The Skeptics Guide #1052 - Sep 6 2025

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

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

Today is Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

Event Bernstein.

Hello, everyone.

And George Robb.

See you in September.

This is September.

Hi, everyone.

Everybody's great to have you on the show.

Oh, nice to be here, even though I'm here and you're there, but still, the idea of us being here together is what it's all about.

Virtually here, basically.

I'm really way over here.

It's true.

I can see you from here.

I can see your house from here.

Don't get me wrong.

Sarah Palin reference.

It's a very old joke.

So, George, we wanted to have you join us just partly because we love having you on the show, and you're going to join us for the whole show.

But two and a half weeks from now,

two weeks from when the show comes out, we are going to be together in Lawrence, Kansas.

Kansas?

Have you built a show in a while?

It's going to be a lot of fun.

Okay, who amongst us has been to Kansas before?

Because I have not.

I don't think I have.

I don't quite remember, though.

Why?

And you were there.

And you were there.

Seriously, right?

How many Wizard of Oz references can we throw in to this trip?

I'm excited.

I'm excited.

I think it's going to be really cool because it's like the kind of place you go where I think the people that are going to be at these shows are going to be really into it and appreciative of this kind of science island arriving, perhaps.

Much like the wizard in the balloon stopping by for a few minutes to be like, it's okay.

We're all on the same team.

Yay.

Yeah, so we're doing a extravaganza.

That's the nighttime show.

That's the nighttime show.

We change that every time we do it.

We change at least one little thing about it.

We keep iterating it, and it keeps getting better.

People ask us, like, what is this show?

What do you guys do?

Basically, it is an improv show where George has all these different things that he throws at us that we know the game, but we don't know the specifics of what it is.

So, for example, would be we do a thing called freeze frame, which George and the audience secretly pick out a movie.

And then all of us but one know we're going to be told what the movie is, and they have to freeze their bodies in a position.

So, the person that doesn't know what the movie is, let's say it's Bob, he's backstage, he comes out and he sees all of us standing in this weird position.

He has to figure out what the movie is.

So it's like we don't know what the movie is going to be and we don't know what any of it's going to be.

And it's crazy and it's awesome and it's fun for us and it's fun for the audience because we're doing some

crazy stuff, Steve.

Remember when your pants fell down that year?

It was great.

And then also, we are teaching the audience about how they cannot trust their own senses.

And we fool the audience in so many different ways.

There's a lot of audience participation.

There is.

Yeah, we're going to have you doing all kinds of interesting stuff.

To me, the whole show is about showing you how your brain is really good at some things and your brain is really bad at some other things and doing it in the most fun and interactive way we possibly can.

Audiences love it.

I mean, we get a really good response when we do it.

We're always excited when we do it, and people seem to really dig it.

And like Steve said, it's different every time.

It's different every time, even the same games that we do, because the games are set up to be different, even if you've seen the show before.

It's a very different experience every single time.

And then we're going to do a private show, but it's really more than a private show.

We call it the private show plus.

It's at least three hours, but it'll be more than that.

And in the middle, we record a live recording of the SGU, but around that we do just a whole bunch of interactive stuff with the audience.

And that changes every time, too.

We just sort of decide, what are we going to do this time?

But it's always fun, sort of interactive games.

And George, you're going to give us a little bit of a demonstration of one of the games that we play during.

this episode.

Yeah, later on in this episode, we're going to play a little bit just to give you sort of a hint of what's going to be happening.

It's like, like you said, there's this chunk of it that is just a regular podcast.

Not that there's anything regular about this podcast.

It's a little regular.

It's a sort of off-the-rails recording of the show, which is really fun to see because out of the two plus hours, let's say, that

is recorded, it usually ends up being in an hour and a half show-wise.

So there's all this extra little sort of behind-the-scenes stuff.

And then we have on top of that some games that we play, stuff that also involves the audience in a cool way.

It involves the rogues in a cool way.

And it's a lot of fun.

And we're going to have a little sneak preview today in this episode.

Yeah, those shows are a lot of fun.

So get your tickets while you can, because there's still how much space is left.

They're going quick.

Jay, how do they go quick?

How do people get tickets?

Well, there's one particular way, George, that people get tickets here.

It's a little complicated to see if you can follow along.

You go slowly.

You got to go.

So you go or I go?

Or just one goes?

They.

It's always they go.

They.

Okay, they go.

They have to go to the skepticsguide.org, the website.

Okay, and then not the physical store, the website.

Yeah, not the store.

Yeah, no, they go there.

There is a link there for both of the shows.

The private show plus is going to happen, I think our star time is at noon, and that'll run from noon to 3-ish.

And then the nighttime show starts at 8 p.m.

I think VIP starts at 6, but all this will be clarified in emails that I'll be sending out to everyone soon.

Tickets are absolutely available.

We would love to have you out there.

You know, the private show plus situation, though, George.

Yeah.

That one, you know, this is the thing I tell people, but they don't really know it until they've come and then they go, oh, yeah, now I get it.

The thing is, we do a show, sure.

We do a live recording of the SGU, but everything is off the rails from the get-go.

You know, because we're in the space with people and it's a more intimate situation, like we're joking around more, we're saying things that we don't say

while we record at home individually over here.

Like, it's just, you know, when we're in a room together, there's a lot more chemistry happening and it's a ton of fun.

Plus, you're, you know, you're there, which is going to make it even more entertaining.

Well, that's very sweet of you to say.

It's a behind-the-veil kind of look at the process of the whole thing.

Plus, I mean, look, just one segment that we're doing.

You've all been to Q ⁇ As before.

You know, you have the podcast Q ⁇ As, you have the celebrity Q ⁇ As.

We have a Q ⁇ A that is going to be the most original, different, fantastic Q ⁇ A you've ever been involved in.

We are guaranteeing this is going to be the most interesting Q ⁇ A.

We came up with this the other day.

It was like a bolt of lightning hit all of us.

we went oh my gosh this is the way we're going to do it so if if for nothing else come to that q a that's going to be really really special and different we're excited for that all right let's move on with the show we got a lot of great content for you coming up bob you're going to start us off with real interstellar technosignatures yes thank you steve this is your cookie with bob um guys you know you know there's so much nonsense out there lately about interstellar comets and asteroids being alien technology and i'm just getting increasingly frustrated with people like Avi Loeb and now, also, apparently, apparently, Michio Kaku, who's also now chiming in with similar nonsense.

It's like so ridiculous.

Didn't he learn anything from us when he was on our show many years ago?

Oh my god, no, it was no.

It was therefore, therefore, very refreshing just recently to see a paper out there spelling out the actual red flags that would make me and real scientists sit up and take notice.

Like, whoa, what's going on over over here?

So, this is a new paper that was recently published in the archive server called Technosignature Searches of Interstellar Objects.

Very straightforward.

So, this was led by James Davenport from the Dirac Institute at the University of Washington.

So, ultimately, this is a search for technosignatures, right?

Direct evidence of technology being used by some extraterrestrial life, some alien life out there.

Now, this paper specifically addresses four technosignatures for ISOs, ISOS.

That stands for interstellar objects.

Okay, so that's the context.

So, this is a quickie, so let's just cut to the chase and I'll stop rambling here.

The first category here is described as acceleration anomalies, and this is this is, I think, is one of the most important ones.

So, this is primarily deviations from an expected orbital path, right?

Unexplainable by known natural processes like outgassing, radiation pressure, and there's lots of other

subtle, you know, subtle ways that objects in space can move non-gravitationally that don't imply an engine pushing something.

It's just like slightly weird trajectories, but they are easily explainable and they are real.

So one famous example for this is one eye, Omuomua.

This had a weird, seemed to have a weird trajectory.

And we really just didn't get enough observing time to pin down exactly what was happening.

Of course, Avi Loeb was chiming in saying that this was a major example, a major red flag, this to be an alien ship, which is ridiculous.

Nobody, no one reasonable in my mind, thinks that Omuomura was not natural.

This was just something we caught at the tail end of its orbit, you know, that we could easily observe, and we just didn't have enough time.

We don't know exactly what was going on, but we have a decent idea.

Okay, now the hallmark of this option, this category, these acceleration anomalies, isn't subtle in my mind, right?

Any subtle motions that we can't immediately explain are probably going to be natural, right?

There's something that will, oh, we'll figure it out.

It's just very subtle.

I mean, what was that probe that we sent out?

Yeah, I was thinking about Pioneer.

Yeah, one of our own probes

had anomalous acceleration we couldn't figure out for years.

Yeah.

Just slight subtle accelerations like Amuamua had, which was probably just outcasting and we just didn't know where it was coming from.

Right, exactly.

You don't need to hypothesize alien

nuclear engines to explain that.

But if it's doing major course corrections in a way that's beyond what, even beyond the possibility of a natural explanation, then that is convincing.

Right.

So to me, that would be the hallmark of this first category, this acceleration anomaly.

It's a sudden non-gravitational acceleration that's clearly unnatural,

perhaps caused by some advanced thruster.

Who knows?

Seeing this, and I mean, if it changes its orbit or speeds up or even slows down dramatically,

I think that would be enough to say, whoa, this could seriously be something artificial because this was dramatically beyond anything we would expect naturally.

So that's category one.

Number two was strange colors or spectra.

So here we're looking for non-natural colors or reflectance.

Okay, this could indicate some weird coatings or paints or even or even glass.

Another option in this category would be something like if we see an extra infrared glow.

This could be suspicious waste heat, you know, for example.

To detect this kind of stuff, spectroscopy could help us with this category.

Potentially to find unknown chemicals or even alien laser emissions potentially would be in this category.

That was two.

Number three was odd shapes in space.

This one was an interesting category.

So if something that we detect is incredibly thin, like a solar sail, say, or even something that was shaped like a cylinder, then this would be a huge clue.

Unfortunately, though, I don't think at these distances that we're talking about, we might not, even if it was a solar sail or a cylinder, we might not get close enough to have that one image that clearly shows that.

But there are other clues or hints that we could get.

If we saw something like unusual brightness changes or unusual rotation patterns or even light curves, weird light curves, any of those could indicate that we may have an object out there that

has an artificial shape that is causing those anomalies.

So that's number three.

Number four, this final one is transmissions or emissions.

So this would probably be one of the easiest technosignatures to detect from an ISO in our solar system.

I mean, we're talking about detecting potentially just EM radiation.

Like, for example, the classic one is the narrowband radio transmissions that SETI often is looking for.

Now, this would be

trivial for us.

We've been doing this for many, many decades.

So these signals, these narrowband radio transmissions are prioritized because these would be ideal communication frequencies for long distance with minimal interference from the interstellar medium.

It just sails right through with very little interference.

We've looked for those frequencies because it's ideal.

If you're, you know, a technology that uses electromagnetism to communicate and study the universe, that's probably what you would use.

But, of course, if this is an alien spacecraft and it is communicating in something like subneutrino axion fields oscillating at Planck scale harmonics, then we would never detect it and

we would never know.

So I'll end with that.

This has been your non-Avi Loeb quickie with Bob.

Back to you, Steve.

Bob, what about a warp signature?

Oh, my God.

Maybe we'll add a category five, or maybe would that fit under, yeah, that would probably fit under acceleration anomalies.

Or they're hailing us.

I guess that's transmissions.

That's category four, yeah.

Transmissions or emissions.

So yeah, so this is the stuff we should be talking about.

None of this nonsense.

Oh my God, look, it's going by Jupiter and Saturn.

That's got to be intentional.

That is clear signs of an intelligence.

Give me a break.

You got to sell books, Bob.

It's about selling those books.

Yeah, that's what it seems like to me.

It's so frustrating.

Dude, come on, please do some.

Listen to our podcast.

How about that?

Listen to that.

Get some critical

start there, Bill.

All right, Jay, tell us about sexless seeds.

Well, Steve, I have a question for you.

Yes.

Do you know how the Cavendish banana crop is grown?

Yeah, I do.

Well, go ahead.

So, because

each banana plant is a clone, right?

So you have to take actually

a clipping from the corn, you know, of one banana plant and plant that, and that becomes another banana plant.

Those are the offshoots, and they're called suckers.

Yeah.

And I didn't make that up.

Yeah, so that's essentially similar to what I'm about to talk to you about.

There's a nice and obvious benefit to doing this.

One, because you can pretty much predict what the flavor is going to taste like, its consistency, how long will it take to, you know, how long will it last during shipping?

You know, they know all these numbers now because they're dealing with the same exact fruit every time.

But, and I know you know this, Steve, there's a dark side, right?

There's a downside too.

The downside is really bad.

And it's not as bad.

It's not quite as bad as Steve's cats peeing in his banana plants in the SGU studio.

No.

That

almost destroyed George's live stream show that we were doing that night.

But I won't digress.

I don't need to go there because George knows what the hell I'm talking about.

I do.

It was bad.

I do.

So in the mid-1900s, there was a fungus called Panama disease, and it nearly took out all the Gro-Michel bananas, which were the bananas that people were eating before they decided to switch over to the Cavendish.

And now there's a new strain of the same fungus.

It's called tropical race 4, and it's spreading around the globe because every Cavendish is genetically identical.

So once the fungus strikes, you know, once the fungus figured out what version of itself was going to work, it's starting to tear through plantations like wildfire around the world, and there's no diversity diversity to slow it down.

That's bad.

Right now, scientists are trying to create that same kind of situation on purpose, but with more guardrails up.

So the idea is, and this starts in eastern Australia, there's a crop of sorghum, which it will soon sprout.

It's under a mesh tent, and it looks pretty ordinary, but these plants are nothing but groundbreaking, and there's a massive modification to them because they will reproduce without sex.

Now, this is plant sex.

I'm sure you can find that, like other kinds of sex, on the internet if you're interested to see about it.

The process is called, Catch me, am I right here?

Apomyxis, Steve?

Apomyxis.

Apomyxis.

Okay.

So their seeds grow without fertilization.

They produce perfect genetic clones of the parent plant.

And it's pretty much the same outcome as the bananas, right?

But the seeds form rather than like these offshoot cuttings.

And that's the way that they would reproduce those plants.

A scientist called Anna Kolotunau, she's at the University of Queensland, and she's been working towards this for three decades.

She began studying wild plants like dandelions that naturally reproduce this way, which I didn't know.

I think that's pretty cool.

So her team has actually engineered the process into a major food crop.

Their experimental strain is called high-gain sorghum, and if it works, every flower head could produce thousands of cloned seeds.

And there are major players involved in this.

They're circling, right?

You have a company called Carteva AgriScience.

This is one of the world's biggest seed companies, and they happen to be a partner in the project.

And also, the Gaines Foundation is backing similar efforts because there's a huge potential here to help

small-scale farmers in the sub-Saharan Africa region where access to reliable seeds could mean the difference between feeding people and survival and a famine, which happens over and over again.

Most commercial seeds today are actually hybrids.

That's a statement.

They happen for a long time.

That was Jay.

As I'd like to point out, before the first GMOs came on the market, like 98% of seeds planted in the U.S.

were hybrids.

Hybrid.

That's right.

So farmers, Steve, come on, get serious.

Farmers buy them.

They buy them because they deliver high yields, which is exactly what farmers want.

Those Those benefits though disappear in the next generation due to genetic reshuffling, right?

So you can't, it's not like going to last forever.

It happens during that one season of planting and then it, you know, they start to lose the traits that you want.

This forces farmers to buy new seeds every year, which, you know, isn't really a bad thing, if you think about it.

There's a big, you know, business around seeds and companies are involved and there's genetic patents and all this stuff.

It's a whole other story that we could go into at some point.

But

it does require farmers to buy seeds every year.

ApoMixis, like I said, changes the rules.

Farmers could save seeds and they can replant them without losing the performance, which is the desired traits that they want from the plant.

And this would break them free of an expensive seed buying cycle.

So for companies like Corteva, it's a chance to rapidly fix these desirable traits into new varieties, which would speed up development.

It'll cut costs.

It all seems really, really nice.

And, you know, so again, this isn't just science.

There's a lot of economics mixed in with this.

And I dare say that there's always economics mixed in with big science.

So the banana story, getting back to that, it is like a dark cloud that hangs over all of this.

So when every plant is genetically identical, a single pest or disease can devastate those plants.

It could be in an entire region or it could be globally.

So this uniformity can bring stability on one hand, which a lot of things that we want, again, like I said, the size of the fruit and the taste and the shipping and all that stuff, but it also creates a new vulnerability that we have to calculate into this expression.

But Jay, it's not a new vulnerability.

It already exists.

We already have monocropping.

We're already planting uniform hybrid seeds.

They're just difficult to make, and they only last that first generation.

The hybrid traits don't breed true because now you get a random assortment of

matchup of genes.

This is really just going to leave us in the same place, just a lot cheaper to propagate these hybrid plants.

You don't have to hybridize them each generation.

Once you make them, they just clone themselves indefinitely.

The hope is, so the way I see it, there's two real benefits here.

As you said,

for farmers who don't have the money to buy seeds every year, they could potentially save and replant their own seeds.

But also, the hope is that they just get a new genetic strain every season.

Exactly.

It makes it so much cheaper that we can have a lot of different hybrids so that we're not all planting the same one, right?

So if you lower the cost of generating new seeds, that increases the genetic diversity of the plants that we plant, of the crops that we plant.

It's really expensive that a few companies dominate and they have their signature seeds, they don't have as much biodiversity.

I think the same is true of GMOs.

Most of the cost is in the regulation.

And by having the regulation so intense, it really makes it only profitable for a few mega corporations.

The small startups have a hard time.

So making the development and marketing process as cheap as possible actually opens it up to a lot of smaller companies and increases the variety of seeds that are out there.

Yeah, and hopefully as they develop this technology, they will do a thing.

Maybe it's on its cycle.

Maybe every three or four years they sell them a different strain.

You know, what would you call that?

Cultivar.

A different cultivar, which essentially is different genetics that would be variable enough that maybe wouldn't be susceptible to the same thing that the previous one did.

And if they can make that happen, this could put farming in the hands of more people.

It could lower the prices.

It could streamline a lot of things.

And again, another big fear that I have after learning about all this is that these big corporations don't want that because they want to make the money and they want to make a lot of money.

It's not like let's do what's best for the people and the world.

It's what the companies are going to do what's in their best interest.

Yeah, but companies, they don't own the plants and the cultivars and the seeds that are already out there.

But if they make a new hybrid, which is hard to do that, then they have a patent on that for a while.

But again, if you lower the threshold so that, say, a university or a government or an organization can make a hybrid with a stable trait, that then

to make more of them, all you got to do is plant them and collect the seeds, right?

Because the hybrid traits are stable because you're just cloning it.

Again, that's the point.

Now, you can just seeds reproduce themselves, right?

You can just mass produce them with the stable hybrid traits, and it won't be, it won't be, it will actually break the monopoly of the big corporations,

which is a good thing in that, you know, it gives us greater diversity, more competition, more startups, more other opportunities to do this.

So, anything, anytime, you know, you lower that cost and that threshold for getting something to market, getting it in the field, you know, that's in my that seems to me that that's a good thing.

Jay, there was one word you mispronounced.

What's that?

It's a sorghum.

Sorghum.

Yeah,

you have to say it that way.

Sorghum.

No, you just in Pennsylvania here, whenever, like, there's fields and fields of stuff.

It's corn, there's like sunflower.

It's like, but whenever I drive by a field and I see it, I point at the field and I go, oh, sorghum.

Why?

I don't know why.

It just makes me very happy.

It just makes me very happy.

You ask why, and that makes me think, do you even know George?

This is a guy that has infected me over and over and over again.

Well, this is a new infection, and I hope that whenever you see a field of anything, you'll go, oh, sorghum.

I don't say the number seven anymore.

I say salv.

I can't say it any other way.

It's been Georgified.

It's been Georgified.

So, folks out there, please pronounce it sorghum.

Do you know what it's used for?

Sorghum?

Sorghum.

For

gingham?

What?

No, I don't know.

Yeah, for filler, right?

For feed?

Yeah, it's animal feed, ethanol production, biofuel, but also just a gluten-free grain, which could be used in any way that grains are used.

You know, flour for traps or whatever.

Okay.

It's got a a lot of uses.

Actually, a really important crop.

You know, even though you don't, like, you never order sorghum at the restaurant.

You know what I mean?

Like, you know, it's not like.

Never order what?

Sorghum.

Sorghum.

Sorghum.

Okay.

Thank you.

You know what I mean?

I've never gone to the store and purchased a bag of sorghum.

Yeah,

but it's in a lot of the stuff that we eat, right?

Right.

All right.

Right.

Thanks, Jay.

Kara.

Yeah.

You ever had that friend, like a couple, a married couple,

and, you know, they have the same personality type.

Yeah, definitely.

And maybe sometimes even more than that.

You know, is that a thing?

Tell us about that.

That's definitely a thing.

We're going to talk about a very specific study, but to broaden out, I guess we could point to some really interesting research that as a psychologist, I had to study quite a lot of like why people are attracted to each other.

And it does seem to be the case that while the the number one predictor of attraction is, can anybody tell me?

The very first number one?

Face.

Face.

Smell.

Physical attractiveness.

Age.

Proximity.

Oh, yeah, that's right.

Yeah, that's kind of credit.

If you are around somebody a lot, you are more likely to be attracted to them.

Also, imagine.

I imagine there are evolutionary pressures involved in that.

The one you're with, right?

And there are others, though, right?

There are people are attracted to people who are like them, right?

People tend to be attracted to people who look like them, who sound like them.

There's even, unfortunately, a sibling.

Do you guys remember?

Oh, God, I'm getting into the weeds here.

But there's a documentary about this very unethical physician who donated his own sperm to a lot of women in his community.

And like, there are rules about how much sperm you can donate.

2,000 babies or something.

Yeah.

For that reason, there are all these children in the community, many of whom are related without knowing it, and many of whom found themselves dating

and then had to obviously take these DNA tests and learn about this.

But there is some good research that shows that people who are genetically related do tend to be more attracted to one another, very likely for this same reason, right?

But then isn't there also like the exotic factor where you could also be attracted to somebody who's very different from you?

Well, sure.

I mean,

anybody can be attracted to anybody.

But what we're talking about is not so much, let me figure out out the variance for you personally, but let me look at like global trends, right?

And so when I look across the board, people who are near each other tend to get together.

People who have things in common tend to get together.

Opposites actually don't tend to attract as often.

But that's only a part of what we're talking about today, because a new study that was published in Nature Human Behavior looked at almost 15 million people.

They looked at the records of many, many people in Taiwan, Denmark, and Sweden because they wanted to ask a simple question.

When somebody is diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, are they more or less likely to be partnered with somebody who also has a psychiatric disorder?

And they found that across the board, whether we're talking about different age cohorts, whether we're talking about Asian versus Scandy communities, that

people are significantly more likely to be diagnosed with the same or another psychiatric condition of their spouse.

Wow,

so

yeah, it's really interesting.

So, so when one partner is diagnosed with, so they looked at nine different conditions.

They looked at schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, anxiety, ADHD, autism, OCD, and substance use disorders, and also anorexia, nervosa.

And they found that spouses are more likely to have the same condition as their as their significant other than to have different ones but people are more likely to also have another psychiatric condition than not when comparing all of these different couples now this was a trend that was noticed in the literature or noticed by some researchers in Nordic countries but nobody had looked at it globally and so researchers from across those countries and here in the U.S.

namely in Tulsa in San Diego and in Los Angeles looked at these large databases from Taiwan.

Where else did I mention?

Sweden and from Denmark.

And they compared those databases to each other.

And they found that not only does the pattern hold across countries, across cultures, it also holds across generations.

So they looked at Taiwan specifically because they had access to richer data there, and they divided it into like 10-year cohorts.

So like the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s, all the way up to the 1990s.

And they found that the chances of partner sharing a diagnosis actually increased a little bit with each decade, especially around

substance use disorders, but that the pattern really did tend to hold.

The only place where they found some differences

in Taiwan, married couples were more likely to share an OCD diagnosis than in Nordic countries, for example.

But for the most part, they found that this held.

And so, you know, they didn't answer the question, why, but they speculated, as many researchers do, where they dig deep into an important question and they do a complex statistical analysis and they say, we can see this pattern, but now we've got to explain this pattern.

This is what we think, and maybe we should do more research to figure that out.

So I would ask the panel, the rogues, why do you think that people with a psychiatric diagnosis are more likely to be partnered with somebody with a psychiatric diagnosis.

Well, my question is: does it develop over time?

Like, the longer you are with someone, is your environment similar so that those kinds of behavioral things can emerge?

Or is it because if you have some condition within you, you inherently find another person equally attractive, or like you were brought up in a similar way?

Like the whole nature and nurture.

Right.

And you're touching on two of the reasons that the researchers did speculate.

One of them, they said, is that

here's a psychiatric geneticist named Jan Fullerton at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

She said that, you know, social and environmental stressors can contribute to a new diagnosis in a partner who is unaffected before, especially if they had mild or undiagnosed symptoms.

So let's say they had a tendency.

towards and then being around their partner who maybe was either untreated or was manifesting certain symptoms that may kind of have pushed them into a diagnostic category.

Another thing mentioned by the researchers is that obviously we're just attracted to people who are like us.

And so, you know,

I struggle with depression.

I tend to do well with people who understand that about me.

Maybe they understand that about me because they've dealt with it as well.

Kara, what about just the propinquity thing again?

Like literally meeting in the waiting room, you know, seeing your therapist.

My personal experience, like when I know couples who both have psychiatric diagnoses, that's almost always how they met.

Yep.

And that's they mentioned that as well.

Shared environment is a way to meet people, but also once you are in a shared environment, people tend to converge.

They just become more like each other the longer they're around each other.

And then finally, what about social stigma, right?

I mean, it's one thing when we're talking about depression, anxiety, you know, but if we're talking about more what we might call severe mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar one disorder, it can be difficult to date.

Just telling people that you're dealing with those conditions may make them concerned or there may be so much stigma that they don't want to engage.

But when you know other people, again, who are dealing with the same thing, who might take the same medications as you,

who understand what it's like to live with these mental health conditions, you may be more likely to be interested in sharing that time and space with somebody.

So, and this just reminds me of like just a very basic thing that almost every student of psychology is exposed to.

And I think physicians as well, Steve, which are these different models of thinking.

The first one, which it's almost like, I never think to use the word anymore because it's so ingrained in me, but this idea of a biopsychosocial model of wellness or of health, right?

That we are all made up of our biology, our psychology, and our social.

experiences.

And it's very hard to tease those things apart because they all influence each other.

And then finally, in psychology, we often talk about there being something called a diathesis stress model, which means that, yes, it is likely that we have predispositions, whether they be genetics, differences in our brain chemistry, personality types,

early childhood experiences.

And then there is the stress portion.

So you've got a diathesis already, and then you experience some form of stress, whether that's trauma or a chronic stress like poverty or discrimination or maybe drug use or some other form of stress.

And those things combined often lead to the onset of a mental health disorder.

And so you can see how having both the diathesis portion and the stress portion of that could also come into play when two people are spending a lot of time together.

But so it's really interesting.

I think the thing that surprised me the most, I don't think it actually surprised me that this was the outcome of this study.

I think the thing that surprised me the most is that it didn't, it hasn't seemed to change over time, even with massive advances.

I mean, they looked, the first first cohort was 1930 to 1940.

We didn't have antipsychotic drugs then.

Like, massive advances in mental health treatment, and yet these trends tend to hold.

So, that's pretty interesting.

Aaron Powell, the Madonna song, I'm Crazy For You, is more clinically accurate than we previously presumed?

It could be.

Yeah.

Not that it's pejorative, sorry.

And this also, I mean, like, because now you have the whole idea of dating and finding mates is very different now than it was in the 30s and 40s and even the 60s and 70s in terms of online dating.

And

it still doesn't matter.

You still find people that well, if anything, I would think it would get even more,

yeah.

I think so.

Because with online dating, and this is something I have quite a bit of experience with lately,

you can, you know, you do sometimes open up about certain things early on.

And especially the older that you get, the more you're like, I don't want to deal with somebody who's not aligned with me politically, ideologically, who doesn't understand like these things about my life.

And so people do.

They kind of share those things early.

Like there are checkboxes on dating profiles for things like neurodivergence.

People just, they wear those labels sometimes very proudly and they want to meet other people who get it.

And so I think that that probably does have a lot to do with this.

And if you go to like a big college or university, which most people who go to university do by definition,

there's tons of these sub-communities, right?

You will find your group of people who

are really in your very narrow, narrow sub-niche, you know?

Yeah.

And that

could also

align with psychiatric disorders.

Absolutely.

I think it's surprising.

What's surprising to me is not that this is the case now.

It's surprising to me that this was the case in like the 30s and the 40s.

Right.

When people were mostly marrying somebody who lived down the street, you know, or who they met at work.

Interesting.

All right.

Thanks, Kara.

Guys, I have more CRISPR news for you.

Oh, we got it.

We got it.

And it's good news.

Thanks for saving it, not saving it for science or fiction.

Yeah, I almost did, but no.

All right, so you know what the big limiting factor is on CRISPR.

And for those who need reminders, remembering what the acronym means.

Yes, what is the acronym, Evan?

Did you bring it up?

No, no.

Clustered.

Steve, can't do that.

Clustered regularly.

Regularly interface.

Regularly.

That's the one.

Short palindromic repeats.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, right, Steve, you are right.

Thank you.

Good job, Steve.

Thank you.

Oh, my goodness, Steve.

And that was from memory.

I don't have that in front of me.

So, CRISPR, if you need reminding, is now it's like 10 years old or something.

Technology.

Don't say that.

I know, right?

To more efficiently and cheaply edit genes, right?

You can silence a gene, you can make a SNP, you can insert a gene, you can do all kinds of things.

And it's really made it easier to do a lot more genetic research, and there's the potential for genetic treatments.

There's already two FDA-approved CRISPR treatments, both for blood-borne diseases like sickle cell and thalassemia.

both of which have something in common, which I've mentioned before.

You can take the cells out of the body, right, the bone marrow, do the CRISPR, and then put them back.

Why is that the case?

Why are the first two therapies targeting cells that you can remove from the body?

Because then you can just inject it.

Yeah,

it makes it easy to target those cells.

Yeah, you don't have to worry about a vector and something that you can do.

You know where they are, you know where they go.

Bam.

Right.

If you're trying to do CRISPR on tissue inside a living organism and you can't remove that tissue and put it back, you have to get the CRISPR to those cells.

Yes, you have to use a vector, but it needs to be specific to the cell.

This is the big limiting factor.

So we have this great tool, but we can't get it to the cells we want to get it to.

It's got to get to the right organ.

It's got to get to the right tissue within that organ.

It's got to get to the right cells within that tissue.

It's got to get into the cell.

It's got to get into the nucleus.

And it's got to make the genetic change.

And not just that, you don't want it to go to the cells.

You don't want it.

You want to go on target.

You don't want off-target changes.

And each step of the way, you lose a big chunk, right?

So you end up with sometimes less than 1%

of the cells that you're targeting actually get the genetic change you're looking for.

Something very tiny.

And therefore, that could limit the effect, the effectiveness of therapeutics.

And it also means that there are some things you just can't target.

So it narrows the scope and

it really limits the effectiveness of CRISPR.

The CRISPR itself is an amazing tool, but we can't get get it to the cells we need to get it to.

But now.

They solved it.

They totally solved that problem.

They did.

I mean, it's never a total solution, but there's been a lot of.

80%.

80%.

Give me a high number.

Significant advance.

There's been a significant advance.

So you remember, I've spoken before about LNPs.

What does that stand for?

Magellanic

people.

Lipid nanoparticles.

Remember?

Lipid nanoparticles.

LNP.

I thought you said NP.

No, LNP,

lipid nanoparticles.

So, this is a technology for delivering stuff to tissue in the body, right?

And you can use this to deliver drugs to cancer cells, you can use it to deliver CRISPR

to the cells you want to.

Yeah, they're little fat bubbles that can be designed to go to where you want them to go to.

They have the proteins on them that will bind to the receptors or whatever.

LNP, huge technology.

There's another technology that's similar

that is not

been approved for any specific use yet, but is in stage phase two clinical trials, and that is SNAs.

What does that stand for?

There are a lot of acronyms.

Small narrow.

That stands for spherical.

Spherical nucleic acids.

So this study involves LNP hyphen SNAs.

And what they did was they take the CRISPR, CRISPR, they put it inside an LNP, a lipid nanoparticle, and then they wrap the LNP in a spherical nucleic acid.

Oh, I thought it'd be the other way around, but okay, you're

sounds better.

So

you have basically all the tools you need, right?

The Cas9 enzymes, the guide RNA, DNA repair template, whatever you need to deliver to the cell in order to do the genetic change that you're interested in, wrapped in an LNP, right?

So that's the sort of capsule that delivers it all.

But then you coat that in the SNA, a spherical nucleic acid, and now what that does is that targets the cell that you're interested in and also helps it get into the cell.

Because the spherical nucleic acid, right, it's nucleic acid, it's DNA.

Yeah, it's code, yeah.

It's programmable.

You can ma you can make it into whatever you want.

So that means once you have this technology, you can program that DNA theoretically to target any cell population that you have.

But how does it get there?

But

how does it move?

What's the motility?

How does that work?

Well, that's different ways.

You can just inject it into the blood.

If that's what you do, if that works, or you can inject it into the organ or into spinal fluid or whatever.

You inject it into whatever the cavity is that you want it to get to.

And you get it nearby and it goes the final yard, the final mile.

All right.

All right.

So

in this proof-of-concept study, they found that the LNP SNAs entered cells three times more effectively than LNPs alone.

And

they increased the success rate of the CRISPR more than 60%

compared to current models.

There's your number, Bob.

Yeah, so it's three times the ability to target the cells, three times the ability to get in, and a 60% improvement in the final, making the final edits that you're interested in.

Yeah, but 60% better than 1%?

I mean, wait, is that what we're talking about here?

Yeah, so, yeah, I know.

But that's still low.

That is still,

that's clinically significant.

Yeah, I mean, when you take a pill, what percent of the active ingredient is actually binding to where you need it to be?

Yeah, it gets distributed throughout the whole body, and only a small portion of it.

It's probably a teeny tiny bit of disease that you actually need.

It needs to be tested in specific, like specific formulations need to be tested in specific diseases.

Yeah, I was wondering, did you mention that?

What disease were they?

Are they just looking at the mechanism?

They were just looking at the mechanism.

This is just again proof of concept.

So now they need to go to animal studies to disease models, right?

They need to do the actual.

And then once the animal disease model studies are done, then they will be ready to do human trials.

So we're still years away from this being in the clinic, but this is an important technological advancement.

And it's, again, it's not one thing.

It's not like this is only going to be useful for one disease.

We're talking about a technology that could use CRISPR for, yeah, like CRISPR, CRISPR.

SNA, this is just a general platform that could theoretically target any cells in the body,

make any genetic change that we want.

So this will massively increase the scope of targets for CRISPR

and also the success rate of making the genetic changes.

And we'll only know it as CRISPR the same way we only know CAS9 or CAS10 as CRISPR.

It's all different.

Yeah, but it's CRISPR.

But actually, you know, this LNP SNA technology is as important as the CRISPR.

And again, it's used for other things, not just delivering CRISPR.

It could be used to deliver drugs to cancer cells,

for example, getting those chemo.

Chemo, chemo directly to cells.

Yeah, that would be great.

It's a really important technology.

So when is this going to roll out, Steve?

Well, again,

this is just

a proof of concept study.

Remember all those steps I talked about?

It improved performance every step of the way.

Every step in that chain was better with the SMPs.

Who developed it, Steve?

Which

is it?

So this was developed by a team of researchers.

But like American or

Merkin's lab is at Northwestern.

Merkin is the main doctor working on it, and it's at Northwestern.

That's where most of the work is being done.

So they'll lose their funding soon, which which is good yeah right

yeah I mean this is exactly the kind of research that needs I mean you know there is a company called Flashpoint Therapeutics which is commercializing the technology so that's good too that sometimes you get that startups will spin off out of a university they get a patent they spin off a startup and they commercialize it and there you go so that seems to be what's happening which is good you know again you don't want it to be dependent on government funding some universities are optimized for spinoff technology like that, which I love.

Absolutely, man.

Turn it into tech that I can get to.

Come on.

So this is great.

I've been paying attention to this technology.

This is a massive improvement.

This is the kind of thing like 10 years from now we'll be looking back and thinking, wow, this was a huge milestone.

All the things that

will just be in the background

of so many of the therapeutics.

I suspect.

Steve, I mean, I remember, for God, it's been a few years now or more.

We're talking about other advances, other types of CRISPR.

And one was that instead of actually, you know, snipping, you know, the,

you know, the genome, it actually would turn it on and off.

Oh, yeah, that's still in place.

That's still in play.

Absolutely.

Okay.

Yeah, that sounds pretty awesome.

You could turn genes off and turn them back on again.

Yeah, CRISPR is like a big tent now.

Oh, totally.

Yeah.

Yeah, I just don't come across it.

It's because it's all just included.

They just call it, but everything, even CAS9 and CAS 10, like I mentioned, those are different techniques.

But we just kind of assume that that's other cases too.

Yeah.

Yeah, right, right.

All right.

George,

tell us about this robotic B.

Okay.

So I have a question for all of you.

If you were to design a robotic B

or what they call a micro-aerial vehicle, an MAV, what do you think would be the most difficult thing to do?

Power source.

Yeah, probably power source.

Flight too.

I guess

control.

No, we can make things that fly.

I think making things that fly is not that big a deal.

It's all about the power source.

Yeah, something really tiny would be power.

I would suspect powering.

I mean,

I would think that if it's so small, solar could help.

I think it would just be that, like, dying, I don't know, like getting damaged.

Like, it's expensive, and you have to make a bunch of them.

Well, you're sort of, yeah, you're sort of, you're all in the ballpark.

I mean, it all feeds off of each other, but the biggest challenge, it's not the maneuverability, it's not the size.

They can get these things very tiny.

They can make them maneuver.

They can fly.

The problem is flight time, which in essence is energy.

So you know,

building something into the system that allows it to fly for more than 10 seconds.

So like in 2021, MIT Robotics, they developed this little guy.

It was less than a gram.

That's what's considered an MAV.

Any kind of flying thing that's less than a gram, which is super tiny.

But they developed one, and this, because they were working on it, this had, in essence, eight wings and four little like bodies on this thing.

And it was very maneuverable, but it could only fly for about 10 seconds because it would basically get up.

And

the simpler the flight, the longer it would last.

The more complex the flight, the less long it would last.

But on average, about 10 seconds.

Well,

they've gone back to the drawing board and basically redesigned this little MAV

to be much more reminiscent of nature in terms of one body, like a bee's body, and two wings.

And what they did is by using this and then combining with some other little

modifications, they're now capable of having this thing fly for 17 minutes.

Whoa.

So it's

over 100 times more efficient

within that time, right?

Which you can do a lot within that time.

So from the Precy,

they had this of the study.

They said most subgram MAVs, so yeah, so that's considered a thing less than a gram, are limited to hovering for less than 10 seconds or following simple trajectories at slow speeds.

Here, we developed a 750-milligram flapping wing MAV that demonstrated substantially improved lifespan, speed, accuracy, and agility.

With transmission and hinge designs that reduced off-axis torsional stretch and deformation, the robot achieved a 1,000-second hovering flight, two orders of magnitude longer than existing subgram MAVs, which is really cool.

Now, what's neat about these little guys is not only could they give bees a break, and if you know there's sort of the bee population,

it's in danger, then it's not in danger, then it's in danger, then it's not in danger.

What these little flying MAVs could act as pollinators, but they could act as pollinators in environments that bees don't really work well.

So you could have the vertical farms with fluorescent lighting, let's say.

Now, bees don't like vertical farms,

they especially don't like vertical fluorescent lighting, but

these little guys can do the gig.

They can also be in harmful environments, like in space or in areas that, let's say, were contaminated with radiation or poisons or who knows what, to kind of help re-establish and fix crops or fix whatever kind of thing you might need fixing.

So, it's not to replace bees, but to sort of

be an extra artificial pollinator.

While they were developing this little bee, this little guy, they also worked on a grasshopper-like little robot, which I thought was really cool.

This is smaller than a human thumb, and it can hop 20 centimeters at about 30 centimeters a second.

It jumps into the air, and it can land and be effective on all kinds of surfaces, from grass all the way up to ice.

And it can even land on a tiny leaf and stuff.

The grasshopper, which they're calling the grasshopper, they can also hover like a drone using 60% less energy than flying robots that are similar to it.

So, the robots the size of a bee and a grasshopper scientists believe can also be helpful in rescue missions during earthquakes or inside pipelines where large counterparts cannot get into or reach.

So, it's like much like the CRISPR news, it's good news on the front.

You know, like with the there was always the problem with jetpacks, right?

What's the major problem with jetpacks is fuel

flight time.

Well, it looks like they're getting way, way closer to having significant increases in flight time for these little tiny MAVs.

Again, picture a gram and all the tech that's in this little tiny, less than a gram device flying around doing complex flying.

For right now, we're at 17 minutes, and it should increase.

It's pretty cool.

Love it.

I wonder if you could get a thousand of those buggers.

Could they lift me up?

For a few?

Yeah, probably they could.

Legit, like, is this an experiment or like, what would they use these for?

I wonder.

Well, besides pollinating plants, like George said, I mean, what else what else could they do?

You know, they could assess nooks and crannies in disaster sites and report back, yeah, found some people down here, come over here.

You could, you know, get them to be sensitive to any kind of, so like they could, they could search for oxygen, let's say, in some kind of a pipe or search for CO2, which means that survivors are breathing off CO2.

So they send in these little bees or these little grasshoppers.

You could build large...

farming facilities that wouldn't need to rely on natural pollinators.

So you could have, you know, like when you have those sort of the idealized city buildings that have the large towers of fruits and vegetables and flowers kind of growing, these guys

would be great in those environments, especially with fake light, because bees don't like the fake light, apparently.

So, yeah, so that's kind of a thing.

Steve, I wonder if you could GMO some plants that are so weird and foreign that regular biological bees just don't want to pollinate it or can't pollinate it.

Then you just throw these mechanical buggers in and have them do it because the normal bees are just

too afraid of the GMO plants that don't make any sense to the real bees.

Why would you want to do that?

Well, let's say you have some kind of like space crops that have to be resistant to, who knows what, radiation.

Or, you know, maybe you have to develop, we can't use bees.

We'd have to either genetically modify bees to be able to do this kind of stuff or just use these little guys.

Yeah, okay, you're saying that they inadvertently can't be pollinated by regular bees.

That wasn't done on purpose.

Right.

Well, yeah, I mean, it's a cool plant, but like, hey, bees don't like this.

We got to pollinate

these weird GMO plants some different way.

And, like, let's use them.

Let's use the robot bees.

All right.

Thank you, George.

Okay, Evan, tell us about Tin Man syndrome.

What is that?

I will, yeah.

File this news item under how the hell did we miss this one 10 years ago?

This is actually a current news item, but as always, there's background, so I have to go back 10 years to fill you in here.

It's March 31, 2015.

The website is called radiopedia.org, which is described as a well-known and widely used radiology reference site.

And they published a case titled Ectopia Cordis Interna, or Tin Man Syndrome.

And this is where a patient's heart was depicted as being located entirely in the abdominal cavity beneath the diaphragm.

It was written by, or case contributed by, I should read directly from the site, Matt Skalaski.

And the systems involve the chest, the

gastrointestinal, and cardiac.

I guess those are the areas of concern.

Here's the story.

A patient went to a radiologist as part of a pre-employment screening, apparently because the patient had a long history of gastroesophageal reflux.

The case starts with an x-ray picture of the man's chest with this descriptor.

Frontal and lateral chest radiographs demonstrating absent cardiomediastinal shadow.

No aortic outline is evident.

Bilateral ectopic inferior pulmonary veins.

Basically, it's a chest x-ray.

Now, the next image is that of an MRI of the patient's torso, and that descriptor reads: Selected coronal images show the intra-abdominal heart closely related to the stomach, distral transverse colon, and pancreas.

This vascular congestion is a common feature.

And then there's one more image.

A drawing by Leonardo da Vinci titled Organ Networks of the Thor

cavity.

Thoracoabdominal.

thoracoabdominal thank you Steve the thoracoabdominal cavity drawn in 1502 and they just they say there remains academic debate as to whether this was based off of a corpse with

ectopia cordis interna or whether the heart's location was a deliberate distortion of reality by the artist here's the case discussion

So Tin Man syndrome, it's a rare variant of ectopia cortis in which the heart is located completely within the abdominal cavity.

It's almost always an asymptomatic condition found incidentally on imaging or less often detected by physicians when attempting to osculate.

I mean, less that stethoscope.

Osculate.

Or in vulcans, apparently.

Oh, yeah.

When they're attempting to hear what's going on in the chest or the abdominal palpitation.

or abdominal palpitation.

And they talk a little bit about the history.

They talk about the Leo da Vinci drawing there.

Now, they also say the first ever description of the condition in the medical literature was a controversial monograph submitted to the Royal Society in 1874 by Dr.

Nohir Lubdub entitled An Unusual Case of Ectopia Cardia in a Hariana Boy.

I guess that's the location.

His last name was Lubdub.

Did you see that?

I'm getting there.

I'm getting there.

Massive red flag.

Nohir Love Dub.

Nohir Lubdub?

I mean, what the fuck is that?

I'm reading to you.

This is verbatim

from the article.

And the the monograph was later retracted when accusations were made that the images accompanying the text had been doctored.

It was not until 1908 that Dr.

Love Dub's work was vindicated when the existence of the condition was confirmed during the early years of chest radiography.

Unfortunately, Dr.

Love Dub had fallen into deep depression following his expulsion from the Royal Society, only occasionally seen wandering the streets of Sheningar, mumbling, and yet it beats.

His death was unrecorded.

Love Dabbler.

Love Dubdeb.

Okay.

I left out a couple of key things here.

The title of the, I doctored the title of this paper, which actually reads, April Fools, 2015, Octopia Cortis Attorney, a tin man syndrome.

And the first paragraph of which says, this case is fictitious and the described condition is not a real diagnosis.

The images in this case have been digitally altered.

It gained attention back in 2015.

Apparently, some medical professionals initially mistook it as real pathology.

They began citing or sharing it as authentic.

And I guess they say that's perhaps understandable because Radiopedia's trustworthiness has their reputation.

But this was clearly, and there were so many indications, like Dr.

Lubdub, Kara.

No here, Love Dub.

No here, Love Dub.

Right.

But to be fair, don't publish an April Fool's journal article.

They have a

history.

They're doing.

Yeah, no, I get it.

They have a history.

It's kind of their

thing.

I agree, Kara.

That's part of the takeaway.

You can't do it anymore.

Social media has ruined it.

You can't do that anymore.

Well, not just that.

AI has ruined it.

It's not always people who are scrubbing the internet for this stuff.

It's bots.

Among their other April Fool's pranks, because it's an annual thing, apparently, they do von Schlapp syndrome, obviously Tin Man syndrome, cactus disease, something called Apple Eye.

I mean, I haven't read into all of these.

Apple Eye?

Apple Eye is one of them.

We'll talk about that one maybe.

This reminds me of, did you guys ever, do you remember when Stephen Colbert used to do the daily show?

And he had a character named, it was called, it was a segment called Cheating Death with Dr.

Stephen T.

Colbert, DFA.

Oh, God.

And he was like, and he was like with Prescott Pharmaceutical.

Yeah, and he would always have like a weird side effects of all of the drugs that he was pushing.

And like,

I don't know.

Hilarious.

Wandering fungus.

All right.

So that's your background, but how does it relate to the contemporary news on Skeptic's Guide to the Universe?

Because over at Retraction Watch, Kara, we love Retraction Watch.

We do.

They have a report from about two weeks ago, and also another one that came out the other day.

But here's the one from two weeks ago that reads: Tin Man syndrome case plagiarized from hoax, sleuths say.

And they describe: a group of researchers say they encountered Tin Man syndrome in real life

in a 22-year-old patient they claim that had no significant medical history.

The researchers based in Iraq published their rare case report in the journal Medicine.

This was in July of 2025.

The journal Medicine.

Steve, that sounds, that's a legit journal.

Yes?

No, are you familiar with it at all?

Medicine?

No.

Medicine.

I've never heard of it.

Well, I looked it up.

The journal Medicine is published by Lipnicott, Williams, and Wilkins, a reputable, peer-reviewed medical journal.

However, it is a mega-journal.

with a broad scope and a lower impact factor compared to highly selective top-tier journals like the New England Journal of Medicine.

Its reputation is valid, but its status has changed over time.

So take that for what it's worth.

Here's the title of the paper that was published there: Asymptomatic Young Male with Ectopia Cortis Interna, a rare case report.

I'll read to you a couple highlights.

Their rationale.

Ectopia cortisinterna is a rare congenital condition that occurs when the heart is found within the abdominal cavity.

Patient concerns, a 22-year-old Iraqi male with a chest infection presented to the clinic with a chest infection during which the anomaly was incidentally discovered, just like the original paper.

Diagnosis.

Although there are no clear symptoms, the anomaly can lead to potential risks during any abdominal procedures, interventions.

The patient got a chest x-ray for his infection, which revealed the anomaly.

Outcomes and lessons.

The case highlights the importance of early detection of this condition through imaging modalities and the need for focused research into its long-term implications and management strategies.

So a sleuth came across the paper.

I'm reading, but going back to Retraction Watch here.

A sleuth came across the paper and after running the images through Google Lens, that's a tool I've never used before, but apparently what, you take a photograph of something and then you ask Google to find the original source and it will do it.

That it linked them back to the April Fool's publication in Radiopedia way back when.

The sleuth as a physician was asked to remain anonymous.

They sent Retraction Watch the tip out of concern that the misrepresentation could mislead healthcare providers, potentially leading to incorrect surgical planning or treatments for patients patients with similar conditions.

Retraction Watch went over to David Sanders, who is an expert, image expert and biologist at Purdue University.

He said the images indubitably originate from the same source.

He says it's very obvious they overlap in the images.

The overlap in the images otherwise is so extensive as to be impossible to represent different patients.

So they absolutely pulled it directly from the original source material.

He also pointed out the first reference in the paper

which the authors used to define the condition is actually a paper about ectopia cordis, not ectopia cordis interna.

And ectopia cordis is a rare condition where the heart grows outside of the body.

Oh, God.

That's a real thing.

That's awful.

So the author, Retraction Watch also reached out to Skolasky, who was the original author of the satirical paper.

And he said, I'm not sure how this made it through peer review or why anywhere in the right mind would think to publish it.

The authors

maintain, the authors of this paper maintained the validity of their case.

The lead author is Ashraf Basiliyah

and he's a researcher at Hadraumat Hospital in Yemen.

And he called the similarities to the Radiopedia case entirely coincidental.

The case report is one of six that Basiliyah had recently published in the journal Medicine.

So that was back on August 15th of this year.

One week later, August 22, the journal Medicine says that they're retracting it.

None of the paper.

Yeah.

So here's what they said.

This is their response.

The article, A Symptomatic Young Male with Ectopia Cordis Interna, a rare case report, which appears in Volume 104, issue 30 of Medicine, is being retracted.

After publication, a concerned reader contacted the editorial office, alleging that the images in the case appeared to be direct reproductions from a satirical online publication.

Yep.

The authors were asked to provide supporting documents for their case and response, including the original radiographic images, and they were unable to provide the necessary documentation, which casts doubt on the credibility of the presented case.

So the Journal of Medicine went back, and they also looked at the five previous submissions by Basilia and his group, and they retracted them all.

Something tells me that these doctors' publishing careers have maybe come to an ignominious conclusion.

Do you think they were publishing just to say they were published?

Or would there be some other here's the reason?

That's a good question because Retraction Watch actually reached out to the doctor to say, hey, we need your opinion on this.

And he said, he did reply in email.

He said, I admit that Ectopia Cordis is not a real case based on our investigation, and it was faked.

That's his own words.

But it was faked to destroy the author's reputation.

That's what he said.

He said, the doctor said the paper was a trap.

This is a quote, a trap made by someone who wants to destroy my career intentionally.

And that person in

that person in question, who the doctor says is not a medical professional, provided the researchers with, quote, all the case details and documentations regarding the octopia cortisol.

And they didn't do their work.

They were fooled.

The fact that they were fooled, again, I think he's just making shit up to cover it

is the easiest explanation.

But even the story he's telling doesn't let him off the hook.

He initially means he didn't do due diligence.

He didn't do what academically is like the minimum necessary.

So by coincidence, I wrote about predatory journals on science-based medicine today, and it dovetails nicely with this news item.

There was a study looking at using AI to basically screen for predatory journals.

And so right now there's over 1,500 open access journals.

And

AI flagged about 1,300 of them as being probably predatory.

And then human evaluators went through them and said over 1,000 of them were truly predatory.

So there were 250 or so or 300 false positives by the AI.

So it's possible, you know, they want to know, because the thing is, they're just human evaluators are overwhelmed by the sheer number of

these fake journals.

And when one does get outed as being predatory, meaning they don't have legitimate peer review, they don't have legitimate editorial policy.

They're just taking money from researchers to get published.

And once, you know, if they get out, they just make a new website with a slightly different name.

The barrier to entry is so low that you can just keep making more and more and more fake journals and start collecting money.

And

the researcher specifically said that a lot of

countries that don't have a well-established infrastructure of science and academia are who they're targeting.

And so a lot of papers coming from places like Iraq

do end up in these lower tier or sometimes outright predatory journals.

And they're crap.

And they're doing it just to get recognition and just to buff their CV and get promoted and whatever and try to establish themselves.

Publishing credits, whatever.

Yeah, so it's a huge problem.

It's just gumming up the whole system with terrible papers.

And

we really need to get a handle on it.

in multiple ways.

So at the very least, stop at the April Fool's crap.

Yeah, again, like we just...

Well, I guess, yeah.

At the very least,

we won't live in that world anymore.

Basically.

All right.

I still want to look into Apple Eye, though.

All right, Bob, tell us about superwood.

Jokes aside.

Superwood in the news.

I'm not talking about an improved version of Tadalafil, but regular tree wood that's been chemically and mechanically treated to be far stronger and tougher than any other type of wood before.

Researchers claim it's even stronger than steel and could be used used as a structural load-bearing material similar to steel or concrete.

This was licensed for a startup called Invent Wood, which plans to start a commercial run of this wood this year, this year.

Actually, they said this summer.

But the summer is almost over, so maybe they're running a little late.

Okay, you might not know this about me, but I love wood.

I've actually been working with a lot of large, old, heavy planks of wood because we're building our pirate ship for this year's haunt.

So I'm just like, you know, wood is just wood.

I just love it.

It's just, especially really old wood.

It's got so much character.

All right, steel and concrete are great, but the beauty of wood is just so far superior in so many ways.

But it's not strong enough to replace those other materials for many of the,

you know, the many of the areas that we use them for.

And attempts have been made in the past to make wood stronger.

They would treat, they would pre-treat the wood with chemicals and then they would squeeze it to make it denser.

And that helped a little bit, but it actually wasn't enough because the wood would often expand and weaken.

So it really wasn't ideal.

This new technique is very similar, but it adds a novel

removal process first.

So it's removing components before it does the squeezing.

So wood contains three components.

There's cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin.

And they basically bathe it in chemicals to reduce the hemicellulose and the lignin.

So it's really just mainly just the cellulose is left.

So this raw wood is treated to remove these, the lignin and hemicellulose, and that allows this next step to reach levels that it's never reached before.

So they mechanically treat the wood

to be hot.

They use a hot, they call it a hot press.

And I think it's at about like 100 degrees Celsius.

So it's really hot.

They're squeezing the crap out of it.

And what that does is that it completely collapses the cell walls in a process called, surprisingly, densification.

Actually, I don't mind.

Are these like boards, Bob, or is this like chopped up like fibrous?

They don't go into detail in the paper on what they are.

They just said they describe it as just raw, raw wood.

But, Bob, they say it's specifically not chopped up wood bound by

the colours.

That EPS wood where it yeah, it's not little chips that are that are put together.

So I know it's definitely not that, but I'm not sure how how it looks in you know, during the in the middle of this process.

So, all right, so it's it's densified, it's densification.

So, what's happening is that these strong cellulose nanofibers are all like pressed really close together,

closer than ever than ever before.

And it's this reduces the wood's thickness by,

what percent do you think?

It's it's it's reduced

too late.

You guys took too much time.

80%.

Whoa.

80%.

So, and it increases its density threefold.

So as you might imagine at this point, this superwood has some amazing mechanical properties.

But before we discuss that, we probably need to discuss strength and toughness.

We've mentioned it only a couple of times on the show before, because this involves strength and toughness and things.

So what does that actually mean?

Strength is the ability to withstand forces without permanently deforming or fracturing.

Toughness is the ability to absorb energy and deform before breaking.

Okay, so for me, an iconic strength, an object that's pure strength with very little toughness is glass, right?

It resists force fine, but it just shatters easily.

It's not going to bend.

It's not going to deform.

It's just going to just shatter.

The other end of the scale here is toughness.

If you have that without strength, it's like, I try to think of this one.

I think Plato is a great example of toughness without strength.

It absorbs energy quite well, right?

But it really, it does not resist forces before permanently deforming, which is the hallmark of

strength.

So now remember though, as part of this, though, there's this classic trade-off between

strength and toughness.

Most of the time, if you increase one, you're going to diminish the other.

And there's really no way to get around that if it doesn't want to get around that.

So if you make something stronger,

it's going to become more brittle and less tough.

And conversely,

the opposite is also true.

So a particular type of strength needs to be mentioned here.

I'm doing this for Steve because he specifically mentioned this, and he's right.

It's often the most important strength rate or type of rating for how strong something is, and that's called specific strength.

This compares strength to density.

You could think of this as, and I'm sure you've heard of this, the strength to weight ratio.

That's essentially specific strength.

So how was this superwood?

How strong was this?

So they threw a not, there were a lot of numbers in the paper.

First off, remember that trade-off I mentioned between strength and toughness?

Well, that didn't even apply here.

They said in the paper, interestingly, the large increase in tensile strength of the densified wood is not accompanied by a decrease in toughness.

So, looking at the strength of the superwood,

it had a record high, Steve, a record high tensile strength, 587 megapascals.

That's 11 and a half times higher than that of just untreated natural wood.

The toughness didn't go down, the toughness was actually 8.3 times higher than that of natural wood.

So stronger and tougher,

which is pretty epic.

But what about the specific strength?

Because actually, that could often make or break a new material.

Regarding the specific strength, the paper said the intrinsically light weight of cellulose also results in a specific strength of the densified wood, 451 megapascals per cubic centimeter per gram.

That's higher than lightweight titanium alloy.

So the specific strength is very, very high here.

It's really good.

So this is not a deal killer for this at all.

They say in the paper also that our processed wood has a specific strength higher than the most structural metals and alloys, making it a low-cost, high-performance, lightweight alternative.

And that's kind of the crux here.

It's like, sure, this is very strong, but can we really use this as a structural metal that will be as a structural component that will be as strong as some metals and alloys that we use.

And it seems like it can.

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, right?

Let's just see what it really can do.

Let's have some engineers look at this and see and do their own tests and see if it really can be structural and load-bearing.

That would be great.

Spokesperson from Inventwood recently said, remember, this isn't from the paper.

This is basically marketing.

But they said, superwood is specifically engineered to be up to 50% stronger than steel in certain applications with a strength to weight ratio up to 10 times greater.

So, clearly, some strong-ass wood we got here.

So, what are the benefits?

Here's one that I hadn't considered.

Just the purely environmental, the densest and hardest woods are found where?

What do you think they're found in?

Tropical.

Yeah, very

good.

Yeah, tropical, like teak and mahogany.

We've all heard of those.

Those are some of the most beautiful and dense and hardest woods out there.

If superwood is actually a viable alternative, then environmental costs could disappear with teak and mahogany.

Like over-harvesting is a problem.

And also trading biodiversity for monocultures, right, could all be minimized.

So that would be wonderful.

So we wouldn't be depleting teak and mahogany and potentially, you know, over-harvesting and all that other stuff.

The other side of this coin, though, is that the concrete and steel we use in so many buildings in our infrastructure, you know, we love our big, beautiful concrete and steel, right?

Carbon footprint.

Yep.

Making steel and cement, which is the critical component of concrete.

I look this up.

That causes 10% of our world's total greenhouse gas emissions.

Is that in the ballpark, Steve?

Yeah.

Was my source right?

10%.

It may be a big if at this point, but if renewable superwood can replace some of that for some of the things that steel and cement do and concrete do, that could make, even if it goes down a few percent, that would be just, you know, yippee for us.

You know, good job for us

if we can make that happen.

We don't don't know.

So basically, I'm waiting for this to be released commercially and have real people using this and reporting on it.

They said it was going to be released at commercial, you know, commercially this summer.

And I tried searching for some of the latest news about this, and I haven't been able to find anything that's more that's less than a couple of months old.

So I'm not sure what's going on.

Maybe they were delayed.

Maybe it's just going to be released this year.

Who knows what happened?

But this one, I definitely want to follow this one.

This is pretty cool.

Super wood, people.

Yeah, we've we've talked about this kind of thing before.

We also talked about the idea of building large buildings out of wood rather than steel because it becomes a carbon sink, right?

Not a carbon source.

Right.

And if it's making it, yeah, if the wood is

preserved and it's high quality, it could last 100 years.

You know, it could be locking up that carbon for a long, long time.

So, yeah, that could be

one more way to try to turn this huge ship around.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

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

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

All right, what is this?

Easy, it's baby Godzilla.

So, I stuck with a theme here on the ones that I chose.

So, I'll just go down this real quick.

So, a listener named Bradford West wrote in and said, Ciao, Jay, man, do I love dogs?

Some of them, though, are complete drama queens about getting their nails clipped.

So, yes, you correctly identified this noise as coming from a dog, but I wanted a little bit more information.

And I've clipped my dog's nails, and he didn't make that noise, but maybe some do.

So, let's see what the next person says.

So, Robin 10 Kate said, Hi, Jay, longtime listener.

Rare, who's that noisy guesser?

I think this sound like a this sounds like a dog, specifically a Pomeranian about to get vaccinated.

I don't think it's a Pomeranian.

I think it's a French bulldog.

And then Robin did tell me how to pronounce her name, which is, it's not Robin Ten Kate, it's Robin Tencata.

So even when people tell me how to do it, I still screw it up.

Ryan Skiba wrote in and said, I hope George is not on the next episode of the show.

He's a smart man.

What the hell?

How did he know?

That's weird, yeah.

So he said,

crap.

He said, is it a screaming French bulldog?

Now, my son and I love listening to freaky French bulldogs make all the weird noises that they do.

And there is a massive array of crazy sounds that French bulldogs make.

So I highly recommend if you have any free time, go check that out.

It's really crazy.

Bob Coburn wrote in and said, this week's noisy sounds like Little Fred, a TikTok dog who is a tiny little guy who loses his shit anytime a package is delivered.

His life goal is to destroy any such package.

He's my hero.

I looked up Little Fred, and indeed he loves to rip up packages.

This is not the same dog.

Steve has a dog like that, or had a dog like that.

Yeah, my dog, as a puppy, that was his favorite thing to do, was to rip up my freaking packages.

With your camera equipment in it, yeah,

so I have a winner.

This is the person who guessed correctly.

This is Jim Borzillin.

Nope, Borzillery.

Borzillary.

Yes, sorry, Jim.

He said, hi, Jay, long time, first time, Patreon, subscriber, etc.

Sounds to me like a beagle that was super happy to be reunited with an old acquaintance.

Now, that is technically correct.

You selected the correct dog, and I do believe the correct circumstance, but there is a little bit more information that we need, and someone did send that in as well.

So, I would consider this person a winner as well.

This is Ben Z.

Mueller, and Ben said,

just started listening to Skeptic's Guide podcast, and I love it so far.

Thanks for all the hard work.

You guys are awesome.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, there lived a dog named Geraldine who who made noises like a TIE fighter.

I'm 90 to 90% sure this is it.

So listen again.

This dog indeed sounds exactly like a tie fighter.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we're talking about Star Wars, Kara.

Star Wars.

Stop it.

So

I can't play it for you because you have to see it as well.

So look up Geraldine Star Wars, and you'll see a video where they take the noise that this dog makes and then they add a little sound effects to it and show it over the Star Wars movie.

And it's remarkable.

This is why we have the internet.

Yes, exactly.

Thank you, George.

This is why we have the internet.

Fantastic.

So good job, everybody.

I have a new noisy for you this week.

This is sent in by a listener named Rob Shoekroon.

He did give me the pronunciation, and trust me, I would not have gotten it correct.

Okay, so I played enough.

Everybody knows how to play this game.

You know what to do.

Email me at wtn at the skepticsguide.org if you think you know what it is.

And if you heard something cool this week, please take the take a moment, record it, do what you got to do, and send it over to me.

So if you want to become a patron of the skeptics guide, you can support the work that we do.

Go to patreon.com forward slash skeptics guide.

You can join our mailing list.

Go to the skepticsguide.org.

And we can send out an email every week.

We'll tell you everything that we did the previous week and some other fun stuff.

You could give our show a rating.

We're going to Kansas.

Two shows on September 20th.

Go to the Skeptics Guide homepage, like we discussed, if you want to get information or buy those tickets.

And that's it, Steve.

That's all I got for you.

All right.

Thank you, Jay.

Hey, George, it's time.

You're going to do a bit that we do in some of our live shows.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

All right.

All right.

So I'm going, this is called taxing deductions.

Taxing deductions.

A little game we call taxing deductions.

I'm going to present a statement, and this is a statement that is historically true.

This isn't like a fictional thing, or this is a thing that has occurred, but it's very vague.

And you five have to figure out what in the heck I'm talking about.

I can basically say yes or no as you sort of query me as to what it is, and you have to deduce what I'm referencing, what I'm talking about, and why the statement that I have made is the way it is.

Does that make sense to everybody?

It does.

All right, kids.

This is a tough one, but I think you can do it.

Here we go.

Why did one of the world's most famous sculptures cause a bridge to be three times longer than it needed to be?

Now, if you happen to just know this answer, you have to recuse yourself because the fun is not in the destination, the fun is in the guessing.

So, again, I will say it again.

Why did one of the world's most famous sculptures cause a bridge to be three times longer than it needed to be?

My initial guess is it might be the Washington Monument.

That's not a sculpture, though.

What is it then?

Are they carving stone?

Obelisks.

Well, it's not the Washington Monument.

Is it the Statue of Liberty?

It is the Statue of Liberty.

The bridge.

In order to get the bridge, to get the statue to where it is, they had to

put a bridge in a certain location that was longer than the most efficient location?

No.

Not as relates to the statue.

So you want us to guess the bridge?

Well, you have to guess the bridge and the reason why.

But it had to do with the transportation from France, like the boat that carried the piece.

of the fire.

Maybe that was so heavy that they couldn't make it that short.

They had to let it.

Nope.

Okay.

So, yeah, so you're already presuming something in terms of the relationship of the statue to the issue.

So,

for the traffic to get to her?

Nope.

The traffic to get away from her.

Can we ask you questions?

Yeah, yeah.

Was this bridge in the U.S.

or in France?

It is in the U.S.

Okay.

Yes.

Which is not a yes or no question, but I'll save some time.

Was this bridge in New York?

Yes.

Is it the Varanzano bridge?

No, it is not the Varanzano Bridge.

Does the bridge still exist today?

Sort of.

What the kind of answer is that?

Sort of.

Okay, so the sort of bridge somewhere in the New York City area.

Yeah, it's a little bit of a gray, but yes,

it sort of still exists.

Is it a car bridge?

Yeah, it's a car bridge.

Is it also a train bridge?

I don't know.

There's no trains on it.

I don't believe there's a train on on the bridge.

Does it have something to do with the trucks that had to bring pieces over?

Nope.

Does the height of the bridge factor in?

The height does not factor in.

No.

Okay.

But so there's a bridge related to the Empire State Building

somewhere.

I'm just checking to see if George is paying attention.

All right.

So the Statue of Liberty was not brought in,

it wasn't built.

They brought it in in pieces.

So I don't think it...

That's true.

Does that have anything to do with this?

Probably not.

Probably not.

Okay, so we talked about traffic for people to see the statue.

That wasn't a factor.

We talked about height.

Does it have to do with ships getting to Ellis Island?

No.

So, but how could a bridge three times longer than it needed to be, which means that the bridge would start and stop way inland?

Or it bends.

Not necessarily.

Not necessarily.

Or

it has a hump in it?

Yeah, no, not.

I think there is a little bit of a hump.

It's a little circuitous route.

It is a bit of a meandering bridge.

They had to change the location of the bridge?

Yeah, the location is important here.

Yes.

It's the location of the bridge.

Was the statue in the way?

No.

Is it the Brooklyn Bridge?

It is not the Brooklyn Bridge.

Damn you.

So think about, okay, think about New York City bridges, or New York bridges, I should say, that are sort of still there, but not really, but they are.

Oh, not that Tap and Z bridge, the old Tap and Z, which is now the Mario Cuomo Memorial Bridge.

Yeah.

It just got rebuilt about 10 years ago.

Yes.

And it's longer than it needed to be?

Yes.

But it's still there.

They just redid the bridge.

Is it longer now than it needed to be?

It's still longer than it needs to be.

It

runs parallel to where the old bridge was.

Yeah, I mean, that bridge takes two curves on the water.

Yeah.

So like if you're unaware, the Tap and Z Bridge was built in 1955, and then in 2017 they basically knocked it down and built a new one just a couple hundred yards off from where the other one was.

Yeah, it just crosses the Holland

River.

And it's now the Mario Cuomo, but still everybody calls it the Tappan Z.

But this is related to the Statue of Liberty.

It's related to the Statue of Liberty.

Yeah, why is it where it is?

Because you can see it from there.

No.

No.

You can see New York City a little bit.

Yeah, you can't.

I don't believe you can see the Statue of Liberty from there, but you can see New York City.

Yeah, it's quite...

Speaking of Kansas and Oz,

it looks like Oz from out there.

It's kind of interesting.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

Yeah.

Is it a union thing?

Like, hey, we've got to build this bridge three times longer, three times the cost.

That is

the closest so far.

It's not because,

but that, yeah, now you're thinking the right way.

Okay, so the unions or the people involved are going to

be not.

I want to say not unions, but that's the direction we want to start thinking.

The people involved in building this bridge were going to benefit from

long care.

Yes.

And what does that have to do with the Statue of Liberty?

Oh, did it.

Was there some kind of budget that they had to use up and they had to sink it into something?

No, that's a good guess, but no.

So also think about, if you're familiar with the Hudson, there are portions of the Hudson that are very wide, and there are portions of the Hudson that are not so wide.

Oh, my God, you're right.

I mean, it's not the widest part, but

it is kind of wide.

Oh, yeah, they built it at the wide part.

Why did they built it at the wide?

Why did they build it there?

That's what I said originally, George, that they built it at a wider part than what they had to because of the Statue of Liberty.

Yeah, but why?

But there's a specific reason I didn't.

Yeah, there's a specific reason.

So, yeah.

Built it at the wider part.

Well, to benefit them somehow.

That there's some financial incentive.

Okay, next to the rich people?

No.

They were closer to the bridge.

No.

So, again, this is 1955.

So the statue's there.

The statue's established.

It's done.

If we think that the.

Is it to have to do with New Jersey, New York,

sort of, sort of,

wiring the land on the other side?

Not so much.

Did they want it in a specific neighborhood?

No.

I mean, it ended up being this place because this fit what they needed it to be.

So they could charge a bigger toll?

No.

No, but Evan

to be long enough.

Okay, so I'll tell you this.

It was close to George Washington Bridge, by the way.

The Tappanzee Bridge is three miles long because at the place it crosses over, it's three miles wide.

If you go about a half mile south, it could have been a mile wide.

Why didn't they build it a half mile south?

So the Statue of Liberty is a marker, for sure.

A landmark.

Yes.

Yes.

It doesn't relate directly to the Statue of Liberty, but the Statue of Liberty influenced where the thing was built

because of an organization.

Like airplanes?

No.

Both.

Does it have to do with the ferry?

The WK.

All those.

All those.

All those.

The state.

What controls all those?

Transportation Administration.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

So they needed you to be like, turn left at the statue.

No.

All right.

There's two organizations.

There's the Port Authority.

Okay.

Oh, I know, George.

They had like a.

Oh, God.

I went to the Statue of Liberty and they told me about how the size of the island changed, and there was like different organizations

that were like buying over who owned what property and all that.

Is that it?

So, like, if it was at that point, one organization could take care of it, but if it was somewhere else, it was a good thing.

That's it, Kara.

That was it.

Yeah, it's like you're pretty much there.

So, there is the Port Authority, and the Port Authority controls the bridges, the tunnels, the ins and outs of New York.

They control a span that is 25 miles with the Statue of Liberty in the center.

Oh, that becomes the center of the radiation.

That becomes the center, and everything that radiates out from that 25 miles is the Port Authority.

When New York State was building the Tappan Z Bridge, they didn't want the tolls to go to the Port Authority.

They wanted it to go to the newly formed New York State Thruway Authority.

Oh, my God.

So it had to be outside of the 25 miles.

So it had to be outside the 25 miles, and exactly about a half mile outside the 25 miles is one of the widest portions of the Hudson.

And it was worth it because the economics of it was, even though it cost, whatever, five times more than it would have, even though it was three times longer, it was worth it because now every penny of the tolls that go for the Tappanzee Bridge and the new Mario Como go to the New York State Thruway as opposed to the Port Authority.

And those tolls just go up, up, up, but the cost of the materials was the same.

What they did is they moved the statue a mile north and

brought it into the water.

Gave her like a very playing guitar, like a mile-long guitar.

Liberty Island, a lot bigger than it originally was.

And if I remember correctly, the Statue of Liberty is in New Jersey water, not New York water.

Yes.

Yeah, officially it's in New Jersey.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

All right, so we got

George.

It's a tough one, but yeah, you did well.

You did well.

Well, that's the kind of

brain-melting fun that we're going to have in Kansas.

I want everybody tonight to go on their phones and play a game of Symantec and tell me if you had the same feeling.

S-Y or S-E.

And then report back.

Symante, like semantics.

But Symante.

All right, that was fun, George.

But now we're going to go on to an even funner game, science or fiction.

It's time for science or fiction.

Each week, I come up with three science news items for facts: two real, one fictitious.

Then I challenge my panelist skeptics to tell me which one is the fake Aruni.

We have a theme this week.

Bridges.

This theme is in honor of Kara, and the theme is marine mammals.

So I will do very poorly on this.

Okay.

Is everyone ready?

Yes, here we go.

Item number one: large whales build up earwax in layers, forming rings which can be used to estimate their age.

Item number two, the blue whale has the largest brain in absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived.

And item number three, otters have pouches near their forearms, which they use to store rocks to use as tools, sometimes keeping a favorite tool for years.

Those are good.

There they are.

George, you know the rule, right?

Whoever talks first goes first.

Whoever talks first goes first.

Okay.

So George gets to go first.

Or go for.

Okay, yeah.

These are actually really fun.

So, so.

As advertised?

Yeah.

We got two whales and an otter.

Now, otters are just the coolest.

I'm just, have you seen otters like holding hands?

Oh, they're adorable.

And floating.

It's just the coolest thing.

So, okay, I'm going to say that otters have the pouches, they can hold stuff is totally true.

I'm going to say the blue whale having the largest brain is totally true because when I was a kid, I used to go to the Museum of Natural Natural History in New York and they have that gigantic floating blue whale, which is the one thing from my childhood.

It's the one thing from my childhood, which is as big as I remember it.

Like I went back there when I was in my 30s.

It's like, oh my God, this is amazing.

So I'm going to say that the earwax having rings that you can sort of guess the age is the fiction.

Okay, Jay.

Number one.

Yeah.

All right, so what do we got here?

We got large whales that build up their earwax and layers, forming rings which can be used to estimate their age.

You said that was a fiction, George?

I did, yes.

Apparently, you don't have an earwax problem because I can see it.

Oh, dude, like,

if there's ever a urine and earwax shortage, I am set.

Okay, all right.

I mean, this one, as weird as it sounds, I mean, it doesn't seem like completely

crazy.

You know, like, maybe their ear canals are so big, too, that, like, there could be many years that go by.

All right, that one's on the back burner as a maybe.

The second item, the blue whale has the largest brain.

Brains?

In absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived.

You know, I don't know.

Any animal that ever lived?

I mean, there's been lots of animals.

I know it's currently, isn't it the biggest animal?

Yeah.

Yes.

I think, by the way, I am correct.

But ever lived?

I don't know.

So that's a question mark there.

Otters have pouches near their forearms, which they use to store rocks or use as tools and sometimes hide shanks in them.

Okay.

I mean, that sounds weird too, but like, not crazy.

That one's freaking weird, though.

Pouches in their forearms.

Yo, RoboCop stored a gun in his leg, and I thought that was always cool.

Not nearly as cute, though.

I don't know.

God damn it.

All right, so

it's the largest brain one is getting me because of

any animal that ever lived.

Like, what about, you know, they're massive, but I don't know.

Any animal that ever lived?

How big did?

All right, I don't know.

You see, I'm thinking here, Steve.

I don't know.

The pouches in the forearms is wicked, crazy, weird, too.

And they keep tools.

That's pretty sentient there.

Ah.

Number two is definitely the fiction, Steve, because it doesn't have the largest brain.

It might be a dinosaur or something.

Okay, Evan.

Airwax and layers, rings used to estimate age.

That's trees.

That's not whales.

That's not earwax.

What?

No way.

That can't be right.

And the blue whale.

What?

The whales are the largest things that have ever lived.

Not specifically the blue whale.

I think the sperm whale is larger than the blue whale, but still, in absolutely absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived.

And then the otters.

I have to go with George.

It can't be.

It can't be rings of earwax.

No.

Okay, Bob.

I'm going to go with my gut and just screw up as usual.

So

the earwax thing, yeah, weird, weird as hell, but not like beyond the pale.

The blue whale is absolutely the largest creature that has ever lived on the earth, ever.

So the fact, no, it's a blue whale.

And the fact that it has the claim here is that it's the has the largest brain of anything that's ever lived in absolute size.

That makes perfect sense, but maybe that's what Steve wants me to think.

There you go, Bob.

I'm just going to go with the one that just gave me a reaction, and this was the pouches.

I have seen otters messing with rocks, and the rocks are a decent size.

They're not tiny pebbles.

They are rocks.

And to think of a rock that size in a pouch on the forearm is kind of ridiculous.

It's not a little rock.

It would be a big, weird thing that just is too big to make sense.

So I'll just, I'm going to say that the otter is fiction.

Okay, and Kara.

So I am pretty confident that otters have pouches near their forearms.

Forearms?

Okay.

Yeah, you mean like by forearms, you mean not their back legs.

Right, not their back arms.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I'm pretty confident they're sort of in their pity pits, like near their pity pits, and they do put rocks in them.

And they like, and they love their little rocks, and they hang on to them for a really long time.

I like my little rocks.

I'm pretty confident.

It's like a pet rock.

I'm less confident about the other two.

The earwax and layers, at first blush, sounds ridiculous, but I don't know.

I could see that happening, right?

If you're that long-lived and you're not, how are you going to clean out your own earwax if you're a whale?

I don't know.

Yeah, that's a good point.

Yeah.

And then

how does that relate to

a year on a calendar?

I don't know.

Well, but it doesn't have to be like one-to-one.

It just,

you take enough cores out of whales' ears, then you compare

other aging.

Yeah.

It does say estimate.

Yeah.

And then

I agree with Bob.

The blue whale, because

I think I got slammed for this once on the show.

It's like, clearly, there's a dinosaur this bigger.

It's like, no, the blue whale is the biggest thing that has ever lived on the planet.

I like that.

Extant or extinct.

But that doesn't mean it has the largest brain.

And as we know,

chihuahuas have like a ridiculous brain-to-body ratio.

It's like no, but he's talking insect size.

That's true.

That's true.

Okay, he's talking abstract size.

And Chihuahuas don't swim that great.

They don't.

But they do have pouches.

So their brains are small, but they're really big for little dogs.

You know what I mean?

And so maybe there is another huge whale.

I don't think it would be a dinosaur.

I would think it would be something similar.

Like another species of huge whale that has like a ridiculously big.

Either the earwax is totally made up, or there's a different whale.

And I just don't think you'd make that up of a pulled cloth.

So I'm going to say the whale ones, or sorry,

they're all about whales.

The blue whale brain is the fiction.

All right, so we've got two for the earwax, two for the blue whale, and one for the otter.

So I guess we'll start with the otter since that has the least amount of people for that.

Otters have pouches near their forearms, which they use to store rocks and to use as tools, sometimes keeping a favorite tool for years.

Bob, you think this one is the fiction.

Everyone else thinks that otters have pouches, and this one is science.

This is science.

You got to watch the video.

I have a link to it in the notes.

Adorable science.

Adorable as hell.

Adorable science is the best kind of science.

Yeah,

they show us like the keeper of whatever working with this otter, and he hands them some food.

They put food in there to eat later.

Then it has this fairly big rocket.

It just sort of squirrels it away in its little axilla pouch, you know, near its forearm.

Come on.

It's amazing.

So good.

It is amazing.

You knew that, George?

I did.

I did, yeah.

I just, it's like

otters are.

I could watch videos of otters just floating on their backs

holding hands for days.

Shouldering up with their babies.

Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait.

Are we saying there was selective pressure for an otter to have a pouch in its forearm, or is this just some kind of random thing?

Must have been.

Yeah, probably used it.

Probably both.

It had something that it could.

be.

They open shellfish.

They open shellfish.

They crack the little shells on their chest.

They float on their backs.

They grab the rock.

They crack the shell.

I've seen them.

So they find

rock.

It's a good heft and the right shape.

This is a keeper.

And then they made more babies that live longer.

And then

they ended up in their baby.

They really are epically cute.

I mean, the fact that they eat while floating on their back is genius.

It's like a vacation animal.

It's just it's on permanent vacation.

All right.

Oh, Steve, I just watched a video.

Oh, my God.

He's sniffing that in there.

Like, it's nothing.

He's like, wow, there it is.

I mean,

yeah.

All right.

Imagine like one of them just whips out like a birthday cake on one of those targets.

Something else comes out.

Swiss Army knife.

So the other two are interesting, right?

So the thing is, you know, ears are kind of self-cleaning.

Like, you don't have to clean out your ears.

The wax

comes out by itself.

For most people.

And blue whales are the largest animals to have ever lived.

But that doesn't mean that their brain is the largest.

So these could go either way.

Even if whales do have wax, tree ring dating, I mean, that's kind of weird.

Yeah.

Let's go, let's do number two.

Okay.

Jay and Kara, you think this one is the fiction, correct?

Have a good night, Kara.

We lost you.

The blue whale has the largest brain in absolute terms of any animal to have ever lived.

Jay and Kara think this one is the fiction.

Everyone else thinks this one is science.

And this one is

the fiction.

Oh, jeez.

Now

we're going to be.

Oh, I got it.

It feels so good.

If the blue whale is the largest animal, why doesn't it have the largest brain?

Well, maybe it doesn't need it.

There is no, it's not always a correlation of brains.

Is it a current living animal or an ancient animal?

It's a current animal.

It's got to be like a Jay.

Dinosaurs had tiny walnut brains.

Yeah, it's another tiny thing.

It's not a reptile.

It's got to be another whale.

It's got to be another whale, which

is a sperm whale.

It is the sperm whale.

The sperm whale is smaller than the blue whale, but why would the sperm whale have a bigger brain than the blue whale?

Because it needs more brains.

It's a college.

Because it dives deeper and it needs more brain to manage all that air management?

It needs more brain power to manage its lifestyle, but it has nothing to do with diving per se.

Hunting?

Hunting, that's right.

Blue whales are baleen whales.

They filter feeds.

They just

film the bitch,

sucking in their food.

Sperm whales have echolocation and hunt, and they're way more social and cooperative, and that requires more brain power.

Wow.

Sperm whales have brains that are about 20 pounds.

Blue whales, 15, 16 pounds.

So it's not insignificant.

It's a huge difference.

That feels very small, though, still.

Yeah, that's a a good thing.

Well, a human brain is, what, three pounds?

So it's

a lot bigger than a human brain.

But are those whales only five times bigger than humans?

So the thing is,

if you map out brain size to body size, it's not linear.

As you get bigger, you don't need to...

The brain doesn't grow as fast as the body does.

So it actually makes sense for that curve.

You know what I mean?

With the sperm whales being a little bit above the curve, and because they're hunters and the blue whales being more typical on the curve.

All right, that means that large whales build up earwax in layers, forming rings, which can be used to estimate their age.

Is science.

This is cool.

Now, what happens is it's actually an adaptation.

The earwax builds up until it completely occludes the ear canal, and you get a wax plug.

And then that plug just grows bigger and bigger and bigger linearly as they age, right?

So, when you have a wax earplug from a whale, you cut it sort of lengthwise

and you can see the light and dark rings, dark rings for when they're migrating, light rings for when they're feeding, because there's more lipids in the wax, so it's lighter in color.

Think of the size q-tip you need to do that.

I mean,

now you might think that that impedes their hearing, but it actually improves their hearing.

Do you know why?

What?

Just conduction through the wax.

Yeah, because the wax has the same conductive properties as water.

And so

underwater, underwater, it actually aids in the sound waves communicating through to the inner ear.

Yeah, cool.

So, and Kara's right.

The ratio of rings to years is not always one to one.

It depends on their habits.

Some whales have a seasonal migration, and it's pretty much one year.

One ring is one year, but not all whales.

It depends on their migration patterns and feeding patterns, etc.

But yeah, they have freaking rings.

You could estimate their age from their

ear wax plugs, these giant

little plugs that they recover from whales.

Yeah, cool.

Steve, you said the wax conducts sound as like it's better because it's like water.

But wait, without the plug, it would be filled with water anyway, so wouldn't it be the same?

They said it would be better if it were filled with air.

I guess there could still be a pocket of air in there.

Okay.

And yeah, that's what they said.

But the thing is, it's not a detriment, right?

Because it's water conduction to water conduction to the eardrum, basically.

Does the wax have like ambergris properties to it, you think?

I wonder if it's like has some kind of

smell.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I think it only has it only has scientific interest, you know.

Otherwise, I don't see why.

No, I just mean literally, like,

is it like, is there some

use for it?

Did whalers back in the day?

Yeah, we got the unique.

Time to smoke, blah blah.

We've got the plug.

Four more candles for the day.

Light her up.

If you don't know, ambergris.

Ambergris is like whale puke, right?

That's the best.

It's puke, yeah, basically.

Like perfume, it smells so good.

Right.

So I wonder if there's something that's not a little bit more.

It's not because it smells good.

I think it's because of its physical properties.

It helps it stick and stay on you longer.

Oh, it has a really no.

I thought it was like musk, like a really intense, musky smell.

And I thought it was pronounced ambergris.

Ambergris.

Oh, now you pray.

Ambergris.

No way.

Ambergris.

Ambergris.

Ambergris.

Ambergris?

So ambergris is used in perfume because it functions as a powerful fixative.

See, that kind of thing.

Making scents last longer on the skin.

And it imparts, okay, and it imparts a unique, complex, musky, sweet, and marine aroma.

So it's both.

Yeah.

It's a marine fecal aroma that sweetens with age.

People figured this out.

That's remarkable.

Just random random selection of doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff.

When you're slaughtering big, beautiful whales for your job, I know the whale can smell some crazy shit from it.

I suppose so.

But of all.

But really, you guys always heard it as ambergris?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Always heard ambergris because it's from the French.

It means gray amber.

Ambergris.

Well, there's the.

One of us is right, and you're wrong.

There's the patina.

There's the patina, which is, I think, maybe that's called

ambergris.

The internet says ambergris.

Which internet?

I'm just saying the first link that comes up.

It's a medical journal.

Go to the French one, Gouglais.

Guglais.

Kare, I just listened to a pronunciation online, and the guy was saying ambergris.

That's crazy.

Just one guy who knows.

I don't think I ever heard anyone actually say the word.

I've just read it over and over and just pronounced it phonetically.

It's just very simple, ambergris.

It doesn't come up in conversation often, I'll grant you that.

Just say it already and listen to this guy go on and on about how to pronounce it.

Oh, my God.

No, even the French guy.

Even though the pompous French guy says ambergris.

Oh, okay.

All right.

There we go.

Now, now.

You always make things so complicated, Kara.

Let's not be redundant here.

That is an example of what's called hyper-foreignization, where you over-apply a rule that you learn about a foreign language.

It's like,

and I learned the concept of hyper-foreignization because of the coup de grace.

It's like, nope, it's coup de grace.

It's coup de grace.

Coup de grace is a blow of fat.

Like Mardi Gras.

Coup de grace is the blow of grace.

But people think.

People just think you always don't pronounce the S at the end of French words, but it's not true.

So, Steve, how awesome are me and Kara then?

Yeah, you guys won.

Oh, come on.

Congratulations.

We were having such a pleasant conversation.

How som.

How som.

Had to bring competition into it, Jay.

Listen, everybody won because everyone had fun and you learned something interesting.

All right, Evan.

Did you not take that doll?

No, you're not picked that doll.

Oh,

that's the correct pronunciation for ours.

She would pronounce it Amber Gris.

Yeah, you're right.

Amber Grease.

Amber Grease.

Amber Grease.

All right.

Kiss my Amber Grease.

Evan, give us a quote.

Tonight's quote is a cautionary quote.

If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything.

I like that.

Now, that was, I've heard this before.

I had no idea from where it was.

I say it all the time.

Or some version of it.

Right.

Yeah, if you torture the data until it confesses is another version of it that I like that one.

Ronald Harry Coase, C-O-A-S-E, British economist and author,

Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics and Sciences in 1991.

So he is a Nobel Prize winner

in economics.

And yeah, so there it is.

That's where it came from.

And yes, so definitely a cautionary quote, I believe.

I mean, it says it all.

You know, it's really perfect for the right circumstance.

It's kind of about p-hacking.

That's why you got to pre-register your studies.

Absolutely.

There you go.

It's like that episode in Next Generation when Data was, you know, taken hostage.

So he was pushed so hard that

he was ready to kill the guy.

He was ready to kill the guy.

It was exactly.

And

something happened in transport.

So, yeah, don't push the data.

George.

Oh, I was wondering where you were going.

So we've had two Star Trek and one Star Wars reference this episode for keeping track.

Too much.

George, thank you so much for joining us, brother.

I am so, I'm going to be making the sound that that dog made when I see you guys at the airport.

I'm so excited.

I'm just going to be, oh, whoa, whoa, man.

I'll see you in just about a little over two weeks.

Yeah,

looking forward to it.

Looking forward to visiting Kansas for the first time.

Yeah, my goodness.

Gonna be a ton of fun.

All right, guys.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

Sure, man.

Thanks.

You got it, brother.

Bye.

And until next week, this is your Skeptics Guide to the Universe.

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