeostatic dynamic systems in the body that exists in some sort of balance where you want just the right amount of it, but not too much, right?

Too much inflammation can cause tissue disruption, not enough, makes you susceptible to infection and illness.

So you need, there's a balance.

And just saying that something is increasing or decreasing inflammation is not necessarily good or bad.

It depends on the details.

And just saying that, oh, this one marker, which of course there could potentially be many of them, is increasing or decreasing in the blood doesn't mean you're going to get more autoimmune disease.

So again, these are sort of the leaps from preliminary kind of basic science findings to clinical outcomes that they're making.

But in this case, it's not even true, really.

The clotting thing is the same.

It's the same kind of issue.

You want your blood to clot just the right amount.

Too little and you bleed.

Too much and you have strokes and heart attacks, right?

And there's sort of a sweet spot.

Even within that sweet spot, if you sort of push the system in one direction or another, you know,

if you thin the blood, you'll increase bleeding but reduce vascular events.

If you make it clot more, you'll increase vascular events but reduce bleeding.

There's just no way around that.

That's just the way the system works.

And so, again, they're just saying, oh, look, in this study with this marker or whatever, there's reduced or there's increased clotting, therefore it's going to cause heart attacks or strokes.

But it doesn't.

Probably this is all down in the noise of, you know, every food does everything.

You know what I mean?

Like, if you really looked at biomarkers, pretty much anything you eat would probably have some effect on some clotting number or some

inflammatory number somewhere.

And without having any net effect clinically, because again, the body kind of adjusts for all this.

It's all sort of comes out of the wash.

Appears to be the same thing.

Again, the bottom line is omega-6 reduces your risk of heart disease.

It does not increase it.

But I think these are the reasons, at least this is how they're justifying their anti-seed oil crusade, right?

The ratio is off or whatever.

Now, what actual nutritionists who know what they're talking about say is that

just don't worry about it.

You go ahead and use seed oils, cook with them, eat them, put them in your salad.

You're not getting too much.

It's perfectly fine.

There are plenty of things to worry about.

Don't worry about seed oil.

If you're worried about your six to three ratio, eat more omega-3.

Like, don't restrain or restrict your omega-6.

Increase your omega-3, which is a good thing anyway.

Like, we could all use more omega-3 in our diet.

There's one tiny thread where there is maybe some legitimate concern, like there always is, right?

And that is if you re-fry the seed oil at high temperature over and over again, right?

So like in a deep fryer in McDonald's, right?

Then there's an open question about whether or not that can form any unhealthy substances.

Why would that be hard to figure out?

It seems like they could do it really quickly.

I got lots of questions.

Well, because again, it's a matter of dose, right?

Yes, it forms aldehydes, but how long, how much of them are in there, and does it get absorbed, and how much of a clinical effect is there, et cetera, et cetera.

So, again, it's a hazard versus risk thing.

We could say, yes, there are aldehydes can get formed in seed oils that have been fried over and over again at a high temperature.

Doesn't mean that's actually a health risk.

But again, this has nothing to do with home use or buying it in the grocery store and using it in your salad or cooking with it.

This is more like: should we

have regulations about how frequently restaurants need to change their deep-frying oil?

You know what I mean?

Like that sort of thing.

Now, probably going back to beef tallow, like an animal-based fat to fry foods in, would be counterproductive, right?

Which again is very Hallmark RFK Jr.

is using his misinterpretation of science to make bottom line recommendations, which are actually harmful to your health, right?

Because he just doesn't know how to put everything into perspective.

He's just sort of, as I like to say, he uses scientific evidence as a drunk uses a lightpost for support rather than elimination.

I didn't make that up, but it's a great, it's a great phrase.

So here are my take-homes.

Don't worry about it.

Just don't worry about seed oil.

Don't believe the demonization.

Don't believe the health gurus.

It's fine.

There's nothing to worry about.

Again,

if you want to make your 6-3 ratio more pre-industrial, eat more omega-3 fatty acids.

Yeah, we should do more research on fryer oil.

Probably whatever we use in the fryer is probably going to have

something.

And again, if you're concerned about that, you could try eating less fast food fried food.

That would be one thing to do.

And also, do not listen to anything RFK Jr.

says.

He's a dangerous crank.

And as an extension of this RFK rule, don't get your health advice advice from health influencers on social media.

So those are the takeaways.

But don't worry about seed oil.

It's fine.

What's your guys' favorite oil?

I mean,

favorite oil.

Virgin olive oil is college oil.

I use avocado oil when I cook mostly because it has a high

burn point.

So you can do like really high heat with it before it starts to smoke.

Yeah.

So yeah, like most of the things I cook with, I just stick with avocado because it's easier.

I like olive oil the most if you're not cooking.

Yeah.

I cook with olive oil.

I put it in my salad.

I only use like sesame oil for certain Chinese dishes,

and peanut oil, whatever.

I use specific seed oils for specific dishes, but otherwise my go-to is olive oil.

Oh, yeah, I never cook with olive.

I only use it for like a week.

Oh, it's great.

It's great for cooking.

But I just read a study today.

There's always something.

This is the noise you should ignore, where it says that one type of fat in olive oil might promote fat cell growth and promote obesity.

It's like crap.

I'm just not going to worry about it until I see a clinical study.

You know what I mean?

And again, as I said, there's like probably everything you eat.

And there were a guy years ago, I talked about this study, which looked at, I just went through a cookbook and looked at every, the first hundred ingredients, and almost every one of them either like prevented cancer or caused cancer.

Like every one, like, you know, any food, you could look at any ingredient.

There's some studies somewhere where people are promoting it as either it's healthy or it's horrible for you.

You could

ignore all of it.

Just have a generally a varied diet and you're fine.

Otherwise, there's nothing you can't eat anything.

Also, the psychological, like I feel like so often when

I've had friends who are, you know, I live in LA, who fall victim to like the influencer sphere, like the health influencer sphere.

And I feel like the biggest outcome of having a restricted diet due to fear-mongering that health influencers

monger

is anxiety.

Yeah.

Like, there's so many people who I feel like their mental health suffers because they obsessively worry about what they're feeding themselves, what they're feeding their children.

Everything's going to kill me.

Everything's going to give me cancer.

And while there is, you know, a prudent level of paranoia about certain foods that have demonstrable, you know, negative health consequences, the neurosis that I see very often, especially, I don't know, I think it's, yeah, it's especially bad.

I mean, would it be to the point where one of those people would

eat something accidentally they didn't realize was in it that they fear, and then they would just really freak out about it.

Yeah, all the time.

Even though they, but part of their brain must know that eating that one maybe bad thing one time is not going to

have a negative impact.

Yeah, and the problem is even more than just, oops, I accidentally ate a thing.

It's the obsessive worrying.

It's the amount of money that they spend at the grocery store, the amount of time they spend online scrolling and reading.

Just like the,

I don't know, the portion of their life that's dedicated to that.

It takes up a lot of time and attention.

It doesn't limit this resource.

Yeah, it's increased anxiety and depression, anxiety, yeah.

And increased expense, right?

Because they'll pay for the stuff that apparently, you know, is the fad today that's avoiding the bad food or that is the good food.

And probably,

if anything, worse nutrition because they have a more restrictive diet.

Yeah, for sure.

All right.

Jay, tell us how to turn lead into gold.

Well, let me ask you guys a question first.

Is gold valuable?

Inherently?

Yes, because it has some properties in electronics, et cetera, that are valuable.

But otherwise, it's just a standard that we've

chosen as a society to use.

But as valuable as it is in our society, like monetarily, that's just convention.

I mean, I think there's a few ways to look at it.

One, it is actually rare compared to other precious metals.

It's hard to extract, right?

It's got some complexity to it.

And it's beautiful, right?

Gold has been sought after largely historically,

not because of the, you know, the fact that it has cool properties that we use today, but it's gorgeous.

You know, it's a good idea.

Well, you can do that.

Yeah,

pirates bought those damn.

So

Steve said one of them, it's electrically,

it's fantastic to use with electronics.

It just has a lot of electrical properties that are wonderful.

It's biocompatible, so it doesn't corrode in the human body.

It doesn't react to the immune system.

Yep.

And it's chemically stable.

So it has a lot of really good industrial properties that make it very sought after.

But, you know, can we create gold?

Has gold ever been really created?

Well, this is...

This is what I'm going to talk to you about tonight, and it's a little complicated.

So, you know, the large Hadron Collider, right?

The LHC?

Heard about it.

Word on the street is that the physicist at CERN successfully transmuted lead into gold.

So how did this happen?

So CERN is near Geneva, right?

And what they did was they did a lead-ion collision experiment using the ALICE detector.

This is a large ion collider experiment, right?

And this is what they did.

They had beams of lead ions.

that

were accelerated to almost the speed of light, and they were directed to graze past one another rather than collide head-on.

And this is a key factor in how they pulled this off.

So these near misses created a very strong electromagnetic field around each of these lead ions.

And that electromagnetic field generated high-energy photons.

And when one of these photons

hit a lead nucleus, it could knock out three of the protons.

And since lead has 82 protons, losing three results in a nucleus with 79 protons,

which is gold, but it's not exactly what you think.

So

let me give you some details.

Yeah, it's never exactly what, you know,

the analysis that came after, there was a paper published in Physical Review C on May 7th, 2025, and they found that from 2015 to 2018, the LHC created approximately 86 billion gold nuclei.

It's not a lot.

It sounds like a lot, but it's not a lot.

This is equivalent to about 29 trillionths of a gram.

It's also called 29 picograms.

Pico.

So the gold atoms were super unstable.

They existed only for a fraction of a microsecond, and they were destroyed almost immediately by the further collisions that were happening or decay.

So

they were there for just the tiniest of time.

And then to continue, because there is obviously more complexity, it wasn't the gold that we handle.

It It was a, what do you call it, Steve?

Took an isotope.

It was an isotope of gold.

Yeah.

There are 41, apparently, isotopes of gold, but only one, gold 197, is stable.

Yeah.

Oh,

I see.

So

this has scientific importance, not because they were trying to get rich.

It confirms a theoretical model or more than one that electromagnetic interactions in high-energy physics can actually do these things.

You know, they want to know what those electromagnetic interactions are and how they function.

This is how science works, right?

They might not know exactly today.

There might not be an application for this today, but there could be a lot of downstream applications that would take advantage of this.

It also helps refine the future of particle accelerator experiments.

It just gives us more data on what we can do with particles.

It shows that the precision and the power of

our modern nuclear transmutation techniques.

This is a big deal.

Again, remember when I said they weren't head-on collisions, they were grazing.

These were grazing collisions?

They did that on purpose and they were able to control that, which I find to be unbelievable.

Like, I don't care who sits me down and explains to me how they do that.

It's remarkable that, Bob, say it.

Remarkable.

Thank you.

It's remarkable that they do that.

It also provides a clear example of proton removal, nuclear alchemy.

through photonuclear reactions.

Yeah, I've listened back to that three times and I still don't understand exactly what the hell that is.

Proton removal nuclear alchemy.

They're actually calling it alchemy.

What the?

Well, you know, alchemy was about changing the base metals, you know, from one to another.

Yep.

So

if most of the isotopes are unstable, what do they decay into?

Yeah, that's a good question.

So, what isotope is created by this process?

Gold, what?

So, stable gold has 79 protons and 118 neutrons, right?

Gold 197.

The CERN process knocked three protons off lead, the lead nuclei, but it

didn't carefully control the number of neutrons.

So they left behind these gold isotopes.

They had unusual neutron to proton ratios, which made them incredibly unstable.

So it wasn't a standard thing that it created.

It created lots of different isotopes.

But mostly unstable.

Yeah, and there was radioactive decay that immediately these immediately started to decay.

So they were created, and if they weren't smashed smashed apart by other interactions that were happening around them, they just started bingo.

They started to decay instantly.

They said that some of them likely underwent beta decay, fission, and other nuclear transformations, turning them into different elements or just breaking apart completely.

The LHC,

well, which would turn them into different elements.

Yeah.

Now they said that the LHC, like when they're when they're doing an experiment, it's considered to be a very violent place, right?

Because there's a ton of particles that are super dangerous that are banging into each other.

And the nuclei that were created during the collisions were surrounded by extreme energy and radiation.

So it's a pretty serious environment that they're creating in there.

I see here that radioactive gold isotopes decay typically into mercury or platinum.

Oh, platinum wouldn't be bad.

That wouldn't be bad.

That's a decay.

But still, remember what I said?

It was like the tiniest of tiny.

Like, there wasn't like someone picked up a chunk of platinum and they're like, psych, you know, that that didn't happen.

But I like this because,

you know, historically, alchemists, they wanted to turn lead into gold through

all these chemical processes that they were trying.

They didn't know what they were doing.

It's actually impossible to do because, you know, there's a fixed

atomic number, right?

Lead has 82 protons, gold has 79.

What they were doing back then couldn't do what they were hoping would just spontaneously happen.

So it's really cool.

You know, like, you know, they took this idea of chemists

back in, when were they doing this?

God, I don't even know what would, when, when were people trying to do this?

In the 1600s, 1400s?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Sometime, I forget exactly when it would hit its heyday, but sometime like that.

But the idea that today now we perfectly understand what the difference is between lead and gold.

Like we, with absolute precision, we completely understand that.

you know, we actually took a step in that direction to create an isotope of gold, but no, no gold that is going to turn into electronics or jewelry or anything.

Yeah, I wonder, though, if they could refine this to knock out the right number of protons and neutrons to create either gold or just to create

the isotope that decays into platinum, because that's even better than gold, to be honest with you.

In terms of rarity

and utility, that's the problem, yeah.

Yeah, um, let's hope we don't get electrum, though.

Electrum.

That's a Dungeons and Dragons joke, by the way.

Thank you, Evan.

Thank you, Kara.

All right, Kara, tell us what's happening to science in America.

It's kind of a big, big top.

It's tough.

So I think, you know, it's hard to even know where to start, but because we're recording this on the 4th of June, I was out of town for the past week, so I wasn't there last week when we recorded.

I want to say during Nauticon.

When was Nauticon?

It's like so long ago.

15th, 16th, 17.

It was the 15th, 16, 17.

Okay, so after Nauticon, there was an executive order that was released from the White House called Restoring Gold Standard Science.

The day it was released, I know people, friends of mine who work in government agencies who happen to be scientists with those kinds of jobs, texted us this executive order and said, like, you know, presented without comment.

And it's,

shall we say, worrisome to say the least.

And here's just a little bit of language from

the actual executive order.

This comes from Section 3A.

Within 30 days of the date of this order, the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, so the OSTP director, shall, in consultation with the heads of relevant agencies, issue guidance for agencies on implementation of, quote, gold standard science in the conduct and management of their respective scientific activities.

For the purpose of this order, gold standard science means science conducted in a manner that is, what do you guys think?

Reproducible, transparent, communicative of error and uncertainty, collaborative and interdisciplinary, skeptical of its findings and assumptions, structured for falsifiability of hypotheses, subject to unbiased peer review, accepting of negative results as positive outcomes, and without conflicts of interest.

That sounds good, right?

Superficially,

isn't that what we're always talking about here on the show?

That is what gold standard science should look like.

So, why do we need an executive order calling for science to follow this gold standard?

Well, as the executive order claims, and again, I'm quoting here, these are not my words, over the last five years, confidence that scientists act in the best interests of the public has fallen significantly.

Although, when you look at Pew surveys,

the general public still trusts scientists significantly more than the federal government.

That was my interjection there.

Okay, the order continues.

A majority of researchers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics believe science is facing a reproducibility crisis.

The falsification of data by leading researchers has led to high-profile retractions of federally funded research.

Unfortunately, the federal government has contributed to this loss of trust.

And then they go on to basically throw the previous administration under the bus with regards to COVID-19 guidance.

They specifically call out the CDC.

It literally says that executive departments and agencies have used or or promoted scientific information in a highly misleading manner.

They call out the National Marine Fisheries Service.

They call out multiple agencies throughout this executive order.

Now, this comes kind of against the background of a lot of, I mean, I don't even know where to start, right?

Different political appointees who have questionable, if not outright,

like anti-science views being put in charge of scientific agencies.

Let's see, since the presidency, since basically January 20th,

when Trump actually took office, different executive actions have significantly cut funding at the NSF, the National Science Foundation, fired staff scientists across different departments, right?

Like EPA, NOAA, the National Weather Service.

Recently, you guys probably saw the government report on child health that cited research papers that don't exist, just fully fake citations.

They probably used

AI to generate it.

Yeah, exactly.

And then double-check it, and there's just like made-up shit in there.

So scary.

It's incompetent.

It's gross incompetence.

I mean, it's beyond, it's weaponized incompetence.

It's like intentional.

And so we've seen just a bunch of undermining of research regarding climate change, regarding biomedical science, health and human safety.

And so, a fear here is the wording, right?

Because the wording on its surface sounds like all the things that we're always talking about, like how do we make research papers rigorous and transparent, you know, open science movement, you know, reproducibility, unbiased peer review.

But

there was a letter of protest that was recently published by

multiple scientists, over 6,000 scientists, wrote this open letter, or I should say scientists and physicians and other researchers.

And in their letter of protest, they said that the executive order is, quote, co-opting the language of open science to implement a system under which direct presidential appointees are given broad latitude to designate many common and important scientific activities as scientific misconduct.

And so this echoes.

a movement that many people are aware of called Lysenkoism.

And I've seen people writing, even at Science-Based Medicine, David Gorski wrote about kind of the new Lysenkoism.

He started writing about it in March of this year.

He's written two articles about it so far.

I've used this term recently around some of my friends.

And some of my friends I noticed, and again, I was born in 1983.

So even though I'm in my 40s right now, and I have, you know, contemporary peers that are my contemporaries, some of my friends didn't know who Lysenko was, or this concept of Lysenkoism was new to them.

I was never taught until I was aware of, through skepticism, is how I found that.

And that's the problem.

That's good to know.

Age 30.

Right, right, right.

So even

individuals who were like,

I guess I shouldn't say now alive about, because this actually, Lysenkoism was like a long time ago.

But those who saw the echoes of Lysenkoism may not have,

I don't know, may not be as aware of it.

So what do you guys know about Lysenkoism?

Why don't we start there?

Well, it was supposed to have basically repudiated

Mendelian genetics and natural selection.

And Soviets took it upright agriculturally

and even just regular science.

And yeah, it was significant harm.

Yeah, when it was applied, it was so damaging.

It became the official state science.

Yeah, and that's a problem.

Scientists who disagreed with it, because they agreed with correct science, were sent to the gulag.

Sometimes killed.

And then some of them killed.

And then, of course, it tanked the agricultural sector of the Soviet Union, causing mass starvation.

And then even worse, though, is when it was taken up by China, and then millions of people starved.

So Lysenkoism responsible for millions of deaths.

Yeah,

so this started way back in, you know, the 20s.

And Lysenkoism is named for Trophium Lysenko.

So this was a, you know, a scientist.

I was about to call him a geneticist.

He was not a geneticist.

He did not believe in genetics.

Apparatchik.

Yeah.

Well, some people called it like Marxist genetics.

There are, you know, different terms that were used for

genetics.

Yeah.

But it was basically, like you mentioned, Bob, a repudiation of natural selection, of evolution via natural selection.

And instead, he favored Lamarckism.

And I don't know if folks

remember Lamarckism, but this was kind of a prevailing view before it was debunked, that instead of there being genetic material that's already existing in a population that's then under, you know, environmental pressure in which, quote, the fittest survive, right?

Those organisms who happen to already have those beneficial mutations tended to do well against those pressures.

Instead of that, Lamarckism, you know, claimed, Lamarck said, well, there's behaviors that happen during the lifespan of an organism, and those behaviors can then be passed down to their offspring.

Can I say though, Carol,

just to not get an email on this,

that idea, the passing on of acquired characteristics, was not invented or unique to Lamarck,

and he renounced it later in his career.

So it's really not even fair to call it

Lamarckian.

Well, it's interesting because that is what it is.

I know.

It's known by that, but it's really unfair to him.

Oh, poor Lamarck.

Well, but he changed his mind, right?

But he did publish under that.

Yeah, but like everybody.

Like, again, he didn't invent the idea.

It wasn't unique to him.

There's no reason legitimately to attach the idea to him.

Oh, that's so interesting because there's almost like not another, like I just looked up on Wikipedia, like the term Lamarckism, also known as Lamarckian inheritance or neo-Lamarckism.

But there's no other, oh, also called the inheritance of acquired characteristics, or more recently, soft inheritance.

Maybe that's what we should start saying.

We'll call it soft inheritance.

So this idea of soft inheritance, right?

And the example we often hear about is the giraffe, but it could be any example.

Like, an organism wants to reach, or let's say a bird wants to get at a certain seed and it pecks at the seed, and its, you know, beak gets like pointier, and then it has offspring with pointy beaks, and then their offspring have pointy beaks, right?

Like, that's just not how it works.

And it's long been debunked.

Although, there are some, we could have a whole side conversation about epigenetics, which is really interesting, but we know that epigenetics still requires genetics.

You're right.

Like, we're still talking about DNA.

And so, his specific technique, which was called vernalization, was a really interesting process that he used to help certain plants survive more in Russia.

And it actually worked with certain plants.

And that's why it started to gain momentum.

The problem is, it didn't work beyond that.

But Stalin thought that he was great.

He loved his ideas.

His ideas made sense to him.

They were easy and palatable.

They felt like they kind of went with the nationalistic pride of the time.

Like, oh,

we can sort of have this new biology and it's just ours and we have this national pride for it.

And because of that, as you mentioned, Steve, even against evidence, physical evidence that this vernalization and grafting technique that he used was not working with specific crops and that the crops were failing.

And, you know, more and more, Lysenko had more and more power.

He was able to kind of affect most of the policy around Soviet agriculture.

He said, no, I don't want there to be any pesticides or herbicides that are used.

I want to only use my specific form of agriculture.

And these crops just started failing left and right.

And even against that evidence, it was, you know, explain it away, keep going, keep pushing.

Oh, now we have new problems, but that's okay.

Lysenko and his approach are going to fix them.

And because of that, I want to say it was about a 30-year period where the crops failed and there was mass famine.

And then, of course, we know that there's kind of a ripple effect that happens after that because you can't just go back to how things were, you know, a day later.

Like, there's some kind of evidence that there were still

effects from Lysenko's decision-making up through the 90s.

Yeah, plus

you kill off a generation of experts.

You can't recreate that expertise or anything.

Exactly.

So it's not just about the science that's being practiced.

It's also about the good science that's being suppressed.

And those are actually two separate issues that have outcomes that are related.

And so that's why I think, you know, I don't know if it's a direct correlation.

Gorski writes about Lysenko being, you know, like the RFK Jr.

being the new Lysenko.

And he does, I think, like to his credit, he says it's not Lysenko that killed all those people.

It's, you know, it's Stalin.

But it's Stalin choosing Lysenko.

And I think that's the part that we have to remember here, that these executive orders that with Trump at the helm, it's not just about RFK Jr.

Trump is choosing RFK Jr., but even beyond RFK, we're seeing across federal agencies that have, you know, that control federal science and funding for federal science.

So we're not just talking about health and human services, we're not just talking about biomedical science, we're talking about environmental science, we're talking about the climate, we're talking about all sorts of knock-on effects.

It all flows down from Trump, but he is giving Kennedy a lot of free rein with

healthcare.

So, for example, Kennedy wants to, at least he said he wants to ban American scientists who get federal funding from publishing in journals,

publishing in the top journals.

They want the CDC to create its own journal where you're forced to publish.

Essentially, again, this is sort of taking over the scientific process by the government, which is lysenchoism.

It's very, very bad.

It's super scary.

And these are,

this is new, but not new.

So we've heard these kind of mutterings.

People were starting to publish this, you know, even a couple of months ago about this consideration of banning, you know, scientists from publishing in journals like JAMA, in journals like The Lancet, in journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.

Kennedy literally said, quote, we're probably going to stop publishing in The Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and those other journals because they're all corrupt.

He just like straight up, they're just corrupt, which is bananas because these are some of the top-tier medical journals to publish.

Yeah, that's it's it's about you know undercutting, delegitimizing the institutions of science and health and professionalism.

And we all saw this coming, right?

Because what is what did we know RFK Jr.

as prior to this position?

I mean, basically, an anti-vaxxer, but an anti-vaxxer.

And why was he an anti-vaxxer?

Where were the original MMR studies published?

In the Lancet.

Lancet.

I mean, obviously they were retracted, but it's hard to unring a bell.

But it's the retractions that probably made him so angry.

And so there's a new piece to this puzzle, and that was just published like yesterday or no, like a couple of days ago.

So two researchers from the VA, right,

Veterans Affairs, they're both pulmonologists.

They published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, and that article was critical of the basically that these mass cancellations of contracts and the planned staff reduction of 80,000 VA employees is going to put the health of a million veterans at risk.

Like, that's what they said in the article, including those seeking treatment for toxic exposure.

This opinion piece was a warning.

It was published, and this bothered the administration.

And so the administration basically is ordering staff scientists now not to publish in medical journals without first receiving official clearance.

So it's one thing to like pontificate about it on a podcast, like RFK Jr.

did.

It's another thing to send out an email to the VA saying, no more publication until we approve it.

The only state-approved science publication.

I mean, that's as Lysenko was saying, authoritarianism one of them.

Totally.

And getting back to your

original list of gold standard science, they're weaponizing it.

They're just using that as an excuse to target, because no science is pristine, right?

You could nitpick any study, anything, any research or whatever.

And if you could say this is gold standard, then just gin up some reason to go after any study

or any scientist that you don't like the conclusion conclusion of.

You don't like

and I think the important question is: according to whom?

Right.

Because I would prefer that that be gold standard science according to the scientific community, wouldn't you?

Of course.

I don't want it to be according to RFK Jr.

or according to Donald Trump.

Or any politician.

Any politician, absolutely.

I mean, they're like the two worst I could think of, but yes, but any politician.

Any person who is put in a position of oversight across these different organizations and government agencies who either are not even scientists scientists themselves, or if they are scientists, are fully, fully biased at this point.

It's so, so scary.

So, you know, I think that up until now, it's felt more theoretical and the alarm bells have been ringing, but we're starting to see more and more evidence.

You know, it's one thing to cut funding.

Yes, it has a really terrible knock-on effect, right?

And it definitely is a direct and quick way to say, I don't want you to do that thing.

So I'm just going to not give you the money to do the thing.

It's, I think, an entirely different animal to say, I don't want you to do that thing.

I command you not to do it.

And that's really, really scary.

So this is something we definitely have to keep an eye on.

And there's got to be, like, the public has to complain about this.

Like, there needs to be public pushback.

All your congresspeople, folks, your senators, anybody, everybody.

I mean, this people know that this is happening.

That's the scary thing because if you read the executive order, it sounds like they're using all the right buzzwords.

And unless you get it.

It's so cloaked.

Yeah, it's so cloaked.

It's like here in California, we see this all the time when we vote,

which is why you have to constantly read different voter guides, because you'll sit down to vote on the different ballot propositions and you'll be like, oh, that sounds good.

And you don't realize because it's the way that the proposition is written that they're actually getting to.

It's frustrating, isn't it?

It's so scary.

Yeah.

It's all propaganda.

It's like, you know, a lawyer giving you a contract and signing it without having another lawyer read it, right?

Like, you really think like as a non-expert or layperson, you're going to be able to parse all of the fine print and know that you're not being screwed.

It may superficially sound reasonable, but you have to know the details.

It's the same thing with legislation.

You got the devil's in the details.

And I think that an important outcome here, because we've talked about this before, but this comes from, you know, I've read a lot of different articles and kind of pulled from different articles and quoted different articles when I was talking about this.

But one that I'm looking at here from Environmental Health News, they do, they like summarize the story, and mostly they were pulling from a Washington Post story, but they did like a little why this matters at the end.

And I think they kind of are saying it better than I could.

Cutting off access to peer-reviewed medical journals doesn't just isolate U.S.

research, it threatens global health standards, and it further politicizes the nation's scientific institutions.

Science does not thrive under censorship, and undermining scientific integrity does not bode well for maintaining robust public health systems.

RFK Jr., and mark my words, like he said he wants to do this.

So, when this happens, we need to be wary.

Not only is he trying to ban these scientists from publishing in leading medical journals, he wants to start an HHS preeminent journal, he used that word, to house taxpayer-funded research.

So, if we start to see a government-sanctioned journal, we know that that journal is biased.

Right.

It's very important.

State science.

Yeah, here we go again.

It's Lysenkoism.

We have to remember that and spread the word about that.

The only question now is.

Kennedyism.

Will RFK Jr.

kill more people than Lysenko?

And a lot of people think he will.

He is on track to doing just that.

Right, because it's not just agriculture.

No.

No.

This is, we're talking vaccinations.

We're talking, you know, health advice.

Like, what about the next pandemic?

If there's a pandemic in the next three years, you absolutely will be responsible for more deaths.

Super scary.

Yeah.

And deregulating all the, oh, gosh, there's so much.

Our food, our, oh, okay.

Medicine.

All right, Evan, I need one more thing to worry about.

Tell me about.

Tell me about the screw worm.

What?

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

We're talking about worms now?

Have we talked about the screw worm on the SGU before?

I don't think so.

I don't remember talking about it.

It's a good thing.

Not the bar worms.

It's a very good thing.

It's a good thing we haven't because this little parasite comes right out of one of Bob's nightmares.

You're going to love it, Bob.

Not.

Screw worms come from blowflies, specifically the family, oh, here we go, Califoriade.

Not Californiae, but Califoriade.

They belong to unique genera that set them apart from typical scavenger blowflies.

And the two main screw worm-producing species are, well, old world screw worm, Chrysomia baziana, and New World screw worm,

Cochleomia

hominivorax, hominivorax,

and that homina,

which translates to man-eater.

Oh, Christ.

That's the one we're talking about, New World Screw Worm.

So, NWS is what they call it for short.

A screw worm is the larval, also known as the maggot, stage of a parasitic fly, known for infesting and feeding on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals, including livestock, pets, and yes, even human beings.

Now, human fatalities from screw worm infestations are rare.

The condition is known as

M-Y-I-A-S-I-S.

Miasis, measis.

Miasis, I believe.

Fatal if not promptly diagnosed and treated.

In fact, I looked it up.

There was a death, two deaths last year in Panama from this,

of humans, and prior to that in Panama,

you had to go back to the 1990s to find someone who died from it.

And that's what this news item is going to be about.

Animals at greatest risk include those that have recently given birth, have opened wounds, or have undergone surgery, or management procedures like dehorning and branding.

The screw worm is obligate.

Do you know what that means, Bob?

Yeah, for that.

What's the

finish the sentence?

It means that it's

obligate what?

Yes, it has to feed on living tissue.

The opposite of necrophages.

Okay.

And, you know, where is it now in the world?

Yeah.

So it's been relegated

to the deeper parts of South America,

you know, in

non-human populations kind of holding it there.

And in Panama, because that's kind of where the efforts, and there's been ongoing efforts for a long time to keep this parasite in check because it's super, super nasty.

This parasite will kill a cow, for example, in as little as one week.

If it gets it, that cow could be dead in seven days, and no more than two weeks in many cases.

And what can they do?

What's the

yeah,

again,

the parasite will eat your flesh.

And let's see.

If left untreated, infestations can disfigure the affected areas, lead to severe bacterial infections, cause sepsis or organ failure, and destroy critical anatomical structures, including eyes, ears, and genitalia.

Oh, my God.

So a worm can eat your balls.

Quite true.

It's a fly, but yes.

Specifically, the larva state of the fly.

We have been battling.

Do you know how long we've been battling

the screw worm and keeping it in check?

200 years.

Over 70 years.

Wow.

70 years.

And this is why we haven't heard about it, because the efforts in the mid-1950s were very effective at pushing this really away from the United States and much of Central America.

In the 1950s, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture laid the groundwork for a continent-wide assault on the screw worm.

Workers raised screw worms in factories, blasted them with radiation until they were sterile, and then dropped sterile adult screw worms by the hundreds of millions

at its height weekly over the United States and then further south into Mexico and eventually the rest of North America.

The screw worm was eradicated from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America between 1966 and 2006.

Eliminated.

What did I say?

Eradicated.

Eradicated is worldwide.

Eliminated is from a region.

Oh, gotcha.

Okay, cool distinction.

Oh, clever, Steve.

Thank you for that correction.

I'll remember that.

Eliminated.

And again, there was a barrier in Panama, the Darien Gap, which maybe you've heard of before, and that's basically where it's been held in check for all of that time, but it has broken through and identified in 2023 that it broke through the grap, the gap.

It's heading back north into Central America.

It's been detected in Mexico, and there's a heightening risk now of reintroduction into the United States.

To prevent this moving back northward, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture,

Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, they both collaborated with Panama to maintain the biological barrier zone in eastern Panama.

So they're doing what they can to reinforce that buffer zone.

But again, it has been breached, and there needs to be renewed efforts to keep this parasite away.

I saw pictures of this fly, and you know, it looks like a fly, however, it has an orange face, including like orange eyes, and an orange, what do you call it, muzzle or mouth area to it, metallic green-blue body, so it has that sort of shiny, you know, almost coat to it, and there are three black stripes on its thorax.

If one of these buggers gets into you, into you, within three days, there will be thousands of larvae present.

They position themselves head down with their posterior ends visible at the surface of the wound.

And in deep or narrow wounds, the only way that you know you might have this thing is the subtle movements under your skin and things that may be a visible sign.

Oh, I'm getting all creeped out here just reading about this.

So, this is bad.

I mean, again,

for people, for the most part, they get treated in time when they have this infection and few people, you know, are become victims, but it can impact people.

It definitely, in fact, impacts animals and especially livestock.

This has already started to cause a little spike in

cow and beef prices because of the extra efforts now that they're going to have to go through to keep this away.

So it's already starting to manifest itself.

Is this where they use ivermectin?

They do have medicines and things that they can use

in order to get rid of it in time.

But again,

if a cow or a herd goes undetected in a few days or within a week, that could be the end of the herd.

kills very quickly and it's not to be trifled with and there's been an ongoing effort for 70 years to keep this contained.

And now it has to be redoubled.

If you happen to see one of these things, chances are you're not going to, hopefully.

But there is something called the USDA Screw Worm Emergency Hotline, 800-353-7575.

It's a real service.

And, you know, like you said, Steve, just one more thing to kind of keep on the lookout for.

Well, I mean,

the real thing is that this is why we have agencies to deal with it, right?

To keep an eye eye on this, to address it, to react to it.

And without that, without

agencies funded, populated by scientists, free to do the work that they need to do, these kind of things are going to run wild, right?

Right.

Can you imagine?

I mean, what should have other kinds of things?

Right.

There should be experts to worry about it for you.

Exactly.

And if they get defunded, guess what?

How many things are going to get

past the net?

It's unfathomable.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Bob,

I always thought that Andromeda one day was going to collide with the Milky Way.

Yes.

And

it still is.

We just are less certain about when that's going to happen.

So, yes, Steve, new improved

simulations suggest that this Milky Way Andromeda collision is far less certain than previously thought, as Steve and I just discussed.

It's no longer almost certain to happen within five billion years, which was the consensus since about 2012.

As usual, the reasons for this change of thinking is fascinating to me anyway.

Let's see if you guys agree.

This is from the journal Nature Astronomy.

The title, Nonlinear Kinematic Modeling Suggests Stochastic Divergence and

Collision Trajectory.

Actually, that's not the title.

I made that one up.

The real title is No Certainty of a Milky Way Andromeda Collision.

Like, what?

That's weirdly straightforward and to the point.

Okay, let's just roll with that.

But I had to come up with some geeky variant because that's what I'm used to.

All right, so I'll start with an apology, maybe to Steve as well, as countless people since 2012, because I've told many, many people that our Milky Way galaxy should collide and merge with the Andromeda galaxy within about 4.5 billion years.

I always was fascinated by that.

It's on my Google calendar.

Right.

They even had a name.

They have a name for it, Milkopeda, Milkopedia or something.

It's just like, which I'd never really, really care.

Yeah.

yeah getting ready for really care for that one but but you know but hey that's the game you play with science communication even a scientific consensus can be shaken up at times uh and of course that's perfectly fine if that's where the evidence leads right when you don't really care uh where it leads it's just whatever what the evidence good evidence says all right so what happened um now we've known since 1912 that that the Andromeda Nebula, as it was known at the time, was headed in our direction.

And 100 years later, 2012, they did a detailed study based on Hubble Space Telescope data, and that showed that there was a minuscule amount of sideways motion of Andromeda.

So a titanic collision between our galaxy and Andromeda in 4.5 billion years seemed fairly certain,

very, very strong confidence on that.

And of course, this would not be fun for the two galaxies.

It would trigger massive starbirths as clouds of hydrogen just kind of smash together.

Stars would probably never collide.

They're just too tiny in the schemes of things, but these huge hydrogen clouds would certainly be smashing together.

There'd be more supernovae.

Even our sun could be forced out of its orbit into a different galactic orbit.

You know the joke.

Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

You know, it would still be kind of cool to have that happen.

I'd actually love to see it right now.

Now, however, we have better observational data, not only

new Hubble data, but we also have data from the Gaia telescope, which I think we've mentioned a couple times.

And we also have new mass estimates of the galactic players involved.

That new data, that new data was plugged into simulations that considered 22 distinct collision variables, each variable having an impact on the collision.

And they ran it 100,000 times.

And the new estimates put this chance of collision at, wait for it, only 50% over the next 10 billion years.

Only 50%.

Now, if you look at the simulations themselves, half the simulations show that

our our two mighty galaxies, the biggest in our local group of galaxies, these two galaxies fly past each other, separated by about a half a million light years.

That sounds huge, and it is huge, but it's not too far away, however, to have our dark matter halos interact, right?

We had got these dark matter halos around, surrounding our galaxies, you know, beyond, you know, our galaxies, what, 100,000 light years across.

Beyond that, we've got these dark matter halos, and they would be interacting.

Our Milky Way and Androbana, they would be interacting in a way causing what's called dynamic friction.

And that friction would eventually bring the galaxies back around towards each other.

You know, who knows, maybe circle each other a few more times, but eventually causing a merge.

So that's half the simulations causing an eventual merge because of this dynamic friction.

But most of the other half of the simulations show that these two galaxies will be too far away, even for this dynamic friction, to close the deal, meaning that we could dance together far, far into the now, you know, more unpredictable future.

We just can't say at this time when they could potentially merge

if they're too far away for this dynamic friction to take over.

So, as of now, the old prediction of a direct collision in 5 billion years has what chance of happening, do you think?

20%?

1%.

Evans, closer?

2%.

We have only a 2% of happening.

So, it still could happen.

That's how much uncertainty there is.

My answer had a 2 in it, though.

What?

My answer had a 2 in it.

Ah, yes.

It did.

But yeah, in the wrong column, though.

Columns do matter.

So, yeah, 2%.

2%.

So it could still happen.

But instead of being something like whatever,

95%,

92% certainty back since 2012, now it's back down.

Now it's down to 2%.

So now the critical part of this new uncertainty,

oh, my robots fell over.

Crap.

All right.

They're good.

They're good.

Please leave that in the show.

So, a critical part of this new uncertainty that we seem to be experiencing, it really has nothing to do with the Milky Way or Andromeda, but our biggest satellite galaxies.

The Andromeda has the famous M33 galaxy near it, which actually increases the probability of a merger.

On the other hand, our Milky Way has our beautiful smear of a satellite galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud.

And that dude is actually pulling us away from a potential merger.

So something's pulling it.

Something is, one satellite galaxy is making it more likely for a merger.

The other satellite galaxy is making it less likely.

So it's just like, well, yeah, just can't really pin this down.

And of course, it's more complicated than that, of course.

But it's actually fascinating that better data has actually increased the uncertainty, which happens a lot.

And it's just like one of the wonderful things about science.

So Till Sawala, who's an astronomer of the University of Helsinki in Finland and lead author of the study, said this.

It's somewhat ironic that despite the addition of more precise Hubble data taken in recent years, we are now less certain about the outcome of potential collision.

That's because of the more complex analysis and because

we consider a more complete system.

But the only way to get a new prediction about the eventual fate of the Milky Way will be with better data, with even better data.

So our future is uncertain.

Well, actually, it's not our future technically.

There seems to be a high probability that the Earth and even the Sun as we know it will probably be gone by the time the Milky Way collides with Andromeda.

So we'll be long gone.

The Sun will just be a white dwarf kind of slowly losing heat.

So even though we can't yet pin a confident date on that collision,

we are very certain that not only will the two biggest members of our local group of galaxies collide, Milky Way and Andromeda, and merge for sure, but all the scores of galaxies bound together gravitationally into our local group will also someday all merge as well into one mega galaxy that was once, or a part of it was at least, was once the home of humanity, but will be, or, you know, maybe our robot descendants will be hanging out, checking things out, but we probably won't be here.

We absolutely.

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

I've totally lost track on what the previous noisy was.

Well, I'll catch you up.

Last time, guys, was it three weeks ago, Steve?

Something like that.

A month?

I played this noisy.

Any guesses, guys?

Broken Dejiridoo.

I would guess some kind of instrument.

Some

kind of wind instrument.

Maybe the flatulator.

So is this what you're going to play in your retirement, Steve?

I'm going to take up the flatulator, yeah.

Steve, that reminds me of a fun movie, fun Disney movie, Treasure Planet, basically sci-fi pirates, which is such a fun movie.

And there was an alien whose language sound, you know, very, very close to that noise.

And

they called the language, the language had the best name.

They called it Flatula, which I loved.

I never forgot.

So it's not the flatulator?

I had a listener write in and say, hi, Jay, this week's who's that Noisy?

Sounds is the sound of a Goliath Beetle bench pressing 94 pounds.

Oh,

triggering, triggering.

Nice callback.

And Bob, I remember you because of your meatball NASA shirt.

Thank you for teaching me about that.

Another listener named BJ Tetrault said, Jay, congrats to you and the rogues on reaching 20 years on the podcast.

He says, I was honored to be there for the thousandth show recording, and it was great.

I also went to the two DC shows, but wasn't able to make it to Nauticon.

I said this week's noisy sounds like a brass musical instrument, probably a trumpet, that the player is playing pedal tones.

I forget the acoustic mechanism, but it's a way to play very low notes.

It's probably, it probably has something to do with the resonance of the instrument and the frequency of the player blowing in the mouthpiece.

So, this is actually iPuppy, by the way.

And this is a very good guess, but not all the way there.

Then, Shane Hillier wrote in, say, Jables, for this week's guess, I think this person's trying to learn to play a tuba.

Again, you're in the vein there but you are not you're not you know all the way James Lovell wrote in and said

James Lovell that's right I think this week's noisy is someone playing a trombone in such a way that they get the harmonic notes along the bass note they're likely using a particular ambiture to achieve this that's somewhat there but let me give you the uh the winner is uh mitch burke for this week's noisy and Mitch says I'm sure many musicians have answered this one but the noise that this week's is a multiphonic ditty where a person blows a drone note on the instrument and hums a separate melody while blowing sounds like a trumpet probably with a mute on the on this in this case hope this is specific enough all right so what we're seeing here guys what we're hearing here this is actually from a listener named sam rumble and sam said my old trumpet teacher is the clip in the clip he actually uh you know videotaped his his teacher he said so hopefully the rights won't be an issue this effect is created by playing the instrument with with your lips and then also singing a note behind that was within your throat.

This means you can play two notes at once, creating some really interesting harmonic effects and resonances between the played and sung notes.

In this clip, he is playing a single note on the actual trumpet while only changing the sung notes.

You can hear him change them if you listen closely.

Yeah, so I mean, you know,

there were some definitely good guesses in here.

I think out of all of them, James Lovell and

Mitch got the closest.

So let me play that again.

For those of you who play wind instruments,

I'm curious to know how many of you were able to tease this out.

So I definitely hear the guy humming, and you can hear where the notes don't perfectly match up, you know, that there is some

almost dissonance vibrations happening in there.

It's really cool.

Sound waves are pretty damn interesting.

So, a multiphonic trombone.

Yes.

Well, it's paired with a drone note on the trombone with the singer singing a scale that is playing with that drone note.

It's very cool.

Also known as a flatulator.

Okay.

That's right.

What do you got for this week?

This week's Who's That Noisy was sent in by a listener named Stella Why?

I can't answer that question, Stella.

I don't know.

And here it is.

Wow.

All right.

That was a cool thing.

All right.

So if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, you got to email me at wtn at the skepticsguy.org.

Steve, we have a show coming up.

The show is going to be in Kansas.

It's the weekend of September 20th, but this is Saturday, the 20th of September, and we will be doing two shows that day.

We will be doing a private show, and we will be doing a special extravaganza.

You're going to love either or both of those shows.

Both of those shows will be in the same venue on the same day at two different times.

One of them will be somewhere around noon, and the other one will be at 8 p.m.

If you're interested, all you got to do is go to the skepticsguide.org, and you'll see a button on there that will give you a link to buy the tickets.

Thanks, Jay.

One very quick email.

This comes from Keith from Wales, United Kingdom.

And he asks, I've just discovered your podcast and have started episode one.

This means that I now have nine years to catch up on.

Try 20, dude.

20 years.

No,

he meant nine years of listening straight through.

Yeah, maybe.

If I listen to episodes while I'm asleep, will I absorb all of the information in the podcast to a level that I can readily recall them in detail.

No.

Okay, let's move on.

So if you want a little bit more of a longer answer than that, really no.

You cannot learn while you're asleep.

So, but there is quote-unquote learning that goes on during sleep, but it's implicit learning.

You know, it's like memory consolidation and, you know, the brain doing its thing to try to like lock in information.

Defrag in the hard drive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but yeah, you can't like listen to something.

There's no conscious learning, right?

Your brain is not processing.

That would be incredible.

Yeah, so

obviously there are stages, there are the deep stages of sleep where actually a lot of the implicit learning stuff is happening.

Like you're in a coma.

There is no processing of information going on at that time.

You are not able to hear, understand, and react to stuff.

So no.

And in REM sleep, you're...

environmental things can influence your dreams, but still like you're not really learning during the dreaming.

That's a different thing that's going on.

So, there'll be no benefit to listening to the show while asleep.

You have to be awake when you listen to the SGU.

All right, let's go on with our interview.

We are joined now by Emily Scherning.

Emily, welcome to The Skeptics Guide.

Thanks so much for having me on the show.

So Emily, you are the founder and CEO of something called American Resiliency.

Tell us about that.

What is American Resiliency?

American Resiliency is a nonprofit.

We're a 501c3 and we're an education nonprofit.

We're focused on getting actionable, accessible climate projection information.

to all Americans so that people can understand the changes that are likely to happen to their home and to places that they care about.

There's a lot of range in the change nationwide.

Yeah, so this is a very interesting challenging subject for science communicators.

We talk been talking about this for 20 years, you know, for a couple of reasons.

One is that this is one of the few issues where there are real stark differences, you know, among the population, like Americans.

Usually

there really isn't much of like a middle consensus like there is on so many issues.

We really are polarized.

And two, it's like the one issue that does not respond to factual correction of information, right?

Like you could tell a science denier, climate change denier, factual information, it doesn't change their mind.

So, first of all, do you find that and how do you deal with it?

I think that the playing field has shifted enormously in the last 20 years, where it is more common now.

The majority of Americans believe that climate change is happening because we're feeling it on the ground.

Yale Climate Communication has done a lot of great national survey work that gives us a more up-to-date picture of how people are feeling and accepting climate science.

And I would also push back that climate science is the only issue where people are just like, just say no.

I think that we see that sort of perspective on all kinds of stuff, even on if the earth is round, right?

And we live in a world where the media is willing to set up two sides problems in situations where dichotomies really aren't appropriate.

Yeah, I agree.

Like, there's a false balance issue that the media deals with.

Yeah, I wasn't saying it's not the only issue, but it is one where there's a measurable polarization politically, which is not true of a lot of other issues.

It's, you know, because the majority of people tend to fall in the middle.

But in any case, the bigger problem, I think, is the fact that,

again, we say climate denial, we're not talking necessarily about, you know, this, about people just straight up denying that climate change is happening.

There's a whole whole spectrum of it.

You could deny that it's happening, or that it's anthropogenic, or that it's going to cause bad things, or that there's anything we could do about it.

That's true, right?

They kind of shift up and down that spectrum, sometimes, you know, just you know, deliberately, like the Mott and Bailey defense, where they just will change their strategy based on the context of the situation.

But at some level, at the end of the day, they don't want to do anything about climate change.

You know,

I think that that's true, and that it is not a strictly polarized denial.

I think that there are quite a few people who are very accepting of climate science who also deny that there's anything practical that we can or will do about it.

I think that this is such a serious existential issue that people bring a lot of deep psychology, deep emotions to their parsing of the issue.

And that it's such a big problem that there's a natural human response to shut down instead of work the the problem.

But it's a problem we need to be working.

So what approach do you take in terms of public education about climate change?

I think that there are a number of nested approaches that I take based on my communications research.

Some of it is using broadly accessible language.

I think that when we're inside the world of science, we use a lot of specialized vocabulary that helps us communicate in world that makes us sound completely irrelevant out of the world.

Or we may start using vocabulary in specific ways without even realizing how foreign that can sound to a very educated person in another field, not even outside of academia.

They could be on the other side of the building, right?

So the language is important.

Accessibility isn't just about using words that everyone can understand.

It's about emotional engagement.

It's about finding ways to connect.

And it's about finding ways to translate knowledge into action.

I think that the warmth, the connection, and the action are all really critical elements of climate communication today.

So give me an example of how you connect it to people.

So when I am talking about really serious change,

It's one thing to show numbers and graphs.

It's another thing to say, and if we look right here, if we look right at this spot in Texas, this is where we see threats converging, and this is how we saw that start to show up in the derecho that hit Houston last year.

And my friend Diane was in Houston, and because she used some of the preparedness techniques we've talked about with American Resiliency, she had water when their utility briefly failed.

You know, you've got to go from the top down and to people's lived experiences.

And I'm really fortunate that people around the nation share their lived experiences on the ground.

Because I'm here in Iowa.

You know, I don't see the whole national landscape just through my eyes.

I'm glad to be part of a network of people who are paying attention.

How have you dealt with the straight-up misinformation that's being pushed by the fossil fuel industry or other or you know or you know political agents who are trying to find the truth?

Or for them, it's not an emotional issue.

They are deliberately spreading misinformation.

You know, I am not interested in being right, I'm interested in change on the ground.

And so, is it really worth my time and energy to fight misinformation, or is it worth my limited time and energy?

Because everyone has limited resources to put my work into getting the message out there and to getting work done on the ground.

I think that we have wasted too much time in quote-unquote debate that's about not taking action, and we need to be taking action.

So like what kind of action do you recommend?

The thing that I am personally fixed on is small-scale habitat creation, but that's because I'm in a situation where I have some access to land.

I think that for everybody there are meaningful actions that you can take beyond reduction of carbon footprints, which we often focus in the environmental movement on what you can stop doing, right?

On how you can reduce your consumption habits.

I think that we're in a point in our relationship with the earth where refraining from harm is not enough, that we need to be doing active good, that in our communities, wherever we are, we need to be doing things to nurture life, to make space for life, and to put

something positive.

into the world rather than just make ourselves smaller.

So like at my place, I do a lot of small-scale prairie restoration.

And five years ago, this was a very normal suburban yard.

And now it's the place where the monarch migration comes through.

I get to have like huge clouds of butterflies in my yard every year.

It's amazing.

You have the milkweed plants all ready for them?

I have some milkweed, but I have a lot of butterfly bush.

They're really into the butterfly bush.

Yeah, I got some of those in my yard, but people have complained that in Connecticut, at least they're technically, they're not native, so they're not great.

So, yeah, at least in New England, there's a big push for the milkweed.

But it's got to be the right one.

There's milkweed that's the wrong one that they don't like.

So, even there, you got to be careful.

You can't just go and say, Give me a weak milkweed.

You got to do a little bit of research.

There are so many milkweeds, and it's wonderful that there's this growing awareness of native plants and about the incredible diversity of native plants.

But I think that it took me to me, rather than getting caught in analysis paralysis and making sure you do the perfect thing, you just do the best thing you can.

And if it turns out that you bought an imperfect milkweed, you can get another one next year.

Then you got two milkweeds.

Yeah, don't make the perfect the enemy of the good enough.

Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of people have very good intentions with climate.

And of course, climate is a topic that causes people to have enormous anxiety.

Anxiety often freezes us, it stops us from taking action.

Anything that we can do is generally going to be better than not attempting a positive action.

So we often have a discussion about

at what level we should really be focusing our efforts in terms of trying to slow down or avoid the worst outcomes of climate change.

Essentially, is it at the individual level, at the community level, at the national level, like the biggest level?

And

not that there's been any resolution, it's just that we have to have that kind of meta-discussion.

Like, because there's only, I think there's a lot individuals can do, but there's only so much individuals can do.

And everything we do can come to nothing if big companies are still pumping out tons of CO2.

So it sounds like from what you're saying, you're focusing more on the sort of individual community level.

Do you get involved at sort of the biggest level as well?

Well, you know, I think that at this time,

my nested action is personal, it's related to my community on the ground, and it's related to the nationwide AR community.

We're people who are doing the work and helping get the message out there in our volunteer network.

But the fact that I'm focused on this sort of ground-based, ground-up solution doesn't mean that I'm in opposition to other pieces of this puzzle.

I think that we're in a place where if we want to slow this train down, it's an everything problem.

It's an everything to the table problem.

And that we also need policy-level action as well as community-up action.

But I think a lot of people feel adrift.

You know, a lot of people don't know what to do.

And that if you start by making concrete changes around you, changes that you can see in your life, where you can see the abundance and diversity of species increase around you, you can see life coming up around you, that can be a very grounding thing.

Because even on days where you're like, this is all for nothing, it's hopeless because there's no policy level change.

You can look around you and you can say, well, at least I made a home for this

thrush.

You know, this meadowlark is here.

because of me.

That's a meaningful thing.

I think that all life matters and that being able to connect with life is important at this time.

We're in a bottleneck event.

Do you find in your research or your experience that if you get people invested at that level, you know, like trying to make their own backyard, you know, more friendly for local species, et cetera, that they then get more engaged at the political level, at the national level?

I think that once a person feels less stuck and starts moving forward, that they can end up going quite far on their journey, that they can become civically engaged, that they can become more involved with diverse national networks because there is a huge ecosystem of organizations working on climate, right?

I think that for a lot of people, being able to feel grounded, knowing what they can do to start, and knowing what their local outcomes are are things that can be very freeing because there is such a huge diversity in local outcomes, even at this next step of projected warming, which would be hitting about 2 C above pre-industrial baseline.

So, Emily, so do you have like a shortlist?

Like when people ask, hey, what can I do?

I want to make the world a better place.

What's your shortlist of things that people could think about or do in their own, whether they're in an apartment or in a house or they have property or don't have property?

What do you tell people they can do to get involved?

I encourage people to think about what could be doing directly that will nourish life, that will nourish other living things, and that will nourish community.

Because in times of change, it's impossible for any one person

to completely provide for their own needs.

We need community.

And so, whether you're engaged in nurturing life or nurturing community, these are good grounded places to start where what grows up around you will make you stronger and help you to the next stage on your journey.

And do you have resources available for people on your website or on your online presence?

We do.

We have a workshop that I think a lot of people would enjoy that can be found through our YouTube channel and through our volunteer network.

We have a variety of worksheets and trainings to help people cultivate the resilience on a variety of system levels in their home and in their community.

So anyone who's interested in that, I'd love people to get in touch with me.

There's a contact form on the website, and I'll get you hooked up with the right person and resource.

And where should people go online to get to your stuff?

They should go to AmericanResiliency.org.

Okay, well, Emily, it was really fascinating talking with you.

I would really appreciate the work you're doing at American Resiliency.

So, I encourage our listeners to check it out.

Again, as you say, we need to be fighting this at absolutely every level.

It's true.

This is not a time where we should be fighting amongst ourselves.

Anyone who's interested in life

should be working together to get as much through this bottleneck as we can.

Okay, thanks, Emily.

Well, thank you.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week, I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake just three regular news items this week back into a more of a normal rotation you guys ready yeah all right here we go item number one astronomers have detected the most energetic explosions in the universe stars that can release the total lifetime energy of 100 suns over the course of a single year item number two engineers have developed a 3d printer that can print with three different materials sourced from the same filament spool.

And item number three, researchers have used AI to accurately date ancient manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls based upon the shape of their characters.

Jay, go first.

Astronomers have detected the most energetic explosion in the universe,

stars that can release the total lifetime energy of 100 suns over the course of a single year.

Wow.

So they can release that energy.

Yeah, so like, you know, our our sun, when I say suns, I mean our sun.

Yeah, of course.

It's not an explosion.

It's an entire 10 billion year lifespan released in a single year.

A hundred of those.

It's not an explosion?

Well, that's, you know, explosions are relative.

Okay.

Yeah, it's considered

an explosion.

Okay, so

the quick equation in my head is if it's like, you know, if it's a, what's with the gravity, right?

You have the mass.

The gravity is what holds everything together.

So why would it be able to push out that much energy?

You know, and the light is also,

you know, when the light is created by the sun, it bounces around in the interior of the sun for a very long time before it escapes.

Okay, that's confusing, but you know, I learned something from Perry.

And he said, if it has anything to do with bacteria or outer space, the answer is yes, it can happen.

Engineers, number two, engineers have developed a 3D printer printer that can print with three different materials sourced from the same filament spool.

All right, now this is the one that bothers me when you read it the first time because I know my way around 3D printing.

And you're saying that it has one filament spool, but there can be three print with three different materials sourced from the same filament spool.

How could it print from three different

defined spool?

The spool is basically the

raw material.

It's the raw material that's wound up on a a spool just like a, you know, just like thread, except it's printing out the other con.

Yeah, so that spool.

Yeah, but can't you just wind two different materials around it?

Yeah, but how would it because the spool has to spin.

The fact that they're bringing this up, the fact that they're even bringing up the spool here troubles me because if it's like a multi, if it's like the same spool, it's very different than two spools of the same exact size, kind of right next to each other that are both spinning, which is how today you would do, you know, do a 3D print with multiple colors.

But Steve is saying here, it's the same spool, and that's very particular.

It doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make any sense to me that you have a spool that has three different filaments,

three different materials sourced from the same filament spool.

Okay, so maybe

what Steve is saying here is that the filament itself has the three different things, and the printer head can pick which one it's using out of that.

Yeah, but then that's so wasteful, it's disgusting.

Why is it wasteful?

Because it's always going to not print two-thirds of the material.

And what happens to that material?

Is it melted and discarded?

Is it just spooling off, like going off to the side?

I don't like it.

I don't like this, Steve.

It really bothers me.

Let me quickly go over three here.

Researchers have used AI to accurately date ancient manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Well, okay, fine.

That's great.

I believe it.

I think the 3D printer one is wrong and fake and not.

Okay, Kara.

What if

the 3D printer, so most of these are polymers, right?

So polymers are plastics, but they're made out of like, you know, kind of going to our material science brain, they're made out of these different compounds.

What if it printed three different materials sourced from the same filament using like different levels of heat or different,

you know, added some sort of chemical process to it to physically turn the filaments on the spool into three different materials.

Right now, I'm going to superheat it, and now it makes this harder plastic or this softer plastic.

I don't know, thinking outside the box here, but that sounds interesting.

Jay didn't like it.

Most energetic explosions in the, I have no idea.

This is why Bob's going last.

Stars that can release the total lifetime energy of a hundred suns.

I mean, but our sun is kind of mid, right?

So, like, would that surprise me?

Yeah, I know it's a single year.

Yeah, I know it sounds bananas, but I'm never not surprised.

Like, things are always bigger and hotter and more violent than I ever think they will be.

So that one doesn't really bother me, especially because our son is like not anything that special.

It's special to me.

I mean, no, it's really special because we exist because of it.

But yeah, I think it is pretty mid in the universe.

And then finally, AI accurately dates ancient manuscripts such as the Dead Sea Scrolls based on the shape of their characters.

Okay, so basically, looking at a bunch of old manuscripts and the actual font, like the writing on them.

Yeah, I could see that.

So, like, you know, styles changed over time with how things were written.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if the written word evolved a little bit stylistically.

So,

I think I'm going to go with Jay and say it's a 3D printer one.

Like, I think my idea is cool, but maybe they haven't pulled that off yet.

Okay, Bob.

All right, so let me go backwards here.

The manuscripts of Dead Sea Scrolls, that just seems kind of trivial.

Now, remember, though, these are there's no printing press.

I mean, these are written.

So

I'm not sure what's actually changing here.

I mean, people write differently.

The same language.

Everyone's different.

It's not like, oh, they're using this font and that font didn't become popular until this century.

So that's kind of weird.

It's kind of weird.

The shape of the characters.

I mean, mean, is it the shape or is it actually, you know, the dialect of the language changing?

I don't know.

So there's a lot of questions there.

And the second one here with the 3D printer, I mean, I don't know a lot about how three, you know, I haven't actually

observed 3D printers working that much.

But, I mean, I can imagine a spool that has three sections to it, each independently spinning compared to the other two or one or whatever.

And so you need some of this other material, then you use this this side of the spool.

And for another material, you use the other one.

But that might be going against the spirit of how this is worded, where it seems like it's specifically saying that it's creating three different types of material from one spool.

And then that's where Kara's

interpretation comes in: of adding something to a common spool that changes it into a different type of material.

It shouldn't be too hard.

I don't know if it's increased heat or less heat, but it could be something else.

So that seems reasonable that that would be true too.

And

the explosions of the universe, I mean, that one could be reasonable as well, depending on how, you know, on the details, of course.

I mean, I'm not turned off by this possibility.

It's not a knee-jerk reaction, but I mean, it just depends on the details.

So I'm going to go with the

explosion one.

So which one is less reasonable?

The manuscript or the 3D printer?

All right.

I'm going to.

Jay's got some good familiarity with it.

And Carrie, you went with Jay as well.

So I'll go with 3D printer fiction.

Okay, and Evan.

Last time I was put in this position,

I went a different direction and failed.

Not that that's necessarily having an influence on me this time around,

but Jay's passionate, and I mean passionate defense of the 3D printer being fiction, I think, has won me over on this particular occasion.

And therefore, Jay,

I side with you and the team.

We're all going to go down together or raise the cup in victory together.

Sweet, sweet, sweet.

Okay, well, there's definitely going to be a sweep in one direction or the other.

I guess I'll take these in order.

We'll start with number one.

Astronomers have detected the most energetic explosions in the universe, stars that can release the total lifetime energy of 100 suns over the course of a single year.

You guys all think this one is science.

So you realize that means that this star, this object, is one trillion times brighter than our sun.

I didn't do that math.

Sure.

A trillion times.

A trillion, 100?

10 billion times 100, right?

So that means it would shine as bright as three or four Milky Way galaxies, right?

Well, yeah.

I mean, ours is.

It seems extravagant, but.

So

let me ask you a related question.

How bright are the brightest supernovae?

Less bright than that, because you just said they detected the most energetic.

But

by how much?

Half?

Yeah, the classic description is that they're brighter than their entire galaxy, briefly.

But that's on the order of, what, weeks?

So a typical supernova, like a big supernova,

would release the energy of one sun over the course of a year.

They usually only are really bright, bright, bright for a few weeks, as Bob says.

But if you look at their entire, like that year, you know, because it is a longer-term event, basically, they're releasing the energy of our sun's entire lifetime over a year.

So, this is a hundred times brighter than a supernova.

Science, science, yeah.

I mean,

well,

all right,

now you're talking about a gravitational collapse supernova, I assume, right?

Not a not a supernova 1A.

Yeah, yes.

So, I mean, for those giant stars, I mean, they are shedding outer layers, so it's really not the entirety of the star that's, you know, that's

so there's less material to

create the energy, but there's something funky going on here, I'm pretty sure.

All right, so this one is science.

This is very cool science.

So, the question is: as Bob was getting to, how is this happening?

What do you think?

Is it tidal disruption?

Significant from what?

Black hole.

What kind of black hole?

Colliding black hole.

A supermassive black hole.

So, this is what happens when a very large star gets too close to a supermassive black hole.

Supermassive black hole.

It rips it apart and causes it to flame out in a year, burning as bright as 100 of our sun's lifetime of energy over just one year.

Oh, man, that is cool.

Yeah, that is cool.

All right.

These are a new class of objects called ENTs, extreme nuclear transients.

Extreme nuclear transients.

I got to read on that.

ENTs, though, yeah, look at that.

So cool.

A bit of extreme nuclear transients.

All right.

Engineers have developed a 3D printer that can print with three different materials sourced from the same filament spool.

Better be right to get it.

All things are one of the subjection.

See, before you say, can I add one more thing?

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah.

Different materials require completely different printer heads that do, you know what I mean?

They function differently.

It's not like everything.

There's 3D printers that can print

a wide variety of stuff, but you have to have a different printer head.

So, nope.

Definitely not science.

Nice.

Well, what if I tell you that Kera

was the closest to reality here?

Neat.

And that it's the same material on the filament spool, but it's treated in different ways in order to change the physical properties of it, making it functionally a different material.

Do you think that

make it plausible for you?

I think they tried and failed.

No,

they tried and succeeded.

But only with two?

But only with two.

But not only that,

they did it with

two materials, and also it wasn't a filament spool 3D printer.

It was with a different kind of 3D printer.

The VAT ones, you know, were basically where you just...

Oh, the lasers.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That cross and then they harden where they intersect.

Okay.

Those are cool, too.

Yeah, it's that photo polymerization.

Yeah.

So they, yeah, they basically

growing the 3D printed objects out of this vat of polymer.

And what they do is they essentially can make two different materials out of the same vat of material, of source material.

One is hard and permanent, and the other is not permanent.

It could be break down very easily.

So essentially, they're using the hard,

so you have one pot of resin, right?

And then you treat them with different frequencies of light.

And then the hardened resin is your object.

And the more

then you have to

supports that you have to take away anyway.

So this is to try to eliminate a step and make it easier to get rid of the supports that you have to put on in order to print it.

The scaffolding.

The scaffolding.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like it.

Thank you, Jay.

But yep, that's the fiction.

So you guys swept me.

And that means that researchers have used AI to accurately date ancient manuscripts, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, based upon the shape of their characters.

Is science.

And, Bob, it's the shape of the characters.

It's what I said.

I can't make it something else.

It's not

any other aspect of the language.

It is just based upon the writing itself.

Well, this reminded me, so I was thinking the same thing, though, like, how different

do people make characters over historical time?

But remember, like, colonial America, remember, like all the S's look like F's, you know?

Yes.

So it was different.

Like just 100, 200 years ago, yeah, people's letters looked different than they look today.

So that does not surprise me.

Me either.

Now, there's a,

and this is not, they did the research on the Dead Seed Scrolls, but it's not, obviously, this technique is not limited to that.

However, what they need as a reference are dated documents.

Now,

interestingly, like some ancient documents that we have, sometimes people put dates on them and sometimes they don't.

And of course, it's very useful if even one document is dated, like somebody wrote the date, so we know exactly when that was written, that sort of anchors that in time.

But

for the Dead Sea Scrolls, very few of them are dated.

And so we don't have enough of them in order to do this.

So they had to also use,

what do you think?

Oh, radiocarbon.

Yep.

Radiocarbon.

Radiocarbon dating.

So they used radiocarbon dating and the precious few dated documents to create the timeline.

And then they could, you know, with other documents, they can put them into that timeline based upon the AI analysis of the characters.

And so, yeah, the hope is that...

Now that they've done this, that they could apply this to other series of documents where, you know, we want to be able to know not just where

individual documents fit into the sequence, but be able to create the entire sequence of documents over time.

Pretty cool.

And this is not new.

The idea of doing, this is paleography, right?

So paleography is doing that very thing, placing writing into its chronology based upon the character shape itself.

They're just using AI to do it better, you know, because obviously this is what AI is good at, analyzing lots of data and finding patterns, etc.

And it was pretty accurate.

Yeah, 79%,

which is pretty good.

And when it was off, it was only off

by that much.

You know, it was like off by 30 years, you know, which is nothing.

So, pretty cool.

All right.

Well, good job, guys.

Jay led the way.

Good job.

Hey, Jay.

You're welcome, guys.

I appreciate that very much.

My gift to you.

I'll get you next week.

I'll make it up to you.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

A short quote this week: The history of science is the history of corrected mistakes.

And that was written or said by David Gerald, G-E-R-R-O-L-D,

a science fiction writer and novelist.

He wrote the script for the original Star Trek episode, The Trouble with Tribbles.

Oh,

awesome, awesome.

Plus, he created the Slea Stack race.

So that's always the TV series Land of the Lost.

The Slea Stacks.

The Slea Stacks.

Gosh, that was terrible.

I mean, it was so camped.

It was so campy.

It was wonderfully campy, yeah.

And he also wrote the novelette, The Martian Child, which won the Hugo Award and Nebula Award.

Hugo.

Nice.

Nice.

So, yeah, the history of science is the history of corrected mistakes.

Yeah.

Because pretty much everything we thought, whatever, 2,000 years ago was wrong.

And we've had to correct everything we thought we knew about the universe.

Yep, and we're still doing it, and we're still doing it.

Yep, all right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Guys, Steve, surely.

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

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

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

Send your questions to info at the skepticsguide.org.

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

Our listeners and supporters are what make SGU possible.

If you thought goldenly breaded McDonald's chicken couldn't get more golden, think colder!

Because new sweet and smoky special edition gold sauce is here.

Made for your chicken favorites.

I participate in McDonald's for a limited time.