The Skeptics Guide #1034 - May 3 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 Wednesday, April 30th, 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.

Hey, Steve, you know that May, particularly May 4th, is Star Wars Day, right?

Yeah, may the 4th be with you.

There's a few things happening all at once.

So this show comes out on May 3rd, which is one day before Star Wars Day.

It also is our 20-year anniversary.

Right.

And

the Volonaut airbike looks like the speeder from Return of the Freaking Jedi.

It's real.

It's real.

Oh, my God.

Way to lump all those.

It's like a hovercraft moped.

Oh my god.

It's not really a moped.

I mean, it's a hoverbike.

It's a bike, though.

Yeah.

It looks like a speeder.

It does look like a speeder.

It looks like the speeder from episode six, the return of the jet.

Which was an excellent marketing decision on their part.

No doubt, because they did this in the forest among the trees and things.

How could you not think of that when you're watching this video?

I do kind of feel like I've been on one of those hoverbikes this whole week that I've been in Vietnam because we have been riding around on a scooter in the most insane scooter traffic you can imagine.

It would be nice to be able to go over the head of the scooter in front of us periodically, I think.

Although what I don't like about these hovercraft is that they're basically like leaf blowers, like vertical leaf blowers.

Well, so what?

That's how they go around.

Yeah, so this is Volina.

They came out with their promotional video.

It looks damn impressive, but yes, you could see the blast of air below the bike as it's going over the ground.

It would not be pleasant, I imagine, like in an urban or

environment.

We haven't developed anti-gravity yet.

Could you give this company a break?

This thing is freaking awesome.

No, but here's the thing: like, how feasible is this technology, really, if you have to blast everything directly underneath it?

If the whole point is that you want to be able to go over top of things.

But what other technology exists that mitigates that?

No, no, no, but that's not the right question.

Do we need this?

Do we need

to?

I don't think this is for commuting to work.

This is a recreational vehicle.

So long as it remains like an ATV kind of off-road-y,

go on dirt paths and have fun.

But this doesn't seem like it's going to be great for the environment, and it definitely is not going to be good for any commuters underneath it.

Well, it's electric.

It's not like it's pouring, it's not gas at your

blasting

foliage it's going over.

Well, most of the video I'm looking at, it's in like the desert.

It's like over a sandwich.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But you see the video where there's a little bit of like tree something, and there's just like leaf bits flying everywhere.

Yes.

This is as if you took a leaf blower to it.

Out here,

he's going over like gravelly terrain, and from one camera angle, you see rocks flying all over it.

Yeah.

Just like chipped windshields left and right.

I think you guys are missing the whole point of this thing.

I am missing the point, Jay.

This is why

it's so fun to have us.

At 200 kilometers an hour, 124 miles an hour, this thing can go.

Oh my gosh.

What better hold on?

What range?

I'm looking for it.

I'm not seeing it.

It's

seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle.

How could it hold the fuel, Bob?

I don't know that it could

propel itself if it had to hold the weight of the fuel.

Yeah, it has to be lighter than a typical motorcycle or it wouldn't get off the ground.

I bet you it's like five, ten minutes.

Yeah, 20 minutes, maybe, something like that.

That's scary, man.

But again, this is version 1.0.

And like all these other vehicles that are coming down this path,

they intend to

be able to increase their range.

No time soon is this going to be used for actually

traveling from point A to point.

If at all.

This is, yeah, I said, if at all.

This is a recreational vehicle.

The only other, just to sort of brainstorm, the only other application I could imagine for it would be military.

You know, if you need to search and rescue.

Search and rescue.

Search and rescue.

Yeah, search and rescue, definitely.

Great for that.

Or needing to traverse something that's not traversable.

Like you're on some sort of vehicle and then you need to fly over something so that you can continue whatever you're doing.

It says it's jet propulsion, so it might not be electric.

Ooh, really?

Jet propulsion?

What does that mean, though?

Well, you know, we don't know.

There's just not enough information here.

Yeah, does that mean jet fuel or does that just?

It says seven times lighter than a typical motorcycle, thanks to advanced use of carbon fiber materials, 3D printing, and minimalistic approach.

Sounds electric.

So more importantly, will they sell a kit to make it look like the speeder from Return of the Jedi?

That'll be the first kit that comes out, yes.

Because

that is something that I want.

There's not many things out there that I want at this point in my life.

It looks super fun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'd rent one.

I would definitely rent that and check it out.

There might be a place like where you go and you pay 20 bucks to get a five-minute ride.

You go to Las Vegas, right?

They have a spot out in the heart desert.

A bunch of people jump on these things for whatever, 50 bucks, 100 bucks, and you take it up for 20 minutes.

Don't they already have like a water version of this, though, that's been around for ages that like nobody uses and is not for sale?

Yeah.

I wonder how high it can go, too.

I would imagine

as the resident wet blanket of the group.

No, that's okay.

We need you to

keep us honest.

Keep your ground lying.

Yeah.

No, I agree.

This is a product looking for a function, right?

It's not totally

easy.

It's just we can do it.

It's cool.

It's a solution to a problem we don't have.

Yeah, yeah.

But look at the video.

I know.

As I said, I mean, that is an impressive

recognition,

maybe some niche things like search and rescue or storming a castle.

It's about freaking time, too.

I mean, come on.

We've been watching all of these products come and go, and they're like, this is going to do this and that, and everything.

This thing looks like it's ready to go.

We'll see.

Looks like it's working.

I wonder if you could fit a ballistic parachute in it.

I will say, one thing that's so strange to me being here, so I'm in Vietnam right now.

I'm in a really remote kind of area outside of Lang Ko, which is somewhat near, about an hour from Daenang.

I know that's terrible pronunciation, but I don't speak Vietnamese, which is near Hoi An and Hui.

Jay, when you first introduced this, you said three things, right?

You talked about our anniversary, you talked about this

hover bike, and then you mentioned the date.

So, and Steve, when you introduced the show at April 30th, it was like really jarring for me because, again, I am in the future, which really weirds me out for some reason.

You're on May 1st.

Yes, it's May 1st where I am.

And I realized when I was coordinating getting home that I arrive home before I leave.

Yeah.

Oh, that's that cool.

Oh, that's quirky.

That's friggin' cool.

That's a great quirk.

You're just getting back time that you lost.

I'm just getting back time.

Yeah, because I got here two days after I left.

That's true.

But yeah, Jay, I definitely had one of those, like, what time is it in the North Pole moments?

Oh, my God.

I still think about that from time to time.

All right.

Well, let's, we have a good interview coming up later in the show, but let's get started with our news items.

Kara, you're going to start us off with internet fakes and their effects on public violence.

Yeah, so this is a really interesting article that I stumbled across.

It was recently published in Information Communication and Society.

That's an open access journal, or maybe it's not, but at least the article itself is open access,

published by a group out of Notre Dame and a couple of other kind of allied universities called Visual Narratives and Political Instability: A Case Study of Visual Media Prior to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

So, these researchers

who wrote about it in the conversation, one of them is a professor of engineering at Notre Dame, and the other is a

professor of peace studies and global politics.

They were interested in kind of investigating a new way to maybe not predict, but to understand

violence and mass conflict by looking at propaganda online.

And apparently, using AI, which many researchers have been using because it allows you to comb through just like mass quantities of

big data, oftentimes when we use AI, we're relying only on written text because it's much easier for these models to be able to comb through all this written text and categorize it or understand it.

But as we know, when things go viral, what's usually going viral?

Videos of cats.

Videos of cats, that's one of them.

Yeah.

But like

visual imagery, right?

We're usually seeing like memes with photographs or drawings, and there might be some text included, but there's not even always text necessary to convey a pretty complex kind of political political message.

And so, what they're interested in understanding is how memes or how these different online propaganda approaches promote, this is how they list it, promote beliefs and goals, gain support, dehumanize opponents, justify violence, and create doubt or dismiss inconvenient facts.

And so, again, because these different technologies are more and more sophisticated, like these deep fakes are getting better and better.

AI is still pretty good at understanding this image is manipulated versus this image is is genuine.

But what it struggles with is understanding context.

So an example that they use is, you know, they already know how to program to track posts online that say something like, quote, and this is the example they use, Ukrainians are Nazis.

But what's harder is to find images of Ukrainian soldiers with Nazi insignia on them.

Does that make sense?

Like it's just tougher for them to be able to comb through that.

So combined with AI, they used basically a team of computer scientists and social scientists, and they looked at a massive, massive kind of trove of data.

So what they did for this, it's sort of like a proof of concept study, it's a case study, is they looked at accounts of 989 Russian mill bloggers.

Have you guys heard that term mill blogger before?

Yes, I have.

Yeah, like a lot of people who are not in the middle of the market.

We mentioned it

back in 2010.

Like a blogging sweatshop kind of thing?

Yeah, basically,

like a propaganda sort of machine.

So these mill bloggers, they specifically focused on Telegram, which is a messaging app.

Well, it's much more than that.

They combed through the accounts of 989 Russian Mill bloggers.

So they came out with about 6 million posts, including about 3 million images.

And then they analyzed them in a detailed way by categorizing them, time stamping them, and then using a suite of AI tools that could detect image manipulation.

So they were able to know if the image was changed.

And then they also use actual people, physical people, to try and understand the context.

And they put that information.

together.

They use a couple of examples in the conversation write-up.

Like for example, there's an anti-Putin journalist, actually, an ex-Russian soldier named Arkady Bebchenko.

And they show, so apparently, Ukrainian security services faked his death to expose an assassination plot against him.

And so, because his death was faked and that was discovered,

there's a meme of him wearing like a t-shirt that says gamers don't die, they respawn, right?

And the idea here is to kind of like

A, be quote-unquote funny,

B, sow division and kind of increase that distrust that was already starting to form.

And they show other examples as well, doctored images of political officials from Ukraine spending time in kind of more like submissive positions with Western leaders.

And also, we mentioned kind of the Nazification, which is very kind of low-hanging fruit, classic online meme.

And here's the big takeaway.

So they found, this is really, really interesting, that leading up to Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, I think in the two weeks, yeah, only two weeks leading up to it, there was a 9,000% increase in the number of posts that were just produced by these, you know, nearly 1,000 Russian mill bloggers, and a 5,000% increase in manipulated images from these Russian Mill bloggers.

They could only figure that out.

out yeah by actually screening to see what was manipulated.

They could do things like take footage of of prior incidents that didn't even have anything to do with that conflict and re-tag them and basically call it current.

That was a very popular method that they would employ quite a bit.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And we see that now.

We see that in our kind of American political discourse right now.

All the time.

Yeah, you'll see like some sort of march or some sort of rally, and it turns out that wasn't even in the same country or it was from three years previous for a different reason.

So basically, what they were trying to proof of concept in

this study was how can we analyze this visual content?

How can we understand it contextually?

Because that's the really kind of sophisticated portion that they show in this study.

AI just simply can't do yet.

It can't look at an image and understand

the underlying propaganda message and understand how it might sow division, how it might dehumanize, how it might increase distrust.

But what they also showed, which is really interesting, and they they did not, it's not that they didn't explain why, it's that the point of the study was not to try and understand why, but that this massive spike two weeks prior to the

invasion was meaningful.

I mean, it was like deeply statistically significant.

And so, you know, as the title implies, memes and conflict study shows surge of imagery and fakes can precede international and political violence.

You know, whether it's a chicken and egg situation, whether these mill bloggers knew what was coming and they were trying to increase, I guess in some ways, intentionally increase support from the citizenship, or whether there was a lockstep kind of unrest that was occurring amongst the people that helped, I guess,

codify, maybe that's not quite the...

right word, but justify the military action.

You know, we don't know the cause and effect here, but what we do know is that prior to a breaking point, in this situation at least, where

violence erupted in a meaningful way, there was a lot of online chatter and a lot of sowing of distrust and a lot of just

you know, negative memes that were being flown all around the internet.

And so this may be a way, as the authors argue, to predict conflict, to predict unrest, and to understand better where those thresholds and those breaking points are in a real-world way, like a measurable kind of geopolitical conflict way, we may be able to take that temperature online just in terms of the quantity of this type of chatter.

It's disheartening, it's scary, but it's also fascinating, and I think it could be incredibly useful for promoting peace.

It reminds me a little bit of that show, Person of Interest, which features

an AI just surveying the internet and seeing patterns.

The kind of contrived bit was that for reasons of confidentiality, whatever, you know, you can't violate people's privacy.

So it was skirting the laws on privacy by not telling the police, oh, this person is going to murder that person, so you better do something about it.

It would just spit out a social security number and say, this is a person of interest.

Oh, I see.

And then the police had to figure out who was going to kill who and why and when, you know, and then keep it from happening.

But it was just the basic idea of you have artificial intelligence

monitoring all internet traffic and picking up on these patterns and predicting what's going to happen, which I think is highly plausible.

Oh,

it's already happening.

It's already happening.

Yeah, these researchers could do it with probably minimal clearance.

So you can imagine that these NSA programs, I mean, we've been talking about this for decades, these NSA programs that are collecting large data from citizens.

And, you know, they would claim, oh, we only look at the metadata.

And whether that's true or not,

you got to be Amazon where I want to buy.

I mean, how does it know that?

Exactly, exactly.

And there's also a big difference.

Relatives are shopping for, and it's me with it.

How does it know I'm even related to these people?

Of course they look.

But we have to be careful because what we're conflating here is

like a national security military spying on your own citizens, Big Brother thing, versus a monetary system.

But they have the list of it.

Of course, it exists.

It exists.

And we have probably, in the terms and conditions, given them permission to do this already.

Oh, no doubt.

They hear everything that you say.

What did you say?

I mean, you know, it's no mystery.

Like, our phones are constantly monitoring what we say.

I mean, well, when you say what we say, you mean in multiple ways.

You don't mean physically our voices.

You mean all the things we're saying with our internet activity, right?

Well, I think he meant with that.

No, I meant that.

I'm not listening in on your phone.

Our phones are here.

You know, we have Alexa devices and Google devices and our phones.

Their phones are, you know, know where we are at all times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So through all these different.

Yeah.

And you're right.

They do physically listen to our voices too through things like Alexa and Siri.

We do have a microphone there.

Yeah.

Whether it's listening in the background, I think you're right.

We've yet to.

Well, it's listening in the background enough that it gets activated when you say, like, okay, Google.

Sure.

It gets activated.

What's probably the most disturbing thing is how comfortable we're getting with all of of this.

Well, and that's part of why I have a level, and this feels a little weird, talking about this in a hotel room in Vietnam prior to hopefully gaining re-entry to my country where I am a natural-born citizen

in only a few days, but having been in China and Hong Kong, because one of the reasons that I feel a little bit of just discomfort when I travel to China is the normalcy of, and maybe it's just because it's much more out in front, like the same kind of stuff is happening in the background in a lot of Western countries, but the normalcy and the comfort level of like large monitoring and of having all of your banking transactions on the same app across the whole country in a closed way and being behind this great firewall and having facial recognition.

Yeah, to get into your apartment building and swiping the same card for all of the transit.

And that's not to to say that it's not like that in the U.S.

Maybe we just have more of a sheen of privacy and more of a, whereas there's just sort of an openness to that, quote, big brother vibe.

But I definitely, when I'm in China, I do feel a little like I'm in a black mirror episode.

And that's, that's an uncomfortable feeling.

In a very bad way.

Yeah.

But again, I don't know how much of that is

a real difference or just a feeling difference between all these nations at this point.

Isn't that the point?

How can you know?

Exactly.

I think it's a real difference.

It's both.

I think it's both.

You're right.

There is a demonstrably measurable difference, but I do think that we sometimes assume that while we have a lot of freedoms, which are, you know, question, we can question whether or not they're dwindling, but that we have a lot of freedoms in like the United States, for example, and other Western nations.

Comparatively, exactly.

I think we often conflate freedom with lack of oversight.

And that's just not, I don't think we can do that anymore.

Two quick things.

One is, just to make a point, when I just said, okay, Google, a minute ago, my phone popped up with the assistant.

And it just.

Yeah, I was going to say, how did you undo that after CASI?

And the microphone pops up listening to what I'm saying.

And the other thing is, since you mentioned Black Mirror, the new season is out, and it's awesome.

So good.

I need to watch when I get home.

So good.

So good, man.

I'm still working my way through.

I guess I could watch here on a VPS.

The first episode is brutal, but it's brutal in that black mirror like just a very realistic like uncomfortably realistic way anyway believe totally believable yeah

it's the fact that it was believable is what made it so brutal made it so scary yeah i mean that's the yeah that's that's so many of those episodes it's like uh oh we are right on the precipice of this or i'm i can feel it because like five out of the ten aspects of this episode have already happened.

Oh my God.

I mean, like, we're literally saying, guys, that our reality here in the United States is kind of similar to Black Mirror now.

Yeah, it's a quasi-documentary.

It's terrifying.

I'm reading The Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler right now.

Aren't you guys proud of me, sci-fi?

Proud of you?

Wow.

Liz,

you've got to talk to Liz about that character.

Yeah, and part of the reason that this book is like such a bestseller impression, I mean, granted, she wrote about it in the 90s.

It's not like it's hundreds of years old, but it takes place today.

That's what's the weird thing is you're reading these journal entries like labeled 2025, 2026, and you're like,

this might be where we're going.

I mean, isn't there someone who specifically says make America great again?

Yeah, I haven't gotten to that part yet, but yeah, I think so.

It may not be in the sewer, but there's, yeah, because it's a, what's a duleogy?

That's not a thing.

It's a two-part book series.

But part of the reason that I think these kinds of books are so jarring and things like Black Mirror are so hard is that Octavia Butler didn't sit down and come up with something fantastic.

She was like,

you know, a few left turns and this is where we could be.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And we're always on the table.

And we took those left-hand turns.

We did.

Yeah, I think even she would have been shocked at where we're at right now.

Yeah, she probably didn't expect it to happen so soon.

Let's move on.

Jay, tell us about lab-grown teeth.

Yeah, thanks, Jay.

I'll clean that up.

Do they get up and walk around?

Click over to something a little bit more positive.

Click over to.

So, guys, what was your worst dental experience?

I don't know.

I haven't really had any.

They're all about the same.

I haven't had anything.

I had one root canal, and it was not fun.

I had a root canal.

Yeah.

Some teeth cleanings can be brutal.

Oh, okay.

But don't root canals.

From what I understand, and I've never had a root canal, but my dentist, I almost had to have one.

My dentist told me they feel the same as when you have to get a deep

cavity drilled out.

The only difference is your pocketbook.

They cost three times as much.

I had one, and it was not nearly as bad as I had anticipated.

You know, I'd say it was worse than a typical cleaning.

Well, yeah, than a cleaning.

But not a filling, right?

Like, if you have to get the shots and get the drilling and get like a partial or a crown or something.

You know what I don't like about taking it?

It's being a little bit more dramatic.

I don't like being prone for long periods of time like that.

And I have gone through things.

Like, I remember when I had my braces and I had to have all those impressions done and things like that, it's felt like hours that I had to remain in that chair and my head tilted a certain way and don't move and do this.

And, oh, I hate that.

Is it the body being

for me?

It's the gap.

It's like the holding your mouth open and trying not to like choke on your own spit.

Right.

Yeah, I hate that.

It's the breathing through your nose and trying not to gag the whole time.

That's what bothers me.

Well, there are a lot of people, guys.

You know, the world is filled with people that are having dental nightmares.

You got to to take care of your teeth and you got to do it every freaking day.

It is a lot of work and it's a commitment.

I'm trying to train my kids right now to like really want to do it.

Ah, they don't have to.

They've got these tooth replacement things coming up, man.

But the point.

The point is, though, there are, you know, we're lucky that we haven't had really bad dental surgery and stuff.

There's a lot of things that people have to go through in order to have some semblance of teeth in their mouth.

Yeah, my mom has implants and things like that.

It's funny.

She's in her mid-70s and she likes refuses.

She does not want dentures, right?

So she's, every time she has a tooth problem, she has to go through the implant thing.

You guys know about these where you get like the post and you've got the bone graft and it's got a cure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So the point is that these researchers that I'm about to talk to you about, the vision that they have is one day you'd go to the dentist and, you know, they're not going to be giving you fillings or giving you these hardcore implants and stuff like that, that they're going to do something where your body regrows a legitimate biological tooth that occupies that space and it is a tooth.

That's it.

It's a new tooth.

So their long-term goal

is that the researchers at King's College London, they recently developed a new type of hydrogel that is a key factor in supporting the growth of teeth from stem cells in the lab.

And the study that they published, it was published in ACS Macro Letters, and it marks what, I mean, I would consider this to be a significant step towards biological tooth replacement using their regenerative tissue engineering so this is significant again you know we're not talking about you're gonna go out and get this next year at the dentist like this is a step but this was a big one this was a really important step that they made today tooth loss is treated with you know the interventions like fillings and crowns and implants.

You know, they work, right?

You know, some of us have, you know, I definitely had to get a root canal as well, you know, and I've been hyper taking care of my teeth my whole life.

It just, you know, it can happen to anybody.

But these treatments, of course, you know, they work, but they have limitations.

You know, fillings, they weaken over time, and, you know, you could need to get them replaced.

It's not uncommon for people to get their fillings replaced.

You know, implants that people get, they can fail.

And that is actually more common than I think most people who don't get implants don't realize that they do and can fail.

And none of them really are restoring the structure or the real function of real teeth, right?

You know, you get a root canal and now you have a numb spot in your mouth, right?

Like you have a, you know, those teeth are no longer registering the information that all the other teeth in your mouth give you, right?

Your teeth actually give you quite a bit of information about temperature and

chewing sensation and everything.

The study's co-author, Dr.

Zhu Chen Zhang, said fillings and implants are stopgap measures, but they don't regenerate, they don't grow, and they don't integrate like natural tissue and in nature tooth development it begins in the embryo through a complex exchange of chemical signals between two types of stem cells Steve you've probably heard of these we have the epithelial and the menzecho menzechemo mesenchymal mesechyl yeah that's a tough word huh so these are two different types of stem cells that are set into motion in an embryo and that eventually turn into teeth.

And there's a very specific environment that teeth need to grow in.

There's actually quite a complex thing going on for teeth to do what they do.

So these cells that I mentioned, these two different types of cells, they self-organize into a tooth bud and they progress through these developmental stages, right?

It starts with a bud, then there's a cap, and then eventually

the bell will grow.

And then they're forming the layers and structure of a complete tooth and it absolutely doesn't just happen.

It needs a specific environment and it has to be coaxed by the body in order for it to work.

So the researchers have to replicate this process in the lab and it requires more than just putting the right cells together.

It requires the right environment and they came up with something that mimics the body's extracellular matrix, which supports the cell viability and enables this slow coordinated signaling necessary for the tissue growth to take place.

And that's where this hydrogel stuff comes into play.

The researchers at King's College London, they created this special gel-like material that's made from gelatin that acts as a support structure for growing teeth in the lab.

So they used a chemical technique called click chemistry to connect parts of the gel in a precise way using two ingredients, tetrazine and norbarine.

Have you guys heard of those two chemicals?

Yeah.

I've heard of certain tetrazine, certainly.

Right, okay.

So there's these two chemicals, ingredients that they're using to make this happen.

So by changing how much gelatin they used and adjusting the balance of the tetrazine and the norbamine, they were able to control how stiff or soft the gel was and how much it could swell and how quickly it released the signals to the cells inside, right?

You get a picture here, so it's like a lattice that they have control over where

they can regulate its stiffness and

how firm it is, how much support it's giving.

And this was like a thing where they were like like just trying to get it through this particular keyhole so it works perfectly with

how these two stem cells need to grow in order to successfully produce a tooth.

Now, the physical traits turned out to be critical here, right?

Softer gels gave the dental stem cells room to talk to each other and arrange themselves into early tooth-like structures, which are called tooth organoids.

I've never heard of that before.

Tooth organoids.

Well, you've heard of organoids because you've talked about it on the show.

Of course, I've heard of organoids, but tooth tooth organoids,

it's like a doll that I would play with or a kid's, a boy's toy from the 90s.

You know what I mean?

I've heard a cavity.

Remember the micronuts?

You guys remember those?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, sure.

Tooth organoids.

I can't remember that.

So gels that were too stiff made it harder for the cells to develop.

That's okay, Karen.

All right, so they tested all different types of gels

and changing the stiffness of these gels.

And what they found was if the gel was too stiff, it made it harder for the cells to develop properly.

So the best results came from a gel that was made with 8% gelatin and a 0.5 to 1 ratio of the tetrazine and the norbamine.

Within eight days, this setup that they came up with consistently produced organized cell structures that showed the early building blocks of real teeth.

And that is it right there.

And that is the incredible feat that they did.

You know, it's easy for me to talk about this.

And, you know, I'm basically talking here for a couple of minutes about something that was an incredible amount of time and energy and research that it took to get to the point where they realized the environment that needed to be there and how to simulate that environment.

The researchers confirmed that the tooth organoid formation was happening using a couple of techniques, histological staining and fluorescene imaging, right?

These are just ways for them to be able to kind of see what's going on inside of the gel.

Only the softer hydrogel group produced organized structures that that had both of the two types of stem cells needed and they also were able to detect that they were interacting properly.

And this indicated that the scaffolding that they created successfully replicated the signaling environment of natural tooth formation because stem cells need to communicate with the environment that they're in and other stem cells in order to do the things that they do to build basically any part of our biology.

So when you think about it, to grow a tooth, there's a little microcosm universe that has to exist there in order for everything to be just right, in order for the cells to function the proper way to do what we want them to do.

So, this was a very difficult thing that they pulled off.

Now, the hydrogels that had higher stiffness produced either poorly organized tissue or they failed to generate the tooth organoids at all, right?

They couldn't, it just didn't work.

So, the conclusion here is that the physical characteristics of the hydrogel scaffolding that they were able to figure out, it directly impacted the developmental outcomes.

And therefore, and the good news is now that they can go on to the next step with moving on to the next phase here, which is actually going to be to fully grow the tooth.

So, the team said that they haven't implanted any lab-grown teeth into a living subject yet, but their work demonstrates they basically created a bioengineered tooth, at least in the early stages.

It's possible, and this was the hard part.

This was the part I think that if this didn't work, nothing was going to work.

And they were able to actually make it happen, which is fantastic.

So the next round of research will focus on developing methods to transplant these organoids into the jaw and guide their

full maturation into a functional tooth.

So I don't know, man.

It doesn't sound like it's that, that far away.

You know, hopefully, once they do this, the body will take over and actually finish the job.

According to the authors of the study, though, they said this approach could definitely someday offer a biological alternative to regular dental procedures.

You go into the dentist, they probably would have to take samples of your biology to

grow the culture, say,

to get that beginning thing happening.

And then

it's like a little implant that they put in there that you probably can't even feel because it's tiny.

Yeah, but in your joint.

And they pop it in there.

Yeah, hell yeah, Bob.

They pop it in there.

And like, you know what?

They take out the root canal.

They pop this in there.

And, you know, I don't know how long it would take for your body to grow the tooth.

But imagine a tooth just comes up and out of your gum, and you've got a new tooth.

Yeah, but Jay, it may be functional, but my question is: is it aesthetic?

Is it just like some freaky snaggle tooth that works, but you don't want to smile because it's like, what's happening in there?

Well, the real question about that is: can you grow vampire teeth?

Or shark teeth.

Yes, or shark teeth.

Imagine they just keep folding out like shark teeth.

That would be freaking awesome.

All right, but all kidding aside,

I know I'm being enthusiastic about this, but I happen to be like, I'm a big toothbrusher, and teeth, you know, I take care of my teeth.

I take care of my teeth.

You know what I mean?

I really do.

There's nothing better than having a clean mouth and dental, you know, having your dentistry,

your mouth be healthy is very important.

Lots of things can go wrong in your health if you don't have healthy teeth.

And, you know, it's been documented.

You know, they're saying that heart disease could be affected by the health of your teeth and the cleanliness.

And, you know you get cavities and you have like you know that going on in your mouth not only does it give you bad breath but it is a health risk so i just think this is awesome i really hope that you know my kids at least get to get to experience this if they ever have any major problems which everyone will you know most people have some type of thing go wrong you know you can't really get through unless you're like a complete completely religiously like going in there and flossing and taking care of your teeth from childhood but even then yeah even then it doesn't always matter because a lot of this stuff is genetic.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

What bacteria do you happen to have living in your mouth?

I asked my

last time I got a tooth cleaning.

Well, I've talked to the hygienists on and off, like just out of curiosity my whole life.

Usually make friends with them as they're in there.

You know how they make small talk?

They're in there.

But I talked to you.

I like to talk to them because they see.

And I had a hygienist tell me, I said, come on, what was the worst?

What was the worst thing you ever saw?

And

First thing she did, she went, oh,

she goes, the person

had not taken care of their teeth at all.

And all of the tartar and the buildup, which can be as hard as your teeth, you know, like it's unbelievable like that stuff that grows on your teeth.

Calculus.

She said that when she tried to do the initial cleaning for the person, that the back, like the inside of their teeth, like the back side of their teeth, there were no bumps or ridges from their teeth.

It was all smooth from the buildup of that material.

Yeah.

And

when they cleaned it out, and it took, it was an incredible amount of work, and there was lots of bleeding and terrible stuff going on.

The person touched their tongue to the back of their teeth and commented, oh my God, I feel bumps in my mouth, right?

As opposed to this kind of wad of

rud that was otherwise.

It's like just like

you can't feel the difference between one tooth or the next.

It's just one slick little situation going on there.

And I guarantee you, that's not even close to the worst stuff that's going on.

But I mean, that

you got to take care of your teeth, folks.

I mean, they will take care of you.

You know, you don't want to have chewing problems.

Can you imagine every time you chew, it's painful?

That's a nightmare.

I want a new damn biome.

I want a biome that is benign and doesn't create goddamn tartar and calculus on my teeth.

That's what I want.

I want a biome that makes them like, I don't know, calcified better.

I want a biome that's a little bit more

and stripes.

Yeah, that's not just benign, that's like beneficial.

Yeah, can you imagine if you replace all the oral flora, firstly, get rid of anything that secretes acid, anything that will eat away your enamel, anything that will give you bad breath, anything that will cause a buildup of the tartar, and replace them with ones that will actually protect your mouth, take care of it, make it smell nice, and repair your enamel.

It would be amazing.

If I made a product like that, I would call it tartar sauce.

But guys, keep in mind,

you taking care of your teeth goes an incredibly long way.

Get a cleaning a couple of times a year.

Go to the dentist, listen to what they have to say.

They don't just tell you,

they are telling you about your oral health, not just like, how's your tooth doing?

I mean, it's like they're checking your gums for cancer.

This is an important thing to do.

And Jay, my hygienist told me that you could be perfect, brush floss

every day,

and you still need to go get it cleaning because it only helps slow it down.

The calculus will still build up no matter how good you are.

So, you got to still go in no matter how good, like twice a year, at least.

I went last month.

My hygienist said, My gums look great.

Yep, okay.

Thank you because I pay attention.

Um, so, guys, have any of you heard what RFK Jr.

had to say about autism in the last week?

Yeah, but all over that Steve.

Something new and stupid or old and stupid.

What now?

Well, Well,

what he said was old, but he did say it recently.

It's bad.

It's really bad.

So it's vintage R.F.

K.

Jr., right?

He, as I like to say, I didn't make up this term, so I forgot who said it first.

He uses scientific data as a drunk uses a lamppost for support rather than illumination.

Right.

Yeah,

he makes a lawyer's case for whatever his narrative is, because that's what he is.

He's not a scientist.

He's a conspiracy theorist.

He's a lawyer.

And that's what he's doing.

So he said, this is how he characterized autism.

He's like, you have a normal child who regresses into autism when they're two years old.

And these are kids who will never pay taxes,

they'll never hold a job.

They'll never play baseball.

They'll never write a poetry.

They'll never write poetry.

They'll never go out on a date.

Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted.

And then he goes on to say, so I would urge everyone to consider the likelihood that autism, whether you call it an epidemic, a tsunami, or a surge of autism, is a real thing that we don't understand and it must be triggered or caused by

environmental or risk factors.

Oh, boy.

He further said that he's going to figure out what the cause of autism is by September.

So don't worry about it.

He's going to have it all sorted out within

going to surpass 50 years of research in five months.

God, there's so much, Steve.

There's so much.

It's a tsunami of misinformation.

So

let's break this down a little bit.

So first of all,

he's talking about autism, and he's describing the absolutely most extreme end of the spectrum, right?

Because autism is a spectrum.

It's the autism spectrum disorder, which is interesting, the fact that they...

I understand why they include such a broad spectrum under one diagnostic name, because there is a neurological similarity going on, there's a phenomenologically speaking,

there is some commonality there.

But it does create a lot of confusion, right?

If you're at one end of the spectrum, you have people who are above average in intelligence, completely functional, very successful in life, doing all the things he says that people with autism will never do, but they are just neurodivergent, right?

They're not neurotypical.

Yeah, but let's be fair, Steve.

Those people usually are not diagnosed with autism.

No, no, but increasingly they are, Kara.

That's part of the point here.

But what I'm saying is that part of the diagnostic criteria is that you require support.

So if you don't require any support, you can't qualify for diagnosis.

I didn't say these people don't require any support.

You can have all of those things that I said, but still have different sets of strengths and weaknesses.

You still may have difficulty with social engagement, have difficulty with maintaining your

cognitive attention, et cetera.

I just wanted to clarify, because it kind of sounded like you were saying they were high functioning across everything.

No, they're not.

Otherwise they wouldn't be able to do it.

Otherwise they don't have autism spectrum.

As I say, they're neurodivergent.

That's what meant by that.

And that neurodivergence can include lots of things that are just...

they have different challenges than people who are neurotypical.

But that's the pop psychology concern that I have lately is that so many people are self-diagnosing ASD because they're neurodivergent when really they they have ADHD or some other form of neurodivergence.

And they're like, oh, but I'm on the spectrum.

And it's confusing.

You shouldn't self-diagnose.

And we don't get that.

But the point being is that you can get diagnosed with autism beyond the spectrum and be extremely high functioning, even though you do need some,

you might need accommodations for the challenges that you have.

And then there's the entire spectrum down to people who are nonverbal, right?

So he's talking about that end of the spectrum.

We struggle with language here, which I'm going to get into in a minute, because, again, because we're trying to capture this broad spectrum under one label,

there's no way to make everybody happy all at once.

And when you say, well, this person has severe autism or level three autism or profound autism, the people at the neurodivergent end of the spectrum that I described like, well, that implies that it's a bad thing or that, you know, even just using the term severe, they take exception to it.

It pathologizes it.

We're just, and so it makes it challenging to even discuss it.

Yeah.

But, and there's legitimate points on,

you know, all sides here.

This is, it's, there's no perfect answer because there are just different trade-offs.

I don't have a perfect language.

Yeah, exactly.

The deaf community says, you know,

we are, this is part of us.

We are deaf.

This is our identity.

We have a deaf culture.

We don't need to be fixed.

We don't need to be cured.

We are what we are.

And it's the same thing.

The neurodivergent community, they support each other with that kind of approach.

It's like, yeah, we're not diseased.

We are just different.

Yet there still is a requirement of support, even in the deaf community, right?

Like, if you are deaf, you need closed captioning in certain situations.

You need types of support.

Some of them will say, Kara, that the only reason they need quote-unquote support is because civilization was built by neurotypicals for neurotypicals.

And they're neurodivergent trying to survive in a neurotypical world that's not adapted to them.

Absolutely.

And that's in some ways how you can define support.

There's some legitimacy to that.

I like right-handed, left-handed.

Right.

It's like considering left-handedness a disorder because the world was made by right-handed people.

But which is why the levels are, at least in the DSM, defined as level one requiring support, level two requiring substantial report, and level three requiring very substantial support.

So that's how the language has evolved, the level of support you need, not the level of disease or disability

or severity or whatever.

It's just there's high support and higher support and low support, whatever.

So in any case, RFK Jr.

is living in 2005, right?

He's living in a world before we even had this conversation.

And he is looking at autism through the lens of the anti-vaccine movement, 100%.

Oh, that's it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Everything he just said is from, is the, is the, you know, again, we dealt with this in 2005 from the anti-vaccine movement.

He is still locked into that narrative that

his narrative is you have normal children, right?

Typical children, healthy children, who then regress into autism and it destroys their lives.

It destroys their families.

And this is something that is the environment that we are doing to them.

That's literally what he said during that talk.

That's his narrative.

And his narrative, let's be honest, is propagandizing something in a really major way.

He's describing level three autism in the same breath that he's talking about all these new cases and some sort of epidemic.

But all these new cases are not level three cases.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So that's one problem.

It's infuriating.

Yeah, that's one of the problems with what he's saying.

He's saying that there's like the autism diagnoses are quote-unquote surging.

Epidemic, wrong term.

It implies, you know, that's epidemic is a term you use if you're trying to imply that there's a an environmental cause.

And an infectious disease.

Contagious disease.

But even if you're saying, yeah, there's an increase in the autism diagnoses, that's a fact.

Nobody denies that.

But what the evidence shows is a few things.

One is that it

could mostly be explained by diagnostic substitution, increased surveillance, and the increased availability of support, of services.

And every way you look at the question, that's sort of the answer that we get.

And the best studies are ones that take a look at different cohorts and apply the exact same diagnostic criteria.

And they find that when you do that, right, you look at people from 20 years ago versus today and you apply the exact same diagnostic criteria, the rate is the same right it's the it's flat because the difference is not in a real increase it's an it's a huge point it's a shift in diagnostic patterns in several ways but the evidence also shows that the increase in the number of diagnoses is way skewed towards the level one end of the spectrum right the yeah the people that weren't caught before right exactly the people that we didn't that we just go like oh yeah, that person

doesn't make eye contact.

Yes, exactly.

And we just didn't diagnose them.

They would have had no diagnosis or they would have had some other diagnosis.

There is.

Or like, I just interviewed a wonderful woman on my podcast recently who specializes in neuroimaging.

And she talked all about like the female autism spectrum kind of pattern and how it's just been missed historically.

Yeah.

Right.

Like everything, it was all about boys, boys, boys, boys, boys.

So we just didn't recognize it in young girls who were more trained in sort of.

It manifests differently.

Yeah, totally.

We don't diagnose as many heart attacks in women because the criteria are all male-centric.

It's all about it.

And so the fact that we're getting better at this is a good thing.

It's a good thing that we're diagnosing it more.

That's the point.

There was an increase at the level three end of the spectrum.

The profound is what some people call profound autism end of the spectrum, but it's much, much, much, much less.

And again, that's explained by diagnostic substitution.

These people were diagnosed 30, 40, 50 years ago.

They were just diagnosed with something else.

So, like with schizophrenia or chemistry, schizophrenia

or just mental retardation, you know, just something less specific, just not autism.

So, but he conflates it all.

He says there's a surge at the mild end of the spectrum, and therefore there must be a cause at the severe end of the spectrum.

But he completely gets it wrong.

Because, again, he's not a scientist.

He's not a critical thinker.

He's a conspiracy theorist, and he's a crank.

And he completely gets it wrong.

But again, he is starting with this 30-year-old narrative that is from the

right out of the anti-vaccine movement.

So, what about the regressed into autism thing?

So, first of all, he's getting that wrong on multiple layers as well.

First of all, most people with autism do not regress.

It's like 20% or so, 30%.

And what that doesn't mean, when we say regress, that's just any loss of milestones or any loss of function.

It doesn't mean that

they were typical or normal to start, right?

He's misinterpreting regression as going from not having autism to having autism.

Oh no, but not just like the autism manifesting in a worse way.

It's like you have autism and then you have more difficulty with language.

When you have autism, you have more difficulty with socialization as you get older.

You know, that's a complicated phenomenon.

You know, it has to do with, you know,

things can get more challenging as you get older, but there may be also something in a subset of people in terms of what's going on.

But in any case, they're not going from not having autism to having autism.

But he's misinterpreting it that way, deliberately, because, again, this is all about blaming vaccines.

Let's not forget that, right?

But we know from data that

if you look back at evidence that we have, or if you follow cohorts, you know,

longitudinally, that you can see clinically the signs of autism as early as six months.

So, not two, not two years old.

And you can see it

in, if you look at the brain and if you look at biomarkers, you could see it.

Guess how early you could see it?

Like,

in utero, in the row, I was right.

In the fetal stage.

So, it's, and also, there's pretty overwhelming evidence at this point that it is a complicated multi-gene genetic disorder.

It is dominantly dominantly genetic.

There's like 150, 200 genes that have been implicated.

And here's the thing.

A lot of those genes, they're not bad alleles or bad genes.

They're not like, oh, if you have this, the only thing it does is increase your risk of autism.

A lot of them are beneficial

in other ways, right?

That's kind of how evolution works, right?

People who get sickle cell anemia, that gene persists because it also protects you from malaria.

It's the same kind of thing, where genes that might make you more intelligent or whatever in some high functioning in some ways make it more likely for you to develop neurodivergent traits as well.

It's complicated.

It's super complicated.

So it's not going away.

It's not going away.

It's mostly genetic, right?

So we know it's really it's not increasing.

It's not you know happening to children who are not who do not have autism in age two.

They're not regressing from non-autistic to autistic.

So he basically gets every aspect of this story wrong.

He basically pissed off everybody with autism and everybody who is connected to the neurodivergent community.

And now he's selling this complete snake oil thing of he's going to find the cause of autism by September.

Again, everyone, and he hired, of course, he hired an anti-vaccine fake doctor, Charlatan, you know, Geyer, to do the study.

Everyone knows what the outcome of this fake is.

Of course, he's starting with the conclusion.

He's starting with the conclusion.

Absolutely.

That's what he does.

That is what he does.

There is a wrinkle to this, though, while everyone's getting pissed off at RFK.

I read an interesting opinion piece out-ed in the New York Times by a mother of a child with profound autism who's like, sometimes she feels like that end of the spectrum gets lost in the discussion, right?

And the lost in the neurodivergent approach, which includes things like we don't need a cure, we just need accommodation.

And she's like, my child, yes, he needs accommodation, but he's again, non-verbal, not independent for anything.

And it's like, you know, this is not just neurodivergence.

You know, this, you know, my child is impaired.

And absolutely, this is something that I would want to prevent or treat if we had a treatment for it.

So let's not, you know, lose sight of that.

And I do think, like, what's the solution here?

I don't know because again, it's different trade-offs.

We may, I think, I do think we need to make it more clear, though, that autism is such a broad spectrum.

And we might need to have

more distinct subset names that we use.

Well, that we used to, but we got away from that.

I know.

We went in the wrong way.

Yeah, we used to say Asperger's.

Like Asperger's.

We would say Asperger's.

Who's that any?

No.

No, for individuals who were verbal.

I mean, that's a level autistic question, basically.

Now it's level one autism.

Whereas, like, you know, if somebody is level three, for example, they would probably have all these specifications on their diagnosis.

They would have perhaps with accompanying intellectual impairment, with accompanying language impairment, with catatonia maybe, or with, you know, so there are all these specifiers.

But that nuance, that minutiae gets lost.

You're right.

So, but the label, I go into this in some detail on Neurologica, but just very, very quickly.

How we make diagnoses depends on what you're using those diagnoses for.

Because there's different ways you could make diagnoses.

Then again, they're not one's right and the other one's wrong, and they're just different trade-offs.

I feel like we've moved in the direction of a diagnostic scheme that was designed by researchers and not necessarily clinicians, and certainly not people who are dealing with the public or regulations.

And so, you know what I mean?

It's like

they're emphasizing what is helpful for research, not necessarily what's helpful in terms of dealing with this as a society.

And so, we end up with, yeah, Right, so we end up with a diagnostic scheme that's confusing in every context except for research, where it emphasizes phenomena.

It's trying to please both.

Yeah, I think it's emphasizing it's trying to please both.

It is.

It is.

But I remember very distinctly the director of the NIMH complaining that the DSM, that's the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of

Psychiatric Diagnoses, that it was specifically blaming it for problems with research because

it was not optimized for research sufficiently.

And that's the thing.

It has to be both because what we know about what to do clinically comes from the research, and what we do research-wise comes from clinical feedback.

And it's like they have to talk to each other.

Yes, but you can't optimize it for both.

No, I know, and that's the hard thing.

Yeah, something's got to give.

And we've moved away.

I mean, this is really in the weeds, but like really quickly, we've moved away from more categorical.

DSM was historically very categorical.

If you have these things, you have this.

And now we've moved into more dimensional, which is more clinical.

I mean, it's like it is a move in the right direction, but maybe it hasn't gone far enough.

So, yeah, so it's tricky.

It's tricky.

But there's one thing we can say for sure, and that RFK has no idea what he's talking about, but he's worse than ignorant.

Yeah.

He's full of misinformation and

a completely biased narrative that is all about being anti-vaccine, essentially.

He is a dangerous, dangerous quack, that guy, really.

Yes, yes.

All right, let's move on.

All right, Bob, tell us how AI is going to help transform astronomy.

Sure, man.

I really dig this one.

All right, guys, what if researchers handed off the redesign of the most sensitive instrument we've ever created to an AI?

That's exactly what researchers have done for gravitational wave detectors, and these new designs seem better than any we have come up with.

The next gravitational wave detectors we build might not just represent the next generation, but a leap to the one after that.

And imagine if after the baby boomer generation, we went directly to millennials.

This would absolutely not be like that.

The paper is published on Physical Review X, Digital Discovery of Interferometric Gravitational Wave Detectors.

It's a good read.

Most of it, of course, is jargon everywhere, but some parts of it are eminently understandable, at least by me.

So gravitational wave detectors, we've gone over them many times, but

let's do a brief overview.

They detect those mind-bogglingly faint ripples in space-time caused by accelerating masses.

Our current detectors, like LIGO, can now detect the ripples caused by neutron stars or some black holes that are orbiting each other ever closer, right, until they collide.

We can detect them, and we have.

To do this, they use laser beams at right angles, L-shaped, right, L-shaped, they say, to act as interferometers.

Now, gravitational waves change the length of

one of the beams, changing the interference pattern between the two beams that we can detect and then interpret and figure out what exactly caused them.

Now these machines are fiendishly complex but so sensitive they can detect changes less than the width of a freaking proton, less than the width of a proton.

Incredible.

We have plans for future gravitational wave detectors, but they use tried and true design principles for the most part, even the ones that are space-based.

The lead researcher here is Dr.

Mario Kren, who helms the artificial scientist lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light.

For this research,

he and his team joined forces with LIGO researchers, which of course makes sense because that's their babies.

So together, they made Urania.

Hmm.

Where is it Urania?

U-R-A-N-I-A.

Urania is pretty slick.

It's not an LLM, not a large language model, or it's not even a neural net.

It's based on machine learning methods, and that means that it's a subset of AI that uses algorithms and statistical methods, which learn from data to make decisions.

That's just a basic overview of what that is.

Now, Urania doesn't look at gravitational wave detectors and try to improve it.

This is key.

It starts with a performance goal, and then it works backward to discover the optical designs that can reach that goal.

That's critical here.

So

it's like an evolutionary algorithm.

There's a lot of

similarities between that and evolutionary algorithms that are based on physics that incrementally builds better and better gravitational wave detectors based on the performance

feedback with like every generation that's created.

So, what did

Urania discover?

What do you think, guys?

Tell me what you think would be the first thing researchers would love for Urania to discover.

The first thing.

I would want to see, and what they saw was the gravitational wave detectors that we already have.

Like basically, hey, here's LIGO.

That was very, very important because

if it designs LIGO from scratch, that means that you're doing something right because you know LIGO works when you use it every day.

And if it says, hey, this will work, then you know that you're probably, it's going to increase your confidence level that you were on the right track with your ANIA.

Okay, so that's exactly what they got.

They got designs that they know they've already created and they know it works.

Yeah, so that's like any model.

The first thing you want to do is show that it predicts what you already know.

Right.

That's fair.

Okay.

But that's not enough.

That's not enough.

That just means that at least there's nothing broken about it.

Right.

So, yeah.

So it gives you, so this gives it the fact that

it predicted or created designs that you know already work gives you confidence that other designs that it might come up with are probably

have a more

greater chance of actually being actually decent.

And Urania did absolutely do that.

But it made designs.

The cool thing here is that it created these designs that nobody thought of and nobody probably would have thought

of maybe ever or for a very long time.

And I'll describe some of the designs that they came up with.

It had designs that were very, that had very non-intuitive light paths.

So they weren't the typical L-shaped right-angled laser paths.

They were like weirdly intricate nested paths that don't use any type of normal beam splitter logic, right?

Some designs had optical components that were arranged in such a way that no designer would ever put them together that way.

It didn't make any sense.

So the optimization logic for some of the designs were totally opaque to the researchers.

They're like, why this optimization design doesn't make doesn't seem to make any sense.

Why would this optimize

this detector?

They didn't know.

But the next step, the next critical step here was testing the designs.

And they, of course, they have a way of testing them without spending millions of dollars by building them and testing them that way, right?

You don't want to do that.

That's ridiculous.

They would have built 50 of these.

So to do that, to test these designs that Urania came up with, they use the tools and the simulations that they use, that they already use for LIGO upgrades.

And they use these tools to test other observatories like Cosmic Explorer.

and the Einstein telescope, which is a next-generation interferometric gravitational wave detector.

So we use those tools that we know they work extremely well.

And they know that these tools can say, this design will most likely work and you could make, you can spend, you know, it's worth risking millions of dollars because

the tests have been so successful.

So these are the kind of tests that they brought to bear on these new designs, these weird, intricate, bizarre, unintuitive, non-intuitive designs that Urania came up with.

That's what the tools that they used.

The result of this was designs that were shown to be using these tools that were not only better than current instruments, but better than anything that we have on the drawing board.

by

like a two generations beyond anything that they were even thinking of.

So one of the designs that Urania made extended the sensitivity band deeper into the sub-10 Hertz range.

So that sub-10 Hertz range would be critical for observing heavier black hole mergers earlier in their co-orbiting in spiral.

And that's one of the problems with current gravitational wave detectors is the mass range of black holes that you can detect.

So this would help with that.

But one of the most intriguing findings had really novel topologies, you know, design.

detector designs that look like they could expand our current observable volume in space up to 50 times our current detectors.

Because right now, these detectors can find amazingly faint gravitational waves from certain sized black holes, but

you can't just detect them at any distance in space because eventually it's going to be so attenuated we can't even detect it.

These designs, or some of these designs, seem to be able to

potentially increase our observable volume in space up to 50 times, which is amazing.

50 times.

That's incredible.

Okay, so

how exciting is this?

I think it's pretty amazing.

This reminds me specifically of Ted Chang's short story.

Got to talk about my buddy Ted Chang here, one of my favorite authors.

He created a super short, short story called The Evolution of Human Science.

And the parallels here are really interesting.

So in his story, human science discoveries stop.

And it has stopped because there is

these benign meta-humans that have been born, you know, genetically engineered.

And these metahumans make all the new discoveries and they make all the inventions because they're just so ridiculously smart.

But they're also incomprehensible to us.

So in order

for neurotypical humans, if you will, to learn any new scientific principles, what they have to do is they have to employ what's called hermeneutics, which Kara had mentioned, I think, a couple of years ago.

Awesome word.

So they employ hermeneutics, and that means that they try to interpret and understand the science and technology of the metahumans, who are so smart that we can't understand what they create or publish.

So we have to try to infer new scientific principles by the objects that they create and what little documentation there is that's comprehensible.

So that's the story.

And it seems like that's kind of like

this era of scientific discovery that we're creating here with AI.

We're kind of going down that road to a certain extent.

And let me just say here a quote by Kren, who seems to agree with me.

He said, we are in an era where machines can discover new superhuman solutions in science.

And the task of humans is to understand what the machine has done.

This will certainly become a very prominent part of the future of science.

So very interesting point of view there that I obviously agree with.

So humans, let me just try to describe this in another way.

Humans have relatively easy access to a portion of the design space for gravitational wave detectors, right?

We've created them, we've theorized them, we use them.

So we kind of have this ability to access a portion of this design space.

We don't know how big that is, but we obviously can have some insight into a part of it.

But we're also in a bit of a straitjacket of old assumptions and design traditions, right?

And even the limitations of the human brain is also kind of a straitjacket for solving some of these issues.

So these

AI tools don't have these limitations.

It just optimizes based on physics and performance goals.

That's what it does.

So how much more of that total possible design space will they see?

I want to see that.

I want to see how far they can go

in creating these designs that we will, you know, may have never even dreamt up in a million years.

So, the researchers took, the next step was that the researchers took the top 50 designs and put them in a catalog called the Detector Zoo.

Now, this is public.

Other researchers, other scientific institutions can look at these designs, study them, and learn from them, and maybe even refine them, and hopefully, eventually even construct some of them.

So,

I'll end my talk here with a chat GPT quote on this topic,

which I liked.

So, my chat GPT said to me, he's like, it's like we taught AI the language of mirrors and lasers, and it spoke back to us in a dialect we barely understand, which was, I thought, was a pretty good quote.

When it said that to me, I said, where did you get that quote?

Give me the reference to that quote.

And it's like, and my chat GPT said, I thought it up myself.

This is from me.

Probably telling me the truth.

I'm not, you can't be 100% sure.

Fuck Mark Twain said that.

There you go.

No, it was Abraham Lincoln.

So, yeah, this is really fascinating.

We're starting to see this, Steve.

You'll agree, we're starting to see this in

other fields where the assistance that we are getting from AI is quite dramatic in scientific discovery.

And I think we're just barely scratching the surface here.

And

to me,

this Urania was one of the better examples that I've come across.

And it's also being applied to particle physics and quantum physics as well.

So I am really excited over the next 10 or 20 years to see

what these machine learning tools,

these AI tools can come up with

and design and think about

in a way that we may never be able to do.

We may struggle, and I assume in the future we're going to be struggling even harder as these designs become even more complex and

obtuse to our way of thinking.

It's going to be fascinating to have these advances that we may never even be able to figure out.

We know that they work, but like those characters in Ted Chang's novel, we know that they work amazingly well.

We just can't understand at all what's going on inside.

Bob, can we use this method to design a better hoverbike?

I would think absolutely.

You just give it a lot of data on hoverbike data and studies and everything.

And I think it probably could come up with one that we never would have thought of.

All right.

Thanks.

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

All right, guys.

Last week I played this noisy.

Okay, Dr.

Zaius would

make a human doll that talked.

A listener named Benjamin Davu said, Hey guys, Ben here, the Frenchie from Japan.

I think I got this one.

This is a bamboo leaf held between two thumbs, and the user blows on it to make it vibrate.

Also seems like a pinched rubber balloon, but I really think it's the leaf.

This one, and a ton of people guessed that this was a blade of grass in a similar situation.

This is not correct, but there is a definite similarity between that noise and, you know, basically creating like a reed instrument with some type of plant or grass or whatever.

Another listener named Braden Ellis said, I think this week's sound is a baby goat having its teeth brushed.

That sounds like a video that I missed, but sure, yeah, I could see that.

Ben Borger wrote in and said, hello, everyone.

This week's noisy is a rubber chicken.

The change in pitch is controlled by how hard you squeeze the rubber chicken.

I've had so many people email in the rubber chicken answer.

I think this might be the first time I mentioned it.

I'm not sure.

But it does kind of sound like a rubber chicken a little bit, and I think it was a good guess.

I don't think it sounds like a rubber chicken.

To me, whatever it is, I do not want it to be behind me on the airplane.

Yeah, of course not.

Of course not.

It would be a nightmare flight.

Oh, boy.

Alexis Collins wrote in and said to Jay, we'd like to listen to your podcast with our dad in Kildare, Ireland.

We think this week's Noisy is a rollout party blower that has a small hole in it at the end.

You know, those little party failures you blow and the thing rolls out.

It goes, oh, yeah.

It's not that, but there's a little bit of that in there.

I can hear that.

Another listener wrote in named Stephen.

Stephen said, Jay, it's a cat pretending to be a baby.

My cat is always pretending to be a baby.

So I want to hear that.

So if your cat pretends to be a baby and makes baby noises, email me at wtn at the skepticsguy.org.

Listener named Omar Moynuddin.

Omar, you've got to tell me how to pronounce your last name.

He says, hey, Jay, this noisy sounds just like my two-year-old when you give him a mic and a speaker.

He puts his mouth directly on the mic and makes these sounds.

So this, that guess is actually not that far from what's what's going on here.

Just keep that in mind.

And then, you know, the closest one that we got was a listener named Michael Sucito.

Michael said, Hey, Jay, it sounds like a small mammal.

I'm going to say a porcupine getting its belly tickled.

Okay, so what this actually is, is this is a baby otter playing with its hand and its mouth.

What?

It's a little baby otter who's using his hand to kind of go

like that in his mouth.

Listen again, and you'll hear it.

Yeah, Jay, I caught a little bit of the la la la la.

Of course, you did.

I think that's utterly ridiculous.

Yes, it is.

So, anyway, Steve did the heavy lifting.

Baby otter.

I know.

I love how you're like, thanks, man.

I got you covered everywhere.

That was solid.

You're a good man, Steve.

But I would rather have a baby otter than one of those, what is it, a French bulldog?

You know, the ones that talk a lot?

Oh, they do sound like that.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All sorts of crazy stuff.

Those dogs.

There's one of them I like in particular.

This woman carries him around in a baby carriage, and he goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Like, literally sounds like a guy with no teeth saying blah, blah, blah.

Oh, I know that lady on the end.

And she's always like, you're embarrassing me.

Stop.

Oh, that's, yeah,

my son and I listen to him all the time.

He's the one that did that song.

Right, if you know it, you know it.

Yes, yes, that one.

The car.

Yeah.

That dog is awesome.

But never would I own one of those dogs.

Just never.

Because they are so vocal and bad.

You know, they're just they sound like they're angry and upset all the time.

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

This noisy was sent in by a listener named Kenny Haberman.

It's a little long, but you got to hear the whole thing.

Wow, that's the hover bike.

Yeah, I love those types of sounds.

They are so freaking, I don't know.

They're just very powerful.

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

Did I say that correctly?

Email us at WTN at the skepticsguide.org.

Now, you might wonder, Jay, how did you screw that up after doing Who's That Noisy for so long?

I am so busy that I can't see straight getting ready for the conference.

I've got so many details that I've got to handle.

But the thing

that you need to hear from me right now is that it's still not too late to go.

Wow.

You could hear this within a few days of when the show comes out and easily buy some tickets and show up in White Plains and have the time of your life.

We are really excited.

I mean, we just

were going through all the details.

You know, we have nine people involved as directors for this.

for this conference.

And, you know, we're just constantly upping the ante on all the bits that we're doing and refining everything.

And it's really, really coming out awesome.

I'm so psyched, guys.

I can't wait.

We're going to have such a good time.

So, if you're interested, just go to nataconcon.com or you can go to the skepticsguide.org, and there'll be a button on there on the home page for you to get more information.

But tickets are available.

We'd love to have you.

A couple more quick things.

You could join our mailing list.

You can go to the skepticsguide.org, and we have a way for you to join our mailing list on there.

We send out a mailer every week that goes over everything that the SGU has done the previous week.

You could also become a patron to help show your support, especially during these times when skepticism and critical thinking need to be out there.

You know, we are expanding the amount of things that we're doing.

We have new shows that we're working on.

I told you guys this.

They're going to be happening over the next few months.

We're very excited, but your support would help a lot.

So go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide.

Steve, what else we got?

We have the Kansas show.

Kansas.

Yeah.

We will be in Kansas.

We'll be not not too far from Kansas City in a town called Lawrence.

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

That means the entire cast of the SGU, Kara, Evan, Bob, Steve, me, George Robb.

And if you look quick, you might catch a glimpse of Ian doing some fancy stuff behind the mixing board.

Everybody loves Ian.

Every single one of us thinks Ian is awesome, and he hates when I say this, but that's the truth.

He's listening, right?

That's why we love him.

And if you know, you know.

But Ian might have another watermelon incident.

You don't want to not be there because if another cool thing like that happens again, you want to be on home plate to see it happen for yourself.

Anyway, those dates,

the weekend of September 19th.

I believe both of our shows are happening on the Saturday of that weekend.

Please consider coming.

It's going to be a great time.

And who knows when we'll be out to Kansas again?

This might be a very long time.

So please try to join us if you're local.

There you go.

Thank you, Jay.

One really quick email.

This one comes from Jim from Michigan, and Jim writes: Thanks for the informative and entertaining show.

I had a friend recently questioned me about miracles.

I told him that I had not seen any evidence of a miracle.

He then asked me if I believed the Big Bang theory, not the show.

I told him that I did, and that it was, in my opinion, the most likely explanation for the beginning of our universe.

He then stated that the cosmic inflation aspect violated our physics laws because it expanded faster than the speed of light.

He stated that this would qualify as a miracle.

I did not have a reply other than to thank him for giving me something to think about.

I am curious what your thoughts are regarding this.

Keep up the good work.

So, what do you guys think?

That does not break any laws of physics because

space can expand faster than light.

You just can't move within that space faster than light.

Exactly.

So, the premise is wrong.

It's a faulty premise.

Next letter.

But there's also a logical fallacy in there.

What is that?

A good bet whenever someone's claiming a miracle is what is a logical fallacy.

God of the gaps.

Yeah, the fact that we don't understand it.

The fact that we don't understand something doesn't mean that you have to then.

Therefore, God.

Therefore God.

God of the gaps.

So, yeah, it's an argument from ignorance.

The specific version of that being what we call a God of the gaps argument.

We insert God or a miracle into something that we don't currently understand.

You could also frame it as confusing currently unexplained with unexplainable.

Like there's no possible way to explain it, therefore, it's magic.

But yeah, so the premise is wrong, but even if it were correct, even we didn't currently understand it, that just means that we don't have a complete set of laws of physics for the universe yet, which we don't, right?

Our laws are at present incomplete, and things like the Big Bang are where those laws break down, right?

We don't have a quantum gravity law in physics, for example.

We do not yet have a theory of everything.

So it's also like saying, well, black holes couldn't exist, therefore that there are miracles.

It's like, no, that's pointing in the direction of we need more complete physics in order to describe what happens in weird situations like black holes and the Big Bang.

But in this case, he's not even up to bat because as Bob said, the universe can expand faster than the speed of light.

That's not the same thing as traveling faster than the speed of light within the universe.

So he got his premise wrong, too.

Double failure.

Okay, guys, let's go on with our interview.

Joining us now is Melanie Trisick King.

Melanie, welcome to the Skeptic's Guide.

Oh, thank you for having me.

I'm so happy to be here.

And, Melanie, you're an associate professor of biology at Massasoit Community College, and you are also an activist skeptic running the

multiple things.

Thinking is power, I think.

Would you say that's your main outlet?

Yeah.

So tell us how you got started in all this, and why did you decide to incorporate this whole skeptical thing into your academic career?

My background is ecology, and I'm from the Midwest.

And when my husband got a job across the country, I'm from Iowa.

We moved across the country to Massachusetts.

I started teaching at a community college, and I love teaching at a community college.

But I was finding myself teaching the science courses for people who don't want to scientists when they grow up and love those courses.

But I finally realized, with as much as I love biology, that was probably not the best use of their time.

And so

I

thought if I had a single semester to teach the average person what they need to know about science, what would that look like?

And I'm a bit ashamed to say that I actually didn't know about the skeptic movement during that time.

And so I.

How long ago are we talking about?

Oh, this was five years ago, maybe six.

Okay.

Yeah, not very long.

When I finally, when I found the skeptic movement, I found so many resources that I didn't know were there.

And I was incorporating basic concepts anyway, but this gave me so much more to include in class.

And so, yeah, then I started communicating that online on Thinking is Power, thinking maybe people who weren't my students would be interested.

And yeah, that's where I am.

Just took off from there.

Do you have a like a specialty within the whole scientific skeptical thing that you focus on?

Or are you trying to really hit like any issue?

Like I said, a lot of your videos range from alternative medicine to

more biological topics to climate change.

Do you trying to cover it all or do you have a specialty?

I mean, so I think broadly speaking, my specialty would just be misinformation.

But I joke that my science communication is for the normals.

I mean, that's who my students are.

They're just people who are mildly curious, don't have lots of time to spend looking into these things, and are open to things.

And so

there's a lot of them out there.

And so what I try and do is just take a lot of the different concepts that other people specialize in and then distill them to where maybe somebody who doesn't have a lot of time and interest can learn something about.

So starting off, say, you know, five, six years ago, basically as just a scientist, you know, a biologist, and then trying to get into the host skeptical thing.

How do you feel your science background prepared you for all of the content that is necessary to understand in order to fight misinformation and pseudoscience?

Did you feel like, oh, you're basically starting from scratch, or did you feel well prepared for that transition?

That's a really good question.

I feel like, so the class that I designed ended up being, it's for non-majors.

Yeah.

But what I realized in the process was that I didn't know a lot.

Like there was a lot about pseudoscience and science denial and conspiratorial thinking that I didn't know about, and actually, even basic philosophy of science.

And so, learning those things

I think made me a better science educator.

But then, I actually think that we need to do a better job.

I'd be curious your thoughts on this too, but we need to teach more science majors these things.

I mean, we see way too many, you know, medical professionals and falling for, for example, anti-vaccine anti-vaccine or even thinking homeopathy works.

And so I think we could do a better job teaching our future scientists.

Me personally, I feel like my science background prepared me for a little niche within science, but not necessarily to help understand the misinformation in the science.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's my experience as well.

all the critical thinking, media savvy, science versus pseudoscience, logical fallacies, all of that stuff.

I was not taught that in school, you know, as part of my

education, either undergraduate or medical school or whatever, at any time

during that extensive education, right?

That was all just completely separate from formal education.

That information is out there.

And I think you had a lot easier time in 2020 than we had in 1990 or 1995.

Because, yeah, there's a the amount of resources that are out there now are massive.

But you're right, it's very hit or miss.

What I find like with my own residents, fellows, students, or whatever, is that they could be all over the map.

Some of them, I think it's just all like what mentors you happen to come across, you know, in your training.

Some of them are very well equipped, you know, to deal with misinformation and pseudoscience.

Others have absolutely no idea.

Not only straight, not only pseudoscience, but even pathological science within mainstream science, which, you know, these are two sides of the same coin.

Right?

So it's, you're right.

There's no systematic way of teaching it, which we absolutely need.

Yeah, I actually, and I did have something that you did not have for sure, which is your book.

Honestly, your book was so helpful in my process.

Yeah.

So thank you.

Yeah, well, that was why we wrote it.

We bestly

got to put all this in one space.

Yeah.

I mean, there were, and we had, you know, predecessors too.

We obviously read the demon-haunted world,

why people believe weird things.

There were books along the way.

And so this, I think,

we like talking with younger skeptical activists because it does provide a lot of continuity,

like generational continuity.

We've got to keep this movement going, right?

We're not going to be here forever.

And so even though a lot of it

feels like reinventing the wheel, but it is, it's important, I think, for each generation to have new voices.

Yes, we're going, we're debunking the same shit.

We've been doing it for 200 years.

I mean, it's amazing.

You know, when we, sometimes I do a deep dive on a topic.

Like I remember I was looking at magnet, you know, devices, like fraudulent snake oil magnet devices.

And I found a reference to a book that was written in 1850, systematically debunking snake oil magnetic healing devices.

All the same shit we're dealing with today.

It's like, wow, they

did this 200 years ago.

And it was amazing.

It's like, it's all just, just, so

we're just passing it forward.

You know what I mean?

And we are building, I think, a knowledge base.

I do think we are more knowledgeable how to do this than previous generations.

Oh, of course.

Yeah, we're standing on their shoulders.

I think one of the things the skeptic music movement really taught me was that, so as a science educator,

nearly every science course, especially for the introductory stuff, starts with

chapter one, the scientific method.

And for those of you who can't see me, I'm now air quoting scientific method, right?

Here are the steps that you do to do a science, and then it gets done, and then like, here's everything that we know.

And it's presented like a collection of facts that are tried and true and never going to change.

And this is what we know for certain.

And what the skeptic movement really taught me was why do we need the scientific method?

Right?

We need it because we are irrational and biased and flawed and emotional and unreliable narrators of our own experience?

Like, why isn't I tried it and felt better, sufficient evidence?

Or why isn't I saw it so I know it's real?

And so,

you know, I designed the course, and I, it's kind of scared me at first because I now spend probably the first, I want to say, like, third of the semester

on what I call critical thinking, but it's basically epistemology, metacognition,

the limits of perception and memory, cognitive biases, all of that then gets to a place where when I introduce science, students know why we need science.

And so in other classes, when I start, you know, day one, here's a scientific method, I think I'm missing some really important stuff here because how are students to know why this information is more reliable than anything else?

And so

that was an important lesson.

And the other thing was just the basic idea of including misinformation.

A lot of student classes don't include them.

So how are students to know the difference between reliable and unreliable information if you don't bring that into the classroom and help them grapple with it, help them understand the differences?

Absolutely.

And I still think there's a bit of a stigma within academia about

touching upon fringe topics or talking about pseudoscience or bringing, as you say, you got to bring it into the classroom.

They just feel uncomfortable with it.

I still get that a lot.

Or at best, it's like, well, I'm glad you're doing it.

You know, do you get that a lot?

Do you get the, well, good thing you're, I don't have to worry about it now because you're taking care of it.

You know, because I don't know, just, it's, which is unfortunate.

It's like, no, you should, we shouldn't be embracing this with both hands.

This is the most important thing that we need to do:

teach people how to tell the difference between what's real and what's not real.

That is what science is all about.

So, why do you not want to do that?

When I start the semester, day one,

I

start by fooling students.

I do the

Randy, James Randy made it famous, but it came from Bertram for the fake personality or astrology reading.

Astrology.

Yeah.

Classic.

Yeah, it's great.

They fall for it, hook, line, and sinker, right?

And it turns out I'm a decent liar, but it's for a good cause, right?

So I tell students like giant

backstory.

I have a friend who's a great astrologer, and I'm not going to tell you who she is, but I get some basic information from them.

I make them think I'm really deep diving into their personality.

The next class, I give them their readings, how accurate is she?

And I've been doing this for a long time, and about 4.3 to 4.5 out of 5, which is about what four found.

So now get with somebody around you and talk about your reading.

And why do you think it's reliable?

Why do you think she was able to know this?

And sometimes it takes them like 10 minutes before they realize they all got the same reading because they're cherry-picking.

Like, this worked for me.

There's denying that.

It's a game, though.

It's a joke.

Like, it's a low-stakes environment where I'm able to, yeah, okay, yes, I lied to you.

Am I sorry?

You know, like, not really.

Will I do it again?

I might, you know, right?

So I want you to be skeptical.

I don't want you to just trust what I'm saying.

But the real lesson is I could tell you I could fool you.

And you'd be like, oh, sure.

I'm writing a book on misinformation right now.

And every time I talk to somebody about misinformation, they're like, oh, that's fascinating.

Oh, can you believe what people fall for?

Oh, my God.

People are so stupid.

And it's like, how long until I get to the misinformation that they believe right because we all have something so with the students it's like um if i told you i could fool you you wouldn't believe me so i fool you to prove to you i can fool you now if you don't want to be fooled have the humility to recognize that and now we need to practice our skepticism and here's how we do that

yeah i mean that's you know, that is a tried and true method within skeptical seminars to lecture.

I do it all the time.

What I find a little challenging, you have to really up your game.

So yeah, I love talking to naive audiences, meaning they're not steeped in skepticism because everything works on them because they haven't seen any of it before.

But then when you're talking to like people who are in the skeptical movement or who like, like you're telling them ahead of time, I'm giving you a lecture on how you could be fooled.

And so then their

guard is way up or they, you know,

it becomes a lot harder to get away with that, but you still can do it.

You just got to know which ones will sell, even to a prepared audience.

And so if you find something that works on more skeptical audiences, you simply must share.

Because

you're right.

The ones in the skeptic movement, they know these tricks.

So you have to find one.

And even if you find one where they know you're fooling them, they just maybe not are able to figure out how.

That even works.

Yeah.

Like, you're not going to get them on the astrology one, on the four effect.

Like, don't even bother.

Or even like, there's a, you have to go one level deeper.

It's like, for example, you know, you know, the gorilla video, right?

The invisible gorilla.

Well, there's a, there's a follow-up to that where it's meant for people who know the invisible gorilla video, where they throw another deception in there, another inattentional blindness.

So people think they know it, but they really don't.

So that's the kind of thing that you have to do.

You could find that on the website.

Of course, we're giving it away now to anyone listening to this episode, but

spoiler alert.

But that's the kind of thing you got to do.

You got to figure out, all right, you got to get more obscure, or you got to do it in a way they don't realize realize you're doing it, or you got to do it, you got to divert their attention to things you they think they know while you're doing something else.

It becomes, yeah, it's a little tricky, and you're not going to get them on everything either.

So, you know, you just got to accept that and just say, This is a demonstration.

I know you guys are skeptical, you've heard all these before, but for what it's worth, right?

And then you've got to pick the ones too.

The last thing I'll say is you got to pick the ones that work even when you know it's happening.

For example, like anchoring is a great one.

You know, about anchoring, like you show people a picture of a house and you you tell half the people without the other half knowing, does this house cost more or less, cost

more than a million dollars?

You ask the other people, does this cost more or less than $200,000?

And then you ask them to guess the actual price.

And of course, they're going to anchor to whatever you told them.

And so even if they kind of know about anchoring and they know about the demonstration, it'll still influence them.

It's kind of hard for it not to.

So you still get a good effect out of it.

Or there's all the priming stuff.

Like you can't not, you can't make yourself immune to that, you know, even when you know what's happening.

You know, it's like, if you've ever seen a really good mentalist like Banichek, I was going to bring up mentalism because you know they're fooling you.

Yes.

You just don't know how.

Right, exactly.

If they're really good, they have to be good, though.

Like the one, the bad ones, not so much, but the good ones like Banichek.

Doesn't matter if you could know, you know, even have an idea of the kinds of things they could be doing.

It doesn't matter.

They're good enough to fool you.

There's just too many ways to do it.

So Melanie, you mentioned your book.

So you were currently writing this book or

is it coming out soon?

What's the status on that?

Yeah, it's coming out next fall.

So I'm

in the midst of writing.

And how's it going?

Goodness.

I have newfound respect for people who've written books.

This is an emotional roller coaster.

I'm having a great time doing it.

On other days, I may tell you something else.

But the book is A Field Guide to misinformation and it's basically about understanding the different forms that misinformation takes.

And not just, so there's a lot of great organizations that focus on specific kinds of misinformation and they do great work.

But I feel like a lot of what's missing there is why we fall for misinformation.

And so it's also understanding ourselves and our own vulnerabilities to different kinds of misinformation.

So the threading the needle of why might I be vulnerable to this and how to understand how this particular kind of misinformation works.

Out of curiosity, are you discussing politics at all?

Oh, that's actually a really good question.

I try, I use what I call a trading wheels approach, which is I purposefully wade people into the shallow end.

I'm giving lots of metaphors here and I don't mean to.

I teach people how to think and how misinformation works using examples that aren't emotionally or identity triggering, so that they learn the skills and then hopefully graduate to something else.

That's why I start with like the astrology reading, and then I go into like witchcraft and psychics, and I work my way to like evolution denial, or climate change denial, or vaccines, but I don't start there.

So, with a book, I'm trying really hard to spend most of my time on examples

that would not trigger the vast majority of people.

I'm also also very aware that we're in a time where the concept of misinformation itself has become political and is the subject of a lot of conspiracies, skepticism, and that the people who most need to read a book like this, I don't want to turn them off right away.

Yeah, I mean, you have to thread that needle.

We all have to do it from time to time.

I mean, it's, for us, it's been very much like we don't discuss politics on the SGU again.

Well, to clarify, we are non-partisan.

A lot of the topics that we deal with, like we've talked about gun violence, for example, you know, and gun safety laws.

That's massively political.

But we say we try to talk about the science and to try to stay as non-partisan and politically neutral as possible, which is impossible.

But whatever, we do the best we can.

Say, well, at least let's talk about the science.

Then there are topics where you could tell me what you think about this.

It's just unavoidable.

It's so unavoidable that even within the skeptical community, community, everyone has taken political corners, which is incredible.

Like the whole trans issue, everyone has taken to their political corner on that issue.

And we're not supposed to do that.

Like we're the one movement who's not supposed to do that.

And yet, here we are.

Something like climate change comes to mind too.

It's climate change, like the one predictor,

the single most predictive factor, whether somebody accepts or denies climate change, is political affiliation.

And as soon as issues become attached to our identity, they're very hard to dislodge, and especially if they become a tribal issue.

And we obviously need to be able to address those issues.

But something else with addressing those issues is that, like somebody who denies climate change or denies evolution, or

going in with the facts on those issues or going in with the science is not going to convince somebody because that's not how they got there.

It's not a knowledge deficit problem.

Right.

And so helping them

understand their own thinking,

why they may have gotten there without following the science.

It certainly feels like we did, right?

None of us think, oh, I'm denying science or I'm falling for pseudoscience.

Yeah, so it's a dicey issue.

I joke that with my class, it's way easier.

My students are captive for a semester.

They want a grade, and so they have to stick with me for four months as I walk them through and then finally get them to the deep end and we can take off the training wheels.

Online and in real world, it's much harder than that.

And it requires somebody to

take a deep dive into their own thinking and really be willing to be skeptical not of what they've heard, but of their own thinking processes.

So, what, and you have your

mainly on YouTube, you're putting out your series of videos?

I mean, you have to do all the social media these days.

You can't just do one.

As far as social media channels, my biggest platform is Facebook.

I try on Instagram.

I don't understand Instagram.

I am on TikTok and I'm trying on YouTube.

Stick with it.

It is funny how they all have their own sort of personality and they skew to different demographics and they're different little subcultures.

They all have their own little online subculture.

Again, we try to do everything, but like currently we've been doing a lot of TikTok.

It's very frustrating because the culture on TikTok is so anti-intellectual.

It's overwhelming.

It's really overwhelming.

I've watched your videos on TikTok if that makes you feel better.

Thank you.

No, I mean, we're there.

Obviously, we think we're getting something done, but man, it's rough some weeks.

Facebook is great.

It's just old.

I mean, it's just for old people, which is fine, you know, but you can't just, you know, you can't just do Facebook because you're going to be missing a whole generation.

Once their parents got on Facebook, the kids all got off Facebook, basically.

Well, there are at least a lot of people on Facebook.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we do everything as well, but you just got to figure out whatever works for you.

It's all an experiment.

There's no formula.

And I have heard for what it's worth that the largest podcasting platform is actually YouTube.

So Melanie, tell us where is the best place that our listeners can find you.

So my major platform is Facebook.

I'm also on Instagram and TikTok and YouTube.

All of those are at Thinking Powers.

And I have a website, thinkingispower.com.

Great.

So if they go to ThinkingisPower, that'll get to to everything.

Yes, everything.

Awesome.

Okay.

Well, Melanie, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you, Melanie.

It's time for science or fiction.

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

I have three news items, but they all happen to be in the same theme.

These all have to do with metallurgy.

All right, here we go.

Item number one, researchers at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and energy usage by 18%.

I number two, scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes

that is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.

And iron number three, researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods.

Kara, go first.

So in Max Planck, or at Max Planck, they devised a single-step method for extracting.

You said that was nickel?

Can you hear me?

Nickel.

Yes.

Okay, cool.

For extracting nickel from ore, it reduces the total carbon footprint by 84%, energy usage by 18%.

The total carbon footprint of the extraction process, I'm assuming, is what you mean.

Okay.

UT scientists developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal.

Oh my god, I don't know.

Nanopore membranes.

So that would be like trace amounts of rare earth metals.

Three times faster than existing methods, half the energy.

Okay, so we've got 84% carbon reduction, 18% energy reduction.

Then we've got three times faster, half the energy.

And then at Penn State,

we've got lithium extraction, minutes rather than hours, no toxic chemicals, much less energy.

So that one's vaguer.

That one doesn't have any specific numbers.

I don't know.

Which of these things is harder to do?

To extract nickel from ore, to separate rare earth metals, or to extract lithium?

And which one do we need the most?

I mean, we need the rare earth metals, so I think people are probably working on that faster.

I'm going to say that that one is the science.

It might be the fiction, because who freaking knows?

But I'm going to say that one's the science because that's probably what there's more effort in right now and more money being put towards is the rare earth metals.

So then that leaves nickel and lithium.

I think we need lithium even more.

I don't know if we need as much nickel.

We probably do.

But I'll call the nickel one the fiction.

I don't know.

It was a total shot in the dark.

Okay, Evan?

It would be easier if I knew what the multi-step method for extracting nickel was.

So I could make some kind of good comparison here to these 84%

to the carbon footprint, 84% reduction, and the energy usage of 18% savings.

The second one, the industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions.

Nanopore.

Nanopore membranes.

I don't know that.

Three times faster than existing methods.

Half as much energy?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Metallurgy, really, Steve.

Can we have a different topic?

It just happened to be over here.

They're all news items, you know, from this week.

This all happened to be around.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

These were all over TikTok.

Metallurgy also involving things that we really need.

And the last one here about the

new technique for extracting lithium.

All right.

Whenever I see something like new technique for something,

that leans me towards the science section because, yeah, you could have the technique down.

It doesn't mean you're going to necessarily have the immediate results.

It's more like a proof of concept kind of things.

And I think those things turn out more to be more science rather than fiction.

So therefore,

tell you what, Kara,

I'm going to join you.

I'm going to say nickel.

Extracting nickel is the fiction, and I don't know why.

Same, same.

Okay, Jay.

I think it's

the last one here.

Researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that they could do it in minutes rather than hours.

Oh, that's right.

The researchers were from some other university, right?

Yeah, I think that one is the fake.

Which one?

The Penn state one okay all right and bob yeah i mean i don't know enough about any of these technologies to have any big red flags the only the main thing that stuck out to me is uh the lithium one the the third one and and my attitude is it's it probably too good to be true or you know because it'd be great for for batteries so i'll say that one's fiction i'll join with jay So you all agree on the second one.

You have a chance to sweep us right now, Steve.

We'll start there.

We'll see.

Scientists at the University of Texas have developed an industrial process for separating rare earth metals from common metal ions using nanopore membranes.

That is three times faster than existing methods while requiring half as much energy.

You guys all think this one is science, and this one is the fiction.

Oh, wow.

I did

it for you.

Just like that, people.

Just like that.

Yep.

But this is based on the real news, isn't it?

That does have to do with rare earth metals and nanopore membranes.

But it's not an industrial process.

This is just a laboratory proof of concept.

So there's no data on how much faster, how much energy, nothing, because they just didn't do it on any scale.

It was just like the basic science of trying to figure out how to make pores that will be selective in terms of which kinds of ions can pass through.

So it's a good start.

You know, it might be the kind of thing where down five, ten years from now, you might have something.

It was able to

have greater affinity for, again, for rare earths versus potassium, magnesium, like calcium, those kind of ions.

But also it was able to have differential

preference for the lighter rare earths versus the middle rare earths, not the middle earths, and the

heavy rare earths.

So yeah, it has potential, has potential, but this is still a ways off.

So, you know, the big problem with the rare earths, they're critical for tons of modern technology, electronics, for batteries, for

lots of things, but they're very difficult to purify from ore, and they're also very difficult to reclaim from recycled electronics.

They require a lot of toxic chemicals.

They're very bad for the environment, and they're slow, right?

So in fact, it's the...

The refining of the rare earths is really more the limiting factor in terms of supply than mining the ore.

And we actually have rare earths in the U.S., not as much as in other parts of the world, like China.

Some minor point.

Yeah, but

we just have no capacity to refine it.

You know, that China has most of the world's ability to refine rare earths.

So, being able to come up with a process that's more environmentally friendly and that is more, of course, efficient would be fantastic.

But there's a lot of work to to do before we get there.

Let's go back to number one.

Research at the Max Planck.

That's all right.

China will steal it and then make it and make it work.

Yeah, they'll make it work.

Research at the Max Planck Institute have devised a single-step method for extracting nickel from ore that reduces the total carbon footprint by 84% and use and energy usage by 18% is science.

This is a pretty significant advance, and this is

well on its way to application.

So, this process has a number of advantages.

For one thing, it can use lower quality ores.

Like right now, we have to use sort of the high-quality nickel ores because the lower-quality ones are way more complicated to extract the nickel.

There's more complex, more complex chemical compounds with nickel in them.

And so, it takes multiple steps using a lot of carbon and a lot of energy.

In fact, if we make batteries, you know, batteries and EVs have a lot of nickel in them you know arguably we're not actually reducing the carbon by much we're just shifting it to the battery production right because we're just shifting it to mainly the nickel production it's still a net advantage right there's still a net gain but a but a huge part of the carbon footprint of evs is processing the nickel that's going in the batteries, you know?

So they came up with a process that if you use green hydrogen, that's a huge if, right?

If you use green hydrogen, they use hydrogen plasma instead of carbon.

So it uses zero carbon.

So the only carbon release would be in the production of the hydrogen itself.

But if you use green hydrogen, then

actually the process itself, this one-step process, which uses a lot less energy and is a lot faster, which is also very important, releases no carbon.

But if they include the mining and the shipping and all the other stuff, and all that, there's still a carbon footprint.

But all the carbon from the actual processing of the nickel itself and extracting it from the ore would be gone.

Of course, if we're using gray hydrogen, it's not as much of an advantage.

Still an advantage, still better, but just not as much.

Is that like the difference between gray hulk and red hulk?

Remember, gray hydrogen is like you make it from, you're stripping the hydrogen off of hydrocarbons.

Ah, yes.

Versus electrolyzing water versus pulling it out of the ground.

There's like all different kinds of hydrogen depending on.

Can we institute a laugh track for the jokes that I make that fail horribly?

Just checking.

Just checking.

We've been playing without a safety net for 20 years now.

I'm about to start now.

So demand for nickel is probably going to double by 2040, which is not that far off.

Double.

Double your nickel is a dime.

See, Bob, no laugh track.

Yeah, it sucks, doesn't it?

This means.

I tell you, I'm getting depressed.

No, no, we're saying nickel so many times, I keep thinking of Joe Nickel every time you say it.

Oh.

All right.

This means that researchers at Penn State have patented a new technique for extracting lithium that requires minutes rather than hours, does not use toxic chemicals, and requires much less energy than existing methods, is science.

And this is also potentially huge because

right now, the way they purify lithium is a couple of methods.

They both suck.

So one is you can, well, they're both energy intensive.

So if you can purify it from lithium-rich like brine, but that requires evaporating it, which means pouring a ton of energy into heating it up for hours in order to evaporate it off.

And then you get left with sort of the lithium cake, and then you have to purify the lithium further from there.

The other thing you could do is if you get like the lithium ore, is you have to bake it at high temperature with sulfuric acid.

Like you're baking it in sulfuric acid, and then you leach it with water.

It's a multiple-step process.

Then you have to add a basic chemical, what is that, sodium hydroxide, and then to neutralize it, and then you have to heat it again.

And it's a multi-step process, uses a lot of energy.

They figured out a way,

and what they did was they first they modeled it and then they tested it.

They found that if you combine it first with sodium hydroxide, then you can go from that compound with a single step at a low temperature to a purified lithium without having to go through an acidic phase and then neutralizing the acid and all that.

So

the whole process is an order of magnitude faster, does not use any toxic chemicals, uses a lot less energy.

So this is obviously critical.

The demand for lithium is going to increase even more than demand

for nickel.

But we keep finding more and more of it.

Again, the limiting factor is the processing of the lithium.

It's not necessarily like

the source of the deposits.

Yeah, it's not the lithium deposits.

It's getting, it's turning it into battery-grade lithium.

You know, it's got to be relatively pure.

We have millions of metric tons of lithium deposits in the U.S.

We just cannot process it fast enough to meet our needs.

So we get 97% of our lithium comes from Chile and Argentina, even though we have lots of lithium in the U.S.

So yeah, we need to develop these

techniques

and get them at an industrial scale so that we can be more independent, but also just increase the world's supply.

It helps everything, right?

It helps everybody.

Yeah, we need multiple times the amount of lithium, we need twice as much nickel, we need way multiple times the rare earths.

We're having the same problem with copper.

We don't have enough copper right now.

If you calculate how much copper we need to get to our climate goals by 2050, we don't have enough.

We We have like a third of the copper that we need.

So we would have to like triple the world's production of copper, which again, the limiting factor is not the mining of copper.

It's more the refining of it.

Okay.

Yeah, and so

we need to do it faster, and it needs to be energy and carbon efficient, right?

If we spend a lot of our carbon budget making this transition,

it could actually make things worse in the short term.

It still might be worth it in the long term

for electrifying these various industries, these various sectors.

But

certainly, if we could dramatically reduce the carbon footprint of the transition itself, that would be a huge help.

So all these news items are good news.

They're all moving in the right direction, and hopefully they will pan out

really well.

So good news, everyone.

That's great.

It's actually quite a positive.

Yeah, even though

science or fiction.

I did sweep you.

Okay, Evan, get the quote.

It is truth that I seek, and truth never yet hurt any man.

What does hurt is persistence in error and ignorance?

Written by my favorite emperor, and should be yours, Marcus Aurelius.

Yep, you're cool dudes.

The sixth book of meditations.

He was a real skeptical philosopher.

Absolutely.

2,000 years ago.

It's amazing.

Yes.

Yep.

And was in

a leader.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

a real leader of government.

I think he's from the future.

Is that right?

Because we have a chance then.

Let's hope the future comes quickly.

Not to diminish the intellect of the ancients.

He was just a very, very,

you know, he was a philosopher and, as you say, and a leader and

very accomplished.

Very.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Thank you, Steve.

Finally.

Thanks, Steve.

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

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