The Skeptics Guide #1023 - Feb 15 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, February 12th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

How's everyone doing?

Getting ready for your fake holiday coming up in a couple of days.

You guys, did anybody do anything?

Like, my wife and I deliberately don't do anything for bounds.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, everything's just inflated and expensive.

I know.

The Hallmark holidays, as I call them, are just, you know, consumer

excuses for people to spend money on things they, frankly, let's face it, don't need.

And your love and appreciation for a person, I mean, you know, that should be celebrated every day, not on any one day.

It should be, but the unfortunate thing is it's not often.

Listen, it's a good reminder to like take some time out for your significant other, but you can do it in a non-commercial way.

And if you feel like they like getting flowers every now and then, this is the worst time to get them flowers.

Just do it at some other time of the year.

Just make a point, a note of it, even if it's just a few weeks from now, anytime other than Valentine's Day when the supplies are limited and prices are ridiculous.

Yeah, or do something a little different.

Like you have you and your partner give to a charity, right?

Make a Valentine's Day charitable donation, something like that, that you can celebrate together.

That'd be nice.

Or cook together instead of going out to dinner.

Yes, agreed.

Absolutely.

Play a board game.

Do, you know, just hang out and enjoy each other's company.

And do it every week.

You know?

That too.

Yeah, but the Hallmark holidays, I don't know, have always kind of stuck in my craw a bit.

I've never quite understood them.

And even though other members of my family, I don't know, they sort of live and die by the calendar on these things, you know, and they go with the pageantry, they dress up, they do the whole thing.

It just never appealed to me.

Just didn't.

You're so right about like Mother's Day and Father's Day and

are there siblings' days?

I'm sure there are, you know.

But can we still do like our birthdays?

You okay with that?

Okay.

Yeah,

I'm not as

militant.

I'm not as put off by birthdays and those kinds of celebrations.

I feel like celebrate any day you want to celebrate.

There's enough garbage in the world right now that if you can find a reason to celebrate, do it.

Here, here.

Oh, and happy birthday, Charles Darwin.

Born on this day, February 12th.

Darwin Day, that's a real holiday.

Now, that's a holiday worth celebrating.

I'm going to buy you all a Finch card.

Or a fossil.

I'd rather have a fossil rather than a card.

Yeah, but those are expensive.

I'd rather have a $500 thing instead of a $2 thing.

Sure.

No, you know, come on.

There are fossils that are literally one or $2.

Like a low-quality trilobite.

There's literally millions and millions of those.

You could get them anywhere.

Well, then it wouldn't be much of a gift, then, would it?

It's the idea.

It's the, you know, it's the thought.

You know, here's a little fossil to celebrate Dartmonday.

Well, and

someday, you know, you would think that, hey, you know, give someone a penny on a day and, you know,

big deal, no, no big deal.

But there is going to come a day soon, maybe, in which you get a penny.

It's like, oh, wow, I remember these because these don't exist anymore.

I've been hearing that my whole life, that they're getting rid of the penny.

Well, you know, it was made news last week that I guess the president is going to say no more penny production.

No, but I read that the Mint stopped making pennies like three years ago.

Oh, no.

We wouldn't be able to detect it for like 20 years.

That's how many freaking pennies there are.

I know, but let me know.

About 3.2 billion pennies were manufactured in the 2024 fiscal year.

Oh, there you go.

Right.

JK then.

And that's down from 5.3 billion from just a few years ago.

So they're.

They're down.

Yeah, okay.

They're phasing them out.

Gotcha.

I was speaking with someone and we were talking about, he was concerned about the inflationary effect of the removal of the penny from the system, which is not something I'd really thought about before.

Do people even use cash, not to mention?

Yes, they do, Kara.

They do use cash.

I still see people, you know, mostly, let's say,

older.

types of people

that reach into their wallet and pull out the greenbacks and jingle in in their pocket for that change.

Yeah,

if our mom's got some cash in her wallet, she just automatically pulls it out.

I'm like, Ma, save that.

You could use your credit card.

Save them cash for tips.

You know, that's it's it's so weird because I used to I remember I used to have a nice little skull bank in my room.

I would come home every day and fill that up with

some coins.

A skull bank.

Did you just say a skull bank?

A skull bank.

You got a problem with that?

Do you mean it's not a piggy bank?

Is that literally like a piggy bank skull or you just call it like when you save money, you you call it the skull bank?

Oh, no.

It's a plastic hollow receptacle resembling a skull that is meant for money.

After a year or two, I'd have like, you know, $150 of change.

It's a lot of bones.

But for the past 10 years or more, it's like I've gotten no change in my pocket at the end of the day.

It's like none.

It's so rare.

Yeah, I never have change.

I hate it when I get to a meter and it doesn't have like any way to pay except with change.

I'm like, I guess I'm not parking here.

Yeah, right.

Well, Kara, you remember payphones, right?

Where you were still live on payphone.

I took a picture of one the other day.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, there was one like when I was on a walk and I was like, ooh, relic.

I don't think the phone, I think somebody had cut the cord to the phone.

You know, some people's parents wouldn't let the kids go out unless they had pocket change, so they could make that emergency phone call from the payphone if they had to.

And I came from the era, you know, I was born in 1983.

So when I was a teenager or even a preteen out on my own, I had a pager.

I fell right in that demographic.

So before cell phones, we had pagers, and our parents could page us and tell us to call home.

That's high-tech for

way, way more.

Yeah, you know what the pager was when we were growing up?

It's our mother at the door yelling our name into the air, saying, Get home for dinner.

Oh, boy.

But speaking of Steve's retirement,

That was smooth, huh?

That's coming up.

Yes.

What do you think about when you think about retirement, Steve?

Like, how does it turn over in your head?

So it's 95% very positive.

I definitely am looking forward to working full-time for the SGU.

I'm looking forward to

being on my own schedule.

You know what I mean?

Like the biggest thing is if I could sleep just as long as I want to in the morning, that would be wonderful.

But at the same time, you know, I've been spending the last 30 years keeping all these plates spinning, you know, basically maintaining, you know, all my clinical skills and knowledge and board certifications and licensure and everything.

That's, you know, it'd be nice to not have to worry about all that.

But I have all these pretty highly developed skills that I will no longer be using.

And yeah, so it's a little sad.

You know, it had to happen sometime, obviously.

Do you think you'll consult or anything?

No.

Because either you maintain everything or you don't.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

You have to shut, you really shut it down, basically.

I mean, I'll probably

get licensed for another year just because I've already met all my requirements for doing that.

But in a year, I won't have met my requirements for to continue my license.

So I'm not going to get 30 CME credits over the next year if I'm not working at Yale and doing what I'm doing.

So that's part of the benefit is not having to maintain everything.

You're going to lose access to all your all the publications and things?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, you're not with the institution anymore.

Yeah, well, I mean, I'm retiring from, you know, I literally have to turn in my ID.

I'll lose access to everything.

The key to the washroom, too.

But I'm looking forward to the transition.

It's not like

every patient's now asking me about it.

But I tell them, I'm not really retiring.

I'm just retiring from patient care.

I'll still be doing...

I'm not really retiring.

I'm just retiring from you.

From you.

I'm still going to be teaching, right?

I'm just going to be teaching in a different venue.

And all of my medical and clinical knowledge will still be put to use writing and

promoting science-based medicine and all that, just not in direct patient care.

So, you know, it's better than just retiring entirely.

Sure, and having absolutely nothing to do at that point.

That would be awful.

You think?

I can't imagine.

Well, I've had a lot of people talk to me about their retirement.

And it's you know about 50-50.

Some people like it's wonderful, you're gonna love it.

Other people are like, I am bored out of my skull.

Oh my god, you will not be bored.

That's like a prison of their own making.

Absolutely, absolutely.

I will not be bored.

I'm not worried.

I think I will be in the this is wonderful category because I'm still going to be working exactly as much as I want to.

You know what I mean?

I have plenty, plenty to do.

I think before long, Steve, you'll be crafting your own sword.

Maybe.

You're going to become a swordsmith.

Maybe.

We'll open up.

I have room for one more hobby I can add.

We'll see.

I love it.

How much room you have for hobbies.

Do you have any ideas about that?

No, I don't know.

I'll think about it.

Jay and I took a bladesmithing class.

That was fun.

I'm ready to do that again.

I loved it.

And a pesto making class, right?

I took a pesto making class.

And glass blowing.

Oh, yeah, you're good.

You know.

You'll find plenty of things to do and learn.

Well, let's get on with the show.

We're going to go right into some news items.

And actually, I'm starting off.

There was a new meta-analysis for, you know, looking at the demographics of who is most susceptible to misinformation.

And they were specifically looking at one particular research paradigm, which is

the news headline paradigm, where you show somebody a news headline, it's either real or fake, and it's a forced choice.

They have to say say if they think it's real or they think it's fake.

Ooh, how good would we be at that game?

We would be very good based upon

the results of this, but we'll just hit that.

But let's go over.

There's some interesting details here worth digging into.

First of all, this is a meta-analysis.

They looked at 256,337 unique choices made by over 11,000 participants across 31 experiments.

So that's a pretty sizable meta-analysis.

So first of all, just looking across all of that, people did better than chance.

So that was good.

It wasn't 50-50.

That's promising.

They were correct.

They correctly identified true headlines 68.51% of the time.

Okay.

False headlines 67.24% of the time.

So about two-thirds of the time,

more or less, they were able to correctly guess whether a headline was true or false.

That's, you know, that's pretty bad, actually, if you think about it.

You know, if a third of the time you really don't, you falsely believe that something is true or you think it's false.

So, better than chance, but you know, not that great.

Not great.

And so, then, of course, the more interesting thing is they're delving down into what factors predicted it.

So, let me go over a few of them.

So, one factor they looked at was education level.

How do you think that predicted whether people were able to identify true or false headlines?

I think

more education.

It had a positive impact.

Probably really wouldn't kick in, though, until

really higher education.

So across these studies, it had zero impact.

Well, that's not good.

Education level alone conveyed essentially no benefit.

What about PhD level?

So what you're thinking of, Bob, is belief in pseudoscience, which is a separate.

It's not this paradigm.

That was my ⁇ I remembered that as well.

I actually wrote about that.

That

education level doesn't protect against believing in pseudoscience until you get to the PhD level.

That's why I'm science education level.

That's similar.

Yeah.

But this, at least in this paradigm, in these studies, I don't know

how the range of education level was, but the education level had no measurable.

Across the board.

So what does that mean?

To me.

You got to listen to this show and be a skeptic.

Yeah, to me, that's a failure of the education system.

Yeah, that's what I was going to say.

What does that say about our education system?

It means we're not teaching the skills necessary to tell fake from true headlines.

So there were some strong predictors, though.

One of the biggest was having an analytical thinking style, which is why I think we would do well because that's what we do, right?

We do analysis.

So analytical thinking means that you go through and you look at the evidence, the logic, the source of the information.

Like you do an analysis as opposed to the intuitive thinking style, which is like this feels vague.

My gut is telling me.

And again, not to criticize that.

That's not a bad thing to listen to, but it should just be a starting point, not a conclusion.

It kind of gives you a head start on your analysis, but

or it tells you maybe how much of an analysis you have to do.

But you shouldn't just rely on your gut because that's just heuristical thinking.

That's easy to do.

Some people's heuristics are more reflective of reality.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Or they're just not perfect.

They're never perfect.

They're just shifting.

They're never perfect, but some.

But heuristics build on previous analysis.

And so if you're never analyzing, then that's not very good.

And that comes up a lot, the analytical versus intuitive thinking style.

Analytical thinking style also correlates with lower belief in conspiracy theories, lower belief in pseudoscience.

Go figure.

Lower belief in paranormal stuff.

So, yeah, so it does correlate with a lot of of those things.

And it is something that can be taught.

It is a skill.

Whereas some people are just naturally born analytical versus intuitive or vice versa, but it is absolutely a skill that can be taught.

So that's the thing I think that's not being taught in public schools that we absolutely should be.

Yeah.

Older age, what do you think?

Well, what do you mean by older age?

What's the cutoff?

I don't know how they broke it down, but just.

My guess is that it's bimodal.

I could be wrong, but that the very young and the very old are struggling more.

But it could be that older is actually better for using analytic styles.

Older is older you get the better you are at it.

Pretty much

throughout the age groups, that they looked at older was better.

They also looked at not just how accurate they were, but if there was a true headline bias or a false headline bias.

And the older age was associated with higher overall discrimination, but also with a false headline bias.

So they tended to think that headlines were false.

Good.

That's a good knee, Jarek, right?

Yeah, that's actually not a.

So, and one of the points, I'm kind of jumping to one of the limitations of this study, which is interesting because I thought about it and then it was listed by the authors as a limitation, is in these studies, in this paradigm, there's generally 50-50 true and false headlines.

But that's not necessarily reality, right?

Reality may

have a different mix, and therefore a false or true bias may be helpful or harmful depending on how well it matches reality.

Here they just did 50-50, which was artificial.

But anyway, so yeah, the older we got, the more cynical, I guess, we get because we tend to have a false headline bias, but overall, more accurate, higher discrimination.

They also looked at self-identified political party,

self-identified Democrat and self-identified Republican.

What effect do you think that had?

Well, I mean, we know what you know, one party leans more towards a reality bias than the other, right?

Depends on the subject, but

so

I'll just say what you're all thinking.

Self-identified Democrats had a greater accuracy, and self-identified Republicans was associated with a lower accuracy overall.

But also, the Democrats had a greater false bias, and Republicans had a greater truth bias.

Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, so Democrats, again, tended to be more cynical about the headlines, more negative, whereas Republicans tended to be more trusting about the headlines.

Safer.

More likely to believe they were true.

They also were more accurate

on deciding what was true than

on determining what was false.

But it goes along with the truth bias, right?

You're going to pick up more of the true ones if that's what you say.

If you said 100% were true, you would have 100% truth accuracy and 0% false accuracy, right?

So yeah, truth bias goes along with a higher truth accuracy.

So this is a complicated question.

We're not saying, and this study is not saying, and this research is not saying that Democrats are smarter than Republicans or Republicans are gullible or anything like that.

Exploring why exactly this is

very complicated.

There is a couple of theories out there.

One is that Republicans may already be self-selecting for some cognitive features like intuitive thinking style.

So being Republican may mean that you, like by definition, are more intuitive as a thinker.

There's also different relationships with authority, authority, which may be playing a role.

And what about exposure to news as it is?

Then the other one is the information ecosystems that they're living in.

At least in this country, are Democratic-leaning or liberal-leaning news outlets, do they have a different style or strategy than Republican or conservative-leaning news outlets?

Certainly feels that way, but again, exploring exactly why that is, was not part of these studies, but that's interesting to think about.

But when I blogged about this, like a lot of people reacting, you're just saying Republicans are stupid.

It's like, that's not.

First of all, I'm not saying anything.

I'm reporting on what this systematic review found looking at 31 different studies.

This is the data.

But

no one is saying that.

Like, if you read these studies, nobody is saying that.

It has to do with just like the information ecosystems and maybe cognitive style, things like that.

You also have to look at other demographics.

Like, is there an age difference or income or whatever?

There's all kinds of other demographic differences that could be playing a role here.

But I still haven't mentioned the single biggest predictor.

So what's happening?

Is it SES?

And this one correlated with mainly with accepting false headlines as true.

So this is the predictor of a lower accuracy, but specifically accepting false headlines.

Have you voted for it?

Nope.

What haven't we touched touched on?

We've touched on age.

We've touched on

race or gender.

Neither of those.

It was familiarity.

If people had heard it before, that was

by far the strongest predictor.

Yeah, so familiarity bias.

Oh, yeah, I've heard that.

Therefore, it must be true.

Think about that.

We all do that, right?

So

that's actually pretty scary because that means if you lie repeatedly, people will believe it.

I know that's true we see that i know that's this is this is the echo chamber effect too so if you're if you have a if you have a news echo chamber like you're only consuming a few sources of ideologically aligned news the familiarity bias is going to be massive and i think that's when things get elevated from propaganda to gaslighting, right?

To you're living in a different reality.

And this is what we're experiencing.

Let's face it.

Like there are people who are living in different realities because of partly, it's not just that they're being exposed to false news or misinformation.

It's also which news they're being exposed to.

You could have a propaganda outlet with a massive influence on your audience without ever lying or saying anything that's not true.

If you just, there's so many events and facts and things out there.

All you have to do is just have a massive filter.

Just really select only the news that reinforces certain narratives.

They're all true.

It's all real news.

It's just a very biased selection of the news.

And that

familiarity bias kicks in and that creates your view of reality.

And that literature is pretty well established as well.

It's very comfortable for a lot of people.

Yeah, and it's very comfortable, yeah, to reinforce what you already believe or what you want to believe.

We know that as as well.

That's separate research that shows that.

So what does all this mean?

You know, I think individually is the easy thing to say.

You know, consume various outlets of news.

Don't rely on anything narrow.

Specifically look for sources that are neutral or even may go against your preconceived notions, you know, to challenge yourself.

And it doesn't mean you have to consume propaganda, but you should try to consume a range of reasonable sources of information.

Don't stick yourself into an echo chamber.

Learn analytical thinking, right?

Which means listen to the skeptics out of the universe.

Seriously, you have to learn skeptical, critical thinking, media savvy, and scientific literacy.

Those skills are critical, you know, in the world today.

On a societal level, this is where it gets tricky, right?

And we've had this conversation before because nothing seems to work or be feasible.

You know, it's like we live now in the wild west of misinformation, and I don't know what's going to change it.

You You know, we sort of, that's just the new reality.

Improved education.

I mean, that's dealing with the misinformation, but I just mean

there's no guardrails anymore.

There's no editorial policy.

There's no fairness doctrine.

Those things are gone.

I don't see that they're going to come back anytime soon.

Yeah.

I have a different interpretation as to what this means and what's going to happen.

And I could boil it down to two words.

Yeah, I know.

We're effed.

No,

that's a good one.

My two words are

Morlock and Eloy.

The Morlock and the Eloy?

Yeah.

Is that the time machine?

Yeah, time machine.

Yeah, human society evolves into two classes of people, the underground Morlock and the naive angelic kind of Eloy on the surface.

And what the Morlock eat them?

Yeah.

Yep.

So interesting.

You know, the research is, I think, very informative in terms of the phenomenon.

What we do about it is more complicated.

All right.

Jay, you're going to talk about something a little bit similar.

Fake research and what kind of toll that's having on real research.

I didn't really realize to what depth all of this is and how serious it is.

And the basic concept here is that researchers rely on

the integrity of existing published studies.

And they'll reference them to create new studies, right?

So they'll take the existing knowledge, they'll make sure they're fully aware of it, and then they'll study something else that's based off of those earlier studies.

You know, when a scientific field advances, new technologies,

new treatments and everything, this is always born on research that was using previous research as a building block or a stepping stone.

This works for the majority of sciences that are legitimate, right?

You know,

scientists are constantly referring to pre-existing literature.

But today, I'm going to make you guys aware that

there has been this growing issue in the scientific community that's threatening the basic core of especially medical research.

You know, over the past decade, a shadow industry has emerged.

I know it sounds creepy, but that's a good way to put it.

And this freaking industry is churning out fake academic papers and peer-reviewed studies.

These are called paper mills.

They profit in many different ways when they do this, but

they profit by flooding journals with fraudulent studies, undermining legitimate discoveries.

They stall the progress in critical fields like cancer research and medicine.

So, what's the scope of the problem?

So, there are estimates out there that suggest that fake studies number in the hundreds of thousands.

There are retractions of these fake studies, but this is a slow and inconsistent and pretty rare occurrence.

There's been over 55,000 papers withdrawn, and the experts suspect that

there's a much, much larger number that goes undetected.

In some fields, particularly oncology and genetics, these fraudulent studies have become a a very serious major roadblock to new scientific discoveries.

My God, that is so depressing.

So, how do they get published?

Academic publishing operates on the peer review system.

So, what does that mean?

That means that somebody will publish a study into a journal, right?

The journal is 99%

based on the field of science that they're working in.

And then there are experts who evaluate the submitted papers before they're accepted.

And this process, at its best, it should filter out unreliable research, but that's not how it actually happens.

Reviewers, the vast majority of them, are volunteers, right?

So they have limited time and they frequently have to assume that the submitted research was meant to be legitimate, right?

It might not be.

It's done in good faith.

It's done in good faith, exactly.

So they don't have the time or the bandwidth to vet these papers with fraud on their minds, right?

They have to do it this particular way because it would become massively time-consuming, which does that, those man hours don't exist.

So, also, some publishers who want to make money above all else choose reviewers that are more likely to approve submissions.

Accepted studies get, you know, get charged, right?

So, if they accept a study to the paper, they're going to make a lot of money off of the person submitting it because they have to pay publication fees, which can be very pricey.

It's all part of the cost of doing research.

So, at its worst, some paper mills create fake peer reviews, which that is insidious right there.

These are entirely fabricated experts who approve these fraudulent studies, right?

So it's not real people who are not, and these fake people are approving fake studies.

And then others infiltrate editorial boards or bribe journal staff.

You know, the result is a steady influx of fake research, and it's making its way into all of these different scientific databases, which what does that do?

It completely waters down the quality of the information that's in there.

And that's the least of the problem, because it has disinformation in it, right?

Miss or disinformation, depending on your perspective.

But that wrong information will make future researchers do studies that are based off of the wrong information.

The consequences of this fraudulent research is absolutely extensive and it goes beyond the particular study themselves.

So the false data, like I said, it can mislead scientists.

It can influence new clinical trials that would

never have taken place.

It can delay the development of life-saving treatments.

I mean, this list just goes on about what these fake studies can do.

I can't remember if we spoke about this, but the one great example of how fake studies can distort research was Alzheimer's disease.

Did we talk about this real huge controversy over this

fraud in Alzheimer's research?

So basically, there was this one researcher who was literally faking these blots, right?

Faking data in order to get good results on their study.

And they were allegedly supporting the amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's disease.

Whether or not these amyloid plaques are driving the disease in Alzheimer's, and therefore we should treat them as a way of addressing, slowing down or stopping Alzheimer's.

So for 15 years, for a significant amount of time, this person was cranking out fake research and really distorting the research in the direction of the amyloid hypothesis and distorting the field of Alzheimer's research for over a decade.

It was massively, massive negative effect on the research.

Really, a real scandal.

To what end?

All just for their career.

Yeah, basically.

This one researcher's career, as if that's more important than

hundreds of thousands of years.

Because of these circumstances, lots of scientists have abandoned their fields.

For example, Jennifer Byrne, who's an Australian researcher, she specializes in cancer genetics.

She discovered that the genes that she had been studying for decades were being misrepresented in fraudulent papers going back to 2017.

So she closed her lab and she was unable to justify continuing her research because of all of that polluted misinformation.

You know,

that's happening more and more frequently.

It's happening right now.

There are people who are doing research based off of false information.

They don't even know it.

So I do have to, let me just say one thing, though.

This is all all true, but

one thing that researchers do often is before you set up a whole lab to study something and do a grant and everything, you replicate the findings that you are basing your research on.

That's one of the main reasons that replication gets done.

People are doing it before they then build on it in their own research.

That's what you should be doing.

Because that's one way to minimize the negative impact of fraudulent research.

If you can't replicate it, then don't build from there.

But there's only so much that you can do that, right?

I mean,

it's to some extent you are relying on good faith publication of research.

Aaron Ross Powell, there's been pushback, though, which is good.

So, because of how serious this is, researchers and publishers have developed some new tools, right?

You'd think that they'd be using AI, and I'm sure if they're not right now, they will be.

But they're using new tools to detect the fraudulent work.

They have automated screening systems.

One of them is called Problematic Paper Screener.

And it analyzes huge databases to flag whatever, you know, there's a lot of keywords that they have

and concepts and things like that, which are considered to be suspicious studies.

And some journals started collaborating to share the fraud that they've detected and fraud techniques that they've detected.

And then, you know, there's independent watchdogs like Retraction Watch.

You know, they track and expose retracted studies.

But the problem is the field is growing very fast, and it's always harder to keep up with the fraudsters.

In every field or whatever, wherever you look at them, they're harder to keep up with than we can.

And I'm really hoping that AI can.

This is a perfect job for AI.

Yeah.

And because they could do just that.

They could look for patterns that would predict fraudulent research, at least then, so that the papers can be flagged and then screened by a person.

You know, I mean, there's no reason why we shouldn't be using that and really developing good fraud detecting AI tools.

Think about it this way.

You could write a whole fake paper with AI.

Oh, yeah.

Submit it to some pay-to-play throwaway rag journal to beef up your

credentials.

Oh, sure.

I mean, gee whiz,

we've seen non-AI generated written papers that have made it past the pro that have gotten past the gatekeepers.

Well, yeah, that's been studied, right?

Yeah.

We did that famous study where they submitted to hundreds of these

online pay-to-play journals and like half of them published blatantly fraudulent paper.

Right.

But half didn't.

Half screened it out.

They said, no, this doesn't, this doesn't work.

So there were good quality journals out there.

And the higher quality journals didn't publish it.

I mean, to some extent, you could have predicted like some of the ones that would not have fallen for it.

But there's just so many now.

Part of it, it's like, again, this is the digital revolution.

This is like social media.

The bar has been lowered, the bar for entry.

You can set up a virtual publication business all online, all digital, and without much investment.

Like you don't need a brick and mortar infrastructure.

So that opens the floodgates to

fly-by-night fraudulent operations.

It opens the floodgates to legitimate publication too,

but

this is the price you pay for lowering that bar to entry, is that it lets everything, good, bad, fraudulent, all the crap, it lets it all in.

And the literature is an entity, right?

That's the thing you have to realize.

It's just like you talk about the media or whatever, but the literature, like the scientific literature, you know, in each field is...

like a living organism.

You know what I mean?

It is a dynamic

thing.

It's a dynamic thing

people yeah it's produced by people and but it has patterns within it it tells a story and you know we base our scientific understanding on the story that the literature is telling us and it's it's easy to distort that either by just bad practice by naivete

in it by unintended consequences, just some systemic problems in the publication process or biases in the publication process, or deliberate fraud, right?

Yeah.

And we have to get better at minimizing all of those things.

It's starting to get to like really concerning levels, you know.

It is, yeah.

All right.

These things are at concerning levels.

Yes, they are.

One of them

is dangerous street drugs.

This is the PSA be a part of our show.

Oh, yes.

Welcome to the more you know.

So, have any of you heard of nitazines?

Yeah.

Have you heard that term?

Nidazine?

Also,

nitazines?

There you go.

Also known as benzimidazole opioids.

These are synthetic opioids that have a specific structure, a benzimidazole structure.

Sometimes they're called opioid new psychoactive substances, opioid NPS.

They've got a couple other group names, depending on who you ask, the organization that's looking into them, the country where they're being used.

But these drugs have been around since the 50s.

They were first synthesized, actually, by a pharmaceutical company in, I think it was Switzerland, but they were deemed to not be usable because they are incredibly potent and there's, you know, just a strong risk of respiratory depression and because of that, death.

So this is a group of synthetic opioids that are not legally used as medicine pretty much anywhere in the world, but are making its way into the street drug culture.

They bind the mu opioid receptor, and there's still some argumentation about their potency.

I've read like different claims from different sources of literature, and that's because I think the jury's still out on this, but they can be up to several hundred times more potent than morphine.

Some people claim that they're stronger than fentanyl.

Other places say that their potency might be around the same as fentanyl.

And to be clear, fentanyl is also a synthetic opioid.

Most synthetic opioids can be kind of put into two different classes, like the fentanyl-type opioids and then the nitazine classes.

And I'm talking about the nitazines, not the fentanyls.

Both are synthetic opioids.

Does that make sense?

Yep.

So there is a really interesting article online.

It was written by Philip Berry, who's a research fellow at King's College, London.

And he is somebody who has researched sort of the UK drug trade for many, many years,

really the international narcotics industry, but he's looked at UK specifically, working for the UK Home Office as a consultant.

And he also specializes in the Afghan drug trade.

The reason that that becomes a part of this conversation is that only very recently there have been some changes to the Afghanistan culture, if you guys remember?

And there have been some real crackdowns on opium poppy growth and distribution out of Afghanistan.

And when the opium market changes in a country that was sourcing much of the heroin around the world, people find drugs elsewhere.

So heroin produced from opium poppies is apparently a pretty intensive process.

I mean, this doesn't surprise me.

It's a very, very old process.

I didn't realize as I was digging into this that in some cases, it's like 17 plus steps to go from the actual plant to the produced heroin.

Whereas when making synthetic opioids, these can be synthesized in a lab with as few as four steps.

significantly less labor-intensive, in many cases significantly cheaper and easier to produce, and also significantly stronger.

Not only are they stronger, there's another reason that they may be preferred in the global drug trade.

And what do you think that might be?

We're trying to make money off a product here.

Yeah, more profitable.

More profitable, yes.

It also means smaller bulk.

So we can move more product

more easily.

Less is more when moving drug products.

You can hide them more easily, and then you can later cut them into like a lower quality heroin or a lower quality drug.

And that is what we're starting to see based on some toxicology reports coming out of multiple countries.

This article skews very UK, but

we've seen this in the US and we've seen this in a lot of other European countries as well, that during fatal drug overdoses, during investigation of those deaths, nitazines were found in

the toxicology reports, but very often it wasn't just nitazines.

It was nitazines mixed with other medications.

And Steve, I know that you've probably seen this when you've been doing acute care in clinic.

I've definitely seen this when I'm in the hospital.

That when somebody comes in with a really complicated tox screen, I think that there's an assumption that, like, whoa, that person's doing a lot of drugs.

But very often, that person might have only taken one substance, and that substance happened to have a lot of things in it that they didn't know about.

And that is the real risk when we're talking about synthesized street drugs in illicit laboratories.

Because whether they're being sold as brand name drugs that were then released back to the street, counterfeit drugs, or they're being pill pressed as a new formulation,

we don't know what's in them.

And when you don't know what's in the drug, you don't know what kind of a tolerance you have.

You don't know

what a lethal dose looks like.

You don't know what an effective dose looks like and a lethal dose, and you don't know where those curves cross, which is really important to know when it comes to drug toxicology.

So there have been, I'm seeing

a statistic here that more than 400 deaths plus more non-fatal overdoses were linked to nitazines in the UK between 2023 and June 2023 and January 2025.

But the author says this is likely an underestimate.

Just because these drugs are so new, we may not even be looking for them and we may not be reporting on them.

And what we have seen across the board, and I don't want to get sort of too in the weeds about the UK drug trade versus the U.S.

drug trade, but there are specific sources, Afghanistan being one, Turkish drug trade being another, that historically bring heroin into the UK.

We often in the U.S.

get our drugs from China or from Mexican cartels or from Mexican cartels via China.

A lot of these drugs are being synthesized in China, and although there have been some crackdowns, there haven't been really many, if any at all, in Mexico.

So you're saying we need more crack?

No.

I'm not saying that.

We can talk about solutions to this problem in a minute.

Crack is not one of them.

Or crackdowns, I guess.

Yes, crackdowns, crackdowns.

That is what I said.

These synthetic opioids can be made relatively easily using precursor chemicals that are, generally speaking, uncontrolled and actually not illegal.

So there are places in the world where you can buy all of the ingredients that you need to make these synthetic opioids, and you can make them relatively cheaply and easily,

which is dangerous.

Also, just a cursory look at like the Wikipedia article for the list of benzimidazole opioids, the nidazines, is I can't even count how many are on this list.

There are so many variations.

So when legislation, when drug laws try to catch up with these and say, okay, we got to ban this or we're going to make this Schedule I or, you know, this is no longer going to be legal, manufacturers just change one component of the drug and now it no longer fits into that classification, and they can sell it legally until regulators catch up with them again.

So it's a pretty dangerous game that we're seeing across many, many countries where the illicit drug trade favors opiates and especially favors opiates that are strong, that are cheap, and that don't take up very much space.

So I mentioned one of the reasons was because of some of the crackdowns, or not the crackdowns, but basically the changes to the legislation and just to the general culture in Afghanistan around

opium poppy farming.

But we've also seen some changes in the culture in China, which has sort of throttled a little bit of the production there.

So now we're seeing more coming up through Mexico.

So even though nitazines have been slower to catch on here in the United States than they have in parts of Europe, there is a chance that we're going to be seeing a big wave coming through the United States soon, especially given the U.S.

history with opiate misuse.

We know that the reason that we had the opiate crisis to begin with is because of a market that was flooded with legally prescribed opiate medication.

And then, when people could no longer get the drugs, they would turn to other forms of opiates on the street, like fentanyl.

We also know that there's been a demographic change in opiate users.

So it's not really chic

to

use IV drugs.

Now, people still do it, but we do see that those people are tending to get older and that younger generations want oral drugs.

They don't want to inject opiates.

These very, very, very potent drugs can be taken orally.

So the route of administration is easier and it sadly is a little bit more welcome by a younger group of users, which can be very dangerous.

But one of the things that I'm really curious about is what we do about this.

How do we approach this?

What are some of the ways, especially here in the U.S., where we know that we've already had a synthetic drug crisis using the opioid fentanyl?

Gosh, 75,000 deaths in 2023 alone.

And did you know this?

Primary cause of death for Americans age 18 to 49.

Yeah, my gosh.

Primary cause of death.

So we already know that there's a susceptibility here to this

as a crisis.

And when these new kind of nitazines come in, or continue to come in, because they already are here, it's only a matter of time before they're here in larger numbers.

We see something that's kind of scary that happens.

So, let's say somebody was taking a prescribed opiate that's a very specific potency.

They develop a tolerance for it, and they need more to feel the same pain relief or the same euphoria that they had before, or just to stave off withdrawal symptoms at this point.

So, they take something that is either a larger quantity of the same drug or it's a stronger drug in a lower quantity.

And they continue to take that.

Steve, I'm sure you've seen this.

I've seen this many times.

There are patients who, because of their opioid use, I see it in cancer a lot, because they have to take large quantities of opiates, they're walking and talking and seem clear-headed on a dose that would knock most people out.

Yeah, they get tolerant to it.

People can build up a tolerance, right?

Well, what happens when you build up a tolerance to a certain type of opiate and then you turn around and take a whole new new opiate that you think is the same, but it's chemically different, you're going to take it in a dosage that may be really dangerous for you.

You're probably not going to start slow.

And that's where we see a lot of these deaths.

We see them in people who think that they can handle the dosage that they're about to take, but their body is naive to it.

Or they're just getting a much higher dose than they think they are.

Yeah, or you're right.

Or it's significantly stronger than what they think they're taking.

They think that they're taking oxy, but they're really taking fentanyl.

Or they're really taking these nitosines, and that's really, really dangerous.

So it's a huge issue.

And I guess, you know, as we know, the drug war, as we have waged it over the past, what would you say now, 50 years, has not really been working.

There are some lessons that can be learned, but anybody have any kind of ideas?

I have a few.

Well, I mean, education is.

Education is important, right?

I don't think most people have even heard of nitazines.

I think more and more the education that what you think you are taking might not be what you're taking because there are in this article specifically, but I've seen it cited in a couple of reports by the CDC and a couple, like a larger report by the OAS, the OAS CICAD, the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission from the Organization of American States.

They put out an informational bulletin last year on the emergence of nitazines in the Americas.

And what I'm seeing is that people think they're taking like a benzodiazepine, like they think that they're taking Xanax Xanax that they bought on the street, but it's cut with nitazines.

And so they don't even know they're taking the drug that they're, yeah, it's really scary, right?

It's really scary.

So drug testing, having access to be able to legally test the drugs that somebody is about to imbibe into their body to get a report that says, this is the drug that you actually think you're taking.

Or this drug is this percent, this, this percent, that.

So you buy a kit to test your drug?

Yeah.

And we also see these sort of kits becoming more and more available.

Well, we see them in safe use spaces, of course, but we also see them becoming available as community pop-ups in regions where a lot of street drug use is common, like at

dance parties, things like that, or intense cities around different large populations.

And so making these things more available and understanding the harm reduction approach, I think, is a really, really important one.

And just, yeah, becoming aware.

But it's always hard to outrun the drug manufacturers because they do seem to be one step ahead of the legislation and the law enforcement.

Aaron Powell, part of the problem is that we're no longer cooperating with China on drug enforcement.

Nope.

Yep.

It's a big part of the problem because

there was it was sort of a free-for-all.

So most of these nitazine problems started in 2019.

It's funny.

They were first developed in like the 1950s, but we really didn't start seeing them flood the market until 2019.

And at that time, there were some really good negotiations with China about reducing or increasing, I guess, some of the crackdowns there on the precursors.

But since then, you know, obviously, because of the geopolitics right now, those relationships are pretty fraught and it's becoming more and more difficult.

So

we may not even see a lot of imports from China directly due to tariffs on...

other products that are mostly going to be used to smuggle these drugs in.

But those tariffs don't exist between China and Mexico.

And so this researcher, who is an expert in the international drug trade, was basically saying, we're just going to be continuing to get these drugs through Mexican cartels who are probably getting them from China anyway.

Huh.

All right.

Thanks, Kara.

Yep.

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All right, let's get back to the show.

Bob, tell us about this nearby potentially habitable, habitable exoplanet.

Habitable.

Surely, surely.

This is a recent paper that has confirmed the existence of an exoplanet only 20 light years away.

This is a super-Earth, but it's even more special.

It's within the star's habitable zone, and it's brawny as hell, weighing in at a whopping almost six Earth masses.

That is beefy.

This was published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

Now, how cool is that?

But it gets better.

This gets even better, but then towards the end, it gets a little worse.

So let's go over that.

Let's go over now what we know about this solar system.

This is the star is HD 20794.

Never even heard of this, 20 light years away.

I never heard of it.

I've looked at the nearby stars before,

and I don't know.

The name, maybe because the name is just so damn lame.

That's probably it.

But this star now, we know now, presides over a multi-planet super-Earth system.

Bravo and bravo to all the people, all the scientists and technicians and everybody who spent years, literally a few years-doing data analysis to tease out this data because it was at the edge of detectability.

And they worked on it and worked on it, and they found something very, very cool.

Very social.

Did they say which method they used to detect the exoplanet?

Yeah, this was

radial velocity, but it was right at the edge of detectability.

So, this star, I'll start with the star.

This is a GHV star.

Our sun is a G2V.

And I was like, you know, I didn't kind of know what those mean, but I dove in a little bit.

The G is essentially a yellow star around 5,700 Kelvin.

That's essentially what that means.

The V, I didn't know this, means that it's on the main sequence, which means a few things.

It means it's fusing hydrogen in its core, which is nice.

And that means that it's going to be stable for a really long time.

So that's really good.

That's where you want to evolve on a many billion-year life size.

Oh, yes.

Right.

Yes.

Orange is probably optimal, but yeah, yellow is acceptable.

Yeah, yellow is good.

I'm happy with yellow.

So this star, it's just, this star is very similar to the sun, except it's a G8, and the Sun is a G2.

The lower the number, the hotter the star.

So this star is slightly cooler, dimmer, and smaller than our Sun.

So now that I've given you a little bit more information, let's sum up now.

Not only have they found a super-Earth in its habitable zone and only 20 light years away, but the star itself is also very, very sun-like.

Steve, Jay, Evan, what kind of D and D role is that?

Is that an 18?

That's an amazing, it's an amazing find to find it, to find it that close.

I mean, there could be liquid water on this all over this planet.

It's pretty amazing.

I was pretty excited by this.

So a couple more comparisons, though, with the star.

The metallicity of the star is low.

That's not great for some reasons.

That means that it has fewer heavy elements than the sun, which is a bummer.

If you're evolving on a planet, you want a lot of heavy metals.

Having low metallicity of the star, I assume that that's going to translate to the planet itself.

That's not great.

If you develop complex life, you're not going to have good resources.

Even your belters out in

some

asteroid belt might not even be able to find too much stuff.

But it's the other thing is that this star is six to ten billion years old.

So this, this is an old boy.

This is, our sun is what, four and a half, 4.6 billion years.

So if there's life on this,

it could have developed, it could have a billion years or more evolution than any life on the Earth.

So who knows what's possible there?

You know, that's a lot of assumptions right there, but it's nice.

It's cool to think that

a few billion years more of evolution could potentially do.

Bob, does the age tie into that number, that G8 number versus the G2 number?

In other words, because it's older and it's causing fewer, you know, less less metallic?

The lighter mass stars have a longer lifespan.

Yes, they do, yeah, because the giants burn through it like there's no tomorrow.

Right.

So then you've got really, really much lower mass stars like brown dwarfs and stuff that and that last like ridiculous amounts of time.

All right, so let's look at the planets.

There's three planets, they think there's at least three.

They're pretty confident about three.

There could be a few more for sure.

So these are named B, C, and D, right?

Because they just give the Sun, you know, the Sun designation.

Right.

So, so, uh, so B and C are they're they're beefy too.

They're 2.1 and 3 Earth masses, but they are too close to the star.

So it's pretty hot.

It's going to be probably pretty hot there.

Oh, and unless, of course, they're tidally locked, then there could be potentially a ring of temperate climate around it.

Who knows?

But we basically know very little about those guys.

Let's see, and we don't know a lot about the other one either.

The D.

D is the one that we're talking about here.

This is 5.82 Earth masses.

It's got a 647-day orbit.

Earth is a D.

And it's in,

and it's in the habitable zone mostly, which is really, really cool.

So, like I said, the planet has about six Earth masses at about 1.8 Earth diameters.

So, this seems to be pretty dense, right?

That's, you know, you're shoving six Earth masses, and

it's not even probably twice the diameter of the Earth.

Can we assume higher gravity based on that?

Oh, yeah.

Surface gravity would be about twice that of Earth.

Twice, about two.

Yeah, I did some calculations on it.

It'd be about two.

So, yeah, which means you would

never get off the surface of that world with chemical rockets.

Well,

I did some research on that specifically, as you might imagine.

And as far as I can tell,

it's at the edge of possibility.

It's maybe potentially possible because it's right at the edge.

You would only need to go only a little bit faster than the fastest theoretical speed a chemical rocket could attain

to achieve escape velocity.

So it's right at the edge, right at the edge.

So, yeah, either way.

even if they can get off with a chemical rocket, this would take technology that we don't even, we couldn't, we couldn't muster today ourselves.

So yeah, they're going to have a very, very hard time getting off of that planet, if at all, assuming, of course, there's complex life.

But also, meaning if we ever wanted to land on that planet, we wouldn't be able to get back off again.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, we'd just be all probes, and we'd have to do some

virtual telepresence if we want to pretend like we're on it.

So, there's not a lot of other findings about this planet that they can really talk about now.

It's, you know,

there's still need to do some more investigations and things, but it's the implications that I find so fascinating.

So what do you think?

What are some of the major implications of this finding that we could do?

What sticks out in your head?

We have to look at the atmosphere.

Yeah, and it's all about the biosignatures, I think.

Yes, we're on the cusp of being able to do more than ever with remote biosignature detection.

If you want to look at another planet and see any biosignatures, this guy is almost the perfect trifecta, right?

It's really close because the closer you are, the much, much easier it's going to be to detect any biosignatures.

We found some promising exoplanets, and they're like, you know, 100 light years away or 1,000 light years away.

Good luck.

I mean, you know, maybe we could do something, but it's so much easier to, you know, to observe these, obviously, when it's so much closer.

So that's great.

It's also, it seems to be a rocky super-Earth.

So it's...

much better, much higher chances, I think, of finding life or any biosignatures than if it were a Jupiter planet, right?

A giant, gas giant.

And of course, of course, it's in the habitable zone of the star, at least for a good chunk of its elliptical orbit.

It's in the habitable zone.

And that could be potentially problematic.

I'll touch upon that.

towards the end.

All right, now detecting these signatures, these biosignatures, will likely involve waiting for it to pass in front of the star.

I think we've mentioned this a few times on the show.

The different gases in the atmosphere will absorb different wavelengths of light coming through from the star, right?

And then these absences, these lines of these wavelengths that are absorbed by the gas, would be like fingerprints in

the star's spectrum.

So then you could see, oh,

it's got these gases.

And the gases gases that we would love to see would be anything like oxygen, ozone, methane, nitrous oxide, all of which are obviously specifically associated with life on Earth.

If we found those, oh my god, this would be crazy.

It would be amazing, discovery of the millennia.

If some alien is looking at our atmosphere, the wavelengths that those gases absorb that I mentioned would be subtracted from the sun's light.

What do you think can detect these gases?

What's out there right now that should start looking very soon for some of these fingerprints?

James Webb.

James Webb.

Yep, James Webb can find some of them.

And there's also a bunch of future telescopes that are on the horizon, like the ELT Extremely Large Telescope.

They're going to be able to detect a lot of those as well.

And there's more.

So, wow,

the next 10 years is going to be fascinating.

I hope they really zoom in on this planet.

Let's see.

And there's also, don't forget, there's also the idea that this planet would be fantastic for direct imaging.

I mean, actually looking at the planet and imaging it and not inferring it from

transiting or radio velocity or anything like that.

In that scenario, they use something like a coronagraph or star shade to block out all that intense glare from the star so they can directly observe and image the planet.

And they could also analyze the reflected light for biosignatures as well.

So that's another potential option we may see in the future.

All right, so here's a cool question.

What are some of the ramifications of life on such a massive Earth-like planet?

Like what would some of the things that would really really stand out for life living there, evolving there?

And one, of course, is that there's stronger gravity.

The gravity is like twice Earth's, right?

So that means that the atmosphere could potentially be extra stable, lasting for billions of years, right?

Because we've lost the lightest gases on Earth just like drift off into space because the gravity is not strong enough to hold onto them.

But the problem then, though, becomes if the gravity is too strong,

it could lead to something like a super thick atmosphere, and then you could have a potentially runaway greenhouse effect.

This big planet could have a lot more internal heat than the Earth, and we know that plate tectonics and things like that,

subduction zones and all that, and volcanoes can help stabilize the climate as well.

Volcanoes could even potentially replenish an atmosphere if it's lost.

But then again, if there's too much volcanic activity, that would not be good either.

So it's kind of a balance.

Let's see.

One other thing I found is that the oceans on such a planet could be many times deeper than our oceans.

In fact, if the surface is unhabitable, you could potentially have, you know, the oceans, you know, imagine a 50-mile deep ocean

swarming with life.

That would be good.

Two times gravity pressure?

Oh, my gosh.

Well, yeah, I mean, you go 10.

Can you imagine going under 50 miles of water?

What that pressure would be like?

Damn.

All right, so obviously I'm not trying to get too excited here, but it's so much fun to speculate, isn't it?

I got to reinforce, we don't know a lot about this planet, especially regarding its atmosphere.

Does it have an atmosphere?

We don't know.

If it has a thick atmosphere, it could be more like Venus, hot, uninhabitable, nasty as hell.

It could potentially have a ridiculously large atmosphere, and in that case, it could resemble even Neptune more than Earth.

So it might not even be, you know, really like a rocky planet that you would recognize.

It could be very Neptune-like.

That would be kind of annoying.

Yeah, because super-Earth

basically blend into sub-Neptunes.

Yeah, exactly.

Let's see.

It could have no atmosphere, and it could be barren like Mars, you know, very, very little or no or no atmosphere.

That could be a bummer.

We could find that out.

It's like, oh, oh, well.

And then, of course, it could have a moderate atmosphere.

It could be Earth-like.

It could be an ocean world.

That, of course, is what we're all hoping for.

And even if it had the perfect atmosphere, it could be doomed.

Why?

Because there's no magnetosphere.

Ah, there you go.

Right, the churning.

You can bombard it with all kinds of stuff, and you're dead.

Yep,

the churning of the iron in the Earth's core creates a geodynamo protecting our planet.

Uh Mars doesn't have a robust magnetosphere uh and so the solar wind uh just eroded the uh its atmosphere over millions of years, no atmosphere, just because you don't have a magnetosphere.

That would stink.

That's so that's a possibility as well.

The only other thing I'll I'll end with this is the the only other thing that is potentially a deal killer here is that it's a l its orbit has been shown to be within the um the uh habitable zone, the Goldilocks zone, but it looks like it's not in it for the entirety of its orbit because its orbit is elliptical.

You know, it seems much more elliptical than the Earth.

Elliptical is bad for a planet with life.

The Earth has an elliptical planet, but it's only slightly, barely elliptical.

It's nearly circular.

And that's great.

For a stable climate, that's wonderful.

You start getting

an elliptical orbit, then you're really hot at one year, the other

side of the year,

everything's freezing.

So it's just like crap.

It's going to be pretty pretty tough for something to evolve there.

Unless, of course, it's all oceanic and could potentially get away from it.

So if that orbit is too elliptical, it's like, damn, there's going to be probably very little hope for any, you know, any liquid water on its surface for any great period of time.

So, all right, so I'm done here.

This is just like so much.

interesting speculation, but it's just speculation.

We got to wait for the real scientists to do their work, and hopefully we can take a real good assessment of its atmosphere, maybe even directly image it and try to answer some of these questions.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

All right, man.

All right, Evan, I understand we're

reverse-engineering alien technology.

How's that going?

Oh, my gosh, Steve, we are so close to having this figured out that you can invest.

You can actually make an investment based on that premise.

Can you believe it?

What?

Well, yeah, now let me tell you about it.

It's called an ETF.

You know what an ETF is?

An exchange-traded fund.

We probably, many of us have them in our retirement accounts or our stock portfolios or what have you, but that's a type of fund that's traded on stock exchanges, but they hold a diversified portfolio of assets.

So you trade the fund instead of a single stock, for example.

And there are lots of advantages to doing this type of trading.

And among those is that

you can have ETFs for different asset classes, including equities, bonds, commodities like gold gold or oil, or even niche sectors such as technology and healthcare.

I'm not sure it can get more niche than this because there's been a new filing with the United States SEC, that's the Securities and Exchange Commission, by a group of investors called Tottle Capital.

Their new ETF that they are looking to enact, that they applied for it is called the UFO Disclosure AI-powered ETF with a focus on reverse-engineered alien technology.

The idea behind this group of stocks that would be in this fund is that in the near future, the United States government and perhaps other governments around the world will soon be disclosing all they know about captured or recovered alien technology.

And the tech companies in this fund represent the leaders in those fields that will successfully figure out the secrets on how extraterrestrial vehicles, you know, zip around the solar system, the galaxy, wherever they come from, and also how they seem to defy the laws of physics when they are captured in dribs and drabs on video while buzzing around Earth's atmosphere.

And that is what I call niche.

It will invest at least 80% of their net assets in a basket of companies that total capital, and I quote, believe have potential exposure to advanced or reversed engineered alien technology, spurred by disclosures about UFOs and alleged advanced technologies.

That's direct from their their registration statement.

Companies in here will include, you know, aerospace groups and defense contractors

and other companies that are, this is them, rumored to work with classified technology, potentially leading to groundbreaking advancements.

The chief executive officer of a company, his name is Matthew Tuttle, Tuttle Capital, and he said that he's been interested in UFOs for a long time.

He said, I'm a trader, but I look at UFOs and I say that they're using a power source that is light years beyond anything we have.

If our government has this technology and its release, that will be a game changer.

The ETF is going to short other companies that are threatened or could be made obsolete because any alien-level technology that's discovered, right, is going to blow away whatever mundane Earth-based technology that we have.

Now, they do warn, as these are speculative things, you know, and I'll get to that in just a second, second, on the level of speculation here.

In that, you know, the risks go along with these kinds of investments.

You know, for example, you know, the governments may choose to not reveal all the secrets about the alien technology that they've either captured or recovered or what have you.

They say that government confirmation or denial of advanced alien tech is uncertain and rumored breakthroughs may never materialize.

This entire theme is highly speculative and subject to rumor cycles.

Okay, so I have a couple of thoughts on this.

Just a couple.

My big question is, and I'm sure this is where you're going: is this fraud?

Right.

Yes.

That was definitely one of my big questions.

Is this on the edge of being fraudulent?

And, you know, because I don't know, the chances of this playing out the way that they are describing, I think, approach is implausible.

To say that UFOs and UAPs, disclosures by governments will amount to anything more than simply the declassification of classified information, right?

Just telling you what they know and what they have and saying that

you're going to be able to discern technological information as a result of that.

That is reckless at best.

At best.

What?

This data is going to include blueprints of alien ships or the specs of a propulsion system that has been conceived by otherworldly beings?

Or what?

Medical devices that the aliens supposedly use on the people that they've abducted over the years.

This is science fiction and it is fantasy.

Does it matter if they believe it for fraud?

I suppose, yeah.

Like, it has to be intentional, right?

Hard to prove.

Hard to prove.

It would be, but I don't know that you couldn't make a case for it.

That any reasonable person would know that.

Yeah.

What you're doing is you're drawing in potential investors here who

do not have a certain level of either sophistication or experience in these kinds of investments?

It's one thing

if you know how to invest and you decide to you want to take a chance or a risk on this based on the fundamentals of the companies that are involved in the ETF.

That's one thing.

However, you're going to have whole groups of people who are going to just see UFO and reverse alien engineered tech, and that's going to be it for them.

That will be the entire basis on which they're going to want to throw their money in there.

And I think you are

to a certain degree misleading people with these promises that, frankly, have

so little chance of ever material of materializing based on what they're telling you.

It's complicated though because the companies sound legit.

They are legitimate.

It's just like aerospace companies or technology companies, and they may do fine.

You know, the investment may not necessarily be a money loser.

But the hook is these are the companies that are going to benefit from reverse engineering alien technology, and we're going to short companies whose products are going to be rendered obsolete by reverse engineering alien technology.

And the whole concept is, I think it goes beyond speculative.

As you're saying,

there's speculation and then there's science fiction, right?

There's or fantasy.

This is just really made-up nonsense.

This is the kind of thing I could see a judge going either way on it if it came before them.

But the other question, and this is something I just don't know, like if you fully disclose, it's like, hey, if you want to invest in reverse engineering alien technology, these would be the companies you would invest in.

We could make that happen for you if you want, if that's something you want to do.

You know what I mean?

Not making any specific claims, just saying this is what it is.

That might not be fraudulent.

It may be scummy.

You know, it may not be a good investing idea, but it may not be fraud.

I don't know.

It's complicated.

In a way, it's also a slap to these companies that will be ultimately invested in.

You're kind of slapping this UFO label on them that they don't deserve, they didn't ask for.

They're not individually promoting their companies as having anything to do with these things.

It's sort of a stain upon them, if you ask me.

And I don't even know if these companies really,

how they would feel about it.

I suppose bottom line is bottom line, and dollars are dollars.

So that ultimately rules the day.

But I don't know.

I wouldn't want the taint of this kind of stuff on my company.

Well, does an individual company have any legal recourse for what funds they're included in?

I mean, if they're traded on the stock market, anybody could put together any collection

of openly traded stocks they want, call it whatever, and there you go.

But if you were trading, let's say, healthcare stocks and then you made claims about the companies that were fraudulent claims about the companies without their knowledge.

That's yeah, if you're making fraudulent claims, then that's fraud, right?

But

you can do this without making claims.

Just saying, this is sort of the theme of these stocks, and

invest at your own risk.

We're not making any claims.

We're just making it available for anybody who wants it.

That's the kind of coy way of doing it.

It is very coy.

It's very slick.

And the number of assumptions here they're making in these kinds of statements, you know, when they, when they talk, that's really astounding.

You know, UFOs are real, intelligent beings have brought their technology to Earth.

You know, government has captured and retrieved distinctively otherworldly technology.

That's a lot to have to choke down and, you know, swallow without,

regurgitating.

Well, it's all not sick by it.

But I've seen decisions where judges basically determine that some entity, some person or whatever, is a quote-unquote menace to the investing public.

They may decide that that's what this represents, even if it's not outright fraud.

I don't know.

And before we close, the SEC has granted permission and approved applications of funds that do have similar sorts of names to them.

In other words, there's one called UFO Procure Space ETF that's been approved.

However, they're not making claims about the alien technology and

government disclosures and that things are being repressed.

It's simply a

basket of companies in this particular, and they just, you know, their aerospace and other things, they just happen to call it, you know, UFO.

Something like that is much, much easier to accept than what this other ETF is trying to do.

All right.

Thanks, Heaven.

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

All right, guys.

Last week I played this noisy.

That is two

geese arguing back and forth.

One saying, yes, I am.

The other saying, no, I'm not.

Yes, I am.

No, I'm not.

Yes, I am.

No, I'm not.

So a listener named Johan Lund said, hello, Jay.

It sounds like someone is trying to turn off a big old rusty tap.

Thank you.

And the rest of the SGU rogues for everything that you do.

So, you know, when I read this guess, I'm like, what?

I don't see it.

And then as I re-listen to it, I totally hear it.

So I get why you picked that.

It's not correct, but that was a fun guess.

Anthony Kelly wrote in, hey there.

Hey there.

I think it's ice.

or dry ice falling down some kind of pipe or shaft.

I've heard ice do that.

I haven't heard it make that kind of noise.

I've heard it make like a like, it has like a very uh aluminum type of sound.

I can't think of a better way to describe it.

At my home, when like the ice falls down, uh, in you know, in the uh, what do you call it?

The downspouts, they it doesn't, it doesn't have like a high-pitched thing, it's like a rattly kind of noise.

But thank you for the guess.

Another listener named Adam Price said, My six-year-old son, Sam, says robot monkeys at the zoo.

That is probably one of the best guesses we've had all year.

Now that Sam says that, I want to see these monkeys right now.

Another listener named Darren Hawley wrote in, I'm pretty sure that's a sand hill crane probably recorded at a zoo based on the resonant sound.

That is not correct, but you are moving in the right direction.

I have a close guess here.

Michael Blaney wrote in, Hi, Jay.

It almost sounds like two birds having a rap battle.

Definitely seems like people in the background.

So

I'm guessing just two birds answering each other at some kind of bird park.

That's a very good, close guess.

Not correct, but very good.

The winner for this week is Bob Whiteman, and Bob wrote, This week's noisy is a couple of flamingos talking with each other.

My daughter Eleanor 11 and Madeline 9 recognized this immediately from our many visits to the San Francisco.

There you go.

See, I said the signs, basically the same thing.

Two birds having it out.

So these

are actually two flamingos at the Key West Butterfly Sanctuary.

They're called Rhett and Scarlet, right?

Guess where that's from?

And apparently, they were talking about something that we can't comprehend.

What, Bob?

They both made this.

They both said it.

Okay.

You'll hear it.

Hear it again.

Yeah, that's an argument, I guess.

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

This noisy noisy was sent in by a listener named Aaron Johnson.

Whoa.

The hell, man.

Something's not quite right there.

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

steve we've had several people become patrons in the last few weeks uh with our request for people to please seriously consider becoming a patron now because steve is coming to the sgu full-time and we really could use your support to help make this a smooth transition and to get us into creating the new content that we've been working on i'm hoping like within a month we're going to be able to tell you guys what we have planned i'm very very excited about it i mean it's going to be a very different phase for the SGU when Steve does this because we're going to really, we're going to create a lot more content.

So, if you want to support us, please consider it because we really could use the support at this time.

If you also would like to know everything that the SGU does, you can join our mailing list.

Just go to the

skepticsguide.org.

You can sign up there.

We give you an email about everything that we've done the previous week.

You can also give our show a rating on whatever podcast player you're using.

We have Naticon 2025.

We have tickets to purchase to come to this conference, spend a lot of time with some great people.

There's lots of socializing.

We have a lot of things to entertain everyone.

And of course, we're in the wonderful city of White Plains, New York, not far from New York City, pretty far from Boston, so you won't be going there.

But we had a wonderful time last time.

I'm really hoping that you guys consider coming.

It's going to be a great show.

You can go to nataconcon.com nataconcon.com for more information.

Thank you, Jay.

Evan, you have a science quiz for us this week.

I do have a science quiz for you.

I had actually prepared this a little while ago, you know, closer to the beginning of the year, but we're only getting around to it now.

So there's a particular theme to this quiz, and it has to do with, well, years.

Years is the main theme that runs through this.

So,

years or years?

Y-E-A-R-S.

Years.

So, first of all, I'd like to wish you all a happy new year.

Oh, wait, that's an old note.

When is it too late to wish someone a happy new year?

I'd say, like,

mid-January.

Even if your first interaction with that person isn't until, say, the first week of February, yeah, February's definitely past the due date on that.

Yeah.

All right.

Yeah, but yeah, that's when you say something like, so how's your new year going?

Yes.

I see.

February.

It's like, how late in the day can you say to somebody, have a good day or have a nice day?

Yeah, when does it switch to good evening?

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

But

when you have to switch at some point, good evening is obvious.

But if it's two in the afternoon.

Good afternoon.

But you're saying,

not as a greeting, as like more like when you're leaving, have a nice day.

Yeah, you say like have a good rest of your day.

Have a good rest of the day.

At some point you switch over to have a good rest of the day.

When does that happen?

There's no official time.

It's whatever you feel like, I suppose.

Yeah, no, no rhyme or reason.

Go with your gut.

So, good morning, everyone.

And here's

okay, I've got five questions for you.

They are science questions.

And again, the theme is years.

Let's dig right into it.

Question number one: In what year did the first direct observation of gravitational waves take place?

And it's multiple choice, so I'm going to give you the choices.

Was it A 2015,

B 2017,

or C

2019?

We drew random lots backstage, which we actually didn't do.

I did it myself, and I came up with J.

You'll give us your answer first.

15.

Okay, Kara.

Yeah, I feel like I've lost a lot of time because of COVID, but I do think it was probably a decade ago now, so I'm going to say 15.

Steve?

Yeah, I was thinking 15 as well.

And Bob.

That's so funny.

You guys think it's 2015?

Well, it is.

Which is why Bob went last on this category, because you are all correct.

2015.

I pissed you all it right.

The first direct observation of gravitational waves was made in September 2015 when a signal generated by the merger of two black holes was received by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors in Livingston, Louisiana, and in Hanford, Washington.

What a day that was.

Bob, I know.

That was a big deal for you.

Big, that was big.

Big for all of astronomy.

Astrophysics is immense.

A new, brand new window into space.

Like, damn, multi-message astronomy.

Hello.

I am so happy you're all off to a great start.

Let's move on to the second question.

Who is credited with having discovered the nucleus of an atom?

Hmm.

Well, is it?

And it's a multiple choice, ABC.

A,

1897 by J.

J.

Thompson B

nineteen eleven by Ernest Rutherford

or C nineteen thirty two by Werner Heisenberg

And we will start with Kara.

I think I remember Rutherford.

The date I don't remember at all, so I'm going to just go with my gut and say it was Rutherford.

Rutherford nineteen eleven says Kara.

Steve.

Ernest.

Ernest Rutherford, you sound pretty confident there.

That's good.

Bob, how about you?

I believe he liked calling himself Ernie.

I love people.

To his friends.

Jay, how about you?

Yeah, I'm going to go with Steve.

You and Steve?

Kara?

The fuck?

Oh, yeah.

I'm going to go with Kara, of course.

The Rutherford Adams.

So, Jay, you're changing your answer to go with Kara instead of Steve.

Is that correct?

Am I under?

Yes, please.

Everybody is correct.

1911, Ernest Rutherford.

Yep.

I'll give you a little background on the others.

J.J.

Thompson, 1897, through his experiments with cathode ray tubes in 1897, J.J.

Thompson's finding proved that atoms are not indivisible and contain even smaller particles like electrons.

So nope,

not discovering the nucleus.

Heisenberg, 1932, developed a model for a nucleus

composed of protons and neutrons.

But no, in 1911, it was Rutherford and his experiment involved firing alpha particles at a thin sheet of gold foil, observing that most particles passed through, but a small number were deflected at large angles, leading him to conclude that the positive charge of an atom is concentrated in a tiny, dense center called the nucleus.

Yeah.

Some previous, some other theories, what was it, the nuclear pudding model?

Yeah, the pudding.

Oh, interesting.

I hadn't heard that in

time.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the electrons were embedded in more of a diffuse positive pudding.

But yeah, he proved it was all at the middle, all at the center.

Big, that was big, man.

I was like, whoa.

Very cool.

That's a new layer of the onion.

Third question for you.

Great job so far, guys.

Number three, which one of these journal articles do not belong to Albert Einstein?

Is it A,

1902, on X-rays?

Was it B, 1905, on a heuristic point of view concerning the production and transformation of light?

Or is it C, 1915, the field equations of gravitation?

And Steve, we'll begin with you.

X-rays.

Moving on to Bob.

Yeah, X-rays just leap out.

I believe it was Renten who discovered them.

J?

Goddamn, I don't know.

X-rays 1902.

Transformation of Light 1905.

Field Equations of Gravitation 1915.

1915.

Okay.

And Cara.

I'm going to go with the guys and say x-rays.

If anyone said B, 1905, transformation of light, you'd be incorrect.

It is, in fact, the X-rays one, 1902 on X-rays.

That journal article did not belong to Albert Einstein.

The other two were his.

But for a bonus point, who did, in 1902, write the journal article on X-rays?

Rent?

Nope.

Nope.

No, huh?

Let's see who else might have done it.

It wasn't like Marie Curie.

Yes, Marie Curie.

Yeah, okay.

Really?

Nice.

She was awesome.

Thank God.

All right, moving on.

The fourth question.

Ivan Pavlov's dog experiment is a classic study in psychology that demonstrated the concept of classical conditioning, which posits that behaviors can be learned through the association of different stimuli.

Pavlov's dog experiment was published in what year?

Was it A,

1897,

B, 1910, or C, 1922?

And Bob, you'll start.

Let's go with 1910.

I don't know.

J?

Yeah, 1910.

Kara?

1897.

And

Steve.

Hmm.

I was going to say 1922, but Kara's guess bothers me.

See what you do to us every week.

Welcome to our answer for you.

Yeah.

I'll stick with my original guns and say 1922.

All right, 1922.

The year, in fact, was 1897.

Carrie.

Studying for her licensing.

I know.

Oh, God.

I was so close to picking that.

I don't know why.

Long time ago.

What did we learn?

Yeah.

Jump to 10.

Good job, Carrie.

Carrie, you've gotten everyone correct, okay?

So there's no pressure on you to get this last one correct.

Number five, the last one.

Louis Pasteur published his germ theory in 1861.

What was considered the main prevailing theory of disease at the time that germ theory of disease was published?

Was it A,

spontaneous generation theory?

Was it B, miasma theory?

Or was it C,

the humors theory?

And we will start with J.

I think it was the humors.

Okay.

Kara?

I tried to answer it in my head before you gave the options, and in my head I said miasma.

So I'm just going to stick with that.

But

my time has to go off.

It's an uncomfortable feeling.

Steve, what do you think?

Yeah, I also thought miasma before the choices came.

I mean, all of those things were in play in the 1800s.

But I think specifically for infections, it was miasma.

And Bob.

Yeah, absolutely.

Miasma.

The correct answer is miasma theory.

Well, Don Cara, you swept the entire

game.

What do I win?

Perfect.

Well, I mean,

the accolades and the prestige and the

admiration of your fellow rogues.

Yes.

And so

she didn't have it before.

All right, so miasma theory.

This theory, prevalent before the germ theory, believed diseases spread through bad air or noxious vapors from decaying matter, leading to practices like poor sanitation being linked to disease, but not understanding the actual microbial cause.

The other two, there was spontaneous generation theory, which I really wasn't all that familiar with.

This theory, now discredited.

Life.

You know it?

Yeah, proposed that living organisms could arise from non-living matter, like maggots appearing on decaying meat.

You would remember that, Bob.

And of course, the humorous theory, Jay, which I would have, which I think I would have also guessed if this was posited to me.

So I would be with you there, Jay, humorous theory.

That passed out of favor actually in the 1600s, but it was based on the belief that the human body was composed of four humors: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.

So there you have it.

A science quiz.

The theme is yours, and I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you, Evan.

You're welcome.

Quick email.

This email comes from Big Wohler, who says he's from Menlo Park, California, SETI Institute, NASA Ames Research Center.

Anyone can claim that.

And Bill writes, among other things, one of the items in last week's science science or fiction was space junk.

Just before I heard that, I read that four to five star-linked satellites de-orbit every day.

That's nuts.

I hope they are de-orbited purposefully.

And he gave a link.

So I checked it out, and it seems that that claim is correct.

That seems to be the case.

Okay.

Four to five de-orbits,

at least recently.

That hasn't been at that level for too long.

But

that's the plan, right?

But going forward, that probably.

Yeah, that.

So this is the older satellites are now de-orbiting and being replaced by newer ones.

There have been 500 deorbits so far of Starlink satellites.

Of course, there are thousands in orbit.

So I think the goal is to, what, to get up to 20,000?

How big are they?

50, 50,000 by 2030.

50,000 by 2030.

More additional 50,000.

Are they the size of a bus or a little smaller?

They are, well, I know how much they weigh.

30 kilograms.

Each Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms of aluminum oxide

when they deorbit.

So they must weigh more than that.

Although, yeah, it's combining with oxygen, so that might be adding weight to it.

And they're burning up on the way up?

They're burning up.

Yeah, they burn up entirely in the atmosphere.

So the concern is that as each one enters the atmosphere,

it's producing this waste product like aluminum oxide, which could eat away at the ozone layer.

So there was a recent study which found that

there has been an eight-fold increase in these compounds between 2016 and 2022.

And this is going to increase significantly as more and more of these satellites de-orbit.

So

this is a new paradigm, right?

This is not just sending up satellites.

This is sending up tens of thousands of satellites on a rotational basis, right?

that are going to have to be replaced on a regular interval.

Five of these are deorbiting every day.

So that is going to be putting a large amount of aluminum oxide and other substances into the atmosphere.

This has been characterized by one NOAA scientist as

an experiment in atmospheric chemistry.

Oh, fun.

So does that mean we have to launch things into the atmosphere to compensate, or is that not going to work?

Well, I think we have to think about what these satellites are made of and

what the full life cycle of them is, what happens at the end of their life cycle.

Yeah, the key is we need to study this to see

what it could be doing to the chemistry of the upper atmosphere and what a huge increase in the next five years could potentially mean.

Seems like common sense, but common sense is in short supply these days.

So

it erodes ozone.

It can eat away the ozone.

Yeah.

Well, that's the concern now.

Maybe it does other stuff, too.

I mean, again, it needs to be something.

Cloud formations could be impacted potentially.

And things, of course, that we have no idea what you know what could happen unless we take a deeper look.

Yeah, it's worth definitely worth more investigation.

But it's not, but nothing is pausing while it's being investigated.

It's just right, I know.

It's a full steam ahead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, guys.

Let's go on with science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

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

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

Are you guys just regular news items this week?

You guys ready?

Yep.

Ready.

All right, here we go.

Item number one.

Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity.

I number two, in a recent study, adults were able to learn absolute pitch after eight weeks of training to a greater than 90% accuracy.

And I number three, astronomers announced the detection of a super high-energy cosmogenic neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 petaelectron volts.

Ooh, baby.

That's a lot of volts.

Bob, was I hearing you volunteer to go first?

Fuck.

As I said it, I was like, no, pull the words back.

All right.

Continuous delivery of drugs

to the intestament.

Continuous.

How do we interpret that?

Does that mean that it's creating the drug itself and that it will continue to deliver that drug as long as it's alive?

Yeah, basically.

That's poof.

That's pretty intense.

But then, when you listed the other two,

they seemed even less likely.

Let's see.

Absolute pitch.

My understanding is that absolute pitch was something that's kind of

innate and not necessarily trainable, especially by such a high percentage.

But who knows?

The one that's getting me, though, is this

super high-energy cosmogenic.

What the hell is cosmogenic?

Neutrino.

Super high-energy.

I mean, they found a new neutrino.

Or was it just a regular neutrino that was much higher energy?

I mean, these guys, these neutrinos don't pack much of a wob.

I mean, they don't interact hardly at all with anything.

They can go through light years, literally, light years of lead before interacting with anything.

Yeah, so I'll say neutrino is fiction.

Okay, Jay.

Okay, the first one,

biologist that engineered the bacteria to continuously deliver drugs.

I think that one is science.

I don't think that they worked out all the kinks yet, but bacteria are amazing factories that can make lots of different chemicals, so I don't think there's any problem with that.

All right, this one about the perfect pitch.

I am highly suspect of that.

And I think the reason is, is because adults,

you lose your ability to have perfect pitch as you get older.

So I'm not too sure about that one.

And this last one here, astronomers announced the detection of super high-energy cosmic genetic neutrino that is the most energetic.

Yeah, I mean, the second one here definitely is the one I know the most about.

And I seriously don't think that even with eight weeks of training that you can get that high of an accuracy.

No way.

Okay, Kara.

I don't like any of them.

Bob, like, I'm struggling the way that you were.

The one about the neutrinos, I have no idea, but I was like, sure, sure.

And then Bob was like, no, that's impossible.

And that makes me uncomfortable.

The perfect pitch, I'm assuming absolute pitch is the same as perfect pitch.

Yeah.

This one really rubs me the wrong way, but that's why I think it might be science because it's like, ooh, we all thought, and look, we turned it on its ear.

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

But then the engineered bacteria that can just keep delivering drugs.

What does that mean?

It continuously delivers drugs.

It can, yeah, it can

deliver a steady dose of.

Right, there we go.

Okay, that's the important thing.

Yeah, the steady dose.

That bothers me a lot.

I could see them dumping a bunch of drug, but they would have to be metabolizing the drug somehow in order for it to then be released at a steady dose, which I don't get.

And bacteria are always multiplying.

They have really short lives.

So I don't know.

That one really bothers me.

Like, I've seen bacterial infusions to treat like C.

diff

and obesity.

I don't know.

I'm going to say that that one's the fiction, the drug one.

Ooh, all spread out.

Crumbs.

Yeah.

Up to you, Evan.

Well, let me break this tie.

Help.

None of us.

Carrie, you made excellent.

I was saying,

the bacteria one sounds.

Yeah, that's good science.

It's cool.

But then you said the things you said, and I'm like, oh, crumbs now.

I don't know.

But, you know, just that they engineered the bacteria to deliver the drug.

I mean, what we're talking about, it doesn't matter if it's in a mouse versus a person.

You know, I mean,

at what stage is this?

The fact that you engineered this bacteria that can do it, I don't know if it necessarily means that there's a straight line to, you know, using this for people.

It could, I don't know, more of like a proof of concept kind of thing.

I don't know.

The one about pitch is the one I probably know the least about or have read the least about.

I didn't know about this

90% threshold with pitch.

So that's, yeah, just kind of new to me.

But the neutrino one, I learned everything I needed to know about neutrinos from that documentary

called 2012.

Remember that movie?

In which they discovered that neutrinos were actually interacting with the core of the Earth and destabilizing everything.

Oh my gosh.

It's like over-the-top insanity.

So

that was the one that I had initially pegged as the fiction.

I didn't know that there was a range of different types of these neutrinos and stuff.

So I think I'm going to go with Bob.

I'll say the neutrino is the fiction, but I will not at all be surprised if Kara winds up being correct.

Or Jay.

Or Jay.

Yeah, for that, Matt, right, because I know the least.

I've heard the least about that one.

So, yeah, it's interesting you guys all went with the field that you know the most about.

Well, you know, at least some familiarity.

All right.

Well, I guess we should take them in order since we guys are all spread out.

Biologists have engineered a bacteria that can continuously deliver drugs into the intestine and demonstrated its effectiveness in treating chronic inflammation and obesity.

Kara, you think this one is a fiction.

The boys think this one is science.

And this one is

science.

Sorry, Kara.

Yeah, so they used a bacteria phage to do the genetic engineering of different kinds of gut bacteria that already live in the gut, and they engineered them to produce protein-based drugs.

So they're producing the drug.

They're not just releasing it.

It's protein-based, right?

And this was a study in mice, it was not in humans, and they showed clinical improvement in both chronic inflammation and obesity.

So this definitely has potential.

You just engineer your gut bacteria to produce your protein-based drugs.

Problem with protein-based drugs is that it's hard to get them past the stomach, you know, because the stomach has enzymes and the duodenum, the upper part of the gut that's meant to digest proteins.

So they get digested, but if you have the lower part of the gut, you're already past that point.

And so

enough of the protein can get absorbed.

So it's just another delivery system for protein-based drugs rather than having to get an injection or an infusion.

And this also, yeah, just get your one.

you know, one dose of bacteria and it will last for a while, right?

They'll just continuously release the drug that you need.

So, this could develop into another drug delivery system.

Very cool.

Let's go to number two.

In a recent study, adults were able to learn absolute pitch after eight weeks of training to a greater than 90% accuracy.

Jay, you think this one is a fiction?

Everyone else thinks this one is science.

Perhaps the key word here is adults.

Is that the key word?

I don't know.

Jay, is that what that would you rekeyed in on?

Yeah, so young people have a much higher ability and chance to

learn this skill.

But as your hearing degrades as you get older, I also think that your brain changes to the point where you can't sense perfect pitch anymore.

That's what they used to think until this study.

This one is science.

This was surprising.

So they were testing that assumption that you lose the ability, that it's basically mostly genetic and innate, and that you especially lose it

as you get older.

So they specifically tested this in adults.

And this was just an online training exercise over the eight-week period, but it was fairly intense.

I think it was 24 hours of training on average.

And the adult subjects were able to learn how to identify the absolute pitch greater than 90% accuracy, which kind of turns the prior beliefs on its head, as Kara was saying.

Pretty cool.

It's good to know.

With enough training, But this kind of fits generally with cognitive research that with enough training, most people could learn anything.

It's only a matter of how much training, not if you could learn it.

You know what I mean?

Anything learnable, you could do it if you if you put enough hours into it.

Which means astronomers announced the detection of a super high energy cosmogenic neutrino that is the most energetic elementary particle ever detected at 120 petaelectron volts is the fiction.

But there's only one little part of this that's the fiction.

What do you think that little part is?

It's the energy.

It's not a neutrino.

What do you mean,

the number?

The 120, yeah, because I think the highest cosmic ray energy is higher than 120.

Yeah.

So the 120 is correct.

So

the only thing that's fiction is it's not the most energetic elementary particle ever detected.

So they did detect the highest energy neutrino.

They think it may be a cosmogenic.

They're not sure.

They need more research to know if it's cosmogenic.

But they're defining cosmogenic.

Basically, it's generated by cosmic rays, by interactions with cosmic rays.

So the question is.

That makes sense.

Is it produced as a super high-energy neutrino because it's coming from like a supermassive black hole?

Or is it given that high energy because it's interacting with the cosmic ray?

So they don't know because they only have one, only detected one.

So we need to detect more of these so we could start to get some statistics on it, et cetera.

And then they could figure out if it fits with the cosmogenic model or not.

But it's not even close to being the most energetic particle ever detected, which was a cosmic ray.

Yeah, that's like that little cosmic ray, which is like, I think, a proton, right?

Essentially a proton.

Yeah.

It hits you with the force of a fastball.

So this neutrino was 120 petaelectron volts, which is 20 times more energetic than the previously most energetic neutrino.

But the most energetic particle, cosmic ray, was 320,000 petaelectron volts.

So basically more than a thousand times

as

energetic.

And that particle, Bob, you know, it was dubbed?

It was dubbed

the oh my God particle.

The oh my god particle.

Yeah.

This is the oh my god particle.

Yeah, that that thing is like duck particle.

That thing was intense.

But Steve, Steve, I'm looking at an article here, a recent article.

It says the neutrino was 220 petaelectron volts.

It makes sense.

I think it might be created by interaction with the cosmic ray because,

I mean, we've detected neutrinos from supernova, and they're not anywhere near that.

And since Cosmos

are so energetic.

I think the discrepancy.

So the 120 petaelectron volts was the energy of the muon that they actually detected, but they infer from that the energy of the neutrino

that created the muon.

That was probably the 220.

Yeah.

Right.

So they didn't even directly interact with the neutrino.

It was the muon.

The muon that was produced by the neutrino interacting with the massive underground saltwater thing that they used to do.

Cool, man.

Wow.

I didn't think neutrinos can get that energetic.

You got all that, Kara?

Sure.

Trust us, Kara.

It's cool.

All right.

And you're being bombarded by a bunch of these things.

It's really not that powerful, though, but yes.

No, not that powerful.

Evan, give us a quote.

One of the problems with anecdotes is that they tend to be provided by the satisfied customers, not the unsatisfied or dead ones.

Written by Robert Carroll from the book Unnatural Acts, Critical Thinking, Skepticism, and Science Exposed.

The survivor bias.

Yep.

Right.

Dead men tell no tales.

True as it ever was.

Yeah, very important.

That's one of the many reasons that anecdotal evidence is completely unreliable.

I like what...

So one of our other skeptical colleagues, Barry Byrstein, who unfortunately is no longer with us, summed it up really nicely.

He said, anecdotes tell you what you want to be true, not what actually is true.

That's true.

Anecdotes are just full of confirmation bias.

that they are confirmation bias machines.

That was one of my very first lessons of skepticism back in the 90s.

Yeah.

I'm like, boy, I never thought of that before.

It was like eye-opening.

It's okay to use them to generate hypotheses, but not to test hypotheses.

You can make an observation and go, hmm, I wonder what caused that.

But you can't use just the fact that you happen to observe something or hear about something or whatever as evidence that something is true or not true.

That's confirmation bias.

All right.

Thank you, Evan.

Thank you.

And thank you all for joining me this week.

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks,

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

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