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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 23rd, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Oh, good evening, everyone.

Kara is in China this week, and apparently her VPN isn't working.

She doesn't have a consistent connection to the internet.

She just wasn't able to join us tonight because of technical reasons.

Oh.

Drag.

She's smart.

She'd go to Shanghai, Disney.

Yeah.

Why do they have excellent internet connections there?

Well, I don't care.

Biggest castle of any Disney castle and what seems to be the best pirates ride in the world.

When I visited Disney World Orlando once in my life, I've been there one time.

It was 1999.

I'm sorry.

I saw the castle.

I saw the magic castle, right?

The iconic, you know, Disney Castle.

Yeah.

It was smaller than I thought it was going to be.

Oh, my God.

You're lucky you didn't go to Disneyland in California.

That's the castle that you're like, what?

It was the first one.

And back in the day,

it was great.

But when you compare it to other castles, it is so small and short.

And like, what's happening?

And when you think castle, you think large, oversized, majestic, you know, all the

grandiose, everything.

But then

you see, oh, it's only a model, basically, when you get there.

Well, I mean, they do employ the force perspective, right?

Where it gets smaller as it gets taller to give the impression of more height.

But

I think they're all beautiful.

And I never,

for some reason, your expectations were way out of whack because the Orlando castle is beautiful and seems large to me.

The Paris one might be even a little bit better, though.

It's much, it's more whimsical, and they're just all awesome.

I can't complain about any of them really.

But I've got to see, I want to see the biggest one in China.

So where is that, Bob?

Shanghai.

Shanghai.

Shanghai, China.

So I got my

hearing aids today.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I had no idea.

Try them out.

Yeah, I got them on now.

Fitted for you.

What's happening?

Steve, can you hear me right now?

Can you hear what I'm saying?

Can you hear me right now?

Yeah, so I don't know how much we talked about this on the show.

When I had my hearing test, my lower frequencies are fine, actually, are normal.

But then I have the normal drop-off with age in the upper frequencies, but I have a notch.

I have a zone of frequencies that are in the speech zone that

I have trouble hearing.

And that's because of my tinnitus.

It's like right in the frequency of my tinnitus.

But

the hearing aid technology is pretty spiffy.

And the ones that I got are, um like the you know, the the you know, the ENT was going through everything with it.

It's like this is like brand new, like very, very recent, the the kind of features that the one I have has.

So it's very programmable.

First of all, it's Bluetooth.

I could actually connect it to my phone.

Yeah.

You know, I could basically use them as really

really expensive earbuds.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like my phone, computer, whatever, anything in Bluetooth, I could play through through them.

And then, which is good because I could basically have, you know, just automatically have earbuds in.

But it also they program.

So they when I first got them, you know, we had to calibrate and everything.

So she had me just count up.

And

so at first, it sounded really tinny and echoey.

And then it just suddenly sounded a million percent better.

You know, like the computer just analyzed my voice and hearing what, and, you know, basically hearing my own voice through the hearing aids and then fixed it.

You know?

Yep.

Huh.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, because it could sample your voice normally

through the system, it doesn't boost my own voice so that I don't hear an echo when I talk.

Oh, yeah, man.

That do you remember when we were, where the hell were we?

We did a show.

Or North Strategia.

I think we were in Australia.

It was almost like you're paralyzed because you're hearing an echo of yourself a moment after you say it, and it short circuits your head.

It was hard.

It took a serious effort to actually say something.

It was almost ability.

It was bad.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that was the worst acoustics we've ever had.

Unfortunately.

And they didn't have speakers facing back to us.

You know what I mean?

So it was

to drown it out or whatever.

It was just the echo off the distant back of the wall.

It was similar, but not as bad at one of the TAMs.

It was the one where Kara joined us for the first time.

It wasn't bad while we were doing it live, but in the recording, there's this echo that was just really, really bad.

So, bottom line it, man, what's the end result?

So, I mean, I haven't really had it.

I mean, now I'm wearing headphones, so it's hard to say.

But yeah, so what I notice is that I'm hearing a lot of more background noise, especially crinkly noise.

Like I could really hear the clacking of the keyboard when I signal in my car, like the clack, the clicking of your signal seems really loud and distinct, like all that noise.

Because my brain,

this is what the ENT said, my brain is basically not used to hearing all that noise because I could, because it's, you know, it's because of decreased hearing.

Over time, though, if I wear the hearing aids consistently, my brain will learn to filter that out better.

It won't be as interesting.

Steve, how long will it take to filter out your wife's voice?

Well, they have a special nag mode.

You just hit one button and it automatically filters out.

I have to train it to her voice and then I can completely eliminate it.

No, it doesn't have that.

So is it

the next phenomenon?

Have we talked about that supposed phenomenon in which if you have familiarity with somebody,

you do tend to either lose them

in the background noise, it's harder to hear them over time?

Have we talked about that?

Because I know that's a remember.

That is something.

You guys have heard of that before, right?

I mean, you do tend to

tend to notice very familiar things less because they don't stand out to you.

I thought they studied couples, long, you know, couples who were married a long time, and they tracked a phenomenon.

I thought, I will look into it and get back to you with a report.

Yeah, look it up right now.

I'll let you know what I find.

So,

it's too early to tell.

I'm still getting adapted to it, and it's too early to tell what the net effects are.

Bits like I have 60 days to evaluate it and see if I like it.

But I think it's probably going to be fine.

It also has the notch therapy, which doesn't boost frequencies at the frequency.

It's a very at the very narrow frequency of my tinnitus.

The idea is that it will, it'll help rest those neurons so that they're less noisy.

So, we'll see how that works too.

Spouses learn to ignore each other's voices over time, a study says.

Yeah,

I don't remember that one.

I thought we touched on it.

Yeah, maybe, maybe not.

Yeah, so we'll see.

This is just another milestone in my you know, the endless decay of my body.

Oh, it will end.

Yeah, yeah, I mean, endless as long as I'm alive.

Sorry, Bob.

Just what happens even after you're that's not true?

It's constantly adapting to

aging.

Entropy.

The first thing was when I had to wear, like, the first knew I had to wear reading glasses.

Yep.

Yeah.

I literally thought like there was something wrong with my computer monitor.

It's like these, it's out of focus.

I can't get it to focus.

What's going on here?

My eyesight changed overnight.

I woke up and it was.

Oh, mine was too.

I woke up one morning and that was it.

Like, well, that's that.

Yeah.

I knew exactly what happened.

I lasted a while, but I eventually succumbed to the readers as well.

48.

I was 48 when I needed them.

I think I was like late 50s.

That's good, Bob.

I think you beat the average there.

Yeah, I think I was 45.

I mean, before I had noticed the presbyopia, as they call it, but I think before I had to routinely wear reading glasses, like maybe I have 47, 48.

I'm going to have telomere extension therapy.

You're all welcome to join me.

I'll wait to see how it goes with you.

Yeah, right.

Some side effects include monsters.

I remember doing eye exercises, not consistently or many times at all, but they said a good exercise would be to focus on something very, very close and then very, very far away and go back and forth, back and forth.

I remember doing it, but I never did it much.

So I don't say that that's the reason why I lasted a while before I needed glasses.

But I'm just wondering if that would have made a difference, you know, forcibly changing focus to the extremes over and over again.

Working on the eye muscles?

Yeah, I wonder if that would have made any difference at all.

I don't know.

As far as I can tell, there's no proven method for preventing presbyopia.

Just the lens loses flexibility, so it can't you know ball up enough to focus really close.

My mother-in-law got her um you know the cataract surgery where they take out her lenses and they put in fake ones.

You know, they use sound to break up the old lens and they pull out the pieces and they just fold over the the new one, slide it in there.

And she is reporting it's absolutely remarkable.

Like she has twenty-twenty 20 vision

she um can see close up and far away you know she needs glasses to read but you know she has a good spectrum of uh distance that she can focus on without a problem no pain

you know she just pretty much can't believe how good it's functioning and the the fact that she's got a man-made lens in her eye

which is incredibly awesome you know your but like her body is actually changing the shape of that lens.

Her eye is pushing that lens and making it change shape so she can focus.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember thinking,

how do you reattach

those attachments to the lens?

A muscle attachment.

There is no attachments.

And Jay, you were saying that it's kind of like

this little sleeve that the lens goes in.

It doesn't need a direct connection to the muscles.

You just need to be within that little.

Yeah, from what I understand, because I asked that, because for some reason, I have this picture in my head of

that lens being attached, specifically attached to muscles, right?

Yeah, me too.

I had the same

visual.

I guess it's in a muscle, a sleeve of muscle.

You know, it's like putting a waffle in the toaster.

You know, it's like inside that.

The waffle is the lens, and the toaster is the muscles surrounding it that can shape the lens, I guess.

I mean, you know.

The light still has to go through it, though, so it can't be a full coverage.

Full coverage.

Yeah, but the bottom line is

these surgeries are happening.

You know, they're super quick.

I'm sure that the doctors get so damn good at it.

You know, like her surgery was like one of those 10-minute surgeries, you know what I mean?

For one eye.

Yeah, they have those.

They're called accommodating lenses, accommodating intraocular lenses.

They can change their shape to focus at different distances.

Yeah,

still remarkable.

But it does work off the ciliary muscles, apparently.

But I have to do a deeper dive and let's see exactly how the tech works.

Yeah, but we got that, you know, Steve, that totally kick-ass surgery when, you know, when your lens gets cloudy or, you know, like

in our case, like, you know, know, we can't focus them that well anymore.

But nothing for the ears, just nothing, man.

Like, you know, the hearing aids, okay, you know, but they're not like a, it's not as good as I was hoping it would be when we got up to this age.

I mean, I remember thinking about it 30 years ago.

Things always take longer than you think.

I mean, the hearing aid technology is pretty extreme now, which is good.

But yeah, and if you're totally deaf, you could obviously get

it.

Like you can replace the follicles in the ear, right?

Yeah, you need to be able to regenerate that stuff, you know.

Yeah, where's that?

Yeah.

But Jay, look at the example, the main example in your life, your mom.

You know, mom has, she's basically deaf in one ear and mostly deaf in the other ear.

She's so deaf in her good ear that without her hearing aid, she can't hear

herself talking or anything.

She said she feels basically 100% deaf without the hearing aid.

But with that hearing aid,

she can understand me well enough that we can communicate pretty well.

If If you know, if your voice is in the right range, she really doesn't have that much of a trouble.

So, I mean, without that, she'd be screwed.

Without that hearing aid, she would be

basically functionally deaf.

All right, let's go on

with some news items.

I actually am going to start with a quick, kind of a quickie.

It depends on how much you guys want to talk about this.

Have you guys heard of Game Transfer Phenomenon?

No.

Game training.

What do you think it is?

Game Transfer.

Game.

Game Transfer Phenomenon.

You transfer your character from one server to another game server.

No.

You take animals.

It's a neurological or psychological phenomenon, I'll tell you that.

Oh, so it's not game-animal.

Sorry.

It is like digital video games.

So, have you ever had the experience of playing a game obsessively for a while, and then you start to develop reflexes that carry over into real life?

Yes.

Oh, geez.

Yep.

You mean like when my muscles ache?

No.

When I'm in a position, like too long at a computer.

I can't say definitively, but I think if zombies ever really appear, I will be able to take them out very well, especially with my freeze and fire attacks.

Ooh, inflated sense of confidence.

I like that.

Yeah, so essentially,

the term was coined by a psychologist studying it.

And the idea is that some people, it's actually not that common.

for it to be like a significant manifestation,

but people have reported that

in the extreme versions, like after playing a role-playing game for a while, like a multiplayer game, they actually were like seeing health bars over people's heads.

Oh, that's crazy.

Whoa.

I don't know that I've ever immersed myself long enough in an explanation.

That sounds like

that happen.

A problem.

Yeah, that's a little bit extreme.

But

the idea is that it could happen in a lot more subtle ways.

I definitely noticed just my muscle memory gets trained.

Like, my fingers will go to the ASWD keys automatically.

I don't know if you guys experienced that.

Yeah, of course.

Sure.

That's muscle memory big time.

Yeah, that's just muscle memory.

Even though they should go to the typing home keys, they do that too, but I notice if I've been gaming,

it'll more likely do that.

So the question is: this is the question that I had: is how bad is this going to get

when VR becomes really common?

Because the evidence shows that

the more immersive the experience, the more likely this is to happen.

And also the more time you spend doing it.

So imagine like the movie Ready Player One.

Yeah.

You know, imagine if you get to that level where you're, you know, most people are spending four or five hours a day, six hours a day, eight hours a day in fully immersive virtual reality.

So you're saying that there could be artifacts from the game like a health bar or

whatever.

You know, what if you're wearing some type of tech on your virtual hand that you might see that in the real world?

Yeah, and it's not purely visual.

It's mostly behavioral.

So

here's like a worst-case scenario.

Let's say you are playing a character that can fly,

and you sort of develop those instincts.

This is like an extreme version of putting your fingers on the ASW D keys.

And then you like jump off a balcony expecting to fly.

Oh, gosh.

Because that's what you do eight hours a day.

You sort of develop that behavior.

I can see you're distracted and you have just a weird moment where you're like, oh, yeah.

And then just a split-second decision that basically

just revert to a different, the wrong set of instincts.

Right, right, yeah.

Which will definitely happen.

Definitely happen.

So I've done, there's other examples of that.

Have you guys ever tried to pause live radio?

Because you're

so used now, like with everything is streaming.

You could stop, pause, reverse anything on TV.

I find myself instinctively trying to do that when I'm listening to other media that can't be rewinded.

Oh, yeah.

Anything with a screen you try to try to interact with.

Yeah, but

you also try to

use screens that are not touch screens.

Like, why isn't this moving?

Oh, yeah.

So the digital and analog worlds, you you know, the meat space and the virtual worlds are sort of blending together.

Now, in fact, that border is going to become increasingly indistinct because of augmented reality, right?

So now you have augmented reality.

When you're actually in physical space,

you have information or visual, auditory, whatever overlaid on top of the physical world.

And then when the more immersive virtual reality gets the harder time your brain will have distinguishing when you're in meat space versus when you're in virtual space.

So that's, it's going to be, we're just seeing, I think, the very beginnings of it, right?

That's going to be really bad.

I mean,

the results will be

maybe when you're in VR, like, don't do any one of those things too much.

Like, don't fly too much.

You know, don't

whatever.

You know, who the hell knows what they're going to be doing?

You would have an AI inhibitor that would be looking out for that kind of behavior and stop you from doing it in real life, even if it's just an auditory, like, hey, stop, you can't fly, jerk, or something even more extreme, potentially.

They may have to design those VR experiences in such a way to give you some kind of feedback that would be missing in the physical world.

So, like, as a reminder, it's like you're not able to fly right now, don't you, or whatever it is that

you're getting used to.

Yeah, yeah, they could have digital signs up in MeatSpace saying you can't fly, or just something like that.

Or imagine if they actually manipulate physical reality to prevent people from like they identify certain areas that are that are especially prone to have people try to fly from because it's just the way it's designed and make it even more, you know, make it harder to try to fly from that space.

Wow.

Yeah, interesting to think about it.

And it can be behavior that is not even so

foreign as something like flying.

Like, let's say you immerse yourself in a game in which you're driving race cars or something like that.

I could see that translating.

Then you go to get in your real car, and your muscle memory and other things sort of take over, and your real driving becomes more hazardous, more dangerous.

Yeah, and it shows you a lot of benign ways, too.

Like, you know, in a virtual game, you may be able to pull up your menu by swiping your hand hand in a certain direction or whatever.

And people will be doing that in the physical world, like expecting a menu to pop up.

They just sort of thoughtlessly do that.

You know what I mean?

I'm sure there's other examples of that as well.

Yeah.

And it's not only just gaming.

Like, you know, we've, when we've been immersed in a weekend of LARPing, it takes a day to decompress or two.

Remember that?

It does.

Yeah.

You have to recalibrate.

You have to recalibrate.

Steve, remember, like, I remember the three of us, me, Evan, and Steve talking about having like that PTSD Twitch

because you've been on alert for so long.

Yeah.

Oh, you get Twitchy.

Yeah, it takes, it takes a

few straight days of doing that.

Yeah.

And you find yourself

looking for things, you know.

Right.

Is that a dragon?

No, no.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, no, I absolutely had that experience without a doubt.

Imagine what real PTSD is like, right?

Imagine being in a war situation with bullets flying past you.

I mean, obviously, we just had like the

what we had was just a whisper of that.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah, but you could definitely see how your brain adapts to that kind of combat situation, and you just can't turn it off after a while.

Right.

So it is, I think it's all part of the same kind of phenomenon.

Your brain gets trained for one experience, and

you can't just turn it right off.

So what?

Proceed with caution?

Probably at the end of the day, good game hygiene is going to be important.

Like

limit the amount of time, certain number, amount of time at one, a certain amount of time per day.

Make sure you get physical activity.

Make sure that when you transition to the real world, you got to make sure that you're paying attention and that

you're very present.

The programs may have to come with a timing mechanism by which, okay, you can only do this for 90 minutes and we're shutting it down whether you want it or not.

Yeah, I mean, that's pretty draconian.

That may be the best thing, but it's hard to imagine that's going to happen.

Maybe.

I mean, what if there's liability issues here with some of the manufacturers of these products?

It only takes one incident and one court or judge or jury or whatever to make a decision as to what really happened there.

And that could change a lot of time.

One guy jumps off a balcony, ruins it for everyone else.

I mean, it sounds, sounds almost ridiculous, but that does happen.

No, I agree if it's.

Like that one guy burns himself with coffee, and then now they can't sell hot coffee anymore.

Well, it'd be interesting to see how that plays out.

All right, Jay, tell us about experiments with geoengineering.

I'm curious.

Do you guys think that sunblock can save humanity?

You mean like sunscreen, like the lotion we put on our sunscreen?

However, you want to interpret it.

Save humanity?

That seems extreme to me.

Well, there are kinds of sunblocking that may very well be really helpful, but it depends.

It's a little controversial as well.

So, the UK government has launched a £50 million program to begin outdoor experiments in geoengineering.

This initiative, which is being run by the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, also called ARIA, aims to test whether sunlight blocking technologies can offer a temporary way to actually cool the planet.

And it's one of the largest investments in geoengineering research to date, and it marks a significant shift in how seriously some governments are taking these proposals.

Now, it's nice to see governments put the money in and want to push the the ball forward in one way or the other.

And

I actually think it's really good that they're talking about it at the very least.

So, at the center of the effort is something called Solar Radiation Management, SRM.

And the basic idea here is to reflect a small portion of sunlight back into space using methods like brightening clouds or releasing reflective particles into the upper atmosphere.

And these approaches hopefully could theoretically lower surface temperatures and help delay some of the worst climate impacts.

So, in practice, we still don't know how effective or dangerous any of these ideas are.

And that's why they're exploring them just to see if they can vet them out and see

how safe could it be done?

Is it cost effective, etc.?

So a man named Mark Symes, Professor Mark Symes, who leads the ARIA initiative, says the global goal is to collect real-world data that can confirm whether these technologies work and what side effects they might cause.

The computer models that they've worked up and the lab testing that they've done, right, can only go so far.

And I guess they do need to do some type of real-world testing.

And with the climate system, as everybody knows, it's nearing this tipping point.

We keep hearing, you know, this is going to happen and that's going to happen.

You know, collapsing ice sheets or whatever, changing ocean currents.

It's all very scary.

And it all seems like time is running out very quickly.

So he said that we need to understand what is actually possible in physical terms.

And I think that's legitimate.

The program insists that no harmful materials will be used, which is a freaking relief to hear.

I hope that they're going to have some type of watchdog thing going on.

They'll be subject to environmental reviews and have public consultation.

Who knows how far that'll go?

I mean, I want to give them the, but I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but absolutely, you know, people need to be watching what they're doing.

That said, not everyone is convinced.

There's lots of scientists that are arguing that researching SRM creates a moral hazard.

If people see sunlight blocking as a backup plan, they might feel less urgency to cut carbon emissions or whatever.

I thought that was kind of hooey.

I don't really buy that personally.

Why not?

Why don't you buy that?

The idea that, like, if one method is used to help in one, you know, percentage-wise, it could it can help this much, like, all of a sudden everyone's just going to throw away any other plans that they have to cut carbon emissions.

It's not.

I mean, you're saying it in the extreme.

I think it's but you know absolutely that, like, for example, the fossil fuel industry will use this as another excuse to delay action.

It's like, oh, we have plenty of time.

We'll just block the sun and we're good.

So that's exactly what they're doing, for example, with carbon capture.

Exactly what they're doing.

I guess right.

I stand corrected.

I mean, and I didn't take it as an industry thing.

I was thinking more like the public, but okay, I mean, I could see what you're saying there, Steve, for sure.

Yeah.

So critics have also pointed out the potential for dangerous disruptions to rainfall, particularly in regions that depend on seasonal monsoons for food production.

This all sounds legitimate.

One researcher called the entire concept barking mad.

He said it's like treating cancer with aspirin.

A separate £10 million project by the UK's National Environmental Research Council will look at SRM through computer modeling and using historical data that's available.

And it will not involve any new outdoor testing.

Natural events like volcanic eruptions have

already shown that aerosols can cool the planet, but they also reveal just how complex and unpredictable consequences can be to introducing anything foreign into the atmosphere or doing anything that has a large volume of stuff that we're pumping out anywhere.

Sounds like a massive risk.

It's good to study it.

It's good to study it.

I would be shocked if this becomes the actual plan.

Well, right now there's no international agreement on how SRM should be governed.

And just as a point of reference, we also don't have any national international agreement how AI should be governed, right?

Like, that's a much, much more complicated thing.

But it is a major concern.

You know, a country acting on its own could absolutely affect weather patterns across borders.

That would have very, very serious diplomatic consequences.

Dr.

Sebastian Eastham of Imperial College London is part of the team studying the political risks.

Dr.

Eastham said even the idea of deploying SRM would shape global relations.

And he says that we need to understand how the rest of the world might respond.

So, you know, there is a lot of talk starting to happen.

You know, that's because, you know, a legitimate amount of money has been put into this so far.

I think all the right questions are being asked from what I can tell.

But, you know, we don't know if it will work.

We don't know how dangerous it is.

We don't know how damaging this could be to the environment.

We don't know how hard it will be politically.

And, you know, it's, it's, to me, it's, it's ironic, I guess, that all of these problems that we have now with the environment came from industry, right?

But it's not industry that's trying to fix it.

It's science programs and grants and the public's money is going into trying to fix these problems that corporations became billionaires and trillionaires off of, which I,

you know, that really pisses me off.

You know, I think, you know, governments should be going to the...

you know, to these industries that created this problem and said, look, you benefited from it and you're going to put the money in to solve it.

Get this.

You guys following the recent Supreme Court case?

So basically, petroleum producers are suing California over their emissions standards because it's hurting their business by shifting the market towards electric cars so they can't sell as much gasoline.

Oh, my God.

That's ridiculous.

Isn't that the point of those laws?

Isn't those regulations?

That's the whole point is to reduce the use of gasoline.

But

that's hurting our business.

You can't do that.

That's what they're doing.

It's ridiculous.

Isn't that maddening?

Yep.

Yep, it is maddening.

It's maddening.

It's enraging and murderous.

Let's get people to be more environmentally responsible.

We can't have that.

Lots of money will be spent, and lots of human hours will be put into this.

And the screwy thing is, in the world that we currently live in, who the hell knows what the outcome is going to be at this point?

Oh, yeah.

Certainly not prioritized.

Okay.

Thank you, Jay.

Bob, tell us about this biosignature candidate.

This is kind of the news of the week, I think.

Yeah, yeah, this came out last week just as we were starting to record.

I'm like, oh man, we missed this one.

But next week, and I grabbed it.

So, yes, biosignatures in the news.

The James Webb Telescope recently had a second look at an exoplanet, and the University of Cambridge's press release about that had five very compelling words in it: strongest hints yet of biological activity.

So, that certainly got my attention.

So, have we discovered aliens?

No.

But the real question is, how hard of a no is that no?

So let's see how hard that is.

So this started actually in 2023 when the James Webb Space Telescope looked at exoplanet K2-18B, 124 light years away.

The planet orbits, I'm going to call it a K2, K2 orbits in the habitable

zone of its red dwarf host star.

So that it making liquid water on its surface a possibility, which is like, whoa, when that happens, it's like, oh, wow, that's fantastic.

No matter what else is true, that's always cool.

So this planet is a sub-Neptune classification, though.

It has a radius of about 2.5 times that of Earth and 8.6 times more massive.

So

beefy boy here.

It was not clear what the surface of the planet was like, though, which is always like...

very frustrating and understandable because you know 124 frigging light years away so they found clear signs of methane and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere Clear, pretty, fairly unambiguous.

And they argued that

those chemicals would make sense if the planet had a hydrogen-rich atmosphere and a global water ocean.

That would explain

what they were seeing.

And also, and the implication was that a global water ocean, of course, could potentially support life.

And they also found back in 2023 weak signals indicating DMS, dimethyl sulfide.

DMS is produced by life life on Earth, especially marine microbes like phytoplankton.

It's been described, this is fun, it's been described as part of the smell of a sea breeze, this DMS.

I like that description.

No other known processes on Earth other than life makes DMS.

Now,

we have found DMS outside the Earth, but those chemical processes can't account for the quantities that we're seeing on K2.

So yeah,

DMS is definitely a promising biosignature if it holds up.

But then, okay, and then the most recent observations of K2 was recently documented.

James Webb's new data brought the confidence level for detecting DMS up to three sigma from two sigma.

Three sigma is roughly 99.7% chance that the signal is real, though not necessarily that it's DMS, but that the signal itself is real.

The gold standard, of course, we've said it many times on the show, is 5 sigma.

And the researchers think that they will get there before too long, for whatever whatever that's worth.

So, that all sounds fairly compelling, but many astronomers are still quite skeptical, as they should be.

One example here: MIT planetary scientist Sarah Seeger said, With thousands of exoplanets in view, the temptation to overinterpret is strong, and some are jumping the gun.

When it comes to K2118b, enthusiasm is outpacing evidence.

Came across an interesting article on this

on Ars Technica by John John Timmer.

He explains this quite well.

He describes three questions that any exoplanet biosignature evidence needs to answer with a yes.

Okay, three questions.

Is the planet what we think it is?

Is the signal legit?

And is the signal only produced by life?

Right?

This seems

common sense.

So

let's look at these one by one.

So the first one, is the planet what we think it is?

The researchers think this is a Hycean world.

So this is a portmanteau of hydrogen and ocean.

Hycean.

I like that word.

The James Webb data makes sense if the planet has a hydrogen atmosphere and a water ocean.

So that's why they think this could potentially be a Hycean world.

They kind of think it is.

But the problem is, the problem is, for this world to exist, for this Hycean world to exist, it would require it to be a very cloudy or a hazy planet.

And that would be needed because there's a lot of radiation coming in from the parent star.

And that light needs to be blocked.

Otherwise, the ocean is going to boil away.

So, it's very important that

it's quite cloudy.

Unfortunately, James Webb did not find any clouds or haze over the planet.

That doesn't necessarily mean it's not there, but it's not encouraging.

But, making this whole thing worse, though, other research has concluded that not enough light is being reflected from the planet to prevent this boiled-away ocean scenario.

So, this may very well be just too hot.

Now, let's see.

Another paper suggests that what we're seeing can be explained also by a magma ocean.

So, would that make it a Magmean world?

Did I just coin that?

I don't think so.

Maybe, but who cares?

Nobody's going to care.

So, maybe it's a Magmean world.

We got a Magma.

It would be Hy Sagma.

Hy Sagma?

Yeah, you're right.

Oh.

Well, yeah.

You're right.

Whatever.

No one's going to, no one, these people don't like cool names.

They don't care.

So we're never going to hear this again.

But for the record, Hy Sagma is cool at designations.

Potentially, though.

Potentially.

So, bottom line, this planet, based on this first question, is a planet what we think it is?

Maybe, maybe, probably it isn't.

This planet seems more likely to be way too hot to support any life, except for maybe, like, what?

That magma alien from Planet Excalbia on Star Trek.

Remember that episode?

He seemed like he would be.

Remember, his claws would click and stuff.

He was kind of a weird alien.

I just love the non-humanoid aliens, though.

All right, so know what I'm doing right now?

I'm imagining the SGU being teleported to K218B to fight alongside Carl Sagan and Arlon Schwarzenegger against Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr.

And we would so kick their asses.

If you know that episode,

I'm hoping that you're giggling just a little bit.

Can we have Abe Lincoln?

Okay.

If it's the version of Abe Lincoln where he kills vampires,

I would absolutely take him.

All right, Lincoln was a boxer in his day.

He was a fighter.

That movie had some very, it had the most interesting battle between two people amongst a stampede of horses that I've ever seen.

Actually, it was the only time I've ever seen it.

And it was a really cool scene.

Worth the entire movie.

All right.

The second question.

Is the signal, in fact, legitimate?

Is this signal good?

Right.

How are they able to confirm this thing?

Something real could very well have been detected on K2.

Three sigma implies 99.7 certainty, after all, that something was detected.

But the researchers only get this, this would surprise me.

The researchers only compared the spectral signal that they had against 20 chemicals that could potentially produce that spectrum.

And DMS, that methyl sulfide, was the most likely fit of those 20.

So, okay,

but there's a lot more chemicals that they potentially could have compared the spectral features against.

And maybe one of them would be a better fit than DMS.

So, why I would like to find out, and I couldn't figure it out, why did they only compare it against 20 candidate elements and not more?

because so dms is the best fit that's okay that's cool but maybe there's other elements that would be a much better fit i don't get that at all also there's another problem with this second question that remember the second question is is the signal legit comparing the spectrum from a mini neptune planet to the spectrum of earth at room temperature in one atmosphere is also obviously and potentially problematic.

And even the authors recognize that fact.

So did you follow that one?

Because they looked at the signal that you would get from the spectrum of DMS from Earth, and they compared that to the spectrum they got from K2.

And so, that's what they did, the comparison.

But it's not very apples to apples, because it's not a, you know, it's a small planet to a sub-Neptunian planet.

So, it's maybe that might be a dramatic, you know, more of a problem than you would think.

Okay, the final question: is the signal only produced by life?

This is this is a big one.

Uh, we might we might determine, yes, this is DMS, it It's there, but if we find out it's not produced by life, it's far, far less interesting.

All right.

So there's nothing on Earth that makes us think that DMS can be abiotic, right?

But that's just Earth.

But there are some recent studies that suggest that there are certain unusual conditions that could allow DMS to form without life.

I think

they found some signals in space that potentially could do it and some other exoplanet that gave them this idea that, yeah, maybe maybe DMS can be produced by an abiotic process.

But these processes that

they've discussed are speculative, and even if they do work, they seem very unlikely to produce the amount, the sheer amount of DMS that seems to be present on K2.

But still, it's a big maybe, and

the burden of proof is really, really high here.

So, what we have here, it turns out, is it's a fascinating clue, but it's not the smoking gun that I hoped it was, at least very initially when you start reading headlines.

But as you dig deeper, you know, it's not the smoking gun that it appears.

And

it's just an interesting clue right now.

Anyway, you know, I hate when the universe teases us with these maybes.

So for now, the best answer is no aliens, not yet, anyway.

But who knows?

This is going to take time.

If you're going to wanna answer these questions with a yes in order to really say, yeah, we have discovered life on another world, those three questions are gonna have to be yes.

Is the planet what we think it is?

Is the signal legit?

And is the signal only produced by life?

You need a yes for those.

And that's not going to happen fast.

You're not going to make a discovery and be like, yep, that's it.

We're good.

We have the answer.

There is life on this planet.

It's going to take a protracted, a prolonged discussion by scientists to really look at the data and multiple missions and all these other extra, extra steps beyond just one mission looking at another planet.

It's going to take a while.

Hopefully we'll get there, but it's not going to be an easy decision to be, you know, very, very confident, you know, especially five sigma levels confidence.

Yeah, unfortunately, most of the potential biosignatures have abiotic sources.

You know, yes.

Right.

That's not fair.

Yeah.

Well, what was good about this one is that, you know, when you've got sources like carbon dioxide and methane, those, you know, those are good signatures, but there's so many ways that you could make that geologically and whatever.

DMS dimethyl sulfide was interesting because there's no obvious way to make a huge amount of this stuff.

So it's

more of a compelling biosignature, but it's still very problematic.

Is the next step just more observations with the James Webb Space Telescope?

I think so.

Looking at it maybe with different instrumentalities and

maybe even different telescopes would help.

And

trying to get answers, approaching these three questions and trying to get a solid yes for each of these.

And yeah, it's going to take time, multiple missions, and more work.

But, you know, got to try, you know, assuming science doesn't utterly collapse everywhere.

All right.

It will be done.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Bob, actually, you don't have to worry because we, you know what?

They found a skull on Mars.

You do not go that far.

If they did, I want it in my collection.

Skull on Mars, right?

Well, as I speak right now, Bob is boarding a spacecraft.

He's heading to Mars.

Radiation issues, be damned.

No, there's a skull on Mars.

Bob has to have it.

All right.

Who's saying that?

Are you just pulling my leg?

What's happening?

Well,

it depends on which headlines you read.

I gave a news item about Mars about a month ago, but we're going to revisit the red planet from whence men originated.

Do you think our younger audience even has any idea what that's all about?

Remember, Venus?

Women are from Venus.

Men are from Mars.

Remember?

Remember that?

That is going back, but yeah.

Oh, my God.

Right?

When was the last time we talked about that?

We talked about that early in the SGU, but I don't think we ever revisited it.

But there it is again.

Skull on Mars.

What is this all about?

What are we talking like another face on Mars, you know, which obviously has been a thing since the 1970s and,

you know, certainly captured the imaginations of a lot of people.

Or is it one of these fossilized fish that they think they've taken pictures of on Mars?

Rodent, lizard, sitting on a rock, and of course, my all-time favorite, Bigfoot.

Yes,

Mars is teeming with life, both current and past.

No, not really.

Whenever I hear about the latest, greatest description of something either living on Mars or something that was once alive and died on Mars, my Martian antennas definitely perk up.

So check out this headline.

NASA Rover discovers out-of-place skull, in quotes, on Mars, and scientists are baffled.

That headline is over at Live Science.

That is a very reputable website.

Live science?

Live science ran with that.

Right?

Oh my God.

I think that is a reputable website.

Those quotation marks are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

Probably.

It's not just scientists that are baffled.

Now Evan is baffled and Bob too, apparently.

But actually, you know what?

Good job over at Live Science for pulling me in with that headline.

Here's the real story.

NASA's very aptly named Perseverance Rover recently recently discovered an unusual rock formation on Mars dubbed Skull Hill.

That is the full name of this rock that it actually took a picture of.

And it's intriguing the scientists because it has distinct characteristics and they are not exactly certain about where this thing came from.

There is a place on Mars

called the Jezero Crater.

That is a barren, bowl-shaped depression north of the Martian equator, and scientists suspect that it held a lake.

There was a lake there billions of years ago.

And since December of 2024, Perseverance has been trekking down a tall slope called Witch Hazel Hill in this crater.

Witch Hazel, love it.

I know, I love that Witch Hazel.

And obviously, you know,

they think it's a good place to look for clues about Mars's past climate.

Well, recently, this was April 11th, 2025, and there it goes.

Perseverance is descending Witch Hazel Hill.

And it encountered a dark-toned, angular rock, starkly contrasted with surrounding lighter terrain.

The rock, they named it Skull Hill, and it features a pitted surface.

It's considered a float rock, meaning it likely originated somewhere else and was transported to its current.

Could it not be a meteorite?

They did test it.

They did observe it and thought, well, yes, perhaps this could be a meteorite.

Yeah, because it has two features that are typical for meteorites, at least on Earth.

It has sort of these

dark coloration and this thumbprint kind of indentations around the pitted surface.

Fortunately, Perseverance has something called SuperCam,

the SuperCam instrument, which can do a chemical analysis of the rock.

And it did.

It lacked the high iron and nickel content that is typical of meteorites.

So that's why they believe it.

Well, yeah, they didn't.

That's not mentioned in this particular article.

But they did say that based on what analysis they were able to make, the composition suggests it is likely an igneous rock formed from cooled magma or lava and contains minerals like olivine and

pyroxene, which apparently are indicative of magma lava.

So yeah, this is a float rock.

The pits on the rock may have formed due to erosion of embedded clasts or wind scouring, which would make sense.

And they say that it's fortunate that they found this rock in this particular location.

They said it provides valuable insight into the geological history of Mars and that it may have been transported by ancient water flows or ejected from impact craters, which indicates dynamic geological processes.

And studying the rocks will help scientists reconstruct the planet's past environments and assess its potential to have supported life.

So apparently they do have a sample of this thing.

And in the past few months, Perseverance has collected samples of five different kinds of rocks and have analyzed seven others in detail, zapped 83 more with its laser for remote study.

The Explorer's fastest pace of scientific data collection since landing on Mars four years ago.

And this was courtesy of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who released some bulletins about this most recent find.

And they said, let's see, Katie Morgan, Perseverance's project scientist at JPL, one of Perseverance's project scientists at JPL said, crater rims, you gotta love them.

The last four months have been a whirlwind for the science team, and we still feel that Witch Hazel Hill has more to tell us.

It's all we've had hoped for and even more.

The key here, the real analysis will take place when hopefully we will be able to pick up those samples that Perseverance has been collecting and get them back to Earth to determine, help determine if, hey, life ever existed at one point on mars getting those samples back we have to uh you know continue the efforts and hopefully the funding and things don't get cut for that particular part of uh nasa's budget let's hope you know what i can't find evan is that any mention of how big it is did you find that anywhere yeah why yeah they they should be able to know that i don't know why they wouldn't report that we just haven't taken time to measure it yet to calculate the size i suppose not maybe yeah because it is it is a new find so maybe they are still trying to determine it from the from the photographs and the analysis But no, I'm not reading anything about the size of this rock.

So, when you hear about skulls on Mars, get excited, but don't get too excited because it's not exactly what you think.

And it's really skull hill, is what they're calling it.

It's not a skull hill.

Skull Hill, yes, right, right.

But you're right, they tweaked, you know, they took a little liberty there, I think.

They took a lot of liberty, kind of shitty deadline.

I know, Bob, you're terribly disappointed.

Skull on Mars, what

happened?

I don't know.

Hit the brakes.

That's a big

thing thing to leave out.

I mean, it seems like total bait and switch, clickbait.

Skeleton on Mars.

Over at Skeleton Hill, they've.

Trixie.

False.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Thanks.

So, guys,

I track solar panel technology pretty closely.

Yes.

And I saw an interesting news item today on perovskite solar panels.

So perovskite is basically a mineral that there's been a lot of experimentation and development over the last 10 years or so to develop perovskite solar panels as sort of the successor to the silicon-based solar panels.

You know, the perovskite cells have the advantage of having a potentially higher efficiency in terms of the energy conversion, but they've had a significant detriment in that they're not as stable.

So they break down more quickly.

Oh, I see, not as long as possible.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's a problem.

And they're making great progress there, but it's not quite, for most of them, not quite where it should be.

However, well, there's a however, but let me talk to you about the news item.

So this is just a pretty specific thing, but there was a study looking at altering the chemical that is used in the synthesis of of the

manufacture of the perovskite solar panels, the solar cells,

they're essentially combined with fullerene.

Do you guys know what about fullerenes?

Never heard of Butman's crystal fullerenes.

Yeah, this is a carbon allotrope, and it's a C60 molecule, basically.

I think it's basically the shape of like the

Epcot center ball, right?

What is that called?

That

geodesic structure.

Yeah.

So yeah, it's 60 carbon atoms in that kind of a spherical

shape.

So

for over a decade, that C60, that Buckminster Fullerene, has been an integral component of perovskite solar cells.

However, there is a weak interaction between the C60 and the perovskite, which is what leads to it to mechanically degrade over time, especially with exposure to sunlight, which obviously is the whole point.

So

they've been, as long as it's in the dark, it's fine.

Yeah, awesome.

So the new study looks at

a replacement for C60.

It's C60, but combined with an ionic salt, and it's C60-derived ionic salt, and it's, or CPMAC.

So they were able to develop the solar cell with perovskite and the CPMAC rather than the usual C60 that they've been using.

And what they found was two things.

One, that it stabilized it tremendously because it forms much tighter bonds with the perovskite.

And so in studies, after exposure to bright light and heat,

it degraded at only one-third the rate of the C60 perovskite.

So that's a significant improvement.

However, the other thing that they've noticed was a 0.6% higher solar cell energy conversion efficiency.

Doesn't sound like a lot, but 0.6%

it is it's incrementally better.

And that if you're if, for example, that you're calculating the energy output of a one gigawatt power plant, solar power array, that 0.6% can power an extra 5,000 homes.

So it's not insignificant at scale.

And sort of any incremental improvement in efficiency is good.

So it's a double benefit The cells are more stable, they last longer, and they have a slightly higher efficiency.

That's nice, but I said I wanted to see where the perovskite solar module technology is today.

And specifically,

are there any commercial products available?

And it turns out there are.

So Oxford PV

has developed, and this actually was released in September of 2024, so this is about, whatever, six months months ago, a tandem perovskite silicon solar panel.

So there's both silicon solar cells and perovskite solar cells in tandem, which is something I've been reading about as well.

I didn't realize that they had

released it commercially.

They're targeting this more at the

power.

company level, not like the individual home level.

It's probably still more expensive than a standard

silicon solar panel.

But this raised the efficiency to how much where do you think we are right now what is the efficiency of these commercially available tandem perovskite silicon 33

25

99

27

which is huge considering that the industry standards more in the more like the 23 24 percent so bumping up to 27 is actually

it's pretty significant 10 increase yeah you know it's like a three percent well

relative or absolute absolute

yeah relative 10 percent and so yeah 33 percent Jay like we're we can get there you know we can get there with

with this technology there are lab tested tandem solar panels that are getting into the 33 34 34.6 percent range so but you know that's not commercially being produced yet but that's sort of the the where the industry is headed so that's huge you know so we're already now in the upper 20s.

And remember when we started talking about solar panels at the beginning of the SGU, they were at 12%.

And they incrementally improved over the years, got up into like the 20 to 22% range, which is where we've been for a while.

Now we're at like 24%, 23%, 24%.

But we're kind of running up to the, against the limit of silicon.

I think the theoretical limit of silicon is less than 30%.

I think it's like 29%.

So if we're going to to break 30, we need to make this lateral move over to perovskite.

And I do think the tandem technology is where things are headed using both, you know, silicon and perovskite, because then you get the best of both worlds.

You know, they have different frequencies where they're optimal and the silicon can stabilize the perovskite, et cetera.

Cost more expensive?

Of course, yeah, it's going to be more expensive.

But overall, if you talk about the cost per amount of energy being produced, that continues to go down.

That continues to decrease.

If you're paying for a higher efficiency, it could be cost-effective.

Is there any way to shift what's left of my 401k into this?

Sure.

Yeah, you could buy individual stocks.

All right.

Send me the company names after the show.

Thank you.

No, I do think long-term these are solid

companies and that this is where the industry is heading.

And I do think that there's a lot of headroom for solar.

So worldwide, approximately 5.5% of global electricity production is solar, 5.5.

You know, where's it going to top out?

Who knows?

But we should be able to get up to 20%, 30% maybe worldwide.

So

when do these roll out, Steve?

Well, again, the...

27% ones are out now.

They've been available since September.

The breakthrough that I just talked about today, who knows, right?

These things take time to

get translated to actual production.

But again, having done this for the last 20 years,

we read a lot of these laboratory breakthroughs, but then five, 10 years later, they're actually in commercial products.

Some of them are anyway.

They don't always translate.

But when the commercial products come out, like I remember, like we talked about

the silicone anode lithium-ion batteries.

You know, we talked about them when they actually came on the market.

But it was 10 years earlier when we talked about that news item on the show as a laboratory breakthrough.

And then 10 years later, the battery with the actual technology in it comes out.

So who knows how many years it will take, but it's good to know that these incremental advances keep accumulating.

We keep reading about them.

Like every, I don't know, a few weeks or so, I'm reading about a pretty interesting or significant incremental advance in the perovskite technology.

So I think, you know, five years from now, 10 years from now, if we're still talking about such things, you know, who knows what we'll be up to.

We may be in the low 30s at that time.

And at the same time, you know,

as a parallel project, you know, they're developing the organic solar cells, which are getting into the upper teens.

But the big advantage there, there's two.

One is that they're flexible, and the other one is that they're cheap.

So they're less expensive to install.

They're less expensive to produce.

So again, if you're talking about cost per amount of electricity generated, they're getting competitive with the silicon

slash perovskite solar panels.

So that may, so then it's a trade-off and it depends on what you need.

Do you need to make optimal use of the surface area that you have or you just need the cheapest option?

Right.

Yeah.

But it's good.

It'll be good to have a lot of options.

So the fact that you said these have been available since since September, does that mean that all the big solar companies are already using them?

So again, I think this is mainly for

not like for home

rooftop solar, but for solar power.

Industrial.

This is for utility scale solar, like where you have a big solar installation that's hooked up to the grid, not on somebody's rooftop.

Right.

Whereas

you're making money off the electricity that you're producing and therefore

as an investment, like going from 24 to 27% efficiency, even from the more expensive solar panels, it might be worth it, a worthwhile investment, you know, if you're selling the electricity.

Yeah, so that's a pretty big jump, like from 24 to 27%.

That's huge.

Sweet, man.

All right, let's go on.

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

All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

Crazy.

What do you guys think this one is?

Is that one of those flutes they make out of a human skull?

Remember that, Bob?

Yes.

Is it a glass harmonica?

What happened to the H?

I was wondering that, too.

What's that?

It is not an harmonica, yo.

It's something out of this world.

I don't know.

I couldn't guess this, guys, if I was presented this myself, because it is a very tricky one.

A listener named Hunter Richards sent in a guest.

He said, Hi, Jay, singing bowls.

That raspiness sounds like rock vibrating against the surface.

Maybe it's being played with a wooden bamboo rod.

Question mark.

That's a good guess.

This is not singing bowls, but you you tripped on something in your in your guess there that was not completely incorrect.

Another listener named Bill Weitz wrote in and said Jay today's noisy as someone swinging a hose from a vacuum cleaner.

If you vary the speed, you can vary the pitch.

Now we've all done this.

And I've also, you know, I remember being buying my kids toys that are basically just like a, you know, like a...

a tube that you spin over your head.

And depending on how fast you swing it over your head, it changes the pitch.

And it sounds like that a little bit, but that is not correct.

But thank you for trying.

Another listener named Shane Hillier wrote in and said, I don't know, boss.

I will guess it is some automated pan flute, like a player piano, but for pan flutes.

I thought that was pretty funny.

Oh, Zemfir, remember?

Yeah, right?

Oh.

You could buy his albums on also on cassette, Natrack, by the way.

And there is, I mean, if you've ever heard of a pan flute or heard one, yeah, they...

There is a little bit of a pan flute vibe in there, sound I can definitely recognize, although that is not what this is a listener named Pierce Kennedy wrote in said hi Jay my my sons Kathle age nine and Fion age six would like to guess Kathle thinks it's a squeaky violin Fion thinks it's a broken sound machine they also really like the bit about the crows as they are big bird fans uh well cool guys thank you both for guessing you know this is a tricky one I'll say that you both guessed Absolutely, these were good guesses, but you guys were not correct, but it was a very hard one.

This is not easy.

We did have a winner.

The winner's name is Agent Method.

I suspect that might not be the person's real name.

And Agent says, it's the guy with the rocks and they're waffled, right?

They're cut to different sizes to change the pitch, and he's dragging some smaller rocks across them.

So, yeah, the basic description is: imagine, if you will, the surface of a rock that's standing vertically, you know, a pretty large rock, maybe like an eight feet tall by four foot tall rock surface that has a grid cut out in it.

And

the size of the squares in that grid vary.

And then you take another rock and rub it across these pieces, right?

These the grid, and as it goes to different pieces in the grid, it'll make a different tone because of the size difference, right?

So it's basically like vibrating a rock that's been cut to play specific notes.

And each note is basically a square in the grid.

And

the size difference determines the pitch.

Listen again.

You can hear the rock scraping.

So those note changes, those note changes are the person scraping a different part of

the rock that's standing up that has been cut to be the actual instrument, I I guess.

So it's a rock harmonica.

So why drop the H, though?

That's what it's called.

All right.

Well, I don't know, man.

I think it's weird.

Everybody always says harmonica.

But that's

a different instrument.

Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?

Yeah, man.

I just can't lop off a letter and not let us know you're talking about something different.

He did tell you.

I didn't make this up.

We've talked out of the glass harmonica before.

I'm agreeing with you, Ab.

What the hell's happening right now?

All right, good guesses this week, guys.

I have a new noisy for you guys this week, and it was sent in by a listener named Brandon Aylman.

All right, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or if you heard something cool, email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org.

I think it's Grogu, isn't it, Grogu?

Hey, if you'd like to support the work that we do here on this podcast, you can become a patron.

You can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

We have different levels of patronage.

Any and all are absolutely appreciated and welcome.

We really couldn't function without our patrons.

They've been the glue here for us.

You know, we are in our 20th year.

You know, this is the 20th year.

Hey, just a couple of weeks.

May 4th.

Okay, so it's May.

Technically, May 5th.

So is it the 4th or the 5th?

I would prefer the 4th because that's Star Wars Day.

Yeah.

It could be the 4th.

Yes.

We're allowed to.

In your mind, it could be the 4th.

Yes, May 4th.

It's close enough.

May 4th.

I like that.

It's either the 4th may be with you or it's single-de-Mayo, right?

It's a win-win.

Yeah, it's true.

Hey, guys, Natacon 2025 happening in White Plains, New York, May 15, 16, and 17.

All of the SGU will be there, including George Robb, Andrea Drones Roy, Brian Wecht, and Ian will be manning the tech table and doing all the voodoo that he does.

There will be absolutely no watermelon accidents happening at this conference, as far as we can tell.

If you're interested in going to the conference, go to the skepticsguy.org and there's a button on there for you.

We also have two SGU private shows happening at the conference.

It is going to be one hour on Friday during lunch and one hour on Saturday during lunch.

If you buy a ticket, you're going to be buying a ticket for one of those two hours, or you could buy one for both if you want to.

But those two hours together will make up an SGU episode by itself.

We will not be doing news items.

It will be an off-topic, probably crazy episode.

If you'd like to join us live, please go to the skepticsguy.org to also buy tickets for that.

We are also doing a private show and a skeptical extravaganza stage show this is happening in kansas on september 20th if you're interested again go to the sgu homepage for the link there's a button there that we've put to make it super easy it's going to be a lot of fun we hope to see you there and my final thing is that just a reminder time is ticking and Steve is coming to the SGU.

I'm very, very excited.

I can't wait.

We have new content that we're working on that that we will be releasing after Steve, you know, after he goes full-time for the SGU.

But we still need, of course, time to

start really getting to the heavy lift.

But we know what we're going to do, and we're excited, and we are definitely in full combat insanity.

We want more properties out there to help fight back just all of the myth and disinformation and the crazy that's going on in the world.

So that's

a huge thing that's going on here at SGU.

We're hard at work producing new content to hopefully shed some light on all of this.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

I'm going to do one email.

This comes from another listener who wants us to review his

new theory.

And I'm not going to actually get into the details.

I'm just going to read a piece of the email that he sent me.

He says, the work is titled The Unified Theory of Consciousness, a Cross-Species Model for Intelligence and Regulation.

At its core is a model I call Dragony, which maps dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol, GABA, endocannabinoids, narrative, and energy into an interactive axis, a living system capable of explaining states of emotion, behavior, burnout, addiction, and even artificial intelligence.

Wrapped around that axis is a story that honors the body, the bones, the sediments we come from.

And he reassures me, this is not pseudoscience.

It's not spiritual bypass.

It's not a manifesto.

It's a map born from breakdown, made legible by cross-disciplinary synthesis and written to honor the skeptical mind without losing the poetic one.

And I'm not doing a deep dive on this guy's unified theory of consciousness.

Maybe on a future episode, it depends.

But I wanted to just talk about the phenomenon itself of people who think they've hit upon some deep understanding of reality, right?

One aspect of reality, whatever that aspect is.

Because this is very common, and we encounter this on a regular basis, either because they directly contact us or because they're putting it out there into the world.

So I responded to this person.

I just wanted to tell you what my response is.

I said, listen, I'm willing to take a look at anyone's theory, but you need to be able to do two things.

The first thing is you need to be able to give me an executive summary in 800 words or less.

And that's important for a couple of reasons.

One, because this person, you know, typically these people say, well, you read my 500-page treatise.

And the answer is no, I'm not going to read your 500-page treatise.

If you can, you know, what's interesting about if you do have a new idea, like you have some new insight, I'm not saying it wouldn't require like a full explanation or exploration would not require tens or hundreds of pages, but you should be able to give a concise, coherent executive summary.

What I have noticed is that that is the level at which the cranks always fail.

They cannot do that because they don't have a coherent vision, right?

They just have a lot of stuff that they think they see a pattern in, but they don't really have some coherent idea, right?

And so if you can't boil it down to its nuts and bolts, and that should include this is what the scientific community currently thinks.

This is what we don't know.

This is the new bit.

This is the problem it solves, right?

That's like a three, four-paragraph kind of thing you need to be able to stitch together.

This is why I think this is the way the reality works.

And the second question I ask is: what?

What do you think is my second question?

Falsify?

Yes.

How can you test it?

Tell me one or more ways, at least one way, that you can do an observation or an experiment to test it, to distinguish.

Don't tell me about the observations you made that made you think of this theory.

Tell me how you can falsify this theory going forward and distinguish it from the other theories that are already out there.

If you can't do those two things, you have nothing, right?

I don't care what you think you have, but you have nothing.

And you certainly don't have access to my time.

Right?

Or and you're not going to get access to any scientists' time either.

If you can't convince them that what you have is interesting with the so-called elevator pitch, then

you probably don't have anything.

James Randi used to tell us that

the main obstacle that people who would want to take the million-dollar paranormal challenge would be that they cannot describe what it is they feel they can do.

They can't do it.

And he said that was the vast majority of applicants.

It's a good first-level filter.

Yeah.

It's like, tell me exactly what it is that you do.

Like, it's the operational definition thing.

It's like, what is it very specifically that you are doing?

And if you can't, that's because they can't do that because they only have a vague sense anyway.

Right.

It makes sense inside their brain, but it's not conveyable.

Right.

And I think what these sort of theories of everything is, it's similar in that it tends to be this sort of long, rambling thing and without any coherent bit to it.

I remember there was this one TikTok video that I did a response to.

I probably shouldn't have, to be honest with you, but it was one of those where it was this, you know, a woman who has this theory about the causes of

some kinds of developmental mental problems in children.

And I can't even tell you what it is because she, again, she had a 500-page manifesto and no,

I could not find a coherent explanation of what it is she was actually claiming.

What is your actual claim?

And how is this just you not just stitching together a bunch of published studies?

I didn't know what she was trying to say.

There was no coherent point to it.

How is it different than what scientists currently are saying?

Yeah, and this and this follows a very distinct pattern that has been

plays out for people who do have these kinds of ideas, that they cannot boil boil it down.

Yeah,

so this is to everyone out there who wants

us to review their idea to say if they're onto something, do those two things.

Give us a concise executive summary.

What is the new bit that you're actually claiming?

As specific a definition as you can, and how is it testable?

How could we,

even in theory, demonstrate if your idea is correct or not?

So

what you typically get instead is,

you know, sometimes the people, you could tell the people who are delusional, not just cranks.

Cranks are just, usually they tend to be smart, interested people who just don't know how to interface with actual scientists, right?

They're just not aware of how much they don't know and how it's done.

But I always, the other thing I say to them is like, if you're really onto something, this is what you need to do.

And if you don't do that, it's probably because you're not really onto something.

But then the delusional people are like, I outpredict Einstein.

You know, I'm smarter than Galileo.

It's like, all right, you just, you should have a follow-up appointment with your whoever's taking care of you.

No, so that's they're sort of, you're on a, they're, they're having a different problem, you know.

It's not just that they don't understand how science works.

But in any case,

I don't think there's anything I could say to get through to those people.

But to people who are like, you know, I think are with it, they just are not sure why they haven't fixed physics or whatever, or why they haven't discovered some new underlying, you know, unified theory of consciousness or whatever it is.

I think the key thing that's missing, and if you look back at a lot of cranks throughout history,

is they don't understand that science is a cooperative endeavor.

Science, at least, especially in modern times, is not something you can do by yourself in your garage.

It's just no more armchair if it's a science.

Yeah, it's just it's hard.

You have to bounce your ideas off of experts, right?

It's a conversation.

Science is a conversation.

And you can't, if you're spinning it up all on your own in your own head, chances are you have drifted away from reality.

And it's possible, again, if you could get the attention of an actual expert, they could probably explain to you why you're wrong in in five or ten minutes.

But you have to be open to that.

But first you have to be able to explain your idea to them in a coherent way.

And if you can't do that, then just stop.

You have nothing.

All right.

Anyway, let's move on with science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

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

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

So I just have three regular news items this week.

Are you guys ready?

Yep.

All right.

Okay.

Here we go.

Item number one.

Scientists have published a robust framework for attributing the cost of climate change to the emissions of specific companies, showing that the top five emitters have cost the world economy about $9 trillion

between 1991 and 2020.

I number two, researchers have found the first direct skeletal evidence of Roman gladiator combat against lions.

And iron number three, engineers have created a 3D printed ceramic metamaterial that can withstand temperatures 10 times hotter than the ceramic tiles on the space shuttle, up to 12,000 degrees Celsius.

Jay, go first.

All right, the first one here, scientists, you know, they published a robust framework for

attributing the cost of climate change to the emissions of five specific companies.

I don't know, there's something about that that I think is science.

And if it's not five specific companies, it might be five specific industries.

But I think there's something true about that one.

Second one, researchers have found the first direct skeletal evidence of Roman gladiator combat against lions.

I mean, you know, that's that's not impossible.

You know, they, um, I mean, I just don't, I don't see them burying a dead gladiator with a dead lion.

I don't know.

I just don't see them doing that for some reason.

So I'm kind of iffy on this one.

And the final one, engineers have created a 3D printed ceramic metamaterial that can withstand crazy high 12,000 degree temperatures.

So the idea that it's printed, I think is that's the

sticky thing in that news item.

I mean, could they actually 3D print something made of ceramic?

So So metamaterial means it's ceramic mixed with something else, Steve?

No, I'll give you a definition of it.

A metamaterial is a material whose properties are not dependent solely on the chemical structure, but on its physical structure, usually at the nano type of scale.

Yeah, okay.

I think that one's the fiction because a 3D printer doesn't have that level of resolution.

So I think that's got to be the fiction.

Okay, Bob.

Climate change top five emitters.

That

sounds about right.

It doesn't sound too egregious in either direction.

The skeletal evidence of Roman gladiators combat.

I mean, okay, whatever.

But yeah, the one that grabbed me here was the third one as well.

So I agree with Jay that

metamaterials are typically very, very tiny components that need to be accounted for, you know, potentially even at the nano scale.

So doing that with a 3D printer is...

dramatic.

But not only that, an order of magnitude hotter than the tiles on the space shuttle, that would be, that just sounds like a little bit too much at this point.

It's an interesting idea of using metamaterials to handle that kind of heat.

That's, I haven't, I don't remember seeing a metamaterial that can deal with that.

And I don't, and I don't think that metamaterials won't be able to do that.

I just think it's a little bit too dramatic right now for that.

Plus, coupled with the 3D, the 3D printer aspect, I think, makes that a solid fiction.

Okay, and Evan.

I agree, because I think it's the 10 times stood out to me initially on this one, and I think that's

way too high.

It's likely going to wind up being two times, maybe twice, but not 10.

I think the rest of the time, which is true, man.

Yeah, I think that's the piece of that one.

I think that also makes it the fiction.

Okay, so you guys all agree in the third one.

So let's take these in order.

Scientists have published a robust framework for attributing the cost of climate change to the emissions of specific companies, showing that the top five emitters have cost the world economy about $9 trillion

between 1991 and 2020.

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

You changed it, bastard.

Nice try.

What did I change?

I was just scanning stuff of an hour ago or so, and I saw one that addressed this specifically, but I thought it was like 20 companies and like 29 trillion, not a fewer companies with fewer trillions.

No, it's both.

Oh, good.

I didn't change it.

I didn't dive to it.

I didn't say they only looked at five companies, just that the top five equivalent.

Yes, it was the top 20 companies.

It was actually 111 companies cost the world economy $28 trillion.

111?

111

was attributed.

Yeah.

companies cost the world economy 28 trillion but 9 trillion were attributed to the just the top five emitters one third of that amount roughly yeah so the just the top five yes i didn't read the whole article but i did the i i so i knew the bigger numbers but not the smaller one so it it seemed like you just you just tweaked it to be still true but different than the top line uh title of the article send them the bill evan that's the exact point of this study what is to send them the bill right so the the point that'll happen the point of the study was really to show that you can have a robust framework for doing this, to attribute the cost of climate change at the corporate level, right?

Not just at the country level or at the national level, but to say the activity of Chevron, of this one specific company, contributed this much to climate change, resulting in this loss of whatever to the economy of the world over this period of time.

So they said that with this information, it means you can have a science-based method

for attributing liability to individual companies.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah.

I don't think that they necessarily should have to pay that because it's not, I mean, did they break the law?

I mean, it's, it's just, you know,

it will help with the future and how to deal with these companies.

Yeah.

I think going forward could be more powerful.

Like, all right, you're on notice.

It's definitely...

an easier thing to apply going forward, right?

You could say that, all right, we're going to make you pay for the carbon you emit now.

That's a carbon tax, right?

And which is economists agree, which is probably the most effective method, but it's just hard to get the political will to do that.

But this might help us get there.

It's also when you calculate the subsidies to different industries, it's right.

You know, oftentimes, like I've seen like the fossil fuel industry gets, you know,

$1 trillion subsidy, whatever.

But part of that is direct subsidies.

Part of that, though, is

indirect subsidies

by allowing them to externalize costs, including climate change.

So now we can put a more accurate number on that.

The climate change subsidy for the fossil fuel industry is this amount of money.

Which means when we're comparing that to the cost, for example, of subsidizing renewable energy or nuclear power or grid upgrades, or battery grid storage or whatever, it's like, yeah, but that's actually nothing compared to the indirect subsidy that we're giving to the fossil fuel industry by not making them pay for the predictable and demonstrable effects of their industry.

And in terms, in order to make it work retroactively, as you say, make them pay for the cost they've already induced, you would have to prove some kind of malfeasance.

Not that that's impossible.

That's basically what they did for the tobacco industry.

Yeah, right.

That's true.

You know, basically find them for stuff that that happened in the past because you were able to prove they knew about the risks.

They tried to cover it up.

I don't think that would be impossible to do for the fossil fuel industry, to be honest with you.

Sure.

Again, I'm not recommending that.

I'm just saying that that's not impossible.

But the point of this study was to have a science-based number that you could attach to it.

Because otherwise, you could say, well, how could we really know?

Like, how much?

Yeah.

How can we put a number on this?

Like, well, they did it.

They put a number.

There's a structure.

Yep.

There's a framework for it.

I'm sure they'll say it's inaccurate, but screw those guys.

All right.

Well, why don't we jump to number three?

Engineers have created a 3D printed ceramic metamaterial that can withstand temperatures 10 times hotter than the ceramic tiles on the space shuttle up to 12,000 degrees.

See, you guys all think this one is the fiction.

But Jay said so.

Yeah.

So this is based on a real study.

I won't tell you if it's the science or the fiction.

I'll tell you some details of the study that are accurate.

Trixie.

So it's at least partly true.

Which part?

So they did make 3D printed ceramic material

that does have properties outside the range of normal ceramic material.

The name of the paper is Macroscale Ceramic Origami Structures with Hyper-Elastic Coating.

What they were able to do is produce essentially flexible ceramics.

Flexible.

This is the fiction.

It's not the heat resistance.

It's the flexibility of it.

Malleability of ceramics.

Yeah, so they coat it with a hyperelastic coating, and that enables it to be not brittle, right?

To be able to bend in response to forces and then regain its initial structure.

Well, how thin is the ceramic underneath?

I don't know.

It's got to be quite thin to still bend and not break.

But I think that's also the origami structure is part of that as well.

Okay.

Oh, man.

Interesting.

Is it considered a metamaterial still?

I don't think so.

Okay.

Yeah, still very cool.

So that's the point.

It doesn't sound like metamaterial, although I don't know too many details yet, but it's cool.

I'm going to read about it.

So it wouldn't have to be, like, the 3D printing wouldn't have to be what imposes the metamaterial structure to it, though, right?

You could be 3D printing with a metamaterial.

Right.

Yeah, I didn't think that was going to be the point of contention, to be honest with you.

Really?

Yeah.

So the thing is, so I had to look up, I think, maybe it's going to say it's a, it could, like, I knew like the ceramic tiles on the space shuttle.

So maybe this is ceramic that's even more heat resistant than the ceramic.

tiles on the space shuttles, but I had to look up what that was.

So the space shuttle had both high-temperature reusable surface insulation and low-temperature reusable surface insulation.

The high temperature was able to endure up to 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit or 1,260 degrees Celsius.

But current tiles can go up to what temperature do you think?

Current ceramic tiles.

So the space shuttle tiles were 1,260 degrees.

5,000 degrees?

Yeah, we're at 4,000 degrees now.

Yeah.

So that's how far we've come since then.

I had to make it more than that, you know,

significantly more than that.

That's why I went up to 12,000.

But I knew I was a stretch, but you know, it's because we've got to be.

That's a dramatic change.

I mean,

that would make it then basically much easier to re-enter the atmosphere.

Like, you know, you're so much farther away from the high tolerances that it should be pretty smooth.

Do you guys remember what causes the heat of re-entry?

Friction.

No, no, no, no.

You're compressing compression

ahead of you, and the compression is heating up the atmosphere.

Exactly.

It is not not friction.

That's the wrong answer.

Everyone thinks is correct.

That's the knee-jerk answer.

But it's actually compression of the air, it's not friction.

Yeah, so it's good that we have even more advanced ceramic tiles.

That's great.

I wonder if,

like, I wonder if the military, the United States military has a shuttle-type

ship that still goes up there, right?

I'm watching that.

Yeah, they do have that hash.

Yeah, they have

unmanned vehicles right up there.

I wonder if that has the

higher-quality ceramics.

Maybe it doesn't even quite need it that level.

It's like overkill almost.

Maybe it's too expensive because you don't need that much right now with the way they re-enter.

I don't know.

Cool.

Yeah.

Which means, which means, by the way, I showed you the, they have ultra-high temperature-resistant tiles now.

And the SpaceX Dragon capsule, what do you think that has?

It has a heat shield made of Pika X tiles.

Pika.

P-I-C-A-X.

Sounds like a brand new.

It's a phenolic impregnated carbon ablator.

That's what it's saying for.

Phenolic impregnated carbon ablator.

No way.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so part of the way the heat shields work, like the Apollo era heat shields, that was all ablation, meaning they heat up and they evaporate, right?

Right.

So they're...

No reuse.

That's how they got to be thickening.

It carries the heat away because it's ablating.

But it's not, yeah, no reuse, right?

The space shuttle, they had to make a reusable heat shield, which is why they went to the tiles.

Remember that?

I forget how many ridiculous number of tiles they had, and each one was its own shape.

Yes.

Yes.

No standard shape.

Yes.

Each tile had to go into its very

replaced every time.

Yeah.

Some would fall off.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They had to be full.

Yeah, they had to be basically be.

be fixed each time.

You know, some would have to be replaced.

They'd have to make sure that they were, whatever, they were good to go for another ramp.

The dragon capsule uses, I guess, a combination, both a heat shield and a blade of material.

Interesting.

All right.

All right.

This all means that researchers have found the first direct skeletal evidence of Roman gladiator combat against lions is science.

Have you guys, any of you guys seen this story?

No, not

skeletal evidence.

Yeah, so they basically it's a skeleton.

Uh, they found it was in England, but it was in a

Roman city.

Um, like bite marks on the skeleton, exactly.

They were

teeth marks on the pelvis of this huge scavenging.

That hurts.

I feel it now.

And

they were matched to a large cat.

They said probably a lion.

But they also said to make you feel a little bit better, this could have been scavenger bite marks.

So this might have been something that was done after the person was dead.

Yeah, yeah.

That seems reasonable possibility as well because of the location.

Yeah.

But that's the first time we have skeletal evidence.

Because

we actually have, apparently,

a lot of documentation about the gladiatorial games and descriptions of what went on.

So we have lots of historical evidence to indicate that the gladiators fought animals.

Bears and lions, I think, were the most popular.

Yeah.

But gladiator remains are very rare in this in the archaeological record.

So they found a pit with

multiple male skeletons, all with traumatic injuries, with gladiator-like injuries.

And this one had lion bites on its pelvis.

So it's a pretty, I mean, you know, that's, it's direct evidence.

It's not, it's not ironclad, but it's pretty compelling evidence that, yeah, these were probably gladiators.

I wonder if you could tell from the bones that, yeah, this was a robust individual and not some frail, you know, old guy.

This wasn't just

a peasant that you threw in there.

You can, peasants were hardied.

I mean, they probably had a lot of fun.

That's true.

That's true.

They worked them pretty well.

But you can tell because of the insertions, the tendon insertions on the bone.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Hypertrophy.

You know, so

you can tell how robust somebody was physically by their bones.

Yep.

Yep.

Pretty cool.

All right.

Good job, guys.

All right.

Thank you.

Yay.

Evan, do you have a quote?

I do have a quote.

And this week's quote was suggested by a listener.

His name is Roger, and he's from Connecticut, a local listener.

Thanks for for watching.

I'm just asking this, Roger.

All opinions are not equal.

Some are a very great deal more robust, sophisticated, and well-supported in logic and argument than others.

Douglas Adams.

Oh,

DNA, man.

Love that guy.

He was awesome.

Yes.

I got to listen to some of his stuff again.

It's been a while.

Too long.

I know.

Same here.

It's hard to find his audio books that he narrated.

They just does a great job of narrating his own books.

He is killed.

If you listen, I mean, I've said it before, but I haven't said it in years.

If you like Douglas Adams, read the books, that's fine.

But if you really want to appreciate having him narrate the Hitchhiker's Guide and even the Dirk Gently stories,

he is, as you might imagine, an amazing narrator.

And this is his stuff.

So it just makes it extra, extra special that this is how he

presents his works.

It's like, you know, it's like getting a tour in a museum and having the artist describe the artwork to you.

You know, it's just, you can't beat that.

You can't beat that.

So this is, it's like a fuller appreciation of his art because

it's his voice.

Look for him.

And if you find him, if you find any of his books narrated by him, please let me know.

Yeah.

And I like this quote, although it does require a little bit, I think, of explication in that

all opinions about

facts are not equal, right?

Opinions about reality, about what is true, where there is some kind of objectivity to it, to the opinion.

But opinions that are purely subjective value judgments,

I mean, still you could say some are more sophisticated than others.

That's kind of a very nuanced

piece of music better than that piece of music.

That's it.

Okay.

Conversation is over, basically.

Yeah, it's just a value judgment.

It's not really like versus like, in my opinion, the dinosaurs were wiped out by a meteor, not by something, whatever.

like a scientific opinion absolutely some or some are better than others yeah some are thoughtless naive

whatever not not based on facts or evidence or logic and others are more robust but yeah just saying like just using the shield of that's my opinion it's like yeah that's it's kind of intellectually lazy

right all right well thank you all for joining me this week

thanks steve and until next week this is your skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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