The Skeptics Guide #1036 - May 17 2025

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You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

Your escape to reality.

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

Today is Monday, May 12th, 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.

So, guys, actually, I think we forgot to mention last week.

What happened last week?

But we have now completed, fully completed, 20 years of podcasting.

Oh, my

gosh.

What was the date of the very first episode?

So,

we recorded that first episode on May 5th, 2005, which kind of fell between weeks this time.

When did it air?

That Saturday.

We'd have to go back to it.

8th, the 8th.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Okay.

Yeah, so now we have officially completed 20 years.

And this is the episode we're recording right now is episode 1036.

When I talk with people about our podcast nowadays, I have to remind them that we were podcasting in a time really before YouTube.

There was no video podcast.

It was an audio-only platform at the time.

We primarily remain that way

to this day.

So when I'm talking with someone about a podcast today, the first thing they ask me, if they're new to it, it's like, oh, where can I watch it?

That's what they say to me.

I know.

Oh, wow.

I have to remind them it's an audio.

So I have to say, audio only, audio only.

Something I didn't expect to have to happen.

You point them to the live streams.

Certainly.

Of course.

Of course I do.

I tell them about all the social media channels, everything, everything that we do, the whole slate.

I find that strange because it's not like every podcast has a video component.

That is common now, though.

Some podcasts do have video components now, but the podcast itself is still on a feed.

And the crazy thing is, when we do the live streams, most people listen to the audio only.

And then they complain about the bits that are video only.

You know what I mean?

Oh, I fast-forward past this because you can't see anything.

Well, it's because it's a live video stream and you just watch, you're choosing to listen to the audio, which is fine.

We make it available to you,

but you can't win.

You know, stick it right.

Wow, I didn't know that.

So, yeah, you just have to, and that's how far we've come that's how far this the platform itself has evolved the product has has evolved in lots of different ways but that that's one of the main ways at least i have to be i have to make that distinction regularly to people um because there's still so many people discovering our show for the first time yeah well yeah 20 years it's long enough that an entire new generation has come up that didn't exist or were you know toddlers who started podcasting

And I think we also have to couple that with the, I don't know, it was practically 10 years of skeptical activism we did before there was a podcast.

You know, we didn't just walk into it cold.

We had almost 10 years of experience under our belts.

We earned our bones, absolutely.

We were in the field.

Newsletter, four newsletters,

newsletters.

So then, have I been on the show for half of the life of the show or more or less?

I think I have.

Right, it has.

2015, you joined.

Yeah.

So, yes.

That's weird to think about that.

I still think you were the new girl, you know, but in a way, even though it's been a long time, but it's funny to think that you're talking about that.

Half the time.

Half the time.

10 years, a decade.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

You know,

the thing about this whole 20 years, you know, and of course it predates 20 years.

You guys, you know, did a lot more than I did because I was busy playing music.

But, you know, when the podcast started, I was all in.

The thing that really I just can't wrap my head around the fact that we've been doing this for 20 years.

And like very soon after we got our feet wet, you know what I mean?

We're like, okay, we got our C-legs doing it.

We haven't missed an episode.

You know, we have consistently put out an episode for 19 and a half years, say.

When we hit that mark, that accomplishment really was impactful to me because this is really like the longest commitment to anything I've ever had in my life.

Wow.

And, you you know, it's fantastic.

I mean, think about it.

Think about all the people that we've gotten to know and meet.

Think about all of the

times that we've helped people figure out, you know, not only what the truth is, but make career paths and things like that just because, you know, our science communication inspired them in one way or another.

Like, I am humble to that.

I feel, you know, honored that any work that all of us do gets to do that kind of thing.

And then, you know, Kara, like meeting you, it's like the, you are like the closest thing to destiny in my life, right

because it really you know when i first met you i was like i want to work with her it was immediate yeah right we all just like with george like it was like a switch went off i really like her she's really smart and i wanted i want to work with you yeah your natural communication talents just shine they do it's so it's how i feel like we're all lucky you know we have a family

feel here when did you guys meet george

very early on yeah really wait steve i think it was at that time

No, it was, we met

before that.

Are you sure?

Yeah.

Wasn't it like the first Tam or the second one?

Maybe it was the second one.

The second one that we went to, that we went to.

2008.

I believe.

The story is we saw him, and all of us had the same first impression of George.

He's like, wow, that guy's really cool.

He's too cool to be a Tam.

And

I remember the first image in my mind of seeing George.

George was

dressed in a suit and tie.

He was holding his guitar in one hand, and he had

a woman on his other arm, which was, I believe, Donna.

It was a friend of ours.

We know now.

I think they were dating at the time.

And I'm like, who the hell is that guy?

He stood out so much from the rest of the crowd.

It was funny.

That's funny.

You can just have any kind of conversation you want with George.

It doesn't even have to be about skepticism or science or anything.

Oh, no.

That kind of person who just, you know, whatever tickles your fancy,

he'll converse right back with you about whatever that topic is.

It's he fits right in.

Awesome, dude.

Faux show.

I love his look, by the way.

I mean, oh, yeah, everyone loves his look.

It's cool.

If I didn't have a weird-shaped head, I would go bald as well.

It's the glasses as well that helps the whole image.

You know, it makes him distinctive in a way.

And Carol, you and George, in particular, like getting to know you guys intimately and realizing, you know, you guys are profoundly high-quality people.

You know, it's like, it's not just we're working together.

You know, we are a family in every sense of the word.

You know, like we can.

Except biological.

Yeah.

It's just in the actual literal sense of the word.

Except for literally.

You know, my wife, like Courtney will say to me, she always asks me, like, we're doing something and, you know, as if Kara's not going to be there, but she's like, Is Kara going?

She's like, I go, Yeah.

And she goes, I should go.

You know, I was like,

I miss Court.

I miss her.

But anyway, I'm just thankful.

And I thank you, Steve.

You know, Steve, I've been very vocal about your profound contribution.

But, you know, it's been a pleasure doing this with you, Steve, because

you've just kept us all on track.

You make sure that everything happens.

Every project needs a task master.

Tell me about it.

I know.

I know.

And you're, but you're great at it.

You know, you just, You've really taught us a lot.

It's all been positive.

And I wouldn't change anything.

Well, I would like to have actually earned a lot more money

beyond that.

But that goes without saying in general for everybody.

But anyway, thank you all, guys.

I love all of you, and I love doing what we do.

And I don't even think about it ending.

Yeah, I know.

I could do this is my

forever job, basically, as long as I'm until I go demented or something.

At some point, you guys will have to tell me, Steve, it's time to stop.

Are we the ones to make that determination?

Whoever is like the least demented

keeps the rest of us.

Kara, that's huge.

I think we need to have

an ongoing demented rating then just to see who, you know, just in case we need to know fast.

Part of the reason why I'm retiring now from medicine, from treating patients, actually, is because there is no question that I am still at peak performance cognitively and professionally.

You know what I mean?

And I didn't want to be one of those doctors who's like, people look at him and go, he should retire.

You know what I mean?

This is like your feet.

When you planning on taking some time for yourself.

Yeah,

exactly.

I mean, God, there are some of my colleagues like 75, you know, upper 70s, still working.

They're like, what the hell?

Oh, my God.

Like, you have any other interests?

You have no families?

These people die at their work.

I mean, I enjoy it but it's like I want you know this is I'm ready for the next phase of my life I mean unless you're making science fiction movies like you know work is work and even you know even the SGU I love a lot of it but it's work I would rather be doing the stuff I don't do when I'm working right yeah so but at least this again this is again you say we're all working we're friends we could I could work from my office at home mostly I could sleep in you know what I mean like it's just different than having scheduled professional

no rat race exactly no treadmill no rat race except for just getting the podcast out every week, which I've been doing anyway.

So now I'm going to be doing that.

It's going to become very easy, Steve, because you're going to go from working 40, 50 hours a week to not doing any of that.

You think I'm only working 40 or 50 hours a week?

That's adorable, Jay.

I mean, what is it?

Say it.

Well, you know, Jay, I'm working almost 40 hours a week for my day job.

That's what I was referencing.

And you've got to tack 20, 30 hours on top of that.

But what I was saying was, you're going to eliminate eliminate that 40 or 50 hours of work a weekend.

There you go.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm, you know, I'm tired and messed up right now, but I'm not stupid.

Yeah, and again, like, you know, I think, and I hate to be morbid about this, but this will continue until we meet Steve.

Right?

Like, we're going to keep doing it.

We're going to keep making these shows until Steve is no longer with us, and then that's it.

Either mentally or physically.

All right, well, I'm in.

I don't plan on stopping anytime soon.

All right, guys, let's go on with the show.

Evan, you're going to start us off with a new hybrid segment.

Yes.

The dumbest word of the week.

Thank you, Steve.

Throughout history, there have been a few combinations that have changed the world.

For example, hydrogen and oxygen, fire and food, hand washing and health care, peanut butter and chocolate.

Hi, Bob.

Today marks the latest and perhaps most significant combination of two distinct things that will be recognized as equally significant of a turning point in history.

I've combined what's the word with the dumbest thing of the week.

And

so,

for the first time in history of this universe and all other universes combined, I present to you the dumbest word of the week.

It's the dumbest word of the week.

Come with me, let's take a peek.

Where it's okay to binge, even though we might cringe at what I speak.

The dumbest word of the week.

You know that song, song, right?

What's happening right now?

A new segment,

a new jingle.

That's the rule.

Absolutely.

All right, no more new segments.

For those of us brave enough to be dead.

For those of us brave enough to tread such waters.

True, true.

This week's, the initial dumbest word of the week is moxibustion.

What the hell, man?

That is a compound word.

Would anyone like to care or guess at what two words make moxibustion?

Combustion.

Yeah, combustion.

Second one, yes.

The first one, though, is like

moxie.

Moxa.

Moxa refers to the dried leaves of mugwort.

Oh.

Traditionally used in heat therapy.

Combustion refers to the process of burning, which is central to the moxibustion practice.

What is the moxibustion practice?

Glad you asked, because I'm not certain, Steve.

You may have a different thought on this.

I don't think we've ever talked about this before on the show.

I'm sure

I haven't done a dedicated segment on it, but I'm sure I've done a drive-by while talking about other things like acupuncture and cupping.

Exactly, and that's where this comes in.

Moxibustion, a traditional East Asian therapy that involves the burning of dried mugwort, called moxa, near or on specific acupuncture points on the body.

The goal is to stimulate the flow of qi, you know, life energy, and expel cold and dampness from the body according to traditional Chinese medicine principles.

How does it work in practice?

Well, there are two main types of mock subustion.

There is direct mock subustion, in which you place a small cone of moxa directly on the skin and you burn it.

However, that can cause some burns or scars, especially in the traditional scarring moxibustion method.

That's a thing, the scarring mock subustion method.

The other way is the indirect mock subustion, in which that's more common today.

You know, they're not actually burning burning people.

It's burned near the skin and it's held over the acupuncture points or on top of the

acupuncture needles.

Sometimes a moxa stick like a cigar is used and waved over areas of the body.

Moxibustion supposedly dates back over 2,500 years, which could be earlier than acupuncture itself.

Hmm.

In traditional Chinese medicine, diseases are often thought to stem from the imbalances of yin and yang, and moxibustion is seen as a warming, yang-strengthening therapy.

Here are some of its claimed benefits.

It warms and invigorates the flow of qi and blood.

It treats cold conditions like arthritis and menstrual cramps.

And it helps breach babies turn in utero.

That's a popular claim.

Helps breach babies turn in utero.

What is the scientific evidence for this?

None.

There are studies, though, particularly from China, that claim these effects, but they are considered weak and biased.

And I think that's probably very

generous.

The breach baby claim got attention from a few small trials suggesting a slight increase in fetal movement when combined with acupuncture.

But this has not been able to be replicated, so the science really says no.

Safety and criticisms?

Oh, yeah, burns, blistering can occur if you're doing it wrong.

The smoke from the burning moxa contains a particulate matter that can irritate your lungs, especially if you're using it indoors.

And overall, this is definitely ironclad pseudoscience based on non-falsifiable and unproven concepts.

So congratulations to the term moxa bustion, the very first, what is likely to be many more in this news segment, the dumbest word of the week.

Oh, and stay tuned for more hybrid segments in the future, including the newly thought-of segment Swindler's Quickie.

Back to you, Steve.

I thought you were going to do science or noisy.

I got to save something for the future.

We have 20 more years.

When I do Swindler's List, what are you doing?

Swindler's Quickie.

That's another

hybrid segment.

I'm going to do the quickie quote then.

That's my new segment.

I'm going to do the Swindler's quote, and then anything you come up with, I'll just put Quickie in front of it, and that'll be my new bit.

Perfect.

See how easy it is?

Okay, let's go on with some full news items.

Kara, start us off with the science of cold plunges.

Yeah, some new, well, evidence question mark about cold plunges just published in PLOS One.

The article is titled, No, well, that kind of gives it away, doesn't it?

Damn it.

Spoiler alert.

The article

is titled, No Acceleration of Recovery from Exercise-Induced Muscle Damage After Cold or Hot Water Immersion in Women, a Randomized Control Trial.

So the authors, you know, anytime researchers set out to ask an interesting scientific question, they justify the question.

They say, you know, why is this important?

What is this going to contribute to the literature, to our kind of field of knowledge right now?

And one of the arguments that the authors make is that the vast majority of research in existence right now on things like cold plunge or cryotherapy or cold water immersion post-exercise for recovery are done on men, that there's very, very little evidence using women research participants.

The other argument is that the evidence on men is weak at best.

There is some evidence showing some changes, but a lot of it has not been easily replicated.

And there's a fair amount of evidence showing no improvement.

I even just did a quick kind of Google search before sitting down to do this story where I just looked up, you know, cryotherapy or cold water immersion skeptic and found, you know, a ton of summary articles over the years, starting, you know, back when this got really big in like the teens

up until recently talking about things like whole body cryotherapy or cold water immersion and how the evidence is just kind of all over the place, but it's not very very good.

So far, it's just not very good that this is actually beneficial.

And there is a fair amount of harm that can come from things like cryotherapy or cold water immersion if done inappropriately or done kind of not under the supervision of like, let's say, a PT or a physician.

So.

What did these researchers do?

Well, they said,

what happens if we take a group of women, they took 30 women, and they had them complete something called an exercise called a drop jump.

Have you guys ever done drop jumps?

They're not box jumps.

They're different.

I had to like watch a video about it.

It looks brutal.

Bob has done them.

I know what a box jump is, though.

It's like the opposite of a box jump.

It's like you start elevated, not too, too high, just a little bit elevated, like thigh high, and then or even lower, and then you jump onto the ground and immediately rebound and spring up.

So it's like hit the ground and jump as fast as you can.

Yeah, I've seen it.

Yeah, and sometimes you just jump, sometimes you jump onto another box.

It's a CrossFit exercise.

Yeah, it's like a

high-intensity exercise.

It's hard to do.

Yeah, they had them do five sets of 20.

So it's enough of an exercise that it should cause some amount of like muscle damage, right?

Or at least irritation of your muscles.

And so then they had the, and these were young women.

They were in the average age was 23.

They had them

do one of three different protocols.

They did either a 10-minute dip in 10-degree Celsius water, a 10-minute dip in 40-degrees Celsius water, or nothing, right?

That's the control group.

So they did cold water immersion, hot water immersion, or no water immersion.

And that was immediately after, and then again, two hours after that first soak, they did another one.

So they did an immediate soak and then a delayed soak.

And then they looked at a bunch of different markers, one, two, and three days after the experiment, both subjective and objective measurements.

So

everything from

their muscle strength, how sore they felt, how swollen their muscles were, and

creatine kinase, which is a marker of muscle damage in the blood.

So they had these subjective and these objective measures.

And they found that across the board, muscle recovery looked the same.

Whether somebody did a cold water plunge, a hot water plunge, or no plunge at all, their muscles sort of recovered in the same way.

They did find some differences.

So they found that the cold water immersion protocol reduced oxygenation of the muscles, and they are referring to that as oxygen saturation within the muscles.

So they found that the cold water protocol reduced oxygen saturation within the muscles and the temperature of the skin by a significant margin.

They also found that the hot water protocol increased core body temperature and the temperature of the skin.

So they did affect a measure, right?

Which is which I imagine they predicted ahead of time would yeah.

There was some confusion about the oxygen saturation.

It was actually kind of interesting in the discussion.

I don't want to get too into the weeds, but they like they found that typically the reason that there's some there's still a lot of debate within like the exercise science community about whether cold or hot is beneficial or deleterious is because they both do interesting things.

And the question is, which, you know, do they counteract each other?

We don't know.

So, obviously, when you apply cold to your muscles, what happens?

Like, what are your reactions?

It reduces blood flow.

Yeah, it reduces blood flow.

Right.

Which can be, yeah, which is a bad thing, but it also reduces inflammatory response, which could be a good thing, potentially.

And then when you apply,

but actually, I don't think it is because that's part of the

muscle building activity.

It requires that inflammation.

If it's a,

shall we call it like a normal, healthy amount of muscle damage.

But if there's injury or anything beyond that,

it can actually be a good thing.

But then on the flip side, what happens when you apply heat?

You get increased blood pressure.

Yeah, you've got increased vasodilation.

And so you've got metabolic increases, nutrient delivery increases, an increase in the removal of these waste byproducts.

And so it's like, okay, well, heat sounds like it would be good, but maybe in some instances, cold would be good, or maybe we shouldn't do either and let the body do what it's supposed to do.

Let the body do what it's going to do.

Like, that evolved over millions of years to do it.

And also, is this something where this is damage that's beyond normal activity, or is it normal damage?

Like, it's just complicated, right?

Does it mitigate pain?

And that's another question, right?

What happens

if you feel pain in your muscles, if you feel soreness?

And so they were like, okay, we want to look at all of these things.

And they found that, yes, when they applied cold, the muscles were less oxygenated.

But actually, weirdly, they immediately vasodilated and then they constricted.

So, when they looked at the first measurement in both the heat and the cold group, there was vasodilation, and they were like, well, that's weird.

But then they found that, similar to some other studies, there does appear to be this like biological response that's sort of like a...

the body's reaction to frostbite.

So when the body is a, it can tell that there's been an extreme drop in temperature and that it could be dangerous for tissue, it actually will vasodilate before it vasoconstricts.

So that's kind of interesting.

They call it cold-induced vasodilation.

It's proposed to occur a few minutes after cold exposure to protect against injuries from the cold, like frostbite, but then it usually reverses.

So, but that's like neither here nor there.

So they found that overall, across the board, in the cold group, the muscles were more oxygenated and the skin got colder.

Okay.

In the hot group, the core body temperature raised and the skin got hotter.

Okay.

But there was no measurable difference in any recovery parameter.

So they didn't see any subjective or objective characteristics in the cold water immersion group or the hot water immersion group compared to the passive control.

Participants didn't feel any better, and participants didn't have any metrics that showed that their muscles were healing or improving faster.

And that was at, you know, immediate measurements and up to three days later.

Now, there are some limitations of this study.

Obviously, it was a small sample size.

They didn't, and they talk about this a lot in the study, which I think is interesting.

They didn't do any sort of pretest about psychological bias.

Like they didn't ask them, do you think this will work?

Or what kinds of things do you typically do and what works for you?

And they do note that there could be a psychological component to these types of post-exercise rituals.

Because we've all met people.

Yeah, we've all met people who are like, I always do this thing and I always feel better after.

Yeah.

And it's like, well, yeah, because maybe you think you're going to feel better.

Psychological conditioning, yeah.

Totally.

And so they didn't test for that.

But either way, what's interesting is they did find no measurable difference.

And so they argue in their paper that not only is this an important contribution to the literature because, you know, the literature on cold water immersion and cryotherapy is all over the place.

And this is just another sort of nail in that coffin that says it doesn't seem to work.

But also, most all of that literature,

all of those studies have been performed on men.

And so here is a study showing something that is important to talk about the unique physiology of women when it comes to exercise science.

So I liked this study for multiple reasons.

And it's just one more thing that we can kind of reference when cryotherapy comes up in conversation, as it so often does.

Got to be careful.

Joe Rogan's not going to like you now.

Right.

I think that ship is sailed steady.

That's where you got, you got.

You didn't like me because I said, there's no evidence to show that cryotherapy or this cold plunge treatment is good for muscle recovery or good for anything.

And there still isn't, years later, there still isn't evidence.

In fact, what evidence we do have, as you say, it's all over the place, which is always a sign that it's the null hypothesis.

But this is pretty much a dead negative study.

And even when it comes to areas where we have really good evidence, like I still find myself frustrated.

So I'm going to see an ortho tomorrow because I don't know if you guys remember, but I sprained my ankle way back in February.

I was very good and I wore a boot, an air boot for a couple of weeks.

I was, I babied it for a while, but then eventually I went back to gymnastics and I went back to hiking and doing all the things that I love to do.

And it just is not healing.

And every time I would talk to a physician, they would be like, well, you have to stay off of it.

And I'd be like, for how long?

And they would say, until it stops hurting.

And I was like, it doesn't hurt until I work out.

And then it hurts again.

And they're like, well, until it doesn't hurt after you work out.

And I'm like, well, I am not psychic.

So I don't know how to figure that out.

Right.

And fine.

And the x-rays keep showing nothing.

So obviously I'm going to need to get an MRI and see if I have any damage to my my ligaments.

But I hear all the time from different providers, well, have you been icing it?

Well, have you used a heating pad?

And I'm like, which one?

When?

Why?

I ice it when it's swollen.

I think I'm supposed to do that.

But I don't know when to use heat.

The general rule of thumb is like first 24 hours you ice to reduce swelling, and then after that you use heat to make it feel better, you know, relax the muscles, just to prevent spasm.

None of that promotes healing.

It's just to make you feel better.

Exactly.

And I don't think there's anything going on with my muscles.

Maybe, but it could be ligament.

It could be ligamentous.

Yeah, it's just tendon.

But

then it takes a long time to get better.

And there's

a lot of people about it.

Exactly.

You can't stay off your feet.

Well, you can.

You can use crutches.

Exactly.

Or an air boot to at least,

yeah.

Foot injury in professional athletics is

awful.

It takes them out of the game for a long time.

We take our feet for granted quite a bit.

Well, any part of the body that is like a a part of your just core functionality, like you can't not use it.

That's why, like, back problems are so bad because you can't not use your back.

You know, oh, yeah.

After, if you guys remember, a couple years ago, after my hysterectomy,

I really had taken for granted how often I use my abs.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and it's like you just can't move your abs after hysterectomy.

Court-unquote core body muscles.

Yeah.

And it's, you can't do anything.

And everything you do, you have to be so controlled and so intentional about it for weeks.

All right.

Thank you, Kara.

Jay,

when is life on Earth going to end?

Guys, what's going to kill all the life on Earth first?

Oh,

what will the cause be?

Yeah, just draw out your guesses.

Well, the easy guess is other things.

Nuclear winter.

People.

People, yes.

All life on Earth, I would say.

If you're including bacteria, then it's got to be the increasing heat of the sun.

Well, right.

It would have to be the same.

Well, I think it's between.

Well, there's a few things I could do.

It could be that just by necessity, eventually

the sun will grow, you know, the temperature will increase, and eventually the earth will boil.

But before that, we may be hit with a gamma-ray burst,

or we may be hit with an extinction-level asteroid event.

Well, barring any outside effects, you know, like Bob was in the right, the right zone.

It definitely has something to do with the sun.

So, you know, when we think about the long-term future of the Earth, you know, like you were saying, Steve, we often think of like, you know, weird things happening to the continents and asteroid impacts.

And then, you know, I remember as a kid being told that the sun is going to like engulf the earth.

And I thought that was really horrifying.

It's terrifying.

But the cool thing and the interesting thing, well, first of all, we don't have to worry about any of this.

So, everyone, it's all good.

This is going to happen a very long time from now.

So, long before any of that nonsense happens, there is a slow and silent killer that could reshape the Earth's biosphere.

And what that means is there would be a complete loss of atmospheric oxygen.

And that, my friends, is it.

That kills everything on the planet.

What about the anaerobic bacteria?

Well, they'll hang out for a little while and then they'll die, too.

And the tardigrades?

Creatures like that will probably be the very, very last.

Luckies.

You know, tardigrades, you know, who knows?

And who knows what.

Yeah, it's really cool.

I'm curious to know.

I wonder if there would be evolution happening for creatures like that to survive.

Yeah.

So let's get into the details.

So, Kazumi Ozaki at Toho University and Christopher Reinhardt at Georgia Institute of Technology published their study in nature geoscience, and they used a sophisticated Earth system model to forecast the fate.

You know, the fact that we have an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and they wanted to know, you know, what was going to happen to, you know, all the elements of the Earth when the Sun eventually starts really heating things up.

So they concluded that Earth's breathable air isn't going to last forever.

And according to their simulations, the planet has about

1.08 billion years left with an error bar of about 140 million years before oxygen levels like plunge.

And this would happen within about 10,000 years of when it starts.

It'll be all over and there is no recovery from it.

So they were saying that this would leave the atmosphere like the Archean Earth, right?

You know, very, very, very long ago before we had the oxygen-rich atmosphere that we have now.

So as our sun ages, it's gradually going to become more luminous, which sounds very pretty.

But with that extra luminosity, we have heat and lots of different things changing.

Lots of levers are going to change.

It increases the solar energy.

It kicks off this crazy cascade of geochemical and biological feedbacks that will ultimately trigger a total collapse in atmospheric oxygen.

So, at the core of the model, they're saying it's photosynthesis.

So, the process that generates all the oxygen over billions of years on the planet, you know, these come from plants and microbes, and they need CO2.

But the more solar radiation Earth receives, the more chemical weathering occurs, which scrubs CO2 from the atmosphere, and that's it.

That's the marble.

So, as CO2 levels drop, photosynthesis will eventually start to stumble, and then it will completely break down.

And then the biosphere can no longer sustain high levels of atmospheric oxygen.

It just, the production will stop.

And eventually, even oxygen-producing life like cyanobacteria and plants, they're just not going to be able to survive.

And

it's going to plummet very quickly.

So, like I said, they estimated that once this tipping point is reached, oxygen levels will fall severely over the span of about 10,000 years, which is nothing from a geological time scale.

And the atmosphere,

it's going to end up being rich in methane, very low in oxygen.

It's going to resemble Earth about 2.5 billion years ago prior to to what has been called, what, the Great Oxidation Event?

The oxygen revolution.

Yeah, so

it's just going to do a 180 on that.

And this change isn't about habitability in the abstract.

It's about, you know, the fact that the habitability of the planet, it's complicated, it's oxygen-dependent, and microbes and extremophiles might be able to last a little longer and everything, but it's just going to get to the point where it's going to change the atmosphere so much that they're saying they don't think think anything is going to survive.

You know, we know exactly what the sun's going to do.

You know, it's not a mystery in any way.

We know exactly what these stages are, and

because of the size and makeup of our sun, we know pretty accurately how long it's going to take for it to become more luminous and what that change in temperature and everything is going to do.

And it just makes this whole thing fascinating, even though it's terrible, right?

But it's so far in the future.

And any humanity that is alive or any, you know, anything that you know, comes after humanity that's alive at that point is probably not going to need Earth anyway, which I find to be kind of sad too.

So, I'm not worried about it like, you know, killing humanity, in a sense, you know, a billion years, like, we won't even exist, not certainly in the state that we're currently in.

But, like everything, most humans, like, we take everything for granted, including the simple fact that we have an oxygen-rich atmosphere.

And it's not a fixed feature, though.

It wasn't here when the Earth began, and it's not going to be here for

quite a a long time before the Earth really does get engulfed by the sun.

And they're saying like, you know, we should think about it as it's a fragile system.

But if you look at the freaking Earth from outer space, there's this tiny thin layer of roughly on average 70 degree oxygen rich atmosphere.

And that's it.

And there's nothing between us and space, just a column of air that isn't that much.

So it was interesting to hear them say, you know, take a deep breath and enjoy it.

You know, it's wonderful and we should should be thankful.

I know, we only got a billion years left.

Yeah, but we could screw up our atmosphere.

I mean,

we are doing things that are damaging ourselves right now.

Like, we, you know, we should show some freaking respect to humanity and to the earth and not allow these things to happen, or at least once we discover it, do something

very severe to undo it.

But, you know, we're just not doing it.

But I'm breathing and I'm enjoying it, and I just don't want to lose that feel.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

Well, Jay, I have a solution for you.

Go ahead.

For global warming.

Yep.

For our energy conversion into a low-carbon future.

What is it?

You ready?

Floating nuclear power plants.

I like this.

Why would you do that?

Wait, floating on the ocean or floating in the air?

Exactly.

I'm so excited.

Take care of it.

That's a big difference.

That's true.

That is true.

Yes, floating on water.

Now, when was the first nuclear-powered vessel commissioned?

Oh, that was the Nautilus.

That's the submarine, the 1956?

1955.

Good guess of it.

1955, the USS Nautilus.

So we have basically been operating nuclear-powered reactors on ships for 70 years without incident.

Isn't that

great?

That's the U.S.

Right, not the Kursk, right?

In Russian.

The Soviets had a couple of mishaps, but I don't think that's inherent to the technology itself, let's say that.

So, yeah, so it it seems like it seems pretty doable.

Right now, there are 160 nuclear-powered ships in operation, mostly submarines and aircraft carriers.

So, the idea is: well, why not make a ship that is a nuclear power plant?

Like, not powering the ship, but just

making power.

So, a typical ship will generate several hundred, you know, 200, 300 megawatts of electricity compared to a typical land-based nuclear reactor, which generates 1600 or more

megawatts.

But you could certainly make one that, again, since you're not using it as an aircraft carrier or a submarine, you're just using it as a nuclear power factory, you could get up to like that range, you know, 500 watts, 600 megawatts.

Yeah, gigawatts.

How do you plug it into the grid, though?

That's a good question.

That yeah, we'll get to that.

So

I just wanted to say before anybody else did.

You take the three prongs and you click it in.

So what would be the advantages and the disadvantages to doing this as opposed to just building nuclear reactors on the land, which is what we're currently doing?

You can move them to where the power is needed.

Mobility.

Yeah, so mobility is what.

Mobility, obviously.

So there's a company that's currently, I think, the farthest along,

core power.

They say that

from what I could tell of any company, I think there are other companies working on this as well, in terms of being able to produce this,

these floating nuclear power plants.

So they point out that 65% of economic activity occurs in coastal regions.

So that's a lot.

As Bob said, these nuclear barges could be towed to a port and they could just park them in the port.

Like right now, we park nuclear aircraft carriers in ports, right?

You could do it.

No problem.

Plug it in, and you have power where it's needed.

I don't know that the moving thing is going to be that critical.

You know what I mean?

Like once we put them where they need to be, they probably will be there for a while.

But the big advantage, though, is you don't have to do any site preparation.

Before you build a nuclear power plant, you've got to prepare the land for it.

Oh, sure.

And that's

a lot to do.

It's a huge delay.

There's a lot of regulations.

Environmental studies.

It costs a lot of money.

So much.

Damn red tape.

This way you just float it where you want it to be, and that's it.

There's no site preparation, right?

Or at least not where the power plant is going to be itself.

The other thing is we already have a ship building industry, right?

We basically already have an infrastructure with the people, with the training and the shipyards to do this.

All we have to do is adapt that to building these nuclear barges.

And then they could be produced relatively quickly.

It'd be kind of like the similar idea to the small modular reactors where you come up with a design and then just produce a bunch of them in a factory, you know, rather than bespoke power plants on site.

This way, like once you come up with a design, you could build a hundred of these ships, these nuclear barges, send them to where they need to go.

They would all be centrally produced in shipyards, which could also handle maintenance, fueling, you know, refueling, and waste disposal, right?

So all of that could be handled with this sort of centralized infrastructure.

And you could even park someone, some of them, further offshore if that makes more sense if you don't want them in the port.

And that would work as well.

So, Bob, you bring up one point is like, well, how are they going to get plugged into the grid, right?

Because obviously that is important.

And so, yeah, that would be the one infrastructure thing that we would need to do.

We would need to make sure that there was a place for them to plug in, right?

There would need to be an access port for the grid, wherever they are.

That's obviously not a deal killer,

but that's some infrastructure that

we would have to build, as opposed to, say, building a nuclear power plant on the site of a decommissioned coal-fired plant, which is something else I think that we should be doing.

We are doing that in some cases, but that's,

again, some of the low-hanging fruit with the big advantages.

We have an existing connection to the grid.

You're just swapping out a coal-fired plant for a nuclear plant.

That's awesome.

This would be a new location.

So you would need new connections to the grid.

To me, that's the one main downside.

But other than that, I I think it sounds like a good idea.

There are a lot of advantages.

It's a way of getting the nuclear power close to its end use

just offshore.

A lot of our cities, a lot of our infrastructure is built along the coast for obvious reasons.

Yeah, there'd still be a lot of red tape, right?

Because you would still, you know, you wouldn't need to prep the area necessarily for the construction, but you'd need to prep it for the regulations of having a nuclear power plant right there, you know.

Yeah, but as I said, we we already park nuclear-powered ships in these ports, right?

Yeah, but they're not there.

You said once they go there, they're probably going to stay there for quite a while.

So those ships don't stay for that long.

Yeah, so there's, I'm sure there's going to be some regulatory steps here, right?

And of course,

the companies are working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and all of the

necessary regulatory agencies, and they will have to get all of that.

What I would like to see happen is an operation Warp Speed for these nuclear power plants.

You know, get streamline the regulations without compromising safety, of course, but you know, we are nowhere near the optimal compromise of speed and safety.

We are at way towards the end of inefficient bureaucracy, way more inefficient than it has to be.

And a lot of it is just that we don't have the resources.

Like you put it on someone's desk, like, yeah, I'll get to that in a year.

You know, that kind of thing is going on.

Where if you just had more people who could, you know, pile through this, like Operation Warp Speed for the vaccine for COVID, it didn't reduce the research, it just allowed them to happen at the same time, right?

Instead of saying, okay, now you've got to do your phase one, and then when that's done, stop, pause.

We'll look at everything, we'll go over everything, and then once you get your approvals, now you can start planning for the second phase, right?

So it takes years, and the warp speed was like, just do it all at once.

You know, you still have to do everything and get approval of everything, but you don't have to wait to get started.

And right,

it's more in parallel rather than in series.

So we could do the same thing.

We could, you know, find ways to streamline the process, increase the regulatory resources so that's not a log jam, right?

That's not slowing down the process and just make it happen.

You know, just make it happen.

And then we could be deploying these fairly quickly.

And this could be a great addition to our transition to low-carbon energy.

So, hopefully,

this will proceed fairly quickly.

I do think this is nuclear power now, interestingly, is like the one thing that has bipartisan support in the U.S.

Because it has traditional Republican support, and the Democrats are like, it's better than global warming.

You know what I mean?

So, they're coming around to it as well.

The Biden administration was all in on nuclear.

They did a lot of, they passed a lot of things to fast-forward nuclear power.

And it's like the one thing I don't think that the Trump administration is going to go back on.

I mean, we'll see, but it looks like the, I mean, other than they're just generic destroying the infrastructure of our federal government.

But other than that,

the hope is that at least we can continue to move forward on the nuclear power.

So by coincidence, I think this is a total coincidence, right after I wrote my article on floating nuclear power plants, I read a research study on floating solar farms.

So this is kind of

another

low-carbon energy, solar power.

The idea here is that you build a grid-scale solar power plant.

You have floating solar panels, and you put them on a body of water, right?

This is already happening, you know, and China, of course, is doing more of it than anybody else.

And the growth rate is pretty huge.

Right now, there's about 13 gigawatts of floating solar capacity installed worldwide, but the growth rate's about 34% per year and accelerating.

So, this is, obviously, it's going to level off at some point, but I think we're sort of picking the low-hanging fruit.

Mostly, it's going on artificial bodies of water, so reservoirs and irrigation ponds, you know, not on like natural lakes and not on the ocean or anything.

Now, here, there's an interesting synergy here because

if you have an irrigation pond, or if you have a body of a reservoir used as part of closed-loop hydro grid grid storage power, right?

We talked about that before.

You need anti-evaporation measures, right?

So guess what?

The floating solar panels, yeah, that can

be your anti-evaporation strategy.

And

that's a win-win.

Yeah, so now you've got to imagine like a vast solar farm on top of a closed-loop hydro reservoir.

It prevents evaporation.

It produces the energy that the closed-loop hydro is storing, storing, you know?

So it's like its own little system.

So that's another, I think, opportunity.

The biggest, so the reason why that is critical, in my opinion, is because what's the biggest downside of solar power?

It's not

battery.

It's

land use.

It uses a lot of land.

What do you guys think is the most intensive land use per...

Like, if you talk about how many meters squared per megawatt hour,

what source of power uses the most land for the amount of power it generates?

Biofuel?

No.

Is it solar?

Nope.

It's hydro.

Hydro.

Really?

Hydro.

Number two, concentrating solar.

So not a photovoltaic, but mirrors pointed at a tower, right?

Okay.

Three is coal power.

Four.

What about sand power?

Four is photovoltaic.

It's some photovoltaics, solar.

So it's pretty close to the top, 19 meters squared per megawatt hour.

Hydropower is 33.

The best is, what do you think?

Oh, least

land use.

Least land per megawatt hour.

Is it nuclear?

By far, nuclear.

By far.

0.3, literally two orders of magnitude less than hydropower.

Because it generates so much power.

Yes, and on a fairly small footprint.

This would even be less.

All right, but close to the bottom, 1.2,

is rooftop solar.

That is why I'm a big fan of rooftop solar, even though it's not the most cost-effective per se.

Big solar installations may cost less for the energy generated, but they use a lot of land.

So

if you include the land use, they become much less attractive.

So I think we should just have solar on every rooftop, or at least the top two-thirds efficiency-wise.

You know what I mean?

We could, if we, if by one estimate, if every rooftop in the country had solar panels on it, that would generate 45% of our electricity.

So let's say we do 20 to 30%.

We pick the low-hanging fruit.

That's like almost no land use, right?

It's just on rooftops.

Yeah, it's great.

But in cases where we need some solar installations, we can have them floating on bodies of water that are artificial that we just have sitting there that we need anti-evaporation technology for.

Anyway, the only issue is it does affect water birds because they do use those bodies of water.

And so that actually was the news item that I came across: that they're studying the interaction between water birds and floating solar panels, both how they affect each other, right?

So no real conclusions about that.

Just laying out the questions that we need to research to make sure that we're having a minimal footprint.

You know, it's kind of like with wind turbines.

Do you guys remember like how many birds do wind turbines kill each year in the United States?

Ooh, I don't want to know.

Hundreds of thousands, isn't it?

It's hundreds of thousands.

Estimates are between 150 and 700,000 birds.

Sounds like a lot, but that's nothing.

It's a round-off error.

You can kill a lot more than that, right?

Yeah.

Domestic cats, domestic cats kill one to three billion birds a year.

Good kitty.

One billion birds die annually just flying into wind turbines.

Windows.

Yeah, the window dust.

You got to get rid of all the windows.

So even if you rounded up wind turbines to a million, it's a round-off error.

It's nothing compared to that, to the billions that are dying from these other reasons,

essentially anthropogenic reasons.

So

we could do more.

We could save more birds just by having bird-safe windows in buildings.

You know what I mean?

But not having said that, we should be putting wind turbines in locations that minimize their impact on birds, especially the large raptors.

We don't want to put them right in a

mating

pathway or feeding pathway for large raptors.

And we're getting better at that.

We're studying it.

We're getting better at it.

We're trying to minimize the impact.

We're designing them so that they're less disruptive to the birds, et cetera.

You could put them at a height where most birds don't go.

You could put them offshore.

Nothing has a zero ecological impact, but we could minimize it.

Minimize it.

It's always minimized.

It's all about minimizing it.

Yeah.

So for all of these things, wind and solar and floating solar and floating nuclear, it's all about minimizing the footprint, minimizing the ecological impact, not to zero, but just to

less.

And here's the other thing.

How many birds do you think burning fossil fuel kills a year?

Oh, it's got to be many tens of millions, if not hundreds.

Quintillions.

14.5 million.

So again, an order of magnitude more than wind turbines.

And that's only from direct causes.

That doesn't even include global warming.

That's just

the burning of fossil fuel, fossil fuel factories, you know, themselves directly just the pollution and just interaction with the birds.

14.5 million birds a year.

So any of the global warming deniers who go, oh, their turbines are killing birds are hypocrites.

They're lying hypocrites because the fossil fuel kills way more, way more wildlife, way more birds than all of the clean energy combined.

It's not even close.

And that's not, and that's even before you include global warming.

All right, guys, let's move on.

All right, Bob, how can we better visualize special relativity?

Okay, let's do this.

So,

all right, so researchers have confirmed in a lab the Terrell-Penrose effect, which I didn't even hear about as of two weeks ago.

It's a theory that at speeds close to the speed of light, objects would appear to be weirdly rotated and not flattened as early interpretations of Einstein special relativity predicted or seemed to predict.

So I promise to be gentle with this one.

This is from researchers in Vienna.

The title of their paper is A Snapshot of Relativistic Motion, Visualizing the Terrell-Penrose Effect.

Okay, so we've all heard of Einstein's special theory of relativity.

Largely deals with the idea that the speed of light in a vacuum absolutely refuses to be measured at any other speed, no matter what.

186,000 miles per second, 300,000 kilometers per second,

C.

No matter what speed you're moving at, that's what you're going to measure.

So

that might seem like not too dramatic,

but really, though,

it's such a dramatic universe-changing statement.

Imagine you're zooming through space at 99.9999% of the speed of light, and then you turned on the ship's outside lights, and you measured that light.

It would still fly away.

from you at 300,000 kilometers a second.

What the hell is going on?

You're traveling almost that speed right now.

How could it go its same old speed?

It doesn't make any sense.

Of course, not to our like highway traveling car sense, right?

But this is the way the universe works, apparently.

So for that to be real, for that to be an actual thing that happens, that would mean that some of the basic assumptions that we make every day would not be true.

Like space and time, you know, time and length

have to be

assumptions that aren't going to always hold true.

So at such relativistic velocities, time would have to slow down dramatically for you, in some real sense, for you to measure light as unchanged, right?

So this is relativistic time dilation.

Talked about it about a billion times.

Less well known to the uninitiated anyway is that length contraction or a flattening in the direction of movement is also a real and dramatically large thing at such speeds, according to observers, as usual.

Now, you wouldn't notice any of this inside your ship, but outside outside observers, as I just said, could.

And scientists have confirmed time dilation and length contraction over and over through the decades.

But one ramification of

these effects, specifically length contraction,

has not been confirmed.

And that's this Terrell-Penrose effect, theorized in 1959 by Roger Penrose and James Terrell.

The key insight of this theory, one of them was that if an object is moving across your field of view at near the speed of light, and if you could also also somehow, somehow see it or image it with a camera or whatever.

So, given that those assumptions, it would not appear to be visually flattened or Lorentz contracted, as the Boffins say.

It would mainly appear rotated and with some other effects, but mainly rotated, even though it's not really rotated.

This optical effect

would be visualized.

So, how many of you guys have seen that representation of a contracted ship, like a flattened ship moving near the speed of light?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it's like all I've seen it many, many times.

It's common, and it's not really wrong because our measurements would indeed show a shorter length if it weren't for one thing getting in the way, the finite speed of light, which is what is creating this optical illusion of this rotation.

If you could in fact image it.

So, now if you imagine a Borg cube on impulse, of course, don't even think about that warped drive crap.

It's on impulse traveling near the speed of light across your field of view, and you have some technology that somehow lets you image it, and you take a picture of the cube.

Okay, so that's the scenario.

Now, you know, you're not seeing the cube as it is right exactly, specifically this instant, right?

You're not really seeing that.

You see the ship,

it's like a time mosaic.

The image is,

in a sense, you know, ideally, it's it's kind of a mosaic in time as it was.

This image of the ship is as it was at different points in the recent past, right?

Different parts of the ship at different points in time, all put together, constructed, composited together, in a sense.

So I'm not talking about Star Trek time travel, just the fact that the light you see left the ship at a different time depending on how far away that part of the ship was, right?

The back of the ship is farther away than the near side of the ship.

So that's true, even when you look at an object like a jet, right?

If you're looking at a jet or one of those fast penis rockets, right?

They're moving so slowly, okay, but they're moving so slowly that the time differences of the light from the near sides and the far sides of those ships, for all intents and purposes, are the same.

And there essentially is no time delay because they're just not moving fast at all.

The Borg ship, though, is moving near the speed of light.

That's the difference here.

That means that the ship travels a relatively large distance as all the light that's coming from it gets together for your image.

So think about it.

The light from the rear of the ship had to travel farther.

It left earlier when that part of the ship was farther back.

Now, light from the front traveled a shorter distance and left more recently.

So the image is stitched together from light emitted at different times and positions.

That's the key.

The image you're looking at when you're looking at that Borg ship traveling across your field of view at near the speed of light, that image you're looking at is stitched together from light that's emitted at different times and different positions.

And that's why the object appears rotated because of that optical illusion that's created.

It's this artifact of taking an image of something moving that fast.

It's important to note and reiterate.

to outside observers this rotation effect is an optical illusion it's caused by a lorenz contracted ship because this ship is still lorentz contracted It's still flattened in the direction of motion.

That's still, that's not going away at all.

So this is kind of like a veil in front of that

if you tried to image it.

So let me say it again.

It's an optical illusion caused by a Lorentz contracted ship that's moving so fast that the light from different parts of it builds up over time and distance, which stretches the image, making it seem not contracted.

So over time, you're building up these photons that happen to arrive at the same time for your image.

And as that's happening, it's stretching out the Lorentz contracted ship so that it doesn't look contracted anymore.

That one's kind of tough to wrap your head around.

I hope I'm describing that okay.

So how do you even test this?

You can't do real-world testing.

There's nothing that we could possibly do with a quintillion dollars to do a real world test on this.

You'd have to move something relativistically that is absolutely gargantuan on scale for this to even be remotely feasible.

So it's not, you're not going to do this.

You can't put a little model of a spaceship in the Large Hadron Super Collider.

Yeah, that's not going to work, Steve.

But

nice thought, though.

But in this case, the scientists used a sophisticated camera that had picosecond laser flashes and rotating mirrors and essentially to trick the camera into seeing what a sphere and a cube would look like if it were traveling at these ultra-relativistic speeds.

So that's what they kind of did.

They made this analog that would run the equations from special relativity and build it up in a way that was basically identical to what would a real-world system, but without you having to use a real-world system, which never would happen.

This involved timing when the light from the objects hit the camera, so it timed when the light

created the image, basically reconstructing what a relativistic flyby would look like.

So that's what they did.

And the result was the Terrell-Penrose effect was real.

The object seemed, looked rotated, and also there's also these distortions like relativistic aberrations that happen too that bends the curves and stuff that but that's kind of like not important to this right now so a very very very slick experiment and fascinating to see what this look at some of the videos online of what you would actually see they're they're really cool and it it depends a lot on where it is in your field of view how far away it is is it approaching you is it is it moving farther is it moving away from you and all those differences can can change how you would see the the object so in the future this experiment could open up other avenues for exploring other relativistic phenomena in laboratory settings so that's that's interesting and it's there's always this hope i have uh that would actually make me giggle out loud in the movie theater uh the the hope that someday they will actually incorporate a borg ship or probably better a spaceship a regular spaceship that actually shows some of these real relativistic effects that they never really do hardly ever i'm having a hard time thinking of a a science fiction movie that really shows some of these relativistic effects because if these relativistic effects are fascinating and world-changing really help illuminate what the universe is really all about at these at these velocities but they're never going to they don't do that in the movies because even near the speed of light is not fast enough you need to go warp speed you need to go thousands of times the speed of light in order to to to travel any distance in science fiction so they're not you know they're not very interested and they i don't know that would you i wouldn't i'm sure you guys would enjoy seeing real bizarre relativistic effects in science fiction but it's just not there right i mean i just think they they, they're just not, there's no motivation to do it because that's not fast enough.

What was happening in Star Trek the motion picture when they went through that wormhole or something?

Oh, that's just all baloney.

We have no idea.

Yeah, that's that's fast.

That's what Asher did light.

That's just...

But wasn't that an attempt to kind of capture that thought?

Would you say?

You know, where they distort everything and things become stretched and pulled and

no, no, I don't think so.

I think it's just whatever's going to look, you know, they throw out the, they don't even use wormhole.

They're just, you know, warping space around the ship, and it's just all kind of nonsense, and it looks good.

But

the only movie with realistic visuals was Interstellar.

Yeah.

Black Hole.

They actually did so much work for that movie that they wrote a paper from the research they did

to show a black hole

in a way that is realistic.

And that was, yeah, that was unprecedented and probably

singular at the level that they achieved.

But it was great.

It was clever.

Singularity.

Got it.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Evan, tell us about brain spotting.

Is that like train spotting?

That was a good thing.

Wasn't that everyone's first thought, maybe, when they heard this word, brain spotting, train spotting?

A movie?

Right?

In the 90s?

But no, brain spotting is a thing.

It's a psychotherapy, by definition, that aims to help people access, process, and release trauma, emotional pain, and other psychological challenges by using spots in the patient's visual field.

What?

Here's how the method is described.

There's a therapist who will guide their patient to find a, quote, brain spot,

which they define as a specific eye position that seems to correlate with the activation of a traumatic memory or emotion.

The patient then focuses on that spot

while observing their inner experience.

The process is usually silent and and allows the brain to, quote, unwind stored trauma without detailed verbal discussion.

This was developed by a

doctor, Dr.

David Grand in 2003 as an offshoot of EMDR, which is eye movement

desensitization and reprocessing.

Thank you.

EMDR, right?

Now, EMDR, from what I've read, I don't know how much we've spoken about this on the show.

Yeah, we've covered it.

It's scientific, right?

It's evidence-based.

Well, yes, but no.

It's complete.

It's not complete sense.

It's completely different.

Oh, it is complete.

Wait, wait.

I'm getting multiple signals here.

Is it good or is it?

No, no, no.

It's not that simple.

It is considered an evidence-based treatment by the American Psychological Association, but that is very problematic because of the type of research that they did to come to that conclusion.

Basically, the underlying component, which is the therapy that's done for post-traumatic stress disorder, is evidence-based and works.

The moving your eyes thing is a hat on a hat.

They just do that on top of it, and they go, look, see how much better they are?

Right.

And that's the problem.

So you're saying you can achieve the same result without the eye movement part?

Exactly.

It's a part of this nutritious breakfast treatment.

Yeah.

Yes.

Thank you.

That's an excellent way, excellent way of putting that.

But the thing is, it's neuroscientifical nonsense.

It makes absolutely no sense.

It's not based on any basic science about how the brain works.

It's just people just spouting pseudobabble.

That's all it is.

And are you at all surprised that there are proponents of EMDR out there and they are all over

singing its praises, basically.

As Kara said, it's quote-unquote evidence-based.

What that is, is an indictment of evidence-based standard.

That is why we have a science-based standard, because it's absolutely not science-based.

So, this becomes a good example of the difference between something that's evidence-based versus science laws.

Yeah, but even the advocates of EBM would say they're doing it wrong.

There are some people who say because there is a study which shows an effect that it's quote-unquote evidence-based, but that's not what it really means.

You know what I mean?

You have to do an actual systematic review that shows a number of things, that there is efficacy, and it doesn't do that.

There's no efficacy to the EMDR part of the intervention.

So they basically just stopped controlling for it, right?

They stopped doing the kind of studies that would show that EMD, if EMDR has efficacy or not.

So they just focus on studies which show that people who get it, in addition to effective therapy, feel better, right?

Oh.

Okay.

All right.

That makes sense.

And therefore, because this brain spotting

therapy, if you want to call it that, is what an offshoot of EMDR is.

Makes perfect sense.

And therefore, that's why

Dr.

Gary Wank wrote in Psychology Today recently that brain spotting is pseudoscience.

That's the name of the article and the news item for this week.

I'll read you a couple of the highlights from what he wrote.

A recent publication examined an egregious example of pseudoscience, brain spotting,

for its lack of plausible underlying neural mechanisms of

psychopathology, and for its promotion of a method of intervention that is literally impossible for a human therapist to implement.

Brain spotting is a talk therapy.

Kara, I imagine you're familiar with talk therapy.

Well, yeah, all, I mean, all psychotherapy is talk therapy.

Okay, all right, so it's just another way of describing psychotherapy, yeah, yeah.

I mean, as opposed to pharmacotherapy, right?

Okay,

that's a big category of intervention.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is based on the unproven idea that eye positions correlate with activation of specific brain regions involved in unconscious emotional experiences.

So they fail right there.

I just have to say, they fail right there.

That is not true.

They just make that up.

That the idea that, like, if your eyes are in a certain position, so that they're looking at a certain place in three-dimensional space, that that correlates to an area of your brainstem.

This reminds me of a homunculus almost.

It is.

It is.

It's basically a neurohomunculus.

Oh, wow.

And not only that, Evan, but that that part of your brainstem is where the traumatic memories are stored.

Oh, no.

That's where the actual physical trauma is stored.

Wrong.

And you can release it.

I mean, I know that.

You can release it by looking at it without having to actually even talk about it.

I mean, it's nonsense from

to bottom.

It makes no sense.

That's no different than

reflexology.

It's no different than pushing a top of your foot into your liver.

Yeah, exactly.

Wow.

Okay.

Well, the creators of this therapy claim.

You know, I got right to the spoiler alert there.

But the creators of the therapy claim that where a person looks affects how they feel.

And that's what this, that's what Gary Wank wrote about here.

He says that is absolute nonsense.

Brain spotting requires that the therapist identify very brief pauses in the patient's eye movements while the patient is following a moving target.

Essentially, the principal component of the treatment requires that the therapist must accomplish a task that is physically impossible for humans to perform with the naked eye.

Right.

So there's another totally implausible aspect of this is that, you know, people cannot do this,

what they're claiming that they can do.

It's kind of like in astrology, like if you're using a...

the kind of astrology, the sidereal astrology, where you have to know the minute of your birth.

Nobody knows the minute of their birth.

Nobody knows it.

But that's not really the worst part of the astrology, right?

It just happens to be this additional technical limitation that emphasizes how much nonsense it is.

But the nonsense goes a lot deeper than that.

And the body of evidence so far to date to support this is anecdotal.

It's non-existent.

So I looked it up.

I did a, you know, just a literature search.

There were four, four studies.

Two.

Two in medical hypotheses, which is worthless.

That's a a pseudoscientific journal, in my opinion.

And the other two were in studies.

They were just talking about it.

In 23 years or 22 years, right?

So that's also a red flag.

Massive.

Also, it's a red flag that, like, I've never heard of it.

Right.

Well, yeah, I was surprised.

I said, hey, Kara, have you heard of this?

You're like, nope.

No, this is not.

taught in, yeah, I hope not.

At least, yeah, it never even came across any book I read.

No, the only way this should be taught is an example of pseudoscience.

That's the only time this should be taught.

Exactly.

So, good on Gary Wank over at Psychology Today for bringing this to the public's attention and making it so clear what this really is.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Thanks.

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

Last week I played This Noisy.

Anyone have any guesses?

Sounds mechanical.

Well, that's always a good guess because there's tons of mechanical things all over the planet.

So, a listener named Michael Blaney wrote in and said, Hey, Jay, sounds like some kind of electronic leaf sweeper.

And I was thinking about it.

I'm like,

if there was, and there probably is an electronic leaf sweeper, I could totally hear it sounding like that.

So, I think that's a good guess.

A listener named Christine Andrews wrote in and said, I think this week's Noisy is an air raid siren motor without the blower horn attachment attached.

I thought that was a genius guess because I would never have thought of that as a source of sound, right?

Because it's, you know, an air horn, an air raid horn basically without the blower.

Like, what does that sound like?

So I don't think anybody knows.

And then another guest from another listener named John Geis, and he says, Jay, this week's noisy is the sound of a paper going through a shredder.

If you need more specifics, it's Dr.

Steve shredding his accumulated notes records after retirement.

Did you do that or do you have to end up doing that, Steve?

Well, everything's digital now, so no.

We don't even keep physical records anymore.

Do you have like a whole bunch of personal things there?

No, just books and stuff, which I'm just leaving behind for the residents and festivals.

Oh, okay.

Wow, that's cool.

All right.

So I had

two winners this week.

One of them came in first.

His name is Robert Caldwell, and Robert said, Hi, Jay.

I was starting to wonder if I would ever know any of the noisies that were on the show, but this week I've got it.

The sound is from a Boeing horizontal stabilizer trim wheel.

This is a manual trim wheel located in the cockpit that's used to reduce control pressure.

So yes, Robert, you're absolutely right.

And another listener named Paul Redmond wrote in and said, hi, Jay, I think this week's noisy sounds like an aircraft's elevator trim wheel in motion.

So from what I have been explained by the person who sent in the noisy, there is a wheel that is in a housing that is between, let's say, you know, on that plane in particular, there's the pilot and the co-pilot.

So there's like a round-looking thing that is in between them, right?

And inside of that casing is a flywheel.

And that flywheel helps orient the, when you look at the back tail of a plane, right?

You have a horizontal stabilizer airfoil.

That's the thing.

And if I'm wrong, somebody email me, but that's how it was described to me.

Yeah, and it makes this noise.

So I remembered something else too.

This wheel mechanism, it's part of a, of course, it's part of a system that's in the plane.

It actually auto-controls that stabilizer fin in the back of the plane, right?

So the pilot doesn't have to constantly be, you know, doing the trim.

And I remember when I, when I did go for flights in, you know, a single prop, you know, Cessna or whatever, whatever, there is a wheel in there that the pilot manually moves, right?

It's like a mouse wheel next to the seat, but it's big.

And they just kind of roll it with their hand to

trim out this thing that levels the plane off.

It's really cool.

Of course, yeah, it's automatic in those bigger planes.

All right, moving on, I have a new noisy this week sent in by a listener named Sam Rumble.

If you guys think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you heard something cool, email me at wtn at theskepticsguide.org.

So, Jay, when this episode goes up, we'll be at Noticon.

Yes, Saturday.

Yeah,

that'll be the 17th.

And next week's show is going to be that episode that we record.

So it'll be a couple of weeks before we reveal this.

Who's that noisy?

That'll give people plenty of time to do tons of research.

Right.

Oh, and

as a side note to that noisy, be specific, please.

It'll just help you win.

So, a couple quick things, Steve, because we have nothing to say about Naticon at this point, other than we'll tell you how great it was when it's over.

I just want to say, if you like the work that we do and you want to support us, you can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

That's one word.

You can join our mailing list.

We send out an email every week.

You can can join that on the skepticsguy.org homepage.

You could give our show a rating on any podcast player you're using or just use iTunes because I think people still use that for podcast ratings.

And we will be in Kansas the weekend of September 20th, and we'll be doing a live SGU recording as one event.

And the nighttime event, we will be doing a skeptical extravaganza.

If you haven't made it to any of these shows, please join us.

It's a ton of fun.

You know, give us a day of your life, and we will entertain you for for most of that day.

Right, Steve?

Yeah, we'll try our best.

All right.

Thanks, Jay.

All right.

Let's go on with some questions and emails.

We got a couple.

So one, we've got a few emails and also just reading the comments in various locations.

So some we when we're talking about the pig heart transplants, right, genetically engineered pigs in order to harvest their organs, specifically their hearts, for human transplant.

We didn't get into the ethical discussion, partly because the discussion was long as it was, and that's a whole other can of worms, right?

But enough people wrote in about it that we should talk about it at least for a few minutes.

So anytime.

Just animal studies in general?

Anytime animals are involved, there's ethics involved.

Absolutely.

There's ethics involved with animal research, with any use of animals in medicine, and also with any use of animals.

period, right?

If we're using animals for their parts, there's ethics involved with that.

I'll just give you my personal take, which is gonna be, you know, reiterate things that I've said in the past.

You guys could tell me what you think or if you think there's any other angle here.

First of all, you know, we raise and slaughter pigs for food, right?

So pigs will be raised and slaughtered and slaughtered.

Seriously, so you know, and I know people think that's unethical, but the point is we're just talking about raising and sacrificing them for another purpose.

So if you think that eating animals is ethical, you shouldn't have a problem, at least at a fundamental level, with using animals to save lives by donating organs, right?

Sacrificing them for their organs.

For me, the only real ethical consideration, well, I mean, not the only ethical consideration, but the important bit is

how are they treated, right?

What is their

treatment like?

And there are rules to that, right?

Just like there are in research.

There are rules about treating any animals in research or medical use ethically, humanely, no gratuitous cruelty, right?

Nothing that is done.

No torture.

Yeah, nothing is done.

They have good living conditions, clean, they're fed, they're cared for.

In fact, the pigs that would be used for transplant organs are treated really well in terms of just how their environment is extremely clean.

They can't get any infections, obviously.

The only thing you can't say that some people pointed out is that they're not free-range, right?

They're in a very, very controlled environment.

That doesn't mean that it can't be built in such a way that they have a lot of stimulation.

Right, exactly.

But

I think it's important to point out that the laws around

welfare of research animals are significantly stricter than the laws around research or around the welfare of animals raised for food

in this country.

Absolutely.

So we already have that in place.

And for me, I mean, this is something I've written about a lot and talked about a lot, and it's kind of near and dear to my heart.

I think that everybody has a line in the sand.

Everybody has a certain level of complexity or of, you know, whatever word you want to use to define it, where you say, above this, I don't think it's ethical to use these animals, and below it, I do think it's ethical to use these animals.

You know, for me, I don't think it's ethical to do research or to engage or to eat, for example,

elephants or cetaceans.

Apes or primates.

Yeah, or primates.

Or apes at least, at the very least.

For some people, they would add dogs and cats and pigs and cows to that.

And for some people, they would say, you know, no animals, not even a fruit fly.

It's about how do you live your life?

Where is that line in your sand, right?

What are your personal ethics and your morals?

And what are you willing to, I guess, do in your own personal life life to hold on to that?

Because I think it's valid for somebody who practices veganism and who is opposed to using animals in any way to say, I don't want to add to the burden, right?

Like we already use them for food.

I already am against that.

I already fight against that.

I don't want to see them also used for this purpose.

I think what's important to recognize is they're already used

for research.

And so while that's a valid position to have, if it's morally consistent with how you live your life, it's important to speak up and to have those kinds of conversations about it and to do your activism

in a way that is respectful, right?

And is legal.

I don't think there's anything wrong with being against it per se.

I think the problem is when people are somewhat morally inconsistent with those values.

Exactly.

Those are the two points.

One is be internally consistent.

Right.

You can't be like, oh, I could eat pigs, but I don't want to use them for donating organs or being sacrificed for their organs.

Right.

But assuming people are being internally consistent, as you say, they're like, yeah, I'm against using animals for food and for research and for medical purposes or whatever.

I will only go

down so far.

It's a continuum, right?

It's always a continuum.

Some people are perfectly fine with fruit fly and nematode research, but they don't want to see, let's say, vertebrates being used for research.

Exactly.

But does that mean they're going to not take antibiotics and other medicines and things

from which those studies ultimately

be

careful with that argument too because while I agree that it is morally inconsistent to say okay I think this is wrong but I want to take these meds we have to remember that we can do things now that we couldn't do 20 30 40 100 years ago there are ways that we can do research now that increase welfare of animals significantly more than we did in the past.

Sure, exactly.

We know that.

We used to do really messed up stuff in the lab.

Oh, yeah.

And we have a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And now we have a lot of laws that protect against them.

There's a lot of basic research with animals that we don't have to do anymore because we already have those answers and we're moving beyond that, right?

There are a lot of things that we can synthesize now that we don't have to extract from animals, for example.

And so I do think it's a little bit like unfair to be like, well, then you can never take an antibiotic because we do a lot of drug research now.

Yes, we still do a lot on mice, but we don't, we don't, it's not to the same extent that it was historically.

Yeah, but I think Everett's point is more like, if you're one of those people who's like, we shouldn't harm a fruit fly, it's like, okay, but so no pesticides is what you're saying.

So we exactly.

It's like, think about all the other things.

But also, yeah, but if you think like you can't, you're killing millions of bacteria to save yourself.

Is that okay?

And if you're drawing the line at bacteria, why can't we draw the line at fruit flies?

And why can't we draw the line at invertebrates?

Or why can't we draw the line at fruit flying?

And that's the important question.

What is your moral argument for that?

I think it's very rare.

I use the fruit fly example.

It's an extreme example.

Mostly we're talking about people who practice like really extreme Buddhism.

And many of these individuals may actually be living in monasteries.

But for some people, saying, you know, no vertebrates or no whatever, if you have a solid argument, like I have an argument, if you want to really get into it with me, I'll tell you why I think no apes, no cetaceans, no elephants, and why I'm more permissive when it comes to other vertebrates.

Yeah, I'm with you.

It's not just

a matter of time.

Yeah, it's like I'm not pulling it out of my ass.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But it's okay to have a line, but make sure that you've done the work.

Exactly.

And then, and my response is, oh, these pigs are not being treated well, whatever, is to treat them better.

I think same thing like with the meat industry.

And I eat very little meat.

You know, this isn't for multiple reasons, but I do think that we're trying to

produce too much meat.

And if we just reduce that, then we could, it becomes easier to have high standards, you know, in terms of the way animals are treated, right?

I think we need to regulate it so that animals are treated humanely.

Absolutely.

And that is the solution, not to not do life-saving research or, you know, do life-saving transplants from genetically modified pigs.

I think we absolutely should be doing that and just treating them well.

And I think we.

Yeah, I often think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is the most extreme reaction.

And regulation is probably a good first step.

I agree.

So that's where we are, and we have a reason to do that.

It's not being thoughtless.

It's not like we don't care.

Some people said we were shameful.

And I think that's not a very useful way to approach this issue.

It's like if you draw the line in a different place, just don't be judgmental by people who draw a line in a different place from you.

If it's thoughtful and internally consistent and reasonable, it's okay to say, all right, we have slightly different values.

That's fine.

Rather than saying, anyone who's to the left of me is shameful.

You know what I mean?

Like, that is not a useful way to approach it.

Okay, let's go on to the next question.

This is interesting.

This comes up every now and then.

This one comes from Matthew, who writes, I am convinced that flat earthers don't really exist.

In their 2025,

with today's technology and education, there is no way flat earther philosophy can thrive.

Instead, those who are self-proclaimed flat earthers or conspiracy theorists continue to advocate for what they believe in because they benefit somehow or in some way, such as receiving attention or monetary gain.

Think about all the TV shows, podcasts, news clips, blogs, or whatever.

Those who proclaim to be a flat earther just do it for some reason other than that is what they truly believe, and everyone is giving way too much attention to this nonsense.

Would you agree to this?

So, they're role-playing the fact that they're flat earthers?

I've often grappled with this question.

I don't know if I fully agree with Matthew, but I've asked myself, is this for real or are these people just doing this for all of them?

It's pro or no, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So, I think the answer is yes, both of these things.

I think there are people out there who don't care if they're a flat earth, if it's real or not.

It's just something to gain clicks or to be part of a community.

I think for some people, the conspiracy is the thing.

They're conspiracy theorists, and this is just one, this is like a grand conspiracy.

I think for some people, they went down this rabbit hole.

So the thing is, I might have felt this way 20 years ago, but I have personally experienced people who genuinely are flat earthers.

There's no question that they are genuine flat earthers.

And also people who are just, you know, not scientifically literate and who were exposed to some of the claims of flat earthers and are, you know, questioning, right?

They just are like, I don't know this.

They say things that make sense and I don't understand this and there's something going on.

And then also just sort of somewhat distrusting of authority.

And so there's a whole continuum here.

And I don't think you can make any simple statement as they're all just in it for the money or attention or they're all true believers.

I think it's pretty much every permutation across the spectrum.

Makes sense.

Right.

But we, yeah, I have met personally people who are absolutely real flat earthers.

And also, just you could, there's, you know, there are, you could watch the documentaries like Behind the Curve and other things online that show, I think, a pretty broad breadth of who is in this community.

And there's definitely true believers in that community.

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

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week I come up with three science weeks items or facts, two real and one fake.

Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

We've got three good news items this week.

Are you ready?

I said, are you ready?

Do it.

Let's do it.

We've gotten so afraid of being

aware of that.

Earlier and earlier.

All right, here we go.

Item number one, researchers find that the parasite Entamoeba histolytica evades the host immune system by crawling inside white blood cells.

I number two, a new analysis finds that atmospheric mercury has decreased by about 70% since 2000.

And item number three, a a recent study finds that the universe will end heat death much sooner than previously calculated, in 10 to the 78 years, rather than the previous estimate of 10 to the 1100 years.

Jay, you go first.

All right, this first one, researchers find that the parasite Entamoeba.

Entamoeba histolytica.

Entamoeba histolytica.

That's cool.

Evades the host immune system by crawling inside white blood cells.

Oh shit, could you that's not not cool at all?

God, I've never even heard of that.

Go inside the body's system of removing foreign bodies.

That's genius.

I think that's science.

I absolutely think some creature figured out to do that.

Number two, a new analysis finds that atmospheric mercury has decreased by about 70% since 2000.

Okay, so if mercury If atmospheric mercury was going to go down,

what's putting it into the atmosphere?

Damn, what would be putting mercury in the atmosphere?

I know that there's something for sure.

Industry,

any kind of exhaust?

MMR vaccines.

I don't think that anything has changed.

I don't know.

I think this might be the fiction because I just don't think that there has been massive changes in any kind of regulations that would be mindfully

removing mercury from the atmosphere.

And I just simply don't think 70% would go, would it would drop by 70%

without human intervention.

I know I'm speculating, but I really do think that's a fiction.

Let me go on to the third one.

A recent study finds that the universe will end heat death much sooner than previously calculated, 10 to the 78 years rather than the previous estimate of 10 to the 1100 years.

Well, that sucks.

And I guess my news item kind of fits in there somewhere.

Wow.

Ironic.

I mean, what, nine years?

Steve, my gut is telling me that if there was a 70% decrease in atmospheric mercury, I don't think that that would happen on its own.

And I'm not seeing activity by the governments that have large populations and everything.

I'm not seeing anything that it would point in that direction.

I mean, there's a lot of holes in my reasoning because I simply don't know what's putting it in the atmosphere.

But I think that one's a fiction.

Okay, Evan.

Well, yeah.

Jamie, you brought up some good points.

The first one here about the parasite

evades the host immune system by crawling inside white blood cells.

Yikes.

How?

How does it get in there?

Well, yeah, I suppose so, and maybe this is why this would be leaning towards it being science.

But at the same time,

wouldn't it be rejected in some other way if it, like the white blood cells?

I need to know more about white blood cells as well and

how the body would react to that because to use it as like a shield seems kind of against what part of the reason what the function of what white blood cells should be doing.

So I don't know about that one.

The mercury one, the second one.

Atmospheric mercury has decreased by 70% since 2000.

Was it the aerosols?

Is it the chlorofluorocarbon?

Is that atmospheric?

Was there mercury in that stuff?

Or is it just kind of we've phased out mercury from a lot of products over the course of the 20th century, realizing I mean, you know, they knew even before that that mercury was

deadly.

So there may have been efforts very early on

to

do mercury prevention efforts.

Maybe this one's the science as well.

The last one about the universe and heat death, 10 to the 78 years rather than the previous estimate of 10 to the 1100 years.

And

yeah, okay, a recent study.

I think that one's of the three is the most science-y

in the context of this game.

Because, sure, you can have all kinds of studies.

I'll go with, I'll mix it up and say the parasite one is the fiction, but yeah, I would not be surprised if you're correct in the Mercury one is the fiction.

Thank you.

How about that?

Thank you.

All right, Kara.

I feel like it's the one that makes, like, that I would feel the most comfortable with.

Oh, there you go.

Not with it being.

science, but with like why my reasoning that it might not be science is the case.

Because the atmospheric mercury one, I don't know, but it doesn't surprise me that there's been some sort of like massive change due to human activity in

a molecule in the atmosphere.

So, well, that's not even a molecule, that's an element in the atmosphere.

So, like, yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

There's probably some stupid thing we've been doing that's completely changed the makeup of our atmosphere.

The heat death of the universe one, I don't know, these numbers are not numbers.

They mean nothing to me.

I so struggle.

Get out your scientific calculator.

I know it's real.

It's just so meaningless to me when we get into like Steve.

Why didn't you put the 78 zeros behind that 10?

Yeah, thanks, Steve.

If you had just typed it out, it would have made a lot more sense.

And then Bob could have said some fancy thing like septillion, killium, billion, zillion, gillium, billion, allelion.

Yep, yep.

But the parasite being, okay, so entamoebia, entamoebia, amoeba, meeba, and amoeba.

So like enteric, like inside, I don't know, a histolytica.

See, that one bugs me because it's histological, so it's in the cell.

Maybe that's how they discovered it is they saw it inside of cells.

So it's like, ooh, that one feels like, okay, maybe that's how it works.

But this is a new discovery, right?

How would a parasite crawl inside a you don't want to be in that white blood cell, my friend?

Right.

That's what I would, well, that's why you don't want to be.

Thank you, Carol.

I was trying to express that.

I knew something seemed to be amiss there.

I feel like parasite going straight to, he's just walking into the, into, taking himself to death.

Bacteria going into the antibacteria room.

Right.

Yeah, I don't like this one.

So I feel like maybe there's something else going on, or maybe the real thing here is that it turns off the white blood cell, knowing to attack it.

But just crawling inside of a white blood cell, I feel like, is not enough.

I don't like this one.

I'm going to call it the fiction.

Okay, and Bob.

All right, I'm going to start with number three and go back down.

Evan, for your edification, that number is a quintillion Novemdecillion.

And yeah, I've heard of

this type of stuff before.

A new study, a new theory can change it and

can change the anticipated end of the universe.

Sure, it's a big drop down to 10 to the 78 from 10 to the 1100, but I'm totally buying that.

The second one, let's see, I know nothing about atmospheric mercury at all.

I really don't know what's going on with that, but I totally believe that it could be

humans screwing up the atmosphere yet again, one way or the other, doing something

ridiculous.

Okay, number one, this is the one that really rubbed me the wrong way.

Yeah, I just can't imagine how this is going to happen.

The parasite squeezes itself into the white blood cell without destroying it, and then what?

Then it's got to come out later to do its parasitic business, and then it goes back in again, or in another one.

I just crazy not buying that at all.

I'll say that is fiction.

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

A recent study finds that the universe will end by heat death much sooner than previously calculated, in 10 to 78 years, rather than the previous estimate of 10 to the 1100 years.

You all think this one is science.

And this one is

science.

This one is science.

Yeah, I had to put heat death in there just so you wouldn't think it was going to be you know, die from some other reason before it dies of the heat death.

No, it's just the heat death is going to happen quicker.

So so yeah, so the idea is that

I think the bottom line is that

they didn't think that white dwarfs would decay with Hawking radiation, but they say they would decay just slower.

But if you even, if you just consider the Hawking radiation, so what that means is it's, you know, Stephen Hawking just first described this phenomenon with the black hole.

If you have a particle-antiparticle pair

emerging out of the quantum quantum foam, right?

And it happens right on the event horizon.

So that one particle goes into the black hole and the other particle escapes from the black hole before they can annihilate each other, right?

So what this means is that black holes are evaporating.

They're giving off Hawking radiation and they're evaporating, however, you think that that's happening.

So this study is like, well, if that's happening to white dwarfs, which they think it is, then it would be much slower because they're less massive.

The evaporation would be much slower.

So they said, so the 10 to 78 years is how long it would take for

white dwarfs to evaporate through Hawking radiation.

They used to think it would take 10 to the 1100 years, but now it's only going to take 10 to the 78 years.

So that moves up the date for the ultimate heat death of the universe by that much, which is quite a lot, but it's still a long time, but it's nothing compared to 10 to the 1100 years.

All right, let's go back down to number one.

Researchers find that that the parasite Entamoeba histolytica evades the host immune system by crawling inside white blood cells.

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

And you think it's the fiction for various reasons.

I want to examine those reasons.

Oh, no, don't do that.

Let's not do that.

That's not cool.

So, first of all, these are not macrophages, right?

So, macrophages would eat the Entamoeba, right?

But there are lots of other kinds of white blood cells that themselves don't cook.

Okay, well, you didn't specify.

Well, at the ritual, well, I said that's what I know, but I didn't.

There are different types of white blood cells.

There are different kinds of white blood cells.

But definitely this, yeah, the, you know, off-white.

You definitely wouldn't want to crawl inside a macrophage.

No, that's the whole point.

You're just coming to the macrophage.

So the way I want you to think about this is like on men in black.

Remember when the alien wore a human suit?

Yes, it is.

So this is the same kind of thing where the Entamoeba histolytica wears a white blood cell suit in order to look like the host, you know,

a self-cell from the host,

so that the immune system doesn't attack it.

But why would it pick a white blood cell and not another type of cell?

I don't know.

Red blood cells evolution?

Red blood cells are way too small.

No, red blood cell would be small.

Oh, too small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, probably because it's serving a double function of also taking out the immune system, which a lot of parasites and bacteria do.

Damn, are you saying this is science?

Yeah, that's one of Steve's ploys.

He does that from time to time.

The flow, the cadence.

Are you saying I'm becoming too predictable, Bob?

Not so much predictable.

It's just one of the games that you play unpredictably.

Yes.

This one is

the fiction.

It's the fiction.

Now,

the reason why it's the fiction

is because the Entamoeba, which is an amoeba,

is way bigger than a white blood cell.

There's a size mismatch here.

So, is it a different kind of cell?

Does it hide in like a movable?

What it does is it eats the white blood cell and then displays its proteins on its outer coat and disguises itself as a host cell.

That's what it's doing.

It's not inside or wearing it, it's just eating it and then displaying the protein, which a lot of cells do.

Yeah, that would work.

Yeah, that's all they need to do.

It works.

It freaking works.

Tricks.

How do cells detect foreign bodies?

By the the proteins on their plants?

By the proteins, that's how they do it.

Yeah, so the immune system is like, oh, okay, that's self.

I don't have to worry about that guy over there, right?

Yeah, remember when we talked about spike proteins with the COVID vaccine, all that good stuff?

How long has this been happening?

A long time.

Then why hasn't the white blood cell system adapted to this?

Well,

it's an Arms Race 7, right?

We're evolving, they're evolving.

This is just the current state of things.

It's an infection that kills people, right?

It's not like we're not all walking around with this all the time.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

That's why.

So this is.

Yeah, if we if we are all walking around with it,

this is an infection that is that comes from dirty water, right?

So very rare in developed nations, unless you have recent travel or you're just coming from a place where there isn't good sanitation, right?

There wasn't the availability of clean water.

And the histolytica care,

that means that it breaks down cells.

This is the histolysis.

Histolysis.

This causes abscesses of liquefied tissue.

Really bad.

That's really disgusting.

But it also makes sense that it would break down these white cells.

Yeah, most infections lead to just really bad diarrhea, and you could get very sick from it, and you get these abscesses.

But worldwide, 700,000 people die every year from this.

Yeah, that's hard because abscesses get infected with secondary infections.

And also bad diarrhea can kill you.

Yes, it can.

Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Of course.

Again, I probably should bet this, but my memory is that, like, in you go back to like Alexander the Great and some war that he fought, like, most of the soldiers die of dysentery.

They don't die of war.

They don't die of wounds.

They don't die on the field.

They die of dysentery.

That's true of a lot of wars.

Yeah, I know.

Most people playing Oregon Trail also died of dysentery.

Which means that a new analysis finds that atmospheric mercury has decreased by about 70% since 2000 is science.

Jay, you're 270.

That sounds bad.

And this is science specifically because of regulations.

That's it, 100% due to regulations.

Oh, it's a good thing that atmospheric mercury has gone down.

Yeah, mercury's bad.

Oh, okay.

Mercury is very bad.

Great.

Excellent.

I guess I missed all those news items.

The

Minimata Convention on Mercury basically sets standards for minimizing atmospheric mercury, which is mostly released through, you know, through man-made activity, anthropogenic, or at least it used to be.

So there's there's natural, anthropogenic, biomass burning, which is very little, and terrestrial, just coming from the dirt.

But of course, it gets in there

because of anthropogenic reasons.

So to some extent.

So anyway, the man-made portion of it, massive decrease since 2000.

And to leading to a total of 70% reduction in atmospheric mercury, which is good.

Very, very good.

And it's just a direct result of regulation.

Just agreeing we're not going to do things that puts a lot of mercury, like not burning super dirty coal or requiring that you have you filter it out, you know, at the smokestack level, things like that.

You can't burn certain things,

yeah, it's very, very good.

And the reason, well, part of the reason why this caught my eye was because, very little quick history.

So, you know, and

Bob, you mentioned MMR.

By the way, MMR vaccine never contained mercury.

That's just a misunderstanding.

But

soon after the MMR, like in the 1990s, the anti-vaccine vacciners, anti-vaxxers were saying, oh, the MMR is causing autism.

And then that was disproven very quickly.

They never agreed that it was disproven, but they moved on to thimerosol, which contains ethylmercury.

And they said, oh, it's the mercury in the vaccines that's causing it, which is not the MMR, but other vaccines.

And then we took thimerosol out of the vaccines, right?

And the autism rates continued to go up.

So then they said it's atmospheric mercury.

So they were blaming it on atmospheric mercury right at the time that it was massively decreasing.

So they're more than wrong.

So it's just another way in which they're hopelessly wrong.

Right.

They just make shit up, right?

Then without looking at data.

It's like, oh, it was the vaccines, but now as the thimerosol was decreasing, atmospheric mercury was probably increasing.

But in fact, it was also decreasing at the same time.

Losers.

Okay.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

This week's quote was suggested by a longtime listener and participant of the show, Jay Novella.

I guess I am a listener, too, sure.

You are a listener.

We're all listeners.

Thank you, Jay, for suggesting this one.

I had to.

The difference between what is said and what is known to be true has become an abyss.

Of all the things at risk, the loss of an objective reality is perhaps the most dangerous.

The death of truth is the ultimate victory of evil.

Mon Mothma

from the Star Wars Universe.

Now, Jay, maybe you can tell us.

Oh, and well, yes, the Star Wars universe, but the Andor series.

Yep.

And Jay, Mon Mothma, can you tell us about that character?

I mean, she's really a cool character.

I mean, I loved her in the original series.

And, I mean, I find that,

hold on.

I mean, what is it?

Is her ranked general?

She is the political head of the rebellion.

Political head.

Let me say that so I don't think that's it.

She's like the Sinn Fein, you know, of the rebellion.

Wow.

So

the reason why I sent that to Evan is I love when science fiction has something to say about modern times.

Star Trek, the original series, did this

wonderfully.

It was just unbelievable how almost every episode.

was talking about a very you know serious social issue that was going on and i read that quote and I'm like, damn, that is like, that is so prescient.

It's like 100% what's going on right now.

So, when my wife and I watched that episode

last week when it came out, and when I was watching her give that speech, she's giving a speech in front of the Senate, right?

And that's the whole longer speech.

That, I think, is the money quote.

And we definitely, about the time, we were like, that is so deliberate and aimed at the current moment in America.

100%.

Like, Like, it was so obvious.

Without a doubt.

Yeah.

Like, you could just pluck that speech out of, you know, Coruscant and put it into Washington, D.C., and it would be 100% relevant.

Definitely deliberate.

And I loved it too.

I thought it was very, very good.

So I was not surprised to see that pop up as the quote this week.

Very nice.

Yeah, but yeah, that is, it is one of the

things I like about science fiction.

Pay attention, Kara, is that

you can make these big social points basically separated from their cultural context, right?

Oh, yeah, that's the only thing I like about social fiction.

That's like, that's all the best science fiction for me.

But a lot of good science fiction has that in there.

It's like, yeah, it's sometimes it's a little ham-fisted, like on Star Trek when you have like the half-black, half-white people fighting each other.

You know, it's a little heavy-handed, but at least like, oh, yeah, like you could see

these social issues playing out in another culture, in an alien culture, so that

you're not reacting to it?

It basically divorces it from your tribal reactions or your identity.

It's just in the abstract.

Yes, of course, you could see how this is true when you're looking at another culture, you know?

So, yeah, so

good science fiction does that very well.

And this was very powerful.

I thought it was very, very powerful the way they did that.

Andor also, by the way, is my single favorite Star Wars property.

Wow.

That's a big opinion.

It's just really, really good.

That's a big opinion.

Wait, wait, when you say that, do you mean like better than Empire?

I meant it.

I mean,

yes, it is.

Sacrifice.

It is.

It's gritty.

It's really well written.

The characters are fabulous.

And

I love it.

It is the best manifestation of the Star Wars universe, in my opinion.

So there.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Thanks for suggesting the quote, Jay.

Very, very good.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

You got it, Steve.

Thank you, Steve.

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

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