The Skeptics Guide #1004 - Oct 5 2024

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You're listening to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, your escape to reality.

Hello, and welcome to the Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

Today is Tuesday, October 1st, 2024, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Cara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, everyone.

Bob, welcome back.

How was the trip?

fatto un viaggio fantastico unitalia e a parigi.

You went to Little Italy and awesome time.

It was fantastic two weeks.

Oh my god.

Rome, Florence, Venice, Geneva, and Paris.

And of course, Paris, Disney, which was epic.

But it was

the art, the food, the architecture, it was just mind-boggling.

We have a million pictures to go through.

I can't even pick what my favorite thing was um from the colossal try for the studio audience here

give us one i mean we took a tour at the coliseum which was fantastic because the guy just knew it inside and out uh that was an amazing tour but also yeah i hate when they only know the outside of the thing

yeah

right you get in there and like they have no idea what they're talking about

But the David, of course, is just, oh my God.

That's, again, as close as you get to an actual religious experience, standing in front of the David.

Yeah, your jaw just basically drops.

It's on the level of

seeing the Saturn V and the Bridge of the Enterprise set.

It's one of those things that pictures can't fully do it justice.

I mean, of course, you can see

how pretty it is, but there's just something about being in the presence of that.

Yeah, that's different.

Yeah.

My favorite meal was in Rome, Amatriciana, which is a pasta dish that I had never had before.

Caccio and Pepe was great.

Carbonera was great.

But

the third pasta that Rome is known for, Amatriciana, was just mind-blowing.

Oh my God.

So good.

Highly recommend it.

It depends on where you go because I've had both of those dishes in multiple restaurants and

they're variable.

In Rome.

In Rome.

Yeah.

Okay.

But yeah, the best single dish I had when I was there was a cacho et pepe, but that just could be just luck of the draw.

Yeah, right.

Two things that I missed.

Now, this is the end of September, I missed

Halloween basically has no presence.

And peanut butter, my two loves, my two joys in this entire universe, not over there.

I saw a jar of Skippy peanut butter in a grocery store.

I think that was in Rome.

And I saw some Reese's peanut butter candy, but that was it.

Otherwise, you go around and it was like...

Peanut butter is just not a thing.

It's a very American thing, Bob.

Yeah, it is.

And it's not only American, it's also like a male American.

So that's fine.

But I thought we would have exported that concept.

Like we've exported Halloween everywhere as well.

There was one store I saw,

Flying Tiger was the name of the store, and they actually had some Halloween stuff, but that was it.

Otherwise, that was it for all the cities we went to.

But whatever.

I mean, you know, we're still exporting Halloween, and I think it's growing everywhere.

It'll take eventually.

Yeah, but I'm happy.

I mean, it was sad to come home, but I'm happy to dive headfirst into Halloween and get my more filling.

When they hang a trick-or-treat bag off the arm of David, that's when you'll know.

It's gotten to the Italian culture.

Yeah.

That's not going to happen.

But we were just, we were just, after the first few cities, we were just museumed out.

We're like, oh, my God.

We did our biggest day, 31,000 steps.

Oh, my God.

That's a lot of steps.

But it's great.

We were walking so much, I want to maintain it.

Now that I'm back, it's like, I gotta

up my cardio because I, you know, because I've after two weeks, we definitely noticed we were getting no, you gotta train.

Everyone's gonna be fitter before we went to Florence a couple years ago, we were training to basically keep up with all the walking that you have to do to do it justice.

Yeah, we did that, we did similar training for our big Disney trip the year before.

We didn't train for this one, but we didn't.

I mean, we were fine.

I mean, the first hundred steps up the Duomo in Florence were a little rough.

No joke.

That's no joke.

Yeah, that was like

440 or so steps up to the top of the Duomo.

And the first hundred, I was like, oh shit.

But then I got my wind or whatever, and I was totally fine, almost jogging up.

It was okay.

But for a minute there, I was like, oh man, what the hell?

How long was the line to get inside there, Bob?

You schedule an appointment.

Yeah, it's all scheduled.

The line was fine.

I always see lines.

The view was amazing.

And St.

Peter's, I haven't, I mean, I got to say, I went to St.

Peter's

in Rome.

That was, and I went, I've seen a lot of cathedrals.

That one is just my favorite.

It's beyond the beyond.

It's so dense in artwork and culture.

You saw the skeleton over the doorway?

Oh, yeah.

So I took pictures of all the skulls I came across in any art or sculpture.

Yeah.

Of course.

So that's a highly recommended visit.

We went to the catacombs in Paris, which, of course, you know, hey, here's a million bones arranged in amazing patterns and walls.

Did you see Jim Morrison's grave?

Fantastic.

No, didn't see that.

But I recommend the catacombs as well.

That was amazing.

I could just go on and on.

Amazing, amazing trip.

And hey, and Disney Paris, Disney Paris.

I prefer Disneyland Paris to,

I mean this, to Disney Magic Kingdom in Florida.

It's actually better.

I remember doing research.

I was watching some videos on the building of Disneyland Paris, and they made sure that that the quality of the architecture and the painting and the intention to detail was above and beyond what you would see at a normal Disney park.

And you can really see it just from the architecture and the detailed painting and the quality of the materials.

It's actually better than I've seen at the other two Disney parks, Disneyland and Disney World in the States.

And my favorite rides, The Haunted Mansion, which is Phantom Manor at Disneyland, at Disney and Paris, and the Pirates of the Cribbed, my two favorite rides, are better in Paris.

Sometimes you could tell that they're just newer.

Because, I mean, this was built, I mean, it was built in 92, which is, you know, not yesterday, but you could tell that they're just newer.

And sometimes they employ better technology.

Like some of the fires in the Pirates of the Caribbean are actual digital fire.

It's not the classic, you know,

shimmering cloth, reflective cloth that's reflecting a light that looks like fire.

This is like digital fire.

And it was so good.

And the animatronics, get this.

In the Pirates of the Caribbean, they had two audio animatronic pirates fighting with a sword.

I've been to other Pirates of the Caribbean.

They don't have that.

But somebody just stopped me.

I'm going to go on.

I'll stop you.

So today

is Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday.

My 111th birthday.

Not just that.

Wow.

That's incredible.

What, the first president to reach 100?

I don't know.

Is he?

I believe that is.

Maybe.

But it's also,

it's not just that.

It's also other important days for other people.

My younger daughter's birthday.

Yes.

And it's very easy to remember another date because Jay got married on my younger daughter's birthday.

Yes.

A happy anniversary, Jay.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Wow.

13 years, 13 years with my best friend.

It's unbelievable when you find your best friend, you get to marry them.

And she's okay with you podcasting on your anniversary.

We'll talk about that later.

When she unlocks the door and allows you to come out, then you'll know.

Did you, wait, this is interesting.

Did you know that not only is Jimmy Carter the first president to reach 100, first former president, he was the first president born in a hospital?

Yes.

I remember hearing that.

Oh, my gosh.

I remember that child

decades ago.

Wow.

It blew me away.

What a life.

That just doesn't even seem possible.

Right?

What a life.

Yep.

They were all born on, what, farms before that?

We heard it at home.

Yeah, because he was born in 1924.

Why would you go to a hospital before modern medicine?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, right.

Because hospitals were treating, you know, what, people with Spanish flu and warp and war victims.

They were cesspools of infection.

Yeah, just

cesspools of infection.

That covers it.

Places where legs got cut off and stuff.

Oh, you're infected.

Here goes your leg.

Doctors wouldn't wash their hands until the end of their shift.

So they just wash it once at the end of the shift.

Person to person to person.

I'll wash later.

Yeah, I mean, this was like 1924.

They were probably still pulling people's teeth when they had like psychosis back then.

Oh, geez.

I mean,

yeah, like medicine was weird in the early 1900s.

It was still finding its way, I suppose.

You know, trying to sort out the

crap from what might work.

1910 was a big inflection point.

That was the Flexner report.

Yeah.

We said, yeah, maybe we should base this shit on science.

Right.

And then it took a while to, you know,

still a work in progress.

Right.

And no kidding.

At least we started trying, you know.

Yep.

Yeah.

No kidding.

Thank goodness.

For that.

All right, Bob, you're going to start us off with a quickie.

Thank you.

Dave, this is your Quickie with Bob.

Molten mantle moon in the news.

This was somewhat fascinating.

Not overly fascinating, but somewhat.

High fascinating.

Just like

somewhat for our excitement.

Yeah, right, whatever.

Some scientists have recently concluded that the moon's lower mantle is likely molten, which could potentially impact our thoughts on the moon's origin and evolution.

Now, they arrived at this conclusion by looking at the tides on the moon.

And this is the more interesting aspect of this, is how they came upon this.

Now, it's not often thought that way, right?

Whenever you mention tides, it's usually about the tides on the Earth that are caused by the Moon.

But the Earth and Sun create tides on the Moon as well, which can distort its shape and its gravitational field.

Now, the way the Moon responds to its tides actually depends to a degree on what its deep internal structure is like, right?

So,

by studying the Moon's response to tides, then it can give us clues as to what's deep below, and that's the basis of this whole thing.

In this case, the researchers gathered data for the first time about how the moon changes, specifically how its gravitational field changes over the course of a year due to its tides.

And they added that new data to on top of the pre-existing data that covered changes that happened over the course of a month, right?

So they put the monthly data in with the annual data.

And then they took all that and combined it with other interesting, other important data, like the average moon density, right?

Which would cut, which you would imagine would be an important about the interior of the moon.

And then they plopped all of that into a model.

And that model simulated the deep interior of the moon.

And they found that their model could not duplicate what they were observing about the moon's changing gravitational field because of the tides

unless the model had a soft layer at the bottom of the mantle.

So in order for the model to behave like the moon does,

you had to have in the model a soft lower layer of the bottom of the mantle.

Now, the researchers think that if such a molten gooey layer exists, it's probably made of a titanium-rich material that they call ilmenite.

I never heard of ilmenite before.

So assuming this is true, the next step then would be to determine what the heat source would be that could keep that part of the mantle partially melted for probably something like billions of years.

Wouldn't it have to be a radioactive decay?

You would think, you would think.

I'm not sure.

I thought most of the radioactive decay was pretty much done for the moon.

The implication here is that there might be some other source that they're not aware of, which would be, which sounds like it could be really fascinating.

For what it's worth, this has been your cookie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Joe, you're going to go do another space sort of related news item.

Tell us about the fate of heart cells on the ISS.

I bet it's not good.

Not good.

NG.

Yeah, don't get excited.

So, researchers from Johns Hopkins University created a, they created this study to show how space flight affects heart cells.

Going into it, they knew that there was an effect and they wanted to be able to get more details on it.

They sent 48 bioengineered heart tissue samples up to the International Space Station, and they left them up there for 30 days.

It's bioengineered?

Yeah.

Yeah, the heart cells were created from human-induced pluripotent stem cells.

You know, pluripotent stem cells can become any cell type in the human body.

And then these cells were placed in an advanced organ on a chip device that, in this particular case, it simulates the environment of a real heart.

So the cells would actually, you know, I guess kind of think that they're in a real organ by the feedback that the chip gives them.

And this allows the scientists to closely study how the cells are actually behaving under different conditions.

So these devices are, they're really small and they're about half the size of a regular cell phone, and they're designed to act like a human heart in a 3D environment.

They're simulating the 3D environment.

And they let the scientists see how the heart cells will actually function in this particular case in outer space, right?

Where there's almost no gravity.

And the heart cells in space were then compared to similar ones that stayed on Earth.

So the researchers could understand the differences over the 30 days.

So, like I said, you know, the findings were not good.

Just didn't turn out to be a positive piece of information.

Heart cells in space beat with only about half the strength of the ones that were, yeah, that were left on Earth.

So the loss of contraction strength, this is called twitch forces, and it shows that heart cells and microgravity, they simply just struggle to function properly.

While the results, you know, were not positive, they weren't surprising to the researchers because

previous studies have shown astronauts often experience, you know, when they get back, they have reduced heart muscle function, irregular heartbeats, you know, arrhythmias, and this all happens, you know, when they return from space.

But this study brings a lot more clarity to what's actually happening at the cellular level, which is exactly the information that we need in order to, you know, to do something about it.

So they found these key damage markers, the space-exposed heart cells.

So first, the sarcomeres, these are the proteins responsible for helping heart cells contract.

They were shorter and more disordered than in the earth samples.

Without properly functioning sarcomeres, the heart cells lose their ability to contract efficiently, right?

So the lack of efficiency is a big player here, which leads to the overall weakening of the heart muscle function.

And there were also significant changes in the mitochondria, right?

These are the energy producing parts of the cells.

And normally mitochondria, you know, they have long structured shape that helps them generate energy efficiency.

But in space, what happens?

You know, the mitochondria become larger because there's less gravity.

They become rounder, which is not the proper shape for them.

And they lose this characteristic structure.

And this led the researchers to believe that the cells were under significant stress and had difficulty producing the energy that's needed for normal heart function.

So, the mitochondrial dysfunction likely contributed to the weakening contraction strength of the heart cells.

It does make perfect sense.

So, on top of that, the space-grown cells showed elevated levels of inflammation and oxidative stress, which, as everybody knows, that's bad.

These markers typically are seen in people that have cardiovascular disease.

So, that draws a correlation to the heart cells in space.

They weren't just under physical stress, but they were also experiencing damage from these free radicals and other harmful molecules that

are cropping up there, which led to the long-term dysfunction.

So Dr.

Yoon-Hyun-an,

one of the researchers on the team, he pointed out that astronauts often show these same markers of inflammation and oxidative stress after long-duration space flights.

So they come back home and they study them and they take samples and they figure out what's going on.

So, this cleanly makes the connection between cellular level changes and the real-world results of astronauts.

So, this team was led by Professor Diak Ho Kim,

and he's now focusing on refining the heart-on-a-chip technology, right?

This is going to enable them to gather more data on how the damage is happening at the molecular level.

And if the researchers can better understand the specific pathways that are leading to this cellular damage, then they hope to develop medications, other protective strategies that could be used to help the astronauts from experiencing these negative effects, especially for long-term spaceflight.

So this research is absolutely crucial because what's going on?

NASA is preparing missions to the moon, long-term missions to the moon, long, long, long-term missions to Mars.

And, you know, and there's also talk now about what's coming after Mars, too.

So these findings, they're needed.

They're there to help address these significant risks that space travel is absolutely going to cause on astronauts as they spend more time in outer space.

I was very curious to know if astronauts, when they return home, if they regain their heart function.

And the answer is typically yes, but it depends on other factors like how long were they there and their overall health.

You know, after an extended time in microgravity, astronauts' heart muscles can significantly weaken.

They can become less efficient at pumping blood.

And, you know, this typical day-to-day function, you know, the lack of gravity really does have a dramatic effect.

But, you know, if you're healthy and if they spend enough time and if they, you know, if they take the right steps, they could regain that heart function.

But, you know, what if someone is in space for three, four, five years?

We haven't had anybody up there that long yet.

You know, it could actually lead to very scary

situations where people might, you know, they could die, right?

You know, like, we just don't know.

We don't have enough data to really know what will happen.

Or it might get to the point, like, if you've been in space beyond a certain number, amount of time,

there's no coming back, yeah.

Like, yeah, your heart can function in zero gravity, in microgravity, but it's now it's too weak to handle, you know, 1G.

Steve, what I don't understand is, like, there is gravity plating in Star Wars.

Like, why don't they just invent that and we solve the problem?

Yeah, that'd be nice.

Now, there are some caveats here, though, Jay.

I mean, so this is, you know, cell on a chip technology is fine, but it's not the same thing as a whole organism, you know, homeostatic system.

There could be plenty of compensatory mechanisms or whatever that are not at play here.

So, you know, this is information, it's telling us something, and you do have to correlate with it clinically, like what's happening with actual living astronauts, which they're doing.

So it's definitely telling us something, but it doesn't necessarily have to be as bad as it sounds because, again, we don't know how the whole organism

is responding or adapting.

The other thing is, it might be that after a certain amount of time, there may be adaptations that take place

that mitigate some of the cellular problems, like

oxidative stress and inflammation, etc.

Yeah, because a cell on a chip is not in a circuit, so it's not getting any feedback from the

homeostatic, you know,

whatever dynamic system.

Yeah, so

this is not the end of this research.

This is just one interesting piece of it.

But I do think, taking all the evidence that there is at this point in time,

the prolonged microgravity is absolutely a problem.

And the best thing we could do would be just to simulate gravity for long-duration space missions.

Which we're not ready for.

Which we are not ready for.

We just really don't have the technology to do that.

Technology is not there.

We got that from the horse's mouth.

I mean,

a representative from NASA herself said it.

Just get there.

Just get there fast.

They're not even working on it.

It's not anywhere on their radar at this point in time.

It's just too far away.

It's too challenging an engineering problem.

Even though conceptually it seems simple, you know,

just a long cable rotating around, you know, but it just would have to be so big that the engineering challenges are too great.

So they just said, screw it.

We'll just get there fast.

Yeah.

Beat me to it.

All right.

Thanks, Jay.

Kara, tell us about this new FDA-approved schizophrenia drug.

Yeah, so there's a new drug on the market.

It's called Cobenfi.

That's the brand name.

And it's being kind of touted as the

first drug in decades that takes a novel approach to schizophrenia treatment.

So a lot of the headlines are things like, you know, first new drug, first new type of drug.

I take slight issue with that because although, yes, the mechanism of action is wildly different and this could potentially be a game changer, we've seen, I guess you could call them incremental advances, but I think we've seen changes in the way that we treat schizophrenia that have radically changed the lives of people.

And what I mean by that is that there was a huge leap when we went from only having pills available to having long-acting injectables available.

That was a massive change because treatment adherence is a very big problem with schizophrenia.

So sometimes I'm like, the headline doesn't tell you everything.

It's not the first new thing, but it is really interesting because it's the first drug on the market in a very long time that acts on a different neurotransmitter.

And so let's talk a little bit about the landscape of antipsychotic drugs historically versus this new drug and how it works differently.

So quick and dirty review of the antipsychotic drugs that are on the market now, or at least the main ones.

So first there was the first gen antipsychotic.

Sometimes they're called like traditional antipsychotics.

And they include, I'm going to give you both the brand names and the

generic names because many people are aware of these drugs.

You've seen them talked about in popular culture.

You have people in your life who struggle with schizophrenia symptoms or even like bipolar with some psychosis.

Or some of these drugs are actually like adjuvant drugs for depression.

And so you may see them as an add-on or even a different drug as an antidepressant.

Okay, so first-gen antipsychotics include chlorpromazine, so that's thorazine, haloperidol, that's haldol, thioridazine, that's melaril, and flufenazine, so that's prolixin,

among others.

And these work by blocking dopamine, but specifically at the D2 receptor.

And the problem with these drugs is that although they work really well, they have really severe side effects that come along with them.

And, you know, from my understanding, talking to patients with schizophrenia, talking to psychiatrists, and also reading the literature, most people who take antipsychotics have side effects.

It's not like a, oh, it's few and far between.

It's like a, that is just the risk that you deal with in order to treat schizophrenia.

Some side effects are almost guaranteed.

They're basically dose and duration dependent.

Like

you're going to get some.

Yeah.

And then what?

What are some of the well I'm about to dive into them.

So there's basically three big categories of side effects that you get from the first gen antipsychotics.

So you have anticholinergic effects.

You see those with like chlorpromazine and thyridazine.

Those include like dry mouth, blurred vision,

trouble relieving your urine, constipation, and rapid heartbeat.

You've got extra pyramidal side effects or extrapyramidal side effects.

Those happen with the more high potency like HALDAL and prolixin.

And those are movement disorders.

So they include like Parkinsonism.

So that would be like a resting tremor, some rigidity of your muscles, dystonia, so those are uncontrolled muscle contractions, akathesia, so this sense of restlessness that you have inside, and even tardive dyskinesia, which is potentially life-threatening.

It often starts to happen after long-term use, but it can be irreversible.

And tardative dyskinesia

is this involuntary, very stereotypical rhythmic movement that you see in the tongue, face, and jaw.

And over time, it starts to affect other parts of the body.

And then there's a third category called the neuroleptic malignant syndrome category.

So this is a rare, but it's life-threatening.

And this is when muscles can get tight, you get a high fever, you have autonomic dysfunction.

So your blood pressure, your heart rate, like your sweating all sort of goes out of whack.

You can be a little bit confused, combative.

And when somebody shows this reaction when they start on an antipsychotic, they have to get them off of it immediately and do supportive therapy because it can kill you.

So, like, you know, there's some real risks here.

Then, then came the second generation antipsychotics.

You'll often hear them referred to as atypical antipsychotics.

So, those are

clozapine or clozaril, resperidone or resperidol, olanzepine or zyprexa, and quetiapine, siroquil, and also eripiprazole, which is abilify.

So some of those are often used as antidepressants as well, or they're used in bipolar disorder.

They are also

act on dopamine, but they tend to act more on the D3 and D4 receptors.

And they are good at alleviating positive symptoms, just like the first gen are, but they can also alleviate some of the negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

And positive symptoms, because that doesn't mean good versus bad,

but positive symptoms and schizophrenia are the ones that we think of as kind of like thought processes that are confused, hallucinations, delusions,

hyperactivity.

And the negative symptoms, as the name kind of implies, that's things like lethargy, withdrawing from social settings, having a hard time getting out of bed, having changes in sleep, not really taking care of your grooming and your hygiene, and having like flattened affect, like kind of just like flat emotions.

And schizophrenia can have either.

There can be positive, there can be negative, or there can be mixed.

And very often historical drugs worked pretty well on the positive symptoms, but not so great on the negative symptoms.

The atypical antipsychotics are less likely to cause those extrapyramidal side effects, but they can still have anticholinergic effects.

They can still cause neuroleptic malignant syndrome.

They can also cause metabolic syndrome.

And so this is like a whole new thing that's fun for people who take antipsychotics, where they will often gain a bunch of weight, their blood pressure will go up, they'll develop insulin resistance, hyperglycemia,

and

even they can potentially develop diabetes and heart disease.

So, there are studies that show that people who are on long-term atypical antipsychotics, they're dying younger because they are gaining all of this weight and they're developing all of these secondary symptoms that are associated with that.

And all of this is basically the result of evolution.

It's because as our brain evolved, our neurotransmitters evolved and there's a branching pattern of relationships just like anything in evolution.

And different parts of the brain use the same neurotransmitter for different things.

Yep.

And so if you're not...

And drugs are dumb, you know, because they have a lot of damage.

But they evolve subtypes, right?

And then just like you could have like different subtypes, like like lions and tigers are both big cats, but they're different types.

Same thing, you have D1, D2 receptors, et cetera.

And they, so there's different affinities and different proportions of those receptors in different parts of the brain.

So

these second-generation antipsychotics are partially selective.

They're more active

at the receptors we want them to be active at and less active at the ones we don't want.

But it's not clean.

It's not a clean.

Yeah, it's not clean.

And they do also work on serotonin more, which means, and that's more involved with the negative symptoms.

So you do see a little bit of

a different kind of response on them.

But they're still not clean, like you said.

And you can even get like neutropenia from atypical antipsychotic.

So that's like changes to some of your immune function because certain types of white blood cells drop, and that can be pretty dangerous as well.

So yeah, I mean...

These are all big risks.

And very often, patients with schizophrenia are dealing with a risk-benefit calculation, but they're also dealing with it sometimes with insight, sometimes lacking insight.

And that can be really difficult because if somebody gains a ton of weight or they start having uncontrolled muscle movements or they start experiencing symptoms that they don't like, they may just stop taking their drugs because they don't like the way that they feel.

Enter this new medication, Cobenfi.

And I'm going to tell you a little bit, like I'm going to tell it to you in story form.

So since the very first antipsychotics, those first-gen ones were introduced in the 50s, everything was based on this hypothesis that has very good evidence to support it, that dopamine is the culprit, right?

And that, you know, blocking the production of dopamine because there's too much dopamine is going to reduce symptomatology in schizophrenia.

And so then we had all of those drugs developed that I just kind of went through.

Now, every single schizophrenia drug on the market up until now acts on dopamine primarily and then may have some downstream effects on other neurotransmitters as well, neurotransmitter systems.

This new drug doesn't act on dopamine.

It's the first drug that's been developed for schizophrenia that primarily, I shouldn't say it doesn't act on dopamine because it does have downstream effects, but primarily works in a completely different way.

So I want to tell you how it was first developed because it's pretty interesting.

There was a study in 1997 on Alzheimer's patients where a drug was developed that reduced some of those kind of severe dementia symptoms, the more psychotic leaning dementia symptoms.

But the patients couldn't handle the drug because it made them barf and it gave them horrible diarrhea and they felt super six to their stomachs the whole time.

It was like a really brutal GI reaction when they would take the drug.

So they stopped the study, they pulled it, it never made it to market.

So the lead inventor of this new drug, Andrew Miller, he was like, huh, something about that drug was working and it was working well.

But is there a way to figure out how to make it work without making people quite so sick?

So, he started looking at these receptors in your gut called muscarinic receptors.

They're named for a chemical that's found in some mushrooms called muscarine.

And he was trying to figure out a way to develop a drug that activates them in the brain without activating them in the GI tract.

So he's like, hmm, hmm, hmm, okay, what's going on?

What's going on?

What's going on?

And he found a drug that was already used for overactive bladder.

And that drug shuts down the GI receptors.

And the cool thing about that drug is it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier.

So in putting those two drugs together, he's able to shut down the muscarinic receptors in the gut, but not the brain.

And that combines with this new drug that acts on acetylcholine in the brain.

And together,

that drug is able to have an effect on both the positive and the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, but not affect the GI tract nearly as much as it did in its original form.

So that's probably, Kara, that's exactly the story of Cinnemed.

Oh, really?

Well, it's, yeah, it's carbidopa levodopa.

So it's the same thing that the levodopa, which is for that for the treatment of Parkinson's disease, it causes nausea because it has effects in the stomach.

And so you combine it with

a competitor that doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier of the carbidopa, and that

eliminates the nausea.

That's why it's called synomet

without emesis.

Without emesis.

That's amazing.

Yeah, I love that.

Wow.

And so, I mean,

how brilliant, how elegant.

I love it so much.

Ultimately, though, to be fair, it doesn't reduce, it doesn't, I shouldn't say reduce, it massively reduces nausea.

It doesn't get rid of it.

So, in the clinical trial that was published by Bristol Myers Squibb,

who is the company who bought the company that the guy I told you about before, who developed the drug works for, Coruna Therapeutics, that was his company.

They did a study, and it's only a five-week study.

So, this is interesting.

The FDA was as impressed by the study results, even after only five weeks, that they said we're going to approve this drug.

But there, about 20% of the patients on the drug still experienced nausea, and only, I shouldn't say only, and about 14% dealt with vomiting.

But apparently, that's a massive difference than the original Alzheimer's drug where the patients were dropping out because they just couldn't handle the GI discomfort.

The jury's still out on the long-term effects, though, but Bristol-Myers-Squibb is is claiming that the drug, which was originally called Car XT,

that was like in clinical trials, that's what it was called, now it's called Cobenfi,

that they actually kept studying these patients for a year.

And later this year, they're going to release the data from those studies.

And they're claiming that the patients often lost weight, did not gain weight, and they did not experience any metabolic changes or metabolic disease, that their side effect profile was significantly lessened, with nausea being basically the main side effect, and that they didn't see any movement disorders in the patients.

That's great.

So this could be a game changer.

I think what would be really cool is if they then also developed this into a long-acting injectable.

Because right now it's a two-pill a day dosage.

And I do worry about treatment adherence on a medication like that.

It's also probably going to be pretty expensive.

And it's looking like it may be one of these drugs where

you have to be be resistant or you have to have tried one or two other drugs and had side effects that were too severe.

And then your insurance company might approve this drug.

The landscape, you know, we'll have to see how the landscape changes once this is on the market and people are taking it regularly.

And we're getting a lot more kind of real-life data from that.

But

really cool story, fascinating, and could be a game changer for a lot of people who are living with schizophrenia.

Yeah, absolutely.

What we really need is to go beyond pharmaceuticals, because pharmaceuticals can only get as specific as the receptors that are in the brain, and that's limited by the messiness of evolution.

But if you could directly electromagnetically hack the circuits, there is no theoretical limit.

You can get down to the neuronal level, technically, you know.

I was wondering where you were going with that, because I thought you were going to say like genetics.

Well,

that's another approach as well.

Yeah, but it's funny because in this one big article where they're talking to a lot of schizophrenia schizophrenia researchers, there's one of the researchers, there's actually a quote here.

As a schizophrenia researcher, I'm embarrassed to say that we've spent literally billions of American tax dollars on genetics looking to understand what causes schizophrenia and to help us develop new drugs, and we've not been successful.

Yeah, there's only a 50% concordance rate with identical twins in schizophrenia.

Yeah,

at most, it's 50%

contributed to by genetics.

And it does seem to be the case that there are very predictable experiences that can induce schizophrenic symptoms.

And so it's like it's you have to have the predisposition, and then something has to happen experientially.

Yeah, yeah,

it's a really fascinating diagnosis.

It's a syndrome, really, because there's a lot going on in the brain with schizophrenia and it manifests in a lot of different ways for different people.

So, yeah, but this is a big step.

All right, thanks, Kara.

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Guys, have any of you heard of wood vaulting?

Wood vaulting?

Of course.

It's when you lock away chunks of wood.

That's right.

You save the children.

You close the door.

That's exactly right.

Oh, no way.

There you go.

So, yes, I have heard of it.

So, the idea is to use wood for carbon capture, and then you got to preserve it for a long period of time, right?

So

there's a very fun little science story that just got published, but let me give a little bit of background first.

So the idea is, right, with carbon capture, is that we're only going to be able to reduce our carbon emissions by so much, so fast.

And even if we can really significantly decarbonize our energy sector and our transportation sector, we still have like steel making and cement.

And there's, you know, it's going to be really hard to get below 10 or 20 percent

of where we are now.

But you know, if you want to reach net zero, we're going to have to take carbon out of the air, right?

You have to somehow capture carbon dioxide.

Recapture it.

Yeah.

And then, of course, you have to then lock it away somewhere.

You can't just release it back into the atmosphere.

You got to lock it away.

You know, so there are, if you use like biofuels,

that's not carbon negative.

That's carbon neutral because then you burn it and then they release the CO2 again.

Planting trees is also not carbon negative in the long term.

Planting trees is basically essentially the way to look at tree planting is the trees of the world store a certain amount of carbon.

And that amount of carbon is sort of permanently taken out of the

environment, you know, the air, the ocean, et cetera.

Meaning, it's not the same trees, but you have the same number of trees.

You know what I mean?

As long as there's a steady state of trees, that amount of carbon is removed from the carbon cycle.

Does that make sense?

Sure.

Yes, it does.

Yep.

So that is what we're doing, unfortunately, with deforestation, we're reducing trees as a carbon sink.

You know, we, of course, want to increase

reforestation.

We want to increase forest as a carbon sink, and that could bias us time, but that can't continuously remove carbon from the atmosphere.

That can only just provide a one-off temporary increase in enlarging the forest carbon sink of the world.

Does that make sense?

But what if we could keep trees from decaying and releasing their carbon back into the atmosphere?

Then that would be a permanent store of carbon.

Or you could also think it wouldn't necessarily have to be permanent, permanent.

If it could be thousands of years,

that would work too.

Even hundreds of years

would be helpful.

You know, it's really like the next two, three hundred years that's going to be really critical.

But if we could lock it away for a thousand years, that's really what we're talking about.

There's a number of ways of doing that, right?

One way to do that is to plant trees and then build stuff out of them, right?

And you build stuff that

you keep dry and you keep in good condition and it can last for a very long time.

So if you build a building out of it and that building can survive 200 years, then you're taking that wood out of circulation, if you will,

for whatever the duration is of that.

you know, that building.

There are also some trees that just survive a very long time.

There are trees that survive hundreds or even thousands of years.

So those could be good long-term carbon sinks.

But another way

is to

bury the wood,

you know, just bury it.

The problem is, if you just bury wood, it decays and releases its carbon into the soil.

Like coffins.

Yeah, which is not a bad thing.

You know, that's a good way to temporarily

increase the soil as a carbon sink, because, and it's also good for the soil, et cetera.

So, that's actually not a bad thing, but it, but again, it's not this open-ended, negative carbon sink, you know, because

that carbon is getting back into the environment.

So

researchers were looking to see if they could find soil conditions that would slow or significantly delay the rotting of wood.

And

if they could find soil conditions that would delay it for a really long time, then we could just like plant trees and then harvest them and

bury the logs underground.

And that could be a cheap and effective carbon sink, right?

We're doing a lot of research on carbon capture

technology, but trees are carbon capture technology.

They do exactly what we want to do, which is to remove CO2 from the air and lock it in a long-term solid form.

We just need that long-term solid form to be really long, right?

So, this was Ning Zhen and colleagues.

They found a location near Quebec with soil conditions that they thought they predicted would be good for preserving wood for a long time.

Basically, low oxygen, right?

That's always the key.

You know, you want it to be low oxygen.

So it was very clay-rich soil, or it had like a good top layer of clay.

So they dug a trench in order to put some test wood down in there so that then they could follow it over time and see how quickly it loses its carbon.

And you know what they found when they dug that trench?

A log.

Did that.

And you know how old that log was?

5,000 years old.

3,000.

3,775 years old.

They knew it.

Whoa.

Which to me, it's so ironic.

You know, they're saying, hey, look, this might be a good place

to bury logs.

They dig down there, and there's already a log there.

And that was naturally buried.

So nature has

already done the experiment they were hoping to do.

So instead, they just analyzed that log and published those results.

So they found out that not only its age, but they estimate that the log has lost less than 5% of its carbon over that period of time.

That's amazing.

Which is negligible, right?

So essentially, this is a, they were able to demonstrate that this is an effective, long-term

way to store wood so that it would be in the vault, right?

So this is now a wood vault.

It's not going to just go back into the ecosystem.

And again, the key is that I guess the clay prevents water from getting down in there and keeps the oxygen very, very low.

And there are other aspects of it too.

It's all about the acidity and other things as well.

All right.

So they also did some calculations.

And okay, so if this is the case, then,

you know, how if we had an optimized or even a reasonable system of growing trees and burying them in soil conditions that will preserve them for thousands of years,

how much carbon could we take out of the atmosphere?

And another critical component, how much would it cost?

So, right now we're releasing about 36 gigatons of carbon each year, right?

Which is the most we've ever released.

We're still on the maximum release of CO2.

We haven't even turned that corner yet.

We haven't even decreased the rate of increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So 36 gigatons per year.

What their calculations showed that there's a potential, a global potential, to sequester 10 gigatons per year just using existing technology.

So not requiring the development of any new technology.

You're basically just growing trees and burying it.

So that's pretty good.

That's a little bit less than a third.

So that is more than enough.

So the IPCC estimated that the minimum amount of carbon removal we're going to need to do in order to reach

our goals, right, in terms of limiting global warming, is five gigatons per year, which is way more than we could do right now.

But this could potentially be, by their estimate, 10 gigatons per year, which is more in the middle of the estimate of what we might need.

So that's sort of well within range.

This, of course, would still cost...

a massive amount of money.

Now, they estimate the cost to be anywhere between $30 and $100 per ton.

They say quote unquote after optimization, so I don't know what that means, but

I guess that means like if we have to, you know, really automate and mass produce this kind of process so that you get some kind of cost benefits of scale.

So

even at the

currently, current methods of direct air capture of CO2, which is what we're talking about here, range from $100 to $300 per ton.

So they, you know, they sort of overlap right at the boundary there.

But so it's, it's, this would be less than that.

I mean, hopefully we can get it close to the $30 per ton.

If we assume $30 per ton and we're sequestering 10 gigatons per year, that means that that program to do that would cost $300 billion per year to do that, which sounds like a lot, but it really isn't because we're talking globally.

right that 300 billion dollars a year is not a lot for the world to spend on a project that could Well, especially a project that mitigates things that cost way more than that.

The estimates are that global warming, the cost of global warming, the estimates range from $1.7 to $38 trillion per year.

So even at the low end of that estimate, which is probably way under calling it, $1.7 trillion per year, this would be a sixth of that, right?

So yeah, it's going to cost way less than mitigating the effects of global warming itself.

Probably way, way less.

You know, one to two orders of magnitude is what we're talking about.

So, even at $300 billion per year, if we can get it down to that cost,

at the high end, it

could be $1 trillion per year, which is still less than the cost of global warming, but that would be the high end of their estimate.

So,

what all this means is these numbers are back of the envelope in the range of plausibility, in terms of the amount, the scalability, and the cost.

It's not ideal, but it's plausible, right?

This would actually work if we could pull it off.

And this could go a long way to

reduce our CO2, our net CO2

release.

This could get us to net zero.

you know, much faster than not doing this, right?

So, yeah, this is somewhat encouraging that, you know, it may be as simple as burying trees in the ground, you know, which is not a high-tech solution.

You know, we obviously need some follow-up studies.

We really need a survey of

where in the world are the soil conditions adequate.

How deep do we have to dig?

How many logs could you throw in there?

How much would it cost to engineer the ground to do that?

What would be the long-term effects on the environment for doing this?

This requires more study.

I'm sure it

would not be as bad as global warming, though.

So again, I'm not worried that we're going to find out that this is like worse than this is a cure that's worse than the disease.

I think that's probably very unlikely.

But all it takes, though, is for the world to work together for the greater good.

Yeah.

Is that all?

That's all.

Okay, so it's not going to happen.

Right.

Right.

Again, I had to say, Bob.

My approach generally is to not put all of our eggs in one basket, right?

So we always want to...

It's not like we're trying to find the one solution, right?

It's this is one more thing that could add to a lot of other things.

Like we should do reforestation, right?

We should do something like this.

We should do other forms of carbon capture as well.

And the other thing is, there's maybe other places that we could put wood products.

Like, there are other places that have very, very low oxygen.

Like, I know some people have brought up

space has very low oxygen.

I understand that, but that's probably cost-prohibitive.

It's expensive.

Yeah, there is that.

But what about like the Marianas Trench?

You know,

right?

Wood floats.

What about the whales living down there at the biotwine?

Not all wood floats.

That's true.

But hey, I'm just, you know, I haven't seen a plausibility study on that.

But, you know, so anyway, this is

there's a movement to build big buildings, big commercial buildings out of wood rather than steel and cement.

Because wood has a much lower carbon footprint than steel and cement does, right?

So

how big of a building can you make out of wood?

Surprisingly big.

Yeah.

You know, with modern.

What examples do we have?

We have the largest.

I've seen some.

They're gorgeous, first of all, like an all-wood, huge building.

They have these massive beams.

But

I don't know off the top of my head what the

maximum size you can get to.

Not skyscraper size, right?

You need steel for that.

Well, and I know that this isn't like building buildings, but Evan, you should Google the way that they do scaffolding in most Asian countries because they don't use metal for scaffolding.

They use bamboo.

Bamboo.

And it can be like very high.

I know that's not the same as building a building, but it is pretty impressive how you can change the engineering of these things in ways that you can utilize them.

You know, we're envisioning just replacing steel beams with wood beams, but there are other ways to build buildings.

Oh, sure, or just use more wooden materials in the building of these buildings.

Right.

You know, a hybrid.

I remember we talked about like compressed wood or condensed wood,

which is

much stronger than natural wood.

And I think

it can get to greater specific strength than steel, which is strength per weight.

It's not stronger than steel.

It's just for the weight, it's stronger.

But again, that's a process and that costs money.

And, you know,

residential homes still made of wood?

Residential homes are mostly made of wood, still.

That's what I thought.

Yeah.

They're mostly wood frames.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

Yeah, but I don't know what the average life expectancy of a home is.

But it's probably a home.

In New England, it's been standing for 350 years, easily.

Yeah, not a lot, though, but some, yeah.

But again, anything we think about, like,

we have to be in the realm of gigatons of CO2, or you know, it's not going to have enough of an impact.

But collectively, like, not every again, I think we should take the all of the above approach here.

We're trying to bias some time and we're trying to

get to net zero as quickly as possible, maybe even net negative for a while until we reach

whatever scientists say is the best equilibrium point.

And then we might get to the point where

the world industry just releases a certain amount of CO2 that we're really never going to be able to get rid of.

And then we just have to also carbon capture the same amount to get to a steady state.

But there's general consensus that we

do need to do some type of significant carbon capture to get to net zero.

And that's like the one piece to the puzzle that we don't really fully have now.

For pretty much everything else that we need to do to mitigate global warming, we have the technology.

We just got to do it.

It's a matter of just transitioning fast enough.

Scalable, cost-effective carbon capture.

We're working on it, but it's still expensive and

nothing really is fantastic.

So

this could be a good option.

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

So, Evan, tell us about those Nazca lines.

Yeah, the Nazca lines.

Have we talked about this before on the show?

I'm sure probably 15 plus years ago.

Really, it had to have been a long time ago because I went looking through my notes for old notes on one.

I've at least talked about NASCAR.

I could not find any.

So,

I'm not sure.

All right, let me give you a little background then.

Well, I'm going to take us back to 1997.

This was eight years before the podcast.

We were running a local skeptics group, the New England Skeptical Society, and we had a featured speaker come and speak at one of our lecture in our lecture series, Joe Nicol.

Do you remember?

Oh, yeah.

Joe Nicol.

He's great.

He gave a presentation about so much of the work he had done over the prior 20 plus years as a skeptical investigator.

And he was the chief investigator for what was, what, Psycop at the time, the Committee for Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal.

And today, they're simply known as CSI, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

And one of the topics Joe had investigated and reported on were the Nazca lines of Peru.

And this was brand new to me, and this might be new to some of our maybe younger listeners who have never heard of the Nazca lines before.

So, these Nazca lines, they're a series of large geoglyphs.

They're etched into the ground in the Nazca desert of southern Peru, about 200 miles southeast of Lima, near the modern town of Nazca.

Yep.

These lines were created by the Nazca culture, the people

that lived in this region, between

500 BCE and 500 CE.

And it is basically ancient large-scale art.

They stretch across an area,

these lines, about a thousand square kilometers in the area.

And really, their full scale can only be appreciated from the air or perhaps the surrounding foothills due to their immense size.

These things get very, very large.

In fact, they were only really recognized, I believe, in the 1920s when airplane technology finally

was emerging and they noticed them at that point and became more curious about it.

So the NASCAL, how did they make them?

Well, they were made, you make them by removing what are described as the reddish-brown iron oxide-rich pebbles that cover the desert surface, and it reveals a lighter yellowish soil underneath.

And that contrast creates the visible patterns.

And a lot of these lines, they're simple geometric shapes, you know, straight lines, spirals, trapezoids, triangles.

Some of them stretch as long as 12 miles.

Whoa.

And sometimes they form more intricate patterns.

There are depictions of animals, plants, among other things.

Maybe some of the ones you've seen in pictures, a monkey with a curled tail, or we've seen them in slides.

Certainly Joe Nicol brought examples with him during that presentation.

There was a hummingbird.

That's one of the more famous ones.

A spider,

a whale, a condor, a lizard, a dog, among others.

And those lines are amazing for really so many reasons.

It's the size and scale, like nothing else from that era.

Some of those lines have stood the rigors of time.

Just the fact that they're still around after

all this time.

Thank goodness they're in the desert, in which I guess it's a relatively...

comparatively stable climate, fewer weather swings and those kinds of things.

But there's also been the disturbance of other cultures treading on the region over thousands of years.

And it makes you wonder how were they able to accomplish such a feat of both art and engineering?

One set of lines, let's see, it's described as an enigmatic human-like figure known as the astronaut or the owl man.

And when you take a look at that particular one, you can go online and look at it, you can start to think why some people might jump to a conclusion that this particular work represents, well, something otherworldly, like a deity, or a supernatural being, such as an extraterrestrial.

Yep, you know, that big round head, you know, the big eyes, that prototypical sort of alien that our current culture would have us envision of what such a thing would look like.

And then you can see how that would then touch into the world of pseudoscience and alternative archaeology.

Because why?

What?

They didn't have a bird's eye view of what they were trying to accomplish at the time.

So how did they get into the air, the people, to see it?

You can't really discern it at ground level, right?

They're just lines that stretch and curve at great distances, and you can't really envision it in your head, even if you walk the path.

How did they do it?

This was a legitimate scientific mystery well up through the late 20th century, trying to figure out how it was done.

Now, the Nazca lines could only really be extensively studied in the 20th century, obviously,

for flight.

There was a German archaeologist at the time.

Her name was Maria Ries,

R-E-I-C-H-E, or Reich.

Reiche.

She dedicated much of her life to studying preserving the lines and advocating for their protection and proposing that they had, well, her theory was they were of an astronomical significance, you know, maybe of

stars and constellations aligned and those sorts of things.

And the purpose is still today a subject of legitimate scientific debate, right?

Are they astronomical significance?

Or was it a calendar of some kind?

Were they just religious symbols?

And, you you know, they're still trying to work this out.

But the idea that someone or something other than the Nazca people created these geoglyphs is the stuff of pseudoscience and alternative archaeology.

And that idea gained widespread attention, largely through the work of Eric von Dynecken.

which is a name we may have brought up in the past at some point, a Swiss author who promoted the concept in his 1968 book, Chariot of the Gods.

Right?

Remember that?

That extraterrestrial beings either directly created them or they assisted the humans in constructing these.

Because, of course, there's no way people back in those times could have done this without the assistance of what?

Imaginary super-outer space creatures.

And they said, of course, they were doing it.

You know, why?

And they had the help of aliens because they were using them, what, as landing strips, navigational markers for extraterrestrial spacecraft, right?

These were intended for beings that could only fly and that had to be extraterrestrials at the time, you know, aliens.

You know, was it a form of a tribute to the sky gods, which they called them at the time, you know,

these aliens from other words?

So

no ancient culture had a concept of a deity living up in the heavens, right?

Right, right.

So that's why the Nazca lines are a topic in the skeptical community.

We've been tackling it since really the 1970s, and this was one of the reasons why Joe Nicol came to talk with us about his investigation into the Nazca lines.

He went down to Peru and studied them firsthand.

He did his own investigation.

They were able,

after their investigation, and they saw everything that was going on.

You remember what they did, what Joe told us they did?

They went to a desert, I think in New Mexico or in Arizona.

And they decided, we're going to make our own Nazca lines.

We're going to see.

And we're going to only use the technology that was available at the time, which is basically twigs.

and rope

and a sketch, you know, just a sketch on a regular piece of paper of what they were trying to draw.

And they got it to work.

They did it.

And yep, they absolutely did it.

And in fact, Joe, I remember Joe telling us, he said there was a flaw in the sketch, like there was a notch or something, right, that they hadn't noticed at the time.

But when they did the work and then they went up

into the air to look at it, that notch, that little mistake was actually in there in the actual

lines that they drew.

So fascinating.

No extraterrestrials required.

That's the backstory.

Here's the news this week.

Scientists are now using AI to find more of the Nazca lines in the desert.

They have found so far over 300 of them that they weren't able to detect before.

Yep.

Including abstract humanoid figures, ancient ceremonies, decapitated heads, Bob.

Cool.

And one that they described as a fancy.

Wait, is it a decapitated

head?

Yes, decapitated.

Is it a decapitated head or is it a decapitated body?

Oh, well.

Right.

Can you say a head is decapitated?

Is this any without a head?

Interesting.

I knew what you meant.

I know.

I'm just curious.

No, that's a fair point.

That's a fair point.

You

hadn't really thought about it.

Well, let's not lose our head over it.

All right.

Oh,

so

yeah, there's going to be, and there's one.

They describe it as a killer whale holding a knife.

It was one of these.

So here comes the new alternative archaeology theory that's going to assume that sea mammals crawled out of the ocean to help the Nazca people create those lines.

I doubt it.

The geoglyphs they are finding,

they're hard to find, right?

Obviously, which is why they needed the AI technology to find them.

They could not be found with

direct observation or even the satellites, satellite imagery that they had been studying for decades of pictures of the area.

They found, and they're mostly smaller.

They span, what, maybe about nine nine meters long, some of these.

And they're mostly humanoid and animals.

So, yeah,

a little harder to kind of see those.

It just faded out so much.

But they said here was what they were able to do.

The AI model looked for them in the aerial photographs.

Their high-resolution photos covered an area about 10 times as large as Manhattan, which encompassed the desert plateau, the Nazca Pampa, and its surroundings,

to search for missed shapes in satellite images of the Nazca Desert.

And so the AI produced a gridded map that categorized the probability of each grid square containing the geoglyphs.

And then researchers spent more time, 2,600 hours manually inspecting the highest probability photos and doing field inspections of the sites.

And they estimate the AI helped speed up the screening process, right, before AI and then after AI, sped it up by a factor of 50, 50 times, by eliminating 98% of low-probability aerial imagery from consideration and providing probabilities for the remaining 2%.

So they used it as a great tool, a great use of AI in order to really narrow down their search for these and it yielded results.

They also said they expect with more research they're going to find at least a few hundred more of these as they continue.

They released their paper and their findings without even having fully looked at all the data they have, but they anticipate there's going to be hundreds more that they're going to find using the AI.

Very cool stuff.

You know, it makes sense that you would have these smaller, you know, Nazca figures because,

and oftentimes we see that where like the pseudoscience community is presenting the tip of an iceberg, you know, like the best examples.

Right.

And they say, like, how, yeah, like these are, look how amazing these are.

And, but once you see them in the context of the full expression, you realize that, you know, yes, this is people who were doing this and they were using techniques.

You know, these are basically doodles.

You know, you wonder if some of this was like just developing their skills and like the best of the best are the ones who got to draw the really big ones, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

It absolutely makes sense that you would look for smaller and smaller ones, especially if you're dealing if you were relying on satellite photographs.

To begin with, you know, your chances of finding small things in those photos are not as good.

As you know, you find the low-hanging fruit, which are the big ones first, and then you work your way down.

And they expect to find more.

And then, of course, with hundreds of these weird pictogriffs,

geoglyphs,

pareidolia kicks in, right?

You're going to see,

you're going to be able to imagine all kinds of funky stuff.

And they have, and some of the, and they have found some funky stuff.

Yeah.

So just looking at a couple of guys playing basketball, there's a giraffe.

Right.

There's a teletubby.

See the teletubby?

Yeah.

Okay, thanks, Evan.

Yep.

Bob, tell us about the biggest telescope ever.

Isn't LISA going to be the biggest telescope ever?

You could say that.

All right.

You could say that.

Well, he said it.

Yeah,

a new type of gravitational wave detector has been approved, and it's called LISA for Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

It won't be deployed for 10 years, so that sucks.

But when it does, it will be the first gravitational wave detector in space, and it could transform our understanding of the universe.

You guys remember the beginning of gravitational wave astronomy 2015.

It's going to be long remembered.

It opened an entirely new window into the cosmos.

Instead of detecting light, like visible light, x-rays, or infrared, etc., these gravitational wave detectors sense the ripples in space-time itself that Einstein predicted over 100 years ago.

And of course, he was right.

Yet again, these waves expand outward at the speed of light whenever three conditions are met.

Number one, you need mass.

Mass has to be there, has to be present.

Two, that mass needs to accelerate.

It has to have some change in motion, such as a collision.

That's a classic one, classic example.

And three, that accelerating mass needs to be asymmetric.

So if you had

a perfectly symmetrical spinning neutron star that would not emit gravitational waves because it was perfectly symmetrical, but even if it had an atom-sized bump on its surface, then that would be enough to emit gravitational waves because it would be asymmetrical.

Now, these waves literally distort space-time, but even the waves from titanic events like colliding neutron stars distort space-time by an amount less than the width of a proton.

Such little Puchian distortions are detected using interferometers, though.

And of course,

it's not just the interferometers, it's the fact that they're isolating these devices so exquisitely from outside interference, which is a key component.

But the key technology here is the interferometers, specifically Michelson interferometers.

Look that up.

So these split laser light into two beams that then travel away at 90 degrees from each other.

And these beams come back and then they interfere with each other.

They overlay.

They combine them together.

And if both beams have traveled the same distance, then they will be in phase and the light waves will interfere in a specific way, producing a specific and predictable interference pattern.

No problem.

If, however, a gravitational wave has passed by while this was happening, then the resulting stretching and compressing of space-time means that the distances that the light travels no longer matched.

So, one of these laser beams had their path was changed so that it was longer or shorter, and then the interference pattern would reflect that, and

the pattern that would arise would make it obvious that, oh, look, this is not, the light didn't match, and we probably had a gravitational wave go by.

Now, we've detected over 200 such gravitational waves,

lots of

stellar mass black hole collisions and neutron star collisions as well.

They've been detected by the three facilities that are on the Earth, LIGO in the States, then there's

Virgo, and that's in the UK, I believe, and Kagra in Japan.

Now, these use laser beams that travel four kilometers or two or two and a half miles.

And these are the arms of the device, right?

The arms of the gravitational detectors

is the length that the beam travels before it comes back.

And that's a good, I mean, two and a half miles, that's pretty good, right?

But that distance limits the frequency of

the gravitational waves that they can detect, right?

There's a correlation there between

how long the arm is and then how sensitive it is.

So that means that they can detect only certain events that produce those types of gravitational waves.

So therefore,

we can now detect black holes merging, but only if they have a mass between, say, 5 to 80 solar masses.

So, we call them

roughly stellar mass black holes.

But if it's heavier than that,

we can't see it because our gravitational wave detectors cannot detect those frequencies.

What if we want to detect supermassive black holes colliding with millions or billions of solar masses each?

To detect such low-frequency, long-wavelength gravitational waves, we need far longer arms.

Longer than the Earth is wide, the diameter of the Earth.

So we have to put it in space, and that's exactly what LISA, LISA will do.

LISA will consist of three spacecraft in an equilateral triangular formation, and they will travel behind the Earth in very stable orbits, and that are will be, their orbits will be not around the Earth, but around the Sun, like the Earth.

And they should be able to maintain their triangular formation for years.

The distance between these spacecraft, or the arms, right, the arms of these spacecraft where the laser beams go out and come back, it wouldn't be four kilometers like LIGO, but two and a half million kilometers.

That's wider, that's bigger than the sun, wider than the sun.

Two and a half.

So these are going to be extremely far apart because you'd have to be that far apart to get to detect really the low, the really big events that are happening that produce the low-frequency, long-wavelength gravitational waves.

Now, the real interesting part here, in my mind, is inside each spacecraft, there's masses, bits of a chunk of matter that they call golden cubes.

Are they golden?

They might be gold-colored.

Are they made of gold?

I don't know.

Are they cubes?

Probably, I guess.

They've got to call them golden cubes for some reason.

So these cubes are not attached to the craft.

They're suspended within it using electromagnetic traps, and that allows them to move freely.

Now, the goal here is to have them in a perfect free fall around the Sun because they're in orbit around the Sun within these spacecraft.

And if you're in orbit, you're in free fall, right?

You're just giving in to gravity.

You're just basically falling around the Sun.

That's how orbits work.

So each craft then sends laser beams from cube to cube.

So each cube will send a laser beam out to the other two, the other two cubes in the triangle, and they come reflected back.

Now, as with LIGO, if the combined light has specific interference patterns, then it's likely that a gravitational wave has passed by and changed the path lengths that these laser beams have traveled.

So,

it works like the ground-based gravitational wave detectors, but you're in space.

It's just a much bigger example of the technology in a lot of ways.

Now, having such an instrument in space, Lisa is expected to make many different types of ground-breaking discoveries.

She'll likely see hidden details about supermassive black holes with billions of solar solar masses merging in distant galaxies.

This could fill in details about such huge, how these huge black holes formed and evolved that we still don't know how they got to be the way they are.

So massive and even over billions of years,

we're still not confident on how some of these can get so big.

Lisa should be able to test also some predictions of general relativity that would be untestable otherwise.

And they could either confirm our understanding of gravity or even better challenge our understanding of gravity and maybe even lead to new physics, which is always awesome.

Lisa might also be able to detect gravitational waves from early in the universe, leading to an improved understanding of the Big Bang itself.

Unfortunately, Lisa won't be in space, as I said, until the mid-2030s.

But unless I'm dead, or even better, a zombie, I'll be sure to tell you about it in episode 1530, approximately.

No guarantees on that number.

Can't wait.

All right, thanks, Bob.

Sure.

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

All right, guys.

Last week I played This Noisy.

I can't stop.

Oh, probably my favorite noisy of all time.

Yeah, it was really good.

All right, so.

I don't care what it is.

I know,

it's just a fun noise.

So Benjamin Davolt, Yavol, he wrote in and said, hi, this is a frog.

You know what?

I've heard frogs make some crazy noises.

Why not this one?

This is not a frog, but that's a good guess.

A listener named Taylor Greger wrote in.

He said, hey guys, new listener, hoping to get through as many of the thousand episodes as possible.

While hearing this week's noisy, I instantly thought that's a giraffe.

What?

And he said, if you've seen the South Park movie, I'm sure you can guess why that is my guess.

I think there was a time that I did hear what a giraffe, a sound that the giraffes make, but that's not it.

John M.

Road in, hi Jay, I heard something like this when on a boat at the Ophenokee Swamp in Georgia.

It is a baby alligator.

Baby alligators sound more like blasters.

That's definitely not a baby alligator.

And if you've ever heard a group of them making their squeaking noises, it sounds like, you know, it sounds like a Star Wars blaster fight.

Len Schaefer said, Hey, Jay, this is my first time having even a ghost of a guess at the noisy, and I've been listening for years.

Any chance that that was a parrot you played us this week?

He said, a presumably incredulous parrot.

No, this is definitely not a parrot.

Although birds can make lots of different sounds, different, you know, the same bird can make lots and lots of different kinds of sounds.

But this is not like a typical parrot noise.

There was a winner.

Actually, there was a few people that won, and this was the first person.

So, Gary Rubinson wrote in and said, I think I'm right that today's Who's That Noisy is the call of the go-away bird, previously the Gray Lorry, which is a very common resident bird in urban South Africa.

Gary, you are 100% correct.

Let me give you guys a little bit more information here.

The gray go-away bird, Crinifer Conchler, also known as Gray Lorry, Gray Loray, or Cuevo, like wow, names I can't pronounce.

It's a

bold and common turaco of the southern Afrotropics.

They're present in arid to moist open woodlands and thorn savanna, especially near surface water.

Yeah, so this is a bird, and birds make pretty much every noise on the planet.

I would be very happy to play you this one again.

So take a listen.

Okay.

I love that.

So there it is.

I want five of them.

I don't know.

I mean, I don't know if owning one of them would be fun because you'd hear that in the middle of the night.

I have a new noisy for you guys.

This one was sent in by a listener named Scott Leonard, and let's check it out.

So,

I'm going to guess that one was not a bird.

No, that was a bunch of birds.

Quit!

Quick.

So, if you think you know what this noisy is or you heard something cool, please email me at WTN at the skepticsguy.org.

Steve, I'd like to make a couple of quick announcements.

One,

on December 7th of this year, we have an SGU Private show plus.

You will be a part of a live recording of the podcast.

Then after that, we have an hour of audience interaction.

This is a really good time, and we hope to see you guys there.

You can get tickets for this show by going to the skepticsguide.org and look for the button on the homepage.

Just so you know, George Hobb will be, of course, joining us for that show.

On the same day, that night, December 7th, We have our stage show.

It's called A Skeptical Extravaganza of Special Significance.

At this show, guys, we teach you how you can't trust your brain.

This This is a two-hour show packed with a ton of fun bits.

We have been running this show for, I think, about 10 years, and it is awesome.

I really hope you can join us.

You can also go to the skepticsguide.org.

There'll be a button there for tickets.

And finally, guys, here's the big one.

Not a con tickets are available.

The rollout is happening right now.

Let me tell you exactly how it works.

Paid patrons get access on October 5th.

They can buy all their tickets.

There's different things going on at the conference.

Non-paid patrons get access on the 7th, and everyone else gets access on the 9th.

If you want to get earlier access to those tickets and those other shows that we're going to be doing, then you could consider becoming a patron or becoming a non-paid patron.

We have one-day tickets, we have full conference tickets, and we also have a VIP.

We also have a new event called the Board Room, which is a board game event.

And if you're interested, you can play tabletop board games with the rogues and with the other hosts of the show.

That's Brian Weck, Andrea Jones Roy, and George Hobb.

Tickets for the VIP and the board games are limited.

One other note: the VIP includes the following.

It includes a meet and greet on Thursday night, early access to all the SGU swag.

You'll also get a VIP pin.

You'll also get a VIP badge.

And there's VIP preferred seating.

Tickets are limited to the VIP and to the board games, so please register early.

You can get tickets at notacon con.com.

Let me say that again.

That is notacon con.com.

And like I said last year, you can thank Ian for that URL.

Jay, are we going to do a Pearl Harbor-themed extravaganza?

Whoa.

Why?

Well, because it'll limit infantry.

You know, December 7th?

No.

No.

To do a Pearl Harbor.

I don't even know why you'd bring that up.

So, anyway, moving on.

Because of December 7th?

Because it's December 7th.

Whatever.

Who cares?

We're going to be in D.C.

We're going to have fun.

We're going to have a couple of good meals.

We're going to do a couple of shows.

We're going to get to hang out with Kara, who basically is my sister at this point.

Yep.

But just Jay's.

I kid.

I kid.

Cool.

I bet you

Harbor will come up there.

All right.

God.

Steve, wait a second.

Steve.

One more thing.

Sure.

Steve, hold on.

One more thing.

Are you there?

I'm here.

Go.

All right, listen listen to this.

Yes.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

We're going to do one question.

This question comes from Campbell.

And after some prologue, he writes, My question is,

where might does could critical thinking sit in helping religious people push back against extremist religious ideology?

But without making an atheist argument, is there something humanists should be encouraging non-extreme religious people to do?

So what Campbell's talking about is should

we be

spending, you know, I say we, like in the rationalist movement, he says specifically humanist, but it could be atheist, could be skeptical, you know, movement to encourage religious people, people who have religious faith, to be less radical, less extreme, and more critical thinking, rational, you know, moderate in their religious beliefs.

Is there a place for that within the rationalist movement?

What do you guys think?

Of course.

Yeah, that's kind of my reaction.

Yeah, sure.

I kind of, throughout the course of my skeptical career, have rejected this like perfect being the enemy of the good approach of it's we have to have a purist method, either, we have to have a purist message.

Either you're pushing, you know, hardcore atheism or nothing.

You know what I mean?

It's got to be, like, there's no room for for anything in the middle.

And I've heard, you know, the term gets thrown around like you're an accommodationist, right?

If you

do anything other than promote a purist approach, which I disagree with, it's not accommodationist.

If you're trying to meet people where they are.

And right, you think about it.

If you could, you know, turn somebody from a radicalized fundamentalist, you know, religious believer into a deist, you know, who believes in God, but is, you know, takes a more scholarly intellectual approach to theology and how that applies to the world, you know, doesn't mix their religion into science, all that stuff.

Would that be a positive change?

Of course it would be.

Of course, it would.

Yeah, you're not going to say we're not doing that just because either you're an atheist or get away from me.

You know what I mean?

What's the point of that?

Yeah, I also can't stand this like this mentality within the skeptical movement that

being a firebrand atheist is, like, the best way to prove that you're a skeptic.

Like, there are tons of skeptically oriented scientists who are also religious.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And they're good at their jobs.

You know what I mean?

Like,

I think that's a

minority of the skeptical community, Kara.

I think it is now the minority.

I do not think it was when I first started.

Well, I think you might be confusing, though, because the thing is, like, the humanist, the atheist, and the skeptical communities kind of all overlap a lot.

And there are people in the skeptical community who are really humanist, or they're also humanists or atheists.

And sometimes they're atheists first.

And again, that's fine, but they're the ones who are more likely to have that kind of attitude where, like, the atheism is more important to them than scientific skepticism.

Yes, but like, you know, yes, it's intersectional.

And I would define myself that way.

I am atheist first.

I actually came to atheism long before I came to science and skepticism.

And I really do wear that hat heavily.

But I also am not the type of atheist who thinks everybody should be atheist.

Right.

It's just a weird mentality to me.

Yeah, I mean, our approach has always been at the Skeptics Guide, the Mayland Skeptical Society, ever since we've been activists, is like, we don't really care what your faith is.

Like, that's not our business, and it doesn't really affect anything necessarily.

What we care is that you don't use faith to trump science, logic, or reason, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, it is incompatible with fundamental Fundamentalist belief, yeah.

But if you want some unfalsifiable deist belief, I mean, I disagree with that philosophically.

That's not what I believe.

I will argue with you about it philosophically, but it's not like I feel like I need to be an activist to make people not have that belief.

I just don't want people to deny evolution, to deny, you know, to deny science in the name of their religion, to

oppress people in the name of their religion.

You know, absolutely.

There's a massive difference between promoting an ideology, or I should even say like a phenomenology, like promoting a way of thinking that makes the world better, right?

Promoting a way of thinking that improves public policy, that improves public health, that improves safety, and promoting an ideology that, for example, doesn't.

Like the thing that's just so confusing to me is when people care if somebody has a personal faith relationship.

Like that doesn't affect anything.

Not anything.

Yeah, if somebody denies science, that affects the world.

But if somebody has a personal faith relationship, that doesn't affect anything.

If somebody is fundamentalist, if somebody is engaging in organized religion and utilizing it for social control, that's a different question.

But that's not what we're talking about.

Right.

And not for nothing, and this is a discussion I've been having again with my fellow atheists, skeptics, humanists for 30 years, is even if it is your goal to move people away from faith, your approach doesn't really work.

The approach of like beating their faith out of them, like, you know, metaphorically.

Nope, they entrench.

Yeah, they is not a good approach.

The approach of, you know, let's give you some critical thinking skills and appreciate why science says what it says and et cetera, et cetera.

And eventually, if they're going to

get rid of their faith, they're going to surrender it because you gave them the alternative worldview and the tools to do that, not because you bashed religious belief and faith.

And the last 30 years of research has, I think, supported that position.

Yeah.

And even, and the truth of the matter is that a skeptical mindset will not ever replace faith for some people.

Right, sure.

And I think that's the toolkit won't necessarily completely lead them to that place.

place because there's a whole other component of faith that has nothing to do with what we're talking about.

But it has a far better chance than religious ideas.

Oh, absolutely.

It's bad.

You got to get rid of it.

Yeah.

And that's like the Dunning, the David Dunning idea of like, it's not just that people have these blank minds, it's that they have ideas.

And if you can't replace them with something else, if there's not a good alternative appropriate for them to kind of put on for size, they're never going to be.

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We're going to abandon those core beliefs.

And the problem with viewing atheism that way is that that's a lack of belief.

I can't replace your deism with my lack of deism.

Yeah,

I mean, but I will push back on that a little bit because

you are technically correct.

Atheism itself is a lack of belief.

But we do fill that space with a philosophical and science-based and rational approach to thinking about the universe and existence and morality.

Well, I think you do, but I think there are plenty of atheists out there who are not scientific skeptics.

Well, I know that.

Believe me.

Yeah, so I think they just don't need faith.

But I'm saying, but the thing is, if you give people those things,

their need for faith goes down, in my opinion.

Does that make sense?

I think that that is true, but I don't think

it takes it to zero.

I think that

faith serves a purpose for plenty of people that is far beyond what we're talking about.

And I don't care if it takes it to zero, because again, if you get rid of all the negative aspects of it, what are you left with?

Just a personal faith?

Okay, good for you.

Who cares?

Exactly.

We all have different, like, I'm very existential in my philosophical leanings.

Like, I don't expect you to be that way.

Good.

You know, it's like,

yeah, like, what does that matter to me?

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Yeah, we are agreeing with each other.

You got to do the Indiana Jones thing, you know, when he has the statue and the bag of sand.

You got to put something else there.

You got to like swap him out.

You know, yeah, that didn't work yet.

Yeah, but that worked, you know.

But it almost worked.

He almost got run over the board.

He had got crushed.

But that's old college try.

Yeah, okay.

Anyway, good question.

I like that question.

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 real and one one fake.

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

Just got three news items this week.

This is a hard week to find news items for science or facts.

It took me a long time this week.

Are you ready?

Yes.

All right, here we go.

Item number one.

In a recent survey, 86% of climate experts expressed belief that we will experience greater than 2 degrees C of warming by 2100, with a median estimate of 2.7 C, a level projected to have catastrophic consequences.

I number two, a CRISPR-like gene editing system, once thought exclusive to prokaryotes, was recently identified in eukaryotic cells.

And iron number three, a recent AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our Sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Evan, go first.

Okay, we have a survey, a recent survey, 86% of climate experts express belief that we will experience greater than 2 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100.

This is terrible.

And I guess that median estimate of 2.7 degrees Celsius and, yeah, catastrophic consequences.

Well, I mean, this is the one you want to be fiction, I think, right, of these three.

It's not going to be, unfortunately.

I see nothing here that would make me think that this is obviously fiction.

Okay, Okay, so I'm going to move on.

Number two about the CRISPR-like.

CRISPR-like gene editing system?

Wait a minute.

Have we talked about other gene editing systems other than those CRISPR ones?

I don't recall.

Once thought exclusive to prokaryotes was recently identified in eukaryotic cells.

I don't know.

This is very

new, and I'm very ignorant about this.

So I don't have a good sense for it at all.

And then let me see what I can find it in the last one.

Recent AI-powered simulation,

and this is about exoplanets, F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy.

Don't those usually happen around what, the red dwarfs, the

most Earth-like planets?

Not, which are, I think, smaller, but the planets are closer to them.

Right?

So, this is kind of different.

So, you're first, so I'll clarify: by Earth-like, I mean completely Earth-like.

So, like, a tidally locked planet would not qualify

as Earth-like.

Oh, okay.

Well, I mean,

I'm most ignorant about this CRISPR-like gene editing system.

I don't even, again, I don't recall us ever talking about a gene editing system other than CRISPR.

I really know nothing about that one.

And

the exoplanet one.

I'll just say the CRISPR one is fiction.

I wish I had a better reason as to why, but it's just because I'm ignorant.

Okay, Jay.

You know, with this first one here,

you were saying that climate experts are saying that we will experience a

two degrees Celsius warming by 2100.

I mean, I thought that we were going to get there sooner than that.

That's a long way off.

2100 is a very long way off.

So I'm not sure about that one.

Number two, the CRISPR-like gene editing system.

So Steve, again, the difference between those two types of cells is what?

Prokaryotes are like bacteria, eukaryotes are us, multicellular creatures.

Yeah, like a function.

And plants and fungus.

And nucleus is one of the key differences.

Oh, I mean, so I'm not clear about what that difference is, though.

So the first one means that CRISPR can edit.

No.

Explain it to me.

I'm just not kidding.

CRISPR

was derived from bacteria.

Correct.

Right?

Bacteria are prokaryotes.

Right.

So it's the CRISPR was a bacterial system that is now used for gene technology.

Gotcha.

So they found that system in creatures like us, not in bacteria.

Yes.

That's the claim here.

Okay.

Got it.

That makes perfect sense.

All right.

So this CRISPR one, for sure, I mean, I think it makes sense that if it exists in bacteria-sized creatures, why wouldn't it exist in human-sized creatures?

I know that there's a massive difference between bacteria and

a super large organism like a human.

But still,

it's all like, it just seems to make sense that the cells would need to do things like this over time.

So I don't know, I'm feeling like that one is science.

And this AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets.

Okay, so

that one doesn't seem that remarkable either right these are stars that are slightly larger than earth uh earth's sun our sun and they're more likely to have earth-like planets okay i just don't see what what the big deal is with that that one seems like it's not a strange thing or out of out of bounds of what i'm typically used to reading here on you know in in this uh segment so okay

That means that the first one, which I was, you know, not too happy about to begin with, this is the global warming one.

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

Okay, Bob.

Really?

The first one?

Yep.

That one seems totally, totally correct to me.

Yeah, I get what you're saying.

2,100.

I thought maybe we were going to hit 2 degrees a little before then.

But no, 2,100, that's kind of like the iconic date for some of these estimates.

And yeah, 27 catastrophically, yeah, we're totally going to hit that.

So that makes way too much sense to me.

Let's see, the CRISPR one, this one makes sense too.

It wouldn't surprise me that

they would identify some bizarre CRISPR-like gene editing system in

Prokaryotes.

So yeah, I could totally see that see that happening.

And the same with 3 here, with its F-type star.

So it's really

for me it's a coin toss between the CRISPR and the F F-type stars.

They both seem reasonable.

I don't think we have enough data points necessarily to to conclude um what kind of type of star would host more Earth-like planets.

Um I mean we've got well I know we've got like what four thousand last time I checked four four or five thousand exoplanets discovered but uh still that's still a tiny tiny number compared to what the what the real numbers are in terms of exoplanets and in our galaxy alone.

So it's but still this is what the uh you know based on the current exoplanet data, that's what the AI came up with apparently.

And that kind of that you know wouldn't surprise me.

But

I'm kind of thinking it might be less massive than our sun.

So I'll just say that's fiction.

Whoa.

Three.

Not for the first time, Kara.

The boys are all over the place, so you're the tiebreaker.

Okay, so one each.

One each.

Okay.

Yeah, because I also am having the same struggle where they all seem reasonable.

I think the one that's the coolest to me is the CRISPR one, but I also think, like, yeah, of course, eukaryotic genes are going to be edited as well.

So, why wouldn't we have some sort of, you know, interesting mechanism that's similar?

Plus, we evolved from prokaryotes.

So, wouldn't we have evolved some sort of system that's similar, or maybe more complicated, but you know, has the same kind of core roots?

So, that one is the coolest in some ways to me, and maybe the least,

I don't know.

But

I think that one's science.

I'm going to be really annoyed if the climate one is the fiction.

Yeah, because

it's like

it's such a duh thing, but

I have to say it's science, like unless just some of the numbers are off, but I just don't think they would be off by that much.

Yeah, right now dramatically.

Well, I'll get mad at Jay if he wins.

The one I just don't, I don't know enough about is the F-type stars one.

And my guess would be that AI-powered simulation data would show, sorry, what types of stars the sun?

G?

G yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

My assumption is that they would be like, well, where are we more likely to find Earths?

Around suns.

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

And maybe they found that G-type stars were more likely.

Who knows?

Okay, so I guess I'll take these in order.

We'll start with number one.

In a recent survey, 86% of climate experts expressed belief that we will experience greater than 2.0 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100 with a median estimate of 2.7 C, a level projected to have catastrophic consequences.

Catastrophic.

You think this one is the fiction.

Everyone else thinks this one is obvious science.

And this one is

science.

This is science.

Yeah.

Seven.

I mean, in a way, we'd be celebrating if it was the fiction.

I would think.

Yeah, but what, like, yeah, we don't know.

Depending on what the truth is.

So again, this is just a survey.

This is not like a study or anything.

This is just asking

experts who know the data.

Their assessment of the data is.

And, Jay,

my interpretation is not that they're saying that we won't cross 2.0 C until 2100.

It's just that by 2100, we will have crossed 2.0.

So, it could be any time between now and 210.

No, that's not cool because that's

exactly what it says.

With a median estimate of 2.7, you know, by 2100.

They think, yeah, at 2100, the median estimate was 2.7.

So what do they mean by catastrophic?

I don't remember any details of like...

Well, that's when you get to tipping points.

And if we get to 2.7, we'll probably end up at 6, you know, and that's when everything melts.

That's bad.

2.7 would be bad.

So yeah, this is what they think.

But

again, this is not a prediction so much as this is

what they think is the most likely to happen.

In other words, there's not like a

scientific projection or anything.

They're just saying

because a lot of this includes their estimates of how they think, what they think the world is going to do, right?

This is not like if A and B and C, then this will happen.

This is just, yeah, this is what we think is going to happen based upon how we think politics is going.

You know what I mean?

That's factored in here as well.

True.

But a lot of them do think on the positive, they do think we will reach net zero by the second half of this century, which is good.

So it's just going to take longer, though, to get to net zero and to turn that curve around.

Yeah, it's going to be too late.

By 2100, we'll probably still be close to our peak, which is not good.

So we have to do more and we got to do it faster in order to prevent these scenarios.

I am sorry, future grandkids and great-grandkids.

Really, really sorry.

All right, item number two, a CRISPR-like gene editing system, once thought exclusive to prokaryotes, was recently identified in eukaryotic cells.

Evan, you think this one is the fiction?

Everyone else

thinks this one is science.

So there are reasons why the scientists thought that a CRISPR-like RNA-guided endonucleases were exclusive to prokaryotes, because they probably evolved from things that bacteria do that eukaryotes don't do, right?

Like exchanging DNA, etc.

So they were a little bit surprised when they did find that it exists in eukaryotic cells, because this one is science.

Actually,

this is a follow-up study where they're looking at the anatomy of these systems.

So they basically found that there are two clades, if you will, of these eukaryotic-based gene editing systems, Fanzor 1 and Fanzor 2.

That's F-A-N-Z-O-R.

So the new study is a cryoelectron microscopy looking at the structure of fans or zoo in a specific cell type.

And they're just looking at the architecture and trying to understand how it works.

So this is still early days because we've only, you know, this has only been discovered fairly recently.

But

yeah, but this could eventually become a

gene editing system that we can use, you know, clinically or in research.

It's a eukaryote-based gene editing system.

Cool.

Yeah.

All this means that.

I know Jay's really excited.

All this means that a recent AI-powered simulation based upon current exoplanet data finds that F-type stars, which are slightly more massive than our Sun, are likely to host the greatest number of Earth-like planets in our galaxy, is the fiction because the study wasn't even about that.

You just made it up.

Is that one?

No, no, it is based, it's loosely based upon a paper that was published by some astronomers who were just kind of, you know, speculating about the kinds of stars that might have life on it.

Now, planets that are, you know, in the habitable zone.

They focused on F

so they basically were trying to say, is there any possibility that F-type stars may have life?

The the reason to be pessimistic about that is because the remember, the bigger the star, the more massive the star, the shorter their lifespan.

And so these stars would not survive as long, which is why they're not going to have the most.

Because it's essentially, you have to think, you could do this calculation.

You have to figure out what's the probability of

having a planet in the habitable zone, which is partly based upon how big the habitable zone is.

And also, is it far enough away that you could be in the habitable zone and not be tidally locked, right?

So they're saying, well, we haven't really been considering F-type stars as host stars for life because they're too short-lived.

But they said, but you know, their habitable zone is big.

It's bigger than, say, a Sun-like star.

And there might be more opportunity for life to arise around an F-type star.

And they could arise around moons orbiting...

Jovian, you know, or Jupiter-like planets.

So they were just speculating about that, but there's no calculation right there.

I made all that AI-powered stuff up.

And

we've talked about this before, actually.

So, if you remember our previous discussion where astronomers did calculate which type of star is likely to have the most Earth-like planets, and it's slightly smaller stars, as Bob said,

or orange stars, because they're big enough and bright enough to have a good habitable zone, but they are way longer-lived than the yellow sun of the Earth.

They might live for 15 to 20 billion years, for example.

Wow, that long.

But they're not so small that they're red dwarfs, and you'd have to be tidally locked to be in the habitable zone.

So

the orange stars may be in the sweet spot, right?

So just a little bit smaller than Earth is probably where the sweet spot is, not bigger than Earth.

Bigger than, bigger than our sun, yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, so there was a way to figure out that that one was the fiction.

All right, well, good job, Bob and Kara.

Thanks, Bob.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

You know what, Evan?

Give us a really old, crusty quote.

Wait, wait.

Before I give you a really old, crusty quote, I'm about to do it.

I want to segue from the last segment to this.

Is there such a thing as an F-type planet?

I don't think we name planets that way.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Our planet seems pretty effed.

All right.

Isn't there an M-class on Star Trek on Star Trek?

Totally worth this.

All right, a crusty old quote.

So this one was suggested by a listener's name Patrick.

Last initial L.

Thank you, Patrick.

And back on August 8th of 2014, Patrick suggested this quote to us.

So I'm catching up with some old emails here.

2014.

2014, 10 years ago, they were suggesting this one.

That's awesome.

Beware of false knowledge.

It is more dangerous than ignorance.

The legendary George Bernard Shaw.

Yeah, that's a good question.

Infinitely quotable.

Oh, my gosh.

I had to look this up to make sure we had not used this particular one before.

We had used so many great ones before, but we had not.

And we've expressed this sentiment.

This is, ironically, what Kara was just saying about the Don Kruger

idea that it's not ignorance that's the problem.

It's the illusion of knowledge.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

People's brains are not blank slates.

They're filled with false information and narratives and beliefs and et etc.

So true.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Sure, man.

Thank you, Steve.

Steve.

Thanks, Steve.

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

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