The Skeptics Guide #1060 - Nov 1 2025

Speaker 1 You're listening to the skeptic's guide to the universe, your escape to reality.

Speaker 1 Hello, and welcome to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Today is Thursday, October 30th, 2025, and this is your host, Stephen Novella.
Joining me this week are Bob Novella.

Speaker 4 Hey, everybody.

Speaker 1 Kara Santa Maria. Howdy.
Jay Novella. Hey, guys.
And Evan Bernstein.

Speaker 5 Good afternoon, everyone.

Speaker 1 So, Bob, tomorrow's Halloween.

Speaker 1 You all ready? You set? You cramming?

Speaker 1 What is it? Oh, it's a screen. That's Bob's wife.
She's under the table. I usually

Speaker 1 for Bob. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I'm in decent shape for Halloween and the party, which is the next day.

Speaker 4 Not too bad shape for that either.

Speaker 4 Of course, no matter how ready you are,

Speaker 4 I will still work to the last minute trying to tweak, tweak, tweak the final tweakings of various things, but I'm very happy with my output this year.

Speaker 5 Bob, you to Halloween is what Stanley Kubrick was to movie making.

Speaker 1 Oh, Kubrick. That's a huge.

Speaker 5 Him too.

Speaker 1 It's Kubrick.

Speaker 1 It's not like Q from Star Trek. All right.

Speaker 2 Well, it's Emu, not Emu.

Speaker 1 We all say it's Emu. I'm probably going to say that wrong, Leo.
Uri Geller, not Yuri Keller.

Speaker 3 If you understand what the person is saying, you got to be cool, you know.

Speaker 2 Also, we got an email from somebody in Australia this week who was like really mad that we all say solder instead of solder, I guess.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 1 Wow, I wouldn't. Oh, my God.

Speaker 5 There's actually three L's in solder.

Speaker 2 But I looked into the etymology, and it comes from the French, but then it was changed. So it's like the original

Speaker 2 doesn't even have an L in it. But this happens a lot in American English because it's so informative.

Speaker 1 That's like saying, why don't we say connigate?

Speaker 2 Well, they do say like,

Speaker 2 why don't you say fillet or herb? And it's like, because it comes from the French. And we pronounce it like the French.
Because American English is a mix.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. You know what's funny, though?

Speaker 3 You could see your own language evolving over time. Like,

Speaker 3 herbs with an H to me sounded so utterly ridiculous, and I've been kind of like training myself to realize it's probably the better way to pronounce it. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 I don't like it. I don't think so.
I think it's Erb.

Speaker 1 Erbe.

Speaker 5 But then there's the name Herbert, which adds a layer of confusion to the whole thing because you do pronounce the H in that sense, herb for short.

Speaker 2 Well, what about

Speaker 2 Houston and Houston? That one always gets people. In Texas, it's Sam Houston, right?

Speaker 4 But in New York City.

Speaker 2 In New York, it's Houston.

Speaker 1 Yeah. What about honor? You don't pronounce the H in honor.

Speaker 2 Honor. Honor.

Speaker 1 And, like,

Speaker 2 Brits don't say ballet. They say ballet, but then they say fillet.

Speaker 1 Fillet, fillet. It's all chaos.
Language is. Fuck it is.

Speaker 1 Yes. Where do you stand on the Halloween should be the last Saturday in October rather than October 31st? Oh, good question.

Speaker 2 Oh, it should always be a weekend.

Speaker 1 So it'll always be on a Saturday.

Speaker 3 Because it's a party day. I get it.

Speaker 4 I say, I'm a traditionalist. I say, stick with the 31st because it doesn't matter because wherever Halloween is, if it's Wednesday, I'm not working.
I'm not going to a job.

Speaker 1 So that doesn't matter to me.

Speaker 3 That's a Bob-centric thing, right? Like, what about all the kids whose Halloween could be significantly truncated if it's on a school night?

Speaker 4 Well, don't get me started because

Speaker 4 the tradition that we need to worry about is this stupid trunk or treat where

Speaker 4 a lot of families are doing trunk-or-treat, and then instead of trick-or-treating which to me is scandalous and should be illegal I don't know if I had a bunch of cars the other day in a parking lot doing that yeah but you have to remember there are parts of this country where

Speaker 2 people don't want you coming to their homes it's not safe to go into neighborhoods people all the lights are off trunk or treat does allow kids to like trick-or-treat safely if that's the only option that's fine but I don't think that's as common as you

Speaker 2 I do I literally I'm in the middle of LA in a very very family-friendly neighborhood in a development of houses where half of the people here have kids. And on Halloween, nobody has their lights on.

Speaker 2 And it's so sad. One year, I turned on my light.
I had the whole thing. I had all the candy.
I got like, you know, king-size candy bars from Costco ready. Not a single person came to my door.

Speaker 2 It was depressing.

Speaker 1 I know, it's terrible. I think partly this is a COVID holdover because the whole trunk or treat thing started in COVID.

Speaker 1 We did it when we were kids. It's just ratcheting down our actual physical interaction with other people.
I mean, Halloween.

Speaker 2 I think it increases it. I actually think that kids who trunk or treat are more likely to get more FaceTime with people.

Speaker 1 I don't know. The thing about taking your kids around the neighborhood is you get to, you know, to an event every year where you meet every neighbor in their house.
They meet your kids.

Speaker 1 You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 That died like 30 years ago.

Speaker 1 It really did. No, my kids were young, we did that.
And now, again, last year, zero people came to our home.

Speaker 2 Okay, we'll say 20 years ago because your kids are getting

Speaker 1 when they were young. Yeah.
I was like, oh, time.

Speaker 2 I know. I trick-or treated when I was young, too, but I also stayed out with my friends until the streetlights went out.
My parents had no idea where I was. We don't live in that era anymore.

Speaker 2 We live in an era where kids can't walk home from school without being released by an adult. Like, it's just a different time.

Speaker 1 Is that a good or a bad thing?

Speaker 2 I think it's bad. Yeah.

Speaker 1 I think it's parental. It's the helicopter parenting, which is.
Yeah, it's just a lot of people. It's a holdover.

Speaker 2 Well, it's not even their fault. It's like school policy now.
You know what it is? It's CYA.

Speaker 1 Yes. It's all CYA.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 liability.

Speaker 5 Right. Accountability.

Speaker 4 But kids who are relevant for Halloween, almost.

Speaker 4 Adults in the United States have taken over Halloween. The kids are just like this.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah, that's kind of cool, too.

Speaker 4 So let's focus on what's really important. The parents, they're the ones that are spending the money on decorations, costumes, candy.

Speaker 4 They're making it the second most popular holiday in terms of money that people spend. And Halloween is the best because you throw a Halloween party, you invite people that you care about.

Speaker 4 You're talking Thanksgiving or Christmas, you got to go to family shit. And nobody, you know, a lot of people don't want to do that because family is full of drama and craziness.

Speaker 4 So that's one of the things that makes Halloween special is that, just from the party angle, but the idea of adults taking it over, it's just like it's a done deal. And the kids are just ancillary.

Speaker 4 Like, yeah,

Speaker 4 get some candy,

Speaker 4 which is interesting. And

Speaker 4 I like talking to other people from other countries who love Halloween, but they're like, damn, man, you know, we're just not embraced in our country yet, but it's kind of like a slow, kind of like a slow migration that is happening for a lot of countries.

Speaker 4 It's just interesting to see this particular American United States export,

Speaker 4 an export that I agree with, you know, going out there and finding kindred souls all over the place. People just love the macabre aspect of Halloween and want to embrace it.

Speaker 2 Jay, don't you love how Bob, see, this is why I love doing throwdowns with Bob.

Speaker 2 You asked him if he thinks it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month, and he said no, and then made a compelling argument for why it should be changed to the last Saturday of the month.

Speaker 1 Can I push back on that? I think so.

Speaker 4 Another reason not to change it, it's really not really about one day. It's the fall season, it's all of October, all the things that embrace Halloween.
It's not just that one night.

Speaker 2 The problem, though, is when it's on a Thursday or a Friday, because you do all the parties the weekend before, and by the time Halloween comes, it feels over a little bit, and then it feels weird to have parties on November 1st or November 2nd.

Speaker 4 It feels only a little bit weird. It's still fine.
I think it's still totally fine.

Speaker 4 First off, you can get amazing deals on, because it's after Halloween, you can get the cheapest costumes, pumpkins, all sorts of great stuff.

Speaker 4 Also, if you're like me and a few people that I know, where it's actually a little bit of, it's a bummer.

Speaker 4 When Halloween's over and that buildup is done you kind of not I don't get depressed about it but it's like November 1st sucks it's the worst day of the year but if I but for years now I've been throwing the party after the first Saturday after Halloween and it's great because it extends the season for me a little bit as well but it also means that no one's going to a Halloween party after Halloween so you get a bigger party because everyone bails on parties when I tried to throw them in October because you know they because they're going to so many parties there's so much competition for really essentially only two weekends is the big competition, and then that's it.

Speaker 4 So, it's so, there's so many good reasons to do it right after Halloween. I mean, maybe next year, Saturday is Halloween, I think, right?

Speaker 1 That would be a good, a good day. Is it moving forward or backward? Forward, so yeah, it'll go with Saturday, unless it's leap year.
I don't know if you can. No, no, no, no, it's not.

Speaker 4 So, yeah, Saturday, Halloween, man. That's big.

Speaker 2 I love having an October 19 birthday for that reason. Every year from the time I was a kid, my birthday parties were epic.

Speaker 1 Epic.

Speaker 2 Because, like you said, it's a friend holiday. Yes.

Speaker 1 It's not a family holiday.

Speaker 4 Not necessarily a family holiday.

Speaker 5 But if you move Halloween off of October 31st, aren't you decoupling it from All Saints Day? And doesn't that kind of defeat half the purpose?

Speaker 1 Do we really care?

Speaker 4 Oh, God, not at this point.

Speaker 1 Not in 2025. But those are the origins, right? Yeah, but

Speaker 2 nobody thinks about that.

Speaker 1 Except me. Okay.

Speaker 1 Well, you know, I mean, maybe there are people.

Speaker 2 How many people who celebrate Easter and are like hiding eggs and stuff are thinking about...

Speaker 1 You can dress up for All Saints' Day next time.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but, like, you know, how many people who are celebrating Easter are thinking about like fertility? They're not. They're thinking about Jesus.
Or they're just like candy.

Speaker 5 Easter is one of those holidays. It does fall differently each year.

Speaker 2 No, I know, but I'm saying like it's coupled to a fertility, like a pagan fertility festival.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's coupled to the solstice, I thought.

Speaker 2 And fertility festivals. That's why we have like bunnies and eggs.
Yeah, that's what most of our holidays are. They're like amalgamations of multiple cultures.

Speaker 5 Yeah, no,

Speaker 5 I get it. I get it.
But there's a reason why Easter drifts and All Saints' Day does not.

Speaker 4 Yeah, Easter is calculated, and it was very important historically to get that calculation correct. Otherwise, you're going to hell.

Speaker 5 I suppose it was a way of people tracking exactly where the heck they were in any given year. Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right, let's move on to our news items.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 1 Can't we just spend three hours talking about that?

Speaker 1 Jay, you're going to start us off by talking about therapeutic nanoparticles.

Speaker 3 Alzheimer's disease has been blamed on what, Steve? The sticky clumps of amyloid beta protein that builds up between the brain cells, right?

Speaker 1 I mean, it's complicated.

Speaker 1 Alzheimer's is a complicated disease that has lots of pieces. Lots of things are happening at the same time.
And

Speaker 1 the complexity is we don't know what is driving the disease and what's an effect of the disease. And there may be multiple different things driving it in different people.
Right?

Speaker 1 There also could be feedback loops where, where, like, A causes B, which reinforces A, which causes C. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Yeah. But those are markers, right? Those are good markers of the disease.

Speaker 1 But the thing is, it's not all pure markers. Like, amyloid beta is the big thing, right?

Speaker 1 Is amyloid beta just, because that just, that's a waste product that builds up in the brain cells, and it definitely causes problems. But is that what's driving the disease?

Speaker 1 And the only way we're going to ultimately really know is if we fix that problem, does it fix the disease?

Speaker 1 Which is why there was so much excitement about the recent treatments that are amyloid-based that did have some clinical improvement.

Speaker 1 It was not dramatic, which means it's probably not the whole story.

Speaker 2 What did they do? Did they slow the progression?

Speaker 1 They did slow the progression.

Speaker 1 They didn't stop or reverse it, but they did slow the progression.

Speaker 3 Well, I thought that this study was pretty cool.

Speaker 3 I mean, again, it's still in mice, but there was a team co-led by the Institute of Bioengineering at at Cathalonia and West China Hospital, Sejuan University.

Speaker 3 They were in collaboration with partners in the UK, and they published a study that suggests the real problem may be a broken cleanup system, not just excess waste.

Speaker 3 So, right now, like Steve said, the amyloid beta is building up. It's a protein that builds up in the...
the brain.

Speaker 3 And this is one of the things that they find that people that suffer from this disease, you know, they can see that build up.

Speaker 3 And in the past, of of course, you know, like there really isn't that much we can do about it, although we do think that it is, you know, one of the very important markers.

Speaker 3 The human brain, our brains, rely on the blood-brain barrier.

Speaker 1 Brains. We can call it BBB if you want.

Speaker 3 Easy, Bob. Its main job is to control what can pass from the blood into the brain, and it also is there to help remove waste from the brain, right? So it does a couple of critical things.

Speaker 3 One critical protein that's called LRP1, it almost says the word LARP, which I thought was funny.

Speaker 3 That works like a conveyor belt system that brings the amyloid beta out of the brain and into the bloodstream.

Speaker 3 And actually, when we see that happen, we can tell, we can detect it in the blood.

Speaker 3 So with Alzheimer's, that system fails.

Speaker 3 LRP1 levels fall, its function weakens, and the brain's waste begins to pile up. And that pile up can actually stop your brain from functioning well, could even be doing damage to your brain.

Speaker 3 Those leftover proteins and protein fragments clump into these plaques that disrupt and damage the nearby neurons.

Speaker 3 So instead of trying to invent new drugs, though, this team decided to try something different.

Speaker 3 They wanted to try something that isn't based on chemicals, it's based on more like the plumbing of the brain. I thought that was a really cool way to put it.

Speaker 3 They looked for a way to fix the brain's natural waste removal system.

Speaker 3 They built these tiny hollow particles, and these you could visualize them as microscopic bubbles, and they call them polymerosomes. And these bubbles were coated with a molecule called angiopep2,

Speaker 3 which can attach to the LRP-1 and the protein that normally carries waste-like amyloid beta out of the brain.

Speaker 3 So each bubble has just enough of this angiopep2 to get the LRP1 working again, but not so much that it would overload or damage it.

Speaker 3 And that was a big issue, you know, and a very hard thing for them to do. They had to find the right balance and

Speaker 3 how tightly the particles stick to the LRP1.

Speaker 3 And they ended up finding the right balance there.

Speaker 3 And again, like that little detail was difficult, and it just shows you how cool science is and how they can actually change the properties of things like molecules, which I find just incredible.

Speaker 3 So in the Alzheimer's model mice, a single injection of these optimized polymersomes reduced the amyloid beta in the brain by about 45% within a few hours.

Speaker 3 Now, Steve, that sentence, that idea that I just said to me, is that sounds amazing. Like, what?

Speaker 1 Yeah, don't get excited. It's a good proof of concept, right?

Speaker 1 That's what they get it. That's what these mouse models are for.
But, I mean, you know how good mouse models are at predicting Alzheimer's treatments? Not much. Basically, almost zero, right? I mean,

Speaker 1 they're like famously terrible at predicting the outcome of clinical trials in humans because it's not the same disease. It is a model.
It is a model to test very specific mechanisms.

Speaker 1 It really, it isn't the disease. It's not the same disease as it is in humans.
And so you just cannot extrapolate at all clinically from mice to humans. But you can do is ask very specific

Speaker 1 mechanistic questions. Will this increase the clearance of amyloid beta

Speaker 1 from neurons? And in these these mice, it does. Will that have a clinical benefit in humans? Well, no, in 10 to 20 years.

Speaker 3 Sure, but the point is, though, and again, this is just science doing its thing.

Speaker 3 This is another test that they found, another, you know, they created something that has an effect, and they might be able to someday have a version of this that works in humans.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and as is often the case with these kinds of news items, like don't get so focused on the Alzheimer's bit, in my opinion.

Speaker 1 What's really cool about this is they are engineering these polymersomes and that they can fine-tune to have very specific effects.

Speaker 1 It's the therapeutic model that I find more interesting, not this very specific application, which may or may not pan out.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 I was just saying what you just said, but not as cool.

Speaker 1 That's what I meant.

Speaker 3 Like the idea that they can modify

Speaker 3 these molecules and have them have you know, varying properties and they're like, we got to change this property. Like that to me is is such a fantastic thing that they're able to do today.

Speaker 3 So, anyway, the point is that

Speaker 3 when they applied this, they were able to detect in the blood that there was an increase of amyloid beta, which shows that the brain was actually moving it outside the brain barrier and dumping it into the blood, which means it's waste product.

Speaker 3 And it was, so they were able to 100%

Speaker 3 verify that that process was happening. It showed that the peptide was being, you know, essentially flushed out.
out, and that's exactly what we want to have happen.

Speaker 3 Microscopy confirmed that the nanoparticles restored normal placement of the LRP on blood vessel cells and shifted the blood-brain barrier internal machinery back towards healthy function.

Speaker 3 Then they were testing the mice's behavior, and the mice treated with the new therapy performed almost as well as healthy animals in memory and navigation tasks.

Speaker 3 The improvements also lasted up to six months. So there were some very interesting outcomes here from this study that they did.
And

Speaker 3 they made sure that the researchers obviously know what Steve knows, that there are cool things about this and there's some early, early things that are happening that might pan out to humans one day, but it's too early.

Speaker 3 And you'll see some headlines actually say, you know, like, you know, Alzheimer is completely eradicated in mice, you know, that type of thing.

Speaker 3 That's not what's going on here. But

Speaker 3 the nice thing about what they're doing, again, is this isn't giving somebody medication and trying to figure out medications that can sneak through the blood-brain barrier and again becoming dependent on chemicals.

Speaker 3 They're changing the function of the plumbing in your brain, which I find to be a most important thing.

Speaker 1 Well, they're optimizing it, right? They're restoring it, is really what they're arguing.

Speaker 1 And just as for further background, which I think impacts on this study, there's a huge correlation between vascular health and Alzheimer's. And

Speaker 1 you know what the number one risk factor for Alzheimer's is? What? What do you think? Age.

Speaker 1 Age is like the universal risk factor. Yeah, let me just say other than age.

Speaker 1 Oh, other than age. Heart disease?

Speaker 2 Genes.

Speaker 1 Like cardiovascular problems? Yeah, specifically high blood pressure. And what does high blood pressure do? It damages these small blood vessels.

Speaker 1 The very same small blood vessels that this study is saying are necessary in order to clear the amyloid.

Speaker 1 And so that makes sense.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so which again may be a coincidence, but I think it probably all has something to do with itself.

Speaker 1 You get the buildup, which damages the vasculature, which worsens the buildup, and this is kind of reversing that by introducing this sort of optimized

Speaker 1 polymer that's in that sweet spot, right, where it's binding, just strong enough to get it, but not so strong that it gets backed up.

Speaker 1 And so it facilitates the clearing of the amyloid, which restores the blood-brain barrier and the vascular health so that

Speaker 1 it could clear it even more.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's so interesting because I feel like it's always more complicated than that first idea. Like, oh, we see this stuff.

Speaker 2 Something about Alzheimer's must be causing us to make more of the stuff. Or maybe we'd always make this stuff, and something about Alzheimer's causes us to not be able to clean it out.

Speaker 1 Right. Or both.
Or both. Yeah.
Yeah. And then there's tau.
Don't even get me started on tau. It's a totally different waste product, which, again, there's probably different subtypes

Speaker 1 to different people. Then there's different genetic subtypes.
It's very complicated.

Speaker 2 Trevor Burrus: And what you're talking about is what commonly known as the plaques, is what we've been talking about, and you're talking about the paper.

Speaker 1 Well, the plaques form from these waste products. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So you have like amyloid, for example, then you have amyloid plaques. These are two different things.

Speaker 1 And then you also have other pathological features that form, like the tangles. Then

Speaker 1 you have inflammatory activity, which how much of that is driving it? How much of that is reactive or secondary?

Speaker 1 Even if it is secondary, does it exacerbate and worsen it? Would i is there any room for clinical improvement by treating the specific components of the inflammatory reaction?

Speaker 1 These are all open questions.

Speaker 2 And there's not going to be one answer. There's not going to be one answer.
But that's the thing. It's too complicated a disease for there to be one simple treatment.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it may get to the point where we need to, I mean, unless we find this missing key that we've been missing all this time.

Speaker 1 And it's like, oh, if we change this one thing, the whole cascade doesn't happen. I doubt that's going to happen at this point.
I can't rule it out, though.

Speaker 1 But more likely, we're going to have a suite of treatments. Like with cancer, you have to be tested.
I was going to say that.

Speaker 2 And the way to get rid of cancer is to prevent it from ever happening.

Speaker 2 That's hopefully what we could do with Alzheimer's, right? If we could get to a point where we prevent it, then we don't have to treat one million components of it.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the promise of the treatments that prevent the buildup of amyloid.

Speaker 1 It's like, oh, if we can get to people 20 years before they would become symptomatic, maybe they'll never become symptomatic.

Speaker 1 But how do we identify people that early? Well, it's easy if they have a genetic form where we could say, you're going to get it because your parents had it or whatever.

Speaker 1 It's harder if it's not genetic

Speaker 1 and we have to figure out some way to accurately screen people

Speaker 1 in a way that actually predicts who should get treated early on and who should not.

Speaker 2 Or if the treatments become cheap and they're not very invasive, we just do it to everybody like we do with vaccines.

Speaker 1 But that we're not there. Right.
Right. The treatments are...

Speaker 1 have high risks. They're expensive and they have bad side effects.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's the thing. You can't just give it to it in the water, as we like to say, even though

Speaker 1 putting aside whether that's practical or not, just meaning we can't just give it to everybody because you end up causing way more harm than good.

Speaker 1 We're definitely, yeah, we're not at the vaccine point where we could just give everybody an Alzheimer's vaccine. You know, that would be great if we do get to that point, but we're not there.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 All right. Thank you, Jay.
Kara, what killed off Napoleon's forces?

Speaker 2 Oh, so this is a really interesting study that I came across. And I have to admit, I'm not a war buff, and I definitely haven't done deep dives onto

Speaker 2 or into

Speaker 2 the 1812. I even had to look up what, what was this called? Because it has like five different names.

Speaker 2 The French invasion of Russia, the Russian campaign, the Second Polish War, and in Russia, they actually call it the Patriotic War of 1812.

Speaker 2 Anybody here have any sort of like personal interest?

Speaker 1 In that particular war?

Speaker 2 Yeah, like have you been reading books about it?

Speaker 1 Not a lot, but

Speaker 2 you know, it's like that.

Speaker 1 How often do you think about the Roman Empire?

Speaker 1 I've read about the Roman Empire, just not

Speaker 1 so much Napoleon.

Speaker 2 Not so much Napoleon. So I had to read up a little bit on the background.

Speaker 2 So I want to talk about the background first so that then I can talk about this study that sort of challenges some of the previously held ideas. So

Speaker 2 long story short and like very short, Napoleon invaded Russia in June of 1812 with over half a million soldiers.

Speaker 5 Big mistake.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like a lot. Yeah, we know.
Russia is not, and it's never a good idea to invade Russia with a ground war.

Speaker 2 And so then there was this big battle on September 7th that was super, super bloody. And Napoleon and his troops actually were able to invade and occupy Moscow.

Speaker 2 So they thought they were doing pretty well. The problem is when they got to Moscow, it was like empty and had been burned.

Speaker 2 So under the orders of the governor there and military officials, Russian military officials, they burned the city and

Speaker 2 left. So Napoleon gets there and he's like, we got here.

Speaker 1 Look, we're going to take over.

Speaker 2 But there was nobody there to take over. He was king of the ashes.
Yeah. And then after that, he kind of like squatted for a while to, you know, try to

Speaker 2 supply up and figure out a new way to leave. The problem is he probably waited too long.
He was also looking for a peace offer that never came. So on October 19th, actually, my birthday,

Speaker 2 they started to retreat. They already had lost quite a few soldiers, you know, during battle.
Then, as they started to retreat,

Speaker 2 you know, all the terrible things happened, right?

Speaker 2 There were some ongoing attacks, so they did lose more soldiers to battle, but really they were devastated by, what do you think, weather and disease,

Speaker 1 right?

Speaker 5 Russian winter kind of thing.

Speaker 2 And so, there was,

Speaker 2 this goes down in like military history books as one of the most devastating military campaigns in history. There are estimates that he lost over 90% Napoleon of his army.

Speaker 2 So over 500,000 soldiers and horses died. And a lot of people think that typhus was the cause of the vast majority of disease.

Speaker 2 And there have even been some early studies where DNA was taken from fallen soldiers, you know, in their graves.

Speaker 2 And but older, like PCR techniques were used to amplify some of these DNA, these broken DNA fragments. And

Speaker 2 it was kind of estimated that typhus was the cause. So typhus

Speaker 2 is also known as Rickettsia. I can never say this, Rickettsia.
I always want to say Ricksetia, but it's not. Rickettsia

Speaker 2 prowazechi, and that's a parasitic, aerobic, bacilliform bacteria, and it's the main agent of epidemic typhus.

Speaker 2 And then they also, there were some ideas that there was another pathogen called Bartonella quintana, which is spread by body lice.

Speaker 2 So, okay, let's cut to this new study, which was just published this month, where the authors say, not so fast, we used more modern techniques to look at the remains of a very, very small sample of this much larger group of soldiers who died.

Speaker 2 So these soldiers died in Vilnius, Lithuania, in December of 1812 and were buried there. So they were able to collect samples from 13 teeth of these different soldiers, and they looked at

Speaker 2 it, kind of made up about 20 million different DNA reads.

Speaker 2 And then they used some pretty complicated, I could get into it if you like, but some pretty complicated new approaches that are kind of being called A DNA. Have you guys heard A DNA?

Speaker 2 I had to Google it and then I was like, oh, that's so obvious. Ancient DNA.

Speaker 1 Oh.

Speaker 2 So there's like a whole field now called A DNA.

Speaker 2 So there's like all these really state-of-the-art methodologies that go far beyond PCR. It's not just about amplification.
Now it's about using much more sophisticated techniques.

Speaker 5 How do they define ancient? Is there a number defining?

Speaker 2 There is, actually. I looked it up.
Obviously, we know there's an upper boundary for sufficient DNA for sequencing, which is between half a million and one and a half million.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the oldest DNA that's ever been sequenced was from mammoth molars that are about a million years old.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 2 We've recovered genetic material from sediments that was 2 million years old, but they couldn't sequence it. But it looks like most of it, we're talking thousands of years.
Okay.

Speaker 2 Yeah, a few studies have succeeded.

Speaker 2 Only a few studies have succeeded in amplifying DNA from remains older than several hundred thousand. Most of it is within like the tens of thousands.

Speaker 2 So, researchers in this study are using, and there's a name for this field too, which I hadn't heard before either, metagenomics.

Speaker 2 Metagenomics, which is the study of genetic material from entire communities of organisms.

Speaker 2 So, that's where they will often look at like environmental samples collectively so that they can try and understand something.

Speaker 2 So, these are metagenomics researchers that I guess are borrowing from those techniques and they apply them to these 13 different teeth.

Speaker 2 And obviously, this is 200-year-old DNA. What they did after this really sophisticated kind of extracting and analysis, what they realized is they couldn't find any typhoid at all.

Speaker 2 They actually couldn't find either a Rickettsia

Speaker 2 or the Bartonella quintana. And actually, it would be like R.
proazechi. Usually you would say the

Speaker 2 species name,

Speaker 2 or B quintana. But they did find a couple interesting things.
They found salmonella enterica, and specifically a specific type of salmonella enterica that causes something called paratyphoid fever.

Speaker 2 So it's similar to typhoid. They're both types of enteric fever.

Speaker 2 And so comparing that to the records of the time, like what was actually written about how these soldiers were acting and what their symptoms were, it would make sense then that it could have been paratyphoid when maybe they didn't know about it or they just kind of misdiagnosed it as typhoid.

Speaker 2 So they found not only paratyphoid caused by the salmonella enterica strain, but they also found a bacterium in the DNA called Borrelia recurrentis or recurrentis.

Speaker 2 So this is another body lice-transmitted bacterium, and it causes something

Speaker 2 called louse-borne relapsing fever. It's not necessarily deadly, but combined with the paratyphoid and the exhaustion and the starvation and the hypothermia that a lot of the

Speaker 2 soldiers were experiencing, it could have exacerbated or caused their death in addition.

Speaker 2 So, these two main diseases these researchers found, you know, they say in their discussion, you know, we only looked at 13 teeth.

Speaker 2 So, it could be that there actually was some typhoid and that there actually was some B quintana 2, but we didn't see any of it.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, maybe we just didn't sample the right people, or maybe what we thought caused the majority of this death was not actually the pathogen that caused it, and maybe it was more likely this paratyphoid problem along with this body lice

Speaker 2 disease called relapsing fever, which is super, super rare now. I mean, both of these diseases are rare in developed countries.

Speaker 2 You do see louse-borne relapsing fever in some regions of Africa where it's still endemic. Paratyphoid, I actually don't know how common paratyphoid is because

Speaker 2 there's no vaccine for it. The typhoid vaccine can help a little bit, but there is no vaccine for paratyphoid.
Oh, here we go. 6 million people a year are affected.

Speaker 2 Most common in parts of Asia, very rare in the developed world, can cause 30,000 deaths a year.

Speaker 2 It's very similar to typhoid. So we're talking fever, headache, abdominal pain, malaise, wasting.
like muscle wasting, non-productive cough, a slowed heart rate, and I guess spots. You get rosy spots.

Speaker 2 Not everybody does, but some people do. And abdominal pain with nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 But Kerry, do you think, is it fair to say, because

Speaker 1 a lot of ancient armies, they died of like disease and exhaustion and malnutrition and climate, whatever.

Speaker 1 I know Alexandria, Alexander the Great's army, like half of them or more died from dysentery or other illnesses.

Speaker 1 And I know the same is true of Napoleon's army, especially during this retreat from Moscow.

Speaker 1 But do you think, is it fair to say that they died of diarrhea, whether it was typhus or another disease that could also cause diarrhea?

Speaker 2 I mean, probably. Basically, they originally thought that, you know, dying of whatever this disease is, they actually, in the documented symptomatology, they do say fever, diarrhea, and jaundice.

Speaker 2 Those were the three things that were like heavily documented. So I think it is safe to say.
But historically, we thought it was typhus and what's called trench fever, which is that beat quintana.

Speaker 2 And now the researchers are saying actually it may have been para typhus, louse-borne relapsing fever,

Speaker 2 not typhus, and trench fever. Fun time.

Speaker 1 Trench fever is one of those wonderfully archaic-sounding diseases, right? Yeah. Old-time eases.
Trench fever and contraction. Trench and foot.
The dropsies.

Speaker 2 Which is why I couldn't come up with it because when you actually look at modern write-ups of Bartonella quintana, CDC or NIH or WHO write-ups of it, they don't call it trench fever anymore.

Speaker 2 So you have to specifically Google trench fever to learn about the fact that that's what caused it.

Speaker 1 Shell shock.

Speaker 2 Yeah, exactly. There's so many of those things.
Trench foot.

Speaker 5 Trench foot, yep.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 World War II, that was still pretty big. What was it? Do they still call it foot and mouth disease? Hoof and mouth disease?

Speaker 5 Hoof and mouth disease.

Speaker 1 Yes, that is correct.

Speaker 2 But trench foot specifically is.

Speaker 1 That's just from having your feet wet for weeks and weeks. Yeah,

Speaker 2 we now call it immersion foot syndrome. Cold and wet for a long period of time, and it can cause all sorts of horrible things.
And eventually you can lose your feet.

Speaker 1 Yeah, terrible.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Horrid.

Speaker 2 All right, thanks.

Speaker 2 Not how Napoleon's army died. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Either.

Speaker 1 All right, guys, we're going to talk to you about photosynthesis. You guys know what photosynthesis is, right? Of course.
Yes. Yes.
All right, Evan, tell me me what it is.

Speaker 1 What's the core of photosynthesis?

Speaker 5 By core, you mean like what happens? You mean plants? And plants absorb the energy from the sun

Speaker 5 and have a chemical process by which it derives its energy?

Speaker 1 Yeah, what's that chemical process? Carbon dioxide.

Speaker 2 They're fixing carbon.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the key piece is the taking of carbon from carbon dioxide in the air to build the sugars, right? That is the food, the carbohydrates.

Speaker 2 And then they also respire.

Speaker 1 They respire oxygen. Yes.

Speaker 2 They still respire. They respire and they photosynthesize.

Speaker 1 Now, does anybody know what the key enzyme is that fixes carbon from the atmosphere?

Speaker 4 Is it enzyme 4716?

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 4 Are you sure?

Speaker 1 It is Rubisco. Oh, Rubisco.
Yes.

Speaker 2 Ribulose 15-biphosphate carboxylase oxygenase. Thank you.

Speaker 1 Right, we'll call it Rubisco. What?

Speaker 1 Now, obviously. Don't worry, I looked that up.
I did not know that.

Speaker 4 Sounds like a hot sauce.

Speaker 1 It's impressive. This process

Speaker 1 of photosynthesis using Rubisco as the main enzyme driving it is the key to all life on Earth, right? I mean, most of the energy that is consumed by life is produced in this process. And

Speaker 1 most of our food we grow is dependent on this process. What's interesting is that in plants, the Rubisco-based Rubisco-based photosynthesis is really inefficient.
It's massively inefficient.

Speaker 2 Well, it never needed to be, right? There's just plants everywhere.

Speaker 1 Need is an interesting concept evolutionarily.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 There was no environmental pressure for it to become more efficient.

Speaker 1 So I don't think that's accurate. I think

Speaker 1 it's better to say that plants found a very inefficient solution to the Rubisco inefficiency problem. Their solution was just to mass-produce Rubisco.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 4 Steve, what about the idea of like it's much harder to go back than

Speaker 4 to continue forward, right?

Speaker 1 There's the evolutionary constraints, you know, that maybe why didn't we hit upon other solutions? Yeah, like once plants hit upon that solution, it's like we're going to basically

Speaker 1 brute force our way to making more food from sunlight by just making tons of Rubisco. It was just an easy way.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's cheap and easy for a cheap and easy way to do it.

Speaker 1 And by some estimates, like, you know, that's half of the protein in a photosynthesizing part of a plant could be Rubisco.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Well, but then again, that is its main driving

Speaker 1 activity.

Speaker 1 So for plants, it was fine. Yeah, just make a ton of this stuff.
We can do it. It is an easy, evolutionarily easy solution.
Just make more.

Speaker 1 But the problem is, when now we are trying to feed the 8 billion plus people by growing crops as efficiently as possible, that just brute force your way through it and make a ton of Rubisco

Speaker 1 becomes the limiting factor in the efficiency of agriculture, right?

Speaker 5 Right, like silicon to computer chips, right?

Speaker 1 Yeah, and so specifically,

Speaker 1 the very high need of nitrogen fertilizer comes from the fact that you need nitrogen to make Rubisco, right? So

Speaker 1 a lot of that fertilizer and a lot of water.

Speaker 1 So, water use and fertilizer use in crops, you know, a lot of that is due to this very brute force solution that plants evolved, you know, in order to maximize their photosynthesis.

Speaker 1 Now, there's a couple of other living organisms that also photosynthesize that are not plants that hit upon

Speaker 1 a different solution.

Speaker 1 What were you going to do? Rubisco?

Speaker 2 Blue-green algae.

Speaker 1 Yes, algae, Absolutely. Algae and

Speaker 1 some bacteria. And they came up with a different solution.
So rather than just like producing tons of Rubisco, do you know what solution they came upon?

Speaker 5 A different enzyme. No.

Speaker 1 Not a bad thought. What's called CO2 concentrating mechanisms, or CCM.
So they evolved to get as much CO2

Speaker 1 next to the Rubisco as possible so that the enzyme becomes more efficient. So rather than having 10 times as much, you make it 10 times as efficient, just to throw a number out there, right?

Speaker 4 Just by having CO2 closer? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a reaction.

Speaker 1 It's a reaction, right?

Speaker 1 So you need to have lots of interaction between Rubisco and CO2 by having lots of Rubisco, or you could maximize that interaction by concentrating the CO2 over a little bit of Rubisco.

Speaker 1 That makes sense?

Speaker 4 Yeah, that sounds like a relatively easy fix evolutionarily. Why didn't more.

Speaker 2 Well, it's not a good thing necessarily. Think about the fact that our oceans are acidifying and we're seeing these massive algal blooms everywhere that kill everything else off.

Speaker 2 Well, it's probably because they're able to use that carbon so much more efficiently than the other organisms.

Speaker 1 Right, but it wasn't a problem in nature. We're making it a problem.

Speaker 2 Right, but it's a problem now.

Speaker 1 Because we are, because yes, because we are part of the reason for that is we have to give so much nitrogen to our agricultural plants to make them grow optimally.

Speaker 1 And if some of that fertilizer gets washed into the ocean, now you have these very efficient organisms with all this nitrogen, and they just go crazy, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah, tons of that, not just some.

Speaker 1 Tons of some of these things washed out. Yeah, it's a lot.
All right.

Speaker 1 But what if?

Speaker 1 What if we could get that CO2 concentrating mechanism, that CCM, as they call it, into our crops?

Speaker 1 This has been the goal for decades of researchers. They were looking for how we can do this.
Now, one of these specific mechanisms is what's called a Rubisco-containing compartment.

Speaker 1 You put the Rubisco in a box, and you get CO2 in that box, and that's how you increase its concentration of CO2. That makes sense? It's very

Speaker 1 conceptually very simple. Just put it in a box with a bunch of CO2, and the reactions happen in the box, and you're good.
That's how

Speaker 1 the algae solve the problem rather than just making a bunch of Rubisco. All right, so researchers have made a proof of concept, right, by

Speaker 1 creating their own box for Rubisco

Speaker 1 and showing that it can actually work. It can increase the efficiency of photosynthesis.
Now, what do you think they make the box out of? Polymerosomes?

Speaker 1 Very close.

Speaker 1 The The same kind of idea, right? Basically liposomes. Just, you know, this is that technology that we're talking about, right? Where you just encapsulate things into fat.
Yeah, these bubbles.

Speaker 1 All right, so they made one,

Speaker 1 but you have to get Rubisco inside these cages, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 what they figured out is that you have to make the cage around

Speaker 1 the Rubisco. You can't get it in there after the fact.

Speaker 5 Why?

Speaker 4 Why can't you shove the Rubisco in there after you make the cage?

Speaker 1 Whatever.

Speaker 1 This has been the trick, right? Making this happen

Speaker 1 at a nano level. So

Speaker 1 they were working with the Rubisco-containing compartments from cyanobacteria specifically called carboxysomes. So we had the polymerosomes from J.
Now we have the carboxysomes from photosynthesis.

Speaker 1 And they were able to tag it with this 14 amino acids so that that would load the Rubisco inside of it, right?

Speaker 1 So basically something that would latch onto the Rubisco and then build the cage around the Rubisco. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 So they had to build it at the right time, you know, as the plant develops so that

Speaker 1 the cages are forming when the Rubisco is made. Maybe it's critical.

Speaker 1 Yeah, because if they didn't do that, then

Speaker 1 it didn't assemble properly and didn't work. This is all the technology, right? You got to get stuff to work.
There's always these little

Speaker 1 trials

Speaker 1 trials, a lot of little things you got to go through.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 eventually, they were able to make the carboxysomes, package up the Rubisco, and they worked.

Speaker 1 But they haven't

Speaker 1 completely developed the technology yet, right?

Speaker 1 This is just a proof of concept.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 there are additional components that they're going to need to get in there in order for this to fully work, right? And then, of course, we need to get them into

Speaker 1 so that our wheat and corn and rice are using this method. And this isn't the only research being done into, you know, again, this carbon concentrating methods.
This is this is the whole approach.

Speaker 1 But the good news is, you can always look at it in terms of good news. Good news is there's a lot of headroom on efficiency of photosynthesis in our crops.

Speaker 1 Because by chance, plants evolved this inefficient method, which means all we got to do is figure out a way to get this either algae or cyanobacteria method into crops.

Speaker 1 And again, this is a significant progress in doing that.

Speaker 1 And then, if we do that, what that means is not only will our produce be way higher yields, but they will use significantly less water and nitrogen fertilizer.

Speaker 1 So, this could be an absolute game changer for agriculture. It's miraculous.
Yes, it could be an absolute change.

Speaker 1 Holy crap. So, that's why it's worth

Speaker 1 developing this technology and investing a lot in this kind of research and also multiple different ways. Like we cannot put all our eggs in one basket.

Speaker 1 We could try to address this issue with multiple different approaches.

Speaker 4 How beneficial would this be? Just

Speaker 1 during,

Speaker 4 especially though, especially during the zombie apocalypse, all the canned food's gone. You got to actually grow your own food.
Oh, look, I've cut this new plant 2.0 that's much more efficient.

Speaker 1 That's going to be a lot easier to it could be a second green revolution, right?

Speaker 4 Oh, my God. Yeah, if it works as we hope, I can't see how it wouldn't be.

Speaker 1 Well, the potential is there, right? That's the bottom line. The potential is there.
They're making progress on the technology. Conceptually, I think we have our heads wrapped around this.

Speaker 1 We've just got to keep track of it and see how it goes. And obviously, there's a lot of GMO research that's going on to do the same thing, you know, to get

Speaker 1 some kind of carbon concentrating technology going. There's also different types of Rubisco that are more efficient, and some plants have them and some don't.

Speaker 1 So getting the C4 versus C3 into all the plants can also give a boost of 10, 20% to productivity, which is huge.

Speaker 1 But the potential here is just massive. All right.
Bob, tell us about second generation black holes.

Speaker 4 All right. So my title for this is, well, kind of, is Black Hole Zombies in the News.
They're dead stars and they ravenously eat their own.

Speaker 4 Now, at least that's what a recent paper is saying, but not in those words, of course, not even close that they even use those words.

Speaker 4 But a more conventional opener for this news item might go like this: Gravitational wave astronomers report two unusual black hole mergers that are the best evidence yet for second-generation black holes.

Speaker 4 A paper was recently published on this in the astrophysical journal Letters. Okay, so these collisions were revealed by not just LIGO, but we're talking LIGO, Virgo, and CAGRA collaboration.

Speaker 4 These respectively, those are the gravitational wave observatories for the United States, Italy, and Japan. And three together, they make quite a team-up.
So we know this, right?

Speaker 4 They measure subatomic scale distortions in space-time caused by distant cataclysmic events like colliding black holes or neutron stars.

Speaker 4 It's

Speaker 4 a new era in astronomy, multi-messenger astronomy, where you can look at the radiation from objects in space, but you could also look at what it does to the fabric of space-time itself.

Speaker 4 Okay, so last year they came across two unusual but similar black hole collisions

Speaker 4 within a month of each other, although one was 700 million light years distant and the other was over 2 billion light years distant.

Speaker 4 Imagine they're traveling through space all that time and they hit our observatories within one month.

Speaker 4 LSC spokesman Stephen Fairhost described it as among the most novel events among the several hundred that the LIGO-Virgo-CAGRA network has observed. So why was this special?

Speaker 4 So both of these collisions were interesting in that, now imagine you've got four black holes, two, and they're binary. So, they've got two binaries.

Speaker 4 For each of these binaries, one of the pair was extra massive, right? It was

Speaker 4 more than twice as massive as its partner that it's orbiting around.

Speaker 4 So, for example, one was 17 solar masses and its partner was seven, and the other binary pair had a 16 solar mass primary and an eight solar mass secondary black hole. So they were much,

Speaker 4 they were unbalanced in terms of their mass. But these larger black holes also had very unusual spins.
One was among the fastest spinners ever, ever seen.

Speaker 4 I was trying to figure out, okay, this star is spinning really fast, almost the fastest ever detected. So how do you put that into context? And it's really hard because there's no solid surface here.

Speaker 4 It's dimensionless, so it's hard to actually describe it.

Speaker 4 So the best I can come up with was a fair way to think about it is that the space-time at the black hole's horizon, like 83 kilometers wide, was frame-dragging around and around about 400 times per second.

Speaker 4 It's literally pulling space with it. And it sounds pretty disorienting and potentially spaghettifying as well.
So

Speaker 4 the other larger black hole was bizarre as well, in that its spin wasn't necessarily as fast, but

Speaker 4 the spin was in the opposite direction of its orbit. So that's a

Speaker 4 retrograde spin that has literally never been seen with this level of clarity and confidence before.

Speaker 4 They think they've seen them before, but it was just very fuzzy and hard to make out. This one was like basically crystal clear as far as I could tell.
A retrograde retrograde spin on a black hole. So

Speaker 4 what does this all mean? So what?

Speaker 4 Seeing binary black holes where one member has twice the mass and in addition this atypical rotation implies what? It implies a violent history for that black hole.

Speaker 4 Something happened in its past that was

Speaker 4 pretty nasty. So, the simplest explanation is that those larger black holes weren't just simple remnants.

Speaker 4 They didn't form from just one dead star and have been hanging out ever since.

Speaker 4 They likely formed from previous collisions, and the resulting larger mass and the weird spins that they saw initially were basically you could look at it as like scars from those previous those previous mergers that had happened in its past.

Speaker 4 So when these black holes smashed together in the past,

Speaker 4 it left these fingerprints on it. When they merged with other black holes in the future, they showed that these scars from having

Speaker 4 already merging previously. So they liken these now to what they're calling second generation black holes, which experience what they refer to as hierarchical mergers.

Speaker 4 Black holes that merge over and over suggest that they formed in these dense environments, like star clusters, where this can happen.

Speaker 4 So it's not like a typical, when you think of a black hole, you know, an ordinary stellar mass black hole, you know,

Speaker 4 a very large star goes through its life cycle and it explodes in a supernova and it becomes a classic black hole.

Speaker 4 They kind of like stay there and encounters with other black holes are very, very rare because you're kind of like in your solar system and there's not the nearest star or black hole could be many, many light years away.

Speaker 4 But these look like they formed in dense environments, so dense that the closest black holes and other stars were close enough where they could, over the years, of course, many millions of years, they could merge together over and over and over.

Speaker 4 So, this helps us elucidate

Speaker 4 this life cycle, or you know, this life cycle of some black holes and what you know, you know, what their journey through their existence is like compared to, say, other black holes.

Speaker 4 So, for me, though, the real takeaway and potential of these observatories, it was expressed by John Luca Gemme. He's the spokesperson of the Virgo collaboration.

Speaker 4 He said, These detections highlight the extraordinary capabilities of our global gravitational wave observatories. And he couldn't be more right with that.
I'm constantly amazed at

Speaker 4 what these gravitational wave observatories can do.

Speaker 4 No instrument, no instrument ever created by humanity can detect changes in distance better and smaller than a proton like LIGO and its siblings do basically on a daily basis.

Speaker 4 It's amazing how exquisitely sensitive they are. They help us interpret these distant laboratories in space that could never exist on Earth with the tremendous energies that they unleash.

Speaker 4 We would never be able to. I mean, we could model it on supercomputers, probably, but actually observing reality and as a laboratory, these are colliding black holes.

Speaker 4 We're only ever going to just observe these

Speaker 4 in distant space. This allows us, these devices, this technology allows us to stress test general relativity in ways that

Speaker 4 we'd never be able to do otherwise.

Speaker 4 And the fact that LIGO and Virgo and Kagrug and their future descendants continue to be refined and become even more sensitive than ever means that they will be even more sensitive to any new physics that may go beyond Einstein's general relativity or our standard model of physics.

Speaker 4 So, the more sensitive they become,

Speaker 4 the better they will be to sense new physics when it finally, you know, finally, if ever, emerges out of there.

Speaker 4 Brand new branches of physics like that is a holy grail, obviously, and would certainly win future Nobel Prizes and offer insights into deeper layers of our universe.

Speaker 4 If any of that interests you, of course.

Speaker 3 That's all I got, Steve.

Speaker 1 All right, interesting. Thanks, Bob.
All right, Evan, Avi Loeb is at it again. What's going on now? Oh, my God.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, there's news this week because,

Speaker 5 well, October 29th was just yesterday. And Comet 3i, Atlas, made its closest approach to our sun.
So that has to do with Avi Loeb and the news. I'll get to him in a moment.

Speaker 5 The anticipation for this day was built up for several months, actually, as scientists and the public have anxiously, maybe not anxiously, but they've been waiting to see if this stranger from outside our solar system is going to swing around the Sun, as, well, standard models would predict, or is this something other than a comet that has the capability of altering its own trajectory in some way?

Speaker 5 Which would be a very strong indicator that it's not a comet at all, but rather something out of a science fiction novel. Hmm, I wonder what the results are.

Speaker 5 We're going to find out. But Comet 3i Atlas, yes, first of all, a little history was discovered on July 1st, 2025.

Speaker 5 And since then, astronomers have been doing everything they can to learn as much about it. Because, unlike other comets, 3i Atlas doesn't orbit our Sun.

Speaker 5 It's an interstellar comet, one of only three that we've ever seen, hence the designation 3i, 3 Interstellar. It is thought to be at least 7 billion years old, which is almost twice as old as Earth.

Speaker 5 And apparently the oldest comet that's been observed.

Speaker 5 So that alone makes the study of this comet a rare chance to try and learn something about ancient objects hurtling around from outside of our solar system.

Speaker 5 But it also, unfortunately, opens an opportunity for fringe scientists, crank pseudoscientists, and conspiracy theorists to have a field day playing with this chunk of debris from a distant part of our universe.

Speaker 5 Yeah, so here's something unusual to our understanding. Let's go crazy with our imaginations, they say.
It doesn't work that way, folks.

Speaker 5 We've mentioned 3i Atlas on the show many times over the last few months since that July discovery. And not the least of reasons why is because of that astronomer from Harvard University, Dr.

Speaker 5 Avi Loeb. He's made quite a name for himself, occupying that fringe science or fringe scientist category, in my opinion.

Speaker 5 He made international headlines back in 2018 for arguing that the interstellar object Omuamua might have been a light sail sent by an ancient civilization.

Speaker 5 And more recently, he led an expedition to the Pacific Ocean to recover debris from IM-1, that was that 2014 meteor that he also suggested could be of interstellar origin and

Speaker 5 possibly artificial.

Speaker 5 Both cases drew wide attention, but none of Loeb's extraordinary interpretations have stood up to any peer-reviewed scrutiny. But 3i Atlas,

Speaker 5 Loeb's theory is that, well, yet again, here's another candidate for extraterrestrial technology.

Speaker 5 It is cleverly disguised, maybe, maybe as a comet, yet revealing because the comet does not behave like other comets that scientists have been able to study, the ones that originate and continue to move in orbit in our own solar system.

Speaker 5 He describes these anomalies as such. These are jets of material that are apparently pointing toward the sun rather than away from it.

Speaker 5 An almost complete lack of a visible tail, and an emission of nickel without any sign of iron, where you would normally have the two of those coming out in a predictable ratio.

Speaker 5 So this is an unex that's considered an extremely unusual mix.

Speaker 1 It's almost as if we've never seen an interstellar comet before. Well, that's the point, right?

Speaker 1 That's what this all boils down to.

Speaker 1 Oh, it's the first interstellar comet. It's a third interstellar object.

Speaker 5 Third interstellar object.

Speaker 1 So it's the first time we're seeing something like this. And he's saying, but there's unusual stuff we've never seen before.
Therefore,

Speaker 1 we need to seriously consider aliens. It's a lot of fun.
Therefore, aliens.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 I went to EarthSky. EarthSky is a good website.

Speaker 5 They've done good work on tracking 3i Atlas

Speaker 5 and its movements and the plausibility at all of what Avi Loeb has to say about this. And there's really nothing here that requires any alien engineering degree whatsoever.

Speaker 5 It's moving on a hyperbolic trajectory. It's going to sling it back out of the solar system after it passes near the sun, as the models describe.
And this is observations from multiple observatories.

Speaker 5 This isn't just one source looking at this. The Pan-STARS 2 telescope has been tracking it.
NASA's NEOWISE mission is tracking this as well,

Speaker 5 among others. And it really has all the hallmarks of a typical...
It's volatile, but it's a typical interstellar comet that they say. It's losing water and gas as it warms.

Speaker 5 It has a faint coma.

Speaker 5 They say it's just not dramatically seen as some of the other comets that we've...

Speaker 5 been you know have observed in the past uh jets pointing towards the sun that can be explained away by as an optical optical geometry effect because of our viewing angle and solar illumination.

Speaker 5 So there are answers to all of the questions, all of the anomalies

Speaker 5 that are being posed here. Again, none of it you have to go to alien engineering for.
Yeah, so what happened? Yeah, it reached the sun just yesterday. And again, the latest observations, it's

Speaker 5 on its way back out of the solar system now, but it has not made any dramatic turns. It has not done anything out of the usual.

Speaker 5 It is not displaying any kind of behavior that would say, hey, we need to really scrutinize this and take a second look at it. And maybe Avi Loeb or someone else is onto something.

Speaker 5 None of that is occurring. This is acting as a comet should act.
Oh, did you know? I hadn't heard this one before I researched it for this news item.

Speaker 5 There's speculation that the object's reversed engineered trajectory points towards the same direction as the wow signal that was detected back in 1977.

Speaker 1 Really?

Speaker 4 No way, man.

Speaker 5 I mean, that's, you know.

Speaker 1 How accurate could that be?

Speaker 5 A point for creativity, but you know, I mean, trying to stir up old controversies and old, you know, old conspiracy theories is

Speaker 5 rather interesting,

Speaker 5 I thought, that they were able to bring back the wow signal and fold it into this

Speaker 5 into this event as well.

Speaker 1 He's spiraling down the cranktrain, this guy. So now he's saying that NASA's withholding photographic evidence that could prove that he's correct.

Speaker 3 Yeah, just for him, anything for him to be correct, right?

Speaker 1 This is the pattern he's falling into. And it's actually

Speaker 1 way worse than what we've already documented. So, for example, he says, oh, it doesn't have a coma.
A comet should have a coma. And then there was a paper that showed that it does have a coma.

Speaker 1 And they said, the paper's wrong. Because

Speaker 1 why? Because it shows that

Speaker 1 he had to admit that it did have a coma. He said, well, maybe it has a coma because the interstellar craft picked up dust from its intercellular travel.
Oh, my God.

Speaker 1 So he just keeps

Speaker 1 changing what he's claiming,

Speaker 1 just getting more and more silly. Then he said, oh, it's glowing with its own light, which is not true.
Yeah, the anti-tail, the tail pointing forward, is likely because

Speaker 1 the stuff that's coming off,

Speaker 1 what happens is

Speaker 1 the comet gets heated up by the sun. That's what creates the coma, and then the solar wind creates the tail, right? So it blows the stuff away.
But if the particles are very heavy,

Speaker 1 they won't quickly get pushed away by the solar wind.

Speaker 1 They will just keep going and radiating out from the comet, and the brightest point on the comet is the one that's facing the sun, right?

Speaker 1 So you're going to have ejected material going towards the sun, and if it's heavy particles, it won't get pushed into a typical cometary tail. Hence, you're left with an anti-tail.

Speaker 1 Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 And we've seen this before, and then you would expect, well, over time,

Speaker 1 it still will get pushed into a regular tail. It'll just take longer because the particles are heavier, and that's what's happening.
That's what we're seeing as time goes on.

Speaker 1 But he, you know, the thing is, again, I don't have a problem with saying, oh, could this observation be consistent with an alien craft, whatever.

Speaker 1 But this is just not the kind of thing that should be shopped to the public at this stage, because this is completely consistent with just a regular comet or

Speaker 1 an interstellar comet with some unusual features that we've never seen before, because it's interstellar. That's it.

Speaker 1 The probability of this turning into something fantastical like an alien spacecraft is negligible, but maybe it's not technically zero, but it's pretty damn low.

Speaker 1 And it's certainly Occam's razor dictates that we have to rule out

Speaker 1 non-alien interpretations first, just regular old astronomical object stuff first.

Speaker 1 And he's just making a career. He's going on Joe Rogan now, talking about how NASA's hiding data.
I mean, this is he's becoming just a straight-up crank now.

Speaker 2 People aren't just picking this up. He's got a publicist.
You know he does.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 4 He has sullied these interstellar close calls for years, for years.

Speaker 4 And we're going to get to the point where we could literally, you know, potentially detect two, three of these every year.

Speaker 4 And now for years, everyone's going to be talking about, what, is this also an alien craft?

Speaker 4 I also expect him at this point to say, those aliens are so smart that they made this one look just like an icy ball of rock and not, you know, not what it really is. That's how good they are.

Speaker 4 It's like, really? I expect to hear that from him anytime now, how good the aliens are at disguising.

Speaker 5 Real shame.

Speaker 1 It detracts from the wonder.

Speaker 5 of the science of all of this. That's what really should be on showcase here is how amazing these things are and the fact that we are able to learn these new things about them.

Speaker 1 That's the real

Speaker 5 excitement here, as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 4 How American is this whole thing, right?

Speaker 1 Just like

Speaker 4 there's a chance of real interesting science. No, it's aliens.

Speaker 1 I don't think that's uniquely American.

Speaker 5 As far as NASA not releasing the photo, not all of their devices spit out photos as fast as others. And, you know, I think it was the, what, the high-rise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

Speaker 5 That takes time to

Speaker 5 get those images to come out of that particular one, and that's the one he was referring to. So he doesn't bring that into his discussion at all when he's talking about it.

Speaker 1 You know, that

Speaker 5 this particular instrument does take a long time to render these pictures. No, no, no.
Instead, it's NASA's hiding stuff.

Speaker 5 So, yeah, that's what throws him into the crank category when he starts doing stuff like that.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, the guy is probably drunk on money and

Speaker 1 the fame that he's getting for it yep and that's selling mm-hmm it's a good lesson here you know like you can watch it in real time just watch him slide down the crazy hole you know just because he's getting other things that he that are apparently more important than real science well even if you put the motivations aside I do think there's a feedback loop of why aren't I being taken seriously for my crank ideas then to people are just closed-minded to they're hiding data, to their wrong, to there's a conspiracy, and it's all, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 You just keep, that's, I think, the feedback loop that he is going down right now.

Speaker 1 All right, Jay, it's who's that noisy time?

Speaker 3 Yes, it is. All right, guys, last week I played This Noisy.

Speaker 3 That's pretty weird. What do you think?

Speaker 5 Did anyone suggest it was a Morse code signal of some kind?

Speaker 1 No. No, okay.
You did, though.

Speaker 3 Maybe. Are you going to stick with that?

Speaker 5 Possible that's what they were going for. I just don't know what made the noise, though.

Speaker 3 All right, well, I got a lot of guesses.

Speaker 3 Some fun ones. There was a lot of people sending in a lot of jokey stuff.

Speaker 3 Thank you for the laughs, but obviously

Speaker 3 I can't go all in on that.

Speaker 3 But this one made me laugh. This guy is named Kevin Walsh, and he says, Hi, Jay.
I think you're at the point where if it sounds like a bird, it's probably not.

Speaker 3 But if it's a bird, it doesn't sound like one.

Speaker 3 That being said, this doesn't sound like a bird, so I'm going going to guess it's a woodpecker.

Speaker 1 I'm like, okay.

Speaker 3 It is not a woodpecker. And Steve, have you ever heard a woodpecker make any kind of sound like that?

Speaker 1 No. They're usually way more rhythmic.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And they laugh a lot according to the cartoons.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. That's only the pileated woodpecker.

Speaker 3 I have another listener named Gary Blantford. Gary said, to me, it sounded like a...
lead worker flattening or shaping the lead sheet prior to welding or other processes.

Speaker 1 Keep up the great work.

Speaker 3 That's an interesting guess. I haven't worked with lead.

Speaker 1 I've only worked with iron.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 I don't hear that, but that was interesting. I actually want to know what that sounds like now.
Another listener named Nicole H. said, Hi, this is my first time writing.

Speaker 3 I was bummed a few weeks ago because I recognized the roller coaster noise, but I didn't send an email. This is a lesson to everyone out there.
Take the chance, send the email.

Speaker 3 Sometimes you're going to be right. She continues: this week's noise sounds like liquid-filled bottles rolling downstairs.

Speaker 5 Interesting. Okay.

Speaker 3 I've heard this noise. This is not correct, but thank you for the guess.

Speaker 3 Scott Wesley writes in, sounds too simple, and I think you've done it before, but it sounds like one of those playground pipes where you can tap with your hands or slip on flat shoes to make these sort of noises.

Speaker 3 It sounds very clean, though,

Speaker 3 either well-practiced or I'm wrong. So, Scott, did you mean did I have I played the playground pipe noise before, or I wasn't crystal clear on what you said or what you meant by that.

Speaker 3 But the bottom line is, I'm almost sure I have never played this noisy before. I mean, it is a hard thing because the noisies go back into when Evan used to do it as well.

Speaker 3 So I don't have perfect clarity. I have okay clarity on that, particularly things that are like over five years ago.
Anyway, you are incorrect, and that's all fine. It's okay to be wrong.

Speaker 3 As Steve says, he's wrong all the time, right? No, he never says that.

Speaker 1 Hi. Anyway,

Speaker 3 so nobody won. And I, you know, it always completely baffles my mind when people don't guess that it's a bird when it's a bird.
And this is a bird.

Speaker 3 Steve, you want me to play it again and you want to try to guess? Sure. All right, here we go.

Speaker 1 What do you think? I have no idea. Bird.
It's an emu.

Speaker 1 What's it doing?

Speaker 1 You're right. I actually wrote down how to pronounce it.
It's an emu.

Speaker 3 I told you later in the show I was going to mispronounce it. Did you hear me say that?

Speaker 1 It's funny. All right, so it's an emu.
Emu.

Speaker 3 And these are large, flightless birds. They live in, they're native to Australia.
They are the second largest bird in the world after the ostrich.

Speaker 3 The adults can grow to about six and a half feet tall and weigh around 100 to 130 pounds. And of course, they have long necks.
That's how they get up that high.

Speaker 3 Strong legs, brownish feathers that look shaggy because each feather has a double shaft. Very cool bird.
I have a new noisy for you guys this week. And here it is.
I'll say it now.

Speaker 3 You got to put it in before Steve. Ready? Yeah, so this noisy this week, guys, this one has very high-pitched, somewhat annoying tinging sounds.

Speaker 3 So if you want, turn your volume down a little bit just to make sure you don't hurt yourself.

Speaker 3 The people in the background have nothing to do with this, just so you know. All right, guys, if you think you know what this week's noisy is, or you heard something cool, email me at WTN.

Speaker 3 Finish it, Steve.

Speaker 1 At the skeptic sky.org.

Speaker 3 There you go. All right, Steve, there's stuff.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 3 There is stuff. Okay, so first off, we have

Speaker 3 tickets for sale. We have a bunch of shows planned.
We're calling this the ERE, the exclusive rogue encounter. What is it, you might ask?

Speaker 3 This is the result of of people emailing us for a very long time asking us they want something.

Speaker 3 They like the VIP things that we do, but they want something more intense, you know, like an intense VIP thing. So we thought we'd turn this kind of like into, you know,

Speaker 3 a Disney World attraction where you will encounter us like we are dinosaurs.

Speaker 3 No, that's not what it is.

Speaker 1 This is going to be,

Speaker 3 this is going to be exclusive, meaning the numbers are going to be very low and it's going to be more intimate.

Speaker 3 We are are going to have, you know, it's going to be like you and a handful of other people hanging out with the SGU.

Speaker 1 We don't have to. We're not performing.

Speaker 2 We're engaging.

Speaker 3 We're talking. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Private time with the SGU.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a lot of fun.

Speaker 3 We don't know exactly what we're going to do because we'll, you know, we'll think about it. We could do anything.
It could be

Speaker 3 anything from listening to music to, you know, to playing games to slapping George around, just whatever, you know, whatever we decide. But it'll be fun, and this will happen on Friday night.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to say anything else about that because the tickets are not up yet, or they might be by the time this episode comes up.

Speaker 5 That's how exclusive this is.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they'll be next week. Bottom line is: watch out for that

Speaker 3 on the SGU homepage. Then, you know, that will be January 9th, and on January 10th, we have two shows.
We have the SGU Private Show and we have the SGU Extravaganza with George Rubb.

Speaker 3 All those tickets are available on the SGU.org site. And then we fast forward now to Saturday, May 16th.
That's in Madison, Wisconsin at the Atwood Music Hall.

Speaker 3 It'll be the same exact arrangement I just said. Friday night, exclusive Rogue Encounter.

Speaker 3 The Saturday, which is actually the 16th, we'll have both the SGU Private Show and the Skeptical Extravaganza Stage Show.

Speaker 3 And just to let you know, we're going to be doing a show in New Haven at some point. That's New Haven, Connecticut.

Speaker 3 Those dates will be coming out soon. It'll be sometime in the probably early spring.

Speaker 3 And also, if guys, if you want to support the work that we do, you can go to patreon.com forward slash skepticsguide.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Jay. All right, we got a quick email.

Speaker 1 This one comes from Norbert, who asks, Here is my paraphrase of what a psychologist said on a radio program many years ago: Humans have reflexes, drives, and urges, but humans do not have or act on instinct.

Speaker 1 At the time, I simply accepted the comment as accurate, but what are your thoughts? I thought that this might make an interesting segment for the show. All right, well, thank you, Norbert.

Speaker 1 I think it is an interesting question. Kara, what do you think about that? Do humans have instinct?

Speaker 2 I have to look at specifically how they worded this.

Speaker 1 Your immediate reaction is: it depends on the details, which

Speaker 2 is reflexes, drives, and urges, but they do not have instinct. Well, how is a reflex not an instinct? Like, this is all just operational definitions.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 But I read them like, but it depends on your definition. This is a semantic argument.

Speaker 2 Because we do have reflexes and drives and urges, and I don't think there's a difference between an instinct and an urge or a drive I think what they're asking is do we have things that are innate versus environmentally influenced and we do

Speaker 2 totally we totally have in your flight thoughts feelings behaviors yeah and like suckling exactly yeah coughing like yeah all of those things so we have these basic kind of neurological ones um but i think even more complicated like i think the parenting instinct is absolutely real yeah there are definitely instincts i mean and and people have them when they have uh pets, even, I think.

Speaker 2 Whenever there's something in your charge that you're caring for, there are certain

Speaker 2 neurotransmitters, there are certain brain states that you experience. But then again, there's always an exception to the rule because there are some people who have weaker versions of that.

Speaker 2 There are people with psychopathy who might struggle with

Speaker 2 empathy, and probably those things aren't triggered.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Now, I think where

Speaker 1 people might make a distinction is that

Speaker 1 because all of these things, reflexes, drives, urges, instinct, whatever you want to call it,

Speaker 1 the more neurologically sophisticated a

Speaker 1 species is, the more higher-level cognitive processes will be affecting these behaviors and feelings, etc.

Speaker 1 Right. So, just because, like, as human beings, we can think about stuff and alter our behavior accordingly doesn't mean we don't have the instincts, right? It doesn't mean the instincts aren't there.

Speaker 2 I think there's also a big difference between what we're talking about, like quote, neurological, what I would actually not use the word instinct, I would use the word reflex or drive or urge.

Speaker 2 And what we often think of as instincts can be learned, but they're still instincts because we have heuristics and we have biases.

Speaker 2 And so even though there's a lot of environmental influence, there is still the quick reaction, you know, the thinking fast and slow.

Speaker 2 And when we have the quick reaction, whether it is socially influenced or whether it is biologically influenced, there it's the immediate reaction versus the higher level, I need to sit and think about this.

Speaker 2 And so some people might call that an instinct. It depends on how you define it.

Speaker 1 Right. But I think by any reasonable definition, we have instincts in that, you know, the core part of the definition is there are some things that are innate.

Speaker 1 that affects our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And pulling away your hand from a hot fire, you can call it a reflex, sure, but we also have the cognitive ability to override that and force our hand there, even if it burns.

Speaker 2 So it's like even a reflex is more complicated than that. So I think the word instinct is just a loaded word and they're using it.
Whatever your professor was or the

Speaker 2 psychologist on the radio program was, my hope is that they contextualized it more than that. They didn't just say that sentence and then like go dead silent.

Speaker 1 Right. You can't leave it there.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I reflexes have a very specific definition in neurology, so I would reserve them for that.

Speaker 1 Those are usually things that are happening at a peripheral level, you know, or if they are in the knee within the level. Or if they are in the brain, they're in a subconscious level.

Speaker 1 It's like a circuit. It is literally a circuit that does not involve any higher level thought and may, in fact, be completely independent of it.

Speaker 1 Like, you can't even impact it with your higher level thought.

Speaker 2 Right. So, like, instinct, for example, as opposed to reflex, would be maybe pulling your hand away.

Speaker 2 Or it's like there's all the obviously famous little Albert experiments, which were flawed, but whatever.

Speaker 2 And most psychologists generally agree that there are two main fears that infants have, loud noises and heights. Falling?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Like falling and loud noises, that those are just things that... quote unquote innately

Speaker 2 they're going to react to they're instinctive yeah but then they can learn all sorts of other ones and they feel instinctive it feels instinctive to recoil to a snake, but that is learned.

Speaker 4 That's totally fully learned.

Speaker 2 There's all sorts of cool experiments where they put babies with snakes and the babies are just like grabbing at them and like totally not concerned at all.

Speaker 1 Right. Yeah.
Right. Okay.
We're going to do a name-natalogical fallacy as well. This one comes from TikTok, so this is also from TikTok, but this was someone who Kara, I believe, is a Mormon, who,

Speaker 1 according to their faith, there were horses, modern horses in the Americas prior to contact with the Europeans, right?

Speaker 1 But of course, scientists, you know, historians say that there is no modern horses in the Americans prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Speaker 2 Okay, only like extinct horses.

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 And those extinct horses probably all migrated over from Europe.

Speaker 1 But horses evolved in Europe and Asia, and then there were waves of immigration from over the Bering Strait when that was passable, etc.

Speaker 1 And then modern horses evolved in Europe and Asia and were brought to the Americas by Europeans, basically.

Speaker 2 According to the Mormons, Native Americans are a quote, lost tribe of Israel.

Speaker 1 I know, right. This is all part of what I've read.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which we don't have to get into for this piece. But this guy is saying that that argument that there were no modern horses in the Americas prior to the arrival of Europeans is a logical fallacy.

Speaker 1 It is the argument from ignorance.

Speaker 1 And then then he backs it up by saying the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Speaker 1 So he's trying to use skeptical logic, you know, the kind of arguments that we make, in order to say we don't know that there weren't

Speaker 1 modern horses in the Americas prior to Europe. You're just basing it on this conflation of absence of evidence with evidence of absence.

Speaker 2 But that's just another semantic argument. We can't prove that there were no horses, but we can say reasonably that there's no evidence that there were horses, so it's likely there weren't.

Speaker 1 I don't understand why. Yeah, it's

Speaker 2 we say the same thing all the time. We operate as if there were no horses because there's no evidence to think there were.

Speaker 1 Exactly.

Speaker 1 You weren't here for the interview with a philosopher a couple weeks ago where he made a very good point, which I think we need to constantly reinforce, which we have, but he put a good term on it.

Speaker 1 Science operates by the inference to the best explanation. Yes.
And that's it. It's all inference to the best explanation based upon the totality of evidence.
And not proof, right? It's not math.

Speaker 1 It's not proof. And so

Speaker 1 in the context of science, we can say that if you look at all the evidence, right, there's evidence that horses evolved in Europe and Asia, right? They did not evolve in the Americas.

Speaker 1 There's no evidence for horses in the Americas prior to contact with Europeans. And we know that Europeans brought their horses over here.

Speaker 1 And so the simplest explanation, you have Occam's razor kicking in.

Speaker 1 The simplest explanation, the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions, as we like to say more accurately, and the best inference

Speaker 1 to the most likely conclusion is Europeans brought modern horses to

Speaker 1 the Americas. They were not here before.

Speaker 1 Him trying to call that a logical fallacy means it's the fallacy fallacy, right? He does not understand how these fallacies work.

Speaker 1 I also often point out that saying absence of evidence is not evidence of absence is technically wrong. It is evidence of absence.
It's just not proof of absence.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's a form of evidence of absence.

Speaker 1 It's a form of evidence, though. And how good is the evidence? Well, it depends on how much you've looked and how effective, whatever your survey technique is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, which percentage of the population can we sample? Yeah, would we have expected to find horses, evidence of horses pre-Europeans if they were here?

Speaker 1 Like, would we have expected to find typhus in the remains of Napoleon's soldiers? It doesn't prove they didn't have typhus, but we didn't find what we expect to find if they did.

Speaker 1 And that is absolutely evidence of absolution.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's just not proof. I use the same argument when people ask me why I call myself an atheist and not agnostic.
And I always tell people, I think that the term agnostic is a global label.

Speaker 2 We are all agnostic. We are either theistically agnostic or we are atheistically agnostic, meaning nobody has full proof.
All we can do is operate as if

Speaker 2 there is no God or as if there is a God or multiple gods. I operate as if there is no God, meaning I am an atheistic agnostic.

Speaker 2 Some people operate as theistic agnostic. So I drop the agnostic label because it's redundant, but I feel like it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 Like there's evidence of absence all around me, which is why I choose to subscribe to that view, but I cannot prove that there is no God.

Speaker 1 Inference is the best explanation is we don't need to hypothesize God or gods or supernatural things to explain the world that we see. And it's not a very useful hypothesis anyway.
Exactly.

Speaker 4 What makes it extra frustrating is the fact that a lot of people will say that they absolutely do have evidence, which of course is no evidence.

Speaker 1 Of course they don't.

Speaker 1 Yeah, they're wrong. It's so frustrating.
I always say both. I'm an atheist and an agnostic.
I have just a slightly slightly different formulation.

Speaker 1 I agree with what you said, but I think this is a communication thing. Because agnosticism,

Speaker 1 yeah, agnosticism professes the inability to know, which you are saying. So you are agnostic.
So I am professing.

Speaker 2 And you're right. Some people don't profess it.
Some people, yeah. But my argument is: I don't care if you profess it.
You still don't care.

Speaker 1 Atheists. Right.

Speaker 1 And I've gotten to this argument

Speaker 1 before, too.

Speaker 1 There's a strong atheism and weak atheism, right? And strong atheism is,

Speaker 1 you know, I know there is no God, whereas weak atheism is I don't believe in God

Speaker 1 and I have no faith in God. Yes, we are weak atheists and agnostics, which is the only scientific stance in the world.

Speaker 2 It is, and etymologically speaking, I'm sorry, but atheism is a lack of theism.

Speaker 1 Yes, right.

Speaker 2 That's all that is.

Speaker 2 It's not an assurance that theism is wrong, it's not anti-theism, it's atheism.

Speaker 1 Okay, but we like to be philosophically accurate. Yes.

Speaker 1 All right, let's go on with science or fiction.

Speaker 1 It's time for science or fiction.

Speaker 1 Each week I come up with three science news items or facts, two real and one fake. Then I challenge my panel of skeptics to snip out the fake.

Speaker 1 There's a sort of theme here, and the theme is good news, everyone, which I've used many times before. These are all news items.
They're all current news items, but they all tend to also be good news.

Speaker 1 All right, here we go.

Speaker 1 Item number one, engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen.

Speaker 1 Item number two, a new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results.

Speaker 1 And item number three, researchers demonstrate a liposomal delivery system that can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.

Speaker 3 Jay, go first.

Speaker 3 All right, first one, engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium materials already used in electronics that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen.

Speaker 1 What does gallium-doped mean?

Speaker 2 So dope.

Speaker 1 It just means that

Speaker 1 you include it.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay.

Speaker 1 It's an engineering term. It just means you've added it to the gallium atoms have been added to the germanium.

Speaker 3 So, Steve, instead of superconduction happening at a much lower temperature, it's happening at the liquid nitrogen level. That's essentially what you're saying here, right? For that, for that.

Speaker 1 You're framing it interestingly. We already have superconducting material that's at this temperature range.
But it's like it's ceramics.

Speaker 1 This is the first time we're using metals we're already using in electronics, getting up into that range.

Speaker 3 That's a big deal. I can clearly see that.
Okay. I mean, you know, that's

Speaker 3 it would be fantastic. I can't think of anything off the top that would go against this being a possibility.
Yeah, so I'll just say that's a maybe.

Speaker 3 Number two, a new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results.

Speaker 3 Less than 1% of the energy of current methods. That, if true, would be a massive,

Speaker 3 massive gain and help in so many freaking ways, not using all that energy and all the heat that's produced. When you say deep learning, are you including LLMs?

Speaker 1 Whatever uses the deep neural net learning methodology. Okay, I mean,

Speaker 1 I'm pretty sure that includes LLMs.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's massive. Sub 1% of current energy use.
I can't imagine

Speaker 3 how they could have figured that out. That the framework allows them to use a hundredth of the energy.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 3 Okay, that's a big what-if. No, I don't think so.

Speaker 3 That one is on my top list now.

Speaker 3 Third one here: researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system could be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with a thousand times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.

Speaker 3 Well, the good news is it's either like this awesome cancer thing or the 1%,

Speaker 3 less than 1% energy usage, which either one of those being true would be fantastic. You know, for some reason, I think the cancer thing is true and the energy one is false.

Speaker 3 Number two, Steve, the deep learning using less than 1% of the energy usage of current methods is

Speaker 3 a fiction for me.

Speaker 1 Okay, Kara.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm kind of leaning that way too. I don't really understand the first one, the gallium-doped germanium.

Speaker 2 So we've got these materials that are already used in electronics, and they've created this form that's now superconducting at ambient.

Speaker 2 Dang it. I feel like we get this all the time, superconduction at ambient temperatures, and we haven't been able to crack it in the temperature range

Speaker 2 of liquid nitrogen. Okay, that's still pretty cold.
So that's considered ambient temperature?

Speaker 1 Ambient pressure.

Speaker 2 Oh, sorry, ambient pressure, but still really cold. Okay, yeah, that one actually seems like it could be true.

Speaker 1 Because, you know, some superconducting materials are like millions of atmospheres. Like, yes,

Speaker 1 happy for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Because I feel like I've seen like the, yeah, maybe it was ceramics, like you guys mentioned, but the displays of like the thing like floating, but it had to be super, super cold.

Speaker 2 Deep learning models, yeah, less than 1% of the energy of current message.

Speaker 2 What I don't like about this news item is it doesn't say something like a new framework for deep learning models has been shown, has been

Speaker 2 shown to train faster or like has been modeled to train faster. It just says it does train faster and it uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods.

Speaker 2 So that makes it sound like it's not theoretical or it wasn't a proof of concept. They actually did it.
And so that's like, wow, that's a big deal.

Speaker 2 I think the liposomal delivery system being used to safely deliver anti-cancer drugs is, I think that's already science.

Speaker 2 So the big question here is it was previously an unusable drug and it had a thousand times the toxicity of similar drugs, but now it can be used safely.

Speaker 2 That would be the new bit, because I think we already have liposomal delivery systems for anti-cancer drugs. So that's why that one seems like it's closer to reality.

Speaker 2 So I'm going to say the deep learning model is also the fiction. That's what you said, right, Jay?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm with you.
That's correct.

Speaker 1 Okay, Evan.

Speaker 5 I can't really add much more to that than what Jay and Kara have already said and led me to the same conclusion.

Speaker 5 I don't know how you get to less than 1% of the energy of current methods and achieve equal or better results. That's like, you know, win and winning,

Speaker 5 winner beyond that. win-win.

Speaker 5 So I think that's the least plausible of the three. I'll just say that that's the fiction.
That's all I've got.

Speaker 1 Okay, and Bob.

Speaker 4 All right, well, I mean, this superconducting advanced seems interesting. As you said, Steve, yes, we for many years we have had matched this with ceramic-based materials.

Speaker 4 And it's been great, but one of the classic problems was: well,

Speaker 4 how do you turn ceramic into like

Speaker 4 wire, you know, superconducting wire, or something like that?

Speaker 4 So perhaps this was mainly beneficial because it's since it's metallic-based, it would be better to use at the liquid nitrogen temperatures and ambient pressures. I don't know how much of a of a

Speaker 4 big plus this one is, considering that we're can already do what we could already do it with ceramics.

Speaker 4 But yeah, there certainly can be some huge advantages potentially that I'm just not

Speaker 4 really bringing to mind here. Let's see, the less than 1% of the energy.

Speaker 4 Isn't that what, do you remember early in this administration, Trump was talking about spending like what, some crazy money, a billion dollars for these,

Speaker 4 you know, super, super, you know, these computer centers

Speaker 4 for AI? And then was it China that just came out with

Speaker 4 the similar AIs

Speaker 4 that were LLMs that were just like use much less energy? I'm forgetting the details. I try to try to forget that period of my life.
But

Speaker 4 I don't, so it reminds me of that. So in that sense, it seems very similar to what we've already knew or seemed that

Speaker 4 China could do or admitted to being able to do many, you know, many months ago. I don't know.
It's just too foggy to really remember those details. So let's look at the third one here.

Speaker 4 Yeah, this liposomal delivery system,

Speaker 4 that sounds great.

Speaker 4 I want that to be. true so much.
So much. But yeah, I'm going to just have to go with the crew here.
Less than 1%

Speaker 1 still.

Speaker 4 That's so dramatic. I hope it's true, but it just seems less likely than the other one.
So fiction.

Speaker 1 Okay. So

Speaker 1 let's start with number three.

Speaker 1 Researchers demonstrate that a liposomal delivery system can be used to safely deliver a previously unusable anti-cancer drug with 1,000 times the toxicity of similar drugs, resulting in highly effective treatments for even drug-resistant cancers.

Speaker 1 You guys all think this one is science, and this one is

Speaker 1 science. This is very cool science.
So, yeah, the question of like, was the thousand, like, it could easily have been a hundred or even ten times the toxic, you know what I mean?

Speaker 1 So, and as we've discussed before, and I know as Kara is very well aware of, you know, chemotherapy is very toxic. It is poison.

Speaker 1 And there's a therapeutic window. The therapeutic window is it has

Speaker 1 clinically significant anti-cancer effects with tolerable side effects, right? The benefits are more than the side effects.

Speaker 2 But like, and so toxic that, for example, in chemo centers, there's a dedicated bathroom.

Speaker 2 The workers and the guests do not use the same bathroom as chemo patients. And chemo nurses, the infusion nurses, have to get their blood tested regularly.

Speaker 2 It's that toxic.

Speaker 1 Yeah, like wipes out your immune system.

Speaker 2 So they like the nurses working around chemo have to make sure they are not getting, yeah, that they're healthy to be able to use it and that they're not getting any chemo. Right.

Speaker 4 How does your contamination happen?

Speaker 2 Well, some of it's so toxic. Like, I think it's, what's it called? Red, oof, not red devil, but there's this one like for triple negative breast cancer

Speaker 2 treatment that's so toxic that like if you spill a vial of it, it like burns a hole in the linoleum. Like it's it's pretty intense.
It's a million blood.

Speaker 1 What the hell? Right. Yeah.
Right.

Speaker 1 So there are lots of drugs which kill cancer cells quite nicely, but there isn't a therapeutic window because

Speaker 1 at the, at they're so toxic that there's no safe dose for people, basically.

Speaker 4 So like injecting bleach for COVID.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 something like that.

Speaker 1 But as Carol said, the idea of, well, we're going to take liposomes, this is the third SOAM

Speaker 1 news item now that we're talking about this week. We take these little packages, and if we can deliver them selectively to cancer cells, that then might open up a therapeutic window.

Speaker 1 It might increase the amount of toxicity to the cancer while decreasing the amount of toxicity to non-cancer cells. So, this is just doing that really well, basically.

Speaker 1 They developed this liposome that can target cancer cells, specifically like certain genetic changes that make cancer cells cancer cells. And they make it so that they can't repair their own.

Speaker 1 It causes DNA damage that can't be repaired. So, eventually, those cells die.

Speaker 1 Because it is so super selective in its delivery, it was encapsulated what's called a pegulated liposome.

Speaker 1 It says in vivo efficacy, this is all animal studies, but in vivo efficacy was evaluated in three allographed models of cancer, melanoma, breast cancer, lung, and a xenographed model of uterine sarcoma.

Speaker 1 So basically, they're trying to give mice human cancers, right?

Speaker 1 And they were highly effective, even in the very drug-resistant cases, and in some of the mice, like eliminating the tumors completely.

Speaker 4 Damn, man, I want to be a mouse.

Speaker 4 Cancer, Alzheimer's, what else? They got it going. So,

Speaker 1 this approach could open up a whole new list of possible anti-cancer drugs that previously were just too toxic to use, and now we can use them, and they're more effective, even against previously

Speaker 1 drug-resistant tumors.

Speaker 4 How were the side effects, though?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 4 it's harsher than conventional.

Speaker 2 No, it would be less.

Speaker 1 The idea is to make it even even less necessarily.

Speaker 2 No, it would be because it's more targeted.

Speaker 1 Yeah, the targeting is, again, this is a mice, so it's hard to say what it would be like in people, but the idea is to get it at the same or less than conventional chemotherapy.

Speaker 1 Hopefully much less.

Speaker 4 If it's more targeted, then couldn't you just use this for all chemo drugs then? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because it's more targeted.

Speaker 1 That's where we're headed. That's where we're headed.
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 The idea, there is a correlation. I wouldn't say they're the same thing, but there's a massive correlation between toxicity and side effects.
Yeah. Like side effects are a a function of the drug.

Speaker 1 They're the effect.

Speaker 1 The side effects are the effect. It's just

Speaker 1 you want to use drugs where cancer drugs are more susceptible than non-cancer drugs for whatever reason. And

Speaker 2 that's why diseases like triple negative breast cancer, you have to hit people with just like this horrible toxic drug because it doesn't have any genetic markers. It doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Markers actually sometimes use the target therapies, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's triple negative. That's what that means.
There's no markers in it.

Speaker 1 All right, let's go back to number two. A new framework for deep learning models trains faster and uses less than 1% of the energy of current methods while achieving equal or better results.

Speaker 1 You guys all think this one is the fiction, and this one is

Speaker 1 science. This is

Speaker 1 awesome.

Speaker 1 Now, how do you think they did it?

Speaker 3 Who cares? You got the sweep.

Speaker 1 So, this is the title. This is the title of the paper.
How do they? Topographical Sparse Mapping, a neuro-inspired sparse training framework for deep learning models. So they model it after the brain.

Speaker 1 And specifically, so you know, in these neural nets, this is now

Speaker 1 my oversimplified understanding based upon the articles that I'm reading, right?

Speaker 1 So I know the experts will be cringing at how inaccurate is, but this is the basic concept that they're discussing in this paper. That neural nets,

Speaker 1 the nodes all connect to nodes at the next level, right? Like every node connects to every node from one level to the next. But in the sparse mapping,

Speaker 1 a node only connects to the nearby nodes at the deeper level. And therefore.

Speaker 4 That's it.

Speaker 1 That's the breakthrough?

Speaker 1 That's a big piece of it. And so there's far fewer fine-tuning that you have to do in the training.

Speaker 1 You don't have to use, you don't have to, they say, they call the old old models over-parameterization, right? Oh, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 And by getting rid of that, you know, basically you're getting rid of a lot of the

Speaker 1 parameterization that you have to, the tweaking that gets done to these connections

Speaker 1 so that it uses less than 1% of them, right? And you still achieve the same results. And in fact, you get there faster.
And

Speaker 1 yeah, because, of course, the training is faster because you're not having to make as many computational changes each step of the way, right?

Speaker 1 So essentially, you're using a sparse connectivity patterns rather than an unnecessarily overly robust connectivity patterns. The other thing that they do, also inspired by brain function, is pruning.

Speaker 1 Oh, okay. The connections that don't get used get pruned.
Oh my God, what a great idea. Yeah, so again,

Speaker 1 it's trying to just use only the connections that are absolutely necessary for the functionality rather than just having this default everything connects to everything, right?

Speaker 1 Because that's the oversimplified way to say it. And the results were impressive.
Again, the training worked went a lot faster, used less than 1% of the energy, which is

Speaker 1 huge in terms of obviously one of the big issues with AI is the massive energy.

Speaker 1 footprint that they have but also the reason that's the reason why it costs tens of millions of dollars to train ai models because of all the energy usage so this could also make it a lot cheaper to train these models as well.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, that's pretty cool. I hope this all

Speaker 1 pans out. Yeah.
All right.

Speaker 1 And that means that engineers have created a form of gallium-doped germanium, materials already used in electronics, that is superconducting at ambient pressures and in the temperature range of liquid nitrogen.

Speaker 1 Is the fiction

Speaker 1 because

Speaker 1 they did make gallium-doped germanium that is superconducting, but only at 3.5 K, 3.5 Kelvin, whereas Whereas liquid nitrogen starts at 77 Kelvin.

Speaker 4 Right, so it's super expensive if you want to get it that way. But you just can't use it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's just not using nitrogen. So again, it's much cheaper.

Speaker 1 It's funny because I was reading first the press release and then the study itself. And in the press release, they don't mention, I'm like, the whole time, like, at what temperature?

Speaker 1 At what temperature? At what temperature? They didn't mention it till the very end.

Speaker 1 That's bullshit. I know.
Come on.

Speaker 1 That's your first paragraph.

Speaker 1 Oh, my God. It's how they keep you you reading to the end, actually.

Speaker 1 So, I mean, obviously, like a lot of superconducting research, like the very high ambient, very high-pressure superconductors or whatever, the idea is that this is sort of a new way of achieving superconductivity, and then hopefully we'll be able to keep going with this research and get to the point where it is at liquid nitrogen temperature, which is still super cold, but because you can cool it with liquid nitrogen, it becomes, which is actually relatively relatively cheap, it becomes functionally very useful.

Speaker 4 I read once that's as cheap as milk. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So it's night and day, right?

Speaker 1 Like when the first superconductors that hit the public awareness in the 80s, the breakthrough was getting those ceramic superconductors up to liquid nitrogen temperature. Oh, yeah, that's it.

Speaker 1 That was the big breakthrough. Not room temperature.

Speaker 1 We're not there yet.

Speaker 4 Not at ambient pressures anyway.

Speaker 1 Now,

Speaker 1 if we could make germanium is similar to silicon,

Speaker 1 germanium and silicon are kind of the

Speaker 1 workhorses of electronics, right? And computing. So it is a big deal that we can get to superconducting in germanium at all.
That's great.

Speaker 1 Now we just have to figure out how to get it at much higher temperatures.

Speaker 1 And it does essentially work in the same way ultimately as other superconductors, Bob, which you know is what?

Speaker 4 Well, Cooper pairs is one

Speaker 4 way that's

Speaker 1 what you're talking about, yeah. Yeah, the the doping of the of the gallium allows them to get two electrons to form together to form a Cooper pair, and then they're superconducting.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but it's so

Speaker 4 more complicated than it is.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's the simplistic level description.
So it seems to be working. Eventually, you get to that same end point of Cooper pairs.

Speaker 1 Interesting, but not useful at present, just maybe might lead to something in the future. But the other two are massive, and those are

Speaker 1 very, very good news indeed.

Speaker 5 I had a Cooper Pears once. He gave me both barrels.

Speaker 1 Did he? I don't get it. I didn't either.

Speaker 1 Oh, a Cooper, a Cooper in a barrel.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Cooper. Yes.
That was pretty weak, Evan.

Speaker 1 Pretty weak. All right, Evan, give us a quote.

Speaker 5 I wouldn't describe it as weak. Some might say clever.

Speaker 5 All interpretations made by a scientist are hypotheses, and all hypotheses are tentative. They must forever be tested, and they must be revised if found to be unsatisfactory.

Speaker 5 Hence, a change of mind in a scientist, and particularly a great scientist, is not only not a sign of weakness, but rather evidence for continuing attention to the respective problem and an ability to test the hypothesis again and again.

Speaker 5 Ernst Meyer.

Speaker 1 Yep, correct, although said in an age before science denial was a thing.

Speaker 1 True.

Speaker 1 So he's missing a lot of nuance that was not necessary back in the day. The good old days.
Right?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 5 That's a good point.

Speaker 1 But now we would say, but I'm not saying that we can't act upon science that we have now. You know what I mean?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, he died in 2005,

Speaker 1 right before we started this podcast, basically.

Speaker 5 We could have had him. I know.
Clarify that for us, but he was gone.

Speaker 1 And you could mention he was an evolutionary biologist.

Speaker 1 You could say that. That was his claim to fame.

Speaker 1 All right. Thanks, Evan.
Thanks. And thank you all for joining me this week.
You got it, brother. Thanks, Steve.
And until next week, this is your Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

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