The Skeptics Guide #1054 - Sep 20 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 Tuesday, September 16th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.

Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Hey, everybody.

Kara Santa Maria.

Howdy.

Jay Novella.

Hey, guys.

And Evan Bernstein.

Good evening, folks.

So, what's new, everyone?

We're going to Kansas this weekend.

Well, I think if you're hearing this now, we are in Kansas.

We are there.

We're probably like starting the private show as this comes out.

Oh, fascinating.

Time travel is so weird.

And chances are we're going to run into a traveling potion salesman on the road.

And then a tornado will come.

I saw it in a movie once, I think.

Oh, I had no idea where you were going.

Yeah, I remember it was happening.

And it will all be in black and white.

Yes, the world will be black and white once again.

And, you know, something we missed last week, I'm not sure if you guys saw, but on September 6th, we lost a scientific great.

David Baltimore died.

I think we've talked about him before on this show.

He, I think most recently was at Caltech, which is how I knew of him.

He was 87 years old when he died.

He won a Nobel Prize when he was, I think, 38.

Yeah, I know.

He's really, really young.

Yeah, wow.

Because you have to wait a while after the science that you performed actually gets recognized for that prize.

So he must have been, what, a teenager?

He was 37.

Okay, so he was 37 and split the prize with Renato Dolbecco and Howard Temin for, quote, their discoveries concerning the interaction between tumor viruses and the genetic material of the cell.

Specifically, they discovered the enzyme reverse transcriptase, which is like huge.

And then he went on to study all sorts of different aspects of cancer research, recompetent DNA research, immunology, virology.

He was really, really instrumental in HIV research because of the work that he did on reverse transcriptase.

He was also part of the cancer center at MIT.

He

worked at the Salk Institute early on.

He ended up ultimately at Caltech doing continued

important research on gene editing

and and yeah,

died at the age of 87 of cancer.

She was.

That is like right in the average age.

You know, like that's a very common age for men to die at.

Oh, what's life expectancy is like 78, 79, so

it's past that.

Wow.

The upper 80s is a good run.

Yeah, I thought 86 was the number.

No, no.

No, no, it seems high.

And this man, I mean, I'm looking right here at his legacy.

He published over 700 peer-reviewed articles.

Oh.

He won way back in like 1970.

He won the Gustave Stern Award in Virology.

He's won awards from major companies, the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize,

National Medal of Science.

Of course, he was in all of the big institutions.

And yeah, won a Nobel Prize.

He was president of AAAS.

I mean, just an incredible career.

Wow.

What a resume.

A lot.

And he has honorary degrees, like 20 honorary degrees.

Oh, boy.

That's such a weird thing, the honorary degree.

It is, right?

Yeah.

Just a nice tribute.

A very nice tribute.

Here's an honorary IQ.

How would you like some honorary dinner?

Hope you do

Yeah, exactly.

Here's your honorary mint.

It's Waffa Thin.

Poor David.

All right, well, let's go straight to some news items.

I'm going to start us off with a discussion of conspiracy physics.

What do you guys think that refers to?

Is that like quantum bullshit?

Oh, yeah, like Deepak Choker kind of thing.

Is that what we talked about a bunch of years ago?

We were talking about the probabilities of these conspiracies actually working as they're about the physics of conspiracy theories.

Is it like what the bleep do we know stuff?

Yeah, sort of.

I mean, it's that and everything else.

So there was a Wall Street Journal article recently called The Rise of Conspiracy Physics, which discusses the popularity of social media

influencers who claim that there is a vast conspiracy among academic physicists.

So this is, again, nothing new, and this is not unique to physics, but it is interesting, you know, having been, and Jay can attest to this as well, you know, we do TikToks every week, and we're constantly, you know, combing social media for good skeptical topics.

And it's a bottomless pit of these conspiracy narratives, which have a very familiar format, you know, where it's, I notice this strange thing and then leap to some massive, ridiculous tin-hat conspiracy theory, right?

And it could be the Earth is flat or

the electrical universe or quantum helium or whatever, just some weird thing, and then

justifying it in the fact that they get zero attention among academic physicists or scientists.

Well, that's because they're all lying to you.

It's a giant conspiracy, right?

Yes.

And why?

Well, that's how you.

So, you know, if you have an alternate theory of of reality and it's not accepted at physics, then you either you're wrong or all of physics is wrong.

Right.

Okay.

So they claim, well, all of physics is wrong.

This is like everything you think you know is wrong.

And

NASA lies about everything.

But what's their explanation for why all of physics would be lying to us, I guess?

They don't really have one.

No, I think that's what I find is that.

You can't handle the truth.

It's yeah, it's whatever.

It's because reasons.

You know what I mean?

It's just they're aren't they looking for it though?

I mean they want they they want to slip into that pocket.

Into what pocket?

Into

the like I know better and I found this thing.

We see that all the time.

Yeah.

Well yeah they are doing the I know better and I found this thing.

But I feel like at least with the like anti

medical establishment conspiracy theorists and their, you know, what big pharma doesn't want you to know, they have some whole narrative about how like it's really a cabal to keep you sick so they can keep selling you drugs and make all that money.

And The best they got is that scientists are doing it.

You know, usually it's something it could be super vague, like they don't want you to know how the world really works.

Like, who is they, and why don't they want you to know that, and what's they really doing?

They don't have to really spell it out.

If they, for the those, the more sophisticated version of that is that they're all just ginning up these lies to get research grants to keep the grant money going.

It's like, okay, but how does that work?

Oh, yeah, big grant money.

Yeah, how does making up lies fund more research than doing good science?

You know, and wouldn't other scientists immediately sniff them out?

So then everybody has to be in on it.

Again, it just gets ridiculous really fast.

So when I wrote about this, I went over a little bit like the this is just crank, these are cranks, right?

And the history of crank behavior.

So we've been doing this long enough, you know, basically pre-saturation of the web, pre-web 2.0.

So back in the analog days, what cranks would do to get the attention of anybody is they would send their manifesto to a scientist and say, Look, I've proven Einstein wrong, or whatever.

We used to get these.

We still get them sometimes.

We still get them.

Now it's more email,

but we used to get like, I've had two, 300-page manifestos of pure nonsense.

You've read them all, right?

Oh, yeah.

I went line by line.

And then there's the Web 1.0 kind of cranks.

You guys remember the classic example?

You guys remember the Time Cube?

Oh, gosh, the Time Cube.

Oh, my God.

The Time Cube.

Ancient.

Long vertical scroll of incoherent nonsense.

Oh, yeah.

And also self-congratulatory, I'm the smartest person on the planet.

Wow.

So that was the sort of the standard for a while.

And now it's more the social media version, which is you make a video or you write a blog post or whatever, and it's just encapsulated.

Although sometimes they still do the manifesto.

I did just one TikTok video on a woman who I don't even know what she was claiming.

That's the crazy thing.

I'm not even sure what her claim was.

It's just that she thinks she solved autism and ADHD and everything.

And it's just this incoherent meandering kind of linking to different articles.

But there's no thesis, like there's no hypothesis.

If you can't express your own theory,

you're in trouble right off the gap.

No, so you have 150-page, whatever, 200, whatever big it was.

It's like that.

You should be able to say it in 10 words or less.

Yeah.

Well, you should be able to make an executive summary, like an elevated pitch.

Give me a paragraph, give me a page.

If you can't summarize it in that sort of coherent way, then

you probably don't have anything.

Well, yeah, every peer-reviewed journal article requires that an abstract be included.

That's what an abstract is.

I love abstracts.

Give me the abstract.

So, you know, a lot of the so the question is, why is this taking off?

Why is there so much of it?

And there's a lot of blaming the victims going on.

So blaming physicists or scientists or academics or experts, right?

It's all their fault that the cranks are out there on YouTube and TikTok.

And it's really not, in my opinion, it's not fair, it's not accurate.

And they will say contradictory contradictory things.

Well, academics ignore the cranks and let them flourish, or they respond to the cranks and give them attention.

So, whatever you do, it's your fault.

Whether you respond to them or ignore them, you're just

enabling the cranks.

Not a new problem.

We've seen it for a long time.

That's infuriating, though.

Isn't it?

But here's the big thing.

So, this is the thing that really makes me furious: is that, oh, it's scientists' fault for

lying to the public so much.

Right?

Oh, I do.

And so this usually comes in one of two flavors.

One flavor is, well, they lied to us about global warming, so why should we trust them now?

So it's basically using one conspiracy theory to justify other conspiracy theories.

Yeah, what about the masks during COVID?

Yeah, or the big one is they lied to us about the flat Earth.

So that's the point.

I think that's like the point of the flat Earth is to say, well, if we could prove this, then we could deny everything that they say because clearly they're lying to us about everything.

That's actually the point of their conspiracy theories, right?

It is to justify all other conspiracy theories, essentially.

It's just anti-elitism, anti-expert, anti-institutionalism.

We could ignore everything, shoot from the hip, do our own research, because they lied to us.

But sometimes, even if you don't believe in a specific lie or denialism, like global warming denial or flat eartherism, or

again, COVID, like everything about COVID.

You know, say, well, they lied to us about COVID or about masks or ivermectin or whatever, again, whatever crap you believe in.

It's just the sort of generic, well, you know, scientists can't be trusted because

they're always coming out with these announcements that are not true, like cold fusion and string theory or whatever.

It's like, okay, but

they kind of

looking at fringe cases or like cases don't really illustrate a systemic problem within science.

These are some of these are one-offs or they were an example of the media getting way ahead of a story or reporting preliminary evidence.

So, yeah,

there's a media, there's definitely a media problem.

And as we have discussed many times, sometimes scientists play into that or journals play into that.

Absolutely.

Well, and they often blame when we have like incomplete, you know, when we update our information instead of being like, look, they updated their information, they were wrong before, and now they're flip-flopping.

No, that's the thing.

So, part of this, like 90% of it or whatever, is just the normal process of science.

There's preliminary findings, they get people try to replicate them, they don't replicate, then they get discarded, right?

That's the way it's supposed to work.

But if the media is breathlessly sort of reporting every preliminary finding, it seems like the scientists are lying to us or they're taking away all of these big claims.

It's like, no, this is just the normal grinding of the meat of science, and you're just not being given the correct perspective on it.

You know,

you're misinterpreting the mainstream media for scientific activity.

These are not the same thing.

But it just

generates this sense of, well, we can't trust anything we read about from scientists scientists in the media, so we can just believe whatever we want.

And of course, even if you correctly identify a problem, like, oh, whatever, the researchers are too cozy with industry or whatever, or sometimes they fall for fads or they're closed-minded, you know, that doesn't mean that your wacky idea is true, right?

You could be correct about a problem existing without being correct about your proposed solution.

Which the proposed solution is anything goes, my crank ideas must be true.

I have no burden of proof.

They have an impossible burden of proof.

They have to be 100% correct all the time, out of the gate.

And I just need to have a wacky idea with the flimsiest of

correlations or whatever, and don't have to prove a thing.

Like the double standard is absolutely overwhelming.

But that's what exists.

That is

basically what is common on social media.

How much, like when I think about conspiracy theories and

what kinds of conspiracy theories are peddled, I often think that there's you know, there's a million ways to slice and dice, right?

You could lump and split whatever.

But there are the people who are promoting certain types of conspiracies in an effort to sow disillusionment, you know, in an effort to, let's say, interfere with like elections or stability of a government.

There are the people who are promoting conspiracy theories because they want to make money off of their version of a thing.

Stop paying these people.

I want to take your money.

Yeah.

I worry with the physics conspiracy theories that I, they read to me the most like there's a higher percentage of people with like severe mental illness who are propagating them.

Have you ever noticed that too?

Yeah, totally.

Like the TimeCube guy had schizophrenia almost.

Yeah, like they often feel like this frenetic, like somebody was up all night on acid solving all the problems of the universe.

Yeah, I think that attracts that shit.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it's like, if I can just make everything fit, there's different flavors, totally.

Yeah, and the medical ones are snake oil salesmen.

You know what I mean?

They're not necessarily.

They just want to sell their vitamins.

Right.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Exactly.

They want to just sell their snake oil.

I think our previous experience having to do with physics and things probably are the perpetual motion machine peddlers.

Oh, yeah, man.

Free energy believers.

Remember, that was in the news every week back in the day.

In the 90s.

It never goes fully away, but man, it's...

Well, because that's one of those, like, it's too good to be true.

This could solve all our problems.

And they're trying to sell a machine or finance their machine at the same time.

They have an ulterior motive, effectively.

And it makes sense why people buy into the things that are the solutions to all of their problems.

I mean, that's what everybody wants.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Who doesn't want that?

Which is why I think, again, these like these physics ones are kind of weird.

They're in their own camp because, A, yeah, you have a lot of these like, I've made sense out of a nonsensical world, but then like the...

The people on the receiving end don't understand them either.

Yeah, they're not necessarily tied to a product they're trying to hawk or

something like that.

They're just looking for intellectual credibility where, you know,

seeking it in alternative ways.

I think so, because they feel so esoteric to the everyday sort of citizen.

They're not like, oh, I want to buy that manifesto.

Right?

Like, I understand your manifesto.

My manifesto by Dr.

Crank.

Available now on Amazon.

Well, Carrie, you're going to talk about something very similar.

Tell us about cancer misinformation.

What's going on with that?

I was about to segue, and then I was like, that's not my job.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, this aligns perfectly with an article that I came across recently in the conversation written by a psychologist named Andy Levy.

And it has a British lens, right?

This is a British psychologist who is writing from that perspective.

And so I found it interesting because he highlights some sort of misinformation, some pseudoscience on British TV.

So the article is called How Cancer Misinformation Exploits the Way We Think.

And he spends some time talking about a specific incidence on television, followed up with, you know, some of the things we often talk about on the show, like what is misinformation?

Why does it happen?

How does it happen?

And then what are some of the ways that we can sort of protect ourselves against it?

But this one, specifically, he's focusing on cancer misinformation.

I think that's why it piqued my interest.

That's the world that I'm in.

And I cannot tell you, as somebody who works with people who have cancer, I work with them from a psychology perspective, it is rampant.

I've had patients who everywhere from, you know, a small kind of off-the-cuff statement about something that's patently untrue to patients who seek out just like rank pseudoscience and you know, harmful non-treatments and everything in between so apparently um our listeners who wow i just fully apparently apparently yeah i heard it um

so our listeners um in the uk may recognize the name danielle lloyd it was new to me but she's a tv personality and actress i guess she was a former um miss great britain winner she recently announced earlier this this year that she was diagnosed with melanoma and she had to have a mole that was on her collarbone removed.

And throughout her process of then getting treatment, she had to have a second biopsy and second treatment.

And so there's, you know, it's the news is reporting it.

And she's sort of taken to social media to do the opposite of what we're often talking about on the show.

This was a breath of fresh air for me.

She's not going online and spreading misinformation.

She's going online and debunking misinformation and cautioning her followers and her listeners to not listen to these social media influencers who don't have credentials and don't know what they're talking about.

She had a big wake-up call when she, I guess she was filming or she was at a press junk.

And it's not really clear why she was there, but she was traveling and she was talking to a reporter from Vogue.

And she was like, oh, sunscreen is really toxic.

There's all sorts of harmful chemicals in it.

And the reporter from Vogue said, absolutely not.

It's dangerous that you're saying that out loud.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah.

Like, that is not.

Say that more, people.

Like,

sunscreen is one of the best preventive measures we have to prevent skin cancer.

And there is good evidence to support that.

And there may be some, you know, products on the market that are, that are, I guess, better or worse than others, but by and large, wearing sunscreen is safe and it could save your life.

And so she started to really dig into a lot of the messages that she had been fed on social media and recognized how many people out there who don't have any credentials, who have no idea what they're talking about, are spreading deeply dangerous misinformation.

And so she's now become something of kind of a role model to other individuals, teaching people about checking, you know, your body for moles, looking for signs that they're changing color, that they're changing shape, you you know, going to your dermatologist, wearing sunscreen, and seeking out evidence-based intervention when there's a risk of cancer.

That's kind of one side of the story.

The other side of the story in this article really does focus on why cancer misinformation seems to be so, not just so prevalent, but so, I don't know, like why people are so credulous toward cancer misinformation.

And it does seem like it hits on a few things that are, that we're especially vulnerable or sensitive to.

I mean, obviously fear is a big one, right?

People are afraid of cancer.

They're afraid of sickness.

They're afraid of pain.

They're afraid of death.

And cancer sort of, for a lot of people, embodies a lot of these taboo fears.

I have had patients who were diagnosed who couldn't use the word.

right and we would refrain from the word cancer in our sessions because it was such a triggering and taboo word for them.

Cancer carries a lot of weight for a lot of people.

But what are two of the things, or what are some of the things, I guess I should ask you guys, that you can think of when you think of the types of cancer misinformation that you've seen online?

Like, what are some of the

ways that cancer misinformation is spread, or like the tactics that the

pseudoscientists use?

So a common one is to scare people away from standard treatment.

This is the burn, poison, and cut, you know, is how they characterize it.

And so, like, don't take chemotherapy, don't get surgery,

don't do radiation therapy.

Are things like chemotherapy actually is toxic, or like I shouldn't say it's toxic because it is in a lot of ways, but chemotherapy actually causes cancer to spread, or chemotherapy will kill you faster, chemotherapy is worse than the disease.

You'll hear these kinds of claims a lot.

And then, what happens when somebody hears that and they're afraid, and they want to make the best decision, they put off treatment.

And they die.

And they die.

Yeah.

Either they never get conventional treatment or they wait so long that it's no longer as effective because that's one of the toughest things about cancer.

The more and faster it spreads, the harder it is to treat, right?

The earlier you can catch it before it has spread, the easier it is to treat.

Yes, this is a very common tactic that they use.

And one of the ways that they do it, and this this is something that the writer of this article really points out, is that there's a negativity bias, a principle that we talk about in psychology where the bad is stronger than the good.

And that could partially explain why a lot of this type of pseudoscience is so triggering for people and works better than hopeful or fact-based messages, because people...

are going to react more strongly to this is going to, like you said, you know, the burn, the cut, right?

This is going to disfigure you.

This could make you disabled.

This could, you know, the cancer spreading and eating away at you more than, you know, you could get 15 healthy months if you start on this treatment now.

Or by and large, people who take this treatment, you know, have this many better days in front of them.

When they're sort of hopeful or fact-based, they don't seem to stick as much because of that negativity bias.

Another thing that they talk about quite a lot is the idea of highlighting losses as opposed to potential gains.

So they're kind of related.

That when we see cancer messages that talk about, you know, losing health, losing comfort, losing actual years of life, it does feel a lot more urgent and a lot more motivating than when we flip the script and we talk about improved survival or better quality of life.

And so I think knowing that there is a bias toward loss, there is a bias toward sort of bad stronger than good or negativity can help those who are messaging position their messages in a way that are more effective.

Because we see this so often, right?

That the misinformation, the pseudoscience, their messages are unfair.

They hit below the bell.

They don't play by the rules.

And unfortunately, they're often more effective to people who are vulnerable and who are afraid.

And so we could be thinking about how to improve our messaging so that it feels just as urgent or just as necessary.

And also, the writer of the article talks at length about pre-bunking.

I think we've all talked about pre-bunking before, so we don't have to get into it too deeply.

But the idea of pre-bunking is just that when you sort of are aware of common techniques that pseudoscientists, grifters, you know, snake oil salesmen use,

when you're aware of them in advance, you can spot them before they get to you, before they take hold, and you're more likely to be able to resist those messages.

And so a lot of things is like understanding scare tactics, understanding mechanisms of deception, like exaggerated risks, like fear-mongering, like promises of cures or miraculous, you know, treatments that don't seem to carry any weight, but being aware of that before they hit you, you're less likely to fall victim to them.

It's much harder to undo than it is to prevent.

And, you know, they end their article, which I think is an important one.

We've probably used this quote within the first, you know, I wasn't here at the very beginning of the SGU, but I can imagine that maybe, Evan, you know, the Carl Sagan quote, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

I mean, we use that quote all the time.

Was that ever one of the quotes at the end of the SGU?

Oh, gosh, probably in episode two.

Right, that's what I was thinking.

It must have been really early on because it's such a mantra.

But it is such an important quote.

And I think we have to go back to it over and over and over.

When we hear a claim that sounds too good to be true, there better be a whole lot of evidence backing it up because it likely is too good to be true.

But often the evidence is, I heard it from someone on the internet.

Exactly.

That's the entirety of the evidence.

So much cancer misinformation, so much cancer pseudoscience falls into that bucket of too good to be true.

And we have to remember that.

But good on Danielle Lloyd for sort of changing that narrative.

And it's always nice when we can talk about how a public figure, a celebrity, is using social media for good, right?

Rare.

Yeah.

Yeah, the other thing I often point out, too, is that when you're disconnected from reality, right, you don't have a process which constrains your claims and your message and your narrative because you have to defend it with evidence and logic and review, you know, of some sort.

And then you get to craft your message purely for psychological appeal.

Of course.

So that's these things, and these things evolve, the ones that have its adaptive radiation, the ones that have the best

psychological appeal, those are keepers, man.

You just get variations on those themes.

And then over time, they get fine-tuned to be pushing the psychological buttons of people, you know?

Absolutely.

And I mean,

that's why I sort of use the analogy without making it so overt of like hitting below the belt or not playing by the rules.

Like that really is what is happening here.

There are no constraints.

And so

when there's a fight and there are rules to how you fight, and then somebody just comes in with a weapon, It's very easy for them to win the fight.

And that's what we see over and over and over.

And I think that is the eternal problem: is how do we continue to, I mean, I hate that I'm using like a violent analogy here, but to whether it's fight back or be on the offensive without stooping to the level of also using weapons, right?

How are we able to make sure that the narrative that is an evidence-based and scientific narrative is factual, but it's also persuasive?

And that it can even find a voice within the cacophony that is pseudoscience.

Yeah, it's tough when one side's ethically constrained and the other one isn't.

Yep.

And that's the catch-22 of trolls, right?

Is they poison the dialogue because

they're not acting in good faith.

And there's no real solution to that.

There's just there are things you can do, but it's all a trade-off.

There's no real solution to it.

Right.

It's flagging misinformation.

It's education that allows for that type of pre-bunking.

And it's, you know, I think those of us in the community who are in those sort of authoritative positions, physicians, scientists, psychologists,

you know, individuals who have that type of education and training, continuing to maintain really,

really meaningful relationships with their patients, with their community members, and continuing to be that trustworthy voice.

Because when it comes down to it, yes, people are listening to all the bullshit that's out there on social media, but when they get sick and they go to the doctor, polls continue to show us that they trust what their doctors tell them.

Yeah.

We have to keep

fostering those relationships.

All right.

Bob,

give us an update on thermal nuclear propulsion.

I know you love this.

Ooh.

I thought you were going to say thermal nuclear war.

I'm like, what?

You love it, Bob.

You love it.

I don't love that.

So, yes, it's been, I calculated, it's been 34 episodes since I've talked about nuclear rockets in some ways.

So, we are due.

Way overdue.

Yes, try to keep it to 20, you know, so we hit 34.

This time, we have an advance for nuclear thermal rockets that use liquid or molten uranium to potentially, it seems, double the efficiency of nuclear rockets using an ingenious centrifuge design.

This is from researchers at Ohio State University, collaborating with the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

They've published in ACTA Astronautica, a paper called Addressing Challenges to Engineering Feasibility of the Centrifugal Nuclear Thermal Rocket.

I never heard of this type of rocket before, CNTR.

So why do we even want rockets that are nuclear?

Well, if you haven't listened to me talk about this the 40 or 50 times I have, chemical rockets, they're just annoying.

You know, they've served us quite well.

They've done an amazing job, and they will probably help us get off the planet for a really long time.

But in space,

chemical rockets have hit an efficiency wall, a physics wall of efficiency.

And we've got the technology.

We don't have to use chemical rockets in space anymore.

Now, this ceiling that chemical rockets have been hitting stems from the fact that the energy released from chemical reactions, it's just paltry and inefficient compared to the energy from nuclear reactions.

So that's why this is the preferred rocket if you really want to move cargo and get places fast in space.

And you know what fuel, what chemical rocket fuel has the highest specific impulse, which means

basically change in velocity for the mass of fuel?

Well,

it's got to be hydrogen.

It's the lightest.

That's it.

That's it.

That's as best as you can do.

Yes.

Just burning.

Burning hydrogen with oxygen.

That's as good as chemical rockets are going to get, basically.

Yeah.

So nuclear thermal use fission instead of chemical energy to heat the rocket propellant and shoot it out of the out of the ship to fly through space.

We've had and we've tested these nuclear thermal rockets since the 60s and

we're finally seeing a resurgence now in this technology for various reasons and which I don't really need to go into right here.

But

we are having this renaissance which is making me very happy.

Now these types of rockets are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets meaning that you can transport more cargo with the same amount of propellant or the same cargo with less propellant.

So, huge advantages that would save a lot and a lot of money, millions to billions of dollars.

So, this news item is essentially a new idea how to make these nuclear thermal rockets even more efficient, perhaps twice as efficient, which would make them about four times as efficient as chemical rockets.

So, one of the best ways to do this is just let's do a comparison because it took me a bit to figure out why is this better?

How is this centrifuge even working?

And why is it better than a nuclear, than a

run-of-the-mill nuclear thermal rocket?

So, let's look at at a solid core nuclear thermal rocket.

So we start with a uranium composite.

So this uranium composite is filled with thousands of little tunnels.

Now imagine that the uranium is undergoing fission while hydrogen gas is flowing through those tunnels.

So you could imagine what's going to happen, right?

All that heat from the fission is conducted through the metal to the tunnels, which heats the gas inside tremendously.

And this superheated propellant is then directed to the ship's nozzles to essentially push the ship through space, right?

Simple.

Simple design, at least, you know, at that high level.

Complex to pull off, but that's essentially how it works.

So, but now we've got this CNTR, this centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket.

So, what is this guy doing?

In this proposal, the researchers

primarily imagine a beefy centrifuge.

You're going to need a very strong centrifuge for this, obviously.

So, now remember that carnival ride, guys?

Steve, Jay, you know this.

When you or your parents, which I have to say now, we're kids, the gravitron that's that thing you would get in it it would spin you around and pin you against the wall with like say what like two and a half to three G's which is which is three times the force of gravity that you feel right now so we were pinned against that wall really hard well this new nuclear centrifuge would spin at literally thousands of g's So instead of spinning you into a thin paste against the wall, which is what that would do, it spins a liquid or molten uranium around and around.

And of course, that uranium is also undergoing fission.

Bob, let me ask you a question.

So

your description of how this works, is hydrogen the propellant?

Hydrogen?

Yes, hydrogen is the propellant and uranium is the fuel.

Because hydrogen, while it's a great fuel, it's not that great a propellant.

So I'm wondering why they use that.

Because it's light, right, which makes it a great fuel, but means you don't get that much bang for the bucket as a propellant.

Anyway, just well, yeah, but actually that...

That's actually part of the benefits of this design.

This design can run on many different fuels, including methane and other things that we can get from asteroids and the moon.

So one of the huge benefits of this technology is that it could be self-sustaining.

You could go out into space and then just pick up more fuel in an asteroid.

Fuel or propellant?

Propellant.

Propellant.

I mean propellant.

Because it's so adaptable, it can use so many different types of propellant that,

I mean, I was just focusing on what is the process, but they do mention...

They do mention hydrogen a lot.

Okay, so let me just finish up here.

So

you've got this huge mega centrifuge.

It's spinning this

thin film of kind of a liquefied uranium, you know, in the centrifuge.

And what happens is that the gaseous propellant then bubbles through the fusing uranium, and that heat is transferred directly to it through direct contact.

And that's the key there.

That's the key difference there.

There's something like millions or billions of these little gas bubbles of propellant percolating through that fusing uranium.

And those bubbles,

you know, all those billions of bubbles have an incredibly large surface surface area, far larger than those tunnels that I had mentioned with the other technology.

And that's what makes the heating so much more efficient than conventional nuclear thermal rockets.

That's one of the keys right there.

So, I tried to come up with some other analogies for how this works.

So, the typical, the conventional nuclear thermal rocket would be like blowing air through a red-hot radiator, right?

So, you're blowing your air through the red-hot radiator, and the air that's coming out at the other end

is going to be hotter, obviously.

But with the CNTR, it's like bubbling that air through molten metal.

So what's coming out at the other end is just going to be much hotter.

And that's what we're seeing with the CNTR

technology.

So the end result is that the propellant reaches much higher temperatures, which creates higher exhaust speeds, meaning less propellant is needed.

for the same job.

But one of the things, and Steve, you alluded to this, you mentioned it, one of the key things here to compare these technologies is to look at specific impulse.

So specific impulse, it's essentially the miles per gallon, or should I say kilometers per liter for rockets.

That's one interest, you know, one good way to look at it.

Higher ISP means you get more push per unit of propellant.

That's all it really is saying here.

So now, but you've got to remember, ISP is not equivalent to thrust.

It's not the same thing because you could have crazy high ISP with tiny thrust, like ion engines, or you could have a lot of thrust with modest ISP, which is chemical rockets.

And that's why chemical rockets are great for getting us off the surface of the planet.

Thrust, baby.

The thrust is huge,

but you can't thrust like that for very long.

So its ISP is crap.

So, Bob, you can't thrust long?

Oh, boy.

Somebody went for it.

All right, Jay.

Congratulations, bro.

Thank you.

Bob, thrust long.

The ISP, so the ISP for chemical rockets is 450.

For solid-core nuclear thermal rockets, it's 900, which is, I mean, that's just a huge improvement over chemical rockets it's it's so beneficial now cntr has a potential isp of 1500 to perhaps at a perhaps the best it might be able to achieve is 1800 seconds of isp and that's one hell of an incremental improvement that's a what did i say four times that could be four times better than than chemical um so it's so it's so it's so efficient it's great so what might this mean okay what's the bottom line in terms of what we see on the ground if you will or in space i guess it would be more accurate.

If we wanted to, using this technology, we could add extra propellant and extra propellant on top of that to do really cool things and still have room for cargo.

Now, that's something that you can't do with chemical rockets.

You can add more and more chemical components for your propulsion, more propellant, but there's a limit.

There's actually a limit you can't go beyond.

And you will have, at the end of the day, what's going to happen, Steve?

You're not going to have any room for cargo if you add, you just keep adding more and more propellant.

But you're not

in that situation necessarily with these other nuclear options.

So that means that you could add extra propellant for the CNTR rocket, and that means you could push the ship harder, you can burn the engines longer,

you could brake harder, you can get to your destination a lot faster and then just hit the brakes really hard, turn and burn or whatever, meaning that you could potentially bring a trip to Mars down to two to three months.

Whereas for a chemical rocket, you would need probably something like eight or nine months.

So you can, if you do this, get somewhere faster.

But this technology really shines, though, for just the amount of cargo that you can carry.

So, for example, you could double the cargo for Mars with the same, basically the same ship mass.

You could just double your cargo, which is which is a huge benefit.

Doubling the cargo, that's something amazing right there.

You could also do the

you could do it direct to Jupiter.

You know, the pinball in space where you got to do gravity assists for this planet, then you got to go to this planet and do another gravity assist.

It takes a long time.

It takes a long time.

Right.

With this technology, you can go essentially, you know, pretty much direct to Jupiter without years of gravity assists.

You could also, how about this?

You could use this technology to add, you could take away, you could trade away some of your spare propellant that you no longer need for a given cargo, and then you could just add extra radiation shielding for space to make people extra safe, right?

With all that nasty radiation out there.

How about this one?

You could do faster intercepts for if there's a surprise comet or asteroid asteroid coming to the Earth, you can do a much faster intercept with

this CNTR centrifugal nuclear thermal rocket compared to a chemical rocket.

And then finally, you could also do bigger science, bigger and better science.

You could loft heavier instruments into space.

You can have more power.

You could have more data.

You could just do bigger and better science when you have this much power behind you.

All right, so before I finish, of course, we got to go over some of the potential issues.

CNTR is quite complex.

It's definitely more complex than NTR, nuclear thermorocketry.

So there's definitely some engineering challenges ahead.

And they just briefly mentioned things like, you know, ensuring that the new design is stable,

that the startup and even the shutdown is actually stable and won't blow up on you.

And also, they also need to make sure that they don't lose a lot of uranium fuel during the operation.

That's another classic problem that they could have with this.

But the researchers hope that they may have a design ready for real-world tests within five years.

So in five years, we might have something substantial ready to go with this in terms of either having the design pinned down so they could build it or have something that's already partially built in five years.

I'm not sure.

I'm not sure how fast they can get this stuff ready.

But it looks very promising, and anything that makes nuclear rockets better and more efficient is great to me because that is clearly, I think we, Steve, you would agree we could say with confidence that nuclear rockets are our future.

It could be literally for centuries, for centuries, we could continue tweaking this, fitting into fusion.

Until we get fusion, right?

Fusion and then fusion, and then after that, it would be maybe directed energy.

But clearly, we could tweak this, just this general idea of nuclear rockets, fission, fusion,

for literally for centuries.

I mean, this is the way people will, people won't even remember chemical rockets eventually.

Well, I still think we're going to need them to get off planets for a little bit.

Yeah, that's true.

That's so annoying.

Isn't that frustrating?

You have all this amazing efficiency and power behind you, but

you can't really just launch from the planet using a nuclear rocket.

Not easily.

I've come across a design or two that could potentially do it.

They're not sure if a nuclear rocket could actually launch people and cargo off of the Earth.

One design that might work would actually spew the entire continent with radiation, so that open cycle

engine is not probably going to be very useful if it's going to irradiate most of the planet.

But if they come up with a closed cycle, that would be great.

I don't know.

But yeah, chemical rockets will be with us for a while on the Earth.

But in space, it's going to be all nuclear.

Yep.

All right.

Thanks, Bob.

Jay, tell us about these old mummies.

Yeah, I mean, when I first looked at this, the first thing I thought of was that

Bob would want to make one of these

for his aunt because he was so crazy looking.

Careful, he might have.

You know, so historically, you know, most people are like, you know, mummies come from Egypt, right?

That's like a common piece of knowledge there or South America but that's not the whole story and there's a lot of complexity to the um to the history of I was going to say zombies Bob but I

of mummies so there was a PNAS study and it verified that the earliest known mummification happened somewhere in Southeast Asia and it was not in the the regions that most people are or think of when they think of mummies.

So this discovery, now it's rewriting the timeline of human mortuary practices, which is interesting, right?

Because we don't, you know, when you think about this type of thing, like people, people did this to mummies or did this to people, turn them into mummies for religious reasons, for communal reasons.

You know, it was a very important thing.

It wasn't just like, hey, we're going to just do this because we like it.

You know, it's more revolved around,

you know, there's a lot of culture involved with it.

So there's complexity to how they do it.

There's different ways that they do it.

This way, though, I've never heard of, and it's really, really cool.

This research team was led by Hung, Deng, and Matsumura.

And they examined human remains from 95 different archaeological sites.

And this was across southern China, Vietnam, and Indonesia.

11 of these sites were analyzed in extreme detail.

And what they found was that

this wasn't just burial.

There were many bodies that they found that were bound tightly in like this compact, compressed thing.

It looks almost like an impossible contorted pose with the arms like crossed under the thighs and the knees were pulled up all the way super tight up into the upper chest.

Yeah.

That's weird.

And these positions were, you know, they found them to be really extreme.

And the people that who prepared the corpses also did something where they removed soft tissue before, you know, in the start of this process so they can make these bodies even more compact and tight looking.

So what they confirmed was that the bodies were deliberately dried and they were preserved before internment.

So, there's a few things that they had to do to get the full picture.

The first thing they did was with the they looked at the bones and there was some really important evidence that were found.

Look at the bones.

So,

many of the bones showed a blackening or charring on very

specific places on the body, foreheads, elbows, knees, pelvises.

Now, these areas have the thinnest layers of muscle and skin.

And the pattern wasn't random.

What they found was, so the pattern didn't match a cremation pattern that they find.

It suggests that there was some type of controlled, deliberate process that they were using.

And to confirm it, the researchers used two advanced techniques, you know, X-ray diffraction or a Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy.

Right?

Almost said it, right?

These methods detect microscopic changes inside bones and reveal whether they were exposed to heat or smoke.

And I found that interesting that they used these devices specifically to track heat and smoke.

I guess it was the charring that led them to that.

So

even when there was no visible signs of burning left in what they found.

And anyway, the results were really cool.

So

more than 80% of the samples showed a clear sign of low temperature heat exposure.

And this confirmed that the bodies were treated over smoldering fires for an extended period of time before they were buried.

So think about that.

They were like heat-treating and smoking the corpses to preserve them.

Right?

That's like, I don't know what it is.

Maybe it's a big cannibal barbecue scenario.

No, I mean, these were intentionally preserved.

Absolutely.

So when, sorry, what year are they from?

How old are they?

14,000 years ago.

Wow.

Yeah, it's older than

any other mummifications.

I mean, what's the goal, Jay?

What's the goal?

I mean, wasn't mummification used to prepare kings for like the afterlife, right?

So why would you...

Yeah, that's one culture, but this was more of...

I don't think they have a complete picture, but

their understanding is that it would be for

leaders or a religious leader or someone that was really valuable to the community.

And they would preserve them and then

use them for rituals and things like that.

Just have them there as

something else.

It keeps them connected to their dead.

It's a way to honor their dead and also have them be a part of their rituals and everything.

Okay.

So they also did radiocarbon and they calibrated the readings.

And what this means is they corrected them to match true calendar years using data that they found from tree rings and other sources, which is pretty cool.

So that 14,000-year

timeline is accurate.

So again, like, you know, when we say they go back 14,000 years, that's significantly farther in the past than, you know, other mummies that we know from around the world, like Egypt and Chile.

They've embalmed dead examples in Egypt.

So this means that the hunter-gatherers in tropical Asia were smoking their dead long before all the other zombies that I'm sorry, all the other mummies, vampires, werewolves.

So the process itself, they found is actually similar to practices that are still found in the highlands of New Guinea, like actively happening today.

So some communities out there, what they do is they have, like I said, a revered revered leader.

They would smoke them over the fires for months.

You know, they'd bind the limbs in a very similar way in these compact positions.

And this was all to preserve the bodies.

I think it's pretty interesting that there's cultures that are still doing that today.

They found a lot of these bodies in buried caves or in shell middens.

You ever guys hear of a shell midden?

No,

it's like a pile that they collect over time of shells and different things, of bones and all that stuff.

And what happens is if they bury it in this collection of shells and bones and whatnot, it preserves it much better than if it were buried in dirt.

You got that, Bob?

That's your tip for the day.

Yeah, Bob, you got to make one of those at your haunt.

Thank you.

Well, and what's interesting is they probably didn't know that.

It's, you know, it's a survivor bias.

Obviously, they didn't survive, but the reason that we know they're preserved better is because they preserved better.

Yeah.

When you see one, I highly recommend you go take a look at a picture of this.

They have a really good picture of something that looks to be completely intact and it is fascinating.

I mean it is really cool.

It's kind of scary too, but it's really, you know, from a history perspective, it's really incredible.

You should take a look.

So they also, you know, with this new interpretation of what was going on with these with these corpses, you know, they have to rethink a lot of the finds that other archaeologists have made when they find jumbled bones, right?

So they'll find skulls tucked inside of rib cages or limbs bundled together.

And what they assumed historically was that this was like ritual dismemberment.

But this evidence now points to the fact that, you know, after months or years of smoking and exposure and all that to the corpses, you know, some of these mummies did naturally decay and break apart, which I'm sure a lot of them do that.

So when it came time to bury them, the remains weren't.

weren't in regular human form like they would have been if they buried them in from death immediately, right?

So they just grabbed all the bones.

And you know, that's why we find a lot of burials in these weird configurations with like the head inside the ribs and all that stuff.

It's more like they're just picking them up and then burying them without laying them down in a fashion that you would think is a human body form, right?

It just makes you think how much of modern and even historical, even more so probably historical, physical anthropology is so culture-bound.

Like that, all of the assumptions that were made based on minimal evidence were so shaped by like our modern death practices or our modern ideas about gender roles or about families or about whether a culture would have been violent or would have been peaceful.

I mean,

it's fascinating to hear story after story coming out that like, you know,

women hunter-gatherers were by and large actually hunting and you know these things that historically they thought were like ritualistic dismemberments and like these violent practices might have actually been a way to honor

religious leaders or dead that they wanted to honor.

It's fascinating.

Yeah, and also, you know, when you look back on these different burial practices and everything, like you were saying, culturally, you know, the norm today, I'm sure there's a lot of variation here, but in my country, you know, the norm is you put someone in a coffin and you put them six feet down and you bury them.

But, you know, to them, culturally, it was more meaningful to have the representation of that person physically there.

Of course.

And we think of the norm today being some sort of amalgamation of thousands of years.

It's not.

It's really new.

Our death practices are really, really new.

And they're probably more different than these historical death practices than they are similar.

But we're constantly comparing everything to what we think is normal.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's hard to get out of your own lens.

You know,

you have that, you have, we have a narrative, and that's our first thought when interpreting things like that.

All right, thanks, Jay.

You got it, Evan.

Yeah, not the screw worms.

The screw worms, yes.

I did an update.

I gave a report on the screw worm a couple of months ago, and there is an update this week, but I'll go back a little bit and remind you of what we talked about.

What is a screw worm?

A screw worm is the larval or maggot stage of a parasitic fly known for infesting and feeding on the living tissue of warm-blooded animals, including livestock, pets, and yes, we humans.

Human deaths from screw worms are rare.

The condition is known as

myoisis, and it can be fatal if it's not promptly diagnosed and treated.

And again, the key here is that these larvae must eat living flesh to survive.

whereas ordinary maggots they feed on the dead tissue.

The update is that last week, the Center for Disease Control here in the United States confirmed a fear that we've had.

We do have the first human case of New World screw worm in the United States.

The patient, who

is a Maryland resident, they had recently traveled to El Salvador, and that's where screw worm infestations are rampant in both livestock and wildlife.

The doctors spotted the larvae burrowing into this person's living flesh, and they immediately sent sent samples to the CDC for confirmation.

This case is considered the first travel-associated human case from an outbreak-affected country since at least the early 2000s, so almost 25 years.

But here's the good news: the infection was treated quickly and successfully, and the patient has fully recovered.

And even better, there's no evidence that it had spread,

no evidence of that.

So, we don't have an outbreak, but definitely this is a bit alarming, and people are on alert now, you know, veterinarians and other health officials about this particular case.

There was a time where we did eradicate this problem in the mid-20th century because the U.S.

had faced constant livestock losses from these infestations of the screw worm.

But then they used something called the sterile insect technique, in which they bred millions of screw worm flies.

They sterilized them with radiation and released them by airplane over huge areas.

And those sterile males mated with the wild females.

They produced no offspring and collapsed the population.

They said by 1966, it was wiped out.

It was done.

The screw worm was done in the United States, and it remained that way until 2023.

But then they started to,

there was evidence it was coming back.

So in the 60s,

they did this massive sort of public health campaign where they sterilized worms.

I mean,

amazing to me.

Yeah, it, yeah.

I feel like we were talking about genetically engineering mosquitoes.

Mosquitoes is the one, yeah, where we've talked about it before.

And from an ethics perspective, in a modern, there's like so much, you know, argument around it.

And should it be done, and what would happen if it got out there?

And blah, blah, blah.

That's, I don't, I don't know why, but that's like really stunning to me that that would have happened in the 60s.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

And

it is a bit amazing to think about in that particular time period.

But that's how bad this threat was.

I mean, it was like an all-hands on deck.

We have to get this under control.

We're going to lose our livestock and probably lose a lot of people.

Yeah, and how cool that it worked.

That it worked.

Yep.

And they're doing it again.

This is also a current intervention that they're doing as well to be particularly safe.

Because while they were able to, during much of the latter half of the 20th century, keep it contained, Panama and South and South America, they were able to get it mostly out of Central America.

It has come back.

And in 2023, again, right on the border with us is Mexico, and Mexico read reported cases in 2023.

So we knew this has been knocking at our doorstep for the last couple of years.

And we've been trying to, you know, get this back, you know, at least back under control as best as we can here in the United States on this particular problem.

They're setting up surveillance, they have set surveillance traps across several states, a lot of them in the east, but also in the south.

And what they do is they detect signs of wild screw worm flies.

And so far, the traps, anything that's trapped, they've not detected any screw worms yet.

So that's good.

But the USDA is also expanding that sterilization program that we talked about.

And the FDA has issued emergency authorization so veterinarians can rapidly access treatments for animals if the outbreak occurs

among livestock and other things.

So

you you have to pre-game this thing.

That's the key.

And that's kind of maybe the main takeaway here.

They say the return of screw worm is a reminder of how fragile eradication victories are.

And even though things might have been gone for decades, you know, in this particular case, a parasite kept at bay,

you know, using good science, vigilance, and cooperation mostly, you know, we could see this, we could see this come back.

We could see other things come back.

This definitely, definitely parallels what's happening with vaccinations.

No doubt, no doubt about it.

It's the same thing.

So there's a lot of different ways that things like this manifest, and we don't realize how fragile our protections really are until it's too late, until we've done a lot of dumb things and bad things in order to make these things relevant again in our day-to-day lives.

All right.

Thanks, Evan.

Yep.

Jay, who's that noisy time?

All right, guys.

Last week I played this noisy.

Any guesses?

I know it's not right, but it has a helicopter-sounding quality to it.

Yes, it does.

But I doubt it's a helicopter of any kind.

Okay, I got a new listener here named John C.

Edwards, and he said, long time, first time, sounds like the interference on ham radio from the Woodpecker, the Russian OTH ultra-long range radar.

If it's not that, I'm suspecting it's some kind of similar radio phenomenon.

Lots of people guess this.

John happened to be the first one.

It's a very good guess, but that is not correct.

Visto Tutti said the noisy sounds like those big lawn sprinklers where the water jet powers its circular spraying around the green.

You know what I'm talking about?

Like those ones that spin around a circle.

Oh, sure.

And it does have that.

Bap, bap, bat, bap, bap vibe, but this is not it.

He is not correct.

This is from a listener named Scott Williams.

He said, Hey, Jay, first-time guesser from San Antonio.

My guess is a pulsar as picked up by a radio telescope.

Big fan of the show.

Thanks.

Many, many people guessed this as well.

And

it sounds like that, but it doesn't happen to be that.

I have one last guess here: Caleb Chrome or CROM.

And he said, this sounds like the mechanism that moves film when projecting.

It's a pretty slow rate, maybe an old Super 8 or older, right?

So he's talking about a projector that.

The older reel projector.

Yeah, to real projector, which there's not that many of those out there anymore.

Oh my gosh.

Science, science, biology films in 1974.

Yep, I really, really liked this guess.

And as a fun, interesting side note, did you know that the part of the lightsaber sound was taken from a film projector?

No.

Yeah.

It's one of the sounds that makes up the aggregate sound.

Cool.

So, no winner this week, guys.

There was no winner.

So I'm

going to tell you what this is, and then I'll play it for you again.

So this is called the photoacoustic effect.

So this effect happens where sound waves are generated from light.

And, you know, think about that.

Like, sound waves are actually, you know, being generated from light exposure.

So it happens when a material absorbs a pulsed or modulated beam of light, like a laser, right?

So step by step, There's a short burst of light that hits the material and then if the material absorbs the light its molecules gain energy and heat up very, very slightly and very quickly.

And what happens is there's thermal expansion, and the thermal expansion happens almost instantly.

And then, and of course, then there is like a pressure wave that's created, and that turns into sound.

So, the light actually heats up the material,

and the air gets heated up, and that air gets pushed out and makes sound.

So, listen to it again.

Now, of course, you need special equipment to hear this, or else we'd be hearing it every day, all day long.

And that's that.

What did you guys think of that?

Cool.

Cool.

You love it?

Very neat, Jay.

You didn't love it.

Good for you.

Liked it a lot.

Didn't love it.

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

I'm sorry, that's the test code up here.

There you go.

Right here, Steve.

So, normally I would take out the white noise in the background, but I didn't do it this time.

So, that's a clue for you.

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

As you listen to this, it's probably too late to have bought the tickets for the Kansas shows unless you're listening to it at noon on Saturday, the 20th.

And we will tell you next week how much fun we had and it turned out so far.

We have great ticket sales.

Very excited to go.

I can't wait to see Kara.

Yay.

Hey, Kara.

Hey.

And by the way, guys, if you enjoy the work that we do and you want to support us, you can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

And you can support the work that we do.

And we have lots of new stuff coming as we've discussed.

Steve, when is our political podcast going to drop?

Like in about two weeks, three weeks?

So I think we're going to our recording days in three weeks, and then however long it takes us to do post-production.

So hopefully within a month, we'll have the first episode out.

But we are making great progress, and you know, we know what we're doing now.

How about that?

All right, thanks, Jay.

Yep.

I have one question.

This comes from Alex, who writes, Hi, folks.

Hello, Alex.

On your show show of 19th July 2025, the opening discussion was flu vaccines, and in that discussion, it was mentioned that no study could ever be done which gave a placebo to participants because we know the flu vaccine works.

Would a way around this be to invite participants who wouldn't normally get the vaccine due to personal choice, but who wouldn't mind either way if they did or did not get it?

Surely there would be enough people who fall into this category.

The question, I suppose, can be applied on a wider basis than just the flu vaccine, Alex.

So what do you guys think?

Do you get what he's saying there?

And so to get around the ethical problem of randomizing people to not getting

a known effective treatment, which is unethical, you could never get IRB approval for that protocol, right, for that study.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Well, that's the operative word there.

They're no longer randomized.

Well, yes, they're no longer randomized.

Yeah, so if you have a bunch of people who are willing to take a placebo, they know that they're getting the placebo.

Or even if they don't, even if they say I'm willing to get the drug or the placebo,

there's a variable there in those types of people that's different than the other group.

So it's not necessarily a representative sample.

Exactly.

So it's not a substitute for like the scientifically optimal study, which is to have no selection bias to completely randomize

people to whether or not they're getting a treatment versus a placebo.

So,

this wouldn't do that.

But I also think that even within that group, you're still withholding an effective treatment from people.

So, even if they say that's okay, you can do that, it doesn't get around.

It does not obviate the ethical consideration.

That's true.

It's one thing for somebody to refuse treatment.

It's another thing for a physician-led study, which usually these are,

for the researchers and or physicians to say we are withholding treatment.

Yeah, it's like just because if someone says it's okay to do unethical research on me doesn't mean it's okay.

Exactly.

This is not about informed consent.

What they do do is they do observational studies where, or cohort studies, or even prospective studies, where they do follow people who choose not to get vaccines.

But again, that's a self-selective group.

So it's not

randomized.

So it's not a substitute.

This is why clinical trials for new chemotherapies, for example, are often full of people who have failed out of all their other treatments.

Exactly.

They are people for whom this is the best option they have in front of them, but they're not foregoing treatment that we know works in order to try out treatment that may or may not work.

Right.

Or this is the other way around it.

Looking at the new treatment as adjunctive therapy.

Right.

So we do this with seizure therapy too.

Like, you know, at some point I noticed like every new anti-seizure medication, they get their first indication as an add-on therapy.

And that's purely for pragmatic reasons, because you can't withhold effective anti-seizure medication from somebody to see if this new experimental drug works.

You have to give them the effective medication plus placebo versus the new medication.

So it's always studied first as add-on therapy.

It's the same thing with chemo.

It's like if we add this to the proven therapy, does it work even better?

Or people who can't take the other ones because they've already failed it or whatever.

So, you're not withholding anything that somebody would otherwise get.

All right, we're also going to do a named out logical fallacy.

This one comes from Mark.

It's kind of a long email.

I might not read the whole thing, but I'll give you the gist here.

He says, Over the past few years, I have seen people using this reasoning in different contexts more and more.

I grew up in the Bible Belt and went to a Catholic school, and I used to hear comments like this much more often in the 80s.

But it seemed that it died out a little, but now it seems to be coming back regardless of political or religious views.

Here are the 80s versions that I remember, mostly the extremely religious.

So then in quotes, he says, he was killed by a drunk driver, and I don't feel sorry for him at all.

He spoke out against prohibition.

So in other words, saying that, well, because he was against prohibition, it kind of serves him right for getting killed by a drunk driver.

Or

he caught HIV and deserved it because he advocated for gay marriage.

Or

that's a weird one.

But basically, saying, well, HIV is spreading because of the gay lifestyle.

So your position of advocating gay marriage has come back to bite you because now you got HIV.

Is there a logical fallacy called blaming the victim?

Well,

we'll talk about what logical fallacies take here.

Or he was killed in an armed robbery and he deserved it.

He was an attorney that defended an armed robber.

So things like that.

And then he says some newer ones are:

you guys probably know what news item this is from.

I'm glad those girls died in the flood.

Their parents probably supported government funding cuts.

Or

Kirk was against gun control, therefore he deserved to die via gun violence.

So

the question is:

you know, is there a logical fallacy in there?

And if so, what do you think it is?

I mean, most of these definitely strike you as a non-sequitur, right?

But that's sort of the generic logical fallacy.

And some ad hominem, maybe.

I mean, anytime you say somebody deserves to die, there's probably an ad hominem.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah, but yeah, but they're not really saying that they had a negative attribute.

It's more that they took this position,

therefore

it's you know, part of it is that isn't it ironic, you know, like isn't it ironic that somebody who was against gun safety laws died of gun violence?

But then you take it a step further and say, well, you know, he has some guilt in his own killing.

You know, he kind of deserved it because he was, you know, against gun control to begin with.

So it's hard to feel sorry for it is non-sequitur.

It's reap what you sow kind of logic.

Which I hear with the other examples.

I don't know.

I struggle with that because that's actually not the argument that's being made with that last news item.

Yeah, these are not really

coherent.

We could think of examples that might, again, it always depends on the, again, with informal logical fallacy here.

It depends on the precise formulation and how you look at

Absolutely.

And I guess I'm curious if there is an informal logical fallacy in the argument, not that anybody deserved to die, nobody deserves to die, but that an individual who is quoted as saying that some deaths, you know, you've got to crack some eggs to make an omelette, basically, that some deaths are the cost we pay for maintaining a Second Amendment, then dies in that very way.

It's ironic.

Yeah.

You could say it's ironic.

Right.

I think that that you could say it's ironic, right?

Yeah, but I don't think there's like a logical fallacy in that.

And to claim that anybody deserves death is, yeah.

Yeah.

But even in irony, again, it depends on the specific details.

That could sometimes be a false dichotomy, I think.

So

if you formulate it to say, look, you're either for us or against us.

And if you ever said anything against us, then you deserve everything you get.

Rather than saying, well, there are nuanced positions in the middle here.

Like you can

think that armed robbers deserve a legal defense

and not think that armed robbery is okay.

Of course.

So if you're banking on that notion of, well, you defended this, therefore you're on team, whatever.

So like there's no nuance in the middle.

Like again, like with Kirk saying that, well, he was against gun control, therefore,

you know, he's pro-gun violence.

Well, it's not the same thing.

Right.

You know?

Or,

you know, saying, look, if you're being pro-gay marriage, then you're pro-HIV.

Or, yeah, like, what?

You're against public health measures to minimize HIV or whatever.

You know, it's like, no, there's like, there's no nuance.

I do think it's that us versus them, you're on what you're in this tribe or you're in that tribe.

And anybody in that tribe believes and advocates and deserves everything that goes in that one direction that goes along with this one issue.

It also feels like there's a straw man there.

Yeah, there's totally.

Yeah.

It's a totally.

And again, often those things are linked.

Like the straw man is the false dichotomy, and also a false equivalency in some of these arguments, and also a slippery slope.

So all of these elements can be there.

So like saying that, that, like, equating speaking out against prohibition with being okay with there being drunk drivers on the road.

It's like, nope, that's.

Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other.

Yeah, they have nothing to do with each other.

There's a sort of a false equivalency there.

Yeah.

Or you're right.

Like, it's a slippery slope that if somebody is somehow not okay with one thing, it means that downstream.

I mean, it's the same argument.

The gay marriage one is a perfect example.

Like, oh, he's pro-gay marriage, therefore he's okay when he should get AIDS and die.

It's like, what?

You don't think prohibition is a good idea?

So you're okay with drunken drivers roaming the streets, killing people at random.

You know, I mean, like, that kind of.

Yeah, it's like that.

And we hear those kind of arguments all the time.

So this is a complicated one because there's a ton of logical fallacies potentially in these kinds of statements, depending on the details.

I also, I wonder, just kind of an open question to the person who wrote in the question, how often are those arguments that we hear lacking that much nuance?

Like, how often do you actually hear people saying so-and-so deserves to die because of X, Y, and Z?

Or is it more likely a more nuanced question of like, I wonder if they hadn't made those claims so publicly if this hadn't happened?

Or, you know, it's almost like they're advocating for some sort of horrific karma.

Yeah, right.

And I don't know how to usually publicly say that.

Yeah, it's not just pointing out the irony, it's aligning with their pre-existing political beliefs and biases yeah yeah okay well thanks for that question mark all right guys let's go on with science or fiction

it's time for science or fiction

Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real, one fake, and then I challenge my panel of skeptics to tell me which one is the fake.

Three regular news items.

Here we go.

Item number one: for the first time, astronomers have discovered a five-pointed Einstein cross, which modeling suggests is due to intergalactic dark matter.

Item number two, a recent study of the two most common anti-phishing training campaigns, found no significant better, no significant benefit or reduced susceptibility to fishing attempts.

And item number three, a recent analysis finds that current vertical lettuce farming has 20 times the yield per area and only one-eighth the water use as traditional farming, but still has a significantly higher carbon footprint.

Who hasn't gone first in a while?

Kara, go first.

All right, so we've got

a five-pointed Einstein cross.

I don't even know what that is.

Okay.

So it's a rare phenomenon in which if you have, let's say you have a galaxy

10 billion light years away, but 2 billion light years away, there's a galaxy cluster.

And because of gravity bending light, you see what's called an Einstein cross because Einstein predicted it, you'll see four galaxies like

around

the light-bending source.

So, typically, right, they are four galaxies.

It's across, they're four points.

So, for the first time, astronomers have discovered a five-pointed one.

So, there was five images instead of four images.

Okay, and that suggests it's due to intergalactic dark matter.

So, it's a gravity lensing, gravity-bending light phenomenon.

Sure, I don't know.

Two most common anti-phishing training campaigns found no significant benefit or reduces.

Oh, geez, really?

So teaching people how to spot fishing attacks made them know

more protected against fish.

Well, I hope that's not science because that would suck.

And then current vertical lettuce farming, 20 times the yield per area, 1.8 the water use, but a significantly higher carbon footprint.

I'm worried that that might be science.

only because it is really good with because you can reuse the water, like you can capture it.

Because usually vertical farming happens indoors.

Not always, but it often happens indoors on drip irrigation where you can recapture the water.

And of course, it doesn't take up space because it's vertical.

But I think it calls for like really intense lights.

So, and I think, you know, and like maintaining humidity exactly right and all of that.

So I wouldn't be surprised if that's science.

So I don't know, the first one I have no idea on.

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

I have no idea if it is, but it's going to bum me out if we can't teach people how to like, how to recognize fishing because, like, we're pretty screwed if that's the case.

So I'm going to call that one the fiction.

Okay, Jay.

Oh, and by the way, that's pH fishing.

To a listener, this might sound pretty funny.

Oh, yeah, for the audience, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, Kara, I hear what you're saying about the fishing thing.

Like, I want it to be the fiction.

All right, so let's just talk about this.

I'm not going to even go for the first one.

I don't know enough to even comment on that.

So, the basic question here is:

of the people who are

learning about fishing, like getting training on how to avoid fishing,

would they

not have any significant benefit of learning those skills?

And I find that hard to believe.

If someone's going to take the time to sit down and learn skills.

Yeah, I think I'm I'm going to agree with Kara.

I mean, the vertical farming thing, there's tons of vegetables that are grown indoors in indoor environments that need, you know, they need humidity control and lots of water and irrigation and all sorts of stuff.

So

I don't know if vertical farming would have like a much worse footprint than those other methods.

Yeah, it's an interesting question.

I don't know.

I just don't know.

I would think it'd be more similar than dissimilar.

So I'll go with Kara.

I'll say number two is a fiction.

Okay, bob so all right we got a five-pointed einstein cross here i'm having i'm having problems with that because my understanding is that an einstein cross is four points and that's just what it is and if it's somehow doesn't have that if it has say you know five then it's not an einstein cross i mean it just seems like it might is the implication is that is it even possible now that i i i know of an einstein ring and an einstein cross the einstein ring is when it's the alignment's perfect and you you have a beautiful ring.

It's just like a solid ring.

I've seen some of those, but the cross is from misalignment.

So maybe five is impossible, but I've only seen four.

I've only heard of like four.

Ah, so it's either between that or going with the crew here.

Screw it.

I'll go off on my own, even though I'm not quite sure that this is fiction.

I'll say the Einstein cross is fiction.

Okay, and Devin.

It's my first time hearing about the Einstein cross, so

it's interesting.

Suggests it's due to intergalactic dark matter.

Dark matter causes this.

It does seem strange, right?

I don't know.

But the fishing one also.

No significant benefit.

Zero.

Oh, gosh.

I don't know which one of the two.

I'll go with the fishing one, I think.

It's a coin flip.

I don't really know how else to describe it.

I'll just say it's the fishing.

I don't mean to leave you alone, Bob, but I won't be surprised if you get a solo win this week.

Nah, probably not, but that's.

All right, well, you all agree on the third one, so we'll start there.

A recent analysis finds that current vertical lettuce farming has 20 times the yield per area and only one-eighth the water used as traditional farming, but still has a significantly higher carbon footprint.

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

science.

This is science, so you're all safe so far.

And, Kara, you pretty much got it.

So, I mean, not surprising, it uses 20 times less land because it's vertical.

That's kind of the whole point.

And it's a closed system usually, so water use is going to be much less, but it's more energy-intensive, no question.

This was actually comparing it to vertical farming using renewable energy.

Oh, wow.

So that's still that much worse.

Yeah, even then it's worse.

So it's not as simple as just saying, well, we'll power it with

solar panels.

And carbon footprint is not all about energy use, although that is a big part of it.

But there is some good news in here in that there are ways to reduce the carbon footprint.

So, that's what this study was partly saying.

Like, we've got to,

because you know, so from one perspective, this vertical farming can be very sustainable, right, in terms of land use and water use.

And especially

in a country like Great Britain, where it's landlocked, you know,

they're thinking we're really going to need to do this in order to produce enough food, but they're worried about the carbon footprint.

However, they found that

making certain changes to the process, like here's one.

Researchers found that switching to alternative materials, so right now they use jute fiber plugs and fibrous blocks made from jute in order to support the plants because they're not in soil, right?

So if you switch over to coconut core, C-O-I-R, how would you pronounce that?

I guess it's like the coconut fibers rather than the jute fibers, could cut

the land footprint of vertical farms by more than 95%.

That sounds good.

They should do that.

That sounds pretty good.

The carbon footprint difference was not as profound as the other things.

So the vertically farmed lettuce produced 0.93 kilograms of greenhouse gases for every kilogram grown, while conventional farms use 0.57.

So not even twice.

But still, that's a significant, you know, 0.93 to 0.57 is significant.

So, you know, it still has it, again, it's a trade-off, still advantages.

Hopefully, we'll be able to get that carbon footprint more in line with traditional farming.

And then I do think vertical farming can be significantly helpful.

All right, which one should we do next?

I guess I'll just go keep going backwards.

A recent study of the two most common anti-phishing training campaigns found no significant benefit or reduced susceptibility to phishing attempts.

Evan, Jay, and Kara, you think this one is the fiction.

Bob, you think this one is science all by your lonesome.

And this one is

science.

Whoa, baby.

Wow, whoa.

Yep, the cybersecurity training programs had

no effect.

No effect.

I'm not surprised.

She was surprised.

People are people.

You know how they partly assessed the effectiveness?

To see if people clicked on the links over and over?

Oh, gosh.

They trapped them.

They used internally generated phishing campaigns.

They faked phishing attempts to see who would click the links.

And they just did it.

They did it at the same frequency whether they had

any of the training.

Look a link.

Click.

Wow, man.

Oh, gosh.

We're too tempted to press the big button, right?

Yeah.

It's like you see the big button.

And this is a study of 19,500 employees over eight months.

So it's pretty robust.

And so the

so here's actually, they also were

trying to look at what were the phishing campaigns that were more likely to succeed.

So here they in this study give two examples.

So recipients clicked on a phishing link to update their Outlook password only 1.82% of the time.

So I guess because it was like a password, they were more alert to that.

But then 30.8%,

almost a third, clicked on a link that was purported to update the institution's vacation policy.

Right?

So it's like, click here to update your vacation, whatever thing.

A third of the people clicked on the link.

So the authors conclude that anti-phishing educational programs don't work and that

they basically should just not use them as a means of reducing the

phishing campaign impact, that they basically should rely on countermeasures.

So two-factor authentication is one that they mentioned.

And also you could program password managers so that they only work

on legitimate domains.

So your passwords will not interact with the password managers will not interact with bogus domain names.

Oh, I like that.

But those are just two.

So it's that's it.

You have to build, you have to bake it into the technology itself.

You have to build in, like I do two-factor authentication on everything now.

Yeah, I pretty much do.

And most sites require it.

It's not even an option.

But if it's ever an option, I always do it.

Of course, if anybody actually got, well, I guess if they got a hold of my phone, they'd have to break into it, they'd have to break into it.

But if you could break into it

into my phone, I'd be effed.

But as soon as you knew your phone was missing, you'd call them a phone call.

Yeah, right.

Before they could break into it, I'd have to

change everything.

And that's not something you'd let 24 hours go by

for, right?

You'd know in an hour or two.

Whenever, I mean, there have been,

I don't know about you guys, but there have been times when

I got a whiff of some security breach.

Sure.

Like,

Like, some company I'm working with says, hey, we've had a data breach.

Your data may have been compromised, and blah, blah, blah.

Gosh.

Or something, whatever.

Anything weird happens, like I get a phishing email that's like, that uses, sometimes they'll bait you with some information about you that they just purchased from some third party.

Whenever that happens, I just purge all my passwords, you know, especially the critical ones, you know, like my Google password, the one that gets you access to my Google password manager.

Like that, you know, I will not keep around old passwords if there's been any kind of data breach at all.

Yeah, and you can do health checks on your passwords and things like that.

Google has tools for that.

It's actually pretty good.

I've used it, and I've found a few old things in which they said it's like questionable.

Yeah, this may have been compromised.

I'm like, I'm not questioning it, I'm changing it.

It's out.

But here, so here's one more thought I had, though, about this study.

Because you could also conclude that these cybersecurity training programs were just not optimal.

I don't think this necessarily means that no training can possibly be effective.

It's just that

now these were the most common ones used.

And it's basically like you have to, you know, people had to get certification, right?

You had to go through the cybersecurity training program, get your certification that you did it.

How many people even pay attention to those?

Right.

That's, you know, I mean,

you know, so I've had to do 20 whatever certifications every year, right, in medicine.

I'm sure you'd have to do that all the time as well care.

And they do make you take a test at the end of it to show that you absorb the critical information.

And so just going, even if you're trying to minimize the work you're doing to get the certification, you still, you can't help but learn stuff because, you know, there's just, you know what I mean?

But that doesn't necessarily mean that it's optimal, like that you really like retained and pay attention to the information.

Well, and a lot of us know things cognitively, but that doesn't mean our behaviors reflect that.

Right,

so exactly.

So maybe they have to just use more interactive and active training programs, like with a person who's telling you.

And they might, the other thing is, like, doing it once a year is not enough.

And we know this from

educational research that you have to reinforce it.

And so doing these phishing things where they're pretending to be a phishing campaign to test how the employees were responding.

How about doing that and then saying, you just filed for a phishing scam?

This is the lesson that you, you know, whatever didn't retain from your certification.

Or you have to redo it.

You have to come.

Now you've got to come to class.

Yeah, you best believe people would

be incentivized not to have to do that.

I'm not convinced.

Public embarrassment is powerful, man.

Well, and just having to do more training.

Nobody likes that.

That's a pain in the ass.

Yeah, so I'm not convinced that this means that it couldn't possibly be effective, but certainly just this

get your online certification is not good enough.

That is not good enough.

All right, this means that for the first time astronomers have discovered a five-pointed Einstein cross,

which modeling suggested due to intergalactic dark matter is the fiction.

But, Bob, you were right for the wrong reasons.

They did just discover a five-pointed Einstein cross.

This is the fiction because it's not the first time.

They probably

discovered several.

This is just the latest one.

I also made another aspect of it, the fiction.

Dark matter.

Not dark matter.

Intergalactic.

What the hell is dark matter doing intergalactically?

This was a.

So what they, it's a five-pointed cross.

I totally didn't even see that word, intergalactic.

What I meant,

what that means is it's not like the Pentagon or whatever, not like a star.

It's four, it's like the cross with a fifth image in the middle.

So it's five images.

Wait, they all have that.

No,

they don't have that.

They have just the four.

They do not have a central image.

And the ones that have been discovered previously, oftentimes that central image is really faint.

But in this one, it was very bright.

It was as bright as the other images.

And it's very rare.

And so it's got to be some kind of rare situation.

With the other ones,

what they think is going on is just that

it's not like one galaxy that's causing the gravitational lensing.

It's multiple galaxies.

So it's creating a more complicated lensing pattern that gives you these five images instead of the typical four.

In this case, they modeled it, and the only model that could explain the image was a dark matter halo

around the lensing object.

So, not intergalactic, but a halo around the object, which makes way more sense because that's where dark matter is supposed to be.

Yeah, so this was sort of fiction for two reasons.

It wasn't intergalactic dark matter, and it wasn't the first time you've discovered a five-image Einstein cross.

Steve, you could change the wording of this one and give it to us next week, and I would still get it wrong.

Yeah, I know this one's a bit wonky.

But yeah, I didn't know if any of you, this is in the news.

You know, you might have heard it.

No, I hadn't seen it.

First time I've heard of it, as you're bringing it up right now.

Good job, Bob.

Way to sniff it out, Bob.

All right, Evan, give us a quote.

Even if individual researchers are prone to falling in love with their own theories, the broader process of peer review and institutionalized skepticism are designed to ensure ensure that eventually the best ideas prevail.

That was written by Chris Mooney.

Yep.

Yeah, we haven't spoken to Chris in a while.

Chris was on the show a long time ago, wasn't he?

Yeah, it's been a while.

It's been a minute.

It has been.

That's funny.

This exactly dovetails with my news item.

Yep.

The idea that, yeah, yes, there are problems with individual researchers, with, you know, again, falling in love with your own theories, trying to sex up your theory, your grants to get, you know, whatever, to increase the chance of getting attention or getting grant all these things happen but these are around the edges right at at its core there is you know with the mainstream institutions and journals and legitimate scientists at the end of the day the best ideas do have a tendency to prevail over time right there is no substitute with for

actually being true and having

real-world evidence support you know your ideas you can only fake it for so long, you know.

Right.

Yep.

It's a good reminder.

Yep.

All right.

Well, thank you all for joining me this week.

You guys, Steve.

Thanks for watching.

Looking forward to seeing you all in Kansas.

So soon.

Hey, there you are right now.

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

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