The Skeptics Guide #1029 - Mar 29 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, March 26th, 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, hi, everyone.

Kara is off this week.

She has her last exam to do tomorrow, and she is studying right up until the exam.

How dare she miss an episode?

That is just not cool at all.

It's good to be back, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

You know, sometimes work

intervenes.

Yes, it does.

But I'm glad to be back, and we wish Kara all the luck.

She doesn't need it.

She's going to

be gone.

But you know,

big tests like that come up.

You need to just mentally be in a space and you need to, you know, absolutely

and everything.

Right.

It becomes immersive.

You really do have to get your head in a space in which there are few other distractions going on around you.

Trust me, I know this because I've been in it for a while.

But no, it is good to be back here again.

And I do apologize for missing last week, but it was unavoidable.

So there's an eclipse coming up this weekend.

Yeah, I know.

A kind of cool one, if you think about it.

Partial eclipse.

It's total if you're in the right position in space, but from Earth, it will be partial, yes.

It's not total anywhere on the Earth.

Yeah, it's just partial.

Not on the Earth, right?

Visible from the East Coast?

Yeah, that's correct, which is us.

So we may have actually a chance to witness this.

One of the rare devil's horns

eclipses, which I've read about before.

Never thought I would have maybe a chance to actually see one in my lifetime, but here we go, and I may try to make an effort to go and see it.

And what that means is that this is going to be an eclipse in which during sunrise.

So as the sun rises, it will be in a partial eclipse.

And if you can envision, kind of vision that in your head, what are you going to see first rising from the horizon?

You're going to see these two little tips, you know, where the two circles are overlapping each other, and those will rise first.

And that's how it gets the name, the devil's horns.

Yeah, I've seen a picture of one rising from the ocean, and it really did look like devil horns coming out.

It's just a very cool image.

I'd love to see one.

You have a chance, Bob.

I won't be anywhere near the ocean, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I just don't know if we're going to be in the right place.

It'll be, it says between 4:50 a.m.

Eastern Time and 8:43 a.m.

Eastern Time.

So you got to get up pretty early

and

coincide with sunrise.

But this is a partial eclipse, so you should wear eye gear the whole time.

Yes, good point.

Because, yeah, there'll still be part of the sun exposed.

Yes, plenty of damaging light getting your way.

Yeah.

So be careful.

But still, just amazing.

And I'm sure there's going to be a ton of great pictures taken of this, so long as the weather conditions permit.

But most of the eastern seaboard of the United States, I think the northern half of it at least, will be able to have a chance to see it.

So that will be very cool.

We're still talking about doing the

solar eclipse in 2026 in Spain.

Yes.

No definitive plans yet, but we're preliminary discussing it.

That should be going on.

Total eclipse in Dallas was amazing.

It was completely amazing.

Yeah.

Still,

I mean, really, how is that?

You know, that is an all-time memory right there.

That moment.

Oh, yeah.

I think of forgettable time.

I mean, especially considering the fact that we what I would have I would have bet my house on the fact that we weren't gonna see shit.

We just lucked out.

We lucked out.

All the predictions were horrible over all of most of Texas.

But man, it just like 15 minutes, not like an hour or two.

It was like literally 10 or 15 minutes before go time.

Like, oh, the clouds just said, I'm out of here, you know, which does happen from time to time, but it's not

a cuts phenomenon because of the technology.

Yeah, but you can't depend on it.

You can't depend on it.

Like, if you were in Austin, Texas, you, you know, you did not have a good day all right well we're gonna get right into the news bob you're gonna start us off with a quickie yes thank you steve this is your quickie with bob uh this time i will be discussing research on the great dulling

it was actually called the great dying which refers to the worst extinction event in earth's history that we know of eighty percent of all marine species died out during this end permean mass extinction so uh calling it the great dulling refers to the fact that for millions of years afterwards after this extinction event, marine ecosystems looked boringly similar literally all over the planet, you know, from the equator to the poles.

It was just like this is so much sameness happening.

Real scientists call it the taxonomic homogenization, and this has happened with other mass extinctions as well.

So they've been trying for a long time to try to figure out why this is

a feature of mass extinctions, it seems.

And for 200 years, I think they've been

trying to figure out exactly why this was happening.

Stanford University researchers studied marine fossils records and made some interesting models.

And they were trying to figure out why this global marine diversity takes such a hit in these situations.

They found that it wasn't because of ecosystem level changes, which was one of the main theories.

You know, for example, like a lot of the predators dying, allowing their prey to run amok all over the place.

So those ecosystem level changes could have explained some of this, but it doesn't seem to be the case, at least according to the models that they developed.

Their models show that the mass extinctions and environmental changes allowed some of the highly adaptable marine species, like clams, oysters, and snails, and slugs, to spread all over the world, primarily because of their high adaptability.

The hope here is that this can provide insight into how ecosystems will react to the crazy environmental disruptions and extinctions that we are causing right now.

So, hopefully, some good will come out of

these revelations and maybe help save some species that are, and at least to understand what to expect in the future with this havoc that we are wreaking ourselves.

So, this has been your dull, homogenized quickie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

Bob, you know what creature-dominated land ecosystems right after the Permian extinction?

After the Permian?

Hmm.

Yeah, the end Permian extinction.

It was

Lystrosaurus, which was a synapsid.

They were pretty adaptable, pretty generic.

A species that wasn't highly specialized, right?

It was a generalist.

And pretty much covered the earth,

was pretty dominant for a while, but then

the dinosaurs took over.

Yeah, it looks like a dinosaurian quadruped.

But they predated the dinosaurs.

You're saying.

Well,

it was a synapsid, which was like a reptile-mammal hybrid.

You know, it was evolving into.

Wow, mammal.

Yeah, the synapsids were the group of reptiles that eventually became mammals.

Yeah, this was not, this was very, very early, was not very early.

Okay, interesting.

Wow, man.

Cool.

All right.

Let's go on with the regular news items.

What do you guys know about constructed languages?

Constructed languages.

Esperanto.

Would that be a construction?

It's the big boy, yeah.

I don't know much about it, but I do know that they seem to be a complete waste of time.

Why?

Because nobody uses them.

Well, that's not true that nobody uses them.

There are 60,000 Esperanto speakers around the world.

Esperanto was invented in 1887.

It was designed to be an international language, so it was made with the simplest grammar.

It uses the syntax from Indo-European languages, and 80% of the vocabulary is taken from Romance languages.

So it was kind of meant to just be as easy and adaptable as possible.

But the question is, if you take a made-up language like Esperanto, or let's say

Klingon,

or Navi from Avatar, Navi Avatar, yeah, or High Valerian or Dothraki from the Game of Thrones.

And Lord of the Rings has languages, yep.

Elvish from Lord of the Rings, whatever.

You take a made-up language.

How does our brain process that language?

Does it process it like a natural language, like one that occurred organically over generations, or does it treat it differently?

Wouldn't it want to?

Because that's like the easiest path, the path of least resistance, the least effort that it would take.

I would think that it's since it's constructed artificially, that the brain wouldn't be quite as efficient with it as an organic language that arose through actual

human interaction and need.

Well, let me tell you what the.

So, that's the question for the study that we're going to be talking about today: is does the brain process conlangs?

That's what they call them, conlangs, constructed languages.

Constructed languages are.

The same as natural languages.

Now, prior research has looked at artificial languages such as math and computer code.

Right?

How do you think about that?

Now, when computer coders are working with a computer language,

we call it a computer language, one that they are well-versed in, right?

They're fluent in this computer language, and

they are using it, and they're looking at their brain with a functional MRI scan, right, fMRI, which shows which parts of the brain are active.

Do you think the language areas light up or they don't light up?

Light up.

Sure, they light up.

I think they would light up.

They do not light up.

Oh, no.

Computer language.

The brain does not treat a computer language like a language.

It does not utilize the language centers.

Rather.

At all.

Rather, it uses the brain areas that are involved with complex cognitive tasks.

So it's different parts of the brain, ones that

are involved in symbology and complex tasks.

Oh, so it's trying to decode a puzzle almost.

Yeah, it's like exactly.

It's more like it's trying to decode a puzzle than actually thinking in a language.

So the question is, is a conlang going to be treated like a computer language or like a natural language?

You guys want to

make your bets?

Not natural.

I'd say more natural still.

Oh, you think more natural?

You think more like a computer language?

More like a computer language.

Jay?

I agree with Evan.

All right.

So they did a study.

They looked at speakers of Esperanto, Klingon, Navi, Heisalarian, and Dothran.

Like fluent, like absolutely fluent.

People who are,

people who are, yeah, whatever, as fluent as you can get in those languages.

And they looked at their brains while they were speaking this artificial language.

And the language centers lit up just like a natural language.

Language.

Just like a natural

treats it like a natural language.

So what's the difference?

What's the difference?

So the question is,

what's the difference between computer languages and conlangs and natural languages?

Well, computer languages, they're not expressing feelings and emotions and describing events.

It's like more mathematical.

Right, exactly.

So it's not describing internal state or external reality.

It's just a code, right?

It's like math.

It's way more like math than it is like a natural language.

Right.

There's no inflections in code.

Right.

Is that what we're talking about?

Like how language sort of weaves along?

That's interesting.

So the question is, is it phoneme-based or is it abstraction?

Is it what abstractly refers to?

So here,

for the authors of the study, this is their interpretation.

The features of conlangs that

differentiate them from natural languages, including recent creation by a single individual, often for an esoteric purpose, small number of speakers, and the fact that these languages are typically learned in adulthood, appear to not be consequential for the reliance on the same cognitive and neural mechanisms.

We argue that the critical shared feature of conlangs and natural languages is that they are symbolic systems capable of expressing an open-ended range of meanings about our outer and inner worlds.

Right, so that was their interpretation.

And again, they specifically wanted to say that, okay, was the I think what the serious hypothesis here was: is there something like when languages evolve naturally in a population, is that going to map to our native language areas better than some guy, one person just making up the language?

And it would not be as good a fit.

But apparently, that doesn't matter.

And I suspect it doesn't matter because even if you're making up a fake language, and anyone who has tried to do this, like any GM, you know, in role-playing games, for example,

you're going to follow, even if subconsciously, the rules of your native language.

Because what else do you have to go by?

Right, right.

You're going to imitate a natural language.

It's going to ultimately have the same features of that language.

Yeah, so apparently well enough that it doesn't matter.

I also think the

difference between a computer language and

either a conlang or a natural language is you speak a language, right?

You say the words in your head to some extent when you're reading, some people more than others, I know, but still.

But you're not speaking the code.

Even if you translate it into a language, if you say, if this, then that, it's still not the same as speaking a language inside your head, even if you're reading it, right?

You're just treating it as code.

So it is, like Evan said, more of a puzzle.

It's not a language.

It's a set of instructions and operations.

It's not referring to things and ideas

directly,

maybe indirectly.

Now, here's another question.

What about people?

This is not this study, but this I just looked up.

I looked this up separately because I was interested to take it one step further.

What about people who speak in sign language?

Ooh, that's a good question.

No, that lights up.

I'd say that definitely lights up like a language.

I suppose absolutely.

All right.

So let me give you some background information about prior research.

So when you make nonverbal gestures, right, even if it's for communication purposes,

if I'm trying to signal to you to come over here,

that's a nonverbal gesture meant to convey information.

Is that processed in my language area?

Or is it processed, let's say, in the motor area?

Yeah, the motor, what, the cerebellum?

Is that it?

No, just like the motor strip.

Cerebellum is different.

That's coordination.

Could it be both?

It's just more in the motor area.

It's not processed in the language area.

Right?

So nonverbal gestures are processed like motor actions, not language.

Okay, like the middle finger.

Yeah,

if you flip the bird, that's a motor action.

It's not a language action in the brain.

But what about sign language?

So is sign language processed like a gesture, like a nonverbal gesture, or like speech?

That's a great question.

I'm going to say speech.

It's too, I mean,

but what would be going on in your head?

You're trying to think of what language.

Yeah, but what would make sign language different?

Is sign language just really elaborate nonverbal gestures?

Or

are you actually speaking with your hands?

You're speaking with your hands.

Yeah, you're speaking with your hands.

And because when you're speaking normally, you're using your tongue and your lips and your mouth.

I mean, you're coordinating all those movements as well.

But it just becomes reflex.

You're not really thinking about it.

And I'm sure

if you're good at ASL, you get to that point where you're really not even thinking about the sequence of events.

It just flows automatically because you're just

second nature.

It's a combination of the other human reactions intertwined with this signing that turn it, that...

make the brain go to the

allows the brain to use the language interpretation parts to it's a fascinating question, isn't it?

It is.

Give me the answer.

Give me the answer.

The answer is it depends on.

It depends.

Oh,

you.

I'm raising my middle finger right now.

What do you think it depends on?

How good you are.

How long you've been doing it?

Right, Steve?

The person, either

are they saying the words in their head as they sign?

Well, too many.

So, what do you think, Bob?

I think that it depends if you learned it

at a young age and you needed to learn it

because you were hearing impaired, I think that would be more language.

But if you learned it as an adult, say, to communicate with a family member who needs to use ASL, then it would be more

motor control and not language.

That's exactly correct.

Yeah.

Makes sense.

Makes sense.

If you are congenitally deaf and fluent in sign language, you use your language area to sign.

If you weren't congenitally deaf, you learned learned it later.

You brain process it like a gesture.

That's it.

And you'll never get to the point where it's a language.

But what does that mean, though?

Even if you can't train yourself to that point.

I think it means that the language area.

It's like an accent.

No, it's like when you are born deaf, the language area has no input.

And you can substitute visual input for audio input

into the language area.

But if you grew up speaking, then your language area is already used for processing audio as language.

And then if you try to add on top of that sign language, it's just an elaborate gesture to you.

It doesn't use your language area.

So you have to be congenitally diverse and fluent in sign language in order for it to be processed like a language.

That's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, I love it.

That's really cool.

Never thought of it.

Never thought of it before.

Yeah, well, now we have fMRI and other tools, so we could ask and answer these questions.

Right.

And it says a lot about how the brain develops and how the brain, like what different parts of the brain do.

And, you know, the brain definitely is, you know, it's like a you use it or lose it type of thing, but it's also, it, it develops to use.

It develops with use.

It maps to use.

Right.

And yeah, so, and obviously there's also developmental windows with the brain, meaning that there are times when the brain's trying to develop its language, you know, and if you miss that that window, you know, which lasts until you're about four years old,

you can still learn later, but it will never be as fluent as it is if you want to.

Like with vision, people that got vision after being blind,

their vision will never be like our vision.

It's really...

I remember, I never will forget a story about a guy who got his vision back in adulthood and

he grew to hate it.

He didn't like it.

It was

a hard time because the brain just

didn't grow dealing with it.

So it just didn't.

And one interesting side effect was that he was immune to basically

illusions.

Optical illusions he was immune to because it's like he was seeing more like the raw data than his brain's interpretation of it.

Yeah.

Jordi LaForge imaging those things almost.

And couldn't deal with things like glass and shadows.

What if you're a robot?

What do you mean?

Yeah.

I'm just asking.

And we're a robot.

What if you're a robot?

Look, Bob wants to know.

He's embarrassed to ask, so I'm asking for him.

If you're a robot,

is it a language or what?

You tell me.

I guess it depends on how we program the robots, right?

If you don't have that language model,

that language module installed, Jay, then you're going to treat it as gestures instead of language.

It's bottom line.

Humanoid robots will learn, will sign eventually, right?

They will be signing humanoids.

Oh, yeah, man.

Humanoid robots.

Yeah, sure.

They're getting dexterity levels that are that should be up to the task, if not now, but soon.

All right, Jay, talk to us about the effect of exercise on brain health.

Let me guess.

When I first was scanning through some articles looking for something and I came across this, I'm like, this again, you know what I mean?

I've read about this so many times.

But I decided to peek inside, and I was pleasantly surprised to find some pretty interesting information here.

That's it's new information and it's important information.

So I thought I would let everybody know.

So there was a new umbrella review out of the University of South Australia that delivered what the experts are saying it's like the strongest evidence to date that physical exercise, pretty much of any kind, can significantly improve brain function across the human lifespan.

And, you know, we're not talking about a minor boost either.

It could be walking, you could be doing Tai Chi, you could be doing yoga,

even interactive video games.

Regular physical activity enhances general cognition, memory, and executive function in both healthy and clinical populations.

We all pretty much already knew this.

It's all about the degree.

And

when they mentioned interactive video games, I've done them.

And yeah, you could get a really good workout from a video game.

Beat Saber is a good one.

Oh, yeah, Beat Saber will get you going.

But there are exercise games.

You know what I mean?

It's not really a game.

It's more of a you know you're

exercising the hell even just regular vr video games that are not optimized for exercise you're standing up you're moving around it's just different than sitting you know definitely oh my god that's i mean i was playing um half-life alex yeah awesome game yeah so i'm playing half-life of alex and you know you're standing up the whole time and i'm playing the game on the weekend and i was on my feet for four hours and i didn't didn't feel it you know what i mean It was so engaging.

You know, it was an incredible experience to play the game, but also, yeah, you're on your feet.

It's so much more healthy to be on your feet than it is to be seated.

Anyway, okay.

Part of the reason I used to love to LARP was getting out and running around.

It was awesome.

We were in great shape back in those days.

We were.

You had to be.

I remember one weekend, we were running around so much, I got to the point where my muscles tapped out.

Like they were out of energy.

I felt like just like I just had to stop.

Your brain was telling them to do things.

The gym was gone.

Yeah, and they refused to eat at low levels.

Nice.

Yeah.

Yeah, we would, yeah, just my glycogen stores were done, I guess.

That's what it was.

Steve, we would be running from like 9 a.m.

to 3 in the morning.

And it's all adrenaline the whole time.

Right.

And you're thinking and you're doing puzzles and you're doing all this stuff and you're fighting.

It's, gosh, it was fun.

All right.

Sorry, Jay.

All right.

So this was, in case you want to know, this was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

The study pulled data from 133 systematic reviews and meta-analyses.

This encompassed over 2,700 randomized controlled trials and more than, and this is an awesome number, 258,000 participants.

I like that.

It's the most comprehensive synthesis ever conducted of the cognitive impact of exercise.

So this has legitimate value and legitimate weight.

And when I even give you more details, you'll see what they did in the study to make it even more accurate, right?

So the researchers found that exercise improves general cognition, it improves memory, and it improves executive function.

But let me dig into each one of these real quick.

So thinking and mental sharpness, right?

This is your general cognition.

They figured out that it improved by a noticeable amount.

So people exercise regularly, scored better on brain tests than those who didn't, enough to make a real difference in daily life.

It's not a huge leap.

It's not like, oh my God, I'm like, you know, be able to predict the future.

No, but it is clearly better.

People who are

wanting their general cognition to improve absolutely will see a legitimate improvement if

they're engaging in regular exercise.

Memory improved by a small but meaningful amount.

Now, when I say small,

these things are very hard to measure, and they use like percentile points to figure out how much better or whatever.

So the real thing here is it is a meaningful amount that memory improves.

Exercise won't, you know, it's not going to turn you into a genius, but it can help you remember things more easily.

You know, like you, you will have a better memory, like names, appointments, you know, where you left your keys, all that short-term memory stuff definitely will improve.

Now we have focus, planning, and self-control.

These are part of executive function.

And these got a modest boost.

This includes skills like staying on task, making decisions, resisting distractions.

It's very helpful if you have kids, if you're a student, or people in particular with ADHD,

you know, who suffer from focus problems and planning problems and self-control problems, you know, their executive function will go up.

And they specifically said people with ADHD will show the most significant bump here in executive function.

So these gains held up even when the authors excluded lower quality studies and they corrected for publication bias.

So these results, I think, can be highly trusted and are significant.

While physical activity, you know, it's often marketed as a way to slow age-related cognitive decline, the review found that the largest benefit was in children and adolescents.

And here are the few things that really I thought blew me away.

So, particularly in memory performance, children and adolescents had the biggest gain.

And again, people with ADHD, the improvements in executive function were really pronounced, significantly outpacing any other group.

Adults and older adults still showed statistically significant gains, of course, but the effects were smaller, but still not insignificant in any way.

So, to summarize this part, the data suggests that physical activity is not only preventative, but it's developmentally beneficial.

So, it's just as important in the classroom as it is in the retirement home.

They were saying about children who are engaging in exercise frequently, it actually helps them developmentally.

This is an important point that I'm not sure I made clear.

It'll actually improve their cognitive function in a way that adults can't get the bonus anymore because their minds are developing and still growing.

So, if they're exercising on a regular, they will actually, you know, their brain function will be better than kids who don't.

Like, it's part of the development process.

So, really keep that in mind.

If you have young kids, you know, you should really have them get outside and not be on their phone or video games all the time.

Get them out, even for a half an hour a day.

So, traditionally, it's been thought that vigorous aerobic activity is the the gold standard for brain health, but the study shows that low to moderate intensity activities had the most consistent and robust cognitive benefits.

So there were two standouts.

Something called Xer games, which is what we were just talking about.

These are video games that require physical movement like Pokemon Go or VR Fitness apps.

These had the largest impact on general cognition and memory.

And mind-body practices like yoga and Tai Chi were the most effective for improving memory.

And they think it's due to the combination of focused attention, physical coordination, and mindfulness.

So, the point to a key insight here is mental engagement during exercise matters.

I have never heard this before.

I don't know if you have, Steve.

I do not either.

But this is brand new information.

Activities that require both physical and cognitive effort, like tracking sequences, solving problems, reacting quickly, these appear to stimulate brain networks more effectively than movement alone.

So, if you're on the treadmill and you're just mindlessly walking and not doing anything, that's not as good an exercise as actually doing one of these exercise video games where there's puzzles involved or you have to do, you know, you have to make fine motor skills and deduce things while it's happening.

Remarkably, this actually,

the mental engagement matters in this overall success.

Oh, it's like the biathletes, right?

They cross-country ski and then they have to stop and shoot targets.

Oh, I've always been impressed by that.

Now, Bob, this next one really applies to you.

The title of this next part of my

news item here is called Shorter is Better.

There's another really surprising finding here.

So, interventions that lasted just one to three months, right?

Meaning that you get onto some type of regular exercise routine and you're only committing to one to three months and you don't force yourself to go any longer than that and you can take a break, right?

These delivered stronger cognitive gains than people who extended their exercise routines beyond six months.

And there's a couple of ideas that they have about why.

So, one reason is that the shorter programs are easier to maintain, right?

Of course,

I can exercise consistently for one to three months.

It's not that hard.

It really is hard to stick with it for six months, years on end, or whatever.

Like you have to be okay with you taking breaks.

It's not a horrible thing to do.

As a matter of fact, you might get more exercise at the end of the year.

If you go on like a three-month, one-month-off type of routine, because

your average exercise time will be better at the end of of the year than if you try to just continue to do it every three times a week, whatever, right?

Another reason could be that the brain responds best to, and Steve, I think you know what I'm going to say, to these novel engaging challenges.

Sometimes there's a decline when you continue to do the same routine over and over and over again.

So if you do it for a little while and then take a break, when you come back,

there'll be a newness to it, even though you've did it for a while.

Like that break can actually help your body like re-engage with the exercise and it'll be like a new thing again.

So they're not 100% sure.

It's really hard to lock in these types of details when they're doing this type of testing because how would you really know unless you're cutting into all these brains?

But the bottom line is that this is there.

It's something to keep in mind when you're exercising.

If you have a problem, you know, going past the three-month mark, don't worry about it.

Take your break and then come back to it.

Yeah, but also, you know, don't use this as an excuse to quit and be like, even if you're if you're enjoying it, just do what you do what you enjoy in terms of being active and moving around, no matter what it is.

Don't worry about, oh, maybe I should stop for a month.

If you're enjoying it and you're into it, because Jay, these benefits, these extra benefits by engaging and focusing the mind while you're working out, I mean, how much better is it to do that than just mindlessly moving?

I mean, you know, a couple of percentage points.

I mean, I'm sure it's not dramatic.

It's probably detectable, but it's not necessarily like a dramatic improvement by focusing while you're doing cardio, right?

But they were saying that you will get more of a cognitive bump if you are actually

engaging your brain when you're doing it.

Like, again, fine.

And how much?

I mean, but I'm sure it's not a dramatic improvement.

I mean, I'm sure just

engaging in the exercise itself, even if it's like, you know, every other day for years, it's

basic for you.

They were able to see a correlation where it appeared to stimulate brain networks more effectively than just movement alone.

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out how much more, how much more.

I would say it's probably hard to really get a level on that, but the point is, it does make sense.

And so what's interesting, though, it's interesting.

Let's try it.

Because, you know, and the other thing, if you're mentally engaged, this is the other thing.

If you can find something,

it'll go by faster and you'll enjoy it more.

Like, you will enjoy Beat Saber more than just walking on the treadmill.

Right?

So, watching TV doesn't count.

You have to be doing something with your mind.

I just recognize that.

But watching TV while you do cardio, it will go by faster.

Yeah, that's

not putting that down.

I'm just saying it's not going to happen.

It depends on what's on TV.

It doesn't do the viewer's time.

I'm going to use a crossword puzzle on my iPad while I ride the bike.

Oh, there you go, Steve.

There you go.

That'll do it.

All right, so here's another thing, guys.

I won't be doing that.

There was no clear dose-response relationship.

Benefits didn't increase in a linear fashion with longer session lengths or higher weekly volume.

And that's good news for people like a lot of us who struggle with time or energy.

So a few short cognitive engaging workouts each week may be enough to make the big difference.

Yeah,

the curve is steep at first.

Like anything's better than nothing, but you don't have to dedicate your life to it.

You don't have to be training for the Olympics.

You know what I mean?

Just do something.

Do like some regular exercise and keep mentally active.

So my takeaway from this is you don't have to be knocking yourself out with super intense weightlifting, super intense cardio.

like yes resistance training is very healthy cardio of course is very healthy but they're saying that even small spurts of of exercise moderate exercise like you will see and have improvements if you're doing this and it's and it's reachable by most people and you should you really got to think about this right and part of the reason why i really wanted to talk about this this particular news item is this right we live in an age guys where we are all on one level or another, most of us are addicted to screens, like in a bad way.

Like, we all, and I think as an individual, if you're hearing this, you know, be honest with yourself for five seconds.

Are you on your phone and then you're on your computer too much?

You know, you basically get in those little dopamine hits as you're on TikTok and breezing through.

You know, it's not just that, Jay.

It's like I work on screens.

Like, I cannot do my job.

I do too.

You know, I have to as well.

The fact that, you know, by default, most of us are behind a screen all day, and every other free moment we have, the phone comes out.

We can't stand to not be mildly entertained when we're just sitting there somewhere like a chat, right?

Or alone with our thoughts, God forbid.

Be mindful of the fact that this is unhealthy.

It also supports, you know, funding and prioritizing gym at school, right?

Especially where they said kids, teens

and children especially benefit from physical activity.

So building that into the school day actually has academic benefits for those kids, you know?

Oh, my God, right?

Yep.

So there is a whole purpose for recess, gym class.

Absolutely.

In an academic sense, it would also be helpful not to get up so early and go to school.

Put in your alarm, whatever phone or brand that you have, they all have alarms.

Put in a daily alarm a couple of times a day, right?

Whenever you think you're most likely to have a little break time or whatever, just put in, go for a walk for 10 minutes or go for, you know, do X activity for 15, 20 minutes.

Put that in there, and that reminder will help you.

A reminder, yeah, just to keep it in a daily thing.

So you're constantly being pinged, hey, man, get off your phone and do some exercise.

You could also play Pokemon Go.

Yeah, legit.

It's in there.

That's still a thing, huh?

It is.

They're still supporting that app?

Yeah.

Did they come up with new things to collect?

Yeah, it's still an actively managed app.

It just got

to be too annoying.

Yeah,

I would go to the same spot trying to pick up a creature, and nothing would be there because I had already collected it.

Like, really?

I got to go find new places to go.

You got to walk around that blade.

But

I thought that that would,

it was a lot of fun to do for a while.

And I thought it would be like the first, you know, the first game of similar AR-type games that would appear.

And it just didn't happen.

It didn't materialize.

It didn't take off as much as it should have.

I like to

catch creatures in every city that I visit because it tells you where you caught it and when you caught it.

It's actually

a good way to mark all of my travels.

Steve.

I know.

It's nerdy.

All right.

Evan, tell us about the Curiosity rover finding some long carbon chains.

Yes, yes.

Can we do a little background first?

Yes, always.

Before I get to the actual news.

All right, here.

I have a question: Is there life on Mars?

No.

Or has there ever been life on Mars?

We don't know.

We don't know yet.

There you go.

Now, those questions, right?

Those questions right there have bedeviled both scientists and pseudoscientists for a long time, millennia, I would argue.

For example, do any of you remember the canals on Mars theory?

Oh, yeah, you should, right?

Sure.

1877, Giovanni Schaparelli, an Italian astronomer, observed Mars through a telescope and described seeing canali, which is Italian for channels or grooves.

Channels.

That was the critical mistranslation, right?

Channels?

Yes, that's right.

But good old English, we translate it to English.

Canali becomes canals, and that means, oh, okay,

not so much channels, but canals like things that are artificial that were constructed.

Exactly.

And there you go.

That one translation or mistranslation sparked an entire, what, generation of people thinking that, yeah, Mars, there was life on Mars, including some actual astronomers.

Percival Lowell

bought into that theory for a while and wrote about it.

And that's just one example.

Ooh, the face on Mars.

I mean, my gosh, talk about famous rock formations on Mars.

That low-resolution photo taken in 1976 by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter.

And how much cover time did that get on tabloids all over the world for like 30 years?

I mean, that thing paid off in spades.

Then they took a high-resolution photo, which showed a mountain, and then they said, oh, they must have blown it up with an atomic bomb.

Those Martians,

they are clever.

No, NASA did not hide it.

Oh, NASA.

Yes, of course.

Of course.

NASA lies about everything, right, Evan?

But then we started sending more and more sophisticated vehicles to Mars and caught better images, among other things.

But unfortunately, sort of our, you know, our tendency to see things where they aren't real continued.

2013, photo from Curiosity showed, well, what some claim to look like a rodent or a lizard sitting on a rock, if you remember that, evidence of life.

Of course, NASA's covering it up, conspiracy theories.

Yeah, it was just the lighting that made it look animal-like.

A fish, a fish on Mars, 2016.

Same idea.

You know, hey, look, it looks like a fish, but it's all about the angle and how the rock fractures and so forth.

There have been other pyramids that have been taken through photographs from Curiosity, among other things that have landed on Mars.

And what?

The Bigfoot on Mars, even.

Here you go.

That's like the brass ring of pseudoscientists everywhere.

Bigfoot on Mars.

2007, Rover Spirit sent back images to Earth.

Sure enough, there it is.

It's that same image of Bigfoot from the Patterson Gimlund film, right?

You know, with that, that's it.

It has the same kind of vibe to it.

Yeah,

with the Bigfoot sort of turning and looking over its shoulder at the person taking the photograph.

At that moment, it sort of you could line it up.

So people went crazy for that.

But it was like, what was it?

It was really small and at an angle.

Correct.

It was only a couple inches tall, right?

But, you know, that's the way our brains work.

Yep, Mars is devoid of canals, Egyptian-looking pyramids.

Yep, and even Bigfoot.

Well, our rovers and landers have been scratching the Martian surface for decades now.

My gosh, decades, trying to find evidence of the most basic traces of current life or life long since vanished.

And at the moment, you know, it's just been this slow-grinding work of scientists along with the vivid imaginations of humans.

But, but

a headline from just the other day: NASA's rover, Curiosity, that thing has been going for so long now, over a decade, it detected something that is curious.

And I first read this report over at livescience.com.

And the author of this particular article, her name is Jess Thompson.

Headline reads: Longest molecules ever found on Mars may be remnants of building blocks of life.

A chain of 12 carbon molecules linked together has been confirmed in the soil of Mars.

That's according to a study published on March 24th, so just a few days ago, in the

Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Pinas.

The chain was detected in a 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample collected from a dried-up Martian lakebed named Yellowknife Bay.

And, okay, you might think, wow, big deal.

Strand of a dozen carbon molecules.

So what?

So what?

Oh, my gosh.

This might be the best evidence collected to date suggesting that Mars once had living organisms on the planet.

I mean, that seems pretty significant to me.

The long carbon chains are thought to have originated from molecules called fatty acids, which on Earth are produced by what?

You know, creatures, biological entities.

But fatty acids can form without biological input, which could be the case on Mars.

But it could mean that there are signs of life lurking within its soil, or it once did.

The co-author of the study, her name is Caroline Friesinet, an analytical chemist at the French National Center for Scientific Research in the Laboratory for Atmospheres and Space Observations, was quoted as saying this: The fact that fragile linear molecules are still present at Mars's surface 3.7 billion years after their formation allows us to make a new statement.

If life ever appeared on Mars billions of years ago, at the time life appeared on Earth, chemical traces of this ancient life could still be present today for us to detect.

So cool.

Yep.

Got to get some of those samples to Earth.

Well, that is the next part, right?

And I know, Jay, you've spoken about this in some recent news items and brought it up.

We have to pick up those canisters, those little, what are they, titanium tiny little vials that have been collected.

There's samples within those vials, and they're waiting to be picked up.

That is the, what is that plan called?

The sample retrieval lander, the SRL.

It'll land near Perseverance,

another

robot on Mars, and deliver a small rocket called the Mars Ascent Vehicle.

Perseverance

and

backup helicopters like mini drones will deliver the catched samples into the lander and then the MAV will launch those sealed samples into Mars orbit and that'll be the first rocket launch from another planet.

That's cool in of itself.

So it rendezvous in orbit with an ESA, a European Space Agency built orbiter, which will catch those samples and then it will start the long trip back to Earth.

It will be sometime in the early 2030s.

We don't know exactly when this will happen.

We've got some years to wait.

But talk about that will be, that will be quite literally the catch.

I mean, seriously.

It's one thing to have the robots do the analysis on the planet and send the data back, you know, for us to read.

In fact, these samples, guys, this, these samples that they found these carbon chains in, they were actually collected in 2013.

Wow.

And it was only by accident through some other

experiments that they were doing that they realized, oh my gosh, fatty acids.

Look at this.

So they said they weren't necessarily surprised by it, but in a sense, they were, because they sort of had this data in their hands.

They just had never had a technique to look at it until they tried applying.

What were they doing?

They were trying a new

technique.

It was called, oh, not sure what it's called, but the researchers behind the new study thought to test out a new method for finding the molecules by preheating samples to 1100 degrees Celsius, ooh, hot, over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, to release oxygen before analysis.

And their results showed no amino acids, but by pure luck they discovered fatty molecules hiding there instead.

So they kind of just stumbled upon it, and actually, we had these samples for well over a decade and only now are realizing this.

It's unfortunate that there are so many things that are like primarily produced by living things, or they're on Earth they're produced by living things, but they have some non-like abiotic chemical production.

So, we can't completely rule out that the source is abiotic.

Like these, yeah, I mean, long chains of carbon are typical of life, you know, like for fatty acids, but they could have some theoretical abiotic source, and that just keeps us from being able to conclude definitively that the source is life.

But it is intriguing, it is very intriguing, extremely, yeah.

I mean, it would be nice when we eventually settle this question of whether there's life on Mars or not, you know, or ever was.

Likely it is.

Someday.

Yeah.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Thanks.

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Bob, I like like these two words together, and I especially like them together: nanotech light sales.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, this one's very, very cool.

Researchers have made an interesting advance in light sale technology.

Their new materials and production process could revolutionize not only small-scale deployment in our solar system, but outside our solar system as well.

This was published in Nature Communications.

The title is a fun mouthful: Pentagonal Photonic Crystal Mirrors: Scalable Light Sales with with enhanced acceleration via neural topology optimization.

Damn.

All right, so let's break that down a little bit and make it a little bit digestible.

You'll notice that they mention light sales and not solar sales.

Interesting distinction.

Solar sails obviously imply the use of sunlight to push the sale, and light sales typically assume that powerful lasers will be doing the heavy lifting there.

So that's why it's light sales and not solar sales.

This news item seemed to have started with an engineering project you may remember.

We briefly mentioned it not too long ago, Breakthrough Starshot, which was founded in 2016 by Mark Zuckerberg and Stephen Hawking.

The goal was to create a fleet of tiny interstellar

chip probes, very, very lightweight probes attached to light sails accelerated by, say, gigawatt-class lasers, sending them to Alpha Centauri, the Alpha Centauri system four light years away.

Conventional rockets, even with no cargo, would take about 10,000 years to get there.

But such a design with the light sails could conceivably reach speeds of 15 to 20% the speed of light, getting there in

20 years or so, right?

I remember talking about that a while ago.

So that's dramatic.

I mean, to another star system in 20 years, that's crazy.

It's such a compelling idea.

But to do that, the biggest technical hurdle is arguably, you know, not the lasers or the actual probe itself, itself, but the light sails themselves.

For such a task, they would likely have to weigh less than a gram, but also be sufficiently reflective across multiple wavelengths, and of course, also fairly strong as well.

So, that's not easy.

We cannot do that right now in the way that it would need to be done for a project like this.

Now, the cost is especially critical here because a mission like this, you know, the mission design would likely use a shotgun approach, right?

would, you'd send not one of these probes and a light sail, but you'd probably send many, many of them in the hopes that at least one would make it.

Because who knows what could go wrong or even what little particles you, you know, you go, you're traveling at 20% the speed of light.

It doesn't, you don't have to interact, you know, you don't have to hit much to obliterate the probe or the sail or whatever.

So, yeah, they'd want to send a lot.

So, cost is important because you may need to create 10 or 20 of these or more, 100, and send them all out and see what happens.

So, this is now where the new paper comes in.

These researchers made two impressive advances to achieve these goals.

The first breakthrough, and the most important one, in my opinion, involved what's called neural topology optimization, which you may remember from the title of the paper.

The last two words, topology optimization, that's a common technique.

It's been done for a very long time.

It's essentially a computational technique that tweaks the design and layout of a new material that you want to design.

It tweaks it over and over, iterating it over and over until it reaches whatever the performance objectives are.

So, in this case, for example, you might your performance objectives might be a light sail that would be that's very lightweight, strong, and reflective, and can accelerate to you know 20% the speed of light fairly quickly.

Those are the kind of things you would probably want in light sails, and that's what you would want this optimization process to kind of iterate itself towards.

That's the goal you would program into it to get to.

Now, the other part of this

technique is neural, the neural part of neural topology optimization.

That simply means that AI algorithms were used that were trained on huge amounts of data on doing specific things like identifying patterns and predicting optimal outcomes.

So putting these two concepts then together, combining

these AI, you know, these AI algorithms with this topology optimization technique, when you put them together, it resulted in a design of a five-sided crystal mirror structure,

which not only greatly enhanced the performance possibilities of this light sale, but it also greatly reduced the fabrication costs.

At the same time, that's a pretty much

probably an optimal result.

You know, hey, I could do this for you now, and

it's going to perform even better, and it's going to be a lot cheaper.

I mean, what else can you ask for?

The second breakthrough was actually, this is kind of where the nanotech comes in, but it's not dramatic nanotechnology.

Of course, it's never really, I mean, it's fascinating, but it's not whatever.

It's not the nanotech I'd be wishing for in 2025.

But all right, don't let me go off on that damn tangent.

But the second breakthrough was manufacturing a small sample of the light cell.

They were able to use advanced lithography techniques, you know, used for integrated circuits and printing chips and all that, which were, now remember that these lithography techniques were aided by the topology optimization step because this optimization step made it easy to create

these elements, these optical elements.

So, that's one of the reasons why the price

was so cheap.

So, these optimization techniques helped create the silicon nitride light cell that was in their sample, 60 millimeters by 60 millimeters by 200 nanometers.

So, that was the size of this test test light sail that they created.

But

on that medium, on that substrate that they created,

they created a billion of those nanoscale crystals that they etched into it using those advanced lithography techniques.

That's where the nanotech comes in.

So

that level of precision and control has never been done before.

They estimate that creating the full-size light sail,

which they estimate to be about 10 square meters, if you're using the old techniques to create that, it would have taken 15 years, 15 years to create a light sale that was 10 square meters.

This new method, they claim, could make it in one day.

One day.

The fabrication.

That's a significant improvement.

It's like ridiculously dramatic.

Like, what, really?

15 years or one day?

The fabrication cost to do this was also dramatically reduced by a factor of 9,000, bringing the cost from an estimated 26 million euros per sale to 3,000 euros.

26 million to 3,000.

So dramatic drop in cost.

And mainly, you know,

that was due, remember, again, not just to the advanced lithography techniques, but also

this neural topology optimization technique that they use.

I think I get the sense that that's the real reason why this was optimized to be so inexpensive.

They're not where they need to be.

That doesn't mean that they can now scale this up and create these light sales right now.

These are the first steps, but this is basically like a couple of major breakthroughs

in this effort.

Now, this could ultimately be the critical advance that light sales need to eventually send those chip probes to the closest stars and exoplanets to us.

Now remember, let me reiterate, they would be quite small.

The probes themselves wouldn't not weigh more than a gram, but

they should still be festooned with

a lot of cool technology like sensors and cameras and transmitters

and a lot more even that they want to be able and should be able to pack into these tiny devices more than enough to send images back to us from from light years away and of course relying heavily on our you know on our high-powered telescopes to be able to to intercept that that you know those signals and and create images from them just thinking about this it's like i i really envy the people who knows later this century perhaps that that could actually see close-up images not only of uh the closest stars to earth but also the exoplanets that are there and some of them are extremely interesting exoplanets.

Who knows what we might find on them?

So my God, can you imagine having those signals coming in finally, however long that takes?

This won't be the only application, though, of such scalable, cost-effective light sales.

Most of their work that these light sales do, I think, will take place closer to home within our own solar system, and probably a lot sooner than these things would ever even arrive at Proxima Centauri.

Once we have this technology, you could send out thousands of these probes.

You could send them out rapidly to explore the solar system,

the moons and asteroids and comets.

You could even send them, hey,

why not just send them to the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud?

Now, these are not close.

These are not close at all, even for these probes necessarily.

But for example, the Kuiper Belt.

If you go there with a chemical rocket, it would take you 10 years to get to the Kuiper Belt.

If you use these probes at, say, I think 10% of the speed of light, less than five hours you can get to the Kuiper Belt.

That is ridiculous.

The Oort cloud, if you wanted to go to the Oort cloud, remember,

that's a light year away, ridiculously far.

It would take thousands of years for a chemical rocket to get there.

We are never going to send a chemical rocket ever to the Oort cloud because who the hell is going to send a rocket that's going to take a thousand years?

If you send one of these probes at 10% of the speed of light, it's only 16 years, which is...

nothing compared to thousands of years.

Amazing.

Oh, there's so many other possibilities.

You could send these probes out into deep space for early warning of, let's say, asteroids and monitoring.

They would be great just for communication relays, and you can use them to enhance communication bandwidth from probes that we may have deep, you know, by Saturn or Neptune really, really out there in our solar system to

beef up the communication bandwidth so they can send more data, higher resolution pictures

a lot sooner than otherwise.

How about this?

You could send these probes to the James Webb Space Telescope.

That's a million miles away.

You can send one of these probes there pretty damn fast.

And the other angle here is just not even just exploring our solar system or even other solar systems.

You can use these technologies, these light sails, for experimental physics.

There's so many new possibilities open up.

Accelerating masses to

relativistic velocities will let us study light-matter interactions and even relativistic physics at macroscopic scales,

in ways that we just can't do right now.

And then I'll end with some more pie-in-the-sky stuff.

Much further in the future,

we could see the creation of extremely large light sails, like kilometers in size, and also using, say, terawatt or exowatt-class lasers to rapidly

ferry cargo weighing even tons.

Tons of cargo can be sent throughout the solar system.

Of course, you know, you would, you would, the infrastructure you would need in place,

the powerful lasers and the light sail sizes would have to be immense, but that is physically doable.

And that could potentially, who knows how long that could take?

That could take, you know, a century or two or more before we could see something where we could station these.

super beefy lasers throughout the solar system to you know to speed up light sails with heavy cargo and then slow them down when they get to their destination and uh and you can even scale that up to even to even more you know crazy stuff happening who knows what kind of future but um these light sales are fascinating, and I hope they become part of our infrastructure for exploring not only our solar system, but the closest solar system as well.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

All right, one more news item.

I'm trying to make this pretty quick.

So we've talked in the past quite a bit about vaccines and autism, the fact that there isn't a connection between any vaccine, any vaccine ingredient, and the incidence of autism or autism spectrum disorder.

This is now fairly well established over decades of research.

Steve, did they initially blame it on the mercury, the tiny amount of mercury it used to be?

It was originally blamed on the MMR vaccine,

which does not have thimerosol in it, does not have mercury in it.

That's the one that Andrew Wakefield blamed.

So that was like in the 90s.

They were blaming the MMR.

There's a ton of research, basically clearing the MMR.

of any association with autism.

Then they revised it to, okay, I guess it's the thimerosol.

it's the mercury in the vaccines.

And then by 2001 in the U.S., mercury, the thimerosol was removed from the

not every single vaccine, but every vaccine in the standard childhood program, right?

Right.

Schedule.

So, you know, the exposure to thimerosol plummeted.

And they said autism rates are going to plummet right along with it.

And they never did.

Nope.

Here we are 25 years later, 24 years later.

And nope, never happened.

They, man, they dragged that out as far as they could.

Oh, there's still, people are still using the stored-up vaccines, blah, blah, blah.

Nope.

And then, of course, there's been tons and tons of studies.

There was just a study in 2019, in fact.

This is in Denmark.

This was an MMR study, though.

They looked at, because the Scandinavian countries have national

healthcare data banks, right?

So

you could literally study millions of people epidemiologically, observationally.

It's not a obviously not a placebo-controlled trial, but they looked at those millions of people over years,

and they found zero association between the MMR vaccine and either risk for autism, trigger for autism, in susceptible children, clustering of autism after associated cases.

They looked at it any way they could.

There's just no correlation.

So, anyway, it's pretty well established that that was always spurious.

There's no link between vaccines and autism.

So, but you know, RFK jr who is our new secretary of health and human services has not would not let it go right even he would not he will not agree that vaccines do not cause autism when he was asked straight up about this during his confirmation hearing he said well if i see evidence that clear that shows that it's not associated i'll believe it what do you mean if you see evidence you've been talking about this for 30 years right you have had plenty of time to review three decades of research showing that there's no correlation It was a complete dodge.

So we knew that RFK Jr.

as HHS was going to be a shit show, and guess what?

It's a shit show.

It's like exactly what we thought was going to happen.

So now this, he is directing the CDC to do a study of vaccines and autism.

Completely unnecessary.

But, you know, another, like I like, again, there's a Denmark study came out in 2019, not really because it was necessary, but because they could do it, right?

They had the database.

They had the data in the database database to answer the question, so they did it.

They ran the analysis.

Yep, still no association.

But there's no real opportunity or reason to do it.

And two things have been floated, two types of ideas have been floated.

One is to do something that anti-vaxxers have been asking for forever, which is never going to happen.

And that is a vaxed versus unvaxed placebo-controlled double-blind trial.

Why do you think you can't do this?

It's inhumane.

It's unethical.

It's like ethically prohibited.

You cannot withhold established effective care or medicine or whatever from a study subject.

So you can say, well, what about people who choose not to be vaccinated?

It's like, yeah, but now it's not randomized, right?

That's the whole point.

If you're looking at people who choose to be vaccinated and choose not to be vaccinated, that introduces confounding factors.

It's not randomized, it's not blinded.

You have to give people placebo vaccines, right?

You can't do that ethically, period.

You cannot do it.

So, you know,

basically, they're calling for a study they know will never be done as an excuse to say that vaccines are not adequately studied, which is nonsense.

The other type of study that's been floated now is to do an observational database study in the what we call the VARES, the vaccine adverse event reporting system, which exists in the United States.

What's the problem with VARES?

It's not a systematic database.

It is voluntary reporting.

It's voluntary reporting.

Again, confounding factors galore.

And so it's very weak, very noisy

data.

In fact, we've written about the VARES database over the last 20 years at science-based medicine.

David Gorski says,

I love this term, anti-vaxxers have been dumpster diving in the VARES for years, basically looking for anything that they can, right?

Does VARES serve a legit purpose?

Yeah,

whatever.

It does.

But you have to look at it very carefully.

So if you're going to do a study that's doing data analysis in the VARES database,

that analysis has to be bulletproof.

It has to be rigorous.

It has to be really tight.

It's got to be statistically

ironclad.

You should put together a team of completely objective, respectable experts who know how to do this kind of study to do it.

Otherwise, it's not going to serve any purpose, right?

So, who do you think RFK Jr.

has tapped to do that study?

Oh, no.

Musk.

Literally, the worst person in the universe to do that study.

Sherry Texas.

David Gere.

No, David Gere.

Mark and David Gere is a father-son team who have been doing this dumpster diving kind of crappy, fatally flawed research for years.

I mean, it's so bad.

Like the research,

they make blatant errors, statistical errors.

Their technique is horrible.

And of course, they always show that there's some association, right?

So we've been tearing them apart.

ever since the beginning of science-based medicine because they're just horrible.

So you basically have the absolute worst person in America as the Secretary of Health and Human Services who was tapped the absolutely worst person to do a very difficult study, a person with a history of horrible research.

The guy's not even a doctor.

He's not a scientist.

What are we doing?

He's actually had, who was fined for practicing medicine without a license.

This guy is dubious as hell and incompetent.

He doesn't know what he's doing.

This guy should get zero contracts to do this.

This is the guy.

And I know, exactly.

This is the guy who's going to do what RFK wants to be like, the definitive, finally, we're going to answer this question about vaccines and autism.

Absolutely not.

All this will serve is to produce a preordained outcome that RFK will use as a way of hampering vaccine uptake in this country.

This is just fodder for the anti-vaxxers.

That's the only possible thing that this could serve.

You know,

it's like tapping

a pseudoscientist to do a study of their own pseudoscience, you know?

Let's get a dowser to be on the water,

draw on the water.

Yeah,

you're not going to build consensus that way.

You're not going to resolve anything that way.

We've already pre-debunked it.

You know what I mean?

It's like this is worthless, absolutely worthless.

So, this is the horrible stuff that is and will continue to be done with a clown like RFK Jr.

in charge of the health and human services.

Just absolutely terrible.

Okay.

Okay.

You know what that means?

It's who's that noisy time

who's that noisy in the data time?

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

That's it?

That was it.

Very short, right to the point.

I mean, it sounds like a roar.

Yeah.

So it's some animal or it's a like a reconstitution of what a T-Rex roar would sound like, or something.

Yeah, it sounds like a robot T-Rex in one of those theme park, you know, Disney things.

Animatronic.

So a listener named Joe Lanandria, he said, this week's noisy sounds like some sort of gas venting.

Yeah, we hear that at the SGU all the time.

Well, some

it sounds like there are birds in the background making me think this is some sort of natural outdoor environment.

So I'm going to guess this is some sort of small geyser this you know this this noise can be anything there's lots of different things that it would fit so i've never personally heard a geyser but um that's a i thought this was a cool guess another listener named laurie smith wrote in and said hi this sounds like a blast of gases yeah it is

at first i was thinking a test fire of of a satellite altitude adjusters but i can hear nature sound you know, sounding noises in the background.

So my guess is that the blowhole of some kind of whale.

Another cool guess, not correct, but I thought that one was really cool.

Hunter Richards wrote in, hey, Jay, I was going to guess an animal of some kind at a zoo, but the ambient drone suggests a fixed exhibit, maybe.

So my guess is an animatronic dinosaur exhibit, and the roar is a result of the proximity trigger.

So that's kind of what you were saying, Ev.

Mm-hmm.

Yep.

But, Hunter, I'm sorry, you were incorrect.

Well, that means I'm like,

I will be hearing animatronic dinosaur roaring soon with Bob and Steve.

Yeah, baby.

Wait, wait, wait.

A sister named Darwin Hawley wrote in.

The background sound of birds makes me think of a rainforest, and although brief, the noise sounds like a howler monkey.

And yeah, there is a little bit of howler monkey in there.

I definitely have heard that sound, and it definitely does sound like that.

However, you are not correct.

And then my last guess was from Visto Tutti.

And Visto said, I heard birds tweeting, so it's on planet Earth.

So that rules out the roar of a taunton from the snow plains of Hoth.

It sounds bigger than a cucaracha, la cucaracha.

So I'll say it's the roar of an elephant.

That's a good guess.

Again, I've heard that, and it does sound kind of like that.

That is incorrect, and there was no winner this week.

Whoa.

So I'll give you guys a hint.

All right.

It is an animal, and it's a particular kind of animal.

Do you guys want to guess?

Play it again.

Is it a big cat?

Hold on, let me play it again.

Wow.

Definitely sounds like a big cat, but it is not a big cat.

Is it an animal cule?

It's a bird.

That's a bird.

That's a bird.

That's a bird.

Oh, like an ostrich or something, or an emu?

Cassowary?

Is it a terror bird reconstruction?

One of those big birds.

That's a big bird because it'll mess up your world in a heartbeat.

Oh, man.

Yeah, they just chop you in two with their beaks.

Leave a hanging there, Jack.

The mythical thunderbird.

All right, this indeed, guys, is the Australian bustard roar.

Nah.

It's a bird.

It's not that big of a bird.

You It's not a small bird, but it's not like gargantuan, and it just makes this deep, deep, rowdy roar.

Here it is.

It's a good defense mechanism.

Yeah, no kidding.

If you hear that, forget about that.

In the brush, forget about it.

Turn around, go away.

Forget about it.

Forget about it.

So, yeah, so that's a bird, Steve.

You know what?

I was shocked, man.

I thought you were going to go there.

Yeah, I didn't wasn't familiar with that one.

Yeah, well, that's why we do this show.

I want to see.

How big is this bird?

I have a new noisy noisy for you guys.

This is a noisy that was sent in by a listener named Jeremy Anderberg.

Hey, guys, just for those of you who are sound-sensitive, this could be a sharp, a little annoying kind of noise.

All right, so guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is or you heard something cool, don't hesitate.

I'm just an email away.

Lots of people send in these cool guesses.

It's a lot of fun, and your noisy might be played on the show.

So send me something in cool.

Also, Steve, yeah, you know, we're getting up there, man.

And, you know, how many more of these Nauticon conferences can we actually have before we just, you know, we all just turn to dust?

You know, 10.

That's what we can do about taste.

But Nauticon 2025, we just did a live stream with George today.

As we record this, it is 3.26, Wednesday, the 26th.

And we did talk about NATACON a little bit.

I will just quickly remind those of you who don't know or who haven't fully made up your minds yet, now would be a great time to buy your tickets.

What we see happening is as people are getting into this close date range, because the conference starts on May 15th, where some people are realizing, oh, I can't go, and they've got to relinquish their tickets, that there might be some VIP tickets or board game tickets available, right?

Because we have a VIP on May 15th.

That's a Thursday that starts at 7 p.m.

And also the board game, which actually, I think, what are we starting at, Evan?

Is that at 3:30, 4:30?

4 o'clock.

I think, I believe, 4 o'clock to 6:30 is the official game time.

And we're going to start checking people in around 3 that day, I believe.

Yeah, so there's a board game event where we're going to have a bunch of different board games that people can choose from that they want to play, and then we're going to get in there.

I will be running, I think, the werewolf game,

which I think is a lot of fun live.

So, anyway, if you're interested in coming to this amazing event that we're going to be having,

go to nataconcon.com and you will be able to

learn all the details, check out the schedule.

So, please do

give us a consideration because of just how awesome it's going to be because George will be there.

But don't let George know I said that because the guy's got an out-of-control ego,

which is the exact opposite of reality.

Yeah, a couple more things, guys.

You could become a patron.

We would really appreciate your support, particularly now because Steve is coming to the SGU full-time.

We have a hell of a collection of years ahead of us to fight back the pseudoscience and the noise.

Like, you know, we did a news item tonight about RFK.

There's lots to talk about and lots of mis and disinformation to fight back.

Steve's going to be doing that with me full-time.

So we could use your support.

Go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

You could also join our mailing list.

I think you've heard this before.

You could just go to our website.

And the final thing I'd like to tell everybody is: don't bury your head in the sand with what's going on in the United States.

Stay informed, but stay healthy.

Regardless of who you voted for or what's happening, it's a very uncomfortable

country to live in right now.

There's a lot.

lots of stressors out there, lots of people

very much,

we're divided.

I don't care who you voted for.

You got to take care of yourself physically, you got to take care of your mental health.

Please, you know, do something for you and your friends and your family to do something that's healthy.

Like, stay off your phone as much as possible, get outside, exercise,

exactly.

Stock up on food.

Actually,

all right.

Thank you, Jay.

Wait, Steve, not done.

Oh,

I want to say one more thing.

Go ahead.

Hello.

Go ahead.

All right.

One email.

This comes from David, who writes, Thank you for 20 years of excellent journalism and discussion.

I remember where I was the day I listened to your first episode on my clunky iPod and twisted white headphones.

The Skeptic's Guide is only one of a few podcasts I listen to on a weekly basis.

I've been thinking about a quote that comes up frequently on your show.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I wonder is this still true?

Arthur C.

Clarke, that's right.

Can you imagine anything that would appear magic after everything we know about the nature of the universe?

Things appearing out of the air could be manipulated matter.

Something floating could be warped gravity.

Faster than light travel could be warped space, etc.

Is it possible to be technologically advanced enough to understand physical possibilities, no matter how unlikely, and still understand something to be supernatural?

Of course, it's impossible to imagine the unimaginable, but is there anything we could witness that is inconceivable?

Keep up the good work.

I look forward to the discussion.

What do you guys think?

So I think he's asking, you know, do you get to a point where your understanding of science and technology, of physics and, you know, potentialities is enough that you would never mistake advanced technology for magic, whereas more technologically primitive society would be more susceptible to interpreting advanced science and technology as magic.

Yeah, of course I agree with that.

I mean, I think

as societies progress, you know, like using ours as the single point of data that we have.

Yeah, I mean, mean, we're because we're aware of what technology can do and everything, I mean, of course, we're going to be able to say, hey, you know, you could do that with technology instead of having it have to be magic.

Yeah, we've conditioned ourselves to kind of go in that direction at this point.

Yeah, I think there's two factors here.

One is the technological advancement of the society that you come from, but I think

also

you know, how skeptical you are, right?

What your worldview is.

So, but I think what he's asking is: so, let's say, Jay, not that if you saw something that is technically possible with today's technology, or maybe just like an incremental advance on today's technology, what if you actually encountered alien technology that was super advanced?

Would you still think that's got to be advanced technology?

Or is there something that you would see would go like, damn, I don't know what's going on there.

That is magic to me, right?

So, somebody, let's say, an alien, super advanced nanotechnology that literally could look like you're casting a spell, but it's really at its core, it is technology.

Super advanced, maybe harnessing ridiculous energies, for example.

Right.

I mean,

I don't think I would ever say

that something was magic because I could always contrive of some way to get around the need for supernatural magic.

I mean, how would you, you have to define magic, first of all.

What do you even mean by magic?

I agree.

It means something that's supernatural.

I agree with you.

But again, I think that does not, that's not because of our technological savvy.

It's because we're skeptics.

Because we know you should never do that.

That's the, you know, the argument from ignorance or the confusing unknown with unknowable, et cetera.

Like, we know that even if something appears to be, quote-unquote, magical, it has to have a naturalistic explanation.

We just don't know what it is.

And even saying, even saying, I may have just encountered a super advanced alien technology is more plausible than it's literally supernatural outside.

It's a philosophical thing at that point, right?

We do not believe that there are supernatural things happening in the world, and therefore there must be a naturalistic explanation.

And also,

it's also that saying it's magic is the end of your curiosity and your exploration.

Whereas if you say there's got to be a naturalistic explanation for that, that motivates you to find one, even if it is that I'm encountering alien technology or whatever it is, or maybe just really clever leveraging of existing Earth technology.

Or, how am I fooling myself?

Or I'm being fooled in some ways, not what I thought it was, whatever.

So, but let's put that aside.

Let's see if we could put the skeptic versus not skeptic angle aside.

That's tough.

Do you think that just based upon your level of exposure to technology, that the more primitive

technology of the society in which you grew up makes you just because of the gap between that and advanced technology is greater, you are more likely to think that it's quote-unquote magical?

You know what I mean?

Rather than

all things being equal in terms of philosophy and skepticism and all that.

And I do think there is something to that.

I don't think it's as absolute as David is saying.

I think that the gap increases, but I don't think it ever goes away.

In other words, you could frame it as not that you think it's literally supernatural, but that to you it does appear to be magical, right?

Meaning that you have zero explanation for it, you can't even begin to reverse engineer what's happening.

It might as well be magic, even though if you don't believe philosophically that it's supernatural.

Does that make sense?

So, yeah, I agree.

Like, if you show

your iPhone to somebody from 2,000 years ago, they would have no other way of grappling with that other than that this is some kind of magic.

But if you showed us something, anything like that, like somebody levitating or whatever, something that I don't have a current explanation for, I would still think it was technological, you know.

Absolutely.

And even if they violated some fundamental law of physics, I would still think, you know, I think the last place I would go is like, all right, that appears to contravene

some fundamental physics that is so fundamental and unbreakable that

they may have found a loophole

in physics that would allow them to seemingly do that.

And I would say that would be more possible, that would be my explanation, which would seem magical, but it's still

would ultimately be physics-based, even if it's far beyond what I even think would be like faster than light travel.

Sure, you found a loophole.

That's it.

I wouldn't be that

freaked out.

I think we can imagine more advanced technology, right?

We've lived through more change.

We lived with science fiction.

Science fiction is not living.

Think about it.

Yeah, right.

Exactly.

We can imagine more, even ultimately, advanced technology, whereas somebody from, say, medieval times might not be able to imagine anything beyond

the type of technology that they're used to.

They would not be able to imagine things things like electronics.

Right.

How could they?

Or computer technology or whatever.

Yeah.

Right.

Steve, as you know, I mean, that's

one of my dreams is the limits of technology based on physics.

I would love one of my dream

books or movies or documentaries.

According to the physics, as we know it right now, what are the limits of physics in terms of, so what can technology do within the limits of physics?

That is something I think about all the time, and I explore and I try to read about and things like that.

So, yeah, so that's like, yeah, this is like not that hard for me.

Um, but that's just you know, I'm just kind of weird that way.

That's the kind of shit I think about a lot.

Yeah, but I think so much a lot of people in our culture who, because of science fiction, because we've lived through so many advances in technology, etc., we can imagine super-advanced technology

so much more now than

many years ago, for sure.

In fact, i've encountered people not infrequently who make the opposite mistake who assume that technology is more advanced than it currently is right so if i for example bob i was working in your haunted corn maze and i was in a zombie costume and i had my i had a mask on and i had

lights where my eyes are right

and i

remember remember that so and i moved like the zombie's going back back.

There were occasional people who thought I was an animatronic, which is like, I'm sorry, we do not have animatronics that are able to walk like this.

This was, again, this is like 20 years ago.

Yeah, this is, yeah, that's like, we're talking like 2008.

So that's even, yeah, quite, you know, not recent.

We didn't didn't, definitely didn't have animatronics back then like that.

And Steve, I do that even last year.

I pretend to be, I pretend to be an animatronic.

And so they, so people dismiss me.

And then, and then I, of course, I jump at them and

I do non-animatronic movements.

I'll put it that way.

And some people

are still asking, is that a robot or not?

To me, that's just experience and

your level of familiarity with that kind of stuff.

They just don't know.

And it's still shocking to me.

Like, what?

There's no robot that's going to move like I just did.

But I'll make geek, and that's what I think about.

Yeah, people are going to be able to do it.

Yes, but I don't think about that like we do.

I think people are more prepared to believe that technology can do amazing things.

Like, we encounter this in medicine all the time, where people are like, Where's the super advanced medical intervention?

You know, or

people who watch a lot of CSI-type shows

and then they're on a jury.

They think, Well, where's this super advanced forensic technology?

Yeah, right.

Yeah, they're sort of expecting more advanced stuff than does exist.

Okay, 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.

We have three regular news items this week.

Are you guys ready?

Yes.

All right, here we go.

Item number one, a new study finds that deep sea ecosystems have not yet fully recovered following mining of polymetallic nodules in a testbed 44 years ago.

Item number two, computer scientists have produced certified randomness using a 56-bit quantum computer.

And item number three, researchers find that as bicycle and e-scooter use increases in an urban setting, the relative risk of collisions with vehicles increases significantly.

Evan, go first.

Ooh, okay.

Let's see.

Deep sea ecosystems have not yet fully recovered following mining of polymetallic nodules in a test bed 44 years ago.

I don't know what incident.

Is this a specific incident?

Yeah, well, it was a test bed.

So you know what the polymetallic nodules are, right?

So those are those potato-sized lumps of nickel and cobalt and other...

They're like little batteries, you know what I mean?

Like it's all the metals that we need to make batteries.

And they're just, there are certain parts of the ocean where they're just sort of strewn across the ocean floor.

And the idea is we want to go in there and suck them all up, right?

And

billions of, you know, of these nodules down there.

So 44 years ago, they did a test where they did a little strip.

They vacuumed up all those nodules.

And so now they're looking 44 years later to see if the ecosystem is still affected.

And what the study found, if you believe this one is true, is that even 44 years later, the ecosystem has not fully recovered.

Fully recovered, meaning gone back to the state prior to when it was right, in terms of biodiversity, you know, the number of organisms, etc.

Well, you know, I don't know if this one will be fiction or not.

You know, we've seen, we have seen evidence, though, of ecosystems, you know,

bouncing back.

I think about Chernobyl a little bit, you know, about, you know, some, you know, animals and things came back to the the area to reclaim, even though it's, you know, people and things can't live there.

But, you know, that was sort of an ecosystem bounce.

And we've seen, and I know, although overall, I know we've talked a lot about coral reef and the disleaching is occurring, but there's also, you know, some evidence that some coral reefs have been repairing themselves and sort of

recovering.

So maybe it hasn't yet fully recovered.

Maybe that's the trick of this one.

I don't know about this one.

The second one, this is the one that intrigues me the most maybe.

Computer scientists have produced certified randomness using a 56-bit quantum computer.

I always thought, I was led to believe, and I'll blame someone else for this if I'm wrong on my memory, that you can't have certified randomness.

Like it's like

it would defy the laws of physics to have it.

And then now to say that they've produced it using quantum computing, of course, that makes sense, but I don't know.

This one like rings an alarm bell in my head.

Because I always thought it was physically impossible to have it.

You could come close, but you can't have true,

you cannot artificially generate randomness to its purest form.

And then the last one: hmm, bicycle and e-scooter use increases in an urban setting.

The relative risk of collisions with a vehicle increases significantly.

So, just to just to make sure you understand what that means, it's not just the absolute number,

but the percentage risk, like the relative risk goes up.

Like you could think of it as like your chance of getting into an accident increases with the number of vehicles increasing, not just the absolute number of because there's more bikes in these scooters.

Well, the thing about this one is at first read, you would think, okay, that makes a lot of sense, but as so many times you go and you actually do the research on these and they turn out not to be the way your initial perception of these things would be like, sure, it makes sense that, yeah, if you're going to have more of these things around, you know, yeah, the chances will go up.

But maybe they found out that the opposite is actually true.

Oh, gosh, it kills me to guess against the certified randomness.

But I think that's why you threw it in there.

So I'm going to say the bicycle and e-scooter urban setting one is the fiction.

Okay, Jay.

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing about not being able to pick random numbers on computers has been true.

And I was wondering if quantum computing was going to be able to

break past this problem because

it's a very difficult thing to even mimic, let alone achieve.

So I'm not surprised that a quantum computer could do it.

I just don't know if we're there yet, but sure.

I mean,

we've been working on this for so long, and there's functioning quantum computers out there that can do

some pretty cool stuff already.

So, all right, I'm going to agree with that.

I'll say that one is science.

The first one, a study that the deep ecosystems have not fully recovered following mining of polymetallic nodules 44 years ago.

I mean,

how much of the deep sea ecosystem, you know, like what are we not the whole thing, I would imagine, right, Steve?

Well, it's in the testbed.

They compared it to areas that were not mined.

All right.

I mean, I could see how that could be a problem.

Yeah.

I mean,

this last one,

I've been turning this over in my head as well.

I mean, I'm not reading anything about lots of accidents with these vehicles.

It doesn't hit my radar at all.

I don't know.

I mean, there's lots of cities that have amazing amounts of traffic without

crazy amounts of accidents and all this stuff.

I mean, oh, God.

I don't know anything about the deep sea one.

Yeah, I'm going to go with Evan.

I think this one is probably the fiction.

Okay, and Bob.

All right.

The polymimet, polymetallic, I was going to say polymimetic alloy.

The polymetallic, polymetallic

nodules.

It's just that seems like too long, that you would have pretty damn good recovery after almost a half a century.

It almost seems like too obvious.

Like, well, of course it would have pretty well recovered there.

But it's just it's just, I don't know, something's dropping me the wrong way.

And

I have a bigger problem with

potentially with number three.

Number two, though, is very easy for me.

Yes, pseudo-random number generators are a thing with like classical programming and classical computers.

You cannot create a fully random number generator using those techniques.

But using anything that's based on quantum processes, you absolutely can.

And we talked about it on the show many years ago.

They have done it already based on quantum processes.

So the fact that they could do it with a quantum computer, it seems like a no-brainer, like, of course.

So that one has got to be true.

I have really no doubt on that.

The third one, though, is the one that really rubbed me wrong.

I mean, we've gone on those, we've used those scooters in various cities.

They were a tremendous amount of fun.

I mean, the best time I ever had in DC was with

you guys.

We rented scooters one night, and we and we visited like most of the monuments at night using those damn scooters, and it was fantastic.

So much fun, and you can get so much coverage.

But it was pretty safe.

We had one goofy little accident, and it wasn't with another car.

It was E, and it was going too fast, and he flew off of it, and he had a nasty road rash, but no cars were involved.

And I mean, it's not hard to be safe on that, it seems to me, because your visibility is incredible.

You've got full visibility all around you.

You know, there's nothing really in your way.

Sure, people are reckless.

And I also agree with Jay that I have never heard about anything about collisions with cars, with those scooters.

So that one kind of makes me think maybe that one's the fiction.

It seems more likely than the other ones.

And the first one, I could be wrong about those polymetallic nodules.

It just doesn't seem right to me.

So I'll just go with the scooter and join the team.

Yay, we're all right.

All right.

So why don't we take this in order?

A new study finds that deep sea ecosystems have not yet fully recovered following mining of polymetallic nodules in a test bed of test bed 44 years ago.

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

science unfortunately yeah yeah right the unfortunate science yeah so you know

it's unfortunate it's unreally unfortunate we would love to be able to scoop up these polymetallic metallic nodules we really can use the metals to to fuel our transition to EVs and you know electronic you know electrifying everything and and you know battery grid storage all that stuff and but but it's still under study it's still being studied to see what the effects of on the ecosystem are going to be.

And so, this little test bed that was done 44 years ago for this specific reason, I didn't realize that they started looking at it that long ago.

I was thinking about it back then.

Yeah, that

they yeah, the biodiversity and biodensity is still not recovered.

There are some creatures that just need the hard surface, and there's nothing else there that really replaces that.

So, there's also the issue of the sediment, because it turns up a lot of sediment.

They said said that pretty much did return to its

previous levels.

Like the sediment wasn't screwed up anymore.

But yeah, but the biodiversity is not bouncing.

It's improved.

It is improving.

It is starting to come back.

But even 44 years later, it has not gone back to the way it was.

So we really have to think very carefully about

how and even if we're going to mine these polymetallic nodules.

I was thinking when I was reading this, wouldn't it be awesome?

I don't know how feasible this is, if we could make something like the polymetallic modules, the same size and hardness,

made out of carbon, and then go down there and swap them out, right?

So we take away all the metals

and sequester a whole bunch of carbon.

Pull an Indiana Jones statue bag of sand kind of thing.

Can we do that economically, though, right?

Obviously, it's cheaper to go in there and just vacuum them all up, but that's the most disruptive to the ecosystem.

If you go in there with robots or something, I guess, that you have to swap them out, that could

be cost-prohibitive.

But we'll see.

I don't know.

Well, this has to be studied more.

Maybe we could just

come up with some other method that maybe takes half of the modules away and not all of them, or does it with less disruption of the sediment, something.

We need to develop technology that we can get access to at least some of these nodules without destroying the ecosystems.

No sediment in it.

All right, let's let's go on to the second one.

Computer scientists have produced certified randomness using a 56-bit quantum computer.

You guys all think this one is science.

So there is a formal certification process for determining if something is truly random.

And it was developed not that long ago.

I think in 2018, it was developed.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And it has to be, as you say, like the sequence has to fit

a procedure to determine if it's truly random or not.

And it has to be novel randomness, right?

You can't be recycling a random sequence.

Right.

People will, like, they'll generate random numbers

and then they'll just use that as a text file, you know, as a file of information that they, you know, that's not a good way to do it.

Right.

But how do you determine that it wasn't

generated at some other time and reused, like Jay is saying?

How do you know that that's the case?

Because you have to generate enough of them and you have to be able to do it again, you know, whatever.

They have to show that it's not just following a string.

So, yeah, the threshold's pretty high, and it hasn't been done even with quantum computers.

So, the question is: have we finally done it?

I thought one of you would say, would invoke the wouldn't I have heard about this if it had actually happened?

That would most likely be.

But this would be, at least in the geek circles, this would be pretty big news.

So this one is

science.

They did it.

Yeah.

Oh, it is.

True.

Randomness.

True certified randomness.

Steve, we talked about this about a decade ago about truly random numbers that were generated and done through

quantum processes.

It wasn't a quantum computer, but it was other

quantum processes that they were able to use for that purpose.

I'm pretty damn sure that this has been done before, but not

without a quantum computer though but done before yeah like this is the first one that's certified by this new process certification process okay that's why

you'll notice i didn't say in my i didn't say for the first time in the in the text because i couldn't verify if it was the first time or not they just said that they did it and it was certified and they never said this has never been done before um or anything like it whatever so that that's why i didn't put that in there because i wasn't 100 sure about that.

But this is certainly the first time they've done it this way.

Right, absolutely.

Yeah, so they said certified randomness using a trapped ion quantum processor.

But I think, certainly, even if they were so you have, listen, you people have generated random numbers before, but they use a physical system or they use something that requires some kind of physical randomizer.

But that, of course, really slows down the ability to generate quantum, you know, random numbers.

Oh, yeah.

But this, because it's just a quantum you know computer it's a 56 qubit computer they can spit them out like in in massive amounts so this is critical for oh god banking for encryption yeah this is like most that's probably going to be the most critical application of this is encryption uh being able to generate truly random numbers not be able to unlock that right forget it that's that is the key all right that means that researchers find that as bicycle and e-scooter use increases in an urban setting the relative risk of collisions with vehicles increases significantly is the fiction.

This was

an actual real research question.

The question was, would the increased just density of vehicles sharing

the available space, the available roads,

would the crowding lead to increased risk of accidents?

And what they found was the opposite, that the relative risk decreased by 20%.

And the reason for that, they think, is that when there are more, and this was like, so for example, you could also, in some of the tests, they introduced or they had a scheme where you could rent e-scooters or whatever.

They did something so that the use of e-scooters increased significantly.

And that reduced the rate of bicycle accidents

by 20%.

And the thinking is that with more, with the increased use of these like microtransport devices, that they're calling them,

or micro-mobility, micro-mobility,

that people in cars are more careful.

They're more aware of them and they're more careful of them.

Whereas if they're few and far between,

they're not thinking about them and they do risky things and they cut them off.

Now the authors were

careful to point out that while this is good, that the relative risk decreases just for the increased visibility of these micro-mobility options, we still need to think about sort of redesigning cities to make dedicated space for more of this transportation because it's also good for health.

You know, if you're riding a bicycle,

you know, in the city, it's yeah, it's good exercise.

Less emissions.

It's less emissions.

etc.

And apparently...

Less wear and tear on the streets themselves, I'm sure.

Apparently, it's safer.

We really just need fewer cars.

I mean, and

we need to control the traffic, and we need drivers to be more aware and more careful of non-car traffic.

And then I do think this fits the overall idea that

we kind of designed our cities and our roadways around car supremacy, right?

Like the cars are the most important thing.

They have the right of way, stay out of their way, etc.

And

we really need to rethink that and say we really should make more walking and micro-mobility-friendly cities, and cars should really be staying out of everybody's way.

You know, and even a lot of cities now are setting aside like a significant proportion of their streets as no cars, like these are no cars at all on these streets.

So, again, to make way for foot traffic, bicycle traffic, e-scooter traffic, which I think is a great idea, definitely.

There's European cities that are doing it, and it works nicely.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, as long as

winter climate cities, maybe not so much, but certainly there's plenty of cities in the zones where you have decent weather most of the year.

And those are

covered walkways or you just clear the walkways aggressively.

You could still bike an e-scooter even in the cold if you have a jacket on.

You know what I mean?

Obviously, yeah, there's certain bad weather.

You're not going to go out in driving rain or whatever.

Obviously, there are times when it's just not going to be feasible.

But yeah, but we should definitely be shifting away from cars and towards walking, biking, e-scooters, and mass transit.

Don't forget mass transport as well.

Don't forget.

Yeah, it's good for the environment.

It's good for health.

It's good for noise pollution, for air pollution.

And it makes cities more livable and increases quality of life.

You also have more space to plant more trees,

which also increases mental health and air quality and improves health overall.

So, yeah, you know, thoughtful, thoughtful design and prioritizing in cities rather than just letting the chips fall where they may, you know what I mean?

Like is very important as we're sort of pushing the limits of what cities can do and how many people we can cram into them and all of the infrastructure that is needed, et cetera.

I also think it'll be nice when you know the most of the cars on the road are EVs, you know, and they're not cranking out pollution.

Think about how much more livable cities are going to be when that's the case.

All right, well, good job, guys.

You swept me this week.

I thought this was a tricky week.

Yeah, well, I thought this was tricky.

It was a tricky week.

That quantum one really was surprising.

Yeah.

Easy.

Need.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

People of good will may be misled by bad information, but people of ill will deliberately spread misinformation.

Oh, yeah.

From the book Merchants of Doubt, written by Naomi Urskas and Eric Conway.

Yep.

That is a book.

Have you read that book, Steve?

Yeah.

Oh, I have to read it.

That's one of the many books that I have to obtain and

get caught up on because that book came out about it.

Yeah, no, it's very good.

Yeah, I definitely highly recommend it.

So this is something I have to constantly remind myself and other people about when I lecture about this as well.

Like we talk about as skeptics, all of the

mechanisms of self-deception and all the reasons why we need to have good critical thinking skills, etc.

But you have to remember: sometimes there are just bad actors out there.

You know, it's not like we're not just having people aren't just misleading themselves or falling for pseudoscience.

They are doing those things, but in the mix also are people who are con artists or who are shills or who are paid by the industry to spread misinformation or propaganda, right?

There are countries generating disinformation, not just misinformation, but disinformation designed to change the conversation.

And

you have to keep that on the list of things to be wary of.

It's not just misinformation, it's not just pseudoscience, it's not just bad thinking skills, it's active, deliberate, purposeful disinformation.

And sometimes that could be dominant, that could really dominate the conversation, you know,

or generate entire pseudosciences.

I was really surprised when at SciCon last year, during one of the lectures, I learned that the whole the U.S.

government manufactured HIV as a, you know, as a weapon was Russian disinformation.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, that's right.

That's right.

You know, we talked about that for years as skeptics saying how it's a conspiracy theory, blah, blah, blah, without realizing that it was deliberate Russian disinformation.

So, yeah, we have to keep that on the list of possibilities.

You know, there are bad faith actors out there.

People acting in bad faith.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks, Steve.

And good luck, Kara.

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

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

For more information, visit us at theskepticsguide.org.

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Hey, it's Brian Christopher.

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