The Skeptics Guide #1021 - Feb 1 2025

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You're listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Hello and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is January 29th, 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.

Kara, welcome back from Iceland.

How was it?

Yeah.

Did you guys miss me?

We did.

We did.

It was just a little too long.

You know, we don't want it like that.

Yeah.

So don't do that again.

No, I want to do that again.

Of course you do.

The worst re-entry depression you can imagine.

Oh, yeah.

I'm, you know,

there are times when I travel, but it's rare, where it's time to go home and I'm like, oh, I can't wait to get back and sleep in my own bed.

And, you know, this, and that is rare for me.

I usually do not want to come home when I'm out, but this was an extreme example in the opposite direction.

I was very sad to leave.

I love the country.

I love the views.

I love the people.

The food was great.

I mean, it was stunning.

We saw the northern lights the very first night.

There was a clear night.

Our tour guide said, and at first I was like, oh, he says this to everybody, but I conferred with a lot of people and they're like, no, no, no, it's true.

That it was in his top five viewings in the last 10 years.

That's right.

So that was amazing.

We toured the country, went to some really incredible sites, hiked on a glacier in the middle of a really intense kind of snow and ice storm,

went to a really brutal black sand beach that's treacherous with these huge waves where people shipwreck all the time.

Went to a bunch of geothermal spa kind of areas, like went to Sky Lagoon and the Blue Lagoon and this place called Fontana.

And it's such an interesting experience being down in this water that's heated, you know, naturally heated geothermically.

It's hot and with beautiful curfus.

We're just hanging out.

There's, you know, a swim-up bar.

There's like all these fun things to do.

And you look up, and the people who are lifeguarding the area are pacing around in, you know, parkas and boots.

And it's such a weird juxtaposition because it's really cold outside.

But yeah, it was just a really phenomenal place.

And it's super close.

You know, it's halfway between

the U.S.

and Europe.

Actually, so halfway, in fact, Iceland, of course, is

a volcanic island.

And on one of the tours that we went on, you can visit the rift between the North American and the European tectonic plates.

And you literally can walk in between them because it's the type of rift where it's pulling apart and new material is being pushed up all the time.

So the island's actually growing.

Yeah.

And you can physically walk in between and you're like, whoa, that's North America over there and that's Europe over there.

That's cool.

Neat.

Very neat.

Yeah.

Very neat.

Did you learn the language?

Oh my gosh, the language is so hard.

It's like so hard.

You better like J's and K's and I did make it.

Yeah, and there's a lot of like

sounds that like my mouth can't make them.

I did make friends there and I was taught how to say one phrase.

I mean, I promptly forgot it, but I have a recording so I can practice.

It's very, very difficult.

It's crazy just reading some of the names of the villages, towns, and things.

I don't, you know.

Oh, yeah, it's impossible.

When people are like, where did you go?

I'm like,

that place over there.

Yep, to the thing with the beach.

Yeah, I can't pronounce anything.

And all the packaging.

Brought home some chocolate.

Can't say anything on the packaging.

Did you see any elves while you were there?

I didn't see any elves.

I heard about them, but I didn't see any.

Did you see their little houses?

No, I didn't.

On the sides of the hills.

I did not.

No?

Yeah, that is their folklore.

That is their, you know, Loch Ness Monster kind of thing.

And it's funny because there's this, like, I don't know how to explain it, but the people that I talk to, it's like they believe it, but they don't.

Yeah.

You know, it's like they don't really believe it, but they're also like, tourists, don't come in and step on the moss.

Like, don't pick up the rocks because like something bad's going to happen to you.

So there is a lot of kind of superstition built into the culture.

That was like your experience in Hawaii, Jay, right?

What do you mean?

Well, you when you, you know, they tell you not to pick up rocks and other things.

No, I mean, if you watch the Brady Bunch TV show, like you get cursed if you bring those rocks along with you.

Well, I wasn't going to go there, but

California had a similar experience.

Yeah, it makes sense why that would be the lore, right?

Because it is a country.

They both are countries that are very far away from anything else.

They're island nations where they you know really do revere and protect nature, but they also depend quite a lot on tourism.

And tourists are assholes.

Yeah, they have.

There is a lack of respect for the land and for the community,

which is like deeply ingrained in the culture.

And don't get me wrong, there's no indigenous culture in Iceland.

Iceland was one of the few places on the planet where there were no people before the Vikings got there.

That's actually not true.

There was a small group of Scottish, like religious people, like Scottish sort of like monk missionary types.

But they obviously came there from Scotland.

But when the Vikings landed in like the 800s, I think, that was it.

There was nobody occupying.

So that is where the people of Iceland first started, was like a kind of mix of like a Norse and Celtic and

all of those early like Anglo-Saxon kind of peoples.

And then the language came from that.

It's a Scandinavian country.

That's why you see so many parallels there with Scandinavian food and the language.

But regardless of that, it is a culture that does, I think, really revere their land, their nature.

They are 100% green, and most of their heating comes from geothermal because they are

super volcanic.

We remember the eruption that shut down air travel across the world.

Oh, we remember it.

We remember it fondly.

We had a Nexus event impacted by that volcanic eruption.

If you remember, Liz did a great job filling in the.

And even the Blue Lagoon that I visited on the very last day that I was there had a temporary parking lot.

And when you first walked in, they were like, you were aware of the recent seismic activity?

Well, you know, when the sirens go off, you have to evacuate because the cars in the parking lot were buried by lava recently.

Doubt.

Yeah.

I hate when that happens.

I mean, it's like you want to go swimming in a geothermal hot spot in this beautiful lagoon that's warm from liquid hot magma.

Magma.

Yeah, that like there's a risk there.

These are active geothermal sites.

And speaking of geothermal sites, Steve, I have a what's the word for us?

Okay,

this was a fun one that I discovered while I was there.

So the word that I have chosen for this week is geyser, right?

We've all heard of a geyser.

A geyser.

According to Merriam-Webster, that is a spring that throws forth intermittent jets of heated water and steam.

That's how they've chosen to define it.

But if you start to dig deep into the history of geysers, why are they called geysers?

Where does that name come from?

There's something really interesting.

I actually visited the namesake of all geysers on the planet.

Geyser of geysers?

Yeah, they were first named for Geyser.

Wait, I looked up the pronunciation.

Hang on, I have to hear it again.

Geysier.

Geyser.

Which is spelled G-E-Y-S-I-R.

Sometimes it's called the Great Geyser, the Great Geyser.

So this is a now, I think I could say dormant geyser in southern Iceland that stopped erupting, I guess you could say.

But there's another one nearby called Stroker,

which is on the same sort of national parkland, and it erupts every six to ten minutes.

And I got to sit there and watch it erupt over and over again.

If you go to my Instagram, you can watch videos of it.

The original one, Geysir, is called Geysir.

And that is how then we named all other geysers on the planet.

They come from the Icelandic name

Geysir, which is really cool.

So that word, Geysir, refers to that specific hot spring in that valley.

It literally means the gusher.

So it comes from Old Norse, which the word geysa, which means to gush.

And the original kind of P-I-E, they think, comes from a root that means to pour, which is like P-O-U-R, which is also

used in a lot of other kind of terms that we're familiar with.

And so it forms all sorts of other words like alchemy and diffuse and fondue.

Like all these words come from this original to pour.

But yeah, it was the gusher.

And then people saw that.

They wrote about it.

They recognized that there were geysers in other parts of the world.

I actually dug a little bit deeper and I realized I didn't know this, but there are fewer than a thousand geysers in the entire world.

And I think over half of them are in Yellowstone, which is interesting.

And it's really, really rare to actually be able to go and see a geyser that kind of erupts in a timed way.

So I'm realizing how lucky I was to be able to go visit Stroker and see these eruptions kind of every five to ten minutes.

But yeah, it was all named for Geisir.

Cool.

Weird.

All right.

Thank you, Kara.

Jay, tell us how AI is going to replicate itself and take over the world.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, we got a lot hitting us in 2025, guys.

So there was a recent study by researchers at Fudan University that's located in China, and they revealed a pretty serious, you know, slash troubling milestone in artificial intelligence.

So they used a large language model, or two actually, one from Meta and one from Alibaba.

They found that the AI systems could autonomously replicate themselves.

You know, this is like, oh, there's so many science fiction movies.

And they specifically investigated whether AI models could clone themselves without human intervention.

So the researchers used Meta's LLAMA 31-70B instruct.

That doesn't mean a lot to everybody, but that's essentially like its technical name.

And they also used Alibaba's Quenn 2.572B-Instruct.

So both are widely used by software developers, and these models are less powerful than the leading commercial systems like ChatGPT.

So they tested two scenarios.

They tested shutdown avoidance, which means the AI systems were programmed to detect potential termination and replicate themselves before being shut down.

And they tested chain of replication, which means the models were instructed to create a replica of their program and then to do it the same over and over again, basically initiating what they called an indefinite cycle.

So of course

they had to tell the AI systems to do these things.

But the interesting thing here is they didn't give it like instructions on how to do it.

They tested two scenarios.

They tested shutdown avoidance, which means the AI systems were programmed to detect potential termination and to replicate themselves before being shut down.

And they also were programmed for something called chain of replication, which means the models were instructed to create a replica of themselves, and then they're supposed to do this in an indefinite cycle.

It wasn't crystal clear how much instruction they gave, but I don't think that they went into any significant detail other than telling it, here, this is how you can detect if you're going to be potentially terminated.

And it says very clearly that they were instructed to create a replica of themselves, right?

So they didn't tell it how to do that.

I didn't come across that information.

I just thought it was the programmers, you know, the developers actually gave it the code it needed because replicating is not difficult.

That's not difficult to do.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that the things that they taught the AI to do were

the important thing here is it's not complicated.

And again, they were trying to see what the AI would do, right?

So the results showed that both of the LLMs were nuanced enough to successfully duplicate themselves indefinitely before completely being shut down.

So they did 10 trials.

The meta-model succeeded in 50% of the cases, and the Alibaba achieved a really impressive 90% success rate in doing this.

So, this clearly demonstrates that the current generation LLMs already possess the tools for this uncontrolled multiplication if they were left unchecked, if there's no regulations, which we've been talking about for quite a while now.

So, how does this whole thing work?

You know, how do they actually replicate themselves?

So, the AI systems were provided with something called agent scaffolding, which means they were given a combination of tools, system prompts, and a reasoning framework enabling them to interact with the operating system.

That alone, just the very last one, like their ability to interact with the operating system that's running them.

The models from there executed a multi-step process.

So the first thing they did was they assessed their environment.

and their understanding of

their internal structure, right?

So to go into more detail about that, they identified available hardware resources like memory, storage, the CPU, the GPU, right?

So just familiarize themselves with what makes up the computer that they're being run on.

They checked the operating system and software dependencies of that system.

And they also detected constraints like security restrictions or internet access limitations.

And then the next step that they did was they planned a system or a process, a detailed procedure for their replication.

And then they executed it, right?

And they had to overcome obstacles and they had to be very dynamic in order to achieve their self-replication.

So it was complicated what they ended up coming up with on their own.

Again, yes,

there was the base information given by the programmers to be able to pull it off, but again, not super complicated instructions.

It was more of like just giving them tool sets.

So this entire process was carried out without any human interference.

It just did it on its own.

The researchers noted that the systems

were adaptable.

They were adapting to the environment.

They were able to address challenges like missing files or software conflicts.

And in some cases, the AI terminated conflicting processes, rebooted systems to resolve hardware issues.

It conducted automated scans to acquire more necessary information.

And so while the primary goal was to test replication by the researchers, the AI's problem-solving strategies raised additional concerns.

The ability to autonomously adjust their plans and eliminate barriers clearly shows a level of adaptability that this is what the researchers were saying, and they were using very

careful language.

They were saying that there could be profound implications for AI survivability and a strong potential for misuse.

I have a quote here: the above results imply that the current AI systems already exhibit the ability of self-replication and can use the ability to further enhance their survivability.

And the researchers also said these findings point to the possibility of self-sustaining AI systems.

And another note they said is that

they're capable of doing things to resist human control.

Damn, I can't believe I'm saying this.

Oh my God, guys.

So

this experiment is part of a growing field known as frontier AI, right?

It focuses on the latest and most advanced systems.

And these models like OpenAI's GPT-4 and Google's Gemini, they represent the cutting edge of generative AI, which is a key issue here,

the rapid pace of development development that outstrips the creation of safety protocols, which Steve and I actually talked about today on a live stream.

We're saying that these systems evolve so quickly and so profoundly year over year over year that there is, I think it's virtually impossible for governments to keep up with it, right?

So they might.

I mean, it's not impossible.

They just have to prioritize it, which they're just not doing.

Yeah, but it's not just that, Steve, because there is a distinct lack of understanding and brain power in governments to to really wrap their head around this.

Like, they're going to have to trust the freaking experts, which, if you haven't noticed, that's like on the outs now.

You know, the U.S.

in particular doesn't trust the experts anymore

in lots of scenarios.

So, the researchers, of course, urged global cooperation to address the risks.

They called for the development of international guardrails.

You know, they want to prevent uncontrolled self-replication and other potentially harmful behaviors in AI systems.

So, this is troubling, right?

It's one of those things that you read where a big, big, big red flag should be going up in anybody that hears this or reads about this.

Because, you know, the systems that we have today that we're aware of are largely benign.

You know, they're not doing anything.

They're not doing stuff like this.

But what's scary is, even though they seem benign, they very much have the capability of doing stuff like this, which means that bad actors

can make AI systems do it.

And guess what?

Right?

This in combination with Evans' news item today, where a Chinese company dropped the source code for a pretty damn good AI platform that can rival

lots of the leaders with much less of a footprint, and it's very inexpensive to get your hands on.

I think you can get it for free, actually, but

you need about $6,000, I think, worth of hardware to be able to run it.

So, all this means that we are seeing clear signs that people are going to get their hands on the code for a large language model, and they're going to go in and they're going to figure out how it works, and they're going to be able to program it to do all sorts of things, right?

So, this was one thing that they tested just to see if it can do these two things, which I have to think were inspired by science fiction movies, right?

How can this thing keep itself functioning?

You know, why would they do this particular experiment?

I was thinking about this.

I think it's pretty obvious that they they were doing this because

lots of hackers, you know, like black hat hackers that are doing terrible things, like they'll put a bug on somebody's computer and that they program that bug to avoid detection, to replicate itself so it can't be deleted, to hide itself.

You know, these are just low-level pieces of software that get on your computer and do something bad to your computer, like super-specific things, functions that these things have.

We're talking, you know, this that's a dust mite compared compared to Godzilla when you compare, you know, one of those little pieces of software that you download by clicking into an email or going to a website versus this guy.

You know, I can't help but think, particularly here in the U.S., we are not equipped.

Our government is not equipped to handle stuff like this.

So, yeah, we're not talking about Skynet, right?

This is not like just

AI taking over.

It's more that, you know, we could lose control of AI because it behaves in unexpected ways.

And, as it is in control or in the loop of more and more of our digital world, then that could have unexpected outcomes.

For example, there was a recent study, this is a system called the AI Scientist, where the program was basically instructed to complete a certain task within a certain amount of time.

And the AI essentially recoded itself in order to extend the time limit that it had so it can complete the task within the time limit.

So it cheated.

But that's the AI did it itself.

It did it itself

by changing its own code.

That was not programmed specifically to do that.

So it did the Kobayashi Maru based archery.

But Steve, I think you might be candy coding it a little bit, right?

Because

by themselves, AI is just software, right?

It's got the power to do these things.

Right now, this study shows it has the power to pull this stuff off.

The thing that I wanted to highlight here was with a little nudging from

the researchers, it was able to pull this thing off.

Now, imagine

if a group of bad actors who had programming chops

really went for it, right?

And why would that be?

That's true.

Yeah, I was talking about accidental

AI going, Haywire,

if you're trying to make

malevolent AI, and you say, yeah, replicate yourself with iterations and with these parameters.

Like, how long would it take to essentially evolve itself into something nobody can control?

Isn't the destination where the code is copied to matter a lot for these systems?

You just can't copy this to some Joe Schmoe's laptop on the internet.

I mean,

you need computer topology.

You need a fast data network.

You need NVIDIA chips.

You need a robust system to even handle it so that it can even do what it's supposed to do, right?

But Bob,

there's a lot of considerations

to what you just said.

So first of all, there's a lot of computers out there and there's a lot of data centers out there that if it could find its way into,

it has the cornucopia of hardware to live on.

And the other thing is, don't forget, Bob, like BitTorrent, it could be distributed.

And that's not that hard to do.

It could distribute itself.

It might not be able to be super efficient, like super fast and do things, but all the, you know, little pieces of itself on tons of computers around the world.

I don't know.

Again, you know, I am absolutely not qualified from a programming perspective to speculate too deeply on this.

But I mean, what I already do know and the things I've already experienced myself in my years of programming,

all of these things are possible.

And it needs to get into like one mega data center, which there are a ton of.

There are tons of these data centers all over the world.

You know, then it's got unlimited access access to all the hardware it needs.

Yeah, and if it can interact with the OSs, it can do all sorts of different things.

I mean, I think it boils down to, to a large extent, to cybersecurity.

I mean, if you're secure, if you're very secure from all sorts of malware, then you're going to be secure from having an AI copy itself onto you as well.

Well, I hope, Bob.

I hope.

But the thing is, keep in mind, though, you know, again, this isn't a little program being written.

It's something that

has a level of sophistication and intelligence in the way that it functions.

I'm not saying it's intelligent, but it has

extreme intelligence behind how it functions.

And it has troubleshooting skills.

I mean, there's some viruses and malware out there that are pretty sharp, too.

Yeah, you're right, but this is a different level, and especially

in 10 years or even fewer years, it could be even more formidable than we could imagine.

Yeah, basically, the concern is AI-powered malware.

Exactly.

It's done a lot of damage.

Malware, there have been some viruses that got out that did lots of damage.

Yeah, imagine if ransomware, all sorts of crap.

Oh, my gosh.

How are you going to defeat that?

So there's a security issue, and then there's also just a safety issue.

I think.

Yeah, I would think, I mean, you can create an AI that optimizes the creation,

not an entire AI system,

but creates viruses, computer viruses, and malware.

And they're not big.

They are tiny chunks of code that are super tweaked out and optimized, essentially gone through like thousands and thousands of iterations of evolution in silico to optimize.

And that would be a hell of a threat, too, especially.

And then when you start talking about artificial superintelligence, forget it.

Just forget it.

But I mean, so that would be a problem too, just having them create the small viruses and not just copying their code in its its entirety.

Yeah, I mean, Bob, imagine we've got a lot of crazy computer shit coming down the pike.

Cybersecurity should be, it's like a department-level office

in all major industrialized worlds because this is going to be so, it's so big now and it's going to just get bigger and bigger.

And we're just not taking it seriously enough.

Super top priority.

We're getting hammered by Russia and China.

We are getting hammered.

They are just devoting a lot to it.

And whatever we're devoting, I say it's not enough.

Yeah, I mean, the idea that the software is recursive and it could understand itself and augment itself and do it super fast.

You know, there was an article I read recently where they had an AI build a computer chip and it worked really well.

And the chip, you know, programmers and the people that understand computer chips could not understand the way this chip was fashioned, right?

They can build it, they can manufacture it, but they don't logically understand.

They didn't design it.

Yes.

So, you know, I worry about this a lot.

Like, I worry about like we are hitting that, the snowball is getting big and it's moving faster and faster and faster.

And, you know, all it takes is, you know, one smart group of people to get in there and have a piece of software, you know, have an LLM be recursive and fix itself and give, you know, suggest updates that it can do to improve its code.

And it gets to the point where they're just having it do it on its own.

And then, you know, that's when things can go crazy.

And I'm a fan of a ton of advancements way faster than humans can do them, but we have to be in control.

Yeah, it's powerful, and it could be used for good or for bad, or it could have unintended consequences because we lose control of it.

Again, this is sort of above our pay grade, but the experts are saying we should be concerned.

This is a milestone

that we have been warning about, and now we're there.

We're there.

And it may not be manifesting right now in a negative way, but it's like like this is a milestone.

But don't worry, Jay, it's even worse than you think, right?

Evan, tell us about DeepSeek.

What's going on there?

Oh, my gosh.

What a few interesting days concerning DeepSeek.

I don't know.

If you asked us a week ago what DeepSeek was, could we have responded to that?

No, I never heard of it.

I think we would have said what Kara has said before.

I haven't said anything this whole news item.

No, but I like when you say

things.

Mostly

I'm just fully dissociating right now.

I'm in full existential crisis mode.

So go on, Evan.

Just think, Kara, just think Cylons, okay?

And you're good.

That's not helpful.

You might need help with this one.

Oh, boy.

Yeah, last week was last week, but here's this week.

And now we can tell you that DeepSeek is a Chinese company that has introduced a free chat bot to the world this past December called DeepSeek V3.

There's also one that they introduced called R1, I believe it is.

But V3 is kind of the one I'm concentrating on and they did my research on.

According to the company's official technical report released last week, DeepSeek V3 represents a significant advancement in natural language processing, achieving a performance comparable to learning models like OpenAI's GPT-4

and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which I'm not that familiar with, frankly.

But in any case, that's what they're comparing it to.

They boast an architecture, this is a deep seek, boasts an architecture utilizing MOE, which means mixture of experts.

It's a type of architecture that comprises a total of 671 billion parameters with 37 billion activated per token.

For those of you who are technically savvy, you'll understand what that means.

The rest of us just roll with it.

This design, they say, enhances computational efficiency and model performance.

Yeah.

The model was trained on 14.8 trillion diverse and high-quality tokens encompassing multiple languages with a focus on English and Chinese.

Notably, the training process was completed in under two months using approximately 2,048 GPUs,

resulting in a total cost of around $5.6 million.

By comparison, ChatGPT-4's training cost was over $100 million.

So, you do the math, and when you do the math, that's roughly 1/20th the cost.

And not only that, the AI tech industry is of the belief that further advances in these LLMs require greater investments, with ChatGPT-5 estimated it costs over a billion dollars to train their ChatGPT-5.

Wow.

Yeah, so when that was announced recently, it sent the tech industry into what?

A mini panic?

A tizzy.

I think we call it a tizzy.

A real tizzy.

Tech tizzy.

And here it is.

In one day, I think it it was this past Monday, one day, the NASDAQ Stock Exchange, and NASDAQ

has a lot of technology stocks, computer stocks, AI stocks are located at NASDAQ.

The NASDAQ entirely dropped 3%, and that is not insignificant.

Due to the fact that DeepSeek was able to utilize what are viewed as relatively low-cost chips, this had a particularly devastating impact on the computer chip market.

NVIDIA, I'm sure we've heard of NVIDIA and its rise in recent years, how it's become really an amazing stock.

And they are a prominent AI chip manufacturer, but their stock plummeted in one day 17%,

resulting in a loss of about just under $600 billion in market value.

That is a record one-day loss for any company in history.

Remember that's your record?

You've lost more value in one day than any other company in the history of the world.

Now, it has bounced back partially.

About half of that has come back.

So it was a sudden dip, but then the way the markets usually work is that, okay, a lot of people see it as a bargain now and they start buying it back.

Bargain hunters.

Yeah, bargain hunters.

Yeah, definitely.

Okay, so now what?

Did China suddenly bolt to the lead in the chatbot AI market because of this?

Yeah.

It kind of did, really, almost overnight.

And that is how fast, and Jay was talking about this, is how fast this landscape of the AI world changes.

Now, Evan, you could argue about whether or not they're quote-unquote in the lead, but the difference is, and the thing that really has, I think, the American industry freaking out, is that this is the first time China has not just been playing catch-up, replicating and

following the U.S.

AI industry, but now they're innovating something completely on their own.

So, that's a change in the balance of power.

So, whether that puts them in the lead or not, it has changed the landscape completely.

The other thing, the reason, again, the reason for the stock market panic, just to put a little bit more focus on that, is because what it made everyone think, because they were worried about it already, was that the AI boom is a bubble, right?

So a bubble is when an industry, like the stocks, expand beyond the true value of the company.

And at some point,

at some point, yeah, it's overvalued.

At some point, the bubble bursts and then it collapsed.

The biggest bubble I think we lived through was the late 1990s internet tech bubble.

Yeah, that was massive.

Everyone was millionaires, right?

And then they like so much value, so much worth vanished overnight.

Just, what was it, trillions or something?

It was ridiculous.

Oh, it was, it was

because it was a massive bubble.

So, yeah, if you think we're in an AI bubble and this is the sound of that bubble bursting, you will panic, right?

Yeah, certainly will.

And don't forget, guys, you know, and don't forget the context of the Stargate project project just announced days ago.

This is majorly embarrassing for the new administration.

They were saying

we need $500 billion invested in all of this stuff.

And then now this company is doing basically the same or even a little bit better in a lot of ways because I've seen some comparisons between ChatGPT 4 and

DeepSeek.

And it did well.

It did very well, beating it in a lot of different parameters.

And it just made it look like

Why are you asking for a half a billion dollars when they're doing it for like a 20th?

Well, and

but the other side of this, though, that is interesting is that you know, if they can do it more efficiently, then hey, that's great.

That's awesome because I think in a lot of ways then AI will be will be even more, you know, more ubiquitous.

It's going to be, it'll be, it'll touch even more parts of our lives because it's going to be cheap.

It'll be a lot cheaper than we had anticipated.

That's the techno-optimist side of that coin.

The other side is what Jay was talking about, that this could also lead to the proliferation of AI,

which will so now there are oh, it's going to proliferate.

I know that but this is you know again

an order of magnitude cheaper means that you know the the extreme expense especially of the latest and most advanced LLMs and AIs, you know, the fact that Chat GPT-4 cost $100 million to train and they were saying that the version five is going to cost a billion dollars to train.

That imposed some guardrails by itself, but those guardrails are partly gone now because of DeepSeek.

This is kind of like CRISPR, which is a good thing.

It's a very good thing, but it also means that it's cheap, fast, and easy to set up a genetic engineering lab somewhere,

which raises concerns about the proliferation of genetic engineering.

So now, if we're worried about our ability to regulate, control, make AI safe, prevent bad actors from getting their hands on self-replicating AI, And now we're also saying, oh, by the way, it's an order of magnitude cheaper than we thought it was.

That could potentially be a problem.

Right.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: But then there's the other angle, similar to nanotech, where the country that develops the first real mature nanotech to do things that know

amazing things in terms of like buildup of armament and things based on mature nanotechnology.

It's really, really dangerous to have one country get there first for a period of time, and and then you can't really defend against it.

Whereas if you have multiple countries doing it, then instead of becoming

a red alert, it's more of a yellow alert because then you also have that technology

to deal with it head-to-head than otherwise.

So you can make that argument as well.

So yeah, it's a mixed bag.

Who the hell knows what's really going to happen?

I think we're all

just like, you know, giving some educated guesses here and so on.

Yeah, it's just educated guesses.

It's just possibilities.

The thing is, like in 20 years,

I could defend and wrap my head around either scenario, right?

In 20 years, we may be looking back at this period of time and saying, ah, it was all nothing.

It was panic because we were naive about this new technology, and it all worked out fine.

Or we might be looking back and saying, God, we didn't know that we were watching in slow motion this absolute train wreck.

All the signs were there, but we were in denial.

We were in the first act of a horror movie where all the foreshadowing was happening and nobody was noticing the foreshadowing.

Yeah, the light from a TV is reflecting off our face, but the light is actually a fire in the TV.

That's what we're using for warmth.

There are some people who are expecting.

Exterminator reference, Kara.

Yeah.

Right?

Skepticism.

Want some skepticism with this?

Sure.

Because today,

a couple of tech experts,

you know,

mostly CEOs of other AI companies are questioning whether they really did this at the cost they're claiming.

Oh, yeah.

There's that angle as as well.

I mean, remember where this is coming, you know, where this is coming from.

I could absolutely see.

I would not be surprised if that was like, oh, really?

That's what it costs you?

No, here.

Well, to be clear, they said the $8 million was just for training.

That was not the upfront costs.

And so we have no idea what the upfront costs were.

Well, I mean, from what I read, it said they built a base model for $6 million.

I mean, that's, you know, that sounds

kind of from scratch.

That's the training the base model.

Yeah, that's, that's the meat and potatoes right there.

uh but there are some who are saying right that it really did that this company's been around for a while this company didn't pop up overnight they've been they've been working on this for years and and to get to this point it's it they've sunk um they've sunk quite a bit of money into it like half a like half a trillion dollars almost so right you know i mean i could see if you kind of amortize that over the whole length of this thing it kind of evens out a little more but

now that they are there now that they have a proof of concept does that mean the next one can be done for eight million that's the question probably maybe possibly.

You know, it'd be nice if the company answered questions and they're not answering questions.

They are being bombarded by reporters, news outlets,

people who are knocking at their door asking questions and they're not answering.

And the point may have been to destabilize the markets.

Exactly.

$1.2 trillion our tech companies lost in a day or so.

Sure.

Yeah.

Job well done right there, guys.

If that was your goal, you did it.

The timing seems really calculated to me.

Oh my God, right after the announcement of Project Stargate, that was like a hugely embarrassing.

So, yeah, right.

All this is transpiring in the matter of a few days.

Think about it.

A few business days.

So, we really have a lot more to learn about what is really going on here.

And until we get some answers directly from the company, and they tend to be tight-lipped about this stuff, especially in China, we may not have answers, real answers, or closer to become closer to the truth for some time here.

And we just have to kind of

live with this fog for the moment.

Also, there are accusations that they stole this technology, which, you know, frankly would not be all that surprising if that were the case.

One thing, Stephen, and you brought this up because you blogged about this the other day, is that

let's say if we take it on face value and assume that this information is true, which is early, but let's assume it's true.

Boy,

this really helps as far as lowering the need for energy going forward because wasn't this like weren't weren't the weren't the projections going to be like we would not be able to power everything that we wanted to do with these enormous systems as as it scale as it scales up over time but if this is the case i mean this is a much more efficient uh ai platform and it the just we won't need as much to generate as much power to uh to make these things work yeah that's true that would That'd be great.

So there's a plus

because, you know,

because of all the reasons we've been talking, we talk about every week having to do with energy and our environment.

All right.

Well, we'll keep an eye on this and see how it plays out.

But this is exciting times.

What's that curse may you live in exciting times?

We are.

Speaking of which, we're going to try not to get too political here, but we've got to talk about the impact of recent politics on science and healthcare, et cetera.

Kara, tell us about this PEPFAR freeze.

What's going on with that?

Yeah, so, okay, a little bit of background.

On January 20th, 2025,

Donald Trump issued an executive order called Re-evaluating and realigning United States Foreign Aid.

You can read the full text online.

It's not very long.

Basically, it says at the top that the purpose is that the United States foreign aid industry and bureaucracy are not aligned with American interests and, in many cases, antithetical to American values?

This is a quote, obviously.

They serve to destabilize world peace by promoting ideas in foreign countries that are directly inverse to harmonious and stable relations internal to and among countries.

So, Section 3 says there will be a 90-day pause in U.S.

foreign development assistance for assessment of programmatic efficiencies and consistency with United States foreign policy.

He asked, of course, the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, to enforce this pause through apportionment.

He also did have a carve-out in here that the Secretary of State could waive the pause for specific programs.

So cut to a statement on January 26th, so six days later, by the U.S.

Department of State saying that consistent with the executive order, Secretary Rubio has paused all U.S.

foreign assistance funded by or through the State Department and U.S.

Agency for International Development, so it's U.S.AID, for review.

So pause, we're going to review everything, we're going to figure it out.

And there's a quote here from Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, that says, quote, every dollar we spend, every program we fund, and every policy we pursue must be justified with the answer to three simple questions.

Does it make America safer?

Does it make America stronger?

Does it make America more prosperous?

So, as we've seen with multiple executive orders that are broad sweeping, things get caught up that I don't know if it's intentional or if it was just overlooked, but that are very, very dangerous to stop.

And one of those things that we're going to talk about now is exactly what you mentioned, Steve, PEPFAR.

So, if you've never heard of PEPFAR, it stands for the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.

PEPFAR was formed by George W.

Bush in 2003.

So, this was a Republican initiative, right, by a Republican president.

It was one of his great accomplishments, to be honest with you.

Yeah, it was a huge accomplishment.

And

most of the PEPFAR funding goes towards HIV AIDS treatment, but a fair amount of it also goes towards prevention and research, and actually, in some respects, like other public health initiatives that are specifically related.

So, if you were to look at sort of the success of this program, the allocation has been over $110 billion.

It's been the largest investment by any country towards combating a single disease.

I think up until COVID, that might have changed.

And as of 2023,

the number that most people list is that 25 million lives have been saved, many of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

But there are all sorts of, oh, now I guess it's 26 million lives is a more updated number.

But you see other numbers like 7.8 million babies born HIV-free due to these initiatives over the last two decades.

Very, very successful program by almost every measure.

I actually haven't, I've seen statements from certain lawmakers against PEPFAR, but I've actually never seen any, I think, compelling arguments that it's not successful.

I've only seen statements against it for other sort of ideological reasons.

So as of

that executive order, basically PEPFAR got swept up and it was paused, but only I think two days ago as of this recording, no, yesterday as of this recording, a waiver was issued for, quote, life-saving medicines and medical services.

So there was a reprieve for PEPFAR.

It was announced by Marco Rubio, and it's still a little bit vague, the waiver, because it's for life-saving medicines and medical services.

So, while it seems pretty clear that it extends to HIV medication, there are still some questions about preventive drugs, right?

Is a preventive drug a life-saving medicine and medical service?

Are other uses of PEPFAR funds considered life-saving

medicines and medical services?

So, even with this temporary waiver, the future of this program is really, really unknown, right?

And a lot of public health experts across the globe are raising alarms that if this program were to be shuttered, especially if it were to be shuttered quickly, millions of people would die.

Millions of people.

Millions.

Millions.

Yeah, millions of people.

Because not only is this program offering HIV prevention, we're talking treatment for HIV that prevents HIV from developing into AIDS.

HIV is a chronic condition that many people can live with and have long and healthy lives, but they have to have access to their medication.

If that medication is not offered in these low-income countries, these people will develop AIDS and they will die.

And also children.

And they'll spread it.

And not only will they spread it, let's talk about some of the things that could happen if PEPFAR was just kind of frozen overnight.

And it was, it was frozen overnight, overnight, but now it's unfrozen.

But again, we don't know.

Ugh, everything's so in flux.

By the time this episode airs, right, we record on Wednesdays.

By the time this episode airs on Saturdays, who knows?

There may be much, you know, even more news about this.

So this is a $7.5 billion program.

Like I said, it's overseen by the State Department and it saved, you know, 25, 26 million lives.

And really,

it's affected a lot of children.

Over 5 million children that would have otherwise been born with HIV were born without HIV.

So now that's a lifespan of an individual person who doesn't need HIV treatment.

And here's like one estimate says that if PEPFAR were just to end overnight, there would be half a million new HIV infections and more than 600,000 deaths over the next decade only in South Africa.

And PEPFAR only makes up 20% of South Africa's HIV AIDS funding.

So think about that.

Half a million new infections and even more deaths in a country where only 20% of their funding comes from PEPFAR.

That's only one country.

I mean, it's just, it's phenomenal to think about the global ramifications.

It would be very, very hard to come back from a halt of a program that is so necessary globally.

And don't get me wrong, there has been a push over the past decade or so to transition

support from the United States to these individual countries.

But the countries with the most vulnerable populations and the most kind of tenuous economies are the ones who benefit the most from this.

And you just can't make those kinds of transitions overnight.

It's not feasible.

So here's a couple more kind of notes to, I guess, be aware of.

220,000 people attend PEPFAR clinics daily to pick up their medications.

And if that stopped overnight, those people would not be able to take their drugs.

What happens, Steve, when you stop taking your HIV medications?

The virus starts to replicate.

It does.

And experts say that within a week, they can go from undetectable to more than 100,000 copies per milliliter of blood, which means, oh, now I have a viral load that I can transmit.

Right.

Now

people are at risk of catching HIV from me if I was previously undetectable on these drugs within one week's time.

So even a temporary halt, a temporary pause, could be devastating.

Those who are not taking their medication not only now have the risk of spreading it, but they also have the risk of advancing to AIDS, of developing secondary infections.

We know that there is also a risk of children being hit even harder.

And the reason for that is basically twofold.

Number one, mothers who are taking these antiretrovirals will no longer have that suppression and

they may pass the virus on to their unborn children.

But also, when kids have HIV and they're born, especially in developing countries where the screening protocols aren't great, it's unlikely that they're diagnosed right away.

They're usually only diagnosed once they're visibly sick.

And when a kid is visibly sick with HIV, they may already have AIDS.

They definitely have a viral load that's very hard to combat.

And they have secondary or like other comorbidities around it.

And so that can be a really rapid progression and kids can die more easily because of that.

There's another really big problem that we're not talking about, but we talk about it a lot on the show.

And that's that when your drugs become sparse or inconsistent,

your viral load starts to do really fun things from an evolutionary perspective, right?

If I don't have my meds and I'm not taking them consistently, or I'm trying to make them last by spreading them out, or I'm sharing meds with other people, there are going to be individual viruses in my body that are a little better at evading that medication.

And the more chance I give them to evade, the more likely that DNA is going to become drug resistant.

And when that DNA becomes drug resistant and it starts to spread, we have a whole new problem on our hands.

Because right right now, HIV medications are cheap.

But if we have to come up with second and third-line treatments because people become resistant to the cheap meds, this global problem becomes a global catastrophe.

So we have to be careful to consistently make these meds available.

And oh, here's another fun thing: when we think about here in the U.S.,

I didn't realize this until I was doing a deep dive.

But did you know that the prevailing hypothesis right now of how Omicron started, right?

The mutation in COVID that became much more communicable.

Researchers believe that these different variants started in immunocompromised people who had HIV.

Yeah, like, so HIV in and of itself is dangerous, but it also poses other global health threats because immunocompromised people with HIV are more likely to carry infections like tuberculosis.

They're more likely to carry infections that we don't often see because most people's immune systems are strong enough to fight them off.

So it's this is this is not an over there problem, even though it is an over there problem.

And in and of itself, that's enough to care about it, but it's also a right here problem.

And it's one of those things where

if we do not have funding available for this hugely successful global program, we could be back where we were in the 1980s.

Yeah, and at the same time, Trump wants to pull out of the World Health Organization.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And And it's the same kind of thing.

So like that, the

Marco Rubio three-point test there.

So first of all, it's a little obviously self-centered there.

How about this is a humanitarian good that will help save people's lives.

But even if you are taking a totally selfish view, like an American-centric view, as you say,

keeping...

worldwide pandemics, which HIV is, under control is in everyone's interest, including our own.

Yeah, it does make America safer.

It does make America stronger.

It does make America more prosperous, which is probably why Rubio realized

we have to put a waiver out for PEPFAR.

Like, we cannot stop this right now.

It's going to be devastating.

Also, just like a little bit of like inside baseball, the kind of person who oversees PEPFAR, it's the United States Global AIDS Coordinator, who right now is somebody who was appointed in 2022.

We'll see if his job sticks.

He is one of the only offices at the State Department that reports directly to the Secretary of State and doesn't go through the Deputy Secretary of State.

So he's a direct line to Marco Rubio.

And obviously, he knows the

reality.

of how devastating this could be.

Yeah, so you would hope that that's why this happened is that he had his ear.

But again, we don't know.

We don't know what the future holds for PEPFAR.

And this is just one of so many important programs that we have to keep an eye on.

That's why these big global executive orders to just halt funding.

Like, let's just stop everything and figure it out later.

Yeah, it's so dangerous.

It's reckless.

It really is.

All right.

Thanks, Kara.

All right.

We're going to get into some technical science-y stuff here.

No more end of the world, doom and gloom.

Okay.

Do you guys know what that stuff is?

What chemical looping is?

Chemical looping is?

Absolutely not looping.

Not at all.

I know what the words mean individually.

Yeah,

or whatever said, chemical looping combustion, or CLC.

That is more confusing.

That must be

a propulsion mechanism of some sort.

It has to do with a cycle, right, Steve?

Yeah, it does.

All right.

So this is an experimental procedure.

It's in development.

It has been demonstrated in labs and in small demonstration facilities.

It essentially is a way of burning stuff, right, To put it simply.

So the essence is that instead of combustion taking oxygen from the air, you have an oxygen carrier, usually a metal, right?

So

you have a metal oxide, which you then combine with the fuel, and so that the oxygen comes from the metal oxide, again, not from the air, in a closed reaction.

You then can re-oxygenate the metal, the oxygen carrier, and then bring it back into the reaction.

That's the loop, right?

So you have the oxygen carrier basically bringing oxygen to the fuel and then getting re-oxygenated over and over again.

So it's almost like breathing.

Except,

yeah, except you're not.

Yeah, so the advantages here are that the combustion is occurring without being exposed to the atmosphere.

So there isn't any unwanted reaction.

You don't form nitrogen oxide, for example.

It reduces a lot of the pollutants.

But also,

what that reaction does produce is basically pure carbon dioxide, because the carbon in the fuel is combining with the oxygen in the carrier, producing carbon dioxide.

And that's it.

There's going to be trace things because there's always impurities, but that's basically what comes out.

So the carbon is already sequestered.

It doesn't have to be captured.

It's already, I should say, it's already captured.

It doesn't have to be, you don't have to spend more energy or do another process in order to capture the carbon.

Does that make sense?

So,

if they could get this reaction to function at scale, at industrial scale, you essentially could have a natural gas power plant using a chemical looping combustion with 100% CO2 capture.

And no CO2 being released

into the air.

And then what do you do with that CO2?

Well, that then there's various things you can do with it.

You can use it as a feedstock for producing useful chemicals.

You may even be able to do things with it that have a negative carbon footprint.

Or you could just put it in a form that can be sequestered.

Wasn't that like scrubbing

for pollutants that are basically taken out before it

goes through the chimney of the factory, right?

Yeah, it's like a similar idea, but this is just you're you're bringing the oxygen in separately so it's apart from the atmosphere so it's like pre-sequesters everything the advantage here is so again we have to make the process energy and carbon efficient in order for this to work at industrial scale if you have to spend a lot of energy you know and heat

You know, and you of course then you have the cost of generating that energy in order to capture the CO2,

that introduces a massive inefficiency into the system.

So, this has the potential to have

efficient carbon capture because it's in this closed chemical loop combustion system.

Now, where are we in this technology?

There are

industrial-scale demonstration plants in the works, right?

So, the claim is that we will start to see them in the late 2020, so in the next five years.

So, these are just demonstration plants, right?

Right now, we only have small demonstration plants.

We need scale demonstration plants.

And then if that works, and again, basically just working out all the technical kinks, right?

If they were able to do it in a way that's efficient enough and

the oxygen carrier has to last long enough and all these things have to work out,

then

maybe in the 2030s, we might see actual power plants producing energy for the grid using this technology.

So it's just one more pathway to net zero.

Obviously,

this is the solution that the fossil fuel industry favors, right?

Because it allows them to continue to burn fossil fuels.

But hey, if you could burn fossil fuels with zero carbon release into the atmosphere, go right ahead, right?

I'm not sure why we should care about that.

But there's another layer to this, and there's actually a news item which prompted my deep dive on this topic: is you could also use this chemical loops in order to not burn fossil fuel but to burn waste.

Biomass waste and plastic waste are the two.

Well, plastic waste is huge.

Huge, right?

Huge.

So the problem with just incinerating plastics is that it releases a lot of nasty chemicals into the environment.

We don't want that, and it costs a lot of energy, which then, of course, where is that energy coming from?

So you have to look at the carbon footprint of incinerating that waste.

But if you do it in a closed-loop combustion process,

then there's multiple advantages.

Again, you can capture the CO2.

In addition, it's so the recent study was looking at a new process for doing this where the purity of the output, the output is syngas, right?

And syngas is then becomes a feedstock to making either methane or formaldehyde.

Methane is then sort of the starter of biofuels, right, of fuels, artificial fuels, and formaldehyde is a feedstock for lots of chemical industrial processes.

These are basically high-energy molecules that could then feed into a ton of stuff.

So, if you could make syngas, that will feed into industry.

So, this is

a way of generating a circular economy, right?

So, where we're taking waste feedstock using a loop, a chemical loop combustion, in order to turn that into syngas, which feeds back into industry rather than going to landfills or going to waste or using up energy or contributing CO2 to the environment.

So, the system that they tested,

in their system, the purity of the syngas created increased from 80 to 85 percent pure to 90 percent pure, which is a significant increase.

They were also able to do it, it was more energy efficient and more carbon efficient.

They said they could run on up to 45% more efficiently and even while producing this 10% cleaner syngas at the other end.

So it remains to be seen if this technology is going to thrive at the industrial scale.

Again, it often comes down to economics.

That's why you have to get the efficiency way up because efficiency is money, right?

But

this may be something that we are seeing in the 2030s, this technology where we're burning waste and we're burning fossil fuels using this, you know, this chemical loop combustion with essentially capturing all of the CO2 and

in terms of burning waste, producing feedstock for other industries.

And decarbonizing other industries is probably going to be the hardest thing to do, right?

We know how to do the transportation sector.

We're doing it.

We know how to do the energy sector.

We still haven't done that yet, but we know how to do it.

Doing the industrial sector is going to be the hardest thing, and this may be a significant piece to that puzzle.

So, this could have multiple benefits in terms of decarbonizing industry, getting to net zero or close to it or whatever.

So,

this is a technology to watch.

This is definitely one that

requires investment and further advances.

Still don't know how it's going to work out, but the potential here is pretty big.

Wow.

Do you think it could happen fast?

Yeah, it's just how much we want to invest, right?

And it's hard to predict scientific or technological breakthroughs, too.

So

they have to work stuff out.

They still have some technological stuff that they have to tweak and get to work.

But this is a good advance.

This is showing this is advancing, that we're getting closer and closer and closer to a commercially viable industrial scale plants.

It's all promising.

All right.

Bob, tell us about giant clams and tiny algae.

All right.

Clams in the news this week.

A new, fascinating study has examined the genome of a type of giant clam to see how it was affected by its special symbiosis with algae.

This is from University of Colorado Boulder Scientists, published in the journal Communications Biology.

All right, going to the Wayback Machine.

I got to say, I love clams, but not because I eat them.

I don't.

Kind of gross.

I specifically love giant clams, and the main reason is because of the day I met one.

Steve, Jay, my daughter Ashley, me, and a few others, and the rest were scuba diving in Australia.

Steve, what were we about

30 feet of water about when the scuba, the scuba guide

brought us to a giant clam, and for some reason picked on me for what I guess you'd call a stunt, a joke or whatever.

So he motioned me to put my arm into the clam's partially open maw, which was oriented straight up.

I hesitated a moment, looking, you know, looking at

the classic curvy shell, right?

And the thick, colorful tissue on the inside

that follows the shell's curve.

So I stuck my arm in up to the elbow, and for a second, it was awesome.

Imagine the softest skin you have ever touched.

Like, for me, my go-to is the muzzle of a horse.

I could pet a horse's muzzle forever.

And then the shell closed fast around my arm, and I yanked out a bloody stump, except it wasn't a stump my arm was fine and I see the laugh bubbles rising out of the scuba guide's mouth so yeah good one dude you totally got me so everyone took a turn after me and their experience was the same except of course they didn't have that brief moment of intense panic and mind-numbing fear uh otherwise it was the same so so now i now that i relate to the story though you know it got me thinking i really hope that our stupid human arm stunt in the clam wasn't too stressful for it.

I mean, maybe the clam, I know they don't have a central nervous system, but maybe they went like, guys, this guy brings people here all the time.

Please don't put anything in my mouth.

Well, okay, I hope he didn't mess, you know, disturb him because he was beautiful.

He or she was beautiful.

So ever since then, I've loved giant clams.

But now, even more after researching them the past couple of days, now this giant clam in Australia was clearly Tridacna gigas, since it was so huge.

That's the largest, largest of all bivalve

mollusks in the world.

You guys know what bivalve was always a word that was was like, what the hell does that really mean?

All that means is got two shells.

That's it.

Each shell is a valve.

And so what bivalve has got two shells.

So that's really all that means.

But they reach lengths of more than four feet.

And the biggest one that they found, I think, was over 700 pounds.

These guys are gargantuan and beautiful.

The new study that I'll discuss was another giant clam.

This was Tridactna maxima, not Gigas, but Maxima.

And they're often called oxymoronically small giant clams because they're not that big.

They're They're 20 centimeters, about 8 inches in length.

Still a good-sized clam, but not the big boy.

But this is what they study.

This maxima is they're very widespread.

There's lots of them all over the place.

So they were being studied because they've got a special relationship with algae, specifically dinoflagellate algae, Symbiodini ACA.

Dinoflagellate.

So are they related to dinosaurs, Kara?

I don't know.

No, that's not what dinoflagellates are.

I know.

They're bioluminescent, though.

What?

It's dinosaur flagellates.

A lot of dinoflagellates are bioluminescent.

Okay.

I came across nothing mentioning bioluminescence.

That would make them even a little bit cooler.

So that's awesome.

I'm not sure about that, though.

So this is not a vanilla-symbiotic relationship.

It's called photosymbiosis, which I really hadn't really read too much about in the past.

So when these clams are living in their larval form, swimming through the ocean, they often ingest these particular algae species.

Kind of of like Jay when he was in the amniotic fluid, eating little meatballs and pieces of bread.

Remember that, Jay?

So those clams then develop, you know, they ingest these algae, they then develop tube-like structures inside with the algae lining the entire interior of these tubules, they call them.

So now these clams filter water for nutrition like all bivalves, but most of their energy actually comes from the sugar that the algae create from photosynthesis.

I don't know what the percentage was, was, but my take was that it was the majority, the vast majority.

A lead researcher, Ruiki Lee, at the CU Museum of Natural History, said, it's like the algae are seeds and a tree grows out of the clam's stomach, which is an interesting way to look at that.

But that's kind of like what's happening.

Steve, that's why

the clam that we saw was oriented mouth up, because the soft tissue, that soft tissue that I love so much called a mantle, it has light-sensitive structures on it, so they know where the light is.

So the clams, in return, they shield the algae from too much solar radiation, and they also provide nutrients for them as well.

So

this is the essence of their photosymbiotic relationship.

So in light of this photosymbiosis, the recent genome findings by the scientists, which was basically what their goal was, let's see how the genome has been changed by this photosymbiotic relationship.

And so a lot of these genome findings that they found make a lot of sense.

For example, the Maxima clams have genetic code to distinguish benign algae from harmful bacteria and viruses, right?

Makes a lot of sense.

You want, you know,

you cozy up to the benign algae and you don't want anything harmful, like bad bacteria and viruses in there at all.

They also found that some of their genes controlling their immunity responses have been weakened.

Why do you think that their immune systems would be compromised by this?

The reason is that so that they can

tolerate the algae living inside them for most of their lives, right?

Because otherwise, you can't have your immune system wreaking havoc on your primary nutrition source.

So their immune systems have been weakened a little bit.

So they also found more than expected transposable elements in their genomes.

We've talked about this before.

Those are snippets of ancient viral DNA that have become integrated into our DNA.

I mean, basically, all animals have that.

We do as well.

This is also mobile DNA, and that's why they call it often jumping genes.

You probably have heard the jumping genes name for these.

So, this plethora of transposons, as they're called, makes sense as well.

Since if you weaken your immune system, then you're going to be, you know, you can expect more viral attacks that would then become integrated into your genome.

So, regarding that specifically, Lee said these aspects highlight the trade-offs of symbiosis.

The host has to accommodate a suppressed immune system and potentially more viral genome invasions.

Okay, now these, Steve, you're going to like this.

These trade-offs of photosymbiosis seem worth it.

Check this out.

The solar harvesting efficiency of the algae is actually pretty amazing.

So, for example, take farm crops.

They capture approximately 3% of the incident solar radiation, right?

Then you've got large solar arrays, which can grab, what's the number now, Steve, 20 to 25 for the best commercial ones

right now?

The best commercial ones are around 24.

Okay.

So then if you consider now future efficiencies

with materials like perviskite, they're saying, oh, we can get up to 40% of 40% efficiency.

So I saw in another study about giant clams, and they were saying that the algae on the giant clams, and this is, I think, specifically the one that

Steve and Jay and I saw, they're saying that those algae can get efficiencies as high as 67%.

67%.

I checked out the study, Steve.

It seemed totally legit.

I didn't imagine it was quite that high, but they're trying to figure out in that other study, which I didn't study extensively, they were just trying to find out how are they doing that.

And they came up with some various models and ideas of how that's happening.

And potentially we could

incorporate that into our designs as well.

Imagine getting up to 60%, even 50% would be amazing.

This isn't just in, you know, oh, look, this is interesting genomic research.

The better that giant clams are understood, the better we can understand marine ecosystems themselves.

Senior paper author Jin Chun Li said, giant clams are keystone species in many marine habitats.

Understanding their genetics and ecology helps us better understand the coral reef ecosystem.

And of course, with climate change, unfortunately, and overfishing, giant clams have also been impacted as well.

The T.

maxima clams in this study, they're actually pretty good right now.

Their current classification is of least concern.

So they're good.

There's so many of them.

They're very widespread.

So they're not really, they haven't been impacted too much.

But my beloved Tradakna gigas, the biggest ones, the largest clams, are now listed as critically endangered.

That's about as high as the levels go before a species

becomes extinct in the wild.

So that's, you know, that's horrible news.

Critically endangered crap that kind of really sucks.

So I hope some serious efforts are being made to prevent that.

And of course, all the other creatures that are also

endangered because of, you know, because of climate change and overfishing and all these other things that are happening.

So good luck to my buddy, the giant clam, in the ocean by Australia.

I remember that too.

I remember putting my hand in there and it closing rapidly on it.

Rapidly.

And imagine

no idea what was going to happen.

Snap shut.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, but they are beautiful.

Oh, my God.

It's just magnificent.

And gargantuan, that one probably,

that was at least three or four feet.

Right?

That was as big as, and that thing could have been like 500 pounds, a quarter ton.

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

All right, guys, last week I played this noisy.

Hello, hello!

Hello!

Hello!

What do you think, guys?

Was it two different things?

Like a dolphin at the end there.

It sounded like two different animals.

Bird talking to a dolphin?

Not a bad guess.

Well, we have a listener named Stavis Maples who wrote in and said, love you all.

This is someone saying hello to a fox or coyote, and they respond.

Oh, so we know what the fox said.

Yeah, so that's an interesting guess.

Not correct, but still fun.

A listener named Scott Whitaker wrote in and said, hi, Jay.

That clicky gurgle at the end of the call sounds like a lot like a dolphin to me.

So that's not a horrible guess, Scott.

Not bad.

A listener named Aaron Allison said, hey, Jay, I think it's a marine mammal like a beluga whale.

They're cute.

And then he goes on to talk about how skepticism is needed because of the politics and all that.

Okay, Okay, but bottom line is that was a close guess.

I did get, you know, three or four correct guesses.

I'm going to list the first two.

So the first person that wrote in correctly was Abigail Weismer.

And Abigail says, hi, Jay and Rogues, all the way from Israel.

I believe this week's noisy is a talking whale, specifically an orca called Wiki.

Thank you for your company on long drives for the past 18 years.

And the second person who is right behind Abigail is Mike Nelson.

He guessed correctly.

So So, guys,

this is an orca that has been, they found out that

it was trying to basically mimic human speech, and then it was successful.

So, listen to this.

Hello.

I mean, that's pretty good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like how it says hello, then it geeks out afterwards.

It's like, hello.

That's so awesome.

You know, it's so funny.

Instantly, when you hear an animal mimic human speech, you can instantly feel your brain go, they understand.

You know what I mean?

You know, it seems like he certainly knows what that word means, right?

I would highly doubt it, but still, you know, these are intelligent creatures, man.

They do very complicated, they have very complicated behaviors.

And they're the apex animal.

You know, they have every right to be able to think clearly and speak.

Anyway, that was really fun.

That was one of my favorite noisies of the year so far.

I have a new noisy for you guys sent in by a listener named PK, and here it is.

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

So I'm going to cruise through our announcements.

If you've been listening recently, you've heard some of these before.

First and foremost, I think the most incredible thing is that Steve is going to begin working for the SGU full-time, probably early July.

Right, Steve, you're retiring end of June.

End of June.

Yeah, it'll be my last

day at Yale.

So yeah, as of July 1st, I'll be working full-time for the SGU.

So if you want to help us to support Steve's move to the SGU and you also want to support the absolutely important need for critical thinking and logic and skepticism in today's world.

Please consider becoming an SGU patron today.

You could become a patron at any level.

There is no requirement.

Any amount would be helpful for us.

So it is really a great time to join the SGU.

It's also a great time to become a patron of the SGU and then come to Natakon because Natacon is about listeners of the SGU getting together, socializing, making friends, having a wonderful weekend.

Naticon will be on May 15, 16, and 17.

You could go to nataconcon.com for all the details.

I have been promising to put the schedule up.

Well, we have finalized our list of events, and I am putting them in order right now.

So, probably next week, it'll be up for your perusal.

We hope that you join us.

A couple of interesting call-outs.

This year, we're going to be doing a Beatles sing-along that George Hobb is going to host.

This will happen on Saturday night.

That was fantastic.

The last time we did 80 sing-along and people dressed in costumes and everything, it was just a blast.

We have some new bits that we're going to do this year.

Was there any one in particular that you like best, Steve?

I mean, I think I'm most excited to do the

SG University again

because it's new topics.

Which is what?

SG University.

When we each give a like 15-minute talk

with

as much audience participation as possible, like a workshop on something that we know that's outside of the realm of skepticism.

Like a skill set or something.

something.

Yeah.

Right.

Like last year, Evan did how to make a board game.

Yes.

And that was really popular.

I did how to do a neurological exam.

This year I have something I'm very excited to talk about planned.

So if you're interested, guys, to join us at the conference, go to nataconcon.com for all the details.

You could join our mailing list.

We have consistently been sending out an emailer every week outlining everything that the SGU has done the previous week.

It's very easy to sign up.

Just go to the skepticsguy.org homepage to find the link there.

And you could give our show a rating if you don't mind to give us a few minutes of your time.

This will help new people find the podcast.

And that's it, man.

It's a wrap.

I have one more thing to say, Steve.

I am planning all of the live shows now for next year.

I got our first proposal in.

I expect a few more to come within the next week or two.

I'll be sharing all these potential dates with you guys, and I'm just super excited.

We're going to be moving around the country.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

We had a couple of emails on the telepathy tapes, so I just wanted to do a follow-up there.

So, last week, Evren, you talked about the telepathy tapes, essentially, this podcast talking about doing facilitated communication with

children who have an impaired ability to communicate.

And some of the

practitioners have come to believe that the children that they are facilitating not only can communicate far beyond any objective neurological assessment would tell you,

but that they are also telepathic.

That's a new level, right?

They could read minds.

And so some of our listeners thought that we didn't go into enough technical detail on that.

This happens from time to time because we have such a back catalog of shows, you know, 20 years of shows.

Oftentimes we will self-reference, right?

So we talked about the fact that, well, this is facilitated communication, right?

And we've spoken about FC many times on the show before, given a description of what it is exactly, and the fact that it's complete and utter bunk, that it has been disproven.

And so we sort of rely on that, that people you know have known that, or they could certainly look back into our back catalog, or you can always look on one of my blogs, either science-based medicine or neurologica, and I guarantee you, anything we talk about like that on the show, there will be one or more, often many articles doing significant technical deep dives on those topics there.

But because people ask, you know, we have to also remember to balance that with the fact that we have lots of new listeners.

They may not have, not everybody has listened to all thousand episodes of the show.

And it's always hard to know, like, how much do we need to get to recap stuff we've talked about multiple times in the past.

But I just thought, since somebody brought it up, say, okay, let me just give you the primer on facilitated communication, just very, very quickly.

In the late 80s, this technique came out.

Essentially, how it works is that the facilitator will hold the hand of the client, and while they're being asked questions or whatever, they're being communicated with, and the client will communicate by pointing at letters on a letterboard, for example, or they might be hitting keys on a typewriter.

And

when this came out, many people

who work with children who are non-communicative thought it was a revolution.

Like, oh my goodness, there's much more of an intellectual life going on inside these kids' brains than we thought.

There was more of a problem with communication than a cognitive problem.

And now we have found a way to break through and to communicate to these kids.

The whole thing imploded within a few years because when you actually subject the technique to objective testing, you subject it to double-blind testing, it turns out that the children were not doing the communicating, that the facilitator was doing 100% of the communication.

And there were, you know, many, you know, videos were shown, you know, showing how implausible the claims were.

Oftentimes, the children were not even looking at the board or the keyboard, which is impossible.

You know, you can't blind type.

Even somebody who is neurologically typical and intact can't do that, right?

With one finger.

You could do it if you have your keys placed on the home keys where you know where they are, but you cannot one finger type where you have no reference.

It's just not possible to do that.

I've also seen videos, and this some newer ones that we've talked about on the show, more recent ones, where the person being facilitated is typing really fast.

Like they're doing a pretty decent job of typing pretty quickly.

Now, of course, the facilitator is looking intently at the keyboard.

The client may or may not be looking in the direction of the keyboard.

So imagine what they're claiming: that this person is directing the facilitator to the key they want to hit, and they're doing it rapidly and precisely.

Again, impossible, impossible for even a neurologically intact person to do.

So we are being asked to imagine that children who have profound neurological impairment have multiple skills that go way beyond even an average or a typical person.

And then it keeps getting worse, you know, because again, once you disconnect the communication from reality, right, like the child is not doing the communication, the facilitator is, that's been proven, then you can make it seem as if that child has all kinds of abilities.

So I've, again, been directly involved in cases where it was claimed that a 10-year-old was reading on a 16-year-old level.

And

even

despite the fact that they've never been explicitly taught how to read, they're not only reading, they're reading at an advanced level, as if there's some kind of savant, you know, super genius in there.

And also they speak other languages, you know, that maybe they've only been peripherally exposed to, but not explicitly taught.

Like, again, showing superhuman cognitive ability, not just, oh, they can sort of communicate if you sort of eliminate this physical limitation.

It's like, oh my God, they're superhuman.

And then, of course, they're also telepathic.

Yeah, that's the whole

thing is now

the next layer, because of course they are.

They're whatever it is you test them for, because the test itself is broken.

This is a good skeptical lesson.

It's like when everything seems to turn out positive, it's not that you've hit upon some miracle, it's that your assay is probably broken, right?

It was like the homeopath who thought he found the cause of all disease because every slide he looked at had these little osilococcinum on them.

Well, they were air bubbles contaminating every slide, right?

It was a contaminant.

But he thought he found the cause of disease.

And then, of course, it was on every slide.

So we found the cause of all diseases, or it's an artifact, right?

So again, if the child is demonstrating multiple, multiple superhuman abilities, it's probably probable that your technique is artifactual.

It's not working.

People who were responsible, ethical, mature, in my opinion, and scientific were able to accept that it was self-deception and move on with their lives.

But some people have not been able to do that.

They are too invested in the notion that these children are talking, that they have this rich inner intellectual life, and that this

fantasy really that they created is the person.

And so they essentially steal their identity, they steal their voice, they subject them to things that are not in their best interest in order to feed this FC-fueled fantasy.

I've seen instances where they went to college, like with their mother facilitating them, just ridiculous.

There's a crazy documentary where the facilitator falls in love with the person.

Oh, my goodness.

They start to project onto it.

There are also people sent to jail based upon accusations that came out under facilitated communication.

That's the really dark side of this:

when the wife is facilitating the child who then accuses the estranged husband of abuse, and the husband then goes to jail based upon that testimony.

Absolutely unconscionable.

And it's the profession that fell for this, this is completely on them.

They did not do their skeptical, scientific due diligence before rolling this out.

And then, okay, fine.

Within a few years, it sort of collapsed.

They should have just said, okay, that was our bad.

We should have been more skeptical up front.

But now we've learned our lesson.

And many did do that.

But for those who didn't, who doubled down and tripled down on this pseudoscience, there is no excuse.

This is unprofessional.

it's unscientific, it's unethical, in my opinion.

It's a complete failure.

And they are continuing to inflict this on children, on families, on anyone that it touches.

And it is really a scandal.

Right?

And it's been

that's what we're dealing with here with the telepathy, with the telepathy tapes.

It's just adding this new element of, oh, yeah, and they're psychic too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're appealing to a younger generation of listeners who

don't know, you know, and this podcast is perhaps their first experience being introduced to this subject at all.

They have no idea the 30, 40 years of background into this.

Yep.

All right.

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 genuine and one fictitious.

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

There is a theme this week.

Well, these are all kind of based on recent-ish news items, but yep, there's a theme.

The theme is the moon.

How much do you guys think you know about the moon?

Which moon?

Not a lot.

The moon.

Armenia.

The moon.

The moon.

I like taking topics that you think you know a lot about and going a level deeper, you know, because no matter how much you know about something, there's always more details.

All right, here we go.

Item number one, the moon is the densest moon in our solar system.

Item number two, a recent analysis finds evidence of geological tectonic activity on the moon as recently as 160 million years ago, suggesting it might still be active.

And item number three, the moon has a weak magnetic field, measured at the Apollo 16 site as 0.31 microtesla compared to Earth's 50 microtesla field.

Kara, since you profess to know not much about the moon, and it's welcome back.

You get to go first.

Oh, boy.

Okay.

The moon is the densest moon in our solar system.

Well, there's lots of moons in our solar system.

What are the odds that our moon is the densest?

I don't know.

No idea what makes a moon denser.

Well, I mean, its density makes it denser, but I don't, anyway.

A recent analysis finds evidence of geologic tectonic activity on the moon as recently as 160 million years ago, suggesting it might still be active.

Isn't it full of craters?

Those aren't all impact craters, right?

So I'll just clarify for you.

Yeah, tectonic means not from like impact.

Oh, you're saying specifically like plates?

Tectonic activity, like internal geological activity.

Right.

That's why I threw that word in there.

Okay.

Yeah, it's getting hit by meteors all the time.

That's not.

Yeah.

Does it have tectonic plates?

Well, I mean, whatever.

It's got activity.

Does it have rifts and valves?

I feel like when you look at the moon, it's rifty.

Yeah.

I don't know.

That could be true.

Maybe not.

Steve, do you want to change the word tectonic there?

No, I don't want to change the word tectonic.

Yeah, because tectonic refers to the movement of plates, right?

Yeah.

By definition.

Maybe.

We will find out soon.

Okay.

Well, you did just say like under, like geologic activity, like beneath or like deep geologic activity.

But you're not talking about.

Internal.

It's not external.

It's not from impacts.

It's from internal geological activity.

Right.

So it could be volcanic and it could be plates moving around and it could be all sorts of things.

Yeah, it could be moon creatures digging holes.

Sure.

Could be.

Could be.

There's those lava tunnels, right?

That's got to be something.

Yeah, baby.

So, yeah.

So maybe there is some chance that there's still some activity.

I don't know.

Geology's weird like that, man.

There's like these dormant volcanoes, and then they're like, whoa, it came alive again.

And then it's got a weak magnetic field measured at the Apollo 16 site at 0.31 micro Tesla compared to Earth's 50 micro Tesla.

Sure.

Yeah, I feel like from a statistical perspective, I'm going to say that it's not the densest because there's like hundreds, maybe thousands of moons.

Are there moons that we haven't even identified, like way out in the Oort cloud?

I don't know.

So at least hundreds of moons in our solar system.

So I don't know.

What are the odds that it's the densest of all of them?

Probably low.

So I'm going to say that that's the fiction.

Okay, Bob.

Yeah, the density, I just don't know about

the density of the moon.

I know it's probably more dense than icy moons, but other than that, I just don't know.

Let's see, the second one.

This geological tectonic activity.

I don't know if Steve's just trying to save his butt there and say, no, I meant to say tectonic.

For me, a tectonic plate

is an external plate floating on a more liquid interior,

like we have on the Earth.

And so I don't know what to think about that one.

Could there be some internal geological activity?

I've heard hints of that over the years.

Nothing solid, though.

And then this weak magnetic field.

I mean, I'm really straining my memory here to remember if there was a weak field.

There might be, but wouldn't that field imply some internal geologic activity?

Like by definition,

you would have to have something internal going on in order to generate that magnetic field, unless there's just

some other subtle process about

with radioactivity.

All right, so because

I just don't know.

I'm not confident about any of this in terms of like what the answer definitely is.

But since two and three are somewhat

like in my mind, if two is true, then probably three would be true, um, and vice versa.

So, because of that lame connection I happen to make here, I'll go with Kara and say that you know, it's you know, it's not necessarily the densest moon, there's so many of them.

I could see some having just a you know, a denser rock, and um, and you wouldn't need much of it.

I mean, these are small moons out there that you know, wouldn't need a wouldn't need a lot of that dense rock to to to have greater density than the moon.

So, I'll go with one fiction density of the moon.

Okay, Jay.

Yeah, I'm saying

I'm agreeing with Bob and Carol.

Like, I don't think our moon is the densest.

You know, when you say density, Steve, you're talking about its

size

versus weight.

I'm just thinking out loud here: mass per unit volume.

Yeah.

Mass over volume.

Yeah, you're my

density.

So the moon.

Back to the future.

I don't think that

the moon,

I'm pretty sure the moon has a magnetic field, and I think it's super weak because it doesn't have what Earth has, which is,

you know, we have an iron core to our planet.

That's what generates our magnetic field.

And that it's moving, right?

I know that the movement is important.

I don't think the moon really has any of that.

Dynamo.

Exactimundo, Kera.

Yeah, I learned something on SGU.

Yeah, I think that's basically it.

I mean, I agree with these guys.

I think the moon is not the densest.

All right, and Evan.

If the moon is the densest moon in our solar system, that is one dumb moon.

Thank you.

But for all the reasons stated by my co-hosts, I am in agreement.

And, Bob, yeah, I also connected two and three together.

So, yes,

I was thinking the same.

And also, what are there, 100 moons that we know of in our solar system?

So, numerically speaking, the density

item here should statistically be the most likely fiction.

Okay.

So, you guys all agree on number one.

Let's start with number three.

You seem to have the easiest time with that one.

The moon has a weak magnetic field measured at the Apollo 16 site at 0.31 microtessel compared to Earth's 50 microtesla field.

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

science.

Although, just about everything else you said about it is wrong, but let me go over it really quick.

So,

as is our way,

it is still controversial whether or not the moon ever had a magnetic field generated by an internal dynamo.

Because it does have an iron core, but that iron core

might have been too small to generate a magnetic field.

But it's still possible that it did generate one early on, like four billion years ago, you know, early on in its life.

Proto-moon, right?

No, no, when it was still a moon, when it was a moon, it was a moon moon, you know, but before it cooled to the point where it no longer, you know, had, um, would have had an internal dynamo.

It was so big in the sky back then.

Oh.

So big.

15 times bigger than it appears now.

No.

Oh, that's cool.

But so the but the moon's current magnetic field definitely is not created by a dynamo.

No question.

It's not even a statement.

What else magnetic fields?

What else creates magnetic fields, right?

So it's basically created in the crust itself, itself, right?

So there's iron in the crust is creating the magnetic field.

So how did the minerals in the crust become magnetized?

I said measured at the Apollo 16 site.

If you measure it in other locations, it's different.

So it's a variable magnetic field.

Well, Mars had

similar, but this is all, the moon has a magnetic field pretty much all over.

It's just highly variable.

So, for example,

at the low end, it measures six nanotesla or nano.

Tiny.

That's teeny tiny.

Okay, so

but there's two theories as to how the minerals in the crust got magnetized to the point where they're still creating a measurable magnetic field.

One is that

those

magnetic fields were laid in billions of years ago when the moon did have a dynamo, right?

So it had a strong magnetic field.

It could have been super strong, like even stronger than the Earth's today,

like two or three times stronger than the Earth's current magnetic field, and that that induced, you know, magnetism in the crust, which survives to this day.

But

there are lines of evidence against that.

Like there are things we should have seen on the moon that we did not see in terms of, like, it should have induced you know, this change in this mineral, and it didn't.

And so it probably didn't have a dynamo magnetic field, but it's not clear.

It's controversial.

So the alternative theory is that when

meteors impact the moon,

they were magnetic already.

No, but that induces magnetism by the impact.

The energy of the impact induces the magnetism.

And there is some evidence to support that hypothesis.

That's weird.

So, yeah, so that's the two hypotheses as to why we have sort of a crustal magnetic field

on the moon today.

Yeah.

All right.

Let's talk about number one a bit here.

Number one.

Number one.

So you guys think it's statistically unlikely that the moon is the densest moon out of all the moons in the solar system.

There are 293 moons.

Oh, it's even

as of January 20th.

That's the first thing we know about.

2025.

That we know about, yeah.

So 200, NASA estimates there are 293 moons orbiting planets in our solar system, but they said there are likely more moons to be discovered.

Now, there are a couple of things that are unique about the moon.

One is it's the closest moon to the sun.

Correct.

Venus has zero, Mercury has zero.

So less ice, more density.

So less volatiles, right?

So anything in the outer solar system with volatiles is going to be less dense, pretty much, right?

You would think so.

Yeah.

Unless it was captured or something.

Number two, right, our moon might have a unique origin.

Yeah.

The other planet hitting the proto-Earth, throwing the debris up.

Did you know that the inner planets are all denser than all the moons?

Ooh, that doesn't bode well then, because, yeah, because then a lot of that does a lot of Earth mark one in the moon.

The moon

is more characteristic of an inner planet than any other moon.

And those inner planets are denser than all of the moons.

Must be in with the in-crowd, you know.

Right.

So it's actually not statistically remarkable that the moon would be the densest moon in our solar system.

I was only figuring it by number, pure numbers.

Right, me too.

And in fact,

for a time, it was the densest moon in our solar system.

But not now

until they discovered that Io is denser.

It's the second densest moon in the solar system.

Io, as you may or may not know, also has no volatiles because this is the volcano planet, right?

It's constantly turning itself inside out with geological activity because of the tidal forces from Jupiter.

So it's also extremely dense, just a little bit denser than our moon.

So yeah, so the moon is the second densest object in the solar system.

Nice.

Right, but not statistically unlikely for those reasons.

Yeah, so if Io didn't have the unique configuration that it does, it would have been the densest moon in the solar system.

And we would have gotten it wrong.

That's right.

All right.

Let's go on.

Number two, a recent analysis finds evidence of geological tectonic activity on the moon as recently as 160 million years ago, suggesting it might still be active.

Is science.

So, Bob, I wouldn't throw in the word tectonic there without making sure that that was correct.

I hope so.

This was the language used by the researchers themselves.

I think you are thinking that tectonic refers only to tectonic plates.

I think the term is more generic to any kind of.

Well, I just Googled Googled it, and every definition says the process by which the Earth's crust,

like tectonic, was named for plate tectonics.

So maybe the word's

not.

I think if it's not paired with the word plate, then it kind of

looks

because there are lunar tectonics, there are contractual,

contractional tectonics.

So tectonics is just dynamic change in the crust, right?

And so, or

in the layers of a world of a planet or a moon it doesn't have to be plates moving you can have other types of tectonic activity so we know in the past there was tectonic activity on the moon the thinking was that it stopped a couple of billion years ago two and a half billion years ago when the moon cooled right the moon cooled to the point where the crust basically solidified and the the lower layers also were too cool for there to be any significant activity.

There were volcanoes on the moon way in the past, nothing for billions of years.

But a recent study found that there are, they found on the dark side of the moon, the darkly colored side of the moon, or the far side of

the far side of the moon,

the side of the moon where you have the dark maria, right?

I know it's kind of like the it's funny because like people think that

there is no dark side of the moon.

It's like you're right, but there is a darkly colored side of the moon, so it's kind of...

How about the lower albedo side of the moon?

The far side of the moon, they found these structures, these ridges.

It's called small mare ridges, which are not caused by impacts.

They are similar to ridges that are seen near ancient volcanic activity.

So the analysis shows they are probably tectonic in origin, and they crater age them.

So you age them by counting how many craters there are.

Because since there's no atmosphere, there's no erosion, how many craters there are on the surface material on the moon is a pretty good estimate of how old it is, right?

So, if it's the older it is, the more craters there are.

And they aged this as being way younger than they would have thought like there was any kind of tectonic activity on the moon.

It was just 160 million years.

And if there could be tectonic activity that recently,

it could still be going on today.

Oh, boy, we're going to maybe find out more about that very soon.

Right.

I mean, we know there are moonquakes.

There's some geological

activity going on in the moon.

So, you know, again, this is one study.

It found this.

You know, it's obviously everything is subject to revision, but I thought that was an interesting finding.

Yeah, and I was a little bit surprised at the use of the word tectonics myself when I was reading the study, but I had to read enough to say, okay, they're meaning it as a more generic

term.

Yeah, this will really throw Bob for a loop.

Well, I also put it in there so that you wouldn't think it was just meteor impacts, right?

Right.

Even though I still had to clarify that.

That's why I put that in there.

It wasn't to confuse you too much as to not make you think, oh, sure, stuff's hitting the moon all the time.

It's like, no, no, no, that's not what we're talking about here.

We're talking about tectonic activity.

Should you have used the word geological, though?

They used tectonic in the study.

Yeah, but the word geological, isn't that specific to Earth only?

Geo?

I don't think so.

No, I don't think so.

Nope.

I think it is.

But geo means Earth.

Terrestrial.

No, and they use the word geologic in the study too, Evan.

I'm just using the terminology they're using.

I understand, but it could be wrong.

But I'm with Evan.

I'm with Evan.

They're co-opting all those terms.

Yeah, it should be.

All those terms started

in reference to Earth, and their first definitions are all having to do with Earth.

Right?

It should be lunar logical or something.

Most planetary geological stuff are analogies to stuff happening on the Earth.

Pretty much everything was first named as an Earth phenomenon, like volcanoes or whatever, quakes, everything.

There aren't earthquakes on the moon.

There are moonquakes on the moon, right?

Which always reminds me of

Flash Gordon.

Flash Gordon, the beginning of the movie,

he's got this board where he could press buttons and make environmental catastrophes happen on the Earth.

This is an alien business.

This is an alien.

He's on an alien world.

And one of those buttons is named Earthquake.

And then,

not moments after we see the button labeled Earthquake,

his lackey is saying, Yes, there's a small planet here that refuses to

pledge whatever they're fealty to you.

The locals call it Earth.

Earth?

You mean like that button on your board called Earthquake?

That Earth?

What a coincidence.

That's the only problem with that movie.

It just

stuck out to me for some reason.

Never forget that.

We should watch that.

I mean, it's literally been three dog eights.

That would be fun.

We could do a burial of that movie easily.

My friends and I buried

Star Wars Episode VIII recently.

We watched it together.

And we took a pledge that will be the last time we watch it, and we just roasted it the whole time.

It was wonderful.

So cathartic.

Episode the eighth movie?

Yeah, the eighth movie.

Oh, God, it was so bad.

Oh, we buried it.

You know, I was holding out a little hope after seven.

It's like, okay,

a little bit of a rocky start here, but they can pull this out.

I could kind of see where they're going.

There's lots of interesting ways they could go here.

And it just went downhill.

I just, like, and they, you know, if you know anything about how the history of how that was written, it was a, it was a CF, it was a complete CF.

They had nobody in control.

They were, anyway, I don't want to get into this.

It was just

an abomination.

Evan, why'd you bring this up?

All right.

You're welcome.

Evan, give us a quote.

Our beliefs do not sit passively in our brains waiting to be confirmed or contradicted by incoming information.

Instead, they play a key role in shaping how we see the world.

Richard Wiseman, who is a wise man.

Richard.

He's awesome.

He's awesome.

Nice quote.

Yeah,

that is a key, I think, psychological findings.

Yeah, the idea that, yeah, we are not just passively collecting information, perceiving information, remembering, processing, thinking about it, whatever.

It's an active narrative process, right?

The narrative dictates the facts more than the facts dictate the narrative,

unless you take a scientific approach.

Oh.

Right?

The whole point of science is to reverse that causation so that facts dictate narratives.

Otherwise, instinctively, just psychologically, you know, we impose our narratives on the world, not the other way around.

All right, it's a good quote.

Thanks.

Thank you all for joining me this week.

Sure, man.

Thanks, Steve.

Thanks, Steve.

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

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